| WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
ARTICLE EXTRACTS: Volume XIX, No 2, SUMMER 2002
In 1878, when Britain had just gained control of the Middle East by purchasing the majority shares in the new Suez Canal, and was about to secure its dominance of the Mediterranean by acquiring Cyprus at the Conference of Berlin, the colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon, asked his civil servants if they knew the meaning of this new word “imperialism.” As a member of the government that had two years earlier bestowed the title empress of India upon Queen Victoria, and as the man who steered the North America Act through Parliament, making Canada into a self-governing dominion, he should have known. He did not. Even as the sun of Victorian empire was rising to the point at which it never set on lands owing allegiance to Her Majesty, the term caused confusion. It does so to this day, as a fascinated and resentful and sometimes admiring world tries to comprehend the nature of the current extraordinary American preeminence in the arts of war and commerce, finance and technology, scientific scholarship and popular culture. “Empire,” as a metaphor rather than a precise definition, seems to describe this new predominance better than most alternatives, largely because of its familiarity. The Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century was based on global military reach through naval power and on commercial and industrial dominance. The current Pax Americana appears to share many of the same characteristics. Thus the easy syllogism suggests that the United States is the British Empire’s heir, and that just as the British entered upon their imperial greatness after the 20-year war against Napoleon’s France, so the United States now inherits the fruits of its success in the Cold War. There are three serious objections to this simplistic parallel.
The events of this past April that led to the brief removal from power of Hugo Chávez Frías, Venezuela’s mercurial president, caught many scholars and policymakers who had come to believe that coups were a thing of the past in Latin America by surprise. More significantly, the turmoil in Venezuela challenged another bit of conventional wisdom about contemporary politics (and indeed, a tenet of American foreign policy): that a strong and invigorated civil society is an unmitigated blessing for democracy. This idea was put forward as early as the mid-1800s with the publication of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic treatise on American political culture in the postcolonial period, and in the last decade it has enjoyed a robust renaissance in academic and policy circles. “Tocqueville was right: democratic government is strengthened, not weakened, when it faces a vigorous civil society,” writes Robert Putnam, a leading voice among the “new” Tocquevilleans. Putnam’s views are shared by the international aid community, which in recent years has embraced the mission of fortifying civil society as a programmatic priority in nations that have recently inaugurated democratic governance. The United States Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have taken the lead in boosting the development of groups thought to comprise the heart of civil society: grass-roots social movements, unions, a free media, and a wide range of nongovernmental organizations involved in promoting such causes as human rights, governmental transparency, and protection of the environment. Presently, funding for “civil society assistance” exceeds that of any other initiative designed by aid to encourage democracy abroad. The agency’s budget for 1999 designated $204 million for “civil society promotion,” $147 million for “rule of law,” $203 million for “governance,” and $59 million for “elections and political processes.” Few would dispute the importance of civil society to the creation and maintenance of a democratic public life, but civil society can only serve as an effective foundation for democracy where there are credible functioning state institutions and strong political parties with deep roots in society. Under such conditions, the virtues of civil society–safeguarding society against abuse of power and socializing the citizenry to democratic practices–become apparent. In their absence, however, civil society, especially an invigorated one, can become a source of instability, disorder, and even violence. The latter scenario, predicted by Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington more than three decades ago in his classic work on political development, Political Order in Changing Societies, is currently being recreated in struggling democracies around the world. In particular, a mobilized and energized civil society in the midst of failing political institutions affords a highly auspicious environment for a “civil society coup.” This is a shorthand term employed in this analysis to suggest the handling of governing crises by extraconstitutional, undemocratic means by such actors as the business community, organized labor, religious institutions, and the media. This distressing political phenomenon, an increasingly familiar feature of contemporary Latin American politics, found its latest and most dramatic manifestation in Venezuela. A civil society coup develops in three distinct phases, each with devastating consequences for democracy. The first is the institutional decay and eventual collapse of the political system (especially political parties), the result of corruption, incompetence, and neglect of the electorate’s basic needs. The second is the rise of an antiparty, antiestablishment leader whose appeal to the masses is rooted in the failures of the political system and whose commitment to democracy is at best suspect. This development, in turn, makes civil society, rather than formally organized political forces, the principal opposition to the regime in power, and potentially the sole defender of democracy against encroaching state authoritarianism (itself a consequence of the lack of formal political opposition to the government). The third phase is a confrontation between government and civil society, the result of the government’s failure to deliver on its promises and its attacks on both civil society and the democratic system. In the absence of credible political institutions through which societal demands and dissatisfactions may be channeled, the streets–rather than the legislature, the courts, and the electoral system–become the principal setting for this confrontation. At this juncture, sectors of civil society are not only likely to become radicalized but are also vulnerable to being hijacked by antidemocratic forces.
East Asia, so recently plunged into its post-Cold War economic and political crisis, is emerging from its lost years, as some of us think of the late 1990s, more swiftly and determinedly than anyone would have imagined a little more than a year ago. It’s not merely the growth statistics–gross domestic product (GDP) in Asian economies other than Japan’s is currently forecast to expand by 7 percent this year. More than this, it’s the desire throughout the region to discover a new direction–a new social and political ethos. One sees this not only at the top but at ground level, too, and throughout the middle classes and the commercial elites. South Korea is a particular standout. Progress in solving its problems is steady, gradual, and at times a little messy–the ideal way forward in a young democracy. The old “hermit kingdom,” so long preoccupied only with itself, is also thinking in terms of regional influence in a way that would have been impossible to anticipate prior to the turn of the millenium. This raises fundamental questions. How clearly did we see the crisis that began with a run on the Thai baht in July 1997? How well did we understand the underlying forces at work? How dependent were we upon a set of assumptions that remain, even now, inapplicable on the ground? To take but two examples, many of us still entertain the idea that “crony capitalism” lay at the core of the Asian crisis. Many still accept the notion that among Asia’s most urgent tasks is to deregulate, this in a region that suffers from underregulation, bad regulation, inconsistent regulation, or all three–but not, by and large, from overregulation. And last in line but first in importance, if we failed to grasp the nature of the crisis, how well will we see what the region’s recovery from it is made of? With these questions as a point of departure, let me describe three things far too briefly: what was supposed to be happening in Asia during the 1990s, what actually happened, and what is happening now, as Asia seeks a new footing for itself–which is to say, nothing less than a new way forward.
Of the four futures studies that are the subject of this essay, all but one were written before the events of September 11. Collectively, they illustrate the thinking of current and former government officials charged with pondering the shape of the world to come. They are thus of considerable interest to the ordinary citizen as well as to strategic planners. Three of the four were prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the government bodies that, along with the State Department, are responsible for national security policy. The fourth study, a compendium of three separate reports, is the work of the U.S. Commission on National Security. Chaired by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, the commission was chartered in 1998 by the secretary of defense with the imprimatur of the White House and the leadership of Congress. Unlike the spate of theoretical books on the changing global landscape that appeared at the end of the Cold War, the government studies represent the view of national security practitioners. They are meant to provide policymakers with a considered assessment of global challenges and what they might portend for the United States. With the exception of the Hart-Rudman reports, each of the studies is presented as a work-in-progress, and the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff documents iterate previous reports. Of the three reports completed before September 11, only the Hart-Rudman Commission study called attention to the vulnerability of the United States to terrorist attack, despite the 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Center, the assaults on two U.S. embassies in East Africa, and the explosion on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. Remarkably, all of the studies envision the same alternative futures. Such intellectual congruity is a product of the bureaucratic conformity prevailing policy preferences impose on the analytical process. REPORTAGE
Since Deng Xiaoping opened China’s economy in 1979, many Chinese cities have developed a frenetic energy, the kind of 24-hour hubbub that comes with nonstop work and play. In Hangzhou, consumer electronics companies feeding China’s massive telephone and computer markets work through the night. In Shanghai, wealthy merchants along Nanjing Road and other swank streets who have made the city China’s retail center haggle with customers incessantly, the sounds of their jousting filtering up into the apartments above. But in Kunming, capital of southwest China’s Yunnan province and a city that has attracted little foreign investment, law enforcement officials believe the constant energy, late-model sedans, gaudy jewelry, and other signs of prosperity often come from another, less licit industry: narcotics. As China has developed close links with Southeast Asia, a change that has coincided with Beijing’s loosening of social controls, the People’s Republic has experienced an explosion of drug trafficking and abuse, much of it concentrated in Yunnan and several large coastal cities. Though China’s current drug habit does not yet compare to the country’s nineteenth-century addiction, today use of heroin, methamphetamines, and other drugs is skyrocketing, and Chinese gangs have aggressively entered the narcotics trade in Asia and the West. Just as important, this narcotics habit is pushing China toward an HIV catastrophe, as Chinese injectable drug users spread the deadly virus. Ultimately, unless Beijing changes its policies regarding narcotics and HIV, drug abuse could contribute to the destruction of China’s social fabric, a development that could cost China’s leader, Jiang Zemin, and his cohort their jobs–or their heads–but would not necessarily lead to a democratic Middle Kingdom.
In the new world disorder of the post-Cold War period, United Nations peacekeeping has moved far beyond the patrolling of cease-fire lines to encompass a wide range of administrative, humanitarian, and reconstruction tasks within shattered countries. Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister with long experience in the U.N. system, who was asked by Kofi Annan in 2000 to prepare a report on reforming peacekeeping, has called these “peace-building” tasks. In the case of East Timor, the Security Council devised a unique mandate. For the first time in history, it took total control of a country, with all executive, legislative, judicial, and even military power vested in its appointed administrator, who ran everything from the power stations and fire departments to radio, television, and a U.N. newspaper. So when Kofi Annan watched the blue U.N. flag come down over Dili, East Timor’s capital, at midnight this past May 19, the tropical air hung heavy with colonial antecedents. The secretary general was not just a VIP at someone else’s independence party. He was an imperial sovereign handing over the reins of power. The mission he closed was the shortest, least bloody, most benevolent, and possibly most successful colonization since the Middle Ages. But, in carrying out its mandate, UNTAET made mistakes from which future U.N. missions would do well to learn. UNTAET’s very name–United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor–conceded that this was no proud empire on which the sun would never set. U.N. Resolution 1272 of October 25, 1999, which authorized the mission, did not mention an exit date, but U.N. members foresaw a timeframe of two, perhaps three, years. In early September 1999, Indonesia had agreed to withdraw from East Timor and allow an Australian-led peace force to enter the territory to guarantee security. UNTAET was to take over command from the Australians and create a civil administration to run the country until independence. The Security Council had authorized a large, though less comprehensive and dominant, U.N. administration for Kosovo only four months earlier. The timetable for the Kosovo mission was open, since none of the five permanent members of the council could stomach the goal of independence for the territory, even though its Albanian majority ardently wanted it. East Timor was different. The council’s objective was clear, the timeframe was to be limited, and although the Bush administration was not yet in existence, nation building was already frowned on by major states. UNTAET would be Quickfixville. PRESS NOTES
Two weeks after September 11, as New York fire department officials worked bravely in the wreckage of the twin towers, a British journalist named Mark Thomas tastelessly wrote in the New Statesman (a magazine that once published the flower of the British liberal intelligentsia) that the Bush administration’s propaganda effort in the wake of September 11 had “hijacked the language of liberation” and was “headed in the direction of the twin towers of fact and truth.” He added that “Americans have taken on the mentality of a lynch mob. You can almost hear them drawling in southern accents: ‘Yew jus’ know Bin Laden’s guilty, yew only gotta look at his eyes!'” Thomas admittedly did preface his article by saying that the attack on the World Trade Center was “one of the vilest atrocities we have seen.” In the same magazine a week earlier, the veteran investigative reporter John Pilger had argued that “far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims–that is victims of American fundamentalism, whose power in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.” The novelist Salman Rushdie was talking about just such people when he wrote in the New York Times in February that “anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or has followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population.” September 11 (and even more the successful American military response to it), far from evoking pity, or anger, actually took the lid off a boiling cauldron of resentment among European progressives against the American way of life, mentality, and political system. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in what was one of his last published essays, was probably telling the truth about people like himself when he said that the “striking images” of the terrorists’ planes crashing into the towers had brought “immense joy” into our hearts. The attack on the World Trade Center, for Baudrillard, was something we have all, “without exception,” been dreaming of for years. It was the dramatic realization of the “terrorist imagination” that inevitably “dwells inside” all of us as an unavoidable psychological response to the dominance of the external world around us by the world’s hegemonic power. “They did it,” Baudrillard said, “but we wanted it to happen.” Why did so many liberals, intellectuals, thinkers, and media people in Britain and the rest of Western Europe feel a frisson of exultation when the twin towers were bombed? Why have they subsequently been so outright hostile, or at best ambiguous, about supporting the United States in the war on terrorism? RECONSIDERATIONS
Few upheavals in the Middle East have had wider aftershocks than the 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadeq. As seen by Mossadeq and his National Front Party, the chief issue was Iran’s right to nationalize a British oil giant that held exclusive rights to drilling and selling the country’s petroleum. As seen by the incoming Eisenhower administration in Washington, something very different was at stake–a possible Soviet takeover in Tehran, its way prepared by Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party. But to many Iranians, the United States betrayed its own values by covertly joining with Britain to depose an elected leader, and then abetting the imperial ambitions of Shah Mohammed Pahlevi. For Americans, the unintended result was the rise of political Islam, leading to the 1979 revolution and the present continuing impasse in Iranian-U.S. relations. Containing communism was the justification for the coup, but by the coldest reckoning the price was excessive. The Shah’s legitimacy was irreparably compromised by owing his throne to Washington. It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup Iran now would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup’s legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motives for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran. With this in mind, it is worth looking again at what happened in August 1953, when the Shah dismissed Mossadeq as prime minister, and then fled the country after National Front demonstrators took to the streets. This was followed by counterdemonstrations promoted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, and when it appeared that Operation Ajax was succeeding, the Shah returned to reclaim the Peacock Throne. Once back in his palace, the Shah thus thanked Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore and head of the CIA’s Middle East Department: “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army–and to you!” Or so Roosevelt quoted him in his 1979 memoir, Countercoup. Yet nothing about the 1953 events was that simple. This essay will attempt to explore the complex factors–the people, the countries, and the parties–that played a part in what was hardly an inevitable outcome. What is striking is that until the final months Washington resisted joining with Britain to unseat Mossadeq, and that even within the CIA, the Tehran station chief was reportedly opposed to “putting U.S. support behind Anglo-French colonialism.” BOOKS
It seems altogether fitting that Malaysian Eclipse edited by Jomo K. S., the Malaysian political economist and long-time critic of Kuala Lumpur officialdom, would appear in the same year that Beacon Press reissued The Great Transformation. In his forward to this new edition of the renowned economic historian Karl Polanyi’s classic study of the myth of self-regulating markets, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank, calls the East Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 “the most dramatic illustration of the failure of self-regulating markets.” The myth of self-regulating markets is the topic of the Malaysian Eclipse as well. What Jomo and his coauthors write about the Malaysian experience with the neoliberal agenda, especially financial and capital market liberalization, will be instructive to those who study economic development in East Asia and elsewhere. Malaysia is especially well suited for the study of the effects of financial liberalization and of “self-regulating” markets on economic development. First, as the World Bank’s East Asian miracle report pointed out nearly a decade ago, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, the second-generation NICs (newly industrializing countries) of Southeast Asia, relied more heavily on markets and less heavily on government interventions than had the first generation of East Asian NICs, especially South Korea. Second, Malaysia was a favorite destination of financial capital, capturing more of the capital that flowed into the newly emerging markets during the 1990s than any other developing economy. Third, Malaysia oversaw its recovery not with International Monetary Fund-administered austerity measures but with its own policies that included a highly controversial experiment with capital controls. That move made Malaysia, and especially its firebrand prime minister Mohammed Mahathir, an object of derision in orthodox financial circles but a champion for others seeking an alternative to financial-market-dictated economic development.
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