Your thesis suggestion for the day

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - 9:17 AM

Pssst… international relations majors and masters students. Having a hard time coming up with a BA or MA thesis topic? Worried that too many of your friends are writing about Wikileaks?

Here's a fun little project, courtesy of the Financial Times' Andrew Ward and Geoff Dyer:

China's campaign to boycott this year's Nobel Peace Prize was shown to have had some success after 18 countries joined Beijing in declining invitations to Friday's award ceremony for Liu Xiaobo, a jailed democracy activist.

Russia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and Pakistan are among 19 countries, including China, that have declined invitations to the prize-giving.

The Norwegian Nobel committee has accused Beijing of applying "unprecedented" pressure on countries to boycott the Oslo ceremony, amid Chinese anger over the award to the jailed dissident.

The other absentees are expected to be Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco, according to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which is organizing the ceremony....

Ambassadors from all countries with embassies in Oslo are invited to the ceremony each year. As of Tuesday, 44 countries had indicated they would be represented on Friday.

Two countries - Algeria and Sri Lanka - had not replied.

It was not clear that all 19 absentees were staying away because of China but the Nobel Institute said the number of expected no-shows was higher than usual.

In 2008, for example, when the prize was won by Martti Ahtisaari, a relatively uncontroversial Finnish politician, 10 embassies were not represented at the ceremony for various reasons (emphases added).

OK, here's your thesis topic: what were the key factors that determined a country's decision not to attend Lu's Nobel ceremony? How much of this was due to Chinese pressure, how much was due to ideological affinity with the Chinese regime, and how much was due to the ambassador's spouse renting The Expendables on Netflix and absolutely needing to watch it that night?

The obvious variables to consider are alliance patterns, regime type, trade with/aid from China, proximity to Beijing, and maybe a corruption measure. That said, if you look at the list of all foreign embassies in Oslo, there are some interesting questions to ask. Why is Thailand attending but not the Philippines? Why is Colombia joining Venezuela in not attending? Why is Vietnam, an enduring rival of China, allying with China on this issue?

Go to it, students! And check out the lively comments that I'm sure will be posted down below that provide additional hypotheses. And remember, "A day without social science is like a day without sunshine."

UPDATE: Reuters does some preliminary field work. The most interesting and candid admission:

Embassies are not required to explain why they accept or decline a Nobel invitation, but a senior Filipino diplomat spoke candidly, underlining China's growing power, especially in Asia.

"We do not want to further annoy China," he said.

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Iceland's conspiracy complex

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Saturday, August 15, 2009 - 2:23 PM

For reasons that will soon become clear, your humble blogger has been reading up on Iceland's financial boom and bust in recent years. So I noted with interest that yesterday, Iceland's Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir took to the pages of the Financial Times to vent about her country's treatment at the hand of big countries... like the Netherlands. See if you can spot the contradiction in her statements:

In its efforts to conclude negotiations over compensation for foreign savers in failed banks, Iceland has been accused of a tendency to imagine a British or Dutch conspiracy behind any bad news.
Iceland has no such tendency. It is battling the effects of severe banking and currency crises and a recession that is affecting our part of the world as much as any other. My government, which took over in February and gained a majority in general elections in May, has to deal with the aftermath of the fall of nearly all of Iceland’s privatised banking sector....
The FT has reported how the Dutch opposed the IMF lending to Iceland in order to enforce their demands on Icesave [an online bank headquartered in Iceland that attracted upwards of 300,000 British and Dutch depositors--DD], claiming the UK and Germany as allies. The perception is that Treasury officials in the UK and the Netherlands used their bargaining power against a much weaker party when the Icesave deal, now being debated in the Icelandic parliament, was struck.
This has made it difficult for Iceland’s government to convince the parliament and Icelanders that an agreement on Icesave accounts with the UK and the Netherlands is un-avoidable.

Here's the funny thing -- if you click on the link from the FT about how the Dutch are using the IMF to put the screws on Iceland, you get this story which sources those suspicions to.... Icelandic officials. The story also goes on to say that, "The view in London is that Iceland has a tendency to imagine a British or Dutch conspiracy behind any bad news."

To be fair to Sigurðardóttir, she wasn't in power when Iceland got itself into this mess. Furthermore, Iceland did have help getting into this mess -- reading up, it's clear that EU banking regulations are even more screwed-up than US banking regulations. And it wouldn't stun me if the Dutch were putting the screws on Iceland.

Still, reading up on the mess in Reykjavik, it is truly stunning how little Icelanders seem to blame themselves for their current plight (and how much they thought their run of success was completely deserved). The fault always seems to lie with cabals of hedge funds, rating agencies, foreign central bankers, etc.

Iceland has had its share of bad luck, and until recently had a political class that was by far the most incompetent in the OECD area (and the competition in this arena is admittedly intense). Still, reading Sigurðardóttir's op-ed, I can see why Henry Kissinger once described Iceland as the most arrogant small country he had ever encountered.

COMMENTS (7)

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