Blogoir: February

Off to give some specialist skills training in The Hague on Negotiation, including a session on Ambiguity.

A good place to start is UNSCR 242, where differences over the absense of the word 'the' in the English version but not the French version continue to bedevil the Middle East peace process decades later.

This reminds me of a famous smutty English case which turned on the meaning of the word 'with'.

Man X enters a public WC cubicle. In the adjacent cubicle Man Y (who does not know Man X) is busy performing a lewd act. Man X peers at this through a handy hole in the cubicle wall. Man Y notices that Man X is watching, but proceeds withal.

Police swoop. X and Y are charged with an act of indecency 'with' each other. So what does 'with' mean?

Guilty. How times have changed. Nowadays that would be a supposedly edgy BBC family comedy show routine.

Anyway, if people want to disagree they'll find ways to do so, using the tiniest linguistic subtleties if that helps waste time and create annoyance. Ambiguity is embedded deep in the language, so there's nothing to stop them.

However, there are techniques available to help manage such problems and create an atmosphere conducive to constructive dialogue. If you want to know what they are, you'll have to pay haha.

Things must (sic) go better for me than they did last week at the Speechwriters Guild event. I planned to give a short presentation based on dictating the talk into my MacBook Air and having the words appear on the big screen via voice recognition software. The point was to show that it is better to speak a draft speech than write it - spoken words have an indefinable added directness and authenticity.

Alas the formidable Dutch Speechwriter on before me would not allow me to set up my computer lest her own presentation be messed up. So I failed in the short time available to get the IT sorted and ended up looking a trifle ridiculous.

Moral: Never Assume

 

Warning!

This site will be down for maintenance around lunchtime on 14 March.

So there we are.

I fear that the Prime Minister was ill-advised to allow his name to be attached to an astonishly bad and strange letter sent to 'Presidents' Van Rompuy and Barroso by twelve national EU member state leaders.

Parts of it was written by the EU's version of our old friend the Postmodernism Bureaucratic Generator, a computer program which assembles plausible sounding jargon words in a more or less random way to produce sentences which have a creepy plausibility but absolutely no meaning:

In this context, we ask the Commission to convene without delay a new forum for the mutual evaluation of national practices to help identify and bring down unjustified regulatory barriers, examine alternatives to regulation which ensure high professional standards and assess the scope for further alignment of standards to facilitate mutual recognition of professional qualifications.

We look forward to the Commission report on the outcome of sectoral performance checks and call on the Commission to fulfil its obligation under the services directive to report comprehensively on efforts to open up services markets and to make recommendations for additional measures, if necessary in legislation, to fulfil the internal market in services

Anyway, I have analysed this ghastly thing over at Telegraph Blogs

First, it is absurdly long. 1656 words. It has succumbed to an acute case of EDDS (European Dustbin Drafting Syndrome), where successive versions of the text get ever more obscure additions as bureaucrats throughout twelve governments press their pet concerns, and no one dares say "Stop!"

Concluding thusly:

Had I been in No 10 I would have advised the Prime Minister not to sign such a text. It wastes time, and (worse) it’s undignified.

Much better that he drop a short private line to Messrs Barroso and Van Rompuy to say that he knows that eleven other leaders are writing this letter, and that he supports the thrust of it: without significant speedy EU-wide steps to promote growth and cut bureaucracy, the crisis will intensify. Who knows, they might even have read it.

Instapundit regularly serves up this wonderful quote from Robert Heinlein, so I share it with you:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Next time you hear someone droning on about the 'causes of poverty', hoot out: "What are the causes of wealth?"

The point being (today) that Greece is being sent back by the big Eurozone powers and their banks to a significantly poorer way of life for many years to come. Is that unfair or unkind?

Not really. Greeks in their mainly dry, hot unproductive country not far from the Sahara desert are entitled to as much wealth as they produce, and no more. They also are entitled to borrow money to help them invest wisely to create wealth. But they have to pay back their loans. If they mess up, this hurts. They may well get poorer and trend back towards living like cavepersons. That's the way it should be. It sets all the right incentives.

Yes, they got trapped in a bad situation in good part because of German and other policies and the naive über-exuberance which led to setting up the Eurozone. But others were smarter and managed to avoid that absurd situation. All Greeks are free to migrate to somewhere else in the EU to compete for jobs at higher wages than are available in Greece. The Poles set Europe a fine example here - they don't expect to be fed by anyone except themselves.

Plus we need to get away from the idea that somehow all Europeans are 'entitled' to some sort of civilised minimum living standard. They're not. There is no reason why Europeans should be better off than anyone else on Earth if they are not being productive and efficient. Smart money is pouring into other parts of the world because Europe is not seen as productive or efficient.

So Europe gets poorer. That's it.

 

When we look at the savage 'cuts' in public spending (not), why not start at the top? Namely the FCO's busy anti-bullying industry?

This is what you taxpayer suckers are spending your money on! Powerpoint slides for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office describing what to do to avoid bullying or 'discrimination'?

Choosing a man for a job if he is the best candidate is not discrimination

Phew. I was worried there for a moment at the fact that all current FCO Minsters are challenged when it comes to displaying female body parts.

And then there's ... this beyond astounding educational infograph-like thing, a supreme example of why modern Social Europe is doomed:

It's not just that the diagram itself is terrifying. Even worse are the accumulated collectivist assumptions and structures - and insanely wasteful demoralising procedures - which it so accurely represents.

I voted Conservative - and this was the T-shirt I got.

I am trying to find out More, thanks to the wonders of FOI.

Here's another truly horrible piece at Social Europe Journal that caught my beady eye. It's by one Kinga Pozniak (someone of Polish origin no doubt, an anthropologist who lectures at the Western University in London. Not London, England. London, Canada).

It's entitled "Poland's ACTA Protests - Molecular Change in an unlikely Place". Let the fisking begin!

As the economic crisis washes over Europe, political and economic discourses across the continent make it sound as if “there is no alternative” to widespread belt-tightening that withdraws and privatizes areas of social welfare and undermines social solidarity

We know that any article including the word 'discourse' is going to be awful. Thanks for alerting us so early on. And note the superb metaphors. : Crisis 'washes'. 'Belt-tightening' 'withdraws', 'privatizes', 'undermines' - in fact almost anything rather than keep trousers safely aloft.

This discourse is certainly hegemonic in Poland, a country frequently held up as a token success story of neoliberalization.

Aaaagh. A hegemonic discourse! Note the startling Leftist sneer that follows. Poland is frequently (sic) held up (sic) as a token success story (sic) of neoliberalization.

Following socialism’s collapse in 1989, Poland eagerly embraced a variety of neoliberal reforms, including rapid privatization of formerly state-owned enterprises, withdrawal of price subsidies, cuts to state spending and decentralisation of state responsibility for social and family policy

Yup. All good policies. That's why Poland is now the EU country with the best growth rates. People working, things getting built, new investment. Solid banks, lending to new businesses. Stuff like that. What's not to like?

Since economic troubles in Europe first broke out, Poland has been on board with Europe’s austerity agenda, with the country’s major newspapers vilifying countries such as Greece for their “irresponsible spending”.

I think you'll find that Europe has had 'economic troubles' for the past 2000 years or so. The point now is that we know how to manage them. And right at the heart of sound economic policies are two simple yet profound ideas. Don't borrow money you can't pay back! Work hard!

Poland has taken these norms to heart and grown steadily over the past 20 years. Plus Poland has striven to invest wisely generous EU 'cohesion' funds, taking the Greek example as the way not to do it. Hence Poland is - not unreasonably? - annoyed that those who mess up are clamouring for funds from those who behave responsibly. This takes us back to the Prodigal Son, not the most obvious example of cruel neoliberalization in action.

And yet recent events in the country suggest that resistance may sometimes originate in unlikely places.

On 19 January 2012 news broke out in Poland that the country’s government planned on signing ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), a multi-national agreement for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. ACTA’s critics are concerned that it will stifle civil rights, including privacy and freedom of expression on the internet.

The news triggered a massive public outcry. As hackers shut down a number of government websites, protests numbering into tens of thousands broke out across the country, and members of the opposition party Palikot’s Movement (Ruch Palikota) donned Guy Fawkes masks during a parliamentary session.

Resistance? I am no expert in ACTA, but most normal people would agree that there is some sort of balance to be struck between protecting intellectual property and allowing people do do what they want. So what do these resisting Polish folk propose?

What is significant about this wave of protests is that for the first time in over two decades (that is, since the opposition movement of the 1980s that led to socialism’s collapse), it is driven by young people. Until now, Poland’s postsocialist generation has been relatively complicit and complacent.

Oh. You don't tell us. Instead we get the astounding claim that Poland’s postsocialist generation has been relatively complicit and complacent. Complicit in what exactly? Complicit in getting off their butts and coming over to England to work hard? Complicit in working hard at college?

With national hegemonic discourses discrediting anything associated with the country’s socialist legacy, members of the postsocialist generation grew up convinced that “there is no other way”.

If 'national hegemonistic discourses' discredited Poland's appalling communist experience, what's wrong with that? Poland's socialist 'legacy' was impoverishment, subservience to Moscow, environmental degradation, vast networks of people spying on their families and colleagues, and periodic brutality against striking workers.

Kinga, focus! That sort of thing is what 'discreditable' means.

While other groups – such as nurses or coalminers – have, over the past two decades, periodically resisted certain reforms that threatened their work or welfare, Poland’s youngest generation is overwhelmingly pro-market, ascribing to the neoliberal rationality of individual responsibility, independence, and ability to bear risk. This is the generation associated with support for Poland’s current ruling party, the economically liberal and European Union-oriented Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska), which favours the privatization of the remaining public sectors of the Polish economy, fiscal responsibility, and decentralization of the state.

Neoliberal rationality of individual responsibility, independence, and ability to bear risk. Fiscal responsibility. Sure thing. All incredibly positive. Great news that one of Europe's largest young populations gets it. Unlike ours.

Kinga contrives to suggest that these virtues are part of a hegemonistic discourse and therefore ... bad!?

And yet recent events show that this support is not unconditional. Both the content of ACTA and the covert manner in which the government intended to push it through are perceived by many as testament to the erosion of democracy and the privileging of corporate rights and interests over individual ones.

Well, what's with this ACTA stuff? If I work hard to write some new software and try to sell it, is it OK for someone to steal it? Why should people who steal from 'corporation's have their 'rights' 'privileged'? #justaskin

So what will come out of these protests? Perhaps nothing, perhaps something.

At last, a sensible point.

But it is worth recalling that Gramsci identified revolutionary potential in “molecular changes” which, over time, may “modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes”.

Oh lordy. Wheel out the dead Italian Marxists. Just what Poland really needs now.

Poland’s ACTA protests hit home just as the government is recovering from a public upset about recent changes to a national drug refund plan, as well as trying to introduce unpopular reforms to the retirement system. Perhaps Poland’s ACTA protests are just that crack in the political terrain which may in time shift its foundations and open up possibilities for more widespread social critique in other areas.

Bring on the 'social critique' of Poland's reactionary failing policies. If Gramsci Pozniak and Co get their way, Poland and the rest of Europe can be de-hegemonised and thereby reduced again quickly to progressive Greek-style national socialist impoverishment .

Molecule by molecule.

 

Always fascinating to see self-styled progressives retreating in confusion, trying to cover their errors by (of course) blaming someone or something else. Preferably the Tea Party tendency in the USA.

Take John Weeks (economist and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London). Here he is over at Social Europe Journal lamenting the state of the Eurozone:

Few outside of Europe (and not all within) understand the profoundly undemocratic nature of the European Union that created the current disaster.  In retrospect it is clear that the long-term effect of the Maastricht Treaty and its infamous “criteria” were to remove economic policy from democratic oversight.  The design of the European Central Bank completed the task. 

The anti-democratic removal is not an accident of the law of unintended consequences.  It is the conscious fulfilment of the central political principle of neo-liberalism, that economic policy is the preserve of experts, and should not be subject to the “populism” of democratic politics. 

It is an irony that the European Union is frequently assailed by right wing politicians in the United States as a haven of socialism.  The reality is that the European Union represents exactly the end of democratic oversight that the Tea Party Republicans crave.

HAHAHA *pauseswhilescrapesselfofffloor*

Yes, folks. The problem is that the EU is too RIGHT-WING!

Wait. There's more?

Similarly, today in Europe a pact among the governments of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to coordinate a simultaneous withdrawal from the euro zone would offer a viable alternative to the imposed austerity programs.  Together the output of these five countries is almost forty percent larger than Germany’s.  The probability of this radical but feasible alternative may be as high as one in a million...

How far we have fallen!  The vision of a cooperative Europe, that began in 1950 with the Iron and Steel Community, is now realized as a collection of weak and strong countries caught in a spiral of beggar-thy-neighbor trade and austerity policies, in which the 99% are the losers (even in Germany).  

The authoritarian governance of the EU has reached its fullest expression in the debt disasters of the 21^st Century, bringing on a continental depression.  The ideology that justified this consciously-created and unnecessary depression was and is pure neo-liberal economics.

Of all the bitter ironies of European unity gone viral, one stands out from all the others:  a political project designed consciously to ensure that no country would again dominate the continent changed into the mechanism to achieve that domination.

And, yes, it's all GERMANY'S FAULT that the EU is 'authoritarian'. Arbeit macht frei!

Read the whole thing, but first take out life insurance against dying of extreme mirth.

Yet let's be fair. His idea that a group of countries leave the EU to set up some sort of more manageable formation is not a bad one.

Maybe this is getting to the nub of the whole business. The EU is just too big.

Given that there is no willingness across Europe to set up a single big country and have all the wealth transfers between richer and poorer areas run centrally and supposedly democratically as might happen (or not) in a normal country, the alternative is to have all sorts of ad hoc rules which are in substance capable of being untransparent or oppressive. Why not have a number of national groupings in Europe which share some common light-touch overall trading and strategic framework, rather than the one-size-doesn't-fit-all rigidity as we have now?

It can't be said enough. It's all about Trust. 

As of this morning, the German elite have concluded that the Greek elite and Greek masses alike can not be trusted to keep their promises, and so insist on highly intrusive measures and controls to keep them up to the mark (so to speak). There is even talk of leaning on Greece to postpone elections.

The Greeks think that all this is arrogant and intrusive and object strenuously. Distrust in Germany (the main source of European money to help Greece!) soars. Loony Greeks (Left and Right) start railing against foreign oppression. And down we do spiral.

The latest news is that all is in place to give Greece yet another bail-out. But we all know that it won't work. Greece can not pay back the debts it now owes even under the most optimistic scenarios of the next bail-out working. Plus the capacity of the Greek system to deliver the measures promised even with cruel Germans manning the towering heights of Greek bureaucracy is inadequate. It won't happen.

If you want a more nuanced look at Greece/EU from a demoralised progessive point of view, try Nick Cohen in the Guardian, who points to a strange fanaticism within the Eurocracy which can not accept that its most cherished beliefs were attached to utterly wrong-headed policies:

Raised in a Eurosceptic country, we do not understand how an absolute commitment to the European project was a mark of respectability on the continent. Like going to church and saying your prayers for previous generations, a public demonstration of commitment to the EU ensured that the world saw you as a worthy citizen. If you wanted to advance in Europe's governing parties, judiciaries, bureaucracies and culture industries, you had to subscribe to the belief that ever-greater union was self-evidently worthwhile...

When historians write about the end of its postmodern utopia, they will note that it was not destroyed by invading armies anxious to plunder Europe's wealth or totalitarian ideologues determined to install a dictatorship, but by politicians and bureaucrats, who appeared to be pillars of respectability, but turned out to be fanatics after all.

The point, dear Professor, is that the EU crisis has nothing much to do with 'neo-liberalism'. The EU is a convoluted sui generis ideological potage (because nothing else could be cooked up in the kitchen) which messily combines bits of almost anything you can think of. Tedious 'social' policies, endless formalism, and  'single market' rules which do indeed rely upon some simple ideas, namely that debts should be repaid and that generous 'solidarity' transfers from one country to another require respect for honest process in return. 

As a gesture of goodwill towards Scotland, let's go to Macbeth to sum up where the Eurocrats now stand:

I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er

Over at Commentator I gallop through some of the issues arising from the splitting-up of countries, drawing on the examples of the collapse of the USSR and SFRY, and seeing how far they apply to Scotland.

The division of Czechoslovakia into two units might well be more relevant, as a commenter fairly points out. But I haven't followed that one personally, so do not feel qualified to say much about it.

One point I did not mention is the radical impact Scottish independence might have on all sorts of other separatist causes . The United Kingdom is seen round the world as a country which for all its annoying post-imperial pretensions has achieved incredible results through its long, stable democratic traditions. The eventual example of Scotland breaking away (albeit under closely negotiated terms) might well embolden others to say that if it's OK for areas to break away even from the best-run democracies, it's surely OK to demand separation from less than well-run democracies.

Plenty for the next leadership in Moscow to think about in that sense - across Russia's vast time-zones are plenty of territories itching to have a lot more say in their own affairs. Republika Srpska? Any number of places in Africa? Certain other EU countries? 

In other words, Scotland v UK is just another example of the wider phenomenon of institutions created in very different times no longer seeming fit for purpose and yielding to a highly focused democratic impulse for complete change. That the new institutions might not be much better in any particular respect (and that the opportunity cost of setting them up could be incredibly high) is not necessarily going to stop people insisting on them.

 

My piece over at Telegraph Blogs about language teaching and learning in UK schools has attracted 226 comments so far.

First, an apology to Will Hutton. My piece said that Hutton's Guardian article on this subject did not make clear that learning languages is hard work. Openmind2010 points out that he did in fact do so. In all the drafting excitement I somehow missed that rather basic fact. Old age.

Otherwise the usual stream of collective consciousness and sub-consciousness, some but not all on the immediate points raised:

I always considered if you listened to Labour the British empire was something to be horribly ashamed of that we should continually apologise for and make sure we paid trillions of people back with 'integration' and 'multiculturalism'.

 

The haughty bougeoise attitude (always expressed in 'caring' terms a la Horrorperson) of NuLab, Ltd's elite towards the general population is nowhere better illustrated than in this matter. The children of the great unwashed were too stupid to learn foreign languages, and so they should not be 'forced' to try to learn them. To do so was not 'inclusive', and was probably somehow 'racist'

Liberalism; what your country turns to when the race is to the bottom and lowest common denominator in every category of society.  Forget those stupid Russians and those impetuous Chinese, we are going to - once again - do the impossible and produce a silk purse using a sow's ear.  Education is like that and there are even "advanced degree programs" for those liberal losers who can decry the silk purse in florid, fluid fluttery.  You can't eat it, but you do know the way to the government benefit office.

... it is sensible not to force pupils down a road they don't wish to go and give them flexibility. The curriculum should not be too proscriptive where foreign languages are concerned. It just makes a mockery of Crawford's statement "thanks directly to Labour Party policies language learning in British education is disappearing from British state schools and fast becoming an important reason to send a child to private school (if that can be afforded)." Public schools are not bound by gov't legislation but it shows that on the issue of voluntary languages after 14, Labour and public schools were at one. Crawford is the odd one out and doesn't know what he's talking about.

'Chinese is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.'
That's absolutely not true. Chinese is structurally and grammatically an extremely simple language and far simpler than English (no verb conjugations, no singulars and plurals, no gender, no inflections, no agglutination, no almost anything that can make many European languages such a slog to learn). It's just that it has absolutely nothing in common with the Indo-European languages with which most Europeans are familiar. Anybody who has a good ear and can be bothered to sit down and methodically learn 2,000 or so Chinese characters can learn it (and by extension acquire around two-thirds of Japanese and Korean vocabulary into the bargain).

But then there's also this, from Cutley: Sorry, seems a good piece, but I hate the illiterate use of "insofar" rather than "in so far". I couldn't go on reading after that.

 

Illiterate? Moi? Here's what I wrote:

[Hutton] is coy on the causes of this phenomenon. Insofar as he calls anyone in particular to account, it is the UK’s current Coalition Government.

I have to say that I have been labouring (sic) under the impression for most of my life that insofar as used in this sense is one word, not three. In so far as feels oddly clumsy. Yet it seems that this usage is hotly contested by Cutley and maybe by other purists.

 

My two volume Oxford Dictionary indeed does not have insofar listed. Eeek. My Chambers Dictionary does have it - with a qualification: See in

 

The Internet has thoughts firmly working in my favour. See eg here. Wiktionary says insofar is an Americanism. Yet Webster's Online Dictionary traces the word back to 1514 or earlier, suggesting that it was not - at that point at least - very American.

 

Meanwhile my English dictionaries all have inasmuch as one word. Then there are all those excellent legalisms such as hereinafter, wherein, thereinbefore and so on.

 

Conclusion? It's a bit harsh to call insofar as an illiteracy. It may not be 'pure' English English, but it's surely within the range of the reasonable. And as readers here know all too well, what is English and what is American comes and goes down the decades: see honor and honour.

 

Where I myself do draw the line is underway, as opposed to under way. Yet that ugly thing is fast establishing itself, as in underage and underwear.

 

No-one has an answer to when a determined effort should be made to defend a language point and when to let grammar and spelling wash dreamily away. Are we now under the torrent of techspeak and instant messaging moving back towards the freeform English of the Shakespeare era when people wrote the language largely as they thought fit? Look at Bulgarian, which has dropped many of the familiar Slav endings. Life in Bulgaria goes on well enough?

These details are why learning foreign languages is such a hard job, a point on which Will Hutton and I can warmly agree. As this curious linguistic insofar point itself shows, learning accurate English is difficult enough

 

Here's my latest LSE book review, on a new book by Charlie Beckett with James Ball describing the rise and fall of Wikileaks:

One of the key advantages of WikiLeaks as seen by its avowedly radical ‘hacktivist’ creators led (loosely speaking) by Julian Assange is that it subverts all existing categories of pretty much anything: geography, law, morality, self-restraint. The book notes that by aiming for impunity from the law WikiLeaks hopes for immunity from the consequences of the ‘wider settlement between journalism and society’ (sic) and “a less-reported but similarly liberating degree of ethical and moral flexibility”. Hmm. Which tyrant down the ages has not hoped for such ethical and moral ‘flexibility’?

Take the vital issue of ‘protecting sources’, something journalists claim to be a core part of their professional responsibility. Assange is quoted as saying that any US informants in Afghanistan who were murdered by the Taliban as a result of WikiLeaks revelations deserved their fate, a loathsome and – as he found – unsustainable position.

Likewise the book records that WikiLeaks’ publication of confidential documents about corruption in Kenya led to riots in 2007 which 1300 people were killed and 350,000 displaced. The authors’ assessment is at best baffling: “It also indicated that Wikileaks, and Assange in particular, were prepared to make a different risk calculation that accepted some incidental harm for the ‘greater good’ of transparency.” Had a Western politician described the deaths of 1300 Kenyans as ‘some incidental harm’ caused by a different risk calculation in official policies, imagine the banshee shriek.

In this moral tarpit some people see in WikiLeaks a source of hope. The book quotes ‘cyber-optimist’ Clay Shirky: “it represents, in its irresponsibility, a space for reform and progress”.

No thanks. WikiLeaks is by any normal standards a malign phenomenon based on a business model of stealing then selling other people’s information. It has surged sensationally across the media firmament but now looks bedraggled and discredited. As the authors note in the epilogue, former WikiLeaks enthusiasts are writing it off, as further damage has been done to its credibility.

The real value of this fascinating but uneven book is that it reminds us that especially in an age of ‘anything goes’ e-leaks, the heart of credible journalism remains a sense of unwavering professional responsibility – and a good old-fashioned sense of honour.

Check out the rest.

Frugaldad has sent me this interesting infographic. As the proud but broke owner of ever more Apple products, I share it with you: 

Source: http://frugaldad.com

 

Just spotted that funny things have been happening to my attempts to make blog postings - my Syria piece appeared three times. Two now deleted.

Apologies. It all stems from trying to get things here posted nicely AND sent to Twitter at the same time.

#fail

Will Hutton's recent misleading piece in the Guardian about the decline in language learning in UK skills needed some serious demolition.

And here it is, by me over at Telegraphs Blogs:

... in my experience both at school and later at the late FCO Language Centre, a big part of the problem with language learning is language teachers. Most people who go into teaching language are obsessive on the detail and fine points. They tend to be poor if not hopeless at explaining the way the language works as a whole, and where intelligent guesses and smart short-cuts might be made.

This was brought home to me by a distinguished retired teacher near Stellenbosch who taught me Afrikaans when I was posted by the FCO to South Africa. His main love was Latin. He told me how he had taken a boy who hated Latin from next to nothing to almost degree standard with a year of private tuition. His method? To look at the whole of Latin grammar – great sheets of verb and case endings – for a first tough two weeks to get the gloomy boy to see the grammar in terms of simple patterns, then to plunge straight into Caesar and other interesting texts.

By contrast the typical British school treats learning a language as a trite linear process. Start with Nominative, then move to Accusative and Vocative. After a year or so of fatuous sentences no one would want to say, tackle Dative and Ablative. X-rated Subjunctive is for serious students only.

Even the former FCO Language Centre – yes, also abolished by Labour(!) – fell into this trap. Teachers of Russian were snootily dismissive of anyone who had learned another Slav language, refusing to see any overlap and congruity. Instead an institution like the FCO should be tackling "Slav", basing teaching squarely on the several thousand root words and general grammar construction common to most Slav languages. With that mastered, budding diplomats can easily switch to and between Russian, Polish or whatever. William Hague has inherited the diplomatic rubble left to him by those long years of Labour incompetence and is trying to reboot the FCO's language learning capabilities. I have volunteered my services.

But, you ask, is any of this necessary anyway? Aren't we fast moving to world in which Google instantly translates any page pretty well from its original language to almost any other? Isn't it just a matter of time before Apple produce a Siri-like way of simultaneously translating speech from one language to another? This won't be 100% accurate, but then almost no one who learns a foreign language ends up 100% accurate anyway. Surely accelerating technological cleverness is the main driver for not bothering to learn a foreign language?

Plus, native English speakers have one extraordinary advantage. They speak English. The other day I was in Paris as a judge for the latest ICC Mediation Competition. Smart law students from some 70 universities across the planet came compete as negotiators. The competition was run in English. And impressive it was to watch young, tough Chinese students in action.

English is a bit like the QWERTY keyboard. You wouldn't necessarily choose it as the main common international language of choice, but once it has established itself it has a decisive, ever-compounding advantage. Every day around the world tens of thousands of young people start absorbing or learning English. It's easy to get started. You can even make up words and still be comprehensible, even witty: "Hey baby! You me go coffeeshoppingwards?” Chinese (say) is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.

I have written about foreign language teaching previously. See eg here. And here.

From one who has sloshing around among his diminishing brain cells lumps of Serbia/Croatian, Polish, Russian, French, German, Afrikaans, Spanish and (best of all) Latin.

Remember my piece almost a year ago describing smart diplomatic options for Doing Something about Libya?

Here it is, and none the worse for wear:

You draw a noisy stick across the bars of the FCO/State Department cage to rouse the bemused and sulky inmates, and demand ideas for action. What might they serve up?

"Basically", they'll primly reply, "You politicians have to accept that there are subtle/difficult trade-offs and hard choices to be made between Breadth v Depth, Fast v Slow, Big Impact v Less Impact, More Certain Impact v Less Certain Impact, Risky v Not-so-Risky, Legal v Not-so-Legal, and so on."

"Oh, and did we mention Cheap v Expensive?"

And having got that off their clever chests, if they are smart they'll produce something like the following Options Menu...

I grouped options under different headings:

-  Indirectly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Directly Limiting the Regime's Power

-  Preparing for New Government

Does anything new spring to mind in connection with Syria, based upon our vivid experiences in toppling Gaddafi?

The key thing in diplomacy as in life is to pick the right tool for the job.

Yes, to a glib outsider Libya and Syria look much the same. Both full of Arabs, both led by wicked dictators who have lingered on for far too long, both held back by lunatic national policies. Where's the differences?

Well, scale for one thing. Syria has some 21.5 million people, just one down from Australia at 53rd place in the list of countries by population. Libya by contrast has just over six million - at 103rd place. So the physical and psychological impact of the Gaddafi regime has been very different. With only six million people everything happening in a country becomes a lot more 'personal'. Pluralism and politics mean very different things.

But also look at economics. Libya is close to the top 50 countries in the world going by GDP per cap - Syria is below 100th place, a dismal record of Baath Party incompetence. Syria has some oil, but other noting than cheap plastic washing-up basins sold in Serbia I have never seen any product made there.

Perhaps above all, Syria has some friends. And important near neighbours (Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon). For decades Gaddafi actively annoyed almost every capital on Earth in one way or the other. And apart from oil, who really cares about all that North African desert? Damascus by contrast has run a pretty tight national socialist ship, wooing/thwarting East and West alike as and when necessary due to its proximity to Israel and that knot of Middle East problems. During the Cold War Syria played an important role as a friendly or even close partner for Moscow, the USSR being muscled out of Egypt by the USA's spending power and moving away from its early positive relationship with Israel.

This is why the Russians are still busy in Syria, including by vetoing UNSC resolutions. It gives them diplomatic market share in that turbulent region. Some say very busy:

According to Le Figaro on Tuesday, Russian military “advisors” are “omnipresent” in Syria. Besides reportedly sending S-300 anti-air missile systems to Damascus and agreeing to deliver a new batch of military aircraft, the Russians this week celebrated the reopening of a Cold War-era intelligence listening post on Mount Qassioun, the summit that dominates Damascus from the northwest.  The Russians appear increasingly dug in.

Russian advisors are also laboring to reorganise the Baath Party and arrange talks with members of the Syrian resistance.  They are making their own contacts with Arab and Islamic organisations, seeking to dilute the solidarity of the West with Arab leaders on the Syrian problem. 

To any normal non-Russian person the Russian position is beyond cynical. Every senior Russian diplomat mouthing sentiments which in effect of not in substance give succour to the revolting Assad regime has his/her job (OK, almost 100% his) because the West actively supported democratic transformation in the USSR. Moscow's lack of elementary human solidarity with the Syrian resistance/opposition is chilling.

Yet Russia is in it for Russia, not for anyone or anything else. Moscow knows that one of the key lessons of the fall of Gaddafi is that however much the 'West' supports the Arab Spring opposition, the default popular Arab instinct these days is to want to be as un-Western as possible.

So even if Assad falls and a new government ostentatiously ejects the Russians from their naval base and fancy listening posts, the Russians will soon be comfortable again sidling up to the new management and whispering anti-Western blandishments in their willing ears.

Likewise because Russia is in with the current regime it can have some sort of real role talking to in-country opposition tendencies about a negotiated end to the crisis. This is exactly what the UK did in apartheid South Africa, to very good effect. The very fact that Mrs Thatcher stood firm at the UN against sanctions made us look tough - and therefore more credible - to all sides in the drama.

So where does that leave the West? In a weak but not hopeless position. What tools work here? Many of the ideas listed in the Libya piece linked above look OK (enough) for Syria.

The unhappy Syrian masses surely can go only so far without outside military support. The regime's firepower and ruthlessness are pronounced, and the Russia/China blocking of the UN Resolution served to leave the active anti-regime elements feeling let down by 'world opinion'. Yet plenty can be done secretly to help 'train and equip' anti-Assad forces. I'd also be rummaging around to find ways to get secret messages to those hovering on the edge of the Assad circle encouraging them to hold back - in their own interests: Nothing like finding a message from MI6 pushed under the front door during the night to give one cause to reflect.

Sensible governments also should start working on a powerful offshore programme of Preparing for a New Government - drafting new laws and new constitutional changes for a post-Assad government, working with smart Syrians in exile, helping train potential judges and senior policy experts in the areas needed to make Syria develop well under civilised management. Sensible Arab countries' experts and other international transition experts (eg from Poland which knows a few things about Syria from Cold War days) could join this effort to make it substantively balanced and not explicitly 'Western'.

That sort of programme has three big advantages. First, it's needed anyway. Second, it offers an intellectually attractive rival to self-serving and parsimonious Russian offerings in the general 'reform' area. And third, it serves to send an encouraging signal to Syrians (and to Assad) that we are preparing hard for a new era.

Finally, make it a key policy goal that a New Syria opens all police and secret police archives, so that the extent of Soviet/Russian (and other foreign) penetration can be exposed once and for all. That is important as a goal in itself: these archives otherwise can end up being a disruptive source of poisonous politics and blackmail. Plus it sends Moscow and signal that inevitable future transparency could well end up embarrassing the Russians too, so they might like to proceed now in a measured way.

This one will get much worse before it gets better. As things stand now, the Russians for a change have some non-trivial diplomatic momentum and a chance to wield effective influence. Will they manage to use this to get some positive results, if only for themselves?

In the short term, perhaps. In the longer run the Assad regime will wobble then crash under the weight of opposition from massed Syrians fighting local tyranny with Western and wider Arab support. And this phase of crafty Russian diplomacy will crash with it.

Small 'unofficial' referendum in northern Kosovo - not many dead.

In case you haven't noticed, the Serb population of northern Kosovo have set up and run their own referendum on whether to accept rule by the institutions of Kosovo. The answer, to no-one's surprise: No!

As the EU knows to its cost, referenda are troublesome. The public are quite capable of being awkward and annoying. Which explains why everyone in authority including the Belgrade leadership is busy saying that the result just doesn't count. BalkanInsight:

But the OSCE and the UN mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, had earlier warned that the referendum had no validity and would have no legal consequences.

Serbian President Boris Tadic on Tuesday said holding the referendum was harmful to the interests of Serbia, which is currently pressing its case in Brussels for EU candidate status.

Borislav Stefanovic, Serbia's chief negotiator in Kosovo talks, has called the referendum "completely unnecessary and meaningless". He said: "The referendum will leave no trace in history, nor will have any result.
"It has sent the wrong message that Serbs in the north cannot agree with their own country," Stefanovic told Serbian news agency, Tanjug.

Kosovo authorities predictably condemned the vote as illegal.

The problem of course is that the result is not meaningless. A small but coherent group of people have proclaimed that they do not want to be part of a country not recognised by the majority of states (representing the majority of people) on the planet. Not in itself a trivial or even unworthy position, you might think.

The Kosovo authorities' official line that the referendum was 'without legal effect' and so 'void' is curious. Attentive readers will recall the ICJ decision on Kosovo's own independence declaration, where the Court looked at a question tabled by Serbia:

The ICJ decision was likely in view of the strange question which the UN General Assembly posed at Serbia's request:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

Since international law loftily takes no view about declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise. As I previously wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, Kosovo won its own significant ICJ victory precisely because its independence declaration in itself was deemed to have no legal effect. It was the subsequent acts of recognition (or not) which mattered.

Here there will be no need for 'recognition' of the results of the referendum by others. Those countries which don't accept Kosovo's independence see northern Kosovo as part of Serbia anyway. Those countries which do recognise Kosovo see the referendum as a futile silly noise - those pesky Serbs will have to accept that they are part of Kosovo sooner or later, or move out.

But on the whole this move (as was its originators' intention) reaffirms in clear political terms the position of those countries (with Russia to the fore) which say that it is simply unwise to move international borders, especially those in Europe, without the consent of all concerned. And it embarrasses the general thrust of the majority of EU states' policy in this area. Why in fact should a local population accept that it is being allocated to a new country by foreigners?

All of which drags us kicking and screaming back to the origins of the Yugo-crisis in the early 1990s, and back from there to the post-WW2 Titoist rearrangement of the internal demarcations of Yugoslav 'republics' and 'autonomous provinces', and then back to the inter-war arrangements for Yugoslav 'governorships' (banovine). And then back to the Treaty of Versailles after WW1, and finally then by a great jump back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Who lives within which borders? And, above all, who decides?

To be continued ... for ever.

The winner of the the 2012 ICC Mediation Competition in Paris was South Texas College of Law. Hurrah.

I was over in Paris for the Preliminary Rounds earlier this week. This is an excellent opportunity for students around the world to work up their negotiating skills in something a bit like a professional context.

Each round features a haggle between two University teams presided over by a professional mediator. The teams have a scenario in common, plus their own confidential briefs explaining what they really want and don't want from any settlement. The skill lies in articulating their own interests well and finding deft arguments for managing the replies from the other side. My own role was not a Mediator but a Judge, marking the two teams (and the Mediator) according to a number of defined criteria.

In the rounds I saw the students were smart, articulate and effective, not least those teams having to do the whole competition in English where that is not their native tongue.

The main problem was that they all tended to be smart, articulate and effective on the wrong things, often getting bogged down in intriguing points of detail and losing sight of bigger issues at stake.

In particular, when an issue was in dispute (such as liability for a chef plus large cake falling over on a hotel escalator), they seemed to think that by sheer dint of cleverness and sheer attrition they could compel the other side to back down, when in fact the smart thing to do was suggest that it would be huge waste of time and stress to take this footling probem to court and instead cut a speedy deal.

The most simple issue has to be identified up front: do we divorce, or do we maintain a rebooted relationship? If the latter, what can we both bring to it, and how to avoid any stupid disagreements in future?

The competition made me realise that the main point of a mediation is NOT, as mediation theory has it, to 'find a deal'. That's the easy bit. The real battle and skill for all parties is to try to get a deal at the favourable (for them) part of the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA, as we in the trade call it). The Mediator needs to give a context for that battle playing itself out.

The competition rules did not make this as clear as it might have been. Plus some teams clearly enjoyed the benefit of serious professional advice, whereas others were for all practical purposes flying blind - a clever academc law prof is not necessarily the best source of tactical and operational advice here, folks!

Anyway, I'll be proposing to the ICC that next year I'll be happy to offer some online coaching for teams from non-English native speaker countries to help them grasp some of the core techniques needed to prosper. Watch this space...

Long time no see.

Up in deepest Leeds, on a combination of family and other business. The Queen's Hotel does fine cheap deals via LateRooms and has a very solid fish and chips.

Here's the link to the next UK Speechwriters' Guild conference, in London on 23 Feb.

The theme is Make it Stick: Techniques for Leaders to Get Their Message Across. An excellent line-up of speakers/presenters, not least a cameo appearance by myself, and a disgracefully good bargain at £249 for the day.

I'll be talking in the later morning about the problem speechwriters have in making a speaker sound spontaneous. Too many speakers are given a text which gives them no room for improvisation, and does not help them express to the full whatever capacity for good speaking they may have.

The draft speech needs to be written in colloquial language and then laid out in a way which helps the speaker have a conversation with the audience, not give a lecture.

Easier said than done, of course.

Be there. Or be square. Not many tickets left.

Here is my piece over at Commentator on Drone Warfare, beginning with exploding the tragic George Monbiot and proceeding thusly:

Not that long ago Europe’s parents and grandparents were being blown to bits in their tens of thousands by bombs simply dropped from planes in the general direction of the target. The sheer precision of modern weapons has saved countless more innocent lives caught up in armed conflict than, alas, still get taken.

One perverse result of this development is to give new life to Stalin’s reputed infamous observation that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”. Precisely because so few people are now killed in modern warfare, the numbers of those who die shrink to the point where individual deaths of unarmed civilians can be ‘personalised’, and attacks on specific military targets start to look more like ‘assassinations’ or common law murder than war. At what point can (or should) we start to think about war and the legal parameters of it completely differently?

...

The Guardianistas’ Monbiotish pronouncements on human solidarity and existential Gaian interconnectedness in, for example, the ‘climate change’ or development aid contexts seem to evaporate when it comes to defence questions. Yet the issues are exactly the same.

Just as the planet can be seen as a single organism worthy of collective respect, so too can the technical infrastructure which supports human life these days. No country in the world can survive in any meaningful sense without some reliance on the networks of real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) by which things get done and new inventions happen. Who protects those facilities?

Classic international law tells us that, in principle, it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key installations in other countries?

If a country and its citizens want to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging the modern global networked space, do they in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending those networks pro-actively and vigorously against those who, for whatever reason, want to wreck it? And if they can’t or won’t take the action needed to deal with such people, can they complain if other powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Interventions need not be anything so crass as invading with huge numbers of soldiers. Rather the best available tools can be found to neutralise these threats from afar, including swarms of hi-tech drones that identify an enemy, watch the enemy’s movements to minimise the risks of collateral injuries – and pounce.

That sort of remote-controlled intervention in principle offers the most moral, controlled, restrained and proportionate expression of legitimate military self-defence the human race has ever seen. Which, of course, does not make it perfect or fool-proof. Or wise.

Several good comments - Commentator attracts a more, shall we say, thoughtful class of commenter than Daily Telegraph blogs.