The Second Time As Farce, Or, And A Pony Please

I'm reading The Hugo Young Papers, whose main feature thus far has been to make you realise how far the terms of political discourse have been shifted to the libertarian right since Young started his journalistic career: the idea of the Tories fighting an election over their right to impose a national incomes policy, as Heath did in '74, is unimaginable now. However, I've now just reached the early eighties and the formation of the SDP and then the Alliance. This is from the interview with Richard Holme in January 1982, who was later to be Lib Dem spokesman in the House of Lords but had then just finished a stint as President of the Liberals. Young asks about the prospect of the Alliance going into coalition with the Tories after the next election and, crucially, how to extract proportional representation from such an arrangement; "how to prevent getting a pledge to PR out of the Tory leader, and then this being ditched by Tory MPs - meanwhile the Alliance being locked into the government and looking stupid":

[G]ive support on the back benches for, say, eighteen months: which would mean that the Alliance would bring down the government, not itself be brought down by Tory backbenchers. This would put the government's survival on their commitment to PR being pushed through the HC - hence a much better tactic than joining the government on a condition not fulfilled.

Grindingly Awful Up Close

In his foreword to a recent translation of parts of Garibaldi's memoirs, Tim Parks says of Garibaldi that he appreciated that "only complete singleness of mind could make anything happen... he sacrificed every other consideration for Italian unity". Parks clearly thinks this is a virtue in Garibaldi. I'm pretty sure it's not: as Parks acknowledges, what sacrificing every other consideration for Italian unity meant was not just sacrificing himself - and let's not forget that Garibaldi lived to see Italian unification - but "the lives of thousands upon thousands of others". Garibaldi's own view seems to have been that anyone who wasn't prepared to take ill-equipped and untrained young men off to fight guerilla campaigns in the firm belief that, despite the hostile attitude of the two nearest Great Powers, the sheer glory of being prepared to kill and be killed to be united under a tinpot monarchy would be enough to ensure victory. For example, when criticizing the behaviour of Cavour in allowing French interference during his attack on Naples in 1860, he says of some of his own followers who assisted Cavour that they were

swayed by the hypocritical, terrible pretext of necessity. The necessity of being cowards! The necessity of abasing oneself in the mud before some ephemeral image of power instead of heeding and understanding the vigorous, forceful, virile will of the people who wish to exist at any cost and are prepared to destroy these insect-eating icons and bury them back in the dung from which they sprang.

This is just batshit crazy. This is not, it's a gamble and maybe it won't come off, but that doesn't make it not worth trying; this is, because we want it enough, it will happen. Never mind the fact that the book is full of the refusal of peasants in what was still a predominantly rural society to assist Garibaldi's troops; never mind that if it was true that merely wanting it was enough to make it so, it'd be hard to explain how it hadn't happened yet, or indeed why it would be wrong to try and stop it happening; never mind the price that both sides pay for showing that you want it enough; Garibaldi has seen the virile will of the people, appointed himself its tribune, and thereby licensed himself to demand that all others yoke their will to his, to throw away their plans and commitments in the service of some greater glory. Parks ends his encomium to Garibaldi's ability to drive the campaign for Italian unification out of the murky shadows of high politics and out into bloody fields and mountainsides up and down the country with a discussion of Garibaldi's instructions for his funeral:

He wanted his body to be cremated in a red shirt. 'Plenty of wood for the pyre', is his last exhortation. The remark is emblematic of his personality. He consumed his whole life and the lives of thousands upon thousands of others in a conflagration that is still the most illuminating moment in modern Italian history. Very few of those warming their hands at the bonfire look well in the weird light it casts.

Perhaps those who outlived Garibaldi, who embody the tendencies that he struggled against - for the backroom deal rather than the barriacdes in the street, for compromise and often deceit and even betrayal rather than plain-speaking - are emblematic of the forces of reaction in Italian politics, as Parks clearly thinks. But they are not the forces of reaction because of their methods; they are the forces of reaction because of the use they put them to. This is what politics is like, and without it, as the corpses strewn over the Italian penisula in Garibaldi's crimson wake show, whatever glories we may be fortunate enough to find, they will be cold comfort when we're lying in the mud trying to hold our guts in.

He Believes It's Not Coincidence

Hegel on Catholicism (from the Philosophy of Mind, paragraph 552). This would be one of the crazy bits in Hegel and so, in my mind at least, not like Kant:

...yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the 'host' presented to religious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annhilation of its externality, and in the act of faith, i.e., in the self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exlated to be present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality - of bondage, non-spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from another order - which order again does not get possession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but only to that end essentially requires an external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying - partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject forgoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray - addressing his devotion to miracle-working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.

So this maybe explains why Alasdair MacIntyre doesn't talk about Hegel in After Virtue, despite that book being in many ways very Hegelian - MacIntyre is after all a committed Catholic, and Hegel clearly totally despises Catholics and does not shy away from listing, at some length, their faults. What's more interesting than that though - at best a passing note in the history of political
thought - is what Hegel claims is at the root of all of Catholicism's ills; it's conception of the sacrament, and specifically the moment at which transubstantiation takes place. That is real lunacy; as if a minor theological point is central to the political manifestations of a religion in which that minor theological point became important several centuries after its foundation. Lunacy, I tell you.

For The Most Part Less Physically And Emotionally Expressive Than Neapolitan Dockers

As I've mentioned before, the Oxford graduate population is not particularly British, and so brings home to you the peculiarities of being British, makes you see that certain ways of doing and being that you accept as natural are in fact contingent, even if you could no more shake them off than your own skin. Of course, that cuts both ways: those members of Oxford's graduate population who did not grow up in the UK must find it odd and at least slightly disconcerting to be exposed to people who have different cultural specifities, since that is the understandable reaction to that experience, whether or not you are British. Indeed, it is undoubtedly much more disconcerting, since even if they are not totally hegemonic, typically British norms are dominant amongst that population, and that population is hardly the only one which people coming from abroad to study here will encounter. A foreign graduate student I know, for example, claimed that for much of the first year they were in the UK, they thought that everyone disliked them. They interpreted various forms of reserve, of awkwardness, forms of reserve and awkwardness which could all too easily have only been increased by failures to understand them as generic rather than directed, as a signal that they were not welcome. The turning point was apparently reading Kate Fox's Watching The English, which explained to them that all this apparent disinterest was perfectly normal.

I've not read Watching The English, and so perhaps it doesn't fall into the genre that I suspect it does, although any synchronic study risks doing so, because of the way time-slices ignore what has come before. Here, the sort of thing I'm thinking of is typified by what I remember of Bill Bryson's Notes From A Small Island, which I recall as being a artfully cobbled together collection of exercises in triple-distilled Daily Mail issue nostalgia, full of the glories of its common sense. As I've said before, this sort of thing, of which I'm sure Bryson's book is not the only example, naturalises existing social heirarchies, obliterates difference and opposition, gilds chains with flowers. It performs what I take to be the classic Orientalising maneouvre, and takes what it discusses out of history, placing a specific set of social relations, which redound to the advantage of those who occupy particular places in that structure, in statis, beyond the reach of change and so critique. It turns those who fall victim to it into patients, incapable of ruling themselves, trapped by their preordained and inescapable role. Unsurprisingly, I don't really like that kind of thing.

In a way, it's present in the attitude that the Labour Party has adopted to the power of the right-wing press in the UK whilst it has been in government. The attitude, notoriously, has been that there is nothing to be done about it, that the political centre-ground is where it is, cannot be moved, and must instead be placated. Achievement of traditional Labour objectives, if they're to be sought at all, is to be done stealthily, so that neither Murdoch nor the Daily Mail notice. Those who read those papers are turned into cultural dupes, and the formidable political resources Labour had at its disposal when it came to power in 1997 - a broken opposition, leaders unburdened by the mistakes and mishaps inevitably associated with a period in government, and not least a period of persistent economic growth - denied. Existing social relations are reified, and the power of particular actors - so obviously central to the long-term political success of Thatcherism - ignored. That failure to even seriously attempt to shift the terms of the political debate, as Chris says in comments here, is 'the great, great failure of the Labour government'.

It's also present in the attitude Paul Ginsbourg describes the leadership of the Italian Communist Party having in the aftermath of World War II in his history of contemporary Italy (and which I think Phil has described the continuation of into the Anni di Piombo and beyond). Terrified by the thought of Allied military intervention, either through proxies or directly, at any sign of communist take-over, Togliatti endorsed a policy of accommodation with the other anti-fascist parties, which seems to effectively meant that De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats got communist support for a series of measures which eliminated the institutional possibility of any serious disruption to the underlying Italian social heirarchies which formed the basis of their support. Land reform was designed to be both as sympathetic to the interests of big landowners as possible and to ensure that there remained a substantial class of small and marginal peasant proprietors, vulnerable to various forms of exploitation, while any idea of worker's control in industry was quickly squashed. More than that, the apparatus of the state and even the personnel manning it remained the same; Ginsbourg shows disturbing levels of continuity between the Fascist and post-Fascist police and judiciary, for example, lasting well into the sixties and seventies. The communists took themselves to be far more constrained by the situation than they were; even well after the peak of their post-war power, a failed assassination attempt on Togliatti was able to provoke a general strike which succeeded in taking over several Northern cities for days. They, like parts of the Labour Party, Orientalised both themselves and the population they found themselves amongst.

What's good about Ginsbourg's book in this context though is the way in which it's a counter to that sort of thinking. After having cast his hands up in the air at the Communists' refusal to make use of the power they had, Ginsbourg goes on to expose exactly the Christian Democrats did make use of the power they had, making sure that Italy had, insofar as they could control it, the character they wanted. Clientelism in the South, and forms of associationism often bound up with the Church in the North; the willed political acts which created those institutions for the benefit of the Christian Democrats in the fifties have shaped Italy since. To take that shape, that set of social relations, out of that history, in which groups and individuals exercised power, and could have done otherwise, is to misunderstand that social structure, to fail to see the ways in which it generated by the interplay of particular social forces. Likewise, Bryson-esque pieces of pop anthropology misdescribe their subject; we need to bring back the history, the history which exposes the way they are formed by political struggles and so the way in which they both encode power relations and can have new power relations encoded on them.

He Never Asked Me If I Bowled Spin

More from War in Val D'Orcia. Even before the overthrow of Mussolini and Italy's subsequent occupation by the Germans, prisoners of war had been trickling through the writer's estate, and being given food, shelter and instructions as to getting back to the Allied lines in the South, but in the chaos that begins in the winter of '43, that soon becomes a flood. There are thousands of partisans hiding in the hills around, and both the Fascists and the Germans suspect more and more, rightly, that they are being supported by the population at large. What is striking about that support is the seemingly automatic sacrifice it involves, all apparently done on the basis of simple human need, which Denis Mack Smith rightly highlights in his introduction. Here, for example, is an entry from February '44, beginning with the return of three prisoners of war who had left the month before to try to get through to the Allies in the South:

A peasant from a remote farm on Monte Amiata, Fonte Lippi, came to see, bringing with him a letter from three of our p.o.w.s, who (after having lived for four months hidden in this man's farm) set off in January to try to rejoin their own troops. There were four of them, but when they got near to Cassino one of them was captured, and the other three have now returned, worn-out and ragged, to the same farm. Their note says: 'We realize that this man has robbed himself and his family to keep us', and begs me to help him in any way I can. The peasant's story is remarkable. He took in these four Englishmen at the beginning of October, when they were obliged to leave [the manor house], and fed and housed them - disregarding the danger as well as the expense - for over three months. Then the Fascist militia ... came to search his house and threatened to shoot him for harbouring enemy aliens. They came in the middle of the night and turned the hosue upside down, but della brava gente (some good folk) had given the warning two hours before, and the prisoners had escaped into the woods in time - returning again to the farm the next day. 'We couldn't just turn them out', said their host. 'They had become a part of the family - and when at last they left, my old woman and the children cried.' But meanwhile they had eaten up all the family's flour - everyone was going short - and at last, in January, they had set off - only to return again a fortnight ago... Finally, in despair, the peasant has come to us...
Surely this is a very creditable story... [H]ere is a man (and there are hundreds of others like him) who has run the risk of being shot, who has shared his family's food to the last crumb, and who has lodged, clothed and protected four stran gers for over three months - and who now proposes continuing to do so, while being perfectly aware of the risks he is running.

In The English Patient - in the film at least: it's longer since I read the novel - after his much-liked sergeant has been killed whilst celebrating VE Day by a German bobby-trap, Kip, a Sikh, says to his lover Hana, as evidence of the man's basic decency, that he never asked whether Kip bowled spin. Fittingly, it seems to have been exactly that acceptance of others merely because they were also human that provided shelter, food, and clothing for many of Kip and his sergeant's real-life counterparts in the Tuscan countryside where I think The English Patient was set.

Premodern Postmodern Distance

From Maurizio Viroli's Machiavelli:

If repentance and penitence were not [Machiavelli's] way to find shelter or relief from the miseries of life and the horror of death, what then were his defences?

One was irony. To laugh at one's own and others' weaknesses alleviates 'the pains that every man bears'. Life 'is short', and 'many ills and strange events crush almost all mortals': it makes no sense to live only with labour and toil. When life is miserable, when we are powerless against men's stupidity and meanness, it is time to look at the world and ourselves with irony.

Whatever else you might think about him - for example, the casual misogyny of the thought that it followed from fortune being a woman that the best way to deal with her was to "beat and ill-use her"; the archpriest of evil politicking view is a bit old-hat, these days - apparently Machiavelli at least had a sense of the absurdity of life.

No More Meaning Than Is Revealed In The Finished Product

The Friday before last, Open Democracy published this rather good piece by Fred Halliday, which deplores the lack of what one provocatively might call Enlightenment-style analysis of recent conflicts in the Middle East, and, by extension, presumably further afield. Halliday invokes Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt as critics of both of the sides involved, pointing to Arendt's distaste at the Israeli derivation of the entitlement to try Eichmann from their Jewishness, rather than any simple universal principle of things human beings must not do to other human beings, and presenting Deutscher - whom Wikipedia informs me he has edited - as arguing that while both sides had legitimate claims, they were not the claims that they were making, and indeed the manner in which they were making those claims seemed almost designed to perpetuate the conflict. I've not read either Eichmann in Jerusalem or the NLR piece which Halliday extracts his claims about Deutscher from, although I can well believe that these are the kinds of things Arendt and Deutscher would have said from what I have read by them.

The substance of Halliday's criticism, as his use of Arendt suggests, is that both sides have departed from universalism: they have become immersed in the particularity of their own claims, and forgotten that they have other audiences to address. It's a bit like Bernard Williams' critique of relativism: it is now far too late for them to just be talking amongst themselves, for there is a problem to be solved, and short of committing various moral horrors, its solution requires the participation of another group which does not accept the consensus which structures their internal conversations. In this context, what Norm Geras says here and then here is interesting.

Geras is troubled by what we might call the perverse totalitarianism of liberalism: it demands that people tolerate each other, regardless of whether they want to or not. This, at least in the structure, particularly the universalism, of its moral claims, seems disturbingly similar to religious fundamentalism: you will do this, whatever your views on the matter. Now, liberals might just be prepared to bite the bullet, and say, effectively, we're right, you're wrong, and the universalism of our moral claims ought not to trouble us, because they're true. I'm not saying that view is wrong: there's a lot of mileage in pointing out that most illiberal political visions involve doing lots of things which are, by anything approximating a decent moral compass, pretty hideous. It is more that I think that there is something more to be said about the perverse totalitarianism of liberalism, something which, I hope at least, does away with the meta-ethical similarity.

Last weekend, I found out that I have got funding to do a DPhil at Oxford - you can go and crow now, David -which I'll be taking up. The problem I am intending to work is that of the relationship between the political and the ethical, how the question of how one should live individually bears on the question of how we should live together and, although perhaps to a lesser extent, vice versa. Crucial to that relationship is, clearly, the distinction between the public and the private. I feel quite strongly about the distinction between the public and the private: recently, for example, I found something like it useful in attempting to defend the refusal to think that anything particularly morally wrong, as distinguished from undesirable or regretable, happened to Inigo Wilson here, and in the past I've mobilised it as a critique of Blair's attempts at self-justification. It bears on concerns about the Government's anti-terrorism policy - the point about the 'just they say it, it don't make it so' critique of that policy, for example, is that it highlights its privacy, its inaccessibility to the public, both as a body of people and as a sphere of discourse, its lack of justification, its arbitrariness, even, at root, its unreasonedness - and - which is where Geras comes in - on the role of religion in public life.

One problem with the use of specifically religious claims for public justification is that they are quite literally incredible: no-one, other than religious people, believes them, or ought to, at least not because they are religious claims, and so no-one, other than religious people, has any good reason to acquiese to them. But, again that's not quite it. In a way, there's a comparison with one of Williams' many critiques of utilitarianism. Presumably, granting for the sake of argument that utilitarianism is true, Williams suggests, it could be the case that the best way to fulfill the commandment of creating the greatest happiness of the greatest number would be to erase from public consciousness all trace of that commandment, and allow some privileged elite of experts to control social life. There is something deeply perverse about that, even on its face - a moral theory which forbids its own promulgation is very strange - but the problem goes deeper than that.

The publicly affirmed rules by which people live their lives, as a matter of fact, have no purchase on their lives - they are systematically decieved about the point of their actions - and, as a direct corrolary of that, the rules which in fact do govern their lives are being kept from having any presence in those lives. Although practically it may be very difficult for the two difficulties to come apart, they are separate: someone doesn't have to be decieving you for you to be decieved - we are after all quite capable of that all by ourselves. What's wrong with this situation is that these people, these victims of what Williams called Government House Utilitarianism, are being denied agency, the chance to live their lives for themselves, to shape their own existences. They are subjects under the most perfectly paternalistic regime imaginable, and that is a hideous possibility.

Notice though that the consequence of that paternalism is the disappearance of the distinction between the public and the private, or, better, the disappearance of those categories totally. The public sphere under Government House utilitarianism is a sham: anything that those who live under it discuss operates totally differently from how they imagine it, and always will, and they have no ability to alter it anyway, because it is under someone else' control. Equally, their understanding of their valorisation of their fidelity to their spouse lacks any grasp on the real reason for that fidelity, and does so because someone else has sketched out a plan of their life, of how every detail of their existence will go: a panopticon that does not even need eyes. Now, clearly, religious or other dogmas don't go quite that far - no-one is deliberately decieved - but the control extends, perhaps not as far, but in the same way. Looking to a completed moral universe to guide political action destroys, by destroying the possibility of either a public or a private sphere, political action itself: what is left to ask about how to live together when we all live the same way anyway?

It is to this distinction that liberals uncomfortable with its meta-ethical tyranny, as I assume Geras is, need to appeal. Liberalism's universalism, unlike that of some of its opponents, is both public and private: it does not demand that the possibilty of human agency is absolutely constrained by a single text or moral principle, merely by some fairly minimal moral commitments, and so allows everyone to go to hell in their own ways whilst retaining enough shared ground to make mutual comprehension possible. In contrast, like utilitarianism, religious fundamentalism demands total conformity to a rigid set of moral diktats, and would thus, if perfectly implemented, destroy the idea of privacy, of a space in which you are not under the gaze of others, and of publicity, of a space where differences can be reconciled or at least ignored, because when everyone does the same thing all the time, there is only one, and so no others to be under the gaze of or differences to reconcile. Indeed, one might press the point against liberalism's more totalitarian foes that their universalism is a charade, that universalism, to make any sense, needs to address the universe, needs to take into account the fact of plurality, of a world inhabited by distinct agents. Understanding Halliday's anti-particularism in this sense might not go too far wrong.

Hey Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?

The Vietnam War has come to be something of a foundational myth - an example the moral implications of which are beyond reproach, almost - on much of the left, and even the centre, I'd guess. There can't be many Britons, for example, who think that Harold Wilson did the wrong thing by refusing to send British soldiers when asked to by LBJ, and when arguing about other military interventions, despite how much Vietnam gets used, the retort is always 'it won't be like Vietnam', rather than 'what's so terrible about Vietnam?'. I'm not sure how much that is because Vietnam was a totally unmitigated disaster, although you'd have to guess that plays a role, rather than because of how central Vietnam was to the formative political experiences of a whole generation, and so, as a consequence, appears all over that generation's literary and cinematic output, which then means that a whole other generation gets socialised into the myth. Like I was, I suppose. I've read 'Bright Shining Lie' and 'In Pharaoh's Army', and, more importantly I think, seen 'Apocalypse Now', 'Born On The Fourth Of July', 'Platoon', and 'The Deer Hunter'. So in that context, it was interesting to see 'The Fog Of War', a documentary based around a series of interviews with Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defence from 1961 till 1968.

The film is structured around eleven lessons the director, Errol Morris, draws from McNamara's experience in the US Government, the US Airforce during World War Two, and working at Ford in between. McNamara clearly regrets decisions he took, or encouraged the taking of, whilst working for the first two of these organisations: maxim number five, "proportionality should be a guideline in a war", either prompts or is prompted by the thought that he, as an adviser involved in the firebombing of Japanese cities, committed war crimes, and he is clear that US involvement in Vietnam breached maxim number one, "empathise with your enemy", by seeing what the other side saw as a struggle of national liberation as the attempt to maintain a barrier against the spread of communism. Given the conventional wisdom on those events, I don't suppose that's particularly surprising. Neither are the content of the maxims: number two, extrapolated from his experiences during the Cuban Missile Crisis, partly either reflects or is mirrored by work in game theory which has drawn heavily on the experience of nuclear confrontation, claiming "rationality will not save us", while number six, "get the data" is banal even for common sense, although, from McNamara's examples, more important than you might think.

The temptation, obviously, is to regard the lessons McNamara draws as having wider currency. It's not really one I'm prepared to resist, and, given the general terms in which they are articulated, it's one that he and the film explicitly encourage. Only the claim that rationality will not save us, which McNamara quite clearly means to be understood as relating to the use of nuclear weapons - he baldly states that it was a matter of luck, not judgement, that there was no nuclear war in 1962, saying that, amongst other things, Castro had not only told the Soviet Union that they could use the weapons in Cuba but that they should in the event of an invasion, despite both being rational and knowing it would result in the total destruction of Cuba - does not clearly have wider application. Given what I said here, for example, it's tempting to read maxim number nine, "in order to do good, you may have to be prepared to do evil" as alerting us to the occasional duty of neglecting to intervene whilst evil triumphs, for fear of the consequences of doing so, especially in light of McNamara's unwillingness to escalate the conflict in 1962, rather than the more conventional reading.

That's not the clearest one though, I think. Making judgements of counter-productivity and imprudence in morally charged situations can often both difficult and dangerous, because you need to be sure of what aim is not being realised, of what imperative is being violated. That means being sure both of the specific intentions of the actors involved, and of the possible moral limits to the achievement of those ends - because of a standing assumption that people don't want to commit obvious moral wrongs which, to be effective as a tool of criticism, needs to identify obvious moral wrongs - neither of which can always be easy.

In some cases, though, it's relatively easy. A significant strand of the criticism of both what is described as the War on Terror and the current Israeli occupation of the southern Lebanon seems to me to point out that they break maxims one, six, seven and eight - that they don't understand what the enemy is fighting for, that they lacked adequate intelligence, and that they lack the necessary openness to the possibility that the beliefs and reasoning they are fought on is flawed. That doesn't rule out the further criticism, that they are simply wrong and shouldn't be done because of that, of course. It has a kind of strength unavailable to the 'it's just wrong' critique if successful though, because it, immediately, without engaging in further moral argument, performs an immediate reductio ad absurdum: if you want to do x, why on earth would you do y, it demands. For example, why on earth would Israelis think that occupying the southern Lebanon was a good idea, when they did it for nearly twenty years, failed to destroy Hizbullah, and, only six years ago, were more or less agreed it was a pretty disastrous policy? Or that serious damaging the capacity of a state to act by devastating its infrastructure would be a good way of ensuring that it acted to disarm what is by all accounts a well-equipped and trained militia force?

The problem is, of course, that these critiques aren't always paid attention to. Ways of avoiding them are developed: mostly obviously, perhaps, the denial, by essentially denying their humanity, of the opponent's possession of a complex set of motives, and so the possibility of empathy with them. Think of the claim that Hizbullah presents an existential threat to Israel, for example, and the uses to which that is put. Interestingly, the last maxim that Morris drew from talking to McNamara is that human nature doesn't change, which he apparently sees as an ironic comment on the rest of the maxims, since it shows that the mistakes which McNamara made are mistakes that we will keep on making, that, effectively, the maxims are useless because they will continue to be ignored. Maybe we should just go back to chanting.

Goalkeeping And Killing Arabs

Disclaimer: this post, despite its title, has nothing to do with the current conflict in the Middle East, and mostly concerns my views about how to best explain the history of political parties, in the context of my discussion with Phil Edwards here. Should you be interested in my views on the current conflict in the Middle East, they can be found, expressed in their typically digressive fashion, here and here.

Having written at the weekend about the way in which, to get a little excessively Kuhnian, our paradigms can make it difficult for us to assimilate certain kinds of information, I thought I might offer some further thoughts on the same theme.

I've always thought that there was something oddly appropriate about the author of L'Etranger having been a goalkeeper. As anyone who has played in goal enough knows, it has a sense of separation, of not really being engaged in a team sport. Typically, a goalkeeper's intervention will, if successful, prevent a goal being scored, and if unsuccessful, do the exact opposite. There's usually no-one there to save a goalkeeper from the consequences of their mistakes, which are always frighteningly immediate, and so the sense of cooperation, of working together, of a safety net, I imagine outfield players have is lacking. Responsibility gets drawn differently: whilst you alone are culpable for your mistakes or moments of brilliance, your culpability for the mistakes of your team-mates is, because in a way you do not play with them, much more limited than is typical. Something of the same spirit seems to me to lurk in the distance, the alienation of the existential anti-hero, with their inability to see others as anything more than objects in the world. I suppose though, the thought that being a goalkeeper and existential angst are in some way complements is perhaps significantly more revealing about my temperament than it is about either goalkeeping or existential angst.

As an undergraduate, I took a paper in British twentieth century political history. Because of the essays I and my tutorial partner choose to write, and perhaps because the person who taught us was a card-carrying member of the Labour Party who somewhat wistfully explained he could no longer remember the original wording of Clause Four now it was no longer on the back of his party card, we ended up concentrating rather heavily on the demise of the Liberal Party and the rise of the Labour Party. There are essentially three competing narratives about this series of events. One focuses on internal and basically personal divisions within the Liberal Party which fracture it, creating a space on the political left which Labour then, after some troubles of its own, fills. Call this the Lloyd George thesis. Another stresses the role of the First World War, an external shock which reconfigured, in a variety of ways, the political landscape to the detriment of the Liberals. Call this the Total War thesis. The last claims that, even in the absence of rifts in the party leadership and the trauma of the First World War, social changes were afoot - the gradual dissolution of an electorate based on local and sectarian affiliations into one based on class, primarily - that the Liberals would have always struggled to deal with. Call this the Class thesis.

Any sophisticated historical analysis is obviously going to draw on some aspects of all three accounts: Lloyd George and Asquith's fallings out clearly took place against the background of World War One - briefly, Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exhequer in the peacetime government, did a deal with the Tories to shaft Asquith, his Prime Minister, through a mix of what seems to have been genuine disagreement with Asquith's running of the war and unadulterated lust for power, which resulted in the formation of a Coalition government which, although containing Liberals and led by Lloyd George, was numerically dependent on Tory votes - just as some of the later disagreements amongst Liberals were partly doctrinal, largely about how to best deal with mass unemployment - Keynes, after all, was a Liberal grandee of sorts. The question, though, is about the dominant strand in the argument: which, causally, is given greatest weight?

Now, the relevance of the thoughts about the complementarity of existentialism and the great art of goalkeeping start to become clear. One of the things about the distance between a goalkeeper and the rest of their team is that the goalkeeper tends to experience the failings of the rest of their team as somehow fated, beyond their control. If the defence fails to mark up properly, the defence fails to mark up properly, and beyond shouting, there is very little a goalkeeper can do about it. It is not their failing, but the rest of the team's, a collectivity whose doings effect the goalkeeper despite the goalkeeper having little power to effect them. Or at least, that's how I see it. Impersonal forces, not on a stage of their own making, and so on. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, then, I've always found the Class thesis most convincing as an explanation of the demise of the Liberals and eventual rise of the Labour Party. You can expect personal animosities and external shocks in politics, and a party which struggles to deal with them will need a remarkably loyal as well as numerically significant constituency to be able to survive as a serious political force for any serious length of time. Changes to the composition of the electorate, both because of external social change and electoral reform, as well as the deflation more or less inherent in property requirements, meant the Liberals lacked a loyal and numerically significant constituency. That's why they virtually disappeared, I'm fairly convinced.

The relevance of this is that, well, this operates as a kind of Kuhnian paradigm for me. If we're talking about the history of political parties, we're talking about social change, about the appearance and disappearance of loyal and numerically significant constituencies, and only really at the margins about the creation or destruction of those constituencies, at least so far as I am concerned. Political leaders are, for me, a little like goalkeepers, their actions constrained by being somewhat at the mercy of impersonal forces they can often do little more than shift slightly in one direction rather than another. That does not place them beyond criticism - how I still laugh, thinking of Tim Howard's failure to stop Kenny Miller's weak shot from slipping under his hand when Wolves beat Man U 1-0 at Molineux in 2004 - but it does constrain the criticism in a particular way.

Not On A Stage Of Their Own Making

Dearieme said something quite interesting in the comments to this brief piece linking to a lengthy and pleasingly outraged rant at Ephems of Brian Barder. There's something understandably quite appealing about the frisson of excitement to be gained from re-imagining the past, from playing speculative games with something that, unlike the present, since it is fixed, cannot play them back. The case that Dearieme suggests as the point at which normality collapsed is quite plausible, it seems to me:

I sometimes wonder whether "normality" is the hypothetical state the country would have reached if its evolution after 1913 had not been distorted by two World Wars.

You could go further back, perhaps, but coming further forwards seems harder: the near past, more recent in our minds, its immediate causal ancestors also closer to present concerns, seems somehow more fixed than a past which is now beyond the memories of almost everyone now living. It is more implicated in the present perhaps, lacks the distance to be different, since doing so would make us too different to be us, maybe almost unrecognisable, despite the fact that, since we live now, the chances are most of us would live in most other nows, and so we must be us.

Going further back, although easier I think, in extremis seems to present a kind of reverse version of the same problem: rather than resulting in a kind of disquiet from the alterations a change would make to us, a kind of excessive openness, going too far back, to say medieval times, is too closed, has too many fixed points that need to be changed. Rather than disorientation occurring because things are similar without being the same, it occurs because things are too dissimilar to be anything like the same. Just as pondering what would have happened if the Gang of Four hadn't split the centre-left vote in 1983, or Argentina hadn't invaded the Falklands, brings the prospect of a series of selves which are both us and not-us, sets of weird, separated twins unable to reconcile their similarities with their profound differences, pondering what would have happened if Henry VIII had been able to have a child with Catherine of Aragon opens up the possibility of something like the children your parents had in another life, in another country: an insistence on a meaningful relationship despite all the evidence, other than that of the counter-factual, that strains at credulity, even comprehension.

So I like the idea of a world without the First World War: close enough to make sense, and far enough away to keep contingency at bay. Just in Britain, we could imagine a Liberal Party that didn't split under the strain of running a total war, and then institutionalise that split in the face of being squeezed both from the left and the right; Home Rule for Ireland without 1916 and its aftermath; Reform of the House of Lords; perhaps a better response to, or even the avoidance of the slump of the 1920s; no enormous national debt accumulated from funding our Allies. Globally, who knows, whether, for example, Tsarist Russia would have been able to hobble towards some kind of quasi-constitutional liberal state in the absence of the pressure of war that it suffered horribly in, and whether, indeed, that would have made for, globally, a better world. A world without the First World War might be a considerably more hospitable place.

It might not be though. Assessing how long the various multi-national empires of Central and Eastern Europe and the Near East and their resentful successor states could have staggered on, shedding and gaining territory, opening opportunities for and creating requirement of international realpolitik is, I think, likely to be rather difficult, as making accurate guesses to the consequences of the various demises of the various states also is. Equally, domestically, whilst Asquith and Lloyd George's differences, exacerbated by the War, certainly started the liberal collapse in the 'real' Britain, tensions over Ireland or the scope of domestic reform could easily have brought similar tensions to the fore. After all, famously, if you'd told people in 1913 that Britain would be fighting a war the next summer, they'd have assumed it would be in Ireland.

One of the people doing a doctorate in political theory I know is working on establishing a framework for thinking about compensation for historical injustices, in which counterfactuals play a role, as they are needed to assess the level of damages which themselves constitute the injustices. One of the limiting features of his model is that the counterfactual used to assess the damages needs, in order to attribute moral responsibility properly, to imagine a world in which neither serious wrongs nor supererogatory acts are committed, where damages are not either increased or diminished by the intervention of other actors. That, of course, seriously limits the number of counterfactual worlds, yet his model incorporates the possibility of reasonable disagreement about the content of those worlds. In a much larger set, that disagreement is likely to be all the greater.

Misdirecting The Post

Phil Edwards says something suggestive, if relatively commonplace on the left, in the comments on his piece on the relative virtues of Englishness:

[i]f we're going to mobilise on any basis I'd be happier orienting to class irrespective of nationality.

I too would, ceteris paribus, prefer to mobilise on the basis of class rather than nationality. That of itself, is not particularly interesting: nationalism, as a backwards-looking ideology, with its grounding of political rights in arbitrary membership of a historically-rooted community, is hardly a particularly progressive political force, so one would not expect progressives to approve of it. Conversely, class, for all that it is rooted in historical social formations, typically seeks to eliminate itself and so is both forward-looking and hopefully not as permanently or as seriously violent or divisive as nationality.

What's suggestive about it is the context in which it occurs. It raises issues about the relationship of nationality and class and their respective identities, by begging the question of whether the divisions which constitute classes and nationalities are so separate that one, distinct from the other, can be used the basis of an attempt at political mobilisation. After all, one can hardly mobilise on the basis of class as against nationality if class is deeply intertwined with nationality and vice versa.

I said in the comments to Phil’s piece that there can hardly be much hope of mobilising Englishness against the Britishness he characterises as an ideology of Empire and central state power when Britishness is so closely tied, at least in its elites, to Englishness. I think that’s true, if perhaps less so than it once was: for all Tony Blair, a man brought up and even educated in Scotland, is transparently culturally English, his next in line is unashamedly Scots, culturally as well as by birth, and to my mind superior for it.

Although I can’t speak with any authority at all on the class hierarchies of the other parts of the Celtic Fringe – and they are the Celtic Fringe: that’s precisely the point – I get the sense that class hierarchies are structured differently in Scotland. My mother, a Scot, has always claimed to find the English class system bizarre as well as morally repugnant, having been socialised into a quite different and, she would claim, substantially less pernicious system of social hierarchies in her Grampian fishing port. That would make sense in light of the thought that the British establishment is predominantly English: the Scottish class system has had its top lopped off, and so its exploitation and status hierarchy differ from that of the English one, simply because to a certain degree you stop being Scottish once you reach a certain level.

This calls into question the social ontology of class and nationality that motivates the commonplace sentiment about it being preferable to mobilise politically on the basis of class rather than nationality. Some of the same historical experiences which shaped Scottish national identity, however we might characterise that anyway, shaped the particular manifestation of class identities in Scotland: a variety of forms of English dominance, political, military and economic, played midwife to them both. For a Scot, to mobilise on the basis of class, presumably against various parts of the elite, is to some degree to mobilise on the basis of nationality, against the English.

If that’s true of Scotland though, it could be true elsewhere. Indeed, a priori – and this is all a priori – given that Britain was a centralised state relatively early, one might expect that it would be more true elsewhere. Political and economic centralisation, one would expect, by reducing the importance of more local centres of power, would tend to be a homogenising force, decreasing the importance of particularistic affiliations like nationality while increasing the importance of more universalist ones like class: after all, if the political relationship which matter are with some local notable, it is them, not the place occupied in the distribution of the means of production that will tend to define a political identity.

There has, I understand, been some debate within Marxian circles about the question of whether Marx made some mistake in his assessment of the world-historical power of class, on whether other, in some ways more primal, forces have shaped the world over the past hundred and fifty years. Tom Nairn quotes Ernest Gellner on this possibility here:

Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error delivered to nations…

Nairn seems to think that the problem has been a lack of patience, that Marx’s prophecies had a longer delivery date than those awaiting them expected, that globalisation has finally managed to re-direct them to their proper recipients. I’m skeptical. Either way, his explanation is Marx’s youth in a society whose features he thinks are becoming more and more common – the Rhineland of the 1840s, a borderland imbricated and in the interstices of a number of competing authorities. I wonder, though, whether Marx and Engels’ time in England, experiencing a British class system which, despite ruling over a multi-national state, was, in its upper echelons, mono-national, might have had its effects too.

Update, 10/06/06: Merrick has a slightly different take on the Britishness-Englishness thing at the Sharpener here. I suppose the problem I have with Englishness is that it thinks of itself as Britishness: unless its resurrection involves some explicit admission that Great Britain contains two other nations, and the British Isles another one, Englishness is going to be even more reactionary than Britishness. Put it another way: so far as I know, the BNP has no presence in Scotland at all. It is only a minority of the English who think that they have some legitimate greivance on the basis of the their Britishness.

Chris Rea and Tony Blair, Munich and Pre-Emptive War, and Some Other Stuff

Not that I hate all MOR, or indeed everything about New Labour, but there is, as Backword Dave points out here, something quite appropriate about a major New Labour figure having been responsible for a load of MOR-ish tripe in the 1980s. The pandering, the refusal to see beyond existing preferences, the acceptance and even moralising of the status quo, of the all too common sense, the sense of the blindly satisfied or gratuituously aggreived: these don't just seem to be superficial similarities but approach the status of deep conceptual linkages. Once the history of popular music, initially in part a revolt against all these things, is added to the somewhat self-fulfilling myth of the Labour Party as a moral crusade, a pleasingly romantic, if doubtlessly misleading, narrative of corrupted ideals could perhaps even be constructed. That would probably be taking felicitious serendipities a little far though. However appealing the idea that the same kind of causal explanation be applied across the board might be, that more or less exactly the same kind of thing keeps happening over and over again, it doesn't really do justice to the complexity of the world.

Thinking of the idea that the same thing keeps happening, that despite having been warned, we do fail to learn the lessons of history and are consequently doomed to repeat them, I feel that not enough has been said about the reasonably common trope, repeated here, of equating resistance to neo-conservative demands for pre-emptive action against their enemy of the moment to Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich, or indeed the appeasement of the later thirties more generally. The point of this rhetorical move is to damn anyone who opposed the war in Iraq, or generally has quibbles about a doctrine of pre-emptive war, as morally equivalent to the Guilty Men. Since it has become a piece of conventional wisdom - which I won't question - that appeasement was wrong, it's fairly effective. Unfortunately, it's pretty much bullsh*t.

This is because, for very good two reasons, the analogy doesn't work. The first is that Chamberlain broke treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia at Munich, just as the Anschluss and the remilitarisation of the Rhineland were forbidden under Versailles, so there was a perfectly good case under the conventional just war theory neo-conservatives seek to overturn against appeasement. The second is that at least in the case of Munich, a war at the time would have been better than the war which was later launched: Czechoslovakia would have had Soviet support, probably could have defended itself, and in giving up the Skoda arms factories, contributed significantly to the German war machine, none of which was true of Poland. It remains to be shown that there were no better wars to be fought than the invasion of Iraq. Of course, opposing the second of these reasons effectively argues appeasement was the right course of action, that in this case a war delayed was the best outcome, since it denies that, consequentially, going to war over the Sudetenland was better than going to war over Poland.

This may seem like an odd thing to get exercised about, and in some ways it is. However, it's one of those things that gets repeated enough that it, like the judgement of appeasement, becomes a form of conventional wisdom and unquestionable. For example, there was an article in a recent edition of Philosophy and Public Affairs, one of the most prominent journals in Anglo-American political philosophy, repeated without questioning the claim that a war at Munich would have been pre-emptive, which is simply historically inaccurate. Particularly when the falsehood is obviously morally and emotionally manipulative, it seems to me best to attempt to squash these things as early as possible.

In other news, I am too lazy to attempt decent inter-item links, Daniel Davies' pieces at Comment is Free have been excellent, Matthew Yglesias confesses to something I think is either a lot less or a lot more absurd than he does and William Gibson rates V for Vendetta.

Updated for various stylistic infelicities on 30/03/06.

Historical Accidents And Political Parties

It seems that a number of people find it rather strange to think that

the Labour Party is the best vehicle for the achievement of a progressive politics in this country, and that battles over what counts as progressive politics ought to be fought within it.

Sadly, I can well see why. The Labour government over the past eight years has hardly met the heights of the Attlee administration, which in terms of its dominance of the Parliamentary scene it has significantly outstripped. A national minimum wage has been introduced, at a level which working full-time on it would lead to virtual penury, and unemployment has fallen, but without, it would seem, increasing job security or reducing hours; large increases in public spending have been made, and in some cases have made substanial differences, but have so often been crippled by a bizarre insistence on using public money to line the pockets of the shareholders of large construction firms; some effort, not wholly unsuccessful, to remove children from poverty has been made. These are bitter-sweet, limited achievements, so much less than could have been done, and yet, I'm struggling to lengthen the list. It's hardly the foundation of the National Health Service, the introduction of free secondary education, the establishing of child benefit, and the nationalisation of swathes of industry, all of which the Attlee government achieved in six years, two less than Blair has already been in power. This is of course without mentioning the adoption of all kinds of mendacious, reactionary rhetoric on law and order well before the war on abstract nouns apparently justified greater restrictions on civil liberties than at any other time than in living memory, or foreign policy at all. It would be fair to say I don't really like the current Labour government.

So, why did I join the Labour Party? Because the Labour Party is not the current Labour government. The Labour Party is a group of people, the majority of whom affirm, in the one of the usual senses, the first sentence of Clause Four: 'The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party'. The distinction between this organisation and the current Labour government could hardly be clearer, since it is neither, on any plausible reading of either, democratic nor socialist. It is a government of the Daily Mail, not of the typical Labour voter, or of the typical Labour member. It's like it's an odd historical accident, a kind of cruel joke, that it is formed by members of the Labour Party, since they and the Labour Party seem to share so little. I joined because I believe in the party, and in its capacity to regenerate and reinvigorate itself, to find leaders other than those it currently has, and to then return to the values of social justice and mutual tolerance it once stood for. This may be a leap of faith, but as a broad coalition of progressive interests since the collapse of the Liberals in the twenties and thirties, the Labour Party has been reasonably successful, and it would be unwise to assume that Blair et al have done permanent damage to it, or that what is to be gained by abandoning it will be a huge improvement. Phil mentioned in his comments on the previous post the formation of the Labour Party, taking it that it is a given that the fracture of the progressive movement and ushering in of three decades of conservative dominance was a good. I'm less sure.

God's Playground And The Importance Of Political Economy

One of the things I've been occupying my time with now I have moved from being a soap-dodging, scrounging student to a work-shy, scrounging member of the unemployed, apart from reading the jobs section of every paper imaginable most days, is reading things that aren't academic political theory or novels. Once whoever's got it out gets round to returning them, for example, I will be trying to get my teeth in some of Jared Diamond's dauntingly thick tomes. The most recent thing I worked my way through was the first volume of Norman Davies' history of Poland, 'God's Playground', which runs up to the third partition in 1795. It's quite good, although I think it suffers a little from the decision to structure it with the thematic chapters - economy, social structure, political institutions, religious belief, foreign affairs and so on - before the actual chronology, since, unless you know the history of Poland in some detail, it can be a little difficult to grasp exactly what's going on.

Davies is quite big on the unanticipated consequences of individual decisions, citing a mid-seventeenth century decision by the Poles to give up, believing they could fairly easily regain it, the Ukraine east of the Dneiper to the Muscovites. They then, rather than trying to get it back, chose to concentrate their efforts on protecting Christendom from the Turks, including rescuing one of their major regional adversaries, Austro-Hungary, by routing the Sultan's forces at the walls of Vienna and embarking on a rather ill-fated expedition to present-day Romania. The Poles never did regain the left bank of the Ukraine, and the loss of population and economic resources proved crucial in their subsequent military collapse, not least because it handed those resources to the Muscovites, who, by absorbing much of the Ukraine, genuinely became an Empire of all the Russias.

However, what really comes across strongly from his history is the importance of political and social institutions. Poland had, until its eventual absorption by Russia, Prussia - which had been a vassal state but a hundred years previously - and Austro-Hungary in 1795, been an elective monarchy with an immensely, within Poland at least, powerful nobility. Not only did the nobles elect the King, allow for widespread foreign influence, but he was, to a significant degree, merely an executive officer of their parliament, which, for around four hundred years, had a rule of unanimity, creating what in retrospect is entirely predictable political chaos. When the King was a strong individual, he was able to mobilise Polish forces for successful military campaigns - John Sobieski was a hero across Christendom for a reason - if little else, but when he was weak, the magnates did entirely as they pleased, which was often to ally with neighbouring states or ravage the countryside in legalised rebellions known as Confederacies. One of the factors behind the decision to give up left bank Ukraine was that the King's army, under the command of Sobieski, had just been defeated by one such rising, headed by Jerzy Lubomirski, which had been provoked by the threat of withdrawal of noble privileges, for example.

This total absence of institutionalised central power meant that, in the late eighteenth century when Poland was substanially larger and more populous than Prussia - Poland had much the same population as France, which within the next fifty years would achieve near-total continental dominance, even after the first partition - yet was consistently bullied by it. It was also poor, and poor, Davies argues, because both of the political dominance of a parasitic class of robber barons with little interest in maintaining that dominance and earlier dependence on markets for grain which had since collapsed, partly as a result of the emergence of competitors, but also because of the failure to recreate them after early to mid seventeenth century disruptions. Not enough grain was grown to send much to market in the aftermath of the wars, and then fewer traders came for it, and so it became more difficult to support expanding grain production the next year in the absence of funds, starting a vicious downward spiral which saw overall production collapse totally. The collapse of cities and so the possibility of economic diversification, after the same disruptions - a series of foreign invasions and civil wars, to be fair - was equally never remedied, because of the lack of interest in doing so on the part of nobles to whom they would have been challengers for political authority.

There seem to me to be one major lesson to be learned from the story of Poland's decline from being the largest and one of the wealthiest states in Europe in the sixteenth century - from sea to shining sea as the Lithuanian half of the Commonwealth proclaimed, meaning from their homeland on the Baltic, to the Crimea - to the frankly pathetic and crisis-ridden entity of barely a hundred and fifty years later, that political and economic structures matter. Poland's unique system of Noble Democracy created forces of such centripetal strength that, in a way, the miracle is it lasted as long as it did, while the dependence on the export of grain for wealth, a commodity which could easily be controlled by the large landowners, left Poland incredibly vulnerable to shifts in demand - almost all the major European countries experienced endemic violence during the early Modern period, yet few other economies collapsed as spectacularly as Poland's.

The obvious parallel here is oil. I am not enough of an economist to know whether the forces tying global capitalism to oil are as strong as those that prevented Poland from centralising or dealing with its dependence on grain, or whether the difficulties that would await such economies if starved of oil are as significant as those posed for Poland by Russia's relentless expansionism, but it is worth bearing in mind that Poles, even as they were happily auctioning their independence to the highest bidder, mocked those who argued that their system of government was unjust, inefficient and weak, pointing, interestingly, to their freedom. They clearly underestimated the difficulties their political and economic system created and in actively opposing reform, did nothing to tackle or even amielorate them. Human nature does not change much, and the attractions of self-deception remain. Let us hope we are not falling victim to them.

The Pope, Slavoj Zizek, And Anti-Communism

Pearsall has noted my quoting of Terry Eagleton's criticism of Polish Catholicism as, amongst other things, particularly anti-Communist, and expresses dismay that anyone would regard Pope John-Paul II's role in the overthrow of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe as anything but a crowning glory of his Papacy. Undoubtedly, John-Paul II did play a relatively significant role in the eventual withdrawal of Soviet support for the Warsaw Pact regimes, by organizing peaceful Catholic resistance to those regimes, and supporting other forms of resistance, most notably Solidarity. I didn't mean to condemn that: the regimes in question were fairly reprehensible, and it is a good thing that they have fallen, even if that goodness is slightly mitigated by the less-than-ideal successor regimes in some cases. Anti-Communism potentially has a wider scope as a description than picking out these acts, though, and the content of that wider description, I think, can be used as a criticism of John-Paul II.

Understood in the context of the kinds of views the Pope held about desirable social, political and economic arrangements and in the context of an increasingly reheated Cold War in the Eighties, anti-Communism becomes the criticism of any proposal for progressive social change, other than the social change of the removal of Communist regimes. It is a kind of Reds-under-the-beds mania, which extends not just to an entirely proper criticism of oppressive Eastern European regimes, but to a denial that Liberation theology picked up on any legitimate concerns of the Latin American poor by associating it with those regimes. This is, I think, what Eagleton means to criticize when he describes the Polish Catholic Church as "ferociously anti-Communist". Anyone who shows any sympathy for vaguely Marxian ideas - of the structural necessity of injustice in a capitalist economy, of class struggle, of the base and the superstructure - is at least a fellow-traveller and crypto-Communist, if not a full-blown supporter of the gulags, show trials, mass starvations and deportations of the USSR in the thirties when one is 'ferociously anti-Communist'.

In a way, my willingness to read this criticism this way, to see it picking out more than merely the criticism of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe, casts doubt on an argument Slavoj Zizek has made in the LRB, which John Holbo has been criticizing for some time, as part of what seems to be a general campaign against Slavoj Zizek. Zizek argued that liberals - as is often typical of post-modernists, it is far from clear exactly what this is supposed to pick out at all - cannot see an important difference between Fascism and Stalinism, and so tend to regard Stalinism as worse. Zizek's own argument that Stalinism is not as bad as Fascism turns, I think - it is quite hard to tell what he is arguing a lot of the time - on a premise that historical materialism is true when he says that "[c]lass antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism". Consequently, liberals, who typically do not believe that 'class antagonism is constitutive of the social field', are unlikely to accept his argument: it begs the question against them, in a quite obvious way.

However, I do think there is an important sense, which is particularly relevant what Zizek is writing about, the remembrance of these regimes, in which Stalinism was less bad than Fascism, in that Stalinism, for all its horror, at least held out the prospect of a progressive emancipation, an achievement of freedom, whereas Fascism is inherently backwards-looking, a true blood and soil ideology, whose end is the subsumption of humans into their ethnicities. Communism is a progressive and utopian system of political thought, and that utopia, were it reached, would be a genuine utopia, whereas Fascism is a form of radical nationalism, steeped in myths of bloody confrontation and martial glory leading only to further bloody confrontation. Insofar as Stalinism is a failed form of Communism, however morally disgusting and grotesque it was, there should be a tinge of regret in our assessments of it because of the emancipatory promise of Communism: there is a sense in which it is sad that Communism is not true, because, were it true, there would be the possibility of achieving the kind of utopia it describes. Fascism utterly lacks this kind of regret, because it has no vision of an end-point, a justification for its horrors, that any right-thinking person could want to embrace. Our collective memory of the two sets of regimes should embrace that difference in regret, I think.

I think that it is also this kind of emancipatory vision which links other left-leaning movements and Communists in anti-Communist's minds: they share the belief in the possibility of a radically better world, often to be achieved by overthrowing or removing existing social, political and economic structures, sometimes by violence but sometimes not. So anti-Communism is, if one thinks that the world could be made better by the removal of some social, political and economic structures, however incrementally and carefully that removal should be done, and if my earlier analysis is correct, a series of claims of which one ought to disapprove: it stands as a criticism of the Pope, I think.

Postscript: John Holbo is having another go at all these obsfucating lit-theory types, specifically at their ill-explained use of the term 'liberalism'.

Postscript II: Pearsall has an interesting take on the 'Communism tinged with regret' line.

The Third Way

Chris Brooke has a series of five posts, partly prompted by an article in the Grauniad today, about the slightly disturbing way in which the Labour Party under Blair has adopted slogans used in the past by fascists, going on to discuss what exactly the ideological content of New Labour is. They're all interesting, but what really piqued my interest was the reference to my kind-of supervisor, Stuart White, and his piece in the book he edited on the Third Way. As I understood when but a lowly undergraduate, his point is that there are two roughly left-right cleavages within Third Way European social democracy: real vs. formal equality of opportunity and social responsibilities vs. individual rights.

The idea is that within a broad framework of equality of opportunity and civic responsibility, which are the distinctive normative commitments of the Third Way, there are choices between emphasizing a lack of formal barriers, or providing a genuine helping hand, and between taking punitive action against those who degrade a social environment, or recognizing sometimes awkward individual rights, precisely because of the broadness of the framework. This leaves a kind of two-two matrix giving ideological slants within the Third Way: economically egalitarian and socially liberal, economically egalitarian and socially authoritarian, economically free-market and socially liberal, and ecomomically free-market and socially authoritarian.

One could believe for example, in extensive support for the poorly paid, for working mothers, and generous retraining and relocation programmes, encouraging businesses to move into economically deprived areas, and in attempting to eliminate, through redistributive taxation, inherited inequalities, and take either the position that low-level vandalism should be stamped by curfews and all the rest, or that it should be dealt with by an engagement with its primarily social causes and a respect for the rights of the criminal, as well as those of the victim. Equally, one could combine the belief that once a basic level of services and a minimally decent level of income are secured for all, our economic obligations are fulfilled, with either of those two positions.

I think White's idea about the main normative commitments of the Third Way is basically right: equality of outcome is more or less gone as an end for Labour under Blair, for example, and the references to vaguely communitarian notions ought to be familiar (he also talks about the way that Third Way politicians emphasise the importance of non-state actors in securing these goals: hence PFI, privately-run but mostly state-funded schools and so on). What's interesting is that I think it's fairly clear on which sides of these two divides New Labour comes down, the socially authoritarian and the economically free-market. Whilst their attacks on civil liberties, both of terrorists and of petty criminals, are fairly well known, it is noticeable that their welfare reforms have basically aimed at ensuring that it is possible and not economically disadvantageous to enter employment, rather than attacking an ingrained class structure which does substanially alter opportunity sets.

This makes them basically One-Nation Tories: although some of us may be at the bottom of the pile, those at the top have the responsibility to ensure that they have the opportunity to live a minimally decent life, as long as they do not fall into the category of the undeserving poor (all that rhetoric about social exclusion does hide the basic fact that New Labour has resurrected, maybe only morally, as opposed to economically, the category of the undeserving poor) either through idleness or moral squalor. For all Blair's rhetoric about being the inheritor of Gladstonian liberalism as well as of the vision of the New Jerusalem bequeathed by the 1945 government, the late-nineteenth century politician he resembles the most is Gladstone's opponent across the dispatch box, Disraeli. Perhaps the apparent alliance with brewers is not wholly coincidental, in this respect: Gladstone's liberal party, good non-conformists to a man, would have never extended pub opening hours, whereas the Tory sympathies of publicans were an electoral force of no little note in the nineteenth century.

Anyway, to return to Chris Brooke's posts. Chris talks a bit about how a lot of New Labour rhetoric is not quite fascist, but similar to the rhetoric of Vichy France, which from what little I know about it, was basically a kind of One-Nation Tory deal. But White's diagnosis could have told us that too.

Postscript: Stumbling and Mumbling infers, from the content of some of Blair's speeches, an admiration for the Tory-Liberal Imperialist governments of the late nineteenth century. Interesting in this context, perhaps...

Protestantism And A Culture Of Life

Russell Arben Fox has a post up on the Terry Schiavo case, which in his typically thoughtful way discusses the content of a religiously-motivated culture of life. Lots of liberal bloggers have become rightly exercised about federal intervention in this case, which seems to have been adopted by the leader of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to distract from an ongoing parliamentary ethics scandal, and is advocating a position apparently in contradiction with that of a law Dubya signed as governor of Texas (go to any liberal American blog, and there will be details). There are cheap political points to be scored here, undoubtedly, but Russell is much more interested in what the American reaction to the publicization and politicization of the case, and what it says about the religious right in the States, at a philosophical-sociological level.

What he has to say reminds me of the discussion I had with Pearsall about national identities, because the kind of highly individualistic (De Tocqueville might well say atomised), almost manichean, religious world-view that Russell describes - a culture of life which is concerned only about the rights of the unborn and the terminally ill, and not with poverty or misery amongst the rest of us - seems to have been a mostly American (sometimes Anglo-Saxon - Thatcher embodied a kind of it particularly well, I think) phenomenon, with its roots in millenarian, spiritually egalitarian, radical Protestantism. That kind of radical Protestantism, the punitive, socially conservative, Augustinian Protestantism of Luther and Calvin rather than the liberal, perhaps Thomist, Protestantism of Locke, for example, has played a particularly important role in shaping the way in which Americans think of themselves: the visions of the New Jerusalem, carved out, pure and industrious, from the wilderness in a land of opportunity, far from the inquity and corruption of the Old World.

Although Protestantism has shaped other national identities - undeniably the British, which has recurrent tropes, perhaps being seen again now in the opposition to the EU, about the links between Catholicism, Absolutism, and the Continent - I don't think it's quite the same version of Protestantism: we've had Christian Socialist Prime Ministers (Attlee cut his political teeth working in Church missions to the poor in the East End), and Labour was able to co-opt the image of a New Jerusalem to propagandize successfully for the welfare state, both unimaginable in the US, although undoubtedly not solely because of the form Evangelical Protestantism takes there. That is not to say, unfortunately, that Britain does not have tropes leaning towards the kind of manichean individualism so prominent in a lot of American political discourse: witness Thatcher's combination of anti-Establishment views, social conservativism and (heartless) hard-nosed individualism, and, more importantly, its success.

What may be troubling Russell is that he is trying to understand these kinds of views - insofar as they are religiously motivated, an outgrowth of radical Protestantism - through a Catholic framework. He approvingly quotes a long section of Pope John-Paul II's Ecclesia in America, which lays out what seems to me like a kind of One-Nation Tory agenda, socially conservative but economically progressive (that's a broad brush: the Pope is not Disraeli, but they bear certain rough family resemblances; in Freeden's metaphor, they arrange the furniture more or less the same way). Catholic political parties, at least in Western Europe, where they have been separated from feudal landowners, have tended to be like this, the Christian Democrats of Italy and Germany being a case in point (I know the German CD is not solely Catholic, but it is Catholic-influenced: the Bavarian Catholic party inevitably co-operates with it in government).

Protestants, particularly the radical Protestants - yes, the Church of England is Disraeli's Tory party at prayer - just don't think like this: because of the emphasis in such Protestantism on the individual's relationship with God, not needing the mediation of a Church and its traditions, the concern for society as a community, the whole greater than the sum of its parts, simply doesn't exist (this can be seen both in Locke and the strands of American political discourse Russell is discussing). So, in a sense, whilst I think Russell is right - a culture of life which doesn't care about the suffering of the poor and disadvantaged is no culture of life at all - I think he misses the point, because the kind of Protestantism which is motivating the religious right in the States simply doesn't think in those terms: because individuals have a direct relationship with God, they and they alone are responsible for their behaviour.

Update: Matt Yglesias has been posting on a number of thought experiments about personal identity, with reference to the Schiavo case, which are themselves quite interesting.

Further update: Body and Soul has a nice discussion of the cooperation of the Catholic Church in the States with evangelical Protestantism. I'm thinking, I should add, about writing a post on the legacy of explicitly Catholic political thought in Lockean liberalism, but that'll have to wait.

Democratic Peace Theory And The Neo-Cons

Timothy Burke has a post up arguing, amongst other things, that various cheerleaders - Christopher Hitchens is perhaps the most familiar - for the neo-con's foreign policy experiments in the Middle East fail to address the genuine problems with their theory that appear even if you take what they say at face value. I don't think, personally, that all the stuff about democracy is much more than a figleaf for installing client regimes wherever they can get their grubby little mitts on, but even assuming that they do really mean it, they have some serious problems, most of which Burke skewers fairly accurately. For example, neo-cons have been known, I understand, to cite democratic peace theory as support for the supposed project of democratization, because, it is claimed, democratic peace theory shows that a more democratic world will be a more peaceful world.

Democratic peace theory generalizes from the fact that no two (fully-fledged, parliamentary) democracies have ever gone to war to a thesis that no two democracies will ever go to war, or at least that democracies are much less likely to war with each other than any other sorts of states are. As I remember from doing a paper in international relations as an undergraduate, you have to be fairly robust in your definition of democracy to get the empirical claim, and then, because the numbers of democracies are so low, and often so far apart, the idea that it is democracy rather than not having anything to fight about that prevents these states from fighting starts to collapse. For example, it hardly particularly surprising that Australia and Swizterland have not ever gone to war, because they are simply so far apart. Equally, since it has, until the last hundred or so years, been fairly rare for states which do not have a land border to go to war, so that the United States, the oldest democracy, has not gone to war with any other democracies, since most of them have, historically, been in Europe, separated by at least three thousand miles of water.

There is, though, it seems to me, something to the idea that democracies are much less likely to go to war with each other. The ideas that democracy encourages compromise and negotiation rather than resort to violence, that it is particularly responsive to the wishes of those who are likely to die in wars, rather than the wishes of those who are likely to gain prestige and wealth from wars, that democracies tend to be more open societies, with more links to other states, and so on, do seem to argue that democracies are less likely to go to war, at least with other democracies (actually, the historical record indicates that democracies are in fact more likely to go to war with non-democracies than other non-democracies are: this is probably because democracies often have interests in liberalizing non-democracies - opening them up to foreign trade, for example - and the conflict-resolution stratgeies of both tend to clash - crudely, if I am used to resolving disputes by trials of strength, I will look upon attempts at compromise and negotiation as an invitation to agression).

All that said, it is worth noting that whatever truth the democratic peace theory has, it has as a result of stable patterns of democratic decision-making and the dominance of commercial interests in democratic societies. Installing, from above, a set of democratic structures, unless and until those structures are supported by the population, will not provide the benefits, because the characteristics from which the benefits flow do not yet exist. In fact, states which have recently changed system of government, and democratizing states in particular, appear to be more likely to go to war than any other states. It is easy to understand why stability in domestic political arrangements might in general lead to less violent foreign policy: a stable domestic political arrangement is likely to lead to a stable foreign policy, because the interests of those ruling the state are unlikely to change particularly quickly, and a stable foreign policy tends to be more peaceful, because going to war is usually essentially a mistake, where one side has underestimated the strength of the other, a mistake which is less likely to be made if everyone has reasonably accurate expectations of each other's behaviour.

What's particularly interesting is that democratizing states are particularly likely to go to war, that their foreign policy is particularly aggressive and unstable. Again, if we think about the domestic political structures, this makes sense. Democratizing societies are characterized, generally, by aristocratic or autocratic groups attempting to cling onto power by mobilising support from other groups whose interests run counter to those of the mass of the new enfranchised population: heavy industry, perhaps the urban middle class. Yet shackling together largely commercial and largely military or agricultural interests does not make for stable policy prescriptions, especially when there is an attempt to capture a working-class nationalist vote. Unless a democratizing polity is utterly monolithic, then it will be characterized by groups which have political power utterly disproportionate to their electoral strength, who realise that power is ebbing, and will attempt to create coalitions which they can dominate in order to hold onto it. This will lead to increasingly incompatible policy prescriptions as the coalition becomes more and more disparate. Thus, an unstable and often aggressive foreign policy.

But if democratization leads to increased amounts of war, then even if the democratic peace theory is correct, it would not necessarily be a good idea to attempt to use it as the theoretical basis for democratizing societies, as these societies are likely to become more violent before they become less, if they ever become less. It might be possible, of course, to skip the stage of democratization and go straight into being a fully fledged democracy: I can only assume that this is what the neo-cons assume will happen. But that just shows an ignorance of political sociology. Democracies tend to exist, where they do exist, as the result of a process of gradual historical development, where the polity becomes more democratic as the society does, distributing political power increasingly equally, becoming more and more habituated to democratic modes of political practice. In the absence of that process, and the favourable historical conditions which tend to allow it, democracies tend to collapse back into a more or less autocratic system. Perhaps those historical conditions do exist in the Middle East now, and so that process will occur. It seems unlikely to me, and even if it does, it's likely to lead to more violence at first.

This is the kind of genuine intellectual challenge to the neo-cons, which takes their professed belief in democracy seriously, and wonders about the wisdom of their policy, which their cheerleaders utterly fail to address. Shouting ' you're an apologist for mass murder' does not address the point that democracy requires social support, which may well not be forthcoming if it is imposed by external force, and that the period of habituation to democratic norms may in fact lead to further violence. I think it's quite interesting in a way that some many once on the hard left are now supporters of the foreign policy of the Bush government, since both share the Manichean tendency to paint any disagreement as collusion with an unutterably evil enemy. The utopianism of both is probably the root of this, and one of the things which substanially distinguishes them from liberals, who realise only too well that there are genuine moral costs to most actions, and that the ends do not necessarily justify the means.

History And National Identity

A while ago, I wrote a response to a number of posts at Pearsall's Books on national identities, which Pearsall has now written a response to. My initial disagreement with Pearsall, as he correctly identifies, was that I thought he was conceding too much a generally essentialist account of national identity. I argued that saying "[t]he borders between the European nation-states as they stood in the aftermath of World War II were essentially boundaries between highly homogenous ethno-lingual societies" conceded "half the ground to the anti-immigration nuts, by allowing them to legitimate their construction of a national identity which is substantially ethnically based". Pearsall says in response to this that "national identity is not a fixed concept, that it is respondent to historical change" but that "while I see these identities as things that change over time, I think that they move more sluggishly than reality", and that because European nation states were relatively ethnically homogenous, at least after World War II, there are lingering quasi-tribal ideas of national identity at work in most European states.

This is undoubtedly true: the way in which anti-immigration politicians have been able to whip up a moral panic, aided and abetted by large sections of the press, about a rising tide of funny-coloured people scrounging off our generous welfare system, spreading disease, committing crime and just being a bit weird would not be possible without such an idea. I think I may have actually slightly misrepresented my disagreement with Pearsall, because, insofar as this is what he is claiming, I don't disagree with him. What I disagree with, I think, is the failure to challenge these ideas, the acceptance of dubious historical claims that they rest on and, because of that, the granting of a right to make moral claims about who is and is not entitled to be a member of a state.

For example, in my original post, I talked about a basically non-ethnic process of formation of a British national indentity, stretching back roughly to the Glorious Revolution. What I was trying to get at was that the attempt to impose, in Britain and thus a fortiori in most other European states, even an ethnically based account of the formation of national identities - that even if the explicitly essentialist parts of an ethnic account were dropped - was simply historically inaccurate. Ethnic differences, certainly in an overtly racialist sense, but also in linguistic-cultural sense, simply played a fairly minimal role in the processes of the formation of national identity. For such differences to have played a genuinely important role, they would have to have been prior to the processes to which they were an input to: there would have had to have been some people who were French, or German, or whatever, who constituted a nation before there was a state to go with that nation. Unless that's the case, then it looks like what constitutes a sense of national identity is the sense of shared history, embedded in linguistic and cultural tropes, substanially created by the experience of living in a state together, of living in a social and political system the experience of which is more or less the same across a large territory. The formation of nations is significantly the same process as the formation of nation-states.

We can see this if we think about the Cote D'Azur. A lot of the French Riveria was part of the kingdom of Piedmont - itself a French, not Italian, name - which stretched over what is now north-west Italy and parts of south-eastern France. In the 1860s, when Italy was being unified by the kingdom of Piedmont, in return for French military support, the king of Piedmont seceded western parts of his kingdom to France. Nice and the area surrounding it, which had been part of Piedmont, where people spoke a wierd pidgin of French and Italian, became part of France. If you go to the old centre of Nice now, you can still see street signs written in this pidgin. Yet presumably the vast majority of the indigenous inhabitants of Nice would quite happily describe themselves as French, even though less than a hundred and fifty years ago, they were apparently members of another nation, the Piedmontese, and spoke a quite different language.

The same point could be made about Alsace-Lorraine. Dogs, presumably originally from Alsace, are also called German shepherd dogs, but the people all speak French and presumably think of themselves as French. Although Pearsall correctly points to a number of occasions on which serious intra-state violence has been committed by one ethnic group against another in Europe, the fact is that the majority of the time, after the violence about which state the territory belongs to dies down, ethnic groups have tended to be integrated into the nation the state has created. I don't know whether this is true or not, but it seems likely that excluding the break-up of the USSR, the sixty years after 1945 have seen the fewest changes in European borders since the beginning of there being anything like decided borders between political authorities. If there have been all these changes in which political authority groups were subject to, then there must be some successful processes by which they have been integrated, given that most of Western Europe is not riven by ethnic divides. The social, economic and legal pressures to learn a common language, a national educational system and so on created by the largely nineteenth century creation of nation-states seem plausible candidates.

The same thing of course applies the large numbers of intra-European immigrants, particularly those in the huge migration from the Mediterranean to the North that went on between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, with a break between the wars. But if this is true, that nation-states create nations, the acquiescing to the idea that there is some absolute existential threat from immigration makes no sense, except at the extreme margins. Europea nations might have quite tribal senses of identity, but those senses can change, adapt, and we have no reason to believe that they will not do so in such a way as to integrate current flows of immigrants unless we allow them to. Obviously, the common culture of Christianity and the fact of relatively similar skin colour have made integrating the groups that have arrived so far comparatively easy. There is a genuine problem, but it is far from being insoluble.

Assuming that it is is a bit like making the mistake that I think Russell Arben Fox made a while ago when writing on Rousseau. Creating a group to live under some collective arrangement is not prior to the legitimation of that collective arrangement, both because collective arrangements create groups, and because legitimation is a matter of whether the collective arrangement treats those subject to it adequately. Nationalists, as distinct from patriots, don't understand that. Rather than pandering to them, we should be pointing it out.

A coda: I've just been thinking, looking at the comments on Pearsall's post, that part of the disagreement might actually stem from ideas of national identity. Perhaps, because part of American national identity is the escape from the corrupt, tradition- and history-bound old world - all the city on the hill stuff - the explicit role that history does play in European national identities seems rather worrying for Americans. Equally, for some Europeans, because of the way in which they see their national identity bounded by contingency, by historical accident, and so see national identities as malleable, changing things, the certainty of American national identity, what can seem like a blindness to its historical roots, makes it seem very odd. Maybe. I might have been captivated solely by the rather pleasing symmetry of the idea, but...