New Frontiers Podcast
New Frontiers, the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs’ podcast series, offers a deeper view into global areas through one-on-one discussions with Middlebury College faculty and others.
New Frontiers topics—from big tech, environmental conservation, global security, and political economy to culture, literature, religion, and changing work patterns—have global or international dimensions.
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Episode 7 - Whatever Happened To “Essential” Workers?
In March 2020, the COVID pandemic forced the United States into lockdown, as it did many other countries. As workers were ordered home, many but not all businesses and institutions closed. Those that remained open were staffed by workers who—too often poorly paid, nonunionized, and lacking meaningful benefits—were now deemed “essential workers”.
The lockdown lasted months. The pandemic upended work patterns and—at a time when vaccines were nonexistent while knowledge about transmission, prevention, and treatment of COVID was scant—exposed essential workers to extraordinary and unparalleled risks.
Understanding and explaining how the pandemic affected workers and Labor—organized or not—is the goal of Jamie McCallum’s new book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Struggle for Worker Justice. A central lesson McCallum draws from his research is that the fate of those of us who are not essential workers is tied to those who are: ensuring workers have good jobs at good wages, in safe conditions with plenty of paid time off, will in the end benefit us all; and as the pandemic showed, the converse is also true.
For more information on Jamie McCallum’s book, Essential (Basic Books Nov 2022), and other work, click here.
New Frontiers EP 7 - Whatever Happened To "Essential" Workers?
How did the COVID pandemic affect America’s workers—especially those deemed “essential” who often were poorly paid, nonunionized, lacked meaningful benefits, and were required to continue working while most other workers stayed home? How did these workers respond to the health risks they encountered on the job, and how did their struggle for labor justice transform—at least for a while—political discourse and consciousness in America? Jamie McCallum and Mark Williams explore these and other issues in this episode of New Frontiers.
Transcript
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, Mark Williams talks with labor sociologist Jamie McCallum about the research he conducted on the COVID pandemic’s impact on American workers, the US labor movement, and what this research tells us about the state of American labor and our public health system today.
Mark Williams
Jamie McCallum is the associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. During the COVID pandemic, he spent a lot of time interviewing essential workers and researching issues in public health. The fruit of that research is a new book. It will be published this year by Basic Books, and it’s titled “Essential: How the pandemic transformed the long struggle for worker justice.” Jamie McCallum, it’s a pleasure to have you visit us here on New Frontiers.
Jamie McCallum
Thanks for having me.
Mark Williams
Good to have you here. Now, your book is all about the COVID pandemic’s impact on American labor. And so right off the bat, I was struck by two things about the book’s title. And the first thing that struck me was that the title implies that workers’ struggle for justice changed somehow as a result of the pandemic. And if that’s the case, then can you give us a quick synopsis or a tease about how things changed and about how great the change was. And then we’ll circle back later on for a deeper dive.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah, thanks for that question. It’s great. So the best way I think I can say it is that there were different phases of struggle or protest or worker activism, whatever you want to call it, that characterized early parts in the later parts of the pandemic. The biggest part that changed I think is that we saw a much larger increase in sort of spontaneous or less organized by official uniondom-type protests. During the first year and a half of the pandemic, about a third of the workplace protest strikes, walkouts, and whatever were by non-union workers, which is pretty atypical. And that’s one thing that happened. Another thing that happened, I think, is the sort of outcome that we’re seeing now, which is a revival of, in some ways, very traditional types of sort of workplace militancy, bottom up workplace militancy characterized by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers who are now organizing unions like gangbusters. And to some extent, some of that bottom-up frustration that happened during the pandemic ended up in this new sort of form of labor struggle.
Mark Williams
Okay, great. Thanks. Well, we’ll come back to this later on and we’ll go into it in more detail. Now, the second thing that struck me about your book’s title is the phrase essential workers and you know, your book is really all about essential workers. Could you remind our listeners what an essential worker is?
Jamie McCallum
So, the first time most people heard the phrase essential workers was during the pandemic, obviously, and that mostly referred to people who had to work in person March 2020, until whenever. You could break it down and say those were frontline workers, and that there were certain industries that were considered essential to our survival. And therefore, anyone in those industries was essential, whether they worked in person or not. So for example, administrators at hospitals sometimes did not come into the hospital every day, but they would be characterized as essential by certain people. In the book, I basically use essential and frontline interchangeably to mean people who worked face to face in person during the pandemic.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now, who made the determination as to who was classified as essential and who wasn’t? Was this a policy? Was it a regulation?
Jamie McCallum
That is a great, great question. And I think it’s not that easy to figure out. So there were obviously certain industries like healthcare, computing, certain parts of finance, certain parts of food production, certain parts of like maintenance of things that were necessary for our daily survival that were deemed essential by the federal government. However, states varied widely as to who also fell into that category. So sometimes a welder in Massachusetts was deemed essential and in Pennsylvania they were not, or certain kinds of convenience stores were deemed essential in certain places, but a county away those same services were not. And then sometimes businesses themselves lobbied to be considered essential and were allowed to operate on the basis that they sold hand sanitizer or tissues or whatever it was. You know, I interviewed people who said that their stores just simply started stocking quote unquote essential items just to stay open even long after those items were sold out. So it was a very convoluted process and one that I think is much more confusing than we typically thought.
Mark Williams
Okay. Okay, thank you. Well, let’s get into the meat of your book and we’ll start off with “the why.” Why study essential workers during the pandemic? Was there something particularly important or useful about that time period, analytically?
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. Well, so I’m a labor sociologist. So when the pandemic started, that’s what I looked toward. I was teaching the sociology of labor at Middlebury when the pandemic happened and my students were like, do you think this is going to affect anything? And I was like, that’s interesting. You know, I don’t know. So we started talking about it and I started interviewing workers mostly in healthcare and grocery stores right away. Sort of from my own curiosity. But what I think became quickly apparent to me is that the news cycle and our everyday lives pretty quickly determined—by the ability of us to access certain goods and services and to some extent, our ability to do that was predicated on essential workers doing those jobs. And so people who were formerly invisible or on the margins of society, all of a sudden had this huge sort of vaunted place in American life. The news media focused on essential workers. The government was talking about essential workers. They were at the heart of matters of national security and public safety. And so it seemed appropriate to place them sort of at the center of a story about the pandemic. The book is essentially the story of the pandemic from the standpoint of essential workers. And so it sort of places them as the epicenter of a society wide problem.
Mark Williams
And these are workers, I think you mentioned, who were more or less out of sight in terms of being that prominent. Not that they weren’t playing important roles in the economy or in industry, but they were not those who were typically talked about.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. The extent to which anyone cared about grocery clerks or nursing home aids or delivery drivers, it’s apparent simply, you know, our society treats them with wild disregard. And for the most part, our policy makers have ways of shifting the cards around so that it never really comes around to them. At a certain point that did begin to change; in our social imagination and in a reality, you know, they were our heroes, right? I mean, New Yorkers, banging pots and pans every evening. That didn’t happen before, and it actually hasn’t happened very much since. But for a moment they occupied this extraordinary social place.
Mark Williams
I can recall seeing homemade signs in people’s front yards, thanking essential workers. Right. For staying on the job. Right. Can you tell us a bit about how labor and essential workers therefore responded to the pandemic? And here I’m talking about in terms of organizing and activism, what were the workers doing and during the pandemic and what did those efforts accomplished?
Jamie McCallum
Immediately as the pandemic started by April, we started seeing,
Mark Williams
April 2020?
Jamie McCallum
April 2020. We started seeing workers push back mostly about workplace safety and low wages and variable schedules. The scheduling thing was obvious long before the pandemic schedules of American workers began to fluctuate wildly. During the pandemic, some days you had 14-hour days, next day, you had two-hour days, you were sent home in the middle of it. You weren’t paid for that time, et cetera. So that was an issue. And then workplace safety became front and center. So you had walkouts, workers at Amazon and strikes by gig economy, workers, delivery drivers mostly. You had walkouts by garbage collectors, food workers, meat packing workers. And so we saw this, which is pretty odd and unusual in American society, sort of an outpouring of spontaneous activism, revolt, whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t actually on that large of a scale. Like if you look at a typical year, 2020 registered fewer large strikes than previous years. But you know, first of all, only a fraction of the workforce was going to work. And second of all, the barriers to organizing something like that were extraordinary. But what we did see was all this nontraditional sort of new kind of experimenting. Some of it, to the rest of your question, amounted to a lot. I mean, workers won higher wages, better healthcare, paid sick time, childcare, free transportation to work in COVID-safe environments. And then very often they also won nothing. The difference depends to some extent on if you’re in a workplace that has strong unions, that was one of the key differences, I think. Like for example, meat packing workers who did an incredibly important and dangerous job during the pandemic won very little. Nursing home workers who work in a similar environment had a much greater time winning material benefits—raises time off, et cetera.
Mark Williams
And is that because there were unions present in one and not in the other?
Jamie McCallum
No, actually, I mean, there’s unions present in, in meat packing actually, they’re just really weak. Nursing homes were the epicenter of the pandemic. Their unions were comparably strong. So I did some research with other—actually political scientist Adam Dean, who used to work at Middlebury, led a research team of myself and two medical doctors. And we did research on nursing homes that showed, for example, that unionized nursing homes had much lower levels of mortality of residents and much lower levels of infections by staff than did non-union homes. For example, it’s possible that unionized nursing homes had better access to PPE. They had better paid-sick leave. They had higher wages, so that nursing home workers didn’t have to moonlight at various homes spreading the disease place to place. There were benefits like that, that were not only workplace specific, but also sort of society wide that I think workers helped win.
Mark Williams
In terms of the amount of activism that was going on during the pandemic, was there any indication that there was more activism just in smaller groups as opposed to larger unions going on strike?
Jamie McCallum
So, there is some indication of that. So the Cornell labor center did a cool project where they ended up tracking labor unrest during that time. And they found, as I sort of mentioned before, an explosion of protests, whatever you want to call it, among non-unionized workers. Some of the larger unions, I think personally missed an opportunity to organize more large-scale strikes, walkouts, protests, and so you don’t register some of those as much. The exception probably was in nursing. Of the eight major strikes in 2020, in other words, thousand workers or more, half of them were in hospitals, by nurses. The longest strike of the pandemic, I believe, was led by nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, So those people were the forefront or the trenches, whatever. Whatever you want to say.
Mark Williams
Right. Okay. Well, one of the things that you say in your book and here I’ll quote is “the pandemic has profoundly impacted the way we work and with it, the working class.” Now I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on those points.
Jamie McCallum
So part of the book is trying to understand the process by which some sort of essential working class came to cohere or not during the pandemic. In other words, we typically think of class in America as essentially an income bracket. If you’re in the bottom quintile, you’re poor. If you’re in the next one up you’re working class or whatever it is. And then you have the rich on top. There was a moment during the pandemic when grocery clerks, teachers, nurses, nursing home workers, meat packers, all these different kinds of people who make different amounts of money or sort of exist in different cultural spheres and are in vastly different occupations with different levels of education and yet came to sort of see themselves as having a common identity or a common cause or something.
Mark Williams
They were all classified as essential.
Jamie McCallum
They’re all classified as essential workers. And the most important factors is that they all were in close proximity to serious risk. That was a main defining thing. It’s like what do these people working from home risk? Nothing, right? We’re in a different situation. And so that was a compelling and powerful narrative that workers came to understand. And so part of the book is understanding that process, which would be what social scientists referred to as class formation—something like that, how classes really come together and form. And then of course, as the pandemic wore on and Biden extended unemployment benefits, and more people could stay home longer. And people began to say, why doesn’t anyone want to work anymore? Cause there’s a labor shortage. Some of the coherence around that essential working class began to unravel and they turned against each other, and they turned against the unemployed, and all those things. And so there was this process by which this sort of organization of workers cohered and then unraveled. And I sort of wanted to trace that process.
Mark Williams
If I understand what you’re saying, a type of sort of proto class that formed and then disintegrated.
Jamie McCallum
I think that’s right. I mean there was no march for essential workers on the DC mall. No one really came together to say, you know, this is who we are. But in a million of Facebook groups and online chat centers and here and there protests … through interviews I did when I talked to people in May, June, July of 2020 people said, “look, us essential workers. We’re all in this together.”
Mark Williams
At that point, the commonalities between them were very, very striking and they could see them. They were all in the same boat.
Jamie McCallum
Exactly. They had a certain sense of solidarity with each other. I met people who said they routinely gave other essential workers free groceries at the store. And you know, there was all kinds of stuff like that that was happening. Almost like sort of micro level acts of solidarity. And then later on, people began to say, well, why do they get to stay home? Right? Why do they get an unemployment check that is larger than my wage, which was true. And there was some sense of sacrifice by certain groups of people—who knows how many of them had died in their industries. And that I think sort of tended to fracture that sense of solidarity.
Mark Williams
Could you clarify for me who, who was it that was staying home, receiving these unemployment checks that were larger than the wages.
Jamie McCallum
If you were unemployed, let’s say from a restaurant or a hospitality, some of the sectors most largely impacted during the first year. And you made, you know, 11, 12 dollars an hour at your hotel job or your restaurant job with tips, then some of Trump’s and even Biden’s unemployment insurance was significant. It was better. I mean, some of the Cares Act checks and then the American Rescue Plan checks were significant. And there’s some evidence that was keeping people home. I don’t think there was any evidence that it was totally driving the labor shortage, which I also talk about in the book. But I do think that after working for however many months through the pandemic, people did want to stay home. And so when those checks came out, a lot of people took advantage of that stuff to find a new career or spend time with their family or take care of loved ones or whatever it was. But there was that tension.
Mark Williams
So there were people who one might have classified as essential workers who were unemployed at home, receiving unemployment checks while others who were classified as essential workers were at the till at the grocery store, checking people out. Is that what you’re saying?
Jamie McCallum
Right. I interviewed a nurse who said, “we’re out here working our butts off and they’re at home sitting on them.” And she was referring not to, you know, people like me who worked at college, but like other nurses who had said, you know what, like I’m not doing this anymore. So I think that those unemployment benefits were extremely valuable and extraordinarily important, probably saved lives, but also ended up sort of affecting the composition of this working class sort-of status.
Mark Williams
Okay. I see. Thank you.
Mark Williams
Well, let’s shift gears a bit, given your research, do you think that there’s some kind of relationship between what we might broadly call the public health on the one hand and class struggle on the other?
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. Why do we have relatively safe workplaces, let’ say? And I think most people assume that market competition forces employers to do the right thing here and there. And that government regulations like OSHA and other regulatory bodies like that give us some protections as well. And there’s of course, probably some truth to that. My perspective was that essentially workplace safety is the outcome of class struggle. Well if you had a union during the pandemic, like all the research shows that you had greater access to PPE, you had a more consistent schedule, you had greater paid sick leave, and you made more money. And those things did translate into safer workplaces and therefore into safer places for the rest of us. So I looked at healthcare, education, and meat packing. So in healthcare, the research I did with Adam Dean was fairly shocking. As I said before, unionized nursing homes basically saved lives. There were, I think, 10 percent lower resident mortality in union homes than there were non-union homes, looking at every nursing home in the continental United States, which is a significant drop. So if you can imagine industrywide unionization, if the whole nursing home industry was unionized, that would be associated with about 8,000 fewer deaths. That’s a lot. And if you imagine all those people have family and grandkids or whatever, it’s like the ripple effect is enormous. In education, I found that in Chicago, L.A., Philly, New York, there were a lot of places where teacher protests and pushback against the return to school orders resulted in more mask mandate, better ventilation in classrooms, smaller classrooms, whatever it was that teachers wanted, they pushed for and got it.
Mark Williams
The relationship then between public health and class struggle, what would that equation look like if you were to sort of verbalize it?
Jamie McCallum
More struggle, more health. Greater forms of worker, organization, higher levels of unionization, especially lead to better health outcomes. So if you can imagine a situation like in a hospital, if you’re a unionized nurse, you have the right to bargain in your contract over all kinds of stipulations related to your personal health. That personal health easily translates into better health outcomes for patients in the general public. So that equation was interesting to me during the pandemic.
Mark Williams
And your data bears that out, you see this happening again and again.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. I mean, there’s both the quantitative data that we have about nursing homes to some extent schools. And then if you talk to meat packing workers, where they have incredible levels of death and sickness and illness and whatever, and their unions are incredibly weak. Their unions were essentially incapable of struggling in a way that that could get them what they needed.
Mark Williams
I see. I’d like to circle back to something we briefly touched on at the beginning of our chat. Earlier, I asked about how workers’ struggle for justice had changed as a result of the pandemic. And I’m wondering, could you expand some more on what you said earlier?
Jamie McCallum
So July 2022. We’re seeing an extraordinary moment in which working class activism is sort of taking shape like it hasn’t in a long time. I think union elections are up 60 percent this year than they were in previous years. And there is I think, a renewed interest, especially among young people and among workers of color about what workplace struggle and especially union struggle can do for us. That being said, there has been also a parallel movement generally in society where the sort of vaunted position that essential workers occupied during the pandemic has more or less disappeared. I went to a protest of nurses about a year ago now, and they had a banner outside the hospital that said, “last year’s heroes, this year’s zeroes.” And everyone I interviewed said the same thing. They said where’s the pots and pans now—that kind of thing. And I think what, to me, that exposes is the thin and superficial nature of some of that support early on in the pandemic when it was essential to our absolute physical survival. Yes. We cared about people in those positions. And when vaccines sort of a return to normal, a certain degree of the COVID recession more or less ended, then people began to return to a world in which we treat essential workers like they’re servants. And so that quick turnaround was also shocking to me. I sort of optimistically expected some of that, you know, essential workers being able to sort of cash in on some of that good will and power social power that they earned during the pandemic. And it’s been scarce lately.
Mark Williams
Do you think that there was a moment, perhaps a prolonged moment in which workers in various sectors had an unparalleled opportunity to organize in the context of that pandemic and the upheaval that might have passed at this point?
Jamie McCallum
There was a moment in the fall of 2021, what people dubbed “Striketober” during October. There was an explosion of strikes that basically paralleled the labor shortage—however you want to define the labor shortage, be it, some of it was fictitious, some of it was real. That provided an opportunity and workers stepped through that window and unions followed them in many ways. And that was really great. There was also a time when if we needed nurses to show up and nurses went on strike, well, very often they got what they wanted quickly. But not always. So nurses at tenant hospitals in Massachusetts struck for, I think 300 days. Just imagine being the owner of a hospital and having hundreds of nurses not being able to work and then keeping them out for most of the year. I mean it’s almost insane. And so yes, there were these sort of structural opportunities during the pandemic, but in many ways, I think what we’re seeing now, especially the Starbucks campaigns and the sort of historic union victory at Amazon, the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, is some sort of full circle organizing. So for example, the leader of the Staten Island Amazon union was more or less the first profiled person to be fired for leading a workplace safety protest in 2020. And he has basically risen to be the star of the labor movement. And so I think that people tried to take advantage when they could during the pandemic, but the chaos of it all did sort of interrupt some of that. And as there has been some return to business as usual, whatever workers have said “okay, now is the time.” It’s been interesting to see how that has dovetailed with certain kinds of public support or certain kinds of political support from the Biden administration, but ultimately probably not enough.
Mark Williams
Okay. Thank you. I read something in your book that I’d like to explore a bit more. You say that during the pandemic’s first year, so this would be 2020 and here I’m going to quote again, “the U.S. has only 4 percent of the global population but suffered about 22 percent of COVID 19 deaths.” And then you go on to say, and again, I’ll quote “by 2022, the share of Americans who had died of coronavirus was at least 63 percent higher than in our peer countries.” I’m wondering, what do you see as the most important factor or factors behind these really alarming stats?
Jamie McCallum
I wish that I was an epidemiologist right now, and I could give a real holistic answer to that. So I, first of all, don’t know fully why that is the case. I do think there’s a lot of evidence that during the very early part of the pandemic workplace transmission was driving the spread. COVID was a workplace hazard, essentially. We did almost nothing politically to mitigate that spread. In other words, OSHA made almost no investigations at workplace transmissions. Where there were incidents of workplace malfeasance where workers died when they shouldn’t have died, OSHA barely levied fines. There was just very little we did. There was some evidence early on that countries with greater levels of respect for labor rights had lower levels of COVID transmission. I did some investigating that and found that it was just, it’s just too simplistic of a story. Like the factors that led to the American explosion of COVID compared to peer countries is very obviously complicated. And I don’t know the full picture of it. One thing I will say, and this again is related to the workplace is that years of deregulation of healthcare probably had something to do with it. So for example, when COVID hit, we had almost no surge capacity in hospitals. Many countries, South Korea being a really notable one, had large surge capacity in hospitals that they could soak up people during an influx or a crisis. Why we had almost none was essentially because of years of private deregulation of healthcare, which maximized the capacity of hospitals. Nurses’ unions routinely pushed for a surge capacity. They routinely pushed for excess beds in hospitals and nursing homes, and they often lost those battles. So again, one example, I think, where workplace struggle, dynamics, whatever you want to call it, class struggles had some relationship to public health outcomes.
Mark Williams
Looking back, how well do you think the official response to the pandemic was? And I asked that because as an outside observer, it would seem that a lot of the confusion and outright denial of the importance, the significance of the pandemic coming from official circles probably played a part in those statistics.
Jamie McCallum
I think that the Trump administration was essentially a death cult. And I think that the willingness to let so many people die without significant emergency response was world historic and devastating. The link that I found in my research that would relate to that, I think again, is this thing about our inability to recognize COVID as a workplace illness. We had a much better record of guarding against a workplace spread of Ebola, workplace spread of HIV, even workplace spread of swine flu. And our response to this disease, we still have no federal guidelines that protect workers against airborne illness. That to me is something that going forward, if you think about like what is to be done, that would be something.
Mark Williams
Well, that almost leads into the next question that I had. Given the experience that essential workers had during the COVID pandemic, do you think that labor has anything to teach us about how to prepare for the next pandemic?
Jamie McCallum
To some extent, you know, as a society, we are only as healthy as the people who deliver our goods and services, essentially. Thinking about average working-class people, not as the bottom of a social hierarchy, but the foundation of sort of a healthy population and a democracy is important. I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson.
Mark Williams
I think there was a period during the pandemic where we came very close to learning that.
Jamie McCallum
When was it?
Mark Williams
It was when I saw all of those signs. Out on people’s front yards and plastered on the sides of buildings, thanking essential workers. While most people are locked down and if you did venture out into the highways, they’re virtually deserted.
Jamie McCallum
Right, right.
Mark Williams
People are really sheltering in place. And they’re critically dependent upon people who are risking their lives to sell food to them, to serve them.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I remember talking to grocery store workers who were like, the people that come through the line are calling me by first name and thanking me and this and that, that kind of thing. I think what is curious is why that public support did not translate into something lasting and meaningful. So for example, if it is the case that workers having a voice on the job, more power at work, et cetera, is important. Why do we not pass legislation that makes it easier for workers to do that? Right. The protecting the right to organize act would be the first legislation in 90 years to update labor law. And we don’t do it. When I was writing, I was cautious about overestimating the significance of that public support, because it didn’t translate into material, political gains for people. And I think that is a tragedy.
Mark Williams
It’s almost like you’re talking about the difference between short term political calculations and longer term what we might call statesmanship. Where you see the, the big picture, you are adopting policy for the good of society as a whole over the long term. So you have very long time horizons in terms of the policy versus what’s in it for me now. What, what are my basic interests at this moment in time, political interests I’m talking about. And then basing your calculations and therefore your actions upon, upon short time horizons.
Jamie McCallum
Right. I mean, Biden came in against all odds. Biden’s spent his whole career being, not Bernie Sanders, essentially. Right. He was not austerity guy. He was in neoliberal for decades. And all of a sudden he comes in and he is like, let’s, let’s talk to organizing workers. Let’s raise the floor. Let’s blah, blah, blah. And it, unfortunately didn’t happen. He’s not the only one to blame, but there was a moment, as you said, when large swaths of the American people, democrats, republicans, all across the income spectrum were like, these people deserve our everlasting respect. And it’s like, we didn’t raise the minimum wage. We didn’t make significant adjustments to labor law. That to me is an indication that we just didn’t learn the lesson well enough. So when there’s another pandemic, it seems likely that we will force people to work in unsafe situations. And they will have to take responsibility to fight for the things that they need to do their job safely, which will likely translate into things that make our lives better. I mean, in some ways, this is the point of my book, whether or not you hold crummy, rotten, lousy jobs, people that do hold them, the better those jobs are the less rotten and crummy and poorly paid they are, the better off the rest of us are. During the pandemic, that was very clear. If people around you have COVID, you’re more likely to get COVID. you know, if workers around you are sick, your grocery store will close or you’ll get COVID that way or whatever. If your nursing home is run by profiteers and a private equity firm, then your loved ones are more likely to get sick. So I think those lessons were clear. We just have done a poor job of sort of translating them into real political gains.
Mark Williams
Thanks very much, you know, almost everywhere I go these days, I see signs and those signs say things like “Now hiring. Apply now.” And I’m wondering, do you have any thoughts on what people have called “the big quit?”
Jamie McCallum
So, on the one hand, it was totally inexplicable. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. So the labor shortage began as a ruse. Capitalist societies like ours have an easy solution to labor shortage that is just to pay people more money. If you have a shortage of, let’s say nurses, which we do, and you offer nurses a million dollars, you’d all of a sudden, overnight have more nurses. Is a million dollars too much? Well, how much is the right number then? Right? And so, but we didn’t really do that for a while. And sure wages rose, they rose a little bit more, but they never rose enough. So there was on the one hand, a movement of people, especially on the right, who just simply called a labor shortage. They called it a labor shortage and it was really a surplus of bad jobs. And that lasted for a couple months, and then the labor shortage persisted in certain industries. And then it became more interesting. And people began to say, well, people have a bad work ethic, or they’re not Protestant enough, or what have you. And I think there’s two responses to that. The first is that a cataclysmic reorganization of the economy like happened in March and April 2020 is simply hard to quickly rebound. Like in Europe, they didn’t lay everyone off. They didn’t fire everyone. They just furloughed people. So when the pandemic was quote unquote over, or it was time to come back to work, you just assumed your job again. Right. That didn’t happen here. Millions of people were fired, and they had to find new jobs. That reshuffling led to a fair amount of economic instability and people took new jobs and found new things to do, and did not want to work in certain industries. Certain industries never rebounded, like hospitality is still pretty low. The other way, however, the labor shortage is totally explicable is that we have the census and the census every week asks people why they didn’t work this last week. And all you have to do is look on that census and look at what people say. And so for the….
Mark Williams
What are some of the results?
Jamie McCallum
So during the 18 months of May 2020, till early 2022, the main reason people give for not working that week are caregiving responsibilities—so, caring for kids who were still at that time out of daycare or out of school, caring for elderly people who were either taken out of nursing homes, couldn’t go to hospitals, had COVID, had something else, whatever, were taking care of themselves. The percentage of people who applied “I did not want to work last week” was comparably small. So I think that “the big quit” was a little bit overblown. It really wasn’t a big quit. It was really a big, get a better job. I mean, everyone that quit looked for a better job. They weren’t like anarchists shutting the paid labor market, as some people I think tried to paint it as.
Mark Williams
Well, what one heard, at least what I heard is that this is a result of the unemployment checks. There are people who are comfortable not working because they are receiving these checks. Do you put any credence into that?
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. So people on the left don’t like that, I’m on the left. People on the left don’t like that explanation because it feeds into the narrative of lazy workers on unemployment or whatever that the right always tends to put out there. But it’s clear that there were people who did not go back to bad jobs when they could earn more on unemployment, even when they could earn sometimes a little bit less. And to me, that was the whole point of those unemployment checks was to keep people who didn’t want to work or didn’t have to work, not working. And it was a policy instrument that I think was brilliant. I think should probably become a much more permanent feature of our economy, which would tighten the labor market and raise wages almost instantly. And puts us much more in line with advanced welfare states, which have much more generous unemployment programs. Our unemployment system is essentially broken or anachronistic and designed to keep people from getting unemployment checks. During the pandemic, it was much better. Like the pandemic unemployment assistance, the PUA program, was an incredible program. Millions of people benefited from it. It was substantial. I mean, Trump, right, Trump was to some extent, I mean, his administration helped to design that program. Since the pandemic has waned, we’ve gone back to our previous program which is essentially insufficient and flawed. But yes, there was a moment when those unemployment checks were doing that. As I said, I think there were other reasons also, which were probably more significant that was driving people to stay home.
Mark Williams
One of the interesting things that I observed is that there was a push to end the maintenance programs. The argument being that, precisely, it was perpetuating idleness on the part of otherwise productive workers. And so those programs were ended in various states. They were ended, but the labor shortage persists. “The big quit” persists.
Jamie McCallum
Right. I mean, we had almost a natural experiment on, on a nationwide scale, which I’m sure there are a million dissertations being written on that moment right now because half the states, the red ones, ended unemployment checks. For six more months, the labor shortage persisted in those states. Right. It was almost equivalent to the blue states. And it was confusing. It was like, well, we have long had a welfare state that punishes people and puts people back to work with low welfare checks. Why did it not work this time? And I think to some extent, the best answer was that jobs were so bad, risks were so significant, and caregiving responsibilities were very real. Even if people did want to go back, they couldn’t. At the time that those red states ended those unemployment benefits, schools were closed, daycare centers are closed, nursing homes were emptying. What were people supposed to do? They can’t work full time out of the house when you have kids without childcare. So it was sort of, there’s some explanations that are about that. But the degree to which they took the opportunity to try to paint people as, you know, morally backward or lazy or whatever just … I think it backfired.
Mark Williams
You don’t think it holds up to close scrutiny? That explanation.
Jamie McCallum
No. I mean, it never does. Even though good times it doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t now. I mean, my last book was basically all about this, right? Why people work so much. And one of the reasons is that welfare policy forces people to work in order to get benefits. But during the pandemic, I think that forcing didn’t work as much and therefore the ideological stuff that comes with it backfired.
Mark Williams
Well, Jamie, this has really been a fascinating discussion. Thank you very much for helping us understand what’s clearly an incredibly important period for American labor. And I always like to ask my guests what they’re working on next. So how about you? Are you going to be doing some more work on the pandemic and workers, or are you going to be going onto something new?
Jamie McCallum
As a labor sociologist, I’m always interested in these questions. I do have essentially a project brewing that came out of this research that focuses on nurses in particular, which sort of dovetails what we were just talking about. There is an incredible and long-standing nursing shortage in America, although there’s sort of not. Like we have one seventh of all the nurses on the planet in America, and yet we can’t employ them because jobs are so bad and people are leaving bedside jobs left and right. The explosion of traveling nurses is backfiring. So like what will be the future of the caregiving occupations, post pandemic. More people work in healthcare now than in any other industry in America. That is only going to grow. And so part of that research project will be sort of the future of healthcare work post 2022, post pandemic.
Mark Williams
Well, I really look forward to reading that it it’s an important topic.
Jamie McCallum
Thanks. Well, in 2027, we, we can talk about that again or something.
Mark Williams
So very good. We’ve been talking about how the COVID pandemic has affected American workers and more broadly about the state of organized labor and US capitalism today. Our guest has been Jamie McCallum. Jamie’s written a new book called “Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Struggle for Worker Justice.” It’s a great read and I hope that you’ll pick up a copy and check it out for yourself. Jamie, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with us here on New Frontiers.
Jamie McCallum
Thanks for having me.
Jonah Roberts (Middlebury ’23)
A native of Bethlehem, PA, Professor Jamie McCallum now lives in Weybridge, Vermont. He serves on the local school board there, and during the pandemic he joined the Weybridge Fire Department to become a first responder. He enjoys hiking the Trail that encircles Middlebury’s Vermont campus and—when not teaching courses or on the trail—he can often be found in town at the Haymakers restaurant—where he jokingly claims to keep a running tab and hold office hours.
Mark Williams
This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Music is by Ketsa. If you like the show give us a rating, a review on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Podcast or where ever you get your podcast. This can help others to find us too. We’ll be back with another episode soon. Thanks a lot.
SHOW NOTES:
For more information on this and other podcasts go to the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College website https://www.middlebury.edu/office/rohatyn
Essential by Jamie K. McCallum (Basic Books Nov 2022)
Music Credits
Forte by Ketsa - Summer with Sound Album
Soul Zone by Ketsa - Light Rising Album
Edited by Jonah Roberts (Middlebury ’23)
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, Mark Williams talks with labor sociologist Jamie McCallum about the research he conducted on the COVID pandemic’s impact on American workers, the US labor movement, and what this research tells us about the state of American labor and our public health system today.
Mark Williams
Jamie McCallum is the associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. During the COVID pandemic, he spent a lot of time interviewing essential workers and researching issues in public health. The fruit of that research is a new book. It will be published this year by Basic Books, and it’s titled “Essential: How the pandemic transformed the long struggle for worker justice.” Jamie McCallum, it’s a pleasure to have you visit us here on New Frontiers.
Jamie McCallum
Thanks for having me.
Mark Williams
Good to have you here. Now, your book is all about the COVID pandemic’s impact on American labor. And so right off the bat, I was struck by two things about the book’s title. And the first thing that struck me was that the title implies that workers’ struggle for justice changed somehow as a result of the pandemic. And if that’s the case, then can you give us a quick synopsis or a tease about how things changed and about how great the change was. And then we’ll circle back later on for a deeper dive.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah, thanks for that question. It’s great. So the best way I think I can say it is that there were different phases of struggle or protest or worker activism, whatever you want to call it, that characterized early parts in the later parts of the pandemic. The biggest part that changed I think is that we saw a much larger increase in sort of spontaneous or less organized by official uniondom-type protests. During the first year and a half of the pandemic, about a third of the workplace protest strikes, walkouts, and whatever were by non-union workers, which is pretty atypical. And that’s one thing that happened. Another thing that happened, I think, is the sort of outcome that we’re seeing now, which is a revival of, in some ways, very traditional types of sort of workplace militancy, bottom up workplace militancy characterized by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers who are now organizing unions like gangbusters. And to some extent, some of that bottom-up frustration that happened during the pandemic ended up in this new sort of form of labor struggle.
Mark Williams
Okay, great. Thanks. Well, we’ll come back to this later on and we’ll go into it in more detail. Now, the second thing that struck me about your book’s title is the phrase essential workers and you know, your book is really all about essential workers. Could you remind our listeners what an essential worker is?
Jamie McCallum
So, the first time most people heard the phrase essential workers was during the pandemic, obviously, and that mostly referred to people who had to work in person March 2020, until whenever. You could break it down and say those were frontline workers, and that there were certain industries that were considered essential to our survival. And therefore, anyone in those industries was essential, whether they worked in person or not. So for example, administrators at hospitals sometimes did not come into the hospital every day, but they would be characterized as essential by certain people. In the book, I basically use essential and frontline interchangeably to mean people who worked face to face in person during the pandemic.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now, who made the determination as to who was classified as essential and who wasn’t? Was this a policy? Was it a regulation?
Jamie McCallum
That is a great, great question. And I think it’s not that easy to figure out. So there were obviously certain industries like healthcare, computing, certain parts of finance, certain parts of food production, certain parts of like maintenance of things that were necessary for our daily survival that were deemed essential by the federal government. However, states varied widely as to who also fell into that category. So sometimes a welder in Massachusetts was deemed essential and in Pennsylvania they were not, or certain kinds of convenience stores were deemed essential in certain places, but a county away those same services were not. And then sometimes businesses themselves lobbied to be considered essential and were allowed to operate on the basis that they sold hand sanitizer or tissues or whatever it was. You know, I interviewed people who said that their stores just simply started stocking quote unquote essential items just to stay open even long after those items were sold out. So it was a very convoluted process and one that I think is much more confusing than we typically thought.
Mark Williams
Okay. Okay, thank you. Well, let’s get into the meat of your book and we’ll start off with “the why.” Why study essential workers during the pandemic? Was there something particularly important or useful about that time period, analytically?
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. Well, so I’m a labor sociologist. So when the pandemic started, that’s what I looked toward. I was teaching the sociology of labor at Middlebury when the pandemic happened and my students were like, do you think this is going to affect anything? And I was like, that’s interesting. You know, I don’t know. So we started talking about it and I started interviewing workers mostly in healthcare and grocery stores right away. Sort of from my own curiosity. But what I think became quickly apparent to me is that the news cycle and our everyday lives pretty quickly determined—by the ability of us to access certain goods and services and to some extent, our ability to do that was predicated on essential workers doing those jobs. And so people who were formerly invisible or on the margins of society, all of a sudden had this huge sort of vaunted place in American life. The news media focused on essential workers. The government was talking about essential workers. They were at the heart of matters of national security and public safety. And so it seemed appropriate to place them sort of at the center of a story about the pandemic. The book is essentially the story of the pandemic from the standpoint of essential workers. And so it sort of places them as the epicenter of a society wide problem.
Mark Williams
And these are workers, I think you mentioned, who were more or less out of sight in terms of being that prominent. Not that they weren’t playing important roles in the economy or in industry, but they were not those who were typically talked about.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. The extent to which anyone cared about grocery clerks or nursing home aids or delivery drivers, it’s apparent simply, you know, our society treats them with wild disregard. And for the most part, our policy makers have ways of shifting the cards around so that it never really comes around to them. At a certain point that did begin to change; in our social imagination and in a reality, you know, they were our heroes, right? I mean, New Yorkers, banging pots and pans every evening. That didn’t happen before, and it actually hasn’t happened very much since. But for a moment they occupied this extraordinary social place.
Mark Williams
I can recall seeing homemade signs in people’s front yards, thanking essential workers. Right. For staying on the job. Right. Can you tell us a bit about how labor and essential workers therefore responded to the pandemic? And here I’m talking about in terms of organizing and activism, what were the workers doing and during the pandemic and what did those efforts accomplished?
Jamie McCallum
Immediately as the pandemic started by April, we started seeing,
Mark Williams
April 2020?
Jamie McCallum
April 2020. We started seeing workers push back mostly about workplace safety and low wages and variable schedules. The scheduling thing was obvious long before the pandemic schedules of American workers began to fluctuate wildly. During the pandemic, some days you had 14-hour days, next day, you had two-hour days, you were sent home in the middle of it. You weren’t paid for that time, et cetera. So that was an issue. And then workplace safety became front and center. So you had walkouts, workers at Amazon and strikes by gig economy, workers, delivery drivers mostly. You had walkouts by garbage collectors, food workers, meat packing workers. And so we saw this, which is pretty odd and unusual in American society, sort of an outpouring of spontaneous activism, revolt, whatever you want to call it. It wasn’t actually on that large of a scale. Like if you look at a typical year, 2020 registered fewer large strikes than previous years. But you know, first of all, only a fraction of the workforce was going to work. And second of all, the barriers to organizing something like that were extraordinary. But what we did see was all this nontraditional sort of new kind of experimenting. Some of it, to the rest of your question, amounted to a lot. I mean, workers won higher wages, better healthcare, paid sick time, childcare, free transportation to work in COVID-safe environments. And then very often they also won nothing. The difference depends to some extent on if you’re in a workplace that has strong unions, that was one of the key differences, I think. Like for example, meat packing workers who did an incredibly important and dangerous job during the pandemic won very little. Nursing home workers who work in a similar environment had a much greater time winning material benefits—raises time off, et cetera.
Mark Williams
And is that because there were unions present in one and not in the other?
Jamie McCallum
No, actually, I mean, there’s unions present in, in meat packing actually, they’re just really weak. Nursing homes were the epicenter of the pandemic. Their unions were comparably strong. So I did some research with other—actually political scientist Adam Dean, who used to work at Middlebury, led a research team of myself and two medical doctors. And we did research on nursing homes that showed, for example, that unionized nursing homes had much lower levels of mortality of residents and much lower levels of infections by staff than did non-union homes. For example, it’s possible that unionized nursing homes had better access to PPE. They had better paid-sick leave. They had higher wages, so that nursing home workers didn’t have to moonlight at various homes spreading the disease place to place. There were benefits like that, that were not only workplace specific, but also sort of society wide that I think workers helped win.
Mark Williams
In terms of the amount of activism that was going on during the pandemic, was there any indication that there was more activism just in smaller groups as opposed to larger unions going on strike?
Jamie McCallum
So, there is some indication of that. So the Cornell labor center did a cool project where they ended up tracking labor unrest during that time. And they found, as I sort of mentioned before, an explosion of protests, whatever you want to call it, among non-unionized workers. Some of the larger unions, I think personally missed an opportunity to organize more large-scale strikes, walkouts, protests, and so you don’t register some of those as much. The exception probably was in nursing. Of the eight major strikes in 2020, in other words, thousand workers or more, half of them were in hospitals, by nurses. The longest strike of the pandemic, I believe, was led by nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, So those people were the forefront or the trenches, whatever. Whatever you want to say.
Mark Williams
Right. Okay. Well, one of the things that you say in your book and here I’ll quote is “the pandemic has profoundly impacted the way we work and with it, the working class.” Now I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on those points.
Jamie McCallum
So part of the book is trying to understand the process by which some sort of essential working class came to cohere or not during the pandemic. In other words, we typically think of class in America as essentially an income bracket. If you’re in the bottom quintile, you’re poor. If you’re in the next one up you’re working class or whatever it is. And then you have the rich on top. There was a moment during the pandemic when grocery clerks, teachers, nurses, nursing home workers, meat packers, all these different kinds of people who make different amounts of money or sort of exist in different cultural spheres and are in vastly different occupations with different levels of education and yet came to sort of see themselves as having a common identity or a common cause or something.
Mark Williams
They were all classified as essential.
Jamie McCallum
They’re all classified as essential workers. And the most important factors is that they all were in close proximity to serious risk. That was a main defining thing. It’s like what do these people working from home risk? Nothing, right? We’re in a different situation. And so that was a compelling and powerful narrative that workers came to understand. And so part of the book is understanding that process, which would be what social scientists referred to as class formation—something like that, how classes really come together and form. And then of course, as the pandemic wore on and Biden extended unemployment benefits, and more people could stay home longer. And people began to say, why doesn’t anyone want to work anymore? Cause there’s a labor shortage. Some of the coherence around that essential working class began to unravel and they turned against each other, and they turned against the unemployed, and all those things. And so there was this process by which this sort of organization of workers cohered and then unraveled. And I sort of wanted to trace that process.
Mark Williams
If I understand what you’re saying, a type of sort of proto class that formed and then disintegrated.
Jamie McCallum
I think that’s right. I mean there was no march for essential workers on the DC mall. No one really came together to say, you know, this is who we are. But in a million of Facebook groups and online chat centers and here and there protests … through interviews I did when I talked to people in May, June, July of 2020 people said, “look, us essential workers. We’re all in this together.”
Mark Williams
At that point, the commonalities between them were very, very striking and they could see them. They were all in the same boat.
Jamie McCallum
Exactly. They had a certain sense of solidarity with each other. I met people who said they routinely gave other essential workers free groceries at the store. And you know, there was all kinds of stuff like that that was happening. Almost like sort of micro level acts of solidarity. And then later on, people began to say, well, why do they get to stay home? Right? Why do they get an unemployment check that is larger than my wage, which was true. And there was some sense of sacrifice by certain groups of people—who knows how many of them had died in their industries. And that I think sort of tended to fracture that sense of solidarity.
Mark Williams
Could you clarify for me who, who was it that was staying home, receiving these unemployment checks that were larger than the wages.
Jamie McCallum
If you were unemployed, let’s say from a restaurant or a hospitality, some of the sectors most largely impacted during the first year. And you made, you know, 11, 12 dollars an hour at your hotel job or your restaurant job with tips, then some of Trump’s and even Biden’s unemployment insurance was significant. It was better. I mean, some of the Cares Act checks and then the American Rescue Plan checks were significant. And there’s some evidence that was keeping people home. I don’t think there was any evidence that it was totally driving the labor shortage, which I also talk about in the book. But I do think that after working for however many months through the pandemic, people did want to stay home. And so when those checks came out, a lot of people took advantage of that stuff to find a new career or spend time with their family or take care of loved ones or whatever it was. But there was that tension.
Mark Williams
So there were people who one might have classified as essential workers who were unemployed at home, receiving unemployment checks while others who were classified as essential workers were at the till at the grocery store, checking people out. Is that what you’re saying?
Jamie McCallum
Right. I interviewed a nurse who said, “we’re out here working our butts off and they’re at home sitting on them.” And she was referring not to, you know, people like me who worked at college, but like other nurses who had said, you know what, like I’m not doing this anymore. So I think that those unemployment benefits were extremely valuable and extraordinarily important, probably saved lives, but also ended up sort of affecting the composition of this working class sort-of status.
Mark Williams
Okay. I see. Thank you.
Mark Williams
Well, let’s shift gears a bit, given your research, do you think that there’s some kind of relationship between what we might broadly call the public health on the one hand and class struggle on the other?
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. Why do we have relatively safe workplaces, let’ say? And I think most people assume that market competition forces employers to do the right thing here and there. And that government regulations like OSHA and other regulatory bodies like that give us some protections as well. And there’s of course, probably some truth to that. My perspective was that essentially workplace safety is the outcome of class struggle. Well if you had a union during the pandemic, like all the research shows that you had greater access to PPE, you had a more consistent schedule, you had greater paid sick leave, and you made more money. And those things did translate into safer workplaces and therefore into safer places for the rest of us. So I looked at healthcare, education, and meat packing. So in healthcare, the research I did with Adam Dean was fairly shocking. As I said before, unionized nursing homes basically saved lives. There were, I think, 10 percent lower resident mortality in union homes than there were non-union homes, looking at every nursing home in the continental United States, which is a significant drop. So if you can imagine industrywide unionization, if the whole nursing home industry was unionized, that would be associated with about 8,000 fewer deaths. That’s a lot. And if you imagine all those people have family and grandkids or whatever, it’s like the ripple effect is enormous. In education, I found that in Chicago, L.A., Philly, New York, there were a lot of places where teacher protests and pushback against the return to school orders resulted in more mask mandate, better ventilation in classrooms, smaller classrooms, whatever it was that teachers wanted, they pushed for and got it.
Mark Williams
The relationship then between public health and class struggle, what would that equation look like if you were to sort of verbalize it?
Jamie McCallum
More struggle, more health. Greater forms of worker, organization, higher levels of unionization, especially lead to better health outcomes. So if you can imagine a situation like in a hospital, if you’re a unionized nurse, you have the right to bargain in your contract over all kinds of stipulations related to your personal health. That personal health easily translates into better health outcomes for patients in the general public. So that equation was interesting to me during the pandemic.
Mark Williams
And your data bears that out, you see this happening again and again.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. I mean, there’s both the quantitative data that we have about nursing homes to some extent schools. And then if you talk to meat packing workers, where they have incredible levels of death and sickness and illness and whatever, and their unions are incredibly weak. Their unions were essentially incapable of struggling in a way that that could get them what they needed.
Mark Williams
I see. I’d like to circle back to something we briefly touched on at the beginning of our chat. Earlier, I asked about how workers’ struggle for justice had changed as a result of the pandemic. And I’m wondering, could you expand some more on what you said earlier?
Jamie McCallum
So July 2022. We’re seeing an extraordinary moment in which working class activism is sort of taking shape like it hasn’t in a long time. I think union elections are up 60 percent this year than they were in previous years. And there is I think, a renewed interest, especially among young people and among workers of color about what workplace struggle and especially union struggle can do for us. That being said, there has been also a parallel movement generally in society where the sort of vaunted position that essential workers occupied during the pandemic has more or less disappeared. I went to a protest of nurses about a year ago now, and they had a banner outside the hospital that said, “last year’s heroes, this year’s zeroes.” And everyone I interviewed said the same thing. They said where’s the pots and pans now—that kind of thing. And I think what, to me, that exposes is the thin and superficial nature of some of that support early on in the pandemic when it was essential to our absolute physical survival. Yes. We cared about people in those positions. And when vaccines sort of a return to normal, a certain degree of the COVID recession more or less ended, then people began to return to a world in which we treat essential workers like they’re servants. And so that quick turnaround was also shocking to me. I sort of optimistically expected some of that, you know, essential workers being able to sort of cash in on some of that good will and power social power that they earned during the pandemic. And it’s been scarce lately.
Mark Williams
Do you think that there was a moment, perhaps a prolonged moment in which workers in various sectors had an unparalleled opportunity to organize in the context of that pandemic and the upheaval that might have passed at this point?
Jamie McCallum
There was a moment in the fall of 2021, what people dubbed “Striketober” during October. There was an explosion of strikes that basically paralleled the labor shortage—however you want to define the labor shortage, be it, some of it was fictitious, some of it was real. That provided an opportunity and workers stepped through that window and unions followed them in many ways. And that was really great. There was also a time when if we needed nurses to show up and nurses went on strike, well, very often they got what they wanted quickly. But not always. So nurses at tenant hospitals in Massachusetts struck for, I think 300 days. Just imagine being the owner of a hospital and having hundreds of nurses not being able to work and then keeping them out for most of the year. I mean it’s almost insane. And so yes, there were these sort of structural opportunities during the pandemic, but in many ways, I think what we’re seeing now, especially the Starbucks campaigns and the sort of historic union victory at Amazon, the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, is some sort of full circle organizing. So for example, the leader of the Staten Island Amazon union was more or less the first profiled person to be fired for leading a workplace safety protest in 2020. And he has basically risen to be the star of the labor movement. And so I think that people tried to take advantage when they could during the pandemic, but the chaos of it all did sort of interrupt some of that. And as there has been some return to business as usual, whatever workers have said “okay, now is the time.” It’s been interesting to see how that has dovetailed with certain kinds of public support or certain kinds of political support from the Biden administration, but ultimately probably not enough.
Mark Williams
Okay. Thank you. I read something in your book that I’d like to explore a bit more. You say that during the pandemic’s first year, so this would be 2020 and here I’m going to quote again, “the U.S. has only 4 percent of the global population but suffered about 22 percent of COVID 19 deaths.” And then you go on to say, and again, I’ll quote “by 2022, the share of Americans who had died of coronavirus was at least 63 percent higher than in our peer countries.” I’m wondering, what do you see as the most important factor or factors behind these really alarming stats?
Jamie McCallum
I wish that I was an epidemiologist right now, and I could give a real holistic answer to that. So I, first of all, don’t know fully why that is the case. I do think there’s a lot of evidence that during the very early part of the pandemic workplace transmission was driving the spread. COVID was a workplace hazard, essentially. We did almost nothing politically to mitigate that spread. In other words, OSHA made almost no investigations at workplace transmissions. Where there were incidents of workplace malfeasance where workers died when they shouldn’t have died, OSHA barely levied fines. There was just very little we did. There was some evidence early on that countries with greater levels of respect for labor rights had lower levels of COVID transmission. I did some investigating that and found that it was just, it’s just too simplistic of a story. Like the factors that led to the American explosion of COVID compared to peer countries is very obviously complicated. And I don’t know the full picture of it. One thing I will say, and this again is related to the workplace is that years of deregulation of healthcare probably had something to do with it. So for example, when COVID hit, we had almost no surge capacity in hospitals. Many countries, South Korea being a really notable one, had large surge capacity in hospitals that they could soak up people during an influx or a crisis. Why we had almost none was essentially because of years of private deregulation of healthcare, which maximized the capacity of hospitals. Nurses’ unions routinely pushed for a surge capacity. They routinely pushed for excess beds in hospitals and nursing homes, and they often lost those battles. So again, one example, I think, where workplace struggle, dynamics, whatever you want to call it, class struggles had some relationship to public health outcomes.
Mark Williams
Looking back, how well do you think the official response to the pandemic was? And I asked that because as an outside observer, it would seem that a lot of the confusion and outright denial of the importance, the significance of the pandemic coming from official circles probably played a part in those statistics.
Jamie McCallum
I think that the Trump administration was essentially a death cult. And I think that the willingness to let so many people die without significant emergency response was world historic and devastating. The link that I found in my research that would relate to that, I think again, is this thing about our inability to recognize COVID as a workplace illness. We had a much better record of guarding against a workplace spread of Ebola, workplace spread of HIV, even workplace spread of swine flu. And our response to this disease, we still have no federal guidelines that protect workers against airborne illness. That to me is something that going forward, if you think about like what is to be done, that would be something.
Mark Williams
Well, that almost leads into the next question that I had. Given the experience that essential workers had during the COVID pandemic, do you think that labor has anything to teach us about how to prepare for the next pandemic?
Jamie McCallum
To some extent, you know, as a society, we are only as healthy as the people who deliver our goods and services, essentially. Thinking about average working-class people, not as the bottom of a social hierarchy, but the foundation of sort of a healthy population and a democracy is important. I don’t think we’ve learned that lesson.
Mark Williams
I think there was a period during the pandemic where we came very close to learning that.
Jamie McCallum
When was it?
Mark Williams
It was when I saw all of those signs. Out on people’s front yards and plastered on the sides of buildings, thanking essential workers. While most people are locked down and if you did venture out into the highways, they’re virtually deserted.
Jamie McCallum
Right, right.
Mark Williams
People are really sheltering in place. And they’re critically dependent upon people who are risking their lives to sell food to them, to serve them.
Jamie McCallum
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. I remember talking to grocery store workers who were like, the people that come through the line are calling me by first name and thanking me and this and that, that kind of thing. I think what is curious is why that public support did not translate into something lasting and meaningful. So for example, if it is the case that workers having a voice on the job, more power at work, et cetera, is important. Why do we not pass legislation that makes it easier for workers to do that? Right. The protecting the right to organize act would be the first legislation in 90 years to update labor law. And we don’t do it. When I was writing, I was cautious about overestimating the significance of that public support, because it didn’t translate into material, political gains for people. And I think that is a tragedy.
Mark Williams
It’s almost like you’re talking about the difference between short term political calculations and longer term what we might call statesmanship. Where you see the, the big picture, you are adopting policy for the good of society as a whole over the long term. So you have very long time horizons in terms of the policy versus what’s in it for me now. What, what are my basic interests at this moment in time, political interests I’m talking about. And then basing your calculations and therefore your actions upon, upon short time horizons.
Jamie McCallum
Right. I mean, Biden came in against all odds. Biden’s spent his whole career being, not Bernie Sanders, essentially. Right. He was not austerity guy. He was in neoliberal for decades. And all of a sudden he comes in and he is like, let’s, let’s talk to organizing workers. Let’s raise the floor. Let’s blah, blah, blah. And it, unfortunately didn’t happen. He’s not the only one to blame, but there was a moment, as you said, when large swaths of the American people, democrats, republicans, all across the income spectrum were like, these people deserve our everlasting respect. And it’s like, we didn’t raise the minimum wage. We didn’t make significant adjustments to labor law. That to me is an indication that we just didn’t learn the lesson well enough. So when there’s another pandemic, it seems likely that we will force people to work in unsafe situations. And they will have to take responsibility to fight for the things that they need to do their job safely, which will likely translate into things that make our lives better. I mean, in some ways, this is the point of my book, whether or not you hold crummy, rotten, lousy jobs, people that do hold them, the better those jobs are the less rotten and crummy and poorly paid they are, the better off the rest of us are. During the pandemic, that was very clear. If people around you have COVID, you’re more likely to get COVID. you know, if workers around you are sick, your grocery store will close or you’ll get COVID that way or whatever. If your nursing home is run by profiteers and a private equity firm, then your loved ones are more likely to get sick. So I think those lessons were clear. We just have done a poor job of sort of translating them into real political gains.
Mark Williams
Thanks very much, you know, almost everywhere I go these days, I see signs and those signs say things like “Now hiring. Apply now.” And I’m wondering, do you have any thoughts on what people have called “the big quit?”
Jamie McCallum
So, on the one hand, it was totally inexplicable. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. So the labor shortage began as a ruse. Capitalist societies like ours have an easy solution to labor shortage that is just to pay people more money. If you have a shortage of, let’s say nurses, which we do, and you offer nurses a million dollars, you’d all of a sudden, overnight have more nurses. Is a million dollars too much? Well, how much is the right number then? Right? And so, but we didn’t really do that for a while. And sure wages rose, they rose a little bit more, but they never rose enough. So there was on the one hand, a movement of people, especially on the right, who just simply called a labor shortage. They called it a labor shortage and it was really a surplus of bad jobs. And that lasted for a couple months, and then the labor shortage persisted in certain industries. And then it became more interesting. And people began to say, well, people have a bad work ethic, or they’re not Protestant enough, or what have you. And I think there’s two responses to that. The first is that a cataclysmic reorganization of the economy like happened in March and April 2020 is simply hard to quickly rebound. Like in Europe, they didn’t lay everyone off. They didn’t fire everyone. They just furloughed people. So when the pandemic was quote unquote over, or it was time to come back to work, you just assumed your job again. Right. That didn’t happen here. Millions of people were fired, and they had to find new jobs. That reshuffling led to a fair amount of economic instability and people took new jobs and found new things to do, and did not want to work in certain industries. Certain industries never rebounded, like hospitality is still pretty low. The other way, however, the labor shortage is totally explicable is that we have the census and the census every week asks people why they didn’t work this last week. And all you have to do is look on that census and look at what people say. And so for the….
Mark Williams
What are some of the results?
Jamie McCallum
So during the 18 months of May 2020, till early 2022, the main reason people give for not working that week are caregiving responsibilities—so, caring for kids who were still at that time out of daycare or out of school, caring for elderly people who were either taken out of nursing homes, couldn’t go to hospitals, had COVID, had something else, whatever, were taking care of themselves. The percentage of people who applied “I did not want to work last week” was comparably small. So I think that “the big quit” was a little bit overblown. It really wasn’t a big quit. It was really a big, get a better job. I mean, everyone that quit looked for a better job. They weren’t like anarchists shutting the paid labor market, as some people I think tried to paint it as.
Mark Williams
Well, what one heard, at least what I heard is that this is a result of the unemployment checks. There are people who are comfortable not working because they are receiving these checks. Do you put any credence into that?
Jamie McCallum
Yeah. So people on the left don’t like that, I’m on the left. People on the left don’t like that explanation because it feeds into the narrative of lazy workers on unemployment or whatever that the right always tends to put out there. But it’s clear that there were people who did not go back to bad jobs when they could earn more on unemployment, even when they could earn sometimes a little bit less. And to me, that was the whole point of those unemployment checks was to keep people who didn’t want to work or didn’t have to work, not working. And it was a policy instrument that I think was brilliant. I think should probably become a much more permanent feature of our economy, which would tighten the labor market and raise wages almost instantly. And puts us much more in line with advanced welfare states, which have much more generous unemployment programs. Our unemployment system is essentially broken or anachronistic and designed to keep people from getting unemployment checks. During the pandemic, it was much better. Like the pandemic unemployment assistance, the PUA program, was an incredible program. Millions of people benefited from it. It was substantial. I mean, Trump, right, Trump was to some extent, I mean, his administration helped to design that program. Since the pandemic has waned, we’ve gone back to our previous program which is essentially insufficient and flawed. But yes, there was a moment when those unemployment checks were doing that. As I said, I think there were other reasons also, which were probably more significant that was driving people to stay home.
Mark Williams
One of the interesting things that I observed is that there was a push to end the maintenance programs. The argument being that, precisely, it was perpetuating idleness on the part of otherwise productive workers. And so those programs were ended in various states. They were ended, but the labor shortage persists. “The big quit” persists.
Jamie McCallum
Right. I mean, we had almost a natural experiment on, on a nationwide scale, which I’m sure there are a million dissertations being written on that moment right now because half the states, the red ones, ended unemployment checks. For six more months, the labor shortage persisted in those states. Right. It was almost equivalent to the blue states. And it was confusing. It was like, well, we have long had a welfare state that punishes people and puts people back to work with low welfare checks. Why did it not work this time? And I think to some extent, the best answer was that jobs were so bad, risks were so significant, and caregiving responsibilities were very real. Even if people did want to go back, they couldn’t. At the time that those red states ended those unemployment benefits, schools were closed, daycare centers are closed, nursing homes were emptying. What were people supposed to do? They can’t work full time out of the house when you have kids without childcare. So it was sort of, there’s some explanations that are about that. But the degree to which they took the opportunity to try to paint people as, you know, morally backward or lazy or whatever just … I think it backfired.
Mark Williams
You don’t think it holds up to close scrutiny? That explanation.
Jamie McCallum
No. I mean, it never does. Even though good times it doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t now. I mean, my last book was basically all about this, right? Why people work so much. And one of the reasons is that welfare policy forces people to work in order to get benefits. But during the pandemic, I think that forcing didn’t work as much and therefore the ideological stuff that comes with it backfired.
Mark Williams
Well, Jamie, this has really been a fascinating discussion. Thank you very much for helping us understand what’s clearly an incredibly important period for American labor. And I always like to ask my guests what they’re working on next. So how about you? Are you going to be doing some more work on the pandemic and workers, or are you going to be going onto something new?
Jamie McCallum
As a labor sociologist, I’m always interested in these questions. I do have essentially a project brewing that came out of this research that focuses on nurses in particular, which sort of dovetails what we were just talking about. There is an incredible and long-standing nursing shortage in America, although there’s sort of not. Like we have one seventh of all the nurses on the planet in America, and yet we can’t employ them because jobs are so bad and people are leaving bedside jobs left and right. The explosion of traveling nurses is backfiring. So like what will be the future of the caregiving occupations, post pandemic. More people work in healthcare now than in any other industry in America. That is only going to grow. And so part of that research project will be sort of the future of healthcare work post 2022, post pandemic.
Mark Williams
Well, I really look forward to reading that it it’s an important topic.
Jamie McCallum
Thanks. Well, in 2027, we, we can talk about that again or something.
Mark Williams
So very good. We’ve been talking about how the COVID pandemic has affected American workers and more broadly about the state of organized labor and US capitalism today. Our guest has been Jamie McCallum. Jamie’s written a new book called “Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Struggle for Worker Justice.” It’s a great read and I hope that you’ll pick up a copy and check it out for yourself. Jamie, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with us here on New Frontiers.
Jamie McCallum
Thanks for having me.
Jonah Roberts (Middlebury ’23)
A native of Bethlehem, PA, Professor Jamie McCallum now lives in Weybridge, Vermont. He serves on the local school board there, and during the pandemic he joined the Weybridge Fire Department to become a first responder. He enjoys hiking the Trail that encircles Middlebury’s Vermont campus and—when not teaching courses or on the trail—he can often be found in town at the Haymakers restaurant—where he jokingly claims to keep a running tab and hold office hours.
Mark Williams
This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Music is by Ketsa. If you like the show give us a rating, a review on Amazon, Spotify, Apple Podcast or where ever you get your podcast. This can help others to find us too. We’ll be back with another episode soon. Thanks a lot.
SHOW NOTES:
For more information on this and other podcasts go to the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College website https://www.middlebury.edu/office/rohatyn
Essential by Jamie K. McCallum (Basic Books Nov 2022)
Music Credits
Forte by Ketsa - Summer with Sound Album
Soul Zone by Ketsa - Light Rising Album
Edited by Jonah Roberts (Middlebury ’23)
Episode 6 - Understanding Slavery in Medieval China
Despite its long pedigree, Chinese slavery during medieval times has failed to attract wide scholarly attention. Hence, questions about it abound. What was slavery like in medieval China? How was it similar to—or different from—the institution of slavery found in other societies and at other times? Who were the enslaved in the Chinese context, why were they enslaved, and what function did slavery serve in Chinese society? In this episode of New Frontiers, Don Wyatt, the John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Middlebury College, sits down with Mark Williams to discuss these and other issues.
For more information click here for the newly released Cambridge Element Slavery in East Asia by Don Wyatt.
New Frontiers- Episode 6: Slavery in Medieval China
Slavery lasted for centuries in China, and yet its particulars are not well known. In this episode of New Frontiers, historian Don Wyatt takes us back to help us understand how the institution thrived during imperial times and the roles it played in Chinese culture.
Transcript
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation, and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—sits down with historian Don Wyatt, to discuss his recent research on slavery in medieval China, what it tells us about Chinese society at the time, and how it compares with the institution of slavery in other societies and eras.
Mark Williams
Don Wyatt is the John M. McCardell Jr. Distinguished professor of history at Middlebury College, where he specializes in early to modern Chinese history. He’s authored a number of books, book chapters, and essays on Chinese history. And today he’s agreed to sit down with me and discuss some of his most recent scholarship published as part of “The Cambridge World History of Slavery.” It’s a chapter in that volume titled “Slavery in Medieval China.” I’m really happy he’s decided to join me today. Don Wyatt, thank you very much for visiting us on New Frontiers.
Don Wyatt
Well, thank you for having me, Mark. I’m a big fan.
Mark Williams
Thanks. Don, I have to confess that when I think of China and Chinese history, slavery is not something that readily comes to mind. And I’m wondering is this because I’m a poor historian? I’m not an expert on the country, I haven’t kept up with what scholars are publishing in the field?
Don Wyatt
Actually, probably neither of those reasons or none of those reasons, Mark. In comparison to other sociocultural activity, slavery is a much under researched subject in relation to China. Whether for the ancient, the Imperial or the modern period.
Mark Williams
Okay. So, I’m not necessarily an outlier. Why hasn’t there been that much research or discussion on slavery in China?
Don Wyatt
Well, there are numerous reasons, but chief among them is that whereas slavery was practiced perhaps since the beginning of the civilization, which distinguishes it from perhaps nowhere else in the world, at least during historical times, which extend back to the appearance of written records, roughly the mid second millennium BCE, slavery was practiced exogenously. That is the enslavement of outsiders. And also, endogenously. That is, Chinese enslaving their own people.
Don Wyatt
The latter group, that is the insiders has always made up the great preponderance of Chinese slavery.
Mark Williams
Chinese themselves were.
Don Wyatt
Yes. Okay. So consequently, the study of people who enslaved their own lacks, the same allure as inquiry into those who enslave mostly or exclusively outsiders.
Mark Williams
It has less of an imperialist bent perhaps or less of a, a conquering edge to it? Or a dimension to it?
Don Wyatt
Something more of a less, it seems inherently less exploitive.
Mark Williams
Oh, okay. You say that slavery is sort of primordial. It’s always been there. Was there a time in China when it didn’t exist? How did it actually get started?
Don Wyatt
The starting point for slavery in China, was warfare. With such being the case because the original slaves of China were prisoners of war. We know from evidence, dating back to the end of the Chinese neolithic period that the historical dynasty that was not the first Chinese dynasty, but the first that we know significant amounts about, the Shang dynasty, which came to power approximately 1600 BCE and lasted until the year 1046 BCE, was one in which enslavement of non-Chinese peoples was commonplace. There were slave expeditions or forays out into non-Chinese areas where tribal peoples were basically enslaved and brought back to the Shang domain.
Mark Williams
For purposes of being workers?
Don Wyatt
They were employed in various forms of labor but chief among those was the construction of royal tombs. We also know that the Shang, and again this is not typically dwelled upon by Chinese historians, were practitioners of human sacrifice. And these individuals were excellent fodder, if you will, for sacrifice to be offered up to the gods.
Mark Williams
That’s what I was going to ask. These were religious rituals, to some extent, these sacrifices?
Don Wyatt
They were ritual sacrifices, particularly to the chief Shang deity, Shangdi. This practice was carried out throughout the period of Shang rule.
Mark Williams
It’s remarkable. Well, this raises a couple of questions for me. And one of them, the answers to which you might have already touched on. What is the time period that we’re really talking about with respect to medieval Chinese slavery from when to when?
Don Wyatt
Taking as really the touchstone and recognizing that there’s little parity between chronologies from civilization to civilization, the touchstone years for the volume is the common era year 500 to 1420. And this certainly works from the Western perspective as basically incorporating the classic medieval period. The tricky part with respect to China is that this is also a period of time when China basically entered on the threshold of early modernity. There were a number of changes in the society that suggest that from about the late 10th century onward that China was essentially moving toward modern times.
Mark Williams
Well, you talked a bit about difficulties in terms of the chronologies between civilizations. It makes me wonder about any parity or distinctions or differences between slavery in medieval China and slavery and medieval West. Are we talking basically about the same type of institution that is just set in a different locale? Or are we talking about an institution that’s fundamentally different in China than its Western counterpart? And if it is different then how. Is it different in scope or maybe it’s permanence, or maybe the assumptions on which the slavery itself rested?
Don Wyatt
I think the most fundamental difference, to be born in mind in terms of scope, is that at no time in China, did slavery ever become the chief mode of economic production as it did, for example, in the early modern Portuguese maritime empire or the antebellum, pre-Civil War United States. I think a real difference here too is to be found in thinking about percentages per capita of the population. The Chinese enslaved population during Han dynasty times, which is correspondent to the beginning of the Christian era, for instance in our terms or contemporary with the Roman empire, was probably one percent of the population. In later times in a more populous China, it probably rose to two percent, but by contrast on the eve of the American Civil War, probably something close to a quarter of the population was enslaved. That’s a huge difference.
Mark Williams
Yes. I see the differences in terms of the population, the numbers, themselves being different, the number of people who are enslaved within the population. So, there are some important distinctions between slavery in China and slavery in the West. What about…
Don Wyatt
And since you mentioned it, you asked too about assumptions. And I think it’s important to underscore that there continued to be the assumption in medieval Chinese slavery that enslavement was a punitive action. And I think this idea of slavery as punishment certainly had become lost in Western medieval slavery and certainly in later Western slavery.
Mark Williams
In the Chinese context, slavery as punishment, this would be punishment in terms of those who were enslaved were the adversaries of the slaveholders?
Don Wyatt
Well, that’s a great question.
Mark Williams
Punishment for what?
Don Wyatt
Yeah, exactly. It’s arguable that the first sin of individuals who were enslaved, who were non-Chinese, was that they simply resisted and consequently, they were victimized because of that. But it’s also important to bear in mind that Chinese slavery has a strong and even more dominant, endogenous aspect. And this aspect is one in which cultural insiders, largely because of the transgressions against higher authority by an individual, typically the patriarch of a family, these individuals fell into slavery at the command of higher authority. In this sense, the Chinese situation is a classic example of the intrusive application of slavery. On the one hand, the slave is adversary. And the extrusive imposition of slavery on the other hand, where someone typically of standing within the society, because of rebellion, because of treacherous behavior, because of insult, fell and collaterally members of that person’s family, clan were enslaved.
Mark Williams
I see. So, punishment for resistance, punishment for opposition, punishment for lack of deference or insult….
Don Wyatt
And it applied in either the intrusive case or the extrusive case. By the way, this terminology is, directly from Orlando Patterson, sociologist of comparative slavery in his famous book, “Slavery and Social Death” 1982.
Mark Williams
Thank you. Were there any distinctions within China itself from region to region regarding the type of slavery that might exist there? Or was it pretty much the same?
Don Wyatt
Especially later we do encounter such conventions as debt bondage which is again a kind of limited term slavery that is practiced in various cultures. And also since you ask about regional differences, the prominent phenomenon of child enslavement in south China in later centuries, much to the consternation of Imperial authority. And also civilian officials. But fundamentally, no, the two fundamental types of slavery had long been and continued to be official slavery and private slavery.
Mark Williams
What’s the distinction between them?
Don Wyatt
The distinction is essentially, and connected with my discussion of intrusive and extrusive modes of enslavement, official slavery typically involved someone who had fallen into disfavor and their descendants had been enslaved. There was also official slavery in the form of tribute that was given to the Imperial court by various foreign dignitaries. Oftentimes the gifts were human gifts and these individuals were enslaved. And then there was private slavery which began to proliferate particularly during the medieval era. And this was the enslavement of most typically Chinese individuals by their countrymen.
Mark Williams
I see. Okay. Listening to this and thinking about the institution of slavery you’re describing in China, I can’t help but compare Chinese slavery with the type of slavery that developed and then plagued the United States. And, you know, here in the United States slavery was hereditary. If the Black parents were slaves, then their offspring were too and their offspring’s offspring. To what extent did something like that exist in China? Was it the same kind of hereditary condition there? If so, how extensive was it? Or if it was hereditary, was it more limited in terms of its coverage?
Don Wyatt
In essence, Chinese slavery was hereditary though probably not with the same sort of consistency that you would find in the United States. But one development, social development, that tended to ensure this kind of hereditary status of slavery was the fact that early on in China there developed a division of society into so-called good people, respectable people, the Chinese term is Lian, and Jin people, debased, ignoble people. Best estimates are that this group of base individuals probably constituted no more than five percent of the overall population. But the important thing from the standpoint of slavery is that whereas not all base people were slaves, all slaves were base people. And this base category included great numbers of other people. And there was a tendency for it over time to become largely occupational. Consequently, certain occupations necessarily fell under the rubric of baseness. This included torturers because torture was a constituent of the Chinese legal system, executioners, jailers, watchmen.
Mark Williams
So, the individuals performing those functions would themselves be slaves.
Don Wyatt
They weren’t slaves, but they were base.
Mark Williams
They were base. I see.
Don Wyatt
Particularly after the advent of Buddhism, butchers, because they killed animals. Took life. But also some occupations you would not necessarily expect: actors, musicians, boat people.
Mark Williams
Musicians?
Don Wyatt
Yeah.
Mark Williams
That’s fascinating. One of the things that always seemed to terrify slave holding societies regardless of time, regardless of locale, was the possibility of a slave rebellion. The Spartans feared this back during the time of the Peloponnesian war, the French feared a slave revolt in their colony of Haiti. They got one as well. One thing that the slave holders in the American South feared during antebellum times was the prospect of slave uprisings. And I’m wondering whether or not your research is uncovered something similar, a similar type of fear amongst Chinese slaveholders. Were there any episodes of significant slave revolts and maybe if so, what impact did this have on the institution of slavery?
Don Wyatt
In a word, no.
Mark Williams
Really?
Don Wyatt
Yup. Part of the answer for this is to be seen in the percentages that I offered you in terms of the overall population. The slave component was just too small to be able to raise a rebellion or…
Mark Williams
Pose any real risks.
Don Wyatt
Significant threat to authority even no matter how rest of it might have been. But your question, because again, of the punitive basis of Chinese slavery, raises another very counterintuitive way in which medieval Chinese slavery, but really Chinese slavery of any period, differed from Western slavery. And this was the fact that mutilation was a common practice in Chinese slavery.
Mark Williams
Mutilation of the slaves.
Don Wyatt
Yes, with the slaves falling prey to anything short of the most extreme of the five ancient punishments in China. And these were in increasing order of severity. Tattooing, which involved the incising, scarification and inking of the face especially the forehead. The second of the five ancient punishments was the cutting off of the nose. The third of these, which was probably the least frequently applied was the cutting off of one or both feet, which obviously was seriously debilitating. The fourth of these was castration and the fifth was capital punishment, which almost always meant decapitation. And as a consequence of this, these punishments, because Chinese traditional punishments were always mutilative, became cultural code for anyone encountering someone like this. In other words, this person was obviously a criminal. And very potentially also a slave.
Mark Williams
Yes. So, anyone you see that might have bore the scars of any of these types of punishments.
Don Wyatt
The so-called markings of the body as they were called.
Mark Williams
How did slavery finally end in medieval China? And what did the end of slavery signify in terms of perhaps the bequeathing of new liberties or new rights for the people who were governed under Chinese rule?
Don Wyatt
Regrettably, it didn’t end but more or less transformed in later centuries, in that a new channel emerged as the main source of recruitment of slaves. And this was self-enslavement, self-sale.
Mark Williams
Really? How did that come about?
Don Wyatt
Well, it’s a feature of, of Chinese society that is probably one of the most difficult elements to translate to students in the sense that they have to somehow become persuaded that there were conditions in the world in the past, such that slavery was more preferable than living under those conditions. And you know, we live, especially those of us who are products of the liberal democratic West. We live in an age of affluence in which it’s difficult to conceive that sacrificing liberty could actually be beneficial to us in terms of survival. That’s not necessarily the case in China in subsequent centuries.
Mark Williams
Are you talking about economic deprivation? Are you talking about something else?
Don Wyatt
I’m talking about economic deprivation. I’m talking about famine. I’m talking about pestilence. I’m talking about warfare. I’m talking about a number of socially disruptive forces that were so severe and so debilitating, disease, plague, so forth, that being in a situation in which one might be enslaved but relatively well taken care of was preferable to being exposed to these sort of elements. To give an example, this goes a long way toward explaining the Chinese eunuch tradition.
Mark Williams
Would you care to elaborate?
Don Wyatt
Well, it’s simply the fact that under destitute circumstances someone might volunteer, so to speak, to enter the palace by making that sacrifice.
Mark Williams
Yes. How did this actually work? How, if you research has revealed this, how would one go about finding someone to enslave yourself to who was not afflicted by the things that were afflicting the person contemplating voluntary slavery?
Don Wyatt
You essentially take a chance and make yourself available. You know, you show up at their gateway. And sometimes that meant showing up at the court. Whether you would succeed or not, that’s another matter. And you may have made that sacrifice in vain. But you did ask about an endpoint and essentially slavery was not abolished in China until 1910. And this was not really an emancipation so much as it was a ban on the sale of slaves. So consequently, it became illegal to…
Mark Williams
How did that come about? Why was that?
Don Wyatt
It’s a number of factors. Part of it is official condemnation. It is the influence of early constitutionalism in China. It is the influence of missionary involvement in China. And perhaps the fact that in the quest for modernity, China had to move in a direction in which this ancient institution was laid to rest. But needless to say, since it wasn’t an emancipation, slavery continued to be practiced illicitly, of course, but it continued for a good deal of time after that. Certainly, up until the communist revolution in 1949.
Mark Williams
The end of slavery in the United States is something that many can look back to and celebrate just as those who were living at the time that it ended in the United States, many celebrated. Was there anything analogous to the end of slavery or the demise of slavery that happened in China? Was this action you’re talking about that occurred in 1910? Was this something of note that people, at least some people celebrated or was it just more of the sort of grinding the function of the state and something that happened more as a matter of fact, that was little taken notice of.
Don Wyatt
I think it probably attracted little notice.
Mark Williams
Interesting.
Don Wyatt
And probably the further away you were from, you know, the seat of power the less it mattered to you.
Mark Williams
Do you think that it’s possible that China’s version of slavery might owe anything to, or perhaps was influenced by slavery that existed outside of China?
Don Wyatt
There is some speculation regarding transferability of the eunuch tradition. Some contact perhaps between China and ancient Assyria. And the Persians have also been cited in this connection. We do know from Herodotus that the Persians did practice eunuchism. He attributed it to the Persians as one of their practices. He even praised it suggesting that eunuchs were more loyal, more dedicated than normal people.
Mark Williams
Yes.
Don Wyatt
The evidence for this is very tenuous and very weak. I think it’s arguable more likely that much like the Chinese writing script, much like the Chinese development of bronze metalwork technology, that it was an indigenous development.
Mark Williams
I’m wondering if the knowledge that we get from examining slavery in China might be transferable. And by that, I mean, is understanding medieval Chinese slavery, does that help us better understand other world slaveries? Either, you know, during the same time period or maybe at different time periods?
Don Wyatt
Chinese medieval slavery is perhaps a prime example of functionalism determining status in a way that had the effect of making it really an organic institution within the culture. One that was almost invisible because it was based on the functionalist contribution that slaves made. Chinese did not regard as slaves, individuals whom we typically would classify as slaves. I think great examples of this are the eunuchs that we’ve already touched upon. But also, concubines who essentially because of their function were at best regarded as a kind of specialized slave, if regarded as slaves at all. And their status within the home or at the court was certainly superior to other slaves. But nevertheless, from our standpoint, anyone who can be bought or sold is a slave.
Mark Williams
Yes. Is property. When you talk about the invisibility of slavery, you ascribe that invisibility here to perhaps functionalism.
Don Wyatt
Yeah. A kind of a seamless, regulatory contribution made to…
Mark Williams
Society.
Don Wyatt
To society okay. To the culture, to sustaining the culture.
Mark Williams
Is the invisibility also a function of how few people relatively speaking were actually enslaved? And here I’m thinking about situations in the United States, for example, where it’s the numbers are, are much larger. It’s very clear. It’s very much out in the open. These are not activities that are behind closed walls in the court.
Don Wyatt
It’s probably not divorced from that. The relative lack of prominence in terms of numbers might have had some effect but very often too these individuals were individuals of consequence.
Mark Williams
You mean because of the function that they played?
Don Wyatt
Because of the function that they played. The role that they had. We can see this in the diversification of functions of eunuchs, for instance. Their original function was of course, as harem guardians. But over the course of time, they come to take on many roles. And even someone so famous of late as the Ming dynasty eunuch commander Zheng He, the great navigator, who made seven expeditions, even as far as the east coast of Africa, was a eunuch.
Mark Williams
Remarkable. Perhaps on a related note, when you think about the world today, there are still unfortunately, pockets of slavery, some types of slavery that still exist in different parts of the world. Do you think that any of the insights about contemporary global slavery, are there any insights that we can draw from examining medieval Chinese slavery?
Don Wyatt
Probably the most difficult of your questions to try to get a handle on. I think essentially, we can learn how tenacious the institution can be, and that it, continues to take many forms. Particularly, I think the case of medieval Chinese slavery goes a long way towards informing our understanding of current day human trafficking. It also has a way of explaining child exploitation.
Mark Williams
In what way would it illuminate either one of those areas, human trafficking, or child exploitation?
Don Wyatt
In terms of your first question about human trafficking, China today is a place in which we have a population of approximately 1.4 billion people. And there are many more males than females. In fact, the rough estimate currently is that there are about 35 million more males than females. These individuals are going to have to find wives. And very oftentimes that’s going to have them casting beyond China. And consequently, this situation I think, is informing in terms of human trafficking and driven by this element of functionality that I suggested to you earlier.
Mark Williams
That you alluded to earlier.
Don Wyatt
We also know that much like prison labor, child labor is a fixture in China. And unfortunately tends only to come to the world’s attention when there is some sort of unfortunate accident in which children are the principal victims. And I guess the message there is that slavery as an institution, especially when driven by functionalist imperatives, is very difficult to stamp out.
Mark Williams
Yes, I could see that as well. As we look towards the future, Don, in terms of your own research, what’s next for you? Are you going to continue to study aspects of slavery in China? Are you going to be researching different aspects of Chinese history?
Don Wyatt
Much of my work has been largely in three areas: Chinese intellectualism, Chinese violence and warfare, and Chinese ethnicity and slavery. The slavery component certainly has taken the lead and is the driver in the sense that, it seems to be what is most in demand and like all scholars, we, no matter how high-minded we are, we have to respond to demand. So, it’s fair to say that I’ll be delving further into these questions in the future. At least in the short-term future.
Mark Williams
Well, it’s a really fascinating topic. It really is. And I want to thank you for sharing that with us.
Don Wyatt
Well, I really only wish that I had the opportunity to talk about something a bit more uplifting. But at any rate, thank you for having me.
Mark Williams
I’ve been speaking with Don Wyatt of Middlebury College about the arguments that he makes in a new volume called “The Cambridge World History of Slavery” published by Cambridge University Press. His chapter contribution to that work is titled “Slavery in Medieval China.” Don, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you today and thank you very much for visiting with us on New Frontiers.
Don Wyatt
It’s been a pleasure being with you and continued success.
Mark Williams
Thank you.
Student (Nora Hyde)
A native of Illinois, Professor Don Wyatt lives with his family—and his dog, Clive—in Weybridge Vermont. He loves green tea, basketball, and his favorite city in China is Xi’An. Outside of the classroom, students are most likely to find him prowling the stacks and working on his research in the Library.
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation, and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—sits down with historian Don Wyatt, to discuss his recent research on slavery in medieval China, what it tells us about Chinese society at the time, and how it compares with the institution of slavery in other societies and eras.
Mark Williams
Don Wyatt is the John M. McCardell Jr. Distinguished professor of history at Middlebury College, where he specializes in early to modern Chinese history. He’s authored a number of books, book chapters, and essays on Chinese history. And today he’s agreed to sit down with me and discuss some of his most recent scholarship published as part of “The Cambridge World History of Slavery.” It’s a chapter in that volume titled “Slavery in Medieval China.” I’m really happy he’s decided to join me today. Don Wyatt, thank you very much for visiting us on New Frontiers.
Don Wyatt
Well, thank you for having me, Mark. I’m a big fan.
Mark Williams
Thanks. Don, I have to confess that when I think of China and Chinese history, slavery is not something that readily comes to mind. And I’m wondering is this because I’m a poor historian? I’m not an expert on the country, I haven’t kept up with what scholars are publishing in the field?
Don Wyatt
Actually, probably neither of those reasons or none of those reasons, Mark. In comparison to other sociocultural activity, slavery is a much under researched subject in relation to China. Whether for the ancient, the Imperial or the modern period.
Mark Williams
Okay. So, I’m not necessarily an outlier. Why hasn’t there been that much research or discussion on slavery in China?
Don Wyatt
Well, there are numerous reasons, but chief among them is that whereas slavery was practiced perhaps since the beginning of the civilization, which distinguishes it from perhaps nowhere else in the world, at least during historical times, which extend back to the appearance of written records, roughly the mid second millennium BCE, slavery was practiced exogenously. That is the enslavement of outsiders. And also, endogenously. That is, Chinese enslaving their own people.
Don Wyatt
The latter group, that is the insiders has always made up the great preponderance of Chinese slavery.
Mark Williams
Chinese themselves were.
Don Wyatt
Yes. Okay. So consequently, the study of people who enslaved their own lacks, the same allure as inquiry into those who enslave mostly or exclusively outsiders.
Mark Williams
It has less of an imperialist bent perhaps or less of a, a conquering edge to it? Or a dimension to it?
Don Wyatt
Something more of a less, it seems inherently less exploitive.
Mark Williams
Oh, okay. You say that slavery is sort of primordial. It’s always been there. Was there a time in China when it didn’t exist? How did it actually get started?
Don Wyatt
The starting point for slavery in China, was warfare. With such being the case because the original slaves of China were prisoners of war. We know from evidence, dating back to the end of the Chinese neolithic period that the historical dynasty that was not the first Chinese dynasty, but the first that we know significant amounts about, the Shang dynasty, which came to power approximately 1600 BCE and lasted until the year 1046 BCE, was one in which enslavement of non-Chinese peoples was commonplace. There were slave expeditions or forays out into non-Chinese areas where tribal peoples were basically enslaved and brought back to the Shang domain.
Mark Williams
For purposes of being workers?
Don Wyatt
They were employed in various forms of labor but chief among those was the construction of royal tombs. We also know that the Shang, and again this is not typically dwelled upon by Chinese historians, were practitioners of human sacrifice. And these individuals were excellent fodder, if you will, for sacrifice to be offered up to the gods.
Mark Williams
That’s what I was going to ask. These were religious rituals, to some extent, these sacrifices?
Don Wyatt
They were ritual sacrifices, particularly to the chief Shang deity, Shangdi. This practice was carried out throughout the period of Shang rule.
Mark Williams
It’s remarkable. Well, this raises a couple of questions for me. And one of them, the answers to which you might have already touched on. What is the time period that we’re really talking about with respect to medieval Chinese slavery from when to when?
Don Wyatt
Taking as really the touchstone and recognizing that there’s little parity between chronologies from civilization to civilization, the touchstone years for the volume is the common era year 500 to 1420. And this certainly works from the Western perspective as basically incorporating the classic medieval period. The tricky part with respect to China is that this is also a period of time when China basically entered on the threshold of early modernity. There were a number of changes in the society that suggest that from about the late 10th century onward that China was essentially moving toward modern times.
Mark Williams
Well, you talked a bit about difficulties in terms of the chronologies between civilizations. It makes me wonder about any parity or distinctions or differences between slavery in medieval China and slavery and medieval West. Are we talking basically about the same type of institution that is just set in a different locale? Or are we talking about an institution that’s fundamentally different in China than its Western counterpart? And if it is different then how. Is it different in scope or maybe it’s permanence, or maybe the assumptions on which the slavery itself rested?
Don Wyatt
I think the most fundamental difference, to be born in mind in terms of scope, is that at no time in China, did slavery ever become the chief mode of economic production as it did, for example, in the early modern Portuguese maritime empire or the antebellum, pre-Civil War United States. I think a real difference here too is to be found in thinking about percentages per capita of the population. The Chinese enslaved population during Han dynasty times, which is correspondent to the beginning of the Christian era, for instance in our terms or contemporary with the Roman empire, was probably one percent of the population. In later times in a more populous China, it probably rose to two percent, but by contrast on the eve of the American Civil War, probably something close to a quarter of the population was enslaved. That’s a huge difference.
Mark Williams
Yes. I see the differences in terms of the population, the numbers, themselves being different, the number of people who are enslaved within the population. So, there are some important distinctions between slavery in China and slavery in the West. What about…
Don Wyatt
And since you mentioned it, you asked too about assumptions. And I think it’s important to underscore that there continued to be the assumption in medieval Chinese slavery that enslavement was a punitive action. And I think this idea of slavery as punishment certainly had become lost in Western medieval slavery and certainly in later Western slavery.
Mark Williams
In the Chinese context, slavery as punishment, this would be punishment in terms of those who were enslaved were the adversaries of the slaveholders?
Don Wyatt
Well, that’s a great question.
Mark Williams
Punishment for what?
Don Wyatt
Yeah, exactly. It’s arguable that the first sin of individuals who were enslaved, who were non-Chinese, was that they simply resisted and consequently, they were victimized because of that. But it’s also important to bear in mind that Chinese slavery has a strong and even more dominant, endogenous aspect. And this aspect is one in which cultural insiders, largely because of the transgressions against higher authority by an individual, typically the patriarch of a family, these individuals fell into slavery at the command of higher authority. In this sense, the Chinese situation is a classic example of the intrusive application of slavery. On the one hand, the slave is adversary. And the extrusive imposition of slavery on the other hand, where someone typically of standing within the society, because of rebellion, because of treacherous behavior, because of insult, fell and collaterally members of that person’s family, clan were enslaved.
Mark Williams
I see. So, punishment for resistance, punishment for opposition, punishment for lack of deference or insult….
Don Wyatt
And it applied in either the intrusive case or the extrusive case. By the way, this terminology is, directly from Orlando Patterson, sociologist of comparative slavery in his famous book, “Slavery and Social Death” 1982.
Mark Williams
Thank you. Were there any distinctions within China itself from region to region regarding the type of slavery that might exist there? Or was it pretty much the same?
Don Wyatt
Especially later we do encounter such conventions as debt bondage which is again a kind of limited term slavery that is practiced in various cultures. And also since you ask about regional differences, the prominent phenomenon of child enslavement in south China in later centuries, much to the consternation of Imperial authority. And also civilian officials. But fundamentally, no, the two fundamental types of slavery had long been and continued to be official slavery and private slavery.
Mark Williams
What’s the distinction between them?
Don Wyatt
The distinction is essentially, and connected with my discussion of intrusive and extrusive modes of enslavement, official slavery typically involved someone who had fallen into disfavor and their descendants had been enslaved. There was also official slavery in the form of tribute that was given to the Imperial court by various foreign dignitaries. Oftentimes the gifts were human gifts and these individuals were enslaved. And then there was private slavery which began to proliferate particularly during the medieval era. And this was the enslavement of most typically Chinese individuals by their countrymen.
Mark Williams
I see. Okay. Listening to this and thinking about the institution of slavery you’re describing in China, I can’t help but compare Chinese slavery with the type of slavery that developed and then plagued the United States. And, you know, here in the United States slavery was hereditary. If the Black parents were slaves, then their offspring were too and their offspring’s offspring. To what extent did something like that exist in China? Was it the same kind of hereditary condition there? If so, how extensive was it? Or if it was hereditary, was it more limited in terms of its coverage?
Don Wyatt
In essence, Chinese slavery was hereditary though probably not with the same sort of consistency that you would find in the United States. But one development, social development, that tended to ensure this kind of hereditary status of slavery was the fact that early on in China there developed a division of society into so-called good people, respectable people, the Chinese term is Lian, and Jin people, debased, ignoble people. Best estimates are that this group of base individuals probably constituted no more than five percent of the overall population. But the important thing from the standpoint of slavery is that whereas not all base people were slaves, all slaves were base people. And this base category included great numbers of other people. And there was a tendency for it over time to become largely occupational. Consequently, certain occupations necessarily fell under the rubric of baseness. This included torturers because torture was a constituent of the Chinese legal system, executioners, jailers, watchmen.
Mark Williams
So, the individuals performing those functions would themselves be slaves.
Don Wyatt
They weren’t slaves, but they were base.
Mark Williams
They were base. I see.
Don Wyatt
Particularly after the advent of Buddhism, butchers, because they killed animals. Took life. But also some occupations you would not necessarily expect: actors, musicians, boat people.
Mark Williams
Musicians?
Don Wyatt
Yeah.
Mark Williams
That’s fascinating. One of the things that always seemed to terrify slave holding societies regardless of time, regardless of locale, was the possibility of a slave rebellion. The Spartans feared this back during the time of the Peloponnesian war, the French feared a slave revolt in their colony of Haiti. They got one as well. One thing that the slave holders in the American South feared during antebellum times was the prospect of slave uprisings. And I’m wondering whether or not your research is uncovered something similar, a similar type of fear amongst Chinese slaveholders. Were there any episodes of significant slave revolts and maybe if so, what impact did this have on the institution of slavery?
Don Wyatt
In a word, no.
Mark Williams
Really?
Don Wyatt
Yup. Part of the answer for this is to be seen in the percentages that I offered you in terms of the overall population. The slave component was just too small to be able to raise a rebellion or…
Mark Williams
Pose any real risks.
Don Wyatt
Significant threat to authority even no matter how rest of it might have been. But your question, because again, of the punitive basis of Chinese slavery, raises another very counterintuitive way in which medieval Chinese slavery, but really Chinese slavery of any period, differed from Western slavery. And this was the fact that mutilation was a common practice in Chinese slavery.
Mark Williams
Mutilation of the slaves.
Don Wyatt
Yes, with the slaves falling prey to anything short of the most extreme of the five ancient punishments in China. And these were in increasing order of severity. Tattooing, which involved the incising, scarification and inking of the face especially the forehead. The second of the five ancient punishments was the cutting off of the nose. The third of these, which was probably the least frequently applied was the cutting off of one or both feet, which obviously was seriously debilitating. The fourth of these was castration and the fifth was capital punishment, which almost always meant decapitation. And as a consequence of this, these punishments, because Chinese traditional punishments were always mutilative, became cultural code for anyone encountering someone like this. In other words, this person was obviously a criminal. And very potentially also a slave.
Mark Williams
Yes. So, anyone you see that might have bore the scars of any of these types of punishments.
Don Wyatt
The so-called markings of the body as they were called.
Mark Williams
How did slavery finally end in medieval China? And what did the end of slavery signify in terms of perhaps the bequeathing of new liberties or new rights for the people who were governed under Chinese rule?
Don Wyatt
Regrettably, it didn’t end but more or less transformed in later centuries, in that a new channel emerged as the main source of recruitment of slaves. And this was self-enslavement, self-sale.
Mark Williams
Really? How did that come about?
Don Wyatt
Well, it’s a feature of, of Chinese society that is probably one of the most difficult elements to translate to students in the sense that they have to somehow become persuaded that there were conditions in the world in the past, such that slavery was more preferable than living under those conditions. And you know, we live, especially those of us who are products of the liberal democratic West. We live in an age of affluence in which it’s difficult to conceive that sacrificing liberty could actually be beneficial to us in terms of survival. That’s not necessarily the case in China in subsequent centuries.
Mark Williams
Are you talking about economic deprivation? Are you talking about something else?
Don Wyatt
I’m talking about economic deprivation. I’m talking about famine. I’m talking about pestilence. I’m talking about warfare. I’m talking about a number of socially disruptive forces that were so severe and so debilitating, disease, plague, so forth, that being in a situation in which one might be enslaved but relatively well taken care of was preferable to being exposed to these sort of elements. To give an example, this goes a long way toward explaining the Chinese eunuch tradition.
Mark Williams
Would you care to elaborate?
Don Wyatt
Well, it’s simply the fact that under destitute circumstances someone might volunteer, so to speak, to enter the palace by making that sacrifice.
Mark Williams
Yes. How did this actually work? How, if you research has revealed this, how would one go about finding someone to enslave yourself to who was not afflicted by the things that were afflicting the person contemplating voluntary slavery?
Don Wyatt
You essentially take a chance and make yourself available. You know, you show up at their gateway. And sometimes that meant showing up at the court. Whether you would succeed or not, that’s another matter. And you may have made that sacrifice in vain. But you did ask about an endpoint and essentially slavery was not abolished in China until 1910. And this was not really an emancipation so much as it was a ban on the sale of slaves. So consequently, it became illegal to…
Mark Williams
How did that come about? Why was that?
Don Wyatt
It’s a number of factors. Part of it is official condemnation. It is the influence of early constitutionalism in China. It is the influence of missionary involvement in China. And perhaps the fact that in the quest for modernity, China had to move in a direction in which this ancient institution was laid to rest. But needless to say, since it wasn’t an emancipation, slavery continued to be practiced illicitly, of course, but it continued for a good deal of time after that. Certainly, up until the communist revolution in 1949.
Mark Williams
The end of slavery in the United States is something that many can look back to and celebrate just as those who were living at the time that it ended in the United States, many celebrated. Was there anything analogous to the end of slavery or the demise of slavery that happened in China? Was this action you’re talking about that occurred in 1910? Was this something of note that people, at least some people celebrated or was it just more of the sort of grinding the function of the state and something that happened more as a matter of fact, that was little taken notice of.
Don Wyatt
I think it probably attracted little notice.
Mark Williams
Interesting.
Don Wyatt
And probably the further away you were from, you know, the seat of power the less it mattered to you.
Mark Williams
Do you think that it’s possible that China’s version of slavery might owe anything to, or perhaps was influenced by slavery that existed outside of China?
Don Wyatt
There is some speculation regarding transferability of the eunuch tradition. Some contact perhaps between China and ancient Assyria. And the Persians have also been cited in this connection. We do know from Herodotus that the Persians did practice eunuchism. He attributed it to the Persians as one of their practices. He even praised it suggesting that eunuchs were more loyal, more dedicated than normal people.
Mark Williams
Yes.
Don Wyatt
The evidence for this is very tenuous and very weak. I think it’s arguable more likely that much like the Chinese writing script, much like the Chinese development of bronze metalwork technology, that it was an indigenous development.
Mark Williams
I’m wondering if the knowledge that we get from examining slavery in China might be transferable. And by that, I mean, is understanding medieval Chinese slavery, does that help us better understand other world slaveries? Either, you know, during the same time period or maybe at different time periods?
Don Wyatt
Chinese medieval slavery is perhaps a prime example of functionalism determining status in a way that had the effect of making it really an organic institution within the culture. One that was almost invisible because it was based on the functionalist contribution that slaves made. Chinese did not regard as slaves, individuals whom we typically would classify as slaves. I think great examples of this are the eunuchs that we’ve already touched upon. But also, concubines who essentially because of their function were at best regarded as a kind of specialized slave, if regarded as slaves at all. And their status within the home or at the court was certainly superior to other slaves. But nevertheless, from our standpoint, anyone who can be bought or sold is a slave.
Mark Williams
Yes. Is property. When you talk about the invisibility of slavery, you ascribe that invisibility here to perhaps functionalism.
Don Wyatt
Yeah. A kind of a seamless, regulatory contribution made to…
Mark Williams
Society.
Don Wyatt
To society okay. To the culture, to sustaining the culture.
Mark Williams
Is the invisibility also a function of how few people relatively speaking were actually enslaved? And here I’m thinking about situations in the United States, for example, where it’s the numbers are, are much larger. It’s very clear. It’s very much out in the open. These are not activities that are behind closed walls in the court.
Don Wyatt
It’s probably not divorced from that. The relative lack of prominence in terms of numbers might have had some effect but very often too these individuals were individuals of consequence.
Mark Williams
You mean because of the function that they played?
Don Wyatt
Because of the function that they played. The role that they had. We can see this in the diversification of functions of eunuchs, for instance. Their original function was of course, as harem guardians. But over the course of time, they come to take on many roles. And even someone so famous of late as the Ming dynasty eunuch commander Zheng He, the great navigator, who made seven expeditions, even as far as the east coast of Africa, was a eunuch.
Mark Williams
Remarkable. Perhaps on a related note, when you think about the world today, there are still unfortunately, pockets of slavery, some types of slavery that still exist in different parts of the world. Do you think that any of the insights about contemporary global slavery, are there any insights that we can draw from examining medieval Chinese slavery?
Don Wyatt
Probably the most difficult of your questions to try to get a handle on. I think essentially, we can learn how tenacious the institution can be, and that it, continues to take many forms. Particularly, I think the case of medieval Chinese slavery goes a long way towards informing our understanding of current day human trafficking. It also has a way of explaining child exploitation.
Mark Williams
In what way would it illuminate either one of those areas, human trafficking, or child exploitation?
Don Wyatt
In terms of your first question about human trafficking, China today is a place in which we have a population of approximately 1.4 billion people. And there are many more males than females. In fact, the rough estimate currently is that there are about 35 million more males than females. These individuals are going to have to find wives. And very oftentimes that’s going to have them casting beyond China. And consequently, this situation I think, is informing in terms of human trafficking and driven by this element of functionality that I suggested to you earlier.
Mark Williams
That you alluded to earlier.
Don Wyatt
We also know that much like prison labor, child labor is a fixture in China. And unfortunately tends only to come to the world’s attention when there is some sort of unfortunate accident in which children are the principal victims. And I guess the message there is that slavery as an institution, especially when driven by functionalist imperatives, is very difficult to stamp out.
Mark Williams
Yes, I could see that as well. As we look towards the future, Don, in terms of your own research, what’s next for you? Are you going to continue to study aspects of slavery in China? Are you going to be researching different aspects of Chinese history?
Don Wyatt
Much of my work has been largely in three areas: Chinese intellectualism, Chinese violence and warfare, and Chinese ethnicity and slavery. The slavery component certainly has taken the lead and is the driver in the sense that, it seems to be what is most in demand and like all scholars, we, no matter how high-minded we are, we have to respond to demand. So, it’s fair to say that I’ll be delving further into these questions in the future. At least in the short-term future.
Mark Williams
Well, it’s a really fascinating topic. It really is. And I want to thank you for sharing that with us.
Don Wyatt
Well, I really only wish that I had the opportunity to talk about something a bit more uplifting. But at any rate, thank you for having me.
Mark Williams
I’ve been speaking with Don Wyatt of Middlebury College about the arguments that he makes in a new volume called “The Cambridge World History of Slavery” published by Cambridge University Press. His chapter contribution to that work is titled “Slavery in Medieval China.” Don, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you today and thank you very much for visiting with us on New Frontiers.
Don Wyatt
It’s been a pleasure being with you and continued success.
Mark Williams
Thank you.
Student (Nora Hyde)
A native of Illinois, Professor Don Wyatt lives with his family—and his dog, Clive—in Weybridge Vermont. He loves green tea, basketball, and his favorite city in China is Xi’An. Outside of the classroom, students are most likely to find him prowling the stacks and working on his research in the Library.
Episode 5 - Why Did Turkish Democracy Collapse
After six decades of multiparty politics, Turkish democracy has collapsed. Yes, the trappings of democracy are still visible. Elections are held, parliament sits in session, the courts rule, and the elected executive leads. Yet, the substance of democracy moves ever further into the past. How did this happen? Why? And what implications does the unraveling of democracy in Turkey hold for political systems in other countries? In this episode, Mark Williams explores these topics with Sebnem Gumuscu, associate professor of political science at Middlebury College, whose recent scholarship highlights the reality of democratic backsliding.
New Frontiers - Episode 5: Why Did Turkish Democracy Collapse
After decades of democratic governance, Turkish democracy has not just declined, but collapsed. How? Why? In this episode, Sebnem Gumuscu traces the rise and decline of Turkey’s democratic system and provides insights into the forces by which Turkey has slid ever deeper into autocracy.
Transcript
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
Today, Sebnem Gumuscu joins Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—to discuss the plight and demise of democracy in Turkey.
Mark Williams
Sebnem Gumuscu is an associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs here at Middlebury College. In her capacity as a faculty fellow, Professor Gumuscu co-directs the Rohatyn Center’s program on Global Trends in Autocracy and Democracy which is supported by the Cangiano Family, in memory of Leon M. Cangiano Jr. Class of 1963. Much of her research has focused on political Islam, middle Eastern and north African politics, democratization, and democratic backsliding. Her first book, Democracy, Identity and Foreign Policy in Turkey, was published in 2014. Her second book, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press is titled Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. Today I’m delighted Sebnem’s agreed to stop by to discuss a topic that’s related to this larger book project. It’s a recent article that appeared in the journal Party Politics. Professor Gumuscu co-authored this article with her colleague, Berk Esen, and it’s titled, Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of AKP’s authoritarianism. Professor Gumuscu, welcome to New Frontiers.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Thank you for having me, Mark.
Mark Williams
We’re glad you’re here. Let’s start with a little background. Can you tell us a little bit about Turkey’s political development, first of all. Was it always a democracy? Was it ever a truly vibrant democracy before the decay set in that you write about?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes. Turkey indeed has a history of multi-party politics since 1950. Modern Turkey is established as a republic in 1923 and it has become a full functioning well functioning democracy in 1950. If we are to use Huntington’s analogy of waves of democratization, that would actually put Turkey in the second wave of democratization that happened after the Second World War. That said, of course Turkish democracy had its certain shortcomings. Of course, many people who are somewhat familiar with Turkish politics would know that the Turkish military armed forces were quite active in politics. They held what we could call tutelary powers and they would actually check and balance the elected officials. And they would actually kind of act like guardian of the nation and would intervene in politics to redesign political institutions, rewriting constitutions, changing the electoral system to straighten things out. But what makes Turkey really interesting is that unlike many other cases where we see military interventions happening quite frequently, in the Turkish case, the armed forces did not stay and establish a military regime. They would come in, intervene, get rid of existing corrupt politicians as they see them, and then rewrite a constitution—a new constitution, and then design the electoral institutions, and then they would go back to their barracks, so to speak.
Mark Williams
So, this is a very different type of scenario than an area of the world that I studied, which is Latin America, where militaries would intervene in politics and not always retreat back to the barracks. They would stay for a long time.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now your article claims that after about 60 years, six decades, Turkey’s democracy has basically collapsed and you know, honestly that’s a, a really bold claim. And so I want to know what’s your evidence to support this?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. So we adopt Dahl’s criteria of democratic politics. Robert Dahl. So he specifies couple things for minimum criteria for democracies like free, fair, regular elections, universal suffrage, of course, the right to run for office without much restrictions and fundamental civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of information and association. Without these civil liberties, it’s really hard to imagine a well-functioning democracy, free and fair elections of course. A closer look at Turkey reveals two things. Number one, civil liberties are systematically violated under the AKP government. And number two, elections are no longer free or fair. So we compiled data from the last decade to document all these violations of basic freedoms in Turkey and the ruling party’s actions that undermine the freeness and fairness of elections. Unlike Turkish democracy and how it functioned before AKP’s rise to power in 2002, we actually see elections are no longer fee or fair in the country. And free speech is very much systematically undermined. And also, the media, Turkish media is very much under the control of the government.
Mark Williams
So what you’re saying is that you see violations of two of the basic foundations of democracy that Robert Dahl had spoken of in his work. And you see that happening in Turkey.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now another question, doesn’t this conclusion about the collapse of Turkish democracy, doesn’t this actually fly in the face of what we see happening on the ground, so to speak, in Turkey? Isn’t the president still an elected official? Isn’t parliament still in session? Are we really talking about a collapse of democracy? Are we talking more about perhaps a backsliding?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That is a really great question. And many people are actually puzzled by this particular observation. You have elections, quite regular elections, and you have a president that is elected in a free and fair election, at least in 2002. That’s how they came to power. And we have a parliament that is pretty much in session. They’re not actually canceled and the constitution is still there, right? And the constitution actually guarantees civil liberties and freedoms and democratic rights. All of this on paper looks quite democratic. But when it comes to the reality of democratic politics, we actually see over the past, maybe 10 to 15 years, there has been very incremental, gradual change in all of these institutions. And mostly, yes, elections are still there, they’re regular, but as I said, they’re not free or fair. So we have freedom of media and freedom of the press guaranteed in the constitution. But in reality the AKP actually controls about 90 percent of both public and private media. That’s huge, right?
Mark Williams
Ninety percent.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. That’s a rough estimate, but when you think about news coverage, you actually see, for example, President Erdogan having a public ceremony or some kind of speech for some reason, and all TV stations actually tune in and they cover his speech and you don’t have any other kind of, you know, news coverage for that except for maybe one or two network stations. And they’re very kind of, you know, small, not very well funded network stations, very much marginalized. You can imagine 90 percent of Turkish media is very much pro-government and they’re also resorting to black propaganda almost and fake news quite frequently to show that the opposition is a terrible option and the people should not ever actually even imagine or consider voting for them. So there is a huge unevenness, especially in the media landscape. So the opposition does not have a fair chance at winning the game, despite the fact that we have regular elections.
Mark Williams
So despite the fact that on paper, it looks like a democracy and it has the trappings and trimmings of a democracy, in practice it functions in ways that are patently anti-democratic.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Absolutely.
Mark Williams
Yes. Okay. Well, if Turkey’s democracy really has collapsed, I guess the question is, how did this happen? The government was elected. The government presumably was popular and won a mandate. So what transpired to bring this about?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, it’s a long process and it will take a long time to unpack. But of course, as you said, everything started with an election. And this is actually a quality or character of the most recent backsliding wave that we observe in multiple countries like in India, in Hungary, in Poland, even in the United States. These elected officials who subvert democracy, they come to power in a free and fair election, but once they’re in power, they start to subvert democracy very slowly, very incrementally. And they start to kind of, you know, make sure that most of these democratic rights and institutions work in their favor and at the expense of their competition. In the Turkish case, more specifically, maybe we can highlight two routes to democratic breakdown. Number one was the politicization of state institutions. Those state institutions like the judiciary, police forces, even tax authorities who were supposed to remain independent and nonpartisan, they have been increasingly politicized over the years. So the government basically took over these state mechanisms and turned them into weapons to sanction their opponents and also reward their own supporters.
Mark Williams
So by politicized, you mean they were used in opposition to the opponents.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. I can give an example, and that relates very much to what happened with the Turkish media, especially how private media ended up under a AKP control. Tax authorities I said were politicized and some people may, actually can even ask how is that even possible? When you have, for example, a big media company, a conglomerate, that controls multiple network stations and newspapers, you can basically send—and that’s exactly what the AKP government did—send tax auditors to these companies and start looking at their books. And what happened in 2009, when one of these big media companies were covering some corruption stories about the government, they received several auditors from the tax authorities. And these tax authorities decided that the company was actually evading their taxes. So they charged them with $3 billion of tax fines. That was basically more than the value of the entire company. So the company was actually forced to negotiate and settle with the government. One part of that settlement was to sell some of their newspapers and their network stations to pro-government businesses. That’s a very good example of how politicized state institutions can actually punish your opponents and also reward your supporters.
Mark Williams
That’s amazing and incredibly effective if you have an authoritarian bent. Well, if Turkey no longer has a genuine democracy, what kind of government does it have? What would we call this type of government?
Sebnem Gumuscu
In this paper, we use a concept that Steven Levitsky and Luke Way coined, and that is competitive authoritarianism. So that may sound a bit kind of oxymoronic. How a regime is competitive and authoritarian at the same time, this is a kind of a hybrid regime type, which actually has both democratic qualities and autocratic qualities at the same time. That’s why it’s competitive authoritarian. What makes it competitive is actually we still have regular elections. They’re not free or fair, but the government has to win those elections to come to power and to remain in power. And still there are some room for competition, despite the fact that the game is not fair and that competition is open to at least one part of the opposition. So we have multiple parties running in elections and we have multiple candidates running in presidential elections. So it’s really kind of a system where you have a bit of competition that is really not very fair. That makes it autocratic and democratic at the same time.
Mark Williams
And are you talking mostly about the federal level? What’s going on at the subnational levels in terms of competition and political power?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. I would say that at least for a big part of the last 20 years, both local and national level elections were very much competitive and authoritarian at the same time. Recently however, in 2019, the opposition parties actually made significant advances at the local level, if not the national level. I’m guessing that at this, kind of, for the AKP, it is much easier maybe to concede loss at the local level because yes, they lose significant resources at the local level. But losing the national government is much costlier and they would not necessarily accept that loss that easily.
Mark Williams
That’s the big prize, the national government. How does the approach that you take in this article towards the study of the breakdown of democracy, how does that differ from the way that scholars have studied this phenomenon in the past? And here, I’m really thinking about an earlier wave of research done back in the 1970s by people like Juan Lynn and Al Stephan, who took a close sort of systematic look at the breakdown of democratic regimes in different parts of the world. How does your approach differ from that which they took?
Sebnem Gumuscu
We spent some time thinking about existing scholarship on democratic breakdown and backsliding. And if I do not misremember this, Lynn and Stephan put maybe more emphasis on political leadership rather than what we do here in terms of coalition. So we agree that political leadership matters greatly and leaders play an important role in undermining and subverting democracy, but when it comes to broader support for those leaders, actor-centric approaches do not necessarily explain the entire picture. Here we’re kind of, you know, trying to bring in the society as well into the equation. Because it’s not just about elected leaders, but also their supporters.
Mark Williams
And so what do you call the approach that you utilize?
Sebnem Gumuscu
We call this a coalitional approach. We look at electoral coalitions and political coalitions that these leaders build. It’s a political economy understanding of coalitions, of course, but you can imagine there may be other ways to build coalitions around social values, perhaps ethnical religious identities. So in this paper, we’re explicitly subscribing to a political economy understanding of coalition building.
Mark Williams
And so what kind of analytical leverage does a coalitional approach provide you?
Sebnem Gumuscu
There’s a huge debate in the scholarship about the most recent wave of democratic back siding and breakdown. And some scholars say that it’s the elite that is the responsible party here. As many other scholars have done in the past. So it’s Trump, Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Putin that actually undermine and subvert democracy. And then some other scholars actually say, it’s really not about these people, these leaders, but the people who support them, the masses and their political attitudes and interests that we need to understand. So there’s an ongoing debate in the scholarly circles about who’s to blame, so to speak, right? We tend to hope that in this particular approach, we’re bringing the two together.
Mark Williams
I was going to ask you, do you feel that it is really this dichotomous? That it’s ither, or?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes, exactly. We think that it’s both, and they work together because political leaders build coalitions, but these coalitions then keep those political leaders in power. So they do not only vote them in office, but they also keep supporting them later in the elections, despite the fact that they see these leaders are subverting democracy. So there, we need to understand at one point the masses or the coalitions that all these leaders build, keep supporting these leaders, despite everything. That also tells us that at the end of the day, masses practically favor their own interests and their expectations from the government and certain policies that deliver them certain goods over their democratic commitments. They’re contingent democrats, not real democrats.
Mark Williams
Well, that’s really interesting. In a nutshell, could you tell us what the essential argument is that you make in your paper regarding the breakdown of democracy in Turkey?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Once the AKP came to power, the leader, of course, of the party, Erdogan along the two main groups in the society built a very tight coalition. Those two groups are the businesspeople and the urban poor. Both of these groups are very much dependent on the governing party, ruling party, for certain privileges. For the urban poor, this is social security assistance, social welfare policies, and specific clientelistic connections to the party. You can imagine urban poor, especially living in big cities like Istanbul and Ankara, they have certain needs. And they need jobs. They need connections. They need networks. And they also need very specific goods like food, food stamps and, and whatnot. What the party actually kind of politicized over the years as well. So if you’re an AKP supporter, you get all of these goods and benefits. And if you’re not an AKP supporter, you’re completely shut down and excluded from all of these distributions. And the same goes for businesspeople. Businesspeople who have close connections to the government actually receive significant favors in public procurement projects, for instance, and AKP is really great in public procurement projects and especially big projects like, you know, big bridges, you know, highways and whatnot, you know, significant redistribution of resources from the public budget to businesspeople who have been taking all these projects. So if you have close ties to the government, you’re favored and you’re given all these very long-term projects that are not in Turkish currency in U.S. dollars. And they’re enormously beneficial for the recipients.
Mark Williams
Can I stop you right there for a moment? I can understand how contracts and no bid contracts could be awarded to friends and to consorts and so forth by incumbents. Could you help us understand how it is that public goods, food and other types of basic necessities can be systematically denied to those who are not supporters of AKP? How is that regulated? What’s the policy framework behind that, wherein you could ensure that only your supporters receive these benefits?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. So I have done a little bit of field work at the local level. The AKP is perhaps the best organized party in Turkey. They have very strong grassroots existence in, presence, in neighborhoods, especially lower income neighborhoods. So they know people. They know who constitutes their support and they’re organized even at the polling station level. They know every individual person, every citizen and whom they vote for. And this is exactly what they told me in interviews that I have done in the past. You can actually kind of imagine them knowing more or less, who is an AKP supporter, who is on the fence and who an opposition voter. Some voters are white, some voters are black, the opposition, and some are gray. They basically allocate these resources to the people who have strong connections to the party and they can rely on for their support. And then we have the gray people who actually can go either way. So they also spend some resources for them as well to sway them.
Mark Williams
Are we talking about individuals receiving these benefits, or are we talking about the benefits being targeted towards neighborhoods or regions?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Both actually. They are organized at the neighborhood level and regional and neighborhood level. And then within neighborhoods, they know what families are actually supportive of AKP and what families are actually against them, very much geared towards individuals and they select their own supporters and channel resources to them.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now let’s circle back and get to the way in which this coalition, which was created, the way in which it worked to destabilize democracy and to degrade the democracy.
Sebnem Gumuscu
So here, I think the key thing to remember is Turkey was a parliamentary system until 2017. When the AKP changed the system to a presidential system. Which means, in parliamentary systems we don’t have term limits. The same party can be reelected multiple times without any restrictions. That’s exactly what happened. The AKP came to power in 2002 and remained in power since then. And over the course of 20 years, they cultivated very strong ties with both businesspeople and urban poor. And both of these groups ended up being really, really dependent on the government for these privileges. And you can also imagine there has been a lot of corruption, especially between the government and the businesspeople in their, you know, handling of public procurement and whatnot. When you think about a very long-lasting relationship for 20 years, you can also imagine how much benefits have been accumulated by these different groups and how much corruption they’re involved in. Right. So deep, deep corruption we’re talking about. That means the cost of losing power now for the urban poor, for businesspeople, and the party itself has increased substantially. If they lose power, it’s very likely that they will be brought before courts because they have engaged in so much corruption, and many of the dealings that they had with the government were basically kind of extra-legal. Urban poor has not been involved in corruption perhaps, but they’re definitely at the receiving end of significant redistribution. So they fear that if government changes hands, then the new government will not give them these select benefits and privileges that they have been receiving from the AKP. All of these different components, different parts of the coalition have a lot to fear. They fear losing power to the opposition who actually is—sounds quite, maybe—radical in their desire to kind of bring some of these connections to the court and cutting those ties between the businesspeople and the government, and perhaps even revising the entire clientelistic network that the AKP built over the years. So all of these actors have a lot to lose. If they lose power, they will be losing a lot.
Mark Williams
So the incumbents then have a strong incentive to really repress opposition and to preclude agency on the part of opponents. And the clients, the businesses, and the urban masses have strong incentive to continue to support the incumbents as well as to tolerate the repression.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly.
Mark Williams
What about other cases of democratic breakdown? Let’s think about the argument you’re making here in Turkey. Does it have legs? Can it travel to other cases and help explain what we might see in countries beyond Turkey?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Absolutely. As you’ve just beautifully summarized, the mechanism is very much clear and can easily travel to other cases. And that mechanism is about those people who are in power, they fear losing that power and they have incentives to cheat, and they also have incentives to support an actor that actually subverts democracy. If you have similar coalitions elsewhere in the world that represent some of these actors in the society, as well as among the political elite, they can actually be okay by cheating. And they may have incentives to support those who cheat. That will be actually end of democracy in many different parts of the world. So we believe that if not the same structure or same relationship between businesspeople, the ruling party, and urban poor, even if that does not travel to other cases, it is very possible that the causal mechanism itself that starts with fear and then leads to subversion of democracy can very well travel to other cases.
Mark Williams
That’s really interesting. And it’s actually very scary for people who look fondly on democracy. I’d like to take the discussion in a slightly different direction if we could. Given what we’ve lived through in the United States, particularly since 2016 and given your own expertise on democratic decay, do you think that Americans should be concerned about the state of their democracy?
Sebnem Gumuscu
I think so. Many people, I believe, were relieved with 2020 elections, but—there’s a but there—if we are to understand why Donald Trump was elected first time around, and despite all of his failures he received many more votes in 2020 elections, we need to see the coalition there. That there is indeed both a factor or an element in the political elite, as well as the society that forms a coalition of sorts, who have certain anxieties, who have certain fears about politics. Perhaps they fear and many scholars like people Norris and Ronald Ingelhart, in their book Cultural Backlash, or Yascha Mounk in his book The People vs. Democracy, they highlighted these anxieties, especially in the American context. So we can perhaps argue that there is a similar coalition of sorts that have certain anxieties have certain fears and they want to remain in power and they cannot tolerate their political rivals any longer. They’re ready to cheat and change things if they need to. And we, unfortunately, we see signs of these, you know,
Mark Williams
I think we see more than signs. We see actual concrete evidence toward subverting, the democratic process.
Sebnem Gumuscu
January 6th insurrection was a very good example that Donald Trump …
Mark Williams
Planned well in advance. Planned well in advance.
Sebnem Gumuscu
We can also perhaps look at what happened since 2020 elections and many multiple states have changed their electoral laws and getting ready for another election. And they don’t want to lose that election. And they’re kind of creating an uneven playing field as we speak to make sure that they will not be losing another election. And that’s very scary.
Mark Williams
That sad dynamic is playing out on multiple fronts in multiple states as we record this podcast episode. It is scary. You’re right.
Sebnem Gumuscu
And I think that coalition will not fizzle out. There is a coalition there, 70-some million people voted for Donald Trump. And even if Trump is gone, there will perhaps be another person who will be carrying the same banner for this part of society. It’s really about what they want, what these people want, and what kind of values and interests they’re rallying around. The really scary thing is they really do not see their political rivals as legitimate actors. And they do not want to tolerate them. They don’t want to live with them in the same political arena.
Mark Williams
It is scary. It’s sad to see that development deepen and spread and solidify. I have a three-parter that I’d like to ask if I may. You are a native of Turkey, right?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes.
Mark Williams
Okay, part one. What part of Turkey did you grow up in, part two. And how did you wind up at Middlebury here in Vermont?
Sebnem Gumuscu
I’m born and raised in Istanbul. I spent perhaps 20-some years there and I went to college in Istanbul. It was a small liberal arts college like Middlebury. And it was a beautiful college that had actual—we had the opportunity to have a lot of conversations about political science, international relations—that was my major. And I had couple American professors there who encouraged me and my friends to study in the United States. I was fascinated with political science, and I was not ready to stop studying political science at all when I graduated. So I applied for a Fulbright fellowship. I got it. And then I moved to Virginia to get my master’s degree and PhD. That’s my encounter with the U.S. for the first time. Then the American academia was so vibrant, so fascinating, I wanted to stay here. And I wanted to work here. And I went back to Turkey for field work and writing my dissertation. But then in 2013, I was looking for jobs. There was an open position at Middlebury. I applied, got here and I’m glad I did.
Mark Williams
Well, we’re glad you’re here as well, Sebnem. Very much so. Again, with a personal question, as a political scientist, how do you keep your objectivity when studying your country of origin? How do you prevent love of country or patriotism, your feelings for home, cloud your analysis of what might be going on politically in Turkey?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. It was hard because I’m a citizen and a researcher at the same time. And I have my normative commitments. You know, I like democracy. I want democracy to flourish in the United States, in Turkey, and everywhere in the world, if it makes sense. But I think I’m good with compartmentalizing. And it also gives me some relief to be able to isolate myself from political developments. Like, you know, that concerns me as an individual, as a citizen. You know, okay, lot,s happening in Turkey with respect to autocratization, but studying it, gives me a little bit of distance and makes it easier for me to understand.
Mark Williams
In a way less painful to see this?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. It becomes less dreadful and less painful, less emotionally charged. Taking on that kind of analytical lens makes it easier for me to get out of that emotional state, and see it as a kind of a rational lens and make sense of what’s going on.
Mark Williams
I can completely understand what you’re talking about. In terms of research, then what’s next for you? The article that we’ve been discussing was published back in 2020. Are you continuing to do research in this general area? Or do you have a new project that’s in the works?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, I’m working on multiple projects currently. I don’t want to bore you with them.
Mark Williams
Tell us about at least one of them. What can we look forward to reading from you down the line?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, I’m really excited about one book project that I’ve been thinking of lately and I will be starting field work this summer. So it is actually about the decline of the ruling party in Turkey. I know maybe it’s too soon to talk about their decline, but I think we’re getting closer and closer, especially with the ongoing economic crisis in the country. I’m hoping to write a book on the rise and fall of the AKP. And for that I will be again doing some field work this summer in lower income neighborhoods in Istanbul talking to lower income families.
Mark Williams
These would be families who typically would be supporters of AKP?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. I want to ask what changed for them, if anything, over the last couple of years, with higher rates of inflation, about 60 percent as we speak, and rising unemployment, and stagnant economic growth that particularly hit the lower income families really hard.
Mark Williams
Wow. Well, I look forward to reading the book and presumably some of the articles that come from this research. Thank you very much for taking time to visit with us today; I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. We’ve been talking about the breakdown of democracy in Turkey with Middlebury College Associate professor of Political Science Sebnem Gumuscu. Sebnem, again, thanks so much for visiting us here on New Frontiers.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Thank you for having me.
Outro
Vera Rousseff
Growing in Instanbul, Prof. Sebnem Gumuscu won several high school awards for her short stories and poems. She enjoys cooking and trying new recipes and is always experimenting with sugarfree options. A hobby she picked up over COVID is building miniature rooms and houses from kits, similar to a dollhouse. Outside of class students often see her on her campus walks.
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
Today, Sebnem Gumuscu joins Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—to discuss the plight and demise of democracy in Turkey.
Mark Williams
Sebnem Gumuscu is an associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs here at Middlebury College. In her capacity as a faculty fellow, Professor Gumuscu co-directs the Rohatyn Center’s program on Global Trends in Autocracy and Democracy which is supported by the Cangiano Family, in memory of Leon M. Cangiano Jr. Class of 1963. Much of her research has focused on political Islam, middle Eastern and north African politics, democratization, and democratic backsliding. Her first book, Democracy, Identity and Foreign Policy in Turkey, was published in 2014. Her second book, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press is titled Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. Today I’m delighted Sebnem’s agreed to stop by to discuss a topic that’s related to this larger book project. It’s a recent article that appeared in the journal Party Politics. Professor Gumuscu co-authored this article with her colleague, Berk Esen, and it’s titled, Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of AKP’s authoritarianism. Professor Gumuscu, welcome to New Frontiers.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Thank you for having me, Mark.
Mark Williams
We’re glad you’re here. Let’s start with a little background. Can you tell us a little bit about Turkey’s political development, first of all. Was it always a democracy? Was it ever a truly vibrant democracy before the decay set in that you write about?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes. Turkey indeed has a history of multi-party politics since 1950. Modern Turkey is established as a republic in 1923 and it has become a full functioning well functioning democracy in 1950. If we are to use Huntington’s analogy of waves of democratization, that would actually put Turkey in the second wave of democratization that happened after the Second World War. That said, of course Turkish democracy had its certain shortcomings. Of course, many people who are somewhat familiar with Turkish politics would know that the Turkish military armed forces were quite active in politics. They held what we could call tutelary powers and they would actually check and balance the elected officials. And they would actually kind of act like guardian of the nation and would intervene in politics to redesign political institutions, rewriting constitutions, changing the electoral system to straighten things out. But what makes Turkey really interesting is that unlike many other cases where we see military interventions happening quite frequently, in the Turkish case, the armed forces did not stay and establish a military regime. They would come in, intervene, get rid of existing corrupt politicians as they see them, and then rewrite a constitution—a new constitution, and then design the electoral institutions, and then they would go back to their barracks, so to speak.
Mark Williams
So, this is a very different type of scenario than an area of the world that I studied, which is Latin America, where militaries would intervene in politics and not always retreat back to the barracks. They would stay for a long time.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now your article claims that after about 60 years, six decades, Turkey’s democracy has basically collapsed and you know, honestly that’s a, a really bold claim. And so I want to know what’s your evidence to support this?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. So we adopt Dahl’s criteria of democratic politics. Robert Dahl. So he specifies couple things for minimum criteria for democracies like free, fair, regular elections, universal suffrage, of course, the right to run for office without much restrictions and fundamental civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of information and association. Without these civil liberties, it’s really hard to imagine a well-functioning democracy, free and fair elections of course. A closer look at Turkey reveals two things. Number one, civil liberties are systematically violated under the AKP government. And number two, elections are no longer free or fair. So we compiled data from the last decade to document all these violations of basic freedoms in Turkey and the ruling party’s actions that undermine the freeness and fairness of elections. Unlike Turkish democracy and how it functioned before AKP’s rise to power in 2002, we actually see elections are no longer fee or fair in the country. And free speech is very much systematically undermined. And also, the media, Turkish media is very much under the control of the government.
Mark Williams
So what you’re saying is that you see violations of two of the basic foundations of democracy that Robert Dahl had spoken of in his work. And you see that happening in Turkey.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now another question, doesn’t this conclusion about the collapse of Turkish democracy, doesn’t this actually fly in the face of what we see happening on the ground, so to speak, in Turkey? Isn’t the president still an elected official? Isn’t parliament still in session? Are we really talking about a collapse of democracy? Are we talking more about perhaps a backsliding?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That is a really great question. And many people are actually puzzled by this particular observation. You have elections, quite regular elections, and you have a president that is elected in a free and fair election, at least in 2002. That’s how they came to power. And we have a parliament that is pretty much in session. They’re not actually canceled and the constitution is still there, right? And the constitution actually guarantees civil liberties and freedoms and democratic rights. All of this on paper looks quite democratic. But when it comes to the reality of democratic politics, we actually see over the past, maybe 10 to 15 years, there has been very incremental, gradual change in all of these institutions. And mostly, yes, elections are still there, they’re regular, but as I said, they’re not free or fair. So we have freedom of media and freedom of the press guaranteed in the constitution. But in reality the AKP actually controls about 90 percent of both public and private media. That’s huge, right?
Mark Williams
Ninety percent.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. That’s a rough estimate, but when you think about news coverage, you actually see, for example, President Erdogan having a public ceremony or some kind of speech for some reason, and all TV stations actually tune in and they cover his speech and you don’t have any other kind of, you know, news coverage for that except for maybe one or two network stations. And they’re very kind of, you know, small, not very well funded network stations, very much marginalized. You can imagine 90 percent of Turkish media is very much pro-government and they’re also resorting to black propaganda almost and fake news quite frequently to show that the opposition is a terrible option and the people should not ever actually even imagine or consider voting for them. So there is a huge unevenness, especially in the media landscape. So the opposition does not have a fair chance at winning the game, despite the fact that we have regular elections.
Mark Williams
So despite the fact that on paper, it looks like a democracy and it has the trappings and trimmings of a democracy, in practice it functions in ways that are patently anti-democratic.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Absolutely.
Mark Williams
Yes. Okay. Well, if Turkey’s democracy really has collapsed, I guess the question is, how did this happen? The government was elected. The government presumably was popular and won a mandate. So what transpired to bring this about?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, it’s a long process and it will take a long time to unpack. But of course, as you said, everything started with an election. And this is actually a quality or character of the most recent backsliding wave that we observe in multiple countries like in India, in Hungary, in Poland, even in the United States. These elected officials who subvert democracy, they come to power in a free and fair election, but once they’re in power, they start to subvert democracy very slowly, very incrementally. And they start to kind of, you know, make sure that most of these democratic rights and institutions work in their favor and at the expense of their competition. In the Turkish case, more specifically, maybe we can highlight two routes to democratic breakdown. Number one was the politicization of state institutions. Those state institutions like the judiciary, police forces, even tax authorities who were supposed to remain independent and nonpartisan, they have been increasingly politicized over the years. So the government basically took over these state mechanisms and turned them into weapons to sanction their opponents and also reward their own supporters.
Mark Williams
So by politicized, you mean they were used in opposition to the opponents.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. I can give an example, and that relates very much to what happened with the Turkish media, especially how private media ended up under a AKP control. Tax authorities I said were politicized and some people may, actually can even ask how is that even possible? When you have, for example, a big media company, a conglomerate, that controls multiple network stations and newspapers, you can basically send—and that’s exactly what the AKP government did—send tax auditors to these companies and start looking at their books. And what happened in 2009, when one of these big media companies were covering some corruption stories about the government, they received several auditors from the tax authorities. And these tax authorities decided that the company was actually evading their taxes. So they charged them with $3 billion of tax fines. That was basically more than the value of the entire company. So the company was actually forced to negotiate and settle with the government. One part of that settlement was to sell some of their newspapers and their network stations to pro-government businesses. That’s a very good example of how politicized state institutions can actually punish your opponents and also reward your supporters.
Mark Williams
That’s amazing and incredibly effective if you have an authoritarian bent. Well, if Turkey no longer has a genuine democracy, what kind of government does it have? What would we call this type of government?
Sebnem Gumuscu
In this paper, we use a concept that Steven Levitsky and Luke Way coined, and that is competitive authoritarianism. So that may sound a bit kind of oxymoronic. How a regime is competitive and authoritarian at the same time, this is a kind of a hybrid regime type, which actually has both democratic qualities and autocratic qualities at the same time. That’s why it’s competitive authoritarian. What makes it competitive is actually we still have regular elections. They’re not free or fair, but the government has to win those elections to come to power and to remain in power. And still there are some room for competition, despite the fact that the game is not fair and that competition is open to at least one part of the opposition. So we have multiple parties running in elections and we have multiple candidates running in presidential elections. So it’s really kind of a system where you have a bit of competition that is really not very fair. That makes it autocratic and democratic at the same time.
Mark Williams
And are you talking mostly about the federal level? What’s going on at the subnational levels in terms of competition and political power?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. I would say that at least for a big part of the last 20 years, both local and national level elections were very much competitive and authoritarian at the same time. Recently however, in 2019, the opposition parties actually made significant advances at the local level, if not the national level. I’m guessing that at this, kind of, for the AKP, it is much easier maybe to concede loss at the local level because yes, they lose significant resources at the local level. But losing the national government is much costlier and they would not necessarily accept that loss that easily.
Mark Williams
That’s the big prize, the national government. How does the approach that you take in this article towards the study of the breakdown of democracy, how does that differ from the way that scholars have studied this phenomenon in the past? And here, I’m really thinking about an earlier wave of research done back in the 1970s by people like Juan Lynn and Al Stephan, who took a close sort of systematic look at the breakdown of democratic regimes in different parts of the world. How does your approach differ from that which they took?
Sebnem Gumuscu
We spent some time thinking about existing scholarship on democratic breakdown and backsliding. And if I do not misremember this, Lynn and Stephan put maybe more emphasis on political leadership rather than what we do here in terms of coalition. So we agree that political leadership matters greatly and leaders play an important role in undermining and subverting democracy, but when it comes to broader support for those leaders, actor-centric approaches do not necessarily explain the entire picture. Here we’re kind of, you know, trying to bring in the society as well into the equation. Because it’s not just about elected leaders, but also their supporters.
Mark Williams
And so what do you call the approach that you utilize?
Sebnem Gumuscu
We call this a coalitional approach. We look at electoral coalitions and political coalitions that these leaders build. It’s a political economy understanding of coalitions, of course, but you can imagine there may be other ways to build coalitions around social values, perhaps ethnical religious identities. So in this paper, we’re explicitly subscribing to a political economy understanding of coalition building.
Mark Williams
And so what kind of analytical leverage does a coalitional approach provide you?
Sebnem Gumuscu
There’s a huge debate in the scholarship about the most recent wave of democratic back siding and breakdown. And some scholars say that it’s the elite that is the responsible party here. As many other scholars have done in the past. So it’s Trump, Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Putin that actually undermine and subvert democracy. And then some other scholars actually say, it’s really not about these people, these leaders, but the people who support them, the masses and their political attitudes and interests that we need to understand. So there’s an ongoing debate in the scholarly circles about who’s to blame, so to speak, right? We tend to hope that in this particular approach, we’re bringing the two together.
Mark Williams
I was going to ask you, do you feel that it is really this dichotomous? That it’s ither, or?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes, exactly. We think that it’s both, and they work together because political leaders build coalitions, but these coalitions then keep those political leaders in power. So they do not only vote them in office, but they also keep supporting them later in the elections, despite the fact that they see these leaders are subverting democracy. So there, we need to understand at one point the masses or the coalitions that all these leaders build, keep supporting these leaders, despite everything. That also tells us that at the end of the day, masses practically favor their own interests and their expectations from the government and certain policies that deliver them certain goods over their democratic commitments. They’re contingent democrats, not real democrats.
Mark Williams
Well, that’s really interesting. In a nutshell, could you tell us what the essential argument is that you make in your paper regarding the breakdown of democracy in Turkey?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Once the AKP came to power, the leader, of course, of the party, Erdogan along the two main groups in the society built a very tight coalition. Those two groups are the businesspeople and the urban poor. Both of these groups are very much dependent on the governing party, ruling party, for certain privileges. For the urban poor, this is social security assistance, social welfare policies, and specific clientelistic connections to the party. You can imagine urban poor, especially living in big cities like Istanbul and Ankara, they have certain needs. And they need jobs. They need connections. They need networks. And they also need very specific goods like food, food stamps and, and whatnot. What the party actually kind of politicized over the years as well. So if you’re an AKP supporter, you get all of these goods and benefits. And if you’re not an AKP supporter, you’re completely shut down and excluded from all of these distributions. And the same goes for businesspeople. Businesspeople who have close connections to the government actually receive significant favors in public procurement projects, for instance, and AKP is really great in public procurement projects and especially big projects like, you know, big bridges, you know, highways and whatnot, you know, significant redistribution of resources from the public budget to businesspeople who have been taking all these projects. So if you have close ties to the government, you’re favored and you’re given all these very long-term projects that are not in Turkish currency in U.S. dollars. And they’re enormously beneficial for the recipients.
Mark Williams
Can I stop you right there for a moment? I can understand how contracts and no bid contracts could be awarded to friends and to consorts and so forth by incumbents. Could you help us understand how it is that public goods, food and other types of basic necessities can be systematically denied to those who are not supporters of AKP? How is that regulated? What’s the policy framework behind that, wherein you could ensure that only your supporters receive these benefits?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. So I have done a little bit of field work at the local level. The AKP is perhaps the best organized party in Turkey. They have very strong grassroots existence in, presence, in neighborhoods, especially lower income neighborhoods. So they know people. They know who constitutes their support and they’re organized even at the polling station level. They know every individual person, every citizen and whom they vote for. And this is exactly what they told me in interviews that I have done in the past. You can actually kind of imagine them knowing more or less, who is an AKP supporter, who is on the fence and who an opposition voter. Some voters are white, some voters are black, the opposition, and some are gray. They basically allocate these resources to the people who have strong connections to the party and they can rely on for their support. And then we have the gray people who actually can go either way. So they also spend some resources for them as well to sway them.
Mark Williams
Are we talking about individuals receiving these benefits, or are we talking about the benefits being targeted towards neighborhoods or regions?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Both actually. They are organized at the neighborhood level and regional and neighborhood level. And then within neighborhoods, they know what families are actually supportive of AKP and what families are actually against them, very much geared towards individuals and they select their own supporters and channel resources to them.
Mark Williams
Okay. Now let’s circle back and get to the way in which this coalition, which was created, the way in which it worked to destabilize democracy and to degrade the democracy.
Sebnem Gumuscu
So here, I think the key thing to remember is Turkey was a parliamentary system until 2017. When the AKP changed the system to a presidential system. Which means, in parliamentary systems we don’t have term limits. The same party can be reelected multiple times without any restrictions. That’s exactly what happened. The AKP came to power in 2002 and remained in power since then. And over the course of 20 years, they cultivated very strong ties with both businesspeople and urban poor. And both of these groups ended up being really, really dependent on the government for these privileges. And you can also imagine there has been a lot of corruption, especially between the government and the businesspeople in their, you know, handling of public procurement and whatnot. When you think about a very long-lasting relationship for 20 years, you can also imagine how much benefits have been accumulated by these different groups and how much corruption they’re involved in. Right. So deep, deep corruption we’re talking about. That means the cost of losing power now for the urban poor, for businesspeople, and the party itself has increased substantially. If they lose power, it’s very likely that they will be brought before courts because they have engaged in so much corruption, and many of the dealings that they had with the government were basically kind of extra-legal. Urban poor has not been involved in corruption perhaps, but they’re definitely at the receiving end of significant redistribution. So they fear that if government changes hands, then the new government will not give them these select benefits and privileges that they have been receiving from the AKP. All of these different components, different parts of the coalition have a lot to fear. They fear losing power to the opposition who actually is—sounds quite, maybe—radical in their desire to kind of bring some of these connections to the court and cutting those ties between the businesspeople and the government, and perhaps even revising the entire clientelistic network that the AKP built over the years. So all of these actors have a lot to lose. If they lose power, they will be losing a lot.
Mark Williams
So the incumbents then have a strong incentive to really repress opposition and to preclude agency on the part of opponents. And the clients, the businesses, and the urban masses have strong incentive to continue to support the incumbents as well as to tolerate the repression.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly.
Mark Williams
What about other cases of democratic breakdown? Let’s think about the argument you’re making here in Turkey. Does it have legs? Can it travel to other cases and help explain what we might see in countries beyond Turkey?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Absolutely. As you’ve just beautifully summarized, the mechanism is very much clear and can easily travel to other cases. And that mechanism is about those people who are in power, they fear losing that power and they have incentives to cheat, and they also have incentives to support an actor that actually subverts democracy. If you have similar coalitions elsewhere in the world that represent some of these actors in the society, as well as among the political elite, they can actually be okay by cheating. And they may have incentives to support those who cheat. That will be actually end of democracy in many different parts of the world. So we believe that if not the same structure or same relationship between businesspeople, the ruling party, and urban poor, even if that does not travel to other cases, it is very possible that the causal mechanism itself that starts with fear and then leads to subversion of democracy can very well travel to other cases.
Mark Williams
That’s really interesting. And it’s actually very scary for people who look fondly on democracy. I’d like to take the discussion in a slightly different direction if we could. Given what we’ve lived through in the United States, particularly since 2016 and given your own expertise on democratic decay, do you think that Americans should be concerned about the state of their democracy?
Sebnem Gumuscu
I think so. Many people, I believe, were relieved with 2020 elections, but—there’s a but there—if we are to understand why Donald Trump was elected first time around, and despite all of his failures he received many more votes in 2020 elections, we need to see the coalition there. That there is indeed both a factor or an element in the political elite, as well as the society that forms a coalition of sorts, who have certain anxieties, who have certain fears about politics. Perhaps they fear and many scholars like people Norris and Ronald Ingelhart, in their book Cultural Backlash, or Yascha Mounk in his book The People vs. Democracy, they highlighted these anxieties, especially in the American context. So we can perhaps argue that there is a similar coalition of sorts that have certain anxieties have certain fears and they want to remain in power and they cannot tolerate their political rivals any longer. They’re ready to cheat and change things if they need to. And we, unfortunately, we see signs of these, you know,
Mark Williams
I think we see more than signs. We see actual concrete evidence toward subverting, the democratic process.
Sebnem Gumuscu
January 6th insurrection was a very good example that Donald Trump …
Mark Williams
Planned well in advance. Planned well in advance.
Sebnem Gumuscu
We can also perhaps look at what happened since 2020 elections and many multiple states have changed their electoral laws and getting ready for another election. And they don’t want to lose that election. And they’re kind of creating an uneven playing field as we speak to make sure that they will not be losing another election. And that’s very scary.
Mark Williams
That sad dynamic is playing out on multiple fronts in multiple states as we record this podcast episode. It is scary. You’re right.
Sebnem Gumuscu
And I think that coalition will not fizzle out. There is a coalition there, 70-some million people voted for Donald Trump. And even if Trump is gone, there will perhaps be another person who will be carrying the same banner for this part of society. It’s really about what they want, what these people want, and what kind of values and interests they’re rallying around. The really scary thing is they really do not see their political rivals as legitimate actors. And they do not want to tolerate them. They don’t want to live with them in the same political arena.
Mark Williams
It is scary. It’s sad to see that development deepen and spread and solidify. I have a three-parter that I’d like to ask if I may. You are a native of Turkey, right?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes.
Mark Williams
Okay, part one. What part of Turkey did you grow up in, part two. And how did you wind up at Middlebury here in Vermont?
Sebnem Gumuscu
I’m born and raised in Istanbul. I spent perhaps 20-some years there and I went to college in Istanbul. It was a small liberal arts college like Middlebury. And it was a beautiful college that had actual—we had the opportunity to have a lot of conversations about political science, international relations—that was my major. And I had couple American professors there who encouraged me and my friends to study in the United States. I was fascinated with political science, and I was not ready to stop studying political science at all when I graduated. So I applied for a Fulbright fellowship. I got it. And then I moved to Virginia to get my master’s degree and PhD. That’s my encounter with the U.S. for the first time. Then the American academia was so vibrant, so fascinating, I wanted to stay here. And I wanted to work here. And I went back to Turkey for field work and writing my dissertation. But then in 2013, I was looking for jobs. There was an open position at Middlebury. I applied, got here and I’m glad I did.
Mark Williams
Well, we’re glad you’re here as well, Sebnem. Very much so. Again, with a personal question, as a political scientist, how do you keep your objectivity when studying your country of origin? How do you prevent love of country or patriotism, your feelings for home, cloud your analysis of what might be going on politically in Turkey?
Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. It was hard because I’m a citizen and a researcher at the same time. And I have my normative commitments. You know, I like democracy. I want democracy to flourish in the United States, in Turkey, and everywhere in the world, if it makes sense. But I think I’m good with compartmentalizing. And it also gives me some relief to be able to isolate myself from political developments. Like, you know, that concerns me as an individual, as a citizen. You know, okay, lot,s happening in Turkey with respect to autocratization, but studying it, gives me a little bit of distance and makes it easier for me to understand.
Mark Williams
In a way less painful to see this?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. It becomes less dreadful and less painful, less emotionally charged. Taking on that kind of analytical lens makes it easier for me to get out of that emotional state, and see it as a kind of a rational lens and make sense of what’s going on.
Mark Williams
I can completely understand what you’re talking about. In terms of research, then what’s next for you? The article that we’ve been discussing was published back in 2020. Are you continuing to do research in this general area? Or do you have a new project that’s in the works?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, I’m working on multiple projects currently. I don’t want to bore you with them.
Mark Williams
Tell us about at least one of them. What can we look forward to reading from you down the line?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, I’m really excited about one book project that I’ve been thinking of lately and I will be starting field work this summer. So it is actually about the decline of the ruling party in Turkey. I know maybe it’s too soon to talk about their decline, but I think we’re getting closer and closer, especially with the ongoing economic crisis in the country. I’m hoping to write a book on the rise and fall of the AKP. And for that I will be again doing some field work this summer in lower income neighborhoods in Istanbul talking to lower income families.
Mark Williams
These would be families who typically would be supporters of AKP?
Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. I want to ask what changed for them, if anything, over the last couple of years, with higher rates of inflation, about 60 percent as we speak, and rising unemployment, and stagnant economic growth that particularly hit the lower income families really hard.
Mark Williams
Wow. Well, I look forward to reading the book and presumably some of the articles that come from this research. Thank you very much for taking time to visit with us today; I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. We’ve been talking about the breakdown of democracy in Turkey with Middlebury College Associate professor of Political Science Sebnem Gumuscu. Sebnem, again, thanks so much for visiting us here on New Frontiers.
Sebnem Gumuscu
Thank you for having me.
Outro
Vera Rousseff
Growing in Instanbul, Prof. Sebnem Gumuscu won several high school awards for her short stories and poems. She enjoys cooking and trying new recipes and is always experimenting with sugarfree options. A hobby she picked up over COVID is building miniature rooms and houses from kits, similar to a dollhouse. Outside of class students often see her on her campus walks.
Episode 4 - What to Do about Cosmic Garbage
According to the US Space Force, only 2,000 of the 22,000 objects that have been tracked circling the Earth are fully operational, functioning satellites. Put differently, roughly 90 percent of the objects that can be tracked circling the globe is junk—space junk, or cosmic garbage. How did it get there, why does it keep accumulating, and how best might we address this global problem are all topics that Akhil Rao, assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College, writes about in a co-authored article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In this episode of New Frontiers, Professor Rao speaks with Mark Williams about these issues and explains why adopting “orbital use fees” could be the best way to address the problem of cosmic garbage.
New Frontiers - Episode 4: What to do about Cosmic Garbage
Only 2,000 of the 22,000 man-made objects that currently circle the Earth are fully operational, functioning satellites. The rest—roughly 90 percent—is space junk, or cosmic garbage. In this episode of New Frontiers, economist Akhil Rao explains how it got there, why it accumulates, and why economic tools could be the best way to address this problem.
Transcript
New Frontiers Podcast with Akhil Rao
EPISODE 4
C.T.
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, economist Akhil Rao joins Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—to discuss a global problem that’s literally out of sight—the congestion and debris in outer space—and why an economic approach to address this problem could help manage it successfully.
M.W.
I’m really pleased to be joined here on New Frontiers, by Akhil Rao, who is an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College. Some of his research is focused on the economics of infectious diseases—certainly a hot topic during this COVID pandemic—as well as the field of computational economics. But today I’m going to be asking Akhil to help us understand what for me is a somewhat unusual realm of economic study and research, and that realm is outer space. In particular, we’ll spend some time talking about an article he co-authored, that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s all about the space industry, its growth, and how economic tools, rather than technological fixes, might better address some of the problems that have been created by a growing private sector space industry. The article is titled “Orbital Use Fees Could More Than Quadruple the Value of the Space Industry.” Akhil Rao, thank you so much for stopping by today and welcome to New Frontiers.
A.R.
Thanks for having me here, Mark.
M.W.
We’re glad you’re here. Your research here is in outer space and I mean, you know, you’re not a physicist. You are not an astronomer. You are not even an engineer. You’re an economist. So let’s start at the beginning. How did you become interested in studying the economics of outer space? What triggered your curiosity about space and economics?
A.R.
So I grew up in Northern California and south India and exchange rates were something that really fascinated me when I was a kid. Like, I didn’t understand why the paper in one place meant different amounts of paper in the other place. And so that got me kind of interested in economics to begin with. From there I started thinking a lot about water. And so when I went to graduate school, I wanted to study water resources. Southern California, where I went to undergrad has severe water problems, south India, where I grew up also has severe water problems. So it just seemed kind of like a natural thing to focus on that, like, here’s this scarce resource, here’s this science of scarce resources, let’s study scarce resources. But I went to grad school at Boulder and Boulder does a lot of aerospace. And so at some point I was walking around and I saw a lot of space-related stuff. I was reading some short stories and I saw some things about space debris, and you know these two just kind of connected. And I thought, well, I wonder if anybody’s written about the economics of orbital space.
M.W.
Interesting.
A.R.
Started looking into it. And I thought, well, you know what? This is kind of like water stuff. It’s a scarce resource. It needs to be allocated, not a lot of folks have written about it. Maybe I’ll write like a one article about it, right? Like how much could there really be to say about this? And it’s just kind of been what I’ve been doing since.
M.W.
So this developed for you, the convergence of economics and outer space, developed while you were in graduate school.
A.R.
That’s right. So I think it was sometime in my first or second year of graduate school when I really started thinking about this and then got good feedback in brown bag seminars and stuff.
M.W.
Looking for a dissertation topic and so forth, and perhaps this might be it?
A.R.
Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much how it went. You know, I really didn’t think that it would be that big a topic, but the more I looked into it, the more questions I found. So now this is the thing that I work on.
M.W.
Space is a pretty big place. Well, before we really dive into your article and the argument that you make, could you help us understand a bit more about the private sector and outer space? I think a lot of people might have heard something about the Blue Origin’s New Shepherd Flights. Blue Origin, being the aerospace firm that’s owned by Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, and the new Shepherd Flights, being those commercial space tourism flights that have taken a handful of incredibly wealthy people and celebrities into outer space as tourists. But when your article talks about the space industry, you’re not really talking about space tourism, you talking about some other aspects of that industry, is that right?
A.R.
That’s right. That’s right. So what we’re really talking about are satellites and the supporting infrastructure that makes satellites work. So we’re talking about rockets, we’re talking about receiver stations on the ground that transmit signals to and from satellites. That’s what we’re talking about. The space tourism business is interesting and it certainly captures the public imagination, but if you think about this in terms of shares of value that it generates it’s tiny. It’s probably a decimal point, but it’s not much bigger than that yet.
M.W.
So the number of people who are benefiting from the satellites far exceeds the number of people who are benefiting one way or another from space tourism.
A.R.
That’s right. And I mean, to get a sense of the magnitudes here, the people who are benefiting from space tourism in sort of the direct sense to the folks who go up, if you want to be a bit more generous, you can say, well, there’s folks who work at the companies and, you know, they get paid and they get revenues, so they’re benefiting too. But it’s hard to go much farther than that. If you think about satellites in orbit though, there’s a ton of people. So anyone who’s ever used remote sensing imagery, or who’s ever benefited from some decision making somewhere, having access to a satellite picture. You can think about folks who in the California wildfires in 2020—folks getting evacuated had some benefit from space-based tools because the U.S. Forest Service used satellite imagery to coordinate their responses.
M.W.
Anyone who’s looking for their best friend’s new house when they’re trying to drive to it.
A.R.
Right. That’s right. That’s right. Google maps. And you know, now, if you think about Ukraine well satellite imagery is playing a huge role in the conflict. So the number of folks who benefit from satellite imagery alone, that’s one product that a satellite can produce, is easily on the order of millions of people. That’s a different ballpark than people going to space.
M.W.
We’re talking about orders of magnitude difference. Can you clarify a bit more about what’s been going on in outer space right now and especially why economists or others should be concerned about things that they can’t even see in terms of how corporate actors and states have been using outer space? What’s wrong with the status quo?
A.R.
So what’s been going on over the last 50 years is a buildup of junk. So we can kind of describe this more scientifically and technically, but like at a very basic level, we’ve got a bunch of folks showing up at the campsite and not cleaning up after themselves and leaving a bunch of junk behind. And that’s what humans have been doing in orbital space since the dawn of the space age. So there’s a bunch of stuff like dead satellites, bits of rockets. So when you launch a rocket, there’s this upper stage that inserts the satellite into the target orbit, it does kind of those last adjustments. That gets left behind. That’s a pretty big thing per launch. There’s nuts and bolts from satellites. There’s bits of fuel that have leaked out of satellites. There’s tools that astronauts have lost on space walks. There’s a lot of junk that’s up there. And so there’s just been this ongoing buildup of junk.
M.W.
Okay. As I was reading your article, you say that the buildup of debris, or junk, is kind of a classic tragedy of the commons problem. And for all of our listeners who aren’t really familiar with this concept or maybe haven’t thought about it in some years, could you briefly explain what the tragedy of the commons is and why it poses a unique type of problem?
A.R.
So the tragedy of the commons, that term is referencing an article by Garrett Harden, I think in Science, in the 1950s and the argument in the article was that if you have a scarce resource where users of the resource are not in some way coordinated and are able to use it—I’m putting air quotes here—unchecked that they’re going to really spoil the resource and mess it up. So this was Harden’s argument and he was applying it in a pretty racist way to people having kids and the natural resources of the world. And I should note that the fundamental argument that he makes about like pastures in England, that’s something that historians and others have found many issues with. So it’s not clear that Harden’s argument goes through on the historical merits. And it’s not clear that his arguments really describe the general situation of all resources in the class that he was focusing on. But what his arguments do describe, which we focus on here is the case of a resource, which is in fact uncoordinated.
M.W.
By uncoordinated, you mean by the users.
A.R.
By the users, that’s exactly right. So what we in economics would call an open access commons. So a common pool resource in economics is a resource where my use subtracts from your use and vice versa. And we don’t have the ability to secure excludable rights to the resource. So you can think about these water bottles that we have on the table. I drink the water in this bottle. You can’t drink it. But we do have some notion of excludable rights where I can say, look, this is my water bottle. You can’t drink from this one. And you can say the same thing about a different water bottle. Now, imagine a case where we couldn’t say that. Where, you know, you’re free to just grab my water bottle at any time, and I’m free to grab your water bottle at any time. And there’s no sort of notion that we would say this is yours or mine. Well, then in that case, we might expect that we would end up drinking more water or depleting the water bottles faster than we otherwise would. That because I’m unable to have some sense of security in the notion that the water will still be there in 20 minutes, I’m going to drink more faster than I otherwise would, because if I don’t drink it, it’s gone. So to economists this term open access is a really important modifier on the term commons. The term commons is used across many disciplines and it refers to, broadly speaking, some kind of communally held property. But what’s really important to economists are the institutions that govern the use of that property. And so open access is one particular institution under which anyone is free to use the resource in any way they see fit so long as they have the ability to do so. So think of open access as a formalization of what people usually mean when they use a term like “the wild west.” So outer space right now has characteristics of an open access commons. As a side note, I think that Harden’s article is maybe better understood as describing the tragedy of open access rather than the tragedy of “the commons” broadly. So, in outer space, because we have these open access institutions to use orbital space, my co-authors and I argue that we are seeing something like what Harden was describing in his article happening there.
M.W.
I’d like to sort of pull the discussion back towards a way that you described the issue, the problem in outer space. You said that there’s a lot of junk, space junk, up there. Okay, I’ll play devil’s advocate. Come on. Let’s be, let’s get real. How much stuff is really up there as space is a huge place? How much of a problem is this in reality?
A.R.
You may have seen this recently. Elon Musk had a claim that there’s room in orbital space for billions of satellites. There’s no issues at all with any kind of congestion up there. And I think that, you know, there’s some, there’s a grain of truth to that, space is big, that’s for sure, unquestionably true. Right now, in orbit, there’s on the order of 27,000 officially cataloged pieces of debris floating up there. Most of those are about 10 centimeters, softball roughly or larger. That’s to do with the limits of our tracking systems. So we can’t really detect things smaller than that in most locations in orbital space. And so there’s probably a bunch more stuff that’s smaller than that. Almost surely there is, we just can’t really see it. So we don’t really know how much there is or what the distribution overs sizes is. But coming back to the question like space is big. Why is this a problem? I mean, the American west is huge. Los Angeles still has traffic jams. People want to be in places where there is value. And often that means that people are going to cluster in the same places. So there are regions in orbital space in low earth orbit, the region from sort of zero to 2000 kilometers above the mean sea level. I should probably say closer to 100 to 2000 kilometers above the mean sea level. There are regions there that are fairly congested. So you could think about the particular orbital paths, the sun synchronous orbits that remote sensing satellites use. These are very special orbits because they ensure that shadows are always in the same place when a satellite crosses over a patch of the earth every day. So if you’ve got a satellite and a sun synchronous orbit, that’s passing over this building, it’ll always pass over this building at the exact same time, so that the shadows look the same so that you can start to do some inference on what’s actually there without worrying about shadows getting in the way. So that’s a really valuable orbit. There’s a ton of remote sensing satellites that all tend to cluster in sun synchronous orbits.
M.W.
Because those orbits would be most beneficial for the function of the satellite.
A.R.
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So that’s the issue. It’s not that there isn’t space, it’s that the space that we want, there’s only so much.
M.W.
Sort of like real estate in San Francisco or Boston. Well, this sort of brings up a housekeeping question that I have, when you think about housekeeping for outer space, who keeps track of this debris, this junk that you’re talking about? If a company or a nation state wants to launch a satellite, where do they turn to find out whether the proposed orbit that they’re contemplating is one that’s safe or not?
A.R.
So there’s a bunch of layers in the question that you asked that I’ll try to answer in the appropriate order. So at one level there’s a UN registry of objects. If I launch a satellite, then I’m going to, I should at least, tell the registry that, “hey, I’ve put this satellite in this orbit and I’ll keep you updated on what happens with it, if I move it somewhere else,” or what have you. That’s an entirely voluntary disclosure. And so there are a bunch of objects, many of these objects presumed to have a military function, which are not on the registry.
M.W.
And the registry is only for satellites? Or for other debris?
A.R.
It’s for satellites. And so to the extent that a piece of debris was once a productive, active satellite, it will also be in the registry. But to the extent that there’s, you know, bits of fuel that leaked out, that’s not going to be in the registry
M.W.
And discarded.
A.R.
Discarded nuts and bolts, or what have you. That’s not really going to be it.
M.W.
Components and so forth.
A.R.
For that stuff, just physically tracking it, there’s a network of sensors. There are several networks of sensors, actually. The one that is widely regarded as the best is operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. And so this is a military network work of sensors that tracks objects in orbit. The U.S. makes this data publicly available, again, up to certain restrictions. So, U.S. military satellites, for example, do not often show up in this record. And they make this available as sort of a public service. They’re also a number of companies that are starting to offer tracking services. So there’s one called Leo Labs that’s doing this. Steve Wozniak one of the Apple founders started a new one called Privateer that is also trying to do this.
M.W.
I wonder if they have the capacity at this point to measure as much debris as say DOD does.
A.R.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I think that they’re working towards that capacity and DOD itself is actually looking to offload some of this function onto commercial partners. So one of the things that the Trump administration did was pass a series of space policy directives. They were actually very active in the space policy realm, and I think it was space policy directive two, or maybe it was three, that said that the space situational awareness function should be moved from defense to department of commerce. And that eventually that should be handled by some private actors.
M.W.
Interesting. Okay. Well, it sounds to me as if there’s a type of a traffic management problem going on in outer space. And your article seems to suggest that this traffic management problem is also really an environmental policy issue. And how would that be? Why might we rightly classify it or categorize it in that fashion?
A.R.
I think there’ a few ways to get to that conclusion. One is to say that it’s an environmental policy problem because outer space is an environment that humans use. And because it’s an environment that humans use, we should think of this region in the sort of lens that we use for other areas that humans use.
M.W.
We shouldn’t pollute it.
A.R.
We shouldn’t pollute it. Right. That’s one way to think about it. One way to get to that conclusion. Another way is to say that, look, this is an environmental policy problem, because it has the characteristics of one. There’s a productive activity that humans do, there. That product activity produces a residual, a pollution product, debris. And that’s what happens with lake management. That’s what happens with atmosphere management. So why shouldn’t we fit orbit management into that same bucket.
M.W.
Okay, great. Thank you. Let’s get into the heart of your article itself. You talk a lot orbital use fees in the article. Can you explain to the listeners what an orbital use fee is, and how would it work?
A.R.
Yeah, so I think the easiest way to think about an orbital use fee is going back to that camping analogy. If you want to go to a campground, you’re going to pay a fee to use it. If you litter at the campground, then presumably you clean up after yourself. And if you don’t, you pay a fine, and that fine is meant to deter littering. And it’s also meant in some part to cover some of the cost of cleanup. That’s kind of the idea of an orbital use fee. That when you put a satellite into orbit, you’re going to pay a fee that grants your satellite the right to access the site. That fee is also going to go towards incentivizing you to keep the site clean. If you pollute more, if you create more debris, you pay a higher fee. If you reduce the amount of debris you generate, you pay a smaller fee. And so in that way, it’s really trying to align your incentives with an environmental sustainability incentive, to keep the orbit clean.
M.W.
Who would the fee be paid to? To whom?
A.R.
So there’s many ways that you could implement this. Sorry, I’m going to go on a brief tangent here about space law. Objects in outer space are regulated by the state in which they were launched. So the launching state is the authority for the object. So if I launch a satellite from the U.S., the U.S. is the state that holds authority over my object. And so in one version of this orbital use fee, I would pay my O.U.F. to the United States. I think that that’s probably an easier way to make it work than to build an international orbital use fee collection agency in the UN or something like that. But, you know, in theory, you could do that too. There’s nothing really in the theory that we discussed that we laid out that requires you to pay the fee to one or the other specific entity. What’s really important in getting the orbit users to use the resource right, is that they pay the fee.
M.W.
Is the fee a one-time fee? Is it something that is paid annually? How would that work?
A.R.
So it’s a recurring fee. Every let’s say year, you could cut it into finer increments. That’s fine too. Every year that your satellites in orbit, you’re going to pay this fee. If you want to stop paying the fee, pull your satellite out of orbit.
M.W.
Interesting. You and your co-authors refer to something called the Kessler Syndrome. What is that and how does this concept influence the way that you analyze orbital use?
A.R.
So the Kessler Syndrome is this idea that came about in the 1970s. A NASA scientist named Donald Kessler and another one named Burton Cour-Palais, they wrote this paper talking about what would happen if the debris in orbit built up to a density where debris can start colliding with other debris. So one thing that we haven’t really talked about here is why we should care about debris in space. And the issue is that stuff in space goes really fast. There’s a common, I think, sense that you go to space by launching a rocket that pushes you upwards. And that’s only half true, partially you’re going upwards, but partially you’re also starting to fall and continuously missing the earth. So you’re also going sideways. And you’re going sideways at a tremendous speed, something on the order of 17 and a half thousand miles per hour. So when stuff in orbit collides, like it’s going really fast and it’s not going to come out of it in one piece. That’s bad because if it doesn’t come of it in one piece, now there’s a whole bunch of other fragments that are also going very fast, that can also hit something else. And, you know, to the extent that we want our satellites to keep functioning, we should maybe not want them to get hit by junk. Seems like a thing we might want. The Kessler Syndrome is this idea that what if there was so much debris that debris can hit other debris and generate new debris in a kind of self-sustaining cascade without any human intervention required. Like we could wave a magic wand that pulls every single productive satellite out of orbit, and there’s still enough junk left up there to keep producing new junk year over year for, I don’t know, the next century or something like that. So that’s the idea of the Kessler Syndrome. You can think of it as analogous to run away climate change. If enough carbon gets into the atmosphere, then it triggers some mechanisms like, you know, permafrost melts and methane gets out of the clathrates and that triggers more greenhouse gas release and so on and so on.
M.W.
The Kessler Syndrome posits that there is a tipping point at some point.
A.R.
That’s right. And so this has been verified in a number of analytical and simulation studies. To the extent that we’re able to observe this happening, it seems like it’s already begun in some orbital regions. So there’s the 750 to 850 kilometer region. There was a missile test there in like the 2007, 2008 timeframe around then, the Chinese government blew up one of their own weather sensing satellites to show that they had the capacity to blow up satellites. So that anti-satellite missile test is widely understood to have generated enough debris there to have kept a cycle of debris production going. Now, it’s important to note that this is not like, if you’ve seen the movie Gravity, this is not like that. This is not like all of a sudden two days from now all of orbital space is totally unusable because the cascade started and it just goes like a flash. This is a slow-moving catastrophe. It’s probably going to take 30 to 50, maybe even 100 years for, you know, some of those regions to become fully unusable.
M.W.
Thank you. You know, I have never really heard to be honest about an orbital use fee for outer space. Perhaps that’s because I’m just, ill-informed on the topic. As far as I can tell it’s something that’s never been tried before, in outer space. So I’m curious, are there some other examples, perhaps from other sectors where environmental policies analogous to an orbital use have been tried, and if there are, what’s been the result? How well have they worked?
A.R.
Yeah. So an orbital use fee, I think you should understand this as one among a suite of policies that are, in some sense, equivalent. These are what I call natural capital pricing policies. So these are policies that say we have some kind of capital that nature has given us. It’s currently available in a way where folks can use it without having to pay a market price. So, you know, you go chop down some trees, you go out into the high seas and you grab some fish, things like that. And the idea here is really just that, well, you know, if you had to pay a price for it, you’re going to think a little bit more carefully about your use than if you didn’t have to pay a price for it. And so there’s many different implementations. You can think about a cap-and-trade system. That’s a kind of natural capital pricing policy. So in a climate change context a carbon tax is maybe the thing that’s closest to an orbital use fee. But it is in some sense, equivalent to a cap-and-trade system. It’s just that the international legal situation is such that property rights for orbital space seems like a far more distant prospect than taxes for using orbital space.
M.W.
And if we were to focus on the efficacy of these analogous policies in other policy realms can you speak to that?
A.R.
Yes, they seem to work. There are issues. So let me get into some examples here. The EU has an emissions trading system. So this is the EUETS. It’s a cap-and-trade kind of carbon market. So firms can buy permits to emit carbon dioxide in the EU. They can trade these permits. Year over year, the total number of permits rachets down slowly, and firms either pay a higher price for each permit, or they choose to not get a permit and then reduce their emissions so that they’re in compliance. The EUETS seems to have worked. It seems to have brought emissions down. Now I’m saying worked, but I should put a caveat here, which is that it’s worked at achieving its own goals. So the EUETS says that it’ll achieve an X percent reduction, it achieves an X percent reduction. Now you can say, well, you know, an X percent reduction, isn’t what we need. We need like a 10 X reduction. Sure. And by that light, if you say, well it hasn’t achieved a 10 X reduction. You could say it hasn’t worked. But as far as meeting the goals that it sets goes, it’s done that job. The California cap-and-trade market is another example of this. California has a market for capping greenhouse gas emissions. It has successfully blown past the target that is set for itself.
M.W.
So is this why you also said that the orbital use fee was part of a suite?
A.R.
That’s right. So you could think about an orbital use fee as literally tax, you could set it up as a tax with some kind of rebates and some kind of tradeable permits. Maybe it makes sense for the tradable permits to be for actors within one administrative unit, like the United States, maybe not. There’s lots of flexibility that system designers have here in implementing the policy.
M.W.
So another question that comes to mind given what we’ve been discussing is the extent to which using orbital use can ameliorate the totality of the problem that’s there. Debris that has been there for quite a while. I would imagine some of this stuff is pretty old stuff; it’s been up there for a long time. Perhaps even put up there by actors who no longer exist, like the Soviet Union. How does one rectify that aspect of the problem? How do you address the environmental fallout of space junk by using orbital use fees, particularly the legacy debris problems?
A.R.
So the legacy debris problem is an interesting one because a fee isn’t going to do anything about that directly. It’s just not, and that’s not what it’s trying to do. Now it will affect it indirectly through a couple channels. First, we have really robust evidence across a number of different sectors that when you put natural capital pricing policies into a place you incentivize clean innovation. So when we start charging power plants for emitting carbon into the atmosphere, pretty soon, they get pretty good about reducing the amount of carbon they emit into the atmosphere, whether that means taking innovations that were kind of on the fence, hadn’t really been deployed yet and deploying them, or whether that means putting money into R and D to develop new innovations that will let them stay in compliance and reduce their costs. So an orbital use fee would have the same effect, we think, for orbital space. That it would incentivize the development of clean technologies. And we really need these clean technologies, because right now there is no scalable system for removing debris from orbit. There’re some companies that are trying to develop things, that’ll remove large pieces of debris. There are some folks who are talking about ways to remove small pieces of debris, but there is no one yet who has both a technology and a business model that will let them pull this stuff down.
M.W.
So if given the correct incentive structure, then firms, presumably states as well, who are operating and putting satellites into orbit will become more conscious about littering.
A.R.
That’s right.
M.W.
And then in the aggregate over time, while you may not be decreasing the legacy debris, you won’t be necessarily adding to it, at least not to the same rate.
A.R.
You won’t adding to it, and you’ll be developing the technologies that you need to remove it. And once you’ve got those technologies, removing the legacy debris actually helps reduce your orbital fee liability because it reduces the risk of a collision on orbit. Now what’s really important with this orbital use fee is to get the numbers right. So we spend a lot of time in the paper figuring out how to calculate these numbers. And, you know, it’s an order of magnitude approximation, but it’s still, as far as we can tell the best numbers that are out there. You want to charge a fee that gets people to internalize the amount of the cost that they’re pushing onto others. To put it a bit differently, we don’t want a fee that’s so large that it starves the space industry, that it kind of kills it in the crib. We don’t want that. We don’t want a fee that’s so small that people don’t pay attention to what they’re doing. We want a fee that’s just right. So that people can say, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing. And this thing is going to have all these impacts on all these other folks. Let me factor that into my bottom line. Let me see whether the thing that I’m doing passes the cost benefit test once I add all of the costs that I’m imposing on others into that calculation.” And so part of those costs is the risk that a piece of debris that you put up there, or that your defunct satellite contributes to a cascade of collisions and generates more debris in the future. Well, if we remove all that legacy debris that reduces that risk, that reduces your fee liability.
M.W.
Pretty interesting, actually. I just thought of another question, maybe perhaps a vexing one. If countries really do start taxing, regulating their satellite sectors, like you and your co-author suggest, won’t the private companies just sort of pack up and leave for less strict countries. I mean, isn’t the solution that you’re proposing really unworkable until orbital use fees are more broadly adopted by most states in the world.
A.R.
This is what we call the leakage problem in economics. And it’s a real problem, right? Like it’s a real thing that people worry about. I mean, I guess I’d address this in two ways, right? One is you can look at this by analogy, right? There’s a very clear analogy to tax rates and wealthy individuals that, you know, if you raise the capital gains tax, then folks are going to leave and stop innovating in the United States. They’ll go elsewhere. I mean, if that were actually true, we would see almost all wealthy individuals concentrated in whichever country has the lowest tax rates. And eventually pretty soon, we’d see all countries racing to the bottom for a zero tax rate. That’s not what we see. To some extent, there are wealthy individuals in countries, despite high tax rates who stay there despite high tax rates. I mean, really what I think is going on here is that there’s other things too, the taxes, aren’t the only things in the calculus. If you’re a company that wants to, you know, do space stuff, broadly, launch some satellites, provide imagery, provide some value-added services on top of the imagery, machine learning on the imagery, whatever. You need access to a talent pool. So you need to have a bunch of engineers who can do stuff. Many of these goods are what are called dual use goods. They can be used for military purposes as well. So again, this imagery is a great example, right? You can use satellite imagery to detect fires and respond to wildfires. You can also use satellite imagery to detect troop movements and position your forces accordingly. So these dual use goods are very, very tightly regulated and pretty much every country around the world. If you’re in the U.S., and if you want to serve the U.S. market, you have to jump through a whole bunch of regulatory barriers. All of which are more onerous than paying, like, I don’t know, 0.1% of your profits in a tax. That in some sense is the easiest barrier that you have to jump through because you just send the money off, you send the check off and you’re done. You don’t have people coming in and checking that you’re in compliance that, you know, you don’t have foreign nationals with compromised allegiances working for you or whatever they get worried about.
M.W.
Trying to manage orbital use for the good of everybody. That seems like an inherently global problem. It’s a really large problem. And I wonder if you would agree with that. And I think you just did but doesn’t it then follow that trying to push for orbital use fees before there’s global cooperation or an international treaty, isn’t that like putting the cart before the horse? Don’t you need to get the cooperation first? Don’t you need to get a consensus amongst the states who would be collecting these fees?
A.R.
I think that’s a good question. I think it’s actually an open question. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what the right sequencing of events is. I guess I’ll say this, there’s some in the space community who say that we shouldn’t worry about environmental policy until there’s a big debris event. And then there’s some that take a, maybe more, realist take that we aren’t going to end up worrying about this stuff until there’s a big debris event. Which are two different positions. I think we should worry about space policy before there’s a big debris event precisely because it’s so rare to have a chance to get ahead of an environmental problem when we know good policy tools. We almost never have that opportunity. But to your point about international agreements, I mean, I don’t know, maybe if the U.S. starts implementing these orbital use fees, that’s the seed that’s necessary to start building these agreements. The field of space law is a very active field. There’s a ton of folks in it. And broadly, when I talk to space lawyers who work in this area who are trying to negotiate agreements and norms of orbital space use, they say that, you know, things are deadlocked. The UN is the body that things have to go through. There’s UN COPUOS, the committee on the peaceful uses of outer space. Nothing really happens there. Folks spend years and years arguing over like details of language in an agreement. And, you know, that’s just not at the time scale that we need for these agreements. And so, I mean, I think if someone can move faster, if the U.S., for example, can set the example through a tax policy route, they don’t need to go through the UN for that. And if they can get folks to agree, then they can get folks to agree. And that’s like any other multilateral or bilateral set of negotiations. It can go faster.
M.W.
Let me ask you this. Are you relatively optimistic that we will see something akin to what you and your colleagues are advocating? That we will see some type of environmental policy adopted to address the problem of space junk? First, if you’re optimistic about that, and second, given that there’s a variety of forms that this might take and different ways it might be achieved, what do you see as the most likely route that this will happen?
A.R.
Yeah. So I think someone will do something. I think people are trying to do things.
M.W.
A state?
A.R.
A state. So, focusing on, I guess, the U.S. and the EU right now. The EU, I think is a leader in regulation, broadly. I think that they have of the European Space Agency has put a lot of resources into building the technical tools that are necessary to provide these types of natural capital pricing policies and other environmental policies. Now they don’t have the same kind of market for space services that the United States does, and they don’t have the same kind of supply side that the U.S. does. There’s just not nearly as many companies trying to build rockets, for example, in the EU, as there are in the U.S., trying to build satellites in the EU, as there are in the U.S. Now, the U.S. has also been trying to do stuff, so recently, in 2020, the FCC issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that they were thinking about asking for a kind of a bond, a performance bond, they called it. So this is like, you launch the satellite, you pay this bond into the FCC account, you deorbit the satellite, you get the money back. And, you know, this was kind of a napkin sketch of an idea that they put out there. And the industry very quickly came out and said, you know, no, no, no, we don’t need this. We don’t need anything that would increase our costs. Which, that’s exactly what I would expect. So that’s not really surprising and that didn’t really go anywhere. But more recently, the office of science and technology policy at NASA has been putting together efforts to study the problem more. I think that we’ll probably see something happen in the U.S. that is more than just, we recommend you follow these guidelines.
M.W.
Do you think that it’s likely that there will be serious cooperation and coordination amongst the states most likely to be utilizing satellites? I’m thinking of China perhaps along with the United States, will that type of interstate cooperation in this global commons be something that would be realized?
A.R.
I don’t know, because I think that, you know, the U.S. and the EU can cooperate. The U.S. can cooperate with Canada. Sure. I don’t see how the U.S. is going to be successful at cooperating with Russia, for example, in the next five years on these issues. I think it would be great if they could, but I don’t know that they would, and similarly, I think there’s real challenges that have nothing to do with space involving U.S.-China cooperation. So I don’t know. I mean, you study this stuff, like, do you see U.S.-China cooperation happening?
M.W.
I see it as being in the broad, general good, but states have their own distinct interests. And those interests in the best of times they align so that great powers can cooperate and coordinate their actions, toward the greater good. But those are infrequent. And I don’t see a lot of that happening. And so that comes back then to the question of how feasible is this proposal, if a major player, I don’t mean to be picking on China, but I’ll use China as a major player, is not part of the game?
A.R.
I think that’s a great question. So there’s two pieces here. The first is that partial implementation is better than no implementation. And so to the extent that the U.S. is able to do things as a big market, if the U.S. implements something where it’s like, you’ve got to pay this fee, you’ve got to post this bond, if you want access to the U.S. consumer market. I mean, that’s a pretty big lever.
M.W.
Yeah. I’d agree.
A.R.
You know, I can’t think of a single satellite internet constellation that has an actual commercial business plan that is even remotely close to viable without access to the U.S. consumer market. So that’s, I think a big lever there.
M.W.
Akhil, this has been a really, really fascinating discussion. As someone for whom the stars have always intrigued me since I was a boy, but has never studied the economics of outer space, this has just been a fascinating discussion. I appreciate you spending time with us today. Where’s your research leading you next? What are you working on now that our listeners may want to keep an eye on down the line?
A.R.
Yeah. So there’s, there’s two questions here, I think, that maybe of interest to folks listening to this. One is exactly that question that you raised earlier, what’s the right sequencing of these measures? To what extent does an orbital use fee policy, for example, make an international treaty to pull a bunch of debris down or keep debris from crossing some level become more or less likely? So this is work that I’ve been doing, actually, with a student at Middlebury, Aditya Jain, he’s graduating this year, phenomenal student, he’s going off to University of Chicago to do amazing things at a pre-doctoral program.
M.W.
That’s wonderful.
A.R.
So, this I think, is really important research and I think this will help us understand the right order of operations for doing these kinds of policies. The other is studying the effects of events like missile tests on collisions in orbit. Now at a very granular level satellites maneuver out of the way when they think there’s going to be a collision. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved. It’s a very technical thing. It is, as I say, literally, rocket science.
M.W.
Sounds like it’s not easy to do either.
A.R.
Not easy at all. And you know, when you do this, it’s like, I guess, think about like you’re driving on the road and someone throws a, I don’t know, a bottle out the window while you’re on the freeway and you’re going pretty fast. You might swerve to dodge it. And if you do that, if you’re on a busy enough road, your swerving is going to make someone else have to swerve. It’s going to make someone else have to swerve, and on and on. There’s a cascade here. And so I’m trying to study whether or not these cascades occur, when they have occurred, and what we can learn about them.
M.W.
Interesting. Interesting. We have been talking with economist Akhil Rao about outer space, the private space industry, and why adopting orbital use fees might be a great way to address the growing problem of space debris, or as he terms it space junk. Akhil, thanks very much for stopping by and talking to us today on New Frontiers. Really appreciate it.
A.R.
My pleasure.
M.W.
Bye-bye.
Student
Professor Akhil Rao grew up in southern India and northern California. He picked up snowboarding as a graduate student in Colorado, and during Vermont’s beautiful winters he enjoys snowboarding the slopes at the Sugarbush ski resort. When time permits and he’s not lesson prepping, teaching, or conducting research, Professor Rao is an avid gamer. Outside the classroom, students might spot him hustling to class, roving around the library stacks, or at some of his favorite hangouts in town like the Mad Taco restaurant or the Otter Creek Bakery.
EPISODE 4
C.T.
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, economist Akhil Rao joins Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—to discuss a global problem that’s literally out of sight—the congestion and debris in outer space—and why an economic approach to address this problem could help manage it successfully.
M.W.
I’m really pleased to be joined here on New Frontiers, by Akhil Rao, who is an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College. Some of his research is focused on the economics of infectious diseases—certainly a hot topic during this COVID pandemic—as well as the field of computational economics. But today I’m going to be asking Akhil to help us understand what for me is a somewhat unusual realm of economic study and research, and that realm is outer space. In particular, we’ll spend some time talking about an article he co-authored, that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s all about the space industry, its growth, and how economic tools, rather than technological fixes, might better address some of the problems that have been created by a growing private sector space industry. The article is titled “Orbital Use Fees Could More Than Quadruple the Value of the Space Industry.” Akhil Rao, thank you so much for stopping by today and welcome to New Frontiers.
A.R.
Thanks for having me here, Mark.
M.W.
We’re glad you’re here. Your research here is in outer space and I mean, you know, you’re not a physicist. You are not an astronomer. You are not even an engineer. You’re an economist. So let’s start at the beginning. How did you become interested in studying the economics of outer space? What triggered your curiosity about space and economics?
A.R.
So I grew up in Northern California and south India and exchange rates were something that really fascinated me when I was a kid. Like, I didn’t understand why the paper in one place meant different amounts of paper in the other place. And so that got me kind of interested in economics to begin with. From there I started thinking a lot about water. And so when I went to graduate school, I wanted to study water resources. Southern California, where I went to undergrad has severe water problems, south India, where I grew up also has severe water problems. So it just seemed kind of like a natural thing to focus on that, like, here’s this scarce resource, here’s this science of scarce resources, let’s study scarce resources. But I went to grad school at Boulder and Boulder does a lot of aerospace. And so at some point I was walking around and I saw a lot of space-related stuff. I was reading some short stories and I saw some things about space debris, and you know these two just kind of connected. And I thought, well, I wonder if anybody’s written about the economics of orbital space.
M.W.
Interesting.
A.R.
Started looking into it. And I thought, well, you know what? This is kind of like water stuff. It’s a scarce resource. It needs to be allocated, not a lot of folks have written about it. Maybe I’ll write like a one article about it, right? Like how much could there really be to say about this? And it’s just kind of been what I’ve been doing since.
M.W.
So this developed for you, the convergence of economics and outer space, developed while you were in graduate school.
A.R.
That’s right. So I think it was sometime in my first or second year of graduate school when I really started thinking about this and then got good feedback in brown bag seminars and stuff.
M.W.
Looking for a dissertation topic and so forth, and perhaps this might be it?
A.R.
Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much how it went. You know, I really didn’t think that it would be that big a topic, but the more I looked into it, the more questions I found. So now this is the thing that I work on.
M.W.
Space is a pretty big place. Well, before we really dive into your article and the argument that you make, could you help us understand a bit more about the private sector and outer space? I think a lot of people might have heard something about the Blue Origin’s New Shepherd Flights. Blue Origin, being the aerospace firm that’s owned by Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, and the new Shepherd Flights, being those commercial space tourism flights that have taken a handful of incredibly wealthy people and celebrities into outer space as tourists. But when your article talks about the space industry, you’re not really talking about space tourism, you talking about some other aspects of that industry, is that right?
A.R.
That’s right. That’s right. So what we’re really talking about are satellites and the supporting infrastructure that makes satellites work. So we’re talking about rockets, we’re talking about receiver stations on the ground that transmit signals to and from satellites. That’s what we’re talking about. The space tourism business is interesting and it certainly captures the public imagination, but if you think about this in terms of shares of value that it generates it’s tiny. It’s probably a decimal point, but it’s not much bigger than that yet.
M.W.
So the number of people who are benefiting from the satellites far exceeds the number of people who are benefiting one way or another from space tourism.
A.R.
That’s right. And I mean, to get a sense of the magnitudes here, the people who are benefiting from space tourism in sort of the direct sense to the folks who go up, if you want to be a bit more generous, you can say, well, there’s folks who work at the companies and, you know, they get paid and they get revenues, so they’re benefiting too. But it’s hard to go much farther than that. If you think about satellites in orbit though, there’s a ton of people. So anyone who’s ever used remote sensing imagery, or who’s ever benefited from some decision making somewhere, having access to a satellite picture. You can think about folks who in the California wildfires in 2020—folks getting evacuated had some benefit from space-based tools because the U.S. Forest Service used satellite imagery to coordinate their responses.
M.W.
Anyone who’s looking for their best friend’s new house when they’re trying to drive to it.
A.R.
Right. That’s right. That’s right. Google maps. And you know, now, if you think about Ukraine well satellite imagery is playing a huge role in the conflict. So the number of folks who benefit from satellite imagery alone, that’s one product that a satellite can produce, is easily on the order of millions of people. That’s a different ballpark than people going to space.
M.W.
We’re talking about orders of magnitude difference. Can you clarify a bit more about what’s been going on in outer space right now and especially why economists or others should be concerned about things that they can’t even see in terms of how corporate actors and states have been using outer space? What’s wrong with the status quo?
A.R.
So what’s been going on over the last 50 years is a buildup of junk. So we can kind of describe this more scientifically and technically, but like at a very basic level, we’ve got a bunch of folks showing up at the campsite and not cleaning up after themselves and leaving a bunch of junk behind. And that’s what humans have been doing in orbital space since the dawn of the space age. So there’s a bunch of stuff like dead satellites, bits of rockets. So when you launch a rocket, there’s this upper stage that inserts the satellite into the target orbit, it does kind of those last adjustments. That gets left behind. That’s a pretty big thing per launch. There’s nuts and bolts from satellites. There’s bits of fuel that have leaked out of satellites. There’s tools that astronauts have lost on space walks. There’s a lot of junk that’s up there. And so there’s just been this ongoing buildup of junk.
M.W.
Okay. As I was reading your article, you say that the buildup of debris, or junk, is kind of a classic tragedy of the commons problem. And for all of our listeners who aren’t really familiar with this concept or maybe haven’t thought about it in some years, could you briefly explain what the tragedy of the commons is and why it poses a unique type of problem?
A.R.
So the tragedy of the commons, that term is referencing an article by Garrett Harden, I think in Science, in the 1950s and the argument in the article was that if you have a scarce resource where users of the resource are not in some way coordinated and are able to use it—I’m putting air quotes here—unchecked that they’re going to really spoil the resource and mess it up. So this was Harden’s argument and he was applying it in a pretty racist way to people having kids and the natural resources of the world. And I should note that the fundamental argument that he makes about like pastures in England, that’s something that historians and others have found many issues with. So it’s not clear that Harden’s argument goes through on the historical merits. And it’s not clear that his arguments really describe the general situation of all resources in the class that he was focusing on. But what his arguments do describe, which we focus on here is the case of a resource, which is in fact uncoordinated.
M.W.
By uncoordinated, you mean by the users.
A.R.
By the users, that’s exactly right. So what we in economics would call an open access commons. So a common pool resource in economics is a resource where my use subtracts from your use and vice versa. And we don’t have the ability to secure excludable rights to the resource. So you can think about these water bottles that we have on the table. I drink the water in this bottle. You can’t drink it. But we do have some notion of excludable rights where I can say, look, this is my water bottle. You can’t drink from this one. And you can say the same thing about a different water bottle. Now, imagine a case where we couldn’t say that. Where, you know, you’re free to just grab my water bottle at any time, and I’m free to grab your water bottle at any time. And there’s no sort of notion that we would say this is yours or mine. Well, then in that case, we might expect that we would end up drinking more water or depleting the water bottles faster than we otherwise would. That because I’m unable to have some sense of security in the notion that the water will still be there in 20 minutes, I’m going to drink more faster than I otherwise would, because if I don’t drink it, it’s gone. So to economists this term open access is a really important modifier on the term commons. The term commons is used across many disciplines and it refers to, broadly speaking, some kind of communally held property. But what’s really important to economists are the institutions that govern the use of that property. And so open access is one particular institution under which anyone is free to use the resource in any way they see fit so long as they have the ability to do so. So think of open access as a formalization of what people usually mean when they use a term like “the wild west.” So outer space right now has characteristics of an open access commons. As a side note, I think that Harden’s article is maybe better understood as describing the tragedy of open access rather than the tragedy of “the commons” broadly. So, in outer space, because we have these open access institutions to use orbital space, my co-authors and I argue that we are seeing something like what Harden was describing in his article happening there.
M.W.
I’d like to sort of pull the discussion back towards a way that you described the issue, the problem in outer space. You said that there’s a lot of junk, space junk, up there. Okay, I’ll play devil’s advocate. Come on. Let’s be, let’s get real. How much stuff is really up there as space is a huge place? How much of a problem is this in reality?
A.R.
You may have seen this recently. Elon Musk had a claim that there’s room in orbital space for billions of satellites. There’s no issues at all with any kind of congestion up there. And I think that, you know, there’s some, there’s a grain of truth to that, space is big, that’s for sure, unquestionably true. Right now, in orbit, there’s on the order of 27,000 officially cataloged pieces of debris floating up there. Most of those are about 10 centimeters, softball roughly or larger. That’s to do with the limits of our tracking systems. So we can’t really detect things smaller than that in most locations in orbital space. And so there’s probably a bunch more stuff that’s smaller than that. Almost surely there is, we just can’t really see it. So we don’t really know how much there is or what the distribution overs sizes is. But coming back to the question like space is big. Why is this a problem? I mean, the American west is huge. Los Angeles still has traffic jams. People want to be in places where there is value. And often that means that people are going to cluster in the same places. So there are regions in orbital space in low earth orbit, the region from sort of zero to 2000 kilometers above the mean sea level. I should probably say closer to 100 to 2000 kilometers above the mean sea level. There are regions there that are fairly congested. So you could think about the particular orbital paths, the sun synchronous orbits that remote sensing satellites use. These are very special orbits because they ensure that shadows are always in the same place when a satellite crosses over a patch of the earth every day. So if you’ve got a satellite and a sun synchronous orbit, that’s passing over this building, it’ll always pass over this building at the exact same time, so that the shadows look the same so that you can start to do some inference on what’s actually there without worrying about shadows getting in the way. So that’s a really valuable orbit. There’s a ton of remote sensing satellites that all tend to cluster in sun synchronous orbits.
M.W.
Because those orbits would be most beneficial for the function of the satellite.
A.R.
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So that’s the issue. It’s not that there isn’t space, it’s that the space that we want, there’s only so much.
M.W.
Sort of like real estate in San Francisco or Boston. Well, this sort of brings up a housekeeping question that I have, when you think about housekeeping for outer space, who keeps track of this debris, this junk that you’re talking about? If a company or a nation state wants to launch a satellite, where do they turn to find out whether the proposed orbit that they’re contemplating is one that’s safe or not?
A.R.
So there’s a bunch of layers in the question that you asked that I’ll try to answer in the appropriate order. So at one level there’s a UN registry of objects. If I launch a satellite, then I’m going to, I should at least, tell the registry that, “hey, I’ve put this satellite in this orbit and I’ll keep you updated on what happens with it, if I move it somewhere else,” or what have you. That’s an entirely voluntary disclosure. And so there are a bunch of objects, many of these objects presumed to have a military function, which are not on the registry.
M.W.
And the registry is only for satellites? Or for other debris?
A.R.
It’s for satellites. And so to the extent that a piece of debris was once a productive, active satellite, it will also be in the registry. But to the extent that there’s, you know, bits of fuel that leaked out, that’s not going to be in the registry
M.W.
And discarded.
A.R.
Discarded nuts and bolts, or what have you. That’s not really going to be it.
M.W.
Components and so forth.
A.R.
For that stuff, just physically tracking it, there’s a network of sensors. There are several networks of sensors, actually. The one that is widely regarded as the best is operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. And so this is a military network work of sensors that tracks objects in orbit. The U.S. makes this data publicly available, again, up to certain restrictions. So, U.S. military satellites, for example, do not often show up in this record. And they make this available as sort of a public service. They’re also a number of companies that are starting to offer tracking services. So there’s one called Leo Labs that’s doing this. Steve Wozniak one of the Apple founders started a new one called Privateer that is also trying to do this.
M.W.
I wonder if they have the capacity at this point to measure as much debris as say DOD does.
A.R.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I think that they’re working towards that capacity and DOD itself is actually looking to offload some of this function onto commercial partners. So one of the things that the Trump administration did was pass a series of space policy directives. They were actually very active in the space policy realm, and I think it was space policy directive two, or maybe it was three, that said that the space situational awareness function should be moved from defense to department of commerce. And that eventually that should be handled by some private actors.
M.W.
Interesting. Okay. Well, it sounds to me as if there’s a type of a traffic management problem going on in outer space. And your article seems to suggest that this traffic management problem is also really an environmental policy issue. And how would that be? Why might we rightly classify it or categorize it in that fashion?
A.R.
I think there’ a few ways to get to that conclusion. One is to say that it’s an environmental policy problem because outer space is an environment that humans use. And because it’s an environment that humans use, we should think of this region in the sort of lens that we use for other areas that humans use.
M.W.
We shouldn’t pollute it.
A.R.
We shouldn’t pollute it. Right. That’s one way to think about it. One way to get to that conclusion. Another way is to say that, look, this is an environmental policy problem, because it has the characteristics of one. There’s a productive activity that humans do, there. That product activity produces a residual, a pollution product, debris. And that’s what happens with lake management. That’s what happens with atmosphere management. So why shouldn’t we fit orbit management into that same bucket.
M.W.
Okay, great. Thank you. Let’s get into the heart of your article itself. You talk a lot orbital use fees in the article. Can you explain to the listeners what an orbital use fee is, and how would it work?
A.R.
Yeah, so I think the easiest way to think about an orbital use fee is going back to that camping analogy. If you want to go to a campground, you’re going to pay a fee to use it. If you litter at the campground, then presumably you clean up after yourself. And if you don’t, you pay a fine, and that fine is meant to deter littering. And it’s also meant in some part to cover some of the cost of cleanup. That’s kind of the idea of an orbital use fee. That when you put a satellite into orbit, you’re going to pay a fee that grants your satellite the right to access the site. That fee is also going to go towards incentivizing you to keep the site clean. If you pollute more, if you create more debris, you pay a higher fee. If you reduce the amount of debris you generate, you pay a smaller fee. And so in that way, it’s really trying to align your incentives with an environmental sustainability incentive, to keep the orbit clean.
M.W.
Who would the fee be paid to? To whom?
A.R.
So there’s many ways that you could implement this. Sorry, I’m going to go on a brief tangent here about space law. Objects in outer space are regulated by the state in which they were launched. So the launching state is the authority for the object. So if I launch a satellite from the U.S., the U.S. is the state that holds authority over my object. And so in one version of this orbital use fee, I would pay my O.U.F. to the United States. I think that that’s probably an easier way to make it work than to build an international orbital use fee collection agency in the UN or something like that. But, you know, in theory, you could do that too. There’s nothing really in the theory that we discussed that we laid out that requires you to pay the fee to one or the other specific entity. What’s really important in getting the orbit users to use the resource right, is that they pay the fee.
M.W.
Is the fee a one-time fee? Is it something that is paid annually? How would that work?
A.R.
So it’s a recurring fee. Every let’s say year, you could cut it into finer increments. That’s fine too. Every year that your satellites in orbit, you’re going to pay this fee. If you want to stop paying the fee, pull your satellite out of orbit.
M.W.
Interesting. You and your co-authors refer to something called the Kessler Syndrome. What is that and how does this concept influence the way that you analyze orbital use?
A.R.
So the Kessler Syndrome is this idea that came about in the 1970s. A NASA scientist named Donald Kessler and another one named Burton Cour-Palais, they wrote this paper talking about what would happen if the debris in orbit built up to a density where debris can start colliding with other debris. So one thing that we haven’t really talked about here is why we should care about debris in space. And the issue is that stuff in space goes really fast. There’s a common, I think, sense that you go to space by launching a rocket that pushes you upwards. And that’s only half true, partially you’re going upwards, but partially you’re also starting to fall and continuously missing the earth. So you’re also going sideways. And you’re going sideways at a tremendous speed, something on the order of 17 and a half thousand miles per hour. So when stuff in orbit collides, like it’s going really fast and it’s not going to come out of it in one piece. That’s bad because if it doesn’t come of it in one piece, now there’s a whole bunch of other fragments that are also going very fast, that can also hit something else. And, you know, to the extent that we want our satellites to keep functioning, we should maybe not want them to get hit by junk. Seems like a thing we might want. The Kessler Syndrome is this idea that what if there was so much debris that debris can hit other debris and generate new debris in a kind of self-sustaining cascade without any human intervention required. Like we could wave a magic wand that pulls every single productive satellite out of orbit, and there’s still enough junk left up there to keep producing new junk year over year for, I don’t know, the next century or something like that. So that’s the idea of the Kessler Syndrome. You can think of it as analogous to run away climate change. If enough carbon gets into the atmosphere, then it triggers some mechanisms like, you know, permafrost melts and methane gets out of the clathrates and that triggers more greenhouse gas release and so on and so on.
M.W.
The Kessler Syndrome posits that there is a tipping point at some point.
A.R.
That’s right. And so this has been verified in a number of analytical and simulation studies. To the extent that we’re able to observe this happening, it seems like it’s already begun in some orbital regions. So there’s the 750 to 850 kilometer region. There was a missile test there in like the 2007, 2008 timeframe around then, the Chinese government blew up one of their own weather sensing satellites to show that they had the capacity to blow up satellites. So that anti-satellite missile test is widely understood to have generated enough debris there to have kept a cycle of debris production going. Now, it’s important to note that this is not like, if you’ve seen the movie Gravity, this is not like that. This is not like all of a sudden two days from now all of orbital space is totally unusable because the cascade started and it just goes like a flash. This is a slow-moving catastrophe. It’s probably going to take 30 to 50, maybe even 100 years for, you know, some of those regions to become fully unusable.
M.W.
Thank you. You know, I have never really heard to be honest about an orbital use fee for outer space. Perhaps that’s because I’m just, ill-informed on the topic. As far as I can tell it’s something that’s never been tried before, in outer space. So I’m curious, are there some other examples, perhaps from other sectors where environmental policies analogous to an orbital use have been tried, and if there are, what’s been the result? How well have they worked?
A.R.
Yeah. So an orbital use fee, I think you should understand this as one among a suite of policies that are, in some sense, equivalent. These are what I call natural capital pricing policies. So these are policies that say we have some kind of capital that nature has given us. It’s currently available in a way where folks can use it without having to pay a market price. So, you know, you go chop down some trees, you go out into the high seas and you grab some fish, things like that. And the idea here is really just that, well, you know, if you had to pay a price for it, you’re going to think a little bit more carefully about your use than if you didn’t have to pay a price for it. And so there’s many different implementations. You can think about a cap-and-trade system. That’s a kind of natural capital pricing policy. So in a climate change context a carbon tax is maybe the thing that’s closest to an orbital use fee. But it is in some sense, equivalent to a cap-and-trade system. It’s just that the international legal situation is such that property rights for orbital space seems like a far more distant prospect than taxes for using orbital space.
M.W.
And if we were to focus on the efficacy of these analogous policies in other policy realms can you speak to that?
A.R.
Yes, they seem to work. There are issues. So let me get into some examples here. The EU has an emissions trading system. So this is the EUETS. It’s a cap-and-trade kind of carbon market. So firms can buy permits to emit carbon dioxide in the EU. They can trade these permits. Year over year, the total number of permits rachets down slowly, and firms either pay a higher price for each permit, or they choose to not get a permit and then reduce their emissions so that they’re in compliance. The EUETS seems to have worked. It seems to have brought emissions down. Now I’m saying worked, but I should put a caveat here, which is that it’s worked at achieving its own goals. So the EUETS says that it’ll achieve an X percent reduction, it achieves an X percent reduction. Now you can say, well, you know, an X percent reduction, isn’t what we need. We need like a 10 X reduction. Sure. And by that light, if you say, well it hasn’t achieved a 10 X reduction. You could say it hasn’t worked. But as far as meeting the goals that it sets goes, it’s done that job. The California cap-and-trade market is another example of this. California has a market for capping greenhouse gas emissions. It has successfully blown past the target that is set for itself.
M.W.
So is this why you also said that the orbital use fee was part of a suite?
A.R.
That’s right. So you could think about an orbital use fee as literally tax, you could set it up as a tax with some kind of rebates and some kind of tradeable permits. Maybe it makes sense for the tradable permits to be for actors within one administrative unit, like the United States, maybe not. There’s lots of flexibility that system designers have here in implementing the policy.
M.W.
So another question that comes to mind given what we’ve been discussing is the extent to which using orbital use can ameliorate the totality of the problem that’s there. Debris that has been there for quite a while. I would imagine some of this stuff is pretty old stuff; it’s been up there for a long time. Perhaps even put up there by actors who no longer exist, like the Soviet Union. How does one rectify that aspect of the problem? How do you address the environmental fallout of space junk by using orbital use fees, particularly the legacy debris problems?
A.R.
So the legacy debris problem is an interesting one because a fee isn’t going to do anything about that directly. It’s just not, and that’s not what it’s trying to do. Now it will affect it indirectly through a couple channels. First, we have really robust evidence across a number of different sectors that when you put natural capital pricing policies into a place you incentivize clean innovation. So when we start charging power plants for emitting carbon into the atmosphere, pretty soon, they get pretty good about reducing the amount of carbon they emit into the atmosphere, whether that means taking innovations that were kind of on the fence, hadn’t really been deployed yet and deploying them, or whether that means putting money into R and D to develop new innovations that will let them stay in compliance and reduce their costs. So an orbital use fee would have the same effect, we think, for orbital space. That it would incentivize the development of clean technologies. And we really need these clean technologies, because right now there is no scalable system for removing debris from orbit. There’re some companies that are trying to develop things, that’ll remove large pieces of debris. There are some folks who are talking about ways to remove small pieces of debris, but there is no one yet who has both a technology and a business model that will let them pull this stuff down.
M.W.
So if given the correct incentive structure, then firms, presumably states as well, who are operating and putting satellites into orbit will become more conscious about littering.
A.R.
That’s right.
M.W.
And then in the aggregate over time, while you may not be decreasing the legacy debris, you won’t be necessarily adding to it, at least not to the same rate.
A.R.
You won’t adding to it, and you’ll be developing the technologies that you need to remove it. And once you’ve got those technologies, removing the legacy debris actually helps reduce your orbital fee liability because it reduces the risk of a collision on orbit. Now what’s really important with this orbital use fee is to get the numbers right. So we spend a lot of time in the paper figuring out how to calculate these numbers. And, you know, it’s an order of magnitude approximation, but it’s still, as far as we can tell the best numbers that are out there. You want to charge a fee that gets people to internalize the amount of the cost that they’re pushing onto others. To put it a bit differently, we don’t want a fee that’s so large that it starves the space industry, that it kind of kills it in the crib. We don’t want that. We don’t want a fee that’s so small that people don’t pay attention to what they’re doing. We want a fee that’s just right. So that people can say, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing. And this thing is going to have all these impacts on all these other folks. Let me factor that into my bottom line. Let me see whether the thing that I’m doing passes the cost benefit test once I add all of the costs that I’m imposing on others into that calculation.” And so part of those costs is the risk that a piece of debris that you put up there, or that your defunct satellite contributes to a cascade of collisions and generates more debris in the future. Well, if we remove all that legacy debris that reduces that risk, that reduces your fee liability.
M.W.
Pretty interesting, actually. I just thought of another question, maybe perhaps a vexing one. If countries really do start taxing, regulating their satellite sectors, like you and your co-author suggest, won’t the private companies just sort of pack up and leave for less strict countries. I mean, isn’t the solution that you’re proposing really unworkable until orbital use fees are more broadly adopted by most states in the world.
A.R.
This is what we call the leakage problem in economics. And it’s a real problem, right? Like it’s a real thing that people worry about. I mean, I guess I’d address this in two ways, right? One is you can look at this by analogy, right? There’s a very clear analogy to tax rates and wealthy individuals that, you know, if you raise the capital gains tax, then folks are going to leave and stop innovating in the United States. They’ll go elsewhere. I mean, if that were actually true, we would see almost all wealthy individuals concentrated in whichever country has the lowest tax rates. And eventually pretty soon, we’d see all countries racing to the bottom for a zero tax rate. That’s not what we see. To some extent, there are wealthy individuals in countries, despite high tax rates who stay there despite high tax rates. I mean, really what I think is going on here is that there’s other things too, the taxes, aren’t the only things in the calculus. If you’re a company that wants to, you know, do space stuff, broadly, launch some satellites, provide imagery, provide some value-added services on top of the imagery, machine learning on the imagery, whatever. You need access to a talent pool. So you need to have a bunch of engineers who can do stuff. Many of these goods are what are called dual use goods. They can be used for military purposes as well. So again, this imagery is a great example, right? You can use satellite imagery to detect fires and respond to wildfires. You can also use satellite imagery to detect troop movements and position your forces accordingly. So these dual use goods are very, very tightly regulated and pretty much every country around the world. If you’re in the U.S., and if you want to serve the U.S. market, you have to jump through a whole bunch of regulatory barriers. All of which are more onerous than paying, like, I don’t know, 0.1% of your profits in a tax. That in some sense is the easiest barrier that you have to jump through because you just send the money off, you send the check off and you’re done. You don’t have people coming in and checking that you’re in compliance that, you know, you don’t have foreign nationals with compromised allegiances working for you or whatever they get worried about.
M.W.
Trying to manage orbital use for the good of everybody. That seems like an inherently global problem. It’s a really large problem. And I wonder if you would agree with that. And I think you just did but doesn’t it then follow that trying to push for orbital use fees before there’s global cooperation or an international treaty, isn’t that like putting the cart before the horse? Don’t you need to get the cooperation first? Don’t you need to get a consensus amongst the states who would be collecting these fees?
A.R.
I think that’s a good question. I think it’s actually an open question. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what the right sequencing of events is. I guess I’ll say this, there’s some in the space community who say that we shouldn’t worry about environmental policy until there’s a big debris event. And then there’s some that take a, maybe more, realist take that we aren’t going to end up worrying about this stuff until there’s a big debris event. Which are two different positions. I think we should worry about space policy before there’s a big debris event precisely because it’s so rare to have a chance to get ahead of an environmental problem when we know good policy tools. We almost never have that opportunity. But to your point about international agreements, I mean, I don’t know, maybe if the U.S. starts implementing these orbital use fees, that’s the seed that’s necessary to start building these agreements. The field of space law is a very active field. There’s a ton of folks in it. And broadly, when I talk to space lawyers who work in this area who are trying to negotiate agreements and norms of orbital space use, they say that, you know, things are deadlocked. The UN is the body that things have to go through. There’s UN COPUOS, the committee on the peaceful uses of outer space. Nothing really happens there. Folks spend years and years arguing over like details of language in an agreement. And, you know, that’s just not at the time scale that we need for these agreements. And so, I mean, I think if someone can move faster, if the U.S., for example, can set the example through a tax policy route, they don’t need to go through the UN for that. And if they can get folks to agree, then they can get folks to agree. And that’s like any other multilateral or bilateral set of negotiations. It can go faster.
M.W.
Let me ask you this. Are you relatively optimistic that we will see something akin to what you and your colleagues are advocating? That we will see some type of environmental policy adopted to address the problem of space junk? First, if you’re optimistic about that, and second, given that there’s a variety of forms that this might take and different ways it might be achieved, what do you see as the most likely route that this will happen?
A.R.
Yeah. So I think someone will do something. I think people are trying to do things.
M.W.
A state?
A.R.
A state. So, focusing on, I guess, the U.S. and the EU right now. The EU, I think is a leader in regulation, broadly. I think that they have of the European Space Agency has put a lot of resources into building the technical tools that are necessary to provide these types of natural capital pricing policies and other environmental policies. Now they don’t have the same kind of market for space services that the United States does, and they don’t have the same kind of supply side that the U.S. does. There’s just not nearly as many companies trying to build rockets, for example, in the EU, as there are in the U.S., trying to build satellites in the EU, as there are in the U.S. Now, the U.S. has also been trying to do stuff, so recently, in 2020, the FCC issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that they were thinking about asking for a kind of a bond, a performance bond, they called it. So this is like, you launch the satellite, you pay this bond into the FCC account, you deorbit the satellite, you get the money back. And, you know, this was kind of a napkin sketch of an idea that they put out there. And the industry very quickly came out and said, you know, no, no, no, we don’t need this. We don’t need anything that would increase our costs. Which, that’s exactly what I would expect. So that’s not really surprising and that didn’t really go anywhere. But more recently, the office of science and technology policy at NASA has been putting together efforts to study the problem more. I think that we’ll probably see something happen in the U.S. that is more than just, we recommend you follow these guidelines.
M.W.
Do you think that it’s likely that there will be serious cooperation and coordination amongst the states most likely to be utilizing satellites? I’m thinking of China perhaps along with the United States, will that type of interstate cooperation in this global commons be something that would be realized?
A.R.
I don’t know, because I think that, you know, the U.S. and the EU can cooperate. The U.S. can cooperate with Canada. Sure. I don’t see how the U.S. is going to be successful at cooperating with Russia, for example, in the next five years on these issues. I think it would be great if they could, but I don’t know that they would, and similarly, I think there’s real challenges that have nothing to do with space involving U.S.-China cooperation. So I don’t know. I mean, you study this stuff, like, do you see U.S.-China cooperation happening?
M.W.
I see it as being in the broad, general good, but states have their own distinct interests. And those interests in the best of times they align so that great powers can cooperate and coordinate their actions, toward the greater good. But those are infrequent. And I don’t see a lot of that happening. And so that comes back then to the question of how feasible is this proposal, if a major player, I don’t mean to be picking on China, but I’ll use China as a major player, is not part of the game?
A.R.
I think that’s a great question. So there’s two pieces here. The first is that partial implementation is better than no implementation. And so to the extent that the U.S. is able to do things as a big market, if the U.S. implements something where it’s like, you’ve got to pay this fee, you’ve got to post this bond, if you want access to the U.S. consumer market. I mean, that’s a pretty big lever.
M.W.
Yeah. I’d agree.
A.R.
You know, I can’t think of a single satellite internet constellation that has an actual commercial business plan that is even remotely close to viable without access to the U.S. consumer market. So that’s, I think a big lever there.
M.W.
Akhil, this has been a really, really fascinating discussion. As someone for whom the stars have always intrigued me since I was a boy, but has never studied the economics of outer space, this has just been a fascinating discussion. I appreciate you spending time with us today. Where’s your research leading you next? What are you working on now that our listeners may want to keep an eye on down the line?
A.R.
Yeah. So there’s, there’s two questions here, I think, that maybe of interest to folks listening to this. One is exactly that question that you raised earlier, what’s the right sequencing of these measures? To what extent does an orbital use fee policy, for example, make an international treaty to pull a bunch of debris down or keep debris from crossing some level become more or less likely? So this is work that I’ve been doing, actually, with a student at Middlebury, Aditya Jain, he’s graduating this year, phenomenal student, he’s going off to University of Chicago to do amazing things at a pre-doctoral program.
M.W.
That’s wonderful.
A.R.
So, this I think, is really important research and I think this will help us understand the right order of operations for doing these kinds of policies. The other is studying the effects of events like missile tests on collisions in orbit. Now at a very granular level satellites maneuver out of the way when they think there’s going to be a collision. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved. It’s a very technical thing. It is, as I say, literally, rocket science.
M.W.
Sounds like it’s not easy to do either.
A.R.
Not easy at all. And you know, when you do this, it’s like, I guess, think about like you’re driving on the road and someone throws a, I don’t know, a bottle out the window while you’re on the freeway and you’re going pretty fast. You might swerve to dodge it. And if you do that, if you’re on a busy enough road, your swerving is going to make someone else have to swerve. It’s going to make someone else have to swerve, and on and on. There’s a cascade here. And so I’m trying to study whether or not these cascades occur, when they have occurred, and what we can learn about them.
M.W.
Interesting. Interesting. We have been talking with economist Akhil Rao about outer space, the private space industry, and why adopting orbital use fees might be a great way to address the growing problem of space debris, or as he terms it space junk. Akhil, thanks very much for stopping by and talking to us today on New Frontiers. Really appreciate it.
A.R.
My pleasure.
M.W.
Bye-bye.
Student
Professor Akhil Rao grew up in southern India and northern California. He picked up snowboarding as a graduate student in Colorado, and during Vermont’s beautiful winters he enjoys snowboarding the slopes at the Sugarbush ski resort. When time permits and he’s not lesson prepping, teaching, or conducting research, Professor Rao is an avid gamer. Outside the classroom, students might spot him hustling to class, roving around the library stacks, or at some of his favorite hangouts in town like the Mad Taco restaurant or the Otter Creek Bakery.
Episode 3 - What Made Russians Skeptics about Democratic Capitalism?
In this episode, Mark Williams talks with economist Will Pyle, the Frederick C. Dirks of International Economics at Middlebury College, about recent findings he published in the journal Post-Soviet Affairs. Their discussion explores why Russians of a certain cohort—although liberated from the economic and political constraints of Soviet Communism—are not the strong enthusiasts of democracy and capitalism that many westerners believed they would become after the USSR collapsed.
New Frontiers - Episode 3: What Made Russians Skeptics About Democratic Capitalism?
Did the collapse of the Soviet Union—and the tumultuous years which followed—help shape Russians’ attitudes toward capitalism and democracy in the Putin era? If so, how; and why would the effects of the Soviet collapse still be felt and manifest thirty years later? In this episode, economist Will Pyle joins RCGA director Mark Williams to unravel this puzzle.
Transcript
New Frontiers Will Pyle Transcript
Hosted by Mark Williams
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
Today, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—is joined by economist Will Pyle, to explore how the tumultuous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union helped shape Russians’ attitudes toward capitalism and democracy in the Putin era.
Mark Williams
Will Pyle is the Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury College. Much of his research is focused on the evolution of markets and markets supporting institutions, particularly in post socialist countries, and especially in Russia. Today, I’ll be talking with Will about one of his most recent projects. It’s an article he published in the journal, Post Soviet Affairs, that, interestingly enough, examines Russians’ political attitudes and their preferences, as much as it does their economic attitudes and preferences. The article is titled, “Russia’s Impressionable Years: Life Experience during the Exit from Communism and Putin Era Beliefs.” Will Pyle, welcome to New Frontiers.
Will Pyle
Thank you, Mark. It’s wonderful to be here.
Mark Williams
Well, why don’t we dive right into it? As an economist, what initially got you interested in researching Russia? How did this happen and what aspects of Russia’s economy have you studied the most?
Will Pyle
Well, my interest in Russia came actually before my interest in economics and it goes all the way back to two years of Russian language courses I took at my public high school in Seattle back in in the 80s. I had a great teacher, a Russian emigree, who, along with teaching us Russian, got us interested in the country’s culture and history. I went on to major in history in college and I took several courses on Russia and eventually wrote a senior thesis on a topic in 19th century Russian intellectual history. I actually only took one economics class as an undergrad and found it found it really boring honestly. After college, I went on to work at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC, and I was there in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the countries of Eastern Europe threw off communism and held democratic elections. It was a really exciting time. I took a great class on the economic transition from communism to capitalism. My professor convinced me that I might want to go on and get a PhD in economics to better understand the whole process of abandoning one economic system for another. So as a graduate student, I got into a decent PhD program and eventually wrote my dissertation on credit markets and the banking system in Russia in the 1990s. And then my research and the Russian economy, or on the Russian economy, for at least the next 15 years after I left graduate school, was focused on Russian businesses, as you as you alluded to earlier, and how they navigated an economic environment in which the bedrock institutions of a modern market economy, like the rule of law, including the enforcement of private property rights, were weak or compromised.
Mark Williams
Well, it sounds like a really fascinating journey that you had from an undergraduate to the professional status that you have right now. The research we’re talking about today, here, is about public opinion in Russia, but again, you’re an economist. And so how did you get interested in researching what you are calling in this article, political preferences of Russians? Is this a topic that you’ve been working on for some time?
Will Pyle
My interest in doing research on public opinion is actually relatively recent. Five years ago, I taught a first-year seminar on the old Soviet economy and its collapse. One of the books that I assigned was an oral history by a Belarusian journalist, a woman by the name of Svetlana Alexievich. And the book of hers that I assigned for my first-year seminar is called Second-hand Time, and it’s about how the demise of communism was experienced in Russia by very average people. And what her oral histories highlight is a real nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s achievements, and a deep sense of loss at its collapse. It was that book, perhaps more than anything else that I read or heard about, that got me thinking carefully about how Russians form their worldviews, about the factors that shape their beliefs, about the way societies should be ordered. And I, I couldn’t help thinking that the really wrenching and disorienting experience of transitioning away from one socio-economic system, communism, to another entirely different socio-economic system, market-based capitalism, like Russia went through in the early 1990s, would leave a lasting impact. And so as a researcher, as an economist, I started cataloging the available public opinion survey data that would allow me to connect Russians life experiences, in the 1990s to their worldviews into the 21st century, that is to understand Russia today, to understand how Russians collectively view the world we have to spend more time understanding the 1990s. And my sense is that certainly economists and to a lesser extent, political scientists, have forgotten the 1990s. And one of the reasons I think, is that there’s just not that much good data from that decade. In the early 1990s especially, the Russian government just didn’t have the capacity to collect the sorts of market-generated data that governments and other industrialized societies routinely collect for many, many economic variables. Decent government data doesn’t begin until just before the turn of the 21st century.
Mark Williams
From what I’m hearing, you see the 1990s as a critical period where one needs to understand what’s going on in Russia, at that point, in order to better understand what one sees coming out of Russia today. On that basis, let me be a bit provocative and ask you this sort of devil’s advocate question. Honestly, why should someone even care about public opinion in Russia today? Why should someone care about what Russians think about their country? How it ought to be run? After all, Russia is an autocracy. Political freedoms are limited and circumscribed dissent is suppressed. Aren’t the opinions of Russians really unrelated to how their country is actually governed and what Vladimir Putin decides to do?
Will Pyle
Well, that’s a great question and you are indeed being provocative there in asking it. There’s a Middlebury alum, Tim Frye, and he’s now a professor of political science at Columbia University. And he’s one of our country’s leading interpreters of contemporary Russian politics. Anyway, he’s just published a book about Putin called Weak Strongman. And one of the points he makes, Putin wants to be feared, yes. But since repression is costly, and not always effective, he also wants to be loved. And being popular by being responsive and sensitive to public opinion, makes it less likely that he’ll face challenges to his rule. There’s another recent book by political scientists Sam Green and Graham Robertson that makes a very much related point. They argue that Putin’s rule is it’s not forced on an oppressed and unwilling public, but is in some sense co-constructed with society. Putin has been, in effect, lifted up above the normal push and pull of politics by 10s of millions of Russians.
Mark Williams
Again, that’s a fascinating response. Let’s dive into the heart of your article. And let’s start with the title. What are Russia’s impressionable years? What does that phrase actually mean for listeners who aren’t acquainted with it?
Will Pyle
There’s a hypothesis from social psychology, that one’s life experiences in young adulthood, basically late teens until the mid 20s, leave a more lasting impact than if they’d occurred at another stage in life. This is often referred to as the impressionable years hypothesis. And not too long ago, two economists put the hypothesis to the test by looking into whether living through an economic downturn when you were 18 to 25, whether that affected your worldview later in life. So they looked at a lot of survey data from the United States going back to the middle of the 20th century, and what they found was that if you were you were living in a part of the United States that was going through tough economic times when you were in your impressionable years, you are more likely to hold progressive economic views later in life than somebody your own age that hadn’t experienced that same sort of economic downturn during their impressionable years. Now, the impressionable years that I’m talking about in my article, that are part of the title of the article, are a bit different. I’m using that phrase to refer to what I hypothesize is a stage of history in which all Russians regardless of age, were prone to form enduring memories and beliefs based on their own individual life experiences. I home in particular on the period from 1989 to 1994. And so that’s the idea. So I’m cribbing a term and using it in a slightly different way than it’s used traditionally. I focus in on that period from 1989 to 1994, and it’s a period that that covers the last three years of the Soviet Union and the first three years of an independent Russia. It’s a period that’s bracketed on one side by the dissolution of Soviet control over Eastern Europe and the unraveling of the Soviet economy and on the other side by the privatization of a huge swath of Russia’s economic base. It’s a half decade in which Russian life expectancy collapsed in a way that’s almost unprecedented for a country not experiencing war, or widespread disease. It’s a period in which the old rules governing how society was organized were thrown out, and new ones were introduced. It’s a period as I write in the article, when so much was so new for so many. Russians at that time, were taking it all in learning lessons about how a market economy with private property functioned, how democracy and free elections functioned, and drawing conclusions, forming beliefs that had the potential to endure for a long time, perhaps their entire lives. That particular half-decade, from 89 to 94, had the potential, I hypothesize—and it’s just a hypothesis—I hypothesize left a deep and lasting impression on them.
Mark Williams
How do you go about showing that there’s actually a connection between what Russians experienced in life during those impressionable years you’re talking about which, which honestly is over a generation ago, and what they believe much more recently.
Will Pyle
So I couldn’t have done it without access to a really wonderful data set. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development carried out a massive survey across Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union in 2006. And they asked a whole bunch of questions of at least 1000 individuals per country. And one set of questions, had a retrospective or backward in time component to it. People were asked about life events, potential life events, and whether they’d occurred in 1989, 1990, 1991, each year all the way up until 2006. Which years for instance, they had been laid off from a job, which years they had experienced a severe decline in their household income, etc. Those are those sorts of questions.
Mark Williams
Big life changing events, milestone events.
Will Pyle
Exactly, exactly. People were asked also for a lot of information on their lives in 2006: their employment status, their income, how well they felt they were doing financially relative to other people in their country. So they basically collected a ton of personal information from this representative sample of at least 1000 people per country. The questions that I was most interested in had to do with their attitudes and beliefs, particularly whether they felt democracy was a good political system, whether an economy based on markets and private property was better than the alternatives, and whether they felt their government should do more to redistribute income and wealth. Now, these are their attitudes and beliefs circa 2006, well into the Putin years, which had begun in 1999. And I was particularly interested in investigating my impressionable years hypothesis, that a person’s life experiences and experiencing economic hardships between 1989 and 1994 influenced those beliefs and attitudes with respect to democracy, and a market economy, and the proper role of government in redistributing income in 2006 were different as a result. I’m thinking of Russians as being just incredibly sensitive to external stimuli in that period from 89 to 94, because everything was so new. And so they’re learning lessons about how this new world works. They’ve heard, and they’ve imagined what the world beyond the Berlin Wall was like prior to 1989.
Mark Williams
The wonders of capitalism, and consumerism, and prosperity.
Will Pyle
Exactly they had an exaggerated sense, I think, of the glories of life to the west. But they really had their antennas up in that period that half decade. And so that, because they were extra sensitive to their initial experiences, those initial lived experiences, I’m hypothesizing that those initial experiences did get embedded in a way that maybe later experiences with markets, private property, and even democracy didn’t get embedded in the same way.
Mark Williams
Well, one thing that stuck out to me in your article is that when you examine the attitudes and preferences that the Russians display, they’re quite skeptical, you claim, about economic inequality. And presumably, I assume that’s because since under Soviet communism, vast or routine economic inequality was rare, or at least it wasn’t acknowledged, officially. And this raised two questions in my mind: first, hasn’t economic inequality actually grown dramatically under Putin? And maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my impression. And second, if that’s true, then what does it tell us about how much Russians’ beliefs actually shaped the country’s trajectory under Putin?
Will Pyle
So that’s a great question. A really, really good question. I’m going to put a pin in it, if it’s okay with you, and come back to it. And I’d like to finish the thought about how I actually use the survey data.
Mark Williams
Okay, please do.
Will Pyle
To illustrate that the hypothesis, my hypothesis, actually held up. And so, we economists, and a lot of political scientists these days, use statistical software. We take it to the big data sets, and we can look at large data sets and perform exercises that effectively allow, in this case, me to compare Russians that are similar in all respects that I can observe in the data: same education, same household structure, same gender, age, similar economic circumstances in 2006. And then see if those who experienced economic hardship during the impressionable years, on average felt differently from those that didn’t experience economic hardship from those same impressionable years. And that’s, in fact, what I find in the data. Russians who suffered between 1989 and 1994, Russians who suffered, in particular because they lost their job or they suffered a severe decline in their income, they’re the ones that are particularly skeptical of democracy and market economics. And they’re particularly big believers in a more progressive redistributionist government in 2006. So they have a very different orientation than Russians who didn’t have this same experience of suffering back in those impressionable years. Now, interestingly, I didn’t find any relationship in the data between individuals experiencing a job loss or a decline in income after 1994 and their beliefs in 2006, there was only in that period between 1989 and 1994 where we see that strong relationship. But to come back to your really good question about inequality and Russian sensitivity to inequality, it certainly comes out in the survey data from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development that Russians are unusually kind of sensitive to questions of economic inequality. And they’re big believers relative to peoples in other countries that government should get involved in addressing inequality.
Mark Williams
What’s interesting to me about that is from a Western perspective, we hear a lot about the oligarchs who have commandeered the commanding heights of the Russian economy, perhaps via the privatization of portions of the old Soviet state-owned enterprises and so forth. And from a Western perspective, one hears a lot about the growth of inequality that seems to be quite dramatic. And so, which is why I was wondering about the impact that Russians’ concerns over inequality might actually have or not have on the direction that the Russian state is going under President Putin.
Will Pyle
It’s a very natural question. Now economists, we have ways of formally measuring inequality. And those measures just took off really rapidly in the early 1990s. And if anything in the years since they’ve come down.
Mark Williams
Really, they’ve come down?
Will Pyle
They’ve come down. They’re still very high. In terms of the policy response to the inequality even in the present day, I think there are a couple points worth making. First of all, Putin recognizes that there’s a political payoff to knocking the rich off their pedestal. During his first term, all the way back in the early 2000s, he launched a frontal assault against one of the big oligarchs. There was one particular oligarch, guy named Mikhail Kolakowski, who was the owner of the biggest private oil firm in Russia in the early 2000s. And Putin threw him in jail for 10 years, before sending him into exile, and that was incredibly popular. And Putin understood that that would be popular because of Russian sensitivity to question inequality.
Mark Williams
I see. So he could use some of this to his own political advantage in a very practical sense.
Will Pyle
Yes, very much so. And another point, in part because of the Russian public sensitivity to economic inequality, Putin and his inner circle have gone to great lengths in the present day to conceal just how wealthy they’ve become. You’re probably familiar with the name of Alexei Navalny, who’s been Russia’s leading opposition figure for at least a decade now. Just in the past year, he survived an assassination attempt.
Mark Williams
He was poisoned, wasn’t he?
Will Pyle
He was poisoned just before getting on a plane, and then he was nursed back to health in a German hospital. But being the courageous figure that he is he went right back to Russia, got right back in the game, and very soon after that was put in prison on trumped up charges. Anyways, Navalny’s popularity as an opposition figure grew out of his efforts to expose the corruption and ill-gotten wealth of Russia’s governing elites. Information about Russia’s inequality today is something that Putin very much wants to keep hidden.
Mark Williams
That reminds me of something that’s been in the news of late, and that is the revelations about hidden wealth by powerful individuals and world leaders that have been revealed with respect to the Pandora Papers. Can you tell us anything about that, and how that might play into the sensitivity that Russians have about inequality within their country?
Will Pyle
So my understanding is, I’ve just read the news stories, and my understanding is that there are more Russian accounts that have been unearthed than accounts from any other single country.
Mark Williams
These are issues they would rather not see come to light.
Will Pyle
Exactly. Because of exactly what you asked about because of Russian sensitivity to questions of inequality, they really want to keep these sorts of matters under wraps.
Mark Williams
When one reads your article that Russians are skeptical of inequality and draws a line, perhaps logically, that maybe that type of public opinion would lead to state policies that might seek to diminish inequality or address issues of inequality, what I’m hearing you say is that it’s not that the political leadership doesn’t understand the sensitivities that Russians display towards inequality, it is that they do understand them, and, A, either don’t want them to become too public and too much discusses, or B, at times might be able to use those sensitivities for political purposes and to their political advantage.
Will Pyle
I think that’s right.
Mark Williams
Let’s think about what you’re addressing with respect to Russia but in a slightly different context. Didn’t a lot of other countries that are in Russia’s part of the world also go through some really similar tough times when communism collapsed after the Cold War ended? What do we see in those countries? What can you tell us about, you know, something about how Poles, or Ukrainians, or Georgians experienced those impressionable years? Was it similar with the Russians? And have the outcomes to your knowledge been similar or different?
Will Pyle
So it’s true. Almost all the other countries that you mentioned, all the other countries in the region experienced profound economic shocks in the wake of the collapse of communism. Some countries experienced even steeper declines in income in the early 1990s. And throughout Eastern Europe, hard times in the aftermath of economic liberalization were the norm, collapses in GDP, persistently high rates of unemployment; for all the former Soviet republics, but Russia really, those economic wounds were salved, at least in part by the excitement of democracy, by getting out from under the Soviet yoke, and achieving political independence. But for Russians, identification with the Soviet Union was always much stronger than it was for the peoples of the other post-Soviet states. So, the Soviet Union’s collapse was experienced by them much more as a psychological loss. In the survey data that I look at for the article, outside of Russia and those other countries from the former Soviet Union, I don’t see the same pattern connecting personal experiences with economic hardship in the early 1990s. And personal beliefs in the 2000s.
Mark Williams
Are you saying that the psychological dimension that you see in the Russian data isn’t mirrored in the data from some of the other countries?
Will Pyle
So, I am speculating. I don’t really see the psychological dimension in the Russian data, I’m speculating that it’s there that the fact that I see that relationship in the Russian data, and I don’t see it in the data from these other post-Soviet countries, lines up with this hypothesis that I have, that there is this kind of this combination of economic and psychological factors that’s unique to Russians and is not shared elsewhere in the post-Soviet space.
Mark Williams
Do you think that that’s because Russians, seeing themselves as the sort of lodestone of the Soviet Union, had much more to lose than some of the other countries that were grafted into the Soviet Union, are satellites of the Soviet sphere of influence?
Will Pyle
The Soviet Union got started in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were the cradles of the revolution. Russians always occupied the most prominent political posts. Russians always identified more with the Soviet Union, than the peoples of the other republics. So, there was a real sense of identity tied to that.
Mark Williams
That larger political project.
Will Pyle
That larger political project, that larger political body the Russians felt that certainly the people in the Balts, certainly the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azeris, they never felt. And a lot of those people had been part of independent countries before the Soviet Union was even formed. And so, they really kind of felt a sense of liberation when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Mark Williams
Will, I’m curious about something in your, in your hypothesis, and in the findings that you are presenting in this paper? I’m really curious to know what role, and it’s not necessarily addressed in the paper which is why I’m asking now, what role do you think that time and speed might play in the process of forming worldviews? And by this I mean, do you think that it was simply the losses, the economic and the social losses that Russians experienced when the Soviet Union imploded, which played the leading role in forming their worldview, that you see during the Putin era? Or was it the rapidity of these changes that mattered more?
Will Pyle
I think the speed of the changes is critical here. Russians really had the rug pulled out from under them in the early 1990s. The Soviet world, in many ways, was a world of certainty and security. Incomes may not have been as high as the incomes that we have here in the industrialized West. But people were guaranteed a job, they were guaranteed basic health care, they were guaranteed a pension. In the early 1990s, all that was taken away, almost overnight, incredibly rapidly. There’s a Berkeley anthropologist, a guy by the name of Alexei Yurchak, who captured that sense of a wholly unexpected, an almost tectonic shift in Russians’ lives in a book he entitled, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.
Mark Williams
It’s a great title. Well, given the magnitude of the changes that were wrought inside what had been the Soviet Union, given the way that those changes seem to have affected the development of worldviews and the preferences for politics and economics that citizens hold later on, would you expect to see similar results if you studied a different country that underwent a sort of similar loss? And here I’m thinking of, for example, suppose you studied the British say, pre and post the loss of empire, would you expect to see something similar develop in the mindset of British citizens. Would you expect to see similar dynamics, as you observed in Russia, in these other contexts?
Will Pyle
That’s a fun question. Of course, with economists always wanting to know if there’s good data to answer that question. If there was good data to answer that question, I think that would be a natural extension.
Mark Williams
I’m asking you to speculate.
Will Pyle
So, I will speculate now and I’ll draw on somebody who’s smarter than me, Yegor Gaidar who served under Yeltsin as Russia’s prime minister in 1992 and was really the architect of the country’s rapid economic transition away from communism. Just before his death a little over a decade ago, he wrote a really, really smart book called Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. And in it, he writes how difficult it can be to the national consciousness to adapt to the loss of imperial status. He pointed out that when the decline is gradual, a process that extends over decades, this was arguably the case, for Britain.
Mark Williams
It certainly was the case for Britain.
Will Pyle
In the 20th century. The elites and the public realized that coming to terms with the hopelessness, the uselessness of trying to preserve the empire is futile. And in those cases, it’s much easier to handle imperial decline than a sudden collapse, like the Soviet Union experienced. A second thing Gaidar pointed out was that while his reading of history is that nostalgia for territorially integrated empires is always going to be stronger and longer lasting and deeper than the nostalgia for overseas empires. When the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, millions of ethnic Russians were cut off from Russia proper and they were residing in newly independent countries like Ukraine, in what used to be Russia’s territorially integrated empire. Now Putin drew on that, that sense of loss and frayed connections when he decided to annex Crimea back in 2014. Indeed, that was incredibly popular. And Putin’s popularity, I think, was no higher than it’s ever been over the past 20 years than immediately after.
Mark Williams
So, the loss of a landed empire is felt more acutely, more intensely than the loss of an overseas empire. That in turn will have effects on the development of a worldview.
Will Pyle
One of the things that Gaidar expounds on in making that point is that he’s worried that Russia will suffer from the same sort of syndrome that Germany suffered from between the wars. After World War One and territories were, the borders separating states were redrawn. And some of the empires that existed prior to World War One were dissolved: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire were dissolved and state boundaries were redrawn. A lot of Germans got left in nation states outside of Germany, for instance, the Sudeten Germans who were in Czechoslovakia. And of course, Hitler used the fraying of those ethnic bonds across national borders to gin up nationalist sentiments and to get Germans fired up for his ambitions, his expansionist ambitions. And Gaidar, writing in 2007 in a way that was very prescient actually, thought that Putin might do something similar.
Mark Williams
To try and reacquire influence or even territory of what had been the Former Soviet Union.
Will Pyle
Exactly. Not only did Russia invade Georgia in 2008, a year after Gaidar wrote those words, but using the pretext of Russians in Ukraine, he annexed Crimea and has supported surreptitiously this kind of frozen conflict in the Donbass in the years since.
Mark Williams
This is really fascinating. Let me bring you back to how you approach the research in your in your article. As an economist, Will, as a scholar of Russia’s economy, its economic performance, its economic transition, how is research that’s based on honestly what we might call sort of non-standard economic tools, how is that useful? I guess what I’m really asking is, what does the approach that you’ve adopted in the article here help us understand about Russia’s economy or its trajectory that a more standard economic approach might not fully explain or illuminate?
Will Pyle
So, I’m not sure that I’d say that there’s a more standard economic approach to the topic. Economics is a discipline that’s diverse in the questions that it asks and the methods that it uses. I do feel particularly good, particularly proud about the way that I reached out to research on Russia from other disciplines, sociology and anthropology, for example, oral histories, as well, those sources from outside my discipline were particularly influential in the way I formulated my hypothesis, that Russians were particularly impressionable during those years right around the Soviet collapse. To the extent that commentators talk about the Yeltsin years in the 1990s today, most treat the decade as a single contiguous whole. But what my investigation of the sociological and anthropological literature allowed me to see was that Russians experienced the early 1990s very differently than they did the mid to late 1990s, even though the economy in the latter half of the decade was even, if anything, in a worse state than it had been in the earlier part of the decade.
Mark Williams
Interesting. Interesting. Well, what’s next for you? The article that we’ve been discussing for this episode of New Frontiers was published back in January 2020. And you’ve been on sabbatical, I know, for the past year, so are you continuing to do research on this topic? What’s coming down the line?
Will Pyle
Well, so with a colleague from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, I’m working on a new paper that also explores the general relationship between economic shocks and political preferences in Russia. We’re looking at presidential voting patterns between 1991 and 2000, a period that bridges the before and after of market liberalization and privatization. There’s another paper that I’m working on with a colleague at Indiana University, and we’re analyzing how Russians respond relative to the peoples of other countries that get at what we’re calling for now aggressively nationalistic points of view. We’re not terribly comfortable with that term yet. It has a kind of a negative connotation.
Mark Williams
It sounds foreboding.
Will Pyle
Yes, so we might rethink that. But for now, we’re calling it aggressive nationalism. And we’re looking at a quarter century worth of polling data from the 1990s up almost to the present day, focusing in on whether people agree that it’s best to support their country even when it’s wrong, or that their countries should pursue its interests, even if doing so leads to conflict with other countries. And what we’re finding with our data suggests that there’s a real appetite for expansion of military spending, supporting their country, even if it leads to military conflict, supporting their country, even if they know in their heart of hearts that it’s wrong, that that appetite, if anything, it’s stronger, prior to Putin getting on the scene.
Mark Williams
It’s much more endogenous than something that’s been induced by the leader.
Will Pyle
It’s more embedded in Russians. And I don’t want to get into the kind of essentialist argument that it’s always been in the Russian character to be more militarist and aggressive. I think the trigger, and it’s a natural trigger, and it’s not a kind of story, an essentialist sort of story, is that it’s the Russians’ experience that exit from communism in just a very particular way. It’s that combination of being the metropole of a former imperial empire, and experiencing the economic hardship. Those two things kind of mixing in together, gave rise to, it kind of created this brew of factors that gave rise to a more aggressively nationalistic population. In the West, I’m not sure we treated Russia with the respect that they deserved.
Mark Williams
Certainly not the respect that they felt they deserved.
Will Pyle
Certainly not the respect they felt they deserved in the 1990s. We took NATO right up to their right up to their doorstep.
Mark Williams
All the time expressing surprise that this might disquiet Russia. Yes.
Will Pyle
And I think it did. And I think that in many ways, and that was done in the 1990s by the Clinton administration. And I think there were good reasons, there were not necessarily all, there were good reasons for doing that. Can I say with certainty that Putin wouldn’t have made a move into Estonia, if Estonia wasn’t a member of NATO, like it is now? No, I can’t say that; maybe that would have occurred. But I think if we were a little bit more careful in the way that we treated Russia, and were a little bit more sensitive to their former status as a superpower, were a little bit less triumphalist in the aftermath of the Cold War’s end that that aggressive nationalist streak, or however you want to call it, may not have come to the fore as dramatically is it seems to have in the survey data that we’re observing.
Mark Williams
Will, your new project sounds fascinating. I can’t wait to read the article that comes from it. And thank you very much for talking to us today on New Frontiers.
Will Pyle
Mark, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
NH
Professor Will Pyle lives in Middlebury with his wife and sons—the joys of his life. While Professor Pyle grew up in Seattle, Washington, he lived in various places throughout the world which included Japan where he went to kindergarten. Professor Pyle has always loved music from eclectic to Americana and grew up playing the piano. He is very active in the community and has been a Meals on Wheels volunteer for over 12 years. Around town, you can often see him bicycling or catch him at a soccer or ice hockey game.
Hosted by Mark Williams
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
Today, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—is joined by economist Will Pyle, to explore how the tumultuous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union helped shape Russians’ attitudes toward capitalism and democracy in the Putin era.
Mark Williams
Will Pyle is the Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics at Middlebury College. Much of his research is focused on the evolution of markets and markets supporting institutions, particularly in post socialist countries, and especially in Russia. Today, I’ll be talking with Will about one of his most recent projects. It’s an article he published in the journal, Post Soviet Affairs, that, interestingly enough, examines Russians’ political attitudes and their preferences, as much as it does their economic attitudes and preferences. The article is titled, “Russia’s Impressionable Years: Life Experience during the Exit from Communism and Putin Era Beliefs.” Will Pyle, welcome to New Frontiers.
Will Pyle
Thank you, Mark. It’s wonderful to be here.
Mark Williams
Well, why don’t we dive right into it? As an economist, what initially got you interested in researching Russia? How did this happen and what aspects of Russia’s economy have you studied the most?
Will Pyle
Well, my interest in Russia came actually before my interest in economics and it goes all the way back to two years of Russian language courses I took at my public high school in Seattle back in in the 80s. I had a great teacher, a Russian emigree, who, along with teaching us Russian, got us interested in the country’s culture and history. I went on to major in history in college and I took several courses on Russia and eventually wrote a senior thesis on a topic in 19th century Russian intellectual history. I actually only took one economics class as an undergrad and found it found it really boring honestly. After college, I went on to work at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC, and I was there in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the countries of Eastern Europe threw off communism and held democratic elections. It was a really exciting time. I took a great class on the economic transition from communism to capitalism. My professor convinced me that I might want to go on and get a PhD in economics to better understand the whole process of abandoning one economic system for another. So as a graduate student, I got into a decent PhD program and eventually wrote my dissertation on credit markets and the banking system in Russia in the 1990s. And then my research and the Russian economy, or on the Russian economy, for at least the next 15 years after I left graduate school, was focused on Russian businesses, as you as you alluded to earlier, and how they navigated an economic environment in which the bedrock institutions of a modern market economy, like the rule of law, including the enforcement of private property rights, were weak or compromised.
Mark Williams
Well, it sounds like a really fascinating journey that you had from an undergraduate to the professional status that you have right now. The research we’re talking about today, here, is about public opinion in Russia, but again, you’re an economist. And so how did you get interested in researching what you are calling in this article, political preferences of Russians? Is this a topic that you’ve been working on for some time?
Will Pyle
My interest in doing research on public opinion is actually relatively recent. Five years ago, I taught a first-year seminar on the old Soviet economy and its collapse. One of the books that I assigned was an oral history by a Belarusian journalist, a woman by the name of Svetlana Alexievich. And the book of hers that I assigned for my first-year seminar is called Second-hand Time, and it’s about how the demise of communism was experienced in Russia by very average people. And what her oral histories highlight is a real nostalgia for the Soviet Union’s achievements, and a deep sense of loss at its collapse. It was that book, perhaps more than anything else that I read or heard about, that got me thinking carefully about how Russians form their worldviews, about the factors that shape their beliefs, about the way societies should be ordered. And I, I couldn’t help thinking that the really wrenching and disorienting experience of transitioning away from one socio-economic system, communism, to another entirely different socio-economic system, market-based capitalism, like Russia went through in the early 1990s, would leave a lasting impact. And so as a researcher, as an economist, I started cataloging the available public opinion survey data that would allow me to connect Russians life experiences, in the 1990s to their worldviews into the 21st century, that is to understand Russia today, to understand how Russians collectively view the world we have to spend more time understanding the 1990s. And my sense is that certainly economists and to a lesser extent, political scientists, have forgotten the 1990s. And one of the reasons I think, is that there’s just not that much good data from that decade. In the early 1990s especially, the Russian government just didn’t have the capacity to collect the sorts of market-generated data that governments and other industrialized societies routinely collect for many, many economic variables. Decent government data doesn’t begin until just before the turn of the 21st century.
Mark Williams
From what I’m hearing, you see the 1990s as a critical period where one needs to understand what’s going on in Russia, at that point, in order to better understand what one sees coming out of Russia today. On that basis, let me be a bit provocative and ask you this sort of devil’s advocate question. Honestly, why should someone even care about public opinion in Russia today? Why should someone care about what Russians think about their country? How it ought to be run? After all, Russia is an autocracy. Political freedoms are limited and circumscribed dissent is suppressed. Aren’t the opinions of Russians really unrelated to how their country is actually governed and what Vladimir Putin decides to do?
Will Pyle
Well, that’s a great question and you are indeed being provocative there in asking it. There’s a Middlebury alum, Tim Frye, and he’s now a professor of political science at Columbia University. And he’s one of our country’s leading interpreters of contemporary Russian politics. Anyway, he’s just published a book about Putin called Weak Strongman. And one of the points he makes, Putin wants to be feared, yes. But since repression is costly, and not always effective, he also wants to be loved. And being popular by being responsive and sensitive to public opinion, makes it less likely that he’ll face challenges to his rule. There’s another recent book by political scientists Sam Green and Graham Robertson that makes a very much related point. They argue that Putin’s rule is it’s not forced on an oppressed and unwilling public, but is in some sense co-constructed with society. Putin has been, in effect, lifted up above the normal push and pull of politics by 10s of millions of Russians.
Mark Williams
Again, that’s a fascinating response. Let’s dive into the heart of your article. And let’s start with the title. What are Russia’s impressionable years? What does that phrase actually mean for listeners who aren’t acquainted with it?
Will Pyle
There’s a hypothesis from social psychology, that one’s life experiences in young adulthood, basically late teens until the mid 20s, leave a more lasting impact than if they’d occurred at another stage in life. This is often referred to as the impressionable years hypothesis. And not too long ago, two economists put the hypothesis to the test by looking into whether living through an economic downturn when you were 18 to 25, whether that affected your worldview later in life. So they looked at a lot of survey data from the United States going back to the middle of the 20th century, and what they found was that if you were you were living in a part of the United States that was going through tough economic times when you were in your impressionable years, you are more likely to hold progressive economic views later in life than somebody your own age that hadn’t experienced that same sort of economic downturn during their impressionable years. Now, the impressionable years that I’m talking about in my article, that are part of the title of the article, are a bit different. I’m using that phrase to refer to what I hypothesize is a stage of history in which all Russians regardless of age, were prone to form enduring memories and beliefs based on their own individual life experiences. I home in particular on the period from 1989 to 1994. And so that’s the idea. So I’m cribbing a term and using it in a slightly different way than it’s used traditionally. I focus in on that period from 1989 to 1994, and it’s a period that that covers the last three years of the Soviet Union and the first three years of an independent Russia. It’s a period that’s bracketed on one side by the dissolution of Soviet control over Eastern Europe and the unraveling of the Soviet economy and on the other side by the privatization of a huge swath of Russia’s economic base. It’s a half decade in which Russian life expectancy collapsed in a way that’s almost unprecedented for a country not experiencing war, or widespread disease. It’s a period in which the old rules governing how society was organized were thrown out, and new ones were introduced. It’s a period as I write in the article, when so much was so new for so many. Russians at that time, were taking it all in learning lessons about how a market economy with private property functioned, how democracy and free elections functioned, and drawing conclusions, forming beliefs that had the potential to endure for a long time, perhaps their entire lives. That particular half-decade, from 89 to 94, had the potential, I hypothesize—and it’s just a hypothesis—I hypothesize left a deep and lasting impression on them.
Mark Williams
How do you go about showing that there’s actually a connection between what Russians experienced in life during those impressionable years you’re talking about which, which honestly is over a generation ago, and what they believe much more recently.
Will Pyle
So I couldn’t have done it without access to a really wonderful data set. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development carried out a massive survey across Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union in 2006. And they asked a whole bunch of questions of at least 1000 individuals per country. And one set of questions, had a retrospective or backward in time component to it. People were asked about life events, potential life events, and whether they’d occurred in 1989, 1990, 1991, each year all the way up until 2006. Which years for instance, they had been laid off from a job, which years they had experienced a severe decline in their household income, etc. Those are those sorts of questions.
Mark Williams
Big life changing events, milestone events.
Will Pyle
Exactly, exactly. People were asked also for a lot of information on their lives in 2006: their employment status, their income, how well they felt they were doing financially relative to other people in their country. So they basically collected a ton of personal information from this representative sample of at least 1000 people per country. The questions that I was most interested in had to do with their attitudes and beliefs, particularly whether they felt democracy was a good political system, whether an economy based on markets and private property was better than the alternatives, and whether they felt their government should do more to redistribute income and wealth. Now, these are their attitudes and beliefs circa 2006, well into the Putin years, which had begun in 1999. And I was particularly interested in investigating my impressionable years hypothesis, that a person’s life experiences and experiencing economic hardships between 1989 and 1994 influenced those beliefs and attitudes with respect to democracy, and a market economy, and the proper role of government in redistributing income in 2006 were different as a result. I’m thinking of Russians as being just incredibly sensitive to external stimuli in that period from 89 to 94, because everything was so new. And so they’re learning lessons about how this new world works. They’ve heard, and they’ve imagined what the world beyond the Berlin Wall was like prior to 1989.
Mark Williams
The wonders of capitalism, and consumerism, and prosperity.
Will Pyle
Exactly they had an exaggerated sense, I think, of the glories of life to the west. But they really had their antennas up in that period that half decade. And so that, because they were extra sensitive to their initial experiences, those initial lived experiences, I’m hypothesizing that those initial experiences did get embedded in a way that maybe later experiences with markets, private property, and even democracy didn’t get embedded in the same way.
Mark Williams
Well, one thing that stuck out to me in your article is that when you examine the attitudes and preferences that the Russians display, they’re quite skeptical, you claim, about economic inequality. And presumably, I assume that’s because since under Soviet communism, vast or routine economic inequality was rare, or at least it wasn’t acknowledged, officially. And this raised two questions in my mind: first, hasn’t economic inequality actually grown dramatically under Putin? And maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my impression. And second, if that’s true, then what does it tell us about how much Russians’ beliefs actually shaped the country’s trajectory under Putin?
Will Pyle
So that’s a great question. A really, really good question. I’m going to put a pin in it, if it’s okay with you, and come back to it. And I’d like to finish the thought about how I actually use the survey data.
Mark Williams
Okay, please do.
Will Pyle
To illustrate that the hypothesis, my hypothesis, actually held up. And so, we economists, and a lot of political scientists these days, use statistical software. We take it to the big data sets, and we can look at large data sets and perform exercises that effectively allow, in this case, me to compare Russians that are similar in all respects that I can observe in the data: same education, same household structure, same gender, age, similar economic circumstances in 2006. And then see if those who experienced economic hardship during the impressionable years, on average felt differently from those that didn’t experience economic hardship from those same impressionable years. And that’s, in fact, what I find in the data. Russians who suffered between 1989 and 1994, Russians who suffered, in particular because they lost their job or they suffered a severe decline in their income, they’re the ones that are particularly skeptical of democracy and market economics. And they’re particularly big believers in a more progressive redistributionist government in 2006. So they have a very different orientation than Russians who didn’t have this same experience of suffering back in those impressionable years. Now, interestingly, I didn’t find any relationship in the data between individuals experiencing a job loss or a decline in income after 1994 and their beliefs in 2006, there was only in that period between 1989 and 1994 where we see that strong relationship. But to come back to your really good question about inequality and Russian sensitivity to inequality, it certainly comes out in the survey data from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development that Russians are unusually kind of sensitive to questions of economic inequality. And they’re big believers relative to peoples in other countries that government should get involved in addressing inequality.
Mark Williams
What’s interesting to me about that is from a Western perspective, we hear a lot about the oligarchs who have commandeered the commanding heights of the Russian economy, perhaps via the privatization of portions of the old Soviet state-owned enterprises and so forth. And from a Western perspective, one hears a lot about the growth of inequality that seems to be quite dramatic. And so, which is why I was wondering about the impact that Russians’ concerns over inequality might actually have or not have on the direction that the Russian state is going under President Putin.
Will Pyle
It’s a very natural question. Now economists, we have ways of formally measuring inequality. And those measures just took off really rapidly in the early 1990s. And if anything in the years since they’ve come down.
Mark Williams
Really, they’ve come down?
Will Pyle
They’ve come down. They’re still very high. In terms of the policy response to the inequality even in the present day, I think there are a couple points worth making. First of all, Putin recognizes that there’s a political payoff to knocking the rich off their pedestal. During his first term, all the way back in the early 2000s, he launched a frontal assault against one of the big oligarchs. There was one particular oligarch, guy named Mikhail Kolakowski, who was the owner of the biggest private oil firm in Russia in the early 2000s. And Putin threw him in jail for 10 years, before sending him into exile, and that was incredibly popular. And Putin understood that that would be popular because of Russian sensitivity to question inequality.
Mark Williams
I see. So he could use some of this to his own political advantage in a very practical sense.
Will Pyle
Yes, very much so. And another point, in part because of the Russian public sensitivity to economic inequality, Putin and his inner circle have gone to great lengths in the present day to conceal just how wealthy they’ve become. You’re probably familiar with the name of Alexei Navalny, who’s been Russia’s leading opposition figure for at least a decade now. Just in the past year, he survived an assassination attempt.
Mark Williams
He was poisoned, wasn’t he?
Will Pyle
He was poisoned just before getting on a plane, and then he was nursed back to health in a German hospital. But being the courageous figure that he is he went right back to Russia, got right back in the game, and very soon after that was put in prison on trumped up charges. Anyways, Navalny’s popularity as an opposition figure grew out of his efforts to expose the corruption and ill-gotten wealth of Russia’s governing elites. Information about Russia’s inequality today is something that Putin very much wants to keep hidden.
Mark Williams
That reminds me of something that’s been in the news of late, and that is the revelations about hidden wealth by powerful individuals and world leaders that have been revealed with respect to the Pandora Papers. Can you tell us anything about that, and how that might play into the sensitivity that Russians have about inequality within their country?
Will Pyle
So my understanding is, I’ve just read the news stories, and my understanding is that there are more Russian accounts that have been unearthed than accounts from any other single country.
Mark Williams
These are issues they would rather not see come to light.
Will Pyle
Exactly. Because of exactly what you asked about because of Russian sensitivity to questions of inequality, they really want to keep these sorts of matters under wraps.
Mark Williams
When one reads your article that Russians are skeptical of inequality and draws a line, perhaps logically, that maybe that type of public opinion would lead to state policies that might seek to diminish inequality or address issues of inequality, what I’m hearing you say is that it’s not that the political leadership doesn’t understand the sensitivities that Russians display towards inequality, it is that they do understand them, and, A, either don’t want them to become too public and too much discusses, or B, at times might be able to use those sensitivities for political purposes and to their political advantage.
Will Pyle
I think that’s right.
Mark Williams
Let’s think about what you’re addressing with respect to Russia but in a slightly different context. Didn’t a lot of other countries that are in Russia’s part of the world also go through some really similar tough times when communism collapsed after the Cold War ended? What do we see in those countries? What can you tell us about, you know, something about how Poles, or Ukrainians, or Georgians experienced those impressionable years? Was it similar with the Russians? And have the outcomes to your knowledge been similar or different?
Will Pyle
So it’s true. Almost all the other countries that you mentioned, all the other countries in the region experienced profound economic shocks in the wake of the collapse of communism. Some countries experienced even steeper declines in income in the early 1990s. And throughout Eastern Europe, hard times in the aftermath of economic liberalization were the norm, collapses in GDP, persistently high rates of unemployment; for all the former Soviet republics, but Russia really, those economic wounds were salved, at least in part by the excitement of democracy, by getting out from under the Soviet yoke, and achieving political independence. But for Russians, identification with the Soviet Union was always much stronger than it was for the peoples of the other post-Soviet states. So, the Soviet Union’s collapse was experienced by them much more as a psychological loss. In the survey data that I look at for the article, outside of Russia and those other countries from the former Soviet Union, I don’t see the same pattern connecting personal experiences with economic hardship in the early 1990s. And personal beliefs in the 2000s.
Mark Williams
Are you saying that the psychological dimension that you see in the Russian data isn’t mirrored in the data from some of the other countries?
Will Pyle
So, I am speculating. I don’t really see the psychological dimension in the Russian data, I’m speculating that it’s there that the fact that I see that relationship in the Russian data, and I don’t see it in the data from these other post-Soviet countries, lines up with this hypothesis that I have, that there is this kind of this combination of economic and psychological factors that’s unique to Russians and is not shared elsewhere in the post-Soviet space.
Mark Williams
Do you think that that’s because Russians, seeing themselves as the sort of lodestone of the Soviet Union, had much more to lose than some of the other countries that were grafted into the Soviet Union, are satellites of the Soviet sphere of influence?
Will Pyle
The Soviet Union got started in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were the cradles of the revolution. Russians always occupied the most prominent political posts. Russians always identified more with the Soviet Union, than the peoples of the other republics. So, there was a real sense of identity tied to that.
Mark Williams
That larger political project.
Will Pyle
That larger political project, that larger political body the Russians felt that certainly the people in the Balts, certainly the Georgians, the Armenians, the Azeris, they never felt. And a lot of those people had been part of independent countries before the Soviet Union was even formed. And so, they really kind of felt a sense of liberation when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Mark Williams
Will, I’m curious about something in your, in your hypothesis, and in the findings that you are presenting in this paper? I’m really curious to know what role, and it’s not necessarily addressed in the paper which is why I’m asking now, what role do you think that time and speed might play in the process of forming worldviews? And by this I mean, do you think that it was simply the losses, the economic and the social losses that Russians experienced when the Soviet Union imploded, which played the leading role in forming their worldview, that you see during the Putin era? Or was it the rapidity of these changes that mattered more?
Will Pyle
I think the speed of the changes is critical here. Russians really had the rug pulled out from under them in the early 1990s. The Soviet world, in many ways, was a world of certainty and security. Incomes may not have been as high as the incomes that we have here in the industrialized West. But people were guaranteed a job, they were guaranteed basic health care, they were guaranteed a pension. In the early 1990s, all that was taken away, almost overnight, incredibly rapidly. There’s a Berkeley anthropologist, a guy by the name of Alexei Yurchak, who captured that sense of a wholly unexpected, an almost tectonic shift in Russians’ lives in a book he entitled, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.
Mark Williams
It’s a great title. Well, given the magnitude of the changes that were wrought inside what had been the Soviet Union, given the way that those changes seem to have affected the development of worldviews and the preferences for politics and economics that citizens hold later on, would you expect to see similar results if you studied a different country that underwent a sort of similar loss? And here I’m thinking of, for example, suppose you studied the British say, pre and post the loss of empire, would you expect to see something similar develop in the mindset of British citizens. Would you expect to see similar dynamics, as you observed in Russia, in these other contexts?
Will Pyle
That’s a fun question. Of course, with economists always wanting to know if there’s good data to answer that question. If there was good data to answer that question, I think that would be a natural extension.
Mark Williams
I’m asking you to speculate.
Will Pyle
So, I will speculate now and I’ll draw on somebody who’s smarter than me, Yegor Gaidar who served under Yeltsin as Russia’s prime minister in 1992 and was really the architect of the country’s rapid economic transition away from communism. Just before his death a little over a decade ago, he wrote a really, really smart book called Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. And in it, he writes how difficult it can be to the national consciousness to adapt to the loss of imperial status. He pointed out that when the decline is gradual, a process that extends over decades, this was arguably the case, for Britain.
Mark Williams
It certainly was the case for Britain.
Will Pyle
In the 20th century. The elites and the public realized that coming to terms with the hopelessness, the uselessness of trying to preserve the empire is futile. And in those cases, it’s much easier to handle imperial decline than a sudden collapse, like the Soviet Union experienced. A second thing Gaidar pointed out was that while his reading of history is that nostalgia for territorially integrated empires is always going to be stronger and longer lasting and deeper than the nostalgia for overseas empires. When the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, millions of ethnic Russians were cut off from Russia proper and they were residing in newly independent countries like Ukraine, in what used to be Russia’s territorially integrated empire. Now Putin drew on that, that sense of loss and frayed connections when he decided to annex Crimea back in 2014. Indeed, that was incredibly popular. And Putin’s popularity, I think, was no higher than it’s ever been over the past 20 years than immediately after.
Mark Williams
So, the loss of a landed empire is felt more acutely, more intensely than the loss of an overseas empire. That in turn will have effects on the development of a worldview.
Will Pyle
One of the things that Gaidar expounds on in making that point is that he’s worried that Russia will suffer from the same sort of syndrome that Germany suffered from between the wars. After World War One and territories were, the borders separating states were redrawn. And some of the empires that existed prior to World War One were dissolved: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire were dissolved and state boundaries were redrawn. A lot of Germans got left in nation states outside of Germany, for instance, the Sudeten Germans who were in Czechoslovakia. And of course, Hitler used the fraying of those ethnic bonds across national borders to gin up nationalist sentiments and to get Germans fired up for his ambitions, his expansionist ambitions. And Gaidar, writing in 2007 in a way that was very prescient actually, thought that Putin might do something similar.
Mark Williams
To try and reacquire influence or even territory of what had been the Former Soviet Union.
Will Pyle
Exactly. Not only did Russia invade Georgia in 2008, a year after Gaidar wrote those words, but using the pretext of Russians in Ukraine, he annexed Crimea and has supported surreptitiously this kind of frozen conflict in the Donbass in the years since.
Mark Williams
This is really fascinating. Let me bring you back to how you approach the research in your in your article. As an economist, Will, as a scholar of Russia’s economy, its economic performance, its economic transition, how is research that’s based on honestly what we might call sort of non-standard economic tools, how is that useful? I guess what I’m really asking is, what does the approach that you’ve adopted in the article here help us understand about Russia’s economy or its trajectory that a more standard economic approach might not fully explain or illuminate?
Will Pyle
So, I’m not sure that I’d say that there’s a more standard economic approach to the topic. Economics is a discipline that’s diverse in the questions that it asks and the methods that it uses. I do feel particularly good, particularly proud about the way that I reached out to research on Russia from other disciplines, sociology and anthropology, for example, oral histories, as well, those sources from outside my discipline were particularly influential in the way I formulated my hypothesis, that Russians were particularly impressionable during those years right around the Soviet collapse. To the extent that commentators talk about the Yeltsin years in the 1990s today, most treat the decade as a single contiguous whole. But what my investigation of the sociological and anthropological literature allowed me to see was that Russians experienced the early 1990s very differently than they did the mid to late 1990s, even though the economy in the latter half of the decade was even, if anything, in a worse state than it had been in the earlier part of the decade.
Mark Williams
Interesting. Interesting. Well, what’s next for you? The article that we’ve been discussing for this episode of New Frontiers was published back in January 2020. And you’ve been on sabbatical, I know, for the past year, so are you continuing to do research on this topic? What’s coming down the line?
Will Pyle
Well, so with a colleague from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, I’m working on a new paper that also explores the general relationship between economic shocks and political preferences in Russia. We’re looking at presidential voting patterns between 1991 and 2000, a period that bridges the before and after of market liberalization and privatization. There’s another paper that I’m working on with a colleague at Indiana University, and we’re analyzing how Russians respond relative to the peoples of other countries that get at what we’re calling for now aggressively nationalistic points of view. We’re not terribly comfortable with that term yet. It has a kind of a negative connotation.
Mark Williams
It sounds foreboding.
Will Pyle
Yes, so we might rethink that. But for now, we’re calling it aggressive nationalism. And we’re looking at a quarter century worth of polling data from the 1990s up almost to the present day, focusing in on whether people agree that it’s best to support their country even when it’s wrong, or that their countries should pursue its interests, even if doing so leads to conflict with other countries. And what we’re finding with our data suggests that there’s a real appetite for expansion of military spending, supporting their country, even if it leads to military conflict, supporting their country, even if they know in their heart of hearts that it’s wrong, that that appetite, if anything, it’s stronger, prior to Putin getting on the scene.
Mark Williams
It’s much more endogenous than something that’s been induced by the leader.
Will Pyle
It’s more embedded in Russians. And I don’t want to get into the kind of essentialist argument that it’s always been in the Russian character to be more militarist and aggressive. I think the trigger, and it’s a natural trigger, and it’s not a kind of story, an essentialist sort of story, is that it’s the Russians’ experience that exit from communism in just a very particular way. It’s that combination of being the metropole of a former imperial empire, and experiencing the economic hardship. Those two things kind of mixing in together, gave rise to, it kind of created this brew of factors that gave rise to a more aggressively nationalistic population. In the West, I’m not sure we treated Russia with the respect that they deserved.
Mark Williams
Certainly not the respect that they felt they deserved.
Will Pyle
Certainly not the respect they felt they deserved in the 1990s. We took NATO right up to their right up to their doorstep.
Mark Williams
All the time expressing surprise that this might disquiet Russia. Yes.
Will Pyle
And I think it did. And I think that in many ways, and that was done in the 1990s by the Clinton administration. And I think there were good reasons, there were not necessarily all, there were good reasons for doing that. Can I say with certainty that Putin wouldn’t have made a move into Estonia, if Estonia wasn’t a member of NATO, like it is now? No, I can’t say that; maybe that would have occurred. But I think if we were a little bit more careful in the way that we treated Russia, and were a little bit more sensitive to their former status as a superpower, were a little bit less triumphalist in the aftermath of the Cold War’s end that that aggressive nationalist streak, or however you want to call it, may not have come to the fore as dramatically is it seems to have in the survey data that we’re observing.
Mark Williams
Will, your new project sounds fascinating. I can’t wait to read the article that comes from it. And thank you very much for talking to us today on New Frontiers.
Will Pyle
Mark, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
NH
Professor Will Pyle lives in Middlebury with his wife and sons—the joys of his life. While Professor Pyle grew up in Seattle, Washington, he lived in various places throughout the world which included Japan where he went to kindergarten. Professor Pyle has always loved music from eclectic to Americana and grew up playing the piano. He is very active in the community and has been a Meals on Wheels volunteer for over 12 years. Around town, you can often see him bicycling or catch him at a soccer or ice hockey game.
Episode 2—China and the American Right
“Asia First was an insistence that Pacific affairs receive as much if not more attention than European Atlantic relations in the Cold War. Its proponents, its supporters, many of whom were very powerful, conservative voices in the Senate and in Congress, felt like U.S. foreign policy after World War II was neglecting mainland Asia and therefore imperiling the whole Cold War.” —Joyce Mao
In this episode, Mark Williams talks with Joyce Mao, Middlebury College associate professor of history, about the Asia First initiative and, in particular, the effects that U.S.-China-Taiwan relations had on American domestic politics. Why were American conservatives so interested in Asia after WWII and in China particularly? In what ways, if any, did conservative concerns over China influence U.S. foreign policy, and how did conservatives’ interest in China help shape the development of the political right in the United States?
Joyce Mao’s book, Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism, was published in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press.
New Frontiers - Episode 2: China and the American Right
New Frontiers - Season 1, Ep 2: China and the American Right
Joyce Mao, associate professor of history at Middlebury College, discusses her research and book, Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism, the first publication to look at the imprint of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations upon the American Right after World War II.
Transcript
New Frontiers podcast with Joyce Mao
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—sits down with historian Joyce Mao, to discuss how concerns over China—and US foreign policy in Asia after WWII—helped shape modern political conservativism in America, and create a movement which in time exercised increasing influence in American politics.
Mark Williams
Joyce Mao is an associate professor of history at Middlebury College. Much of her research is focused on American foreign affairs and national politics during the cold war, especially with respect to U.S.-Asia relations and, in particular, with respect to the effects that U.S., China, Taiwan relations had on American domestic politics. Today, I’ll be talking with Joyce about the arguments she makes and the conclusions she reaches in her book, Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism, which the University of Chicago Press published in 2015. Joyce Mao, welcome to New Frontiers.
Joyce Mao
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. I love the title of the series. I feel like we’re going to announce a mission to the moon.
Mark Williams
We might get there eventually. Well, why don’t we dive right in and let me ask this. With all of the history that there is to study what kindled your own personal interest in this particular topic, China and the United States of the 1950s and 60s, what was it that drew you to this subject?
Joyce Mao
Well, my interest in political history and the history of conservatism began when I was an undergrad history major at UC Berkeley and growing up in California and studying California history, I became very aware of California as the cradle of the new right. And when I went to grad school in history at Berkeley, there was a very steady discourse about conservative internationalism, especially after 9/11. And mainstream media coverage of 9/11 and what the Bush administration would do in response to it really made it seem as if conservative internationalism and overseas intervention were a given. And I was curious about how that came to be, because I was doing a lot of reading about the 1930s and 1940s when conservatives were considered isolationists. So, I began to wonder how conservatism got from point A to point B. And the more I read, the more I researched, it became very clear that China was a big part of that equation.
Mark Williams
Interesting. Interesting. Well, let’s go back to the beginning in a way, and let’s think about the title of your book itself. What do you mean by Asia First? What is that?
Joyce Mao
Well to put it succinctly, Asia first was an insistence that Pacific affairs receive as much, if not more attention than European Atlantic relations in the cold war, its proponents, its supporters, many of whom were very powerful, conservative voices in the Senate, in Congress felt like U.S. foreign policy after World War II was neglecting mainland Asia and therefore imperiling the whole cold war.
Mark Williams
Is this sort of coming out of the, the tail end of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to, to rebuild Western Europe after the war?
Joyce Mao
Yes. And certainly that was a counterpoint. Conservatives who were Asia firsters looked at what was happening in Europe and the investment that was happening there on the part of the United States as a stark contrast to what they felt was not happening in China in particular. And it’s great that you bring up Marshall because it was the failure of the Marshall mission in 1947, to bring about some sort of coalition government between the Chinese communists and the Chinese nationalists that really saw a drop off in terms of initiative for U.S.-China policy. And of course, Asia firsters would argue that pause really helped bring about a conclusion to the Chinese civil war that was unfavorable to American interests.
Mark Williams
You perhaps have already answered this or at least provided part of an answer. If we were to go back to the 50s and 60s, is the reason that American conservatives were so concerned about Asia precisely because they saw this divide, you might say, between the focus on Europe and the efforts that were being put forth there and the focus on, or the lack of focus that they saw or perceived to be with respect to of Asia?
Joyce Mao
There was definitely among some conservatives, a genuine, sincere interest in China and the fate of China. A long missionary history, a long history of engagement with China that really dated from the early 19th century was one of the underpinnings that Asia first conservatives pointed to as evidence that the United States should keep up a commitment to the potential of a democratic, what they called a free China. And so, all the efforts that were underway in the European Atlantic provided a strong precedent for conservatives to say, why isn’t the same sort of investment being made in regards to China. But then there’s the cynical side of the story in that there were plenty of conservatives who became Asia firsters, who really didn’t have an organic interest in China, who regarded Chiang kai shek’s leadership with some degree of skepticism, but China was too good of an opportunity to pass up when it came to critiquing containment policy, liberalism as a governing ethos. And so, when joining forces, those Asia firsters who really believed in a free China and those who were there for more sort of opportunistic reasons, and many of them were one and the same really, it resulted in a potent argument about an Achilles heel in U.S. foreign policy and became a politicized issue within domestic political circles.
Mark Williams
So, China should be at the forefront for a variety of security reasons, strategic reasons.
Joyce Mao
Yes, absolutely. And after 1949 and Mao’s victory, you have to understand that the world map was at the forefront of a lot of political arguments in terms of which part of the world was free, quote unquote, and which part of the world was red, quote unquote. And with Mao’s victory, the largest country in the world went red. And so, that for Asia first conservatives was proof positive that containment policy was going to fail. It had already failed. The United States had, quote unquote, lost China to communism. And so, there were questions of, well who lost China? Who within the U.S. government let this happen? And that is based on a number of assumptions about American paternalism and that China is the United States’s to lose in the first place?
Mark Williams
That’s exactly what I was going to say. It’s always fascinating to me to hear those types of discourses for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined, as if a country, a civilization as old and a country as vast as China was America’s to lose in the first place. It’s quite odd. So let’s go back to these concerns that the conservatives had with respect to China. Was this the dominant mode of thought in the United States at the time, is this what most people were thinking back then, or was there a kind of counter narrative and at least in political circles that saw things about China differently than the way that the conservatives did?
Joyce Mao
Asia first conservatism, the argument that the United States had somehow lost China was definitely the alternative political view. But they were an incredibly loud minority voice with well-placed advocates in elite institutions within government. The dominant mode of thinking about U.S. foreign policy was of course containment theory. And this was, you know, the overarching framework for the cold war that most experts signed on to. What was different about Asia first was its very pointed critique, not only that containment and a defensive posture in the cold war, wasn’t going to work in the long term and that China was evidence of that; but also, they took containment theory as an example of how liberalism overall was a faulty way to approach governance, both at home and in foreign policy. And so, the spinoff arguments about who lost China and Asia first brought in arguments about executive power, congressional balance of power, not only in foreign policy but in other realms of governance as well, and how the United States saw itself within a multilateral security system. So, Asia firsters extended the who lost China argument into critiques of the United Nations for example, corresponding arguments about how the United States needed to wield its power more unilaterally and not be beholden to the whims of communist states or third world nations.
Mark Williams
Who might be members of the United Nations.
Joyce Mao
Precisely. So then there’s also the McCarthy side of the story. McCarthy’s red scare began as a hunt for communist subversion within the state department. Who lost China was a big part of the context for McCarthyism’s rise to the fore of the national political discussion. And so, arguments about government is too big; it’s too bureaucratic; there are employees within government who aren’t vetted enough; and that such an unwieldy state is not serving American interests either at home or abroad.
Mark Williams
I see. Well, this is really fascinating to think about the way that the foreign gets mirrored into the domestic and is welded together there. Let me be a little provocative. You said that you were a history major as an undergraduate. I almost became a history major myself, so I did a fair amount of reading as an undergraduate in history. And the history books, at least to my mind, they’re usually filled with lots of information, lots of details and so forth. But when you boil it all down, most history books seem to make a couple of central or really big arguments. And one of the biggest arguments that your book seems to make is that the conservatives’ interest in China actually helped shape how the political right developed here in the United States. So I have two questions for you here. First, is that more or less an accurate reading of the book, I’m not misinterpreting anything there? Is that an accurate reading of one of the books big arguments? And second, if it is an accurate reading, then how much of this conservative focus on China actually did help shape how the political right developed here at home?
Joyce Mao
You read the book correctly. Thank you for, you know, hewing so closely to one of the main arguments that I make in the book is that China helped bridge a divide between the elite institutional politicians that were easily associated with Asia first conservatism, names like Barry Goldwater, William F. Nolan, who was a senator from California, Robert Taft, who was a senator from Ohio and senate majority leader. These were folks who really inhabited sort of exalted realms of elite American politics. But one of the marked features of the postwar new right is its grassroots movement and its ability to reach new audiences, new constituents, and keep conservatism evolving and reaching new audiences and new voters. And in the 1940s, there is a palpable divide between elite conservative officials in places like Congress, and a growing grassroots movement that is going to only reach full flower in the 1960s.
China is an issue that helps, in a topical way, elite officials reach out to grassroots activists and vice versa. China means so many different things to so many different kinds of Americans. And what really helps unite these branches of the conservative movement, when it comes to China, is this affinity for the idea of China and the potential of China as a democratic counterpart to the United States in the Pacific. It is something that I found really consistently in the archives when it came to letters from constituents to their representatives. Publications that grassroots organizations would put out to members and future members, as well as, you know campaigns trying to reach out to elected officials.
Mark Williams
This belief that China would become or ought to become a democracy, sort of the mirror image of the United States, something like that?
Joyce Mao
Yes. And that goes back to that sort of open door, special relationship that harkened back to the United States poised to become a major world power reaching out, the world’s youngest democracy reaching out to reform, you know, the world’s oldest country in a meaningful way and building sort of bridges of ideological brotherhood. At the same time, the reality is that that relationship never really existed in the first place; that there was a distinct power imbalance that the dreams of a Chinese democracy never really come to fruition according to American metrics. And there is a lot of discussion among both conservative activists and conservative officials in the past perfect tense that the United States should have done this. It could have done that. And so, in the 1940s maybe there was some potential hope that the cold war would go a different way, but once the PRC became an irrevocable reality, there is a distinct rhetorical shift that both elite officials and activists share in that, okay, well we’re going to treat China as evidence. What happened to China’s evidence that liberalism is a failure containment is a joke and use what we can out of this idea of China to move our own agendas forward.
Mark Williams
So, the right becomes shaped by its being the antithesis of liberalism, its perception of liberalism. And this has both a domestic and an international or foreign component to it.
Joyce Mao
And one of the arguments I make in Asia First is that without China, without the specter of Chinese communism, the right would not have been able to muster the same kind of foreign policy platform and foreign policy arguments that it so eloquently advanced in the 60s and beyond.
Mark Williams
Interesting, interesting. Your book I think makes clear that when you’re talking about conservatives, quote unquote, you’re really referring to modern conservatives. And so, for the benefit of our listeners, could you please explain what you mean by modern conservatism? Modern as opposed to what?
Joyce Mao
Modern as opposed to the earlier iteration of conservatism that dominated say in the 20s and the 30s, the brand of politics that emphasized small government, free market, and a brand of politics that frankly, after the great crash of 1929 was associated most readily with big business, the one percent. I call it modern conservatism based on two key characteristics. The first is an approach to internationalism, meaning an active vision for the United States role in the world, and a clear approach to foreign policy. This is something that’s distinctly lacking in the pre-World War II version of conservatism. But after World War II, it’s a political necessity to have a foreign policy. And one of the stories that I track in the book is how it is that China as an issue came along at precisely the right time for conservatives who are looking for a way to achieve a toehold in full foreign policy discussions. This gave them a really good opportunity to enter a national and international discussion about how it is that the United States was going to wield its superpower. So, however theoretical or imperfect in its application, this Asia first internationalism really did signal a responsiveness to global affairs, marking it as modern, as I discuss in the book.
Mark Williams
Okay. Then one might say that the conservatives at the time took stock of their movement. They saw a gap, meaning a foreign policy gap, and China was utilized to help fill that gap and help build and expand the movement.
Joyce Mao
Yes. The second feature of modern conservatism that I really want to mark is how it is that conservatism continually evolved its organization and its mobilization, meaning that it was a political movement whose dynamic composition allowed for future growth. And it allowed for the movement to have multiple epicenters of activism, legislation, changing ideas, and therefore ensuring that it would continue to progress and move forward. And one of the key claims that I make in Asia First is that China was a key component of both those branches of conservative development.
Mark Williams
So, China was also an aspect of this, we might call it agility, this movement agility? Can you elaborate?
Joyce Mao
China was a way for conservatives to advance ideas and ideals because it was almost a figment of the imagination, this idea that China could be a democratic counterpart to the United States. The needle wasn’t moving in terms of official China policy, per se. Chiang kai shek was not going to be, quote unquote, unleashed to take back the mainland. That was a far from distant possibility and conservatives knew it. So the ways in which they would invoke China, which drew upon, you know, sort of sentimental attachment to China or China as a shorthand for liberalism’s failures, was a way for conservatives to demonstrate that they had some sort of foreign policy acumen, but at the same time invoke a lot of the ideas that were driving their movement at that particular moment in time.
Mark Williams
Okay. Thank you. Sort of carrying on with this notion of modern conservatives, as you look over America’s political landscape today, do you think that there’s still such a thing as a modern conservative, at least as in terms of the way that you’re using this to describe the 1950s and the 1960s?
Joyce Mao
When I look at politics today, I definitely see vestiges of Asia first internationalism within contemporary discussions about foreign policy. There are still tenants of conservative internationalism from the 50s and 60s that are readily associated with the ways in which conservative foreign policy is thought of and remembered; things like an emphasis on unilateralism, selective military intervention, and certainly a sort of hardline rhetorical articulation about things like communism. And I’m thinking specifically about the Reagan era, but even today there is growing public sphere analysis of how the cold war continues to impact contemporary politics, and Asia first internationalism should be part of that conversation. But I think when you look at and assess the conservative movement today, you also need to take into account the social and moral phase of conservative development that drove the movement in the 1970s and the 1980s. Nowadays, I think it’s a combination of a hawkish unilateralism and the moralism of the Christian right, as well as a willingness to harness the energy of the fringe as a way to redefine the mainstream. Someone like Josh Hawley seems eager to take up the mantle of modern conservatism. Ben Sasse is also in the mix.
Mark Williams
Okay. Good examples. You know, I have to say that I found your book a really enjoyable read, and I’m wondering if you could share a couple of telling stories from the book, you know, are there any particular nuggets that listeners might look forward to reading about?
Joyce Mao
Well, one entire chapter is devoted to the John Birch Society, which was a well-known grassroots organization named after a U.S. army intelligence officer named John Birch, who was killed by Chinese communist soldiers in the waning days of World War II. Not many folks who have even heard of the John Birch Society would recognize the origins of the group’s name. And it’s an example of what I was talking about in terms of that bridge that China provided between grassroots organizations like the John Birch Society and elite politicians. The name inspiration came to the founder of the John Birch Society, a man named Robert Welch, who was a candy maker from just outside of Boston. Welch was really disillusioned with Republican politics; he did not like the direction of the party; he really hated Eisenhower. In fact, he accused Eisenhower of being a secret communist in a really ill-thought-out book.
Mark Williams
They were everywhere.
Joyce Mao
Apparently. And he really did not feel at home within the Republican Party. And then he heard a speech by Senator William F. Nolan of California, one of the loudest Asia first conservatives, about this man named John Birch, who was a Baptist evangelical soldier, who was the so-called first casualty of the cold war. And it happened in China. And Welch was inspired. He wrote to Nolan, I saw the letters between them, and they had this long correspondence about how John Birch was an American hero. And Welch kept that under his hat for a few years. And then decided to establish this new grassroots organization that would fight for American freedom, fight the American cold war, you know, by harnessing the power of the American voter, the ordinary American. And, again wrote William F. Nolan and said, this is what I’m doing with this story that you shared with me. And so, that to me is a really potent example of how it is that China brought together these different branches of the right, that weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye.
Mark Williams
Grassroot and elite in this case. I see. Okay.
Joyce Mao
And the John Birch Society is a really good example of that. Another story that I really love that I talk about in the book is the time when Barry Goldwater sued Jimmy Carter in 1979. One of Jimmy Carter’s initiatives as president was to fully normalize relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. And he began,
Mark Williams
This was the process that had begun with Richard Nixon.
Joyce Mao
Yes. Traveling to Beijing in 1972. Until the late 1970s, there really hadn’t been much advancement in that relationship in terms of fully realizing a normal relationship between these two very important countries, and Carter wanted to bring that about. And he decided not to renew the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. And this was a decision that he announced in late 1978. Conservatives, as you can imagine, were livid. None more so than Barry Goldwater. He accused Carter of obliterating Taiwan’s independence, quote, he is saying Taiwan has no right to exist, end quote. All because Carter had announced that he wasn’t going to renew the mutual defense treaty. And so, Goldwater took Carter to court. A sitting U.S. senator sued the sitting U.S. president. Goldwater, and nine other senators, and ten representatives filed a civil suit in U.S. district court. They argued that the president had no constitutional right to end a treaty without consulting Congress or the Senate ratifying the decision with a vote. And this was really, as you can imagine, a remarkable moment.
Mark Williams
Somehow this escaped my intellectual horizon. This is the first I’ve heard about this.
Joyce Mao
The case reached the Supreme Court, eventually. It cycled through, you know, district court and eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case without oral arguments, in December 1979. After hearing arguments, it declined jurisdiction, dismissed the case by a vote of six to three. The majority opinion stated that matters of presidential power should be determined by congressional processes, not judicial processes. And really basically the majority opinion said, this is an embarrassing situation, and it would not bode well if all three branches of government did not see eye to eye on this particular question. So we’re not, we’re not getting involved in this fight. This defeat of Goldwater’s case was actually offset by the passage of the Taiwan Relations Act in the spring of 1979. And the TRA was a really forceful statement by Congress that there would be continuing American support for Taiwanese sovereignty. It included that crucial element of future arms sales, if the island’s defenses were in need. And that’s really what Goldwater and other Asia firsters wanted to maintain in the first place. They also wanted to show up the president and really kind of reiterate Congress’s power when it came to foreign policy.
Mark Williams
This is so fascinating. In light of everything that you’ve said so far and what I have read in the book, what impact did the conservative efforts ultimately have on American foreign policy and U.S.-China relations? What’s your assessment there?
Joyce Mao
Well, the foreign policy manifestation took time. It wasn’t an immediate overnight change in which you see conservative internationalism or conservative foreign policy rise to the fore of actual cold war strategy.
Mark Williams
So if we were talking about the 40s and the 50s where you, the period that you’re focusing on, are we seeing demonstrable achievements at this point?
Joyce Mao
Not so much. What I talk about in the book is that the foreign policy arguments that were being made in the 50s really had most impact on domestic politics. But then the seeds were planted for the long term. Conservatives eventually run presidential candidates, eventually win the White House under an unabashedly conservative banner with Ronald Reagan. And certainly, you know, something like Reagan’s rhetoric during the cold war, which was very hardline, at least in public, owes a lot to that conservative internationalism and that sort of hardline stance about winning the cold war. We’re talking about rollback, not containment. And that’s something that Asia firsters articulated as far back as the 50s. I think another impact that Asia first has had on U.S.-China relations specifically, is the fact that Taiwan remains a key issue and that the independence of Taiwan, the sovereignty of Taiwan, is something that is going to continue to mark U.S.-China relations.
Mark Williams
It’s in the news right now.
Joyce Mao
Absolutely. I mean, it’s certainly what she and Biden were discussing the other day. The other element in terms of lingering and lasting impact is how Asia first really demonstrated that American public sentiment about China matters when it comes to the shape of national political discussions. And that millions of Americans care about China and think that China has a place within America’s future for better or for worse.
Mark Williams
Okay. I understand now. To what extent do you think that Asia first still resonates with America’s political right today? Can it help us better understand what’s happening inside conservatism right now?
Joyce Mao
Understanding the history that American conservatism has with China, I think helps us to better understand not only the history of that particular movement, but also get a better read on the nuances of what’s being discussed today. When we think about China’s continuing reverberations within American politics, conservatives consistent calling out of the PRC is really hard to miss. Trump’s demonization of the PRC, even as he expressed personal admiration for Xi Jinping is one example, and certainly foreign policy credentials for politicians who are on the right entail op-eds and public addresses about the dangers of a China unchecked by the United States. Even with a Democrat in the White House, the tenor of recent U.S.-China relations really does recall the era of the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. Biden’s overall approach, his continuation of the trade war with the PRC, his emphasis on building out American infrastructure and multi-lateral alliances to counter the PRC, signal the legacies of Asia first. And when it comes to American public opinion, polls reveal a prevalent concern about China and its significance for the United States, and it’s a concern that cuts across partisan and regional lines. And so, one thing that I’m left wondering is how these present circumstances really elicit the question of, are we all, progressives, liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between, all Asia firsters now?
Mark Williams
It’s an interesting question. I’m thinking about the extent to which a focus on China might actually carry more weight today than it did in times past, particularly in the 40s and the 50s. I’m thinking about China which is not a huge, impoverished country. It is a huge, wealthy country. A China whose power clearly is growing, whose influence is growing, and whose ambitions are following in step with its growth of influence. As a political scientist, as someone who looks at and thinks about great power relations in a serious way, there seems to be a great case to make that this is a relationship that ought to be managed with care, for all of these obvious reasons. We’re not talking about a country that is easy to ignore, or that should be ignored. In contrast with the 40s and the 50s, where one I think could make a case that given what had happened in the second world war and given the problems that Europe had created for most of the world, the focus probably should be there to make sure that those types of problems don’t recur. Do you have any thoughts about what’s going on with U.S.-China relations right now? As a student of history, are there any lessons from the 1950s and the 1960s that you think might help policy makers, either in Beijing or Washington, make this relationship the best that it could be?
Joyce Mao
I keep coming back to Taiwan as a flash point for U.S.-China relations, and the recent discussions about China and about Taiwan really do show a contrast in terms of what the United States will go to bat for. Not human rights violations, not pro-democracy protest crackdowns in Hong Kong. Those two latter events did not elicit the same sort of strong protectionism that the Biden administration has demonstrated say with military exercises and strong rhetoric in bilateral talks with the PRC. The way in which I think I’m going to consider, you know, the shape of future U.S.-China relations still centers on that old issue of Taiwan. Which is very familiar to many Americans, sort of intergenerationally, and I think holds a sort of historical weight that even Hong Kong, the Uighur situation, don’t really resonate in the same way with Americans who are observing from afar in many cases. I think the Biden administration is using both multilateral means and bilateral discussions to make its own mark on U.S.-China relations. And the fact that we are now in a steady dialogue between the two countries is, in and of itself, perhaps the point, right? Because it’s been a while since there has been a really clear China policy. And it seems as if the Biden administration is making China a real focal point in the way that it conceptualizes world order and American foreign policy to shape that world order. Even during the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, there were gestures, but not this sort of front and centering of China as both a potential partner in some cases, say with the climate discussions, but also adversarial. And I’m watching with keen interest. What I think is different about the Biden approach, vis-à-vis the Obama approach, is that we’re in a different political moment now. We’re post-Trump. Trumpian politics really singled out the PRC as an enemy, as an adversary that any strong nation would have to counter in a very direct fashion. I think coming out of that political context, perhaps the Biden administration is having to respond to that context, those expectations that many Americans have about what to do about China, and this new China question for the 21st century. His Democratic predecessor Obama wasn’t operating in those particular political contexts. And so perhaps that’s something to bear in mind when thinking about why it is that the Biden administration seems to be placing China front center.
Mark Williams
I can see the residual effects of how the relationship deteriorated, one might say, from 2016 up through 2020 increasing animosity and so forth, and trade wars and so forth. I can see that. Well, Joyce, let me ask you in the time remaining what is next for you? The book that we’ve been discussing was published in 2015, and what are you working on now that we can look forward to reading?
Joyce Mao
What I’m working on now is a project about China in the American economic imagination. So, I’m asking questions like, why does the Chinese economy inspire such deep emotions, ranging from anxiety to optimism among all types of Americans. I’m interested in the history of the answers to that question. So I’m looking at how U.S. officials try to decipher events like the Great Leap Forward. How American economists use China as a case study for modernization theory, particularly in the 1960s. I’m also making the Asian Development Bank the subject of one chapter. In many ways, this new project is a natural follow up to Asia First. With Asia First, I looked at conservatives, now I’m turning my attention to the liberals, who actually had policy making power in the 60s, and how they sought to significantly alter the U.S.-China dynamic when there was no official relationship between the two countries. And what I’m finding is that money and economic theory are key tools that American liberals tried to use to reshape not only the U.S.-China dynamic, but the Pacific region at large.
Mark Williams
That’s really fascinating. I honestly look forward to reading what you have to write. We’ve been talking about the book America First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism. And we’ve been speaking with the author of that book, Middlebury College Professor Joyce Mao. Joyce, thank you so much for taking time to talk to us today on New Frontiers.
Joyce Mao
Thank you so much.
Student
As a native Californian, Professor Joyce Mao grew up on the West Coast and after migrating to the Northeast, she’s embraced life in Vermont—hiking the trails around Middlebury and enjoying the ski slopes nearby—while trying to keep up with her two children. She enjoys baking, reading, and is an architecture and design enthusiast.
New Frontiers podcast with Joyce Mao
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
In this episode, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—sits down with historian Joyce Mao, to discuss how concerns over China—and US foreign policy in Asia after WWII—helped shape modern political conservativism in America, and create a movement which in time exercised increasing influence in American politics.
Mark Williams
Joyce Mao is an associate professor of history at Middlebury College. Much of her research is focused on American foreign affairs and national politics during the cold war, especially with respect to U.S.-Asia relations and, in particular, with respect to the effects that U.S., China, Taiwan relations had on American domestic politics. Today, I’ll be talking with Joyce about the arguments she makes and the conclusions she reaches in her book, Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism, which the University of Chicago Press published in 2015. Joyce Mao, welcome to New Frontiers.
Joyce Mao
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. I love the title of the series. I feel like we’re going to announce a mission to the moon.
Mark Williams
We might get there eventually. Well, why don’t we dive right in and let me ask this. With all of the history that there is to study what kindled your own personal interest in this particular topic, China and the United States of the 1950s and 60s, what was it that drew you to this subject?
Joyce Mao
Well, my interest in political history and the history of conservatism began when I was an undergrad history major at UC Berkeley and growing up in California and studying California history, I became very aware of California as the cradle of the new right. And when I went to grad school in history at Berkeley, there was a very steady discourse about conservative internationalism, especially after 9/11. And mainstream media coverage of 9/11 and what the Bush administration would do in response to it really made it seem as if conservative internationalism and overseas intervention were a given. And I was curious about how that came to be, because I was doing a lot of reading about the 1930s and 1940s when conservatives were considered isolationists. So, I began to wonder how conservatism got from point A to point B. And the more I read, the more I researched, it became very clear that China was a big part of that equation.
Mark Williams
Interesting. Interesting. Well, let’s go back to the beginning in a way, and let’s think about the title of your book itself. What do you mean by Asia First? What is that?
Joyce Mao
Well to put it succinctly, Asia first was an insistence that Pacific affairs receive as much, if not more attention than European Atlantic relations in the cold war, its proponents, its supporters, many of whom were very powerful, conservative voices in the Senate, in Congress felt like U.S. foreign policy after World War II was neglecting mainland Asia and therefore imperiling the whole cold war.
Mark Williams
Is this sort of coming out of the, the tail end of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to, to rebuild Western Europe after the war?
Joyce Mao
Yes. And certainly that was a counterpoint. Conservatives who were Asia firsters looked at what was happening in Europe and the investment that was happening there on the part of the United States as a stark contrast to what they felt was not happening in China in particular. And it’s great that you bring up Marshall because it was the failure of the Marshall mission in 1947, to bring about some sort of coalition government between the Chinese communists and the Chinese nationalists that really saw a drop off in terms of initiative for U.S.-China policy. And of course, Asia firsters would argue that pause really helped bring about a conclusion to the Chinese civil war that was unfavorable to American interests.
Mark Williams
You perhaps have already answered this or at least provided part of an answer. If we were to go back to the 50s and 60s, is the reason that American conservatives were so concerned about Asia precisely because they saw this divide, you might say, between the focus on Europe and the efforts that were being put forth there and the focus on, or the lack of focus that they saw or perceived to be with respect to of Asia?
Joyce Mao
There was definitely among some conservatives, a genuine, sincere interest in China and the fate of China. A long missionary history, a long history of engagement with China that really dated from the early 19th century was one of the underpinnings that Asia first conservatives pointed to as evidence that the United States should keep up a commitment to the potential of a democratic, what they called a free China. And so, all the efforts that were underway in the European Atlantic provided a strong precedent for conservatives to say, why isn’t the same sort of investment being made in regards to China. But then there’s the cynical side of the story in that there were plenty of conservatives who became Asia firsters, who really didn’t have an organic interest in China, who regarded Chiang kai shek’s leadership with some degree of skepticism, but China was too good of an opportunity to pass up when it came to critiquing containment policy, liberalism as a governing ethos. And so, when joining forces, those Asia firsters who really believed in a free China and those who were there for more sort of opportunistic reasons, and many of them were one and the same really, it resulted in a potent argument about an Achilles heel in U.S. foreign policy and became a politicized issue within domestic political circles.
Mark Williams
So, China should be at the forefront for a variety of security reasons, strategic reasons.
Joyce Mao
Yes, absolutely. And after 1949 and Mao’s victory, you have to understand that the world map was at the forefront of a lot of political arguments in terms of which part of the world was free, quote unquote, and which part of the world was red, quote unquote. And with Mao’s victory, the largest country in the world went red. And so, that for Asia first conservatives was proof positive that containment policy was going to fail. It had already failed. The United States had, quote unquote, lost China to communism. And so, there were questions of, well who lost China? Who within the U.S. government let this happen? And that is based on a number of assumptions about American paternalism and that China is the United States’s to lose in the first place?
Mark Williams
That’s exactly what I was going to say. It’s always fascinating to me to hear those types of discourses for precisely the reasons you’ve outlined, as if a country, a civilization as old and a country as vast as China was America’s to lose in the first place. It’s quite odd. So let’s go back to these concerns that the conservatives had with respect to China. Was this the dominant mode of thought in the United States at the time, is this what most people were thinking back then, or was there a kind of counter narrative and at least in political circles that saw things about China differently than the way that the conservatives did?
Joyce Mao
Asia first conservatism, the argument that the United States had somehow lost China was definitely the alternative political view. But they were an incredibly loud minority voice with well-placed advocates in elite institutions within government. The dominant mode of thinking about U.S. foreign policy was of course containment theory. And this was, you know, the overarching framework for the cold war that most experts signed on to. What was different about Asia first was its very pointed critique, not only that containment and a defensive posture in the cold war, wasn’t going to work in the long term and that China was evidence of that; but also, they took containment theory as an example of how liberalism overall was a faulty way to approach governance, both at home and in foreign policy. And so, the spinoff arguments about who lost China and Asia first brought in arguments about executive power, congressional balance of power, not only in foreign policy but in other realms of governance as well, and how the United States saw itself within a multilateral security system. So, Asia firsters extended the who lost China argument into critiques of the United Nations for example, corresponding arguments about how the United States needed to wield its power more unilaterally and not be beholden to the whims of communist states or third world nations.
Mark Williams
Who might be members of the United Nations.
Joyce Mao
Precisely. So then there’s also the McCarthy side of the story. McCarthy’s red scare began as a hunt for communist subversion within the state department. Who lost China was a big part of the context for McCarthyism’s rise to the fore of the national political discussion. And so, arguments about government is too big; it’s too bureaucratic; there are employees within government who aren’t vetted enough; and that such an unwieldy state is not serving American interests either at home or abroad.
Mark Williams
I see. Well, this is really fascinating to think about the way that the foreign gets mirrored into the domestic and is welded together there. Let me be a little provocative. You said that you were a history major as an undergraduate. I almost became a history major myself, so I did a fair amount of reading as an undergraduate in history. And the history books, at least to my mind, they’re usually filled with lots of information, lots of details and so forth. But when you boil it all down, most history books seem to make a couple of central or really big arguments. And one of the biggest arguments that your book seems to make is that the conservatives’ interest in China actually helped shape how the political right developed here in the United States. So I have two questions for you here. First, is that more or less an accurate reading of the book, I’m not misinterpreting anything there? Is that an accurate reading of one of the books big arguments? And second, if it is an accurate reading, then how much of this conservative focus on China actually did help shape how the political right developed here at home?
Joyce Mao
You read the book correctly. Thank you for, you know, hewing so closely to one of the main arguments that I make in the book is that China helped bridge a divide between the elite institutional politicians that were easily associated with Asia first conservatism, names like Barry Goldwater, William F. Nolan, who was a senator from California, Robert Taft, who was a senator from Ohio and senate majority leader. These were folks who really inhabited sort of exalted realms of elite American politics. But one of the marked features of the postwar new right is its grassroots movement and its ability to reach new audiences, new constituents, and keep conservatism evolving and reaching new audiences and new voters. And in the 1940s, there is a palpable divide between elite conservative officials in places like Congress, and a growing grassroots movement that is going to only reach full flower in the 1960s.
China is an issue that helps, in a topical way, elite officials reach out to grassroots activists and vice versa. China means so many different things to so many different kinds of Americans. And what really helps unite these branches of the conservative movement, when it comes to China, is this affinity for the idea of China and the potential of China as a democratic counterpart to the United States in the Pacific. It is something that I found really consistently in the archives when it came to letters from constituents to their representatives. Publications that grassroots organizations would put out to members and future members, as well as, you know campaigns trying to reach out to elected officials.
Mark Williams
This belief that China would become or ought to become a democracy, sort of the mirror image of the United States, something like that?
Joyce Mao
Yes. And that goes back to that sort of open door, special relationship that harkened back to the United States poised to become a major world power reaching out, the world’s youngest democracy reaching out to reform, you know, the world’s oldest country in a meaningful way and building sort of bridges of ideological brotherhood. At the same time, the reality is that that relationship never really existed in the first place; that there was a distinct power imbalance that the dreams of a Chinese democracy never really come to fruition according to American metrics. And there is a lot of discussion among both conservative activists and conservative officials in the past perfect tense that the United States should have done this. It could have done that. And so, in the 1940s maybe there was some potential hope that the cold war would go a different way, but once the PRC became an irrevocable reality, there is a distinct rhetorical shift that both elite officials and activists share in that, okay, well we’re going to treat China as evidence. What happened to China’s evidence that liberalism is a failure containment is a joke and use what we can out of this idea of China to move our own agendas forward.
Mark Williams
So, the right becomes shaped by its being the antithesis of liberalism, its perception of liberalism. And this has both a domestic and an international or foreign component to it.
Joyce Mao
And one of the arguments I make in Asia First is that without China, without the specter of Chinese communism, the right would not have been able to muster the same kind of foreign policy platform and foreign policy arguments that it so eloquently advanced in the 60s and beyond.
Mark Williams
Interesting, interesting. Your book I think makes clear that when you’re talking about conservatives, quote unquote, you’re really referring to modern conservatives. And so, for the benefit of our listeners, could you please explain what you mean by modern conservatism? Modern as opposed to what?
Joyce Mao
Modern as opposed to the earlier iteration of conservatism that dominated say in the 20s and the 30s, the brand of politics that emphasized small government, free market, and a brand of politics that frankly, after the great crash of 1929 was associated most readily with big business, the one percent. I call it modern conservatism based on two key characteristics. The first is an approach to internationalism, meaning an active vision for the United States role in the world, and a clear approach to foreign policy. This is something that’s distinctly lacking in the pre-World War II version of conservatism. But after World War II, it’s a political necessity to have a foreign policy. And one of the stories that I track in the book is how it is that China as an issue came along at precisely the right time for conservatives who are looking for a way to achieve a toehold in full foreign policy discussions. This gave them a really good opportunity to enter a national and international discussion about how it is that the United States was going to wield its superpower. So, however theoretical or imperfect in its application, this Asia first internationalism really did signal a responsiveness to global affairs, marking it as modern, as I discuss in the book.
Mark Williams
Okay. Then one might say that the conservatives at the time took stock of their movement. They saw a gap, meaning a foreign policy gap, and China was utilized to help fill that gap and help build and expand the movement.
Joyce Mao
Yes. The second feature of modern conservatism that I really want to mark is how it is that conservatism continually evolved its organization and its mobilization, meaning that it was a political movement whose dynamic composition allowed for future growth. And it allowed for the movement to have multiple epicenters of activism, legislation, changing ideas, and therefore ensuring that it would continue to progress and move forward. And one of the key claims that I make in Asia First is that China was a key component of both those branches of conservative development.
Mark Williams
So, China was also an aspect of this, we might call it agility, this movement agility? Can you elaborate?
Joyce Mao
China was a way for conservatives to advance ideas and ideals because it was almost a figment of the imagination, this idea that China could be a democratic counterpart to the United States. The needle wasn’t moving in terms of official China policy, per se. Chiang kai shek was not going to be, quote unquote, unleashed to take back the mainland. That was a far from distant possibility and conservatives knew it. So the ways in which they would invoke China, which drew upon, you know, sort of sentimental attachment to China or China as a shorthand for liberalism’s failures, was a way for conservatives to demonstrate that they had some sort of foreign policy acumen, but at the same time invoke a lot of the ideas that were driving their movement at that particular moment in time.
Mark Williams
Okay. Thank you. Sort of carrying on with this notion of modern conservatives, as you look over America’s political landscape today, do you think that there’s still such a thing as a modern conservative, at least as in terms of the way that you’re using this to describe the 1950s and the 1960s?
Joyce Mao
When I look at politics today, I definitely see vestiges of Asia first internationalism within contemporary discussions about foreign policy. There are still tenants of conservative internationalism from the 50s and 60s that are readily associated with the ways in which conservative foreign policy is thought of and remembered; things like an emphasis on unilateralism, selective military intervention, and certainly a sort of hardline rhetorical articulation about things like communism. And I’m thinking specifically about the Reagan era, but even today there is growing public sphere analysis of how the cold war continues to impact contemporary politics, and Asia first internationalism should be part of that conversation. But I think when you look at and assess the conservative movement today, you also need to take into account the social and moral phase of conservative development that drove the movement in the 1970s and the 1980s. Nowadays, I think it’s a combination of a hawkish unilateralism and the moralism of the Christian right, as well as a willingness to harness the energy of the fringe as a way to redefine the mainstream. Someone like Josh Hawley seems eager to take up the mantle of modern conservatism. Ben Sasse is also in the mix.
Mark Williams
Okay. Good examples. You know, I have to say that I found your book a really enjoyable read, and I’m wondering if you could share a couple of telling stories from the book, you know, are there any particular nuggets that listeners might look forward to reading about?
Joyce Mao
Well, one entire chapter is devoted to the John Birch Society, which was a well-known grassroots organization named after a U.S. army intelligence officer named John Birch, who was killed by Chinese communist soldiers in the waning days of World War II. Not many folks who have even heard of the John Birch Society would recognize the origins of the group’s name. And it’s an example of what I was talking about in terms of that bridge that China provided between grassroots organizations like the John Birch Society and elite politicians. The name inspiration came to the founder of the John Birch Society, a man named Robert Welch, who was a candy maker from just outside of Boston. Welch was really disillusioned with Republican politics; he did not like the direction of the party; he really hated Eisenhower. In fact, he accused Eisenhower of being a secret communist in a really ill-thought-out book.
Mark Williams
They were everywhere.
Joyce Mao
Apparently. And he really did not feel at home within the Republican Party. And then he heard a speech by Senator William F. Nolan of California, one of the loudest Asia first conservatives, about this man named John Birch, who was a Baptist evangelical soldier, who was the so-called first casualty of the cold war. And it happened in China. And Welch was inspired. He wrote to Nolan, I saw the letters between them, and they had this long correspondence about how John Birch was an American hero. And Welch kept that under his hat for a few years. And then decided to establish this new grassroots organization that would fight for American freedom, fight the American cold war, you know, by harnessing the power of the American voter, the ordinary American. And, again wrote William F. Nolan and said, this is what I’m doing with this story that you shared with me. And so, that to me is a really potent example of how it is that China brought together these different branches of the right, that weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye.
Mark Williams
Grassroot and elite in this case. I see. Okay.
Joyce Mao
And the John Birch Society is a really good example of that. Another story that I really love that I talk about in the book is the time when Barry Goldwater sued Jimmy Carter in 1979. One of Jimmy Carter’s initiatives as president was to fully normalize relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. And he began,
Mark Williams
This was the process that had begun with Richard Nixon.
Joyce Mao
Yes. Traveling to Beijing in 1972. Until the late 1970s, there really hadn’t been much advancement in that relationship in terms of fully realizing a normal relationship between these two very important countries, and Carter wanted to bring that about. And he decided not to renew the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. And this was a decision that he announced in late 1978. Conservatives, as you can imagine, were livid. None more so than Barry Goldwater. He accused Carter of obliterating Taiwan’s independence, quote, he is saying Taiwan has no right to exist, end quote. All because Carter had announced that he wasn’t going to renew the mutual defense treaty. And so, Goldwater took Carter to court. A sitting U.S. senator sued the sitting U.S. president. Goldwater, and nine other senators, and ten representatives filed a civil suit in U.S. district court. They argued that the president had no constitutional right to end a treaty without consulting Congress or the Senate ratifying the decision with a vote. And this was really, as you can imagine, a remarkable moment.
Mark Williams
Somehow this escaped my intellectual horizon. This is the first I’ve heard about this.
Joyce Mao
The case reached the Supreme Court, eventually. It cycled through, you know, district court and eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case without oral arguments, in December 1979. After hearing arguments, it declined jurisdiction, dismissed the case by a vote of six to three. The majority opinion stated that matters of presidential power should be determined by congressional processes, not judicial processes. And really basically the majority opinion said, this is an embarrassing situation, and it would not bode well if all three branches of government did not see eye to eye on this particular question. So we’re not, we’re not getting involved in this fight. This defeat of Goldwater’s case was actually offset by the passage of the Taiwan Relations Act in the spring of 1979. And the TRA was a really forceful statement by Congress that there would be continuing American support for Taiwanese sovereignty. It included that crucial element of future arms sales, if the island’s defenses were in need. And that’s really what Goldwater and other Asia firsters wanted to maintain in the first place. They also wanted to show up the president and really kind of reiterate Congress’s power when it came to foreign policy.
Mark Williams
This is so fascinating. In light of everything that you’ve said so far and what I have read in the book, what impact did the conservative efforts ultimately have on American foreign policy and U.S.-China relations? What’s your assessment there?
Joyce Mao
Well, the foreign policy manifestation took time. It wasn’t an immediate overnight change in which you see conservative internationalism or conservative foreign policy rise to the fore of actual cold war strategy.
Mark Williams
So if we were talking about the 40s and the 50s where you, the period that you’re focusing on, are we seeing demonstrable achievements at this point?
Joyce Mao
Not so much. What I talk about in the book is that the foreign policy arguments that were being made in the 50s really had most impact on domestic politics. But then the seeds were planted for the long term. Conservatives eventually run presidential candidates, eventually win the White House under an unabashedly conservative banner with Ronald Reagan. And certainly, you know, something like Reagan’s rhetoric during the cold war, which was very hardline, at least in public, owes a lot to that conservative internationalism and that sort of hardline stance about winning the cold war. We’re talking about rollback, not containment. And that’s something that Asia firsters articulated as far back as the 50s. I think another impact that Asia first has had on U.S.-China relations specifically, is the fact that Taiwan remains a key issue and that the independence of Taiwan, the sovereignty of Taiwan, is something that is going to continue to mark U.S.-China relations.
Mark Williams
It’s in the news right now.
Joyce Mao
Absolutely. I mean, it’s certainly what she and Biden were discussing the other day. The other element in terms of lingering and lasting impact is how Asia first really demonstrated that American public sentiment about China matters when it comes to the shape of national political discussions. And that millions of Americans care about China and think that China has a place within America’s future for better or for worse.
Mark Williams
Okay. I understand now. To what extent do you think that Asia first still resonates with America’s political right today? Can it help us better understand what’s happening inside conservatism right now?
Joyce Mao
Understanding the history that American conservatism has with China, I think helps us to better understand not only the history of that particular movement, but also get a better read on the nuances of what’s being discussed today. When we think about China’s continuing reverberations within American politics, conservatives consistent calling out of the PRC is really hard to miss. Trump’s demonization of the PRC, even as he expressed personal admiration for Xi Jinping is one example, and certainly foreign policy credentials for politicians who are on the right entail op-eds and public addresses about the dangers of a China unchecked by the United States. Even with a Democrat in the White House, the tenor of recent U.S.-China relations really does recall the era of the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. Biden’s overall approach, his continuation of the trade war with the PRC, his emphasis on building out American infrastructure and multi-lateral alliances to counter the PRC, signal the legacies of Asia first. And when it comes to American public opinion, polls reveal a prevalent concern about China and its significance for the United States, and it’s a concern that cuts across partisan and regional lines. And so, one thing that I’m left wondering is how these present circumstances really elicit the question of, are we all, progressives, liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between, all Asia firsters now?
Mark Williams
It’s an interesting question. I’m thinking about the extent to which a focus on China might actually carry more weight today than it did in times past, particularly in the 40s and the 50s. I’m thinking about China which is not a huge, impoverished country. It is a huge, wealthy country. A China whose power clearly is growing, whose influence is growing, and whose ambitions are following in step with its growth of influence. As a political scientist, as someone who looks at and thinks about great power relations in a serious way, there seems to be a great case to make that this is a relationship that ought to be managed with care, for all of these obvious reasons. We’re not talking about a country that is easy to ignore, or that should be ignored. In contrast with the 40s and the 50s, where one I think could make a case that given what had happened in the second world war and given the problems that Europe had created for most of the world, the focus probably should be there to make sure that those types of problems don’t recur. Do you have any thoughts about what’s going on with U.S.-China relations right now? As a student of history, are there any lessons from the 1950s and the 1960s that you think might help policy makers, either in Beijing or Washington, make this relationship the best that it could be?
Joyce Mao
I keep coming back to Taiwan as a flash point for U.S.-China relations, and the recent discussions about China and about Taiwan really do show a contrast in terms of what the United States will go to bat for. Not human rights violations, not pro-democracy protest crackdowns in Hong Kong. Those two latter events did not elicit the same sort of strong protectionism that the Biden administration has demonstrated say with military exercises and strong rhetoric in bilateral talks with the PRC. The way in which I think I’m going to consider, you know, the shape of future U.S.-China relations still centers on that old issue of Taiwan. Which is very familiar to many Americans, sort of intergenerationally, and I think holds a sort of historical weight that even Hong Kong, the Uighur situation, don’t really resonate in the same way with Americans who are observing from afar in many cases. I think the Biden administration is using both multilateral means and bilateral discussions to make its own mark on U.S.-China relations. And the fact that we are now in a steady dialogue between the two countries is, in and of itself, perhaps the point, right? Because it’s been a while since there has been a really clear China policy. And it seems as if the Biden administration is making China a real focal point in the way that it conceptualizes world order and American foreign policy to shape that world order. Even during the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, there were gestures, but not this sort of front and centering of China as both a potential partner in some cases, say with the climate discussions, but also adversarial. And I’m watching with keen interest. What I think is different about the Biden approach, vis-à-vis the Obama approach, is that we’re in a different political moment now. We’re post-Trump. Trumpian politics really singled out the PRC as an enemy, as an adversary that any strong nation would have to counter in a very direct fashion. I think coming out of that political context, perhaps the Biden administration is having to respond to that context, those expectations that many Americans have about what to do about China, and this new China question for the 21st century. His Democratic predecessor Obama wasn’t operating in those particular political contexts. And so perhaps that’s something to bear in mind when thinking about why it is that the Biden administration seems to be placing China front center.
Mark Williams
I can see the residual effects of how the relationship deteriorated, one might say, from 2016 up through 2020 increasing animosity and so forth, and trade wars and so forth. I can see that. Well, Joyce, let me ask you in the time remaining what is next for you? The book that we’ve been discussing was published in 2015, and what are you working on now that we can look forward to reading?
Joyce Mao
What I’m working on now is a project about China in the American economic imagination. So, I’m asking questions like, why does the Chinese economy inspire such deep emotions, ranging from anxiety to optimism among all types of Americans. I’m interested in the history of the answers to that question. So I’m looking at how U.S. officials try to decipher events like the Great Leap Forward. How American economists use China as a case study for modernization theory, particularly in the 1960s. I’m also making the Asian Development Bank the subject of one chapter. In many ways, this new project is a natural follow up to Asia First. With Asia First, I looked at conservatives, now I’m turning my attention to the liberals, who actually had policy making power in the 60s, and how they sought to significantly alter the U.S.-China dynamic when there was no official relationship between the two countries. And what I’m finding is that money and economic theory are key tools that American liberals tried to use to reshape not only the U.S.-China dynamic, but the Pacific region at large.
Mark Williams
That’s really fascinating. I honestly look forward to reading what you have to write. We’ve been talking about the book America First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism. And we’ve been speaking with the author of that book, Middlebury College Professor Joyce Mao. Joyce, thank you so much for taking time to talk to us today on New Frontiers.
Joyce Mao
Thank you so much.
Student
As a native Californian, Professor Joyce Mao grew up on the West Coast and after migrating to the Northeast, she’s embraced life in Vermont—hiking the trails around Middlebury and enjoying the ski slopes nearby—while trying to keep up with her two children. She enjoys baking, reading, and is an architecture and design enthusiast.
Episode 1—Should Corporations Govern Global Food Systems?
In this episode, Molly Anderson, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies at Middlebury College, joins Mark Williams to discuss her recent article titled “UN Food Systems Summit 2021: Dismantling Democracy and Resetting Corporate Control of Food Systems.” At issue is whether multinational corporations (MNCs) should have more influence and say in controlling/governing food systems than does civil society and its constituent parts, which are most plagued by problems of food insecurity. Anderson believes MNCs should not enjoy such a privileged position over so vital a basic necessity, and she offers a forceful critique of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), which in her view helped ensure such corporate control.
New Frontiers - Episode 1: Should Corporations Govern Global Food Systems?
With global food insecurity on the rise, what can the United Nations do to help protect the world’s food systems and establish safeguards against food insecurity? Did the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit take us in the direction of a future where populations’ access to food is ever more secure? If not, why, and what would a more optimal approach entail? Middlebury College William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies, Molly Anderson, discusses these and other issues examined in her recent article, “UN Food Systems Summit 2021: Dismantling Democracy and Resetting Corporate Control of Food Systems.”
Transcript
New Frontiers Podcast with Molly Anderson and Mark Williams
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
Today, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—is joined by professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson, to discuss food systems, food security, and why the recent United Nations Food Systems Summit is unlikely to generate effective safeguards against global food insecurity.
Mark Williams
Molly Anderson is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies and the academic director of food studies at Middlebury College; much of her research is focused on food security, food systems, human rights and the food system, and the right to food here in the U.S. and other industrialized countries.
Today, I’ll be talking with Molly about one of her most recent projects, a coauthored article that appeared in the journal Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems.
As a political scientist myself, one thing I find intriguing about this article is that it deals as much with political factors as it does with agriculture, ecology, or other factors that we typically associate with food production. The article is titled “UN Food Systems Summit 2021 Dismantling Democracy and Resetting Corporate Control of Food Systems.”
Molly Anderson, welcome to New Frontiers.
Molly Anderson
Well, thank you for inviting me to the RCGA podcast series.
Mark Williams
You’re quite welcome.
Molly Anderson
I’m honored.
Mark Williams
I’m glad to have you. Now, you hold a doctorate in ecology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So as a trained ecologist, how did you become interested in in food studies to begin with, and especially for our listeners who may not know, what exactly is food studies anyway?
Molly Anderson
Well, let me answer the second question first, because it has a lot of connection with what surprised you about that article that I’m writing about political issues, even though my training is in ecology. Food studies is fascinating to me because it deals with everything that food touches, which of course includes political dynamics. Political dynamics are extremely important in determining who’s able to eat, how much they can eat, what quality of food they can eat, how food is produced. And those actually are some of the things that entered into this question that we were considering in that coauthored article that appeared in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
But how I got into food studies. I originally wanted to work in Latin America, in international development and was in Peru, up on a hilltop in the Andes, 14,000-plus feet gasping for breath,
but also had a kind of apocalyptic moment where I realized that I should be working in a culture that I understood much better than the Andean culture. I had come there with this presumption. And in retrospect, it’s really presumptuous that I would have something to teach people in that culture about managing their landscapes. And this is a place where people have been managing their landscapes sustainably for millennia. They’ve done an incredible job of terracing in the Andes. And here I am, coming from North Carolina that was dealing with all sorts of environmental problems, coming from there with this idea that I had something to tell them.
And I realized I needed to go back to the United States and work within my own culture on the
problems that were really pressing environmentally and socially in our environmental milieu.
And one of the biggest problems in North Carolina at that point was the concentration of
hog manufacturing and chicken production in CFO’s confined animal feeding operations,
which were both terrible for the people who had gotten roped into being producers of hogs or chickens under these circumstances, but also terrible environmentally, as we saw soon after that, with hurricanes where the hog lagoons, as they call them—lagoons, connotes this beautiful blue tropical view—but hog lagoons are these nasty pits full of hog manure and urine. And with the hurricanes, the lagoons were breached, and the manure and urine spilled out into riverways, polluted them, did terrible things to the fish living in the riverways, and also created dead zones at the mouth of the river as they came out into the ocean, just like the dead zone that’s in the mouth of the Mississippi River, where it feeds into the Gulf of Mexico.
So I got into food systems because that was the big issue in North Carolina: what was happening with this transition from independent hog producers into basically cogs in an industrial system and causing huge environmental problems in the process. And then one thing led to another. I went to Tufts University and worked in the School of Nutrition Science and Policy, started a graduate program in agriculture, food, and environment while I was there,
and then left Tufts for various reasons. But was out doing independent consulting for about eight years and then decided I really missed academia, really missed working with students, went back to teaching and here I am at Middlebury.
Mark Williams
Well we’re glad to have you here at Middlebury, and we’re glad that you brought this expertise with you. When we talk about food systems again, what exactly are we talking about?
Molly Anderson
We’re talking about everything that affects how food is produced, distributed, and consumed, which includes all of the policies, all of the institutions that make the rules, the regulations, the laws that affect how producers operate, how input suppliers operate, inputs like pesticides and fertilizers. And then where the food goes, how much it’s sold for, who gets to eat it, who gets the best quality food.
Mark Williams
How it’s distributed and how it’s consumed.
Molly Anderson
Exactly. So everything that feeds into that system, the food system, is part of food studies.
Mark Williams
Just to follow up a bit. What are some of the common problems or threats that food systems typically face?
Molly Anderson
Well, right now there’s a battle going on in food systems. It’s a battle between industrialized food systems, which were started largely in the United States during the Green Revolution and the research money that we poured into the Green Revolution in Mexico, in the Philippines, all over the world, not in Africa. But the industrialized food system has been highly productive, and many people will say, well, it’s prevented starvation of millions of people. Yet that productivity came at a huge cost: environmentally, socially, economically, from the perspective of farmers. The winners are the corporations largely that have written the rules, the governments that have cozied up to the pesticide manufacturers and the fertilizer manufacturers, and the CEOs of those companies. But the losers have been people whose land has been grabbed in order to produce food with these industrialized food systems, the farmers who have lost income because they no longer have as much power and their livelihoods are being threatened, and the environment—the environment has been a huge loser. So we’re seeing all of those threats from the industrialized food system. The good thing is that there’re alternatives. That’s not the only way to produce food.
Mark Williams
OK, well let’s dive into your article and get to the focal point. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit is what you’re writing about. Was this the first time that the UN had ever convened a summit on food systems?
Molly Anderson
The summit did take place. It was September 23rd through the 24th of 2021. It was not the first food summit, but it was unusual in many ways. There have been at least four food summits that preceded this, and they have all operated in a very different way than this one did. This one was organized by the UN Secretary General in partnership at the World Economic Forum, and the secretary general had signed an agreement. Actually his deputy, Amina Mohammed, had signed an agreement with the World Economic Forum just a few months before the launch of the UN Food System Summit. They had agreed to work in partnership, and this was quite unusual because the previous summits had all been organized coming out of the FAO, which is responsible in the UN food, in the UN system.
Mark Williams
FAO meaning?
Molly Anderson
Food and Agriculture Organization. It is responsible for all issues that have to do with food, food and agriculture. So this, which of course should be about food and agriculture—it’s a food system summit, after all—is coming out of the Secretary General’s Office with strong support from the World Economic Forum. It was not designed with any kind of strong input or an ask from member states, and the UN is really the place where member states of the United Nations come together and make decisions together. But this summit was set up in a way that diminished the role of the member states. It really elevated the role of the corporations that are part of the World Economic Forum, which is constituted of the thousand biggest corporations in the world. So they had a big role in this summit, and the member states relatively little. The organization was quite different. The conduct was quite different of the summit.
Mark Williams
Well, let me just stop you for a minute for point of clarification. If the United Nations had been more or less in the business of holding these types of summits periodically, and I think you said there were three or four that have preceded this one. Why was this one called? And you seem to be saying that it was called in a very atypical manner. Why was it felt that there was a need for a summit now? And what did the summit aim to achieve?
Molly Anderson
Well, let me answer that in two ways. From the perspective of the World Economic Forum, I think this summit was a continuation of what they call the Great Reset, which was an initiative that first came out of the World Economic Forum several years ago, in which they said member states operate too inefficiently, too slowly. And these UN processes that we’ve been relying on, we can’t rely on them to solve global problems anymore. They should be turned over to corporations, which are able to operate far more efficiently, far more effectively. So, they were arguing for this Great Reset. And that was one of the problems, and that’s how it played out in the summit—that it really was posing this Great Reset as the answer to world problems. The big problem right now is that we are facing the end of the Sustainable Development Goal period, 2030, when many different objectives, many different goals are supposed to be achieved. We are not anywhere near being on track with achieving the end hunger goal. In fact, for the last five years, we’ve been slipping farther and farther back in terms of food insecurity, and with COVID, that became much worse. As of last year, 711 to 820 million people are facing food insecurity. And this is a major jump from the previous year, which was 600-some million people facing food insecurity. So, a much larger number last year, because of COVID, are at risk of severe malnutrition than in the previous year.
Mark Williams
So there’s a perceived need for this summit then, to address these types of problems then.
Molly Anderson
The problems are real, but to have a food summit called in this way—this is so far from the way that civil society would have organized a food summit. And civil society recognizes that there’s a major problem.
Mark Williams
Well, this more or less gets to my next question that I wanted to ask you, and I think you may have addressed some of it. In your article, you and your colleagues criticize this particular summit, and actually you criticized it a lot. So what would be the two or three major critiques that you and your colleagues have about this summit?
Molly Anderson
Diminishing the role of multilateral institutions like the Committee on World Food Security. And what I mean by multilateral is that countries make decisions.
Mark Williams
The states themselves.
Molly Anderson
Yes, the member states are making decisions. What the summit replaced multilateral decision making with is something called multi-stakeholderism, where anybody can come to the table. It sounds great in principle. It sounds as if this is a very democratic way to negotiate problems.
Mark Williams
Sounds like an improvement.
Molly Anderson
Well, it sounds like an improvement. But in fact, it’s not because the multi-stakeholderism allowed the stronger institutions, the corporations, which had a lot more money, a lot more ability to participate in these negotiations, it allowed them to play a dominant role. And the people who should have been at the front, the people who were actually facing food insecurity—the social movements, the most marginalized people—their voices were cut out in multi-stakeholderism.
Mark Williams
So the people most affected by the problem of food insecurity, we might say were silenced or at least not given an opportunity to have input into solutions.
Molly Anderson
Exactly. And they’re the people who can say best, what kinds of solutions would work. So that was one of the big problems, replacing multilateralism with multi-stakeholderism. But some of the other problems had to do with the chaos, the lack of transparency in decision making that pervaded the Food Systems Summit, and the way that the CSM, which is the major body within the Committee on World Food Security.
Mark Williams
And the CSM means?
Molly Anderson
The CSM is the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism. It is the place within the Committee on World Food Security where the social movements and NGOs can participate and can speak directly in plenary sessions of the Committee on World Food Security and can negotiate in every way on any guidelines coming out of the Committee on World Food Security. They decided not to participate in the Food Systems Summit because they were knocked out, and they could see from the way it had been organized and the way that the CFS itself had been marginalized.
Mark Williams
Let me play devil’s advocate a little bit. If civil society organizations haven’t really joined in the summit and they’re not very enthusiastic it, is it really fair to blame the UN organizers for this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to blame the civil society organizations themselves? I mean, aren’t they basically shooting themselves in the foot by not participating in a summit that is directly related to a concern that they hold dear?
Molly Anderson
Some people have made that argument. And in fact, the organizers made that argument that they open the door, anybody who wanted to could participate. It was very inclusive. They even renamed the summit, the People’s Summit, which was a bit of an insult, honestly. And some civil society organizations did participate. The organizers cherry picked civil society, who they thought would support their views or be receptive, at least to their views, and wouldn’t object to multi-stakeholderism. But it was a very principled decision, a very difficult decision that was made by the CSM, and they actually went to the organizers and said we would be glad to participate in the summit if you would add an action track. Action tracks were the ways that it was organized. There was an action track on equitable livelihoods, an action track on nature-based solutions, for instance. They said if the organizers would add an action track on corporate dominance, corporate takeover of the food system that could be self-organized by civil society, they would be glad to join. That was one of the things that simply was not on the agenda of the Food Systems Summit, even though people who are pretty much in favor of what corporations are doing will say there’s corporate dominance of food systems now. So, they refused to participate, partly because the organizers would not work with them. So, it was not a rash decision by any means.
Mark Williams
I see.
Molly Anderson
They consulted with their constituencies and the constituency said we simply cannot participate in this. This is so far from what we believe needs to be happening in discussions of what’s wrong with the global food system.
Mark Williams
Let me ask you about something that I’ve been curious about, and it’s to gauge your thinking about an alternate way of looking at this scenario you’ve just described. And by this, I mean, shouldn’t we be happy? Shouldn’t we be glad that the big corporations seem to be playing a fairly significant role in the summit, organizing it and participating in it? Given the power and the influence that these corporations seem to have with global food systems, isn’t it really important to keep them engaged in helping to solve what’s clearly an important problem?
Molly Anderson
The problem is that they created the problem. So, by bringing them in and saying, yes, you can help us solve these problems of inequity, of lack of livelihoods for poor farmers, of fertilizer prices shooting through the roof, of seeds being held by rules that prevent smallholders from saving their own seed. By asking corporations in the door and saying, yes, you can help us solve these problems, you’re asking them to solve the problems they have created. And it just doesn’t make any sense. They do give lip service to solutions, but then they turn around and do the bad things they were doing all along. They just continue with that. There’s a fundamental disconnect here because the main purpose of corporations is to make money for shareholders.
It’s not to serve the public good, to increase the income of small-scale farmers. That’s not what they’re about. They even aren’t about increasing environmental quality, although the degradation of environmental quality is making their own corporations—it eventually, that’ll catch up with them; it’ll turn around and bite them because they won’t be able to continue in the businesses that they’re in if the environment degrades sufficiently. Yet in the short term, they are completely obligated to make as much money as they can.
Mark Williams
The business of business is business.
Molly Anderson
Yes. Yes. So they want to continue with business as usual, instead of some fundamental change in perspective.
Mark Williams
I see. Do you think that the folks who organized the Food Systems Summit are more or less just blind to the problems that that you and your colleagues are highlighting in this article? Hasn’t anyone tried to point these issues out to them so that they could be fixed? And if they had been pointed out, what has typically been the response?
Molly Anderson
That’s a real mystery because, as I said, the UN has been the bastion of multilateralism of member states coming together. So why the UN would suddenly be signing partnerships with the World Economic Forum and why FAO signing a partnership with Crop Life, which is made up of the major pesticide producers in the world? In some ways it’s a complete mystery. But it’s a direction that civil society is fearing very much: that corporations are taking over this space that has been the space of member states. And some member states don’t like this either. They can see that they are losing power to corporations. And of course, many corporations have a lot more revenue, a lot more to invest than member states do. So, the UN is turning to corporations hoping that they will finance solutions to the problems because they don’t have the money at their disposal to pay for these solutions. So it’s a kind of devil’s bargain. They are saying, well corporations, you can be involved and we trust that you will come up with solutions in partnership with civil society and other voices that are at the table that will serve the public good, but that’s not what corporations are about, and they have the major say.
Mark Williams
Given the disempowerment that seems to be happening, in this case with respect to the member states, how have the states responded to this or has there been a response? Have they recognized this as a disempowerment or have they, have they not?
Molly Anderson
Some of them definitely recognize that it’s disempowerment, particularly the African nations. And one of the issues with the UN Food Systems Summit, the special envoy, who was appointed by the director general of the secretary general of the United Nations was Agnes Kalibate, who is the president of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa—very close ties with corporations and with philanthropic organizations that have a lot of corporate buy-in, like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—so, because with Brazil’s change in government, with a far-right government coming into play with Jair Bolsonaro in power in Brazil, they are basically aligned with corporate interests far more, so they have become an ally of the private sector mechanism, which is the way that corporations come together in the Committee on World Food Security, just like the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism is how social movements and NGOs come together. The PSM is far more powerful in Brazil, and Brazil is not opposing this at all.
Mark Williams
What about some of the industrialized states?
Molly Anderson
Many of them have not supported the CSM in the way that we, and by we I mean the CSM would have hoped that they would support.
Mark Williams
Let me get back to the civil society organizations who were disappointed with the way this summit was organized and not enthusiastic participants. What kind of summit would these organizations have liked to see?
Molly Anderson
They would have liked to see a summit that was organized by the people who are not benefiting from the global food system now. The very people who are suffering that increase in food insecurity, that are suffering from land grabs, having their land taken away, having their fishing rights taken away by industrialized fishing fleets, having the consequences of climate change. They are bearing the brunt of that, and they didn’t cause it. So what they would have liked to see would be a summit organized by the people who are suffering most from food insecurity instead of the people who are benefiting now in the global food system. And that’s what the Food Systems Summit was all about. A summit by the winners.
Mark Williams
Would an argument against that type of summit be that those who are most disadvantaged by the problems of food insecurity are also in the least likely position to be able to solve that problem because of a lack of resources, or lack of organization, or lack an inability to grapple with something that is of the magnitude of the kind of crisis that you’re talking about?
Molly Anderson
Well, they know what the solutions need to be. They know better than anyone else what needs to be done in order for them to be food secure, for them to have tenure rights over the lands that they have been farming or fishing, the seas that they’ve been fishing for generations. They know best what needs to change. They know what needs to change in terms of addressing climate change. We’re just coming out of the COP26 and again, a highly non-representative summit where people from the global south were not able to travel to Glasgow. They did not have as much of a voice because of connectivity issues with internet, because they are still struggling with COVID immensely, because of this vaccine apartheid that’s been imposed by the wealthy nations where we are still getting far more booster shots. So yes, they do not have the financial resources, but they are incredibly articulate and they know the solutions, and it’s the member states who have the responsibility to listen to them to uphold their human rights. That’s the obligation of member states. So, the member states should be listening to social movements and civil society, and upholding their human rights, and then engaging with corporations in whatever way is necessary to, or with philanthropic organizations, in whatever way is necessary to bring in resources, for instance, having very strict limits on what corporations are able to do in their country, or very strict limits on how corporations can engage in negotiations. A corporation that’s abusing human rights and degrading the environment should not have a seat at the table to talk about solutions to environmental degradation and the violation of human rights.
Mark Williams
Thank you. I’d like to ask you to try and look ahead now and help us understand what might be coming down in the future. What do you think the long-term impact of the UN Food Systems Summit will likely be? Do you think that there’s going to be lasting effects on how food systems are actually governed, or maybe even on how much gets invested in different solutions to the food insecurity problems we’ve been discussing?
Molly Anderson
There may well be, and that’s exactly what civil society feared at the very beginning. They feared that there would be far more of a focus on the high-tech solutions, the kinds of solutions that bring benefits back to the venture capitalists in wealthy nations, than on the kinds of solutions that would benefit poor people—things like agroecology, like food sovereignty. And true enough, there was almost no mention of agroecology or food sovereignty in the Food Systems Summit. Agroecology did come up toward the end and there were member states that advocated for it, several in the EU, several in Latin America.
Mark Williams
Could you briefly tell us what agroecology means and food sovereignty?
Molly Anderson
Agroecology is the system of food production, distribution, and consumption that is counterbalanced against the industrialized food system. It’s a way of producing food in far more harmony with nature, not using pesticides, eschewing the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers because they are damaging the environment. They are leading to the incredible loss of biodiversity that the whole world is facing right now. And the ecosystem services that biodiversity provides are things that are essential for human survival. So if we are killing biodiversity, destroying it, and degrading the natural environment, there’s a limit to how long humans will be able to survive and certainly a limit to how long the kind of civilization that we’ve created will be able to survive. So agroecology also has a focus on improving farmer livelihoods, on improving the nutritional status of people. So farmers are planting far more crops, which allows them to diversify; they have a better chance of getting an income from whatever crops do survive under the consequences of climate change, and the family—the household—has better nutrition because they’re eating a bigger diversity of crops, or eating animal products and crops, instead of planting cash crops to feed a global economy.
Mark Williams
And food sovereignty.
Molly Anderson
Food sovereignty is having control over your own food system, and that’s something that corporations have been threatening immensely through investing in things like AGRA, but also through imposing regulations on farmers that prevent them from saving seeds, that prevent them from farming in the way they want to be farming: regulations that say you have to be growing cash crops. If you want a loan from the World Bank or a loan from the IMF, you need to be growing cash crops and not investing in things that are useful for your household. It’s a continuation of structural adjustment.
Mark Williams
This has been really fascinating. The whole topic has been fascinating. Looking ahead, what’s next, what’s next for you? The article we’ve been talking about today was published back in April of 2021. The summit took place this fall in September. Are you going to continue to monitor what comes out of the UN Food Systems Summit? Or do you have another research project that you’re going to be conducting?
Molly Anderson
Well, I’ll continue to work with the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism. I have been attending the CFS to the greatest extent possible over the last 12 years, and I find it fascinating to see these very articulate smart people coming from the global south and trying to present their case to their governments in this Committee on World Food Security that allows them to speak directly to their governments. And when their governments say, oh everything’s going fine, the people from the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism can say, well actually, they’re not. We are suffering incredible hardship and particularly with COVID, that’s been something that was nowhere on the agenda of the Food Systems Summit, even though that was the big problem leading to an acceleration of food insecurity. So, I will continue working with the CSM, and I’m also starting a project of narratives of food system transformation.
Mark Williams
Oh, really.
Molly Anderson
Yeah. I have a book contract with Routledge to develop a book to look at this narrative of the industrialized food system and its supporters, vis-à-vis agroecology and the kinds of narratives that are coming out of the global south. So I’m hoping to go to Mexico and interview people who have been involved in agroecology research.
Mark Williams
That should be fascinating. I look forward to reading what you publish based upon that research.
Molly Anderson
I hope you will.
Mark Williams
Molly Anderson, thank you very much for talking to us today on New Frontiers.
Fun Facts about Molly Anderson
Professor Molly Anderson lives in Middlebury, Vermont. Besides her passion for food studies, she enjoys reading, bicycling, and gardening; specifically ornamental, perennials, vegetables, and herbs. She also loves her two Manx cats, Anya and Ethos. Once upon a time she was an avid long-distance bicyclist, and in tenth grade, this future professor was a finalist in the Texas State spelling bee. Outside of the classroom, students often bump in her at the library or food co-op.
Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.
Today, Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—is joined by professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson, to discuss food systems, food security, and why the recent United Nations Food Systems Summit is unlikely to generate effective safeguards against global food insecurity.
Mark Williams
Molly Anderson is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies and the academic director of food studies at Middlebury College; much of her research is focused on food security, food systems, human rights and the food system, and the right to food here in the U.S. and other industrialized countries.
Today, I’ll be talking with Molly about one of her most recent projects, a coauthored article that appeared in the journal Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems.
As a political scientist myself, one thing I find intriguing about this article is that it deals as much with political factors as it does with agriculture, ecology, or other factors that we typically associate with food production. The article is titled “UN Food Systems Summit 2021 Dismantling Democracy and Resetting Corporate Control of Food Systems.”
Molly Anderson, welcome to New Frontiers.
Molly Anderson
Well, thank you for inviting me to the RCGA podcast series.
Mark Williams
You’re quite welcome.
Molly Anderson
I’m honored.
Mark Williams
I’m glad to have you. Now, you hold a doctorate in ecology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So as a trained ecologist, how did you become interested in in food studies to begin with, and especially for our listeners who may not know, what exactly is food studies anyway?
Molly Anderson
Well, let me answer the second question first, because it has a lot of connection with what surprised you about that article that I’m writing about political issues, even though my training is in ecology. Food studies is fascinating to me because it deals with everything that food touches, which of course includes political dynamics. Political dynamics are extremely important in determining who’s able to eat, how much they can eat, what quality of food they can eat, how food is produced. And those actually are some of the things that entered into this question that we were considering in that coauthored article that appeared in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
But how I got into food studies. I originally wanted to work in Latin America, in international development and was in Peru, up on a hilltop in the Andes, 14,000-plus feet gasping for breath,
but also had a kind of apocalyptic moment where I realized that I should be working in a culture that I understood much better than the Andean culture. I had come there with this presumption. And in retrospect, it’s really presumptuous that I would have something to teach people in that culture about managing their landscapes. And this is a place where people have been managing their landscapes sustainably for millennia. They’ve done an incredible job of terracing in the Andes. And here I am, coming from North Carolina that was dealing with all sorts of environmental problems, coming from there with this idea that I had something to tell them.
And I realized I needed to go back to the United States and work within my own culture on the
problems that were really pressing environmentally and socially in our environmental milieu.
And one of the biggest problems in North Carolina at that point was the concentration of
hog manufacturing and chicken production in CFO’s confined animal feeding operations,
which were both terrible for the people who had gotten roped into being producers of hogs or chickens under these circumstances, but also terrible environmentally, as we saw soon after that, with hurricanes where the hog lagoons, as they call them—lagoons, connotes this beautiful blue tropical view—but hog lagoons are these nasty pits full of hog manure and urine. And with the hurricanes, the lagoons were breached, and the manure and urine spilled out into riverways, polluted them, did terrible things to the fish living in the riverways, and also created dead zones at the mouth of the river as they came out into the ocean, just like the dead zone that’s in the mouth of the Mississippi River, where it feeds into the Gulf of Mexico.
So I got into food systems because that was the big issue in North Carolina: what was happening with this transition from independent hog producers into basically cogs in an industrial system and causing huge environmental problems in the process. And then one thing led to another. I went to Tufts University and worked in the School of Nutrition Science and Policy, started a graduate program in agriculture, food, and environment while I was there,
and then left Tufts for various reasons. But was out doing independent consulting for about eight years and then decided I really missed academia, really missed working with students, went back to teaching and here I am at Middlebury.
Mark Williams
Well we’re glad to have you here at Middlebury, and we’re glad that you brought this expertise with you. When we talk about food systems again, what exactly are we talking about?
Molly Anderson
We’re talking about everything that affects how food is produced, distributed, and consumed, which includes all of the policies, all of the institutions that make the rules, the regulations, the laws that affect how producers operate, how input suppliers operate, inputs like pesticides and fertilizers. And then where the food goes, how much it’s sold for, who gets to eat it, who gets the best quality food.
Mark Williams
How it’s distributed and how it’s consumed.
Molly Anderson
Exactly. So everything that feeds into that system, the food system, is part of food studies.
Mark Williams
Just to follow up a bit. What are some of the common problems or threats that food systems typically face?
Molly Anderson
Well, right now there’s a battle going on in food systems. It’s a battle between industrialized food systems, which were started largely in the United States during the Green Revolution and the research money that we poured into the Green Revolution in Mexico, in the Philippines, all over the world, not in Africa. But the industrialized food system has been highly productive, and many people will say, well, it’s prevented starvation of millions of people. Yet that productivity came at a huge cost: environmentally, socially, economically, from the perspective of farmers. The winners are the corporations largely that have written the rules, the governments that have cozied up to the pesticide manufacturers and the fertilizer manufacturers, and the CEOs of those companies. But the losers have been people whose land has been grabbed in order to produce food with these industrialized food systems, the farmers who have lost income because they no longer have as much power and their livelihoods are being threatened, and the environment—the environment has been a huge loser. So we’re seeing all of those threats from the industrialized food system. The good thing is that there’re alternatives. That’s not the only way to produce food.
Mark Williams
OK, well let’s dive into your article and get to the focal point. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit is what you’re writing about. Was this the first time that the UN had ever convened a summit on food systems?
Molly Anderson
The summit did take place. It was September 23rd through the 24th of 2021. It was not the first food summit, but it was unusual in many ways. There have been at least four food summits that preceded this, and they have all operated in a very different way than this one did. This one was organized by the UN Secretary General in partnership at the World Economic Forum, and the secretary general had signed an agreement. Actually his deputy, Amina Mohammed, had signed an agreement with the World Economic Forum just a few months before the launch of the UN Food System Summit. They had agreed to work in partnership, and this was quite unusual because the previous summits had all been organized coming out of the FAO, which is responsible in the UN food, in the UN system.
Mark Williams
FAO meaning?
Molly Anderson
Food and Agriculture Organization. It is responsible for all issues that have to do with food, food and agriculture. So this, which of course should be about food and agriculture—it’s a food system summit, after all—is coming out of the Secretary General’s Office with strong support from the World Economic Forum. It was not designed with any kind of strong input or an ask from member states, and the UN is really the place where member states of the United Nations come together and make decisions together. But this summit was set up in a way that diminished the role of the member states. It really elevated the role of the corporations that are part of the World Economic Forum, which is constituted of the thousand biggest corporations in the world. So they had a big role in this summit, and the member states relatively little. The organization was quite different. The conduct was quite different of the summit.
Mark Williams
Well, let me just stop you for a minute for point of clarification. If the United Nations had been more or less in the business of holding these types of summits periodically, and I think you said there were three or four that have preceded this one. Why was this one called? And you seem to be saying that it was called in a very atypical manner. Why was it felt that there was a need for a summit now? And what did the summit aim to achieve?
Molly Anderson
Well, let me answer that in two ways. From the perspective of the World Economic Forum, I think this summit was a continuation of what they call the Great Reset, which was an initiative that first came out of the World Economic Forum several years ago, in which they said member states operate too inefficiently, too slowly. And these UN processes that we’ve been relying on, we can’t rely on them to solve global problems anymore. They should be turned over to corporations, which are able to operate far more efficiently, far more effectively. So, they were arguing for this Great Reset. And that was one of the problems, and that’s how it played out in the summit—that it really was posing this Great Reset as the answer to world problems. The big problem right now is that we are facing the end of the Sustainable Development Goal period, 2030, when many different objectives, many different goals are supposed to be achieved. We are not anywhere near being on track with achieving the end hunger goal. In fact, for the last five years, we’ve been slipping farther and farther back in terms of food insecurity, and with COVID, that became much worse. As of last year, 711 to 820 million people are facing food insecurity. And this is a major jump from the previous year, which was 600-some million people facing food insecurity. So, a much larger number last year, because of COVID, are at risk of severe malnutrition than in the previous year.
Mark Williams
So there’s a perceived need for this summit then, to address these types of problems then.
Molly Anderson
The problems are real, but to have a food summit called in this way—this is so far from the way that civil society would have organized a food summit. And civil society recognizes that there’s a major problem.
Mark Williams
Well, this more or less gets to my next question that I wanted to ask you, and I think you may have addressed some of it. In your article, you and your colleagues criticize this particular summit, and actually you criticized it a lot. So what would be the two or three major critiques that you and your colleagues have about this summit?
Molly Anderson
Diminishing the role of multilateral institutions like the Committee on World Food Security. And what I mean by multilateral is that countries make decisions.
Mark Williams
The states themselves.
Molly Anderson
Yes, the member states are making decisions. What the summit replaced multilateral decision making with is something called multi-stakeholderism, where anybody can come to the table. It sounds great in principle. It sounds as if this is a very democratic way to negotiate problems.
Mark Williams
Sounds like an improvement.
Molly Anderson
Well, it sounds like an improvement. But in fact, it’s not because the multi-stakeholderism allowed the stronger institutions, the corporations, which had a lot more money, a lot more ability to participate in these negotiations, it allowed them to play a dominant role. And the people who should have been at the front, the people who were actually facing food insecurity—the social movements, the most marginalized people—their voices were cut out in multi-stakeholderism.
Mark Williams
So the people most affected by the problem of food insecurity, we might say were silenced or at least not given an opportunity to have input into solutions.
Molly Anderson
Exactly. And they’re the people who can say best, what kinds of solutions would work. So that was one of the big problems, replacing multilateralism with multi-stakeholderism. But some of the other problems had to do with the chaos, the lack of transparency in decision making that pervaded the Food Systems Summit, and the way that the CSM, which is the major body within the Committee on World Food Security.
Mark Williams
And the CSM means?
Molly Anderson
The CSM is the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism. It is the place within the Committee on World Food Security where the social movements and NGOs can participate and can speak directly in plenary sessions of the Committee on World Food Security and can negotiate in every way on any guidelines coming out of the Committee on World Food Security. They decided not to participate in the Food Systems Summit because they were knocked out, and they could see from the way it had been organized and the way that the CFS itself had been marginalized.
Mark Williams
Let me play devil’s advocate a little bit. If civil society organizations haven’t really joined in the summit and they’re not very enthusiastic it, is it really fair to blame the UN organizers for this? Wouldn’t it make more sense to blame the civil society organizations themselves? I mean, aren’t they basically shooting themselves in the foot by not participating in a summit that is directly related to a concern that they hold dear?
Molly Anderson
Some people have made that argument. And in fact, the organizers made that argument that they open the door, anybody who wanted to could participate. It was very inclusive. They even renamed the summit, the People’s Summit, which was a bit of an insult, honestly. And some civil society organizations did participate. The organizers cherry picked civil society, who they thought would support their views or be receptive, at least to their views, and wouldn’t object to multi-stakeholderism. But it was a very principled decision, a very difficult decision that was made by the CSM, and they actually went to the organizers and said we would be glad to participate in the summit if you would add an action track. Action tracks were the ways that it was organized. There was an action track on equitable livelihoods, an action track on nature-based solutions, for instance. They said if the organizers would add an action track on corporate dominance, corporate takeover of the food system that could be self-organized by civil society, they would be glad to join. That was one of the things that simply was not on the agenda of the Food Systems Summit, even though people who are pretty much in favor of what corporations are doing will say there’s corporate dominance of food systems now. So, they refused to participate, partly because the organizers would not work with them. So, it was not a rash decision by any means.
Mark Williams
I see.
Molly Anderson
They consulted with their constituencies and the constituency said we simply cannot participate in this. This is so far from what we believe needs to be happening in discussions of what’s wrong with the global food system.
Mark Williams
Let me ask you about something that I’ve been curious about, and it’s to gauge your thinking about an alternate way of looking at this scenario you’ve just described. And by this, I mean, shouldn’t we be happy? Shouldn’t we be glad that the big corporations seem to be playing a fairly significant role in the summit, organizing it and participating in it? Given the power and the influence that these corporations seem to have with global food systems, isn’t it really important to keep them engaged in helping to solve what’s clearly an important problem?
Molly Anderson
The problem is that they created the problem. So, by bringing them in and saying, yes, you can help us solve these problems of inequity, of lack of livelihoods for poor farmers, of fertilizer prices shooting through the roof, of seeds being held by rules that prevent smallholders from saving their own seed. By asking corporations in the door and saying, yes, you can help us solve these problems, you’re asking them to solve the problems they have created. And it just doesn’t make any sense. They do give lip service to solutions, but then they turn around and do the bad things they were doing all along. They just continue with that. There’s a fundamental disconnect here because the main purpose of corporations is to make money for shareholders.
It’s not to serve the public good, to increase the income of small-scale farmers. That’s not what they’re about. They even aren’t about increasing environmental quality, although the degradation of environmental quality is making their own corporations—it eventually, that’ll catch up with them; it’ll turn around and bite them because they won’t be able to continue in the businesses that they’re in if the environment degrades sufficiently. Yet in the short term, they are completely obligated to make as much money as they can.
Mark Williams
The business of business is business.
Molly Anderson
Yes. Yes. So they want to continue with business as usual, instead of some fundamental change in perspective.
Mark Williams
I see. Do you think that the folks who organized the Food Systems Summit are more or less just blind to the problems that that you and your colleagues are highlighting in this article? Hasn’t anyone tried to point these issues out to them so that they could be fixed? And if they had been pointed out, what has typically been the response?
Molly Anderson
That’s a real mystery because, as I said, the UN has been the bastion of multilateralism of member states coming together. So why the UN would suddenly be signing partnerships with the World Economic Forum and why FAO signing a partnership with Crop Life, which is made up of the major pesticide producers in the world? In some ways it’s a complete mystery. But it’s a direction that civil society is fearing very much: that corporations are taking over this space that has been the space of member states. And some member states don’t like this either. They can see that they are losing power to corporations. And of course, many corporations have a lot more revenue, a lot more to invest than member states do. So, the UN is turning to corporations hoping that they will finance solutions to the problems because they don’t have the money at their disposal to pay for these solutions. So it’s a kind of devil’s bargain. They are saying, well corporations, you can be involved and we trust that you will come up with solutions in partnership with civil society and other voices that are at the table that will serve the public good, but that’s not what corporations are about, and they have the major say.
Mark Williams
Given the disempowerment that seems to be happening, in this case with respect to the member states, how have the states responded to this or has there been a response? Have they recognized this as a disempowerment or have they, have they not?
Molly Anderson
Some of them definitely recognize that it’s disempowerment, particularly the African nations. And one of the issues with the UN Food Systems Summit, the special envoy, who was appointed by the director general of the secretary general of the United Nations was Agnes Kalibate, who is the president of AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa—very close ties with corporations and with philanthropic organizations that have a lot of corporate buy-in, like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—so, because with Brazil’s change in government, with a far-right government coming into play with Jair Bolsonaro in power in Brazil, they are basically aligned with corporate interests far more, so they have become an ally of the private sector mechanism, which is the way that corporations come together in the Committee on World Food Security, just like the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism is how social movements and NGOs come together. The PSM is far more powerful in Brazil, and Brazil is not opposing this at all.
Mark Williams
What about some of the industrialized states?
Molly Anderson
Many of them have not supported the CSM in the way that we, and by we I mean the CSM would have hoped that they would support.
Mark Williams
Let me get back to the civil society organizations who were disappointed with the way this summit was organized and not enthusiastic participants. What kind of summit would these organizations have liked to see?
Molly Anderson
They would have liked to see a summit that was organized by the people who are not benefiting from the global food system now. The very people who are suffering that increase in food insecurity, that are suffering from land grabs, having their land taken away, having their fishing rights taken away by industrialized fishing fleets, having the consequences of climate change. They are bearing the brunt of that, and they didn’t cause it. So what they would have liked to see would be a summit organized by the people who are suffering most from food insecurity instead of the people who are benefiting now in the global food system. And that’s what the Food Systems Summit was all about. A summit by the winners.
Mark Williams
Would an argument against that type of summit be that those who are most disadvantaged by the problems of food insecurity are also in the least likely position to be able to solve that problem because of a lack of resources, or lack of organization, or lack an inability to grapple with something that is of the magnitude of the kind of crisis that you’re talking about?
Molly Anderson
Well, they know what the solutions need to be. They know better than anyone else what needs to be done in order for them to be food secure, for them to have tenure rights over the lands that they have been farming or fishing, the seas that they’ve been fishing for generations. They know best what needs to change. They know what needs to change in terms of addressing climate change. We’re just coming out of the COP26 and again, a highly non-representative summit where people from the global south were not able to travel to Glasgow. They did not have as much of a voice because of connectivity issues with internet, because they are still struggling with COVID immensely, because of this vaccine apartheid that’s been imposed by the wealthy nations where we are still getting far more booster shots. So yes, they do not have the financial resources, but they are incredibly articulate and they know the solutions, and it’s the member states who have the responsibility to listen to them to uphold their human rights. That’s the obligation of member states. So, the member states should be listening to social movements and civil society, and upholding their human rights, and then engaging with corporations in whatever way is necessary to, or with philanthropic organizations, in whatever way is necessary to bring in resources, for instance, having very strict limits on what corporations are able to do in their country, or very strict limits on how corporations can engage in negotiations. A corporation that’s abusing human rights and degrading the environment should not have a seat at the table to talk about solutions to environmental degradation and the violation of human rights.
Mark Williams
Thank you. I’d like to ask you to try and look ahead now and help us understand what might be coming down in the future. What do you think the long-term impact of the UN Food Systems Summit will likely be? Do you think that there’s going to be lasting effects on how food systems are actually governed, or maybe even on how much gets invested in different solutions to the food insecurity problems we’ve been discussing?
Molly Anderson
There may well be, and that’s exactly what civil society feared at the very beginning. They feared that there would be far more of a focus on the high-tech solutions, the kinds of solutions that bring benefits back to the venture capitalists in wealthy nations, than on the kinds of solutions that would benefit poor people—things like agroecology, like food sovereignty. And true enough, there was almost no mention of agroecology or food sovereignty in the Food Systems Summit. Agroecology did come up toward the end and there were member states that advocated for it, several in the EU, several in Latin America.
Mark Williams
Could you briefly tell us what agroecology means and food sovereignty?
Molly Anderson
Agroecology is the system of food production, distribution, and consumption that is counterbalanced against the industrialized food system. It’s a way of producing food in far more harmony with nature, not using pesticides, eschewing the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers because they are damaging the environment. They are leading to the incredible loss of biodiversity that the whole world is facing right now. And the ecosystem services that biodiversity provides are things that are essential for human survival. So if we are killing biodiversity, destroying it, and degrading the natural environment, there’s a limit to how long humans will be able to survive and certainly a limit to how long the kind of civilization that we’ve created will be able to survive. So agroecology also has a focus on improving farmer livelihoods, on improving the nutritional status of people. So farmers are planting far more crops, which allows them to diversify; they have a better chance of getting an income from whatever crops do survive under the consequences of climate change, and the family—the household—has better nutrition because they’re eating a bigger diversity of crops, or eating animal products and crops, instead of planting cash crops to feed a global economy.
Mark Williams
And food sovereignty.
Molly Anderson
Food sovereignty is having control over your own food system, and that’s something that corporations have been threatening immensely through investing in things like AGRA, but also through imposing regulations on farmers that prevent them from saving seeds, that prevent them from farming in the way they want to be farming: regulations that say you have to be growing cash crops. If you want a loan from the World Bank or a loan from the IMF, you need to be growing cash crops and not investing in things that are useful for your household. It’s a continuation of structural adjustment.
Mark Williams
This has been really fascinating. The whole topic has been fascinating. Looking ahead, what’s next, what’s next for you? The article we’ve been talking about today was published back in April of 2021. The summit took place this fall in September. Are you going to continue to monitor what comes out of the UN Food Systems Summit? Or do you have another research project that you’re going to be conducting?
Molly Anderson
Well, I’ll continue to work with the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism. I have been attending the CFS to the greatest extent possible over the last 12 years, and I find it fascinating to see these very articulate smart people coming from the global south and trying to present their case to their governments in this Committee on World Food Security that allows them to speak directly to their governments. And when their governments say, oh everything’s going fine, the people from the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism can say, well actually, they’re not. We are suffering incredible hardship and particularly with COVID, that’s been something that was nowhere on the agenda of the Food Systems Summit, even though that was the big problem leading to an acceleration of food insecurity. So, I will continue working with the CSM, and I’m also starting a project of narratives of food system transformation.
Mark Williams
Oh, really.
Molly Anderson
Yeah. I have a book contract with Routledge to develop a book to look at this narrative of the industrialized food system and its supporters, vis-à-vis agroecology and the kinds of narratives that are coming out of the global south. So I’m hoping to go to Mexico and interview people who have been involved in agroecology research.
Mark Williams
That should be fascinating. I look forward to reading what you publish based upon that research.
Molly Anderson
I hope you will.
Mark Williams
Molly Anderson, thank you very much for talking to us today on New Frontiers.
Fun Facts about Molly Anderson
Professor Molly Anderson lives in Middlebury, Vermont. Besides her passion for food studies, she enjoys reading, bicycling, and gardening; specifically ornamental, perennials, vegetables, and herbs. She also loves her two Manx cats, Anya and Ethos. Once upon a time she was an avid long-distance bicyclist, and in tenth grade, this future professor was a finalist in the Texas State spelling bee. Outside of the classroom, students often bump in her at the library or food co-op.
New Frontiers is hosted by Mark Williams, director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs and Middlebury College professor of political science.
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