The American Civil War as a global struggle

Excerpted “The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War”by Don H. Doyle in a recent Salon:

While the war was being fought on the battlefields of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, another contest was waged overseas. The Confederacy sought international recognition and alliances to secure independence, and the Union was determined not to let that happen. “No battle, not Gettysburg, not the Wilderness,” one historian claimed, “was more important than the contest waged in the diplomatic arena and the forum of public opinion.” The history of Civil War diplomacy—that is, the formal negotiations among governments and the strategies surrounding them—has been told and told well. This book turns to the less familiar forum of public opinion, which was filled with clamorous debate for four years. It took place in print (in newspapers, pamphlets, and books) as well as oratory (in meeting halls, pubs, lodges, union halls, and parliaments). Wherever free speech was stifled, as it was in France, the debate continued over private dinner tables and at cafés. Whatever one’s views, there was general agreement that the American question mattered greatly to the world and to the future.

The Union and Confederacy each hired special agents, who usually operated under cover of some kind. They were typically veteran journalists and political operators whose job it was, as one of them deftly put it, to give “a right direction to public sentiment” and correct “erroneous” reports that favored the other side. Some bribed editors and hired journalists, while others published their own pamphlets, books, and even newspapers. Few were above planting rumors or circulating damaging stories, and some of what they produced can only be described as propaganda and misinformation. But that was only part of the story of what was more often a sophisticated appeal to ideology and values.

In today’s parlance the diplomatic duel that took place during America’s Civil War can be understood as a contest of smart power, the adroit combination of hard-power coercion with soft-power appeals to basic values. Hard-power diplomacy typically involves the threat or use of military force, but can also include economic coercion (blockades, embargoes) and inducements (low tariffs, commercial monopolies). The employment of soft power involves persuasion and information, but the underlying strategy is to appeal to the fundamental values and interests of the foreign country, to demonstrate that the two countries in question share common aspirations. Soft power resides in “the power of attraction,” not in crude propagandizing.

The Union won and the South lost this diplomatic duel abroad not because the Union possessed an obviously more appealing message. To the contrary, at the outset many foreigners found the South’s narrative of valiant rebellion against the North’s oppressive central government far more attractive. Slavery had never disqualified a nation from acceptance into the family of nations. The United States and most European powers had at some point sanctioned slavery with no loss of status under international law. Confederate emissaries abroad were nonetheless instructed to avoid discus.sion of slavery as the motive for secession, and they happily pointed to Lincoln’s own promises to protect slavery in the Southern states as proof that this was not the issue. Southern diplomats crafted an appeal that evoked widely admired liberal principles of self-government and free trade. The conflict, they told the world, was one arising naturally between industrial and agrarian societies, not freedom and slavery. The industrial North wanted high protective tariffs, while the agrarian South wanted free trade with Eur. Southern leaders had rehearsed their foreign policy for years, and they began their rebellion fully confident that Europe would bow to “King Cotton.” “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?” South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond asked in 1858. “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.

The American crisis not only heartened the enemies of democracy; it also emboldened them to invade the Western Hemisphere, to topple governments, install European monarchs, and reclaim lost American empires. Suddenly, the Civil War rendered the Monroe Doctrine toothless. Republican regimes in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and, not least, the United States were suddenly vulnerable to imperialist aggression, including nefarious plots to install European princes and recolonize their lands.

The most audacious of European schemes was Napoleon III’s Grand Design for  Latin Catholic empire. It began with an allied invasion of Mexico late in 1861 and led to the installation of the Hapsburg archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico in 1864. The Grand Design went far beyond Mexico to envision the unification of the “Latin race” in America and Europe, under the auspices of the French, and to reverse the advances of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and egalitarian democracy in the Western Hemisphere.As its bid to win support in Britain foundered, some thought due to popular antislavery sentiment, the Confederacy sought to align itself with Napoleon III by adopting a Latin strategy that would make common cause with the French and the Catholic Church against the “Puritan fanatics” of the North. The Confederacy sent emissaries to the vatican, appealing to Pope Pius IX, the archenemy of republicanism, to bless their “holy war” against the “infidels” of the North. They also contrasted the North’s “mobocracy” to the traditions of patrician rule among the South’s European-style gentry. Southerners even encouraged Europeans to think the Confederacy might prefer a monarchical form of government, perhaps under a European prince. on several occasions Southern leaders proposed some kind of permanent league with, or protectorate under, France, Britain, or Spain. All this portended far more than mere separation under a new flag.

Southerners also took pains to emphasize they were sympathetic with European designs to restore monarchy and Catholic authority in Latin America. Confederate diplomats were instructed to repudiate the South’s earlier imperialist ambitions for a tropical empire in Latin America. They assured Europeans that with an independent South, expansion would no longer be necessary.

... At the end of the war, Eugène Pelletan, a leading French republican, expressed eloquently what the American question had meant to the world: “America is not only America, one place or one race more on the map, it is yet and especially the model school of liberty. If against all possibility it had perished, with it would fall a great experiment."

Some readers may feel such unqualified admiration of America was undeserved. The Union, everyone knows, had been painfully slow to embrace emancipation, and America’s deeply ingrained racial prejudice would long outlast slavery. These were only some of the egregious flaws in the nation foreign admirers hailed as the Great Republic.

Yet we miss something vitally important if we view Pelletan and other foreigners who saw America as the vanguard of hope as naive or misguided. Foreign admirers typically regarded the United States not as some exceptional city upon a hill, but as exactly the opposite: an imperfect but viable model of society based on universal principles of natural rights and theories of government that originated in Europe but had thus far failed to succeed there. In the 1860s they were horrified to see government of the people seriously imperiled in the one place it had achieved its most enduring success. Abraham Lincoln was hardly boasting when he referred to America as the “last best hope of earth.” His was a forlorn plea to defend America’s—and the world’s—experiment in popular government.

In the mid-nineteenth century, it appeared to many that the world was moving away from democracy and equality toward repressive govern- ment and the expansion of slavery. Far from being pushed off the world’s stage by human progress, slavery, aristocratic rule, and imperialism seemed to be finding new life and aggressive new defenders. The Confederate South had no intention of putting slavery on the road to extinction; its very purpose in breaking away was to extend and perpetuate slavery— forever, according to its constitution. Had the Confederacy succeeded, it would have meant a new birth of slavery, rather than freedom, possibly throughout the Americas, and it would have been a serious blow to the experiment in egalitarian democracy throughout the Atlantic world.

Long after the defeat of the Confederacy, enemies of liberal, egalitarian society had every reason to look back on America’s Civil War with regret. In 1933, during an after-dinner discussion in Munich, Adolf Hitler bemoaned the South’s defeat in chilling terms: “The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt caste of tradesmen, but by a real Herren-class that would have swept away all the falsities of liberty and equality.” Hitler’s reading of America’s history might have been grotesquely flawed, but his outburst echoed the same refrains against the evils of “extreme democracy” and “fanatical egalitarianism” heard in the 1860s.

Everybody has their favourite pirates: Giancarlo Casale’s The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Near the beginning of Giancarlo Casale's  book, he remarks that the famous explorer-hero Prince Henry the Navigator was basically a pirate.  What follows is an entire book about Ottoman pirates of the 16^th century, whose role in expanding the trade in the Indian Ocean basin Casale obviously admires.  He knows they are pirates, or the next best thing, but then everybody has their favourite pirates.Casale has done his subjects proud.  His Ottoman admirals/merchants/corsairs are now part of the English language scholarly narrative of the age  of exploration, in a form that is accessible to any one who is really interested.

Casale argues that just as the Portugal and Spain created entirely new empires based on trading opportunities in seas unfamiliar to them, so did the Ottoman Empire, which before the 16^th century had been entirely oriented to the Mediterranean.  The story of 16^th century exploration in the eastern hemisphere should not be seen as merely  one of Christian Europe expanding into Muslim seas.  Although the Ottomans were Muslims, they had to work just as hard to find and exploit the new opportunities of the time.  Casale argues convincingly that the Ottomans were just as crucial as the Portuguese in creating a new global field of geopolitical competition.  And maybe they did better.

Here is where a certain amount of sentimentality comes in.  The book is a tribute to Ottomans whose role in politics, trade, exploration and cartography has long been underappreciated, in good part because theso few people have the necessary languages.  But at the end of the book of we are in a position to see that even if the trade in that region had increased dramatically, the Ottomans working to monopolize it, like their Portuguese counterparts, failed to create a viable Indian Ocean empire.  Nevertheless, Casale succeeds: he brings to life an interesting part of world history and made me care about it. 

Democracy in the Middle East

Back in 1993, Phil Paine and I published "Democracy's Place in World History" in the Journal of World History, in which we argued that just about any part of the world had customs and institutions that might lead to democracy, that the development of democracy was not simply the elaboration of a unique "Western" tradition that "other people" could not really understand.


Phil and I have also argued at times that democracy is both older and younger around the world than is commonly realized, depending in part on whether you are talking about potential or realization.  And that the arrow of democracy doesn't always point in the direction of  "more," even if you live in a historically favorable environment.  (This should be obvious, but often pundits talking about the big picture breeze right past it.)


Given this background, I was very interested in Irfan Ahmad's article, How the West de-democratised the Middle East, which I excerpt below.

First, the position that Islam is incompatible with democracy was false from the beginning, because it served imperial ambitions of the West and violated Muslims' self-perception that, not only is Islam compatible with democracy, it was one of the engines of democratic empowerment.

Second, I argue that the West's discourse of democratisation of the Middle East is dubious because it hides how the West actually de-democratised the Middle East. My contention is that, from the 1940s onwards, democratic experiments were well in place and the West subverted them to advance its own interests. I offer three examples of de-democratisation: The reportedly CIA-engineered coup against the elected government of Syria in 1949, the couporchestrated by the US and UK against the democratic Iran in 1953 and subversion of Bahrain's democracy in the 1970s. I also touch on the West's recent de-democratisation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

...

The Western view about Islam being incompatible with democracy is rooted in the Enlightenment which, contrary to the received wisdom, was prejudiced - and, to cite John Trumpbour, "shot through with Islamophobia". Thus Alexis de Tocqueville held that the Quran laid stress on faith, not splendid deeds, as a result of which Islam was inhospitable to democracy. In the post-World War II era, Kedouri, Huntington, Lewis and others presented different versions of this argument.

This Western view was, however, seldom shared by Muslims who believed that Islam and democracy were perfectly compatible. As early as 1912, the Indian philosopher Abul Kalam Azad (b1888) wrote: "Islam regards every form of government which is non-constitutional and non-parliamentary as the greatest human sin." Turkey's Mustafa Fazil Pasha (b1829) held that Islam determined one's destiny in afterlife but it "does not limit the rights of the people". Abdullah Abdurrahman of South Africa (b1870) observed that, without full equality, "there is no such thing as a democratic institution". Without multiplying examples, it is suffice to note that the notion of divine sovereignty advanced by India's Maududi and Egypt's Qutb were complex developments unfolding much later. 

That last point may seem counter-intuitive, but I take it seriously (which is not to say that I am sure that it is right).  There were plenty of "Western" thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries, influential ones, who were denouncing democracy.  If we are talking about the potential of an Islamic environment producing democratic thought, my bet is that Ahmad has a point.

Finally, on Ahmad's citation of de Tocqueville on the Quran;  if Ahmad is accurate, I gotta say:  Alexis, did you never read St. Paul?

Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

Christopher Lascelles seems to be a nice man, and he likes this blog. I love him for that. He has asked me to do something really difficult which is to review something he has written, his Short History of the World, available as an e-book from a variety of sources.  (Here and here, for instance.)

Asking a professional historian to do such a review, of a book that summarizes a lot of material for a popular audience, guarantees that two things are going to happen, at least if the historian is honest. First the reviewer will see everything where his or her judgment differs from the author's and start complaining. Second – and here is where the honesty comes in – the professional historian will say to him or herself, "If you're so smart why don't you write a world history yourself?"  (If you want to weasel out of your predicament, you can say, "Of course I won't. This is not a sensible project at all."  But I at least can't honestly say that.) It's a difficult position to be in.

But my discomfort is really beside the point.This book, like any other book of similar aim, is not for people who have always been interested in history. This is for people who for some reason have just realized that history is important, and not just local, regional or national history but all of history.   They want a quick and brief orientation so that they can put their fragmentary knowledge of history into some kind of context. Christopher's book will do that job.

Given that this is Christopher's audience, it is kind of pointless to talk about what he included and what he left out, at least in any detail. I think he probably should have said more about Africa and South America... And the list reaches out to infinity until Christopher is required to write a huge encyclopedia.

So I will restrict myself to saying that I was rather surprised that he hasn't included very much about events since the fall of Soviet Union in 1991. That is something that I think he might actually consider doing something about. For instance, I'd urge him to think about how amazing it is that South Africa's apartheid regime was dismantled with such a small amount of bloodshed. (This should come naturally, since he is very forthright condemning other instances where regimes murdered millions.)  South Africa was a bomb waiting to blow up half a continent and never did. Finally, he may consider that the  Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War, and the more recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan need to be put in context, too. Young readers  are coming along all the time, and the gap between 1991 and the present grows every year.   I had a bright student about 21 years old tell me just last month that she hadn't really realized the importance of 9/11 until about three years ago.

Final point: good maps.

Review of "The Secret History of Democracy" by Christopher Hobson

A fair evaluation, I think:

The Secret History of Democracy is an ambitious attempt to offer an alternative narrative to the dominant account of the history of democracy. Reacting to a common tendency to draw a line from Ancient Athens, through Republican Rome to revolutionary America and France and so on, this book seeks out other historical instances of democracy. In highlighting these ‘hidden’ examples, the hope is to re-energise the way we now think about democracy. Even if not fully announced as such, what the editors are essentially trying to offer is a history of the present – a critical rereading of the past to better comprehend the contemporary situation and enable political action towards further democratisation. Lamenting the way democracy is regularly understood by the (Anglo-American) West, Isakhan and Stockwell propose that by ‘opening awareness of the breadth of democratic forms [it] gives people the means to deepen, strengthen and develop democratic practice and the opportunity to promulgate democracy more widely’ (p. 223). And the various chapters in the volume do indeed offer a broad selection of democratic pasts. The book considers pre-Athenian experiences elsewhere in Greece, the Middle East, India and China; it explores democracy in the ‘Dark Ages’ in Iceland, Venice and Islamic history; it revives forgotten democratic practices in colonial and settler contexts in Africa, Australia and Canada; and it looks at more contemporary examples in the Arab Middle East. In light of the ongoing Arab Spring, the notable inclusion of multiple chapters on the Arab Middle East – too often excluded from books on democracy – is particularly prescient and worthwhile.
For the most part, the individual chapters are strong, and they offer useful illustrations of how versions of democracy can be found in many places where we have forgotten to look. For instance, Philippe Paine provides a fascinating account of ‘Buffalo Hunt democracy’ that was practised by the Métis people of Western Canada. The extent to which the chapters contribute to the overarching aims of the book is more mixed, however. Contributions such as Steven Muhlberger's on Ancient India, Pauline Keating's on China, and Mohamad Abdalla and Halim Rane's on Islam's past clearly identify the relevance of previous democratic experiences for contemporary struggles, but some of the other chapters do not connect their historical examples to present-day concerns in a sufficiently deep manner. This does not undermine the value of the chapters as stand-alone pieces, but it does have consequences for the volume as a whole. In itself, identifying examples of democratic practices that fall outside the standard historical narrative is not necessarily that difficult. Few would maintain the extreme position that democracy has only existed in the West. The question then is how these past experiences with democracy can be mobilised so that ‘people all over the world may come to have a greater sense of ownership over democracy and take pride in practising and re-creating it for their time, for their situation and for their purposes’ (pp. 15–16). On this point there is less direction both from the editors and most of the contributors.
A further issue that arises is: why these specific cases? There are many ‘secrets’ in democracy's past, and there are many different examples that could have been considered. What is it about these experiences that make them particularly valuable in re-envisioning contemporary democracy? Here the editors give little guidance. For instance, given that there are many examples of democratic practices in countries that are now struggling to institute democracy, what is it that makes street protests in Iraq worthy of inclusion above so many other alternatives? In this regard, the volume would have benefited from a much better explicated set of cases, and a stronger attempt to link them to contemporary concerns over democracy. While noting these shortcomings, on the whole this is an interesting and worthwhile addition to the slowly growing literature on the global history of democracy. In redirecting our gaze away from the standard historical reference points, it offers an important corrective to the common tendency of identifying democracy as a Western product. This volume pushes us to question accepted thinking on the topic, and suggests that the past may be one route towards a more democratic future.

Christopher Hobson (2012): The secret history of democracy, Global Change,

Peace & Security: formerly Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change, 24:1, 193-194

The sad historian thinks...

...That there are whole cultures that will never enjoy maple syrup. But then he realizes that Ethiopian monks once said that about coffee...

Foreign Policy cover story: explaining the fall of the Soviet Union

Some of my readers will surely want to read Leon Aron's article in Foreign Policy,
Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong*And why it matters today in a new age of revolution.

A sample:

LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond the necessity to correct the economy or make the international environment more benign. The core of Gorbachev's enterprise was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral Soviet Union.

For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions with which every great revolution starts: What is a good, dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such a state's relationship with civil society be?

"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country," Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987 meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices," he called it his "moral position."
In a 1989 interview, the "godfather of glasnost," Aleksandr Yakovlev, recalled that, returning to the Soviet Union in 1983 after 10 years as the ambassador to Canada, he felt the moment was at hand when people would declare, "Enough! We cannot live like this any longer. Everything must be done in a new way. We must reconsider our concepts, our approaches, our views of the past and our future.… There has come an understanding that it is simply impossible to live as we lived before -- intolerably, humiliatingly."

Does this sound like some of the stuff coming out of the Arab Spring?  You betcha:

The fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation set off the Tunisian uprising that began the Arab Spring of 2011, did so "not because he was jobless," a demonstrator in Tunis told an American reporter, but "because he … went to talk to the [local authorities] responsible for his problem and he was beaten -- it was about the government." In Benghazi, the Libyan revolt started with the crowd chanting, "The people want an end to corruption!" In Egypt, the crowds were "all about the self-empowerment of a long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own leaders," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported from Cairo this February. He could have been reporting from Moscow in 1991.

"Dignity Before Bread!" was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution.

I can't help thinking of something else I read today, from a satire on American politics by Jim Wright:

Hell, Huntsman [a newly-announced GOP candidate for President] is even an Eagle Scout.
But, he’s far too liberal for conservatives.
And he’s far too conservative for liberals.
Maybe he could overcome that. 
But this morning, in front of the Statue of Liberty, he committed an unforgivable sin.  Beneath the shining symbol of America Jon Huntsman called for polite political discourse and promised to run a civil campaign.
Huntsman didn’t vilify his former boss, instead he claimed that both he and President Obama love their country, but have different visions for its future. 
As outrageous as that was, Huntsman went even further.  He crossed the line and said 2012 is about “who will be the better president, not who’s the better American.”
That’s when the crack appeared in the earth and an ominous rumbling began as the flying monkeys stirred in the fiery deep.
Huntsman said, "Our political debates today are corrosive and not reflective of the belief that Abe Lincoln espoused back in his day, that we are a great country because we are a good country."

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine a civil campaign.  Can you imagine how boring it would be? Without the vitriol and exaggerations? Without the lies and hyperbole? Who would we hate? Who would we cheer? 
Act like civilized adults?  That’s no democracy!
Americans don’t want civil discourse.
And they sure as hell don’t want to see candidates who refuse to engage in mudslinging, brawling, and fear mongering. Fight you bastards, don’t just stand there! Fight! Fight!
Americans don’t want moderates! We want extremists!
We demand to know who is the better American!
There can be only one.

Oh, and we want flying monkeys.

A day late for the anniversary

Yes, Russia can be proud.

Saudi Arabia

Thanks to Feed for Arabist.Net for this excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Karen Elliott House: From Tunis to Cairo to Riyadh? - WSJ.com:

Thirty years of visiting Saudi Arabia, including intensive reporting over the past four years, convinces me that unless the regime rapidly and radically reforms itself—or is pushed to do so by the U.S.—it will remain vulnerable to upheaval. Despite the conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia is unique, and that billions in oil revenue and an omnipresent intelligence system allow the regime to maintain power by buying loyalty or intimidating its passive populace, it can happen here.

The many risks to the al Saud family's rule can be summed up in one sentence: The gap between aged rulers and youthful subjects grows dramatically as the information gap between rulers and ruled shrinks. The average age of the kingdom's trio of ruling princes is 83, yet 60% of Saudis are under 18 years of age. Thanks to satellite television, the Internet and social media, the young now are well aware of government corruption—and that 40% of Saudis live in poverty and nearly 70% can't afford a home. These Saudis are living Third World lives, suffering from poor education and unable to find jobs in a private sector where 90% of all employees are imported non-Saudis. Through new media the young compare their circumstances unfavorably with those in nearby Gulf sheikhdoms and the West.

It strikes me that the world as a whole is suffering from a case of a surprisingly small number of really old guys hogging the vast wealth of the modern world, while the young scramble for scraps.   Search for "United States economic inequality" and see what pops up.

The Secret History of Democracy is out!

I have heard from one of the editors that the book The Secret History of Democracy is out.  I have an article in it:  "Republics and Quasi-Democratic Institutions in Ancient India."  Phil Paine has one, too, on Metis institutions on the Canadian praries: "The Hunters who Owned Themselves."

The publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, has a promotional web page with links to the full table of contents, a sample chapter, and other supporting materials.

Immanuel Wallerstein: The global economy is like, over

Back in the 1980s, when it was incumbent upon me to come to some understanding of world history (so I could teach it!), Wallerstein was one of the people I read. He had a huge, detailed, Marxist-inspired theory of everything, with emphasis on the expansion of Europe.  The main virtue of his work for me was the fact that he did know a great deal about a great deal, and I benefited from exposure to it, even while I was rather wary of the Marxist framework.

So, when so eminent a theorist of the global economy (or the modern world-system) says it's over, I have to be interested:

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER, NOW OR EVER

Virtually everyone everywhere-economists, politicians, pundits -- agrees that the world has been in some kind of economic trouble since at least 2008. And virtually everyone seems to believe that in the next few years the world will somehow "recover" from these difficulties. After all, upturns always occur after downturns. The remedies recommended vary considerably, but the idea that the system shall continue in its essential features is a deeply rooted faith.

But it is wrong. All systems have lives. When their processes move too far from equilibrium, they fluctuate chaotically and bifurcate. Our existing system, what I call a capitalist world-economy, has been in existence for some 500 years and has for at least a century encompassed the entire globe. It has functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved steadily further and further from equilibrium. For a while now, it has moved too far from equilibrium, such that it is today in structural crisis.

The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle.

What we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.

The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic and egalitarian.

The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it merely exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970. The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies.

Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive.
Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets. We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.

Image: ah, the days when I could just swallow such books whole.

Democracy Denied by Charles Kurzman: my review appears

I just recently received my contributor's copy of the Journal of World History, vol. 21, no. 3 (September, 2010).  It is a special issue of the journal devoted to articles on cosmopolitanism. 

My contribution is a review of an excellent 2008 book by Charles Kurzman, Democracy Denied, 1905-15:  Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy.   Here's an excerpt.

Kurzman contends that the six revolutions he examines can be seen as part of a global movement with local variations, rather than phenomena strictly tied to local conditions and problems.

The revolutions in question (in Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China) all began  between 1905 and 1911; all were consciously democratic in their aspirations, at least insofar as democracy was understood at the time; all succeeded in obtaining effective parliamentary elections; and all the revolutionary regimes, except Portugal's, had failed before World War I broke out. Yet, as Kurzman says, even though more than a quarter of the world’s population was affected by this wave of democratic revolution, it has seldom been treated as an international event.

You can read the review in the Journal, or just go straight to the book.

Good-bye to dreams of uniqueness

For some time now, I have been thinking that the Internet is a great eroder of that sense of uniqueness that many of us have been attached to.   I have a rather odd last name, and I have never met anyone named Muhlberger who was not related to me. My father, who lived until his mid-80s, never did either. But now, thanks to the Internet, I know that there are a fair number of Muhlbergers in South America and even more in German-speaking Europe. The latter group includes one Steven Muhlberger, who like a variety of other Muhlbergers appeared in a scientific journal in a footnote.  Of course I could have guessed that there must be other Muhlberger around – in fact I had evidence  of their  existence  – but search engines easily throwing out numbers of Muhlbergers have made a bigger impact on my view of life.I may not have  physically stumbled across any nonrelated Muhlbergers, but they are easy enough to find if you really are interested.

There is a humorous report on the Internet which makes a point of non-uniqueness, or at least our realization of that situation. Chuck Shepherd, in connection with News of the Weird, back in 2003 assembled a list of things that can no longer be considered unusual, since they have been reported in the media so often. (I believe John Emerson referred this to me.)  Here are the first 10 of those items. No proof whatsoever is offered at these things have been reported ad nauseam, or just happen to occur all the time, but you know they have been. Just ask your stomach:

1. an old, widely-advertised phone-sex number is reassigned to a
church/charity
2. suspicious package thought to be a bomb, turns out to be something stupid
3. robber leaves his ID [wallet or appointment card for probation officer or etc.] at the scene
4. peace/brotherhood conference erupts into violence
5. robber on getaway accidentally hails unmarked police car
6. political candidate dies but still wins the election
7. family thinks he's dead, but he's not and attends his own funeral
8. hunters shoot each other
9. funeral home owner neglects/mixes up bodies
10. "victimized" drug buyer complains to police that someone sold him weak or bogus drugs

Plenty more where those came from!

Boy, do I feel dumb! Afghan railways

I like to think of myself as smart and well-informed, more interested in world history and comparative history than other people, and sensitive to the little details that change the big picture.

I guess I have to revise that self-image. I just found out today, thanks to Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, that Afghanistan has never built a railway of any particular length, that it is not connected to the greater network of Asian railways.

Here is my excuse: back in the 1920s, Afghanistan had a modernizing King named Amanulla. After reading Before Taliban about two years ago, I was aware that he built or at least started to build, a railway from Kabul. I know that he came to a bad end and was replaced by a more standoffish government, in typical Afghan style, but it never occurred to me that this was pretty much the end of railway building in Afghanistan! The Soviet military had big plans and actually laid some track, but the anti-Soviet resistance took care to see that it didn't get very far. In more peaceful times, the Kabul government has usually been opposed to the extension of foreign lines into Afghanistan, since those plans were almost always sponsored by the government of British India or the government of Russia.

I really should have known, since I've seen lots of pictures of the Khyber Pass. If you have seen them too, you'll notice that there's nary a track, and no place to hide one, either. Furthermore, that I was teaching first-year world history, I found that it was difficult to talk about and illustrate 19th-century developments without lots of pictures of locomotives. It was the prestigious symbol of modernization and development in those times -- and into the 20th-century, too. I should've been sensitive to the fact that there are no such pictures of Afghanistan, and what pictures of Afghanistan there are have no locomotives.

The lack of rail transport in Afghanistan is not just a symbol of the country's rejection of the outside world, it is one of the major concrete policies that Afghan governments have usedto guarantee of outsiders will not, in somebody's words,plunge a knife into the vitals of the country. (Of course they have had to deal with large-scale air transport for long time now, and there are highways, but that doesn't take away from the original point. See what Eugene Robinson has to say about the prospects of mining in Afghanistan.) I am sure that not everyone feels that way about the outside world, but enough do.

If you're interested in the railways of Afghanistan, such as they are, see this excellent article on the web and its various links.

Image: somebody else's railway.

The comparative present

Thanks to Brad DeLong, from whom many good things come, I have just been alerted to the existence of the publication called Business Insider, which seems to have a real predilection for charts and lists illustrating current trends. This kind of thing can be either very useful or very deceptive, but I love it, even if a given example doesn't hold up very well under strict examination. Comparative material has a lot of potential to make people think, if they don't take the first analysis they see as the final word.

Business Insider first two lists of can which I found interesting. Some readers may remember that I am skeptical about alarmism in connection with demographic crises, especially crises of shrinking population. Business Insider offers us a list of 10 countries heading for a demographic crisis, and what is interesting here is that includes both countries with too much and too little population growth, and some detailed discussion of each. I haven't had the time to read it properly myself, but at least I think it will be worth reading.

The second list discusses 10 countries that have significant oil reserves and can be expected to pump away in the "distant future," long after places like Saudi Arabia have run dry. Of course it is hard to say what the world will be like then anyway, but the list does alert me to a couple of things. One, Iran has a lot of oil, and so will continue to be a "trouble spot" no matter what the ideology of the people in charge. Two, Canada is on that list, which I find quite alarming but not entirely surprising. I would rather not be a "trouble spot."

Imperial profits/imperial losses

Keep this story (from McClatchy referred by Juan Cole) in mind when you are thinking about the dynamics of imperialism. It means different things to different people:

For several years, Afghan police recruits under the tutelage of private U.S. government contractors couldn't understand why their marksmanship never improved.

The answer became clear earlier this year. Italian contractors also helping to train Afghan volunteers showed them that the sights on their AK-47s and M-16s had never been adjusted.

"We're paying somebody to teach these people to shoot these weapons, and nobody ever bothered to check their sights?" Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said, after relating that story at a hearing Thursday.

To McCaskill, who chaired the hearing of the Senate Contracting Oversight panel, it illustrated why the U.S. has spent more than $6 billion on private contractors, but the police-training program remains rife with problems.

"It is an unbelievable, incompetent story of contracts," she said. "For eight years we have been supposed training the police in Afghanistan. We've flushed $6 billion."

Later in the same story:

"Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong," Defense Department Inspector General Gordon Heddell told the subcommittee.

Moreover, the job of an Afghan police officer is exceedingly dangerous. The death rate has risen from about two dozen per month in recent years to about 125 each month, Heddell said.

So what do you think is going to happen?

Total human population

There's a blog out there called Barking Up the Wrong Tree, and someone (Brad DeLong, probably) cited it for a chart showing How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

Here it is:

Year	Population	Births per 1,000	Births Between Benchmarks
50,000 B.C.	2	-	-
8000 B.C.	5,000,000	80	1,137,789,769
1 A.D.	300,000,000	80	46,025,332,354
1200	450,000,000	60	26,591,343,000
1650	500,000,000	60	12,782,002,453
1750	795,000,000	50	3,171,931,513
1850	1,265,000,000	40	4,046,240,009
1900	1,656,000,000	40	2,900,237,856
1950	2,516,000,000	31-38	3,390,198,215
1995	5,760,000,000	31	5,427,305,000
2002	6,215,000,000	23	983,987,500

Number who have ever been born	106,456,367,669
World population in mid-2002	6,215,000,000
Percent of those ever born who are living in 2002	5.8

Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates.

And here's a link to the original source.

Thanks to all involved.

Image: Zanzibar, in memory of John Brunner.

Population crash in Europe?

Fred Pearce has written a book called Peoplequake and also an article in the Guardian flogging its message of anxiety about Europe's lack of enthusiasm for reproduction. Some excerpts from a meaty article:

On the windswept roof of the Lausitz Tower, the town's only landmark, I meet Felix Ringel. A young German anthropologist studying at Cambridge University, he has passed up chances taken by his friends to ­investigate the rituals of Amazon tribes or Mongolian peasants. As we survey the empty plots of fenced scrub below, he explains that the underbelly of his own country seemed weirder and far less studied than those exotic worlds.

In its heyday in the 60s, Hoyerswerda was a model community in communist East Germany, a brave new world attracting migrants from all over the country. They dug brown coal from huge open-cast mines on the plain around the town. There was good money and two free bottles of brandy a month. But the fall of the Berlin Wall changed all that.

...

Under communism, East ­German women worked more, and were ­often better educated, than the more conservative western hausfrau. But when their jobs disappeared in the early 90s, hundreds of thousands of them, encouraged by their ­mothers, took their school diplomas and CVs and headed west to cities such as ­Heidelberg. The boys, however, seeing their fathers out of work, often just gave up. In adulthood, they form a rump of ill-educated, alienated, ­often unemployable men, most of them ­unattractive mates – a further factor in the departure of young women.

...

"There has been nothing ­comparable in world peacetime ­history," says the French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais. After the Berlin Wall came down, millions of East Germans who stayed behind decided against producing another generation. Their fertility more than halved. In 1988, 216,000 ­babies were born in East Germany; in 1994, just 88,000 were born. The fertility rate worked out at 0.8 children per woman. Since then it has struggled up to around 1.2, but that is still only just over half the rate needed to maintain the population. About a million homes have been abandoned, and the ­government is demolishing them as fast as it can. Left ­behind are "perforated ­cities", with huge random chunks of ­wasteland. Europe hasn't seen ­cityscapes like this since the bombing of the second world war.

And nowhere has emptied as much as Hoyerswerda. In the 80s, it had a population of 75,000 and the highest birth rate in East Germany. Today, the town's population has halved. It has gone from being ­Germany's fastest-growing town to its fastest-shrinking one. The biggest age groups are in their 60s and 70s, and the town's former birth clinic is an old people's home. Its population pyramid is ­upturned – more like a mushroom cloud.

In a school in a partly demolished suburb known simply as Area Nine, I meet Nancy, a tattooed and quietly ­spoken social worker. Forty years ago, her parents were among the new­comers: her mother was a midwife, her father a train driver. "There were modern flats and services here then. It was a prestige development. When you asked the kids what they wanted to do when they grew up, they had ambitions to drive buses or work in the power station. But now parents find it very difficult to encourage their ­children when they have no jobs or prospects themselves. My friends have all left. I'd like to stay, but I have a three-year-old daughter and the schools are no good any more. I'll ­probably go too."

...

Across the rest of Germany, Hoyerswerda is regarded as a feral wasteland – complete with wolves. Slinking in from Poland and the Czech Republic, they are finding empty spaces where once there were apartment blocks and mines. And the wolves, at least, are staying. A few kilometres down the road, near the tiny town of Spreewitz, wolf enthusiast Ilka Reinhardt can't believe his luck: "We have more wolves than we have had in 200 years." The badlands of former East Germany are going "back to nature". And Europeans should be worried, for some fear that eastern Germany is, as it was back in the 1960s, a trailblazer for the demographic future of the continent.

This is definitely an interesting phenomenon, but strangely I am not moved. First, the traditional population of Europe may be falling, or look like it's about to fall, but the population of the world is still going up, with devastating impacts on climate and the rest of the environment. If Europeans don't want to devote their lives to aggravating the problem, who am I to tell them that they should?

Also, there are sizable parts of North America where the population is thinning out pretty drastically, too. Canada and the United States both have growing populations, but the places where people used to support themselves by breaking the sod or digging mines by hand are clearing out and these areas may well end up with populations of the scale that existed before the huge invasion from Europe. Remember that huge invasion from Europe? That took place because Europe could not support its population under decent conditions with technology and institutions of the time. I am not so sure why people get so excited about this stuff, but it may have something do with the fear of slang-speaking kids wearing baseball caps backwards.

Me, my neighborhood has both wolves and kids with baseball caps worn at various angles. So what.

Image: This is Hoyerswerda.

Whose past? Whose present? More on my personal understanding of history

A while back I posted here about my personal understanding of religious traditions. I wrote about how any religious tradition that is big and important by necessity has to include a whole bunch of different and often contradictory elements. Thus, people who talk about "true X" where X is a big-name religion, seem to me to be talking about their aspirations and not a historical reality.

Yesterday, a post on Richard Scott Nokes' blog, Unlocked Wordhoard, made it possible for me to put into somewhat awkward words another thing I'm fairly sure of after all these years. Let me borrow parts of Scott's post and adapt a comment I left on it. Maybe it will make more sense this time around.

Here is what he said:

I'm using Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism in something I'm writing. ... Biddick offers up terminology useful in establishing a framework for talking about medievalism.

Two of the most useful terms, however, are two of the ugliest: pastist (which “argues for radical historical difference between the Middle Ages and the present”) and presentist (which “looks into the mirror of the Middle ages and asks it to reflect back histories of modernist or postmodernist identities”). They're ugly on the page and ugly rolling of the tongue, and are kind of unsophisticated in their construction.* The terms are, however, very useful.

Me, I am not so sure that those terms are useful, but maybe Scott will convince me that I'm wrong when it comes to talking about medievalism. But I doubt it.

You see this touches on one of the most important things about history, namely that every human being has a different perspective on the past, because they are in a different position in the present. A commonplace for some people, of course, but one that people should take more seriously.

I know that Scott has lived in Korea, so that he knows that it is not like the United States, but he also knows it is not entirely incomprehensible. With this experience behind him, he might find Korean culture more or less comprehensible than some other cultures in the world. And again with this experience behind him, he could rate certain medieval cultures as really exotic, and others as kind of tame and boring in their familiarity. Say that Scott also has lived on a farm in Iceland for several years in childhood, and so there are certain things about rural North Atlantic and Scandinavian cultures, even medieval ones, that he can pretty much take for granted. Scott also has a neighbor, we will say, who shares neither of his foreign experiences. Depending on where he is coming from, he might find everything about Iceland to be exotic, more so than South Korea, where at least they have big cities. And traffic lights. Here we have two hypothetical Americans, both of whom we will say are white, about the same age, and well-educated, and they have different histories of the Middle Ages, and different views of the present as well.

I think the only history we can know is the particular understanding we have of the past. There was a real time before us, I am reasonably sure, but what's left of it is a few stories, a few records, a few monuments heavily restored by later architects, and a lot of trash. The history that we discuss and use to bring some kind of order into our understanding of the world is inside our heads, and in the debates we have about people's differing understandings. There are billions of world histories, and at the very least hundreds of different types of history.

It is legitimate to use various schemes to try to relate those differing histories and simplify things a bit, but I find that an awful lot of historians stop there; they really do divide the human experience into "the present," whose characteristics are pretty self-evident, and the "past," the particular slice of the dead and gone that they find fascinating, which all too often stands in for the entire past, or the crucial transition between a singular past and in the present with which we are so familiar with. (Even the present in Nepal?)

I may be overreacting to Scott's post, but at the very least it reminded me of something that drives me crazy. I visualize a discussion in which the participants have forgotten the vast variety of the human experience, and which turns the past and present both into cartoon versions of themselves.

Image: I have never been to Iceland, so I don't know whether they have traffic lights. My 25 years in the Canadian countryside, however, make it easy for me to think that they haven't bothered.

Becoming Evil: How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing, by James Waller

Over the years Phil Paine and I have occasionally sat down and talked about some book that we wished existed. One such book was "Famous Social Science Experiments You Should Know About."

This is pretty much that book. It talks about the nature of human nature, from a social psychology and evolutionary psychology point of view. Some of the most important social science experiments of the 20th century are here, described well, and related to the greater theme, which is how ordinary people become perpetrators of genocide. It is systematic, clearly argued and a good basis for further research. There are some things about it that could've been improved but nothing that reduces its importance.