The revolutionary status quo Power

Based on a comment I originally made here.

The US is at once both a revolutionary and a status quo Power.

It is a revolutionary Power in the straightforward sense that it is the only contemporary state seriously trying to export its revolution, apart from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is also a revolutionary Power in a somewhat more subtle sense, in that it produces so much of the technology that continues to transform the world. Which puts the US in a similar situation during its Pax Americana, as Britain during the Pax Britannica: being the premier source of transforming technology while trying to foster international stability.

But the US is also a status quo Power, in that the current arrangement of world affairs suits its interests--as the major economic, financial, trading and military Power. It tends to act as the central manager of the international system--its performance as such is very much affected by its own interests, because that's what Powers do. But precisely because the US has a bigger stake in international stability than any other polity, it tends to be more active in trying to maintain that stability.

But being a status quo Power is not very compatible with being a revolutionary Power. And even more so, vice versa. It would be hard to argue that its attempts to export its Revolution to Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush have been exactly stabilising, even as it sought to create a (new) stability.

A hardy perennial in (failed) US policies has been ignorance of history. Both the US as status quo Power and US as revolutionary Power tend to encourage history-fails. A status quo Power has a tendency to live in an eternal now. A revolutionary Power has a tendency to fixate on its own framing of social patterns and desirable outcomes. Add to that American exceptionalism, and you have a recipe for serial history-fails.

As has been particularly obvious in US interventions in the Middle East.

As Somaliland shows (the successful, formerly British, bit of the former Somalia), a House of Elders (in other words, a House of Lords) would very likely have been sensible policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as it would have connected government into traditional social structures. But hereditary and religious legislators, can't have that! Because we're Americans and we don't think like that! Our Revolution is explicitly about no hereditary government, and separation of church and state, so a House of Elders (or Shura Council, or whatever) becomes unthinkable and unthought.

And holding a vote on whether to restore the king in Afghanistan (pdf) would also have been sensible policy. But we're Americans and we don't think like that!

Yes, but those folk you're trying to help: they're not Americans and they don't think like you. Alas, American exceptionalism and the US-as-revolutionary-Power trumps trying to understand the local societies in their own terms and building something that might work for them.

Similarly, Iraq should have been divided into three, as any "Iraqi" identity was too shallow to survive any serious stress. But the US is a too much of a status quo power (and a little too ignorant of Middle Eastern history) to think like that either.

Being at the same time a status quo and a revolutionary power is a difficult double. Alas, it is also very well set up to create serial policy failure.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

What a difference framing makes

The current turmoil in the Middle East is, amongst other things, one long vindication of Zionism. Given that, to many folk, Zionism has no meaning other than "Israelis being nasty to Palestinians", some explanation is in order.

European Zionism

Zionism was founded by Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl (1860-1904). Observing the trial of French officer Alfred Dreyfus and the rampant Jew-hatred in the French Republic--the land of liberty,  equality, fraternity--Herzl concluded that Jews were not safe in Europe, and so conceived the notion of a Jewish homeland as an active political project. A place of defence and refuge. 

Theodor Herzl

Of all modern ideologies, none had its founding proposition more thoroughly vindicated than Zionism, as the Holocaust proved that, verily, Jews were not safe in Europe. The lead-up to the Holocaust, as countries such as the US and Australia declined to be the mass Jewish refuge required, helped to energise Zionism. The horror of the aftermath of the Holocaust, in a broken Europe, did so exponentially more. 

Hence the post-war migration of European Jews to the British Mandate of Palestine and the UN-sponsored division of Palestine into a putative Jewish and Arab state. Then followed the refusal of Arab states to accept either a Jewish or a Palestinian state. Thus the Israeli War of Independence (Nov. 1947-July 1949) and the creation of the state of Israel. The war included a mass exodus of Palestinians, the most dramatic event of which was the Deir Yassim massacre of 107 Palestinian civilians by Zionist paramilitary groups, condemned at the time by official Israel, although it was clearly operationally useful in consolidating a Jewish-majority state.

This was followed by the 1956 Suez War, where Israel occupied and then returned territory. Then the 1967 Six Day War, which left Israel with the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai. All territory it declined to return. Then the War of Attrition (1967-70). Then the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Agreement, whereby Sinai was handed back to Egypt. The one and only time that Israel relinquishing territory has resulted in a peaceful border.

Israel was also drawn into the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). This included the South Lebanon Conflict (1985-2000), which resulted in an Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon. This strategic Hezbollah victory has since led to further conflicts across that border between Hezbollah and Israel, most notably the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2005, Israeli unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and dismantled all Jewish settlements therein. Hamas subsequently took over Gaza, and used as a base from which to attack Israel, leading to the 2008-9 Gaza War and the 2014 Gaza War. 

So, Israeli experience over the last 15 years is that territory they withdraw from is used as base to attack them. Not exactly an encouragement for further withdrawals. 

This is the framing (minus the point that withdrawal means attacks) that people are generally somewhat familiar with. Israel as "alien" European settler state "imposing itself" on the Middle East. Israel as Jewish apartheid lebensraum state. It is the framing that the mainstream media overwhelmingly uses--Israeli politics get reported, Palestinian politics very little; Israel acts, Palestinians suffer. Happenings that conflict with the framing are ignored or glossed over.

Middle Eastern Zionism

Except that framing, and even the above history, leaves more than half the story out. The story of Middle Eastern Jews. The story of Palestinian politics. 

Palestinians killing Jewish civilians is an enduring picture of Palestinian terrorism; something that used to do a great deal to harm the Palestinian cause in the West and still does something to maintain support for Israel. It is often presented as "asymmetrical" warfare--the weapon of the weak (Palestinians) against the strong (Israel).

The only problem is that massacring Jewish civilians was an Arab/Palestinian tactic back when Jews were a minority in Mandatory Palestine and there was no Jewish state. Such as the 1929 Safed riots (18-20 Jewish dead), the 1929 Hebron massacre (67 Jewish dead and the end of Jewish presence in the city) and the 1939 Tiberias massacre (19 Jewish dead).

Jewish militias also got into the killing game, though they often targeted occupying British authority (police, soldiers): most famously in the King David Hotel bombing. The aforementioned Deir Yassam massacre was part of a series in both directions during the Israeli War of Independence. On the Jewish side, the killings hardened the determination to form Israel.

There was a also a wider history of riots, pogroms and massacre of Jewish civilians in Arab [Muslim Middle Eastern] lands well outside Mandatory Palestine, such as the 1934 Thrace pogroms which saw 15,000 Jews flee the area, the Farhud massacre in Baghdad in 1941 (over 180 Jewish dead), the 1945 anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania (over 140 Jewish dead), the 1947 Aden riots (82 Jewish dead), the 1947 Aleppo riots in Syria (75 Jewish dead), the 1948 Cairo bombings (70 Jewish dead), the 1948 riots in Morrocco (43 Jewish dead), the 1948 riots in Tripolitania (13-14 Jewish dead, 280 Jewish homes destroyed). All of which helped motivate Jews fleeing en masse from Arab lands to Israel and the West. About half of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern origin. Israel is very much a refuge for Middle Eastern Jews, not merely European ones.

Muslim and Armenian quarters just after 1909 Adana massacre.

Especially when the massacres are put in a wider context. For example, that Jews in Iran could not touch merchandise before purchasing it, as that made the merchandise "unclean" for believers. Or that massacre of non-Muslims had been very much a feature of recent Middle Eastern history.

The 1933 Simele massacre which killed at least 600 Assyrians in Iraq was a relatively mild instance. The Hamidian massacres of 1894-6 killed at least 80,000 Armenians, Assyrians and other Christians. The Adana massacre of 1909 killed another 20,000 or more. They were a prelude to the massacres during the Great War; the Armenian (1.5m dead), Assyrian (at least 275,000 dead) and Pontic-Greek (at least 750,000 dead) genocides.

The broader pattern was fairly clear--when some real or apparent enemy was giving Muslims a hard time, the local group allegedly connected to the same would be subject to massacre. Hence the upsurge in killing of Jews during the Israeli War of Independence. Mass homicide-as-protest hardly encouraged the targeted group to stick around if it had a place of refuge available.

The increasing intrusion into the Middle East of Western norms about equal protection of the law during the C19th made previous patterns of subordination seem increasingly burdensome and unacceptable to non-Muslim groups. One response was the development of Arab nationalism, which sought to provide a common identity for Arabs across religious persuasions; hence the importance of thinkers of non-Muslim or of heterodox Muslim origin in its development: such as Michel Aflaq, George Antonius, Butrus al-Bustani, George Habash, Ameen Rihani, Ibrahim al-Yaziji, Constantine Zureiq (all raised as Christians), Shakib Arslan (Druze) and Zaki al-Arsuzi (Alawite).

But there was a deeper pattern, which connects to the notion of the dhimmi. The non-Muslim who was permitted to reside in dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, but only if they accepted their subordinate status. Any agitation for equal rights broke the Pact of Umar and made them targets. The Armenian agitation for equal rights and equal protection of law was very much part of the lead-up to the Hamidian massacres.

Jewish population in various Arab countries.

But the creation of a Jewish state was seen as an offence against Arab nationalism as well, so Jews were not included in this common Arab identity. All of which gave Zionism thoroughly grounded in the realities of the Middle Eastern every bit as much emotional power and justification as European Zionism. Hence the flight from Arab lands to the West and to Israel as it soon as it was established. It is quite false to see Zionism as merely an alien intrusion into the Middle East. As American Jonah Shepp nicely puts it:

Palestinians who say that “the Zionists” must go but “the Jews” can stay need to come to grips with the fact that Zionism, at its core, is about creating a space where Jews do not need someone else’s permission to live.

Death and rejectionism
What is striking about the Palestinian tactic of targeting Jewish civilians is that it has never worked. Not as an anti-Israel strategy. It helped energise the creation of the Jewish state, to maintain support for it, to create deep scepticism about the possibility of peace with Palestinians, leading to overwhelming popular support within Israel for the recent Gaza war. As an anti-Israel strategy, it has been massively counter-productive.

Except that the tactic of targeting Jewish civilians has worked very well. As an anti-Israel strategy, it has been utterly hopeless. As a political strategy within Palestinian politics, it has worked again and again. Which is why it is persisted with. If Palestinians kill Jews, they are heroic fighters for Israel. If Israel retaliates and kills Palestinians, it demonstrates the murderous evil of Israel. In Palestinian politics, violent death is a win-win.

Leading to a Palestinian politics divided between corrupt ex-terrorists (Fatah) and explicitly genocidal current terrorists (Hamas). (An English translation of Hamas's founding Covenant is here.) Noting that genocide is not an alien intrusion into Middle Eastern politics: on the contrary, the Muslim Middle East has been a pioneer of modern genocide. 

As the Islamic State is currently reminding us. As did the Islamist regime in Sudan with Darfur.

Overlords or victims
Maronite-dominated Lebanon, Alawite-dominated Ba'athist Syria, Sunni-dominated Ba'athist Iraq and Israel were all manifestations of the same logic--if you are a minority group in the Middle East, you are either overlords or victims. So, better be overlords and control the state.

Except Israel is the great exception--Jews are very much a majority within Israel. It is also the only stable democracy. Because Jews are very much a majority within Israel. It has not collapsed into civil war. Because Jews are very much a majority within Israel. Israel is a majority Jewish state, and that makes a profound difference.

When the Jews first started migrating in serious numbers to Ottoman-controlled Palestine, they brought capital with them, raising the value of land and labour in the area. Under British rule, the trend accelerated. The rising wages and commercial opportunities encouraged movement of non-Jews to the area. A proportion of current Palestinians only have any connection to the land of Palestine at all because the Jews came. Which is why the definition of a Palestinian refugee is any who lived in Palestine for 2 years or more prior to May 1948, or is descended from someone who did. (Pausing here, the notion of multi-generation hereditary refugees is an interesting one in itself: but Israel accepted and integrated its Jewish refugees; the Arab world prefers to keep the Palestinians as permanent refugees, stateless sticks to beat the Zionist entity with--it is easier for a Palestinian to become a citizen of the US or Australia than most Arab countries.)

Amin al-Husseini

There were those in the Palestinian community who thought cooperation with the newcomers who were bringing opportunities with them was worth exploring. But the influx of new workers and rising wages undermined the debt bondage which was the conventional form of subordination to the landlord class in the area. Jews-as-enemies suited both religious leaders--operating as gatekeepers of righteousness--and a landlord class threatened by modernity. Hence the role of Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini (c.1897-1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in setting the dominant and enduring model of Palestinian politics of death and rejectionism.

One that proved to have enduring appeal in the wider Arab world--the Zionist entity became the perfect scapegoat, the way to redirect anger from the failings and oppressions of Arab regimes. Or just Arab failings generally.

Not on offer
To concerned Westerners, and the dwindling Israeli Left, it seems obvious that the only moral solution is for Israel to accept Palestinians as worthy of equal protection of the law. As Israeli journalist and writer Noam Sheizaf declares:

The two-state solution is not a progressive cause and neither is a single-state solution — they are just possible means to an end. The only possible goal for progressive politics in Israel/Palestine can be full human, civil and political rights for everyone living on this land. ...
I support equal rights for all people living in this land, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. 

Or as American Jonah Shepp writes:

The Israeli right remains convinced that the Palestinians must learn to accept Israel before the occupation can end. That is about as convincing as someone claiming in 1960s America that the end of segregation would have to wait until black people stopped resenting white people. Peace is nearly always made between leaders before it is made between peoples. Israel is no exception to this rule; claiming otherwise just avoids the issue. And Israel must take the lead on this, precisely because the balance of power is so lopsided.

In fact, the problem is much deeper than accepting Israel. It is accepting. Accepting Jews, Christians, Shia, Yezidis, Alawites, Kurds ...  The Middle East has been a pioneer of, and continuing arena for, genocide not because Jews exist, nor because the Jewish state exists, but because the idea of different-but-equal has so little resonance. After all, Jews are not even close to the majority victims of genocide in the region, which became a modern pioneer of genocide well before the Jewish state seemed a serious prospect. What is different about the Jews is that they are the only local minority who has found an effective solution (thanks crucially to the influx and skills of European Jews). Although the Kurds would like to copy them. With the Peshmerga having the role of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Aspirations that has official and popular support in Israel.

Israeli PM Ehud Barak made a two-state offer to Yassir Arafat at the 2000 Camp David summit. Arafat made no counter-offer. And so the entrenched pattern of Palestinian politics continued. It is all very well for folk to say Israel must take the lead, but Israelis have no reason to believe that any peace deal is possible. As Israeli journalist Matti Friedman points out,

The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned.

Without death and rejectionism, what is there to Palestinian politics and Palestinian identity? Not enough, apparently. The demand to be overlords, without the power to make themselves such, bedevils Palestinian politics.

Which leaves Israel with what exactly? To relinquish territory it can expect to be attacked from? It cannot unilaterally declare peace. And retaliation may feed the dynamic of death, but so does not doing so, while reverting Jews back to the role of powerless victims Israel exists to deny. The murderous civil was of Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq demonstrate that stopping being a Jewish-majority state is the road to disaster. The continuing existence of the IDF is not negotiable. 

Or does Israel just decide to grab what it can when it can? Not an admirable position, but an understandable one. 

"Correct" moral responses are "obvious" if you frame the issues narrowly enough. But Israel lives in the complete Middle East, not a conveniently packaged version of it.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Gee, can I be a Guardian pundit ...

A US former special ops officer argues that ISIS is just using tactics (via) that al-Qaeda had previously used, which work against Arab forces, but not Western ones:

AQI/ISIL quickly learned to never use these tactics on the Americans. They regretted it in 2005 when they carried out a complex multi-prong attack on Abu Ghuraib prison - it was a virtual slaughter of all the attackers. On the other hand local Arab forces respond poorly these tactics.

Which provides an opportunity:

A massive defeat on ISIL could decimate their professional spearhead of veterans and break the image of invincibility. Just one drone and a Special Forces forward control team with a B-1 bomber package with could do that with ease.

Provided, of course, one can specifically target such.

Foreign trucks and weapons, local homicidal hatred.

Jonathan Freedland, writing in Comment is Free on the Guardian website, identifies the success of ISIS as being primarily the result of the collapse of state power--in Syria and Iraq. In Syria because of the civil war, in Iraq because of the US overthrow of Saddam and the sectarian incompetence of the Maliki Government.

Which is also, of course, the US's fault. Yes, getting rid of authoritarian dictators can let loose unexpected difficulties. But Iraqi PM Maliki has consistently refused to follow US advice. Which, as the elected head of an independent and sovereign state, he was free to do. Maliki's incompetence is his fault. This making only Western/US agency count is a tiresome game. (Also, do we remember that Saddam's wars killed far, far more people than the current unpleasantness?)

Now, whether the US should have committed itself to maintaining the backwash of European imperialism: probably not. But redrawing the Middle Eastern map in that way would have caused all sorts of diplomatic difficulties. Which would no doubt have been denounced by Guardian pundits as an outrageous use of American power. 

Meanwhile, Freedland goes on to lament the lack of power on the world stage. So, the world system needs a manager--who promises not to do anything that a Guardian pundit might complain about. No responsibility and moral superiority too. Can I be a Guardian pundit?

Arab messes

The trouble is, whether the US directly overthrows a tyrant (Iraq), helps a populace overthrow its tyrant (Libya) or refuses to get [seriously] involved in an attempt to overthrow a tyrant (Syria), it all ends up in a similar mess. Which rather suggests that the problem is not US policy, but Arab states not grounded in Arab realities. 

So, what should the US do? Provide military support for the Kurds and Maliki (the UK's plan to attack ISIS's fundraising has the right sort of target) and prepare everyone for breaking up Iraq. And probably Syria as well. But that would take more sense of history than is likely either in Washington or the offices of The Guardian.

There is, after all, not much evidence that the Obama Administration has either the perception or the stomach for such an approach. So, flailing around trying to shore up the backwash of European imperialism it seems to be.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Short observations 3

A wonderful takedown  (via) of Love, Actually (by someone who enjoys the film). The suggestion that the characters are all emotional 15 year olds may also have some merit.

***

On the Kindle-highlights measure, Thomas Piketty's tome on inequality, Capital in the C21st, looks like outdoing Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time as the great unread book of our time.

***

Factory farming has expanded its possibilities as the Japanese create a lettuce factory (via). Energy, rather than land, is the constraint in such food production.

***

Nice post on the effect of the 1997 Asian crisis on housing price booms in the US. Given that land rationing restricted supply responses in many housing markets, and rising price for a class of asset is a signal for an asset to be a good investment, the point that capital was sucked in to housing rather than more productive investments has even more force.

***

The US is the dominant global military power, but seems to be rather better at making friends than China, or Russia, especially in Asia. According to this consideration of recent Pew global survey (pdf) data, folk in India, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Bangladesh all see the US as an ally, and someone else as a threat. (Except Indonesians, who see the US as both.) It is probably not accidental that the Pakistan and Malaysia, where opinion sees the US as a threat, are both Muslim countries, or that Muslim Indonesia is mixed in views of the US.

***

The fuss over the US Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision (pdf), which Alan Dershowitz dismissed as (legally) "monumentally insignificant", is nicely dissected here, based on Megan McArdle's rather longer post.  Folk who do not get that religion matters are probably not the sort of folk who are going to understand the Middle East.

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An apparent attempt to unilaterally impose an aspect of Sharia in Philadelphia.

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Michael J Totten provides an excellent survey of the Arab Spring (aka "the Sunni Surge") and how and why each country was different--in happenings and outcomes.

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Anti-prostitute "activists" slaughter 30 people, including 28 women, in an up-market area of Baghdad (via). The conjunction of religion and homicide for patrilineally controlled fertility.

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ISIS split off from al-Qaeda before its current surge into Iraq. That the jihadists have split is not necessarily good news: it may just mean accelerated competitive evolution to being more dangerous.

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ISIS is offering Christians the traditional Islamic choice--convert, pay extra tax or die. In the words of their announcement:

We offer them three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract - involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword.

*** 

ISIS is using the prospect of killing Jews as a recruitment tool (via). Jew-hatred in the contemporary Middle East has much the same roots as Jew-hatred in C19th and C20th Europe--scapegoating angst over modernity built on traditional religious prejudice. So, there is real, if grim, symmetry in hoping for a new Holocaust. Even if Jews have mostly fled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries.

***

Perhaps Greater Israel is the new reality. Arafat's failure to agree, or even make a serious counter-offer, at the 2000 Camp David summit looks like even more of a disaster for Palestinians than it did at the time. But, in a way, the failure of Ehud Barak's offer may also have been something of a moral disaster for Israel.

Migration, history and countries as club goods

This is based on comments I made here and here.

Thin conceptions
There is a line of argument which holds that if free trade in goods and services is good for economies, if free trade in capital is good for economies, then surely free trade in labour would also be good for economies. So, just as one should have open access for goods, services and capital, one should also have it for labour. Thus, migration should not be hindered. It is basically a "maximise the gains from trade" argument.

There is a related line of argument which holds that free trade in labour would result in net improvement in the overall human condition, so should be permitted. It is much the same as the previous argument, except that there is no implied preference for existing residents of a given territory--an unbounded "maximise the gains from trade" argument.

A more robust moral argument is that open borders represents acceptance of the primacy of personal liberty. People should simply be free to live where they want.

All these arguments ultimately rest on very thin (indeed, literally incredibly thin) conceptions of society and human interactions. People are treated as completely interchangeable economic agents without histories, collective preferences or issues of loyalty and affinity. Polities are treated as utilitarian service providers. It is a world literally without history. These arguments have almost no popular resonance for exactly those reasons--that people have far "thicker" conceptions of themselves, their societies and their polities than are acknowledged in the framings on which the above arguments rest.

Thicker concerns
Looking at dysfunctional polities (of which there are many) provides a salutary corrective. Indeed, open borders libertarianism suffers from the revealing irony that libertarians typically bemoan the insufficient commitment to liberty of the freest societies on the planet but completely fail to notice how unusual any such commitment is among contemporary or historical polities. Or draw any conclusions from same. It is as if the structures and habits which create free societies are taken to magically descend on folk, rather than being painful historical evolutions.

It is true: the case against open borders is based on failing to treat people as if they were goods, services or capital because they are very much more than that. As are the connections between them.

Goods and capital don't vote, they don't commit crimes, they do not serve in the protection of others, they do not fight, they do not create (or destroy) communities. (Though they can be tools, instruments, for all these things.)

A society is much more than a set of transactions, a set of potential gains from trade. And migration policies change societies in all sorts of ways. For example, a society which is largely monocultural can manage much denser policy structures than a more diverse society. While migration creates costs within the host society which are not evenly distributed. Costs which are profoundly affected by who migrates, in what numbers and where.

Migration can also be a weapon of one group against another. Hence the so-called Curley Effect (pdf)--using migration to attract in folk likely to vote in a particular way and the results to drive away folk who vote differently.

Nick Rowe has posted on his excellent way of teaching comparative advantage. But if one adds in issues with costs of communications and different expectations across language, cultural and religious groups, it hardly works quite as smoothly. Especially if there is geographic clumping. Adding in history, in other words, shift the analysis some.

Policy variance 
Immigration can be handled more or less well. Australia handles migration comparatively well and has a very high rate of foreign-born residents by Western standards (around 28%)--for example, migrants to Australia actually do better in school on average than locally-born, which is not a normal pattern. But Australia is a prosperous, English-speaking island-continent, so border enforcement is relatively easy and we can cherry-pick migrants (which we do quite effectively).

Australia also has diverse migrants, which helps greatly. Indeed, the most problematic migrant community are Lebanese Muslims in Sydney because:
(1) Sydney is Australia's least socially-functional metropolis.
(2) Unlike Maronite Lebanese, they do not plug straight into well-established Catholic networks.
(3) They were brought in an unusually large "lump" with minimal selection procedures.
(4) There are specific issues for Middle East Muslims settling into Western countries.

The US has much less difficulty with Muslim migrants than Europe does because the US is set up as a settler country, its migrants are relatively diverse, its Muslim migrants are generally better educated, "God-discourse" is much more conventional part of public life while organising through your local mosque just replicates established patterns of organising through your local synagogue or church.

Varying experience
In Australia, opinion polling had become somewhat hostile to migration since the mid 1970s. The polls improved dramatically after the Howard Government (1996-2007) made a big play of "stopping the boats", despite running a considerable migration program, the least Eurocentric in Australia's history up to that time. The Government's slogan of "we will decide who will come here" seriously resonated. The costs and benefits of migration are not evenly distributed, and giving voters a sense they have no say or control is not healthy. It is that sense of powerlessness is surely a very big driver of popular responses.

Native-born Americans

In Without Consent or Contract Robert Fogel documents the significantly adverse effects of mass migration on locally born US citizens during the C19th. The nativist movement expressed rational antipathy to mass migration. The new Republican Party brilliantly finessed that into antipathy to "the Slave Power".  Access to resources for existing residents can be reduced by migration--this is what happened in C19th US, for example. The dysfunctional EU labour markets also share some of such features. Another way in which the "it is just about gains from trade" analysis does not work.

The sense that your rights will be under threat if a particular group gets sizable is another factor. Mass migration of Muslims into a society (or even developing world Christians) might not be good for the freedom of queer citizens. So queer folk are not likely to be keen on large scale Muslim migration, especially if the fight for equal protection of the law is not yet fully won or is otherwise precarious. Polities make rules, migrants become voters and vote. It makes a difference.

We have to take into account peoples real world preferences. The Rawlsian (behind the veil of ignorance) analysis is both not applicable and instructive. Over the longer term, the game of migration policy is about the rules as much as anything else, where rules are openly up for grabs and preferences about rules are not the same as preferences within individual transactions.

Hence, part of the "thicker" concept of country is that it is not just a mass of one-off transactions. Not even the concept of repeated transactions allows trade analysis to be "deep" enough. The rules and affinities powerfully affect not only which transactions take place, but their content and effects.

Since polities need to be able to claim the loyalty of citizens (not being able to do so is not a survival trait in a polity) and as political entrepreneurs exist (see the recent EU elections) telling large numbers of citizens that their preferences on entry to their country have no standing, no matter how important it is to them, is not conducive to political or social stability.

Increased communication costs and dispersal in preferences also affect what public policies become more or less viable. The "Scandinavian model" in public policy fairly clearly rests on high levels of communication and shared preferences. The more migration reduces such flows of communication and disperses the range of preferences, the less viable the Scandinavian model becomes. As that becomes clearer, the costs of migration may well lead to rational antipathy to said migration.

Of course, pandering to anti-immigration feeling can have other political entrepreneurial uses. It may be a lot easier than, for example, dealing with dysfunctional labour markets. Even when said dysfunctions have a great deal to do with how dysfunctional the banlieue are, for example. Regulations tend to defend social incumbents (see dysfunctional labour markets): but well organised/politically focused incumbents rather than just any incumbents.

Conceptions
A defender of open borders on liberty ground can claim that: The only question is whether you believe in liberty or not. It's about principles. In fact, the debate is about how to conceptualise human interactions and what countries are. And yes, one can "win" a debate by simply ignoring or denying those parts of the social world which are awkward for one's own case. But that is not going to be remotely persuasive to folk who are not up for that.

I do not find any sort of anarchism persuasive, for example, as (1) state societies have achieved so much more than non-state societies and (2) a lack of a state just creates a market niche for entries to the "state" market. That, after all, is what protection rackets are: competitors to the state in extraction-via-coercion.

Conversely, using the family as an analogy for country bothers me, as I feel some connection to fellow citizens, but not that intense a one. Moreover, talking about countries as being like families is a favourite rhetorical ploy of socialists, nationalists and fascists, so has uncongenial, even dangerous, collectivist associations.

Polities as clubs
A way to think of polities in economic terms is that they are a uber-club good. A way of providing public goods. They are not fully voluntary associations, because one is born into a polity, so membership is partly "by blood". Which makes them territorial clubs (a bit like gated communities).

The effect of new entrants on the rules is another way polities are club-like. And there are a reason clubs have membership rules and rights to exclude. Clubs want people to "fit in", not be disruptive, hopefully be active in supporting the activities of the club.

Of course, border control can have its ugly aspects. And making unapproved migration illegal without sufficiently effective border control creates a population of "illegals" who, being isolated from normal legal protections, become vulnerable to exploitation, even labour bondage and slavery. Nevertheless, managing a successful polity is a more precarious enterprise than supporters of "let anyone in" seem to understand.

Thinking of a polity as a device for making political bargains, large and small, if anything increases the power of the club analogy. If group X rejects group Y as someone to make deals with, this is deeply disruptive to making bargains. (See Sunni and Shia in Iraq; Protestants and Catholics in Ulster.) The greater the entrenched associations of common loyalties, the more somewhat antagonistic diversity can be dealt with. The Catholic v Protestant fights in Australia could be managed through a mixture of past Britishness and future Australian aspirations. The Ulster divisions were so entrenched because which polity they should be part of was precisely what was in dispute, while "Iraq" clearly has little standing except as a useful device for whichever group is in control of the state apparatus to repress the other(s).

History matters. Really, it does. Which is why the argument for simply open borders both fails to resonate with the wider public and simply fails. It just does not take history, the requirements of effective politics or the depth of human interactions seriously enough.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

The evolution of social bargains -- operative not normative

I was reading Yoram Barzel's property rights analysis (pdf) of the rise of Parliamentary government in England, when the full force of his critique of normative concepts of the rise of parliamentarianism and representative government hit me.

That Iraq is busily messily falling apart, following on from--and partly a consequence of--Syria doing so, with the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, (vindicating the long-ago analysis of T E Lawrence) helped the penny-drop moment.

If we, building on Charles Tilly's seminal Coercion, Capital and European States and recent scholarship in economic history (notably the LSE's economic history working papers), take the crucial element in the rise of the West as being the develop of what might be called the active bargaining state, then it is a great error to see it as the operation of some normative-driven process, some Hegelian necessity working behind history to realise some culminating outcome. (Active bargaining state as even the most autocratic states from the past represented implicit or passive social bargains: the active bargaining state coming in both direct--Parliamentary--and indirect--authoritarian--forms, with ancien regime France being an unstable mixture of the two.)

Norms evolve

The normative approach is an error of historical understanding at two levels. First, because the norms evolve along with the evolution of the bargaining state. The barons at Runnymede in 1215 (Tammany Hall in chain mail, as H Beam Piper called them) lived in a different normative universe than the participants in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 who themselves lived in a different normative universe than those arguing over votes for women in the late C19th and early C20th. If acceptance of the norms of representative democracy as they currently operate in the West is necessary to establish an active bargaining state elsewhere, then the enterprise is doomed. Those norms are the result of very particular histories and experiences.

If, however, the exercise is an operative (i.e. about trade-offs that work for the society in question), rather than a normative, one, then we can be much more hopeful.

Just as Britain tried to export the Glorious Revolution to Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush, so the US has tried to export the American Revolution to the same places. But both the Glorious and American Revolutions were the product of very specific historical circumstances--as the adherents thereof well recognised at the time. Even such a revolutionary firebrand as Patrick Henry grounded his most famous Revolutionary speech in specifically British traditions.

Evolving trade-offs
Traditions which are too often read from now backwards, instead from then forwards. Hence the second error--not understanding the operative nature of the process and the evolving bargains.

Yoram Barzel's point is that it the process of the growth of Parliamentary government should not be understood as one long wresting of power from royal clutches, but as process where monarchs often engaged in trade-offs that were very much in their interests. It is easy enough to point to King John being dictated to at Runnymede, the military defeat and execution of Charles I, the overthrow of James II but what these rulers had in common is that you could not make a deal with them. In the case of John and Charles I because they could never be trusted to keep to any agreement and James II because he was fixated on an outcome that was anathema to the bulk of the British political nation.

Runnymede 1215, a reluctant signatory to
 posthumously enduring bargain

Magna Carta stuck because it was re-issued under Henry III and by Edward I. Simon de Montfort's innovative parliament stuck because Edward I saw it as an effective tool of governance. Indeed, the pioneer of summoning elected merchant representatives was a king--Alfonso IX of Leon & Galicia. The Glorious Revolution stuck because William III and Mary II could see a good deal when offered to them. And while these spectacular landmarks of history generate nice dramatic set-pieces, Barzel points out that the history of the growth of Parliamentary government and rule of law was much more a steady evolution, an evolving series of trade-offs, where rulers gained by giving folk a say.

A point that Barzel does not consider much, is that such forums also provided very useful information sources for monarchs. It gave them a way of checking up on their own agents (a helpful monitoring service) and of ensuring they were in touch with the concerns of people who mattered. Even from this distance, it is fairly clear that Edward I was concerned that he not lose touch with the concerns of the powerful--of the wider political nation--in the way his father had and saw in Simon de Montfort's parliamentary innovations a useful way of doing precisely that.

East Asian contrasts
A nice social bargaining contrast is provided by comparing China and Japan as they confronted the Western challenge during the C19th. The great difference between Qing China and Japan in confronting said challenge, was that under the Song, the Ming and the Qing, China had been ruled by thin meritocratic official layer. There was a clear, very passive, social bargain--the state upheld family authority and provided minimal public goods, taxing relatively lightly, while families did not make trouble. Since the only lever the Emperors had to control their officials was command-and-control, the system was prone to decay into corruption and the dissipating of central control.

Official in a one-track system.

This was somewhat like what happened to the command economies, though they fell apart rather more speedily (given each of the the above three dynasties of mandarin China lasted over 260 years), as the greater technological capacity of the modern command economies was not enough to compensate for the much more overweening attempt to command-and-control everything. Of course, if you regard Mao as the First-Emperor-with-a-telephone, Mao's attempt did last longer than said Emperor's regime (as the Qin dynasty only lasted 15 years) with Deng and his heirs subsequently trying to be the new Han. (I.e. the much longer lasting dynasty as result of taking the overweening elements out of what the Qin Shi Huang had created.)

Not only was the Qing dynasty already well into its decay phase as the Western challenge became more urgent, China possessed no mechanisms for more active social bargaining, no real precedent for such, not even the political vocabulary for it. (That the Qing was a foreign dynasty was a complication, but when was the last time England had an English dynasty? The Tudors were Welsh, the Stuarts Scot, the Hanoverians/Coburgs/Windsors German, the Plantagenets French, the House of Rollo Danish. Even the House of Wessex were invaders, if you go back far enough.)

Provincial ruler among
competitive jurisdictions.

Japan was in a very different situation. Social bargaining was built into its political structures, both active and competitively passive (between daimyos). It was much easier for Japan to add on to already existing institutions and patterns more formal structures for social bargaining adapted from the West and develop a modernising social bargain able to rise to the Western challenge than it was for a China where any such habits and structures had to be built from scratch.

Back to the Middle East
The problem with Iraq is that it might be able to work as part of a larger empire, but it makes no sense as a nation. (A state which needs someone like Saddam Hussein to hold it together is one not worth keeping.) It was a cobbled-together imperial deal, lumping together three (separately administered) Ottoman vilayets (a Kurdish one, a Sunni Arab one and a Shiite Arab one) into one state. While the recent American adventures there represent the US, yet again, trying (with not much success) to deal with the backwash of European imperialism, it also represents the triumph of the normative over the operative.

The Republic of Somaliland shows what can be created by a genuinely locally-driven arrangement. It is governed by a universal suffrage House of Representatives and a House of Elders, made up of traditional leaders. In other words, their very own House of Lords. Because that reflects how their society operates.

House of Elders

Both Iraq and Afghanistan would have had, or have, more chance of stable futures if their legislatures were more grounded in their social realities. But, of course, the Americans would never consider having some local House of Lords equivalent, because that would require too much knowledge of their own deeper history and be too confronting to their evolved norms.

Nevertheless, the trick is to sell a workable bargain, a useful set of trade-offs. Not some pre-set normative wish-list from a quite different tradition.

Part of the problem being that you have to see other folk as people to bargain with. The Iraqi PM clearly did not see the Sunni in such a way, and is now reaping the consequences. Just as using ethnic membership as an indicator of loyalty can reduce coup possibilities while increasing the likelihood of civil war.

Indeed, it is a depressing principle of contemporary Middle Eastern politics that any minority that does not control its own state or quasi-state gets oppressed. (Hence the Alawites and their minority allies fighting so hard not to lose control of the Syrian state to the Sunni majority.)

That the jihadis reject any notion of the social bargaining state (which may also make them, including in the form of ISIS, less than durable in their local control) makes the need to have socially-and-locally grounded bargaining all the more urgent. Even if some negotiated settlement is (eventually) a likely outcome. But the Iraqi implosion also points to the fact that Europe's boundaries evolved over centuries, and even now are less than a perfect fit. The Middle East and Africa are dealing with state boundaries that often did not evolve locally at all, but were imposed by outside imperial powers.

The last time the US did a good job of occupying a major country effectively on its own was Japan, and there it had much more similar social material to work with a pro-consul from a family with experience of colonial governance.

The Bush Administration clearly did not think through the genuine difficulties and constraints of Iraq--having too little sense of history and too much American presumption of omnipotence. (Attempts to blame the present situation in Iraq on President Obama are particularly pathetic: though one may well make other criticisms of his Middle Eastern policies, which display a similar inability to think things through.) But the sui generis nature of American historical evolution makes for a poor set of framings from which to understand other societies.

Yes, dividing Iraq was diplomatically fraught, but it is now the likely outcome anyway--or, at least, a very decentralised state--and in much less Western-friendly terms than a deliberately organised divorce would have been. While having some House of Lords equivalent--or equivalents--could have been a very useful way to work through existing social structures and to encourage bargaining that operated according to the contours of the societies in question.

Conversely, the analytical humility required for a better effort would have militated against making the attempt in the first place. Such analytical humility would include taking religious motives seriously--but that is a perennial failure of contemporary Western analysis.

It is revealing that the one part of post-intervention Iraq which is a clear success--Kurdistan--is also the one part with a clear identity where local forces had already evolved workable local bargains. This is the example that could have been built on (and should still be supported). But so building would also have required a strong sense of locality and history. (Of course, hindsight is always 20x20, but that is the fun of historical analysis ...)

Perhaps also the notion of instant solutions needs to be abandoned. The open and democratic societies of the West took a long time to evolve. In the longer view, perhaps the overthrow of Saddam has allowed underlying forces to, however brutally at times, work themselves towards social and political equilibriums which do not require rule by the most successful psychopath.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

ADDENDA Nice comment about clans and consensus. Nepotistic societies work on different time horizons and need processes that respect that.

Revolutionary divides

It is in the nature of successful revolutions (successful in the sense of imposing a new political order which persists) to divide their society. They represent a political bargain implemented by force. Those against whom such force was applied are not participants in the revolutionary bargain, they have it imposed on them.

The Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution and the French Revolution all had this effect. The alienated from the Glorious Revolution were the Jacobites, from the American Revolution were the Tories and from the French Revolution throne-and-altar France.

Absent, faded or enduring

Of the three Revolutionary regimes, the American revolutionary republic was by far the most ruthlessly successful in dealing with the said divide. The American Tories were expelled and their property confiscated. (The American Revolution generated more refugees than did the French Revolution.) Thereafter, there may have been arguments about the implications of the Revolution (in a sense, Americans have argued about little else since) but being in favour of the Revolution itself (even if not quite the same Revolution was being conceived) has been the overwhelming social consensus. Hence the US Constitution--the embodiment of said consensus Revolution--being the icon it is. Given that migrants went to the US precisely because it was the polity that the Revolution created, they have not disturbed that social consensus or the Constitution's iconic status. (If anything, they have reinforced it.)

The political order established by Glorious Revolution was not in a position to simply expel all supporters of the deposed King James and had to endure various Celtic fringe revolts for decades after. Indeed, the last, 1745, was the biggest and most threatening. One could say that Catholic Ireland was never fully reconciled to the new order, but as it had never been fully reconciled to any English dominated order, that is not really a case of a revolutionary divide. (Of course, one could also argue the failure to incorporate Catholic Ireland as a participant in the new political order entrenched Irish alienation.)

In the end, the passage of time won, more or less. The Revolutionary political bargain was broad enough, and flexible enough, to expand to encompass the previously disenfranchised. Though the harrowing of the Highlands after the disaster at Culloden (1746) was the iron fist which blocked off alternatives. To claim that the contemporary push for Scottish independence represents a continuing divide over the Glorious Revolution seems an excessively long bow, since even the pro-independence Scots want to continue along the broad constitutional path the Revolution established. They are about reversing the Act of Union (1707), not the Revolutionary settlement.

The French Revolution is a complex case. There was fairly clearly a resurgence of the Revolution-alienated in the radical right politics of the 1930s, for example, and in the Vichy regime. A resurgence one could reasonable argue has re-manifested in the electoral prominence of the Front National today. The politics of the guillotine made the French Revolution far more elite fratricidal than either the American or Glorious Revolutions, while the brutality of the suppression of the Vendee also has no real counterpart in either the Glorious or American Revolutions. So France remains a country where the divide over its Revolution remains a much more live issue than in the UK or the US. That the French Revolution was not able to create a stable political order (again, unlike the American or Glorious Revolutions)--France currently being on its Fifth Republic, having also had two Empires and three Monarchies since the Revolution--also points to a more divided society. 

Sui generis framing

That the US Revolutionary order became functionally consensual so early may distort American perspectives. Certainly, they had their own Civil War, but that can be put in the slavery box. Either way, it was not a revolt against the Revolutionary Order as such, but a fight over its implications. The Confederate Constitution was, after all, just a tweaking of the US Constitution, with the tweakings being very much about slavery.

But Americans can look at their country, one that was always ethnically mixed, see a common political (and to some extent social) enterprise agreed upon and a stable political order being created. The expulsion of the Tories gets written out of the story, the British legal and political heritage also gets somewhat written out (or taken for granted: that they were fortunate heirs of the Glorious Revolution is not much dwelled upon) and the Civil War becomes a heroic fight over a noble cause and a peculiar institution, enabling it to be put in a special historical box. So they can look at a country like Iraq and not consider how much they are treating a backwash of European imperialism as an inviolable entity. Not every political inheritance is a suitable basis for that workable social bargaining that makes for stable political orders.

Yes, the US Founding Fathers created (on the second try) an enduring political order, but they were dealing with populations who had already been through the selective process of migrating there in the first place as well as the experience of representative politics within the British colonies. Electoral social bargaining was already part of their operative experience in relatively egalitarian social settings (given Amerindians and slaves were not part of the political nation). As was the notion of some broad common enterprise.  American historical experience is fairly sui generis. It is a poor basis for thinking about societies with very different histories and structures. But moving outside American framings is both conceptually difficult and politically fraught. Yet, without such moving beyond American framings, American policy is going to continue to have a ham-fisted quality when dealing with very different societies and histories.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]