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Monthly Archives: December 2021

Audiences for War

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by Oren Litwin in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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government, politics, war, worldbuilding, writing

When you go to war, what are you trying to do?

You might think the answer is obvious: “Defeat the enemy.” But even setting aside that you can find victory through multiple avenues (battlefield victory, outlasting the enemy in a siege, outproducing the enemy in a war of attrition, diplomatic isolation, et cetera), sometimes warfighters seem to treat victory as a minor consideration. Sometimes they even try to prolong wars, rather than winning them.

Mary Kaldor, writing about the 1990s war in Bosnia, noted that the casualties suffered by civilians dwarfed those suffered by military forces by about 10 to 1. In one sense, the nominal belligerents in the Bosnian War were actually collaborating with each other against their true enemy: the multiethnic, tolerant civilian populace. Serb and Croat nationalists, and to some degree Bosniak jihadis, strove to drive the ethnic populations of the former Yugoslavia apart from each other. By reshaping the populace and creating single-ethnicity communities, who are forced to view each other as enemies, the armed groups justified their own illegitimate power—they presented themselves as “ethnic champions,” so to speak.

Insurgent groups often continue their fight against the state government long after the fight is obviously hopeless. They have failed to gain the support of their home communities, they don’t have the strength to defeat government forces, and continuing the fight achieves no larger political gains and just gets more people killed. Why, then? For one thing, insurgent leaders are often competing with each other for the loyalty of their followers. Taking hard-line positions are often a way to shore up one’s support among the rank and file against competing factions. (I have read one argument that the 9/11 attacks came about because Osama bin Laden was feeling pressure from other factions within the jihadi movement, and needed something spectacular to reinforce his claimed position as the Amir. The attacks were successful in the short term, and may have harmed America in the very long run as well; but in the medium term, they were a strategic disaster for Al Qaida and its allies.)

Second, many insurgent groups are dependent on outside patrons for their support; very often, these patrons are other states, hostile to the insurgent group’s government and seeking proxies to cause it grief. (For example, many armed groups active in the Congo civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s were basically cats-paws for neighboring Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.) In such a case, your patron may demand that you keep fighting long after true victory is outside your grasp, and will give you money and weapons to keep you in the field. (This is one of the most difficult complications in trying to make peace deals between sides in a civil war.)

In other situations, warring sides may be looking beyond their immediate enemy to some other actor on the sidelines, which constrains the choices they can make. For example, American strategy in Vietnam was hobbled by the threat that China or even the Soviet Union would (overtly) join the war if North Vietnam were seriously threatened. On the flip side, American willingness to continue a war they were apparently losing, even with a senseless and wasteful strategy, was an important signal for nearby countries such as Indonesia who were threatened internally by powerful Communist movements.

Similarly, many NATO member countries contributed forces to the Afghanistan war—not necessarily because they felt threatened by the Taliban, but because they saw it as important to vindicate the Alliance, since in the future they might need the United States to protect them from aggression rather than the reverse.

*****

When setting up your fictional war, there are all kinds of juicy complications you can throw into the mix. Maybe that isn’t the kind of story you want to tell, and that’s fine. But if you do want something more complex than “Bad Guys are attacking Good Guys,” consider asking about the audiences for your warring sides. What are they trying to accomplish with the war? Who are they trying to impress, or frighten, or influence?

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. I am now moving my attention to the planned second and third books in this series; the subject matter of this post fits into the third book, working title War for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

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Manipulating the Perceptions of Elites

15 Wednesday Dec 2021

Posted by Oren Litwin in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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government, politics, worldbuilding, writing

One of the odd features of the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany was that Hitler was made chancellor in an antidemocratic process, by elite leaders of the old regime, just when the Nazi Party was starting to lose popular support. Why? The eminent political scientist Nancy Bermeo argued, in a pattern that recurred in many times and places since, that Germany’s leaders overestimated the true level of support that Hitler enjoyed—because Nazi street violence and protests, taking place in the very narrow range of places frequented by the old elite, conveyed the impression that the Nazis were gaining strength. By contrast, the growing opposition to the Nazis was quieter, and completely escaped the notice of Hindenburg and the others in the old guard.

Similarly, many have noted that modern American journalists are almost all on Twitter, and spend most of their time talking to each other. As a result, more and more news stories are mere lazy stenography of whatever new trend is going viral on Twitter, a domain dominated by a relatively small cohort of young urbanized people that poorly reflects what is going on in the country as a whole. It is easy to convince a handful of cloistered journalists that some new rarified issue is a serious problem, even as the populace at large thinks it ridiculous and a distraction from more crucial concerns. Then the politicians read the news stories, and similarly think that they reflect actual problems, and so on.

If you want to change society, there appears to be the right way and the easy way. The right way is via a true popular grassroots movement. The easy way is by carefully constructing a Potemkin movement to scare existing elites with and make them think that they need to make concessions to you, well before you have the actual support to back up such a perception.

If you are an author trying to come up with a nefarious scheme for your heroes to thwart, Option 2 seems like a good one.

How might it work? The key is to understand how your setting’s elites get their news of the world, and then systematically subvert those channels. Do they work in a particular office building? Hire a handful of unemployed drifters to protest in front of the office every day. Do they read the same newspapers? Influence the journalists and editors to print what you want the elites to read—via persuasion, ideological appeals, manipulation of gullible journalists, or naked bribery. Create crises for politicians to panic over; carefully recruit friendly elites by hook or by crook, who can then work on their colleagues.

Above all, do your best to isolate the targeted elites from the “common people” who disagree with you. Wherever possible, create the appearance of popular support; stigmatize your opponents as out of touch, or actively disloyal to the society. Create time pressure; give the appearance that normal deliberation would take too long in the face of whatever crisis you choose to focus on; don’t give legitimate democratic mechanisms a chance to work against you.

This works in autocratic settings as well, and is easier. If your setting is a monarchy, how do you influence the king? Through his advisors, his queen, his mistresses or harem. Subvert each of them in turn, and you can gain control of the realm without any support at all from the people. The same principle is at work: understand how information flows to the leadership, and target those flows.

How can such a scheme be thwarted? By breaking through with other information flows, that better reflect reality. Perhaps the captain of the guard breaks protocol and speaks directly to the king, charging the corrupt advisors with treason. Perhaps a democratic populace starts holding voter referenda well before the next scheduled election, revealing the plotters’ lack of support. Perhaps a hacker replaces the falsified news reports in the elite newspaper with a hefty dose of the truth.

(That is one of the relative advantages of democracy, compared to autocratic systems. Information wants to be free, and helps the elites better govern. It is harder to convince elites to panic over a crisis, or to choose a harmful response based on falsified information, in a free society. Harder, but hardly impossible.)

This type of scheming can produce really compelling fiction. Give it a try.

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Why Do Tyrants Sometimes Have Political Parties?

07 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by Oren Litwin in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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government, politics, worldbuilding, writing

In democracies, we are used to politics being largely carried out via political parties. Parties are used to mobilize voters before an election, and to discuss policy platforms and figure out which policies might work best and have the most support. But not only democracies have parties. The Nazi and Communist Parties, for example, functioned long after democratic contestation ended in their countries. But what did they do? How were they useful to the regime? (And how can we use those concepts in worldbuilding?)

The most “natural” use for a political party, even in a tyranny, is to incorporate the people into political life. (This is the main function of parties in a democracy—mobilizing potential supporters so they will vote for you.) In a regime without contested elections, mobilizing the people may still be important; we noted previously that some regimes want the people to be politically active in a way that augments the regime’s power. In early Communist China, for example, the relatively stunted state had few institutional structures that reached down to the village level. Political control needed to be exercised by Party cadres in the villages, who took direction from the leadership and then carried it out in their local settings without formal oversight.

But what about regimes that demobilize the people, and in fact want the people to butt out of politics altogether? Why have a political party then?

For one thing, a party is useful to a dictator who is taking over an existing government, and has to deal with existing bureaucracies or security forces that might resist his orders. By organizing a political party, you can sidestep notional hierarchies and systems by imposing your own parallel system, responsive to control from the top, through which you can direct the government’s behavior outside of “official channels.” Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote extensively about how the Nazi and Communist Parties subverted the existing state institutions in Germany and the former Russian Empire.

Another real-world reason, even if absurd, is “dictator envy.” All the cool dictators had political parties, says the local tinpot dictator, so I want one too! For example, Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of Congo/Zaire, created the Popular Movement of the Revolution in 1967, ostensibly to represent the “national revolution” which legitimized him. In practice, its ideology was incoherent, being “neither left, nor right, nor even center” and calling for a repudiation of “both capitalism and communism.” Essentially, Mobutu’s party was another way of formalizing his absolute control over the country.

A more intellectually interesting reason was pointed out by Beatriz Magaloni. She noted that an absolute ruler faces an unexpected problem when dealing with subordinates: because the ruler can do whatever she wants at any time, even her most essential subordinates cannot trust her. History is replete with rulers who decided to execute their advisors on a whim.

Some rulers enjoy creating this kind of uncertainty; but it comes with problems as well. A subordinate who is constantly keeping an eye on Plan B is not going to be as efficient a functionary for the ruler as one who trusts the ruler to keep her bargains, and is thus motivated to serve the ruler well. An even bigger problem is that if the subordinates cannot trust the ruler, then the ruler cannot trust the subordinates either; she can never dare to give up her hold on power, or she will soon find herself before a hastily-formed firing squad, or swinging from a lamppost.

This is particularly true if the ruler is faced with strong opponents, and wants to co-opt them into her government. Any offer of power that the ruler makes would have to be better than the power than an opponent already has, which is dicey since the whole point of co-opting an opponent is to remove him as a threat.

In this reading, a single-party system can actually serve as a commitment device for both sides. The party provides an institutional structure and a career path for young subordinates to follow, with some assurances that one’s position wouldn’t be summarily stripped from him whenever the ruler feels like it. By the same token, the party provides relatively predictable mechanisms for the dictator to transfer power to a trusted successor, and gratefully head off into a safe and long retirement.

Magaloni found that single-party regimes tended to last longer than pure military dictatorships; moreover, after the end of the Cold War, most autocratic regimes were actually hegemonic-party regimes, that had the ruler’s political party in control but had also legalized opposition parties. Magaloni argued that allowing other parties strengthened the usefulness of the ruling party as a commitment device; if party members were dissatisfied, they could credibly threaten to jump ship to the opposition.

This is a brutally short treatment of Magaloni’s argument, and I recommend reading the whole article if you can. In any case, few works of speculative fiction really make use of the possibilities of a tyrannical regime’s official political party. The machinations of party politics offer another avenue to really spice up your story.

******

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

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