Open Migration: Burma

Here's a good piece on Burma in the New Yorker by George Packer. Burma's military junta, although it resembles North Korea's government minus the personality cult, is far more inept that North Korea. For one thing, it allows or even encourages some of its citizens to leave the country. As Packer writes, "The endgame seems to be a regime virtually without citizens."

So, Burma could be a good test case for my theory of open migration. What will actually happen to a regime that mistreats its citizens once they have all left? Will it become a no-mans land, populated only by the few remaining generals smoking cigars in their villas overlooking the deserted city streets? What would the costs of this sort of outcome be? There is value, for instance, in the history and resources of the land. Is it appropriate to forfeit these in order to "starve" a corrupt regime of its citizens? Also, will the regime be able to support itself even as it loses its potential workforce? North Korea, which prevents its citizens from emigrating, in effect holds them hostage, forcing South Korea and the US to send aid. This aid, even when in the form of food, is essentially just money in Kim Jong Il's bank. But, even if all of North Korea's citizens left and the aid stopped flowing, the regime would last for quite a while, I'd assume, by selling off natural resources, counterfeiting money or selling nuclear secrets. Will Burma's regime be able to similarly sustain itself? Will China continue to support it? We shall most likely see, since it is unlikely, unfortunately, that the regime will collapse without first losing all of its citizens.

A little chill in the air?

It's not yet September, but it's already feeling icy in East Asia. Check out this article about the anti-Korean sentiment on display in Beijing during the Olympics. As the article points out, it is too soon to tell whether or how this will affect relations between the two countries. But, I think it is worth noting how far from cosy bedfellows China and Korea remain a mere 16 years since resuming diplomatic relations.

Major commentators, from old Sam Huntington to Robert Kaplan, routinely lump Korea in with China, citing their proximity and their shared Confucian heritage. Often, they caution the US against letting South Korea fall into China's clutches, or in fact assume that this has already happened. But the US has a far sturdier position in South Korea than they credit. The US is the best ally Koreans have ever seen, bar none. Not more than a vassal to China for many eons, and an exploited colony of Japan's for half the 20th century, Korea has not had a lot of positive relationships with foreign powers. Though not perfect, the US has been a pretty stead-fast partner for the past 50 years. And China doesn't seem overly anxious to cut in.

Koreans, for their part, have fifty negative prejudices toward the Chinese for every one they have toward Americans. The Chinese are dirty, greedy, disorganized, lazy, manufacturers of inferior products and producers of toxic, heavy-metal-laden yellow dust. Americans are merely imperialistic and occasionally boorish. In sum, whatever negative sentiment the Chinese harbor towards the Koreans is more than mutual.

But, like it or not, the relationship between the US and South Korea has been cooling of late as well. Certainly there is anti-American sentiment in Korea, and the US has been seeking for sometime to reduce our military commitment to the country. The pending FTA has, if anything, exacerbated this chill, by stirring up issues--like Korea's absurd position on US beef, on the one hand, and US arrogance, on the other--that might be better to have left dormant. I have mentioned that Koreans would be right to have doubts about this FTA, and there may be good reason to have doubts about all such bilateral trade agreements, but it seems to me that South Korea had better hang onto the US as an ally or else risk being left out in the geopolitical cold. Korea, for all its industry, is a very small country that needs some friends if it's going to thrive. There is a good chance that Korea is never going to find good allies in East Asia. In a sense, the depth of this history here prevents, rather than facilitates, effective partnerships. The US might continue to be the best friend Korea's going to be able to find for a long, long time.

Dworkin on Boumediene (plus a few of my own ideas)

Here is an excellent summary of the background, outcome and effects of the Boumediene v. Bush SCOTUS decision, which I wrote about earlier. There is one point that I disagree with Dworkin on, however: I think that Justice Kennedy's wording is not sufficiently broad as to extend the writ to prisoners held in Afghanistan or Iraq. Kennedy makes a point of saying that Guantanamo has been in US possession for 100 years, unlike these locals. This was a big problem I had with the ruling, as I mentioned before. I hope Dworkin is right and not me, but anyway I imagine that this point will be challenged in many future cases.

I want to clarify, in passing, something I said on this topic in my earlier post. Many people (for instance, Amnesty International) argue that the Bush Administration has violated the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of war-on-terror prisoners. I think that a case can be made for this. Of course, in practice there is no court in which such a case could be presented....

But, in my previous post I was willing to concede the possibility that unlawful enemy combatants fall outside of the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, I believe there is a strong ethical imperative not to torture or in any way violate the human rights of the prisoners. Bush should have had no reason to seek to avoid the guidelines of Geneva! Prisoners--that is to say, people--should always be treated with at least that level of respect.

Pundits and politicians (for instance, as Dworkin notes, McCain) often support Bush's evasion of Geneva on the grounds that we must hold on to terrorist suspects or else they will attack us again. But this is a bunk justification for abandoning Geneva. The current "war on terror" is not different from previous wars in this respect. It would be dangerous to release any enemy soldier before the war is over, and I agree that this war, or whatever it is, against al-Qaeda is not over. I would not be outraged if prisoners were held--even for the six years that some of them have been--as long as they were granted human rights (i.e., POW treatment) during that time, and as long as they could have the chance to confront the evidence brought against them in an open military setting. (Geneva grants prisoners charged with war crimes an appearance in a military court but not a civilian one.)

I think that there is one and only one reason why Bush tried to avoid Geneva: torture. It was assumed that torture would be needed in order to mine information from captured combatants/terrorists. But, again this not any different from any other war. It would have been useful, during the World Wars, to torture Germans to get information about their troop movements, but we didn't. We also did not systematically torture Japanese or Vietnamese, when we at war with them, even though they did not necessarily uphold our notion of jus in bello. (I'm sure that more torture went on than is officially acknowledged, but at least it was not official policy!) Why should it suddenly be ok to torture militiamen in order to find out the placement of roadside bombs? I don't want American soldiers to be killed, but this is not simply a cost/benefit analysis, where we trade the pain and degradation of the prisoners for the lives of our soldiers. This is a matter of justice.

And so, in conclusion, I'm going to segue into the issue of global justice. I think that, although most people claim to understand and agree about human rights, we have not actually worked out firm theories about the scope and force of justice on the global scale. What duties do we owe to people who are not citizens of our own country? What is the relationship between a group like al-Qaeda and the US, and what standards should each side adhere to? What happens if one side does not adhere to these standards? These are not questions about how to apply the Geneva Conventions or international law, but about what the basis for international law is or should be. The scope of these inquiries, moreover, should be global now rather than international, because we need to try to understand how people and states should interact with non-state actors as well as nations. Headway on these questions is the goal I've set for myself as I start grad school this fall. Stay tuned.

Phelps and Obama

Michael Phelps and Barack Obama represent a new, different kind of American ethos than, to take two people at random, Mark Spitz and Bill Clinton. Phelps and Obama are standard bearers of the post-baby-boomer nation, one that is no longer so ridiculously self-absorbed or patronizingly anti-establishment. I'm generalizing here, but bear with me. Contrast Michael Spitz, who, "sounding brash and cocky," predicted he would win six golds in Mexico City in 1968, with Michael Phelps, who consistently refused to talk about his eight-golds attempt. (Spitz won four that year.) Then, after winning seven in 1972, Spitz, aged 22, gave up swimming, signed with William Morris Agency, and set out on a Hollywood career. He did sports cometary and got a bit part in a show called "Emergency!" before fizzling out due to lack of talent. (Check out his IMDB page.) And then there's the mustache. According to this blog, Spitz grew the mustache "as a form of rebellion against the clean-cut look imposed on him in college" and then kept it because it psyched out the competition. To top it off, the Daily News ran this story just yesterday that quotes Spitz as saying that, if they raced in their respective primes, he would tie Phelps. I mean, come on. I've got nothing against Spitz, but he is very 1970s, very self-entitled, very, in a word, baby-boomer.

Phelps, as there is no need to report, displays a different persona. Just check out the difference in facial expressions in their pictures below. Sincere, hard-working, within-the-system, self-effacing even if self-confident, Phelps represents what is expected, what is valued, in 2008. I think that Spitz, if he were competing today, would not capture people's attention the way Phelps does. And Phelps, no doubt, would have come off as square in 1972.









The differences between Clinton and Obama are similar and just as striking. Clinton came on the scene 20 years after Spitz won his seven, but politics is always a little behind sport and pop culture. Clinton, only four years older, was clearly brought up in the same milieu as Spitz. And he displays many of his same attributes: a cocky, stick-it-to-the-system sense of entitlement along with a willingness to sell out to that same system at the earliest convenience. Obama, on the other hand, displays the same sincerity as Phelps, the same confident greatness without arrogance, the same aura of earnest effort. You get the leaders--and, I suppose, sports stars--you deserve, so perhaps we are collectively doing something right these days. Now we just have to win that election. Maybe we can get Phelps to campaign for Barack...