Thanksgiving in Turkey!

   Friends & Comrades,

   Ironically, I spent the Thanksgiving break in Turkey this year!

   I was invited to a workshop on Latin America. It was hosted by Ankara University, and financed by TIKA. A tiring but certainly worthwhile trip. Below are the highlights:

Distance covered: approx. 6000 miles (~10,000kms), each way

Flight Connections: 3

Total number of poking and probing by the airport security: 6

      (yes, they touch you w/their left hands, despite having beeping detectors in their right hands)

Days spent in Ankara: 4

Total number of days spent while traveling to Ankara: 4

Number of Latin American Ambassadors met on this trip: 7

Number of diplomatic missions from Latin America in Ankara: 9

Hotel reservations: 1

Number of days spent at the hotel: 0

Number of nights spent at various friends’ homes: 4

Happy hours with friends: 4

Amount of stuffed mussels consumed on this trip: over 20

Turkish coffee: 2 cups

Fortune telling from coffee grains:  1

Summer 2012, Part I

Cayyolu, Ankara, June 2012

Esteemed Readers;

I’ve been quiet lately. My last post was almost 5 months ago. Actually, many things happened since then. But it was the sheer volume and intensity of the stuff that kept me from writing.

So here is a quick summary of this summer:

May:

Went back to Ankara, to my beloved university and students. I LOVE teaching IPE! (international political economy). And the feelings are mutual, I might add. My students seem to enjoy my classes as much as I do, at least according to the student reviews.

This semester we stirred up quite lively discussions in class on auto industry. Does Turkey need its very own auto company? My students made excellent claims on both sides. We also had a few engineers in class, who were very much engaged by the topic. I am very proud of them all.

In the second half of May, my family flew in from the US. My son went to a public school in the neighborhood. To everyone’s surprise, he managed to fit in quite well. No harm done by local bullies, and he actually made some good friends...

June:

Classes and university obligations continued full blast. Upon Mexican Embassy’s request, I organized a panel on G20. Other than the “death by powerpoint” incident by one of the presenters, it went quite well.

We had a big party for my son and his best friend from our apartment. I mean BIG PARTY! 2 huge cakes, clowns, music systems set up in the basketball court. After hearing the music and seeing the clowns and the guy walking on stilts, lots of people from the neighborhood joined. Both the kids and their parents had great time.

When school was over, we registered our son in an all-day sports school, since both my husband and I were working full-time at the university.

First week, he got injured in gymnastics. At the end of the month when he completed the program, they gave him a “gold medal” in gymnastics! I am telling you, this is a spoiled generation we have… They are pampered left and right…

July:

My son went to the summerhouse with my mom, my brother and his Russian girl friend. It seemed like they had great time along the Aegean Sea, while land locked Ankara was baking in the summer heat. 

The snorkel grandma got for him truly enamored my son. He insisted to speak with me over the phone, while wearing it! Needles to say, I didn’t get most of what he was saying but we played along…

In the absence of a young son, my husband and I jumped right into the exciting nightlife of Ankara! This meant attending some uptight parties thrown by various embassies in town.

Probably one of the best was at the Canadian Embassy, jointly organized by their NAFTA partner, the Mexicans! Don’t ask me why they excluded the US. We didn’t want to stir up any controversies, and were just happy to be invited.

At the party, the Embassy staff had a funky payment arrangement: You paid some money, say 20 Liras, and got a card with a bunch of monkeys on. 5 Monkeys would get you a beer, 6 monkeys for margaritas, and 7 monkeys for whisky.

It turns out, my husband had left over monkeys in a card, but from 4-5 years ago! He pulled it out and politely asked the bar tender, if they would honor the monkeys in his old Embassy card.

To our surprise, the bartender did! He said it’s been years since he had seen a card like that, but served the beer anyway… When my husband shared the incident with the Canadian Ambassador, the Ambassador was super proud! He said: “We Canadians honor our contracts!”

Wishing you all fun neighbors like the Mexicans, and virtuous neighbors like the Canadians!

The Diplomat-Friendly Academic Mommy

Visiting the Brazilian Ambassador:

Photo: Ministry of External Relations (The Itamaraty Palace) in Brasilia, Brazil

  Today, I had a nice long visit with the Brazilian Ambassador. As usual, we covered many topics ranging from PetroBras to black labs... But my entry is not about the content of our conversation. Rather, I’d like to talk about political cultures.

  Throughout my academic career, I had the opportunity to encounter and work for some high profile individuals. At my Alma Mater, Bogazici University, for instance, I was the assistant for the then vice-rector, who got degrees from Yale and Stanford.

  When working at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, I had the chance to meet with the ex-president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo. We had a nice chat about my dissertation with Dr. Zedillo, who incidentally has PhD in Economics from Yale.

  My last rector in Turkey, who was recently promoted to be the head of the highest scientific research institute of the country, received his PhD from Georgia Tech. He was both the sharpest and most accessible administrator that I ever worked with.

Here is where I am trying to get at:

  When I look at the high profile people that I interact with, the ones that I communicate with utmost ease all have some education experience in the US. Therefore, it wasn't a great surprise for me when the Ambassador said he too had studied in the US. 

  I think the higher education system in the US, particularly the Liberal Arts tradition, is the best form of soft power that the US could ever achieve. It breeds a unique blend of cosmopolitan individuals, who acquire the pragmatic, laid-back, no-nonsense attitude that is emblematic of the American political culture.

Let me put this in a comparative perspective, so that the contrast would pop out more:

  In my home country, which is not much different from the other members of the developing word, protocol and hierarchy are strongly entrenched qualities in political culture. The higher up in the ranks you go, the more stiff you get. Consequently, it is really hard to have a genuinely open, productive communication with these people…

  Unfortunately, the Europeans are not immune to this stiffness virus either. Their strong adherence to bureaucracy (see the colossus they’ve created called the EU), the meandering way they talk, which involves so many subtle connotations that you need a decoder to capture them all, make it really hard to get to the nuts and bolts of an issue. 

  There has been a growing literature on the American decline since the 1980s. Yet, most of these were coming from the left-leaning IR scholars, hence were not taken too seriously by the mainstream. Recently however, even the centrist, mainstream scholars are talking about the “US decline”. (Here is a great piece by Stephen Walt of Harvard)

  Hard power (military and economy) is a whole other issue. But if it wants to maintain its soft power, the US cannot afford to lose its global edge in higher education.

My humble suggestion: 

 Get the  public university budgets off the butcher block, and stop the intimidating visa procedures for international scholars and students. What all these end up doing is undermining the precious US soft power in the long run... 

  Happy Thanksgiving!

The Liberal Arts loving Academic Mommy 

International Relations Theory and Diplomats

 Recently, I had the privilege to listen to a high ranking NATO diplomat. I won't disclose his nationality, since that would reveal too much info. Suffice to say that he's pretty high up in NATO hierarchy, and had served as the spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry of his country prior to this post.

 For almost half hour, he talked about NATO's Afghanistan mission.
 I honestly cannot recall anything of substance from that entire speech.
 Except that troop withdrawal is planned by 2014.

 Since it seemed impossible to derail the NATO diplomat from his rehearsed lines, I saved my questions for this blog.

Here we go:

Q1: What exactly is NATO's job definition in Afghanistan?

My educated guess: Establish stability and security??

My comment: Good luck with that one!

Stability and security requires a functional state. What is the grand strategy to achieve this?

The only two successful cases of state building through military intervention were Japan and Germany. Besides, they had functional, highly effective state apparatuses before being destroyed during WWII. In both cases, state building was not just a military task. World Bank, then called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was heavily utilized to rebuild Europe.

In short, NATO in Afghanistan is de facto engaged in state building. But it is ill-equipped for this task. Furthermore, we don't even know if all the members are content with this "state building" mission...

Q2: What exactly is NATO's exit strategy in Afghanistan?

My educated guess: Nada!

My comment: We owe this concept largely to Colin Powell, probably the only decent man in GWBush cabinet. The senior NATO diplomat said absolutely nothing about the exit strategy in 2014.

What amazes me the most is, how they come to speak for so long and manage to say absolutely nothing... Hence, is the cartoon below. Sorry if it offends any diplomat admirers...

 Lastly, someone in the audience asked the diplomat his opinions of Arab Spring. He said, "well, each case is very specific, unique to itself..." As a scholar, this kind of statements just spike my blood pressure.

 I'm not saying let's rush to lump apples and oranges, but come on. Where is your systematic analysis?

There is either some kind of ignorance or contempt for generalization among the diplomats. They feel like they have to re-invent the wheel at every single incident. Yet, there is a huge literature on revolutions and social movements. Political science have not been sleeping over the French, Russian and Iranian revolutions.

 Likewise, diplomats seem to completely ignore theoretical approaches in the study of IR and foreign policy. Mostly, they endorse almost an archaic form of realism, that even realists have grown out of, and expect their audience to concur... come on...

Unfortunately, Turkish universities have an old habit of employing retired diplomats as faculty in International Relations departments. This is a huge retrogress for our discipline. If anything, IR scholars should lecture the diplomatic core about the recent theoretical and analytical insights of our discipline.

Diplomats should keep in mind that anecdotes, no matter how interesting they are, do not count as social science.

The diplomat-weary Academic Mommy