Value Competition

Obama's Peace Prize

The following op-ed uses Obama's recent Nobel Prize to combine value competition ideas about good things arising from the competition of self-interested pols with classical/neoclassical economic ideas about good things arising from the competition of self-interested businesspeople:

Robbed by Oslo:

 

Obama and Other Peacemakers Whose Successes Were Overlooked

 

Wayne Eastman

Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick

1 Washington Park

Newark, NJ 07102

weastman@business.rutgers.edu

(973) 353-1001

 

    With its airy recognition of Barack Obama for potential rather than accomplishment--"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"--the Norwegian Nobel Committee did the President and the cause of peacemaking a disservice, but not for the reason that most critics of the award have suggested.

    In fact, Obama would have been a reasonable if controversial choice for a peace prize based on accomplishment, given his substantial contributions as an opposition politician and then as President to the winding down of the war in Iraq.

As an anti-war Democratic candidate in 2007, Obama took the position that the U.S. needed to withdraw large numbers of troops from Iraq relatively quickly.  At the time, that position was highly controversial though popular among many Democratic primary voters, and was opposed by Hillary Clinton, John McCain and other Republican candidates, and the Bush administration.   Two years later, Obama’s position has become conventional wisdom, and has gone along with a major reduction in violence and considerable political progress in Iraq. 

    It is true that the situation in Iraq was and is highly complex, and that figures in addition to Obama--David Petraeus with his military ingenuity and Nouri al-Maliki with his outreach beyond his political base are just two who come to mind—can also be credited with major roles in the reduction in bloodshed and increase in order.  Still, a Nobel award that recognized Obama “for his central role as a democratic opposition politician and then as President in fostering a resolution to a long-running war in Iraq” would have been sound in a way that the actual award citation was not.

Although the oddity of Obama’s being recognized by the Nobel Committee for the wrong reason makes his situation unusual, he stands in a long line of figures in politics and in business over the decades who have made major contributions to peace but have been unrecognized by Oslo, with its chronic bias toward noble gestures and diplomatic agreements.

Unless they engage in dramatic diplomatic deals, hardheaded democratic politicians like Obama who care about winning elections and who often wage war as well as peace are poorly represented in the roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners.  For example, Boris Yeltsin, whose decision to end Russian control over Ukraine and the other parts of the Soviet empire was intertwined with his own electoral calculations as President of Russia and who later went to war in Chechnya, did not win a Nobel.

Given the Nobel Committee’s tilt against practical politicians, Yeltsin’s failure to win is not surprising.  But considering that it was Yeltsin—not Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted to preserve the Soviet Union—who ended the coercive Russian empire, the Nobel Committee wound up snubbing one of the century’s major contributors to peace. 

Another politician who didn’t fit the Nobel Committee’s preferences for idealism and diplomacy but who made a major peacemaking contribution was Charles de Gaulle.  Given his deep identification with the French military, French nationalism, and French party politics, along with his often undiplomatic diplomacy, de Gaulle did not fit the Nobel Committee’s criteria well at all.  But as the man who led his nation out of a brutal, futile, and very difficult to end war in Algeria in the early 1960s, he would have been a deserving winner.   

Hardheaded businesspeople who worry about profits are even more poorly represented among Nobel Peace Prize winners than hardheaded democratic politicians who worry about elections.  But business leaders who have knit the world together economically have likely done far more for international peace in the past several decades than many actual Nobel winners have. 

For example, Sony founder Akio Morita and long-time Toyota leader Eiji Toyoda would have been worthy Peace Prize recipients, given their roles in transforming a nation that had been convulsed by violent nationalism into a model of how to succeed through economic rather than military strength.  Neither Toyoda’s contributions to a just-in-time inventory system that has encouraged businesses to integrate their operations with those of other businesses around the world nor Morita’s contributions to innovations in electronics that in turn have contributed to a global popular culture fit into the familiar Nobel categories of idealism and diplomacy.   But if the right test is how much a life’s work has moved a nation and the world away from the ways of war to ways of peace, both men would have been good choices.

Given that consequences are tricky to evaluate and that hardheaded democratic politicians and businesspeople have multiple motives and are not saints, recognizing them for contributions to peace will always be controversial.   If Sam Walton had won a Nobel Peace Prize for his central role in knitting together the Chinese and American economies and in doing so enhancing the prospects for world peace, the award would have been simultaneously reasonable and open to reasonable criticism from the many critics of Walton and Wal-Mart.

   Likewise, it would undoubtedly have been controversial if Obama had been recognized in 2009 for his contributions over the last two years to reduced violence in Iraq, given the complexity of the situation there and the close connection between Obama’s actions and his political ambitions.  But such recognition would have been much more sensible than what the Nobel Committee actually did.

There have been all too many Nobels awarded over the years for high-minded but less than effective idealism and ultimately futile diplomatic deals.   Progress toward world peace has depended and will depend in large part on hardheaded, calculating actions by imperfect, unsaintly leaders like Boris Yeltsin, Charles de Gaulle, Akio Morita, Eiji Toyoda, and Sam Walton.  Perhaps in his acceptance speech in Oslo, Barack Obama can employ his formidable gift for explaining to tell us how he is proud to be one of those leaders, rather than the plaster saint that the Nobel Committee takes him for.

A Downside of Left-Right Value Competition

Although I'm optimistic about left-right competition in the United States and other wealthy democracies, it does have its difficulties.  One difficulty is that a deeply embedded left-right culture fosters a mode of writing in which the author and some of the author's audience finds satisfaction in a demonstration that ideological opponents have engaged in a course of action driven by adherence to ideology.  Such writing is frustrating to readers who are unconcerned with such a demonstration of ideological motives and concerned instead with whether the course of action taken makes sense and what alternative actions might be preferable.

That's my core reaction to Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.   At the length of a magazine article--a format in which I've enjoyed Caldwell's work--the unmasking exercise he engages in strikes me as worthwhile; he is right, I think, that European elites impelled by a "never again" horror over Fascism and ethnocentric nationalism as well as by a desire for cheap labor were ideologically predisposed to support a multicultural Europe and did not think over carefully what that involved or submit expanded immigration to democratic debate.  But with 442 pages to work with, Caldwell has more than enough room to make a reasoned case not merely about ideological motivation but about the rights and wrongs of immigration policy.  That he does not do, unfortunately.  instead, we have snark directed toward European elites.

it's possible, of course, that my belief that Caldwell does not engage the pros and cons of policy effectively is tinged by my own ideological tilt toward the position that for all the very real problems of mass Muslim immigration to Western Europe, the long-run outlook for European nations, for immigrants, and for predominantly Muslim nations is better than absent the immigration wave; I like the prospects for France in the 21st century considerably better than I like the prospects for Japan.  But I also believe that Caldwell's book is affected for the worse by a deep-rooted ideological culture that makes unmasking of the ideological foe enough for some of us, inadequate as it is for others of us.  Books that criticize liberal (or conservative) ideology but that also argue that a different understanding is correct--such as the Thernstroms' data-laden argument that the U.S. was doing better on race before the rise of affirmative action, or Herrnstein and Murray's similarly data-laden argument about the connection between heritable IQ and life success--are stimulated by an embedded left-right ideological culture just as Caldwell's is, but are, I think, better ways for a reader to spend his or her valuable time than reading a book that unmasks without advancing its own argument.

How about Burke, whose book on the French Revolution is Caldwell's titular inspiration?  Burke's argument is not data-laden in the mode of much modern ideologically-driven debate, but it is clear, thoughtful, and passionate.  If Burke's reflections were like Caldwell's, instead of Burke's actual full-throated denunciation of the planned society in which all vistas lead to the gallows and his powerful and emotional defense of an English order of tradition and gradual change, we would have a small book that stopped with unmasking the motives of the revolutionaries and their English sympathizers. 

Why Thomas L. Friedman Should Not Be President

Thomas Friedman's latest, which I just returned to the very useful Newark Public Library, http://www.npl.org/ is Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How it Can Renew America:

http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/hot-flat-and-crowded

Over the years, Friedman has been impressive in his ability to promote and popularize policies--engagement in the Middle East, globalization, and now a green revolution in energy--as beneficial for America despite their costs to some Americans.  His policy agenda, though, does not balance between big ideas that are more congenial to those in the educational and economic vanguard of American society and ideas that are more congenial to those lower in the socioeconomic spectrum.  As the Sunday NYT review noted, Friedman's latest is more "left" in the sense of supporting government regulation than his globalization books were.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Freedland-t.html  But it is of a piece with his earlier work in its advocacy of a position more likely to appeal to America's socioeconomic winners than to those doing less well.

For an opinion columnist and writer, Friedman's tilt is fine, much as I'd like one day to read a book by him extolling a big idea more responsive to the preferences of those further down the social ladder.  For political leadership, on the other hand, the situation is very different.  A  proposition of value competition theory is that to deter politicians from facilitating value-reducing, beggar-my-neighbor policy-making on behalf of elites or the majority, it is highly important to have a balance between party values that favor those better off and those worse off.   Barack Obama (and John McCain) function in a party system that imposes some kind of elite-majority balance on a party politician's views; we should be thankful for that, much as we can and should debate as citizens, advocates, and scientists how well that balance functions and whether both sides honor it properly.

Splitting Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Iraq

The 10-20 NY Times describes the reluctance of some generally pro-American Shiite and Sunni parties to sign on to a security agreement with the US that would by their lights restrict US forces insufficiently: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/middleeast/20iraq.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

One key factor in whether Iraq will be able to pull together as a democracy is whether there will be two competing sides that both blend pro-Iraqi, anti-foreigner nationalism with more cosmopolitan positions.  The alternative--an opposition of a nationalist and a cosmpolitan side--will not work to create a sustainable democracy.

An opposition between an alliance of Kurds, Sunnis, and pro-American Shiites on one side and anti-American Sadrist Shiites on the other could work well for the first criterion of splitting nationalism.  The more pro-American side can attack the Sadrists as pawns of Iran, and the Sadrists can similarly take it to their foes as being pawns of America, with both sides having some valid claim to truly represent Iraqi national pride as against foreign domination.

Could the opposition also work for the second criterion of splitting cosmopolitanism between the sides?  I'm pessimistic on that score.  There's a whole lot that I don't know about the situation in Iraq, but I don't see transnational Shiism or secular intellectual values as likely to generate a cosmopolitan aspect to the Sadrist side that would balance out the likely pro-business, pro-Western (or less anti-Western) cosmopolitan qualities of a Dawa/ISCI/Tawafiq/Kurdish alliance on the other side.