Blogoir

RFE/RL is an excellent resource for all sorts of detail about what is happening in the former Soviet Union. See especially The Power Vertical, a blog written especially for Russia wonks and obsessive Kremlin watchers.

Try these pieces:

One about new popular protests against price rises and corruption (even if the 'tide of protests engulfs more Russian cities' title is ridiculous):

Tatyana, a 50-year-old preschool teacher in the central Russian city of Penza, must now spend 5,000 rubles ($168) per month on water, gas, and electricity. This leaves her with just 2,300 rubles ($77) to feed her two teenage children and her husband, an invalid whose health problems prevent him from working

Garry Kasparov always has interesting things to say:

Because sticking to the current form of governance, which is to say guaranteeing the survival of Putin's regime, will necessarily lead to the demise of Russia within its present borders.

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally...

And the (maybe a bit overwritten?) Online Petition against Vladimir Putin:

Bubbling away nicely?

Or just minor hiccups in all that vast space, which as ever changes very slowly in its own very Russian way?

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

As you try to grasp what is happening in Ukraine, you may well be asking yourself: what does Ukraine mean anyway?

And, needless to say, views differ. There is a root word kraj in Slav languages which has all sorts of nuanced meanings in different Slavonic languages, linked to the idea of land, or borders of land, or land on or around the borders of a country/territory.

Remember the Krajina Serbs, who attempted to set up a Serbian territory separate from Croatia until Croatian forces crushed their resistance and most Serbs fled to Serbia?

Or indeed Momcilo Krajisnik? Another unhappy Slav with the kraj root in his name.

So Ukraine suggests either a 'border' territory, or a 'separate' principality or territory in its own right, depending on who's talking.

Ukraine's voters accordingly seem to face two eternal choices. Either to be somehow part of the Russian psychological space, on the frontiers of Russia's western lands. Or to be a separate territory, defined in their own terms, and looking at least as much to Europe as to Russia.

Which explains why any person elected President needs to be a magic knight:

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is not a particularly happy one: the majority of Ukrainians don't want a head of state with clearly formulated ideological priorities, with the experience and attitudes of a radical political fighter, with an explicit geopolitical orientation, and with an economic-reform program that can be hard on their wallets. That may explain why different groups of Ukrainians have such widely diverging views of their country's past and future...

... the voting habits of the majority of Ukrainians could still enable a politician to become head of state who is capable both of winning the support of the majority of voters and of implementing genuine modernization.

That politician would simply have to have enough human virtues, combined with managerial ability, to overcome all possible objections on the part of either the east or the west of the country, and both the right and the left.

That may sound like a fantasy, but then the whole of Ukrainian history for the past 20 years has resembled a fantastic saga of wandering in circles locked in time, waiting for a knight to break the spell.

Elections there tend to be close-run things these days. Western Ukraine, predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, looks mainly West towards Brussels. Eastern Ukraine, predominantly Russian-speaking, looks mainly East towards Moscow.

Viktor Yanukovych is seen as East, Yulia Tymoshenko as West. It looks as if this time round East has edged home in front.

A triumph for Moscow over the West/Europe?

Maybe. But not a huge one.

There is now a lively and tough political space in Ukraine, and whoever runs the place has no real choice but to manage relations with both Moscow and the EU carefully.

Ukraine's main problem is that it is the subject of an existential tug-of-war between a Westernising trend in Slavic thinking and a more traditional Moscow/Eastern trend.

Alas for Ukraine, the Russians weigh less but pull harder on their end of the rope than the EU does. 

Some Europeans are more European than others. Too many EU capitals in general (and Paris in particular) are quite happy for that part of Europe to be seen as 'not quite European enough', and to stay mainly outside European processes. Why annoy the Russians for the sake of all that empty space and complicated people? 

Some Russians hanker after reabsorbing Ukraine somehow, although the grisly case of Belarus and wider failed attempts at CIS integration show that even under what appear to be optimal conditions it is not possible to put chunks of the Soviet Union back together again.

So Moscow contents itself with making sure that if Russia can't have Ukraine, the West won't have it either.

We can expect Yanukovych (if confirmed as President) to talk a lot about Europe, safe in the knowledge that the EU doesn't know what to do about Ukraine other than send in lots of consultants and bureaucratic experts, some of whom do some useful work now and then. Nothing much will happen on Ukraine/NATO.

Which is not to say that Ukraine will stagnate (necessarily). As someone has wittily put it:

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues.

On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer. 

Another look at Ayn Rand, this time dwelling (reasonably) on her Russian roots and their literary impact on her books.

That said, I think Anthony Daniels misinterprets a number of the examples he quotes from her novels to make his point, namely that Rand was clever and perceptive but above all intolerable if not oppressive. She may well have been in real life, but the reasons he gives based on the books often do not work.

Still, worth a read for the Russian literary and psychological angles.

Back in Moscow in 1994 or thereabouts I asked a top Russian foreign policy pundit what would happen to Ukraine, then languishing in a deacying post-communist stupor.

"We'll just buy it," came the sardonic reply.

But what about less obvious places, such as Nauru, which has just recognised Abkhazia and S Ossetia as independent states, fulfilling a key Nauru foreign policy priority namely for its vote to be up for sale?

Thus:

A new player has emerged in the roiling political theater of the Caucasus: the tiny, destitute Pacific island nation of Nauru, which on Tuesday became the fourth country to formally establish diplomatic relations with Abkhazia, effectively recognizing its sovereignty...

Nauru, an eight-square-mile rock in the South Pacific with about 11,000 inhabitants, was no pushover, according to the influential Russian daily newspaper Kommersant. In talks with Russian officials, Nauru requested $50 million for “urgent social and economic projects,” the newspaper reported, citing unnamed Russian diplomats.

When in doubt on such issues turn to Mark Steyn, who unlike me knows a high percentage of the population of Nauru and eruditely links this subject to various musicals:

In the early Nineties, I met a couple of bigwigs from the capital, Yaren, in London when the Nauruan government, in the wake of Cats and Les Miserables and Phantom Of The Opera, decided to invest in a British musical about Leonardo written by a couple of guys whose only hit song was the long ago Number One “Concrete And Clay”. Oh, come on. You must remember:

Which was literally the situation the bird-pooped-out Nauruans found themselves in.

But there is also this:

First, Russia’s imperialist ambitions are an issue that resonates far beyond Russia’s backyard. Australia has been concerned for some time about a China/Taiwan competition to, in effect, buy up hastily decolonized Commonwealth territories in the Pacific. It will have a terribly corrupting effect on the region’s politics if Russia is determined on a piece of the action.

Secondly, we underestimate the importance of sub-jurisdictions. Nauru is sovereign but not quite independent:  Its Appellate Court rulings can be overturned by the High Court of Australia, a country to which Nauru also contracts its national defense. Why would they object to Abkhazia entering into similar relations with Russia?

But look at the other side, too: Poti sits on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and Georgia has just sold a 51 per cent stake in the port to Ras Al Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates, to run it as a “free industrial zone”.  Like the bankrupt Dubai, Ras Al Khaimah is also a sub-national jurisdiction. These are cross-currents in the undertow of the Big Pond: Arab money, Russian ambition, Chinese subversion, and emerging statelets susceptible to all three.

You’ll notice who seems largely irrelevant to all of the above: us. America and its allies. In a globalized world, the west defers increasingly to the transnational institutions, without apparently even noticing the destabilization by key players at sub-national level.

Foreign Policy in the twenty-first century: stop me and buy one...

“The concrete and the clay beneath my feet begins to crumble…”

A reader says nice things about my long posting on the Copenhagen Negotiating Disaster (for the EU at least) but also asks a terrific question:

A remarkable piece of analysis, Charles, with fascinating insights for the outsider.

I detect a theme emerging in your posts - a sort of neo-realpolitik that suggests that your view is that only large, powerful countries (or those soon to be large and powerful) have a realistic chance of shaping world affairs, despite modern rhetoric about equality of nations, consultation, and international legal systems. Neo-Kissinger?

Where to start?

First, I have little time for all that American academic burbling about multi-polar uni-polar worlds, let alone the California School of IR studies which seems to think it can all be reduced to equations. 

When you see just how much of top-level diplomacy comes down to instincts and personalities and sheer luck on the day, all that abstracting seems quite irrelevant. Things do not fall into neat categories just because academics and indeed diplomats have to write in a few pages about the whirling endless complexity of world goings-on and so indulge in amazing simplifications. 

I tend to start with Reality. When I look out of the window to scrutinise global diplomacy I observe thusly:

• there is no lack of consultation and debate which has an 'equalizing' function and does bring in many smaller countries and 'non-state actors' these days - see Copenhagen plus many more examples
• international law may lack some sort of normative über-sanction but it counts for a lot - governments make great efforts to negotiate all sorts of international law norms, and then even greater efforts to demonstrate that they are living up to their obligations (albeit some obligations more than others)
• there are also Power/Resources, Will, Clarity of Purpose and Technique. And those states exhibiting and deploying these in generous measure will tend to do better than those which either lack them or are loath to use them
• which is another way of saying look at some of the key physics principles involved in delivering impact and foreign policy volume

A large fast powerful determined country will tend to get favourable outcomes in any negotiation (and many situations are in effect a Negotiation even when people are not sitting around a table). They get results either by being active and pressing for specific outcomes including by bribes of different sorts (eg USA) or (more often in the case of Russia and China) simply by blocking others who want specific outcomes.

It also is worth bearing in mind Timescale. Things do come and go. Here on Earth gravity plays a huge part - bigger things necesarily tend to be heavier and less manoeuvrable, which means that in many situations smaller, nimbler creatures have their own advantages - or not.

Russia gets what current management sees as a good outcome by building hi-tech weapons systems. Yet its health-care record and death-rate statistics are calamitous, piling up demographic and so political problems down the road.

Venezuela is getting a lumpen-populist global PR boost from Chavez, but only by ruinous domestic policies which will drag the country down for a long time to come.

Norway in its Middle Eastern policy shows what can be done by a smart smaller country pulling together a well-tuned package of Will, Determination and Resources. Australia does well by using commin sense Anglo-Saxon technique in an Asian context.

By the standards of Africa the leaders of South Africa do well at the high international level, combining busy moral primness with energy and (again) good technique. Cuba gets rave reviews in the Guardian, but at the cost of impoverishing its people for decades.

The whole EU internally is based upon an uneasy eqilibrium between the Bigs and everyone else, with the Bigs on the whole wanting to lead collective strategic policy and the Rest satisfied by grabbing ad hoc national advantages through cunning use of whatever blocking power they have. The Greece/Macedonia row over Macedonia's name is a classic example of Blocking for self-centred national reasons, Greece uniting blocking power with unbreakable wilfulness to fine effect (as Greece defines it). 

Externally, the EU has Resources but mainly lacks Clarity of Purpose and so Will, hence such EU Technique as exists does not get far. There is a case for a strong and unified expression of democratic European values in today's world, but done rather through key hard-headed member states pooling their Resources and Technique and mustering as much Will and Clarity of Purpose as can be mustered.

Other regional groupings such as ASEAN scarcely try to have collective impact, except in mainly defensive ways, eg to fend off 'Western' scrutiny of Asian human rights abuses.

Going down to buzzing micro-insect level, small formations of Islamist fanatics can 'shape world affairs' by causing almost limitless damage and alienation in free societies - see any airport.

So I suppose that I look at International Relations less as a Newtonian billiard table with elegant shots by clever players ricocheting balls into selected spaces, and more a Darwinian jungle. Many different natural phenomena interacting and changing in ways which create new patterns and indeed over time new life-forms, but not in easily predictable ways.  

None of these creatures 'defines' the way the jungle works, any more than a herd of elephants defines a jungle in Africa. But the metaphor breaks down because people and states (unlike animals/plants/insects) can identify specific purposes, good or bad, and work consciously to achieve them.

Which seems to be why the Obama Administration is trying to move away from the rhetoric of American power and championing 'democracy' towards an anti-Bush, more inclusive 'organic' style of leadership.

The problem with that is that if the USA with all its resources and energy does not champion Freedom, other things get championed instead. The opportunity cost of repressive behaviour will decline, and we'll get more of it.

Enough IR theory - Ed.

Remember my rather dismissive account of the UK's attempt to teach the Russians how to fish, rather than inundate them with free fish? And the ensuing Big Mac Attack?

I have just heard from a former member of the UK Agriculture Ministry MAFF (by no means related to naff) who was engaged on all that work back in early Yeltsin Russia:

I liked your Model Farm item, but it was a bit incomplete.  Fact is, that we in MAFF got so p*ss*d off with KHF and their byzantine procedures that we found some Departmental money of our own that we could legitimately gift to UK private-sector industry (in this case the seed-potatoes sector) to plant the stuff directly on Russian sacred land on the Model Farm territory, with the full and happy support of the Russians. 

Another Browser link, this time to a fascinating interview with Stephen Lucas, a heavyweight expert on Soviet Law.

This is well worth reading since it casts some light on an area largely neglected in Western analysis of Communism, namely the way the Soviet regime tried to give legal effect to its ideological dogmas.

For example, the catastrophic collectivisation of agriculture:

... law was used as a pretext for going to the countryside and expropriating grain, how it was used as an engine for change from peasant subsistence farming to mass collectivisation.

In March 1929 the notorious article 107 of the criminal code in 1929 was widely applied to those hoarding grain. You got three years’ “deprivation of freedom” for the crime of deliberately increasing prices by “buying up grain” or by “not putting it on the market” (ie, delivering it to the government) and you were also subject to “full or partial confiscation of your property”.

And yet everybody was hoarding grain because the state was seizing as much as possible for the towns, there was nothing otherwise to eat and you feared for your next harvest or supply of grain...

Not so sure about this:

The demise of the Soviet Union was the demise of a country underpinned by a concept, an ideology, an alternative vision – socialism. It was an evangelical empire posing questions about how best to manage an economy, the extent to which the state provides social welfare, the scope of human rights and the importance of the arts and science.

That said, it was also an empire with a darker side. But since 1991 it seems like we have lost something when it comes to politics – lost the enthusiasm to debate about the bigger questions and to worry about whether there is a better alternative –  ideology seems to be missing. The mere existence of the Soviet Union almost seemed to provide a counter ideological force that helped us to question and frame the nature of how we in the West choose to live.

The great hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, 'the man who stopped the motor of the earth'. The bold idea is that when the greatest creative minds of society go on strike, the system inexorably breaks down.

Pretty fanciful?

No. In fact the Soviet Union came up with a better way to run this experiment on our behalf. It murdered tens of thousands of its great minds and stopped the rest from being truly creative.

And, yes, after some seventy years of this madness in 2001 the spluttering Soviet motor finally simply seized up, and the whole system keeled over.

Laws and all.

No great loss - apart from all those millions of its victims.

The popular rising in Iran against its revolting regime is gaining momentum. But will that be enough?

A good WSJ piece on the Big Picture:

Much has been written about the fact that Iran's democratic movement today combines the three characteristics of a velvet revolution—nonviolent, nonutopian and populist in nature—with the nimble organizational skills and communication opportunities afforded by the Web. Less discussed has been the significance of the youthfulness and Internet-savvy nature of the Iranian population.

Seventy percent of Iranians are under the age of 30. And in a population of 75 million, 22 million are Internet users. In spite of the nominal leadership of reformists like Medhi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami, the real leaders of the movement have been the thousands of groups and individuals who work autonomously, and whose structure replicates the Internet.

A good case can be made, and is made by me at least, that the fall of Milosevic in 2000 was the world's first Internet-driven revolution: public opposition to the regime was amplified by well-networked opposition groups, and especially the OTPOR students group.

Iran seems to be taking this to a far higher level. It is a bigger country with a huge youthful population and all the networking benefits of massed mobile phones, Twittering and the rest. Even if it is losing skilled people at a startling rate:

... Iran is today one of the most corrupt economies in the world. It also has the ignominy of topping the list of all countries in terms of brain drain. Each year, between 150,000 and 180,000 of the country's best and brightest leave the country. The yearly cost to Iran for this brain drain alone is estimated to be almost equal to the yearly cost of the Iran-Iraq War, according to the World Bank

See for example how an attempt by the regime to smear an opposition figure by showing him in women's clothes has backfired - the symbols used by the regime are swiftly being annexed by protesters themselves and used to hit back in fierce post-modern irony.

Yesterday I heard the argument from a top UK official who is closely following all this that one good move by President Obama has been to neutralise the argument that the USA is the Enemy of Islam; it is far harder now for the Iranian regime to blame its woes on the Great Satan's machinations.

Maybe.

We went round this one earlier in the year - should or should not Western leaders speak out in support of Iranian protesters? Thus:

By not encouraging them publicly, Western leaders send a signal that they don't care if they win or lose. Demoralising and profoundly cynical?

Let's be fair and not exclude one option. Namely that in some way the Americans and maybe Europeans too have agreed with the Iran Opposition leaders not to say anything in public, so as to deny the regime the propaganda momentum of saying that the Wicked West is fomenting anti-Iranian spies and disarray.

This is what happened in the historic Serbia election of 2000.  As a matter of deliberate policy the Americans did not come out publicly in favour of Kostunica against Milosevic. Instead they whistled nonchalantly and looked the other way, while quietly throwing technical and other support to the anti-Milosevic organisations.

This crafty silence led to a good outcome for Western policy, viz the giddy collapse of support for Milosevic, precisely because the whole campaign against him was not 'internationalised' - Serbs could think of it as a purely home-grown revolution.

I'd like to think that something like this is going on in this case...

Thrashing around wildly as the protests intensify, the regime has decided to blame someone else: Great Satan Lite, ie the UK:

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, claimed statements from the British Government were inciting demonstrations that swept the country's biggest cities on Sunday. He warned that Iran would strike back against the British and other western governments that were supporting the opposition movement launched in the wake of June's disputed presidential election.

"If Britain does not stop talking nonsense it will get a slap in the face," he said. "The lowly and downgrading remarks by some foreign officials show the black stain on their record in their contradictory interactions."

The regime even summoned HM Ambassador Simon Gass to berate him in this general direction and to show Iran's official rage at this provocative and inflammatory outburst by David Miliband which plunged a perfidious British dagger deep into Iran's internal affairs.

What might we best do to help?

The strength of the Iranian protest movement lies in its diffused, domestic and almost spontaneous mass nature. But that can be a weakness too - to bring down a system like Iran's will require deadly focused force aimed at the heart of the regime, and probably a lot of ruthless killing along the way.

One way Western powers can help is to try to drive wedges into the system. To try to identify moderate or wavering fanatics within the ruling elite, and urge them privately that the game is up - and that they should hold back as and when the final crisis comes. Nothing like an obviously authentic secret personal message from the top of a Western intelligence agency to concentrate the mind.

More publicly we might want to think about setting up websites populated by lists and pictures of the worst people in the Iranian regime whom we would expect the Iranian people to want to put on trial for crimes against humanity, as and when the regime falls. Once people are on an open list that warns that the long arm of Justice will eventually nab them, who knows what they might do to get off it?

And when in doubt, push stories that the regime's top people are getting ready to run away. Those around them are likely to believe them and get cross at the idea of being left behind to face the music. Remember all the rumours that Milosevic was poised to flee to Kazakhstan?

The trouble with countries as corrupted as Iran is that far too many people are implicated in misdeeds. Which means that it may suit the mass of pirates running the ship to throw a couple of leaders overboard as if in a great popular convulsion and go below decks for a while, to bide their time when they can sneak back into power or at least strong places of influence under a new fairer dispensation.

We Western diplomats will want to think that things have changed once and for all, and pat ourselves on the back for having played a limited hand so deftly. But in practice it all will be much less dramatic than it looks...

See Russia and Serbia passim.

2010 to see long awaited regime change in Iran? Or only in UK?

As the myriad delgates wend their various snowy ways from the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, what is the overall assessment?

Not UN, but UM.

Unambiguous Mess.

Key aspects of the whole thing were a priori perverse from a Basic Diplomatic Technique point of view.

Let's audaciously and even hopefully assume that the science is settled (which it isn't), and that we all agreed that human pouring out of carbon emissions is really likely to do heavy global damage in decades to come.

And that we all agree that we need to cut man-made emissions.

If the real aim was to deliver a significant global new deal on emissions reductions (as opposed to eg boosting the role of the UN and/or redefining global order as ends in themselves), this was a bizarre and doomed way to set about it.

Look at this Wikipedia list of heavyweight global emitters (lists by countries according to per capita emissions are very different, but not really relevant when it comes to Saving the Planet - it's total emissions (and the trends of growth of emissions) which matter, not where they come from):

1	China	6,103,493	21.5 %	4.57
2	United States[11]	5,752,289	20.2 %	18.67
-	European Union[12]	3,914,359	13.8 %	7.84
3	Russia	1,564,669	5.5 %	11.03
4	India	1,510,351	5.3 %	1.29
5	Japan	1,293,409	4.6 %	10.14
6	Germany	805,090	2.8 %
7	United Kingdom	568,520	2.0 %
8	Canada	544,680	1.9 %
9	South Korea	475,248	1.7 %
10	Italy[13]	474,148	1.7 %

South Africa is at 13th place, providing 1.5% of global emissions - the most polluting African country by some way, but still not that important overall.

These figures measure emissions by burning fossil fuels. Add in carbon emissions caused by deforestation which exposes peaty soil which then dries and emits CO2, and Indonesia (19th in the list above) soars towards the top of the charts as the world's third biggest emitter.

So to make a strategic difference, we need a negotiation aimed at a possible treaty involving (say) the top twenty heavy emitting countries alone. No UN. No NGOs. No EU. No-one else.

They could sit in relative seclusion somewhere and work up robust ideas on a comprehensive set of deals - transparency, rich-to-poor subsidies, moves to cheaper energy sources and so on - without a howling circus outside.

Plus any deal reached by those countries (including all UN Security Council members plus a majority of the world's population) would have such political authority and technical weight behind it that the rest of the world would have little choice but to accept it.

Indeed, if the issue is (as we all agree) so urgent, the rest of the world would be wildly applauding that the countries causing the vast mass of the problem had shown leadership and responsibility and taken real steps towards solving it.

Instead we saw a globalised free-for-all which predictably degenerated into an uncontrolled and squalid haggle in which everyone wanted a bung to sign up.

Since the number of countries which can (a) afford a bung, and (b) might be inclined to pay one is pretty small, the haggle turned into farce, with populist charlatans like Chavez and Mugabe ranting insultingly against 'capitalism', and no-one having the nerve to turn off their microphones and bundle them back out into the snow.

So the whole thing was structured to fail, with the EU noisily in the lead.

If you are President Obama, how do you salvage something from this wreckage?

Cut a small deal, any deal, proclaim victory, dash for home.

But there has to be something in it for the USA. No American President is going to throw money into a doubtful international pot without some way of being able to claim that some of the money is being spent honestly now and then.

Hence Obama's statement insisting that without respectable verification arrangements a deal would be "empty words on a page".

A typical punchy 'Western' politician's sound-bite, which had one important advantage - that it was true.

But also one serious disadvantage - that it allowed various undemocratic regimes to pretend to have a hissy fit at this insulting impugning of their sovereignty, including China.

A US blunder? Or just part of the trite negotiating mind-games going on?

Finally, it all ended in comical gyrations, culminating in Obama sitting down with the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and South African leaders to hammer out something or other among themselves, far from the madding crowd of NGOs and all the other leaders.

Thus it came about in spasm of post-modern irony that a small self-proclaimed group of countries defined the main outcome on behalf of everyone else, with the European Unionists (collectively the third biggest CO2 emitter) left outside. Ditto Russia, left holding its cute little red reset button handed over by Hillary Clinton. And Indonesia, a huge emitter. 

The progressive-Left symbolism of this is magnificent: no Dead White Men (especially those sanctimonious Europeans) spoiling the photo-shot!

We decide - Dead White Men pay!

A New World arises.

The bickering starts. The UK is pointing the finger of blame at different suspects, including sundry leftist regimes from Latin America: Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. A bit late now for New Labour to realise what we are dealing with here?

* * * * *

Of course there is a lot of science in climate change. Including physics.

Remember how the EU is a vital and valuable multiplier of UK interests?

How about this:

Europe came to Copenhagen as the bloc that potentially stood to lose the most. The fear was that the US and other countries would refuse to cut their emissions further, but the EU would be forced by public pressure, or by the US ... this would leave it carrying most of the cuts and economically compromised.

The EU need not have worried.

No country forced its hand on emission cuts in the negotiations, and it was itself comprehensively split, with countries such as Poland and even Germany reportedly blocking moves by Britain and others to put the cuts on the table.  

Once again President Obama dissed the UK, despite (or because of?) the Prime Minister's undoubted work and rhetoric to get a 'better' deal:

Unfortunately for Brown he did not receive a name check from Obama in his roll call of those to be thanked for their efforts to reach a deal.

Conclusion?

The worst-run negotiation in human history.

Because the issue at stake is by definition 'global', everyone demands that everyone takes 'responsibility' for tackling it.

And so no-one takes any responsibility.

Small countries irresponsibly exploit a unique chance to act as spoilers to get bribes.

Larger countries mainly responsible for causing the problem exploit the chaos to shrug off any real responsibility for doing something about it. 

And the European Union for all its huffing and puffing 'leadership' was left peering through the window as the USA, China and India did what they liked, with the Brazilians and South Africans there to let Obama tick the Latin American and African political correctness boxes.

Can anything be more incompetent in raw diplomatic technique terms than this?

All in all good news, according to some:

If India, China, America, Brazil (and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) carry on with “business as usual”, then anything Europe does to cut its emissions is irrelevant, at best: it will cause pain and hardship for its own citizens to no purpose whatever.

So let’s toast the negotiators of Copenhagen. By failing so spectacularly, they have presented us with a wonderful Christmas present. All we have to do is open it.

Meanwhile over at the ICJ the USA and Russia (and Spain and Finland) have been giving their views.

The USA arguments are smooth, somehow rather personal and elegant (including a nice oblique reference to Sherlock Holmes - the dog which did not bark, from Silver Blaze).

The Russians are more formalistic and businesslike, insisting that Kosovo can not have the benefit of UNSCR 1244 and use powers accorded under 1244 to act in defiance of it. Plus a swipe at the 'unlawful actions of NATO'.

Heavyweight boxers, landing big hits. Well worth reading for the fascinating differences of style and approach.

Since Classic Communism (more or less) ended nearly twenty years ago, which country has done better, China or Russia? And why?

Big Questions

Big answers.

More on European Foreign Policy - and Physics (or maybe Maths).

Take two tennis balls, A and B. A is twice the size of B.

By which I mean that the diameter of A is twice the diameter length (the straight line across the widest part of the inside of the ball) of B.

The formula for calculating the surface area of a sphere is:

Whereas the formula for calculating the volume of a sphere is:

This, as Archimedes worked out while playing with a rubber ball in the bath, means that for every doubling of the radius the surface area goes up by four times, but the volume goes up by eight times.

So as the EU has enlarged over the years, the surface area of its foreign policy has increased significantly (lots of offices all round the globe), but the volume of its foreign policy (as measured in hot air output of declarations and working groups) has increased even more!

How does the Lisbon Treaty affect the equation(s)?

Three articles are worth reading, since they each suggest that whereas the surface area and volume of EU foreign policy indeed have increased even more under Lisbon, the velocity has declined.

And, worse, the ball is leaking air.

First, RFE/RL on Lisbon's Dark Side:

Only higher, shared ends and values can check the national instinct of self-interest. With the decline of the role of the European Commission heralded by the way the Lisbon Treaty is being put into practice, it is inevitable that the EU's encouragement of political and economic reforms beyond its borders will gradually become less a political imperative and more a project carried forward by bureaucratic inertia provided by existing mechanisms of cooperation.

Then two from European Voice, on faltering collective EU policy towards Cuba and Uzbekistan. In each case some member states are pushing their vision of what should happen at the expense of an EU common position. Yet the 'common positions' themselves in practice were so feeble as to be meaningless if not embarrassing. So is much in fact being lost?

What are we mere voters and taxpayers to make of all this?

The idea of a powerful group of reasonable, successful countries coming together to pursue joint interests and positions is attractive. Note that those countries need not all be European - indeed, presentational and operational gain if they are not?

But if it turns out that those joint positions and interests amount to next to nothing in practice, is the effort and money devoted to all that work simply going down the drain?

So risks but also opportunities for the next UK government, one fervently hopes a Conservative one.

By collapsing a number of obviously obtuse or banal 'EU common positions' it can clear the way to identifying where European states in fact can add value by cooperating in a hard-nosed way to get real results. Those who want to do something and are prepared to commit real resources can join, the rest can sit and watch.

And if governments like the one in Spain want to suck up to decrepit doomed Communist regimes in Latin America, countries who want to promote democracy there can get on with it free from fretting over lowest common denominator EU junk diplomacy.

Which is fine for issues such as Cuba/Uzbekistan which are interesting but not existentially important for Europe and the West.

Dealing with Russia and China is a different matter. But here too an inner core of countries which together can deliver something like a coherent policy are best place to agree what can be agreed, and agree to manage differences as sensibly as possible on what can not be.

In all this the new Lisbon Treaty structures may come to be seen to be adding people and process to no real purpose, other than being awkward vehicles for delivering whatever policies the main member states agree? 

Surface area, volume, velocity: all about looking at policy in the round.

The Advisory Opinion hearings at the International Court of Justice on the Serbia/Kosovo question have started.

The curious thing about this one is the actual question which the ICJ is tasked by the UN General Assembly to address:

Since the answer is obviously Er, yes.

Huh?

Because in a trite sense a declaration of independence (or of anything else for that matter) has to be 'in accordance with international law', since it has no relevance in international law. International law does not deign to take any notice of declarations.

Thus, for example, if the town council down the road here in the UK makes a solemn unilateral declaration of the town's independence from the UK, the rest of us will make a wry smile and go back to blogging or working.

The declaration is 'in accordance' with UK law - free speech and all that. But it is just that, and no more. It's what happens afterwards that counts one way or the other in legal terms, in domestic as in international law. 

If citizens of our town en masse support the declaration of independence, put up road-blocks, stop paying taxes to Westminster and proclaim Vladimir Putin their new king with his consent, things begin to get more interesting.

Norms are being created and broken in all directions. Realities start to be created. Loyalties start to shift...   

In Kosovo's case, many obvious attributes of substantive independence are visible, not least total absence of any governance influence from Belgrade for most of Kosovo, plus a huge majority of the local population supporting independence, police forces loyal to Kosovo and so on.

Which is why a good number of countries (63 last sighted) have lined up to recognise Kosovo as a new state within the border accepted by Kosovo's Provisional Institutions.

This includes several of Kosovo's neighbours and many European countries (albeit not all). That has persuasive force for the ICJ - this is without doubt a significant international law development of some sort, not a silly town council PR stunt.

By contrast the number of countries which have recognised S Ossetia and Abkhazia is, hem, rather less impressive. Which, as we know, suits Russia just fine. If they started to become real countries, who knows, one day they might want to join NATO?

Anyway, if the question posed to the ICJ by the UNGA at Serbia's suggestion is strange or even perverse, what will the answer be?

Probably mixed, with lots of ICJ-style politics sloshing about in an ill-concealed way.

The ICJ members from (say) Russia, China, Brazil, Morocco and Somalia (all of whom have not recognised Kosovo as an independent state) may incline to favour the arguments that a unilateral declaration of independence under these circumstances may have some de facto impact but is not desirable or acceptable for general international law reasons.

Whereas judges from (say) the UK, France, Germany, New Zealand and Japan (countries which have recognised Kosovo) may be persuaded by the argument that by bringing Kosovo under effective UN protection in 1999 the 'international community' set in motion a chain of events which were bound to lead to a divorce, albeit an unhappy and messy one; the fact that so many countries have recognised Kosovo shows that reality has to prevail over abstract principle in this special case.

So at best a confusing and awkward outcome? No knockout victories for what is in any case an advisory and not binding decision next year.

Which more or less suits Kosovo  as it creeps along towards wider recognition.

And more or less suits Serbia, since it can wave the flag of principle and play on lumpen 'non-aligned' anti-Western sentiment in the developing world to try to deter heavyweight but as yet uncommitted countries (say India, South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia) from recognising Kosovo, while cynically edging towards EU membership itself. 

The fact that the EU itself is unable to give a unanimous view on the matter is a terrific boost for Belgrade.

As is the fact that countries representing a clear majority of the world's population and including two UN Security Council members are taking Belgrade's side of the argument, and may not see any reason to change their minds if as expected the ICJ does not give a clear steer: the USA and the EU Bigs unwisely created this expensive and incoherent mess - let's leave them to it.

Here is a trenchant analysis of the tendency of Bosnia to split in two, written by Matthew Parish, a lawyer who has worked in the divided Bosnian city of Brcko and knows what he is talking about.

His basic argument is that step by step Republika Srpska is heading towards separating from the other Bosnian 'Enity' - and that as and when this happens the international community will be as divided as Bosnia will be. His description of the way successive international High Representatives have overused their power and authority to make things worse through good intentions is especially convincing.

His conclusion? This:

Every measure should be used to ensure that even if gradual de facto independence is inevitable, and to a great extent has already occurred, any act of declaration of de jure independence – which might incite Bosniaks to take up arms, and Croats to themselves secede – is postponed indefinitely.

If the proper aim is delay, the international community can do nothing better than to leave the country alone, at least for now. The current strategy – of giving Dodik pretexts to detach himself from the rest of Bosnia – can only catalyse the secessionist agenda.

... However much sympathy for the Bosniaks’ situation one may have, knowing the atrocities perpetrated against them, their political aspiration of a unified Bosnia governed by majority rule is possible only for so long as the international community is prepared to run the country as a colony.

That level of commitment has evaporated. The Bosniaks must thus be gently disabused of their unitary political agenda, or they surely will be prepared to go to war for it, and foreign Muslim fighters will again be drawn in as they were in the 1992-95 war.

For international politicians familiar with the injustices of Bosnia’s first war, this is an unpalatable message. But the time is long past for pursuit of perfect moral ideals.

The danger of catastrophe unfolding in Bosnia is real and the overwhelming aim must be to prevent a second Bosnian war. The least bad option is to preside over Bosnia’s inevitable gradual disintegration with a moderating hand, ensuring it happens slowly, so its citizens become accustomed to the evolving political landscape.

Blimey. Strong meat.

He has a website too: http://matthewparish.com/

Look at it like this.

In a city there's a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily.

One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner.

This happens day after day.

Gradually the people who used to enoy the park start to steer clear of that corner. An unspoken sense of subtle anxiety develops among them.

Who are those people, and what are their intentions? Are we safe there any longer? And do we need the hassle in our lives of having to worry about it? Why not go elsewhere for a walk?

I was talking to someone who works in the EU system and lives here in Brussels. She has moved away from the Brussels centre because (as a 'white' European) she does not want to be jeered at and spat at by gangs of Moroccans and other immigrants hanging around on street corners. If necessary she'll leave Brussels and move to join her husband in a part of the EU where these issues do not arise.

Back to the park scenario. The point is that whereas the municipality/public own the park, the arrival of the nasty gang on a regular basis means that the psychological ownership of the park quickly starts to shift. 

Like an evil miasma, the gang's sneeringly malign influence spreads across that space, the more so for being ostensibly aimless and unfocused. 

The legal owners of the park (here in the form of the police) have to decide. Do they compel the aggressive new element to leave the park? Not easy. The gang members are committing no clear offence worth all the hassle of going to court; they may not go quietly; and above all the problem is not a Priority Target for government resource-allocation purposes.

Thus inch by inch the values of the more aggessive element come to prevail in the minds of all concerned. And if the gang hang around for long enough and erect a temporary structure unchallenged, the formal legal ownership of the park itself will start to mutate into something less clear. 

Even if the gang leaves and goes somewhere else, the underlying anxiety within the public will linger - maybe they'll come back one day. 

One way or the other, the gang wins. The public 'retreats'.

Which of course also goes to explain Russia/Georgia and many other issues of global politics. We are moving into a dangerous phase where the symbolism of will-power and sheer determination seem to matter as much as who formally owns what.

This is the deep sense of Russian policy towards the former Soviet republics and eg the Orthodox parts of former Yugoslavia (ie Serb-dominated areas). Moscow is aiming to assert that those territories may be legally independent but in fact they are under Moscow's psychological 'protection' - if the EU/US/West tries to push its values into those regions, they will face Resistance.

Ditto the new surge in open naval piracy. These nimble pirate gangsters are asserting that they define the operational and psychological order on the high seas - and if merchant ships do not repel them by force, they will use force to take them over.

So are the exceptionalist demands of eg Islamist extremists (and not-so-extremists) in Western countries all about establishing a psychological force field around their activities, as the first stage in establishing a quasi-judicial space outside normal national jurisdiction? In form and substance a process of incremental territorial conquest?

And as Mark Steyn argues, do we know it's really working when we see it happening and simply ignore it?

You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Major Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK”. But we (that’s to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign.

Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry.

That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken...

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said General Casey, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence”.

Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out...

We recently considered the proposition that the European Union is a vital and valuable ‘multiplier’ for British foreign policy. And found it not altogether accurate.

Here is the definitive argument in favour of it, delivered in a high-profile speech by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and winning a gushing review from the Indy:

David Miliband yesterday delivered the kind of speech that is too seldom heard in British politics; a speech that made a strong and unambiguous case for a greater role for the European Union on the global stage. As the Foreign Secretary argued, it is in Britain's "national interest" to see the EU develop a strong foreign policy.

It was a forward-looking analysis. In a future that will be dominated by the two economic giants of China and the United States, relatively small nations such as Britain will struggle to be heard on their own. The institutions of Europe provide us with a potential megaphone. Britain would also benefit from the existence of an EU that punches its weight when it comes to preventing nuclear proliferation, dealing with Russia or confronting rogue states.

David Miliband:

… our European alliance is unlike any other. We share sovereignty in key areas. We cooperate across the full range of policy issues. And Europe is our continent. The idea that the UK can maintain its influence in Beijing or Washington or Delhi or Moscow if we marginalise ourselves in Europe is frankly fanciful.  In fact I would say the opposite; through leadership in Europe we augment our bilateral ties with other countries. Alone, we may be interesting; leading a group of 27 in common values and purpose, we have real sway…

The truth is that there is a deception at the heart of Conservative policy.  A deception of the country that you can hate Europe as it exists today and remain central to European policy making.  In fact, a failed attempt to renegotiate aspects of the European Union that the Conservative Party does not like will lead inevitably to more calls for Britain to leave the European Union. The fact that one third of Conservative candidates support such a position of withdrawal is testimony to the way the Tory wind is blowing.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it is really propaganda, not analysis.

So let’s get this one nailed, once and for all.

* * * * *

What makes any policy successful?

The answer lies in physics (scary, but true). The formula for kinetic energy is thus:

  E_K = (1/2)mv²

E_K = Kinetic Energy

m = Mass

v = Velocity

This shows why tank shells are small and very fast: you get exponential increases by increasing velocity, not if you increase mass.

Bomb X:         0.5kg travelling at 1000m/second

E_K =                0.25 x 1000 x 1000 = 250,000 Joules

Bomb Y:         1kg travelling at 1000m/second

E_K =                0.5 x 1000 x 1000 = 500,000 Joules

Bomb Z:          0.5kg travelling at 3000m/second

E_K =                0.25 x 3000 x 3000 = 2.25m Joules

And why reducing Velocity significantly diminishes Impact, even with a lot more Mass:

Bomb EU:         2.0 kg travelling at 200m/second

E_K =                1.0 x 200 x 200 = 40,000 Joules

(ie far less than the impact of smaller, faster Bomb X)

The Impact of anything moving, including Policy, has a lot to do with the relationship between its Mass and Velocity.

The key point about an EU Foreign Policy is that it certainly adds heavy Mass (lots of countries intoning the same thing), but it significantly reduces Velocity (ie the speed with which positions are formulated and then the nimbleness of actual real-life responses and associated resources deployments).

The result is uncertain and often much reduced Impact.

Which in part explains why the EU coordination processes at the UN are so gormless that even EU fans are worried.

The other core point ignored by Mr Miliband is that energetic national policies work because they are authentic. He seems to be saying that European nations are doomed to be ineffectual unless they pull together. This is simply not true. Or at least not necessarily true.

Countries like China, Russia, Brazil and India have weight because they are not part of any sovereignty-diluting wider formation. See also the case of Norway, which shows just what can be done by using diplomatic fleetness of foot and a pile of money to make a difference here and there.

And look at this story of France and Brazil together defining a position on a Climate Change issue. France strides ahead and in its quintessentially French way asserts a global leadership role, all the more impressive because it is solely ‘French’ and not laden down with weasel wordy compromises needed to suit each and every EU country which wants to stick an oar in.

See also President Sarkozy in 2008 noisily proclaiming victory in Georgia by cutting a ‘peace’ deal with Moscow on behalf of the EU which did not involve Russian troops withdrawing fully from Georgia’s territory. A great result for France/Russia – an awful one for the EU/Georgia.

That’s how a country uses EU weight as a ‘multiplier’ for its own interests – by being assertive and single-minded and largely ignoring the positions of many other EU member states. Look also at how Greece has used its EU membership to blackmail other member states including the UK into not accepting the name which Macedonia wants to use to describe itself.

Not exactly the sort of multiplier examples Mr Miliband had in mind?

Why did not Mr Miliband also be honest and offer us some examples of the damaging if not ruinous downside of EU coordination? Such as:

• The debacle at the UN Human Rights Council in October where the UK and (yes) France manoeuvred themselves into a pitiful no-show. To be fair, other EU countries on the Council (Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia ) did actually manage to vote against a one-sided Gaza/Israel resolution, so maybe this was down to sheer UK/French incompetence on the day?

• The fact that the EU has no policy at all on Cuba (since the EU in effect has outsourced its Latin America policy to socialist-led Spain) and a dopey one on Honduras

• The EU’s on/off policy of engagement (or not) with Belarus

• The startling sums of EU money wasted on ‘development’ in Africa with no serious way to include meaningful political conditionality

• The fact that even where issues involving Europe itself are concerned, the EU can not come up with a united policy – see recognition of Kosovo. (That example of course also might be said to show the unwisdom of the UK pushing ahead with key allies without working up a coherent EU joint position first?)

NB There are policy areas where Mass is better than Velocity. Such as the laborious rolling out of democratic processes to former Communist Europe.

Here (Ukraine, Belarus and other CIS countries) the sheer weight and tedium of EU process is the best weapon we have to grind down the resistance of post-KGB structures aimed at maintaining Russia’s psychological and operational control. It took decades for Communism to do so much damage. It has to take decades to repair the damage. Velocity counts for a lot less here.

But in many other areas, including most issues which fall for UN votes, the lack of Velocity brought about by EU wittering is a serious handicap.

In the UN Security Council permanent membership status of the UK and France the European Union has a tremendous asset. It would be far better for ‘Europe’ and European values if the EU just let the UK and France get on with it and simply endorsed whatever positions they thought made sense, rather than trying to ‘coordinate’ policy to suit every footling point of view and thereby just wasting UK/French time and resources to no useful end.

Put it another way: the opportunity cost of UK diplomats wearily haggling with EU partners over meaningless texts aimed at achieving ‘common positions’ is the time (and credibility) lost in not engaging hard with the emerging powers in the world on hard substance.

Outcomes in EU processes all too often mean dumbed down analysis and effort. We professionals all know this. It is not honest of David Miliband not to acknowledge this openly.

David Miliband makes a final ritual swipe at the Conservatives for their supposedly anti-European approach. Zzzzz.

But who systematically stripped from UK foreign policy-making most of the available resources by creating DFID, thereby reducing our policy impact in and with Brussels (“The worst decision we ever made” – R Cook)? Labour.

Who has wrecked European language learning in UK schools? Labour.

Who made a clueless attempt  a few years back to set up a bossy UK/France/Germany 'EU Trilateralism' which promptly crashed since they did not have the nerve to follow it through? Labour.

Who scaled back the UK’s EU Fast Steam scheme for civil servants, sharply reducing the number of smart UK officials getting good jobs in Brussels? Labour.

Who made concessions on the UK Rebate – and got nothing in return? Labour.

* * * * *

Let’s not pretend that all this is easy, or that point-scoring sloganising one way or the other helps.

I hope that William Hague becomes Foreign Secretary and (a) reboots the foreign policy process in London so debauched by Labour, and as part of that, (b) throws British weight about more assertively within the EU and at the UN.

Labour will have a hissy fit, wailing from the margins that the UK is ‘isolated’. Well, on some things such us upholding principles of honesty and democracy in the UN Human Rights Council it is better to be isolated if everyone else is looking in other, darker directions.

One good way to proceed will be to start by asserting a new UK approach to EU coordination at the UN. Namely that it will be much reduced in practice, and largely limited to working closely with France and Germany and any other EU country with immediate influence on the issue in hand, so as to focus not on limp process but on tough outcomes which are better for Europe.

Having established that new firm approach at the very top, the way will be clear to streamline a businesslike working relationship with the new EU High Representative, based on the UK telling him what positions the UK plans to take then working out how best to swing most EU opinion behind it.

In short?

A lot of nonsense is talked about the UK ‘punching above its weight’.

What the EU does is oblige us to punch below our weight, as part of its own flabby and disorganised weight.

And, as the iron laws of physics tell us, more Mass but much reduced Velocity = Less Impact.

When it comes down to it, what is a Blog?

Not much more than personal musings, often with links to other websites which in one way or the other serve to reinforce the point one is trying to make.

Some sites aim higher - to become places where intelligent people go to find at a one-stop-shop manifold links to intelligent work of all shapes and sizes.

Such as Edge, which is way too intelligent for me:

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

We make technology, but our technology also makes us. At the online science/culture journal Edge, BB pal John Brockman went deep -- very deep -- into this concept. Frank Schirrmacher is co-publisher of the national German newspaper FAZ and a very, very big thinker. Schirrmacher has raised public awareness and discussion about some of the most controversial topics in science research today, from genetic engineering to the aging population to the impacts of neuroscience.

A superb and reliable aggregator is Arts & Letters Daily: not too many new links each day, but each one posted with dry humour and a liberal-minded instinct.

Have a look before they disappear down the A&LD page at the superb collections of links to articles and other writing of all shapes and sizes about the 20th anniversary of the end of European Communism and the Fall of the Wall. Such as this interview with Adam Michnik:

With the West struggling to come up with a response to Iran's nuclear ambitions, Mr. Michnik cites Ronald Reagan's approach to Poland as a useful model for President Obama. The day after martial law was imposed in 1981, the U.S. publicly sided with the Polish people against their regime.

"You have to support in a smart way those forces in Iran that aren't like that crazy president, that Islamo-Maoist Ahmadinejad," he says. "What is important for them is to see in America a friend. In Poland it worked; today there's no more pro-American country in the world." The violent repression of democratic protestors in Iran since June, he adds, indicates that "the ayatollahs must feel the breath of history on their backs."

But many many others too.

Finally, I have tripped over The Browser, another excellent site pulling together interesting work in a manageable format.

Including this handy link to the expensive watches worn by powerful Russians.

There's just too much to read, folks.

Back from Berlin.

Maybe I was in the wrong place on the night, but there seemed to be a remarkable number of road-blocks near the Brandenburg Gates to keep the public well back from the assembled global VIPs.

By which I mean hundreds of yards away. A curious and depressingly telling way to celebrate the Wall's fall.

One of the worst things about blogging is that one's beloved former work is as lost as old newspaper copy. Yet sometimes readers hit upon something I wrote a long time back, such as this famous piece about the UK's doomed attempts to teach Russians how to fish (and farm):

Moscow had not had fresh milk in any quantities since the Revolution. Behold, it started to come into supermarkets in 1995. Why?

In part because of McDonald's.

The then biggest McDonald's hamburger outlet in the world had opened not far from Red Square. Russians queued en masse to sample the food - and the glamour. But to run an operation on this scale required milk shakes and meat, ie cows. And importing meat/milk to meet Russia's surging demand was not sustainable.

So McDonald's set up their own farm in Russia. And it worked.

Thus a magnificent case study in failure of development assistance.

On the one hand, an intelligent well-designed and expensive socialist model farm which never produced a single sausage as far as I know. Launched with such a fanfare it quietly crawled away to die in a KHF cupboard. I still wonder what it all cost.

A reader finds this piece and writes:

Excellently written post, if only all bloggers offered the same content as you, the internet would be a much better place. Please keep it up!

For once I am not minded to argue.

Former senior diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer is busy describing what he sees as a decline in the influence and technique of British diplomacy:

New Labour's obsessive reliance on the alchemy of consultants has infected much of Whitehall. The culture of targets, set by the Treasury, has acquired the madness and mendacity of Soviet statistics.

While I was in Washington as ambassador, from 1997 until 2003, I had to engage in an annual objective-setting exercise. In principle, it is absolutely right to set clear goals for your embassy. But the Foreign Office, throttled by the Treasury's grip on its budget, insisted on a bureaucratic exercise of elephantine proportions ... 

Finally, like the annual promulgation of the theses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the objectives would be published, often months into the year to which they were meant to apply. They were, for all practical purposes, dead on arrival.

Meantime, we just got on with the job for which there was only one authentic objective: advancing the national interest, using our judgment, common sense and professional skills to work out how to get from A to B.

The Foreign Office website continues to be riddled with the jargon of management consultancy. There is much talk of corporate leadership, audit and risk, business strategies, "change owners" and what appears to be the terrible sin of "change-bunching". Innovation has become a virtue in its own right, as if permanent revolution were necessary for the effectiveness of British foreign policy.

All of which is more than familiar to readers here.

As is the folly mentioned in the article of spending so much taxpayers' money via DFID to get no foreign policy gains at all. I heard Robin Cook himself say that "hiving DFID off from the FCO was the worst decision we ever made".

A lot of strenuous competition in the Worst Ever New Labour Decision category of course, but, yes, that one is in there towards the top.

Yet as various furious commenters on Sir Christopher's piece point out, he makes no mention in this article of the European Union and the impact of all that process on the FCO's capacity both to think and act.

The fact has to be faced. If you think that the EU is an unambiguous force for good, and that all things considered it is better that we do diminish our national foreign policy firepower in favour of European 'soft power', at least have the honesty to accept what that means in practice.

A huge erosion of the intellectual capital of the FCO has occurred because people working there know that there is just no point in trying hard to master a subject if the final policy outcome has to be negotiated in some footling Working Group (sic) in Brussels, comprising other representatives of EU member states whose own Ministries' capacities to offer intelligent and 'deep' analysis is often close to nil.

It is in the end all about Values. But also about Confidence.

We are richer than Russia. We have far better and more substantial relations round the world than Russia. We are (usually) better analysts than the Russians - remember the Russian diplomatic fiasco when Milosevic fell and Moscow was taken utterly by surprise? We have equal weight with Russia at the supreme top table of global affairs, the UN Security Council.

But who looks and acts like a world power? Who gives the impression of believing in something, and being prepared to act tough to get it? Of being powerful?

Of thinking that power exists, and is there to be deployed for a national interest?

Of having any national interest at all?

The most scandalous cliche burbled round the FCO and Whitehall corridors and even in public is that the EU is a multiplier of UK influence in the world. Even some people who otherwise appear to be sane are heard to say it.

See here a classic example from 2008, FCO Minister Jim Murphy on Zimbabwe:

We’ve made progress today in a number of areas of foreign policy that are important to the UK and the rest of the EU.

Most notably we got a very clear statement from the EU on Zimbabwe. Ministers from all 27 EU member states expressed their unanimous concern about delays in announcing the election results, about acts of intimidation, violence and other human rights abuses.

Today was busy but well worth it, and the progress we have made in a number of areas a good demonstration that Europe is an essential multiplier of UK influence in the world.

Hurrah. We won an EU statement.

No. No.

No.

The EU is an amazing multiplier of Luxembourg's influence in the world. And Ireland's.

And Greece's (look how Greece for years has stopped the rest of Europe including us calling Macedonia 'Macedonia').

When so many countries have views and instincts running against our own - and their positions are being amplified with our own resources (since by spending so much time dealing with countries which have no authority, we diminish our own) - it just can not be true that our influence is multiplied to any significant extent.

On the contrary, in many key foreign policy areas the EU directly diminishes our influence, by forcing us to sign up to lowest common denominator positions at the UN and elsewhere, since to give a clear principled British view would break a carefully negotiated EU consensus which is actually worth nothing since it is so trivial. 

This process brings us to pull our national punches and disincentivises movement of internal resources to where we might make a strategic difference. And it leads to appalling confusion eg in the way we (don't) speak out strongly at the UN Human Rights Council.

Not to mention examples where the UK once would have seized a strong and active position, but because New Labour had no PR interest in getting stuck in we left the EU to 'take the lead' (see eg the absence of real UK involvement in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine). Belarus?

Maybe there is some perverse benefit in having the nascent EU External Action Service launched if that leads to an end to wasting precious time in EU Working Group processes in Brussels, with the top national capitals dealing directly with the new High Representative's office instead. Or not.

So, whereas I look with some confidence to William Hague to start to put at least some of this right, I worry that the sheer extent of the stupidity and decay caused by Labour has done irreparable damage.

And all for what?

So that key Labour people can try to get top jobs for themselves in Brussels as the ship sinks?

Yes.