How to Make Love to a Despot: An Alternative Foreign Policy for the Twenty-First Century by Stephen D. Krasner

Author:Stephen D. Krasner [Krasner, Stephen D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st Century, Diplomacy, Foreign Affairs, History, International Relations, Political Science, United States
ISBN: 9781631496608
Google: bSqfDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07TK4RMP1
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2020-04-07T03:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Historical Examples of Forcing Your Neighbor’s Hand

SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL IN 1989, I WAS teaching at Stanford University. One of my colleagues was a visiting professor from the prestigious Freie Universität in West Berlin. He traveled back to Berlin after the wall fell and brought back for me a small piece of the wall. It was a cherished gift. As far as I could see, he was brimming with pride that his country, and his city, had been freed from the yoke of Soviet oppression.

That same German professor was subsequently arrested and convicted in Germany. He had been a spy for the Stasi, the East German secret police. He lost his position at the university and spent some time in jail. In his defense he stated that he had never given the East Germans anything of value and that he had worked for them only because his mother’s refusal to reveal who his father was meant that he could not get public support from the West German state.

The Stasi employed more than one hundred thousand people in East Germany—on a per capita basis, many more than the Nazi Gestapo ever had. There were also many informers who were not official members of the Stasi. The Stasi had files on almost a third of the East German population. The Stasi tapped on a regular basis about one hundred thousand phone lines in West Germany and West Berlin. The organization was guided by the Soviet secret police, the KGB.

In East Germany and in other satellite states the Soviets were successful in putting in place a closed access order. A despotic state with ample military power can use its resources to create a regime in its own image. An external elite can successfully impose on another polity a closed access order. Moving other polities toward Denmark, toward consolidated democracy, is a much more challenging, often impossible, task.

Foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) emerged in the international system as a prominent policy option only with the triumph of the sovereign state. Classical empires, which preceded sovereign states, often had ill-defined borders. Geographic noncontiguity was common. Territorial control was often hereditary. In the sixteenth century, the Hapsburg kings of Spain were accepted as the sovereigns over Spain, the Low Countries, parts of France, parts of Germany, territories in North Africa, and other parts of the Western Hemisphere. Imperial centers did not necessarily attempt to impose any kind of uniform institutional structures across all territories, if only because the centers lacked the administrative and military capacity to do so. Imperial centers demanded taxes, put down revolts, and suppressed ideologies or religions that might challenge their rule. But they did not demand institutional uniformity.

The Romans crushed the Jewish rebellions and scattered the Jewish population of the Levant in the first and second centuries because the Jews presented a set of beliefs that challenged Rome’s preeminence and because they revolted against Roman rule. But so long as subject people were quiescent, Rome did not demand uniform institutions.

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