Blogoir

Craig Murray and I have a fleeting moment of agreement, rather like ships sailing in opposite directions who pass and exchange friendly waves.

He commented on my earlier piece about Libya and MI6, responding to another reader:

Your second point rests on the premiss that if government ministers approved something, then it was legal. That is simply not true. A previous government may have done something, and may even have briefed their successors about it. if it were illegal, nothing in that means it should not subsequently be the subject of criminal investigation. Theoretically, the current government has no role in either encouraging or stopping the criminal investigation - it is quite rightly a matter for the police and CPS.

However, a new development arises. Two Libyans are launching civil actions in the English courts against my old colleague and good friend Sir Mark Allen, over the circumstances under which they were subject to 'rendition' to Tripoli and subsequent abuse by the Gaddafi regime. The Guardian:

Saadi was detained in Hong Kong in 2004 and then forced on to a plane to Tripoli with his wife and four children in an operation that MI6 allegedly mounted in co-operation with Koussa, who was Gaddafi's intelligence chief at the time. Saadi says he suffered years of torture.

Belhaj was detained in Bangkok along with his pregnant wife after an MI6 tipoff and was allegedly tortured by American agents for several days before being flown to Tripoli, where he says he was tortured and detained for several years. His wife was detained for several months.

The issue here is not any claim that MI6/HMG engaged in torture. Rather it is that MI6/HMG are said to have been 'complicit' in torture in Libya of certain Libyans by certain other Libyans. Which raises the question: what does complicity mean?

Back in March 2010 in an earlier exchange with Craig I looked at precisely this question. Craig and other maximalists insist that even to possess information which is suspected as having come from torture amounts to 'complicity'. That position, as the House of Lords found in 2005, is incorrect as a matter of law (and common sense):

Very (very) broadly speaking, I conclude from this judgment that the the top legal body in the UK drew at least three important conclusions:

• That it may be acceptable for the state's executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives)
• But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals
• If seemingly well-founded allegations are made that evidence has been or may have been produced by torture, the court/tribunal has to consider most carefully how to deal with that evidence, but is not bound to conduct an exhaustive investigation of the origin of the evidence to reach a final view as that would just not be possible

These conclusions do not apply directly to the current emerging case, namely where HMG allegedly took action leading to Libyans being returned to Libya where they say they ended up being mistreated.

The problem here is that any secret 'rendition' by us or even a contribution to secret rendition by others is likely to have been endorsed by Ministers, either specifically or as a general rule. So to single out one civil servant for litigation is mischievous if not malevolent.

Second, the whole case turns on the idea that 'complicity' can be stretched far beyond any immediate link to maltreatment. Any abuse or torture was not committed by HMG or its officials. Is it really fair to make us legally responsible for horrors committed by others far away?

Even if you think that it is reasonable to do so on the moral level, you need to draw a line somewhere and say that the actions alleged were too 'remote' to amount to complicity. Under what principle should the line be drawn in specific cases? What balancing factors should be taken into account?

What if our attempts to bring under control Gaddafi's WMD have hit the rocks and it looks like we need to make some 'minor' concessions to Gaddafi's entourage to get things restarted? How do we even begin to weigh up the possibility of abuse of two individuals with the possible dangers to millions if the WMD are not secured asap? 

This leads us back to the core policy dilemma, namely how to deal with wicked regimes? Thus:

Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This nasty, bleak, lonely policy and moral frontier was where Mark Allen and his colleagues were operating. If the way is opened to sue them for outcomes which were far from ideal if not awful, who is going to be ready to do this sort of fundamentally important work?

The issue here is simple. Not what the 'right' choice is when you are dealing with a regime like Gaddafi's. There isn't one.

Rather it is 'who decides?'.

We seem to be ending up in the absurd position that sanctimonious lawyers and unelected judges far from the operational and policy realities of such questions are seen as more 'responsible' than elected politicians and civil servants who are elected to do our dirty work while operating to arguably the highest standards of public probity in human history.

Yes, judges have the benefit of detachment. And yes, Ministers and officials can get so wrapped up in what they are doing that serious errors get made. But this is one where the best people to judge are voters, not lawyers.

As you all know, I happen to be a fan of what the Blair government and MI6 did to help bring Gaddafi back towards what passes for the mainstream of civilisation in that part of the world, by helping negotiate the end of his elaborate MWD programmes in return for 'normalisation'.

But did MI6 go beyond some sort of unspoken and perhaps not obvious line by getting a bit too close to the Gaddafi regime thereafter? To the point of helping hand over to Libya some regime opponents, either suspecting that they might be mistreated back in Tripoli, or not bothering to think about that too much?

I have no idea. But a new wearying police investigation begins.

Something about all this is not quite right. Above all, I find it hard to imagine a pretty far-reaching step like that being taken without some sort of explicit political clearance. So when are the police going to start rummaging through the papers submitted to T Blair, J Straw and other Labour politicians leading or close to the policy at the time? 

One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.

In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have 'smarter' policies. Which doesn't work because our policies are too slow anyway,  often out of date before they begin.

All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).

Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:

The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't.

Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.

However, just as we realise that we can't work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.

Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.

In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the 'Western Social Model' is over-complex. But under-robust. It's science, see?.

This appears to be a well-sourced Telegraph piece revealing that the FCO has instructed Embassies to start making contingency plans for a Eurozone crash.

If so, it's startling.

Startling!

Partly because our much-diminished Embassies across the EU - cheerily cut back by Labour and this Coalition government alike to redeploy diplomats to the 'emerging markets' - just won't be able to handle the tens of thousands of consular cases which could come their way.

Can someone working at an EU mission quickly drop me a private line (via the site-link above) to tell me what exactly a contingency plan to deal with thousands of people whose credit-cards have stopped working would look like?

But startling also because the FCO is not warning the British public through its formal Travel Advice to start making similar precautions.

Here is the current FCO Travel Advice for France, which 19,000,000(!) British nationals visit each year. It focuses on the eternal issue of the day in Europe - French food:

• Sea France has suspended all of its cross-channel ferry services. Call Sea France on +44 (0) 845 458 0666 for further information and allow extra time for your journey
• Following an outbreak of botulism, the French Health authorities have issued a warning not to consume any pastes or spreads produced by a French company called La Ruche. The pastes are branded as Les Délices de Marie Claire, Terre de Mistral and Les Secrets d’Anais

Here's the FCO's lugubriously out-of-date ungrammatical Travel Advice for Italy:

·         There is a general transport strike planned in Italy on 17 November. All means of public transport is expected to be affected.  If you are flying to/from Italy contact your airline before you travel. See Safety and Security - Local Travel - Major pre-planned strikes.

Germany has another grammatically challenged entry, but at least has some references to money. Maybe the advice should be to carry lots of counterfeit Euros - soon likely to be worth more than the real ones?!

• Like other large European countries there is a high threat from terrorism in Germany. Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers. See Safety and Security - Terrorism.
• We are aware of British nationals who have been arrested for possessing counterfeit currency.  We advise against changing currency anywhere other than banks or legitimate Bureaux de Change.

Hmm. Not much in all this on how a few million Brits across Europe might get back to our island fortress if the Eurozone folds overnight and the cash-machines stop working and fuel for cars, planes and cross-channel ferries runs out.

There is a real problem here - any such official warning would trigger panic and make the Eurozone's horrible problems even worse. 

Yet the Telegraph piece archly quotes a "senior Minister" to the effect that a Eurozone collapse is now 'just a matter of time'. Perhaps this IS the consular warning. To lucky Telegraph readers at least.

I write little here about Israel/Palestine as I have little to say which countless others are not saying. Plus I don't have first-hand professional experience.

What is going on? Of course the Palestinians want to advance their claims and demands on all international fronts. Upping their status at the UN to that of an 'observer state' might help them launch new legal claims against Israel. But that would be far from straightforward - maybe even impossible in practice:

European countries worried about Palestinian access to the ICC blocked a Spanish-French proposal for nonmember observer status for Palestine, and there has even been discussion among Europeans about creating a new legal status for the Palestinians that would provide an upgrade in status but block potential access to the ICC and other international legal enforcement agencies.

Even if the Palestinians got nonmember state status at the U.N., which is the maximum they could achieve under the present circumstances, and were able to become party to the ICC, there are serious doubts about their practical ability to bring charges against Israel or Israeli officials. Any request for such charges would be more a diplomatic and political question than a legal one, and both the ICC and prosecutors would be subject to significant domestic and international political pressures that make it hard to imagine such a scenario actually unfolding...

Here is a neat account by former UK diplomat Carne Ross of the procedural goings-on in the fetid New York UN corridors aimed at shunting the issue into the long grass so that President Obama is not embarrassed into using a veto to block Palestine's UN membership. Note Carne's shrewd view on the Russia/China angle here - to get some PR 'progressive'/Arab credit but not do anything on the substance:

So far, only the US has declared its outright opposition to the membership application, but we can be confident that there will be others who will abstain on the vote, giving the US some political company and, perhaps, avoiding them having to veto (this will happen if the Palestinians cannot muster the 9 votes necessary to pass a resolution, thus forcing a veto if the US wants to stop it).  Germany and Colombia will abstain, and perhaps the UK too.  

Russia and China will support the Palestinian initiative but without sufficient vigour to take on the Americans in the Council.  They will be not be desperately unhappy if this gets blocked.  Their objective is to look good to the Arab world, and this objective is met by merely promising their support, and not by spending any serious political energy on it.

Meanwhile, the US is putting ferocious pressure on weaker non-permanent members like Bosnia.  This is a vicious nasty business: I have seen it done.  A number of diplomats have told me about the extremely aggressive pressure being put on them by US diplomats, including here at the UN.  But the pressure will also involve high-level phone calls from Hillary Clinton and the President, and others.  

This type of pressure is very, very difficult for weaker countries, who may be dependent on the US in some way or other (like Bosnia), to resist.  This is how power works.

Yup. If you want the privilege of being on the UN Security Council, you have to play hardball with the mean players who always hang around there.

I wonder how Bosnia will end up voting if it gets to a UNSC vote where Bosnia and Herzegovina is currently a member. The Muslim/Bosniac position will be to support Palestine, and the Bosnian Serbs will vote for the best available anti-Muslim option (in this case whatever suits Israel). Bosnian Croats anyone?

Likely BH position: abstain. All too difficult.

Or is it Coup des États?

Definitely one or the other. Let's stick with the headline one.

My latest Commentator piece is out, belabouring a theme familiar to regular readers here, namely the Limits of Trust:

Once upon a time world leaders met only rarely if at all. They maintained their dignity if not power precisely by not meeting.

Now EU leaders are meeting and talking almost every month in one way or the other. This (for now) has the effect of making wars in Europe a lot less likely. How can Hans send his country to war against Juan and Maria’s countries when they had such a jolly expensive dinner together last week in Brussels?

There is nonetheless a downside. Which is that Trust reasserts itself in a peculiarly personal way. Private tiffs can spill over into public disagreements, and vice versa.

Imagine that you are the Dumpling Finance Minister who is getting it in the neck from the Dumpling media and public opinion for being far too lenient with the EU’s Olive tendency. You sit there at the EU Council meeting listening to an Olive drone on about urgent reforms which both of you know won’t be carried out quickly or honestly or even at all. Worse, the predecessor of this Olive (probably a cousin of the current one) actually lied at Council meetings time and again about the state of his country’s finances – that’s how the whole mess started.

Basically, your willingness to listen to any more Olive nonsense is trending towards absolute zero. Your exasperation is likely to burst out when it is your turn to speak. Meanwhile your unctuous officials sense your mood and are freezing out their Olive counterparts in the coffee breaks.

And lo! ‘Dialogue’ diminishes. Trust declines. Emails start to get no replies, phone-calls aren’t taken. Differences start to count for more than what people have in common. Those who have money start to bark out instructions to those who are hoping for yet more cheap loans. The whole mood shifts for the worse, defaulting to petulant defensiveness...

The problem for the European Union is that it has very little legal or political room for manoeuvre for tackling the Eurozone crisis. It's as if they designed a beautiful tall building without factoring in the right sort of fire safety plumbing. There is no direct way to put out all the small fires which have erupted on different floors of the building, and as these fires develop they in turn reduce still further the room for bringing in more water.

Thus:

... the mighty elite brains who got us into this mess will come up with an even better plan, but then implement it with even less public scrutiny and direct accountability than now exists. To do that they may have to start taking serious legal short-cuts, to the point of side-stepping or ignoring key national laws and EU treaty constraints.

A voter's right to choose.

This is not good enough. Insofar as it means anything it sounds like a coup d’etat, or more precisely coup d’etats.

I might be prepared to sign away some of my own autonomy and my own little slice of my country’s autonomy in return for a wider economic package which makes sense, but only if I get to take part in a proper debate about the options. Which, given what is at stake in current circumstances, means a referendum

Imposed behind my back on the hoof by the people who led us into this fiasco? No way. That breaks the most profound Trust test which allows our society to work freely

Maybe we are heading towards an existential democratic crisis. Stressed-out European leaders round on their bewildered and increasingly angry voters, and tell them in blunt terms: “Your money. Or your democratic life”.

Over at Commentator is my latest piece on UK engagement with Libya, in which I argue that what happened in recent years was principled, smart and mainly effective. Take that, you chattering classes:

there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: Isolation, or Engagement. And that both can have perverse consequences, because it is impossible to deal with perverse regimes without some perverse outcomes

Isolation (plus or minus sanctions) invariably drags on unhappily, mainly because the regimes are never in fact that isolated: see the wild success of those policies for eg Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Belarus. In some cases the regime may isolate itself, all the better to oppress its own citizens: see decades of North Korea.

Engagement creates different problems. Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways.

So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?

Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisation process, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.

Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...

This is also where I part company with my former UK Ambassador colleague Craig Murray. Forget his idiosyncratic leftism. My problem is that Craig's books and website lambast almost any 'Western' foreign policy as corrupt, mendacious, duplicitous or whatever. Yet he is almost 100% silent on how in real life to achieve any positive changes for the better, not least in Uzbekistan which is run by a hard-core regime which he knows only too well.

A loyal reader of my latest Commentator piece says this:

My initial instincts would be to disagree mostly with the kind of line you take on this particular issue. I'm a no compromise man on dictatorships. But, as you say, what are we supposed to do with them? If I may say, you make a very convincing case that really makes me think hard.

Let's think about this a bit more, taking for granted that a 'Western' democratic system with a strong legal system is just 'better' than a cruel torturing dictatorship. What should the democracy do about the dictatorship?

One option is to do nothing. Faraway wicked foreigners oppress each other - what's new?

That option is in fact quite often used, even if there is a busy pretence of 'doing something'. Saudi Arabia is the classic example of a system which in most respects imposes odious unfair apartheid-like restrictions on its citizens, and which we studiously treat as a 'factor of stability'. Communist China used to be far worse, murdering millions. As did the USSR.

In all these cases the hard fact that these systems are powerful, ruthless and/or rich compels a certain caution. But does the fact that we 'tolerate' (say) the Saudi system demolish any claim by us to moral superiority? Double standards, they shriek.

No. Any good policy has to be realistic as well as consistent. If you can't stop all killers, it's right to stop those you can stop. To that extent there is solid intellectual and moral territory between 'double standards' and 'no standards'.    

If we nonetheless decide to do something about a dictatorship, what in fact is likely to work, where 'work' means bringing about change for the more pluralistic, preferably without massive violence?

Hold it right there. Why is massive violence bad? Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted recently thus:

What if we think that there are possibilities for more or less peaceful change? Egypt in some ways is a good current example. NB South Africa is always presented as a triumph for peaceful change but of course wasn't.

Libya might have been too, had the Gaddafi elite not reverted to stupidity instead of using its new improved relations with Western democracies to negotiate .

Cuba? Belarus? Myanmar/Burma? Zimbabwe? China itself?

Simply making a short list like that shows just how varied and problematic the challenge is. In each individual case the options range far and wide, as does the prospect of getting allies and building successful coalitions for change. 

Let's not forget too that Western political leaders' main focus is what their voters want. And voters (with rare exceptions) do not put changing the ways of revolting foreign regimes far up their priorities list. Or much taxpayers' money to be spent on the problem. In 1999 Robin Cook realised that it was a good investment to fund anti-Milosevic activities led by myself, and got superb results. 

So in the real world of foreign policy it makes no sense to take a stark 'no compromise' position of substance with dictatorships. They exist, they have UN and other votes, they can export trouble, they probably have Ambassadors in London. Your aircraft may need to fly over their territory, or they may agree with you on various international technical issues. It's complicated. 

You almost always end up with some form of 'engagement'. But the fact of matter-of-fact exchanges and opportunistically looking for areas to build some common ground is not the same thing as having a policy of Engagement aimed at deliberately using a range of options (openly or otherwise) to bring out reforms. 

When in Poland I quietly and privately explored with the then Ambassador of Belarus (smart, energetic diplomat) some ideas for engaging with the Lukashenko elite. But it all fell into the Not Important Enough category in London. Getting anything done there would take a lot of effort and senior time: Tony Blair saw no real upside in this long slog, and plenty of reasons for letting this one quietly fester under 'EU pressure'.

Was that the wrong decision by No 10? Or the right one? It's still festering, but EU governments are still wobbling unconvincingly between Engagement and Isolation.

A huge subject.

My point today is simple. British foreign policy and leadership can make positive changes in unpropitious foreign situations. But simply wanting to make a difference does not get results. Making that happen requires a powerful combination of strong policy determination, operational nimbleness and fine professional technique, an area where the FCO obviously declined under Labour. Plus some money.

What just doesn't help is facile sneering from the likes of the BBC's 'foreign editor' Jon Williams:

WilliamsJon Jon Williams

Any suggestion of MI6 relationship with #Libya into 2011 v damaging to FCO & No10. Til (sic) now claimed UK-Gaddafi ties part of Blair/Brown past

The fact that MI6 had a relationship with #Libya under Brown/Blair and continued under Cameron showed the policy was working, you silly fellow.

Here is a long and generally brilliant analysis of the Eurozone's predicament by Edward Hugh.

I especially like the way he explains deftly the hard realities and policy paradoxes we all now face, in one hard-hitting paragraph after another:

It is not simply a question of “closet” (or open) eurosceptics suddenly reappearing, but of the monetary union repeatedly showing fault lines exactly where many of those much berated macroeconomists had expected they might appear...

... at the heart of the monetary union’s current problems lie the huge imbalances which have been generated between the economic “surplus” countries in the core, and the external deficit ones on the periphery. Europe’s leaders have long avoided biting the bullet, and indeed could be considered to be in deep denial, over the significance of this issue...

With the arrival of the Italian elephant onto the centre stage at a stroke this argument has become as outdated as the institutional structure which lay behind it, since few of core Europe’s leaders are really willing to accept the responsibility for giving full and lasting guarantees for the country, quite simply because it is not just one more state in a fully integrated union, but a sovereign nation with all that that implies...

One of the curious anomalies about how the debate is currently being framed is the way in which banks and money funds who have invested in Europe’s periphery are being told that it is only right they should now assume some part of the anticipated debt restructuring burden due to their earlier policies of “irresponsible lending”, while these very same investors are also being urged to purchase new issues of just this very debt, on the argument that risk is exaggerated since the countries concerned have essentially sound economies, and are only suffering from short term liquidity and balance of payment type problems...

Banks have some responsibility to their clients (Nice - Ed) , and will not normally knowingly take decisions which will lose money for them. So it is only rational for them to try to “lighten up” their positions on some of Europe’s weaker sovereigns. What isn’t credible is for political leaders to at one and the same time tell the banks that they are lending irresponsibly and urge them to purchase debt which may well end up being restructured...

Which is why the Italian government is in a huge bind.It doesn’t have a debt flow problem, it has a debt stock problem, and as the risk premium charged on Italian debt rises and rises, and as the growth outcomes fail to meet the often optimistic targets, then the snowball of debt steadily slides its way down the mountain side with little the government can do to stop it growing as it moves. Like some modern Sisyphus, they are condemned to struggle with a monumental task where advance seems well nigh impossible...

His answer? The best chance for some sort of orderly outcome is to divide the Eurozone into two new currencies (Euro 1 - based on the deep logic of the old Hanseatic League which did well for 402 years! - and Euro 2), letting those countries which need a devaluation boost join Euro 2. If Germany heads Euro 1 and France Euro 2, the Franco-German axis can have a fine new job.

The great advantage of such a move would be that two of the major burdens under which the monetary union is labouring – the lack of price competitiveness on the periphery and the lack of cultural consensus between the participants – would be resolved at a stroke...

Read the whole thing and then give it a standing ovation.

As I wrote in June:

is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

The whole project is now exposed as a dangerous folie de grandeur.

Look. What do we Europeans basically want? To get richer, live nicely and not fight.

There is no reason why this should not be achieved through a network of several smaller regional European Unions with customised levels of integration and mutually reinforcing basic trading and security relationships. This arrangement would also make further enlargement much easier - Turkey might become the core of a new Regional Union.

All the expensive and annoying central bureaucracy could be scaled back or even abolished - farewell, European Parliament. Legitimacy and public accountability within each Regional Union would soar, as the governing arrangements would be much less remote.

Above all such a scheme would not be brittle, subject to horrible institutional contortions as one sprawling Union tries to accommodate quite different needs, policies and cultures.

Is someone in Whitehall planning a blueprint for how this would work?

Hullo?

Hullo..?

That letter from President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel to Herman van Rompuy (President of the European Council) has shaken rather than stirred the word's financial markets.

I thought it worth a detailed look. But Protesilaos Stavrou has done it for me. Here is his thorough and interesting fisking by someone close to the Greece end of the issues:

So this is my analysis of the joint letter of French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel. The two leaders are stuck in the same policies that have allowed the crisis to spiral, that have failed to contain contagion and that have created a euro of two speeds. Moreover they focused more on the future upon a false ceteris paribus assumption.

Economic governance needs to be enhanced and further integration needs to be achieved, but these will be done in a very different manner than what the Franco-German axis wants. Most of the rhetoric of the two leaders will be fundamentally revised by market pressures and events in the real world that are far detached from the world Mr.Sarkozy and Ms.Merkel currently visualise.

Grahnlaw too has a go:

All in all, the Franco-German proposals would enhance the influence of the heads of state or government (of the biggest eurozone states) at the expense of the other EU institutions, without solving the fundamental problems of the euro area: lack of robust institutions and democratic legitimacy at European level.

Let's instead look at the style and methodology of the letter and some of the things lurking below the surface.

First and foremost, it's a letter to Mr van Rompuy (President van Rompuy as they put it). He was chosen to be the president of the European Council only because he was not a threat to any national leaders' press conference. This is why they offer him a key new job:

Can you imagine President Sarkozy writing to President Blair in such dainty terms? No you can't.

Because the two leaders are wanting the Euro-world to transform itself on their terms when they have no real capacity to make that happen on their own, they resort to grand but hollow exhortatory language. The English text has no fewer than 22 uses of the word 'should':

• cooperation should
• member states should
• aforementioned proposals should
• cohesion funds should (be suspended)
• progress should
• (my favourite) parliaments should (Note: and if they won't/don't?)

I have written before about how such musty, needy rhetoric sounds eerily reminiscent of another grim European tradition:

This strange repetitive exhortatory language detached from any real analysis of the problems is reminiscent of the communist apparatchik from Party HQ standing on a barren collective farm field and addressing the workers. He hectors them to even greater efforts to bring about the triumph of socialist productivity. They stare blankly at him, lost in their own thoughts and the disappointed emptiness of their blighted lives.

Plus there are the usual crop of redundant Euro-tautologies, especially the word 'further', included to give a sense of inexorable dynamism:

• to strengthen further
• be further enhanced
• further progress

Here's a core policy passage -  see the shoulds and furthers (original emphasis):

Lots of things are incredibly complicated and yet oddly simple when you strip down the issues to the basics.

Such as the Eurozone drama.

Amidst all the swirling technical/clever analysis of bonds, treaty provisions, sovereign debts and so on, Marshall Auerback gives us this lively thought:

Germany is in effect also a passenger on the Titanic, as Italian Finance Minister Guilio Tremonti recently noted. It might be in the first-class cabin, rather than steerage (or Irish stowaways, as the Germans no doubt view the former “Celtic Tiger”), but when the boat hits the iceberg, all passengers are affected.

OK, but what's the nub of the problem?

... it is ironic (and more than a touch hypocritical) that Germany chastises its neighbors, like Greece, or its trading partners like the U.S., for their “profligacy”, but relies on these countries “living beyond their means” to produce a trade surplus that allows its own government to run smaller budget deficits.

But ... but ... but the Eurozone has rules to manage these tricky situations. Not only rules. Principles!

... there has been a complete lack of consistency of principle. When larger countries such as Germany and France routinely violated spending limits a few years ago, this was conveniently ignored (or papered over), in contrast to the vituperative criticism now being hurled at the Mediterranean profligates. The EU’s repeated tendency to make ad hoc improvisations of EMU’s treaty provisions, rather than engaging in the hard job of reforming its flawed arrangements, are a function of a silly ideology which is neither grounded in political reality, nor economic logic. As a result, a political firestorm, which completely undermines the euro’s credibility, is potentially in the offing

Huh? What are you talking about? President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel took decisive new action this week. They sent Herman van Rompuy a letter:

The Euro is the basis of our economic success and symbol for the political unification of our

continent. It stands for the will of Europe to consolidate its internal development and to

jointly meet the challenges of our time. Germany and France, consider it their historic mission

and stand united to protect and strengthen the economic and monetary union and thus the

stability of the single currency.

That's pretty clear. Strong stuff, surely?

And to judge from the flaccid statement that accompanied the conclusion of the Merkel-Sarkozy summit yesterday, it appears that even at this late stage, policy makers don’t get it, or just cannot summon up the political will for the huge conceptual leap forward required to save the euro. The Germans are paralysed politically and things are moving too fast for their policy makers to respond quickly. And their political leadership has neither leveled with the electorate in regard to the magnitude of the problem, nor the costs associated with ongoing punishments of the profligates.

Still, at least Marshall Auerback foresees a happy ending if Germany itself can't stand any more of this and abruptly leaps from the Eurozone taking a few honest and efficient states with it:

The Club Med, such as Greece, Italy, and Spain countries are saved because the euro plunges and they get to export their way out of this. The euro becomes a soft currency country again and these countries go back to living with higher inflation, higher exports and probably a generally more comfortable way of life. 

Interestingly enough, the country which really gets screwed in this type of environment is France which is neither a true “Club Med” economy, but has yet to undertake many of the structural reforms of its German counterpart which it is seeking to emulate. Its economy is more akin to that of Italy, but should it seek to become part of the “greater DM bloc”, then its industrial base will likely face a huge competitive threat from Italy.

Read the whole thing. Very carefully. A fine example of clever complex expert work expressed in words and graphs for the rest of us to follow.

Well, sure he's clever. But is he correct to present the choices so starkly and pessimistically? Who knows? I don't.

In this whole accelerating drama over the past couple of years, those who have predicted that things will get worse (and then worse again) have been vindicated by events. Because (in part) the whole Eurozone rests on elemental existential Euro-assumptions about Paternalism, Trust and Solidarity which turn out to be flawed or flimsy - or just not true.

My latest piece over at Dale & Co looks at a possible spiral down into the next global conflagration:

In short, the planet’s legal and moral order looks and feels weak. For the first time in centuries the USA and Europe are increasingly unable to define, let alone set the global agenda. Other powers are slowly coming to the fore. They sense that things are going their way: why not exploit this situation to redraw the map - and rewrite the global rules - as they see fit?

What in fact is stopping a new brazen 'grab what you can' looting attitude emerging? And if it does emerge, what is to stop it? Conventional weapons and tactics are useless against more or less spontaneous bottom-up networked challenges to existing ruling elites.

World Wars One and Two were conflicts with global consequences arising from European power-struggles. But there was at least a clear context, involving classic thematic rivalries in an understandable form. And far fewer countries were global players. World War Three will be different, a crazy free-for-all.

Disintegration in this sense is not pre-ordained. Western uncertainty is matched by Chinese, Russian and Indian hesitation. Yes, those powers see an historic opportunity to move into the philosophical and political space created by the West’s disarray. Yet how best to do it successfully, without doing immense economic damage to themselves or falling prey to destabilizing ‘flash riots’ which seem to come from nowhere in more and more countries?

At least they have options. Including ‘wait and see’. After all, even if they do nothing their relative power improves as Western confidence and reach diminish. Why bother to loot, when sooner or later plenty of juicy apples may well start to fall into your lap?

Maybe one extra point should be made. Any such free-for-all might not necessarily involve massed armies and messy explosions, although in practice no doubt there would be plenty of them. Deft cyberwarfare aimed at sneakily weakening key enemy military and civilian infrastucture installations time after time might be enough...

A handy round up of some of my wise and prescient thoughts from the past year on the state of the European Union.

1   18 October 2010

... Which prompts me to post this extract from my Krakow presentation, a slide entitled Will EU Diplomacy Survive? Indeed, such are the marvels of modern technology that you can see a picture of me staring aghast at my own handiwork here.

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years' time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years' time?     No

EU in 50,000 years' time?         No

EU in 5000 years' time?            No

EU in 500 years' time?              No

EU in 50 years' time?                Maybe

EU in five years' time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU's finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky...

2   16 May 2010

... I tend to think that he's correct - that the EU as currently configured can not survive much longer. If only because the measures needed to make the Eurozone work will compel new levels of 'integration' for all EU members which will go well beyond what some countries can accept.

Things are already coming to a head, via Qualified Majority Voting.

Under EU rules decisions in many policy areas and binding on all can be taken by votes of EU member governments. Hitherto voting has not been a decisive factor, since EU member governments mull things over, look at the weight of likely opposition to see if any combination might have a blocking minority, and cut deals.

So there is voting but it in effect usually defines a different way to reach a consensus.

What we can expect soon are proposals put forward for voting which are said to be essential for Eurozone members as such, but may well have negative outcomes for non-Eurozone members. The Eurozone members may then start to push through those votes in the face of outright opposition from many of the others - but especially the UK.

If that starts to happen systematically, the implicit deal based primarily upon a sense of consensus will have been changed irrevocably in favour of majority-led power-plays. The legitimacy of that sort of decision-making and its outcomes will fall to be challenged very hard.

So there has to be a good chance that the result is the emergence of some sort of formalised new arrangements, maybe two or more smaller European unions.

In one group, those countries which are ready to stop being countries and form a new bloc phenomenon, with one currency and the inflexible fiscal, popular voting and other mechanisms needed to make that happen.

And in another, countries which are satisfied with looser and more flexible cooperative arrangements.

Anything really wrong with that, as long as the two groups live nicely together and don't fight?

Not really. But the transaction costs and associated convulsions will be considerable. Which group Germany would now join?

Maybe those convulsions, huge as they must be, are preferable to standing in a swamp watching the slime-level inexorably head north above our knees, no-one able to move because we are all tied together?

3   17 November 2010

This national sovereignty idea is very odd when you think about it. We don't lament the fact that Yorkshire or the west part of London or a quarter of Shanghai don't have the freedom to run their own economic policies.

So why does it really matter if Ireland's small population end up being told what to do by stern German bankers? 80 million Germans seem to be managing fine under that arrangement.

One answer might be that Ireland would have no say in the German decisions, so it wouldn't be 'fair'. True. But it is the Germans' money bailing Ireland out.

Maybe if you decide to take a huge risk and mess up, part of the deal is that you lose your right to decide for yourself until you have been sorted out - on the terms of the people doing the sort out. A bit like a belligerent drunk being incarcerated to sober up.

The really interesting thing about the EU crisis is that as Simon Heffer says, it forces out into the open First Principles and collapses careless assumptions.

I wrote this in 2008. And gosh, it reads nicely now (emphasis added):

Trust grows in subtle unexpected ways, usually slowly and through doses of unhappy trial and error. It can not be created by European elites telling us all what is good for us. Especially when some of them look to be cheating on their expenses which our taxes have paid for.

Another former colleague recently said to me, "the trouble with you is that you reduce everything to first principles!"

He's right. I do. 

The risk for someone who does that lies in sounding like the wily but annoying Irishman who tells a lost traveller trying to get to Dublin that it is "no good starting from here".

The key advantage in looking hard and regularly at First Principles is that one is less likely to build a tall edifice on wobbly foundations. And perhaps more likely to be a better source of advice as to when something tall and imposing is in fact risking collapse.

That former colleague is a prominent LibDem EU fan. QED

Postscript: Or as another former senior FCO colleague put it:

"Huh? It's wrong to reduce things to first principles? What other principles are there?"   

Julian Borger at the Guardian has written a long and well-sourced piece about the hunt for Bosnian war crimes suspects. It even quotes me a couple of times (no great surprises for diligent readers of this site).

The key policy dilemma point is here, tucked away in the middle of the article:

While deciding to go after the criminals, the Nato powers had chosen the more cautious course of going after the smaller fry first, on the grounds that they would be less well-protected, a decision many later regretted because it allowed the bigger fish to go into hiding

In most if not all situations there is a spectrum of policy outcome options, ranging from Utterly Awful to Deliriously Wonderful. Politicians and officials know that they really don't want the former and are unlikely to get the latter, so they settle for a range of options somewhere in the middle.

The thing to understand is that within that range of options (which usually is all about balancing risks and short-term v longer-term likely upsides/downsides of different choices) reasonable people might disagree on where the 'right' choice is, but also agree that another point in that range is in itself a reasonable choice, all things considered.

So in Bosnia in 1996 our leaders had a very tricky operational decision to take.

Do they try to arrest the biggest ICTY indictees first? Upside: they deal with the worst suspects immediately, encouraging lesser suspects to surrender. Downside: the biggest fish are well protected and likely to resist - the operation might go wrong and prompt wider protests which could destabilise the peace process itself.

Or do they go for 'lesser' indictees, get some easy runs on the scoreboard and then work their way briskly up towards the biggest fish? Upside: less risky, therefore more chance to plan harder operations in the light of experience - unlikely to rock the peace process. Downside: suggests lack of resolve - the biggest fish may go underground and make life very difficult as we try to catch them.

In other words, once it was decided in principle to arrest ICTY indictees, all sorts of non-trivial policy and operational issues then presented themselves.

As Julian Borger describes, the steady-as-she-goes cautious option prevailed (as it usually does): 'lesser' indictees first. 

But the predictable (if not quite predicted) result of that was the bizarre spectacle of Karadzic and Mladic evading arrest for a startling 14 or so years, even though they were lurking in the Serbia/Bosnia/Montenegro area.

I don't recall being consulted about the pros and cons of arresting Big v Lesser ICTY indictees first. My instinct, I think (hope), would have been to go for some pretty Big ones, as that would send a signal of determination precisely because it was more 'risky'. But I was pleased when the decison was taken to start arresting lesser indictees, and then delighted when the first operation finally unfolded, even though the ICTY indictee concerned, a Serb called Simo Drljaca, died when resisting arrest by the SAS.

This first operation was notable also because the mad Bosniac/Muslim media in Sarajevo quickly denounced it as a typical British pro-Serb plot, designed to rally Republika Srpska opposition to Dayton by making Drljaca a martyr. These ravings played into the background to Robin Cook's first dramatic visit to Sarajevo in 1997.

Anyway, all ICTY indictees have been taken to The Hague to face justice. The whole process has been staggeringly expensive and in many ways deeply unsatisfactory. 

Yet through ICTY the facts of the former Yugoslavia conflict have been aired and argued about in stunning detail. If anything the unfairness of the process lies in the fact that it was too narrow: many senior Bosniacs and Croats with a case to answer - including Izetbegovic and Tudjman themselves - were never called upon to explain themselves and answer serious accusations against them.

Still. Rough justice better than no justice?

As I peck at the keyboard there is plenty of scrambling in Washington to try to get together the votes needed to pass the 'compromise' package agreed by President Obama and Republican/Democrat leaders.

Hardcore Democrats bewail the 'cuts'. Hardcore Republicans/Teapartyers bewail the fact that the cuts don't go far enough and may bear down too heavily on defence spending. These positions echo public annoyance and confusion as to what it all means.

Leftists like Paul Krugman are furious with President Obama for ceding too much, to the point of near-hysterical babbling about the startling fact that Congress members elected with a clear mandate to cut federal spending have had the temerity to want to do so. Banana republic tactics! Extortion!

What does it all mean? Luckily we puny earthlings have the brilliant Keith Hennessey to explain it all.

And, as he warns, it all gets very complicated:

The key technical detail is that the Committee’s recommendations on taxes will be measured against a current law baseline for taxes. Under current law, certain taxes are scheduled to go up in 2013, most notably the individual income tax rates and rates on capital gains and dividends. Normally Republicans dislike a current law baseline on taxes, but in this case it helps them.

Here’s what that means for the Joint Committee:

• If the Committee allows tax rates to increase in 2013 (aka “raise tax rates in 2013,” or “let the Bush-Obama tax cuts expire,” depending on your point of view), the additional revenues raised will not count toward the Joint Committee’s target since this is already current law
• So raising these tax rates doesn’t help the Committee meet their $1.5 T deficit target.  That doesn’t mean they can’t include them in their legislation (they can), just that they can’t get any numeric benefit for doing so. That is incredibly important.

Hmm.

OK, Keith. You win. It's complicated. But what does it basically mean?

While the Joint Committee process does not preclude tax cuts, it is tilted pretty heavily against them and toward spending cuts. That is huge.

That sounds OK. Anything else?

Senate Democrats get to punt this year and next on passing a budget resolution and making any politically difficult choices in the open. This is for me the only unequivocally bad part of this bill. It is process abuse, in which Senate Democrats are avoiding taking responsibility for proposing solutions to America’s biggest economic policy problems.

Everyone wants to blame the other side. No change. Next?

I think Team Obama thinks, because a failed Joint Committee would cause the trigger to cut defense spending an additional 10% and nondefense discretionary spending “only” an additional 8%, that Republicans will pay anything to get a new law, including agreeing to tax increases.

I think Congressional Republicans think this judgment is wrong, and this difference of opinion allows both sides to agree to this trigger and this new law

OK. High stakes political poker. No change:

I am reminded of the familiar scene in an action movie. The bad guy holds a hostage and a hand grenade while our hero, five feet away, points a gun at the bad guy. The bad guy threatens to pull the grenade pin and kill himself, the hostage, and our hero. He points out that the hero may not care about himself, but surely he doesn’t want to risk the life of this innocent young girl.

The hero, who we know is a kind and compassionate man, looks the bad guy straight in the eye and says, “Go ahead. Blow us all up. I don’t care about her, and I don’t care about myself, as long as you’re killed in the process as well. We both know you won’t pull that pin because you won’t kill yourself. So let her go and let’s end this peacefully.”

The bad guy backs down because the hero has demonstrated the threat provides no relative advantage. As long as the exploding grenade would do sufficient damage to the bad guy (death), it doesn’t matter that the hero suffers a greater loss (death X 2). The bad guy doesn’t want to carry through with his threat any more than the hero does.

NB: Superb passage on negotiating technique and 'relative advantage'.

But is the underlying problem of dangerously high public spending in the USA solved by this compromise? Or not?

$2 trillion of spending cuts is big for Congress but small relative to our underlying fiscal problems. If this bill becomes law and if the fall Joint Committee process is successful, the remaining spending problem will be more than an order of magnitude larger than this accomplishment.

If you think this summer has been painful or dread the battle of this fall, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait until Congress wrestles with the big stuff.

As I expected. Important step in the right direction, but a long hard road ahead.

Read Keith's three magnificent posts in full. You'll learn something.

Here we are, back from Turkey after the Mother of All Horrible Flights thanks to Thomson Airways, which diligently contrived an 18-hour information-free delay. Details to be written up when I have the strength.

For now have a look at my latest DIPLOMAT piece on Diplomatic Technique. It helpfully includes the answers to the three questions I posed back in May:

You are supervising the seating of VIPs in the two front rows at the theatre at a gala production sponsored by the ITO. As guests arrive you are told that two key VIPs allocated the best centre front-row seats are not expected to attend. Do you:

a)         do nothing

b)                   offer these seats to the two most senior VIPs seated in the second row

c)                   quickly try to find the Head of Mission to see what should be done

d)                   ask other VIPs in the front row to move along so that there is no awkward ‘gap’ in the front row, leaving a seat empty at both ends of the row

e)                   give the seats to two friends who were sitting in the aisle because of the crush

You are the mission’s lead Communications Policy officer. The HoM is busy and gives you several complicated oral instructions in English needing early action. You understand most of them, but not all. Do you:

a)         go back to interrupt the HoM and ask her/him to clarify exactly what he/she meant

b)                   start to carry out those instructions you did fully understand, and leave the others until the HoM is less busy

c)                   ask the Deputy HoM for advice

d)                   do nothing until the HoM is free to confirm exactly what she/he wanted

The Head of ITO plus you and one other top ITO colleague are in a late-night meeting with 20 other delegations arguing over a important UN budget deal worth millions. Several hours more work will be needed. Your delegation shares a pocket calculator to help with the complicated options.

Suddenly the pocket calculator runs out of battery. The junior staff on the delegation were all sent home long ago. An all-night supermarket five minutes away sells new batteries. Do you:

a)         volunteer to run down to the supermarket to buy a new battery

b)                   if the Head of ITO asks you to go and buy a new battery, insist that it is not your job as a senior diplomat to go shopping, and say that the delegation will have to manage by doing paper calculations

c)                   ask around quietly to see if another delegation will lend you a calculator

d)                   not mention the fact that the battery has died and do your best to use paper

e)                   ask the Head of ITO to decide what to do, agreeing to accept any instruction even if you feel it is immensely undignified or even improper

f)                     telephone the hotel to wake up a junior ITO colleague and order a new battery be brought to you asap (probably 45 minutes or more)

The Commentator has published a piece of mine - Torture versus terror - a tale of two resignations - which is intended to bring out in 100% unambiguous terms what practical and ethical/policy dilemmas a blanket extension of the idea of 'complicity in torture' might produce.

It takes a dramatic imaginary scene some years in the future to explain why and precisely how some anguished operational choices might need to be made, and how different honourable people might come to completely different conclusions: 

I believe that in the extreme circumstances I faced, I acted – as I was elected to do - in the national interest, by accepting that information and acting on it. Torture is despicable. We work tirelessly at the United Nations and elsewhere to stamp it out.

But I believe that it cannot be right to avoid any action to thwart murderers and so save innocent lives. The relatives and friends of all the victims of the bombings today in London and Edinburgh will be tortured by their grief from this disaster every day for the rest of their lives.

This situation creates appalling policy and ethical dilemmas for us all. Indeed, I myself might be open to prosecution for what I did. If this happens I will plead not guilty but enter no defence and leave it to the jury to decide.

I do not wish to continue to serve as Prime Minister without a clear mandate from voters as to how I should respond in such circumstances.

I hereby resign my seat in Parliament with immediate effect. A by-election will be called in the shortest possible time. I will stand for re-election but not campaign for it. My statement here tonight represents my only policy position and my only public statement in that campaign...

In fact the dilemmas are there already for practical purposes. British police officers have been busy grilling MI6 officers on what if anything they knew or suspected about the treatment in other countries of AQ and other terror suspects.

These issues take us right to the very outskirts of Policy and how it's made. And if you want one of the most remarkable and profound set of answers ever articulated on some of these problems as they come up in a democracy out there on the Limits of Diplomacy, swing by the transcripts of the UK's Iraq Inquiry and have a read of this testimony by an MI6 officer.

Plenty of heavy black redactions for reasons of the highest secrecy, but what's left is gripping and subtle enough. And, in parts, downright magnificent:

Here is Craig Murray rumbling on about the fact that News International recently held a reception in the FCO:

Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.

But what's this?

A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there.

Let's see what they say now under Conservative/LibDem management...

Remember the Bonn Powers for Bosnia and Herzegovina - the supposed authority bestowed on the High Representative by the 'international community' to allow him/her to remove recalcitrant Bosnians from office or otherwise 'move forward' the 'peace process'?

The impressive thing was that as far as I could see the Bonn Powers had no real legal basis at all. They amounted to an international political power-play bluff which successive High Representatives wrapped up in legal language to make the whole thing look imposing and inevitable.

And they worked, for many years. Senior BH politicians and officials were indeed sacked. Yet the perverse if unsurprising result of sacking people whose elections we had proclaimed to be free and fair was only a diminished sense of local responsibility for real-life outcomes, rather than enhanced effort. Inat?

Thus familiarity bred contempt. Sooner or later a direct legal challenge to these 'powers' was going to be mounted somewhere.

The whole idea of these 'powers' (not granted under the Dayton Peace Treaty) was at best ambiguous. The more they were used, the more likely they were to become counter-productive: they amounted to an arbitrary use of power with no serious legal checks and balances.

Matthew Parish is a lawyer who knows the BH situation from first hand. Here is a trenchant essay decribing how the current HiRep Valentin Inzko is quietly demolishing all the powers, many of which were abused in a grotesque way:

Mass dismissals became common shows of force. High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch dismissed 12 people (and imposed 24 laws and amended the constitutions of both Entities) in his last two days in office. Ashdown dismissed some 58 officials on one day in June 2004.

The so-called “Bonn powers”, named after the international conference that created them, became used with increasing frequency and capriciousness.

Some of the most repellent exercises of this unrestrained authority took place quite late. In July 2007 High Representative Miroslav Lajcak accused a hitherto obscure official Dragomir Andan, then Deputy Head of Police Education in Republika Srpska, of supporting Radovan Karadzic, fired him from office, confiscated his identity documents (and those of 90 other people) and ordered the police to investigate him.

In September of the same year his Deputy, Raffi Gregorian, fined a Brcko District parliamentarian two months’ salary for making an obscene gesture on television.

Bosnia’s Constitutional Court, despairing of the gross failures of due process and right to a fair trial inherent in OHR’s methods, declared that the Bosnian courts should review OHR’s decisions. OHR annulled its judgment and threatened any judge with the same sanctions should (s)he seek to implement the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

What was intended to be a deft tool for removing crude senior trouble-makers after all else had failed became a clumsy and quite illegitimate bludgeon.

The issue now becomes stark(er): can Bosnia and Herzegovina survive in its current form if this threat, clumsy as it was, is removed, allowing Bosnia's Serbs and Croats to express their objections to the Dayton peace deal all the more assertively?

It's easy to be pessimistic:

In lifting OHR’s remaining bans, Inzko has quietly conceded that OHR no longer has the moral authority to dismiss people from public office or to punish them by international decree. An educated and civilised advocate of European values, he considers the use of these powers out of place in a modern democracy.

In taking this decent stance he deserves to be praised in the highest degree, because his embrace of principle is likely to subject him to significant attacks. Abdication of the Bonn powers confirms there is now no domestic tool to prevent Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats from pursuing their secessionist goals.

Bosnia and Herzegovina may collapse over the coming months, and the international community will shortly find it convenient to blame Inzko. We will hear expressions of despair about his weak leadership and lack of resolve in letting Dodik push the country to the brink of failure.

The period of proconsulship is now over, and the international community will need a scapegoat for the fact that its labours over the last 15 years have proven to be for naught. The Americans in particular will inveigh over European weakness, refusing to countenance that their heavy-handed model of state-building, pioneered by Richard Holbrooke in reconstructing Bosnia and Kosovo, has proven unsuccessful.

Instead we are getting a turbo-boosted EU 'Embassy', armed with lots of long-term carrots and no sticks. Soft power!

This soft power strategy carries its own dangers. It risks underestimating the depth of inter-ethnic animosity, which may impede meaningful political cooperation whatever the external incentives. It also assumes a maturity to Bosnian democracy – in which the electorate can be expected to vote for the outcome most economically beneficial to them – which so far has proven absent.

The most desirable solution for the future of Bosnia may be as a radically decentralised state which maintains formal unitary sovereignty only in name. The Scottish, Swiss and Northern Irish models all may provide insights in this regard. But such an approach would entail dismantling many of the institutions of central government that OHR previously created.

If the EU tries to resist this course, then it may perpetuate political crisis in much the same way as OHR has done and its soft power will prove uninfluential.

We are on the brink of a profound change in the international community’s attitudes towards Bosnia. Bosniaks will not like it, because they perceive the authority of OHR to have been exercised mostly in their interests. Croats and Serbs will welcome it because they will be able to advance their agendas ...

International officials cannot credibly exhort domestic politicians to observe the bedrock standards of European governance set out in the European Convention on Human Rights, if they do not see fit to submit to those standards themselves.

That last point must be right.

More generally, the BH model gives all sorts of insights into what works and what does not in internationally-sponsored 'nation-building'. In particular, it points to what I call front-loading for success, taking radical action in the early days of any intervention to remove senior extremists from positions of influence so ass to empower (and be seen to empower) more moderate and constructive local forces. The absurdly extended hunts for Karadzic/Mladic show how idiotic and off-balance things get if this is not done.  

But will anyone bother to learn those lessons and apply them next time round? Of course not.

As always, these things boil down to some simple propositions. In this case, how to make work a new European state when something like half the population would, on the whole, rather not be in it?

You all know where these came from:

• Art never expresses anything but itself
• All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals
• Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life
• Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art

Remember this vivid argument last year? Thus:

The slide asks some questions:

EU in 50,000,000 years' time?   No

EU in 5,000,000 years' time?     No

EU in 50,000 years' time?         No

EU in 5000 years' time?            No

EU in 500 years' time?              No

EU in 50 years' time?                Maybe

EU in five years' time?               Probably

This is a striking idea. It reminds us that over time things just come and go.

I enjoy giving presentations featuring maps of Europe and national borders over the past 800 years, one century at a time. These maps show countries, peoples and powers waxing and waning. Now that the Polish, Holy Roman, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires have disappeared, in some areas of Europe the map looks quite like what we had many centuries ago.

Why should not this pattern continue? In particular, is not the European Union as presently constituted Too Big to Fail - and thereby doomed to Fail in the not too distant future?

In other words, it is likely that within the lifetimes of the sassy young Poles who comprised much of the audience in Krakow last week the European Union will change into something completely different. Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better. Just different.

This change could come slowly. Or abruptly. The state of the EU's finances because of ill-discipline within the Eurozone means that important parts of the EU financial sector across different countries are vulnerable to sudden crashes in global market confidence which, as we have seen, can come out of a clear blue sky.

All of which is simply to say that any talk of opening the Pandora's Box of Treaty Change brings forward to the day when the current arrangements start to dissolve.

The political and operational problem in trying to bring about any organised change is that there is now huge weight of people, money and prestige invested in the current ungainly structures: European Parliament, European Commission and countless funding arrangements for all sorts of activities. So trying to take a proper radical look at what is happening now - and identifying something simpler but better - will be next to impossible.

This is dangerous, since it implies that only a really stupendous crisis will force national governments to confront reality and take the genuinely difficult decisions needed to change course.

In such a situation there is no reason to think that national governments will have too much time for an elusive Europe-wide common interest. Instead it will be sauve qui peut.

Art indeed.

Yet look at this amazing piece from the Guardian's Martin Kettle today, showing how Life is fast catching up:

... just the other day, I heard Sir Stephen Wall say something so similar. Here's what Wall said, at a seminar run by the Policy Network thinktank in London: "We have seen the high point of the European Union. With a bit of luck it will last our lifetime [Wall is 64]. But it's on the way out. After all, very few institutions last forever."

Ferguson is a Eurosceptic. His dismissive view of the EU is not a surprise. But Wall's view that the EU is on the way out marks the death of the old faith. For Wall was the most influential British pro-European diplomat of his time: our man in the negotiations of most of the EU treaties of the modern era; Tony Blair's longtime European policy adviser; and the author of a book on the EU that begins with the words: "I am convinced that wholehearted participation in the EU is strongly in Britain's national interest."

First the Berlin Wall. Now Stephen Wall. European collapses don't come more dramatic.

Yet the remarkable thing about Wall's pessimism is that it no longer seems so remarkable. As EU leaders gathered in Brussels on Thursday to grapple with the Greek crisis, the airwaves were awash with existential debates not just about Greece or the eurozone but about the very future of the EU itself.

Though most EU-watchers still talk of muddling through as the most likely policy response to Greek bankruptcy, it is a muddling without momentum, direction or real agreement, let alone enthusiasm.

NB the famous 'muddling through' idea. One of my very first posts here was all about what the Muddling Through Somehow (MTS) idea means in itself, as it were. MTS makes sense only if there are categories of events which do NOT amount to muddling through - non-MTS events:

The Muddle Through Somehow (MTS) metaphor conveyed a number of interesting assumptions:

 

"… general notions of pragmatism; a certain degree of homely confusion; perhaps an absence of precise planning and control (“muddle”) but at least a broad sense of direction (“through”); … an absence of drastic, shocking, violent or cataclysmic change”.

 

But, I asserted, MTS as a very concept made sense only if it did not cover everything. World War Two had not exactly been a MTS event. In each case there had to be agreed non-MTS events (for Yugoslavia eg civil war or Soviet military intervention to prop up communist rule) whose likelihood also had to be assessed hard-headedly.

 

I tried to weigh all this up, and concluded that there was a serious chance of drastic non-MTS internal tensions escalating across Yugoslavia in the years to come as the various republican leaderships diverted attention from the country’s grim economic problems and played the card of mass nationalism. Kosovo was a particularly likely flashpoint. “One has an eerie feeling of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.”

 

These exchanges read rather well now from my point of view – after many tens of thousands of violent deaths, plus billions of international taxpayers’ dollars thrown not very successfully at the problem. Oh, and look: here comes Kosovo again.

 

Yet it took a while for all that to unfold. Yugoslavia did Muddle Through Somehow. Until it didn't. Hence the core diplomatic policy conundrum: over what timescale is success measured?

Could we just be seeing an extraordinary opportunity for redefining the whole European project: summarily demolishing a lot of the institutional hulks now cluttering the landscape and creating instead a simpler and, yes, less 'ambitious' framework for peaceful cooperation built on much more solid and legitimate foundations?

And if so, does someone in Whitehall have a plan?

Here's a lively little number over at The Commentator, if I say so myself:

There is now little joy in this fast unfolding fiasco for any political tendency or EU member state. Everyone has got what they wanted. Yet it is not working out so well, just as in the best Five Children and It story:

"We want," said Robert slowly, "to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other."

"Avarice," said Jane.

"So it is," said the Fairy unexpectedly. "But it won't do you much good, that's one comfort," it muttered to itself…

"[T]he sight was too dazzling for their eyes to be able to bear it. It was something like trying to look at the sun at high noon on Midsummer Day. For the whole of the sand-pit was full, right up to the very top, with new shining gold pieces …and on the sides and edges of these countless coins the midday sun shone and sparkled, and glowed and gleamed till the quarry looked like the mouth of a smelting furnace, or one of the fairy halls that you see sometimes in the sky at sunset."

Millions of Greeks have not paid their taxes, yet their benefits and state services have trundled on. Greek demonstrators babble that the cuts and taxes needed for Greece to start to pay its honest way are “unfair”.

The Euro-elite in Brussels have wanted and achieved closer economic and political integration at the expense of national governments. Many EU countries have wanted and been given lots of new infrastructure funded by foreigners. People across Europe wanted and have bought new houses and fancy cars. European bankers lent money for this profligacy and have given themselves vast bonuses, confident (they thought) that they would never be called to account if it all went wrong, as they were “too big to fail”.

Leftists clamour for the state to do more. They have a point. In a crisis maybe the first priority is to set more/better rules? Rightists clamour for the state to do less. They too have a point. Has not too much official regulation insulated the financial world from common sense and professional responsibility?

Europhiliacs clamour for “more Europe”. They have a point. The current rules have failed to keep member states in line.

Eurosceptics have the grim satisfaction of saying “I told you so” and clamour for “less Europe”. They have a point. Systems which are too complex lose legitimacy and are doomed to fail.

* * * * *

As in the Psammead’s sand-pit, so in modern Europe. We sit perched on the reality of mountains of borrowed money. Yet we are now confronted with the consequences of that reality, namely that we are fast getting weaker and poorer. The policy train we designed and built chugs into the black Tunnel of Doom. But it’s no-one’s fault!

In this vivid situation, who “deserves” what? And why?