The Ukraine War

 Romanian television is full of images of refugees crossing from Ukraine into Romania from its northern border – some of them Romanian-speaking since the border a hundred years ago under the Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be much further north and towns like Czernowitz part of Romania. Gregor von Rezzori based his famous trilogy there. 

Like most people, I’m constantly refreshing the news to get updates about the horrific events occurring there and trying to make sense of it all. One of the things I realise is how little I can trust the commentators for whom the war seems little more than a spectacle – with roles of goodies and baddies too easily assigned. Only the likes of Paul Rogers (Professor of Peace Studies and respected military analyst) and Lawrence Freedman (Professor of military history and author of the recent amazing “Strategy – a history”) seem able to rise above this - although I reference some others at the end of the post 

Anthony Barnett is someone I can rely on to articulate most clearly our hopes and fears – whether on issues of democracy, nationalism, Brexit or the pandemic. So it’s not surprising that it is a typically nuanced piece of his which has spurred me into a few words about what a Moscow historian has courageously called “the most senseless war in history”

I have never been so wrong about a major event that was so clearly forewarned. I was convinced that Vladimir Putin would not be so reckless as to launch a full-scale conquest of Ukraine, if only for the simple reason that he would lose. I had assumed he was a cunning dictator who hated democracy, was smart enough to play on the corruption of a West enamoured of rentier capitalism and therefore had a cold measure of realities. I also thought he felt profoundly threatened by last year’s uprising in Belarus. The possible contagion of a democratic revolution there would threaten him personally, and the West’s sanctions, while not enough to undermine Lukashenko’s regime, were a close call. So I reckoned – perhaps I should say hoped – that the huge mobilisation of Russian military forces around Ukraine was a feint, whose real aim was to consolidate Russian control over Minsk, not Kyiv. This, it seemed to me, was bad enough.

It is important to hold onto one’s disbelief and the reasons for it. There is a danger in defaulting to self-regarding huff and puff, especially if you are British, with righteous declarations of how dictators must not be appeased. Putin should – and more importantly, will – be defeated. Now is the time for war, given that he has chosen it. It will be fought and suffered by the people of Ukraine, and we must extend to them solidarity and support. In the spirit of such solidarity, this also means it is time to begin to plan the peace that follows when the would-be conqueror is vanquished, and Russian forces withdraw. Ukraine’s heroic President Zelensky is right to put his country’s neutrality on the table in any negotiation. For if we do not wish to return to the old cycle that has led to this war, we have to acknowledge where we are coming from. 

There were, Barnett argues, two reasons why Putin’s invasion was ‘unbelievable’. “First, Ukraine is a large country with a proud people and long borders. It cannot be successfully occupied against determined patriotic resistance. Even if the Russian forces can completely subdue Ukraine’s professional army, which is not yet clear, they cannot withstand a long insurgency fed with the latest infantry weapons, night-vision rifles and drone technology, supported by US surveillance and cyber-warfare. The premise of Putin’s assault, as set out in his historically insane address, is that the people of Ukraine are really Russian. As his troops will learn, this is untrue. Nibbling off part of an oblast is one thing – seeking the conquest of an entire, functioning country that borders NATO does not make sense”. 

Putin is a product of the disastrous way that the US replaced the Cold War. As I write in ‘Taking Control!’, then-president George H W Bush expressed 30 years ago “the joy that was in my heart” at the way America had “won the Cold War”. He was thrilled that “a world once divided into two now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America”.

But America’s solo hegemony was responsible for a period of unrestrained unfairness. Its wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq were indecent disasters and its insatiable financial system exploded in the great crash of 2008.

Nowhere was more indecently and unfairly treated than Russia. After 1992, the US could have supported its transformation into a relatively uncorrupted democracy as its people wished. Instead of extending an updated Marshall plan to a defeated enemy, as the US had so successfully done with Japan and Germany after 1945, Russia was ravaged by economic ‘shock therapy’ and bankrupted. Putin is the foster child of Washington’s greed and myopia, determined to take revenge on the forces of the capitalist family that also orphaned him even while he has been personally enriched and empowered by it. 

Other useful analyses

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/

https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war-foretold/

https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/remembrance-of-nuclear-things-past

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-eu-oil-gas-trade-russia-budget-military-spending-ukraine-war-crisis/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/liberal-democracies-must-defend-their-values-and-show-putin-that-the-west-isnt-weak

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power

Adam Tooze Chartbook 90

Just added - Rebel Wisdom – sensemaking Russia and Ukraine A recent find, this website gives original insights. This long post is the most amazing assessment of useful commentaries and very much reflects my own feelings  

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340 An interview with Fiona Hill, the Brit in the US Foreign service who is a good Russian analyst

https://samf.substack.com/p/russias-plan-c?s=r Lawrence Freedman’s post of 2 March

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/01/on-humiliation-and-the-ukraine-war/ 1 march

Ukraine and the art of strategy; Lawrence Freedman (2019) in which the military historian links the events of the past 8 years to the lessons from his great opus on “Strategy – a history”

https://indi.ca/white-empire-is-playing-russian-roulette-with-sanctions/

https://unherd.com/2022/02/vladimir-putins-reckless-gamble/

https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/24/what-happened-in-kazakhstans-january-rebellion/

https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/18/waiting-for-the-russians-in-ukraine/

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii87/articles/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukraine-s-fractures of historical interest (the mood in 2014)

https://warontherocks.com/ a US security website “with a Realist” lens.

Those Clever Romans – the tactical Playbook of the Corporate Elites

That’s half a dozen posts I’ve done in a row on the apparent increased divisiveness in our societies – without any real attempt at either explanation or prescription. Indeed the blog’s focus on political frustration can be traced back to the first mention of the pending election in Bulgaria at the beginning of April. The posts since then have argued that -

- few (if any) societies can any longer claim to be democratic

- we need, very loudly, to be exposing such claims to be the falsehoods they are

- a better vision of democracy needs to be articulated

- pressure groups should coalesce around the demand for citizen juries – initially at a municipal level to demonstrate their benefits

- political parties no longer serve any useful purpose

- we should be insisting that governments start focusing on the big issues - which governments currently seem incapable of even attempting to deal with

- using citizen juries

- governments, in other words, should govern

So let me try to pull the posts together by questioning the way the media has placed the issue of political polarisation on the agenda. It’s clear that social media have increased the rancour of the tone of conversations - - certainly since Twitter started in 2006.

But can we really blame the social media for the strong and sustained political divisions? The fact that 70% of US Republican party members still cannot accept the validity of Jo Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential elections certainly indicates not just a very significant shift in the US political mood but a major question about the resilience and legitimacy of that country’s basic political system. This may or may not be part of “American exceptionalism” but is certainly very serious.

But the wider populist backlash against elite rule is part of something much deeper – and was there for anyone with any sensitivity to see some 20 years ago. I don’t profess to have any particular skills of foresight but in 2001 I drafted a short note which forms the first seven pages of this longer paper (written a decade later). I summarised the basic message at the time thus

·       The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1980 was an effective system for the West.

·       It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.

·       deindustrialisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through votes and unions

·       a thought system has developed which justifies corporate greed and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company

·       All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world

·       People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

·       Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few

·       Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

·       It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

·       Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

·       But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

·       as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

·       We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed

·       to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed) 

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – 5 years ago. But that was simply the point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – not just 20 years but probably at least 50 years – as Anthony Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)

The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. Some may not like some aspects of what the crowd is saying – for example the border restrictions….but we ignore its message at our peril. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common way of dealing with a problem – which runs like this –

-       Deny the problem

-       Rubbish the critics

-       Blame the victim

-       Marginalise the issue – concede a little by suggesting that the problem was caused by “just a few bad pennies”

-       set up an Inquiry

-       But ensure (by its composition and direction) that it goes nowhere

-       Compartmentalise the responsibility – to confuse

-       Sacrifice a few lambs

-       Bring on the games and spectacle

-       clowns and jesters

-       Feed the dogs with scraps

-       Starve any programme conceded of serious funds

-       Take the credit for any eventual concession that there was indeed a problem

Suggested Background Reading

We are so  swamped with books these days that someone like me can offer only what catches his eye. But the OECD, Lakoff and Tarrow are significant sources which should be taken seriously!

Catching the Deliberative Wave (OECD 2020) Executive summary of recent important book Innovate Citizen Participation and new democratic institutions - catching the Deliberative Wave which tries to help the global elite make sense of the latest challenge to their rule

Macron’s Grand Debat; useful article about the French approach

citizen jury experience (2016) german; rather academic

Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent, the fight for freedom Raoul Martinez (2016) Fascinating book which starts from the proposition that the current failure of our social systems must lead us to question our foundational beliefs

Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)  Too much of the discussion on democracy is conducted by anglo-saxon political scientists. Here an Italian sociologist makes the connection to the social movement literature

The New Machiavelli – how to wield power in the modern world ; Jonathan Powell (2011) Tony Bliar’s Chief of Staff does some musing about the government class thinking

Moral politics – how conservatives and liberals think; George Lakoff (1996) an important psychologist sets out our tribal thinking

Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition – first in 1994) one of the key writers in this field

Metaphors we live By  George Lakoff (1980) our very words betray us

Brexit – and its different levels of “explanation”

There have been lots of theories about “How Brexit happened” with the “explanations” generally turning out (at least in the newspapers and journals) to be little more than superficial rationalisations than serious attempts to understand what drove voters to turn out (or not) and to decide to put their cross at the top rather than at the bottom of the ballot paper…The “explanations” have included –

- The alienation/distrust of those marginalised by deindustrialisation who have been given the rather derogatory designation of “Left Behinds”
- An interpretation robustly challenged by Danny Dorling and others who correctly pointed out that it was the older, more comfortably-off conservative voters who were Leave enthusiasts
- A 25 year campaign of hostility to the EU by the tabloids – ably assisted by a maverick Daily Telegraph journalist, one BoJo. The resulting Euroscepticism is well mapped in an article “Not European Enough” (2019)

- A dramatic rise in net immigration to the UK since 2000 with results mapped in “a tangled web” 2019

- The silence of the Labour party in the campaign - giving Conservatives the freedom to be active in both the Leave and Remain campaigns

-  The  unimaginative nature of the Remain campaign – whose economic threats were seen as counterproductive

The researchers, of course, have been active – but few of their studies have surfaced in the media most of which have adopted their own particular “narrative” of the referendum result and are more interested to cover the never-ending pantomime of Brexit politics. There is, of course, one other “gatekeeper” between academia and the public namely Think Tanks which, however, focus on future policies and not on historical research.

So ordinary citizens are left on their own to google key terms and try to identify readable results of the research on voter motivation in the 2016 referendum. One of the best of these Brexit – understanding the socio-economic causes and consequences (2016) – appeared  remarkably quickly

You will notice that some of the research material resulting from that google search is very recent (2019) but I have just been reading a book which was written 2 years ago - The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) which I find the best analysis of the issue.

Written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages - with each of its 34 chapters having an almost self-explanatory title such as “Jailbreak”, “The four breaches of trust”, “Roll the Dice”, “It was England’s Brexit”, “Big Britishness”, “The Legitimacy of the EU” and “No Left to Turn To”.

It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely – not only underlining (in my case in different colours) but making copious notes about….Indeed, for the first time ever, I transcribed my first set of comments into a larger notebook - partly for some of the one line quotes, partly the better to follow the argument….Barnett was the moving force behind Charter 88 and has a bit of a hobbyhorse about constitutional issues which I don’t find easy to follow..

Let me, very briefly, try to do justice to his book. He starts it by suggesting that if there is one symbol to represent the modern world it is that of the prison - with surveillance everywhere and everyone

“trapped by the way voting and its outcomes are bought, corrupted, manipulated, spun by the PR industry and calibrations of costly marketing analytics” and then arguing that

“Brexit (and Trump) are attempts at mass breakout from the marketised incarceration of contemporary corporate democracy”

The breaches of trust which have sown the dragon seeds of public distrust and sullen anger in the US and the UK are 
- first the 2003 Iraq invasion itself in the face of massive protest (which offended the liberals); 
- the subsequent destruction affecting the Middle East as a whole which was ultimately proved to have been a disaster (offending the right - which had been expecting victory and “greatness”)

- The global financial meltdown was the third breach of trust 
- and the corporate greed it revealed was the final breach (arfuably started by the parliamentary expenses scandal) . 

Many of us thought that the third breach of trust would not only lead to a rethink about globalisation but to the birth of a more balanced model - and it was Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism which alerted us in 2011 that Neoliberalism was still very much alive and kicking…. Barnett puts it very eloquently –

“A democratic warming that began on the left but only became a hurricane capable of taking power after picking up force in the warm waters of the right”

He goes on to suggest that the attraction of Brexit was what he calls the “jailbreak factor” – “the experience of democracy being so confining that any offer to escape was attractive”. It’s noticeable that Remainers cited mainly economic factors for their vote (75%) whereas Leavers discounted the economic, having just 2 major concerns – ending EU decision-making and immigration. Remainers were focused on the future, Leavers on the past…..

Although Barnett was a Remainer, he is pretty savage about the EC dishonesty around the Lisbon Treaty and has a great quote about the campaign –

The UK (although he correctly argued that it was actually England) walked out of Europe on two Big British Eurosceptic boots – one marked Leave, the other Remain

He later emphasises that both Leave and Remain were run by right-wing sects – with the Labour party sulking in the undergrowth – their slogans about the future being indistinguishable, “global Britain” in one case, “world Britain” in the other….I  kid you not! I’ll finish with one final quote –

“the Brexiteers have abandoned a very ambitious but achievable aim of growing like Germany within the EU for the fantastical ambition of growing even faster while outside it”

Brexitannia (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DzbctACZWY is a far more thoughtful film of an almost sociological depth based on about 200 in-depth interviews the length and breadth of the country and including commentaries. It’s reviewed here by Zero Anthropology

"Inside Europe - 10 years of turmoil" (2019) the BBC documentary referred to in the opening

Resources
Brexit Geographies – 5 provocations; (2018) Looks a good analysis 

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/explaining-brexit/

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CSI-Brexit-4-People%E2%80%99s-Stated-Reasons-for-Voting-Leave.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5856072/pdf/PIRS-97-117.pdf

https://blog.usejournal.com/brexit-a-detailed-summary-of-what-the-hell-is-going-on-for-my-american-friends-61c92b04d9f7

http://natcen.ac.uk/media/1319222/natcen_brexplanations-report-final-web2.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/13/brexit-boris-johnson-parliament-written-constitution

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35620/ttr-2018-special-brexit.pdf

https://www.eurozine.com/explaining-brexit/?pdf

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/theo-veenkamp/

https://adamtooze.com/2017/03/02/notes-global-condition-mapping-debate-around-left-behind-white-working-class/

https://braveneweurope.com/2337-2 youtube

ttps://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/on-anthony-barnett-s-lure-of-greatness/

Narratives of Encroachment

Like most people, these days, my attention tends to wander…my eye will soon catch something else. It’s not often that an article is able to hold my attention but “Turning Inward; Brexit, Encroachment Narrative and the English as a “secret people” achieved that amazing feat…

I almost missed it since it had been lurking as one of hundreds of hyperlinks which I store in a file but rarely activate.

And my attention was held because the author – one Prof Patrick Wright - had cunningly embedded in the article a video of his presentation which made even more interesting points than the article itself. But the sound-level was so low that I had to strain my ears to identify the embellishments he was making to the text.

Truly the sort of cunning technique one would expect from a Professor of “Literature and Visual and Material Culture”!! He is also the author of On living in an old country – national past in contemporary Britain, published in 1985.

The basic argument of his paper is that English society has been portrayed over the ages by certain writers with particular themes and symbols eg rustic meadows, the sound of a cricket ball and warm beer. The gallery of writers includes William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, JB Priestley and George Orwell….each of whom, admittedly in very varying degrees, paints pictures of “sturdy yeomen” under threat…

 While the Brexit campaigns have rightly been condemned for its appeals to xenophobia, and for the lies, misrepresentations and sheer opportunism of its leaders, there is more to be said than that. To the considerable extent that this resurgence of English identity has been engineered by partisan politicians, campaigners and journalists, it has also been activated by the deployment of allegorical narratives that work by simplification and polarisation.

In these encroachment narratives, the traditional nation and its way of life is typically squared off against a vividly imagined and probably advancing threat — be it immigrants, bureaucrats, Europe, ‘experts’ etc. Where the reality addressed is likely to be complex and full of nuance, encroachment narratives of this kind press that reality into a brutally simplified and prejudged opposition between good and evil. They often defend a traditional idea of community against modern forms of society and political organisation. They tend to favour common sense and instinct over long words, abstract knowledge and expertise. They make a virtue, particularly in the English context, of insularity and shrinkage. They champion the small, the grounded and the localised, as opposed to the large and mobile sweep of internationalisation and cosmopolitanism. They are highly resistant to any possibility of compromise or synthesis between their opposed terms.

 ……….Encroachment narratives abound in the writings of William Cobbett (1763–1835), the campaigning journalist and furious defender of the beleaguered Georgian countryside, whom Raymond Williams would place among the founders of a characteristically English idea of culture, and whose name now appears as a proto-Brexiteer in blog posts. He conducted his ‘rural rides’ as the agrarian revolution proceeded in the 1820s, producing a fulminating account of England as he saw it at this moment of transition…..
As G.D.H. Cole would assert much later, Cobbett lived before it became apparent that the urbanisation and industrialisation, which Cobbett saw as entirely hellish, would eventually open new possibilities of working class politics. As it was, Cobbett raged against everything he could blame for the destruction of the traditional rural community: the Reformation, the national debt, tea drinking, decadent MPs sitting for rotten boroughs, the genteel fashion for mahogany furniture, sofas and picturesque views in which the countryside was dissociated from utility, the abolitionists (accused of being more ‘concerned’ about distant slaves than about native English labourers) and, as some of Cobbett’s admirers still struggle to accept, Jews. The list is long, varied and disconcerting, even after Cobbett has bundled up everything on it to produce the overwhelming biblical monster he named ‘the thing. 

Polarised allegories also feature strongly in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, who may well appeal to the Brexiteers not just as the author of ‘The Secret People,’ but as the man who turned being a ‘Little Englander’ into a positive virtue.

The presentation was made at a British Academy symposium and can be read with others on the British Academy website in the report European Union and Disunion – reflections on European Identity (2017) which I had downloaded some time ago without noticing the Wright contribution. But it encouraged me to activate google search and discover a Demos pamphlet from 1995 The Battle over Britain which clearly laid the basis for the subsequent Cool Britannia theme. A decade later, Gordon Brown tried in vain to get the notion of British identity taken seriously but was faced down by a wave of criticisms including the redoubtable Tom Nairn who called him The Bard of Britishness  

This is the latest of what has become quite a series of musings about what the 23 June 2016 Referendum might tell us about the sort of people the Brits are… When I then went on to ask whether novelists don’t perhaps have better insights than specialist academics, I had forgotten the debate of the mid 1990s and the later one sparked off by poor Gordon Brown. 
But it's ironic that what has tuned out so far to be the most insightful of the bunch, should have been penned by an academic - if of a rather unusual sort !

Resources for English identity

- England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (2018) - explores the various strands which have created the english weave over the centuries - looks very strong on theory

- The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) – probably the best analysis of the issue, written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages. . Each of its 34 chapters has an almost self-explanatory title. It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely and make notes about….I received the book only in September and will devote a special post to it in the autumn

- The party politics of Englishness 2014 – a typical exploration by a political science academic of the question

- The debate on Englishness can no longer be avoided; 2012 short article

- British identity and political discourse – analysis of New Labour’s search for identity; a useful little piece from an outsider from 2010

- Priestley’s England – JB Priestley and English culture (2007) a biography of the man which looks at the society in which he became such a famous name.

- BBC Postscripts; a lovely tribute to the 1941 radio talks Priestley did in which you can hear excerpts

- Priestley’s Finest Hour; Commentary from one of the librarians of the University collection of Priestley’s works

- English Journey; JB Priestley (1936) Gives a sense of the sort of people he met as he travelled around by bus

- The secret people; GK Chesterton. The poem which was apparently used by a lot of Brexiteers

- Rural Rides; William Cobbitt (1830) an early example of a political travelogue by a great radical