Brontides

I’m posting this, an article about an economist with some unusual ideas about poor world economic alleviation, relatively uncritically.

The central conceit of the article is the work of Paul Romer, a Senior Fellow at Stanford and successful software entrepreneur. Mr. Romer wants to build a series of what he calls “charter cities” – cities run by rich-world governments on land loaned to them by poor-world countries. The article invokes two models – Hong Kong under the British and Lübeck under Henry III of Saxony. If you think that the idea sounds wacky, then you’re not alone. It is a decidedly odd proposition, but for all that it inspires a certain sense of moral abhorrence, it’s an interesting thought experiment, and deserves to be examined for its merits.

His solution may be unconventional, but his diagnosis is complex and mostly rings true. Although an awful lot of poverty can be traced back to underlying causes – corruption, a lack of resources, an unskilled workforce, rich world privilege or weak distribution networks – one feature that is common to almost all poor societies is weak governance.

To drive home the importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.

The Atlantic’s article is subject to the usual sloppy editorialism – the reason why many poor-world homes lack access to electricity cannot solely be reduced to rules, as it will also have roots in infrastructural weakness, high energy generation costs and old-fashioned sleaze. But Romer’s charter cities are more nuanced than that; not only are they intended to provide governance models that will have a pervasive effect throughout localities, they are also intended to act as mediums through which richer countries can funnel defensive stability, money and expertise into a populace.

So the idea has some merit, to the extent that it attacks some of the problems that it sets out to solve in a way that traditional aid does not. Frustratingly, the Atlantic’s article is a puff-piece, and makes very little attempt to examine the further problems that it potentially raises:

1. What country would willingly allow a project like this to take place on their land? Forget the problems implied by corruption – countries with poor governance tend to have poor governors, and western cities on the doorsteps of corrupt officials would cause unwanted scrutiny, provide a safe haven for anti-government sentiment and act as a drain on public purses intended for skimming. The colonial period demonstrated that local populations resent foreign dominance immensely. The anger and distrust that the example of Hong Kong engendered cannot be understated.
2. So if willing assent can be discounted, can it be assumed that charter cities will be imposed by force? Hong Kong was seized; Lübeck was rescued from anonymity and anarchy in the troubled times preceding the rise of the Hanseatic League. Neither example is entirely happy. Even in troubled times, Henry III’s presumption made him no friends, and his possessions were eventually taken from him. Fondness for Britain in her former colonies is in short supply. Furthermore, these were both isolated incidents. At a time when America has earned the ill will of much of the Middle East, it can be seen that no power in the modern world has the capacity to hold several such properties against the will of local populations.
3. The commitment for rich countries would be significant and long-term. This post assumes that the scheme would be undertaken as a philanthropic venture, and that the client cities would not be subject to rapacious profit-seeking – a long assumption at best, but the scheme is posited as philanthropic so that seems like the best basis upon which to judge it. Britain held Hong Kong for a hundred and fifty years and sunk huge amounts of its extensive resourced into it; by the time that Britain was a shrunken homunculus of a power. Would rich governments or populations be prepared to risk so much for such intangible rewards?
4. There is evidence that Hong Kong was exceptional, and reasons why it was exceptional have not been fully examined. Hong Kong was the only part of the British Empire to such achieve gains under the British. The rest of the Empire had mixed results. The benefits conferred upon India are debatable; developmentally it garnered advantages, but the economic gains were weak and confined to a ruling class, deepening and entrenching inequalities already in place thanks to the local caste system. Southern Africa was left with an even more extreme inequality in the form of apartheid. Egypt was left almost entirely undeveloped as its domination was purely strategic; Britain wanted control of Suez. British presence in Mesopotamia led to the formation of the state of Israel; good for Israel, but the local population received fringe benefits at best. The West Indies… so on, so on. Hong Kong was made rich for strategic reasons; it was Britain’s entrepôt and the economic capital of the region. The circumstances in which it existed were unusual.
5. Finally, there exists a problem with the fungibility of governance systems. A British system of patent, competition and bankruptcy laws, for example, may not be the most appropriate in all situations; some countries will respond, for reasons of existing legal traditions and social expectations, to a French of German system. However, this is a decision that will always be subject to political interference and historical influence.

So there are good reasons to discount the actual manifestation of the idea. But that shouldn’t be taken to undermine the perspective that it takes when considering the problems that traditional aid faces when addressing questions of global poverty. The idea exposes some real problems with the assumptions that we make when attempting to confront inequality and these problems deserve to be examined.

Full credit to Kevan for the link.

This has just appeared as a guest post over at All Lit Up. Any comments would be appreciated over there.

A Winter In Arabia by Freya Stark is not a straightforward book to read, but it is extremely rewarding for anyone with an interest in history, archaeology, the Middle East, and kick-ass female explorers who make it look easy.

The book was published in 1972, some 45 years after it was written. In it, the author chronicles the season that she spent – along with her companions – searching for the ancient city of Shabwah, the capital of the southern Arabian state of Hadhramaut. Long since lost, the city had been a capital of culture and trade in the region; Pliny catalogued it thus:

Almost in the very centre of that [South Arabian] region are the Atramitae [Hadramis] – the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota [Shabwah], a place situated on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight posts [days' travel] from this is the incense-bearing region inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bordered on the right by the ocean, from which high plateaux shut it in. The forests extend eighty miles in length and forty in width.

In search of this city, Stark travelled through pre-Westernised Yemen, detailing the culture of the people with whom she interacted and the landscapes through which she journeyed. Her heroics are matched by the land she describes; Hadhramaut is a particularly dramatic part of Arabia. Comprised of an immense valley, which runs for 160 km from open plains in the west, where the cliffs of the rocky plateaux to north and south close in about it, near Shabwah, towards the dry and inhospitable Wadi Masilah in the east, the area is a curious mix of desert and fertile river plains. The main Wadi (Wadi meaning river or river-cut valley) Hadhramaut itself is 12 km wide in some places, and is fed by innumerable tributaries, but beyond the city of Shabwah one quickly reaches the desert of Saihad – ‘an empty desert, a wilderness where the winds blow in all directions, a country where crows are king ‘. Only after travelling west across this desert for three days would one come to irrigated fields and settled lands once more, the beginnings of highland Yemen. This is the country that Stark describes.

The first thing that should be said about this book is that it is deeply poetic. Stark’s writing is fluidly lyrical, and is as evocative as it is enlightening. Her voice is not that of a dull-but-worthy academic, in pursuit of esoteric potsherds, any more than it’s an echo of the manly heroics of Thesiger and Lawrence; it’s… well. It’s a voice the deserves to speak for itself:

In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended… As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ‘Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the
sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me – the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs – echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.

Stark’s writing conveys deep knowledge and understanding, but also profound affection for the land, the people, and the life that surround both. It’s not necessarily easy to read; you have to concentrate, or otherwise after an hour or so it all starts to elide into a formless mass of undifferentiated beauty. But this is a book to dwell over, and it rewards the persistent reader with keen insight and human detail.

The star of the book is the character behind the narration, however. Stark was an incredible woman. This book doesn’t document her first trip to Yemen; a previous expedition had failed due to an illness that almost killed her. Before then, she had already travelled extensively throughout Arabia, notably completing three dangerous treks in western Iran and being the first European to reach Alamut, the long-lost fortress of the Assassins. She was more than just an explorer, however, and A Winter in Arabia is littered with passages expounding upon her own philosophy (of which a lengthy excerpt can be found here). She continued to travel until her death, at the age of 100, in 1993. To experience Arabia with the benefit of her perception, humanity and fierce intellects is one of the great draws of this book.

This book deserves to be regarded as belonging to a corpus of European works which, when taken together, provide an overview – albeit Eurocentric – of pre-Westernised Arabia. The aforementioned Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is perhaps the most famous of this body of work. In many ways, Stark and Thesiger had a great deal in common. Thesiger was an explorer, too, most famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arab peninsula – several times. He was only the third Westerner to do so, and often operated contrary to the wishes of the local and international authorities, but with the respect, admiration and friendship of the local Bedu – a respect that lasts to this day; an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, but also a gifted social observer. He shared Stark’s dismay at what he perceived as the growing Europeanisation of Arabia and its indigenous culture. A major theme of both books was the deterioration of an old order, just as it was about to be swept away: Thesiger’s last journey across Arabia’s sands was from the oasis of Al Ain to the trading port of Muscat, now a city in the UAE and the capital of Oman respectively. He spent nearly two months in 1949 in that interior. It now takes just under 4 hours to drive from the Hilton in Al Ain to the Sheraton in Muscat; I know because I’ve done it. Thesiger would have hated it, and the power of the book is such that it made me hate it, too, even as I was doing it.

Stark’s work evokes a similar sense of deterioration, but unlike Thesiger, the bland, monied future that she feared, cleansed of all of its identifying features by a glut of RAF bases and oil revenue, didn’t come to pass. What did come to pass was worse; an awkward halfway-house between modernity, with its guns and narcotics, and tribalism, poverty and alienation. Unable to resist the world that developed around it, and lacking the resources to preserve its heritage, the Yemen of today is a much-changed beast.

An alternative perspective on the issue comes from Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun. At the outline level, these books have a great deal in common; like Stark, Bibby was an archaeologist seeking the remains of a long-lost civilisation. Bibby’s obsession was the empire of Dilmun, a long-lost – and supposedly mythological – empire which was mentioned in Sumerian legend but never geographically placed. Contemporaneous with the Indus Valley civilisation, Sumer, Babylon and Akkad, Dilmun was found by Bibby on the island of Bahrain, although hints have since been found of an earlier civilisation on the same grounds; it is thus one of the oldest sites of human civilisation that we know of.

Unlike Stark, however, Bibby was an oil man himself, based in Bahrain and gifted only with an intellectual curiosity and a slightly more moralistic outlook than many of his contemporaries. Where Stark and Thesiger detailed an Arabia as yet unsullied by the graft of Europe’s finest grubbers, Bibby’s story is all about the cracks in the façade as they slowly spread, and the desperate attempt by Arabia’s last traditional rulers – such as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, who distrusted Bibby enough to eventually exile him despite Bibby’s professed academic and historic mission. Compare that with the reaction earned by Stark and her companions in the excerpt above!

Many of the characters and locations appear in two or even all three of these books. Between them they chart a heartbreaking story of the decline of an indigenous way of life, albeit – and this has to be stressed – from the somewhat Eurocentric perspective of a motley band of explorers and outsiders. Their value thus exceeds their individual conceits; these are more than just travelogues or historical diversions. They are records of a way of life that has deteriorated over the course of a single lifetime.

In that capacity, Stark’s work immediately stands out as the most successful. The human warmth and compassion that she has for her Yemeni and Bedu hosts is apparent on every page (“We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage”), and her relationships with the people that she encounters transcend the vignette. In an early passage, she returns to one of the sites of her earlier journey, and “wonder[s] uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have ruined my friendship with those two, Sa’id and Husain;”when, a few pages later, they reconcile, there is a sense of human connection that overcomes cultural barriers.

For me, this was a wonderful, nostalgic read. As an account of an a culture that has long since passed on, it’s stimulating. But what makes the words jump off of the page is the lucid, witty prose of Stark, and the character that lies behind it.

Whatever your opinion – and you only have another 20 hours or so to decide – make sure that tomorrow you go out and vote. You may not feel like it has an impact and you may, ultimately, be right. But the act of engaging in a political process is its own virtue. Own your vote, own your issues, and own your own little corner of the debate, and you will find that the politicians work pleasingly hard to meet your needs.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written an implausible amount on the three parties, their manifestos and their policies. I hope that someone has found it useful; it’s actually been quite handy for me as a way of gathering my thoughts on the various topics and investigating them at length.

But now it’s time.

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When a politician refers to “front-line services,” they are talking about a wide array of things. Firefighting, the Post Office, jobcentres, and embassies all qualify. But in truth, the politician is probably talking about something much more narrow. In politicianese, the term “front-line service” is really shorthand for two things: schools and hospitals.

If immigration is Britain’s equivalent to the bitter cultural clashes of America’s bipolar body politic, then schools and hospitals are more like the First Amendment: although arguments as to details may get heated, there remains a consensus across the political spectrum as to the overall direction of travel. If Britain is to succeed in the 21st Century, then education needs to be strengthened and broadened; and the NHS is part of our political and social heritage, and should remain well-funded and widely accessible. This level of broad agreement means that the debates surrounding school and hospital reform tend to be somewhat more advanced than those surrounding crime or migration – which can make “correct” outcomes hard to judge.

Schools
Despite the very best of intentions, schools have not done well under Labour. It’s a stark statement but not an unfair one; results have declined over the past decade. In studies by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, British 15-year-olds came well above the average in 2000, at eighth in mathematics and seventh in reading out of 27 countries. In 2006 they scored below the average in both, at joint 18th and 13th respectively. In science, at least, they remained above-average—but fell from fourth to ninth. The 2009 data are due but there is little evidence to suggest that they will to buck the trend.

One thing that the Labour years have clearly demonstrated is that this isn’t a spending problem. Real spending per student has doubled since 1997, to an average of £5,900 per student per year. School buildings have been improved and facilities extended; teacher pay has risen above inflation; teacher shortages, barring a few persistently problematic areas like mathematics and physics, are mostly receding, although tough schools in poorer areas can face a fearful struggle to attract a capable and qualified faculty. A lot of money has been spend on classroom assistants; a recent report (pdf) was critical of the impact that this influx of support staff has had.

Meanwhile, the Economist, amongst others, alleges that young talent has been ineffectively managed:

Able pupils have also been shortchanged. Labour has started and then wound down three schemes to stretch students in the top 5%, whether academically (“gifted”, in the parlance) or in music or sport (“talented”). Attempts to find some sort of talent in everyone, and teachers opposed to giving anything extra to those already doing well, scuppered each in turn.

While this feels like more of a political or philosophical point than one based in fact-based evidence, it’s noticeable that while all three parties have pledged to do more to support struggling students, there’s a general lack of willingness to engage with the question of how best to stretch those students whose capabilities exceed the necessary restrictions of classroom teaching.

That notwithstanding, the proposals for how to best support struggling students are mostly weak; Labour do promise to provide individual tuition for children who fall far behind their peers in primary school, but this is uncosted; the manifesto claims that:

This will include up to 40,000 six and seven year olds benefiting from extra tuition in English and Maths through ‘Every Child a Reader’ and ‘Every Child Counts’

but it’s unclear who would be delivering the extra tuition: existing teachers, classroom assistants, or additional resource. The Tories, however, seem to have a fairly narrow idea of what education needs; the manifesto devotes a measly 3 pages to it, mostly advocating a return to the 1920s – “better teachers and tougher discipline” seems to be the unifying theme. (Especially entertaining is the Troops to Teachers programme, in which the Tories envision ex-service personnel being retrained for the classroom – presumably to instil some barracks-yard drill-sergeant discipline into the youth of Peckham.) The Lib Dems are favouring the approach that they seem to have gone with in most of their manifesto promises – reach into the magic pot of Trident money and chuck it at the problem:

• Increase the funding of the most disadvantaged pupils, around one million children. We will invest £2.5 billion in this ‘Pupil Premium’ to boost education opportunities for every child. This is additional money going into the schools budget, and headteachers will be free to spend it in the best interests of children.

• The extra money could be used to cut class sizes, attract the best teachers, offer extra one-to-one tuition and provide for after-school and holiday support. This will allow an average primary school to cut classes to 20 and an average secondary school to introduce catch-up classes for 160 pupils.

The approach of targeting investment at schools that are struggling is welcome, especially after Tory and Labour proposals to link performance to results (apparently with the logical understanding that the way to fix schools with poor results is to give them less money), but it doesn’t hide the fact that the Lib Dems don’t really have any concrete proposals for actually improving performance: their manifesto contains such well-meaning emptiness as “improve discipline by early intervention to tackle the poor basic education of those children who are otherwise most likely to misbehave and become demotivated” – hard to disagree with but a long way from being an actual policy.

Having said that, both the Tories and the Lib Dems offer suggestions on how to recalibrate the curriculum (all Labour do in this field is promise to add a teacher training qualification for Mandarin). The Tories proposals are muddled (they promise a primary curriculum organised around subjects like English, Maths, Science and History; the current primary curriculum is organised around English, Maths, and Science) but they explicitly state a desire to make exams, particularly Key Stage 2 exams, harder. One interesting proposal is the suggestion that public schools would be free to offer international exams, similar to those offered by private schools, although one would hope that the governing principle would be a desire to ensure that GCSEs are competitive against these fancy international baccalaureates. The Lib Dems’ proposals are bolder. They would establish an independent body to regulate standards, incorporating OFSTED and replacing the existing (toothless) Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency. They would scale back Key Stage 2 examination, relying on teacher checking and ongoing assessment. They would remove the arbitrary distinction between academic and vocational education, and echo the Tory policy of allowing a broader range of courses and examinations to be offered in schools. Perhaps most radically, they would axe the National Curriculum, replacing it with a “minimum curriculum” upon which teachers can embellish. This last is bold, but probably problematic, as it raises questions of how testing will be standardised and whether tougher schools, with less experienced and qualified teaching staff, or smaller schools, in which the teachers already bear a greater burden for lesson design, will be able to offer as well-tailored a product as more affluent and better-resourced schools.

Teaching is not the sole driver of results, however. The way that schools are created, closed and run is also important. The Tories have their much-mooted Swedish policy, under which the decision on who gets to open new schools will be removed from the dead hand of local government. Parents, charities and other not-for-profit groups will be encouraged to create new schools that could be open by September. Funded by the state according to the number of children who attend, they will stand or fall according to their popularity with parents. Smaller, more expensive schools that local councils are ready to abandon could be rescued by a committed citizenry.

There are costs to this. Like the (existing, mostly popular) City Academies, this scheme will be expensive and will sit alongside the existing state school infrastructure, possibly to its determent. Discouraging well-intentioned and not-so-well-intentioned groups with agendas would be more of a burden here than in small, liberal Sweden. But the truth is that until it’s trailed, it’s hard to say how effective this will be. The one place where this will certainly be unpopular is the teaching unions, whose political power would be sharply reduced.

The Lib Dems are also keen on supply-side reforms but have no idea how to go about it; their policies mostly leave schools still dependent on local government, which means that they would struggle to seriously change how schools are instituted and funded. The manifesto speaks of well-meaning platitudes, such as an Education Freedom Act banning politicians from getting involved in the day-to-day running of schools, but little of any concrete worth.

On higher ed, the picture in Britain still looks mostly positive. As discussed in a previous post, however, the Tories have policies in place that would dissuade lucrative foreign students from gracing Britain’s elite universities. Meanwhile, The Lib Dems have reinstituted their long-held policy of scrapping tuition fees, which is still a terribly policy that seriously undermines their credibility when it comes to universities. The Tories and Labour go the other way, and both parties are likely to back a raise in the cap it tuition fees from £3,000 to £5,000 per year.

This will be unpopular but may be necessary, given the lean years which are ahead. Labour argue that they missed their target, under which they aimed to send 50% of young people to University, by a whisker despite raising the levy to £3,000 in 2003; the UK’s system of student loans and grants meant that the raise actually affected admissions very little. And, to be fair, the higher education participation rate for young people from the most disadvantaged areas has increased every year since 2004. Labour have also intimated that funding for expansion of university places will linked to course types – science, tech, engineering and maths will all be promoted.

Conclusion
I have used my last two posts to talk down the importance of some major electoral issues – the economy and crime in particular. But education is genuinely important – probably the most important single issue at stake in the UK right now, and our long-term economic and cultural vitality is dependent on the right mixture of policy, infrastructure and regulation.

All three manifestos have some merit, as well as some obvious deficiencies. The Lib Dems’ approach to primary and secondary curriculum reform are probably the strongest; not just by default (Labour barely even have a policy on curriculum reform, and the Tories’ policy boils down to “whip them with nettles”) but because it contains ideas that are genuinely worth exploring, such as the flexible funding for school budgets. The Tories’ Swedish school commissioning model is interesting despite it’s potential pitfalls; although potentially expensive it could inspire some excellent results if implemented properly (neither Labour nor the Lib Dems showed up to this event). And Labour generally seem to have the strongest thinking on higher education and universities.

On the grounds that universities are generally doing reasonably well at the moment, I’m going to discount Labour on education; their manifesto reads more like a defence of their record than a serious or credible plan for reform at the mandatory levels. On education, then, it depends which area you think is important and what you’re prepared to hold your nose over. If you want a better commissioning model vote Tory; they probably won’t get their illiberal primary curriculum changes through parliament without a significant majority anyway. If you want better funded schools and a more rational approach to struggling children, vote Lib Dem – again, a tuition fee ban would never make it to law. I’ll probably do the latter but I don’t see the former as an entirely indefensible choice.

The NHS.
The health service has consistently been one of the three most important issues to voters since it was implemented over sixty years ago. This year is no different. What is different, however, is that broadly speaking there is consensus between the parties. There are no major policy objectives in this field; even the Lib Dems are saving their huge stack of Trident money for other areas.

The engine-tinkering is mostly minor stuff – all three parties have ideas about procurement, for example. The Liberal Democrats would have the Primary Care Trusts, which do the buying for hospitals, locally elected to give them more clout. The Conservatives would give GPs much more of a say by reviving the 1990s system of fund-holding, in which many GP practices had their own budgets for elective care done by hospitals. Both opposition parties would also drop or gimp performance targets; the government has been moving away from them of late suggesting that Labour would do the same. The Lib Dems would go farthest here, offering to cut the Department of Health by 50% (fun fact: I’m currently engaged in a downsizing project for a major Department, and cutting an organisation like that in half is much harder than you’d think). Labour and the Tories are also pursuing their bizarre world of perverse incentives here, threatening to use the payments system of the internal market to reward quality and penalise poor care – effectively taking money away from hospitals that are struggling.

One thing that is noticeably absent from the manifestos is closures and cuts. But some scaling back is not just demanded by the state of the economic climate, but also desirable. David Nicholson, who runs the NHS in England, thinks that by 2013 the service could wring 15% out of its budget, meeting increased demand with the same real resources. But pay would have to be held down and the workforce cut by around 10%. Some district hospitals would have to close, or do less. This will be unpopular but isn’t really a political issue. Expect whichever two parties don’t win to oppose it bitterly, and for constituency MPs of all strips to fume at length on local news programmes.

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Aside #1: On Typography
The Tories and Labour manifestos are both hideous on screen. They are clearly meant to be held and read in the hand; both go with dense, serifed fonts (Times New Roman for the Tories – suggesting that CCHQ doesn’t know how to change its defaults – and Book Antiqua for Labour). The Lib Dems’ manifesto is in a much more aesthetically pleasing Helvetica Neau. I may have mentioned in the past that there are good reasons and bad reasons for voting for or against a party. Typography is a good reason, and I look forward to punishing the Labservatives at the ballot box.

Aside #2: In Which I Discover Google Analytics
To the person who googled their way to this site asking “cet school tyumen good school?” the answer is: yes, as is the school in Nizhnevartovsk, or at least they were when I was there a year ago. On the other hand, the person who googled “did hassan steal the rubaiyaat from omar khayyam” – the answer to that is no, I’m afraid. It’s one of many narrative details that Amin Maalouf invented for Samarkand to make it a better story; the truth is that there probably never was an “original” Rubaiyaat – just a corpus of work that Edward FitzGerald pulled together and published, much of which is questionably attributable to Khayyam at best. Although Sabbah seems to have regarded Khayyam as an intellectual inspiration of sorts, it’s not entirely clear that they ever actually met in person, and there’s certainly no evidence to suggest that he was obsessed with Khayyam once Alamut became firmly established.

There was an excellent interview in last weeks’ London Review of Books with Tony Judt, the American historian of European history. As I said, it was in last weeks’ magazine, but the whole thing’s available online, so you should read it before I fisk it.

There’s quite a lot here, so I’m going to speak to general points rather than specific lines or paragraphs. Firstly, I think that there are a number of ways in which events have quite rapidly played out to undermine some of Judt’s points. He early-on makes the point that Barack Obama is a compromiser, a consensus-builder – a common criticism that is balanced out by the counter-charges that he is a “machine politician” (FiveThirtyEight did a fine elaboration on that theme way back in 2008). On the whole, I think that the later group has the right of it. Obama is not a bridge-builder, he’s just someone with an acute and subtle understanding of how the machinery of power and legislation works. Sometimes, that requires him to at least appear to seek compromise. At others, it requires him to screw his party to the sticking point and ram legislation through Congress by brute force. The recent passage of healthcare exemplifies that, and should silence those who chirp about Obama’s lack of courage in the face of intransigence, at least for a little while.

Judt later observes that courage is unheard of in today’s politicians; that it is, in fact, a negating virtue. It should be noted that the passage of healthcare was considered by many to be courageous. I’m not convinced that it was – the Dems had a majority in the House, and once they’d been talking about it for a year, passing it was more or less the path of least resistance – but I do think that some individual politicians displayed considerable courage.

His comparison of the US President with the position of his European counterpart, however, was on the nose. Although it should be noted that the UK, tepidly, held out for a much more powerful and robust holder of the mandate, by and large the actions of the EU’s leaders have been exemplified by a stark lack of spine. It’s fair that the leaders of France, Germany, Spain and Britain fear an eclipsing of their individual national clouts, as a robust EU Presidency would do exactly that; but it’s a hit that’s worth taking, because the individual national clouts of France, Germany, Spain and Britain are slight and diminishing by the day. Relinquishing some local power in order to gain access to much greater, wider-scale influence should be an easy decision to make, but it takes courage, and Europe’s leaders are trained to be some of the most risk-averse in the world.

But the internal politics of Europe are thus in most regards. Judt also talks about Europe’s relationship with Israel, correctly observing that:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time… However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East [...]They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage.

This is largely correct, and indeed economically and politically it has largely succeeded. Most international companies who divide their regional operations by continent will have Europe and MEA (Middle East & Africa) – with Israel firmly in the former camp. This is largely a practicality; a sales rep or local manager with an Israel stamp in her or his passport will struggle to cross Arabic borders. But it is also a reflection of a broader truth, in which the state of Israel is culturally divorced from the land upon which it lies, even as its claims of legitimacy depend on that land for their historical vigour. Should Europe start to push back – making political and economic ties incumbent on the observation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example – then Israel would be faced with a choice that has the same outcome either way: one that forces it to reconcile itself with its neighbours and the contested land upon which it is built.

Judt asserts that Europe resists the impulse to use this economic and cultural leverage out of a misplaced sense of historic guilt; that many European states continue to treat Israel with kid gloves as a way of continuing to atone for the events that it either perpetrated or failed to prevent. I think that this relies on too many assumptions and thus fails to meet the standards set by Occam’s Razor. Treating Israel as a member of the club of civilised nations, when it already has America’s robust backing, is simply a continuation of progress along the path of least resistance.

That this multinational spinelessness must be rooted in a domestic system that encourages and perpetuates a venal political elite seems like the next logical conclusion, and to an extent, Judt makes that link persuasively. He talks robustly about the “bad use of fear” that has taken hold of Europe’s social democratic model:

There is the demagogic exploitation of fear of outsiders and strangers, which culminates in putting up barriers against immigration, refugees or exiles. The sense that things are out of control, that we may lose our jobs next year because of competition from China or India, or that some farms may become unworkable in five years’ time because of climate change, has been intensified by globalisation, and it has given rise to large, unspecific fears which are played on [...] in Denmark by the anti-immigrant party, or in Switzerland with the referendum against minarets [...] Britain has more closed-circuit television cameras, which keep a record of almost everyone’s movements everywhere at all times, than any other democracy in the world. In the old days we would have seen this as an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedoms, yet today it’s accepted because people are frightened of crime, outsiders, terrorism. We no longer have a choice of a wonderfully happy and prosperous, secure and stable future: this isn’t Sweden in 1965.

Again, this can be explained in many forms, and socially it makes a lot of sense, but politically it’s only rational if most or all of the actors are acting in a narrow, cowardly self-interest. Acquiescing to these fears breeds nationalism, patriotism, preventive wars and repressive anti-terrorist legislation. These trends can be satisfying for a population in the short term, but the ugly truth is that in the end it’s just excessive state power. They have no power to combat or limit terrorism; they don’t strengthen our economy or our cultural vibrancy; they limit our international political power and tarnish our model of governance with claims of hypocrisy; and in the long run, they make the local population less comfortable and less free. But the European politicians with the courage to make these points and argue forcefully against the encroaching illiberality of the state are noticeable by their absence.

If the cause of this trend is understandable then the ways of fixing it seem daunting. When asked how and why we have reached the point where mass protests are ignorable by political elites, Judt talks about the disconnect between the people and governments; and as he correctly observes, in the span of a nation’s transition to democracy from an earlier state, the window of opportunity – where a political system is sufficiently unstable that it has to listen to popular will – is quite narrow (although it can be artificially extended). In late-19th Century Britian, he remarks,

They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result.

This isn’t a state that lasts, however, and one of the weaknesses of democracies is that as democratic structures become more entrenched and social continuity becomes more normalised, the threat of actual consequential popular uprisings recedes. It doesn’t help that much of today’s European political activities are quasi-undemocratic, being run from bureaucracies and unelected bodies (such as the European Union, haw haw).

When I did my degree, we learned about a process called “incorporation,” by which subcultures are amalgamated into the mainstream. It’s a two-stage process; first, superficial and somewhat challenging aspects of the subculture are embraced by society at large; then, the remaining aspects are rejected as extremist and ignorable. This was presented as a process affecting the subcultures that surround musical genres (for example, clothing and some of the musical trappings of punk were assimilated, while the broader political and social aspects were attributed to anarchism and discarded), but it can also be clearly seen as affecting non-artistic philosophical and social movements – in feminism, for example, in which superficial aspects of female empowerment are embraced and prominently displayed as virtuous while the wider complaints of inequality and rape culture are dismissed as excessive and extremist.

I mention this because, to some extend, it corroborates the earlier discussion of cowardice in Europe’s political ranks. Courage is, after all, collocated with threat, but the political determination of the populace has been largely incorporated into modern mainstream politics. Elections and mass-media provide some semblance of what can be referred to as direct democracy, but the wider, more effective trappings of people power are dismissed as extremist – protest, worker collectivism and engagement with party politics. Against this backdrop, modern politicians lack a serious threat and thus have very little incentive to be courageous. The truth is that, no matter how easy and tempting it is to blame the electorate for Europe’s malaise, the power to reverse it has been removed from them.

Temporarily, though. The problem with Judt’s analysis is simply that it’s too pessimistic. It treats the status quo as a final state; it assumes that cowardice is a feature that Europe is doomed never to escape. It is this underlying assumption that is shown up by the one encouraging sign that comes from across the water, where Barack Obama – the machine politician – has demonstrated that courage, or the appearance of it, can be its own political virtue. The marvellous thing about democratic systems is that they have the potential to be self-renewing; that in a time of cowards, the courageous man is valuable simply by dint of his courage, let alone the effects and intentions that lie behind it. The era of loud, brash direct mass involvement of populaces in politics may well be over, and that may not be a bad thing, but a population can still make its will felt in terms of broad themes, if not entirely on matters of specific policy.

All of which is to say: if you value political coherence and courage enough, and vote accordingly, then it will come. In the meantime: please write to your MP and demand proper debating time for the Digital Economy Bill. It’s a dreadful piece of legislation and an accelerated period of debate won’t help that.

Juan Cole tells it like it is:

Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Monday that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.” He continued that the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel cannot be denied. He added that neither could the historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. He insisted, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today.” He said, “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” He told his applauding audience of 7500 that he was simply following the policies of all Israeli governments since the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War.

Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.

So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.

1. In international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory, as are the parts of the West Bank that Israel unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid occupying powers to alter the lifeways of civilians who are occupied, and forbid the settling of people from the occupiers’ country in the occupied territory. Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, its usurpation of Palestinian property there, and its settling of Israelis on Palestinian land are all gross violations of international law. Israeli claims that they are not occupying Palestinians because the Palestinians have no state are cruel and tautological. Israeli claims that they are building on empty territory are laughable. My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.

2. Israeli governments have not in fact been united or consistent about what to do with East Jerusalem and the West Bank, contrary to what Netanyahu says. The Galili Plan for settlements in the West Bank was adopted only in 1973. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave undertakings as part of the Oslo Peace Process to withdraw from Palestinian territory and grant Palestinians a state, promises for which he was assassinated by the Israeli far right (elements of which are now supporting Netanyahu’s government). As late as 2000, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims that he gave oral assurances that Palestinians could have almost all of the West Bank and could have some arrangement by which East Jerusalem could be its capital. Netanyahu tried to give the impression that far rightwing Likud policy on East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been shared by all previous Israeli governments, but this is simply not true.

3. Romantic nationalism imagines a “people” as eternal and as having an eternal connection with a specific piece of land. This way of thinking is fantastic and mythological. Peoples are formed and change and sometimes cease to be, though they might have descendants who abandoned that religion or ethnicity or language. Human beings have moved all around and are not directly tied to any territory in an exclusive way, since many groups have lived on most pieces of land. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews, i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese, many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not exist.

4. Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather ‘built-up place of Shalem.”

5. The “Jewish people” were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues & etc. Jews and Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside Palestine.

6. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent “Jewish people” in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not ‘the city of David,’ since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens, don’t know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine.

7. Since archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander’s descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander’s other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= ‘Common Era’ or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.

The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.

Adherents of Judaism did not found Jerusalem. It existed for perhaps 2700 years before anything we might recognize as Judaism arose. Jewish rule may have been no longer than 170 years or so, i.e., the kingdom of the Hasmoneans.

8. Therefore if historical building of Jerusalem and historical connection with Jerusalem establishes sovereignty over it as Netanyahu claims, here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:

A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.

B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.

C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.

D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.

E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.

F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.

G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.

9. Of course, Jews are historically connected to Jerusalem by the Temple, whenever that connection is dated to. But that link mostly was pursued when Jews were not in political control of the city, under Iranian, Greek and Roman rule. It cannot therefore be deployed to make a demand for political control of the whole city.

10. The Jews of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine did not for the most part leave after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 136 CE. They continued to live there and to farm in Palestine under Roman rule and then Byzantine. They gradually converted to Christianity. After 638 CE all but 10 percent gradually converted to Islam. The present-day Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Jews and have every right to live where their ancestors have lived for centuries.

Lots of people (apparently galvanised by the New South Wales Government) are claiming that Australia is the first country to recognise ‘non-specified’ gender.

This is nonsense. Even if we ignore simple iterations of cultures with a third gender, there are hundreds of examples stretching into prehistory of ambiguous gender specifications. India has an ancient and firmly established tradition of non-binary gender which Pakistan has recently adopted. Indigenous North American cultures had Two-Spirit, which allowed for an array of gender roles to be filled – or dispensed with altogether. Ethiopia, Kenya and Congo all recognise non-gender, as do Indonesia, Polynesia and the Phillippines. Going back into history, Mesopotamia and Sumeria recognised non-gender states, and Sumerian myth even speaks of the goddess Ninmah, who fashioned a being “with no male organ and no female organ”, for whom Enki finds a position in society: “to stand before the king”. In Akkad, Enki is remembered as instructing Nintu, the goddess of birth, to establish a “third category among the people” in addition to men and women, that includes demons who steal infants, women who are unable to give birth, and priestesses who are prohibited from bearing children. Ancient Egypt had a third gender category for “non-gendered” while Indic cultures – including the ancient texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – all refer to non-gender thanks to the influence of Vedic culture.

So: yes, well done Australia, I’m very pleased that you have taken this step. But let’s have less of this blinkered Eurocentricism!

In centuries to come, the early 21st Century will come to be regarded as the moment at which Brazil emerged from a long dark age.

Probably “discovered” by the Portuguese at the start of the 16th Century, it underwent just over 300 years of Colonial surpression as its lands and resources were contested by a variety of European powers. Portugal was more successful here than it had been elsewhere; while its African and Eastern properties were gradually stripped from it by more predatory Empires, it stubbornly clung onto Brazil in the face of mounting French and Dutch opposition, eventually even shifting its metropole from Portugal to Brazil in the early 1800s to avoid the worst of the Napoleonic Wars. The absence of the King and Court from Portugal caused unrest at home, however, and after just thirteen years King João VI returned to Europe, leaving in charge his son Pedro, who promptly declared independence.

The “Empire of Brazil” lasted for some sixty years, before falling to a military coup in 1889. The ensuing parliamentary democracy also fell to a junta in 1930, which led to a period of uneasy governance, which vascillated from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, before resolving definitively into a full military dictatorship after another coup in 1964. Since 1989, Brazil has been steadily redemocratising, and has been governed since 2002 by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula” for short. Elected on a platform of reducing Brazil’s extreme inequality (Brazil has one of the most pronounced splits between rich and poor in the world), Lula is probably one of the most popular democratically elected politicians in the world; even after 8 years in power his popularity remains in the high 70s. His chosen successor, Dilma Roussef, seems to be cut from the same mould and is likely to win by a landslide. Brazil is now one of the more significant emerging economic powers; with a huge – and cheap – labour force, abundant mineral deposits, a growing middle class and rapidly developing infrastructure, Brazil has the potential to grow into a major player over the course of the next century.

With economic swagger comes political, of course, although until recently Brazil had been content to make an exception of itself in this. He is regarded as a key US ally in Latin America almost by default – by virtue of being peaceful, democratic, opposed to Chavez-esque populism and open to free-market liberalism. Although he has lobbied strongly for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Lula had – until recently – been pursuing a modest foreign policy – possibly designed to demonstrate responsibility on the world stage – best described as Oman-esque:

[...] Oman from 1970 has explicitly taken the policy to adapt to changing circumstances, remain non-aligned, never harbor hostile intentions, and avoid confrontation.

Over the last few weeks, though, something seems to have changed, and Lula has slowly, iteratively, but decisively been lowering himself into a more decisive foreign policy. His caution is justified, as his chosen point of insertion is possibly the most divisive and unstable geopolitical fracas of our times. He has refused to yeild to American pressure on Iran, saying “It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall [...] The prudent thing is to establish negotiations.” He has visited Palestine. And now, he is criticising Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, saying that he is willing to talk to Hamas and caliming that Israel’s continued settlement building was “extinguishing the candle of hope”. He has also shown himself willing to kick the US about for violating international trade law. So much for avoiding confontation.

Could this presage a more muscular Brazilian presence in world politics? While I admire Lula’s adherence to a series of principles which must seem obvious to most observers who do not rely on America’s patronage, this will do his immediate chances at gaining a permanent seat on the Security Council no good. In the long run, however, he may be gambling on the strength of a non-aligned movement in a multipolar world. What is certain, however, is that as Brazil’s strength grows it will become increasingly hard to ignore.

The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas Cole

There’s a great article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs by Niall Ferguson, the British economic and colonial historian. It’s called Complexity and Collapse, and it deals with the idea that civilisations face a “life cycle” – that they must, inevitably, began, expand, reach an apex then decline and collapse. You can’t read it unless you’re a member, sadly, but it argues quite successfully that the cyclical view of empirical supremacy may be misguided.

The crux of the argument is that, while trends can build up over time that make an empire susceptible to collapse, the collapse itself is virtually always sudden, swift and decisive. Therefore, the long-standing trends that contributed to the collapse event in question cannot be usefully thought of as being factors of causation in the collapse; they are, in fact, common features in a complex system – which an empire will successfully encounter, navigate and expurgate plenty of over the course of a multi-century lifespan, potentially indefinitely. Thus, long-term trends of weakness that, in retrospect, appear to have presaged a collapse are in fact not signifiers of a structural weakness in systemic power nor proof that empire decline is cyclical or inevitable.

These seems to fly in the face of established reason and observed experience, but Ferguson shows that destabilising trends are only really noticeable when they successfully destabilise. Even then, their effects can be over-interpreted. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes takes a long view, ascribing said fall to factors ranging from the personality disorders of individual rulers to the rise of monotheism. Certainly, one factor that he highlights did play a significant role: the trend towards civil war, following the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180AD, never really went away. But to say that Rome’s decline stuttered along for 200 hears seems to misunderstand the nature of complex human society. By the time Rome got to the 4th Century it was no more collapsed than it had been in 180; it was simply changed, as a complex adaptive system should, from a normally functioning society dealing with one set of circumstances to a normally functioning society with another. Political intrigue, barbarian migration and Sassanid ambition were features of the times, but even at this stage the collapse of Rome was not a fait accompli.

The actual collapse of Rome can, according to Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, be measured more or less exactly from 406, when Germanic invaders crossed the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Within 5 decades, the Western Roman Empire was dispossessed of most of its most valuable properties – including Carthage, Britain and most of Spain – and the population of Rome had collapsed by almost 75%.

This may seem like a slightly deterministic attitude. The drive to narrativise history compels us to question: can we really accept Sassanid expansion and civil war as simple influencers? Should we not also examine which Roman policies may have led to those trends achieving the prominence that they did? A fair question, as in its development Rome certainly provided space and encouragement for these trends to develop. The distinction is not to simply allow that “things happen”, however, but to differentiate between events that are the product of a complex system behaving normally (even if they produce outcomes that may appear to be desirable) and events that are the cause or product of a period of systemic collapse.

However fuzzy and ephemeral that distinction may appear, it’s important. States do not drift serenely from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon. The complex system that we call “Rome” encountered and subsumed many problematic factors in the course of its development – the threat posed by Hannibal of Carthage, or the transition from Republic to Empire. It survived those, but eventually succumbed to a sudden and catastrophic malfunction. From the perspective of learning from history, then, we can look to the civilisations of our own times – particularly the US – and think more broadly about the signs of impending collapse. There have been occasions when kingdoms have risen, dwindled, and then risen again; but final collapse tends towards the swift and definite.

The nature of the activity that the term “political correctness” describes is difficult to neatly define. The term “political correctness” is, of course, deeply unhelpful; it is a process that is neither directed nor overseen by politics or political bodies, although laws and legal institutions may respond reactively to it. Furthermore, it seems to me that it describes a correctness, or an orthodoxy, only insofar as it casts a shape by opposition. It is a social process, and one that is concerned primarily with ruling out that which is unacceptable in its midst, not with carving commandments into graven slabs on the mount.

Broadly speaking, political correctness is the process by which society is currently re-evaluating the extent to which it finds certain acts and ideas tolerable and permissible. The term “Culture of Tolerance” has been suggested in its place, despite it not always being particularly tolerant; was the headscarf ban in France an act of toleration? Anne Applebaum dubbed it the “European Project”, which is only somewhat satisfying, as it is not a process that is necessarily bound to Europe. Its roots, however, most certainly do lie in that continent, and its impulse to both forget and atone for its past. In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West,Christopher Cadwell writes:

Avoiding another European explosion meant, above all, purging Europe’s individual countries of nationalism, with “nationalism” understood to include all vestiges of racism, militarism and cultural chauvinism – but also patriotism, pride and unseemly competitiveness. The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans”.

Cadwell’s thesis is that it was this traumatised recoil from the close, bloody proximity to history that Europe had enjoyed in the early 20th Century that became the foundation upon which millions of Muslims came to build their lives in Europe, bringing with them, unchallenged, many of the exigencies that have come to define the inter-communal friction that has afflicted Europe over the last half-century. And he has a point. In no other location at any other time would the migration of so many people, from so many radically different cultures, have been permitted as it has here. The Europe that shunned the stark divisions of colonialism and cultural absolutism could not allow itself to deny migration on the basis of cultural difference, any more than it could bring itself to apply a standard upon those who it had enticed.

While it does Cadwell a disservice to reduce his nuanced, well-considered arguments in such a fashion, this does hint at the roots of what we today call “political correctness”. The problem is not, and has never been, one of illegal or illegitimate migration; the Home Office accounts for maybe 400,000 illegal migrants at large in the UK, but the number of legitimate refugees in the UK has recently crested 3 million, and the number of legal migrants is greater still. This rapid rebalancing of the cultural mix cause a friction to develop within Europe; not just between the newcomers and the hosts, but within the host cultures themselves – between those who clung to the European Project, and worked to embody its principles of inclusively and cultural relativism, and those who espoused a new (or a return of the old) nationalism, demanding that those who arrived, integrate. It was this duality of response that led to refugees becoming, as Georgio Agamben would have it, homo sacer*; in a society which could not agree upon a consistent response to the issues raised by migration and political asylum, these lives became politically untouchable.

Attempts to resolve the issues arising from this dichotomy have been incoherent. The aforementioned headscarf ban was notorious in Europe but elicited interest beyond not for its severity but for the haphazard way in which it was implemented. To ban a scrap of cloth is clearly illiberal, which is why the French authorities argued that it was being banned as the symbol of an aggressive international political movement. Instead of simply banning on that basis, however, the French government felt the need to make the law inclusive – and thus banned religious paraphernalia across the spectrum, including “large crosses” and yarmulkes. There was never any illusion or doubt that the law was directed at, or intended to target, anything other than the Islamic headscarf. But the European project mandated that any action against one group must be carried out against all others, in equal measure. The irony here is that the law worked; even though the law has been in effect for only a short while, integration is perceived to have improved significantly. But the cautiously inclusive way in which the law was framed was completely ineffective at muting Islamic resentment against it, which was still – naturally – regarded as a hostile move specifically targeting France’s substantial Muslim population (which is effectively what it was) – meaning that the rights of the Christian and Jewish populations were curtailed for no worthwhile reason.

But for all its frequent stupidity, incoherence and hypocrisy, the European Project remains a worthwhile pursuit. For all the cultural and social tension it may have caused, it has undoubtedly prevented far worse; a those chauvinists who have argued for a responsive rise in European Christianity unwittingly demonstrate. A religious revival may be good for the souls of Europe’s flocks, administered as they are by a faith that is both fragmented and bloated, and hamstrung by a society fixated on cultural passivity; but what virtues it may have in its own right do not even begin to account for its value as a “response” to the rise of Europe’s Muslim influx. Who would seriously argue for a renewal of religion conflict in Europe?

The European Project is not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. It simply needs to hold the ring until the still-unhealed fractures in Europe’s post-war psyche finally knit together. Migrant societies cannot be held accountable for the divisions that have existed in this post-war continent; for every Abu Hamza there are multiples, many multiples of examples of Muslim migrants who have migrated seamlessly into secular European culture: the sophisticated Iranians of Paris, the Pakistani entrepreneurs of London, and individuals like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Europe’s ills are self-inflicted; they are the ailments of a culture that has lost its sense of self. Politicising migration in response to this is a straw man. To paraphrase The West Wing, the culture which gave us Shakespeare doesn’t need defending, any more than the cultures that gave us Balzac, Hesse or Calvino.

There are historical precedents for our migratory state; the habit of importing spouses from the old country was practiced by American immigrants (Jewish, Irish, Italian), many of whom remained in isolated, internally cohesive communities for three or more generations. The fingerprints of those communities remain still, but they nevertheless integrated, and the reasons for this should give Europe hope. The integration of America’s subcultures came about through a shared dream of prosperity – a dream that required a firm grasp of English to realise. Europe may lack the more deeply conformist aspects of American society, but it certainly has no lack of wealth or culture to entice the young and dissatisfied members of migrant communities – and history has shown that, once assimilated, it’s very hard for a community to un-assimilate. It is this structural strength, borne of working through the issues of migration the hard way, that have allowed America to bring its true demons to light. 8 years may seem like a long time, but the institutional paralysis that Europe would have encountered in similar circumstances hardly bears thinking about.

But if I appear to optimist in asserting that Europe’s migratory issues will resolve themselves, given enough time, then let me temper that with some pessimism. The abrasive rift within European culture caused by the implementation of the European Project is a real problem, and cries of “political correctness” from disaffected Daily Mail editorialists cannot be simply dismissed as the belated death-throes of a class dreaming of defunct colonial privilege. If they are to succeed in preserving the bedrock of European unity for future generations to build upon, then those who carry the flag of the European Project need to change some of the ways in which they operate.

First, there is a need for objectives to be debated, discussed, clarified and understood. Awkward kludges like the French burka ban help no-one; either ban the burka or do not, but do not allow the ideals of equality of temperance to resolve into incoherence or trivial platitude. It is from this farcical, maniacal adherence to principle in the face of situational reality that fuels dissatisfaction with political correctness, as much as the erosion of civil liberties or the shame of a national identity in perceived retreat.

Second, common ground needs to be established and understood. It is not impossible to be nationalist and still tolerant; it is not contradictory to support a national team and still oppose chauvinism and racial hatred. The rhetoric of national pride and competitiveness still needs to change; the Lord knows that I roll my eyes when French- or German-baiting is indulged in by those of my kin who follow English football or European politics. But sarcastically supporting the Scottish team is not an appropriate or helpful response to that. The middle ground is a field of dreams; if you build it, they will come.

And finally, it needs to be understood that the questions of race and migration are a battlefield that has been played out. The conflict over the future of the soul of Europe is not between the indigenous populations and their immigrant guests; it is an internecine dispute and not one that needs to be mortal. The migrants are here and their fate is their own, and, with luck, they will add to the richness of the future of Europe. What kind of future that is remains to be seen.

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As an aside; my good friend Charly has joined myself and Kate as bloggers of distinction. Charly makes cakes that are both edible and incredible, and Kate’s design blog is the kind of site that gives you the warm happies when you’re stuck at work on a miserable November afternoon. Go; read; enjoy.

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*In Ancient Rome there existed the legal concept of homo sacer, the sacred life – an entity legally defined as an exile under the law, someone to whom no law applied and who could claim the protection of no rights. The law applied to them only insofar as it was forbidden to use them as a ritual sacrifice; any other act against them – including killing them – was permitted.

To be rendered homo sacer was a punishment; the sacred nature of this mode of life was cast as a disparagement. Clearly, there are benefits to choosing to live outside of society, but for the Ancient Romans, they were outweighed by the determents of being stripped of all rights conferred by a system of law and a social compact.

Agamben argued, quite successfully, that refugees enjoyed a similar status in modern Western society.

And I’ve been thinking largely about historic truth.

If you ask most people to give as detailed a history of humanity as they can, most would go: monkey, caveman, cradle o’ civilization, ancient Egypt, China over there, blurblelug, GreeceRomeMiddleAgesBritishEmpireAmerica. And that’s fair enough, because it’s our history; the history of the “civilised west”. The Eurocentric version of history won, or at least has ascendancy at the moment, because Eurocentric version of society won, because Eurocentricism won its wars and now gets to teach  the students who go on to write the history books. The victor’s justice of history: an obvious point but one that occasionally deserves to be revisited.

But when we talk about historic victor’s justice, we tend to think about in in limited terms. We think about Neuremberg, and whether we’d like the Nazis more if they’d won; we think about Charles Taylor and the ICC; we think about America and whether it truly understands the cultures of the countries it invades, and whether history will accord Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay the weight they deserve. But history’s bias towards victory is much more far-reaching than that; it affects our entire world view. Michael Hastings at True/Slant gives a demonstration of this in his review of District 9, in which he expounds on the nature of English language political and social discourse on Iraq and Afghanistan:

Our government’s language is teeming with condescension when discussing Iraqis and Afghans, as if they’re not quite complete humans, child-like, and certainly not really civilized. Their lives are not valued as much as Western life–in economic terms (the families of Iraqis or Afghan who get accidentally killed during get a payout of around $3000; the family of a Westerner, military or civilian, who gets killed will get around $500,000) and in how we process the daily death totals. (Politicians always mention the 4,500 Americans who’ve died in Iraq, but rarely give more than perfunctory acknowledgment to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.)

The very metaphor for our strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is so casually offensive that it’s somewhat astounding that it passes through our lips without comment. Usually it’s summed up by American officials like so: “The Iraqis are on a bicycle and we’re holding the bicycle seat until they’re ready, so we can let go.” Or: “It’s like we have training wheels on their bicycles, and we can leave once we take the training wheels off.”

This echoes the way that we often refer to people from “hot places” – and by minimising them in this manner we pave the way for an oversight of the historical worth of their culture. It is somewhat true that all history is, to some extent, ‘-centric’;  it has to be, as a history can never really be comprehensive, the scale of the task is too big. So we narrow it down, by region and era, and take it from there. You can ask, “What would a Native American-centric explanation look like? What would an Afro-centric explanation look like?” but the answer would be too obvious: they would tell the story of the development of the civilisations of Africa or Latin America, and only deal with Europe when it impacts those stories; after all, we don’t have to simply focus on history’s winners. And it’s legitimate to ask whether, given that all history is at least slightly -centric, and that the story of European history has to be told, why Eurocentricism has to be classified as a criticism. After all, a large part of the justification for the idea of the nation-state is that it preserves the culture, identity, language and history of the nation it serves. Insofar as an obligation to record Latin American and African history exists, it lies with Latin America and Africa; the duty of European scholars to record that history extends only so far as it takes to explain its impact on our own history. So long as we can do that respectfully and without jingoism then we have done all that is required of us.

But there is an untruth to that, and in that untruth lurks an imperative. In our military and political worlds, we have a concept called the “Responsibility to Protect”. This (admittedly contested) doctorine states that a nation has the right to intervene on behalf of a people whose government either will not protect them from grevious need, or which is directly oppressing them. Why is there no comparable ideal in history? During the Early Middle Ages, learning in Europe was a complete bust. The intellectual and social rout was complete, and all of Europe’s history was profoundly lost. The only reason why we know anything of Europe pre-1200 or so is because there was an external superpower who was minding our business better than we were. The scholars of the Byzantium and the Islamic Caliphate painstakingly transcribed and preserved the words of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates; they kept and treasured the history of Europe, even though it had had almost no direct influence on the development of the Caliphate itself. Our entire knowledge of the world exited Europe via Byzantium and spent centuries making its way around the Mediterranean, through Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Carthage and finally back into Europe through Cordoba.

By enshrining European knowledge, the Caliphate did the entire world a courtesy, one which Europe and, later, America have been tepid in returning.

Take Africa. A cat may look at a king; but the poorest, bloodiest, most corrupt and least densely populated continent by a long margin cannot fairly be compared to Europe. They seem to be worlds apart. Why is that? In the short term, we talk about colonialism, but that’s a code, because we still think of the European invaders rounding up chieftains in grass huts full of yams. There is a reason for this: it is because sub-Saharan African history is virtually unknown to us except as an extension of European history. The history of an entire continent is basically lost to us – not just because modern historians have been more interested in Louis XIV (aka the most awesome king in history) but because history throughout the ages has been homocentric, and Africa has never had a chance to record Africa’s history. The earliest we can go with confidence is the Kingdom of Mutapa, which was founded in 1450 in the area that is now Zimbabwe and which was attacked by the Portuguese – pre-guns – who were trying to establish a trade route to India. The history that has been preserved for us is the Eurocentric ideal: it has no context beyond what our historians have given it.

Which gets to my second point: Eurocentricity is one thing, but our obsession with our victor’s history has caused us to reflexively overlook another cause. The Caliphate was not restricted to the Mediterranean coast. The main reason why Portugal and Mupata clashed, rather than coming to a peaceful trading agreement, is because the Mupatanese government was Muslim. We have no idea what the southern extent of the Caliphate was, and even if we did, we would have no idea how its influence had spread within Africa, because those historical records don’t exist. When we talk about the Caliphate, we fixate on the geography of the empire itself, and this grossly overlooks the human and cultural dimensions of what it achieved.

Thirdly, these two misunderstandings – Eurocentricism and geography-fixation – have led to you a conclusion that is false. Because we do have a little bit of pre-European knowledge of Africa, mostly thanks to Caliphate historians and architectural digs. In the aftermath of the Bantu expansion, the Monomatapa kings (the precursors to the Mutapa Kingdom) built a city called Great Zimbabwe. It stood for 300 years, covered seven square kilometres and has a population of around 20,000 at its peak, making it significantly larger than London was at the time. It was the centre of a trade network that stretched from China to Arabia and possibly even to South America. With Great Zimbabwe, we can prove that as of 1400 AD, sub-Saharan Africa was as technologically advanced as Europe – not ‘noble savages’, not victims of geography, but genuine contenders for the mantle of future leaders of the free world. Portugal could not beat Mupata. Portugal’s generals are recorded as having described it as “invulnerable”. Mupata collapsed through infighting and domestic politiking, and so thrust sub-Saharan Africa into its present dark age.

Europe is not alone in having suffered dark ages; Latin America is only decades removed from its own, and Africa is still deep in its clutches. The reason why Eurocentricism is a criticism is because European history doesn’t need protecting. It is as complete as it possibly can be, but for lucky finds and interpretation; but more African, Middle Eastern and Latin American history is being lost by the day. History is written by the victor, but only because the losers have a few other things on their hands, so under the circumstances, it surely doesn’t hurt us to be a bit more magnanimous with our resources.

In the mid fifteenth century, the Venetians were the undisputed masters of the Mediterranean. Following the sacking of Genoa, they had no meaningful rivals when it came to the sea’s lucrative trade routes, and the Ottoman overthrow of Byzantium and the destruction of Armenia meant that overland trade with Asia Minor was all but impossible. Operating mainly through Beirut and Alexandria, Venetian ships more or less single-handedly represented Europe’s market to the old world.

In these two ports, everything was traded – the goods brought overland from India and China along the Silk Road – Persian gums, precious stones – copper and incense from the south of the Arabian peninsula, ivory, pearls, fruit and cloth from north Africa. But one commodity stood above the rest, commanding prices put all of the others to shame, and that was spice – more specifically, pepper.

What the spice trade meant to Europe can be read upon the pages of any medieval account or cookery book. In spite of the perverse vagaries of the Mameluke Sultans – whose greed could send prices soaring on a whim, and whose uncertain tempers and squalls of fury could inflict upon a patrician Venetian a flogging, as if he were a slave – to the Republic, the rewards were well worth the costs. German, French and English consumers would pay whatever prices were demanded for as much spice as Venice could supply.

But, in 1487, Batholomew Diaz became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, and before the end of the century Vasco de Gama proved the viability of a sea route to Calicut. This was apocalyptic for the Venetians; a pilgrim’s journal of the time notes that “all the city of Venice was greatly impressed and alarmed, and the wisest men held that this was the worst news that could ever come to the city.” Sure enough, by 1502, the Venetians found that there was no spice to be found in Alexandria. The Portuguese had stolen the trade, although the English would later steal it from them in turn, and Venice’s star was on the wane.

I find this interesting for several reasons. Firstly, I think that cooking – the desire to source new, exciting ingredients and have them delivered fresh – is underrated as a motivator when it comes to understanding geopolitics. It only recently that, for the first time in human history, the most commonly internationally traded resource had not been a foodstuff; coffee, the erstwhile leader, still accounts for phenomenal quantities of shipping every year. To those who say that the current banking crisis somehow proves the inviability of capitalism as model, that this is the end of the supremacy of the market, I can only say: human behaviour is economic behaviour. As long as people need to eat, international trade will be at the forefront of or politics, our society, and our world. A few fewer banks and a few fewer bankers won’t change that; there still will be banks and traders and investors, because at the end of the day, people will always need pepper, and that’s the bedrock upon which international trade is built, not mortgages. The mortgage trade may seem like a lot when your fate is directly linked to interest rates, but it’s peanuts compared to how the peanut sellers roll.

Secondly, it illustrates what a harsh mistress that very market is. Both Venice and Portugal had their dreams of glory dashed on the spice trade; then, as now, the Middle East proved to be an unreliable trading ground. In the context of this history, it makes sense for America to pursue their ethanol dream. What doesn’t make sense, however, is why the rest of the world is allowing them to do so. If the Brazilians have developed, in sugar cane ethanol, a fuel that is four times more efficient than America’s corn ethanol at the same cost, a fuel which many believe has the potential to be as efficient as gasoline, and a fuel which impacts global food supplies in no way at all, then why isn’t China, or Russia, or the EU, investing in it?