Mr. and Mrs. Smith...

There is a deep absurdity to espionage, one that seems to have been made worse by the apparent eagerness of spies to embrace a clumsy pastiche of B-movie and dime-store short-story clichés[1].

“You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,” [the intercepted message] said. “Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles and send intels [intelligence reports] to C[enter].”

Is this a joke? This has all the traits of a high school screenwriting class: A message from Russia lacking the definite pronoun (I hope that this was originally sent in Russian); a nice and helpful summary of all that has been provided to the spies, the clumsy classic of contextualization; and of course, the misssion!! That way the audience does not need to be bored by scenes of meetings in hotels, or flashbacks, or some other way of introducing the objectives of the spies that might unnecessarily eat into the 1hour 38minutes running time, time that could be better served by an expensive chase scene or sex.

But I guess the way we know it's not a joke is the headline in the Washington Post (online): Alleged spies targeted think tanks, officials say. I suspect that even the greenest of high school screenwriters would think that this was implausibly misguided (not to mention dull, but I suppose real world espionage is going to be less sexy and exciting than a teen's fantasy). I wonder if they were in situ in time to hear the devious crafting of the public option, or the current debates on when to start cutting the deficit. Do you think they learned our Afghanistan policy? Maybe they could send it to Moscow, and then have Moscow send it back to us. Certainly I'd like to hear what the Council on Foreign Relations believes we should do, without, that is, going on to their website or taking a bus down to D.C. 

[1] Apparently the same thing happened to the mob. Once the Godfather movies came out, everyone in the Mafia--from the top on down--started to imitate what they'd seen in the movie. The result was that thugs and family men became caricatures, aspiring to what they now saw as an appropriate and desirable personage.

On a related note

You can very quickly decide whether a piece on the public debt is worth reading by looking for explanations of the explosion of debt in the last few years that sound like this: "But after four years in office Gordon Brown took out the country's credit card and let rip."


This is accompanied by the following graph

Now it's not entirely clear what the red and the blue are supposed to represent. Certainly not Labour governance, as they took back the House of Commons in 1997. Rather it seems to be Brown governance. Now notice that there are two big spikes in the data, and possibly a third if we go back to pre-1977. Now one comes under Tory rule, and the other under Labour rule. What do they seem to have in common? Houw about the onset of a recession and the resulting collapse in revenue and increase in the automatic stabilizers of unemployment insurance and the like. 


In fact, the major cause of the spike in deficits is not increased spending but rather collapsing demand. Here is the American data, from James Kwak

Or from the Center for Budget and Economic Priorities

In short, when you read statements such as "But after four years in office Gordon Brown took out the country's credit card and let rip" as an explanation for the current size of the deficit, you should be on guard for some nonsense streaming your way. 

Why Parties Matter....

Not in the political science sense, but rather in the policy sense: There has been much chatter in the press about the different priorities that are being brought to the G-20 meeting, with the most pronounced difference (or at least the one most often highlighted) being the division between Obama and the United States (who want additional stimulus at best and at the very least want to avoid taking the money out of the economy before the recovery is secured) and European leaders who want immediate and often harsh fiscal austerity.

The suggested reasons for this difference are to be found in the greater sensitivity of European counties to debt, either because of the closer involvement in the Greek drama or because of the greater debt-to-GDP ratios in some of these countries (the UK especially).

But what I have not heard mentioned is the fact that the major deficit-cutting hawks are all from their respective countries' conservative party: Sarkozy, Cameron, Merkel. And the new commitment to halve the debt by 2013? That little gem of foolhardy is brought to us by none other than Canada's Stephen Harper. There is nothing surprising about this. There is nothing particularly surprising in this. It is not that conservatives are more concerned with the problems of government debt; they aren't, and in Canada and the US at least it was under conservatives that a budget surplus painfully won by the respective liberal parties was wasted (in the US case, wasted on tax cuts that had very little stimulus value, on wars, and on the largest entitlement expansion in decades).

It's not that conservatives are more attuned to the responsibilities of accounting, nor are they less attuned to the positives of deficit spending (see above-mentioned tax cuts and wars). Rather, it is that they oppose the welfare state, either tout court or a more targeted dislike for programs that benefit groups outside of their base. And fiscal austerity, the consequences to long term recovery be damned, provides an excellent means to undermine and restructure the welfare state. The fact that the welfare state had very little to do with the explosion of debt is beside the point.

But let's cut the nonsense: the political class is not now worried about debt because it has become the central problem in these countries. Unemployment remains remarkably high, with tens of millions of people out of work. Rather, it has become the central problem amongst the political class because it serves the interests of conservative parties.

When the opportunity presents itself, conservatives will take it. I would only hope that liberals and social democrats would do the same were they presented with the opportunity to expand the welfare state.

Some nonsense....

...from the New York Times.

This will not be a particularly thoughtful post, but I do want to return to this theme in greater depth in upcoming posts. For American political scientists, believe it or not, the violence in Kyrgyzstan is a little difficult to explain. In the American academy, the most prominent theories of ethnic conflict claim that cross-cutting cleavages are a crucial factor in ensuring stability in ethnically heterogeneous countries.But there is cross-cutting a-plenty between Uzbeks and Kyrgys in Kyrgyzstan: there is considerable intermarriage, political alliances, schools (although the desire for separate schools amongst Uzbeks seems to be considerable).

If you don't buy the cross-cutting cleavages claim, or rather, you believe that cross-cutting cleavages are themselves more likely to be the product of relatively sustained periods of peace rather than the necessary condition for it, and a fine thing to have but not something that should be relied upon too heavily or made a high priority in conflict resolution, then the current violence in Kyrgyzstan is not particularly surprising: you have a homeland minority (that is, a minority living on what it believes to be its ancestral homeland) that constitutes around 15% of the population, highly concentrated in the south, where they constitute around 50%, and in key strategic valleys; you have a political turmoil in which a regime with concentrated support amongst the dominant majority was overturned and the leadership forced into exile after a revolt sparked by the killing of protesters by the military and replaced by a regime that seems to have support from both elements of the dominant and most of the subordinate segments.

And crucially, you have two different segments that consider themselves to be of different ethnicities, that believe themselves to be of separate political, cultural, and social communities (even as many of them surely believe they also share a political community with each other).

Is this sufficient cause for a riot? Is it sufficient cause for a pogrom? Well no. But very few of the most important causal relations in political science are sufficient causes. Nor is it a necessary cause for deadly riots. But does it greatly raise the likelihood that such violence, targeted not solely at individual protesters but at broader communities often who had no direct relation to the political turmoil that might be the proximate cause, will occur. When this happens, those cross-cutting cleavages become tragic, in the sense that they force families into bitter decisions of loyalty and belonging. Which is not to say that they don't matter at all, nor that they are not a fine thing. If cross-cutting cleavages represent an aggregation of free decisions of individuals and groups to intimately associate with people from a variety of backgrounds, that's great. But if it is not enough on its own to ensure concord, then these cross-cutting ties will often receive an even greater stress and shock when stability breaks down and violence breaks out. This is not novel: this is Romeo and Juliet.

This is all background. It is meant to highlight that there are two broad positions in the political science literature on this matter: one, prominent in the US, believes that cross-cutting ties are the best solution to ethnic conflict, while the other, prominent in any other country that has had ethnic conflict, as well as many that have not, believes that cross-cutting ties are secondary at best, a decent consequence of a peace process and settlement that is more attuned to the reality of ethnic belonging.

It is background for reading this: "Kyrgyz Tensions Rooted in Class, Not Ethnicity, Experts Say." As I see it, there are two main options for political scientists of the cross-cutting cleavage persuasion: given the existence of such ties in Kyrgyzstan, they can either claim that this is not really ethnic conflict, but some other form of conflict in which these ties are less important, or then can claim that these ties were insufficiently developed in Kyrgyzstan. Both of these strategies are likely, but the New York Times presents you the distilled form of the latter. Beginning with the painfully obvious--the violence "is frequently ascribed to ethnic tensions, but regional experts say the causes are more complex"--we move relatively quickly to the bold claim (and common claim in situations of ethnic conflict) that "ethnic distinctions between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz are so slight as to be hardly distinguishable." The rest of the article argues that in reality class, not ethnicity, is driving the resentment, which is presumably driving the violence. 


This is a weak article, and I don't want to impugn Prof. Cooley, the man quoted here. But the point is not whether the ethnic distinctions are themselves obvious to the outside observer, but whether they are obvious to the participants. For instance, there are very very few ethnic differences between African Americans and white Americans: they are both predominantly Christian, have very similar cultural practices (especially when the comparison is appropriate in terms of region and class), have very similar if not identical value hierarchies (which is always a tricky construct, given that there is huge variation amongst individuals). Outside observers could definitely be excused if they felt that there were not significant ethnic distinctions between the two, and that the only real line between them was a patently absurd "racial" line whose contours are the product of a tortuous (and torturing) history of slavery and subordination. But one of the first things we learn as Americans is the difference between white and black; it is not necessarily an objective difference, but rather is a schema of categorization. 


If a comparable schema exists Kyrgyzstan, and all evidence suggests it does, since Uzbeks and Kyrgyzs certainly believe that they are different people with different histories and communal identities, then whether there are sufficient objective differences is immaterial. Prof. Cooley's statement that he doesn't "believe in a narrative of long-simmering ethnic tension", however, is perfectly valid--the current fight did not begin in earnest centuries ago. To claim such would be to deny the agency of those who coordinated the attacks, and we certainly would not want to deny their agency (and legal and moral culpability). But it is perhaps an indication of the poverty of popular understandings of ethnic conflict that this is being raised. 


Ethnic diversity, and even past ethnic antagonism, does not lead to contemporary violence by a mystical process of simmering.  But these are crucial components of the broader context in which violence becomes more likely. As for the class-ethnicity separation, it cannot be stressed often enough that these are mutually constitutive: ethnicity is marked, often rigidly but often quite flexibly, by certain economic roles. Ethnicity often becomes the basis upon which different economic functions are allocated (think Italian Americans and masonry), reinforcing existing ethnic differentiations (which is the cross-cutting cleavages main target) and creating new tension lines in which ethnic belonging can be mobilized as both the object and subject of violence. 


Or put another way, I can think of all sorts of class conflict that is not marked by ethnic divisions, but I cannot think of any ethnic conflict that does not have some economic component. And yet ethnic conflict tends to be much more violent than class conflict alone, suggesting that in practice these are distinct phenomena and that simply asserting that "Kyrgyz Tensions Rooted in Class, Not Ethnicity" greatly misses the point. Class conflict very rarely becomes a targeted pogrom against a group defined not simply as being "rich" or "poor", "workers" or "capitalists", but as fundamentally distinct and outside of the sphere of common membership. That is the special, albeit not exclusive, domain of ethnic conflict. And that is why what is occurring in Kyrgyzstan needs to be understood as an instance of such rather than as driven primarily by class. Recognizing the ethnic dimension's importance does not mean accepting the "centuries old hatred" trope; but it calls for us to look at a different set of agents and a different rationale than one motivated primarily by economic competition and resentment. It calls for different solutions--although economic redistribution should be a major component, if Uzbeks cannot feel secure as a communal group without institutional protections, recognition, and even separate institutions, then redistribution is neither likely to occur nor likely to provide for a lasting peace.