Election Day – An Appreciation
November 6, 2012 § 8 Comments
Whenever I teach intro to comparative politics (or Comparative Political Systems as we call it at Georgetown), I always start the class off with the following anecdote. There was a leader of a country who was in power for over a decade and was forced out of office before he was ready to step down. The leader’s bitter rival, who had spent months painstakingly turning elites and the general population against the country’s ruler, took over power and embarked on a crusade to cement his own hold over the country. After nearly a decade marked by scandal and recriminations, the current leader was retiring and the first leader’s son, who had a severe alcohol problem, a string of failed business ventures to his name, and was chased by allegations of drug use, decided that he wanted to run the country. He challenged the current president’s hand-picked successor, accusing him of being involved in scandals and misusing the military and vowing to avenge his father’s loss. A vote was held that was marked by all sorts of irregularities and accusations of fraud, and when the dust cleared it turned out that the current president’s successor had won the most votes.
The challenger was not willing to accept his loss though, and being stymied by the results of the election, he approached the country’s constitutional court, a majority of whose judges were appointed by his father when he had been in power, and convinced the judges declare him the winner through a technicality and order the current president’s government to step down and cede power. Knowing that there was a genuine sense of anger among the former president’s powerful supporters and that he was facing a crisis of legitimacy that would hamper his rule, and perhaps even in an effort to make sure that he had the army on his side, he then appointed popular military officials from his father’s government, including the former commanding general of the country’s army and the former defense minister, to high ministerial posts in his own government. He then proceeded to organize a parade through the streets of the capital that literally brought him to the steps of the presidential palace, where he placed the outgoing president on a military helicopter and sent him away.
I then always ask my students what they think will happen next. Is this country going to be stable, or is it likely to go through years of repression and civil war? They invariably answer that the country is going to experience an outbreak of violence and that authoritarian rule will prevail, and when I tell them that this series of events actually occurred somewhere, they guess Iraq, China, or Saudi Arabia. Only once has a student immediately realized what probably all of you have already, which is that the country I am describing is the United States under Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush. Considered in a vacuum, the fact that the U.S. simply moved on in the aftermath of the 2000 election is mind-boggling, but it is not at all unusual when you stop to consider that this is the effect that democratic politics has on a state and a society. There was simply no question that once the Supreme Court ended the recount, effectively making Bush the president, there would be no violence or rioting, no military coup, no measures to prevent the new president from moving into the White House, and that the Clinton administration would stand aside for the Bush administration.
As Americans we take this for granted, because this is the way our country works and has always worked (save for that pesky Civil War), but in the grand sweep of history it is nothing short of remarkable. Not only do we get the opportunity every fourth year to decide who will be president, but when the incumbent is voted out or must step down after two terms, the most powerful person in the world and commander-in-chief of the most awesome fighting force in the history of mankind unfailingly vacates his post peacefully and makes no move to hang on to the trappings of absolute power. Just take a minute to reflect on how improbable this would be were it to happen once, let alone routinely as a matter of course for over two centuries. Take a minute to reflect on what an incredible country this is and how lucky we are to be living in it.
Something else to keep in mind on this Election Day is that as American citizens we get to select our leaders, but we are also voting in an election that for many countries is more consequential than their own election. The decisions taken by the president and the Congress directly impact the lives of billions of people across the globe and determine whether they will live in peace and security or whether they will live in an environment that is considerably worse. It is a solemn and awesome burden, and even if you are not thrilled with the choices that you are presented with on your ballot this year, please think about how those billions of people worldwide would jump at the chance that you have today, and make sure to vote. We talk about exercising our right to vote, and it is aptly described as a right, but it is also a privilege and a responsibility. The simple act of voting to elect our president and representatives reverberates around the entire world and such a thing should not be taken lightly or treated callously, and it is a right that under no circumstance should go discarded or unexercised. Go out and vote, reflect on how lucky we are to live in such an amazing place and time, and have a very happy Election Day.
A short Election Day programming note: I will be spending the evening at National Public Radio headquarters in DC, watching the returns and tweeting out my thoughts as we (hopefully) find out who our next president will be. I am really excited about it, so if you don’t already follow me on Twitter, my handle is @mkoplow and I’ll be tweeting all night.
What Game of Thrones Tells Us About State Formation
April 2, 2012 § 1 Comment
A lot of people have been talking about Charli Carpenter’s entertaining exposition on Game of Thrones and IR theory, and with other efforts out there such as Dan Drezner’s opus on zombies and international relations, academics love to apply IR theory to all sorts of fantasy situations. It got me thinking though that you rarely see similar attempts to apply the basic concepts of comparative politics to popular culture. True, IR theory is a lot more parsimonious and less wide-ranging (or perhaps less rambling would be a more accurate description), but CP deals with the fundamental core of how politics are organized and how outcomes are affected by institutions, and Game of Throne is a perfect vehicle for looking at this aspect of political science as well. After all, comparative politics seeks to explain everything about the state, which is the central actor in politics, and while Game of Thrones is in some ways about the struggle between different entities (Starks vs. Lannisters, the North vs. the South), in other ways it is about basic state formation. What can the world of Westeros tell us about where states comes from, how they are sustained, and whether state-building is a natural activity?
There are two competing theories about how states are formed, which we can dub bottom up and top down. The bottom up theory is a nationalist model which says that before you have a state you must have a group of people with a common national or ethnic identity. This identity naturally develops when different small groups of people realize that they have shared common threads that together coalesce to make them a sum much larger than its parts. These shared characteristics might be language, history, culture, or religion, all of which point to the conclusion that these disparate groups of people are not unique or alone in the world. This in turn leads to group consciousness where these people who share these common attributes realize that they are part of a larger group, in effect expanding what they see as the lowest common denominator linking themselves to other people. Whereas before they may have viewed themselves primarily as members of a village, now they imagine a larger political community to which they belong. Leaders of the group then encourage its members to form its own polity (or revolt against the current rulers who do not come from the group), a struggle for independence ensues, and eventually a state is born.
In contrast, the top down theory does not begin with an assumption of nationalism. Rather than being initiated by some form of group consciousness and a desire of that group to have its own state, in this model – popularized by Charles Tilly in his work on European state creation – states come into being as a result of external threats, which create an incentive for an ambitious actor to become a protector. In order to counter the threat, the protector has to raise an army, which requires extracting resources through measures such as conscription and taxation. In order to do this effectively, the protectors needs to create what we think of as the modern bureaucratic state – a tax office, a defense ministry, etc. Once this machinery is in place, the protector then uses it to neutralize internal rivals and protect his position of power, and thus you get a cycle in which war makes the state and the state makes war.
The first season of Game of Thrones unmistakably follows the top down model of state creation. Viewers are thrust into a world in which Aegon Targaryen conquered the seven distinct kingdoms of Westeros and made them into one state though force and brutality, and then created the institutions necessary to rule. By the time Robert Baratheon rebels against the Targaryens and becomes king 300 years later, all of the hallmarks of the bureaucratic state are in place. The small council controls the king’s treasury, sets policy large and small, and is tasked with running the day to day affairs of the state. There does not seem to be an ideology or a sense of shared identity holding Westeros together, as alluded to when Cersei sardonically observes that the only thing holding the kingdom together is her marriage to Robert. Despite the existence of a common tongue, there does not appear to be much else that unites the various people of Westeros. The histories of each kingdom are disparate enough from each other that there developed over time different noble houses with their own sayings, philosophies, sigils, and cultures. Certainly there does not appear to be a common culture uniting the north and the south, which manifests itself in everything from Sansa’s new “southern” hairstyle that she adopts upon arriving at King’s Landing to Ned’s insistence on executing Sansa’s direwolf himself according to northern custom. There is not even one shared religion, as some Westerosis have kept the old gods while others now pray to the Seven, and even the oath taken by new Night’s Watch members is accommodated to account for this difference.
Cersei is not, however, entirely correct. There is one uniting force that holds the state together outside of her union with Robert, and that is the fear of common enemies. All of Westeros is united in seeking to keep the wildlings and any supernatural forces that might exist out of Westeros and on the other side of the Wall. In this way, the king in his support of the contingent of Black Brothers is the protector who is acting against external threats, and his mechanisms for doing so create and sustain the state. Robert was also concerned with putting down local rebellions such as the one carried out by the Greyjoys, and in actively preventing threats from materializing abroad, whether they be a Dothraki army or a return of the Targaryens. The gearing up for a Dothraki invasion and the constant vigilance surrounding the Targaryen exiles is a good example of the state making war in order to sustain itself. We thus have a state that was created not out of a shared identity or group consciousness but through sheer force, and that is sustained through the need for a protector.
While we are only now one episode into the second season – and I have not read any of the books save for the first one so I do not know what is coming down the road – it appears that the bottom up model might begin to have greater relevance. Certainly Robb’s crowning as King of the North results not so much from the need for a protector and the emergence of a state bureaucracy, but because the northerners feel that their region of Westeros and their northern culture is so distinct from the South that they should have their own state. Unlike the increasingly futile quest to hold the seven kingdoms together under one iron throne, one gets the sense that Robb Stark will have little trouble keeping the North together as one cohesive unit, even if there is grumbling from lords who resent having to pay for their own castle maintenance. Game of Thrones demonstrates that there is more than way to create a state, but that one path might be more sustainable in the long run than the other.
