Politics - Spring 1998

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Politics 80J Bill Clinton's America

Tuesday and Thursday
12-1:45
Social Sciences II, Room 75
Instructor: Daniel Wirls
Associate Professor of Politics

(Note: Given the evolving crisis facing the presidency, the exact topics and emphasis of this course are subject to change to accommodate important current events.)

With an emphasis on the dilemmas facing government and politics as we approach the 21st century, this course provides a topical introduction to contemporary American politics by focusing on the politics of the Clinton presidency. After setting the historical context for the Clinton presidency, we focus on several aspects of the troubled relationship between government and society, including scandal, public cynicism, money and politics, the budget and social programs, civil rights, and globalization. Students will read works by political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and some primary sources, including Supreme Court decisions.

The instructor worked in Congress for a year during President Clinton's first term.

Tentative Course Outline:

I. Getting to The Post-Cold War Era

II. The Politics of Scandal

III. The Rise of Public Cynicism and Anger

IV. Money and Politics

V. Civil Rights and Wrongs

VI. Politics of the Budget

VII. The United States and the World

Please visit the course website at:

http://www.learnworld.com/Courses.html

This course was last taught over four years ago under a different number (Pol. 157). Although I was scheduled to teach it last year, I spent the academic year instead as a Fulbright Lecturer in Politics and American Studies at Charles University in Prague. It may therefore be useful to extend the catalog summary of a course with a somewhat unusual structure and contents.

"Politics and Modern Literature" represents my commitment to exploring the uses of literature as a means of illuminating the study of politics. It is based on the thesis that literature can serve such purposes not as an entertaining alternative to conventional treatises in political science but as a distinctive means of focusing and intensifying human choice in the political arena while employing artistic devices not available to political scientists to create complexly reinforcing symbolic resonances. So great is that power when put to use by skilled literary artists that fictional "reality" can easily displace history in defining what is happening in politics and how to think about historical events. Yet literature can also sharpen beyond historical narration our appreciation of the moral challenges confronting those who act not only as ethical individuals but as bearers of responsibility for effective collective action.

Among the topics we shall discuss are five of perculiar pertinance in the 20th century:

I. MORALITY AND POLITICS IN THE ANCIENT AND MODERN WORLD

Antigone : two retellings by Sophocles and the 20th century French dramatist Jean Anouilh; Richard Wasserstrom, "The Obligation to Obey the Law"

II. DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AS A VOCATION

Edwin O'Connor, The Last Hurrah; Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation"

III SELF-DEFINITION THROUGH POLITICAL ACTION

Albert Camus, The Just Assassins (a play); Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands (a play); Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (selections); Michael Walzer, "Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands"

IV. THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon; John Le Carré,The Spy Who Came In From the Cold; Milan Kundera, The Joke; Weber, "The Sociology of Charismatic Authority"; R. Tucker, ed., The Great Purge Trial (excerpts)

V. POLITICS IN THE THIRD WORLD: THE PROBLEM OF ORDER

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas; Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth (selections)

In this class, the primary texts will always be plays and novels of independently recognized literary merit that address political questions. We shall analyze these texts not only for the messages they convey but with close and sustained attention to their qualities as works of literature The class will proceed almost entirely through discussion of these texts, though in their contributions participants will be expected to incorporate perspectives refined through careful reflection on relatively short parallel readings (which I have included illustratively in the above list) in political theory or of documentary accounts of historic events transformed into fiction. Since class discussions will form the core of the course, all members of the class will be expected to attend regularly despite the early hour (8 a.m. M-W-F--a nice hour on sunny spring days!) and to contribute to the discussions on the basis of timely reading of the assignments. Everyone will also be expected to turn in two essays based on the readings. The first and normally somewhat shorter essay (5-7 pp.) will be based on the commonly assigned reading; the second, on readings in the second half of the course together with one additional work of literature drawn from a list of "collateral" titles.

This class has no prerequisites beyond Upper Division standing. If necessary, I will give priority to final-year Politics majors to maintain the size required for effective participation in seminar discussions. In past years, Literature and Philosophy majors have regularly made up a large and valued fraction of a class that stresses close interpretive reading of philosophically-oriented literary masterpieces.

Because I have been away from campus for well over a year on a Fulbright Lectureship in Political Science and American Studies at Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), a sketch of this course beyond its catalog description may be more than ordinarily useful to those considering taking it. I have also made some changes in its structure that limit the validity of previous syllabi as a guide to its approach.

As its title suggests, Politics 140B offers a broad overview of the dynamics of change in political systems extending from Latin America across sub-tropical Africa and the Middle East to the Asian Far East. Nearly 80% of humanity currently lives within this zone. That percentage is certain to increase sharply within a few decades. Most of the battles of the Cold War were fought by proxy in the Third World. Most of the social conflicts and political upheavals in the post-Cold War world have likewised occurred there. By all indications, this pattern will extend well into the next century.

Students of politics have therefore strong reason to familiarize themselves with the politics of the Third World. Yet most American citizens, tourists, media outlets, and politicians show little familiarity with "Third" World societies beyond a few highly selective aspects of their cultures. They likewise show little disposition to move beyond these stereotypes except during brief periods when the American military becomes drawn into Third World conflicts. If anything, survey evidence suggests that much of the Third World is now less well known to the American public than it was some thirty or forty years ago. This indifference persists despite the fact that this region encompasses the sites of nearly all the great civilizations of the past, much of the world's most remarkable architecture, all of its great religions. Its peoples have experimented with the full range of political regimes in this century; and its economic, ethnic identity, and ecological crises promise to set the agenda for much of the next. Amid general levels of squalor and misery most Americans most fortunately cannot imagine, some sectors have experienced an almost equally unimaginable surge of sudden wealth; and communal tensions, radical inequalities, and civic violence have not precluded the rise in their midst of some of the most shining political leaders of this century.

The extraordinary variety of topographies, climates, ethnicities, languages, religions, social structures, and political traditions within the Third World makes generalizations concerning its politics inherently suspect. And this problem is compounded by an extreme instability of Third World political regimes such as render cross-sectional descriptions of its contemporary governments of little validity beyond the year in which they are offered. The very features that make the Third World of exceptional value as a laboratory for students of comparative politics thus create special challenges in an introductory presentation.

This course will attempt to overcome these problems in four ways. Since it does not presuppose familiarity with or previous courses on the region, I shall make extensive use of my own slides and those of the World History collection to provide a visual context for the readings. I shall also Mconcentrate on certain "core" nations in each region--China and Japan in the Asian Far East; India in South Asia; Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East; Nigeria and Tanzania in Africa; Brazil and Mexico in Latin America--so as to permit an adequately complex tracing of the intertwining ecological constraints, cultural traditions, patterns of economic growth, religious values, leadership strata, and contrasting encounters with the West that together have shaped these countries' differing degrees of political stability and their differing political agendas. Systematic comparison--most often, as the above list may suggest, paired comparisons and eventual triangulations--will be used as controls on explanations that may appear to fit individual cases. They will also be used to generate new or reformulated propositions to try out in the next case. Finally, since this course focuses on societal change, institutional development, and the search for a viable political community in contexts where military coups, regime collapse, and revolutionary reorientations are not exceptional events but the norm, it will freely employ long-term perspectives to identify persisting parameters and profoundly conditioning historical memories amid the often quite evanescent state structures and policies that happen to characterize these countries' governments in any particular year.

The reading for this course has been chosen in light of these ends. Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies , with its explicit focus on the problems of constructing stable and effective governments in deeply divided societies in which the traditional foundations of social order have begun to shift, has long been recognized as the single most comprehensive, provocative, and analytically ambitious text in the field,. We shall use and criticize it in this course to develop an agenda of questions. Thereafter, we shall be looking at the cases listed above, always with emphasis on the formation and disintegration of political authority and community. However, we shall do so at three levels. In a course in comparative politics, it is appropriate to focus on the problems of constructing and maintaining collectively binding authority at the level of what are still the fundamental building blocks of international order--the nation states. We shall therefore begin with politically sophisticated histories by John K. Fairbank and Kenneth Pyle that emphasize the distinctive challenges of modernization and the contrasting responses thereto by the Chinese and Japanese imperial regimes and their successors. Thereafter, we shall make use of several explicitly comparative country studies in a collective volume edited by Larry Diamond et. al., The Politics of Developing Countries.

Concurrently, however, we shall be traveling with prize-winning reporter Robert D. Kaplan, whose The Ends of the Earth documents a world of the 1990s extending from West Africa through Anatolia, Central Asia, India, and Indo-China in which exploding populations, decaying public facilities, pervasive corruption, pullulating diseases, communal violence, and a collapsing public authority of road blocks and armed gangs suggest the unreality of national boundaries and capital cities in this region as symbols of political community. While Kaplan, from his position at the grass roots, sees anarchy--or at least the parcelized sovereignty of neo-feudalism--as the coming political disorder of the Third World, Samuel Huntington, whose theses in his recent Clash of Civilizations I found discussed in Riyadh, Tokyo, Prague, Shanghai, and Buenos Aires, now argues in that book that in the post-Cold-War era national authorities are becoming consolidated and polarized around the "core" states of eight civilizational blocs. Searching for possible reconciliation of these conflicting theses concerning the critical tiers of public authority in the Third World will provide the final organizing focus of this course.

Politics 140B has been designated as suitable for meeting the Upper Division Core Course distribution requirement for Politics majors. It has no prerequisites. In addition to attending the three scheduled M-W-F lectures a week, members of the class will be expected to participate regularly in a weekly discussion section. Written requirements for the class will consist of an introductory exercise and mid-term and final take-home examination essays.

Politics 163 Comparative Foreign Policy & International Diplomacy

This course addresses the problem of the making and taking of foreign policy. What is it? Who makes it? What do they do? Why? We shall analyze, discuss, and replicate cases in an effort to answer these questions: (1) a crisis simulation over a threat by the People's Republic of China to invade Taiwan; (2) international negotiations and national actions on climate change; and (3) a UN Security Council debate. By studying how countries, organizations and people perceive and respond to the kinds of situations inherent in these two cases, we should gain a better understanding of how national security, interests, norms and goals are defined, how policies are formulated, and why things don't always turn out as the planners might have hoped.

The requirements for the course are substantial; don't take the course unless you are prepared to work and participate actively. Students will organize into policy groups of 6 that will represent national and subnational actors in each of the two cases. Each group will undertake research on the actors in order to play specific roles, in a realistic fashion, in the two in-class simulations. Each group is expected to do all of the assigned reading, whether or not it deals with your actor, and groups will be assigned specific readings to present and discuss in class. There will be a take-home mid-term exam on the lectures and readings, and a final paper that is a written analysis of the two simulations, composed in light of readings and practice. A research draft will be due prior to the beginning of the simulations; this will be discussed in class. Course evaluations/grades will be based on: class participation and presentations (1/3), papers (1/2) and exam (1/6).

An advanced seminar focused on Human Rights. Collective required seminar reading will be in:

• Henry Steiner and Philip Alston Internation Human Rights in Context (Oxford Univ Press paperback 1996)

Each student will select a research topic and produce a 20-25 page research paper. Active participation in seminar discussions and oral presentation of research findings and conclusions will also be required.

Revised 7/14/04.