American Democracy at a Crossroads

The problem of political polarization has long been a concern of political scientists and pundits, but it now seems like it is the worse that it has ever been and that the trajectory that we are on can only lead to bad outcomes. What we are now witnessing is the normalization of anti-democratic actions and attacks on the rule of law which have the potential to seriously undermine our democratic order and erode our institutions.

The 2016 election was a major turning point in this story. Donald Trump’s wavering about whether he would concede defeat to Hillary Clinton, were she to win, and threatening to jail her if he became president, represents something of an omen, it seems to me. The legitimacy of Trump’s victory was immediately questioned by his opponents because he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, even as he benefitted from and potentially colluded with Russia in its active measures campaign.

It is Trump’s actions regarding the investigation of his campaign and Russia that has, until now, placed the most stress on our institutions. Trump and his allies have gone to war with the Department of Justice, attempting to cast a pall of illegitimacy over the Mueller probe and to disqualify any of its findings as being the result of a “witch hunt” by the “Deep State.” While he has yet to explicitly order the investigation of Clinton, Trump has directly intervened in DOJ investigations— violating longstanding norms of an independent system of justice.

In these hyper-partisan times, Republican voters largely agree with Trump’s framing of the issue, and support wholeheartedly his attempts to bring the investigation to an end. Be that as it may, and despite numerous attempts to end the investigation, Trump and the GOP have yet to do much to stifle Mueller’s pursuits and, after more than a year in, one has to suspect that it is coming to a close. How the investigation is weaponized by the opposing sides hinges on the results of the election in November.

This flashpoint coincides with other high stakes political events. The recent history of Supreme Court nomination politics has made the coming showdown over Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat a fight with huge implications. After Senate Republicans unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s attempt to fill Antonio Scalia’s vacant Supreme Court seat with Merrick Garland, and Mitch McConnell dismantling of the filibuster to seat Neil Gorsuch in Scalia’s former place, Trump’s second pick will give the Supreme Court a solidly conservative majority for the first time in decades.

Given those stakes, and how little power Democrats have to give their “advise and consent,” it is not too surprising that there is a movement building to use civil disobedience to prevent Trump from filling the vacant seat, presumably by shutting down the chamber. This is an escalation in political warfare that goes beyond the parliamentary escalation we have seen in recent years and takes it to an extra-institutional level.

Preventing a political body from conducting its business is clearly a blow to democracy. One can argue that, operating under its former rules with the filibuster (which still exists for legislative purposes), and its very structural composition, the Senate was already anti-democratic— with the voters of smaller states overrepresented in the body politic. But the chamber was long able to carry out its functions in a stable way because, for a long time, political polarization was not as intense has been in the last two decades. Now that it is clear that one party is the beneficiary of a structural imbalance, the legitimacy of the institution is in question.

Should activists take illegal steps to prevent the institutional process of filling a vacant judicial position, we will have crossed a line that there is no turning back from. Arrests will be made, the chamber will do its business and, soon after, voters will go to the polls, but it will have created a precedent of the use of anti-democratic means to counter a process that ostensibly had been decided by voters at the polls.

And speaking of polls, the 2018 midterm election is certain to be one of the most consequential in recent years. With Trump’s presidency at stake, can we really rule out that partisans on either side will the decry the legitimacy of the outcome? Once the dust has settled, and the political stars have realigned (or not), what will our politics look like? It appears that the answer to these questions will be further complicated by the fact that the swearing in of the next Congress will coincide with the end of the Mueller probe, and whatever actions are taken in that regard are going to occur in an environment of maximal political tension.

While I have entered into the (dangerous) territory of political prognostication, I think that we are not without a bit of a roadmap as to how the coming years might turn out. If Democrats win the House there will be enormous pressure to impeach the president, irregardless of how Mueller’s report says. But Trump is a fighter, and he and allies will use whatever power they have at their disposal to ward off any attempts to impeach the president and investigate him and his family. Will Republican activists engage in the kind of civil disobedience mentioned above to protect the president from Congressional oversight, and thus negate the electoral outcome?

Depending on what Mueller’s findings are, the president may engage in other unprecedented acts, like pardoning himself or members of his family. Trump also has the option of installing more obedient political appointees in the Justice Department to protect himself and, God save us, go after his enemies.Whatever occurs, we can expect all of it to play out through the typical partisan lens that the administration’s series of controversies has thus far— whatever Trump does will be supported by the GOP, save a few defections when things get really bad. And that is just about in time for the 2020 campaign to get underway.

American Political Theory X

In his book The Promise of American Life, published in 1909, Herbert Croly makes the claim that “American public opinion…still believes that democracy is a happy device for evading collective responsibilities by passing them along to the individual” (Croly, 458). Such an attitude, and such a practice, was the product of Jefferson’s vision of American democracy having won out. In Jefferson’s first inaugural address, Croly argues, he made clear that the framework of America’s democratic institutions was designed primarily to protect individual liberties from attack (Croly, 55). It was ultimately a “policy of conservatism,” and so addressing what were obvious political problems, especially the contradictory reliance on slavery in a democracy, were not addressed (Croly, 55-56). Political stagnation continued for another fifty years after Jefferson’s presidency, as Americans put the power of the state’s institutions into the “hands of safe men,” as it was thought that “good government” consisted of “letting things alone” (Croly, 56). Such a state of affairs—to Croly, the existence of an underdeveloped and misguided politics—encouraged and reinforced a culture of “vigorous, licensed, and purified selfishness” (Croly, 56). Any political matter that involved a restriction of one’s pursuit of self-interest was thought to represent a malfunctioning in the democratic machinery (Croly, 57).

Croly is especially critical, as mentioned above, of the existence of slavery in a democracy—it was sanctified in the Constitution. The major political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, found reasons to evade the issue by focusing on the “millions of pale-faced democrats” thriving on the frontier. Croly is perfectly willing to acknowledge the importance of the pioneer Democrats in creating egalitarian political communities, which had a “homogeneity of feeling” that he considers the “most valuable and promising characteristic” of American democracy (Croly, 73). However, this homogenization required too much for Croly, because such a society “viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement” and fetishized the average man (Croly, 74-75). Such a creed, Croly argues, “has tended to impair American moral and intellectual integrity”—a sacrifice “of a higher to a lower type of individuality” (Croly 75). What the Jacksonian Democratic tradition means by “individuality is an unusual amount of energy successfully spent in popular and remunerative occupations,” while the kind of “individuality which may reside in the gallant and exclusive devotion to some disinterested, and perhaps unpopular moral, intellectual, or technical purpose, they have not the remotest conception” (Croly, 76). Such a culture retarded the emergence of a critical mass to oppose to slavery, but eventually Americans had to either take or not take possession of the institution (Croly, 84). It was only with the emergence of Lincoln, who argued that Americans were shirking their duties by “shifting the responsibility” for slavery to “individuals and localities,” and he “made it plain that a democratic nation could not make local and individual rights an excuse for national irresponsibility” (Croly, 98). Lincoln attempted to rally the nation to a sense of national, rather than local, democracy, and the “triumph of the North in the war” both ended slavery and “began to emancipate the American national idea from an obscurantist individualism and provincialism” (Croly, 98).

Henry David Thoreau similarly bemoaned the evasion of collective responsibilities on the issue of slavery. In his essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Thoreau writes that whatever a human law may be, individuals are responsible for what their governments do in a democratic system, and “neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual, without having to pay the penalty for it” (Thoreau, 22).. Thoreau was railing against both the practice of the Massachusetts government in participating in returning fugitive slaves to their owners, the injustice of the Constitution in having legalized slavery, and the America’s aversion to change. The American people risked becoming forever the “laughing-stock of the world” by deliberately and persistently enacting injustice (Thoreau, 22). The logic of the Fugitive Slave Act was that an individual’s civic responsibility was confined to ensuring that another person’s property was returned to him, were one to come across it—it represented the trumping of property rights over “human rights.” American society, collectively, was hiding behind a cloak of legality in the perpetuation of human bondage. Thoreau compares the justices of the Supreme Court, the arbiters of the Constitution, to “inspectors of a pick-lock and murderer’s tools,” making sure that “they are in working order or not, and there they think their responsibility ends” (Thoreau, 23). The Constitution was not some hallowed document decreed by God, Thoreau argues, and the “law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free” (Thoreau, 23). If a law is unjust, it is the responsibility of the nation to change that law, to have it reflect the moral order.

That the moral order is an evolving system is how we should link the writing of Croly and Thoreau with that of the historian of the American West, Frederick Jackson Turner, who was more optimistic regarding pioneer democracy. What the West represented, what was required for it to be re-peopled, was formative for the creation of a democratic society. The triumph of the individual in the frontier required an innovative spirit, an ability to “shape former habits, institutions and ideas to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable,” and thus it was far from stagnant (Turner, 271). Democracy was not simply equated with the ideal of individualism, as it also entailed a strong belief in equality and a “passionate hatred for aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege” (Turner, 273). The open lands in the West were a safety valve, they allowed men to “escape from oppression or inequalities that burdened them in the older settlements” (Jackson, 274). Had the frontier option not been available to American settlement, the inequality that would have persisted would hardly have been conducive to addressing issues at the national level, as Croly would have wanted. Rather, there probably would have been a rehashing of the spirit of revolt, the emergence of a tyrannical majority, a la Shay’s Rebellion. In other words, in order for the kind of national state that Croly and other progressives desired to develop, America had to go through a stage of expansion and economic development, as “Economic equality fostered political equality,” a “belief in the worth of plain people” (Turner, 274). An individual first had to gain a modicum of property so that he could move beyond his “primitive individualism” to the belief that government was less a “necessary evil and more like an instrument for the perpetuation of his democratic ideals” (Turner, 277).

The existence of slavery in the United States was the crucible of the nation—the Union was nearly dissolved. Such an outcome would not have occurred were the victorious North not able to realize that there was a collective responsibility in ending slavery. There needed to be an emergence of a national consciousness, but this required first that the various and dispersed communities of the Union develop a stake in national politics. Croly, writing at the beginning of the 20th century, was disappointed that the post-Civil War developments did not fit into his liberal-progressive vision of the overriding power of the national government, of a “systematic authoritative transformation of the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion” to the nation (Croly, 458). Such disappointment cannot negate the fact that America had finally stared the problem of slavery in the face and dared to act, and then to have inscribed the new moral order into the very Constitution that had legitimated the iniquity of slavery. America had proved that it could act collectively when tested or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, after it had exhausted all other options.

A Tale of Two Insurgencies: The Muslim Insurgencies of Thailand and the Philippines

A common feature of many of modern states, particularly for some non-Western countries, is that their borders were drawn arbitrarily, directly by Western imperialists or through one ethnic group conquering others, and then having their sovereignty recognized internationally. In such states, crucial decisions have had to be made about how to govern a diverse population, how to turn a geographical idea into a modern nation, with a strong economy and a peaceful internal existence. As I will explore with this essay, often the dominance of a majority group over minorities that arises in such states creates tremendous tensions, which are only exacerbated as conflicting political aspirations and ideologies are developed between groups and as identities harden, which make compromise difficult. This essay explores two case studies of such states, Thailand and the Philippines. In both of these countries, the nature of the states that were set up alienated their Muslim populations, as their traditional societies were subjected to policies that were meant to assimilate the populations to the dominant group, and their demands for independence and autonomy were rejected and met with repression, with the consequence of a decades long scourge of violence.

The roots of Thailand’s conflict are very much rooted in the birth of its modern state structure. The southern part of Thailand, including the five predominantly Malay-Muslim provinces, known as Patani, were incorporated under the rule of the Thai monarch, King Chulalongkorn, in 1832. The Thai state thereafter extended its reach into the region, dividing it into separate provinces which were to be governed by “appointed bureaucrats under a centralized administrative structure” (Islam 433). Integral to the extension of Thai governance was replacing most of the Islamic legal regime of sharia and adat with Thai civil law (Liow 533) Treaties signed by the Thai government with the British in 1904 and 1909 over the borders of Thailand and British Malaya cemented Patani’s subjugation to the Thai state, divorcing the region and its people from the larger Malay world with which they identified. The project of nation-building being undertaken by the Thai government kicked into high gear in the late 1930s. The government of Prime Minister Phibunsongkhram (or Phibun), was attempting to unify the country by creating a Thai nationalism. Forging this nationalism required, his regime thought, widespread secular education, which was to be instructed in the Thai language, effectively banning the religious curriculum and instruction in the Malay dialect that existed in the south. In 1944, the remaining Islamic civil laws in the South, relating to the family, especially marriage and divorce, and inheritance, were abolished and replaced by Thai civil laws (Islam 434).

In 1945 a military coup replaced the Phibun government, and it coup government acknowledged that the assimilationist policies described above were causing radical protests in the South and that changes needed to be made (Aphornsuvan 108). The Islamic laws relating to the family were restored, and the government wrote up regulations for how the Islamic court system would function. One of the regulations specified that jurists must be able to read write Thai, and Muslim leaders, including the most prominent one, Haji Sulong, regarded this as an extreme intrusion. Sulong and others demanded that the Islamic legal system be separate from the Thai, and that only Muslims could appoint their own judges—an argument that the Thai government rejected (Aphornsuvan 110). In April, 1947, the Muslim political leadership submitted a document to a Thai governmental delegation visiting the South in which political autonomy, religious, and cultural rights were demanded. The government rejected the proposal, as it considered the idea that any ethnic group should receive separate rights and autonomy anathema to their vision of the Thai nation-state, undermining as it did the “the trinity of the nation, religion (Buddhism), and king” (Aphornsuvan 112).

Haji Sulong, the Muslim leader mentioned above, continued to call for autonomy and special rights, and began to organize people to boycott the court system. Another coup occurred in 1946, and it appeared as if the less conciliatory Phibun was going to return to the helm through the elections that were to take place, and so Haji Sulong organized an electoral boycott (Aphornsuvan 116). Meanwhile, unrest and violence between Malays and the government began to fester, and the police began using mass arrests of the alleged criminals that were participating in the support of the nascent resistance (Aphornsuvan 117). Eventually, the government tried to put an end to the unrest by arresting Haji Sulong, along with several of his associates, and charging them with treason. It was this move that touched off a true armed rebellion, and the clashes left 400 Muslim villagers and 30 police officers dead in two days of battle. Between 2,000 and 6,000 refugees fled across the border to Malaya to escape the violence and 250,000 Muslim-Malay signatures were obtained to plead to the United Nations to preside over the secession of the four Muslim provinces of Patani (Aphornsuvan 118). A guerilla army began to form in Malaya, as religious leaders in Patani and Malaya were now calling for jihad.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that political violence really surged in Thailand, with over 60 insurgent groups existing during this period. The growth of insurgency coincides with policies of the Thai government that resulted in the migration of Buddhists from across Thailand into the South, eventually numbering 100,000 by 1969 (Ross-Harrington 151). Perceptions among Malay-Muslims that this was in effect an attempt at internal colonization aimed at changing the ethnic balance were widespread. The establishment of the National Patani Liberation Front (BNPP) marked an important point of consolidation of opposition to the Thai state. The group sought fundraising through the contacts that Malays had throughout the Muslim world, and it recruited new members at religious schools in Patani (Ross-Harrington 151). The National Revolutionary Front (BRN), and the Patani United Liberation Organization also formed in the late 1960s. Thus, opposition to the Thai state was framed in terms of opposition to religious and ethnic domination. The targets of the armed wings of these groups were the police and government buildings (Ross-Harrington 152).

Violence began to wane with the reforms of General Prem Tinasulanond. Elected in 1980, he was from the South and understood the nature of identity and cultural grievances of the Malay-Muslims. The Southern Border Provincial Administration was created through which the grievances of southerners could be addressed administratively, and police and security forces were put under more scrutiny in an effort to combat abuses of power. Many members of the armed groups accepted amnesty offers (Ross-Harrington 153). However, the most hard core fighters did put down their arms, and all of the groups mentioned above continued to exist, even as other groups came into being, like the GMIP, which “represented a growing trend of radical Islamist ideologies” (Ross-Harrington 154). In the late 1990s, many of the groups formed a tactical alliance known as Beratsu (Unity), which was used to plan the “Falling Leaves” campaign of 1997, which was a 6 month period consisting of 33 coordinated terrorist attacks, killing 9 state officials (Ross-Harrington 154). The fall of violence from the 1980s and into the mid-1990s appears to be a period of reorganization of armed groups, and the evolution of separatist ideologies, and then violence came roaring back in the following decade (Ross-Harrington 154).

It has been since 2001 that Southern Thailand has been at its most violent. The nature of the violence can be greatly explained by the attacks of April 28, 2004, which are a kind of microcosm of the conflict. These attacks were a coordinated affair in which over 130 men, ranging from teenagers to men in their 60s, attempted to storm military and police outposts. The day is explained greatly by Duncan McCargo, who has interviewed some of the men who participated in the violence. The attackers believed that they were going to be protected from harm by magic spirits (belief in magic is integral to Malay’s “syncretic” version of Islam), which was not the case, as over 100 died, while killing 3 soldiers. However, the attackers were clearly motivated, according McCargo, by the goal of ridding their land of Thai authority (McCargo 135-146). As McCargo writes, the attacks “showed that large numbers of Malay-Muslim men were very easily led and could be readily enlisted to fight for doubtful causes” (McCargo 146). That so many men in a relatively small number of villages could be persuaded to engage in such attacks displays the widespread fury and antagonism that exists among the Malay-Muslim population and the Thai state (McCargo 146).

Srisompob Jitpirosmri and Duncan McCargo point out that the violence since 2004 has been fluctuating. There were 1,838 violent incidents in 2004, 2,173 in 2005, 1,847 in 2006, 1,850 in 2007, 821 in 2008, and 1,035 in 2009 (Jitpirosmri 157). In terms of deaths, 2,417 Muslims have died, compared to 1,559 Buddhists. What has been going on in Southern Thailand, especially over the last decade, cannot adequately be accounted for simply by referring to casualty statistics. The insurgency in the south has effectively dismantled the functioning of the Thai state in much of the region. The reason that Muslim deaths are so high is partly because the militants have targeted Malays that are seen as being collaborators, either for actually being informants, or for being associated with Thai state structure (school teachers and post office workers especially) (McCargo 155-163). As David Kilcullen writes, given that the population of the south is only 1.8 million, this makes the “ethnoreligious insurgency one of the most intense in the world, second only to those in Iraq and Afghanistan during” during the years cited above (Kilcullen 243). By mid-2008, the Thai government had effectively lost complete control of large areas of the South (Kilkullen 244).

Separatism has `emerged elsewhere in Southeast Asia, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, which has long been one of the region’s Islamic bastions. Like Patani, Mindanao was incorporated into a polity in which its Muslim population was a minority. The Spanish had successfully conquered the northern part of the modern day Philippines in the mid-1500s and was able to convert the population to Catholicism (Chalk 1997, 80). The Spanish attempts to convert the Muslims of Mindanao over the next three centuries, however, failed in the face of serious resistance. Once the Spanish-American war ended in 1898 with the Treaty of Paris, sovereignty over the Philippines was transferred to the United States, and an armed rebellion broke out in Mindanao, as the people opposed being incorporated into a republic that was predominantly Catholic. The use of American firepower pacified the rebellion by 1913, and Mindanao was successfully incorporated into the Philippine Republic (Chalk 81).

What ensued in Mindanao once the Philippine state extended control into the region is very similar to the events in Thailand. In Mindinao, the US sponsored Catholic transmigration into the region from overpopulated regions in the north of the country, especially Luzon. The program started in 1913, and grew in the 1920s and 1930s, and further accelerated upon independence, in 1946. As Chalk writes, by “the 1975 census it is estimated that about 6 million of Mindanao’s 9.7 million had their origins in the Christian dominated Luzon and Visayas regions” (Chalk 1997, 81) This has been a particularly provocative phenomenon, as Muslims there have been displaced from lands that were considered, by ancient and communal custom, to be rightfully theirs. Moreover, the Philippine state imposed, just as in Thailand, a secularized government upon the Muslim population. Thus, there developed a fear that the Catholic-dominated government in Manila aimed to destroy the religious, cultural, and political traditions of Mindanao through its assimilationist policies (Chalk 2001, 247).

The events that actually sparked the armed rebellion of Mindanao against the Philippine state were, first of all, the unwillingness of the Philippine regime, led by President Ferdinand Marcos, to allow the creation of a separate Islamic republic in the south. Instead, the government ramped up its settlement program, and by the 1960s, the Moros, the main ethnic indigenous ethnic group, would be a minority in Mindanao (Ringuet 38). Moreover, a Catholic militia in the south, the Ilaga, was operating with the clear support of the Philippine military in its atrocities against Muslims, as communal violence emerged, reflecting a struggle for local dominance. At the same time that this was breaking out, in the early 1970s, President Marcos declared martial law in order to extend his reign to a third term. The consequences of martial law meant that the military had increasing influence over government, and the Muslim community saw this development as a potentially destructive force to their existence. The Muslim Independent Movement, which was the militia organization of Mindanao’s Muslims, was replaced in 1971 by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which had the goal of achieving independence from the Philippines through armed struggle. The level of violence skyrocketed, as the Philippine military was given a free had to quash the insurgency, even as the insurgency itself was strengthened by support from Muslim countries, particularly Libya. By the mid-1970s, the death toll from the violence already reached 60,000, with 200,000 people displaced (Chalk 1997, 82).

In 1980 there was the emergence of a group that splintered from the MNLF, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The group has more of a religious orientation than MNLF, as it seeks to promote Islamic ideals, rather than Moro nationalism. The MILF is also more rejectionist than the MNLF, as the former insists upon the creation of an Islamic state, ruled by sharia law, while the MNLF was more willing to compromise. The group is relatively large, consisting of 8,000 to 10,000 fighters, according to the Philippine National Police (PNP) and military estimates. Its military tactics are classically guerrilla, with hit and run missions against military targets as the MILF’s primary staple. That is not to say that the MILF has refrained entirely from attacking civilians– in fact it has a long track record in doing so. The civilian targets have been Christian communities, as well as business that have refused to pay the taxes the MILF has demanded of them (Chalk 2001, 248).

There is yet another armed group, the Abu Sayyef Group (ASG), which has waged a military campaign against Philippine rule. Founded in 1989, the ASG has a religious fundamentalist bent, and is profoundly intolerant of the Christians in their midst, as they have a policy of targeting all Filipino Catholics for killings. In 1999, the PNP estimated the fighting force of ASG to be 330, many of whom participated in the “jihad” against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The ASG violence has been largely terroristic in nature, aimed at “exterminating” non-Muslims in Mindanao (Chalk 2001, 249). While its tactics may differ from the MNLF and MILF, the ASG also aims to secede from the Philippine Republic and create an independent Islamic republic.

Chalk argues that the MILF and ASG are more threatening to the Philippine state than is the MNLF. Indeed, in 1996 the MNLF agreed to lay down its arms and participate in mainstream politics after having negotiated the Davao Consensus, which provided the “carrot” of an MNLF-led Council for Peace and Development that would “implement and coordinate peace and development projects throughout the fourteen provinces of the southern Philippines as well as the creation of a separate, limited, four-district Muslim autonomous region” (Chalk 252). Both the MILF and ASG rejected Davao, as neither will stop no short of the creation of an independent Islamic state, freeing Mindanao from its role as a “puppet” of Catholic dominated Manila (Chalk 252). Thus, the violence in the south continues, “with bombings, shootings, kidnappings… and, at times, full-scale military clashes occurring, if not weekly, certainly monthly” (Chalk 2001, 252).

Chalk argues that what makes these groups so dangerous is that they exhibit a “radical Islamic fundamentalist identity” that essentially excludes compromise on the status quo of being a part of a state which includes infidel Christians (Chalk 2001, 252). Moreover, these groups are part of a larger international Islamic extremist network that has been in existence since the Cold War, and they have inherited guerillas from the Afghan-Soviet jihad, who are as ideologically committed as insurgents come. As Chalk notes, the Philippine government will never agree to the secession of Mindanao, especially considering that both the whole of the Philippines, as well as Mindanao itself, is overwhelmingly Catholic. There will never be an electoral mandate to agree to secession, in other words. Chalk concludes that any hope for a peace settlement to take sway in Mindanao in the short term are quite doubtful, especially considering that the economic development projects implemented since 1996 have not been very effective at reducing the dire poverty of the South. Indeed, most economic growth in the region has mostly benefitted the Catholic population, an outcome which can only exacerbate the interethnic tensions that exist and further delegitimize the Philippine state in the minds of Muslims (Cragin 20).

As this essay has shown, violence has broken out over political conflicts that were almost inevitable, as former independent regions, with their unique histories and identities, had imposed upon them foreign political systems, and in the case of the Philippines, actual displacement by colonists. Thus, both conflicts revolve around demands for independence of the main Muslim regions. Moreover, as the violence has continued over the decades, the factor driving it more and more resembles simply a hatred of the other. The discontent about being ruled by what is deemed a foreign power has become irreconcilable by a large enough slice of the population that a self-sustaining insurgency has become possible. Armed factions have emerged that are unwilling to compromise, and hardliners have become the most prominent members of the opposition. Both Thailand and the Philippines, therefore, face intractable ethnic secessionist movements.

Bibliography

Aphornsuvan, Thanet. “Origins of Malay-Muslim “Separatism in Southern Thailand,” from Thai South & Malay North: Ethnic Interactions on a Plural Peninsula, ed. Patrick Jory. NUS Press, 2008. Marc Askew

Islam, Syed Serajul. “The Islamic Independence Movements in Patani of Thailand and Mindanao of the Philippines,” Asian Survey, Vol. 38, No. 5 (May, 1998), pp. 441-456.

Chalk, Peter. “Islamic Factor in Southern Thailand, Mindanao, and Aceh,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2001.

Chalk, Peter. “The Davao Consensus: A panacea for the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao?” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1997.

Cragin, Kim and Chalk, Peter. Terrorism and Development : Using Social and Economic Development Policies to Inhibit a Resurgence of Terrorism. Santa Monica, CA, USA: Rand Corporation, 2003.

Islam, Syed Serajul. “The Islamic Independence Movements in Patani of Thailand and Mindanao of the Philippines,” Asian Survey, Vol. 38, No. 5 (May, 1998), pp. 441-456.

Jitpiromrsri, Srisompob and McCargo, Duncan. “The Southern Conflict Six Years On: Insurgency, Not Just Crime,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 32, No.2 (2010), pp. 156-183.

Kilcullen, David. Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Liow, Joseph Chinyong. “The Security Situation in Southern Thailand: Toward an Understanding of Domestic and International Dimensions,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Vol. 27, No. 6 (2004), pp. 531-548.

McCargo, Duncan. Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand. Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Ringuet, Daniel Joseph. “The Continuation of Civil Unrest and Poverty in Mindanao,” Contemporary Southeast Asia, Vol. 24, No. 1 (April 2002), pp. 33-49.

Ross-Harrington, Jonathan. “Separatist Insurgency in Southern Thailand: An Approach to Peacemaking,” from Eichensehr, Kristen and Reisman, W. Michael (eds.), International Humanitarian Law Series, Volume 27 : Stopping Wars and Making Peace : Studies in ,International Intervention. Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2009.

Death, Taxes, and Censorship: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and U.S. Policy Innovations

In the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson had been the relatively conservative candidate, compared to the likes of his opponent, former President Theodore Roosevelt. The campaigns even had opposing slogans for their respective platforms. Roosevelt’s was the New Nationalism represented a significant increase in the federal government’s administrative apparatus. Wilson, on the other hand, called his program the “New Freedom,” which “emphasized decentralization of all power” (Kloppenberg 147). Yet decentralization is precisely the opposite of what occurred under the Wilson administration. Some very important policies that he put in place were in large part driven by his reaction to the First World War, as he planned for U.S. involvement. This essay will discuss three specific policy areas in which U.S. introduced drastic changes as part of its war effort: the federal tax regime; the military and economic mobilization undertaken by the nexus of government, business, and the military; and the government propaganda and censorship campaign that was used to convince the U.S. public on the necessity of American involvement in the war. The First World War One of the first changes that occurred in the U.S. stemming from the war was a change in the federal tax regime (Pollack 246). When hostilities broke out between the European powers, tariffs and custom duties continued to be the primary source of government revenue for the U.S. national government. Trade and commerce with Europe were substantially reduced as a result of the war and a recession in the U.S., and thus the government coffers took a hit, and revenue dropped from $73.2 million in July to $44.5 million in October (Pollack 246-247). The administration, which had begun planning for a significant military preparedness program, was in a particularly tough bind (Brownlee 175). The Wilson administration rejected the idea of drawing from the Treasury deposits that were in private banks, as well as selling Treasury bonds, fearing that such actions would put too much pressure on the money markets, which would cause public spending to crowd out private investment, thus exacerbating the recession (Brownlee 175). Moreover, in lieu of a significant increase in the amount of revenue that the government was able to take in, interest rates on government bonds would probably prove crippling, as investors would demand very high rates in the face of uncertain fiscal prospects or inflation (Brownlee 175). A crucialpractical problem confronted Wilson: How is a nation able to devote a significant amount of the nation’s fiscal resources to war in the midst of steadily falling government revenue?The initial move was to try to increase excise taxes. The Emergency Revenue Act of 1914 increased “taxes on beer and domestic wine, set new taxes on tobacco manufacturers and dealers, bankers, and brokers, established excises on patent medicines, cosmetics, perfumes, and places of amusement, and imposed stamp taxes on bonds, bills of sale, drafts, mortgages, and other legal documents” (Brownlee 176). The administration realized that these tax measures were hitting consumers and small businesses hard, in both their regressive nature and how cumbersome they were to collect (Brownlee 177).Moreover, the revenue that the tax increases generated proved far short of what had been projected, and what was needed for Wilson’s preparedness program (Pollack 247). Thus, it was President Woodrow Wilson’s Treasury Secretary, William G. McAdoo, who “pressed Congress for structural changes to the income tax” (Pollack 247). Structural changes, in this case, meant that rates would be increased, and the base would be broadened by reducing the amount of personal exemptions (Pollack 247). Wilson, in his State of the Union address in December 1915, essentially called for what has come to be known as a progressive income tax regime, in which the highest earners are taxed at the highest rate, and, in gradations, that rate goes down as one is lower on the income scale (Pollack 247). In that address, Wilson also proposed raising the “excise taxes on the production of gasoline, iron, and steel” so that, in his words, “’the industry of this generation should pay the bills of this generation’” (Pollack 247).Congress put the issue of taxation on the top of its agenda when the session began in 1917. The first order of business was to renew the Emergency Revenue Act, thus preventing a potential financial crisis (Brownlee 181). Though Wilson had been rather vague in his State of the Union address, deferring to the House of Representatives to grind out the bill, Treasury Secretary McAdoo had already developed a highly detailed plan. Whereas the administration’s proposal sought to expand the tax base by lower the level of income that was exempted, many of the more populist members of Congress sought to place the increased burden solely on the wealthiest of Americans, as well as on munitions producers (Brownlee 185). The bill that Wilson signed into law on September 8, 1916, the Revenue Act, raised the “income tax on individuals from 1 percent to 2 percent, added a surtax of 1 percent on personal income in excess of twenty thousand dollars, and raised the maximum rate from 6 percent to 13 percent on income in excess of $2 million” (Pollack 247-248). The proposal also “introduced federal estate taxation,” which is taxation on inherited wealth (what has come to be known as the “death tax” in Republican circles). It also “initiated the first significant taxation of corporate incomes, and contributed to the nation’s most dramatic departure toward progressive redistributional taxation” (Brownlee 173). The new income tax regime “financed the preparedness program of the Wilson administration and clearly emerged as a tax capable of supporting the future expansion of the federal government” (Brownlee 203). The Revenue Act proved effective in increasing federal revenue by $310 million from 1916 to 1917. That figure, however, was only one-third of what was needed to fund Wilson’s preparedness program (Brownlee 204).

The mobilization for war was the United States’ first experience with “industrialized warfare,” in which U.S. had to “mobilize its economy totally for the first time” (Koistinen 379). Such a mobilization, as will be shown, required a coordinated effort on behalf of business, government, and the military—a relationship that has come to be known as an “industrial-military complex” (Koistinen 378). From the very beginning in the preparedness process it was important that the administration coordinate its effort with industry executives, for ideological reasons, but for practical reasons as well. The kind of state-directed regimes adopted Britain and Germany were antithetical to the economic liberalism of Wilson, who thought that the private citizen (usually with a corporate background) should volunteer his services to prepare for the war effort, rather than be coerced (Cook 296). Public-private cooperation was also necessary because “national government’s administrative capacity was simply too underdeveloped, lacking in sufficient expertise and political and administrative experience to carry most of the burden”(Cook 178).

The Wilson administration’s preparedness program began with Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels founding the Naval Consulting Board in mid-1915, for which he recruited “members of leading engineering and industrial societies to serve as unofficial industrial consultants for the expanding Navy” (Koistinen 381). A subdivision of the Board was the Industrial Preparedness Committee, which relied on corporate volunteers and private financing to collect data on the industrial potential of the U.S., and in 1916 “inventoried thousands of industrial facilities for the services” (Koistinen 381). The nature of this public-private consulting apparatus was not sufficient to undertake such a large mobilization as was aimed for, and so the Council of National Defense (CND) was created, which absorbed the Naval Consulting Board (Koistinen 382). The Council, which was created by Congress in a provision in the Army’s 1916 appropriations bill, consisted of six cabinet officers. The Council members would “nominate and the President appoint seven experts in various fields to act as a National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC) to the Council,” which would be “President’s advisory body on all aspects of industrial mobilization” (Koistinen 382). The CND,NDAC, and the Naval Consulting Board all concluded that private industry should supply munitions to the government, rather than have the government produce its own munitions, thus signaling the beginning of a “government-industry partnership for the purpose of national security” (Koistinen 384-385).

In this government-corporate partnership, “Information on the capacity of the essential industries was collected, the means for curtailing production for civilian uses and converting industry to meet governmental needs were considered, and rudimentary price, priority, and other controls were developed” (Koistinen 387). This was basically a control over the supply of needed war material, but there was a rather unorganized approach to the military procurementside of the equation, especially for the Army. First five, and then eight, independent bureaus were responsible for Army procurement (Koistinen 388). Each bureau had its own staff, “handled its own funds, stored its own goods, and transported its own supplies,” and competed with each of the other bureaus to meet its own needs (Kostenin 388). This decentralization and lack of planning made it difficult for the War Department to determine what it actually required (Kostenin 388). The system of Chief of Staff-General Staff of the War Department had been created at the turn of the century and was supposed to have centralized control over the bureaus, but they had resisted up to the start of the U.S.’s entrance into the war. Billions of dollars had been flowing into the economy from military procurements since 1916, though with little coordination, as it was expected by the “War Department insisted that the civilian economy adjust to its decentralized, inefficient, functional supply system,” rather than the other way around (Kostenin 390).

It was a confusing system, to say the least, but one that would continue to be used until July of 1917, until the National Defense Advisory Commission could not maintain economic balance (Kostenin 391). The Council of National Defense replaced the NDAC with the War Industries Board, which was to “regulate the entire industrial might of the nation, not simply to expedite munitions production” (Kostenin 391). The new structure consisted of the Board, with its subdivision of Commodity Committees which represented the government, and the War Service Committees, which represented entire industries and served in an advisory role. The Committees were to be headed by leaders that were elected by members of the industry trade associations (Kostenin 392). As Kostenin writes: “Private industry was organized, an agency capable of coordinating mobilization existed, and trained personnel were available” (Kostenin 394). However, the War Industries Board still served only in an advisory role, and the intransigent War Department, still in charge of procurement, continued to insist on its ownsystem (Kostenin 395).

By the end of 1917, it was apparent that allowing the military to have the final word on procurement was having a detrimental effect on the economy (Kostenin 395). Congress started working on legislation that would delegate procurement to a civilian agency, and so “the Army began to reform its supply system and the administration came forth with the Overman Act,”which put the War Industries Board directly under President Wilson (Koistinen 396). The Overman Act, however, also allowed the military to remain in control of its own procurement, though it was no longer directing the economy. The survival of the military in this institutional capacity set an “important precedent for twentieth-century warfare. Unlike most belligerent nations, in the United States the military services continued to procure their own munitions and, therefore, remained in a position to affect the economy most directly and vitally during war as well as peace” (Koistinen 396). The War Industries Board “negotiated war contracts, helped plants convert to military production, arranged to have new factories built, provided war producers with technical knowhow, and handled orders from the Allies” (Schaffer 45). Through the War Industries Board, the government-business organization was able “to supervise decisions of private industry; to regulate consumption of fuel, agricultural products, and other materials vital to war; to stimulate military production; to manipulate commerce and finance; and to control the nation’s transportation system” (Schaffer 47). The War Department reorganized and consolidated its procurement bureaus in order to better determine what materiel was required (Schaffer 45). Thus, “economic and military institutions were integrated for the duration of the war and the foundation for the ‘industrial-military complex’ was laid” (Koistinen 403).

Another important innovation in the governance structure was the creation of an apparatus to “manage the mind” of the American people (Schaffer 3). The Committee on Public Information (CPI), also known as the Creel Commission, was created by an executive order of President Wilson in April of 1917 in order to conduct American propaganda in the United States and overseas (Schaffer 4). Wilson named as directors the secretaries of the War, Navy, and Army departments, as well as the journalist George Creel (Schaffer 4). The commission flooded the newspapers with information– for example some six pounds a day of publicity to California newspapers—making “rational analysis difficult” (Schaffer 5). It was a wide ranging and well-coordinated media campaign which “issued press releases, placed ads in newspapers and magazines, organized conferences and ran speaking campaigns, attached posters to walls and billboards all over America, manufactured cartoons and slides, and produced war movies” (Schaffer 6). Modern advertising techniques—George Creel called it the “world’s greatest adventure in advertising”—were adopted by the Wilson administration in order to direct public opinion to support America’s role in the war (Schaffer 5).

As Schaffer writes, there were three basic themes to the propaganda: “a unity motif, the image of a despicable enemy, and the idea of a crusade for peace and freedom” (Schaffer 6). The unitary motif was essentially an appeal to nationalism, and was aimed at native born Americans and immigrants alike, who were encouraged to act on behalf of the “team” (Schaffer 7). The CPI distributed its information to Americans from all segments of society, with specific messages for each. The CPI tried to win over workers, many of whom were suspicious of the motivations for America’s entrance into the war, and President Wilson declared the nation to be engaged in a “laborers war” (Schaffer 8). A labor historian was assigned by the committee to write a leaflet “which explained that the profits of capitalists were being controlled and that union leaders served on the boards that set wages and hours” (Schaffer 8). Regarding the demonization of the enemy, the propaganda highlighted the military atrocities that had been inflicted by the German military, including against civilian populations, on land and at sea (Schaffer 8). The CPI produced numerous posters that depicted German soldiers as physically “animal-like,” and engaged in acts of violence against women and children (Schaffer 9). Propaganda also sought to depict America’s role in the war as taking out the Central Powers so as to bring peace to the world and to make it safe for democracy, a subject which Wilson spoke about at length in public(Schaffer 9). The war was even depicted in religious terms as being a “’crusade,’” and the Creel committee declared that it was “’not merely to re-win the tomb of Christ, but to bring back to earth the rule of right, the peace, goodwill to men and gentleness he taught’” (Schaffer 10).

Another aspect of the Wilson administration’s campaign to “manage the mind” of the American people was its effort to control dissent. Soon after the U.S. entered the war, the CPI advised editors that if they had doubt about the veracity or appropriateness of what they intended to print, then they should submit the material to the Committee (Schaffer 13). Because “the CPI did not tell the editors specifically what was banned, they had to guess what the government might object to; and unless they were unusually courageous or naive, they interpreted the committee’s directive broadly,” lest the CPI “turn them in to the Post Office and the Department of Justice, agencies with specific authority to curb dissent” (Schaffer 13-14). Books were banned by Creel’s Censorship Board, and lists were prepared to ban books, magazines, and movies for export that the Board disapproved of (Schaffer 14).

Congress would get involved in the censorship campaign when it passed the Espionage Act, which “authorized the Post Office to deny the mails to any piece of writing that violated the act’s other provisions,” which it enforced with no small degree of enthusiasm (Schaffer 14). Any writing—from private letters to newspapers and magazines– that questioned, let alone criticized, the government’s prosecution of the war was to be sent to the director of the Post Office, Albert S. Burleson (Schaffer 14). To give an example of the breadth and depth of censorship: Burleson “suppressed an issue of the Public for urging that more money be raised by taxes and less by loans” (Schaffer 14). When Burleson finally spoke out on the modus operandi of his censorship operations he explained that he targeted anything that said “’that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in for the wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the Government for going into the war,’” or that accused the government of acting on behalf of Wall Street or munitions producers (Schaffer 15).

If the Post Office suppressed dissent, or anything that was not full throated support for the war, then the Justice Department was responsible for imprisoning dissidents. It “instituted nearly 2,200 prosecutions and secured 1,055 convictions” (Schaffer 16). Among the most popular convictions was that of former presidential candidate and socialist Eugene Debs, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for saying to a group he was trying to convince to join his party that “’You need to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder’” (Schaffer 16). Again relying on the American spirit of volunteerism, the Justice Department employed 250,000 volunteers from the American Protection League to help it hunt down people against the war (Schaffer 17). Thus vigilantism ensued, as “APL members impersonated federal officers, opened private mail, wiretapped telephones, recorded conversations with dictaphones, broke into offices, conducted searches and seizures, and delivered materials they uncovered to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation” (Schaffer 17). State and local authorities also involved themselves in this effort, even sponsoring the American Protective League and other such groups (Schaffer 17).

German-Americans, the nation’s second largest ethnic minority, were a particular target of the vigilante groups. The propaganda described above was apparently effective, as “Americans ceased to eat frankfurters or sauerkraut or keep dachshunds as pets,” and, setting an important precedent, “’consumed “liberty sausages,” “liberty cabbage,” and walked “liberty dogs’” (Schaffer 20). The German language was restricted or outright banned in almost half of the states by the summer of 1918 (Schaffer 20). There were also a number of public beatings and executions of German-Americans throughout the nation (Schaffer 21-23). The government’s propaganda and censorship campaign ultimately proved effective, as the population embraced the war effort, and dissidents were either jailed or self-censored, “and the American people became mentally prepared, not only to serve on the battlefronts but also to join in the massive economic mobilization that the Great War demanded of belligerent nations” (Schaffer 30)

In conclusion, it is no exaggeration to state that the First World War resulted in policies that greatly changed the nature of the federal government. A new tax regime became necessary in the midst of falling revenues and plans for expansionary fiscal policy to build up the military. The substantial expansion of the income tax, both on individuals and corporations, as well as the estate tax, introduced into the U.S. a system of progressive taxation. The military expansion itself also created the precedent of government, business, and military coordination in directing the nation’s economic resources to war spending. Finally, the government’s large scale propaganda campaign to convince the public on the necessity of the U.S. entrance into the war, and the curtailment of free speech and the freedom of the press to quash dissent, represented a new feature of government power, as the Wilson administration, and then Congress, sought to manage the American mind.

Works Cited

Brownlee, Elliot. “Wilson and the Financing of the Modern State: The Revenue Act of 1916,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 129, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp.173-210.

Cook, Brian J.. Democracy and Administration : Woodrow Wilson’s Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management. Baltimore, MD, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Kloppenberg, James T.. Virtues of Liberalism. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.

Koistinen, Paul A.C. “The “Industrial- Military Complex” in Historical Perspective: World War I,” The Business History Review, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1967), pp. 378-403

Pollack, Sheldon D.. War, Revenue, and State Building : Financing the Development of the American State. Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Schaffer, Ronald. America in the Great War : The Rise of the War Welfare State. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Political Islam and Global Revolution

 

The phenomenon of political Islam is one of great complexity and is multifaceted in its manifestations and, thus, implications for contemporary world politics. In many Muslim countries, this essay will show, there was a definite trend towards secularism throughout much of the twentieth century, and especially in the immediate decades of the postcolonial period. Each of the authors covered in this essay point to specific causal factors that are responsible for the growing support that the Islamist movement has been able to attain, yet the arguments are all quite related. What can be clearly be ascertained is that there was a political space was created for the Islamists because all the secular opposition had been wiped out by the security apparatuses of these countries. Moreover, the developmental paradigm, based largely on the Soviet model of state control over industries, largely failed to produce wealth, at least in an equitable manner, even as the populations of these countries were booming, leading to massive migration to cities with very little in the way of state provided welfare services. Thus, the Islamists, effective political entrepreneurs as they were, capitalized on the failure of these states and built a constituency, promoting the Islamist political ideology all the while, which has only been growing in influence in recent decades. The effect on world politics of these recent trends has been troubling, especially for Western policymakers, and the US in particular. The reason this is the case, as I will argue, is not because Muslims are seeking to destroy the West, as one of our authors contends, but because one of the manifestations of political Islam is a terroristic variety that seeks to strike the West in such a way that its influence in Muslim countries is expelled entirely. In summation, it is an internationalized expression of the “re-Islamization” of society that is common to all Islamist parties.
Muhammad Ayoob, of all the authors that are covered in this essay, is the most comprehensive in his analysis of the emergence of political Islam, the varying manifestations that they take, and the challenge that it represents for contemporary world politics. A great driving force for the Islamists has been the nature of the authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world. Such regimes, which have been in power in many Muslim countries since these states attained independence from the imperial powers, repressed all secular political opposition through effective use of their intelligence and security apparatuses (Ayoob 155). In doing so, Ayoob argues, the regimes actually created the space in society into which Islamists could enter. A crucial point here is that the various regimes allowed the religious institutions to remain largely free of state control, and Islamists have been able to spread their ideology through the effective use of propaganda, and were thus able to build support for Islamist political action (Ayoob 156). An example of a successful political mobilization was the Iranian revolution of 1979. Due to the oppressiveness of the Shah’s regime, wiping out most of the secular opponents to the regime, a vacuum was created that could be filled by a “radical faction of the Shia clergy” (Ayoob 156). The clergy were able to antagonize the regime, especially by portraying it as a kind of usurper entity (which is a heavy dose of religious idiom), and then they portrayed their leaders as the only viable replacement of the Shah’s regime. The security apparatus was confronted with a conundrum, as opposition to the regime could only continue to build, yet to repress the clerics would only create further turmoil. Ayoob points out that secular opposition were also wiped out in Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan, even as Islamists were able to organize effectively (Ayoob 156).
Another critical factor accounting for the rising popularity of the Islamists is that they often filled another vacuum in society created by authoritarian regimes—namely the need for effective social services and charity. (This is a theme that is present in some of our other authors’ work as well.) The regimes had failed to develop their nations’ economies in a way that would benefit the poor masses had not created an effective social safety net. Islamist groups on the other hand, ranging from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, to the Hezbollah and Hamas of Lebanon and Palestine, respectively, have been able to effectively distribute aid and provide social services, thus becoming something of a shadow state, a dealing a further blow to the legitimacy of the regimes. This provides these organizations with a constituency and bolsters their political support (Ayoob 157).
Ayoob views the rise of political Islam as relatively benign, compared to our other authors, because he differentiates between those who want to simply live by the sharia, on the one hand, and the jihadi elements on the other. Thus, Ayoob sees the potential democratization of the rest of the Muslim countries as a potentially moderating influence. He notes that in Turkey and Indonesia, majority Muslim countries that are democratic, Islamist parties are moderate—in the sense that they are “willing to accept democratic norms of political participation,” even participating in coalitions with secular parties. That is a trend, he predicts (perhaps inaccurately, given recent events), that would occur with the Muslim Brothers were Egypt to begin to democratize (Ayoob 158-59). The more open the democratic system is, Ayoob argues, the more likely different strands of Islamism are able to be voiced, a kind of pluralism that prevents the more extreme wings to gain prominence. According to this theory, the Arab Spring, and the future democratization (if it occurs) of the Arab and Muslim world, should not be a prospect that is disconcerting for the world, but should indeed be welcomed, as the space for militants will be greatly diminished.
The argument that Gilles Kepel makes to account for the rise of political Islam is similar to that of Ayoob’s, in that he stresses the obliteration of secular political opposition and the failure of the state to improve living standards as key to providing space for the Islamists to enter. However, Kepel tends moer to stress the failure of secular ideologies—progressivism, socialism, anti-imperialism, and so on—which were cultivated by the regimes since achieving independence (Kepel 10). The regimes were ineffective at improving living standards—the emulation the Soviet model of development proved ruinous, as the state owned industries upon which hopes were pinned failed to become competitive internationally. The countries that purported to operate according to a market economy, moreover, were plagued by the “persistence of feudal mechanisms and the development of large-scale corruption” (Kepel 14). Marxists proved to be the main political opposition, even in the nominally socialist states of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Algeria (claiming the state was not pure enough ideologically), as well as in the “conservative or ‘bourgeois’” regimes of Turkey, Iran, and Lebanon (Kepel 15).
Political Islam displaced Marxism as the kind of Salvationist ideology with the onset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, as the “aspiration for a better world changed register and passed from the secular domain to the religious” (Kepel 17). The degree of secularization of the Muslim world, Kepel argues, was really exaggerated because the only opinions that were allowed to be heard were the more secular advocates for modernity (“Westernization”). In reality, those who argued that the “social order must have a religious foundation went unperceived,” yet they were still an influential voice (Kepel 17). The Muslim Brothers of Egypt were harshly suppressed or eliminated, and yet it was one of their most prominent ideologues, Sayyid Qutib, whose message about the need for an Islamic “break” would later resonate strongly with the downtrodden masses. The idea was to destroy the “barbaric” states under which Muslims lived in the present and to restore the original Islamic society that had been brought by the Prophet Muhammad to the Arabian Desert in the 7th century (Kepel 20). Kepel writes that “it is the idea of the break, in its many interpretations, that is at the root of contemporary movements of re-Islmaization” (Kepel 21). What pushed political Islam into the spotlight was actually a confluence of factors.
The space for the Islamist movements was the blow dealt to the credibility of the Arab regimes in the aftermath of their defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, a defeat that “was immediately construed as a sign of overall failure” (Kepel 21). It was the armed Palestinian resistance against some of these very same Arab regimes, and the radicalization of the student movement in Egypt, that drove Sadat into attacking Israel in 1973, driving it out of the Sinai. The Arab oil embargo of the same year led to the enrichment of the oil producing states, especially the Saudi regime, which would use its financial assets to propagate its own version of Islam throughout the world, but also promoted the “movements inspired by Sayyid Qutb” and “promoted their spread” (Kepel 22). Moreover, the overpopulation of many Muslim countries was compounded by the ineffectiveness of the states’ to do anything about this, and so “Islamic welfare networks were coming to play an essential part in assimilating those elements of the population who aspired to taste the fruits of modernity and prosperity, but could not get them” (Kepel 24). The Islamists also played an important role in the universities, by providing a gamut of services and, at the same time, they “instilled an attitude of ‘Islamic break’ with the surrounding world” (Kepel 25).
The influence of political Islam has only gained in the last few decades, however it may have reached its ascendance, at least in terms of a top-down strategy, with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. However, as a political force, political Islam remains strong. Kepel points out that these Islamist movements are essentially antithetical to democracy, and indeed, despise it as something ungodly. In Islamic culture, it is not the people that are sovereign, the demos; rather, God is sovereign. The goal of these movements is not to democratize these states, but to overthrow their “ungodly” rulers, and perhaps to expunge the territories of non-Muslims (Kepel 194). Moreover, the goal of the Islamists has international implications, as the “aim is to participate in a dynamic process of spreading Islam to the whole of humanity, while defending an identity that is under threat during temporary ‘phases of weakness’” (Kepel 200). This could mean conquering non-Muslim countries and forcing them to convert, but Kepel seems to mean to re-Islamicize Muslims that live in the West and elsewhere, and to “break” with the infidel ways of being and to communalize. How damaging this is to the idea of citizenship and the nation remains to be seen, but a certain danger that exists is the kind of militancy that can be bred in such an environment.
Another author, Bernard Lewis, cites the backwardness of the Muslim world, in terms of economic performance, poverty, illiteracy, and tyrannical governments as provoking a kind of anti-modernism. His argument relates to one of the major themes of Professor Janos’ lectures, the International Demonstration Effect, as, with “modern media and communication, even the poorest and most ignorant are painfully aware of the differences between themselves and others, alike at the personal, familial, local, and societal levels” (Lewis 117). Lewis writes that “many Muslims speak of the failure of modernization and respond with different diagnoses of the sickness of their society, with different prescriptions for its cure” (Lewis 118). For some, “modernity itself is the problem and the source of all their woes” (Lewis 119). Presumably, these people have realized that what their societies have not been able to attain, namely modernity, is actually antithetical to Islam. Thus, the desire is to overthrow the regimes that are both repressive and un-Islamic, but also to strike out the states that have propped up their regimes for selfish reasons (Lewis 120). Thus, the different strands of political Islam, that which is internally focused, like the Muslim Brothers and other fundamentalists, as well as the terroristic variety, the al Qaeda types, are derived from fundamentally the same seed, the failure of Muslim societies to modernize.
Samuel Huntington, in his Clash of Civilizations, gives us another, and quite interesting, view of the rise of political Islam. Huntington places its rise in the context of the long history of the conflict between the West and Islam, and argues that what has occurred is actually an Islamic Resurgence in a civilizational war. That is, the political salience of Islam had been rather dormant in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. However, given the nature of Christianity and Islam, both as religions and civilizations, as expansionist and uncompromising, they create an environment of mutual hostility—an “us and them” dynamic (Huntington 211). Huntington, like Kepel, makes reference to the population boom that occurred in the Muslim countries in the 20th century, as it “generated large numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people who become recruits for Islamic causes, exert pressure on neighboring societies, and migrate to the West” (Huntington 211). Huntington argues that there has been a renewed sense of the worth of their civilization’s values vis-à-vis the West. This kind of reaction has taken place because the West has attempted to universalize its secular values and institutions, succeeded in building economic and military supremacy, and has intervened in conflicts in the Muslim world. Communism disappeared as a political force in global politics, which threatened both the West and Islam, and now each has the other as its main enemy. As the world has become more connected, Westerners and Muslims are coming into contact with each other more often, and this actually hardens identity differences. Such interaction and intermingling, Huntington argues, has become particularly problematic in states which contain both Christians and Muslims, as who is going to dominate the other becomes a central political question (Huntington 211).
Huntington’s argument actually seems quite compatible with and comparable to Ayoob’s and Kepel’s. Westernization had been seen as the model through which postcolonial Muslim societies could generate wealth and improve living standards. The policies that were pursued, and failed, came to be seen as just another Western imposition, a neo-colonialism, aimed at wiping out the cultural traditions of Islam. Thus, the Islamists seek to restore and “maintain the integrity of that culture against Western onslaught,” which is “materialistic, corrupt, decadent, and immoral” (Huntington 213). However, this conflict is not limited to expunging society of what the West imposed, directly or indirectly (Western political ideas adopted independently, for example), and is not domestically contained. This line of reasoning is very much consistent with our other authors. The Muslim states have become anti-Western in their foreign policies as well, and the West and Muslim countries now fight over “issues such as weapons proliferation, human rights and democracy, control of oil, migration, Islamist terrorism, and Western intervention” (Huntington 212). As I will show below, these conflicts are not inevitable, and the usefulness of the civilizational paradigm is hardly credible.
Since the Iranian Revolution, Huntington writes, there has been an “intercivilizational quasi war” between the West and Islam, as Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, as well as “a wide range of Islamist organizations” funded by the Saudis and other Islamic regimes, “have been fighting the United States and, at times, Britain, France and other Western states and groups, as well as Israel and Jews generally” (Huntington 216). It seems that Huntington is unaware of the fact that, as Ayoob points out, American support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan played a vital role in creating a fighting force that would one day be known as al Qaeda (Ayoob 165). He says that it is a “quasi war” because it does not include all of the members of the two civilizations and is not continuous; and the tactics that are used are limited, with terrorism on one side and “airpower, covert action, and economic sanctions on the other” (Huntington 216). One cannot deny the phenomena that are described above have a factual basis. However, as we are taught in PS 3, correlation does not say anything about causation. What of the rest of the Muslim countries—what of Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Muslims of India? Over 500 million Muslims with whom we are not “at war with.” He writes that another aspect of this war is that the US plots the overthrow of “extremist Islamist regimes” (Huntington 217). The US tried to overthrow democratic governments during the Cold War (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and so on). Does this mean that the US was at war with democracy (the US, of course, called all of these target governments communists)? Or was it Third World nationalism that was seen as particularly threatening to US interests, thus needing to be repressed? It is not Islam that the US is at war with, and Islam is not at war with the US. It is not a civilizational paradigm that explains the conflicts, but an international state system in which a hegemon has attempted to create certain spheres of influence, supported authoritarian regimes, and is now dealing with the blowback of such activity as Islamists are attempting to change that order, though most often in a limited sense of internal revolution.
The anonymous author of Through our Enemies Eyes (the former head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA), indeed focuses on the origins of the particularly militant strand of political Islam. The author notes that many in the Muslim world have the perception “that Washington is prosecuting a systematic and brutal anti-Islamic policy” that “has stacked the deck in al Qaeda’s favor” (Anonymous 229). Yet, as he points out, it is not only al Qaeda’s targeting of American targets that is noteworthy, as he was writing in the early 2000s there were Islamist insurgencies against the former Soviet states in Central Asia, Russian Chechnya and Dagestan, the Southern Philippines, Algeria, Kashmir, and the threat of armed conflict in many other countries with Muslim populations throughout Asia and Africa (Anonymous 230). The writer frames the conflict in very much the same terms as Huntington, namely as civilizational. The Christian West is seen as attacking Islam, directly or indirectly (by siding with its enemies, for example, in Indian controlled Kashmir). This may be the language that is used by the jihadi movements, but one should not, therefore, ignore that the terms of the conflict are explicitly political—
Given the scale of Islamist militancy, which has proven to be a major security concern for Western states, and is indeed spreading further into Africa as I write, the challenge to contemporary world politics is quite substantial. The Islamist groups that have gained prominence in Nigeria, Mali, and Somalia for example, seem to be focused on the domestic regime, and the internal ethnic makeup. These phenomena are indeed troubling, yet they are very much consistent with the Islamist credo of setting up a puritanical Islamic regime. This problem only grows when these countries become failed states and provide space for more internationally oriented terrorists to set up camp. That being said, the primary reason that al Qaeda has sought to attack the US is to drive it out of the Muslim world, where it used to have military bases in Saudi Arabia and Jordan (now relocated to elsewhere in the Gulf). The military presence in the Muslim has yet to be reduced, and in fact, since 9-11, the US has invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, and bombed Pakistan and Libya. Moreover, the US continues to support Israel almost unconditionally, which is another reason bin Laden sought to attack America. These policies continue to fuel resentment and provide fodder for Islamic terrorist groups. Moreover, the policies of other Western countries, both domestic anti-terrorism measures mostly aimed at Islamists, and international actions, like aiding the US in the Iraq War or supporting tyrannical governments, have been perceived as attacking Muslims and have led to terrorist attacks in Britain and Spain and made others, like France, a target (Anonymous 234-235). The writer was pretty accurate in predicting that the US response to the 9-11 attacks, with the so-called War on Terrorism, has only led to widening animosity for the West, especially America, in the Muslim world (Anonymous 239-241). This argument is more accurate than Huntington’s, because it focuses more on power than culture, and is actually based on empirical evidence—the reasons that Osama bin Laden actually wanted to attack the United States are well documented, as are those terrorists who struck London and Madrid, which were aimed at forcing their respective governments out of Iraq.
As I hope this essay has showed, the rise of political Islam is the result of the particular regime types that took hold in many Muslim countries in the postcolonial era, particularly their oppressiveness and their failures to actually modernize. The regimes created a vacuum in politics and civil society that was filled by Islamists, as they proved a viable alternative to the tyrannies that existed. Moreover, the message of the need to “break” with the barbarism imposed upon Muslims has resonated with many, and is proving to be an influential feature of the politics of societies that are including more popular forms of government (see Egypt’s proposed constitution). However, as Ayoob has argued, Muslims are not monolithic, and indeed, in places such as Egypt, there is not a consensus that the society is to be returned to the 7th century, and indeed liberals and leftists are a strong force. What is most troubling for contemporary world politics is the militant brand of Islamism, as it has proven a security threat for the West and other states. The extent that the West can ameliorate this threat depends on, to a great extent it seems, on how it reduces its military footprint in the Muslim world. This, however, does not mean stability will ensue in the Muslim world, as Muslim societies themselves are often highly diverse, and sectarianism remains is proving to be a major destabilizing force, much as it did after the Protestant Reformation in Europe. This last point deals a further blow to the civilizational paradigm, as the majority of violence taking place in the Muslim world is “intracivilizational,” it is about which groups in these countries are going to rule, and thus represent the kind of ethnic conflict that has existed in almost every heterogeneous nation-state.

Does Size Matter? Montesquieu and the American Republic

         

            The political theorist Montesquieu had the idea that size matters greatly when it comes to the viability of a republic. Republics, he says, are popular governments that are driven by the principle of virtue—such a love of the republic that one refrains from satisfying their “particular passions” in order to devote one’s “passions for the general order” (Montesquieu 43).  As such, republics can only exist in a small territory, he argued, because in large republics there emerges opportunities for great wealth, and individuals are more likely to sacrifice the common good in order to pursue individual goals. As Montesquieu writes, one can achieve greatness “only on the ruins of his homeland” (Montesquieu, 124). In a large republic, the centrality of the common good is sacrificed to “a thousand considerations,” whereas in a small republic, “the public good is better felt, better known, lies nearer to  each citizen” (Montesquieu, 124).  One has a vested interest acting to ensure the public good only in a small republic. Yet, according to Montesquieu, small republics suffer from a serious flaw: namely, they are unable to defend themselves from a larger foreign force, the invasion of which dissolves the republican civic institutions and leads to the expropriation of all property (Montesquieu, 130). Montesquieu offers a solution for this conundrum about republics—death by internal vice in a large republic, or by external invasion in small one—by highlighting the historical successes of federal republics. Federal republics combine the strength of virtue that is cultivated in a republican government with a means for collective defense by an assemblage of states (Montesquieu, 131-132).

            Publius, the shared name under which The Federalist Papers were penned, argued for the support of a United States Constitution that would erect a much more powerful federal government than existed under the Articles of Confederation. In Federalist number 9, Alexander Hamilton argued that the opponents of the Constitution—the anti-Federalists—wrongly cite Montesquieu’s praise of small republics in their favoring of the status quo of a decentralized Confederacy (Federalist 9, 43). The small republics that Montesquieu wrote about, Hamilton points out, were much smaller than most of the states in the Confederacy. They were ignoring, Hamilton argued further, the fact that Montesquieu saw the expansion and maintenance of republican government as being possible only by the establishment of a confederacy, as evidenced in the passages of Montesquieu cited above, which Hamilton quotes at length (Federalist 9, 44-45). James Madison, in Federalist number 10, points out there is a tendency for “factions” to arise in popular governments, which he defines as a “number of citizens” who are “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” (Federalist 10, 48). Such a tendency for factions, Madison argues, has been the “disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished”—regardless of how small they were (Federalist 10, 47). The institutional structure that would be created by the Constitution controls the effects of the inevitable emergence of factions (Federalist 10, 50). In a relatively small republic, there is strong likelihood that a faction that is large enough to impose its tyrannical will on the rest of the population will emerge. In a large enough republic, there are many more interest groups, and the particularities of each are so various that it is much less likely that “a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens,” and if one does, they will have trouble acting because of the mutual distrust between the groups (Federalist 10, 53).

             One of the important features of the arguments of Montesquieu and Publius is their agreement about the power that was possible through the establishment of confederate republics. As Hannah Arendt points out, Hamilton and Madison trumpeted Montesquieu’s historical and theoretical treatment of confederate republics, as they argued that the viability of republican government hinged on the creation of a confederation, as opposed to the mere “alliance” under the Articles of Confederation (Arendt, 144-145). She writes that the “true objective of the American Constitution was not to limit power but to create more power” by creating “an entirely new power center” to compensate the lost power now that America was no longer part of the British Empire (Arendt, 145). The state governments are strengthened under the scheme of the Constitution, as they possess “certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power,” even as they are “constituent parts of the national sovereignty” via their “direct representation in the Senate” (Federalist 9, 46). Arendt points out that Madison had argued that “the very establishment of the Union had founded a new source of power which in no way drew its strength from the powers of the states, as it had not been established at their expense” (Arendt, 144).

Montesquieu might have been amazed at how picturesque the United States was as large republic. Tocqueville agrees with Montesquieu regarding the corruptive nature that exists in a large state, especially considering that majority action, rather than a strong prince, is the only means to combat the “Great wealth, abject poverty, big cities, lax morality, personal egotism, and the confusion of interests” in a republic (Tocqueville, 187). Tocqueville reckons that it entirely possible that the logic of Hamilton and Madison is correct: that a larger population means a more diverse set of interest groups, which makes it more difficult for a “unified majority” to form and enact schemes that undermine the public good (Tocqueville, 187). There is something else that tempers the destructive passions that might arise in a condition of freedom—that is, the “republican spirit” of Americans. The “public spirit of the Union,” however, is “not itself anything other than a summing up of provincial patriotism” (Tocqueville, 190). Much as Montesquieu thought that it was in the self-interest for one to sacrifice their passions for the benefit of the public good, Tocqueville points out that an American, in defending the Union, “is defending the growing prosperity of his district, the right to control its affairs, and the hope of establishing plans for improvement which are to bring him wealth” (Tocqueville, 190). It is the Union’s very size, its commercial spirit and talented population that provides its strength. As Tocqueville writes, “The Union is as free and happy as a small nation, as glorious and strong as a great one” (Tocqueville, 191).

Montesquieu thought that only by being subsumed into a confederacy would a small republic have the power to survive. As Alexis de Tocqueville was able to observe during his travels in America, republicanism, which Montesquieu thought was necessarily a very local affair, was thriving notwithstanding the establishment of a very powerful Union. The people, Tocqueville observed, were truly sovereign at the level of the township, which operated as a participatory democracy. What Tocqueville saw in the United States was essentially Montesquieu’s idea of virtue; it was a place where freedom did not mean that men had the “right to do anything he liked,” as “social duties were imposed upon him more various than anywhere else” (Tocqueville, 85). It was the fact that such associations, such “confidence in one another,” as John Adams said, predated the Revolution that something much larger was able to be assembled. To the men of the Revolution, Arendt writes, “power came into being when and where people would get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges” (Arendt, 173). Tocqueville writes that, when the Revolution broke out, there was little that the “upper classes” could do to stop the tide of such democratic forces (Tocqueville, 69). Democratic seeds had been planted in the township and they grew up from there, to the county, then the state, and ultimately the Union (Tocqueville, 72). If a small republic is dependent upon a confederation for its very survival, it is equally the case that for the United States, the Union could not have sprung into being without the existence of its smallest parts.

Works Cited

Arrendt, Hannah. On Revolution. London, England: Penguin Books (2006).

Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. The Federalist Papers (Rethinking the Western Tradition), ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press (2009)

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. London, England: Penguin Books (2003).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Racial Politics in a Majority-Minority America

Jamelle Bouie, writing for Slate, makes an interesting post about the potential course American politics might take, given the declining proportion of whites in the country vis-à-vis minorities. He fears that America will eventually look more like Mississippi; that is to say, its politics will be dominated by a racial division between whites and non-whites. Bouie points to research that shows that, when white subjects have been primed by the experimenters with references about their potentially becoming a minority population, their political views become significantly more conservative. The shift occurs, Bouie argues, basically out of fear. The logic is really simple: When the demographic  makeup of the country shifts, it is expected that there will be a commensurate shift in power and influence. Non-whites are going to increasingly gain control over the purse strings, and so they can be expected to reap some kind distributional dividend, and apparently at the expense of whites. If there is one common thread that has run throughout the rising significance of the Tea Party, it is this idea that there is a dichotomous split between “takers” and “makers” in American society. The fiscal conservatism of the Tea Party is not so much concerned about shrinking the size of government, but rather scaling back its functions so that only those “deserving” of benefits receive them.

Bouie goes on to discuss the really dark periods of racism in American history—from slavery to Reconstruction era violence– all of which were driven by the fear among whites that their status was imperiled because of the growing numbers of blacks.  It is a theme that pervades American history. The current state of the South, while not featuring a large amount of racial violence, is quite deplorable. Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi are all characterized by a highly polarized electoral politics, pitting blacks and whites against each other. As a result, Bouie argues, there has been a “huge disinvestment in public goods like education and health, and a political culture where the central question isn’t “how can we help each other” but “how can I stop them from taking what I have.” Bouie’s fear is that, with a growing non-white population, these phenomena are likely to spread throughout the country.

The fear that Bouie expresses is a reasonable one. As Bouie writes, we have already seen that a majority of whites voted for the President’s white Republican challengers, while most non-whites voted for President Obama. Moreover, the recently passed budget in the House, drawn up by Paul Ryan, seems to point in the direction of retrenchment that Bouie fears. Social programs, even beyond those that are typically thought of as “welfare” (with all of the negative connotations that the phrase entails), are slated to be pared back, including food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, the Obamacare provisions, and Pell Grants. This Republican vision affects whites and non-whites alike, including those in the Tea Party who have been telling Democrats since 2009 to “keep their hands off Medicare,” because all racial groups benefit from social programs. Thus, Bouie’s question, in this age of growing inequality, is essentially whether race will trump class. One thing that is certain is that Democratic politicians are actually quite pleased to have the Republican platform out in the open. It allows Democrats feature its own platform that potentially will unite the different racial groups along a class lines. While white voters in the study that Bouie cites did express more conservative views when the idea of their becoming a minority was broached, how the whole thing will play out electorally and through governance remains to be seen

 

Will the Supreme Court destroy our democracy?

There has been yet another Supreme Court decision striking down limitations on electoral spending, as it ruled that caps on individual contributions violate the First Amendment. The amount that an individual may contribute to a candidate remains capped at $2,600, and so the court has simply eliminated the cap on the aggregate contributions allowed. Basically, this does not seem like a huge deal, as there is already so much money sloshing around in politics now. Theoretically, a donor may contribute the maximum amount to every candidate running for federal office, but given the sheer magnitude of the sums that candidates for federal office raise, the maximum contribution is but a drop in the bucket to these candidates. Thus the influence that any one individual is able to exert over a candidate is still quite limited, especially compared to the power that super PACs now wield. Super PACs already operate with tens of millions of dollars to contribute to entities that function like campaign organs, under the guise that candidates have no role in their operations. The hypothetical scenarios that Justice Steven Breyer warned about in his dissent in the McCutcheon case, such as money pouring into the coffers of candidates at the last minute, is already occurring under the regime created by Citizens United. The McCutcheon decision creates another way for the wealthiest donors to coalesce around a candidate of their choice, which certainly raises major issues about the potentially corrupting nature of contributions. To argue that it makes the electoral system, and our democratic politics, substantially worse, is hyperbolic.

 

International Political Economy paper

This is a paper from my senior year at UC Berkeley

Liberalism and Neo-mercantilism:

A Comparison of American and Chinese Foreign Economic Policy in the 1980s

(bibliography has been lost)

This essay examines the foreign economic policies of the United States and China in the 1980s using the lens of two analytical approaches, liberalism and neo-mercantilism. As different as the histories of these two nations had been up to that point, in that decade they shared some important policy features. The United States had been the major player in international trade since World War II. China, on the other hand, had for some 30 years been functioning in an autarkic system with a very small international footprint. Entering the 1980s, the United States struggled to keep what had been its powerhouse industries alive as international competition heated up. China, on the other hand, was just beginning to open up its economic system to international trade after decades of complete state control, and so it had to undergo a policy transformation. As I will argue in this essay, both countries embraced neo-mercantilist policies, and thus often shunned liberal economic principles in order to gain an advantage against international competitors.

It is necessary to start with a brief introduction to the differences between liberalism and neo-mercantilism. A liberal international economy is one that is “characterized by relatively free trade, currency convertibility, and freedom of capital movement” (Gilpin 38). Such an international economy requires that nation’s pursue their comparative advantage, which is what they are relatively most efficient at producing given their natural endowments of labor, land, and capital, and precludes the intervention of governments (Lecture 2/2/2012). Global efficiency in the allocation of resources leads to the most prosperous world possible, and, moreover, all parties reap the benefits. Neo-mercantilism actually happens to be a response to the above liberal vision, and it has a very different view of the nature and purpose of the nation-state. If liberalism sees wealth expanding for all to gain, neo-mercantilism views the gains as being zero-sum. Thus, according to the latter view, state behavior should be geared toward securing the national interest through the pursuit of the maximization of wealth and power. In terms of policy, liberal policies are those that open the nation’s borders by reducing barriers to trade and rolling back government intervention in the economy. Neo-mercantilist policies go quite in the opposite direction, as they are government policies that are aimed towards the protection of domestic industries from the forces of global competition (Lecture 2/9/2012).

The environment in which foreign economic policy was formulated in the U.S. in the 1980s was one in which there was substantial pressure for protectionism. Unemployment was relatively high, having risen from 5.7 to 7 percent from 1979 to 1980. The U.S. economy was more sensitive to exports and imports than ever before. In 1980, international trade amounted to 12 percent of the gross national product, up from 6 percent in 1970 (Richardson 8-9). The position of the U.S. in terms of trade balance suffered throughout the 1970s, and it “deteriorated precipitously in the early 1980s” (Richardson 12). As a result, “Pressures to protect devastated industries and regions…reached feverish intensity (Richardson 12).

The Reagan administration, which was inaugurated in 1981, allowed the trade bureaucracy to wind its way through. Industry groups or individual firms are allowed to submit petitions to the government, which “require investigations by the International Trade Administration (ITA) of the Department of Commerce and by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), an independent agency.” Paula Stern, who was a commissioner on the ITC from 1976 to 1987, writes that “Most investigations involve allegations of unfair and injurious competition from subsidized imports or dumped imports (imports sold at less than fair value) and are intended to ensure ‘fair’ pricing” (Stern 38). Both the ITC and the ITA must make “positive determinations” that material injury has been caused by dumped or subsidized imports, at which time a duty will be applied to eliminate the advantage (Stern 40). As Stern writes, the system is “intended insofar as possible to be free of politics” (Stern 38).This system for dealing with industry complaints was set up by Congress and the various presidential administrations because of the realization that protectionism was a major cause of the Great Depression and World War II.  Congress was made safe from industry demands for protection, and this was fundamental to ensuring that liberal foreign economic policies prevailed (Alesino  310).

There seems to be a strong consensus as to why the trade deficit essentially skyrocketed in the 1980s, as a “mix of tight money and loose budgets drove the dollar skyward and sent international balances awry” (Destler 251). The strong dollar made U.S. exports less competitive, while, domestically, imports became less expensive for Americans.  Thus, the “ratio of U.S. imports to exports peaked at 1.64 in 1986, a disproportion not seen since the War between the States” (Destler 251). The result of these economic realities had an “enormous impact on the balance of trade politics: enlarging the population of the “trade-afflicted”; diminishing those gaining on the export side; weakening the legitimacy for existing trade policy approaches; driving Congress and the administration to take action” (Destler 255). Destler sums up the changed political calculus of foreign economic policy by saying that “Mercantilism became semilegitimate” (Destler 254). The various demands for protection by American industry ultimately prevailed over liberal principles.

The Reagan administration entered office with the U.S. auto industry facing the “greatest trade-related disruption any U.S. industry had experience since the Great Depression” (Alesina 271). Over 300,000 of the 1 million autoworkers in the U.S. were unemployed. Imports of automobiles had surged from 17.7 to 26.7 percent of the U.S. market from 1978 to 1980. A major reason for the increased demand for imported cars was the fact that smaller, more fuel efficient cars that Americans began to demand were produced by Japanese automakers, and the American automakers were failing to adapt to changing consumption patterns (Cohen 178). In 1980, the automobile company Ford and the United Auto Workers, filed a petition with the ITC. In a 3-2 vote, the ITC ruled that import relief could not be granted because “energy-related, non-import factors were the most important source of the industry’s problems” (Cohen 178). With such a ruling, the administration had no legal authority to impose restrictions on imports (Cohen 178). This would seem like a major victory for supporters of liberalism, as the U.S. auto industry was being outcompeted, and so U.S. trade law barred government retaliation. Moreover, adaptation to changing market conditions was a formidable task as American auto companies “faced an estimated $80 billion price tag for retooling and new capital equipment to make the smaller cars that Americans wanted to buy” (Cohen 178). In the liberal terminology, Japan had achieved a comparative advantage in producing fuel efficient cars. Under a free trade regime, getting wiped out by competition means that the global economy is functioning properly, as the world’s resources are being used in an efficient way.

For politicians in the United States, unemployment and possible deindustrialization had to be averted, and so they had to turn toward neo-mercantilism. President Reagan’s cabinet was split on whether to impose import restrictions on automobiles (Cohen 179). Meanwhile, in lieu of any legal option protection American auto companies, Congress was “drafting automobile quota legislation that would have severely cut back imports from Japan” (Cohen 179). President Reagan had promised during his electoral campaign to convince the Japanese to restrict their imports, and this is precisely what he went on to do, thus preventing a severe restriction on the part of Congress (Cohen 180). Japan pledged to reduce the “number of cars sold in 1981-82 by 7.7 percent below the previous year” (Alesino 259). This form of “negotiated protectionism” is what is known as a “voluntary export restraint,” or VER, and it would remain in place throughout the eighties (Alesion 260). Thus, notwithstanding the supposed liberal safeguards built into the trade policy making apparatus, protectionist forces were still able to triumph

The number of VERs would soon proliferate. On January 11, 1982, Destler writes, “seven US steelmakers jointly delivered 494 boxes containing 3 million pages of documentation for 132 countervailing and antidumping petitions against foreign (mainly European Community) suppliers” (Destler 154). The European suppliers were indeed subsidizing their industries, and so instead of going through the legal procedures stipulated under US law, the Europeans “sought to bargain,” so as to prevent serious disruption  (Destler 154). Thus, the “EC ‘voluntarily’ restricted carbon steel exports to the United States to 5.44 percent of the US market” (Destler 154). In 1984, the steel industry again flooded the trade bureaucracy with petitions alleging unfair trading practices, this time aimed at the newly industrializing countries, especially Brazil, Korea, and Mexico (Destler 155). The steel industry was quite frank in expressing its desire to see “’temporary’ steel import quotas, however they might be achieved or implemented” (Destler 155).

By the time that the International Trade Commission had voted 3 to 2 in favor of 5 of the 9 import categories under question, employment in the industry had dropped by 200,000. The ITC recommended to President Reagan a “series of tariffs, quotas, and tariff-rate-quotas for five years on products in those five categories” (Destler 156). Yet President Reagan rejected the ITC’s recommendations on the grounds that, in the words of his Trade Representative, “protectionism is not in the national interest. It costs jobs, raises prices, and undermines our ability to compete overseas” (Destler 157). These are the words of a devout liberal, it seems. Yet, rhetoric is one thing, and the actual political calculus is quite another. Negotiations by the Reagan administration were held or reaffirmed with every major foreign seller of steel, regardless of whether the ITC had found injury as a result of the seller’s imports (Destler 157). The agreements, finalized in the months before the 1984 presidential election, were to last five years. As Destler writes: “What all this amounted to was systemic circumvention of the rules for enforcing fair trade, for creating a level playing, to which the administration, and Congress, claimed to give their highest priority!” (Destler 157). Overall, in the years from 1981 to 1983, the percentage of imported goods that was subject to quantitative restrictions doubled from 6.2 to 12.72 percent. Moreover, when the impact of high tariffs is included, the percentage of imports subject to protection was 21 percent in 1984 (Destler 195).

In Reagan’s second term of office, beginning in 1985, he sought to rectify one of the most important drivers of the trade troubles that the American economy was experiencing, namely the overvalued dollar (Alesino 266). This was achieved with the Plaza Accord of June 1985, which was agreement between the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan to allow the dollar to depreciate (Destler 350). This neo-mercantilist initiative was intended to bring about a decline in the 12 digit trade deficit by making US exports more competitively priced, as well as imports more expensive vis-à-vis domestically produced goods. The devaluation of the dollar was to be supplemented by an activist export policy, as President Reagan pledged to “press several unfair trade practice cases against Japan, the European Community, Korea, and Brazil” (Destler 122). Reagan’s Trade Representative, Clayton Yeutter, led “negotiations aimed at opening specific foreign markets under threat of closing our own,” which has been referred to as “aggressive unilateralism” (Destler 123).

The US had had on its law books a provision, Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, that grants the “president authority to take any of a broad range of retaliatory actions against a country that ‘maintains unjustifiable or unreasonable tariff or other import restrictions,’ or ‘subsidies . . . on its exports . . . which have the effect of substantially reducing sales of the competitive United States product. . . .’” (Destler 123). Section 301 had basically been kept in the closet for over a decade, but it had the potential to be wielded as a serious tool in “export politics” (Destler 124).

The most prominent Section 301 case in the 1980s was against the Japanese semiconductor industry, as Japanese imports not only were not only harming U.S. automakers, but also the American semiconductor industry. In 1985, the Semiconductor Industry Association, the American trade group, filed a Section 301 case against Japan alleging that “import resistance” was a barrier to market entry. Soon after that, “antidumping cases were submitted by individual US firms and by the secretary of Commerce” (Destler 125). The administration viewed the state-of-the-art industry as being a “critical domestic industry,” and thought the decline of the industry would have “strongly negative implications for the competitiveness of the American economy as a whole” (Zeng 136). The U.S. and Japan commenced negotiations and “adopted a system of minimum prices and reporting of sales by Japanese firms” (Destler 126). Furthermore, there was a commitment to allowing the U.S. to attain a 20 percent market share of the Japanese market in 5 years (Destler 126). As soon as it became apparent that Japan was going to renege on the agreement, President Reagan “imposed punitive (100 percent) tariffs against selected Japanese electronics imports” (Destler 127). This, you might say, was the height of U.S. neo-mercantilism in the 1980s.

The discussion of China that follows traces an even more remarkable change in foreign economic policy than the one of the U.S. outlined above. Prior to 1978, “the Chinese economy was virtually closed to the outside world” (Fu 223). That year, China began to implement a series of reforms that both made the economy more open, as total state control was relaxed, while at the same time maintaining a heavy hand in guiding the nation towards industrial growth.

The pre-reform Maoist era, which began in 1949, was characterized by a centrally controlled economic system. The Communist regime espoused an ideology which “considered trade and commercial activities to be the ‘tail of capitalism’ that should be cut’” (Lin 31). Thus, private property was abolished, land was confiscated and redistributed, and a collectivized state controlled mode of production ensued (Lin 33). It was the very antithesis of a liberal economic model, in terms of being closed off from the international economy, and the subordination of the market to the dictates of state planners. The Communist regime’s long-term plan, however, was to build a state with an industrial capacity equal to that of the United States (Lin 34-35). This goal of industrialization necessitated the acquisition of technologies and machinery from abroad, and so China followed an import substitution industrialization model, with “importers supplying products necessary for the implementation of key development plans in industry and exporters selling goods necessary to finance imports” (Bożyk 223-224).

The death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and the emergence of Deng Xiaoping at the helm of the Communist Party led to a reassessment of China’s economic policies. Ultimately a more open economic system was embraced. As Lin writes, “the role of central planning was significantly reduced, coupled with the introduction of free market forces in the national economy” (Lin 60). The goal of the Chinese government was to maintain a balance between imports and exports, but this theoretical commitment to a balance was made “with the important qualification that it should be calculated over a longer period than one year” (Gittings 226). Thus, the regime commenced a buying spree of “turn-key plants and new technology which caused three successive trade deficits in 1978– 80” (Gittings 226).

China’s embrace of foreign trade dovetailed with the policy goal of the Mao era of nation building, as “outwardly oriented economies usually achieve higher rates of savings and investment, and greater efficiency in the use of investment resources, both of which contribute to higher rates of growth” (Lardy 1075). Growth was the key word during the Maoist era, and this is precisely what China experienced when it began to integrate into the international economy. Between 1979 and 1985 China’s “growth in the volume of exports was steady and continuous at an average rate of 20 per cent per annum” (Nayyer 92). Exports were able to take off because China implemented reforms that “began to erode the bias against exports inherent in the traditional China’s trade policy and began to conform China’s foreign trade system with standard international practices” (Lardy 38). Among these reforms were the decentralization of the foreign trading authority, an end to import subsidies, a devaluation of the currency, and a reduction in direct import subsidies (Lardy 38).

The decentralization of foreign trading authority meant that the central government had “relinquished the monopoly over the foreign trade it had exercised, through its subordinate foreign trading corporations, since the mid-1950s” (Lardy 39). In the prior system, “Export products were sold to foreign trade companies at officially established domestic prices, either ex factory prices for manufactured goods or government procurement prices for agricultural goods,” and so producers “had little incentive to expand production of goods for which there was strong international demand” (Lardy 30). Goods produced for the domestic market received protection from imported goods by a pricing mechanism that “amounted to a variable import tariff that automatically marked up the price of imports to the cost level of the domestic producer” (Lardy 30). The major tenet of liberalism is that countries should pursue their comparative advantage in international trade so that their domestic resources are allocated most efficiently, thus maximizing potential economic growth, was clearly violated through China’s price control system (Lardy 31). Overall trade was greatly stunted and the type of trade was distorted. Lardy argues that China’s comparative advantage was in labor-intensive goods, given its huge population, but capital-intensive commodities, especially crude oil and refined petroleum products, made up the bulk of the country’s growth in export earnings well into the 1980s (Lardy 31-32). This was how China financed its “turn outward” in the 1980s (Lardy 31).

The centralized planning of foreign trade described above, with all of its irrationality and inefficiency, was gradually dismantled in the 1980s. That is not to say that China discarded the mercantilist motivations that drove its trading regime in the pre-reform era. Instead of direct quantitative restrictions on internationally traded goods, China embraced a system more reliant on tariffs and nontariff barriers to manage the flow of imports and exports (Lardy 32). Indeed, Lardy writes that the import regime in the 1980s was so complex that, for those outside of China, it was difficult to discern whether or not the country was becoming more open (Lardy 32-33). The complexity of the system, which introduced a lot of uncertainty for firms attempting to do business in China, was in itself a form of protectionism (Lardy 33).

As China reduced the degree of trade planning that was reliant on quantitative restrictions, it substantially raised tariffs on imported goods. In 1982, the “average statutory tariff stood at the relatively high level of 56 percent” (Lardy 33). Then, in 1985, the National People’s Congress passed a reform that reduced the average statutory tariff to 43 percent, around where it would stay for the remainder of the decade (Lardy 33). In 1979, China also began using tariff exemptions on “raw materials and intermediate goods used to produce or assemble goods that are then exported and capital goods used in joint venture and wholly foreign-owned factories.” These exemptions provided “incentives for the processing of raw materials for export and the assembly of imported parts and components to produce finished goods for export” (Lardy 34). In 1987 the exemption was expanded to cover all “raw materials, parts, and components used in the production of goods for export” (Lardy 34). While liberalism embraces free trade, the mixture of duty-free goods, when combined with high tariffs elsewhere in the economy, channels resources away from where they would be used in the pursuit of one’s comparative advantage.

China also implemented nontariff barriers in the early 1980s, including a system of import licensing. Import licensing is typically viewed as restricting free trade, but in the case of China were more liberal than the pre-reform “direct planning of all trade”(Lardy 40). While such requirements were relatively modest at the start of the decade, “by the late 1980s the number of commodity categories subject to licensing expanded to fifty-three, and the share of all imports subject to licensing requirements hit a peak of 46 percent” (Lardy 39). Licensing requirements may be relatively more liberal than the prior system of total quantitative control by the central authorities, but they are still protectionist.

Control over trading rights is another nontariff barrier that China had used prior to the reforms in order to restrict the flow of goods. In 1978, there were 12 foreign trade corporations in all of China, each “had a monopoly in the import and export of a well-defined range of commodities” (Lardy 40). China liberalized the trading rights system, opening up its doors to foreign investment. By 1985, the number of firms authorized to engage in foreign trade had reached 800, and by 1988, that number had skyrocketed to over 5,000 (Lardy 41).  Several different types of corporations were created. Some were created by the various national production ministries. For example, The Metallurgical Ministry set up its own foreign trade corporation, as did the several military production corporations (Lardy 40). Provincial governments also set up hundreds their own foreign trade corporations to handle trade, which was usually in commodities, within their own regions (Lardy 39). As foreign trade authority began to be decentralized, the overall national trade planning footprint was reduced. Lardy remarks that China’s trade system was transformed during the 1980s and 1990s,” as the “share of import goods for which trading rights were either monopolized or limited through the system of designated trading fell from 90 percent in 1980 to 40 percent in 1988” (Lardy 43).

The regime governing exports also underwent a transformation in the 1980s, as the “direct physical planning of exports gradually was replaced by decentralized, market-oriented transactions” (Lardy 46). Export licenses were used for a number of reasons. One reason was to prevent domestic shortages of products that otherwise would be sent abroad by producers seeking to maximize profits (Lardy 47). The Chinese government also thought that it had “market power,” or a substantial supply, in a number of globally important commodities, like “tungsten, antimony, and tin and certain rare earths,” and limiting exports prevented the price from falling (Lardy 47). While the number of commodities subject to export licensing and quotas was 24 in 1981, that number rose to 235 by 1991, which was “two-thirds of all exports” (Lardy 47).

In the pre-reform era, China had kept its currency overvalued in order to pursue import substitution industrialization. The overvalued currency was used to subsidize the importing of the capital goods that China needed for further industrialization. This system was biased against exporters, who were forced to sell goods to the government at prices that were artificially low (Lardy 48). Exporters also had to forfeit their foreign exchange earnings to the government. Both of these features were reformed in the 1980s. When China devalued its currency early in the decade, exports now became a profitable enterprise, whereas before exporting most products essentially led to losses (Lardy 48). Once companies were able to hold onto the foreign exchange they earned, they were able to finance their imported inputs without going to the government for foreign exchange, and this incentivized entering the international marketplace (Lardy 48).

If many of China’s policies in the 1980s seem like they were edging toward liberalism, it is because China embraced international trade. To go from an autarkic system to one engaged in trade is indeed a big change. This is what is referred to as China’s Open Door Policy. Central control over economic activity was much relaxed in order to increase the potential for growth. The embrace of the market, of price signals and incentives, leads to a more efficient allocation of resources. It would be incorrect, however, to say that China embraced liberalism, in the classical sense of free trade and pursuit of comparative advantage. The state maintained control over the direction that the economy would, but instead of autarky, the policies that were set up were geared toward turning China into a major exporter of manufactures. Critical industries were protected from international competition by high tariffs and nontariff barriers (Lardy 5). The state also limited what imports could enter the country through a licensing process, and only the companies that it authorized engage in trade. Even by 1998, government owned industries “still controlled more than 70 percent of all of the fixed assets and 80 percent of all working capital used in manufacturing” (Lardy 15). It is quite clear China embraced neo-mercantilist principles wholeheartedly in the 1980s.

China’s policies make the American ones discussed above look quite modest. However, the argument that the U.S. engaged in neo-mercantilism still holds true. The institutional mechanisms upon which American liberalism had rested, trade policy having been divorced from the protectionist tendencies of politicians, was discarded when it became too inconvenient for the American economy and the polity—when it would hurt the “national interest.” Moreover, President Reagan had become emboldened in his second term, as the trade deficit continued to rise, despite having secured auto and steel VERs. One may argue that the U.S. was only protecting itself against the predations of “unfair” traders—those who subsidized their industries and protected their own markets from exports, while at the same time exploiting the relative liberalism of the U.S. For a liberal purist, however, liberalization always leads to benefits, to a more efficient economy, and to cheaper prices for consumers. It turns out that high unemployment seems to be quite important in bringing out a nation’s neo-mercantilist tendencies. In both the case of the U.S. and China, the benefits of trade are clearly motivating factors behind their policy choices, but allowing the free market to determine the allocation of resources was basically unthinkable.