James Bradbury – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Thu, 22 May 2014 18:14:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 James Bradbury – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 A people’s choice https://stanforddaily.com/2014/05/22/a-peoples-choice/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/05/22/a-peoples-choice/#comments Thu, 22 May 2014 08:32:54 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1085907 India didn’t vote the Congress out because of their welfare schemes: They voted the Congress out because, time after time, welfare schemes were all they offered. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the very man who as finance minister under Narasimha Rao had spearheaded the implementation of the Bhagwati reforms—was an invisible (and usually inaudible) leader whose deep loyalty to the Gandhi family, for whom a new welfare proposal was the solution to every problem of government, consistently won out over his better policy judgment.

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When Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party was the landslide winner of the past month’s parliamentary elections in India, campaigned for an “India free of” the incumbent Indian National Congress, even he must have assumed that to be an exaggeration. But voters (and the country’s winner-take-all electoral system) obliged. The Congress Party, dominant for most of India’s post-independence history, won fewer than ten percent of the seats in the lower house—not enough even to serve in the constitutional role of official opposition.

This was, as is often argued, the first Indian election in decades that can reasonably be described as a referendum on an individual candidate, but it was more than that. It was also an unprecedented rejection of ten years of rule by a party—one long taken for granted as the embodiment of mass politics, the establishment and even the idea of India—that is now so dominated by one family that its likely next step after the failure of its PM candidate Rahul Gandhi, son of party president Sonia Gandhi, is to swap him out for his sister.

Yet another characterization of the parliamentary elections, less frequently seen now than it was several months ago, is that they were a grand choice between development models, with the Congress representing left-wing economist Amartya Sen’s vision of social welfare-driven growth and Modi the neoliberal prescriptions of Jagdish Bhagwati, the architect of India’s 1990s economic reforms.

But this too is incomplete, especially in hindsight. India didn’t vote the Congress out because of their welfare schemes: They voted the Congress out because, time after time, welfare schemes were all they offered. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the very man who as finance minister under Narasimha Rao had spearheaded the implementation of the Bhagwati reforms—was an invisible (and usually inaudible) leader whose deep loyalty to the Gandhi family, for whom a new welfare proposal was the solution to every problem of government, consistently won out over his better policy judgment.

The Indian left—and there is a vast political space to the left of the Congress, with socialist and communist parties of every stripe and affiliation holding power in several state governments—views the Congress’s “faux-socialism” with disdain. But while it is certainly the case that the most loudly trumpeted, and most expensive, welfare policies tend to be aimed more at voter blocs than social needs, the Congress’s critics from the left are reeling due to an election in which large numbers of poor and middle class voters, both urban and rural, shifted from longstanding Congress loyalties to voting for an overtly conservative party.

The left—and the Congress—will continue to view things differently, but it was precisely the BJP’s conservative development vision, even more than the party’s right-wing Hindu nationalism (which Modi consistently downplayed on the campaign trail), that drew so many Indians to vote BJP this month. Modi is no Thatcher—he opposes liberalizing foreign access to the Indian retail market, is thought to have mixed feelings about privatization and plans a set of massive infrastructure projects as the centerpiece of his economic platform—but he has shown India a credible economic alternative in which business can play a constructive role.

***

In the absence of an official political opposition, the role of a check on the Modi administration falls largely to civil society and the press. And when the left decries “Big Media” as being dominated by the corporate interests they claim brought Modi to power, and the right argues equally passionately for the existence of an uncritically pro-Congress journalistic cabal, this check can come only from the increasingly assertive third section that practices neither Modi-worship nor Gandhi-apology.

The magnitude of Modi’s mandate itself provides somewhat of a silver lining for the 69 percent of Indians who voted against him: Unlike Manmohan Singh, he cannot blame coalition allies or opposition intransigence for the government’s failures.

But five years is a long time, and Modi may only become a more divisive figure as he begins to pin down policy choices that his campaign had deliberately left unspecified. Above all, he must choose between adopting the policy platform of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP-affiliated Hindu paramilitary group to which he has dedicated much of his life, and being Prime Minister for all Indians.

It is too soon to tell if Narendra Modi’s victory this spring should be seen as a triumph of democracy. (His most ardent detractors, unsurprisingly, see instead a mirror of the elections that brought European fascism to power.) But it already explains why democracy matters.

The modern Chinese state, for instance, argues that what differentiates it from western democracies is simply a lack of “inefficient” and “disorganized” rotations of power between multiple political parties. Both the Congress and the BJP have massive nationwide party bureaucracies, constructed at a scale far beyond anything we can imagine in the United States. China might call it duplication—but the Indian people call it a choice.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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Long live the King https://stanforddaily.com/2014/05/13/long-live-the-king/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/05/13/long-live-the-king/#comments Tue, 13 May 2014 09:01:46 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1085543 Last Wednesday, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was removed from office by Thailand’s Constitutional Court. This week, now-ex-PM Yingluck – the least corrupt prime minister in modern Thai history – faces a five-year ban from politics at the hands of the country’s National Anti-Corruption Commission. These moves are only the latest in a decade-long struggle that pits Thailand’s aristocratic establishment against a tycoon they view as a traitor, its urban middle class against newly empowered rural masses and King Rama IX’s privy council against the very man set to succeed to the throne.

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Last Wednesday, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra – younger sister of exiled billionaire politician Thaksin Shinawatra and the current leader of the political party he founded – was removed from office by Thailand’s Constitutional Court. This week, now-ex-PM Yingluck – the least corrupt prime minister in modern Thai history – faces a five-year ban from politics at the hands of the country’s National Anti-Corruption Commission.

These moves – together, the fourth such ousting an elected prime minister hailing from Thaksin’s party since 2006 – are only the latest in a decade-long struggle that pits Thailand’s aristocratic establishment against a tycoon they view as a traitor, its urban middle class against newly empowered rural masses and King Rama IX’s privy council against the very man set to succeed to the throne.

Thaksin’s 2001 election victory – the first of five in a row by parties he controls – represented a dramatic break from 20th century Thailand’s parade of corrupt coalition governments interspersed with frequent military coups. Here was a man with establishment credentials – he made his fortune through monopoly contracts granted by contacts in the Thai military – who spurned established methods and established power centers, instead deciding to create his own constituency through populist policies.

But to his opponents Thaksin would still be simply the latest and most capable in a succession of corrupt party leaders that made millions off the business of governing while convincing the less-educated sectors of the general public that he represented their interests, were it not for a deeper royal struggle with which the fight against the Shinawatra family has become inextricably intertwined.

Thaksin has thrown his lot in with Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, a playboy with mistresses in every corner of the world and a longtime outcast in palace politics. The American ambassador even described Thaksin in 2005 as having “invested in crown prince futures.” The prospect of the prince becoming Rama X – as the present king wishes and succession rules dictate – is a threat to the existing royal establishment (which is linked closely with the political, business, and military establishments in a web called the “network monarchy”). It is surpassed only by the prospect of Maha Vajiralongkorn as king overseeing another decade of Thaksin rule, this time unfettered by the machinations of the political elite, like the recent moves against Yingluck.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX), the longest-serving head of state in the world and one of the longest-reigning monarchs in world history, will likely pass away soon. With each passing year, the importance to the “royalist” forces (ironically, it is the self-designated royalists who are most opposed to the king’s stated wishes for succession) of holding Parliament, by any means necessary, in order to amend the royal succession law only grows.

The first such attempt – a 2006 military coup against then-PM Thaksin orchestrated by Privy Council President General Prem Tinsulanonda (himself seven years older than the king) – failed in its primary objective of restoring Thailand to the pre-Thaksin “tutelary democracy” status quo. Instead it gave rise to a pro-Thaksin popular movement, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (also known as the Red Shirts), which joined the anti-Thaksin, “Yellow Shirt” People’s Alliance for Democracy, already protesting on the streets of Bangkok.

On the night of the coup, Thaksin was at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. While he has not returned to Thailand since to face the corruption charges the coup leaders brought against him, he has repeatedly addressed Red Shirt rallies from exile in Dubai. When the coup leaders called a new election, a pro-Thaksin party won again. Within months, the Yellow Shirts stormed the capital, blocking the doors to Parliament and seizing Suvarnabhumi International Airport.

Two politically motivated Constitutional Court rulings deposed two pro-Thaksin prime ministers in late 2008, and the resulting unelected government, led by PM Abhisit Vejjajiva of the Democrat Party, became the target of several new rounds of Red Shirt demonstrations. At the height of the protests in 2010, a government crackdown led to 91 deaths; Thaksin supporters alleged that the Thai military fired on protesters.

The most recent protest movement began when PM Yingluck attempted to pass an amnesty bill that would have allowed Thaksin to return to Thailand (while also exonerating Abhisit of murder charges surrounding the 2010 crackdown). This movement, which calls itself the People’s Democratic Reform Committee, is led by a charismatic, belligerent, and nationalist former Abhisit deputy named Suthep Thaugsuban. Working with this new group, the royalists have given up any hope of defeating Thaksin at the ballot box, instead openly calling for a temporary end to parliamentary democracy and the imposition of a royally-appointed oligarchy to “reform” Thai politics and rid the country of all traces of the Shinawatra family.

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Discussion of the royal aspects of the present political fight is still tightly limited by Thailand’s lèse-majesté law, which forbids criticism of the king, the queen, and the crown prince on pain of a 15-year prison term – >thus making even well-established facts about the Royal Family (like the fact that the king probably killed his predecessor by accident in 1946, or that the king and queen have been estranged since the mid-1980s) sound like conspiracy theories to those who have heard only the official, public line.

Even foreign journalists are beholden to the dictates of lèse-majesté. While BBC reporter Jonathan Head managed to escape a threatened prosecution under the lèse-majesté law in 2008 – in part because his reporting had generally hewed closely to the royalist line – Reuters editor Andrew MacGregor Marshall had to resign from the company in 2011 in order to publish an exposé on the Thai monarchy based on recently leaked U.S. diplomatic cables.

But like the anti-democratic nature of the royalist program, the succession fight is increasingly out in the open: PM Yingluck’s cabinet meetings in the months prior to her dismissal featured a prominent portrait of the Crown Prince, while Princess Chulabhorn – seen as a supporter of alternative succession options involving her sister Princess Sirindhorn – frequently displays symbols of the anti-Thaksin protest movement on her Instagram page.

This weekend, PDRC leader Suthep argued that the removal of PM Yingluck leaves a power vacuum that can only be filled by an appointment by the president of the Senate, as the lower house was dissolved by Yingluck prior to a February election that was boycotted by the opposition and annulled by the Constitutional Court. But the Senate is also without a president, and the Constitution states that only the prime minister can submit the name of a new Senate president for royal endorsement.

In short, just about anything could happen now. The latest news is that Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, who recently solidified control over additional military posts, has warned the officers under his authority against any attempt at a coup.

The larger struggle – of which the political fight, the palace disputes and the protests and street violence are only the most visible parts – will no doubt continue as it has continued since the 1932 revolution against the Thai absolute monarchy. The Thai establishment has proven that it will stop at nothing to resist the rise of true democracy in Thailand. But with Thaksin, Yingluck and their legions of supporters – and for the first time since Pridi Banomyong, the leader of the 1932 revolution, was framed by an official investigation for the murder of Rama VIII – Thai democracy at least has a name, a face and a chance.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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“There are no supermen” https://stanforddaily.com/2014/05/01/there-are-no-supermen/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/05/01/there-are-no-supermen/#respond Thu, 01 May 2014 14:20:09 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1085157 It will take a level of optimism in the face of unceasingly bad news that perhaps only Bassem Sabry was really capable of, but there is a way forward. The one constant in the last three years of Egyptian politics is that public expectations have consistently been unreasonably high; that each government, upon failing to meet those expectations, has received more blame for the country’s problems than it deserves.

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Six months ago, I had the opportunity to meet Ahmed Maher, the seemingly unstoppable activist behind Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement and the closest thing the country’s 2011 revolution had to a guiding force. He could have given an hour-long speech about the importance of democracy and the rule of law and answered a handful of inane questions from whichever audience members lined up at the microphones fastest. Or he could have skipped us altogether, spending his whole short early-November trip to the United States talking to officials or NGOs or supporters from the Egyptian diaspora.

Instead, he spoke for ten minutes in a small room at the Haas Center for Public Service and then opened up to questions from the 20 or so people in the audience. He came on only a weekend’s notice, and I was lucky to be on the right mailing list (SIG-friends, if you’re curious). It was a degree of closeness I’d hoped for, but never really expected, in the three years since January 2011, which I spent glued to the limited window of al-Jazeera.

He told us why he’d come: that a discussion with students was more important than a discussion with officials because his movement (April 6) was a student movement, and in any case, he’d had enough of official duplicity and broken promises—Egyptian, yes, but also American.

He gave us the basic narrative of April 6. The first protests beginning in 2005 (two arrests) became explicitly anti-Mubarak in 2007 and 2008 (another arrest, this time with torture). Helping plan the protests of January 2011. Being called “heroes of the revolution” at first by the post-Mubarak military government, but then criticizing the military, too, when it began to restrict media and protect the old, corrupt business establishment, of which it was itself a part. (“At the time, the Islamists supported the military against us,” he recalls, with a touch of irony.)

Maher continued his narrative: Pivoting from an independent stance in the first round of presidential elections to an endorsement of Islamist Mohammed Morsi in the runoff, because the other candidate—Mubarak’s old prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq—was unacceptable and a boycott was the wrong choice for a first stab at democracy. Turning against Morsi when he overstepped his mandate (another arrest, in May 2013). Joining the call for Morsi’s ouster in the June 30 Tamarrod protests, then criticizing the overreaches of the resulting interim government: “Again the government has started to control the media, and we’re in square number zero.”

At times he was prescient: “We want to be the third alternative—besides Islamists and the military—but we know it will be hard.”

At times he was wrong: “I don’t think [army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi] will even compete [in this spring’s elections], because he doesn’t need to hold the presidency in order to run Egypt.”

He told us that, maybe, a third revolution would be all it would take to create a free Egypt with a lasting democracy, and expressed optimism that one would be forthcoming—but after the meeting he talked to a techie friend of mine about developing a private communication tool for the movement because, for the first time since he started using it to organize in 2007, the vulnerabilities of social media outweighed their advantages. Facebook had become too risky.

He was so focused on the future of his movement and his country that those of us who were listening could easily forget that his own future was less certain than ever, that his record of standing up for his values and criticizing government after government was bringing him more enemies every day.

Indeed just weeks later, a few days after he returned to Cairo, he was indicted after defying a draconian new protest law implemented by al-Sisi’s interim military government. He turned himself in to the Cairo police—wearing sunglasses, surrounded by a crowd of hundreds, chanting, “Down, down with military rule! I’ll write on the prison wall that army rule is shameful and a betrayal!” (It rhymes in Arabic.) He was released after a few hours, but then was arrested again on another charge of inciting protest—the protest that gathered when he turned himself in the first time. While in custody awaiting trial, he was refused paper to write on but managed to sneak out a snark-filled statement on toilet paper, disparaging a government-run “Human Rights Council” that is anything but.

On December 22, he was sentenced to three years in prison, along with another co-founder of the April 6 movement and a supporter. These were the first convictions handed down under the new protest law.

Since December, the military government has pushed through a constitutional referendum (98 percent voted in favor, though the Muslim Brotherhood and April 6 both pushed for a boycott). Field Marshal al-Sisi has stepped down from his official military post and announced a presidential campaign that is all but guaranteed to win, and thousands more activists have become political prisoners.

This week, the Egyptian government attracted international condemnation again for banning activities of the April 6 movement, sentencing 491 Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated protesters to life imprisonment and 37 to death, and referring 683 additional death-penalty sentences, including that of Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, to a higher court for final approval. For the moment, American military aid to Egypt is on hold as we attempt to exercise what is perhaps the only remaining bit of leverage we have in Cairo.

Like many who have followed post-revolution Egypt from the English-speaking world, I turned to Bassem Sabry—a brilliant, bilingual Egyptian journalist of unparalleled insight and honesty—for information, analysis, and solace after this, as after every piece of disheartening news from the country. But the world is cruel, and Sabry—one of the last prominent Egyptians to constructively engage with all sides in a political environment polarized almost beyond imagining—died on Tuesday, at age 31, in a tragic accident.

He left a straightforward policy guide for whenever the Egyptian government decides to begin confronting the hard problems, rather than pushing them further into the future, and a personal manifesto—entitled, with typical low-key erudition, “Eleutheria,” Greek for “freedom” –which has been exchanged countless times these past two days over Egyptian social media.

“I have learned that there are no infallibly great supermen in the manner we used to see them once from a distance or when we were children … And I have learned, in contrast, that there are astoundingly extraordinary human beings. If you asked such individuals if they could obliterate a mountain with a spoon, they would respond that everything was possible.”

Ahmed Maher is such a human being, and no one has come closer to obliterating the mountain of the corrupt, unfair, and oppressive Egyptian establishment from as modest and unassuming a position as him.

It will take a level of optimism in the face of unceasingly bad news that perhaps only Bassem Sabry was really capable of, but there is a way forward. The one constant in the last three years of Egyptian politics is that public expectations have consistently been unreasonably high; that each government, upon failing to meet those expectations, has received more blame for the country’s problems than it deserves.

Maher, Badie and the entire leadership of April 6 and the Brotherhood are in prison; Bassem Youssef, the massively popular TV host who drew comparisons to Jon Stewart, has seen his show suspended yet again; and liberal icon Mohamed El-Baradei is in exile. And whatever the benefits to stability, counterterrorism and perhaps foreign investment of a Sisi presidency, no man who spearheaded the systematic exclusion of every one of these liberal and progressive political forces from the Egyptian public sphere will meet the expectations of a country that still believes in pluralism.

Like the Islamist Salafi al-Nour party, which saved its political rights by promising not to field a presidential candidate for the next decade, Ahmed Maher has always taken the long view. He knows the contours of three years—how much can happen, and how little can change. The next three years will probably bear that out yet again. But if we are ever led by the setbacks of the hour to despair that the light of the revolution has gone out—that not even a candle is left burning in Egypt—there is still a torch in Tora Prison.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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No “U” in Colombia? https://stanforddaily.com/2014/04/24/no-u-in-colombia/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/04/24/no-u-in-colombia/#comments Thu, 24 Apr 2014 07:00:50 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1084790 That so-called Uribismo quickly upended the Colombian political environment, previously characterized by a relatively stable opposition between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. Although Uribe was subject to term limits, popular support for his policies—his approval ratings were regularly upwards of 70 percent—led several factions to unite around their common support for a constitutional amendment that would allow a second Uribe term; this “U Party” won more votes in the 2006 legislative elections than either of the traditional parties.

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He may have left the office in 2010, but ex-president Álvaro Uribe remains the elephant in the room of contemporary Colombian politics. One of George W. Bush’s closest international allies, he presided over the twin “Colombian Miracles” of the 2000s: rapid investment-driven economic growth, and the military defeat of both drug traffickers and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Marxist guerrilla group.

Uribe’s program of “democratic security” aimed to restore government control over Colombia. He called for vastly increased defense spending and the active assertion of Colombian government sovereignty in rural areas that had previously been under the tacit control of FARC or drug lords. Along with policies aimed at shoring up “investment confidence” and “social cohesion,” and a majoritarian principle—opposed to Colombia’s historic legalism—that Uribe called the “state of opinion,” this program formed the backbone of his populist, statist brand of conservatism.

That so-called Uribismo quickly upended the Colombian political environment, previously characterized by a relatively stable opposition between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. Although Uribe was subject to term limits, popular support for his policies—his approval ratings were regularly upwards of 70 percent—led several factions to unite around their common support for a constitutional amendment that would allow a second Uribe term; this “U Party” won more votes in the 2006 legislative elections than either of the traditional parties.

Even though in 2009 the Constitutional Court ruled out the possibility of yet another re-election bid, the future of Uribismo still looked secure, for President Uribe had picked out a seemingly perfect successor. Juan Manuel Santos had founded and led the U Party—and, as defense minister, had overseen the implementation of Uribe’s “democratic security” policies and the war against FARC and the cartels.

Running under the banner of a party named for President Uribe, and as a cabinet member linked more closely than anyone else to the President’s security policies, Santos campaigned for and won the 2010 elections as a loyal Uribista. But halfway through his term, President Santos marshaled his unquestionable conservative credentials into the Colombian equivalent of a “Nixon to China” moment: He announced peace talks with the FARC militants, to be held in and mediated by Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Uribe denounced this decision repeatedly from his wildly popular Twitter account, and within a few months the men who were once patron and protégé became bitter political enemies. Uribe left the U Party to found the Democratic Center party (one that was poorly named; in reality, it was well to the right of the conservative establishment); with that party he contested and won a Senate seat in this past March’s legislative elections.

But besides Santos himself, a candidate from Uribe’s new party, a representative of the socialist left and a Conservative Party candidate who has tried to stay relatively neutral in the Santos-Uribe fight, there is yet a fifth major player in next month’s presidential vote. The country’s capital of Bogotá, a bastion of opposition to Uribe’s presidency, has also been a breeding ground for a new kind of urban politics.

Beginning in the 1990s, a succession of leftist mayors transformed Bogotá as deeply and as successfully as Uribe had transformed the nation in the 2000s: Enrique Peñalosa alone, mayor for only three years, embarked on five hugely popular megaprojects—including the most comprehensive and successful bike path and bus rapid transit networks in the entire developing world.

Two of these mayors joined forces for the 2014 presidential elections, using the Green Party as a political vehicle; they selected Peñalosa as a candidate and are currently polling second behind President Santos.

The race is so complex and wide-open because, in attempting to navigate a relatively centrist path, President Santos has ticked off both the Colombian left and right.

A scandal surrounding the December dismissal of Bogotá’s current mayor for allegedly breaking the law by nationalizing the city’s garbage collection (Santos agreed yesterday to reinstate him) made many progressives contend that he wanted to exclude the core of the Colombian left—former guerillas like that mayor—from politics entirely. Uribe, for his part, continues to criticize the FARC peace talks as “negotiation with terrorists.” Polls suggest that 70 percent of Colombians would rather not see Santos re-elected.

But Peñalosa’s Green Alliance candidacy is still a relatively long shot, and Uribe and the rest of Colombia’s conservatives could still close ranks around Santos in the election’s second round (though Peñalosa actually received an unexpected, and probably unhelpful, Uribe endorsement in his failed 2011 attempt at regaining the mayorship). Indeed, Uribe’s candidate, Óscar Zuluaga, could yet claim second place, leading to a second-round election that would look like a Republican Party primary, and would surely generate more than a few criticisms of the two-round electoral system.

But at least one recent poll has Peñalosa defeating Santos in a runoff. If that’s accurate, the upstart center-left economist-mayor will have won because the modern Colombian right, the most powerful in the western hemisphere, is split by the very man whose presidency made it so strong. Progressivism has been in retreat in Colombia (relative to its success in the rest of Latin America) because it is seen as the intellectual loser of the multi-decade civil war; this would be an unexpected twist of fate. And so perhaps progressivism in Colombia, “condemned,” like the late Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “to one hundred years of solitude” because of a legacy of Marxism and violence, “will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on Earth.”

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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Democracy after America: war, Islamism and elections in Iraq and Afghanistan https://stanforddaily.com/2014/04/17/democracy-after-america-war-islamism-and-elections-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/04/17/democracy-after-america-war-islamism-and-elections-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2014 08:33:20 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1084539 Interesting and important elections are piling up this spring, but few have quite as much riding on their success as those in the two countries most ravaged by the War on Terror. But the Afghan presidential election, whose first round took place two weekends ago, and the Iraqi parliamentary vote set for the end of […]

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Interesting and important elections are piling up this spring, but few have quite as much riding on their success as those in the two countries most ravaged by the War on Terror. But the Afghan presidential election, whose first round took place two weekends ago, and the Iraqi parliamentary vote set for the end of April, are more than just crucial milestones in the countries’ recoveries from more than a decade of war: They also represent two of the best opportunities left for a political defeat of terror itself.

The idea of terrorism always consists in a rejection of politics; in the Islamic context in particular, terrorism is conceived in opposition to political Islam. Concurrent with (infuriating) Western arguments over whether the Middle East is “not yet ready” or even “culturally incompatible” with democracy are lively debates between and among Islamist movements over the role that democracy can play in achieving Islamic government.

Much as conservative Soviet leaders (rightly) concluded that the introduction of parliamentary democracy would rob the Communist Party of its revolutionary claim to mass sovereignty and thus ultimately of its power, hardline Islamist theorists have questioned whether a democratic political process can serve as a foundation for a state that places sovereignty with Allah and Islamic law.

Ever since the handful of Islamist political parties of the first half of the 20th century lost out to Western pressure during the Cold War, those same hardliners have kept a consistent line: Democracy will destroy Islam, and so the forces of Islam must fight—as al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi said in 2005, in response to President Bush’s freedom agenda speech: “A bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it.”

As the West’s favorite option of stable, secular dictatorships (making the issue moot) becomes increasingly untenable, the question of politics or militancy has reasserted itself again and again, with only one consistent result: Whenever and wherever the question is decided by force, those who advocate force inevitably have the upper hand.

And so the wars against terror drag on, as the conflict itself is stacked towards the side that wants to fight. The elections in Afghanistan and Iraq matter so much because they force a reframing of this conflict: They force every faction and every leader—even or perhaps especially those which boycott the elections—to be a political actor, just as war forces every party to be a military actor.

Although no members were on the ballot, the Afghan Taliban’s political position was clear. They announced before the election that they had “a specific military plan for the election”—namely, “to attack the security forces deployed for election security and the election materials.” As if it weren’t clear enough already, the spokesman reiterated that “we have warned the people […] not to participate in the election.”

Their failure was military, yes—not a single large-scale assault was successful—but since the people of Afghanistan spurned the Taliban’s demands to stay home, it was also a failure of a political platform.

In Iraq, political Islam is competing with not one but two alternative conceptions of the Islamist project. One is terrorism: The militant Sunni group once known as al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) has been disowned by central al-Qaida, and now, as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), forms the most extreme faction in the Syrian opposition and controls several cities in Iraq’s Anbar province. Like the Afghan Taliban, ISIS aims to sabotage the upcoming Iraqi elections, distributing leaflets in Anbar to warn the public against participation.

The other is the theocratic ideal of wilayat al-faqih, the “guardianship of the jurist,” that underlies the Iranian political system, under which sovereign power is vested in a single (Shi’a) ayatollah, who manages and overrules the decisions of democratically elected leaders. In contrast, and despite Iranian pressure, Iraqi Shi’a political parties have chosen a more pluralist relationship with the ayatollahs that reside in their country. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest-ranking Shi’a jurist in Iraq, has been careful to endorse the election itself without standing behind any one party or leader.

Political Islam faces setbacks around the region—from the collapse of Western support in Gaza a decade ago after highly anticipated elections brought to power a party that endorsed terrorism, to the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and threats to AKP rule in Turkey—but it remains the only credible alternative in the Middle East to the autocracy and misrule of the 20th century.

Every election in a country riven by conflict is an opportunity for democracy to prove itself capable of the most difficult demand that can be placed on it—an opportunity, that is, to prove that electoral politics can be a substitute for war.

By any purely institutional account, Afghanistan and Iraq are not model democracies. But nobody has fought for democracy harder, has endured more for its sake or understands more deeply why it matters.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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In Defense of Turkish Democracy https://stanforddaily.com/2014/04/04/in-defense-of-turkish-democracy/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/04/04/in-defense-of-turkish-democracy/#comments Fri, 04 Apr 2014 07:46:41 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1084091 The election results—in particular, the relatively poor performance of the Kemalist opposition—only serve to confirm the new landscape of Turkish political power: a landscape composed of three people and the three organizations they control. The AKP under Erdoğan, the PKK under Öcalan (who influences the movement from prison) and the Hizmet under Gülen all represent well-organized movements with charismatic and forward-thinking leaders and, most importantly, fresh ideologies, each of which in their own way mark a break with the seemingly tired Western political discourse.

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It’s become a cliché to call Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the “most powerful” and “most capable” Turkish leader since the country’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. But that is arguably an understatement: Erdoğan maintained for a decade what, for a multiparty democracy, is a truly exceptional level of control over Turkish politics, even though his AK Party never once obtained a majority of the national popular vote in the six elections since his rise to power.

Erdoğan’s achievement is all the more impressive when placed in the context of Turkey’s political history. In 2002, he inherited a state apparatus dedicated to the preservation of the secularist legacy of Kemal Atatürk and the elimination of Islamic-tinged political forces like the one Erdoğan represented. Only five years earlier, a so-called “postmodern coup” by the Kemalist military leadership had brought down the last prime minister to attempt a shift away from secularism.

Even beyond the historical connection to the original state that Atatürk built, this Kemalist elite had another, more recent source of legitimacy, having led the brutal and lengthy counterinsurgency in southeastern Turkey against Kurdish nationalists, especially the militant and (formerly) Marxist organization known as the PKK. This campaign has been so central to modern Turkish political and military culture that after the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan was finally captured by intelligence operatives in Kenya in 1999, he was imprisoned alone on an island in the middle of the Sea of Marmara under a guard of over a thousand Turkish soldiers.

But Erdoğan and the AKP were not alone in their protracted fight against the entrenched political-military establishment: They enlisted the help of a complex nongovernmental movement with a closely allied ideology and a stable of loyal cadres. This so-called Hizmet movement is made up of followers of the charismatic but moderate Sunni Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen and, despite amounting to only two or three percent of the country’s population, controls much of the Turkish media and a massive global network of charter schools.

The idea behind the Erdoğan-Gülen alliance was to replace the old-guard Kemalists who made up most of the career staff of the Turkish police, judiciary and other key bureaucratic organs with trustworthy but not overtly partisan Gülenists; in return the Gülenist media would provide full-throated support for the AK Party. After all, Gülen himself—exiled since 1999 to a private compound in rural Pennsylvania—had no interest in competing politically with Erdoğan or forming a party of his own.

That was the status quo until less than a year ago. But last weekend, when Turkey held municipal elections, the political climate could not have been more different. After a year and a half of hidden tensions, the AKP and Hizmet split publicly in December, with Gülenist prosecutors and media announcing corruption investigations into senior AKP officials and members of Erdoğan’s family. In response, Erdoğan doubled down, eventually announcing that he would seek Hizmet’s “eradication.”

The recent local elections were a referendum on Erdoğan’s rule, and he has taken the AKP’s victory as a signal that his comrades have been acquitted of the Gülenist corruption charges “at the ballot box.” That is less unreasonable than it might sound; Erdoğan’s famously micromanagerial governing style means he can legitimately be held directly responsible for everything from the growth rate of the Turkish economy to the (allegedly politically motivated) shootdown of a Syrian warplane in the week before the elections. And the corruption allegations? It certainly wasn’t Erdoğan who made a jury of the Turkish electorate by leaking wiretap after wiretap; the charges and evidence were debated in public because the Gülenists made them public.

The election results—in particular, the relatively poor performance of the Kemalist opposition—only serve to confirm the new landscape of Turkish political power: a landscape composed of three people and the three organizations they control. The AKP under Erdoğan, the PKK under Öcalan (who influences the movement from prison) and the Hizmet under Gülen all represent well-organized movements with charismatic and forward-thinking leaders and, most importantly, fresh ideologies, each of which in their own way mark a break with the seemingly tired Western political discourse.

But of these three principal power centers in contemporary Turkey, only one seeks, obtains and trumpets electoral legitimacy. Only one has the direct mass engagement that is essential to true republicanism and which Thaksin Shinawatra, leading the most powerful political party in Thailand from Dubai, has proven is possible to obtain even in exile. In short, in the aftermath of the vote, only one faction actually represents a plurality of the Turkish people.

I believe that these elections fairly represent the will of the Turkish people, and that is why I consider the AKP legitimate, unlike the Maduro regime in Venezuela. And so while Öcalan’s deeply articulated libertarian socialism and Gülen’s vision of Muslim-Jewish reconciliation are political ideals I would give anything to see realized, and despite being personally haunted by resemblances between Erdoğan and authoritarian leaders of the past and present, I must still break with the bulk of Western commentators and stand firmly with the AKP.

It is easy to criticize Erdoğan’s paranoid leadership style—his latest move is to assert that Hizmet is controlled by the CIA—and his constant announcement of blanket bans on everything from late-night alcohol sales to Twitter access. But as with the fallen Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, autocratic tendencies, though distasteful, do not necessarily imply autocracy. We can note, for example, that although Öcalan is in prison, he is still permitted to articulate his views. Turkey’s press and social media remain some of the most vibrant and incisive in the world, and I am confident that the day the AKP begins to actively repress their political opposition is the day their empire will begin to crumble.

In Afghanistan, an Erdoğan-like era of strong and independent personal leadership is coming to an end this spring because the country lacks the means to actually pursue this independence in the political, military or economic spheres. The central government in Kabul cannot enforce the centralization it desires. As President Hamid Karzai’s effort to do so anyway has resulted in the country finding itself increasingly alienated from the patrons it depends on to support basic state and military institutions, every single credible presidential candidate in next week’s election is bending over backwards to show that their leadership would be less “unpredictable” and (to put it bluntly) more beholden to foreign powers than Karzai’s.

On the other hand, through its far better economic position, Turkey continues to have the opportunity to pioneer a new democratic politics—a politics characterized by a strong ruling party, a strong and public leader and a strong opposition that can claim the moral high ground when necessary. Last weekend Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the fight of his political life, and the man who was once hailed as the model for a new kind of democracy is back.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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Papa Putin: Russia’s Narrative of Paternalism https://stanforddaily.com/2014/03/06/papa-putin-russias-narrative-of-paternalism/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/03/06/papa-putin-russias-narrative-of-paternalism/#comments Thu, 06 Mar 2014 09:25:10 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1083032 Over the weekend, the “Russian military intervention” that I claimed last week was “unlikely” came to pass, and on Tuesday morning Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an hour-long press conference—at times rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness; at times frustrated and impatient—where, instead of explaining why Russia had invaded Crimea, he denied that the occupying soldiers were Russian […]

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Over the weekend, the “Russian military intervention” that I claimed last week was “unlikely” came to pass, and on Tuesday morning Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an hour-long press conference—at times rambling, almost stream-of-consciousness; at times frustrated and impatient—where, instead of explaining why Russia had invaded Crimea, he denied that the occupying soldiers were Russian at all.

But apart from this KGB-like disavowal of an obvious and easily confirmed truth, Putin’s press conference gave a surprisingly unfiltered insight into the Russian perspective on the Ukrainian revolution—and the blind spots of that perspective. This was not a press conference of a blustering leader at the top of his game but of a man caught off guard. After the intervention, the Russian President was left to rely on his uniquely Putinesque wit and geopolitical common sense to reclaim the mantle of political reasonableness which, at the best of times, has defined his international self-image. In order to do this, he had to smear Maidan’s central motives and tactics as unreasonable or ignore them altogether.

Vladimir Putin’s goal on March 4 was to build a Russian narrative of the Ukraine crisis that is coherent enough to be accepted, and presumably repeated, by those whose default position is mistrust of the West.

He undoubtedly succeeded. But that doesn’t mean he was right.

From the very beginning, Putin said he “understands the people on Maidan who are calling for radical change.” With an amusing, but not entirely unjustified elision of the whole Soviet period, he acknowledged that “the ordinary Ukrainian citizen, the ordinary guy, suffered during the rule of Nicholas II, during the reign of Kuchma, and Yushchenko, and Yanukovych.” And in a final, self-serving flourish: “Corruption has reached dimensions that are unheard of here in Russia.”

In the most charitable interpretation of Putin’s point of view, it is only Maidan’s revolutionary methods which are unacceptable, and they are unacceptable only because they are unreasonable. Putin called the protesters’ unwillingness to accept last week’s transitional peace agreement “foolish” and insinuated (without much irony) that the purpose of their extra-constitutional (or revolutionary, they amount to the same thing) actions was to “humiliate someone.” Putin’s basic claim, and one that deserves a closer look, is this: “Only constitutional means should be used on the post-Soviet space, where political structures are still very fragile, and economies are still weak.”

Much of the area of modern Ukraine has been under Russian control for almost its entire history, and Putin’s rhetoric is fundamentally paternalistic. To Putin, Ukraine is defined by its status as a state in “post-Soviet space,” and thus as the unstable child of Soviet stability. And the Ukrainian oligarchy, the context for Yanukovych’s corruption, is simply a lesser, and more broken, version of Moscow’s comparatively functional economic system: “Here in Russia we have many problems, and many of them are similar to those in Ukraine, but they are not as serious as in Ukraine.”

This way of thinking has no place for three of the most important aspects of Maidan’s philosophy and message—its European outlook, its nationalism and its revolutionary idealism.

First, if Ukraine is a post-Soviet state with post-Soviet problems—problems Russia understands, acknowledges and believes itself to be overcoming—then in Putin’s view, Maidan’s insistence that Ukraine’s near-term future lies in Europe is clearly unreasonable, especially when, as Putin notes, “just about all [of Ukraine’s] engineering products are exported to Russia.”

Second, Ukraine is the home of the original Russian state, and in many ways the closest thing to an equal partner that Moscow had in the Soviet Union throughout the Soviet period (especially during World War II)—so a “Ukrainian nationalism,” conceived in opposition to Russia, is a fundamentally unreasonable idea and must actually be unreconstructed fascism.

Third, and perhaps most maddeningly for Putin, Maidan displayed a positively American thirst for revolution for its own sake, even after most of its demands were met by the government in Kiev. Much like the objectively unreasonable revolutionaries in the Continental Congress of the American colonies, Maidan ultimately transcended the concrete goals of Yanukovych’s exit and the restoration of the 2004 Constitution in favor of abstractions like freedom and democracy.

In case it wasn’t understood the first time, Putin kept reiterating his point about revolution: “You have to understand that this kind of chaos is the worst possible thing for countries with a shaky economy and unstable political system.”

But it isn’t really a point about revolution at all. The “chaos” which Putin sees sweeping Ukraine—a chaos which he sensationally likens several times to the disordered Weimar political context out of which the Nazi party rose—is really nothing of the sort. What Putin fears in Ukraine is a true politics in the post-Soviet space—and thus a compelling, nearby alternative to his own cheap imitation.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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Revolution in Ukraine: Take Two https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/27/revolution-in-ukraine-take-two/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/27/revolution-in-ukraine-take-two/#respond Thu, 27 Feb 2014 09:29:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1082770 “In order to cut electricity consumption, it has been decided to switch off the light at the end of the tunnel.” Such was Ukrainian comedian Dmytro Chekalkin’s line upon the 2010 inauguration of President Viktor Yanukovych. After a decade of failed reform and economic collapse under the first two post-Soviet leaders and another decade of […]

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“In order to cut electricity consumption, it has been decided to switch off the light at the end of the tunnel.” Such was Ukrainian comedian Dmytro Chekalkin’s line upon the 2010 inauguration of President Viktor Yanukovych.

After a decade of failed reform and economic collapse under the first two post-Soviet leaders and another decade of political chaos (there are Wikipedia articles on the “2006 Ukrainian political crisis,” the “2007 Ukrainian political crisis” and the “2008 Ukrainian political crisis”) under a succession of governments that promised much and delivered little, the presidential elections had gone to the very man who had tried and failed to steal that same office six years earlier.

The events of 2004—known as the Orange Revolution—represented a hope that the power of the people could bring down Ukraine’s oligarchic and corrupt political structure and replace it with a Western-style democracy. Peaceful street protests forced the rigged elections to be rerun under close international scrutiny, and President Bush declared Ukraine a success story of his Freedom Agenda.

But the crisis had done little more than solidify the political structure Ukrainians had meant to overthrow. A country that had always been divided between an industrial eastern half with historical and linguistic ties to Russia and a largely agricultural western half that leaned more towards Europe now saw that division etched permanently into its electoral politics.

Caught between Western governments that wanted liberalization, a Russian state focused on opaque economic deal-making and the populist demands of their constituents, Ukrainian political parties lost their ideological distinctions and resorted to regional and nationalist identities that allowed them the political space for these complex maneuvers.

Each party was really three parties in one: a liberal face for the West, a personally charismatic and identity-based face for the voters and an oligarchic core modeled off of Putin’s Russia. And while Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of the Orange Revolution protests, pioneered this model with her Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (now the Fatherland Party), nobody was better at it than Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

So despite Western handwringing and the very real irony of it all, Yanukovych’s reappearance on the scene didn’t represent a rejection of the changes the Orange Revolution brought to Ukrainian politics as much as their consummation. And despite the looming feeling that a political system predicated on playing Europe, Russia and the Ukrainian people off each other couldn’t possibly last forever, Chekalkin was right to perceive that the possibility of autocracy looked distressingly likely.

It took a series of missteps last year to upset this equilibrium, first on Europe’s part and then on Russia’s. European leaders assumed that Yanukovych’s repeated expressions of Ukraine’s desire for closer European integration were honest and unreserved, and they decided that they could safely add more conditions to a proposed EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

When Yanukovych announced the suspension of the Association Agreement talks in November, it was at first established opposition parties that called for protests in Kiev, especially the Fatherland Party (effectively led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, as Yanukovych had imprisoned Tymoshenko for the same sort of corruption he regularly engaged in) and UDAR, led by former boxer Vitaly Klitschko.

But then something different happened: The protest movement in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti square catapulted entirely new political forces to the fore. Citizen committees organized under the Maidan banner took over local and national government offices, and citizen militias carried out the functions of the police in its absence.

When Russia miscalculated, assuming that a customs agreement of their own, coupled with a Ukrainian government crackdown, would be enough to return Kiev to “normal” politics, Yanukovych was forced to accept defeat. This took the form of a peace agreement and a transition framework negotiated with the opposition parties and pressed for by both European and Russian diplomats.

This weekend the Maidan had the last laugh, as the transition agreement—already humiliating for Yanukovych—collapsed and the president was forced to flee Kiev for a safe haven in Crimea (by now the Moscow suburbs, if recent reports are correct). Parliament voted to release Tymoshenko from prison, and the vast presidential palace that had been Yanukovych’s personal fiefdom was opened to the public, revealing, among other things, a sizable personal zoo.

Any of the dozen things that have happened since last Saturday, or the dozen challenges that Ukraine now faces, would merit its own column—but I’ll merely mention a few.

Yatsenyuk is now prime minister, while Klitschko is a leading candidate in the presidential elections scheduled for May. If Klitschko wins (and Tymoshenko may also run), will their relationship be more productive than the famously ill-tempered partnership of Viktor Yushchenko as President and Tymoshenko as Prime Minister that doomed the Orange Revolution?

What will happen to Ukraine’s economy? The West will not provide as substantial of a financial assistance package as Russia offered in December, in part because of the anti-bailout and anti-foreign aid attitude that now prevails in Europe and the U.S., but also because much of the money would simply be funneled straight to Russia to pay natural gas debts. But if a pro-Western government takes power, it’s likely that Ukraine will lose significant amounts of Russian trade and subsidies. Will IMF loans and currency devaluation (ironically a tool that’s denied to struggling European countries) be enough to tide Ukraine over, and will the Association Agreement actually lead to enough European trade to put Ukraine’s economy on a permanently stronger footing? Might China become a more important economic and political partner instead?

What about Ukraine’s territorial integrity? An actual civil war or Russian military intervention looks unlikely. But will the Crimea—the semiautonomous, majority-Russophone Black Sea peninsula that hosts much of the Russian Navy—become a de facto independent Russian satellite like South Ossetia or Abkhazia?

And what about Ukraine’s political landscape? Will the radical new local politics the Maidan has built—in certain places distressingly right-wing, but everywhere impressively grassroots—survive the next decade of political maneuvering? If so, perhaps the Ukrainian people have indeed found the light switch for the post-Soviet tunnel.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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In Venezuela, Ideology and its Consequences https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/21/in-venezuela-ideology-and-its-consequences/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/21/in-venezuela-ideology-and-its-consequences/#comments Fri, 21 Feb 2014 10:10:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1082589 There is something starkly impressive in the Venezuelan government’s accomplishment, in the ideological construction of an alternate universe so thoroughly divorced from reality and yet so thoroughly integrated into the political fabric of the country. The Venezuelan economy is not on the brink of collapse because of covert “economic warfare” carried out by a shadowy […]

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There is something starkly impressive in the Venezuelan government’s accomplishment, in the ideological construction of an alternate universe so thoroughly divorced from reality and yet so thoroughly integrated into the political fabric of the country.

The Venezuelan economy is not on the brink of collapse because of covert “economic warfare” carried out by a shadowy “oligarchy,” as the government’s alternate universe would have it, but because of spectacular financial mismanagement, corruption and a stridently antagonistic approach to private industry and international trade.

The Venezuelan political opposition is not “ultrarightist,” and certainly not “fascist”—indeed, the scrupulously moderate former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles is the grandson of Holocaust survivors—and opposition leader Leopoldo López is not a CIA agent just because he attended an American graduate school.

Student anti-government protests that began several weeks ago and escalated on Feb. 12 are not “fascist violence,” and the few remaining independent media outlets that dare to cover them are neither “inciting hatred” nor “advocating a coup.”

But what Colombia’s NTN—the only television channel broadcasting the protests live, rewarded for its courage by being blocked from all Venezuelan televisions—and the thousands who have taken to social media with their stories and pictures are doing is telling the truth. And in a Venezuela with constant and debilitating shortages of everything from toilet paper to newsprint, the truth may be the scarcest commodity of all.

Current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro took over after the death last year of his mentor Hugo Chávez. Between them, the United Socialist Party has controlled the country for 15 years, slowly ratcheting up the state monopoly on goods and information. (Globovisión, the last independent TV station based in the country—whose existence gave many Venezuelans hope that the truth would not be smothered completely—was forced into submission a few months ago.)

Indeed, 15 years is long enough that opposition to Chávez and Maduro’s self-styled “Bolivarian” regime has undergone a full generational cycle—and veterans of the 2002 protest movement that came nearest to ousting Chávez say that the students now protesting in the streets of Caracas have yet to learn the lessons of that earlier attempt.

The criticisms leveled against the new generation of protesters by the older generation are often harsh and can easily sound bitter. “The one thing Chavismo can’t do without is an enemy” is point one of a list of “seven lessons today’s students are eventually going to figure out,” and “you are the perfect enemy: seriously, you tick all the boxes” is point two.

For the generation that learned from the failure of the 2002 protests that revolution should be pursued moderately, slowly and constitutionally—above all, through the successive presidential bids of Henrique Capriles, who lost last year’s election by only 1.5 percent—the very fact that the economic crisis on whose brink Venezuela has stood for years has now palpably arrived means that now is not the time for protests. The government is looking for scapegoats more urgently than ever and, had they not been forthcoming, might have been forced over the next few months to accept an even greater share of blame for the economic disaster.

But asking young people who share your indignation at Bolivarian dictatorship and your vision for a better Venezuela not to take to the streets and say so is still a little presumptuous, even if you justifiably believe that protesting now is counterproductive. Today’s students have known nothing but Chavista government and heard nothing of protest for nearly 12 years, but even though they are told that “now is not the time,” they refuse to wait for a third Capriles candidacy in 2018 that, they’re assured, will finally be the one that makes it.

With last Wednesday’s deaths of two student protesters (almost certainly at the hands of plainclothes government militia groups known as colectivos and followed by three more in recent days) and credible reports of indescribably brutal police torture of those who were merely arrested, the time has passed for second-guessing. The government still has a monopoly on the airwaves, the store shelves and the foreign exchange markets, but they have lost exclusive claim to the title of martyr.

I harbor few illusions that the present protests will bring about the collapse of the regime of media disinformation that blankets Venezuela with lies, let alone the government of Nicolas Maduro and his battle-hardened Bolivarian coalition.

But on Tuesday when Leopoldo López—the unflappable opposition leader and Capriles rival who has thrown in his lot with the students—stood up on a statue of Jose Martí, addressed the crowd and turned himself in to waiting National Guard troops, I knew his vision of a “free and democratic Venezuela” was within reach.

And it is worth remembering, as López said on Tuesday, that “the Venezuelan people are suffering long lines and shortages and young people have no jobs and no future” not by any fault of their own, and not only as a result of government incompetence, but“por un modelo equivocado” — because of a broken and misguided economic model “imported from abroad.” The global left may not be paying attention—but in Venezuela, its ideology has once again built a teetering monstrosity.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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European Modernity: Tragedy, then Farce https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/13/european-modernity-tragedy-then-farce/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/13/european-modernity-tragedy-then-farce/#respond Thu, 13 Feb 2014 09:01:12 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1082326 A prominent Stanford professor (whom I won’t name because he wasn’t speaking to be quoted) was only repeating the consensus among the political and economic elite when he told me after a talk on Monday that, simply because Europe was the first to modernize, modernization will always and everywhere involve Westernization. His point was that […]

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A prominent Stanford professor (whom I won’t name because he wasn’t speaking to be quoted) was only repeating the consensus among the political and economic elite when he told me after a talk on Monday that, simply because Europe was the first to modernize, modernization will always and everywhere involve Westernization.

His point was that China, if it is to become a modern superpower, has no other option than to follow what its leaders used to condemn as the “capitalist road.” More specifically, he said that China’s large and independent state-owned enterprises—whose profits largely support the remaining collective welfare infrastructure for workers, retirees and their families, rather than accruing to the state treasury—are in some objective sense “no longer acceptable”: They neither prop up the national budget nor enable rapid consumer-driven growth like more efficient private companies.

Never mind that many Western state enterprises aren’t especially profitable for their respective governments either, or that Germany, the absolute core of the European West, continues to defy foreign economists’ advice to shift its export-driven economy more towards domestic consumers. In the Western view, China is holding on to an un-Western economic institution and it must get rid of it to be deemed truly “modern.”

He was, of course, right. Modernity is Western. The institutions that comprise modernity, from the nation-state and parliamentary democracy to the stock exchange and corporations, began as Western innovations and were spread, first by overt colonialism and then by simple economic dominance, to “the uttermost ends of the earth.”

The West’s ongoing imposition of European modernity on the world does not really distinguish between pre-modern cultural and economic institutions, like family and clan-based social insurance, and alternative modernities like collective farms or the state-owned enterprises I mentioned: Both are swept away. Those of us who idealistically insist (though it really is a conservative impulse) that countries like China can and should forge independent paths which preserve their unique mixtures of traditional, Western and alternative institutions are up against that onslaught, and our victories are always at best both temporary and conditional.

But isn’t it unfair to blame Europe for the continued influence of the Western conception of modernity? Hasn’t the continent been, as it were, defanged through decolonization and demobilization, and hasn’t it even itself adopted institutional mixtures like social democracy?

There is indeed a new Europe. The founding of the European Union as the European Coal and Steel Community—designed to make another European World War a physical impossibility—replaced the modern concept of the nation-state with a new kind of supranational authority. The European Commission—the EU’s unelected executive branch—similarly replaced the modern institution of parliamentary democracy with a more complex technocratic ideal.

In justifying this new ideal, the whole system goes to great lengths, often in aggravating ways, to appear as non-ideological as possible: Every decision and regulation is couched in the language of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis (when the language makes sense at all: The EU itself released a 66-page document detailing the ways in which words used in EU documents do not mean the things they do in other contexts).

Of course, this claim of non-ideology is a façade: It can only be ideology that motivates the EU to (for example) take a strong, science-based position on climate change at the same time as a deeply unscientific policy stance against all GMOs.

This is the reality of Europe which Ukraine and Turkey—perennially almost-European—have wrestled with for years. Ukraine has been equally poorly served by the Russian-aligned President Viktor Yanukovych and his Europe-aligned but infighting predecessors President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—not to mention the series of corrupt governments which preceded them or the present opposition leaders, each of whom are less well liked than Yanukovych.

For Ukraine, then, Russia and Europe, who have both extended loan offers to help shore up the country’s budget, represent limited economic lifelines but not a solution to governance problems. The protesters in Ukraine’s Euromaidan movement want functioning institutions of Western modernity and more democratic and national sovereignty—not the loss of all three that EU membership ultimately promises.

At Europe’s other border—with the Arab world, rather than the Russian bloc—Turkey under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan believes that, while maintaining a largely pro-European foreign policy outlook and adopting at its own pace aspects of EU law and policy it considers helpful, the country can forge an independent development path: one that (among other things) allows for the successful integration of Islamist politics and democratic elections.

Most discourse on EU relations and accession, including that which concerns Turkey and Ukraine, focuses on the economic incentives surrounding the European free trade zone and shared currency, as well as the effects of specific policies like the free flow of immigrants. But the most fundamental right a country gives up when it joins the EU isn’t economic or even political sovereignty—it’s the right to experiment with differing conceptions of modernity and development, to define for itself what those words should really mean.

With that in mind, the European Union project is a necessary framework for Europe as it embarks on its long path of reconciliation with its many historical and social demons. It is not a new modernity to be exported with the same impunity as the last.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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Wanted: A Foreign Policy https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/06/wanted-a-foreign-policy/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/06/wanted-a-foreign-policy/#comments Thu, 06 Feb 2014 08:15:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1082114 A decade ago, as the initial campaign of “shock and awe” in Iraq drew to a close and Afghanistan prepared for its first post-invasion elections, President George W. Bush used a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy to lay out a radical new American foreign policy. He announced that “the United States has adopted…a […]

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A decade ago, as the initial campaign of “shock and awe” in Iraq drew to a close and Afghanistan prepared for its first post-invasion elections, President George W. Bush used a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy to lay out a radical new American foreign policy. He announced that “the United States has adopted…a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” and that “the advance of freedom…is the calling of our country.”

After the speech, support for what Bush called “the global wave of democracy” was now national policy, even in parts of the world where America had long supported dictators in the interests of Cold War strategic advantage or regional political stability. But after featuring in a few more years of speeches, this so-called “freedom agenda” faded from view, remaining in the American political consciousness only as a target of derision, as its most prominent manifestations – the “nation-building” projects in Afghanistan and Iraq – were condemned domestically and internationally as imperialist, misguided or simply as failures.

But we’ve never quite walked it back (though Bush himself stopped trumpeting it when the Palestinian election he held up as the best hope for peace ended up bringing Hamas to power in Gaza). Indeed, the freedom agenda is now taken for granted by most observers of American foreign policy, and it’s hard to imagine it any other way: Whenever and wherever a political dispute pits democracy against its opponents, the United States stands with the democrats.

George Bush’s world was close enough to the Cold War that he could import from it a prepackaged conception of freedom, that which once separated the “free world” from the Soviet bloc. It seemed reasonable at the time to enumerate those differences, as Bush did in his speech, and call it a day: limited state and military authority, independent judiciary and rule of law, religious freedom and freedom of press and assembly and – of course – a capitalist economy, all within a framework of electoral democracy.

But with Cold War blinders mostly lifted, it has become clear that the distinctions Bush drew weren’t subtle enough.

Instead, it’s obvious from events of the past three years that these incomplete conceptions of freedom and democracy simply don’t get us very far when it comes to choosing a side in all but the most clear-cut of political disputes.

So we vacillated for weeks in January and February 2011 over whether to call for Hosni Mubarak to step down. Mubarak himself was unlikely to run for president again (though his son probably would) and Egypt’s multiparty politics, if not fully open, were more than just a façade – but the protesters, after all, were chanting for democracy and calling for just the freedoms we wanted to promote.

We quickly accepted the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in the 2012 presidential elections, but were never quite sure what to make of the widespread view, now held by most Egyptians, that the freely and fairly elected President Morsi had betrayed democracy and deserved to be ousted a year later by the military, acting at the behest of nationwide street protests.

Thus we are left to plead the case of the small minority of Egyptians who oppose both the Muslim Brotherhood and the coup that ousted its president.

We stand tentatively with Ukrainian protesters, some of whom are extreme nationalists, even anti-Semites; if President Viktor Yanukovych were to change his mind and accept a Western rather than Russian bailout we would likely stand with him instead – after all, he, too, was democratically elected.

In Thailand we support the government of caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, rather than a pro-Western and pro-business protest movement (led by former Democrat Party politician Suthep Thaugsuban) that argues that PM Yingluck has betrayed democracy.

I strongly support all three of these stances. I think that in each case our country’s foreign policy apparatus has come to the right decision based on a deep understanding of political and historical context and an unarticulated but real sense of American values that follows through where Bush left off.

But it is absolutely vital that our government find a way to articulate that sense, because the right foreign policy will never be enough if its motivations are opaque. While the transparency of the original freedom agenda was overshadowed by a flawed and incomplete policy, it has still transformed the world: If all goes well, this spring may see the first peaceful and democratic transfers of power in both Afghanistan and Iraq. A foreign policy of values over interests is here to stay. We lack only a leadership that will stand up to articulate, clarify and defend it.

Contact James Bradbury at jbradbur@stanford.edu.

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