Category Archives: International

Anna Fifield – The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un

The best biography of Kim Jong-un available. Fifield goes into his basketball- and 1990s Chicago Bulls-obsessed boyhood, including schooling in Sweden, to how he climbed the order of succession in time to be groomed for power beneath the scenes. He might not have been entirely ready to take over when his father Kim Jong-il died in 2011, but he did have some preparation, and learned the political game quickly.

Given his health, he may not have the longest of life expectancies. Kim is reportedly a heavy smoker and drinker, and judging by appearances, now weighs as much as 300 pounds despite his modest height. He also shows signs of gout despite being under 40, which would indicate he is quite sedentary and gets little exercise, which also bodes poorly. But he seems to have reached an equilibrium both domestically and internationally that will keep him in power for the long term.

Domestically, the elites enjoy roughly a Western middle class living standard, despite north Korea being one of the world’s poorest countries. Kim has allowed some modest market reforms that relieve, to a small degree, the worst sufferings of poverty for commoners. That eases social tension, while still making elites fear even a non-lethal fall from grace. Internationally, north Korea’s nuclear capabilities will almost certainly never be used, but occasional bellicosity and successful attempts to appear irrational are enough to keep foreign threats to the regime at bay.

Kim Jong-un remains a mystery, and his personality remains unknown. He does come across as venal and not particularly restrained in his personal life. But he also seems intelligent, and quickly learned how to play a game that can be lethal—and for many of his opponents, including close family members, has. He is not the sort of person a president of the United States should be falling in love with.

Mary Elise Sarotte – The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

One of the most important events in the 20^th century almost happened on a lark—an East German official made a mistake about loosening travel restrictions during a press conference and couldn’t walk it back. At the same time, the Wall’s coming down seemed inevitable. Sarotte explores this tension in gripping fashion—I couldn’t put this book down.

Even Dan Rather’s on-site news coverage was an accident. He and his crew were there to cover a diplomatic meeting, and didn’t think anything big would come of it. Turns out it did, and how. They covered the fateful press conference, and were just able to set up in a spot near the wall when the celebrants starting tearing down the concrete. Even the floodlights they used for tv lighting were a happy accident they had on hand. In all, Sarotte has done justice to one of recent history’s most important, and happiest events. Its mix of spontaneity and inevitability is the perfect microcosm for twentieth-century socialism’s larger collapse.

Alexander Woodside – Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History

It reads like a Ph.D thesis. Despite its dry style, trendy humanities jargon, and casual disdain for neoliberalism, which he never defines, Woodside argues that there is more than one kind of modernity. He sees it as essentially a rejection of feudalism. Europe went about it one way, on a Renaissance-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenment trajectory. East Asia went about it another way, rejecting hereditary status through a merit-based examination system for government officials.

I would define the term differently–modernity comprises roughly bourgeois popular values that favor openness and innovation. These values, when combined with roughly liberal political institutions, result in the mass prosperity we see today in Europe, America, and the Asian tiger economies–and rapidly emerging today in China and India.

But within his too-narrow confines, Woodside does well. China’s examination system was, for a long time, the world’s most thorough attempt to institute a meritocracy rather than a hereditary aristocracy. It didn’t work perfectly. But the system was far more modern, at an earlier date, than any governmental system in Europe. Neighboring countries had their own variations on examinations and their own rejections of feudalism.

Just as there is more than one trajectory to modernity–Renaissance and examinations being Woodside’s two primary examples–there are significant within-system variations. For examples, Woodside turns to Vietnam and Korea’s examination systems. These were influenced by China, but evolved distinct characteristics to fit their circumstances. Other East Asian countries such as Cambodia also had their examination systems, though Woodside did not have the space to cover them in detail. All of their examination systems were vastly different than Japan, which had no examination system and maintained a strict feudal system until its own rapid embrace of modernity in the 19^th century.

Walter Scheidel – Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

Since Rome fell, there has never been another empire so large, so dominating, and so enduring. Scheidel asks, why is that? His short answer is polycentrism. In post-Rome Europe, squabbling among kings and nobles prevented unitary states of any significant size from emerging. The rise of the Catholic church added church-vs.-state competition to the mix. The church itself had numerous internal splits leading to the Reformation, adding intra-church competition to the mix. As the economy slowly recovered from the Dark Ages, transportation and trade added economic competition to the mix.

A bit of context: Rome was founded in 753 B.C., at least according to mythical lore. Though Rome itself fell in 476 A.D., its government remained the de facto political system in much of Western Europe for another two centuries until Arab conquerors ringed three quarters of the Mediterranean and cut Europe off from long-distance trade. The Empire’s  Eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, continued until 1453 A.D. In all, the same state held sway over significant territory for more than 2,000 years—as much as a hundred generations. Nothing like that breadth or length has been approached before or since.

This is not for lack of trying. Europe alone had Merovingian and then Carolingian France; post-Columbian empires by the Netherlands, Spain, England, France, and Belgium; the Habsburgs; Napoleon; and America’s own efforts in Latin American and the Phillipines. Asia had Attila the Hun; Post-Mohammed Arab conquerors; Genghis Khan and his descendants’ four empires; Tamerlane; Imperial Russia; Chinese dynasties from the Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing; Japan’s Imperial Period; and more. None of these empires stuck around the way Rome did.

Scheidel’s answer to why Rome has never repeated is essentially a broader-ranging, but less sophisticated version of Harold J. Berman’s thesis in Law and Revolution, which applies polycentric frameworks to the evolution of law. Berman does not appear anywhere in the notes; Scheidel would likely find a lot to like in Berman. Berman also argued that his narrow polycentrism thesis applied much more widely. But as a specialist in the law, he intentionally confined himself to that, leaving a natural opening for someone like Scheidel. Nor does Scheidel cite Henri Pirenne, who not only dates the fall of Rome differently than Scheidel, but emphasized decentralized economic and political institutions as important engines of openness and progress. It would be a short step for Scheidel to add that such decentralization and polycentrism is also an important check against a re-emerging empire.

He also leans on economic historian Joel Mokyr’s arguments about a “culture of technology” leading to change and progress. Scheidel argues that dynamism prevents power concentrating in one set of hands for too long. Near the end, he also cites Deirdre McCloskey’s emphasis on values—when people hold roughly liberal cultural values, empire cannot emerge.

On the minus side, Scheidel relies too heavily on counterfactuals. Historians and social scientists use them sometimes to ask “what if?” some event or policy had turned out differently. For example, how would history have changed if the Nazis had won World War II? There is no way to know for sure. There is some value in these thought experiments, but they should not be treated as serious evidence. Initially defending them as an edgy alternative to traditional analysis, he leans on them throughout the book, shoehorning them into his narrative where they do not fit, and where they neither help nor hurt his polycentrism thesis. Most bizarre is his “what if Europe and East Asia switched places on the map?” What is London faced the Pacific, and China faced the Atlantic? It is never clear how this relates to Scheidel’s thesis about empires and polycentrism.

Escape from Rome is a good read. Scheidel’s polycentrism thesis is compelling and, in my estimation, largely correct. The best defense against a monopoly is competition. As with markets, so with geopolitics. Excising most of his counterfactual nonsense would have made this lengthy book shorter while improving its quality of argumentation.