OPINION
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2014
A21
Understanding Putin’s motivations By JAMES V. WERTSCH FOR THE STRAITS TIMES
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HATEVER happened to Putin the pragmatist? In years past, Russian President Vladimir Putin was known as a practitioner of realpolitik, playing great-power politics. The West did not always like the moves he made, but it more or less understood them. Of late, however, Mr Putin’s actions have left many scratching their heads. His annexation of Crimea has dismayed Western leaders, but what really alarms them is the Russian President’s brusque dismissal of their objections and the fear he is eyeing additional targets in Ukraine, Moldova and Estonia. Considering the weakened and vulnerable state of the Russian economy, his actions in Crimea seem anything but pragmatic. Many in the West have drawn a blank when trying to understand what lies behind his behaviour. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly said Mr Putin is “in a different reality”. Many observers in the United States are perplexed. In the March 13 issue of Politico Magazine, American and European observers even tried to put “Putin on the couch”. They variously attributed his behaviour to a susceptibility to conspiracy theories, a cold calculating personality, pessimism, paranoia, deep anger at the West, insecurity, hypersensitivity, as well as a tough upbringing on the streets of Leningrad. It is misguided, though, to think we will understand the Russian President’s actions by focusing on him as an individual. To be sure, he has his personality quirks, but I am convinced these are not the main drivers of his actions. Instead, much of what he thinks and says is a straightforward reflection of an underlying national narrative that has been part of Russian culture for centuries. Catherine the Great, who annexed Crimea to the Russian empire in 1783, reportedly believed that the only way she could defend her country was to expand its borders. This rationale continues to play a role in Russian reasoning today, at the grassroots level as well as at the top. Russians typically view their past in terms of repeated invasions by foreign enemies. In such accounts, the enemies inflict great suffering and humiliation but are eventually defeated by the valiant efforts of a Russian people bound together by a distinctive spiritual heritage. The whole world saw how this narrative played out in the heroic Soviet defence against Hitler. But for the Russians, this is just one iteration of an endlessly repeating narrative. For them, the same story has been played out with different characters for centuries, starting with the Mongols (13th century), the “Germans” (Teutonic knights) from the same period, followed by the Poles (16th century), the Swedes (18th century), the French (19th century), and the Germans again (20th century). This national memory encourages Russians to see threats everywhere, including in the form of “dangerous ideas”, and these
Tree death caused by ceratocystis in a two-year-old Acacia mangium plantation. The fungal disease appears after monkeys and squirrels strip off the bark, and is harder to control than root rot, causing mill owners to fell trees after only four years. PHOTO: DR CHRIS BEADLE, COMMONWEALTH SCIENTIFIC AND INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH ORGANISATION
Nature bites back at Sumatra’s pulp plantation companies By JOHN MCBETH SENIOR WRITER
Pro-Kremlin activists at a rally in Moscow’s Red Square under a flag emblazoned with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face last month to celebrate the incorporation of Crimea. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE threats inform Mr Putin’s perceptions and actions. In recent years, Russian thinkers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Dugin have outlined the dangers of “Atlanticist” forces that threaten modern Russia, and Mr Putin sees them as capable of sapping the strength of a new Eurasian empire with Russia at its core. In his view, this Eurasian domain will stretch beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union and will be guided by a superior spiritual force that contrasts with the soulless materialism and false values of the West. But again, it is not Mr Putin or his philosopher heroes who are alone at work here. The national narrative that guides their thinking has shaped Russian culture for centuries. In his 1872 novel Demons, for example, Fyodor Dostoevsky presented characters who came close to spiritual annihilation because they had become infected with Western ideas. The spiritual demons at work in Dostoevsky’s imagination came in the form of various “isms”, including materialism, nihilism and atheism, and they foreshadow the fears of Solzhenitsyn, Dugin and Mr Putin today. To be sure, repression of activists and the media are key ingredients in Mr Putin’s programme (as they were for the Russian czars), but his strong and rising poll numbers and his ability to rally citizens stem from his appeal to the narrative template at the core of Russian culture. Of course, all these do not exonerate Mr Putin and other Russians from charges of flouting international law in Crimea, let alone undertaking the more dangerous aggression they may be contemplating in eastern Ukraine and beyond. It does, however, provide a basis for responding to Russia’s provocative moves in more effective ways. In the short run, the best response is still strong punitive measures in the form of sanctions that
make clear the serious consequences that can follow acts such as annexing territories. These are likely to hurt Europe and the US as well as Russia, but with sufficient strength, they are also likely to force Mr Putin the pragmatist to reappear. In imposing such sanctions, however, it is important that Western powers do not needlessly stoke Russian fears of threat and humiliation. Germany’s response to its humiliation after World War I provides a hard lesson in this regard, and the point is, if anything, even more salient in Russia’s case, where thinking is heavily shaped by a national narrative about dangerous enemies. In the longer run, a Western response to Mr Putin’s actions that is firm but tempered with respect may be the best hope for encouraging the internal political debate that could guide Russia back into a valued position in the international community. The current wave of patriotic support for Mr Putin’s swagger will subside as the cost of breaking world law and norms becomes clearer. Urban middle-class demonstrators will eventually regain their voice, and the bulk of Russians who simply want to improve their daily lives will question the price of Mr Putin’s gambit. Although the Russian President has shown that a national narrative about external enemies can be used to mobilise his population, this narrative is just one force that guides the country. In the post-Soviet era, its people have shown that they can follow other visions as well, and a strong but patient approach from the international community can help them return to the productive life at home and esteem from abroad that they have often shown they desire.
[email protected] James V. Wertsch is professor of anthropology and vice-chancellor for international affairs at Washington University in St Louis.
F
ORGET the illegal loggers. Think the longtailed macaque in particular, the prevost’s squirrel, even the endangered orang utan or any other mammal for that matter. They are the new bad actors in Indonesian forestry – and across Borneo as well. The trees under threat in Sumatra are not of the pristine, triple-canopy kind. They are in the 1.5 million ha of acacia plantation from where the island’s thriving pulp and paper industry now gets most of its wood. But, as The Straits Times has learnt exclusively, the animals are only part of a much wider problem that forestry experts say threatens the sustainability of the plantations and could ultimately drive the multibilliondollar industry to the wall. They say that by planting a species that is non-indigenous to the island through what is now three seven-year rotations, companies are facing the same ecological disaster that the Germans experienced with imported spruce in the late 1900s. “They should have a natural forest with mixed species and a longer rotation with sound socio-economic principles, less corruption and better law enforcement,” says one expert. “It is simply not sustainable if they go on as they are.” Nature, it appears, is now taking revenge on Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and Asia Pacific Resources International (April), the two biggest companies that for years were reviled for the destruction of the Sumatran rainforest. Since the turn of the current decade, local mammals have developed a taste for maturing Acacia mangium, the monoculture species that delivers commercial wood crops in as little as five years on degraded or infertile soil. The animals gnaw off the bark to get at the sap and its sweet inner layers of phloem and cambium, either killing the tree or exposing it to ceratocystis – a fun-
gal disease even more difficult to control than root rot. The animals are causing so much havoc that companies are now busy substituting their acacia for the less tasty Eucalyptus pelita. It grows more slowly, and there is another significant drawback: It does not grow on Sumatra’s peatlands. The monkeys and squirrels have laid waste to half of the Acacia mangium, while root rot is destroying a similar percentage of Acacia crassicarpa, the species grown exclusively on peatland, which makes up about 60 per cent of the overall plantation area. Dr Chris Beadle, a plant scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, says root rot kills a tree in a year, rendering it commercially useless. Ceratocystis does the same damage in weeks. Mill owners are already having to cut trees after only four years, which means a sharp reduction in resources. As in the more valuable oil palm plantations, chemicals could be used to treat the acacia. But this would cost more than the wood itself. From 1988 to 2003, an estimated 80 per cent of the 185 million cubic m of wood fibre processed by paper mills came from tropical hardwoods. Under mounting pressure from environmentalists, most companies were expanding capacity at a faster rate than their plantations were reaching maturity. Its own hardwood resources close to exhaustion, APP finally signed a landmark agreement with The Forest Trust (TFT) and Greenpeace in February last year to end all natural forest-clearing in its supply chain. TFT says the company is sticking to the deal. Along with April, which has yet to attain plantation sustainability, the two forestry giants produce 6.2 million tonnes, or three-quarters of total pulp capacity, with acacia making up about 80 per cent of the feedstock. APP controls 2.3 million ha of concessions in South Sumatra and West and East Kalimantan, and operates two pulp mills in Riau and Jambi provinces and seven Java-based paper and packaging mills, in addition to other production facilities in China.
April and its partners manage concessions covering 700,000 ha in Sumatra and East Kalimantan, with a large pulp and paper mill in Riau and a smaller facility in North Sumatra. April also expanded into China in the mid-2000s. With an additional nine million ha allocated for plantation conversion by 2020, the Forestry Ministry wants to boost pulp capacity to 16 million tonnes a year. That would mean increasing wood supplies from 29 million cu m to 72 million cu m. The industry’s current problems would seem to make this goal a pipe dream, but it has not stopped APP from going ahead with plans to build a new 2.5-million-tonne-a-year pulp mill near Palembang in South Sumatra. Acacia mangium and Eucalyptus pelita are both indigenous to parts of eastern Indonesia, but when monoculture plantations were introduced into South Sumatra and Kalimantan, acacia was the preferred choice because it grew faster. Little was done to understand the biology, and by the end of the first rotation, root rot had begun to appear. Over the next two rotations, it developed into a scourge. Then, two or three years ago, along came the protected macaque. An accomplished swimmer, it inhabits Sumatra’s mangrove swamps and riverine forest, often in groups of up to 48 animals feeding off fruit, coconuts, leaves and crabs. Indonesian foresters say the monkeys only learnt to feast on the acacia sap after local villagers began felling the green belts that were their habitat, following the wholesale destruction of the original rainforest. Dr Beadle says the macaques made a “massive difference” in a very short period of time, largely because once a tree has been partly debarked or otherwise “wounded”, it allows ceratocystis to flourish and spread at an alarming rate. So far, the monkeys have not shown any interest in eucalyptus, but who knows? “The logical thing is for the companies to switch to something else,” says Dr Beadle. “But you can never tell what the future may hold.”
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Employers, use your hiring power to shape society By DAVID BROOKS
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EAR employers, you may not realise it, but you have a powerful impact on the culture and the moral ecology of our era. If your human resources bosses decide they want to hire a certain sort of person, then young people begin turning themselves into that sort of person. Therefore, I’m asking you to think about the following principles, this Employer’s Creed. If you follow these principles in your hiring practices, you’ll be sending a signal about what sort of person gets ahead. You may correct some of the perversities at the upper reaches of our meritocracy. You may even help cultivate deeper, fuller human beings. L Bias hiring decisions against perfectionists. If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated
job applicants, you’ve probably been flooded with resumes from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success. They got 3.8 grade point averages (GPA) in high school and college. They served in the cliche leadership positions on campus. They got all the perfect consultant/investment bank internships. During off-hours they distributed bed nets in Zambia and dug wells in Peru. When you read these resumes, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there’s something completely flavourless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what he is really like except for a high talent for social conformity. Either he has no desire to chart out an original life course or lacks the courage to do
so. Shy away from such people. L Bias hiring decisions towards dualists. The people you want to hire should have achieved some measure of conventional success, but they should have also engaged in some desperate lark that made no sense from a career or social status perspective. Maybe a person left a successful banking job to rescue the family dry-cleaning business in Akron. Maybe another had great grades at a fancy East Coast prep school but went off to a Christian college because she wanted a place to explore her values. These people have done at least one Deeply Unfashionable Thing. Such people have intrinsic motivation, native curiosity and social courage. L Bias towards truth-tellers. I recently ran into a fellow who hires a lot of people. He said he asks the following question during each interview. “Could you de-
scribe a time when you told the truth and it hurt you?” If the interviewee can’t immediately come up with an episode, there may be a problem here. L Don’t mindlessly favour people with high GPAs. Students who get straight As have an ability to prudentially master their passions so they can achieve proficiency across a range of subjects. But you probably want employees who are relentlessly dedicated to one subject. In school, those people often got As in subjects they were passionate about but got Bs in subjects that did not arouse their imagination. L Reward the ripening virtues, not the blooming virtues. Some virtues bloom forth with youth: being intelligent, energetic, curious and pleasant. Some virtues ripen only over time: othercentredness, having a sense for how events will flow, being able
to discern what’s right in the absence of external affirmation. These virtues usually come with experience, after a person has taken time off to raise children, been fired or learnt to cope with having a cruel boss. The blooming virtues are great if you are hiring thousands of consultants to churn out reports. For most other jobs, you want the ripening ones, too. L Reward those who have come by way of sorrow. Job seekers are told to present one linear narrative to the world, one that can easily be read and digested as a series of clean conquests. But if you are stuck in an airport bar with a colleague after a horrible business trip, would you really want to have a drink with a person like that? No, you’d want a real human being, someone who has experienced setback, suffering and recovery. You’d want someone with obvious holes in his resume, who has learnt the les-
sons that only suffering teaches, and who got back on track. L Reward cover letter rebels. Job seeking is the second-greatest arena of social pretence in modern life – after dating. But some people choose not to spin and exaggerate. They choose not to make each occasion seem more impressive than it really was. You want people who are radically straight, even with superiors. You could argue that you don’t actually want rich, full personalities for your company. You just want achievement drones who can perform specific tasks. I doubt that’s in your company’s long-term interests. But if you fear leaping out in this way, at least think of the effect you’re having on the deeper sensibilities of the next generation, the kind of souls you are incentivising and thus fashioning, the legacy you will leave behind. NEW YORK TIMES
