New cables reveal frank U.S. views on Latin America, from Argentina to Venezuela | La Plaza | Los Angeles Times

More incredible revelations about US foreign policy, including:

1. Cuban intelligence has a lot of influence in Venezuela

2. The US is concerned about Iran's influence in Bolivia and Venezuela, and

3. Everybody thinks the Kirchner family is nuts, including the Chileans.

Any actual _news_ coming out of this?

New cables reveal frank U.S. views on Latin America, from Argentina to Venezuela | La Plaza | Los Angeles Times

Santa Cruz será sede del cuartel del ALBA · la-razon.com

Haven't blogged in a long time, but this seemed worthwhile to highlight; Bolivian newspaper _La Razon_ is reporting that the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, will be the military training headquarters for Hugo Chavez's ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America) left-wing alliance, including a new military academy.

The irony is that Santa Cruz is the center for right wing anti-Morales types.

We'll have to follow this in the weeks to come.

Santa Cruz será sede del cuartel del ALBA · la-razon.com

Blanning on Coffee

The percolator is, as we should all know by now, both the foundation and fountainhead of Anglo-American liberty:

As the number of public spaces proliferated during this period, so did opportunities for the exchange of information, ideas and criticism.  An exemplar was the coffee-house.  Within fifty years of the founding of the first in Europe--in Venice in 1645--it had spread across the continent, reaching London in the early 1650s.  By 1659 Samuel Pepys could record that he had been to the Turk's Head coffee-house in New Palace Yard, close to Parliament, and had heard 'exceeding good argument against Mr Harrington's assertion that overbalance of propriety [property] was the foundation of government'.  For the price of a cup of coffee (although many other beverages were on offer), anyone decently dressed could join in debating the issues of the day.  The newly restored Charles II took a dim view of the freedom expression that prevailed there...

The notion of "public spaces" and the way they permit civil society to function may be the most important part here.

The recent controversy involving Starbucks and the open carry folks (crazies?) may be a good modern example of the ways in which public spaces (though privately owned) can promote political mobilization. 

Blanning on the American Revolution

Another interesting quote from Tim Blanning's book The Pursuit of Glory:

On the American side, there was some confusion, or at least disagreement, as to whether they were conservatives fighting to defend old liberties in the plural or revolutionaries fighting for liberty in the abstract.  Sensibly, the Continental Congress put the two together in  their Declaration of Rights of 1774, appealing to 'the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters and compacts'.

So, the American revolution was both religious and secular, and both radical and conservative?

Late 18th century elections in Britain

Haven't blogged in a long time; intended to start again over the summer, but just haven't had the energy for it.  Have been wanting to start again for a couple of weeks or two.  Maybe I'll start to get back into it again now.  Although I've written that before and not followed through!

My research, this summer, has been about private and public goods provision in Peruvian municipalities, and the democratic dynamics that tend to drive greater or lesser public works spending around the Peruvian countryside.

One of my findings is an interesting interaction effect.  What I've found is that greater electoral competition is associated with greater spending in public works, but only when there are substantial checks and balances present in municipal governments.  These checks and balances, in Peru, consist of municipal council seats controlled by opposition parties.

My argument is, in effect, that all politicians would prefer to seek the support of voters by targeting reliable supporters with private goods than public goods, and only veto power by opposition groups will keep them from doing so.  After all, private goods are easier to provide to supporters while excluding non-supporters.  In the presence of a strong opposition, however, politicians will pursue the next best course; they will attempt to provide public goods to win support, even though non-supporters may experience some benefits of their policies. 

In Peru, "private goods provision" comes at election time, and generally consists of political hopefuls using private or state funds to buy seed, fertilizer, durable goods, food, and (most often) alcohol for their supporters.

For obvious reasons, then, I was struck by the following quote, which describes British elections to Parliament abound the end of the 18th century in The Pursuit of Glory, a history text I'm working through on Europe before 1815:

When a contest did take place, no holds were barred and no stratagem thought too base in the quest for victory.  Treating to food and drink, outright bribery and intimidation were all commonplace, greatly encouraged by the public ballot. 

...and later...

Among the innumberable anomalies that could be found, the practice of bringing back registered "freemen" of a borough for the vote, even if they had moved to other parts of the kingdom, deserves a mention.  When an officer of marines learnt that a number of sailors had been given special leave to return to their home town of Coventry to vote for the government candidate, he did his friend the Duke of Portland a good turn by having them hastily transferred to a ship outward bound to Guinea.  
 
Indeed, it rather sounds as if modern Peruvian elections are substantially cleaner than their 18th century British counterparts.

Thoughts on Theory of the State

So, I've finished posting pictures from Emily and my vacation around Austria; if you're interested, you can click the link in the previous post or the picture in the sidebar.  Most of the pictures are new, and up since yesterday (earlier today, for you folks in Colorado).

Curtis' take on the Treaty of Westphalia has me sold, but being here and going to history a couple history museums (which has taught me enough that I can develop plausible but totally incorrect ideas) has me thinking…

Is it too simplistic to think of the Treaty of Westphalia as the birth of the modern nation-state?  States like the ones we know today existed much earlier.  For example, the Imperial state of Rome, the Greek city-states, and feudal states in Europe with strong bureaucratic and military apparatuses, like the Holy Roman Empire and other Hapsburg territories. 

Organizations which were not states in the modern sense of the world also controlled territory long after the Treaty of Westphalia.  Examples that come to mind include insurgents in Vietnam in the 1960s, groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s (and groups like Villista and Zapatista forces during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1030) and the "Prince-Bishops of Salzburg," who were evidently bishops who became so wealthy off the nearby salt mines that they came to control substantial amounts of territory (much of Western Austria), build fortresses (including the the impressive Salzburg fortress which was never taken by assault or siege) and control military forces. 

Is it more accurate to think of states as simply one of many types of organizations that control territory with greater or lesser degrees of effectiveness?  

New pictures up.

Some of my pictures from Salzburg and Vienna are now up on my Picasa site.  you can click on the link in the blog sidebar (the picture), or here. 

European Rail Service

As pretty much everybody knows, European rail systems are very efficient, comfortable, and well-designed.  I'm jealous, even though train tickets are way more expensive than I thought they would be.  Of course, everything here is more expensive than I thought it would be. 

I used to think that European rail service was so much better than rail service (and bus service, and every other kind of US public transport) because US rail carriers (Amtrak) had been subsidized.  I learned recently, though, that European and other mass transit systems throughout the developed world are heavily subsidized, which is the only thing that keeps them running.  Maybe we need more, not fewer rail subsidies in the US.

Not sure why I didn't assume that European rail was subsidized; only makes sense.  Europe = government intervention in economies, right?

The apparent efficiency of these systems seems like proof that subsidized or public systems can provide a quality of service that can be unmatched by the market. 

Government intervention in rail markets may help providers coordinate and benefit from economies of scale which are necessary in order for transport systems to work efficiently.  If you don't subsidize, using rail transport will cost more, so many fewer people will use rail, so it will be more costly, an so on…  Subsidies probably also make it possible for transport providers to provide services to places that wouldn't be economical destinations otherwise; keeping rural communities alive, despite economic inefficiencies, may be an outcome we value intrinsically. 

Also, it seems hard to argue that the car-centric US culture is more efficient, even in a purely economic sense, than the fast, clean, convenient, and energy-efficient public transport here, even if it's subsidized. 

Of course, private transport is also heavily subsidized in the US (most roads are public, for one thing, and there are many direct and indirect subsidies to auto manufacturing and gasoline production).  So our system may well be the result of heavy subsidies to the automotive industry and smaller subsidies to rail.  Perhaps we would get something like the European system in a purely market-driven economy where nothing was subsidized at all. 

Financial Sanctions on Iran, and missing flights in Europe.

The NY Times discusses the possibility of financial sanctions against Iran's central bank here. 

What I know about this approach is relatively optimistic--sounds like the approach we tried against Sudan during the Clinton administration, after the first World Trade Center bombings--these were the financial sanctions that drove Bin Laden and his cronies from Sudan to Afghanistan.  Though it also sounds like there's a lot to be decided here. 

Anything I'm missing?

In other news, after nearly missing our connecting flight in Houston, Emily and I made our flight to Frankfurt, then, once in Frankfurt, missed our flight to Vienna.  So, we should be in Vienna on a later flight at about 9:30 tonight, unless we can hitch a ride, standby, on a flight that's leaving in about an hour. 

I'm no stranger to long flights, but I haven't crossed this many time zones in a single trip ever in my life before, except for once.  It's weird.  It's 2:15PM here, and I'm just starting to get hungry for breakfast.  Feel like I should be a lot more tired than I am.

In other news, Frankfurt is my new least favorite airport.  As byzantine and poorly signed as O'Hare or the airport in Mexico City, without the charming modernist architecture of O'Hare or the shininess of D.F.

Will Sanctions Work?

The New York Times reports a deal on international sanctions on Iran here. 

Although the jury is still out on whether or not sanctions "work," (some say yea, some say nay, and for a range of different reasons), one thing that we know is that, if sanctions work, they are most likely to work before they're imposed.  That is, sanctions work primarily as a threat, ahead of time.  If a target of sanctions--Iran, in this case--is going to cave, they'll do so after threatened with sanctions, but before sanctions are imposed, to avoid the potential costs.

One problem is that countries (like Iran) might be threatened with sanctions in private, ahead of time.  So it's often to know if private threats of sanctions work in changing the behavior of targeted countries.

However, if there's one thing that democracies are good at, it's clearly signaling their intentions; in this case, to punish Iran for pursuing nuclear power.   Unfortunately, the United States probably isn't the critical player in this case of sanctions, and the most important players--Russia and China--aren't democratic.  So we'll see what happens.

For what it's worth, I do think that sanctions work sometimes, and are worth trying before stepping up to something else (like, say, cruise missile strikes or something like that).  I would also argue that an important normative consideration is for us to reduce our own nuclear stockpile, which is something we're already doing under the Obama administration.  That's probably helpful, if you believe in soft power, the power of persuasion, and the teaching of appropriate norms to "deviant" states.