The global importance of ‘illiberal moderates’, an exchange: partners in peace to precede a concert of democracies

The following is an exchange concerning the concept of ‘illiberal moderates’ and its implications for a new global architecture as well as for a worldview that sees the evolution of a global core of shared values which favour domestic and international security, in sharp contrast to the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. The original statement was published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs (Etzioni 2006). A more extensive treatment can be found in Part III of Security first: for a muscular, moral foreign policy (Etzioni 2007b), which examines texts of four religious and two secular belief systems as well as review of relevant public opinion polls and ‘traveller notes’. Here follows a brief summary of the main thesis, followed by comments from prominent scholars and Etzioni's response to these comments.     

Measuring Street Cleanliness: A Comparison of New York City's Scorecard and Results from a Citizen Survey

Public administrators at the local level often rely on citizen surveys to measure the outcomes or accomplishments of their service delivery efforts. However, many remain skeptical about the value of survey-based measures of local government performance, in large part because of the low empirical correlation between objective and subjective performance measures reported in the literature. Using data from New York City's street cleanliness scorecard, a well-established outcome measure, combined with responses from more than 4,000 respondents to a citizen survey, the authors find a clear and consistent correlation between the scorecard and citizen ratings of street cleanliness in their neighborhoods. Moreover, the street cleanliness scorecard is a much stronger predictor of citizen ratings than demographic factors, trust in government, or contextual effects. These results demonstrate that citizen judgments about government performance can correspond closely with more objectively measured outcomes—and that citizen surveys can provide valid and useful performance measures, at least for some local government services.     

Military Power and Food Security: A Cross-National Analysis of Less-Developed Countries, 1970–1990

Addressing the long-standing debate over the social impact of military power and recent discussions of military-induced famine, we conduct a panel analysis of aggregate food supply and child hunger rates in 75–79 less-developed countries (LDCs). Distinguishing between militarization , as the growth of military resources, and militarism , as the use of military force to handle political conflicts, we show that militarization is both beneficial and detrimental to food security, whereas militarism is consistently detrimental. Arms imports and associated increased military spending plus praetorianism and military repression reduce food security, whereas increased military participation and arms production boost food security. Increased food supply reduces child hunger and is largely confined to the more developed of the LDCs. These military power effects show net economic growth, which "trickles down" to improve food supply and reduce child hunger among the more developed LDCs, reflecting the growth of global economic inequality. Contrary to views that see militarization as a single unified process, use of armed force is not strongly rooted in either praetorianism or militarization.     

Saving the league: V.K. Wellington Koo, the league of nations and Sino-Japanese conflict, 1931-39

In 1919, VK. Wellington Koo, the most famous Chinese diplomat of the early twentieth century, participated in the creation of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference. Little over a decade later, as Japanese forces expanded into Manchuria and North China, Koo struggled to save the League he had helped found. He argued that inability or refusal to brand Japan as an aggressor would sound the League's death knell. In vain, Koo tried to convince European statesmen that the Far Eastern Crisis was a litmus test of the League's viability as a collective security organization. From 1936 on, League inaction in the face of Japanese, German and Italian expansion left Koo thoroughly disillusioned. The lessons of the League were not forgotten during World War II, when Koo argued that a more effective collective security organization, in the form of the United Nations, be created on a basis similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Policemen concept.     

Postmemory and Possession

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - This paper examines the phenomena of ‘postmemory’ as a mode of possession that...     

A ‘society … divisible into the blessed and the unblessed’: Michael Young and Meritocracy in Postwar Britain

‘Meritocracy’ continues to unfold as both core conceptual framework and political ideal of the language of social mobility. In recent decades, politicians of various hues have declared it a sine qua non of the so-called ‘classless society’. The longer trajectory of postwar discourses of equality reveal a more chequered conceptual past. Its origins in the forums of revisionist social democracy of the 1950s, and subsequently popularised in the writings of social democratic polymath, Michael Young, are much more circumspect. The article considers pivotal contributions and developments of this conceptual history and trajectory. It considers the origins and emergence of meritocracy as a dimension of discourses of equality in the 1950s, and the formative contribution of Michael Young, reaction and responses on the left to his 1958 seminal work, The Rise of the Meritocracy, and the subsequent ‘meritocratic turn’. In spite of its satirical origins and warnings of dire social consequences, meritocracy presently enjoys a confirmatory position as a concept of opportunity and social mobility, as an embedded ideal of social organisation and means of allocating differential rewards.     

How the West was Won: A Deconstruction of Politicised Colonial Engineering

History has taught us that the Global North's attempts to ‘civilise' the rest of the world's population, both now and in colonial times, have been fraught with difficulty. This paper argues that this difficulty is mainly owing to the political standpoint and positioning of our perceived engineering and technical superiority. A failure to recognise this viewpoint and to change the way in which we work together—in a global sense—to solve issues such as climate change, threatens our ability to survive as a species. Political standpoints on such issues still assume a superiority of governments in the Global North. This paper retraces colonial engineering projects, mainly directed from the UK, that failed to consider the development of other populations in the world, and their needs. It is also posited that our exploitation in the Global North, which assumes historical superiority as a basic premise, will fail in tackling major issues. Change is needed through a decolonisation of engineering projects, and western engineering curricula that are used to train future professionals. Evidence of the impact of decolonisation on the engineering discipline itself is scarce, but nevertheless, a response is needed to ensure that a more inclusive curriculum and narrative is developed.     

Reforming China's Stock Market: Institutional Change Chinese Style

In this article we examine the dual-track pricing system in China's stock market since its inauguration, a legacy of its economic transition and a major source of institutional predation in the market. We then examine the share structure reform initiated in 2005 that sought to eliminate the distortion this predation had elicited. We interpret the reform push as a process of institutional change and focus on the drivers and theoretical explanations of such changes in China's stock market. We thus advance a model for understanding institutional change, Chinese style. We argue that, initially, the institutional arrangement was constructed by the dynamics of transition – the juxtaposition of the Leninist state and the emerging stock market. This provided huge incentives for state corruption in the emerging market. As the market transition proceeded, the societal and political costs of corruption and market distortion also grew, which produced a crisis that eventually attracted the attention of powerful leaders of the party state. We argue from this case that the broader political context in which specific examples of institutional change occur needs to be examined. Specifically, we argue that powerful agents who are external to given institutional environments can play an important role in institutional change, thus highlighting the political dynamics of an authoritarian state amid systemic transition and global integration.