Columbia Political Review May 2010

May 2010 1

hope for somalia insha’allahdecoding the factions

by mark hay

borderline dysfunctional by david spencer seconiinnovating drug enforcement at the us-mexico border

A Publication of the Columbia Political Union

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW

cpr

the trouble with quotas by mallika narainshattering the glass ceiling, welding a glass floor

2 COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW cpreview.org

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volume ix, no. 4cpr

Editor’s NoteAs the final issue of CPR was going to press, volcanic ash was still

spewing out of the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland and bringing much of our globalized world to a relative standstill. When I first heard the news, I couldn’t help but laugh. The idea of ash covering huge swathes of land was simply ludicrous to me. The idea conjured up paintings of Pompeii from my middle school Latin textbook. Seeing an eerily similar photographs grace the New York Times homepage, I felt a weird sense of déjà vu. At the same time, I thought to myself, “Oh, Iceland. Leave it up to that eccentric Nordic country to go officially bankrupt, to harness geothermal energy—and to give us Björk (in a ridiculous swan dress, no less).” The volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, whose name only added to the absurdity, was just another confirmation of my very simplified view of the country.

While time and again we fall into the essentialist trap, we still try to remain skeptical of our pre-conceptions, and rightly so. In our cover story (p. 6), Mark Hay brings to our attention the politico-religious situation in Soma-lia so that we might not relegate it to hopeless abandonment in our minds. He asks us to bring Somalia back onto our moral radars—not simply through images of Josh Hartnett in Black Hawk Down, but through a more nuanced understanding of its recent past. He urges the Obama administration not to engage Islam in Somalia as if it were a monolith. He suggests that, instead, the US government identify and begin to support (in a delicate fashion) the relatively liberal and popular clerics that do, in fact, exist.

In many ways, Mark’s article is written very much in the tenor and spirit of CPR. As much as possible, we try to fill a journalistic niche on this campus by bringing oft-ignored or Columbia-specific issues to the fore. While the surfeit of publications on campus can be overwhelming, we at CPR hope that this magazine serves as a unique forum for discussion among students—and maybe even a site of intellectual discovery. We hope that you continue to read CPR as it evolves under Mark Hay’s leadership next year. Please consider developing a piece of your very own over the summer (which is now so close you can smell it), and, while you’re at it, try pronouncing Eyjafjallajokull.

CATHERINE CHONG

May 2010 3

MAY.2010table of contents

humor 4 The Challengers!

By Nina Pedrad

cover story

6 Hope for Somalia Insha’Allah Decoding the factions By Mark Hay

features

12 Borderline Dysfunctional Innovating drug enforcement on the US-Mexico border By David Spencer Seconi

16 Hanging in the Balance Life after Gordon Brown

By Henry Wells

20 The Trouble With Quotas Shattering the glass ceiling, welding a glass floor

By Mallika Narain

culture

24 Marx Brothers

By Tim Barker

26 A Modern Look at the American Family By Bryan Lowder

first person 29 Marriage of Identities

By Yuan Yuan Wang

COVER ART BY ANNE PARK

THE CHALLENGERS!By Nina Pedrad, with Photo Art by Anne Park

humor


“Don’t make me angry. You won’t like me when I’m angry,” spat Karl. He’d be damned if he let some senile old waiter bring out a tray of canapes without doilies. Without doilies! Might as well ration the butter and sleep with Stalin’s corpse.

Headquarters were icy, just the way he liked it. Usually they met in the hollowed-out center of a melting glacier, but because of tonight’s event a hotel kitchen freezer would have to do. The Pretty Boy, the Moody One, the Dummy, and the Best. All hand-picked by him to run. All strong armed by him to win.

Karl spent as long choosing the candidates as he did selecting the guests for tonight’s fundraiser. Only the crustiest of upper society were invited. They’d pay up, they knew how important it was. These midterm Senate elections were everything. If they could break the Democrats, really slice ‘em up and scatter their remains over M Street, then they’d put an end to this “hope” trash spoon fed to the iPod generation. With the cold, soft money

of wealthy America in his pocket he could takeover the world! Post-colonial countries would prove challenging, he knew that, but he’d placate them with Coke and How I Met Your Mother. They’d bear their allegiance in no time.

Then he’d finally get the respect of the man he yearned for.

Karl focused back on the task at hand. He knew at a certain point tonight the fundraiser would be out of his hands and onto the shoulders of four men. His marionettes, the hand-picked team: The Challengers.

With their powers combined they could raise enough money in one night to bankroll fifty mudslinging ads —per battleground state.

Across the room he caught Steele sex-eyeing the bartender.

“Michael, guests arrive in five. Do as I said and round up the team. Don’t flirt. And do not under any circumstances pull out those shirts,” snarled Karl. Last week Steele showed up to a fundraiser with t-shirts of his face that proclaimed: “light black is the new black.”

Karl ripped out a flower from a nearby hotel arrangement and smashed it between his palms. It felt good.

No one would ruin tonight for him. No one.

Steele burst in to his freezer. “They’re all assembled! Dick’s on his way.” Steele’s hands were raw and red. Karl worried briefly, then remembered that he didn’t care about Steele. Not tonight, anyway.

They filed in, one-by-one, each shorter and whiter than the last. Scotty Brown first, wearing some god forsaken

pleather tie and that shit eating grin. Pat Toomey next, still shell shocked that he was endorsed, much less invited. Then the white knight, the crown jewel of his recruitment efforts and the man to put a stake in the heart of Biden D e l e w a r e , Mr. Mike Castle. John B o o z m a n f o l l o w e d closely on

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his heels, slower than the rest and smelling vaguely of Sour Patch Kids and brandy. Then, finally, Dick. His brother, his confidant, his best friend, his sometimes more than best friend ... He looked great today, but that didn’t surprise Karl. Dick always looked great.

Boozman sat criss-cross applesauce on the floor. Scotty grabbed a chunk of ice off the wall to smooth his side part with it. The team looked around, breathing in the familiarity of it all. Once Karl felt ready, he began. “The time has come, gentlemen—”

The freezer door burst open and a woman with bright blue eyeshadow toppled in. “Sorry I’m late, boys! Traffic was murder.”

Linda “WWE Nightmare” McMahon. “Linda, I told you you’re not invited. We don’t want you. Your own state barely wants you.” She looked too much like Kate Gosslin to be taken seriously as a candidate. Or a person.

“I brought $100 million, and I’m willing to arm wrestle for more.” Well, that changed things. Linda took a seat on a frozen pile of pork.

Dick cleared his throat. “Any final questions?” asked Karl. Toomey raised his hand, cowering. “They—they like us, right?” Mike chuckled, “Of course they like us, Patrick! We’re the good guys. We clean up the streets.” “Bus the homeless away!” added Boozman. “Look out for the big guys,” said Scotty.

That’s right. Dance, my little marionettes, dance. Karl reminded them they were all

heros in the eyes of God and President Reagan. They

heard John Ashcroft warbly belting “America the Beautiful” in the ballroom.

It was time. Karl brought them in for a huddle. “You get out there and you charm.

Do you hear me? Charm!” Powerful silence followed as they prayed to God and President

Reagan for the strength to carry out this most important of missions.

Dick spoke for the first time all night: “Now, go make us money.” The team cheered, whooped, and USA-chanted their way out of the freezer.

Karl got shivers. There was something so ... sensual about Dick’s lips.

Karl watched the Challengers station themselves. They turned to him. He made the agreed upon hand motion (a flying dove) to signal the commencement of Operation Benjamins. Scotty flirted with desperate women and men in skinny ties. Toomey talked to old people. Boozman played with children under four. Castle worked everyone else. Smiling, laughing, it was going well! He didn’t even care that Linda was arm wrestling Rush Limbaugh.

And then it happened. Right before Mike’s opening speech, Steele happened.

Mike was clearing his throat at the podium when Steele jumped out from behind him holding up a self-promotional t-shirt and shouting “50 boxes on sale in the black! I mean back!” His hands were raw from carrying all those boxes! Mike immediately began apologizing. He would have had a decent shot at saving it if Scotty hadn’t push him aside to deliver a monologue from Top Gun in an effort to fix things himself.

All the commotion only made Toomey more melancholy so he started crying, which scared the old people he was with, so much so that one man suffered a heart attack. Boozman took the old man’s convulsions as a sign that he needed a hug, so he squeezed the poor geezer till he turned green. Things got pretty hazy after the cops arrested Boozman for manslaughter.

John Ashcroft came back on stage, this time with a patriotic rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

All the singing made Karl miss Dick. They locked eyes from across the room. One end of Dick’s lips curled up. Karl swooned at this, until he realized Dick was staring at Paul Wolfowitz. Karl knew he was being toyed with, but he didn’t care. He lived for Dick’s tender caress.

Then, just then, the rail-thin body of a graying man burst in from the ballroom double doors. “Muahaha!” The crowd gasped. Harry Reid! With him were one-hundred dirty hippies and the Ghost of Ted Kennedy. “Show’s over, Challengers!” Reid said. “The Majority has arrived.” The hippies charged. The rich people clutched their cutlery in fear. It. Was. War.

Stay tuned for the fall edition of The Challengers!

Nina Pedrad, CC ’11, is double concentrating in History and Political Science. She hopes to pursue a career in going rogue after graduation. She can be reached at [email protected].

humor


By Mark Hay

HOPE FOR SOMALIA INSHA’ALLAHDecoding the factions

Whenever Americans recall Somalia, whether considering lofty foreign policy aims or simply reflecting upon the chance encounter with the name, our minds inevitably snap back to October 3, 1993 and the tragedy that was the Battle of Mogadishu. This is a memory of eighteen U.S. soldiers lying senselessly dead and desecrated, one even decapitated, in the streets of a hostile city. Given the striking clarity with which Black Hawk Down has memorialized the chaos and the horror of this battle, it is no surprise that the trauma remains fresh in our collective consciousness. At the time, the shock of this loss and the seemingly intractable and inhuman belligerence and disorder of the nation compelled the U.S. and all other foreign forces to withdraw. Somalia did not fit with the spirit of the times, the notions of how intervention and aid was to be conducted. After 1993, Somalia dropped off the map of U.S. foreign policy, relegated to a distasteful and repressed memory, and no one has been able to make a great case for a return.

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Illustration

by Constance Castillo

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HAUNTING MEMORIES OF A DEVIL’S DANCE

Over the past seventeen years, we have only heard of Somalia intermittently, and usually only when a new gust of vio-lence cuts a swath of death across a new section of the nation. Our dimmed moral radar pings for a moment and we release a secondhand story. But we only report in-somuch as to bare vague witness to a cau-tionary tale of state failure and to lament the flogging of the corpse of a nation that, we believe, cannot be resurrected. Soma-lia, many argue, cannot be helped, at least not easily enough to merit the effort, and perhaps it does not want to be helped.

This latter pessimistic argument holds sway with a number of promi-nent policy generators, among them the Brookings Institute, which argued as late as February of this year that Somalia would have to be reconstructed complete-ly to attain order as “no single faction has a monopoly on violence [and …] the vari-ous factions have no interest in a well or-ganized sovereign state.” As the argument runs, force in Somalia operates along clan lines, regionalized by warlords, who have found that they can generate massive amounts of cash and power by extorting a small population under fear of punish-ment from within and invasion from with-out. The fracture also makes it easier for individual agents to sign contracts to sell out their nation, enabling the dumping of foreign waste, overfishing in Somali wa-ters, environmentally damaging charcoal burning, and a host of other profitable, ra-pacious practices.

But this gloomy belief that no force seeks the unity and peace we dream of is blatantly false. Doors to peace have been opening and closing for years. But recogni-tion of these opportunities has been ham-pered, as was so artfully articulated by J. Peter Pham, Director of the Africa Project at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, by “wholesale ignorance … both with respect to Somali culture and history and Somali political developments over the last two decades.” Parsing the his-tory of the past twenty years, though, and pulling out the few lines of consistency from the tangle, we find a host of forgot-ten or overlooked actors. And in these ac-tors, one begins to suspect, may be a hope for peace in Somalia.

A HOPELESS HISTORY?

In 1991, the centralized and militaris-tic regime of Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre (r. 1969-1991) finally collapsed. To mark 1991 as a massive shift in Somalia’s character, though, would be false. Although Barre did manage for many years to impose his erratic will through great fear, abuse and the typical Cold War proxy state aid, his iron control had been slipping throughout the 1980s as he faced increasing pressure from impromptu mobs turned militias swarming in from abused clans and ideologies, includ-ing Islamic movements—all of which pro-vides a brief prelude to the heterogeneous power struggle that would ensue. By 1991, Barre, alone in Mogadishu, fell from power at the hands of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, and an attempt was made to find a more nationally suitable leader for the gov-ernment in the form of Ali Mahdi Muham-mad, a businessman and member of the prominent Hawiye clan of Mogadishu. But when Aidid continued to confront Ali Mahdi in bitter, yet petty and limited warfare, the world was forced to recognize that Somalia’s government had, without the bleak fanfare usually accorded to such events, keeled over and died. An era of fractured warlord rule and civil war ensued.

Brief attempts were made fourteen times (or at least fourteen times recog-nized by the U.S. State Department) by a series of European, American and African co-operations to encourage the recreation of a national, united Somali government. They were made all the more pressing by the attempted (some would say de facto complete) secession by the relatively stable northern province of Somaliland and the self-decreed autonomy of the province of Puntland. Finally, in November 2004, a fif-teenth conference created the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which was granted recognition by the United Nations and the African Union and all but officially declared legitimate by the United States as the legitimate government of Somalia.

But no one elected the TFG, and a brief examination of the organization reveals that it is just another band of greedy war-lords, only with offices and U.S. backing. Yet, they have actually been less successful than their fellow petty despots.

To call this a warlord front is hardly hyperbole. The first president of the TFG, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, came to the po-

sition directly from his throne as strong-armed ruler of Puntland and took with him much of the blunt force and muscle he had used to rule. For most of its existence, the TFG has controlled little more than the south-central inland city of Baidoa, and at times parts of Mogadishu, and has squan-dered the hundreds of millions of dollars granted to it by the outside world. Despite years of siege, they fund only a tiny mili-tia. Instead, they use the cash for nepotism and self-adulation, keeping on full salary a Minister of Higher Education, Minister of Education, Minister of Sports, and Minis-ter of Tourism, despite the absence of the administration’s possession of any of these entities.

Graft seems to be the best allegation one can file against the TFG—at its worst, it has been alleged by Pham and others that small arms provided to the government by the U.S. were simply sold on the black mar-ket, possibly to competitor warlords. Simi-larly, in 2007, Human Rights Watch revealed that the TFG was culpable for the needless deaths of hundreds of civilians that year with little to no purpose or gain to show for the practice. Yet the Bush administration and its allies saw fit to continue to fund what The Economist has referred to as “some of Mogadishu’s worst warlords,” including the TFG, always insisting that the government just needed a little more support. And to an extent that attitude continues to prevail, as seen in a recent conclusion by Hady Amr and Areel Noor of the Brookings Institute: “Is the TFG the best potential route to sta-bility in Somalia? For now, no other option is on the table.” Beyond the walls of Baidoa, no one offered anything other than region-alism, clanism and violence, or at least that was our limited view.

STRANGE WORLDS BEYOND BAIDOA

Beyond and behind the warlords and the TFG, though, there existed a series of local Islamic courts, springing up almost simulta-neously in the early 1990s to restore order in areas men with guns merely patrolled and pilfered. One only finds slight glimpses of their activities in the background of re-ports from that time, but according to Eben Kaplan of the Council on Foreign Relations, they grew silently and “became increasingly popular because they demonstrated their ability to provide some semblance of order.” As time passed by, these individual courts,

May 2010 7


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mainly drawn up along the clan territorial divisions that had traditionally separated communities, gained broad support from local leaders. But forced to contend with warring factions for order, they developed Islamic militias. These courts and their militias coalesced into what become the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a force led politically by Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, who espoused a somewhat conservative shariah law for the nation, and spiritually by Hassan Dahir Aweys, a grizzled veteran with ties to Al-Qaeda and radical Islam.

The courts pushed up from their bas-es towards Mogadishu through the early 2000s, eventually taking the city and solidi-fying its control of the south by 2006. After the initial capture of the city, reports came in of the imposition of the veil, behandings, and other such unsavory practices, and the U.S. took the message—radical Muslims with guns and vague, possible ties to Al-Qaeda were taking over an unstable region. However, as was noted by The Economist, our original fears were overwrought and mainly motivated by slanted information provided by the Ethiopian government, a nation with old territorial rivalries with Somalia. In fear, the U.S. gave the green light for an Ethio-pian invasion (as was readily recognized in American news sources as early as January, 2007), welcomed by the TFG, but not the Somali people, who, according to a panel of thirteen Somali intellectuals gathered at the onset of the invasion, were “very fearful of the agendas of Ethiopia and other foreign powers.” Subsequently, one of Africa’s larg-est and most modern armies surged over a series of ill-trained, tiny, and predominantly disarmed militias and handily torched them to the ground. Meanwhile the TFG sat in their palaces, not taking the initiative to move into opened spaces and allowing cha-os and anarchy to descend into the vacuum. Yet this raises the question, if the UIC de-feated, via violent jihad, the warlords we could not, why was it so easy to defeat them and why were they so few and so poorly armed?

The answer is that foreign observers made one of the most presumptive and pa-tronizing mistakes possible—we considered Islam as a monolithic entity and made the supposition that a grassroots group that had triumphed where we had not necessar-ily meant that the bulk of the populous was aligned behind a fiercely hostile form of Is-lam. We assumed that much of the popula-tion had been radicalized and that we had a

Taliban part deux in the making and were determined to nip it in the bud.

THEIR LAW IS NOT THE LAW

In truth, the character of Islam in So-malia had always been, and was at that point, extremely personal and moderate. Actually, it was often noted up until the UIC came to power (but most heavily in late 2001, in response to some Western Is-lamophobia of understandable origins) that the traditional social code of Somalia was actually much harsher than their relaxed and popular brand of Sufi mysticism. Indeed, the limited depictions available of the early courts show instances of liberal scriptural interpretations, based on the Shafi’i school of fiqh (Is-lamic jurisprudence), so prominent in Somalia, and their practice of ijma (roughly translated as consensus). This doctrine, based in hadith, argues from the mouth of Muhammad that the community of Islam shall never agree upon an error, and, though intended to require consensus by every Muslim in the world (some argue), it has translated down to the practice of making rulings based on local community con-sensus as almost equally im-portant to those based on the Qur’an and hadith. This is of great importance given how vague some passages of scrip-ture can be (or can be made by figurative language, the doctrine of abrogation, and any number of other intensely murky debates on deciphering the Qur’an). For instance, ijma has been used to argue success-fully against behandings for theft, rath-er noting that it is equally likely that the language of scripture means merely to leave a mark on the hand to identify a potential shoplifter, but not to sever the limb.

Although ijma could be used to justify more disturbing or restrictive practices, “historically,” Kaplan claims, “Somalis have been resistant to more extreme forms of Is-lam.” Most of the existing courts at the time of Ethiopian invasion were actually work-ing against involuntary veiling, allowed the drinking of alcohol, and sponsored city works like hospitals and some of the nation’s only schools, which were welcoming to boys and girls alike in the same classroom. Busi-

Illustration by Constance Castillo

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nessmen supported these courts for the stability they created and also because their relatively liberal slant allowed money to flow freely (other schools of fiqh can leave much less room for free action, and perhaps only Hanafi provides a more liberal view). Even in Mogadishu, where the greatest austerity took hold under the conservative leader-ship, the rule of the clerics is remembered as a golden age—one report by The Econo-mist published on October 12, 2006, recalls

the era: “The port and airport have reopened. Prices in markets have

dropped. The streets are being cleaned. Divided neighbor-hoods are being knitted back

together. There has even been an attempt to limit the environmen-tally devastating charcoal trade … Kidnappings and murder have declined.” And even the auster-ity was fading by the time the city was overtaken—Somalis began to reject harsh punishments and to look to the rulings of alternative

courts, exercising their rights under the decentralized system of Islamic justice that can, if

given space and freedom, pop up in populated areas to find alternative rulings to over-turn the crazier sentences. Even the majority of the leadership was coming to accept this popular senti-ment and reject extreme

hardline sentences.

AL-SHABAAB RISES, THE WORLD FUMBLES

That the people should choose conservative leaders, then, seems

strange, but the explanation is rather simple. Awyes, a spiritual leader, but also a national hero of sorts, was a practical focal point for the UIC, but had ties to militant and restrictive brands of Islam, like Saudi Wahhabi. The Saudis, argues Robert Rot-berg of Harvard’s Program on International Conflict and Conflict Resolution, caught onto this fact and donated the money that “was one of the driving forces that led to the formation of the UIC.” Similar allegations have been leveled that other radical Arab Is-lamists funneled money to select, minority clerics, giving them the power and author-ity to unite all of the nation’s courts around them. But, as was reported in The Economist,

the essential mistake of these hardliners was to insist on confrontation even after the South was taken, rather than, as the major-ity wished, negotiate peace—in the words of The Economist’s correspondent, “many mod-erates thus refused to fight,” explaining the weakness and disorganization of the Islamic militants and the massive resent of the pop-ulation, aimed against the Ethiopians and the TFG, at their removal.

One small portion of the UIC escaped destruction, and it was unfortunately un-characteristically radical—Harakat al-Shabaab Mujahideen, commonly known as al-Shabaab, the youth wing of the Islamist militia, which hid itself in the difficult ter-rain of the Kenyan border. Hatred of the Ethiopians, in conjunction with the corrup-tion and ineptitude of the TFG, granted al-Shabaab the time to regroup. This disgrun-tled bunch of impressionable youths proved far too tempting for Al-Qaeda agents, who began training the group in Iraq-style insur-gent tactics and bolstering their ranks with an unknown number of foreign radical fight-ers (somewhere between a few hundred or a couple thousand). Partially funded by Al-Qaeda and partially by Eritrea in an effort to hurt their Ethiopian rivals (regardless of the harm to Somalia), al-Shabaab has been able to pay a salary reported at between $100-150 monthly, complete with family protec-tion, benefits, and burial cost. Al-Shabaab, then, is composed of a few hardliners and many, like unit leader Mukhtar Robow, who are poor, discontented, and confused, as revealed by the twisted wish of Robow on Eid al-Adha: “How sweet it would be at Eid, he told the gathering, if instead of slaugh-tering an animal in praise of Allah, they would slaughter an Ethiopian.” This force has taken back the bulk of the territory the Ethiopians wrested from the UIC, now that the Ethiopians are gone, leaving Somalia to face a force larger, more heavily armed, more radical and violent that that which it attempted to expel.

Unfortunately, Obama has responded to this recent development by simply sup-porting the TFG once more, although this time on the mistaken pretense of working with popular Islamic movements towards peace. The beleaguered TFG recognized recently that it could not fight the rising tide of Islam and so “elected” Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, former leader of the UIC, as their new president when he merged his “moderate” Islamist organization, the Alli-ance for the Reliberation of Somalia, with


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the TFG to bolster support for the govern-ment among popular Islamic groups against al-Shabaab. But no matter how much the TFG attempts to appeal to Islamic senti-ments, it has been too sullied by its con-nection with Ethiopia and other foreign powers. Forget that Ahmed’s shariah does not agree with that of the majority (among other distasteful elements, Pham notes, it would call for the execution of any con-verting away from Islam), but he is now by connection to the TFG viewed as a Western proxy. As an anonymous Somali NGO direc-tor noted earlier this year, the TFG has been so tainted that “Muhammad the prophet could be in change and the result would be the same.” And Ahmed has been notoriously uncooperative with U.S. actors since he took his seat on January 31, 2009. Yet still, as late as October 2009, chairman of the Africa Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives Donald Payne urged Obama to “recognize the TFG and allow the opening of an official Somali Embassy in Washing-ton.” In the words of Pham, “the muddled message seems to be ‘we will arm you in the

hope that you make something of yourself because we don’t have any other ideas at the moment, but we won’t recognize you [fully] just in case you utterly embarrass us.’” But there is another option, both to eliminate al-Shabaab and to restore order in the na-tion without the TFG.

MINDING THE GROWING GAPS

Amr and Noor mention that some time towards the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010, “a rivalry surfaced between Al Shabaab [sic] and Hizbul Islam,” a formally friendly

Islamist party, with some claims that mem-bers of both organizations have broken off and joined the TFG. Amidst this fracturing of the most destabilizing and threatening groups, at the end of March al-Shabaab overstepped its grounds and pushed the bulk of Muslims in Somalia too far when they desecrated the graves of Sufi elders and mystics in pursuit of their hardliner aims. The result has been the formation of a Sufi militia, Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama, cur-rently blocking the advance of al-Shabaab, denouncing their brand of Islam, and pro-moting traditional, liberal Sufi values. Un-fortunately, unable to find the money to provide themselves with defense materi-als and organizational supplies, members of Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama have been forced to sign agreements with the TFG, sullying their name in the process, to get a chunk of international cash. But, as Pham notes, the distaste of working with the TFG has grown too strong and already they are distancing themselves—though how fatal this has been to the movement’s credibility remains to be seen.

Illustration byConstance Castillo

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But Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama still proved a few things: the truly moderate Islamic courts still exist, despite fears that al-Shabaab may have purged all clerics who were not hard-liners, and they still command massive popular support, having organized on short notice the largest protests Somalia has seen in ages. The task, then, is to recognize that supporting such clerics, acknowledging that they are not radicals, but instead are popu-lar, relatively liberal, and open to systems amenable to our American sensibilities of democracy and capitalism, is an option. The next task is to realize that giving money di-rectly to these organizations would be dan-gerous, as there is no central organization among all of them so some might use an al-lotment peaceably, while others would use it to dominate the rest. And we have seen the damage our money and name can do to an organization’s legitimacy and popularity through our experiences with the TGF and other Somali parties. So, we must devise a means of supporting these positive clerics without directly giving them military or fi-nancial aid and without allowing them to be immediately crushed by their internation-ally funded opposition. It may seem like a hopeless task, but actually there is a way to go about it.

SOLUTIONS WORTH A PONDER

The financial aspect of the equation may be accomplished simply by restoring the means by which individuals in the U.S. can donate to such organizations. Perhaps twenty-five to forty percent of some local Somali economies at one point came from remittances granted by the relatively well-off Somali Diaspora community. But in No-vember 2001, in fear of Americans funding (accidentally or intentionally) international terrorism, we forced a freeze on Al-Barakat, the money transfer company that handled most of the remittance transfers from the West into Somalia. Only recently was the Swedish branch restored, but the rest re-main blacklisted with their assets frozen. Perhaps restoring these funds would quash some of the economic incentives for join-ing radical organizations. Also, granted that this money would go to individuals, more money in the hands of pious citizens could increase support for local, liberally-minded clerics. Likewise, after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration led investigations into, closures of, and continued wiretap-pings and abuses of the rights of Muslim

charities, resulting in massive decreases in donations. These donations oversaw pro-grams that could better insure humanitar-ian aid delivery, operating through local Muslim grounds, and increase dialogue between schools of fiqh, hopefully encour-aging dissent against radicalism. But dona-tions have never recovered their pre-2001 levels as, although invasive practices have abated, people still fear scrutiny.

All this suggests that the U.S. must be prepared to engage with Islam to engage

with Somalia, but must recognize that di-plomacy with Islam cannot be treated as diplomacy with a monolithic entity, nor can it always be addressed in the same way as political diplomacy. Perhaps it is time that the U.S. consider training religion attachés in embassies, prepared to engage with local religious groups in their own language and on their own level, creating a more popular and acceptable dialogue with major local actors.

In the meanwhile, we will have to work

on taking away the sources of power moving to bolster al-Shabaab and other destabiliz-ing elements. This would entail confronting the Saudi Wahhabi movements, Eritrea, and others on their funding of extremists. En-couraging the deployment of non-aligned United Nations and African Union peace-keepers, assigned to communities and not acting like the palace guard of the TGF as currently they do, should help to maintain some order for moderate Islam to move within as al-Shabaab and company (hope-fully) crumble. Such forces might also aid communities in weeding out Al-Qaeda cells. After all, UN and AU forces have generated general support save for their associations with the TFG.

The work would be absolutely thank-less, tiring and long. And so it must be rec-ognized that, currently, we are extremely unlikely to support it through a purely prag-matic view, not to mention the perpetual popular hang-ups about working with bla-tantly Islamic organizations. After all, many corporations actually benefit by plundering Somalia’s chaos—Brookings has implicated Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, Russian, British, Ukrainian, Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, Indian, Yemeni, and Egyptian fishing industries of illegally tapping So-malia’s fisheries. Additionally, the UN has explained the presence of large industrial waste piles in the nation by provocatively noting that it costs one-hundredth the price to dump in Somalia as in Europe or North America.

But remembering the brief days of cooled radicalism and restored order just before the Ethiopian invasion, recalling the chaos we encountered in 1993, and thinking of the potential for Somalia to become an Al-Qaeda hotspot, a source of African desta-bilization, and a large blight on the world’s collective consciousness—there is reason enough to act as quickly as possible. And even if we do not act, at the very least we have to admit to our guilty consciousnesses that we have lied to ourselves—there is a vi-able option for peace in Somalia, an option better than the warlords, the Ethiopians or the TFG. There is real hope for a stable, peaceful Somalia.

Mark Hay, CC’12, is a double-major in Reli-gion and Political Science and has a special interest in Islam and its role in political and social institutions in the non-Arab world. He is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of CPR. He can be reached at [email protected].

“This gloomy belief that no force seeks

the unity and peace we dream of is blatantly false.

Doors to peace have been opening and closing for years, but recognition of

these opportunities has been hampered

by wholesale ignorance.”


BORDERLINE DYSFUNCTIONALInnovating drug enforcement on the US-Mexico borderBy David Spencer Seconi

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Picture a world where the whistle of bullets drowns out the chirping of birds. Where army units patrol violent, poverty-stricken streets. Where farmers walk among fields of poppy, hoping a successful harvest will provide for their families. Where mothers of lost sons gather and pray that each new day may bring a resurrection of peace. This is not a distant snapshot, but a reality close to home.

Welcome to the world of narcocultura. Welcome to Mexico.

Stretched across the Mexican landscape is a complex and diverse tapestry of rival drug lords and organizations pitched in constant war over drugs and profits. For decades, these cartels served as a middleman for the international illicit drug market because of Mexico’s strategic position along the porous American

border. There efforts were regional and their targeted killings largely limited to rival gangs. But in the past decade, the numbers of targeted civilians and government officials have increased. In the past four years alone, Mexico has witnessed over 18,000 drug-related deaths, many beheaded or showing signs of torture.

One of the main causes behind the noticeable shift in cartel activity is the

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recent development in the relationship between the lords and the government. Before and during the 1990s, a silent “pact” existed between the lords and the government, in which interference between the two was kept to an agreed minimum. The cartels limited their activity to drug trafficking and murder attempts to rival gang members, and public officials would only arrest low-

ranking members and intercept small quantities of drugs. In return, many of the drug profits were often reinvested in local communities in the form of schools, churches and employment opportunities. This fragile relationship, however, only works under a one-party system. When the 70-year monopoly of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ended with the election of President Vicente Fox in 2000,

the cartels encountered a weaker central government and subsequently began to overstep the limits of their activities. In addition, with the decreased power of the Cali and Medellin cocaine cartels in Colombia in the ’80s and ’90s, Mexico’s cartels used the advantage of their strategic position on the U.S. border to rise to preeminence in the international drug market.

Seeking to crack down on violence and corruption, and possibly to reverse public perceptions of weak leadership following a close election, President Felipe Calderón, on just his tenth day in office, took the unprecedented step in December 2006 of deploying 36,000 federal troops to nine states. The strategy sought to decrease the amount of drugs crossing the border, capture high-profile leaders, and seize shipments and destroy illegal cultivation.

Almost four years of fighting, 45,000 troops, and countless innocent victims later, Calderón has yet to succeed in meeting his primary goal of increasing overall public security. With over 2,000 recorded deaths, 2010 is quickly on its way to surpassing the previous high of 5,580 set in 2009. With few results, ordinary citizens are beginning to turn against the government’s efforts. In a March poll, 59 percent of Mexico’s population believed the cartels were winning the war, in contrast to 21 percent who supported government’s methods.

This connection between violence and troop deployment can be understood as one of increased competition amongst Mexico’s gangs for scarcer territory and resources, as astutely pointed out by Viridiana Rios, a doctoral fellow at the Harvard Inequality & Social Policy Program. As the Mexican Army began to clamp down on supplies and trafficking routes, the cartels saw a dip in profits and more of an incentive to use violence against their rivals. When the troops decreased the number of traditional trafficking routes into U.S. markets, the dealers were forced to fight for those passages that still remained open. Ciudad Juárez, with its 2,660 murders in 2009 out of 1.3 million residents, is the world’s most dangerous city outside a war zone. It also happens to be the main route for cocaine to Chicago. The Sinaloa Cartel, the country’s richest and most powerful, has recently

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attempted a violent takeover of the city from the Juárez Cartel, and the ensuing firefights have crippled infrastructure, closed business, and sent thousands fleeing into the U.S. for refuge. Seizure and extermination of drug supplies has produced similar increased violence amongst cartels, as they must fight for the remaining supplies and search for other alternative illegal activities.

As a result of army intervention and increased competition, the country’s various lords were forced to recruit new, outside members in order to increase their firepower, a sharp contrast to old rules of strict blood-relations employment. Los Zetas, a paramilitary group of 31 ex-Special Forces troops, were originally hired to protect an up-and-coming drug lord. The brutal tactics of these ex-soldiers have forced all other Mexican cartels to play a “murdering” catch-up of sorts. This, Rios believes, has produced a new type of beast: “Now we are seeing the emergence of a different drug trafficker. It is not the old, rural drug trafficker. These ones are younger, enjoy violence more, and are more entrepreneurial.”

Gone are the classic mobster days of respect for the unwritten rules, and paying the price are civilians and government officials. “The consequence of all of this,” Rios claims, “is that these guys are not only dealing drugs, but are kidnapping and extorting.”

Drugs are no longer the principal concern, according to Columbia history professor Pablo A. Piccato. The new widespread violence is a societal problem of which drugs play only one, albeit large, role. The city of Juárez provides a clear example of the other factors contributing to the new violence culture. 80,000 of Juárez’s youth neither study nor work. The industrial city is

the site of inadequate schools, hospitals, and areas of public recreation. Almost 30 percent of the city’s businesses have closed their doors. Its police forces are steeped in corruption and over 100,000 citizens have fled the city in the last four years alone.

The most crucial institution in any of the rebuilding efforts, says Piccato, must be the nation’s judicial system. Since drug trafficking and violent crimes are under federal jurisdiction, local courts have little say over the corruption affecting their own communities. Moreover, trial is by judge, not jury, and with fewer judges on the federal circuit, the cartels are able to efficiently implement the law of “plata o plomo,” the choice that many judges face between accepting bribes or being killed. Any government initiatives that fail to include judiciary reform, Piccato notes, will result in nothing more than the army continuing patrolling the streets.

Initiatives by the Mexican government, however, stand little chance without broader U.S. efforts both at home and abroad. Domestically, the United States is one of the largest illicit drug markets in the world, and much of the competition between cartels is over access to our markets. Billions of U.S. dollars flow across the border into criminal pockets. Experts and politicians claim that 90 percent of the cartel weapons are purchased within the United States. With no efforts to reinstate the assault rifle ban in 2004 in sight, high-powered U.S. weapons will continue to flood the Mexican countryside.

American-related developments that have little direct effect on Americans tend to go unnoticed. But as violence has increasingly spilled over into the United States, American officials began to take more notice of the possible security

threats arising from Mexico’s six northern states. Reported kidnappings in Phoenix, AZ, have tripled from 28 in 2004 to 368 in 2007. American citizens have been victims of extortion as gangs have targeted their relatives across the border. Illegal immigrants are being forced to carry drugs as payment for assistance in crossing the border. Turf wars have flared up in major U.S. cities such as Dallas, TX, leaving beheaded victims in their wake. American officials have expressed fears that border officials have become targets of bribes and extortion.

The first response to the new security threat was the 2007 Bush administration’s Merida Initiative, a three-year, $1.5 billion effort focused on providing advanced interception technology and the strengthening of law enforcement agencies. Though technological support was a necessary first step in fighting the new organizations, the 2007 agreement suffered from a noticeable lack of focus on domestic consumption by either Mexico or the United States. 40 percent of the funds were used for aircraft alone. Though money was allocated for law enforcement, there were no pressures for reform, and in a climate of systemic corruption, cash funds could only go so far. The plan was criticized last year by the Latin and American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, headed by former presidents from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, who claimed that the United States needed to focus on drug users as a health, and not a criminal, problem.

Yet it seems that the Obama administration is finally taking the necessary step of breaking away from the socially conservative attitude of the last administration toward the war against drugs. After the recent deaths of U.S.

“With few results, ordinary citizens are beginning to turn against the government’s efforts. In a March poll, 59 percent of Mexico’s

population believed the cartels were winning the war, in contrast to 21 percent who supported government’s methods.”

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consular worker Lesley A. Enriquez and her husband, Arthur H. Redelf, the White House sent the high-profile team of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to Mexico City in order to revamp cooperation between the two countries. The result was an extension of the Merida Initiative to the tune of $331 million.

Rhetorically, the new declaration should be celebrated as a major and much-needed step in the war against drugs. The new extension of funds goes beyond the military focus and includes crucial funding for social programs and the court system. While police corruption has historically made U.S. officials wary of giving up intelligence, new “fusion centers” are being created to better combine the efforts of American agents and Mexican analysts. Finally, greater focus on monitoring the illicit cargo that gang members traffic between Mexican

and American cities could do much to plug the porous border. Compared with the $18 billion to $39 billion in cartel profits from U.S. markets, American aid seems like a drop in the bucket, but it should be praised as the first step in tackling a bigger problem with a more ambitious agenda.

As the violence continues, Calderón’s government must still provide clear, short-term benefits for its constituency. Otherwise, attempts at long-term solutions could collapse before they can be fully implemented. But Calderón isn’t the only one who should be worried. If the Mexican population becomes fed up with its government’s failed attempts to provide greater security for its citizens and break the cartels, the implications for the United States could be enormous. As Rios duly notes, more breathing room for the drug gangs will mean a greater inflow of drugs into U.S. markets. More drugs create lower prices, and lower prices translates into more potential addicts,

according to simple supply-and-demand laws. Moreover, as Juárez has shown, a breakdown of security could send hundreds of thousands across the border in search of safety in the United States.

The Obama administration needs to solve the international problem of drug violence with greater cooperation and demands for political and social betterment on the part of its allies. If the fountain of killings is not plugged now, the deluge could become unbearable in the near future.

David Spencer Seconi, CC ’12, is a major in History and minor in Human Rights. He is an active member of both the Columbia Parliamentary Debate Team and the Columbia Journal of Politics and Society. He hopes to study international organizations in graduate school and eventually sell his soul to a rich multi-national corporation so he can see the world on a company budget. He can be reached at [email protected].

“The United States is one of the largest

illicit drug markets in the world, and much of the competition between Mexican

cartels is over access to our markets.”

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By Henry Wells

Illustration by Igor Simic

HANGING IN THE BALANCE

Life after Gordon Brown

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On May 6, the U.K. will hold what David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, described on April 6 as “the most important election in a generation.” Given that this election is likely to either bring about Britain’s first post-election hung parliament since 1974, or the end of the Labour Party’s unprecedented 13 years in power, or, quite possible, both of the above, there is good reason to concur with Cameron’s assessment. Although The Economist deemed that the Conservatives held a “comfortable lead” over Labour in March, it has ebbed away in recent weeks. Britain’s political commentators are increasingly predicting that although the Conservatives will still win the most seats, “no single party will secure an overall majority,” thus spelling a hung parliament.

The election is also particularly significant because it will be the first that Gordon Brown will fight as Prime Minister. Indeed, since being handed that position in 2007 by Tony Blair, Brown has resisted repeated calls to hold an election, prompting Conservative Leader David Cameron to claim that “he doesn’t have the mandate [to govern].” However, with the five-year deadline on the election interim period forthcoming, Brown is able to delay no longer.

THE BLAIR YEARS

It was May 1, 1997, when a largely unknown 43-year-old swept the Labour Party to power in one of Britain’s greatest landslide victories ever. Tony Blair’s promise was modernization and reform, both for Labour, which he unofficially rechristened “New Labour,” and for the nation. And, thanks to Labour’s remarkable 179-seat majority in the House of Commons, which ended their 18 years in opposition, Blair was soon able to implement three substantial reforms, namely granting the Bank of England (Britain’s version of the Fed) independence from government control, establishing devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, and ridding Britain’s archaic Upper House—the House of Lords—of all but 92 “hereditary Peers.” Moreover, with

the 1998 “Good Friday Agreement,” Blair achieved what was widely hailed as the pinnacle of a long and drawn-out peace process with Northern Ireland, confirming his credentials as a leader on the world stage. With such feats so quickly achieved, Britain was for a while captivated by its new Prime Minister, described by even the New York Times as possessing “youthful

exuberance … an unflagging smile and seemingly limitless charm.” Thus Blair—and the Labour Party—were well set to roar to a second enormous electoral victory in June 2001, a goal that was duly achieved.

However, 9/11, and the start of the Bush years spelled the beginning of what was to become an inseparable Bush-Blair—and, by proxy, U.S.-U.K.—

alliance. Initially, Blair’s promise to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the U.S. post-9/11 proved highly popular. However, his previously unassailable popularity began to wane when he proceeded to lead Britain into a war in Iraq that was, from the outset, not supported in the U.K. Given the extent to which he had come to embody the Labour Party as a whole in the preceding years, it was little surprise that the demise of Blair also spelled the slow demise of his party. Thus, in stark contrast to Labour’s first two landslide victories, in 2005, Blair’s party was, in the words of The Guardian on May 6, 2005, “edg[ing] painfully into a ... third term,” with their majority slashed from 167 seats to 66. Just two years later, in June 2007, Blair left office amidst boos from anti-war protestors, handing over control to his long-time number two, Gordon Brown.

THE U.S.-U.K. RELATIONSHIP

After storming to office in such “youthful exuberance,” Blair’s main legacy, like his American counterpart, is likely to remain Iraq. However, it seems that the legacy of Iraq will have important implications not only for Bush and Blair, but also for the U.S.-U.K. relationship. That is to say, Blair’s unpopular decision to commit British troops to Iraq is widely attributed to his willingness to “blindly” follow U.S. foreign policy. As a result, any hint of a British leader doing the same again—namely tagging along behind the U.S. with unquestioning subservience—is likely to be regarded with deep distrust by the British electorate. It is highly unlikely, therefore, that Britain’s politicians will show the same degree of loyalty to the U.S. as Blair in the near future.

Given that Gordon Brown inherited Blair’s legacy, it is perhaps not surprising that the “special” U.S.-U.K. relationship deteriorated with remarkable swiftness after Blair’s departure. Indeed, according to The Guardian’s report on Aug. 23, Brown’s refusal to intervene to prevent the release of the Lockerbie plane-bomber last August resulted in “a vitriolic letter from the director of the FBI,” and the Daily Mail claimed on Sept. 11, 2009,

“After losing the 1997 election in such spectacular fashion, the Conservatives looked a party out of sorts for number of years. However,

they have now found a leader in David Cameron, and a

weakness in Labour, that has proved

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that “Obama blast[ed] Brown” on the phone —just one of many signs of rising tension in recent months. However, the U.S.-U.K. relationship is not the only one that Brown has struggled to hold down. Indeed, having notoriously fallen out with Blair before becoming Prime Minister, Brown has since faced several attempts to topple him from within his own Cabinet, and now faces an uphill battle if he is to avoid losing his first election as Prime Minister.

GORDON BROWN

Brown took over from Blair in 2007 after serving the previous ten years in Blair’s Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His credibility, therefore, was staked on the fact that he had created ten years of economic stability, a claim which the economic crisis of 2008-9, in which the U.K. suffered its longest and deepest recession since 1945, was to put in a different light. Thus, lacking both credibility and an electoral mandate, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brown faced a number of early attempts to oust him from within his own Cabinet, with the Daily Telegraph quoting a minister on July 25, 2008, saying that “the Labour Party has no option but to replace him as leader or face certain defeat at the next general election.” However, as the election has drawn closer, Cabinet in fighting has been put to one side, and with the U.K.’s economy emerging out of recession in late 2009, what appeared to be an inevitable election defeat for Labour is no longer so clear cut.

THE CONSERVATIVES ANDPOSSIBLE ELECTION OUTCOMES

After losing the 1997 election in such spectacular fashion, the Conservatives looked a party out of sorts for a number of years, and by 2005 they were onto their fifth party leader in eight years. However, since then they have found a leader in David Cameron, and a weakness in Labour, that has proved promising.

Cameron, at 43—the same age that Blair became PM—with good looks, energy, and sharp rhetorical skills, cuts a clear contrast to Brown. It was

perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that in the wake of the economic crisis, and Labour’s post-Iraq downturn, he was able to advance the Conservatives to a consistent lead in the polls. However, with that lead—which reached a high of 15 points in mid-2009—steadily eroding, their prospects of electoral success are looking increasingly uncertain. Although they are still expected to win more seats than Labour, the polls are now pointing to a hung parliament, meaning that no party would hold an outright majority—an occurrence not seen after a general election since 1974. Should such an outcome prevail, there are two possible scenarios that would follow.

The first and most likely option is that the party with the most seats—expected to be the Conservatives—would form a minority government, and thus be required to “strike issue-by-issue deals [with other parties] to pass its business.” This would inevitably slow the passage of legislation, and inject a great deal of instability into the political process, but unlike the second option, it would by-pass the need for “time-consuming coalition management.” That second option, less common in Britain’s political history, is that either the Conservatives or the Labour Party would form a formal coalition with the third party—the Liberal Democrats—thus manufacturing a majority, but with the flexibility of the main party substantially hindered.

Should either of these outcomes prevail, governing would become much more cumbersome than the British system is used to, and as Professor Lucy Goodhart of Columbia’s Political Science department points out, it would also introduce “greater uncertainty” into the economy. Indeed, as Goodhart explains, “even though the election has not happened yet, [just] the potential for a hung parliament is already affecting one aspect of the U.K. economy ... the value of the pound sterling,” These signs led a group of leading economists last week to warn that “a hung parliament … would be the worst possible outcome for the U.K. stock market,” possibly plunging the U.K. back into recession. Consequently, should a hung parliament be the result

of the election, it can be expected that, as in 1974, a second, “snap election” would be called relatively soon in the hope of establishing a more decisive outcome.

An alternative, and still distinctly possible outcome, is that the Conservatives will win sufficient votes for an absolute majority, enabling Cameron to form the first Conservative government since John Major’s ended

Illustration by Taimur Malik

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in 1997. The big question hanging over British politics if that should happen, therefore, is what would a Conservative Britain in 2010 look like?

A CONSERVATIVE BRITAIN?

Unsurprisingly, the central theme of this election has been and will continue to be Britain’s hard-hit economy. Indeed, as Goodhart points

out, although “whichever party ... occupies government in the days after the election will face the same problem ... lower[ing] the size of the budget deficit,” the two major parties have presented substantially different stances on the best way forward, and thus “the identity of the incumbent is of great importance.” That is to say, Cameron, a keen advocate of small government, has proposed deep and “rapid spending cuts to deal with [the] alarming deficit of 12.6 percent of GDP,” according to The Economist. Brown, taking a line similar to Obama, argues that the economy is “too fragile to do without continued government largesse” in the short term. This has been a major bone of contention between the parties, with “the Conservatives [recently] criticizing Labour for raising National Insurance contributions (payroll tax) ... and saying that they would do more to cut spending.” Although the precise ways the Conservatives would cut spending

are not entirely clear, what is known is that should Cameron triumph, the U.K.’s public sector will experience a pay freeze, the pension age may increase, and tax breaks for children will be tightened. At this cost, Cameron hopes to reverse the trend in Britain’s rapidly growing budget deficit with immediate effect. Brown, on the other hand, is more willing to increase taxes to fund the deficit, although he too acknowledges that before long public spending will need to be substantially curbed.

Internationally, Cameron is committed to Afghanistan, and having vowed in October to “send more troops” to the region, the U.S. can continue to count on a British presence there no matter the outcome of the election. Nevertheless, concerning the U.S.-U.K. relationship directly, it looks like there will be no hasty return to the “Blair years.” Indeed, already on Oct. 21, the Times reported that President Obama “has voiced concern” to Cameron over his EU stance. That is to say, Cameron, and the Conservatives more generally, have traditionally been only lukewarm towards the EU, opposing what they call “the steady and unaccountable intrusion of the European Union into almost every aspect of our lives.” Whilst such a stance has not troubled previous U.S. Presidents, who have been happy to deal with the U.K. on a separate bi-lateral basis, Obama seems keen to deal with “a strong and united Europe” as a whole—in line with his preference for multi-lateral rather than bi-lateral relations. If this is a sign of things to come, one can expect—or at least hope—for the “special” relationship between the U.S. and U.K. to normalize in the coming years.

With thanks to Professor Goodhart of Columbia’s Political Science department for her assistance.

Henry Wells, GS ’11, is a double major in Political Science and MEALAC from London, U.K. He has interned in Britain’s House of Lords, will work with the UN. in Jerusalem this summer, and hopes to work for the British Foreign Office in the future. He can be reached at [email protected].


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By Mallika Narain

Shattering the glass ceiling, welding a glass floor

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ation by

Eliza

beth Si

mins

THE TROUBLE WITH QUOTAS

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Historically, international legislation on the topic of gender equality has often sparked controversy and critical dismissal. The latest version of the debate on women’s rights has focused on the increasing prevalence of quotas for women leaders in both politics and business. Despite the obvious irony, it comes as no surprise that seven Indian MPs harassed Vice President Hamid Ansari on March 8, International Women’s Day, tearing up and throwing copies of the Women’s Reservation Bill at him while shouting anti-bill slogans. Nonetheless, the bill, which imposed a 33 percent quota on seats in both national and state-level legislatures, was passed in Parliament the next day. Unlike in the past, opposition to the bill is focused not on the expansion of opportunities that it affords for women, but on the prospects for strategic politicking—the major claim being that, because of the perceived lack of interest and ability in political engagement amongst women of underprivileged classes, the women most likely to win the reserved seats would be of the upper- and middle-classes. As a result, minority-based parties may potentially be disadvantaged by quota legislation.

In the corporate world, women are similarly receiving a giant leg-boost through the established glass ceiling. Countries as varied as Spain and France are poised to follow the example of Norway, which imposed a 40 percent quota on women in boardrooms in 2005. Norwegian policymakers imposed a three-year deadline for firms to essentially quadruple the amount of women in their boardrooms or face being shut down by the state. An ambitious goal, perhaps, but not without precedent in Norway— a similar quota for the public sector

had been implemented successfully in the 1980s. In a way, the Norwegian government was simply continuing a legacy of pushes towards gender equality in a method considered fairly tried and true. Ansgar Gabrielsen, Norway’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and a conservative, explains support for quota legislation as a natural and rational outcome in a modern society, “I could not see why,” he told The Guardian, “after 25 to 30 years of having an equal ratio of women and men in universities and with having so many educated women with experience, there were so few of them on boards.” Gabrielsen’s statement hits home for most countries with high education levels—in the United States, for example, women occupy only 15 percent of available board seats, despite the fact that they are more likely than men to graduate both high school and college.

Nonetheless, as Schumpeter points out in his March 11 article in The Economist, outrage in “old-boy” networks was the immediate and widespread response to the ruling in Norway. As in the more recent case of India, opposition did not directly denigrate the advancement of women or question social justice as an abstract goal. The primary concerns listed include, as in India’s situation, the inadvertent exclusion of equally qualified candidates as well as effects on the performance of the greater entity in consideration—the nation or corporation. In Norway, it was proclaimed that that the magnitude and the stringency of the ruling was audacious in its own right; corporate failure and board mismanagement were darkly forecast alongside mentions of talented young men being passed over for under-qualified women. None of the more

extreme prophecies came true. Quota programs were not, most realized with relief, some sort of nightmarish form of affirmative action. But neither were they able to generate the results predicted by their most optimistic supporters. Quotas did not seem to substantially improve performance in Norwegian corporations. In a study conducted by Professor Amy Dittmar at the Ross School of Business, it was found that, on average, firms saw a 2.6 percent drop in company value at the outset of the ruling, and this slow plummet continued as the quota program began to see implementation.

PROBLEMS WITH ENDOGENOUS APPROACHES TO QUOTAS

Dittmar, however, has an important disclaimer about her research results: the women who gained seats in Norway in the aftermath of the ruling, given the huge necessary percentage leap, tended to be less experienced than both male and female predecessors—this, and not some ambiguous new ‘feminized’ leadership strategies, negatively impacted corporate performance. Her explanation, then, is exogenous to women themselves, and brings up the folly of rationalizing legislation based on endogenous claims about gender. In the example of Norway, proponents like Gabrielsen based much of their support on what they identified as intrinsic differences between men and women. As Gabrielsen explains, beyond social justice, “the law was not about getting equality between the sexes; it was about the fact that diversity is a value in itself, that it creates wealth.” Gender-based diversity of thought or inclination, clearly, can only exist if women are considered to

“Corporate failure and board mismanagement were darkly forecast alongside mentions of talented young men being passed over for

under-qualified women. None of the more extreme prophecies came true, but neither were they able to generate the sort of results

predicted by their most optimistic supporters.”


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have certain inherent characteristics that set them (and their cognitive processes) apart from their male colleagues, be it in the boardroom or legislature. The same kinds of relativist rationalizations are used in the realm of politics, and it is merely the inversion of this reasoning that is most often used against the advancement of women in patriarchal societies. At a recent gender policy panel sponsored by Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, entitled “Women in Politics: Underrepresented? Overrepresented?,” discriminative perspectives on the question of quotas were addressed at some length. As Visiting Professor Oksana Kis of the Ukrainian Institute of Ethnology explained, in countries like Ukraine and Russia, “the mentality is [still] that politics are not made for women, and women are not made for politics.” Similarly, a widely heralded 2007 Baylor survey found that 33 percent of Americans felt that “most men are better suited emotionally for politics than most women,” the converse of the positive argument that women are more risk-averse and therefore would be less likely to lead a country into financial or political crises.

Concentrating on endogenous reasons for possible benefits to quotas or women’s rights legislation in general is, then, both simplistic and reductionist and, perhaps more importantly, leads policymakers down problematic legislative paths. True, quotas can be seen as a potential method of providing and harnessing gender-reliant diversity. But, in approaching the issue in this way, politicians have failed to address materially grounded issues of wealth, education, and experience. More promising and generative, then, is the consideration of exclusively exogenous

reasoning and outcomes—that is, to view women as any other disadvantaged minority group, in need of tangible professional and educational experience to truly perform at par with the men they compete with for leadership positions.

STRUCTURAL AND GRASSROOTS CONCERNS ADDRESSED

Quota legislation has inadvertently led to the revelation of these deeply rooted structural problems in both politics and business, and only appears to short-sightedly address a symptom of these issues—inadequate representation of women in leadership positions. Luckily, the seemingly inevitable enactment of more quota programs over the next few years may actually increase the urgency of addressing structural problems and, in fact, outsource the responsibility of solving these issues to private entities—political parties and corporations, for example, whose performance in government or in the market will increasingly rely on the effectuality of their women leaders. Politicos and businesspeople are finally beginning to seriously ask themselves, “How can women be empowered across the board to overcome obvious problems of inexperience and profession-specific education?”

In Norway, programs like the Female Future Initiative—a one-and-a-half year managerial seminar headed by the unlikely Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise—are becoming increasingly popular, as businesses temper their previous disgruntlement with the attitude: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Elsewhere, major companies like Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, Europe’s largest telecommunications company, are

recognizing and attempting to redress the structural issues with quota legislation that Norway’s case exposed. Deutsche Telekom has instituted its own quotas for upper and middle-management positions, requiring 30 percent of these positions to be held by women by 2015. As Deutsche Telekom is essentially providing their female employees with the promise of experience in management positions, this is, in fact, one step towards increasing the number of women in board positions as well.

As Time reported on March 22, the German telecommunications company is also looking to redress basic obstacles to women’s participation by making childcare less of an issue for women: “In order to recruit more women managers, the company says it plans to introduce more flexible working hours and part-time positions, as well as expand its parental leave schemes and child-care services.” There are also plans to create a ‘stay in contact program,’ which would better allow women managers on maternity leave to stay posted about corporate goings-on. For German businesses, these sorts of private initiatives are just a result of good business sense as 60 percent of German business-school graduates are women, and by boosting the numbers of women in management positions—and, eventually, board positions—Deutsche Telekom will in fact be capitalizing on an available resource of educated and talented individuals in the hopes of eventually improving company performance and profitability. Similarly, Sweden has implemented parent-friendly legislation in the workplace, minus the quota requirements, along with gender-neutralizing motivations for men to take time off work to care for their children.

“More promising and generative, then, is the consideration of exclusively exogenous reasoning and outcomes—that is, to view women as any other disadvantaged minority group, in need of

tangible professional and educational experience to truly perform at par with the men they compete with for leadership positions.”

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This has worked well for Sweden, where women now fill almost 50 percent of board seats in state-held companies, and only serves to reinforce the importance of questioning quota legislation as a standalone solution.

In politics, the situation is little different. Quotas in politics are currently being instituted to address the dearth of women in leadership positions on the national level. Attempts to institute quotas—as in the case of India—are already revealing structural problems prevalent in electoral machinery. Since, in countries such as India, the party system is largely contingent on underlying class structure, the major adversarial complaint is that quota legislation instituted solely for women could seriously disadvantage parties representing the lower classes. While much of this comprises party filibustering in the hopes of passing reservations for other minorities, the issue of undereducated women is a structural problem that, as in European businesses, will need addressing over the next few years if the expectation of fair representation is to be fulfilled in the post-quota period.

In the case of India, the problem of women being inadequately experienced in the realm of national-level politics was, arguably, in the process of being solved years ago. Between 1992 and 1993, the Indian government imposed the 73nd

and 74th Constitutional Amendments, which reserved 33 percent of seats in all local elected bodies for women. The results have been surprisingly dynamic, with women on the village-level organizing around political issues, gaining valuable experience in the local context, and passionately exercising their rights to election. According to The Hunger Project, over 1 million women have taken part in politics as a result of the Amendments, in a system of more than 500,000 villages and 600 million people. The Hunger Project explains that, “contrary to fears that the elected women would be rubber stamp leaders, the success stories that have arisen from PRI are impressive. A government-financed study, based on field work in 180 villages . . . has found that a full two-thirds of elected women leaders are actively engaged in learning the ropes and exercising power.” Unlike in the case of Norway, then, we may find in the years to come—and depending on the implementation of the national-level quotas—that India already has a reserve of women of lower-class and under-privileged backgrounds waiting for their opportunity to enter into the positions of national leadership. In August of last year, the Cabinet approved a quota bump to 50 percent on the local level, a measure that should only serve to increase the number of politically experienced women eager to engage in

national politics. Like Norway, India may serve as

a test case for quota systems in the future—but, unlike Norway, it may turn out to be one that has somewhat inadvertently taken the time to address grassroots issues of training and mobilization before implementation on the national level. In Europe, Deutsche Telekom’s efforts may very well prove to successfully place women in senior management positions by targeting the issue from the bottom-up. According to the Director of Women’s Studies at the City College of New York, Professor Joyce Gelb, in countries like Taiwan, where reservation systems have had more-than-successful results in increasing women’s representation in national legislature, “Sources of women’s recruitment played a role ... Feminist activism in Taiwan has led to women’s wanting to gain access to positions in government.” Gelb warns, however, of failing to take into account the problems of moving beyond quotas in legislature to women’s representation in appointed positions even in fairly progressive states like Taiwan: “Reservations ... were legislatively-based; in terms of the Cabinet and ministerial system, these quotas and reservations would never be accepted” as things stand. This is, perhaps, an instance in which further research is needed: even in countries with relatively low inequality and high education levels for both genders, Gelb implies, value systems often cut short the progression of women’s participation in both business and politics. Many countries, then, can potentially benefit from an appropriate analysis of their structural condition with regards to levels of experience amongst future women leaders; without this, quota legislation over the next decade or so may fall miserably short of expectations, be these grounded in social justice or material success.

Mallika Narain, CC ’11, is an Economics-Politics major and sometimes—just sometimes—enjoys talking about things unrelated to her major. She reads The Economist avidly and currently interns at a political consultancy firm downtown. She can be reached at mn2319@columbia.

Photo by Joyce Ng


culture

MARX BROTHERSBy Tim Barker

Envisioning Real Utopias,by Erik Olin Wright

Verso; $26.95, 288 pages

A Companion to Marx’s Capital, by David Harvey

Verso; $19.95, 320 pages

“The system must be completely overhauled,” said Nicolas Sarkozy in October 2008, as the world economy was in the midst of a startling decline. A few months later the cover of Newsweek announced “We Are Socialists Now.” These were just two signs of the surprisingly mainstream consensus that the global financial crisis had marked a significant rupture with traditional economics and politics. But the exact nature of the transformation was unclear. Have we witnessed the end of a hegemonic economic order, “the death of neoliberalism,” as authoritative voices like Joseph Stiglitz ask? If so, what will take its place? Specifically, what ideas are being explored by the people who gave neoliberalism its name and identified it as a primary enemy—the radical left? Notwithstanding Glenn Beck’s “Tree of Revolution” diagram, which shows Obama as an outgrowth from Che Guevara and Saul Alinsky, the old order has not been replaced by socialism. In the realm of ideas, however there are those who hope it might yet. Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias and David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital proceed from very different backgrounds and reach very different conclusions.

A clue to Wright’s orientation is the self-applied nickname of the movement Wright was associated with in the 1980s and 1990s: “No Bullshit Marxism.” Formally called analytical Marxists, Wright and his comrades, including G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and

Photo Illustration by Alexander Ivey

May 2010 25

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John Roemer, busied themselves with “bringing the concern with conceptual precision, clarity, and rigor that is characteristic of analytical philosophy to bear on Marxian themes.” By, for instance, modeling propositions about class and exploitation using rational choice theory, they tried to parse what was living and what was dead in a philosophy too often given to dogmatic thinking. They believed that Marx’s writings could be separated into a set of analytic propositions, which could then be assessed based on logical and empirical grounds.

Such an approach led the members to substantial revisions of orthodox Marxism. This is reflected in Envisioning Real Utopias, which finds that the labor theory of value “is simply wrong,” the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit is “quite problematic,” and Marx’s forecasts about the simplification of social classes “have not occurred.” Despite his history on the Marxist left, Wright ends up theorizing social change distinct from socialist and Marxist labels in favor of a “radical democratic” approach to “emancipatory social science.” This gives him a freedom to propose practical policy positions, the titular Real Utopias. The ideas he offers suggest either generalizing existing institutions or instituting mostly notional policies like a basic income guarantee.

The catholicity of his solutions is refreshing, and his willingness to engage with ideas from outside the Marxist tradition is compelling. One of the most radical of his ideas, that of a guaranteed minimum income, once enjoyed support from figures ranging from Martin Luther King to Richard Nixon, and is partially in practice as the Earned Income Tax Credit. While that modest program is far short of what Wright calls for in Envisioning Real Utopias, it is a reminder that some of his ideas have bases in widely accepted existing programs.

In A Companion to Marx’s Capital, David Harvey represents a more purist mode of thinking, stressing an understanding of “Marx on Marx’s terms.” He claims that “No Bullshit” (“brick-by-brick,” in his parlance) approaches do a grievous violence

to works like Capital. Harvey’s entire career argues that any attempt to seriously change the world will come through careful study of that book, which he has taught for almost four decades. To make use of the insights of Marx, Harvey insists that there is no way around grappling with dialectic method. Harvey thus makes few concessions to current affairs.

The Companion is a revised set of the lectures Harvey delivered in his class on the first volume of Capital, and its structure follows Marx’s. He offers modest revisions where he thinks they are necessary, but mostly for emphasis: Marx did not investigate the credit system thoroughly enough, Marx was mistaken in thinking that primitive accumulation of capital ever ceased. On the important questions, namely those of value theory and the systematic problems of capitalism which follow from those axioms, he follows Marx faithfully. Therefore, Harvey’s section on “Reflections on Prognoses” climaxes in the classical communist summation: “class privilege and power, Marx says, must be battled against and destroyed to make way for another mode of production.” This ruptural theory of history, where one totality replaces another, is what distinguishes Harvey’s Marxism most definitively from Wright’s book, which points out the hybrid nature of any political and economic system, and the unsustainability of any “pure” system.

Harvey’s “dance of the dialectic” offers aesthetic thrills missing from Wright’s positivist axioms. The introduction to Companion mentions the influence of Jacques Derrida, and Harvey can sound like a comparative literature professor asking his class to “comment on how it [a basic concept in Capital] would weave into and out of the fabric of the book” and asking questions like “does the word ‘appear’ always signal a fetishistic moment?” Reading an exposition of such a rich text by someone who knows it so intimately is a pleasure. There is also an appeal in the elegant parsimony of Harvey’s orthodoxy—a system which can incorporate any fact into its system and which shows so effectively the limitations of any half-measures.

In the final analysis, though, there is something evasive about it, exemplified in Harvey’s assertion that capitalism’s survival “suggests that the fluidity and flexibility of capital accumulation—features that Marx emphasizes.” Is that really all that capitalism’s survival suggests? Does its survival really speak that well of Marx’s theories? One appreciates Wright’s willingness to examine Marx’s propositions in the analytic “brick-by-brick” method Harvey disdains. (It is also nice to read Wright’s frank acknowledgements of the failures of the actually existing socialism of the 20th century, in contradistinction to Harvey, whose mentions of Lenin and Mao are glancing and sometimes approbatory.) But it doesn’t take a staid democratic socialist like Wright to question Marx’s basic suppositions more deeply than Harvey is willing to. Slavoj Žižek, for all of his defiant Leninist gestures, submits also that “it’s clear that if you want to explain what today is going on with Marx’s theory of exploitation, what goes on today with poverty and so on, you can no longer account for it in the Marxist terms of exploitation.”

For his willingness to venture beyond the confines of these terms, Wright makes a more convincing case for his brand of socialist thought than Harvey does for his well-aged Marxism. Still, the prospects for immediate radical change, or even for the Democrats in 2010, won’t be affected by the publication of Wright’s book. Economic recovery of some sort, it seems, will come and the hint of capitalism’s death throes, so long hoped for by Marxists, will fade once more. But once we accept that radical social change might come through small, thoughtful reforms and not through the iron laws of crisis and contradiction, Wright’s “socialist compass” offers a path forward, both for its specific proposals and as a guide to imagining new ones.

Tim Barker, CC ’13, is originally from Florida. As of yet majorless, his interests include intellectual history and American music. He can be reached at [email protected].


culture

By J. Bryan Lowder

In a recent episode of ABC’s new primetime hit comedy Modern Family, audiences were treated to a familiar scenario. Three of the show’s characters —Jay Pritchett, his thirty-something son, Mitchell Pritchett, and the former’s preteen stepson, Manny —go on a trip to the great outdoors for some stargazing and male bonding, but unexpected events soon lead the evening hilariously awry.

Manny, spurred on by his stepfather to befriend his new brother through wisecracks,

upsets Mitchell, leading the latter to storm off into the woods. He eventually returns from his pouting, having been sprayed by a skunk. Before allowing his son to enter the car, Jay tells Mitchell that he must take off his soiled clothing. Of course, all Mitchell can find in the trunk is a dress belonging to Jay’s wife, and this only further incites Manny’s goading. Having had enough, Mitchell leaves again, only to be told by his father that Manny was only brought on the outing because the boy had experienced social rejection from

his friends earlier in the week. The scene ends with Mitchell comforting Manny, and Jay informing Mitchell, with characteristic doltishness, that “if you were that type of a gay [i.e. a drag queen], you’d probably do alright for yourself.”

While the setup is a common enough, the scene’s ending—in which we see a gay, cross-dressed man advising his decades-younger stepbrother at the behest of their crotchety, politically insensitive father—is surprising, to say the least. In a television

A DERNLOOK AT THE AMERICANAMILY

Courtesy of Google Images

May 2010 27

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landscape that is bloated with derivative reality shows, primetime soap operas, and sci-fi dramas, Modern Family returns the sitcom to its old stomping ground of the family living room, locating there a sense of humor—and of political resonance—that is modern, indeed.

The show (which airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m.) focuses on a group of three interrelated family units who live in an unidentified suburban setting outside of Los Angeles. Claire (Julie Bowen) and Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) and their three children form the core of the show, while the rest of the cast comprises Claire’s brother, Mitchell Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), with his partner, Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), as well as the siblings’ father, Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill), alongside his much younger Colombian wife, Gloria (Sofía Vergara). The series begins with Mitchell and Cam raising their newly adopted Vietnamese baby, Lily, while Jay helps Gloria with her precocious preteen son, Manny (Rico Rodriguez II).

Most episodes begin with an opening question having been posed to one of the characters by an off-camera interviewer, which he or she then briefly answers and around which the rest of the action is loosely organized. Many plots focus on events that affect two or more of the families, while others focus on problems internal to specific couples. Regardless of the story, however, the subtext of the show consistently expresses the difficulty in negotiating what “family” really means at a time in which the definition of that institution is undergoing a series of dramatic, controversial shifts.

Created by Frasier alums, Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, Modern Family’s style is a combination of the mockumentary approach of The Office, the comedic timing of Arrested Development, and, though far less heavy-handed, the sense of sitcom social engagement made famous in the 1970 series All in the Family. In that show, many episodes featured the cantankerous patriarch Archie Bunker’s encounters with some controversial social issue (racism, sexism, etc.), with most of the laughs arising from the obviously stubborn ignorance of his opinions.

Instead of episodic topicality, however, Modern Family seems to be using its regular characters as a means by which to present, in a disarming context, a number of the more serious questions regarding what the “modern family” should or can be.

Unsurprisingly, while Claire and Phil Dunphy play the typical (if parentally inept) straight, white couple, the gay and interracial/cross-generational pairings provide a great deal of the show’s laughs based on their “othered” status. However, they are also presented unapologetically and seriously as legitimate families. In this way, a socially progressive vision of the family is being smuggled into the homes (and possibly, hearts) of actual American families in the incredibly savvy guise of stereotype-based humor.

Take, for example, Cam, Mitchell and Lily. While the two daddies are by no means the most “flamboyant” of gay men, their characters still reference common gay archetypes. At first glance, Cam—portly, jolly, and motherly as he is —would seem to be a trite stereotype, while the more straight-laced, neurotic Mitchell could be read as some sort of queer apologist. However, as the stargazing episode mentioned above illustrates, the writers seem to take great pleasure in subverting these readings: in moments of threat, Cam becomes arguably the most butch character on the show, while Mitchell proves to be the more emotionally sensitive of the pair.

Furthermore, this dynamic carries over from external situations to the couple’s private relationship. In another recent episode, for example, Mitchell sadly recalls that he did not attend many “sports games” with his father (the traditionally masculine Jay) growing up, leading Cam to wryly suggest that Mitchell might have been more successful had he simply called them “games.” This refreshing play with stereotypes is certainly one of the more progressive aspects of the show, and the gay jabs that do remain

Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, left) sits in the back of Jay (Ed O’Neill), his father’s, SUV discussing Manny

(Rico Rodriguez II), Mitchell’s much younger step-brother, and his unhappy school situation. Mitchell

offers to give advice on being a social outcast, at which point his father says that Mitchell would look good in

drag if he were, “that kind of gay.”

Cam (Eric Stonestreet, right) with his partner, Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, left), discussing his recent ethnic faux pas with the latter’s stepmother,

the “spicy curvy diva” Gloria (Sofía Vergara).


culture

seem to be more lovingly based on truth than on homophobia. Moreover (and more importantly), the validity of the men’s love for one another and for their child is never brought into question.

The situation is similar with the Colombian immigrants, Gloria and Manny. While Gloria is often articulated as a fiery, passionate Latina bombshell, she is also almost always shown to be smarter than her husband and the other white characters on the show. Her calls for revenge and ability to eat spicy food aside, Gloria is a good wife and mother, not to mention a patient stepmother-in-law to Cam, who has a penchant for ejaculating an always-popular “you people” at the most awkward moments. As it does with same-sex families, Modern Family works to affirm racially-blended families through a combination of playful ethnic humor and an unflinching commitment to the idea that an American family can include people from south of the border.

However, the show is not without its faults. Some critics have pointed out that, while the straight couples participate in a healthy amount of network-safe innuendo, the gays are noticeably sexless. They often

appear at home in full-body pajamas, and shots of them in bed tend to have them spaced somewhat far from one another. One’s initial impulse here would be to claim that the network is including gay men on the condition of sexual suppression in order to make the show palatable for less accepting audiences. While this assertion seems fair, one might also read the situation as being in line with some agenda to further legitimize the couple as a family.

With a new baby in the house, many couples (straight or otherwise) lose interest in sex. At the beginning of the series, Cam explains his weight as a biological “nesting” response to the presence of the child, indicating that his new size might make him less attractive to Mitchell than he once

was. One episode even features the couple in the common story of a parent (here Mitchell) having to choose between pursing a demanding career and seeing his child’s first steps. Most viewers will recognize that these are the manifestations of stress that challenge the relationships of many new parents, thereby helping them relate to the men as family members and not simply gay people. Of course, one might challenge the idea that gay people—or any marginalized group, for that matter—should be forced to conform to the notions of middle-class, white, heteronormative life in order to be seen as legitimate “family” material; however, it seems unlikely that network television would be willing to present, say, a polyamorous collective, under the Modern Family heading at present.

In the end, Modern Family and other shows like it cannot hope to be politically progressive on all fronts; yet, in being playfully aware of their own stereotypes and conventions, they do have the important

opportunity to provide a space for cultural criticism, and possibly even change. The danger, as always, is that certain segments of the audience will only catch the occasional gay or racial joke; but in Modern Family, the sitcom is at least attempting to present a truthful image of the modern American family: an image that is demographically diverse, politically imperfect, and, perhaps best, deeply, consistently, and lovingly funny.

Bryan Lowder, CC ’10, is a double major in English and music. He will be attending the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in the Fall. He would like to be paid for his writing at some point. Please.

“Modern Family seems to be using its regular characters as a means by which to present, in a disarming context, a number of the more serious questions regarding what the ‘modern family’ should

or can be.”

Upon discovering that Cam’s (Eric Stonestreet, right) car has been stripped in her old Latin neighborhood, Gloria (Sofía

Vergara) screams for the culprits to show themselves while Cam nervously assures everyone that he has auto insurance.

May 2010 29

first person

MARRIAGE OF IDENTITIESBy Yuan Yuan Wang

During the winter break between my two semesters abroad at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I made the trek to Xiaoshan, an administrative district of Hangzhou, one of southern China’s biggest cities. The occasion for this visit to Xiaoshan was a family member’s wedding. My grandmother’s cousin’s daughter, Chen Xingmei, was getting married to a young man, Chen Xingjiang, whom she met through work and with whom, by chance, she shares two of three characters in her name.

It was my first time visiting Xiaoshan. Although I had been raised by my Chinese parents, I had lived in New York City for all but one year of my life. This trip promised

an intimate encounter with my Chinese heritage. To see where my grandmother was from, I could see where I was from.

However, I was in a curious position in Xiaoshan. My Shanghainese speaking parents had hoped that when I returned to my birthplace I would not return as an outsider, but that’s exactly what I was. An apology for not understanding Xiaoshanese was the extent of most interactions I had with my family.

“Rural China was swell,” I wrote to a friend after the trip, “but there’s no way I’m ever again spending four days straight doing nothing else but sitting around waiting to be fed.” Immediately after the

trip, I looked back with disappointment. I had been a complete stranger in a place where I thought that I could glimpse part of myself.

My eventual change of heart was prompted by a revisiting of these photographs to remember the richness of Xiaoshan’s visuals. It was during the time I dismissed as time spent “waiting to be fed” when I would experience the intimacy of the bride and groom in their bedroom minutes before they debuted as a couple to their families, and the picturesque buildings that seem out of place in a rural Chinese town.

During my time at Xiaoshan I was left


first person

alone to roam the town and to venture up the mountains, to contemplate why I was there. And the contemplation took the form of photography.

Photographer John Szarkowski said that the analysis of mirrors and windows is not intended to “divide photography into two parts,” but to “suggest a continuum.” Yet, after giving my photographs a bit of thought, I realized that while Szarkowski’s words were a fine point of departure—they were unsatisfactory. Thinking of mirrors and windows as a continuum would mean that in order for a photograph to successfully be a “mirror” requires that it is not a “window.” As I studied my own photographs, I find that the ones that are most successful as documentaries of other people are the ones that most successfully reflect something internal about me. I abandoned the notion of mirrors and windows being opposite ends of a spectrum. Instead I started to think of my photography as “the window as mirror.”

Of course it would have been more satisfying if I could tell you what these photographs “say” about China. To use the photographs of the vibrant buildings in Xiaoshan as a departure point to discuss Xiaoshan’s rapid development over the recent decades. To tell you that as part of China’s Economic Reform, Xiaoshan has been relegated from a province to a prefecture and eventually to an administrative district of Hangzhou City. That as a result of this absorption, Xiaoshan has been rapidly industrialized.

My grandmother talks of how much Xiaoshan has changed. “Everyone uses western toilets now,” she told me many times during the days leading up to the trip, and continued to remind me of it throughout our stay as though it couldn’t possibly be true. Of the newly built Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport and the Hangzhou South Railway Station she spoke about with a sense of loss. To my grandmother toilets were a blessing, but the airports and railways symbolized the sacrifice of Xiaoshan’s quintessence to China’s development. In this sense of displacement, I could relate to my grandmother. She was a stranger in her own land just as I was a stranger in what was supposedly my homeland.

To me, these photographs were a manifestation of my photographic eye

in the fleeting moments that I spent in Xiaoshan with my family. To impose a significance on these works about my consideration of larger politics at play in China would be disingenuous. These photographs are primarily an access to my consciousness at a particular place and time, and only secondarily a stance on China’s rural development. These photographs are my access to my feelings at their most raw and essential—they represent that which is “Chinese” and “American” and “urbanization” and “birthplace.” It is only through seeing Xiaoshan photographed that I finally feel that I am in the midst of it.

Yuan Yuan Wang, BC ’11, is an East Asian Studies major and in Beijing this year studying Chinese literature and art history. She misses living in a city that rains. She can be reached at [email protected].

May 2010 31

CALL FOR PITCHES: October 2010 Issue The Columbia Political Review will be accepting pitches throughout the summer for next year’s first issue.If you feel the itch or whim to write a piece for CPR in the coming year, please follow the pitch instructions below.

PITCH INSTRUCTIONS

Pitches are due by 11:59 PM on Friday, September 17.Please email them to [email protected]. Your pitch should include the following information:

1. Name, School, Year, Phone Number 2. In one or two sentences, state your argument. What is the thrust of what you will be writing about? Take another paragraph to sketch briefly how you will support this argument 3. What makes your topic engaging? What new vantage are you revealing to readers? 4. If you already have sources in mind for your article, please list them. Note that a full source list is not required, but may help make your argument more convincing and/or compelling. Also, CPR smiles upon sources – such as those within Columbia or New York – that would make a piece unique from what other college publications can produce.

“Mogadishu scene,” Courtesy of ctsnow on Flickr

Columbia Political Review May 2010

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Transcript of Columbia Political Review May 2010