Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
BY WILL INBODEN
never been disclosed at all, let alone prompted public protest and an official
response.
Insecure Bully: Some revealing yet head-scratching moments came when
Chinese interlocutors expressed their consternation at the U.S. Embassy
Beijings Twitter feed reporting on air quality in Beijing, while in the next
breath they defended Chinas provocations such as its anti-satellite missile
test, bellicose territorial claims on the South China Sea and support for
North Korea. These are not the actions of a confident, responsible
stakeholder, but of an insecure bully, obsessing over its international image
while engaging in obnoxious behavior that does much more damage to its
image than any American report on human rights or environmental quality.
This insecurity also prevents China from coming to terms with its own
history. While the Cultural Revolution is widely lamented, the Tiananmen
Square massacre (whose 23rd anniversary passed with censorship even of
the Shanghai Stock Exchange) cannot be mentioned, and Mao remains
valorized. Chinas insecurities also help explain its foreign policies to shield
the Syrian regime and Iranian nuclear program, and prop up the Kim
dictatorship in North Korea all of these are short-sighted decisions, but
short-term thinking is a hallmark of an insecure government obsessed with
maintaining its hold on power.
Some of the "Chinas" above are positive, others are negative. Yet in
understanding China all of these variations must be taken into account. The
U.S. has a major stake in encouraging political reform and economic growth
while discouraging the internal repression and truculent behavior towards its
neighbors. Mistakes in China policy come from privileging one scenario over
all the others for example the "China Fantasists" who believe the growing
economy will inevitably lead to a democratic, peaceful China, or the
offensive realists who focus on the Chinese military threat while ignoring the
economic benefits the U.S. receives in the relationship, let alone Chinas
internal fragilities.
This is also why China policy is such a challenge. Taken together, the
multiple realities of China today defy any simple historical analogies about
the management of rising powers, and demand an unprecedented
wholeness of vision from the United States.
BY DANIEL W. DREZNER
SEPTEMBER 5, 2011
With the passing of APSA and the dawning of Labor Day, its time for people
to go back to school and Think Deep Thoughts. In the realm of international
relations theory, Thanassis Cambanis essay in the Sunday Boston Globe
Ideas section is a great starter course for thinking about the way the world
works. His basic thesis:
Instead of a flurry of new thinking at the highest echelons of the foreign
policy establishment, the major decisions of the past two administrations
have been generated from the same tool kit of foreign policy ideas that
have dominated the world for decades. Washingtons strategic debates
between neoconservatives and liberals, between interventionists and
realists are essentially struggles among ideas and strategies held over
from the era when nation-states were the only significant actors on the
world stage. As ideas, none of them were designed to deal effectively with a
world in which states are grappling with powerful entities that operate
beyond their control.
As yet, no major new theory has taken root in the most influential policy
circles to explain how America should act in this kind of world, in which
Wikileaks has made a mockery of the diplomatic pouch and Silicon Valley
rivals Washington for cultural influence. But there are at least some signs
that people in power are starting to try in earnest. Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton has openly integrated the search for a new paradigm into
her policy making. In universities, think tanks, and the government, thinkers
trying to grapple with this fluid world structure are finally getting attention
in the circles where their ideas could shape policy.
BY DANIEL W. DREZNER
David Brooks seems to publish a State of the Student essay every year or
so. His latest is in the Weekly Standard. Its a good, rambling read, although
many of the mating rituals he describes were in place when I was an
undergraduate twelve years ago, so I dont know how much has changed
there. The more disturbing passage is as follows:
There is, one must always remember, a large cultural gap between the
students and the faculty. I met few studentsalarmingly few studentswho
seriously contemplated a career in the academy. They thought of becoming
high school teachers or reporters or even soldiers. Academia just never
came up. And if you focused their attention on the professorial life, they
would talk about what they saw as the pedantic specialization of academic
research, the jargon and the impenetrable prose, the professors cloistered
remove from the real world. Academia seems stale to many of them, not a
place that allows for exciting inquiry.
Sigh. Brooks is right about the lack of student interest in academia. Its
always depressing when my best students ask for letters of
recommendation for admission into law school or B-school not that
theres anything wrong with those choices, but there are more than two
flavors of career in the world. Even as someone in the ideological minority, I
love my job. I get paid to sit around, read, and think deep and not-so-deep
thoughts all day. On regular occasions Im asked to impart my thoughts to
some students, who actually write down a lot of what I say. Im something of
a specialist in what I write, but Im certainly not a specialist in what I read.
The hours are flexible, the dress code is minimal. Its a good life. On the
other hand, perhaps its best if fewer students enter the world of academia,
because the job market can be brutal for newly-minted Ph.D.s.
BY DANIEL W. DREZNER
FEBRUARY 6, 2003
Robert Shapiro has a good story in Slate on what economists can learn
about the functioning of markets from studying online fantasy games.
(Click here for California State Fullerton economics professor Edward
Castronovas paper that inspired Shapiro). However, its worth pointing out
that the use of gaming simulation data has also occurred in political science.
Douglas Van Belle published a 1998 paper in Political Research
Quarterly that used results from online games of Diplomacy to test certain
realist propositions about order in world politics. (If youre at a university,
click here to peek at the actual article). Van Belle wrote another
article about the merits of studying simulated environments
for International Studies Notes.
The punchline is a bit depressing for my career choice of explaining world
politics, but still provocative: The somewhat disturbing answer suggested
by running this simulation over the Internet is that the international system
may be fundamentally unpredictable. It is not a question of insight, method
or skill, it is a question of the fundamentally unpredictable nature of
innovation by creative, problem-solving human beings. The extreme
Chicago and Berkeley. Like their medieval counterparts, the nobles of the IR
field have few useful skills and do very little that can be characterized as
work. Much of their life is spent in social activity. As the medieval nobles
could spend entire weeks at jousting tournaments, today's nobles spend
inordinate amounts of time going to seminars, workshops, conferences,
invited lectures, not to mention lunches, sherry hours, honorary dinners, and
buffets. They organize edited volumes, participate in edited volumes
organized by their friends, and review edited volumes for presses. The life of
the nobility is a constant round of intense social interaction, and they train
for it from early graduate school by attending parties on a regular basis.
The most important function of the nobility, however, is paradigmatic war.
As the nobles of old viewed armed combat as their central raison d'tre, the
nobles of international relations view inter-paradigmatic conflict as their
main calling. These modern bellatores group together in feudally organized
camps, called paradigms, which typically are led by a charismatic elder peer
of the realm. This Duke or Earl possesses many fiefs to distribute to loyal
followers for services they render in battle, and maintains households of
graduate student retainers in the castle keep that perform the necessary
services needed to keep the house running.
These lucky pages also learn the use of the essential tools they will need to
succeed in combat, including the Polemic, the Diatribe, the Magisterial
Pronouncement, the Tendentious Case Study, the Testy Reply, the
Condescending Retort, and the Sweeping Unfalsifiable Claim. The pages also
learn the social graces and decencies of chivalrous conduct, including the
proper use of the pipe in gesturing, and the correct color for suede elbow
patches on tweed jackets.
Two of the oldest paradigms are Realism and Liberalism. These groups have
done battle since time immemorial and typically focus on material factors,
fighting over office space, funding, post-docs etc. While Realists emphasize
the role of anarchy in preventing cooperation and leading to conflict,
Liberals argue that it is possible to cooperate under anarchy, especially over
the issue of fighting Realists.
A more recently formed paradigm, Constructivism, emphasizes the nonmaterial or spiritual side of combat, much as the chivalric knightly orders
such as the Templars and Hospitalers rejected worldly ties to focus on
fighting the Saracens.
The nobles, then, form the peak of society. Their dominance of the field is
almost unchallenged. The other strata of society can only look on and envy
them.
The Peasants
The peasants of the international relations world are the quantitative
methods scholars. Like the laboratores of old, the life of the quantitative
scholar consists of much work and little reward. Grubbing about in the fields
gathering data under the hot sun, painstakingly assembling data-sets in the
barn, and then going through all the tedious work involved in grinding the
data into flour and baking it into something edible, these scholars are
familiar with toil. Tied as they are to the land, they lack vision and typically
eke out their subsistence livelihoods at lesser ranked universities, publishing
their paltry findings in non-prestigious journals that no one but other
peasants reads.
Given their slender means, they are constantly in danger of famine at
tenure time, and even if they manage to acquire a modest holding they can
be wiped out by floods of better methods or sudden shifts in market
demands from journal editors. One of the few sources of pleasure for the
peasants are the annual folk festivals, or conferences that specialize in
quantitative IR. Here the quantitative scholar can relax among his own kind,
quaff a tankard of mead, and temporarily forget the existence of nobles and
their overweening privilege.
A ray of hope for the peasant is the possibility of revolution. Usually these
peasant revolts are met by the nobility with merciless and successful
repression, but in one corner of the map a rebellion seems to have achieved
some limited success. The democratic peace literature arose in the peasant
community, and matured as a folk wisdom, but was later turned into a
means of mobilizing in solidarity against aristocratic oppression. The nobles
fought back of course, but for once their heavy cavalry was repulsed by the
Swiss pike bearing democratic peace researchers. It is still too early to tell
whether this is a temporary aberration, or whether this heralds a new era
when the life of the peasant will improve at the expense of the ancient
feudal nobility.
The Priests
Like medieval priests, or oratores, the formal theorists in international
relations claim special access to divine knowledge, available not through
observation of the corrupt and impure world but though revelation and
contemplation of the perfection of the divinity. Highly respectful of learning
and abstract debate, the high formal theorists do no work whatsoever, other
than to study the sacred dogma and refine ever more minutely the laws and
teachings of the Holy Theory. Their debates on such arcane questions as,
"How many angels can dance on the head of a subgame perfect
equilibrium?" can get quite heated, but remain largely incomprehensible
and irrelevant to the laity. Their function is to reveal the will of God to the
lesser mortals, and to guide them in walking the correct path towards
rational choice.
The oratores maintain and add to the sacred body of scripture and like their
medieval counterparts, employ a rarefied language unavailable to the laity,
Latin in the old days, formal theory today. This conveniently makes it
difficult for the laity to question the guidance given or interpret the sacred
texts for themselves. Also like their priestly forebears, today's oratores.
depend on the patronage of the nobility for their livelihood and in turn lend
legitimation to their order. While the priests justified social stratification as
the will of God, rational choice scholars lend support to the nobles by taking
the vague self-serving verbal utterances that pass for theory among the
aristocrats and formalizing them in game theoretic terms, lending them the
sanction of Holy Theory.
In exchange for this service, selected priests and monastic orders are
endowed with sumptuous abbeys and bishoprics at the elite universities. Of
course not every man of God is so lucky, many a wandering mendicant friar
ekes out a sad existence selling clumsily faked fragments of the true
Theorem to credulous peasants. While there is a mutual relation of support
between the bellatores and oratores, there is also some rivalry and mutual
contempt.
Indeed the reluctance of the formal theorists to fight wholeheartedly for any
of the paradigms only confirms the nobility in their belief that the formal
theorists are cowardly and lacking in virility. For their part, the priests look
on the nobility as undereducated and deficient in proper piety towards
Rational Choice Theory and his ministers on earth, as well as being
excessively rude and belligerent.
As these examples indicate, the medieval world is a rich source of insight
into the social structure of modern international relations scholarship. The
medieval bellatores, laboratores, and oratores find their counterparts in the
discipline as we know it today. It will be interesting to see if the forces of
change in the medieval world, fairs and the increase of trade, improvements
in navigation, etc. will have a corrosive effect on the social hierarchy of IR,
as they did in the medieval period. This question must be left for future
research.
BY DANIEL W. DREZNER
but what sort of bombing campaign did Schelling think would best ensure
that the North would pick up on the signals and respond accordingly? More
broadly, what should the United States want the North to do or stop doing;
how would bombing convince them to obey; how would we know that they
had obeyed; and how could we ensure that they wouldnt simply resume
after the bombing had ceased? Schelling and McNaughton pondered the
problem for more than an hour. In the end, they failed to come up with a
single plausible answer to these most basic questions.
So assured when writing about sending signals with force and inflicting pain
to make an opponent behave, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life
war, was stumped. He did leave McNaughton with one piece of advice:
Whatever kind of bombing campaign you end up launching, it shouldnt last
more than three weeks. It will either succeed by then? or it will never
succeed. The bombing campaign? called Operation Rolling Thunder?
Commenced on March 2, 1965. It didnt alter the behavior of the North
Vietnamese or Viet Cong in the slightest. Either they didnt read the signals?
or the signals had no effect.
In this description, theres not a whole hell of a lot of brashness indeed,
Schellings recommendation was not to escalate Rolling Thunder if the initial
bombing didnt work. In Kaplans passage, Schelling appears to be acutely
aware of the difficulties of measurement in applying his theory of
compellence to Vietnam. He made a recommendation, but with none of the
hubris Kaplan associates with social science (Kaplan also elides Schellings
leadership in a subsequent attempt to convince then-NSC adviser Henry
Kissinger to withdraw from Vietnam in the early days of the Nixon
administration). Kaplans essay contains a grain of truth about the dangers
of social science.
Too often, theorists come up with great models of the world by assuming
away petty inconveniences like bureaucratic politics, implementation with
incomplete information, or the effects of rhetorical blowback. But before he
throws out the baby with the bathwater, Kaplan might want to ask himself
the following question: if policymakers choose not to rely on social science
theories to wend their way through a complex world, what navigational aid
would Kaplan suggest in its stead? Policymakers across the political
spectrum always like to poke fun at explicit theorizing about international
relations. The problem is that they usually rely on historical analogies
instead which are, in every way, worse than the use of explicit theories.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen quotes Business Weeks Michael Mandel on the
drawbacks of game theory:
Game theory is no doubt wonderful for telling stories. However, it flunks the
main test of any scientific theory: The ability to make empirically testable
predictions. In most real-life situations, many different outcomes from full
cooperation to near-disastrous conflict are consistent with the gametheory version of rationality. To put it a different way: If the world had been
blown up during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, game theorists could have
BY DANIEL W. DREZNER
MARCH 7, 2006
Three months ago, the Feaver/Gelpi thesis was politically controversial. Now
its OBE overtaken by events. Given the current state of affairs in Iraq,
public opinion has already rendered its judgment on whats happening
there. I dont think the administration will succeed in translating those
peceptions into any definition of victory that Im familiar with. So, In
between the new story on this article, and the widespread availability of the
article itself, the real world has moved on. This does not mean, by the way,
that thesis contained in the paper is wrong. Its just that its no longer
politically salient.