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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
… read about the hollowing of Ukraine’s wartime economy.
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In a real sense, a government is financed on the promise that it will persist and continue to govern in the future. Writing at The American Prospect, Luke Cooper outlines how the death of Yugoslavian founder Josip Broz Tito precipitated a peacetime financial crisis, one where international aid came premised on drastic restructuring. The example of Yugoslavia, paired with the ominous suggestion of Balkan breakup and ethnic wars that followed, is used to set the scene for what Cooper fears may happen in Ukraine. Ukraine’s crisis is externally imposed, with the invasion of Russia, but Ukraine’s economic policies in response to that invasion offer a self-selected hollowing of the state, like the
selling off of state-owned companies. “An all-out war is a bad time to maximize the value of these assets. They are likely to be sold off on the cheap, potentially compounding corruption problems and risking a rerun of the mistakes seen in the 1990s post-Soviet economic transition,” writes Cooper. “Overall, Ukraine’s current economic policy mix is likely to disrupt its ability to defend itself against the Russian invasion. It could deepen, rather than mitigate, the crisis facing Ukrainian workers and consumers.”
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Mint Conditions
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Ahead of their meeting at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States summit, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Alberto Fernandez co-authored an article on international cooperation that included a proposal for a unified South American currency: the “sur.”
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“It’s worth remembering that before the European Union started working on a common currency, the region already had a well-functioning, long-standing trade bloc, the European Economic Community. More importantly, European nations had developed a consensus on fundamental political philosophies and their economic corollaries,” writes Frida Ghitis at World Politics Review.
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While a stable regional bloc currency may be a worthy end goal, Ghitis argues, the precursors of longstanding international cooperation on economic issues in the continent are not there yet. Building the economic union without such a foundation could lead to the whole project going south.
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Paper Trails
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Along the western coast of the Red Sea, preserved under desert sand, a mundane workshop with an extraordinary secret was hiding. Wadi el-Jerf was a harbor and storehouse in Old Kingdom Egypt. It was tentatively rediscovered twice in the 20th century, but excavation didn’t begin till the 2010s. Evidence suggests the site was only briefly occupied, for 50 or perhaps 100 years, and then abandoned without even an effort to transport under-construction ships away.
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“‘Yes, we think it’s paper,’” Egyptologist Pierre Tallet told Lydia Wilson. She continues, “My face must have betrayed the incredulity I was feeling. It has long been believed that paper was invented in China, 2,500 years or so after ancient Egyptians worked in Wadi el-Jarf. There is no other evidence of which I, or my colleagues, are aware that suggests Egyptians used anything but papyrus — endemic along the Nile — or stone, wood, and other durable materials.”
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The discovery of paper in Old Kingdom Egypt reveals that the technology may predate its commonly accepted origins by thousands of years — and took place thousands of miles away. It’s a fascinating insight into the lived past, about which we are still learning more.
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Trust the Process: Part I
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“Patronage networks” are a popular villain of political imagination, conjuring to mind cynical images of a corrupt party boss and elected lackeys indulging in extracted wealth from the public coffers. More realistically, this kind of “rent extraction” is real, where appointed government officials use the privileges and access of the job for personal profit, but it’s hardly the only story. That patronage can facilitate corruption is well known, but it remains an insufficient explanation for why patronage structures persist across political systems.
There are benefits from political appointments, not just to the appointees, but to the provision of public goods, argues Guillermo Toral in “How Patronage Delivers: Political Appointments, Bureaucratic Accountability, and Service Delivery in Brazil.”
The paper is written as a broader contribution to the study of patronage, adding discussion of its effectiveness to a literature already rich in outlining how such systems are used for plunder. To test the assumption of benefits, Toral looked at data from local Brazilian governments, surveyed bureaucrats and politicians, and conducted over 120 in-depth interviews across 7 Brazilian states.
“I argue that political appointments and connections upwardly embed bureaucrats, which provides a set of governance resources,” writes Toral. “Depending on how these resources are used, patronage can enhance either rent-seeking or public service delivery.” Toral goes on to explain the five mechanisms of patronage that he uncovered in his research, which he calls “upward embeddedness.” The first is the bureaucrats’ increased access to material and nonmaterial resources. The second is how patronage allows for politicians to monitor bureaucrats, while the third is how it facilitates the application of sanctions and rewards. The fourth mechanism is related to how patronage aligns bureaucratic priorities and incentives, and the fifth is how patronage works to increase mutual trust. Toral explains, “The advantages of upward embeddedness are not based on distributive favoritism because most of
these governance resources are not zero-sum.”
Another way to think of this is that because appointees come in by recommendation and selection from an elected executive, those appointees are bound to that leader and have access to — at a minimum — some of the executives' attention. This makes it especially worth looking at in rural municipal contexts with finite budgets and labor pools.
“In these challenging environments, the counterfactual to a political appointee is not necessarily the highly capable, autonomous, and driven bureaucrat that Weberian theories presume,” writes Toral. “Without adequate human capital and incentives, civil servants may simply lack the capacity and motivation to deliver services. In those contexts, patronage can alleviate some constraints on bureaucratic governance.”
Appointees are also at-will employees, which means that they can be dismissed or threatened with dismissal for a failure to deliver and can also be promoted for success. In Brazil, while a developed city may have an established bureaucracy capable of handling tasks, the trust between appointees and executives in a developing city can facilitate coordination.
This effectiveness can be seen in tracked changes of school quality in Brazil, as illustrated by scores in the Basic Education Development Index following political turnovers. Quality changes with political transition indicated that previously well-connected appointees were using those connections for meaningful service provision before the election.
“For the benefits of patronage to outweigh the costs, politicians must value public service delivery, be it due to intrinsic beliefs and norms, political competition, electoral accountability, or anti-corruption institutions,” Toral concludes.
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Levi Bridges spoke with queer Russians in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, who have fled Russia’s expansive draft and harsh penalties. While LGBTQ rights are not protected or affirmed in Kyrgyzstan, there are fewer restrictive laws, and the country has not actively tied its persecution of queer people to a war effort. “For LGBTQ Russians who do want to leave, the closeness of Central Asia and the visa-free regimes in the former Soviet countries there makes the region one of their best options,” writes Bridges. “But the fact that countries like Kyrgyzstan have close relations with Russia also worries some people.”
Faith Gay and Jasmine Owens clocked the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ latest announcement. The Doomsday Clock is a long-running awareness tool originally created to draw attention to nuclear peril. Last week, the Bulletin set the clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been, accounting for climate change, political deterioration, and increased nuclear risk brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Write Gay and Owens, “Government leaders owe it to every person on this planet
to prioritize working together to prevent further nuclear and climate disasters, with a particular emphasis on reparations for the communities who have already been sacrificed in the endless pursuit of money and power.”
Manuel Rueda documented the exceptional state of affairs in Peru, where protestors in the capital of Lima clashed with a government that is itself in a constitutional crisis. In December 2022, President Pedro Castillo attempted to preempt impeachment by dissolving the legislature, only to find his planned coup had no support among the military. Instead, he was arrested, the legislature has ruled, and protesters in the streets have felt abandoned by a new government that came to power without elections. “In the streets of Lima, some protesters said that they had lost faith in the current government’s ability to do anything meaningful for this [indigenous] minority, which makes up around a
quarter of the nation’s population,” writes Rueda.
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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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