In the box can be good too

I enjoyed 90 minutes today with SAIS’s Mike Lampton and CSIS’s Michael Green commenting on Amitai Etzioni’s Foreign Policy: Thinking Outside the Box, a recent Chatham House publication. Here are my speaking notes, though I should note much of the event focused on China, which was not within my remit: 

1. First let me say it has been a privilege to be required to read this book. It is a model of precision and intelligibility. Professor Ezioni says what he means clearly and concisely, marshaling the evidence with skill and erudition.
2. My doubts have to do mainly with the title: it advertises thinking outside the box, but much of the book is devoted to ideas I would regard as well inside the box, even if some of them might be labeled “new normal.”
3. Take, for example, the chapter on “defining down sovereignty.” A good deal of it is spent pooh-poohing the Westphalian notion of sovereignty and arguing in favor of a more contemporary alternative: sovereignty as entailing rights as well as responsibilities.
4. This leads naturally to Responsibility to Protect, which is well within the box these days, and another, new to me notion, “responsibility to counter terrorism.” If states fail or refuse to do this, intervention might be justified, Professor Etzioni says.
5. It’s an interesting idea that even explains some current behavior, in particular the anti-ISIL intervention in Syria, which the host government has not unauthorized.
6. The downsides are all too clear: the slippery slope that leads to an unjustified excuse for invasion or other intervention, as in George W.
7. The chapter on spheres of influence is not so much outside the box as it is outside the realm of academic discussion, as Professor Etzioni himself documents. Spheres of influence are a well-established practice in international affairs, even if the concept has not attracted much scholarly attention.
8. Professor Etzioni sees spheres of influence, Russia’s “near-abroad” for example or Iran’s influence in Iraq, as providing space for rising regional powers and buffer zones that bolster a feeling of security.
9. The trouble with that notion is that it discounts the will of those who live in these buffer states. The limits of his approach are all to evident in Ukraine, where Etzioni admits Russia used force to try to prevent the Ukrainians from choosing their alignment with Europe.
10. People just aren’t always content to serve the purposes of other powers.
11. When it comes to self-determination, I would quibble with Amitai’s characterization of Kurdistan as more democratic than the rest of Iraq, but more importantly he ignores the negative regional and internal political contexts for any independence move by the Iraqi Kurds. I doubt it will happen, or that it will be democratizing if it does.
12. I would agree however with Amitai’s main conclusion: decentralization rather than secession is far more likely to produce positive outcomes in democratic societies like Spain, where unfortunately the central government has been unwilling to concede even that. That however is a conclusion well inside the box, not outside it.
13. One concluding thought: Professor Etzioni repeatedly doubts the applicability of liberal democratic notions outside the family of liberal democratic states.
14. As an American, I feel condemned to believe in universal rights, as our founding documents are all too clear on this subject.
15. But I would also say that I’ve virtually never met someone outside the liberal democratic world who didn’t aspire to those rights.
16. We don’t need to export the notion that all people are created equal. We only need to help people find ways of institutionalizing equal rights in ways that are appropriate to their particular contexts.
17. All in all, a good and interesting read, even if the novelty is overblown.

I made two points in the discussion period worth recalling:

• Liberal democracy is not congruent with secularism, since we have liberal democratic states (where rights are in principle equal) like Italy and the UK with established churches (not to mention the penetration of religion into government in the US).
• Russia’s behavior in Ukraine cannot properly be attributed to NATO expansion. Putin has made it clear that he is trying to re-establish Moscow’s hegemony in what he considers Russia’s near-abroad. That is not a reaction to NATO expansion but rather an aggressive program vital to his view of Russia’s historic and cultural role, as well as to his domestic political standing.