Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Illiberal Regimes and Internet Goggles

    In the past month we have witnessed two illiberal regimes tested by vigorous domestic oppositions. Malaysia’s competitive authoritarian regime survived a stiff electoral test. Turkey’s electoral democratic regime is facing down protestors in Taksim Square. These events were closely followed by observers from around the world, due primarily to the availability of real-time, unfiltered, sympathetic internet coverage.

    I want to propose that the internet distorts our understanding of politics in illiberal regimes. Not for country specialists—careful analysts of Malaysia and Turkey know that there’s a lot more to understanding these regimes than events in either Taksim or Merdeka Square can capture. But for causal observers, and superficial scholars, and also potentially for those in the position to make important decisions about policy, internet goggles obscure just as much as they reveal.

    The specific problem is the reduction of the regime to its anti-opposition tactics. Internet goggles do this for regimes like the AKP and the BN because that behavior is what you can observe.

    Reducing these regimes to their anti-opposition tactics is problematic in at least two ways. First, it ignores the historical context of current politics, and thereby obscures the conditions through which regimes come to power. In both the Turkish and Malaysian cases, these conditions are rooted in specific understandings of religion and the state, between the party and the market, between popular voice and political order, and between material prosperity and social concerns. (There are some parallels between the specifics in Malaysia and Turkey, but just as many differences.)

    Second, highlighting anti-opposition tactics discounts the popular support that each regime does have, and the non-electoral mechanisms through which the regime stays in power. The problem lies in the fact that the relationship between the incumbent regime and much of the population is not spectacular—which I mean in literal terms, as in “not a spectacle.” The everyday politics of regime maintenance is relatively boring. Yet without understanding why Istanbul votes for the AKP, or why Johor goes for the BN, the meaning or significance of anti-regime protest and the regime’s response is hardly possible. It is hard, reading accounts such as this or this, to understand why anyone would support the AKP or the BN.

    The consequence is not just that the media coverage isn’t comprehensive, but that the analysis based on that coverage is misleading because it misses the “real action” of regime maintenance. A quote from Clive Kessler‘s review of GE13 in Malaysia makes the point well.

    For many of those intelligent, persuasive and globally-networked young Kuala Lumpur cosmopolitans, the Malay heartlands and those who live there are just as foreign and remote a world as they certainly were to the visiting journalists. The young sophisticates with their congenial “discourse” and “narratives” were nice people, but a very poor guide to what the election was really about —— how it was being conducted where it really mattered.

    But, to those who were running the “real” campaign that inattention was no problem. On the contrary. Let the foreign press write the stories that might please them, that seemed to centre upon the overseas journalists’ own effete concerns, not those of the rural Malay voters. Let them chase after stories that led them away from the real story, the main action.à

    So let me stipulate that the AKP’s actions reveal it to be both brutal and indifferent to the Occupy Gezi protestors, and by extension the Turkish opposition—secular, cosmopolitan, leftist, or otherwise—in general. That observation, which all the world can now see plainly, means something different for a regime which can turn out 50% of the country’s voters at election time than it would in a regime that has to rig or otherwise throw elections. The harsh crackdown in Taksim Square would also be a different story altogether if it were taking place in Merdeka Square in Kuala Lumpur.

    As we watch the unfolding situation in Turkey through the goggles of Twitter and Tumblr and the Times, then, take care in drawing strong conclusions about Turkish politics from what we can perceive about the events on the ground. Just like the planned Black 505 rally in Malaysia, the current protests in Turkey cannot do justice to the forces that put AKP in power, or the mechanisms through which it stays in power. For that, less spectacular but no less troubling issues such as the Sledgehammer affair are the place to start.

  • Subsidies that Work; or, Why is Good Food So Cheap in Germany and Expensive in Australia?

    Two summers ago we traveled as a family to Australia, where we were based in Canberra for five weeks. This month we are in Germany, based in Freiburg. We love to travel, but since having kids, we’ve noticed that travel has become a lot more expensive. Nothing illustrates this more than our grocery bill.

    At least, that’s what we’ve come to expect. Here in Freiburg, we have been floored at how inexpensive our food bill has been. Some illustrations:

    1. We always have to stock a kitchen when we arrive in a new town. In Canberra, it cost us AUD245 in June 2011. In Freiburg in June 2013, our bill was EUR62. This is the case even though we also have one more kid this time, and little AP’s diet is pretty strict (and her favorite food, avocados, is hardly a local product).
    2. One Starbucks breakfast in Sydney cost us AUD28: that’s one tea, one long black, one yogurt, and three pastries. Our dinner last night at Hausbrauerei Feierling cost us EUR23: that’s one large fresh organic beer, one fresh-pressed organic apple cider, one bitter lemon, one large fresh soft pretzel, a basket of very good bread, two Landjäger, two Weißwürste, two Bauernwürste, and a salad. This is at a biergarten, yes, but it’s the most touristy one in Freiburg and the food was very good.

    Now in U.S. dollar terms, some of the comparisons might be overstating things. The $ / AUD exchange rate was about 1.2/1 in 2011, which was as bad as it’s been. The $ / EUR exchange rate right now is around 1.3/1, which is great by recent standards. Also, when it comes to stocking our kitchen, we had to be more aggressive in Canberra because we couldn’t walk to the Supabarn, whereas we can walk to the Rewe in about 7 minutes.

    But those differences don’t begin to explain the stark differences in the price of food between Freiburg and Canberra. Moreover, these inexpensive foods that we’re buying here in Freiburg are tasty and nutritious. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this fried egg, which is just a normal organic cage free egg from the grocery store. 10 of these cost EUR1!

    Deep orange yolk = extra delicious

    Subsidies in the U.S. seem to be producing huge amounts of grains, leading to a superabundance of white flour, corn syrup, and corn-fed beef. Here, they seem to be producing nutritious, locally-grown, organic vegetables, tasty dairy, cage free poultry, and free range meat.

    I see two questions here. One is why food is so expensive in Australia but so cheap here. One might think it’s just about subsidies—Australian farm subsidies appear to be very low—but don’t forget that Australia is a big sunny country with no one living in it, and (especially in Queensland) the land is incredibly fertile. Even with low subsidies, and a center which is useless for commercial agriculture, Australia is a net agricultural exporter. Agricultural subsidies in Germany are a big deal, and farmers are very powerful, yet this does not translate into either higher food prices or an abundance of lousy and unhealthy food.

    Which leads us to the second question: why, given the extensive subsidies to German farmers, does this not translate into industrial farms producing bland and unhealthy corn/wheat/soy by the kiloton? The most productive farm areas of Germany would produce approximately the same types of crops as would the most productive farm areas of the U.S. Yet farmers are growing a wide range of healthy, natural foods, and for the same price.

    I’ve asked around a bit, and I have some hypotheses. But none seem satisfactory.

    1. The “Freiburg” Effect. It’s possible that our experience is not a German experience, it’s a Freiburg experience. Freiburg is a very environmental town, and numerous people have explained to us that French culinary traditions shape Freiburgers’ approach to food. Maybe if we were elsewhere in Germany, we’d see fresh produce, dairy, and meats with the high prices that we expect. It’s possible that this is true, as neither JMP nor I have been anywhere else in Germany than Freiburg. But we doubt it: Germany is a capitalist economy with incredibly functional domestic transportation system, so it’d be hard to imagine that prices would differ that much in one city because competition would tend to equalize them. (Also, Freiburg is very close to France, so it should also experience competition from there as well.) This would probably only work as an explanation if the premium on local agriculture elsewhere were so high as to make it impossible to sell Freiburg’s local agricultural products elsewhere at nearly any price.
    2. EU Agricultural Subsidies. It’s also possible that EU agricultural subsidies just really work well, and that the low prices for food are just the consequence of high taxes, which we as tourists don’t see. Could be, but that doesn’t seem quite right, for one reason. German agricultural policy is made in Brussels, and we’ve been elsewhere in Europe (France, Italy, the UK) around this time of year, and seen tasty and nutritious food, but the prices were much higher prices.
    3. Farm size. One economist explained to me that German farms in what was formerly West Germany tend to be small. This creates stiff price competition, and inhibits mass production of cheap grain on an industrial scale. The former seems exactly wrong to me: small farms should be less cost-efficient, on average, than large ones. But there is perhaps something to the second argument. One piece of evidence in favor of this argument might lie in the large farms in the former East Germany, which are large as a legacy of collectivization under the GDR. Perhaps they act more like U.S.-style industrial farms, leaving the smaller farms in the former West producing other types of agricultural products that just happen to be better. But still, this does not explain why oranges (from Spain) and avocados (from Peru) are still so inexpensive.

    In all, we’re stumped. But happily so: eating well and feeling healthy without breaking the bank. And it makes me wonder how agricultural subsidies here are working so well, given their incredibly distortionary effects on food production in the U.S.

    UPDATE:
    An old friend who is also both German and an economist writes the following:

    The low price of groceries compared to really anywhere else always puzzled me, too. Even Switzerland and England are very different. Compared to the US, it’s especially striking since basically everything else is cheaper in the US. The comparison to Switzerland is the most baffling, since Switzerland has free trade with the EU. No trade economist I asked had a good explanation…What people in Germany often say is that retailing is very concentrated. But why is this market power only used to push upstream prices down, and not also used to push up retail prices? Again, I haven’t seen a good explanation or model for this…