An Interesting Contrast
Joshua Foust on Mar 03 2008 at 2:03 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Media
Something has been bugging me a lot lately, but it’s been tough to put my fingers to it. I have been a faithful subscriber to Foreign Affairs for many years; since college I have deeply appreciated the insight and perspective those essays gave on the world. For much of that same span of time, I had somewhat discounted Foreign Policy as a flashier, showier, watered-down version of the same thing—a Time for those who don’t like 5,000 word essays.
That has changed in recent months, however. Perhaps it could be the slow, dawning realization that the elites in society don’t know about the world any more than we do; perhaps my thinking has taken on a much more critical stance; perhaps I just happen to be better at sifting through reams of extraneous data; but Foreign Affairs is boring. It reminds me of nothing so much as a bi-monthly review of the Davos crowd, offering decent thought that is entirely conventional and not very surprising. Vladimir Putin has been bad for Russia. Venezuela is not thriving under Chavez. Panic and demagoguery are not the appropriate answers to terrorism. And so on.
That isn’t to say anything they publish is wrong—certainly it might be so, but the quality of writing is high, and the scholarship is generally solid. It is just… expected. In contrast, Foreign Policy hasn’t been nearly as conventional. The most recent issues of each reveals how.
In Foreign Affairs one can find an essay on how ethnonationalism will remain the defining characteristic of international relations for many years to come. No argument from me—in fact, despite the lame attempt to connect this to Sam Huntington’s seminal (and very wrong) essay, “The Clash of Civilizations,” it is the best oblique critique of Huntington’s work I’ve read in a while.
It also matches up quite nicely with conventional wisdom. For years, ever since the Balkans imploded and Rwanda ran with Tutsi blood, we’ve been hearing about the wave of ethnic nationalism. In college, my professors would talk all the time about the challenge of ethnic separatism, and how they might not be winnable by either side, and so on. Indeed, a cursory glance at recent history shows that as the Cold War fades further and further into memory, ethnonationalism has erupted as the primary conflict driver in the world—the 20th century’s dissolution of Empires, and the Cold War’s bloc system, which served to quell most separatist ethnic nationalism, are no longer around to act as a check on these nativist movements.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this take, and I’m glad someone is making it. But there is so much more to that story than its mere presence. This is where Foreign Policy comes in. Instead of just remarking at ethnonationalism’s existence, Gustavo de las Casas takes it a step further and tries to argue that it is actually a good thing. While I would argue with the strength of the correlation he notes, the argument itself is deeply challenging, and compelling—the very sort of counterintuitive thinking I think is sorely missing from most discussions of international relations.
But FP takes it a step further. One essay by Eric Weiner notes that there is, in fact, no causation of democracy and happiness… if anything, he says, happiness causes democracy, not the other way around. Richard Cincotta makes a further argument about young people and democracies—having a big youth bulge doesn’t just make a society less stable, it makes it far less prone toward democratization. Examining youth as a barrier is not something one normally finds in these discussions—as a problem, yes, but not as a barrier. Both of these perspectives can further inform one’s take on ethnic and civic nationalism, including the slightly discomfiting conclusion that maybe a race-blind, civic nation-state is not a very good idea for most of the world.
Anyway, I think this contrast was made clear only because both magazines happened to discuss similar topics at the same time, and this made for a convenient comparison. I fully intend to continue my subscription to both—understanding the conventional thinkers is just as important as understanding the non-conventional ones—but I certainly know which one of these I will crave reading every other month.
Sphere: Related Content7 Responses to “An Interesting Contrast”
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Joshua, I’ve been through approximations of the same experience with several publications (The Economist, Reason Magazine, Wall Street Journal), and I finally decided that *part* of the problem is inside me. The longer I read these things, the more I know, therefore the harder it is to say something I have not been exposed to already.
That doesn’t mean the quality of the publications does not vary over time. I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint when the Economist and Reason dropped in quality, and I think there were reasons why. But I can’t say that about WSJ.
I remember getting a subscription to a photography magazine in the 1980s when I first got interested in photography. But after taking it for two years, I realized that they were just saying the same things over and over again. The first time I saw something it was fresh, but the next time it wasn’t. It’s possible you are running into the some of the same effect.
Of course, it’s also possible that those Davos-style commentators are just as shallow as you think they are.
Pretty perceptive Josh. I think you are right about yourself, and the publications, though Billy just made the case better than I can. Interesting essays by the way, and I think they all have merit.
“Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.” (from the intro to the FA article)
Makes me think of Susan Power and her idea that as we leave Iraq we give them enough warning to move out of diverse neighborhoods and into segregated ones.
I think it’s terrible. And I would think that it ought to be obvious that segregation does not lead to happy coexistence.
And I blame multi-culturalism.
Because it teaches, first and foremost, that we are members of groups and different, rather than individuals and essentially the same.
Umm, multiculturalism isn’t what exploded the former Yugoslavia, and it isn’t what made the old Soviet republics declare independence, and it isn’t what’s created deep sectarian divides in Iraq. And many cultures I would consider bastions of multiculturalism, like Confucian, or Buddhist cultures, do not teach or highlight the values of individuals.
I’m not saying there aren’t cultural reasons for nationalism, but I also think it’s a lot more primal than just an ordinary social construction.
Maybe not Joshua, but it doesn’t work very well in describing Iraq. First there is the obvious sectarian, rather than ethnic, character of the divisions in Iraq. People divide themselves all the time, but the variations tell us that the nature and character of those divisions are a social construction. Nor is the desire for separation political unless it is exploited by some as a rule. Most people react to such people, not to some primal need.
Thus al Qaeda motivates some, and specifically work to cause tensions which can be exploited by them, and vanguards of their opponents, thus divisions become writ in blood rather than mere shared cultural identity. Nothing new there, it has not only been used throughout history, but explicitly described as a strategy in this century by Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao and yes, Saddam and Bin Laden. Zawahiri also explicitly noted this as his strategy.
So yes, we must recognize this desire, but neither should we exaggerate its importance. Iraq itself has given us many reasons to suspect it isn’t the most important factor, both in the past and since the invasion.
Lance, that’s a good distinction. The point I was trying to make was that you can’t blame the mess there on multiculturalism. There are far deeper drivers of conflict.
Oh, I think that multi-culturalism is an American invention. It can’t be the cause of conflict elsewhere.
It does dictate our response.
But I still feel, in my gut, that separating people doesn’t solve problems.