Suchergebnisse

Contributor(s): Dr Jonathan Hopkin, Dr Brian Klass, Professor Tomila Lankina | Welcome to LSE IQ, a monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. Earlier this year, the independent watchdog organisation Freedom House published a report cautioning that, in 2017, democracy had faced its most serious crisis in decades. In this episode, Jess Winterstein asks what might lie behind this decline in global freedom and what the future might hold for democracy. This episode features: Dr Jonathan Hopkin, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, LSE Department of Government and co-director of Democratic Audit; Dr Brian Klass, a Fellow in Comparative Politics at LSE's Department of Government; and Professor Tomila Lankina, LSE Department of International Relations and lead of the Political Mobilisation and Democracy project. For further information about the podcast visit lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ.

Alina Felder & Merli Tamtik Even though barrier‐free access to student mobility has become a significant policy problem for governments (Cairns, 2019), issues of social justice have been largely absent from institutional strategies of higher education (HE) internationalisation (Buckner et al., 2020a; Özturgut 2017). With our research we contribute to this aspect, offering a comparative […]
The post The Role of Inclusion in Macro‐Regional Policies for Student Mobility appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Alina Felder & Merli Tamtik Even though barrier‐free access to student mobility has become a significant policy problem for governments (Cairns, 2019), issues of social justice have been largely absent from institutional strategies of higher education (HE) internationalisation (Buckner et al., 2020a; Özturgut 2017). With our research we contribute to this aspect, offering a comparative […]
The post The Role of Inclusion in Macro‐Regional Policies for Student Mobility appeared first on Europe of Knowledge.

 Book CLICK:Constitutional PolarizationA Critical Review of the U.S. Political System               by Josep M. ColomerABSTRACTIn this book, Josep M. Colomer argues, against much conventional wisdom, that political polarization is embedded in the constitutional design. The book puts forth that sustained conflict and institutional gridlock are not mainly questions of character, personalities, or determined by socioeconomic or cultural inequalities. They are, above all, the result of the formula of separation of powers between the Presidency and Congress, which, together with a system of only two parties, fosters adversarial politics and polarization. Colomer contends that in the past, bipartisan cooperation and domestic peace flourished only under a foreign existential threat, such as during the Cold War. Once such a threat vanished, unsettled issues and new social concerns have broadened the public agenda and triggered again animosity and conflict. Constitutional Polarization offers innovative and relevant insights in political science to a broad readership without technical or academic jargon. It will be of high interest to those readers attentive to current affairs, as well as to public officers, journalists, pundits, and those in the study of political science, where it can also become a staple for courses in American Politics.  TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: It's the Institutions!   1: A Tamed Democracy  1. Democracy Was Only for Small Countries 2. From Empire to Federation 3. Montesquieu Did Not Speak English   II: An Elected King with the Name of President  4. The Archaic Presidential Election 5. Biased Filters and Checks 6. The Presidentialist Temptation   III: Two Parties with Narrow Agendas  7. The Framers Did Not Like Factions 8. The Unforeseen Emergence of Only Two Parties 9. Shifting Majorities and Accordion Agendas   IV: Either Internal Anger or External Fear  10. Anarchy and Civil War 11. Cold-War Fear and Cooperation 12. The Ongoing Turmoil  V: A Future in Hope  ADVANCED PRAISE: "Many who worry about the state of American democracy adopt a narrow focus andconsequently propose specific reform proposals such as ranked-choice voting orcampaign finance restrictions. This book by an eminent scholar of comparative politicssituates American democracy in a broader historical, comparative, and—especially—international context. Along the way, it makes a welcome shift in the focus of attentionfrom what is going on inside the heads of voters to what is occurring in the larger social,economic, and international worlds in which they live." Morris P. FiorinaStanford University and Hoover Institution "In this brilliant book, Josep Colomer documents how the visionary framers of the USConstitution devised the doctrine of separation of powers to curb monarchical rule andthe follies of immoderate majorities. Although presidentialism generally succeeded in aworld long dominated by imperial powers, he shows how in recent decades theincreased gridlock of divided government continues to undermine genuine democraticgovernance."Arturo ValenzuelaGeorgetown UniversityCo-author (with Juan J. Linz) of The Failure of Presidential Democracy Constitutional Polarization: a critical review of the U.S. political system - Offers a uniqueperspective on polarization, a fertile field for investigation and debates among scholarsconcerning contemporary American problems as well as historical controversies, withplenty of teaching moments for students. The book is free of jargon and is written in away that should be accessible to a wide range of readers. Josep Colomer is an accomplished scholar in political science, an original thinker withdeep knowledge of political history. His scholarship combines the best of formal theoryand comparative empirical analysis. He is an expert on the development andfunctioning of political institutions. The issue of political polarization is of growinginterest and widely taught.BROWNS BOOKShttps://www.brownsbfs.co.uk/ PREORDER CLICK book flyer 20% discountAlso available at: Amazon |

If we are to have a national conversation about trade, manufacturing, debts, foreigners buying up the country and so on then it would be a good and reasonable idea to get the underlying right first:Economic theory, and generations of politicians, told us not to worry about leaving manufacturing behind.We've not left manufacturing behind. Manufacturing output is still within a few percent of all time highs. It's double what it was when St Maggie came to power. Since we moved to a floating exchange rate, economists and politicians have claimed this does not matter. But the trade deficit is both a product of our problems and a cause. It is a product because we do not make, do or sell enough to the rest of the world. It is a cause because the arising current account deficit leads us to sell assets to foreign investors and build up external debt, which leaves us with less control over our economy, and more exposed to investors' interests and increases in international interest rates.Economists are right here. Which, given that we are talking about economics seems appropriate. Then there is the budget deficit and stock of debt…..In 2024-25 Britain plans to issue a record £271 billion in new gilts, and the strangers upon whom we depend will demand higher yields. They will wonder about inflation – higher in services than goods – and the value of Sterling, and price British debt accordingly.And here's it's necessary to become detailed - in order to show why the economists are right.There is no connection - none - between the size of the national debt and anything to do with trade. We have a national debt because generations of politicians micturate the wealth of the country up the wall. They continually spend more than we the people are willing to pay in taxes - or more than the politicians are willing to try extracting from us. That's the cause, the only cause, of the national debt.The trade defict is indeed balanced - exactly, precisely - by a surplus on the capital account. That's definitional. But while capital might flow in from foreigners into debt instruments - like gilts - it doesn't have to. It can purchase assets outright. This then leads to the old Warren Buffett argument about Squanderville. What happens when Johnny Foreigner owns all the capital assets in the country? The UK trade deficit is - of the order of - £80 billion a year, meaning we need to have that same amount coming in on the capital account. In one recent year the UK produced £1 trillion in new wealth. That's a 9% rise in total wealth - and we sold 8% of that new wealth to foreigners. Thus at the end of the year foreigners owned less of the national wealth than at the beginning of it.This does not strike us as being a problem.Painful things to political arguments, facts are. But we do think that facts are where the arguments should start so let's try doing that, eh? Our real contempt is reserved for this argument: Classical economic theory holds that it does not matter who owns what, nor what is made where. Comparative advantage means countries do what they are good at, and buy what other countries provide. Thus, trade makes us all richer. But this is not the case. First, governments get in the way.So the solution to governments getting in the way is that we should have more government getting in the way in order to solve the problem of government getting in the way. We all should be contemptuous of that silliness.

 This week, I went to Winnipeg in the coldest temps of the year thus far to observe one of the new CDSN research efforts: understanding the dynamics of Canadian domestic emergency operations in response to natural events.  Paraphrasing Emdad Haque, one of our co-directors,  nature will create extreme conditions, but whether they are disastrous is up to people and government.  Emdad, Nira Agrawal, and Kawser Ahmed brought together a sharp group of folks, including the army's liaison to Manitoba, the ADM for Emergency Management in Manitoba (a survivor of my big IR class at McG), researches from the universities in the area, and more (see here for details).  What did I learn?Emergencies are rare for any individual but they are increasingly common collectively.  Climate change is already fostering more and more floods, fires, and other extreme events.  So, this is not just a thing that happens from time to time but is an every day thing now.The notion of the CAF as a last responder needs to die.  Yes, the military wants to be called on only in the most extreme emergencies when no one else can do what they can do.  But there are plenty of incentives for folks to ask for help and for the CAF to be unable to say no.That most of this stuff ends being led by the most local folks--that the feds don't take over but are there to supplement.  Which means the military is following orders, not ordering people around.As always, prevention is the least expensive route but often there are not political incentives.  It seems to me that the real opportunity to make changes to manage/mitigate is as the cycle goes from response to the emergency to recovery--that building back better is a thing.  Rebuild out of harm's way, away from the flood plains, for example.As always, the Indigenous people are put into awful positions by the past and by the present.  Limited infrastructure means they need assistance, but then they are seen as objects, those to be rescued, rather than agents with their own expertise and preferences.  Evacuations need to be rethought--they are very disruptive physically, economically, culturally, mentally.Federalism in Canada continues to suck mightily.  Some provinces understand that they need to build back better, so the Winnipeg floods didn't recur with the same level of damage.  Others understand that they can save money by doing less preparation and then call the feds in when help is needed.There is a lot more work, coordination, planning, preparation going on in this area in between emergencies, that many bad storms and other events do get mitigated.  But again, it is going to get much harder as storms and other conditions get more intense.I was very pleased to see the CDSN idea work out here--that we had engaged people in different parts of government and society, there was a real exchange of information, the students were super engaged, and it is the start of a more comparative analytical conversation.  I also learned that Winnipeg is cold, full of friendly folks, and one can lose one's mittens in a cab and then get them back when one happens to take the same cab back to the airport.So glad I could hang with Andrea Charron, who has done so much for the CDSN

I am currently in the most wonderful Helsinki airport, waiting to go back to Berlin.  I have been in Helsinki to study the Finnish case for the Phil/Ora/Steve book on Defense Agencies.  It has been a great albeit cold and mostly wet week.  Definitely glad we have this case in the book, and, yes, it is making it imperative to go to Sweden to see how NATO membership is a common process with perhaps not entirely common politics.First, the joy of Helsinki before I discuss what I have learned for the book project.   It is on the Baltics, so when the wind blows, brrrrr.  Yes, we got some snow here last night, deep into April.  Makes me feel like I am back in Canada, except Ottawa has more sun and not as much cold winds. This is only my second time here, and the first one hardly counts as it was a brief layover between Leningrad (that tells you how long ago it was) and NY.  I got used to tramming around town, never using the metro as everyone was very well located in the center except a couple of interviews--one requiring a bus ride to beyond Helsinki and one or two requiring cab rides.  Two parliament buildingsand funky sculpture One of my fave new experiences for interviewing was that they had a conference center where folks could hold meetings with far less security and inconvenience than going out to the ministries.  I still did manage to go to the Ministry of Interior, which was not far away, and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was a 20 minute walk or 15 minute tram ride.  The Parliament buildings were not just huge (everyone kept reminding me this is a small country with a small population, but their parliament buildings suggest otherwise), but also had more security than any other legislative building I can recall.  Sure, everyone has a front entrance with thick windows, x-ray scanners, etc, but to get from point a to b inside, my escort had to badge the doors every five or ten steps.  And, yeah, my escort in was the counsel to the defense committee, and on the way out ... a parliamentarian who was recently the chief of defense!  They don't have much of a history, by the way, of senior ex mil leaders serving in parliament but Ukraine changed that.  More on that below.reindeer on potatoI am not a huge fan of fish, so I tended to look for non-Finnish food (not all Finnish food is fish, to be clear), so I had Chinese, Italian, Mideast, and Georgian.  Pretty sure that was my first time having Georgian food, but the waitress didn't understand my order, so I didn't get the classic big bread thing dish, so I will have to try that in Berlin (I found a Georgian place near my apartment).  The people were very friendly, even though I have no Finnish.  They all understand that no one speaks Finnish besides Finns, so they all speak Swedish (there is a sizable Swedish minority and the Swedes used to run the place), and English.  Some folks remarked that the kids these days are less interested in learning Russian.  So much for Russia's soft power....Yes, Russia loomed large here, as the Finns have a strong memory of the trauma of the Winter War--their fight with the Russians during World War II.  Apparently, the Ukraine war hit the old folks very hard.   I did wonder where the bunkers are, as  I had heard that civil defense is a big thing here.  I didn't recognize the signs apparently, as I was told that pretty much all of Helsinki has underground facilities.  The difference between old US bomb shelters and Finnish bunkers--the latter are used on a daily basis--parking lots, swimming pools, gyms, etc that are underground.  This keeps them fresh, their air good, and also, most importantly, has the Finns comfy with going to these places.  The economy is not doing well, and it may or may not have much to do with the fact that the Finns have pretty much cut off most trade with Russia.  The whole of government thing Canadians and others have a problem doing?  Finland has whole of society, comprehensive security.  In its history, it has always been alone until ... the last year.  So, they are ready to mobilize the entire society if the Russians attack.  This means a draft (just for men [all young men including one NBA player], women can join the military but their conscription is voluntary [holy oxymoron]), an extensive reservist system so that the small army can swell to 280,000 and then 900,000, coordination of all parts of society to respond to an attack.  The drafted are paid about 5 Euros a day.... which does not go far in super expensive Helsinki.  Decorations inside Parl buildingThe military has been running a month-long defense course 4x/year for a long, long time, where they create cohorts of 50 people, elites from across society, to learn about the military and the rest of comprehensive security.  This is a hell of a public diplomacy effort--it is not cheap although some companies provide the food and booze and such for free.  Companies apparently don't have a big problem with losing an employee for a month.  To provide a comparison, the army exercise I did in 2019 was one day.  This experience is really important as it came up in almost all of the interviews and mostly without my prompting.In ye old comparative politics, the phrase is war made the state.  While not entirely true, the idea is that societies developed more and more extensive political institutions in order to fight and win or survive in international relations.  It may be the case that NATO membership has the same but smaller impact.  That joining NATO has caused Finland has to dramatically enlarge and perhaps empower its very small Ministry of Defense.  NATO requires meetings, document vetting, preparation, the sending of personnel to NATO hq's in Brussels, Mons, and elsewhere.  AND most NATO policy is made by civilians even though NATO is far more an organization about military stuff than civilian stuff (hence why much of the effort to build an Afghan government was run by separate national governments (foreign affairs, development agencies) rather than by NATO.  The relevance of this is that it gives the MoD a greater role in making defense policy than in the past.  That is, the Finnish defense forces made much of the policies but that may be changing now.  Oh, and it was the first EU country I have been in where the NATO flags easily outnumber the EU ones.In terms of the project, Finland is an interesting case with a largely autonomous military, that their number two in the MoD is always a retired senior military officer, their MoD is tiny (150 now, swelling recently thanks to NATO), their President is commander in chief which means the military can try to sideline the MoD and the PM by insisting that the President is the one who oversees them, the President and PM have tiny foreign/security offices, and that conscription deeply shapes everything.  Sweden will be a fun case to compare since the Swedes had a draft, dropped it, and have recently started it again while also joining NATO recently. Random things I heard along the way:five different Baltic pipelines have had "accidents" since the war in Ukraine started!Finland has reached 2% of GDP on defense because it frontloaded the cost of buying the F35s, which means that when that goes through the system, Finland may have a hard time procuring enough to keep at 2%.  Womb chairs!  Multiple waiting rooms in govt buildings reminded me of Oberlin's library way back in the day.  I do love my job even if it requires me to transcribe my interview notes.  I have many more countries to visit and I still have to do some work to figure out the German case as well as write up the Finish case.  All I know is that comparative civ-mil relations has been mighty good to me.Next week, Mrs. Spew hits Europe, so we drive through Germany and then fly to Italy.  So, a very different bit of fieldwork ahead.  Much more focused on comparative cuisine.  

Carbon sequestration has long been discussed as an essential tool in our quest for net zero. Given that we will likely rely on carbon capture methods to offset over half of the UK's residual carbon footprint in 2050, it is important to examine the options available and the feasibility of their application over the coming decades. There are two categories of carbon capture techniques: natural and artificial. The main methods in the former category involve afforestation and reforestation. Given that planting a forest the size of Greater London would over 100 years only offset the next two years of UK carbon emissions, it seems appropriate to focus mainly on the second group. From extracting carbon dioxide from seawater in Devon, to heat-powered methods at Sizewell C, there are dozens of innovative carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) methods being funded by Government net zero investments. Issues only arise when we begin to evaluate the costs of these technologies versus the benefits they provide. There are two key figures to examine. Firstly, the social cost of carbon: the present value of the damage done by a tonne of CO2 released into the atmosphere. William Nordhaus, 2018 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences for his work on the economic implications of climate change, has called this "The most important single economic concept in the economics of climate change", and estimated it in 2017 to be $31/tonne CO2. (It should be noted that there is disagreement around this figure, because of how we weigh impacts on future generations and developing countries. Most papers put the figure around $20-60.) Secondly, is the price of extracting one tonne of carbon from the atmosphere by these methods. A report cited in 2019 by the BEIS committee stated a cost of £80-160/tonne of CO2 prevented from entering the atmosphere at gas-powered electricity plants. Assuming a reduced dependence on fossil fuels, carbon capture will likely come from Direct Air Capture (DAC), rather than being attached to a power plant. A planned British DAC plant hopes to decrease costs to £200/tonne. The International Energy Agency has stated that in the best locations and using the best technology, DAC could fall below $100/tonne. These prices must therefore fall by 50-90% in the next two decades for carbon sequestration to be cost-effective. This is unlikely since most of the cost is from the electricity required by the process, and excepting a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, the price of electricity is unlikely to fall much in the UK, if at all. If this does not happen, capturing carbon could cost more than leaving it in the atmosphere. Given the number of people still sceptical about climate change, funding cost-ineffective policies which will hurt them more than climate change will is not the way to convince them of the very real harms caused by CO2.The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report shows CCUS to be the most expensive of 31 mitigation options, and exhibiting the joint-lowest potential contributions to net emission reduction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Government has not included any discussion whatsoever of CCUS prices across 550 pages of Net Zero, CCUS Strategy or Clean Growth Strategy documents. It is of course possible that we will succeed in reducing costs. However, there are currently no commercial applications of CCUS in the UK, and even if technology improves, the projects in Devon and at Sizewell C are predicted to bottom-out at £100 and £200/tonne of CO2 removed respectively. If new methods are to be developed and carbon capture is to become a serious and cost-effective method for reaching net zero, it is far more likely to happen in the Middle East or China, which have comparative advantages in developing this technology. Given the UK's reluctance to support large infrastructure developments within our own borders, it could be beneficial to partner with these nations and use British brains to aid them in developing these important technologies which, if successful, could then be applied here. Given these realities it appears that without significant technological breakthroughs to lower capture costs, or unlikely catastrophic climactic changes to increase carbon's costs, carbon sequestration is likely to be a net cost to our net zero strategy.

If nothing else, SB 262 by
Republican state Sen. Valarie
Hodges would inhibit in Louisiana racial division and hatred.

The bill, currently
passed out of the Senate into the House of Representatives, would add to
the state's Parental Bill of Rights that schools "shall not discriminate
against their child by teaching the child that the child is currently or
destined to be oppressed or to be an oppressor based on the child's race or
national origin." This addresses the use of critical race theory, or the idea
that racism is pervasive in all societal institutions shaped historically by,
if not currently dominated by, people of Caucasian ancestry, as the
foundational tool by which to shape instruction.

Similar
to Marxism, CRT bases itself on a series of unfalsifiable, if not empirically
unverifiable or logically suspect, propositions that if questioned
automatically connotes racist actions (or, if the analyzer is non-white,
axiomatic of a false consciousness), making the whole enterprise intellectually
lazy and devoid of true scholarship. It increasingly has become a tool by
those ideologically compatible with its policy aims – strong government action
to level differences in outcomes of resource allocations – for instruction from
the academy on down.

As an approach to understanding the distribution of
political power in a society, it warrants scrutiny and study as long as this
occurs in a critical and comparative fashion in the instructional environment.
When made foundational in instruction, however, it subverts the entire process
of education as a search for truth by elevating faith over skeptical inquiry
and becomes nothing more than neo-racism posing as anti-racism.

That by itself disserves children by depriving
them of the opportunity to learn factual knowledge and then engage in critical
thinking using it. And, quite ironically, applying the policy preferences of
CRT actually would
undermine the very institutions that are essential to addressing poverty and
inequality across all racial groups, providing another reason to ban its
use as a foundational instruction strategy.

But the bill's language probes to a deeper and
more sinister implication of using CRT foundationally: it spawns divisiveness, leading
to hatred, then into violence. We
only need review recent history not among non-whites, but central Europeans,
to see a demonstration of how the principles of CRT produce this perversion. In
the 1990s, ethnic conflict largely but not exclusively driven by Serbian
nationalists operating under an ideology of victimization brought war and
strife to the Balkans.

This nationalism, spawned over a century, had
mutated into a blanket indictment of certain non-Serbian ethnic groups. Identically
to tenets of CRT, it taught that a certain ethnic group, Serbs, had faced systemic
discrimination that culminated over the years that granted them special
victimhood status awarding moral status to their claims of group oppression.
Indeed, movement leaders invoked imagery and symbolism from past American
racist policy outcomes when explicating their ideology.

Shared tenets aren't difficult to ascertain: glorifying
the year of enslavement as the beginning of a national narrative (the 1619
Project), attributing sinister ethnically-based motivations and ideologies
to political opponents (the refusal of whites to become "woke" and the denigration
of non-whites on that side of the debate as captured), and calling opposition
and criticism "violence," in order to legitimize future actual violence (propagating
policies such as defunding the police as a reaction to alleged brutality and
disproportionate detainment specifically aimed at non-whites). Sadly, these
tenets constructed a narrative that inspired many to engage in sustained,
violent ethnic conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Regrettably, at its core CRT promotes tribal
hatreds. To teach children fundamentally that their race or national origins
automatically set them at odds with those who are different – unless, of
course, racial preferencing is instituted to redress (under the theory that "[t]he
only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy
to present discrimination is future discrimination") – not only perverts the
idea of education, but fuels a dangerous powder keg if allowed to expand and
persist. SB 262 does its part to prevent this.

Yesterday was the second and final day of the Strat Com conference.  I discussed day 1 here.  The first panel was on Deterrence of the Next Decade.  I thought this would be more about deterring electoral inference and other comms stuff, but it turned into a nuclear deterrence panel.  Interesting, scary, but not what I expected.  Francesca Giovanni talked about the renaissance of nuclear weapons--that they are more relevant these days.  Woot?  Her talk basically reinforced my concerns about the autocratic advantage in the stability-instability paradox--that when countries are deterred by mutual destruction at the nuclear level, they may not be so deterred at lower levels, and that autocratic countries can play the risky game of escalation at lower levels better due to narrower audiences.  Fun!  She argued that lots of the guardrails from the Cold War aren't here--like the officials of the PRC don't pick up the phone during a crisis.She also made an important point--that deterrence works when the other side is assured that your side will not attack if they don't do the thing you are seeking to deter.  My take on this is the big brother syndrome--big brothers are bad at deterrence because they may pound you whether you submit or not.  Not that my brother did that.  The relevance here is that if one threatens, say, regime change or sending someone to the Hague for war crimes even if they give in, then the incentive to give is low....  So, deterring Putin only works if we don't threaten him if he goes along with the status quo.  The next panel was the Global Battle of the Narratives, moderated by the CDSN's own and Canada's own JC Boucher.  I believe he was the only Canadian on any of the panels.  Good thing he repped us all very well.  It was a very interesting panel where folks from a variety of places--Japan, US, Australia, and Microsoft--presented their takes on mostly China.   Key points include: we need to be better at explaining our value proposition in the world especially in the Global South (although panelists hate this term as it makes it seem more homogeneous, unitary, other, etc); that the Russia/China partnership is not going away as they need each other, some speculation about another Trump adminitration (oy), Japan's government is moving but its public is not. I missed the last panel, but did not miss the concluding reception,
which was lovely.  Very good beer in a very nice venue.  They brought in
a group of folks representing traditional Latvia.  They did some games,
including one where young women would throw wreathes onto a tree--if
the wreath stayed, the women would be married soon.  Not too soon given
the outcomes, but once they started throwing the wreathes like frisbees,
they got better results.    Over the course of the two days, I meant a bunch of folks from across
Europe but also Americans and Canadians.  The NATO Field School, a
course run by Simon Fraser University (a CDSN partner), led by Alex
Moens and a few key young women (Hannah and Amy) had 45 young people
from North America and Europe asking good questions during the panels
and then afterwards.  It was great to meet them, and our group of
Canadian scholars will be meeting with them on our last day in Riga and
their halfway point of their course.  They went to the NATO Defense
College for two weeks, now here for two, and then Brussels for 2.  I
learned a lot and will still learn more on our last day with meetings
at the Latvia Ministry of Defense (where I will be tempted to ask
questions for my comparative defense agency project) and the Canadian
Embassy.  This trip was definitely worth it, as I have clearer ideas
both about what is going on here in Latvia and the trends in Strategic
Communications.

In a recent interview with Jordan's government-backed broadcaster, America's top military officer lavished praise on the country's armed forces.


"We have common interests and common values," said Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "The Jordanian Armed Forces are very professional. They're very capable. They're well led."


Milley's view represents the most common American line on the Jordanian military, which has long enjoyed a close relationship with the Pentagon. There's just one problem: It's dead wrong, according to Sean Yom, a political science professor at Temple University.


Where Washington sees a small-but-mighty army, Yom sees a "glorified garrison force," as he wrote in a chapter of the recent edited volume, "Security Assistance in the Middle East." The Jordanian military, he writes, is "more accustomed to policing society to maintain authoritarian order at home than undertaking sophisticated operations."


As Yom notes, the regime that the Jordanian military defends has become increasingly autocratic in recent years. King Abdullah recently approved a cybercrime law that would allow the government to jail its citizens for promulgating "fake news" or "undermining national unity" — terms that the law largely leaves undefined. The crackdown on expression comes just three years after the government crushed the country's teachers' union, which had previously acted as a primary vehicle for political opposition in Jordan.


So what does the U.S. have to show for its decades of lavish support for Jordan's military? And what can that tell us about how Washington should approach security aid? RS spoke with Yom to find out. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.





RS: The conventional story of U.S. security assistance is that, even though some of the countries that we help are authoritarian in nature, our aid tends to lead to greater respect for democracy, and if it doesn't do that, it at least will strengthen partner militaries. But in your chapter, you describe a different story in Jordan. Can you walk me through that a little bit?


Yom: U.S security assistance is typically justified through the doctrine of "building partner capacity." There has been a lot of ink spilled on the importance of modernizing the Jordanian Armed Forces and ensuring that it is a capable, coherent and interoperable armed force that can seamlessly work with the U.S. military or conduct operations on its own in the service of defending Jordan, or bolstering regional stability, for instance, by undertaking counterterrorist operations or contributing to peacekeeping missions.


The problem is that there is very little historical evidence that the Jordanian military is actually a capable fighting force, and I think a few key pieces of evidence underlie this. Number one, Jordan really hasn't fought a major armed conflict in a half century. It's undertaken peacekeeping abroad through the moniker of the UN, and it occasionally conducts one-off missions such as its airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria back in 2014. But there is very little evidence on the battlefield that the Jordanian military is what the U.S. would call a capable and competent partner military. The other piece of evidence is that much of Jordan's defense structure has partly been offshored to the United States. The border surveillance system between Jordan and Syria was built by Raytheon Company through U.S. military and economic grants, and much of Jordanian airspace is monitored as closely by the United States as it is by the Jordanians themselves. The significant U.S. military buildup in Jordan is part and parcel of the United States interest in defending the sovereignty of Jordan and ensuring that foreign aggressors — whether they are terrorists or militant organizations or even foreign states — do not penetrate very far into the Hashemite Kingdom.


We don't see a military that is being built to be capable and modernized and independent and combat ready. Instead, the overriding justification — internally at least, seldom mentioned publicly — is that U.S. security assistance in Jordan is designed not to build partner capacity but to ensure political access to the Hashemite monarchy and to lubricate U.S.-Jordanian relations to make sure that this bilateral alliance is smooth and allows both sides to achieve their mutual interests. In Jordan's case, [its interests are] to remain stable, to receive aid and arms from the United States, and to preserve its sovereignty, and in Washington's case, it's to make sure that there is a pro-Western oasis of moderation in the heart of the Near East.


RS: A question that's underlying a bunch of this is whether the monarchy and the system as it exists in Jordan could even continue to exist without American support. To put it bluntly, does U.S. aid underwrite autocracy in Jordan?


Yom: I think it does, but with a few caveats. The first is that, in comparative perspective, Jordan is not unique in being a middle-income country whose autocratic regime needs foreign aid to survive. The other caveat is that I don't necessarily think that U.S. support and aid is the only reason why the current system of government in Jordan is able to endure. It has its own survival mechanisms, whether it is rallying support from certain constituencies in society, such as some tribal communities, or leaning heavily on other partners in the region.


But I will say this: U.S. support may not be the only reason, but it is a major reason why the Hashemite monarchy and its regime has been able to maintain its current political strategy of maintaining power, which is not to democratize or alleviate repression but rather to maintain an authoritarian status quo. And I think U.S. support is also a major reason why the Jordanian leadership has very little incentive to grant meaningful political reforms such as curtailing corruption and granting more democratic freedoms, which clearly a majority of Jordanians desire. And we know this from public surveys. Jordanians are very explicit in what they are unhappy about the current political system, but they also feel that, because the U.S. often refuses to pressure the Jordanian government to grant or concede more of these reforms, they feel that the U.S. is complicit and preserving the authoritarian status quo.


Geopolitically, Jordan plays an important function to U.S. grand strategy as a critical part of its war-making infrastructure in the Middle East, as well as diplomatically a pro-Western oasis or island of stability in the heart of a "shatterbelt" of the Middle East. Because of these factors, Washington has very little problem providing such profuse amounts of military assistance to the Jordanian Armed Forces. Above all else, of course, Jordan abuts Israel. Jordan's role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its primary purpose as a peace partner of Israel validates in the eyes of many American policymakers why they should continue supporting the modernization and the arming of the Jordanian Armed Forces under the guise, of course, of building partner capacity but knowing full well that Jordan is not going to be fighting a war anytime soon.


RS: At some level, you've painted a picture of a big win for U.S. interests here. There's a sense in which America gets a huge plot of land in the middle of a region that it deems vital, and the only downside is that that support doesn't really square with our stated values. But in your article, you had a different conclusion. Can you tell me more about that?


Yom: By helping to maintain [Jordan's] political infrastructure, the United States is complicit in the continued economic and social stagnation of Jordan. For every dinar that the Jordanian leadership spends on security or military items — money that many Jordanians feel it does not have to spend — the less money there is to spend on, say, social programs or economic development.


If you look at the Jordanian economy, it is astounding how much of a crisis that it has fallen into. We're looking at, right now, 22 to 23 percent unemployment overall, which is probably a vast understatement of the real statistic. We're looking at nearly 50 percent youth unemployment. We're looking at poverty, which is between 25 to 30 percent depending upon which estimate we take as reliable. And this is all in a country that also spends approximately a third of each annual budget on military and security spending. So essentially, what you're looking at when you think about the Jordanian economy today is a wartime economy. The Jordanian government positions itself and maintains an army as if it were about to wage a war it doesn't have to wage, and that has a destructive effect on the economy and often justifies draconian security measures to regulate and police society. The United States, I would argue, is complicit in that arrangement.


Washington has had very similar experiences in the past with other countries where regimes have some kind of deep economic or political crisis, and yet they believe that having a well-armed coercive apparatus is going to immunize them from any sort of domestic unrest or popular overthrow. Now, that may be the case in Jordan, because the future is hard to tell. But that certainly wasn't the case in, say, Iran under the Shah. It wasn't the case in South Vietnam. It wasn't the case in some of our Central American client states in the 1970s and the 1980s.


One of the things I wish U.S. policymakers would reconsider is whether or not the current arrangement is fundamentally in the interest of the Jordanian people. If we define stability as a country having not just a legitimate political system, but a sustainable economy and a relatively satisfied population, then Jordan is failing on some of these key fronts.


History shows us that [this] kind of strategy seldom works, and it's one of the dark consequences that I fear the most in Jordan, since obviously instability in Jordan doesn't help anyone. But the current vision of stability that has encaged itself in the minds of American lawmakers is not one that I think is going to be fruitful over the long term.

A group of faculty at Penn have written A Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania at https://pennforward.com/.  They encourage signatures, even if you're not associated with Penn. I signed. Big picture: Universities stand at a crossroads. Do universities choose pursuit of knowledge, the robust open and uncomfortable debate that requires; excellence and meritocracy, even if as in the past that has meant admitting socially disfavored groups? Or do universities exist to advance, advocate for, and inculcate a particular political agenda? Choose.  Returning to the former will require structural changes, and founding documents are an important part of that rebuilding effort.  For example, Penn and Stanford are searching for new presidents. A joint statement by board and president that this document will guide rebuilding efforts could be quite useful in guiding that search and the new Presidents' house-cleaning. There is some danger in excerpting such a document, but here are a few tasty morsels: Principles:Penn's sole aim going forward will be to foster excellence in research and education.Specifics:Intellectual diversity and openness of thought.  The University of Pennsylvania's core mission is the pursuit, enhancement, and dissemination of knowledge and of the free exchange of ideas that is necessary to that goal.....Civil discourse.  The University of Pennsylvania ... acknowledges that no party possesses the moral authority to monopolize the truth or censor opponents and that incorrect hypotheses are rejected only by argument and persuasion, logic and evidence, not suppression or ad-hominen attacks. Political neutrality at the level of administration.  ... In their capacity as university representatives, administrators will abstain from commenting on societal and political events...The University must remain neutral to scientific investigation, respect the scientific method, and strive to include many and varied approaches in its research orientation.Admissions, hiring, promotion ... No factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered over merit in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level. Excellence in research, teaching, and service shall drive every appointment, advancement, reappointment, or hiring decision.no factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered in any decision related to student admission and aid. Faculty committed to academic excellence must have a supervisory role in the admission process of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Admission policies should prioritize the fair treatment of each individual applicant, and criteria must be objective, transparent, and clearly communicated to all community members. Faculty have outsourced admissions to bureaucrats. While the cats are away, the mice play. Faculty complain the students are dumb snowflakes. Well, read some files. And no more "bad personality" scores for asians. Education:A central goal of education is to train students to be critical thinkers, virtuous citizens, and ethical participants in free and open but civilized and respectful debate that produces, refines, and transmits knowledge. Competition:as Penn's competitors struggle to define their mission and lose their focus on this manner of excellence, Penn has a unique opportunity to emerge as a globally leading academic institution in an ever more competitive international landscape....An unconditional commitment to academic excellence will become Penn's key comparative advantage in the decades to come. As many other universities in Europe and the U.S. compromise their hiring decisions by including other non-academic criteria, Penn will be able to hire outstanding talent that otherwise would have been hard to attract. I have been puzzled that the self-immolation of (formerly) elite universities has not led to a dash for quality in the second ranks. There is a lot of great talent for sale cheap. But many second rank schools seem to have bought in to The Agenda even more strongly than the elite. I guess they used to copy the elite desire for research, and now they copy the elite desire for fashionable politics. Or perhaps donors government, alumni or whatever it is that universities compete for  also are more interested in the size of the DEI bureaucracy than the research accomplishments and teaching quality of the faculty or the competence of the students. Clearly, the writers of this document think in the long run competition will return to the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that universities that reform first will win.  

Yes, I went back to the East Side Gallery my firstweekend, as it was not closed on Sunday most shopping is closed) I have been in Berlin for one week thus far, with nearly three months to go.  It has been a very busy week, and it did not just involve getting situated.  But, yes, that took some effort and time as well.  So, what have been up to in the shadow of the TV tower that is featured in any movie that wants to depict Berlin as a destination?  First, yes, getting situated.  I am staying near the Hertie School's Center for International Security, which is just off of Alexanderplatz.  The apartment has much of what I need, but I had to go out and get a pillow (made in Canada!), a printer, groceries, and a residence permit.  Yes, the country of Max Weber is very bureaucratic.  Because there is much demand these days for all kinds of paperwork, I was lucky to snare an appointment on the farthest southern edge of Berlin.   I got my paperwork stamped, so I can reside in Berlin officially.  woot!        President of Hertie, the Chinese former VM, and Tobias BundeSecond, it turns out that my timing is good and the Hertie School is a happening place.  Tobias Bunde, one of the researchers here, is also a/the organizer of the Munich Security Conference which happened the weekend I arrived.  So, he brought a former Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs to a packed room (the Hertie students are from all over and they are keeners) where she presented her take on what happened at Munich and what are the major trends in international relations.  I found her to be the best representative of the Chinese government: her English was great, she was not overly polemical, she knew her audience, and so forth.  She definitely presented a biased point of view, but a clear one that was well asserted.  She noted for instance that only four panels out of a hundred at the conference were on Gaza. She pointed that the discussions on that and on Ukraine were focused on problems, not solutions.  But she was not pressed to offer any solutions. She contrasted the threat to freedom of the seas--that it is a problem for commercial shipping in the Red Seas but only a threat to American warships in the South China Sea.  Hmmmm.  She talked about Asia's long peace, she seems to be omitting the occasional Indo-Pakistan conflict.  Speaking of omissions, she argued that occupation never works, and that this something the Americans should have known in 2003 and the Russians should have known two years ago.  I was tempted to ask about Tibet or perhaps Chinese intentions towards Taiwan, but the event was for students.  It was a great way to jump into things and meet a bunch of folks.No pics of Peter K, but of other important thinkersAnother event was a session with Peter Katztenstein--one of the most important scholars in both International Relations and Comparative Politics for the past fifty years.  Required reading, indeed.  He was presented his latest book project (no retirement yet) that is pretty complex, raising meta questions about our thinking and about our need to think about uncertainty.  It was similar to Debbi Avant's presidential address at the ISA a couple of years ago.  He gave us a few chapters, the crowded room had read it, and so it was mostly Q&A.  After the talk, he sat near me and we chatted a bit.  That he has written books comparing Germany and Japan was not lost on me given my latest projects.  Next week, there will be a conference I am crashing at Hertie on the state of Zeitenwende and whether other countries are experiencing it as well.  Huh?  Oh, this refers to a speech by Germany's Chancellor  Olaf Scholz shortly after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, that we live in a watershed moment, that we need to have a revolution in foreign and defense policy.  He committed to a lot more defense spending and ending German dependence on Russian energy.  The big questions are: how much of this has and is happening and whether other countries are rethinking their place in the world. I hope to find out next week.Third, I have been getting some work done.  I have started arranging interviews for the German case, finalizing the details for a trip to Finland in April to do that case study, doing the same for a research presentation at Central European University in Vienna in a few weeks (and, yes, nailing down the details for an Alps ski trip).  I also revised three chapters of the Steve/Dave/Phil book before Dave tries to find some interest at the ISA in April.  I hope to do my turn on the rest of the book in the next week.  Fourth, I have, of course, been touristing.  I spent last weekend and today walking around this part of Berlin.  I am far more familiar with west Berlin, as I have been largely based at hotels in west Berlin.  My first walks were more targeted as I was looking for grocery stores (and google maps kept lying about where they were).   Some observations, which may be due to change over time or may be due to East Berlin being a bit different than West Berlin:Less adherence to the guidance of the little green/red Ampelmännchen, as I saw more people walking despite the red signs.  Is this a sign that German society is breaking down?Or is that the walk signals in East Berlin are too damned short?  I can't tell you on how many streets I have been stuck in the middle (mostly where the trams go) as the light turns red very quickly.I don't remember this much graffiti all over the place last time.  On the bright side, when a store or something has nice wall art, the vandals or artists paint elsewhere.Lots of reconstruction and renovations going on.Lots more Five Guys burger places than I can recall.  I haven't tried them yet, as I am mostly doing my own modest cooking (this apartment's kitchen is not well equipped, so no baking and only basic dinners).  I did start off my time here with currywurst and chips, but I think my go-to cheap food will be kebabs/shawarma stuff.  I did happen to walk past an Indonesian place, so I will be returning to that neighborhood when I am tired of my own cooking.Today's walk was more random, as I would head in one direction and then find something interesting on the map.  Which took me to a memorial for those who the East German government killed at the Berlin Wall, which, yes, has been down longer than it has been up.  I learned a great deal:I should have realized how dynamic the interplay between Communist government and those seeking to escape would be.  The wall such as it was kept evolving as the government learned via the escapes and attempts.Part of the memorial showingwhere the house got built over by the wallIncluding tunneling!  57 people got out through one tunnel--amazing.The wall itself caused more people to want to leave as it signaled more repression.The evolution of the barrier included destruction of a church (one dedicated to Reconciliation!) and the movement of dead bodies from a graveyard, it involved boarding up and then destroying houses.   There were a fair amount of German tour groups going through this area, so yes, still much interest even as it recedes in our memories. The other new experience for me is a 21st century gym.  I have mostly exercised on ultimate fields, bike rides through neighborhoods, the treadmill in our basement, and the occasional hotel fitness center.  There is a spiffy, reasonable place near me that has the stuff I need (treadmills, space to stretch to try to fix my balky knee) and far more stuff.  The denizens are in much, much better shape than I am, doing all kinds of exercises that I would not attempt, so that has been a funky distraction while I sweat out the pastries I have been buying.  The bakeries here are good, and, yes, they like their donuts.  I have resisted mightily but not entirely.  Next week, I will report what I learned at zeintenwende-fest.    Some random pics from my walks: Vegetarian butcher?  Funky signs, not sure there is an actual cafe here.

 The past two days were heaps of CDSN goodness.  We supported the book launch of Phil Lagassé and Thomas Juneau's second Canadian Defence Policy volume, and we held our Year Ahead event.      The book launch had triple the number of people we planned for--150 or so.  We ran out of drink tickets before the speakers event started.  I got a chance to say a few words, mostly to tease Phil and Thomas, partly to promote the Year Ahead event.  It might have been the free booze or it might have been the appearance of the CDS that drew the crowd.  General Wayne Eyre stuck around after his talk for a good 1.5 hours to have pictures taken and to chat with the group.  In my intro, I mentioned that most folks think that no one in Canada cares about Defence, so I guess everyone who does was at the event.  I really enjoyed the event--glad to see Thomas and Phil and their contributors get the spotlight, great to chat with former students, officers and officials who have interacted with me online but not in person, and various other folks.  I spent many of my conversations promoting our big event the next day.The Year Ahead started before the CDSN, with Rob McRae as the director of our research center--CSIDS--building a conference aimed at considering the potential challenges facing us in the near future--the year ahead.  We took this over, and it has gone through various changes over the years due to pandemics and such.  This year, we moved to a different space, the former Shopify offices, which meant we could go down a slide and play with giant versions of Connect 4 and Jenga.  We consulted our various partners in and out of government and came up with four topics.In our first session (no pics since I was the moderator), we had Scott Kastner zoom in and Meia Nouwens and Pascale Massot in person discuss the challenge of addressing an aggressive China whilst avoiding war.  The good news is that China is not ready for a Taiwan invasion, so the much feared war is not as likely to happen very soon. On the other hand, various policies to deal with China are problematic--like "derisking" by trying to avoid China in various supply chains is simply not going to work well.  In the second session, we had very different talks as Nisrin Elamin presented her experience as she was in Sudan when the coup attempt/civil war started, and had a hard time getting herself, her kid, and her parents out of the country.  Stephanie Carvin presented her comparative project (with the aforementioned Thomas Juneau) about how democracies take care of their people in conflict situations, Duty of Care, to help us understand the government side.  It was an excellent conversation to see the personal dynamics interact with the policy challenge.We broke for lunch and made much use of this great space especially the students from Carleton and the NATO Field School:    The third session considered whether and how the 2024 election would generate extremism and violence not just in the US but in Canada. They made it pretty clear that, yes, there will be more extremist violence generated by the next current election campaign, that Americans and increasingly Canadians are living in two different realities, and that things are going to get worse before they might get better.  Ryan Scrivens showed the trends over time, Amy Scooter talked about the rise of militancy in the US (buy her new book!), J.M. Berger talked about the social constructions that are driving these dynamics.  Amar Amarasingam presented more on the Canadian side of things.As a political scientist, I ordinarily would not support this appeal that Amar made:Our last panel was certainly not least as Srdjan Vučetić, Jasmin Mujanović, and Sidita Kushi passionately and insightfully presented the latest dynamics in the Balkans.  I used to study the international relations of some of this so I was surprised to learn how badly the US is screwing this up by supporting directly or indirectly Serb nationalists who are preventing Kosovo from moving forward.  That five European countries don't recognize Kosovo doesn't surprise me as these folks haven't read my earlier work--that secession is not as contagious as thought, that recognition in place does not really matter elsewhere, etc.  It was a great panel to end the day, since the speakers were very dynamic in their criticism of US and European policy in the region.  To put a Hungarian in charge of the NATO forces in the region is just dumb from so many dimensions--Hungary is a spoiler, its military was one of the worst performers in Afghanistan (the nearby New Zealanders would patrol in the Hungarian sector since the Hungarians didn't patrol)., and so on.Oh and it turns out the metaphor I used to describe this panel was a bit ... dated and unoriginal and problematic: We concluded and moved on to a delightful dinner.  So glad I had a chance to meet these folks.  And I am very proud of the CDSN HQ folks--Melissa, Sherry, Racheal, and Mourad--for doing all of the heavy lifting (sometimes quite literally as our swag was in big boxes).  Much thanks to the MINDS and SSHRC folks who fund us and to the NATO Field School and the new Carleton Society on Conflict and Security (I am surely getting their name wrong)--a new student group on campus for those interested in defence and security stuff--for providing much of our audience. Oh, and one last thing:While others did go down the slide, I didn't manage to squeeze it in.   

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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