UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 24 - To Get Rich is Glorious - 01h 20m 00s

Lecture Overview: Humanitarian Interventions in the Late 1990s and the Rise of China and India

[0:00]

Okay, it's about time to get going. It looks like the microphone is working today after Tuesday's technical problems. I'm going to start by finishing off the discussion of humanitarian intervention. We've got a substantial amount still to get through. I certainly don't want the lectures to continue into the reading, recitation and review: the three-R week.

[00:26]

So let's move quickly and I'll try to get through both humanitarian intervention in the late 1990s, the parts of Tuesday's lecture that I didn't finish on Tuesday, and the rise of China and India as well, which is what we're scheduled to talk about today. I think I can do it. We'll see.

Summary of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994

[00:45]

On Tuesday we concluded our lecture with a discussion of the Rwandan genocide↗ of 1994. I concluded by remarking that the Western powers choose almost purposefully not to intervene despite you know transparent knowledge of what was going on in Rwanda and available capabilities to act.

[01:10]

What happened in Rwanda was a, you know sort of, gratuitous example of bystanders disdaining to act because in large part, at least in the case of the United States and Great Britain, political leaders were fearful about the domestic political consequences of putting Western lives at stake to save Africans from genocide. I think that's the most succinct and probably accurate interpretation of why the world stood by in 1994.

[01:41]

(student question)

[01:46]

Clinton said it was not in the political interests of the United States that there were no overriding national interests at stake. Clinton's actually you know quite apologetic about this. When he goes to Africa in I think 1998 he actually stops very briefly in Rwanda, but really doesn't venture far beyond his plane. His plane lands in Rwanda; he gets off the plane and gives a speech, and says he's sorry and then gets back on the plane and leaves for somewhere a little more hospitable.

[02:12]

If you read Bill Clinton's memoirs↗, which are actually pretty good then his treatment of Rwanda is really interesting because it's one of the few areas where Clinton I think is genuinely contrite in his memoirs about, you know, things that he did and in this case did not do as President.

[02:29]

Rwanda, you know for obvious reasons,...illustrates the...failures of the international community, the international community fails to act, it fails to do much at all, it fails even to condemn the violence through the sort of official voice piece of the UN Security Council: about 800,000 people die. This is a catastrophic genocide; the scale of it I described in Tuesday's lecture. The experience is a chastening one. It's also an experience that is emboldening to the proponents of what will become known as humanitarian intervention.

[03:07]

For people like Bernard Kouchner↗ and Michael Ignatieff↗, intellectuals who defend humanitarian intervention and even call it a responsibility rather than a right, a responsibility of humanitarian intervention, Rwanda makes the case, right, that the international community should have done something. One implication being that in future conflicts the international community should be more open to action than it was in the case of Rwanda.

The Yugoslav Wars

[03:34]

Sadly it doesn't take very long for the international community to have another opportunity to act in circumstance in which genocidal killings are being perpetrated. The site however will be very different. Rwanda took place in South Central Africa. The next genocidal crisis that the world community will have to confront takes place not in Africa but in Europe -- in southeastern Europe in the states of, what is already by the mid-1990s, to be known as the former Yugoslavia.

[04:07]

Yugoslavia disintegrates fairly rapidly during the 1980s↗. Tito, Josip Broz Tito↗, who had led Yugoslavia since the end of the Second World War, dies in 1980. After Tito's death the Communist system in Yugoslavia, a reformed fairly liberal Communist system by the standards of Eastern Europe, sort of deteriorates and begins to disintegrate.

[04:33]

The economy which had grown quite impressively in the '50s and '60s ceases to grow. The absence of sustained growth corrodes the political legitimacy of the system and so on. These are dynamics that are now fairly familiar to you thanks to your study of other East European economies in the 1980s.

[04:52]

The question of whether the state can survive as a unified state is however more urgent in the case of Yugoslavia than it is the case of say Hungary or Poland or Romania and so on. This is because unlike those countries, all of which are substantially homogeneous: linguistically, culturally, nationally, Yugoslavia was from the outset a multiethnic federation.

[05:16]

The name Yugoslavia literally translates as the land of the south Slavs. But the country is divided into a number of distinct ethnic units. Yugoslavia is populated by Slovenias↗, Croatians↗, Serbians↗, and Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks↗. These are distinct groups with distinct histories. Yugoslavia, when the country was created after the First World War, was not created as a nation-state as such, but rather as a multiethnic state.

[05:48]

Tito did a very job of keeping this multiethnic state together. Communism of course provided a unifying ideology. For a multiethnic state Communism is a very...appropriate economic, sorry, ideological system in some respects because Communism makes little regard to differences of nationality, ethnicity or culture.

[06:08]

You know Communism unifies on the basis of class solidarity. Thus Tito as leader of Yugoslavia could sort of rally the country behind a commitment to working class values, to the rule of the proletariat↗ and so on. But Tito was able to rule without you know much differentation as to ethnic or national difference.

[06:31]

After Tito's death, as the Communist system struggles for legitimacy, nationalism begins to reassert itself. It's clear during the 1980s that nationalism is a rising political force in Yugoslavia --that Croats are increasingly defining as Croats seeking solidarity with other Croatians.

[06:50]

Serbs are doing much the same thing. So too are Slovenians. Astute political leaders in post-Tito Yugoslavia recognize you know sort of which way the historical winds are blowing and begin to redefine themselves as nationalist political leaders rather than as Communist political leaders.

[07:09]

Two leaders in particular, Slobodan Milošević↗, a Serb, and Franjo Tuđman↗, a Croat, sort of recast themselves as assertive nationalist leaders, as leaders who stand not for Communism, not for Yugoslavia, but for distinct national groups -- the Serbs and the Croats respectively.

[07:28]

Ultimately the multiethnic Yugoslav federation collapses; it collapses pretty early. In 1990 Slovenia in northwestern Yugoslavia secedes from the union. This provokes a sort of brief war, but it's a relatively amicable, by the standards of the region, secession.

[07:51]

Next Croatia secedes. This is a much bigger deal. Croatia is a much larger sort of element of the Yugoslav Federation than Slovenia was and moreover Croatia contains an extensive Serbian population: a population that defines ethnically as Serb.

[08:12]

Croatia does not treat the Serb population within it very well after it secedes from the union. It wages sort of an internal war against the Serbian minority -- the purpose being to ethnically cleanse the Croat state, to expel the Serbs and so on.

[08:30]

It's Bosnia however that will be the epicenter of the you know ethnic wars and bloodletting that define Yugoslavia's post-Communist experience. Bosnia has an especially complex ethnic tapestry. Whereas Croatia is predominantly populated by Croats, Serbia predominantly populated by Serbs, Bosnia is truly a multiethnic entity within a multiethnic state. It contains substantial number of Croats, a substantial number of Serbs, and a substantial number of Bosnian Muslims -- Bosniaks.

[09:05]

The country is fairly evenly divided in terms of its ethnic distribution. It's not that any single party holds a sort of majority of power. After Croatia secedes, Yugoslavia, or the states of the former Yugoslavia, will be divided along sort of two, you know, fundamental schisms both centering on Bosnia and Herzegovina↗. It's Bosnia and Herzegovina that is sort of the crucible of the Balkan wars↗.

[09:38]

And the first war which is fought in Bosnia is the Serb war for secession↗. And this is a war that is fought within Bosnia and Herzegovina but with the support of the Serbian state. Serbs resident within Bosnia seek, with the support of Serbia, to sort of secede from Bosnia taking a substantial part of Bosnia's territory with them.

[10:03]

In the areas that they control, predominantly in northern and eastern Bosnia, the Serbs will try to sort of purge or cleanse territory of non-Serbian influence, of Croatians and of Bosnian Muslims.

[10:17]

This is probably the single most bloody and violent of the Balkan Wars: the struggle by Bosnia's Serbs to secede and to integrate to the Serbian nation-state. But the civil wars that are fought are more complex than that. It's not as if the Croats and the Muslims in Bosnia are able to sort of ally together against the Serbs.

[10:41]

On the contrary they fight an internal civil war between themselves. So it's as if every ethnic group in Bosnia is fighting against everybody else, with the support of external powers, namely; the Croatian and Serbian states that come into being following the dissolution of Federal Yugoslavia.

[10:59]

So this is really a quagmire. It's a very, very bloody sort of complex struggle in which there are multiple lines of fracture.

[11:08]

It's a conflict in which the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing↗ becomes a you know sort of commonplace word in the vocabulary of international observers. The Serbs in particular try to perpetrate, you know, what becomes known as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Croats and the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Muslims, who happen to reside in the territories that are controlled by Serbian forces.

[11:35]

And here in the map you can see, you know more or less, the sort of ethnic geopolitics of Bosnia in the context of the post-Yugoslavian wars of secession. Areas in the north and in the east are controlled predominantly by Serbs. Areas smaller, much smaller areas, in the south are controlled predominantly by Croats, and then in the central region, the Bosnian government, maintains sort of more limited zone of control.

[12:07]

Within and at the borders of these ethnically dominated regions ethnic killing is rampant and the Serbs in particular are complicit in the perpetration of it. In the areas that they control Serb forces establish concentration camps within which sort of Bosnian Muslim people in particular will be you know sort of confined and...mistreated.

[12:34]

The Serbs perpetrate, Serb forces perpetrate, acts of individual genocide, including a particularly notorious episode of Srebrenica↗ which we'll talk about in just a few minutes.

[12:47]

It's not as if violence and murder are the only weapons that ethnic cleansing employs. Rape is utilized by Serb forces as a weapon of war. And if you think about the sort of biological aspects of ethnic cleansing -- what does ethnic cleansing try to do? Well, you can see the logic of utilizing rape as a weapon of war -- that it seeks in effect to...exterminate a population by, you know sort of, genetic invasion as it were.

[13:18]

This is, you know, one aspect of the war that is particularly horrible. It's a very, very unpleasant conflict. What does the larger world do? It's clear enough what's going on. Bosnia is open and accessible to international media. European and North American news organizations provide extensive and quite often excellent coverage of the you know human atrocities that are being perpetrated within Bosnia.

[13:45]

The United Nations and the European Union both insist from the outset upon neutrality. Parties in the international community argue that this is an internal civil war; that it's not the responsibility of the international community to take sides.

[14:00]

And indeed it is true that no side in this conflict is really blameless. Whether some are more deserving of blame than others is a harder question to answer. The international community certainly provides humanitarian aid -- a substantial amount of it. You know to its credit the international community provides food aid such that you know Bosnians in the throes of civil war will not, you know, want for basic caloric sustenance. If people starve to death it's because their military adversaries will it: not because there's an absence of provision.

[14:32]

The international community also imposes an arms embargo on Bosnia. This has, you know, consequences for the balance of power within civil war strewn Bosnia. Because the Serbian nation-state of course does not observe the arms embargo. It continues to supply Serbs within Bosnia with weapons. The major victim of the arms embargo is the Bosnian government, a government that dominated by Bosnian Muslims, and a government that is unable to procure the weapons of war with which to defend itself and defend its people because of the arms embargo that the international community mandates.

[15:09]

Still the question of what to do about genocide remains as the international media relays sort of moving images and video footage of a slow moving genocidal catastrophe the question of whether the international community has any responsibility comes to the fore.

[15:28]

What is the world to do when confronted with images of concentration camps in Europe? After all these were images that Europe thought that it had left behind at the end of the Second World War. But the imagery that the Bosnian Civil War produces is powerfully reminiscent of the Second World War and of the Nazi Holocaust.

[15:49]

After the Holocaust of course Europeans said: never again. Well, something resembling the Holocaust is happening again in Europe in the mid-1990s. What do Europeans decide to do about it?

[16:01]

The European Union is slow in deciding upon a course of coherent action beyond the provision of humanitarian aid. Ultimately it takes episodes, particular events, in which gratuitous violence is perpetrated to shock the international community into action.

The Srebrenica and Markale Massacres

[16:22]

One such event occurs in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July 1995. In, at Srebrenica, Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladić↗ massacre about 7,000 Muslim men and boys in cold blood. This is a killing which is perpetrated for explicitly genocidal purposes.

[16:46]

At the beginning of the massacre, a massacre of unarmed civilians, Mladić tells his troops, remember that tomorrow is the anniversary of our uprising against the Turks. The time has now come to take revenge on the Muslims. So this is a purposeful episode of genocide -- an episode of genocide that is undertaken with the explicit purpose of killing people because of their ethnic, and in this case religious background.

[17:10]

In fact that's a point that probably merits a little bit of explanation. What exactly were the differences between the Serbs and the Bosniaks who were the victims of Serb violence in Bosnia? There's really not a great deal of ethnic distinction to be made.

[17:25]

The Bosniaks, the Bosnian Muslims, are simply the descendants of Slavs who converted to Islam in the you know, 14th, 15th and 16th centuries when Bosnia was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. So to call these ethnic wars is in some ways a misnomer of sorts. It's more complex than that. The ethnic differences that exist between the Bosnians, the Muslims, and the Croats are to a substantial part imagined, or manufactured.

[17:53]

The differences are primarily differences of confession and of language. The differences are not all that great yet the intensity of the killing is atrocious.

[18:04]

Still Srebrenica implores the West to do something; it implores the larger international community to act. In part this is because UN forces are involved in the events at Srebrenica. UN forces are arguably complicit in what happened.

[18:23]

How? Why? What occurred that would draw the United Nations into sort of this killing at least by implication? Well, Srebrenica had previously been declared a safe haven by the United Nations. United Nations Security Council Measure 819↗ established a number of safe havens within which UN Forces were supposed to be responsible for protecting Bosnian civilians against massacre and untimely death.

[18:53]

The Srebrenica safe haven was in fact policed by a small contingent of Dutch peacekeepers. So there were UN forces, Dutch forces in this case, on the ground, tasked with responsibility for protecting, you know, civilians against military assault.

[19:09]

This contingent of Dutch peacekeepers was however insufficient in number to defend the safe area, the safe haven, against the concerted offensive that Mladić massed. Their presence in the safe haven was however unfortunate insofar as the presence of Dutch troops on the ground in Srebrenica inhibited NATO from launching air strikes to prevent Mladić's forces from carrying out this massacre of civilians.

[19:37]

Had the Dutch not been there NATO would arguably have had more options because air strikes might have been on the table as a sort of military choice. As it was NATO command was so you know fearful of accidentally harming Dutch soldiers that air strikes were off the table. There was no serious consideration given to the use of air power to protect civilians.

[20:01]

The Dutch troops on the ground do nothing at all to prevent the Serb perpetrated genocide. The Dutch troops are entirely aware of what's happening; they know what's being done, and they make little effort to prevent it. Rather they are sort of bystanders, cognizant bystanders, in one of the most serious episodes of genocide to occur in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

[20:26]

And this episode, you know, in a sense, sort of exempliifies the larger impotence of the West. The West, much like the Dutch soldiers at Srebrenica, knows exactly what is going on, knows that a genocide is being perpetrated again innocent civilians, yet does nothing to intervene. Like the Dutch soldiers at Srebrenica the West is evidently so concerned about the consequences for its own selfish interests that it does not act to protect innocent people.

[20:56]

Another such massacre happens in August 1995 just a month after the Srebrenica massacre. Serb positions above the city of Sarajevo, Sarajevo is the major city in Bosnia, launch an artillery attack against the city of Sarajevo. The explosion of artillery shells in the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo↗ kills dozens of people.

[21:23]

It's another sort of gratuitous example of Serb brutality against civilians. Ultimately these two events, the Srebrenica...murders and the Markale massacre sort of open up divisions within the West -- between specifically the West Europeans and the United States that will ultimately sort of create space for military action to be taken.

[21:51]

There had been previously been some differences between the West Europeans and the United States as to what the proper responsibility and commitments of the international community should be in Bosnia. Within the United States at least there was some debate about intervention. Americans, sorry, their political leaders in the United States Congress, Senator Bob Dole↗ in particular, who argue forcefully in favor of lifting the arms embargo.

[22:19]

Dole argues that lifting the arms embargo and selling arms to the Bosnia government would at least give the Bosnians sort of the weapons of war with which to defend themselves against the Serbs -- perhaps producing a more balanced military situation which might ultimately be conducive to a ceasefire and then peace agreement.

[22:37]

But the Europeans oppose any lifting of the arms embargo. The European logic is that introducing additional weapons of war into Bosnia would only make the situation bloodier and worse. The...American proponents of lifting the arms embargo argue that without, you know, the weapons of war with which to defend themselves the Bosnians will be utterly vulnerable to Serb violence.

NATO Intervention via Operation Deliberate Force

[23:02]

After the Srebrenica massacre and the Markale marketplace bombings in the summer of 1995 NATO decides for a campaign of limited military intervention. NATO launches late that summer Operation Deliberate Force↗.

[23:23]

This is a campaign of airborne sort of intervention against Serb positions in Bosnia. NATO warplanes launch from bases in Italy which is just across the Adriatic Sea from the former Yugoslavia, and from carriers based in the Adriatic itself, launch a sustained series of sorties against Serb positions.

[23:47]

NATO forces focus in particular upon Serb artillery positions and upon the military infrastructure that sustains the Serbian war effort in Bosnia. This military intervention is fairly brief; it lasts for about a month, but it's also highly effective. It pushes the Serb political leadership in Bosnia towards the peace table.

The Dayton Agreement

[24:10]

At Dayton, a US military base in Ohio, in late 1995, in October 1995↗, representatives of the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian government agree upon the basic framework of a peace settlement.

[24:27]

This peace settlement in effect divides Bosnia internally in two. Bosnia will remain a unitary state, a nation-state, but it will be divided administratively within itself. In the north and the east the Serbs will enjoy substantial regional autonomy. In the rest of the country, in the south and the west, the Bosnian government, dominated by Muslims and by Croats, will sort of rule.

[24:57]

So what Dayton provides is a framework for sustaining an uneasy ceasefire between two sort of political units within the same framework of a -- within the framework of a unitary nation-state.

[25:14]

Division is ultimately the principle on which ceasefire and a tenuous peace will be predicated. What's interesting about this episode right, when we think about the history of humanitarian intervention, is that a sort of brief military intervention in the late summer of 1995 was ultimately what pushed the warring parties towards the peace table.

[25:36]

This experience is emboldening for the proponents of humanitarian intervention. You know those who had argued all along in favor of intervention argue that it worked. The only problem was that it came too late. People like Michael Ignatieff can say after the Dayton Accord that we should have done this two years ago.

[25:53]

You know this should have been done at the very beginning of the war and might then have saved you know many tens of thousands of human lives. Whether that counterfactual is plausible or not is debatable but it certainly emboldening to the proponents of humanitarian intervention in the West.

The Kosovo Crisis of 1999

[26:11]

Yugoslavia, or the states of the former Yugoslavia, provide another sort of test case for the proponents of humanitarian intervention later in the 1990s -- in 1999. What's at stake in the Kosovo Crisis of 1999↗ is another sort of contested issue of ethnic succession; this time not within Bosnia but within the Serb nation-state itself.

[26:39]

Serbia is a relatively homogeneous sort of national community; the stress here should be on the word relatively. Within the Serbian nation-state there is in southern Serbia a region dominated by ethnic Albanians who are by confession predominantly Muslim↗. This is the area known as Kosovo, and you can see it shaded here in red on the map.

[27:07]

Kosovo of course borders Albania so there is the opportunity for ethnic Albanians who favor secession, at most expanded regional autonomy, at minimum to seek support from their sort of ethnic cousins across the border in Albania.

[27:30]

From 1998, during 1998, sort of the pressure of Kosovar Albanian nationalism begins to rise within Serbia. And it's suppressed fairly vigorously by the Serbian state which is led now by Slobodan Milošević -- the champion of Serb nationalism who sort of emerged into primary political leadership role during the 1980s

[27:58]

During 1998 Kosovar nationalists form themselves into a paramilitary organization -- the Kosovar Liberation Army or KLA↗. The KLA seeks to win independence for Kosovo from the Serbian nation-state.

[28:16]

This is something that the Serbs are not willing to concede. Milošević is absolutely unwilling to concede Kosovar independence. In part this is because the territory itself, the territory of Kosovo, has a powerful historical resonance for Serb nationalism.

[28:36]

Back in the 15th century century Serb forces were defeated in a battle, an important battle in the history of Serbia, by the forces of the Ottoman Empire. This battle, even though the Serbs lost, becomes memorialized as a sort of defining event in the history of the Serbian nation. The fact that the site of the battle resides within the contested territory is just one of the reasons why Milošević is unwilling to concede expanded regional autonomy, and certainly unwilling to concede independence.

[29:05]

Milošević by consequence fights back quite vigorously against Kosovar nationalism using the sort of full resources of the Serbian army. By the winter of 1998 to 1999 something akin to a full scale civil war is being waged in Kosovo.

[29:28]

Once again this conflict implores the outside world to do something. Once again the international media is very present within Kosovo. Once again television and photojournalistic images of...you know emaciated refugees are...you know being broadcast on the networks of the West.

[29:51]

So what is the West to do? Is Europe poised upon the cusp of another genocide? A genocide perhaps reminiscent of the genocide that Serbian irregular forces in Bosnia tried to perpetrate during the Bosnian Civil War? If so what is the international community to do?

[30:11]

There are humanitarian imperatives at stake. Milošević may be acting within his own territory, but insofar as his government appears bent upon the suppression of Kosovar nationalism does the international community have responsibilities to protect Kosovar Albanian ethnics against the Serbian state?

[30:35]

This is a question that will be seriously debated by Western political leaders and intellectuals in the winter of '98 and '99. Moreover, what to do about the flows of people, the tens, then hundreds of thousands of people, who flee Kosovo and seek refuge across the border in Albania.

[30:55]

If we go back to the map, right, then you, we should recall, that Kosovo has a long land border with Albania. It's very easy for ethnic Albanians within Kosovo who feel that their lives are becoming sort of intolerable as the Serb army clamps down upon ethnic nationalism to seek refuge across the border in Albania -- and many thousands do. This creates a major refugee crisis.

[31:22]

As the refugee crisis expands in scale Western observers begin to ask whether Milošević might not be creating the refugee crisis on purpose. After all there would be a...logical self-interest for the Milošević government in Yugoslavia to force the ethnic Albanians out.

[31:42]

If you can force enough Albanians to leave Kosovo, to resettle themselves across the border in Albania proper, then the future of Kosovo will no longer be contested. It will be uniformly and entirely Serbian.

[31:57]

But of course a major ethnic sort of relocation such as this, a major movement of peoples, will be catastrophic for the peoples involved. Whether this is something that the international community is prepared to tolerate or not is unclear.

[32:12]

The international community is, moreover, divided. Within the United Nations Security Council Russia opposes intervention. Russia opposes intervention in large part because Russia has you know historically maintained a close strategic and cultural relationship with Serbia.

[32:31]

Remember that it is over Serbia in 1914 that Russia intervenes in the First World War. Russia...Russian leaders feel strong affinities with Serbia as do many ordinary Russian people. By consequence Russia is unwilling to take an action in support of humanitarian intervention that might be construed as hostile to the interests of the Serb republic.

[32:57]

China opposes intervention too. It's not that China has particular interests at stake. I mean China doesn't really have significant economic interests in the region. There are certainly no ties of longstanding cultural or other affinity that would lead China to side with Serbia. What's at stake for China is principle. Can anybody...suggest what the principle that is at stake for China might be?

[33:21]

(student response)

[33:26]

Exactly. China is very hostile to the notion that humanitarian intervention is a legitimate prerogative in international relations. For China's leaders sovereignty is sacrosanct. And for this reason China is unwilling to countenance UN mandated intervention to sort of defend the human rights of Kosovar Albanians.

[33:47]

By consequence there will be no UN mandate for humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. Russia opposes it and China opposes it. Russia and China together constitute two-fifths of the permanent membership of the UN Security Council. They both wield veto power within the UN Security Council; without their acquiescence there can be no UN mandated humanitarian intervention.

The Rambouillet Agreement

[34:14]

Still the Western powers led by the United States and Great Britain and France try to do what they can to negotiate a solution. In early 1999 a tentative peace agreement is orchestrated under the auspices of these three Western powers. It's called the Rambouillet Agreement↗ because it's sort of concluded at Rambouillet in France.

[34:43]

This agreement would provide for substantial Kosovar autonomy within the framework of a Serbian state. Rambouillet is sort of a draft ceasefire agreement that would maintain the integrity of Serbia but would give the Kosovars effective autonomy within the Kosovo, Kosovar, region of Serbia.

[35:04]

The agreement would also provide NATO forces with permanent access to Kosovo. The rationale being that NATO would then assume a responsibility for protecting the Kosovar Albanians against the Serbian state.

[35:18]

Critics not only in Serbia but also in the West argue that the Rambouillet Agreement was never an agreement that the Serbs could sign. That the claims or limitations upon Serbian sovereignty that it envisages are so far reaching that the Serb state could not be expected to accede to the agreement.

[35:38]

Whether the terms of the Rambouillet Agreement were reasonable or not from a Serbian perspective Slobodan Milošević decided in March 1999 to reject it. Milošević declared that he would not sort of conclude an agreement that provided for Kosovar regional autonomy and an international commitment to protect Kosovar Albanians against the Serbian state.

Military Intervention in Kosovo by NATO

[36:04]

Serbia's rejection of the Rambouillet Agreement provides a pretext for military intervention on NATO's part. With Serbia unwilling to concede formal autonomy to the Kosovars, with Serbia unwilling to halt it military operations against the KLA in Kosovo, NATO decides in March 1999 for a military intervention.

[36:29]

As in Bosnia in 1995 this will be a limited war conducted primarily from the air. How is this war justified? Well, to answer that question we could listen to Bill Clinton which we will do.

[36:45]

Clinton addresses the nation on Kosovo on March 24, 1999

Clinton: We've seen innocent people taken from their homes, forced to kneel in the dirt, and sprayed with bullets. Kosovar men dragged from their families: fathers, and sons together lined up and shot in cold blood.

[36:59]

Clinton: This is not war in the traditional sense. It is an attack by tanks and artillery on a largely defenseless people whose leaders already have agreed to peace.

[37:12]

Okay, so for Clinton there are really two issues primarily at stake, and the first are the humanitarian imperatives. The fact that Kosovar civilians are being brutalized by the military forces of the Serbian state.

[37:25]

The second thing is that Serbia has rejected a bona fide peace agreement: the Rambouillet Agreement. Together these two...sort of issues provide a pretext for Operation Allied Force↗: an airborne assault on Serbian military forces.

[37:47]

Operation Allied Force as with Operation -- as with the... Operation that was launched in Bosnia in 1995 utilizes warplanes to wage war on the military infrastructure of the offending party -- in this case the Serbian nation-state.

[38:06]

NATO warplanes attack Serbia's military infrastructure and as the air campaign develops they attack Serbia's civilian infrastructure too. The war becomes sort of dubbed in some circles the Espresso Campaign, you know, what does this mean?

[38:23]

This has to do with the remark that a top NATO general made that by focusing on Serbia's electricity grid NATO would be able to sort of deny ordinary Serbian civilians, the cosmopolitan residents of Belgrade for example, their morning espresso.

[38:40]

If you can shut down Serbia's energy infrastructure then you can deny ordinary Serb people the amenities of modern life. This was one purpose of the NATO campaign. There was obviously a political rationale or logic to this. By assaulting Serbia's civilian infrastructure NATO hoped to undermine Milošević's political credibility within Serbia: to weaken Milošević.

[39:06]

So as the goals of the military intervention shifted from military infrastructure to attacks on the Serbian civilian infrastructure a subtle shift in the strategic purposes of the intervention also occurred. The purpose of the intervention ceased to be simply eviction of Serbian forces from Kosovo and became, at least implicitly, the accomplishment of regime change within Serbia itself.

[39:34]

How is this crisis resolved? NATO is at war. Serb forces are still on the ground in Kosovo. How does this conflict end up being ended? Ultimately it's ended when Slobodan Milošević sues for peace. Milošević having subjected Serbia to an intense campaign of aerial bombardment by NATO finally decides to come to the peace table.

[40:02]

And signs an agreement that allows an international stabilization force under NATO auspices, KFOR↗, to enter Kosovo in June 1999. At this point American, British and French and other NATO infantry forces will enter Kosovo to sort of establish political order and security.

[40:24]

NATO's intervention successfully achieves autonomy for Kosovo. Kosovars', Kosovo's, political status remains disputed through to the present day. Kosovo is still legally part of the Serbian state but Kosovo is functionally autonomous. This is the primary accomplishment of NATO's military intervention in 1999.

Milošević Imprisoned

[40:47]

The intervention also reaps political dividends too. Milošević is widely construed in Serbia as having waged a disastrous war. Far from the war rallying support behind Milošević the war, as NATO commanders hoped, undermines Milošević's credibility within Serbia.

[41:06]

In, in October 2000, Milošević loses a bid for reelection as president of Serbia and he loses despite undertaking serious efforts to rig the vote. So Milošević is subsequently prosecuted in Serbia for fraud and electoral corruption.

[41:24]

In 2006 about five years after his initial arrest on fraud charges the government of Serbia extradites Milošević to The Hague, to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia↗, where he is put on trial for war crime, on war crimes charges, for charges of crimes against humanity, perpetrated during the suppression of the Kosovar independence movement. Of course Milošević doesn't make it through to trial and sentencing because he dies while in custody in The Hague.

[41:59]

But Serbia's decision to extradite Milošević is very important for Serba. It marks, in a sense, the normalization of Serbian politics after the Kosovar War and is a precondition for Serbia's membership of the European Union.

[42:13]

Serbia is now a candidate member of the European Union. So...that, accomplishing that, was something that depended upon extraditing Milošević to The Hague to face trial for war crimes.

Legality of Military Intervention in Kosovo

[42:26]

For all that the Kosovo intervention accomplished the question of whether it was legal or not still remains. Was the NATO intervention in Kosovo illegal under international law?

[42:39]

The operation was not authorized by the United Nations, you know, as such...we can't construe it as a UN sponsored humanitarian intervention. Still the absence of UN sanction does not make war illegal on the face of things.

[42:57]

Whether the war was legal...for the United States to wage under US domestic law is perhaps a more contested question. Under what authority did President Clinton deploy NATO forces -- did President Clinton deplay US forces in Kosovo? This is sort of an interesting question in terms of its Constitutional implications for the United States.

Effects of NATO Military Intervention

[43:23]

The war did some good however sort of contested the basis of its legality might be. It of course secured Kosovar autonomy and ended Milošević's reign of terror against Albanian nationalism.

[43:37]

At what cost were these goals accomplished? There were civilian deaths including in Serbia proper where NATO bombs sometimes missed their infrastructural targets and accidentally hit civilian homes. In one particularly notorious episode NATO a bomb went astray and hit the Chinese embassy killing three Chinese diplomats↗.

[43:59]

There were civilian deaths. These however are to be counted in the hundreds not the thousands. Whether hundreds of deaths represents an acceptable price to pay for a successful humanitarian intervention is something that can be debated.

[44:15]

I think though when we look at the military intervention itself and gauge its successes and its limits then it looks like a fairly successful case of limited military intervention. The intervention accomplished its political objectives without causing untoward human death. Whether any human death and suffering is acceptable in the pursuit of humanitarian objectives within a nation-state is however a question that will continue to be debated.

Humanitarian Interventions After Kosovo

[44:45]

After Kosovo humanitarian intervention sort of experiences...a moment of arrival as a new international norm. The Kosovar intervention apparently demonstrates the effectiveness of limited military intervention as a tool of political coercion with humanitarian purposes in mind.

East Timor

[45:09]

After Kosovo new humanitarian interventions occur. UN forces intervene in East Timor in 1999↗. They do so in this case with the sanction of a UN Security Council mandate. They intervene sort of to secure East Timor and to facilitate the stabilization of political authority in that territory which is contested between Timorese nationalists and the state of Indonesia.

Sierra Leone

[45:39]

In 2000 British forces intervene in Sierra Leone↗. This is another sort of example of a quite successful military intervention. A small number of well trained British forces plays a crucial role in facilitating the restoration of political order in Sierra Leone in the face of a serious military insurgency.

[46:04]

Brush forces intervene in Sierra Leone on the side of the legitimate government and in doing so help the government to suppress a sort of military insurgency that might otherwise have toppled it and have overthrown stable political order in that country.

[46:21]

So intervention can serve useful purposes. This seems to be the lesson of the interventions that take place in 1999 and in 2000. At the very end of the 20th century humanitarian intervention seems to represent sort of a new form of international political and military power -- a utilization of power for the purposes of humanitarian good and political stabilization.

Limits of Military Intervention for Humanitarian Goals

[46:50]

Yet there are...sort of aspects of these episodes, in Kosovo, in East Timor and in Sierra Leone, that hint at the limits of humanitarian intervention as a new kind of international commitment. You know one thing which is quite obvious from each of these cases is that humanitarian intervention necessarily involves taking sides in complex conflicts. And this is really important.

[47:18]

The Kosovars may have suffered disproportionately in the Kosovo crisis but the Kosovo Liberation Army was hardly itself blameless. The Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, was after all a paramilitary force that had organized itself with the express purpose of waging kind of low level war against the Serbian state so as to accomplish the political objective of regional autonomy if not independence.

[47:46]

By intervening in Serbia NATO aligned itself unapologetically and unambiguously with the KLA and against the Serbian nation-state. Whether the ethical aspects of the conflict were so clear cut as this in practice is something that will continue to be debated.

[48:07]

And it's also the case as we see in each of these interventions that the international community is only willing to utilize limited military means in pursuit of humanitarian objectives. Importantly NATO ground troops do not enter Serbia, do not enter Kosovo, until they have permission from the Serbian government to do so with the peace accord that Milošević agrees to in June 1999.

[48:35]

Between March 1999 and June 1999 when the war begins and when the ceasefire is agreed there is a substantial human suffering. Many more tens of thousands of Albanians flee across the international border into Albania. Others suffer death and maiming at the hands of Serbian forces.

[49:01]

Had NATO been willing to put troops on the the ground earlier without the authorization of the Serbian government then it's likely that the humanitarian accomplishments of the operation would have been that much greater. More lives would have been saved. Less suffering would have occurred.

[49:18]

But neither the United States nor Britain was willing to do this because to put troops on the ground in the face of Serbian opposition would necessarily have been to start a fighting war between NATO infantry units and the Serb army. This is a war in which the Western forces would have prevailed, but in which there would have been substantial casualties.

[49:39]

So this is another implication of of these late twentieth century cases. NATO will act. The West will act. But only in ways that preclude the likelihood of casualties on their side.

[49:55]

Limiting Western casualties will, it turns out, be the highest imperative of all so far as humanitarian intervention is concerned. Even if more good could be done through the introduction of ground forces Western governments will remain reluctant to do this simply because the political costs of doing so are too high.

Military Interventions for Humanitarian Goals as a new International Norm

[50:15]

Despite these limitations humanitarian intervention emerges in the last years of the twentieth century as a new international norm. Western political leaders and Western intellectuals are increasingly confident that the Western powers, the powers of the so-called civilized world, have a responsibility to protect ordinary human beings when suffering becomes gratuitous.

[50:40]

When humanitarian wrongs are perpetrated within nation-states the new norm of humanitarian intervention proclaims a responsibility on the part of the international community to do something about it. It will be the responsibility of the humanitarian community -- of the international community -- according to this new norm to enforce human rights wherever human wrongs occur. So too will it be the responsibility of the international community to prosecute those political leaders who violate human rights.

[51:10]

And here the extradition of Milošević himself in 2006 to face war crimes trials prosecutions at The Hague offers the exemplary case.

[51:22]

So this is humanitarian intervention -- a new international norm -- that seems in the very last years of the twentieth century to becoming to fruition. Sort of we'll return to humanitarian intervention and the consequences of it next week.

Question on the Relationship Between Military Intervention and the Presence of Interethnic Violence

[51:37]

But let's talk for half an hour now about the development of China and India. So here we're going to sort of shift -- shift tack. (student question)

[51:48]

Sure.

[51:49]

(student question).

[52:01]

Yeah.

[52:07]

Yeah.

[52:09]

That's a really good question. To what extent does the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention in the eyes of its proponents depend upon...the existence of ethnic violence?

[52:21]

I would say, I mean, having read some of this literature that very little reference is paid to the ethnic aspects of violence when it comes to justifying humanitarian intervention.

[52:35]

What matters so far as the proponents of humanitarian intervention are concerned is that civilians are suffering. Whether they're suffering because a government is you know murdering its, murdering people for ethnic, for reasons of ethnic difference or for ideological reasons, or for any other reason, is not terribly relevant for the proponents of humanitarian intervention.

[52:56]

What matters is simply that human beings are suffering and that the international community has a responsibility to act across the barriers of sovereignty to do something about it.

[53:05]

But that doesn't really answer your question of why the international community intervenes in Yugoslavia but not for example in North Korea. To answer that question I think you have to think about the ways in which power and the very real differences that exist in terms of power and military capability between a place like Serbia and a place like North Korea affect the sort of costs and consequences of humanitarian intervention. I think it would be, you know, quite correct to say that humanitarian intervention in general is something that is done only to the weakest and most fragile of states.

[53:39]

Where states exercise serious military capabilities, as in the case of North Korea, there will be very little discussion of humanitarian intervention. And there is probably a correlation between ethnic fragmentation and division on the one hand and the weakness of states on the other. Yugoslavia, or the states of the former Yugoslavia, are, you know sort of, weak in part because they are divided. They're born out of this intra-- you know -- interethnic struggle for post-Communist rule.

[54:11]

So I think there's a correlation between the two things that you identify, ethnic diversity and humanitarian intervention, but I wouldn't see it as a relationship of causation.

[54:21]

But it's a very good question, but I would encourage you to think about the role that power and differentials of power play in determining the prospects for humanitarian intervention because I think that's really the key dynamic here.

The Development of China and India

[54:34]

Okay, but on to China and India -- to get rich is glorious, and how?

Economic Development in China

[54:42]

To explain how China gets rich and glorious we will need to turn the story back to Deng Xiaoping↗. When we last dealt with China a couple of weeks ago in a systematic way we concluded with Deng Xiaoping's emergence in late 1978 as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China.

[55:05]

Deng's emergence does not occur as a consequence of a formal process of selection; rather, Deng's emergence as China's unambiguous leader marks sort of Deng's triumph in the complex and muddy world of Politburo factional politics.

[55:23]

Having emerged as China's ultimate leader Deng sort of recommits China to what Zhou Enlai↗ had defined in 1963 as the purposes of four modernizations. Zhou Enlai had talked in 1963 about the need for modernize agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology and this will be the purpose to which Deng initially sort of recommits himself in 1978.

[55:51]

There are of course you know sort of powerful political resonances in the invocation of Zhou Enlai as a sort of model for what Deng tries to -- wants to accomplish -- Zhou Enlai remains a you know extremely sort of popular leader within the Chinese Politburo and within Chinese society at large. So by invoking Zhou as a way to rationalize his own reform agenda Deng is sort of locating himself within a deeper historical current of reformism.

[56:22]

What does Deng what to accomplish? What exactly is this reform agenda that Deng Xiaoping commits himself to subsequent to his emergence as China's preeminent leader?

[56:34]

Deng seeks to leave ideology beyond: to put practical purposes and practical accomplishments ahead of ideology. In doing this Deng is clearly reacting against the ideological excesses of the Cultural Revolution↗ era.

[56:54]

Deng does not just want to come out however and say that ideology is worthless: to do so in a China in which Mao's influence still weighs heavily upon politics and society would be contentious. It might even be to put Deng's own sort of leadership and primacy in jeopardy.

[57:11]

So Deng instead speaks elusively. He speaks often through aphorisms. And the best known example of this is Deng Xiaoping's famous cat theory. This is an old saying -- but it's something that Deng says frequently. It does not matter whether it is a black cat or a white cat so long as it catches mice.

[57:33]

It's a really wonderful aphorism. And what Deng is saying in effect is that accomplishing specific goals, goals of growth, goals of modernization, is more important than the means by which those goals are accomplished. China's leaders in other words should be flexible and pragmatic. They should proceed with an eye to what they want to do rather than with a slavish devotion to a particularly sort of ideological way of getting things done.

[58:00]

Deng also talks about sort of groping for stones while crossing a river. This is a sort of evocative aphorism which sort of sees that -- which presents the process of reform as an uncertain journey forwards -- a journey that proceeds without sort of clear knowledge at the outset as to what its path will precisely be.

[58:21]

How do we explain Deng Xiaoping's embrace of a reformist agenda? This is a really interesting question. Deng was after all a CCP member of good standing, of longstanding. Deng had participated on the Long March↗. Deng went all the way back to sort of the 1920s when he first embraced communist revolution as a commitment.

[58:41]

Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev he was not generationally the product of a later era. He was not the product of experiences that much different from those that shaped Mao.

[58:54]

To explain Deng's enthusiasm for reform we may have to make some reference to personality. Deng, to put it simply, was a pragmatist. In some ways he was more cosmopolitan than Mao. Unlike Mao he had lived for long periods of time outside of the People's Republic of China. Outside of China Deng had lived in the 1920s in France. Whether this gave him some you know different kind of orientation to the world from that what Mao Zedong had is hard to say.

[59:25]

All we can say with any confidence is what Deng did. It's much harder to explain why he tried to do what he ultimately accomplished. What did Deng accomplish? The most obvious legacy of the Deng Xiaoping reform era is the remarkable series of economic reforms that were embarked upon almost immediately subsequent to Deng's emergence as China's singular leader.

[59:55]

Reform initially proceeded on a regional scale in two provinces: Guangdong↗ and Fujian↗ province -- provinces. These are both southern provinces right in the south of China.

[1:00:08]

And Guangdong in particular experienced both opportunities and difficulties because of it geographical location. I'm afraid I don't have a map here. I should have a map. But if I did have a map what it would show you is that Guangdong province is right next door to Hong Kong.

[1:00:26]

And this is really important. Hong Kong by the late 1970s was already a beacon of capitalist modernity: a territory with a flourishing highly efficient economy. And a territory that was a sort of locus of attraction for disenchanted Guangdong youth.

[1:00:45]

The illegal emigration of people from Guangdong Province to China, sorry, from Guangdong Province to Hong Kong, was a problem for the regional government of the province. It was a problem for the Communist Party.

[1:00:58]

It was a problem that Deng was determined to do something about. But the key actor in Guangdong was not initially Deng Xiaoping himself it was the regional party boss Xi Zhongxun↗ who was appointed to be regional boss in 1979 following a lengthy period of...political exile.

[1:01:23]

Xi had first been purged in 1963. He was purged again during the Cultural Revolution. He was only rehabilitated after Mao's death in 1978, and at that point sort of installed as the provincial party boss in Guangdong Province.

[1:01:39]

Xi is a really interesting character. He was a reformist. Or he would prove himself a reformist of substantial accomplishment. He also happens to be the father of Xi Jinping↗ the man who is in line to become China's next leader in 2012.

[1:01:55]

Xi initially proposed a substantial program of economic liberalization: a program to dismantle economic controls and to create market incentives in Guangdong. After he took this to Deng Xiaoping, Deng was absolutely supportive and committed. Deng said to Xi that he should do everything he wanted to do to transform Guangdong in a new sort of liberalizing pattern.

[1:02:24]

Guangdong would not initially be a template for the entire nation however. Guangdong was to be an experiment. Guangdong and Fujian were recast as special economic zones -- as special zones where a different set of rules would apply.

[1:02:42]

The creation of the special economic zones comes in 1979. And the fact of these being regional experiments is really, really important. Insofar as Xi and Deng are envisaging a radical departure from the controlled socialist economy that Mao Zedong had built the move towards liberalization is invariably contentious and controversial within the Politburo.

[1:03:09]

It's much easier for the reformers, for Deng Xiaoping, to justify the creation of the special economic zones as a you know kind of small-scale experiment than it would be to orchestrate structural economic form at the national scale.

[1:03:23]

Doing this regionally is easier politically than doing it nationally would have been. And this is the way in which Deng Xiaoping sort of justifies the experiment. He tells sort of critics on the Politburo we're going to do this and see what happens and this is not necessarily indicative of China's future direction; this is just what is going to happen in Guangdong.

[1:03:44]

What does happen then in Guangdong Province? Guangdong modernizes with extraordinary rapidity. In 1979 average incomes in Guangdong were about two-thirds of the average national level. Guangdong in 1979 was a poor province by Chinese standards.

[1:04:01]

Since 1989 Guangdong Province has been one of the very richest provinces in China. Within the space of about a decade the removal of restrictions on trade and investment, the liberalization of government controls, and the mobilization of foreign investment all reap dramatic benefits.

[1:04:19]

Consider the transformation of Shenzhen↗ -- Guangdong's major city. Shenzhen is the is city in China that is most proximate to Hong Kong. In 1979 Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village of about 20,000 people. This is a population about one-fifth the size of the population of the city of Berkeley.

[1:04:39]

So this is a town of about the size of Emeryville↗. Today Shenzhen is a city of 10 million people. This makes it bigger than any North American city save New York City. This is a city bigger than Los Angeles and it developed to that scale in about thirty years. This is sort of one of the most dramatic examples of what China's economic transformation has accomplished since the late 1970s.

[1:05:06]

Guangdong's modernization becomes in due course a model for larger Chinese society. In 1984 Deng creates an additional fourteen special economic zones in southern China. And he does this sort of despite opposition from conservatives within the Politburo who attack the experiment in Guangdong as a sort of capitalist deviationism.

[1:05:30]

Deng doesn't buy that at all. Deng sees that reform in Guangdong has accomplished extraordinary things and in 1984 he expands the experiment creating an additional fourteen economic zones. But it's at Guangdong, the pioneering case, that is the exemplar of a new kind of Chinese economic modernity.

[1:05:49]

Deng also undertakes reforms at the national level. These are necessarily slower. They're not nearly so radical as the reforms that take place in the liberalizing southern provinces. But at the national level Deng moves very quickly to reverse agricultural collectivization. Chinese agriculture had been collectivized since 1955.

[1:06:10]

In 1980 Deng Xiaoping orchestrates a new law that permits the devolution of agricultural production to the household scale. Ordinary peasant households will in other words be allowed to produce for the market without participating in the structure of the village collective.

[1:06:28]

This incentivizes improvements in agricultural efficiency and production and indeed China's agricultural productivity increases rapidly during the 1980s.

[1:06:41]

Deng also rethinks China's larger growth objectives. China in the early 1980s is still at the national scale a centrally planned economy. It's an economy that is substantially determined by the dictate of the party. But the party's priorities shift subtly and with durable consequences.

[1:07:01]

Deng's economics guru, Chen Yun↗, argues in favor of a different kind of growth strategy, a growth strategy that will put more emphasis on production for the consumer market than upon the expansion of heavy industrial plants. Though Deng has a sort of personal disposition to favor heavy industrial production he ultimately ends up supporting Chen Yun's so-called balanced growth strategy which seeks to balance consumer production with the needs of heavy industry. This will become sort of China's new model in the 1980s.

[1:07:34]

And what does it accomplish? Well, the data tells the story more eloquently than words could do. From the 1980s onwards China's economy surges. If you look at China's GDP as a share of world GDP then you see that China's share of total global output hovered at around 5% throughout the sort of Maoist era. Beginning with Deng's reforms China's GDP takes off.

[1:08:04]

By the turn of the twentieth century China is responsible for more than 15% of the world's GDP. This is a sort of record of economic growth that puts China on course to become the world's single most productive economy within another couple of decades.

[1:08:24]

How is this growth affecting the material prospects for ordinary Chinese people? If we look not at aggregate growth but rather at growth in terms of growth per head of capita we see a very similar story. China is a desperately poor country throughout the Maoist Era. Beginning in the late 1970s GDP per capita in China begins to surge.

[1:08:49]

By the turn of the 20th century China's GDP per capita is approaching the global average. China in effect makes the move from being an underdeveloped primarily agrarian country to becoming a middle-income developing nation.

[1:09:07]

This is an extraordinary transformation and it occurs within a very, very brief span of time. Think about how long the British Industrial Revolution↗ took. Think about how long it took the United States to industrialize. What China accomplishes it accomplishes far faster than either Britain or the United States.

Economic Reform and Political Reform in China

[1:09:26]

But China's reform is primarily economic. There is little embrace of political reformism. And this is important to remember. Why is there no political reform to accompany economic reform under Deng Xiaoping? Why no political liberalization to parallel the economic liberalization?

[1:09:47]

We might emphasize the role of divisions within the leadership. What Deng wants to accomplish in terms of economic change is contentious. There was hardly a consensus within the Politburo for embracing far reaching political change at the same time. Opposition to economic change to some extent cautions Deng Xiaoping. Makes him sort of -- leads him to be determined to shore up his you know political support for economic change -- hardly allows space for pursuing political reform at the same time.

[1:10:21]

But most important, I would suggest, we should remember that Deng Xiaoping's objectives never really included political reform. Deng Xiaoping was committed to maintaining the primacy of the Communist Party. He did not seek to democratize or even to liberalize China's politics. Deng's goals have to be understood in their own terms which are in terms of economic change not in terms of the accomplishment of political transformation.

The Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989

[1:10:49]

Still, in 1989 China will experience a sort of major episode of political tumult when student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing develop in the course of a few weeks into a major protest↗ -- a protest which in the eyes of some observers you know takes on the characteristics of an anti-regime insurgency: even perhaps a rally for democracy.

[1:11:16]

We still don't know enough about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. This is a difficult topic for historians to do research upon given the contentious of this issue within China today. But I think what we can say with some confidence is that Deng's reforms during the 1980s create new sources of instability and uncertainty within Chinese life.

[1:11:40]

Some Chinese become very rich in the era of market oriented reform during the 1980s. Others lag behind. The economy grows but it also experiences price instability and inflation. These developments are in some ways disruptive of political and even social stability.

[1:11:58]

The students who protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989 may have wanted democracy and free speech but they also have wanted jobs, and commitments of public goods and so on. So it's hard to disaggregate sort of the complex factors that are involved in the demonstrations that occur in Tiananmen Square. The protesters certainly get global attention. That is quite unambiguous. And many of the protesters are adept at capitulating an appeal to larger world opinion.

[1:12:32]

The fact that some demonstrators from an art college in Beijing construct a statue called the Goddess of Democracy↗ that is modeled upon the Statue of Liberty is powerful evidence of the aptitude that the demonstrators at Tiananmen have for making an appeal to larger world opinion.

[1:12:49]

It's one thing for Chinese army tanks to be mowing down demonstrators. It's another thing for tanks for be mowing down demonstrators who are rallied in front of a statue that resembles the Statue of Liberty.

[1:13:02]

Still the protest ends with suppression. The question of whether to suppress the demonstrations or not is a divisive one within the Politburo but ultimately the Politburo decides in favor of repression. As a consequence the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 and then their suppressions reveal the limits of reform in China. This episode affirms that reform will be an economic project not a political one.

Similarities and Differences between Chinese Reform and Soviet Reform

[1:13:32]

It may be useful to compare and contrast the Soviet and Chinese reform projects. Deng Xiaoping, according to his son, you know, remarked in private that Mikhail Gorbachev was an idiot: that Gorbachev pursued a sort of faulty reform agenda -- a reform agenda that was bound to lead to crisis and even dissolution.

[1:13:54]

Of course you know Deng would be proved right about the outcomes whether he was, you know, his verdict on Gorbachev was fair or not is I think much harder to say.

[1:14:06]

But what were the similarities and the differences between these two reform projects? There were underlying similarities. Both Deng and Gorbachev sought economic renewal. Remember that Gorbachev's initial objective was uskoreniye↗ -- acceleration -- improving the existing system.

[1:14:22]

Both seek new international relationships. Both seek to open their economies to the larger world economy. Both seek to bolster and sustain international peace as a sort of concomitant of economic reform at home.

[1:14:38]

But there are also powerful differences. There are similarities but there are differences too. One key difference has to do with the role of the party. Whereas Gorbachev will in due course try to diminish the role of the party -- building state institutions as a counterweight to the power of the party -- Deng does not by contrast try to diminish or dissolve the supreme power of the Chinese Communist Party within China's politics.

[1:15:05]

Deng by contrast is quite determined to preserve and maintain the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party within China. So that's one difference. Political reform -- its presence in one case and its absence in the other -- is another key variable that distinguishes the two cases.

[1:15:23]

So too does the Soviet Union experience a sort of intellectual and cultural opening that is really not paralleled in the Chinese case. Another difference of course has to do with results. China achieves an extraordinary economic transformation. The Soviet Union does not.

[1:15:41]

How do we explain the differences between these cases?

[1:15:45]

This is a harder question. How do we explain why Deng did not embark upon the same kind of political reform objective that Gorbachev pursued?

[1:15:55]

One key difference has to do with leadership. Deng and Gorbachev are men from different eras. Gorbachev's formative experience had been the era of Khrushchev's thaw in the Soviet Union. Deng's formative experiences had been the Chinese Civil War and then the Cultural Revolution.

[1:16:15]

These different formative experiences have quite different consequences for the kinds of reform projects that the two leaders seek to embark upon. The two men are very different in terms of their formative experiences. They're quite different generationally.

[1:16:29]

You know this picture I think reveals that fairly eloquently. You know Deng by the late 1980s is a very old man: a man who has you know sort of direct personal recollection of the Long March and the Second World War. Gorbachev is a much younger man. He's a middle aged man who cannot even remember the Second World War.

[1:16:49]

The conditions are also different too. By Chinese standards the Soviet Union in the late 1980s is relatively affluent. This affluence sort of diminishes the need for a more radical course of economic reformism and perhaps makes Gorbachev more confident in the capacity of the Soviet Union to tolerate far reaching political reforms.

[1:17:17]

China is still a developing country in 1979. The Soviet Union in the mid-1980s is a developed country, and that may inflect the sort of choices that leaders in the two countries made for different kinds of reform agenda.

[1:17:31]

The regional context also matters a great deal. China after all is situated in an economically dynamic region. China has as neighbors places like Hong Kong and Singapore and even Taiwan: dynamic capitalist economies which are also culturally and linguistically in the cases of each of those three Chinese.

[1:17:54]

The existence of a substantial Chinese diaspora in the non-Communist world -- in capitalist southeast Asia for example -- is one of the factors that will facilitate China's process of economic reform and transition.

[1:18:09]

History too plays a key difference. It's important to remember that the histories of China and of the Soviet Union are not synonymous. The Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin is fairly stable. The pursuit and sustenance of stability is the highest objective which successive General Secretary's from Khrushchev through to you know Andropov↗ and then Chernenko↗ tried to serve.

[1:18:36]

China's history by comparison is much, much less stable. Mao in the 1950s pursues a campaign of Soviet-style industrialization. This is then relaxed in the early 1960s. Then the Cultural Revolution happens. There is no analog in the history of the Soviet Union to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Insofar as the Chinese Cultural Revolution shapes the perspectives and priorities of a generation of leaders like Deng and Xi. It is a development that is unparalleled in the history of the USSR or indeed of any other society really in the second half of the twentieth century.

[1:19:13]

The Chinese Great Proletarian Culture Revolution does not predetermine the reform agenda of the 1980s and beyond. But in key respects it facilitates, it makes it possible, it dismantles the rigid planned centralized economy that came into being in the 1950s -- in a sense wipes the slate clean and leaves opportunities open for reformers like Deng to begin to rebuild upon the foundations of a society and an economy shattered by the revolution from below that Mao Zedong sought to initiate.

[1:19:48]

We'll talk more next week when we talk about the relationship between the East and the West in the 1990s and beyond -- about the long term consequences of China's rise for the larger international community.