In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.
This one even has added Literature:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.
This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.
But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...
... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.
No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?
Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated.
Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart.
When the USSR broke up, no-one dealing with the issue in Russia or anywhere else was prepared for the collapse or had any intellectual framework for tackling it. The general idea was that Russia should become 'like the West', or at least 'as much like the West as was possible'.
Fine. But how? There were almost no people in Russia with any significant experience of life outside the Soviet system other than the KGB and assorted businessmen and diplomats. Where to start? What to build with?
Moreover, the whole centralised system had simply stopped. Bureaucrats had left their offices in Moscow and wandered away. Nothing was moving. Food was running low.
The Yeltsin reformers had some good ideas. They passed a simple law allowing anything to be traded, to get people doing things from energetic self-interest. This was a stunning move. Kiosks selling anything and everything appeared as from nowhere. Whereas in 1991 there was no private business in Moscow, by 1995 there was a plump Yellow Pages book listing new businesses. Russians' own creativity was unleashed after 70 years' misery.
Then came the famous Big Mac Attack, which gave Moscow regular fresh milk for the first time in seventy years.. And assorted privatisations, many of which ended up by being manipulated by clever chancers who saw the long-term potential. Leigh Turner (then Ist Sec Econ and now HM Ambassador to Kiev) wrote a stream of elegant reports to London about his adventures in buying a privatisation voucher for a share in a bread business, describing the process vividly as it affected average Russians picking their way through the paperwork.
Was this all pernicious Shock Therapy, as sundry Leftists complain? No. If anything there was insufficient Shock and no Therapy. Above all, Russia could not bring itself to haul mouldy old Lenin from his place of honour in Red Square and bury him far away somewhere. We did not press the issue, to help them make a psychological break with Communist terror. Why? I don't know.
All of which takes me back to my own visit to Red Square a few days ago. My British companion and I decided to go and check out Lenin.
There is a small fence defining a long walkway along the side of the Kremlin Wall to the tomb, recalling the days when there were long queues to pay homage to the villain. On the day we were there no-one was visiting. We nonetheless thought it impolite (and more importantly unwise) to step over the fence and go straight to the tomb. So we walked back to the end of the square dominated by a strange red brick building. At the corner was a gap, allowing us to enter the walkway.
However, a guard told us that we were not allowed to go through the gap. We had to walk round the building and start at the beginning of the walkway. "Why?" "That's the rule."
Rather than suffer this idiotic indignity, we went somewhere else.
OK, OK. Each country has its share of petty annoying restrictions and petty annoying people to enforce them. But in Russia it seems to go further than is possible to imagine. People are told to obey the rules. Flexibility and pragmatic adaption to new circumstances (here the fact that there was no queue) are unwelcome.
So how to change that set of profoundly entrenched instincts?
Luckily there is an answer now available for the first time ever. The Internet.
Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere.
“Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb. Back then, every person felt himself to be in the thick of a nest of spies, there were enemies all around, everything was banned. Unfortunately, we still see this alive and well in the minds of many people today.”
And thus, bit by bit, inch by inch Russia frees its mind of communist stupidity. A long, painful haul. But at least now possible.
Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend.
A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of opportunities to do so (Communists, weary old Gorby) or (b) would never hold honest elections were they to come into power (Zhirinovsky's 'Liberal Democrats'). So a Russian Spring this isn't. Yet.
That said, it takes a lot to mobilise Russia's urban youngsters to take a public stand against the Establishment, and this time quite a lot of them are doing so.
Note especially the use of social media (ie fast live crowd networking by mobile telephones, as taken to a high art by British rioters and other vanguard forces). The Kremlin has been smart to let this latest large demonstration pass without a vigorous and unpleasant clamp-down - so far.
Not sure if I have linked here to my LSE book review about electronic voting, so here it is.
The book itself is interesting and worth buying, as it cogently looks at the pros and cons of different options for registering votes accurately and fairly:
NB: There is an important distinction to understand, folks, between electronic voting and electronic counting.
An electronic voting system means voters pressing a button or touch a screen to register their vote automatically. This is attractive to local authorities wanting to save money on running elections. But it is fraught with operational and conceptual difficulties - how to make the process secret, transparent and safe from manipulation either by external hackers or by malevolent insiders programming/running the electronic system?
An electronic counting system of the sort I saw in Nizhny Novgorod is simpler. The citizen votes as usual on a paper ballot then inserts the ballot paper into the ballot box via an electronic 'reader'. The votes are counted automatically, but the paper votes are there as a back-up in case the result is contested.
The great advantage of the paper-based voting system is that it is clear, simple and in principle reliable. Ordinary people can see what is happening and understand it. Mistakes in counting are unlikely to make a difference. But it is amazingly labour intensive and therefore expensive.
Electronic systems for voting are accurate and fast but much less transparent. Plus an electrical blip of some sort might change the result without anyone knowing.
Two types of new voting technologies were used during these elections. The first was a ballot scanning system called “KOIB”, the second was an electronic voting system “KEG”, based on touch-screen machines. Both systems were used on a moderate scale.
PEC members in most of the regions observed received training on the use of new voting technologies. The practice of publicly testing both systems on or immediately prior to election day can potentially help build trust in e-enabled voting. However, the absence of provisions for random mandatory manual recounts of the processed ballots is of concern. In addition, transparency in the design and functioning of both systems is insufficient as both types of technologies are based on proprietary software not open to public scrutiny.
Touch screen voting machines were equipped with an embedded printer giving voters the possibility to verify their vote whilst voting. Although this enhanced the verifiability of the process, the fact that votes were printed consecutively on one strip of paper created the potential for the violation of the secrecy of the vote.
No special conclusions. But be very reluctant to move to e-voting if it's ever offered. The transparency and security issues are completely different and not easy to follow...
My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December.
I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to senior circles of power in Russia. The Institute supports various public conferences around the world, including the strange one I attended in Belgrade in June. Full disclosure note: I was offered (and accepted) a fee for observing these Russian elections, but it was agreed that I was under no obligation to say anything other than what I thought about the elections or about developments in Russia in general.
Other groups of official international observers were also criss-crossing Russia as elections day approached and on the day itself. The OSCE delivered what looked like the largest observer effort, not least ‘long-term observers’ tasked with looking at the elections in the context of the wider Russian political process. The OSCE's provisional findings include a number of very critical observations on these elections, but also give credit where credit was due in a number of significant respects.
Anyway, I arrived in Moscow on the evening of 1 December to join a dinner with other IIIS group observers, namely some Serbs and Italians. The Serbs were all at the ‘patriotic’ end of the political spectrum in Belgrade and included the Radical Party's Dragan Todorovic who had started spluttering uncontrollably during my presentation in Belgrade in June. One of the other guests was Borislav Milosevic, brother of Slobodan, who had served as Belgrade's ambassador in Moscow after the NATO bombing of Serbia. I did my very best to explain to him the private frustrations of Western leaders and diplomats in dealing with his late brother.
The next day we had briefings about the elections process from the Russian Senate and National Elections Commission and I gave an interview to SKY TV before we set off on our various journeys to watch actual voting. I was relatively lucky (or so I thought) by being sent to Nizhny Novgorod, 400 km east of Moscow. Some of the Serbs had to go to Vladivostok.
IIIS deliver senior access. In Nizhny Novgorod I was given excellent personal briefings by the Deputy Governor and the head of the local elections commission, who showed me one of the new electronic counting machines being used in a number of polling stations across the country.
I then headed for my first polling station. Mistake! I slipped on the ice and wrecked my ankle. I was taken to the nearby basic but efficient wrecked ankle clinic doing its usual brisk business on a Sunday afternoon in Russian winter. An x-ray revealed no breakage of bone, but I had seriously damaged everything else.
The result of this fiasco was that I visited only one polling station, not long before it was due to close. It was run by cheery no-nonsense Russian women. The different parties taking part in the elections had their representatives there – almost all women (Russian men have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon). The party representatives reported no problems. I was intrigued to see arrangements for small portable ballot boxes to be taken to any voter unable to visit the polling station; party representatives were entitled to accompany the ballot boxes during such manoeuvres. It all looked very normal.
After a painful overnight train journey back to Moscow, I attended a desultory press conference at which a smug Bulgarian observer proclaimed that the elections as a whole had been more than free and fair. It was not made clear on whose behalf he was making this bold assertion: his statement was brought round for other observers to sign, and I of course did not sign it. I then departed for home, enjoying a forlorn ride by wheelchair from the aircraft at Heathrow through Terminal 5 to spare my sorry foot.
* * * * *
So much for the little I saw of the elections themselves. Wider considerations?
International election observers have to try to do three things. They need to look at the rules-in-themselves to see whether they make sense and are reasonable and comprehensive. They need to look at how the rules are then applied to real life: are the procedures on paper being properly followed and interpreted? Finally, they need to look at the process as a whole and to see where it fits into the country's political life.
It cannot be said often enough. Russia is an unfathomably huge country with unique issues of command and control (and associated attitudes to governance) going back many centuries. Until the collapse of communism in 1991 there was no tradition of representative democracy. Setting up democratic institutions and practices (and, most important) creating democratic instincts had to be slow.
The arrangements laid down by Russia’s law for conducting elections are technically impressive, albeit detailed to the point of obsession. Russian procedures are better than ours here in the UK in at least three respects:
Votes are counted in the polling station concerned immediately after the polls close, in the presence of party and other observers (ballot boxes are not moved to central counting points with the risk of mischief en route)
No ID, no vote
No postal voting
Moreover, there are streamlined and well monitored arrangements for getting the election results sent fast to Moscow for central compilation. Amidst the complaints about Russia's elections, you don't hear the argument that the counting of the votes as cast has not been fair and accurate.
Remember (again!) the sheer scale of the voting process. Russia has 96,000 polling stations catering for nearly 110,000,000 voters. People are voting for national-level politicians, with totals for individual parties simply added together to get a final total (on one way of looking at it a much simpler and fairer system than they have in eg the USA). The Law of Big Numbers kicks in. Cheating on a scale that makes a significant difference has to be massive – and obvious.
So what's the problem?
First, there inevitably are a large number of electoral violations of different shapes and sizes. When I wrote my book review for the LSE on Electronic Voting, I was struck at how we all take for granted the procedural complexity of voting. The following (and many more) are all essential:
voters lists compiled and kept up-to-date
secret voting
ballot boxes sealed throughout the process
accurate ballot papers printed and distributed under controlled conditions
identification for voters
meticulous and transparent counting, to make sure that all votes are counted and only votes properly cast have been counted
procedures for disputes as to what a messy mark on a given ballot paper might mean
arrangements for recording the final outcome and storing all ballot papers securely in case of future legal challenges.
At literally every stage of the process in any country there is scope for human error and/or deliberate mischief. Ruling out both 100% is impossible.
Thus we need to be careful in agreeing with those who allege “massive violations “of electoral procedures in Russia or anywhere else. If every polling station in Russia has only one complaint about some or other procedural violation, there will be 96,000 complaints! Massive violations! Yet many of those complaints (including two we heard: one party doing some campaigning on the “day of silence" before the elections and not printing its name on election materials) will have been trivial in themselves and quite irrelevant to the final outcome.
Some violations are deliberate and (as far as local conditions allow) systematic. One frequent claim again in Russia is that ‘captive’ voters in mental illness institutions and the Army were lent on hard to vote for the Putin party. Unofficial crowd-sourced election monitors Golos have put on the Web all sorts of other examples, some filmed as they happened.
Complicated official arrangements such as running a nationwide election work in good part because they are transparent. Yes, in formal terms Russia does all it needs to do to host international and political party observers. But this time round the blatant official and unofficial pressure put on Golos (including denial of service website attacks and the usual insinuations that foreign support for such organisations was illegitimate or sinister) created a very bad impression.
More generally the post-Communist ruling establishment in Russia has changed the law to make it harder for new political parties to make a breakthrough. (Note: UKIP has views on the subject here in the UK.) Smaller parties are not allowed to form a single voting bloc. The rules for forming a national party able to contest national elections are excessively strict and not easy to meet. An earlier, excellent option of including on the ballot paper a vote for “none of the above" has been withdrawn. And so on.
Add to all this the violence suffered by some journalists who try to expose official corruption, unrelenting pro-Putin media coverage and the way far too many Russian media outlets condemn or marginalise any liberal views, and you get the sort of outcome which the OSCE fairly criticises.
But…
Just look at the results. Four parties have made it into the national parliament, after roughly half the Russian population voted:
The Putin/Medvedev party United Russia.
The retread Communists who still rant on about Marxist-Leninism (now with added Patriotism)
The erratic pro-Establishment Liberal Democrat populists led by Zhirinovsky, whom we fondly remember on a Russian train taking pot-shots at voters’ pets with a hunting rifle.
And A Just Russia, a relatively new party claiming to be social democrats which has proposed an alliance with the Communists
Parties representing a more liberal policy-set involving reduced state control and better human rights either did not get into the race or (as in the case of Yavlinsky's Yabloko party) failed dismally once again. A new supposedly centre-right party Right Cause won only 400,000 votes.
Western commentators and some in Russia are claiming these election results show rising dissatisfaction with the performance of Vladimir Putin. They might even be right. But that dissatisfaction is rising from a low and apathetic base, and insofar as it translates into changed voting it boosts tendencies which are even worse. Compared with the other three national/socialist parties which crossed the threshold to enter the Duma, Putin's party look almost normal. Putin remains the favourite to be voted back in as Russia's president in the forthcoming elections next March.
In short, the legacy of Soviet communism lives on powerfully in Russia. Lenin still moulders in red Square. Nizhny Novgorod railway station welcomes you with a vast Communist mosaic. Former KGB-type people have prospered since Communism ended, and use their power and wealth to frame things in their favour.
Under current management Russia is getting steadily more prosperous and steadily more pluralistic, albeit in a specific Russian way. Russians en masse have a (for us) startling capacity for putting up with hardships, including overbearing and neurotic state power. They are not bothered by their leaders sneering at foreigners or homosexuals or liberal attitudes. They do want to see progress and get richer, and they hate corruption and get-rich-quick types. But it takes a lot to rouse them to take a stand against the existing “system “.
Are things changing, with young urban people in particular demanding wider changes? If so, does it matter?
Maybe. After the elections the head of the National Elections Commission proclaimed that evidence of electoral malpractice produced by Golos would not be investigated unless it was backed by 'official' complaints. This cynical view reflects a ruling Russian mindset going back centuries, namely that only ‘official’ procedures count.
Yet in Russia as in so many other countries the mass of people are getting more powerful vis-a-vis the state. Perhaps the main story of these elections is the way many Russians are now using cheap mobile technology to follow and record what is happening across their vast country - and Vladimir Putin's so far uncertain response.
Here's an astute point I heard at a top FCO meeting recently:
"The world of states and the world of people are diverging..."
Neatly put, and profoundly true. See also the Eurozone, passim.
How does that apply to Russia?
Russia is the sprawling space on earth which took to the highest, maddest level in human history the idea of 'the state'. Millions of people were murdered or allowed to starve to death to advance state power as something completely above any other political or moral values. The state as both instrument and end-in-itself.
Part of my presentation at Sussex University today was all about the way Belief was replaced by Knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in a stupendous unprecedented new idea pronounced in Philadelphia in 1776: that government derives from the Consent of the Governed.
And as we are seeing all round the world, the fact that hundreds of millions of people now have a spontaneous networking ability with their mobile phones compels even the most miserable dictatorship - yes, sooner or later you too North Korea - to have to think about how best to deal with growing mass objection to being taken for granted by an often corrupt and unjust state.
In Russia this takes an interesting form. Internet penetration of society is rising fast, as Russia's powerful urban elite's interest in new technology inexorably spreads outwards.
It turns out that Russians who are not 'on the Internet' have very high faith in Russia's state TV (and therefore the ruling Putinist establishment who dominate it). However, Russians who use the Internet regularly have a lot more trust in the Internet than in state TV. Not that this is necessarily a change for the better: a heck of a lot of raving extreme nationalist websites are alive and well, in Russia as elsewhere.
Nonetheless, in one way or the other the underlying tendency (and growing fast) is for Russians to be much more critical about reassuring pronouncements from Moscow. Thus the recent extraordinary spectacle of Putin himself being booed by the crowd at a typical Putin PR event - a martial arts competition - was one thing. Even the TV coverage picked it up. But then a video of the spectacle was soon running round the Russian part of the Internet being watched by over a million people.
What does it all mean? That the Putinist tendency will again (of course) prevail in Sunday's Duma elections unless something unfathomable happens and the various opposition groups spectacularly expand their appeal.
Yet slowly but surely even Russia is changing towards some new sui generis pluralism. It will take another 25 years or so before the first generation of Russians not steeped in communism in their adult lives reach the age to dominate society. A society In which the Consent of the Governed will have become a strong factor.
Former FCO Minister Denis MacShane MP has written a small but energetic book praising Kosovo's independence: Why Kosovo Still Matters (sic).
Here it is, a perfect Christmas stocking-filler, the more perfect if bought via this link so that I get a few groats from Amazon:
The main interest of the book for you folk lies in the more or less contemporaneous Ministerial diary extracts from Denis as he visited various Balkan capitals and attended international gatherings where Kosovo/Serbia was being discussed.
There is a walk-on role by Keith Vaz MP, briefly the Minister responsible for Balkan policy, whose modest knowledge of the subject was exposed back in 2001 when he and I had to give evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee:
We find it deeply regrettable that Mr Vaz, the FCO minister responsible for south-east Europe, has not visited the area ... His evidence session with us did not reveal a detailed grasp of the policy issues which the area faces. As the Minister told us, and we know ourselves, the situation in the Balkans is "very complex and very difficult"...
It has to be said that the Committee had a point.
Mr Vaz's eloquent but somewhat insubstantial replies to their many questions were a truly fine example of talking a lot and saying ... nothing.
In Denis' book too Keith Vaz blandly reveals his insightful approach. During a session of briefing by FCO officials on the complexity of the Kosovo problem, he asks:
"Can somebody just draw me a little map and show me where Kosovo is?"
The main interest of the book for me is ... me. I appear wittily or not at various points, but this line caught my special eye:
"... Charles Crawford, one of the most whizzing catherine wheels of a politically astute ambassador that we have"
*blushes prettily*
The book also records accurately enough one amazing moment in April 2002 when then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw chaired a discussion about Balkan policy.
Paddy Ashdown (then High Representative in Bosnia) had nobbled PM Tony Blair to argue against drawing down UK forces too far in Bosnia while maintaining a sizeable UK military presence in Kosovo. The Foreign Secretary asked officials where we all thought the main UK military effort should now focus:
Charles Crawford, the sharp but rather cocky Ambassador in Belgrade, says that we should stay in Bosnia and that Kosovo should be persuaded to stay in a loose federation with Serbia and Montenegro.
The arguments about where UK troops made most impact on the ground and where the main threat to the region's security lay went round and round the table. Finally, as he describes in the book, Denis proposed a vote. And before anyone could question his sanity he quickly had torn up a piece of paper and handed round slips for voting: B for Bosnia, K for Kosovo.
We voted. The votes were counted by Denis. 10 - 5 for focusing on Kosovo. I voted for a heavier UK military presence in Kosovo (of course), even though the book suggests that the opposite was my view.
Denis' case therefore won the argument:
Thus, British foreign policy is made
Hmm. The exception, not the rule, I think.
Otherwise the text is a gay romp through the politics of the Balkans over a thousand years and the latest decades of convulsion, with no opportunity spared to extol the Kosovans and cast Serbs in general and most UK Conservatives in particular in a bad light.
In other words, a typical MacShanian production. Top quality insider gossip, lively, sometimes irreverent, impossibly light, blithely tendentious. And with handy insights. I especially liked the way he linked the events in 1980s' Yugoslavia to the Solidarity pressures in Poland - important to recall that there was a wider European anti-communist context to the issue.
It's also noteworthy that he does not (now) dismiss out of hand the idea of some sort of small territory swaps as part of an historic deal between Belgrade and Pristina, an idea whose time may yet come.
The main problem with the book, apart from myriad other problems, is that it does far too little justice (in fact none at all) to the significant arguments of the Russians and others about the inadmissibility of border changes in Europe "without the consent of all concerned" as per the Helsinki Accords.
Because, Minister, foreign policy is all about balancing realities against principles and rules.
And for all the merits of the Kosovans' claims against Belgrade, is it really such a good outcome for the UK and the world - and even for Kosovo - that international opinion has ended up so divided in a way which shows that deeper Western policy on this subject has spectacularly failed to be convincing (ie Russia, China, India, Brazil, S Africa and many other non-Western big hitters firmly not recognising Kosovo independence on principle)?
Anyway, did I say buy it via the Amazon link above? Go on. You know you want to.
Yesterday my Sunday was interrupted by a request from RT-TV (Russia's answer to the BBC's world broadcasts) to take part in a programme talking about the Eurozone in general and Italy in particular.
As they asked nicely and as it was not too far to the BBC Oxford studio where the short session was to be recorded, off I went.
Here is part of the transcript of the interview, with my friend Patrick Young as it happens also featured just below (Patrick knows more than any human being decently should know about software programs running Balkan and other such new stock exchanges).
Off I go:
“All the countries in the eurozone which are getting these debt difficulties are having the same problem. This is because they are in the eurozone and cannot devalue their currencies. In effect they are left with borrowing money from the international market and the other eurozone members. They are left with reducing government spending, which is sacking people, which is not popular with the people who are sacked. They are reduced to putting up taxes, which is not popular with everyone else," ...
“Once you’ve got into these very strong difficult debt situations, the ways out are all very painful. So in both Greece and Italy and in some other eurozone countries the choices available to the leaders of the countries concerned are very limited. That is why the eurozone is coming under stress – because the political and psychological pressures are coming up against the way the whole thing was set up in the first place,”
Crawford emphasised that the crisis in Europe is like an impressive house where the foundations, it turns out, were not very well built. And it is very difficult to repair the foundations while inside the house and without moving somewhere else.
If you're feeling brave, watch the full interview (only some four minutes) by pressing the link above. Lawks, I look tired. Maybe it was clear and fluent enough for the occasion, even if I got a bit too involved in one or two long sentence thoughts. Keep it short - and simple!
Fascinating in a grimly painful way to watch one's own twitches and mannerisms (such as starting each answer with "Well, ...") when part of one's work is training others in how to do media work ha ha.
A random comment below from one Bogdan shows that he/she has not quite grasped the point of a TV interview:
A weaker Italy might appeal to many inside the EU. It would be very interesting indeed if Mr Crawford could as well analyse the dire status of economy in his own country, which should be the UK by the biased style of his article...
The medium is the message, or something. Even in Russia.
Most readers of this website are interested in one way or another in 'foreign affairs'.
As I have described on different occasions here, the heart of international diplomacy is the state. That idea in its modern form emerged from the Peace of Westphalia. Here are some passages from my 2009 DIPLOMAT article on this subject:
A vital date in the history of the modern world is 1648. That was when the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster were signed. All readers of DIPLOMAT know these treaties off by heart. They together are more usually known as the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War within the Holy Roman Empire and the even more geriatric Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.
The negotiation of those two treaties invented modern grand scale diplomatic junketing. Haggling meandered on for six years. Over 100 different delegations of states, ‘imperial states’ from the Holy Roman Empire and interest groups (today known as NGOs) jostled for good outcomes, all on generous expenses.
The Two Treaties were mainly about settling Europe’s violent religious differences. But in doing so they set up new principles of sovereignty, under which the rulers of ‘nation states’ agreed to manage their relationships in a peaceful or at least civilised way. As democracy slowly came to qualify the power of those rulers, such sovereignty was seen as lying not with the national leader but rather in the ‘nation’. Which opened the way for ‘nation states’ to emerge as independent actors on the international stage.
Hence two tricky questions, still alive and well today:
·how does a defined territory join this grand process (ie what is a ‘state’)?
·which people join this grand process (ie what is a ‘nation’?)?
... Meanwhile Yugoslavia too had broken up. That hard question at the heart of Westphalianism – nation or state? - posed itself in acute form
Should the rest of us recognise the former internal borders of the USSR and Yugoslavia as the borders of the new countries concerned? Or should we negotiate border changes in some cases, better to reflect the principle of self-determination? Who or what should be sovereign?
... The West looked at Slovenia (predominantly Slovene-populated, borders mainly not contested) and decided to have its cake and eat it. Slovenia handily ticked both boxes: internal borders as new international borders, and self-determination.
Which was fine for Slovenia. But not for Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro or Serbia, the other five republics in communist Yugoslavia each with different ethnic/national identity tensions. Not to mention the sizeable category of ‘Yugoslavs’ – people not identifying themselves with one or other ethnic community...
You know the rest. Calamity. War. Refugee columns.Ethnic cleansing. War crimes. ICTY. NATO bombing. In today’s Europe! Dayton. Rambouillet. More NATO bombing. Kosovo run by the UN. Milosevic sent to ICTY and dies in prison. Kosovo declares independence in 2008, but is still not recognised by the majority either of countries or of the world’s population.
... Diplomacy. Building on what exists (ie racial, ethnic, religious tensions going back centuries) and accept that Good Fences make Good Neighbours? As we (HMG/West) did in accepting the break-up of what remained of Yugoslavia into Serbia + Kosovo + Montenegro?
Or building towards what we insist has to exist, hoping to compel people to cooperate nicely within single state frameworks which they dislike and distrust, as we (HMG/West) have done in Bosnia?
Two utterly different philosophies and policies, applied to places a few miles apart, which for eighty years were in one country.
Foolish Consistency? Or Foolish Inconsistency?
From Westphalia to West failure?
Now a new book by Norman Davies is coming out: Vanished Kingdoms. It looks at how the ebb and flow of history builds, removes and sometimes (Poland; Montenegro) restores polities.
People who have their eye on short-term, contemporary events and the world around us tend to forget this. I sometimes think they imagine the world politic to be a chessboard, where you play games, have a crisis, and then you put all the pieces back and have another game. Well it’s not like that. You can have a chessboard, you have players who are either pawns or kings or whatever, but the players themselves are always changing...
At the end of the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine period, the empire shrinks and shrinks until it consists of one city, Constantinople, and the Ottoman Turks can encircle it. There’s a final siege and the Turks go over the wall. The last emperor – number 156 or whatever – disappears in the fray, is killed, and that’s the end of the empire. This is, if you like, the guidebook to this story, to exactly what Rousseau is saying. No matter how powerful they may look, the time will come, as in the lives of men and women, when they die. It’s not a topic that people are eagerly looking at...
And the indigenous population of the region where Glasgow is – Strathclyde, as it’s called now – was Welsh. The chief hero of medieval Scotland was William Wallace. Wallace means Welsh. The Scots don’t tell you that. They had this theory that William Wallace’s family came from Shropshire, which is how they try to explain how a Welshman could be in what they thought of as Scotland. They didn’t know that these Welsh of the north were not intruders from Wales, they were there long before the Scots...
Part of the afterlife of the Soviet Union is, of course, in Putin’s brain. Putin is ex-KGB, an organisation founded to preserve the Soviet state which failed completely. Putin must have a terrible sense of failure. In fact, he has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of modern times. So sure, Putin, in the back of his mind, would like to reassemble if not the Soviet Union, then some sort of empire, a broader Russian-dominated grouping which would be a modern version of the Soviet Union. I don’t think he’s got a cat’s chance in hell...
And finally:
Is there a European identity strong enough to overcome the national identities of its member states? It’s touch and go. But I’m an optimist. I think there will be one hell of a crisis. I doubt if the EU will disappear, but it will be severely chastened. And it will have to put its house in order. Otherwise it will become one of the vanished kingdoms. It wouldn’t be unprecedented for that to happen.
Read the whole thing. It's crackling with wisdom and interest.
Last week I attended the UK premiere of a new Polish film, Battle of Warsaw 1920. It gives a lurid and (inevitably) hugely simplified account of one of Europe's greatest battles.
As I left the cinema I found myself wrestling with a grim and unwelcome question. Had it been the worst film I had ever seen?
The historical story is gripping and extraordinary, and almost totally unknown here in the UK.
Basically, after the Russian Revolution Lenin followed the instruction manual and believed that there could be no true Marxist revolution in backward, peasanty Russia - revolutions needed angry industrial proletariats, such as the one in defeated German. To mobilise and reinforce the German workers the newly formed Red Army had to get to Berlin, which meant trampling over the newly re-formed state of Poland. The Poles advanced into Ukraine to try to stop the advance further east, but failed.
So westwards the Red Army advanced, with a young Stalin as political commissar. However, as they closed in on Warsaw the Polish forces led by Jozef Pilsudski effected a daring if not desperate circling manoeuvre and managed to divide and defeat the Soviet attack. The result was a huge military disaster for the Kremlin and a momentous set-back to Soviet ambitions to spread revolution into wealthy Europe.
Thus the basic story is remarkable and full of both historical and human interest. Charles de Gaulle was involved as a young French officer helping the Polish army. Stalin fell out with the other revolutionary leaders over the causes of the defeat but survived the criticism. In 1937 Stalin took revenge on General Tukhachevsky who as a remarkably young officer had led the Soviet attack on Poland - Tukhachevsky (by then a Marshal of the Soviet Union) was tortured into confessing to be a German agent and summarily executed. Were the horrendous Katyn massacres of the Polish officer class in WW2 Stalin's pay-back for the way the Polish side treated thousands of Soviet prisoners after the Warsaw battle?
Any film made today about such colossal events has to present at best only a few key features and leave out myriad others. Is the end product nonetheless presented with artistic style, intelligence and at least some subtlety? In this case the answer is a glum No.
It starts off quite nicely, with a young Trotsky leading the communists into action, and hints of intellectual liveliness and jolly decadence in newly independent Warsaw.
As it winds on almost everything is reduced to a banal Polish cliché. The battle scenes are of course tumultuous, and remind us just how horrible it was as these vast armies charged at each other and ended up fighting hand-to-hand. Yet even here the frequent glimpses of severed limbs and hideous wounds are somehow presented in a revoltingly prurient way. The 3D effects were lame and annoying.
Otherwise we see nothing but an assembly-line of boring stock characters each there to 'represent' something obvious. The cruel, crafty hard-drinking Cheka commissar and primitive drunk Red soldiers defiling ruined bourgeois property. The uncertain priest who finds the courage to lead a Polish charge to slow-motion massacre. The smirking alcoholic Polish military officer trying to take advantage of the heroine back in Warsaw; he gets demoted and dies a perfunctory death. The heroine herself, a yummy naive cabaret dancer who gets drawn into the war as a nurse and ends up like Rambo, mowing down Reds with a machine gun.
There's more. Much more.
A drunk but plucky Cossack. Two camp Warsaw intellectuals who quickly manage to crack the Soviet military codes. A few walk-on gormless peasants with hearts of gold. The hero who (absurdly) ends up with the Soviet forces as a potential propaganda victory and sees for himself the depravity of communist methods: quite how he seamlessly ends up back on the Polish side defending Warsaw after this 'treason' is not explained. We see repeated shots of bulging-eyed Red Army fanatics bawling 'to Warsaw', to remind us what the film is about. Slowmo crosses spin through the air amidst the carnage to tell us that the Soviets were evil atheists.
The Polish victory is known in Poland as the 'Miracle on the Vistula'. Here the hero is comprehensively bayoneted in slow motion by a fleeing Red. But at the end the heroine finds him in hospital, alive. Another miracle!
The film accordingly sinks to the level of poor propaganda. The artistic value is negligible. The internal Soviet leadership conflicts and other international angles are ignored. Many scenes will touch Polish hearts as part of the detailed Polish collective national memory of the battle, but leave everyone else on the planet unmoved or puzzled or even vexed.
Is it for foreigners to be too critical? After all, Poland's post-WW2 Stalinists tried for decades to wipe this battle and the later Katyn Massacres from the Polish national consciousness. Part of the very point of films such as this is all about Poland 'reclaiming' its history back from Moscow. A more than laudable aim.
Yet not all laudable aims are done well. Andrzej Wajda's film Katyn won many strong reviews for its subtle handling of that horrendous event. I'll be amazed if this banal new film by Jerzy Hoffman gets anything close to the same praise.
Many points of interest here, including on South Africa's not-so-peaceful transition away from apartheid to ANC-dominated democracy:
I had a huge row on this with someone in Warsaw years later. I can even tell you who it was, because no-one will ever read the transcript. It was David King, the former Government Chief Scientist.
It turned out he was from South Africa. We were sitting there in Warsaw having a lunch talking about science policy and global warming and he said – I’m really pleased to be here in Poland, because I come from South Africa. Poland like South Africa had a peaceful transition to democracy.
I said Poland wasn’t that peaceful because quite a few people were killed, but South Africa’s wasn’t peaceful at all. He said – What do you mean it wasn’t peaceful? I said – Thirty thousand people were killed. Hacked to pieces and burned alive.
He said – That’s just ridiculous. I said – It may be inconvenient, and it may be that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, but it strikes me as a bit thick to call South Africa a peaceful transition. It just wasn’t peaceful. If 30,000 Poles had been killed we’d have heard about it. Poland had Father Popieluszko and one or two others, and that’s about it.
Anyway we had this absurd row, with the Poles watching like that Hitchcock film called Strangers on a Train where all the heads are turning to and fro at the tennis match. Eventually we declared the end of hostilities and changed the subject.
I went back to the Embassy and got on to London and said – How many people died in the transition away from apartheid? And the answer was - over that period – seven or eight years period – what you could define the transition as – 30 to 40, 000 known deaths – those sort of numbers. There was basically a civil war going on in different parts of South Africa among the blacks. But the so-called peaceful transition took place because few if any whites were massacred. Anything else was sort of weird unimportant African stuff.
And so your question; was it successful? Well, how do you measure success? I met a woman once whose twin sister had been necklaced by the ANC. She was a PAC supporter. The world let loose revolutionary terror in the townships and the World Council of Churches and these people did nothing about it. In fact if anything they encouraged it and Winnie Mandela with her matchbox – it was disgusting. There were crucifixions going on in the townships just a mile or two away from the Embassy in Pretoria. (Tape change)
CC ... So the question is, how do you measure success? We brought to power a government, an ANC Party, whose subsequent incompetence has led to the more or less winding down of the best electricity system in Africa because of lack of investment.
But above all – according to the Harvard study which came out the other day – 300,000 people have died over the AIDS problem who maybe needn’t have died. Now this is a tremendous disaster, and it’s sort of tucked away on page 3 somewhere, so hideously embarrassing it is that the ANC government has led to this result. It goes beyond any measure.
In the last ten years we’ve had a Labour government, a lot of whom invested hugely, personally, in the anti-apartheid struggle. Tony Blair, Robin Cook – this was one of the big moments of their life and there was a big moral campaign, and for them the ANC are for all practical purposes above criticism. And we’ve sat there watching 300,000 people die because of mistaken policies which we all knew were a farce.
I saw in the paper the other day the government are giving £50 million to South Africa who’s now got a new health minister, to deal with this AIDS problem. It’s the mother of all shutting the stable door after the horses have bolted and died. I’m pleased to say if you type in South Africa peaceful transitioninto Google, my website dumping on the peaceful transition comes up on the front page at number 3. So the truth is out there somewhere.
Or try this spirited passage on the transition (or not) from communism in Russia. Should we have insisted that Lenin be removed from Red Square?
... People say now this was a failure of shock therapy. The trouble was there wasn’t enough shock, and there wasn’t enough therapy. If anything, we should have been more radical in some of the things we’d done in terms of upsetting the old order and breaking up the old monopolies. We certainly should have been more radical in pressing for Lenin to be taken out of Red Square. It was a moral blunder not to press for that.
MM Could we have got away with that?
CC You could only get away with it only if you decided it was important. I think there was a feeling of – Oh well – Leftism in that form is over, so why bother pushing it?
If you get on my website again you’ll see reference to my telegram about a tale of two vampires. The Nazi vampire was killed at the end of the Second World War. The Communist vampire wasn’t killed. It lies there in Red Square but no-one’s driven a stake through its heart, and it just keeps coming back.
Leftism in the Foreign Office and western thinking generally, it’s a profound thing. The idea that you should drive a stake through the heart of communism ... people would say – Well why? Why are you being so divisive? It’s all over. They didn’t realise you had to kill it off. And Mrs Thatcher would have been much better on this, because by then John Major had come in. He wasn’t one of nature’s stake-drivers. He probably would have agreed with it, but he wasn’t somebody who was going to push it.
MM Well I suppose you could say what’s it got to do with us?
CC What it’s got to do with us is that we have to kill vampires. Otherwise they return through the back door. As indeed they’ve done.
So there were decisions made which were not dramatic enough. There were issues about the Katyn massacre in Poland which Yeltsin pushed – but we didn’t really take them up thematically. Because there was always a feeling – Well we don’t want to do this, in case it provokes the opposition to Yeltsin. It was odd. We pulled our punches, but the argument against doing what I wanted was that you can only do so much and we were all working flat out.
I still think there wasn’t a big enough ideological component. A lot of western governments didn’t want to gloat, be seen to be gloating, and maybe there’s somewhere between gloating and being much more determined. When the Second World War ended we organised all these conferences at WiltonPark on de-Nazification. We didn’t do de-Communistification, or whatever the word would be. Because we didn’t think we needed to.
MM Where would it have got us?
CC It might have got us to a lot of good places if you brought a lot of these people across and taught them about the rule of law. Don’t forget in Russia they’ve got no living memory of anything other than communism. In Eastern Europe it’s different.
What you said makes my very point. It wouldn’t have got us anywhere, why bother, it’s too big and it’s too complicated. My point is, this is one of the greatest intellectual convulsions in modern history and we tried to do it on the cheap. The Know How Fund was what, fifty million, a hundred million over eight years – peanuts.
We gave quite a lot of money writing off debts which I suppose was theoretically real money, but in terms of the money we invested in transforming those societies, given the scale of what was needed and the scale of where they’d come from, it was just absurd. Just not up to the job. We saw this after Milosevic was killed in Serbia. We tried to do it on the cheap. Stupid. It was a bad investment.
There are moments when you invest a bit more money because they’re historical moments. There was opportunity to put thousands of people through courses, as opposed to tens or scores or hundreds of people through courses. It’s just a good investment and we didn’t have a leader who had a strategic vision in that sort of way. Plus there was other money around – it’s not our job – why should we bother – dah, dah, dah.
There’s always a reason for not doing anything, and slowly the moments pass. Years later you see Putinism there. One wonders if one had invested a bit more in pluralism, would we have quite ended up where we are now? Some say of course you would, because that’s all there is in Russia. Other people would say no – it would have made a difference. Personally, I would like to have seen us make a bigger effort...
Read the whole thing, as they say. My life and its contribution to the times.
Andrzej Lepper, turbulent leader of Poland's left-populist Self-Defence party, yesterday was found dead. Apparently by hanging himself in his party office in Warsaw
Where to start? The English Wikipedia page gives the basics of his lively career, describing how he came from a modest rural family background and with little formal education worked himself up and up to become one of Poland's leading politicians.
At the peak of his political fortunes his party won 11% of the vote in Poland's 2005 general elections to become the third-largest party in parliament. Lepper himself likewise came a more than respectable third (15% of the first round vote) in the 2005 Presidential elections shortly thereafter.
There ensued a messy period featuring an unhappy coalition government between the Kaczynski twins' Law and Justice party plus the two leading populist parties in parliament, Self-Defence and League ofPolish Families. Lepper became a Deputy Prime Ministerand Minister of Agriculture. This eccentric arrangement duly crashed under the weight of excessive bickering.
In the ensuing 2007 elections both Self-Defence and League ofPolish Families blew up and crashed from any seats in Parliament; the Citizens Platform government led by Donald Tusk swept to a heavy win. Thereafter Lepper has been a forlorn, diminished figure, beset by footling private and political scandals and family difficulties.
* * * * *
What to make of Lepper's rise and fall? He was a classic 'transition' spoiler phenomenon, echoing Zhirinovsky in Russia although nothing like as, ahem, vivid:
Lepper by contrast was much more 'stolid' if not oddly conventional. He rose to prominence during the turbulent post-communist 1990s by the usual populist tactics (noisy championing of the 'little man' especially in rural areas and periodic road-blocks) but necessarily (and unlike Zhirinovsky) calmed down as his party won more and more votes.
By the time I went to Poland as Ambassador in late 2003, Lepper's party was doing well, with polling oscillating up to 15% or more (a result good enough to secure a strong Parliamentary presence).
As Ambassador I had a supposedly tricky decision. Poland was a new EU member. Lepper was likely to do well in the 2005 elections and perhaps get into government. Should I meet him to see for myself what sort of leader Poland might get, as British Ministers might need to engage with Lepper at EU meetings? Or would doing so give him an undeserved and wrong-headed boost of credibility/respectability/legitimacy?
This raises a profound point of diplomatic technique, which in turn links to one's view of politics and political change.
My view was that I should go and see him, even if that might dismay some Polish liberal-minded friends.
First, my own main duty was to help London understand what was happening in Poland, which meant dealing with Poland as it was, not as polite Warsaw opinion wanted it to be.
But second, part of the drama of the whole post-communist transition was all about slowly but surely calming down politics after the brutalising effects of decades of one-party stagnation. Foreign diplomats engaging with people - especially the 'problematic' ones - in a friendly but direct way was all part of the process of restoring normal life and respectable standards. It opened horizons and raised expectations: once a populist gets a taste of diplomatic life and the odd canapé, s/he tends to want to stay in that magic elite circle, which means moderating behaviour and language.
Putting it another way, by engaging with people you do give them a respectability they may not deserve. But you also get leverage you otherwise would not have. Precisely because they get a new sort of vicarious respectability from meeting you, they now have something new to lose. And, usually, they are very loath to lose it.
Slightly undignified for the diplomats, and vexing for mainstream middle-class liberal locals. But it works.
London thought hard about this for all of two seconds, and agreed. So off I went to call on Mr Lepper in his party offices.
Needless to say, Lepper was quite good company: canny, interesting, folksy-funny and genially opportunistic. We had a pleasant and sensible exchange which achieved a few seconds of notoriety in the Polish media. My main problem was not staring too obviously at Lepper's caked-on fake almost orange sun-tan.
And lo! it transpired that when Law and Justice pipped Citizens Platform to the post in Poland's 2005 general elections, the Kaczynski twins decided to form a coalition with the two populist parties who also got into the Sejm. Lepper became Deputy PM! And Minister of Agriculture! Horror!
Apart from the fact this strange coalition government as a whole was a priori dysfunctional and sub-optimal, political life in Poland spluttered on adequately for a while.
Lepper himself did well enough as Agriculture Minister. He was clever and diligent. He mastered the brief, popped over to Brussels for Agriculture Council meetings and made no blatant policy mistakes. A visiting House of Commons Committee met him in his office and had a more than sensible exchange with him about how Poland's fragmented farming sector was coping with the CAP and so on.
In due course the Kaczynski twins collapsed the arrangement and called the 2007 elections which brought Donald Tusk's Citizens Platform a sweeping victory. Both Lepper's party and League of Polish Families were more or less wiped out as political forces, just as Jaroslaw Kaczynski had planned.
This, of course, is why I respected the Kaczynski twins as a powerful force for normalising Polish politics, even if that view much vexed the Warsaw chattering classes. The Kaczynskis really were concerned to tackle 'social exclusion' in Poland, by bringing lots of frustrated rural and small town voters (many of them the human flotsam and jetsam of WW2 displacements from today's Ukraine who ended up dumped on collective farms) into the political mainstream.
Lepper's Self-Defence and to a lesser extent Polish Families delivered handy lumps of these rural, marginalised voters who otherwise might drift away to more extreme ideas. Hence the cynical brilliance of the Kaczynkis' scheme: they would create this unworkable populist coalition government, steadily suck out the electoral juice from their partner parties, then throw away the discredited leadership husks.
All of which went precisely to plan. Polish politics today is more 'inclusive' - and far more stable - as a result. A huge gain for Europe.
Let me tell you about one meeting of EU Ambassadors hosted by the Austrian Ambassador soon after the new improbable coalition government was formed in 2005.
One senior colleague who should have known better proposed that the EU Ambassadors send back monthly reports to capitals about the problematic state of human rights in Poland following the creation of this disastrous new extremist/populist government.
I argued that this was wrong in principle. It was very good news for Europe that these supposedly populist parties now had a taste of government. What was better for the EU? Having these people getting occasional smart lunches in Brussels and learning about modern negotiation of good EU standards, or manning road-blocks to protest EU policies?
The whole point of 'transitions' in post-communist countries was, I said, slowly but surely to bring marginalised people into the normal mainstream political process. That was what the Kaczynski twins were doing, much to their credit. Yes, some of the people concerned did not meet usual high standards of Euro-fastidiousness and table-manners. But the best way for them to get there was through patient engagement, not patronising sneers. The fact that Eurosceptics Lepper and Polish Families had entered government and now would start to engage with Brussels processes was a real success for European integration, not a failure!
And, I concluded, if we were really concerned about 'rising extremism in Europe', the desecration of Jewish graves by Islamist fanatics in some major EU capitals might be a much better place to start.
This terse view won the day, and the proposal was promptly dropped.
Conclusion?
Transitions from communism or other embedded dictatorships necessarily take a long time - decades. Be patient. Deal with these societies as they are, for all the social and moral contradictions.
When in doubt, err on the side of engagement and inclusivity. Be democratic. For all their flaws and failings, people like Andrzej Lepper can play a necessary and ultimately unexpectedly positive walk-on role in normalising things.
Remember the Smolensk air-crash which killed President Lech Kaczynski and so many other senior Poles?
Disagreement has rumbled on about how far mistakes or misjudgements made by the Polish aircrew and/or Russian control tower were responsible, but a major Polish report has now accepted that a good slice of the responsibility is on the Polish side. The Defence Minister has resigned.
Part of the problem after any such calamity is working out the key facts: what precisely happened and why? In this case the Poles have been dismayed that, as they see it, the Russian side has not been as forthcoming as it might have been. Hence the usual conspiracy theories.
One way to improve information understanding immediately after any accident is to have vital data stored not in aircraft 'black boxes' but streamed in real time to different key places for storage and (as necessary) analysis. This super Wired piece describes how that might be done quite easily and fairly cheaply.
In the Smolensk case, the disagreements between Warsaw and Moscow over the causes of the accident might not have vanished had both sides had all flight data streamed to them during the flight, but the areas of disagreement perhaps would have been much reduced - and much more quickly articulated.
“EU success story” gets some 600 Google News hits. “EU crisis” gets 14,000 hits.
What has gone wrong? Some people have a blunt answer: “Too much Europe!” EU structures and policies are said to be creating more problems than they are solving: over-complex institutions, over-ambitious integration (above all the euro zone), over-centralisation of decision-taking. We see a disturbing decline in confidence in European solidarity.
But for Poland, European integration is not a crisis. It’s an inspiration.
Twenty-two years ago when communism ended, Poland’s GDP shrank by 12 per cent. Inflation ran out of control. Key export markets vanished. We had to build a modern democracy and a thriving market economy from scratch, while disentangling ourselves from the Warsaw Pact.
With huge efforts – and generous help from our European partners – we have succeeded. Poland is growing at over 4 per cent per year. We are now the sixth largest economy in Europe, and one of the top 20 economies in the world. Poland is the only EU member to have maintained positive growth through the recent economic storms.
It is no surprise that surveys find Poles expressing strong confidence in the EU. All our success would not have been possible without the investment in institutional stability and solidarity which the EU delivered.
It is not enough to be optimistic and positive. We also must be realistic. The EU faces painful decisions.
Poland will not accept that the answer lies in less solidarity, or less integration. That is the sure path to disintegration...
Well put. But given the severe strains in the Eurozone (Poland says it wants to join but is not (yet) a member, so its role in Eurozone top-level discussions must at best be modest) and everything else going on, can any one Presidency really make much of a difference?
Poland wants to push ahead EU ideas for improving EU-wide e-commerce and better EU-wide patent arrangements - all good stuff but no prospect of short-term improvements arising therefrom.
The main success of Poland's Presidency is likely to be on the foreign policy front, achieving better/closer EU relations with Russia, Ukraine and Moldova and maybe (subject to developments) a new EU move to engage sensibly with Belarus. That last one depends on Belarus being able to open itself up to a new approach: not easy as Russia unemotionally turns the energy and other screws on the erratic President Lukashenko.
Poland also can aim to help set an intelligent hard-headed EU policy framework for helping North Africa through its various 'transitions'.
Meanwhile the next vast row over the EU Budget trundles into view. Here is Open Europe's analysis on the first and inevitably absurd Commission proposals.
The point here is that the Commission deliberately overbids to start the negotiation process, hoping and expecting to lurch the heart of the debate in the general direction of More Europe.
In this case as it happens Poland's Janusz Lewandowski is leading the charge in Brussels on behalf of the Commission. Polish wiliness is evident in the proposed package. 'Less' on CAP/agriculture, more on new EU-wide energy investments, 'efficiency savings' and so on: the EU Budget is very small, really, so we can and should afford to increase it [the more so since Poland is the largest net recipient] ...
But the key innovation is new EU-level tax-raising powers, said to simplify the way the EU is funded.
This is clever. Why?
Because any normal person will agree that the current mechanisms for funding EU spending need reform - too cumbersome, too many anomalies. Even London in principle is ready to talk about dropping the magnificent UK Rebate in exchange for deep reform to both how the money gets to the EU and what the EU then spends it on.
So Lewandowski is hoping to froth up alleged popular support across the EU for some sort of EU-levied tax on financial transactions to get new EU-level tax powers included as part of the final deal: "Y'all say you want reform and simplification - here's the neat way to do it!"
To be really clever he might add that national vetoes on any agreed tax level will still apply: if the UK and all other EU member states agree to launch this scheme in 2018 at tax level X, it can not be increased (or decreased) unless all agree in future. That (it could be said) gives a not insignificant level of real reassurance to national governments that Brussels can't run out of control.
To which we all say: "Nice try - but no thanks."
Because as we have seen in the USA, once the federal centre starts taxing it over time can and does run up insane debts. Somehow or other a national 'lock' on future increased tax increases inexorably will be nibbled away, as has happened with all the other EU policy vetoes we once enjoyed.
Plus the practical implementation of any EU-level tax will create a tsunami of new intrusive Brussels-driven mechanisms, rules and procedures which will erode national powers and set all sorts of over-arching legal precedents for a lot more of the same.
In short, this is the thin end of a huge fat wedge. Another one-way expensive ticket to a Lot More Europe. Which, in current circumstances, most of the EU Givers are not going to want to buy, however noisily the EU Getters cry that it is all for the best.
Anyway, my writings on the way all this works in practice (see many previous postings and this long account here) are a definitive guide to the months if not years of bad-tempered haggling which will now unfold. So check them out.
That epic Budget Battle is for tomorrow.
For today, even Eurosceptics can and should pleased that in the past 20 years Poland has made such an impressive transformation from its appalling communist past to be a credible and dynamic European country and, until 31 December this year, head of the EU family.
Autonomous Mind kindly gave a link and supporting comments to my recent piece about Negotiation Training. And, via Twitter, he asked for More on the Carrot/Stick negotiating paradigm. So, here it is.
The psychology of diplomatic negotiating is a vast, interesting and almost unanalysed subject. A couple of years ago I joined a course for FCO new entrants. The otherwise sensible trainers led off the Negotiation part with this PowerPointed assertion:
Aims
- to maximise interests
- to reach agreement
Really? This is an odd way to put it. Do the Chinese/Russians/N Koreans think that a key aim of negotiation is to 'reach agreement'?
Hell no. They want to WIN, or failing that win as much as possible. Negotiation and 'agreement' are simply possible methods to get there.
So is another outcome - negotiations crashing in failure - that shows steely resolve, as the Poles this very week have been keen to demonstrate within the EU.
In other words, very often a negotiation is not about what it says it is about. On the surface it is about EU Emissions Targets, or Global Climate Change, or new World Trade regimes. In substance it is more likely to be about who decides what, this time round and on into the future.
This explains why the psychological factors are so important. Look at this magnificent negotiation:
There is so much happening here. The two negotiators are weighing up bluff, mutual determination and hard facts. You can guess who wins on all scores.
Or try the superb scene in the Incredibles, where Mr Incredible has been captured by baddy Syndrome. Mr Incredible breaks free and grabs Mirage, Syndrome's lissom assistant, threatening to snap her in half if he is not released:
Mr. Incredible: It'll be easy, like breaking a toothpick
Syndrome: [chuckles] Show me. [after a tense few moments, Mr. Incredible lets go of Mirage]
Syndrome: I knew you couldn't do it. Even when you have nothing to lose! You're weak! And I've outgrown you
Amazing writing. It hits the negotiating nail bang on the head. Most negotiations are all about one thing: who in fact is weaker?
Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi...
What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself.
The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors".
This shows that Sticks and Carrots as a metaphor for diplomatic negotiation are just not up to the job. In this case the Euroweenies and President Obama were keen to get a deal: lots of plausible Carrots (in the form of Western money), with a rather distant Stick (we're doomed without a deal, but only in 100 years' time).
The Chinese ruthlessly played on this situation to belittle President Obama personally, just to show who was boss.
I think that President Obama made a serious mistake by staying in the room, once it was clear what the Chinese premier was up to. Whatever puny and fleeting headlines he needed (and got) by sticking grimly to the core aim (for him) of getting some sort of outcome were much less important than showing Beijing that that was the sort of behaviour up with which he would not put.
In other words, Obama took modest gains on the day, but lost serious ground when it came to his credibility in negotiating with China well into the future. Both sides went home knowing that China had won on substance and powerplay presentation.
Back in Moscow in 1995 after dinner at the US Ambassador's Residence I watched as he sat on the sofa studiously winding up my boss Pauline Neville-Joneswith some not-so implicit sexistly patronising insinuations.
Pauline of course did not rise to the bait, but he knew that she would not do so and enjoyed watching the spectacle of her containing her annoyance, while she in turn seemed to know that he was enjoying that spectacle and so inwardly seethed all the more.
Here the ostensible subject of the negotiation was the fascinating issue of the design of Bosnia's post-Dayton money. But what in fact was happening was Holbrooke deliberately using the issue to wind up PNJ, who knew that he was doing just that.
He knew that she knew what he was doing, so did it all the more. She knew that he knew that she knew, and so found it all the more exasperating, but of course she did not want to show it. And so on. All seething just beneath the surface as they exchanged barbed remarks about the way the UK's pound coins have different markings.
Then we have ... the Russians:
Russia typically wants to project strength as an end in itself. Part of any negotiation is balancing incentive-carrots with pressure-sticks: “If you accept our position, we guarantee you a positive outcome. If you refuse, we’ll make sure you get a very negative outcome”.
Russian negotiators aim to neutralise that approach by conveying a very different proposition: “It doesn’t matter how much you try to pressure us. First, we can withstand more pressure than you can possibly exert, or even imagine. Second, whatever you do to hurt us, we will do something far worse to hurt you.”
The whole point of Moscow's time-honoured diplomatic negotiating style is to project a sense of depersonalised inexorable doom for anyone or anything which gets in the way of whatever Moscow currently wants.
This can be countered, of course, by hanging in there very tough: some of it is bluff, and Russian diplomacy can be as inept as everyone else's. But the very fact that the Russians set about their business in this way helps frame issues and likely outcomes on their terms and projects toughness/determination. A handy way to start.
Conclusion
As previously noted, the reason why Carrots and Sticks work (or don't) in diplomacy has little to do with their 'objective' size and plausibility.
It's all much more 'subjective'. It's about how the person with the carrots/stick is seen by the supposed target, and even more about how both the carrot-sticker and the target perceive themselves and what they believe the other one believes about the problem, the balance of forces and how this situation plays into other situations.
All of which explains why Gaddafi is still there and NATO's bombing campaign looks oddly ... lame. Going right back to President Obama's unwise Cairo speech, Washington and the wider 'West' have been unclear what they really wanted.
Indeed, the then President Putin found the then PM Tony Blair exasperating when they met: charming and smart as Blair was, Putin kept pressing him in private to say what he really wanted. And answer came there none.
Moral: if you don't know what you really want from a negotiation, don't be surprised if you don't get it.
Oh, and don't be surprised if other more single-minded people tend to prevail.
Serbia has been shoved to the top of the diplomatic rubbish-heap by the Russian Foreign Ministry when it comes to issuing extra money for hardship postings!
This piece by RFE/RL notes that Serbia with Kosovo (sic) is now in the same category as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Georgia, Abhazija (sic), Tajikistan, Chad, Israel and Guatemala. Russian diplomats get extra money - a 20% pay uplift - for the additional stress of working in such ghastly places!
The reason given is that Serbia is a greater conflict risk because of Kosovo. Serbia's Foreign Minister is quoted as complaining that Serbia can not be placed at 'this level', whatever its difficulties might be.
... the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev's fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the dismantling of the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself, one of the founding statesmen of modern Russia -- and yet his birthday gala was held in the Royal Albert Hall, in London, among people who hardly knew him...
... all of Gorbachev's most significant and most radical decisions were the ones he did not make. He did not order the East Germans to shoot at people crossing the Berlin Wall. He did not launch a war to prevent the defection of the Baltic states. He did not stop the breakup of the Soviet Union or prevent Yeltsin's rise to power.
The end of communism certainly could have been far bloodier, and if someone else had been in charge it might have been. For his refusal to use violence, Gorbachev deserves Anka's corny serenade.
But because he did not understand what was happening, Gorbachev also did not prepare his compatriots for major political and economic change. He did not help design democratic institutions, and he did not lay the foundations for an orderly economic reform.
Instead, he tried to hold on to power until the very last moment -- to preserve the Soviet Union until it was too late. As a result, he did not politically survive its collapse.
Good grief, this fine piece takes us back to what now seems like another parallel universe.
Remember when Mrs Thatcher organised a visit to London for Gorbachev? The programme included a visit to a well-stocked (ie normal) supermarket in the unfashionable Vauxhall, area of London across the Thames, to help persuade Gorby that capitalism really did manage to deliver goods to the masses, not just a privileged elite.
I also recall the visit to London (in 1991?) of Grigory Yavlinsky who at that point was touring the world with Graham Allison from Harvard to try to drum up international support for their supposedly bold plan to transform the USSR to a market economy. We all raced to Chatham House, wanting to be impressed and indeed with HMG ready to look seriously at options for pumping large resources in to support a good plan.
But it was all a flop. The pitch amounted to a detail-free appeal: "Give us lots of money - and trust us to use it wisely!". Everyone shuffled away unimpressed and somewhat embarrassed.
The Soviet Union then sighed and keeled over. Gorbachev resigned on our Christmas Day, 25 December 1991. By then no-one noticed or even cared - Boris Yeltsin had taken full charge in Moscow.
Thus it is as Anne Applebaum so deftly decribes. Gorbachev lingers on, still enjoying a warm glow of sorts in the West for ending the USSR 'nicely', but a figure of derision in his own country:
Gorbachev knew nothing of real democracy, and even less of free market economics. Brought up and educated in Soviet culture, he was simply unable to think his way out of that system. He didn't prevent change, and he didn't shoot the people who finally made change happen. But at such a historic moment, ignorance is no excuse.
Gorby's basic problem was, of course, that he was at heart a decent man but also a stolid and inflexible communist who believed in witchcraft:
Gordievsky said that Gorbachev utterly misunderstood the problems. He really believed that the Soviet economy was like a car whose only problem was a badly running engine: if it stopped running on vodka and tried running on petrol, the Engine of Socialism would whir into action and propel it off into a bright future.
"In other words," I said, "Gorbachev believes in witchcraft?"
"Exactly - he believes in witchcraft!"
And that is not a sound basis for running a lemonade stall, let alone for reforming an ailing superpower sprawled across eleven timezones.
Here's my latest article in DIPLOMAT magazine, mulling over the subject of diplomatic loyalty:
... the Libya case has given rise to a spectacular number of high profile diplomatic changes of side, with one Libyan ambassador after another announcing support for the opposition forces struggling to bring down the Gaddafi regime.
Whereas host governments might or might not commend the high principle shown by such a defection, unwelcome problems quickly arise if some diplomats in an embassy switch sides but others don’t. Who is running the local Libyan embassy for the purpose of carrying on routine diplomatic business? Who gets invited to which functions? Does a Libyan diplomat who has announced a switch of loyalty still get diplomatic immunity? What about the official embassy car?
What if the uprising fails and Gaddafi wins – must we throw these people out of the Libyan Embassy? Who needs all these complications anyway?
How these questions and many others are answered will depend upon local circumstances and, perhaps, the personalities concerned. The worst outcome from a host government’s point of view is the outcome we have ended up with, the Libya crisis in particular, violently dragging on with no obvious end in sight. The Gaddafi elite are clinging on to power despite NATO forces blowing up significant quantities of military equipment.
Could a worst-case scenario unfold, namely a de facto or even de jure partition of Libya, with unfathomable complications for Libya’s diplomatic representation at the UN and around the world? In short, the Libya drama exemplifies the greatest challenge to any diplomat’s loyalty to his/her country: what to do if the country slumps into civil war or even disappears altogether?
This problem was faced in acute form by Soviet diplomats when the USSR disintegrated in 1991. They had represented one massive state – what to do when the 15 former Soviet republics had each become a new country? For most diplomats born and raised in Russia, the choice was simple: stick with the new Russian Foreign Ministry.
But those diplomats born and raised elsewhere in the Soviet Union had a painful choice. Better to stay on in powerful Moscow as a Russian diplomat, or return to one’s home republic and hope for a role in the nascent and disorganised Foreign Ministry there? If the latter, would they be trusted by the new leadership?
Many chose to stick with the Russian Foreign Ministry. Thus in 1995 when Russia and Ukraine were haggling over the fate of the Black Sea Fleet, the negotiating team representing Russia included plenty of ethnic Ukrainian expert diplomats.
It ends on another interesting question:
Could we see a tumultuous test of British diplomatic loyalties in the coming years if Scotland holds a referendum and opts for independence? Recent SNP gains show the country may well be heading in this direction.
Will the FCO’s sizeable tartan army of Scottish diplomats vote to stay in London representing a reduced UK or will they go north en masse to help Scotland set up its new diplomatic service?
Always good to be reminded that Europe is not just the wimpy EU or neurotic Balkans.
There's also Ukraine, and where (if anywhere) it fits in to the Bigger Picture.
Luckily we have Odessablog's Blog on the case, watching things with an astute British eye from balmy Crimea. Here's a long piece with many points of interest as the argument gets into its stride:
Whether the “Orange Revolution” was about heading “West” and away from Russia as some commentators would say is also debatable. It is possible it was based on the perception (rightly or wrongly) that the Ukrainian population held that the vote was rigged and they were therefore not protesting to “head West” but protesting that they wanted their votes to count and not be a window dressing for perceived “democracy”. Even today the general population would vote overwhelmingly not to join NATO which is hardly an attitude of a population wanting to move “West” at any costs since 2004.
... despite numerous criticisms (some justified and others not), President Yanukovych will continue to have the support of the leadership of the EU and USA. What is allegedly or seemingly lost in non-tangibles such as democracy (and the instability it brings) is a substantial gain when it comes to stability. We should recall how quickly “the West” recognised the last presidential vote regardless of the accusations of foul play by Yulia Tymoshenko...
The EU has given clear signals that it will not be expanding for at least the next decade with regards to EU membership. Ukraine is a very large nation with massive infrastructure needs. It is a bigger geographical area than France. That takes a lot of FDI from the EU and would exceed anything that was, and currently still is, being thrown at Poland. Just not a viable political option when the austerity belt is being tightened around the EU member states...
And especially this:
Within a decade much can and will change. The EU will not be the entity it is today. It faces stark choices over the Eurozone that, whichever path taken, will lead to serious internal changes. There are major policy issues that would affect Ukraine happening now and within a few years, such as integrated transport policies and in 2013 a major shake up of the agricultural policy.
Will Ukraine even want to join what the EU will morph into by the time it can realistically make a formal request and have a fair chance of acceptance?
... The current speed and trajectory of Ukraine towards the EU, pretty much suits all neighbours in the grand scheme of things, so whilst Ukrainian internal shenanigans may occasionally draw a necessary comment, they will never be so forceful as to knock Ukraine off course as far as the Grand Area plan is concerned, or stability associated with it, even at the cost of a little democracy or freedom of speech.
Far better that, than the current situation in North Africa and the Middle East where the Grand Plan is under some serious pressure. Let’s not even mention China!
A timely piece of work, given the stern warning coming from a thoroughly fed up US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who has just given the weebling Europeans what is more or less their last stern warning re defence spending and general backbone:
Nato had degenerated into an alliance "between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of Nato membership but don't want to share the risks and the costs", Gates said.
Noting that he was 20 years older than President Barack Obama, he said Washington's security guarantees to Europe, embodied in the Nato alliance, were fading. His peers' "emotional and historical attachment" to Nato was "ageing out", he said, adding: "You have a lot of new members of Congress who are roughly old enough to be my children or grandchildren."
Generational change, economic hardship and European refusal to take responsibility for their own security were all feeding Nato's decline and possible end, he warned.
Quite.
2021 is a mere 520 weeks away.
Bets on what the Eurozone, EU and NATO (and OSCE and almost every other piece of clunky Cold War institutional architecture for 'European Security') will look like then? Ukraine may find itself quite nicely placed simply by edging along unobtrusively in a sensible enough direction?
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 Equalsconference, 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.
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.
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.
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