Keep Rowing: Amitai Etzioni and History

Reflecting on the most recent stage of his career, the communitarian, Amitai Etzioni, gives three reasons for what he perceives as his loss of influence. First, the media prefers an argument between strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni is neither liberal nor conservative. Second, the media prefers specialized intellectuals, but Etzioni has refused to “stick to his knitting.” Third, Etzioni has taken an unpopular, dovish position on China. I argue that Etzioni is mistaken about the reasons for his and communitarianism’s rise and perceived fall and offer a more optimistic assessment than he does of the potential influence of his thought. I use this local problem of historical interpretation to question Etzioni’s global interpretation of modern history.     

The Chinese People's Liberation Army and Space Warfare

Space warfare will be an integrated part of battle planning by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in any future conflict with the United States. The People's Liberation Army has carefully absorbed and is reacting to what the American armed forces have published on space warfare and counter-space operations. Chinese strategists and legal scholars are engaged in an internal debate on how traditional ideas of sovereignty and the laws of war apply in space. One authoritative volume explored the importance of ensuring that the People's Liberation Army sets out legal justifications for military actions in advance of any conflict. Chinese scholars believe that many of the concepts surrounding the conduct of war on the “common seas” apply in space. Also, there is disagreement between the United States and China on the American position on outer space. The United States treats “peaceful uses” to mean “non-aggressive,” whereas the Chinese interpretation is that to be peaceful uses, it must be “non-military.”     

An analysis of the Latin Americanization of race in the United States: a reconnaissance of color stratification among Mexicans

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has painted with broad strokes a portrait of the future of racial relations in the United States in his paper entitled, “We are all Americans: Toward a New System of Racial Stratification in the U.S.A.” [Race and Society (forthcoming)]. In essence, he sees the United States moving from a two-tier, black-white racial system toward a three-tier racial system where persons will be categorized as “white”, “honorary white”, or “collective black”. Additionally, Bonilla-Silva believes that we are moving from a system in which race is commonly taken into account, toward a system of “color-blind” racism. In this article, we closely examine Bonilla-Silva’s ideas, and although we appreciate the broad scale of his work and its challenge to traditional race relations, we make adjustments to his work, particularly concerning the location of Latinos in the U.S. racial hierarchy, which lead both to a better understanding of the current and future racial situation in the United States, and toward policy recommendations which could ameliorate the bleak situation in which we find ourselves concerning life chances of people of color.     

A “third way” in welfare reform? Evidence from the United Kingdom

U.S. welfare reforms, whether promoting work first or human capital development, have had in common an emphasis on employment as the key to improving the life chances of children living in single‐mother families. We describe in this article a different type of reform—a “third way” in welfare reform. The welfare reforms carried out in the United Kingdom since the “New Labour” government of Tony Blair was elected in 1997 have included promotion of paid work, but alongside two other components—an explicit commitment to reduce and eventually eliminate child poverty, and a campaign against long‐term disadvantage under the label of tackling “social exclusion.” Welfare‐to‐work reforms promoting employment for single mothers have been active but not as punitive as in the United States. At the same time, the tax credit and cash benefit system has been radically overhauled, benefiting low‐income families with children, whether or not parents are working. Early indications suggest a more rapid fall in child poverty in the United Kingdom since its reforms began than in the United States since its reforms, and a faster rise in single‐mother employment. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Export Controls and United States Space Power

This article assesses the impact of export policy on 21st century United States space power. The efficacy of current export controls in preventing the proliferation of space technologies and maintaining United States advantage is evaluated. The study finds that space launch technology has been and remains highly globalized; the United States has lost significant international communications satellite market share, but it maintains a tangible lead in position, navigation, and timing systems; and the recent growth in foreign imaging systems, both radar and optical, have eroded any advantage the United States once enjoyed. Furthermore, export controls have not appreciably slowed the internationalization of space and breaking dependency on the United States is a common underlying theme. The paper goes on to highlight the unintended consequences stemming from current policy, including limiting access to advanced technology of foreign origin, limiting access to foreign-born expertise, and adding “fog” and “friction” to the execution of programs that include foreign content. This paper finds current export control policy is incongruent with 21st century space power programs and initiatives, such as Operationally Responsive Space, Coalition Space, and “Soft” Space Power. Export control reform is suggested herein on the basis of developing a trusted community of trading partners.     

Uncertainty,Shifting Power and Credible Signals in US-China Relations: Why the “Thucydides Trap” Is Real,but Limited

Journal of Chinese Political Science - Is conflict between a rising China and a declining United States inevitable? One of the main purported drivers of the “Thucydides Trap” is that...     

Religious Pluralism and Democratic Inclusion: The American Recipe for Peace

There is no simple formula for religious peace in the United States, such as “separation of church andstate.” Instead, the US Constitution establishes two opposing principles -- religious freedom and civicinclusion -- that must be continually rebalanced. The legal result is a “serpentine wall” between church andstate that creates zones of cooperation as well as separation. Moreover, the relatively peaceful coexistence ofdiverse religious communities within the United States is due, not simply to the principles of the FirstAmendment, but also to the de-spatialized and de-ritualized character of American religion, and to the absence of explicitly confessional parties in the American polity.     

The Communitarian Foreign Policy of Amitai Etzioni

Amitai Etzioni’s communitarian perspective offers a comprehensive approach to international affairs in addition to offering guidance for domestic policy. His argument that a focus on traditional “realist” concerns for a nation’s security and interests (“security first”), combined with a dialogue over competing moral imperatives, is more likely to lead to the emergence of an idealist end state--a sustainable international community. His emphasis on gradualism--of breaking apart complex policy goals into small, discrete steps--comes from his assessment that this is a better way of promoting lasting change in the international system. His perspective does not fit neatly into any of the dominant U.S. foreign policy approaches, but his ideas have formed part of the foreign policy debate for the last fifty years.     

Border Security Technologies: Local and Regional Implications

The Bush administration's “Smart Border” accords with Mexico and Canada present a number of important implications for North America's border communities and regions. As part of the plans, new security technologies have emerged as the preferred policy solution to the difficult problem of screening for weapons and terrorist incursions into the United States through its international boundaries while maintaining flows of goods and individuals, key drivers of globalization and hallmarks of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) era. These new technological systems have various capabilities, ranging from prescreening cargo to identifying problematic travelers to detecting nuclear material in trucks. Deploying these systems in border communities, however, invokes a range of important economic, social, and political challenges, all of which are under examination in this work. Using a risk‐centered approach to United States border security, this article explores several technologically oriented border control systems: screening, biometrics, and information technology. The research is based on regional field research and a public policy analysis method that uses Birkland's “focusing event” framework, a model that provides insights into the postcrisis policy formation process. The article concludes by offering an initial appraisal of these policies within the context of risk, interdependent border communities, and an open democratic society.     

The 2020 U.S. presidential election: A litmus test

This paper provides an overview of what lies ahead of the United States in the event that Donald John Trump either lost or won a reelection bid. The uncertainty of the election outcomes is what we refer to as a litmus test. In this paper, we reflect on the ongoing events shaping the United States ahead of the 2020 presidential election and their implications on the United States. We suggest that the election provide a litmus test in shaping the politics of the United States in answering numerous questions raised in the current Trump administration. We deduce that the election could give birth to the new form of Brexit in the form of “U.S. exit” in the event the United States ignores processes that foster institutional legitimacy and civic engagement to build lost “trust” in the Americanized system.     

“Freedom of Choice”: Israeli Efforts to Prevent Soviet Jewish Émigrés to Resettle in the United States

Beginning in 1967 the Soviet Union allowed some Jewish citizens to leave for family reunification in Israel (see Appendix ). Due to the break in diplomatic relations between Israel and the U.S.S.R., most émigrés traveled to Vienna where they were then flown to Israel. After 1976 the majority of émigrés who left on visas for Israel “dropped out” in Vienna and chose to resettle in the West. Several American Jewish organizations facilitated their obtaining visas and being resettled in the United States and other countries. This article examines efforts by Israel to deny Soviet Jewish émigrés the option of resettling in the United States. Israeli officials pressured American Jewish organizations to desist from aiding Russian Jews who wanted to resettle in the United States. Initially American Jews resisted Israeli efforts. Following Gorbachev's decision in the late 1980s to allow free emigration for Soviet Jews, the American Jewish community agreed to a quota on Soviet Jewish refugees in the United States, which resulted in most Soviet Jewish émigrés to Israel. The article uses the case study to explore efforts by American Jews and Israel to influence American refugee policy in the 1970s and 1980s. It provides insights into ethnic politics as well as “sponsored politics,” whereby Israel used the American Jewish community to further its interests in the making of United States foreign policy. It also deals with the issue of human rights and migration. While no migrant has the right to go to a country of his or her choice, Israel did deny some émigrés the right to exercise freedom of movement to other countries who welcomed them as refugees.     

Dark necessities? Candidates’ aversive personality traits and negative campaigning in the 2018 American Midterms

Are candidates with “dark” personality profiles more likely to go negative? We triangulate data for the 2018 Senate Midterms in the United States from two independent sources (the automated coding of social media posts and an expert survey) and test the extent to which the candidates’ “dark” personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) are associated with their negativity and incivility. By and large, we find that this is the case, especially when combining the separate traits into broader indicators of “dark” personality (“dark core” and underlying personality dimensions). These results resist robustness checks via models run with alternative specifications, such as using measures of personality (and campaign) that are adjusted to filter out the ideological profile of experts, additional covariates, more restrictive modelling, and alternative measurement of key dependent variables.     

Congressional committees and the political economy of federal outlays

The literature on the organization of the United States Congress has been dominated by “distributive” and “informational” theory. One important source of disagreement between these two theories is their characterization of whether individual legislators can engage in pork-barrel activities. Here we provide evidence which indicates that the pork-barrel is alive and well in the contemporary United States Congress. We focus on whether members of power and constituency committees can direct disproportionate federal expenditures to their districts. Finding strong and systematic evidence of pork-barrel activities by committee members provides empirical support for distributive theories of legislative organization.     

Varying Costs to Change? Institutional Change in the Public Sector

Many scholars have argued that social programs are marked by a logic of “increasing returns” that makes change difficult. Yet over the past decades, reformers across industrialized countries have introduced substantial administrative reforms in these services, even as entitlement reform remains politically difficult. This paper explains these shifts by breaking apart the logic of “increasing returns” into three distinct “costs to change”: technical, political, and expectations. Decreases in a particular type of costs produce different logics of institutional change—back end, informal, and front end—that privilege the state, professionals or private, or political actors in distinct ways. I support these claims by reexamining three cases that were considered exemplars of stability but that ultimately had major entitlement reform: health care in the United Kingdom and United States and welfare programs in the United States. I show that even before radical reforms occurred, reformers introduced distinct logics of administrative change that underpinned later changes.     

Myth-Free Space Advocacy Part II: The Myth of the Space Frontier

Space advocates commonly compare the settling of the “space frontier” to the settling of the “western frontier” in the United States, arguing that space settlement will realize the same benefits purportedly realized by the western expansion of the United States: the generation of new cultures; the development of new technologies; and the empowerment of democratic governance. However, much of the reasoning here is based on a faulty understanding of history and on an overly optimistic view of what it will be like to live in a space settlement. Thus, I argue that ardent faith in the promises of settling the space frontier is a mythological belief, rather than a well-confirmed one.     

Viewpoint: International Traffic in Arms Regulations—Controversy and Reform

The International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR) have, for decades, played a crucial role in shaping the movement of sensitive technology from the United States to the world. Originally intended to ensure military dominance, the ITAR regime is seen by some as stifling the competitiveness of American industry. A list known as the United States Munitions List (USML) contains the items subject to the ITAR export controls. This list includes clearly dangerous military technology such as missile navigation systems and fighter jet avionics but also includes seemingly benign items, such as coolant hoses or tape recorders for spacecraft. Among the items considered controversial are a number related to the space industry. An incident in the early 1990s began a jurisdictional tug of war. The United States strengthened its grip on the export of space technology. In the last two decades, some have observed a decline in the competitiveness of American industry. The content of the USML should be reviewed based not on the historical “catchall” approach, but rather based on a “military intent-based” or “military capability-based” approach. This will improve the competitiveness of the U.S. space industry without sacrificing national security.     

Subterranean successes: Durable regulation and regulatory endowments

Scholars sometimes criticize durable regulatory systems for being costly, inefficient, ineffective, and inequitable. This article reassesses regulation, arguing that a mis-categorization of types of regulatory activity has led critics astray. More specifically, the article observes that regulation “hardened” by being built into infrastructure often ceases to be seen as regulation and its benefits are therefore inappropriately omitted from assessments of regulatory accomplishments. Hardening into one or another durable form can create two important benefits: durable regulation moves some items off the agenda of regulators, conserving resources for other regulatory work; durable regulation also creates regulatory endowments, preserving key bargains struck at the time infrastructure was created and reducing future opportunities for capture. Such endowments can then become the foundation for other regulatory work. Examples from the regulation of drinking water in the United States and brief discussions of road safety and disability regulation illustrate the argument.     

Reinventing Pluralism: Consensus,Hegemony, and the Politics of Affirmation

As inequalities in the United States have intensified in recent decades, Washington, DC’s advocacy system has thrived. Why has this proliferation of interest groups failed to deliver more substantive equality? The dominant response to this question typically cites the advocacy realm’s “upper-class accent,” portraying interest group representation as imbalanced and unresponsive to a broad range of voices. Yet this prevailing account—which I term “post- pluralist”—does not sufficiently explore the inegalitarian ways that neoliberalism shapes contemporary political advocacy. To this end, this article builds upon post-pluralist and post-Marxist insights to outline the advocacy system’s “politics of affirmation.” Using recent antigay legislation to explore this concept, I argue that today’s political advocacy circumscribes, rather than enlivens, prevailing standards of democratic participation by mobilizing hegemonic, neoliberal expressions of democratic citizenship. The article concludes by outlining how groups might pursue a transformative politics in order to destabilize neoliberalism’s hegemony.     

Recovering from statelessness: Resettled Bhutanese-Nepali and Karen refugees reflect on the lack of legal nationality

The very notion of international human rights relies on state governments to serve as the legal “duty bearers” for protecting rights, yet governments are often responsible for creating the conditions that necessitate mass displacement. For some refugees, the lack of legal nationality creates an added dimension of vulnerability that exacerbates suffering. In order to illustrate the human rights challenges inherent to statelessness, this article focuses on the lived experiences of 30 formerly stateless refugees who have been resettled to the United States. Qualitative research interviews with 15 Bhutanese-Nepalis and 15 members of the Karen ethnic minority (from Burma and Thailand), all currently resettled in the United States, provide insights into the everyday realities of stateless individuals. In both cases, statelessness represented a human rights violation in itself as well as a contributing factor for further abuses related to recognition and membership, denied education, and serious impediments to employment and livelihoods.     

The evolution of norms: American policy toward revolution in Iran and Egypt

Is there a growing norm against violence towards civilians that constrains how the United States deals with its client states? This article examines two similar cases that suggest there is. In Iran in 1978 and in Egypt in 2011, the United States faced a possible revolution by a democratic/Islamist opposition, yet American policy makers gave their major regional ally opposite advice. In 1978, the White House urged the Shah to crack down on the opposition, and, in 2011, it pressed the Mubarak regime, as well as other regimes, to refrain from violence. This indicates that in situations where the American government is culpable for a potential bloodbath, policy makers are loath to take on that responsibility, which significantly shapes their policy toward revolution in a way that it did not when President Carter called the commitment to human rights “absolute.”