A Friendly Reminder

The longer we hold on to the ring, the more difficult it is to let it go.

Political Obstacles to Decentralization: Evidence from Argentina and the Philippines by Kent Eaton:

Because of weak parties and individualistic behaviour by legislators, presidents of the Philippines have had a very difficult time getting their policy agendas through the legislature. Traditionally, presidents have depended on their formal authority over the release of pork barrel funds as a power resource that allows them to purchase the support of legislators for substantive policy change. As a governing tool, the effectiveness of the president's control over the release of these funds would be seriously undercut by the broad devolution of revenues and expenditures. Local governments would become much less dependent on pork barrel funds, decreasing their political leverage and utility to the president.

Given this political reality, support by President Aquino for decentralization and its passage by Congress in 1991 is politically intriguing. The key to explaining the political logic of the 1991 decentralization is the role played by different electoral incentives, beginning with the lack of electoral incentives facing President Aquino.

A non-traditional politician and political widow who was uninterested in remaining in power beyond her six-year term, Aquino was committed to the `no re-election' clause of the 1986 constitution, which was written by individuals she appointed and which included several measures that were designed to avoid repetitions of Marcos' successful attempts to perpetuate himself in power. Aquino was therefore unlike most presidents in that she was not personally threatened by the loss of power to the national government that the Code would effect. Furthermore, she considered decentralization to be the linchpin of her administration and a reform that would facilitate the transition to democracy, the main legacy of her government.

Migdal on my mind

A glaring omission on my part, I cannot believe I have only just read Joel Migdal. Written twenty-two years ago, this sounds so achingly familiar. On weak state leadership:

Their basic weakness in the face of continued fragmentation of social control has led them to a political style and policies – the politics of survival – that have prevented the state from enhancing its capabilities by not allowing the development of complex organisation in state institutions. Rulers have used similar styles and policies to pre-empt the development of large concentrations of social control outside the state organisation.

As long as the fragmentation of social control has continued, denying state leaders effective mass political mobilisation, rulers have been reduced to ruses and stratagems; they must build and rebuild coalitions and balances of power centres while using state resources to reinforce existing distribution of power and wealth in society. Such mechanisms may at times encourage economic growth, but they do not create a more capable, autonomous state.

In deep

It is week four of the semester and I feel tired already. Why does it feel as though I've been here much longer than a month? A change in location perhaps, but essentially doing the same thing ... only the efforts are more serious and hopefully rigorous, and the terrain politically diverse. Politicking, politicking in academia can be such a bitter exercise. The American is bearing the brunt of it - because of who he is. Being from the Third World, and a woman to boot, every little thing that comes out of my mouth is brilliant! Novel! Miraculous! Ah, the comparative advantage of low expectations. Must make hay while I can.

As far institutions go I feel I have chosen well. The uni is heavily invested, it seems, in my research topic. Never mind my department. It can go hang. The other week i had a glimpse of how professionals behave in their natural habitat. Surprisingly there was very little ego. You had a sense that they took their vocation seriously, especially the ethical implications of their research.  I had no doubt it was cutting edge. I googled and nobody else was doing it. The whole exercise was, above all, a collegial effort. The proverbial blind men struggling to describe the elephant in the room. They came from all over the planet, the UK, Sweden, the US, Korea, India, drawn together by the need to understand and explain. This is what drives them, I think. This drive for cognition. And the politicking, well, its the baggage the comes with being a professional I suppose. Resources, after all, are finite.

Inequality is literally bad for your health

I should like to get a "copy" of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Alas, the pirates of the internets have yet to make them available online.I will have to wait to get to a library :-)

The blurb:

It is well established that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. Now a groundbreaking book, based on thirty years’ research, takes an important step past this idea. The Spirit Level shows that there is one common factor that links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of equality among their members. Not wealth; not resources; not culture, climate, diet, or system of government. Furthermore, more-unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them—the well-off as well as the poor.

The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level reveals striking differences, not only among the nations of the first world but even within America’s fifty states. Almost every modern social problem—ill-health, violence, lack of community life, teen pregnancy, mental illness—is more likely to occur in a less-equal society. This is why America, by most measures the richest country on earth, has per capita shorter average lifespan, more cases of mental illness, more obesity, and more of its citizens in prison than any other developed nation.

Wilkinson and Pickett lay bare the contradiction between material success and social failure in today’s world, but they do not simply provide a diagnosis of our woes. They offer readers a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society. The Spirit Level is pioneering in its research, powerful in its revelations, and inspiring in its conclusion: Armed with this new understanding of why communities prosper, we have the tools to revitalize our politics and help all our fellow citizens, from the bottom of the ladder to the top.

Here is an excellent review.

And here is a podcast with the authors discussing the book along with Barbara Ehrenreich and Harry Holzer.

Love, Passion and Patriotism

The book by Dr. Raquel A.G. Reyes Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Porpaganda MOvement 1882-1892 was featured on the Sunday Inquirer magazine today. It is locally available at the Ateneo University Press. It looks mighty interesting.

The blurb:

Love, Passion and Patriotism is an intimate account of the lives and experiences of a renowned group of young Filipino patriots whose propaganda campaign was a catalyst for the country's revolt against Spain. José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano López Jaena, and the brothers Juan and Antonio Luna were talented writers, artists and scientists who resided in Europe during the 1880s and 1890s. As expatriates, they lived outside the social constraints of their own society and were eager to explore all that Europe had to offer. Provoked by racism and allegations of effeminacy and childishness, they displayed their manliness and urbanity through fashionable European dress, careful grooming and deportment, and demonstrated their courage and virility through fencing, pistol-shooting and dueling.

Their studies exposed them to scientific discourses on the body and novel categorizations of pathology and disease, ideas they used to challenge the religious obscurantism and folk superstition they saw in their country. However, their experiences also radically shaped their ideas of sex and sexual nature of Filipino women. Raquel A. G. Reyes explores the paintings, photographs, political writings, novels and letters in their passionate patriotism, and their struggle to come to terms with the relative sexual freedom of European women, which they found both alluring and sordid.

Exporting Labor

A new typology in an era of transnationalized "flexible" labor is emerging in literatures as varied as sociology, anthropology, economics, international studies and political science. Scholars have called it the "labor-exporting state." Robyn Magalit Rodriguez calls it the "labor brokerage state."

In Migrants for Export she writes:

"Labor brokerage is a neoliberal strategy that is comprised of institutional and discursive practices through which the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating a profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones in the Philippines. The Philippine state negotiates with labor-receiving states to formalize outflows of migrant workers and thereby enables employers around the globe to avail themselves of temporary workers who can be summoned to work for finite periods of time and then returned to their homeland at the conclusion of their employment contracts."

It may well be that the period of migration-for-settlement is coming to an end. In the United States, by far the world's largest migrant-receiving nation, the debate rages whether they should expand their "guest-worker" programs. This would allow flexible labor in but would deny citizenship."Guest-worker" or contractual labor programs have long been the practice in the Middle East, the Asia Pacific and recently in Europe. Citizenship confers political rights. Temporary worker status does not. Should this trend continue, increased precariousness of immigrant workers should be expected.

In the literature on international migration the Philippines is considered the most organized labor-exporting state in the world. And there is evidence that our state institutions and practices are being copied elsewhere. As yet, there is no global regime that would oversee "trade in workers" as the WTO does trade in commodities and investments. But it is not improbable. As the Doha Round finds the WTO regime at an impasse, a spate of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements have been inked. In some cases they include provisions for worker mobility, as with the recently inked Australia-ASEAN-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement.

Clarity from the Left

Epistemological rifts, far from the domain of those who make it their business to study how we know, are significant once their implications in the real world become apparent. I do not claim to have any intimate knowledge of these rifts among leftists in the Philippines. Given this caveat, let me explain the utility of asking questions such as those I have asked Kapirasong Kritika.

Like any student, we often frame reality through the lenses of our discipline. The existence of disciplinary myopia is a human limitation we cannot possibly overcome. We are not omniscient. Neither are we omnipresent. The postmodern intervention is useful in this aspect. Let us acknowledge that the things we know and believe are a sum of our own limited human experience.

Now, science is a human endeavor that aims to build knowledge. Scientists have their theories and hypotheses and aim to test them through experiments. Through rigorous methodologies scientists have proven many things we now know to be true. It is absolute truth that gravity exists. It is absolute truth that once we throw a rock up in the air it will fall back to earth. This is true back in Isaac Newton’s time. It was true a thousand years before that. It will be true a thousand years from now, given that the Earth continues to exist.

Now, what is the difference between a piece of rock and Aling Juana, proprietor of a sari-sari store? Well, while Aling Juana’s physical components may not significantly alter in the course of her lifetime, given she does not meet an accident that will deprive her of limbs or any one of her senses, will her attitudes and beliefs remain the same? It is true today that Aling Juana hates mangoes. This is her attitude. There are many reasons why she hates mangoes – all uniquely her own. The consequence of her belief will drive her not to ever purchase mangoes. Theory translated into action. Will she continue to hate mangoes tomorrow? Who knows? In twenty-four hours a thousand things could happen that might change her mind. That is the difference between a rock and Aling Juana. It is the difference between the study of inert, non-sentient objects and the study of human subjects.

I am reticent to accept willy-nilly any body of knowledge claiming to have the answers to problems besetting the human condition. Largely, this comes from my own positioned study of critical political economy. There are many theories to explain why the Philippines is poor compared to, say, the United States. Can any one theory or any one body of knowledge claim to have the absolute truth as an answer? A RESOUNDING YES animated the ideology of a whole generation of decision-makers among the powerful who sought to shape the world. Theirs was the fool-proof answer to the developing world’s poverty. This failed ideology, as Kapirasong Kritika will probably be familiar with, comes from the discipline of economics – a science of human beings that pretended to have the exactness of the most numeral of sciences – physics. Their claim to absolute truth led to the immiseration of millions around the world. The ill effects of this ideology’s prescriptions, KK will agree, can still be felt today.

I think KK will also agree that there are many ways to interpret the unfolding of politics at any level. He will agree that the dominance of one interpretation over one is necessarily a political struggle. A useful postmodern intervention is this acknowledgment. “Theory is always for someone and some purpose” writes political economist Robert Cox. The science of his vaunted predecessor, to which he and a whole generation of other scholars including this one owe much, is bound by its historical specificity. Karl Marx is not omniscient and omnipresent. He sought to uncover ‘laws’ of Capitalism much in the same manner that his contemporaries sought to uncover ‘laws’ explaining the natural world. As I said, a rock is not a human being. A collection of human beings – in a societal unit such as a country for example – will not be forever cemented in one mold. “Classes” in the specific historical context of nineteenth century Britain cannot be made to function as concept in twenty-first century Philippines. It is testament to Marx’s brilliance that much of his contribution to the body of human knowledge has withstood the test of time. A century and half since the publication of his oeuvre Das Kapital, millions upon millions of events have transpired to change the conditions in which Capitalism, his object of study, functions. For this reason, and as good historical materialists, we need to be critical of these changes.

I have written countless times about the depoliticizing tendencies of biting the postmodern apple hook line and sinker. If everything is relative, as postmodernists say, then what can we believe in? And if we believe in nothing, what do we fight for? I believe that there are certain absolute truths pertaining to the human condition that will apply to all human beings regardless of hue, gender or creed. For example, I hold true that all human beings deserve to live in dignity. My politics will stem from a belief in this truth claim. Now this relates to a value system to which Kapirasong Kritika and I can inter-subjectively agree.

Inequality and Democracy

From Michael Sandel's last Reith lecture, A New Politics of the Common Good, he mentions why inequality poses a danger to the democratic project.

The real problem with inequality lies in the damage it does to the civic project, the common good. Here's why. Too great a gap betwen rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires. As inequality deepens, rich and poor live increasingly separate lives. The affluent send their children to private schools...leaving urban public schools to the children of families who have no alternative. A similar trend leads to the withdrawal by the privileged from other other public institutions and facilities...This trend has two bad effects - one fiscal, the other civic.

First, public services deteriorate as those who no longer use them become less willing to support them with their taxes.

Second, public institutions...cease to be places where citizens from different walks of life encounter one another. Institutions that once gathered people together and served as informal schools of civic virtue have become few and far between. The hollowing out of the public realm makes it difficult to cultivate the sense of community that democratic citizenship requires.

On Philippine Democracy, read also:
The Philippines' Low Intensity Democracy
In the Grip of Electoralism
Castrated by Vacuous Argument for the Sake of Vacuous Argument
Simulating Governance

And on the Filipino's withdrawal from the public sphere:
The Depoliticisation of the Filipino and the Marketisation of Everything

Eschewing Complacent Realism

Political philosopher David Estlund, on status-quo defenders' fear of Utopian thinking:

I haven’t settled whether perfect people would need laws, courts, police or other hallmarks of normal political conditions. I’ve mainly questioned why that question is supposed to matter. The point isn’t that political theory positively ought to assume moral perfection. It will pay at this point to remind ourselves of the polemical situation. A political theory gives an account of justice, authority, legitimacy or some other central normative political value, and is confronted by an objection on grounds of realism: we all know people won’t act in the ways this theory says that justice, or authority, or legitimacy depend upon. I have argued that it is an adequate reply to point out that the theory never said they would. It only said that there would be no justice or authority or legitimacy unless they did.

And so it pays to ask normative questions, that is, questions about how things ought to be. Read the rest of Estlund's article here.

Islam and Democracy

Sections of a paper I wrote many moons ago, when the agenda-setters in world politics were crucifying anything and everything that had to do with Islam. I think it funny now that the color green connotes hope and resistance when some years back the 'red menace' was replaced by the 'green peril.' Too, the cry 'God is great' is no longer deemed a cry of terrorists but of freedom fighters.

Of course this assessment refers specifically to the Arab Muslim world, and I wonder now whether the uprising in Iran is making old timers in the Middle East quake in their boots. Revolution - it is catching.

Post 9/11: Selling Democracy

Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union was unforseen by the leaders of the “free world,” so too were the events leading up to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The 1990s were marked with sub-state instability and civil wars. It was clear that while the likelihood of inter-state conflict may have been diminished with only the United States remaining the lone superpower, insecurity would come from a-territorial elements. The 9/11 attacks showed that stable autocratic allies, while ensuring “stability” in the Middle East and secure access to energy, had not led to a blemish-free Pax Americana.

Discounting questions of the legality of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and how the United States went about these wars undemocratically, the new foreign policy seems intent on finally integrating “soft” measures with “hard” ones. In an uncharacteristic turnabout from the war rhetoric of a few years back, Condoleeza Rice has admitted that the US has a sixty-year record of supporting “stability at the expense of democracy in...the Middle East.”


Addressing the National Defence University in Washington, President George Bush reiterated the vision of a democratic Middle East.

We know that freedom, by definition, must be chosen, and that the democratic institutions of other nations will not look like our own. Yet we also know that our security increasingly depends on the hope and progress of other nations now simmering in despair and resentment. And that hope and progress is found only in the advance of freedom. This advance is a consistent theme of American strategy -- from the Fourteen Points, to the Four Freedoms, to the Marshall Plan, to the Reagan Doctrine.

Given the history of US intervention in the Arab world, scholars from either side agree that the new American tact suffers greatly from a credibility gap.

The Arab intellectual elite, often educated in the West, express deep suspicion of the US’ democratisation rhetoric. It is troubling that this influential group who are most able to sway public opinion doubt US intentions. US aid to incumbents in the region totalled $250 million in the 90s. These were designed not to rock the status quo as American security concerns required stable (if autocratic) allies.

Some of the foreign policy initiatives meant to foster democratisation include the Middle East Peace Initiative (MEPI) unveiled in 2003. It was meant to assist democratisation “indirectly” through the support of civil society movements advancing education and women’s rights. The initial funding of MEPI at $29 million certainly seems a paltry sum compared to the $250 billion spent on the Iraq war effort thus far.

While the US is prepared to deliver hard solutions alone, it is taking a more inclusive tact on its democratisation drive by bringing up the agenda in multilateral talks and institutions. The United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report of 2002 was downloaded one million times in its first year of release.

Also, another program, the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative (BMENA) was unveiled by the US in the G8 Summit of June 2004 (Hobson 2005). On the cultural front, the launch of Radio Sawa ("Together") and the Al Hurrah ("The free") was meant to initiate young Arabs to American culture.

All these initiatives lead us to the question of whether a democracy can be created through external pressure. The danger in this scenario is that while a polity may be induced to acquire the trappings of democratic institutions, elections being the most visible and readily doable, it remains a question whether “the people” have the capacity to exercise their democratic rights.

“Democracy” and a transition to democracy need to be unpacked. Substantive definitions should go beyond mere electoralism, which essentialises democracy as a ceremony with ballot boxes. A substantive conceptualisation of democracy has to address the state apparatus’ accountability to its people and any “transition” to democracy necessitates changes in the institutionalisation of broad political participation. However, democratisation in the Middle East (and indeed many developing countries today) depend not only on domestic agency and local socio-historical contexts. Increasingly, it also hinges on the enabling or stunting role of external agents in a global context. This leads us then to examine the relationship of internal and external conditions in the Arab world that may open avenues and present obstacles to a transition to democracy.

Crafting Rule of the People

The dominant doctrine for political development in American scholarship today has abandoned questions of political philosophy and theory. Minimalist recommendations are easily measurable and polities can be mapped on a linear progression, moving towards or away from “democracy.” (O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead 1986). Paul Cammack calls this normative commitment to democracy “procedural”:

…A system of government that meets three essential conditions: meaningful and extensive competition among individuals and organized groups (especially political parties) for all positions in government, a highly inclusive level of political participation in selection of leaders and policies (at least through regular and fair elections), a level of civil and political liberties (1997: 219).

“Democracy” is fundamentally a political system that legitimises decisions on the basis of formal, procedural, legal correctness without distinction of content except in respect for civil liberties and the equality before the law of all citizens. There is no reference to substantive justice and no link to a system of ultimate values.

This kind of minimalist prescription has led to a “low intensity democracy” in many newly-democratic societies since the “third wave” (Huntington 1991).

A low intensity democracy is a result of both external and internal pressures. But more than anything, authors Gills and Rocamora claim it is an opening meant to facilitate penetration of global capital. It is an unstable political system as it opens up the political space for mobilisation of elements from both left and right while the state apparatus itself, and the incumbent regime, struggle to maintain political order (1992). Seen through the linear progression of transitologists mentioned earlier (O’Donnell et al), then a low intensity democracy is but a few paces away from “transition.”

The 2005 elections in Iraq revealed that fractures of society are divided along ethno-religious lines. Political liberalisation in a sovereign territory which has not reflexively defined itself as one “nation” can only be susceptible to disintegration or a remapping of borders. Democratic institutions, as they have evolved in the Western model, are meant to foster competition. In a country that has not functioned as a single politico-cultural unit, minimalist democracy exacerbates internal imaginary divisions based on different identities.

A nuanced conceptualisation of democracy and democratisation takes a more multi-dimensional approach. The work of Jean Grugel (2002) and Rueschemeyer, Stephens & Stephens (1992) take into account the economic and societal prerequisites of democratisation and their impact on politics.

While democracy is a political order, its efficacy depends on certain preconditions. In the developing world some modicum of citizens’ economic stability directly impinge on their ability to exercise their democratic rights and duties. Operating on a “one-cannot-eat-one’s-right-to-vote” principle, “citizens” are more than willing to trade the sanctity of the ballot for a week’s worth of grocery money.

In Capitalist Development and Democracy, Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens offer a more textured and complex relationship between capitalist development and democracy. While the authors are cognizant of the democratising powers of capitalist development, they do not simply attribute this to the creation of a middle class, the improvement of education or an increase in the numbers of televisions or telephones per household, “measurables” in modernisation theory.

Transition and consolidation of democracy, according to their framework are contingent on the following:

1. Balance of power among different classes and class coalitions
2. Structure, strength and autonomy of the state apparatus and relations with civil society
3. Impact of transnational power relations (on 1 and 2)

The authors claim that ultimately, the contradictions of capitalism generated pro-democratic forces in their case studies in Latin America and Asia. More importantly, Rueschemeyer Stephens and Stepehens emphasise the fundamental requirement for any functioning democracy to take place - that of a strong institutional separation or differentiation of the realm of politics from the overall system of inequality in society (1992: 42).

Grugel’s Democratisation: A Critical Introduction also favours a conceptual framework on democratisation which examines the dynamic between the political and the economic. Similar to the previous authors mentioned, Grugel also uses three levels of analysis:

1. The State
2. Civil Society
3. Globalisation

A democratic state apparatus is one which has undergone institutional change, representative change and functional transformation (what the state actually does and its functional responsibilities). Some obstacles to the democratisation of the state concern national identity, issues on sovereignty, poor state capacity, authoritarian legacies and political fallout from economic reform.

A viable civil society able to mobilise is based on a strong middle class. Historically, the creation of a middle class was crucial in putting pressure on the state apparatus to maintain its “autonomy” (i.e. relatively insulated from capture by certain factions).

Lastly, economic globalisation is an external pressure to facilitate global trade, production and investment as well as intensify integration of global markets. Globalisation impacts local democratisation in various ways. As countries integrate into the world economy, this reduces political and economic options for countries, especially ones with a weak state apparatus. Globalisation is also a process institutionalised by global regulating bodies, such as the international financial institutions (IFIs), the WTO (even the United Nations), which aim for global liberalisation…Trade liberalisation was expected to create free markets which, in turn, would facilitate the creation of citizenship, a middle class and a civil society (Grugel 2002: 118).” This is certainly the theses of Huntington (1991) and even the likes Thomas Friedman (2005).

On the other hand, globalisation has losers along with the winners:

More influential…in shaping the project of global democratisation, are the pressures generated by the global economy, leading to new patterns of dependence, marginality and exclusion. Along with the creation of a global communications network, these guarantee the diffusion of a stylised image of democracy, alongside the penetration of capitalism, the creation of new markets and trading relationships and the establishment of new modes of consumption. More than anything else, the emergence of a global political economy is responsible for the prevalence of democracy as discourse and ideal, because it is able to penetrate dependent societies and influence mentalities and aspirations (Grugel 2002: 138-139).

While the role of external forces are important in the transition to democracy, the authors mentioned domestic conditions above all must be conducive to political pluralism. External support for democratisation only plays a complementary role to domestic pressures.

Islam, Islamists and Islamic Democracy?

Religion/Culture

Some authors argue for an “exceptionalist” explanation as to why the Middle East and North Africa have been laggards in democratising. A quick survey of the region certainly illustrates this.

Eight out of twenty-two Arab states are ruled by monarchs, including all 6 in the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan and Morocco. Countries not ruled by monarchies are similarly run by quasi-monarchs - Saddam Hussein of Iraq stayed in power for thirty-five years, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya for thirty-seven years, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen for seven presidential terms (thirty-five years if he finishes the current one), Hosni Mubarak in Egypt for twenty-four years, Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia for thirty years while successor Ben Ali has been in power for nineteen, Hafiz al Asad in Syria for thirty years and his son-successor Bashar now in his sixth year of rule.

In a survey conducted by World Values Study of nine countries with Muslim majorities and their political and social values, the results showed these did not differ much with Western states with regard to approval of democratic performance, approval of democratic leaders and disapproval of strong leaders. What they do differ on are values regarding women, homosexuality, procreation and divorce. Which means the fundamental difference between Islam and the West is not over democracy at all (as Huntington's thesis asserts).

Within the religious text themselves can be found core concepts and bases on which to build a modern yet authentic Democracy. While the commitment to the ideals of modern democracy is underpinned by “moral values” located in a “post-Reformation, market-oriented Christian Europe," this does not necessarily mean that these values are hopelessly irreconcilable with Islam.

While the Qur’an does not provide a specific form of political organisation, it provides guidelines into which political values are desirable – social justice, non-autocratic and consultative governance as well as institutionalising “mercy and compassion in social interactions (Abou El Fadl 2004: 5).” Further, Islam in principle is against absolutism as it draws strength in diversity:

Absolutism in principle is alien to Muslim political thought. Indeed, Muslim society has historically been marked by a high degree of what we would today might call civil society…Ironically these principles of limited governance were broken primarily in the twentieth century by new authoritarian regimes based on Western nation-building principles in which the Leviathan state assumed maximum control over all areas of life to build the all-powerful state (Fuller 2003: 32).

The Islamists who established authoritarian regimes in countries like Iran who insist on a top-down approach of Islam, is a violation of the Qur’anic principle – “there is no compulsion in religion.” (Fuller 2003: 32).

The question of whether “the people” or God should be sovereign can be reconciled by the religion’s own political philosophy. Islam accepts that humans are “vicegerents” i.e. representatives of God on earth, which carries with it the idea that humans are responsible for carrying out God’s justice (as enshrined in Shari’a law for example). Even then, this little conundrum was circumvented by Iran by establishing a theocracy. The Iranian state was supposed to have been “bestowed by God” and as such, matters of the state override religion because the former is already legitimised by God.

This shows that the religious texts are flexible enough to be open to various interpretations. The ulama, or religious leaders, enjoy political legitimacy from their scholarship of religious matters. Ehteshami claims they serve as unique political class (2004: 93). It seems enormous work need to be done by these religious scholars to reclaim their Islam and to work on reconciling what has been written centuries past with the realities of today.

Some indigenous elements for democratisation also include the shura or consultative council (although monarchies such as Saudi Arabia say the consultation is “non-binding”), ijtihad or independent reasoning and ijma or consensus, baica or approval of leaders by the umma, ash-sharica or deliberation of worldly matters and religious matters where god did not make a reference.

In sum, with regard to religio-cultural aspects, there is nothing inherently opposed to Democracy in Islam.

The State

A legacy of colonialism in the Middle East is the mukharabat - a strong state apparatus to safeguard the gains of independence as well as a reaction to the creation and continued existence of Israel. Alkadry calls this “defensive modernisation,” that is, the nation and state building process takes place in the context of external intervention. This kind of nationalist modernisation privileged stability over broad democratic participation.

Another problematic is - what, where and who constitutes the state? There are still border issues as a result of arbitrary colonial partitioning. The most notable ones are between Pakistan-India-Bangladesh, Iraq-Kuwait, Israel-Palestine, Yemen-Saudi, Kurdistan-Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

A result of the forced fragmentation into a multitude of small weak states was the persistence of sub- and supra-state identities that weakened the identification with the state that was needed for stable democracy. In such conditions, where political mobilisation tends to exacerbate communal conflict or empowers supra-state movements threatening the integrity of the state, elites are more likely to resort to authoritarian solutions.

Aside from defensive modernisation and nation-building taking precedence over openness of the polity, a unique socio-political formation in the Middle East is the oil-exporting rentier state. As oil rents finance day-to-day governance and even welfare measures such as free health care and subsidised education, there is little need or pressure for the rentier state, also a monarchy, to agree to power sharing.

However in recent years there are pressures on the stability of rentier monarchies, especially on the fiscal side. Since the 1990s, the Gulf States have been experiencing economic crises coupled with a booming population.

The timeline varies depending on the scientific study one consults, but once the oil disappears, so too will the rentier state. The only option for these countries today is to steadily diversify their economies or pool their resources in a regional grouping. In the end the economy may well be a precipitating factor in reuniting the heart of the Muslim world.

Islamists and Civil Society

A survey of the Arab world and the different socio-economic groupings do not show a promising context for democratisation. Even with interim colonial occupation the social structure of the 19th century remains intact. For example in 1958 Iraq, 68 percent of agricultural lands were owned by 2 percent of total landowners. In Lebanon 2 percent of landowners owned 2/3 of the cultivated lands. In Syria, 2.5 percent of landowners held 45 percent of irrigated and 30 percent of rain-fed land while 70 percent of the total population held no land at all. In Egypt, 2/3 of the land was owned by 5.7 percent of the population (Halperin 2005: 1137).

With regard to the middle class, mostly professionals, its survival is dependent on the state’s munificence. It is a coopted middle class. As there is little diversification in industries, the government is, in many cases, the only employer. For example in Qatar and Kuwait 95 and 99 percent of nationals work for the State. Non-rentier monarchy Egypt, still has 6 million civil servants. There is no labour force to counter traditional elites as these countries also import labour. Saudi Arabia alone employs 6 to 7 million foreign workers.

Since the state apparatus will not broaden access to political power for reasons already given, and there are no “moderate” social forces that can hold the state accountable, then it can be said that Islamists are the closest approximation of “civil society” in the Middle East. Islamic movements gain legitimacy from the local populations by championing them and providing help for the economically marginalised and by consistently pointing out the artificiality of the current state-system and its entrenched elites.

Denied access to political participation, some have even resorted to radical and violent measures to advance their agenda. Increasingly Islamists have been advocating democracy simply because they are easy targets due to its absence. Islamists, as the major opposition to entrenched regimes, languish in prisons in the Muslim world more than any other political group.

Opening access to political participation has consistently given rise to Islamist parties as the strongest opposition as in the case of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Saudi Arabia. Islamists have participated in elections in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine and Yemen.

Just as the United States suffers from a credibility gap, so too do Islamists who have actually gained power – the Sudan, Afghanistan and to an extent Iran. There is a legitimate worry that once an Islamist movement is able to take over the state apparatus, that it will abandon its democratising project and reveal its “true colours.”

The Arab World, the United States and Democracy

Evaluating the chances for democratisation in the Middle East has shown that there are no social forces strong enough to exert pressure from the bottom up. The only groups which can be seen as pro-democratic have traditionally been marginalised by US-friendly autocratic regimes and have been put under the spotlight so to speak since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Most peoples in the Middle East see a difference between the Palestinian resistance and genuine terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. It does not help the US cause to unceremoniously lump together Hamas with these terrorist groups.

Some American policymakers have actually admitted that democracy in the Middle East will threaten US interests. Zbigniew Brezinski claims democracy in Egypt will put the Muslim Brotherhood in power. King Fahd's overthrow in Saudi Arabia might put the likes of Bin Laden in power.

The whole region has been in a heightened state of alert and seemingly constant danger since the onset of the Cold War. In such a scenario, it is business as usual for the American military-industrial complex. The US has increased arms sales to its client regime since 2000. 20 of the top 25 recipient countries in 2003 are including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Stability in exchange for the supreme control of authoritarian regimes in the region is no longer considered a viable option for US establishment. However its push for democracy in the Middle East seems to be running contrary to its short-term goals of remaining in the region and maintaining stable access to energy. Should the people be allowed to vote, then the marginalised majority will want to put Islamists in the state apparatus. There are currently no non-Islamist internal/local social forces capable of making the transition to a substantive democratisation as evinced in history.

An externally-imposed democracy will be a democracy in name, but not in fact.

Filipino Transformismo?

It is often difficult for me to read about this country as seen through non-Filipino eyes. Especially from academics. They do not have vested interest in the conclusion of their analysis. All that matters is that their work is able to reasonably substantiate its argument. It would be the same as me making an indictment about the state of democracy in the Arab region for example. I would not hesitate to conclude - chances for substantive change any time soon are slim.

While we must take everything we read with a grain of salt, I am afraid Eva-Lotta Hedman's characterization of the status quo is frighteningly accurate.

In her book In the Name of Civil Society, she describes the Philippine's 'oligarchic democracy':

Observers have variously described democracy in the Philippines in terms of 'factionalism', 'clientelism', 'bossism' and 'caciquism', but the overall pattern has been clear. From municipal mayors to provincial governors to congressmen, senators and presidents, the elected politicians of the Philippines have been drawn from the landowning, commercial and industrial oligarchy of the archipelago, representing its interests both directly and through delegation. Competition for political office has revolved around contestation for the spoils of state power - patronage perks, concessions, discretionary enforcement of regulations - between rival families and factions within this ruling class.

The broad mass of the population, while providing the lion's share of the votes in elections has thus been politically 'disaggregated', drawn into support for local, provincial and national candidates for office through webs of dependence on landlords, patrons and other brokers for votes. Poverty and economic insecurity have combined with a highly decentralized political structure to render the majority of Filipinos susceptible to clientelist, coercive and monetary inducements and pressures during elections, and to thwart electoral efforts by political parties championing the interests of subaltern classes and promoting radical social change.

Meanwhile the prominent role of money in Philippine elections - for buying votes, bribing officials, and otherwise oiling the machinery - has created a structural imperative of fund-raising that guarantees politicians' continuing use of state powers and resources for personal and particularistic benefit and their abiding reliance on landowners, merchants, bankers, and industrialists to fund them. Small wonder that observers have been most impressed by the continuities in this seemingly seamless system of oligarchical democracy in the Philippines, as seen in the close attention paid to 'political dynasties' that have dominated municipalities, congressional districts, and in some cases entire provinces across several generations and many decades.

Strategies for Late-late-late Capitalist Development Part Two

Read Part One here.

3. Reforms: From decentralisation to re-centralisation

Maoist China had only the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) as the sole financial institution. Under the centrally-planned economy it served a redistributive function and allocated funds to state-owned enterprises.

Bank diversification, as part of the over-all reform process, was initiated by the Deng regime. The PBOC began to assume a pseudo-central bank function. It remained the main financial institution controlling 80 percent of deposits and issuing 90 percent of all loans by financial institutions. A second bank was created, the Bank of China. As a PBOC’s subsidiary, it was charged with foreign exchange transactions, working closely with state-owned companies. Third was the China Construction Bank (CCB) which disbursed funds which came from the state budget for the state economic plan. Lastly the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) was created in 1984 to take over the commercial banking functions of the PBOC. These major banks would then be called the ‘Big Four.’



Like most developing countries, the Chinese government is a major employer. Until 1994, the central government supported SOEs not only to foster industries but also to maintain full employment. As of 1995, 83 percent of all SOE loans were from the Big Four. Estimates of as much as 40% of these loans are based on “policy directives” rather than commercial profitability.

The economic reforms of the late 1970s made China’s non-state sector the economy’s growth engine. This sector, which included township and village enterprises (TVEs) in the cities, collectively-owned enterprises in the countryside, private enterprises and foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs), benefited greatly from market liberalisation which removed trade barriers in various goods and facilitated import of raw materials. This growth was however constrained by the nature of the China’s financial system, which was primarily geared towards financing state-owned enterprises.

Post-1994 reforms

It is estimated that China has lost $500 billion on non-performing loans (NPLs) to SOEs, a rough equivalent of all total FDI China has garnered since 1979. These loans are characterised as ‘value-destroying’ as there is “little or no hope of repayment (Calomiris 2007: 4).”

To alleviate losses in policy-directed loans, so-called because of their political impetus, further banking diversification, along with other policies, were carried out in since 1994. Three financial institutions were created to address specific development policy objectives – the Agricultural Development, China Development and the Export-Import Banks. This freed up other types of lending for commercial purposes. In 1998, the Central government re-capitalised the Big Four ($34 billion) and established asset-management companies (AMCs) and paired them with the banks to help balance sheets. New accounting standards were also put in place to make it difficult for the Big Four to hide their bad loans.

The 1994 round [of industrial policies]…also targeted five pillar industries – machinery, electronics, petrochemicals, automobile, and construction – for “national promotion (Edin 2005: 112).”
Guonan Ma, a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements estimates that China's bank restructuring costs has amounted to RMB4 trillion (USD500 billion) as of 2005. The Ministry of Finance and the PBOC have shouldered 85 percent of the bill so far, and the rest shared by shareholders and customers both foreign and local.

Despite the reforms of the 1990s, China’s NPLs have not significantly abated. As of 2006, China's NPLs may approach 30 percent of GDP. However, what the reforms have accomplished is the concentration of public loans away from small and medium enterprises to the bigger players of the strategic sectors mentioned earlier. Between 1995 and 1999, employment in state sector decreased by 26.9 million and increased by 50 million in the non-state sector. About one-third of the small and medium SOEs have been privatised resulting to a decrease of workers in the public sector from 113 million in 1995 to 67 million by the end of 2004.

The reforms post-1994 have also led to the concentration of risk among a smaller number of SOEs. Similar to Japan’s banking crisis in the 1980s, China now faces a concentration of loans in hand-picked “winners.” In Japan smaller firms which were not given preferential access to lending sought cheaper financing from capital markets abroad. This in turn quickly made the Japanese hand-picked “winners” into losers as their profitability fell.

While foreign observers laud these reforms, some things have not fundamentally changed. The banking system is still statist. The three policy banks and the Big Four are still majority state-owned (62 percent). Even alternative sources of financing, such as the stock market, are largely state-dominated. SOEs still receive the bulk of funds from SOBs.

The status quo, while having improved on the past, is clearly still unsustainable. As China transitions further into capitalism, the public sector cannot possibly shoulder losses for very long as this damages China’s overall competitive advantage. Preferential loans lent to the public sector have resulted to a ‘glut’ of credit to the more dynamic parts of the economy, the private sector, which now accounts for about 40 percent of total industrial output. The percentage of new loans that went to this emerging group actually declined from 22 percent in 1998 to 14 percent in 2003.

The transition to more market-based financial decisions has been painfully slow and deliberate, owing to the political and social roles played by China’s banking institutions vis-à-vis the rest of the economy. The reforms of the past decade have nominally ‘massaged’ the bank books so to speak, and have reduced the losses incurred by the public sector – but value-destroying financial activities are still significant.

The next session will discuss the strategies employed by the State in manoeuvring, as it were, the Chinese behemoth in the labyrinthine complexes of global capitalism.

4. China and Global Capitalism

While initial changes of opening up the local economy to Asian capital were made in the late 1970s and continued well into the 1980s, it was clear that China was indeed, 'feeling for the stones' as it crossed the river.

Even though reforms in China had been going on for more than a decade already,
the goal of reforming the country’s economic system was still vague. Some
economists and officials responsible for the reform claimed that improving the
existing planned economic system was their only goal. Others considered it to be
the creation of a market-type economy. These two approaches clashed for quite a
long time. As long as there was no clarity about the ultimate objective of
reforms, China was literally “groping” in the dark, the only viable approach
being to take on problems as they arose. If no solution was at hand, a problem
would simply be put on freeze. As a result, many steps taken in the context of
reforms were no more than a compromise, to last as long as a new solution could
be found. The “two-level” pricing system could be called a textbook example of
this. In the late 1980s, when runaway inflation was a serious threat, there was
a growing realization that for the backlog of problems to be resolved, the goals
of reform in the economic system were to be clearly defined as soon as possible
(Zhang 2003: 40).

The 1990s finally saw some clarity China’s strategy by charting its course into what it has termed a ‘socialist market economy’ a duality of centrally-planned and market-based systems. This was a strategic choice that saved China from the US-sponsored ‘shock therapy’ experienced by former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Among the other ‘shocks’ of the 1990s was the Asian financial crisis of the 1997. Unlike its other East Asian neighbours China’s financial markets were little penetrated by highly mobile foreign capital, and thus remained unscathed. Even so, the Chinese realised that its interdependence with the global economy, while having been instrumental in its miracle growth, could also become a source of insecurity. This cautionary tale was clearly taken into account by the Chinese leadership as Jiang Zemin addressed the 15th Party National Congress. Even as he underlined the need to deepen reforms and continued engagement with the global economy, as well as the continued improvement and independence of China’s local enterprises, he emphasised the need for measured steps:

We shall use foreign capital actively, rationally and effectively. We shall
open the service trade step by step. In accordance with the law, we shall
protect the rights and interests of foreign-funded enterprises, grant them the
same treatment as their Chinese counterparts and improve guidance to and
regulation of these enterprises. We shall encourage Chinese investors to invest
abroad in areas that can bring China's comparative advantages into play so as to
make better use of both Chinese and foreign markets and resources. We shall
improve and enforce laws and statutes governing China's trade and economic
relations with foreign countries. We must correctly handle the relationship of
opening up versus independence and self-reliance, and safeguard the economic
security of the country (Zemin 1997).

Chinese academics engaged the Western conceptualisations of ‘globalisation’ and ‘interdependence’ with caveats. It was recognised that markets, production and capital had become truly global in the 1990s, and that the best way to manage globalisation was through multilateralism. Increasingly questions of the economy and environment were also being addressed, as well as issues which transcended borders and needed transnational solutions. Information revolution is recognised as the most important component of globalisation.

Chinese scholars were also cognisant that interdependence does not mean everyone can win. They cite the example of the Plaza Accord signed by the Japanese in 1985. The United States forced Japan to make significant concessions which undermined its economy (perhaps leading to the recession). Not coincidentally these changes took care of the American deficit vis-à-vis the US.

Thus began the elaborated concept of ‘security’ in Chinese strategic thinking. From 1978 to 1992, economic growth and national security maintained two separate logics. The boundary between the two became increasingly blurred in the mid 1990s. National economic security became the “most popular topic for Chinese scholars and policy-makers after the mid-1990s (Wang 2004: 528).” China’s defence white papers of the past few years are indicative of this trend.

…China's security still faces challenges that must not be neglected. The growing
interconnections between domestic and international factors and interconnected
traditional and non-traditional factors have made maintaining national security
a more challenging task (Chinese Defence White Paper 2006).

China had to prepare for economic warfare – a threat much more difficult to detect than conventional ones. It was understood that “through US power in international financial institutions, US power and hegemony can be imposed on the world—and on developing states in particular — without the use of brute military power (Breslin 2004: 663).”

It is with this kind of thinking in mind that the Chinese state carefully regulates its engagement of the global economy and vice versa. For example Chinese scholar Ye Fujing conceptualises the term ‘national financial security’ as “the ability of a financial system to function and develop organically, to the extent that it can withstand, rather than be controlled by, international capital supply/demand shocks (2007: 560).”

Financial security should be characterised not only by stability (i.e. resistance to external shocks) but also sovereignty – to ensure that foreign financial institutions do not control the local financial market and institutions and that market shares of overseas financial companies do not exceed fifty percent.

He then goes on to cite examples dating back to the late 19th century of how American banks behaved as oligopolies – with strong support of the state sector. Sovereignty is ensured by the National Banking Act of 1863 which required that officials of banks and insurance companies operating in the United States – whether domestic or foreign - must be American citizens.

‘Sovereignty’ of other advanced capitalist economies was also cited. In 2004, for example, foreign banks had a 1.4% market share in Germany, 2.8% in France, 1.3% in Japan, and the largest share—at 12%—in Spain (Ye 2007: 573).

With regard to the Asian financial crisis, some Chinese observers apparently do not discount that the ‘Asian miracle’, i.e. the Asian model of capitalism, was undermined by Western speculators deliberately.

When Asian nations called for strict regulations on transnational
speculations, Western governments led by the Clinton Administration insisted on
protecting free capital flows. The international rescue plan designed by the IMF
imposed rigid conditions on Asian nations and required them to open their
domestic markets at the climax of recession. The consequence was that Westerners
suddenly found they could get into the once-forbidden fields in Asian markets by
purchasing local companies at unimaginable low prices (Zhu 2001: 53).

Capital account liberalisation and WTO Commitments

A stable and regularised access to external markets forms the backbone of China’s export-oriented external economy. Accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, which was negotiated over a fifteen year period, finally guaranteed China access to the panacea of the Asian developmental state model – US markets.

Upon accession to the WTO, China agreed to a five-year phase in for banking services by foreign banks. On December 11, 2006, China fully liberalised its financial markets to meet its WTO obligations. Foreign banks must now be allowed to play on a level playing field as local ones. Foreign banks in operation more than doubled from 69 in 2000 to 173 in 2005. Beginning in 2004 more foreign investors were also allowed to buy shares in Chinese banks (Tong & Zheng 2007).

Authorities expect that competition from foreign players would lead to qualitative improvement of the banks’ governance. But more than such technical fixes, the WTO commitments, as an external driver, were expected to further reforms of the protected domestic state sector – namely the SOEs and SOBs – which the State could not accomplish through domestic channels given their political sensitivity.

A haphazard liberalisation of the Chinese capital account could lead to depositors rushing to move savings to foreign banks given the questionable record of domestic institutions. As such, the US has called on China’s failure to remain on schedule with its WTO commitments and the protectionist measures it adopted prior to the December 2006 deadline. A month before, the State Council issued the Regulations for the Administration of Foreign-Funded Banks. This mandated that only foreign-funded banks that have had a representative office in China for two years and that have total assets exceeding $10 billion can apply to incorporate in China. After incorporating, moreover, these banks only become eligible to offer full domestic currency services to Chinese individuals if they can demonstrate that they have operated in China for three years and have had two consecutive years of profits (USTR 2007: 89).

A second bone of contention with regard to China’s financial system is its exchange rate regime. China has been pressured to revalue the Renminbi (RMB) since 2003. While China has allowed its currency to float within a narrowly defined band since July 2005, it has been reluctant to heed calls of the international community. While it is not clear whether US trade deficit with China would improve were the RMB to revalue, the US Treasury Department has “strongly urged” China to allow the RMB to float. It has even considered legislation that would penalise China if it does not do so. There are mixed data on how much (if at all) the RMB is undervalued. The IMF claims it is undervalued, but they cannot say by how much.

China refused to bow to pressure because in the international game of ‘problem assignment’, China has so far refused to accept that the US trade deficit is its problem.

As of October 2007, even as the financial markets looked increasingly problematic due to the sub-prime crisis in the United States (EIU 2007), China has not changed this policy stance. In an address to the IMF, the PBOC’s deputy governor had this to say:

We believe that the Fund’s exchange rate surveillance should focus on whether a
member country’s exchange rate regime is consistent with its medium-term
macroeconomic policies, rather than on its exchange rate level. Given the
apparent weakness in the concept and measurement of the equilibrium exchange
rate, its estimation can serve only as one of references for technical analysis,
but not as the basis for the assessment of members’ policies. We hope the Fund
will fully recognize the diversity of members’ situations, the limited role
exchange rates play in macroeconomic management and the limitations of the tools
used for exchange rate analysis. We also hope that the Fund will respect the
autonomy of its members in choosing exchange rate regimes (Wu 2007: 7).

China has indeed taken advantage of expansion of credit in the US economy for the last decade, having been one of its most robust export markets. Now that the US is in recession (Scopical News 2008), it will be interesting to see if China will finally devalue its currency and begin a serious undertaking of cultivating its own domestic markets.


5. China’s Grand Strategy: From Rule-taker to Rule-maker?

Belatedly, US officials have noted the country's financial insecurity vis-a-vis China. "We are so dependent upon decisions made in other countries' capitals" says Senator Hillary Clinton. In a discussion she had with a retired general, she was given the nightmare scenario of the PRC finally invading Taiwan with the US unable to defend the island because Beijing might well say "Fine. You do that, we will dump your dollars. We will flood the market. We will not buy any more of your debt (Mason 2008)."

The United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission cites as issues of concern China's trade surplus with the US. As of November 2007 this was at $163.8 billion. Its foreign currency reserves is at $1.43 trillion, 70 percent (or 1 trillion) of which are invested in dollar denominated assets, mostly in US sovereign and corporate bonds (USSC 2007).

As the US domestic economy falls into recession, China will have saved more than enough for the rainy days coming ahead and may be better able to weather the economic storm in its primary export market. The PRC will also have enough foreign reserves to continue importing vital commodities such as crude oil. And as the US dollar continues to fall in value, China may well decide to unload its holdings to switch to more stable currencies, such as the Euro. Various Chinese officials have already said as much. Because Chinese business interests are also state interests, any pronouncements of such kind are always treated as political threats. Former World Bank chief economist and US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has used the term 'balance of financial terror' echoing the nuclear stand-off between the Soviets and the US during the Cold War. If China does decide to unload its US dollars en masse, will it be shooting its own foot? In turn, how will the US react?

Due to the credit crunch brought on by the sub-prime crisis, Chinese financial institutions have also been taking advantage of the 'fire sale' in the heart of the American financial capital, acquiring shares in long-standing US financial institutions such as Blackstone and Morgan Stanley (Straszheim 2007). Meanwhile, the collapse of Bear Sterns, with which China’s Citic Securities had cross-investment deals to the tune of $1 billion, has been a learning experience for Chinese players to tread more cautiously. Nevertheless, China’s financial instruments will continue its global expansion (Zhao 2008).

In September last year, the PRC created the China Investment Corporation (CIC) to further venture into the weird, wired world of global capital markets. This new economic policy arm will take charge of China's gargantuan foreign currency reserves. European and American politicians have already expressed worry that the CIC will purchase shares in other countries’ sensitive industrial sectors - and may be used as political leverage in the future. The CIC’s chief risk officer quickly allayed any such suspicions by saying that “The claim that sovereign-wealth funds are causing threats to state security and economic security is groundless…We don't need outsiders to come tell us how we should act (WSJ 2008).”

Given such patterns it is apparent that China is well on its way to flexing its financial muscles and has been successful at playing the high finance game. One would think that the PRC has been taking pointers from Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations – that the path to global leadership and power entails owning and operating the international banking system, controlling hard currencies and dominating international capital markets.

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky doesn't really say anything new in this LSE public lecture, but he neatly ties everything together in a bright red bow that will have you thinking, WOW.

EVERYBODY needs to hear this. You, your parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends, enemies, pets, pests, colleagues, everybody. And listen up to the very end. More interesting stuff in the Q&A.

From the event announcement:

"Clay Shirky, one of the new culture’s wisest observers, steer us through the online social explosion and ask what happens when people are given the tools to work together, without needing traditional organisational structures. As online communication becomes ubiquitous, Shirky unpicks fundamental issues that are increasingly the source of much debate in particular in the media, in business, and in government, all of whom are grappling to make sense of the new social revolution. He argues that the conundrum is not whether the spread of these social tools is good or bad, but rather what the impact will be, for better or for worse."

Ok, pass on.

Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey

How cool is this? Free video lectures! With the world turned into shit, Uncle Karl is in vogue once more. And with Socialist Imperialism (read the Soviet Union) dead and discredited, perhaps a review of Marx and the permutations/elaborations of his scholarship can again be undertaken without the ideological baggage.

"A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by David Harvey."

Vicious Cycles of Technological Underdevelopment

As some of you may know, I am currently scanning as many documents as possible. Uncluttering my home has lead to unearthing some nifty stuff - like my STS readings! I present the first entry under my 'fun with a scanner' label.




To help explain the diagram above, please refer to The Uncertain Quest: Science, Technology and Development.

The Population (Debate's) Explosions

As a response to last week's Talk of the Town in the Inquirer discussing the contents of the Reproductive Health bill, the CBCP will issue their arguments this coming Sunday.

From a socio-economic point of view, here is a fun read this weekend.

The population issue – now passé elsewhere in the developing world, even in the poorer countries – remains a durable puzzle in the Philippines. On the one hand, a majority of Filipinos regard rapid population growth as an impediment to socioeconomic development, requiring policy intervention; on the other hand, virtually nothing is being done about it as the government appears immobilized owing to opposition from the conservative Catholic Church hierarchy. Central to the population issue are the negative externalities that sustained high fertility brings to bear on economic growth, the environment, inequality and poverty. These externalities plus the fact that women, particularly in poor households, are having more children than their desired number, as repeatedly shown by surveys, constitute strong grounds for an unambiguous population policy. Population is evidently a public interest issue that the national government must address squarely objection from some religious groups notwithstanding.

As I am trawling the net for data, I hear Dr. Ben Diokno's interview conducted by our organisation. As of 2 weeks ago at least, and according to the UP economist, the Philippines is the most unstable country in Asia (politically and economically), even more so than perceivable basket-cases Myanmar and Laos. Hooray.

The Philippines in Crisis: Failures of Economic Governance

Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC)

together with

Global Call to Action Against Poverty-Philippines (GCAP)
UPD School of Economics Student Council
UPD Economics Towards Consciousness (ETC) and
UPD College of Social Science and Philosophy Student Council

Invites you to a Forum on

The Philippines in Crisis: The Failures of Economic Governance

University of the Philippines- Diliman School of Economics

July 23, 2008 9:00AM-1:00PM


Program

9:00AM Arrival and Registration

10:00AM Welcome Remarks

UP Economics Towards Consciousness (ETC)


10:15 AM Presentations

Under the Shadow of Debt: Global Trends and the Philippine Economy

Professor Walden Bello

President, Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC)

10:30AM Under a Perfect Storm: The Power and Oil Crisis

Wilson Fortaleza

Co-convenor, EmPower Consumers


10:45AM The Starving Nation: The Food Crisis in the Philippines

Arze Aglipo (to confirm)

Executive Director, Integrated Rural Development Foundation (IRDF)


11:00AM The Lingering Political Malady: The Failure of Democratic

Governance

Loretta Ann Rosales

Three-time Party-list Representative

Chairperson Emeritus, Akbayan! Citizens’ Action Party

11:15AM Reactors

Dr. Emmanuel De Dios (to confirm)
Dean, UP School of Economics

School of Economics Student Council

11:30AM Open Forum

Moderator:

Joel Saracho

Coordinator, Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP)

IBON Midyear 2008 Birdtalk

An alternative venue to discuss the most pressing economic issues of today at the UP School of Economics. Click the picture to enlarge and see details.

Kritika Kultura Lectures

Department of English
Ateneo de Manila University
School of Humanities

“QUIAPO MON AMOUR”: THE GLOBAL MAPPING OF A STREET CINEMATHEQUE

by
Jasmine Nadua Trice

18 July 2008, Friday
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Faura Audio-Visual Room

About the lecture:

This lecture provides an overview of my dissertation project, tentatively entitled Imagined Communities, Imagined Cosmopolitanisms: Spaces of Cinema Circulation in Manila, Philippines, 2006-2008. Grounded in cinema studies, the work examines the circulation of independent cinema in Manila, Philippines, focusing on "alternative" sites of exhibition and their positions within the overlapping arenas of art and politics. Combining participant-observation with analysis of cinema texts and their surrounding discourses in media and institutional documents, the project argues that examining the processes of these works' production, distribution, and exhibition within a specific, urban setting offers new frames for studying local cinematic cultures in the contexts of globalization, frameworks usually approached through audience reception ("resistant" readings of global mass culture) or production (textual analysis of radical works). Rather, by viewing the circulation of small scale works whose experimental aesthetics or radical politics place them at a distance from the more commonly examined global mass culture, the project aims to develop a new approach to cultural goods' local and transnational flows. It examines the ways this model operates within a distinctive system of cultural capital driven by aesthetics, politics and the cachet of internationalism, but ultimately, committed to local artistic communities and political solidarities.

About the speaker:

Jasmine Nadua Trice, a PhD candidate of the Department of Communication and Culture/American Studies Program of Indiana University, takes research interest on cinema theory, history and production, globality, cinema exhibition, new media, reception and audience studies, national cinema, experimental cinema, third cinema, post-coloniality, media spaces, ethnography, gender, and the everyday. She was also an associate instructor in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University.

-----------------

Kritika Kultura Lecture Series

invites you to a lecture

Time Passante: From Forensic to Interrogation Modernity

by

David Lloyd
Professor of English, University of Southern California

22 July 2008, Tuesday
1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Faculty Lounge, De la Costa G/F
Ateneo de Manila University

About the lecture:

The lecture will discuss Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire, Bobby Sands's prison ballads and contemporary techniques of in-depth interrogation. It will draws on the experience of Irish political prisoners to explore the way in which interrogation has become a generalized mode of subjectification in late modernity (as opposed to the forensic mode of earlier periods).

About the speaker:

David Lloyd, Professor of English at the University of Southern California , is the author of Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987); Anomalous States (1993); Ireland After History (2000) and Irish Times: Essays on the History and Temporality of Irish Modernity (forthcoming 2008). He is currently at work on two further books, A History of the Irish Orifice: the Irish Body and Modernity and a study of Samuel Beckett’s visual aesthetics. He has co-published several other books: Culture and the State, co-authored with Paul Thomas (1997), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (1997), with Lisa Lowe, and The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1991), with Abdul JanMohamed. A poet and playwright, he is in the International Board of Editors of Kritika Kultura. His major publications easily mark Prof. Lloyd as an important intellectual in literary and cultural studies today.

Dangerous Questions About Bananas

Intresting blog post at SocFinance. The author points to a New York Times op-ed piece which asks the question: why is the banana, grown waaay down in the tropics, cheaper than an apple grown on US soil? This spurs the author to further ask:

We do not doubt that objects can be valuated differently, but my question is about the calculative underpinnings that sustain inequalities between food producers (humans). It is one thing...to show that pricing and valuation of goods is socio-technically produced. It is quite another to pinpoint just how these prices have, in actual cases, participated in created economic inequalities capable of wiping out entire agricultural industries and shifting the geo-politics of production in favor of some populations over others.

And then this exchange on the blog comments yield yet more interesting questions:

alisonkemper1: "I see in this post some concerns about economic justice. Can SSF help to explain why economics that reinforces unequal distribution of value created has increasingly dominated the landscape?...Are we another form of dirty hippies guised as social scientists? Why do we care about the price of bananas?"

marthapoon: "Is interest in inequality necessarily about justice? SSF has a bad rap in sociolology for being about elites. I thought the post was about ‘bredth of question’ more than anything else…! "

alisonkemper1: "The range of discourse is itself a political decision, is it not? If you begin to speak of the inequality of distribution, you will begin to look for an answer to some difficult problems that others do not wish to open.

The only rightist response to the creation and buttressing of systems of unequal distribution of goods is willful obfuscation. If you ask why the low prices of bananas picked by black people in Jamaica are predicated upon the lower worth of the pickers’ labour, you are asking a dangerous question. BTW, isn’t almost all fruit in North America picked by Mexican and Caribbean people, whether as migrants or as workers in their homes and native lands?"

marthapoon: "A choice of discourse may be political but the question is, is this politics always necessarly defined on a classical spectrum of left and right? Aren’t there analytic questions that (are politically interesting precisely because they) defy these (rapidly shifting) classifications?

What you write about labour is interesting, becuase contrary to your reading, I actually thought this piece was about how the labour of the local Carribean worker is potentially higher in value than elsewhere since this fruit is actually more expensive that the one coming from abroad."

alisonkemper1: "I have no idea why North Americans needed bananas so cheap that it was worth having paramilitary forces aligned with fruit companies. It makes little sense to me.

But we must also explain why tropical fruit prices have fallen in real terms so radically. We don’t demand cheap bananas and pineapple, we demand them at a cost not much higher than zero.

We are willing to pay for mangoes, papayas, durian, pomelos and lichis. But we have to use masked goons all over Latin America to gain the prices we want for bananas.

We must explain both phenomena: the violence as part of the price, and the difference with other tropical fruit."