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This post is co-authored with Fabio Wasserfallen and is cross-posted (with a different title) at the LSE European Politics and Policy Blog. **** The creation of the single market is widely believed to have strengthened tax competition among European countries; … Continue reading →

Over the past decade, inflation has persistently undershot the Fed's inflation target. The Fed's preferred measure of inflation, the core PCE deflator, has average 1.56 percent over this time compared to a target of 2 percent. The Fed officially begin inflation targeting in 2012, but was implicitly targeting 2 percent long before that time. So below-target inflation has been happening for close to a decade and for many observers it is a mystery.



There have been a spate of articles as to why the Fed has not been able to hit its inflation target. Some have wondered if the Fed really understands or even controls the inflation rate. Even Fed officials have been perplexed by the low inflation since it cannot be explained by their Phillips curve models. As a result, they sometimes attribute the persistently low inflation to developments such as falling oil prices, demographics, global competition, changes in labor's share of income, safe asset shortage, and even the rise of Amazon.



These explanations, however, are not satisfactory since the Fed should be able to determine the inflation rate over the medium to long-run. That is, the Fed should be able to respond over time to developments that might cause inflation to drift off target. The Fed should be, in theory, the final arbiter of the trend inflation rate.



So why has inflation been so low? In my view, the answer is simple: the Fed is getting the inflation it wants. There is no mystery. One does not get a decade of trend inflation that is below target by accident. Instead, revealed preferences tell us inflation is where it is because the FOMC allowed it to be there.  Put differently, the Fed has chosen not to fully offset the shocks and secular forces listed above that have pushed inflation down. This is a policy choice.





Fed officials and others may disagree, but the revealed preference argument is hard to ignore. Moreover, there are other reason to believe that the low inflation is, in fact, the desired outcome of the FOMC. They are presented below.

SEP Core Inflation Forecasts

The first reason to believe the low inflation is a desired outcome comes from the FOMC itself. The FOMC's Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) provides a central tendency forecasts for core PCE inflation. The FOMC's definition of the SEP is as follows (my emphasis):

Each participant's projections are based on his or her assessment of appropriate monetary policy.

The SEP, in other words, reveals FOMC members forecasts of economic variables conditional on the Fed doing monetary policy right. And up until recently, doing monetary policy right was not overshooting 2 percent inflation in the following year, as seen in the figure below. Even now, 2 is still seen largely as a ceiling. There is nothing symmetric about 2 percent in these SEP forecasts.







Most FOMC members, therefore, have treated 2 percent as a ceiling over the past decade. This is "appropriate" monetary policy for them. Keep in mind, that at this forecast horizon most of them also believe they have meaningful influence on inflation. Both of these observations point to the low inflation as a choice.

Textual Analysis

The second reason to believe that low inflation is a desired outcome comes from a recent study by the San Francisco Fed. It is titled "Taking the Fed at its Word: Direct Estimation of Central Bank Objectives using Text Analytics" and the abstract reads (my emphasis):

We directly estimate the Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) loss function, including the implicit inflation target, from the tone of the language used in FOMC transcripts, minutes, and members' speeches. Direct estimation is advantageous because it requires no knowledge of the underlying macroeconomic structure nor observation of central bank actions. We find that the FOMC had an implicit inflation target of approximately 1.5 percent on average over our baseline 2000 - 2013 sample period.

Fed officials, via their words, actually want 1.5 inflation on average. And shocker of all shockers, they are very close to getting that just that rate of inflation since 2009. 



The Neel Kashkari Counterfactual

The third reason to believe low inflation is a desired outcome comes from imagining a counterfactual FOMC. Imagine a FOMC that has twelve members that are all clones of Neel Kashkari, as seen below. In this FOMC, where interest rates were not raised over the past few years--and maybe even lowered--do we really think inflation would be the same? I find that hard to believe.





To be clear, I do think there are important secular forces pushing down trend inflation, like the demand for safe assets. But again, the Fed should be able to offset such pressures if it chose to do so. The real question, then, is why the Fed has settled for trend inflation near 1.5 percent. That is a question for a different post. This post is simply a retort to all those who think the low inflation is a mystery. Folks, it is not a mystery. It is a choice.



It is worth nothing that this choice is actually more than a choice for trend inflation. It is implicitly a choice for lower trend aggregate demand (AD) growth. As seen below, aggregate demand growth was averaging 5.6 percent in the decades before the crisis. Since the recovery started, it has averaged about 3.6 percent. That is a 2 percentage point decline in the trend. The red line in the figure shows what a naive autoregressive forecast would have predicted over the past decade conditional on past nominal expenditure history. There has been a sizable AD shortfall.






In my view, it is this dearth of aggregate demand growth rather than the low inflation that is a problem. The slowdown in AD growth has arguably contributed to problems like hysteresis and populism. If so, this policy choice has been costly.

P.S. Adam Ozimek gives us estimates of how costly this AD shortfall has been.

Michal Kalecki 1899 - 1970

Sam Levey reminded me of Kalecki's 1943 article on the political aspects of full employment. This a very interesting and thought-provoking paper. I enjoyed it enough to offer my critique of it.

The paper starts by taking as given what Kalecki calls the doctrine of full employment. The basic idea is that the private sector, left to its own devices, is prone to Keynesian aggregate demand failures (see here for game-theoretic interpretation). The remedy for these spontaneously-occurring "coordination failures," is a government spending program that acts, or stands ready to act, as private demand begins to falter.

Kalecki starts his paper off by asserting that by 1943, the doctrine was widely accepted by most economists. It seems clear that Kalecki views the doctrine to be self-evidently true.

But if this is the case, then this poses a problem. If the doctrine is so obviously true, why then are there still economists who oppose it? And if the idea is so self-evident, why are so many "captains of industry" reluctant to accept it? As Kalecki admits (pg. 324), this attitude is not easy to explain. After all, depressions are bad for business and businesses collectively should welcome any intervention that restores the economy to full employment.

The problem, as he sees it, is a political one. While the "economic experts" that disavow the doctrine may believe in their own theories, however poor they may be, he notes that "obstinate ignorance is usually a manifestation of underlying political motives." He doesn't say exactly what these political motives are, but he notes that these "economic experts" are, or have been, closely connected with banking and industry. But if this is the case, then the question turns to what motivates industry leaders to block interventions that they know will be good for industry?

He lists the following three reasons.

[1] Absent full employment policy the "state of confidence" will produce business cycles. Under laisser-faire then, industry leaders can credibly use this fact to exert a powerful indirect control over government policy.

[2] Supporting obviously beneficial public sector investments leads to a slippery slope. The government may wish to encroach in other areas in competition with private enterprise.

[3] In a perpetually full employment economy, the threat of unemployment vanishes as a discipline device for employers (see also here). As well, the social position of the boss would be undermined and the self assurance and class consciousness of the working class would grow, leading to political instability.

What to make of this? Well, I'm not sure. The first reason asserts that "business leaders" are willing to plumb the depths of economic depression every once in a while in exchange for political power. He doesn't actually say what this political power buys them. But whatever it buys them, I wonder whether it might not be purchased more cheaply through more conventional means?

The second reason doesn't seem plausible to me. Why wouldn't the private sector be willing to support infrastructure projects that benefit their interests directly? Was there any serious industry opposition, say, to the Federal Highway Act of 1956? And if there was, was it because of a fear that the project might succeed too well, an outcome that would encourage the government to become more adventurous in other arenas?

The third reason also seems weak to me. It is true, Kalecki writes, that profits would be higher under full employment, "but 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated by the business leaders than profits." First, the idea of unemployment as a discipline device only needs a constant low level of unemployment to work (Shapiro and Stiglitz, AER 1984 "Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device;" see their reply here to a critique.) A decade-long Great Depression seems like an awfully high price to pay for "worker discipline." And as for promoting political stability, I think it is understood that events like the Great Depression, or even the Great Recession for that matter, promote political instability (which even Kalecki mentions in the article).

To sum up, Kalecki asks a great question. Collectively, we are all better off materially in the absence of economic depressions. We know--in principle, at least--how to prevent major economic depressions (I'm not talking about regular "small time" business cycles here.) But if so, why are interventions like the Obama stimulus program met with such bitter opposition in some quarters? For that matter, the TARP intervention--a "bailout" program aimed at stabilizing the financial sector--was also met with vocal opposition, especially from Main Street. Is this really all just a concern over "moral hazard?"

Maybe there's just a suspicion that these interventions, however good they may sound on paper, work out in practice simply as ways to redistribute income to undeserving, but squeaky wheels. I overheard a political commentator on NPR the other day remark that in economic and political negotiations, "if you're not at the table, then you're likely on the menu."  I suppose it's easy to say what we need in this case is better representation at the table. How to do this? I'm all ears.

Loet Leydesdorff on the Triple Helix: How Synergies in University-Industry-Government Relations can Shape Innovation Systems





This is the sixth and last in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 







The relationship between technological innovation
processes and the nation state remains a challenge for the discipline of
International Relations. Non-linear and multi-directional
characteristics of knowledge production, and the diffusive nature of knowledge
itself, limit the general ability of governments to influence and steer
innovation processes. Loet Leydesdorff advances the framework of the "Triple
Helix" that disaggregates national innovation systems into
evolving university-industry-government eco-systems. In this Talk, amongst others, he shows that these eco-systems can be
expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales, and emphasizes that, though
politics are always involved, synergies develop unintentionally.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is the most relevant aspect
of the dynamics of innovation for the discipline of International Relations?



The
main challenge is to endogenize the notions of technological progress and
technological development into theorizing about political economies and nation states.
The endogenization of technological innovation and technological development
was first placed on the research agenda of economics by evolutionary economists
like Nelson and Winter in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this context, the
question was how to endogenize the dynamics of knowledge, organized knowledge,
science and technology into economic theorizing. However, one can equally well
formulate the problem of how to reflect on the global (sub)dynamics of
organized knowledge production in political theory and International Relations.



From
a longer-term perspective, one can consider that the nation states – the
national or political economies in Europe – were shaped in the 19th
century, somewhat later for Germany (after 1871), but for most countries it was
during the first half of the 19th century. This was after the French
and American Revolutions and in relation to industrialization. These nation
states were able to develop an institutional framework for organizing the
market as a wealth-generating mechanism, while the institutional framework
permitted them to retain wealth, to regulate market forces, and also to steer
them to a certain extent. However, the market is not only a local dynamics; it
is also a global phenomenon.



Nowadays,
another global dynamics is involved: science and technology add a dynamics different
from that of the market. The market is an equilibrium-seeking mechanism at each
moment of time. The evolutionary dynamics of science and technology nowadays
adds a non-equilibrium-seeking dynamics over time on top of that, and this puts
the nation state in a very different position. Combining an equilibrium-seeking
dynamics at each moment of time with a non-equilibrium seeking one over time
results in a complex adaptive dynamics, or an eco-dynamics, or however you want
to call it – these are different words for approximately the same thing.



For
the nation state, the question arises of how it relates to the global market
dynamics on the one side, and the global dynamics of knowledge and innovation on
the other. Thus, the nation state has to combine two tasks. I illustrated this
model of three subdynamics with a figure in my 2006 book entitled The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled,
measured, simulated (see image). The figure shows that first-order interactions
generate a knowledge-based economy as a next-order or global regime on top of
the localized trajectories of nation states and innovative firms. These complex
dynamics have first to be specified and then to be analyzed empirically.



For
example, the knowledge-based dynamics change the relation between government
and the economy; and they consequently change the position of the state in
relation to wealth-retaining mechanisms. How can the nation state be organized
in such a way as to retain wealth from knowledge locally, while knowledge (like
capital) tends to travel beyond boundaries? One can envisage the complex system
dynamics as a kind of cloud – a cloud
that touches the ground at certain places, as Harald Bathelt, for example,
formulated.



How
can national governments shape conditions for the cloud to touch and to remain
on the ground? The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations can
be considered as an eco-system of bi- and tri-lateral relations. The three
institutions and their interrelations can be expected to form a system carrying
the three functions of (i) novelty production, (ii) wealth generation, and
(iii) normative control. One tends to think of university-industry-government
relations first as neo-corporatist arrangements between these institutional
partners. However, I am interested in the ecosystem shaped through the tri- and
bilateral relationships.



This
ecosystem can be shaped at different levels. It can be a regional ecosystem or
a national ecosystem, for instance. One can ask whether there is a surplus of synergy
between the three (sub-)dynamics of university-industry-government relations
and where that synergy can generate wealth, knowledge, and control; in which
places, and along trajectories for which periods of time – that is, the same
synergy as meant by "a cloud touching the ground".



For
example, when studying Piedmont as a region in Northern Italy, it is
questionable whether the synergy in university-industry-government relations is
optimal at this regional level or should better be examined from a larger perspective
that includes Lombardy. On the one
hand, the administrative borders of nations and regions result from the
construction of political economies in the 19th century; but on the
other hand, the niches of synergy that can be expected in a knowledge-based
economy are bordered also; for example, in terms of metropolitan regions (e.g.,
Milan–Turin–Genoa).



Since
political dynamics are always involved, this has implications for International
Relations as a field of study. But the dynamic analysis is different from
comparative statics (that is, measurement at different moments of time). The
knowledge dynamics can travel and be "footloose" to use the words of Raymond
Vernon, although it leaves footprints behind. Grasping "wealth from knowledge"
(locally or regionally) requires taking a systems perspective. However, the
system is not "given"; the system remains under reconstruction and can thus be
articulated only as a theoretically informed hypothesis.



In
the social sciences, one can use the concept of a hypothesized system
heuristically. For example, when
analyzing the knowledge-based economy in Germany, one can ask whether more synergy
can be explained when looking at the level of the whole country (e.g., in terms
of the East-West or North-South divide) or at the level of Germany's Federal
States? What is the surplus of the nation or at the European level? How can one
provide political decision-making with the required variety to operate as a
control mechanism on the complex dynamics of these eco-systems?



A
complex system can be expected to generate niches with synergy at all scales,
but as unintended consequences. To what extent and for which time span can
these effects be anticipated and then perhaps be facilitated? At this point,
Luhmann's theory comes in because he has this notion of different codifications
of communication, which then, at a next-order level, begin to self-organize
when symbolically generalized.



Codes
are constructed bottom-up, but what is constructed bottom-up may thereafter
begin to control top-down. Thus, one should articulate reflexively the
selection mechanisms that are constructed from the bottom-up variation by
specifying the why as an hypothesis.
What are the selection mechanisms? Observable relations (such as
university-industry relations) are not neutral, but mean different things for
the economy and for the state; and this meaning of the observable relations can
be evaluated in terms of the codes of communication.



Against
Niklas Luhmann's model, I would argue that codes of communication can be
translated into one another since interhuman communications are not
operationally closed, as in the biological model of autopoiesis. One also needs a social-scientific perspective on the
fluidities ("overflows") and translations among functions, as emphasized, for
example, by French scholars such as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In
evolutionary economics, one distinguishes between market and non-market
selection environments, but not among selection environments that are
differently codified. Here, Luhmann's theory offers us a heuristic: The complex
system of communications tends to differentiate in terms of the symbolic
generalizations of codes of communication because this differentiation is
functional in allowing the system to process more complexity and thus to be
more innovative. The more orthogonal the codes, the more options for
translations among them. The synergy indicator measures these options as
redundancy. The selection environments, however, have to be specified historically
because these redundancies—other possibilities—are not given but rather constructed
over long periods of time.





How did you arrive where
you currently work on?


I
became interested in the relations between science, technology, and society as
an undergraduate (in biochemistry) which coincided with the time of the student
movement of the late 1960s. We began to study Jürgen Habermas in the framework
of the "critical university," and I decided to continue with a second degree in
philosophy. After the discussions between Luhmann and Habermas (1971), I
recognized the advantages of Luhmann's more empirically oriented systems approach
and I pursued my Ph.D. in the sociology of organization and labour.



In
the meantime, we got the opportunity to organize an interfaculty department for
Science and Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam after a
competition for a large government grant. In the context of this department, I
became interested in methodology: how can one compare across case studies and
make inferences? Actually, my 1995 book The
Challenge of Scientometrics
had a kind of Triple-Helix model on the cover: How do cognitions, texts, and
authors exhibit different dynamics that influence one another?



For
example, when an author publishes a paper in a scholarly journal, this may add
to his reputation as an author, but the knowledge claimed in the text enters a
process of validation which can be much more global and anonymous. These
processes are mediated since they are based on communication. Thus, one can add
to the context of discovery (of authors) and the context of justification (of
knowledge contents) a context of mediation (in texts). The status of a journal,
for example, matters for the communication of the knowledge content in the article.
The contexts operate as selection environments upon one another.



In
evolutionary economics, one is used to distinguishing between market and
non-market selection environments, but not among more selection environments
that are differently codified. At this point, Luhmann's theory offers a new
perspective: The complex system of communications tends to differentiate in
terms of the symbolic generalization of codes of communication because this differentiation
among the codes of communication allows the system to process more complexity
and to be more innovative in terms of possible translations. The different
selection environments for communications, however, are not given but constructed
historically over long periods of time. The modern (standardized) format of the
citation, for example, was constructed at the end of the 19th
century, but it took until the 1950s before the idea of a citation index was
formulated (by Eugene Garfield). The use of citations in evaluative
bibliometrics is even more recent.



In
evolutionary economics, one distinguishes furthermore between (technological)
trajectories and regimes. Trajectories can result from "mutual shaping" between
two selection environments, for example, markets and technologies. Nations and
firms follow trajectories in a landscape. Regimes are global and require the
specification of three (or more) selection environments. When three (or more)
dynamics interact, symmetry can be broken and one can expect feed-forward and
feedback loops. Such a system can begin to flourish auto-catalytically when the
configuration is optimal.



From
such considerations, that is, a confluence of the neo-institutional program of
Henry Etzkowitz and my neo-evolutionary view, our Triple Helix model emerged in
1994: how do institutions and functions interrelate and change one another or,
in other words, provide options for innovation? Under what conditions
can university-industry-government relations lead to wealth generation and
organized knowledge production? The starting point was a workshop about Evolutionary Economics and Chaos Theory: New
directions for technology studies held in Amsterdam in 1993. Henry
suggested thereafter that we could collaborate further on university-industry
relations. I answered that I needed at least three (sub)dynamics from the
perspective of my research program, and then we agreed about "A Triple Helix of
University-Industry-Government Relations". Years later, however, we took our
two lines of research apart again, and in 2002 I began developing a
Triple-Helix indicator of synergy in a series of studies of national systems of
innovation.





What would you give as
advice to students who would like to get into the field of innovation and
global politics?



In
general, I would advise them to be both a specialist and broader than that.
Innovation involves crossing established borders. Learn at least two languages.
If your background is political science, then take a minor in science &
technology studies or in economics. One needs both the specialist profile and
the potential to reach out to other audiences by being aware of the need to
make translations between different frameworks. Learn to be reflexive about the
status of what one can say in one or the other framework.



For
example, I learned to avoid the formulation of grandiose statements such as
"modern economies are knowledge-based economies," and to say instead: "modern
economies can increasingly be considered as knowledge-based economies." The
latter formulation provides room for asking "to what extent," and thus one can
ask for further information, indicators, and results of the measurement.



In
the sociology of science, specialisms and paradigms are sometimes considered as
belief systems. It seems to me that by considering scholarly discourses as
systems of rationalized expectations one can make the distinction between
normative and cognitive learning. Normative learning (that is, in belief
systems) is slower than cognitive learning (in terms of theorized expectations)
because the cognitive mode provides us with more room for experimentation: One
can afford to make mistakes, since one's communication and knowledge claims
remain under discussion, and not one's status as a communicator. The cognitive
mode has advantages; it can be considered as the surplus that is further
developed during higher education. Normative learning is slower; it dominates
in the political sphere.





What
does the "Triple Helix" reveal about the fragmentation of "national innovation
systems"?



In
2003, colleagues from the Department of Economics and Management Studies at the
Erasmus University in Rotterdam offered me firm data from the Netherlands containing
these three dimensions: the economic, the geographical, and the technological dimensions
in data of more than a million Dutch firms. I presented the results at the
Schumpeter Society in Turin in 2004, and asked whether someone in the audience
had similar data for other countries. I expected Swedish or Israeli colleagues
to have this type of statistics, but someone from Germany stepped in, Michael
Fritsch, and so we did the analysis for Germany. These studies were first
published in Research Policy.
Thereafter, we did studies on Hungary, Norway, Sweden, and recently also China
and Russia.



Several
conclusions arise from these studies. Using entropy statistics, the data can be
decomposed along the three different dimensions. One can decompose national
systems geographically into regions, but one can also decompose them in terms
of the technologies involved (e.g., high-tech versus medium-tech). We were
mainly relying on national data. And of course, there are limitations to the
data collections. Actually, we now have international data, but this is
commercial data and therefore more difficult to use reliably than governmental
statistics.



For
the Netherlands, we obtained the picture that would more or less be expected:
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Eindhoven are the most knowledge-intensive and
knowledge-based regions. This is not surprising, although there was one surprise:
We know that in terms of knowledge bases, Amsterdam is connected to Utrecht and
then the geography goes a bit to the east in the direction of Wageningen. What
we did not know was that the niche also spreads to the north in the direction
of Zwolle. The highways to Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol) are probably the most
important.



In
the case of Germany, when we first analyzed the data at the level of the
"Laender" (Federal States), we could see the East-West divide still prevailing,
but when we repeated the analysis at the lower level of the "Regierungsbezirke"
we no longer found the East-West divide as dominant (using 2004 data). So, the
environment of Dresden for example was more synergetic in Triple-Helix terms
than that of Saarbruecken. And this was nice to see considering my idea that
the knowledge-based economy increasingly prevails since the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. The discussion about two different
models for organizing the political economy—communism or liberal democracy—had
become obsolete after 1990.



After
studying Germany, I worked with Balázs Lengyel on Hungarian data. Originally,
we could not find any regularity in the Hungarian data, but then the idea arose
to analyze the Hungarian data as three different innovation systems: one around
Budapest, which is a metropolitan innovation system; one in the west of the
country, which has been incorporated into Western Europe; and one in the east
of the country, which has remained the old innovation system that is state-led
and dependent on subsidies. For the western part, one could say that Hungary
has been "europeanized" by Austria and Germany; it has become part of a
European system.



When
Hungary came into the position to create a national
innovation system, free from Russia and the Comecon, it was too late, as
Europeanization had already stepped in and national boundaries were no longer
as dominant. Accordingly, and this was a very nice result, assessing this
synergy indicator on Hungary as a nation, we did not find additional synergy at
the national (that is, above-regional) level. While we clearly found synergy at
the national level for the Netherlands and also found it in Germany, but at the
level of the Federal States, we could not find synergy at a national level for
Hungary. Hungary has probably developed too late to develop a nationally
controlled system of innovations.



A
similar phenomenon appeared when we studied Norway: my Norwegian colleague
(Øivind Strand) did most of our analysis there. To our surprise, the
knowledge-based economy was not generated where the universities are located (Oslo
and Trondheim), but on the West Coast, where the off-shore, marine and maritime
industries are most dominant. FDI (foreign direct investment) in the marine and
maritime industries leads to knowledge-based synergy in the regions on the West
Shore of Norway. Norway is still a national system, but the Norwegian
universities like Trondheim or Oslo are not so much involved in entrepreneurial
networks. These are traditional universities, which tend to keep their hands
off the economy.



Actually,
when we had discussions about these two cases, Norway and Hungary, which both
show that internationalization had become a major factor, either in the form of
Europeanization in the Hungarian case, or in the form of foreign-driven
investments (off-shore industry and oil companies) in the Norwegian case, I
became uncertain and asked myself whether we did not believe too much in our
indicators? Therefore, I proposed to Øivind to study Sweden, given the availability
of well-organized data of this national system.



We
expected to find synergy concentrated in the three regional systems of
Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö/Lund. Indeed, 48.5 percent of the Swedish
synergy is created in these three regions. This is more than one would expect
on the basis of the literature. Some colleagues were upset, because they had
already started trying to work on new developments of the Triple Helix, for
example, in Linköping. But the Swedish economy is organized and centralized in
this geographical dimension. Perhaps that is why one talks so much about
"regionalization" in policy documents. Sweden is very much a national
innovation system, with additional synergy between the regions.





Can governments alter
historical trajectories of national, regional or local innovation systems?



Let
me mention the empirical results for China in order to illustrate the
implications of empirical conclusions for policy options. We had no Chinese
data set, but we obtained access to the database Orbis of the Bureau van Dijk
(an international company, which is Wall Street oriented, assembling data about
companies) that contains industry indicators such as names, addresses,
NACE-codes, types of technology, the sizes of each enterprise, etc. However,
this data can be very incomplete. Using this incomplete data for China, we said
that we were just going to show how one could do the analysis  if one had full data. We guess that the
National Bureau of Statistics of China has complete data.
I did the analysis with Ping Zhou, Professor at Zhejiang University.



We
analyzed China first at the provincial level, and as expected, the East Coast
emerged as much more knowledge intense than the rest of the country. After
that, we also looked at the next-lower level of the 339 prefectures of China.
From this analysis, four of them popped up as far more synergetic than the
others. These four municipalities were: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and
Chongqing.



These
four municipalities became clearly visible as an order of magnitude more
synergetic than other regions. The special characteristic about them is that –as
against the others – these four municipalities are administered by the central
government. Actually, it came out of my data and I did not understand it; but
my Chinese colleague said that this result was very nice and specified this
relationship.



The
Chinese case thus illustrates that government control can make a difference. It
shows – and that is not surprising, as China runs on a different model – that
the government is able to organize the four municipalities in such a way as to
increase synergy. Of course, I do not know what is happening on the ground. We
know that the Chinese system is more complex than these three dimensions
suggest. I guess the government agencies may wish to consider the option of
extending the success of this development model, to Guangdong for example or to
other parts of China. Isn't it worrisome that all the other and less controlled
districts have not been as successful in generating synergy?



Referring
more generally to innovation policies, I would advise as a heuristics that
political discourse is able to signal a problem, but policy questions do not
enable us to analyze the issues. Regional development, for example, is an issue
in Sweden because the system is very centralized, more than in Norway, for
example. But there is nothing in our data that supports the claim that the
Swedish government is successful in decentralizing the knowledge-based economy
beyond the three metropolitan regions. We may be able to reach conclusions like
these serving as policy advice. One develops policies on the basis of intuitive
assumptions which a researcher is sometimes able to test.



As
noted, one can expect a complex system continuously to produce unintended
consequences, and thus it needs monitoring. The dynamics of the system are
different from the sum of the sub-dynamics because of the interaction effects
and feedback loops. Metaphors such as a Triple Helix, Mode-2, or the Risk
Society can be stimulating for the discourse, but these metaphors tend to develop
their own dynamics of proliferating discourses.



The
Triple Helix, for example, can first be considered as a call for collaboration
in networks of institutions. However, in an ecosystem of bi-lateral and
tri-lateral relations, one has a trade-off between local integration
(collaboration) and global differentiation (competition). The markets and the
sciences develop at the global level, above the level of specific relations. A
principal agent such as government may be locked into a suboptimum. Institutional
reform that frees the other two dynamics (markets and sciences) requires
translation of political legitimation into other codes of communication. Translations
among codes of communication provide the innovation engine.





Is there a connection
between infrastructures and the success of innovation processes?



One
of the conclusions, which pervades throughout all advanced economies, is that
knowledge intensive services (KIS) are
not synergetic locally because they can be disconnected – uncoupled – from the
location. For example, if one offers a knowledge-intensive service in Munich
and receives a phone call from Hamburg, the next step is to take a plane to
Hamburg, or to catch a train inside Germany perhaps. Thus, it does not matter
whether one is located in Munich or Hamburg as knowledge-intensive services
uncouple from the local economy. The main point is proximity to an airport or
train station.



This
is also the case for high-tech knowledge-based manufacturing. But it is
different for medium-tech manufacturing, because in this case the dynamics are
more embedded in the other parts of the economy. If one looks at Russia, the
knowledge-intensive services operate differently from the Western European
model, where the phenomenon of uncoupling takes place. In Russia, KIS
contribute to coupling, as knowledge-intensive services are related to state
apparatuses.



In
the Russian case, the knowledge-based economy is heavily concentrated in Moscow
and St. Petersburg. So, if one aims –as the Russian government proclaims – to create
not "wealth from knowledge" but "knowledge from wealth" – that is, oil revenues
–it might be wise to uncouple the knowledge-intensive services from the state
apparatuses. Of course, this is not easy to do in the Russian model because
traditionally, the center (Moscow) has never done this. Uncoupling
knowledge-intensive services, however, might give them a degree of freedom to
move around, from Tomsk to Minsk or vice
versa, steered by economic forces more than they currently are (via institutions
in Moscow).





Final question. What does path-dependency mean in the context of
innovation dynamics?



In
The Challenge of Scientometrics. The development, measurement, and
self-organization of scientific communications (1995), I used Shannon-type information theory to study
scientometric problems, as this methodology combines both static and dynamic
analyses. Connected to this theory I developed a measurement method for
path-dependency and critical transitions.



In
the case of a radio transmission, for example, you have a sender and a
receiver, and in between you may have an auxiliary station. For instance, the
sender is in New York and the receiver is in Bonn and the auxiliary station is
in Iceland. The signal emerges in New York and travels to Bonn, but it may be possible
to improve the reception by assuming the signal is from Iceland instead of
listening to New York. When Iceland provides a better signal, it is possible to
forget the history of the signal before it arrived in Island. It no longer
matters whether Iceland obtained the signal originally from New York or Boston.
One takes the signal from Iceland and the pre-history of the signal does not
matter anymore for a receiver.



Such
a configuration provides a path-dependency (on Iceland) in
information-theoretical terms, measurable in terms of bits of information. In a
certain sense you get negative bits of information, since the shortest path in
the normal triangle would be from New York to Bonn, and in this case the
shortest path is from New York via Iceland to Bonn. I called this at the time a
critical transition. In a scientific text for instance, a new terminology can
come up and if it overwrites the old terminology to the extent that one does
not have to listen to the old terminology anymore, one has a critical
transition that frees one from the path-dependencies at a previous moment of
time.



Thus,
my example is about radical and knowledge-based changes. As long as one has to
listen to the past, one does not make a critical transition. The knowledge-based
approach is always about creative destruction and about moving ahead,
incorporating possible new options in the future. The hypothesized future
states become more important than the past. The challenge, in my opinion, is to
make the notion of options operational and to bring these ideas into
measurement. The Triple-Helix indicator measures the number of possible options
as additional redundancy. This measurement has the additional advantage that one
becomes sensitive to uncertainty in the prediction.





Loet Leydesdorff is Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He is Honorary Professor of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor at the School of Management, Birkbeck, University of London, Visiting Professor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in Beijing, and Guest Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He has published extensively in systems theory, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation (see at http://www.leydesdorff.net/list.htm). With Henry Etzkowitz, he initiated a series of workshops, conferences, and special issues about the Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003 and held "The City of Lausanne" Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, in 2005. In 2007, he was Vice-President of the 8th International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS'07, Liège). In 2014, he was listed as a highly-cited author by Thomson Reuters. 





Literature and Related
links:



Science & Technology Dynamics,
University of Amsterdam / Amsterdam School of Communications
Research (ASCoR) 


Leydesdorff,
L. (2006). The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, Measured, Simulated. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.


Leydesdorff, L. (2001). A Sociological Theory of Communication: The Self-Organization of the
Knowledge-Based Society. Universal Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.


Leydesdorff,
L. (1995). The Challenge of Scientometrics . The development, measurement, and
self-organization of scientific communications. Leiden, DSWO Press, Leiden University.


http://www.leydesdorff.net/





Print version of this Talk (pdf)



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Siddharth Mallavarapu on International
Asymmetries, Ethnocentrism, and a View on IR from India












How is the rise of the BRICs in the international
political and economic system reflected in our understanding of that system?
One key insight is that the discipline of International Relations that has
emanated from the northern hemisphere is far less 'international' than is
widely thought. Scholars from the 'Global South' increasingly raise important
challenges to the provincialism of IR theory with a universal pretense.
Siddharth Mallavarapu's work has consistently engaged with such questions. In
this Talk, Mallavarapu, amongst
others, elaborates on IR's ethnocentrism, the multitude of voices in the Global
South, and why he rather speaks of a 'voice from India' rather than an 'Indian
IR theory'.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)






What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in
current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



One of the things I constantly contend with in my work
is to think of ways of how we can widen our notion of the international. IR has been too closely linked to the fortunes of
the major powers, and this has been to our detriment, because it has
impoverished our sense of international. I think the spirit of what I contend
with is best captured by what Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his book Globalectics:
Theory and Politics of Knowing concerns himself with, namely '…the
organization of literary space and the politics of knowing'. My interest is to
grapple with the manner in which the discipline of International Relations in
its dominant mainstream idiom orchestrates and administers intellectual space
and the implications this carries for the broader politics of knowledge. Simply
put, the principal challenge is to confront various species of ethnocentrism –
particularly Anglo-American accents of parochialism in the mainstream account
of International Relations.



I am also keenly sensitive to some disciplinary biases
and prejudices, which I think sometimes take on tacit forms and sometimes more
explicit forms, and in which provincial experiences are passed off as universal
experiences. The whole question of 'benchmarking' is problematic, in that a
benchmark is set by one, and others are expected to measure up to that
benchmark. Then there is the question of certain theories, for example the idea
that hegemony is desirable from the perspective of international stability –
think of the Hegemonic Stability Theory in the 1970s, or the Democratic Peace Theory that assumes that liberal democracy is an unsurpassed
political form from the perspective of peace. Then there is human rights
advocacy of a particular kind, and the whole idea of the 'Long Peace' applied
to the Cold War years. In reality, this was far from a 'long peace' for many
countries in the Third World during the same era.



I am also interested right now in the issue of the
evolution of IR theory, and was really intrigued by the September 2013 issue of
the EuropeanJournal of International Relations, with its focus on 'the End of International Relations Theory': I find
this fascinating, because just at a time when there are new players or re-emerging and re-surfacing
players in the international system, there is a move to delegitimize IR Theory
itself. So I am curious about the conjuncture and the set of sociologies of
knowledge that inform particular terms and turns in the discipline.



My response to this challenge
is to consciously work towards inserting other voices, traditions and
sensibilities in the discipline to problematize its straightforward and
simplistic understanding of large chunks of the world. My work is informed by
what international relations praxis looks
like in other places and how it is locally interpreted in those contexts. There
are gaps in mainstream narratives and I am interested in finding ways to create
space for a more substantive engagement with other perspectives by broadening
the disciplinary context. This is not merely a matter of inclusive elegance but
a matter of life and death because poor knowledge as evident from the
historical record generates disastrous political judgments that have already
resulted in considerable loss of human life, often worst impacting the former
colonies.



The global south holds a particular attraction for me
in this context, especially given its often problematic representations in
mainstream IR discourse. The underlying premise here is that the discipline of
IR will stand to be enriched by drawing on a much wider repertoire of human
experiences than it currently does. The normative imperative is to nudge us all
in the direction of being more circumspect before we pronounce or pass quick
and often harsh political assessments about sights, sounds, smells and
political ecologies we are unfamiliar with. IR as a discipline needs to reflect
the considerable diversity.  



My doctoral research on the role of the International Court
of Justice advisory opinion rendered in July 1996 on the legality of the threat
or use of nuclear weapons provided an opportunity to probe this diversity
further. While advancing a case for categorical illegality of nuclear use under
all circumstances, Judge Christopher Gregory Weeramantry discusses at length the multicultural bases of
international humanitarian law. In doing so, he combines knowledge of world
religions, postcolonial histories and canonical international law to frame his
erudite opinion, which displays a thoughtful engagement with often neglected or
obscured sensibilities.



These examples can be exponentially multiplied. Such a
sentiment is most succinctly captured by Chinua Achebe in Home and
Exile where he argues that '…my hope for the twenty-first [century] is that
it will see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world's
peoples'. It most critically calls for '…the process of 're-storying' peoples
who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession'. I would treat this as an important charter or
intellectual map for anybody embarking on the study of International Relations
today. I would also like to add that this storytelling would inevitably
encounter the categories and many avatars
of race, class, gender and nationality crisscrossing and intersecting in all
sorts of possible combinations generating a whole host of political outcomes as
well.  



The skewed politics of knowledge is most evident when
it comes to theory with a big 'T' in particular. Most theories of International
Relations emanate from the Anglo-American metropole and little from elsewhere.
This is not because of an absence of theoretical reflection in other milieus but
due rather to a not so accidental privileging of some parts of experiential
reality over others. IR has been too caught up with the major powers. I could
think of conscious efforts to theorize both in the past and in the present
elements of reality hidden from conventional vantage points. One recent illustration
of social and political theorizing from the context I am more familiar with is an
account by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai titled The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. There
are on-going theoretical engagements in Africa, the Arab world, Asia and South
America reflecting an intellectual ferment both within and outside of these
societies. International Relations as a discipline has to find ways of
explicitly engaging these texts and relating it to prevailing currents in world
politics rather than carry on an elaborate pretence of their non-existence. I
am more troubled by claims of an 'end of International Relations theory' just
at a moment when the world is opening up to new political possibilities
stemming from the projected growth in international influence of parts of Asia,
Africa, the Arab world and South America. IR has to move beyond its obsession
of focusing on the major powers and seriously democratize its content. The
terms 'global' or 'international' cannot be a monopoly or even an oligopoly.
Such a view has severely impoverished our understanding of the contemporary world.





How did you
arrive at where you currently are in IR?



I cannot really claim that this was a neatly planned
trajectory. I stumbled upon the discipline by chance not design. My initial
curiosity about the world of social cognition emerged from a slice of my medical
history. When I was at school in my early teens, I developed a condition referred
to as Leucoderma or Vitiligo which involved skin depigmentation. I enjoyed
writing from an early stage and recall recording my observations of the world
around me in a piece titled Etiology
Unknown borrowing language from the doctor's diagnosis. I recall an urgency
to comprehend and make sense of what I perceived then as a fast changing world
where old certitudes were dissolving on a daily basis. I felt an outsider at
some remove from my earlier self and it gave me on retrospect a distinct
vantage point to witness the world around me. It was impacting who I thought I
was and thereby compelled me to confront issues of identity – individual and
social. An extremely supportive family made all the difference during these
years.



The turmoil and confusion in those years led me to
develop a deeper interest in understanding more loosely why people reacted in
particular sorts of ways to what was in medical terms merely a cosmetic change.
It also led me to informally forge community whenever I saw anybody else experiencing
similar states of being. I also internalized one of the first ingredients of
good social science – the capacity to be empathetic and put ourselves in others
shoes. I learnt that the discipline of Sociology among the available choices in
my milieu came closest to allowing me to pursue these concerns more
systematically further. I applied to a Sociology master's programme after my
undergraduate years at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, but I had also
applied simultaneously to the International Relations programme since in my
understanding it after all concerned the wider world – an extension of scale
but similar I imagined in terms of the canvas of concerns. The numbers in India
are large, the competition is stiff: I made it to the IR programme but did not
make it to the Sociology programme.



Having got there, I had some outstanding influences,
and I soon realized that one could also think about issues of identity (then
cast by me in terms of simple binaries – home and the external world, the
relationship of inside and outside, victors and the vanquished) in the
discipline of IR. I decided to stick the course and delve into these questions
more deeply while keeping up with a broader interest in the social sciences.



I could list a few influences that were critical at
various stages of my academic biography: at high school, an economics teacher S.
Venkata Lakshmi was very encouraging and positive and confirmed my intuitive
sense that I would enjoy the social sciences. Subsequently at college I had in
Father Ambrose Pinto a fine teacher of Political Science. He would take us on
small field excursions to observe first hand issues such as caste conflicts in
a neighbouring village, and all that helped me develop a sharper sense of the
political which moved away from the textbook and was strongly anchored in the local
context.



At the graduate level of study, Kanti Bajpai who later also became my mentor and advisor in the doctoral programme
exercised an enormous influence as a role model. I was convinced that a life of
the mind is worth aspiring and working towards once I came into contact with
him in the classroom. He also exposed me to all the basic building blocks of an
academic life – reading, writing, researching, teaching and publishing,
demonstrating at all times both patience and unparalleled generosity. We have
collaborated on two edited volumes on International
Relations in India and I continue to greatly value an enduring friendship.



For over a decade, I have also had the good fortune of
coming into contact with B.S. Chimni who is an exemplary scholar in the Third World Approaches to
International Law (TWAIL) tradition. It has been a great joy bouncing off ideas and discussing
at length various facets of International Relations, International Law and
Political Theory together over the years. I have learnt much from this rich and
continued association. In 2012 we worked jointly on an edited book titled International Relations: Perspectives for
the Global South.



I have also learnt (and continue to do so) from my
students both at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and at the South Asian
University (SAU). At JNU, I made my beginnings and continue to take some pride
in being intellectually home spun at one of the foundational and premier
crucibles of International Relations scholarship in India. I have also
thoroughly enjoyed my interactions over the years with the students drawn from
diverse backgrounds. At SAU, I have in the space of a short period been exposed
to some fine students from across the South Asian region. I have often been
impressed by their understanding of politics and on occasion have marvelled at
their demonstration of a maturity beyond their years. There is much I learn
from them particularly from their insider narratives of the unique political
experiences and trajectories of their specific countries.



Himadeep Muppidi has also been a remarkable influence
in terms of clarifying my thinking about the workings of the global IR episteme.
His receptivity to hitherto neglected intellectual inheritances from outside
the mainstream and most evidently his capacity to write with soul, passion and
character while retaining a deep suspicion of the 'objectivity' fetish in the
social sciences has alerted me to a whole new metaphysics and aesthetic of
interpreting IR. The thread that runs through all these interests and
influences is firstly the issue of context, and secondly the question of agency
–what it meant to be marginal in some sense, how could one think about
theorizing questions relating to dispossession, relating to a certain degree of
marginality– and also the broader issue of the politics of knowledge itself: of
how certain attitudes and concepts seem to obscure or deface certain
conditions, which seem to be quite prevalent.



I have also found excellent academic conversationalists
with sometimes differing perspectives who help sharpen my arguments
considerably. I would like to make special mention of Thomas Fues and the fascinating
global governance school that he offers intellectual stewardship to in Bonn. In
the years to come, I look forward to further intellectual collaborations with
scholars from Brazil and South Africa and other parts of South America and
Africa as well as the Arab world.





What would a
student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global
way?



The key without a doubt is curiosity. I do my best to
feed that curiosity as a teacher. I also think Gerardo Munck and Richard
Snyder's counsel and interviews in their book, Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics are a useful
resource for students wanting to study International Relations. I also feel
strongly that classics need to be read and engaged with, by bringing them into
play in our contemporary dilemmas. I find that many of the questions we ask
today are not necessarily entirely new questions: there is a history to them
and there has been some careful thought given to them in the past, so it is
important to partake of this inheritance.



Then there is language: it is vital for students to
break out of one particular region or one particular set of concerns which flow
from a limited context, and in this way to become willing to engage with other
contexts. In this sense, language learning potentially opens up other worlds. I also believe that some exposure to quantitative methods is important:
you need to be able
to both contextualize and interpret data with some degree of confidence and not
overlook them when approaching texts. Not
everybody may choose it but we need to make the distinction between The Signal and the Noise as Nate Silverreminds us. I have found Marc Trachtenberg's The Craft of International History (chapter 1 in PDF here) a very useful text in providing
some very practical advice in fine tuning our research designs to weave the
past into our present. D.D. Kosambi's essay on 'combining methods' (PDF here) still
provides important clues to thinking creatively about method.



I also think it is important for students to avoid the
temptations of insularity and also pose questions in a fashion that allows them
to explore the workings of these questions in diverse settings. They should be open to a
diversity of methods from different disciplines such as ethnography, and
develop a deeper historical sensitivity, all these are crucial to shaping up as
a good scholar.



In sum, the importance of classics, fieldwork and
language acquisition cannot be emphasized sufficiently. Classics bring us back
to refined thought concerning enduring questions, language opens up other
worlds, and field work compels one to at least temporarily inhabit the trenches,
dirty your hands and acquire an earthy sense of the issues at hand.





Given the
importance you attach to the learning of language, among other things, and the
linguistic diversity that characterises India, do you often perceive language
to be a barrier to understanding?



I think language works in two ways. On the one hand,
each language has a specific manner of framing issues and a specific set of
sensibilities associated with it which in some respects is quite unique.
However, languages also lend themselves to different cross-cultural
interpretations and adaptations. Kristina S. Ten in an evocative piece titled 'Vehicles for Story: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on Defining African Literature,Preserving Culture and Self' maps some key lines of an enduring debate. Thiong'o
has a particularly strong position on this question of language: he says he no
longer wants to write in the English language, but instead in his native Gikuyu,
as well as Swahili. He argues that language has to do with memory, has to do
with what he calls a soul, and he maintains that language hierarchies are very
real and that we must contribute to enriching our own pools of language to
begin with, if we are to contribute to a much wider, global repertoire of
languages. In contrast, Chinua Achebe whom I mentioned earlier, very often wrote
in English and held the position that it was important to be accessible to more
people and to reach diverse audiences who would not necessarily be from his
home country. He said it was possible to use a language like English and permeate
it with local texture, wisdom and pulse – something he has exemplified in his
own work. I consider his writings a testimony to how well that can be done.



So there is a bit of a divide in terms of how one can
look at this question of language, but teaching in India I know that there are
students who may be very bright but who are constrained by the fact that they
have not had the same access to English schools, and therefore are restricted
to the vernacular. These students may have some very good ideas, but they feel disadvantaged
by the fact that their command of the English language is not sufficient to
guarantee close attention to what they wish to say. Some work hard to overcome
these challenges and meet with considerable success. While I think it is
wonderful to learn another language, it does not need to entail a diffidence or
neglect of one's own native language or any other vernacular language. My
impression is that if unimaginatively pursued something is lost in the process
and students end up feeling diffident and apologetic about their native language
which is entirely undesirable. I believe therefore that while one should enthusiastically
embrace new languages, the challenge is to accomplish this without unconsciously
obscuring one's native tongue. Having said that, all of us in India are keen to
go to English language schools. Vernacular languages have often lost out in the
process. So there is something to be said about this concern about language. We
have to tread carefully and remain attentive to how language hierarchies are
positioned and deployed for advancing particular species of knowledge claims.





From the
language issues flow conceptual questions: Asia is a Western construct, and
South Asia an extension of that. You reluctantly use this term, South Asia, in
what you call shorthand, and similarly terms "nation" and "state". How can we
break away from these concepts if we don't have a new vocabulary?



This really flows from the fact that IR is still very
much an ethnocentric construct. We are also suggesting in the same breath that
there is a particular form in which most concepts and categories tend to be
employed. I think IR language is imbued at least partly with the vocabulary of
the hegemon or of the dominant powers, so that it shares with the area studies' legacy the political connotations that are still very much with us. One
way that I try to break away from this when I introduce students to these
concepts and categories is by focusing on the lineage and the broader
intellectual history and etymology of concepts which come into play in IR.
Students are in any case acutely aware of the fact that there is a strong area
studies tradition which has mapped the world in a particular way which was not an
innocent discursive formation by any stretch of imagination. They also
recognize that this is not the only framing possible. The challenge for us is
of course to introduce new concepts and categories. I noticed for instance that
South Asia has become 'Southern Asia' for some strategic commentators (StevenA. Hoffmann among others) because 'Southern Asia' also includes China. However,
when it is done from the perspective of strategy there are other interests intertwined
such as specific geopolitical assessments.



What I try to do, rather, is to draw on the deeper
histories within the region itself, in order to arrive at concepts and
conceptions which are more germane to our context. I don't think I've succeeded
in this project as yet, but one of the reasons why I think it's important to
historicise these elements and even categories is to open up the possibility of
thinking about different imaginaries and along with that different categories.
I don't want to call it an alternative vocabulary, because I think that some
sensibilities have been given short shrift in history, and some provincial
experiences have more successfully masqueraded as universal experiences. Therefore,
part of the challenge is to call that bluff, while another part of the
challenge is to reconstruct and offer fresh perspectives. These may even be
questions about traditional issues such as order or justice, questions of
political authority, political rule or legitimacy. These are questions which
are of concern to all societies though individual responses may not echo the
language and slants of conventional IR theory. However, they may throw up some
sophisticated formulations on these very issues. A part of the challenge for
the IR scholar, then, is to recover and bring these ideas into the sinews of the
mainstream IR academia.



It is equally important to avoid any sort of nativism,
or to suggest that this is necessarily 'the best' approach, but to widen the
inventory before moving on to stimulating a real conversation between divergent
conceptions. We must avoid falling into the trap of what Ulrich Beck among
others has referred to as 'methodological nationalism'. I am by no means
suggesting that there is 'an Indian theory' of IR, but what I am curious about
is how the world is viewed from this particular location. That is quite
different from suggesting that there is a national project or a national school
of IR. I think that distinction needs to be made more subtly and needs to come
through more clearly, but one of the projects I am currently involved in is the
chronicling of a disciplinary history of IR in India and what that tells us
about Indians and their readings of the world outside their home. In that
process, I ask what the key issues that animated particularly an earlier
generation of scholars - how did they present these ideas and why did they
avoid using certain forms of presentation and framing? What were some of the
conspicuous presences and nonappearances in their work? Exploring these sorts
of issues will lead us forward by, firstly, bringing to bear all these pieces
of work which I feel have been ignored or have not received their due, and secondly,
by showing that there is a fair amount of diversity of thinking even in the
earlier generations of IR scholarship. The intent is to avoid a monolithic
conception of IR that emerges from India. I will have to make this point much
more clearly and emphatically in the future, and hope that my focus on
disciplinary history will contribute to some critical ground clearing. Similar
inventories of IR scholarship need to be assembled in different locations from
Africa, South America, other parts of Asia and the Arab world.



Many of these projects then also link up to very
practical questions. One of the issues that is of interest to me in this
context is that of South-South cooperation, such as for instance the IBSA Dialogue Forum, or the grouping known as BRICS, or the broader forum of
the G-20. There is evidence that the traditional structures and ways of doing
things are increasingly suspect and being viewed with suspicion by some actors
within the international system. It is therefore more important now to reopen
some of these questions and to think afresh about such things as institutional
design: what does it mean to be talking about "democratising international
relations"? How can we think of more inclusive and legitimate institutions? How
can we think about ways in which we can cooperate for the provision of global
public goods, but in a manner which is historically more legitimate and fair?
How can we address previous asymmetries that are not necessarily going to just
disappear? How do we deal with old power structures and their residual
influences in terms of the Westphalian state system? What legacy has been
enshrined for instance in the Bretton Woods institutions and what has that
legacy meant? What happened to non-alignment? Vijay Prashad chronicles
vividly the promise and unfulfilled promise of the non-aligned movement in
his fascinating account titled The Darker
Nations: A People's History of the Third World. How the past plays out in
terms of contemporary global governance questions and arrangements is fundamental
to my research interests. I have recently intervened on the Responsibility to
Protect (R2P) doctrine and its practice. I have been rather critical arguing that it
cannot be disassociated from a longer history of interventionism by the major
powers in the global south however benign its dressing. A thread that runs
through my work is to demonstrate how historical asymmetry continues to manifest
in terms of how the contemporary international system is structured. And I ask if
we are to arrive at a more legitimate, inclusive and effective international
system, then what are the mechanisms and steps which we need to work towards?





What do you
imagine that process might look like? Do we need to return to a 'world of
villages' (the 1300s) before we can reinvent IR, the national and the global?
Do we need micro histories before we can reassemble a bigger history or is a
subtle shift possible?



There are two levels on which this can happen: on one
level the changes that seem to work are incremental changes and not
lock-stock-and-barrel fundamental changes. In terms of scale, different
scholars do different things. Some scholars are interested in micro histories,
others are interested in macro histories and asking the big questions.



I imagine both these projects are important and there
should be more scholars from the global south as well who ask the big macro questions.
What has happened for too long is that we have relegated this responsibility to
the traditional post Second World War major powers and they have treated it as
natural to offer us macro-historical narratives and pictures. I think scholars
from the global south need now to attend to both tasks: to write good micro
histories as well as reframe the larger questions of macro history. I would add
that normative concerns such as the content and feasibility of global justice needs
also to be an integral part of contemporary international relations
scholarship. For instance, it would be fair to ask that in a world of plenty,
why do so many people go hungry?



So if you were to ask me about my dreams and my hopes,
I still think that the 1955 Bandung Conference and subsequent nonalignment visions
remain unfinished business. I hope that within the span of the current
generation there is greater egalitarianism accomplished in the international
system and ultimately a balance not just in terms of what Achebe called the stories
of the world, but also in terms of actual institutional designs and political outcomes.
This should translate into much better provision of various public goods to global
citizenry with special attention to those who have been historically
disadvantaged. For assorted reasons there have been deep asymmetries within the
international system which have persisted and resulted in diminishing the life
chances and collective self-esteem of various peoples in the global south. There
is an urgent need to both acknowledge and remedy the situation in the world we
live in.





In your
experience, what is the role of the IR scholar in India in relation to the
foreign policy establishment and the policy makers?



It is quite hard to find traction of one's ideas in
terms of any influence of scholars or groups of scholars on the social or
political establishment. Overall I would say that academia has for  a long time not been taken seriously by the
foreign policy establishment, and that has more to do with the institutional
structure where there is a pecking order and the bureaucracy sees itself as
being better informed. Even in academic conference settings, one could periodically
expect a practitioner of foreign policy to argue that they know best having
been present at a particular negotiation or at the outbreak, duration and
conclusion of any recent episode in diplomatic history. This does not in reality
translate into the best knowledge because there is the possibility that besides
the immediate detail, the absence of a larger historical context or even
unaccounted variables in terms of the contemporary political forces at work
during that moment could be blind spots in the narrative. It is fair to say
therefore that the influence of academia on the Indian foreign policy
establishment by and large has tended to be minimal. However, one could make
the argument today that there are some early stirrings of changes in the offing.




Quite evidently, the Indian Foreign Service is far too
miniscule for a country of India's size and desired influence in the
international system. There is a perceived need from within the foreign policy
establishment to draw on expertise from elsewhere and on occasion they do turn
to the academia to invite counsel on specific issues. From the perspective of
the IR academic, it is perhaps equally important to be not too close to the
corridors of power as it could alter the incentive structure to the detriment
of independent opinion making for securing short or long term political
patronage.





Siddharth Mallavarapu is currently Associate
Professor and Chairperson at the Department of International Relations at the South
Asian University in New Delhi. He is on deputation from the School of
International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He completed his doctoral
thesis on the politics of norm creation in the context of an Advisory Opinion
rendered by the International Court of Justice in 1996 on nuclear weapon threat
or use. This culminated in his first book, Banning
the Bomb: The Politics of Norm Creation. His principal areas of academic
focus include international relations theory, intellectual histories of the
global south, disciplinary histories of IR, global governance debates and more
recently the implications of recent developments in the field of cognition on
the social sciences. Mallavarapu retains a special interest in issues related
to the politics of knowledge and examines the claims advanced in the discipline
of International Relations through this perspective. His immediate teaching
commitments include a graduate course on 'Cognition and World Politics' and a
doctoral level course on 'Advanced Research Methods'. He has co-edited (with
Kanti Bajpai) two books on recent Indian contributions to International
Relations theory. In 2012 along with B.S. Chimni, he co-edited International Relations: Perspectives for
the Global South.





Related links

Faculty Profile



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Read
Mallavarapu's Dissent of Judge
Weeramantry (2006 book chapter) here (pdf)
Read
Mallavarapu's Indian
Thinking in International Relations here (pdf)
Read
Mallavarapu's Because
of America here (pdf)
Read
Mallavarapu's Nuclear
Detonations: Contemplating Catastrophe here (pdf)


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World
Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution







The global
economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International
Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does
that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems
to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who
denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an
anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he
bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to
advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth
accounts of insiders. In this Talk,
Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic
regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic
crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is,
according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current
International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in
this debate?



If we'd reframe
your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of
the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism
have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have
penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.



This has
happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World
bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of
graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to
American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is
'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they
come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back
home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In
Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing
a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in
key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this
direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in
Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.



I live in the
UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the
government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting
that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are
tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is
only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if
the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being
irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it
is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted
against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to
power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.



The persistence
of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial
crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these
neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In
previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary
case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social
democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the
whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured
on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments
to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not
rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60
percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments
that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by
the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound
budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that
government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of
Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster,
and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse
for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union,
namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as
exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they
call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but
about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very
basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way
down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it
goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run,
and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very
little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about
Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one
small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these
zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically
bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the
overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some
help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.



Yet, one knows
that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One
knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the
question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in
norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this
take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a
real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and
polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement
to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is
now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely
around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if
there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality
at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income
distribution.



Let me explain. The
share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor
income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of
the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider
section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the
profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders
are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If
equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the
population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute
something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the
customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital
markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and
then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the
company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that
dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of
the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in
national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like
this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is
only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility
of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by
using the market against itself, so to speak.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?



I suppose the starting point was really this; my
father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was
twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After
having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very
formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by
the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the
many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular
remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead
and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how
unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also
visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that
great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across
Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or
to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development
Studies in Sussex and  got enrolled for a
PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that
time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied
under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry
textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function
and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this
time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the
middle of the Pacific.



When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced
that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology
thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding
why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did:
a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake,
because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam
Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to
change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state
bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other
related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation
agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was
kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms
of state agencies and then the state as a whole.



Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and
my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted
me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If
in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not,
because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very
different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to
Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk
to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the
published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based
on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the
case. They had never actually talked to
people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would
have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was
quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the
reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing
trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not
want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really
regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the
introduction here) is not well
received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing
the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade
country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.



So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was
that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the
anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I
love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of
anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on
gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier
reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix,
and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see
how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and
that is really not my interest.





What would a student need to
become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate
training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really
difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say
the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will
likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know
how to think, how to make arguments,
they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing
thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other
disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality,
but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or
Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much
idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of
cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of
left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a
lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that
the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.



Point number two is that I think that there is a huge
premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries,
but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out
to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies:
to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are
working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From
the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE
library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a
student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the
experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it
back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I
think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for
studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in,
experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge
almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to
buy into it.





The relations between states are settled
either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to
understand IR?



Because economics—such as
for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and
incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great
deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other
countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if
you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather
different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help
you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my
constituency.



So, in a way, the way you
framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of
IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather
separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very
powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of
the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like
Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people
were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad
regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men,
concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for
the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the
making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a
living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International
Relations.





Pikkety recently published Capital in the
21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality
between people matter for IR?



Let me comment by invoking
a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade
ago I looked at the figures and if you took the
average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the
average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a
percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels
relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market
exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara
Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates
and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there
is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised
land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies
can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move
pretty quickly across these planes.



So all one has to do—and this
might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this
poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of
getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which
you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are
just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International
Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.





You've done anthropological fieldwork inside
the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in
IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank
is?



First of all, let me say
that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know
inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work.
But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the
IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of
US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are
defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them),
they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to
look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but
Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles
of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it
very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their
shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less
recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have
a very strong influence.



Just to illustrate what the
Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the
Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were
in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of
Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of
where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk
out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as
Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said
something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted
with David Lipton.



Just to take another
example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a
person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the
State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or
a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who
appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration,
or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in
a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin
America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the
Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a
protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is
very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he
is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat
about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about
what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about
what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these
personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US
Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing
a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be
doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just
a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years
or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does
not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it
says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take
care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.



So the US wants to keep the
presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on
the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but
provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In
the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans
have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous
sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short
of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round
of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund
depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months
terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's
ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what
was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the
IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is,
resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they
actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with
one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons,
who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look,
the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you
want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects
in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people,
whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way,
way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House
is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond
this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or
producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is
hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a
loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto
in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.



One response of the big
developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the
Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing
number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good
thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking
after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change.
In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World
we have today.



You engage thoroughly with economics and
economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to
economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys
into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it
wrong. Where do you stand in this?



If you take the example of
how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of
rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to
right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large,
and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must
apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic
proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from
propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing
way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro
foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics.
So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?



This leads us to one
fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be
traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th
century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics
on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and
Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with
terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in
economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of
economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical
economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith
thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working,
revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never
separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point
about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was
that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So
economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not
production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with
each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange
rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law
in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the
movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the
gas. So why did they make that analogy?



The point of likening of
individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the
following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of
ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should
we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of
individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations
of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the
question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the
street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?'
And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and
questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a
way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea
of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those
moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of
Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to
capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics,
professional economists work.





Haven't specific fields, like development
economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these
weaknesses in economic theory?



Let me root my answer again
in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in
practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes
visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for
roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all
orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and
read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am
thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look
at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that
much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in
terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is
really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF
loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it
is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington
Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production,
upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export
diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for
experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these
regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to
open the rest of the world to their markets.



In the 80s there were a lot
of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work,
promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But
then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of
people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth
people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as
experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good
governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad
experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten
into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as
roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which
then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole
conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this
direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind
of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to
reroute the global system of economic governance.



So after the 1980s, the
Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic
development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our
dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in
terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory,
but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality,
because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can
feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which
involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.



But then the most recent
turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank
and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent
infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the
West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing
bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building
financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of
the growth of developing countries.





Last question. Adam Smith seems to be
constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?



I kind of engage in a
critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe
his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word
summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually
wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth
of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will
tell you the significance of them. He said:



'Little else is
requisite to carry a state to the highest degree
of opulence from the lowest
barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable
administration of justice; all the rest being
brought about by the natural course of things.'



So I am struck by how today
many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some
qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have
to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more
modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory
Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council
of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very
popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to
say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy
Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also
begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of
elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my
point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front
of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these
centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea
of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word
statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have
to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.







Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of
Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow
Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000.
Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage
Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in
Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank
1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village
Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988,
1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government
in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American
Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.



Related links





Faculty profile at LSE
Read Wade's The Piketty
phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Capitalism
and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Rethinking
Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here
(pdf) 
Read Wade's Bringing the
State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Is
Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Creating
Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

Alexander Dugin on
Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of
Multipolarity







IR has long been regarded as an
Anglo-American social science. Recently, the discipline has started to look
beyond America and England, to China (Theory Talk
#51, Theory Talk
#45), India (Theory Talk
#63, Theory Talk
#42), Africa (Theory Talk #57, Theory Talk
#10) and elsewhere for non-Western
perspectives on international affairs and IR theory. However, IR theorists have
paid little attention to Russian perspectives on the discipline and practice of
international relations. We offer an exciting peek into Russian geopolitical
theory through an interview with the controversial Russian geopolitical thinker
Alexander Dugin, founder of the International
Eurasian Movement and allegedly an important
influence on Putin's foreign policy. In this Talk, Dugin—among others—discusses his Theory of a Multipolar
World, offers a staunch critique of western and liberal IR, and lays out
Russia's unique contribution to the landscape of IR theory.




Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version




What, according to you, is
the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your
position within this debate or towards that challenge?



The field of IR is extremely interesting and multidimensional.
In general, the discipline is much more promising than many think. I think that
there is a stereometry today in IR, in which we can distinguish a few axes
right away.



The first, most traditional axis is realism – the English school
– liberalism.



If the debates here are exhausted on an academic level, then on
the level of politicians, the media, and journalists, all the arguments and
methods appear new and unprecedented each time. Today, liberalism in IR
dominates mass consciousness, and realist arguments, already partially
forgotten on the level of mass discourse, could seem rather novel. On the other
hand, the nuanced English school, researched thoroughly in academic circles,
might look like a "revelation" to the general public. But for this to happen, a
broad illumination of the symmetry between liberals and realists is needed for
the English school to acquire significance and disclose its full potential.
This is impossible under the radical domination of liberalism in IR. For that
reason, I predict a new wave of realists and neorealists in this sphere, who,
being pretty much forgotten and almost marginalized, can full well make
themselves and their agenda known. This would, it seems to me, produce a
vitalizing effect and diversify the palette of mass and social debates, which
are today becoming monotone and auto-referential.



The second axis is bourgeois versions of IR (realism, the
English school, and liberalism all together) vs. Marxism in IR. In popular and
even academic discourse, this theme is entirely discarded, although the
popularity of Wallerstein (Theory
Talk #13) and other
versions of world-systems theory shows a degree of interest in this critical
version of classical, positivistic IR theories.



The third axis is post-positivism in all its varieties vs.
positivism in all its varieties (including Marxism). IR scholars might have
gotten the impression that postmodern attacks came to an end, having been
successfully repelled by 'critical realism', but in my opinion it is not at all
so. From moderate constructivism and normativism to extreme post-structuralism,
post-positivistic theories carry a colossal deconstructive and correspondingly
scientific potential, which has not yet even begun to be understood. It seemed
to some that postmodernism is a cheerful game. It isn't. It is a new
post-ontology, and it fundamentally affects the entire epistemological
structure of IR. In my opinion, this axis remains very important and
fundamental.



The fourth axis is the challenge of the sociology of international
relations, which we can call 'Hobson's challenge'. In my opinion, in his
critique of euro-centrism in IR, John M. Hobson laid the foundation for an
entirely new approach to the whole problematic by proposing to consider the
structural significance of the "euro-centric" factor as dominant and clarifying
its racist element. Once we make euro-centrism a variable and move away from
the universalistic racism of the West, on which all systems of IR are built,
including the majority of post-positivistic systems (after all, postmodernity
is an exclusively Western phenomenon!), we get, theoretically for now, an
entirely different discipline—and not just one, it seems. If we take into
account differences among cultures, there can be as many systems of IR as there
are cultures. I consider this axis extremely important.



The fifth axis, outlined in less detail than the previous one,
is the Theory of a Multipolar World vs. everything else. The Theory of a
Multipolar World was developed in Russia,
a country that no one ever took seriously during the entire establishment of IR
as a discipline—hence the fully explainable skepticism toward the Theory of a
Multipolar World.



The sixth axis is IR vs. geopolitics. Geopolitics is usually
regarded as secondary in the context of IR. But gradually, the epistemological
potential of geopolitics is becoming more and more obvious, despite or perhaps
partially because of the criticism against it. We have only to ask ourselves
about the structure of any geopolitical concept to discover the huge potential
contained in its methodology, which takes us to the very complex and
semantically saturated theme of the philosophy and ontology of space.



If we now superimpose these axes onto one another, we get an
extremely complex and highly interesting theoretical field. At the same time,
only one axis, the first one, is considered normative among the public, and
that with the almost total and uni-dimensional dominance of IR liberalism. All
the wealth, 'scientific democracy', and gnoseological pluralism of
the other axes are inaccessible to the broad public, robbing and partly
deceiving it. I call this domination of liberalism among the public the 'third
totalitarianism', but that is a separate issue.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about IR?    




I began with Eurasianism, from which I
came to geopolitics (the Eurasianist Petr Savitskii quoted the
British geopolitician Halford Mackinder) and remained for a long
time in that framework, developing the theme of the dualism of Land and Sea and
applying it to the actual situation That is how the Eurasian school of
geopolitics arose, which became not simply the dominant, but the only school in
contemporary Russia. As a professor at Moscow State University, for six years I
was head of the department of the Sociology of International Relations, which
forced me to become professionally familiar with the classical theories of IR,
the main authors, approaches, and schools. Because I have long been interested
in postmodernism in philosophy (I wrote the book Post-philosophy on the subject), I paid special attention to
post-positivism in IR. That is how I came to IR critical theory,
neo-Gramscianism, and the sociology of IR (John Hobson, Steve Hobden, etc.). I came
to the Theory of a Multipolar World, which I eventually developed myself,
precisely through superimposing geopolitical dualism, Carl Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and John Hobson's critique of
Western racism and the euro-centrism of IR.





In your opinion, what would
a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?



In
our interdisciplinary time, I think that what is most important is familiarity
with philosophy and sociology, led by a paradigmatic method: the analysis of
the types of societies, cultures, and structures of thought along the line
Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Post-Modernity. If one learns to trace semantic
shifts in these three epistemological and ontological domains, it will help one
to become familiar with any popular theories of IR today. Barry Buzan's (Theory
Talk #35)
theory of international systems is an example of such a generalizing and very
useful schematization. Today an IR specialist must certainly be familiar with
deconstruction and use it at least in its elementary form. Otherwise, there is
a great danger of overlooking what is most important.



Another very important competence is
history and political science. Political science provides generalizing,
simplifying material, and history puts schemas in their context. I would only
put competence in the domain of economics and political economy in third place,
although today no problem in IR can be considered without reference to the
economic significance of processes and interactions. Finally, I would earnestly
recommend to students of IR to become familiar, as a priority, with geopolitics
and its methods. These methods are much simpler than theories of IR, but their
significance is much deeper. At first, geopolitical simplifications produce an
instantaneous effect: complex and entangled processes of world politics are
rendered transparent and comprehensible in the blink of an eye. But to sort out
how this effect is achieved, a long and serious study of geopolitics is
required, exceeding by far the superficiality that limits critical geopolitics
(Ó Tuathail et. al.): they stand at the beginning of
the decipherment of geopolitics and its full-fledged deconstruction, but they
regard themselves as its champions. They do so prematurely.





What
does it entail to think of global power relations through a spatial lens ('Myslit prostranstvom')?  



This is the most important thing. The
entire philosophical theme of Modernity is built on the dominance of time. Kant
already puts time on the side of the subject (and space on the side of the
body, continuing the ideas of Descartes and even Plato), while Husserl and Heidegger
identify the subject with time altogether. Modernity thinks with time, with
becoming. But since the past and future are rejected as ontological entities,
thought of time is transformed into thought of the instant, of that which is
here and now. This is the basis for the ephemeral understanding of being. To
think spatially means to locate Being outside the present, to arrange it in
space, to give space an ontological status. Whatever was impressed in space is
preserved in it. Whatever will ripen in space is already contained in it. This
is the basis for the political geography of Friedrich Ratzel and subsequent geopoliticians. Wagner's Parsifal ends with the words of
Gurnemanz: 'now time has become space'. This is a proclamation of the triumph
of geopolitics. To think spatially means to think in an entirely different way
[topika]. I think that postmodernity has already partly arrived at this
perspective, but has stopped at the threshold, whereas to cross the line it is
necessary to break radically with the entire axiomatic of Modernity, to really
step over Modernity, and not to imitate this passage while remaining in
Modernity and its tempolatry. Russian people are spaces [Russkie lyudi prostranstva],
which is why we have so much of it. The secret of Russian identity is concealed
in space. To think spatially means to think 'Russian-ly', in Russian.





Geopolitics
is argued to be very popular in Russia nowadays. Is geopolitics a new thing,
from the post-Cold War period, or not? And if not, how does current
geopolitical thinking differ from earlier Soviet (or even pre-soviet)
geopolitics?



It is an entirely new form
of political thought. I introduced geopolitics to Russia at the end of the 80s,
and since then it has become extremely popular. I tried to find some traces of
geopolitics in Russian history, but besides Vandam, Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, and a few
short articles by Savitskii, there was nothing. In the USSR, any allusion to
geopolitics was punished in the harshest way (see the 'affair of the
geopoliticians' of the economic geographer Vladimir Eduardovich Den and his group).
At the start of the 90s, my efforts and the efforts of my followers and
associates in geopolitics (=Eurasianism) filled the worldview vacuum that
formed after the end of Soviet ideology. At first, this was adopted without
reserve by the military (The Military Academy of the General Staff
of the Armed Forces of Russia), especially under Igor Rodionov. Then,
geopolitics began to penetrate into all social strata. Today, this discipline
is taught in the majority of Russian universities. So, there was no Soviet or
pre-Soviet geopolitics. There is only the contemporary Eurasian school, which
took shape at the end of the 80s. Foundations
of Geopolitics was the first programmatic text of this school, although I had
published most of texts in that book earlier, and some of them were circulated
as texts in government circles. Recently, in 2012, I released two new
textbooks: Geopolitics and The Geopolitics of Russia, which
together with The War of Continents
are the results of work in this field, along four axes. 





In
your book International Relations, not
yet published in English, you set out your Theory of a Multipolar World as a
distinct IR theory. What are the basic components of the Theory of a Multipolar
World—and how is it different from classical realism?



In order to be understood
and not get into the details, I can say that the Theory of a Multipolar World
seriously and axiomatically adopts Samuel Huntington's thesis about the
plurality of civilizations. Russia has its own author, who claimed the same
thing more than a hundred years ago: Nikolay Danilevsky, and then the Eurasianists.
However, everything starts from precisely this point: civilization is not one,
but many. Western civilization's pretension to universalism is a form of the
will to domination and an authoritarian discourse. It can be taken into account
but not believed. It is nothing other than a strategy of suppression and
hegemony. The following point follows: we must move from thinking in terms of
one civilization (the racism of euro-centric versions of IR) to a pluralism of
subjects. However, unlike realists, who take as the subject of their theory
nation-states, which are themselves products of the European, bourgeois, modern
understanding of the Political, the Theory of a Multipolar World proposes to
take civilizations as subjects. Not states, but civilizations. I call them
'large politeiai', or civilizations, corresponding to Carl Schmitt's 'large
spaces'. As soon as we take these civilizations—'large politeiai'—as subjects,
we can then apply to them the full system of premises of realism: anarchy in
the international system, sovereignty, the rationality of egoistic behavior,
etc. But within these 'politeiai', by contrast, a principle more resembling
liberalism, with its pacifism and integration, operates, only with the
difference that here we are not talking about a 'planetary' or 'global' world,
but about an intra-civilizational one; not about global integration, but about
regional integration, strictly within the context of civilizational borders.
Post-positivism, in turn, helps here for the deconstruction of the
authoritarian discourse of the West, which masks its private interests by
'universal values', and also for the reconstruction of civilizational identity,
including with the help of technological means: civilizational elites,
civilizational media, civilizational economic algorithms and corporations, etc.
That is the general picture.





Your
theory of multipolarity is directed against the intellectual, political, and
social hegemony of the West. At the same time, while drawing on the tools of
neo-Marxist analysis and critical theory, it does not oppose Western hegemony
'from the left', as those approaches do, but on the basis of traditionalism (Rene
Guenon, Julius
Evola), cultural
anthropology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, or 'from the right'. Do you think
that such an approach can appeal to Anglo-American IR practitioners, or is it
designed to appeal mainly to non-Western theorists and practitioners? In short,
what can IR theorists in the West learn from the theory of multipolarity?



According to Hobson's
entirely correct analysis, the West is based on a fundamental sort of racism.
There is no difference between Lewis Morgan's evolutionistic racism
(with his model of savagery, barbarism, civilization) and Hitler's biological
racism. Today the same racism is asserted without a link to race, but on the
basis of the technological modes and degrees of modernization and progress of
societies (as always, the criterion "like in the West" is the general measure).
Western man is a complete racist down to his bones, generalizing his
ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions. Something tells me that he is
impossible to change. Even radical critiques of Western hegemony are themselves
deeply infected by the racist virus of universalism, as Edward Said showed with the
example of 'orientalism', proving that the anticolonial struggle is a form of
that very colonialism and euro-centrism. So the Theory of a Multipolar World
will hardly find adherents in the Western world, unless perhaps among those
scholars who are seriously able to carry out a deconstruction of Western
identity, and such deconstruction assumes the rejection of both Right
(nationalistic) and Left (universalistic and progressivist) clichés. The racism
of the West always acquires diverse forms. Today its main form is liberalism,
and anti-liberal theories (most on the Left) are plagued by the same
universalism, while Right anti-liberalisms have been discredited. That is why I
appeal not to the first political theory (liberalism), nor the second
(communism, socialism), nor to the third (fascism, Nazism), but to something I
call the Fourth Political Theory (or 4PT), based on a
radical deconstruction of the subject of Modernity and the application of
Martin Heidegger's existential analytic method.



Traditionalists are brought
in for the profound critique of Western Modernity, for establishing the
plurality of civilizations, and for rehabilitating non-Western (pre-modern)
cultures. In Russia and Asian countries, the Theory of a Multipolar World is
grasped easily and naturally; in the West, it encounters a fully understandable
and fully expected hostility, an unwillingness to study it carefully, and
coarse slander. But there are always exceptions.





What
is the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) and how is it related to the Theory of a
Multipolar World and to your criticism of the prevailing theoretical approaches
in the field of IR?



I spoke a little about this in the
response to the previous question. The Fourth Political Theory is important for
getting away from the strict dominance of modernity in the sphere of the
Political, for the relativization of the West and its re-regionalization. The
West measures the entire history of Modernity in terms of the struggle of three
political ideologies for supremacy (liberalism, socialism, and nationalism).
But since the West does not even for a moment call into question the fact that
it thinks for all humanity, it evaluates other cultures and civilizations in
the same way, without considering that in the best case the parallels to these
three ideologies are pure simulacra, while most often there simply are no
parallels. If liberalism won the competition of the three ideologies in the
West at the end of the 20th century, that does not yet mean that
this ideology is really universal on a world scale. It isn't at all. This
episode of the Western political history of modernity may be the fate of the
West, but not the fate of the world. So other principles of the political are
needed, beyond liberalism, which claims global domination (=the third
totalitarianism), and its failed alternatives (communism and fascism), which
are historically just as Western and modern as liberalism. This explains the
necessity of introducing a Fourth Political Theory as a political frame for the
correct basis of a Theory of a Multipolar World. The Fourth Political Theory is
the direct and necessary correlate of the Theory of a Multipolar World in the
domain of political theory.





Is
IR an American social science? Is Russian IR as an academic field a
reproduction of IR as an American academic field? If not, how is IR in Russia
specifically Russian?



IR is a Western scientific discipline,
and as such it has a prescriptive, normative vector. It not only studies the
West's dominance, it also produces, secures, defends, and propagandizes it. IR
is undoubtedly an imperious authoritarian discourse of Western civilization, in
relation to itself and all other areas of the planet. Today the US is the core
of the West, so naturally in the 20th century IR became more and
more American as the US moved toward that status (it began as an English
science). It is the same with geopolitics, which migrated from London to
Washington and New York together with the function of a global naval Empire. As
with all other sciences, IR is a form of imperious violence, embodying the will
to power in the will to knowledge (as Michel Foucault explained). IR in Russia remains purely
Western, with one detail: in the USSR, IR as such was not studied. Marxism in
IR did not correspond to Soviet reality, where after Stalin a practical form of
realism (not grounded theoretically and never acknowledged) played a big
role—only external observers, like the classical realist E.H. Carr, understood
the realist essence of Stalinism in IR. So IR was altogether blocked. The first
textbooks started to appear only in the 90s and in the fashion of the day they
were all liberal. That is how it has remained until now. The peculiarity of IR
in Russia today lies in the fact that there is no longer anything Russian
there; liberalism dominates entirely, a correct account of realism is lacking,
and post-positivism is almost entirely disregarded. The result is a truncated,
aggressively liberal and extremely antiquated version of IR as a discipline. I
try to fight that. I recently released an IR textbook with balanced (I hope)
proportions, but it is too early to judge the result.





Stephen
Walt argued in a September
article in Foreign Policy that Russia 'is nowhere near as threatening as the old Soviet
Union', in part because Russia 'no longer boasts an ideology that can rally
supporters worldwide'. Do you agree with Walt's assessment?



There is something to that. Today, Russia
thinks of itself as a nation-state. Putin is a realist; nothing more. Walt is
right about that. But the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political
Theory, as well as Eurasianism, are outlines of a much broader and large-scale
ideology, directed against Western hegemony and challenging liberalism,
globalization, and American strategic dominance. Of course, Russia as a
nation-state is no competition for the West. But as the bridgehead of the
Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, it changes its
significance. Russian policies in the post-Soviet space and Russia's courage in
forming non-Western alliances are indicators. For now, Putin is testing this
conceptual potential very gingerly. But the toughening of relations with the
West and most likely the internal crises of globalization will at some point
force a more careful and serious turn toward the creation of global alternative
alliances. Nevertheless, we already observe such unions: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Eurasian Union—and they require a new
ideology. Not one like Marxism, any universalism is excluded, but also not
simple realist maneuvers of regional hegemons. Liberalism is a global
challenge. The response to it should also be global. Does Putin understand
this? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes it seems he does, and sometimes it
seems he doesn't.





Vladimir
Putin recently characterized the contemporary world order as follows: 'We have entered a period of differing interpretations and
deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to
retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and
justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary
interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same
time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired
to portray white as black and black as white'. Do you agree with this
assessment? If so, what is required as a response to this international
situation?



These are true, but rather
naïve words. Putin is just indignant that the West establishes rules in its own
interests, changes them when necessary, and interprets allegedly 'universal
norms' in its own favor. But the issue is that this is the structure of the
will to power and the very organization of logo-phallo-phono-centric discourse.
Objectivity and justice are not possible so long as speech is a monologue. The
West does not know and does not recognize the other. But this means that
everything will continue until this other wins back the right to recognition.
And that is a long road. The point of the Theory of a Multipolar World is that
there are no rules established by some one player. Rules must be established by
centers of real power. The state today is too small for that; hence the
conclusion that civilizations should be these centers. Let there be an Atlantic
objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice
will counter them. And the Chinese world or Pax Sinica [world/peace: same word
in Russian] will look different than the Islamic one. Black and white are not
objective evaluations. They depend on the structure of the world order: what is
black and what is white is determined by one who has enough power to determine
it.





How
does your approach help us understand Russia's actions on the world stage
better than other IR approaches do? What are IR analyses of Russia missing that
do not operate with the conceptual apparatus of multipolarity?



Interesting question. Russia's behavior
internationally is determined today by the following factors:



First,
historical inertia, accumulating the power of precedents (the Theory of a
Multipolar World thinks that the past exists as a structure; consequently, this
factor is taken into account from many sides and in detail, while the
'tempocentrism' (Steve Hobden, John Hobson) of classical IR theories drops this
from sight. We have to pay attention to this especially taking into
consideration the fact that Russia is in many ways still a traditional society
and belongs to the 'imperial system' of IR.) There are, besides, Soviet inertia
and stable motives ('Stalinism in IR');



Second,
the projective logic of opposition to the West, stemming from the most practical,
pragmatic, and realist motivations (in the spirit of Caesarism, analyzed by
neo-Gramscians) will necessarily lead Russia (even despite the will of its
leaders) to a systemic confrontation with American hegemony and globalization,
and then the Theory of a Multipolar World will really be needed (classical IR
models, paying no attention to the Theory of a Multipolar World, drop from
sight the possible future; i.e., they rob themselves of predictive potential
because of purely ideological prejudices and self-imposed fears).



But if an opponent underestimates you,
you have more chances to land an unexpected blow. So I am not too disturbed by
the underestimation of the Theory of a Multipolar World among IR theorists.





In
the western world, the divide between academia and policy is often either
lamented ('ivory tower') or, in light of the ideal of academic independence,
deemed absent. This concerns a broader debate regarding the relations between
power, knowledge and geopolitics. How are academic-policy relations in Russia
with regards to IR and is this the ideal picture according to you?



I think that in our case both positions
have been taken to their extreme. On one hand, today's authorities in Russia do
not pay the slightest attention to scholars, dispatching them to an airless and
sterile space. On the other hand, Soviet habits became the basis for servility
and conformism, preserved in a situation when the authorities for the first
time demand nothing from intellectuals, except for one thing: that they not
meddle in socio-political processes. So the situation with science is both
comical and sorrowful. Conformist scholars follow the authorities, but the
authorities don't need this, since they do not so much go anywhere in
particular as react to facts that carry themselves out.





If
your IR theory isn't based on politically and philosophically liberal
principles, and if it criticizes those principles not from the left but from
the right, using the language of large spaces or Grossraum, is it a fascist theory of international relations? Are scholars who characterize your thought as 'neo-fascism',
like Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovstov, partially correct? If not, why is that characterization
misleading?



Accusations of fascism are simply a
figure of speech in the coarse political propaganda peculiar to contemporary
liberalism as the third totalitarianism. Karl Popper laid the basis for this in
his book The
Open Society and its Enemies, where he reduced the critique of
liberalism from the right to fascism, Hitler, and Auschwitz, and the criticism
of liberalism from the left to Stalin and the GULAG. The reality is somewhat
more complex, but George
Soros,
who finances Umland and Shekhovstov and is an ardent follower of Popper, is
content with reduced versions of politics. If I were a fascist, I would say so.
But I am a representative of Eurasianism and the author of the Fourth Political
Theory. At the same time, I am a consistent and radical anti-racist and
opponent of the nation-state project (i.e. an anti-nationalist). Eurasianism has
no relation to fascism. And the Fourth Political Theory emphasizes that while
it is anti-liberal, it is simultaneously anti-communist and anti-fascist. I
think it isn't possible to be clearer, but the propaganda army of the 'third
totalitarianism' disagrees and no arguments will convince it. 1984 should be
sought today not where many think: not in the USSR, not in the Third Reich, but
in the Soros Fund and the 'Brave New World'. Incidentally, Huxley proved to be
more correct than Orwell. I cannot forbid others from calling me a fascist,
although I am not one, though ultimately this reflects badly not so much on me
as on the accusers themselves: fighting an imaginary threat, the accuser misses
a real one. The more stupid, mendacious, and straightforward a liberal is, the
simpler it is to fight with him.





Does
technological change in warfare and in civil government challenge the
geopolitical premises of classical divisions between spaces (Mackinder's view
or Spykman's) heartland-rimland-offshore continents)? And, more broadly
perhaps, does history have a linear or a cyclical pattern, according to you?



Technological development does not at all
abolish the principles of classical geopolitics, simply because Land and Sea
are not substances, but concepts. Land is a centripetal model of order, with a
clearly expressed and constant axis. Sea is a field, without a hard center, of
processuality, atomism, and the possibility of numerous bifurcations. In a
certain sense, air (and hence also aviation) is aeronautics. And even the word
astronaut contains in itself the root 'nautos', from the Greek word for ship.
Water, air, outer space—these are all versions of increasingly diffused Sea.
Land in this situation remains unchanged. Sea strategy is diversified; land
strategy remains on the whole constant. It is possible that this is the reason
for the victory of Land over Sea in the last decade; after all, capitalism and
technical progress are typical attributes of Sea. But taking into consideration
the fundamental character of the balance between Leviathan and Behemoth, the
proportions can switch at any moment; the soaring Titan can be thrown down into
the abyss, like Atlantis, while the reason for the victory of thalassocracy becomes the source of its
downfall. Land remains unchanged as the geographic axis of history. There is
Land and Sea even on the internet and in the virtual world: they are axes and
algorithms of thematization, association and separation, groupings of resources
and protocols. The Chinese internet is terrestrial; the Western one, nautical.





You
have translated a great number of foreign philosophical and geopolitical works
into Russian. How important is knowledge transaction for the formation of your ideas?



I recently completed the
first release of my book Noomachy,
which is entirely devoted precisely to the Logoi of various civilizations, and
hence to the circulation of ideas. I am convinced that each civilization has
its own particular Logos. To grasp it and to find parallels, analogies, and
dissonances in one's own Logos is utterly fascinating and interesting. That is
why I am sincerely interested in the most varied cultures, from North American
to Australian, Arabic to Latin American, Polynesian to Scandinavian. All the
Logoi are different and it is not possible to establish a hierarchy among them.
So it remains for us only to become familiar with them. Henry Corbin, the French
philosopher and Protestant who studied Iranian Shiism his entire life, said of
himself 'We are Shiites'. He wasn't a Shiite in the religious sense, but
without feeling himself a Shiite, he would not be able to penetrate into the
depths of the Iranian Logos. That is how I felt, working on Noomachy or translating philosophical
texts or poetry from other languages: in particular, while learning Pierce and
James, Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Pound I experienced myself as 'we are
Americans'. And in the volume devoted to China and Japan, as 'we are
Buddhists'. That is the greatest wealth of the Logos of various cultures: both
those like ours and those entirely unlike ours. And these Logoi are at war;
hence, Noomachy, the war of the
intellect. It is not linear and not primitive. It is a great war. It creates
that which we call the 'human', the entire depth and complexity of which we
most often underestimate.





Final
question. You call yourself the 'last philosopher of empire'. What is
Eurasanism and how does it relate to the global pivot of power distributions?



Eurasianism is a developed worldview, to
which I dedicated a few books and a countless number of articles and
interviews. In principle, it lies at the basis of the Theory of a Multipolar
World and the Fourth Political Theory, combined with geopolitics, and it
resonates with Traditionalism. Eurasianism's main thought is plural
anthropology, the rejection of universalism. The meaning of Empire for me is
that there exists not one Empire, but at minimum two, and even more. In the
same way, civilization is never singular; there is always some other
civilization that determines its borders. Schmitt called this the Pluriverse
and considered it the main characteristic of the Political. The Eurasian Empire
is the political and strategic unification of Turan, a geographic axis of history
in opposition to the civilization of the Sea or the Atlanticist Empire. Today,
the USA is this Atlanticist Empire. Kenneth Waltz, in the context of neorealism
in IR, conceptualized the balance of two poles. The analysis is very accurate,
although he erred about the stability of a bipolar world and the duration of
the USSR. But on the whole he is right: there is a global balance of Empires in
the world, not nation-States, the majority of which cannot claim sovereignty,
which remains nominal (Stephen Krasner's (Theory
Talk #21) 'global hypocrisy'). For
precisely that reason, I am a philosopher of Empire, as is almost every
American intellectual, whether he knows it or not. The difference is only that
he thinks of himself as a philosopher of the only Empire, while I think of
myself as the philosopher of one of the Empires, the Eurasian one. I am more
humble and more democratic. That is the whole difference.





Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher,
the author of over thirty books on topics including the sociology of the
imagination, structural sociology, ethnosociology, geopolitical theory,
international relations theory, and political theory, including four books on
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His most recent books, only available
in Russian at the moment, are Ukraine: My
War and the multi-volume Noomachia:
Wars of the Intellect. Books translated into English include The Fourth Political Theory,
Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed
From the Right, and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of
Another Beginning.






Related links





Who is Alexander Dugin? Interview with Theory Talks editor Michael Millerman (YouTube)
TheFourth Political Theory website (English): 
Evrazia.tv
(Russian) 
Evrazia.tv
(English) 
Geopolitics.ru
(English version)
InternationalEurasian Movement (English version)
Centerfor Conservative Studies (Russian)

Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version

Bertrand Badie on the Trump Moment, the Science
of Suffering, and IR between Power and Weakness



Lire en français




IR retains a traditional focus on the
game of power between states as its defining characteristic. But what, so asks Bertrand
Badie, if this means that our discipline is based on a negation of our humanity?
A giant in Francophone IR, Badie has labored to instead place human suffering
at the center of analysis of the international, by letting loose sociological
insights on a truly global empirical reality. In this Talk, Badie—amongst others—challenges the centrality of the idea of
state power, which makes little sense in a world where most of the IR agenda is
defined by issues emanating from state weakness; argues for the centrality of
suffering to a more apt IR; and uses this to contextualize the Trump Moment.




Print version (pdf) of this Talk



What is (or should be), according to
you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International
Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



Unquestionably, it would be the matter of change. It is time to conceptualize,
and further than that, to theorize the change that is happening in the field of
International Relations (IR). Humans have always had the feeling that they are
living in a period of upheaval, but contemporary IR is really characterized by several
landmarks that illustrate the drastic extent of change. I see at least three of
them.



The first one concerns the inclusive nature of the international system.
For the first time in the history of mankind, the international system covers
nearly the whole humanity, while the Westphalian system was an exclusively European
dynamic in which the United States of America entered to turn it into a system,
that I would call, Euro-North-American.



The second element, around which publications abound (see notably Mary
Kaldor's work, Theory Talk #30), is the deep mutation of the nature of conflict. War used to be, in
the Westphalian model, a matter of competition between powers. Today we have
the feeling that weakness is replacing power, in that power cannot any longer
function as central explanatory term of conflictual situations, which are
rather manifestations of state weakness. Think of 'failing' or 'collapsing'
states, which refers to the coming apart of nations that have been built badly
as well as the deliquescence of social ties. This new form of conflictuality
completely turns the international environment upside down and constitutes a
second indicator of transformation.



The third aspect concerns mobility. Our international system used to be
fully based on the idea of territory and boundaries, on the idea that fixity
establishes the competences of States in a very precise way. In this
perspective, the state refers to territory—as the definition given by Max Weber
states very clearly—but today this territorial notion of politics is challenged
by a full range of mobilities, composed of international flows that can be
either material, informational, or human.



These are three indicators illustrating a deep transformation of the
inner nature of IR that encourage me to speak about 'intersocial relations'
rather than 'interstate relations'. The notion of interstate relations no
longer captures the entirety of the global game. Our whole theory of IR was
based on the Westphalian model as it came out of the peace of Westphalia, as it
was confirmed by the accomplishment of the nation-state construction process
and as it dominated the historical flow of international events until the fall
of the Berlin wall.



Until the fall of the wall, all that was not related to Europe or to the
United States of America, or more precisely North-America, was simply called 'periphery',
which says enough. Today, by contrast, the periphery is central at least
regarding conflictuality. We should therefore drop our Westphalian prism and
build up new analytical tools for IR that would take these mutations as their
point of departure. Doing away with our Westphalian approach to IR would mean
questioning both our classical IR theories and questioning the practical models
of action in international politics, which means the uses of diplomacy and
warfare.





How did you arrive at where you
currently are in your thinking about International Relations?



You know when we write, when we work, we are first of all influenced by
our dissatisfaction. The classical Westphalian approach to IR, as I said
earlier, did not satisfy me as I had the feeling that it was focusing on events
that no longer had the importance that we kept giving them—for instance the arms
race, great power politics, or the traditional diplomatic negotiations—while I
was seeing, maybe this was the trigger, that the greatest part of suffering in
the world was coming from places that IR theory was not really covering.



I have always told my students that IR is the science of human suffering.
This suffering exists of course where we are—in Europe, in North America, they
exist everywhere in the world—but the greatest part is outside of the
Westphalian area, so the classical approach to IR gives a marginal and
distorted image. Africa and the Middle East seen through the Westphalian prism are
a dull image, strongly different from the extraordinary wealth, both for good and
bad, that these areas of the world have. I've also always held that in a world
where 6 to 9 million people starve to death each year, the main foci of traditional
IR were derisory. Even terrorism, to which we collectively attribute so much
importance, hardly comes near how important a challenge food security is.



My three latest books take a stand against traditional IR theories. In Diplomacy of
Connivance (2012) I tried to
show that the great power game is really a game way that is much more
integrated than we usually say and that this game plays out in all multilateral
fora. There is indeed a club, and that is precisely what I wanted to describe,
a club of powers—one which results to the detriment of less powerful members in
the international system.



In Le Temps des humiliés ('the
era of the humiliated', 2014), I tried to crystallize what the classical theory
could not express, which is domination seen through the lens of the dominated,
humiliation as felt by the humiliated, violence as experienced by the
desperate. For instance, even if we look at powers as accomplished as China
today—sharing the first place with the USA in terms of GDP—we have to admit
that their historical experience of humiliation constitutes a huge source of inspiration
when it comes to the elaboration of its foreign policy.



And then, in my last book Nous ne
sommes plus seuls au monde ('we are no longer alone in the world', 2016), this
critique was even more explicit. We are writing an IR that encompasses only about
one billion of human beings, while forgetting all the others. Today it is
simply no longer true that these old powers are setting the international
agenda. Global politics today is written by the little, the weak, the dominated;
often with recourse to extreme forms of violence, but this needs to be analyzed
and understood, which would mean to totally change the IR theory.



We should not forget that in large part, IR theory was a given as the USA
triumphed in 1945. The well-known 'great power politics' that dominates
traditional IR theory, inaugurated by Morgenthau and supported by so many others,
described what was true at that time: the ability of American power to set us
free from the Nazi monster. Today the challenge is strongly different, and it
is by the way meaningful that two of the greatest American internationalist
political scientists, Robert Keohane (TheoryTalk #9) and Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53),
have both written books that elude to the end of this global order
(respectively After Hegemony and Goodbye Hegemony). Well what interests
me is exactly to dig into what comes after hegemony.





What would a student
need to become a specialist in International Relations or understand the world
in a global way?



First of all, I would advise them to rename their science, as I said
earlier, and to call it intersocial relations. The future of what we call IR
comes down to the ability to understand the extremely rich, multiple and
diversified interactions that are happening among and across the world's
societies. It does not mean that we have to completely abandon the state-centric
perspective, but rather dethrone states from the middle of this multiplicity of
actors in order to realize how very often these states are powerless when faced
with these different actors. That would be my first advice.



My second advice would be to look
ahead and not back. Do not let yourself be dominated by the Westphalian model,
and to try to build up what we need—since almost nothing has been done yet
today to construct this post-Westphalian, meta-Westphalian model. Beyond power,
there are things that we still misidentify or overlook while they are the driving
forces of today's and tomorrow's IR. From this point of view, sociology could
prove particularly useful. I consider, for instance, that Émile Durkheim is a very important inspiration to understand the
world today. Here is an author to study and to apply to IR.



The third advice that I would give them would be to not forget that IR
or intersocial relations are indeed the sciences of human suffering. We should
be able to place suffering at the core of the thinking. We've lost far too much
time staring at power, now it is time to move on to place human suffering at
the center. Why? First of all because it is ethically better; maybe will we be
able to learn from it? But also because in today's actual international
politics suffering is more proactive than power, which is not necessarily
optimistic but if recognized, would allow us a better questioning of new forms
of conflictuality. Perhaps unfortunately, the international agenda is no longer
fixed with canons, but with tears. Maybe this is the key point on which we
should concentrate our reflection.



Your insistence on placing suffering at the center of
IR scholarship seems to place you firmly alongside those who recognize "grievance" ratherthan "greed" as a central logic of international politics. What do you make of this parallel?



You are right: the idea of grievance, of recrimination, is a structuring
logic of the international game today. We did not see it coming for two
reasons. First of all because our traditional analysis of international
politics presupposed a unity of time, as if the African time, the Chinese time,
the Indian time and the European time where all identical. Yet this is
completely wrong because we, in our European culture, have not understood that
before Westphalia there were
political models, political histories, that profoundly marked the people that would
then shape contemporary politics. Remember that China is 4000 years of empire,
remember that precolonial Africa was composed of kingdoms, empires,
civilizations, philosophies, arts... Remember that India also is multi-millenary.
The Westphalian time came to totally deny and crush this temporality, this
historicity, almost in a negationist way, which means that, in the spirit of
those who were defending the Westphalian model, only this model was associated
to the Renaissance; and that the age of enlightenment and reason with a big R
had a calling to reformat the world as if it were a hard drive. This was a
senseless bet, a bet for which our European ancestors who led it had excuses
because at that time we did not know all these histories, at that time we did
not have all the knowledge we today have of the other and thus we simply
resolved it, through the negation of alterity. Yet, IR ought on the contrary aspire
to the accomplishment of alterity. Inevitably, all those who saw themselves
denied their historicity, over several centuries and even several millenaries,
accumulated a feeling of recrimination, of particularly deep grievances.



The second element is that all of this happened in a context of
disequilibrium of power resources, linked to different factors that reflected
indeed the fact that at a given moment of time western powers were both
literally and figuratively better armed than other societies. Abovementioned negation
of alterity was mapped onto, and amplified, by the forceful imposition of a
multilateral system that turned into the worst situation, into a proclaimed
hierarchy of cultures; as a result and there were, as Jules Ferry put it in the France
of the 19th century, 'races'; as in, 'We have the obligation to
educate inferior races'. It is not the beginning of history, but it is the
beginning of a history of humiliation. And through subsequent waves of globalization,
this humiliation has turned into a central nerve running through international
life. A nerve that has been used by both the powerful, who made a tool out of
humiliating the others to better dominate them (think here of the opium wars, colonization)
and simultaneously a nerve that fed the reaction of mobilization in the extra-Westphalian
world by those that had to stand up against those who were humiliating them. So
you see how it truly lies at the basis of IR. In my mind, it became a forceful paradigm,
it explains everything, even though others factors continue to weigh in on
actual dynamics.



In order to appreciate all this, we need a sociological approach, which
has for me two aspects. Both these aspects must be considered together for the
approach to be well understood. The first one is a timeless aspect, which is to
consider that everywhere and in all eras politics is a social product. Politics
cannot be understood as somehow outside society. This I would say contradicts the
majority of IR scholars, who believe excessively in the autonomy of politics
and of the state—even if only for analytical purposes. The second element of
this sociological approach is the historical or temporal component. That is
what I was talking about earlier: with globalization the social fabric strongly
progressed compared to the political fabric, and considering that intersocial
relations grew, we need a sociological approach to understand them.





Do you think that the Trump period constitutes a
fundamental break with the conduct of IR?



Trump himself maybe not, but what he represents certainly. If we look at
the USA today we see, since the new millennium, three models succeeding each
other. After 11-09 there was a time of neo-conservatism where globalization was
considered by American leaders as a means or maybe a chance to universalize the
American model, willingly or not. By force, as was the case in Iraq in 2003.
This model failed.



This lead to a second model which I would describe as a liberal model,
neo-liberal, incarnated by Obama who learnt from the lessons of the failure of neo-conservatism,
and had the courage to question the hypothesis hitherto considered as indisputable
of American leadership in the world, and who considered that the USA could win
only through soft power or smart power or free-trade. That is the reason why
Obama was just a little bit interventionist and was counting a lot on the TTIP
and on all these transregional agreements.



With Trump we arrive at a third model, one that I would call
neo-nationalist, that looks at globalization in a different way. In his perspective,
globalization constitutes a chance to satisfy the national American interests. The
idea of the national comes back after a long interlude of a globalizing vision.
It does not mean that we are not interventionist anymore. What happened in
Syria proves it. It means that we will intervene not according to the needs of
globalization but rather to American interests. It is about sharing a strong
and powerful image of the USA on the one hand and on the other serving the
concrete interests of the American people and nation.



This neo-nationalist model is not defended only by Trump, that is the
reason why I was saying that we should not consider Trump individually. We find
it exactly the same way with Putin. We find it by many other world leaders,
such as Erdogan or Duterte or Victor Orbán—really different figures—or Marshal
Sissi in Egypt.



We find it as well in attitudes, for instance Brexit in Great Britain, in
right-wing neo-populism in Europe: Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Wilders...  or in a certain left-wing neo-populism as
Mélenchon in France. It is in the air, seeming almost a passing fad. But it
constitutes perhaps a double rupture within IR. First of all because since the
emergence of globalization, let's say around the 70's, the national interest as
a thought category was bit by bit replaced with approaches in terms of collective
goods. Today by contrast we witness the abandonment of this image of collective
goods for a return to the national interest. This is very clear in Trump's renouncing
of the COP21 of Paris. At the same time, second, this constitutes some form of the
rehabilitation of the idea of power, which again seeps into the language of IR.




You know the IR scholar is not a neutral person, we have to use our science
towards positive action and for the definition of sound public policies. Going
against the idea of collective goods, casting doubt on the ideas of human
security, environmental security, food security, and sanitary security is
extremely dangerous because the composition of national interests and egoism
will never converge to a globally coherent policy. It is the weak that will
suffer first.



And the same time that power is reinstated as a driving principle of IR
praxis, the paradox is that great powers are becoming more and more powerless. If
we look only since 1989, and ask, when did state power ever triumph in IR?
Where did the strongest ever find a battleship enabling him to resolve a
problem to his benefit and according to his goals? Never. Not in Somalia, not
in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Palestine. Nowhere. Not in
Sahel, not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nowhere. So I am a little
worried, indeed, about this naive and old-fashioned rehabilitation of state
power.





Can we say that globalization, or rather the ambition of
integration at either the European or global scale, has failed? Can today be
considered a good moment to bury of the idea of integration?



I do not like burials, it is not an expression that I would use, but
your question is very pertinent. For around twenty years I have been saying and
teaching that regional integration constituted an intermediary and realistic
level of adaptation between the era of the nation state and that of globalization,
which means that I believed for a long time that regional integration was the
final step towards a global governance of the world.



I thought for a long time that what was not possible at the global
scale, a global government, was possible at the regional level and this would already
strongly simplify the world map and thus go in the way of this adhesion to the
collective dimension required by globalization. Nevertheless, not only Europe
suffers a setback, but all the regional constructions in the world are in a
similar situation. Mr. Trump openly shoves the NAFTA agreement, MERCOSUR is
down as every State that is composing it has recriminations against it, and we
could extend the list… All the forms of integration that have been set by
Chavez around his Bolivian ideal have ceased to exist; Africa progresses very
slowly in terms of regional integration; the Arab Maghreb Union, which is an
essential device, totally failed. Thus indeed the situation does not look good.



In the case of Europe there is a double phenomenon: on the one hand,
there is this really grave failure due to the secession of Great Britain from
Europe, and then there is a general malaise of the European model. Brexit is
really rare, if you look at the contemporary history of IR it is simply
unprecedented that a state shuts the door on a regional or global organization.
As far as I remember, it only happened a few times before, with Indonesia in
the UN in 1964, which lasted only 19 months. It happened with Morocco with the
African Union and Morocco is currently reintegrating in it. This British
situation came as a thunderbolt, worsened by the fact that paradoxically it is
not so much because of regional integration that the British voted against the
European Union. It was more from an anti-migration, xenophobic and nationalist
(in reference to that nationalism trend that I was earlier talking about)
perspective and what is dramatic is that we can clearly see that the
nationalist sentiment is really attacking the inner principles of regional
integration.



I was saying that in the European case there are internal problems which
run even deeper than the British defection, and I will underline at least two
of them. First of all there is a democratic deficit of Europe, meaning that
Europe was not able to match electoral spaces with the ones where decisions get
made; people still vote at the national level while the decisions are taken in
Brussels. In consequence, democratic control over these decisions is extremely
weak. How to resolve this equation? And here the breakdown is total since very
few people are coming up with suggestions. The other factor of this crisis is,
according to me, the fact that Europe has been built with success after World
War II in a progressive way around association and indeed, Durkheim proved it,
the integrative logic makes sense. Unity makes strength and it did make
strength once in Europe to prevent war, a third World War, and secondly to
encourage the reconstruction of European countries where economy was totally
collapsed. This time is now over and it is the fault of Europe to not have
known how to recontextualize itself, to react to the new contexts.



Paying one more time tribute to Durkheim who guessed it right, Durkheim
said that there are two ways of constructing social ties: around association
and around solidarity. I think that the time of association is now over, we
should enter in the time of solidarity, which does not consist in saying 'We
Germans are associated with Greece', but rather 'We Germans are joined together
with Greece because we know that if Greece collapses, in a long term
perspective, we will suffer the consequences'. Thus this idea of fundamental
unity is an idea that has been a little bit overlooked, abandoned by the
Europeans and now they find themselves in a complete paralysis.





Is the decolonization period still having an impact on
contemporary IR?



Oh totally, totally. I would first say because it is a major event in
the field of IR, which made the World switch from 51 sovereign States of the UN
in 1945 to 193 today but above all, a very aggravating circumstance, is that
this decolonization has been a complete failure and this failure weighs
enormously on international politics.



It has been a failure because decolonization assumed the format of copying
the western state model in countries that were accessing independence, while
this model was not necessarily adapted, which provoked a proliferation of
failed states, and these collapsed states had a terrible effect on IR.



Secondly because decolonization should have led to the enrichment and to
the substantial modification of multilateralism, by creating new institutions
able to take charge of new challenges resulting from decolonization. Yet,
except the creation of UNCTAD in 1964 and of
UNDP in 1965, there have been very little innovations in terms of global governance.
Thus global governance remains dominated by what I earlier called 'the club',
which means the great powers from the north, and this is very dysfunctional for
the management of contemporary crises. Then also because the ancient colonial
powers happen to find new forms of domination that did somehow complicate the
international game. Thus in fact decolonization is a daily aspect of the crisis
that the international system faces today.





In conclusion, which question should we have asked? In
other terms, which question have we forgot?



I found your questions very pertinent as it allowed the discussion of themes
that I consider essentials. Now, the big problem that makes me worry is the
great gap between the analysts and the actors in IR. I am not saying that the
analysts understood everything, far from it, but I think that IR theorists are
very conscious of some of these transformations I have mentioned. If you look
at some great authors such as James Rosenau, Ned Lebow or Robert Keohane, to
name just a few—there are way more—they all contributed to the reconstruction
of IR.



What truly strikes me is the autism of political actors, they think that
they are still at the time of the Congress of Vienna and that is an
extraordinary source of tension. Thus as long as this spirit of change does not
reach political actors, maybe Barack Obama was the first one to enter this game
and then the parenthesis was closed, as long as there will not be this move
towards the discovery of a new world, maybe as well through the inclusion in
our reflection about the international fabric such partners as China, it is not
normal that this very powerful China does not have any choice but to share the
paradigm and the model of action proper to occidental diplomacy, as long as we
would not have done this precise effort, well, we will remain in the negation
of the human, and that is the essential problem today, we are unable to
understand that at the end there is just one unity, which is the human being.



I had the chance to visit 105 countries and everywhere I met the same
men and the same women, with their pain, with their happiness, their hardship,
their joy, their sorrow, their needs that were everywhere identical. As long as
we will not understand that, well, we will be living in a world that is in total
contradiction with what it is truly and essentially. We will live in a world of
artifice and thus a world of violence.



Related links  



Read Badie's
The Arab Spring: A starting point (SER
Études 2011) here
(pdf)



Print version (pdf) of this Talk

As much as COVID-19 is a health and economic crisis, at its core, it is also a governance crisis.

NDI President Derek Mitchell and new Director of Democratic Governance Kristen Sample delve into ways governments and the international community have risen (or not) to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play

Derek Mitchell: As we all continue to shelter in place and respond to the colossal health and economic crisis that is COVID-19, we must not forget that at its core, pandemics are as much a result of governance failure as any failure of healthcare or health system.
Since working to support democratic processes, institutions and governance around the world is what NDI does for a living, we thought it useful to delve into the role governance has played in the COVID-19 pandemic with NDI's experience in more than 50 countries around the world serving as a guide. Welcome to DemWorks. My name is Derek Mitchell, president of the National Democratic Institute.
To discuss all this with me in this podcast, I'm joined by NDI's new director of democratic governance, Kristen Sample.
Kristen Sample: Thank you so much Derek.
DM: Kristen just joined us on March 1. She brings more than 20 years of democratic governance experience with her to NBI having advised and evaluated programs at UN Women, UN Democracy Fund, the Open Society Foundation, Global Partners, Governance and International IDEA. Kristen is an expert on countering corruption, legislative strengthening in the nexus of gender and politics and she has led projects focused on the impact of democratic reform on economic development and citizen security. At a moment when the global crisis in governance is at the center of international conversation, at least before the pandemic push pause, we are thrilled to have Kristen aboard to look at that issue with fresh creativity here at NBI. So welcome Kristen to your very first DemWorks podcast.
KS: I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you today on such important issues.
DM: So we'll speak about the crisis of governance but also the pandemic factor as well. But I do want to start with this global governance crisis that has sort of preceded this. This is a broader overhang. We've seen all over the world popular demonstrations over the past year and more and everywhere from Moscow to Managua, to Hong Kong, to Khartoum, to Algeria, to Istanbul, to Paris. You can go on and on. And what it represents is a frustration with the quality of governance. Democracy somehow is not delivering for people. And I want to hear your thoughts on that. It's a moment of turmoil certainly. People will look at this and say, "Well, democracy is failing," but it's more than democracy that this is happening. It's a general quality of governance question that I think actually provides an opportunity. So let me just ask your thoughts on that first off, Kristen.
KS: Yeah. Thanks so much for that question, Derek. I think that NDI, since we have officers or programs spanning every region of the world basically in more than 50 countries, we're in a very good position to be able to take the pulse of what's happening in the different countries. In fact, we have been conducting surveys every two weeks of our country programs to get a sense of what's happening on the ground and we've received some very interesting signals that I'm really happy to be able to share with you today.
On the one side, we are saying that in many countries governments are responding very seriously, in very concerted ways to the health crisis. I mean in more than two thirds of the countries. The governments in the countries where we work are closing nonessential businesses in over 60%, they are communicating in ways, having very intensive communication campaigns that really are reaching all citizens. But when it comes to the democracy side, when it comes to implementing that response and pursuing a response that's consistent with democratic principles and norms and values and institutions, we are seeing some troubling developments at the same time.
For instance, the number of governments by our account, over 40% of the governments in the countries where we work are declaring emergency powers and it's clear that this is an extraordinary situation that requires extraordinary measures, but in many cases these emergency powers are inconsistent with democratic principles. They are not linked to the crisis. There is no provision for legislative oversight or in many cases, these have no sunset class, so there's no time limit and these are simply open-ended.
And link to that and linked in many cases to these emergency powers, emergency decrees, we're seeing an uptick also in threats to fundamental freedoms. For instance, nearly half of our countries are reporting that there are measures in place where governments are repressing non-state media who are critical of the government's response to the pandemic and that in some cases, again, almost 50% of our countries, there are measures in place where governments are limiting space for civil society to engage in political actions.
Another factor that I'd like to highlight too is while we're all distracted by the pandemic and while people are at home and perhaps with less access to information and less direct contact with government, there are also signals that many governments are using this as an opportunity to diminish anti-corruption controls. So that means that in some cases economic response packages or healthcare delivery is taking place with less transparency and less openness, which as you can imagine is a risk in terms of making sure that those resources are actually getting where they need to be.
And all of this, all of the stresses, the frustration and these concerns of course also have impacts when it comes to citizen trust, interpersonal trust citizen trust of the government and also we're seeing greater potential for civic unrest and a deteriorating security environment.
So all together, I hate to start with such a pessimistic view, but I think it is important again, through the networks that we have, the relationships that we have with political and civic actors on the ground, to convey the seriousness of the situation and to make sure that we're always communicating that well, this response requires really drastic measures. These measures need to be consonant of course, with the principles of democratic governance.
DM: Right. It fits into this broader competition of narratives that occurred even before the pandemic began, where China or Russia saying, "Look, authoritarian governments are more efficient in providing services. We do this stuff better. Democracy is messy." And they're able, as you say, to take advantage of this moment when people are looking for strong central control to make that case and to both do that rhetorically but also through provision of services.
And then it's not just those major countries. You'll have folks whether it's Hungary or Poland or you just go around the world, they're postponing elections. They are shutting down civil society, they're settling scores with adversaries. They're constraining public debate, saying that those things are luxuries during a time of crisis and that gives them an opportunity then as you said, for not just power grabs, but resource grabs and money grabs and they say, "Look, these are extraordinary times. They require extraordinary measures." And the concern is that these extraordinary measures will be permanent, that they'll say you need us to be surveilling people.
So this is a challenge for certainly those who do democracy work and for folks inside these countries. But I think the broader question of security, we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later, but it's interesting what we're seeing on the ground as you say.
You do a lot of work in the legislative sphere, you have a lot of background on that. How legislatures are particularly important. Civil society is too, but just focusing on legislature's role as a check and balance against executive overreach, can you talk about from the NDI experience or your other observation, how legislatures are being challenged, how they're dealing with this moment, how they're adapting to deal with the COVID-19 moment.
KS: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm so glad you brought this point up. The first challenge that I'd highlight is this risk that the legislative branch is getting sidelined. In a crisis like this, the executive branch is generally front and center. Their role is clearly understood by citizens. Head of state might be the one out there doing daily press briefings or a health minister communicating medical reports. And there's this sense of emergency that as I sort of alluding to before, it seems to empower the executive branch. And unfortunately that seems to be, in many cases, at the expense of the legislative power.
And additionally, another challenge and another reason that legislatures are perhaps getting crowded out or sidelined is simply that, the coronavirus, by it's dynamic, it's not socially compatible. And since parliaments are these multi-member bodies that have more diffuse operations, more diffuse leadership and that involve hundreds of different people, it's simply just a challenge to assemble a large group of people together, bring them together and keep them front and center in this crisis.
So if that first challenge is making sure that people just keep in mind that legislatures matter and the legislatures are able to exert their rights and their authority, I'd say that the second challenge of course is just how do parliaments, legislatures operate in a virtual world. Politicians are by nature, they like to shake hands, they like to get out on the street, they need to be in touch with their constituents. And there are so many challenge involved in this current world that we have where we should all be social distancing.
So looking across the world where we work, their parliaments are adopting different measures. Some of them are using social distancing restrictions like reducing the number of MPs in sessions. Others are moving to remote voting, remote deliberations. And then others are not meeting at all, which of course is quite terrible. And in those cases where legislatures have been dissolved or have been suspended for long periods of time.
We are working too, as you were saying, as NDI closely with parliaments in a number of countries to try to do those adaptations to the rules of procedures so that they're able to continue meeting in session and continue deliberating and continuing exercising oversight. For instance, we have connected parliamentarians in Colombia with parliamentarians in Ecuador. We have virtual sessions to learn from Ecuador's experience in adopting a regulation for the implementation of virtual session and teleworking.
So we are trying to connect parliamentarians across countries to understand how some parliaments have been moving forward in terms of remote procedures and how that's going for them. And two more challenges. One I'd highlight is that oversight role that we've been talking about. And from the same survey that we conducted with our country programs, we found that in 59% of the countries, checks and balances have been weakened, have deteriorated under the pandemic.
And this is happening at such an unfortunate time when there's so many policy measures that need to be approved and put in place. If we just take the issue of debt policy for instance, I saw a statistic from the Westminster Foundation that more than 80 countries have already requested emergency aid from the IMF. I mean these countries are struggling of course to meet different types of fiscal obligations and they are desperate for cash in order to ramp up health services and put in place economic measures.
And so these governments are taking on debt obligations, debt burns that are going to have far reaching impacts and long lasting impacts that should really be approved by the legislative branch and include monitoring and reporting. And that's not always the case in most of these instances.
DM: So you just say it's a very dangerous time and folks are adapting procedurally, but there are really implications to this longterm, including for security. And I think we'll get to that after the break.
For more than 35 years, NDI has been honored to work with courageous and committed pro-democracy activists and leaders around the world to help countries develop the institutions, practices and skills necessary for democracy's success.
KS: Welcome back. Derek, I've heard you speak to the issue of authoritarian systems and how they're operating in this crisis and that the authoritarian nature in itself makes health crises more likely. And you've also said in some of your speeches and some of the conversations we've had that it's not a coincidence that the pandemic started in China and I'd really like to hear from your expertise, your deep background on China specifically. Can you explain to listeners why that is? Why there is that connection?
DM: Well, as I said at the top, this is not just a health crisis, it's a governance crisis. It's a factor of governance both in the prevention of the pandemic and the response to it. We talked so far mostly about the response, how we're responding to the pandemic, but the core of the pandemic is a failure of governance. The difference between a local health crisis that is contained and a pandemic lies in the ability of a political system to respond to that early challenge quickly and effectively. And that requires both government and civic action. And if you're going to deal with this crisis early, it requires both. To do that, you have to act swiftly. You have to have widespread testing and contact tracing. You need critical support from citizens. In order to do all that and to ensure that that happens, you have to have basic civic trust.
Closed societies routinely fail that test of having that civic trust and that rapid action for some very practical reasons. When a government suppresses a free flow of information, when it fails to empower independent civic institutions, when it's too insecure to convey bad news candidly, doesn't feel that it has a political legitimacy, therefore, it's insecure to convey bad news. When its data can't be trusted because it's opaque, when its officials are afraid to speak truth to power or communicate inconvenient truths to their superiors or act decisively, absent waiting for some strict orders from the very center and they can't move quickly, the result can be deadly.
It turns what is a local health issue into a pandemic so it crosses borders. It becomes not just a problem for one country but for all others. So democratic governance is very, very practical and once again in this regard, transparent, accountable, inclusive, responsive, open governments is essential to crisis response but it's also essential to prevent the crisis from emerging to begin with.
And it is a matter of national security. This highlights frankly what many of us have known all along, that this is not just nice but has very practical national security effects. And as we just talked earlier, the irony is that just as the world needs more open democratic societies to prevent future crises and deal with the current one, there are opportunistic politicians who are closing political and civic space. That I think is a very practical reason why that closed societies cause these pandemics.
KS: I think that all of those points that you've been raising in terms of the threats and the vulnerabilities are so important for us to keep front and center. At the same time, here in NDI, as you know, is we're very keen to make sure that there are also opportunities to elevate the many examples around the world where governments are acting democratically and effectively in response to the crisis and they're framing and working with citizens in ways that are absolutely consistent with democratic values and principles. And so I do want to showcase some of those.
I think it's received a lot of press around the world how New Zealand, for instance has reacted, and I read this week that New Zealand is perhaps one of the very first countries to have been able to successfully eliminate COVID. They have no new COVID cases. And it's a case that really stands out for the way that the prime minister has been able to deliver information in a very clear, compassionate, inclusive way, a way that's very grounded in science of course, and transparent.
And at the same time where the legislature has had an important role developing a parliamentary select committee that's providing scrutiny of the government's response. The government has also been very affirmative there I think, in terms of issues of freedom of information and media freedom and has said that they would not slow down, for instance, their commitment to responding to requests for information during the crisis. So there's certainly the case of New Zealand, which is so interesting and it's shown such early success, but there are other places around the world too where specific measures taken by the government I think have been so positive and far reaching.
Uruguay comes to mind for instance. We see so many cases where authoritarian leaders are using this crisis to be able to settle scores as you were saying, or to act in a very partisan fashion. But in Uruguay, the president convened all of the former presidential candidates to give a joint press conference to send a powerful message of unity and to show that across the party divide, they were working together to develop responses.
Taiwan also really stands out for its cross party coordination, the transparent communications they've had, the very creative efforts that the government has put in place there, I think they've called it humor, not rumor. A campaign to share facts in real time to counter disinformation, to manage fear. So there aren't many cases out there as I was saying, of governments that are responding effectively and in ways that are building that citizen trust that you were mentioning.
DM: Yes. And then a further one, another democracy that's a leading democracy, probably the first out of the gate is South Korea. They did exactly what was necessary. People are looking at that example, a democratic example. They didn't sacrifice rights at all. They obviously had very strong controls at times of the society, but it took very swift action. They did widespread testing, contact tracing and they worked with civil society and is shown over and over that civil society is probably one of the most important factors. It's not simply a government driven thing that makes a response success. Civil society serves as a very efficient force multiplier for government. We saw that in Katrina, hurricane Katrina. We see it's proved over and over that it really is effective in getting the word out and messaging.
Ensuring is like in Taiwan through their civic tech community, they're sort of hackers. They're young citizens, who themselves in a voluntary fashion, formed a community. They were viewed as allies and partners not alienated from the government. And that partnership has been a success in Taiwan, has been a success in South Korea and is essential for a success. And that means that governments need to be open, need to be transparent, they need to see society as partners. So this is absolutely critical.
KS: Yeah. And I just want to add on the South Korea example. I'm so glad you brought that up because South Korea held elections during the pandemic on April 15, they had national assembly lessons and they were actually able to organize those elections in a way that was seen as very transparent, that was very consistent with electoral integrity and they had higher levels of turnout than in previous elections, which is pretty amazing. And there's so many countries around the world that are facing elections in 2020. I think the way that South Korea was able to do it with a very intensive communication campaign as you were speaking again to their transparency of communication, they had expanded early voting measures in place. They had home voting, they had very comprehensive safeguards for people to be able to vote in person. So even organizing an election in a time that seems so difficult and so challenging, I think that as you were saying, democracies like South Korea are showing that there is a way forward.
DM: Right. And I think we can learn some lessons from that as well. There are groups, including NDI has been at the center of this, of putting together documents that say here are the election integrity guidelines for this moment, that democracy should not be sacrificed at the alter of crisis response, that elections need to move forward if they can be done in the right way and if they need to be postponed, it's postponed within a certain timeframe and only during a period of high crisis. So there are principles here where democracy can continue to move forward. It makes the society stronger, it builds that civic trust that's important for crisis response. But we need to... You can walk and chew gum at the same time at this moment. So I'm glad we were able to talk about some of these democratic examples.
KS: Absolutely. And I will be right back after this quick message.
You can hear more from other democracy heroes by listening to our DemWorks podcast available on iTunes and SoundCloud.
DM: Welcome back with Kristen Sample. Of course you're new to NDI, but you know NDI very well and it's a fundamental principle everywhere that nations will only succeed when societies are fully inclusive, where they don't leave anybody behind. They enable all to contribute equally. That means women, that means young people, that means traditionally marginalized groups, LGBT communities, et cetera. It's just plain logic that if you leave anybody behind, that you're not going to get the most out of your citizen when you're going to hold your country back, and yet we are witnessing negative impacts toward these populations during this COVID-19 moment. Kristen, can you speak to this, explain what's going on here and why it matters?
KS: Sure, absolutely. I mean obviously this crisis isn't occurring in a vacuum. It's occurring in a context where across the world, across all countries, there are already this array of existing intersecting inequalities where some people were coming into this crisis already in a disadvantaged place. And then the pandemic itself has differentiated impacts that affect women and other marginalized groups disproportionately. I'll just give a few examples.
I mean lockdown for women who are living in relationships of power imbalance and of abuse perhaps, lockdown for them means locked in, with an abusive partner. And for instance our survey of country offices that I was referring to previously, in 66% of our countries, there seems to be an increase in sexual and gender based violence since the pandemic. In 15% of those countries, it's a significant increase. Of course these women might be locked in in vulnerable situations and then at the same time have less access to government resources, government support. So that's one example.
Others, people with disabilities for instance, who have always struggled to access health services, transportation in an equitable fashion, you can imagine that that lack of access and the differentiated impact of the pandemic on them is life threatening in some cases.
There are digital divide concerns, people in rural areas or women, other marginalized groups who may have less access to information, to resources. There are real concerns also and cases around the world where this pandemic is being exploited by anti migrant hate groups for instance, who try to link movement and migration to the origin of the virus. Or in some cases, for instance in Africa and some of the countries where we work, media outlets are perpetuating stereotypes against people with albinism for instance, and placing the blame for the virus on them.
So there are so many challenges around making sure that people have access to resources, people are safe and that we are able to convey and support a message of social cohesion and solidarity instead of the divisions that we're seeing pop up around the world. I think that in our case, for instance in Indiana, what we're trying to do is reinforce the need for inclusive decision-making, making sure for instance, that women are involved in decision making and other marginalized groups are involved in decision making and representation and in these deliberation bodies, making sure that the policymaking is taking into account these vulnerabilities and these different differentiated needs. And also the government messaging is inclusive, getting to everybody and it's supporting the social cohesion messaging and solidarity messages.
DM: And again, this is critical for the crisis response, pandemic response. I mean COVID-19 doesn't discriminate. Whoever has it, whoever is vulnerable or subject will get it and it will spread to the society writ large. So if you're not inclusive, if you're excluding folks, if politicians then see that there is an opportunity here as some politicians will to divide and conquer, to play on fear. Or spoilers from the outside may see that there are opportunities if they're divided societies, to create tensions that then require or enable them to negotiate the deal that you want to make or promote corruption within the society.
There are all kinds of ways this makes societies less stable, less secure, and affects the development and certainly the response to crises. So this is not just a nice thing, it's not just a human rights thing. This is fundamentally important to national security, international security and to everything that we're seeking to achieve through democracy.
KS: Absolutely. And I think along the things I'd really like to hear from you too, Derek, in terms of how you see along the lines of this being an international crisis that includes the whole world, that joins us all although we are in very different places. How you see role NDI's role in supporting that cross border cooperation and solidarity and having the international community come together?
DM: Given that authoritarians are claiming their model is unique for this moment, we have to be out there making our case. But in terms of our specific adaptations that we are doing, we are working in places like Ethiopia to ensure that the public opinion surveys are necessary invents of their postponed elections or continue forward, but can be done virtually. That we can adapt legislative rules of procedure in places that need it to allow for remote voting and continue the legislative process to ensure that election integrity is maintained.
As I mentioned earlier, there are certain principles and established accepted international principles for when and how to postpone elections, how to hold them during moments of crisis. And we put together crisis response kits that can be used. It's called the practical toolkit for politicians during a pandemic that can help political parties figure out how to do crisis management or help the government put together crisis communication.
So a lot of things that can be done internally and done across different countries that ensure the solidarity is still there, the momentum for democracy is still there. The expectation that democratic norms are sustained in this moment so that the headlines are not simply roll back authoritarian opportunism, that massive surveillance, all the things that people may succumb to because of fear during crisis, that there is an alternative voice and it says it doesn't have to be like that. Or if it does have to be like that now, it doesn't have to continue to be like that indefinitely and that there are some standards by which these things are being imposed.
So that international norm setting at this moment, it's probably more important than ever to do and we are trying to do at national level. We're trying to do it across different countries to ensure that there is not a vacuum to which the authoritarian voice moves and has free open season for its own values. It goes across, I think, a lot of different countries. And Kristen, I'd be interested in your thoughts from your perspective of governance, how that's working.
KS: I think that there's a real role for the international community to play. And I wanted to highlight that too in what you're saying because these challenges are so vast that clearly we have to work together on people to people exchanges and supporting lesson sharing. And so I do think that there's an absolute role for the international community playing in terms of getting out the messages of that democracy is not a luxury, it's not something that could be put into a coma or put on hold while we're all sheltering, that it's something that has to be reaffirmed on a daily basis.
And so I do think that countries also have to, in addition to standing firm, standing on their own ground on democratic principles, they also have to be willing to promote and expand those democratic principles across borders, especially to counter those liberal influences that you were referring to earlier, that in some cases are, really transmitted and increased through disinformation campaigns or phony PR campaigns that need to be called out of course by all actors.
DM: Thanks again, Kristen for joining me in conversation about how democracies can best meet the challenges of COVID and how NDI with its global partners are meeting the moment.
KS: Thank you, Derek.
DM: I'd also like to say thank you to our listeners. To learn more about NDI or to listen to other DemWorks podcasts, please visit our website at www.ndi.org. Thanks very much.


World map of Coronavirus (Covid-19)



19. Governance is Key During COVID-19? (w/ Kristen Sample) Posted 6 days ago

Democracy (General), COVID-19 Podcast NDI Listen democracy