‘Face-to-Face Encounters of the Diplomatic Kind’

Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler

In my blogs this week, I have explored the challenges that face decision-makers in building trust with adversaries, and shown the limitations of approaches like Osgood’s GRIT (see Wednesday’s blog) and Kupchan’s ‘Red October’ analogy (see yesterday’s blog). In my final blog today, I want to explore the proposition that I am developing at length in my new book that face-to-face encounters between leaders and top-level diplomats hold out the possibility of building trust across the enemy divide. In making this argument, I am not falling into the trap of claiming that all that is necessary for a conflict to be transformed is that enemies meet and talk as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain discovered when he met Adolf Hitler at Munich in September 1938.

Even if adversaries meet without the intention of deception, putting enemy leaders in the same room can simply have the effect of heightening their awareness of what is at stake in the conflict, how much they fear and distrust each other, and how determined they are not to make concessions. This was certainly the outcome of the disastrous summit meeting between US President John F. Kennedy and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961. Neither leader was able to exercise that particular kind of empathy which I called ‘security dilemma sensibility’ (see Tuesday’s blog). Over the two days that they met, Kennedy and Khrushchev hammered away at each other on the ideological failings of the other’s political system – a textbook case of the ideological fundamentalism (see Tuesday’s blog) which blocks empathyand trust.

The research that I have conducted to date as part of my ESRC/AHRC Global Uncertainties project on ‘The Challenges to Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds’ suggests three key conditions that are necessary for the success of face-to-face diplomacy in building trust between adversaries. First, leaders must exercise security dilemma sensibility; ideally, they will have begun the process of empathising with each other prior to their meeting, but situations might arise where the exercise of empathy develops through the encounter itself, or is deepened as a result of meeting face-to-face.

The second condition for successful face-to-face diplomacy is political risk-taking on the part of leaders. I discussed yesterday Sadat’s leap of trust in going to Jerusalem in November 1977; the Egyptian leader paid the ultimate price for this gesture of trustworthiness in that he was assassinated from within the Egyptian army four years later, and his opening to Israel played a major part in this. I am not suggesting that this is the measure of ‘political risk-taking’, but the two adversarial leaders need to be able to see that the other is serious about building trust, and a litmus test of this is how far each leader is prepared to take on new vulnerabilities as a signal of their potential trustworthiness. As Annette Baier has put it: ‘Trust is acceptance of vulnerability to harm that others could inflict, but which we judge that they will not in fact inflict’ (1995: 152). These vulnerabilities could, as in the case of Sadat, be personal life-threatening ones, but they could extend well beyond personal risks and dangers to encompass national risks and dangers. It is often argued that Khrushchev left the Vienna summit in June 1961 with the belief that the new and young US President could be pushed around, and this was one factor in the nuclear brinkmanship that the Soviet leader tried with his audacious move of deploying medium range nuclear missiles to Cuba in October 1962.

The third condition for building trust through face-to-face encounters is that both leaders and top decision-makers recognise a common interest and shared responsibility in de-escalating a conflict. Trust will never grow in a context where one side believes that they can only be secure if the other side is insecure; rather, there must be a commitment to common or mutual security. Put differently, each leader must be looking for ways to increase and not decrease the security of an adversary. Indeed, the critical test of a trusting relationship is whether an actor refrains from exploiting opportunities that might arise to make gains at the other’s expense.

In the book I am writing, I test this model of what I call ‘communicative dynamics’ in both face-to-face encounters and written communication between actors.

The best case we have of ‘face-to-face diplomacy’ (the term is Marcus Holmes’s) is the Reagan-Gorbachev one. The summits that these two leaders held at Geneva in 1985, Reykjavik in October 1986, Washington in December 1987, and Moscow in March 1988 offer a fascinating contrast to the cases of Munich in 1938 and Vienna in 1961. Taking the first element in my model, both leaders arrived for their first summit in Geneva in November 1985 with a strong disposition to exercise security dilemma sensibility (this proposition is developed in Booth and Wheeler 2008; Wheeler 2013 – see also Reynolds 2007). With regard to the second condition, both leaders embarked on the summit process knowing that there was strong domestic opposition to a rapprochement of this kind, and yet each proceeded to take the political risks to build trust. Turning to the third condition for successful face-to-face trust-building, Reagan and Gorbachev shared a common vision to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and this created an emotional bond between them – transcending their ideological divisions – which led them to act as ‘nuclear trustees’ (the term was Hedley Bull’s) for common humanity. Reagan and Gorbachev trusted each other because they came to realise through meeting face-to-face that what divided them was ultimately far less important than what united them.

I would argue that face-to-face encounters of the kind that Reagan and Gorbachev had constitute a mechanism of trust building that overcomes the limitations that I identified in relation to other approaches in earlier blogs. Nevertheless, it still remains to be shown that face-to-face trust building enables frame breaking conciliatory moves (the subject of yesterday’s blog). Gorbachev made a series of cooperative moves in 1987-88 that can only be described as frame breaking (discussed in detail in Wheeler 2013). These were costly signals (to use Andrew Kydd’s terminology from yesterday’s blog) because the Soviet Union would never have sent these signals of its potential trustworthiness had it harboured malign motives. Stated boldly, my argument is that Gorbachev felt able to make those moves in significant part because of the trust that he had developed with Reagan. I am not claiming that the frame breaking conciliatory moves that Gorbachev made as Soviet leader would not have happened in the absence of this trust; the available evidence does not permit such a strong claim.

But what has to be explained is how Gorbachev went from making GRIT (see Wednesday’s blog) type moves in the 1985-86 to the more dramatic frame breaking moves in 1987-88. According to Osgood, ratcheting up to bolder cooperative moves should only follow after reciprocation by an adversary; Gorbachev threw Osgood’s GRIT strategy out of the window when in the absence of US positive reciprocation, Gorbachev moved to the frame-breaking level. Realist scholars like Mearsheimer (see Monday’s blog) would argue that Gorbachev made these moves because the Soviet Union was on the ropes as a consequence of economic failure and US competitive arms racing. I would agree that the material pressures exerted by a declining Soviet economy were a critical enabling condition of Gorbachev actions. But this is not to say that these conciliatory frame-breaking moves would have been possible in the absence of the trusting relationship that developed between US and Soviet leaders. In short, a full explanation of the end of the Cold War requires attention to both the material and the ideational, the latter being expressed significantly in the form of the trust that developed through Reagan and Gorbachev’s face-to-face diplomacy.

Our research on the conditions under which face-to-face diplomacy succeeds is only in its infancy, and my book is only the springboard to further research in this area. One exciting area of enquiry here concerns the implication of the latest research in neuroscience for trust building between adversaries, and in particular, the work of Marcus Holmes who is exploring how far mirror neuron theory might offer an escape from the security dilemma (the existential condition of uncertainty about the motives and intentions of others with the capability to do us harm). I am leading a partnership at the University of Birmingham in conjunction with the School of Psychology to take forward this research agenda, bringing in other scholars internationally. As part of taking this research project forward, the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (ICCS) in conjunction with the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) under the latter’s ‘Saving Humans’ theme, is co-hosting a workshop in June at Birmingham that will investigate theoretical issues, and explore further the case of Munich as well as evidence from the Israel-Palestine case. I look forward to reporting back on this work through the ICCS blog and other publications in due course.

Nicholas J. Wheeler is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, and Director of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham.

Follow Professor Wheeler on Twitter: @WheelerICCS

Click here for further information on the work of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (ICCS) at the University of Birmingham.

Further useful links:

Investigating diplomatic transformations

The force of Face-to-face diplomacy

International Politics at the Brain’s edge

The Neuroscience of Diplomacy

Summits 

Vienna 1961: when Cold War tensions came to the boil

What’s the context? 30 September 1938: The Munich Agreement 

‘Frame-Breaking Conciliatory Moves between Enemies’

Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler

In his 2010 book, How Enemies Become Friends, the US International Relations theorist Charles Kupchan evoked for his readers a scene from the 1990 film, The Hunt for Red October in which captain Marko Ramius (played by Sean Connery) commanding a Soviet ballistic missile submarine wants to defect with his submarine and crew to the United States. However, a US Navy Captain, Bart Mancuso, (played in the film by Scott Glenn) tracking the Soviet submarine in the USS Dallas, has orders to destroy the Soviet vessel which US political and military leaders fear could be commanded by a renegade intent on launching a nuclear attack against the United States. At a crucial moment in the underwater game of cat and mouse, the CIA agent on board the US submarine, Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin), persuades Mancuso to take a gamble (it is apparent in the subsequent dialogue just how much of a gamble) on the Soviet captain’s peaceful motives and intentions. Ryan has a hunch – no more – that Ramius is intent on defection and not attack. Mancuso is highly doubtful, after all what Ryan is asking for, risks the potential destruction of the US submarine if the gamble on Ramius’s potential trustworthiness turns out to be wrong. Nevertheless, the story requires the dramatic leap of trust (this idea is discussed in Lewis and Weigert 1985: 970; Booth and Wheeler 2008: 234-237; Wheeler 2011: 160-2) that Mancuso makes when he orders that the submarine’s propeller be reversed, thereby revealing to the Soviet submariners the position of the US submarine, and exposing it to possible destruction. The Soviet captain fortunately interprets the US commander’s decision to make his vessel vulnerable as clear evidence of his peaceful intent, and reciprocates by not taking any hostile actions. A sequence of deescalation follows through a series of unilateral-reciprocated non-verbal communicative acts (using sonar, periscopes and Morse code) and this leads eventually to a face-to-face meeting aboard the Soviet vessel in which arrangements are made for the Soviet submarine and crew to defect to the United States (Kupchan 2010: 39-40; Clancy 1984).

The US captain’s decision to reverse his submarine’s propeller and expose the submarine to possible attack as a way of signalling his peaceful motives and intentions is what I have in mind by a ‘frame-breaking conciliatory’ move (I am grateful to the US trust researcher Roderick Kramer’s for suggesting this formulation to me). The comparison with Osgood’s ‘gradualist’ (the term was coined by Amitai Etzioni who developed similar, though distinctive ideas to Charles Osgood in the early 1960s and continues to apply these ideas today to contemporary challenges) approach is clear. Osgood had called for low-risk initiatives that would build trust that could then establish a platform for bolder unilateral-reciprocal moves. However, as we saw yesterday, such moves might prove too limited to convince decision-makers in an adversary state who are operating with a mindset of ideological fundamentalism and applying bad faith thinking to any conciliatory gestures by an opponent.

‘Red October’ type signalling, in contrast, promises to send a powerful signal of peaceful motives and intent that is hard to discount. Some US International Relations theorists have dubbed what I am calling ‘frame-breaking conciliatory’ moves as ‘costly signalling’. To illustrate this idea, the trust researcher Diego Gambetta wrote that, ‘No poisoner seeks to demonstrate his honesty by drinking from the poisoned chalice. Drinking from a chalice…is a reliable signal that the drink is clean’ (2009: xviii– see also Bacharach and Gambetta 2001; Möllering 2009: 143). In the International Relations context, the idea of costly signalling is used to capture the idea, in Andrew Kydd’s words, that states ‘would hesitate to send [such signals] if [they] were untrustworthy (2000: 326 – see also 2005). However, Kydd argued that there is an explicit link between the costliness of the signal – the extent to which the signal communicates peaceful motives and intent – and ‘the level of trust’ (2005: 198). What Kydd is saying here is that because costly signalling entails a level of risk which increases as the signal becomes more costly, then states should not send such signals until they have built up a corresponding level of trust. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Wheeler 2013), and am developing at greater length in my book, Trusting Enemies, which will be published in 2015, Kydd has no adequate explanation for how this level of trust can be developed.

However, in the case of Red October, Ryan – and crucially Mancuso – have almost no basis for trusting Ramius’s intentions before Ryan convinces Mancuso to send the dramatic signal. In this case, Ryan and Mancuso act as if Ramius could be trusted, and in so doing, they hope to conjure into existence the very trust that they need in order for their gamble to pay-off. This is very different from Kydd’s idea of costly signalling which presupposes a prior level of trust before the costly signal can be sent.

The Red October vignette is the stuff of fiction and Hollywood, and the question is whether it has any relevance to building trust in the contemporary world. Kupchan used the story to argue in his book that it was dramatic, frame-breaking moves of this kind that are necessary for adversaries to begin a process of diplomatic accommodation, but the cases he discussed in the second part of his book (especially the Anglo-American rapprochement in the late 19^th Century) provide little evidence for this claim. More broadly, there is scant evidence that state leaders gamble in the way the captain of the USS Dallas did, and of course, in the real world, it is most likely that Mancuso would have been court-martialled (despite the positive outcome) for endangering the USS Dallas so cavalierly. Mancuso only put at risk his command, but what about leaders who have a primary responsibility for the security of their citizens? They face decisions under the security dilemma (the existential condition of uncertainty) as to whether to trust in which the costs of misplaced trust could – thinking of a nuclear context – be weighed not in the loss of one submarine, but the lives of millions of their citizens.

My point here is not to argue that ‘frame-breaking conciliatory’ moves should only be discussed in the context of novels and films; rather, it is to advance the point that examples of leaders acting as if trust existed in relations with their adversaries will be rare indeed. My best example of this would be Anwar Sadat’s courageous decision to visit Jerusalem in November 1977 and in a speech before the Knesset, publicly recognise Israel’s right to exist. This was close to being a leap of trust, though there had been prior communication between the two sides, and Sadat was working through trusted intermediaries, as well as knowing that he had US president Jimmy Carter supporting his unilateral conciliatory initiative. If it was a leap then, it was one furnished with something of a safety net, though this is not to detract from the game-changing nature of his move in visiting Israel, since it opened the door to the spectacular breakthrough that took place in Egypt-Israel relations through the US sponsored Camp David peace process.

Sadat is the outlier here, and the real challenge is to think creatively about how to build the trust that can lead the leaders in conflict situations to make frame-breaking conciliatory moves. I suggested yesterday that Osgood’s GRIT fails as a trust-building mechanism for two reasons: first, it may not be possible to domestically legitimate a strategy of making unilateral low-risk concessions if these are pocketed by an opponent without reciprocation, and second, the limited nature of the moves (to hedge against exploitation by an adversary) may be insufficient to break down a deeply embedded ‘diabolical enemy image’ (to return to Ralph White’s idea discussed in Tuesday’s blog) which dismisses GRIT type moves as tokenistic, or worse, a trap. In my final blog tomorrow, I will explore how far face-to-face encounters at the highest level of diplomacy are a critical, yet neglected mechanism for building trust between enemies, and making possible conciliatory frame-breaking moves.

Nicholas J. Wheeler is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, and Director of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham.

Other useful links:

• Enemies into Friends
• How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace
• The Hard Way to Peace: A New Strategy
• Who Authorized Preparations for War With China?
• Investigating diplomatic transformations
• The puzzle of trusting relationships in the Nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty
• Image source

 

Trust as a Path to De-Escalation and Frame-Breaking in International Politics

Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler

‘There is little room for trust among states’, so wrote the Chicago based professor of International Relations, John Mearsheimer, in his 2001 opus, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Trust, Mearsheimer argued, is virtually impossible because states coexist in a condition of international anarchy (defined in the field of International Relations as the absence of a global government) that generates a perpetual competition for security. Mearsheimer contended that as a consequence of international anarchy, there is no escape from unending security competition among the most powerful states in the international system, and this despite the fact that one of his key starting assumptions is that states are motivated by the search for survival, and only seek to be secure (2001: 30). Consequently, Mearsheimer has no difficulty in explaining the current crisis over Ukraine between the United States and Russia; for him, competition might wax and wane, and there might even be temporary periods of cooperation, but security competition is inescapable between great powers in a condition of anarchy. The situation is genuinely tragic because even if states have peaceful motives, they can never be certain about other states intentions. Although his critics have often failed to pick up this crucial caveat, Mearsheimer was emphatic that his theory did not make the assumption that states necessarily have hostile motives and intentions. Indeed, as he argued, ‘all of the states in the system may be reliably benign, but it is impossible to be sure of that judgment because intentions are impossible to divine with 100 percent certainty’ (2001: 31).

Writing in our 2008 book, The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust In World Politics, Ken Booth and I agreed with Mearsheimer that international politics takes place in an existential condition of uncertainty and, as a result, actors have to make inferences about the motives and intentions of others with the military capability to do them harm. Indeed, we advance the claim that this is the defining element of the ‘security dilemma’, a foundational concept in the field of International Relations, but the definition of which remains contested. I do not have the space to open up this controversy, but interested readers can pursue it in our book. Where Booth and I fundamentally disagree with Mearsheimer is on the question of whether the existential condition of uncertainty generated by international anarchy (I will use the shorthand of the ‘security dilemma’ to describe this predicament in subsequent blogs) prevents the great powers from establishing significant levels of security cooperation.

One of the most important contributions of trust researchers in the social sciences and humanities is the claim that relations of trust and uncertainty go hand-in-hand; after all, if you had certainty, you would not need trust. The conclusion of our 2008 book – a direct riposte to Mearsheimer – was that if actors could accept uncertainty, and crucially its logical corollary vulnerability, a space opens up – even for adversaries – to build trust at the international level.

I began research in October 2009 that was aimed at exploring this contention in relation to conflicts between nuclear-armed and arming states. I was fortunate enough to receive one of 14 ‘Ideas and Beliefs’ Fellowships in the social sciences and humanities under RCUK’s Global Uncertainties Programme: Security for All in a Changing World. This project was funded by the ESRC and AHRC until September 2013. The research continues at the University of Birmingham under the auspices of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (ICCS) where I am Director.

The central research question guiding the project is: how far is trust a critical causal variable in promoting the de-escalation and transformation of adversarial relationships into peaceful ones (Wheeler 2013). The key conclusion of the project is that cooperation between adversaries is possible without trust, but that any significant process of de-escalation (defined as reducing the salience of force as an instrument of interstate relations) requires increased empathy for the security interests and concerns of one’s adversary, and crucially reassuring actions (taking steps that increase the security of one’s adversary) that are based on this new empathetic awareness. At the same time, I argue that the growth of trust is a significant enabling condition if actors in an adversarial relationship are to make what (building on Roderick Kramer’s earlier formulation) I call ‘frame-breaking’ or game-changing moves. The latter concept is designed to capture situations where one or both sides act in such a way that it becomes extremely difficult for the other side to draw inferences from an opponent’s behaviour that would continue to support an ‘enemy image.’ I will explore in tomorrow’s blog how deeply entrenched such enemy images can be, and how they can seriously obstruct any process of trust building. The measure of a frame- breaking move is that it breaks down such an enemy image. The classic case of frame-breaking moves between nuclear adversaries would be Mikhail Gorbachev’s series of highly conciliatory actions in the second half of the 1980s. The highly cooperative moves that the Soviet Union made under Gorbachev’s leadership robbed the Reagan administration of its image of the Soviet Union as an enemy, and played a crucial role in paving the way out of the Cold War.

Some trust research scholars in the field of International Relations have recognized the importance of trust in leading actors to initiate frame-breaking moves, but their accounts of how trust gets built to make possible such moves have been unsatisfactory. Most theorists argue that trust develops out of initial rounds of reciprocated cooperation on lower stake issues, but this begs the question as to how adversaries move to that level of trust that gives them the confidence to make frame-breaking move(s). On this question, the existing literature has little to say.

Mearsheimer would argue that even asking this question is a corruption of thinking about international politics, and that history is littered with examples of state leaders who forgot to act on the imperatives of power politics. Mearsheimer and his fellow-travellers in the realist camp of International Relations theory are right to caution us against the dangers of misplaced trust in the high-stakes, no forgiving arena of great power politics, but it is equally important to guard against the dangers of misplaced suspicion.

Realism advises leaders to assume the worst about the intentions of others, but if we always assume the worst about the motives of others, we risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of spiralling insecurity. Mearsheimer tells the story of international politics as a structural one in which a particular logic of anarchy drives out trusting relationships. But perhaps our beliefs and values lead us astray here; changing those beliefs and values, and recognizing that trust might offer a viable path to de-escalation, as I will carry on exploring tomorrow, might enable new possibilities of building trust between enemies at the international level.

Nicholas J. Wheeler is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, and Director of the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham.

Other useful links:

• Image source

• Beyond Waltz’s Nuclear World: More Trust May be Better

• Trust-building in International Relations

• The security dilemma and ethnic conflict: toward a dynamic and integrative theory of ethnic conflict

• Trust and Missed Opportunities in International Relations

• A Conceptualization of Trust in International Relations

• Reciprocity in international relations

• Trust and Mistrust in International Relations (Sample chapter)

• Trust and International Relations: a Conference Report

Energy security and saving humans

Jonna Nyman

Energy security is increasingly the subject of headlines around the world. Most states rely heavily on fossil fuels to serve their energy needs, and as these fuels are finite they will eventually run out. There is an ongoing debate over whether or not we already have or will hit ‘peak oil’ in the near future, but either way there is increasing worry over the availability of, and access to, energy in years to come. 

Energy security is a nebulous term which is often used by politicians to justify a range of different policy choices, but the term itself is rarely explicitly defined. Generally, it is used to refer to the availability of secure and reliable energy supplies at stable or reasonable prices. It is worth unpacking this a little further. Unlike renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, fossil fuels are geographically bound in a territory. They are not considered part of the global commons, but rather as the ‘property’ of the state in which they are located. 

In this way, ‘secure supplies’ tends to refer to energy resources which are supplied from one state to another, implicitly putting the focus on fossil fuels which are traded openly on the global market. The emphasis on security of supply also suggests a state-centric focus – energy security policy aims to secure energy supplies to the state. The focus on ‘stable prices’ indicates a heavy focus on oil, as the energy resource most vulnerable to volatile prices in the global market. These factors are at the centre of most discussions of energy security today. 

World oil chokepoints are at the centre of discussion on security of energy supply
[map from http://www.eia.gov/countries/regions-topics.cfm?fips=wotc&trk=p3 ]

There are a number of problems with understanding energy security in these terms. Firstly, securing states through continuous fossil fuel supplies is clearly not sustainable, neither geologically nor environmentally. It’s biased towards developed, energy importing countries, and large scale energy industries – energy exporting countries conversely need security of demand, and in parts of the world many still rely on locally collected firewood for energy. It also does not consider the impact of current energy exploitation on human security. 

There are a number of issues and unresolved questions around energy security which are relevant to saving humans, and this is what I’ll be blogging about this week. At the centre of this is the growing conflict between the focus of much energy security policy and discussion on fossil fuels, and the human need for a stable climate and environment. Current patterns of energy exploitation also affect human security directly, which will be the subject of another post later in the week. 

Ultimately, the planet cannot survive if we continue to consume fossil energy at current rates. Yet, continued energy supplies are essential to maintain human life as we know it. The world still depends largely on finite and dirty sources of energy, and the growing pace of human development has been accompanied by ever-faster resource depletion. Energy security is one of the most important issues today, bearing direct impact on the continued survival of human civilisation as we know it.

Jonna Nyman has just finished her PhD within POLSIS at the University of Birmingham.

Useful links:

UK Government Energy Security Policy

Energy Security- the price of diversity

Ensuring energy security

Conceptualizing energy security

Is natural gas worse than diesel fossil fuel?

Defining energy security

 

World Government: Not Quite an Idea Whose Time has Come, but No Longer So Far from the Academic Mainstream

Dr Luis Cabrera

I can say without much reservation that I am one of the most avid students of world government alive today. Of course, I’m careful when and where I say that…

Actually, even in my relatively brief academic career (12 years, if you count from the PhD award date), there has been, if not a sea change, certainly a surprisingly strong trend toward serious academics taking the world government ideal seriously again.

Consider this: when my lead PhD supervisor and I were trying to put together a doctoral supervisory committee in the mid-1990s, we approached a staff member at the same US institution who had a solid global reputation as an international relations theorist. He was known for his cutting edge theorization of relations between nation-states. Yet, when approached about helping to supervise a thesis exploring the contemporary case for world government, he came back with a very rapid ‘no.’ It just wasn’t a topic he saw as meriting serious scholarly consideration, he said.

Now, such a response would likely be much harder to give. The past two authors to win the International Studies Association’s prestigious ‘Book of the Decade’ award, Alexander Wendt (2000) and Daniel Deudney (2010), have made world government enquiry a clear part of their work. Wendt, who is enormously influential for his work on how ideas and ideology can shape nation-states’ behaviour, has argued for the ‘inevitability’ of a world state – in 200 years or so. Deudney argues that the continuing threat from nuclear weapons remains so great that world-government creation is a necessity, though a weakly empowered one narrowly focused on weapons control.

Wendt and Deudney are only two of a range of IR scholars, economists, international sociologists and moral theorists who have recently explored the feasibility and desirability of full global political integration. Many others have taken up international institution building on a smaller scale, but still one that would require states to cede significant powers upward.

This might, in fact, be thought of as a second ‘heyday’ in world government thought. The first can be dated roughly from 1945-50. It was spurred by the US nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. What had been unimaginable in war was suddenly cold reality. This prompted many to think that political realities must be reconceived as well.

This wasn’t  just a fringe few, either. Leading academics – including Albert Einstein – authors, jurists, political figures and civil society leaders around the world called for, or at least expressed openness to, a world government capable of meeting the awful new threat.

The following quotation from Birmingham-area MP Henry Usborne gives a sense of the urgent rhetoric of the time. In his maiden speech to Parliament in 1946, Usborne outlined a plan for Britain to lead the way to a security and political union with like-minded democratic countries that could evolve into full world government:

‘I imagine that this proposal would meet with a great deal of opposition. That I do not mind. I am quite certain that if we doubled the opposition we should get 10 times the enthusiasm from the common people all over the world in support of a proposal such as that. Is the proposal fantastic? Is it Utopian? Yes, it is both fantastic and Utopian. It is just as fantastic as the atomic age in which we now live; it is just as Utopian as the hope of world peace.’

They ‘heyday’ period ended almost as quickly as it had begun, with the advent of the Cold War and fears of Soviet global domination.  Though some academics and others continued to make the case for world government, they remained mostly on the fringes for about the next 50 years.

Today’s resurgence of academic literature on world government, spurred in part by globalization, is distinguished by the range of disciplines involved and the prominence of some of those involved. Their arguments tend to fall into three camps. In the first, authors such as Deudney highlight continuing threats from world government, as well as terrorism and other security issues, as reason to pursue comprehensive forms of integration between nation-states.

The second camp is concerned with democratic rule. Here, ‘cosmopolitan democrats’ argue that, in an age of intensifying globalization and global economic integration, domestic democracies are losing their powers to live under laws of their own making. Thus, democratic decision making should be shifted upward, generally to include all of those who are affected by specific processes of globalization, or by the decisions of global bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Few of these authors would claim the world government title for their work, but several do advocate the creation of powerful, binding global institutions with broad powers to tax and spend for the common good.

A final camp is concerned with the promotion of justice and human rights globally. Here, authors argue that state sovereignty throws up predictable barriers to actually realizing justice or securing the rights of all persons, so forms of integration should be pursued between states. My own work would be situated here. I have argued in a couple of books and several articles that the current global system will routinely underfulfill individual rights: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/government-society/cabrera-luis.aspx That’s because it leaves states as the final judges in their own cases about obligations. Imagine if we were all left to judge which rules or laws we would prefer to follow, or especially how much tax we’d like to pay. We’d mean well, but chances are we would see other priorities repeatedly getting in the way of ‘donating’ the tax voluntarily that would be needed to maintain social institutions.

Like most students of world government, I take a very long term view. If it ever will be possible to create global institutions capable of routinely protecting the rights of all persons, I have suggested, we shouldn’t expect to see them develop for many hundreds of years. My recent work has been concerned with the kinds of integration and related changes that might be possible in the near term, and yet would conceivably contribute to the long-term aim. I have considered in particular some potentially rights-enhancing forms of regional integration.

I have enjoyed being able, as this week’s Saving Humans ‘guest blogger’ to share some thoughts on recent developments in democracy and human rights. To recap: on Monday, I discussed a new organization, Academics Stand Against poverty, that is dedicated to strengthening the academic voice and direct positive impact on poverty issues globally. On Tuesday, I discussed my own work on global citizenship and immigration, with emphasis on field research among unauthorized immigrants, and with anti-immigration and migrant-rights activists.

On Wednesday, I talked about current work on human rights and prospects for, or possible reasons to purse, trans-state democracy. I looked there at how India’s National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights had sought to reach out to the global human rights community to bring pressure on its own government to do more against caste-discrimination. Thursday’s entry drew connections between the theoretical concerns there and in the struggle by opposition leaders and activists in Turkey to maintain a free, open democracy, against the backdrop of possible accession to the European Union. Today’s entry took the much longer view on rights and integration.

Luis Cabrera is Reader in Political Theory, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham.

Democracy, Rights and European Hopes in Turkey

Dr Luis Cabrera

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of individuals being able to both chasten and challenge political leaders. Constitutionalized liberal democracy, I suggested, is valuable primarily – though not solely – as a means of doing this. The right to vote in regular elections, along with rights to assembly, speech, protest, and closely related rights to bring formal challenges in courts, all are means of holding those who govern us to account.

Today I want to shift the focus from India and the Dalit (former untouchables) human rights struggle to Turkey. The two may not be obvious cases to treat in the same book or blog series, but in fact, some important issues intersect in both. In the Dalit human rights case, activists struggling on behalf of a category of persons within a country assert that those persons’ rights are being systematically violated. They believe that India’s democratic institutions and courts remain stacked against Dalits, despite anti-discrimination laws on the books. At the same time, the Indian government strongly resists ‘outside interference,’ or outreach by such activists to global human rights actors. It reserves the right to interpret rights standards and rights fulfilment to itself.

Protestor, Turkey, July 2013

In the Turkish case, similar claims are heard about democratic institutions and leaders who are increasingly unresponsive to opposition voices. Turkey has long been noted as a secular country, observing strict separation between state and Islam, the religion ascribed to an overwhelming majority of its population. One of the consistent complaints from opposition and activist leaders has been that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced ER-doh-WAN) has been incrementally introducing religious values and behavioural restrictions into law. Activists also complain of a creeping authoritarianism, on which more below.

The Turkish case, like the Indian one, has a significant international, or supranational, angle. Where the Dalit human rights activists have sought to reach out to the global human rights community in the absence of anything like a Global Court of Human Rights, Turkey has long held hopes of joining the still-expanding regional governance project just beyond its own borders.

For me, the Turkish case has been of great interest for the ethical questions it raises about obligations across borders. My basic presumption has been that Turkey stands to receive the same human rights benefits as other less-rich countries had on joining the European Union in the last several decades. These would include particularly Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece. Spain and Portugal were not only relatively poor countries at the time of accession, but they also faced steep challenges to democratization and democratic consolidation. Many observers see European Community membership as an important factor helping them develop stable, rights-respecting democratic institutions.

Of course, few would suggest that membership in the now-European Union is a cure for all political ills, or that the EU itself has developed into a fully defensible set of democratic institutions. EU leaders are still dealing with the fallout from the global economic crisis, which revealed some cracks in institutional design that may need more than a quick plaster-over. Yet, longtime EU observers will note that this is far from the first crisis, and that in fact the EU’s demise has been predicted many times.

Istanbul Police lined up, July 2013

In relation to Turkish accession, my presumption remains that it would deliver significant additional rights benefits to Turks. It would further integrate the country into the EU common market, give it a much stronger political voice in helping to shape and set the direction for that market, while enhancing economic opportunities for individual Turks, not least free movement across borders. It also should help to better ensure robust democratic rights.

I went to Istanbul for the first time last summer, to interview government officials, activists and think-tank representatives about prospects for Turkish accession. Full accession for Turkey has long been a controversial issue in some EU states, of course. This is because first, important issues remain unresolved around EU member state Cyprus. Turkey holds half of Cyprus’ territory in circumstances that continue to draw protest from several quarters. Turkey also would become the second largest EU country, behind Germany, giving it instant political clout in the union. And, a factor which is generally whispered about except by far-right factions, which tend to shout about it, Turkey would be the first Muslim-majority country in the EU. Even so, there is significant support for Turkish accession within the EU, along with opposition, notably within Germany and France.

When I arrived in Istanbul, after an earlier trip to Brussels to interview Turkish and EU officials, I found that few had EU accession foremost in their mind. Rather, they were focused on the flashpoint of Gezi Park. That park – an urban oasis in a city notably lacking in greenery – had become the focal point for demonstrations against the Erdogan regime, stemming from plans to let developers raze it for a shopping plaza.

I took a hotel near the park, which had been cleared of activists not long before in a police crackdown which saw three protesters and one police officer killed. The government response brought harsh criticism from the European Parliament. That was rejected by Erdogan, who questioned the Parliament’s legitimacy and blamed the protests on outside influences.

I spent several days interviewing leaders of activist groups that were focused on democratic governance, with emphasis on those which also interacted with EU institutions, as well as some political party and policy officials. On two nights, I joined the protesters who still filled the streets of the posh shopping district near Gezi Park. In interviews, they expressed their anger at what they saw as authoritarianism and religiosity gradually but relentlessly taking over their political institutions. Few mentioned the EU without prompting. Support for accession in polls of Turks has steadily dropped in recent years, as frustration has grown over the slow pace of accession talks – even while Croatia, which was given permission to move toward full membership at the same time as Turkey, was admitted. Yet, when asked, most saw EU membership as providing additional resources to challenge the government.

After a few dozen interviews, and being water cannoned and tear gassed by police, I decided I had collected enough from the protesters themselves (!) I did, however, join them another night, after they had quietly walked back into Gezi Park, police standing by, and turned it again into a site for singing, chanting, and expression of views.

Protestors filling Istiklal St., July 2013

Woman in goggles, July 2013

Now, six months later, EU leaders are again laying charges of authoritarianism, this time in response to a stringent law pressed by the Erdogan government on internet usage. Critics charge that the law amounts to bald censorship. At the same time, there were hopes for progress on EU accession talks, after years of virtual standstill. The struggle to shape the country’s democracy undoubtedly will continue, though it remains to be seen whether it will be conducted more firmly in the EU context.

Police and billboards, Turkey, July 2013

Luis Cabrera is Reader in Political Theory, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham.

From “thinking politically” to “working politically”

Most people involved in the development enterprise, however, are ‘doers’ as well as ‘thinkers’ – far more of my students hope to work for donor agencies, NGOs or charities than within university faculties or think tanks. A key challenge for proponents of the ‘thinking politically’ agenda, therefore, comes with the ‘operationalization’ of said agenda. How can policy-makers and those dealing with the practical implementation of development projects learn to ‘think politically’? How can ‘thinking politically’ simply become second nature for these individuals? How, ultimately, can we move from ‘thinking politically’ to ‘working politically’?

These vital questions will be addressed by a range of scholars and practitioners at the University of Birmingham at a special International Development Department (IDD) – Political Studies Association (PSA) workshop on ‘Making Politics Practical’ and a summary of the workshop’s major points will be provided on this blog shortly after the event. Today’s entry, however, will place this discussion in context by exploring some of the basic obstacles development policy-makers and managers often face when attempting to mainstream political thinking within their organizations.

1. ‘Doing development’ and the political scientist deficit

It remains the case that most employees of major donor agencies (particularly within the World Bank) are economists or technicians of some kind by training. Informed by the somewhat discredited view of development as a technical, mechanical process commonplace in the decades following 1945 (see Monday and Tuesday’s blog entries), donors have traditionally recruited people based on their technical know-how rather than their understandings of local contexts. These recruitment patterns have been amended in recent years in some cases – DFID, for example, has employed a growing number of political scientists since the mid-2000s, albeit primarily in its Governance cadre. 

Most donors remain, however, populated by people with a certain type of intellectual background and approach to development. This has rarely been addressed or acknowledged, however, by those within these organizations attempting to mainstream political thinking, many of whom have themselves been political scientists! As Sue Unsworth, James Copestake and Richard Williams have argued, donors have not been sufficiently ‘reflexive’ in trying to understand their own workforce and its dominant mindsets when advancing the thinking politically agenda. 

2. Career incentives and the fear of ‘risk’

Mainstreaming political thinking in donor organizations has also been resisted because its implications undermine the prevailing bureaucratic incentive structures within these organizations. For most donor officials, spending (or in the World Bank’s case, lending) money is the main avenue to promotion and, indeed, World Bank managers frequently implore their subordinates to ‘meet our lending targets’. Thinking politically, however, raises problems here since understanding local political contexts often makes policy-makers more wary of ‘risks’ presented to their programmes from corruption, conflict etc which they otherwise might have been blissfully unaware of. Political analysis for many donor officials, therefore, is what Alex Duncan and Gareth Williams have called ‘the dismal science of constraints’ – it flags risks and problems which few donors wish to hear about because it means spending less money.

What is at fault here, however, is not political analysis but the incentive structures within donor organizations and the way in which taking risks is punished rather than encouraged. A growing consensus is emerging in development and wider scholarship (see the work of Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Tim Harford) that real progress comes only when actors are given the space and incentives to take risks and be flexible. Successfully mainstreaming political thinking, therefore, requires a wholescale rebalancing of the ways in which development bureaucracies work internally – something that numerous officials I have spoken to voluntarily acknowledge.

3. The ‘so what?’ question

The final obstacle to mainstreaming political thinking in development organizations can be summarized by two words: ‘so what?’

People working in development are busy people. They often work in very difficult and challenging environments on complex projects and programmes with sometimes limited support or even security. Even those officials chained to a desk in Washington or London must spend their days wading through endless boxes of paper, log frames and evaluation reports with little time to reflect on their ‘thinking’ about development. For many donor officials, therefore, learning how to ‘think politically’ is a distraction – in their minds – from an already over-brimming schedule of responsibilities. Moreover, the theoretical debates on coalitions, relationships and local ownership that political analysis often delves into (see this week’s earlier blog entries) often seem a mile away from the nitty-gritty of the work that most development actors undertake on a daily basis; “this is all fascinating”, say many such officials at ‘political economy analysis’ promotion and training events, “but what do I do with it on Monday morning?”

Making ‘political thinking’ appealing and relevant to donor officials without turning it into another ‘tool’ or subsection of a project planning application is a difficult task…..over to the experts at tomorrow’s workshop!

Sources: 

James Copestake and Richard Williams (2012): ‘The evolving art of political economy analysis: Unlocking its practical potential through a more interactive approach.’ Development Futures Paper, Oxford Policy Management.

Alex Duncan and Gareth Williams (2012): ‘Making Development Assistance More Effective Through Using Political-economy Analysis: What Has Been Done and What Have We Learned?’ Development Policy Review 30 (2): 133-148.

Dr Jonathan Fisher is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Birmingham.

“Thinking politically” Part II:

What, however, do we mean by ‘political’ in the context of development policy and thinking? Almost absent from development discourse prior to the 2000s – as scholar and practitioner Sue Unsworth points out (2009:883) – the word ‘politics’ has now become an integral part of development language albeit without ever having been clearly defined. Along with terms like ‘ownership’, ‘agency’ and even ‘development’ itself, ‘politics’ seems to mean something so intuitive and obvious to all that exploring its actual meaning seems like ivory tower navel-gazing to many policy-makers. Indeed, at a World Bank event I attended last year, participants being told about political economy thinking by their superiors protested on several occasions that ‘we know this’!

The problem is, of course, that when people talk about an issue being ‘political’ they often mean different things with their understandings shaped by a wide range of cultural, intellectual, sociological and environmental contexts. This definitional pluralism matters in development interventions for a whole host of reasons; if two donors both talk about delivering ‘development’ with one meaning ‘democratization’ by this and another ‘poverty alleviation’ then their actions to achieve these goals will be very different – and possibly undermine one another’s. If two donors reassure a recipient government that they wish to support ‘local ownership’ it matters if they define this as that government’s ‘commitment to pre-determined donor policies’ or ‘control of the policy-making agenda itself’.

Tuesday and Wednesday’s blog entries will therefore explore some of the main ways in which ‘politics’ is defined – explicitly or implicitly – by scholars, practitioners and policy-makers involved in ‘saving humans’.

1: Not technical:

The most common understanding of ‘political thinking’ in the development world defines the term against ‘technical thinking’. This contrast ultimately focuses on the assumptions underlying our thinking on how development happens. Those with a ‘technical’ mindset assume that development is a linear process that requires the correct inputs in order to be progressed. As the late Adrian Leftwich emphasized, this has often meant an emphasis being placed on institutions and structures by donor agencies – the things we in the West have that we can ‘build’ in the developing world to mechanically move developing states along the development conveyor belt.

Like the ‘big push’ thinkers of the 1950s ‘modernization theory’ era, this group believes that ‘getting to Norway’ (that is, to an economically developed state with minimal poverty or disparity) is just a question of applying the right formula of interventions and medicines. Donors, in this model, are the purveyors of advice, tools and instruments to developing states moving along this path at varying speeds with World Bank staff (many of whom are economists by training) often seen as the most influential group in this category.

Proponents of “thinking politically”, however, reject this conceptualization of development as naïve, simplistic and ahistorical. They argue that development – however defined – has not happened in quite the same way in any two states and thus why should we expect it to start doing so now? Moreover, they contend that technicalist understandings of development underplay the role of people and societies in shaping their futures. Institutions such as parliaments or political parties have delivered certain public goods in the West not simply because they are there but because important societal coalitions built them and gave them their continued support – and not without significant and continuous reforms and alterations.

“Thinking politically”, according to this strand of thought, therefore means two key things: 1) understanding the contexts and nuances of the environments we work in – people, regions and states are different and ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions are therefore likely to fail in most cases; 2) focusing on the agency of local actors and seeking to support the institutions, relationships and organizations that they view as legitimate and developmental.

Dr Jonathan Fisher is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Birmingham.

Sources:

Sue Unsworth (2009): “What’s politics got to do with it?” Why donors find it so hard to come to terms with politics, and why this matters.’, Journal of International Development  21 (6): 883-894

Further links:

Thinking politically about development