Virginia Journal of International Affairs - Fall 2021

Virginia Journal of International Affairs

Fall 2021

Editorial Staff

Editor-in-Chief

Co-Managing Editor

Co-Managing Editor

C0-Production Chair

Co- Production Chair

Media Manager

Event Coordinator

Special Projects

Emily Ma

Maya Nir

Sukanya Barman

Nicole Luz

Aria Zareibidgoli

Priya Viswanathan

Akshi Kalavakonda

Manaal Khwaja

Editing Staff

Lara Arif

Victoria Djou

Anna Heetderks

Sarah Liu

Jack Massingill

Carina Ritcheson

Sagarika Shiehn

Addie Simkin

Elisabeth Tamte

Nick Wells

About the Virginia Journal

The Virginia Journal of International Affairs is the University of Virginia’s preeminent publication for undergraduate research in international relations. The Virginia Journal is developed and distributed by the studentrun International Relations Organization of the University of Virginia. The Virginia Journal is one of the only undergraduate research journals for international relations in the country, and aims both to showcase the impressive research conducted by the students at UVA and to spark productive conversation within the University community. The Virginia Journal seeks to foster interest in international issues and promote high quality undergraduate research in foreign affairs. The Journal is available online at vajournalia.org.

Submissions

Interested in submitting to the Virginia Journal? The Journal seeks research papers on current topics in international affairs that are at least ten pages in length. Only undergraduates or recent graduates are eligible to submit. Submissions should be sent to vajournalia@gmail.com.

Please direct all comments to vajournalia@gmail.com

From the Editor

Dear reader,

Our contemporary era is increasingly characterized by an interconnected and interdependent global landscape. The growing complexity of many global issues today has only made it more critical for us to understand the changing political, economic, and social forces within and between countries. At the University of Virginia, we are fortunate to have a wealth of undergraduate expertise in and passion for international affairs.

This latest edition of the Virginia Journal highlights a diverse range of research areas including the growing danger that China’s influence poses to global democracy, discrepancies in women’s healthcare in rural India, the influence of language variation on countries’ risk for civil war, the challenges and opportunities of supranationalism, and Indian agricultural policy’s implications for economic development.

While the Virginia Journal has undergone a number of changes in its almost two decades of publication, its core spirit remains the same. The Journal aims to provide student perspectives in the field of foreign affairs in order to spark intellectual curiosity and promote open discourse. I believe that this semester’s papers truly meet and exceed that goal. It is my hope that readers will walk away with new insights on these thought-provoking topics.

The Virginia Journal would not be possible without the dedication, and support of many individuals in the UVA community. Producing the Journal is truly a collaborative effort every semester. This semester, in particular, marked our first return to in-person operations after a year and a half of being entirely virtual. The success of this edition can be attributed to the hard work of the Journal’s executive board and editorial staff; it has been a privilege to work with such a wonderful team. I would also like to thank all of the authors for their contribution as well as recognize UVA faculty for their support. Additionally, I would like to express my deep gratitude for the International Relations Organization’s ongoing partnership with the Journal.

Lastly, thank you to all of our readers. I am incredibly excited and honored to present the following research papers. Please take this opportunity to enjoy and reflect on the critical work of these undergraduate scholars.

Sincerely,

Emily L. Ma Editor-in-Chief

Indian Agricultural Policy: A Political Economy Analysis

By Morgan Meyer

About the Author

Morgan Meyer is a current Second year student at the University of Virginia hoping to double major in Global Studies: Security and Justice and Art History, with a minor in Physics. Her academic research areas of interest include the impact of development on human rights, as well as the intersection of poverty, labor struggles, and incarceration within our increasingly interconnected world. At UVa, Morgan is involved in sustainability work with the dining halls, the Washington Literary and Debate Society, and writes as a freelancer for the Women's Center magazine, Iris. Following her graduation from the University, Morgan hopes to attend law school and continue her work with incarcerated people outside of Oklahoma.

Foreword

I am happy to see that Morgan Meyer’s paper on India’s agricultural development strategy was accepted for publication by the Virginia Journal of International Affairs. Ms Meyer’s article developed from the papers she did for my Spring 2021 class on the politics and political economy of development. In this class I encourage students to write a first draft early in the semester and then revise in reaction to comments from the TA and myself. Ms Meyer assiduously used office hours in pursuit of both data sources and possible angles of attack on the issue of why conflicts around agricultural policy existed and what their consequences might be. Ms. Meyer wrote a very strong first paper and an even stronger revision. The version for publication in this journal reflects those strengths: a brief but pointed consideration of how India’s colonial history shaped today’s conflicts, postIndependence political structures and economic policies, and then a detailed dive into the big policies affecting India’s agricultural sector and how different interest groups line up around those policies. Several of my students have published in the Virginia Journal of International Affairs and I am pleased to

see Ms Meyer joining their company.

Mark Schwartz Dept of Politics

University of Virginia

Abstract

In June of 2020, the Indian Standing Committee on Agriculture issued three emergency ordinances that would later be heard and approved in India’s bicameral legislature. These ordinances intended to introduce new support for India’s small farmers, enabling them to engage in high-value business with multinational corporations and enterprises. However, the 2020 Farm Bills were met with massive resistance on the part of Indian farmers. Over multiple months, in the midst of a viral pandemic impacting India’s economy and citizens, farmers from across the nation gathered in one of the world’s largest protests to date, with hundreds of thousands of people converging on the nation’s capital. This research seeks to evaluate those ordinances in the context of India’s agricultural economic development over time, while focusing on the actual language and protections offered by the legislation. In evaluating these laws, this research hopes to draw new conclusions regarding the priorities of the Modi government, and where to go from here following the stalemate between the government and farmers.

Introduction

India is a country with many challenging natural characteristics that contribute to its developmental struggle. Traditionally, development takes place through the process of raising cropped areas and yields to increase agricultural exports. The funds received from increased agricultural production typically lead to industrial investments, thus resulting in specialized economies of scale. However, India was unable to follow this traditional process, resulting in economic stagnation. India’s complete developmental history is expansive; the totality could not be expressed properly in a discussion of this length. Instead, this analysis will aim to examine a broad history of Indian agricultural development to ascertain a nuanced understanding of the issues impacting the sector to this day. Analysis of this developmental history will determine the effectiveness of the controversial

2020 Agricultural Reform bills that sparked ongoing protests across the nation.

1890s-1914: Initial Development

To comprehend the full impact of the legislation enacted in the summer of 2020, it is important to understand the developmental and economic factors that led to it. In the 1890s, most other tropical countries were growing at a rate on par with the capital giants of the world in Europe, at about thirty four percent, as opposed to India’s five percent (Lidman, Domrese 1970). These tropical nations experienced prosperity and growth because they exported countless valuable commodities, initially in agriculture, to build up their status in the global economy and begin the process of development and industrialization. However, much of this great agricultural growth occurred due to the seizure and subsequent cropping of available land, which India lacked. India’s massive population had already seized and cultivated most available land, and a majority of this land was dedicated to food and subsistence crops, not high-value crops for exports (Lidman, Domrese 1970). Inadequate rainfall and unpredictable monsoon seasons contributed to the exhaustion of India’s land while forcing slow development due to starvation. Over the period of 1891-1914, two of eight year-long famines killed over ten million Indians combined (Lidman, Domrese 1970). This contributed more to delay in entering the global market. Incredibly low specialization—even into 1912—was the result of anxiety about food supply, rainfall, and epidemics.

During the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Indian development made a strong attempt to catch up with its tropical compatriots. In fact, in the year 1913, the total value of manufacturing exports from tropical countries comprised 270 million dollars, and over half of those exports came from India (Lidman, Domrese 1970). With the rise in trade came the rise in demand for shipping and packing materials. Indian manufacturers gained ground during this period because of the many cotton and jute manufacturers that developed in response to this demand (Lidman, Domrese 1970). Comparing the successes of Indian industry and export of mineral resources to tropical growth rates at the time, the country measures up quite well (Lidman, Domrese 1970). The primary issue in India’s economic development lies, therefore, in agriculture, and by extension water and land

Morgan Meyer

scarcity, inadequate state building due to imperialism, security and financial struggles, and inefficient land policy.

Natural Resource Degradation

When considering the issue of water and land scarcity, it is vital to remember that the best way to increase India’s low yield per acre and manage their land is through widespread, well-maintained irrigation and agricultural innovations and improvements, both of which require a valuable resource: water (Lidman, Domrese 1970). India has dealt with a wide variety of water scarcity problems over the course of its development, but initially, the catalyst of its struggles was the uneven and inconsistent distribution of rainfall throughout the tropical nation. Even today, about sixty-five percent of India’s population lives in rural areas, which are economically dependent on agricultural trade and production (Bhattacharya, Patel 2021). Extensive research, published as recently as 2019, on the distributional impact of weather on rural populations concluded that poor farming populations suffer the greatest losses as a result of reduced water availability (Sedova, Kalkuhl 2019). Most rural areas in India received, on average, less than thirty inches of rainfall per year during initial development, and this issue has only worsened with massive population growth, environmental degradation, and poor agricultural practices (Sedova, Kalkuhl 2019). Even when statistics indicate that certain areas of the country received a considerable amount of rainfall, this must be understood in the context of India’s weather patterns. Usually, this seemingly large amount of rainfall is concentrated within the months of the monsoon season. As a result, the majority of the Indian subcontinent is a dry zone, and has implemented rainwater harvesting systems in the present day to better store rainwater for months of drought (Kumar 2019). However, even these rainwater harvesting systems have the potential to cause trouble. For example, due to inadequate maintenance of these systems by the state government of Tamil Nadu, farmers and residents suffered a severe dry spell in 2016 despite the fact that they had been racked by monsoons the previous year (Sedova, Kalkuhl 2019). Without water, it becomes nearly impossible for a country to develop on par with the rest of the world. Without sufficient irrigation, many profitable crops cannot be exported, drying up funding for increased development and technological improvements.

An analysis of Indian development in the late nineteenth and earlier

Morgan Meyer

twentieth centuries by Lidman becomes relevant once more in the face of water scarcity. In his research, Lidman maintains his argument that had the government invested more and earlier in irrigation, the “whole tempo of Indian economic change” would have been different (Lidman, Domrese 1970). This is not a new idea, but it begs the question: why didn’t India invest in irrigation earlier?

1858-1947: British Rule

The answer is a complicated one, involving inadequate state-building along with security and monetary struggles. Predation strangled India’s economic development, with the imperial British government commanding the country until 1947 (Arora 2013). Taxes were not low during this period, but the colonial administration of Great Britain rarely allowed Indians to hold high-level positions, and the vast majority of decisions made by the English during this time centered almost exclusively on British interests, not those of Indian development. The proceeds from taxation were spent to an “excessive and unfair extent” on British civil administrators and the standing British army, where many of the officers were Englishmen, and Indian subjects were foot soldiers for the UK in conflicts across the globe (Lidman, Domrese 1970). The Indian population’s desire to escape the caste system, famine, and disease made them particularly vulnerable to manipulation on the part of the colonizers.

1947-1980: Independence and the Green Revolution

Following the British regime’s exit from the country, India split into India and Pakistan in the Partition. This divide came about due to the dominant religious differences between Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India (Arora 2013). After the Partition, Indian agricultural development focused on improving food security to prevent famine and raising yields per acre to increase agricultural output until the Green Revolution (Arora 2013). The Green Revolution led to innovations in Indian farming, with the country achieving self-sufficiency in food-grains and extensive backwards and forwards linkages in the fertilizer, seeds, and farm machinery industries (Arora 2013). While this was certainly progress, it is important to note that the benefits of the Green Revolution were felt in already-irrigated regions that grew wheat and rice. These crops constituted India’s most important

Morgan Meyer

agricultural exports at the time, making agricultural improvements smoother, but this concentrated the wealth in the more prosperous areas of the country (Arora 2013). This uneven growth caused greater socioeconomic disparities, already heightened due to the caste system.

1980-1991: Post-Green Revolution

From 1980 to 1991, after the Green Revolution, agriculture policy focused primarily on extending the aforementioned benefits of the Green Revolution to more crops and land areas, as well as the diversification of the country’s exports (Arora 2013). This diversification was geared towards higher value commodities: milk, fish, poultry, vegetables, and fruit (Arora 2013). India also worked to increase yields per acre by using higher yielding varieties (HYVs) of seeds. The table below depicts the massive increase in HYVcropped area over time.

1991-2000: Economic Reforms

In 1991, economic reforms ushered in the liberalization of Indian agriculture due to increased globalization. In particular, they aimed to “improve the functioning of markets, reduc[e] excessive legislation, and liberaliz[e] agricultural trade” (Arora 2013). The 1991 reforms led to a decrease in public investment in agriculture, paving the way for increased foreign direct investment. The table below portrays change in foreign direct investment as a percentage of GDP over time; the late 1990s and early 2000s experienced a massive surge in foreign direct investment to continue economic growth.

This era also led to higher production of important horticultural crops, particularly fruits, vegetables, and spices, as evidenced by the table below. This increased diversification is crucial for industrialization and development.

Included here are data depicting the considerable growth of those aforementioned diversified horticultural crops: fruits, vegetables, and spices.

In 2000, the government of India established the nation’s first ever comprehensive agricultural policy statement, the National Agricultural Policy (NAP) (Arora 2013). In this statement, the government made a clear commitment to developmental growth with equitable distribution. In acknowledging this commitment to Indian citizens, the government simultaneously recognized its responsibility of balancing economic growth with the rights and quality of life of its most vulnerable citizens. This is the reality for a late developer in the modern world of media and protest -countries late to industrialization do not have the luxury of developing on the backs of subjugated peoples.

Lastly, before delving into the modern policy issues at hand, it is prudent to provide more economic context to this discussion in terms of exports and imports as a percentage of GDP through discussion of the table below.

The results of hundreds of years of Indian history coalesce in the graph above. The benefits of the 1991 economic reforms are displayed in the rising importance of exports that came with the rising foreign direct investment. Exposure and entry into the market is clearly a beneficial venture in the system of global capitalism, but, as can be seen in this graph, the greatest improvements from the 1991 reform did not manifest for ten to fifteen years after their codification. There exists an opportunity to learn from India’s agricultural history to inform alterations of the 2020 bills that sparked protest; the government should encourage gradual entry into the market while mitigating severe risks for farmers to incentivize economic participation.

MSP: The Minimum Support Price

Before proceeding to the discussion of the 2020 Agricultural reform bills, it is necessary to discuss a previously neglected aspect of Indian agricultural price policy: the Minimum Support Price, or MSP. This policy is a price floor maintained by the government for twenty three commodities, first instituted in the 1960s (Narayanan 2020). In layman’s terms, MSP is the price the government commits to for the purchase of agricultural goods from farmers if the market price drops below the government’s established minimum support price. By protecting struggling farmers from risk, the

government incentivizes participation in the market. The resulting economic change leads to a rise in agricultural income, protection of small farmers from risk, and increased market participation (Arora 2013). Though not mentioned in the reform bills in question, the support has become a point of focus for protestors, who have called for the MSP’s continuity to be codified into law.

Controversy, Protest, and Nationalism

Agricultural development is still an integral struggle in India. The farmers of the country have yet to grow globally competitive, and many state policies have been implemented in congruence with the liberalizing policies of the 1990s. The Agricultural Acts of 2020, better known as the Farm Bills, exemplify this continuation of India’s agricultural policies. On June 5, 2020, the Standing Committee on Agriculture issued these policies as emergency ordinances to be heard later in India’s bicameral parliament (Narayanan 2020). The bills were officially passed in September of 2020, first in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) and then in the Rajya Sabha (Council of the State), with the President Ram Nath Kouhd giving his approval on September 24 (Narayanan 2020). When the ordinances were initially issued, farmers protested in Punjab and Haryana. Following the codification of the bills into law, these protests erupted, with 200,00 to 300,000 farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and many other states camping out on the highway to the capital, Delhi, in protest (Narayanan 2020). This rapid call to action is even more impressive when one considers that the protests were in November 2020, in the midst of a harsh winter and the COVID-19 pandemic. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, repeatedly came forward in support of these laws, arguing on multiple occasions that the bills were intended for the benefit of the farmer, specifically the peasant farmer (Serhan 2020). Modi frames the farmers as ignorant, and some far-right supporters portray the protestors as “leftist anti-nationals” (Serhan 2020). Further, a senior member of Modi’s party, the BJP, claimed the farmers were Khalistanis, a heavy implication considering the large Sikh population in Punjab (Serhan 2020). By echoing the Sikh separatist movement, the BJP member harkens back to Modi’s own divisive, populist campaign and politics. Clearly, the Farm Bills merit discussion and evaluation, contrary to the picture painted by high ranking government officials.

Legislative Impact

The legislation also merits discussion because of its magnitude: fifty nine percent of the working population of India occupies the agriculture sector. While the sector contributes only around twenty three percent of the country’s GDP, according to the UN, “about seventy percent of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with eighty two percent of farmers being small and marginal” (UN 2018). Agriculture in India is massive, both in its importance to the people of India and in terms of landmass -- India is the seventh largest country in the world, with an area of 3.288 million square kilometers (UN 2018). As mentioned previously, a large percentage of the agricultural workforce consists of small and marginal farmers, whose farms take up less than two hectares of land. Small farmers face even greater challenges due to their economic status and typically rural area. They do not receive the advantages of investment, irrigation, and crop management that larger farms do. Furthermore, small farmers find it difficult to take out a loan due to their minimal economic history, hindering their business prospects. As a farmer in India, little incentive for competitive growth exists and no strong mechanisms spur economic development. India needs agricultural policy reform to better promote economic development and serve the farm laborer population, but the government’s June 2020 economic reform bills caters instead to the interests of international buyers of agricultural commodities.

ThereexistsanopportunitytolearnfromIndia’sagriculturalhistorytoinformalterations ofthe2020billsthatsparkedprotest;thegovernmentshouldencouragegradualentryinto themarketwhilemitigatingsevererisksfor farmerstoincentivizeeconomicparticipation.

Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020

The first of these reforms is the “Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act.” This act allows farmers to trade outside of mandis, state operated agricultural trading markets, and permits electronic trading and e-commerce. The act also prohibits state governments

from levying market fees or taxes for any of the aforementioned commerce (Government of India 2020). While this legislation seems innocuous at first glance, many farmers worry that the third provision will lead to a decline in agricultural funding, and therefore the funding of mandis (Narayanan 2020). Without mandis, MSP will no longer be relevant, since it relies on state funding. Without state regulation of trade between farmers and firms, there also exists a high potential for exploitation, which will be further explored during discussion of the second act. When trade moves out of mandis and MSP becomes a memory, small, rural farmers will have no choice but to go into business with global corporations, with little to no option or incentive to sell to a domestic market (Narayanan 2020). The second act provides a framework for this business.

Farmers’ Empowerment and Protection Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020

The “Farmers’ Empowerment and Protection Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act” purports to provide a legal framework for farmers to enter into contract farming with buyers. Contract farming describes an agreement between firm and farmer regarding pricing and quantity of the agricultural commodity in question (Bhattacharya 2021). Further, this “framework” has been criticized; according to research done by a fellow of the International Food Policy Institute in New Delhi, “virtually no rules exist for this new space” (Narayanan 2020). Nothing in the policy ensures competition or the absence of collusion, and the policy does not require either party to record or document transactions, defeating the purpose of contract farming (Narayanan 2020). These deficiencies are compounded by the fact that small Indian farmers are not equipped to engage in contract negotiations with international trading partners. This does not degenerate the intelligence of farmers or the respectability of farm work, but critiques the lack of government support to provide better educational programs and aid in contract negotiations. Further,

“Farmer disenchantment with agribusiness comes not some much from their ignorance of lucrative possibilities but from their underwhelming experience in engaging with large corporations” (Narayanan 2020).

Not only do farmers have minimal experience and exposure to large corporations, the experiences they have had or have heard of have been

overwhelmingly negative. As recently as 2019, PepsiCo sued multiple Gujarati farmers for using their patented potato seeds, and this case made international news (Narayanan 2020). High-profile interactions such as this contribute to a sense of distaste and discomfort towards cooperation with large agribusiness.

The second act requires specific evaluation of its dispute mechanism. Though the Indian government has touted the legislation’s fair and efficient framework for dispute resolution, many Indian citizens have critiqued these claims. If a farmer wanted to file a dispute after experiencing exploitation at the hands of a buyer, they must file that dispute with the Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) assigned that responsibility. SDMs are notoriously known for their corruption and inefficiency, sardonically described as the pinnacles of bureaucracy. Waiting for this dispute to be resolved could take weeks, months, or even years, and the law does not permit farmers to file a lawsuit in Civil Court against the buyer (Narayanan 2020). The third agricultural reform in question exacerbates the financial strain and risks for small farmers associated with the first two acts.

Essential Commodities Act, 2020 (Amendment)

The Essential Commodities Act of 2020 is an amendment to the previous ECA. The ECA lists “essential commodities” that the government does not legally permit to be hoarded in order to manipulate the market price of the commodity in question. In the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—June to late September 2020— the BJP government elected to remove foodstuffs like cereals, pulses, potatoes, onions, edible oilseeds, and oils from the list of commodities protected by the act, stating that it would only intervene in extreme cases (Government of India 2020). The government will only intervene in the price manipulation of these foodstuffs if a nonperishable commodity’s price rises by more than fifty percent, and if a perishable commodity’s price rises by over 100 percent, or doubles. Permitting the stockpiling of essential foods, especially during a pandemic, will inevitably lead to rises in market prices, multiplying the financial strain felt by peasant farmers and encouraging the development of pseudo-monopolies.

Moving Forward

Most agree that change is necessary to spur greater economic growth

in agriculture and encourage entry into the global market. However, these bills will lead to premature entry of farmers into the market by design, leaving seventy percent of the country’s livelihoods at the behest of international firms. Change is necessary, but there must be an equilibrium between economic growth and the safety and prosperity of the country’s citizens. The Indian government must ask a crucial question: what push towards growth serves Indian farmers best? A variety of policy issues can be combated to better the gradual entry of small Indian agriculture into the global marketplace.

Poverty

Poverty is widespread in India, with 21.9 percent of the population living below the national poverty line (UN 2018). While India has made significant strides, reducing their percentage of working poor from 80.7 percent in 1990 to 42.4 percent of the workforce, a large portion of the population continues to make less than or equal to PPP$3.20 per day (UN 2018).

Poverty reduces the likelihood of a farmer to take economic risks and invest in high yielding, high value crops, because the focus instead must be on avoiding disease and preventing starvation just to stay alive. Poverty impacts rural agricultural laborers far more than non-farm laborers because agricultural income has not risen with income in other sectors. A 2019 analysis of agricultural wages in India demonstrates that farm wages rise with a rise in non-farm wages, irrigation, and rural literacy (Kumar, Anwer 2020). Policy attempting to concentrate investment, perhaps through state-operated

banks, in irrigation and job training/education is necessary to achieve greater economic security.

Codifying MSP Into Law

During months of protests, farmers have called on the Indian government to write MSP into law, affording financial security and protection to farmers. The government has responded numerous times, claiming that they will not end MSP. In fact, on September 20, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a tweet, saying, among other things, that the “system of MSP will remain” (Modi 2020). Despite this, the farmers’ worries are not unfounded. For nearly eight months, the government categorically refused to codify MSP into law, raising suspicions. After all, if MSP is to remain, what is the harm in enacting legislation that ensures that after Modi’s departure? Arguably, MSP is more necessary in an international context, as global markets are far more turbulent than domestic markets.

Contract Farming- Agreements

With regards to contract farming with firms, there must be a welldefined and well-regulated framework wherein the government will oversee and monitor contract farming deals presented by buyers according to specified minimum and maximum prices to limit exploitation. This number can be generated in a manner similar to the current generation of MSP values.

Contract Farming- Disputes

To engage in appropriate dispute resolution, there must be a truly effective and efficient mechanism in place with adherence to the policy discussed in the Agreements subsection. The state should make it permissible to file a claim in civil court against exploitative buyers, and provide legal aid if possible. Reducing adherence to corrupt SDMs is key in offering a fair remediation system.

Conclusions

Long-term, sustainable growth requires not only an investment in infrastructure, industry, and agriculture, but also an investment in India’s people. Emergency ordinances rushed through parliament with little debate do not serve the needs of India’s farmers. Legislation that caters almost

exclusively to the ambitions and business interest of wealthy multinational and transnational corporations does not serve the needs of India’s farmers. With a population highly vulnerable to economic exploitation by international actors, these agricultural “reforms” create a perfect recipe for twenty first century predation of the working class.

Bibliography

Arora, V.P.S. “Agricultural Policies in India: Retrospect and Prospect.” Agricultural Economics Research Review. December 2013.

“Agriculture: Production Performance 1995-1999.” 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 Economic Surveys. Ministry of Finance. Government of India.

Bhattacharya, Subhendu, and Utsavi Patel. “Farmers’ Agitation in India Due to the Audacious Farm Bills of 2020.” International Journal of Research in Engineering, Vol 4. Jan 2021.

“Exports and Imports (% of GDP): India.”United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Reports. 1990-Present.

“Human Development Indicators: India.” United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Reports. 1990-Present.

Kumar, Rajiv. “Composite Water Management Index.” National Institution for Transforming India. August 2019.

Kumar, Sant, and Md Ejaz Anwer, et al. “Agricultural Wages in India: Trends and Determinants.” Agricultural Economics Research Review, Vol 33. 2020.

Lidman, Russell, and Robert I Domrese. “Tropical Development 1880-1913: India.” Northwestern University Press. 1970.

Modi, Narendra. Twitter Post. September 20, 2020. 5:59 AM.

Narayanan, Sudha. “Understanding Farmer Protests in India.” Academics Stand Against Poverty, Vol 1. 2020.

P, Shinoj, and V.C Mathur. “Comparative Advantage of India in Agricultural Exports vis-a-vis Asia: A Post-reforms Analysis.” Agricultural Economics Research Review, Vol 21. Jan-June 2008.

Sedova, Barbara, and Matthias Kalkuhl, et al. “Distributional Impacts of Weather and Climate in Rural India.” Economics of Disasters and Climate Change. December 5, 2019.

Serhan, Yasmeen. “Where Nationalism Has No Answers.” The Atlantic December 21, 2020.

Singh, Santosh K., and Mark Rosmann. “Government of India Issues Three Ordinances Ushering In Major Agricultural Market Reforms.” US Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service. June 29, 2020.

Venkatesh, P. “Recent Trends in Rural Employment and Wages in India: Has the Growth Benefited the Agricultural Labours?” Agricultural Economics Research Review, Vol 26. 2013.

Beijing’s Threat to Global Democracy

By Matt Heller

About the Author

Matt Heller is a fourth year undergraduate in the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, double majoring in public policy and history. Matt is originally from Glen Rock, New Jersey before he came down to Charlottesville for school. He’s interested in foreign policy topics such as democratic backsliding, great power competition, and national security. Outside of academics, Matt is involved in the International Relations Organization, Model UN at UVA, the University Guide Service, and he writes for the Cavalier Daily.

Foreword

I am delighted to see that Matthew Heller’s paper “Beijing's Threat to Global Democracy" has been selected for publication in the Virginia Journal of International Affairs. Mr. Heller’s article began as an assignment in a Spring 2021 seminar that I co-teach with Professor Larry Sabato, along with a related internship with the UVA Center for Politics that same semester. The specific assignment for the students was to identify at least one contemporary problem that they believe poses the most significant threat to the health of democracy.

As part of the assignment, I asked students not simply to observe the problem they identify, but to dig deeper and cover what they feel are the likely causes, why it persists and identify potential solutions.

From the title, it’s clear that Mr. Heller didn’t choose one of the more conventional—and typically domestic-focused—responses to the assignment. He reached much further, which was the first aspect of his work that impressed me. Second, I remind my students often that it’s easy be a critique, and thus it is the latter half of the assignment that often poses the biggest challenge for students. As you will read, Mr. Heller handled both parts with equal measures of academic rigor and thoughtful reflection.

Finally, if I may, Mr. Heller’s work serves as a testament that he is a

true leader and a rising star, unafraid to tackle tough challenges, even one as large and daunting as “fixing democracy”. I am not an expert on U.S. China relations, but my background in American politics suggests to me that if democratic societies are to tackle the myriad problems facing this system of governance, it will require sustained effort and robust thought on many fronts - and not just by today’s leaders, but tomorrow’s as well. Mr. Heller models that exact behavior in this thoughtful piece.

Kenneth S. Stroupe, Jr. Associate Director Chief of Staff University of Virginia

Center for Politics

Abstract

All over the world democracies have come under assault fromby autocratic forces. Democratic norms like free expression and the peaceful transition of power are being eroded, and a number of once-robust democracies have since backslid. Chief among these autocratic forces leading the attack on democracy has been the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, who have both actively and passively marketed their model of governance as a contrast to the global democratic order. The paper discusses how China’s authoritarian model is structured, what steps China has taken to export it abroad to disrupt democratic norms in general, and ultimately what policies can be taken by the United States can pursue to rebut this grave threat. Thise paper makes the argument that China’s threat to democracy can be met through increased multilateralism, strengthened international institutions, and continued support for the free-flow of information.

The state of global democracy today is deeply troubling. According to the Global Democracy Index, a ranking developed by The Economist based on electoral processes, government functionality, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties, less than half of the world’s population lives in some sort of democracy, and fewer than one in ten people lives in a full democracy (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021). The year 2020

was particularly challenging for global democracy, as a number of oncefunctioning democracies backslid into autocracy. More worrisome was that even the United States, once a bastion of global democracy, was relegated to the status of a “flawed democracy,” on account of declining public trust in American democratic institutions, which have struggled with delivering policy for the American people (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021).

Within this context, autocracy has been surging globally, particularly as nations where some democratic norms previously existed, have transitioned toward autocracy(Economist Intelligence Unit, 2021). Among these increasingly autocratic countries, one in particular stands out: the People’s Republic of China. China’s autocratic tendencies were on display during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when draconian lockdowns, government censorship, and a pervasive surveillance state were highly effective both at exacerbating and then stopping a pandemic in its tracks. While China’s means to this end were worrisome from the perspective of a citizen, from a government’s perspective, China’s response to the pandemic demonstrated the brutal efficiency of their authoritarian model of governance -- and it soon became the envy of many would-be autocrats globally.

For democracy, however, the threat of China’s autocratic model of governance is grave, and poses a major threat to democratic governance globally. As China’s model demonstrates success while democratic nations falter, the institution of democracy itself faces an international referendum on its continued existence. In this paper, I will discuss China’s authoritarianism, how China is exporting its governance model, and American policies that can be taken to uphold democratic norms and rebut China’s autocracy. I will ultimately argue that democracy can be saved through increased multilateralism, strengthened global institutions, and support for the continued free-flow of information.

The Chinese Authoritarian Model

At the turn of the 21st century few thought that China, a nominally communist state that was quickly embracing the free market and joining democratic global institutions like the World Trade Organization, would remain an autocracy for long. In the early 2000s, many assumed that China would simply follow the trend of Western nations where economic progress came in tandem with civil and social liberalization. Today, China has

achieved the largest reduction of poverty in world history. Yet the political liberalization that would lend itself to democracy is still missing, and there is no indication it will ever emerge (Mitter and Johnson, 2021).

In retrospect, the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989, when the Chinese military used tanks to fire on pro-democracy protesters, foreshadowed what was to come. In the 21st century, China has developed a technologically sophisticated censorship regime that restricts the press, and punishes dissent from individuals on social media using a social credit system that creatively curtails the right to free expression. Neither is there any ability to participate in democratic governance, as most policies are centrally made by a small group of party leaders led by President Xi Xinping, who has installed himself as a dictator for life (Gueorguiev, 2019). Moreover, China has recently promoted Han-Chinese ethnic nationalism, which has gone so far as to justify the mass-internment of the ethnic-minority Uighurs in the largest persecution of a religious minority since the Holocaust (BBC, 2021).

Despite these gross abrogations of their rights in favor of autocracy, the Chinese people are happy with the system in place for one reason: it has spurred economic prosperity and created social stability. As one paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explained, China’s middle class has “willingly accepted authoritarian rule in exchange for getting rich,” (Link and Kurlantzik, 2009). Simply, despite the repression of their individual liberties and disenfranchisement, many Chinese citizens support their government because it has skillfully managed the economy over the years. Especially following its success fighting against the COVID-19, the popularity of China’s ruling regime has soared, and the vast majority of Chinese people support their government despite its autocratic nature (Roberts, 2021).

The success of China’s stability-for-liberty tradeoff has been noted internationally, where global leaders respect the model’s effectiveness at delivering policy and popularity with those it governs. This poses a strong contrast to Western democracies, many of which have descended into polarization and political tumult that has bucked the steady hands of establishment leaders. Ian Bremmer, a scholar of global democracy, recently noted that “many governments...around the world see China as a source of security, stability, and opportunity while Europe and America represent political dysfunction and public disgust with government” (Bremmer, 2019).

Given this, it is troubling for the sake of democracy that international leaders are turning to the China-model as a source of inspiration, instead of aspiring to democratic governance. What is more troubling is that China has recently begun to play an active role in exporting its autocratic model abroad to other countries.

China’s Global Export of Autocracy

One of the main principles of the Chinese autocratic model has been reliance on a technologically sophisticated surveillance state. The Chinese government employs artificial intelligence to surveil its citizens, going through their social media posts, accessing medical records, tracking their locations with facial recognition, and even utilizing government-run DNA repositories. It is a system that is inherently anti-democratic, denying citizens their rights to privacy and making them wary of expressing dissent. It is also a system that China is actively exporting to other nations, such as Malaysia, Egypt, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and many others (Andersen, 2020). Chinese companies, most of which are tightly controlled by the state, routinely sell advanced surveillance systems to foreign governments with the intention for them to be used to restrict the rights of citizens. The Chinese government has even provided direct training to over thirty-six foreign governments on how to construct similar surveillance states (Radu, 2018). Of those a number are democratic countries, and China’s exported surveillance technology will help undermine those democratic norms. Nations such as the Philippines and South Africa that have existent democratic institutions are beginning to deprive their citizens of basic civil liberties as those governments impose a Chinese-style surveillance state on their people -- clamping down on dissent, and weakening local democratic norms in the process. The resultant backsliding of those democracies into autocracies is an explicit intention of China’s policies to sell these surveillance systems internationally, as it benefits China politically to establish new autocratic allies and diminish free expression rights abroad that could otherwise disseminate criticism of the Chinese government (Scott and George, 2020).

Recently, China has become something of an international cheerleader for autocracy, as Beijing has flexed its soft power to promote its model of governance as inherently superior to the liberal models of Europe and the United States. This has come in the form of assistance to would-

be dictators seeking to undermine democracy in their home countries. For example, in Uganda in 2019, Chinese-sponsored companies assisted the ruling political party in surveilling and repressing an opposing political party to win an election (Parkinson et al, 2019). Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party has a robust outreach program that has facilitated thousands of direct contacts with foreign political parties over the past decade; these contacts primarily target vulnerable democracies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Hackensch and Bader, 2020). One study analyzing these contacts found that they have tangibly contributed to authoritarian diffusion, and benefit China in recruiting allies abroad to undermine existing global institutions and foreign democracies in general (Hackensch and Bader, 2020).

But China’s promulgation of autocracy is not confined to voluntary assistance for aspiring autocrats; China is actively involved in using its economic leverage to co-opt foreign leaders and pressure countries into abandoning democratic principles. The chief economic weapon in China’s arsenal is its “Belt and Road Initiative,” a foreign-direct-investment scheme that invests in infrastructure projects around the world. Recipient countries from this initiative, however, often end up saddled with unsustainable debt and onerous contractual terms that result in local governments becoming de facto vassals of China (International Republican Institute, 2019). The consequences of this economic subjugation have been terrible for democracy. In Hungary, for example, Chinese government-backed investment has been directly linked to corruption by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose increased censorship of Hungarian journalists and autocratic power-grabs have been supported by his Chinese benefactors (IRI, 2019).

Not even robust democracies are immune to China’s anti-democratic influence. Take Australia, for example. It is a full democracy according to the Democracy Index, but is heavily connected to China economically. China takes advantage of these close economic ties to exert influence on Australian political elites, using both legal and illegal means to influence politicians with gifts and campaign contributions to condition support for Chinese interests in quid-pro-quo arrangements (IRI, 2019). This illustrates China’s exploitation of the democratic process itself to further its anti-democratic goals, which is also demonstrated by Chinese state-agents’ purchases of Australian media entities in order to produce more content that is favorable toward Beijing (Lee, 2021).

Matt Heller

Fortunately, Australia’s democratic institutions have so far resisted the democratic backsliding caused by Chinese influence that other nations have suffered. Australia has passed campaign finance transparency laws in recent years to counter China’s cooptation tactics, and independent Australian media have led the charge in calling out Chinese propaganda that would otherwise remain hidden (IRI, 2019). It is unclear, however, if Australian democratic institutions will be able to resist these incursions forever, as a growing percentage of the Australian population has come to explicitly prefer autocracy over democracy (Lowy Institute, 2020). Especially following responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Australians have expressed admiration for the effectiveness of China’s authoritarian policies, and have come to perceive “checks, balances, and rights...to be obstacles to solutions rather than inalienable principles.” (Lee, 2021).

Many democracies have also struggled with China’s censorship of multinational companies seeking to do business in China, which results in restrictions on free speech in countries beyond Beijing’s borders. Such was the case when American news anchors on ESPN were recently forbidden from discussing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong after China threatened to ban ESPN from its domestic market over the anchors’ exercising their rights to free expression (Osburn, 2019). Incidents like this pose a major challenge to democracies because governments react by restricting anti-democratic actions because of economic pressure imposed by China. Unfortunately, without active intervention from democratic countries to block this, capitalism creates incentives for companies to concede to China’s autocratic demands in order to continue to profit off of their large and growing market of consumers.

The same issue occurs when it comes to Chinese state-owned companies intervening directly in media companies in democratic nations to impose censorship and control information. One scholar focused on China called this process the “outsourcing of censorship,” and observed how Chinese companies invested heavily in media companies in democratic nations like Taiwan, and used those investments as a reward or punishment to condition favorable coverage of China (Huang, 2017). As a consequence, free citizens of democratic countries have seen a degradation of the free press as companies become dependent on Chinese state-backed investment to turn a profit -directly undermining a key pillar of an effective democracy.

Matt Heller

Ultimately, China’s greatest means for the export of autocracy is the juxtaposition of their model of governance against Western-style democracies. As China’s economy grows and inevitably ascends to become the largest in the world, democratic countries have struggled economically, with democracy directly to blame for policy blunders like trade wars and stymied social investment that China has managed to avoid. A 2009 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace speculated that the appeal of China’s autocratic model “abroad will depend in large part on how the Chinese economy weathers the global downturn,” and it is abundantly clear that in 2021, China’s model has proven successful at securing economic prosperity for the Chinese people (Link and Kurlantzick, 2009). But as democratic nations consider how to rebuff the material threat that China poses to their democracies, they must first prioritize ensuring that their own governments are successful. After all, democracy cannot survive if it cannot produce stable governance: if it yields nothing but polarization and strife, there is little to distinguish nominal democracy from autocracy by other means. That said, there are actionable policies that global democracies ought to take to counter China.

Policies to Reaffirm Global Commitment to Democracy

China’s export of autocracy is heavily dependent on the ability of the Chinese government to control political narratives through censorship and disinformation that it spreads abroad, particularly through social media. This has posed a challenge for democratic countries where media is an independent enterprise, and governments have few tools at their disposal to rein in media companies when they cater to Chinese demands to censor stories or face retaliation. This needs to change, however, as independent media is the most effective tool to rebuff China’s autocratic advances, as was demonstrated by the successes of Australian media in calling out Chinese incursions on their democracy (IRI, 2019). Democratic governments thus ought to do more to protect independent journalism, and block Chinese acquisitions of media companies to prevent co-option by the Chinese government. Further, transparency requirements ought to be strengthened, requiring disclosures of Chinese investment in media, advertisement buys, and political campaign contributions to ensure that the public can discover any China-related corruption undermining democratic processes (Cook and

Boyajian, 2019).

Secondly, democratic countries will need to do more to counter Chinese foreign direct investment which so often results in the abetting of anti-democratic elements of recipient countries. Nations such as the United States have a major role to play here, and ought to increase their provision of foreign aid through the US International Development Finance Corporation to better counter the Belt and Road Initiative. Moreover, democracies ought to better leverage global democratic institutions such as the World bank and IMF to provide aid to other democracies, loosening standards for fiscal responsibility to instead prioritize democracy-development in recipient countries (IRI, 2019). These measures will allow global democracies to serve as effective partners to each other, mutually strengthening their economies in order to ensure that all countries have better development partners to turn to than China.

Finally, democratic countries will need to commit to engaging in multilateralism, and strengthening the global democratic institutions that have been slowly degrading in recent years. For the United States in particular, this means securing bipartisan commitment to engage the international community in the fields of human rights and support for civil society. This will require the United States to return to ratifying treaties in the Senate and minimizing the number of executive agreements entered into by presidents on the basis of their political authority; this will reduce diplomatic whiplash between administrations by forcing foreign policy to be bipartisan and less reversible than it is today. An increase in the number of treaties the United States enters will ensure it is a more reliable diplomatic partner, improving its global reputation as a multilateral actor.

Once the United States has affirmed its commitment to the global democratic order, it will need to lead the reform and improvement of the institutions meant to uphold global democracy. A major priority to this end should be the removal of China and other autocratic nations like Venezuela

Afterall,democracycannotsurviveifitcannot producestablegovernance:ifityieldsnothingbut polarizationandstrife,thereislittletodistinguish nominaldemocracyfromautocracybyothermeans.

Matt Heller

and Libya from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC): a body that a country like China lacks the legitimacy to sit on. This can take the form of reforming the membership process so that it is tied to average scores across a number of human rights indices, instead of an open nomination system that holds the door open for autocracies to shape the global human rights conversation (Piccone, 2021). By removing human rights-abusing countries from the UNHRC, the UN will better be able to set the global human rights agenda and make policies that can properly enforce democratic norms within the international community.

Conclusion

It is clear that global democracy is under threat from the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese autocratic model, which uses advanced surveillance to restrict the free expression of citizens already kept out of the governing process, is posed for export to vulnerable democracies around the world, which will only worsen an already-grim state of global democracy. China benefits from degradation of democratic values, its foreign policy benefits from the creation of autocratic allies, and its domestic position is strengthened when censorship and repression become the global norm so as not to remind its own people what their lack of democracy represents. Given China’s activities promoting and pushing their model of governance, all democratic nations ought to be concerned about this challenge, and ought to work to combat China’s efforts to attack the institutions of democracy. This will not be easy to accomplish. China’s autocratic model benefits as China’s economy continues to grow, and as democratic countries continue to struggle against polarization and economic populism, Chinesestyle autocracy will only look better by comparison. Democratic countries must put petty differences aside if they are to achieve the political unity necessary to counter the threat to democracy that Beijing poses. It is not an extraordinary leap to imagine increased international development, commitments to free expression, and affirmations of international institutions. Such was the norm during the Cold War when democracy was last under threat by totalitarianism, and so it must be again today. One can be confident that democracy can overcome these struggles, but it will require effort and perseverance to ensure that democracy as an institution survives this threat and continues for decades to come.

Andersen, Ross. 2020. “The Panopticon Is Already Here.” The Atlantic.

Accessed May 4, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/.

BBC. 2021. “Who Are the Uighurs and Why Is China Being Accused of Genocide?” Accessed May 3, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-china-22278037.

Bremmer, Ian. 2019. “China-Style Authoritarian Rule Advances Even as Democracy Fights Back.” Nikkei Asia. Accessed May 4, 2021.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/China-style-authoritarian-ruleadvances-even-as-democracy-fights-back.

Cook, Sarah and Annie Boyajian. 2019. “How the US Government Can Counter China’s Growing Media Influence.” TheHill. Accessed May 5, 2021. https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/446998-how-theus-government-can-counter-chinas-growing-media-influence.

Gueorguiev, Dimitar. 2019. “Analysis | Mike Bloomberg Said China Isn’t a Dictatorship. Is He Right?” Washington Post. Accessed May 3, 2021.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/04/michaelbloomberg-said-china-isnt-dictatorship-is-he-right/.

Hackenesch, Christine, and Julia Bader. 2020. “The Struggle for Minds and Influence: The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Outreach.”

International Studies Quarterly 64(3): 723–33.

Huang, Jaw-Nian. “The China Factor in Taiwan’s Media: Outsourcing Chinese Censorship Abroad.” China Perspectives 3 no. 111:27-36.

International Republican Institute. 2019. “Chinese Malign Influence and the Corrosion of Democracy: An Assessment of Chinese Interference in Thirteen Key Countries.” Accessed May 4, 2021. https://www.iri. org/sites/default/files/chinese_malign_influence_report.pdf.

Joe Parkinson, Nicholas Bariyo, and Josh Chin. 2019. “Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents.” Wall Street Journal. Accessed May 4, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ huawei-technicians-helped-african-governments-spy-on-politicalopponents-11565793017.

Kurlantzick, Josh, and Perry Link. 2009. “China’s Modern Authoritarianism.”

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Accessed May 3, 2021.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2009/05/25/china-s-modern-

authoritarianism-pub-23158.

Lee, John. 2021. “The Risks to Australia’s Democracy.” Brookings. Accessed May 4, 2021.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-risks-toaustralias-democracy/.

Lowy Institute. 2020. “Lowy Institute Poll 2020: Democracy.” Accessed May 4, 2021. https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/charts/democracy/.

Mitter, Rana, and Elsbeth Johnson. 2021. “What the West Gets Wrong About China.” Harvard Business Review. Accessed May 3, 2021. https://hbr. org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china.

Osburn, Madeline. 2019. “14 Times U.S. Companies Self-Censored Or Apologized To Appease China.” The Federalist. Accessed May 5, 2021.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/10/14-times-american-companiesself-censored-or-apologized-to-appease-communist-china/.

Piccone, Ted. 2021. “UN Human Rights Council: As the US Returns, It Will Have to Deal with China and Its Friends.” Brookings. Accessed May 5, 2021.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/02/25/ un-human-rights-council-as-the-us-returns-it-will-have-to-dealwith-china-and-its-friends/.

Radu, Sintia. “China Is Teaching Other Governments Its Online Censorship, Surveillance Model.” US News & World Report. Accessed May 4, 2021.

//www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2018-11-01/chinaexpands-its-surveillance-model-by-training-other-governments.

Roberts, Dexter Tiff. 2021. “How Much Support Does the Chinese Communist Party Really Have?” Atlantic Council. Accessed May 4, 2021. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/howmuch-support-does-the-chinese-communist-party-really-have/.

Scott, Caitlin Dearing and Adam George. 2020. “As China Promotes Authoritarian Model, the Resilience of Its Democratic Targets Is Key.” Accessed May 4, 2021. https://www.justsecurity.org/73925/ as-china-promotes-authoritarian-model-the-resilience-of-itsdemocratic-targets-is-key/.

When Words Don't Do it Justice: An Analysis of Language Diversity and Official Status's Effects on Civil War

By Alex Sarchet

About the Author

Alex Sarchet is a third-year from Virginia Beach at the University of Virginia, majoring in Foreign Affairs and Linguistics and minoring in French. While this is his first time researching language-caused conflicts, he is interested in conducting further research on the topic as he continues his studies at UVA. In addition to submitting to the Virginia Journal of International Affairs, he is involved with the International Relations Organization through the Model UN Travel Team and the VAMUN Secretariat, as well as being one of the social chairs. When not focusing on his studies or on IR-related activities, he enjoys reading, cinema, and fencing.

Abstract

This paper examines how language diversity, when isolated as an independent variable, correlates with a country's state of civil war. Of course, in reality, civil wars are caused by and remain ongoing as a result of many complex and interrelated variables. However, as civil war is a result of irreconcilable differences between different groups of people, this paper argues that the linguistic nature of a country can be a predictor of conflict escalating past simple localized violence. The author of this paper analyzes data concerning official and de facto language as well as all living languages used in a country. Then, the author produces data on the amount of civil wars in each country of the world since the end of WWII and the amount of days each country has spent since then in a state of civil war. Using these data, the

author produces ratios of a civil war variable to a language variable in order to see if language diversity correlates with likelihood and duration of civil wars. It is hypothesized in the paper that in countries with a ratio below the world average ratio, language played a major role in its civil war nature. If the ratio is above the world average, then its civil war(s) were likely a result of different issues of which language was not a strong contributor. In the end, the author concludes that there is enough evidence of correlation between language diversity and civil war, but not enough so that it can be used alone as a reliable metric for predicting a country's chances of breaking out into civil war. However, it is proposed that in highly linguistically diverse countries, elevating a language to the official or de facto level can mitigate the chances of civil war.

While analysts have conducted many studies on how ethnic and religious differences affect the likelihood of civil wars breaking out, not as many have looked at linguistic diversity as a correlative factor of civil wars. One article (Bormann et al., 2015) compares linguistic differences to religious differences in influencing rebel activity, and states that language might be a bigger cause of intrastate conflict than religion; however, the data are inconclusive on which has a greater effect, language or religion--they often contribute to civil conflict simultaneously, and it is hard to isolate them for study. Another article discusses how the 22 official languages of India--and its many minority languages--influence the politics of the country and clash with the prominent Hindi and English in the national sphere of influence (Singh & Dhussa, 2020). The Indian government allows official provincial languages to be the primary languages taught in provincial schools, so while Hindi and English dominate at a national level, language conflict is mitigated through this type of appeasement. Most other governments do not grant their minority languages such distinctions. Nelde (2017) discusses current issues in researching language contact and conflict and proposes new methods of studying and resolving these conflicts.

Nelde’s article goes further: In countries where one language is dominant, particularly in former imperial colonies which predominantly speak such languages as English, French, or Portuguese, the dominant language takes center stage in national government. As a side effect, minority languages tend to be deemphasized and only used in cultural and

Alex Sarchet

interpersonal settings, leaving speakers of those languages who do not also speak the dominant language at a massive disadvantage. Minority languagespeakers have reduced social and political mobility (Nelde 2017). This is a language conflict in its most basic form, and it can lead to more drastic conflicts like civil wars if left unresolved. Often, the flames of intrastate conflict are stoked by politicians and economic leaders who use language conflict as a surface-level explanation for civil strife, eliminating the need to address deeply-rooted social and economic issues. Thus, language conflict is used as an excuse to dismiss those with less social mobility and to stop them from advancing, maintaining a status quo. Nelde proposes solutions to conflicts such as those in Canada (between English- and French-speakers) or Belgium (between Flemish- and French-speakers), including giving speakers of minority languages “more rights and opportunities for development,” which in turn reduce the likelihood of minority language speakers taking up opposing ideological positions (Nelde 2017).

My hypothesis in this study is that countries with greater internal linguistic diversity will have a greater likelihood of experiencing a civil war as the disparity between the handful of official and de facto languages and the raw number of languages in use potentially leads to resentment among minority groups. This diversity will also lead to longer wars on average.

Research Design

Although studies such as these cover language involvement in conflict well, I wanted to have a more robust, overarching study. I could not find a simple source that gave raw numbers as data, so I compiled one myself. For the language aspect, I use one data set for official languages as dictated by each country's constitution, one data set for all official and national de facto languages, and one for all languages, as listed by Ethnologue. This should provide something to compare official languages to actual linguistic diversity. For my sample set, I used the full list of United Nations member states, the two UN observer states, and Kosovo and Taiwan, given that Kosovo and Taiwan are two states which are both generally considered sovereign and are not members of the United Nations. I originally planned on cross-referencing this list of countries with the CIA World Factbook's list of languages spoken in each country. At first glance, this list appears to distinguish official languages from de facto and minority languages. However, it is often

Alex Sarchet

inconsistent with the linguistic data it presents. For instance (CIA, n.d.):

Burma

Burmese (official)

Canada

English (official) 58.7%, French (official) 22%, Punjabi 1.4%, Italian 1.3%, Spanish 1.3%, German 1.3%, Cantonese 1.2%, Tagalog 1.2%, Arabic 1.1%, other 10.5% (2011 est.)

These two examples are egregiously oversimplified. In the Burma entry, the CIA only lists one language, whereas the country actually boasts 128 languages in use (Ethnologue, n.d.). In the case of Canada, the CIA includes minority languages spoken by immigrants, but no indigenous languages, of which Canada has many. Since nationally-affiliated resources provided such incomplete and inconsistent data, I used the more reliable Ethnologue instead. Ethnologue is additionally useful because it classifies every language used in a country by its status. For instance, I considered all “Statutory National” languages and working languages as “Official Languages” (OL). I combined “De Facto National” languages and working languages with OL to create an OLDF category, which is a more accurate metric of what languages a country's government uses. This is because Ethnologue only looks at constitutions and not at other legislation that would establish an official language, so OL alone would be unrepresentative of the official languages each government uses. Finally, I summed the raw count of living established and unestablished languages to simply “Languages” (L). These are the languages with a substantial number of speakers in a given country-in other words, it does not include immigrant languages spoken by a mere handful of people, but it does include languages spoken by a few hundred or more immigrants. This data set includes sign languages, which have a far less likely probability of leading to conflict than spoken languages. However, the number of sign languages per country is small enough to have only a negligible effect on the data. I counted creoles and pidgins as languages, as well as several substantially distinct dialects (i.e., the Arabic and Chinese dialects) and foreign and immigrant languages, like English in the postcolonial world. Every country on my list had linguistic data on Ethnologue, save Kosovo, which I found elsewhere to have at least seven languages spoken in sizable amounts (Be in Kosovo n.d.). If any languages are currently extinct, they do not show up in the data, even if they were still living

at some point during the range of years this study observed.

For civil war data, I tried avoiding Wikipedia as much as I could, but I was not satisfied with other sources that didn't have the data I wanted all in one place. I used the article “List of civil wars,” pulling information on every civil war, substantial insurgency, and crisis from 1945 to present for a total of 86 cases. One data set is the raw number of civil wars that the observed countries have experienced in those 76 years (CW). The other data set is the number of days that those countries were in a state of civil war or crisis (DCW), expressed as a ratio of that number of days to the number of days since the end of WWII; from September 2, 1945, to May 14, 2021, this totals to 27,649 days, including both start and end dates. I used May 14, 2021 as the end date of the civil wars that were still ongoing at the time of the study. In cases of more than one civil war occuring at once within the same country, I did not count duplicate days to reflect the simultaneous conflicts. Rather, I considered the number of days a country was in any state of civil war.

With these four data sets, I took the following ratios for each country: CW/OLDF; DCW/OLDF; CW/L; DCW/L. The greater the language diversity or the lower frequency of civil wars, the lower the ratios will be. A smaller ratio suggests that language might have been a greater causal factor in the conflict.

Separate spreadsheets were created, listing all countries, all countries by continent, countries that had experienced a civil war since 1945, and countries that had not. I associated historical data with countries that exist today. Often, this was the same country that experienced the historical civil war, as in the case of the Guatemalan Civil War. In some cases, like the various Sudanese civil wars or the Yugoslav Wars, the country no longer exists in the same form it did at the time, so I attributed the same data to each country that developed within the former borders — like North Sudan and South Sudan. I likewise considered language data with present borders in mind.

I took the average of each data column and compared each country to these averages. I hypothesized that if a country's ratios are below the averages, then that could be an indication of correlation between language diversity and likelihood of civil war for that country, or of the longevity of civil war for that country. In countries with above-average ratios, language is likely not a major factor in civil conflict, and those countries rather tend

to descend into civil war in spite of linguistic homogeneity. I did not expect there to be much correlation since this study excludes other interrelated factors of civil war such as ethnicity, religion, and politics, but I hoped to uncover something noteworthy. I expected to find that a greater number of spoken languages is an indicator of civil war and a longer length of time spent in a state of civil war.

Results

Appendix A shows data for the 66 modern-day countries in the sample that experienced a civil war since 1945. Appendix B shows data for the other 131 modern-day countries in the sample that have not undergone a civil war since 1945. Appendix B excludes data on civil wars, as each country would have a value of 0 in every column. It is provided here as a comparison to the language data in Appendix A.

I also considered further breaking down data by individual continents; those data are summarized below. (There is some overlap between continents due to circumstances like Cyprus being part of both Africa and Europe.)

Of the three language-related data sets, L is perhaps the most relevant, as most countries fall between 0-4 OL and 1-4 OLDF (South Africa is an interesting outlier with 11 OL and 11 OLDF). L ranges from 2 languages to 840, making it the most useful metric for linguistic diversity. While OLDF is also important, there is relatively little diversity among countries’ OLDF numbers; very few countries have more than 2 OLDF.

Still, the CW mean seems to correlate to all three language data sets, broken down by continent. Oceania is the clear outlier. L is at its greatest in Oceania, far superseding any other continent, but none of the 14

Alex Sarchet

countries of Oceania have had a civil war in the last 76 years. This discredits my hypothesis that a greater L alone yields a greater likelihood of civil war erupting. Nonetheless, Africa and Asia have a greater L than the Americas or Europe, as well as a greater CW mean. Thus, we can conclude that Oceania is an outlier. One potential explanation for this discrepancy is that the physical restrictions of island nations lead people of Oceania to settle civil differences without warfare; however, nearby island countries in Asia, specifically Indonesia and Malaysia, have each been in some state of civil war for over half of the 76-year observation range. So, on the mainland and in some island nations, a raw number of spoken languages can be an indicator of one or more civil wars breaking out.

Appendix A reflects some of the aforementioned ratios in even more detail. These individual countries’ ratios help us to determine whether a country has experienced one or more civil wars as a result of language or other, unrelated factors. Consider the examples of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, and Yemen. Afghanistan has experienced four CWs, totalling 7,959 days spent in a state of CW. Its ratios of CW to both OLDF and L are above the world average, so we can say that Afghanistan’s language diversity did not correlate to its number of CWs; however, its DCW ratios are below the world average, suggesting that language diversity did correlate to the longevity of its CWs. Still, because the majority of the ratios were not below average and did not suggest a language diversity-civil war correlation, we can safely conclude that language has not played an active role in Afghanistan's civil wars.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is very linguistically diverse, yet it only has one official language. Thus, it turns out to be above average in the ratios involving its OLDF, but it is well below average in the ratios involving its L. Because the DRC is a large country, it is possible that CWs have broken out because the widespread speakers of different languages across the country harbored resentment for the government’s favor of one language over the rest. The CW/L ratios suggest this likelihood.

Alex Sarchet

The civil conflict in the Philippines, ongoing for 19,040 days since 1969, causes the Philippines to be above the world average in the CW/ OLDF column only, implying that with a greater number of official and de facto languages, language would have had a greater effect on the conflict in the Philippines. On the other hand, the other ratios are below average, suggesting a stronger correlation between language diversity and CW and DCW.

Yemen has had four CWs since 1945, and is above the average across all four ratios. Because it has such a low amount of language diversity, Yemen represents an exception to the trend where high language diversity correlates to civil conflict. Direct comparison of across-the-board averages between Appendices A and B support the hypothesis. On average, countries with at least one civil war have 1.288 official or de facto languages and 66.924 languages of any status. In contrast, countries without any civil wars have 1.366 official or de facto languages and 50.076 languages of any status. In other words, greater linguistic diversity--especially a diversity of languages which are not officially recognized by national governments-- correlates positively with the likelihood of a civil war taking place. In countries without civil wars, there tend to be more official or de facto languages, suggesting that perhaps by elevating the national status of one or more languages, the mitigation of a civil war can be achieved. One final statistic solidifies this theory’s plausibility: On average, OLDFs represent 6.6% of a CW country's languages while in non-CW countries, that number is 13.6% (and the total world average comes out to 11.3%).

Discussion

This study became far more extensive than initially expected, to the point that other academics interested in language diversity and civil conflict can use it as a foundation for future research. At the same time, because of its large scope, this study did have its shortcomings.

Incountrieswithoutcivilwars,theretendto bemoreofficialordefactolanguages,suggestingthatperhapsbyelevatingthenationalstatusofoneormorelanguages,the mitigationofacivilwarcanbeachieved.

For one, while Ethnologue turned out to be an outstanding resource, and better than the initially used CIA World Factbook, there were some drawbacks to using that website. Ethnologue lists any and all natural languages, including those that are extinct. Fortunately, to combat this, each country's page on the site distinguishes between the number of living and dead languages. Ethnologue distinguishes between established and unestablished languages (i.e., minority immigrant languages), although both were included together in this study for a more holistic look at the linguistic makeup of each country. Ethnologue includes sign languages in its listings, but unlike the aforementioned categories, it makes no easy distinction between spoken and sign languages in its country overviews. Instead, it falls upon the researcher to sift through the long lists of languages in order to pick them out. Due to time limitations, I did not discriminate between spoken and sign languages in this study. Sign languages have never led to civil war, so their inclusion is an oversight; fortunately, they are low in number relative to spoken languages and exist at fairly consistent rates around the globe, so they have a negligible effect on the data and were likely drowned out during the rounding of decimals. In addition, they may even have the unintended effect of numerically making up for any spoken immigrant languages that Ethnologue does not include.

Second, all linguistic data used were very recent. The further back in time a civil war took place, the less accurate this data will be in reflecting global language diversity-civil war correlations. Through language endangerment and extinction, as well as immigration and the spread of languages like English, 1945’s global sprachbund is not the same as that of 2021. For this reason and others, it is perhaps folly to even attempt to apply historically-contextualized language data to the analysis of the correlation between language diversity and civil war. In addition, Ethnologue only looks at the most recent constitution of a country when presenting “Statutory National Languages.” Thus, a recent tally of OLDFs won’t necessarily correspond with countries’ OLDFs in decades past and in pre-war constitutions. Again, this study can serve as a broad foundation for potential future research.

In spite of these disadvantages to the study, I found some hints of language diversity-civil war correlation where none were expected. Language diversity can be a possible set of data used to predict what countries are at risk

for civil war, especially countries with a low representation of nationalized language. For instance, Spain has a 1:32 OLDF to L ratio, meaning only 3.1% of its languages are officially recognized. It is well-known, however, that Spain has long experienced great social conflict between the central, Castilianspeaking government and regions like Catalonia, the Basque Country, Valencia, or Galicia. While Spain has not experienced a civil war since 1945, the data in this study predict that it may be at risk for one, based on language alone.

Oftentimes, civil wars don't involve language at all; they are merely ethnic, religious, geopolitical, or any combination of the three. As researchers like Nelde (2017) and Bormann et al. (2015) have found, language is a very important and overlooked aspect of conflict-forming; however language diversity in and of itself does little to explain the causes of civil war, so this study identifies a general correlation at the risk of ignoring diverse and complex causes of civil conflict. Language diversity alone might not lead to civil war, but language diversity combined with ethnic and political differences can very well increase a country’s probability of war. I initially posited that linguistic diversity correlates to an increased probability of civil war; my research affirms this. This finding further suggests that the disparity between state-recognized languages and spoken languages in a country causes civil conflict, though this causal relationship remains unproven.

Bibliography

Be in Kosovo. n.d. “Languages spoken in Kosovo.” Accessed on May 14, 2021.https://www.beinkosovo.com/languages-spoken-in-kosovo/. Bormann Nils-Christian, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Manuel Vogt. 2015. “Language, Religion, and Ethnic Civil War.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 61, no. 4 (April): 744-771. https://doi. org/10.1177/0022002715600755.

CIA. n.d. “Languages.” The World Factbook. Accessed on May 14, 2021. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/languages/.

Ethnologue. n.d. “Browse the Countries of the World”. Accessed on May 14, 2021. https://www.ethnologue.com/browse/countries.

Nelde, Peter Hans. 2017. “Language Conflict.” In The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by Florian Coulmas, 285-300 Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405166256. ch17

Singh, Mahendra Prasad and Ramesh Chandra Dhussa. 2019. “Reorganization of States and the Politics of Official Languages in India.” In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, edited by Stanley Brunn and Roland Kehrein, 1509-1524. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03002438-3_85

United Nations. n.d. “Member States.” Accessed on May 14, 2021. https:// www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states.

Wikipedia. 2021. “List of civil wars.” Accessed on April 18, 2021. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_wars.

The Viability of Modern Supranationalism : An Exploration of the Opportunities for and Challenges to Supranational State Construction

By Joseph Kratz

About the Author

Joseph Kratz is a second-year student in the College studying foreign affairs and environmental thought and practice. His research interests include conflict prevention, developmental economics, human rights protection, and how global climate change will fundamentally shift global politics. In the summer of 2021, Joseph worked at the University of Virginia’s National Security Policy Center to help analyze archival intelligence documents with the goal of more accurately assessing the role of intelligence during the Cold War. This work included coding and compiling hundreds of pages of declassified documents. At UVA, Joseph competes on the sailing and Model UN teams. He hopes to join the Foreign Service after graduation.

Foreword

When I taught the class “The Political Economy of the Modern State and Interstate System” in the spring semester, I was thrilled about the extremely high level of interest and engagement by the participating students. The class considered the emergence, characteristics, and future of the modern state—a political entity that plays such a central role in our daily lives that only a few people think about why it exists and if it will continue to be the preeminent form of political-administrative structure in the future. In this respect, Joseph Kratz submitted a thought-provoking and highly interesting final paper to my class that I am delighted to see accepted for publication in the Virginia Journal of International Affairs. The general goal of all final

Joseph Kratz

papers submitted in my class was to use the insights from our discussions in combination with additional independent research to answer a question of interest to the respective student.

Joseph Kratz’s final paper “The Viability of Modern Supranationalism” carefully considers the possibility that the modern state will be replaced by supranational organizations as the central form of political structure. In his discussion, he argues that, on one hand, the increasingly transnational character of major political, social, and economic challenges (including climate change, international crime, and significant cross-border financial flows) makes wide-ranging collaboration across national borders beneficial—and in some cases even necessary. The creation and strengthening of supranational political entities may be the most effective approach to dealing with the pressures arising from such major challenges. On the other hand, a complete shift to supranational governance would require that the “loyalties” or sociocultural attachments of citizens also shift away from the nation to the supranational entity, which may be difficult to achieve in a world in which nationalism and xenophobia remain strong ideological forces. Additionally, the control of military power continues to primarily reside with national—and not supranational—governments. All of this implies that, while we observe a partial transfer of responsibilities to supranational entities in some cases (most prominently and comprehensively in the European Union), it appears that the modern state remains a central organizational entity of the current era and might not be fully replaced any time soon. This is an important result of the discussion as it points to the relevance of “hybrid” or polycentric forms of governance, in which both supranational and national forms of governance coexist and do not completely replace one another.

I believe that Joseph Kratz’s paper is a great and concise overview of the arguments in the debate on whether supranational organization will replace traditional states. Every student who is interested in what the future might bring for the relationship of the modern state and supranational political entities should read this piece, as it is an excellent basis for future discussion on this topic of extraordinary relevance.

Jan Vogler Department of Politics University of Virginia

Joseph Kratz

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes wrote about the state as an Artificial Man, and just like man it is bound to grow and adapt. The expansion of transnational interactions via commerce, travel, and culture, alongside the proliferation of criminal, ecological, and economic challenges, puts the “classic” model of the modern state under stress, which points to increasing international and supranational cooperation. Yet, international conglomeration and cooperation are impeded by domestic challenges like xenophobia. Comparing modern supranational and international organizations, the supranational state is the next iteration of political and authoritative organization. This is because of a theoretically higher potential for the mobilization of resources alongside an increased ability to address issues that transcend modern state borders. Despite these trends, I argue that the modern state will remain the foremost polity for the foreseeable future. This is due largely to the deeply ingrained socio-cultural loyalties and national identities that are tied to the modern state. Supranational organizations are largely unable to shift those loyalties, and, if they began to shift them, it would undoubtedly take many years.

Introduction

The globalization of culture, economic transactions, and people put the modern state in a situation that this form of political-administrative organization has never before experienced because of the exponential systemic change in how people and capital interact. The internet and climate change, as two disparate examples, represent a spectrum of challenges that has never before faced the global community. The expansion of transnational issues and internal solidification creates a unique combination of stressors that challenge the structure of the modern state itself. This raises questions about whether or not the modern state is the final evolution of political and authoritative organization. The modern state’s preeminence as the contemporary form of political structure was never guaranteed, and there is no certainty that it will remain so within the next half-century. Therefore, we have to ask: What could replace it? The most likely replacement for the modern state would be supranational organizations because their more encompassing nature and increased resource potential make them better suited to address trans-state issues. Therefore, it is important to consider how supranational organizations could expand in power, scope, and number over the next few years or decades.

Joseph Kratz

Prospective changes in government structure are consequential because providing the necessary public goods to individuals depends on its ability to provision them, and that is influenced by their structure. Changes to a state’s structure demand changes in government structure and socio-cultural loyalties to the new “state,” thereby altering the state’s role in the provision of public goods alongside necessary alteration to the roles of the government.

Serious changes in cultural attitudes accompanied the initial shift from feudal, patrimonial, and alternate forms of state to the modern state because the new form of state required “a shift in loyalty from family, local community, or religious organization to the state and the acquisition by the state of a moral authority to back up its institutions structure and its theoretical legal supremacy” (Strayer, 1970, 9). Therefore, based on historical experience, it is likely that transitioning from the modern state to a supranational system would entail similar changes.

Understanding, categorizing, and debating state development is—if it is assumed that the modern state is the ultimate form of political structure—Ivory Tower-esque. This paper, though, does not assume that, so the parallels that exist between modern state development and the possible development of supranational states/organizations/confederations suddenly become consequential to ensure that normative aims are met. Serious social strife would most likely precede any shift in state structure, and large socio-cultural, economic, and geopolitical changes would accompany the developments of new state structures, so the changes in state structure are not esoteric or purely academic. Aside from the internal turmoil that would undoubtedly ensue, changes in state structure would likewise irreversibly change international relations. Newly consolidated forces and resources would challenge regional powers in ability and potential. This would alter the polarity of power, generate new security dilemmas, and possibly create unforeseen international relations issues that inhabitants of the modern system could not have previously imagined.

Failed states represent contemporary examples of the public unrest and loss that can precede and follow a loss of a state’s welfare abilities and monopoly on violence. If a state’s monopoly on violence, the foremost responsibility and authority of the state as Weber would argue (Hirst & Thompson, 2006, 410), is lost, then the people within the territory that the state had authority over are forced to fend for themselves or turn to

alternative structures to provide the watchmenship that the state had originally provided to them. Considering the other characteristics of the modern state—institutional positions of leadership, politico-legal authority and sovereignty, codified law, common standards and measures, shared cultural notions, nationalism, management of external affairs, and capacity for intervention via bureaucracy—the loss of any of these, although a normative judgement, is an unequivocal setback and danger for the citizens living in and under failed or collapsing states (Vogler, 2021). For that reason, any transition in these responsibilities from one political structure to another would need to be smooth or pre-legitimized to ensure the safety and protection of human life and prosperity.

The class “The Political Economy of the Modern State and Interstate System” covered topics including the relevance of the modern state and its bureaucracy, the context and stressors that led to the rise and establishment of the modern state, the legitimization and organization of the internal and external structures related to the modern state, possible alternatives to those developments, and the interactions between the modern state and supranational organizations. Thematic parallels to the content of the class will be evident throughout the paper because my essay will address whether or not supranational organizations are relevant and how that might transpire. My line of argument will also touch on how those organizations would be organized and legitimized as alternatives to the modern state; it will also cover how those early or finite supranational organizations would interact with modern states in bilateral and international form.

The structure of this discussion will begin with conceptual clarifications. Such clarification and definition is critical because precise language is important, especially when discussing large-scale changes to institutions that hem in the day-to-day lives of almost all peoples. Following this clarification, the paper will explore the current stressors and challenges that are pushing the modern Westphalian state and why those factors may amplify the rise of supranational organizations. The discussion will then explore how a supranational, post-modern state organization could legitimize itself in the modern context. This portion of the essay is heavily influenced by the historical example of the European Union (EU) and the work of James Caporaso in his 1996 paper, “The European Union and Forms of State: Westphalian, Regulatory, or Post-Modern?”. James Caporaso spells out three

Joseph Kratz

Joseph Kratz

thought-provoking categorizations of the EU that provide a strong structure and scaffold to consider how other supranational organizations might develop and mature.

Conceptual Clarification of Supranational and International Structures

The most important topic to clarify for the remainder of this discussion is what constitutes a “supranational” organization, and how a supranational organization is different from intergovernmentalism or an international organization. Supranational organizations/unions/ conglomerates emerge only when the states that exist within such a political structure cede some level of authority and sovereignty—over a certain, sometimes limited set of responsibilities—to the overarching organization. The participating states are now bound under a larger politico-legal entity. This is in contrast to an international organization or intergovernmental forum/structure where the individual states are working together, agreeing to something, or pooling resources and decision making. In the latter, they are not ceding any authority or sovereignty and exiting this form of cooperation usually comes with much smaller costs and fewer barriers (Vogler, 2021). This is evident in groups like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or even the United Nations (UN). No participating state loses any major part of their authority or sovereignty by joining these organizations, although some may argue that any international agreement represents a loss of sovereignty. While this does not mean that every member state in an international organization agrees with every action of the larger organization, it does mean that the state remains the centerpiece, and it can still exert final authority.

The EU is the greatest example of a supranational organization because it represents the highest profile and clearest example of a modern structure that successfully and meaningfully subverts some state power into a supranational formation, much to the chagrin of many of its biggest critics (Vogler, 2020, 148). The EU is not alone on the world stage as the only supranational organization, but it does stand apart from other unions like the African Union (AU) in its maturity and depth of cooperation.

An American analogy for international versus supranational organizations is the relationship between the British-American colonies and outside states versus the early states as the Constitution was developed.

By this discussion’s definition, French aid and assistance to the BritishAmerican colonies represented intergovernmental/international agreement and organization; two separate entities, without ceding authority, worked together to achieve a common end. In contrast, the Constitution serves as an apt analogy for supranational organizations. The American colonies became a confederation of independent states under the Articles of Confederation but then ceded authority and sovereignty to the United States of America by ratifying the Constitution. This pseudo-supranational organization then developed into a larger, Westphalian federalist state1.

This analogy lends itself to one of the three ways that Caporaso posits that the EU, and by extension supranational organizations more broadly, can be understood. He categorizes supranational structures as Westphalian, regulatory, or post-modern (Caporaso, 1996, 29). The Westphalian notion of the supranational organization applies the understanding of the modern state as a defensive, national, developmental, and welfare state to a larger, supra-organization (Caporaso, 1996, 34). The regional categorization of supranational organizations posits that supranational organizations are best understood as macro-organizers of the systems and processes that exist on the state level but conglomerated into a larger framework (Caporaso, 1996, 39). The third formation of a supranational organization that Caporaso offers is that of a postmodern state (Caporaso, 1996, 44). The post-modern state does not have a clear definition or set of characteristics because it represents the next, unknown step of state form.

Opportunities for and Challenges to the Proliferation of Supranational Organization

In the present day, the modern state faces an unforeseen number of challenges to its ability to function as the most efficient form of state. As a unitary actor, a modern state can hardly address global stressors and conflicts such as defending against international crime and non-state actors, limiting the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), regulating international businesses and capital flow, fighting global warming and other environmental issues, and preventing diseases and pandemics (Spruyt, 2002, 143; Peterson, 2000, 356; Spruyt, 1994, 183). This failure of unilateralism is due to both the

1 This was due to weaknesses in the federal government created by the Article of Confederation that prevented efficient commerce, regulation, and defense

increasingly transnational nature of the challenges and the profound resources and expertise needed to address them. The Westphalian idea of sovereignty and the natural scarcity of resources—capital, human, and temporal—ensures that these problems and affronts to the power and capacity of the state require a collective approach.

The prospect of unilaterally unsolvable problems makes supranationalism an interesting possibility to deal with these challenges. However, it is important to consider whether supranational organizations are the best institution to address those issues. International organization and intergovernmentalism may be better positioned to “solve,” in a normative sense, the problems facing the world and the modern state right now. The challenges that come with legitimizing and organizing supranational structures make international organization and intergovernmentalism potentially better moderators for these solutions. Rising nationalism, racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and isolationism all stand in the way of state consolidation into supranational organizations. This is evident in cultural changes and upheaval in America and India, Euroscepticism, the rise of great power competition and national authoritarianism, and the power and role of non-state actors in state decision-making (Rose, 2019).

The global community has seen a steep growth in the number of international organizations over the last few decades—the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, NATO, and IAEA. However, it has not witnessed an equivalent or accompanying rise in the number or strength of supranational organizations. This leaves questions about what role there is for supranational organizations to play, and how those organizations would be best suited to solve the world’s problems.

Mobilization of Supranational State and International Organization Power and Legitimacy

With these rising problems challenging modern states, it is important to consider how supranational organizations and international organizations might be better or worse suited to address them. This argument will briefly explore the issues of military security, economic growth, and environmental protection. The European Union, African Union, and the UN serve as real-world examples. Following that exploration, the discussion will proceed a line of argument regarding how a supranational organization might

Joseph Kratz

be constructed and address those problems.

The European Union represents the latest development of a panEuropean supranational organization designed to “integrate European economies and prevent future conflict (McBride, 2020). The most important role of the European Union is as a trade and migration regulator; the EU lacks internal borders and also oversees the Euro, eurozone, and trade agreements for the trading bloc as a whole (McBride, 2020). Additionally, the EU has no military force of its own, so the coercive tools at its disposal largely rely on the institution’s member states to achieve EU goals. This leaves the EU largely polycentric and near-federalist with a weak central government— to extend the metaphor (McBride, 2020; Vogler, 2020, 148).

The African Union (AU), an example of a less mature supranational organization, grew out of the Organization of African Unity, and its initial goal was to decolonize Africa and then help the newly independent nations develop economically (Buyoya, 2006, 165). The AU is now dedicated to much closer, EU-esque, economic, cultural, and political integration between the African states. Its goals also include the creation of AU forces and movement towards a shared African currency administered through an AU central bank (Buyoya, 2006, 170). While this may not be a realistic or feasible goal, the effort and political rhetoric dedicated to it represents a fundamental shift in perspective and resolve.

The United Nations (UN), on the opposite side, represents the most easily recognizable international organization in the world. It was founded for a combination of reasons that almost amount to an aggregation of the EU and AU goals: prevention of conflict, development of economies, and protection of international legal rights (Sungupta, 2017).

Considering how all three of these organizations are prepared to solve defensive, economic, and environmental problems, there are a number of benefits and drawbacks to all three. On all three issues, the all-encompassing, non-geographic nature of the United Nations increases its theoretical quantity and range of resources—capital and human—that it can draw upon.

The downsides to this larger resource pool are two-fold: First, many member states refuse to actually provide the UN with the full amount of resource they could theoretically mobilize to contribute to the organization and its mission; second, the UN has no coercive institutions to manage or extract these resources by itself, so the UN’s ability to solve any problem depends on

whether or not the member states provide the UN with money, personnel, or the legal right to inspect weapons’ sights, coordinate peacekeeping operations, regulate commerce, measure pollution, or any other litany of actions the UN might want to take to address the aforementioned issues (Sengupta, 2017).

The tradeoff for the EU and AU is that although they have more autonomy and coercive abilities, they operate with a restrictive geographic purview and comparatively limited potential resource bank—although that geographic structure often means that states are willing to mobilize a greater number of resources, comparatively, to the EU or AU than they are to large international organizations. The supranational versus international organization resource mobilization decision dynamics are subject to mercuriality as social and political economic priorities shift. The supranational ability to solve problems depends on how much autonomy the union is granted to complete its task. The EU and AU have significantly more power to intervene in the economies of their geographic region, and that, in turn, gives them much more power over environmental regulations because there is a strong operative link between commercial and environmental regulations (Caporaso, 1996, 39). This also gives the EU and AU a marked advantage over the modern state and international organization in being able to monitor and regulate the growing international financial market that has largely erased financial borders (Spruyt, 1994, 309-310).

Where neither of the organizational structures succeed are the military challenges. For one, the nuclear question is largely unanswerable, and nuclear weapons generally challenge every notion of ultimate sovereignty or monopoly on violence (Spruyt, 1994, 309-310). The strong nationalist sentiment against supranational military intervention within the borders of sovereign states limits the ability of supranational organizations to adequately and rapidly address security issues that emanate in their regions (Aboagye, 2012, 5).

The capital excess versus coercive institutions question leans heavily in favor of supranational organizations as superior to international organizations. The EU and AU are both large enough that there is not a handicapping scarcity of resources, and they have the coercive measures necessary to act on the issues2. The largest problem faced by both

2 The presence of coercive measures does not guarantee or assume their use; cultural and legal obligations often achieve the intended goals without the exertion of explicit pressure

supranational entities is the socio-cultural connection among citizens of nation-states. This disconnect has two consequences. It makes it more difficult to transfer more responsibilities to the supranational organization, and it makes autonomous military action to solve security problems extremely unlikely, challenging the authority and legitimacy of the organization.

Thesupranationalversusinternationalorganization resourcemobilizationdecisiondynamicsaresubject tomercurialityassocialandpoliticaleconomic prioritiesshift.Thesupranationalabilitytosolve problemsdependsonhowmuchautonomytheunion isgrantedtocompleteitstask.

The coalescence of military force into autonomous supranational organizations would also represent a seismic shift in international relations theory and calculations. Not only would the consolidation of military capacity and potential change the polarity of the international theater, these large macro-states would create new security dilemmas between regional powers. It would also change the calculus of much smaller states, perhaps forcing them to join supranational organizations to ensure security. The character of the international system’s anarchy would also shift because as the number of states decreased, and especially as states began to work cooperatively to build larger, macro-national systems, fewer independent actors would exist to operate in a self-interested manner; the fewer actors would also interact more, more efficiently constructing relationships and engaging with one another.

Continuation of Modern State Preeminence

The modern state was not, and is not, a forgone final formation of political organization. Indeed, the world has changed in such a way that the most pressing issues are not most effectively solved through the modern state. Instead, supranational organization represents an institutional solution better equipped to address a number of transnational issues and threats of the modern day. But, just like the modern state, the supranational organization is not without faults, drawbacks, and uncertainty. Foremost, the identification citizens have with their nations and states are unlikely to be changed to the degree necessary to fully transfer the responsibilities of the state. That

foundational impediment alongside the new globalized culture limits the ability of supranational states to legitimize themselves as anything other than a welfare, defensive, or developmental state. While the territorial, modern nation-state is likely to remain the dominant form of state in the near future, observing, analyzing, and improving on its weaknesses, and considering the benefits of other forms of state, provide a more efficient, supportive state to protect the welfare and prosperity of global citizens.

Aboagye, Festus. “A Stitch in Time Would Have Saved Nine: Operationalising the African Standby Force.” Institute for Security Studies, Policy Brief, 34 (September 2012).

Buyoya, Pierre. “Toward a Stronger African Union.” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 12, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2006): 165–75.

Caporaso, James. “The European Union and Forms of State: Westphalian, Regulatory or Post-Modern?” Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 1 (March 1996): 29–49.

Hirst, Paul, and Grahame Thompson. “Globalization and the Future of the Nation State.” Economy and Society 24, no. 3 (July 28, 2006): 408–42.

https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149500000017.

McBride, James. “How Does the European Union Work?” Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder (blog), April 17, 2020. https://www.cfr.org/ backgrounder/how-does-european-union-work.

Peterson, Wesley. “The Design of Supranational Organizations for the Provision of International Public Goods: Global Environmental Protection.” Review of Agricultural Economics 22, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 355–69.

Rose, Gideon. “What’s Inside: Profiles of the New Strongmen.” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 5 (October 2019): 8.

Sengupta, Somini. “The United Nations Explained: Its Purpose, Power and Problems.” The New York Times, September 17, 2017. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/09/17/world/americas/united-nations-unexplainer.html.

Spruyt, Hendrik. “The Origins, Development, and Possible Decline of the Modern State.” Annual Review of Political Science 5 (2002): 127–49.

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.5.101501.145837.

The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton, New jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Strayer, Joseph. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. First. Princeton, New jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Vogler, Jan. “‘The Political Economy of the European Union: An Exploration of EU Institutions and Governance from the Perspective of

Polycentrism.’” In Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, edited by Peter Boettke, Bobbi Herzberg, and Brian Kogelmann. Rowman & Littlefield

International, 2020.

“What Exactly Is the ‘Modern State’ and “Modern Interstate System?".”

Presented at the PLCP 4500: The Political Economy of the Modern State and Interstate System, University of Virginia, February 11, 2021.

Two Sides of the Same Country – Regional Variations in Female Reproductive Healthcare in India

By Abigail Quinn

About the Author

Abigail Quinn is a third-year student at the University of Virginia where she majors in Global Public Health with minors in French and foreign affairs. She is graduating a year early, in the spring of 2022, and is continuing her UVA education by currently pursuing her Master's degree in Public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She is involved in a variety of organizations on Grounds including Class Council and two student-run podcasts. Her passions for international affairs and equity brought her to the field of public health, an area she hopes to work in following her graduation with her MPP in the spring of 2023.

Foreword

I was delighted to be asked to write a short forward for Abigail Quinn’s paper, appearing in the Virginia Journal of International Affairs. Ms. Quinn’s paper seeks to explain why women living in different regions and states within India experience dramatically different health outcomes and life chances. Quinn’s exploration of this topic began in my comparative politics seminar, Civil Society & the State. In that seminar, students were asked to draft a research proposal on a topic of their choosing. Quinn –combining her strong interest in women’s health and women’s rights, as well as an interest in South Asia – knew she wanted to study women’s access to health care in India. Over the course of the semester, she honed her research questions, incorporating several rounds of feedback from me and from the class (including a peer review process, and a work-in-progress presentation to her classmates). Her original question centered on why women’s health outcomes in India lag behind those in other democracies. But Quinn quickly pivoted to ask an even more critical question: why do women’s health outcomes vary subnationally, within India? Specifically, why do women in the south, in the state

of Tamil Nadu, have access to care that is head and shoulders superior to that in the state of Rajasthan in northern India?

These questions – which hold constant national-level factors such as GDP, regime type, and central administration, allow for a deeper analysis of the features that drive divergent outcomes within India’s federal system. Applying this sub-national method of investigation, Quinn began to explore a range of potential explanations. Was it state levels of wealth, or differences in formal citizenship regimes (that is, women’s legal entitlements in each state)?

The answer, it became clear, was no. Instead, Quinn looked closely at subnational differences in political culture, including issues related to identity and women’s mobilization. Drawing on recent research on social capital and divergent gender practices in north and south India, Quinn argues that statelevel variation in women’s health care can be attributed to different stocks of social capital in interaction with different gender norms. Quinn’s paper – with its important question, sophisticated sub-national framing, extensive review of the literature, and strong argumentation – is clear example of some of the very best of undergraduate research at the University of Virginia.

Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner Department of Politics University of

Virginia

Abstract

Why is it that we can see such strong amounts of regional variation within countries when it comes to essential services like healthcare access for women? In India in particular, women across the nation do not have the same experience because of broad cultural differences and societies built upon distinct and unique histories. In order to fully understand issues like health care access, we need to look at variations in citizen trust of government institutions and of fellow citizens.

A poor woman in the Indian state of Rajasthan treks through the heat of her village, which is located near the Thar Desert. She has struggled for days to assure her husband that food will grow on the family’s land, but the soil seems extra dry this year. Her husband seems especially nervous after the past season’s failures and the drought that shook the entire village. She

Abigail Quinn

hopes that the wheat they plant will come up in better form than it did last year. She cannot read but instead relies on routine to guide her to the market. She weaves between people on the sidewalk, but she eventually begins to feel faint. She has not drank water in several hours and feels dehydration catching up to her. She is pregnant, and her baby will need to be checked up on, but she fears a doctor may not be able to see her quickly enough. A poor woman in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu treks through the heat of her coastal village. She has struggled for days out in the rice field, preparing the soil for the upcoming season. She can read the names of the fish warming in the market stalls and greets neighbors and friends as she walks through the crowds. She eventually starts to feel faint. She steers herself to the nearby hospital in case something happens, and sure enough, her vision begins to go dark. She is pregnant but does not fear for her own health or that of her baby’s; she is confident that she will see a doctor and knows she will survive when the time comes to deliver.

Two Indian women, two large states, two varied experiences with healthcare. One woman will find a hospital that is understaffed and underfunded, while the other will comfortably rest back to health. These women are already at a disadvantage within this system because of their gender identities, but one is more privileged than the other based on her location. The Indian healthcare system has national flaws which the coronavirus pandemic has further exposed. Deeper subnational analysis is necessary to understand how such issues have emerged. Though the country may not yet be one hundred years old, the land itself that India occupies is home to one of the oldest civilizations on Earth with deep roots of gender discrimination. I will argue in this essay that this nation does not treat women as equals within its healthcare system because of these cultural tendencies and institutional failures. Still, such failures in caring for women’s reproductive health vary from region to region; India is a nation of nearly a billion and a half people across twenty-nine states, and the Indian experience is not uniform. Why, then, is access to female reproductive healthcare so limited in some Indian states compared to others? Under what conditions has the state expanded equal access to healthcare services for women? I argue that some states, like Tamil Nadu, have stronger healthcare systems because of their higher reservoirs of social capital, while other states, like Rajasthan, fail to serve many groups due to a lack of trust between civil society and the state.

Additionally, the status of women differs in both of these states, and diverse gender trends also impact the ways in which an Indian woman is able to access reproductive healthcare. Only when we comprehend these variations from a cultural and historical perspective can we begin to address the issues present that are making life exceedingly difficult for women in the nation.

Before we look into the subnational variation of reproductive healthcare quality within India, we must first understand the overall challenges faced by Indian women as a whole. As a woman in the United States, I take for granted my access to menstrual products and affordable contraception. My government provides me with a certain level of bodily autonomy and access to family planning resources if I require them. Still, many of my female peers complain about taxes on menstrual products and bans on abortions after being pregnant for a certain amount of time.While these complaints are undoubtedly valid, they pale in comparison to the problems faced by women in India, one of the fastest growing nations on the planet in terms of influence, economy, and population. There are over six hundred and sixty million women in the country, but according to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2019, forty-nine million women on the subcontinent had an unmet need for contraception. 51% of women giving birth made less than four antenatal care visits, and 40% of women did not receive a postnatal care checkup within twenty-four hours of delivery. The World Health Organization defines reproductive health as: a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes. Reproductive health implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so. (World Health Organization 2018)

From the statistics we have heard, it does not seem as though Indian women on the whole have the resources necessary to fulfill and fully satisfy this definition of reproductive health. I chose to research this topic because of my intersecting interests in public health, women and gender related issues, and Indian culture; all of these areas of study must be acknowledged and explored in the process of comprehending issues within the Indian healthcare system for women. If we hope to find solutions to this crisis, we must acknowledge the factors that have prevented the development of strong female reproductive

Abigail Quinn

healthcare in India as a whole and how room for improvement exists in all Indian states.

The Indian Constitution is relatively new and was only officially adopted on November 26, 1949, and includes several progressive provisions, including the famous right to work. The independence movement in India was full of hope for the progress that could be accomplished in various sectors. What, however, is the true role of the state in the healthcare system? Sirohi notes that the Constitution of India does not expressly guarantee a fundamental right to health. However, there are multiple references in the Constitution to public health and the role of the State in the provision of healthcare to citizens. The Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV of the India Constitution provide a basis for the right to health. Article 39 (E) directs the State to secure health of workers, Article 42 directs the State to just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief, and Article 47 casts a duty on the State to raise the nutrition levels and standard of living for people and to improve public health. Moreover, the Constitution does not only oblige the State to enhance public health, it also endows the Panchayats and Municipalities to strengthen public health under Article 243G (read with 11th Schedule, Entry 23) (Sirohi 2020).

In short, the Constitution divides public health responsibilities among the various levels of government. With the federal government, the Panchayats, and the Municipalities, one would assume that there are various safety nets in place to ensure the health and wellbeing of all Indian citizens. As we will come to better understand, however, the government has not met such an expectation. According to the Commonwealth Fund, India has a government-funded system of universal healthcare, but the institution severely lacks the funding that it needs (Tikkanen et al. 2020). Sirohi notes that in the 2019-2020 cycle, healthcare funding made up just 1.29% of the country’s GDP (Sirohi 2020). The Constitution of India creates a loose framework that claims the state will provide for the health of the people, but according to the Commonwealth Fund, 63% of the Indian population is uninsured (Tikkanen et al. 2020). For more specialized care in particular, costs can be high, and citizens may need to seek help in expensive private facilities. Kasthuri notes that:

While the private sector accounts for most of the health expenditures in the country, the state-run health sector still is the only option for much

of the rural and peri-urban areas of the country. The lack of a qualified person at the point of delivery when a person has traveled a fair distance to reach is a big discouragement to the health-seeking behavior of the population. According to the rural health statistics of the Government of India (2015), about 10.4% of the sanctioned posts of auxiliary nurse midwives are vacant, which rises to 40.7% of the posts of male health workers. (Kasthuri 2018, 141-143)

Indian women have long borne the brunt of the country’s inadequacies in both the social and institutional sphere, and as the aforementioned statistics note, Indian women seeking reproductive healthcare are no exception.

Although the reproductive healthcare crisis in India is a national problem, it may be best to analyze the systems in place at a subnational level in order to better understand the female healthcare crises: not every Indian state is the same, so we must take into account India’s diverse population. I have chosen in particular to dissect Tamil Nadu, a richer state in Southern India by the coast, and Rajasthan, a poorer state in Northern India which borders the largely inhabitable Thar Desert, to better understand what drives Indian healthcare, particularly for women who are trying to access maternal and reproductive care. What factors influence success, and why is there such subnational variation?

In 2013, researchers presented a study in front of the Indian History Congress that shows the strength of Tamil Nadu’s reproductive health system. According to the report: Although India has made slow progress in reducing maternal mortality, progress in Tamil Nadu has been rapid… the rate has come down, from 380 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 1993… to 150 in 1998… in all types of medical assistance to mothers at delivery, such as institutional and non-institutional, women of Tamil Nadu are relatively better placed as the state’s rate of medical care for mothers is higher than national levels (Krishnamall et al. 2013, 976-977).

Oxfam India reported a shocking, yet hopeful, statistic: only 57.6% of Indian women are able to use a hygienic method of protection during menstruation, but in Tamil Nadu, this number was 91.4% (Oxfam India 2018). Women seem to have access to better healthcare services in this state, though of course, there is still room for improvement. Another study,

conducted in the rural district of Kancheepuram, “found that 62.5% of [the study participants] seek medical treatment from government hospitals and 92.6% prefer allopathic medical treatment” (Gopalakrishnan et al. 2019, 3607-3613). There is much work to be done to address the medical variations within the state itself, especially in the areas that are further away from major cities and the resources found in large, condensed populations, but compared to Rajasthani women, these women have much better healthcare access as they prepare to become mothers.

Rajasthani women have a different reproductive health experience from women who inhabit Tamil Nadu. A study conducted in 2009 found that “with a maternal mortality ratio of approximately 445 per 100,000 livebirths, the state of Rajasthan contributes significantly to India’s burden of maternal deaths” (Iyengar et al. 2009, 271-292). Stark contrasts in birthing facilities also exist here, “with nearly 70% of urban women delivering in an institution while only 23% of rural women did so” (Iyengar et al. 2009, 271292). Oxfam again reported the percentage of women in the state who used a hygienic method of protection during menstruation: the figure was 55.2%, slightly below the national percentage of 57.2% (Oxfam 2018a). Iyengar et al. note that:

although the service infrastructure has improved in stages, the availability of maternal health services in rural areas remains poor because of low availability of human resources, especially midwives and clinical specialists, and their non-residence in rural areas… various national programmes… have attempted to improve maternal health; however, they have not made the desired impact either because of an earlier emphasis on ineffective strategies, slow implementation as reflected in the poor use of available resources, or lack of effective ground-level governance… (Iyengar et al. 2009, 271-292)

Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu are Indian states with nearly identical population sizes (around sixty-seven to sixty-eight million people), but we see two completely different stories when it comes to women’s health. One state nearly guarantees a woman’s ability to care for herself during menstruation, and she is also less likely to die in the natural human process that is childbirth. In the other state, however, no such confidence or guarantee exists.

Abigail Quinn

What causes this variation? How have improvements been able to occur successfully in Tamil Nadu but not in Rajasthan?

If we want to examine the healthcare success of Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan, we must view healthcare as a form of statesponsored welfare and the capacities of the state as being demonstrative of the social capital found among the citizens who make up a truly civic community. Robert Putnam believes that a civic community is one that “is bound together by horizontal relations of reciprocity and cooperation, not by vertical relations of authority and dependency… citizens interact as equals, not as patrons and clients nor as governors and petitioners” (Putnam 1993, 88). Putnam examines Italy and notes that the Italian states where civic communities appeared to be the strongest were also the most economically and socially successful. If a community has strong bonds within it, the community and its members are full of social capital, a phenomenon which Bourdieu says “is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital” (Bourdieu 1986, 9). In Tamil Nadu, social capital is more plentiful and has thus allowed the state to develop over a longer period of time. In Rajasthan, however, historical divisions have prevented the development of social capital and thus responsive institutions that will support improved healthcare access for women. Bourdieu notes that “the existence of a network of connections is not a natural given, or even a social given, constituted once and for all by an initial act of institution, represented, in the case of the family group, by the genealogical definition of kinship relations, which is the characteristic of a social formation… it is the product of an endless effort” (Bourdieu 1986, 10), an effort that we have not necessarily seen in Rajasthan for as long of a time as what we have seen in Tamil Nadu. As we will come to understand when we examine the postcolonial developments of these two states, these differences in the timelines in the cultivation of social capital have impacted the differences in social capital we now see.

RajasthanandTamilNaduareIndianstateswith nearlyidenticalpopulationsizes(around sixtyseventosixty-eightmillionpeople),butweseetwo completelydifferentstorieswhenitcomestowomen’s health.Onestatenearlyguaranteesawoman’sability tocareforherselfduringmenstruation,andsheis alsolesslikelytodieinthenaturalhumanprocess thatischildbirth.Intheotherstate,however,no suchconfidenceorguaranteeexists.

Prerna Singh views the development of a subnational culture within the state as directly connected to state development on the whole; when citizens feel pride to be from Tamil Nadu, they will demand services and accountability for themselves and their compatriots to whom they feel a certain sense of connectivity. Such an idea plays off of Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities:” we associate ourselves with people who share a common language, background, and culture with us, and we lift each other up. To Anderson, “the nation is imagined… because it entails a sense of communion or ‘horizontal comradeship’ between people who often do not know each other or have not even met. Despite their differences, they imagine belonging to the same collectivity, and they attribute to the latter a common history, traits, beliefs, and attitudes (Munro 2020). Singh notes that “the very emergence of Tamil subnationalism was… rooted in the idea of the restoration of Tamil welfare… non-Brahmin elites who were the first to espouse Tamil subnationalism thus came to emphasize social services almost as a corollary” (Singh 115). Such a growth in state pride occurred in the early twentieth century and set the foundation for a society that took care of itself and its underprivileged. As noted, it was not those with the most influence and power, but rather those of lower castes which were potentially more representative of the overall people, who spearheaded change. Over the course of the twentieth century, we saw the Tamil people become unified; as Singh quotes, “writing in 1979 Brass noted that ‘a socially fragmented society’ had been transformed into a ‘politically integrated region’” (Singh 122). We see a people who have fought for themselves and elected leaders who will be responsive to their demands. This social capital has translated into healthcare as well. In Tamil Nadu, subnationalism has positively affected healthcare;

Singh notes that “two unique features of the state health sector are the institution of a specialized cadre of public health officials and the creation, in 1994, of an autonomous medical services corporation… which serves as an apex body for the purchase, storage, and distribution of drugs and other medical supplies” (Singh 125-126). The people of Tamil Nadu feel a collective responsibility towards each other that has allowed them to invest in their own wellbeing.

How does a state like Rajasthan fare when we look at how a subnational feeling of culture translates into a collective identity and a collective desire to improve a situation? Rajasthan is the largest Indian state in terms of land mass; it comprises almost 350,000 square kilometers in northwestern India. Its large size is the result of the newly independent India bringing together several smaller kingdoms to form this new state. The province would come to encapsulate several kingdoms full of different people. As Singh notes, after independence, the majority of Rajasthani people “retained strong loyalties to their former native kingdoms. The absence of any sense of attachment to the state led to a low degree of consciousness of, and involvement with, the sociopolitical life of the state, which manifested itself in popular apathy toward the functioning of public services…” (Singh 171). Any sort of strong identity belonged with the elites and only expanded towards the lower classes when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for their own political gain in the 1980s; even still, Singh sees Rajasthani pride as starkly low compared to the state of Tamil Nadu. Because of this lack of solidarity, progressive policies often have not had the infrastructure needed to be successful. As Singh notes, “the lack of societal checks resulted in poor infrastructure and rampant teacher absenteeism, circumscribing the gains of a progressive social policy” (Singh 179). Educational and healthrelated initiatives have suffered from this lack of unity. When people have no desire to see their fellow citizens improve, the political situation will be unresponsive to the needs of the divided. Such a phenomenon will impact the way women’s issues are addressed, or, more accurately, not addressed; “women in Rajasthan, and especially in the countryside, continue to face some of the most numerous and intense forms of deprivation of women anywhere in the world” (Singh 182-183). A lack of subnational identity has impacted the way in which women receive healthcare in the poor state.

While Singh shows us how variations in social capital can impact

the way in which welfare services are provided and called for on the whole, she fails to detail how gender impacts the way in which services can differ for citizens. The stances on gender discrimmination of these two states in both the past and present vary and, in turn, affect women’s access to reproductive healthcare services. Many westerners examine India from a pitiful perspective and believe that Indian women have no sense of autonomy or strength, but if we understand the regional differences in feminist histories and female independence, we will come to better understand the strength of the Indian woman on the whole. The plight of female reproductive healthcare in India is best understood when we combine Singh’s analysis of subnationalism with a comprehension of the history of female treatment within these two states that often feel as though they are worlds away.

Women in Tamil Nadu experience life in a completely different way than women in Rajasthan do. Women’s movements and empowerment groups have long existed within the region; for example, the Tamil Nadu Corporation for Development of Women, created in 1983, strives “to promote saving habits, nurture entrepreneurial skills and aptitudes, promote exposure to banking transactions and to free [women] from the clutches of local moneylenders” (Gokila 2015, 142-143). Women also voluntarily organize themselves into self-help groups; these smaller clubs replicate the work of the larger corporations on a smaller, local scale. These women work together and support themselves; connecting to each other allows them to identify their problems together and develop plans to make a change. Female literacy in the state, according to Oxfam India, is at 73.4% and has been on a steady incline (Oxfam 2018b). In general, women in Southern India seem to have more freedoms; Alice Evans notes that “Southern women are more likely to survive infancy, be educated, marry later, choose their own husbands, interact more closely with their husbands, bear fewer children, own more assets, exercise more control over their dowry, socialize with friends, move more freely in their communities and work alongside men” (Evans 2020). The recommendation that solo female travelers should stick to the Southern region for safety reasons reflects the relative freedom of women in the South (Cook 2019). In Rajasthan, women are not given freedoms to the same extent; female literacy within the state is at 52.1%. Though this figure has increased over time, we are not seeing the same kind of prioritization of female education within the state. In the South, we saw women joining

revolutionary movements, but in the North, women were not to be seen.

Evans notes that:

To preserve their purity and symbolise a ruler's prestige, elite Rajput women were physically secluded. They are also absent from cultural representations. There are hundreds of portraits of Rajput noblemengifted to strengthen alliances, displayed to show the male lineage, and affirm men's role in history. But there are no portraits of real, named Rajput women. Even when elite Rajput women commissioned portraits they did not do so of themselves. They upheld patriarchal norms. As art historian Molly Aitken reveals, elite Rajput women were made invisible.

(Evans 2020)

Rajasthan has hidden its women away and therefore has not prioritized their health and wellbeing to the same extent that Tamil Nadu has. Historical treatment of women translates into the way Rajasthan regards women’s bodies from a reproductive healthcare standpoint today.

Evans makes an interesting argument regarding female participation in the workforce and the influence of economic viability on the treatment of women in the two regions. Food production is the source of many ideals and traditions, she says; in the North, Wheat has been grown for centuries on the fertile, alluvial IndoGangetic plain. Cultivation is not terribly labour-intensive, though cereals must still be processed, shelled and ground. This lowers demand for female labour in the field, and heightens its importance at home.

(Evans 2020)

In the South, however, Rice-cultivation is much more labour intensive. It requires the construction of tanks and irrigation channels, planting, transplanting, and harvesting. Women are needed in the fields. Rice is the staple crop in the South… Urban female workforce participation is 11% higher in districts more conducive to rice rather than wheat-cultivation, under rain fed and low-input conditions… (Evans 2020)

Women are more likely to work the fields in the South, and such a phenomenon “occurred in the absence of social constraints: purdah, purity, and caste-based policing” (Evans 2020). Historical variations in the treatment of women and their roles in the workforce have resulted in variations in women’s power to organize and demand political change. As Evans notes,

Abigail Quinn

“by harnessing their social networks, Southern women have organised against discrimination: demanding dignity, safer cities and greater respect. In Mumbai, 33 NGOs mobilised for 'the Right to Pee', advocating free, clean and safe toilets for women, asserting their right to public space” (Evans 2020). These centuries-old roots continue to impact the difference between the treatment of women in the two regions of the large country that is not home to a monolithic female experience.

We can attribute variations in healthcare for women across Indian states to differing levels of subnationalistic social capital and gender discrimination. This excludes a causal factor we might expect in this phenomenon: what about wealth levels in the states? We can consider the fact that Tamil Nadu is far richer than Rajasthan; estimations put Tamil Nadu’s GDP to be the equivalent of about 300 billion US dollars, while that of Rajasthan is only 130 billion. The wealth of a state, we would assume, impacts the services that a state can provide. However, “the scholarship on social development is characterized by the salient underlying theme that purely economic dimensions of development, such as GDP per capita, do not adequately capture the human experience” (Singh 13). What was the root of such wealth? Where do states find the ability to accumulate wealth? The answer is the same as it was when we considered healthcare: institutionalized gender culture and subnational identity. The treatment of women in the surrounding culture and throughout history is crucial to both the economy and healthcare because these trends impact who works and how much income a family and a state can use to maintain the wellbeing of its members. Even so, economic terms do not sufficiently detail the hardships experienced by individual Indians because, as the World Economic Forum reported in the Economic Times, “India’s richest 1 percent hold more than four times the wealth held by 953 million people who make up the bottom 70% of the country’s population” (Press Trust of India 2020). Again, we see evidence that there are better indicators of social progress than unequally distributed wealth.

A purely citizenship-based argument is also not sufficient in explaining the aforementioned regional discrepancies in female reproductive healthcare. T.H. Marshall created a progression of citizenship that moves from the securing of civil and political rights to the securing of social rights, which he defines as “the range from the right to a modicum of economic

welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society” (Marshall 2009, 149). Such equality will come once the law treats everyone as equal citizens, he argues. However, this argument fails to take into account the value of common pride in determining the strength and validity of such institutions and laws that attempt to grant everyone equal status in the eyes of the state. To ensure that the state treats everyone as full citizens and gives them social rights, agencies need the respect of the people which they serve in order to successfully fulfill their roles, and this respect will come with an increased subnational identity, as Singh finds: “in the popular psyche Tamil subnationalism [for example became] closely tied to the concept of collective uplifting of the Tamil people” (Singh 119) through government institutions. Agencies find legitimacy when the people actually want to use the services they provide. The citizenship argument also fails to note the importance of complex cultural gender norms in determining women’s social rights, which can also include reproductive healthcare rights. Women in the South, as we have noted, are allowed more personal freedoms, while women in the North are the victims of a historical tradition that has not prioritized their autonomy. As Evans notes, “ensuing gender segregation entrenches inequalities. It curbs exposure to women demonstrating their equal competence in socially valued domains and inhibits collective critique of patriarchal norms” (Evans 2020). If women do not have the opportunity to realize that their condition may be more common than they think, they will be less likely to demand change to these institutions and fully utilize the political aspect of their citizenship. India supposedly followed Marshall’s progression of citizenship as people gained civil and political rights, but women have yet to gain social rights in some areas of the nation and therefore have not received full welfare benefits nor the protections of a full citizen. Marshall’s argument comes from the perspective of the white Western man, but as we know, the human experience, or even the experience within the borders of a given country, is not the same for all. We must remember the cultural and institutional diversity that exists in large countries such as India. Solutions to the crises at hand will require a subnational approach that accounts for the large variety of differences.

A combination of comprehending historical gender trends and acknowledging the importance of subnationalism will provide us with the

most sufficient explanation as to why stark regional variations exist in the field of female healthcare in India and why improvements have been made in some states but not others. Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan are representative of two ends of the spectrum that is Indian development, particularly in the field of female reproductive healthcare. Women in these two states have dramatically different experiences when attempting to care for their wellbeing, especially in the domain of reproductive abilities. Traditional indicators of a state’s strength cannot fully capture why female reproductive healthcare is so strained and limited in some areas while it grows and flourishes in others. Only when we mix cultural history with trends in state development can we begin to search for solutions to the problems that continue to exist in states throughout the large country of India. When we feel connected to each other, we will be more willing to advocate for our compatriots; when we have the power to use our voices, we will speak up for ourselves. The experience of the Indian woman is changing every year, and her healthcare deserves to change and improve with her. The women we walked with at the beginning of this paper will have two different experiences when searching for medical care, yet the laws and declarations set forth under the Indian Constitution considers them to be equal citizens. No woman will ever walk the same path or live the same life, but each deserves to have the same quality of healthcare guaranteed to her when she walks into a hospital or doctor’s office. She deserves to be recognized for the strength that she possesses and the value of her experience; she deserves to be treated like a human.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson, 1-19. New York: Greenwood.

Cook, Sharell. 2019. “Why Tamil Nadu Is Best for Solo Women Travelers in India.” TripSavvy, June 14, 2020. www.tripsavvy.com/why-tamilnadu-is-best-for-solo-women-travelers-in-india-3971447.

Evans, Alice. 2020. “Why Are North and South India So Different on Gender?” Alice Evans, October 6, 2020. www.draliceevans.com/post/ why-are-southern-north-eastern-indian states-more-gender-equal.

Gokila, R. 2015. “Education – A Pathway of Women’s Empowerment in Tamil Nadu.” Indian Journal of Applied Research 5, no. 12 (December 2015): 142-143.

Gopalakrishnan, S., V.M. Anantha Eashwar, P. Mohan Kumar, and R. Umadevi. 2019. “Reproductive health status of rural married women in Tamil Nadu: A descriptive cross-sectional study.” Journal of family medicine and primary care 8, no. 11 (November 15, 2019): 3607-3613.

https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_523_19.

Iyengar, Sharad D., Kirti Iyengar, and Vikram Gupta. “Maternal health: a case study of Rajasthan.” Journal of Health, Population, and Nutrition 27, no. 2 (April 27, 2009): 271-92. https://doi.org/10.3329/jhpn.v27i2.3369.

Kasthuri, Arvind. “Challenges to Healthcare in India - The Five A's.” Indian Journal of Community Medicine: Official Publication of Indian Association of Preventive & Social Medicine 43, no. 3 (2018): 141-143.

https://doi.org/10.4103/ijcm.ijcm_194_18.

Krishnammal, S., S. Brinda Uma Maheswari, and S. Brinda Uma. “HEALTH STATUS OF WOMEN IN TAMIL NADU.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 74 (2013): 975-978. www.jstor.org/ stable/44158901.

Marshall, T.H. 2009. “Citizenship and Social Class.” In Inequality and Society, edited by Jeff Manza and Michael Sauder, 148-154. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.

Mewa, Tasneem. 2020. “Country Case-Study: Sexual and Reproductive Rights in India.” Edited by Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi. Privacy International, June 8, 2020. https://privacyinternational.org/long-

read/3863/country-case-study-sexual-and-reproductive-rights-india. Munro, André. 2020. “Benedict Anderson.” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 22, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedict-Anderson. Accessed May 13, 2021.

Oxfam India. 2018a. “State at a Glance: Health, Nutrition and Women Empowerment, Rajasthan.” Oxfamindia.org, 2018. https://www. oxfamindia.org/knowledgehub/factsheets/state-glance-healthnutrition-and-women-empowerment-rajasthan.

———. 2018b. “State at a Glance: Health, Nutrition and Women Empowerment, Tamil Nadu.” Oxfamindia.org, 2018. https://www. oxfamindia.org/knowledgehub/factsheets/state-glance-healthnutrition-and-women-empowerment-tamil-nadu.

Press Trust of India. 2020. “Wealth of India’s Richest 1% More than 4-Times of Total for 70% Poorest: Oxfam.” The Economic Times, January 20, 2020. economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/ wealth-of-indias-richest-1-more than-4-times-of-total-for-70poorest-oxfam/articleshow/73416122.cms?from=mdr.

Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Singh, Prerna. 2015. How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India. Cambridge University Press

Sirohi, Nishant. “Declaring the right to health a fundamental right.” Observer Research Foundation, July 24, 2020. www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/ declaring-the-right-to-health-a-fundamental-right/.

Tandon, Ajay, Christopher J.L. Murray, Jeremy A. Lauer, and David B. Evans. 2000. “MEASURING OVERALL HEALTH SYSTEM

PERFORMANCE for 191 COUNTRIES.” Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy Discussion Paper No. 30. www.who.int/ healthinfo/paper30.pdf.

Tikkanen, Roosa, Robin Osborn, Elias Mossialos, Ana Djordjevic, and George A. Wharton. 2020. “India.” The Commonwealth Fund, June 5, 2020. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policycenter/countries/india.

World Health Organization. 2018. “Reproductive Health.” World Health Organization, August 27, 2018. www.who.int/westernpacific/healthtopics/reproductive-health.