politics

Chris Blattman disagrees with me on the ICC indictment of Omar al-Bashir, which I think is a defensible position (and one which I would probably have held myself previously). However he links to Alex de Waal’s post All Quiet in Sudan? and suggests that Alex’ arguments may show that the ICC indictments are backfiring. I think this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ICC indictments are intended to achieve.

Although Luis Moreno-Ocampo may well be a loose cannon, as Chris believes, the ICC indictments have one aim and one only: to bring Omar al-Bashir to trial for his role in the conflict in Darfur. While we need to take account of the political realities, the only way that they can backfire is if they put Omar al-Bashir out of reach of criminal proceedings - or possibly if they lead to more crimes against humanity in Sudan. There’s nothing in Alex’ analysis to suggest that this is the case or that it’s likely to be the case in future.

However the points that Alex makes are all dead on - and expose the real fault lines in the international system, cracks which are nowhere near the ICC itself. For example,

The second strand of the [Sudanese] government strategy has been to seek solidarity from regional organizations including the League of Arab States, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. By last weekend, it was clear that the regional organizations all had strong objections to the ICC’s move. Many African states, including Egypt, have been early and strong supporters of the ICC, and their lack of support for this move by the Prosecutor reassured Khartoum. The AU’s new Chairperson, Jean Ping, was particularly outspoken.

It’s often been noted that African leaders have a tendency to turn a blind eye to the excesses of their peers, but at least you can say that they’re consistent. Support for the ICC was always going to evaporate as soon as national governments realised that it wasn’t just going to go after their enemies, so none of this should come as any surprise - nor does it show that the indictments are a mistake. In terms of the remit of the ICC, exposing this is surely the opposite of backfiring - it demonstrates that those regional governments are now aware that they are not out of reach of the law.

Last week: Britain and the US have condemned Russia and China for vetoing a draft UN Security Council resolution to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe’s leaders.

Particularly amusing was UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband saying the veto “would appear incomprehensible to the people of Zimbabwe” - surely they’re used to nobody charge to the rescue by now? The doomsayers railed against the inability of the United Nations to address human rights at all - a charge which has some legitimacy when you look at the charade that the Human Rights Council threatens to become, but has less credibility when you remember that the United Nations has usually been the vehicle for those rights in the first place; and it was the UN that approved the Responsibility to Protect, of which this would have been a fine outing.¹ The UN (unfortunately) is large, it contains multitudes; the truth is that the Security Council will never be able to address these issues without reforms that the permanent members will never agree to - the removal of the institution of permanent membership itself and the end of their veto.²

This week: The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor charged Sudan’s president on Monday with masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and using rape as a weapon of war.

For discussion about Darfur, I can’t recommend Alex de Waal et al.’s Making Sense of Darfur blog highly enough and, sure enough, they’ve provided in-depth analysis of what this means. If you wish to understand the situation in Darfur, you will not find better on the web; and their coverage of the ICC decision is as usual excellent, although unfortunately it’s a temporary feature. The main point here is that - regardless of whether you agree with the decision or not (and tragically the blogosphere doesn’t have much more to offer in terms of commentary than those two) -  the ICC has taken a major step in advancing the status of human rights on the global stage by indicting a sitting head of state in an ongoing conflict,³ which is also an excellent counter-balance to the continuing bad news from Zimbabwe. It also shows that the future of human rights lies not with the old order - the Security Council, one of the oldest institutions available - but with more recent international institutions such as the ICC.

For what it’s worth, I come down strongly for sanctions against Zimbabwe, combined with more vigorous diplomatic pressure - not on Zimbabwe itself, which remains oblivious, but on Zimbabwe’s enablers, particularly South Africa. It is long past time for African governments to stop defending each others actions at the expense of the well-being of their peoples, and long past time for others to stop tolerating it. I come down weakly in favour of the Bashir indictment, because the threats that Sudan may descend into “mayhem” as a result ring slightly hollow when you look at the actual state of Sudan and wonder if “mayhem” would possibly be an improvement⁴ and I think the potential benefits outweigh the imagined disadvantages.

The reason that I support the indictment is mainly for the service it does in advancing the debate on human rights globally. While it may in itself be quite toothless, it changes the terms of that debate - and that may indeed be the strategic reasoning behind it. It’s only through these discussions that we advance the cause of human rights, which is after all a series of discussions between different groups about power and responsibility - even if part of the backdrop to those discussions is the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe.

1. The irony meter goes off the charts when you realise that Mugabe himself was at that meeting. [↩]
2. On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that those two factors are what prevents the Security Council from descending into utter irrelevance. [↩]
3. Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor previously, both in circumstances slightly but critically different. [↩]
4. Joke. [↩]

Wow, it’s a big blogging day, isn’t it? I must be ill or something. Ethan asks

If Darfur is one of the best examples of people in the developed world paying attention to events in a developing nation, and if drawing attention to Darfur has involved an oversimplification of the conflict which may be damaging and misleading, should be be looking at the Darfur movement as an exemplar for how to draw attention to developing world issues, or should we be avoiding it like the plague?

Ethan has already answered the first part of his own question in the post. Darfur is a good example of people paying attention to an constructed narrative that they feel invested in, rather than in the actual situation. This is normal - we all bring something different to the table - but Darfur is interesting because it’s scaled up far larger than anybody (including me) ever expected. Of course the impact of that large scale has been a big nothing for the people of the Darfur, but that doesn’t seem to worry most of the people involved - so all credit to Ethan for asking these questions.

Personally I think we should look at the Darfur movement as an example of how to mobilize people - if that’s what you want. It’s not a good example of how to educate people, which I think is more important than mobilizing them. If people want to mobilize, they’ll mobilize themselves - but they can only do that if they have good information with which to make their decisions. The reason why you’d want to draw attention to developing world issues (or “issues”, as they call them in the developing world) is the one that interests me, as previously noted - not because it’s a bad thing in itself, but because participation without purpose is not a good use of anybody’s time.

In other words, is it possible to get people interested in African stories without oversimplifying them? Is it possible to solve “the caring problem” too well, convincing people to care too much and in the wrong directions? For those of us trying to get more attention to the rest of the world, how do we strike this balance between too much and too little?

Wow, that’s a lot of questions there. Short answers:

a. No.

b. Yes.

c. You should start by asking why you’re trying to get more attention to the rest of the world. Once you know why you’re doing it, you’ll be able to work out the right approach.

Here’s a thought. Martin Bento says in comments:

Particularly in the US, where the country is almost synonymous with the government (most countries have existed under various governments), it makes people feel that the government may be wrong, but its motives must be good.

Where the country is almost synonymous with the government is the part that made me think. Patriotism in the US is constructed on an unbroken chain of governance since the inception of the country - with a possible exception made for the Civil War? - with the added weight that the country itself did not exist prior to the formation of that governance mechanism. This leads many Americans to view that governance mechanism as one of the essential attributes of the country, as well as locating it in the mostly unquestioned belief that the American Way (of life, of politics, of economics) is the right way of doing things.

Other countries lack this unbroken chain of governance. Moments of interruption, whether long or short; complete and wholesale changes in regime; a story as a nation that goes back further than the story of the country itself; borders that change and shift with historical fortune; competing subnational narratives within the attempt to construct a new patriotism. All of these things influence the nature of patriotism (read: nationalism?) in the rest of the world (compared with the New World, and particularly compared with the US) and consequently give us a radically different historical perspective on issues like governmental authority.

Christopher Hitchens is waterboarded for Vanity Fair¹ and comes up for air to proclaim

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Well, quite; but I still find it astonishing that anybody questions whether waterboarding is torture, or that Hitchens needed to be waterboarded before he realised something that should be blindingly obvious to anybody paying attention. The chronically stupid are likely to wheel out their usual protests, which is that any procedure that somebody like Hitchens would volunteer for can’t possibly be torture.² A quick glimpse at the indemnification contract that he had to sign should set their minds at rest:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

So where does that leave us? In absolutely the same place as we started. Kudos to Hitchens for going through with this, but it’s not going to change the mind of anybody who’s already put their chips in with torture, and it’s too late to undo the damage that’s been done by admitting waterboarding into the repertoire to begin with.

The truly insidious nature of torture is only hinted at in Hitchen’s piece:

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

It’s not about what torture can do for your country, it’s about what torture does to your country; but maybe that’s not a concern for people who would trade in their security for a taste of the action.

1. Presumably they quizzed him about his expenses claims. [↩]
2. You can read more monkey at the comments on Harry’s Place, with delightful insights such as “It is an interesting and fair question, though, if waterboarding qualifies as torture, but you’d need to get the answer from tough people, people who have been trained to resist captors and pain” - because apparently you need to be an trained expert to tell if you’re being tortured. [↩]

Many Balkan politicians have very firm principles. They’re prepared to make great sacrifices for those principles, but they’re more often prepared to sacrifice other people for them. People don’t seem to have as much of a problem with this as you’d expect - look at how many Serbs continued to follow Milosevic as he lead the country into utter ruin. It’s to the credit of the Serbian people that eventually they pulled themselves out of that collective descent, but the tendency remains firmly embedded in Balkan politics.

For a contemporary example, look no further than the report on Serbblog on the possibility that Montenegro might recognise Kosovo. Now this is something that’s unlikely in the extreme but which makes great political hay for pro-Serbian politicians in Montenegro - Andrija Mandic captured 19% of the vote in the recent elections by playing up to it. Mandic recently made a visit to Kosovo and has clearly decided that this is the issue that’s going to get him the most mileage:

Mandic suggested that ordinary Montenegrins take to the streets in protest, especially now during tourist season (tourism represents nearly 25% of the Montenegrin economy) should the Montenegrin leadership even consider such a traitorous move.

Apparently the Montenegrin government needs to be prevented from even thinking about recognising Kosovo (thoughtcrime!) and the best way to do that is to cripple the one part of the economy that’s actually growing. The fact that, if successful, the short-term impact of such a strike would damage the average Montenegrin more than anybody else, and that the long-term impact would probably kill the tourist industry in the cradle, seems to have escaped Mandic (and Serbblog, who supports the idea). Or maybe it hasn’t escaped him, and he genuinely believes that cutting your nose off to spite your face is a sensible policy position?

UPDATE: Okay, now Djukanovic has said in public that recognition of Kosovo independence is inevitable. Strike, Andrija, strike! (Of course, this is from New Kosova Report, and Djukanovic apparently specifically used the passive voice, and didn’t actually say that Montenegro is going to recognise Kosovo any time soon, etc, etc. Mileage may vary.)

Norm Geras is smarter than me, but sometimes smart people can be just plain silly.

Opposing the war Hall, like the rest of the many Iraq-war smugwits in the camp of those who opposed the war, favoured the continuation, sine die, of a regime of torture and murder.

It is a truism, of course, that many (although not all) of the pro-war camp were surprising muted in their opposition to Saddam Hussein while he was busy committing genocide against the Kurds, and for an extremely long time thereafter. Presumably this means that at that point they also favoured the continuation of a regime of torture and murder - perhaps Norm could tell us what changed their minds?

Meanwhile Oliver Kamm descends into self-parody, proclaiming “Bush made the world a safer place”. Witness:

The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years… has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society… are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.

Back in the real world, Israel and Hamas agree a ceasefire pending negotiations on re-opening the Rafah border crossing. It is noticeable that those who decry the slightest hint of jaw-jaw and bray most loudly for war-war are frequently those who are unlikely to ever suffer the consequences of war-war. The result is that, while Israel desperately but understandably seeks accommodation with its opponents, professional satirists such as Kamm are busy apparently telling them that they shouldn’t - for their own sake.

Those readers unfamiliar with this brand of satire may require some help understanding passages like this:

For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

“Verbal infelicity” = lying. “Diplomatic brusqueness” = war of aggression. “Negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq” = completely dropping the ball at the most critical point. “Insouciance regarding standards of due process” = heavily editing the Geneva Conventions and sanctioning torture. “The world is a safer place” = pretty much as it sounds, unless you’re an Iraqi citizen.

I’m under no illusions that my opinion counts for anything with either Norm or Oliver, but I truly wish that the pro-war camp would just face their truth. Iraq has been a terrifying mess since the beginning (although the results of the surge have been a welcome relief in terms of the human cost) and pretending otherwise is just a fool’s penny in the fountain. Opposing that war - and wars to come - doesn’t make you an apologist for genocide; it can simply mean that you’ve seen how these games tend to play out on the ground.

While reading this post, you should be listening to Perfect Bird by Hexstatic and Missalu Aduna by Omzo.¹

Dave Steinberg writes a column on How much do we have to care about? with annotations by Ethan Zuckerman. Both of these men are very intelligent, both write very well and both are concerned with how the internet can improve the human condition. So why are both of them so egregiously wrong?

MAKE ME THE OTHER

Dave and Ethan’s worries can be divided into two questions:

The population of Nigeria roughly equals the population of Japan. Yet, the amount of space given to Nigeria by the US news media makes it about the size of Britney Spears’ left pinky toe. Why?

Because Nigeria has virtually no historical connections to the US, almost no strategic value in relation to US interests, and is a long way away. It’s also because the US news media is a terrifying joke, but that’s a more general observation than the topic under discussion.

How can we get past our homophily — the love of that which is like us — to get to xenophilia, which is Ethan’s term for the love of that which is different. How can we change the media agenda?

Of course, the media agenda is not responsible for our homophily – my hunch is that they’re only tenuously related for the purposes of effecting change, since homophily is about as deep-rooted a human instinct as it’s possible to find. It’s not the only deep-rooted human instinct, though, on which more, later.

In fact, they don’t mean how can we love that which is different. In the cosmopolitan stretches of the world, we already love that which is different (what authentic ethnic cuisine would you like tonight?) to such an extent that we forget that most of the world isn’t like that.

THE POWER OF PLACE

What we have difficulty with is that which is distant – that which happens outside our line of sight. But what is inherently good about loving that which is distant? If we invest in this, we run the risk of diminishing our love of that which is closest – our own culture. Given my professional and personal interests, you’ll have a hard time persuading anybody that I’m xenophobic – but I’m not so egocentric that I think that my interests should be everybody else’s interests.

The power of place will continue to exert a hold on human psychology because humans have to live in a physical world where distance and difference matter. The internet may not see those distances (although I think that the internet just reconfigures those distances rather than eliminates them) and the internet may help those already predisposed to xenophilia to get their fix – but the internet isn’t going to make people care more.

CARING IS NOT ENOUGH

Ethan adds:

You might add something about why this “circle of not-caring” matters. My stock examples for this are the genocide in Rwanda, and terrorist training camps in central Asia. We don’t care about these places until it’s too late…

This is where my alarm starts to go off. Who is this mysterious “we” that Ethan is talking about? It would be nice to think that “we” is the community of humanity, but in reality it means “people like me”, which elides into “a particular type of American”. Quite a lot of people cared about the genocide in Rwanda – I understand that most of the population of Rwanda itself got involved – just the “right” people (i.e. those with the power to do anything about it) and not in the “right” way (i.e. to turn caring into a workable policy).

The Save Darfur Coalition has made a huge number of people in the US care about Darfur – yet as far as I can tell, it’s had absolutely no impact on people of Darfur, except possibly to ensure a constant stream of celebrity access). There’s a danger in thinking that caring means anything, because the bad news is that caring – whether a little or a lot – doesn’t mean anything. Acting can mean something, but there’s a danger in action that is just a form of externalized caring – which is what I’d argue a lot of the Save Darfur campaign is.

CURSING THE FAMILIAR

Kwame Appiah’s book, “Cosmopolitanism”… observes that this opportunity to care about fellow creatures in far-flung parts of the world is very, very new. Two hundred years ago, only the most learned city-dwellers would regularly interact with people of other “tribes”.

I’m looking forward to reading Cosmopolitanism at some point in my hopefully long life, but this argument strikes me as being nonsense. The history of civilisation is the history of contact – Europe has been a patchwork of competing factions (tribal or otherwise) for most of its history, as has most of the world. It strikes me that what this idea overlooks the simple facts of history in order to set up a strawman that supports a philosophical theory – but I haven’t read the book yet, so I could be wrong.

I call this “cursing the familiar” because it underplays the significance of local differences purely because they are so familiar. All those differences between different countries, different groups, different towns – they’re simply not different enough. We need something more exotic to get our juices flowing, right? Our own cultures, our own histories, are fascinating enough and need as much attention as Nigerian ninjas (or whatever you find exciting).

This isn’t an argument for parochialism; it’s an argument for recognizing that the familiar is important as well, particularly in a society such as ours where novelty is emphasized at the expense of continuity.

JESUS CALLED, HE WANTS A REFUND

This idea that we might need to care about all of humanity – or at least tolerate them in our interactions – is brand new, and starkly conflicts with basic human impulses – care for our family and tribe and fear the outsider.

This is nonsense. Christianity is 2000 years old, and has exactly this message; so do almost all of the world religions in some form, some more than others, some older than others. I agree that it conflicts with our basic impulses, which is why it hasn’t been particularly successful. However human society and economy are built on tolerating outsiders, so unless Ethan wants to argue that the last several thousand years of human history didn’t happen, it doesn’t seem a particularly strong argument.²

What was so exceptional about Nelson Mandela wasn’t that he was an amazing and vocal leader for black South Africans – it was that he showed compassion and understanding for white South Africans, including deKlerk. Figures who can care across borders are heroes in a very particular and recognizable fashion.

This isn’t quite true, and it reflects a common misperception about what it means to care about the world. We admire people who “care across borders” because of our philosophical and religious legacy. The Christian model of the martyr is the Christ figure, who sacrifices themselves for others – but there’s no value in a sacrifice if it doesn’t actually make things better for other people. Mother Teresa is a good example – widely admired, caring across borders, etc, and demonstrably an utter loss in actually improving people’s condition. We should admire people who make a significant difference in the material condition of the human race, not just those who fit a discredited religious model.

EQUALITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

But Ethan is not arguing that newspapers ought to cover every village and every family. Rather, our newspapers should equally cover places that are of equal significance, or at least not be so blatantly out of balance. Nigeria’s population is as big as Japan’s, and while its economy is not on a par with Japan’s, it’s of growing importance to us. So, why the disparity? And, more important, how do we remedy it?

“Equally cover places that are of equal significance” is meaningless. What is “equal significance” for economists might not be of equal significance for environmentalists; what is “equal significance” for musicians might not be of equal significance for mountaineers. If there are more musicians out there than economists, does that mean that the musicians’ definition give their interests more significance? The reason why coverage of Israel and the surrounding countries is so prevalent in the US media is precisely because so many people find it significant – you may disagree with them, but what makes your view more “significant” than theirs?

The strength of the internet is to provide a platform where all these slices of significance can be found – and if they can’t be found, you can create your own slice of significance. Saxophone-playing members of the Austrian school who like base-jumping can (and do) generate their own content. But the message is – it’s not up to you, me or anybody else to remedy the imbalance on behalf of anybody else, no matter how offensive we might find that imbalance. The most we can do is to improve the chances of the victims of imbalance to strike back (which is something that I think Global Voices Online does quite nicely).

But, there is a serious dilemma here…Our interest is determined not by what we should be interested in but by what we happen to be interested in.

I find this frankly odd. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be a problem – if our interest isn’t determined by what we happen to be interested in, then what should it be determined by? Who judges what we “should” be interested in – people like Dave and Ethan, who have a higher state of consciousness? For somebody who’s a big believer in the power of collective individual action, Dave doesn’t seem convinced that the wisdom of crowds is working well in this instance, because it collides with his own perceptions.

MORE TRUE THAN ANYTHING ELSE IN THE ARTICLE

Thus, if newspapers or their online replacements become more proportionally accurate reflections of the world, we’ll just skip the sections we don’t care about. That’s what we do already: Everything you ever wanted to know about Nigeria is online, but you haven’t read hardly any of it, have you? Me neither.

You have just answered your own question about why there isn’t more coverage of these places, haven’t you? If you guys, of all people, aren’t interested enough to follow up on Nigeria, then why on earth do you expect the broadcast media to follow it up?

Maybe one conclusion to draw is that good writing is harder than we thought. Or maybe there is more good writing around than we think, but we need help finding it.

I think it’s safe to say that good writing is harder to find than you think. The vast, vast majority of writing on the web is banal dross, cattleprod cant or porn.

As is so often the case, the question isn’t whether the Web has solved a problem but whether it’s helped.

Absolutely true, and it seems clear that it has helped and will continue to help.

But on the Web there are multiple, overlapping personal and social agendas. Which results in there not being an agenda. There is thus no one putting broccoli on our plates and telling us to eat it.

Yet here you are, telling us that we’re not eating enough from the xenophile buffet?

I don’t want to dismiss Dave and Ethan’s concerns, because they are smart and they are engaged and that’s important - yet if I was being cruel, I would have to say that this whole piece smacks to me of annexing the world in the name of entertaining Americans. Mostly, their complaint is that other people don’t share their particular interests - even while they acknowledge that even they don’t share their particular interests (they haven’t read most of the online material about Nigeria, remember).

There’s nothing wrong with being a xenophile, but you shouldn’t expect everybody else to be a xenophile as well. Even if there are Nigerian ninjas involved.

1. However I couldn’t upload them today, so you’ll have to wait. Read anyway. [↩]
2. If he’s taking a long-term evolutionary view, then you can argue that several thousand years is still brand-new, but I don’t think he is arguing that. [↩]

David Runciman on Orwell’s defences of hypocrisy:

What Kipling and Wodehouse had in common for Orwell was that there was a kind of integrity to their double standards, though of very different kinds. Kipling deliberately concealed something of himself, but did not seek to conceal the truth about the nature of imperial power; Wodehouse exposed himself, and thereby inadvertently exposed something of the double standards of the system of power in which he unthinkingly believed. But it is also true that what rescued Kipling and Wodehouse in Orwell’s eyes was that they did not share the other’s vice. The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider what would have happened if their positions had been reversed. It is inconceivable that if Kipling had found himself in Wodehouse’s position, broadcasting for the Nazis for the sake of a quiet life, then Orwell would have defended him; there was nothing innocent about Kipling, and therefore there was no way of imagining that he might have been self-deceived in such circumstances. Stupidity might just retain its integrity in the face of totalitarianism, but knowingness never could. Equally, it is impossible to imagine Orwell defending a PG Wodehouse view of British imperialism, because there was nothing innocent about imperialism, and political naivety in that context was always culpable. Kipling could write about empire because he was in no sense naive about it; what made Orwell despair of British imperialism was that it was not on the whole staffed by Kiplings, but by Bertie Woosters.

Ditto the invasion of Iraq, which has been brought to you entirely by Woosters, when all we needed was a Kipling.

While reading this post, you should be listening to Everything Is Under Control by Coldcut.

Ah, those were the days, when I would hang out with Rockwell and shoot cans off the top of Germaine’s afro. Everything’s different now, of course - Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Panopticon:

Conceived of as a theory of social control by the 20th century’s Michel Foucault, the Panopticon was originally the design of the 19th century’s Jeremy Bentham for a prison in which all the inmates would force themselves to behave because they would assume that every moment and act was being observed. Foucault argued that state programs to monitor and record our comings and goings create imaginary cages that limit what citizens do out of fear of being observed by those in power…

So far, so non-significant - the Panopticon is regularly trotted out in discussions about law and order, civil liberties, surveillance and so forth. Yet Vaidhyanathan questions whether the concept has any explanatory power:

… people tend to act out and get weird regardless of the number of cameras pointed at them. There are thousands of surveillance cameras in London and New York, yet those cities do not lack for the eccentric and avant-garde. Long before closed-circuit cameras, cities were places to be seen, not to be not seen… There is no empirical reason to believe that awareness of surveillance limits the imagination or cows the creative in a market economy under a nontotalitarian state.

This is where your doubts start to grab the sides of the kayak and start rocking, because I’m not sure that either Bentham or Foucault were worried that the Panopticon might prevent maverick art installations. The genius of the Panopticon is that it disposes of the need for the obvious trappings of totalitarianism - you didn’t need to keep an eye on people all the time when they’re disposed to keeping an eye on themselves on your behalf, even when you’re not actually watching them. Vaidhyanathan gets back on track though:

Basically, the Panopticon must be visible and ubiquitous, or it cannot influence behavior as Bentham and Foucault assumed it would.

But wait! We hear news (in our kayak) of the complete failure of the Panopticon from the UK, where Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard tells the world:

CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure. Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working.

So even when the Panopticon is visible and ubiquitous, nobody cares. How’s that for rad irony? Foucault was wrong; he was also French, and now he’s dead; three strikes against his credibility. Vaidhyanathan now plumps for the Nonopticon (or latterly, Cryptopticon):

The Nonopticon describes a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it. The most pervasive surveillance does not reveal itself or remains completely clandestine (barring leaks to The New York Times). We don’t know all the ways we are being recorded or profiled. We are not supposed to understand that we are the product of marketers as much as we are the market. And we are not supposed to consider the extent to which the state tracks our behavior and considers us all suspects in crimes yet to be imagined, let alone committed.

It’s none of those things - it’s just that we don’t care. All of this information is accessible, it’s just that most people can’t be bothered to track it, and the reason for that is twofold.

1. We don’t care that we’re the product of marketers because the marketers sell us shiny things which help us get our buzz on. The invisibility of this is partly what appeals to us, because it helps to maintain the illusion that we’re choosing our purchases and pleasures freely. Our illusion of control is more appealing than control itself.
2. We don’t care about the state considering us all suspects because our particular state has repeatedly shown itself unable to organise the Olympics a piss-up in a brewery. When you hear about human rights abuses attributed to surveillance technology, it always turns out that somebody somewhere dropped the ball and got embarrassed.

Of course all that changes if our state started to turn into that other type of state - you know, like the one I saw in that film about leftwing bedroom DJs - but in that film, the surveillance was ubiquitous and invisible, and the mixing was crap. Remember what I wrote earlier about the genius of the totalitarian? The real power of the panopticon lies precisely in its invisibility - you know that somebody might be looking but you have no idea if they are. The surveillance state that you see in The Lives of Others shows this perfectly - you don’t know if they’re watching or listening, or even who they are.

With a jarring shift in tone, Vaidhyanathan ends on a rousing chorus:

We must demand to know the terms of surveillance by our state and its partners in the private sector. We must be allowed to be agents in the construction of our reputations. We must insist on fairness, openness, and accountability in those institutions that commit such widespread surveillance. Otherwise we will cease being citizens. We will be subjects, mere fodder for our watchers, means instead of ends.

That’s all very inspiring, and of course I agree, but it misses one key point. Following the information revolution, we cease being citizens and become data points, the inevitable outcome of the layer of technology that’s being added to our societies and our lives. Bentham and then Foucault were absolutely right about how the Panopticon fitted their respective times, and the Panopticon is still with us.

In fact, the Panopticon is us.

(HT: Eric Rauchway at Crooked Timber.)

Since Cyclone Nargis struck Burma, there’s been much discussion about the wherefores and the whyhows of forcing assistance upon the military junta that runs the country. Rosemary Righter’s words summarise the argument:

The junta is not, of its own volition, going to let in anything like the volume of aid required, at the speed required, to prevent a natural disaster turning into a monstrous, and manmade, humanitarian catastrophe… Governments with the power to help must insist on doing so, with or without the junta’s co-operation - with the approval of the UN Security Council if they can, and without it if they must.

Bernard Kouchner weighed in, invoking the droit d’ingerence¹ and the Responsibility to Protect, to which one can only reply - well, he would, wouldn’t he? Kouchner came of age politically as the droit d’ingerence was being born, and since becoming French Foreign Minister (no, I can’t believe that one either) he’s used his position as a platform to promote a more activist approach towards international affairs. In response, Gareth Evans - one of the architects of the Responsibility to Protect - at first expresses concern that the invocation of R2P in this context

had the potential to dramatically undercut international support for another great cause, to which [Kouchner] among others is also passionately committed, that of ending mass atrocity crimes once and for all.

Having said that, Evans then makes the point that

when a government default is as grave as the course on which the Burmese generals now seem to be set, there is at least a prima facie case to answer for their intransigence being a crime against humanity - of a kind which would attract the responsibility to protect principle.

This would mark a tremendous shift in international affairs, even beyond that of the original endorsing of R2P at the 2005 UN World Summit. While in principle I can agree with a statement like that, in practice it doesn’t appear to be workable. The question of who decides when a government is being sufficiently “intransigent”, and what the criteria for intransigence would be, seem to make it of limited use as a policy tool - as with the Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. However I wouldn’t use that as an argument against the Genocide Convention, so I can’t in good conscience use it as an argument against applying R2P to cases such as Burma.

(The implications are wider than that, of course. At what point does intransigence become sufficient to warrant intervention? How incompetent does a government have to be before we push in regardless? Anybody with the slightest interest in these things should recognise that the first argument could have been used against Israel with the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and that the second could have been used against the US federal government in New Orleans. Let it be clear that I am not making these arguments - but you can be damned sure that there are more than a few states that would like to.)

We can argue around the moral and legal arguments around R2P as long as we like. My problem is that many of the arguments for humanitarian intervention don’t take into account the realities of delivering assistance, particularly following a natural disaster in an authoritarian state. Take, for example, Nick Cohen - a man with precisely no experience in this field, but who nevertheless knows exactly what we should do:

Suppose they are wrong, say the realists, and aid workers are met with armed resistance. Is the UN going to start a war for the sake of delivering rice rations? Even the apparently modest proposal to airdrop supplies is, they continue, a violation of Burma’s sovereignty. As always, there are 1,001 good reasons for doing nothing. But I don’t think passivity is an option for the UN.

Well, maybe he doesn’t know exactly what we should do, but he knows we should do something! This is of course the classic humanitarian fallacy, the thought bumble that launched a thousand NGOs, and should be treated with the suspicion it deserves. I couldn’t let this topic go by without allowing Conor Foley (who has taken issue with Cohen in the past) to explain:

The problem with mounting humanitarian operations during complex emergencies such as this is that it is very difficult to separate the effects of conflict, natural disaster and the overall political situation… Some have argued that aid should be made conditional on the government agreeing to meaningful political reform and dialogue with the pro-democracy movement. But if the government rejects this, then refusing aid will simply increase the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, then - the humanitarian imperative says that we should deliver assistance to people, regardless of the nature of their government, while the political reality is that we can’t even get into the country. The way to break the deadlock, according to Righter and others of that inclination, is to go in with all hearts bleeding and all guns blazing:

If the generals get the message that “no” will not be taken for an answer, they may decide to join what they can’t beat. And if not? Imposing aid is a messy business. Dying for lack of it is messier by far.

Above I mentioned the realities of delivering aid following a disaster, and unfortunately one of those realities is that you can’t “impose” aid. If you don’t have the co-operation of a government that has functional control of the affected areas, then it’s difficult to get anything done.² Even if you do have the co-operation of a government, it’s often difficult to get things done; there are a thousand ways that a government can make life difficult for aid organisations on the ground, whether through malicious intent or bureaucratic neglect.

So “imposing aid” isn’t just a “messy business” - it’s a logistical impossibility in an environment like Burma. The only hope we have of reaching the communities affected by the cyclone with the aid required - not just this time, remember, but the next time as well - is the course that we’re already on. The diplomatic and humanitarian pressure must be unrelenting, even if it proves to be fruitless, because in the end it’s the only way to actually deliver assistance - which even Kouchner acknowledged (in a joint article with David Miliband):

even in the face of the horror, we have to take into account the Burmese authorities, upon whom we depend to facilitate international action.

People have already died because we haven’t managed to get assistance to them in a timely manner, and many more will die yet. However we must remember that this is not our fault; it’s the fault of the military regime. If we are really serious about relieving the suffering of the people of Burma, then what is needed is not just short-term assistance, but a more effective longer-term strategy for engaging with the government of Burma.³ It is largely because of the absence of interest in Burma and the consequent lack of engagement with the government that we are in the position we are today - stuck on the sidelines, fuming at the fouls.

1. On a lighter note, I wonder if the French version of Wikipedia suffers from the same defects as the English version, except with more shrugging? [↩]
2. People who talk about military intervention in the context of providing relief normally don’t have clue one about either military or humanitarian operations. [↩]
3. This might sound excessively vague, particularly given that I’ve just attacked Cohen for not providing any detail, but that’s another post, when I don’t have so much work to do. [↩]

The New York Times reports on the difficulties of equipping Iraq’s armed forces without running into incompetence and corruption (two problems which usually go hand-in-hand). The ever-vigilant Talisman Gate dissects the article and points out the key phrase:

Those with knowledge of the Serbian arms deal said they knew of no specific crimes, but warned that with so little transparency and such poor oversight, problems were likely to emerge, as they did with the 2004 deal.

So no actual problems, just the hint of problems to come! It’s a whole new form of predictive journalism over there at the NYT.

All I can think of, however, is that there’s something vaguely yet deeply ironic about one country that we invaded buying arms behind our backs from another country that we invaded. Gosh, anybody would think that the international arms trade was riddled with corrupt practices that undermine efforts to establish transparency and accountability in developing countries, and clearly that can’t be right!

Whoop-di-do. That’s about the level of euphoria I can muster.

As of 11pm this evening, Filip Vujanovic had cleared the 50% threshold required to keep him in the Montenegrin presidency - which of course means that Milo Djukanovic is still the power behind the throne in Montenegro. As I’ve said before, I don’t think that the Djukanovic / Vujanovic administration is the worst option for Montenegro, especially at this critical post-independence pre-EU stage. However this does mean business as usual, and that’s not a terribly good thing. Given that they’ve been in power for the last 17 years (I think), the blame for the host of problems that Montenegro faces can be laid squarely at their door. (Richard Cowper ran down a list of those problems for the Montenegro Times.)

Anti-corruption candidate Nebojsa Medojevic ran an interesting campaign, maxing out his photo opportunities and trying to emphasise that he’s accessible and personable - as opposed to Vujanovic, whose PR always seemed to put him in front of some flags looking presidential. Nobody really thought Medojevic could win - but with 15% of the vote, he’s trailing third behind the main Serb candidate, Andrija Mandic, who scored at least 19%.

This suggests two things. First, the Serb vote is stronger than many observers initially thought it would be - although Mandic played up the Kosovo question (to recognise or not to recognise?) considerably in the final stretch of campaigning. This will have some (but not major) implications for how Vujanovic conducts foreign affairs - it’s not as if Montenegro was rushing to recognise Kosovo anyway. Second, the anti-corruption ticket wasn’t as strong as the PzP were counting on, despite the fact that most Montenegrins recognise the problem of corruption as the most obvious one which intrudes on their day-to-day life. (Freedom House’s Nations in Transit report suggests that in more general terms Montenegro is at best standing still in terms of developing a healthy democracy.)

This was a “safe pair of hands” vote; it seems likely that Vujanovic was the beneficiary of the independence honeymoon, particulary following a few years of rude economic health for the country. That health is likely to worsen considerably in the next couple of years, and the question is only how well the DPS will handle it. I think they’ll handle it quite well in the sense of protecting their own financial interests - which in many cases are not that different from Montenegro’s financial interests - but whether they’ll be able to provide leadership that goes beyond that is another question.

The level of interest in this election internationally appears to be almost zero, which is understandable - there’s plenty more interesting things going on in the Balkans, like Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted and Greece administering a diplomatic beatdown to Macedonia. In the long term, however, this result isn’t good for the health of Montenegrin politics, and that has implications for the entire region - remember that Montenegro neighbours Serbia, Kosovo and Albania, and has its own significant Serb, Bosniak and Albanian minorities.

On the other hand, Madonna’s playing Jaz beach this summer. She’ll be 50, you know. Frightening.

The bad news about Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted at ICTY: Serbia is naturally outraged, I tell you, outraged, and it seems likely that there was a fair amount of witness intimidation going on, which doesn’t speak too well for the wheels of justice at the Hague. The judgement summary is explicit:

During the trial the Chamber received evidence from almost 100 witnesses. Nevertheless, the Chamber encountered significant difficulties in securing the testimony of a large number of these witnesses. Many cited fear as a prominent reason for not wishing to appear before the Chamber to give evidence. In this regard, the Chamber gained a strong impression that the trial was being held in an atmosphere where witnesses felt unsafe, due to a number of factors set out in the Judgement. The parties furthermore agreed that an unstable security situation existed in Kosovo that was particularly unfavourable to witnesses.

No surprises there. Although Haradinaj (and Balaj) walked, the evidence shows that the KLA was involved in some distinctly unsavoury activities; Brahimaj went down for “cruel treatment and torture”, but the full description of KLA soldier misdeeds includes rape and murder as well. No surprises there either - the standard defense for the KLA offered by Kosovars is “Look what the Serbs did to us”, but if you read through the trial papers, most of the murders that these three were indicted for were of Kosovar Albanian civilians.

The good news about Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted at ICTY: by all accounts, he wasn’t a bad politician for Kosovo, and it’s not as if they have a particularly wide range to choose from. The international community should be happy - Haradinaj was very popular, and a conviction would have stirred up even more distrust between locals and internationals, particularly following Human Rights Watch’s damning report on the state of Kosovo’s own legal system and the international community’s tragicomic failure to rebuild it.

Hopefully this will inject a little bit of life back into Kosovar politics - now that they’re independent they need as much help as they can get. Ramush always seemed to get on better with the internationals than (for example) Hashim Thaci, and the fact that he turned himself in voluntarily to ICTY in the first place will give him major political capital to spend. The problem is that Thaci is now the first prime minister of independent Kosova, so I’m looking forward to some really dirty political combat very soon.

Look how happy Robert is to be exercising his democratic rights! Good luck, Zimbabwe - here’s to another 20 years of declining life expectancy, booming infant mortality, staggeringly high inflation, widespread human rights abuses and tearjerkingly destructive executive rule!

UPDATE: Fitna has been taken down by Liveleak following threats against its staff. This is a sad day for freedom of speech (even if it’s poorly produced speech) and plays into all the fears that Geert Wilders presumably wanted to raise by making it in the first place. Oh well. You can still watch it on YouTube if you really want to.

Fitna appears to be the modern equivalent of the Theatre of Cruelty, minus the creativity. It’s a fairly rudimentary cut-and-paste job - if I can speak bluntly for a moment, if a video doesn’t feature a fighter jet made of biceps, then it’s going wrong somewhere. However clearly my taste is not shared by the rest of the internet; apparently since it was released the video has been viewed 3291470 times (as I write these very words).

More worryingly, Fitna demonstrates almost no insight into the substantial problems of dealing with immigration in post-war Europe. Yes, I know it’s a polemic; however while it’s fairly clear that Wilders is against terrorist bombing and beheading - radical positions, certainly - beyond that it all gets a little fuzzy. Wilders claims that this is “a call to shake off the creeping tyranny of Islamization” but I have difficulty seeing exactly what the average person is expected to do in this heroic struggle.

If you prefer knowledge to fear, you could spend your time more wisely watching the astonishing video interviews with frontline Taliban fighters carried out by Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. This series of interviews covers a range of topics; it’s pretty much essential for anybody who wants some insight into the mindset of the Taliban, and absolutely fascinating even if you only have a passing interest.

The Taliban are not a good guide to the mindset of Muslims in general; but while we’ve been told that they’re Our New Favourite Enemy, most people have no idea who they really are and what they really believe. As the interviews show, these are uneducated men who come from unrelenting poverty, and their understanding of the world is understandably stunted.

It’s by no means good news, but if we want to understand Our New Favourite Enemy - and to improve people’s lives rather than dismiss their culture - then this is the place to start. Needless to say, the web is having a grand mal episode over Fitna, but almost nothing about the Globe and Mail’s report, the “war on terror” having been reduced to schoolboy videos and endless punditry.

Easter Sunday passed without incident here, mainly since it was only Easter for the Catholics, and everybody ignores them. Oh, except I worked out how the Shroud of Turin was formed - Jesus must have been under for 3 weeks rather than 3 days, because my filthy bedlinen has definitely taken on the print of my body.

Too much detail.

Anyway, religion was on my mind last week as I joined the discussion on euthanasia at Cranmer and OurKingdom - and thanks to everybody who contributed to those discussions, particularly David at Britology Watch. As I said in my original post, this is one of the few areas where the religious insist that their views on life be taken as the standard for everybody else, but to their credit most of the commenters on those other threads presented credible non-religious cases against legalising euthanasia.

Paying a visit to Britology Watch, I revisited the “controversial” statements by Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali following Archbishop Rowan Williams’ prolonged bout of stupidity “controversial” statements. Have you noticed that comments by the clergy only get labelled as controversial when they try to say something about politics? That’s probably because of the separation of church and state that we have - no, wait, that’s the US I’m thinking of.

In an interview with Bishop Nazir-Ali, I was greatly amused by these lines:

The real danger to Britain today is the spiritual and moral vacuum that has occurred for the last 40 or 50 years. When you have such a vacuum something will fill it.

That “moral vacuum” metaphor should be put out of its misery as soon as possible, since it manages to be simultaneously banal and meaningless. Read the rest of this entry »

Cranmer is more than a little irritated by … bland and oblique moralising

Oh crikey. When Cranmer gets a little irritated, property gets damaged, so imagine that carnage that will ensue now that he’s more than a little irritated. Your Grace, what’s got you so riled up?

While Cranmer agrees that the decriminalisation of suicide in 1961 made a modicum of sense insofar as one could never achieve a successful prosecution of the successful and ought to express compassion toward the unsuccessful, the liberalisation of the law on euthanasia would be a dangerously amoral development, as the Lords Spiritual asserted when the issue was last presented to Parliament.

Aha, euthanasia - always a good way of telling the religious person from the secular. Along with abortion, it’s the last area where the faithful believe that they have the right to impose their views on everybody else in our society. Unfortunately Cranmer is not content to assert that his particular faith group is against suicide / euthanasia - he wishes to demonstrate that

Opposition to ‘do anything which is destructive of life’ is one of the few general rules which unites all of the world’s religions

as well as apparently being against the principles of Enlightenment secularism. Unfortunately the quotations he provides demonstrate exactly why the world’s religions are in no position to dictate what the individual does with their body. Read the rest of this entry »

Transitions Online runs an interesting story on that most familiar of Balkan melodies, the rewriting of history. With its independence last year, Montenegro now has to somehow drag itself out from the shadow of big brother Serbia while making too may people angry, a trick which is hard to pull off:

A recent poll suggests that many Montenegrins share Abdomerovic’s moderate nationalism. Conducted in September and October by the independent Center for Democracy and Human Rights, the poll showed that about 35 percent of respondents favored renaming the official language Montenegrin, edging out Serbian by about 5 percent.

There’s a problem with this sort of poll in a country where demographic affiliation can be so contentious. The 2003 census estimated that at least 40% of the population is Montenegrin, while only around 30% are Serbian, and that poll result looks suspiciously like a split along those lines. So many Montenegrins Montenegrins might share that “moderate nationalism”, but they’re likely counter-balanced by Serb Montenegrins who feel short-changed by the whole deal.

The problem is that the Serbian voice isn’t very credible in Montenegro (as far as I know), despite the lack of rancour over the separation of the two countries. A good example of this is given in the article itself, as a Serb intellectual unwittingly demonstrates:

Aleksandar Stamatovic, a pro-Serb historian who lives in Montenegro, said every student in the Balkans should learn one true history, difficult as that might be to reach. Stamatovic would like to take on the job but knows that some of his claims, including that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated, if not made up, would scuttle any such opportunity.

Possibly his lack of job opportunities aren’t related to being pro-Serb, but being an apologist for war crimes, but the idea that there is “one true history” is an interesting one for a historian to make. History is always a matter of interpretations, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

There’s nothing wrong with revising history textbooks, simply on the basis that our understanding of history changes over time. The problem is that such revision implies that the previous history was false and that those who presented it were liars, which is what makes somebody like Stamatovic angry. If only he - and so many other people in the Balkans - could realise that history doesn’t have to be war by other means.

In a Guardian interview, James Lovelock explains why he thinks that there’s no point in most of the environmental activities that we currently pursue. Or indeed, no point to most of the activities that we pursue.

… the current canon of eco ideas… [is] premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

… What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Lovelock may or may not be correct that the apocalypse is knocking on our door, but is he correct that these sorts of activities - carbon offsetting, recycling, energy conservation and so forth - won’t make any difference?

No, he’s not, for at least four reasons.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the late 1990s, Azerbaijan was one of the strangest places I’d ever been. On the flight over, business class was packed with oil executives, while the seven of us travelling economy had the rest of the aircraft for ourselves. We landed at an airport cocooned in biting fog, and it was only after I was through customs that I discovered that it was one of the few international airports that didn’t have radar. I faced oil fields burning off in the Caspian Sea, the detritus of the Soviet Union slowly crumbling on every corner, and an absolute refusal to serve me anything that didn’t have meat in from every waiter that I met. Staying in the apartment of an absent apparatchik, I fell asleep every night uneasily amongst cheap varnished furniture and the smell of hair oil. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

My favourite bicycle pimp Simon Ostrovsky was based in Azerbaijan for a couple of years and has a far better grasp of what’s going on, although even he tends to look confused in the two reports he’s just filed for Al-Jazeera.

This first segment is sadly familiar to anybody with an interest in freedom of expression in post-Soviet countries - well, familiar apart from the story of the journalist who sewed his mouth shut as a prison protest - and that familiarity means that it’s unlikely to set the world on fire. Reporters without Borders reports that the “[Azerbaijan] regime frequently uses violence and threats against the media and the country came near the bottom of the 2006 worldwide press freedom index”, and Amnesty has more information on attacks on journalists.

This is bothersome because the Caspian Sea is only going to become more important in the near future, and the lack of a healthy media in Azerbaijan can only contribute to its instability. The internet remains relatively accessible, though, but even Global Voices Online can’t track down any Azeri bloggers; perhaps the forthcoming elections might spur a bit more activity.

This segment is much more substantial - Iranian broadcasters pushing their signals deep into Azerbaijan in a David and Goliath propaganda war. For those that don’t know, Iran has a substantial Azeri minority - up to a third of the Iranian population and perhaps twice the size of the population of Azerbaijan itself - and Azerbaijan hosts a number of refugees from the Islamic Republic next door. This one has it all - religion, nationalism, technology, oil - and you can probably guess how the story goes from there.

Now, President Ilham Aliyev met with Dubya in April 2006, and the report specifically mentions that the US has been slow to provide media funding as part of its support. So the question for all you conspiracy theorists out there is this: what’s more in the interests of the US right now, considering who lives next door - a corrupt and authoritarian leadership which can keep a tight grip on the country, or a more free but probably equally unstable nascent democracy in the region? Watch this space, and watch the clips - how often does Azerbaijan get 30 minutes on a mainstream news channel?

It’s been all quiet on the Iraq employees front for about two months, but in the background Dan Hardie has been lobbying hard. Despite the progress at the end of last year, the Government has been long on talk and short on actually saving lives. According to Dan,

A small number of Iraqis - fewer than a dozen, according to people close to the operation who are in contact with me- were removed from Iraq in the early autumn of 2007. Since the Prime Minister’s admirable declaration of October, how many Iraqi ex-employees have been evacuated from Iraq? According to all the Iraqis that I am in contact with: none.

Aside from the usual bureaucratic obstacles, which are understandable but objectionable when people’s lives are at risk, Dan describes how

… the policy itself is being used to keep out Iraqis who can prove that they worked for British forces, and who can prove that their lives are at risk as a result. One man, Hamed, worked for British forces on Shaibah Logistics Base for over two years, as the Government accepts. He was threatened by the militias, and gunmen went to his house, so he moved his family to Syria and slept on the base’s floor. He continued to work for the British. Hamed finally was given ‘notice to quit’ Shaibah when the base closed, and fled to Syria, where he cannot legally work and where he and his family are safe (so far) but hungry. The British Government knows who Hamed is. A British Army NCO who knew him has confirmed every detail of his story to me, saying that he knew that Hamed had reported the threats against him to the military authorities. The Government has written to Hamed to reject any claim for help, since he was ‘not directly employed’ by the military.

My last post on Mark Steyn drew a number of comments, one of which accused me of “moral self righteousness” and being a “traitor to reason”. Presumably my interest in saving the lives of those threatened with death - solely because of their own willingness to defend an embryonic democracy, however flawed, and provide for their families - is part of that complex. However if you are also a self-righteous traitor, perhaps you’d like to contact your MP to try and save some lives.

Write a letter to your MP, c/o The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. If you don’t know who your constituency MP is, go here and type your postcode in. When you’ve sent a letter, follow it up with an email: his or her address will normally be SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk - for example BROWNG@parliament.uk. Two or three days after you have written the letter, call the Parliamentary switchboard on 0207 219 3000 and ask for your MP’s office. Repeat your concerns to the secretary or research assistant you speak to (and be nice: most of these people work damn hard for little reward), check that your letter has been received, and politely request that the MP ask questions of Ministers and reply to you. In your email, your letter, and your phone calls, you must be courteous: insulting an MP or a research assistant will discredit this cause. Talking points for the letter are on Dan’s blog.

People who take the idea of Eurabia seriously are almost as dull and pointless as people who take the idea of one world government seriously, and few are as dull and pointless as Mark Steyn, a man who makes me ashamed to wear a beard. However it’s not enough to ignore people like Steyn, because they poison the well of public discourse, undermining our opportunities to really talk about critical issues such as identity and immigration. On the always-interesting Demography Matters blog, Randy McDonald tears down the rich fantasy world which people like Steyn (and more mainstream figures like Mitt Romney in the United States) long to inhabit, and explains why this is a problem:

What’s the problem with all this? For people like ourselves, interested in researching population trends here at Demography Matters and elsewhere, this sort of rhetoric creates yet another set of myths that have to be debunked. It is interesting to trace out some of the likely population futures of different regions, countries and continents, as is determining the different factors operating in different communities within a given territory. Turning a field that could be filled by an ongoing stream of productive research into an endless cycle of disproved popular mythologies would be boring. More to the point, the constant repetition of myths like the ones enunciated by Romney — that the European continent is declining, that Europe is threatened by foreigners — poisons public discourse by legitimating ever more radical statements. If Europeans at large are concerned about the extent to which communities of recent immigrant origin are or are not acculturating to the norms of a wider society and want to influence public policy accordingly, how likely will the debate be calm and rational if many the people who participate seriously believe things scarcely more sophisticated than “OMG the Muslims are going to P3WN Europe”?

My thoughts exactly. Imagine if, in the real world, every discussion you tried to have was dominated by somebody who did nothing but shout in your face about how it was all the Muslims (or Jews, or Hispanics, or blacks - take your pick). It would be utterly unbearable, and people would eventually stop talking about those issues because they couldn’t face the prospect of being harangued by a incoherent belter. That’s Steyn, right there, riding his hobby-horse and protesting that he’s just misunderstood.

These are interesting and important issues which need a healthy public discourse, see? Specifically, what it needs is more people like Randy and fewer people like Steyn, otherwise we’ll all end up like the poor benighted souls that Johann Hari wrote about in his classic piece on The National Review cruise. While acknowledging that Johann was always going to be biased against the sort of people who would go on the cruise on the first place, he wasn’t making any of that stuff up:

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block – already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times – I counted – when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States of America.

Look, it’s 2008 - forget about my jetpack, all I want is an internet that isn’t an echo chamber for people who would previously have been confined to their bedrooms, where they could safely fulminate about how their genius has never been recognised by ignorant fools such as myself. They were better off there, and so were we.

Well, technically that was yesterday, but my internet connection has been out since the middle of last week, and obviously time stops when the internet goes down.

It feels strangely anti-climactic to watch an independent Kosovo paraded on-screen - a mere 9 years after it actually became independent. Everybody’s a winner - the Albanians get their country, the Serbs get another raison de martyre and our governments get to distract us from Afghanistan and Iraq (ooh, contentious lefty jibe!). The real losers are the Kosovo Serb communities that are left - the Kosovar Albanians don’t really want them hanging around, but the Serbian authorities would probably prefer them to stay in limbo to keep the issue live (hey, that reminds me of this great joke about the Palestinians!).

Independence is clearly not a solution to any of Kosovo’s long-term problems, and might even give us a few new ones, but this feels like the inevitable conclusion of a process that started long before the 1999 NATO bombing. Still nobody seems to be prepared to point out in public that Kosovo has no economic prospects of any kind, which I’ve always thought is pretty essential for economic development. I don’t have anything insightful to contribute to that discussion, but I do wonder how long it will take before the Kosovo authorities start blaming the EU for the lack of progress?

Good luck, Kosovo - you’ll need it.

I’m sorry, but what the hell did you just say?

But Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that’s a bit of a danger… There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

No there isn’t. People who predict the Islamopocalypse are barking idiots, and my problem isn’t with Williams’ saying that we should accommodate aspects of Muslim law into our legal system. My problem is his assumption that religion has any place in our legal system at all, apart from in measures to protect the freedom to pursue those beliefs - and protect others from those beliefs. Without that separation, the entire legal system is undermined, as we all merrily pursue our own ideas of what the law should constitute and who it should cover.

Of course, that’s a completely separate question to why Rowan Williams, the head of the established Church of England, feels the need to advocate for Islamic law. Perhaps he misread the job description?

UPDATE: I find more intelligences more subtle and profound than I writing about the same issue at Cranmer and Our Kingdom, while Stumbling and Mumbling emphasises that “civil society” has a place in this discussion that goes mostly unnoticed.

In telephone conversation last week, Cauri referred to fear as “the ultimate commodity”, and - if we grant a little slack to the definition - he’s right. Fear thrives in a bear market, as we try in vain to trade our fear for security; and fear is the currency of war propaganda. There might be a limited demand for fear at the moment, but there’s an inexhaustible supply, as Mike Davis describes in the terrible, beautiful last paragraph of his book “Planet of Slums“:

This delusionary dialetic of securitized versus demonic urban places, in turn, dictates a sinister and unceasing duet: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.

Here’s the secret to fear as a commodity - not only can we can export it, but our overseas investment will pay us back richly over time and we can look forward to huge new reserves of fear being discovered. Everybody is a winner, except for those whose labour pays for our potentially insatiable demand for fear.

Too much weltangst for a Monday morning, I know.

“Luz Eterna” (central panel), Ana Maria Pacheco

Being foolish, Tim has agreed to write an essay about global government as part of his course. Being foolish, yesterday I responded to his question on what might be the arguments against a one world government. We had a fine old chat and I forgot about it as soon as I put the phone down. Yet this morning, I was finishing reading Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, and what should I find but this:

New forms of democracy are essential… And any kind of new democracy must encompass not only communities, towns, cities and societies, but humankind as a whole. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll prosper together on this tiny planet if we don’t eventually have some kind of democratic world government. Of course, many hard-nosed realists would say that this is an implausible and even scary idea. Maybe that’s only because alternatives to our current trajectory remain so difficult to imagine. (p.306)

Count me amongst those hard-nosed realists. I greatly enjoyed - and still recommend - Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap, but this new book is much weaker, and this was one of the points where it just falls apart under the weight of its own presumptions.

People who oppose “one world government” are frequently given to going on (and on and on) about black helicopters and the UN. Needless to say, they are usually colossal bores and not worth listening to. There are serious ideological arguments against such global democratic forms, but they’re weak because if you don’t share the assumptions of the underlying ideology, then you’re unlikely to be persuaded. My opposition to the development of global democratic forms is purely practical - democratic forms simply don’t scale well.

The transaction costs of such forms would be so great that any such organisation would collapse under its own weight. Imagine if you made a human 60 ft high; it wouldn’t be able to hold its weight up and would asphyxiate quite quickly, because we’re just not designed (and no, this isn’t an argument for intelligent design) to be that big. Anybody that’s worked in the United Nations system will be able to attest to the fact that the requirements of getting radically different actors to work in the same system requires a bureaucracy that is barely able to function, let alone function effectively.

More importantly, however, is the simple truth that the larger you make a democracy, the less representative it must be. This is because there are less possibilities for direct links between the constituency and the representative, and therefore less accountability. Oh, it would be possible to construct a complex tower of democracy that started at the grassroots level and ended up representing the whole world - but