Blogoir: August

The growth of e-books is rattling publishers:

Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned.

Mr Nourry said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as Barnes & Noble could destroy publishers’ profits.

He said publishers were “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy – over which the online retailer failed to consult publishers – to charge $9.99 for all its e-books in the US. He also pointed to plans by Google to put millions of out-of-copyright books online for public use.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

Er ... and?

I want to buy the new Michael Connelly book, The Scarecrow. It's not out in paperback yet.

The hardback from Amazon costs £9.42, half the 'original' price.

But if I order it as an e-book via Waterstone's it costs £14.86! Even though I am buying a mainly carbon-free version which costs nothing to deliver and uses no paper and all the vicious chemicals needed to print the paper. The far cheaper US e-version can not be bought online (it seems) outside the USA and Canada.

These people are crazy. They are trying to replicate a model which made sense for technical and financial reasons decades ago (bring out an expensive hard-back version, then a while later a cheaper paperback version) but makes no sense now.

Where o where is the environmentalist lobby railing against this madness?

Via Ed Driscoll, this fine rant from 2000 against those who insist that urban life is the best there is:

The book frowns on gated communities, of course, because they’re exclusionary. Conversely, they praise urban developments with dense housing - which include, I presume, apartment buildings with doormen and security systems. Driving past a guard booth or getting buzzed up via intercom - what’s the difference?

“The unity of society is threatened not by the use of gates, but by the uniformity and exclusivity of the people behind them.” Oh, blow it out your ass. Doctors will never live next to janitors. The streets of New York are full of people from all walks, races, creeds, colors; they are the antithesis of a gated sprawling suburban development. Does this mean that doctors invite their housekeepers to their parties? Or that racist morons cannot be forged in a big city?

“A child growing up in such a homogeneous environment is less likely to develop a sense of empathy for people from other walks of life, and is ill prepared to live in a diverse society.” Boolsheet! If this is the case, then we’d best forcibly integrate North Dakota, right now. And Cabrini Green, as long as we’re at it. Make them more like Brooklyn. Why, everyone who was ever raised in Brooklyn is perfectly prepared to live in a diverse society; naught but harmony reigns in the boroughs.

This sort of fatuous moralizing can be found at the heart of most anti-suburban tracts, and it’s why I distrust the general idea. There are millions of Americans living happy lives in affluent comfort,never troubled by the aroma of cabbage wafting in from a neighbor’s window, never knowing the communal experience of being awakened at 4 AM by a siren and knowing that everyone else in the building is up as well, and this fact just galls some people.

All that space . . . all that room . . . all those things! It just can’t be right.

From, of course, Lileks.

As it is a holiday today in the UK, set aside a few hours to peruse James Lileks' beyond awesome site: "trust me, you can waste a lot of time here".

Starting here.

And moving on to the extraordinary case of L'il Jerry:

Jerry wasn’t cute. With his empty eyes, his trollish body and oversized feet, there was something wrong about Jerry - especially since he didn’t grow as the years passed. He didn’t appear to have any parents, although he had “aunts” - perhaps a code word for the women who hung around the train station where he worked. He had no skills, no endearing qualities.

But he had one superhuman skill - the ability to deliver the Violently Ordinary Rejoinder which blew people off their feet (usually backwards) with stunning force:

That and the myriad other masterpieces on display will keep you happy for hours.

Maybe days. 

Another Crawf starts the long, painful, lonely trudge to high blogging readership.

If 'twere done, 'twere best done early...

Nice name!

Who is to lead Europe?

The French and Germans, of course.

Who else?

Gordon Brown is barely surviving as UK prime minister, and the Conservatives are as provincially Eurosceptic as ever. Europe simply cannot count on the British, at least for a while...

Silvio Berlusconi's sexcapades and Spain's dire economic state put them out of the running for a leadership role.

As for Poland, the country's fixation on security in its immediate neighbourhood is incompatible with true European leadership.

But there are some issues to sort out between Paris and Berlin:

Aaargh.

Bosnia hits another political crisis or two or three:

Meanwhile, Bosnia's state government - the Council of Ministers - is facing a similar crisis after the strongest Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, announced it may boycott the government over the issue of top appointments to key state bodies.

The SDA has been expressing its profound dissatisfaction on this issue since last week, after Bosnian Serb State Premier Nikola Spiric appointed a Bosnian Croat candidate as the country’s new EU negotiator, overriding SDA claims that that positions should be held by a Bosniak.

This week, the SDA and Spiric have continued their quarrel over this appointment, and over who should head the state's Indirect Tax Administration and Communication Regulatory Agency.

The quarrel over the division of top positions among the three main ethnic groups at state level, and the increasingly frequent outvoting of Bosnian Croat and Serb ministers in the Federation government, reflect growing tensions and animosities among Bosnian leaders, local and international analysts claim.

Which all goes to show that a system in which top jobs are allocated according to ill-defined ethnic quotas rather than merit is doomed to go nowhere fast.

It also exemplifies the deep problem in the overall 'Bosniac' view of Bosnia.

On the one hand they insist that the country has to stay together, all three communities sharing power nicely.

On the other, they just don't trust the Serbs/Croats enough to make that happen, not least because they know that the Serbs/Croats do not trust them and ipso facto are untrustworthy.

This logic of mutually reinforcing distrust gurgles around in circles, and nothing gets done.

At least all the BH political parties agree on one thing: that under no circumstances are people for senior official positions to be appointed via open competition by merit.

Maybe the return of my old friend Dragan Kalinic will help restore common sense.

It was always charming to visit him in Pale to discuss the goings-on in Republika Srpska, especially when he would take me out of the main coinference room for some whispered conversations away from the microphones.

Edwin Forprogress helpfully comments on one of my postings about Edward Kennedy and briefs us on the legacy of the great man:

Gee, thanks Edwin. But rather than sharing with us Democrat popcorn, pl attempt to answer the question I posed, namely how to assess the morality of building all those dreams on the reality of Mary Jo being left to drown. Which ends justify which means?

Here is a good account of how Senator Kennedy grappled with his gnawing conscience:

Having provided his constituents his self-serving account of the accident, Kennedy pretended to throw himself on their mercy:

The people of this State, the State which sent John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, and Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Kennedy to the United States Senate are entitled to representation in that body by men who inspire their utmost confidence. For this reason, I would understand full well why some might think it right for me to resign. For me this will be a difficult decision to make...

It has been written a man does what he must in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles, and dangers, and pressures, and that is the basis of human morality. Whatever may be the sacrifices he faces, if he follows his conscience -- the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow man -- each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.

The stories of the past courage cannot supply courage itself. For this, each man must look into his own soul.

Looking deep into his soul, Edward Kennedy bravely decided to ... continue to build his own career, by pumping out legislation. But which of these many laws have really made a bad situation notably better?

Views differ:

Kennedy was, in the turgid term regularly applied to him, the "liberal lion" of the Senate, a principled and unyielding advocate for bigger government, higher taxes, more business regulation, you name it.

Yet many of his signature accomplishments—No Child Left Behind and the Americans with Disabilities Act, for instance—were not pushed through along partisan lines. In each instance, he worked with the respective President Bush and a slew of Republicans at the time to ensure passage.

Which brings me to the second point: The legislation for which he will be remembered is precisely the sort of top-down, centralized legislation that needs to be jettisoned in the 21st century.

Like Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and the recently deposed Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Kennedy was in fact a man out of time, a bridge back to the past rather than a guide to the future. His mind-set was very much of a piece with a best-and-the-brightest, centralized mentality that has never served America well over the long haul...

As the world looks aghast as the US government struggles to pay its way well into the future, maybe some of this Dreamy legislation will come to be seen as just a bit too Real?

Some people are trying to use Edward Kennedy's death to reboot Obamacare into Kennedycare.

What about a single sensible national health insurance scheme for the USA? What a hero would be the person who put forwarda credible plan.

And what a jerk, if not a Nazi and a rabble-rouser would be someone who opposed it!

Richard Nixon proposed the scheme in 1971.

Edward Kennedy opposed it.

Oops.

Wrong N-word.

What if a huge business kept getting huger by ignoring every business rule about good organisation?

This web-based business:

• gets 20 billion pageviews a month
• has 30 employees
• scorns advertising, marketing, sales, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate
• shuts down third-party applications designed to make the product work better
• is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero
• publishes no account of its income or expenses, it has no obligation to respond to criticism, and all authority rests in the hands of a single man
• declares itself uninterested in maximizing profit - but makes a bomb
• emits messages to customers in the form of obscure poems:

frogs croak and gulls cry
silently a river floods
a red leaf floats by

Welcome to Craigslist.

Must-read.

Damn.

When I wrote my few words about Edward Kennedy I had at the back of my mind John Profumo. But I did not make the link.

So Mark Steyn has done so, brilliantly (emphasis added):

An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile?

If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not?

At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test.

Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done...

Which hits the nail on the head.

It is not that Kennedy behaved so badly on so many occasions. It is tough being a leader and having to take responsibility for far-reaching decisions, balancing pragmatically and even cynically what is 'for the best' and for whom.

It's rather that almost uniquely in political life Kennedy faced a personal life and death crisis, and in that existential self-defining moment left someone else to die.

But the true evil is not that grisly act of cowardice. It is not even that Kennedy knew what he had done and then made jokes about it all afterwards.

It is that so many otherwise sensible people who realised what he had done then lauded him and brushed those oh-so-awkward lapses aside, perhaps horrified and yet also somehow exultant at their own dark evil acceptance of his evil, thereby diminishing us all.

As Ayn Rand said:

The soul is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on - and the man is yours. You won't need a whip - he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped.

John Profumo showed us one way to make amends and respect the soul. Edward Kennedy showed us the other.

Last word with Mark Steyn:

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay.

Think.

It as far from here to Sergeant Pepper as it is from him to 1925.

Lawks. Getting old.

And so it is that I recently have meandered back again to a couple of the records of my, hem, student years.

Quadrophenia, by The Who.

And (gulp) Tales of Topographic Oceans, by Yes.

These were both double albums intended to be in effect one long piece. Few bands have tried attempt anything on this scale. Even fewer have succeeded in achieving musical distinction and overall coherence. The Wall by Pink Floyd is perhaps the best known effort.

Listening again to Quadrophenia I am amazed above all by the drumming. Keith Moon's non-stop assault on the drum kit defined the sound of the whole group in a way no other drummer has ever achieved. Try this: 

Keith Moon was not a distinguished scholar ("'Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects"). But his frantic drumming and scarcely less frantic attempts to blow up hotel toilets were more than distinguished.

As for Quadrophenia, the general theme is (of course) teenage angst but cleverly expressed via a young man with a personality split in four ways, each member of the Who having his own memorable musical motif picked up variously throughout the album. Not all of it works or is especially memorable, but the best songs are terrific; the sustained lyricism and sheer musical technique shine through.

The concluding punning Love Reign O'er Me is a wonderful piece of music:

Only love
Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers laying in the fields.

Love, Reign o'er me.
Love, Reign o'er me, rain on me.

Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky.
Only love can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high...

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain.
The nights are hot and black as ink
I can't sleep and I lay and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain.

Topographic Oceans is something else again. Serious top-end 'progressive' rock musicianship (ie likely to be bought by students with too much time to pore endlessly over the imagery and obscure words), but serving up many wonderful melodies, coming and going and twisting and turning for over an hour.

Here the 'sound' is defined primarily by Steve Howe's guitar, Rick Wakeman's keyboard solos and Jon Anderson's beyond impenetrable but yet somehow touching mystic-style lyrics:

Skyline teacher
Warland seeker
Send out poison
Cast iron leader

And through the rhythm of moving slowly
Sent through the rhythm work out the story
Move over glory to sons of old fighters past

Young Christians see it from the beginning
Old people feel it, that's what they're saying
Move over glory to sons of old fighters past.

This shows how in later years they were still playing sections from it:

What do British diplomats in Europe do all day?

Here is a fine example of the Embassy in Warsaw taking an idea (in this case advancing the prospects for disabled people in Poland as part of an EU-wide move in this area), then finding senior Polish partners and moving things forward together.

The leading role here was played by Jane Cordell, possibly the first ever substantively deaf diplomat posted by the FCO (or any other Foreign Ministry?) to a senior overseas position:

.

Jane's main effort in the Embassy has been coordinating with Polish Ministries on foreign policy and security issues (Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia/Ukraine/Georgia and so on). She was able to do this to a high level of effectiveness in good part because she herself speaks Polish.

But as well as that, we together faced the Question - should Jane also take on some sort of Disability portfolio with Polish interlocutors, building on her pioneering example in the FCO?

Not a straightforward issue  - insofar as part of the point of her posting to Warsaw was for her do a substantive policy job with some special arrangements made for her deafness, it was not necessarily fair or even desirable that she be somehow 'marketed' more widely as a disability role model.

On the other hand, someone has to be a pioneer. And Jane cheerfully agreed to be one.

With the excellent high-profile results including in the Polish Parliament as described in the link, and her media work in Polish withal:

Here is an eloquent, impassioned account of a first visit to Auschwitz.

Not least the stunning bewildering realisation when you arrive at the site that the car-park in front of it is full of ... tourist coaches. People in shorts with video cameras, chatting away, perhaps looking forward to moving on to the next mass tourist attraction near Krakow, the salt mines.

The accompanying almost cheery summer pictures bring out well the baffling feeling one has visiting the camp. How did it all happen? How come it is now a tourist site? How come I am here trying to grapple with all this in my head?

Why is that tawdry supermarket over the road so close to the camp? How does one start to try to work out just how far a supermarket 'should' be built from the entrance to a former death-camp?

Imagine what it must be like to live in the town of Oświęcim now. A place of some historical distinction dating back 1000 years, yet now largely ignored by tourists and visitors who want to see only the fearsome Nazi camp built there because it was a handy European railroad crossing.

How to pitch a positive PR campaign for the town? What foreign investor will be keen to invest there, with that baneful camp so closely associated with it? But if one doesn't try to live a normal life nearby, does that mean that the Nazis somehow have won, blighting the area for ever?

One odd thing about Auschwitz is that the operational and policy responsibility for the camp complex and its future is shared among various local and national bodies, with different religious communities too all closely following developments. This creates many possibilities for furious disputes, as have happened down the years.

It also means that, oddly enough, the camp complex is not especially well funded. Nor is it easy to get a decision taken on how to make changes. 

As British Ambassador in 2004 I was told that the Auschwitz archives contained a large collection of poignant drawings made by prisoners, but that the museum/camp authorities did not have the funds to sort them all out and display them properly or publish a book of them.

I suggested that the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz would be a fine opportunity to set up an international appeal to make this happen - the British Embassy would be ready to help drum up high-level British support as part of a wider initiative.

Nice idea? So it seemed. But it shriveled away, no-one on the Polish side seemingly keen to take a lead and drive the project forward (partly, to be fair, because the sheer scale of the Anniversary commemorative events and the visits by Putin/Chirac/Cheney and so many others swamped everything else).

So Auschwitz remains there, with all its ghastly contradictions on daily display.

Yet haunting though it is to visit that camp, a lot has to be left to the imagination as the Nazis did quite a good job in demolishing part of the complex as they fled the Red Army's advance in 1945.

To see even more of what these fiendish places were actually like, you need to go further east in Poland, to Lublin. And the Majdanek camp, much of which was not destroyed. Macabre beyond words. 

One of the UK's top-rated blogs with the inevitably winning combination of a strong Northern Ireland focus plus Russia and eastern Europe is Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness.

Have a look.

The picture at the top of the front page is a masterpiece by Russian/Ukrainian artist Ilya Repin, The Volga Bargehaulers. See a larger version of it here.

Most Brits have never heard of Repin. His work is astonishing, showing a subtlety and dynamism yet also a very Russian sensibility very different to the work being produced in western Europe in the later nineteenth century and on into the twentieth (he died in 1930, seemingly unimpressed with Communism).

Not to ignore the sheer scale of these pictures, one masterpiece a vast 4m x 8m depicting the State Council of Imperial Russia.

Try these famous examples:

The Wikipedia entry on Repin has the basic background, and links to more works here, showing his range and skill in profusion. 

It is hard to imagine that Repin ever expected his work to set the scene for a blog based in Northern Ireland.

Yet it happened.

And if it serves to popularise his work in these islands, so much the better.

PS   You are wondering what a verst is. In Russian it is верста. Here is the answer.

Dan Hannan has some gracious things to say about Senator Kennedy's commitment to parliamentary process.

Funnily enough, the torrent of material appearing on the BBC and elsewhere seems to have little if anything to say about the time Kennedy secretly talked to the KGB to try to thwart the election of Ronald Reagan.

NB This is, of course, not to speak ill of the dead - as a good progressive he just had to do everything possible to keep that Wheel of History moving in the right (ie Left) direction.

As for Mary Jo Kopechne...

Oops. Wrong narrative.

Nonetheless, an interesting question of principle. How far can true greatness ever be built - and fairly agreed to be built - upon a foundation of starkly revealed cowardice and opportunism?

What volume of later good deeds are needed to cancel out past misdeeds to achieve a firmly positive balance? Do moments of terrible selfish weakness invariably define a whole life? What does a weak man need to do to make up for those moments?  

Maybe this is where the Catholic Church's tradition of confession might help.

What contrition did he truly feel and show?

Update: The Anchoress helps give some gentle but perceptive answers.  

Let me describe to you my one and only only encounter with Bono, an influential figurehead who, says Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat, is "almost as important as governments" and (according to surveys!) "already more trusted".

It was on 21 December 1997, in Mostar.

Mostar was one of the cities most wrecked by the Bosnian conflict. Several streets looked like moonscapes, such was the volume of gunfire between at different points Bosniacs/Muslims, Serbs and Croats alike which had literally shot the buildings to rubble.

Into this maelstrom had come War Child, a new charity set up in response to the disaster unfolding across former Yugoslavia which had attracted some big-name celebrity supporters, not least from the world of Rock.

So an idea emerged to use music to bring the people of Bosnia together. And where better than Mostar, a city so ruined and divided? A high-tech new music studio there could become a leading European recording facility, create jobs and buzz and so on.

Thus a major and ultimately successful push was launched to open this new Music Centre in Mostar, named after opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti.

But where? If it was on the Bosniac/Muslim side of the river would the Croats/Serbs ever visit it? If it was on the Croat side of the river, would the Bosniacs/Serbs ever visit it? Would they all ever agree to run the airport nicely to let much international air traffic in?

Eventually it was agreed to build it on the Bosniac side. And a fine new facility it was.

So just before Christmas 1997 a gala opening was planned, with Pavarotti, Bono and others present. But it was hard work agreeing how it all might work, not least with Pavarotti's tough egg second wife Nicoletta whom I met when she came to Mostar personally to negotiate the matter. 

How to get these luminaries to Mostar speedily and safely at that time of year? Only with military support. I myself helped persuade NATO forces to lay on an expensive helicopter to support the cause.

Thus the Great Day came. Bosnia's then Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic and a sizeable delegation of top dignitaries drove down to Mostar. The Crawfs en masse went too.

Admittedly the whole event was marred by a stunning all-day downpour. But worse, the celebs could not be persuaded to get their delicate celeb bottoms into the military helicopter.

So we all sat in a crowded stuffy hall and waited. And waited. And waited. Silajdzic was furious.

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

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

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

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

Here is a glowing description of this event from prominent Bosniac spokesman Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbery (sic), as given on Pavarotti's death. Sacirbey's own plummet from celeb-style status soon thereafter was suitably steep.

The Pavarotti Centre happily survived this indignity and has done what it can do in Mostar, still a grim example of a divided city. See eg this sympathetic account, which mentions that (as everyone in the know predicted at the time) the Centre would struggle to pay for itself as few stars would want to trek on down to Mostar to make recordings 

Moral of the story?

You may have little faith in elected politicians. Have even less in unelected celebs.

Mind you, this is quite a good piece of work: 

Carne Ross sends a cheery comment on my posting about his article: that I am wrong!

Re-read the article with a bit more care and you will see that I do not advocate the rise of the Bono's and Soros's, I simply recognise it.  It is an unarguable truth, acknowledged by many authorities greater than me, that non-state actors are ever more important in foreign affairs.  Some of these are benign, some less so (mafia gangs, self-interested corporations). 

If they are smart, govts will recognise this and work with this trend, building coalitions to achieve their goals.  The less smart ones can stick their heads in the sand, demand like Canute that the tide be reversed, and nod heartily when they read the conclusion of your commentary. 

Hmm. This is what he wrote in his article:

George Soros’s Open Society Institute has in my view been as important as the European Union in fostering civil society and building the pillars of democracy in post-Soviet eastern Europe. The private sector’s foreign direct investment and speculative flows outweigh both official and philanthropic funds, in determining the economic fate of countries.

In global politics, non-governmental movements and influentlial figureheads like Bono are proving almost, although not yet wholly, as important as governments, and according to surveys, are already more trusted.

Carne has not served in countries being supported by the Soros empire. I have. Sure, Soros runs influential and adult NGOs. But to say that eg in Belgrade from 2001-2003 Soros-sponsored efforts were "as important as the EU" (not to mention the US, British, French, Russian and other Embassies) in promoting democracy in post-Milosevic Serbia is over-egging any possible Balkan pudding. Fact.

Is an influential figurehead such as Bono 'almost as important as governments'? He may be more trusted but that is only because he has no responsibility for anything (hence has nothing to mess up and can say more or less what he likes) and has a vast PR machine linked to the U2 phenomenon behind him. If one has to choose between bi-syllabic names ending in -o to follow on issues related to Africa (and one does), I go for Moyo over Bono:

So what of the rock and Hollywood stars, who have appointed themselves advocates of making poverty history? She is withering: “Most Brits would be irritated if Michael Jackson started offering advice on how to resolve the credit crisis. Americans would be put out if Amy Winehouse went to tell them how to end the housing crisis. I don’t see why Africans shouldn’t be perturbed for the same reasons,” she replies...

Look, of course the world is more fluid and confusing, and of course all sorts of 'non-state actors' are busy and significant. And, yes, smart governments should work with the better ones to get more impactful results. In my career I did more of this 'on the ground' than Carne ever did (not that this is any criticism of him - he had a different sort of career, and a shorter one!), so I have plenty of operational insight into what works and why and where and how.

My sole forlorn point is that Carne's feisty article crams too many ideas into one space, and fails to make the basic case he (I think) tries to make, namely that diplomacy as hitherto practised needs somehow to be utterly overhauled to make way for these new and unelected forces.

His article is headlined "It's time to scrap ambassadors and their embassies". That would open a lively new market for Independent Diplomat. But otherwise it would simply be (mainly) stupid and massively disruptive.

Happy to debate the whole issue publicly with Carne if someone wants to crank up a venue.

Meanwhile I need to write up Bono's visit to Mostar in December 1997, to tell you all about Celebrity Diplomacy in real live action. Let's see, ...

Last year I reviewed Jonah Goldberg's fine best-selling book Liberal Fascism.

Here and here. Two of my better efforts (I'd say), so have a look if you have not rummaged that far back in the blog.

Jonah has had his own blog talking about the book and its many ideas. But he is now closing that chapter.

He gives some pertinent thoughts on all the accusations being bandied about by Republicans and Democrats alike that their opponents are using 'Hitler-like' tactics:

... the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hitlerite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce Americans into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making.

Yes, there's a danger that such a society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that ("U.N. District 12" has a nice ring to it).

And this is on the button:

What the fascists were or are primarily known for is not necessarily dispositive to the question of what they actually were. Speaking for myself, the relevance of the generous social welfare programs and anti-smoking programs is to point out that the Nazis weren't exactly what we've been told they were. Sure, they were violent and hysterically devoted to an authoritarian leader, but they were also more than that and their popularity with the German people cannot be easily chalked up to those features either.

The Nazis did not rise to power on the promise of bringing war and violence. They just didn't. They rose to power by promising national restoration, peace, pride, dignity, unity and generous social welfare programs among other things including, of course, scapegoating Jews. People forget how Hitler successfully fashioned himself a champion of peace for quite a while.

Liberal Fascism is all about the blandishments of collectivism and the implicit or explicit glorification of the role of the State in our lives (see Polly Toynbee passim). As I wrote last year:

However, one serious weakness in the unique British model is that having grown bit by bit, our liberties and principles can erode bit by bit. We may never notice the process happening. Even if we do, how to stop it?

In the deep way our system works (namely relationships based ultimately not on legal requirements but rather on trust, decency and honour) there are few robust legal ways to attempt to do so. The more so as publicly funded PoMo liberal fascists in academies, NGOs and think-tanks sneeringly ‘deconstruct’ such basic values as intrinsically meaningless, which in turn allows politicians and civil servants to begin to ‘deconstruct’ their responsibilities too.

This for me is the main danger in the UK’s current binge of Big Statism as inflated by unrelenting EU requirements.

Not just a sly erosion of responsibility and our freedoms. Much worse, erosion of the very idea of responsibility, of freedom as something worth having – and worth fighting for.

Arrangements of an astonishingly subtle sort which have helped define some of the highest standards for public life and process ever seen in human history might casually come to be dismissed as boring, old-fashioned - not part of the ‘contemporary narrative’.

Is there a point at which Liberal Fascism via Big Government wins?

Has an unrecognised tipping-point been reached - and (worse) been passed? When state-sponsored passive cynicism and attendant public spending are so enormous a part of our lives that instead of our owning the state, the bland state owns us?

How would we tell?

Would we care?

Still waiting for the answers.

A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the 'Lockerbie bomber'.

Very difficult to say, because it's a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail.

My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the night in 1986 when US planes bombed Tripoli (in response to clear evidence linking the Libyan leadership to anti-American terrorism) after taking off from airfields in the UK to do so. I was the FCO Resident Clerk fielding a torrent of angry calls from the public. One of my first blog postings described the experience.

Two years later came the destruction of Pan Am 103 which crashed on and around Lockerbie. The finger of suspicion pointed at Libya. Sanctions were imposed.   

Over the following years it all slowly changed.

The Cold War ended. Colonel Gadhafi's eccentric if not narcissistic Arab nationalism started to look a bit limp and self-indulgent compared to Islamist violence. Heavy sanctions on Libya took some sort of toll.

Then 9/11. President Bush gets tough. Very tough. Saddam is toppled then arrested and put on trial.

All this gave Colonel Gadhafi a lot to think about. Gadhafi decided that that the time had come to try something new.

A very private message was conveyed to a senior MI6 officer... Here is a vivid and well-sourced account of the whole story as seen from the US perspective.

The elements of a Big Deal emerged.

If Libya accepted responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am 103 and paid out compensation to the families of the victims, plus stopped playing with weapons of mass destruction, sanctions could be lifted and everything normalised. Why, Colonel Gadhafi could be respectable again. 

And, basically, this is what has happened.

The Libyans wrote a letter to the UN Security Council in 2003 which, while carefully drafted, got as close as such a text is ever going to get to accepting responsibility for the atrocity. Sanctions were lifted, in stages. 

And, in due course, Prime Minister Blair visited Libya. Relations were normalised and smoothed out, even if the colour scheme and rug weren't:

As a significant extra element in this story, two Libyans were surrendered to the British and put on trial for the bombing. One was convicted.

An exhaustive and exhausting expert blog by Professor Robert Black pores over the issues surrounding the less than satisfactory conviction of that man, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi.

My view(s)?

1     The decision made in Edinburgh to send a dying Al-Megrahi back to Libya falls, just about, within the scale of what is reasonable. But I would not have voted to do so, broadly for the reasons given by Liam Murray. Michael Binyon makes some trenchant points too.

2     The idea that London/HMG had nothing to do with the decision (ie that it was Scotland's alone to take) is obviously phoney. Hence the row now developing. No decision such as this would be taken in Scotland without a closely coordinated eye being kept in London on the manifold foreign policy aspects for the UK as a whole. See the Observer yesterday, not least this:

Meanwhile, details emerged of a second letter written by the Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis to the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, confirming that there were no legal reasons not to let Megrahi go and concluding: "I hope on this basis you will now feel able to consider the Libyan application." 

3     If Al-Megrahi did not do it, there is now simply no chance of identifying, arresting and successfully prosecuting those who did. And in any case the really guilty terrorists were the people up the hierarchy in Libya (and/or elsewhere) who ordered the bombing, or gave a sly wink to those lesser villains who might do it.  

4     Ignominious, embarrassing, perfidious or whatever you want to call it, maybe the whole thing is for the best, all things considered:

• We and the Americans used a powerful and sustained policy of carrot and stick to bring Libya to accept responsibility for this horror, and pay compensation, and also renounce its weapons of mass destruction.
• This is one of the biggest Western foreign policy achievments of our times (compare North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and so on ), and a huge step forward towards making Northern Africa a partner, not a foe.

Where Diplomacy meets Reality?

John Redwood and Denis MacShane have been debating the growing UK total contribution to the EU Budget.

So let's go back to how it was negotiated in 2005.

Previous postings (in date order for ease of following the story) are:

• here
• here
• and here

In a nutshell, the EU Budget had to grow as the EU had expanded. All agreed on that. But grow by how much? The net Givers (of course) were disinclined to be generous. The net Getters fumed at their meanness. It came to this:

It would have been possible to give Poland most of what it wanted even under the much less ambitious UK/Giver offer, if the Givers themselves took less money from the EU Budget in 2007-2013, primarily through reduced CAP payments.

But France, humiliated by its referendum result, of course would not accept that.

So we in London faced a hard choice.

Should we refuse to accept French and other Giver intransigence and risk letting the EU Budget not be agreed in our Presidency, having fun blaming the French but adding even more stress to an EU already in real disarray?

Or should we accept that, to get what we wanted (ie a final Budget much closer to 1.00% than to 1.26%) French intransigence was an Immovable Object, and instead juggle the sums to offer the new member states a lot less than they reasonably had hoped for but still a goodly whack?

And in any case, how in fact to get a deal?

No 10 came up with a Brilliant Scheme. Do it in a short series of brutal blows.

First, make an offer which you know will be utterly unacceptable. As the howls of rage from all round Europe soar to a crescendo, amuse onesself over the summer by ostentatiously ignoring the din, putting one's feet on the desk and watching the 2005 Ashes:

Then, after they've all shouted themselves hoarse and are shaking with the effort, make a slightly bigger offer, proclaiming this to be a huge but mainly final step in the direction of our EU partners' real concerns blah blah.

This too will be rejected as disgraceful and inadequate, but with less vehemence than previously. Gulp, what if the Brits really mean it?

This second offer will have the vital effect of lurching the whole debate on to the UK end of the outcome spectrum, as some of the countries in the middle who have relatively little at stake start to quietly sign up for a deal 'something along these lines'.

The main Getters will see the previous united anti-UK front fraying and will start to bicker between themselves - those who stand to Get quite a bit will be tempted to grab what is on offer lest the whole deal unravel during the remaining weeks of the UK Presidency, whereas those who think they must Get a Lot will be furious at the weedy and eroding 'solidarity' of their erstwhile closest allies.

Subject to how all that has gone, do some bilateral rounds. Warn privately (and convincingly) that there is just not going to be much more than this in the final deal, so everyone had better start redefining their expectations and briefing their media accordingly.

Pick off individual capitals with sly side-deals and offers of small-print in their favour which others might not notice.

Above all, make every effort to infuriate but also rattle the Belgians who have made several obnoxious statements about British anti-Europeanness.

Let all that stew for a few more weeks, cranking up the pressure as the end-of-Presidency summit looms.

While all this was unfolding, I was acting as chair of the EU Ambassadors group in Warsaw. It happened that in autumn 2005 the Poles were electing first a new Parliament and then a new President. So there was to be no real negotiation with the Polish side until the outcomes of those elections were clear.

That said, some sort of heavy centre-right victory was bound to happen in the polls this time round, and the new leadership would have to press hard for the best possible deal.

The expectation for months had been that the Citizens Platform party led by Donald Tusk would come ahead of the vote in the Parliamentary race and form a coalition with the Law & Justice Party led by the Kaczynski twins. The papers were starting to discuss in great detail who would have which job in the new coalition.

Then ... sensation. The centre-right parties won big as expected.

But Law & Justice came first.

Surely there would be the same coalition but under different top leadership?

Or ... not?!

What did this mean for Poland's negotiating position as the Budget deal showdown loomed?

As my telegram to London put it, having confidently and as it turned out wrongly predicted a new coalition between Citizens Platform and Law & Justice for the best part of a year, I now did not have the foggiest idea what was going to happen.

To be continued...

Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat says that old-fashioned diplomacy has had its day:

Conventional embassies and their ambassadors are equally ill-suited to today’s challenges. The European foreign service, whose embryonic form already exists in the Council Secretariat, is awaiting its first orders once the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified. Like the Eurofighter, it will be elegantly constructed, very expensive, and heading for obsolescence even before day one.

Just like weapons designers, those who construct political bureaucracies and institutions must ask what kind of world are we trying to deal with? The 20th century was dominated by states, but this century is already shaping up with an altogether more anarchic prospect.

They have been saying that for years, if not decades and centuries. So what does Carne think might be better? George Soros! And Bono! And, of course, so-called NGOs (many of which are lavishly funded by governments so are not NG at all).

George Soros’s Open Society Institute has in my view been as important as the European Union in fostering civil society and building the pillars of democracy in post-Soviet eastern Europe. The private sector’s foreign direct investment and speculative flows outweigh both official and philanthropic funds, in determining the economic fate of countries.

In global politics, non-governmental movements and influentlial (sic) figureheads like Bono are proving almost, although not yet wholly, as important as governments, and according to surveys, are already more trusted...

Embassies and diplomats are going to have to work in partnership with (that means not patronise) a much wider range of actors if they are to understand what is going on around them, and influence this hectic circus. At the Bali climate change talks NGOs were an important and powerful presence, and their involvement in international deliberations of this kind will clearly become the norm rather than the exception.

The thrust of this article is that the world is becoming more unruly and, as Carne nicely puts it, less 'resistant to comprehensive analysis'. Hence fusty old diplomats have diminishing credibility to be 'representative' of anything in particular.

In an anarchic world, influence in shaping events is going to go to those with the most convincing arguments and the most power, and they are not necessarily going to be working in government. Governments may still legislate the laws that govern their countries and, to a lesser extent, the globe, but these laws will reflect norms and values instituted and led by others, and only some of the time will these leaders be governments themselves.

I think this is a very exciting prospect, if slightly scary. A world without automatic deference to governments and their diplomats will be a better one. Forcing our traditional élites to get down and dirty on the ground with the people will improve their ideas, and will also make it more fun to be a diplomat.

Let's put to one side the central importance of 'fun' in public life.

Why would a world without automatic deference to governments be a better one? Not that I am a fan of government. But is there not at least some argument that one of the few unambiguous gains of the past two hundred years or so is a rise in political accountability, and that anything which erodes this merely empowers the unaccountable?

Who, after all, is George Soros? Who gave him a mandate to stick his nose and his money into so many places? Who elected Greenpeace? What possible claim does Bono have to speak sense on anything? Should not the fact that he rubs shoulders with world leaders at Davos embarrass all concerned?

This all boils down to a deep and dangerous proposition: that the strength of feeling (and the feeling of strength) matter far more than the strength of reason. A strong step back to the Dark Ages?

More:

Success will go to those who use mass networks effectively, build coalitions of states and concerned non-state actors, corporations and NGOs and can credibly lead opinion.

I wonder how he measures success. Is not his core point that these days there is no 'opinion' to be led?

This sense of confusion may well be the trend we are on. But if so, all the more reason to play up the value of patient, measured professional work done by people representing elected governments as they all try to make the best of a complicated and uncertain situation?

Carne is mainly right about the EU's new External Action Service. It will be yet another body with a legalistic, 'formal' legitimacy but at best uncertain substantive legitimacy and therefore uncertain impact and effectiveness. Its foreign interlocutors will sense that it is unable to project unity of real purpose stemming from what real people want, since that is not what the European Union is all about.

The fact is that Carne is, at root, wrong. Sure, there is a lot swirling away out there. In some cases organisations such as Independent Diplomat can take up issues which are not easily taken up by others.

Yet for all the terrorism and/or nuisance and/or positive energy for change caused on the margins by networked and/or dis-organised and/or post-modern groupings here and there, governments are overwhelmingly the main source of organised power in the world. The resources they deploy leave all the philanthropists and NGOs and even U2 far behind.

If anything government 'power' (or at least the assertion of power) is trending worryingly upwards. Look at the gloating in the Western media by people who claim that state intervention has been the key to stopping the world from lurching into economic disaster.

Since governments need to talk to and negotiate with each other, they need people to do it.

And we know who they are.