Volume 1, Issue 3
Honesty in Crisis Diplomacy Anne E. Sartori
The intellectual sources of U.S. foreign policy David Milne
April 2015 March 2015
April 2015
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chief publisher Eugène Matos De lara
Letter from the editor Dear reader,
editor
Benjamin Miller
Academic advisor Arne ruckert Dave Van Ginhoven
Associate publisher Amelia baxter
Associate editors Eric Wilkinson Mete Edurcan Guillaume lacombe-Kishibe
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If you’ve read the past two issues you have likely found some diverse, thought-provoking, and entertaining pieces, but it may be difficult to make sense of how it all fits together. In a word, what we want to do is bring perspective, and we feel this is best accomplished by bringing various perspectives. Indeed, the baffling diversity of our fascinating authors contains a lesson in itself and that lesson is a bit more explicit in this issue in which our theme is perspective. Each of our articles tries to explain different diplomatic behaviours, from the South China Sea (see Dr. Simon’s article) and the Post-Soviet Bloc (see S. Saari’s article) to nineteenth century British Parliament (see Dr. Milne’s article). While our authors draw on similar sources (both Dr. Hall and Dr. Gram-Skjodager bring to bear history on contemporary problems), their methods couldn’t be more different (see the intriguing empirical evidence of Dr. Sartori). Each one offers a different lens onto a complex world that could hardly be contained by any number of pages. So, I admit, it may very well be puzzling how all our articles fit together. But the beauty of puzzlement is that however distinctly each piece may be shaped, indeed, precisely because each piece is shaped so distinctly, they all do fit together to form a single, striking picture of the world. Fond regards, Benjamin Miller and the Border Crossing Team
Contents 6-
Honesty In crisis diplomacy
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The intellectual sources of U.S. foreign policy
David Milne
Anne E. Sartori
12- History and Diplomacy: New Approaches and Perspectives Karen Gram-Skjoldager 14- Russia’s public diplomacy: soft tools with a hard edge Sinikukka Saari 18- explaining china’s behavior in the south china sea
Sheldon w. simon
20- History lessons
todd hall
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Honesty in Crisis Diplomacy Anne E. Sartori is a Research Scientist at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She has previously been on the faculty at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as visiting faculty at Harvard University. In addition to the book Deterrence by Diplomacy, she is the author of research articles in International Organization and Political Analysis, among others.
Anne E. Sartori Verbal acquiescence to a foreign state’s demands may be uncomfortable or unpopular, but it can be a wise policy when a country is not prepared to fight. When Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin told United States President Lyndon Johnson that U.S. interests were not affected by the Soviet action in Czechoslovakia in 1968, “in response he was told that U.S. interests are involved in Berlin where we are committed to prevent the city being overrun by the Russians.” Johnson’s words reveal that he saw a difference between Czechoslovakia, where he was honestly admitting that there was no strong U.S. interest, and Berlin, where he was threatening and prepared to go to war. Given his decision not to defend Czechoslovakia, Johnson’s honesty served a purpose: as I showed in my 2005 book, Deterrence by Diplomacy, honest acquiescence to some challenges serves to increase the
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credibility of a country’s diplomacy in future crises. International relations scholars invoke poker to argue the merits of bluffing; like a poker player, a state may attain its aims despite a weak hand. How is it that honest acquiescence to another state’s demands–the equivalent of folding–can also be a good strategy? Johnson appears to have understood the answer when he explicitly tied Czechoslovakia to Berlin. If a country’s representatives are greedy, if they maintain that all issues are of paramount importance, adversaries find it difficult to distinguish which ones truly are. Moreover, the adversary may call a bluff; if the state is then unwilling to fight, its threats will be revealed as dishonest. On the other hand, if a country’s representatives are willing to relinquish some issues, an adversary’s leaders are more likely to believe the claim that they are prepared to fight over others.
Put differently, honest acquiescence, like honestly following through on a threat, helps a country to acquire a reputation for honesty. When
a state has such a reputation, the representatives of other countries are more likely to believe its leaders’ statements in future situations, at least until the reputation fades. While this heightened credibility does not guarantee diplomatic success, it does increase the odds. On the other hand, when states are caught in a bluff, (i.e. backing down despite having threated action) they acquire reputations for bluffing, and this lowered credibility increases the odds of later diplomatic failure. Because diplomatic success is valuable, the honest use of threats is valuable too. Is bluffing ever a good strategy? When leaders consider an interest to be vital, bluffing is beside the point because the state is prepared to fight. When they consider the interest relatively
unimportant, honesty is a better policy, because it facilitates the future use of diplomacy. Only when the state is almost, but not quite, willing to fight is bluffing optimal. In Deterrence by Diplomacy, I evaluated these arguments using data on international relations from a period of almost 200 years. Consistent with these arguments, I found that challengers are less likely to attack when the defender has a reputation for honesty, acquired through some combination of honest acquiescence and fighting in its recent international disputes. While the impact of a reputation for honesty varies depending on the current military balance, having used threats honestly in the five years prior to a dispute increases the chance of deterrence success by about twenty percentage points in the basic scenarios I examined, from about 20% to about 40%. As one might expect, reputations for honesty or for bluffing fade over time an alternative measure of reputations, based on behavior in the past year, indicated a stronger association between honesty and deterrence success. . The theory and evidence in my book concern a narrow slice of diplomacy: the impact of top leaders’ honest or misleading public statements, either threatening or failing to do so, and the future success of such statements. Does the theory extend to a greater variety of actors and statements? While data to test the theory in these contexts
are hard to come by, I expect that a similar phenomenon operates. That is, if a country’s negotiating team claims unwillingness to budge on all issues, it is unlikely to find success. If, on the other hand, it signals willingness to yield on some issues, it is more likely to convince an adversary when it claims that other issues are so important to their country that compromise is impossible. Similarly, if diplomats make promises that they do not keep, this deception is likely to undermine their future work. One difference between these scenarios and the macro-scenarios in my book, however, is the more private nature of many lowerlevel negotiations. A reputation for honesty acquired by a negotiating team seems unlikely to impact future relations with countries uninvolved in the original negotiations, since such countries often lack pertinent information about the details of those negotiations. Of course, for a statement to affect a reputation for honesty or for bluffing, the listener must make a judgment after the fact about whether the statement was honest. Adversaries usually perceive statements of acquiescence as honest because the speaker has no reason to bluff; the state gains nothing in the present crisis by indicating low resolve. They have a more difficult time pinning down statements of high resolve. If the state backs down after signaling resolve, its leaders can and often do claim that the original threat was misunderstood or that they never
claimed an issue as vital. In part, they do so to avoid a reputation for bluffing. This wiggle room is possible because many of the threats leaders make are ambiguous; negotiators’ statements can suffer from the same problem. Note, however, that if a state’s representatives cannot observe the honesty of statements, even when bluffs are called their foreign counterparts cannot accurately assign reputations for honesty or for bluffing, and future diplomacy will be more difficult. While I also lack data to test this hypothesis, I would expect that more precise statements are more credible for exactly this reason. Since reputations for honesty facilitate effective diplomacy, more precise statements today are also more likely to make diplomacy more successful tomorrow. International relations theorists are not always sanguine about diplomacy, with Realists like Kissinger portraying it as simply an extension of power. My book showed this not to be the case: a leader’s honest or dishonest use of statements has an independent effect on the country’s future diplomatic success, controlling for the effect of the balance of power. The incentives for honesty in international diplomacy are beneficial; the relative rarity of bluffs is an important factor contributing to the credibility and effectiveness of diplomacy.
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The intellectual sources of U.S. foreign policy David Milne is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008) and senior editor of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). His new book Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy will be published in September 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
David Milne
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hile an undergraduate student at the LSE in the mid-1990s, I took a survey course on twentieth century U.S. foreign policy. As we moved into the 1960s, the era of the “Best and the Brightest,” I was surprised to discover that American presidents hired university professorsto advise them on policy. This was fascinating to me, and even a little shocking. By and large, British prime ministers seem to prefer that intellectuals stay in their ivory towers, where they can do the least damage. Why do U.S. policymakers take academics more seriously? Differences in each nation’s political structure go a long way to explaining the divergence – the British Cabinet is drawn from the House of Commons (and more rarely, the House of Lords); American presidents can appoint Cabinet secretaries from anywhere. But intellectual history is helpful, too. One of the most interesting points of contrast between Britain and the United States throughout their centuries of global dominance is the educational backgrounds of those
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making policy. Through the late 18th and 19th centuries, British diplomacy was generally crafted by a narrow elite educated at the great public schools – places like Eton, Charterhouse, and Harrow, or later at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. These individuals studied history, philosophy and rhetoric. Gentlemen did not study the natural sciences, of course, and the fledgling social sciences were barely given a second thought. Oxford and Cambridge were rather uninspiring and parochial institutions in the 19th century. Indeed, it is a curiosity that at the highpoint of British power, England’s universities were decidedly second rate; one travelled to Scotland or Germany in pursuit of a rigorous education. American foreign policy from the First World War to the present, conversely, has been the most academically informed in the world and its universities are of the very first rank. Through a series of innovations, America’s elite academies became closely involved in the making of policy. At the turn of the 20th century, Robert LaFollette enlisted the University of Wisconsin to pursue
research that responded to the practical needs of the state he governed (the so-called “Wisconsin Idea”). In 1917, Woodrow Wilson established an academic “Inquiry”, in which 150 scholars were convened in New York City to present him with advice on how to redraw Europe’s boundaries after the defeat of Germany. Through the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt formed what became known as the “Brain Trust”, mainly comprised of scholars from Columbia and Harvard universities, to help draft the seminal legislation that formed his New Deal. From 1945 onwards, university professors have played a vital role in shaping U.S. domestic policy and its international relations, including: Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, and Samantha Power. Nineteenth century British foreign policy was also different from America’s in the 20th in other ways. First and foremost, a broad political consensus existed about the purpose of diplomacy. British policy towards continental Europe was driven by the notion that practicalities, not abstractions, should inform foreign policymaking. Beyond
maintaining a balance of power in Europe through offering support to whichever nation or coalition of nations was threatened by a more dominant group, British prime ministers held true to Lord Palmerston’s dictum: “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The German poet Heinrich Heine astutely expressed Britain’s dislike of guiding ideologies in 1828 when he observed that “it is rarely possible for the English, in their parliamentary debate, to give utterance to a principle. They discuss only the utility or disutility of a thing, and produce facts, for or against.” The historian A.J.P. Taylor observed that in Britain: “Ideologies were a minor theme in the seventy years between 1848 and 1918.” No such consensus existed or exists in the United States. Certainly there have been some foreign policy intellectuals such as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger who have emulated Palmerston in calling for interests to be prioritized ahead of ideals. But while Kennan and Kissinger loom large in the biography sections of bookshops, their actual influence on American foreign policy
was actually quite limited: Kennan mattered from 1946 to 1948 and Kissinger from 1969 to 1976. Both men struggled to dent the prevailing Wilsonian orthodoxy that emphasized America’s wider obligations to the world – to extend freedom, foster democratization, and follow humanitarian ideals. Here lies the major difference between our two nations: British diplomacy through the 19th century typically sought to work within history while American foreign policy through the 20th often sought to transcend it and to depart from precedent. What do I mean by this? U.S. foreign policy has often been shaped by grand strategists such as Woodrow Wilson, Walt Rostow, and Paul Wolfowitz with universal theories to prove. In Wilson’s case, it was that the world should be made safe for democracy through the creation of a league of nations; in Rostow’s, it was modernization theory, the historic inevitability of five stages of economic growth, and America’s duty to prevent deviations from this path; in Wolfowitz’s, it was the necessity that the United States catalyse the promotion of democracy in the Middle East, starting with the
liberation of Iraq. It is no coincidence that Wilson, Rostow, and Wolfowitz all held Ph.D. degrees in the social sciences. They tended toward scientism, and their common purpose was to unveil new truths about the world or to validate a theory. Those in possession of such geopolitical theories did not guide British foreign policy in the previous century. The scholarly machinery that sustained such investigations simply did not exist. The British in the 19th century tended to treat foreign policy as an art requiring craft, intuition, and some acquaintance with history; one certainly didn’t need a Ph.D. to do it. As the positivist social sciences rose to prominence through the 20th century, conversely, some Americans began to view foreign policy as a science; they began to see the world as a laboratory. In 1943, Paul Nitze helped establish the School ofAdvanced International Study, in Washington D.C. which in 1950 became the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Study (SAIS). He later recalled how disappointed he was by the deficiencies he had encountered in academic thinking about foreign policy.
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When I joined the academic community and surveyed the literature, most of it was historical. They would give courses on current affairs, but they would have no theoretical background at all. And I complained to various people… why has United States academia been so deficient in addressing themselves from an experienced and theoretical view as to the practice of foreign policy? And the answer was: well, nobody’s really addressed that yet –-why don’t you address it? Nitze replaced Herter as Dean of SAIS in 1952. From that point onward, many academics who studied or taught there pursued notable foreign careers: Madeleine Albright, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot A. Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, and Paul Wolfowitz, to name a few. Nitze’s SAIS blazed a trail that others followed, such as the Walsh School at Georgetown, the Kennedy School at Harvard, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and the Fletcher School at Tufts. These programs teach foreign policy largely through the prism of economics, political science, and international relations. But unlike the disciplinary departments of political science and international relations, schools of international affairs seek explicitly to influence policy and prepare graduates to enter the policymaking realm. Since 1943, scholars based at schools of international affairs and public policy, at think tanks such as RAND, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute, have produced seminal work that have informed and shaped foreign policy debates. The list is long and distinguished, and includes books such as Nathan Leites’ The Operational Code
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of the Politburo, Albert Wohlstetter’s The Delicate Balance of Terror, Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, and Joseph Nye’s Soft Power. All of these scholarly interventions have provoked vigorous debate, and some even entered the stream of policymaking, with mixed results. But there are clearly some problems that stem from the model of research, advocacy, and pedagogy pioneered by Nitze. In the pursuit of influence, scholarship can sometimes be stripped of its critical element as ideas are simplified— thereby amplifying their originality and importance—for the consumption of presidents and presidential aspirants. Complexity is the primary casualty of this process, while reductionism and mono-causality are often the winners. Complexity is not a virtue in and of itself, but when policy-oriented research loses nuance and dexterity it can be misapplied to a complex world. The distinguished realist scholar, Stephen Walt, recently criticized the public policy and international affairs schools for two principal shortcomings: One is, I think, many of our schools use an obsolete model. The standard model of a public policy school will teach people some microeconomics, teach them some statistics, teach them something we call policy analysis, maybe give them a little bit of leadership, and then they can dabble in a bunch of other areas. This is a model that’s been around for 30, 35 years. It shortchanges history. We don’t generally teach history in public policy schools…
Problem number two is public policy schools have one danger that disciplinary departments don’t have, and that’s the danger of co-optation. The great virtue of academic institutions is that they are independent. They can be creative, original, dissident voices. Walt’s cautionary words are well worth heeding. For history suggests that the making of a judicious foreign policy requires a cognitive flexibility that individuals pursuing policy influence often lack.
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Mastermind China’s history and diplomacy: Merging New Approaches ANd perspectives Energy Diplomacy Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Ph.D., is associate professor in contemporary Danish and international history at the Department of History, Aarhus University, Denmark. Before taking up her current position, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She has published extensively on international law and diplomacy, liberal internationalism, and Scandinavian foreign policy.
Karen Gram-Skjoldager
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iplomacy as an object of study has attracted attention from a broad range of academic disciplines. Political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have all taken an interest in understanding what diplomats are and what they do, each adding their distinct perspectives to our understanding of diplomacy as a profession and as an institution of international society.
Long lost friends No academic discipline has taken a keener interest in diplomacy than history. Modern history is a product of the European nation-state and throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the raison d’être for the historian was to document, explain, and legitimize diplomatic negotiations, decisions and victories of the nation-state that paid his salary. In the second half of the twentieth century, this relationship cooled as new trends toward studying broader social and cultural, societal developments took over the historical
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profession. However, things are starting to change. Riding on the tailwind of a rapidly growing interest in diplomacy among political and social scientists in the last 20 years, historians are now rediscovering diplomacy and diplomats as subjects worthy of academic attention. At the moment, a ‘new diplomatic history’ is emerging that picks up on the time honored tradition of diplomatic history while shifting attention away from diplomats as instruments of state interests and decisions and looking instead at diplomats themselves, their methods, and their cultural, political, and social practices. In this article, I will try to highlight some of the insights that this recent development in history can bring to the field of diplomatic studies.
Diplomacy and time The fact that historians have been relatively absent in the booming field of diplomatic studies is somewhat ironic given that the key scholarly debates in this field revolve around questions of historical change. Ever since American president Woodrow Wilson declared the beginning of a ‘new’ form of diplomacy characterized by transparency and democratic legitimacy
at the end of the First World War, the question of break and continuity in diplomatic ideas and practices has been a key scholarly concern. Recently, one prominent variation on this theme has been the question of whether the EU and its supranational construction of overlapping political and legal authorities has fundamentally changed diplomacy. A closely related, but distinct discussion concerns itself with whether globalization and its accompanying technological developments and complex interdependencies have rendered diplomacy as it is traditionally conceived obsolete. Considering that the political and social scientists that investigate these themes have an explicit ambition to understand the historical transformations of diplomacy, there is often a striking absence of historical depth to their analysis. This literature is generally characterized by sweeping, general outlines that draw up the overall developments in diplomacy since the Westphalian Peace as the background of a clearly focused study of present-day diplomatic practices. It is evident that history has something to offer in this context. To form a qualified understanding of what is new and what is old, what is
disappearing, what has remained, and what has emerged in diplomacy, we are dependent on mid- and short-term historical studies that are based in careful examinations of archival documents. If we want to understand the changes in diplomacy brought about by the EU, it is essential that we know how diplomats have engaged with and been shaped by earlier and parallel multilateral organizations such as the UN, OEEC/OECD, and NATO. Likewise, in order to fully grasp current diplomats’ relationship with the European institutions, we need some sense of where this relationship is coming from and how it has evolved: how their diplomatic predecessors first made sense of the European integration process and how diplomatic norms and practices changed with the emergence of the new European transnational polity. Only when we have a clear understanding of these broader and more complex processes can we develop a precise and nuanced understanding of when EU diplomacy started setting itself apart from diplomacy in other multilateral settings and whether the differences that have emerged over time are differences in degree or in kind. Likewise, to assess the validity of the argument about the diminishing relevance of diplomacy in a globalizing world, we need as a reference point systematic historical exploration of how diplomats have engaged with businesses, NGOs, and think tanks since the first wave of economic liberalization and legal regulation of international relations in the late nineteenth century. Historians are currently working to develop this knowledge basis.
Diplomacy and ambiguity In parallel to the preoccupation with
shifts and changes in current diplomatic norms and practices, other political and social science researchers are interested in pinpointing the stable, perennial features of the diplomatic profession. In doing so, many scholars of diplomacy – and diplomats themselves – tend to roam freely across the centuries, drawing on classics of diplomatic writing from the eighteenth century and early twentieth century – such as Ernest Satow’s A Guide to Diplomatic Practice (1917) and Sir Harold Nicolson’s Diplomacy (1939) — when trying to get at what diplomacy and diplomats are today. At the core of many of these characterizations lies an understanding of diplomacy as something unalterable, exclusive, and distinct from other professions. Here too, historians might have something to contribute. Taking their cue from a broader shift within history to incorporate social and cultural history approaches to political history, historical studies have begun exploring diplomacy as a contextual social practice. What this means is that historians now study the diplomatic profession not only as functional representatives of the nation-states but also as a social universe that reflects the social backgrounds and experiences of the diplomats, the political and cultural climate of their time, the economic constraints, and broader patterns of administrative norms and practices they operated under. Though nominally carrying out the same functions today as a hundred years ago, a diplomat in a large modern European foreign service is a very different creature from the diplomatic nobleman performing his diplomatic functions in the closed elitist circles of early twentieth century diplomacy. By breaking open the analytical category of ‘diplomacy’ and taking an interest in the worldviews, professional norms, and routines of
the people inhabiting it, historians are able to get at the silent, gradual shifts and changes that the profession has undergone over time. Just as important, the above approach allows us to explore the tensions and ambiguities associated with inhabiting the diplomatic role: how did a diplomat in the 1950s navigate the institutional hierarchies of his Foreign Service? How did he balance political sympathies and bureaucratic professionalism, and how did he mitigate tensions between national and international loyalties? How was this different from the way diplomats approached these questions in the 1960s, 1980s or early 2000s? These are some of the questions that currently interest historians.
Take-Aways In sum, what history can bring to the study of diplomacy is the banal, but nonetheless often overlooked insight that present day diplomacy is neither something completely new nor the invariable continuation of an old, exclusive, and distinct profession. Like all other forms of human activity, today’s diplomacy is made up of sediments and developments of previous diplomatic practices and diplomats are political and social creatures that are situated in and shaped by and evolve with the broader social and political contexts they operate in. Looking at diplomacy from a historical perspective therefore allows us to gain a better understanding of what is old and what is new, what is general and what is specific in twenty-first century diplomacy. These insights are important because they allow for diplomats to understand the traditions and structures that shape their professional role, while also realizing that this role is always open to reinterpretation and reinvention.
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Russia’s public diplomacy: soft tools with a hard edge Sinikukka Saari is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs since 2006. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has published widely and taught both in the UK and in Finland. She has held visiting fellowships in Sweden and in Russia. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Saari has worked at the EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia in 20122014. Her areas of expertise include political developments in Russia, Russian policy in the post-Soviet space, EU–Russia relations, the EU’s Eastern Partnership and conflict resolution in the post-Soviet space.
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draws heavily from the Soviet practice of manipulation and “active measures” while the Western strand of PD first relied on the soft power of attraction but gradually turned towards the strategies of manipulation, albeit still of a softer kind than in the post-Soviet context.
globally, at least partly, at the expense of more traditional diplomacy. This trend is linked with the process of globalisation and significant
Gradual hardening of Russian PD in the West
Sinikukka saari ublic Diplomacy (PD) is the cultivation of public opinion and promotion of culture, language and image of a state in other countries by state officials and other actors. PD is growing in importance
advances in worldwide communication. Indeed, foreign ministries around the world are rethinking their strategies, and engaging in complicated exercises of ‘nation-branding’ while building partnerships with various civil society actors.
After the so-called colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, Russia stepped up its PD efforts abroad significantly, in particular in the post-Soviet states. Another boost of PD came with the Ukrainian crisis; this time around though, the primary target was in the West. These two strands, Western and post-Soviet, are distinct. The post-Soviet strand
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After the colour revolutions, the aim of Russia’s revised Western-strand PD was to catch up with the more sophisticated and developed Western PD tools and strategies to improve Russia’s image in the West. More recently, the message has hardened and become more anti-Western in its tone. Russia has left behind the “catch-up” phase; it has developed its own distinctive strategies of promoting its messages abroad. Russia’s efforts in international broadcasting, news services, and media campaigns, as well as establishing links with political actors and parties abroad, have been the primary instruments of Russian PD in Western states.
After the colour revolutions, Russia also established an international multilingual Russia Today (RT) TV channel, increased funding and modernised the RIA Novosti news agency. In 2015, a brand new international Sputnik News Agency was set up. The aim is that Sputnik will gradually replace RIA Novosti. One can see a shift in the content of the Russian-run international media outlets; although it was never neutral in content, in the early years the tone was more benign towards Western states and the focus was more on defending Russian stances internationally. Simultaneously with the hardening of the tone, RT and other Russian media outlets directed towards the West have increased their professionalism year by year, and attracted more and more viewers. It seems that the anti-Western message sells better than the clumsy promotion of Russia’s image and policies abroad. At the same time, active pro-Russian activity on social media and the internet overall during the Ukrainian conflict has
led to speculations about the size and significance of Russia’s “troll army”. Indeed, there are indications of an orchestrated use of “trolls”, paid online commentators whose job is to virtually spread pro-Russian messages, and occasionally pure disinformation. Furthermore, Russia has built alliances with several European parties from both the left and right by taking advantage of overlaps in their agendas. Many European populist political actors from ultra-right to ultraleft find Russia’s anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism, strong anti-democratic leadership, and state-dominated economy that claims to resist the neo-liberal tenets of a globalised world appealing. Russia has been skilled at taking advantage of these affinities and has offered money, political support and public attention to these underdog parties which, for their part, pay this back by promoting more conciliatory European policies towards Russia.
The post-Soviet space: “active measures” revisited The Russian post-Soviet PD as formulated after the colour revolutions stands on four pillars. The first pillar consists of proactive political involvement with a wide spectrum of parties, not only pro-Russian ones. The second one is the so-called NGO diplomacy, or establishing and assisting pro-Russian youth groups, minority and separatist organisations, and think tanks abroad. For instance, in 2006 Russia supported the establishment of an Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of Separatist Authorities as well as the separatist youth movement Breakthrough (Proryv) that is operational in Crimea, Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Furthermore, the current de facto leader of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov joined pro-Russian organisations like the Russian Community of Crimea and the Civic Asset of Crimea before establishing his Russian Unity party in 2009. Aksyonov is a chilling example of
how a marginal pro-Russian actor (his party received 4 per cent of the vote in the regional parliamentary election in 2010) can seize power practically overnight with a little help from his Russian sponsors. Another example of Russian involvement in the region is its active support for the establishment of pro-Russian research centres as well as organisations that engage mainly in information production and distribution regionally. These include the Legal Information Centre of Human Rights in Estonia, the International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty in Transnistria, the Caucasus Institute for Democracy and the Free Europe Foundation in South Ossetia. The names of the organisations are intentionally misleading and thus follow the Soviet practice of establishing NGOs with misleading names in the West during the Cold War. The third pillar of Russian PD in the post-Soviet states consists
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of establishing and managing Russian media ventures as well as orchestrating media campaigns abroad with Russian and local media actors. Finally, the fourth PD pillar consists of cultural cooperation as well as language- and history-related PR campaigns abroad. The methods vary from support for Russian language and scholarship programmes to active pressure on history-related issues, such as in the case of the relocation of the Bronze Soldier statue from the centre of Tallinn in 2007. One initiative bringing together the Western and the post-Soviet strands is the Russky Mir (Russian World) foundation established in June 2007. This is a geopolitically-inspired government PD organisation. The Russian word ‘mir’ simultaneously denotes community, peace and the world. Accordingly, the foundation states that its mission is “to promote understanding and peace in the world by supporting, enhancing and encouraging the appreciation of Russian language, heritage and culture”, but also to reconnect “the Russian community abroad with their homeland”. Since its establishment, Russky Mir has established Russian centres that promote the Russian language and culture in 44 countries around the world. The Foundation also provides grants for individuals and NGOs. Grants are given for the promotion of the Russian culture and language, the “formation of favourable public opinion about Russia”, and “interaction with the diasporas”.
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Practically all the pillars of post-Soviet PD employ Russian-speaking minorities as “hooks” for influencing developments in the neighbourhood, and as the Aksoyonov case demonstrates, the practice can hardly be considered benign toward the target states. Furthermore, many of the PD instruments are often bundled with the coercive use of Russia’s economic and energy leverage, such as gas cuts and boycotts of various goods and food products. Hence, it is evident that Russian soft power has a harder geopolitical edge. Russia’s evaporating soft power A review of Russian PD efforts suggests that Russian policy in the post-Soviet states is driven primarily by Russian material interests in which ideological considerations play a small role. Even compatriot and historyrelated issues seem to be brought up only when those issues support the Russian political and economic agenda. In the post-Soviet space, the Russian PD relies on the manipulative logic inherited from Soviet practices. This basic logic applies throughout the post-Soviet and Baltic region. This strong Soviet legacy is hardly a revelation. Russia’s political technology overall draws from Soviet practices; this is apparent even in the vocabulary used, and the link has been acknowledged in previous studies. As is in the nature of political technology, in PD
words and deeds rarely match. Despite claiming to respect the sovereignty of states, separatists in the region are supported by public diplomacy efforts with puzzling moral ease and openness in practice. Small states such as Moldova are punished with hard economic measures if their policies are seen to be running contrary to Russia’s wishes. In principle, Russia still has plenty of soft power potential in many post-Soviet states where Russian popular culture and media dominate the local market, but as events in Georgia and Ukraine show aggression is the fastest way to get rid of these softpower resources. Russian anti-western PD presents a particular challenge for Europe. There is a growing realisation in Europe that it must respond to the Russian PD challenge, on national level as well as on the EU level. The EU should translate its technocratic language into more comprehensible, clear-cut messages. The EU also needs to deliver the message pro-actively and more effectively to a wider public in future.
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EXPLAINING CHINA’S BEHAVIOR IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA Sheldon Simon is professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University where he has been on the faculty since 1975. A specialist in US national security and Asian international politics, he is the author or editor of ten books and some 200 scholarly articles and book chapters on Asian security issues.
Sheldon W. Simon
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hina’s grand strategy is manifest in its South China Sea (SCS) actions. The PRC is striving for an exclusive sphere of influence in its neighborhood, a restoration of the traditional Middle Kingdom dominance, in other words a Chinese Monroe Doctrine. The SCS is a main theater for this effort. It is a semienclosed body of water that straddles key shipping lanes between the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean and northeast Asia. The Southeast Asian littoral countries around the SCS are small and medium-sized and do not possess the material capabilities to resist China’s supremacy. Unlike the situation in northeast Asia, the American security presence in Southeast Asia is smaller and Washington’s security commitments less robust. China’s legal claim to the SCS—the nine-dash line—encompasses close to 80 percent of its waters. Initially articulated in a 1992 law passed by China’s National People’s Congress, the PRC claimed the SCS as China’s
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national waters, though little was done to enforce this claim for several years. Initial evidence for its implementation was the discovery in 1995 that China had occupied Mischief Reef off the Philippine island of Palawan. More than another decade elapsed before China had the capability to begin to exclude the boats of Southeast Asian claimants, particularly those of Philippines and Vietnam. China began the initial stages of its grand strategy: to dominate the «first island chain» that stretches from Japan’s Ryukyu islands south through the Philippines. China’s control of that SCS stretch would also help to implement its «Anti-Access/Area Denial» strategy (A2/AD) vis-à-vis the United States, so as to exclude America’s navy and air force from the PRC’s neighborhood.
China’s Maritime Capabilities If China’s ship building remains on schedule, it will outstrip its largest competitor, Japan, in Aegis-equipped destroyers by 2018. These destroyers will provide long-range anti-aircraft warfare capability, though not to the same degree as Japan’s or South Korea’s navies, or, of course, the US
Seventh Fleet. However, China has the great advantage of proximity to any potential battle location. The ultimate goal of China’s naval buildup is to deny access to the East and South China Sea for other claimants as well as to American forces. A recent example of this effort was the December 2013 harassment of the USS Cowpens, monitoring the Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning. A Chinese ship ordered the Cowpens to leave the vicinity and came within 100 yards of the US ship, claiming that the Cowpens was in China’s national waters. The Americans replied that its vessel was clearly in international waters.
China’s Vision of Sea-based Governance China is now building structures on islands, reefs, and shoals it controls in the South China Sea to ensure that these features are above water over a 24-hour period, a legal necessity to claim ownership. These activities are progressing in several components of the Paracel and Spratly islands, a number of which are also claimed by Vietnam and the Philippines. PRC Coast Guard and Fisheries
Administration boats are blocking and sometimes ramming Vietnamese and Philippine fishing vessels, keeping them away from their traditional fishing grounds. From May-July 2014, the PRC moved a large oil exploration rig into Exclusive Economic Zone waters claimed by Vietnam and employed the Chinese Coast Guard to keep its Vietnamese counterpart away from the rig. Indeed, China’s Coast Guard ships already outnumber all Southeast Asian coast guards combined.
Conclusion Although Vietnam and the Philippines have tried multilateral diplomacy backed by the United States to rein in China’s dominance, these tactics have been unsuccessful. The Philippines has submitted a claim against China to the UN Arbitral Tribunal on the Law of the Sea; both Manila and Hanoi have attempted to employ the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meetings to protest against China’s behavior—to no avail. The United States is now deploying more of its military assets to the region and is assisting in the modernization of Philippine armed
forces as well as providing military assistance to Vietnam for the first time. However, there is no indication that Washington is prepared to become involved with its own naval and air forces as long as the general freedom of international maritime navigation remains unencumbered. The bottom line is that China’s maritime impunity will continue. No easy solution presents itself to the SCS imbroglio. So far, diplomacy based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has achieved little. Although the Southeast Asian claimants—Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei—have all endorsed the UNCLOS provisions that divide littoral states’ claims into 12nm national waters and 200nm exclusive economic zones from their land/sea boundaries, China has rejected in advance any UN arbitral tribunal distribution of SCS claims. Even if the UN judicial body endorses the Philippine submission in the next few years, at most, this would be a moral victory for the Southeast Asian disputants and a political embarrassment for the PRC. The alternative appears to be naval and air buildups by the Southeast Asian
competitors. Indeed, they are purchasing new surface ships, aircraft, and for Vietnam, even submarines. While none can hope to match China’s rapidly growing naval and air inventory, the Southeast Asian acquisitions provide a minimal ability to protect the sea and air spaces of each contender and might lead Beijing to dial down its more bellicose actions. The other feature in Southeast Asian contenders’ strategies has been their support for the Obama administration’s rebalance that is scheduled to deploy 60 percent of US naval and air assets to the AsiaPacific by 2020. In sum, this combination of internal and external balancing appears to be Southeast Asia’s best hope for maintaining the SCS status quo.
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Tai Chi and the fine art of diplomatic history lessons negotiation Dr. Todd Hall is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and the Tutor in Politics for St. Anne’s College. Dr. Hall earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2008 and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Princeton and Harvard, as well as visiting scholar appointments at the Free University of Berlin and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Dr. Hall held the position of Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Toronto (2010-2013). Research interests extend to the areas of international relations theory; the intersection of emotion, affect, andforeign policy; and Chinese foreign policy. Dr. Hall is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the role of state-level emotional behavior in international relations entitled Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage, forthcoming this year from Cornell. University Press.
Todd Hall
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apan should learn from Germany when it comes to dealing with history. This is a common refrain in statements coming from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), one that we are likely to hear repeated many times anew as we approach the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II. “Germany’s sincere remorse has won the confidence of the world,” says one PRC foreign ministry spokesperson, whereas, “the leaders of Japan, which caused harm and which lost the war, are to this day still trying to reverse the course of history and deny their history of invasion.” The recent and still very tepid thaw notwithstanding, the “history problem” continues to loom large as a source of friction in SinoJapanese relations. But what exactly are the lessons of the German experience when it comes to historical reconciliation? Much has been written about the relevance of Franco-German or even Polish-German relations for the Sino-Japanese relationship, but perhaps nowhere has the ability of
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the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to achieve historical reconciliation been better showcased than in its relations with Israel. Today, Germany ranks for Israelis as the most popular state in Europe, and more than two-thirds of Israelis hold a positive opinion of Germany. Such a state of affairs would have been unthinkable when Israel came into existence and when animosity towards Germany was so strong that Israel marked its passports as valid for travel in all lands except Germany. In 1952; however, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed a massive compensation agreement— the Luxembourg Agreement— with Israel, paving the way for the improvement of relations and their eventual normalization in 1965. Looking at the history of relations between these two states can serve as instructive in thinking about how historical reconciliation can be achieved. In particular, four lessons stand out.
Lesson One: Perceived Incentives Matter Extending gestures of reconciliation
is not easy. Such gestures can entail significant political costs and in certain instances financial ones as well. We might hope that moral imperative would overrule such concerns. But in truth, efforts at reconciliation may lack domestic support and even face opposition. Such was the case with the Luxembourg Agreement. Only 11% of the West German public supported the Luxembourg Agreement as it stood, and it met outright hostility from government officials and parliamentarians who worried about its implications for national finances and FRG diplomacy in the Middle East. While there were those who backed the agreement for moral reasons, a crucial factor in the efforts of Adenauer and his political allies to overcome domestic opposition and push forward the Luxembourg Agreement was its anticipated rewards. These not only included German re-entry into the “family of nations,” but also stemmed from perceptions of Jewish influence. In internal party discussions, Adenauer justified the agreement stating, “We should be clear, that the power of Jewry is extremely strong… reconciliation with Jewry […] is an absolute necessity for the Federal
Republic.” Simply, the perceived need for Israel to validate the FRG as a reformed state played an important role in spurring early West German efforts to reconcile in the face of domestic resistance. That said, accepting gestures of reconciliation is not easy either. Opposition to accepting FRG overtures in Israel was so strong that when the Knesset deliberated on the issue, it had to be protected with troops and barbed wire. The Israeli negotiators literally put their lives on the line in the face of assassination threats. But Israel was in dire economic straits and desperately needed the assistance an agreement promised. Later on, Israel would also profit from FRG diplomatic support and a covert flow of arms. In short, Israel saw financial, military, and political benefits in improving relations with the FRG, and these served to counterbalance the effects of strong domestic animosity towards Germany.
Lesson Two: It Takes Two Historical reconciliation requires
effort by both sides. Political courage and will is required from the apologizing side to overcome domestic resistance. But the receiving side also plays an important role in creating an environment in which such efforts are rewarded, strengthening the position of those who may have taken a political risk. Without such assurances, reconciliation can falter. Adenauer’s first public statement of German responsibility before the West German parliament was made only after it was clear that the Israeli side would not reject it. Jennifer Lind has argued that efforts at apology often fail because they elicit domestic backlash with negative repercussions for a state’s image. Backlash, however, is what the other side makes of it. The Israeli side repeatedly validated the Federal Republic of Germany as a reformed actor in spite of domestic dissonances. In fact, when antiSemitic graffiti appeared in Cologne in 1959 and then spread throughout West Germany, Ben-Gurion agreed to a meeting with Adenauer and then publicly reaffirmed that “the Germany of today is not the Germany of yesterday.” (The FRG, for its part, subsequently increased the secret flow of weapons to Israel; see
Lesson One.) An important— although unanswerable— counterfactual question is whether or not we would now perceive Germany as “sincerely remorseful” had Israel not accepted its gestures and instead maintained a highly critical stance.
Lesson Three: It Is Not About Overcoming the Past, But Finding an Arrangement Both Can Live With There is no apology or reconciliatory gesture that can relegate the past to the past once and for all, no wiping the slate clean. The Federal Republic of Germany and Israel reconciled not because they overcame the past, but rather because they settled into mutually beneficial and reinforcing roles in which the past was ever present. The FRG was expected not only to project the image of a repentant actor in its rhetoric and symbolic behavior, but also to back this up with material compensation. The Israeli government, for its part, would in return recognize this and validate Germany’s efforts for its domestic public, the international (and most significantly American) Jewish
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community, and the “family of states” more generally. Indeed, having accepted compensation explicitly designated as a gesture of atonement, Israeli officials could hardly persist in decrying the FRG as unreformed. Over time, these roles solidified. By validating the FRG as a reformed state, the Israeli side also helped cement its place in the maintaining that image. In return, the German side came to internalize a special responsibility towards Israel entailing political, financial, and even military support (recently in the form of Dolphin-class submarines).
Lesson Four: Political Reconciliation Came First Both sides occupied roles officially that only later would come to be accepted on a more popular level. Initially, much of the West German public was preoccupied with seeing itself as the victim. By engaging in political reconciliation, however, Israel helped participate in crafting an image of repentance in which German officials became invested and thus saw a need to protect. This, in turn, motivated additional efforts on the FRG side through exchange, education, and symbolic actions to further popular reconciliation while avoiding domestic challenges to its reformed image. It is not due to chance the FRG pushed through further reforms to its history education in the aftermath of the international fallout from antiSemitic graffiti incidents in 1959. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent comments in Japan that “summing up the past can be a prerequisite to reconciliation” may therefore have the causal arrow pointing wrongly. Political reconciliation between the FRG and Israel was not a result of comprehensive, popular efforts to
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confront the past in Germany; political reconciliation came first and may even have been a contributing cause. So what do these lessons tell us about Sino-Japanese relations? In short, the history of German-Israeli relations suggests that political reconciliation requires incentives, it takes two (including willingness by the recipient to overlook various domestic “warts”), and it needs to result in stable, mutually beneficial roles that incorporate the past. What is more, it was political reconciliation that set the stage for deeper societal reconciliation, not the reverse. Transposed onto Sino-Japanese relations, the implications of these lessons are not encouraging. Looking back, it is possibly a tragic irony of history that the PRC side chose not to seek reparations when relations were first established in 1972. Understood as a magnanimous gesture, it conceivably deprived both sides the impetus for stable, mutually reinforcing roles that integrated their history at a time when both had strong incentives to make the necessary compromises. Instead, the PRC simply settled for a statement of deep self-reproach, and with that the past was swept under the rug as opposed to being given a clear place in the relationship. Granted, subsequent Japanese aid packages may have implicitly played the role of reparations, but these were never officially recognized gestures of contrition. As the history issue resurfaced in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese side did make efforts to show remorse, but these were unattached to concrete actions whose acceptance would have encouraged the PRC to overlook discordant notes emanating from Japan’s domestic political arena. Over time, the PRC’s complaints have come to be seen in a more cynical manner and in Japan antipathy towards the PRC has grown,
especially in light of other concurrent disputes. For their part, conservative Japanese politicians have repeatedly added fuel to the fire by visiting the controversial Yasukuni shrine where fourteen Class A war criminals are enshrined. If anything, political incentives at present would appear to be pushing against reconciliation. In both countries, percentages of the public holding positive views of the other have sunk to the single digits. Ongoing economic interdependence may help to prevent an absolute breakdown, but it has not proven sufficient to motivate any bold political steps. Taking into account the role of Japan in the PRC’s domestic nationalist discourses and the way in which history can be usefully employed to oppose a larger Japanese role on the international stage, it is unclear what the Japan side could offer to entice the PRC government to recognize it as sincerely repentant and reformed. Consequently, if the only incentive Japanese officials face is a temporary cessation of criticism, the situation bodes ill for any stronger Japanese efforts at historical reconciliation. Where the international incentives for presenting an image of remorse are lacking, domestic politics and the ideology of Japanese officeholders will likely play a more defining role. It hardly seems a coincidence that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe avoided visiting the controversial Yasukuni shrine during his first term when warmer relations with the PRC seemed possible, but then later chose to visit when relations with the PRC (and also South Korea) were stuck at frigid temperatures.To be sure, the lack of incentives does not excuse Japanese official conduct, but it does help explain it. The bottom line is that while we may witness periodic ceasefires, SinoJapanese historical reconciliation does not look to be in the cards anytime soon.