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.
Here as a treat is the answer to those who wail about Greed and Inequality.
Not because Inequality is OK. Or because Greed is OK.
Rather because any of the usually proposed solutions for reducingh such distortions trend towards prioritising other forms of Greed and Inequality, in which collectivists take decisions they are unfit to make and try to use state-sponsored violence to get their way.
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?
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.
The other day we had the pleasure of meeting senior colleagues at Edelman London, part of the global team who prepare the annual Edelman Trust Barometer. The online survey aims explicitly at educated people round the world who follow current affairs.
This year's survey concluded that trust in governments had suffered a sharp erosion in the past year, a finding that is both unsurprising and (as far as it goes) welcome. Yet it also suggested (perversely) that people wanted more government action in the regulatory field. Here's a snapshot of the results as recorded by the BBC.
Trust in government stayed high in several countries including China (perhaps because people there 'trust' the authorities to watch the replies in online surveys like this one?) yet in China trust in NGOs had leaped - NGOs there seen as an emerging force for alternative views?
Trust in business had also declined. Not surprisingly perhaps, given what is going on.
Such surveys are more interesting and indicative than strictly scientific. Yet this one coincides with what we might expect. Basically, as people round the world get access to new cheap IT, the emerging energy of networks is disrupting the established power and effectiveness (and legitimacy) of hierarchies. The rate at which government is unable to cope is accelerating: new laws and policies can be out of date or rendered irrelevant before they are promulgated.
Plus the Tower of Babelisation represented by 'social media' makes it all worse - facts, rumours and complaints all appear and circulate at startling speed, creating strange echo chambers in which truth, sense or nonsense alike are amplified to a meaningless crescendo. Governments are unnerved by this clamour and start to look for instant results. See the latest shameful row over RBS bonuses in the UK, where the government seem to have bowed to 'public opinion' and pressed a private citizen not to enjoy the bonus he is entitled to under his contract.
People in all countries sense this confusion and look to other ways to get things done, while hankering after greater certainty or order which (they still think) only government can provide. Examples in all directions: mainly incoherent, such as the creepy collectivist demands of assorted 'Occupy' tendencies.
One of the ideas which the survey throws up is the proposition that we need to move away from (rigid) Rules towards (more flexible) Principles or Standards. But how?
Look at the Eurozone drama unfolding once again today, as I type. The EU leaders are scrambling to come up with even more rules, in the shape of a brand new treaty which is intended to impose strict requirements on errant member states. Yet we all know that the new rules are unlikely to be enforceable, and new standards are unlikely to be respected when things get difficult. No-one in power dares suggest that the EU structure as currently configured is itself the main problem. Instead they press their leaking euro-canoe on towards the deeper faster rapids, proclaiming that that is the only sensible thing to do.
Trust in fact is what is wrong with the Eurozone. The Germans conclude that (say) the Greek government can not be trusted to do what is right and so must give way to EU-imposed technocrats. The Greeks (not unreasonably) think that they'll get stiffed by such a procedure which is designed to prop up German, French and other over-stretched banks.
Meanwhile the world peruses this unseemly flailing around and concludes that a bickering and demographically declining Europe can not wholly be trusted to repay money it has borrowed, hence imposes higher interest rates to help cover the risk.
Trust, in short, is simply another way of looking at Confidence. And as the Edelman 2012 survey suggests, it is unsurprising that global popular confidence in 'government' is declining - but not easy to work out what sensibly might be done about it.
The core question of politics and economics is Trust. More specifically, under what circumstances can and should one trust strangers?
The greater the ambient level of trust in any given social space, the easier it is to do things quickly and well. People who scarcely know each other or who have never even met can strike sophisticated deals, knowing (a) that other partners are likely to be reliable, and (b) that if things go wrong the local state institutions will honestly help sort out the problem.
Without Trust of this sort, personal and organizational horizons shrink. Extended family networks and associated corruption thrive as the best way of dealing with the trust problem.
Or one trusts primarily members of one's own group/clan/religion/community. And assumes that members of other groups/clans/religions/communities are doing the same, so they are not to be trusted too far since their primary loyalty (like one's own) is not to a fair, neutral process.
All this is massively obvious across the former Yugoslavia space. Political leaders must represent 'their' national communities first and foremost if they are to get elected; voters distrust other communities and make a mainly ethnic/national choice as a form of political fire insurance.
Even in the UK where there is no serious complaint about the intrinsic fairness of the legal system and Trust is at civilizationally high levels, many Scots want a different political structure, viz some sort of independence from England. Likewise Quebec, Kurds, Chechens and countless other examples. The Israeli/Palestinian problem seems capable of being settled only on an ethno-national basis.
Thus the so-called 'nation-state' turns out to be a sophisticated device for enabling trust to operate, often at much higher levels of population. This has created conditions for the surge of economic growth and creativity seen around much of the globe over the past couple of centuries. Greater attention to this fundamental trust issue would pay huge dividends in the international development industry.
Our success here in Europe (and the ruinous experience of the two World Wars where certain national ambitions ran amok ) has brought us to think that there is a new 'higher' stage of development.
The European Union is a unique example of an attempt to create a wider context of trust at a supra-national level. But it too risks making a fundamental blunder by trying to insist on, or sneakily nudge people towards, a new 'European' uber-identity which supersedes supposedly drearily parochial 'national' identities...
In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.
This one even has added Literature:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.
This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.
But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...
... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.
No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?
Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.
Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.
In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.
Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly...
... In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.
It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states...
I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:
Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.
There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.
Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis' fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.
Here at Commentator are my vivid thoughts on the way The Rules drive out common sense discretion in public services in general, and at Leeds Crown Court in particular:
Stop right there, Mr Ambassador! What would happen if the Embassy in Warsaw went out of its way at a senior level to help this one hapless citizen? That would set a precedent for the whole network -- word would get around that one person in Poland had had a lot of active support from the Embassy and the Ambassador personally, and everyone else would expect the same! Worse, it could even be a breach of their Human Rights if they did not get it!
... So there it is. After years if not decades of Citizen's Charters and all sorts of official Mission Statements, Objectives, Targets and goodness knows what other noisily proclaimed expensive initiatives intended to make public servants helpful and responsive to the public, this forlorn group of public servants were bent on driving a few taxpayers and citizens out into a howling rainstorm for no reason other than the fact that The Rules appeared to require it.
The point?
The standardisation of public service needed to deliver what, as far as possible, counts as equality of treatment for all can be achieved only by deliberately excluding competition and any serious incentives to improve services.
Those people at any level of public service finding a clear case for common sense and discretion which somehow goes against The Rules risk getting into trouble (or think they do).
And in such an uncompetitive, neurotic context The Rules breed like crazy, as we see in English education where the state's instructions to schools now run into hundreds of pages and have catastrophic results.
Outcomes deteriorate. Dumbed down stupidity and officiousness result. Confidence in the state erodes.
But as the Leeds episode shows, the public can fight back. When confronted with an obviously insane decision, politely insist that those concerned use their discretion or demand to see where The Rules say that no such discretion exists.
The officials concerned are visibly rattled by the thought that maybe, just maybe, The Rules in fact allow them to think.
Civil servants! If you have any examples of this working against good practice, just send them in. Key thing: do you think your hierarchy will support you if you do the smart thing, even if it goes against established procedure?
We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.
But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?
Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?
I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.
The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.
This really matters.
Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.
Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?
Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?
Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:
But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...
Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.
So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?
The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.
Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..
And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.
This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.
The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.
Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.
So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:
This is how 2011 and our civil liberties limp to an end. With a supposedly arty chair in a shop in Lewes being accused of falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act.
Look at what is going on here.
A woman designer of this tedious piece of furniture has decided to adorn it with naked women taken from old Playboy magazines. So much for the feminist argument that such images 'degrade' women - even trendy women designers like them, to the point of wanting male and female buttocks to crush down upon them!
But lo!, a 'member of the public' saw the chair in the shop window - and complained to the police!
Worse. The police did not tell the member of the public to get a life. They moved into action.
Think about that. You're walking along past the shops in earnest, self-important, middle-class little Lewes, and you see something you don't like. You are not content to shrug and put it all down to living in a free society. Nor is it enough to walk on and not buy the stupid chair. You don't want the possible embarrassment of going into the shop to argue with the shopkeeper. So you outsource all responsibility and urge ... the state to act.
Then the state acts. The police take this stupid request seriously enough to go along, no doubt keen on looking at the chair themselves. They rummage around in their modest brains and find something which covers the case (they think), namely the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.
No matter that the act is intended to cover (a) 'obscene' and (b) 'publications', neither of which obviously apply in this case. The shop was then 'politely' asked (by whom) to remove the chair from the shop window. Which, according to the Sun, was done. What would have happened if the shopkeeper had 'politely' refused, asking the police to get out of the shop and mind their own damn business?
Is this a stunning example of crass state oppression, nothing being too small or fatuous to avoid heavy-handed police intervention?
Or is it even worse, namely the state asserting to itself the right to lean upon anyone when someone claims to be 'offended' or insulted? Where exactly is free speech in that?
Or is it all these things plus jolly British seasonal eccentricity, and a chance for the bored policepersons of Lewes to get away from filling in forms and ogle a chair with boobs..?
2011 has exhausted its possibilities. Next year, please.
Even on Christmas Eve - or maybe especially on Christmas Eve - we need to be aware of those repellamt people who stroll around the Western chattering classes exploiting the historic privilege of democracy to make excuses for the inexcusable.
All the very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all my loyal readers. Let's all look forward to a calm, stable and generally agreeable Eurozone in 2012.
My extended thoughts on the Russian elections for the national parliament (Duma) which took place on Sunday, 4 December.
I played a modest part in the proceedings as an official international observer accredited to the elections under the auspices of the International Institute for Integration Studies, a Moscow-based grouping close to senior circles of power in Russia. The Institute supports various public conferences around the world, including the strange one I attended in Belgrade in June. Full disclosure note: I was offered (and accepted) a fee for observing these Russian elections, but it was agreed that I was under no obligation to say anything other than what I thought about the elections or about developments in Russia in general.
Other groups of official international observers were also criss-crossing Russia as elections day approached and on the day itself. The OSCE delivered what looked like the largest observer effort, not least ‘long-term observers’ tasked with looking at the elections in the context of the wider Russian political process. The OSCE's provisional findings include a number of very critical observations on these elections, but also give credit where credit was due in a number of significant respects.
Anyway, I arrived in Moscow on the evening of 1 December to join a dinner with other IIIS group observers, namely some Serbs and Italians. The Serbs were all at the ‘patriotic’ end of the political spectrum in Belgrade and included the Radical Party's Dragan Todorovic who had started spluttering uncontrollably during my presentation in Belgrade in June. One of the other guests was Borislav Milosevic, brother of Slobodan, who had served as Belgrade's ambassador in Moscow after the NATO bombing of Serbia. I did my very best to explain to him the private frustrations of Western leaders and diplomats in dealing with his late brother.
The next day we had briefings about the elections process from the Russian Senate and National Elections Commission and I gave an interview to SKY TV before we set off on our various journeys to watch actual voting. I was relatively lucky (or so I thought) by being sent to Nizhny Novgorod, 400 km east of Moscow. Some of the Serbs had to go to Vladivostok.
IIIS deliver senior access. In Nizhny Novgorod I was given excellent personal briefings by the Deputy Governor and the head of the local elections commission, who showed me one of the new electronic counting machines being used in a number of polling stations across the country.
I then headed for my first polling station. Mistake! I slipped on the ice and wrecked my ankle. I was taken to the nearby basic but efficient wrecked ankle clinic doing its usual brisk business on a Sunday afternoon in Russian winter. An x-ray revealed no breakage of bone, but I had seriously damaged everything else.
The result of this fiasco was that I visited only one polling station, not long before it was due to close. It was run by cheery no-nonsense Russian women. The different parties taking part in the elections had their representatives there – almost all women (Russian men have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon). The party representatives reported no problems. I was intrigued to see arrangements for small portable ballot boxes to be taken to any voter unable to visit the polling station; party representatives were entitled to accompany the ballot boxes during such manoeuvres. It all looked very normal.
After a painful overnight train journey back to Moscow, I attended a desultory press conference at which a smug Bulgarian observer proclaimed that the elections as a whole had been more than free and fair. It was not made clear on whose behalf he was making this bold assertion: his statement was brought round for other observers to sign, and I of course did not sign it. I then departed for home, enjoying a forlorn ride by wheelchair from the aircraft at Heathrow through Terminal 5 to spare my sorry foot.
* * * * *
So much for the little I saw of the elections themselves. Wider considerations?
International election observers have to try to do three things. They need to look at the rules-in-themselves to see whether they make sense and are reasonable and comprehensive. They need to look at how the rules are then applied to real life: are the procedures on paper being properly followed and interpreted? Finally, they need to look at the process as a whole and to see where it fits into the country's political life.
It cannot be said often enough. Russia is an unfathomably huge country with unique issues of command and control (and associated attitudes to governance) going back many centuries. Until the collapse of communism in 1991 there was no tradition of representative democracy. Setting up democratic institutions and practices (and, most important) creating democratic instincts had to be slow.
The arrangements laid down by Russia’s law for conducting elections are technically impressive, albeit detailed to the point of obsession. Russian procedures are better than ours here in the UK in at least three respects:
Votes are counted in the polling station concerned immediately after the polls close, in the presence of party and other observers (ballot boxes are not moved to central counting points with the risk of mischief en route)
No ID, no vote
No postal voting
Moreover, there are streamlined and well monitored arrangements for getting the election results sent fast to Moscow for central compilation. Amidst the complaints about Russia's elections, you don't hear the argument that the counting of the votes as cast has not been fair and accurate.
Remember (again!) the sheer scale of the voting process. Russia has 96,000 polling stations catering for nearly 110,000,000 voters. People are voting for national-level politicians, with totals for individual parties simply added together to get a final total (on one way of looking at it a much simpler and fairer system than they have in eg the USA). The Law of Big Numbers kicks in. Cheating on a scale that makes a significant difference has to be massive – and obvious.
So what's the problem?
First, there inevitably are a large number of electoral violations of different shapes and sizes. When I wrote my book review for the LSE on Electronic Voting, I was struck at how we all take for granted the procedural complexity of voting. The following (and many more) are all essential:
voters lists compiled and kept up-to-date
secret voting
ballot boxes sealed throughout the process
accurate ballot papers printed and distributed under controlled conditions
identification for voters
meticulous and transparent counting, to make sure that all votes are counted and only votes properly cast have been counted
procedures for disputes as to what a messy mark on a given ballot paper might mean
arrangements for recording the final outcome and storing all ballot papers securely in case of future legal challenges.
At literally every stage of the process in any country there is scope for human error and/or deliberate mischief. Ruling out both 100% is impossible.
Thus we need to be careful in agreeing with those who allege “massive violations “of electoral procedures in Russia or anywhere else. If every polling station in Russia has only one complaint about some or other procedural violation, there will be 96,000 complaints! Massive violations! Yet many of those complaints (including two we heard: one party doing some campaigning on the “day of silence" before the elections and not printing its name on election materials) will have been trivial in themselves and quite irrelevant to the final outcome.
Some violations are deliberate and (as far as local conditions allow) systematic. One frequent claim again in Russia is that ‘captive’ voters in mental illness institutions and the Army were lent on hard to vote for the Putin party. Unofficial crowd-sourced election monitors Golos have put on the Web all sorts of other examples, some filmed as they happened.
Complicated official arrangements such as running a nationwide election work in good part because they are transparent. Yes, in formal terms Russia does all it needs to do to host international and political party observers. But this time round the blatant official and unofficial pressure put on Golos (including denial of service website attacks and the usual insinuations that foreign support for such organisations was illegitimate or sinister) created a very bad impression.
More generally the post-Communist ruling establishment in Russia has changed the law to make it harder for new political parties to make a breakthrough. (Note: UKIP has views on the subject here in the UK.) Smaller parties are not allowed to form a single voting bloc. The rules for forming a national party able to contest national elections are excessively strict and not easy to meet. An earlier, excellent option of including on the ballot paper a vote for “none of the above" has been withdrawn. And so on.
Add to all this the violence suffered by some journalists who try to expose official corruption, unrelenting pro-Putin media coverage and the way far too many Russian media outlets condemn or marginalise any liberal views, and you get the sort of outcome which the OSCE fairly criticises.
But…
Just look at the results. Four parties have made it into the national parliament, after roughly half the Russian population voted:
The Putin/Medvedev party United Russia.
The retread Communists who still rant on about Marxist-Leninism (now with added Patriotism)
The erratic pro-Establishment Liberal Democrat populists led by Zhirinovsky, whom we fondly remember on a Russian train taking pot-shots at voters’ pets with a hunting rifle.
And A Just Russia, a relatively new party claiming to be social democrats which has proposed an alliance with the Communists
Parties representing a more liberal policy-set involving reduced state control and better human rights either did not get into the race or (as in the case of Yavlinsky's Yabloko party) failed dismally once again. A new supposedly centre-right party Right Cause won only 400,000 votes.
Western commentators and some in Russia are claiming these election results show rising dissatisfaction with the performance of Vladimir Putin. They might even be right. But that dissatisfaction is rising from a low and apathetic base, and insofar as it translates into changed voting it boosts tendencies which are even worse. Compared with the other three national/socialist parties which crossed the threshold to enter the Duma, Putin's party look almost normal. Putin remains the favourite to be voted back in as Russia's president in the forthcoming elections next March.
In short, the legacy of Soviet communism lives on powerfully in Russia. Lenin still moulders in red Square. Nizhny Novgorod railway station welcomes you with a vast Communist mosaic. Former KGB-type people have prospered since Communism ended, and use their power and wealth to frame things in their favour.
Under current management Russia is getting steadily more prosperous and steadily more pluralistic, albeit in a specific Russian way. Russians en masse have a (for us) startling capacity for putting up with hardships, including overbearing and neurotic state power. They are not bothered by their leaders sneering at foreigners or homosexuals or liberal attitudes. They do want to see progress and get richer, and they hate corruption and get-rich-quick types. But it takes a lot to rouse them to take a stand against the existing “system “.
Are things changing, with young urban people in particular demanding wider changes? If so, does it matter?
Maybe. After the elections the head of the National Elections Commission proclaimed that evidence of electoral malpractice produced by Golos would not be investigated unless it was backed by 'official' complaints. This cynical view reflects a ruling Russian mindset going back centuries, namely that only ‘official’ procedures count.
Yet in Russia as in so many other countries the mass of people are getting more powerful vis-a-vis the state. Perhaps the main story of these elections is the way many Russians are now using cheap mobile technology to follow and record what is happening across their vast country - and Vladimir Putin's so far uncertain response.
Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair's Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency:
"... the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force"
Almost anything said by the Western world's increasingly bedraggled and violent Occupiers falls into this category, a footling mish-mash of ignorant platitudes jumbling up anti-capitalist slogans with Green and feminist 'demands' of all shapes, genders and sizes.
But these dim light-bulbs are as nothing compared to Naomi Klein who operates on an intergalactic if not utterly cosmic scale of forceful idiocy. Something has gone badly wrong at the Browser who link to what they call her 'outstanding essay' on Capitalism and Climate.
Well, to be fair, it is outstanding. Outstandingly communist and odious.
It's very long and gets increasingly hysterical as she tries to create a new way of looking at things which moves on from both the Greedy Neoliberal Right and Statist Left:
The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilisational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.
So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable.
These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.
Anyway, Naomi wants a heck of a lot of collective action, which (it turns out to no-one's surprise) necessarily involves incredible coercion by the Statist Left inflicted on the rest of us:
Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale.
That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.
The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.
This is the very same public sector which is wasting trillions of dollars by messing up the Eurozone.
We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. (But why do you think people will vote for this folly? What happens when they try it, find it's crazy, then vote against it? Presumably you'll stop this happening by refusing to turn back the wheel of history)
The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world (Drivel - the 'vast majority' of people on earth have been getting richer precisely because authoritarian socialism has been dumped)
These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. (Yup - the Arab Spring sure is all about the Arab masses rising up against neoliberal economics.) Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative...
Anyway, on she drones at vast length. But amidst all the rambling, this one especially outlandish thought caught my eye as summing up just why she is so confused and perhaps dangerous (my emphasis):
The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty.
Meanwhile, in the industrialised world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.
Just say we all decide that 'corporations' are too powerful and somehow need to be 'reined in', favouring state-driven 'planning' instead. Where do jobs and innovation then in fact come from?
What is missing in Klein's wild rant is any sense at all of the role of personal creativity. Growth is nothing more than the cooperation of people inventing and doing new things, preferably within a solid legal framework to help mobilise others to invest their efforts and accumulated savings too.
It is theoretically meaningless to 'reserve' growth for parts of the world pulling themselves out of poverty. Every time anyone anywhere has a good new idea, the potential for growth asserts itself: how even in theory do you limit that? Poor people in principle of course can be as inventive as anyone else. But it is only capitalism and market processes which allow that creative energy to be reproducible on a significant scale for general benefit. Poor people are poor because they do not have capitalism but usually gangster statist socialism instead.
To go the Klein route means that huge millions of people will be sacrificed and die for 'the planet'. As market mechanisms are dumped in favour of 'planned' outcomes, we'll no longer have any coherent basis for working out what anything costs and what is 'affordable'. Every industry now existing will be run down. Medicines will not be developed. New, cheaper technologies for fixing things and saving energy won't be invented.
And since there is no prospect of containing people and their creativity in this insane way except by brute force, democracy will have to give way to the Statist Left on Steroids, aka one-party communism. Which we have tried.
It was not such a good deal for the Planet, as the systemic information deficiency and suppression of innovation caused by mass oppression stopped even the most elementary environmental concerns from being registered. Ecological disaster on a scale greater than anything else ever seen on Earth took place:
This is what Nutty Naomi wants to re-inflict on us, as an 'existential imperative'.
All the greatest idiocies rolling inexorably into one gigantic useless force.
No thanks. Please go away.
Update I needn't have bothered. JoNova does a far better and ruthless demolition job by looking at how Naomi ignores the numbers:
Klein thinks the answers to feeding the poor lies with “Big Government”, but rational thinkers know that more than anything, the fate of the poor depends on clear thinking, real evidence, and polite debate. None of which is on offer in this article.
Reading Klein is like visiting a parallel universe — her religious devotion to her ideology means nearly every sentence is the exact opposite of the truth. More’s the pity that The Nation has no editors who recognise innumerate drivel and an ideological rant based on a logical black hole.
Bad mannered bluster, blind assumptions, and religious rationalization have always been the tool of witchdoctors and con artists.
We mere taxpayers suspect in our dark hearts that a formidable industry has grown up around the 'climate change' issue, with all sorts of organisations big and small depending on state handouts to survive, and so frothing up the climate issue regardless of the facts to make sure that those handouts keep on rollin'.
Today I was giving my views on the Diplomacy of Climate Change to one such NGO, pointing them in the direction of my website and such gems as this and especially this:
It of course all depends on the precise questions being asked.
Does human activity have an impact on the planet? Of course.
Is it easy to measure that impact? To a degree yes, but only over the relatively short term.
Does the climate change naturally anyway? Of course. It would be impossible to imagine a world in which it didn't. It probably would be dead.
So how do we measure what changes are caused by Man, and which are occurring anyway? Ah, now you're talking. Very difficult, the more so if you look at longer timescales.
If it turns out that human activity is affecting the planet, are the effects good or bad? Some must be bad (eg if we eat every fish, no more fish). But again, it depends on what timescale you choose to use - what is Bad over (say) a century may turn out to be Good over a longer period. Thus the Industrial Revolution poured out nasty pollution (and still does) but it opened the way to far more economical use of natural resources now and into the future.
Is it better to act now to stop future bad outcomes? This is the heart of it. We can't be sure what will be bad outcomes and what will be good ones. So it may well not be wise to overinvest now in vast inflexible and expensive schemes to 'prevent' climate change. Better (in my view) to spend money as we go, adapting to the effects of changes as they unfold over time.
So are you saying do nothing now?! No. Energy-saving ideas and generally being less wasteful look to make sense. There will be a role for government in advancing those. But the main impetus must come from market forces and human ingenuity. Where else? Huge collectivist schemes are unlikely to be wise or sustainable in terms of popular support - we just do not know enough about Cause and Effect over the timescales concerned.
But what about all the scientific evidence? Hmm. In the past thirty years 'scientists' have veered between warning of a new Ice Age to warning about Global Warming to (now) warning about Climate Change in any and all directions. Not very persuasive?
Don't you care about future generations? I do care about them, often. Some of them live in my house and demand pocket money. But one way to care about them is not to lumber them with huge debts and stupid policies brought about by our current ignorance and hubris. Look at it this way. Which scientific innovations or other trends/developments would you have stopped in 1909 to make things better now? And how would you have been sure that you hit the right ones then? Why should poorer people in 1909 have subsidised far richer people in 2009? Why should poor people in 2009 subsidise far richer people in 2109, or 2209?
Bottom Line? Steady as she goes. Bet on the wisdom of people, not on the dogmatic certainty of governments. Because it is just not clear what to do for the best. And governments will make a far bigger mess if they get that wrong.
We chatted to and fro about Climate diplomacy. I said that as Copenhagen had showed, the very complexity of the issue meant that a 'global' approach to it was doomed to fiasco. Better to get together a smallish group of industrialised carbon-generators (eg the Top 20) and try to sort out something within a much smaller circle. There would be fierce squeals from all the people and NGOs left out, but too bad - Saving the Planet was far more important than their self-esteem issues.
But even that, said I, assumed that (a) we could convincingly identify a causal relationship between human activity x and bad climate change y, and (b) identify policies that would help tackle y while not causing new problem z.
Oh, and then we'd have to work out who pays for it all.
All of which went to explain why countries like China piously insisted on bringing in the developing world to the process: by expanding the meeting they ensured that nothing would happen on Climate, which suited them for the next 50 years or so as their development hurtled on.
Meanwhile all bureaucrats could sense when top-level leaders were really focusing on an issue, or not. The policy caravan had moved on, from Climate to Arab Spring to Money. No senior attention was being given to Climate issues, regardless of the fact that more huge Climate junkets were continuing in Durban soon and on to Rio next year. PM David Cameron had already said that he's not going to Rio. Good choice - total waste of time.
I concluded that it all boiled down to a simple choice: spend massively now with money we don't have on uncertain and probably stupid measures, or be less ambitious and invest in adapting to Change rather than foolishly trying to modify it. And even that was not a choice - we'd end up adapting and hoping for the best, as there was no deliverable alternative to it.
My youthful NGO friend said that he tended to agree with the Bjorn Lomborg arguments on the whole issue. But he had to be careful what he said, lest his NGO stop getting funding!
I politely pointed out that he had said something profoundly bad and corrupt. The whole Western world was reeling from ill-advised investment decisions (mainly by profligate governments), and his organisation was hiding what it believed to be the truth to keep getting money. Horrendous. I sympathised with his current career plight, but that was no way to go. He ruefully said that he saw the point.
So, there we have it.
It's not Climate Truth that counts.
It's the requirement that we taxpayer suckers keep paying out to people who want to avoid the truth if it puts their grants at risk.
Greece relies on imports, fuel and food especially. The agricultural sector has dropped to less than 4% of GDP – can enough be grown to feed the population? How many more businesses will close because they can't get stock or supplies? Where do we get the cash and specialised skills to revive moribund industry to produce products needed in the country, let alone exports? Will stagflation and harsher austerity be survivable?
Tourism may boom, at least for those who don't mind things scruffy and simple. Hopefully they won't expect quality, and will be content with what we used to offer in the 60s – as long as it's dirt cheap...
... The disconnect is mutual. It's rare to find anyone who retains faith in any bastion of the state. Polled regarding corruption among various professions, 94% believed politicians are all or mostly corrupt, journalists 80%, the church 67%, judges 64%.
Such animus is justified, by revelations of how much of the country's money they have simply lost (the state bank president reported that 30% of the budget was unaccounted for); by endless scandals that never lead to punishment; by more than three decades of much-needed improvements promised, enacted into law, then ignored.
Fear and anomie increase as we realise how profoundly wounded this society is. It seems the price of freedom from the bloated, feckless bureaucracy in Brussels is to maintain the status quo; that the opportunists will flourish; the political cabal will expand their power; that justice won't prevail.
The only certainty is how wrong the pundits are to presume Greece's recovery is simply a matter of "weathering the transition, increasing exports and returning to the markets".
See also an unusually cogent stream of Comments, going to and fro over how far Greece and its Leftist culture have created all this misery.
The key issue is simple. How can a country like Greece create wealth and so avoid being like a dusty poor part of Africa?
The traditional route is obvious enough. It exports sunshine in the form of tourism. But modern tourism needs decent facilities and one or two basic things like water and petrol. Cheaper-end tourism won't pay for the imports to keep up standards on the scale Greece needs. So wealth-creating industries and activities are needed too.
Greece's problem now is that no-one wants to lend Greece the money to help these things keep going, except at unaffordable interest rates. For all the reasons described in the above article, Greece has collectively lost credibility as a society.
Commenter Demetri is on superb form here:
Too many Greeks want money.... from someone else.The believe their are "owed" money by other Greeks...the government... .the banks... the EU.... rather than take personal responsibility for their own lives. The unions are still holding Greece hostage with their endless strikes and riots (destroying their own country)/ This is not out of principle and human goodness. Its because austerity hurt their pocket books. Their motivations are personal greed and petty envy of those that have more money than themselves... not ethics.
In reality far leftists in Greece are tax evaders and corrupt in no lesser frequency than the very "elites" they constantly scapegoat for their problems. The main difference is the far leftists expect the same money as others... but don't actually produce enough to earn the money they think they are owed. They would rather hug a tree and write poetry rather than build a factory that produces jobs and goods.
In short, they want to live parasitically off others while whining about the injustice of it all.
... If Greeks want their dignity back they will now have to earn it through their labours not borrowing money or expecting others to fund their lifestyle. Rather than constantly whining about how the government owes them money and calling for revolution far leftist Greeks need to grow up and start thinking about how to start an export business. Or how to get practical in demand technical skills.
Rather than scheming for new ways as to how they can taking the wealth of others, far leftists in Greece need to start thinking how they can produce wealth themselves. It is morally stronger position to give than to take.
A profound conclusion lost on the tedious #OccupyLSX tent-dwellers and all the other 'occupiers' now being roundly ignored everywhere.
Their remedy - to make things better by 'protesting' and 'making demands' while offering not a shred of a sensible idea - is just what is NOT needed to impress foreign investor who now have money which we don't have.
In an historic move, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke yesterday announced a major strengthening of the rights of victims standing up to intruders in their property.
It means anyone who reacts ‘instinctively’ to defend their home and possessions will be protected if they use reasonable force. The current law says they can act only if they feared for their life or those of their family. It also places duty on victims to retreat from an attacker if they are acting in self-defence. This will also be scrapped.
At the same time, the Home Office is set to change guidance for police on whether to arrest someone who has attacked an intruder in their home. It could mean arrests are not necessary when householders and businessmen say they have acted in self-defence.
Mr Clarke said: While fleeing is usually the safest option if you feel threatened, people are not obliged to retreat when defending themselves or their homes
The funny thing about newspaper stories like this one is that is often not easy to find out what exactly has been 'announced'.
Mr Clarke said: 'People should feel safe in their communities and especially in their own homes and these measures, along with the rest of our radical package of reforms, will ensure they are protected.'
The measures include:
Making squatting in residential buildings a criminal offence
Strengthening people’s rights to use force to defend themselves from intruders in their own homes
The site then points you the House of Commons website to see the proposed amendments to the law. But it is a hell of a faff trying to find the amendments relating to burglary/intruders.
Anyway, I have tried - and failed!
But I have found the proposals to make squatting a criminal offence - quite a shift in the law, as it happens. It's here, but you have to scroll down to 3615.
I have telephoned the MoJ Press Office to see if anyone can point me to the exact changes proposed in the law relating to burglary. I was told that the law currently said that when confronted by a burglar a homeowner was under a duty to retreat. I asked where that came from - what was the source of that assertion? Some sort of case-law norm?
They promised to get back to me. I await their call.
Talking of squatters, there's this historic text which as it happens has a lot to say about self-defence and indeed mentions Bahrain in that context (Note: not for the faint-hearted)
It turns out that the proposed changes are pretty puny.
“Defence of property” becomes a legitimate purpose of self-defence (it wasn’t previously?!). And a tweak is applied to one possible (and ridiculous) legal interpretation of s76 of the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act which itself codified common law principles of self-defence and how reasonableness is applied::
“In deciding the question mentioned in subsection (3), a possibility that D could have retreated is to be considered (so far as relevant) as a factor to be taken into account rather than as giving rise to a duty to retreat”
So, listen you moronic judges and barristers overdosing on Human Rights legislation! There is no ‘duty’ to run away to help someone prove the reasonableness of any self-defence if he/she is attacked, OK?
Will the Ministry also issue guidance to courts and police on homeowners defending themselves or their property, with a strong steer not to prosecute anyone for defending themselves unless the violence used is unbelievably ‘disproportionate’. Who knows? The MoJ website doesn’t tell us.
In 1969, in her seminal work On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross eloquently detailed the five stages of dying - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. It remains one of the most important contributions to our understanding of the final phase of life and will do much to explain the otherwise baffling lack of self-awareness characterizing European elites' approach to the entire EU project...
Back in 2005 after the French and Dutch referendum debacles, William Schirano and John Hulsman wrote a doom-laden piece for the US-based The National Interest about the fact that the European Union and its ideals were, in fact, dying.
Watching the latest fevered summitry it is hard not to see Denial, Anger, Bargaining and Depression aplenty. Just quite not enough Acceptance yet?
Perhaps this is understandable. How to accept that something so vast and magnificent is failing, and perhaps giving way to uncertainty and disarray which risk lurching Europe back towards its ghastly past?
Read a version of their famous article here. It's only some 300 weeks old, but the names of the key players (Blair, Chirac, Schroder) seem to come from a prehistoric age.
Six years on things are, of course, much worse. But their core idea still makes sense:
Simply put, a one-size-fits-all approach does not conform to the modern political realities of the Continent - European countries have politically diverse opinions on all aspects of international life: free trade issues, attitudes toward NATO, relations with the United States and how to organize their own economies.
For example, the Netherlands is a strongly free-trading country, traditionally pro-NATO and proAmerican. France, by contrast, is more protectionist, more skeptical of NATO, more statist in organizing its economy and more competitive in its attitude toward America. Thus the two European renegades actually have very different political cultures - there simply is no common "European national interest."
The EU should function as a political clubhouse - coordinating an intra-European consensus where one exists...
Tragedy! It arrived but was just too big for my, ahem, delicate wrist.
I promptly repacked the box and sent it back. They are promptly refunding both the cost of the watch and the cost of the special posting needed to return it safely.
If you are ordering a watch online, do think about just how big you want your watch to be. Wide and a tad heavy appears to be in fashion at the moment, and it's not easy to tell as you blink in awe at this site what it will look and feel like in practice. Christopher Ward are most helpful in talking this through too.
So if you are looking for that always winning combination of fine service and elegant products for a special gift for someone, go no further than this site.
Retailers! Even when you end up not selling something you generate great good will and a strong reputation by being organised, helpful and courteous about it.
* * * * *
Update One of the founder partners of Christopher Ward writes:
I just wanted to thank you for taking the trouble to pen such a positive note – even though we didn’t sort out a watch you wanted. Rest assured, the whole team will be circulated with your comments as this is the kind of reward that really motivates them to continue giving what we hope is the finest assistance possible to our customers.
Let's give his troops a boost by looking at what they are doing well.
The core Christopher Ward business is selling good Swiss watches much cheaper than others by cutting out marketing and other glossy flim-flam. Hence the watches are sold through their website.
To sell a classy product they need a classy website, duly delivered.
Very few(!) grammatical and other infelicities of the sort likely to annoy someone like pernickety me. Easy to navigate. Lots of quick-access photos of the different watches to make a potential customer get very interested. Nice testimonials and media reviews (although of course we see only the good testimonials - maybe some people out there thought the products rubbish?). Also interesting background material on what makes watches special. There's even a section on Ethics, although this seems a bit 'random' and inward-looking.
This is all backed up by people who answer telephones and reply quickly to emails in a positive, professional way.
So, in short, an impressive enterprise which does a good job in trying to create a feeling of partnership and engagement with customers. Dialogue/questions/comments are positively welcomed. This is hard to deliver on a larger scale for obvious reasons (see the very different emphasis of eg Amazon, although their vast operation also turns on strong service and reliability), but for a smaller, more targeted customer-base it is a strong feature as long as it is done well. Which in this case it is, to judge by my own experience.
All in all, Christopher Ward come across as people who enjoy what they are doing and are really striving to give their customers something 'extra'.
In other words, a superb example of the benefits of capitalism. People taking a personal risk to build a new business using a new model, whose success in turn creates new jobs and new products: incredibly sophisticated, beautiful devices available to a much wider group of people than ever before in human history.
Walter Russell Mead pours out one fine article after another.
Look at his blunt observations on the desperate situation in Rhode Island where years of not decades of public sector greed and a refusal by politicians and unions there to accept underlying financial realities (especially for pensions) is creating a ghastly mess now:
Rhode Island is looking more and more like Greece, and not in a good way. That is one message of this important piece by Mary Williams Walsh in the New York Times. Years of blue social policy have wrecked local and state government finance in the country’s smallest state, and now the bills are coming due. Services are being cut to the bone and elderly retirees are losing money they thought was secure.
In Rhode Island, it is Democrats, not nasty union-hating Republicans, who are doing the dirty work. Democratic mayors are telling their unions that there isn’t any money — not because they are vicious corporate stooges who hate working people and want to see them suffer, but because There. Isn’t. Any. Money.
... But “objectively”, as our Marxist friends would say, the union leaders and their political chums were the worst enemies of the workers: they told state workers that their benefits were secure even as it became increasingly obvious that, as a matter of arithmetic, they were not.
Let’s be crystal clear about this. To tell a 50 year old pretty lies about the soundness of a pension plan is one of the most wicked and irresponsible things you can do without actually shedding blood; people who believe these phony promises will not make the extra savings, work the extra years or otherwise take steps to protect themselves until it is too late.
Telling those pretty lies is exactly what Rhode Island’s establishment has been doing for some time; it is what Ostrich Party legislators, trade unionists, journalists and governors are still doing across much of the country...
Reform cannot and should not be understood simply as an assault on state and local government workers — although these workers cannot be insulated from the general consequences of a major failure of our political system.
The problem is not that teachers and firefighters earn “too much” money; the problem is that we have developed a dysfunctional social system which cannot pay its bills. The public economy needs to be rationalized and restructured, but the most important job is to revitalize and energize the private sector...
Devastating.
Neither the US political classes nor the EU political classes seem to understand that the game based on funding unaffordable spending via the hope of unending growth is up.
A few years back I joined a seminar organised in the margins of a FCO Leadership Conference in London. The discussion focused on global trends. A striking observation was made: “in the past ten years or so we have seen one of the greatest changes in human history–a billion people have joined the global economy".
This, it was argued, changed everything. Above all, it meant a colossal downward pressure on living standards in Western economies: when so many jobs and functions could now be outsourced to poorer parts of the world, why should wages in the UK and elsewhere in Europe and the USA continue to trend upwards? This in turn had startling implications for strategic Western pension models, set up on the basis that living standards would improve indefinitely. Likewise for the whole of state funding: taxes would have to rise significantly to pay for state functions.
I butted in to challenge that last proposition. Why was that the only option? Why not start looking at scaling back the role of the state? That question seemed to daze the then New Labour speaker: did it represent a line of thought which had never occurred to him?
The underlying insight nonetheless was correct. Once a billion people in a matter of a few dozen months join the global means of production of ideas as IT gadgets get cheaper and better (see the swarming cheap telephones videoing the ghastly end of Gaddafi), everything starts to change at an exponential rate. In particular, the very logic of the existence of institutions and practices set up under completely different conditions can be called abruptly into question, in a way which is for practical purposes unmanageable.
We now see this everywhere, all the time. What is the role of banks? Why the nation state? What is money, and why should should governments have a monopoly on it? Why should Premier League football clubs play only in England? How to run a sensible immigration policy? What sort of tax system makes sense in current circumstances? Why do we vote the way we do? Why not have far greater citizen participation in national-level political decisions? What's the point of schools when any child can download the world's information on to a small gadget? How to balance transparency against privacy? Should we show Gaddafi's end on TV? Why do we have a monarchy? Who is my neighbour in a global village?
Any one of these questions is profoundly difficult to discuss in a measured, organised way: they all take us back to first principles which we have never really felt the need to articulate. Pile them up one on top of the other and you end up in endemic confusion and uncertainty. As G K Chesterton put it, “When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing–they believe in anything". The very stupidity and incoherence of the various “occupy" demonstrations and sit-ins in cities across the world represent an almost endearing heartfelt, juvenile squeak for help amidst all this doubt.
All of which takes us to the UK Parliamentary debate on the European Union, and the British government's lugubrious attempts to head off calls for a British referendum on basic EU questions.
There is something to be said for the claim that as the Eurozone burst into flames all this talk of a British referendum is an unwelcome distraction. But that looks like a puny tactical point when far bigger issues are at stake.
There is a lot more to be said for giving intellectual leadership, embracing the proposition that the time has come to look long and hard at the way the European Union is now set up. As I have previously argued, the iron laws of physics show us the fatal weakness of the European Union: it bulks up mass and reduces velocity.
Almost everything about the European Union is now at odds with scary, dynamic world we face, and reflects ideas which are now unsustainable. The huge salaries and pensions. The impenetrable procedures and untransparent decisions. The constant overriding or outflanking of voters' opinions. Above all, the truly heroic impertinence of the European elite who, having blundered in creating the Eurozone and its ruinous results, now insist that they and they alone must be given more centralised power over voters and their money.
True, David Cameron and William Hague are in a tight spot. Were they to allow a free vote in parliament on the referendum motion, they would face a furious reception from other European leaders when they next appeared at a summit. Don't underestimate the way these personal relationships affect leaders these days.
On the other hand, the Conservative Party and Labour Party alike could be put at risk if public dissatisfaction with European Union started to run out of control. Hence the current febrile attempts to determine the outcome, which seem to be getting the worst of all possible worlds: the collective determination of the main British political parties to deny the British public a say on these momentous matters looks out of touch, if not oppressive.
The deeper logic of the government's position is simple, if a trifle cynical: since the European Union is doing a good job of deconstructing itself, albeit in an appallingly risky way, there is little to be gained by the UK kicking away its Zimmer frame. Sooner or later a radical renegotiation of European arrangements will fall into the British lap, with London in a strong negotiating position. Without British taxpayers' money European “solidarity" doesn't go far.
Europe Minister David Lidington has put out a new gloss on the government's position: that a referendum on the U.K.'s attitude to European structures would make sense once new EU Treaty changes have been agreed. In normal circumstances that might indeed make sense. It risks being overwhelmed by events, although it does have the great advantage of sending a signal to other European capitals that unless any new treaty represents a really important shift of power back to national capitals it has no chance of being accepted by British public opinion.
What's missing is the UK's brutal insistence on a long list of specific powers which need to be repatriated. But that in a way is a detail.
These parliamentary games do not match the severity of the situation. The time is coming to respond to public opinion and seize the intellectual high ground, by starting a hard debate on the best way to organise Europe in the tumultuous changing circumstances brought about by the IT revolution.
Sooner or later that debate has to happen. Surely it is better to have it in some sort of controlled way with the UK using its detachment from the Eurozone debacle to define and lead the debate, rather than as a result of pell-mell collapse?
Needless to say, as soon as the British Prime Minister makes a public call for profound EU treaty revision, the shriek from Brussels (and Paris) will replicate the horrible banshee wail of the Nazgul as Mount Doom started to tumble.
So be it. The EU’s current arrangements are dying. Time to change course.
Are you following the stupidity and incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street #OWS tendency with its lumpen supporters in differemnt US cities?
Ed Driscoll gives us a helpful round up of why the phoney idea of Liberaltarianism (ie the supposed new synthesis between libertarian and left-liberal thinking) is meaningless.
Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. At Liberty Square, one of the signs reads: "F**k your unpaid internship!" Fair enough. But, to a casual observer of the massed ranks of Big Sloth, it's not entirely clear what precisely anyone would ever pay them to do.
Do you remember Van Jones? He was Obama's "green jobs" czar back before "green jobs" had been exposed as a gazillion-dollar sinkhole for sluicing taxpayer monies to the president's corporate cronies. Oh, don't worry. These cronies aren't "corporate" in the sense of Steve Jobs. The corporations they run put "people before profits": That's to say, they've figured out it's easier to take government money from you people than create a business that makes a profit.
In an amusing inversion of the Russian model, Van Jones became a czar after he'd been a Communist. He became a Commie in the mid-Nineties – i.e., after even the Soviet Union had given up on it. Needless to say, a man who never saw a cobwebbed collectivist nostrum he didn't like no matter how long past its sell-by date is hot for "Occupy Wall Street." Indeed, Van Jones thinks that the protests are the start of an "American Autumn..."
... Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn't been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: they're anarchists for Big Government.
As, perhaps, are we, if we are relying upon this horde of dimwits and agitators not only to pay their own way in the world but also to generate enough of a surplus to pay us oldies our Ponzi Pensions in some twenty years' time.
Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They're the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they're done for.
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