WELL:

The Winston Churchill correction for autocorrelation in time-series data:

Drink a bottle of scotch. You will no longer care about autocorrelation in your data.

LINK: Brendan appropriately takes down an e-mail from Andrew Sullivan's website. When I saw it, I thought "median voter theorem," but that's probably because I'm not an Americanist and so don't really have as sophisticated a take on that sort of thing.

Also, in an unrelated note that won't make any sense unless you were there, his description of last week's GSC as "the Great Tof Filibuster of '05" was pretty hilarious.

LINK: Go read Joe Carter on Andrew Sullivan and his 'conservatism'

LINK: I found this to be pretty amusing:

"To simply be in Texas and be eating BBQ is to enter what the Sautrantikas school of Buddhism considers nirvana: the ability to transcend the lower states of knowledge -- unhappiness, satisfaction, indigestion –- but without their complete disappearance. In other words, being blessed by our Creator with the ability to consume a plate of BBQ while sojourning in the Promised Land of Texas isn’t exactly heaven (after all, the celestial sphere won’t reach 104 degrees in August) but it's as close as we can get in this earthly existence."

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

"...we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall readily become a part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life."

-V.I. Lenin, "Better Fewer, But Better"

LINK: Norm has a long-ish post up on why people tend to automatically link up GWB (or America currently) to Nazi Germany when searching for analogies. The obvious, easy answer is the dull thrill of satisfaction one gets from presumably thumping one's opponents.

Norm says:

"It is true that, when the limits come down, it can happen fast. We know this not only from Hitler's Europe but from many other experiences before and since. In no time at all, many - not all - can become torturers and killers. Others who don't become torturers and killers turn away or look on indifferently. There are always bystanders, supportive, unconcerned, or merely frightened, to the evils that are perpetrated."

Which also leads me to suspect there may be something resembling an uninterest in looking beyond the prima facie 'responsible' parties. One notable feature these outlooks tend to incorporate is the idea of a state being a unitary actor (or, in slightly more nuanced form, the social group as proximate cause of individual behavior). In either event, the analysis tends to bear the imprint of being political, rather than philosophical, and it's this, I suspect, that makes the particular 'Hitler, but also Bush' approach so attractive: it bears some immediate attractiveness, but to disprove it (to take Norm's approach, outlined above), requires a lot of work. Not, of course, that only the anti-war group makes these sorts of distinctions (pro-war types can assume that the complicated further down bits will go their way, too), but those just happen to be the way the winds are blowing at the moment.

FROM IM:

Me: shorter Fearon: I can explain everything that Huth can explain, except more parsimoniously
Me: of course, that's probably the shorter version of every IR article

IT'S FUNNIER IF YOU KNOW HIM:

"Stefan... he's a different animal."
-Ali

ACTUALLY, IT WAS 'CORRUPTING THE YOUTH' AND 'INTRODUCING NEW GODS,' BUT WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT THE TEXT MIGHT ACTUALLY SAY?

The Nation:

"At the birth of Western culture, a teacher called Socrates was executed for filling "young people's heads with the wrong ideas.""

THREE THOUGHTS: On Yglesias on institutions:

1. It seems awfully odd to discount what is essentially the only case which would prove that your theory, and only your theory, is correct. What Yglesias seems to leave is a mishmash of possible explanations for what's actually doing the work when an institution does what it does.

2. I don't think it's a point of realism that actors never change their preferences, so that certainly can't be taken as evidence that institutions have an effect.

3. There's still a bit of cognitive dissonance here: it's not clear that what's doing the constraining in any given liberal institutionalist test case is the institution, and not the combined might of whatever states are pushing the institution to demand a certain behavior from another state. You'd have to get some case where the bureaucratic apparatus of an institution makes a demand of a state where all other states are against it or neutral, if one wished to have an explanation of institutional efficacy which couldn't be reduced to the power of particular states.

WHICH THEN LEADS TO THE QUESTION: Of what exactly one should do given these options. One might like to accept the liberal notion that states act for reasons other than of power (though provide a stronger basis for it than norms); one might think that the realist account of international politics being driven by something like the will-to-power is mostly descriptively correct, but normatively lacking (and, importantly, descriptively wrong, though rarely, often enough to warrant some re-explanation of how states choose the policies they choose). But all of this, it seems to me, hinges on the question of what, if anything, it means for a state to be 'morally obligated' to do something: when one makes a statement of the form 'state x ought (normatively) to do y,' does one think of the state as some people who are in the state, the state as a unitary actor, or the state as an aggregation of the people in it (and are the last two a distinction without a difference)? Is there a difference (meaningfully) between 'Syria ought to get out of Lebanon' and 'The US ought to promote democracy around the world?'

THE REALIST RESPONSE: Not that the below should give you the impression that this warms my heart any more. Justin makes a good point here:

"But I am not under any illusion that any "rule-based framework" will ever constrain a state from pursuing its interests based on one calculation: power and self-aggrandizement.  Now, it may be the case that a layer of institution makes a state act (or, more often, talk) differently in pursuing those goals.  But the UN will do precisely nothing to prevent the U.S. from bombing Iran if it wants to, China from attacking Taiwan if it wants to, or Sudan from murdering its citizens if it wants to."

That is, all of Matt's examples are of states doing things their national interest would've dictated them wanting to do anyway. If he wants to prove his point, he should find a case where a state doesn't do something that's clearly in its interests because of an institution. I'll not hold my breath on that one.

But then we get to the problem:

" I think the Gulf War was a mistake, because I think it was based on a faulty calculation that a shakeup of who controlled Kuwait's oil would cause unacceptably high economic costs to the United States."

Realists, it seems to me, countenance states doing whatever ends up being in their interests to do, unconstrained by even something as shaky as norms. So if you have any inclination that there might need to be a place for moral judgments to enter into (and effect) state action, this theory doesn't have room for it.

LINKS: I've been vaguely following Matt Yglesias'a attempts to bring back Norman Angell and Idealism (in the international relations sense) into political discourse, which strikes me for the most part as strictly dog-returning-to-its-vomit-type stuff (for the liberal who finds pacifism appealing and yet just a touch too unsophisticated). In that vein, I mostly ignored this post the first time I read it, being mired as it is in the typically faulty assumptions of the Liberal Institutionalist. Then I read the 'realist' reply to Yglesias, and I was, in a word, horrified. Both sides in this debate seem eager to perpetuate the stereotypes about themselves, and I found myself wondering: are these really my options?

First Matt:

"My big meta-point on the UN is that we should desire a world in which the UN can efficaciously handle global security issues, and, as we manage global security in the interim, one eye should be kept on the ball of bringing that about and not doing things that make that harder to accomplish. The EU and NATO are examples of, to my way of thinking, highly efficacious international institutions that can be discussed in terms of why we should desire the creation of a more efficacious UN."

thus:

"Justin raises the expected realist objection to the view that NATO and the EU are responsible for the long post-1945 peace among the western powers. Rather, he says, we should credit the threat posed by the USSR and the post-1945 bipolar power dynamic. I don't think that's wrong, as such. It's worth noting, however, that the Cold War ended some time ago. When then happened many prominent realist scholars followed John Mearsheimer in predicting that with the Soviet threat lifted and bipolarity gone, the process of European integration would fall apart and the main European powers would return to armed competitiion"

But this is, of course, wrong. Mearsheimer predicted that the end to the Cold War plus U.S. military withdrawl from Europe would lead to armed competition. But the latter condition was not satisfied (perhaps because it was in the security interests of the US not to let the further-down-the-road possibility of European war have even a chance of happening, perhaps because the realist-friendly relationships between the US military and European nations were still in the collective interests of both sides). One can criticize Mearsheimer for incorrectly predicting history, but the fact that we didn't go down that portion of the game tree doesn't mean his hypothetical is incorrect.

But further:

"NATO provision of absolute security guarantees altered, over the decades, the whole orientation of western security establishments and defense industries to create a situation where nobody thinks of capacity-building in arms-race or power-competition terms. At the same time, the EEC (the EU's precursor) created a kind of hyperinterdependence which has made the costs of defection from the institutions that built up around the long peace extraordinarily high. The evolution of the EEC into the EU has created institutional mechanisms for disagreements among European countries to be resolved purely through diplomacy, and treaty-revision process has created a precedent for handling things that can't be handled through the existing formal mechanisms of the EU."

Which is a pretty typical line of argument from liberal institutionalists, except that this seems to explicitly lead us to ask whether it's the institutions doing the work or the state interests. Certainly, state regimes make security arrangements (like NATO) for obvious realist reasons, and economic arrangements may be similarly based. But consider the implications of a buried bit of Matt's argument:

"At the same time, the EEC (the EU's precursor) created a kind of hyperinterdependence which has made the costs of defection from the institutions that built up around the long peace extraordinarily high."

The argument, then, is that states will choose to join the EU not because of the inherent desirability of joining, or out of some sense of higher moral duty, but because a state does marginally worse by not joining than it does by joining; states will stay in because to leave will impose higher costs than any arrangement in the EU, no matter how undesirable, leading us thus to the somewhat worrisome conclusion:

"A better way of putting my point is that the creation of these institutions worked, at first, to facilitate a policy of cooperation that was adopted for independent reasons. Over time, however, those institutions began to gather momentum of their own, reaching a point where, today, they are basically self-sustaining"

But why exactly is this worrisome? Because it works on the unspoken assumption that states more or less can have a harmony of interest. It might be the case that an institution can work amongst the (small-l) liberal and democratic states of Europe, all being (for the most part) equally economically advanced and (for reasons of history) ill-prepared to engage in any military operations of any kind (and with the US still looking over at Europe and providing at least a bit of external stabilizing and balancing against threat). Look, if it's true that every state really wants nothing but economic growth and people are generally good, progressive beings, then we should probably all go out and become liberal institutionalists. But one could probably put together a pretty decent historical narrative that would make one doubt whether those assumptions are true, or could be true widely enough to be meaningful.

The second problem is that institutions adhere around norms, which are by nature constituitive and ungrounded. Just because path dependence and orientations happened to resolve happily in one or two cases provides no evidence (and one might look at the League of Nations or the UN as counterpoints) that one can expect them to always resolve happily.

I DID NOT KNOW THAT: From The Weekly Standard:

'One of the foremost Canadian Studies programs in the country is at Duke. A professor in the program has said, "We're the most important university to make a serious effort to study Canada. That's like being the best hockey team in Zimbabwe."'

LINK: this is easily the most surreal blog on the internet.

Well, except for this one.

9:06 PM, March 5th: I'm an uncle!

UPDATE: My mother has more info:

"First reports indicate red, curly hair, impossibly long fingers and toes, and a birth weight of 7 lbs, 1 oz."

LINK: Zing!

WELL: The funny thing I've been discovering this term is that if you spend more of your time doing your reading, you have less of it to spend doing things like blogging. Richard Rorty (and his anti-liberal, anti-democratic self) having been sufficiently made fun of in class by me (e.g. "one might want to infer from this... oh... wait... inferring is bad... one might want to engage in a redescription of this process"), and the world being made safe for metaphysicians again, and, more importantly, me not having anything pressing to do until after spring break (a.k.a. "doing reading for my lit review in International Relations"), and (crown me the king of the run-on sentences) this being prospectives weekend (a.k.a. 'the happiest weekend of the year'), it seems only fitting to make a few general notes as to what's been going on:

1. I'm already in the planning stages of writing my first children's book on political science; it'll be on the Communist show trials, and I plan to call it Goodnight Trotsky.

2. The biggest running joke in my social group at the moment involves pooled cross-sectional time-series analyses; my game theory study group decided that constructivism was the only way for us to complete out homework ("what do we think it means for something to be sub-game perfect?")

3. Dan Lee: still not thinking anything