Exploring the World: Adventures of a Global Traveler: Volume Iv: the Dynamics of Asia and the Middle East

By Howard J. Wiarda

Professor Howard J. Wiarda, a leading academic expert on foreign policy, comparative politics, and international affairs, is the author of more than eighty books. Wiarda has traveled to many of the worlds most troubled and exciting places. Now, in the more personal accounts of his global travels, he recalls his foreign research adventures, the countries visited, and the people he met and interviewed along the way.

Wiardas new four-volume set, Exploring the World: Adventures of a Global Traveler, details his travels and foreign adventures since 2006. In these travel books, he tells the stories that lie behind the research, offers his impressions of the countries and regions he has explored, and considers how and why some have been successful and others not.

Volume I in this new series tells the story of Wiardas 2010 circumnavigation of the globe. Volume II focuses on Europe and the continued importance of European regionalismdespite the bumper stickers advertising Europe Whole and Free. Volume III deals with Latin America and questions whether the region is really as democratic as we would like it to be. Volume IV provides Wiardas analysis of Asias economic miracles while also recounting his recent visits to the Persian Gulf and his assessment of modernization and development in the Islamic world.

Insightful and entertaining, Wiardas travel narratives offer commentary on important and interesting sites all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781475997002

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Exploring the World: Adventures of a Global Traveler

Volume IV: The Dynamics of Asia and the Middle East

Copyright © 2014 by Howard J. Wiarda.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-9699-9 (sc)

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iUniverse rev. date: 06/26/2014

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1     Introduction: Traveling The World

Chapter 2     The Heart Of Asia

Chapter 3     Taiwan: Endangered Dynamo

Chapter 4     Around The World: Asia Revisited

Chapter 5     Hong Kong And Macao: Flush With Success

Chapter 6     Abu Dhabi And The Persian Gulf: Is There A Gulf Model Of Development?

Chapter 7     Dubai And The United Arab Emirates: More Trouble In The Persian Gulf

Chapter 8     Conclusions

PREFACE

I am not an Asia specialist. Instead, I started my academic life as a specialist on Latin America. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, 1957-’61, I took four courses on Latin America, became intrigued with the area, and went off to grad school at the University of Florida, which then had the best, multi-disciplinary program on Latin America in the country. I wrote my M.A. thesis, Ph.D. dissertation and first books on Latin America. In some autobiographical writings, I divided my life into decade-long periods, the 1960s being the decade of Latin America. In many quarters I’m still mainly known for my writings on Latin America. I’m seen as a Latin Americanist.

But by the 1970s I’d moved away from this earlier concentration and began to specialize on Europe. Naturally I did not want to abandon Latin America because of the years I’d spent acquiring expertise on the area and because I was by then known for my Latin America analyses and studies, but beginning in 1972-73, we began traveling to and doing research in Europe on a regular basis. We lived in Portugal for a year in 1972-73, studied in Spain, and traveled throughout Western Europe. We returned in 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1977, and then took a second year-long sabbatical leave in Europe in 1979-80. The 1970s (and early-to-mid 1980s) thus became, for us, the decade of Europe.

I went to Asia for the first time in 1987. I had been invited to be a plenary speaker at a major international conference in Singapore. En route, wanting to see as much as possible, I stopped off in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. On the way back I did research in the Philippines and then stopped off in Japan again. ¹ In the next few years I received invitations to lecture in South Korea and China, always stopping off in Japan en route.

Those initial forays into Asia blew my mind. These societies were so energetic, so dynamic, so clearly on-the-move; I had never seen anything like them before—and I am a student of development and developing areas. Not only did the Asian nations—the first tiger (Japan) and the four little tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore); the Philippines was a possible exception—put Latin America to shame. But they were, as well, already more dynamic than either the U.S.A. or Western Europe. What a shock! If the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism were already fading in the West, they were alive and well in the East. I had grown up in a Dutch-Calvinist environment (Wiarda is a Dutch name), but now I found the Calvinist traits of hard work, determination, emphasis on education and raising oneself up by the bootstraps were more prevalent in Asia than in my home country.

There followed during the 1990s several more trips to Asia, including Japan several times, South Korea and China. Then in 2000-2001, on sabbatical leave, I spent extensive research time in Asia: Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, India, Indonesia and East Timor. These visits are reported on in my earlier series of travel books, Adventures in Research, which carried through 2006.

The Asia and Middle East travel recounted here begins with a 2007 trip around Asia. I had been invited by the government of Taiwan as part of a group of think tankers and policy experts to visit their island. Taking advantage of that opportunity, I made it into another around-Asia tour: Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore before going on to Taiwan. Then in 2010, this time as part of an around-the-world trip,² I went to Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore and Malaysia, before returning home via Abu Dhabi and London. Finally, in early 2011, I was invited back to Asia, specifically Hong Kong and Macao, flying there by way of Paris and with a stopover in Dubai.

So in the last twenty-five years (since 1987), I’ve seen a lot of Asia. All the big important countries and their dynamic economies, as well as quite a few of the smaller ones. My records show that in this quarter century I’ve made a dozen trips to Asia, averaging one every two years. I don’t presume to be an expert on Asia and I don’t know Asian languages as I know Latin American or European languages. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of Asia and I have access at some levels and in some quarters that few people have. In some ways, just as the 1960s was my decade of Latin America and the 1970s and 1980s my decade of Europe, the last two decades have been my decades of Asia.

Recall that this is a travel book, not a purely academic book. I have fun and interesting experiences when I travel that are worth telling about. Nevertheless the book is informed by my background as a research specialist/Washington think tanker on foreign policy, comparative politics, and international affairs. Therefore the travel accounts and descriptions are enlivened by my ruminations on Asian domestic politics, culture, development strategies, and international relations. I hope it’s a nice mix and combination.

One other matter requires clarification: why include two chapters on the Middle East in a book that is principally about Asia? The answer is, mainly, simple convenience. I am not a Middle East expert, I’ve only visited that area on four occasions (the first time, actually, in 1973—Morocco—long before I got to Asia), and I cannot claim to have had a decade of the Middle East as I’ve had earlier decades on Latin America, Europe and Asia. Nevertheless I’m intrigued by the Middle East, its culture, society and politics, and I intend to go back there.

At first I thought I might develop some fancy, Edward Said-like theory of Orientalism³ to justify including both the Far East (East Asia) and the Near or Middle East in a single volume. And there is something to that, because all these designations (Near East, Far East, Middle East, and East Asia) are products of the Western imperial or colonial era and of a Euro-America centric view of the world which is now fading. Maybe I’ll develop that theme at some point in the future, but here I’ve decided to forego the lecture in favor of getting right into the heart of the matter, which is the travel account and the analysis of contrasting Asian and Middle Eastern development.

In undertaking this project, I am indebted to a number of individuals and organizations. The University of Massachusetts/Amherst, Harvard University, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the University of Georgia have been my main institutional homes during this period, and have been strongly supportive of my research. Funding for this research has come from these institutions plus the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Tinker Foundation, Smith Richardson, the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Earhart Foundation, the Oriente Foundation, and the Aspen Institute. My wife Iêda, herself a political scientist and specialist in comparative politics, has always been a pillar of support as well as my companion on almost all these travels. In their earlier years our children Kristy, Howard E., and Jonathan also got dragged along, enriching their lives by the foreign experiences but also disruptive of school, friends, and home life. I thank them for their patience and forbearance as their parents went roaming around the world and hope that they benefitted from all this foreign travel as well. My research assistants Annie Kryzanek, Leah Carmichael, and Megan Lounsbury contributed mightily to the successful completion of this project, as did all-around and long-term typist, word-processor, editor, and good friend Doris Holden. Of course none of these individuals or institutions are responsible for the final product; that is my responsibility alone.

Howard J. Wiarda

Summer 2013

Washington, D.C.

Notes

¹ The account of this earlier travel is contained in Howard J. Wiarda, Adventures in Research (Lincoln, NE; iUniverse, 2007) Volumes II, III and IV.

² Howard J. Wiarda, Around the World in Twenty Days (forthcoming).

³ (New York: Random House, 1978).

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION:

TRAVELING THE WORLD

On Foreign Travel

I started traveling to foreign countries when I was a young graduate student. My first trip abroad was in 1962 when I did research in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The next year, still a grad student, I visited Mexico and traveled overland up and down the Isthmus of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. I lived for most of 1964 and part of 1965 again in the Dominican Republic doing research for my doctoral dissertation which was the basis for my first published books on the Dominican revolution and U.S. military intervention of 1965. ¹ Meanwhile, I visited Puerto Rico numerous times in the mid-1960s to lecture at the Peace Corps training camp set high in the interior mountains.

While my first several trips abroad were all on two- or four-engine propeller planes, the early 1960s was the period when modern jet travel was coming into widespread use for the first time. Jet aircraft certainly facilitated the foreign travel that I and other scholars in the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and foreign policy wanted and needed to do. With jet travel now becoming widespread, it soon became possible to be (almost) anywhere in the world in one day or one overnight.

In 1966 and 1968, as (still) a young assistant and then associate professor, I received grants from my university (the University of Massachusetts) to travel all around Latin America. We (my wife and I) went back to the Dominican Republic, then visited Venezuela (where she had written her doctoral dissertation), Brazil (my wife’s home country), then Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Panama. In 1968, and then again in 1972, we retraced this route, focused particularly on the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Brazil, to complete a research project sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on The Politics of Population Policy in Latin America.²

My own research and travel interests, meantime, had increasingly focused on Europe. We spent the 1972-73 academic year on sabbatical leave in Portugal and Spain, and traveled extensively throughout Western Europe as well as North Africa. In 1974 and 1975 I was back in Portugal as a policy adviser to the State Department on the Portuguese revolution. In 1977 I went to Israel to help train a new generation of young Israeli scholars, diplomats, and journalists on Latin America; on the way back I did preliminary research in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal on Southern European labor relations. In 1979, on another year-long sabbatical, I completed the Southern European project and published a monograph on the subject.³

Up to this point, my foreign travel itinerary was still quite conventional for a young (still under forty) academic scholar. Between 1962 and 1978, I’d gone on student junkets to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America; made several trips abroad mainly to my areas of research specialization (Latin America and Southern Europe); enjoyed two research sabbaticals as a young professor; and lived abroad for three out of those seventeen years. During this period I averaged one trip abroad per year—but only if you count Puerto Rico as being abroad.

However, in 1979-80-81 all this changed; my life was altered forever. In 1979 I was asked to join Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs (CFIA) as a Research Associate and Research Scholar. At Harvard I worked closely with Samuel Huntington, Stanley Hoffman, Joseph Nye, Schmuel Eisenstadt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Verba, Gabriel Almond, and other academic luminaries. I also taught at MIT in the spring of 1980. Being at Harvard, I soon discovered, enormously increases your prestige level and, therefore, also your opportunities to lecture, to contribute to anthologies, and to travel to far-off places.⁴

Then in 1981, in part because of that Harvard connection, I was invited to join the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) as a Senior Scholar and foreign policy program director. Wow; Harvard, MIT, and AEI all within a two-year period. In those years, early-to-mid-1980s, of the Reagan Revolution, AEI was flush with cash from its big donors; it was also viewed as the idea factory of the Reagan Administration. I had no teaching and precious little administrative responsibilities at AEI, leaving abundant time for research, writing, and foreign travel, mainly to Europe and Latin America. While at AEI in the 1980s, I also undertook my first trips to Asia: initially Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore; later China, South Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, Macao, India, and Singapore as well. My travel budget was initially unlimited and it was not difficult to find a reason to go abroad. Instead of one trip a year from my early academic years, I now started to average three or four foreign trips a year.⁵

My itinerary broadened as well. I went to places, and often at five-star levels, that I never would have gone to as an academic. Since I still had research interests in Mexico, Central America (then a hot issue), the Caribbean, and South America, one or another of my research projects would bring me there every year, usually in the winter when Washington was snowy and cold. And since I now also had serious research interests in Europe, we’d find our way there a couple of times a year as well, usually in the late spring or early fall when the weather was nice but the restaurants, streets, and galleries were not overrun with tourists, students, and backpackers. I should say that all these trips also involved legitimate research interest or else were done at the behest of AEI—for example, our work on behalf of the Kissinger Commission on Central America or our efforts to establish ties with like-minded think tanks abroad. But what a life it was, involving numerous opportunities for travel. It could not last, and it didn’t; AEI went belly-up in 1987-88. And I returned to my comfortable, tenured professorship at UMass and my research position at Harvard.

In 1991 lightning struck again; I received an appointment as Professor of National Security Policy at the National War College, enabling us to return to Washington for an extended period. At NWC, I discovered, there were always surplus travel funds (this is the Department of Defense, after all, with gigantic budgets, the Cold War over, and no enemies on the horizon) that had to be spent (use it or lose it) before the end of the fiscal year. So every year, with impeccable timing right after the student spring trips which were NWC’s big travel item, I’d approach the NWC Executive Officer (XO) with a request for travel funds. Of course, the request had to be defense or security related but that was no problem; as a global superpower every area of the globe is related to U.S. defense and security interests. On that basis, using DOD funds, I visited Russia twice, China, South Korea, South America, Mexico, Central America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the Middle East. My years at the War College, 1991-96, even more so than at AEI, turned me into a global traveler instead of just a regional one.⁶

I left the War College mainly because UMass, my home institution for all those peripatetic years and where I still had a tenured professorship, had created a chaired and named professorship for me: the Leonard J. Horwitz Chair. Horwitz was a UMass alumnus who had generously endowed a chair for me. The Chair carried with it a considerable travel fund that enabled me to continue the extensive travel schedule begun when I was at Harvard and continued at AEI and the War College. With these funds I went back to Russia again and began making yearly trips to Eastern Europe. The high point of this period came during a year-long sabbatical leave in 2001 when, aided also by grants from the Aspen Institute, the Fulbright Program, the Erhard Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Oriente Foundation, I spent the first six months living in Vienna and Budapest, the next two months in Brazil and South Africa, and two more months touring Asia: Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Indonesia, and East Timor.⁷

In 2003 I took an early retirement offer from UMass and accepted another chair, the Dean Rusk Professorship at the University of Georgia, as well as serving as founding head of the newly created Department of International Affairs at UGA. The Rusk Professorship, which I still hold, although after two three-year terms I recently stepped down as department head, also carried with it a $10,000 yearly fund for travel. By carefully husbanding that resource and drawing on other travel funds, I’ve been able to keep up the extensive travel begun before. And that means three or four foreign trips per year, mainly to Europe but also to Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Just this year, for example, I spent part of the spring in Central Europe (the Imperial Splendors tour of Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria), May-June in Asia (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Malaysia) and then around the world (Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, and London), and part of July in Central America.

I’ve thus had thirty years of travel, since 1980, averaging three or four foreign trips per year, coming on top of an earlier seventeen years as an academic averaging one trip per year. It’s an extensive, nearly five-decades-long, travel schedule: I’ve traveled, lived in, or done research in over ninety countries and five continents.

I’ve also been fortunate to have the funding to do this travel. Over these decades I’ve enjoyed four, year-long, fully paid, no strings attached research leaves or sabbaticals from the universities with which I’ve been associated, and three half-year paid leaves. I’ve also been remarkably lucky over the years in winning outside grants and fellowships to supplement this sabbatical support. Then, when I was at AEI for all those years, I had virtually unlimited freedom (no classes, no students!) to travel whenever I wanted, and the almost unlimited funds to go with it. At the War College in the 1990s, I was similarly able to tap into the extensive travel funds available. Finally, over the last fifteen years, at both UMass and UGA, I’ve held endowed chairs that carry with them not large but sufficient travel funds.

What a charmed life! How nice to be able to engage in all that travel. My travel books are a product of all these institutions’ generosity and I’m grateful to them for it.

The Writing Life

I now consider myself a writer. Going back to junior high school, even elementary school, I’ve always loved to write. I wanted to become a professional writer. For about one semester each, I majored, respectively, in English and journalism in college. Until a college mentor pulled me aside one day and gave me some wonderful advice. First, after meeting writer John Bartlow Martin and interviewing him when he served as John F. Kennedy’s ambassador in the 1960s-era, troubled Dominican Republic, I was told there were only about two hundred persons in the United States (Martin was one of them) who made their living entirely from their writing—not good odds. Second, I was advised, sagely as it turned out, that I should not major in English or journalism but should get my degree in something substantive—history, political science, economics, or sociology—and study and do my writing on the side, which I did as a reporter-editor for a really good campus newspaper at the University of Michigan, The Michigan Daily.

So that’s how I became a political scientist and, eventually, a professor of political science. I wouldn’t say that political science was for me a fallback position or even a consolation prize, for I’ve loved (almost) every minute of the life I’ve led in that profession. But political science back when I was nineteen years old would not have been my first choice.

I’m the author/editor of 120 (one hundred twenty) books. The number sounds awfully impressive but actually it’s quite a bit short of that. To break that number down (I have compiled the figures because my wife recently inquired), the list includes thirty-five edited volumes and probably fifteen shorter (under one hundred pages) monographs. The one-hundred-twenty number also includes foreign-language editions of earlier books, multiple editions of some of my books and collections of previously published shorter articles and writings. When you subtract all these exceptions from the list, it leaves thirty-five books for which I am the sole, individual, original author. It’s still a goodly list but nowhere near the total of 120 which at first blush sounds so impressive.

Somewhere in my political science career, I think about five or six years ago, I recrossed that frontier mentioned earlier. I now consider myself a writer as well as a political scientist. I’m not a great writer but I do work hard at it. I love the single, solitary work of being a scholar and writer. I don’t need people around. Some of the best times of my life are spent in my home office, all alone, manipulating words, images, sentences, and paragraphs. I enjoy that singular and solitary existence.

In recent years I’ve become a student of good writing. I read Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike. Right now on my coffee table I have an eclectic pile of books: Anthony Trollope (who wrote a thousand words per hour), Donna Leon (mysteries set in Venice), Elmore Leonard (quirky novels often with foreign policy themes), and Hunter Thompson—he of the gonzo journalism style. I both study and read good writers. I also read books on writing or writers on writing. I’ve become a student of the writing profession. I seldom read political science any more because the writing is, generally, so bad.

My skills are not up to those of these great writers. When I read Updike, for example, whom I like not least because his family history and background are similar to my own, I sometimes sit back in awe at the magic and sparkle with which he infuses his sentences. I hate Oates’s depressing stories but I love her writing style and productivity. In my own writing, which has many faults as numerous unkind reviewers have repeatedly pointed out, I strive to improve my style with every book. Often I fail to achieve what I want.

Nevertheless, I keep on writing. In fact, I write almost constantly. My graduate students often wonder at my productivity and ask me how I manage to do it, while also maintaining a happy home, family, and personal life. The answer, which I’m not entirely clear about myself, is that I’m very organized, very disciplined, and very hard-working. I also have an enormously patient and supportive family. And I love what I do. Unlike some scholars who lack writing background, I never have a moment of writer’s block. There’s always more to see, experience—and write about. Sometimes I fear that I write too much. My dean once told me, Howard, every time you sneeze it gets published.

Lacking the skills and talents of an Oates or Updike, I try to write as clearly and directly as possible. I avoid obscurantism, political science jargon, and unnecessary vagaries. I write to describe, to analyze, and to be understood. Judging from the sales and praise of the textbooks I’ve written, and the letters and responses of my students, I must be successful on at least some levels.

I’ve now figured out that I can write almost anywhere. I write on trains, planes, and while on tour buses. I write in my home office, at the university, and in a hidden office I have in the library. I write in sidewalk cafés, in museums, and while having dinner (if I’m by myself). Once in a sidewalk café in Berlin a