Amitai Etzioni Notes

"A 'Sovereign' Iraq? Don’t You Believe It"

Here we go again. The United States is about to fall prey to its own propaganda.

President Bush has repeatedly said we will grant "full and complete sovereignty" to Iraq on June 30. We've said we'll turn over Saddam Hussein for trial and punishment and that the occupation will finally be replaced by Iraqi self-rule. But these grand promises are as unbelievable as they are unattainable.

Already we've begun to qualify some of them: The Iraqis will take "legal" custody of Hussein, it turns out, but the U.S. will continue to hold him physically.

Now imagine what could happen next. Suppose that Iraqi judges and jurors acquit Hussein. Would he be released? Would he be allowed to preside over the re-erection of his statue in Firdos Square? Or to restore his regime?

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Do Universities Serve a Higher Purpose?

According to Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, universities should play no role in the moral or ethical development of an individual. “You can’t make them good people,” Fish said, “and you shouldn’t try. . . . [Y]ou might just make them into good researchers.”

In agreement with Fish’s statements, John J. Mearsheimer, a distinguished professor of political science at the University of Chicago, stated that “there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral purpose . . . [and universities should operate to] pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter.”

(Source: The New York Times, 6/19/04, A13)

How can anyone teach history, say, about Nazi Germany, the civil rights movement, the Inquisition, or most any other event–morally neutral? How can one teach literature without, in effect, being engaged in the moral education business? The only difference is between those who are open about it and put their values up front, and those who pretend not to communicate any (maybe not even to themselves). The students who go to different classes and are exposed to other sources of loaded information will then choose their own course.

Right on

Philip Morris USA recently asked Paramount Pictures to remove Marlboro cigarettes from its recent film, “Twisted,” and to refrain from referring to any cigarette brands in all films henceforth.

Moreover, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco recently asked Sony Pictures Entertainment to edit its products out of the movie “Mona Lisa Smile,” stating that Sony “do[es] not have the permission to mention or depict [R.J.R. Tobacco’s] brands in [their] films.”

(Source: The Wall Street Journal, 6/14/04, B1, B4)

This is no small matter, given that such product placement in the past has been effective and many other avenues of advertising cigarettes are closed to tobacco companies.

Whatever their motive–for the first time in my lifetime–three cheers.

A Shirt Here, Some Perfume There, and Pretty Soon . . .

Ever since I have been to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I have suspected that sooner or later hatred of America would turn into rejection of our products, exacting economic costs above and beyond the political ones. Tom Friedman reports in Sunday’s New York Times that Chinese young people no longer rush to wear our T-shirts. Before this, there was a report that Russians now prefer to purchase their own perfumes over imported ones from the West. And then there is, of course, the growing trade deficit and the declining dollars (both of which have many sources)–but these straws in the winds may yet indicate a coming economic storm.

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Re: My Response to the Review of From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations

Reviewer: Amitai Etzioni from Washington, DC United States:

The anonymous reviewer, from Publisher's Weekly, on the run to fill the quota of books he must review in short order, obviously did not get around to reading my book, From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. For instance, he dismisses my book as "not too hawkish, not too dovish," ignoring that this is one of the main points of the book: while superpowers benefit from receiving the UN's blessing, the United Nations cannot do much without superpowers. I pointed out that until Australia interfered militarily in East Timor, UN resolutions did nothing to stop the slaughter. The same is true for the British in Sierra Leone, and for the United States in Kuwait (in which the U.S. rolled back Saddam).

The book argues that one can strongly support the U.S.-led global war against terrorism while also believing that the United Nations can and should legitimate superpower actions, a point only recently recognized by the Bush administration. The reader can readily judge the bias of the reviewer when he writes that I "feel" that the invasion of Iraq aroused intense worldwide opposition. This is not something I merely "feel": there is a myriad of evidence, which I cite in the book, to support this point, although at this juncture such evidence hardly seems necessary.

From Publishers Weekly: Review of From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations

Arguing against both what he casts as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism and Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" pessimism, communitarian Etzioni sees the world edging toward a "chemical fusion" of Western individualism and Eastern social authoritarianism. This movement duly demands a transformation of an American "semi-empire" based on military coercion into a world community based on a "new global architecture" of transnational institutions that rely less on force and more on shared interests and values. Etzioni’s turgid disquisitions on such topics as "monofunctional transnational government networks" remain somewhat vague about what the new global regime actually entails. It would definitely not look like the invasion of Iraq, a "Vietnamesque" disaster that he feels has aroused intense worldwide opposition and squandered America’s credibility. But it might look something like the international police and intelligence effort against terrorism and nuclear proliferation, a de facto Global Safety Authority that could be a model for other Authorities governing other world issues like environmental degradation, poverty, sex trafficking and "cybercrime." True to his communitarian instincts, Etzioni insists that the transnational community requires informal but "thick" bonds of shared values and mores; moderate religion will play a leading role, especially a nascent "soft" Islam, which will drive out hard fundamentalist Islam and foster the growth of civil society in the Muslim world. Unfortunately, apart from perfunctory talk of international "moral dialogues," he is vague about how the "global normative synthesis" is to come about. Etzioni’s communitarian formula—not too hawkish, not too dovish, with not too much individualism, not too much social coercion and lots of moral consensus—seems even more nebulous and pat when translated from domestic politics to international relations.

(Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

European Constitutional Track

Kids First

In reference to the “Family Movie Act,” other panelists who testified before and after I did included The Honorable Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights, Copyright Office of the United States at The Library of Congress; Jack Valenti, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); and Penny Nance, President of Kids First Coalition (a non-profit educational and advocacy group). I found Mrs. Nance’s testimony especially compelling. To see Nance's testimony, read this article.