Friday, October 31, 2008

Max Gluckman: Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa

The modern anthropolgist basing his analysis on detailed observation in the field, is concerned in greater detail with the ceremonial roles of persons, categories of persons, an social groups, in relaion to one another. Distinguishes from Frazer in focusing on sociological evidence in lieu of other sources.


Ceremonies in Africa surrounding farming patterns are latently express social tensions. Women permitted to asert licene and dominance against formal subordination to men, princes pretend to covet the trhone, and subjects vent about authority. Rebellion part of an established and sacred tradition system where particualar distributions of power are disputed, but not the structure of the system itself. The institutional protest renews the unity of the system.

Similar employment of sources from ethnographic studies. Dominant role of women in a ceremony contrasts sharply with the mores of the people: a protest against order but nonethelesss eems to embrace it and bless it with progress. Contrast ritual behavior with normal behavior. Women necessary for economy and procreation, but not dominant in system of kinship where they were married off to other families. The group is threatened by two sons and hence women are dangerous.

Changing gender roles for a period was seen as somehow producing a good harvest. Psychological and sociological mechanisms are contained in that somehow - not Concerned. Operates seemingly as an act of rebellion, by an open and privileged assertion of obscentiy acting of fundamental conflict in social structure and individual psyches.

Ceremony makes the king's authority sacred by allowing the airing of tension to achieve unity and prosperity. Problems in who can and cannot be represented through sources solved through similarly organized social sessions. The acting of conflict yields to unity. Women seeking good husbands have an opportunity to act out conflict.

Acceptance of public order as good alloows for unbridled excess, very rituals of rebellion, for order itself keeps the rebellion in bounds. Every social system is a field of tension, full of ambivelence, of co-operation and contrasting struggle: repetivie and developing social systems (diachronic/synchronic)

Alterations of offices, but not a shift in pattern. Contrast with Europe illuminates social setting. Ritual leads to united, is it not possible that civil rebellion itself was a source of strength for these systems. Compare/contrast with Europe.

To achieve anything it values, it must have food, which requires capital and a division of labor, which requires split up of wealth. Peace, good order, and the observence of law necessary for a nation's survival. Individuals vs. political order as a whole demonstrated.

Rebellious rituals may be perhaps be confined to situations where strong tensions are aroued by conflict between different structural principles, which are not controlled by secular institutions. The answer to all these problems lies in comparative research.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Jurgen Habermas

A public sphere is one where people may express ideas freely without their identities exerting too great a control over words or from a fear of violence. For Habermas, these are rooted in the historical experience of the European people. As a state developed its bureaucracy and professionalized armies, public power became a bourgeois phenomena where newspapers permitted criticism of the state and other entities with more or less impunity. That the bourgeois lack power in the state does not stop them from influencing the development of rules that permitted them to exercise free thought and speech directed against it.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Structural Functionalism Notes

Functionalism is a bad term with which nobody wants to be associated, yet it is still relevant to sociology and anthropology today.

Structural Functionalism marked an attempt to provide social science the same legitimacy as natural ones. It has its roots in Auguste Comte. Durkheim draws upon the biological sciences for metaphors to depict organisms in society with attention to evolutionary jargon.

Structural functionalism seeks to explain the development of complex systems through universal laws, or at least acceptable generalizations, through employing synchronic examinations of comparative analysis, thus very critical of social evolutionists.

Adaptation is critical: any organism must adopt externally to its environment and internally to itself. Stability and continuance depends upon an adaptation. Homeostasis is key to development: society is a system endeavoring to formulate regularities.

Of course, it is modeled against ideological histories, moralizing tracts, and antiquarianism. There would be no more speculation on traditional societies as the sources for traditional historians were sorely lacking. History is rejected as ideographic empiricism where in searching to establish everything within a particular context, one cannot compare one thing to any other, it does not seek laws, patterns, or order.

Instead, structural-functionalism will revolve around acceptable generalizations where particular institutions would be interpreted in light of solidarity. Higher social orders and the reproduction of cultural norms are not taken for granted. Society is never merely the sum of their parts: human beings are social individuals inhabiting social institutions which limit and constrain possibilities for making purposive choices. Ideology and false consciousness, so prevelant in Marx, serve no role here, social facts have social explanations.

Society is more than determined by its economic mode of production: systems cannot be reduced to one factor. Cultural values are not ideologies.

Society is corporate, not an aggregate phenomena, and certainly more than the sum of its parts considered as individuals or mere behavior. Society is a reality of its own kind, not reduced. Social structure is distinguished from social dynamics were the former set the conditions and limits of the latter. Society is the total structure of institutions or systems of institutions which are pre-existant ensembales of positions, roles, and rules into which people are born. They are set of role expectations, markers, and values.

A complicated set of institutional roles organized formal relationships, units of analysis in this perspective, part of forming the society.

Society, morality, the presence of obligations, responsibilies that are acknowledged and understood as well as constraints and sanctions on behavior, generates solidarty among its members when its institutions are functionally adapted to one another and anomie when they are not.

Function is not identical with cause, there are manifest and latent functions. Functions do not ask about the origins for or asking about what people mean to do by their action. Bees make honey because people like it.

Manifest/latent function: What is the function of the division of labor? To increase production, according to Smith/Marx, for Durkheim that is the manifest function, but not what is important about it. How the division of labor functions to ensure solidarity is the latent function.

This is not always obvious as a deeper system maintaining social values and functions. For a society as complex and differentiated as ours, it is necessary for people to find reaosns for holding together. Too much order or too little provokes aniome.

Method: Social institutions are nonreductable to aggregates of individual conceptions/choices/behavior/psychology. A tie on with this: social factors can only have social causes and are maintained through existence of constraints. Rooted in the comparative study of social types

Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolts Against Empire in 1919

For a brief interval, Wilson stood alone for mankind. For a moment, there was an extraordinary and significant wave of response to him throughout the globe. No one remembers him that way today save ironically.

For too long, historiography on the League of Nations has focused squarely on Europe and ignored demands from nonEuropean powers for self-determination and rising anti-colonialism. Wilson and what he represented impacted anti-colonial Asian intellectuals. Responses to rhetoric and the construction of images allows one to better capture the broad scope of the "Wilsonian" moment.

World War I deprived colonial powers of their moral superiority. The disappointments from the West and the United States led to widespread disenchantment. Wilson loomed far larger in the imaginations of Asian intellectuals, both as an inspiration for expectations and rhetoric and as a putative source of practical support for self-determination. Wilson's war-time rhetoric was a blueprint for a more peaceful and inclusive international order, one in which Asian nations achieved greater measures of equality and sovereignty. The Bolsheviks also trumpeted an anti-colonial message.

Self-determination more than a phrase: it was an imperative principle of action from which statesmen ignored at their peril, conjuring an international order based around democratic forms of government that would serve as a check against radicalism. Wilson's adoption of a Bolshevik phrase rendered his pronouncements more radical, amplifying their impact. Nationalists recognized the utility of Wilson's rhetoric and a sense of unprecedented opportunity, punctuated with religious terminology, pervaded nationalist press in India and elsewhere. Wilson, with his unworldliness, could break free from these confines as the United States, with its anti-colonial origins, creed of liberty, and wealth represented the potential for something new in world history.

Wilson, of course, ignored pleas from the Indian National Congress for self-determination as he considered it neither possible nor desirable for the peace conference to become a referendum on imperialism. Chinese and Indians felt betrayed by the Great Power game occurring in India, which made Bolshevism more appealing. Expectations for a new and more inclusive world order provoked by Wilson's rhetoric went far beyond the president's intentions.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Back to the League of Nations: Susan Pederson

Literature on the League of Nations following World War II concluded the League was destined to fail as not sufficiently "realist" in orientation. As the issues of failed states and ethnic conflict reemerged in the late twentieth century and the emergence of transnational history in academia allowed new perspectives to come out on the league. The League historical importance extends beyond the realm of its failure to preserve the peace: it existed in a transitional period of world institutions where the collapse of empires coincided with the first attempts at global goverance through legal institutions.

Created to maintain the peace, the League suffered an epic fail. Yet Pederson and other scholars contend the League provided a useful setup for foreign ministers to hammer out great power agreements to that effect. Abandoning Wilsonian rhetoric, the League opened more doors than it shut in the 1920s and was active in economic, political, and transnational issues. The 1930s cannot be blamed on 1919: other factors, especially the Great Depression, wrought them. League reliance on public opinion hampered as well as aided the cause of peace as the public would not always favor peace or the status quo, diplomats might use the organization simply to parrot platitudes while conducting serious negotiations behind closed doors, in other words: realpolitk would remain the course of the day.

Reconciling the ideal world of all states operating on the same ethical and administrative logic to the realities of power disparities in international politics justly absorbed much of the League's attention. With imperial and strategic interests conflicting with self-representation, the League found itself confronting issues of sovereignty. Protecting minorities in Eastern Europe, though not universally, marked a major development in international organizational history.

On the one hand, the League lacked the power to enforce penalties against Poland etc absent cooperation from France and Britain. For some critics, the League's reliance on state actors ensured secret manipulations would impede real protections and impeded petitioners from finding receptive audiences for their claims. For others, the publicity of infringement claims provided political opportunities for irridentists. An attempt at a synthesis illuminated that while serious about protecting minority rights, the integrity of the League and 1919 settlement proved higher goals. Holding the League to a realistic standard rather than an idealistic one reveals adroit professionals sincerely dedicated and often succeeding in preventing ethnic conflicts from simmering into wars.

The mandate system marked the first point in western history where direct imperial control of extracontinental territory gave an international organization an opportunity to create norms and rules governing international development. While national and strategic interests superseded any others, mandated territories were at times run with placating the League in mind. Generalizations aside, the most League accomplished was articulating that aggressive conquest as an illegitimate form of sovereignty proved enduring and where norms and interests coincided, accomplishments were there.

Refugees, epidemics, and economic crises taxed the power of independent organizations and new states who discovered the great powers preferred a League solution to direct intervention. Institutions created by the League helped set up the United Nations. These technical aspects attracted wider international cooperation than any other projects. States with interests that extended beyond their borders found the League an effective tool to attain them. Where outside individuals not interfering with state projects could make a difference, more often than not, it was individuals inside the organization that mobilized iniative. The international bureaucracy, its professionalism and efficiency, helped make the League more appealing as a tool for advancing interests, and sometimes redefining those interests.

The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950: Mark Mazower

The emergence of the human rights phenomena between 1941 and 1948 is nothing short than amazing given the almost absolute disregard statesman paid the concept for millenia beforehand. To address this question, legal scholars rely too much on legal texts and political scientists take events out of their political context. Historians are too subject to intellectual fashion, too deferential to legal historians, and guilty of failing to examine how human rights have been employed in international politics.

Given that international law implies weakening the state's power, why did the states in the United Nations choose to do so? Recent history circles around a moral teleology stressing the agency of individual activists. State interests and cynicism played a much larger role in events than noted previously.



Fears over minority rights in Eastern European states made international recognition conditional upon guaranteeing all ethnicities collective rights verified by the League of Nations. Following in the pattern of Great Power paternalism from the nineteenth century. Self-interest limited the power of the declaration to Eastern Europe, and once the strategic situation changed in the 1930s, the French and British preferred strengthening Eastern European states as bulwarks against fascism and communism, regardless of the quality of the regime.



The Atlantic Charter outlined the preservation of human rights across the globe as a war aim. The experience of the Holocaust proved that only through international defense could human rights be defended. This meant ending the policy of permitting a state to persecute its own nationals as it saw fit. Enforcibility emerged as the primary obstacle for forming a policy as states would need to commit resources and sacrifice sovereignty over actions to achieve progress.



The British supported the rights movement because it wanted the Americans, moving away from isolationism, to have a reason to remain in Europe post-war. Human rights also offered an alternative vision for minority rights seemingly discredited by the failure of the League of Nations. Czechs, Poles, and Jews believed individual rights better protected their interests than minority rights, the British feared the Russians would ignore any international system trying to supervise his territory while the Americans might nibble away at the Empire. Indeed, a majoirty of states preferred an international organization concerned with rights to focus on "human rights." Minority rights pushed to the side.


Inside the planning meetings, British and Russian delegates worried too much scrutiny on rights would lead to dissent in crafting the postwar international organization. Attempts to backtrack from the rhetoric of the war aims encounter swift and strong resistance from the American public and the smaller nations of the world. The real issue now became ensuring that only a declarion lacking teeth would get through the Charter, so as not to upset American isolationists. Little language on implementation found its way into the charter.

Friday, October 24, 2008

A New Deal For The World by Elizabeth Burkhardt

Introduction:
Elizabeth Burkhardt believes the American government's experience tackling domestic economic issues through government intervention provided the impetus for its decision in 1941 to construct a postwar world governed by international institutions and laws established under the premises of universal human rights. Calling the departure from isolationism a "revolutionary" development, Roosevelt's commitment to a liberal democratic world order only makes sense when understood in the context of American political and economic developments in the 1930s.
The United States would stand for stabilizing and coordinating international currency, economic development, international justice, freer trade, self-determination, social welfare, and a permanent system of general collective security. Its concern with individuals ahead of state interests and a world transcending the economic and political condition that provoked previous global conflicts marked a transformitive moment in the history of human rights and America's national identity.
Historiographically speaking, Burkhardt places her work in the realm of the new international histories concerned with employing concepts from international law, relations, and economics to seemingly insular political development. She places herself in contrast to the 1960s school that sought to explain American involvement in international politics as merely an embedding of national interest in international institutions. Thus far, she concludes the United States had a philosophical and ideological connection to the new world order.The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson:
The failure to keep the peace following World War I loomed over policymakers during the Second World War. Though unamitity eluded planners, almost all high level players agreed that co-opting future domestic resistance through early participation in a lengthy process that sought to integrate political and economic security with international regulations on trade, finance, and labor in a realistic scheme mindful of the unchanging imperfections of human nature. In other words, the United States had more to gain than to lose through participation in a new world order.
With Great Britain fighting a lonely battle through the bleak years of 1940 and 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt strove to provide the island all the resources it could without committing political suicide at home while moving the American public to accept that U.S. diplomacy and national interests could be considered idealisitc as well as hard-headed while setting the record straight for the world that America believed in international law as well as moral and human decency. In crafting the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, the editions to the original draft reveal the president's political acumen trumping his idealism and the prime minister's dexerity at protecting vested British interests. Under close scrutiny, the Atlantic Charter's principles appear less the product of enlightened consensus on postwar order than a propaganda piece crafted to fulfill the immediate needs of two statesmen.
Yet the Atlantic Charter was also the first official statement issued by the American people outlining the war's aims and the shape of the postwar outcome. Some read it as a blueprint for the institutionalization of universal human rights, others an extension of free trade and New Deal principles across the world, still others a strong anti-imperialist message. At the very least it represented a real and symbolic expansion of the U.S. national interest and a rearrangment of conceptions and ideas. At the most, it followed the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address in recasting the aims of the Allied war effort to an abstract ideal society that animated policythinking across the globe in the six decades since.
Forging a New American Multilateralism:
States must provide subsistence to those on the margins of society, not only for moral reasons, but because international security rested upon the eradication of the demogougey fueled by depression and privation that propelled the fascists and communists into power. So President Roosevelt and his supporters in the press and academia concluded.
Encounters with totalitarianism necessitated the elevation of human dignity and life, at least life after physical birth, as outside the jurisdiction of positive international law. Previous conceptions of human rights focused on narrow domestic restraints on governmental authority now morphed into an international creed devoted to providing for what Roosevelt considered the fundamental requirements for freedom. Roosevelt's legalism and institutional problem-solving structures were rooted in older ideologies only gaining wide currency in policy-making circles following the failures of moralism and isolationsim. 1930s New Dealers convinced their efforts to reform America through an activist regulatory state projected this philosophy onto international relations in the 1940s. Rejecting Wilsonian perfectionism, the men occupying key posts were still predisposed to believe their plans for reshaping the world through legal institutions that elevated human rights as the end goal of any state policy. The individual, rather than the state, now became the ultiamte object of protection by the international community.
Key for Burkhardt's understanding of the evolution of nascent internationalism is its connection with the ideology of the New Deal: to separate an evolution of foreign policy thinking from a transformitive moment in American domestic politics would be an error. The New Deal for the rest of the world rested on two assumptions: all human beings are entitled to freedom from oppression by virtue of their humanity and that individuals could be held responsible for acts committed by the name of the state during war. Of course, no one ideology hold sway over all of American policy and the genesis of modern human rights thinking has diverse and interrelated roots. The political resistance to an interventionist foreign policy also lessened as a new generation of Americans reared in the Depression and tempered by war were not constrained by their forebearers parochialism.
Bretton Woods, 1944: The Perils of Economic Planning:
A postwar economic order established by the United States would revolve around stability. Freer trade, freely convertablie currencies, and reconstruction projects not unduly hampered by wartime debts were the economic ingredients for a more prosperous and stable international system. While reliant on Keynesian theory, it had to be packaged in such a way to command domestic support. Yet technical debates over monetary policy were not closely scrutinized by the public or partisans, a fact that Burkhardt believes ensured their passage.
A prisoner's dilemma emerged in the realm of international finance following the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. Bretton Woods was an attempt by the United States to ensure currency manipulation and tariff barriers would never again prolong a recession. Reformers schooled in the Progressive Era and New Deal, organizing the economy into a deliberate process of institutional change carried these conceptions into international relations.
Harry White and John Maynard Keyes led the American and British postwar planning respectively. Handicapped by an interventonist United States Senate, White committed the United States to a form of internationalism that would spread responsible capitalism aborad and render the dollar supreme where Keynes sought to compensate Britian in spite of its economic power.
Bretton Woods: Investing in Global Stability:
In June 1944, British and American delegates at the Bretton Woods conference set out to synthesize American and British proposals on currency stability programs and whip the other allies into line. Their postwar vision of international finance rested on an international monetary mechanism that would encourage trade by making currencies exchangable at stable rates while making short-term credit available with the focus of rebuilding Europe. Broad principles, however, were not easily translated into policy, as previous attempts at coordinating the redistribution of food to impoverished nations illuminated.
The IMF would administer a code of conduct regarding exchange rate policies that would make international transactions more predictible and shelter domestic problems aimed at full employment and expansive social programs. The debate at Bretton Woods surrounded who would contribute how much and on what terms would that money be made available, the extent members would alter currency rates to permit a certain level of flexibility. Trading nations and businesses wanted predictability and systemic stability, but a weak economy would want to devalue its currency to shore up its export industry, which Americans assigned as the source of the Depression. On the issue of contributions, the United States maintained it should possess the lion's share, which would afford it a greater capacity for directing the fund afterwards.
The World Bank would abet the mobilization of economic resources for longterm reconstruction and development projects for projects and regions private capital neglect. Engaged less in direct lending than guaranteeing loans so as to encourage private investment. Other considerations hampered its ability to serve as an independent lender.
While the Roosevelt Administration championed the Bretton Woods agreement as an opportunity to spread economic freedoms and prosperity across the globe while protecting American laborers from international financial conditions by providing an institutions where the United States could impose its will, isolationists attacked it as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. The mix of American idealism and power in economic affairs was an unprecedented occurence: its survival in the House and Senate rested upon the prevailing internationalist settlement following the conclusion of the war and the apathy a majority of Americans possessed in considering its appeals. Americans believed they were investing in global peace, prosperity, and stability: Roosevelt saw dispensing sovereignty across multinational institutions as part and process of participating in a functioning international system.
Rather than simply providing freedom from fear, internationalism provided an opportunity for augmenting the happiness of the world and the development of the human personality.
Burkhardt sets herself apart from historians who claim the outbreak of the war marked the end of the New Deal. By the late 1940s, a backlash against the New Deal and state interventionism caused the economic, social, and cultural rights extoled earlier to recede into oblivion. As the realities of the war merged with the maturing New Deal consciousness, Roosevelt sought to internationalize his accomplishments at home through the mobilization of the state's resources to preserve peace and open up greater areas of the world for peaceful advancement into prosperity. Unattained ideological goals enshrined in Roosevelt's planning documents should not be ignored by political and economic historians as irrelevant to the study of his policy.
She provides a backhanded compliment to the advocate scholars in the field of human rights, who in their zeal for expanding the realm of interventionism even further into private society, the dialogue becomes abstract and distanced from historical reality, and hence irrelevant in expanding the limits of knowledge. Burkhardt also worries contemporary debates cannot reconcile non-Western conceptions of "human rights" with the traditional model. Imaginative distance from the subjects under historical evaluation is a prerequisite for a narrative exhibiting deference to the forces contingency in the development of the doctrine. Rather than ransacking the past for familiar sounding concepts, context is necessary for understanding any event's role in the process of historical progress. A historical approach, rather than legal, political, philosophical, or sociological, best sheds light on the novelty of Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter in American political discourse.
The Chimera of Collective Security:
Postwar peace planners believed setting in motion a process an American-led commission composed of apolitical experts aiming to separate the peace treaty from the machinery of collective security while hostilities are still ongoing promised the best solution for a lasting peace. The draft emerging for the initial U.N. Charter in 1944 reflected the principles of the Atlantic Charter and a heightened awareness of the relationship of public awareness to the perpetuation of human rights.
American policymakers crafting the U.N. Charter never lost sight of Wilson's failure to reconcile foreign policy with powerful anti-imperial and anti-multilateral strains of domestic thought and the structural flaws in the League of Nation that impeded effective action.
At the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the scope over veto-power and the voting process on the security council provoked the greatest friction, with the Soviets joined other countries in objecting to America's proposed proportional voting system on financial matters on the grounds such a system would lead to yankee hegenomy. American proposals to support human rights abroad encounter resistance from the British and Soviets, the latter of whom were determined to limit the powers of the body to issues of peace and security with minimal pretexts for interference in domestic policy. In other words, no state decided to entrust its interests to the whims of an international body, and the postwar order would revolve around the power politics of 1945 rather than abstract moral or legal principles.
Learning to Work Together by Working Together:
A lack of literary flourish and details in the Dumbarton Oaks draft deflated idealist dreams, but the proposal for a U.N. Security Council committed to combating aggression and an international criminal court were applauded as steps in the right direction by internventionists. Americans worried over the yet undetermined voting procedures in the Security Council and the implications of force commitments on American political institutions. Small states clamored for greater recognition and a more formal commitment to individual rights as previously articulated in the Atlantic Charter.
Negotiations with the Soviets as the war in Europe came to a close proved vexing for Roosevelt. Power realities in Eastern Europe compromised any American hopes that Stalin possessed any incentive to cooperate along an internationalist perspective against his own interest. Indeed, the United States also behaved in a manner at variance with the principles of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter in promising the Soviets territory in exchange for an attack on Japan. More concerned with Soviet participation in a worldwide body, the dying Roosevelt placed the United Nations ahead of other political and diplomatic considerations.
Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, remained committed to the U.N. and the Conference on International Organization opened on April 25. Friction over veto as an agenda setter evaporated after the Allies bonded againt Soviet intransigence. Smaller nations succeeded in reducing the discretionary powers of the Security Council and the addition of human rights language that still contradicted language on sovereignty and self-defense.
Human rights activists protested the distance between lofty commitments to self-determination, individual rights, and social progress and reality in the Charter's revamped preamble. The presence of language committing the United Nations to equal rights, self-determination, human rights, and fundamental freedoms including language and religion and ends to discrimination on racial and sexual lines marked a vast change from the technical document produced by the legal experts and policy wonks at Dumbarton Oaks.
Policy concerns again superseded ideological ones. The U.S. refused to allow any outside interference with its freshly acquired territories in the Pacific, Colonial powers were clearly uneasy over any timetable to relinquish their possessions: language promising eventual independence for all territories was scrapped from the Charter. Deference to domestic autonomy absent a threat to international peace, ambiguities in the nature of enforcement, self-defense, and the nature of human rights themselves were also the product of political realities of the time.
Nuremburg 1945: The Limits of Law:
Nazis were tried with four major crimes: planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of war of aggression, the commission of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The final count was the most innovative and the product of a merging of ideas, politics, and institutions that drove America to abandon its traditional perogatives and the potential its power provided in favor of mulitlateral solutions. Could individual guilt be established for a state's actions in committing war and crimes and could Germans be prosecuted for crimes against Jews and others before the war began.
Dismissing accusations of victor's justice, Americans hoped a trial would serve an educational function for the German public while providing the world an example of a new world order. The laws lie in context of Allied policy toward Germany, outlaw aggressive war, bring opporbrium and attention to crimes against humanity, and was constructed upon exisiting treaty laws. It also fucntioned as the source of future international courts and annihilate forever fear of aggressive war.
Inside the Executive Department, State, Treasury, and War proposed radically different plans for postwar Germany reflecting a diversity of thought over future American interests in the region. State wanted a strong German state in central Europe economically integrated with the West to stand as a bulwark against Communism, War wanted to maintain much of the German apparatus to ensure a speedy and efficient transition, while Treasury endorsed laying waste to the industrial capacity of Germany, rendering the most powerful state in Europe an agricultural pygmy lacking the capacity or mindset to wage aggressive war.
The latter approach apparently was Roosevelt's personal preference and the grand nature of the reconstruction of a nation by outside agents echoed New Deal reformist motifs. Worries over the collapse of the German economy worried Morganthau's understudies and Secretary of War Henry Stimpson rightfully contended the destruction of a nation violated the Atlantic Charter. Domestic political opinion moved against Morgenthau's proposal, forcing Roosevelt to disown it before the election. By May 1945, the United States accepted the necessity of an ordered German society with a vibrant economy providing a buffer against further Communist encroachment as an overriding national interest, though denazification programs and the destruction of the German military played a serious role in the occupation agenda.
Trials for Nazi leaders were designed to enshrine the principle that wars waged unjustly were a crime. International law protects states and individuals in most circumstances from being subject to answering for actions conducted during war, but the Nazis were out of control in World War II and forfeited their right to protection through atrocious actions.
Internationalizing New Deal Justice:
Although aware of Nazi policies toward P.O.Ws and the Holcaust, their greatest sin in the eyes of American policymakers was drawing the Allies into a ruinous war. Robert Jackson and his fellow New Dealers entered Nuremburg believing they possessed a mandate and the capacity for using the trial to alter forever the great power struggle. While prosecuting the Nazis for aggressive war was a given, finding a way for guilt to be assigned for the Holocaust and other transgressions proved more difficult from a legal standpoint as no international law dealt with extermination and mass murder. Broad language in the Hague Convention abetted their efforts, as did the decision to make the customs of justice applicable as well. Wary of expanding the powers of the international tribunal to German actions against German nationals prior to 1939, the Court limited its jurisdiction.
For its critics, the Nuremburg Trial's focus on crimes against peace was merely a reflection of status quoism while another batch of military men worried the focus on individual responsibility for soldiers obeying orders set a dangerous precedent, especially as the United States, in defeating the Axis, targeted civilians in carpet bombing missions and used the atomic bomb.
If Nuremburg was animated by American production, it is one improbable to emerge from the United States outside of 1945. The emerging mulitlateralist sensibility that sought to ensure peace and prosperity around the world through international institutions. More than simply prosecuting crimes, the Nuremburg Trials were a projection of the New World Order that justified the sacrifices of wartime and whose establishment, reckoning with precedent, and aims bore resemblence with other New Deal programs synthesizing legalism with moralism.
The Nuremburg Trials embodied the first institutionalized, multilateral to use the ideals of the rule of law to give voice to the moral intuition that individuals composing the univere are entitled to equal moral consideration. It legitimized the idea of individual responsibility for crimes against international law, jurisprudential underpinning of the dignity of the individual irrespecitve of local, domestic laws, and an example of the importance of documenting and narrating the specifics of atrocities to creae a detailed and enduring record while moving the yardstick of human rights law toward the protetion of individuals.
No judicial system in a transistional political period can escape social understandings of previous injustice.
Forgotten Legacies of the Atlantic Charter:
History too often makes the Atlantic Charter moment an aberration in a larger Cold War history. Burkhardt proposes a counternarrative of the importance of institutions established in the period for providing the United States the capacity to last through the Cold War. The United States volunatarily constrained its influence through instituional channels and consolidating consent for international order. The Cold War thus becomes the bipolar abberation.
The World Bank and IMF became another Cold War arena or promoting anti-Soviet ideologies for monetary trade, finance, and developmental policies.
F.D.R. succeeded in altering the fundamental concept of government and its obligations to the governed and established a change in attitudes worldwide toward economic stability and the responsibility of the great powers to achieve it.
The U.N. and Nuremburg Trials rhetorically and symbolically puts human rights violators on the permanent defensive and deprives the world of impunity.
Political, legal, and economic developmets indivisibly contributed to the nation's security. An ideological mindset or a similiarly pragmatic approach?
Last Chapter = Annoying
Recapitulating her earlier points and the arguments of other scholars vis-a-vis the importance of the "Zeitgeist of 1945" in altering how Americans concieved of their world, namely, that Americans, in the aftermath of World War II and the Great Depression, were willing to endorse Roosevelt's multilateral schemes as sound policy decisions and that individual human rights deserved protection.
She then rails globalization cheerleaders, sneers at the realists and neoconservatives and contends that because the United States encountered unforeseen difficulties overruning Iraq, it must therefore bow to whim of a global test and submit the implementation of its foreign policy to conditions of human rights. She never argues how multilateralism would aid the United States achieve its objectives abroad, save perhaps as a guard against overextension and make the Europeans like us more, as if the realities of 1945 should instruct us in how to understand those of 2008.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

The World In Depression: Charles Kindleberger

If I misapply an economic term or fail to grasp all the macroeconomic stuff, my bad. I think the purpose of reading this piece was to impart a counterargument to Polyami and Friedman while demonstrating how interrelated economic developments in one region are impacted by another while also illuminating why states sometimes fail to act in the aggregate interest of the world economy.

According to Kindleberger, five institutions are needed for the stability of the world economy:
1. A relatively open market for distressed goods
2. Countercylical or at least long-term lending
3. Stable exchange rates
4. A coordination of macroeconomic policy
5. A lender of last resort that discounts or otherwise provides liquidity in a crisis

Kindleberger contends that provided these functions, the economic system could handle and adjust to shocks to the market. Even given the overproduction of raw materials into primary products, the French clamor for strict reparations, the American stubborness for debt-payment, currency chaos, and halts in foreign lending from New York coupled with the Stock Market crash, Kindleberger argues that the United States and Great Britain acted in concert to secure global financial stability, the worst of the Depression could have been averted.

Free trade, the process that sets domestic resources amenable to productive capacities abroad and keeping import markets open, was abandoned in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Rather than incurring some short-term costs by keeping markets open to surplus goods from abroad where demand declined, the United States set off a process of protectionism by raising rates on all kinds of imports. Tariff retaliation and competitve depreciation led to mutual losses everywhere. With no country providing a market for surpluses or willing to incur appreciation of it currency, which would damage export-oriented industries while hurting those competing with imports on the domestic market, or offer capital loans or discounts to nations struggling with debt. In other words, what was good for the one not good for the whole.

Countercyclical lending, as practiced by the British in the nineteenth century, helped stabilize the economy from shocks in the global market. The British would import during boom periods and cut spending abroad, thereby lessening the impact of bad investment on borrowed funds in recession periods while encouraging production abroad. After World War I, the U.S. decided to lend and export during a boom period, which was not a good long-term plan.

In the nineteenth century, the gold standard established the exchange rate for currencies. After the inflation following World War I, the equilibrium for a number of reasons was not correctly established. With export prices going down after the Depression hit, smaller countries in a quasi-competitive manner devalued their currencies, which led to only further deflation as domestic prices remain unchanged while reducing prices in appreciating countries.

Gold standard also allowed for greater coordination of macroeconomic policies. Domestic usurptation of this responsibility subordinates the aggregate interest to the rabble of protection.

The lenders of last resort protect against depositors and prevent widespread panic withdrawal. No one did this in the 1930s. Bed.

Emancipation and the Empire: Sven Beckert

The American Civil War accelerated the transformation of the world cotton economy from one centered between the United States and merchant cities in England to a worldwide enterprise. States, rather than a small caste of merchants and factory owners, set the structure of the economy and enabled local merchants in Brazil, India, and Egypt to exert indirect control over an emerging class of laborers and sharecroppers whose traditional sustenance societies and economies were transformed by the incentives of the global market and the power of the state to enforce contracts and private property laws. For Beckert, the de jure liberation of four million North American slaves led to the de facto bondage of millions more spread across continents.

The American Civil War provoked all of this by creating a shortage of cotton on the world market. The cotton produced through slave labor had catapulted the United States onto the world stage in the early nineteenth century. Cotton exports to Great Britain and other nations in Europe tapered to insignificance in 1862, hurting the textile industry and prompting unemployment and violent riots. Fearing for the social order, the British government exercised its power to open Indian land to foreign investment in cotton, where the crop had previously failed to catch on due to the backward Indian social structure, American predominance in the export industry, a lack of state support for investors, and the difficulties of transporting the crop back to Europe. With the closing of the American market from 1861-65, Indian entrepeneurs jumped at the opportunity to grow and export the suddenly scarce cash crop. A modernizing sultan in Egypt also took advanatage of European demand as did Brazilians. The cotton industry linked areas of the world in manners previously unthinkable as the state interest in preserving social order forced it to ally with capitalists eager to exploit labor on the periphery, thus ending the reign of Anglo-American slave holders and merchants over cotton.

The scarcity of cotton during the Civil War on the world economy did not stop the industry from expanding. New sources flourished at the high prices of cotton, but even after American production began exceeding its antebellum output in the early 1870s, India, Egypt, and Brazil maintained a steady level of exports well above their pre 1860 levels. The Civil War imparted on cotton experts the knowledge that labor, rather than land, constrained production. While some worried the chaos of the post-war South would damage the market for decades to come, the transition from plantation labor to free was made easier by the system of sharecropping. Advances in railways and shipping, to say nothing of the telegraph, lowered transaction costs while individual farmers of cotton incurred debts due to start-up costs and the fluctuations of the world market that made a transition away from producing cash-crops improbable. The British government and local merchants pushed people into producing cotton and much of traditional rural Indian culture and economics died away in the face of the complete transformation of the countryside where local elites lost power to urban merchants who used agricultural debt and methods of extra-economic and political coercion to maintain efficiency.

Given the scope of the textile industry in European nations, the government needed to expand its range in the economic sector to guarantee order at home. In devoting more energy and resources to consolidating empires, the construction of infrastructure, and securing property rights abroad, the European powers overran traditional common land practices and left the livelihoods of millions of people across the globe tied directly to the rising and falling of cotton prices. The Civil War accelerated this process.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Karl Polyani's "The Great Transformation" - Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2

Polanyi's Concept of Embeddedness:

In seeking to subordinate political, social, and cultural life to the logic of the free market, advocates of self-regulating markets engage in a utopian fantasy. Trust, mutual understanding, and the enforcement of contracts are pivitol to the success of a capitalist system: the market needs the state to survive.

Why Disembedding Cannot Be Successful:

Modern economics rests on the incorrect assumption that land, labor, and money are commodities like any other good produced for sale on the market. From a moral perspective, it is wrong to treat human beings and nature as commodities. Unfettered capitalism also provokes resistance from people when it pushes society too close to a breakdown of the natural environment and the destruction of normal human relations. The state, an entity composed of greater forces than the market, is necessary to facilitate any success in a capitalist system: for capitalism to flourish the state must stress to the many alienated by the free market to bear the costs.

The Consequences of Impossibility:

The structures existing to inhibit the free market are the residue of market failures and represent the desire of many disparate groups to curb against a crash of the financial systems. This marks a departure from Marxist analysis and market liberalism who see the contest between capital and labor as a clash between incompatible ideologies. That markets crash when states intervene provides the laissez-faire school an air-tight argument for their theroy: had the state not acted, the market would have solved the problem. Polyani contends market socialism can create a synthesis from the democratic and efficient aspects of market liberalism and communism.

The Centrality of the Global Regime:

Market liberals desiring a world open for commerce needed a system where people with different currencies could freely engage in transactions with one another. Therefore, nations fixed their currencies in relation to gold and commit to buy and sell gold at that price, based their domestic money supply on the amount of gold that it held in its reserves and its circulating currency would be based in gold, giving its residents ample opportunities to trade abroad. This permitted the markets to operate globally without a state or world organization overseeing them.

The Consequences of the Gold Standard:

Adopted globally, states became more important as deflationary measures drove down wages to reduce consumption leading to sharp jumps in unemployment and bank and farm failures. Nations began colluding to offset the impact of the gold standard: tariffs emerged and states acquired colonies. Exploiting people abroad allows for a higher standard living domestically. Societies under duress from the manipulations of international finance often chose revoking freedom in favor of security: fascism.

Contemporary Relevance:

Neoliberal economists and their followers employ a dangerous confidence in the efficacy of free markets to resolve the world's problems. Absent a universal government, or a lender of last resort, the global market will not resolve crises. Even more, free market liberalism makes demands on people that are simply not sustainable. People will mobilize to protect themselves and the state, seeking to hold on to order, will find scapegoats. Domestic uprisings are deeply tied to the impersonal forces of the global marketplace.

Democratic Alternatives:

Polanyi feels democratic societies will engage in socialism to protect man and nature from the market while permitting markets to operate in an efficient manner.

The Hundred Years' Peace:

Nineteenth century civilization rested on balance of power politics, liberal states, the self-regulating market made possible by the gold standard which permitted the spread of trade. The self-regulating market could not exist without destroying man and the world, yet no society wished to curb it which led to further strife.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Marxism Notes

Marxism is a holistic theory of society that challenges the models of Hegel, narrative history, and political economy as defined by Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. Marx satirizes Von Ranke's grand history as lacking a coherent theory and labels it the product of the dominant ideology. For Marx there are patterns of historical motion that are visable through objective analysis. Like rational choice, Marxism presupposes the existence of a division of labor, the commodization of labor, and the inevitablity of monopoly in a capitalist society, but Marxists want to explain how that development occured and how individual responses to it are conditioned to the larger superstructure of socialization that the dominant mode of production imposes on society.

For Marx, society is a mode of production which includes structure, forces, matieral relations, culture, values, in total, a way of life, that proceeds any individual and encompasses him. It is an absolute rejection of that society which is deemed the sum of its parts. One is born into a structure which necessarily dominantes but does not necessarily determine behavior inspite of powerful conditioning.

A mode of production = a mean of production. For capitalism, the mode of production is the creation of commodities. This is directly related to the social relations of production which include the market itself, forms of private property, the state, ideas, culture, and a class structure. Revolution occurs when the mode of production alters, as in the case of factory. History, therefore, is a linear sequence of modes of production in which each is distinguished by a unique set of class relations. Class is very specifically defined as having the same relationship to ownership over the means of production: for capitalists, it is the capacity to call labor into being.

Revolution is occasioned by the internal contradictions between the means of production and social relations becames totals and inescapable. Changes in ther means of production lead to older ideologies contradicted by new ones. If your real class position is x, but you think of yourself as y, there must be a social revolution from the subjective classes to alter the situation.

Base and superstructure: there is an intimate relationship with the productive nature of society and the state, culture, and ideas of it. Ideology is a false consciousness, which is still a force of production. Individualism and religion, for instance, are ideologies which force people to act in certain ways, the former of the two marking the triumph of capitalism. Ideologies are te ruling ideas of every age and represent the dominant interests of the ruling class because they control the means of production. The state exists as the executive arm of the ruling class.

Man is alienated from the fruit of his labor. People do not own their labor power, or the product of it. No one likes work, instead we work to eat. In this sense we are alienated from nature and alienated from our selves, and competition alienates us from others. The degree to which human beings are alienated varies with the modes of production. In general, the greater the productivity, the more alienation. The capitalist system finds all society falling into 2 and only 2 classes.

Major criticisms: If you disagree, it is because you are alienated. Marxism remains too philosophical for social scientist methodologies. Like rational choice, historical materials are only exemplifications of the logic of structure. There is no agency, no attention to structure, no laws of motion exist in real contingent histories. Sociologists and political scientists find it crude. Cultural scientists doubt ideas, ideologies, and identities can be so easily reduced.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Notes from IH Seminar

With regards to the study of imperialism and international history, we are surveying snapshots of a field reinventing itself. Each of the works we viewed is reacting against something that left issues under or unexamined.

English Lessons tackles the whitewashing of British action in the the 19th century as an unfortunate but necessary passage by remapping the scale and violence and justifications of the civiliziing mission. Havia's work seeks to recover the lost history through examining how the British employed visuals to convey and shape a narrative of their rule while reterritorializing the Chinese state. He also looks at plunder, travel, and memory.

Chinese historiography underwent a series of mutations since the late 1960s. The old thesis on the China World Order, where a confrontation between fixed and rigid Chinese culture and the modern formations lost ground to an assault on the grand narrative that instead focused on internal developments in China. Havia chooses to illuminate how outside connections with other cultures forced a hybrid Chinese development. Insularity is a major issue for the China field.

Kristin Hoganson seeks to destablize certain histories as does Kramer. Notions of race, pg 21, constructed in the colonial outposts, not exported from the metropolis.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Mnemonic Devices: Memorializing the West as Victim and Hero

In narratives designed to "suture" the West's self-perception, the West is seen as a victim and the overcoming of Chinese savagery is viewed as a heroic act deserving of memorialization, serving an effective way of reducing anxiety over barbaric violence.

Tales of suffering substituted for looting: the cause of the uprising seen as little more than anti-foreignism. Missionaries relied on worldly powers for support yet also sought to establish a moral ground aloof from it. Missionaries did not provoke the outbreak, they were victims and even heroes. Atrocity anecdotes abound these explanations and are closely linked to accounts of retribution that give meaning to what otherwise might have been construted as Blood and Iron triumphalism. Also helps counter claims that missionaries were out-of-control.

Chrisitan monuments to memorials in China reconfirmed the right to prostelityze and provided optimism. Christian teleology wedded to a secular vision of evolution and progress in a universal pattern of human development. Missionaries would forgive the repentent Chinese and continue their good works for the sake of progress, humanity, and development.

A marked shift in the study of monuments occurred over the past few years as sites where national and individual effort to construct meaning converged and diverged: willful efforts to remember as well as remold memory: as sites where the interests of the individual and the state might intervene: the meaning of sites of memory transform with time and memory is collectively formed and sustained and linked to material objects. Memorials in China and elsewhere part of a larger pilgrimage a missionary could go through.

China now put into the larger adventurism plot and reinforced the dichotomy between the virtue of civilized against uncivilized. Monuments had encoded in their very structure the language of higher moral purpose centered around sacrifice and valor. Tourbooks guided visitors on an inspiring tale of history where Westerners saw their nations triumphant and enjoyed special privilege.

The construction of authoritative narratives in institutional forms of memorymaking also drove a wedge between the West and Chinese, though some ex-pats led lives that defied the rigourous boundary.

Desacralizing Qing Sovereignty, 1900-1901

The West targeted the imperial sovereignty of the Qing government by demanding it bring to justice those responsible for anti-Western atrocities. The indemnities were an additional humiliation. The ministers also sought to ensure no other anti-foreign outbursts in China would be nipped in the bud and that the foreign community be protected. The status of the emperor and the affixing of personal responsibility to transgressions committed against the West made the Qing regime altered, impotent, and archaic.

Who really controlled the writing of the treaty? The way the powers "collectively" framed the conflict? Context of the piece shows the beginning of the construction of a narrative aiming to assert the basis of Western intervention: Western action, thus extraordinary and justified lack of Chinese sovereignty. To become civilized then, required a formal apology for actions taken by Chinese against Westerners, punishment for those held most responsible for their actions, and the implementation of novel political structures into China that institutionalized the Western presence. China had to construct memorials for those who died. West revamped Chinese police and diplomatic procedures.

The emperor viewed by the West as an impediment to progress while necessary for stability. To remedy this situation, the emperor had tobe recalibrated as a monarch who was perfectly equal to other ones and would, on his own free will, listen to the West and conform to Western diplomatic practices. The site of diplomatic proceedings was moved to a primary audience hall in the Forbidden City, underscoring the importance of Chinese-Western relations as well as further undercutting the Qing. The movement into the home of the Chinese emperor signified the difference between real and imagined power. In restricting and mandating movements of the emperor, the protocol tore down the old hiearchy.

The product of the treaty was a patchwork of European universalism and Chinese particularity. While the Chinese succeeded in maintaining some privileges, they failed to prevent the greater scrutiny of the Manchu household.

Social transformation of Western societies by imperialism. New ocular advances in technology permitted physical objects or their reproductions to be sent to different places and reassmebled as necessarily new things in different relations to one another. This allowed for the presentation of the world as an exhibition. Viewers were expected to see the world and everything in it as an experience for viewing scrutiny and judgment: photography and tourism being paramount.

The exhibition of the exotic world of others at world's fairs involved a relationship of power marked most profoundly by a transgression of boundaries, of movement across the barriers of everyday life into the absolute realm of otherness. Tours of the forbidden city and colonial exhibitions served to disechant the viewer as well as the once celestial became mundane and became colonized as equivilent and less than Europe, a specimen. Photography made the city an immutable mobile. With the destruction of the signs, sites, and symbols of Qing sovereignty, the monarchy had been rendered low.

Motivated by a desire to win support for its perpetuation, the Qing accomodated Western demands. To some observers, they became an ethnographic display of an alien exhibitionary regime.

The media served to reassure the public that the looting and violence of 1900 need not concern Western perceptions of civilization. Visual narratives of conquest, humiliation, punishment, and symbolic approrpriation meshed with a master story of little wars breaking out all over the place, China became part of a global narrative of righteous warfare and just punishment of the guilty. No way the British are connected to the photographs only to prevent cruel and needless torture. Serve to enlist sympathy for an unfortunate people, arouse a strong abhorence to cruel practices, and provoke a feeling of thankfullness. British action justified and places the Chinese people into a colonial world: not where they had been before.

Friday, October 10, 2008

A Reign of Terror: Punishment and Retribution in Beijing and its Environs

The Boxer Uprising a reaction against the political impotence of the Qing dynasty, socioeconomic dislocation in the North, economic ambitions of Western companies, poor harvests, rivalries between the Western powers and friction between the West and China on numerous fronts.

The West saw it as an opportunity for altering Qing notions of imperial sovereignty. For the Chinese elite, it illuminated the bankruptcy of the government.

Western diplomatic and military elites planned a campaign designed to make the Chinese people and rulers lose face. This entailed American troops entering the Forbidden City and using sacred space as a parade ground while building a railroad through a Chinese temple. This meant erasing once and for all any real or imagined Qing claims to universal kingship.

The marching into the Forbidden City put race and nation in a place once off limits to both while serving as a beacon of progress. The British believed these actions served a larger purpose of subjugating the Chinese. The march into the city was informed by an identification of things that the Chinese held to be invested with mythical powers. Worries also persisted that the Chinese government might topple and leave the whole region under anarchy.

Given the self-righteous rhetoric calling for retributive justice for the savage and barbaric assaults on Chinese missionairies, how did the British justify such looting? Compare contrast: 1860: smaller force occupying a small area for a shorter amount of time. British auction system helped justify the plunder and sealed the army off from the moral chaos of plunder. The imperial British system best understood in this regard: necessary to maintain moral superiority of the British. The chaos in the wake of the war permitted Westerners and Chinese alike to take up brigandry.

With death reigning over the countryside, the Europeans seemed to think the Chinese were getting what they deserved. War made them callous and altered the manner of interaction between victor and Chinese. Rather than seeking to improve the Chinese character, they accepted it as what it was and morphed their own actions to better control it. Given the nature of the Boxer rebellion, the people were now held accountable: collective punishment now in vogue. Was this really anything new? Counterinsurgency tactics employed by the Spanish in Cuba and by our forces in the Philippines. Chinese culture distinct needed to be destroyed, as in other parts of the world: the distinctness of China that researchers strove to pull out was inherantly subordinate to the West. Qing officials, rather than the emperor or the government, were held responsible for their actions. Executions not only aimed to strike fear into the Chinese, but it provided a quasi-legal framework that differentiated Western behavior from Chinese while providing a shield against Europeans being seen as barbaric.

The Boxer uprising brought an uprupt end to the British civilizing mission in China. The destruction of Chinese culture and pride meant as a lesson to lift them out of barbarism. Western self-criticism emerging. There existed a tension between those who saw implementation of tough-love for the sake of order and those who wanted the West to retain its moral superiority. While they did little to alter the course of the war in China, the debate shifted the way people interpreted events. For Euroamericans, the link bertween race and progress of civilization remained paramaount for buttressing positive assessments of colonialism: could the Chinese destroy the West through contact? Western intervention no longer seen as clear European moral superiority. Western self-perception needed to reorder China so that the problem of barbarism within civilization could be effectively suppressed.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The Qing Empire in the Era of European Global Hegemony

Demographic growth compounded by fiscal crises, and poor administration placed significant pressure on the economic and political system and provided a substantial body of evidence that the Qing was in decline in the early nineteenth century. The arrival of less benevolent powers than Britain in East Asia demanding exclusive trade concessions and spheres of influence.

Where did imperial adventure and colonial power fit into the rapid technological and economic transformation of the late nineteenth century? The emergence of the global economy and the reworking of more and more areas of the world under a capitalist framework abetted by improved communication systems certainly played a role. The structure of the international system also abetted it. A synergisitc realtionship also emerged among technological change, corporate capitalism, and expansive European nation-states: the rise of the miltiary-industrial complex. To ensure security for possessions, sometimes this meant an offensive-defense. Interaction in China seen as securing the industrial world's surplus reduction: curing it thus forever from the woes of the market.

Whether driven by the rules of the market or the interests of particular classes in perpetuating their power, Western politcal, economic, and cultural forces marched inexorably into formerly alien lands deep in the heart of China. A consistent British policy of deterritorialization yielded to the instability of capitalism and global power politics and hampered British efforts. Western views on spheres of influence and partition led to a new China map.

Qing officials still retained their snobbery yet not their prestige over parts of their empire as more diffuse and decentralized power as regional governors built regional bases independent of central authority. The weak Qing state in the 1890s eroded British confidence in its viability and provoked a rupture in relations. Westerners claiming treaty rights came into conflict with resentful and suspicious locals. The Chinese government seemed oblivious. To many, the dynasty still resided in a fantasy world.

Foreign perceptions were limited to coastal observation. Measures of improvement and empire rule can be measured outside of the modernity narrative. The Qing effectively dealt with their Central Asian possessions, especially Xinjiang. China able to play the great game independent of Western influence, but judgments against it quite harsh.

New literature on China now part of a broader discourse on race and civilization common in Europe and North America. Race transformed in the 1860s and 1870s to biological determinism. Westerners sought to manipulate what they saw as deficient Asian characteristics. This led to a collapse of the optimism in hoping for cooperation. Yet Russian advances eastward worried the British and in their realism sought to prevent the Qing from ever seeking succor from the Tsar.

Constructing a New Order

Control of territory and access to technology as well as a comprehensive knowledge of the peoples of Asia provided by field agents permitted British domination in the nineteenth century. The depository of knowledge acquired by British archivists permitted the Europeans an opportunity to transform naked political power into a managable entity for exploitation of human and material resources.

Paperwork permitted the transportation of faraway things to be reproduced at distant sites for little cost an infinite amount of times. To rule over a territory, the British needed to superimpose an alien coding over an ancient area that usually produced complete misreadings of an area. Trending toward empiricism as the expanding British presence in the region provided further opportunities for ways of more efficient organization of information. Classification schemes abetted the world market for Chinese art goods, providing a greater respect for the accomplishments of the Qing. Organizing material became difficult.

Standardization of language allowed the publication and cross-referencing of dictionaries and bibliographies, and encouraged the systematizing of data. Maps of China, for instance, allowed for the imposition of Western style demarcation that created a new reality suited to the biases of the cartographer.

Transaction costs in the market could to be lowered by alleviating the transferable cost incurred by ignorance of language. Textbooks on Chinese symbols began appearing. Essays on Chinese law, weather, wildlife, geology, medicine, geography, traditions and cultures began appearing from men who had spent time in China. This mindless empiricism created a new China accessible to an audience literate in English that expanded the British imagination of China. This allowed a better informed public to access British activity in China. An alien empire in less than half a century had been decoded and made available for mass consumption.

Missionary, commerical, and diplomatic exercises also reordered Chinese society. On the one hand, these groups provided secure channels through which information could flow, but they also penetrated deeper int China and reordered locales and linking the resulting formulations into global networks. The British sought to instruct Chinese bureaucrats in the science of Western rationality and science. Missionaries working for the Chinese government linked innerparts of China with a global network of Chrisitan outeach.

For knowledge to have value, however, it needed to make the world safe for empire: in China this meant preventing another flare-up or war. For the British, this meant imparting on the reclariant Mandarin elite their position of relative weakness in the realist world of great power competition. To change minds, the British hoped to recalibrate Qing sensibilities of Englishmen. When the Chinese tried to pull a fast one on the British ambassador by citing an arcane use of language employed in the treaty, the diplomat turned the tables on the linguistic trick and imparted upon the frustrated Qing a lesson in the extent of resources on their culture available to the adversary.

In having his ambassadors bow before Queen Victoria and his officials supervised by a British agent, the Chinese emperor often treated much like a native prince under British indirect rule. Qing elite, those educated, began arguing in Western language for greater rights for Chinese sovreignty. Learning the intracies of international alw and diplomatic practices as well as acquiring European weaponry became top objectives for the Qing. The English taught proper intercourse in diplomatic as well as military discipline. While Qing Westernization couched in the language of mutual benefit made the Chinese government more amenable to some British pressure and sensibilities, the deterritorialzing effects of global forces undermined these appartent gains.







Loot, Prize and Retribution

Given the high purpose ascribed to English intervention in Chinese affairs, the looting of the Summer Palace is problematic. The practice itself was not out of departure from British adventures in India nor really much different than how many seedy Westerners operated in coastal cities, and those high-ranking describing the event took pains to ascribe agency to the lower class status of the soldiery and their susceptiblity to cultural pollution by the even baser coolie.

The British had a long tradition of taking looted goods, auctioning them, and splitting the proceeds among the officers and troops as a bounty. The prize procedure that auctioned personal pieces of the emperor part of a larger process that incorporated China and its political order into the regularities of the British Empire, thereby undermining Qing authority and signaling to all the costs of defying British power. It also had symbolic importance for the British: disciplined forces achieved righteous conquest.

The opening of the global market for Chinese imperial luxury goods provided a continual reminder of the British triumph over the opulent emperor, putting shame on the latter and reinforcing the views of the former on him. The objects at any moment could stand for conquest and humiliation, fantastic monetary value, and for little or nothing at all, allowing any awe of the Chinese emperor to dissipate. The Chinese could be seen as the backward student of a British tutor requiring punishment and disciple as the grounding on which learning could be initiated.

The Chinese government treated prisoners-of-war in a manner that the British found barbaric and outside of the "law-of-nations." Though prudential matters of diplomacy overriding all other concerns, the British decided to torch the Summer Palace as an act of retribution against the Chinese emperor, further humbling his pride while hopefully also imparting a lesson on future conduct and the seriousness of the British presence.

The ratification of the treaty provided the British an opportunity to hammer home their point on real power. The British located a symbolic spot for the treaty-signing and employed it to humiliate the Qing, a method they believed would lead to subserviance from the populace. The Treaty of 1860 formally ended the difficulties the British had negotiating with Chinese.

Violence and the Rule of Law in China, 1856-1858

Advancement of Western capital and culture into China impossible without the favorable treaties following their military victories. The treaties were part of a larger Western imperial process of tearing down older networks of power and establishing newer ones. The destruction of the Qing hegenomy over Eastern China began with the illicit opium importation and the circumvention of its established buffers to foreign contact and influence.

Market forces drove Western investors into Chinese ports in the early 19th century as the benefits of exporting Opium to the Chinese exceeded all other costs. The trade brought Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain into a London-centered economy that linked Great Britain, India, and the China coast. Opium completely reordered commercial relations between China and Europe while encouraging smuggling and piracy, completely upsetting older commercial patterns. As silver drained from Chinese markets led to inflation as peasant poverty, official corruption, and a displaced population sent shockwaves to the Qing dynasty as market forces out of their control impact their authority. When the Chinese government tried to stop the trade, the West won a war and concessions in Chinese port cities allowed even greater Western penetration, destroying the Qing's control over the economy. The lines between British and Chinese enterprises blurred as well. Chinese society, like European ones, was reoriented toward transnational market places that establish the universal character of addiction.

Military advancement abetted the British as speed and rapid deployment helped lessen Chinese home advantage. This, coupled with gunboat bombardment, quickly brought the opposition into submission. The enemy learns it cannot defeat it, thus its function inscribed a visible sign of loss as well as imparted a lesson as the Chinese military would need to be reordered.

The British sought to impose upon the Chinese a universal form of language and meaning that would lower the transaction costs to the former and which they hoped would improve the behavior of the latter by making them more amenable to reason. Access to Chinese archives reinforced British perceptions that the Chinese were backwards and arrogant and provided a rational for striping the Qing of its power, which included the authority of its language. The process completely disrupted traditional Chinese bureaucratic procedure while legitimizing the historical record in favor of the Europeans by cloaking it in terms of righteous conquest and universal benefit.

The British also sought to impose tradition bourgeois standards upon diplomatic protocol. Doing so satisfied the manliness constructions of the Europeans while undermining the traditional authority of the Emperor. It also served to display the distinction between real power and ceremonial, that is the power of modernity and that of the ancient, with a clear bias in favor of the former.

This all laid the ground for the right of physical presence and residence for Euroamericans in China: the right to buy and own property, purchase dwellings, and have them protected. Treaties created a new tariff protocol constructed a new series of paperwork and bureaucracies that expanded the zone of contact between Chinese and Europeans that was reordered and disciplined conforming to the latter's standards.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

by Jeremy Bentham

Pain and pleasure govern man and determine his behavior. Man cannot escape their domination. Utility is the foundation of the present work: utility is that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question. The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur: the interest of the community is the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. Individual is the community.

Of Principles Adverse to Utility:

If it is ok to be governed by utility, then all other principles must be wrong. The only way to combat it is through a strictly regimented society. Ascetics concluded that certain pleasures when reaped in the long run attended with pains more than equivalent to thme, took occasion to quarrel with everything that offered itself under the name of pleasure. The principle of utility is capable of being consistently pursued while otherwise not.

If you hate much, punish much: if you hate little; punish little; punish as you hate. The fine feelings of soul are to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dicates of political utility. Right and wrong merely sympathy and antipathy: avoid the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and prevail upon the reader to accept of the author's senitment or opinion a reason for itself.

Imperfect Information, Marriage, and Divorce

by Gary Becker

Imperfection information is the essence of divorce, search in the marriage market, contributions by children to elderly parents, a good reputation, and other behavior. People in the marriage market hardly know their own interests and capabilities.

Imperfect Information in Marriage Markets:

People don't marry the first reasonable prospect encountered, but try to learn about them and search for better prospects. Assumes people goal oriented and rational to the extent the information they possess allows them to be. People marry when the cost of further searching exceeds the expected benefits from better prospects.

Since lasting love is not easily distinguished from momentary infatuation, little confidence is attached to the direct assessment of love before marriage. Dating etc increase reliability. Marriage rate would be better if better information existed. Data cited in marriages that break up quickly usually the product of this imperfect information. Assumes people are utility seekers and that costs after a while are higher than benefits. Lower children rate due to higher uncertainty of outcome?

Maturity and independence of men has been delayed by greater investments in their human capital. Women don't marry as frequently cause they have work. Assumes children are the cost preventing remarriage. Use of historical data odd: how can he make those conclusions from them?

One has only to determine whether the joint wealth of a married couple would be increased by divorce, without worrying about how the increase is divided or about who has legal access to divorce. Rules shape divorce rates. Martial instability related to economic incentives. People who enter these situations weigh incentives and make a decision. Some people enter mixed marriages not because they are unlucky, but are inefficient.

Expected gain from remaining married was generally quite large in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given high fertility and that few women participated in the market sector.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations

Of The Division of Labor:

The division of labor is a rational action that leads to greater efficiency. The separation of labor exists due to the economic advantage and leads to the greatest prosperity. Farming irrational if pursued only seasonally. Market allows specialization. Increase in production is due to the increased dexterity of the workman, lowering transaction costs, and increasing machines. The division of labor decreases the operation of one man's activity to one thing, giving him greater ease in performing it. Market forces driving change in work, technology, conceptions of time. Holds people to a high standard. The invention driven by the division of labor, not contextually or accidently as narrative might say. People maximize utility. He assumes mankind will progress to even greater rationality and efficiency.

Examine the house but only interested in the source of these materials, does not ask why X got it, probably because that matters not, X wants what X wants for reasons unknown to us, but the division of labor allows him to attain it and he is ratioanl in how he uses his money. Measures the class of peasant against King of Africa in terms of economic status.

Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labor:

Division of labor not the impact of human wisdom, but the product of a "slow and gradual" consequence of a certain human propensity to exchange. We do not know why or how, limits our understanding of it. Common to all men. Civilized men do not fawn, but see into the future and know that to get what they want, they will have to offer something in return. Men want to gain more through trade.

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up, is the effect of the division of labor. Incentives from external forces drive human choice and behavior. He groups men into one species and animals into another to make his points.

That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market:

The extent of the market divides labor. In a small market, no one can devote himself entirely to one trade. Industry goes along rivers. Commerce drives all improvement. Egyptian society motivated by the same force as English. Does not understand why Egypt, India, or China pursued foreign commerce, though they did.

Of the Wages of Labor:

In the state of nature, what you made was what you got. Man at his most basic will exchange things and make stuff cheaper. Bound to end before production improvements. Wage disputes caused by desire for more money, the capitalist tend to win. Groups form due to economic incentives. Labor tactics influenced by constraints of time and money, not anything else. Family size an economic reality. No mention whatsoever of anything else.

Collective action only possible when groups make it so. Marriage etc. explained in economic terms.

Digression on Silver:

What ancient societies value and why speculate on stuff. Low value of other things makes silver appear more valuable. Dietary habits comapred to corn.

Rent of Land:

Every improvement causes rent to rise, the wealth of the landlord, his power of purchasing labor or their produce. The landlord's share raises produce. Rise in productive power of labor reduce prices. The interest of the landed class those of general society as they want whats best, in theory. Labor also want whats best, but havent the time to think it through. Public interest cannot be expected from merchants: class, but interest dominates their political lives.

How Rational Citizens Reduce Information Costs

by Anthony Downs

Rational citizens under a great pressure to cut down the quantity of scare resources they use to obtain political data. Society's free information stream provides some citizens more politically useful information than others. Specialists in the division of labor act automatically to reduce data costs drastically to focus attention on areas most relevent to decision-making. Rational men might remain completely ignorant. Any society containing uncertainty and a division of labor will see that men will not be equally well-informed about politics, no matter how equal they are in other respects. Any concept of democracy based on an electorate equally well-informed citizens presupposes that men behave irrationally.

The Nature and Sources of Free Information:

By the needs of production and psychological necessity, free information is made readily available for a number of things. Time nontransferable, other ones are. In the self-interest of political elite to distribute information. Free information is the floor for all types of rational calculations. The factor most important in determining how much free information a man can fruitfully receive is his ability to bear the nontransferable costs inherent in all information.

How Attention is Focused By Information Providers:

Political decision-making cannot be undertaken without fanstastic costs unless information is gathered for many decision-makers by a few specialists and the information each citizen recieves is prefocused upon the differential areas of decision.

How Rational Citizens Reduce Their Data Costs:

Rational men expend no more time or money on acquiring political information than its returns warrant. Rational citizens will seek to receive free information from other persons if they can. Can recognize problems without specifying their nature.

Delegation of Analysis and Evaluation as a Means of Reducing Costs:

Many areas of decision are noncomprehensible for those who are not experts, but nonexperts often must have opinions concerning the aptness of policies followed in these areas to make important political choices. Citizens can buy generalized opinions of experts in each area at much lower costs than they would incur by manufacturing similar opinions on their own. Democracy is impossible without a shifting of factual analysis onto specialists. Professional standards in most areas provide an independent check upon expertness. Evaluation is a process of judging means in the light of ends; thus the ends are all-important. To be rational, a delegator must personally determine whether the agent he selects has goals similar to his own, possesses more data than he himself does, and has powers of judgment that are, at worse, not so inferior to his own that they offset the advantages of better information. It may be rational, therefore, for a man to delegate all or part of his decision-making process to others, no matter how important the decision is. S cannot be an expert in all fields of policy that are relevant to his decision, so he will seek assistance from people who are, share his goals, and own good judgment. S should make no decisons himself save to evaluate whether T knows best.

We cannot trust party leaders because they are only interested in maximizing votes, never in producing any state per se, where voters are concerned with the latter. A rational voter cannot assure members of any political organization have goals similar to his own unless he beleives a certain political party will maximize votes by catering to the desires of a specific interest group or section of the electorate, and its own goals are identical with the goals of that group. This requires some cost, but it also rewards poltically motivated, and hence, radical elements of the electorate.

The Differential Power Impact of Information:

A man's ability to use the information he recieves depends upon the time he can afford to spend assimilating it, the kind of contextual knowledge he has, and the homogenity of the selection principles behind the information with his own selection pricninples. One's job and education background impact your ability to comprehend. Since the mass media is owned in many democracies by high-income interests than low-income ones, low income citizens are more likley to recieve data selected by principles conflicting with their own than upper income ones.
If our model were populated by rational individuals with equal intelligence, equal interest, and equal incomes, they would nevertheless not be equally well-informed: division of labor always puts men in different situation with different access to information.

An Economic Theory of Democracy: The Process of Becoming Informed

by Anthony Downs

Reaction against economic theory: Information is attainable only at a cost. Ratioanl decison-makers acquire only a limited amount of information before making choices and all reporting is biased because the reporter must select only some of extant facts to pass on to his audience, therefore, a rational citizen keeps properly well-informed by exposinh himself to a particular set of information sources has chosen for the purpose.

The Role of Information in Decision-Making:

To be rational, a man must know what his goals are, the alternative ways of reaching them, and the probable consequences of choosing each alternative. Rationally deciding how to vote goes as follows: gather all relevant information to each issue for which political decisions have been made, select information that will be used in voting, for each issue, analyze the facts selected to arrive at specific factual conclusions about possible alternative policies, appraising the consequences of every likely policy in light of relevant goals, coordinating these appraisals of each issue into a net evaluation of each party in the election, making a voting decision based on comparing the evaluation, actually voting. Voters delegate these steps to someone other than the voter: time is a scarce resource to be used for assimilating data. The fewer costs the voter performs himself, the fewer costs he bears directly and it allows him to make use of economies of scale and the expert knowledge of specialists.

The Process of Becoming Informed:

From among many sources of information, he must select only a few to tap. The object of his choice is creation of a system of information acquisition which provides him with data that are both chosen by means of selection principles in accord with his own and comprehensive enough to enable him to make the decisions he faces. A rational person makes selections that provide versions of events that closely approximate the versions they would formulate themselves were they expert. A man's selection principles are rational if application of them provides him with information that is useful for making decisions which will bring about the state he most prefers: no one suits all men. Necessarily hypothetical and subject to great error.

The Quantity of Information It Is Rational To Acquire:

Some people acquire information as an end itself. An information seeker invests resources into procuring data until the margin return from information equals its marginal cost. At that point, he makes a decision. The disparity between real behavior and the procedures in the model to appear striking since few people behave in the manner described, but assumes these are implicit assumptions even if casual observation fails to confirm it.

The Need For Focusing Attention:

Any differences between the way one party would run the government and the differences between the way the other would is relevant, including trivial ones in administering obscure agencies. It is not possible to know which ones are revelant with knowing what all of them are. The cost of discovering the latter is prohibitive to the average voter. Voters need a device to know how to avoid the staggering difficulty of comprehending everything the government does and everything its opponents would have done differently. Areas of decision where opposition parties contest the policies of the incumbents; areas of decision in which the presently governing party changed the government's method of reacting to or handling a situation; areas of decision in which the situations to which the government must react are markedly different from those extant under preceding governments. If voters focus on these three areas, they will be rational.

Characterisitcs of a Rational Information System:

Every rational citizen constructs for his political usage a system of information acquisition that consists of a limited number of information sources, a part of whose data output he selects to use in political decision-making. He must rely on a rather crude process of trial and error to construct this system. The data reporters are identifiable with his own yet also broad enough to report anything of significance in differential areas. It provides him with enough information about each issue for his decisions, given his desire to invest in information. It possesses sufficient internal plurality so that its parts can be used as checks upon each other's accuracy and deviation. Creating this system absorbs scarce resources, the cost of which must be balanced against the returns from the information obtained.

Summary:

Decision-making is a process which consumes time and other scare resources; hence economy must be practiced in determining how many resources shall be employed in it. The prinicples of selection they employ depend upon the end for which information is a means, but some principles are inherant inevery report; so all information is biased. Information used by one citizen is gathered, transmitted, and analyzed by others: if the user is to know what his information really means in terms of decision-making, he must be sure others have the same principles of selection. Each citizen decides how much information to acquire by utilizing the basic marginal cost-return principle of economics: marginal return from information is computed by weighing the importance of making a right instead of a wrong decision, to his value is applied the probablility that the bit of information being considered will be useful in making this decision. Much of this is a transferable cost, but the time for assimilation is a nontransferable one. The decision-maker continues to acquire information until the marginal return equals the marginal cost.