Political Science Sampler 2020

POLITICAL SCIENCE

SAMPLER Cornell University Press 2020

This sampler includes a small excerpt from the following new and forthcoming books from Cornell University Press and its imprints.

For more details about these books, as well as others in this field, please visit our website.

Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, by Simon Miles The Justice Dilemma: Leaders and Exile in an Era of Accountability, by Daniel Hrcmaric Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight against Hunger, by Michelle Jurkovich Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand, by Ruth Streicher Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of US Human Rights Diplomacy, by Vanessa Walker Why Noncompliance: The Politics of Law in the European Union, by Tanja A. Börzel How To Prevent Coups D’État, by Erica De Bruin

ENGAGING THE EVIL EMPIRE

WA S H I NGTO N, M OS COW, A N D TH E BEGI NNI N G O F T H E E N D O F T H E CO L D WA R

S imon Miles

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Miles, Simon, 1988– author.

Title: Engaging the evil empire : Washington, Moscow, and the beginning of the end of the Cold War / Simon Miles.

Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020016628 (print) | LCCN 2020016629 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501751691 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501751707 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501751714 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Cold War. | World politics—1975–1985. | United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States.

Classification: LCC D849 .M5412 2020 (print) | LCC D849 (ebook) | DDC 909.82/5—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016628 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020​ 016629

Co nte nts

Acknowl­edgments

ix

Abbreviations xiii Note on Transliteration and Translation xv

Introduction: ­Grand Strategy and the End of the Cold War

1

1. Red Star Rising: The World according to Washington and Moscow

11

2. Arm to Parley: Reagan Rebuilds and Reaches Out

33

3. Talking about Talking: Continuities and Crises

57

4. Trial Balloons: Reaching Out and Laying Groundwork

84

5. New Departures: The Beginning of the End of the Cold War

106

Conclusion: Winners and Losers

130

Notes 141 Bibliography 201 Index 223

Introduction ­Grand Strategy and the End of the Cold War

A Soviet worker is to be given the honor of carry­ing General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko’s portrait in the 1984 May Day parade. “­Don’t ask me to do that,” he demurs. “I carried Lenin’s portrait and he died. I carried Stalin’s portrait and he died. I carried Khrushchev’s portrait and he dis­appeared. I carried Brezhnev’s portrait and he died. Not long ago I carried Andropov’s portrait and he died too.” His boss insists, “You have golden hands! You must carry Comrade Chernenko’s portrait.” A fellow worker then chimes in, “Let him carry the red flag [of the Soviet Union]!”1 Jokes (anekdoty in Rus­sian) like this abounded in the Soviet Union during the early 1980s, and with good reason. A string of politburo members died in rapid succession: one ­every six months, on average, between 1980 and 1985.2 In the United States, leaders also made light of the seemingly constant flow of obituaries out of the Kremlin. Vice President George H. W. Bush, as the White House chief of staff James Baker joked, should have a­ dopted “you die, I fly” as his unofficial motto on account of his regular attendance at funerals in Moscow.3 It seemed that t­ here was no one Ronald Reagan could do business with in the Kremlin. And even if ­there ­were, ­there was ­little evidence to suggest that the president was willing to do so in the first place. Reagan appeared to miss no opportunity to attack the Soviet Union. In his view, its ­ uman leaders could not be trusted.4 Its ideology was a “bizarre chapter in h 5 history” and certain to fail. “The march of freedom and democracy,” Reagan 1

2 Introduct ion

insisted, “­will leave Marxism-­Leninism on the ash heap of history.”6 The Soviet Union was “the focus of evil in the modern world” and, most famously of all, an “evil empire.”7 The Soviets gave as good as they got. According to General Secretary Iuriĭ Andropov, Reagan had nothing to say but “profanities alternated with hypocritical preaching.”8 An article in Pravda summed up his administration’s foreign policy as ­little more than “nuclear insanity.”9 The Soviet press even went so far as to liken the fortieth president to Adolf Hitler.10 The end of the Cold War pre­sents a puzzle to this day. “Wars, hot or cold, do not normally end with the abrupt but peaceful collapse of a major antagonist,” the historian John Lewis Gaddis observed a de­cade ­after the conflict’s end. “Such an event had to have deep roots, and yet neither our histories nor our theories came anywhere close to detecting ­these. . . . ​The Cold War went on for a very long time, and then all of a sudden it went away.”11 So profound a transformation of the international system had theretofore only been brought about by great-­power war.12 The end of the Cold War, by comparison, was remarkably—­albeit not completely—­peaceful.13 In the years since the Cold War’s improbable and unpredictable end, the conventional scholarly and policy wisdom has coalesced around four explanations. To some, the Cold War ended b­ ecause Ronald Reagan rejected the failed foreign policy doctrines of containment and détente and crafted a new ­g rand strategy that ended it.14 Rejecting this triumphalism, ­others credit Mikhail Gorbachev, whose new thinking transformed the Soviet Union and transcended the East-­West confrontation.15 Alternative explanations look beyond the superpowers entirely, focusing on the power of ­people: ­human rights activists, anti-­nuclear campaigners, concerned scientists, and citizens who reshaped their world.16 And for all ­these explanations centered on the agency of individuals, t­ here are t­ hose who point instead to structural forces, the broader trends and systemic weaknesses that ­shaped their choices.17 None of ­these explanations accounts fully for the remarkable pace of the transformation—­especially given what came before. ­After all, the Cold War’s denouement between 1985 and 1991 is regularly cited as a textbook case of long-­standing adversaries setting aside prior disagreements and beginning to cooperate.18 And the conventional wisdom maintains that this transformation was sudden, emerging out of the deep freeze of the so-­called Second Cold War from 1979 to 1985.19 Détente, many argue, was dead—­and with it, any meaningful dialogue between the superpowers during the first half of the de­ cade. Then, suddenly, every­thing seemed to change for the better.

This rapid rate of change, too, pre­sents a puzzle. One school of thought posits an abrupt “reversal” in Reagan’s approach. Nearing the end of his first term,

I n t r o d u c t i o n

3

the president shifted his strategy from one of confrontation to one of cooperation, motivated in large part by fears that the Cold War might turn hot.20 Another rejects the idea of Reagan as ­grand strategist; rapid change should come as no surprise when ­there was no consistency in US policy. Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union instead strug­gled to reconcile two irreconcilable impulses: seeking peace for a world that included the Soviet Union (which required working with the Kremlin) and eradicating communism worldwide (which ­necessitated ousting its occupants).21 Alternatively, many seize on the fact that Gorbachev’s accession to power and the beginning of Cold War’s apparent shift from confrontation to cooperation both occurred in 1985. The new general secretary was the missing piece, the indispensable ­factor who remade not only his country but also the world.22 And some challenge the notion that t­ here was a rapid change at all, arguing that policy makers in Eu­rope kept détente alive and the lines of communication open throughout the early 1980s.23 In seeking to understand both why the Cold War ended as it did and the deep roots of that transformation, archival evidence from both sides of the Iron Curtain led me to three conclusions. First and foremost, the key to understanding the puzzle of the Cold War’s rapid and unexpected denouement at the end of the 1980s lies in the beginning of the de­cade. In the span of just five years, between 1980 and 1985, the Cold War transformed in two fundamental ways: from a balance of power perceived to ­favor the Soviet Union to the more realistic perception of one tilted in ­favor of the United States, and, as a result, from a war of words coupled with back-­channel discussions to overt superpower dialogue and summitry. T ­ hose twin shifts constituted the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Second, US ­g rand strategy ­shaped both of ­these pro­cesses. From 1981 on, Reagan implemented a ­grand strategy with parallel and complementary tracks.

The first, what the president referred to as “quiet diplomacy,” was the proverbial carrot. Reagan had long seen dialogue with the Soviet Union as impor­tant not only to keep Cold War tensions ­under control, but also—­and arguably more importantly—to cement US advantage through diplomatic agreements which would constrain the rival superpower.24 The second, dubbed “peace through strength,” was the corresponding stick. Reagan was convinced that the United States needed to rebuild its military strength in order to secure ­these advantageous agreements.25 A more secure United States would create a more secure world, he believed, deterring Soviet adventurism. Reagan’s g­ rand strategy was, in the words of his second secretary of state, George P. Shultz, the “parallel pursuit of strength and negotiation.”26 Third, successive Soviet leaders had ­g rand strategies of their own. Gorbachev did not inherit a blank slate on coming to power in March 1985, even

4 Introduct ion

if he himself dismissed the preceding years as nothing but “an era of stagnation” (zastoĭ in Rus­sian).27 Many agree with the final general secretary, dismissing his geriatric pre­de­ces­sors out of hand. The end of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, along with Iuriĭ Andropov’s and Konstantin Chernenko’s short tenures, was no more than an “interregnum.” History was waiting for Gorbachev.28 In fact, Soviet g­ rand strategy u ­ nder all four sought, in varying ways, to reduce Cold War tensions in the hopes of creating breathing space to address the myriad economic, social, and po­liti­cal prob­lems multiplying at home. For policy makers in the Kremlin, this never entailed abandoning the Cold War rivalry.

They tried to strike a balance between cooperation and confrontation in order to redress the power imbalance between the two superpowers and compete more effectively. ­These three interventions—­situating the roots of the Cold War’s end in the early 1980s, identifying the Reagan administration’s dual-­track ­g rand strategy, and mapping the evolution of the Soviet ­g rand strategy—­are only pos­si­ble thanks to international archival evidence. ­These sources illuminate how and why policy makers crafted strategy, but also how ­others perceived ­those choices and the global context in which they unfolded. ­Here, documents from Czecho­ slo­va­k ia, East Germany, and Ukraine combine with extensive research in Rus­ sian archives to produce a more complete Eastern perspective; and US materials join with Australian, British, Canadian, French, and West German rec­ords to do the same for the Western side of the story. This “pericentric” approach sheds new light not only on both superpowers, but also on the roles of their allies as actors in their own right.29 Such an outlook also addresses the challenges inherent in con­temporary history, not least ­those of access and classification. Tapping into alliance networks—­triangulation—­can overcome ­these obstacles. Take, for example, the Soviet Union. Moscow sought to shape its allies’ foreign policies, but exerting such control was not automatic; it required meetings, briefings, and the flow of information—­all of which left a paper trail, accessible in repositories across Eastern Eu­rope where states have made transitions to demo­ cratic governments that prioritize transparency and access to information pertaining to their communist pasts.30 But what Stephen Kotkin terms “speaking Bolshevik” pre­sents historians working with such intra-­bloc documents with an added challenge: they must separate pro forma pablum from meaningful commentary on the activities of the Eastern Bloc or perceptions of the West.31 Iosef Stalin once famously dismissed historians as mere “archive rats,” so focused on hunting down individual documents that they miss the big picture—­ unable to see the forest for the trees or, rather, the products thereof.32 But

I n t r o d u c t i o n

5

t­hose documents can illuminate aspects of a past unknown even to participants and eyewitnesses. In this case, new evidence from both the superpowers and their allies, in both the Eastern and Western blocs, brings to light the pivotal importance of the first half of the 1980s and the ­g rand strategies employed by Washington and Moscow to begin to end the Cold War. At its core, the Cold War was a strug­gle of global proportions between two competing systems, rival definitions of legitimacy and modernity driven e­ ither by the market or the state. Since its outbreak in the aftermath of World War II, the conflict had been defined by a mix of cooperation and competition between the superpowers. Indeed, the former was often a key means of ­doing the latter. Like their pre­de­ces­sors, leaders in Washington and Moscow during the early 1980s debated how best to engage their Cold War rival in order to come out on top.

The storied dialogue between Reagan and Gorbachev of the late 1980s did not appear out of the blue; the preceding half de­cade of East-­West engagement, much of which has remained in the shadows, made it pos­si­ble. Engagement ­here does not mean cooperation. Knowing the intentions with which both US and Soviet negotiators came to the bargaining t­ able, it is hard to sustain the argument that they wanted only to cooperate with their Cold War adversary; rather, both superpowers saw engagement as a means of furthering their own, primarily competitive goals.33 Engagement describes diplomacy in a value-­and intention-­neutral way: a contest, constrained in time and scope, that is a step t­ oward the attainment of a greater objective.34 For both superpowers, what that objective was changed during the years between 1980 and 1985, but it remained competitive in nature.

How US and Soviet policy makers approached engagement depended as much on perception as real­ity. Indeed, so much of the story of the Cold War is one of perception, real­ity, and the varying (and often vast) distance between the two. The first half of the 1980s was no dif­fer­ent. On the campaign trail in 1980, Reagan and his advisers lamented the United States’ weak position and feared the consequences thereof. Washington would have to wait if it was to engage the Soviet Union on terms favorable to the United States. Upon taking office, the Reagan administration’s priority was rebuilding. Over the next five years, its outlook brightened considerably. The US economy recovered, while the Soviet economy continued its decline. Reagan’s defense buildup under­wrote a new confidence in US foreign-­policy making. So, too, did major structural trends emerging around the world. Markets and politics ­were becoming freer, something that could scarcely benefit a superpower built on quasi-­ autarky and single-­party rule like the Soviet Union. All ­these developments

6 Introduct ion

redounded to Washington’s benefit, emboldening the Reagan administration to overtly engage the Soviet leadership. The transition was the opposite in Moscow. In 1980, Soviet policy makers believed themselves to be in a better position than the United States. Such optimism was short lived. Soviet economic and military power steadily declined, plagued by prob­lems from Kabul to Warsaw—­many of them of the Kremlin’s own making. Whereas the Reagan administration took license from rising US power to begin overtly engaging the Soviet Union, the Kremlin concluded that Soviet decline, which showed no signs of abating, necessitated a return to the bargaining ­table.

In Washington and Moscow alike, policy makers often misjudged their own position in the world, especially vis-­à-­vis that of the other superpower. In real­ity, the balance of power between the two shifted far less between 1980 and 1985 than did their perceptions thereof. But throughout, both superpowers sought to engage from a position of strength, and both focused disproportionately on the other’s pursuit of strength—­mostly militarily—as compared to their professed desire to negotiate. T ­ hese military mea­sures seemed to t­hose b­ ehind them to be defensive in nature, redressing an unfavorable imbalance; but to the other superpower, ­these ostensibly defensive mea­sures appeared both offensive and threatening.35 That same perception runs through observers’ accounts, be they allies or the general public, or ­those of historians writing ­after the fact.

The central role of perception in the events and evolutions of the first half of the 1980s is an impor­tant reminder: ­those years may have constituted the beginning of the end of the Cold War, but that pro­cess remained highly contingent. Leaders in both Washington and Moscow responded to one another and to the changing world in which they operated, but the choices they made ­were far from preordained.36 Time and again, they could have made dif­fer­ent ones that would have set the Cold War on a more confrontational course and made the world a less safe place. A declining Soviet Union could have reacted by lashing out. A rising United States could have pressed its advantage too far.

Instead, both superpowers successfully managed the potentially dangerous power shift that played out between 1980 and 1985.37 “Gorbachev is hard to understand,” the last general secretary told his biographer William Taubman, referring, as he often does, to himself in the third person.38 By contrast, he maintained that it was easy to make sense of what had come before him: stagnation, and nothing more. But the pro­cess of reevaluating this period of Soviet history has already begun, in part catalyzed by the ongoing opening of the Rus­sian archives and ­those of former members of the Warsaw Pact. New studies of Brezhnev’s tenure as general secretary move past the stagnation-­centric narrative in foreign and domestic policy alike.39

I n t r o d u c t i o n

7

Andropov, too, has enjoyed a resurgence in historical prominence, in part ­because of an effort in con­temporary Rus­sia to boost the prestige of the security ser­vices, of which both he and current president Vladimir Putin served as chief.40 Chernenko’s historiographical day has yet to come. Understanding the evolution of superpower relations over the course of the first half of the 1980s requires a deeper understanding of each of ­these Soviet leaders. Strug­ gles within the Kremlin over succession in all three instances—­contrary to conspiracy theories that the four final general secretaries had made a secret pact to establish the order of succession in late 1978—­are especially instructive for the light they shed on internal policy disputes.41 In Brezhnev’s case, the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982 concluded that the Soviet Union needed “peace and a reduction in tensions . . . ​[to] create better conditions for internal development and buy [the Soviet Union] time to win the strug­gle against imperialism.”42 Unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize the tenuous economic situation at home, Brezhnev looked abroad.43 Reducing tensions internationally was the only way he could see to enable the Soviet Union to compete with the United States more effectively. He was not wrong: during Brezhnev’s tenure, the Soviet Union eliminated the US superiority in strategic weapons, and Moscow came to be seen worldwide as Washington’s equal. Andropov inherited many of the same prob­lems, especially in the domestic economy, but he was less risk-­averse, hoping to fix them through a crackdown on inefficiency using the tool he knew best: the KGB. An eco­ nom­ically healthier Soviet Union, he believed, would be better able to compete with the United States; however, the unhealthy general secretary had ­little time to see his ­g rand strategy through. His successor, Chernenko—­a Brezhnev protégé—­looked to his mentor for inspiration. U ­ nder his tenure, corruption skyrocketed and the economic situation worsened, and Chernenko’s poor health meant he could not indulge in what he found most attractive about Brezhnev’s approach: high-­profile summitry with his Western counter­parts—­above all, Reagan.

By 1985, with Gorbachev at the helm, the politburo understood that it would have to engage with the West and accept less advantageous agreements than it might have pressed for even in the recent past. Gorbachev inherited a shambolic economy, whose collapse, according to one prominent Soviet economist, was inevitable—­“it was just a question of when and how.”44 He inherited a military and, through the Warsaw Pact, an alliance undoubtedly and self-­consciously weaker than ­those it faced in the United States and NATO. Though not entirely on his own terms, Gorbachev made dif­fer­ent choices than ­those of his pre­de­ces­sors in impor­tant areas of foreign and domestic policy.

To be sure, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko all appreciated that the Soviet

8 Introduct ion

Union’s position relative to the United States was in decline. Gorbachev saw no choice but to take their efforts further, as the situation grew increasingly dire at home. The last general secretary changed the nature of the Cold War competition, but he did not “abandon it.”45 As a historical figure, Reagan poses a host of challenges. To some, his Hollywood background served him all too well ­after he entered politics. When ­Reagan said something unexpectedly welcome, Allan Gotlieb, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, instinctively doubted the president’s sincerity: “This is Reagan speaking? Or is this Reagan, the actor, reading his lines?”46 Gorbachev himself l­ater responded fiercely to such assertions: the president was a “man of real insight, sound po­liti­cal judgment, and courage.”47 To ­others, Reagan was a simpleton, on whom the nuances of statecraft ­were lost.48 And historians have not just Reagan the man to contend with but also Reagan the myth. The fortieth president has become the avatar of American exceptionalism to many, for better or for worse.49 Often credited with changing the Cold War game, Reagan’s Soviet counter­ parts ­were skeptical that he had in fact ushered in so significant a foreign-­ policy departure. Few in the administration would care to admit it, but Reagan’s policies bore a striking similarity to ­those of his pre­de­ces­sor, Jimmy Car­ter.

The Car­ter administration had increased defense spending and Car­ter’s willingness to speak out on ­human rights in the Soviet Union vexed the Kremlin. ­These continuities w ­ ere so clear that even in 1985, analysts in Moscow concluded that US policy ­toward the Soviet Union would have been the same in the case of a second Car­ter term as it had been during Reagan’s first.50 Reagan could articulate a deceptively s­ imple vision for the Cold War’s outcome: “We win, they lose.”51 But an end to the Cold War was a long way off.

Certainly the United States should work toward “the peaceful, eventual devolution of the Soviet Empire into free states,” but that process, Reagan’s advi­ sers estimated at the beginning of the 1980s, would take at least sixty years.52 In the mean time, Reagan wanted to reduce East-West tensions—albeit on the West’s terms. Identifying a singular US foreign policy during this period nevertheless poses a serious challenge. Reagan’s White House staff consisted of advisers regularly at odds with one another, and not infrequently with the president himself.53 Reagan’s strong personal aversion to discord in the policy-­making pro­cess, which dated back to his time as the governor of California, meant that this factionalism all too often produced policies that did not fully reflect the president’s own views.54 He was also, in his wife’s words, “a loner,” who did not share his private thoughts willingly.55 From the Oval Office, the president “kept his eye on the ‘big picture,’ ” namely US-­

I n t r o d u c t i o n

9

Soviet relations, “and tended to scant issues he believed w ­ ere of l­ittle importance.”56 The challenge for the historian of Reagan’s foreign policy is precisely that his g­ rand strategy was not spelled out in the grand-­strategic venues to which historians often turn, such as at meetings of the National Security Council, at which Reagan regularly said ­little of substance and which often ended with every­one feeling that they had won the president over to their—­ diametrically opposed—­positions. ­People, not just pro­cess, make policy. In the case of Reagan, that meant a president with a keen emotional intelligence and an ability to engender trust.

Not only did Reagan have the self-­confidence to see the value in personally engaging the Soviet leadership, but he was able to do so with empathy.57 ­These personal relationships proved key to ending the Cold War.58 However, Reagan’s style, particularly his willingness to speak openly about his distaste for the Soviet system, also aroused far more negative emotions. Worldwide, policy makers and publics feared the president’s bombast and what it might represent.59 Hundreds of thousands took to the streets expressing their fear that the superpowers might lose control and plunge the world into nuclear war. It was this same fear of annihilation, the prominent evangelical minister Billy Graham argued in a sermon at Duke University, that brought Reagan and Gorbachev together for the Geneva Summit in November 1985.60 The wide range of outcomes resulting from the Reagan administration’s policies at home and abroad make an assessment of his presidency all the more difficult. At home, many w ­ ere critical of the “Bacchanalia of the haves”—­and abandonment of the have-­nots—­which resulted from his economic policies.61 Abroad, US (as well as Soviet and Cuban) intervention in Latin Amer­ic­ a’s civil wars led to staggering death tolls: 200,000 in Guatemala, 70,000 in El Salvador, and 30,000 in Nicaragua. This last, lowest figure still represents a greater loss, in proportional terms, than all US casualties during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.62 And as support for the administration’s policies in Latin Amer­i­ca waned, they turned to solutions of dubious legality. The Iran-­Contra scandal revealed US arms sales to the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, the profits of which wound their way to the right-­wing Contra movement working to unseat the government of Nicaragua. In thinking holistically about Reagan’s foreign policy, moving past the partisan rhe­toric on both sides, t­ hese failings cannot be ignored, no m ­ atter the successes in his dealings with the Soviet Union.63 This account of the Cold War’s transformation between 1980 and 1985—­the impact of power and personalities, as well as perception and misperception—­ plays out over five chronological chapters. Chapter 1 sets the stage, exploring

10 Introduct ion

how the world looked from Washington and Moscow at the dawn of the 1980s.

Chapter 2 then examines the last two years of Brezhnev’s life, shedding light on often ignored back channels between the superpowers. Chapter 3 addresses Andropov’s tenure in the Kremlin, his efforts to reform both foreign and domestic policy, and the crises of late 1983. Chapter 4 is devoted to Chernenko’s time in office. It takes stock of his efforts to shift superpower relations back to a détente-­like footing, while examining attempts on the part of vari­ous Western leaders to carve out a role for themselves as the superpowers’ chosen intermediary. Chapter 5 covers Reagan’s first meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva in November 1985, exploring the internal and external roots of the nascent new thinking in Soviet foreign policy and its impact on East-­West relations. Superpower relations over ­these five years ­were messy and, at times, contradictory. Moscow and Washington exchanged harsh words but also engaged in far more dialogue than is commonly thought. Within this brief win­ dow of time, both sides’ outlooks changed dramatically. As US policy makers regained confidence in their place in the world, their Soviet counter­parts took increasingly drastic mea­sures to deal with a deteriorating situation, and the process of ending the Cold War had begun.

The story does not end in 1985 with this book, nor on Christmas Day of 1991 when the Soviet flag was lowered one last time over the Kremlin. Foreign-­ policy makers still operate in a world s­ haped by the end of the Cold War—­ one in which understanding that complex pro­cess from beginning to end, and the grievances it engendered, is essential. Examined from 1985 to 1991, as is so often the case, it is easy to see the story is one of an obviously crumbling Soviet Union and a United States inexorably headed for its “unipolar moment.”64 Why, then, should Washington not have done as it pleased in the world, expanding NATO eastward, dismissing Moscow’s protestations? Expanding the temporal scope of the end of the Cold War makes for a very dif­fer­ent story. Taking just five e­ arlier years into account changes the picture: the Soviet Union trying desperately to stop its decline and remain a coequal superpower to the United States, and the United States keen to speed Moscow’s decay. This dramatic and precipitous reversal of fortunes left an indelible mark on the minds of Kremlin policy makers ­today, who remember this collapse and the turmoil it caused all too well.

The Justice Dilemma Leaders and Exile in an Era of Accountability

Dan i e l Krcm a ric

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University, which aided in the publication of this book.

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krcmaric, Daniel, 1986– author.

Title: The justice dilemma : leaders and exile in an era of accountability / Daniel Krcmaric.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: Cornell studies in security affairs | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020001955 (print) | LCCN 2020001956 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501750212 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501750236 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501750229 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: International criminal law. | Criminal justice, Administration of—International cooperation. | Heads of state—Legal status, laws, etc. | Exile (Punishment). | International crimes—Prevention. | Political atrocities—Prevention. | Civil war.

Classification: LCC KZ7235 .K73 2020 (print) | LCC KZ7235 (ebook) | DDC 341.6/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001955 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001956

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xiii

1.

Justice Goes Global

1

2.

The Justice Dilemma

20

3.

The Mechanism: Exile

68

4.

The Perverse Effect: Prolonging Civil Wars

107

5.

The Positive Effect: Deterring Mass Atrocities

145

6.

Grasping the Dilemma

181

References

197

Index

215

v

chapter 1

Justice Goes Global

By 1979, the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had presided over the killing of some three hundred thousand people, pillaged his country’s economy, and started a war with neighboring Tanzania. After eight tumultuous years in power, Amin’s regime was on the verge of collapse. Ugandan rebels and their Tanzanian allies, both determined to take down Amin, were rapidly closing in on the capital city of Kampala. Despite his long-standing claim to be the indispensable “Big Daddy” of Uganda, Amin opted not to make a last stand against his adversaries. He had a better option: exile. Before Kampala fell, Amin and his family boarded a plane that delivered them to safety. After a brief stop in Libya, Amin settled into a long-term retirement in a beautiful villa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to a journalist who caught up with Amin during his exile, the former leader liked to spend much of his time frequenting Jeddah’s finer hotels. Indeed, Amin “had spent the previous years taking a morning swim in the pool of the local Hilton, having his back massaged by an Egyptian masseur at the Intercontinental, and finally having lunch at a third hotel.”1 As shocking as the Amin example may seem, there is a long history of abusive rulers finding safe havens abroad once they were no longer welcome at home. In 1986, for instance, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos retired to Hawaii when the People Power Revolution toppled him following a fraudulent election. That same year, as protests raged throughout Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier took a similar exit option by fleeing to the French Riviera. In short, exile was once the default option for dictators in distress.

Today, however, embattled leaders seem to think twice about exile. Consider the tale of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In 2011, as the Arab Spring spread throughout the region, Gaddafi faced growing unrest within Libya.

1. Riccardo Orizio, “Idi Amin’s Exile Dream,” New York Times, August 21, 2003.

1

CHAPTER 1

Peaceful protests morphed into a full-blown civil war, and the Libyan rebels eventually gained the upper hand in the conflict. As the rebels marched on Tripoli, Gaddafi faced a predicament eerily similar to the one Idi Amin had encountered several decades earlier. Should Gaddafi stay in Libya to battle it out or flee to a foreign safe haven? Guided by a desire to avoid further bloodshed in Libya, speculation among the punditocracy ran rampant about possible exile destinations for Gaddafi.2 But unlike Amin, Gaddafi opted to fight rather than take flight, a move that ultimately cost him his life.

Gaddafi is not the only leader digging in his heels instead of retiring abroad these days. After Laurent Gbagbo refused to recognize that he had lost the Ivory Coast’s 2010 presidential election, opposition fighters advanced toward Abidjan. As he hunkered down in the presidential palace, it must have been a moment of soul searching for the former strongman.

Just a couple of months earlier, a delegation of West African diplomats had visited Gbagbo and pressed him to stop the violence and go into exile.3 But Gbagbo refused to go quietly into the night and instead clung to power until opposition forces captured him. Similarly, when Syrian rebels pushed toward Damascus in December 2012, many thought that Bashar Assad would try to save himself by fleeing abroad.4 Assad himself appeared open to this possibility if the circumstances were right and reportedly was “looking for a way out.”5 Yet, in the end, Assad decided to keep fighting in Syria rather than seek a retirement home abroad.

What explains the divergent behavior of these leaders? Why have recent leaders like Gaddafi, Gbagbo, and Assad desperately clung to power whereas past leaders such as Amin, Marcos, and Duvalier were willing to spend their days in exile? The answer, I argue in this book, is that something new is happening in the world of international justice. For a long time, advocates of global accountability had little to celebrate. Despite employing lofty rhetoric about ending impunity for the world’s worst war criminals, tangible successes were elusive. In fact, proponents of international justice—relying on the idea that some crimes are so heinous that the perpetrator should be punished regardless of national borders—were

2. Among others, see William J. Dobson, “Dictator Seeks Second Home? A Guide to Gaddafi’s Exile Options,” Washington Post, March 29, 2011; and David Smith, “Where Could Colonel Muammar Gaddafi Go If He Were Exiled?,” Guardian, February 21, 2011.

3. On Gbagbo’s finals days, see Colum Lynch and William Branigin, “Ivory Coast Strongman Arrested after French Forces Intervene,” Washington Post, April 11, 2011.

4. Andrew E. Kramer, “In Russia, Exile in Comfort for Leaders Like Assad,” New York Times, December 28, 2012.

5. Anne Barnard and Hwaida Sadd, “No Easy Route If Assad Opts to Go, or to Stay, in Syria,” New York Times, December 24, 2012.

2

JUSTICE GOES GLOBAL

frequently mocked as out-of-touch idealists.6 Accordingly, the prospects for international accountability were once bleak: oppressive leaders simply went into exile in posh locales where they could retire without fear of prosecution.

But the world is now a smaller place for tyrants. Consider the leaders just described: Gaddafi faced an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant at the time of his death, Gbagbo was extradited to the ICC and charged with crimes against humanity, and Assad was widely condemned as a war criminal.7 In a world of globalized justice, fleeing abroad to a quiet exile no longer guarantees that a violent ruler can escape the long arm of the law.

A variety of international criminal tribunals have proliferated since the 1990s. To address mass atrocities, the United Nations (UN) created ad hoc international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and hybrid tribunals popped up to judge war criminals in places such as Sierra Leone, East Timor, Cambodia, and Chad, among others. Foreign courts also joined the fray by invoking universal jurisdiction to initiate prosecutions for crimes committed on the other side of the globe. The tribunal-building process culminated with the Rome Statute in 1998, the treaty establishing the ICC, the first permanent international court with broad jurisdiction over mass atrocities. Equally important, many of the world’s most powerful states—especially Western democracies—started to provide the muscle to make tribunals work by apprehending and transferring indicted war criminals. The results have been impressive. In the world of international legal proceedings, few scenes are as striking as watching once-untouchable tyrants face justice for their misdeeds. Though the march toward global accountability has been uneven and undoubtedly remains a work in progress, it is hard to disagree with human rights activist Paul van Zyl’s claim that “the international justice genie is out of the bottle.”8 This book is about the effects of this dramatic change in world politics, sometimes called the “justice cascade” (Sikkink 2011) or the “revolution in accountability” (Sriram 2005). More precisely, I examine one specific part of this justice cascade: the new trend toward international prosecutions of heads of state.9 I focus on prosecutions that (1) are international/foreign in

6. Consider the tribulations of Raphael Lemkin—widely regarded as the father of the Genocide Convention—as he attempted to outlaw the “crime without a name” (Power 2003).

7. After spending seven years behind bars, Gbagbo was acquitted in 2019. But the Gbagbo saga likely is not over. The ICC released him to Belgium following the surprise acquittal.

While Gbagbo technically is free, Belgium forced him to surrender his passport and will keep him under surveillance. Belgium also promised to send Gbagbo back to the ICC if the court’s prosecution team appeals the case.

8. Christina Lamb, “Trapped in the Palace,” Spectator, May 28, 2011.

9. Hence, when I colloquially mention the effects of the justice cascade throughout the book, I am referring to international or foreign prosecutions of heads of state. Many other

3

CHAPTER 1

nature and (2) target political leaders because this sort of prosecution raises unique implications for the exile dynamics that are at the core of the book.10 While other aspects of the justice cascade (e.g., domestic trials of unpopular rulers or international prosecutions of the rank and file) are important in their own right, the pursuit of globalized accountability for those at the very top is a qualitatively different phenomenon. As I explain later, heads of state have historically been a protected class of individuals who were essentially immune to arrest on foreign soil no matter how badly they behaved. Only in the past couple of decades has the special status of political leaders in international law been challenged.

I primarily take a positive perspective rather than a normative one. From a normative or moral standpoint, things seem relatively straightforward.

Few would dispute that it is appropriate to hold leaders legally accountable for committing atrocity crimes. Moreover, most would agree that fewer oppressive rulers escaping to comfortable, if not luxurious, foreign retirements is a welcome change. But from a perspective that investigates the political effects of international prosecutions, things are far more complicated. As I will show, pursuing global justice for abusive leaders produces difficult and inescapable trade-offs. Simply put, there is a justice dilemma.

The Argument in Brief My argument starts with a simple observation: exile can be a pragmatic political solution. Specifically, exile provides a mechanism for leaders, especially those facing domestic unrest, to give up power in a manner that is relatively costless. Leaders who might refuse to step down because they fear domestic punishment upon retirement can instead go into exile and find a safe haven abroad. Thus, exile offers a “golden parachute” exit strategy that facilitates leadership transitions. Though they give up power, leaders will likely view exile abroad—and the secure retirement it typically affords—as the best option available when the risk of domestic punishment

scholars, including Kathryn Sikkink in her seminal book, The Justice Cascade (2011), use the term to refer to a wider range of human rights prosecutions (i.e., domestic and international, leaders and foot soldiers, etc.). As outlined later, my more specific focus is justified because of this book’s emphasis on exiled leaders. However, in the concluding chapter, I speculate about how my argument might apply to other actors (rebel leaders, military officers, titans of industry, etc.).

10. For ease of exposition, I use the terms head of state, leader, and ruler interchangeably.

There are, however, some technical differences among these terms. Note also that I use masculine pronouns for leaders for the sake of clarity and consistency. Though not all exiled leaders are men, the vast majority are (the only female leader to go into exile during the time period examined in the analysis in chapter 3 is Bolivia’s Lidia Gueiler Tejada).

4

JUSTICE GOES GLOBAL

is high. For this reason, there has been an extensive history of rulers fleeing abroad once they were no longer safe in their home countries.

The justice cascade, however, complicates the exile option for some leaders. The globalization of accountability means that leader culpability (whether leaders have previously presided over atrocity crimes) now influences the search for a safe haven. Today’s culpable leaders have to worry that fleeing into exile will ultimately land them in the jail cell of an international tribunal, which creates incentives to entrench in power rather than retire abroad. But nonculpable leaders—those who refrain from committing mass atrocities against civilians—can still safely go into exile because they do not need to fear international arrest. In more concrete terms, exile remains a viable exit strategy for “merely” unpopular or corrupt leaders such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré, but a similar retirement for culpable mass killers like Muammar Gaddafi, Laurent Gbagbo, and Bashar Assad is increasingly problematic.11 By making the availability of a safe post-tenure exile conditional on a leader’s behavior while still in power (i.e., the leader’s culpability), the justice cascade generates two effects that pull in opposite directions. On the negative side, the justice cascade exacerbates conflict. By undermining the possibility of a secure exile for culpable leaders, international justice incentivizes such leaders to double down on the battlefield and keep fighting during civil wars when they otherwise would have retired abroad. On the positive side, the justice cascade deters atrocities. Precisely because leaders now know that committing abuses will decrease their future exit options, international justice effectively increases the costs of brutality. Taken together, these predictions form the justice dilemma: deterring atrocities and prolonging conflicts are two sides of the same coin.

To test the argument, I exploit stark over-time variation in the threat international justice poses to leaders. In the past, punishment expectations were low because realpolitik strategies consistently trumped concerns about international justice. Moreover, prevailing ideas about international legal order, based on respect for sovereignty and head-of-state immunity, protected leaders from arrest while in foreign countries. As a result, all leaders—even notoriously brutal ones—historically had little to fear from international justice. In recent years, however, the landscape for pursuing justice across borders has changed dramatically: a slew of oppressive leaders have been arrested and transferred to foreign or international courts as part of the justice cascade. This rapid change in the likelihood of

11. Due to the growth of international anticorruption laws and the associated weakening of bank secrecy, amassing the funds required for a luxurious exile may be increasingly difficult as well. On the international campaign against grand corruption, see Sharman 2017. For a normative political theorist’s take on recovering the wealth of exiled leaders, see Nili 2019.

5

CHAPTER 1

international punishment provides a unique empirical opportunity, perhaps even “some kind of natural experiment” (Kim and Sikkink 2010, 944).

Building on this insight, I argue that the push for international justice reached a tipping point in the late 1990s. Specifically, I suggest that two key events in 1998 marked a critical juncture. First, the signing of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court institutionalized the previously ad hoc legal regime and signaled to leaders that the international community was interested in pursuing justice globally on a permanent basis.

Second, the arrest of former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet in the United Kingdom—the first time a leader was actually arrested in a foreign state for international crimes—provided a powerful demonstration effect that shattered the expectation of impunity leaders had once enjoyed. While these are certainly not the only two factors that mattered, the landmark events of 1998 constitute the watershed moment in a shift from an era of impunity to an era of accountability.

Much of my book is devoted to evaluating how this shift from global impunity toward accountability has shaped patterns of exile, civil war duration, and mass atrocity onset using both quantitative and qualitative methods. While neither method of inquiry is without potential pitfalls, a multimethod research design allows the strengths of each approach to help compensate for the weaknesses of the other.

The statistical tests, by establishing correlations between independent and dependent variables across a wide variety of contexts, demonstrate the generalizability of the theory. The quantitative approach also prevents cherry-picking only the cases that are consistent with my theoretical expectations. Three main statistical findings bolster my argument. First, leader culpability had no effect on the likelihood of exile during the impunity era, but today’s culpable leaders are nearly six times less likely to go into exile.

Second, because they lack good exit options, today’s culpable leaders tend to fight longer civil wars. During the accountability era, the likelihood of a war ending is cut in half if a culpable leader is in power. Third, this dark side of justice also produces a benefit: deterrence. Today’s leaders are over six times less likely to initiate mass killings than their peers were during the impunity era.

While the quantitative tests provide data on general trends, qualitative case studies are generally better at illustrating causal processes. If my theory is correct, we should not only observe the predicted correlation between variables, but we should also see leaders reasoning and behaving in a manner consistent with my argument’s expectations. By turning to creative sources of qualitative data such as the testimonies of arrested leaders, the accounts of the diplomatic contacts who helped arrange leaders’ escapes into exile, and the perspectives of killed leaders’ surviving deputies, I work to reconstruct the decision-making processes of embattled leaders. Specifically, I offer case studies of Charles Taylor, Muammar Gaddafi, and Blaise

6

JUSTICE GOES GLOBAL

Compaoré to illustrate how leaders think and act in ways that are consistent with the theory.12 Overall, the combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence provides compelling support for the argument.

Debating Peace and Justice Evaluating international justice is a tricky business. One challenge is that there is “a dizzying array of lofty objectives for international war crimes tribunals” (Bass 2000, 284). The absence of a clear benchmark for judging success or failure has even led some to conclude “that the performance of international criminal courts cannot be assessed reliably” (Damaska 2008, 330). There are, however, certain objectives that repeatedly show up in discussions of international justice. Some draw on the legal maxim fiat justitia et pereat mundus (let justice be done, even if the world were to perish) to argue that there is an ethical responsibility to pursue justice regardless of the consequences. Others highlight how international justice might play a role in building the rule of law, moderating desires for revenge, giving voice to victims, rehabilitating abusers, erasing past animosities between groups, creating a reliable historical record, and propagating new norms and values.13 Though these goals are doubtlessly important, this book largely focuses on the issues where lives are at stake—deterring atrocities and prolonging wars. Relative to the large normative and legal literatures, much less is known about the real-world effects of international justice on the behavior of the individuals who are targeted for punishment.14 Existing work on this topic is primarily a debate between optimists and pessimists. The optimist position holds that international justice can deter atrocities. Some scholars reach this conclusion by building off the logic of rationalist theories of domestic criminal punishment, which assert that crime decreases as the likelihood and/or severity of punishment increases.15

12. The decision to examine three African leaders in detail was intentional. As I will describe later, the international legal regime (especially the ICC) is sometimes accused of bias against African leaders. By focusing on these three leaders in the case studies, I am able to hold this potential source of cross-case variation constant. Note that exploring only African leaders in the case studies should not raise generalizability concerns since the statistical analyses use global samples.

13. For an overview of the many potential justifications for international criminal accountability, see Bass 2000; Damaska 2008; Drumbl 2007; and Shklar 1964.

14. As Kate Cronin-Furman (2013, 435) concludes in an assessment of research on international trials and deterrence: “The study of the practical impacts of international criminal law is, in general, characterized by an absence of empirical evidence.”

15. Gary Becker (1968) provides the seminal rationalist model of crime and punishment.

In the next chapter, I will address the debate among criminologists on whether the

7

CHAPTER 1

Since the international legal regime is designed to increase the likelihood of punishment for the architects of atrocities (though not necessarily the severity of punishment), many argue that it will create a deterrent effect (e.g., Appel 2018; Gilligan 2006; Jo and Simmons 2016; Kim and Sikkink 2010; Olsen, Payne, and Reiter 2010; Orentlicher 1991; Sikkink 2011). Others move beyond the rationalist approach to argue that prosecutions reduce violence by stigmatizing war criminals and producing a political culture that views atrocities as unacceptable (e.g., Akhavan 1998, 2001). Regardless of the precise mechanism, however, all optimists share the conviction that international justice can prevent abuse.

Outside the academy, the optimist view enjoys widespread popularity with policymakers, international lawyers, and human rights activists. Consistent with the claim of Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch that “behind much of the savagery of modern history lies impunity” (Roth 2001, 150), the presumption is that the promise of legal accountability might prevent the next bloody campaign of atrocities. In the words of the ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, “My mission is to end impunity for these crimes in order to contribute to the prevention of future crimes” (Moreno-Ocampo 2010). In fact, policymakers often cannot help but use triumphalist language when describing the development of international criminal law, sometimes considered one of the international community’s landmark achievements in the post–Cold War era.16 The pessimist perspective explores a negative consequence of legal accountability.17 If belligerents are vulnerable to criminal prosecution, they may decide to keep fighting when they otherwise would lay down their arms.18 For example, Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri (2003) critique the view that justice—whether domestic or international—should be applied to all cases of atrocities. Instead, they argue that neutralizing potential spoiler groups (typically the losing side in a civil war) should take precedence over retroactive judicial punishment.19 Overall, the pessimistic view implies that

likelihood or the severity of punishment has a greater effect on the decision-making of potential criminals.

16. For instance, David Wippman (1999, 473) describes how many internationalists see international criminal law as “the last, best hope for stemming the tidal wave of atrocities that all too frequently have marked both international and internal armed conflicts.”

17. Beyond the assertion that international justice might exacerbate conflict, others critique it for being too expensive (Cobban 2006) and for imposing universalist norms on local communities (Hopgood 2013).

18. This argument echoes claims first made in a related literature on transitional justice and democratization, particularly Samuel Huntington’s (1991) classic work on the dilemmas of punishing outgoing autocrats in the “third wave” of democratization. For more recent work on this topic, see Escribà-Folch and Wright 2015b; and Nalepa and Powell 2016.

19. According to Geoff Dancy and Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm (2018), it might matter which side is targeted with prosecutions. They find that rebel trials tend to shorten civil wars, whereas trials of state officials often lengthen them.

8

JUSTICE GOES GLOBAL

international justice will create perverse incentives that could exacerbate conflict and ultimately increase civilian victimization (e.g., Goldsmith and Krasner 2003; Prorok 2017; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003). Jack Goldsmith and Stephen Krasner (2003, 51) even warn that “a universal jurisdiction prosecution may cause more harm than the original crime it purports to address.”

This view is less popular among policymakers and pundits, but it occasionally receives attention in the public sphere. Writing in the Guardian during Libya’s civil war, Philippe Sands worried that the ICC arrest warrant for Muammar Gaddafi “made an early departure from Libya less likely” and instead gave him a reason “to dig in his heels.”20 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also implicitly endorsed the pessimist view when discussing the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. Clinton acknowledged that Bashar Assad was a war criminal, but she warned that initiating an international prosecution could “complicate the resolution of a difficult, complex situation because it limits options perhaps to persuade leaders to step down from power.”21 While the existing literature offers useful insights, it suffers from shortcomings at both the theoretical and empirical levels. On the empirical side, most research is oddly ahistorical. Instead of thinking about broad trends in the international justice landscape, almost all studies zoom in on a specific tribunal or sometimes even a particular arrest warrant.22 To give just one example, scholars have provided nuanced case studies of the Yugoslav tribunal (e.g., Hagan 2003; Subotic 2009) and conducted rigorous quantitative tests of the effects of its judgments (e.g., Meernik 2005). However, by focusing on one tree instead of the whole forest, this sort of analysis misses the opportunity to exploit remarkable over-time variation in the international legal regime. As I show in this book, stepping back to examine the historical arc of international justice offers rich new insights.23 On the theoretical side, optimists and pessimists alike take narrow views on the consequences of pursuing international justice. In particular, scholars tend to hypothesize exclusively “good” effects such as deterring atrocities or exclusively “bad” effects like prolonging conflicts.24 Optimists, for example,

20. Philippe Sands, “The ICC Arrest Warrant Will Make Colonel Gaddafi Dig in His Heels,” Guardian, May 4, 2011.

21. Richard Spencer, “Bashar al-Assad Could Be Regarded as a War Criminal, Says Clinton,” Telegraph, February 28, 2012.

22. When referring to international tribunals, I follow the general convention of using the terms indictments and arrest warrants interchangeably. However, for some tribunals (such as the ICC), these terms technically are not equivalent.

23. I discuss several other empirical challenges in the specific chapters on exile, civil war duration, and mass killing.

24. One possible reason why many scholars hypothesize causal effects in only one direction is that the study of international justice often comes with political, legal, and moral

9

CHAPTER 1

insist that “there are many claims about the negative effects of trials but relatively little solid evidence to support them” (Sikkink and Walling 2007, 429) and that “practically no systematic evidence has been produced to date to support such concerns” (Jo and Simmons 2016, 445). On the other side, pessimists worry that international justice is “not robust enough to act as a reliable deterrent against depredations by leaders—but it may be just enough to complicate their exits from power.”25 The existing theoretical approaches each get part of the story right, but they both fail to see the bigger picture: the atrocity-preventing and conflictprolonging effects of international justice are two sides of the same coin. If the threat of international punishment lacks credibility, we should see neither effect. An international legal regime that is not strong enough to deter atrocities is also not strong enough to incentivize leaders to keep fighting in some desperate attempt to evade justice. On the flip side, if the threat of international punishment is sufficiently credible, we should see both effects together. An accountability regime robust enough to convince culpable leaders to spurn the exile option and instead risk everything on the battlefield is also strong enough to deter at least some other leaders from committing atrocities in the first place.

As a result, one of the major contributions of this book is to show both theoretically and empirically that these effects—the positive and the perverse—are intimately linked. Simply put, international justice is helpful in some ways and harmful in others.

One Theory, Many Puzzles One of the strengths of the argument presented here is that it generates a wide variety of empirical predictions using a single theoretical framework.

According to Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba in their classic book on political methodology, “The scholar who searches for additional implications of a [theory] is pursuing one of the most important achievements of all social science: explaining as much as possible with as little as possible” (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, 29, emphasis in original). I take this advice seriously by exploring several different testable implications of my argument. In fact, the theory and evidence presented in this book shed light on three puzzles in world politics. Though each of these puzzles is typically

strings attached. As Oskar Thoms, James Ron, and Roland Paris (2010, 354) point out, there is an “urgent need for . . . greater attention to fact-based rather than faith-based claims” in the study of international justice.

25. David Bosco, “How International Justice Makes It Harder for Dictators to Step Down,” Washington Post, January 24, 2017.

10

FEEDING THE HUNGRY Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight against Hunger Michelle Jurkovich

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS  ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Jurkovich, Michelle, 1983–­author.

Title: Feeding the hungry : advocacy and blame in the global fight against hunger / Michelle Jurkovich.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048969 (print) | LCCN 2019048970 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501751165 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501751783 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501751172 (epub) | ISBN 9781501751189 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Food relief—­Political aspects. | Right to food. | Hunger—­ Political aspects. | Food security—­Political aspects. | Food relief—­International cooperation. | Hunger—­Prevention—­International cooperation.

Classification: LCC HV696.F6 J78 2020 (print) | LCC HV696.F6 (ebook) | DDC 363.8—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019048969 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019048970

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction: The Politics of Chronic Hunger

1

1.

Putting Hunger on the Agenda

13

2.

How to Think about Advocacy

34

3.

Not All ­Human Rights Have Norms

57

4.

Hunger at the Nexus of Rights and Development

83

5.

The Limits of Law

109

Conclusion: Policy Implications and the Road Ahead

131

Appendix References Index

141 147 163

Introduction

T HE POLITICS OF CHRONIC HUNGER

“Let me just tell you something a bit more provocative,” said a se­nior official at Oxfam Amer­i­ca as we began our interview. “If [anti-­hunger organ­izations] a­ ren’t willing to use the word ‘blame’ or an appropriate euphemism for it . . . ​they d ­ on’t actually believe ­there is a right to food.”

So, then, who was to blame for hunger? Grabbing a sheet of paper, she began to draw. “­There’s the person ­we’re trying to benefit,” she said, drawing a stick figure in the ­middle of a big circle. “She sits at the center of the universe.” Dividing up the circle around her into three sections (the private sector, the state, and civil society) at three dif­fer­ent levels (local, national, and global) she proceeded to rank each segment to identify its relative level of blame for the prob­lem of chronic hunger. In total, nine dif­fer­ent actors ­were to blame. Being able to say ­there is a “right to food” meant “you are capable of identifying who’s responsible, talking about the nature of their responsibilities and ­doing something about it,” she explained.

Confused, I looked at her drawing of the nine dif­fer­ent actors she ranked as to blame for hunger: “So, who is responsible?”

“I’ve just told you,” she replied.

“Lots of ­people, then?” I asked.

“Yeah, and you hold them all responsible.”

Our conversation continued for several minutes before I raised the Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights, thinking that clearly international law had already determined that national governments ­were the actors who ­were obliged to 1

2 Introduction

fulfill the right to food. Interjecting quickly, she exclaimed, “­We’re not that ­legal.

I mean, the reason—­honestly—­the reason we do rights-­based work is, I walk into ­every room . . . ​I go in to any place anywhere and just say, ‘Listen. I’m not ­going to tell you anything about the law. Who in h ­ ere has the right to enough basic food to eat everyday so that they can live with dignity?’ Every­body. ‘What convention is it in?’ ‘I ­haven’t a clue, but I have the right!’ That’s what you need to know, okay? I ­don’t care if you know the name of the convention, I need you to know that the ­people we serve have that right and somebody is responsible.”1 In the course of one hour, this se­nior official had taken much of what the ­human rights lit­er­a­ture in international relations had come to expect from h ­ uman rights advocacy and turned it on its head. We have come to expect advocacy organ­ izations to focus blame and shame on one common target actor (almost always a national government) in ­human rights campaigns.2 We expect that ­these activists rely on ­human rights law to inform their understanding of whom to target in the event that a ­human right is not protected or fulfilled. ­After all, law is what gives legitimacy to ­human rights claims, according to our scholarship.3 International ­human rights law, in par­tic­u­lar, ascribes responsibility to national governments for the protection and fulfillment of the ­human rights of ­those living within their borders. Once governments commit to ­these laws, we expect activists to use them to compel states to comply.

Over the following months, I would meet with se­nior and executive staff at top international anti-­hunger organ­izations and time and again would be confronted with a very dif­fer­ent lived real­ity of advocacy work around hunger. This was an issue area where every­one seemed to agree on a common goal (nobody should be hungry), but where t­here was no consensus among gatekeepers on a unitary actor who was to blame for the prob­lem of chronic hunger, nor any consensus on what precisely should be done to solve the prob­lem. Food is a h ­ uman right, codified in international and sometimes even domestic laws. However, t­ hese laws did not generally motivate activists to focus pressure on national governments to fulfill this h ­ uman right. For many international anti-­hunger organ­ izations I examined, the very concept of a “right” to food was justified not in ­legal but in moral terms. The result of the lack of consensus on such foundational questions as who is to blame for hunger and how the prob­lem should be solved resulted in a complex aggregate of international advocacy campaigns often si­mul­ 1. Interview, Oxfam Amer­i­ca 1, May 2013, emphasis added. All interviewees are anonymous, though respondents have consented to attributing their quote to a general ranking (e.g., “se­nior official”) u ­ nder their specific organ­ization’s name. Executive and se­nior level staff are grouped ­under the common ranking of “se­nior official.” Since identifying the gender of some respondents would make their identities obvious, all respondents are identified with feminine pronouns.

2. Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999, 2013.

3. Alston 1991; Schmid 2015; Sikkink 2011; Simmons 2009.

The Politics of Chronic Hunger

3

ta­neously targeting dif­fer­ent actors to blame for hunger and making dif­fer­ent demands of t­hose actors in an attempt to mitigate the staggering global hunger rate. Certainly, global hunger was not a new issue that advocacy groups w ­ ere only now starting to address and thus only now grappling with questions of blame, causality, and proposed solutions. International anti-­hunger organ­izations active ­today have a long history, dating back to the final years of World War II, though less-­organized and more l­imited advocacy around hunger reaches back much further.

Understanding international anti-­hunger advocacy requires challenging assumptions in our lit­er­a­tures on ­human rights and transnational advocacy. For the most part, t­ hese are lit­er­a­tures that have focused almost exclusively on cases of civil and po­liti­cal rights campaigns (such as torture, enforced disappearances, suffrage, and slavery).4 We now know a ­great deal, empirically, about civil and po­liti­cal rights campaigns and have used this knowledge to derive theoretical arguments about how and why advocacy campaigns function the way they do. But ­there is a gap—an entire subset of rights (i.e., economic and social rights)—­that we have left underexplored.

This book addresses that gap. In focusing on international anti-­hunger activism, I draw to the fore advocacy surrounding one of the most essential—or, as Henry Shue (1980) would argue, the most basic—of all ­human rights: the ­human right to food. Without the realization of the right to food, the fulfillment of other ­human rights is ­either impossible or substantively meaningless. The right to education, for instance, can hardly be realized when individuals are so hungry that they cannot think. It would be challenging for freedom (of assembly, of speech, of thought) to retain its full promise when experienced on an empty stomach.

The liberating promise of ­human rights rings hollow when parents find themselves in constant worry that their c­ hildren ­will have enough to eat, such that they can avoid the pangs of hunger and the weakness and sickness that comes with it.

And yet, hunger is a daily, lived real­ity for an estimated 821 million ­people in the world.5 According to John Holmes, United Nations under-­secretary-­general for Humanitarian Affairs from 2007 to 2010, “Each day, 25,000 ­people, including more than 10,000 c­ hildren, die from hunger and related c­ auses.”6 To put this issue in perspective, more ­people die from hunger and related causes globally than in all wars, civil and international, combined. More p ­ eople die from hunger 4. Carpenter 2011, 2014; Hawkins 2004; Hyde 2011; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Kelley 2008; Klotz 1999; Lutz and Sikkink 2000; Price 1997, 1998.

5. Food and Agriculture Organ­ization et al. 2018, v. The estimate is for the year 2017.

6. Holmes 2008. Estimates of hunger related deaths vary. According to Black et al. (2013), in 2011 an estimated 3.1 children died from undernutrition globally.

4 Introduction

and related causes each year than in all violent deaths (including gang vio­lence, intentional and unintentional hom­i­cide) combined.7 Hunger remains a prob­lem in all countries, not only in ­those with the most struggling economies or ­those emerging from de­cades of civil war. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimated a 14 ­percent rate of “food insecurity” among Americans in 2014, among the highest rates in all industrialized countries.8 Hunger is one of the most pressing global prob­lems t­ oday, and yet the discipline of po­liti­cal science has spent surprisingly ­little time examining the role of international advocacy in this issue area.

This is unacceptable. If we think politics is about “the uneven distribution of power in society, how the strug­gle over power is conducted, and its impact on the creation and distribution of resources, life chances, and well-­being,” t­ here are few prob­lems as inherently po­liti­cal as who gets enough to eat in this world and who does not.9 Yet, few po­liti­cal scientists, particularly in the United States, focus much attention on the prob­lem of global hunger. ­There was a brief surge of interest in hunger and the politics of food in the late 1970s, culminating in a special edition of the journal International Organ­ization titled “The Global Po­liti­cal Economy of Food,” but the discipline’s interest in the topic quickly subsided.10 Over the coming de­cades, a few po­liti­cal scientists would conduct studies on international food aid and social movements around food,11 apply regime theory to hunger,12 examine the global food crisis of 2008,13 debate the role of genet­ically modified organisms in modern agriculture,14 and probe the link between food insecurity and domestic instability,15 but such studies ­were comparatively rare. The subfield of international relations, in par­tic­u­lar, has remained focused on questions of conflict and trade, with virtually no scholarship on global hunger in any of the field’s flagship journals.

Instead, scholarship on hunger in the social sciences is scattered across a number of disciplines, with no clear disciplinary “home.” Economists have been and continue to be interested in questions of economic demand for food, food sub 7. According to Geneva Declaration Secretariat (2011, 1), “More than 526,000 people are killed each year as a result of lethal violence.”

8. In 2006, the USDA removed the word hunger from its hunger metric, settling instead on the term food insecurity. The rationale for the change was that officials argued that hunger, as a sensation, was not something that could be effectively mea­sured and thus the term should not be used.

Food insecurity served as a more technical (and perhaps po­liti­cally sterile) word that the USDA defines as “a household-­level economic and social condition of ­limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” See U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Ser­v ice 2019.

9. Marsh and Stoker 2010, 7.

10. “The Global Po­liti­cal Economy of Food” 1978.

11. Claeys 2015; Clapp 2012; Uvin 1992; Wallerstein 1980.

12. Margulis 2013; Uvin 1994.

13. Clapp and Cohen 2009.

14. Paarlberg 2009; Zerbe 2004. See also sociologist Lang 2016.

15. Hendrix and Brinkman 2013. On the relationship between food insecurity and conflict, see Messer and Cohen 2007.

The Politics of Chronic Hunger

5

sidies, food price volatility, the effects of economic policies on nutrition, and the economics of food aid.16 Anthropologists have conducted impor­tant studies on food insecurity in specific local contexts.17 Sociology, like po­liti­cal science, has seen ­little scholarship on global hunger, despite the efforts of Stephen J. Scanlan to bring the study of food security into the field.18 Hunger has, in many ways, become an “orphaned” issue: every­one agrees that it is impor­tant, but nobody knows who ­ought to be studying it.

Within the natu­ral, agricultural, and earth sciences, prior scholarship has conceptualized hunger as primarily a technical prob­lem with technical solutions: if only we could devise ways to grow more food with fewer inputs and in more environmentally friendly ways, ­these studies suggest, we could solve the hunger prob­lem.19 Yet the social sciences are especially equipped to challenge answers to complex social and economic prob­lems that rely exclusively on technical solutions, as few benefits in society are ever distributed equally or fairly, even when scientific advancement allows resources to exist in abundance. The world currently produces more food than it needs to feed even its ever-­growing population of over seven billion, and should new crop va­ri­et­ies and farming methods enable it to produce an even greater surplus, ­there would still be no guarantee that this abundance would reach the most marginalized in socie­ties. As of 2014, the United States had roughly a 14 ­percent food insecurity rate, despite having the most efficient agricultural industry in the world and producing far more food than its population needs. Having been raised in the farming community of Fresno County, California, I was struck by the stark contrast of staggering rates of poverty and hunger amid the abundant groves of oranges, orchards of almonds, and the seemingly limitless supply of grape vineyards; this was a daily reminder that the existence of a resource by no means guarantees an individual any access to that resource. One might assume that simply increasing the supply of a specific commodity would automatically decrease the price to consumers (thus enabling greater access), but history reminds us that ­there has always been, and likely always ­will be, a gap between the lowest price that producers are willing to sell a commodity at to turn an acceptable profit and the highest price the poorest in society can afford to pay for the given commodity. The market alone has never been able to solve the hunger prob­lem.

16. Barrett 2001; Barrett and Maxwell 2005; Drèze, Sen, and Hussain 1995; Pinstrup-­Andersen 1987, 1988, 2010; Sen 1981.

17. De Waal 2004; Scheper-­Hughes 1993; Taussig 1978. For a broader survey, see Pottier 1999.

18. Scanlan 2003, 2009. ­There has been, however, growing interest in food safety regimes (see, Epstein 2014) and in questions of global food systems (see Winders 2009; and Wright and Middendorf 2007).

19. Baldos and Hertel 2014; Bommarco, Kleijn, and Potts 2013; Burke and Lobell 2017; Godfray et al. 2010; Popp, Pető, and Nagy 2013. On growing more food in an era of climate change, see Lipper et al. 2014.

6 Introduction

Looking specifically at famines, Nobel Prize–­winning economist Amartya Sen argues that scholars must look beyond questions of food supply in order to understand the conditions ­under which famines might be expected to arise and persist. As Sen notes, “Starvation is the characteristic of some ­people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of t­ here being not enough food to eat”; instead, it is an individual’s entitlement to food that explains who gets enough food to eat and who does not (1981, 1, emphasis in the original). According to Sen, the “entitlement approach . . . ​concentrates on the ability of p ­ eople to command food through the l­egal means available in the society” (1981, 45). Entitlements, however, are complicated, socially negotiated arrangements that can and have changed over time depending on the par­tic­ul­ ar social and economic issue at hand.

Central to understanding entitlements is not only determining who is entitled to what, but who is obliged to provide that specific good in the event the individual is unable to command it through one of the more conventional mechanisms of entitlement (namely, trade or individual owner­ship). Looking back to the conversation with the Oxfam Amer­i­ca official at the beginning of this chapter, t­ here was ­little doubt she believed all h ­ umans w ­ ere entitled to enough food to eat, though this belief was not rooted in any ­legal framework. But as this book ­will show, agreement on a desired goal or objective (that all ­people ­ought to have enough to eat) does not mean it is clear how that goal should be attained, or perhaps most importantly for the purposes of understanding social pressure, who should be obliged to ensure the goal is met.

The pre­sent study takes the challenge of constructing this who should do what seriously, bringing insights from across dif­fer­ent fields to bear on the case of international advocacy to combat chronic hunger. It embraces Sen’s (1981) argument that one must look to entitlements and not food supply to understand the per­sis­tence of hunger but challenges the idea that t­hese entitlements should be (or are) viewed primarily in l­egal terms. This book highlights the socially constructed nature of an entitlement to food and the varied interpretations of what constitutes a h ­ uman right to food, identifying challenges that hinder the construction of a norm that good governments ­ought to ensure that their ­people have enough food to eat. Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze (1989) have documented the ability of public pressure in open po­liti­cal environments to eliminate famines, but it has not had the same effect in eliminating chronic hunger. In highlighting the strug­ gle to articulate an anti-­hunger norm, this book helps to explain why.

Fi­nally, in contrast to much of the hunger lit­er­a­ture, this study focuses not on famines or short-­term hunger but rather on international advocacy around chronic hunger. While a study of campaigns seeking emergency famine relief would be a valuable contribution in and of itself, the majority of the world’s hungry suffer not from short-­term famine but from long-­term food deprivation.

The Politics of Chronic Hunger

7

This hunger often does not have the benefit of flashy media attention, where pictures of c­ hildren with bloated bellies could perhaps sustain a brief period of sympathy for a food crisis. Ventures in response to chronic hunger require far more effort on the part of activists to construct meaningful campaigns, and how and why activists construct t­ hese campaigns m ­ atters a g­ reat deal. Put differently, it would be easy to forget about chronic global hunger. A prob­lem of this sort cannot on its own easily sustain media or public attention. Without the advocates examined in this study, it is unlikely that this prob­lem would receive much attention or support at all.

Rethinking Core Concepts As this book ­will demonstrate, an analy­sis of international anti-­hunger advocacy requires rethinking core theories and concepts used by h ­ uman rights scholars.

Our way of thinking about what constitutes a h ­ uman right and a norm, as well as the relationship between rights, norms, and law, are all challenged by the impor­ tant work international anti-­hunger activists are currently ­doing in the world.

Much scholarship focuses on the primacy of law in constituting and legitimating ­human rights, yet advocacy around hunger and the right to food problematizes such a link. As this study ­will highlight, while per­sis­tent hunger can indeed be conceptualized as a rights violation, some international anti-­hunger organ­izations choose to avoid rights language entirely, framing hunger instead as a development prob­lem. T ­ hose who do frame the hunger prob­lem as a violation of the ­human right to food, such as the Oxfam Amer­i­ca official quoted at the beginning of this chapter, may justify this right in moral and not l­egal terms. This is a case in which international ­human rights law exists but is rarely used, even by top international anti-­hunger organ­izations. Ronald Dworkin (1978) considers “rights as trumps,” but the hunger case begs caution. As subsequent chapters in this book ­will discuss, the near hegemonic focus on civil and po­liti­cal rights in the ­human rights lit­er­a­ture has ­limited our understanding of alternatives to ­legal justification of rights and encouraged models of ­human rights activism that assume that in cases of ­human rights violations activists must inherently agree on one target actor on whom to focus social pressure, the national government, ­because this is the actor to whom international law ascribes responsibility. Instead international anti-­hunger organ­ izations exhibit a complex understanding of blame and responsibility surrounding the per­sis­tence of hunger and focus their efforts on a wide array of targets spanning from transnational corporations to price speculators, financial institutions, and outside states, or sometimes choosing in their advocacy efforts to avoid attempts at targeting any actor at all as to blame for hunger.

8 Introduction

The hunger case thus invites us to reconsider what constitutes and legitimates the ­human right to food. How do activists determine whom to blame in the case of violations of economic and social rights such as the right to food? If law is not the primary means of legitimating this ­human right, how do moral justifications serve to mobilize support for international anti-­hunger campaigns? Answering ­these questions ­will require unpacking how social scientists understand the role of norms (defined as collectively shared “standards of appropriate be­hav­ior for actors of a given identity”),20 and the relationship between norms and law. Norms are what enable focused shaming and blaming on a common actor when that actor deviates from the socially appropriate be­hav­ior expected from it. But in order to have a clear “norm violator,” t­ here must be a norm to be v­ iolated in the first place. The hunger case encourages scholars to consider more carefully the difference between shared moral princi­ples (e.g., “­people ­ought not be hungry”) and norms (e.g., “good governments o ­ ught to ensure that their p ­ eople have enough to eat if they cannot afford to feed themselves”). This book offers readers an expanded conceptual tool kit with which to understand the social and moral forces at play in h ­ uman rights advocacy, moving beyond the overreliance of the norm concept to understand how norms differ from moral princi­ples, supererogatory standards, and law in the case of international anti-­hunger advocacy.

The Landscape of International Anti-­H unger Advocacy The pre­sent study relies on interviews and surveys conducted with se­nior officials at top international anti-­hunger organ­izations.21 In total, more than seventy staff members of international anti-­hunger organ­izations w ­ ere interviewed for this proj­ ect, most of whom ­were based at the following organ­izations: Action against Hunger; ActionAid; Amnesty International; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Bread for the World; CARE; the Food and Agriculture Organ­ization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN); FIAN International; Médecins sans Frontières / Doctors without Borders (MSF); Oxfam; the Rocke­fel­ler Foundation; Save the C ­ hildren; the UN’s World Food Programme, and World Vision. Many of t­hese organ­izations contain multiple affiliate offices based in dif­fer­ent countries. For additional information on the non-­UN organ­izations consulted for this study, including the specific affiliate offices (where applicable) of ­these organ­izations where I conducted interviews, see

20. This definition of a norm comes from Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 891.

21. For additional information on research methods, and especially on the interview method, see the appendix.

The Politics of Chronic Hunger

9

­TABLE 0.1 Anti-­Hunger INGOs and Foundations Included in This Study AFFILIATE/SECTION/CONFEDERATE OFFICE INTERVIEWED OR SURVEYED

YEAR ORGAN­IZATION BEGAN ANTI-­ HUNGER WORK

Action against Hunger/ Action Contre La Faim

Action against Hunger USA

1979 (as Action Contre la Faim)

ActionAid

ActionAid UK, ActionAid USA

1972 (as Action in Distress)

Amnesty International

Amnesty International Secretariat Office

2001 (though the organization was founded in 1961, it began economic, social, and cultural rights work in 2001)

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Not a confederation

2005 (though the organ­ization was founded in 2000)

Bread for the World

Not a confederation

1974

CARE

CARE USA

1945

Doctors without Borders / Médecins sans Frontières (MSF)

Doctors without Borders USA

1971 (as Médecins sans Frontières)

FIAN International

FIAN International Secretariat Office

1986 (as FoodFirst Information and Action Network)

Oxfam

Oxfam Amer­i­ca, Oxfam International, Oxfam G ­ reat Britain

1942 (as Oxford Committee for Famine Relief)

Rocke­fel­ler Foundation

Not a confederation

1934 (though the Foundation was established in 1913, it began agricultural funding in 1934)

Save the ­Children

Save the C ­ hildren UK, Save the C ­ hildren US

1919 (as Save the ­Children Fund)

World Vision

World Vision International, World Vision US

1950

NAME OF ORGAN­IZATION

t­able 0.1. ­These organ­izations ­were selected based on prior secondary research as well as through discussions with activists themselves about impor­tant organ­izations working in this issue area.22 ­There is no perfect metric by which to determine the definitive list of “most impor­tant” organ­izations working in any issue area, but ­here I have selected organ­izations that are power­ful by the sheer size of their bud­get, scope, and scale of their operations (e.g., Oxfam) as well as ­those which, while far more ­limited in their financial resources, are nonetheless extremely influential in this issue area by nature of their very vis­i­ble and vocal advocacy campaigns (e.g., FIAN International). Multiple years of fieldwork in Washington, DC, where most anti-­hunger international nongovernmental organ­izations (INGOs) have at least 22. This list of top international anti-­hunger organ­izations is, of course, not exhaustive. ­There is certainly impor­tant work being done by influential international anti-­hunger organ­izations that I was unable, due to time and resource constraints, to include h ­ ere. Additionally, these organizations work on diverse issues, not only hunger. Only a small part of Amnesty International’s work, for instance, focuses on food. They remain in the study because of their influence in the human rights community.

10 Introduction

some presence, as well as over a month spent at the FAO allowed me to observe which organ­izations ­were not only active in this issue area but also w ­ ere influential in terms of spearheading initiatives within UN organ­izations and garnering both financial and popu­lar support for large international multiyear campaigns.23 In light of their significant influence on international anti-­hunger organ­izations (due to their substantial funding resources), I also have included two foundations (the Gates and Rocke­fel­ler Foundations) in this study. Fi­nally, a note about timing—­the study that follows focuses on the work of t­ hese organ­izations generally up through 2014, with most interviews completed by 2015. More recent changes to advocacy work within ­these organ­izations, therefore, may not be reflected ­here.

Broadly, we can think of most international anti-­hunger organ­izations as fitting into one of three ideal types: humanitarian, development, and ­human rights organ­izations. Most organ­izations blend the work of two or more of ­these types—­ for instance, humanitarian organ­izations which also engage in development work or development organ­izations which have developed h ­ uman rights–­based approaches to their work. Some organ­izations run operations, o ­ thers focus exclusively on advocacy. Each of t­ hese types of work is represented by the international anti-­hunger organ­izations examined in this study.24 ­These are organ­izations that work globally, and several wage a common campaign or utilize a common advocacy approach in multiple countries and regions of the world at the same time. For this reason, the pre­sent proj­ect does not ask about hunger specifically in one country or region but asks se­nior and executive staff at ­these organ­izations about how they understand chronic hunger generally, as this understanding informs the construction of ­these large multiyear and multiregion campaigns. Furthermore, while it is more common among qualitative proj­ects in the transnational advocacy lit­er­at­ ure to examine a singular campaign or partnership in a given issue area, I have opted instead to widen the lens of this proj­ect to encompass multiple international anti-­hunger campaigns across dif­ 23. The decision to classify an organ­ization as an international nongovernmental organ­ization (INGO) or a nongovernmental organ­izations (NGO) is challenging, as the dividing line is imprecise.

In this book, I refer to t­ hese organ­izations as INGOs b ­ ecause they work, e­ ither through their advocacy or operations on hunger amelioration, across borders. This does not mean all of t­hese organ­ izations have physical offices in multiple countries. Bread for the World, for example, is physically based only in the United States, though as their name suggests they advocate policies for reducing hunger abroad, often focusing on lobbying the U.S. government to improve policies and funding for anti-­hunger efforts internationally.

24. As discussed ­earlier, this proj­ect focuses on chronic hunger, and ­because of this, I did consider omitting MSF, a highly influential international anti-­hunger organ­ization, as their work focuses more on emergency responses to acute malnutrition (and its treatment, for instance, through ready-­to-­use therapeutic food [RUTF]) than chronic hunger. In the case of MSF, however, I opted to keep it in the study, ­because it was repeatedly referenced as influential by other international anti-­hunger organ­izations and ­because of its significant advocacy efforts directed ­toward U.S. food aid. When organ­izations focusing both on chronic hunger and short-­term hunger (such as emergency famine relief) w ­ ere interviewed and surveyed, they ­were asked to direct their responses to how the organ­ization considered chronic hunger.

The Politics of Chronic Hunger

11

fer­ent types of organ­izations (including development and more purely ­human rights–­based organ­izations) taking place si­mul­ta­neously. Advocacy around access to food, like that surrounding access to education, health, or other economic and social rights, involves diverse organ­izations within its network. Broadening my focus to include this complexity allows for not only a more accurate empirical snapshot of advocacy in the hunger realm but also a more comprehensive analy­ sis of advocacy in this issue area.

Moreover, as ­will be discussed in the chapters that follow, the nature of advocacy in the hunger issue area often differs from the more “aggressive” (to use the word of one se­nior official at Oxfam Amer­i­ca) street protesting and rallies envisioned in much of the ­human rights lit­er­a­ture.25 Indeed, some of the participants in this study might not identify with the word activist and some might even hesitate to classify the work of their international anti-­hunger organ­ization as advocacy given its association with a specific type of more confrontational protest work. I use the terms activist and advocacy in this book b ­ ecause the work of all of ­these organ­izations is about enacting serious change in the way hunger is engaged with and responded to globally, even when some international anti-­hunger organ­ izations eschew approaches to activism and advocacy that reflect more conventional naming and shaming strategies. International anti-­hunger advocacy takes varied forms, as ­will be discussed in chapters 2 and 4.

An Over view of the Chapters This book has an unconventional structure. With the exception of chapter 1, which provides historical detail necessary to understand con­temporary advocacy in this issue area, each subsequent chapter opens with its own distinct research question, geared ­toward better understanding con­temporary international anti-­hunger advocacy. In this way the book takes more of a “stepping stone” approach to discovery— in answering the question at hand, each chapter opens up a new question that readers might not have considered absent the preceding discussion. The following chapter then takes up that new question, a routine that continues throughout the book.

The book begins by placing con­temporary international anti-­hunger advocacy in its historical context. Building on archival research I conducted at the FAO archives, the UK National Archives, and the U.S. National Archives, chapter 1 examines how hunger evolved from a condition, understood as an inevitable part of the natu­ral landscape, to a prob­lem, such that state and nonstate actors would begin to see it as something to be ameliorated. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the emergence of 25. Interview, Oxfam Amer­i­ca 1, May 2013.

12 Introduction

the con­temporary international anti-­hunger organ­izations examined in this book and explores the origins of a ­human right to food in international law.

Chapter 2 turns its focus on con­temporary international anti-­hunger advocacy, describing the nature of con­temporary campaigns across top international anti-­hunger organ­izations and asking if dominant h ­ uman rights models—­namely, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s (1998) “boomerang model” and Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink’s (1999, 2013) “spiral model”—­are able to account for the be­hav­ior pre­sent in this issue area. Arguing that they cannot, the chapter provides an alternative model of advocacy, the “buckshot model,” to describe and explain advocacy around hunger and the right to food.

Building on the insight from chapter 2 that international anti-­hunger advocacy does not fit the expectations of dominant models in the lit­er­a­ture, chapter 3 asks how it is pos­si­ble that the be­hav­ior of international anti-­hunger advocacy varies from the expectations of the h ­ uman rights and advocacy lit­er­a­tures. This chapter turns its attention to critically evaluating the normative environment in which international anti-­hunger advocates work. I argue that ­there is no norm around hunger or the right to food among top international anti-­hunger organ­ izations, and I use this insight to theorize advocacy in issue areas that lack a norm.

Chapter 3 provides additional conceptual tools for scholars to make sense of the social and moral environments in which activists are working, articulating the distinction between norms, moral princi­ples, and supererogatory standards.

If ­there is no anti-­hunger norm within this community, this insight invites another question: Why is ­there no anti-­hunger norm? Chapter 4 takes up this question, reconsidering how scholars understand what constitutes a ­human right and how issues that sit at the nexus of development and h ­ uman rights (like hunger) strug­gle to develop socially shared expectations of appropriate be­hav­ior by specific actors (i.e., norms).

Fi­nally, chapter 5 considers the puzzling role of international law around the right to food. Why has existing law been unable to generate norms within this advocacy community? This chapter examines the reasons why international anti-­ hunger organ­izations rarely legitimate the right to food in l­egal terms and how this case can challenge scholars’ understanding of the relationships between norms, ­human rights, and law.

My objective in the pre­sent study is not simply to replace one advocacy framework with another; it is to force deeper thinking about how the constituent ele­ ments of ­these frameworks fit together. By breaking down standard advocacy models into their components parts and under­lying assumptions and showing how the politics of blame, the assumption of established norms, and the role of law do not function as expected in the case of hunger, I can better help explain how alternative types of advocacy arise.

Ruth Streicher

Uneasy Military Encounters The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand

Southeast Asia Program Publications an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Southeast Asia Program Publications Editorial Board Mahinder Kingra (ex officio) Thak Chaloemtiarana Chiara Formichi Tamara Loos Andrew Willford Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Streicher, Ruth, 1982– author.

Title: Uneasy military encounters : the imperial politics of counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand / Ruth Streicher.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020000457 (print) | LCCN 2020000458 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501751325 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501751332 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501751349 (epub) | ISBN 9781501751356 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnic conflict—Thailand, Southern. | Counterinsurgency— Thailand, Southern. | Militarism—Thailand, Southern. | Islam—Thailand, Southern—Relations—Buddhism. | Buddhism—Thailand, Southern— Relations—Islam. | Race discrimination—Thailand, Southern. | Sexism—Thailand, Southern.

Classification: LCC HM1121 .S768 2020 (print) | LCC HM1121 (ebook) | DDC 305.8009593—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000457 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000458

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Note on Transliteration and Referencing

xi

Introduction: Policing the Imperial Formation

1

Chapter 1 Policing History: A Military Handbook on the Southern Provinces

17

Chapter 2 Checkpoints: Racialized Practices of Suspicion

37

Chapter 3 The New Path to Peace: Disciplining Religious Subjects

63

Chapter 4 Guarding the Daughter: Patriarchal Compromise and Military Sisterhood Conclusion: Happiness and Military Rule

87 109

Glossary

115

Notes

117

Bibliography

145

Index

161

Introduction Policing the Imperial Formation

In August 2016, the conflict in southern Thailand received a sudden and unexpected moment of global media attention. A series of bomb and arson attacks launched across seven central- and upper-southern Thai provinces on August 11 and 12 killed four people and wounded thirty-five, several international tourists among them. In the following days, media reports around the world presented the image of Thailand as a devastated tourist destination; the bombings had shattered the “Thai smile,” the tropical travel paradise was in danger, and many foreign offices issued travel warnings.1 Although Thai officials went out of their way to dismiss any possible connection between the August bombings and the ongoing armed conflict in southern Thailand, forensic evidence confirmed the involvement of southern insurgents: the attackers had used Malaysian mobile phones to detonate the bombs, and their improvised explosive devices resembled those deployed in the southernmost provinces. In September 2016, Thai authorities finally detained a suspect linked to the insurgency.2 The Thai military’s counterinsurgency strategy in southern Thailand is one of the reasons the August 2016 bombings caught foreign media unawares. As this book will show, the counterinsurgency has included a careful public relations strategy that presents the southern Thai conflict as a “minor unrest.”3 For over a decade, a network of insurgent groups has fought for the independence of an area stretching across three of Thailand’s southernmost provinces close to the border with Malaysia (Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat) and four adjacent districts of Songkhla province. This area once belonged to an Islamic sultanate called Patani and is now, in official terminology, considered the home of Thailand’s Malay-Muslim minority.4 During the insurgency, nearly seven thousand people have been killed and many more wounded since 2004, making the conflict one of the most deadly in Southeast Asia. Insurgent attacks targeting both civilians and security forces—most of them small-scale bombings, roadside ambushes, and shootings—have largely been restricted to the southernmost provinces, but there have been several coordinated bombings beyond the main area of conflict. The Thai military’s counterinsurgency campaign—the largest in Thai history, deploying over sixty thousand security personnel—has so far not been able to meet its proclaimed goal of stopping the insurgency.

The August 2016 bombings therefore also left in tatters both a counterinsurgency mission that had been celebrated as a success and an official discourse that portrayed the everyday violence in the South as “religious misunderstandings” and “minor cultural conflicts” instigated by misguided individuals.5 The bombings, which occurred in the very heart of the Thai nation-state and drew international attention to the southern conflict, consequently left officials to assert that “Thailand does not have any conflicts regarding religion, ethnicity, territory or minority groups.”6 In this official framing, the insurgency is made conspicuous by its absence.

2

Introduction

This book, by contrast, puts the southern Thai conflict center stage and analyzes such statements as part of a larger counterinsurgency discourse key to understanding the power dynamics of both the present-day Thai state formation and the ongoing insurgency. Counterinsurgency practices, I argue, contribute to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a modern state formation with roots in the premodern Buddhist empire of Siam that secures its survival by constructing the southern Muslim population as essentially and hierarchically different. Reinforcing notions of the racialized, religious, and gendered Otherness of Patani, counterinsurgency thus fuels the very conflict it has been designed to resolve. From this perspective, it is possible to understand the marginalization of the southern conflict in official discourse, the denials of obvious connections between the insurgency and the August 2016 bombings, and the culturalization of a deeply political conflict as integral parts of imperial policing practices.

Thailand as an Imperial Formation The production and authorization of difference are key principles of rule in imperial formations.7 The adjective “imperial,” in contrast to “colonial,” denotes strategies of both formal and informal control that do “not necessarily involve conquest, occupation, and durable rule by outside invaders”;8 the notion of a “social formation,” originally a Marxist term, in its poststructuralist rendering presumes the productive vulnerability of structures sedimented through history. Thus, as Ann Laura Stoler highlights, imperial formations are “projects in the making”; by fabricating and managing difference, they produce instability to ensure their own survival.9 Understanding Thailand as an imperial formation allows us not only to emphasize the continuities between Siam’s premodern empire and the structures of the current state formation but also to underscore how Western imperialism has come to shape Thailand in general and, as Tamara Loos shows, its relations with Patani in particular.10 Premodern Roots One of the key continuities between contemporary Thailand and Siam’s premodern empire is the operation of rule through the management of difference generally and the Othering of Islam in particular. The Islamic tradition was widely influential in premodern Siam not only on the Malay Peninsula, where Patani was located, but also in the center of the kingdom, where Muslim traders from India and Persia settled. The Thai term khaek, for instance, is today used with derogatory and racialized undertones to refer to southern Thai Muslims, but in the royal chronicles of the Ayutthaya kingdom, which ruled Siam from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, it referred more generally to Muslims of Indian, Persian, Arab, or Malay origin. While khaek were allowed to practice Islam and to build mosques in Ayutthaya, a seventeenth-century royal proclamation strictly prohibited the king’s subjects from converting to Islam, and the edict became part of Siam’s premodern law code, the Three Seals Law.11 The proclamation also banned Thai, Mon, and Lao women from having “clandestine sexual intercourse with khaek, French, English, khula [strangers] and Malays who uphold wrong-thinking,” thus differentiating subjects adhering to the Theravada Buddhist tradition (Thai, Mon, and Lao) from followers of other traditions such as Islam.12 The edict exemplifies how managing the difference of religious traditions hinged on distinctions of gender and ethnicity in premodern Siam. To start with, the Buddhist

Policing the Imperial Formation 3

Pali terms used to express “wrong-thinking” in the edict underscore the centrality of the Theravada tradition to Siam’s premodern system of rule, which consisted of several vassal states structured around a center that represented the power of the universal Buddhist monarch.13 The decree, moreover, regulated only women’s sexual relations and thus mirrors the paternalistic structure of Siam’s kingdom, where male sexual prowess symbolized political power and paternal lines of descent determined political loyalties.14 Last, it demonstrates that ethnic distinctions often correlated with those of religious traditions but did not necessarily match political ties in an empire where the king himself patronized distinct communities and “qualified as . . . emperor by ruling over many peoples,” obtaining imperial glory by military conquest.15 In this period, Patani was an independent Islamic sultanate that strategically sent tribute to different overlords such as the king of Ayutthaya in order to prevent military aggression. After Ayutthaya fell to the Burmese in 1767, Patani switched allegiance to the Burmese kingdom but suffered a number of severe military defeats when Rama I (r. 1782–1809), the first king of the currently reigning Chakri dynasty, reconstructed the Siamese empire and eventually reestablished rule at a new capital (present-day Bangkok) at the end of the eighteenth century. Notwithstanding its economic and political decline, and the violent dislocation of great parts of its population, Patani had grown into a flourishing regional center of Islamic scholarship by this time, with a mobile Muslim community that linked it to Mecca, Cairo, and other centers of Islamic learning.16 Siam’s Modern Imperial Formation In the late nineteenth century, the advent of modern Western imperialism had a dual impact on Siam that would, in the end, prove disastrous for Patani. Despite avoiding colonization, Siam became heavily dependent on European powers, while, at the same time, itself deploying modern imperial means to subordinate former tributaries such as Patani in the process of nation-state building.17 The Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893 exemplifies this dual set of relationships: the Siamese army had aggressively confronted the French military in seeking to expand its control over its former Lao tributaries along the banks of the Mekong River but lost definitively to the French, in the end having to concede vast amounts of territory and allow Asian protégés to remain under French jurisdiction. The defeat, sparked by Siam’s own imperial ambitions, demonstrated the helplessness of the “formerly powerful empire” in the face of modern European imperialism.18 Only after the 1893 crisis did Siam make efforts to revise the treaties of “friendship and commerce” that it had signed with European powers in the mid-nineteenth century, and not until decades later would scholars call them “unequal treaties”—after the treaties imposed on China by Western powers—to highlight how they had locked Siam into a system of hierarchical relationships with the West.19 Most crucially, extraterritoriality regulations in the treaties exempted specified foreigners from Siamese jurisdiction and justified the exception on the grounds of the assumed barbarousness of Siam’s traditional legal system. In this way, the treaties made the kingdom’s sovereignty conditional on a Western “standard of civilization,” which “amounted, essentially, to idealized European standards in both external and, more significantly, internal relations,” and they were only repealed in 1938 after royal governments had completely reformed Siam’s legal system with the help of European advisers.20 While originally signed to accelerate Siam’s economic development, the treaties, moreover, facilitated Siam’s further absorption into Britain’s informal empire, and by 1932 foreigners controlled over 90 percent of Siam’s export economy.21

4

Introduction

The 1893 crisis also prompted an acceleration of Siam’s own modernization efforts, which, as Benedict Anderson has shown, were consciously modeled on European imperial regimes in the region, and these efforts began to operate through the epistemological categories that undergirded Western imperial power.22 Thongchai Winichaikul has detailed, for instance, how the royal government under the “modernizing monarchs” King Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851–1868), King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910), and King Vajiravudh (Rama VI, r. 1910–1925) appropriated modern notions of space in negotiations with colonial neighbors, thus enabling the transformation of the flexible tributary relations into a modern system of sovereignty based on the idea of a bounded territory.23 Most importantly, the reforms instigated by Siamese monarchs at this time began to reflect the modern categories of race and religion that Western imperialism had formed, globalized, and intertwined. Racialized difference that privileged the white Christian West constituted the key condition for the discourse of world religions that divided and investigated the lives of Others in terms of their religious difference; these Others of Western civilization were, moreover, typically characterized as feminine.24 In the course of the enforced incorporation of the Islamic sultanate of Patani into the modern Siamese territory beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, these modern categories of difference came to play an important role. Whereas the integration of other tributaries such as the Lao states went hand-in-hand with an official demarcation of their population as Thai and Buddhist, the Patani population was marked as Other. Since the southern khaek had a “different religion” and spoke a “different language,” the royal government sent an envoy in 1896 to investigate their customs and support the Ministry of the Interior with designing an appropriate policy for governing the South. The envoy, concluding that the khaek malayu were living in “semibarbaric states,” advised the ministry to implement family law regulations modeled on the British colonial government of Muslims in Malaya.25 When, in 1902, Patani’s Islamic sultan rebelled against the planned Siamese intrusion, Siam engineered a blockade of the Pattani River and imprisoned the raja before integrating the formerly independent principalities into its new administrative system.26 In their treatment of Patani, Siamese rulers adopted means typical of modern imperial formations: they merged incorporation with differentiation by completely crushing the sultanate’s political and legal authority while narrowing the scope of the Islamic tradition to the private realm of the family. Thus, a population that was regarded as different in modern terms of both race and religion was primarily managed through the feminized notion of the family, and the family law system institutionalized the intersection of these categories of difference, mapped the difference of the Patani population onto the southern provinces, and secured the provinces’ marginal status as the geographical periphery. Concurrently, this Othering of southern khaek also became a constitutive element of an imperial formation that began to organize itself through a racialized idea of a Thai nation and turned the Buddhist tradition into its official religion while transforming a patriarchal monarchical system into a paternalistic state. The modern category of the Malay-Muslim minority and its geographical counterpart, the three southern provinces, are products of this historical process.

Policing Siam: The Counterinsurgency Army The instability of Siam’s modern imperial formation prompted the establishment of an institutionalized, modern military to engage in what would later be called

Policing the Imperial Formation 5

“counterinsurgency.”27 The military’s core function was to fight internal uprisings sparked by the forceful incorporation of former tributary states—those of the Shan and Lao peoples in particular, as well as Patani—into the new state territory.28 The catalogue on Siam prepared by the royal government for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world fair held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, for instance, glossed the main purposes of the new army as “chiefly the maintenance of order and security in the outlying districts, and . . . to cope with any eventual rising of unruly alien elements whether in the capital or in the interior of the country.”29 Likewise, the preamble to the edict that promulgated conscription in 1905 clarified that “effective, up-to-date government requires trained troops ever ready to suppress rebellions.”30 Besides internally regulating the emerging state, Siam’s armed forces were also important for positioning Siam on a global scale in line with European world powers. Thus, after visits to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and the British Raj in the 1880s and 1890s, King Chulalongkorn undertook the first efforts to reform the existing royal forces into an institution that met the military standards of European colonial empires. Like other newly established state institutions, a modern armed force was intended to signal Siam’s progress, and initially, many of the senior officers were members of the royal family who had received their military education in Europe.31 Remarkably, Siam’s modern armed forces were thus not designed to fulfill any external defense function but emerged as a counterinsurgency army, thereby enacting an imperial form of what security studies scholars have called “policing”—a governmental practice that connects the management of the population to the internal order and strength of the state.32 The analysis of counterinsurgency as policing is based on Michel Foucault’s elaboration of “police power” in his governmentality lectures (here, the term “police” does not refer to the constabulary force but reaches back to earlier understandings that Foucault traces to German discussions of Polizeiwissenschaft in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and allows for understanding counterinsurgency on a continuum from government to war.33 As a strategy of unconventional warfare, after all, counterinsurgency locates the local population as the main battlefield and explicitly prefers civilian to military means to fight armed rebellions inside state territory; counterinsurgents foreground methods such as psychological and information operations, economic assistance, and political stabilization to persuade the local population instead of using military force to annihilate the enemy.34 Since colonial and imperial contexts were key to the development of these population-centric tactics of war, however, postcolonial readings of Foucault’s work—which have emphasized the continuity of imperial structures of difference, the function of modern categories of knowledge as imperial technologies of rule, and the fragility of imperial orders—are indispensable to comprehend the work of policing.35 From this perspective, counterinsurgency, rather than aiming at managing the general population, manages certain populations in specific ways, so that modern categories of difference become central to the operation of police power. Counterinsurgency draws on such hierarchical categories of difference, renders them vital, and thus enables, nourishes, and mobilizes imperial relationships of force.36 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Siam’s modern military also reproduced these imperial structures of difference internally by excluding certain categories of people from conscription. For instance, the large Chinese population, which had increased dramatically due to Siam’s need for labor and was systematically discriminated against, was not allowed to serve in the armed forces. Likewise, the conscription edict exempted “wild tribes”—indigenous populations in mountain and forest areas.

6

Introduction

Social status was another critical category of exclusion for senior military positions; in this way, the royal government ensured that the upper ranks were occupied by members of the aristocracy.37 And although people from the southern Malay provinces were initially included, the Ministry of the Interior regarded them as untrustworthy and eventually refused to arm and train them.38 Military Coups and the Alliance with the United States during the Cold War Having emerged as a policing rather than a combat force, the Siamese military soon after its establishment started to challenge Siamese rulers in order to strengthen the Siamese state. In 1932, Western-educated elite officers staged a military coup, which abolished the absolutist monarchy.39 This coup was the first of a series that would haunt modern Thai history, forming what Chai-Anan famously called the “vicious cycle of Thai politics.” Until the 1990s, “coups, not elections, formed the norm for changing the government.”40 From 1932 to 2018, the military staged twelve coups; the most recent, in 2014, installed a military government that ruled until the beginning of 2019.

By maintaining repressive laws, disbanding an opposition party, controlling the electoral commission, and appointing the senate, the junta has managed to retain power even after official elections in March 2019.41 Thailand’s alliance with the United States during the Cold War is critical to understanding both the enduring power of Thailand’s military and the imperial characteristics of contemporary counterinsurgency in southern Thailand. In the global context of decolonization in the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States began funding academics to further develop theories of anti-guerilla warfare based on tactics of imperial policing, and the John F. Kennedy administration in the 1960s eventually codified the term “counterinsurgency” as the primary method for containing communism and strengthening the power of the US empire in countries considered to be part of the Third World.42 Fashioning itself as the “epitome of Western power and civilization,” the United States thereby attempted to “keep the nations of the Third World within the Western fold,” making Thailand the most important regional stronghold in the wake of the Vietnam War.43 As in the nineteenth century, a double set of relationships, external and internal, ensured the survival of Thailand’s modern imperial formation in the twentieth century. Thus, on the one hand, the Thai state, in general, and the Thai military, in particular, became dependent on the United States as part of the latter’s global counterinsurgency strategy, while on the other, they aggressively deployed imperial counterinsurgency strategies to crush political opposition, which was strongest in those geographical border regions that used to be tributary states. In the US-led imperial system of the Cold War, Thailand’s civilizational status was now measured in terms of the Thai government’s success in anticommunist counterinsurgency, and whereas international advisers had rewritten Siam’s legal system in the early twentieth century, US generals completely restructured Thailand’s security forces in the 1950s and ’60s. Nearly fifty thousand US troops were stationed in a country that had never been colonized—the US armed forces themselves recognized that “the presence of American military men, no matter how benign, tended to confirm the communist contention that the United States had ‘occupied’ Thailand.”44 Moreover, Thailand received so much institutional and financial support from the United States to strengthen its security forces that a US officer concluded in

Policing the Imperial Formation 7

1969: “It is fair to say that there are no major Royal Thai Government counterinsurgency programs in effect or planned that do not receive some kind of US assistance—be it in the form of material, training, or advice.”45 The national military was not only expanded significantly but was also completely reorganized according to US standards, and thousands of Thai troops were deployed to South Vietnam in support of the allied forces.46 The “distinct American flavor” that US military reports detected in the Thai government’s “posture in the realm of counterinsurgency” was also reflected institutionally.47 To coordinate military civic action in the anticommunist campaign, the armed forces established the National Security Council (NSC) and the Communist Suppression Operations Command (CSOC), later renamed Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC)—both were directly modeled on US military institutions.

In political terms, the US-Thai alliance was based on the United States’ backing of the military dictatorship of Gen. Sarit Thanarat and his allies (1957–1973); under his rule, notions of gender, race, and religion gained increasing importance for the counterinsurgency campaign. In direct reference to the imperial ruler of the kingdom of Sukothai (1238–1438), which was promoted in modern Thai historiography as the origin of the Thai nation, Sarit styled himself as the “fatherly ruler” (pho khun) of the race of Thai people.48 Moreover, Thai government propaganda followed US policies by labeling communists as both “un-Thai” and “atheists,” proclaiming in the Anti-Communist Law of 1969 that communist activities included “persuading others to lose faith in religion or engaging in activities that would destroy Thai customs.”49 A host of government initiatives that involved Buddhist clerics was eventually centralized under the “missionary monks” program (thammathut), which propagated the policing of Buddhist morality as a means to strengthen national security, and sent groups of monks to distant provinces to provide public education.50 Likewise, counterinsurgency school-building programs focused on teaching Thai to people that were recognized as potentially disloyal to the Thai state—particularly indigenous peoples in the north and northeast.51 The far south also featured as an area of insurgent activity on the maps of anti-guerilla strategists: recognizing the “unfortunate symptons [sic] of colonializm [sic] that characterize the southern situation,” they feared that “dissident Moslems” might join with “communists” in order to seek “autonomy from the Buddhist-oriented government of Thailand.”52 In fact, the group now suspected to be one of the main drivers of the insurgency—the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (National Revolutionary Front, BRN)—was founded in the 1960s and had intimate connections with the communist parties of both Thailand and Malaysia.53 After decades of anticommunist warfare, the Thai armed forces eventually declared themselves victorious in the 1980s—a questionable success, however, which resulted from an internal weakening of the Communist Party and a law granting amnesty to its members; hundreds of cadres gave up their fight and surrendered. Many of the older officers whom I met in southern Thailand had not only participated in the anticommunist campaign but had also learned everything they knew about counterinsurgency during the Cold War, and Thai military discourse still celebrates the Cold War campaign as its main (and only) military success in modern history. In this context, the southern insurgency in the early twenty-first century provided the perfect incentive to revive the Thai forces’ main tactics and institutions of unconventional warfare—for instance, the ISOC, which had been lingering for years without a core agenda, has been reinstituted as the main body responsible for coordinating both civilian and military counterinsurgency measures in the southern provinces.

8

Introduction

Policing Southern Thailand The counterinsurgency motto “Understanding, Reaching Out, Development,” coined by King Bhumipol Adulyadej (Rama IX, r. 1946–2016) in a speech in February 2004, has guided military operations in the southern region under various governments and juntas, and it encapsulates how counterinsurgency discourse is predicated on and produces the essentialized differences of the southern population.54 “Understanding” reiterates the official framing of political grievances of the southern population as “cultural misunderstandings”; “reaching out” recapitulates the peripheral location of southern Thailand; “development” integrates a temporal perspective that confines the South to an earlier stage of a teleological history than the rest of Thailand.

Most conspicuously, the motto positions Thailand’s military as the paternal caretaker of the South and relocates the causes of insurgent violence in the differences of the southern population.

The motto also reflects a depoliticized discourse of military benevolence that has prevailed in official policy toward the southern provinces since the ousting of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a military coup in 2006. Thaksin, a billionaire business tycoon who had won the 2001 election with his party, Thais Love Thais (Thai Rak Thai), has widely been seen as having taken a hawkish approach toward the southern insurgency.55 Following the January 2004 attacks on army bases that marked the beginning of the current conflict, the Thaksin administration imposed martial law in the southern provinces and drafted the Emergency Decree, which was initially designed to replace martial law but ended up being applied in addition to the latter.56 The resulting legal gray zone allows security forces in the South to detain suspects without warrant, to hold them for a maximum of thirty-seven days, and to be guaranteed immunity if they declare they have acted “in good faith.”57 Moreover, it was under Thaksin’s government that two of the most serious cases of abuse by security forces occurred: the incidents of Kru Ze and Tak Bai. At Kru Ze, a small group of men retreated to the historical Kru Ze Mosque, one of the most important Muslim sites in the region, after attacking a nearby Thai security checkpoint; in reaction, special forces stormed the mosque and destroyed it, killing all thirty-two men inside—most of them probably innocent victims. In Tak Bai, the military shot and killed seven protesters marching peacefully outside a police station; seventy-eight additional protestors died after being arrested and tightly packed, hands tied behind their backs, into trucks for transport to an army camp.58 The widely reported killings were perceived as an embarrassment by military officers opposing Thaksin. When Thaksin was ousted in 2006, coup leaders referred to his mismanagement of the southern problem and promised a more efficient and less brutal counterinsurgency policy.59 At that point in time, a number of analysts speculated that Thaksin’s approach had mobilized and strengthened the insurgency movement; however, increasing insight into the movement has not only proven such accusations wrong but also, once again, revealed the significance of the imperial context of Patani’s annexation for understanding the current conflict.60 Experts now suspect the Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Coordinate (BRN-C), a successor of the BRN movement founded in the 1960s, to have played a leading role in recruiting and mobilizing a new generation of insurgents since at least the 1990s. The January 2004 assaults had been long planned, and the date of the April 2004 attacks—which in addition to the Kru Ze checkpoint attack involved coordinated incidents in Yala and Pattani Provinces—was likely carefully chosen to memorialize the Thai authorities’ brutal suppression of a rebellion

Policing the Imperial Formation 9

in 1948 that had killed over a hundred Muslim militants.61 The approximately three thousand active insurgent fighters receive support from a number of villages in the southern provinces and make use of a relatively permeable border with Malaysia. Most operate under the banner of the BRN-C, which rallies around the claim to self-rule in an area roughly comprising the former Islamic sultanate of Patani, rather than calling for global jihad.62 While many observers at the start of the conflict described a diffuse network of insurgents, the BRN-C seems to be organized in a structure that includes a military and political wing as well as village-based cells. Operating in secret, insurgents have been able to sustain high levels of violence since 2004: on the one hand through regular small-scale assaults such as targeted shootings, bombings, and ambushes, and on the other by scaling up the violence in certain cases and launching large coordinated attacks.63 The military junta that ruled after the 2006 coup presented the counterinsurgency policy in southern Thailand in more depoliticized terms of paternal benevolence than did the Thaksin government. In a peacebuilding policy of 2004, Thaksin had accused certain groups of instigating “war” in the form of “terrorism.” By contrast, in October 2006, just one month after the coup, Prime Ministerial Order 206, titled “Policy to Promote Peace and Happiness in the Southern Border Provinces,” mentioned neither term and instead assigned the military to deal with “unrest” in the area by “eradicating the factors that facilitate the use of violence.” Thaksin’s policy had openly invoked the differences in the race, language, religion, and culture of the people in the southern area as grounds for indoctrination; the 2006 order obfuscated such differences by introducing notions of national unity, happiness, and harmony, and using affective language to voice concerns about “feelings.”64 People in the southern border provinces, it asserted, felt (wrongly) that they were not truly part of a unified Thailand. Counterinsurgency, consequently, should eliminate any factors that mobilized such misguided feelings and nurtured an atmosphere of mistrust. In this discourse, Patani’s longstanding political problems are collapsed into the subjectivities of people in the three southern border provinces and their feelings, suggesting that the military is dealing with the consequences of minor confusions of identity rather than political opposition. The Thai state thereby emerges as a neutral arbiter offering valuable disciplinary lessons that teach mutual understanding, and the military is called upon to manage the southern population in such a way that its incorporation comes without a need for rebellion. Combining hierarchical differentiation with the eradication of political dissent, this form of policing clearly echoes its imperial forebears.

The post-2006 policy has also authorized the expansion of the military mandate to encompass matters of internal security. Thus, the Internal Security Act, passed in 2007, gave the military the lead role for safeguarding internal security and revived and restructured the ISOC by giving it a new legal foundation and securing powerful posts for elite generals.65 The ISOC command for the southern region (called ISOC Region 4 Forward Command) became the lead organization for the southern counterinsurgency, and security forces under the southern ISOC leadership became heavily engaged in social development projects and public relations campaigns.66 This counterinsurgency strategy has legitimized a military mission in southern Thailand on a previously unseen scale. For an area with a population of approximately 1.8 million, the number of security personnel is huge, and it has been steadily increased, growing from fifteen thousand in 2005 to over sixty thousand by 2015.

A large part of the security force is composed of troops from the Royal Thai Armed Forces, the Royal Thai Navy, the Border Patrol Police, and police forces; yet very few

10

Introduction

of these soldiers are locals. The Royal Thai Armed Forces are organized into four regional armies, and each is in charge of one of the four provincial task forces in the southern counterinsurgency campaign.67 Soldiers from the Fourth Regional Army of southern Thailand, which includes both the lower and upper southern provinces, are deployed only at Task Force IV, which is responsible for a very small area of three districts of Songkhla. Task Force II in Pattani Province, however, recruited soldiers from the northeastern Second Army. The imperial structure of the Thai state is thus replicated in Pattani. Like the southern Thai provinces, the northeastern states were forcefully integrated into Siam at the end of the nineteenth century and are still considered by the Bangkok elite to be a rural hinterland; the economic conditions in this region are often even worse than in southern Thailand. Manpower from the northeastern margins, in other words, has been dispatched to develop and appease the southern periphery.

Locals recruited by the Thai military, by contrast, are usually paid less, receive less training, and have to work in the most volatile conflict areas. The biggest group is the thahan phran—paramilitary forces, also called “rangers,” which are largely a legacy of Thailand’s anticommunist campaign in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.68 The rangers are given only a short forty-five-day training course and earn a relatively low salary of approximately THB 9,000 (around USD 300) per month. Unlike troops who are regularly rotated among different military stations, the rangers are expected to remain in an area of operation for several years, and instead of residing in large army camps, they are stationed in small groups. In the ranger unit responsible for the Saiburi area, for instance, about twenty paramilitaries would usually lodge together in camps located at what were considered to be strategic hot spots, such as opposite a Muslim boarding school.69 The black uniform of the thahan phran, which distinguishes the rangers from the khaki-clad members of the general forces, features prominently in rumors about military brutality in Pattani that often construct the paramilitaries as particularly vicious traitors to the insurgent cause.

Moreover, the security forces have armed and trained civilians to support the counterinsurgency campaign and protect their own villages in southern Thailand.

Rough calculations in 2012 estimated there were over eighty thousand members of these volunteer defense forces, a number that has likely increased over the course of a military initiative that has expanded these forces to all districts of the southern provinces (see fig. 2).70 Due to this large-scale arming of civilians and the easing of firearm regulations, the number of guns in circulation in the southern region has rapidly increased.71 Rather than de-escalating the conflict, the counterinsurgency mission has thereby contributed to destabilizing the area; as many rumors and some specialists have it, moreover, the military has profited greatly from its southern mission, using the strengthening of its force in the periphery to repeatedly seize power in the center.72 Meanwhile, the southern insurgency has continued unabated: by 2018, the estimated number of fatalities had risen to nearly seven thousand, and over thirteen thousand people had been injured since 2004. Victims have included both security personnel and civilians, and although there have been a number of attacks on Buddhist monks and villagers, Muslims account for about half of the casualties. The ongoing conflict has yielded one key result for Thailand’s imperial formation: it has, once again, institutionalized the demarcation of Patani as an “exceptional region . . . which is administered and governed . . . visibly differently from other parts of the country.”73

PRINCIPLES IN POWER Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy

Vanessa Walker

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

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Copyright Š 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come]

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: The Politics of Complicity

1

1. The Chilean Catalyst: Cold War Allies and Human Rights in the Western Hemisphere

15

2. Words Are Not Enough: Building a Human Rights Agenda in the Shadow of the Past

62

3. A Special Responsibility: Human Rights and U.S.-Chilean Relations

112

4. Weighing the Costs: Human Rights and U.S.-Argentine Relations

154

5. The Reagan Reinvention: A Cold War Human Rights Vision

205

Conclusion: The Golden Years of Human Rights?

249

Acknowledgments 255 Notes 259 Bibliography 323 Index 335

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Introduction The Politics of Complicity

September 7, 1977, should have been a highpoint for the Carter administration’s new approach to U.S.-Latin American relations. The leaders of the hemisphere were gathered in Washington to celebrate the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties, a signature accomplishment of Carter’s foreign policy agenda. The gathering not only marked a new phase of bilateral relations with Panama but also symbolized Carter’s increasingly multilateral, less interventionist approach to the region. Further, in a private meeting earlier that day, Carter had persuaded General Augusto Pinochet of Chile to allow UN inspectors into his country to survey human rights conditions for the first time. This was a substantial breakthrough and the first major human rights concession Carter had been able to elicit from Pinochet, one of the most contentious figures in the human rights politics of the 1970s. The Carter administration had spent the past nine months fastidiously cooling relations with South American dictators, signaling its intention that human rights abuses would have real, material consequences for relations with the United States. Carter and his team had prepared rigorously for the bilateral meetings accompanying the signing ceremony, drafting in-depth plans for each leader, including a focus on concrete measures to address specific human rights violations. In the private bilateral meetings, Carter genially but

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2 Introduction

adamantly pressed the region’s strongmen—formerly close Cold War allies with Washington—on uncomfortable human rights questions, urging them to take meaningful action, and leaving no doubt of his administration’s commitment to the issue.1 Carter seemed understandably surprised, therefore, at the evening gala when a Washington Post reporter informed him that more than seven hundred protestors had gathered outside the White House. “Oh really?” he responded. “Against me?” These protestors were not the conservative opponents to the Canal Treaties, who had gathered in smaller numbers on the steps of the Capitol Building that morning. Instead, many carried placards that said “Down with Pinochet” and chanted in protest against the Chilean leader, as well as several other of the foreign heads of state.2 Earlier that day, approximately 1,500 demonstrators had rallied in front of the Pan-American Union Building, condemning political repression by right-wing military governments in many Latin American countries. In nearby Lafayette Park, speakers denounced Carter for flouting his commitment to human rights by inviting these dictators to Washington. Sue Bornstein, a member of a Chilean solidarity group, spoke to the crowd: “From now on, Jimmy Carter, you have given us the signal of what our attitude must be towards your administration. . . . This administration is all lip, all words.”3 More formally, Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-CA) held a press conference to remonstrate the administration for including repressive leaders in the Canal Treaties celebrations. Standing beside Isabel Letelier— a human rights activist and widow of the former Chilean ambassador who had been assassinated in Washington, D.C., by Chile’s secret police just a year earlier—Dellums denounced Carter’s personal welcome to Pinochet and other “dictators.”4 Although Carter expressed surprise, these denunciations could not have been totally unexpected for him. Human rights groups and members of Congress had voiced their concerns in the weeks leading up to the ceremonies. While some criticized the administration’s inclusion of the region’s dictators in the signing ceremony and celebratory events, most focused on Carter’s private bilateral meetings, especially with the military leaders of Argentina and Chile. Letters from prominent members of Congress, including Donald Fraser (D-MN) and James Abourezk (D-SD), expressed dismay at the legitimacy that these private, bilateral meetings would convey on these repressive regimes.5 Congressman John Burton (D-CA) cautioned in a telegram, “These meeting[s], an important symbol of U.S. relations with

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The Politics of Complicity 3

these countries, appear to contradict the bold human rights stand that the President has taken, and the intent of Congress that Chile and Argentina be condemned for their flagrant denials of the most basic human rights.”6 Carter’s decision to proceed with the meetings, despite these warnings, evidenced his belief that engagement on difficult issues, including human rights, was essential to resolving them. When asked at a press conference following the meetings how he would respond to people who said the U.S. government should not be meeting with these dictators, Carter replied, “I don’t feel that this should be an obstacle to my meeting with them, to describing to them the problems as I see them, to ask for their explanation in a very frank and forthcoming way and to request their plans for the alleviation of the problem or the explanation of the charges that have been made against their governments.”7 Carter perhaps felt vindicated in his approach, knowing that the yet-to-be-announced concessions he garnered from Pinochet would set in motion a significant UN fact-finding mission, one that would bring even more pressure to bear on the Chilean regime to reform its repressive practices. Moreover, the treaty summit as a whole had its intended effect of signaling the administration’s serious commitment to setting relations with Latin America on a less interventionist, more multilateral footing, giving it a “new measure of high priority attention.”8 Yet those who had cautioned him against the meetings—arguing they would undermine Carter’s domestic support from the human rights community and be used by foreign leaders to bolster their own legitimacy— were also vindicated. The Washington Post reported the day after the ceremony that most of the demonstrations “focused on charges that Carter, by personally receiving dictators or their representatives at the White House, has betrayed his own devotion to the promotion of human rights and has given these regimes a stamp of respectability.”9 Indeed, the morning headline of Chile’s El Mercurio—a mouthpiece for the Pinochet regime—touted “67 Minutes between Carter and Pinochet,” accompanied by pictures of the two leaders smiling broadly at each other.10 Thus, even as Carter pressed vigorously for human rights with individual leaders, his apparent support for these leaders’ views confirmed advocates’ suspicions that the administration’s commitment to implementing a human rights policy was no more vigorous or sincere than that of past administrations. Good relations with strategic allies, it seemed, would continue to trump vigorous measure on behalf of human rights violations. In short, the administration appeared to be “all lip, all words.”

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Figure 1. President Jimmy Carter with General Augusto Pinochet in Washington, D.C., for the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties. A similar image was featured on the front page of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, championing “67 Minutes between Carter and Pinochet.” The meeting and photo op were also widely criticized by human rights groups in the United States.

Courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.

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The Politics of Complicity 5

U.S. Cold War policies were deeply implicated in the human rights violations perpetrated by many of Latin America’s governments.11 This entanglement of U.S. policy and human rights abuses make the Western Hemisphere a critical site for the development and implementation of U.S. human rights diplomacy during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies. New human rights advocacy targeting Latin America in the 1970s not only sought to mitigate foreign abuses but also challenge Cold War relationships between the United States and repressive right-wing regimes, contesting presidential prerogatives over the very mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy making.12 Latin America is essential for revealing the uniquely anti-interventionist and selfcritical elements of human rights policy that took shape at this time; it was at the core—not the periphery—of both U.S. domestic policy debates and the new international policies that reached far beyond the hemisphere.13 The United States’ human rights policies that arose in the 1970s were not only about addressing abuses taking place abroad, nor has human rights diplomacy been the exclusive purview of those who “care” about human rights. Debates about new human rights initiatives quickly moved beyond whether the United States should pursue such initiatives, to more complex arguments about what the purpose of such a human rights policy should be, how it fit with other national interests, and, from this, what defined an effective policy. Rather than evaluate U.S. human rights policy based exclusively on its ability to change the behaviors of foreign governments, or as a “feel-good” measure to appease domestic critics, this book explores it as a self-critical policy to address the failings of Cold War paradigms for domestic and foreign political power.14 Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power reveals the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

A serious analysis of the multiple meanings and objectives of human rights diplomacy requires a reassessment of the complex relationship between advocates and government officials. Many works now explore the critical contributions to human rights policy made by nongovernment actors and Congress before Carter’s election. Few scholars, however, have explored in depth how these essential precursors shaped the Carter administration’s agenda, bilateral diplomacy, and working dynamics with the broader human rights community while in office.15 The interactions between the U.S. administrations and human rights advocates were not only generative but also limiting, even during the demonstrably sympathetic Carter presidency. This project engages the decisive contributions of nongovernmental actors while also seeking to understand their complex relationships with government

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6 Introduction

officials in advancing their agendas. By taking seriously the perspectives of both advocates and policy makers, it reveals how the effectiveness and prioritization of human rights initiatives became entangled in domestic struggles over the control of foreign policy and presidential power. Tracing this relationship across three very different presidencies, moreover, gives us greater insight into the shared dilemmas and sustained relationships of policy makers and advocates that transcend any one administration’s ideological proclivities. Informal collaboration between government and nongovernment actors, a self-critical reassessment of U.S. foreign policy norms, and a power struggle between Congress and the White House for control over U.S. foreign affairs all shaped human rights policies and diplomacy during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.

This work explores the relationship between advocates and diplomats from 1973 to 1982 through an influential coalition of left-liberal human rights actors targeting U.S. policy in Latin America, or “the Movement,” as one State Department official dubbed them.16 In addition to the Movement’s focus on Latin America, a sense of responsibility for abuses by U.S. Cold War allies distinguished the Movement from advocates targeting repression in the Soviet sphere. Although the Movement’s constituent actors had diverse political and strategic perspectives, they shared a common assumption that human rights abuses in Latin America could not be abstracted from larger Cold War dynamics. The United States had a responsibility to mitigate foreign repression—not because of its unique historical traditions and values but because its recent policies and practices that facilitated abuses.

The Movement was defined by its belief that curtailing human rights abuses abroad required the reform of their own government’s interventionist policies that supported repressive regimes in the name of Cold War security relationships. This emphasis on U.S. complicity in foreign violations led to a strategy of reforming U.S. policy as a means to improve human rights globally. The Movement’s advocacy was not an irrational effort to absolve themselves of responsibility for the costs of the Cold War. The Movement believed its strategy of targeting U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships signaled moral condemnation and materially affected the ability of foreign governments to perpetrate abuse against their own citizens.17 Moreover, Washington’s support for repressive, right-wing governments not only undermined human rights abroad but also revealed the antidemocratic impact of Cold War foreign policy on the United States’ own government structures and practices. Human rights legislation and mechanisms advanced by the Movement evidenced a desire to mitigate repression in places such as

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The Politics of Complicity 7

Chile, but also to curtail presidential power and American interventionism in the name of establishing democratic oversight to the foreign policy process within the United States. Advocates’ desire to devolve greater authority to the legislative branch was intimately intertwined with a broad questioning of whether the growing power of the presidency was consistent with basic democratic principles within the United States.

The politics of complicity unified the diverse coalition that constituted the Movement.18 Political scientist Lars Schoultz observes, “By 1977, the combined interest groups concerned with the repression of human rights in Latin America had become one of the largest, most active, and most visible foreign policy lobbying forces in Washington.”19 Recent scholarship on human rights in the 1970s has given much attention to Amnesty International (AI) and its apolitical ethos of freeing political prisoners, rather than “trying to remedy oppression and injustice by targeting their sources.”20 Amnesty International certainly became an institutional behemoth of the human rights world during the 1970s, and its information and international contacts were critical to the burgeoning human rights coalition focused on Latin America. Yet the Movement’s agenda was not defined by AI’s scrupulously nonpartisan approach but rather by a synergy of moderate liberal groups, socialist networks, and leftist organizations that targeted U.S. Cold War policies. Established liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and leftist groups such as the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) increasingly turned to human rights in the 1970s as a language to expand their concern for civil rights and social justice into the international sphere, linking U.S. domestic and foreign policies. They were joined by new groups focused specifically on human rights conditions in Latin America. Organizations such as the ecumenical Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and socialist grassroots solidarity networks brought new voices and priorities to these established groups, targeting the connection between human rights abuses and U.S. intervention and regional hegemony.

The Movement combined the overseas contacts and information, cultivated by groups such as WOLA and other religious groups, Amnesty International, and solidarity networks, joining it with the Washington access, government connections, policy background, and lobbying expertise of the Institute for Policy Studies and ADA.21 In 1976 the core of the Movement formalized its collaboration through the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG), under the auspices of the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy (CNFMP).22 HRWG was a visible site of the rich informal collaboration among the groups and individuals active in the Movement. These groups

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8 Introduction

also had a fluid relationship with Congress, often working in tandem with sympathetic members to pass legislation, organize testimony from Latin American actors, and provide detailed information from advocate networks.

In turn, members of Congress contributed to the governance and operation of these groups, serving as national chairs, participating in events, and speaking at protests. This close working relationship with Congress mobilized the Movement and human rights concerns in the domestic political struggles between Congress and the White House over democratic governance and distribution of political power.23 Although they often disagreed on strategies and priorities, they shared a commitment to not only curtailing abuses but also reforming the power structures and policies that perpetuated them.24 The Movement’s emphasis on U.S. complicity in the abuses of Cold War allies became a central component of the Carter administration’s human rights policy. During the Carter presidency, human rights was part of a broader reassessment of Cold War paradigms, which diminished the centrality of the Soviet Union in its strategic thinking.25 This is not to say that East-West relations were unimportant to the Carter administration or to the development of human rights issues in the late Cold War. The Carter administration certainly believed that human rights considerations would inform relations with the Soviets and give the United States an ideological edge over its longtime adversary, but it anticipated little in the way of substantial improvements in human rights conditions within the Soviet Union. Human rights problems within the communist sphere were a serious concern for many, but the primary instruments formulated by Congress in the mid-1970s and implemented in bilateral relations—particularly restrictions on foreign aid, international financial institutions, and State Department country reports—overwhelmingly targeted the U.S. government’s alignments with and support for repressive Cold War allies.

U.S. relations with the military governments in Chile and Argentina epitomized the human rights politics of the 1970s. Although they do not represent the experiences of all Latin America, both Chile and Argentina received a disproportionate amount of attention from advocates and diplomats alike, and strongly influenced the contours of U.S. policy and debates in the 1970s. The 1973 Chilean coup was a crucial catalyst for the emerging human rights movement, bringing together criticism of U.S. Cold War foreign policy with challenges to presidential power domestically.26 Argentina is widely regarded as one of the most successful cases of the Carter administration’s human rights diplomacy, and it was certainly one of the most visible, with the military coup coinciding with the 1976 U.S. presidential campaign.27

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The Politics of Complicity 9

Yet even with this “success story,” one can see the limits faced by the administration stemming from tensions with the advocate community and competing domestic and international policy objectives. The dilemmas faced by the administration in implementing its human rights policy in Chile and Argentina reflected other high-profile crises: tensions between productive engagement and dissociation, the limits of U.S. influence to shape human rights outcomes, the legacy of U.S. intervention and support for repressive regimes, divisive domestic politics, and entrenched congressional opinion.

This book bridges the fields of U.S.-Latin American relations, human rights, social activism, and policy history, situating diplomacy in a broad social and political domestic context, and considering the influence of a wide array of actors, both in and out of government. Moreover, it emphasizes the ways in which foreign actors and issues can define the central debates of U.S. politics and identity. This study thus reveals the deep and inextricable connections between international structures and policies, and domestic dissent and reform in the 1970s. In this, it is neither an exclusively “top-down” history that focuses only on policy makers and grand strategy, nor an exclusively “grassroots” history of human rights that seeks to decenter the state. It instead focuses on the interchange between governments and societies, with nongovernment actors providing influential limits within which policy makers operate.

Chapter 1 traces the rise of the Movement in response to the 1973 Chilean coup, revealing the centrality of Latin America in 1970s human rights activism and formulation of human rights foreign policy mechanisms— including foreign aid legislation and bureaucratic structures in the State Department. Unlike human rights violations in the Soviet sphere, U.S. advocates viewed human rights abuses in Chile as a product of U.S. political dysfunction resulting from Cold War paradigms of national interest and excessive concentration of power in the presidency. Coming in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the failures of Vietnam, U.S. complicity in the Chilean coup and the subsequent repression underscored the antidemocratic nature of Cold War foreign policy, highlighting the connections between foreign human rights abuses and U.S. policies. Using the information generated by South American advocates, newly organized and vocal human rights groups in the United States and their congressional partners advanced a slate of legislative initiatives targeted at the nexus of foreign repression and U.S. policy, challenging the logic and substance of Cold War alliances.

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10 Introduction

The political battles in the United States over the proper response to Chile’s ongoing human rights problems became a way to debate the merits of competing approaches to human rights diplomacy and the distribution of foreign policy responsibilities between Congress and the president. Under pressure from new human rights forces, the Ford administration slowly moved to incorporate the issue into its State Department structures and diplomacy, yet simultaneously balked at congressional usurpation of executive privilege in foreign affairs and the prioritization of human rights over what it viewed as more concrete security interests. The limited human rights agenda of the Ford administration never led to sweeping reconceptualization of foreign policy championed by human rights advocates or the subsequent Carter administration, but these battles created an environment that would decisively shape the Carter administration’s interactions with Congress, relationship with advocates, and implementation of its human rights policy.

Chapter 2 analyzes the early development of the Carter administration’s human rights agenda, built in tandem with a new approach to U.S.-Latin American relations during its first year in office. From the outset, the Carter administration envisioned a human rights policy that would simultaneously mitigate human rights violations abroad, build U.S. credibility and stature in the international sphere by reasserting a moral and ideological pole of attraction, and signify a move away from the excessive secrecy and power of the Cold War presidency at home. Carter incorporated human rights into his Latin American policy as a way to demonstrate an increased respect for sovereignty in the region and divorce the United States from interventionist legacies that had both undermined self-determination and exacerbated human rights crises. The Carter administration offered a vision of human rights based not on regime change from without but on restrained U.S. engagement in the region to empower citizens to reform their own countries from within. This conception of human rights policy—laid out in a new approach to U.S.–Latin American relations in the spring of 1977—emerged also in policy frameworks well beyond the region as the administration drafted its global human rights policy in the summer of 1977.

Although Carter largely shared the premises of the Movement’s vision, differences over the implementation and signifiers of this policy in high-level diplomacy created rifts between like-minded advocates and policy makers. Carter found himself grappling with the legacies of both U.S. intervention in the region and also congressional and public distrust stemming from past excesses of the Cold War presidency. The administration’s options in implementing its policy were bounded by both past

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The Politics of Complicity 11

regional relations and human rights advocacy itself. Carter had to prove to human rights proponents that his administration was serious about its human rights agenda, that quiet diplomacy was not simply code for inaction. Yet his own advocacy to overcome this legacy of apparent executive indifference, with statements such as “our commitment must be absolute,” raised expectations he could not hope to meet and ran against the more nuanced, restrained diplomacy he thought would be most effective in light of past U.S. interventionism.28 Early battles over incorporating binding human rights language into foreign aid legislation and backlash to the invitation of Chile’s and Argentina’s leaders to Washington for the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties foreshadowed problems that would plague the administration throughout its time in office.

Chapter 3 addresses U.S. relations with Chile during the Carter administration as an avenue to explore the innate tensions within a policy that simultaneously sought to promote human rights abroad and champion nonintervention. The administration, seeking to appeal to both domestic and international constituencies, sought an approach that balanced distancing the U.S. government from the Pinochet regime, maintaining pressure to improve human rights, and avoiding overt interference in domestic Chilean affairs, which could prompt a nationalist backlash. The competing demands of demonstrating to domestic audiences a cooler relationship with the Pinochet regime on the one hand, and implementing a human rights policy that would improve conditions in Chile on the other, shaped and at times undermined the Carter administration’s efforts. The administration was always aware that its leverage was limited and that regime change from without was not a primary objective. The assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976, highlighted the tensions between the domestic and foreign policy objectives of the administration’s human rights policy. When faced with the limits of pairing human rights with a commitment to nonintervention, the administration erred on the side of restraint, choosing its commitment to supporting gradual change over a more strident policy. This approach was largely supported by human rights groups in Chile and paid dividends in the long-term stature of the United States in the region. However, it undermined Carter’s standing with the Movement at home, which read the restrained but open relations between Washington and Santiago as a continuation of prior administrations’ “half-hearted” policies on human rights. Criticism from disappointed human rights advocates fed into broader questioning of the costs and effectiveness of the policy across the political spectrum.

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12 Introduction

Chapter 4 explores the Carter administration’s approach to Argentina, driven by a rich interaction between advocates and government officials in Buenos Aires and Washington. Argentina was the site of some of the Carter administration’s most sustained and vigorous human rights efforts, yet it also revealed the limits of influence and competing priorities among administration officials and U.S. human rights groups. In Argentina tensions arose around the dual objectives of U.S. policy: to defend human rights by distancing itself from dictatorships and to engage with repressive regimes to improve specific human rights problems. The Carter administration had built its foreign policy around the premise that the promotion and support of human rights would serve the national interest by building the United States’ stature and influence in the international system. With Argentina, however, its human rights initiatives increasingly appeared to conflict with other national interests, particularly economic growth and new security concerns. With a struggling economy at home, the potential loss of trade and jobs due to human rights legislation curtailing international investment led some to question how this policy served the national interest. Moreover, resurgent tensions with the Soviet Union in the second half of Carter’s term increased pressure to court noncommunist allies.

By summer 1978 the Carter administration faced domestic pressure from both increasingly restrictive human rights legislation passed by a liberal contingent in Congress and more conservative voices who expressed dissatisfaction with “costs” of human rights initiatives. The tenuous connection between economic aid and human rights abuses made the costs of the policy all the more difficult to accept. Even as it chafed against the provisions that restricted its flexibility, the administration leveraged these legislative limits to obtain concessions on human rights issues from the Argentine government, including access for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). Despite the IACHR visit’s crucial role in improving the domestic rights climate in Argentina, the Carter administration’s resumption of aid and loans to secure the visit garnered significant criticism from the Movement, which expected greater changes before offering such substantial inducements. Carter’s Argentine policies simultaneously galvanized a powerful counter–human rights block in Congress and beyond, bringing together pro-business groups with ascendant conservatives. This coalition critiqued Carter’s policies as being too costly to both economic and security considerations, a formulation that would gain traction under the incoming Reagan administration.

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The Politics of Complicity 13

Chapter 5 traces the dramatic reinvention of U.S. human rights policy during Reagan’s first year in office. The Carter administration pursued human rights as a corrective to U.S. interventionist legacies in the region, emphasizing pluralism and eschewing regime change. The Reagan administration, in contrast, aggressively promoted human rights within a reinvigorated but narrow Cold War framework. This construction, championing a limited range of civil and political rights, downplayed the human rights violations of pro-American governments, focusing instead on what it considered the much greater moral flaws and violations of communist regimes. The Cold War framing of human rights under Reagan empowered a pairing of military power and moral values, leading the United States to not only not limit arms sales to governments but also recast military aid as a critical aspect of both hemispheric defense against communism and the advancement of human rights. Examining this policy shift in the Reagan administration’s first year, especially in regard to Chile and Argentina, this chapter argues that Reagan’s formulation of human rights in the Western Hemisphere continued conservative formulations articulated by Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others, developing in parallel with the liberal construction of human rights favored by Carter.29 Latin America was again the crucible for new instruments and reorientation of human rights policy. The Reagan administration’s efforts to bring “balance” to human rights initiatives by emphasizing violations in the Soviet Bloc reinforced, rather than diminished, the importance of Latin America in framing U.S. human rights policy. The markedly warmer relations between Washington and military governments in Chile and Argentina raised pointed questions about the Reagan administration’s own even-handedness and double standards, undermining its message on communist abuses. Its approach to Latin America was central to defining perceptions of its overall human rights policy as weak and inconsistent—the very criticisms it had lodged against the Carter administration. Reagan’s reinvention of human rights demonstrates that human rights diplomacy was not fixed in either its goals or its mechanisms but was continually contested and reinterpreted within a larger framework of national interests and international aims.

Michael Ignatieff has observed that human rights can be seen “as the language of a moral imperialism just as ruthless and just as self-deceived as the colonial hubris of yesteryear.”30 This sense of moral imperialism is heightened in the Latin American context by the long history of U.S. intervention there.

Yet the relationship between the Movement and the Carter administration

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14 Introduction

was grounded in a politics of complicity, giving rise to a uniquely self-critical, anti-interventionist vision of U.S. human rights policy in the 1970s. It was, as Robert Drinan noted in 1981, a “noble experiment,” addressing the failings of U.S. Cold War policies and grappling with the limits of U.S. power. Human rights, in this context, was not an abstract moral gesture or a new form of interventionism, but rather a recalibration of U.S. policies and regional relations to support both vital national interests and democratic values.

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WHY NONCOMPLIANCE The Politics of Law in the European Union Tanja A. Bรถrzel

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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This book is available in open access form as the result of a grant from the Freie Universität Berlin. Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges this generous funding that made it possible to open this publication to the world.

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Börzel, Tanja A., 1970– author.

Title: Why noncompliance : the politics of law in the European Union / Tanja A. Börzel.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020013043 (print) | LCCN 2020013044 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501753398 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501753404 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501753411 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Law—European Union countries. | Effectiveness and validity of law—European Union countries. | European Union countries—Politics and government—Philosophy. | Compliance.

Classification: LCC KJE5087. B67 2021 (print) | LCC KJE5087 (ebook) | DDC 341.242/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013043 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013044

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Politics of Noncompliance

xi xv 1

1. Infringement Data and Noncompliance

13

2. Power, Capacity, and Politicization

35

3. Why Some States Comply Less Than Others

61

4. Why There Is No Growing Noncompliance

96

5. Why Noncompliance Is Sector Specific

Conclusion: The Limits of Regulatory Governance

Appendix 1. Summary Statistics Appendix 2. Correlation of Independent Variables Appendix 3. Dependent and Independent Variables and Their Operationalization Appendix 4. Robustness Tests Appendix 5. Interaction Effects Notes References Index

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vii

140 171 193 197 201 209 213 215 225 257

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INTRODUCTION The Politics of Noncompliance

More than ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the European Union (EU) is still facing not one but multiple crises. The member states have managed to avert the breakdown of the euro. Yet Italy’s expansionist budgetary policies could lead to its sovereign spin out of control and throw the eurozone into its next crisis. The historic influx of refugees into the EU, which brought the borderless Schengen area to the verge of collapse in 2016, may have subsided. But the EU has yet to agree on a common asylum and migration policy, by which all member states share responsibility rather than passing it on to a few. Even eastern enlargement, once celebrated as a success of the EU’s transformative power, is called into question as Hungary and Poland, the former poster children of transition, contest the fundamental values of the EU. The Covid-19 pandemic, which struck Europe in early 2020, adds yet another crisis refueling and exacerbating the previous ones.

What the various crises have in common is that one of their main causes appears to be noncompliance with EU law. If Greece or Italy had complied with the legal rules governing the EU’s common currency and the border-free Schengen area, they would not have piled up such record debts, nor would so many refugees and migrants have found their way into the EU but rather would have returned to their home countries. There is hardly any member state that has not violated the so-called convergence criteria, which are to keep in check state budgets. Likewise, virtually all member states have infringed on the EU’s legal rules and procedures regulating the admission of refugees and asylum seekers.

Finally, the EU initiated the Article 7 sanctioning procedures against Hungary 1

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2 INTRODUCTION

and Poland for breaching fundamental values that are protected by Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU).

The extent to which member states have violated EU law during times of crises is exceptional. Rather than breaching selective legal obligations under EU law, Greece, Italy, Hungary, or Poland have gone against the core of norms and rules on which the euro, the border-free Schengen area, and the European Union as a polity are based. Moreover, noncompliance with EU law is usually about the scope of application. Member states usually contend that the law does not apply to the particular case at hand, or they disagree with the Commission as to what rule-consistent behavior entails. Italy, Greece, Hungary, and Poland, in contrast, have denied the validity of EU law, claiming that the EU has no authority to interfere with the sovereign right to spend their taxpayers’ money, control their borders, and organize their political institutions.

At the same time, member state violations of euro and Schengen rules reflect those states’ general noncompliance behavior. The laggards among the euro and the Schengen countries are also those who show the lowest levels of compliance with the more than thirty-four thousand pieces of EU legislation that regulate the quality of their drinking water, the equal treatment of men and women in the labor market, the admissibility of genetically modified food, or the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities. Whether it is their sovereign debt, the treatment of refugees, or the protection of wild birds, Greece and Italy outdo the other member states in their defiance of EU rules and regulations. They are joined by Portugal, France, and Spain. Denmark, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany show greater respect for European asylum and refugee law, the Stability and Growth Pact, and the EU’s environmental regulations. At the same time, there is significant variation within the two groups of compliance laggards and compliance leaders that defies any attempt to make noncompliance merely a “southern problem.” Portugal and Spain have introduced comprehensive austerity measures and are praised by the European Commission for their reform efforts. Greece, by contrast, has only slowly been moving away from the edge of sovereign default. Italy used to show a strong commitment to reforms, but implementation is slow. The Commission opened an excessive-deficit procedure against Italy in November 2018. The populist government of the Five-Star Movement and the far-right League refused to back down in adjusting its budget plan for 2019, which violated EU fiscal rules by overspending on welfare. In that year, Italy’s public debt ran at 131 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) and was the second biggest in the eurozone after Greece. The EU’s economic surveillance and disciplinary program could result in financial sanctions, amounting to fines of up to 0.2 percent of GDP and the suspension of some EU funds. After months of arm-twisting with the Commission, which saw Italy’s credit ratings

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The Politics of Noncompliance 3

deteriorate, the Italian government finally settled at a compromise of 2.04 rather than 2.4 percent budget deficit.

France has largely managed to stay under the radar screen, despite posting the largest debt-to-GDP ratio among Europe’s biggest economies and running a budget deficit of over 3 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, Denmark lives up to its reputation as the top of the class, whereas the UK and the Netherlands, which also belong to the group of compliance leaders, have been as reluctant as Spain, Italy, and Greece to abide with EU asylum and refugee law.

The euro, migration, and rule-of-law crises feature serious violations of EU law. This could lead to the conclusion that member states do not comply with EU law “when they view these rules as in conflict with . . . their myopic self-interest” (Keohane 1984, 99). US president Donald Trump’s “America first” policy would simply be symptomatic for states reasserting their national sovereignty against the liberal world order. The period after the end of the Cold War saw the rise of multilateral institutions at the global and regional level with more authority than ever before, reducing the relevance of the consent principle in interstate decision making (Lake 2009; Börzel 2013; Zürn 2018). For states that commit themselves to international law, the growing scope of international authority in the attempt to advance peace, prosperity, and justice at the global level further limits their freedom of action domestically. In the absence of compliance, however, international authority will be futile in helping to tackle global challenges such as climate change, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or massive human rights violations. EU norms and rules are superior to national law, do not require ratification to take effect at the domestic level, and can rely on an independent court for their enforcement. Identifying conditions under which states break the law in such a highly legalized context contributes to our understanding of when international law impacts the behavior and the policies of states (Simmons 2009; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 2013; Haftel 2012). It also offers important insights as to why the rule-based international order has been under increasing pressure since the turn of the millennium (Ikenberry 2018; Alcaro 2018; Lake, Martin, and Risse, forthcoming).

As for the EU, policy makers and EU scholars have been claiming for decades the EU is suffering from a growing compliance problem, which they believe to be systemic or pathological to the EU (Krislov, Ehlermann, and Weiler 1986; Weiler 1988; Snyder 1993; Mendrinou 1996; Tallberg 2003; Cremona 2012; Commission of the European Communities 2011); the more political authority the EU acquires, the less member states obey its laws. This book argues the opposite.

First, there is no evidence that the EU has a problem with noncompliance. If anything, the functioning of the Internal Market suggests that almost all member states comply with almost all EU law almost all the time (based loosely on

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4 INTRODUCTION

Henkin 1968).1 Second, the evidence that we have clearly indicates that noncompliance has been declining over the past twenty-five years. Violations of the euro and Schengen rules are extreme cases, which contradict this trend. Ever since the Maastricht Treaty sought to develop the Internal Market into a monetary, economic, and political union, noncompliance has decreased rather than increased, despite the substantive deepening and widening of European integration and a virtual doubling of the EU in size.

While not being indicative of a general compliance problem in the EU, the different extent to which member states have defied the EU’s convergence criteria, Schengen rules, and fundamental values conforms to the general variation in member state noncompliance patterns. Moreover, as extreme cases, the euro, the migration, and the rule-of-law crises exemplify the role of politicization for explaining why some member states comply less with EU law than others do, and why noncompliance has declined since the 1990s. The different degree to which EU law spurs political conflict at the domestic level also helps to account for why noncompliance varies across policy sectors.

Three Puzzles Noncompliance is defined as state behavior that is inconsistent with the obligations prescribed by domestic, international, or EU law (Young 1979, 104; Chayes, Chayes, and Mitchell 1998, 39; cf. Raustiala and Slaughter 2002). Placing the euro, the migration, and the rule-of-law crises into the broader picture of compliance in the EU gives rise to three puzzles that this book seeks to solve: First, how do we account for the diverse patterns in member state noncompliance with EU law? Why does Eurosceptic Austria or the UK comply better with EU legal obligations than Europhile Italy, France, or Portugal? How is it that big and powerful Italy and France are almost as bad compliers as small Greece and Portugal? Why do centralized Greece and France have compliance records equally bad as those of regionalized Italy or Spain? As the book will show, none of the major compliance theories focusing on power, capacity, and legitimacy can fully capture these country-specific compliance patterns. They become even more puzzling when we bring eastern enlargement into the picture. Contrary to expectations of EU scholars and policy makers, the ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, which joined the EU in the first decade of the 2000s, comply better on average than older member states whose domestic power and administrative capacity are equally limited and who show greater support for the EU. While the southern enlargement in the early 1980s had substantially

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The Politics of Noncompliance 5

increased noncompliance in the EU, eastern enlargement has had the opposite effect. This is hard to explain with standard accounts of the so-called southern problem (Pridham and Cini 1994) as the CEE countries equally struggle with authoritarian legacies and administrative capacities weakened by corruption and clientelism.

Second, noncompliance climbed steadily ever since the Commission began to report on violations of EU law in 1978. The trend reversed, however, in the early 1990s—despite an exponential growth in legal acts the EU had adopted in order to complete the Internal Market. Compliance research has been largely silent on temporal change focusing on explaining country variation. Existing compliance theories provide some potential explanations for why we might see a decline in noncompliance over time. Yet neither improvement in the EU’s capacity to detect, punish, or manage violations of EU law, nor increasing socialization into EU law or changes in the public support for the EU, correlates with the decline in noncompliance since the 1990s.

Third, noncompliance with EU law does not only vary across time and member states. It also shows variation across policy sectors. All member states together infringe on EU law in some policy sectors more frequently than in others. Environment and Justice & Home Affairs (JAIN) are the most noncompliant sectors, while Competition and Agriculture have given rise to far fewer problems.

The limited attention compliance research has paid to the policy dimension may be related to the lack of some clear or intuitive patterns as we find them with regard to time (decline since 1994) and member states (North v. South, new v. old). What do Environment and JAIN have in common, and what separates the two sectors from Competition and Agriculture? Policy matters, but the literature offers hardly any explanation for why.

Taken together, the three puzzles form the main research question this book seeks to answer: How do we explain the variation in compliance patterns in the EU, be it over time, between member states, or across policy sectors? Why has noncompliance in the EU decreased since the mid-1990s, despite a growing number of member states with weak compliance capacities and waning enthusiasm for European integration, and with EU legislation expanding in sectors that are particularly prone to noncompliance?

EU research has been rather eclectic in addressing noncompliance with EU law. It has identified a multitude of explanatory factors that provide a theoretical patchwork rather than a consistent theoretical approach (Toshkov 2010). This book develops a theory of compliance with international law that integrates major factors identified by various strands of the literature to account for variation across states, time, and sectors.

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6 INTRODUCTION

One Theory The literature on compliance has focused on three different sets of factors to explain state compliance with international norms and rules: the preferences of states, along with their power and their capacity to act upon these preferences (Chayes, Chayes, and Mitchell 1998; cf. Raustiala and Slaughter 2002; Simmons 1998; Tallberg 2002). On a theoretical level, preference-, power-, and capacitybased arguments tend to be treated as competing or alternative explanations of noncompliance (Chayes and Chayes 1993; Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom 1996; Checkel 2001). Yet, empirically, a growing number of studies find that all three sets of variables are causally relevant (Mbaye 2001; Linos 2007; Börzel et al.

2010). The book corroborates these findings. Rather than merely adding their explanatory power, it integrates different explanatory factors into a theoretically consistent model dubbed the power, capacity, and politicization model (PCP).

Conceptualizing the politics of noncompliance as a two-stage game played by rational actors across two levels within an institutionalist setting allows us to specify how power and capacity of member states connect with EU institutions in influencing the noncompliance behavior of states. Moreover, introducing politicization, which crucially affects the ability of states to shape and take compliance costs, helps account for why member state noncompliance varies across time and sectors.

Noncompliance becomes an issue only in the case that states are not willing or not capable to cope with the costs. Costs arise when compliance with EU law requires institutional and behavioral changes at the domestic level. As rational actors, states have an incentive to reduce such costs in the adoption of EU law. They differ, however, in their ability to shape EU law according to their policy preferences. Likewise, states are not equally able to take compliance costs.

The PCP model integrates the taking stage, at which EU law is implemented and enforced, and the shaping stage, at which EU law is negotiated and adopted.

Moreover, the PCP model assumes that power, capacity, and politicization are key factors that affect the ability of states to shape and take EU law and its costs.

Power refers to the ability of states to pursue their preferences against resistance at the EU and the domestic level. In light of the highly legalized framework in which states cooperate in the EU and their democratic systems, state power is largely institutional. At the EU level, their votes in the Council and their contributions to the EU budget should enable member states to reduce compliance costs by shaping EU laws according to their policy preferences. Moreover, if they fail to do so, they can resist taking the costs at the domestic level because they can afford EU sanctions or deter EU enforcement authorities from imposing sanctions in the first place.

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The Politics of Noncompliance 7

Capacity relates to the resources member states are endowed with and the efficiency of their bureaucracies to use resources (staff, expertise) to shape EU law, on the one hand, and to change legal and administrative institutions, as well as the behavior of domestic actors targeted by EU law, on the other. The capacity to formulate a coherent bargaining position at the shaping stage and to bring together the public authorities with the competencies necessary to legally transpose, practically apply, and enforce EU law is not necessarily related to political and economic power a member state has in the EU. It allows small states, like the Netherlands or Denmark, to “punch above their weight” (Panke 2010a).

Politicization captures the extent to which compliance costs give rise to political conflict at the domestic level. It is not only a function of veto players, which have the institutional power to block compliance because they are not willing to incur the costs. Domestic actors have to be aware of the costs, and they have to care about them, being willing to politically mobilize against their governments imposing these costs on them. The compliance literature has largely neglected the public visibility of international and EU law and the public sensitivity to its costs.

A higher propensity of politicization in the taking of EU law at the domestic level can increase the ability of a government to negotiate for less costly outcomes at the EU level. At the same time, politicization can seriously constrain the ability of a government to introduce the domestic changes necessary to achieve compliance.

The PCP model expects small member states like Denmark with weak voting and budget power, an efficient bureaucracy, and a Eurosceptic public, to be the best compliers. The likely domestic resistance against high compliance costs allows Denmark to shape EU laws despite its limited power. Should it fail at shaping, it still has the capacity to comply with costly EU laws and not enough power to resist enforcement power. On the other end of the spectrum, we find big countries, such as Italy and France, which have strong political and economic weight in the EU but inefficient bureaucracies and citizens who support the EU. They are less able to shape EU policies to minimize compliance costs. However, they have the power to resist enforcement pressure when their low capacity prevents them from taking the costs. As a result, France and Italy, as two of the largest EU economies, are as bad compliers as Greece, which has always been the poorest member state in the EU-15; while the UK and Denmark, as the two most Eurosceptic member states, are more compliant than Germany. Politicization also helps explain the counterintuitive finding that Eurosceptic member states are better compliers than their Europhile counterparts. Lower public support for the EU renders the politicization of compliance costs more likely. Governments can use their Eurosceptic publics to “tie their hands” (Putnam 1988) at the shaping stage, bargaining for EU laws that are closer to their policy preferences and entail lower costs.

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8 INTRODUCTION

By incorporating EU-level factors that are not country specific, the PCP model can also account for the time trend in declining noncompliance since the completion of the Internal Market. EU law has become less costly to comply with over the past twenty-five years, as it tends to amend existing rather than introduce new legislation. Amending legislation is less complex and requires fewer institutional and behavioral changes at the domestic level. Moreover, compliance costs are less likely to be politicized in the member states since large parts of EU law have been adopted and implemented with no parliamentary involvement. Finally, noncompliance is higher in sectors harmonizing national regulations, because the compliance costs of market-correcting policy are more likely to become politicized.

The PCP model offers four major benefits. First, it pulls together diverse strands of existing theory and empirical research on noncompliance in international relations (IR) and EU studies by integrating the bargaining (shaping) and the implementation and enforcement (taking) stages of EU law making. Drawing on the principal components of major IR approaches allows the PCP model to organize the multitude of explanatory factors empirically analyzed in EU research into three distinct theoretical concepts (power, capacity, politicization), thereby reducing the eclecticism and complexity of many approaches. So do the empirical testing of alternative conceptualizations and the operationalizations of power, capacity, and politicization.

Second, the PCP model moves beyond country variation. Both IR and EU research focus on explaining why some states comply less than others. EU scholars tend to assume that the EU has a growing compliance problem and argue about how to measure it (cf. Börzel 2001b). Likewise, IR scholars have debated whether compliance with international law has really deteriorated or to what extent this is an information effect (Clark and Sikkink 2013). Some EU studies have ventured into sector variation but identify selected variables that are related to individual legal acts rather than policy sectors. IR research has been reluctant to compare international institutions with regard to noncompliance because of the great differences between them.

Third, systematically exploring temporal and sectoral variation allows us to theorize how EU institutions and sector characteristics affect compliance costs and the power and capacity of states to shape and take them, adding politicization, which has been largely neglected in compliance research. The PCP model thereby provides a comprehensive explanation for why some member states comply less than others, why noncompliance in the EU has been declining, and why some policy sectors are particularly prone to noncompliance.

Fourth, since the PCP model draws on principal components of IR theories, it also travels outside the EU. International institutions, which do not pool and delegate political authority to the extent the EU does, still have an effect, albeit

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The Politics of Noncompliance 9

weaker, on compliance costs and the ability of states to shape and take them.

These effects should also vary depending on the policy type and the regulatory logic of the issue area international institutions are tasked to deal with.

One Data Set For the empirical analysis, the book draws on the European Commission’s own infringement database, from which I received a data set covering the period of 1978 until 1999. I have been constantly updating the data set over the past twenty years. Unlike the data publicly accessible, the Berlin Infringement Database (BID) contains detailed information on the more than 13,300 violations of EU law the EU officially recorded between 1978 and 2019 (March). As the most comprehensive database on noncompliance with EU law, it allows for analyzing variation across time, member states, policy sectors, type of legal act, and type of violation. It covers all the cases in which the European Commission determined a violation of EU law. This may only cover the tip of the iceberg of noncompliance in the EU, and we have no way of knowing how big the iceberg is. Unlike alternative measures of noncompliance, however, infringement proceedings are less prone to bias and cover all possible types of violations of EU law, not only the transposition of directives into national law. While the BID does not allow us to measure the size of the iceberg, it includes all those cases that lie at its core and are central for the functioning of the EU.

Organization of the Book Chapter 1 maps the variation in noncompliance across countries, time, and sectors. I outline the three puzzles the empirical chapters will explore in more detail.

First, I tackle the methodological challenges of measuring noncompliance and introduce the BID. Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the different indicators developed in the literature, I justify my choice of using the EU’s official infringement proceeding to measure my dependent variable. Reasoned opinions are the first official stage of the legal action the European Commission can bring against the member states for violating EU law. Some caveats notwithstanding, I argue that they are the most comprehensive and reliable measurement of noncompliance with EU law. The chapter concludes with placing infringements into the wider context of noncompliance with EU law outside the Internal Market.

I point to the risks of the EU trying to enforce compliance with its fundamental values and redistributive decisions, such as the relocation of refugees, the same way it does with regulatory policy.

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10 INTRODUCTION

Chapter 2 develops the PCP model that brings together power, capacity, and politicization in a theoretically consistent way. I start by integrating power and capacity within a rationalist institutionalist framework that conceptualizes noncompliance as a two-stage game played across two levels. This allows me to introduce politicization as a third principal component. The PCP model departs from the assumption that the costs of compliance determine the choice of member states to comply or not comply with EU laws. At the EU level, member states use their capacity and power to shape EU laws to make them less costly for their domestic constituencies. Member states have an advantage at the shaping stage when they can tie their hands to domestic constituencies that are likely to politicize EU law in the implementation at the taking stage. Capacity renders member states better shapers. It also enables them to take compliance costs in the implementation of EU law at the domestic level. Power, in contrast, allows member states to resist compliance with costly laws at the taking stage. Power, capacity, and politicization are country-specific variables that are rather stable across time and policy sectors. To account for temporal and sectoral variation, the PCP model brings in EU institutions. These institutions mitigate member states’ power and enhance their capacity. EU decision-making rules at the shaping stage also influence the propensity of domestic politicization at the taking stage. Parliamentary involvement at the EU and the domestic level increases the public visibility of costly EU laws. Moreover, the compliance costs of EU laws and their propensity of politicization differ across policy sectors. Regulatory policy that aims at protecting citizens against market failure by harmonizing social and environmental standards incurs higher costs that are more likely to be politicized at the domestic level. Based on these propositions, I formulate expectations on which member states are more likely to violate EU law, on when noncompliance is likely to subside over time, and on which sectors of EU law are more prone to noncompliance.

Chapter 3 solves the first puzzle of the book related to the country variation: Why do some member states comply less than others? I argue that member state noncompliance is neither a purely southern nor an eastern problem. Neither the power nor the capacity nor the propensity of politicization varies systematically between the advanced industrial democracies forming the northern and western core of Europe, and its southern and eastern European periphery. Member state noncompliance in a deepened and widened EU is best explained by the combination of power, capacity, and politicization. Denmark and the UK are such good compliers not only because they have efficient bureaucracies; their Eurosceptic publics allow them to shape EU policies according to their preferences, reducing costs or seeking an opt-out. If they fail, both have the capacity to comply with costly EU law. Denmark’s performance is even more exemplary, because, unlike the UK, it lacks the power to resist enforcement pressures. Europhile Italy and

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HOW TO PREVENT COUPS D’ÉTAT Counterbalancing and Regime Survival Erica De Bruin

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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ​ ​I THACA AND LONDON

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Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.c­ ornell​ .­edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­ic­ a Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data [[CIP to come]]

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Contents

List of ­Tables and Figures Acknowl­edgments

ix

Introduction: Preventing Coups d’État

1

xi

1.

The Logic of Counterbalancing

13

2.

Counterbalancing and Coup Failure

38

3.

How Counterbalancing Works: Testing the Causal Mechanisms

57

An Effective Deterrent? Counterbalancing and Coup Attempts

79

5.

Challenges to Building Coercive Institutions

93

6.

How Coups d’État Escalate to Civil War

4.

115

Conclusion: Coercive Institutions and Regime Survival

131

Appendix Notes Index

141 155 000

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Introduction

PREVENTING COUPS D’ÉTAT

In April 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s military collapsed within weeks. While the mismatch between the adversaries’ capabilities left ­little doubt about the eventual outcome of the war, the conflict was notable for the speed with which conventional military re­sis­tance fell apart.1 ­There was a reason for this. For most of his time in office, Saddam had divided the country’s coercive power into multiple, overlapping security and intelligence organ­ izations—­efforts to insulate his regime from coups d’état that also sapped morale within the armed forces and undermined military effectiveness.2 A de­cade ­later, following a multiyear, $20 billion effort to rebuild military capacity, it became clear that Prime Minister Nouri al-­Maliki had hobbled the reconstituted Iraqi army in similar ways.3 As a result, in the spring of 2014, when the Islamic State began capturing territory across northern Iraq, Maliki took much of the blame.4 The dilemma Iraqi rulers have faced is hardly unique. How to build a military strong enough to defend the state against the threat of war and rebellion—­but not so power­ful as to undermine civilian rule—is a fundamental challenge for demo­cratic and authoritarian rulers alike. For individual leaders, the decision to prioritize coup prevention is a rational one. The threat of a coup is more immediate and unpredictable than the threat posed by civil war or international conflict. The overwhelming majority of rulers removed from power via a coup face death, exile, or jail.5 In their efforts to prevent coups, rulers adopt a range of coup-­ proofing strategies that can hinder military effectiveness, reinforce ethnic and po­liti­cal divides, and drain financial resources. Some rulers artificially inflate defense bud­gets and salaries, while ­others take the opposite approach—­keeping the 1

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2 Introduction

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size of the military small, restricting soldiers’ access to arms, or rotating officers frequently to prevent them from developing their own bases of power. Elsewhere, leaders manipulate recruitment and promotion within the military to surround themselves with loyal troops.6 The choices that Saddam and Maliki made are particularly common ones: counterbalancing the military with republican guards, militarized police, and other paramilitary forces is often a central feature of rulers’ coup-­prevention strategies.7 From the praetorian guard in ancient Rome to the secret police in Soviet Rus­sia and national militia in con­temporary Venezuela, coercive institutions outside the regular military have long been used as a bulwark against coups.8 Yet despite the frequency with which counterbalancing is employed—­and the ways in which it can weaken military capacity—we know ­little about ­whether and how it works. Is counterbalancing an effective way to prevent coups d’état?

This book demonstrates that the way rulers structure their coercive institutions can indeed have profound effects on the survival of their regimes. Drawing upon an original dataset of security forces in 110 countries, combined with careful pro­ cess tracing in cases of individual coup attempts, it shows that counterbalancing the military with coercive institutions outside the regular military chain of command increases the risk that coup attempts w ­ ill fail. The presence of additional security forces can make it more difficult for coup plotters to recruit among key units in advance. While a coup attempt is ­under way, counterbalancing creates incentives to resist the coup. ­Because the consequences for being on the losing side of a coup attempt can be dire, most officers remain on the sidelines ­until it is clear ­ ill be.9 When rulers or­ga­nize security forces outwhat the outcome of the coup w side of military command, however, it changes the calculus, increasing the costs of inaction and creating incentives for officers in such forces to defend the incumbent regime. Counterbalancing also complicates coup plotters’ efforts to monopolize information during a coup, increasing uncertainty about the outcome of the coup—­and thus also the odds that at least some officers w ­ ill resist. However, counterbalancing is not without risk for the leaders who adopt it. Where counterweights compete with the military for resources and recruits, resentment and fear about a decline in status among military officers can provoke new coup attempts, even as counterbalancing creates obstacles to their execution. Furthermore, the way in which counterbalancing works—by creating incentives for armed resistance—­ increases the risk that coup attempts w ­ ill escalate to civil war.

Understanding how counterbalancing works can thus help us predict where coup attempts ­w ill occur, ­whether they ­w ill succeed, and how violent they are likely to be. Taken together, the arguments and evidence in this book suggest that while counterbalancing may prevent successful coups, it is a risky strategy to pursue—­and one that may weaken regimes in the long term.

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Introduction

3

Why Stopping Coups M ­ atters Between 2000 and 2019, soldiers in thirty-­one dif­fer­ent states have attempted to seize power, staging more than fifty dif­fer­ent coup attempts altogether.10 While coups are no longer as common as they once ­were, the threat of a coup thus remains a pressing one. Coups are the most common way dictatorships begin and end. They also remain common in many democracies. Newly demo­cratizing regimes, which have not yet developed norms of civilian and demo­cratic governance, are particularly vulnerable.11 Knowing what works, and what does not, in stopping coups is impor­tant ­because their outcomes can have alarming consequences. About half of coup attempts succeed overall, and t­hose staged against demo­cratic regimes are more likely to succeed than t­ hose against dictatorships.12 In the past de­cade alone, newly elected rulers in Egypt, Honduras, and Thailand have fallen to coups. The 2013 coup in Egypt ousted Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first demo­cratically elected leader, from power. In its aftermath, ­human rights organ­izations documented mass, arbitrary arrests, the detention of protestors and ­human rights workers, new restrictions on nongovernmental organ­izations, and a crackdown on po­liti­cal opposition.13 To be sure, some successful coups do usher in more demo­cratic regimes.14 In recent years, some observers have gone so far as to suggest that coups may be the most practical way to force long-­entrenched dictators from power. Since the end of the Cold War, the number of so-­called “good coups”—­defined as ­those that are followed by competitive elections—­has been on the rise. But more often than not, coups in authoritarian regimes still simply replace one dictator with another. ­Those coups that are followed by elections, moreover, typically revert to authoritarianism within a few years. In part, this is b ­ ecause many coup leaders receive support and protection from autocratic sponsors abroad. More generally, military intervention in politics undermines norms of civilian control that are a prerequisite for stable, demo­cratic rule.15 Even failed coup attempts can have deleterious effects. Rulers who have survived a coup frequently take violent mea­sures to prevent subsequent efforts to oust them from power, using the coup as justification for increased repression against po­liti­cal opponents.16 For example, ­after he survived a failed coup in April 2002, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez cracked down on the press and repressed supporters of the opposition. In the year following the failed 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan led a sweeping purge of po­ liti­cal opponents. An estimated fifty thousand p ­ eople w ­ ere arrested and another one hundred fifty thousand dismissed from their jobs.17 Fi­nally, no ­matter their outcome, coup attempts themselves can also result in a significant amount of bloodshed. The 2016 coup in Turkey resulted in an estimated 265 deaths.18 Some

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4 Introduction

coup attempts even escalate to civil war. The Spanish Civil War began with a failed coup, as did more recent civil wars in Nigeria and Guinea-­Bissau. All told, an estimated 22 ­percent of civil wars between 1946 and 2011 had their origins in coups or other mass defections from the military.19 The analy­sis in this book suggests that the risk that coup attempts ­will escalate to civil war is higher when rulers use other coercive institutions to counterbalance the military.

Designing Coercive Institutions to Combat Coups

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How rulers design their coercive institutions varies widely. Some countries, like Chile ­under Augusto Pinochet, centralize control over all state security forces ­under military command, while ­others, like Libya ­under Muammar Qaddafi, rely on a complex web of overlapping and competing coercive institutions to check and balance one another.20 How states configure their coercive institutions is, in part, a reflection of their historical experiences and the par­tic­u­lar combination of threats they face. More fragmented and politicized coercive institutions are thought to help rulers combat threats to their power from within their ruling co­ ali­tions, while more centralized and merit-­based institutions are more effective at combating threats from other states and rebel groups.21 Where rulers or­ga­nize coercive institutions outside of military command, they have the potential to serve as counterweights to the military.

A wide range of coercive institutions may be capable of balancing the military. Some rulers have focused on strengthening presidential guards or elevating individual units within the military. In Haiti, François Duvalier split a number of units off from the regular military to form counterweights; they began to report directly to him without g­ oing through the normal military chain of command. Duvalier also raised a civilian militia commonly known as the Tonton Macoutes, which both served as a check on the military and harassed regime opponents.22 Other leaders depend on interior troops, gendarmerie, or small, militarized units within the regular police. In the Ivory Coast, for instance, the National Gendarmerie “provide[d] a military counterweight to the army, which could not seize power without securing the unlikely consent of the Gendarmerie.”23 Elsewhere, rulers turn to secret police, like ­those ­under the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in East Germany, or the State Security Department in North ­Korea.24 What ­these very dif­fer­ent types of coercive institutions—­presidential guards, interior troops, civilian militia, and secret police—­have in common is their in­de­ pen­dence from the regular military and access to the centers of po­liti­cal power that are the targets of coups.

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Introduction

5

While counterweights might help insulate rulers from successful coups, their use weakens the state in a number of ways. As Saddam Hussein and Nouri ­al-­Maliki found in Iraq, counterbalancing and other coup-­proofing mea­sures undermine military professionalism and hinder the coordination crucial to success in conventional warfare, making states more vulnerable to external threats. Counterbalancing in par­tic­u­lar makes it more difficult for dif­fer­ent security forces to work together on the battlefield and execute more complex operations.25 Counterbalancing can also help institutionalize factional and ethnic divides within the state apparatus, which affects how regimes respond to domestic threats such as revolutions and mass uprisings. The proliferation of coercive institutions can demoralize soldiers in regular army units, creating grievances against the regime and making them less likely to defend rulers in the face of widespread protest.26 More fragmented security sectors have also been associated with higher levels of repression and vio­lence against civilians. In a study of Taiwan, South K ­ orea, and the Philippines, for instance, Sheena Greitens found that “a fragmented, exclusive coercive apparatus gives its agents social and material incentives to escalate rather than dampen vio­lence, and also hampers agents from collecting the intelligence necessary to engage in targeted, discriminate, and pre-­emptive repression.”27 The costs of counterbalancing make it all the more imperative to understand ­whether, and how, it does what it is intended to do: stop coups. While the ­causes of coups have been the subject of an im­mense body of research in po­liti­cal science and sociology, impor­tant gaps remain in our understanding of coup prevention strategies.28 An emerging lit­er­a­ture on coup prevention, or coup-­proofing, has brought new focus to the practice of counterbalancing and other strategies rulers use to insulate themselves from coups.29 Existing studies have provided impor­tant insights, but debate remains over ­whether or not counterbalancing strategies actually work to prevent coups. In part, this is ­because central works on counterbalancing are primarily descriptive in nature; they do not develop or test arguments about how counterbalancing is supposed to work.30 It is not obvious why police and paramilitary units would be any more reliable than the regular military. Nor is it clear how the presence of a small presidential guard force or a lightly armed civilian militia might block a larger, better-­trained, and better-­ equipped military from seizing power. Some studies depict counterbalancing as complicating the coordination of a coup attempt, but typically do not specify how it might do so. Partly ­because of this under-­theorizing, ­there is no consensus about ­whether counterbalancing is effective at preventing coups.

Identifying the mechanisms linking counterbalancing to the incidence and outcomes of coup attempts is impor­tant ­because ­doing so can help reconcile conflicting theoretical predictions about the strategy’s effectiveness. Case studies of long-­standing civilian regimes frequently highlight the role of counterweights in

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preventing military intervention in politics. For instance, in an influential study of coup-­proofing practices in the M ­ iddle East, James Quinlivan empahsized the role of counterbalancing or “parallel militaries” in keeping rulers in power. Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, built two coercive institutions outside the regular army: a Royal Guard made of tribal retainers and the White Army (now called the National Guard). Likewise, in Indonesia, Robert Bruce argues that counterbalancing was responsible for delaying for several years the coup attempt that eventually ousted Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, from power.31 Yet ­there are reasons to be skeptical of counterbalancing: as the case of Indonesia highlights, coup attempts still regularly occur in states that counterbalance. Indeed, coup plotters frequently cite efforts to establish counterweights among their motives ­ hether counterbalancing is effective for seizing power.32 Statistical evidence on w 33 is also mixed.

Part of the reason for the lack of consensus stems from limitations in the empirical approaches used in existing studies. Some restrict their focus to long-­ serving civilian regimes. This method of case se­lection makes it difficult to know ­whether it is counterbalancing or some other ­factor underpinning regime stability.34 Efforts to test theories of coup prevention more systematically have been hindered by poor quality data. Existing analyses depend almost exclusively on the Military Balance, an annual defense review published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). However, a number of studies have documented biases, inconsistencies, and errors in IISS data that limit its utility in mapping the use of counterweights.35 In more recent editions, the IISS itself explic­itly cautions against using its data to capture changes over time in how states or­ga­nize their security sectors.36 As a result, scholars and policymakers do not yet know what works to prevent coups.

The Argument: Counterbalancing and Regime Sur vival

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This book shows that the way rulers or­ga­nize their coercive institutions affects the survival of their regimes. In par­tic­u­lar, counterbalancing the military with security forces outside the military chain of command increases the likelihood that efforts to oust rulers from power through a coup w ­ ill fail. To see why this is the case, it is impor­tant to understand how coup attempts unfold. Coup attempts can be understood as illegal and overt actions intended to seize executive authority in a state. In contrast to insurgencies or rebellions, coups originate from within the regime in power at the outset of the coup.37 While many coups are bloodless, the threat of vio­lence underlies all coup attempts. It is what distinguishes coups from

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7

voluntary transfers of power. The perpetrators of most coup attempts are therefore ­those within the state apparatus best positioned to threaten vio­lence: members of the state’s military and security forces. Nonmilitary elites can also instigate coup attempts, but must depend on armed actors if the threat of vio­lence is to be carried out.38 Coup plotters begin their efforts to seize power by recruiting potential supporters. ­Those at the top of the military hierarchy have the most resources at their disposal to do this. Where coup plotters can coordinate extensively in advance, the coup can be accomplished without vis­i­ble movements of troops at all. Instead, coup plotters simply announce that they have taken power. In most cases, however, such coordination is too risky and the number of conspirators is kept to a minimum to prevent the plot from being exposed. This means that when the coup begins, most officers are not yet committed to one side or the other. W ­ hether the coup succeeds or fails depends crucially on how they respond.39 Where no officers move to resist the coup, it can succeed bloodlessly. Where some resist, t­here is some probability that the coup ­will succeed and some probability that it ­will fail. Each outcome entails a combination of costs and benefits for all involved. The question then becomes how the relevant actors—­officers in military and security forces in a position to intercept the coup attempt—­perceive ­these costs and benefits.

I argue that three ­factors are particularly impor­tant for officers weighing ­whether or not to resist: the likelihood the coup ­will succeed, the costs of it ­doing so, and the costs of using vio­lence to stop it. The estimate of w ­ hether the coup ­will succeed is impor­tant ­because the consequences of backing the wrong side can be severe. ­Those on the losing side of a coup may be executed, dismissed from their posts, or other­wise punished. If the coup fails, the military as a w ­ hole may face a loss of prestige, cohesion, discipline, resources, and po­liti­cal standing.40 In consequence, the vast majority of soldiers during any coup attempt adopt a “wait and see” approach, only committing to a side when it is clear what the outcome ­will be. Actors also weigh the costs involved of using vio­lence to resist the coup. ­These costs include the loss of life and damage to property and infrastructure.

Where coup attempts pit members of the military against one another, using vio­ lence to resist the coup may also undermine military cohesion and morale.41 The costs of using vio­lence mean that coup plotters frequently choose to return to the barracks rather than engage in a bloody and protracted fight for power against other members of the armed forces. According to Naunihal Singh, army officers in Ghana weighing w ­ hether or not to join a coup attempt expressed a firm desire to avoid “unnecessary vio­lence.”42 Such caution helps explain why almost half of failed coup attempts end without a single fatality.43 I argue that counterbalancing the military with republican guards, secret police, and other security forces outside the regular military chain of command increases

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the likelihood that a coup attempt ­will face resistance—­and with it, the odds that the coup ­will fail. The presence of multiple armed actors makes it more difficult for coup plotters to coordinate in advance of the coup attempt and to control the flow of information once it is u ­ nder way. Counterbalancing also affects actors’ estimates about the costs of defeat and vio­lence. For officers and soldiers in counterbalancing forces, the costs of the coup succeeding are likely to appear higher than they would for ­those in the regular army. This is ­because, over time, presidential guards, secret police, civilian militia, and other security forces develop their own orga­nizational interests, distinct from t­hose of the military. Rulers can deliberately hasten this pro­cess by staffing or paying security forces differently than the military. They may also find that personnel changes are easier to make in new security forces than they are in the regular military, where existing positions are already filled. This enables them to stack counterweights with co-­ ethnics or party loyalists.44 Rulers can also facilitate diverging interests by compensating dif­fer­ent forces for dif­fer­ent tasks—­paying the army to defend the country from rival states, for instance, and the police to monitor the army.45 As a consequence, officers in counterbalancing forces may be less likely to view a coup from within the regular military as serving their interests.

Furthermore, military coup plotters cannot credibly commit to refrain from dissolving other security forces or incorporating them into the military if the coup succeeds. The creation of coercive institutions outside of the military challenges the latter’s core interest in holding a mono­poly on the state’s use of force.46 Coup-­ installed regimes frequently disband competing coercive institutions. In Indonesia, for example, a mobile police brigade that had been built up as a counterweight to the army was placed ­under military command ­after the 1957 coup attempt. As a result, “Police officials found themselves taking ­orders from army personnel as low in rank as corporal; they found this humiliating and resented it.”47 The inability of coup plotters from within the military to commit to maintaining the existence and status of other coercive institutions if the coup succeeds creates power­ful incentives for officers in counterbalancing forces to get off the sidelines when a coup is ­under way and defend the regime in power.

Fi­nally, where a coup attempt pits military officers against t­ hose in other coercive institutions, the costs of using vio­lence to shape the coup’s outcome are likely to appear lower. Firing on other security forces does not threaten to undermine military cohesion or require soldiers to overcome normative prohibitions on vio­lence against ­those with whom they have lived, worked, and trained in the same way that firing on members of the same force would. More broadly, vio­lence is likely to be seen as less detrimental in an already divided and politicized security sector. For ­these reasons, counterbalancing the military with republican guards and other security forces should increase the likelihood that

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9

attempts to oust rulers through a coup d’état ­will fail. This is not to say that counterweights themselves never participate in coup attempts. The 1975 coup in Peru, for instance, had the support of the Civil Guard, which had initially been built up as a counterweight to the army, but was deliberately marginalized u ­ nder the regime of Juan Velasco in the years leading up to the coup. And in Ethiopia, the commander of Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard, created as a counterweight to the army, staged a failed coup attempt in 1960. For the most part, however, counterweights refrain from staging coups.48 And it is their re­sis­tance that makes coup attempts staged in states with more fragmented coercive institutions less likely to succeed.

Yet counterbalancing is not without risk for the rulers who use it. Even as it makes coups more difficult to carry out successfully, counterbalancing frequently triggers fears about a decline and status within the regular military that can provoke coup attempts. In Ghana, for instance, the 1966 coup was staged by officers aggravated by Kwame Nkrumah’s efforts to elevate his presidential guard, the President’s Own Guard Regiment (POGR), into a formidable counterweight.49 As one participant in the coup explained, “All the emphasis was on the POGR, while the rest of the forces suffered.” Another argued: “In all this plan to build a second Army [out of the POGR] one ­thing stood out prominently: and that was a plan gradually to strangle the Regular Army to death.”50 The resentment among regular military officers that counterbalancing generates can provoke new coup attempts, even as it si­mul­ta­neously creates obstacles to their execution. ­These grievances are likely to be most deeply felt in the immediate aftermath of creating a new force. In Nigeria, for instance, the military intervened to disband President Ibrahim Babangida’s new National Guard force in 1993, less than a year ­after it was created.51 The 1977 coup in Pakistan was also staged in large part to disband President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s recently established Federal Security Force, which the military viewed as “a potential rival institution—­a threat to their autonomy and mono­poly of coercive power.”52 Establishing new coercive institutions to counterbalance the military increases the risk of a coup in the short term.

The mechanisms through which counterbalancing works also mean that coup attempts against regimes that counterbalance are more likely to escalate to civil war. This is for two reasons. First, ­because coup-­installed regimes cannot credibly commit to refrain from disbanding counterweights or impinging on their autonomy, officers in ­these forces have incentives not only to resist the coup attempt but to “fight to the death,” increasing the odds that conflict between coup plotters and regime loyalists ­w ill escalate to higher levels of vio­lence. Second, where coup plotters gain the upper hand in their initial effort to seize power, counterweights can serve as a pre-­organized source of armed resistance—­helping

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rulers quickly circumvent the challenges of recruiting, training, and equipping an armed group to challenge the new regime. As a result, coups in states that use counterbalancing are at greater risk of escalating to civil war than ­those in states that do not.

The Plan of the Book

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The chapters that follow trace how leaders choose to structure their security forces and what the consequences of t­hose choices are for individual leaders, the soldiers ­under their command, and the citizens ­under their rule. Does counterbalancing affect the incidence or outcomes of coup attempts? If so, how? And ­under what conditions does counterbalancing best achieve t­ hose effects? What are the risks of using this strategy? Fi­nally, what recommendations can be made regarding how leaders in demo­cratizing states can best prevent coups? This book combines theory, statistical analy­sis, and historical case studies to answer ­these questions.

The first chapter pre­sents the core of the argument. It begins by spelling out how coups d’état pro­gress, from the initial plot to the consolidation of power by a new regime. It then describes how the presence of coercive institutions outside the military might affect the incentives facing relevant actors during each stage of a coup. In addition to considering the constraints facing officers in the regular military, I consider the preferences of ­those in other coercive state institutions.

The discussion generates testable hypotheses about how counterbalancing affects the incidence and outcome of coup attempts, as well as the risk that coups w ­ ill escalate to civil war. I also describe and address potential alternative arguments that focus on the strength of the military or the extent of coup risk faced by the incumbent regime. The chapter closes by discussing the strategies the book ­will use for testing the theory’s predictions empirically, explaining the criteria used to select cases for closer analy­sis.

Chapters 2 and 4 assess the predictions of the theory using a new dataset that tracks how rulers or­ga­nize and use the presidential guards, police, and other coercive institutions u ­ nder their command. The dataset includes 110 countries between 1960 and 2010. ­Because it includes fined-­grained information on features of individual security forces, including the chain of command through which each force reports to the regime and where it is deployed, the dataset allows me to develop more precise mea­sures of counterbalancing than previously pos­si­ble.

Chapter 2 first pre­sents descriptive data on the frequency with which rulers counterbalance and how the use of counterbalancing varies across countries and over time. It then tests statistically the argument that counterbalancing is associated

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with coup failure. In order to test arguments about the determinants of coup failure, I also compile new data on the identity of coup plotters in nearly three hundred coup attempts. The chapter considers competing explanations for the negative association between counterbalancing and coup success, which posit that some other ­factor might explain both counterweights and coup failure, but shows that available evidence is inconsistent with them. The finding that counterbalancing makes coups less likely to succeed helps explain why some leaders have successfully prevented military coups, while ­others have not.

While chapter 2 pre­sents statistical evidence consistent with the argument that counterbalancing decreases the likelihood that a coup attempt w ­ ill succeed, it provides ­little information on the causal ­factors at work. I thus turn, in chapter 3, to a close examination of the role of counterbalancing during individual coup attempts. I examine in detail coups staged to unseat Daniel Arap Moi in ­Kenya, King Hassan II in Morocco, and Manuel Noriega in Panama. In each case, counterbalancing affected the outcome of the coup attempt: while soldiers within the regular military w ­ ere hesitant to take a side, presidential guards, Ministry of Interior units, and militia built up as counterweights to the military defended incumbent rulers. In contrast to most existing accounts, which suggest that counterbalancing works primarily by creating obstacles to coordination between dif­fer­ent security forces, the evidence in ­these cases suggests that counterbalancing creates incentives to resist the coup.

Chapter 4 examines ­whether counterbalancing can deter soldiers from attempting to seize power in the first place. I conduct an array of analyses of patterns of coup attempts, which show that organ­izing security forces outside of military command is not associated with a reduction in coup attempts. In fact, establishing a new counterweight increases the risk of a coup attempt in the following year. ­These results challenge the widespread assumption that counterbalancing deters coup attempts, and help to explain why counterbalancing is not even more widespread than it is. Yet the results in this chapter also raise another question: What explains why some rulers are able to establish counterweights without provoking a backlash from the military, while ­others are not? To address this question, chapter 5 compares Kwame Nkrumah’s failed effort to counterbalance with efforts by leaders in similar po­liti­cal and economic circumstances: Saskia ­Stevens in Sierra Leone, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Modibo Keita in Mali. The comparison provides support for the proposed causal mechanism linking counterweight creation to coup attempts: in each case, the creation of a new counterweight generated resentment and fear about a decline in status within the regular armed forces. The comparison also helps refine the arguments developed in chapter 1, suggesting new hypotheses about the conditions u ­ nder which this resentment ­will result in a coup attempt. It emphasizes the other strategies of coup prevention

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that rulers adopt in conjunction with counterbalancing, as well as the type of security force used to counterbalance the military. The findings suggest limits to the conditions u ­ nder which counterbalancing is feasible, as well as concrete steps that rulers might take to mitigate some of the risks associated with counterbalancing.

Chapter 6 identifies an additional and previously unknown risk of counterbalancing: it can increase the risk that coup attempts escalate to civil war. The chapter compares two coup attempts in the Dominican Republic: the bloodless coup in 1963, which removed the country’s first demo­cratically elected president, and the 1965 coup, which sought to return him to power, and which escalated to a civil war resulting in several thousand fatalities. In ­doing so, it leverages variation over time in one country, which enables me to hold constant several of the historical and contextual f­ actors thought to affect the onset of civil war. The comparison shows that a crucial difference between the two coups was the presence, in 1965, of a new counterweight to the military. Chapter 6 then briefly compares the 1965 Dominican coup to one in a very dif­fer­ent context that also escalated to civil war: the 1962 coup in North Yemen. The comparison illustrates how very dif­fer­ent types of counterweights employed in very dif­fer­ent settings can affect the pro­cess of violent escalation in similar ways, and suggests that the dynamics in ­these cases might hold more broadly.

The conclusion explains the book’s implications for theory and policy. ­After briefly summarizing the book’s findings, it describes their implications for our understanding of democ­ratization, civil-­military relations, and civil war. Exploring patterns in how states or­ga­nize and use their security forces can shed light on when and where coup attempts ­will occur, and what their outcomes are likely to be. The results of this study emphasize that while counterbalancing can help rulers stay in power, it also carries impor­tant risks. While no ­simple policy solutions follow from the arguments and evidence in this book, its findings can offer some guidance to policymakers interested in shoring up civilian control over the military.

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