Three thoughts and some links on Egypt and Tunisia

Thought 1: I've warmed considerably to Wikileaks because I've realized it's not about us. I've never been outrageously offended by Wikileaks the way some have, let me clarify. But I haven't been especially impressed with them either - and my lack of being impressed has been more due to the details of what they've done rather than their broader mission (I have no quarrel with their broader mission). The first video they released of an operation in Iraq bothered me because it vilified American soldiers who, from what I could tell, had no idea whether their target was friend or foe - and given the circumstances and the odd behavior of the target it was perfectly plausible for them to have concerns. I don't know the rules of engagement, but to call it "collateral murder" struck me as grossly unfair. This was nothing like the Abu Ghraib pictures where culpability was crystal clear. I wasn't initially all that impressed with the diplomatic cables either. It seemed like Wikileaks was leaking for the hell of it. These were not the Pentagon Papers. There was no great failure of the government they were exposing (I'm not surprised or bothered by the fact that our diplomats spy on, lie to, or insult other people). They made diplomacy look less credible and stole sensitive material for what? I could see no payoff so it was hard for me to see much value in the act, but I did see the potential for a lot of damage. Not damage to Clinton's prestige or anything silly like that - damage to the prospect of successful diplomacy. But now I'm starting to change my mind - I'm realizing it's not about us. Wikileaks' claims about Tunisia's leaders apparently played a central role in motivating the protests there. That's the value of this. There was no "Pentagon Papers" moment exposing problems with our government - but it did expose problems with other governments, and that is very good. And when our government does need exposing, I'm glad Wikileaks will be there. They'll still probably aggravate me as they needlessly expose things with little benefit and potentially great cost. But I'm starting to see a broader picture.

Thought 2: This is going to bury the idea that democracy (1.) is impossible in the Middle East, or (2.) must be imposed by violence from the West, and that is an unbelievably good thing. I can see lots of potential reverberations from this. For one thing, it's a serious blow to the Bush legacy. The one silver lining to Bush for the history books was that he was bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. It's an extremely dubious claim for him, but it is even less tenable if we see Egyptian and Tunisian autocracy fall (and Iranian autocracy at least shaken) by twitter and Wikileaks and domestic protest. If history looks back and sees the bulk of Middle Eastern democracy emerging from these sorts of protests, and a mess (without Saddam Hussein, to be sure) in war-torn Iraq, they are not going to look at Bush as favorably as they might have. It also is going to have more impact in the region. It's not clear what will happen in Egypt yet, but clearly it seems like there's going to be an improvement. Other countries are going to follow. Even more if Julian Assange makes a concerted effort at it. The final ripple effect I could imagine is with Israel. Israel is an odd duck. I'm not willing to completely write it off as a democratic, free society. Given the pressures it faces and the environment it finds itself it preserves these institutions remarkably well. But we also have to be honest - it is a repressive, heavy handed, police state, apartheid of a democracy insofar as it is a democracy. What's been keeping it in the good graces of America (aside from our evangelical eschatology) is that the rest of the Middle East is even worse. If we see a spate of popular revolutions that overthrow dictatorships there will be considerably more pressure on Israeli reform.

Thought 3: I'm glad Christopher Hitchens is alive to see this. Part of it is simply that he's a friend to human freedom and the revolution. Part of it is also that he's been cozy with neoconservatives and the Bush administration on the idea of democracy from the barrel of a gun. Hitchens hasn't been quite as bad as them, of course. He's more about overthrowing dictators and killing terrorists than he is about the violent imposition of democratic institutions on foreign populations. I personally think overthrowing dictators and killing terrorists is perfectly respectable business (although perhaps not always the wisest or most appropriate move from the perspective of both national interest and collateral damage). Nevertheless, even if he's "better than Bush", he's still hads a trigger finger this last decade. Maybe a little homegrown revolution will bring him back to his roots and reform his mindset a little before he passes on. I say this as a tremendous admirer of Hitchens - not to say "this'll show him!!!". Hitchens has written about Tunisia here, but as far as I can tell he hasn't written about Egypt yet. I'm confident we'll be seeing something shortly.

Some links:

- John Quiggen with thoughts similar to my Thought 2.

- The Economist strikes a somewhat pessimistic note when it channels Keynes: "In the long run, if Tunisia's authoritarian dictatorship is replaced by a more open and democratic government, and if something similar happens in Egypt, that will probably lead to greater stability and security for everyone. Unfortunately, this is one of those long runs in which many of us are dead."

- Mark Thoma shares lots of links.

- Peter Boettke calls our attention to theories of revolution.

1848 and the Last Temptation of Marx

I thought I'd cruise through the book 1848: Year of Revolution now that my class is over, but of course I haven't (maybe it's because I blog too much). Starting Röpke's Crises and Cycles while reading it doesn't help, either. I did want to write about something I found very intriguing, though. The Habsburgs, after their initial shock at events in Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Berlin, began to respond to the assorted revolutionaries, liberals, leftists, and nationalists with considerably more craftiness than Metternich was able to muster before being ousted. As revolutionary fervor broke out in Galicia, the Austrians deftly played the Ukranian peasants against the Polish nobles and nationalists that demanded greater liberties from the empire. The Ukranians sided with the Austrians because the depredations of the Poles were more immediate than the arguably far greater imperial claims of the authorities in Vienna. This sort of sentiment was not uncommon during the American revolution either, where the refrain was often heard that "I would rather be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away than three thousand tyrants one mile away". Thus, the 1848 revolution in the Austro-Hungarian provinces especially took on a decidedly bourgeois (if not noble) tone, rather than a populist one. Paradoxically, the emperor became the "man of the people" rather than the democrats.

Another thing I found interesting was how damned sympathetic the leftists and the socialists come across in Paris and Berlin! I don't think it's the author's secret ideological sympathies, I think it's simply the fact that relative to monarchs and autocrats, a socialist that isn't saying that much about a workers' paradise, but is emphasizing constitutional reform and democracy doesn't seem all that bad. These are two somewhat surprising elements of the book, which upon further reflection of course aren't all that surprising at all.

Without knowing that much about the history of communism, I have to suspect that these two observations decisively shaped the future of the movement. Marx (an active participant in the Berlin revolution) certainly digested the monarchical alliance with the peasantry against the nobility, and he remarked on this process again a decade later when Tsar Alexander II emancipated Russia's serfs against the wishes of the Russian nobility:

"If the Russian nobility do not think that the “4th of August” (1789) has yet arrived, and that so far there is no necessity of sacrificing their privileges on the altar of their country, the Russian Government is going a great deal faster; it has already arrived at the “declaration of the rights of man.” What, indeed, do you think of Alexander II, proclaiming “rights which belong to the peasantry by nature, and of which they ought never to have been deprived"? Verily, these are strange times! In 1846, a Pope initiating a liberal movement; in 1858, a Russian Autocrat, a true samoderjetz vserossiiski, proclaiming the rights of man! And we shall see that the Czar’s proclamation will have as world-wide an echo, and an ultimate effect of far greater magnitude than the Pope’s liberalism."

What lessons could he have learned from this? I'll submit a few:

1. That autocratic authority can be brought to bear to serve the interests of the collective, and that the lower classes will embrace the autocrat for this.

2. That socialists are the good guys. It's easy to write-off the down-side of socialism when (1.) you've never seen the downside yet, and (2.) your formative years were spent battling emperors, kings, autocrats, and nobles. I'm sympathetic to the socialists as I read this book, and I know how the story ends! It's understandable how the revolutionaries could get so confident in their beliefs. It's comparable to Jefferson's support for the French Revolution, even as it started to descend into macabre chaos.

3. That a conflict of power is not the same as a conflict of class. For Marx, the dialectics of class were absolutely paramount. Today, in America especially, we have an inherent libertarianism. For us, exploitation is a function of the exercise of different power relationships. It's a perspective that is shared by French philosophers, particularly after Foucault, but it is also derived from a contractarian approach. But this is not a foundational assumption of many socialists and even many liberals in the 19th century who did not have a contractarian understanding of the world. For them, power was a tool to be used by either side - the oppressor or the oppressed. Simply exercising power over someone did not make you an oppressor. The primary source of oppression was class. To borrow from my recent series on calculation problems vs. incentive problems, the primary source of oppression was not a capricious violation of contract, but an institutional arrangement that stacked the deck in favor of one class over another. If autocratic power could rectify this, then so be it.

If you put these three together, the dictatorship of the proletariat follows naturally. It may be naive. It's a view that could greatly benefit from an infusion of contractarian thinking. But for a man that cut his teeth on the 1848 revolutions, it's understandable. If the imperial authorities had sided more vigorously with the nobility, and given Marx a greater distaste for autocratic power, I wonder if communism would have turned out differently.