Choking on China

The Superpower That Is Poisoning the World

In their single-minded pursuit of economic growth, China's leaders have long overlooked public health --

which, by some measures, is now worse than under Mao. Despite recent reforms, China's citizens keep

getting sicker, threatening the country's health-care system, the economy at large, and even the stability

of the regime.

melamine-laced powdered milk that sickened thousands of children, China's food record hasn't

improved. Companies have been caught making ham laced with pesticides, counterfeit alcoholic drinks,

fake baby formula, adulterated pickled vegetables, and carcinogenic chili sauce. And Beijing's responses

are having little impact.

China is the world’s worst polluter -- home to 16 of the 20 dirtiest cities and the largest emitter of

greenhouse gases. Recent headlines have been shocking: 16,000 decaying pig carcasses in Shanghai’s

Whampoa River, dire air quality reports in Beijing, and hundreds of thousands of people dying

prematurely because of environmental degradation. Most recently, the country has been shaken by a

mysterious virus, H7N9, which has already killed six people and has spurred health authorities to order

the slaughter of thousands of pigeons, chickens, and ducks thought to carry it. In the United States, the

Center for Disease Control and Prevention has begun work on an H7N9 vaccine.

The dangers of China’s environmental degradation go well beyond the country’s borders, as pollution

threatens global health more than ever. Chinese leaders have argued that their country has the right to

pollute, claiming that, as a developing nation, it cannot sacrifice economic growth for the sake of the

environment. In reality, however, China is holding the rest of the world hostage -- and undermining its

own prosperity.

According to the World Bank, only one percent of China’s 560 million urban residents breathe air

considered safe by EU standards. Beijing’s levels of PM2.5s -- particles that are smaller than 2.5

micrometers in diameter and can penetrate the gas exchange regions of the lungs -- are the worst in the

world. Beijing’s 2012 March average reading was 469 micrograms of such particles per cubic meter,

which compares abysmally with Los Angeles’ highest 2012 reading of 43 micrograms per cubic meter.

Such air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, according to the Global

Burden of Disease Study. The unrelenting pace of construction of coal-fired power plants is only making

matters worse. In his recent monograph, Climate Change: The China Problem, environmental scholar

Michael Vandenbergh writes, “On average, a new coal-powered electric plant large enough to serve a city

the size of Dallas opens in China every seven to ten days.” The lack of widespread coal-washing

infrastructure and scrubbers at Chinese industrial facilities exacerbates the problem.

Carbon dioxide emissions from cars in China are also growing exponentially, replacing coal-fired power

plants as the major source of pollution in major Chinese cities. Deutsche Bank estimates that the number

of passenger cars in China will reach 400 million by 2030, up from today’s 90 million. And the sulfur

levels produced by diesel trucks in China are at least 23 times worse than those in the United States. Acid

rain, caused by these emissions, has damaged a third of China’s limited cropland, in addition to forests

and watersheds on the Korean Peninsula and in Japan. This pollution reaches the United States as well,

sometimes at levels prohibited by the U.S. Clean Water Act. In 2006, researchers at the University of

California–Davis discovered that almost all of the harmful particulates over Lake Tahoe originated in

China. The environmental experts Juli Kim and Jennifer Turner note in their essay “China’s Filthiest

Export” that “by the time it reaches the U.S., mercury transforms into a reactive gaseous material that

dissolves easily in the wet climates of the Pacific Northwest.” At least 20 percent of the mercury entering

the Willamette River in Oregon most likely comes from China. Black carbon soot from China also

threatens to block sunlight, lower crop yields, heat the atmosphere, and destabilize weather throughout

the Pacific Rim.

China’s use of fresh water resources also threatens those beyond its borders. As Mark Twain reportedly

said, in reference to California in the late nineteenth century, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for

fighting over.” The sentiment holds true in modern-day Asia as well. Asia’s per capita fresh water

availability is less than half the global average. China and India, for example, are home to 40 percent of

the world’s population but make do with ten percent of the world’s fresh water. China is guzzling and

polluting this limited resource at an alarming rate. The country has dammed every major river on the

Tibetan plateau, including the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Indus,

the Sutlej, the Shweli, and the Karnali, and there are large-scale plans to dam others. Of the 50,000 largest

dams in the world, more than half are in China. As a result, China now controls the river water supply to

13 nearby countries but so far has refused to sign any treaties or cooperate with other countries on water

issues. Beijing also voted against the UN attempt to regulate water sharing in the region. China’s former

minister of water resources, Wang Shucheng, described China’s water policy as “fight for every drop of

water or die.” This philosophy, combined with China’s unabated pursuit of economic development, will

have profoundly destabilizing consequences for the region, both politically and environmentally.

Unfortunately for China, compromising the environment and health in pursuit of economic growth is not

a sustainable strategy. The threat of water scarcity and the adverse domestic health effects of pollution

darken China’s future. Pollution-related illnesses are soaring. A recent social media campaign led by

locals and international activities shed light on the growing phenomena of “cancer villages” -- areas

where water pollution is so bad that it has led to a sharp rise in diseases like stomach cancer. China’s own

Ministry of Environmental Protection has concluded that 70 percent of the country’s major waterways

are heavily polluted. According to Scott Moore of the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard’s

Kennedy School of Government, pollutants have even seeped into the country’s subsurfaces, with more

than half of monitored wells deemed unsafe to use for drinking water. The China Geological Survey now

estimates that 90 percent of China’s cities depend on polluted groundwater supplies. Water that has been

purified at treatment plants is often recontaminated en route to homes. China has plundered its

groundwater reserves, drilling massive underground tunnels that have even caused some cities to

literally sink.

China has also completely botched its waste-removal efforts. Eighty percent of the East China Sea, one of

the world’s largest fisheries, is now unsuitable for fishing, according to Elizabeth C. Economy, a China and

environmental expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Most Chinese coastal cities pump at least half

of their waste directly into the ocean, which causes red tides and coastal fish die-offs. According to the

World Wildlife Fund, the country is now the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean.

The economic costs of pollution have been the focus of various government-backed studies in China. A

recent study by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning found that environmental damage to

forests, wetlands, and grasslands shaved 3.5 percent off China’s 2012 GDP. The World Bank puts the total

cost of China’s environmental degradation in the late 1990s at between 3.5 and 8 percent of GDP. China’s

pollution problem is holding back its economy -- and poisoning its own people and the rest of the world

in the process. The international community should push China to realize that if it continues to ravage the

environment, it will be unable to secure its future health and prosperity -- or avoid a global disaster. 

The Swiss Miracle?

Beyond Chocolate, Cheese, and Banking

The eurozone's troubles -- including the possibility of Greece's exit from the union -- no longer qualify as

a crisis. What looks like significant instability is really just the slow-motion settling of the continent's new

economic order.

From Ireland to Cyprus, the whole of Europe seems to be locked in economic and political crisis. But

there is a small area of calm at the continent’s core: Switzerland.

Switzerland’s secret is that it is part of Europe -- and it isn’t. On the one hand, it is a signatory to the

Schengen treaty, and thus delegates the protection of its borders to the European Union. It has had a free

trade agreement with EU nations since 1972. Accordingly, it sends 60 percent of its exports to the EU and

gets 80 percent of its imports from the EU. The country is a member of the Single Euro Payments Area

(SEPA), which integrates the European financial industry, and its currency has been bound stably to the

euro since 2011. At the same time, though, Switzerland is not part of the continent: it belongs neither to

the European Union nor to the eurozone, so it makes its own fiscal policy and remains economically and

politically independent.

Switzerland’s middle path is likely the reason why the country is doing so well. Between 2007 and the

first quarter of 2012, its economy grew at a steady two to three percent per year, with a modest

contraction of 1.9 percent at the peak of the financial crisis in 2009. GDP also shrank slightly in the

second quarter of 2012, but is predicted to increase again by over one percent in 2013. In addition, the

government is incredibly stable. The basic balance of parties in the executive branch has remained

constant for the last 50 years.

Switzerland’s success stands in contrast to the struggles of many of its neighbors, which are still deep in

recession, face deep social splits, and have governments that are fighting to hold on to power. That fact

alone should make the Swiss case an object of international study. But, to date, it has not. The world only

occasionally talks about this landlocked “island of the blessed” in the middle of Europe. And even then,

the tales are mostly of morally problematic banking secrets or the imposition of the world’s strictest legal

regulations for companies quoted on the stock exchange. But there is more to Switzerland than that.

Underneath the country’s relative success is a unique political system, some elements of which Europe

might do well to adopt.

At their root, Europe’s economic and political problems result from a crisis of legitimacy. In Europe, the

common economic zone and currency were created without an accompanying federal government. And

the union itself controls less than two percent of the combined national GDPs of the 27 EU member states

and is thus largely inoperative. National governments have retained their legitimacy but are bound to a

hapless and unpopular union. As the recent Italian elections showed, Europeans feel stymied by both an

overly complex bureaucracy and a power vacuum. That, in turn, has led to a loss of confidence in the

traditional parties and in institutional politics.

None of this is true in Switzerland, though, which has a brand of direct democracy that keeps politics, the

capital, and the public in constant discourse. In a nutshell, the executive branch of Switzerland’s

government consists not of a president and prime minister but of something called the Federal Council,

which is elected by the Swiss parliament. The council is composed of seven members and all five major

parties, and the German and French languages must be represented. The distinction between the

governing party and the opposition is thus blurred, since everyone participates in the executive branch of

government.

Another difference is that Switzerland’s barely eight million citizens are called to the polls as many as

four times a year for national elections alone. The frequency of voting relates to two facts: constitutional

amendments can be brought to government through popular initiative (100,000 signatures in 18

months) and all constitutional changes are subject to mandatory public referendums. In addition, Swiss

citizens can initiate a referendum on any piece of legislation by gathering 50,000 signatures within 100

days. In the last few years, Swiss citizens have voted on constitutional changes relating to protection from

gun violence, the introduction of managed care, protection from secondhand smoke, the requirement to

put treaties with other countries to a public vote, and a rule that no one in a company can earn less in a

year than the highest-ranking manager earns in a month.

Continuous political deliberation has created a rare balance between citizens and government.

Government commissions are driven to develop legislation that will pass the immediate scrutiny of

parliament and the people. And the government spends a considerable amount of time communicating its

policy decisions to the public. Not surprisingly, policymakers’ information efforts are repeatedly

scrutinized: a vocal segment of the public has demanded that government representatives abstain from

campaigning and let the people decide on certain issues without any influence from the government.

Similarly, campaign spending, particularly by trade associations, has come under scrutiny, and media

sponsored by public foundations and the broader public have raised awareness for the increasing

spending inequalities. In addition, Swiss laws ban political advertising on television and radio. Of course,

that still does not mean that public is perfectly informed: the introduction of free newspapers, the

pressures on print media, and the turn toward news as entertainment on television have all threatened

the quality and diversity of information.

As a result of the Swiss political system, the constitution is subject to constant amendment by its citizen-

authors. Admittedly, the emphasis on the Swiss public’s right to revise the constitution according to its

beliefs of the moment occasionally leads to inconsistencies in the highest law and, sometimes, tension

with international human rights laws. Popular initiatives from the right, for example, led to a ban on

minarets in Switzerland (which goes against the Swiss constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion)

and to new rules for the deportation of foreigners who have been convicted of crimes (which are thought

to counter international human rights treaties). The constitutional court, tasked with adjudicating such

discrepancies, shows considerable restraint in ruling against direct democracy and for human rights. In

1990, it overruled male citizens in one canton (state) who repeatedly voted down women’s suffrage.

Since then, it has rarely stepped in, famously avoiding interfering in the 2009 Mosque minarets decision.

On the other side, the public-is-king mentality has, at times, led to a weakening sense of the rule of law.

Still, the tension between direct democracy and the constitutional state aside, Switzerland’s brand of

government has brought with it a strong sense of identification with the political system. Unlike in other

countries, polls are rarely used as a protest against Bern.

So should the rest of Europe adopt the Swiss model? For government to work, it needs legitimacy. This is

attained through the including as many voices as possible, and political efficacy, which is achieved when

that public opinion actually informs legislation. Switzerland gets a good rating on the efficacy scale. It also

does fairly well on the legitimacy scale. The recent transformation of the media landscape with the

introduction of free political newspapers for commuters (a large segment of the population) and other

populist media has certainly taken its toll, but the country suffers far less from lack of legitimacy than do

other European countries.

Some elements of the Swiss model could not translate to the rest of Europe. Switzerland is comparably

small and consists of an ethnically and culturally homogenous population. (In fact, it has been growing

more homogenous over the past 150 years, as various confessions and French, German, and Italian Swiss

cultures have merged.) The country further profits from its highly profitable niches in the world

economy, such as the pharmaceutical industry, metals, watches, and agricultural products. Thanks to

these industries, the country’s welfare state and education system are well funded. The European Union

enjoys none of these benefits. But Switzerland does have four official languages and an urban-rural divide

on many political issues, especially those relating to immigration, integration, and cultural diversity.

The Swiss system offers four lessons for the European project. First, small is beautiful. Switzerland’s

emphasis on small-scale administration autonomy for the different cantons could serve as a model for a

Europe of regions. The way Switzerland handles its four languages and their respective ethnicities is an

example of the unity in diversity that Europe seeks. Second, direct and frequent appeals to the public

make government more palatable. Europe has to dramatically improve government-people relationships

if it wants to avoid further loss of the public’s confidence. Third, not only do direct appeals make

government more palatable but they also make citizens feel more responsible for government business

and more likely to participate in it. Fourth, success in an interconnected world depends on blending

integration with autonomy. Switzerland is successful because it has integrated with Europe but has

preserved its autonomy. Europe-wide, this would mean giving up on full integration and being more

lenient about half-measures, as Switzerland is -- if not as a definitive solution, then certainly as a viable

pathway in times of crisis and transition.

In other words, Switzerland could be a model for a potential United States of Europe, which several

commentators, such as the political theorists Jürgen Habermas and Umberto Eco and the politicians

François Hollande, Mario Monti, and Angela Merkel, believe is needed to overcome the European crisis. At

the super-national level, the Swiss model would create a political union without a homogenization of

cultures, identities, and laws. The EU could be headed by a council like Switzerland’s, with no single

leader. Instead of governing from above -- light years away from European citizens -- governments could

bring as many issues as possible to a joint vote of all European citizens of all 27 member states. Such

polling would foster feelings of community, shared destiny, and common identity. It would also help

create a more concrete joint historical memory. If Switzerland’s stability, peace, and prosperity is the

goal, it is time for Europe to take the country’s model to heart.

How Thatcher Saved Britain -- And Lost Europe

The Iron Lady's Foreign Policy

Margaret Thatcher's memoir, The Downing Street Years, offers little nuanced portraiture, self-revelation

or introspection. But it is a work of real force and shrewdness that recounts the political battles of a

dogged, self-assured champion of conservatives. In tone and tilt, thus, it is unalloyed Iron Lady.

The United Kingdom has had its share of remarkable twentieth-century prime ministers. David Lloyd

George was in many respects the architect of victory over Germany in the First World War. Winston

Churchill led the country to victory in the second. Clement Attlee spearheaded the transformation of

British society after 1945 with the creation of the welfare state. None of them, however, lent their names

to an “ism”; there would have been something almost un-British about it. All that changed in 1979 with

the election of Margaret Thatcher. The outlines of Thatcherism on the socio-economic front are well

known: rolling back the frontiers of the state, emphasizing individual responsibility, and championing

entrepreneurial creativity. Today, the legacy of Thatcherism is ambivalent. On the one hand, Thatcher

pulled the country out of the economic tailspin of the 1970s; on the other hand, her war on regulation

facilitated the banking extravaganzas that eventually resulted in the ongoing financial crisis. What is less

well grasped, however, is Thatcher’s legacy in foreign policy, which is at least as important and equally

complex.

After all, the sobriquet “Iron Lady” was bestowed on Thatcher not by British miners or Thatcher’s many

other domestic opponents, but by the Soviet press in the mid-1980s. It reflected her reputation for

toughness on the military and diplomatic fronts, particularly in the joint effort with U.S. President Ronald

Reagan to strengthen the West’s nuclear defenses during the Cold War. Thatcher’s uncompromising

struggle against Irish republican terrorism earned her the undying hatred of the Irish Republican Army

(IRA), which made its first targeted assassination attempt against a British prime minister in the

notorious Brighton hotel bombing of 1984. Her most complete victory came in the 1982 Falklands War,

when she dispatched a British task force -- at considerable risk -- to expel an Argentinian junta from the

Falklands Islands. (The conflict ended in a decisive British victory.) Thatcher’s relations with her partners

in the European Economic Community were more pacific, but the leaders of continental Europe

nevertheless feared the vigor with which she represented British interests in Brussels. After decades of

drift and decline, Thatcher re-established the United Kingdom as a major force on the international scene.

Three interlocking -- but not always mutually reinforcing -- impulses drove Thatcher’s foreign policy.

First, the Iron Lady hated dictators and bullies of any kind. She refused to be intimidated by IRA violence,

and she despised the culture of fear that the Irish republican movement fostered to keep its community

in line. Her toughness on the Falklands reflected a determination not to hand island’s inhabitants over to

the military regime in Buenos Aires, whose abysmal human rights record was well known. And her

opposition to the Soviet bloc was informed by a deep sympathy for the dissident movements in such

places as Czechoslovakia and Poland. Later, Thatcher was one of the few members of the British political

establishment to speak out strongly against Serb ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

The sobriquet “Iron Lady” was bestowed on Thatcher not by British miners or Thatcher’s many other

domestic opponents, but by the Soviet press in the mid-1980s.

Underpinning this hatred of dictators was the second impulse that drove Thatcher’s foreign policy: her

passionate commitment to democracy. She was outraged that the National Union of Mineworkers refused

to allow its members to vote on whether to strike, a decision that was ultimately made for the miners by

an authoritarian, Soviet-leaning leadership. Her unyielding line against IRA terror was rooted in the

knowledge that the majority of those in Northern Ireland wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Thatcher’s close relationship with Reagan was based, above all, on their shared belief in economic

liberalization at home and democracy promotion abroad, at least in the Communist world. To be sure, her

conception of democracy could be a little narrow. She was slow to understand, for example, that a first-

past-the-post electoral scheme was not suitable for a divided society such as Northern Ireland, and that a

system that guaranteed more power-sharing among different groups would work better.

Despite her reputation for inflexibility, Thatcher often showed remarkable imagination. She was the first

Western leader to recognize the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she defined as “a man we can

do business with” even before his elevation to the Soviet leadership. In this respect, she played a key role

in ending the Cold War. Likewise, Thatcher pushed through the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s, in

the face of furious opposition from Unionists, thus paving the way for a constructive role for the Dublin

government in the peace process. In both cases, however, Thatcher knew she needed to negotiate from a

position of strength -- be it a favorable balance of nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union or a robust

counterterrorist strategy that reduced the IRA threat to what was dubbed “an acceptable level of

violence.” Subsequently, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 incorporated the democratic consent

principle so long resisted by armed republicanism.

Where Thatcher ultimately came unstuck was in her third principle, which was a preoccupation with

German power -- and a related profound ambivalence about European integration. She was a strong

supporter of the European common market, partly because of her belief in free trade and partly because

she thought that a reinvigorated and economically robust Europe would help contain the Soviet Union. At

the same time, however, Thatcher belonged to a generation that had gone through World War II and

naturally feared German power and German unification. By the late 1980s, she began to view the growing

influence of the European Commission in Brussels not only as an encroachment on the democratic rights

of the British people, but also as a vehicle for the reassertion of German power on the continent. This

divided her not only from the French, for whom Europe was a device to contain its historical enemy, but

also from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose genuine commitment to a united Europe she

mistakenly saw as a fig leaf for the reassertion of German power.

In 1989–90, Thatcher’s commitment to democracy and her fear of Germany were in direct contradiction.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc cleared the way for the German people to

express their democratic desire for reunification. Thatcher now expressed concern that a united republic

would “once again, dominate the whole of Europe.” For a time, it seemed as if she would team up with

Gorbachev and French President Francois Mitterand to prevent it. It was only with difficulty that the

United States and her own advisers persuaded her to accept the inevitable.

Nearly 25 years later, as Europe struggles with its sovereign debt crisis and the ever-widening gulf

between Berlin and continent’s periphery, Thatcher’s concerns seem less far-fetched -- not because of

any malevolence on the part of Germany, but because of the flawed structure of the common currency

and the sheer size of the Federal Republic. Her failure of imagination in the 1980s was to insist on the

renationalization of the powers drifting toward Brussels, rather than allowing for the different European

countries to buy in to the project of integration democratically, through the creation of a single electoral

and political space. Of course, the resulting loss of British sovereignty would have been unacceptable for

Thatcher and indeed for the British people. But such a program would at least have given London a

positive agenda toward Europe, instead of its half-in, half-out approach of the past three decades.

Social Diplomacy

Or How Diplomats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tweet

impact of social media has focused on the power of mass protests to topple governments. In fact, social

media's real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere -- which will produce change

over years and decades, not weeks or months.

The rapid rise in popularity of social media outlets such as Twitter have led many to argue that people

around the world are connecting in unprecedented ways. Parsing the data, however, reveals that isn't

true. Rather than creating new relationships, Twitter largely reinforces those that already exist.

Soon after protests erupted outside the U.S. embassy in the Egyptian capital last September, inspired by

the posting on the Internet of an American-made anti-Islamic video, the embassy posted a statement

saying, “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the

religious beliefs of others.” The statement appeared in two forms: a three-paragraph press release, e-

mailed to various government officials and journalists, and a 123-character tweet.

The tweet made waves first. The conservative Twitter-watching website Twitchy posted it under the

headline “US Embassy in Cairo chooses Sep. 11 to apologize for hurt Muslim feelings.” Republicans

quickly called the embassy’s actions an example of the Obama administration’s appeasement of U.S.

enemies, and the Romney campaign denounced it as “disgraceful.” The White House soon disavowed the

statement, saying it “was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States

government.” @USEmbassyCairo deleted the tweet within hours, and, according to media reports, within

weeks the senior public affairs officer on duty in Cairo that night was recalled to Washington.

The Cairo incident wasn’t the first time that a diplomat’s tweets have sparked a firestorm. Sometimes

even apparently benign or accidental use of social media can lead to diplomatic discord. In February

2012, for example, the Canadian ambassador to China, David Mulroney, posted a tweet with a photo of his

official car on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Chinese citizens expressed shock at the discovery

that a prominent Western ambassador would drive a plain old Toyota Camry; the tweet threw the

ubiquitous use of luxury cars by even mid-range Chinese officials into sharp relief and led to a storm of

posts on Chinese bureaucratic excesses.

Washington's Secret Weapon Against Chinese Hackers

Applying the Lessons of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation in Cyberspace

The United States faces unprecedented threats in cyberspace. But in its efforts to mitigate them,

Washington is neglecting one of its best tools: economic sanctions. Without delay, the Obama

administration should start using sanctions to deter both foreign governments and nonstate actors from

hacking into American computer systems.

ZACHARY K. GOLDMAN is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at New York

University School of Law.

governments can do about intellectual property theft. It is time to start considering what the private

sector can do. After years of pressure, most multinational corporations agreed to build fair labor

practices, worker safety, and environmental measures into their supply chains. They should now do the

same with intellectual property protections.

Chinese cyberattacks are stealing priceless intellectual property and crucial military secrets from

companies and governments around the globe. Negotiations with Beijing are unlikely to help, since China

has little interest in cracking down on hacking. So Washington must focus on defenses, not diplomacy.

“The tide of war is receding,” U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed in October 2011, announcing the

impending conclusion of the war in Iraq. In the year and a half since, however, the tide of a new type of

conflict has been rising -- one that takes place not on land, in the air, or at sea but in cyberspace. Indeed,

in the past several months, the Obama administration has called a great deal of attention to the threat

posed by cyberattacks and cybertheft, the most ominous source of which appears to be China. Early last

month, the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, said that the cybertheft of confidential information

and technology from American businesses has been “emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,”

and General Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, has previously called such

theft “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

If recent announcements are any indication, the Obama administration has heightened its focus on

cybersecurity threats. In February, the White House published an executive order directed at improving

the cybersecurity of the country’s critical infrastructure. That same month, it also unveiled a new strategy

for preventing the theft of U.S. trade secrets. One potentially crucial tool, however, has been largely

absent from the discussion of how the United States should address cyberthreats: targeted financial

sanctions. Given the success of targeted financial sanctions in other contexts -- namely, counterterrorism

and efforts to stem nuclear proliferation -- the Obama administration should establish a process for

imposing them on individuals and entities that engage in pernicious cyberactivity.

For a number of reasons, targeted sanctions are particularly well suited to address the threats posed by

cyberattacks and cybertheft, and they could form an important part of a larger strategy to mitigate the

problem. First, for attacks undertaken by states or their proxies, sanctions could serve as a deterrent

against future illicit behavior. This is because states, concerned for their reputations, have an interest in

preventing their unlawful activity from being exposed publicly. Late last year, for example, both Beijing

and the Chinese company Huawei Technologies strongly objected to a report published by the U.S. House

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that accused Huawei and another Chinese company of

posing a significant cyberthreat to U.S. national security interests. Huawei went so far as to label the

report "an exercise in China-bashing.”

Targeted financial sanctions are also well suited to address illicit cyberactivities perpetrated by nonstate

actors. For such actors, public sanctions would not only serve as a deterrent; they would limit their access

to the U.S. financial system. The Obama administration has imposed targeted financial sanctions against

similar nonstate criminal groups in the past -- such as the Yakuza in Japan, Los Zetas in Mexico, and the

Camorra in Italy -- as part of its strategy to combat transnational organized crime. Targeted financial

sanctions have also played a major role in weakening al Qaeda over the last several years.

A second reason that targeted financial sanctions would work well in the cyber context is that, unlike

reciprocal attacks in cyberspace or the use of military force, they are proportionate in scale to

cyberinfiltrations, such as the discreet theft of intellectual property from U.S. businesses, and can be

carefully calibrated to produce their desired effect. Sanctions could therefore act as a brake on escalation

and add leverage to diplomatic negotiations on cyber issues, which the United States and China both

appear to welcome. Finally, if Washington imposed targeted financial sanctions on cybercriminals, the

effect of the sanctions would likely reverberate beyond U.S. borders, because financial institutions

around the world often refuse to do business with sanctioned entities.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF BITS AND BYTES

When the U.S. government uses targeted financial sanctions, it identifies actors engaged in illicit activity,

freezes their U.S. assets, and prohibits American people and entities from doing business with them. The

government’s power to do this is rooted in statutes such as the International Emergency Economic

Powers Act of 1977, which permits the president to declare a national emergency with respect to threats

that originate “in whole or substantial part outside the United States” and to impose certain economic

restrictions on the source of those threats. Unlike older types of sanctions programs like the embargo

against Cuba, targeted financial sanctions are directed only at people and entities that the U.S.

government knows are involved in illicit activity. Washington can impose such sanctions on individuals

or corporations, including front and shell companies, whether or not they are linked to a state.

The United States has not hesitated to use sanctions against Chinese entities in the past. In July 2012, for

example, the U.S. government sanctioned China’s Kunlun Bank for providing financial services to Iranian

banks with connections to the country’s WMD programs and sponsorship of international terrorism.

Sanctions in the cyber context would, of course, extend beyond Chinese entities, embracing the full range

of state and nonstate actors that U.S. intelligence officials have publicly described as posing a cyberthreat

to the United States.

To develop a cybersanctions program, the president would issue an executive order and declare a

national emergency with respect to certain cyberthreats, and specify the persons or entities engaged in

the proscribed conduct. Banks would then take that list of individuals or organizations, freeze their

assets, and block their intended transactions. The Obama administration would also establish a legal

process to ensure that the intended targets of the sanctions had in fact engaged in prohibited conduct. As

with other sanctions programs, designated individuals could challenge the legal basis for the sanctions

imposed on them before a judge.

As with all targeted sanctions programs, the government needs accurate information about who exactly

has engaged in illicit conduct. This challenge is particularly salient in the realm of cybersecurity, since the

government must surmount the additional hurdle of attribution -- the process of determining the true

perpetrator of a cyber operation. This process is made more difficult by the fact that cyberattacks and

cybertheft often make use of intermediate computer systems, many of which do not realize they are being

hijacked in the course of an illicit cyber operation.

Although the problem of attribution poses a significant obstacle to identifying and sanctioning

cybercrime, the U.S. government and the private sector have recently made progress in refining their

ability to classify and identify the sources of threats. Last October, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta

declared, “Potential aggressors should be aware that the United States has the capacity to locate them

and to hold them accountable for their actions that may try to harm America.” Improved analytical

methodologies are enabling public and private sector cybersecurity professionals to synthesize many

small pieces of information collected over time to develop comprehensive pictures of cyberattackers. The

more data the authorities and victims have about computer intrusions, the more they can compare the

characteristics of individual attacks and accurately pinpoint their origins. In a prominent example of this

dynamic, the computer security firm Mandiant recently published a report in which it demonstrated that

one specific Chinese military unit was responsible for a number of cyberattacks on U.S. entities. It based

its assessment on an investigation of hundreds of incidents, employing data-driven analytical techniques.

To be sure, the problem of attribution has not been fully resolved, but the progress that has been made

on this front would enable targeted financial measures to achieve a number of important objectives. For

starters, the establishment of a sanctions process would publicly identify those individuals and entities

involved in illicit cyberactivities. Each time the government imposes sanctions on a person or an

organization, it must publish a public statement that details the offender’s identity and describes the

illicit activities. This information has traditionally served two purposes: it permits the financial

institutions that are freezing assets and blocking transactions to ensure that they are penalizing the

correct target, and it fulfills due process requirements designed to ensure that the entity has sufficient

information about the reasons it is being sanctioned.

In the cybersecurity context, such public statements would serve another important purpose. By

disclosing as much information as possible (consistent with the protection of intelligence sources and

methods), the government would reveal a great deal about the ways in which cybercriminals conduct

their operations. The government could even go so far as to include digital appendices with its public

statements that include threat signatures -- the exact type of malicious computer code used to perpetrate

cyberattacks and cybertheft. Companies in vulnerable industries could utilize such public information to

improve their own defenses.

What is more, the establishment of a sanctions process for cyberattacks and cybertheft could help

catalyze a global coalition to take action against the perpetrators of such activity. This is because banks

all over the world, many of which are not legally obligated to enforce U.S. sanctions, often do so anyway

because they are afraid of the reputational risks involved in conducting business with U.S.-sanctioned

entities. The worldwide reach and power of the U.S. financial system mean that entities sanctioned under

such a program could be effectively shut out of global finance.

Finally, the most important effects of a process for sanctioning cybertheft may not come directly from the

sanctions imposed on illicit actors but, rather, from the incentives that such a program would establish

for foreign governments that do not want to be known for tolerating cybercrime within their borders. By

employing targeted sanctions to address certain kinds of illicit cyberactivities, the United States and

other countries could begin the painstaking work of building international consensus around clear rules

and expectations for appropriate behavior in cyberspace. Sanctioning nonstate actors from countries that

take insufficient action against cybercriminals would call negative attention to their governments and,

over time, identify their behavior as lying outside an international norm. Sanctions could play a major

role in setting guidelines for what constitutes acceptable behavior in cyberspace.

Establishing a sanctions program to combat illicit cyberactivities would be a direct and proportionate

way to address the growing threats that emanate from cyberspace. Although cybersanctions would need

to be combined with diplomacy and other measures to be most effective, they should be implemented

without delay. It is high time for illicit cyber actors to face serious consequences for their actions.

The Long Arm of International Law

Giving Victims of Human Rights Abuses Their Day in Court

In late 1945, the Allied victors of World War II established a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany,

which convicted Nazi leaders for their wartime atrocities. The animating principle of the trials was that

conduct of extreme inhumanity violated the part of international law that protects fundamental human

rights, which applies everywhere, even though the conduct was authorized by German law under the

Third Reich. Since then, the world has accepted that the worst human rights abuses -- including genocide,

slavery, torture, and war crimes -- are crimes prohibited by international law, even if they are expressly

permitted by the laws of the state in which they occur.

Yet over 65 years after Nuremberg, although the world remains awash in these atrocities, the

prohibitions of international law are largely toothless, especially when the abusive governments remain

in power. The international community has established criminal tribunals to try abusers, but those who

remain in power are ordinarily shielded from prosecution by their government and its protectors.

Victims seeking recognition of the wrongs done to them and compensation for their suffering cannot get

relief in their home countries, and they have practically no courts available to them elsewhere.

Since 1980, they have been able to turn to the United States. That year, a U.S. appeals court, invoking a

previously obscure law known as the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), allowed U.S. federal courts to hear civil

suits brought by foreign citizens against foreign defendants for crimes committed on foreign soil,

provided that the defendant brought himself within the territorial reach of the court. The ATS offers

victims of abuse a rare tool in their fight for justice; the United States remains the only country in the

world to entertain such lawsuits. Now, however, the U.S. Supreme Court may slam shut the door on such

plaintiffs, relying in part on the argument that other countries do not offer such relief. During

proceedings held last year, the Court hinted that it may altogether ban ATS cases based on foreign abuses.

At the very least, keeping courts open to civil suits about human rights can bring solace and

compensation to victims. More important, these suits draw global attention to atrocities, and in so doing

perhaps deter would-be abusers. And they give substance to a body of law that is crucial to a civilized

world yet so underenforced that it amounts to little more than a pious sham. The Supreme Court should

continue to interpret the ATS as opening the doors of U.S. federal courts to victims of foreign atrocities

who cannot get justice elsewhere, and other countries should adopt laws that open the doors of their

courts as well.

THE ENFORCEMENT GAP

Respect for fundamental human rights in the world today is dismal -- better, no doubt, than it was 200

years ago, but dismal nonetheless. As in the past, despotic regimes murder, mutilate, and rape civilian

populations and arbitrarily imprison and torture political opponents. Human traffickers, almost

invariably operating with the protection of corrupt local officials and police, enslave children and young

women in the sex trade. So long as the regimes that sponsor and protect these criminals remain in power,

their crimes go unrecognized. 

To deal with the effective immunity of abusers whose regimes remain in power, international law has

developed the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that trials for certain offenses may be heard

in courts throughout the world if the defendant cannot be brought to justice in the country where he

committed them. And following the example of Nuremberg, the international community has created

international criminal courts, generally at The Hague, in the Netherlands, which hear trials of offenses

committed anywhere.

Despite this framework, however, prohibitions against atrocities are rarely enforced. Criminal

prosecutions in international tribunals are infrequent, slow, and inefficient. During its ten years of

existence, the most prominent and permanent of those courts, the International Criminal Court, has

brought only ten cases into the trial process and has convicted only one person (the Congolese warlord

Thomas Lubanga). Fault for that paltry record lies with the court's limited jurisdiction and the intricacies

of international politics: the ICC may prosecute only if the country of the defendant or the country where

the crime was committed has ratified the treaty that created the court, the Rome Statute, or if the UN

Security Council recommends prosecution. Not surprisingly, many of the countries that regularly flout

human rights have not signed the treaty. Nonsignatories can also avoid punishment by relying on their

friends among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of which can use its veto to

block a recommendation. Furthermore, the ICC prosecutes only those who appear in person before the

court, and offending officials of a government that remains in power are not easily arrested. As a practical

matter, then, it is only when a regime has lost power that its offenders will be vulnerable to prosecution. 

Victims of atrocities have few avenues to seek justice on their own. With rare exceptions, they cannot

bring suits against governments, which are protected under the concept of sovereign immunity, nor can

they bring civil suits against individual offenders before international criminal tribunals, which are not

authorized to hear civil suits. Although the ICC does have the power to award compensation once it has

secured a conviction, it never has done so. The court may be reluctant to get into the messy business of

granting compensation; the number and identity of many of the victims of such crimes are likely

unknown, and such a pursuit would divert the court, with its limited resources, from its principal mission

of trying and punishing abusers. So letting victims file civil suits in foreign courts would fill an important

gap. 

JUSTIFYING JUSTICE

In most countries, courts act only with statutory authorization and, under existing legal codes, have no

power to entertain suits between foreign parties alleging foreign violations of international law. For the

most part, then, such suits can be heard only if a legislature grants its country's courts the specific

authority to hear them. No country other than the United States has. But the lack of these statutes today

does not necessarily mean other governments have made a policy decision against hearing foreign

human rights suits; in all likelihood, their legislatures have simply never considered granting their courts

such authority. If human rights advocates were to lobby governments to accept these suits, opponents

would no doubt line up with arguments against doing so. Some of these arguments would have merit, at

least in certain circumstances. But none would justify categorically excluding all such cases.

Among the strongest arguments likely to be made is that allowing victims to bring suits accusing foreign

officials of human rights abuses could interfere with the foreign policy of the government where the suit

was brought. This objection is certainly not frivolous, and any foreign ministry, unless it was reassured

on this score, would likely fight against allowing these lawsuits. But there is no reason to bar all such

lawsuits: some cases have the potential to disrupt foreign policy, whereas others do not. When its courts

are faced with a suit that does, a government could advise them that entertaining the suit would harm the

national interest. Human rights advocates may object to handing governments what would amount to

veto power, but making that compromise is far preferable to the likely alternative of totally excluding the

cases. 

Some countries worry about reciprocity, too -- that if their courts hear suits claiming violations of

international law in other countries, those countries will retaliate by entertaining suits against them. The

fear is not trivial, and a court's judgments could well be fueled more by enmity or bias than objective

facts. But that sort of risk is always inherent in establishing laws and mechanisms to enforce them. 

Another argument is that the proliferation of countries hearing cases of foreign atrocities would allow

plaintiffs to "forum shop" for a court that was prejudiced against the defendant's country, producing a

system of injustice that would neither command nor deserve respect. There is some merit to this

argument. The remedy, however, is not to prevent the expansion of the practice but rather to establish

standards governing the circumstances in which a foreign defendant may be sued. Perhaps jurisdiction

should be limited to cases that present a reasonable basis for imposing it on the particular defendant --

such as the defendant's having brought himself within the court's customary territorial reach, as with

ATS suits in the United States.

The biggest obstacle to any country's adopting such an authorization is the perception that atrocities

committed by foreigners against foreigners in a foreign land are not that country's problem. This view is

wrong for a number of reasons. For starters, it overlooks the fact that courts already adjudicate wholly

foreign disputes, such as cases involving transnational trade when the parties have contracted to bring

their disputes before the courts of a selected country and maritime cases. More problematic, this view is

at odds with the idea that legal protections of the most fundamental human rights derive from the

consensus of nations. Most countries have already crossed this bridge. By underwriting the international

criminal courts charged with enforcing the law of nations, they have repeatedly accepted that violations

of these fundamental rules are in fact their business. 

Accepting universal jurisdiction for human rights violations would not represent a drastic extension of

most governments' existing laws. Many countries have long authorized courts to entertain suits against

absent foreigners alleging wrongs committed elsewhere if one of two conditions is met: the plaintiff is a

national of the state where the suit is filed or that state's interests are in some way involved. All it would

take for countries to start allowing civil suits concerning foreign human rights abuses would be to

recognize that all atrocities in violation of international law, regardless of where they are committed,

affect the interests of every law-respecting country -- thus satisfying the second condition.

Human rights advocates should try to allay predictable objections to countries' opening their courts.

They should start by drafting proposed legislation with modest and realistic goals, building in limitations

that may disappoint the most ardent activists but hugely increase the chances of success. For example, a

proposed bill for a country should require the approval of the foreign ministry before each suit can

proceed to trial and specify that a suit will be allowed only if the plaintiff has no access to just relief in the

country of the defendant or in the country where the abuse occurred. The bill should also require a court

to dismiss a suit when the defendant can show that the plaintiff has forum-shopped and has access to

justice in a country far better suited to hear the dispute, on the condition that the defendant agrees to

face trial in that other country's courts. And it should require an initial showing of probable cause to

stave off frivolous, politically motivated suits. Limitations such as these would do much to disarm or

convert opponents. 

A PRACTICE IN PERIL 

The prospects that legislatures will pass bills allowing foreign human rights suits would get much

dimmer if the country at the vanguard of the practice stopped hearing them. In the past few decades, U.S.

federal courts have heard suits brought by foreigners involving human rights abuses in Ethiopia,

Myanmar (also called Burma), Paraguay, the Philippines, Serbia, Sudan, and other countries. But it was

only by historical accident that the United States started welcoming these plaintiffs into its courts. In

1789, Congress passed the ATS, allowing foreigners to sue in the federal courts for a wrong that was "in

violation of the law of nations." Back then, however, the law of nations expressed no concern for human

rights, much less for a sovereign government's treatment of its own citizens. It focused on matters of

state-to-state relations, such as national boundaries, aggression, safe passage of ambassadors, and piracy.

Only in the mid-twentieth century, at Nuremberg, did international law begin to deal with human rights

abuses committed by governments. And only since 1980 have U.S. federal courts interpreted the ATS as

authorizing suits based on violations of human rights. 

But the Supreme Court may soon stop letting foreign plaintiffs use the ATS to sue the perpetrators of

foreign atrocities. In February 2012, the Court heard oral arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a

case filed by inhabitants of the Ogoni region of Nigeria against an oil conglomerate that allegedly aided

the Nigerian military in carrying out torture and executions in the early 1990s. Although no party had

raised the issue of whether the ATS has extraterritorial reach, the line of questioning by the justices

suggested that some of them were considering ruling that atrocities in foreign countries lie outside the

jurisdiction granted by the statute. The Court then took the exceptional step of directing the parties to

prepare briefs on that issue. It is expected to decide the matter in the coming months. 

The arguments that the defendants submitted in favor of limiting the ATS in this way are distortions of

both U.S. and international law. First, the defendants claim that U.S. statutes apply only to acts committed

in the United States. That is true for U.S. statutes that prescribe norms of conduct, which are clearly

intended to govern conduct within U.S. borders (perhaps of Americans outside U.S. borders, too), but not

all conduct throughout the world. But the argument does not apply to the ATS, because a court hearing a

case under the ATS is not imposing norms prescribed by the United States for the rest of the world. It is

merely giving effect to norms that were prescribed by the international community with the intent that

they would apply throughout the world. (What is more, the ATS was most likely originally intended to

apply to acts committed outside the United States; in the eighteenth century, the law of nations was

understood to apply to piracy on the high seas.)

The defendants also claim that foreign courts, by declining to exercise comparable jurisdiction, have

either implied or ruled that doing so would violate international law. Indeed, courts declining to hear

foreign human rights suits have pointed out that most other countries' courts also do not hear such cases.

That observation can undoubtedly give comfort to any country deciding that it, like so many others, will

not assume the unwelcome burden of hearing foreigners' claims of foreign atrocities. It does not,

however, imply that any country's court would violate international law by carrying out international

law. Global human rights law prescribes global norms of conduct. It leaves the question of how to enforce

those norms to the countries themselves.

That other countries have not yet empowered their courts to hear foreign human rights lawsuits is no

reason for the United States to withdraw the jurisdiction its courts have exercised for over 30 years. If the

Supreme Court barred federal courts from hearing suits about foreign atrocities under the ATS, it would

be making a sad mistake. For one thing, the ruling would not necessarily terminate such litigation in the

United States; it might merely move the cases from federal courts to state courts, where the Supreme

Court would exercise less control. (Unlike federal courts, state courts do not need explicit statutory

authorization to hear cases.) More troubling, the Supreme Court, through such a ruling, would embrace

the retrograde proposition that distant genocides are not the business of the United States -- and deal a

devastating blow to hopes of expanding global recognition of human rights.

India Needs More Democracy, Not Less

The Case for More Bureaucrats, Institutions, and Voting

The Hindu-nationalist leader Narendra Modi's recent election sparked a good deal of controversy. It also

sparked an open and substantive debate about economics, liberalism, and social welfare in Gujarat and

across all of India -- a rarity in developing democracies and a positive thing as India gears up for

nationwide elections in 2014.

More than ever, Indians believe that their government is not keeping pace with their expectations. In the

last two years, India has seen two groundswells of popular protest in which crowds largely composed of

middle-class urbanites have taken to the streets to demand a more accountable and responsive

government. Beginning in the summer of 2011, tens of thousands of citizens joined in anticorruption

demonstrations led by Anna Hazare, the social activist who agitated for reform after a series of high-

profile scandals implicated ruling politicians and their cronies in taking billions of dollars of graft. More

recently, thousands assembled to mourn a 23-year-old woman who died after being brutally gang-raped

and to demand greater government protection of citizens’ safety.

The moral outrage is entirely justified, and the factors linked to India’s governance woes are well known

-- a rise in corruption, cronyism, and criminalism among the ranks of elected officials, and a crushing

government bureaucracy. However, the root causes mostly go unexplored. For starters, the apparent

increase in corruption and criminalism in India is, in part, the product of two positive developments:

increased transparency and rapid economic growth. In addition, the proliferation of elected politicians

with criminal records, although deplorable, is a direct response to rational voter choices -- voters select

the politicians who they believe can work India’s ineffectual state to their advantage.

In turn, the remedies to these problems are somewhat counterintuitive. Although India is often accused

of having too much democracy (a billion and a quarter clamoring voices makes policymaking difficult), it

could actually use more: a more engaged citizenry, more institution building, and a better-staffed

bureaucracy.

THE BEST DISINFECTANT

In part, Indians feel corruption now more than ever because of improved transparency: dirt is more

visible where there is sunlight. Recently, agencies designed to increase government accountability,

namely the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), have started to assert their independence. The CAG

has eagerly brought to light scandals ranging from sweetheart deals for 2G telecommunications spectrum

licenses to the murky distribution of coal mining licenses (leading to the scandal known as Coalgate).

These institutions, and the vibrant and growing news media, have made it very difficult for the

government to conduct its business as usual.

But it is also true that the scope for corruption is on the rise. As the political scientist Samuel Huntington

recognized more than four decades ago, corruption is an inevitable byproduct of economic

modernization. In India, increased economic productivity triggered by liberalization provided elites with

new opportunities to self-deal. Sustained rapid growth, for instance, created a huge demand for energy.

Increased demand, coupled with rising commodity prices, made rent seeking in the natural resource

sector all the more lucrative. And unlike other industries, which have been reformed over the years, the

public sector in India retains control over the “commanding heights,” or the critical sectors that dominate

economic activity, such as power, mining, and petrochemicals. Government agents have thus been able to

easily collude with extractive industries and reap windfall gains. And federalism, in turn, has multiplied

the number of actors with their hands in the till.

In the words of one senior government adviser, Indians have not become more corrupt, “it is just that

the opportunities for corruption have increased due to higher growth.” All this means that, for now,

corruption will continue to rise as India continues to grow. This is especially true in the poor Indian

states that are just now rapidly expanding, such as Bihar. Today, Bihar, which registers among the highest

growth rates of any Indian state, is helmed by Nitish Kumar, a reformist chief minister. Kumar has

earnestly attempted to turn the state around following 15 years of misrule under Lalu Prasad Yadav, his

predecessor. The most notorious corruption scandal during Yadav’s “Jungle Raj,” as it was known, was

the “fodder scam,” in which the chief minister and his cronies allegedly fabricated vast herds of fictitious

livestock in order to embezzle funds from the state’s animal husbandry department. Paradoxically, while

Bihar today may have a less corrupt executive in Kumar, the state is likely to encounter more rent

seeking as the economy enters the industrial era and invests in big-ticket infrastructure, energy, and

road-building projects.

RATIONAL CHOICE

In the short term, the combined effect of corruption and increased scrutiny will lead to uncertainty and

policy paralysis. Think of the bureaucrat who is asked to issue a permit for a big infrastructure project

just months after seeing his predecessor put in the dock for O.K.-ing a similarly dubious deal. This

bureaucrat’s initial -- and rational -- instinct will be to demur. In the long term, frustration with policy

paralysis will likely produce a fundamental rethinking of governance. But first, the government must

cleanse itself of considerable rot within.

Some have suggested that, in the interim, India needs a more orderly democracy with fewer and less

fractious voices. Otherwise, the argument goes, real reform will be nearly impossible to enact. For

instance, former White House official Steven Rattner recently suggested that India’s democracy might

hurt its development prospects vis-à-vis China, writing that “success for developing countries is about

more than free elections.” As odd as it sounds, though, India could use more, not less, political

mobilization. In fact, India’s middle class, which has traditionally been politically reticent, is well placed

to push for better and more responsive governance.

The good news is that the middle class might be mobilizing for just that purpose. Last December, the

citizens who took to the streets to protest violence against women were largely middle-class. For the

most part, their outrage was directed not against ordinary criminals but against the political class, which,

they believed, had failed to provide basic security and protections for human rights. To quell the protests,

the government appointed a committee to propose measures for addressing gender violence in India.

Once they had that win in hand, protestors made the jump from chanting antigovernment slogans to

engaging in pragmatic politics. This spring, the public, especially the middle class, has engaged in a

vigorous and well-informed debate about women’s rights, which led to the passage of new legislation in

March. All this suggests that the middle class is capable of embracing politics and promoting reform.

Of course, for change to be lasting, the middle class must also turn out to vote come election time

(something poor Indians are more inclined to do than the well-off), and middle-class citizens must stand

for elected office themselves. And, unfortunately, it is precisely electoral politics that Indians find most

tainted. It is common knowledge that one in three members of India’s parliament is under criminal

investigation and that one in four state legislators boasts such a dubious distinction. Those disturbing

facts have led to the widespread demonization of politicians and party politics but not to an honest

discussion of why constituents vote for such tainted candidates in the first place. As a growing body of

research suggests, voters in India often support politicians with criminal connections because of -- not in

spite of -- their criminality. From the perspective of voters frustrated by an unresponsive state,

criminality is often viewed as a signal of a politician’s ability to get things done, especially for his or her

parochial community. In other words, transparency only gets you so far. Voters’ incentives must also

change.

FAST TRACK TO LONG-TERM PROBLEMS

To start on the gargantuan task of changing voter preferences, it will be up to reformers to pressure the

state to address the institutional failures that make criminal politicians attractive in the first place:

namely, India’s inability to impartially deliver services, dole out benefits, or adjudicate disputes. Fixing

institutional shortcomings will be a decades-long challenge, and it will be easy to grasp at short-term

fixes in the interim. Exhibit A is the rise of “fast track” courts designed to short-circuit India’s

dysfunctional justice system. In the aftermath of the Delhi rape protests, Altamas Kabir, the chief justice

of India, ordered all state high courts to set up dedicated courts to expedite the prosecution of existing

criminal cases involving rape. The move was a not-so-subtle admission that India’s judicial system is

incapable of resolving criminal cases in a timely manner. Within three weeks, six fast-track courts set up

in the capital city alone were given 500 pending rape cases to adjudicate. Leaving aside concerns about

the quality of justice that these courts deliver, there is some evidence that fast-track courts are

themselves becoming overburdened. According to one independent analysis, Bihar has the highest

number of fast-track courts (nearly 180), yet it has the second-highest number of pending cases and one

of the worst clearance rates in the country.

Quick fixes like fast-track courts may provide instant gratification -- and they might seem to give Indians

faith that they don’t need to elect corrupt officials. But a better response, in this case, would have been to

start addressing the root problem of India’s judicial system: endemic shortfalls in manpower. In the

United States, there are 108 judges per one million citizens; in India, there are 12. Thus, it comes as no

surprise that there are 32 million cases pending in various courts in India, with courts regularly taking

on more cases with each passing year than they can dream of disposing of. According to data collected

in 2008, local magistrates in New Delhi had nearly half a million check-bouncing cases alone to wade

through. More than anything, India should plug the manpower gap by doing everything from revisiting

the outmoded collegium system, in which a small number of elite judges handpick each new justice, to

reforming procedures that allow litigants to indefinitely delay proceedings according to their whim.

When it comes to addressing institutional dysfunction, the enormity of the task ahead should not distract

from the fact that there have already been some real successes. For example, India’s Supreme Court --

responding to grassroots movements -- has intervened to defend and codify numerous rights for average

Indians, such as guaranteeing an individual’s right to food or a child’s right to education. In addition, a

fiercely independent Election Commission has been steadfast in asserting its constitutional authority to

tackle electoral malpractice. In 2005, the Indian parliament passed the landmark Right to Information

(RTI) Act, modeled after the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, to open up government’s

inner workings to public scrutiny. Under the act’s provisions, government bureaucrats are required to

respond to citizen requests for information about government initiatives -- or risk personally incurring

financial penalties. Several states have passed similar laws to prod government agencies to deliver a core

set of basic services in a timely manner. More of that kind of reform is needed to convince Indians that

their government can and will serve them -- even without kickbacks.

The road to making India’s government more accountable goes uphill, and the problem will seem to get

worse before it is better. Even so, India’s governance challenges come against a background of dramatic

economic and political transformation. There is nothing inevitable about continued transformation,

though, or about India improving the quality of its governance. To do both, Indians will have to start

making better diagnoses of their problems and prescribing the correct remedies.