Blogoir

Here is my new Daily Telegraph blog piece comparing the problems of the Eurozone with the fates of the USSR and former Yugoslavia.

In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.

This one even has added Literature:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.

This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.

But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...

... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.

No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?

While you’re mulling over that question, read this scarifying account of Greece’s looming deadlines. Then run out to buy tinned food.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels to be born?

Note the post-modern irony (mis)use of the word scarifying.

In due course I'll need to share thoughts on the lessons of the break-up of the USSR for Scottish independence (or not).

In the meantime, I need to recover form two hours of blather from a suave, persistent but ultimately unsuccessful solar panels salesman.

Here in powerful fluent form is Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, speaking today in Berlin about Europe and the Eurozone.

If anyone can find a better peacetime speech by any Polish Foreign Minister or any Polish politician ever, let it be produced!

Not that it is perfect. Too many rather impenetrable statistics at various point. Some sentences are too long or involved.

He even - horror - takes a populist swipe at the UK (bear in mind the German audience and his own credentials as an Oxford graduate), after saying something important about 'subsidiarity'. Note how he abruptly switches to talking to the UK in the second person, as if we were in the room. Fine technique:

The more power and legitimacy we give to federal institutions, the more secure

member states should feel that certain prerogatives, everything to do with national

identity, culture, religion, lifestyle, public morals, and rates of income, corporate and

VAT taxes, should forever remain in the purview of states. Our unity can survive

different working hours or different family law in different countries.

Which brings me to the issue of whether an important member, Britain, can support reform. You have given the Union its common language. The Single Market was largely your brilliant idea. A British commissioner runs our diplomacy. You could lead Europe on defence. You are an indispensable link across the Atlantic.

On the other hand, Eurozone’s collapse would hugely harm your economy. Also, your total sovereign, corporate and household debt exceeds 400% of GDP. Are you sure markets will always favour you? We would prefer you in, but if you can’t join, please allow us to forge ahead. And please start explaining to your people that European decisions are not Brussels’ diktats but results of agreements in which you freely participate.

Fine, forge 'ahead' as you see fit. But pay for it yourselves. Don't expect too much British money if you overdo it. And don't try taxing us by the back door.

Nor is it easy to see from an admittedly befogged UK point of view how giving a turbo-boost to more powers at the European level as Sikorski suggests is in any meaningful way compatible with democracy as hitherto understood. More power to ... the European Parliament? No thanks. (Remember that one? Follow the link to see a German TV station doing a very early job to magnificent effect...)

Above all, isn't a wholesale reorganisation of  EU powers lunging in a Far More Europe way as Sikorski suggests completely unrealistic? How to negotiate a new treaty structure of such far-reaching new measures without the whole business getting bogged down in referenda and hopeless controversy? It's not by chance we have what we have. And German voters would have to be mad to allow other Europeans effectively to decide how much German money is transferred out of Germany for wider redistributive purposes.

Nonetheless, if you want to hear the message for More Europe delivered by a European foreign minister in a way calculated to impress an audience from another large member state, this is what it looks like.

This one passage - directed directly at Germany - is really good by any standard. Energetic and thoughtful, but also refeshingly blunt. An authentic contemporary rhetorical masterclass in delivering a tough message ("Listen, you helped get us all into this mess..!") to a foreign audience in their own country with style and grace.

Oh, but note too the hard-nosed Polish caveat tucked away at the end:

What does Poland ask of Germany?

We ask, first of all, that Germany admits that she is the biggest beneficiary of the current arrangements and therefore that she has the biggest obligation to make them sustainable.

Second, as you know best, you are not an innocent victim of others’ profligacy. You, who should have known better, have also broken the Growth and Stability Pact and your banks also recklessly bought risky bonds.

Third, because investors have been selling the bonds of exposed countries and flying to safety, your borrowing costs have been lower than they would have been in normal times.

Fourth, if your neighbours’ economies stall or implode, you greatly suffer, too.

Fifth, that despite your understandable aversion to inflation, you appreciate that the danger of collapse is now a much bigger threat.

Sixth, that because of your size and your history you have a special responsibility to preserve peace and democracy on the continent. Jurgen Habermas has wisely said that "If the European project fails, then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before."

What, as Poland’s foreign minister, do I regard as the biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland today, on 28th November 2011? It’s not terrorism, it’s not the Taliban, and it’s certainly not German tanks. It’s not even Russian missiles which President Medvedev has just threatened to deploy on the EU’s border.

The biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland would be the collapse of the Euro zone. And I demand of Germany that, for your own sake and for ours, you help it survive and prosper. You know full well that nobody else can do it.

I will probably be first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.

You have become Europe’s indispensable nation. You may not fail to lead. Not dominate, but to lead in reform. Provided you include us in decision-making, Poland will support you.

I like various Sikorskiesque personal style-touches, such as this feline one:

Croatia is next in line to join the European Union.

But this sort of thing, circulated by the eminent Centre for Research into Post-communist Economies, shows that beneath the surface - or even bang on it - a lot of nasty habits and people and instincts inherited from the communist period and then the ghastly Tudjman era are flourishing.

I am forwarding the CRCE appeal on behalf of H21 to William Hague's office and to senior people in Brussels, urging them to take action.

Come on Croatia. Stop producing this rubbish. And don't bring it into our EU tent. We have enough already. 

A Call for the Release of Croatia’s Political Prisoner - 72 year old Author and Stalwart Anti-Corruption Activist Aleksandar Saša Radović

72 year-old Alksandar Saša Radović (Sasha) - an author and stalwart anti-corruption leader in Croatia was arrested last week just moments after Sasha's name appeared in public as a formal candidate of Hrvatska 21 - Croatia 21 (H21).  The police report given to the press was that Mrs Radovic was present with Sasha when they were arrested on charges of extortion. 

There are major issues involved in this case that require immediate international intervention led by principled leaders of the West:

-  Sasha has been detained at an undisclosed location and denied due process and an attorney for 7 days and counting.

-  Contrary to the police report which claims that Mrs. Radovic was with Sasa when Sasha was arrested, Mrs. Radovic was at their family residence some 60 minutes from where Sasha was arrested.  Mrs Radovic was with her sister and brother-in-law during the period.

-  Due process was denied and lawyers were not appointed or permitted to contact Mr. and Mrs. Radovic.

The arrest of Sasha took place on the day when it became public that he joined the roster of 75 brave citizens as political candidates on the list of Hrvatska 21 - Croatia 21st Century.

In his most recent book, Sasha exposed the outgoing Minister of Interior, Mr. Tomislav Karamarko for political corruption and general Ivan Cermak as a war profiteer.
   
Cermak’s unexplained wealth and evidences of smuggling during the West's arms embargo of the Balkan region have been published in Sasha’s four major books which include the selling of oil and weapons to Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro while Cermak was employed in Croatia’s military during Croatia’s independence war. 

Today, Cermak resides in a lavish castle with an estimated wealth of 200 million euros - much higher than the wages earned working for the government.  Cermak’s “business endeavors” included a chain of gas retail outlets which was sold in the meantime.  Cermak's companies have been a major media advertiser in Croatia.

The West’s leaders have been silent in spite of the fact that Croatia is a NATO member and a candidate of the European Union.  The West has poured over 1 billion euros of taxpayer funds into Croatia’s “reform process” without any results.

Aleksandar Saša Radović has published over 20 books on corruption in Croatia and much of his work (with documents and evidences) has been presented in the international arena to place a spotlight on high level political corruption including cabinet members of the ruling HDZ including former PM Ivo Sanader and the communist party SDP.

Croatia is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media."

EU membership criteria emphasize the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law and human rights.  However, Croatia’s politicians have subverted the rule of law and protection of property rights.  More than 1 million back logged cases are in the court system, some for more than 20 years.

Croatia’s elections are slated for December 4, 2011 with over 550,000 illegal votes not addressed by Croatia’s authorities. Efforts by ruling HDZ and SDP have blocked the verification of the voter list.

Sasha is now a political prisoner of a tyrannical state, a compromised member of NATO with an unreformed intelligence structure dating back to the UDBA (Tito’s communist system) and a tainted candidate nation about to enter the EU.

In an independent initiative, Denis Latin, anchor of Croatia’s state-run television and one of the most respected journalists in Croatia and Southeast Europe has joined well-known public figures in a signed letter calling for the release of Sasha.

Over the last four months, over 20 political party candidates of H21, supporters and volunteers have been harassed, intimidated, lost business contracts and had visits by Croatia's "financial police".

The Adriatic Institute for Public Policy and Hrvatska 21 call for the immediate release of Aleksandar Saša Radović and encourage Western leaders from strong rule of law nations to join this effort in calling for Croatia to uphold the rule of law and establish an independent judiciary.

Former FCO Minister Denis MacShane MP has written a small but energetic book praising Kosovo's independence: Why Kosovo Still Matters (sic).

Here it is, a perfect Christmas stocking-filler, the more perfect if bought via this link so that I get a few groats from Amazon: 

The main interest of the book for you folk lies in the more or less contemporaneous Ministerial diary extracts from Denis as he visited various Balkan capitals and attended international gatherings where Kosovo/Serbia was being discussed.

There is a walk-on role by Keith Vaz MP, briefly the Minister responsible for Balkan policy, whose modest knowledge of the subject was exposed back in 2001 when he and I had to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee:

We find it deeply regrettable that Mr Vaz, the FCO minister responsible for south-east Europe, has not visited the area ... His evidence session with us did not reveal a detailed grasp of the policy issues which the area faces. As the Minister told us, and we know ourselves, the situation in the Balkans is "very complex and very difficult"...

It has to be said that the Committee had a point.

Mr Vaz's eloquent but somewhat insubstantial replies to their many questions were a truly fine example of talking a lot and saying  ... nothing.

In Denis' book too Keith Vaz blandly reveals his insightful approach. During a session of briefing by FCO officials on the complexity of the Kosovo problem, he asks:

"Can somebody just draw me a little map and show me where Kosovo is?"

The main interest of the book for me is ... me. I appear wittily or not at various points, but this line caught my special eye:

"... Charles Crawford, one of the most whizzing catherine wheels of a politically astute ambassador that we have"

*blushes prettily*

The book also records accurately enough one amazing moment in April 2002 when then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw chaired a discussion about Balkan policy.

Paddy Ashdown (then High Representative in Bosnia) had nobbled PM Tony Blair to argue against drawing down UK forces too far in Bosnia while maintaining a sizeable UK military presence in Kosovo. The Foreign Secretary asked officials where we all thought the main UK military effort should now focus:

Charles Crawford, the sharp but rather cocky Ambassador in Belgrade, says that we should stay in Bosnia and that Kosovo should be persuaded to stay in a loose federation with Serbia and Montenegro.

The arguments about where UK troops made most impact on the ground and where the main threat to the region's security lay went round and round the table. Finally, as he describes in the book, Denis proposed a vote. And before anyone could question his sanity he quickly had torn up a piece of paper and handed round slips for voting: B for Bosnia, K for Kosovo.

We voted. The votes were counted by Denis. 10 - 5 for focusing on Kosovo. I voted for a heavier UK military presence in Kosovo (of course), even though the book suggests that the opposite was my view.

Denis' case therefore won the argument:

Thus, British foreign policy is made

Hmm. The exception, not the rule, I think.

Otherwise the text is a gay romp through the politics of the Balkans over a thousand years and the latest decades of convulsion, with no opportunity spared to extol the Kosovans and cast Serbs in general and most UK Conservatives in particular in a bad light.

In other words, a typical MacShanian production. Top quality insider gossip, lively, sometimes irreverent, impossibly light, blithely tendentious. And with handy insights. I especially liked the way he linked the events in 1980s' Yugoslavia to the Solidarity pressures in Poland - important to recall that there was a wider European anti-communist context to the issue.

It's also noteworthy that he does not (now) dismiss out of hand the idea of some sort of small territory swaps as part of an historic deal between Belgrade and Pristina, an idea whose time may yet come.

The main problem with the book, apart from myriad other problems, is that it does far too little justice (in fact none at all) to the significant arguments of the Russians and others about the inadmissibility of border changes in Europe "without the consent of all concerned" as per the Helsinki Accords.

Because, Minister, foreign policy is all about balancing realities against principles and rules.

And for all the merits of the Kosovans' claims against Belgrade, is it really such a good outcome for the UK and the world - and even for Kosovo - that international opinion has ended up so divided in a way which shows that deeper Western policy on this subject has spectacularly failed to be convincing (ie Russia, China, India, Brazil, S Africa and many other non-Western big hitters firmly not recognising Kosovo independence on principle)?

Anyway, did I say buy it via the Amazon link above? Go on. You know you want to.

But better not if you're a Serb.

Most readers of this website are interested in one way or another in 'foreign affairs'.

As I have described on different occasions here, the heart of international diplomacy is the state. That idea in its modern form emerged from the Peace of Westphalia. Here are some passages from my 2009 DIPLOMAT article on this subject:

A vital date in the history of the modern world is 1648. That was when the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster were signed. All readers of DIPLOMAT know these treaties off by heart. They together are more usually known as the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War within the Holy Roman Empire and the even more geriatric Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

The negotiation of those two treaties invented modern grand scale diplomatic junketing. Haggling meandered on for six years. Over 100 different delegations of states, ‘imperial states’ from the Holy Roman Empire and interest groups (today known as NGOs) jostled for good outcomes, all on generous expenses.

The Two Treaties were mainly about settling Europe’s violent religious differences. But in doing so they set up new principles of sovereignty, under which the rulers of ‘nation states’ agreed to manage their relationships in a peaceful or at least civilised way. As democracy slowly came to qualify the power of those rulers, such sovereignty was seen as lying not with the national leader but rather in the ‘nation’. Which opened the way for ‘nation states’ to emerge as independent actors on the international stage.

Hence two tricky questions, still alive and well today:

·         how does a defined territory join this grand process (ie what is a ‘state’)?

·         which people join this grand process (ie what is a ‘nation’?)?

... Meanwhile Yugoslavia too had broken up. That hard question at the heart of Westphalianism – nation or state? - posed itself in acute form

Should the rest of us recognise the former internal borders of the USSR and Yugoslavia as the borders of the new countries concerned? Or should we negotiate border changes in some cases, better to reflect the principle of self-determination? Who or what should be sovereign? 

... The West looked at Slovenia (predominantly Slovene-populated, borders mainly not contested) and decided to have its cake and eat it. Slovenia handily ticked both boxes: internal borders as new international borders, and self-determination.

Which was fine for Slovenia. But not for Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro or Serbia, the other five republics in communist Yugoslavia each with different ethnic/national identity tensions. Not to mention the sizeable category of ‘Yugoslavs’ – people not identifying themselves with one or other ethnic community...

You know the rest. Calamity. War. Refugee columns.  Ethnic cleansing. War crimes. ICTY. NATO bombing. In today’s Europe! Dayton. Rambouillet. More NATO bombing. Kosovo run by the UN. Milosevic sent to ICTY and dies in prison. Kosovo declares independence in 2008, but is still not recognised by the majority either of countries or of the world’s population.

... Diplomacy. Building on what exists (ie racial, ethnic, religious tensions going back centuries) and accept that Good Fences make Good Neighbours? As we (HMG/West) did in accepting the break-up of what remained of Yugoslavia into Serbia + Kosovo + Montenegro?

Or building towards what we insist has to exist, hoping to compel people to cooperate nicely within single state frameworks which they dislike and distrust, as we (HMG/West) have done in Bosnia?

Two utterly different philosophies and policies, applied to places a few miles apart, which for eighty years were in one country.

Foolish Consistency? Or Foolish Inconsistency?

From Westphalia to West failure?

Now a new book by Norman Davies is coming out: Vanished Kingdoms. It looks at how the ebb and flow of history builds, removes and sometimes (Poland; Montenegro) restores polities.

Here at Browser is a super interview with Professor Davies, who as usual is on lively, challenging form:

People who have their eye on short-term, contemporary events and the world around us tend to forget this. I sometimes think they imagine the world politic to be a chessboard, where you play games, have a crisis, and then you put all the pieces back and have another game. Well it’s not like that. You can have a chessboard, you have players who are either pawns or kings or whatever, but the players themselves are always changing...

At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it. There’s a final siege and the Turks go over the wall. The last emperor – number 156 or whatever – disappears in the fray, is killed, and that’s the end of the empire. This is, if you like, the guidebook to this story, to exactly what Rousseau is saying. No matter how powerful they may look, the time will come, as in the lives of men and women, when they die. It’s not a topic that people are eagerly looking at...

And the indigenous population of the region where Glasgow is – Strathclyde, as it’s called now – was Welsh. The chief hero of medieval Scotland was William Wallace. Wallace means Welsh. The Scots don’t tell you that. They had this theory that William Wallace’s family came from Shropshire, which is how they try to explain how a Welshman could be in what they thought of as Scotland. They didn’t know that these Welsh of the north were not intruders from Wales, they were there long before the Scots...

Part of the afterlife of the Soviet Union is, of course, in Putin’s brain. Putin is ex-KGB, an organisation founded to preserve the Soviet state which failed completely. Putin must have a terrible sense of failure. In fact, he has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of modern times. So sure, Putin, in the back of his mind, would like to reassemble if not the Soviet Union, then some sort of empire, a broader Russian-dominated grouping which would be a modern version of the Soviet Union. I don’t think he’s got a cat’s chance in hell...

And finally:

Is there a European identity strong enough to overcome the national identities of its member states? It’s touch and go. But I’m an optimist. I think there will be one hell of a crisis. I doubt if the EU will disappear, but it will be severely chastened. And it will have to put its house in order. Otherwise it will become one of the vanished kingdoms. It wouldn’t be unprecedented for that to happen.

Read the whole thing. It's crackling with wisdom and interest.

Then order the book (on Kindle too):

Anyway, here I am marooned in Vienna Airport yet again. I can't blame Austrian Airlines for this one, even though I flew here thereon. Fog at Heathrow did for me, so I missed my connection to Podgorica. Armed with a €12 voucher for nourishment I am frittering away some eight hours here waiting for a flight to Belgrade and then on to Montenegro late tonight.

Remember that song 'Vienna' by Ultravox? I think it was about the departure lounge here.

Sigh.

This is being typed on my new amazing MacBook Air laptop, by the way. So it may look a bit different when published. My attempt to use Dragon Voice Recognition software to dictate my work foundered immediately on the background noise here in the cafe. I could have tried using my iPhone as a microphone, but then I'd drain down what's left of my battery.

The past couple of hours have been spent working on a letter to the FCO offering various ways in which the Foreign Secretary's call for a new emphasis on Diplomatic Excellence might be prosecuted.

It's one thing demanding Excellence - quite another finding ways to enable the FCO to identify then deliver it. Luckily help is at hand, in the form of www.adrgambassadors.com.

This, if I ever get there, will be my first visit back to Montenegro since 2003. As senior Montenegro officials have pointed out to me with some vim, it was more than unfortunate that various senior British diplomats (including myself) ended up not only with a doomed policy opposing Montenegro's independence but also in effect siding with rumpen lumpen local Milosevicists in the process.

This is an interesting story with lots of lessons in Diplomatic Technique (though, it must be said, probably not Excellence) about which I need to write sometime.

In essence, after the fall of Milosevic in 2000 Robin Cook and almost all other Foreign Ministers round the planet took the view that the Balkans did not need a new round of instability and even more Balkanisation. It seemed more than perverse that clever Montenegro leader Milo Djukanovic had supported anti-Milosevic policies while within what was left of the former Yugoslavia framework, yet sought a divorce from democratic Belgrade as soon as Milosevic fell.

Plus up the road in Bosnia the 'international community' was grappling with the problems of managing a country when a sizeable proportion of its own citizens seemed unwilling to support or even respect it (a struggle still continuing 16 years after the Dayton Accords were signed). Might not the large Serbian minority in Montenegro actively resist Montenegro's proposed separation from Serbia? Where would all this leave Kosovo?

So the policy emerged of maintaining Serbia and Montenegro (and somehow or other Kosovo, or not) in a new sui generis 'state union'. But in the coming years it crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions.

Tiny Montenegro became independent once again, much to the oppression of the English football team.

So back there I go, this time on a private business mission. It will be fascinating to see a bit more of how they are doing - the potential for such small countries in Europe is immense if they get the policy mix just right (not admittedly an easy task).

Luckily Vienna airport has free wifi (unlike the rubbish Boingo Hotspot at Heathrow) allowing me to download speedily to my iPad a truly awful Japanese mayhem movie about crazed robotic geisha girls and sundry monsters that stomp through Japanese cities smashing buildings and producing impossibly gushing fountains of fake blood when they do so. So that's the next stop. Should put me in just the right frame of mind for Belgrade airport departure lounge later this evening...

I have written here before about the way the BBC defaults towards glossing over collectivist crimes and damning with faint praise the success of market-based solutions. Or slips in other strange invariably Lefty assumptions via sly editing.

A handy compilation of a few horrors:

-   Sneaky use of inverted comma qualification to suggest a phony detachment/objectivity

-   blandly reporting Islamist extremism as if the dilemmas these evil people face are normal

-   breaking its own rules against advertising by advertising communist babes

-   using plucky sporting metaphors to describe tyrants

-   simply making things up at the height of a crisis to boost ratings and by implication damn reformers

It is beyond debate that the BBC does this not because there is a secret nerve-centre of Leftists controlling output, but rather because the whole intellectual culture of the organisation tilts in a specific way to make many reporters and presenters simply unaware of the crude biases they are showing.

Take two new examples.

Here is an especially chilling one. Paul Crook worked for 30 years(!) at the BBC World Service describing his life in Mao's China. His communist parents themselves get horrendously persecuted. But he doesn't lose faith! And he gets a nice fat space on the BBC World website to propagate his own humiliation (my emphasis):

We thought my father would be released within a few days, in a few weeks. We had all been educated to think that things were getting better all the time, but sometimes there would be mistakes. One of the slogans at that time was: 'You should trust the Masses, and trust the Party!' 

... My mother was repeatedly summoned for questioning and eventually she too disappeared...

We were anxious about what had happened to our parents, but we weren't eaten up by anger or worry, as we were brought up to believe that if you were innocent then this would be proved in due course.

Meanwhile my parents' friends gave us care and encouragement, and the official position towards young people whose parents were in trouble was that they could still be educated 'to take the right path'.

... In the end my mother was freed after just over three years of lock-up on the university campus. My father was released from prison after five years, much of it spent in solitary confinement. He and my mother were later exonerated of any wrongdoing, and received an official apology.

My parents were never physically abused in all the time they were locked up, but it was a trying time, to say the least. They were sustained by their belief that all this upheaval was part of an attempt to create a better society... 

Like many of my friends I grew to be rather sceptical, to be critical of what people's stated intentions were, and what their grand visions entailed.

My father said when he was locked up, he did think it was a mistake and wondered how he could clear his name. When he came out he found that many of his Chinese colleagues had gone through very similar experiences.

And he was reconciled to the fact that the leadership was making an earnest effort to get rid of these abuses. He had lost five years of his life in prison but he didn't see why he should change his ideals.

Isn't that staggering? Imagine the BBC giving all that space to a slave who had ended up being brainwashed and describes how his slavery was 'all for the best'?

This family have been relatively lucky in not being murdered by the Mao regime, yet they also suffered mightily for nothing. And they still retained their 'ideals' and their belief in the leadership's 'earnestness' in stopping 'abuses'.  No sign at all of any thinking that the sort of undemocratic elitist system they believed in might inevitably create such crimes?

*pauses, lost for words* 

What sort of evil ideas did wretched Paul Crook emit into the world's airways on UK taxpayers' money during his long years at the BBC World Service?

That example shows furtive pro-communist propaganda. This next one shows furtive anti-market propaganda: Has Western capitalism failed?

Note the fact that this very question is asked. The five 'experts' are indeed all prominent enough and give a range of more or less coherent responses. Indeed, they even manage to find a sassy Ghanaian entrepreneur who praises 'Western capitalism in its truest form' as well as Lord Desai:

Russian capitalism is somewhat old and in need of urgent repair, but the spirit of capitalism - risk-taking, saving, investing, hard work - all those virtues have now migrated and are happily ensconced in China, India, Indonesia, Korea and Japan - the countries which we never thought would ever get out of poverty.

Western capitalism probably had half a century of over-indulgence - continued prosperity, full employment, almost guaranteed growth - and that in its turn meant that our costs went up and manufacturing industry migrated abroad, while finance has proved to be a fickle friend.

We will have to rethink our model, our values, we will have to acquire old-fashioned virtues, because capitalism is not going to go any time fast. If Asia has vigorous energetic capitalism and we have tired old capitalism, we will end up paying a huge price and we will trade our prosperity for their prosperity.

Socialism died 20 years ago - capitalism lives on. It changes its form, it migrates, it is fully global. Now we at last understand what globalisation means - it means we are just as important as anyone else. If we don't work very hard, we will lose our importance.

Against them are pronouncements comparing capitalism to slavery, and mystic meanderings from Professor Tim Jackson:

Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. Yet question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival...

Living well is about good nutrition, decent homes, access to good quality services, stable communities, satisfying employment. Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the word, transcends material concerns. It resides in our love for our families, the support of our friends, the strength of our communities, our ability to participate fully in the life of society, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.

Which takes us back to Communist China. Where the regime imposed poverty upon almost a billion people, but where now, thanks directly to capitalist growth, prosperity and freedom are now advancing strongly.

So the real question for the BBC is: Has Western socialism failed? Since most of the people living even now on less than $2 a day are the victims of governing undemocratic regimes which in one way or the other Western socialism has feted for decades.

Will that question ever be asked prominently on the BBC website?

No.

I am entranced not only by the sound of my voice, but also by the sight of it.

Here once again is my contribution to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, describing my long and ever-fascinating diplomatic career.

Many points of interest here, including on South Africa's not-so-peaceful transition away from apartheid to ANC-dominated democracy:

I had a huge row on this with someone in Warsaw years later. I can even tell you who it was, because no-one will ever read the transcript. It was David King, the former Government Chief Scientist.

It turned out he was from South Africa. We were sitting there in Warsaw having a lunch talking about science policy and global warming and he said – I’m really pleased to be here in Poland, because I come from South Africa. Poland like South Africa had a peaceful transition to democracy.

I said Poland wasn’t that peaceful because quite a few people were killed, but South Africa’s wasn’t peaceful at all. He said – What do you mean it wasn’t peaceful? I said – Thirty thousand people were killed. Hacked to pieces and burned alive.

He said – That’s just ridiculous. I said – It may be inconvenient, and it may be that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but it strikes me as a bit thick to call South Africa a peaceful transition. It just wasn’t peaceful. If 30,000 Poles had been killed we’d have heard about it. Poland had Father Popieluszko and one or two others, and that’s about it.

 Anyway we had this absurd row, with the Poles watching like that Hitchcock film called Strangers on a Train where all the heads are turning to and fro at the tennis match. Eventually we declared the end of hostilities and changed the subject.

I went back to the Embassy and got on to London and said – How many people died in the transition away from apartheid? And the answer was - over that period – seven or eight years period – what you could define the transition as – 30 to 40, 000 known deaths – those sort of numbers. There was basically a civil war going on in different parts of South Africa among the blacks. But the so-called peaceful transition took place because few if any whites were massacred. Anything else was sort of weird unimportant African stuff.

And so your question; was it successful? Well, how do you measure success? I met a woman once whose twin sister had been necklaced by the ANC. She was a PAC supporter. The world let loose revolutionary terror in the townships and the World Council of Churches and these people did nothing about it. In fact if anything they encouraged it and Winnie Mandela with her matchbox – it was disgusting. There were crucifixions going on in the townships just a mile or two away from the Embassy in Pretoria. (Tape change)

CC ... So the question is, how do you measure success? We brought to power a government, an ANC Party, whose subsequent incompetence has led to the more or less winding down of the best electricity system in Africa because of lack of investment.

But above all – according to the Harvard study which came out the other day – 300,000 people have died over the AIDS problem who maybe needn’t have died. Now this is a tremendous disaster, and it’s sort of tucked away on page 3 somewhere, so hideously embarrassing it is that the ANC government has led to this result. It goes beyond any measure.

In the last ten years we’ve had a Labour government, a lot of whom invested hugely, personally, in the anti-apartheid struggle. Tony Blair, Robin Cook – this was one of the big moments of their life and there was a big moral campaign, and for them the ANC are for all practical purposes above criticism. And we’ve sat there watching 300,000 people die because of mistaken policies which we all knew were a farce.

I saw in the paper the other day the government are giving £50 million to South Africa who’s now got a new health minister, to deal with this AIDS problem. It’s the mother of all shutting the stable door after the horses have bolted and died. I’m pleased to say if you type in South Africa peaceful transition into Google, my website dumping on the peaceful transition comes up on the front page at number 3. So the truth is out there somewhere.

Or try this spirited passage on the transition (or not) from communism in Russia. Should we have insisted that Lenin be removed from Red Square?

... People say now this was a failure of shock therapy. The trouble was there wasn’t enough shock, and there wasn’t enough therapy. If anything, we should have been more radical in some of the things we’d done in terms of upsetting the old order and breaking up the old monopolies. We certainly should have been more radical in pressing for Lenin to be taken out of Red Square. It was a moral blunder not to press for that.

 

MM Could we have got away with that?

 

CC You could only get away with it only if you decided it was important. I think there was a feeling of – Oh well – Leftism in that form is over, so why bother pushing it?

 

If you get on my website again you’ll see reference to my telegram about a tale of two vampires. The Nazi vampire was killed at the end of the Second World War. The Communist vampire wasn’t killed. It lies there in Red Square but no-one’s driven a stake through its heart, and it just keeps coming back.

 

Leftism in the Foreign Office and western thinking generally, it’s a profound thing. The idea that you should drive a stake through the heart of communism ... people would say – Well why? Why are you being so divisive? It’s all over. They didn’t realise you had to kill it off. And Mrs Thatcher would have been much better on this, because by then John Major had come in. He wasn’t one of nature’s stake-drivers. He probably would have agreed with it, but he wasn’t somebody who was going to push it.

 

MM Well I suppose you could say what’s it got to do with us?

 

CC What it’s got to do with us is that we have to kill vampires. Otherwise they return through the back door. As indeed they’ve done.

 

So there were decisions made which were not dramatic enough. There were issues about the Katyn massacre in Poland which Yeltsin pushed – but we didn’t really take them up thematically. Because there was always a feeling – Well we don’t want to do this, in case it provokes the opposition to Yeltsin. It was odd. We pulled our punches, but the argument against doing what I wanted was that you can only do so much and we were all working flat out.

 

I still think there wasn’t a big enough ideological component. A lot of western governments didn’t want to gloat, be seen to be gloating, and maybe there’s somewhere between gloating and being much more determined. When the Second World War ended we organised all these conferences at Wilton Park on de-Nazification. We didn’t do de-Communistification, or whatever the word would be. Because we didn’t think we needed to.

 

MM Where would it have got us?

 

CC It might have got us to a lot of good places if you brought a lot of these people across and taught them about the rule of law. Don’t forget in Russia they’ve got no living memory of anything other than communism. In Eastern Europe it’s different.

 

What you said makes my very point. It wouldn’t have got us anywhere, why bother, it’s too big and it’s too complicated. My point is, this is one of the greatest intellectual convulsions in modern history and we tried to do it on the cheap. The Know How Fund was what, fifty million, a hundred million over eight years – peanuts.

 

We gave quite a lot of money writing off debts which I suppose was theoretically real money, but in terms of the money we invested in transforming those societies, given the scale of what was needed and the scale of where they’d come from, it was just absurd. Just not up to the job. We saw this after Milosevic was killed in Serbia. We tried to do it on the cheap. Stupid. It was a bad investment.

There are moments when you invest a bit more money because they’re historical moments. There was opportunity to put thousands of people through courses, as opposed to tens or scores or hundreds of people through courses. It’s just a good investment and we didn’t have a leader who had a strategic vision in that sort of way. Plus there was other money around – it’s not our job – why should we bother – dah, dah, dah.

 

There’s always a reason for not doing anything, and slowly the moments pass. Years later you see Putinism there. One wonders if one had invested a bit more in pluralism, would we have quite ended up where we are now? Some say of course you would, because that’s all there is in Russia. Other people would say no – it would have made a difference. Personally, I would like to have seen us make a bigger effort...

Read the whole thing, as they say. My life and its contribution to the times.

I write little here about Israel/Palestine as I have little to say which countless others are not saying. Plus I don't have first-hand professional experience.

What is going on? Of course the Palestinians want to advance their claims and demands on all international fronts. Upping their status at the UN to that of an 'observer state' might help them launch new legal claims against Israel. But that would be far from straightforward - maybe even impossible in practice:

European countries worried about Palestinian access to the ICC blocked a Spanish-French proposal for nonmember observer status for Palestine, and there has even been discussion among Europeans about creating a new legal status for the Palestinians that would provide an upgrade in status but block potential access to the ICC and other international legal enforcement agencies.

Even if the Palestinians got nonmember state status at the U.N., which is the maximum they could achieve under the present circumstances, and were able to become party to the ICC, there are serious doubts about their practical ability to bring charges against Israel or Israeli officials. Any request for such charges would be more a diplomatic and political question than a legal one, and both the ICC and prosecutors would be subject to significant domestic and international political pressures that make it hard to imagine such a scenario actually unfolding...

Here is a neat account by former UK diplomat Carne Ross of the procedural goings-on in the fetid New York UN corridors aimed at shunting the issue into the long grass so that President Obama is not embarrassed into using a veto to block Palestine's UN membership. Note Carne's shrewd view on the Russia/China angle here - to get some PR 'progressive'/Arab credit but not do anything on the substance:

So far, only the US has declared its outright opposition to the membership application, but we can be confident that there will be others who will abstain on the vote, giving the US some political company and, perhaps, avoiding them having to veto (this will happen if the Palestinians cannot muster the 9 votes necessary to pass a resolution, thus forcing a veto if the US wants to stop it).  Germany and Colombia will abstain, and perhaps the UK too.  

Russia and China will support the Palestinian initiative but without sufficient vigour to take on the Americans in the Council.  They will be not be desperately unhappy if this gets blocked.  Their objective is to look good to the Arab world, and this objective is met by merely promising their support, and not by spending any serious political energy on it.

Meanwhile, the US is putting ferocious pressure on weaker non-permanent members like Bosnia.  This is a vicious nasty business: I have seen it done.  A number of diplomats have told me about the extremely aggressive pressure being put on them by US diplomats, including here at the UN.  But the pressure will also involve high-level phone calls from Hillary Clinton and the President, and others.  

This type of pressure is very, very difficult for weaker countries, who may be dependent on the US in some way or other (like Bosnia), to resist.  This is how power works.

Yup. If you want the privilege of being on the UN Security Council, you have to play hardball with the mean players who always hang around there.

I wonder how Bosnia will end up voting if it gets to a UNSC vote where Bosnia and Herzegovina is currently a member. The Muslim/Bosniac position will be to support Palestine, and the Bosnian Serbs will vote for the best available anti-Muslim option (in this case whatever suits Israel). Bosnian Croats anyone?

Likely BH position: abstain. All too difficult.

Many of my loyal readers know a few things about the Balkans. Relax. That probably does not make you bad people.

Here is a gripping analysis of the dreary political paralysis in Bosnia:

In theory, Bosnia’s constitution treats Croats as one of the country’s three constituent peoples, entitling them to representation equivalent to as much as a third of the positions in the country’s public institutions.

In reality Croats may represent only 10 per cent or less of the country’s current residents. Hence, quotas in theory reserved for Croat interests in practice may be expropriated by Bosniaks.

This happens when Bosniaks vote for Croat politicians sympathetic to the Bosniak position. Because there are far more Bosniaks than Croats, Bosniak votes carry the day over those of Croats and the officials occupying quotas reserved for Croats end up representing Bosniak, not Croat, points of view.

The country’s tripartite Presidency is the most glaring example of this outcome. Bosnia’s constitution provides for three presidents: a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. Since the country is ethnically partitioned into two entities, the Serb President is to be elected from Republika Srpska and the Bosniak and Croat presidents are to be elected from the Federation entity.

But 80 to 85 per cent of the population of the Federation is Bosniak. Thus, if a Bosniak political party fields a Croat candidate sympathetic to Bosniak goals, Bosniak votes may elect two members of the Presidency, Serb votes one and Croat votes none.

Huh? What's all this about?

Basically:

• the Dayton peace deal in 1995 set up a new BH constitution which unwisely rummaged around in the debris of Yugo-communist supposed constitutionality and factored in the idea of 'constituent peoples' (namely Bosniac/Muslims, Serbs, Croats and a rump category of Others) in a country comprising two 'entities'
• it further set up a joint three-person BH Presidency comprising a Serb elected from the territory of Republika Srpska (one entity), plus a Bosniac and Croat elected from the territory of the Federation (the other entity)

This scheme is trivially discriminatory (ie Croats living in RS or Serbs living in the Federation can not run for President - Others are nowhere). The  European Court of Human Rights a mere 15 years later said that these provisions were unacceptable.

Fine. Now what?

The problem (as the logical Afrikaners worked out) is that it is impossible to run apartheid-style classifications for eligibility to office without the supporting legislation defining the classifications and how people fit into them. In other words, unless you have laws defining who is (say) a Croat and who can vote for 'Croats, anyone can claim to be a Croat and anyone can vote for him/her.

This opens the way to some Bosniacs voting for a 'moderate' Croat, thereby pushing out the candidate of the 'true' Croats supported by the majority of Bosnian Croats. As Matthew Parish explains above, this happens because the absolute number of Croats in the country is relatively small.

You might say that if the Croats have only something like a tenth of the BH population they should not complain too much about which Croat gets a senior position. You might be right.  

But because the whole Dayton deal is lop-sided (the Serbs get 'their' entity but the Bosniacs and Croats have to share an 'entity'), the RS leadership can play upon these illogicalities in the Federation to create a mess. Note that the Bosniacs/Croats can not do similarly muddy the voting waters in RS - their absolute numbers in RS are insufficient to stop a candidate strongly favoured by a large bloc of Serbs prevailing. 

All of which points up a vivid drama at the heart of democracy. Which voting system gives a respectably representative and thereby legitimate and sustainable outcome?

Clearly some sort of proportional voting arrangement would have been better, but that cuts through 'equality' for all ethnic communities. Had the three ethnic communities not been guaranteed equal shares of the three-person Presidency and other arrangements linking group identities to political power, the Dayton deal would have been far harder to strike.

The other way of doing things was, of course, to have three entities* - one for each community - in some sort of confederative structure. This would have been sensible and principled: each community would get some sort of territorial reassurance in return for accepting the wider structure. See eg Switzerland.

This never got going. The largest group (Bosniacs) were totally opposed to what they saw as further fragmentation, plus the deal to set up the Federation (ie an alliance of Bosniacs and Croats against Serbs) had been a fleeting triumph of US/German foreign policy when the Bosnian conflict was raging. 

The above article mentions that D Holbrooke master-minded Dayton and was a great champion of RS politician Dodik. As we all were at the time (1997/98) - he was a huge improvement on Karadzic.

But the stalemate now in Bosnia also can be attributed to the flat refusal of Holbrooke before Dayton to listen to anything which might have qualified US planning, which basically was more about Clinton's re-election timetable than anything else. 

Get some small but vital things wrong and watch how the consequences compound up and up years later. Did I mention the Eurozone?

* PS: by the way, if any Brit proposes a BH constitution that might actually work and be more or less fair, that person has no chance of being put forward by the FCO as a candidate for EU Ambassador in Sarajevo.

Боже, Боже. 

Here is my latest LSE book review of a tome exploring the exotic world of rumours - how they spread, what they mean, and what might be done about them:

The Global Grapevine: Why Rumours of Terrorism, Immigration and Trade Matter.

Gary Alan Fine and Bill Ellis, OUP 2010

My basic point:

The authors do a spirited job in making sense of this mass of (by definition) confusing and inconsistent material, arguing that successful rumours are both plausible and credible -’too good to be false’. They draw terse insights: “rumours are often wrong, but they are rarely insane”; “an effort to halt the circulation of a rumour based on a conspiracy theory, paradoxically, demonstrates that it is true”; “rumour allows us to discuss hidden fears and desires without claiming these attitudes as our own”.

So far so good. But the book is much less convincing where it moves on from describing/analysing rumours to trying to explain why they ‘matter’ and what if anything might be done about them...

The book peters out in a series of platitudes. “Rumours are not easily mastered”; we should “question claims which seem too good to be false”, moving past “stereotypical thinking” to “recognize our strengths as a society” and “determine cautiously and carefully which forms of globalization strengthen us” (good luck with that one)...

My conclusion? Why focus on vanilla US conspiracy theories when there are such luscious, ripe Balkan ones:

For the best conspiracy theories the authors need to get on down to former Yugoslavia.

In Sarajevo one school of thought has it that the European Union makes very clear that Muslims are unwelcome in Christian Europe.

The evidence? The EU’s yellow star-circle logo, obviously representing the halo above the Virgin Mary.

Julian Borger at the Guardian has written a long and well-sourced piece about the hunt for Bosnian war crimes suspects. It even quotes me a couple of times (no great surprises for diligent readers of this site).

The key policy dilemma point is here, tucked away in the middle of the article:

While deciding to go after the criminals, the Nato powers had chosen the more cautious course of going after the smaller fry first, on the grounds that they would be less well-protected, a decision many later regretted because it allowed the bigger fish to go into hiding

In most if not all situations there is a spectrum of policy outcome options, ranging from Utterly Awful to Deliriously Wonderful. Politicians and officials know that they really don't want the former and are unlikely to get the latter, so they settle for a range of options somewhere in the middle.

The thing to understand is that within that range of options (which usually is all about balancing risks and short-term v longer-term likely upsides/downsides of different choices) reasonable people might disagree on where the 'right' choice is, but also agree that another point in that range is in itself a reasonable choice, all things considered.

So in Bosnia in 1996 our leaders had a very tricky operational decision to take.

Do they try to arrest the biggest ICTY indictees first? Upside: they deal with the worst suspects immediately, encouraging lesser suspects to surrender. Downside: the biggest fish are well protected and likely to resist - the operation might go wrong and prompt wider protests which could destabilise the peace process itself.

Or do they go for 'lesser' indictees, get some easy runs on the scoreboard and then work their way briskly up towards the biggest fish? Upside: less risky, therefore more chance to plan harder operations in the light of experience - unlikely to rock the peace process. Downside: suggests lack of resolve - the biggest fish may go underground and make life very difficult as we try to catch them.

In other words, once it was decided in principle to arrest ICTY indictees, all sorts of non-trivial policy and operational issues then presented themselves.

As Julian Borger describes, the steady-as-she-goes cautious option prevailed (as it usually does): 'lesser' indictees first. 

But the predictable (if not quite predicted) result of that was the bizarre spectacle of Karadzic and Mladic evading arrest for a startling 14 or so years, even though they were lurking in the Serbia/Bosnia/Montenegro area.

I don't recall being consulted about the pros and cons of arresting Big v Lesser ICTY indictees first. My instinct, I think (hope), would have been to go for some pretty Big ones, as that would send a signal of determination precisely because it was more 'risky'. But I was pleased when the decison was taken to start arresting lesser indictees, and then delighted when the first operation finally unfolded, even though the ICTY indictee concerned, a Serb called Simo Drljaca, died when resisting arrest by the SAS.

This first operation was notable also because the mad Bosniac/Muslim media in Sarajevo quickly denounced it as a typical British pro-Serb plot, designed to rally Republika Srpska opposition to Dayton by making Drljaca a martyr. These ravings played into the background to Robin Cook's first dramatic visit to Sarajevo in 1997.

Anyway, all ICTY indictees have been taken to The Hague to face justice. The whole process has been staggeringly expensive and in many ways deeply unsatisfactory. 

Yet through ICTY the facts of the former Yugoslavia conflict have been aired and argued about in stunning detail. If anything the unfairness of the process lies in the fact that it was too narrow: many senior Bosniacs and Croats with a case to answer - including Izetbegovic and Tudjman themselves - were never called upon to explain themselves and answer serious accusations against them.

Still. Rough justice better than no justice?

Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina - the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the 'international community' to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise 'move forward' the 'peace process'?

The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers had no real legal basis at all. They amounted to an international political power-play bluff which successive High Representatives wrapped up in legal language to make the whole thing look imposing and inevitable.

And they worked, for many years. Senior BH politicians and officials were indeed sacked. Yet the perverse if unsurprising result of sacking people whose elections we had proclaimed to be free and fair was only a diminished sense of local responsibility for real-life outcomes, rather than enhanced effort. Inat?

Thus familiarity bred contempt. Sooner or later a direct legal challenge to these 'powers' was going to be mounted somewhere.

The whole idea of these 'powers' (not granted under the Dayton Peace Treaty) was at best ambiguous. The more they were used, the more likely they were to become counter-productive: they amounted to an arbitrary use of power with no serious legal checks and balances.

Matthew Parish is a lawyer who knows the BH situation from first hand. Here is a trenchant essay decribing how the current HiRep Valentin Inzko is quietly demolishing all the powers, many of which were abused in a grotesque way:

Mass dismissals became common shows of force. High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch dismissed 12 people (and imposed 24 laws and amended the constitutions of both Entities) in his last two days in office. Ashdown dismissed some 58 officials on one day in June 2004.

The so-called “Bonn powers”, named after the international conference that created them, became used with increasing frequency and capriciousness.

Some of the most repellent exercises of this unrestrained authority took place quite late. In July 2007 High Representative Miroslav Lajcak accused a hitherto obscure official Dragomir Andan, then Deputy Head of Police Education in Republika Srpska, of supporting Radovan Karadzic, fired him from office, confiscated his identity documents (and those of 90 other people) and ordered the police to investigate him.

In September of the same year his Deputy, Raffi Gregorian, fined a Brcko District parliamentarian two months’ salary for making an obscene gesture on television.

Bosnia’s Constitutional Court, despairing of the gross failures of due process and right to a fair trial inherent in OHR’s methods, declared that the Bosnian courts should review OHR’s decisions. OHR annulled its judgment and threatened any judge with the same sanctions should (s)he seek to implement the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

What was intended to be a deft tool for removing crude senior trouble-makers after all else had failed became a clumsy and quite illegitimate bludgeon.

The issue now becomes stark(er): can Bosnia and Herzegovina survive in its current form if this threat, clumsy as it was, is removed, allowing Bosnia's Serbs and Croats to express their objections to the Dayton peace deal all the more assertively?

It's easy to be pessimistic:

In lifting OHR’s remaining bans, Inzko has quietly conceded that OHR no longer has the moral authority to dismiss people from public office or to punish them by international decree. An educated and civilised advocate of European values, he considers the use of these powers out of place in a modern democracy.

In taking this decent stance he deserves to be praised in the highest degree, because his embrace of principle is likely to subject him to significant attacks. Abdication of the Bonn powers confirms there is now no domestic tool to prevent Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats from pursuing their secessionist goals.

Bosnia and Herzegovina may collapse over the coming months, and the international community will shortly find it convenient to blame Inzko. We will hear expressions of despair about his weak leadership and lack of resolve in letting Dodik push the country to the brink of failure.

The period of proconsulship is now over, and the international community will need a scapegoat for the fact that its labours over the last 15 years have proven to be for naught. The Americans in particular will inveigh over European weakness, refusing to countenance that their heavy-handed model of state-building, pioneered by Richard Holbrooke in reconstructing Bosnia and Kosovo, has proven unsuccessful.

Instead we are getting a turbo-boosted EU 'Embassy', armed with lots of long-term carrots and no sticks. Soft power!

This soft power strategy carries its own dangers. It risks underestimating the depth of inter-ethnic animosity, which may impede meaningful political cooperation whatever the external incentives. It also assumes a maturity to Bosnian democracy – in which the electorate can be expected to vote for the outcome most economically beneficial to them – which so far has proven absent.

The most desirable solution for the future of Bosnia may be as a radically decentralised state which maintains formal unitary sovereignty only in name. The Scottish, Swiss and Northern Irish models all may provide insights in this regard. But such an approach would entail dismantling many of the institutions of central government that OHR previously created.

If the EU tries to resist this course, then it may perpetuate political crisis in much the same way as OHR has done and its soft power will prove uninfluential.

We are on the brink of a profound change in the international community’s attitudes towards Bosnia. Bosniaks will not like it, because they perceive the authority of OHR to have been exercised mostly in their interests. Croats and Serbs will welcome it because they will be able to advance their agendas ...

International officials cannot credibly exhort domestic politicians to observe the bedrock standards of European governance set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, if they do not see fit to submit to those standards themselves.

That last point must be right.

More generally, the BH model gives all sorts of insights into what works and what does not in internationally-sponsored 'nation-building'. In particular, it points to what I call front-loading for success, taking radical action in the early days of any intervention to remove senior extremists from positions of influence so ass to empower (and be seen to empower) more moderate and constructive local forces. The absurdly extended hunts for Karadzic/Mladic show how idiotic and off-balance things get if this is not done.  

But will anyone bother to learn those lessons and apply them next time round? Of course not.

As always, these things boil down to some simple propositions. In this case, how to make work a new European state when something like half the population would, on the whole, rather not be in it?

Ha ha ha!

Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings!

This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, Abhazija (sic), Tajikistan, Chad, Israel and Guatemala. Russian diplomats get extra money - a 20% pay uplift - for the additional stress of working in such ghastly places!

The reason given is that Serbia is a greater conflict risk because of Kosovo. Serbia's Foreign Minister is quoted as complaining that Serbia can not be placed at 'this level', whatever its difficulties might be.

Quite right! Given the gushing reception which greets Russian diplomats in Belgrade, they should jolly well take a pay CUT for the sheer pleasure of going there.

Of course, say the Russians, this is not a 'political' decision. Yet as we know, in wily Russian diplomacy nothing is linked - but everything is linked...

Well, we all have to save the ENVIRONMENT, don't we? Huh? Huh?

Which means going GREEN, right?

Let's hear it for the Continental Hotel in Serbia, deservedly famous for having hosted the murder of Arkan in early 2000. The wifi does not work (much) and the water goes off in the night.

But at least they have taken the idea of Going Green to just the right level of spiritual and political correctness when it comes to their own furniture.

A snappy young Serbian woman with two degrees from universities in the USA comes back to Belgrade to live and work. She gets a good job in a major Serbian bank on the corporate communications side.

She gives a presentation to the bank top brass on how the bank can transform its working methods and effectiveness by using new technology. General delight and applause - they're all impressed.

But after the presentation one of the senior bank executives comes up to her and says "You know, all that clever stuff will never work here. When people look at the sky they tread in dog-shit." She, startled, asks him to repeat his words. He does so.

Next day she hands in her resignation - she won't stay in a place with such foul people and such an attitude to reform, self-improvement and growth.

Serbia loses - again.

* * * * *

Thus it was that yesterday I found myself at the Belgrade Forum For The (sic) World Of Equals conference, an event supposed intended to discuss the prospects for European Security after the USA, Russia, French and other elections in 2012.

The Belgrade Forum is the place where old Milosevic supporters go to die. It is lead by Zivadin Jovanovic, a friendly but formalistic Yugo-communist career diplomat who achieved the anti-distinction of ending up as Milosevic's Foreign Minister after Milosevic was indicted by ICTY.

The Forum champions turgid pseudo-analytical ideas such as this:

Internal democracy is inconceivable without democracy in international affairs, and vice versa. It would be a sad future for the mankind if internal one should be based on the principle of hierarchy instead of the principle of democracy! As early as at the low-level economic, technologic, democratic and cultural development, the society chose to discard rubber-stamping and dictate as the means of the retrograde politics.

Certainly, there is no rationale to revive such theories and efforts, such as, for instance, is the theory on “limited sovereignty” and the like. For example, which Western European or North American country would accept an open interfering in its electoral process in the name of globalization and “new notions of sovereignty and territorial integrity”?

... Belgrade Forum strongly condemns any discrimination and double standards, be it in the area of human rights or any other areas, and endorses full observance of both international and national law.

I particularly cherish the idea that Internal democracy is inconceivable without democracy in international affairs, and vice versa. What this actually means is an extreme 'relativisation' of any sort of principles - that any nasty little dictatorship has exactly the same moral validity and international standing as a normal democracy.

The logic is something like this:

• all states are equal under international law - the votes of brutalised human rights dustbins such as Zimbabwe, Syria and Cuba are as politically - and morally - significant as the votes of Finland, Canada and Poland when it comes to setting the rules of global order, including (nay especially) human rights norms themselves
• therefore no state has the right to 'interfere' in another state's internal affairs
• therefore even if Milosevic was a monster (which of course he wasn't), that's no-one else's business but Serbia's
• because Milosevic's Serbia was democratic, see?
• and because we're so democratic, we can stop the majority of people of Kosovo voting to escape our benign, democratic rule even after we have treated them with semi-racist disdain for some fifty years

The conference duly lived up to these noble principles, with different Serbian speakers bewailing Serbia's fate at the hands of sundry 'aggressors'. But as the event had generous Russian sponsors, there was an added bonus - various Russian experts and other foreign speakers brought in, mainly to extol the virtues of Vladimir Putin!

These two themes combined in a creepy way. In one laboured presentation after another Serbian speakers gushed their praise of Russia's 'principled stand' and 'patriotic' strength and wisdom. The Russian experts (who being Russian experts evinced a certain steely professionalism and realism amidst the general embarrassment) beamed benignly at this painful sycophancy.

Part of the Russian argument about European security turned on what was said to be the growing role of the CSTO. This, for people not familiar with the politics of the former Soviet space, is a collective security organisation bringing together a number of former Soviet republics. The main political point of this organisation is to head off former republics joining NATO. Armenia has dutifully signed up, along with such otherwise likely NATO members as Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Tajikistan.

So question for Serbia. Should Serbia show how independent it truly is and join CSTO? And question for Russia - would you really want these strutting whiny Milosevic Serbs in this happy post-Soviet family photograph?

No-one really wanted to talk about this in any serious way, because of course it's not serious. But instead the thought was wafted round the conference room now and again, like an Orthodox priest swinging a malodorous thurible, to create a mood of naughty 'anti-imperialist' and anti-European defiance.

In this absurd setting it was impossible to say anything sensible. My modest contribution argued that the sprawling institutional legacy of the Cold War (OSCE, NATO, EU, CSTO, Helsinki accords and so on) was slowly losing authority, and that massed citizens power spurred by new technology was challenging political elites from below. Plus for most of the previous three centuries or so Europe (and Americanised Europeans) had defined the world - now the world was starting to define us. We all needed new ideas about what 'security' actually meant in these circumstances, based upon some shared positive values such as pluralism and transparency based on the 'consent of the governed'.

However, I also threw in for good measure the proposition that the Kosovo situation first and foremost had been a defeat for Belgrade policies, where 'Belgrade' represented the capital of Serbia, the policies of Milosevic and the general Serb worldview.

This trite thought provoked a lot of graceless spluttering noises from one Dragan Todorovic, a Serbian Radical Party MP. He then used his presentation to rave away about the glories of Russia and the CSTO, and attacked my cynicism and (yes!) double-standards:

His country defended the Falkland islands for the sake of the sheep, and he denies Serbia the right to defend Kosovo!

Nice one. Lost in his own bewildered burbling, he missed 100% the rather important policy point that a majority if not 100% of the Falklands population wanted to stay with the UK, whereas the great majority of Kosovo's population want to get away from Belgrade rule (and indeed from people like him). 

* * * * *

Conclusion?

Back in 1996 I told Republika Srpska leader Mrs Plavsic, later to serve time at ICTY for war crimes, that too many Serbs reminded me of people who stood on a busy motorway waving the traffic code and crying that everyone was driving too fast: "Good point, but you get run over!"

The sort of attitudes represented at this event yesterday represent complete doom for Serbia.

Look, Serbia. Please listen carefully. 'Ajde slušaj bre!

I agree with the broad proposition that the EU/USA did not really understand the dynamics of the former Yugoslavia, and did not have a clear plan for managing the reasonable and unreasonable expectations of the Serbs as the largest community in SFRY.

So Milosevic had some good points to make. But he time after time blew his opportunity to accept and work with potentially friendly partners by being stupid and violent. One Russian diplomat told me how he'd walked out in disgust after hours of idiotic wrangling and sheer nonsense with him.

The result now is a severely weakened and degraded Serbia - the Cost of Milosevic has compounded up to staggering levels. If that isn't a Belgrade policy failure, tell me what one is.

Yes, you're right. Much of the Western world imposed sanctions, then NATO bombed you. That didn't help. But why did this happen? Could it just possibly perhaps maybe have had a little something to do with Belgrade's policies? And, if so, what might you learn from that to do better next time?

Now what?

It's fine by the EU and NATO if you don't join either of us! Really. Especially if you don't join the EU: British taxpayers won't have to give you lots of free money.

Do what the hell you like. Join the CSTO or ASEAN or create a new progressive Union with Belarus, North Korea and Cuba. Whatever! Just do it. then accept the consequences of your own choices like an adult.

You're good fun when you want to be, but your problems and insecurities have long since ceased to matter much. And please don't hold back other former Yugoslavia communities - or even people in Vojvodina - who think that, frankly, Belgrade's neurotic political classes are just a bit too weird these days.

That said, if Serbia wants to have some self-respect and stop its young people resigning from good jobs and growing up in squalid corrupt towns and cities, try to adopt policies which create wealth and attract investment. Present at least some good ideas.

Sound positive! Friendly! Nice! Don't recycle exhausted Yugo-communist clichés, delivered by exhausted Yugo-communists.

And don't expect Putin-style Russians to care for you either. They know you're weak and demoralised. And that suits them just fine. They'll tend to look on you the way Stalin sneered at uppity Milovan Djilas and boasted about the way the Red Army raped its way down into Serbia:

The Russians will give you all sorts of glittering trophies, because they know finely to calibrate your impoverished expectations. Then they'll buy what's left of your industry for knock-down prices.

True Serbian glory. Achieved at last:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!

Two sljivovica-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right… He loved Big Brother.

Off to Belgrade tomorrow for a conference on Thursday hosted by the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals as supported by Russian partners. The theme is European Security in the Light of 2012 Elections.

Notable speakers include Dragan Todorovic of the Serbian Radical Party, whose programme asserts Serbia's rights over plenty of currently non-Serbia territory in former Yugoslavia. And James Jatras of the American Council for Kosovo which has what might politely be called firm paleoconservative views in favour of Kosovo staying part of Serbia.

The Belgrade Forum is strong on denouncing what it calls 'NATO's crimes' in former Yugoslavia. Plus it has the good luck to draw on the North Korean school of drafting when it sends fraternal messages to other organisations:

The leadership and members of the Belgrade Forum hold in highest regard our thriving cooperation, an outstanding level of our mutual friendship and the evident closeness in opinions on key issues, such as those concerning peace, security, democracy and overall progress.

So insofar as I am there to give a quixotic 'Western'/UK view of the emerging European scene, I can expect to be heavily outnumbered by different proud Slavophiliac tendencies. 

No matter:

The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one ...This day, we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a world brighter than anything we can imagine! To victory!!

I have written a piece for Financier Worldwide on the dark arts of negotiating in central and eastern Europe:

The implicit view is that it is the outcome, not process, which really counts, and that the value of different outcomes can be measured. However, based on my experience as a diplomat in Central and Eastern Europe, contractual or other relationships with businesses there need to factor in a very different way of looking at negotiation.

 

The Russian approach to diplomatic negotiations features an attitude to process far removed from the exquisitely reasonable style of British diplomacy. Moscow diplomats’ training makes this point: “Even if the other side proposes something you completely agree with, never make a move without getting something valuable for it.”

 

Russia typically wants to project strength as an end in itself. Part of any negotiation is balancing incentive-carrots with pressure-sticks: “If you accept our position, we guarantee you a positive outcome. If you refuse, we’ll make sure you get a very negative outcome”.

 

Russian negotiators aim to neutralise that approach by conveying a very different proposition: “It doesn’t matter how much you try to pressure us. First, we can withstand more pressure than you can possibly exert, or even imagine. Second, whatever you do to hurt us, we will do something far worse to hurt you.”

 

That approach emphasises hard practical outcomes, but reveals an attitude to process which is all about establishing psychological ascendancy as the basis for subsequent ‘pragmatic’ discussions. The very vocabulary of Soviet/Russian diplomacy has phrases conveying brooding depersonalised doom: “Negative consequences for your interests can not be excluded.”

Gripping stuff, based on unswervingly bold generalisations. But to read the rest, you’ll have to sign up…

Exhibit A: a superb article describing research which shows convincingly how the influence of the bureaucratic-cultural disciplines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire lives on in today's Europe. Thus:

Our results show that past formal institutions can leave a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms – even after some are generations of being governed by other authorities...

Comparing individuals living on either side of the long-gone Habsburg border within the same modern-day country, we find that respondents in a current household survey who live on former Habsburg territory have higher levels of trust in courts and police.

They are also less likely to pay bribes for these local public services, demonstrating that the institutional heritage influences not only preferences and unilateral decisions but also bilateral bargaining situations in citizen-state interactions.

... the cultural norms of behaviour are unlikely to have survived solely by intergenerational transmission within families. It rather seems that such channels as the persistent nature of continuous reciprocal interactions in local communities, the content of knowledge and behavioural patterns conveyed in schools, and the quality of human capital of bureaucrats and citizens may have also played a role.

This sort of thinking - that 'civilisational' characteristics and trends have an existence far beyond immediate day-to-day politics and even medium-term economic development - lay behind Sam Huntingdon's famous but controversial book 'The Clash of Civilisations'. 

Sweeping and brilliant and provocative as it was, fashionable opinion did not much like it: too pessimistic about human progress and with a scarcely hidden anti-Islamic tone (they said).

Yet for me as a Balkanite, much of whose professional life had been spent on and around the historic faultlines of imperial Europe, he was on to something very profound.

Drive up towards Sarajevo from the Croatian coast and almost within a few hundred metres there suddenly comes a point where you cross from Austro-Hungary into Ottoman. The landscape and its mood changes. The attitude to roadside tidiness, gardens, public and private property, trust in government - they are all just 'different'.

Likewise in Belgrade. On the 'main' side of the river you're on the edge of the greater Ottoman space. Across the river and on up into Vojvodina the landscape and 'society' visibly changes. Part of this is (it's said) directly and literally connected with differing imperial legacies: property rights tended to be codified under the Hapsburgs, whereas under the Ottomans land ownership was far less systematic and untransparent. The result today is that land and investment decisions are much harder in central and southern Serbia, which duly stays poorer.

The authors of the study rightly mention Poland. At the 2005 elections clear voting tendencies emerged which could be mapped neatly against the boundaries of Poland's areas when Poland was partitioned up to WW1. People in Poznan (long part of the Germanic civilisational space) titter at the unpunctuality and unbusinesslike sloppiness of people in Warsaw (long part of the Russian civilisational space). And so on.

Read the whole thing. Most impressive.

And then read Exhibit B, Megan McArdle on the grisly problems of the Eurozone:

Europe has two choices: tighter integration, or partial dissolution.  I agree, but I just don't see how the former can work.  The Irish and the Germans and the Portuguese and the Greeks do not identify with "Europe" the way 1930s Americans identified with "America"; neither group is going to readily sacrifice its own self-interest for the others.  

The elites have gotten around this so far by leaning heavily on unaccountable institutions like the central banks, but as Wolf shows, this cannot last forever. 

Unless their economies rapidly start to mend, continuing in the euro will be economic suicide for the PIIGS once the backdoor subsidies stop.  In this week's column, Robert Samuelson notes just how dire things are "Already, unemployment is 14.1% in Greece, 14.7% in Ireland, 11.1% in Portugal and 20.7% in Spain.

 

What are the limits of austerity? Steep spending cuts and tax increases do curb budget deficits; but they also create deep recessions, lowering tax revenues and offsetting some of the deficit improvement."  Add on top of this the drawbacks of an expensive currency and a tight monetary policy for a troubled economy, and they'd have to be crazy to stay...

And see the Eurozone’s problems. Millions of Greeks cry out: “How dare the state/government/EU take away our rights!” But by what moral or political principle can Greek ‘rights’ to receive subsidies take precedence over the rights of non-Greeks to choose not to pay them?

Conclusion?

Neither conservatives nor liberal-progressives in the West have any coherent philosophy helping them decide which institutions, organisations or even values should best be ‘conserved’ by collective action, or how best to do it by suppressing X’s free choice to uphold Y’s privilege. Instead we get little more than mutually abusive political squawking and improvisation which look increasingly and annoyingly detached from reality.

Perhaps in these profoundly unsettling times it is no surprise that the British public show such Euroscepticism counterpoised by general support for the Monarchy which, for all its silver stick flim-flams and illogicalities, represents our best collective hope for some minimal sense of psychological continuity and shared experience?

The fact is that for reasons which are almost impossible to identify and maybe are highly unpopular to articulate, some things 'fit' and some things don't. It looks increasingly as if the EU itself as currently constituted is not a viable fit - the expectations and attitudes in different parts of the EU are simply not manageable within the over-rigid, prescriptive top-down format we now have.

And the more our UK and EU elites tell the public that it is all for the best when it clearly isn't, the more a deep-seated public unease will grow across Europe in a populist and increasingly incoherent way.