The Power and the Money

Ain’t gonna study war no more?

  John Mueller repeats in this month’s Political Science Quarterly an argument that he’s made before:  war is becoming rare.  Developed countries no longer fight.  Underdeveloped countries rarely fight.  Imperial wars have disappeared with empires.  And civil wars are becoming rarer. 

Even if you want to quibble with Mueller’s typology (maybe Gulf War 2 and Chechnya are imperial wars, the Rwanda-Congo interventions could be called interstate wars instead of civil ones, perhaps you want to call the Caucasian countries developed), the data are pretty incontrovertible. 

The world has become steadily more peaceful since 1989, probably since the mid-1960s.  Mueller has some ideas about the causes of this decline in bellicosity.  I hope Mueller is right.  For while honesty compels me to admit that I would like to add a third (and fourth and fifth) picture to the sequence shown above, I must also admit that I do not want any of those additions to see anything even resembling combat. 

Therefore I ask you:  in the case of war, does the performance of the past two decades predict future results?

An admonition to Micheletti supporters and an admonition to his opponents

  In a previous post, I mentioned Mexico in 1936 and Argentina in 1945 as possible parallels for what the Honduran military was thinking when it exiled President Zelaya instead of simply arresting him.  Steven Taylor mentions a third parallel, a cautionary tale:  Colombia in 1953. 

He raises a good point:  breaking the law in order to save it is always risky and often stupid.  But the specific parallel doesn't apply.  General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla took power in 1953 and established a dictatorship that lasted four years; Roberto Micheletti ascended to the interim presidency with a vote of Congress and seems to be waiting until the November election to hand over power to either Elvin Santos or Porfirio Lobo. 

In other words, the typical historical parallels really don't apply in this situation.  An inability to recognize that is the main reason why the OAS is botching the diplomacy.  (As opposed to the U.S., which is playing it very well ...  but very much in the national interests of the United States and nothing else.)  They keep seeing Pinochet when what they've really got is an unelected Liberal government marking time until they can hand over to an elected government ... preferably also Liberal.  If the OAS diplomats can recognize that, then they can get inside the other guy's head (and his decision loop) and start brokering compromises that will allow everyone to win.

But I have my doubts that insisting on constitutional purity and making absolute demands will accomplish anything.  Demanding that some soldiers be punished, or agreeing that Zelaya should be tried while remaining titular president, those could get somewhere.  But so far that isn't the tack the OAS is taking. 

See also my comment and Steven's response here.  The short version below the fold.

War and remembrance, American version

  The story of the Finnish Guard has been fascinating.  And it has one excellent modern parallel.  In the South End of Boston, in a formerly Puerto Rican area (now filled with native-born Americans pushing baby carriages) you can find the following monument:

Monument to the memory of the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico

This monument is dedicated to the heroic Puerto Rican soldiers who made up the glorious 65th Infantry Regiment, whose actions on the battlefield surpassed the standards of bravery and determination. 

They said to us, “We will have peace even though we have to fight for it,” and so we fought in the mountains of Heartbreak Ridge and marched from Inchon.  We froze in the winter and broiled in the summer.  There were moments when we were completely outnumbered but we kept fighting and many of us gave our lives for liberty, justice, and peace.

The 65th Infantry Regiment played a key role in the most heroic episodes ever seen, showing the courage, valiance, and heart of the Puerto Rican soldier in the person of Ángel Luis García Ledesma, the most decorated Puerto Rican soldier in history.  This brave fighter sacrificed his life to cover an enemy grenade with his body, absorbing all its explosive power, thereby saving his compatriots.  For this heroic deed, he was decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Purple Heart, and monuments have been erected in memory of this transcendental moment of contemporary history.  Today we honor with pride the 65th Infantry Regiment, an example of valor and determination in defense of liberty.

What words aren’t in the monument? 

Guest post #6: War and Remembrance

  These images show the medal that the Russian army minted to commemorate the 1831 conquest of Warsaw. You can occasionally still find these in Finnish antique shops; this one was provided courtesy of Jani Tiainen’s Finnmedals in Helsinki. 

Before we leave behind the Finnish soldiers who fought on behalf of Russia in Poland back in 1831, there are a few questions left to be answered.  What were the consequences of the war for Finland? What were its effects on Poland?  In the short term, the Polish campaign of 1831 undoubtedly strengthened the Grand-Duchy of Finland. In the context of the politically incendiary situation in 1830-1831, the Finnish Guard’s participation in the Polish campaign played an important role in securing Imperial favor for the Grand-Duchy’s autonomous status. At a  time of crisis, Finland demonstrated to the Russian Empire that (unlike Poland) she could be trusted.

For the Finnish officers who had distinguished themselves on the front, the campaign marked the beginning of some splendid careers. Adolf Aminoff, the young lieutenant from the painting in the fourth part of the story, rose to the rank of General of Infantry and ended his career as an adjutant of Alexander III. Henrik Lyra, whom the Poles captured at Długosiodło, became a General Major. The young Casimir von Kothen became the adjutant for Governor-General Aleksandr Sergeyevich Menshikov, and later the governor of the province of Viipuri. And finally, Colonel Ramsay, the commander of the Guard, became General of Infantry and a member of the Russian Imperial War Council.  In short, over the decades preceding the Crimean War, the government of the Grand-Duchy of Finland was in the hands of officers who had earned their ranks on the battlefields of Poland.

For the common people of the Grand-Duchy, the Guard’s campaign of the became the first concrete example of a developing Finnish patriotism that put love for the Finnish fatherland and loyalty towards the Russian Emperor into one and the same breath with no sense of contradiction. A belief in the virtues of the Finnish soldier instilled a special sense of devotion and enthusiasm, celebrated in popular broadside ballads that proclaimed the willingness of the younger generations to follow the example of their predecessors and take up arms under the banner of the Finnish Guard in defense of Finland and the Empire:

Observatorio Argentino 12: Flag of protest?

  The annual protests against the Botnia paper plant on the Argentine-Uruguayan border have started.   Of course, the annual protests don’t mean much, in the sense that the nearby bridge has been shut to traffic since November 2006.  But the protestors did two new things (AFAIK) in this demonstration.  The first was to hang an 80-foot banner proclaiming, “Botnia go home.”  (Mercopress did not get the translation right.)  I kind of like that, along with the Finnish flags adorned with a skull-and-crossbones.  Piracy and poison from our Finnish overlords!  Very slick. 

The second was to wave flags like this one with the red stripe:

Which caused me a bit of startled recognition.  You see, that flag doesn't proclaim “Stop Argentina,” which is what an uninformed observer might think.  Rather, it’s the banner of the Federal League (also known as the League of Free Peoples), an insurgency led by José Artigas that waged a long war against Buenos Aires between 1813 and 1820.  (The Wikipedia entry is essentially unreadable.) 

For a while the League ruled both modern Uruguay and several littoral provinces of northern Argentina.  As usual for the period, it wasn’t always clear what the fighting was about.  Artigas’s early demands were for federalism, although he was a bit vague on commercial issues.  He rejected secession, even when Buenos Aires offered it, but he also rejected a federal compromise with Buenos Aires that would have met most of his early demands. 

Artigas became more radical as time went on, and in 1815 he redistributed land from political enemies (whom he amusingly called “bad Americans”) to “free blacks, mixed-race of this class, Indians, and poor creoles.”  

Artigas also later became the symbolic founding father of Uruguay ... even though he rejected the idea of Uruguayan independence.  What I did not know was that the Federal League still possessed enough historical resonance that angry Argentines would carry its flag in a protest against the Uruguayan government’s decision to approve a big paper mill on the other side of the river. 

It must mean something, but my pop sociology is failing me.  Surely our Canadian and Kiwi readers must see some parallels, no?

On the edge of the French energy empire

  In 1965, the French discovered uranium in Niger.  Here is what the New York Times had to say about it in 1969, right before production began.  It makes for fascinating reading.  

The paved road comes to an end in this isolated, dust-colored market town on the southern shore of the sand sea known as the Sahara.  About 300 miles farther north, along an ill-defined track, lies the town of Agadez.  About 150 miles beyond that, near the jumbled boulders of the Air Mountains, the village of Arlit is rising.  Where nothing more than tumbledown mud huts stood two years ago, French and African workmen are building cement-block houses, shops, an electrical generating plant big enough for a city of 40,000 — and two uranium processing plants. 

The uranium will be produced by a company in which the government of Niger holds 20 percent, German groups 10 percent, and the French Atomic Energy Commission and two French mining companies 70 percent ...

In a country where the per capita income runs about $75 a year ($351 in 2008 dollars), peanuts and bony steers constitute the only significant exports, where fuel is so scarce that technicians once tried and failed to make a power plant run on peanut husks, the discovery of uranium was an extraordinary event.

Niger will receive about 40 percent of the company’s profits ... Niger is counting on only $4 million a year in revenues by 1975 — about a tenth of the current national budget.  “Even with this strike,” said a local economist this week, “this is never going to be a rich country—unless they find a market for sand.” 

To my old master, Colonel P.H. Anderson

  It is pretty nice to be at a major research university.  You can easily do a lot of, well, research.  Of course, you can also easily engage in a lot of procrastination that has the disadvantage of feeling like research when it isn't, or at least not the research you're being paid to produce.  Like looking up the below when you should really be learning more about the details of the Messmer Plan.

You can click on the picture to see a larger version.  That is true for most of the pix on this blog.

Trust, but verify

  Every so often you come across something that just makes your day.  The following letter has made my week.   It even made up for running into monuments like the below while driving around Alabama, southwestern Georgia, and the Florida panhandle.

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson
Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves down in Tennessee.” The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshal General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly—and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die if it comes to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson

The other Castro

  Cipriano Castro managed to make a bit of a hash of Venezuela during his brief regime.  He gained power in 1899, at the head of a revolutionary army.  His army mobilized resources by confiscating property; sometimes of opponents, sometimes not.  Eventually he provoked a bunch of European navies into blockading him.  The resulting diplomatic mess eventually dragged in the United States, who was worried that Germany intended to, say, scarfle off some Venezuelan islands and establish a naval base.  Or something.

So it isn't really clear to me why Hugo Chávez would want to replace a bust of Rómulo Gallegos with one of Cipriano Castro in the presidential palace. 

And then Leticia Arroyo sent me this speech by Castro made on December 9th, 1902, just as the European navies started sinking Venezuelan ships in the harbor of La Guaira:

Venezuelans!

The insolent foot of the foreigner has profaned the sacred soil of the Fatherland!  An extraordinary act in the history of the civilized nations, without precedent, without possible justification, a barbarous act because it is an attack on the most rudimentary principles of international law, an ignoble act because it is the fruit of an immoral and cowardly collusion of force and betrayal, it is something that the English and German squadrons have just done in the harbor of La Guaira just a few moments ago:  in a simultaneous and coordinated action they surprised and captured three undefended ships of our navy that had entered dock for repairs. 

The battle is unequal because two of the most powerful nations of Europe have conducted an attack against our country, which has barely made it out of a  long and painful convalescence ... But justice is on our side, as is the God of the Nations who inspired Bolívar and the constellation of heroes who accompanied him in the great work of bringing us, at the cost of great sacrifice, our Fatherland free and independent ... For my part I am prepared to sacrifice everything on the altar of the Fatherland, everything, including what one might call my anguish over our internal differences.  I have no memory of what disagreements may have occurred in the past.  Erased in my thoughts are the politics and fighting of all who were opposed to my aims, of all who have been able to leave a trace of pain in my heart.  In front of me lies no less than the luminous vision of the Fatherland, of which Bolívar dreamed, of which I dream.

... I open the doors of the Republic’s jails for the political prisoners who still remain in them; I also open the doors of the Fatherland for those Venezuelans who remain abroad for similar reasons and return to them under the constitution the properties of all the revolutionaries who lost them for reasons of public order.  Further still, if I survive these events ... I am prepared to return to private life, leaving behind my sword, of course, at the service of the Republic, and you can be sure that I will retire sans nostalgia for power, because my greatest aspiration is to see my great Fatherland prosperous and happy.

Now I see exactly what Hugo sees in this guy.  I can imagine him giving this speech on Aló Presidente, word for word.  Some things never change indeed.

From Russia, without love? Or a Greek tragedy?

  There is no official definition of “depression.”  Tim Kehoe says a 20% deviation from trend growth over a decade.  Richard Sylla says double-digit unemployment for a period of months.  Brad Delong says unemployment staying in double-digits for three years, or peaking above 12%.  Michael Bordo says a two-year continuous output decline of at least 10%.  By any of those definitions, Finland suffered a depression in 1991-93, or even 1991-96. 

So what caused it?  Well, there was a discussion about that somewhere, but I can't find it.  Anyway, you can sum up the evolution of the conventional wisdom as follows:  “We thought it was the collapse of the Soviet Union, but then we figured out that it was actually caused by a banking crisis.”  Blaming it on the Soviet collapse exculpates Finns:  it all came from Russia.  Blaming it on the banks turns the episode into a Greek tragedy, which Finns unknowingly brought upon themselves. 

Evidence for the banking-crisis hypothesis can be found here and here.  (Another hypothesis holds that Finnish workers decided to take an extended vacation because managers forgot how to run their firms and the government raised taxes.  No, seriously.  I don't have a whole lot to say about that.) 

Now, however, a Ukrainian, a Mexican, and an American have entered the fray to argue that, no, it was indeed the sudden collapse of trade with the Soviet Union what caused the Finnish depression of 1991-96.  Their paper is here.  The argument is pretty simple.  (1) Yeah, there were some signs of financial weakness before 1991, but let's not get crazy.  (2)  Trade shock.  Huuuuuge.  Plus, when you look at the industries that went under first and fastest, it was the ones that relied on the Soviet trade.  (3)  The banking system didn't fall apart until after the trade shock.  Absolutely, it was a weak system, but few systems could have handled a shock that big.

Basically, they argue that you don't have to assume a lot of friction in the real economy to get a slow recovery from a trade shock of the magnitude that hit Finland in 1991. 

But there is that nagging question:  why did Sweden go into a (much less serious) recession around the same time?  Could the Soviet trade shock have precipitated the Swedish crisis somehow?  Or is all just a coincidence, kind of like a man getting hit head-on by a truck and then having a bicycle ride over his hand? 

It's an interesting paper, even if it turns out to be wrong.  Thoughts?

Guest post #5: The Home Front on the edge of Empire

  In Finland, as we saw yesterday, the participation of local soldiers in the campaign against Poland ignited patriotic sentiments, at least among those who had served in combat:  “May our banner call the sons of Finland to perform the highest civic virtues still in the future, to fulfill their obligations and loyalty towards their sovereign.” 

Elsewhere in Europe, the bloody suppression of the November Insurrection aroused, well, different feelings. The Polish independence struggle became an immediate cause célèbre for European liberals. Casimir Delavigne, for example, celebrated the old Napoleonic brotherhood in arms between France and Poland in his exhilarating song La Varsovienne.  In the German-speaking countries, August von Platen’s 1831 sonet collection Polenlieder topped what later generations would call the charts.  

West European sympathy towards Poland, however, hardened Russian attitudes; even the Russian intelligentsia abandoned its criticism of the Tsarist régime and supported Imperial policy in Poland. The anti-European backlash culminated in Aleksandr Pushkin’s legendary (if somewhat unsubtlely-titled) poem, “To the Slanderers of Russia.”  Pushkin’s diatribe, in particular, should be familiar to a modern reader. 

(Uh, Jussi, you give us too much credit.  I’ve never heard of any of the works of music or literature that you’ve cited in here.  Then again, I hope nobody criticizes people in 2145 for their ignorance of, say, “Eve of Destruction” or “Bad Moon Rising.” Right?  Or am I excusing my ignornance?  —ed.) 

Russian officials still reference “To the Slanderers of Russia” in times of conflict.  During the 1999 Kosovo War, for example, the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, cited the poem in order to give a stern warning to the NATO countries.  Eight years later, in 2007, the Russians once again used the poem for propaganda purposes during the Bronze Warrior crisis between Estonia and Russia. 

Guest post #4: Heroes of the Empire

  The work of art that you see below is a painting by Robert Wilhelm Ekman, a pioneer of early national romantic art in Finland. Ekman is perhaps best remembered for his early attempts at the illustration of Kalevala, but this work, finished in 1848, invokes the memory of the Finnish soldiers who had fought and died in Poland seventeen years before. You won’t find this work on display in any museum; it is part of a private collection, and the owner prefers to keep it that way.

The painting depicts the young lieutenant Adolf Aminoff wounded on the ramparts of Tykocin on May 21st 1831. As you can see, the painting captures two ideals.  First, an officer who leads his men from the front, even at the risk of his own personal safety.  Second, his soldiers, equally ready to risk their lives by rushing to the aid of their wounded comrade. During the following decades, national romanticism claimed these universal ideals as quintessentially Finnish military virtues.  Emphasizing the importance of solidarity and camaraderie is always a natural choice.  After all, it doesn’t really matter what you’re theoretically fighting for, because putting your life on the line for your comrade is always a virtue.  

Raisuli my ass

  Who's the biggest pirate-fighter in the last century of American presidents?

From Big Crush, via  Mojo.

Word.

When lawyers declare war!

  You know, the more I learn, the more I think that President Correa of Ecuador is really playing with fire in defaulting on his debts.  Brazil is mad at him, and you don't want to get the new imperial rulers of South America mad at you.  But more importantly, he's got his American creditors mad at you ... and it seems as though those creditors may have a rather powerful legal recourse.  It'll all depend on the definition of a “central bank.”

But let's start at the beginning.  What happens when lawyers declare war on a country?  Well, remember this post, on the U.S. sanctions against Manuel “La Piña” Noriega ?  Turns out that the sanctions weren't really Elliot Abrams' idea.  Rather, the credit goes to a lawyer, William Rogers, acting on behalf of his client, former President Eric Delvalle of Panama. 

La Piña, you see, had an anger-management problem.  He decapitated Hugo Spadafora, one of his political opponents.  When the President of Panama, Nicolás Barletta, made the mistake of thinking that he, you know, ran the country, and decided to investigate the head-chopping, Noriega locked him in his office and threatened his family.  At 3am, President Barletta appeared on national television and offered his resignation, which the National Assemby accepted in a late-night emergency session.  Eric Delvalle, the education minister, then became President.  A little while later, Delvalle decided to pass on to La Piña an American offer to let him peacefully resign with all his ill-gotten gains.  In response, Pineapple-face ejected Delvalle from the presidency.  Delvalle got word that he was going to be arrested the next day, and managed to make it to an American military base.  His ambassador-at-large hired Rogers, and then ...

Things could be worse

  A while ago I posted a chart that seemed to show that employment losses in this recession rivalled the early stages of the Great Depression.  That chart is true.  By the measure of “total employment,” things don't look all that out of line. 

But the U.S. economy was much more agricultural back then.  In fact, a full 36% of all employment in 1929 was agricultural.  (That figure still startles me, as much as I know that it shouldn't.)  Agricultural employment was far more resistant to the ravages of the Depression, even if agricultural incomes were not. 

If you restrict yourself to nonfarm employment, which is what Justin Fox did, you get a somewhat more reassuring figure.  We don't seem to be tracking the Depression, and the many interventions of 2008 and 2009 have done more than a little good:

I suspect that the 1929 data are seasonally-adjusted, since the NBER cites the source as:  “For raw data: Survey of Current Business, March and August 1941; For adjusted data:  Federal Reserve Bulletin, June 1941.”  But since that is ambiguous, I included the unadjusted modern data in green.  It doesn't really change anything ... except inasmuch as all the people laid off after the Christmas rush in 2007 slowly went back to work over the next few months (as is standard), whereas that is not happening in 2008-09. 

So, yes, we're now officially worse than 1981-82.  By this point then, recovery had set in.  But we aren't close to a second Great Depression.

In this country.  Worldwide, not so clear.

Guest post #3: Battle for the Empire

  The soldiers of the Finnish Guard joined the other units of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard in Białystok on April 11th, 1831. By this time, the Polish-Russian war had been raging for two months, and the insurrection was spreading, with violence and mayhem escalating on daily basis. On the same day as the Finnish soldiers listened Colonel Ramsay’s lecture on the Russian War Articles and the letters of protection issued to the Polish civilian population, one Russian cossack regiment massacred civilians in the small Lithuanian village of Oszmiana. The event was subsequently commemorated in Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poems.  

The Polish-Russian war was fought on two fronts.  In the south, on the eastern side of the Vistula, the main 100,000-man Russian army (under a Baltic German field-marshal, Hans Karl Friedrich Anton von Diebitsch) advanced directly towards Warsaw.  Meanwhile, in the north, Grand-Duke Mikhail Pavlovich’s units of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard (the Finnish Battalion included) approached the Polish capital from the northeast, through the dismal woodlands between the Narew and Bug rivers in Mazovia. You can get a rough view of the surroundings from the map.   (Click on it for a larger image in a new window.)

Diebitsch’s army crossed the frontier on February 5th, fully prepared to crush the Polish rebellion. Resistance, however, proved to be a good deal tougher than anticipated; as mentioned before, the Congress Kingdom had a large, professional standing army, which now proved its mettle. On February 25th, the Poles halted the Russian advance in the bloody battle of Grochów.  The Poles then began a counteroffensive. Lieutenant-General Ignacy Prądzyński, the Polish chief of staff, defeated the Russians at Dębe Wielkie on March 31st, and again at Iganie on April 10th. 

But wars, like baseball games, aren’t over until they’re over. 

Guest post #2: The Guardsmen of the Empire

   We continue the story from December 14th, 1830, when the Finnish Guard received its mobilization orders and started to prepare for a long and arduous journey to the Polish battlefields, on behalf of the Emperor and the Fatherland. [The “Fatherland” would be Finland, not the Russian Empire, right? In our hemisphere, we’re not used to those distinctions, except maybe the Canadians.  And the West Indians. And the Puerto Ricans.  And the Colombians.  And … oh, never mind.   —ed.]  However, before we describe the Finnish participation in the suppression of the Polish independence struggle in any further detail, it’s perhaps best to describe those men who ended up serving as tools of the Imperial Russian war machine in the said campaign. What kind of a unit was the Finnish Guard, and what do we know of its officers and soldiers?   

Guest post #1: Empires and nationalities

  Hello, everyone. For those who don’t know me, and for those who are wondering why I’m posting here, it’s perhaps best to start with some details.  [No pix of you with a dangling cigarette and sunglasses? —ed.]

Who am I? My full name is Jussi Olavi Jalonen. I’m a single man on my thirties, and after a long residence in the city of Tampere, I now live on the Western Seaboard of Finland. Why am I posting here? Well, because Noel suggested it. I’ve done all sorts of things for living, but these days I’m basically a free-lance researcher and writer. Guest posts on a high-quality weblog are just as good a way to kill time as anything else.  [We’re high quality! —ed.] 

I write about history. As said, I’m single, but Clio is a very demanding mistress. [My wife is very understanding of that, and it's one of the many reasons I love her. —ed.]  As for my field of study, you could probably say that I’m more interested in Power than Money.  [One often begats the other. —ed.]  I specialize in military history, in a very broad sense. Two months ago, an article that I wrote on the interned Polish soldiers in Finland in 1940-41 appeared in a publication of the Finnish National Archives, and just recently, Studia Historica Septentrionalia published another article that I wrote on the theme of comradeship-in-arms. In particular, however, I’m interested in soldiers who have, for one reason or another, ended up serving in the military establishments of foreign powers — usually, in the service of their Imperial master, occasionally in the service of its enemy, or sometimes even in conflicts where there appears to be no vested national or ideological interest whatsoever. I’ve written articles on the Finnish volunteers in the Boer War, Finnish volunteers in the Waffen-SS, and also a biography of jäger colonel Eino Polón, Knight of the Mannerheim Cross. For those who don’t know, the term “jäger” refers to the Finnish independence activists and volunteers who served in the Imperial German Army against Tsarist Russia in 1915-17.

One particular thing that I find fascinating is the historical contrast between Finland and Poland in their relations towards Russia; as the most recent example, you may remember that during the South Ossetian war last August, Poland sided openly with Georgia, while Finland, as the head of the OSCE, attempted to mediate the conflict and maintain communications with Russia. These contrasts between Finland and Poland have very deep roots. Consider the Finnish Guard’s participation in the 1831 Polish campaign. (Last year, I wrote an article on this topic for the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.) 

But what was this so-called “Finnish Guard?”  What exactly happened in Poland in 1831?  And how did it create such long-standing differences between the two border countries?

Department of WTF, once more

  These are not like things.  The data do not say what the people making the connection seem to think that they say. 

Observatorio Argentino 9: A tale of two depressions

  Argentina seems to be slipping into its third major economic contraction in less than two decades.  (Actually, this may be the fourth.)  Leticia Arroyo asks:  what happened the last two times?

You can blame Mexico (not Canada, sadly) for the 1994 contraction.  Investors dumped their Argentine holdings in response to the mess in Mexico and as a result Argentine interest rates spiked and economic activity fell.  Argentina pegged its peso to the dollar at the time.  The peg survived the contraction, but recovery was slow and halting.   

The 2001-02 collapse was a different animal. 

It is harder to assign blame than one might think.  Argentina's internal and external accounts didn't look that bad in 1999 or 2000 or 2001.  (They didn't look that good either, but nothing to justify the scale of the calamity that followed.)  Investors, foreign and domestic, started to worry about a devaluation, charging the Argentine government higher and higher interest rates every time it had to refinance.  Why did they start worrying?  I am honestly not sure.

That said, what was clear by 2001 was that the currency peg had become too restrictive, but the government had no clear plan to transition out of it.   Fully dollarize, in order to end speculation of a future devaluation?  Devalue early?  Devalue, then dollarize?  The government punted.  People became more and more convinced that there would be a devaluation.  Speculation became widespread, and I mean crazily widespread, unimaginably widespread:  nobody wanted to accept pesos that could lose two-thirds of their value at any moment, and nobody wanted to spend dollars that might jump by two-thirds in local terms at any moment.  Call it hedging, call it speculation, call it crazy, but do the math:  by the time December 2001 rolled around, huge chunks of the Argentine economy had been reduced to barter. 

This sort of thing seems like a real fear in several Eastern European countries right now. 

Cars of Februaries past

  After World War 2 ended, pent-up consumer demand meant that the auto manufacturers could pretty much sell whatever crap their factories could churn out.  It took, in fact, four years for the carmakers to start selling new products incorporating all the technological advances of the Depression and war years. 

Oldsmobile kicked it off with the restyled Futuramic Rocket 88.  It included the Hydramatic automatic transmission and a brand-new V-8 engine.  Now, neither was new.  Olds introduced the automatic transmission in 1940 and it had been building V-8’s since 1932, but the two things hadn’t been put together in a designed-from-the-chassis up vehicle.  In addition, the Rocket V-8 was the first overhead-valve design, allowing the engine to take up much less space and producing less vibration when accelerating.  It also had an AM radio that could sorta kinda be heard with the top down at cruising speed maybe if you had lots of imagination. 

My father, therefore, wanted one.  But they were hard to find in February of 1949.  Yet the above pic from 1949 shows that he got one.  (Well, actually the Rocket 76 with the Big Six engine.) Only wanting is not having.  How did he make that leap? 

How bad is it?

  We really need a labor economist.  Anyone?  Anyone?  Kaplan?

Calculated risk produced a chart based on a chart published by Barry Ritholtz.   It shows the peak-to-recovery job losses for the recessions back to 1948.  So far, it's been about as bad as 1981-82.  I thought it would be interesting to add 1929 and 1937.  How does the situation look compared to the opening months of the Great Depression and the so-called “Roosevelt recession” of 1937? 

To do that, I had to use the “total employment” series from the BLS Current Population Survey in order to make the post-1939 numbers comparable to the Depression-era data.  What I got looked somewhat different from the charts currently running around the internets. 

The big red line is the current downturn.

Qualitatively, the above picture gives the same picture as the other charts.  The current downturn is more-or-less tracking 1981, 1974, 1957, and 1948, all pretty bad recessions.  And since past performance does not predict future results, we are not promised the same sort of rapid recovery we saw from those four.

But two things surprised me, and are very different from the other data. 

Barbados, Jamaica, institutions, and a great reason for a research trip

  There is a debate inside the economics profession about the importance of institutions, broadly defined.  One side of the battle holds that institutions are everything.  Countries can institute all sorts of bad policies and still prosper over the long run if they have “good” institutions — France is a common example.  A subset of this group likes to argue that a particular set of legal institutions is very important.  You can sum their argument up as “Common law good, civil law bad.” 

The “institutions as epiphenomena” side of the debate has mostly given up, with the valiant exception of Greg Clark.  That said, strong opposition still exists in the form of two arguments: “institutions aren't everything” and its subset, “legal origin theory is total b@ll$#/t.”

One obvious experimental laboratory is the British West Indies.  Not a whole lot of good came out of the collapse of the West Indian Federation, but one bit of lemonade coming out of that lemon was that it left us with a collection of independent and quasi-independent states with a similar institutional background.  Now come two authors with a comparative paper on Barbados and Jamaica, arguing that it is macroeconomic policy, not the legacy of history, that explains the different paths of the two nations since independence. 

Are their arguments convincing?  More below the fold.

Senates

  There is a debate going on downblog over the United States Senate. 

Let's take a brief tour of Senates around the hemisphere.  (To which we'll include the Philippines, due to its political history.)  The American example set in 1787 proved very influential, particularly for the larger nations of América.  Did their adoption of an upper house with equal representation for federal subunits make sense?  Did they keep it? 

Argentina:  The Argentine senate gives each province three senators.  That's obviously undemocratic.  Argentina, however, has a historical justification for the practice.  Like the United States, the Argentine Republic began as a federation of independent states.  Unlike the United States, the states that formed the Argentine Republic had very little autonomous political history; most had been created from city councils that simply declared independence in the wake of the political chaos that enveloped South America after 1808.  After a great deal of civil war, including the loss of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, provincial forces decisively defeated Buenos Aires in 1852.  A convention that excluded representatives of Buenos Aires hammered out a constitution the next year.  That same constitution has remained in effect since then, at least juridically. 

The convention accepted equal provincial representation in the Senate in order to limit Buenos Aires's dominance.  It also had senators elected for nine-year terms by state legislatures and required them to be able to show a minimum annual income of 2,000 pesos.  (That's approximately US$67,000 today in terms of purchasing power.)  Thankfully, later amendments got rid of those latter features, but equal representation remains.  In short, while there isn't really any good reason to keep the apportionment of the Argentine senate, the institution has deep roots in Argentine political history.  The resemblance to the U.S. case is quite strong.

Brazil:  The senate of the Federal Republic of Brazil gives three senators to each state.  The historical roots of this institution, however, are rather shallower than in Argentina or the United States.  The 19th-century Imperial senate did not provide equal representation for the provinces.  When the empire fell to a military coup in 1889, the new leaders had to find ways to convince provincial elites to support the new government.  One of the ways that they did so was to provide the provincial governments with equal representation in the upper house, in open imitation of the American example.  (In fact, the constitution of 1891 named the country the United States of Brazil.)  Brazil has gone through multiple constitutions since then, but the institution of the Senate has remained.  Unfortunately. 

Mexico:  The constitutions of 1824, 1857, and 1917 all granted equal senate representation to each state.  There was never much historical justification for doing so, other than imitation of the United States.  (Mexican states gained much autonomy during the 19th century, and several declared independence, but that came about after the end of Spanish rule.)  Since the country's governments rarely ruled by the constitution, however, legal stipulations didn't matter.  Under Porfirio Díaz, for example, all legislative votes were unanimous after 1893.  Nor did senators necessarily come from their putative state.  Under those circumstances, the number of senators per state didn't make a difference.  The Revolution didn't change that.  Under President Álvaro Obregón, for example, recalcitrant legislators were often shot.  Then came the creation of the PRI, with its iron-lock over politics, and ‘nuff said.  Constitutional stipulations didn't become more important than party rules until the 1997 midterm election. 

Mexico, however, is now ruled by a democratic government, and the constitutional rules matter a lot.  As part of the transition to democracy, Mexican politicians amended the constitution in 1993 and 1996.  In theory, the reforms granted each state four senators, up from two.  In practice, the reforms created an upper house selected by a weak form of proportional representation.  The winning party in each state receives two seats.  The runner-up receives one.  The remaining 25% of senate seats are then allocated to each party in proportion to their popular vote share.  In effect, the Mexico's current senate keeps the form of equal representation for each state while abandoning much (but not quite all) of the substance. 

The Philippines:  The Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916 created a 24-person senate.  The act grouped the country's 50 provinces into 12 districts, each of which received two senators.  The 1935 constitution of the Philippine Commonwealth dumped that crazy system, but selected something even crazier in its place:   at-large Senate elections.  That is, every voter writes in 12 names.  The top 12 vote-getters then become senators for six years.  The exercise is repeated every three years, making for a total of 24 senators.  The 1987 constitution of the Philippine Republic retains the feature.

The only polity that I can imagine justifiably imitating the United States, Argentine Republic, and Federal Republic of Brazil in the 21st century is the European Union.  Then again, I may suffer from a lack of imagination.

Taking the C-levels

  Peter asks, was a sea-level canal possible in Panama?  The answer is yes. 

The French initially planned a sea-level canal.  Of course, they failed.  But the American government also considered a sea-level plan.  They rejected it only when a group of consultants presented a report that killed the idea on something other than cost.

First, they calculated the rate at which dirt could be moved away from the excavation, and figured that a sea-level canal would take at least 15 years to build.  (The actual canal took 11 until the first transit and 17 until full commercial operation, but it was planned to take only 8½.)  Second, because a sea-level canal would be pretty narrow for most of its length, transit times would be longer.  (Narrow is a relative term:  the above and below pictures show one of the narrowest parts of the Canal.)    Third, it would be shallow for long stretches.  (41 feet, in fact.)  Finally, it would require locks anyway:  the Pacific tides are twenty feet higher than the Atlantic tides.  Without locks, there would be a 4.5 knot current ... on average.  In fact, it would vary quite a lot, making navigation much tougher. 

In addition, it would be just as vulnerable to sabotage (lots of talk of dynamite-laden vessels in the 1906 report) and require a 180-foot masonry dam on the Chagres, rather than the 135-foot earthen dam actually constructed.  Which would look cool, but be vulnerable.

Later plans were much more grandiose. 

The Panamanian flag

  Panama's flag flies from myriad vessels around the world.  The crews may be predominantly Filipino, and the owners quite likely to be Greek, but 20 percent of all registered merchant vessels fly a Panamanian flag.

The roots go back to 1916.  In that year, Panama's government allowed foreign-owned Panamanian corporations to register their ships under the Panamanian flag. It also enacted a law requiring the recognition of English language contracts. It took until the 1920s to become popular, by which point Panama had created a global network of consuls who, as part of their duties, could transfer and register ships under the Panamanian flag.  Better still, the U.S. cooperated with Panama:  if no Panamanian consul were available, American consuls would serve. 

Why did shippers like to use the Panamanian flag?  I'll turn the floor over to W. Leslie Comyn, a corporate officer of Pacific Freighters:

A ditch not dug

In 1911, U.S.-Latin American relations almost took a dramatic turn for the different.

In October of that year, the head of the Panama Canal Zone's civil administration, Maurice Thatcher, told a U.S. Senate committee, “We must have courts ...  I would like to see an American civil population here ... These Americans would come here to live, make their homes here, and they would prefer to live under the dominion of the American government, under American laws.” 

George Goethals, the rather un-Brooklyn-like Brooklynite in charge of construction thought differently.  “Introduce the franchise, and we’d go to pieces.”  The Taft administration agreed with Goethals.  The Canal Zone was not to receive elected government, civil courts, or even private property.  The Zonians remained a population of transients.  (Vocal, obnoxious, and slightly-crazy transients, but transients.)

But what if Thatcher had won the argument?  The Zonians would have owned farms and businesses.  They would set their own tax rates.  They would elect their governor.  The strange monopoly that the federal government held over ancilliary businesses would not last.  The Zonians would not all work for the federal government.  They would be a settled population, certainly larger than the actual Canal Zone population, which bounced around 50,000 in the 1950s and '60s.  And it is hard to imagine them lacking a non-voting representative in Congress.

Under such circumstances, could Congress have agreed to give the Canal Zone back to Panama?   

Imperialism can really pay

So there's Panama.  Well, what about Suez?

The Suez Canal started under very different political conditions, inasmuch as the Egyptian government was on-board with the project.  So on board, in fact, that it not only put in 45 percent of the initial capital (£1.5 million), it promised the Compagnie de Suez the free use of forced labor to build the thing. 

That wasn't nada.  In 2007 pound sterling, the Egyptians put in £149 million.  But as I've mentioned elsewhere, the world was poorer then:  relative to the growth of the British economy since then, that would be equivalent of plonking in £4.3 billion today.  That would be a lot of scratch for the current Egyptian government; it was an amazing amount of scratch for 1854's. 

So far, so non-imperialistic.  Awful for the poor people who had to live under Cairo's despotism, but that'd be like blaming Russia for the shortcomings of the Kazakh government.  (Wait ... no, I'll leave that to those who know more.)

The story gets better, though.  It's an amazing bit of imperial skullduggery ... and perhaps the coolest thing about it is that it could easily happen today.  I mean, it's not like world powers scarf off strategic parts of nearby states for strategic gain these days.

So, with the caveat that what I'm about to tell you is pieced together from primary sources and could well be wrong, the story is below.

Imperialism can pay

There's a debate out there about imperialism.  Did it pay?  The consensus answer is:  no, it did not.  The British spent far more in defense than they earned from imperial investments; in fact, by the 1880s, the profitability of imperial investments had fallen below domestic and non-imperial ones.  The French believed that their empire after WW2 helped them maintain their balance-of-payments; the numbers don't support that idea either.  The big counterexamples involve the Nazi conquest of France, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after 1945 ... but after 1970 or so the balance on the Soviet empire hinges on how much you believe control of the Warsaw Pact armies was worth to Moscow. 

But there is a case of imperialism paying, and paying quite well:  Panama in 1903. 

Canals and Costa Rica

Peter asks about past Nicaragua canal plans; Randy asks about the environment and Costa Rica.

Nicaragua was in fact considered for a trans-Isthmian canal.  Only one project got past vaporware:  between 1887 and 1893, the Maritime Canal Company excavated 1½ miles of canal and built 11½ miles of railroad in pursuit of the project.  Their planned route to the Atlantic followed the dashed line above.  Meanwhile, their plan to avoid the rapids and shallows of the San Juan River east of its junction with the San Carlos River was brilliant in its simplicity, if not in its feasibility:  build a giant dam at Ochoa and flood everything all the way to Lake Nicaragua.

Inequality and history

I present to you new never-before-known knowledge about Latin America:

This simple chart masks a heroic effort at data collection that took the author to at least seven different countries and ate up a year of her life tirelessly searching through badly-organized archives.  We now have systematic data on nominal wages and land rents in Latin America where before we had just conjecture and guesswork.  More importantly, we now have more understanding as to why Latin America developed such high and persistent levels of inequality.   

More here.  Questions and comments?  The author reads this blog.

Policy of Attraction, part 2

  The Philippines came under American military rule in 1898.  In 1902, Congress authorized a civilian government known as the Philippine Commission, which ruled the place until the Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916. 

 

By the admittedly low standards of colonial governments, the Philippine Commission ran the islands rather well.  It spent heavily on infrastructure and education.  It purchased rice overseas during shortages and sold it at subsidized prices.  It ran a wide array of public enterprises, including a credit system.  It even ran an agricultural research program that managed to double crop yields. 

How did it pay for this?  By taxing the Philippines quite highly by contemporary standards.  Strangely, an entire literature has developed around the idea that the Commission government undertaxed the Philippines.  That literature simply happens to be wrong.    

Doug leaves Burundi

Doug should be back in Germany by now.  He spent his last day in Burundi by the shores of Lake Tanganyika, thinking about tourist potential and the mind-boggling idiocy of the Belgian empire.

I wish him an easy trip home and a wonderful time with his growing family.

Doug in Burundi, parts 3 and 4

Looks like it's rainy in Bujumbura.  It's been weirdly tropical in Massachusetts this summer:  black downpours so heavy that you can't see across the street followed by bright actinic sunshine.  Thankfully, that seems to have ended here; let's hope it ends soon in Burundi.

Over here, Doug explains why there's a Greek deli in the middle of Bujunbura.  It seems as though there was a small community that came down the Nile from Alexandria with the British; some kept going and wound up in Burundi, where they helped administer the place and played a role in commerce.  The messiness of independence, though, drove most of them back to Europe (I assume), leaving a big consulate and what seems to be a very nice deli.

Policy of Attraction, part 1

Here's something I didn't realize:  in 1932, Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña privately asked a rather surprised President Hoover to veto an independence bill that they had publicly supported. 

As best as I can reconstruct it, it was a combination of the nativist reaction to the Watsonville Riots of 1930 and pressure from the sugar and dairy lobbies what led to the approval of the Philippine Independence Act of 1934.  Quezon got Hoover to veto the first independence bill, but Congress overrode him.  Quezon then managed to get the Philippine legislature to reject the bill, but Congress (and FDR) made it clear that independence was barrelling down the pike no matter what.  Quezon succeeded in convincing Congress to rewrite the provisions involving the retention of military bases, which gave him enough political cover to cut his losses and declare victory.  The Commonwealth of the Philippines came into existence the next year, with the Republic of the Philippines followed along in 1946.

Congress immediately cut the number of Filipinos allowed to come to the United States from unlimited to 50 per year.  (That's right, fifty.)  It also started offering Filipinos free passage home in 1935, but that wasn't very successful.  You've got to love the reason given in the linked article. 

Ironically, the U.S. reconsidered the Act's trade provisions (allowing Philippine products tariff-free entry until 1954 instead of 1939, albeit subject to a quota, and giving them preferential access until 1974) and the Philippines changed its mind on U.S. bases. (which infamously remained a huge presence on Luzon until 1991). 

I can shake the suspiscion that it's too bad that the U.S. couldn't decide on a permanent form of what both sides called "dominion status" back in the 1920s.  A permanent relationship along the lines of the Compacts of Free Association would, I think, have served both countries well, much better than the temporary and unequal arrangements that actually emerged, and then faded away.

Counterarguments and commentary are, of course, welcome.

Chillaxing on the volcano, or, the end of empires

Another repost from the HDTD archives, this one from 2006:

I am sitting on a cliff overlooking a volcano sticking out of a lake, and contemplating the end of empires.

One of the reasons for that is the fact that I am being serenaded by a three-man band in mariachi suits singing an off-key rendition of “La Bamba.” Is there an image that better captures the colonial history of the Philippine Islands?

Why yes, there is:

The United States is probably the only other country on the planet in which you might find an “eatería.”

Anyway, I am contemplating the end of empires, in this case America’s empire in the Philippines.

A birthday endorsement

Was the American Revolution a good thing?  After all, Canada didn't turn out so badly.  Without the American Revolution, neither World War would have lasted as long, if they even happened at all.  North American slavery likely would have ended earlier and without the bloodshed — considering the damage of the Civil War and the horrors that followed Reconstruction it hardly could have ended worse.  And then there's the possibility that the retention of the First British Empire might have prevented the pointless expansion of the Second.  Any one of those things marks a whole lot of hurt stemming from from annoyance at a couple of badly-placed taxes, and I haven't even mentioned Napoleon.

But there is a silly case for the defense.  And here, Brad Delong makes the serious one:

I, however, firmly endorse and support the American Revolution, in the sense that it looked like the right thing to do at the time. Remember that the political evolution of Britain toward democracy was not foreordained as of 1775. (Indeed, the pressure exerted by the example of the United States was a powerful democratizing force in Britain throughout the whole of the nineteenth century.) Britain in 1775 was a corrupt monarchical oligarchy — albeit one with much softer rule, a much more effective state, and a much broader and more open system of political competition within the oligarchy than has been standard in human empires. It is quite likely that — absent the American Revolution and the Great Democratic Example across the seas, and absent the long reign of Victoria — the political evolution of nineteenth-century Britain would have stuck where it was at the accession of George III, or even moved backward away from democracy to some degree.

It is one thing to be a Dominion in close alliance with and owing some degree of allegiance to a rapidly-democratizing Britain. It is another thing to be a colony of a superpower ruled by a corrupt coterie of landlords.

Happy birthday, America!  See you at the party tomorrow. 

Happy Canada Day!

Happy birthday, nation to the north!

For a very interesting post on some of the political developments that preceeded Confederation, see Randy McDonald. 

At times, I wondered if there was a reason other than political inertia why the British didn't make the obvious concession to Canada, and grant representation in Parliament.  Randy's post raises the possibility that the result of such a move would have been another Ireland.

Or not.  I don't pretend to fully understand the dynamics of Irish independence, either.  Can anyone explain why the British never moved to better integrate their remaining North American holdings with the British Isles?  Was such a thing even considered before the first Imperial Federation proposals in 1884?

Still, Britain's loss was America's gain, in that we have a solid, strong, and very admirable neighbor to the north.  So here's to the objectively fairest, justest, and best-managed polity on the North American continent.  The only thing wrong with it (beside the weather) is that she just plain ain't my own.

Which is why, emotionally, I'll be celebrating the birth of the bestestest polity in North America three days from now.  And one even better for the great example across the northern frontier.  So, from a patriotic American, with all my heart, ¡Viva Canadá, viva!

The debater Frum hell

At some point I will need to post about the work of Leah Boustan.  She's an economic historian at UCLA, and she's one of the first people to seriously address American exceptionalism:  Why do our cities have such vast zones of deprivation?  As bad as some parts of Europe do get --- in 1990, I made a rather unwise decision to stroll through the Gorbals, and in 2004 I made an equally-unwise decision to roam around the slums of Lyon --- there is nothing to match the blight that afflicts so much of America.  Leah's work gets at those questions.

This post isn't about her research, though.  This post is about Rick Pearlstein's easy dismantling of David Frum in a bloggingheads "debate" about Richard Nixon.  Frum, for those of you who don't know, is the man who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" as a Bush speechwriter.  He is not a stupid man, but he has the supremely annoying habit of refusing to acknowledge when the facts do not support his position.  He doesn't do it all the time and he doesn't do it with everything, but he has these idee fixes about the 1960s and 1970s that are simply contrary to fact and hard for him to abandon. 

What does this have to do with Leah Boustan?  Well, in his exchange with Rick Pearlstein, Frum voices the extraordinary opinion that Lyndon Johnson should have called in regular Army to combat the urban riots of the 1960s.  When confronted with the extent of the law-enforcement response to those uprisings he backs away from the opinion, but the exchange is striking. 

Click the link.  It's worth it.

Why I was in the Dominican Republic

To gather historical data obtainable only in the Archivo General de la Nación.

If there's interest, I'll discuss what the project is about in a later post.  Right now, I'll say that the Archivo was a great place to work.  The staff is incredibly helpful, and the reading room is rather pleasant, although the air-conditioning system was one of the loudest I've ever run across.  Thankfully, the Archivo has its own backup power system, and therefore was only hit with one brownout while I was working there. 

There was one pleasant mustacchioed old fellow there, quite garrulous.  I think he was a professor or former professor:  he was always nattily-dressed in jacket-and-tie, and he was usually assisted by some rather younger women.  At one point he turned to me and asked, "Are you from here?"  I smiled and said no.  He nodded, and asked if I were from Mexico or the U.S.  I lied, of course, at which point he said to me, and this was as weird as it sounds, "In the time of Trujillo, things were orderly." 

I later got the opportunity to glance at the 1940s-era newspapers that he was reviewing.  I'm fairly certain that he wasn't looking at the ads, but I found this one too striking not to record for posterity.

Extranjero vecino, indeed.

The good old days really were better, except when they weren't ... or, something nice to say about Ronald Reagan

The paranoid style in American politics is always present, but it waxes and wanes.  We're currently in a waning period, but it certainly hasn't waned as much as it has in the past.

Here is a 1984 ad from the Reagan-Bush campaign.  It's about the Soviet threat, and aims to convince voters that the Reagan Administration has the correct approach.

To a modern viewer, this half-century old ad appears moderate, reasonable, and as intelligent as one would expect for a 30-second piece.  It bases its argument on prudence against a potential threat, and clearly states what the admakers believe an adequate insurance policy to be.  Contrast with this from the 2004 campaign:

A lie, an information-free bit of "contextual" information (six billion dollars!), an aversion, and a mention of an unspecified wolf-like program related activity that will presumably eat your children.  It's quite horrible, and it's quite horrifying that the Bush-Cheney campaign believed such ads would be effective.

How the Clinton ad stacks up, then, depends on your point of comparison.  As paranoid ads go, it's awful pandering compared to the artful 1984 ad that plays upon concrete fears with real prudence.  But compared to the 2004 slanderous cesspool of a piece, it's quite mild.  On the other hand, the Obama campaign's response manages to mock the whole paranoid trope while going to a whole new level of concrete in a 30-second spot.  Go below and see for yourself. 

Leyendo los archivos en la madre patria

I’ll try to keep up the slack while Doug’s in Germany this holiday season.  This one goes out to Carlos’s paternal grandparents. 

The Republic of the Philippines is unique in Asia in how well it’s assimilated it’s Chinese population.   Chinese-Filipinos have served their country in every position from private to President of the Republic, and nobody seriously questions their Filipino-ness.  As a result, for all their communal solidarity Chinese-Filipinos consider themselves Filipino first, Chinese-Filipino a rather distant second, and Chinese-Chinese not at all.  (I have a sneaking suspiscion that future Chinese governments will find themselves unpleasantly surprised by that fact.)  This didn’t happen in Burma or Thailand or Vietnam or Malaysia or Indonesia. 

So why did it happen in the Philippines, and what does any of this have to do with the madre patria? 

Amma and I were in Sevilla because I was looking for tax and budget data on the Spanish Philippines.  The first place to look for that is the Archivo de Indias.  You can see the main building behind the beautiful woman in the above photo.  The reading room is across the street behind the main building:  look for the sand-colored edifice to the right of this group of Sevillano pedestrians.

In 1864, Madrid decided to modernize the Philippines’ tax system.  Since specific taxes laid on Chinese generated about 7 percent of the islands’ revenue, the Crown commissioned some fascinating reports before deciding on the specifics of the reform.  Extracts below the fold:

Nostalgia, or lack thereof, Part 3

So I'm here reading the Congressional debates about the annexation of the Philippines.  Man, Senator Hoar really ripped Senator Beveridge a new one.  "Have you read the Declaration of Independence, sir?  Allow me to remind you."  And Carlos will be proud that his people's representative, Senator John Spooner, proceeded to call Beveridge's economic justifications of American rule "base and sordid." 

But that's not why I'm here.  I'm here to ask a question that I've asked before, but who's answer I've forgotten:

WTF happened to baseball in the Philippines?  It's gone, disappeared, nada, se fué, totally driven out by ... basketball.  How and why did that happen???

Nostalgia, Part 2

By pure coincidence, I just discovered that Dan Drezner had something to say on the subject of baseball nostalgia.

First, it seems as though my comportment, trained in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium, has very long roots in baseball.  I never realized that I was such a traditionalist. 

Second, Conan.

Nostalgia

As a fan of the New England Patriots and the Green Bay Packers, I have to say that this is shaping up to be a most exciting football season.  I've been a New England fan ever since I wrote the job talk that got me my current employment while watching them win the Superbowl.  And I've been a Green Bay fan since becoming friends with Carlos. 

But my football loyalties are shallow.  I'm a baseball man, a fan of the once and future dreaded (but always hated) New York Yankees.

I follow them around.  That's me at Fenway.  I had doffed my hat at the moment that photo was taken, but look at the two guys standing below my right arm.  Yankees hats.  And look at the fellow seated in front of them.  A Derek Jeter jersey.  We are there, in the bleachers of Fenway.  The opposite would not occur in Yankee Stadium, not unless the Red Sox fan in question wanted humiliation.  Or possibly violence.

The Bleacher Creatures of the Bronx are the fellows who learned to chant obscene comments about the sexuality of Dice-K's mother in Japanese.  Two senior professors once took me to a Red Sox game against Toronto.  They weren't surprised, exactly, at my comportment. 

In some ways, Boston and New York are inverses.  In NYC, nobody could care less if you wear Red Sox paraphenalia.  In fact, Manny Ramírez managed to blow a shot at turning most of Washington Heights and a big chunk of the Bronx into part of Red Sox Nation.  (Guess how he blew it.  Right.)  In Boston, though, people feel free to yell at me in the street for wearing a Yankees hat. (And so I mostly don't, except around Harvard Square.)  On the other hand, Yankees fans do fine inside Fenway, even in the bleachers ... and the reverse ain't true in the Bronx.  (I wouldn't risk it on the D-train after a game neither, to be honest.)    

So why am I a baseball fan?  Three reasons.  (1) I actually played it back in the day.  Sure, now I have trouble throwing a ball ninety feet, but I played the real thing, unlike football.  I think I played tackle football maybe, like, twice in my life, and even then it was way way watered-down because we used neither pads nor helmets and I am still here to talk about it.  (2) I understand baseball.  People who don't understand baseball won't admit this, but the game is actually simpler than football.  And (3) ... history.  Baseball's just got hella more history than football. 

Which brings me to nostalgia.  I rarely give Brink Lindsay props.  After all, he has no idea what really caused the Great Compression, mistakenly believes that the Democratic Party lost white male votes outside the South during the 1960s and 1970s, and claims that the Great Society contributed to "an explosion of crime, urban riots, family breakdown, and welfare dependency."  But he did say one very very clever thing about nostalgia for the 1950s, when baseball ruled supreme, and today's political debates:

"Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there."

True or false?

The Sumner Welles anecdote

There's nothing like an old scandal. From the prologue of Benjamin Welles's biography of his father, Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist:

On a sweltering September afternoon in 1940, Sumner Welles, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Under Secretary of State and lifelong friend, boarded the presidential train at Washington's Union Station. Tall, imposing and immaculately dressed, Welles was then at the peak of a brilliant career. A veteran diplomat and linguist, he had conceived and carried out for FDR, among other responsibilities, the Good Neighbor policy—arguably the high-water mark of U.S.-Latin American relations since the founding of the republic.

Age forty-eight—ten years younger than FDR—he, too, had attended Groton and Harvard. The Welles and Roosevelt families had long been close, and, as a twelve-year-old, Welles had served as a page at Franklin's wedding to Eleanor. Later FDR had sponsored his entry into the diplomatic service, had followed his career closely and, after taking office in 1932, had named Welles Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. Ever since, FDR had come to rely on Welles's quick mind, tireless energy and compendious knowledge of foreign affairs. In 1940 many thought Welles the likely successor to Cordell Hull, FDR's elderly and chronically ill Secretary of State.

Few, however—and least of all Welles—would have suspected that the next thirty-six hours would start unraveling his career and generate a scandal that Roosevelt would struggle to suppress for the next three years.

Gunboats and Vultures

“When people ask me what I mean by stable government,” said General Leonard Wood of the United States Army, “I tell them, ‘money at six percent.’”

Carlos asked for an explanation of the squiggles in my last post, “America's Dream of EMPIRE!!!!”  Well, they’re from a working paper by Laura Álfaro, Noel Maurer, and Faisal Ahmed, the findings of which will in turn form part of a book tentatively entitled Imperial Experiments. 

So, the graphs.  The question behind the first graph is pretty simple:  did Leonard Wood succeed?  The colored lines measure the premium on Latin American sovereign debt over British consols.   The higher their value, the riskier investors believe Latin American bonds to be.  The vertical lines represent American interventions, starting with the bombardment of Dominican ports in February 1904. 

These interventions were all about insuring that governments continued to “pay their obligations,” e.g., their debts.  Gunboat-style debt enforcement went out of style for many reasons, but mostly because the Depression hit Latin economies so badly that Washington decided that sanctioning these governments would be a bit like kneecapping a paraplegic. 

Today a kinder and gentler way of enforcing sovereign debt has emerged.  “Vulture funds” go around buying up the debt of countries in default.  They then sue those countries in European and American courts.  The courts proceed to enforce their decisions by attaching any payments that clear through the developed world.  The vultures go after VAT and landing fees paid to Nicaragua by U.S. airlines, or privatization revenues from the sale of Panama’s telecoms, or Congo’s oil sales.
   
Deny the government revenue or otherwise muck up its economy.  Same effect, in theory, as a gunboat in the harbor.  Call it a virtual blockade. 

And as you can imagine, the vultures have triggered a huge debate (bigger in Europe than in the U.S., unsurprisingly) over whether their activities are good or bad for poor countries.  One thing is absent in that debate, though:  does vulturing work? 

In a Free State

Did you know that Trinidad almost became part of the United States?

OK, that’s not quite true.  What happened was that at a summit at Camp Rapidan in October 1929, President Herbert Hoover told Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the U.S. would cancel Britain’s war debt in exchange for Trinidad, Bermuda, and British Honduras.  Hoover only wanted Belize in order to split it up between Guatemala and Mexico, and nobody expected London to part with Bermuda.  (Strangely, MacDonald drew the opposite line at the summit, insisting on retaining Belize but showing no objection to giving up Bermuda.) 

The real prize was, of course, Trinidad. Hoover had worked there, the place had oil, and its location was perfect.  Between Trinidad and Puerto Rico U.S. planes could overfly the entire Lesser Antilles (and Venezuela), pretty much turning the Caribbean into an American lake.

How much did Hoover offer, you ask?  Well, in nominal terms, a little less than £1.0 billion.  In 2006 terms, £44 billion.  And as a percentage of Britain’s GDP, the equivalent of £254 billion today.  Not a bad deal for the U.K. 

MacDonald, of course, eventually said no.  Hoover later wrote that MacDonald knew that Hoover had previously suggested a moratorium on war debts, and therefore the perfidious British saw no reason to pay off what they owed. 

But what if MacDonald had said yes?

A Flag on the Island

I had three more posts planned, but since the rightful owners are back, this will be the last one.  Interest in Trinidad and the West Indies seems limited, anyway. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems strange that they aren’t one country.  The cultural differences are relatively small, the economic advantages obvious, and the geographic distances (save isolated little Belize, and to a rather lesser extent Jamaica) easily manageable. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems equally strange that the islands aren’t part of the United Kingdom.  After all, their inhabitants wouldn’t have been there at all without Britain, their political traditions and institutions stem from the U.K., and both France and the Netherlands integrated their Caribbean colonies.  Hell, even the United States integrated its Caribbean colonies, giving Puerto Ricans citizenship in 1917 and Virgin Islanders the same thing in 1927.   

(The singular shameful non-British exception is Suriname, which the Social Democrats gleefully shoved out of the Netherlands on the basis of a one vote margin in the Surinamese parliament, against the wishes of 74 percent of the population.  A few violent strikes in Paramaribo provided a pretext, but the real reason was too many brown people moving to Holland.  By that “logic,” Dwight Eisenhower would have been perfectly justified in throwing Alabama out of the Union.  Ironically enough, foisting independence on the place managed to precipitate the very flood of migrants that the Dutch had hoped to avoid.  But I digress.) 

So what’s going on?  And what’s it got to do with the picture of the flags and the pretty lady? 

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.