Matt Steinglass's Notebook:

Vietnamese Buddhists clash over scripture, real estate

Reports have emerged of violent confrontations since June 28 between 
two groups of Buddhist monks and local police at a monastery near the
resort town of Dalat, in southern Vietnam.

A group of monks at the Nha
 Bat monastery who follow the teachings of the internationally renowned
 Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh were reportedly confronted by a mob of monks
 and laypeople who follow the mainstream, government-approved Vietnam 
Buddhist Sangha, along with plainclothes police.

"About 200 people
from outside came into the monastery," said Brother Phap Hoi, a senior
 monk from the group that follows Thich Nhat Hanh, by telephone.

Hoi
said the mob did some damage to the monastery's kitchen and to the
 monks' possessions, and demanded that they leave the monastery within
 a week. Subsequently, the monastery's electricity was cut off, though 
it had been restored by July 6.


The conflict appears to stem from a clash between the group of monks
 following Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings and the main abbott of the
 mainstream government-sanctioned monastery, Thich Duc Nghi.

The monks
 associated with Thich Nhat Hanh had established a subsection of the
 Nha Bat monastery in 2005, with Thich Duc Nghi's approval. But Phap 
Hoi said Thich Duc Nghi had rescinded that approval last year because
 of doctrinal disputes with Thich Nhat Hanh, and now demanded that
 Hanh's followers leave the monastery.

Hanh's followers say they have 
built several buildings at the monastery at a cost of thousands of
dollars in donations from international followers, and have so far 
refused to leave.
 Vietnamese Zen sage Thich Nhat Hanh is perhaps the best-known 
international Buddhist figure apart from the Dalai Lama. He has 
lived in France and the U.S. since leaving South Vietnam in 1965, when 
he was involved in the anti-war Buddhist Movement.

He has tens of
thousands of followers at monasteries in Europe and the U.S. Hanh's
 writings began to circulate in Vietnam in the early 2000s, and in 2005
 he reached an agreement with the Vietnamese regime that allowed him to
 return and lecture in the country. He has since returned twice on 
well-attended lecture tours throughout the country, gathering huge 
crowds in Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City, and has built up a modest
 following inside Vietnam, where his New Age brand of Buddhism appeals
 to many young people and professionals alienated by the stagnant
 mainstream Vietnam Buddhist Sangha.

The group of monks at Bat Nha was the first group in Vietnam to establish a monastery specifically 
affiliated with Hanh, but that group's survival appears to be in
question.
 Some reports had linked the clashes at Bat Nha to recent 
environmentalist opposition to Chinese-run bauxite mines in Vietnam's
 Central Highlands, but Brother Phap Hoi said he knew nothing of any
such connection.

Why Europeans voted against immigrants

Actually, I have no idea why Europeans voted against immigrants in the European Parliament elections the other day. Or rather, I know a bit about why they did, but I can't sympathize. Basically I just wanted to post this photo:

There aren't many immigrants in Finland, compared to, say, the Netherlands, where Muslims comprise well over 5 percent of the population. But there are some: Roma and Somalis and some others, and their presence provokes approximately the same kinds of tensions one sees anywhere else the world. The thing I find amusing is that the current nativist feeling in Europe apparently rejects Muslim immigrants because they aren't European enough, but also rejects ... Europe.

Carbon emissions: What if a carbon tax doesn't work?

This morning's panel at IPI Helsinki has UC Santa Barbara environmental economist Charles Kolstad, Royal Dutch Shell chairman Jorma Ollila, and Ali Sayigh of the World Renewable Energy Network talking about climate change. In response to a question about how to tax carbon to reduce emissions, Kolstad brought up something I hadn't heard of before. He attributed an insight to a German economist named Hans Sinn, who apparently just wrote a book called "The Green Paradox." (For a short version of Sinn's idea, see his recent article on Project Syndicate.) "The idea is that a tax on oil may lead OPEC to just reduce price in order to maintain consumption levels," Kolstad said. "That is a difference between cap-and-trade and a tax system. In cap and trade, you have more assurance of the quantity of carbon reduction you will get."

This seems like a very interesting point — clearly, with the price of oil running substantially higher than production costs, producers will respond to taxes in large measure by lowering prices. That may negate a large portion of the savings in carbon emissions one might expect to see. Most of the time, in the cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax debate, it's the carbon tax that people claim will be simple and will definitely reduce consumption. Cap-and-trade, many argue, can be completely negated by poor implementation. But Sinn's point seems to complicate that claim.

However, I don't understand how this meshes with the fact that European gasoline prices are vastly higher than those in the U.S., due to high European gasoline taxes. Why haven't gasoline producers adjusted by lowering prices?

I asked Kolstad this after the discussion, and he explained he can't really answer because he hasn't yet read Sinn's book — it's only available in German. I suppose the answer might simply be that oil producers can't price discriminate by charging European refiners and distributors less in order to bump up consumption in Europe. They have to sell their oil at a single worldwide price. And European refiners and distributors probably have only a limited ability to drop their profit margins to compensate for higher tax levels. Maybe Sinn is saying that if tax levels rose globally, all over the world, then oil producers would respond by lowering prices. So the reason why taxing gasoline works to raise prices and reduce consumption right now in Europe is that the U.S. and China aren't doing it.

Interesting idea, anyway. I hope Sinn's book is available in English soon.

Future of broadcasting

I'm watching the panel here at IPI Helsinki on the Future of Broadcasting, with among others, Jacob Weisberg of Slate and a blogger named Jotman (at right in pic) whose claim to fame was initially having been among the first to blog the 2006 coup in Thailand. Jotman talked about the need to integrate bloggers more thoroughly into the mainstream media and using crowdsourcing for information. The problem, it seems to me, is that for individual bloggers, there are declining returns to specialization.

That is: Say you're a blogger like Jotman and you happen to be in Bangkok during a coup. You blog about it, you're the first one there, and your blog suddenly goes from 500 hits a day to 50,000 hits in a day. Then the coup ends, and there's nothing happening in Bangkok anymore. But you don't want to go back to getting 500 hits a day. You want to go look for that post that's going to get you 50,000 hits again. So what do you do? You may have to go get a ticket and travel to Cambodia to find a war crimes trial, or to Waziristan, or someplace else where the news is big enough to get you those hits again. And pretty soon you're what we used to call a traveling correspondent, but at a much lower pay grade, and all your local expertise, which was the added value that you brought, is lost. How do bloggers reconcile themselves to the fickleness of fame?

Russophobia lives

Probably the most tense panel discussion of the current International Press Institute conference came this afternoon, with former Soviet and Russian ambassador to the U.K. Anatoly Adamishin, The Economist's Russia and Eastern Europe correspondent Edward Lucas, and Indian international affairs scholar Brahma Chellaney discussing the question of whether a "new Cold War" was in the cards between Russia and the West.

It's a ridiculous question; obviously there's not going to be a new Cold War in any meaningful sense of the term. But the panel opened up much of the same vicious tension between Russia and the Euro-American bloc that one recognizes from Cold War days.

My takeaway is going to be hard to explain. Here's the deal: at Western-oriented international forums these days, the Russians tend to be isolated on foreign policy questions. They're attacked over their actions in Georgia. They're attacked over Putin's threats to dismember Ukraine if it joins NATO. They're attacked over the murders of journalists and over the re-sanctification of Stalin in history books.

All of these things are, indeed, bad. But I think we in the West ought, if we want to encourage Russians to join the Western consensus, to find better language for talking about these issues and to respect the degree to which one's viewpoint on international issues is determined by where you were born. The way we talk to Russians we encounter at international events is almost guaranteed to provoke a defensive, dismissive reaction.

One saw this at the panel discussion, the result of which was to leave one of the more progressive Russian voices around feeling angry and defensive. Adamishin is a very progressive guy who strongly desires a return to more genuine democratic freedoms in Russia, and wants the country to become more Western-oriented. The tensions opened up when the question of NATO expansion was raised. Adamishin said the expansion of NATO to Russia's neighbors was provocative, and was interfering with Russia's ability to pursue better relations with the West, to "reset" the relationship. Lucas disagreed: "A lot of people said back in the '90s, whatever we do, don't bring Baltics into NATO. Well thank goodness we did, because it pushed the zone of security East." Without NATO, the Baltic countries' disagreements with Russia would be the source of potential military conflict in Eastern Europe.

That pushed Adamishin into a corner. A young woman from Russia Today, the government-backed English-language TV channel, asked him a supporting question: "Do you think the negative image of Russia and fear of return of Cold War is a kind of a tool of politicians outside? Maybe having Russia as a potential enemy is easier than as a friend?"

Adamishin's reply was a bit confusing: "I don't like NATO, to tell the truth, and I will never like NATO. With all good objectives, it is a military alliance where the US plays the main role. If you're inside Russia, have to think twice when a military alliance comes to your borders...It is a military alliance who made war like in 1999 over Yugoslavia, and makes war like now in Afghanistan. I would be for Russia entering NATO, then let's speak of a joint effort ... We disagree just because we don't want to be out."

He continued: "I may assure you that our neighbors shouldn't be afraid we will drive them into our courtyard. The imperial project is too big and people in our government are too practical. But we don't like to see our neighbors in a military alliance where there is no place for Russia."

This sounded like a strange mix of wallflower resentment and historical mendacity. (What Westerner could be expected to share the implicit assumption that the interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan were wrong?) A Danish questioner then said the reply showed that NATO expansion had been exactly right, because Adamishin didn't accept the right of Russia's small neighbors to make their own decisions about which alliances to join. Lucas became vehement about Adamishin's contention in passing that the Baltic states had not fought for their freedom, that they had been "given" their freedom by Russia; he restated the obvious, that they had been conquered and subjected by the USSR and that they belonged as independent nations.

Adamishin's replies became increasingly long-winded as he sought to excuse his country's positions, even though he's a Putin opponent. I decided to ask Lucas, rather than Adamishin, a question: "Why do the Russians see it as being in their interests to have all these breakaway republics, in Georgia or Moldova or wherever? Regardless of who's at fault, why is it in Russian interests?" Lukas referred me to a YouTube video from December 2007 of Putin saying some strange things about Estonian independence, essentially saying that Estonia and other small Baltic states were just pocket change that was traded back and forth between Germany and Russia and that while their independence now was a settled issue, it was also a matter of historical chance. By the time Adamishin left he seemed to be fuming.

At dinner, I walked up to the Russia Today woman and asked about how she'd felt at the conference earlier. She didn't want to talk about it. "To be honest I felt somewhat uncomfortable," she said. "I try to avoid this kind of question in these settings. Of course I defend my country, I'm sure you would too in the same situation."

We spoke for a while longer, somewhat uncomfortably; I wound up getting along more easily with her colleague, a South African woman who reports from Israel for them. But they gave me the opportunity to bring the question back to that issue of being the only one in the room coming from one's country's perspective, while everyone else is ganging up against you. It's not a good feeling. And speaking as a Jew with a small amount of insight into the Israeli perspective, I can say something else: even if your country is wrong, encountering criticism of this sort from self-righteous Americans and Europeans doesn't make you more critical of your own country. It makes you defensive and resistant.

I think Russia has been wrong on a number of international issues over the past decade, and that the country's misguided foreign policies are to a large extent determined by its authoritarian internal policies. But I also think that for the purposes of encounters with Russian intelligentsia and analytical elites who might be persuaded to embrace their European heritage rather than trend the opposite way, we Westerners need to discover a language and an attitude that is less arrogant and less self-righteous, more open and persuasive. It's not doing anybody any good to make a 27-year-old editor at Russia Today feel like Americans and Europeans look down on her. It's just cementing her into the same kinds of resentments one can hear in Adamishin's statement: "We disagree just because we don't want to be out."
 

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