Blogoir

One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers.

No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus on one or two of them to help the reader make sense of it all.

Likewise it is a good idea to take a single issue and use it to illustrate a wider point. Or to take a seemingly obscure but nonetheless interesting question and force it to the top of people's attention.

All these devices help achieve the basic rule of good (and therefore impactful) writing: if you want it to be read, make it readable.

One of the best examples from my own career came in early 2004, not long after I arrived in Warsaw from Belgrade. Poland was set to join the European Union. Colossal numbers of Poles were likely to start moving to and fro between Poland and the UK - we had decided to open our Labour market unconditionally, much to the utter disbelief of the Polish leadership.

Once those Poles started moving with the aim of getting richer faster, what would they get up to? I thought it worth analysing one possible source of income - illicit cigarettes.

Hence a telegram I sent to London warning them in very simple language that the UK's multi-billion pound problems with the informal cigarette market was about to get a whole lot worse overnight.

I did this by spelling out in the simplest possible terms the economics for the average Pole of informal cigarette-selling, even within legal limits.

This telegram wittily called Smoking Ants - Coming Our Way? caused a minor sensation in the Cabinet Office. Officials scrambled round to change the rules to limit the numbers of cigarettes which people from the new EU member states could bring into the UK duty-free.

And, thanks to the miracles of Freedom of Information, I am pleased to share this telegram with you today. The FCO cheekily cut out a line or two on the grounds that UK relations with Poland might be adversely affected(!). But otherwise it's just as I drafted it. A nice example (if I say so myself) of drawing senior attention to an unexpected new problem by delivering work written in a bold way which no-one can avoid reading.

Diplomatic Folly Note: look out for the amusing reference to 'Trilateral' at the end. That was a footling attempt by Tony Blair to set up an inner UK/France/Germany driving force within the EU, which collapsed in no time at all in the face of the obvious objections (not least those emanating from one S Berlusconi).

Thus:

SUBJECT: EU ENLARGEMENT: SMOKING ANTS, COMING OUR WAY?

SUMMARY

1. Incentives for Poles to make a reasonable living in the UK's dodgy cigarette business. Policy contradictions.

DETAIL

2. As a non-smoking connoisseur of Balkan tobacco activities I recently met the local BAT team to talk about regional cigarette smuggling. Some striking conclusions.

The Big Picture

3. BAT have studied tens of thousands of discarded cigarette packets. They conclude that some 70 billion cigarettes are sold legally in Poland every year, with a further 20 billion smoked "illegally" (ie sold outside the official excise structure and smuggled into Poland).

4. A good proportion of this illegal trade is conducted by an army of "ants", individuals who carry small quantities of cigarettes into Poland from points East. But up to 50% of the illegal cigarette business is well organised, involving hundreds of truckloads of cigarettes each containing up to 10 million "sticks". [redacted]

5. The emergence of this lucrative illegal trade can be traced readily back to 2000, when Poland pushed up excise duties. Until then almost all the 90 billion cigarettes smoked in Poland each

year were passing through normal procedures. Smuggling soared with these new higher duties.

6. Sharp price/tax/excise differentials as between Russia, Poland and Western Europe are set to continue. Currently a pack of cigarettes which costs 50 cents in Russia sells for 1.30 dollars in Poland and up to 8 dollars in the UK. These ratios will change somewhat in the coming years as Poland raises the effective price of a pack towards EU levels, thereby giving serious new local incentives to regional smugglers (one good truckload can generate a profit of 1.5 million dollars). BAT expect some 50 billion cigarettes per year to be smuggled from Russia to Western Europe; this generates a 5 billion dollar profit - more than double BAT's own global annual pre-tax profit. Implications for UK of EU Accession

7. BAT point out that as things stand every Polish citizen is allowed to bring legally into the UK 200 cigarettes a trip. But after accession this figure jumps to 3200 cigarettes per trip. A pack of Dunhill can be bought in Poland for about £1 and be sold in a UK pub for up to £3.00. Each Pole entering the UK can hope to make a quick profit on the cigarettes of £250 per trip, not to mention extra money by importing a few bottles of cheap vodka. With a return coach fare of £50 and monthly unemployment benefit here of about £80, it is not difficult for a poor Pole to work out what to do. Better to get involved with UK officialdom by filling in UK benefit forms, or make easy money sitting on a bus?

COMMENT

8. The scale of the illicit cigarette business caused by price/tax differentials as between the UK and continental Europe is obvious and well known. It is part of a global compound interest drama: as rich countries get richer, the absolute wealth we generate gives ever-growing and vast incentives for honest people and gangsters alike to "play the margins". The cigarette price effects of EU enlargement is more of the same, albeit a great deal more of the same. But the upstream consequences of this illegality for the region are considerable.

9. Our Policy contains Contradictions. HMCE/HMT are looking at reducing the amounts of cigarettes which accession nationals can bring into the UK. Meanwhile we and our EU partners laboriously try to "train border guards and customs officials" on the EU's Eastern Borders. But only a couple of truckloads of cigarettes inject more resources into corrupting these official structures than we are injecting into reforming them. The corrupted structures then can be exploited not only by cigarette smugglers but also by human traffickers, global drug dealers and even terrorists - serious security questions here.

10. The cost of all this is not on a scale to destabilise the whole of Polish society as has happened in Serbia, to the point of the assassination of the Prime Minister. But it is a serious and systemic obstacle to reform. Scope for a new, hard look (Trilateral or in another smaller group first?) at what else might be done on the strategic level?

Here is a long and generally brilliant analysis of the Eurozone's predicament by Edward Hugh.

I especially like the way he explains deftly the hard realities and policy paradoxes we all now face, in one hard-hitting paragraph after another:

It is not simply a question of “closet” (or open) eurosceptics suddenly reappearing, but of the monetary union repeatedly showing fault lines exactly where many of those much berated macroeconomists had expected they might appear...

... at the heart of the monetary union’s current problems lie the huge imbalances which have been generated between the economic “surplus” countries in the core, and the external deficit ones on the periphery. Europe’s leaders have long avoided biting the bullet, and indeed could be considered to be in deep denial, over the significance of this issue...

With the arrival of the Italian elephant onto the centre stage at a stroke this argument has become as outdated as the institutional structure which lay behind it, since few of core Europe’s leaders are really willing to accept the responsibility for giving full and lasting guarantees for the country, quite simply because it is not just one more state in a fully integrated union, but a sovereign nation with all that that implies...

One of the curious anomalies about how the debate is currently being framed is the way in which banks and money funds who have invested in Europe’s periphery are being told that it is only right they should now assume some part of the anticipated debt restructuring burden due to their earlier policies of “irresponsible lending”, while these very same investors are also being urged to purchase new issues of just this very debt, on the argument that risk is exaggerated since the countries concerned have essentially sound economies, and are only suffering from short term liquidity and balance of payment type problems...

Banks have some responsibility to their clients (Nice - Ed) , and will not normally knowingly take decisions which will lose money for them. So it is only rational for them to try to “lighten up” their positions on some of Europe’s weaker sovereigns. What isn’t credible is for political leaders to at one and the same time tell the banks that they are lending irresponsibly and urge them to purchase debt which may well end up being restructured...

Which is why the Italian government is in a huge bind.It doesn’t have a debt flow problem, it has a debt stock problem, and as the risk premium charged on Italian debt rises and rises, and as the growth outcomes fail to meet the often optimistic targets, then the snowball of debt steadily slides its way down the mountain side with little the government can do to stop it growing as it moves. Like some modern Sisyphus, they are condemned to struggle with a monumental task where advance seems well nigh impossible...

His answer? The best chance for some sort of orderly outcome is to divide the Eurozone into two new currencies (Euro 1 - based on the deep logic of the old Hanseatic League which did well for 402 years! - and Euro 2), letting those countries which need a devaluation boost join Euro 2. If Germany heads Euro 1 and France Euro 2, the Franco-German axis can have a fine new job.

The great advantage of such a move would be that two of the major burdens under which the monetary union is labouring – the lack of price competitiveness on the periphery and the lack of cultural consensus between the participants – would be resolved at a stroke...

Read the whole thing and then give it a standing ovation.

As I wrote in June:

is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

The whole project is now exposed as a dangerous folie de grandeur.

Look. What do we Europeans basically want? To get richer, live nicely and not fight.

There is no reason why this should not be achieved through a network of several smaller regional European Unions with customised levels of integration and mutually reinforcing basic trading and security relationships. This arrangement would also make further enlargement much easier - Turkey might become the core of a new Regional Union.

All the expensive and annoying central bureaucracy could be scaled back or even abolished - farewell, European Parliament. Legitimacy and public accountability within each Regional Union would soar, as the governing arrangements would be much less remote.

Above all such a scheme would not be brittle, subject to horrible institutional contortions as one sprawling Union tries to accommodate quite different needs, policies and cultures.

Is someone in Whitehall planning a blueprint for how this would work?

Hullo?

Hullo..?

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?

More mega-comment web-factories are appearing, before our very eyes.

Here is Iain Dale's new Dale & Co. site, a self-styled current affairs mega-blog. I of course immediately click on World Affairs, and what do I find?

Not much, including this curious little piece by one James Chartlton (sic), a trainee journalist whose "proudest achievement to date is a 5th place finish in the 2006 ‘Christleton to Waverton’ fun run".

Mr Chartlton helpfully gives us his expert views on why the UK should admire Germany: football, Eurovision, federal system, timely trains and so on. Turbo-charged Fifth-form analysis.

Moving up a clear gear we find former Tribune Editor Mark Seddon arguing that the UK will have a major EU referendum in the next five years:

There will be a referendum on Britain’s whole relationship with the European Union within five years. I’m prepared to break the habit of a life time and go to the bookies to lay a bet to that effect. 

It is not that I am anti European, or a ‘little Englander ‘– far from it. But clearly the institution has grown and changed to such a degree and more importantly seeks to accrue yet more powers at a time when global recession means that it has not a great deal to offer in return, that popular will in this country may soon dictate that there has to be a referendum.

Will I be right? Who knows? The trouble is that once this out there there can be no rowing back. I hope that I am.

The Dale & Co. contributors en masse look like a very respectable, safe, mainly Westminstery insider, establishment-pundity group, with perhaps the distinguished exception of punchy Anna Raccoon, whose secret identity is at last revealed here.

Meanwhile another commentary behemoth but with added News has emerged, The Huffington Post UK.

This one looks bigger and intellectually heavier, but also more obviously left-liberal: it even has squeaks from Ed Miliband here and there.

And there's a contribution from HM Ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald:

A Golden Welcome for Will and Kate

Their Royal Highnesses' visit to LA this week will bring to the fore some of the most important practical aspects of a relationship which the president, six weeks ago, rightly described as "essential" as well as "special." The Duke and Duchess will attend a job fair that is intended to help US military personnel to reintegrate into civilian life.

Hmm. Over lunch I was chatting to a former senior UK intelligence officer about the fact that the Americans had had to hold back from us key intelligence information for fear of it being the subject of legal challenge in UK courts.

Then there is The Commentator, an openly conservative-minded site primarily offering fresh perspectives on issues of civilisational importance. Growing nicely but not (yet) with the scale/ambition of the first two.

Basically, we are all sinking in a growing, sprawling swamp of Comment (to which this website contributes its own little portions, although I do at least try to attach some of what I write to operational experience and reliable information) which feeds on an ever-diminishing shared organised basis for Facts and what used to be called 'hard news'.

It's almost as though we all expect facts and news miraculously to appear on their own, perhaps from massed social networks such as Twitter (with whatever checking mechanisms they may or may not offer), so that everyone can then grandly pile in with ever-more noisy (and often simply ignorant but no less noisy) opinions.

All in all, a growing if not towering babbling incoherence on a scale which makes rational government and intelligent adult discussion almost impossible. In all this clamour the News of the World drama is merely another MSM death-spasm, a further example of a networked swarm effect abruptly devouring an established and hitherto formidable organisation which this time round happens to be a media force but in fact could be almost anything.

Back to the eighteenth century?

Busy anti-circumcision Left 'activists' UK Uncut last night tried to protest against Bono at Glastonbury!

An event replete with (in?) delicious post-modern irony. The more so when U2 'security guards' pounded in to seize and destroy the pretty protest balloon. Leftists! Defend private property!

Readers recall my one and only encounter with the absurd Bono:

Finally, the best part of three hours late, they arrived!

In the tight formation of a Wedge of Celebs, surrounded by heaving media elbowing everyone out of the way. The ceremony itself was a brief farce. Pavarotti did not sing a note. Nor did Bono. If either of them even said a word it was at best perfunctory. They showed no interest in watching the performances of the Bosnian children who had rehearsed for weeks. 

Basically, their sheer self-indulgent discourtesy after keeping so many people waiting for so long was quite remarkable.

After a few speeches by others they were off in their media scrum, back to the helicopter. Mission accomplished.

But what of the protest itself?

UK Uncut were objecting to the fact that Irish mega-rich Bono has organised his affairs to avoid paying some tax to the Irish tax authorities.

Think about it. What a narrow, immature, chauvinistic and crudely conservative demand they are making.

What is the principle they are citing to demand that Bono pays more tax in Ireland?

Some sort of mystic Irish essentialism? A neo-Eurosceptic insistence that EU principles on free movement of capital are all wrong? The communist/fascist idea that the individual owes his loyalty and his mind to the masses, but only to those masses with DNA similar to his? (Probably that last one - Ed.)

In any case, we now behold the Irish government reduced to grovelling to Brussels because of the greedy and utterly stupid behaviour by part of the Irish elite. When the EU tries to assemble the vast loans needed to help Ireland and the feckless tax-avoiding Greeks out from the hole they dug for themselves, that European taxpayers' money includes some of Bono's  wealth taxed outside Ireland!

In short, both UK Uncut and Bono are ridiculous phonies.

So much for celebrity diplomacy.

You all know where these came from:

• Art never expresses anything but itself
• All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals
• Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life
• Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art

Remember this vivid argument last year? Thus:

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years' time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years' time?     No

EU in 50,000 years' time?         No

EU in 5000 years' time?            No

EU in 500 years' time?              No

EU in 50 years' time?                Maybe

EU in five years' time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU's finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky.

All of which is simply to say that any talk of opening the Pandora's Box of Treaty Change brings forward to the day when the current arrangements start to dissolve.

The political and operational problem in trying to bring about any organised change is that there is now huge weight of people, money and prestige invested in the current ungainly structures: European Parliament, European Commission and countless funding arrangements for all sorts of activities. So trying to take a proper radical look at what is happening now - and identifying something simpler but better - will be next to impossible.

This is dangerous, since it implies that only a really stupendous crisis will force national governments to confront reality and take the genuinely difficult decisions needed to change course.

In such a situation there is no reason to think that national governments will have too much time for an elusive Europe-wide common interest. Instead it will be sauve qui peut.

Art indeed.

Yet look at this amazing piece from the Guardian's Martin Kettle today, showing how Life is fast catching up:

... just the other day, I heard Sir Stephen Wall say something so similar. Here's what Wall said, at a seminar run by the Policy Network thinktank in London: "We have seen the high point of the European Union. With a bit of luck it will last our lifetime [Wall is 64]. But it's on the way out. After all, very few institutions last forever."

Ferguson is a Eurosceptic. His dismissive view of the EU is not a surprise. But Wall's view that the EU is on the way out marks the death of the old faith. For Wall was the most influential British pro-European diplomat of his time: our man in the negotiations of most of the EU treaties of the modern era; Tony Blair's longtime European policy adviser; and the author of a book on the EU that begins with the words: "I am convinced that wholehearted participation in the EU is strongly in Britain's national interest."

First the Berlin Wall. Now Stephen Wall. European collapses don't come more dramatic.

Yet the remarkable thing about Wall's pessimism is that it no longer seems so remarkable. As EU leaders gathered in Brussels on Thursday to grapple with the Greek crisis, the airwaves were awash with existential debates not just about Greece or the eurozone but about the very future of the EU itself.

Though most EU-watchers still talk of muddling through as the most likely policy response to Greek bankruptcy, it is a muddling without momentum, direction or real agreement, let alone enthusiasm.

NB the famous 'muddling through' idea. One of my very first posts here was all about what the Muddling Through Somehow (MTS) idea means in itself, as it were. MTS makes sense only if there are categories of events which do NOT amount to muddling through - non-MTS events:

The Muddle Through Somehow (MTS) metaphor conveyed a number of interesting assumptions:

 

"… general notions of pragmatism; a certain degree of homely confusion; perhaps an absence of precise planning and control (“muddle”) but at least a broad sense of direction (“through”); … an absence of drastic, shocking, violent or cataclysmic change”.

 

But, I asserted, MTS as a very concept made sense only if it did not cover everything. World War Two had not exactly been a MTS event. In each case there had to be agreed non-MTS events (for Yugoslavia eg civil war or Soviet military intervention to prop up communist rule) whose likelihood also had to be assessed hard-headedly.

 

I tried to weigh all this up, and concluded that there was a serious chance of drastic non-MTS internal tensions escalating across Yugoslavia in the years to come as the various republican leaderships diverted attention from the country’s grim economic problems and played the card of mass nationalism. Kosovo was a particularly likely flashpoint. “One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

 

These exchanges read rather well now from my point of view – after many tens of thousands of violent deaths, plus billions of international taxpayers’ dollars thrown not very successfully at the problem. Oh, and look: here comes Kosovo again.

 

Yet it took a while for all that to unfold. Yugoslavia did Muddle Through Somehow. Until it didn't. Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured?

Could we just be seeing an extraordinary opportunity for redefining the whole European project: summarily demolishing a lot of the institutional hulks now cluttering the landscape and creating instead a simpler and, yes, less 'ambitious' framework for peaceful cooperation built on much more solid and legitimate foundations?

And if so, does someone in Whitehall have a plan?

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.

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.  

We have returned from Florida and I am emerging from jet-lag, just in time to appear today on the BBC World Have Your Say radio programme this afternoon on the rather incoherent subject of Privacy. If you are interested the link to the programme is here, until it fades away.

I cited an extract from this argument by Roy Greenslade, one among many good ones out there on the way English law is currently looking at these issues:

We want there to be a fair and reasonable balance between the right to privacy and the right to know. And the best criterion for judging between the two must be the public interest (and not merely interesting the public).

Is that really it (said I)? Boosting someone else's supposed right to privacy means diminishing someone else's free speech, someone else's right to blog or read or talk or sing. The High Court is not always the best place to 'weigh' the balance of advantage between an emotional plaintiff and an abstract principle such as 'freedom'. 

As Ian Hislop argued robustly on WHYS, the current state of the English law matched by the inclination of some judges is in effect allowing wealthy men to silence less powerful women - not much justice there. Once upon a time we had 'publish and be damned' - now we seem to have 'only publish if the court says so'.

The programme featured contributions from listeners, which together brought out perfectly that no set of laws can manage incompatible issues of principle or keep up with the racing advance of social networking and the access of hundreds of millions of people to sassy new small cameras and IT kit.

There is no clear right answer on Privacy, in theory or in practice, and crafty new ideas such as the so-called 'right to be forgotten' (also described as the right to have 'personal data' deleted from commercial databases) can end up being abused to extend state power - if I choose to shop at Tesco, why should any data held by Tesco on me which I chose to freely hand over be described as solely 'my' data? They paid for it to be collected. Should Tesco be denied the right to use the data represented by my DNA (fingerprints) as distributed round the store if they suspect me of shoplifting?

On the other hand, the myriad information about us all sloshing around out there can now be analysed to see big (and not so big) patterns of activity - and attitude. This does empower in various novel and not necessarily benign ways the people and organisations able to crunch all those numbers.

It's all about trade-offs, and maybe it's best to let consumers and companies come to workable and more or less transparent informal arrangements at their own pace than try to create too clever legal and regulatory frameworks which will be out of date as soon as they are drafted. 

In other words, we readily accept the risk that by driving a car we may have a horrible or even fatal crash at some point. Maybe we likewise should accept that we may have a reputation crash too at some point during life as part of the 'cost' of enjoying all these clever new IT toys, and insure as best we can against it.

My bottom line. If a rich footballer or entrepreneur cheats on his/her spouse, the law should not stop the spouse or the partner in cheating or someone else writing about it or discussing it in public. Mess around? Fine - but take the risks that your messing will be exposed. No-one should be stopped by the state from writing the truth.

Sure that will create some rough justice in some high-profile cases. But so does every other outcome in this fearsomely difficult area. Let's at least err on the side of 'truth will out'.  

Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review says a lot which chimes with my own thinking on the fact that in almost any policy area you choose, the main problem is the over-heavy institutional legacy of industrial-age organisation:

What stands in the way of the future, most often, is the past. It's yesterday's sluggish institutions.

Yet, instead of reimagining and rebooting those institutions, we keep reviving and resurrecting them — zombielike — hoping that by bringing them back from the dead, we can keep the status quo humming along for just a little while longer, that we can eke out the last meager, shriveled morsels of returns from seeds laid down during the industrial age.

If the greatest barriers to prosperity aren't government deficits, bailed-out bankers, ineffectual civil servants, a recession every seven years or so, corporations who shrug their shoulders and keep on practicing the dismal lessons of business as usual, investors who turn their back on authentic investment in lieu of mere speculation — if all those and more are merely incidental second-order effects of a deeper cause, and that deeper cause is the institutions that keep on producing all the above as predictably, consistently, and relentlessly as it rains in London... well, then, it's time to dream bigger.

Read the whole thing, as it's very readable and smart.

Some lively comments too, including one from me which points out that another way of expressing the same thought is the Kinetic Energy metaphor:

This shows why tank shells are small and very fast: you get exponential increases in kinetic energy (ie in this case explosive impact) by increasing velocity, but not if you increase mass.

The point being that we live in a world in which we have large heavy slow 'massive' institutions (government, corporations, unions and so on) which can't cope with the energy of high-velocity changes coming from all sides.

The one sure thing in all this is that 'government' is now a huge part of the problem. It is based upon a pre-medieval idea that centralised power should give orders to people to maintain stability. That no longer works when people have the technological networking power to challenge those orders faster than they can be issued and enforced.

This in turn raises the deep and largely unanswered moral question of the consent of those being governed to what is being done in their name. For most of human history people have had no real chance to express their consent or dissent in a structured way. That chance is now emerging in a high velocity way.

All obvious enough. But it is likely to take staggering planetary disruption to bring down the 'yesterday industrial age institutions' and the jungles of bad assumptions and practices they create. Too many forces on all sides of the argument have an interest in defining the way forward in terms of the discredited past, as the Wisconsin example and almost everything which happens in the European Union both demonstrate.

I have not had anything to say so far on the Alternative Voting referendum here on 5 May.

Which is fine, since Brendan O'Neill at spiked says what I more or less intuit about the whole business:

Which political party will risk standing a hardcore individual – a deep-blue Tory or a workerist Labourite – when it knows that if its candidate fails to secure 50 per cent of the vote in the first count then the views of other parties’ voters may become key?

Today’s anaemic parties rarely stand risky candidates these days anyway; but with the introduction of AV we would likely see the party leaders exerting even more influence over which individuals are permitted to stand, with the elbowing aside of those with possibly controversial beliefs in favour of more acceptable, politer and blander candidates who might not only pick up lots of No.1s from said party’s traditional voters, but also some No.2s and No.3s from the other parties’ voters, too.

AV would implicitly encourage the homogenisation of political life...

Brendan sums it up:

Politics would become less open, less forged in the public realm, and more an act of elite deciphering of what ‘the people’ seemingly prefer rather than want. We could easily end up with representatives that no one truly, passionately, wants.

In short, AV will both weaken The Vote and strengthen electoral bureaucracy. It will encourage even more candidates not to stand on a platform of ideas or policies that they are prepared to live and die by, but rather to take fewer political risks and always to keep one eye on the lowest common denominator of appealing to as many people as possible.

And AV will strengthen the hand of that expert caste of middle-class negotiators and well-connected, well-educated political players who already dominate much of the modern political sphere. It will be a travesty for democracy.

I think that this is a serious critique. One of the worst aspects of different party-list proportional systems across Europe is that it gets very difficult to eject specific politicians ever from public life.

AV does not have that fatal weakness - an unpopular MP might be more likely than not to get heaved out by this voting method if the whole area is fed up with her/him?

However, anything which tends towards making party politics even blander and more complicated than they are already has to be firmly opposed, and the arguments set out by spiked look pretty convincing to me: no obvious upside for AV apart from a mushy assertion of 'fairness' but some clear downside.

Here's my idea for a reform if anyone wants one. The Crawford Double Whammy Voting System

Halve the number of constituencies and instead give each constituency two MPs - the first and second past the post.

Let each Party nominate two candidates per constituency if they wanted to do so, and give each voter two votes.

That would mean in almost all cases that the majority of voters in any local area had at least one representative in Parliament they supported. It would avoid odious party list systems, and keep a direct link between voters and their own MPs.

Above all, it would give people a chance to express a vote with some subtlety. You might give two votes to your Party's two candidates, ie one vote each. You might give two votes to one of your Party's candidates to try to propel him/her to victory.

But you also might give only one vote to one of your Party's candidates and use the second for eg a popular local Green or UKIP candidate to make a point.

Or you might use just one of your two votes if you want to vote, but show dissatisfaction with most of the choices available.

Oh, and counting would be simple - just add up the Xs for each candidate.  

Just a thought. It's simple and gives people a lot more choice. Plus more votes by each person will potentially 'count' in the final outcome.

Had they tried something like this in Bosnia after the conflict and not brought in the idiotically complex and manipulable election system that was adopted by all those international experts, Bosnia probably would be a lot better off today.

Is it too late to scrap this fatuous AV referendum and set up one with my ingenious idea instead?  

Here is my latest tirade over at Business and Politics about Football and Socialism. (Update: link did not work - apologies. Now fixed)

I strongly recommend you check it out. If only for the beyond brilliant photograph of Vaniev Runieski, Stevan Gerardin, Gerd Balev and assorted other heroes of Soviet soccer.

Extract:

The bottom line is this. Football is a private activity. The fact that so many people get emotional about it is an interesting phenomenon which has nothing to do with politics. If football is not run efficiently or competently, everyone involved in football should either take responsibility for sorting out the problems, or agree to live with the current state of affairs.

If the UK Tiddlywinks Association is riven with conflict and run appallingly, so be it. Football is far bigger, but in principle is no different. We all must resist strongly at every opportunity the collectivist temptation to play on emotions to extend state power at the expense of private freedoms

So even if I as the Minister responsible for sport as well as a large body of MPs together are convinced that reforming football is in the best interests of football, we should jolly well mind our own business.

That would not be a breath of fresh air. It would be a hurricane blast against greedy state-sponsored looting.

David Cameron made a businesslike case in the Observer today for his Big Society initiative:

The first objection is that it is too vague. I reject that. True, it doesn't follow some grand plan or central design. But that's because the whole approach of building a bigger, stronger, more active society involves something of a revolt against the top-down, statist approach of recent years.

And neither is it about just one thing. Rather, it combines three clear methods to bring people together to improve their lives and the lives of others: devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community.

So the big society doesn't apply to one area of policy, but many. For example, if neighbours want to take over the running of a post office, park or playground, we will help them.

If a charity or a faith group want to set up a great new school in the state sector, we'll let them.

And if someone wants to help out with children, we will sweep away the criminal record checks and health and safety laws that stop them.

My libertarian heart rises several notches at these words - someone at long last articulating the moral case against centralised collectivism in this country, and offering a different way of looking at social problems.

Yet ... I have a nagging anxiety. Namely that even after a 'community' or a 'neighbourhood' is defined for Big Society purposes, the whole issue turns on how decisions are taken and then implemented. And that is fraught with complications.

One way of looking at the way a small community works is to imagine a group of people marooned on a desert island - how might they agree to run things and to settle disputes?

The usual objection to this approach is that it is too artificial - even if the desert islanders came up with some sort of model scheme, it would have no relevance to modern society with all its inherited interests and expectations.

Maybe, maybe not. As it happens, I have been living in something close to a 'desert island' scenario for the past three years. Let's call it Carboot Park.

The interesting thing about Carboot Park is that it was a small development of less than 20 houses set up in 1996 in effect from scratch. The new properties were sold off as freehold houses to brand new residents, who were bequeathed a simple set of 'byelaws' for running the commonly owned surrounding areas. The expectation was that the first residents would look at the byelaws and soon improve/consolidate them in the light of experience.

This, in short, was a dummy run for the Big Society idea - local people having a more or less blank canvas for running their own affairs, including the power of 'taxation' (ie the level of service charge required to keep the common areas in good shape, or not). Flawlessly democratic and more or less as fair as it could be - each property regardless of size had one vote.

Various things soon became clear.

First, that the willingness of people to 'get involved' varied significantly. This was not surprising as different households had different interests (ie for some people their house was their main family dwelling and investment, for others it had less significance; not everyone lived there full time; and so on).

Second, that there was a collective reluctance to confront the core question of how decisions were taken. On the one hand no-one wanted frequent meetings; on the other hand, there was no enthusiasm for devolving spending authority to specific residents between meetings. "Let's not decide today and instead think about it a bit more".

It duly took until 2009(!) for any full considered view to be taken on Carboot voting issues, a development which quickly led to various long overdue improvements.

The voting issue is especially interesting from a philosophical point of view. Why? Because if you're setting up a Big Society scheme from scratch, how to design decision-making?

Most of you did not bother to read the link to the Wivenhoe Station Master's House project mentioned in my recent BBRU:

And so two hours after a group of individuals rather nervously sat around in a circle in the Loveless Hall, we concluded with a co-operative group that had started to come up with a very real plan for the future of the Station Master’s House.

It is the next stage that will be even more challenging. Assuming that negotiations with Network Rail are positive, some form of social enterprise needs to be created to help steer the project.

The danger here of course is that a committee style operation somehow loses the bottom up enthusiasm that was evident at the Loveless Hall on Thursday evening.

That one was all about a group of local residents looking at options for an empty and run-down local landmark building. The group found some possible outcomes which they liked, but the piece does not make clear what if any thought was given to taking  and implementing specific decisions.

What in practice would happen is that the main 'activists' would tend to prevail, simply because they alone were ready to commit the time and energy to thinking about it. Even then, what if decisions were taken but then those implementing them failed to do what was expected? Where would accountability fit in? Should someone loyally following the agreed line but somehow messing up have to carry on her/his own shoulders any financial costs arising from putting right the mistake?

Back at Carboot Park things were rather different, as all households had a direct legal stake in the the community's common property and in the good neighbourliness of the community itself. So the voting arrangements (such as they were) tended to be by consensus if at all possible. Which (usually) promoted good neighbourliness, but at the cost of making it easy for anyone to block a new idea, especially if it involved spending new money.

This dilemma - the tension between democracy and 'getting things done' - plays itself out at on a grand scale. See the many posts I have written here about the turbulent rows within the EU over voting, such as this early one. The future of the Eurozone and the EU itself is at root all about who pays in to the common pot - and who decides how and where the money is spent.

So let's say that where I now live, as a private idyllic libertarian/conservative householder on a fairly unpopulated country back-lane, the newly identified 'Big Society neighbourhood' gets to have the deciding say on small local planning issues. I want to build a new hi-tech glass extension on my house. Many people don't care, some people do care but approve, some people do care but oppose.

Those who oppose may do so for all sorts of reasons - maybe they're worried about something legitimate, or maybe they are motivated by sheer spite and insecurity: neurotic or even mentally challenged people who have no friends and want to use any opportunity to show how tough they are at others' expense.

What sort of voting mechanisms take the final decision? If it's consensus, the few nasty busybodies can delay block everything. If it's a majority vote, should only those who show up at meetings vote? What about e-voting? What about proxy votes, and how to validate them? Should one resident be able to appear with a bundle of proxy votes which s/he has mustered?

What if, gulp, one faction offers financial or other inducements to get the votes needed to prevail? Is that fair? Is stopping votes-for-sale fair? Should lobbying be banned, or at least 'regulated'? What are the sanctions for disruptive or dishonest behaviour? Who should enforce them?

And what status does that one decision have? When is any decision final? Can a group of residents demand that it be re-opened? Are the outcome and the process necessarily a precedent for others up the road wanting to do something similar? Who decides that one, and how?

And so on. Welcome to politics, all the more bitter, ridiculous and obnoxious precisely because the issues are so small, immediate and 'local'.

The basic point being that for all the horror of local authorities and quangoes and the other accumulated sprawling edifices of 'government' as it now oppresses us, it does have certain advantages. Namely some sort of requirement upheld by the law (in theory) to maintain consistency and due process. Rules exist and count for something. Bureaucracy's very aloofness and anonymous impenetrability have a value - people taking decisions have (in theory) no reason not to try to be objective and more or less 'fair'. The role of malicious local busybodies is much reduced towards vanishing-point.

As the Carboot Park micro-example suggests, those noble qualities can become all the more elusive the smaller the community gets...

In other words, let's support the Big Society impulse as something probably flawed but at least heading in the right direction away from insane centralised Brownian target-setting.

But let's also remember the fine words of the late Polish statesman Bronislaw Geremek:

... democratic values do not function without citizens; there can be no democracy without democrats

Carboot Park, Westminster, the EU - they all show us the same stark truth.

You can't build a Big Society with Small Minds.

This afternoon I was briefly on LBC with James Whale who asked some questions about the impact of Wikileaking.

My core points ran something like this.

All organisations including LBC and firms which LBC listeners worked for had some reasonable expectation of privacy. Governments were no different.

Some of the information which had come out might end up being not a bad thing (eg the Iranians knowing that the Saudis had (apparently) been keen on military action against Iran).

Some information which was embarrassing might well do no real damage - eg the private views of world leaders about each other.

But a really damaging category of leak involved reports of named individuals privately passing on information in trust to the USA which their governments or others might not like. In extreme cases this could lead to death or severe punishment for those individuals and/or their families. NB that the information concerned might not catch any headlines in the Guardian, so the eventual fate of such people might well never be known.

Note: Assange asserts an answer to this point at the Guardian today. Totally unconvincing in my view:

Julian Assange:
WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time there has been no credible allegation, even by organisations like the Pentagon that even a single person has come to harm as a result of our activities. This is despite much-attempted manipulation and spin trying to lead people to a counter-factual conclusion. We do not expect any change in this regard.

I also said that part of the job of senior diplomats was helping give key character judgements of foreign leaders. For example, my mid-2007 private briefing for Tony Blair on the Kaczynski twins before the Lisbon Treaty negotiations had made a significant positive impact for UK national interests in helping us finely calibrate the Poles' reactions at the looming EU Summit. That was a matter of record. Had those notes been leaked before the Summit my own position in Poland would have been untenable, and key British interests would have been harmed. Fact.

I said that it was one thing to support Animal Rights - quite another thing to break open London Zoo and cause all sorts of random accidents as the animals freely streamed out. Quite a few animals might make it to the wild and regain their freedom. Many others would not, plus all sorts of other unpredictable damage would be done.

In the case of the USA and UK where extensive FOI and other provisions were made for publishing official information, the reckless public dumping of so many classified documents was inexcusable. Death sentences could certainly be passed in many countries on anyone doing the same thing, a fact which no doubt concentrated the minds of officials working there. Mr Assange wanted the benefit of being seen by many as a hero - he should hand himself over to the law and accept some of the responsibility too.

I concluded that the main 'existential' damage caused by these leaks lay in the perception created in many countries that the West was weak and unable to convince its own key people to adhere to minimal loyalty. We had seen earlier this week the World Cup bid result, where too many countries had turned against us ostensibly because we had 'too much' media freedom.

And so on.

This one will run and run.

What I find baffling is quite how one US soldier (if it was indeed same) managed to steal quite so much material so readily.

But there again it maybe does not matter how many layers of protection you build into any system, be it a bank or a foreign ministry - there always have to be some people, often quite junior, who have access to huge amounts of material if databases are to be useful.

Which of course is why as well as protecting our systems against malevolent outsiders, we'll probably have to devote a lot of new oppressive unpleasantness to protecting them against deluded or disloyal insiders. As we have seen, it takes only one self-absorbed loner in a vast bureaucracy to do untold damage.

In which connection read this short excellent Economist piece by Nasim Taleb on the world in 2036, which as if by magic develops up a key concluding idea in my recent TEDx Krakow presentation:

The Age of Big Slow Things is ending

The Age of Small Fast Things is beginning

You always need Mass

But in diplomacy as in life, Velocity is the smart way to bet

Nassim Taleb:

Although fragile bridges can take a long time to collapse, 25 years in the 21st century should be sufficient to make hidden risks salient: connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by then.

Nothing much smaller and faster than a USB stick with tens of thousands of stolen documents on it.

Events such as the latest Wikileaks embroglio exemplify the pell-mell course we are all now on towards a dangerous 'randomising' of world events and a decay in institutional authority.

In the looming conflicts as long-established but in any case Big systems abruptly decay (see the Eurozone), the most ruthless - and least committed to freedom in any sense that matters - may have a clear edge.

Thanks for that, Julian Assange. 

Renewed talk of changing the core EU Treaties, this time to strengthen sanctions against countries which show themselves unworthy of being in the Eurozone?

The problem with changing one part of the EU core structure (this time to meet German demands that Germany and its banks be protected from being the Eurozone's rich suckers of last resort) is that other countries will pop up demanding changes to other parts of EU core structure.

Or they'll pop up saying that that's what they want, in the hope of causing enough problems to be worthy of getting a hefty bung to shut up in the form of concessions in some other policy area.

Which prompts me to post this extract from my Krakow presentation, a slide entitled Will EU Diplomacy Survive? Indeed, such are the marvels of modern technology that you can see a picture of me staring aghast at my own handiwork here.

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years' time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years' time?     No

EU in 50,000 years' time?         No

EU in 5000 years' time?            No

EU in 500 years' time?              No

EU in 50 years' time?                Maybe

EU in five years' time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU's finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky.

All of which is simply to say that any talk of opening the Pandora's Box of Treaty Change brings forward to the day when the current arrangements start to dissolve.

The political and operational problem in trying to bring about any organised change is that there is now huge weight of people, money and prestige invested in the current ungainly structures: European Parliament, European Commission and countless funding arrangements for all sorts of activities. So trying to take a proper radical look at what is happening now - and identifying something simpler but better - will be next to impossible.

This is dangerous, since it implies that only a really stupendous crisis will force national governments to confront reality and take the genuinely difficult decisions needed to change course.

In such a situation there is no reason to think that national governments will have too much time for an elusive Europe-wide common interest. Instead it will be sauve qui peut.

So, question.

Do Germany's leaders really think that they can force through this time round a "narrow" Treaty change which gives them enough of what they want by way of financial protection and does not open up all sorts of other clamorous demands?

Or do they know that that is more or less impossible, hence they are pushing for Treaty changes as part of a wider agenda aimed at deliberately prompting a manageable (they hope) mini-crisis which will allow them to redefine the way the European Union works, but on (mainly) German terms? If that means wielding a fierce Teutonic axe on many beloved EU schemes and letting other countries squeal, so be it.

What, I wonder, is the government in London making all this?

In principle this situation represents a huge opportunity for cynical but pragmatic British influence aimed at forcing out great quantities of EU rubbish -- and cutting the bill to British taxpayers.

We aren't likely to find out easily.

This might be because Coalition London is unable to think straight in this situation.

It also might be because if Coalition London (or at least Conservative London) is able to think straight and has some keen plans up its sleeve, the worst thing of all would be to say so: much better for now to let the Germans do the heavy lifting, and so get a sense of where the main battle lines will be?

Big stuff. And, probably, getting bigger.

As the full horror of our impending house move comes into view, with the first cardboard boxes insinuating themselves into the house for some advance packing, Mrs Crawf and I have been seeking solace in new IT equipment.

Thus Mrs C has made a quantum leap from her lumpy Tesco pay-as-you-go primitive mobile telephone to a shiny new HTC device.

There must be people out there who have qualms about outsourcing their life to Google. Fine. Be losers. 

All I can say is that when you slide the Sim card into your new HTC telephone, press the On button and then sign in to your Google account, it is startling to see your Contacts, Calendar and E-mail information all downloaded on to this device in a few seconds.

Oh, and it gives you the latest weather for your neighbourhood as well. Magnificent.

Brand of the Year? Yes, and richly deserved if our experience this afternoon is anything to go by.

However, all that is as nothing compared to my new iPad.

One of our group travelling to Vancouver had one, compelling me to gnash my teeth in jealousy for long hours as he watched different movies and generally amused himself to good effect high above the Hudson Bay. So I bought one too.

There is one important drawback. To carry it around everywhere requires some sort of sissy shoulder bag or something similar, and I'm not ready for that.

But otherwise it is an extraordinary piece of kit. Razor sharp graphics (of course). Twitter becomes a completely different experience. A Paint app delivers wonderful, complex coloured pictures. I have found a "Mind-Mapping" app which already has been a real help in pulling together a new presentation. The Apple Keynote app allows you to import, edit and export Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

Phew.

The most scary aspect of this new gizmo is the Amazon Kindle facility, which can be downloaded for free on to the iPad.

Amazon are doing a fine job both by driving down the cost of e-books and making the customer experience fast and smooth. Sit in your living room cruising on your iPad and find a book you like? Swooosh. It's there on your device, ready to read, with text notes made by other readers if you want them.

Oh, and you've paid for it. Did you notice?

Having bought hundreds of thousands of books in the past 40 years or so, what do I do now? Start slowly migrating my lumbering collection into electronic format? Only use my iPad for new books which I have not bought before? What will happen in a few years time when the iPad itself looks naff and dated?

A similar problem presents itself with movies. It was laborious but straightforward to add my CD collection to my iPod. Apple are not going to make it easy for me to add my DVD collection to my iPad, even though the iTunes movie collection seems to have almost none of the films I really want to watch.

I have looked on the Internet for programs which convert DVDs into iPad format without creating a mess. They exist, but do not look easy. Has any reader tried one of these with success?

I suppose that considerations like this are merely a transitional dilemma for Oldies like us, as the world moves away from owning specific items such as pieces of music or films or books and instead "rents" them from the Cloud instantaneously as and when necessary.

Publishers of data (such as books) need to get used to the idea of amassing s stream of small bits of money from many people by offering them a service, rather than relying on larger one-off chunks of money from a very few people by selling them a thing.

In the meantime they'll no doubt greedily try to get us to buy PD James and Inspector Morse several times. 

Bastards. I am resisting.

Almost. 

Behold the Crawfs trying to move house. Great piles of cassette tapes, DVDs, books, video tapes as well as formidably heavy boxes of LP records. Where should they go? No one wants them. The whole lot would fit in digital format on a couple of iPads and hard drives.

See the price of DVDs tumbling as this new Cloudy world order emerges. Try this classic for a negligible £4.49: 

Maybe in a few years the Lightness of Being will become quite Bearable after all.

Ever wondered why so much human activity is a bit ... odd?

Now we know.

A thoughtful reader writes:

There is one issue that occasionally troubles me.  It is quite obvious in politics and senior positions elsewhere, that leaders cannot have a grasp of everything.  Thus they must trust to their judgement on whom to believe on particular issues. 

This is particularly important on issues where the informed consensus (or its self-professed members) have not got it right, either totally or in significant part.  I think here of issues such as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  Eventually, any wrong consensus must break; how can that be made to happen sooner?

So, how is it best for leaders to decide whom to believe, on matters beyond their personal detailed competence (and also those where there is not time to learn up on the whole issue)?

Very good questions.

In the British system at least, our leaders rely upon a combination of formal and informal advice.

On the formal side there are the posts of Chief Scientific Adviser, Chief Medical Officer and so on -- senior experts tasked with making sure that top levels of government have the best possible scientific/technical advice available. As well as that, individual Departments also may have in-house experts in science, economics and other specialist fields.

Leaders also likely to have a range of senior outside experts upon whom they call now and again to get a feel of the ebb and flow of debate as seen by clever people not within the system.

Plus, of course, individual experts may well send in their suggestions and complaints about official policy; a well-written letter from a senior expert sent to the Prime Minister will require an answer served up by the Whitehall system as a whole, and the fact that the letter has been read so widely down the policy chain itself acts to keep people on their toes and not take conventional wisdom for granted.

Beyond all that lies the hullabaloo of democracy. Think-tanks, commercial research organisations, scientists working for large corporations, amateur enthusiasts and energetic bloggers: they are all whirring away to get their points across in one way or the other. Letters to government ministers and/or MPs make an impact in this sense. The official system has to keep alert to public thinking and concern, whether it wants to do so or not.

All that said, no leader can take into much of this stuff. At the high policy levels knowledge declines steeply and instinct kicks in. The more so since the issues leaders in fact focus on may not be the issues under discussion.

Take the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The assembled armies of climate NGOs and lobbyists seemed to think that the issue was all about "climate change". But as the conference end-game loomed quite different priorities emerged for the key leaders concerned, namely their own reputations and how their own countries might best jostle for position in the new global order. Hence the ensuing fiasco.

Climate Change is perhaps the classic example of policy area where it is impossible to pull together an expert consensus. Partly because the science itself is so complicated. But more importantly because expertise is required from so many different areas and such long timescales are involved. Not to forget the enormous financial and other costs needed to change course in any way which counts.

Sir David King previously was the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, and a prominent voice calling for Action to deal with CAGW. I myself lost faith in his judgement over his emotional reaction to unwelcome facts in a completely unrelated area.

How does a consensus break down? Depends what you mean by consensus.

Even if a large bloc of scientific opinion takes one view, public opinion may not take the same view. This in fact is a genuinely difficult area for leaders. On the one hand, they are being given credible expert advice pointing clearly in one direction. On the other, they know that if they move in that direction they are likely to lose votes.

The Climategate episode exemplifies this dilemma, albeit in a not unhelpful way in that it points to the need for much greater transparency and integrity in scientific process -- in a world of highly networked collective intelligence, the days of a small elite telling us all what to do and think our numbered. I hope.

Conclusion?

Leaders are no different from the rest of us. They sit in an office having little idea of what is going on down the corridor, let alone further afield.

Perhaps the greatest challenge they face is not mastering scientific briefs, but rather avoiding the temptation constantly to be "doing something" when each and every problem appears.

Over at Business and Politics is my latest piece, on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It looks in a roundabout way at issues of information flow, risk management and 'corporate culture':

Perhaps our hard-pressed rig operator makes the mistake of fact, misinterpreting the information being pushed to him by all the safety systems. Maybe he makes a mistake of judgement: he reads and analyses all information intelligently, but decides to take a decision which makes everything far worse.

In either case it is possible that the decision taken would not lead to disaster, had it not been for an underground factor previously undiscovered or not identified as likely to cause extra risk. In other words, the operator was doing his best at the very frontier of scientific knowledge, but that frontier itself was just not good enough.

Of such tiny subtleties are vast calamities made. Lawyers can not wait to get their hands on these problems in any subsequent enquiry or lawsuit. Anyone facing extended cross-examination by a wily barrister over split-second judgement calls is likely to end up sounding, looking and feeling confused or foolish...

My piece at the Independent on the outcome of the Ejup Ganic trial in London provokes the usual flurry of comments:

Mr Crawford is one of the morons that manipulated both US and UK foreign policy towards Bosnia in the 1990s. As an officer in the NATO force that arrived in Bosnia in 1995 I can say, unequivocally, the Bosnian muslims were just as much criminals as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. It is time to start punishing their leadership as well. The Ganic story is not over.

What about those poor conscripts who have been burnt down by
thugs who call themselves ,,Bosnian Army,,? Do they deserve justice?No?And why? Because,they were Serbs.How unfortunate. How much did you get paid for your ,,opinion,,? Lunch? Shame on you!

Appalling! His excellency, the former ambassador Crawford (to Serbia) reminds Serbia that it should shut up because that is the script handed to it by the International Community. Serbia is guilty by definition, so the accusations of war crimes that Serbia may have against others are not to be considered (Ex turpi causa non oritur actio)! Talk about specious syllogisms! 

Mr Charles Crawford is a man of honor and integrity. SHame on you for attacking him.

Some background.

The Independent asked for 400 words. I sent them some 500. They condensed that down to 330 without sending me a final version. So key nuances which went some way at least to tackling points made in the critical comments were lost.

Such is Journalism.

In case anyone is still interested, here is what I think is the full judgement.

The judge said this:

There is nothing within the request which would bring the conduct alleging issuing a command to attack a military convoy within the meaning of a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions 1949. However there is a reference to an Ambulance within the convoy and the request alleges that Dr Ganic expressly ordered an attack upon the Ambulance within the convoy. To that limited extent I am satisfied that the conduct alleges an extradition offence.

I am not satisfied that the rest of the convoy had any right to protection or that the soldiers in the 30 vehicles were prisoners of war.

Without having heard the evidence presented it is hard to say why he reached this conclusion. But it is clear from the video footage of the Dobrovoljacka St shootings that the JNA convoy was leaving Sarajevo under some sort of UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Is there really no case to answer that it is a breach of the laws at war to attack a convoy in such circumstances? Apart from the wider policy issues, this finding directly contradicts the testimony of a British expert on the whole story whom the judge praised for his accuracy.

The Serbia side does not appear to have found any satisfactory answer to the Sarajevo/BH side's arguments that Serbia offered to let the Ganic extradition request lapse in exchange for political support for Serbia Srebrenica Declaration. The judge reasonably gives significant weight to this in support of his wider concern that Serbia's application was in one way or the other 'politically' motivated.

The judge took evidence from various notable people on that point including from Dr Schwarz-Shilling (sic and Lord Ashdown), former High Representatives in Sarajevo. Both asserted that the extradition request "is about politics rather than justice". Since neither of them have lived in Belgrade and both have seen the BH issue mainly from the vantage-point of Sarajevo, their evidence on this point should have been dismissed on the grounds of irrelevance.

Lord Ashdown even linked the extradition request to the date of the opening statement by Radovan Karadzic at ICTY, a linkage so footling that the judge explicitly dismissed it.

The judge was improperly dismissive of the role of the Belgrade war crimes courts and seemed to accept as true various tendentious generalisations about Serbia and Serb views put forward by Noel Malcolm and others.

These statements persuaded him that Serbia's application should be barred by Section 81(a) and (b) of the Extradition Act 2003 on the grounds that the request had been made "for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on account of his race, religion, nationality and political opinions". This in my view is a far-reaching and obnoxious finding, based upon noisy assertions rather than hard facts.

All in all, a powerful but not especially coherent and convincing judgement. That said, in the circumstances it probably was correct enough.

It looks as if the Serbia side had not prepared its case re launching the extradition request and then thought through how best to handle the extradition hearing. It did poorly in presenting witnesses to rebut the openly 'political' case put forward by the Bosnia side. And by attempting some behind-the-scenes deal with Sarajevo while the matter proceeded in the UK courts, Belgrade foolishly laid itself open to a charge that its 'real' intentions were 'political' rather than legal/justice focused.

To be 100% clear for the record.

I am NOT saying or suggesting that war crimes against Serbs should not be prosecuted. I pressed hard for that to happen when UK Ambassador both in Sarajevo and Belgrade.

Nor am I saying that because of Srebrenica/Mladic Serbia is disqualified from running war crimes trials in Belgrade, or from putting in extradition requests such as this one.

Nor do I believe that Belgrade is unable to run a fair trial of non-Serbs. I do think that keeping fair is a difficult problem for all the local war crimes processes in former Yugoslavia:

The ICTY is not the whole story. Special courts for “lesser” war crimes have been set up in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. These important trials are little acknowledged elsewhere in Europe. As British ambassador in Belgrade, I hosted a Kosovo family in Belgrade to give evidence in one of the first trials, involving alleged war crimes by Serbs in Kosovo. They said they had been treated honorably by the Serbian authorities.

The core problem with these trials is that each ethnic community concerned likes to see a conviction of someone from another community who brutalized their fellow ethnic cousins. But they hate it when “their” court is expected to put on trial one of “their” people. They hate it even more when a court elsewhere in the region looks to go lightly on someone from “its” community. Why, cry Serbs, has the Bosnian legal system for nearly 20 years done next to nothing about the 1992 Dobrovoljacka Street killings?

The reality is that every community in the former Yugoslavia sees itself as a victim of something or other. And a central part of being a victim is that you never get justice. So local politicians who believe in pushing the war-crimes agenda face an uphill task -- where are the votes in doing so?

To make it even more difficult, the Serbian government is (as the Amnesty woman at the “Storm” screening rightly pointed out) undermined when other European countries won’t respect Belgrade’s warrants to arrest people indicted in Serbia on war-crimes charges. It makes no sense for the European Union to insist that the region run these trials to high international standards and then not respect local efforts to do that.

BUT...but...

The hard fact of it is that there is a nasty, neo-national socialist tendency in Serbia which flourished under Milosevic, and that those poisonous attitudes infect the way the Serbian elite presents itself. (Similar neo-national socialist tendencies of course are alive and well among Croats, Albanians/Kosovars and Bosniacs/Muslims, a key point lost on some of the supposedly expert senior witnesses presented by the defence at the Ganic trial.)

Serbia's internal struggles continue over what Serbia and Serbs represent both to the world and to themselves.

And that was what ultimately undermined Serbia's case in London; in form and substance it just wasn't convincing.