I'm in Shanghai to discuss how the G-20 has been doing as the world's "premier economic forum." As fate would have it, the G-20 actually opened its collective mouth in response to the market convulsions of this week:

The Group of 20 leading economies pledged a “strong and co-ordinated” effort to stabilise the global economy in an attempt to calm tumbling equities markets spooked by fears of recession in the eurozone and a gloomy economic outlook in the US.

Bowing to pressure from investors to take action, finance ministers from the G20 economies said in a communiqué issued late on Thursday that they would stop the European debt crisis from deluging banks and financial markets, and take the necessary steps to bolster the eurozone’s rescue fund and assist banks to boost capital reserves in line with new global regulations. The statement followed a day in which the equity markets suffered some of the biggest falls since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, as investors rushed to safety in a widespread sell-off.

“We commit to take all necessary actions to preserve the stability of banking systems and financial markets as required,” the group said in a statement. “We will ensure that banks are adequately capitalised and have sufficient access to funding to deal with current risks and that they fully implement Basel III along the agreed timelines.”

The G-20's near-total muteness in the face of European sovereign debt convulsions had begun to raise some eyebrows -- particularly as it was the G-7 economies rather than the G-20 that pledged to provide dollar liquidity to European financial institutions.

Unfortunately, if you read the actual communique, you discover... well.... let's describe the statement as very optimistic about what the G-20 countries have done to promote both growth and fiscal rectitude.

One of the takeaways from my conversations so far in Shanghai has been a sense of disappointment about what the next G-20 summit in Cannes will accomplish. The Financial Times' Chris Giles provides some background on the demise of the France's grand ambitious for that summit:

In mid-February, G20 finance ministers gathered in Paris for what turned out to be a harbinger of the challenges that have beset the French G20 presidency ever since. The meeting was supposed to be routine, with finance ministers agreeing a set of indicators that might be used to assess whether their economies and policies fostered balanced global economic growth.

Far from France undermining the meeting with excessive ambitions, countries struggled to agree even the most basic steps to a more stable world economy.

A country’s current account surplus or deficit is the accepted measure of balance in its relations with other countries, but the Chinese arrived in Paris in intransigent mood. Their negotiators refused to let the G20 use the current account as an indicator of balance. After an all-night session, the absurd compromise China accepted was that countries were allowed to assess every component part of a country’s current account, but the term “current account” was banned.

That ended the French presidency’s lofty plans. From then on, limited goals became the order of the day, a shift that has been reinforced as the year has progressed.

I'd quibble a bit with Giles -- any meeting that details indicative guidelines on macroeconomic imbalances is not gonna be a routine meeting. [Um...could you translate that last sentence out of bureaucratese, please?--ed.] Sorry, to rephrase -- any meeting in which the G-20 points out that China's trade surplus is part of the problem in the global economy is not going to be a smooth meeting.

Your humble blogger went to see Contagion over the weekend for two reasons.  First, Slate movie critic Forrest Wickman concluded his review by calling it, "the most believable zombie movie ever made." He's not the only one to make the zombie connection, and well, now I've got some skin in that game.  Second, the FP editors have asked me to review other disaster scenarios, so I figured I'd just pre-empt their request and join the legions of moviegoers who get their ya-yas seeing Gwyneth Paltrow die on film be entertained. 

So, let me provide the MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT klaxon here and get to the assessment.  How well did Steven Soderbergh and company portray what would happen if a lethal pandemic were to break out? 

OK, good news first:  in terms of both accuracy and suspense, Contagion is a far, far better film than, say, either Outbreak or The Andromeda Strain.  The first reason is that Soderbergh does not bother with the anti-government paranoia that those earlier films possessed in their DNA.  Instead, the treatment of the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Homeland Security, and World Health Organization officials is fair.  They are depicted as flawed but well-meaning bureaucrats, getting some decisions right and some wrong.  They also speak in jargon, a surprising amount of which makes its way into the film.  I fully expect to see the term "R-0" bandied about by news anchors the next time a flu bug breaks out.  A CDC official utters the two most chilling words in the entire movie -- "social distancing" -- to describe the necessary freak-out by citizens to avoid human contact with other humans as a way of slowing the spread of the virus.  That's the perfect dash of bureaucratese. 

The second reason is that Soderbergh almost perfectly nails the first stage of the pandemic.  Unlike, say, most zombie or other apocalyptic films, Soderbergh doesn't get to the breakdown of social order in the first reel.  He takes his time, which helps to amp up the pressure and make it seem all the scarier when things do seem to break down (Matt Damon's character is the perfect vessel here; Damon's best work is in his reaction shots to other people behaving badly).  He also deftly demonstrates in the first ten minutes how globalization would abet the spread of any kind of superbug. 

Despite this slow ratcheting up, I haven't seen a director kill off so many Hollywood starlets since Joss Whedon. 

The third reason is that the movie, intriguingly enough, does not end in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Consistent with the arguments I made in Theories of International Politics and Zombies, humans prove to be just as adaptable as the biological threats to humans. 

That said, here are my beefs: 

1)  Really, the blogger is the Big Bad in the movie?  Really?  The villian of the piece is Jude Law's crudely-named Alan Krumwiede, who detects the spread of the virus early but hawks a homeopathic remedy to enrich himself.  Exactly how he gets rich doing this is not entirely clear -- he has some shady meetings with a hedge fund manager, but it's not entirely clear why, after gaining fame and fortune, he doesn't start acting differently as more attention gets paid to him.  It's also presumed that Krumwiede has the monopoly of blogging on the issue -- I'm pretty sure that as he gained popularity, a few other health bloggers would try to cut him down to size. 

Neither Soderbergh nor his screenwriter Scott Z. Burns like bloggers, like, at all.  At one point the virologist played by Elliott Gould tells Krumwiede, "Blogging is not writing.  It's graffiti with punctuation."  Hah!  That shows what Soderbregh knows -- us bloggers are lucky if we remember to use commas, much less semicolons.  

Look, as a founding member of the International Brotherhood of Policy Bloggers, I can't claim that actors like Krumwiede don't exist.  My skepticism is over whether they'd really wreak as much havoc as Soderbergh thinks.  Myths and rumors can spread on the Internet, but so can the corrections of those myths.  In the end, someone like Krumwiede would affect a very narrow, already paranoid subculture -- the larger effect would be minimal. 

Even if Krumwiede is an absurd villain, I also didn't buy it when the DHS official let him go free once he made bail.  At a minimum, they'd hold this guy for 48 hours without charging.  I'd also wager that they'd try to deport him too. 

One final note:  I'd love to see Lee Siegel hire Sodebergh to direct and Aaron Sorkin to write a movie about the Internet, just to see the final dystopic product. 

2)  Where the hell is the Chinese central government?  The most absurd subplot is when a WHO official gets abducted by her translator as collateral to protect his infected village.  She's held hostage for at least six months -- during which time she goes native -- until the WHO barters some (fake) vaccine for her life. 

Apparently during this entire time, the Chinese central government does not bother to intervene to try to rescue her.  This seems juuuuuuust a bit implausible.  It also leads to the next problem....

3)  Where the hell is the rest of the WHO?  Beyond Marion Cotillard's character, the WHO does not really appear in the film.  It's the CDC's show, and only their show .  They act in Contagion pretty much how they promised they would act if the zombies arrive.  Maybe that's how things would play out, but I suspect other governments and IGOs would still matter more than this film suggests.  Given that the movie virus started in China, and that the head of the WHO is also from China, they might be useful in this kind of situation. 

4)  Few second-order effects.  The virus leads to looting, crime, and other social ills, but I wish they had said something about the total economic devastation that would have occurred.  At one point after a vaccine has been developed, Matt Damon's character walks through a mall to buy his daughter a prom dress -- and 80% of the mall looks to be closed.  Soderbergh suggests a bunch of unions going on strike because they don't want to ge sick.  I'm curious what happens once they find themselves unemployed as well.   

Forget the domestic discord however, there's also...

5)  No international conflict whatsoever.  After the first 15 minutes, almost all of the action takes place in the USA.  Once a vaccine is discovered, there is no discussion of the international wrangling that would take place over scarce supplies.  No diversionary wars happen.  And so forth.  Soderbergh doesn't really address possible problems in world politics.  Because of this, the film implicitly assumes a liberal institutionalis kind of a world.  I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure myself.   

To be fair to Soderbergh and his collaborators, I'm not sure it's possible to get everything right in such a film.  Unless it's a television series I'm not sure it's possible to get all the nuances and complexities right.  Given these limitations, Contagion is a movie worth seeing.  Just bring your own Purell. 

There's been some interesting blog commentary on my debate with Anne-Marie Slaughter, and I encourage international relations theory geeks to check it out.  Over at the Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell makes an interesting intervention.  You should read the whole thing, but here's the part I found particularly provocative: 

Rather than seeing the international sphere as a space for inter-state power politics, or as a space for networked common action, we can think of it as a space for contagion.That is, think of it as a space where ever-multiplying and ever-ramifying sets of networked relationships across border serve not to enable problem-solving DIY diplomatists, but instead to transmit social influences in ways that are difficult to predict ex ante. This would mean taking seriously the kinds of complexity theory and network theory arguments that Anne-Marie mentions, but following them to a quite different set of conclusions than she does. 

The world that complexity theory and network theory depicts is one where actions have highly unpredictable consequences. This follows both from theoretical arguments about processes of contagion across large scale networks, and from empirical research conducted via e.g. experiments....

Just because the world has become more networked, it does not mean that states can either (a) easily use networks to pursue their policy goals, or (b) turn over responsibilities to networks that will self-organize around socially useful tasks and responsibilities. To the extent that networks’ politics are predictable, they will conform to the same kinds of (frequently unpleasant) politics as do states. That is, they will be characterized by power inequalities (sometimes gross), actors pursuing their self-interest while entirely blind to the needs of others, and the rest of the shebang. To the extent that networks’ politics unpredictable, they will be unlikely to be useful tools of policy.

This is a story with far fewer helpful policy lessons than either Dan’s or Anne-Marie’s. It points to plausible developments in world politics, without providing any very obvious tools to deal with them.

I need to process Henry's arguments more before making a fully thought-out response.  This is a blog, a two half-assed thoughts should suffice for now.  First, Henry gets at something that was implicit in the exchange between Anne-Marie and myself:  the notion that powerful actors possess considerable agency in world politics.  Slaughter and I might disagree about who those actors are, but we assumed that power = agency.  Farrell's point about contagion is that this presumption does not necessarily hold.  And the policy implications of that suggestion are rather jarring, to say the least. 

Second, however, my own theoretical predilections lead me to wonder whether powerful agents can halt/regulate/control the spread of contagion more .  The Arab Spring suggests such possibilities.  So far, the general unrest in the region has toppled a regime in Tunisia, partially toppled regimes in Egypt and Yemen, led to a civil war in Libya, and led to... something in Syria. 

This is not insignificant, but it's worth remembering that the wave of unrest was much larger than those countries.  Early protests in Iran went nowhere -- in no small part because the Iraniann state has gotten very, very good at cracking down.  Led by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies have by and large kept populist demands at bay, going so far as to invite Jordan and Morocco to join the Gulf Cooperation Council. 

I'm not trying to pull a Kevin Bacon here; the Arab Spring is Big Earthshaking Stuff.  My point, rather, is that not every contagion proceeds unimpeded -- there are counter-contagions as well.  When and how those counterwaves happen is worthy of consideration. 

 What do you think? 

This past week Anne-Marie Slaughter launched a new foreign policy blog over at The Atlantic entitled "Notes from the Foreign Policy Frontier."  This was greeted with general huzzahs across the foreign policy community, as Slaughter is a universally-acknowledged smart person.  She is an exemplar of someone who can effortlessly transition from the scholarly to the policymaking world and back again.  Her facility with new media is so good that her own bio undercounts her Twitter followers by 50%.

Slaughter's first post suggests the themes of her new blog -- let's take a look and see what she's up to, shall we?  Here are the opening paragraphs: 

The frontier of foreign policy in the 21st century is social, developmental, digital, and global. Along this frontier, different groups of actors in society -- corporations, foundations, NGOs, universities, think tanks, churches, civic groups, political activists, Facebook groups, and others -- are mobilizing to address issues that begin as domestic social problems but that have now gone global. It is the world of the Land Mines Treaty and the International Criminal Court; global criminal and terrorist networks; vast flows of remittances that dwarf development assistance; micro-finance and serial entrepreneurship; the Gates Foundation; the Arab spring; climate change; global pandemics; Twitter; mobile technology to monitor elections, fight corruption, and improve maternal health; a new global women's movement; and the demography of a vast youth bulge in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Traditional foreign policy continues to assume the world of World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the first and second Gulf Wars -- an international system in which a limited number of states pursue their largely power-based interests in bargaining situations that are often zero-sum and in which the line between international and domestic politics is still discernible and defensible. Diplomats and statesmen compete with each other in games of global chess, which, during crises, often shift into high-stakes poker. It is the world of high strategy, the world that Henry Kissinger writes about and longs for and that so-called "realist" commentators continually invoke.

Well, this is... this is... I'm sorry, I got lost among the ridiculously tall strawmen populating these paragraphs.   I'll go out on a limb and posit that not even Henry Kissinger thinks of the world the way Slaughter describes it.  Just a quick glance at, say, Hillary Clinton's recent speech in Hong Kong suggests that actual great power foreign policies bear no resemblance whatsoever to that description of "traditional foreign policy." 

Slaughter knows this very well, given that she was Clinton's first director of policy planning.  She also knows this because much of her writing in international relations is about the ways in which traditional governments are becoming more networked and adaptive to emergent foreign policy concerns.  One could quibble about whether this is really a new trend, but Slaughter was correct to point out that states are doing this. 

So, let's get to the main point of her blog post:  what does Slaughter think about this new frontier? 

21st century diplomacy must not only be government to government, but also government to society and society to society, in a process facilitated and legitimated by government. That much broader concept opens the door to a do-it-yourself foreign policy, in which individuals and groups can invent and execute an idea -- for good or ill -- that can affect their own and other countries in ways that once only governments could.

In late June, I spent two days at the Summit Against Violent Extremism (#AVE on Twitter), a conference sponsored by Google Ideas, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Tribeca Film Festival that brought together more than 80 former gang members, violent religious extremists, violent nationalist extremists, and violent white supremacists from 19 countries across six continents. They came together with 120 academics, NGOs, public sector and private sector partners. The conference grew out of a vision developed by Jared Cohen, the head of Google Ideas, when he served in the U.S. State Department's Office of Policy Planning together with Farah Pandit, who worked on countering violent extremism in the State Department's Bureau of Eurasian Affairs and is the Special Representative to Muslim Communities. But, despite their role, bringing together this range of "formers" is something that Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations can do much more easily than any government could. The range of projects creating networks to help build on effective, early intervention programs already working around the world, such as Singapore's programs to deflect and deprogram Islamic radicals, will also be much easier to develop with a broader range of stakeholders, including some government participation, than they would be through government alone....

Skeptics argue that these kinds of initiatives are doomed to remain perennially peripheral and ineffectual. But, in case anyone hasn't noticed, the traditional tools of fighting, talking, pressuring, and persuading government-to-government really aren't working so well. Thirty years of urging reform produced next to nothing; 6 months of digitally and physically organized social protests and a political earthquake is shaking the broader Middle East. Twenty years of working toward a treaty to govern carbon emissions has barely yielded an informal "accord." Yet measures taken by 40 cities organized by the Bloomberg Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative will have far more impact.

Outing myself as a skeptic, I'd make two points.  First, Slaughter's weakness as an international relations theorist is to uncritically observe phenomena like the Summit Against Violent Extremism and then inductively generalize from them to extrapolate the future of world politics.  AVE is happening, but I'm gonna want to see a lot more evidence that it's making a difference before calling it a success.  There are a lot of issue areas where this kind of initiative will not substantially alter policy outcomes.  Indeed, one could flip this around, look at new trends like sovereign wealth funds, national oil companies and and state-owned enterprises, and reach the exact opposite conclusions from Slaughter.  I don't, but you see my point -- world politics is about a lot more than a Muslim woman setting up a Twitter account thanks to her microfinance loan.     

Second, Slaughter's climate change example is a great one.  I don't doubt that the initiatives she's blogged about likely have accomplished more than the two decades of UN negotiations.  I also don't doubt, however, that those accomplishments are a drop in the bucket compared to what has needs to be done.  Furthermore, I suspect these groups would strongly prefer joint government action to their own initiatives, as the only viable means to mitigate the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions.  In which case, they will function like good old fashioned interest groups, which is not all that new.   

Slaughter believes that these "bottom-up" movements represent the future of world politics -- and she may well be right.  My own inclination is that DIY foreign policy represents a poor and underprovided substitute for effective state action global governance.  We'll see what the future holds. 

Concluding her post, Slaughter says that she'll be, "looking at the world through a very different lens -- highlighting features of the foreign policy landscape that simply disappear if we examine only a world of opaque unitary states negotiating, pressuring, fighting, and ignoring each other."  This is good, and highlights the value-added that such an approach can bring to thinking about world politics.  I'll be looking at Slaughter's musings as well through my own lens -- one that is very wary of overhyped initiatives that do not accomplish nearly as much as suggested by their media hype. 

Am I missing anything? 

Step back for a moment and imagine what a "good" international organization should look like.  Presumably, it should be relatively transparent and representative.  It should earn a reputation for competency, efficiency, and an aversion to corruption.  Stakeholders in the organization should feel that they are being consulted and their needs acknowledged if not always perfectly addressed.  When confronted with a challenge or scandal, the organization should respond with alacrity and a respect for due process. 

I bring this up because, right now, FIFA is the exact opposite of this ideal type. 

The Financial Times' Roger Blitz and Stanley Pignal report on the mockery of global governance that is currently known as FIFA: 

Fifa has become “unstable,” Sepp Blatter admitted as the president addressed the governing body’s annual Congress in the teeth of pressure for reform from several fronts and demands that the election to secure his fourth term of office be postponed.

The biggest pressure was brought to bear from the World Cup sponsors. Four of the biggest sponsors – Coca-Cola, Adidas, Visa and Emirates Airlines – have now gone public, calling on Fifa to act swiftly to restore its damaged reputation in the face of the bribery allegations that have sparked an internecine struggle between the governing body’s most powerful figures. 

The European Commission, which has a say in how Fifa’s European TV rights are awarded, also made clear its displeasure in a thinly veiled attack on Mr Blatter.

Androulla Vassiliou, the commissioner responsible for sport, said: “The situation at Fifa is a concern for many of us and I have confidence that the current issues will be thoroughly investigated and resolved as soon as possible.

“Football and sport in general need good leadership and governance, above suspicion and firmly rooted in accountability and transparency.”

Mr Blatter, in a sombre address to the 208-member Congress, said: “”I thought that we were living in a world of fair play, respect and discipline ... I must unfortunately say this is not the case."

Dude, when the European Union is lecturing you on how to govern, you know you're in trouble. 

So, corporate and state sponsors ticked off - check.  Well, surely, FIFA will respond by sacking those responsible and getting off to a fresh start, right?  Hey, what's this ESPN story saying? 

Sepp Blatter was poised for re-election as FIFA president Wednesday, calling himself the "captain of the ship" and promising to enact "radical" reforms to tackle the corruption scandals that have engulfed soccer's governing body.

Blatter vowed to give more power to the 208 national federations at the expense of the 24-man executive committee by allowing them to pick the host of the World Cup from now on....

Blatter said the worst scandal in the body's history could be solved within FIFA itself and with him in charge.

"Reforms will be made and not just touchups but radical decisions," Blatter said in his speech to the 208 delegations attending the congress....

"We have made mistakes, but we will draw our conclusions," Blatter said.

Blatter was heeding the advice of IOC president Jacques Rogge, who told him on the eve of the election that only drastic measures to improve democracy and transparency had saved the Olympic movement when it faced a similar corruption scandal in the run-up to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games.

Blatter said he would work to make sure the World Cup would in the future be picked in a vote by all federations instead of the two dozen executive committee members, several of whom have been involved in bribery scandals.

A few thoughts.  First, what kind of election process is it when the scandal-beseiged incumbent is the only friggin' candidate?  Bear in mind this is the same Sepp Blatter who declared that FIFA was much more transparent than the IOC -- which is kinda like Frederick's of Hollywood claiming that they're classier than Victoria's Secret. 

Second, widening the vote to all members won't necessarily stop corruption -- if the International Whaling Commission is any guide, it will simply expand the number of actors who could be bribed. 

Third, any anti-corruption campaign depends on Blatter.  As Leander Schaerlaeckens blogs over at ESPN, however, Blatter serms to be doing his best Arab strongman impersonation right now:

Through [the crisis], Blatter has maintained that FIFA isn't in crisis, thus denying that he's pushed the organization over the brink of respectability. Amid the firestorm, the tiny septuagenarian Swiss leader has made it clear that FIFA shouldn't play by ordinary rules or be held accountable to anything or anyone.

This was never more obvious than when Blatter got fed up with questions from a hungry pack of journalists in a press conference Monday. "I will not answer this question," he said in response to a question about [CONCACAF president Jack] Warner. "I am the president of FIFA, you cannot question me." When the assembly was rightly outraged, he admonished it for a lack of respect for him and FIFA. And after taking a few more hard questions, he stormed off the stage, citing a lack of respect once more.

If only Blatter had been caught groping a chambermaid -- then there would be some real reform! 

So, to sum up:  scandal--ridden organization, pissed-off stakeholders, and an out-of-touch megalomaniacal leader who's about to be re-elected. 

Ladies and gentleman, I give you FIFA in 2011 -- the only international organization that can make the Iinternational Olympic Committee and European Union look good. 

Am I missing anything? 

Today was a big American foreign policy news day.  Hamas and Fatah seem to have kissed and made up under the aegis of the Egyptian caretaker government; there's a national defense reshuffle as Leon Panetta is moving from CIA to SecDef and David Petraeus is moving from CENTCOM to the CIA; the FEderal Reserve's Ben Bernanke held the Fed's first-ever press conference. 

These are all big stories, and yet the lead of the day is the fact that Barack Obama showed everyone his long-form birth certificate.  There's something really sad about the fact that this needed to be done, but there it is.  

Today's spectacle prompted Slate's David Weigel, who has followed the varieties of birtherism with an eagle eye, to ask honestly when enough is enough: 

Here's the thing. I've spent a lot of time writing about conspiracy theories. I think they're darkly amusing....And if we're being perfectly honest, conspiracy stories do gangbusters traffic. If I were an advertiser, I wouldn't tell a writer to knock off writing about conspiracy theories.

But this is an honest question: How far can people take this stuff? Is there absolutely no downside to using your celebrity to make the wildest accusation you can and watch reporters fight like the monkeys at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the right to cover them first? In the past, rabbit hole chases for stuff that would blow the lid off some conspiracy or another have backfired, wildly. (Google "Dan Rather" and "National Guard documents.") And in the past, things that have caused a lot of amusement for a lot of people have gotten predictable and boring, pointless. This has to happen at some point. Tell me this happens at some point.

I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories too, and I'm afraid I have some bad news for Weigel.  The truly scary thing is that conspiracy theories do even better gangbuster business outside of the United States.  Hear the one about the Mossad being behind the 9/11 attacks?  How the United States caused the earthquake in Haiti?  It's quick, cheap and easy to create a conspiracy, especially when the truth is usually banal and/or mundane. 

As I wrote in The Spectator last year: 

What is clear is that, thanks to the technological and globalising revolutions of the last two decades, modern life has become infinitely more complex. The world has become far less easy to understand in terms of its economic and social organisation. Yet humans remain hard-wired to look for patterns in a chaotic universe. As David Aaronovitch recently observed in Voodoo Histories, conspiracy theories offer the comfort of a narrative, no matter how crazy it sounds....

Will anger and distrust be a permanent fixture in the politics of affluent countries? A global economic rebound should lead to increased trust in both business and political elites. Beyond trying to revive their economies, however, there must be something that governments can do to earn back the trust of some of their people. The most obvious first response would be to offer more information to persuade angry and distrustful people that their worst fears will not be realised. Unfortunately, such a policy might backfire. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler conducted experiments to see whether correct information could erase misperceptions. They discovered that ‘corrections actually strengthened misperceptions among the most strongly committed subjects’. The very attempt to correct erroneous beliefs simply causes the most extreme adherents to put themselves into a cognitive crouch. This might explain why, even though an image of Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate can be accessed on the web, many ‘birthers’ still believe the President was not born in the USA.

This has nothing to do with intelligence, either -- a few weeks ago I wasted spent 15 minutes explaining to a Fletcher student that, in fact, Julian Assange was not a CIA agent.  This sounds laughable, except that at least one head of government said the same thing.   

As long as trafficking in these questions draws eyeballs, the media will continue to act as an amplifier for these kinds of crazed worldviews. 

There is a downside for those who care about their reputation -- ask Pierre Salinger.  For heads of stare and almost everyone else, however, these costs likely seem negligible compared to the political and psychological gain that comes from belief. 

Think of conspiracy theories like internaional institutions -- they don't actually explain much, but they never go away either.  Even global governance structures that have longed outlived their usefulness do not disappear -- they just persist with fewer adherents.  Popular conspiracy theories work the same way, because there will always be a hard core of believers who can sustain their belief regardless of things like "facts" and evidence."  Indeed, scorn from the mainstream just fuels their conviction that they must be onto something. 

Colin Bradford has written a lot of useful and interesting material on global economic governance.  I say this because I'm not really sure that his latest FP contribution meets the high standard of his prior work. 

In "Seven New Laws of the G-20 Era," Bradford seems to be arguing that even if there are disagreements within the G-20, it's still an effective public policy forum.  Here's a sample "law":

1. Visible disagreements can have positive side effects

Some commentators have argued that, because the G-20 reveals differences and divisions, the group itself must be a failure. Yet gone are the days when we could categorize a summit as a success or a failure based on the outcome document. Dichotomous thinking doesn't really work anymore. So if G-20 meetings display more tension than consensus, that might actually be a good thing. In its discord, the G-20 merely reflects the landscape of this dynamic 21st century. There is order and disorder in our world today, competition and coordination, conflict and consensus -- all going on at the same time. The G-20 is flushing those issues up not only for leaders to deal with but for publics to deal with as well. Unlike the G-8, the G-20 is creating stronger linkages between leaders and publics, because -- not in spite of -- the fact that the conflicts are visible.

Hmmmm..... nope, not buying this spin.  Bradford's basic argument is that the G-20 exposes the fundamental disagreements  so that the global public sphere can better understand the fundamental faultlines of global economic governance.  The publicist that resides inside my brain can appreciate the virtue of this spin, but it's just that. 

It's true that governance structures can serve as arenas of contestation.  The problem with this logic is threefiold, however. 

First, as a general rule, mass publics don't pay too much attention to high-falutin' economic summits.  The issues are too arcane and the remove from daily life seems to large.  So the only thing the public will digest from G-20 deadlock is that leaders can't agree on something. 

Which leads to the second point -- in the end, publics usually want to see outputs from governance structures.  There can be virtues from policy deadlock, but I'm thinking that if an issue makes it to the G-20 agendas it's because a lot of people want concrete policy action rather than additioonal bloviation.   Continued disagreement will lead to mounting public frustration.

Which leads to the third point -- many national governments can endure long-lasting policy deadlocks because their domestic legitimacy is unquesioned.  In the United States, for example, despite mounting frustration with a sclerotic policy process, there's not a huge groundswell for amending the Constitution to make it easier to pass laws.  That's because both the Constitution and the U.S. government have been around for a while. 

The G-20 doesn't have this legitimacy "cushion" to fall back on.  It's not a national government with a monopoly on authority within its bailiwick.  It's not a treaty body like the WTO or IMF.  Unlike even the G-8, it can't point to decades of existence as a justification for its continued relevance.  The G-20 rises and falls with its perceived effectiveness.  While the forum had a good 2008 and a decent 2009, last year was a friggin' disaster.  If the trend of policy gridlock continues, it won't matter what Nicolas Sarkozy proposes, the G-20 will be a dead forum walking. 

Unfortunately, Bradford's essay sounds like a marriage counselor telling a troubled couple to "own your problems... embrace the discord."  Sorry, not buying it. 

Am I missing anything? 

If David Brooks is announcing his Sydney Awards for the year, then it's time to start garnering nominations for the 2010 Albies, in honor of the great political economist Albert O. Hirschman. 

To repeat and update the description from last year's nominations announcement:

I'm talking about any book, journal article, magazine piece, op-ed, or blog post published in the 2009 2010 calendar year that made you rethink how the world works in such a way that you will never be able "unthink" the argument. 

The winners will be announced on December 31st.  In the meantime, readers are strongly encouraged to submit their nominations (with links if possible) in the comments. 

As I said last week, the emergence of gridlock between the legislative and executive branches of U.S. government is going to put political pressure on the unelected components of government.

This isn't just a national phenomenon, however -- it's also an international one. What happens if the big players on the global stage can't agree -- either internally or externally -- on new arrangements to solve a mounting policy problem? If the problem clearly needs fixing, then pressure inevitably builds up to use a pre-existing mechanism to address the issue. Some elites in gridlocked countries will welcome this kind of development, because it allows them to bypass domestic impediments to policy change. Because this new possibility is both suboptimal and less than democratic, however, it inevitably builds up global resentments against unaccountable international institutions.

For exhibit A of this phenomenon today, let's wander over to John Broder's New York Times story on the latest developments in fashioning a policy response to climate change:

With energy legislation shelved in the United States and little hope for a global climate change agreement this year, some policy experts are proposing a novel approach to curbing global warming: including greenhouse gases under an existing and highly successful international treaty ratified more than 20 years ago.

The treaty, the Montreal Protocol, was adopted in 1987 for a completely different purpose, to eliminate aerosols and other chemicals that were blowing a hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer.

But as the signers of the protocol convened the 22nd annual meeting in Bangkok on Monday, negotiators are considering a proposed expansion in the ozone treaty to phase out the production and use of the industrial chemicals known as hydro fluorocarbons or HFCs The chemicals have thousands of times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas.

HFCs are used as refrigerants in air-conditioners and cooling systems. They are manufactured mostly in China and India, but appliances containing the substance are in use in every corner of the world. HFCs replaced even more dangerous ozone-depleting chemicals known as HCFCs, themselves a substitute for the chlorofluorocarbons that were the first big target of the Montreal process…

[T]he plan is not expected to be adopted this year. Large developing countries, including China, India and Brazil, object that the timetable is too rapid and that payments for eliminating the refrigerant are not high enough.

One advantage to using the Montreal protocol as a vehicle, supporters say, is that negotiations over the treaty have been utterly unlike the contentious United Nations climate talks that foundered in Copenhagen last year. Negotiators say that without legislative action on curbing greenhouse gases by the United States, little progress will be made when countries gather in Cancún, Mexico, late this month for another round of climate talks.

In a post-election news conference, President Obama noted that it was doubtful that Congress would do anything to address global warming "this year or next year or the year after."…

Daniel A. Reifsnyder, the deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and the nation's chief Montreal Protocol negotiator, said that it might take several years to persuade the ozone treaty countries to back the plan.

In addition to pace and cost issues, some countries say that HFCs have little impact on the ozone layer and thus should be handled under the United Nations climate change talks. Mr. Reifsnyder dismissed that as a legalistic argument and said that the ozone treaty could and should be used to achieve broader environmental objectives.

"What we've found is that the Montreal Protocol has been a very effective instrument for addressing global environmental problems," Mr. Reifsnyder said in an interview. "It was created to deal with the ozone layer, but it also has tremendous ability to solve the climate problem if people are willing to use it that way."

If I was the policymaker in charge of pushing action on climate change forward, I'd be very tempted to agree with Reifsnyder. This might be a way of achieving a deliverable that would simply not be possible under the Copenhagen Accord or the United Nations effort to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

On the other hand… this is also an action that would inject political controversy into what was a ridiculously successful accord. It will push another governance process that's already in critical condition into hospice care. Plus, I'm not sure it will work -- China and India are going to stoutly resist this move.

My larger point, however, is that political paralysis in certain global governance forums is simply going to trigger a search for more suitable global governance structures. That search isn't going to change the underlying disagreements, however, and it just might cause an erosion of faith in the few multilateral structures that do appear to work well.

Gideon Rachman notes that the WTO has been denuded of controversy, and wonders why:

It’s strange to recall that - just a decade ago - the World Trade Organisation was a deeply controversial organisation. It was the WTO that was fingered by the anti-globalisation movement as the handmaiden of ruthless western capitalism and oppressor-in-chief of the poor. The WTO summit in Seattle in 1999 degenerated into a street riot.

On Wednesday morning, however, the WTO staged a public forum in Geneva, without the need for riot police - and indeed without much public fuss at all. I chaired the opening session at the organisation’s modest headquarters on the banks of Lac Leman.

I think that one of the main reasons why the WTO is no longer in the line of fire is that the change in the pattern of world trade over the last decade - combined with a slump in the West and a boom in China and India - makes the idea that global free trade is a tool of western domination look increasingly absurd. The world has got a lot more complicated than that; and even the anti-globalisation movement has had to acknowledge that complexity, if only tacitly. These days, it is the developing nations that are pressing for completion of the Doha Round and the rich countries that are dragging their feet.

Hmmmm..... well, let's call Rachman's explanation the optimistic interpretation for why the WTO doesn't attract demonstrators anymore. Let me offer a more pessimistic explanation, which consists of two parts: 

1) Finance is the new bogeyman. The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession were caused by bubbles in financial markets -- trade, at best, played a marginal role. Perhaps it's not that trade has become less controversial so much as finance and capital flows have become way more controversial. 

2) The WTO is no longer liberalizing. The WTO does an impressive job of ensuring that the status quo of a (largely) open trading system keeps functioning. What has exercised protestors in the past however, was the notion that further liberalization was going to take place. Since the Doha round is deader than a doornail. why bother with protesting? 

Now imagine a world where there was forward progress on the Doha round -- do you seriously think there would be no protests associated with the WTO? Oddly enough, in this case, a lack of protest is a bad sign for trade. 

I would much prefer Gideon to be right -- but I'm pretty sure he's wrong. 

In light of a World Cup referee stripping the United States of a winning goal despite multiple Slovenian bear hugs of American forwards issuing a controversial call in yesterday's United States-Slovenia game, I was intrigued to read about FIFA's attitudes about monitoring and enforcing the rules of its game. 

And then I began to wonder what life would be like if that attitude were applied to the rest of world politics.....

IAEA REFUSES TO REVERSE CALL ON IRAN

VIENNA:  Today the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) rejected American and European pleas to review and reverse its latest finding on Iran's nuclear program.  Last week IAEA inspectors surprised the world by declaring "there's nothing to see here, move along" after the latest inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities. 

Immediately following that report, both the German and U.S. governments provided clear video and satellite photography of a secret nuclear facility in Iran, and requested that the IAEA reconsider its position.  

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano refused, however, arguing that, "there is a human element to inspections that technology cannot and should not eliminate."  He elaborated, "this kind of strategic ambiguity is exactly the kind of uncertainty and controversy that will promote debate and discussion about Iran's intentions for years to come."  He went on to argue that  nonproliferation will remain more popular than other global governance structures, such as climate change, that have embraced the use of technology in their decision-making.   

When asked if the new data wouldn't provide a more accurate assessment of Iran's program, he replied, "if you start disrupting the natural, sclerotic flow of our decision-making, you abandon the best traditions of global governance. 

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, flanked by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, praised the IAEA decision and blasted the Obama administration's efforts to reverse the call. 

"This is just another example of the United States, with its Zionist cronies, attempting to subvert democratic decision-making with Western imperialist concepts like 'facts' and 'truth.'" 

In all seriousness, it is stunning how both FIFA and the International Olympic Committee manage to make other international organizations look uber-competent. 

Stanford Professor Jon C. Krosnick has an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times in which he argues that public skepticism about climate change in the United States has been way overblown: 

[N]ational surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.

But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.

In our survey, which was financed by a grant to Stanford from the National Science Foundation, 1,000 randomly selected American adults were interviewed by phone between June 1 and Monday. When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.

For many issues, any such consensus about the existence of a problem quickly falls apart when the conversation turns to carrying out specific solutions that will be costly. But not so here.

Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.

Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.

And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).

Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.

Our poll also indicated that some of the principal arguments against remedial efforts have been failing to take hold. Only 18 percent of respondents said they thought that policies to reduce global warming would increase unemployment and only 20 percent said they thought such initiatives would hurt the nation’s economy. Furthermore, just 14 percent said the United States should not take action to combat global warming unless other major industrial countries like China and India do so as well.

Krosnick goes on in the essay to debunk polling results suggesting contrary trends for all of the above statements -- except the one on burden-sharing with China and India, which is the observation that intrigues me the most. 

Krosnick's essay is a useful rejoinder to morose pessimism about climate change.  That said, methinks Krosnick's take on public demand for action on climate change is a bit overstated, for three interrelated reasons. 

First, Krosnick finds strong opposition to end-user taxation on carbon-emitting activities.  This suggests to me that there's less consenus on what exactly to do than Krosnick believes.  Furthermore, this opposition provides a political opening for opponents of climate change legislation to frame the issue in such a way as to generate opposition. 

Second, the partisanship on this issue is rising (cue Lindsey Graham, with a major assist from Harry Reid), as this CBS poll from last fall found:

The increase in climate skepticism is driven largely by a shift within the GOP. Since its peak 3 1/2 years ago, belief that climate change is happening is down sharply among Republicans -- 76 to 54 percent -- and independents -- 86 to 71 percent. It dipped more modestly among Democrats, from 92 to 86 percent. A majority of respondents still support legislation to cap emissions and trade pollution allowances, by 53 to 42 percent.

Opposition among the Republican mass public will mean that the issue will not generate groundswells of public opinion for action, as with financial regulation.  Unlike FinReg, this is not an issue on which the GOP will crumple like a pinata. 

Finally, despite Krosnick's assurances in the op-ed that climate skeptics have not influenced public attitudes about the phenomenom, his own experiments suggest that the more face time skeptics get, the more doubt they can sow: 

The news stories that respondents watched featured the views of only one skeptic and made no claims about the prevalence of such skeptical views. Nonetheless, respondents generalized from a single skeptic to scientists more generally, perceiving less agreement in the scientific community broadly. Our findings suggest that balanced news coverage may have been at least partly responsible for discrepancies between the American public and the scientific community on issues of climate change.

Still, read the whole thing. 

Last week I predicted that, contrary to expectaions, the Greek crisis would force the European Union to abandon their "muddling through" approach to security regulation volcanoes everything under the sun economic policy and start some serious centralization.  Not that this was a great option -- but all the other options were even less palatable. 

So, did the weekend package confirm my hunch?  Well, Anne Applebaum seems to think so: 

Though the European Union has always required a partial surrender of sovereignty from its member states, Greece no longer has much sovereignty at all. IMF agreements also impose conditions, but the language is somewhat different: The indebted country requests help, the IMF responds. In this case, the EU has decided what Greece "shall" do. I don't believe anybody knew that the EU had so much power over its member states, least of all the Greeks.

Well, yes, but on the overall question of the centralization of eurozone decision-making, I think the weekend's events actually prove me wrong.   Indeed, this New York Times story by Steven Erlanger, Katrin Bennhold, and David Sanger suggests that the member states have managed to come up with yet a new way to muddle through without arrogating power to the Commission: 

Germany was insisting on a solution that involved bilateral loans from European member states, similar to the much smaller Greek bailout agreed to a week earlier. But countries like Italy and Spain feared that they would be unable to raise the amounts required and lobbied for loan guarantees on funds raised by the European Commission.

As the evening unfolded, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands all opposed the commission’s proposal to raise money on capital markets guaranteed by member states. The British and Dutch said the proposal was tantamount to giving a “blank check” to the European Union’s governing commission, according to a European diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Near midnight Sunday night, the talks appeared deadlocked, these participants said. “The deal is exploding,” read the text message of one French official to Paris, where Mr. Sarkozy was demanding regular updates and was pushing for a bigger agreement.

Then came the deal-making idea — put together, according to different officials from different countries, by the French, the Italians, the Dutch and a crucial German banker.

Axel Weber, the president of the conservative Bundesbank, who is favored to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet as the next president of the European Central Bank, suggested a mechanism for Europewide loan guarantees that finally won support from a reluctant German government during a midnight call, participants said.

The idea was for a new mechanism euphemistically called “a special purpose vehicle” — essentially eurobonds created by intergovernmental agreement among euro zone countries. That vehicle, supposedly to last only three years, would raise up to 440 billion euros on the markets with loans and loan guarantees, depending on the need.

The Germans, together with other northern Europeans like the Dutch, British and Austrians, insisted that the European Commission not control the vehicle but only manage it — in conjunction, as with the Greek deal, with the International Monetary Fund. The fund would provide discipline, as well as roughly one euro for every two from Europe.

The “special purpose vehicle” finally broke the French-German deadlock.

Yeah, about that special purpose vehicle:

[F]or all the excitement about the scale of the effort, it is important to remember that the core fund does not now exist. The fund, known as a special purpose vehicle, would raise money by issuing debt and making loans to support ailing economies. The European countries would guarantee that fund.

So the package is merely a commitment for the vehicle to borrow money if a large economy like Spain, which represents 12 percent of the output in the euro zone, asks for assistance. The International Monetary Fund is pledging 250 billion euros to support the effort. Sixty billion euros under an existing lending program pushes the total to near $1 trillion.

The fund is therefore more a theoretical construct than the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was created in the United States, and that is where things get tricky.

By definition, if Spain came to a point where it could no longer finance itself, interest rates would be on the rise. The several hundred billion euros for the fund would not only come at a high cost, but would bring additional pain to already indebted countries like Portugal, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, which back the special purpose entity, thus compounding the region’s debt woes.

So, in other words, because Germany and others don't want to transfer either real power or real ability to borrow to the European Commission, the result is a jerry-rigged bailout fund that has some disturbing dynamics if things go further south.    

We'll see how the markets respond in the coming days and months.  For everyone's sake, I hope I'm wrong and the EU can muddle through.  But my fear is that this strategy is not going to be viable for that much longer. 

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner makes it pretty clear how he thinks the next few months will unfold with respect to China's exchange rate policy:

I  have decided to delay publication of the report to Congress on the international economic and exchange rate policies of our major trading partners due on April 15.  There are a series of very important high-level meetings over the next three months that will be critical to bringing about policies that will help create a stronger, more sustainable, and more balanced global economy.  Those meetings include a G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Washington later this month, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) with China in May, and the G-20 Finance Ministers and Leaders meetings in June. I believe these meetings are the best avenue for advancing U.S. interests at this time....

China's inflexible exchange rate has made it difficult for other emerging market economies to let their currencies appreciate.  A move by China to a more market-oriented exchange rate will make an essential contribution to global rebalancing. 

Our objective is to use the opportunity presented by the G-20 and S&ED meetings with China to make material progress in the coming months. 

In layman's terms, the Obama administration has decided that it will rely on multilateral pressure to get China to change its policy rather than take the unilateral route -- for now.  In blog terms, the administration rejected the Krugman/Bergsten/Schumer approach to pressuring China in return for... well... my preferred approach. 

Which automatically makes me nervous, of course, because I could easily be wrong.  Still, there have been signs that other members of the G-20 feel the same way as the United States.  And it's also true that the hour-long conversation between President Obama and President Hu seems to smoothed over a lot of recent contretemps.  Indeed, Nicholas Lardy told the New York Times that on Iran and North Kotrea the U.S. was getting a fair amount in return for deferring the report. 

A few Chinese central bankers and think-tankers are now making noise about movements on exchange rates.  Making this shift via G-20 and bilateral channels -- rather than in response to a Treasury finding of currency manipulation or Congressional threats of protectionism -- gives China a more politically palatable justification for policy change.  Beijing will likely move in the right direction, albeit more slowly than anyone else would like. 

And, if nothing happens from these meetings, China can be named in the fall.  Indeed, the paradox of two-level games is that there needs to a rising but manageable possibility of protectionist action by the United States to give China an incentive to alter their policy. 

In many ways, this is put-up-or-shut-up time for the G-20.  If the U.S. has no option but to name China, it starkly demonstrates the limits of the G-20 process at forcing policy coordination.  If, on the other hand, China pursues a more accomodationist approach, then that augments the G-20's prestige as a useful forum. 

Developing....

UPDATE:  Simon Lester has a round-up of reactions.