Harmonizing interests and values: an application for international affairs

Shahab Sabahi
Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

On May 1st 2012, Janos Martonyi Hungary’s foreign minister gave a quasi-exclusive lecture in the centre for European Study, Chulalongkorn University – Thailand. How Hungary would respond to the forces from the world order shift was the main topic of his lectured. He initially outlined the current world’s powers structure and analyzed the possible shapes of the world structure through evolutionary process. Although he tried to not speculate the future, he ended the lecture with contemplating the possible positions of Hungary in the new world order and supported his hypothesises with the effect of Hungary’s recent foreign policies in regional and national level.

“Value-Based Foreign Policy” was the core of Hungary’s doctrine, Dr. Martonyi’s pointed out. By the “Value-Based Foreign Policy”, he meant that Hungary’s goals would not be selected on an ad hoc basis, but would be a function of the important value sources such as the UN Charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, the Treaty on the European Union and of course Hungary’s constitution.

Commitments are the prime source of values. As the definition suggests, a value-based approach requires policies are formulated within the framework of commitments made at the first place. As the number of commitments rises, policy choices become narrow.

It raises a question and I got it for Mr. Martonyi. How does Hungary harmonize her national interests and values if there would be a conflict between them? Today it is the case of the European Union, from Greece, Italy to Spain. As a competent politician, he answered my question that the value based approach, in the realm of foreign policy,  should not inherently limit Hungary’s relations with countries that do not fully respect the values her country adhere to. He continued that the competition between values and interests would be a perpetual challenge for societies. In effect it means that policy choice again remains a contextual, and values except core values such as human rights, can be altered.     

Concerning international relations, it would be an easy task to rhetorically speak on an international objective, but adopting a collective policy to reach that objective would be hard. Individual nation’s interests and contexts influence nation’s response to policies. Certainly the social structures and relations are manmade and the values (again except the core values such as human rights) are open to reasoned critique about what is the most reasonable to do. Should a commitment to manmade values be treated in completely contextual terms? Or should interests and values be harmonized before thinking about commitments?     

To harmonize interests and values, general practice is to run a pros and cons analysis which is conforming to rationality and reality of the relevant circumstances. If there would not be institutional humps, this approach creates value based interests which would be an optimistic outcome.  Priorities and institutions may cause deeper interests and values divergence which jeopardize the success of the harmonization process.  In fact, commitments beyond the core values, unlike options, bound the ability of adaptation and decrease the resilience level.

So a value-based policy is only a catchphrase, if one misses to recognize the origin of values. It reminds me this quote “G. Kennan believed that language helped make policy and that vague, expansive language would lead to vague, expansive policy” (Ideas Man by Nicholas Thompson)  

Moral economy does not matter

Shahab Sabahi
Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

Maha Hosain Aziz in her article in CNN (April 19th 2012), analyzes the causes of Occupy Wall Street movements around the globe. She claims that at various points in the past six months, movements have been fighting for the same cause as the peasant communities of rural Vietnam during the 1930s - the moral economy. She explains that theorists have typically used moral economy rhetoric to explain rural movements where protesters felt their basic right to subsistence was being threatened. In the case of Vietnam, the onset of colonial capitalism in the Great Depression contributed to a food crisis for peasant farmers, prompting significant protests. In effect, an informal contract had been broken between the governing power and the governed involving the individual’s basic right to feed himself. She believes today, a similar “contract” has been broken between governing powers and the governed, thus the main causes of Wall Street Movements were beyond corporate greed and income inequality.

Her analysis and perspective is valid in the context of the Great Depression and the 1930s. Since then, the world has thoroughly got changed. People’s knowledge has advanced and it affected their worldview, perception of world affairs and their rights. The street movements are not just about demanding people’s basic right, such as work, affordable basic goods, and homes. They challenge the government dysfunctional bodies, lousy regulations and ineffective policies. They simply do not trust governments’ corporate –oriented policies.   

Unlike the Great Depression era, there is no a clash of ideologies in the Great Recession time. Now policy making process faces big challenges and should be restructured. Capitalism embraces the culture of change which drives societies toward growth. Some people accept both the joys and comforts of capitalism achievements and challenges posed by those achievements. Capitalism contains the element of creative destruction which creates winners and losers. The gap between winners and losers widen when governments fail to regulate based on facts and reality and instead intervene by giving ill visions and targets which are not inline with society well-being.        

Contrary to Maha, I see the street movements, in different locations, fight their own causes. But what they have in common is “they are fed up with fake government visions”.  

To conceptualize the main causes of the street movements, two macro-questions should be asked “What difference cultural variation would make to capitalism? and Which forms of embedding would be most successful in supporting the street movements' strategies for success in the context of capitalism? (if we admit the importance of economic growth!!)”

Conflict between what societies need and what societies want in our time may be the key barrier. Perhaps moral economy in the context of globalization, integrated markets falls short to provide adequate principles for designing effective global governance and global policies.

Ideology in Modernity and its future

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

The political scientist Sheri Berman has defined the post world war II order as something historically unusual. He observed “capitalism remained, but it was capitalism of a very different type from that which had existed before the war - one limited by the power of democratic state and often made subservient to the goals of social stability and solidarity rather than the other way around and it was social democracy”

It is general consensus that the rise of capitalism in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused erosion to traditional political and economic order in the western societies. The dominance of market relationships produced economic and social dynamism. The former was driven by the notion of material benefits and the latter got its boost from the idea of personal freedoms and a decrease in communal feeling. Liberalism, then, stressed the importance of the rule of law, limited government, and free commercial transactions. (Foreign Affairs volume 91, the basic question of modernity)

Up to the great depression and the world war II, liberalism was considered as a perfect ideology for basing political and economic systems upon it.

However the catastrophes following the two world wars and the great depression questioned the reliability of liberalism as a perfect ideology to guarantee social stability and economic growth.

Jan Muller, Francis Fukuyama and John Ruggie (Alexandre Kojeve, Hegel scholar) believe that ideology reaches its end in its enough perfect shape. This perfect shape includes mixed economics and democracy. Only systems which are organized around this ideology would be altered and modified in order to adapt with conditions and attitudes change.  In other words, policies and institutions go through an evolutionary process as contexts change.

True. Evidence supports what the scholars saw. Human beings put faith in policies and institutions for building better lives (if not saying creating better idea of life). However the international environment has been radically changed since the early 90s. World free trade, markets deregulation, easy money mobility, economy restructure, information revolution, the fast moving forward world, climate change and global competition are few realities which have changed the individual lifestyle, desires and the protocol of international relationships. The events caused changes in the concept of capitalism and democracy. 

Suppose we concede what Berman observed and the position scholars take in respect to ideology maturity, thus in order to deal with today’s problems,

“One should expect competence policymakers at jobs, who subscribe to realism and are able to come up with policies which promise stability and security in societies through economic equality and life quality”

Is it realistic to expect shaping strong global institutions? Can we expect Neo-Capitalism without contemporary bankers and their attitudes?

Scholars do not deny possibilities         

Where policy matters - Today’s troubles root in policy not principles

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

In political and social science journals, a general consensus is advertised that human beings have reached to best fitted and an effective ideology and need not any longer to develop new ones to model a better life. They also provide further explanations that this matured ideology, however, is dynamics and in progress while its framework remains intact.

They conclude that today’s troubles relate more to policies than principles. It holds true for energy, environment and development policies.

Despite the disagreement between scholars in science and economics in HOWs, the necessity of preservation of environment and economic growth are generally conceded by both. Yet there are no common principles to agree upon for policies development. It leads, as evidence shown up to this date, to confusion and therefore introduces ineffective policies in the realm of energy, environment and development.      

Scientists often view resource depletion and pollution as irreversible and inevitable results of growth in economic output as measured by gross domestic product (GDP). In contrast economists, based on some evidence which indicate economic growth might be necessary before a modern society, generally hold optimism about human’s ability to protect environmental quality and to keep the preservation of natural. They put their faith in ingenuity and adaptability of homo economicus and its ability to extend that ingenuity to the protection of its environment.

With a sole scientist’s perspective, environmental policies should be devised with regulating tools which could implicitly fine tune the economic growth policies. Economies should pay off externalities and clean up their mess by expending at environmental friendly programs. Also the natural resources should moderately be exploited.

Economists believe incentives in markets are the key focus. Technology policy and price instruments in policies can be designed in ways to protect the natural resources, and environments in minimum costs and at least distortion in the market decisions. They view the economic growth along with optimum paths. In this sense one may tag economists, “idealist” rather than “realist”.

Neither scientists could bring global collective actions, nor has the economist’s practice shown any improvement in the environment protection in the global scale      

The fact is, as long as a society is free from the threat of starvation and war, resources can be devoted to protecting and improving environmental quality and preserving remaining wilderness. In a volatile and vulnerable context, when nations compete each others to secure their resources and assure the availability of their supply in future, even with the means of trade-investment policy or aggression to extend beyond their states’ boundary, an economic incentive and scientific consensus and morality seems working less effective.

We should posit SECURITY and STABILITY as the most chief elements that influence the behaviour of human beings in today’s context. The existing international environmental policy has failed to live up the requirements of security and stability through a genuine collective action in the global scale.

Perhaps policies with focus on security, stability, and an effective distribution of wealth doctrine (downgrade from the global level to regional level) would be promising and push our growth toward the quality of life within an environmental friendly atmosphere.

Contrary to principle: Budget deficit reduction policy

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

For reducing budget deficits, governments face two policy choices, either reducing government spending such as health care or raising tax on rich. WHICH one is good?

There are many ways to judge the value of a policy target. To answer the above mentioned question we should answer to the essential questions. How can we distinguish between good and bad?

Utilitarian theory requires, which is one of the most dominant doctrines with stronghold in North America, a policy to maximize pleasures.

According to a utilitarian theory, it assumes that the rightness of an action depends entirely on the amount of pleasure it tends to produce and the amount of pain it tends to prevent. It describes the good not only as pleasure, but also as happiness, benefit, advantage. J. S. Mill particularly emphasizes the importance of pleasures. Thus the values of the consequences of an action are evaluated based on not only the quantity but also the quality of the action’s pleasure.

So if one accepts utilitarianism, its policy target must be set based on the greatest-happiness principle of majority as a standard of right and wrong. Hence, the Budget Deficit Reduction Policy should be judged as good if it improves the greatest happiness of the greatest number, by either increasing pleasure or decreasing pain.

The notion and motion that denies health care to the poor who outnumbers rich, is a BAD policy when it makes the majority unpleased.

By this standard: “should not deficit-reduction policy raise taxes on the very rich?” However one can sticks to only the collective cost-benefit numbers, so then the value judgment is not something it can justify at all on the basis of those numbers.

South-East Asia: policy challenge and social innovation issue

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development – Policy Analysis Research Group

The definition of social innovation still has to continue to evolve in South East Asia. Definitions and the field of action are in constant flux as the challenges of society change, so it makes it impossible to give one concise interpretation. (Hamalainen 2011) One may define social innovation, in the context of South East Asia, as new ways of reaching specific goals and they include, new organization forms, new regulations and new life styles that solve problems better than traditional practices do and that are worth imitating or institutionalizing.

Innovations in the social aspects have to change the direction of social development.

The most significant achievement and strength of an innovated society is its critical thinking education, small income disparities, little poverty, reciprocal altruism and the wide participation of citizens in political and economic life (some points from Sitra 2006).

In South East Asia the focus has been predominantly on export-oriented industrial growth and left behind environment and forest preservation, critical thinker development in universities, examining robust policy and planning for sustainable development with the use of new materials and functional technologies. In this part of the world, technological development and technological innovations are generally considered the pivotal point for socio-economic growth.

As yet South East Asia countries have no clear development strategy for social innovation. The area of social innovation will have to continue to evolve in order to improve the quality of life and the performance of society.

Their problems have to be tackled if they look forward to having stability and security.  The problems are: income raised and lose of competitiveness, entrepreneur and critical thinker shortage, environmentally degraded region, and more damage costs from natural disasters because of their poor infrastructures.

A part of entrepreneur shortage would be structural and now coexists with lack of motivation for cultivating critical thinker. Further issues are income disparities, huge poverty, healthcare and weak institutions and law enforcement and lack of attention to the importance of the infrastructure development.  

Innovation policy in the strong technical orientation is not enough, while the social dimension of innovation has been given less attention.

Thailand: Policy, Values, Floods

Shahab Sabahi

Energy and Environment for Development - Policy Analysis Research Group

The floods setback Thailand's economic growth this year and interrupt the comfort and normal lives of people. Thailand’s agricultures are ruined and it will cause a rise in the global rice market prices. The disaster has also forced up global prices of computer hard drives and disrupted global auto production after the flooding of industrial estates in the central provinces (Reuters Oct.2011)

Looking beyond the social pains which caused by the floods, from economic perspective, a sum of $13 billion budget deficit has been targeted for this fiscal year from Oct. to help with the recovery.

Some blames on Bangkok’s fast growth and its foundation on the flood-risked plain (Sawai Boonma, economist in Thailand) and others advocate the idea of misconduct in irrigation, water management and lack of dams and water storage capacity.

The role that dams play in the flood management is being debated among experts. However the fact is that eleven of Thailand's twenty six major dams currently contain water beyond their nominal capacity, and the rests are 90 to 99 percent "full". (Oct. 2011 ASIA NEWS)

The Chao Phraya River which snakes through Bangkok to the gulf of Thailand was recently flowing at a rate of 4,344 cubic meters per second.

The mighty Chao Phraya River on Oct 29th 2011 in the high tides

Given the above mentioned figures and add the increasing demand for electricity, water, lands and mitigating the risk of floods, the construction of new dams is inevitable. Despite Thailand has substantial untapped potential for large scale hydropower, its use is limited due to strong public opposition and green activists to large storage dams (IEA 2009)

The opposition claims that the large dams will displace the indigenous farmers in the river banks and destroy the forests and natural resources.

It is worth to note that city dwellers as well as farmers displaced since the floods began in July, claimed many lives and put many factories in trouble to pump out waters. They could face the same fate when the floods roll around again.  

It makes one thinks over:

SHOULD the Thailand government set its priority for constructing new dams and infrastructures simultaneously to address increasing demands of energy, and the flood mitigation efforts?

SHOULD oppositions think over their rationales and take different perspective and see the environmental issues from a broader angle?  

SHOULD the development plans be relaxed for the sake of environments or should we revise our consumption pattern?

Dears,………!!!