Turkey and the European Union

Jacques Chirac lambasted George W. Bush today for suggesting that Turkey should become a member of the European Union. It’s no secret that the French government would prefer, all things considered, that Turkey not become a member of the European Union, or that a fair swathe of political opinion in other powerful EU member states (such as Germany) is at best luke-warm towards the prospect. Nonetheless, if I were a betting man, I’d lay strong odds on Turkey getting the official nod as a candidate for EU membership before Christmas, and becoming a full member seven or eight years after that.

In theory, any one member state can block Turkey’s membership - new entrants to the EU require unanimous consent from all existing members. In practice, even member states that are hostile to Turkey’s candidacy, such as France, have enormous difficulty in articulating their hostility in public. And for good reason - their objections to Turkey are rooted in some pretty offensive notions about what ‘Europe’ should be (Christian, white). Whenever anyone tries to voice these opinions, they’re liable to get blasted from all sides. The result is that the opponents of Turkey’s candidacy find it difficult to justify their stance in public - therefore, they’re liable to find themselves being herded into giving their tacit assent to a decision that they would ideally prefer to oppose.

It’s an interesting case-study for international relations theory. As Frank Schimmelfennig observed in his case studyof the EU’s earlier enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe, this sort of phenomenon demonstrates the limits of realist theory. Powerful states such as France may find it difficult, or even impossible, to act upon their preferences if they can’t justify their actions with reference to prevailing community norms. It could also have quite profound consequences for international politics. The prospect of EU membership has already demonstrably pushed Turkey into greater respect for civil rights, and a weakened political role for the military. Expect this to continue, and indeed accelerate if Turkey becomes a full member of the EU, just as it did in Spain, Portugal and Greece. And as John Quiggin said a few months back, a prosperous, stable, fully democratic Turkey within the EU could do wonders for the prospects of democracy in other countries in the same region.

Rawlsian humility

Matthew Yglesias on John Rawls :

A Theory of Justice is a brilliant work in many ways, but it’s also — quite obviously — wrong in a number of ways and employs a variety of arguments that are pretty dubious. Any undergraduate can see this, and dozens — if not hundreds — do so every semester. Now it seems to me that a slightly more scrupulous philosopher might have looked at the manuscript and said to himself, “this is a very interesting argument I’m putting together here, but it doesn’t quite work. Better keep on revising.” But instead Rawls put his thought-provoking work out there in the press, attracting decades worth of criticisms, counter-criticisms, suggestions for improvement, and so forth, thus becoming the major figure in postwar political philosophy.

Someone who all accounts agree was a deeply serious, thinker who cared most of all about getting it right (“scrupulous”), is thus dismissed by a blogger as a careless promoter of his own reputation. Contrast John Rawls on reading the history of philosophy:

I always too for granted that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. If they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students’ time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed those writers saw it too and must have dealt with it. But where? I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the question need not be raised, or wouldn’t arise and so couldn’t then be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or had not read. I assumed there were never plain mistakes, not ones that mattered anyway. (Lectures on the History of Philosophy , p. xvi)

Since my own copy of the first edition of A Theory of Justice is peppered with silly undergraduate marginal sneers, I shouldn’t be too hard on Yglesias. What of Brad DeLong, though, who responds approvingly to Yglesias’s comments by suggesting that David Hume’s Of the Original Contract constitutes an avant la lettre refutation of Rawls? DeLong reveals nothing but his own catastropic misunderstanding (as a number of his commenters point out).

Then Again, He Was Endorsed By The International Iron Worker's Union

Once again, we must turn to Fafblog for thoughtful political analysis. Giblets considers the various Democratic vice-presidential contenders:

Dick Gephardt. Gephardt would have an amazing pull with loser voters, voters who like losing the House to opposing parties, voters who have a long history of being supported by decrepit and dying labor institutions in failing political campaigns, just people who generally like to lose. He could swing loser states, such as Wyoming or Rhode Island, or put states with a large loser population, such as Nevada or Alabama, into play. The upside to having a Kerry-Gephardt ticket is it would take all those people who go into shock in the voting booth thinkin’ “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry?!” and push them just far enough over the edge with “Oh dear god we nominated Kerry and Gephardt?!” that it would sort of jar them into a feeling of complacent somnambulism that would render them susceptible to voting for Kerry-Gephardt anyway. The downside to this is that such a hypthetical waking sleepstate could also get them to vote for Nader.

This is so, so very true. I’m afraid we must all bow down before the superior nous of Giblets. Gephardt? Gephardt??!! Please, God, don’t let the Democratic party snatch certain defeat from the jaws of potential victory by choosing Dick Gephardt as the VP candidate. Pleasepleaseplease. Anybody but Gephardt. If the DP makes me cast a vote for a Kerry/Gephardt ticket I’m going to…well, crap, just put out like a straight-ticket ho. They could put a can of processed cheese food on the ballot against Bush, and I would vote for it. But I’m not going to enjoy it! And no ticket with Gephardt on it is going to win, ever in a million years! How can this blindingly obvious fact be so clear to Giblets yet obscure to Kerry? Maybe they are just toying with us. Maybe. Then when they pick Vilsack, instead of saying, “who the hell?” we will all just be so grateful they didn’t pick Gephardt that we’ll get all fired up, like, “Hey, that Vilsack, he sure does…have a lot of consonants in his name! Frickin’ awesome!”

Maybe Our Fat Chum Chet Could Help!

Courtesy of the now non-blogging (but suspiciously time-wasting-on-the-interweb) Chun the Unavoidable, I present you with the Mayday Mystery. These are a series of mysterious ads which have been running in an Arizona paper since May 1, 1985. It seems to be an erudite, mathematico-historical puzzle of some kind, containing specific Tuscon-area clues (?), but what is the point? Is there a prize? Some of the ads are rebus-like, while others tend to the Dr. Bronner’s label All-One-God-Faith style. Sample text from the May 1, 2004 edition:

1) “Quaerendo invenietis” [1747]}}!!+}The 473rd Anniversary of the Confessio Augustana will again be celebrated in the Riemann Room of the 5)Hotel Californias (non uni fidit antro) where the Founders will be entertained by an in situ demonstration of 17) l’art d’accommoder les restes. The Pigs will be less entertained by le dénoument—and the Hirelings least of all. 29) Alberich has programmed The Symmetry Generator as per I Corinthians 1:28 to serve as the propaedeutic for Ireton’s penetration of [$\omega_{p,n}= i log ˜p^n$] on Trinity Sunday.

Perhaps the brainy CT readership will figure everything out? If there’s lots of money involved, the solver of the puzzle is respectfully encouraged to pass some along to your humble author. Perhaps I will use it to take a vacation in Thailand. I hear Koh Phi Phi is very nice this time of year.

UPDATE: Adam Kotsko has put out a call for posts for a Chun the Unavoidable Festschrift. Suggested topics include: Halitosis in Literature, Cunnilinguis and the Discursive Performance of Class, Richard Clarke, and The blogospheric reception of the verb “to chun.” You know what to do, people.

Kvetching Retrospectively about Analytical Philosophy

Following Chris’s post about topics in philosophy that provoke worries about angels and pinheads, I was going to pitch in with a comment setting out my own pet hates, but realised I was veering off-topic when I began to whine not about the problems themselves but about the values of the discipline itself.

Katharina Blum

Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (based on the Heinrich Boll novel). For those who don’t know, the film is about what happens to a young woman after she spends the night with a man who turns out to be a terrorist suspect. She is alternately bullied by the police and villified by the gutter press. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events. (If you’ve not seen the film, don’t be put off by the sole IMDB commenter, who has also posted politically-motived negative reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bloody Sunday.)

IRRITATED UPDATE: Why is a classic of the New German Cinema available on DVD in Region 1 but not in Region 2 (including the UK and Germany)?

Noblesse d'Etat

Atrios reports that the White House have lodged a complaint with the Irish Embassy over the “disrespectful’ interview by an Irish journalist discussed yesterday. Mere journalists apparently aren’t allowed to interrupt the President when he’s trying to make a point. Nor are Presidents supposed to have to defend their policies against vigorous critique. Kieran posted on this rather bizarre feature of US public discourse last year - as he says, it smacks more of feudalism than democracy. Indeed, as in feudalism, the respect only goes one way - the vice-president seems to feel quite entitled to tell his critics to go fuck themselves, and not to apologize for it afterwards.

Sociology's Final Frontier

Via Baptiste Coulmont comes word of an effort to establish a new subfield of Sociology. Jim Pass, who as far as I can tell is an adjunct sociology instructor at Long Beach City College, is trying to get Astrosociology [Warning! Monster Java Zombie Nightmare Website from Beyond 1996], um, off the ground. He has managed to get a paper on this topic accepted at an Informal Roundtable Session at the upcoming ASA meetings in San Francisco. He’s also organizing an Astrosociology Interest Group meeting¹ for the many, many sociologists who will want to join his proposed section-in-formation.

What is Astrosociology? You may well ask. According to Jim’s helpful email,

Generally, astrosociology is the study of astrosocial phenomena (a subset of all social phenomena)

Well, obviously. My initial thought was that the field would be picking up where Elizabeth Tessier left off. Elizabeth managed to extract a Sociology Ph.D from the Sorbonne a few years ago with the argument that Astrology was as good a science as any other, and vice versa. America is always a few years behind the French trend-setters. But this hope was dashed when I read Jim’s clarification that the field dealt mainly with

all human behaviors related in some way to outer space; a neglected area of sociological inquiry.

Now, it’s true that outer space is a neglected area of sociological inquiry. My naive view was that this was explained by the fact that, at any one time, there are are perhaps three or four people in outer space. That’s enough to keep a social psychologist happy for most of their career, but the rest of us might run into problems. As a great sociologist once said, after all, the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. But Jim is not confining himself to outer space. Although this is a wise move, it makes Astrosociology rather less interesting than it first appears. Jim’s programmatic statement on the field at the roundtable (Table 15: New Ideas in the Sciences) is paired with just one other paper, by Juan Miguel Campanario of the Universidad de Alcala. Unlucky for Juan Miguel, you might think, but his paper title is Resistance to New Ideas In Science, so they should be well set up for a good chat. In a creative scheduling decision, Juan Miguel is also supposed to be speaking simultaneously at Table 16, “Media, Sport and Science.”² Bizarrely, his paper title at that Table is Studying the Competence for Space in Sociology Journals. But it’s the wrong kind of space! So near and yet so far!

¹ Monday August 16, 6:30pm, Union Square 24/San Franciso Hilton. I’ll be there!

² It’s a big tent at the informal roundtables, alright.

Chmess and twaddle

Brian Leiter has a couple of interesting posts reflecting on the state of analytical philosophy, and also links to Dan Dennett’s The Higher-Order Truths of Chmess , which I hadn’t read before. Dennett cites Donald Hebb’s dictuum “If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well,” and remarks

Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb’s dictum were ruthlessly applied.

I confess to succumbing to feeling of utter despair whenever I have to listen to people talking twaddle about twater on twin-earth, so that would be my candidate even though I have dear colleagues who care passionately about the topic. But the twaddlers themselves would, no doubt, want to consign some of my pet interests to the bin. Commenters are invited to nominate the disputes that drive them crazy, and those who care about the tw-topic are invited to explain to the rest of us why we should think it matters.

And then there were six

Germany, Spain, Italy, England, all gone. And now France! This is getting interesting.

Root causes of terrorism

Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to recent developments in current affairs. (Hat tip to Chris).

Making History

Via Bookslut, this account of an interesting dust-up at Foreign Affairs , the influential foreign policy journal run by the Council of Foreign Relations. Kenneth R. Maxwell, who was the journal’s book review editor resigned last month, claiming that the magazine had bowed to pressure from Henry Kissinger, and shut down a debate on its letters page about America’s role in the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister, Orlando Letelier and his wife in Washington DC by “Operation Condor.” Jeremy Adelman, who succeeded Maxwell, has just resigned too after only three weeks in the job. The editor of Foreign Affairs, James Hoge, has admitted receiving at least one phone-call from the head of the Council of Foreign Relations conveying Mr. Kissinger’s displeasure; if Maxwell is to be believed, Hoge also received repeated phone calls from Henry Kissinger. However, Hoge has denied that this had anything to do with his editorial decision to cut short debate.

Henry Kissinger’s historical legacy is very slightly more complicated than it might seem at first glance. Critics like Christopher Hitchens fail to acknowledge his very real contribution to the understanding of international relations - some of his early academic writings (“A World Restored,” “The Troubled Partnership”) are first rate. Nonetheless, his political career seems to have combined a particularly unpleasant variety of Realpolitik with a gruesome eagerness to condone lies, murder, torture and other human rights violations. The greater part of his subsequent writing can be seen as a sustained effort to whitewash the record. Kissinger’s memoirs are mendacious and untrustworthy, even by the usual standards of statesmen’s self-justifications. Like Winston Churchill, he intends to ensure that history is kind to him by writing it. Given Kissinger’s track record, I’m not at all surprised that he seems to have used his clout to try to shut down debate about one of the nastiest aspects of his record as Secretary of State. I am surprised, and disappointed, that Foreign Affairs seems very possibly to have knuckled under.

Bush and Europe

George W. Bush gave an interview to Irish television’s Prime Time that’s worth watching (the interview starts about 15 minutes into the clip). It’s the first time that I’ve seen him subjected to a hostile (if not extraordinarily competent) interviewer, and he clearly didn’t like it - in particular, he got very tetchy whenever he was interrupted. In the course of the interview Bush claims that he had most of Europe’s backing for the war in Iraq.

Most of Europe supported the decision in Iraq: really what you’re talking about is France isn’t it. They didn’t agree with my decision. … Most European countries are very supportive and are participating in the reconstruction of Iraq.

This is misleading in a way in which John Kerry’s much-ballyhooed statement that many foreign leaders preferred him as a potential president to Bush is not. Kerry was undoubtedly correct, even if he wasn’t able to provide public evidence to back up his claim. Everybody knows that most Western European countries (perhaps even including Britain) would prefer a Kerry administration to another round of Bush. Bush, in contrast, does apparently have evidence to back him up - he could point to the various resolutions signed by Western and Eastern European countries on Iraq. However, these statements are for the most part, rhetoric. Most of the Eastern European countries that signed on were less interested in resolving problems in the Middle East than in avoiding punishment by the hegemon, and reaping the political and financial rewards of a friendly relationship with the US. Remarkably few of the so-called “coalition of the willing” were prepared to put their money where their mouth was, by committing substantial numbers of troops to Iraq.

If Bush sincerely believes that the difficult transatlantic relationship is all about France’s posturing, he’s in trouble. Even those governments which nominally signed on last time would have extreme difficulty in doing so again - their voters wouldn’t stand for it. Bush is electoral poison; Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern will not have been pleased at Bush’s expression of gratitude to him for his help on Iraq. It’s almost certainly a vote-loser. The conventional wisdom among foreign policy wonks is that European leaders will not get much more satisfaction from a Kerry administration than they would from a second round of Bush. I don’t think this is true. Bush has managed to create such distrust among the voting public in Europe that it’s going to be politically impossible for European leaders to sign onto any major new transatlantic foreign policy initiative. Given the important threats (such as proliferation of nuclear weapons) that require decisive multilateral action, this is a very dangerous development indeed.

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The world's oldest mountain guide

The world’s oldest mountain guide, Ulrich Inderbinen, has died at the age of 103, having climbed the Matterhorn more than 370 times (making his final ascent at the age of 90). The Economist has the story . I’m sure what they write of him is true, but anyone who has read the beginning of Ernest Gellner’s best book — Thought and Change — will feel slightly suspicious. Gellner illustrates the idea of a society living against “an unchanging temporal horizon”, where everything stays the same “like a train crossing a featureless landscape” with the story of the Taugwalders, survivors of the first ascent in 1865.