Seeing the Shi`a

Wow. Occasionally I find a book that unwinds my mind and rethreads my head. This is one: The Shia Revival, by Vali Nasr.

By now people often know about the Sunni/Shi`i distinction and even know where each is concentrated.  And you can hardly get your pundit license without knowing that the conflict derives from a 1300-year-old succession dispute: the Shi`ites believe that only descendents of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali can rightfully rule.

But Nasr makes this come alive.  He starts with the celebration of Ashura in Karbala in 2003, which Americans took as Iraqis celebrating some kind of religious festival Saddam had prohibited, thus a victory for “freedom”.  In fact Ashura is an emotional ritual commemorating the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn, and this gathering of two million Shi`i marked the transformation of the Middle East not according to Bush’s neocons, but in the direction of Shi`a revival.

Bush– like many of the leaders Nasr describes, ancient and modern– didn’t know what he was stirring up.  More confusion has reigned in Bush’s support for the Iraqi premier’s attacks on Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra, which has been depicted as a struggle against Iran… although in that fight Iran supported the government.  Similarly McCain’s confusion of al-Qaeda with Iran isn’t just a minor point; it’s a failure to understand what’s going on in the region.

Unwittingly, the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan empowered the Shi`ites, who were oppressed by Saddamn and the Taliban, and has greatly strengthened Iran, which saw two neighboring enemies disappear.  It had no need to meddle to secure influence in Iraq; shared Shi`ite values and relationships gave it that on a platter.  At the same time Iraq created a new Shi`ite hero in Ali al-Sistani, who is more moderate and conservative than the Iranian leadership. 

As Nasr shows, it’s useless to talk about Islamic fundamentalism… we have to ask instead which Islamic fundamentalism: Sunni or Shi`i.  In recent years the most dangerous variety is the Sunni, which is responsible for 9/11, the insurgency in Iraq (directed as much or more against the Shi`i taking power as against the US), and violence against Shi`i in Pakistan.  Some Sunni clerics have declared that Shi`i are not Muslims and can be attacked with impunity; it’s common to consider them a fifth column supporting either US or Iranian influence, depending on which enemy is more despised at the time.

 At times Nasr seems to hold out the tantalizing possibility of a US-Shi`a alliance.  The interests of the Shi`i are close to ours, in that they benefit from democracy and oppose Sunni terrorism.  This would have to mean some kind of rapprochement with Iran.  Isolating and demonizing its leaders is a losing proposition, and Iraq is likely to fall into chaos without Iran’s help.  On the other hand, being too pro-Shi`a would only intensify the Sunni extremist backlash against both us and the Shi`ites.

On the whole Nasr isn’t very hopeful; he considers that the alliance of convenience with Sunni leaders, for instance, was a mistake, convincing many Iraqi Shi`ites that the US would not protect their interests.  What’s certain, however, is that a whole lot of events in the next few years, from Lebanon to the Gulf states to Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Pakistan, will be determined by the Sunni/Shi`a divide.

 

 

Ask Zompist: If I had godlike redrawing powers

Alert reader Eric McGill has an interesting question:

I’ve been thinking about your blog entry on nationalism, and reading other people’s suggestions for the Middle East, all of which seem to want to give independent ethnic groups their own countries, and I’m left wondering how you would redraw the Middle East. Or, for that matter, Eastern Europe or the Balkans.

 It’s dangerous to ask someone like me to draw maps. Drawing maps, especially interesting alternative maps, is all too addictive…

So I think I’ll rephrase your question in two ways.

1. How should the great powers have redrawn the map when they had the chance?

In much larger units.  Africa and the Middle East have suffered greatly because of arbitrary lines (which divide ethnic groups and thus cause endless trouble) and too-small nations (which have few resources and become geopolitical debits, unable either to form large internal markets or to adequately protect themselves).

There are a few exceptions, of course– mostly small East Asian nations that could easily function as nation-states.  Thailand is a natural nation; Iraq or the Sudan is not. 

Large nations can be problems too– Russia took a lot longer to recover from the fall of communism than smaller, nimbler states like Poland or the Czech Republic.  But the problem isn’t size per se.  Once India and China found ways of unleashing their entrepreneurial spirit, their size became an advantage.  

2. What should small independent states do now, if nationalism isn’t such a great idea?

Pension off their nationalist leaders, then form European-style unions.  The first step is likely to be the hard part.  Unions have been tried before, notably Egypt and Syria.  They don’t work because of the big-fish-in-a-small-pond phenomenon: two or more generalissimos would rather lord it over a small country than unite to form a richer, more powerful nation where at most one of them can be big kahuna. 

It’s hard to imagine even this working in the Middle East.  But hey, in 1946 it was hard to imagine it working in Europe.   

 

Why so Sadr?

As this Time article by Charles Crain makes clear, the clear winner of the recent operation in Basra was Muqtada al-Sadr.  It was supposed to shore up Nouri al-Maliki; now he looks weak.  It was hoped to marginalize Sadr; now his street cred is only increased, without losing his influence over what there is of the central government.

 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1726763,00.html

I have to ask again– after four years– why the US is at war with al-Sadr.   Sadr is obviously not a terrorist, and we can’t even label him an insurgent– his faction is a major force in the government.  We can’t even say we’re against warlords; we constantly tout our alliance of convenience with Sunni tribal leaders and seek to integrate their militias into the army. 

It’s pretty sad that my post of four years ago could be written today, except that all the names but Sadr’s have to be changed.  Even Bush will be gone soon.  Could a President McCain handle Sadr any better? McCain has opined that Sadr has to be “taken out” without apparently explaining how or why, and seems to think that Maliki’s operation worked.  Do we need four to eight more years of denial?

 

The problem with nationalism

The independence of Kosovo is a reminder of the West’s worst idea: nationalism.  Western Europe spent about four hundred years developing the notion that a nation should be based on ethnicity (preferably accompanied by a single language and religion), and the last fifty trying to undo its mistake.  The major problems:

• People don’t neatly sort themselves into easily separated regions.  After Yugoslavia’s breakup, Serbia had a province full of Albanians; after Kosovo broke away it has a bunch of districts populated by Serbs; if they broke away there would undoubtedly be Albanian villages left out. 
• It produces nearly endless wars.  The vast majority of the wars in Africa since the end of colonialism are conflicts between ethnic groups (e.g. the civil wars in Nigeria, Sudan, and Angola; the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi; the current troubles in Kenya).
• It produces mini-nations which are a geopolitical burden to the great powers.  Woodrow Wilson’s bright idea of dividing Eastern Europe into national states helped lead to WWII, as these small states tempted their larger neighbors and couldn’t defend themselves.
• When things go badly, and they do, nationalism descends easily into oppression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

What’s the alternative?  Cosmopolitan non-ethnic states, of course.  These come in several flavors:

• Culturally homogenous, like the US.  (Our political divisions are striking, but on the big picture they’re not really that large– liberals and conservatives agree on more things than they disagree about.)
• A marriage of convenience, like the EU.  The jury is out on how well this will work.  It’s done pretty well so far for being hobbled by a completely absurd institutional structure.  Being rich covers a lot of problems.
• Empires.  The Ottoman Empire, for instance, worked admirably well, arguably much better than most of its successor states.  Ethnic tension was minimal, as its subjects didn’t think of it as a Turkish but as a Muslim state.  (Consider that two lasting headaches of the modern world, Israel/Palestine and the Kurds, simply were not problems under Ottoman rule.)  Despite this, it was quite tolerant of non-Muslim minorities, giving them local autonomy and ample chances to serve the state.

Nationalism is often justified by oppression; but that oppression is generally itself nationalistic– e.g. the Kosovars fighting against Serbs trying to secure Greater Serbia. 

 Of course nationalism isn’t the only evil in the world, nor the only cause of war.  But for such a source of misery it retains an astoundingly high reputation.  We now repudiate other historical evils (slavery, racism, sexism, religious wars), but many people still think that “—-ia for the —-ians” is a pretty good idea.

 

Maybe we can set them up with Mars

Apparently Mao offered Henry Kissinger women… a few thousands, even a few million.  China was poor, he explained, and women were just increasing the population.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/14/chinese.women.ap/index.html

 And Kissinger, the fool, didn’t take him up on it. 

 

Ask Zompist: Racist Europeans?

Mark, I have been alarmed by a gang of virulent, gun-toting xenophobes and racists here in Finland entering the mainstream and intimidating people in the Net– I have been targeted myself. In general, I think that while there have been horrible racisms in the United States, the innate dynamics of the United States– of the United States constitution– is antiracist and inclusive. In my opinion, there seems to be a strong conservative opinion in the United States which sees immigration as a broadly good thing– the underlying idea being, that “this America of ours sure is a great country, because everybody else wants to join America”. At the same time, in Europe foreigners are not seen as people joining our national project, but as foreign infiltrators who can never become one of us.

Do you agree that Europe is “innately” more racist than the United States? 

—Panu Petteri Höglund 

 

Neat, a chance to upset everybody.

 

As a general caveat, I think racism is pretty universal.  The Western racism that led to slavery and colonialism wasn’t some exceptional iniquity peculiar to Western culture— it’s just that Western racism could be imposed on the rest of the world due to Western economic dominance.  

 

Historically, American are good at welcoming immigrants— in the long term.  Hostility to Germans, Jews, and Irish, for instance, is a historical footnote, and the Italians, Scandinavians, and Eastern Europeans who came around the turn of the 20th century are nearly as Americanized.  East Asians and Indians are well on their way in this process; and despite 9/11 I don’t think native-born Muslims will ever be a problem.  Hispanics are something of a special case because, although they assimilate just fine, they keep coming, so there are always new immigrants for xenophobes to get upset about.

 

In the early 20th century it was a commonplace for Europeans to look down on us for our shameful treatment of blacks… the French could smugly point to their acceptance of Josephine Baker and James Baldwin, exiles from American racism.  But it’s not hard to accept a handful of distinguished immigrants.  Europe didn’t do nearly as well with the influx of Arab immigrants.  My impression is that Arabs in Europe and blacks in America face very similar attitudes and problems.

 

Those problems shouldn’t be intractable, however.  The American racial situation has been improving for decades; and I don’t see any reason they won’t look better in Europe in a generation, as Europeans get used to immigrants, to say nothing of more mobility within the EU.  We may have more experience with successful assimilation, but Europe has advantages too, such as a much firmer safety net for the poor.

 

The long-term view may not be much comfort if you’re being harassed right now by violent xenophobes.  We can’t merely hope that they  go away; institutions should be mobilized to combat them.  In the US, the RICO act has been used to decimate the Klan and other groups, largely by taking away leaders’ ability to delegate responsibility away to their hired guns.  I hope the European left has also gotten over its old infatuation with armed radicalism (à la Régis Debray); if the left is allowed to idolize thuggery it’s hard to maintain that the right should not.   

 

The failure of neoliberalism

I’ve been reading Ha-joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism.  It’s amazing.

Its target is clear enough, but like any criminal enterprise it has a confusing array of names.  Europeans call it “liberalism”, Americans call it “neoliberalism”; I’ve also heard it called the Washington Consensus.  It’s the set of policies– free trade, eliminating tariffs, free movement of capital, privatization, safeguarding intellectual property, balancing budgets– that the IMF pushes on developing countries, and the Economist holds up as the self-evident standard for everyone.

Pretty obviously these are policies that rich First World companies like: they want to sell their products everywhere without restriction, they don’t want copycats, they hate when protectionist or nationalist governments get in their way.  But it’s also claimed that these policies will somehow promote development and prosperity; indeed, enthusiasts like Tom Friedman maintain that it’s “the only model on the rack”.

As Chang shows, it’s not.  It’s not how the First World developed.  It doesn’t produce prosperity and it doesn’t develop economies.

• In the 1960s and 70s, under protectionist import substitution policies, the developing world grew at 3.0% annually.  In the 1980s and beyond, under neoliberalism, the rate was 1.7%.
• Where neoliberalism was implemented earlier and more thoroughly, in Latin America, the contrast is even greater: 3.1% in the 1960s/70s; 1.7% in the 1990s; 0.6% in the 2000s.
• Africa didn’t grow much in the ‘bad old days’ (1 to 2% a year), but it’s shrunk under neoliberalism.
• Mexico grew at a rate of 3.1% under import substitution (1955-82); neoliberalism was a disaster, with growth rates from 0.1% (1980s) to 0.3% (2000s) to 1.8% (1990s).  The free trade agreement with the USA wiped out whole swaths of Mexican industry.

Most damningly, the policies the First World preaches to the rest of the world are completely the opposite of those it used in its own development.  Neoliberalism is climbing up the ladder, kicking it away, and advising those below to learn to fly.

• The first nation to modernize, Britain, did so by state intervention, going back to the Tudor monarchs who pressed for the creation of a wool processing industry rather than shipping raw wool to the Netherlands.  Britain protected its industries with high tariffs on manufactured goods– 45-55% in 1821.  (It also prevented its colonies from developing manufactures.)
• The United States was built on protectionism too; by 1820 average tariffs were 40%.  They were raised during the Civil War and stayed that way till WWI.  During this period it was the fastest growing country in the world, and had the highest tariffs.
• France had something of a free trade policy in the 1800s (tariffs at about 20%).  Concluding after WWII that this had something to do with its economic underperformance, it reversed these policies, directing the economy through state-owned banks and nationalizing key industries; tariffs rose to 30%.  The strategy worked; France was a technological leader by the 1980s.
• South Korea, Chang’s native country, was desperately poor in 1961, with a per capita income of $82 (less than Ghana).  Under heavy state direction, it achieved growth rates above 6% and its PCI today is $13,980.  Its growth slowed in the 1990s when it was forced to accept some IMF direction.
• Japan developed after WWII under heavy state direction.  Imports were tightly limited; foreign ownership was banned in key industries, and where allowed, subject to restrictions (technology sharing, limited ownership, local contents requirements).
• China is big enough to ignore the IMF and develop under its own protectionist regime.

Not only does protectionism work, it’s the only thing that does.  Naturally it doesn’t and shouldn’t last forever: once national industries are in good shape they can compete without government help.  But without protection and local control of investment, the nation won’t have national industries.

Chang goes on to show that state enterprises can work quite well; that free movement of capital was rightfully restricted by the First World during its own development; even that corruption and lack of democracy don’t in themselves prevent development (and tend to lessen once countries do become prosperous).

Intellectual property ‘rights’– actually demands by corporations– sound benign, but Chang points out that they are a great obstacle for developing nations, which cannot afford First World prices for pharmaceuticals, software, and textbooks.  Developing nations need to absorb a huge amount of new knowledge; copyright doesn’t benefit them, but stands in their way– it’s a luxury of rich nations.  And once again, it was only promoted by the First World long after they’d put away their own historical piracy.

Neoliberals have belatedly started to notice that their prescriptions don’t work as well as they should.  Their favorite explanation now is “culture”… some people, they say, just have the wrong values.  Chang neatly demolishes this by going back in time and showing that people’s complaints about poor people are always the same.  The Japanese were once described as lazy and emotional, and with “a quite intolerable personal independence”.  Koreans were dirty, sullen barbarians.  The Germans were “a dull and heavy people” who “never hurry”, unable to cooperate or receive new ideas, and prone to thievery.  Such observations are either simply wrong, or have nothing to do with whether nations can develop.

Despite the somewhat incendiary title, Chang isn’t against capitalism, trade, or globalization.  He simply wants the Second and Third Worlds today to have the same ability to control and encourage their own development that the First World nations enjoyed.

Chang has the best answer I’ve seen to David Ricardo’s old explanation of how poor nations ought to stick to whatever they have a relative advantage in… which generally ends up being resource extraction.  That is the best approach for maximizing current income.  But it fails if you want to increase your income beyond that point– if you want to develop, in other words.  To change those relative advantages– and perhaps create some absolute advantages– you have to sacrifice some current income (e.g., set tariffs to encourage native industries, or direct investment to future possibilities rather than current hot spots, or invest in R&D).

 

The four poles

ils pointed me to a really interesting article by Parag Khanna in the New York Times on the disappearance of American hegemony:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html

In brief: the American century is over.  This was always easy enough to predict– our predominance in the 1950s was largely due to the fact that the established powers had all ground each other into dust. 

The subtler point is that the habit of mind of the American Century– bipolar thinking, dividing the world into us vs. them– is just as outdated.  It’s not going to be the Islamic century, nor the Chinese, nor the European.  Nor is American power going to disappear.  Rather, we’re going to have a multipolar world for a long time.

Bush’s unilateralism and military overreach is only part of the problem; a Democratic administration may win back some friends, but it’s not going to restore American hegemony.  For that matter, the most badass nuke-happy Republican can’t do it either.  We might be able to destroy a few Third World countries; we have no leverage against the other major power centers, China and Europe.

Some telling facts:

• Europe is increasingly the world center for finance, R&D, and development aid; the euro is starting to take over as the world’s currency
• Twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the US
• Europe is poised to economically dominate Russia, while access to gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan reduces Russia’s diplomatic leverage
• The ‘rogue states’ from the US point of view all have strong Chinese support
• Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle now exceeds trans-Pacific trade
• Brazil is reviving projects to build a superhighway to the Pacific to facilitate trade with China

Khanna focusses on a redefined Second World– rising powers with real economic power, all cannily playing all three superpowers against each other: India, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, etc.   Though not unified, these powers are adept at not falling under any one superpower’s influence.

Many Americans worry that the rest of the world hates us.  Some people do, and a less arrogant foreign policy would help with that.  But this is increasingly the wrong way to look at the world.  The real issue is that we are less relevant.  In all too many areas we need to stop pretending to be the leader, and rush to catch up.   In others, there’s nothing we can do except get used to competing with some increasingly competent rivals.

For what it’s worth, I think Khanna pays a little too much heed to theories of geopolitics and clashing civilizations… e.g. the significance of Europe and China being on opposite side of the Eurasian land mass is approximately zero.  The importance of ‘civilizations’ on the three superpowers is not much higher; Europe and the US are the same civilization in any real sense, and China’s rise has little to do with either ideology or its own culture.

 

Punish punish punish

If Israelis wonder why they are not universally loved, they don’t need to look further than this:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/23/israel.gaza/index.html

In brief, to punish the Palestinians for supporting Hamas, Israel has cut off food, fuel, and jobs.  And when people broke down the border crossing to Egypt, Israel demands that Egypt “solve the problem”.

What person can rationally believe that this sort of treatment will have the desired effect?  Do Israelis feel goodwill to people who abuse them?  When Hamas lobs missles at them, do they think “Say, this punishment is righteous and I think I’ll start doing what Hamas wants!”

Naturally Hamas is wrong for launching missiles.  But Israel seems to have lost interest in doing anything that might decrease the motivation for launching missiles.  It has abdicated the responsibility for taking care of the people under its control.  All it wants to do is punish and punish and punish.  The Bush administration calls this Israel “defending itself”.  This is the opposite of defense.  It’s ensuring permanent war.