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.
Off to Belgrade tomorrow for a conference on Thursday hosted by the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equalsas supported by Russian partners. The theme is European Security in the Light of 2012 Elections.
Notable speakers include Dragan Todorovic of the Serbian Radical Party, whose programme asserts Serbia's rights over plenty of currently non-Serbia territory in former Yugoslavia. And James Jatras of the American Council for Kosovo which has what might politely be called firm paleoconservative views in favour of Kosovo staying part of Serbia.
The Belgrade Forum is strong on denouncing what it calls 'NATO's crimes' in former Yugoslavia. Plus it has the good luck to draw on the North Korean school of drafting when it sends fraternal messages to other organisations:
The leadership and members of the Belgrade Forum hold in highest regard our thriving cooperation, an outstanding level of our mutual friendship and the evident closeness in opinions on key issues, such as those concerning peace, security, democracy and overall progress.
So insofar as I am there to give a quixotic 'Western'/UK view of the emerging European scene, I can expect to be heavily outnumbered by different proud Slavophiliac tendencies.
No matter:
The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one ...This day, we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a world brighter than anything we can imagine! To victory!!
I have written a piece for Financier Worldwide on the dark arts of negotiating in central and eastern Europe:
The implicit view is that it is the outcome, not process, which really counts, and that the value of different outcomes can be measured. However, based on my experience as a diplomat in Central and Eastern Europe, contractual or other relationships with businesses there need to factor in a very different way of looking at negotiation.
The Russian approach to diplomatic negotiations features an attitude to process far removed from the exquisitely reasonable style of British diplomacy. Moscow diplomats’ training makes this point: “Even if the other side proposes something you completely agree with, never make a move without getting something valuable for it.”
Russia typically wants to project strength as an end in itself. Part of any negotiation is balancing incentive-carrots with pressure-sticks: “If you accept our position, we guarantee you a positive outcome. If you refuse, we’ll make sure you get a very negative outcome”.
Russian negotiators aim to neutralise that approach by conveying a very different proposition: “It doesn’t matter how much you try to pressure us. First, we can withstand more pressure than you can possibly exert, or even imagine. Second, whatever you do to hurt us, we will do something far worse to hurt you.”
That approach emphasises hard practical outcomes, but reveals an attitude to process which is all about establishing psychological ascendancy as the basis for subsequent ‘pragmatic’ discussions. The very vocabulary of Soviet/Russian diplomacy has phrases conveying brooding depersonalised doom: “Negative consequences for your interests can not be excluded.”
Gripping stuff, based on unswervingly bold generalisations. But to read the rest, you’ll have to sign up…
My recent piece about the Amazing Vanishing Referendm in Republika Srpska was picked up by RFE/RL (in Serbian/Bosnian) and so got a rather wider Balkan readership than it otherwise might have done.
Any normal person reading it might have thought that it (albeit in perhaps a sardonic and annoying way) basically painted a rather convincing picture of RS leader Dodik outfoxing the 'international community' and so doing a good job for his RS voters, viz Serbs.
Yet for a reason I find hard to fathom, I have drawn down the ire of assorted Serbs who think that I have shown a typical 'colonialist' view of Serbs and Serbian issues.
First a couple of commenters here at the site:
Your text shows again Serbs like trouble makers who drinking and loughing... I can see arrogant English colonial wiew on some other nations !
Charles, I thought you are a decent man. But your agenda seems to be: demonization of the Serbs!
It is symptomatic that the High Representative, as well as you Charles, are voicing the gravest possible charges of violations of the Dayton Accords but fails therein to offer a single clear reference to any concrete Annexes of the Accords that have been allegedly violated.
Charles, you are selling your soul, for what?
Maybe it was this paragraph of mine which vexed some Serb readers:
Dodik and the Bosnian Serbs laugh heartily as they swig their rakija, amazed at their own cleverness and already scheming on the next one. The principle of holding a referendum at some point has survived - if anything the Ashton visit has vindicated it.
Well, so what if Mr Dodik likes rakija? I do too. I was using a colourful if trite image to depict him celebrating his wily and clever victory over the weary Europeans.
Anyway, over at a Serb website called Novi Standard ("energy is indestructible") they have impertinently run the whole article without permission and provoked a load of rude comments. Examples include (for those whose Serbian/Bosnian is not yet quite perfect):
English donkey
racist pig
Serbophobe
pure chauvinism
British Ambassadorish garbage
slimy, insolent, hateful
Mister Crawford should be in three parts, just like Bosnia!
Old English hatred against Serbs
You get the general idea. I suspect that this trickle of abusive nonsense comes from the disturbed Russophile 'Radical' tendency in Serbia/RS who see any Serb other than themselves (including Dodik himself) as puppets, stooges and sellouts. Woe betide any foreigner who dares to offer a view.
Back at the RFE/RL article, the class of commenter is of course far higher and often fair and interesting. I got a line of praise from one Spasoje, who invents a new and excellent word just for the occasion
I'm especially pleased that Crawford well spotted one of the important characteristics by which Tito is remembered: narcissoidism (narcisoidnost). It's little discussed...
Here is a strong example from Walter Russell Mead of elegant but tough foreign policy writing, this time on the increasingly dysunctional US/Pakistan relationship.
Once upon a time India with its phony anti-Americanist 'non-alignment' as encouraged by massive Soviet penetration of the Indian establishment was the main reason for Washington to treat Pakistan as a reasonable partner.
No longer. India is a confident and fast-growing international economic force, much less impressed by Moscow's puny blandishments. And Pakistan is decaying and declining, for all the familiar reasons.
So read this analysis which combines facts, arguments, attitudes and interests in a highly persuasive way:
On the evidence of Abbottabad, few Chinese foreign policy analysts will propose trusting Pakistan. Nice words, candy and flowers on its birthday, but little else...
Defeat after defeat by India, progressive deterioration of the domestic security climate and the utter collapse of political morality in what passes for the governing class in Pakistan have not forced a reevaluation. Charm and appeals to sweet reason by American officials and emissaries won’t do it either.
Neither will humanitarian aid: the suffering of ordinary Pakistanis has little impact on the elite, and in the short to medium term public opinion in Pakistan is so anti-American and so politically marginal that we could die of old age waiting for spending however generous to change our image in Pakistan enough to change the politics of the relationship...
The article also helpfully introduces us lesser English-speakers to a new word, 'bromance' ("slang for an unusually strong nonsexual relationship between two straight males or a romantic relationship between two gay males" - see the exchanges in the comments).
For many years I have been a friend of the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies, a sturdy enemy of collectivism based in deepest Westminster. they did fine work in mobilising anti-communist analysis and economic thought during the Cold War and thereafter.
This week they hosted a fine presentation and discussion led by Count Nikolai Tolstoy on the story which never dies, namely the ghastly circumstances surrounding the way British troops under the influence of Harold Macmillan handed over thousands of Russians, Yugoslavs and others to their doom through Stalin/Tito mass murdering.
For background see my posting from October last year and the link there to my RFE piece too.
Nikolai Tolstoy gave a powerful and moving account of his own long efforts to follow this story, which has taken him through a fearsome battle in the English libel courts and then the European Court of Human Rights through to the heart of the Soviet archives in Moscow (that name helped get him in!). Many of his suspicions about the actions and motives of key British and American officers involved had been confirmed in deeply buried Soviet secret documents.
Perhaps his key point at CRCE was to trample on two basic justifications for what happened:
"you don't understand the confused circumstances of the times, with millions of refugees swarming over Europe"
"if we had not handed back these people to the communists, we might not have got back our own POWs"
As Nikolai Tolstoy said, those arguments were never made to him by any of the many people of all ranks who actually had been there and witnessed the cruelty involved in sending back the Cossacks and Yugoslavs and other people whose status had not been covered by the Yalta accords. Nor were those arguments prominent in the masses of British military records and diaries he had studied.
On the contrary, it was clear at the time to the British forces doing the dirty work on orders that something deeply dishonourable if not evil was being done, and that considerable deception and lies had been used by Macmillan and others to try to cover their tracks.
Years later some of the soldiers involved were still having nightmares about the shame of what they had seen and done. All except Macmilland the other officer involved (Brigadier Toby Law, later Lord Aldington) had been ready to speak freely about what had happened and their own roles in it. See here for Lord Aldington's obituary which gives his side of this complex story - some of the points made in that obituary in his favour were specifically refuted by Ct Tolstoy at the CRCE meeting.
Ct Tolstoy described how all sorts of detailed and credible evidence demolishing the Low/Macmillan versions had been disallowed for spurious reasons at the later English libel hearings. The usual court transcripts giving the exchanges on these and other points had not been produced due to inexplicable 'technical failures'. Other blatant abuses of process had occurred to limit public knowledge of what was being said. **
As chair of the evening I opened by quoting from this New Statesman article by Tolstoy from April 2000, which has a grim FCO angle:
By chance, I had recently raised with the Foreign Office the barbaric treatment of thousands of Russian and Yugoslav prisoners of war and refugees in southern Austria in 1945, suggesting that the British government should now make some public gesture of regret, and recompense the few surviving victims.
The FO responded by assuring me that no such event had ever occurred and that, even if it had, it was authorised by the Yalta Agreement.
I passed copies of this correspondence to Zoe Polanska who, as a 16-year-old girl, had been among those flung by British troops into cattle trucks for despatch to the Gulag. Her war had been spent in Auschwitz and Dachau, and she wrote to the "Human Rights Department" of the FO to explain that she had been there, and to ask how anyone could assert that cruelties on such a scale had not occurred.
Polanska received a patronising reply, explaining that she was mistaken and implying that she had imagined the affair. Anyone who doubts the arrogance and inhumanity of our diplomatic representatives may consult this correspondence on my website: www.uvsc.edu/tolstoy
Alas that link no longer works, but if Ct Tolstoy sends me one which does I'll put up a copy of this disgraceful document on this site in the hope of bringing eternal shame on its creator.
Why rake around in all this old history yet again?
Because it's not all that old. The CRCE meeting welcomed two heroic people who had been there at the time, one an English field worker and the other a Slovenian woman who somehow had managed to escape the worst.
The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it.
Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it - but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about 'moving on'.
And those Perfect Criminals are still at it. See a move in Slovenia to get a communist WW2 hero's face on a Euro coin. That might just about be tolerable if the post-communist Left in Slovenia worked hard and in good faith to unearth all the victims of communist murders. But, of course, they don't and won't.
It's a real privilege to play a walk-on part in the meetings at CRCE and elsewhere which keep the small flame of Truth flickering brightly.
** Correction. Ct Tolstoy has pointed out that the passage above confused the strange processes at the various legal hearings:
... a transcript of the 1989 trial was kept. An interesting point, however, is that Judge Davies prevented the jury from refreshing their minds on a long and complex hearing – throughout their 3-day deliberations they were forbidden to consult the transcript!
The ‘accidental’ deletion of a transcript occurred at the subsequent perjury hearing held in secret on 4-6 October 1994. Again, at the High Court appeal against this judgment held on 23 July 1996, the judges’ adverse judgment was recorded - but not a word of the actual appeal!
"...there are about 50,000 people who read my blog daily. If I don't write, three days later the blog will be read by 20,000 people. In a week, the number of readers will be 2,000 people and, two weeks later, only your mother will go and see if you wrote something.
Therefore, if you want to have a popular blog, you have to constantly write and say something. The good thing about the Internet is that the audience is very mobile and no one will wait for Navalny if Navalny won’t write anything for a month. These are the laws of the genre.
Looking at what is happening in the Russian internet world is difficult because (like everything in Russia) there is just so much. But do check out the interview with Russian super-blogger Alexey Navalny as quoted above. Here he is talking about his landslide victory in a virtual election for mayor of Moscow:
... the government has lost the moral and intellectual competition on the Internet, which is pretty big – almost 37 million users. For the government there’s no online platform where it is trusted. There are websites like Kommersant, Vedomosti, Echo Moskvy.
Even if we take non-liberal websites, conservative, entertainment, neutral, whatever – any voting would lead to the victory of what we call “the opposition.” And the government, although it invested a lot of money, has lost this work.
And as the Internet penetrates, this division will get bigger. Internet is the main threat to the stability of the government in Russia.
For a different view, here is an extract from an interview with a hard-nosed Aleksey Chadayev, founder of the 'Kremlin blogger school' which a friendly ex-colleague has sent me from BBC Monitoring. Imagine if D Cameron tried set up a No 10 Blogging School - the howl of derision would be stupendous. In Russia things are ... different.
Chadeyev:
... There is one more factor of some importance here -- the consequences of the demographic explosion. There are many young people in the Arab countries and fairly old regimes controlled by elderly "agents" from the days of the KGB-CIA confrontation. When encountering the new communicative forms, they pour out. But Russian society is older and there is much less of this youthful energy in it. With the exception of a few regions that are a special conversation.
[Chernenko] But the Western press writes that events like those in North Africa could happen in Russia too, and that the Russian authorities fear Facebook.
[Chadayev] Certainly there is nothing to fear. It is simply a new tool, a new weapon; you need to work with it. I would think about this in an entirely different key. And maybe we ourselves will try to organize a Twitter revolution at some particular geographic point that is important for us. The Russian world has vast spaces. Why not...
[Chernenko] ...Arouse the Russian-speaking citizens of Estonia to protest?
[Chadayev] Why not? They are disconnected, each one of them sits in his apartment and cannot do anything with this midget leviathan that is trying to naturalize them and integrate them into their wretched East European carcass. Obviously all the old methods of organizing and mobilizing them do not work. But as for the new ones, why not?
[Chernenko] In other words, the technologies themselves are neutral and any force -- pro-government or oppositionist -- can use them with equal effectiveness?
[Chadayev] Of course! They are simply tools. It is simply that there are people who are able to master them and combine this knowledge with sociology, that is, with knowledge about how the particular society is organized...
Battle is joined. Should be an interesting session.
I have had a kind message from Stevan Hobfoll (former officer in the Israeli defence forces turned expert on Stress) about a novel he has written, The Imperfect Guardian.
The book is a Jewish adventure story, based loosely on his grandfather's early years in Poland and Russia from 1906 (the failed first Russian Revolution) to 1921, a time when (as Stevan puts it) Jewish life had its full share of horse traders, revolutionary leaders, scoundrels, soldiers, intellectuals, peddlers, gangsters, and doctors.
I remember a senior American diplomat arriving at the FCO in 1992 and describing just how busy he was helping get US food aid to a Russia left reeling after the abrupt collapse of communism. We genteel Brits were startled when he described himself as 'drinkin' from a pressure-hose'. The imagery!
Still, we're all now firmly attached to the nozzle of the pressure-hose gushing out all those articles, comments, Tweets and everything else about Egypt and what it means.
This one by Leon Wieseltiercaught my eye. It drills down into what is surely a strategic failure by the Obama Administration, namely surrendering any serious leadership on the subject of 'freedom' for fear of putting at risk its softer post-Bush outreach to the so-called Muslim world.
It has some superb passages:
The wholesale repudiation of Bush’s foreign policy included the rejection of anything resembling his “freedom agenda,” which looked mainly like an excuse for war. But whatever one’s views of the Iraq war, it really does not seem too much to ask of American liberals that they think a little less crudely about democratization—not only about its moral significance but also about its strategic significance.
... It is a common error that prudence is thought about the short-term; the proper temporal horizon for prudential thinking is distant and long. Realism does not equip one for an adequate appreciation of the historical force of the democratic longing.
In this sense, realism is singularly unrealistic. It seems smart only as long as the dictators remain undisturbed by their people, and then suddenly it seems incredibly stupid.
And this:
It was a terrible mistake for Obama to make democratization seem like an “imposition,” with its imperialist implications, and to conflate it with military invasion.
The promotion of democracy is a policy of support for indigenous Egyptian, or Arab, or Muslim democrats who are just as authentic as indigenous Egyptian, or Arab, or Muslim autocrats and theocrats, and certainly more deserving of American respect. It is a policy—to borrow Gibbs’s words—of taking sides—specifically, of taking sides with peoples against regimes.
It does not create dissidents, in some sort of ugly-American conspiracy; it finds them, and then it assists them, because they are in need of assistance, and because assisting them expresses our values and our interests.
This is spot on. The astounding failure of Washington (with Brussels and EU capitals meekly tucking in behind) to articulate a strong moral and political case for regime change in Iran when so many Iranians actually wanted something like our form of pluralism has left 'the West' floundering in response to the upheavals in north Africa now.
The main problem for us and indeed for Egypt is that insofar as there is any coherent world-view in Egypt, it appears to be yet more Muslims-as-victims lumpen Islamistic ideology. The prospects of the tumult leading in the short term to something like a 'normal' democratic new form of government in Egypt must be close to nil.
That said, for decades too long we have nodded deferentially at the different dreary national socialistic regimes sprawled across the Middle East, somehow caught between the racist view that 'Arabs can't run a modern open society' and a fear of anything which might threaten 'stability'.
So if anything the problem is not that Arabs/Muslims of the region have been helpless victims of Western manipulation - the problem is that they have largely been left by us to rot in sub-standard autocracies on their own terms, give or take huge sums of defence and other support thrown at Egypt by Washington for many years. What a dismal return on all that investment.
Here is one other article on Egypt which again strikes me as hitting many right targets, this time by Paul Goodman at Conservative Home:
Imagine a series of Muslim Brotherhood-led governments in the Middle East. Would they be more or less likely than present ones to promote equal opportunities and religious minorities? To pursue economic reform and, yes, civil liberties? To seek a two-state solution for Israel/Palestine?
To back Hamas or the Palestinian Authority? To shrug at Iran's drive for nuclear weapons? To support the Taliban in Afghanistan, where our troops are serving? To be better disposed to liberal democracies, as they pursue the integration of state and religion? To back and fund Islamists in Britain who support attacks on civilians or on our allies?
He also quotes Sir D Plumbly, formerly HM Ambassador to Cairo:
"Obviously, it is desirable to talk to Islamists if we can...But I also detect a tendency for us to be drawn towards engagement for its own sake, to confuse "engaging with the Islamic world" with "engaging with Islamism", and to play down the very real downsides for us in terms of the Islamists' likely foreign and social policies, should they actually achieve power in Egypt."
Still, that looks like the safe way to bet. Let's conclude gloomily on that note with Brian Micklethwait who as always sums it all up deftly:
My understanding is that this is not one of those enjoyable melodramas where there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, when we here in the comfortable seats (the ones outside Egypt) can all cheer the Good Guys and jeer the Bad Guys.
My understanding is that there are the Bad Guys as in the government, the Good Guys as in the people who would just love to be living in a nice civilised country which respects human rights and where there is dignity and freedom and whatever is the Egyptian for apple pie, with a thriving economy for all etc. (with no Jews or Americans screwing everything up) …
and then there are the Other Bad Guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood, who would like nothing better than to see Egypt reduced to ruins, to take charge of the ruins, and then to ruin the ruins a whole hell of a lot more.
The Good Guys are now so angry with the first lot of Bad Guys that they either don't realise or don't care that they may be playing right into the hands of the Other Bad Guys.
Basically, we in Europe are like a group of wealthy homeowners on the smart side of the pond who have watched with disdainful unconcern the dull-witted mafia families in the slums some way across the water. Now all the mafia houses are collapsing and we grasp - too late - that the noisy violent disarray could easily affect our property values, or worse our way of life itself.
Where is Diplomatic Judgement in all this, I wonder, from the Suez crisis onwards?
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