Islamism - lessons from Marxism

The Romanian journal Revista 22 which is carrying my article this coming week is rated the country’s finest political and cultural weekly with prestigious contributors from Romania and abroad. It is actually considered a free market advocate specialising in in-depth political and socio-economic analysis – so it will be interesting to see how my piece will go down – criticising as it does the dismantling of state functions of the neo-liberals. But I am careful to emphasise in my conclusion the naivety of both left and neo-cons since the issue for me is getting and retaining a balance between the powers of corporations, government and the people. As Henry Mintzberg (2000) and Colin Crouch (2011) argue, the balance is at the moment horrifically with corporate interests whose funding of think-tanks has made many people believe. It is, of course, one thing to argue about state functions in the older member states; quite another to argue about them in Southern Europe where the state is a bit of a joke. I need to deal with this issue sometime in the future.
Founded after the 1989 revolution by liberal intellectuals from the Group For Social Dialogue, the 22 of the title refers to December 22nd 1989, the day Nicolae Ceaucescu fled the Communist party’s Central Committee building by helicopter following the incidents at Timişoara which led to his downfall.
Next week’s issue will be a special issue on the decade after 07/11 and I deliberately gave this (and Islamic terrorism) only a passing reference – putting it in the context of shared corporate and state interests and the failure of the anti-globalisation forces to use the opportunity of the financial meltdown.
The New Republic is an excellent journal I seldom mention. Like most of the global media, they too are running a special issue on 09/11 (unfortunately behind a pay-wall). But one of the contributions - Do ideas matter?– looks carefully at Islamic militancy in the wider context of the animosities that liberal societies arouse from time to time -

By liberal societies, I meant societies of the kind that encourage people to think rationally and creatively for themselves, and try to protect everyone’s right to do so, instead of demanding, as non-liberal societies do, that everyone adhere to the venerable and bow to the hierarchical. Liberal societies have been growing for the last couple of centuries, and liberal principles have been spreading around the world. But liberalism’s progress has also turned out to be, for a great many people, humiliating and terrifying, not to mention disastrous, on occasion. The liberal enterprise has kept on swelling, even so—and among the people who have felt outraged or frightened, the dynamism and the evident attractiveness of liberal principles around the world have sometimes generated panic, too, along with a suspicion that gigantic and sinister conspiracies must be at work. And the frightened people have rebelled. Sometimes they rebelled in the hope of preserving the past, a theme for peasants and artisans; and sometimes in the hope of merely expressing themselves, a theme for poets.
But in Europe in the years after World War I, the rebellions also broke out in the form of well-organized mass political movements with revolutionary aspirations. These were movements of the extreme right, or the extreme left, or right and left at once. But mostly these were movements of the avant-garde. The founders were typically charismatic intellectuals who knew how to paint their doctrines in the colors of the future, which was thrilling. And the leaders recounted grand mythologies of world history. The surface details in those mythologies varied from movement to movement.
Still, if you looked beneath the surface, the mythologies tended to be the same. They told a story about a virtuous and superior population that had come under attack from a cosmic conspiracy of foreign enemies and internal subversives. The virtuous and superior population would shortly wage apocalyptic war to fend off the foreign enemies and to exterminate the subversives. And, after the apocalypse, the virtuous and superior population would resurrect an ancient empire from the Golden Age, except in a high-tech modern version—a perfect utopia offering a solution to all of life’s problems, which liberalism does not try to do. The mythology ended, in short, at totalitarianism.

The Islamist and Baathist obsessions about imperialist and Zionist plots, the calls for a utopian resurrection of the ancient Caliphate of yore (which meant theocracy for the Islamists and one-party rule for the Baath), the massacres that followed the Islamist and Baath movements like a shadow—all this seemed, from my lookout perch, entirely recognizable. Here were the worst parts of twentieth-century Europe, creatively adapted to the traditions and circumstances of the Middle East.
The whole history of the Marxist guerrilla movement had demonstrated that, if you can assemble even a modest cadre from among the well-educated, and you can motivate the members to forsake their privileges and comforts and trek into the badlands or the mountains, the cadre will always be able to recruit the wretched of the earth into the battalions of your insurgent army. And you can send those recruits to their deaths, regardless of the name of your cause or the preposterousness of its ideology or its prospects of success.
The Islamist movement was founded in Egypt in 1928, but it also got started more or less independently in other places over the next few years, and its overall progress has been relatively slow, compared with the amazing speed of the European totalitarian movements in their day. Islamism has ended up more loosely structured, as a result. Still, Islamism, too, is a product of charismatic intellectuals. Islamism may well be the most purely intellectual movement of all. Islamism reveres its scholars. The entire power of the movement, its mainstream mass organizations and its jihadi battalions alike, rests on the leaders’ ability to hypnotize large publics into believing that only the Islamist scholars, through their exegetical insights into sacred texts, can penetrate the mystery of what you should do today and tomorrow. That is the meaning of “Islam is the solution.”
But this merely suggests that Islamism offers one more instance of the independent power of ideas—in Islamism offers one more variation on a recognizably modern impulse, which is the avant-garde urge to rebel against liberal ideas and customs—if this is true even in a modest degree, then it makes sense to emphasize the importance of argument and criticism, including arguments and criticisms from outside the Muslim community. Although no one can doubt that, in the matter of argument, the insiders of the Muslim world, and not the outsiders, will make the most persuasive points.
The progressive thinkers from Muslim backgrounds, the people who have chosen to retain their religious identity and the people who have chosen to foreswear it, the people who have experienced for themselves the atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fraternal organizations, the jihadis who have contemplated their course in life and have elected to become thoughtful and articulate exjihadis, the people who know what it is to be locked in an Egyptian jail, the people who find no difficulty in invoking in a single breath their own experiences and the principles of John Stuart Mill, the people who know how to distinguish a genuine feminism from the Islamist variety—these people, the Muslim liberals (or liberal ex-Muslims, as the case may be), will turn out to be the counterparts of the Soviet and Eastern Bloc dissidents. All the efforts of American commandos and drones notwithstanding, they are the ones who will bring the movement down.

Today's Observer carries the latest in the story of health reform in the UK.

Words

I have always been fond of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets not only for its Zen like sense of time and the puniness of our efforts but for its references to the fragile nature of words – thus, in the first poem (Burnt Norton)
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
decay with imprecision, will not stay in place
You can read the entire poem here
and later (in East Coker) a section I use a lot -

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

Little wonder, therefore, that Eliot was a great admirer of a little-known poet from my home town (Greenock) in the 1940s, WS Graham who also wrote a lot about words eg

Speaking is difficult and one tries
To be exact, and yet not to
Exact the prime intention to death.
On the other hand, the appearance of things
Must not be made to mean another
thing. It is a kind of triumph
To see them and to put them down
As what they are. The inadequacy
Of the living, animal language drives
Us all to metaphor and an attempt
To organise the spaces we think
We have made occur between the words.

These poets’ emphasis on the inadequacy of words came to mind as I thought about the 2 hours we spent last night checking the translation of the short article I had duly submitted to Revista 22. The problems started with the title – The Dog that didn’t bark. Romanian has apparently 2 ways of saying this – one of which apparently makes it clear that the dog might have been expected to bark. “Society” had caused a problem – since it has both a social and commercial meaning. The phrase “political leadership” (as in “absence of”) apparently has a stronger meaning in English than in Romanian where it seems to be a more neutral phrase. My phrase about our “becoming customers rather than citizens” needed in Romanian a clearer steer that – ie that we had not necessarily chosen the development. The most interesting was perhaps the word “meltdown” which can refer either to “thaw” (positive) or nuclear disaster!

And now my favourite Romanian poem! Titled ASKING TOO MUCH? by Marin Sorescu

‘Suppose that, to give a few lectures,
daily you had to commute
between Heaven and Hell:
what would you take with you?’

‘A book, a bottle of wine and a woman, Lord.
Is that asking too much?’

‘Too much. We’ll cross out the woman,
she would involve you in conversations,
put ideas into your head,
and your preparation would suffer.’

‘I beseech you, cross out the book,
I’ll write it myself, Lord, if only
I have the bottle of wine and the woman.
That’s my wish and my need. Is it too much?’

‘You’re asking too much.
What, supposing that daily,
to give a few lectures, you had
to commute between Heaven and Hell, would
you take with you?’

‘A bottle of wine and a woman,
if I may make so free.’
‘That’s what you wanted before, don’t be obstinate,
it’s too much, as you know. We’ll cross out the woman.’

‘What do you have against her, why do you persecute her?
Cross out the bottle rather,
wine weakens me, almost leaves me unable
to draw from my loved one’s eyes
inspiration for those lectures.’

Silence, for minutes
or an eternity.
Respite. In which to forget.

‘Well, suppose that to give
a few lectures you had to commute
daily between Heaven and Hell:
what would you take with you?’

‘A woman, Lord, if I may make so free.’
‘You’re asking too much, we’ll cross out the woman.’
‘In that case cross out the lectures rather,
cross out Hell and Heaven for me,
it’s either all or nothing.
Useless and vain my commuting would be between Heaven
and Hell.
How could I even begin to frighten and awe
those poor creatures in Hell -
without teaching aid, the woman?
How strengthen the faith of the righteous in Heaven -
without the book’s exegesis?
How endure all the differences
in temperature, light and pressure
between Heaven and Hell
if I have no wine
on the way
to give me a bit of courage?’

from Selected Poems by Marin Sorescu, translated by Michael Hamburger. Published in 1983 by Bloodaxe Books. www.bloodaxebooks.com

Drisle; Good governance; Germany; and the art of Depression

The almost cloudless skies which greeted us on our arrival here on 10 August have had a 3 week spell and ended only yesterday. Today has become increasingly gloomy (the grey mist is sweeping down from Piatra Craiului), windy and drissly – ideal weather for catching up on the internet after our entertaining of the last 12 days. The first thing which I encountered was the World Bank’s People, Space, Deliberation website to which I am sent alerts every week or so. Today a blog about some jargon caught my attention. The blog and a couple of generous responses showed blogging at its best – with an interesting new development blog and a couple of papers being offered up.

I got to thinking a bit more about the distinction between the field of democratization studies and the field of good governance studies. With respect to the former, there is a longstanding and well-referenced theoretical literature pertaining to political transitions, and a good number of competing "theories of change," each with its own backers, detractors, and robust line of argumentation.
But the concept of "good governance" is a bit fuzzier when you look at it from an academic point of view. What exactly do we mean by the term? Is it democratization "lite?" Is it some combination of voice, accountability, service delivery and state responsiveness without explicit political competition? If so, what is the particular value that this construct brings to the conversation? And, as is often brought up in conversations within the Bank and elsewhere, what exactly is the "theory of change" (or multiple theories of change) underpinning this work? As far as I can tell, the bulk of the literature relating to good governance is either drawn from subsets of the democratization literature, or is made up largely of donor-conducted or donor-funded research - that is, case studies and other applied research designed explicitly to extract lessons learned and best practices to improve implementation in the field. Perhaps the field of "good governance" is significant then mainly as an applied rather than a theoretical construct - in which case it is no wonder that we often come up against the thorny "theory of change" issue.
All this was buzzing somewhat chaotically through my head when I stumbled across a ten year old IDS paper on citizen voice, Bringing citizen voice and client focus into service delivery,by Anne Marie Goetz and John Gaventa. Despite its age, the paper reads like a fresh attempt to clarify the issue of citizen voice by: a) focusing explicitly on citizen voice in service delivery; b) categorizing "voice and responsiveness" initiatives by type; and c) drawing some preliminary conclusions as to the type of political environment in which such "voice and responsiveness" issues may be likely or unlikely to succeed. The paper contains a wealth of information (albeit now somewhat dated) on various types of service delivery-citizen voice initiatives, and for the categorization exercise alone is of value to anyone seeking to better understand how such issues may be usefully broken down and analyzed. For me, though, the most interesting section is the conclusion, in which the paper frames questions for further research that hinge directly on explicitly addressing the idea of political competition and its implications for citizen voice initiatives - "Many participation and responsiveness initiatives are launched with scant consideration of their , relationship to other institutions and processes for articulating voice or engineering state response - namely, political parties and political competition," the report notes. "The research in this report indicates that political competition strongly influences the way citizen concerns are articulated and the way public agencies respond." However, it goes on to say, the relationship between political competition, voice initiatives and responsiveness initiatives is poorly understood. It is a shame that, ten years on, these statements still seem accurate within the context of applied research on "good governance." Setting aside academic theory, if we are serious about achieving results in this field, it seems we would all do well at the very least to acknowledge these issues head-on rather than hide behind fuzzily articulated concepts.

I haven’t had a chance to read the second paper mentioned in the discussions which is Managing pubic finance and procurement in fragile and conflicted settings

I’ve referred before to the great posts which Michael Lewis of Vanity Fair does about countries in the maelstrom of the financial hurricane of the past three years. He has now moved on from Greece and Ireland to the more challenging territory of… Germany with which he clearly has some problems understanding. The comments (which rightly condemn the cheapness of his remarks) are worth reading.
Because of Vodaphone’s incompetent and uncaring policies I can’t upload the paintings which I normally have adorn the blog. But let me refer my readers to a great blog posting about the highly civilised way in which the USA dealt with its last great depression. Sad that contemporary leadership cannot rise to such inspired heights.
And also a link to one of my favourite art galleries in Sofia.

The Dog that didn't bark

I delivered this morning my contribution to the special issue which the Revista 22 journal is running next week to mark the 10th anniversary of 09/11. I changed the title to "The Dog that didn't bark" (the title of a Sherlock Holmes episode)to refer to the strange inability of all those active in the anti-globalisation movement 10 years ago (so well described in Paul Kingsnorth’s One No, Many Yeses (Free Press 2003) to use the global financial crisis to present an alternative vision - let alone mobilise people for change. Previous posts carried the initial text for the article - it now continues -

Democracy requires political and administrative systems to have the capacity to make an impact on what its citizens judge to be unacceptable conditions. But it’s not only governments, corporate power and the media which are failing us – propelling us faster toward the precipice. We are actually failing ourselves. Our collective will to act as local, national and international citizens has weakened enormously over the past decade – despite our being presented in the financial crises of the past few years with the most powerful evidence for systemic change. In 1999 we had the Seattle anti-globalisation demonstrations and annual conferences. But, after the Genoa Conference of 2001, the movement disintegrated. Why? For, as the various financial scandals (eg Enron) of the 2000s culminated in the global meltdown of 2008, it seemed that the scales dropped at last from everyone’s eyes. The neo-liberal Emperor had been exposed in all his nakedness. So surely we now had the shared political understanding and will to return to the State some at least of the functions which had been stripped from it by those under the influence of dogma.
Indeed for a moment there seemed the possibility of developing greater legitimacy for alternative social visions more consistent with basic principles of democracy and collective dialogue and action. Not only did this not happen - but the high ground, amazingly, was quickly recaptured by corporate warriors who saw the State rescue of the banking system as an opportunity to “reframe” the agenda for their benefit. State debts had increased and had therefore, went their argument, to be reduced – but through the dismemberment of the last vestiges of the civilising aspects of state activities. Colin Crouch is one of the few who has recently identified and analysed the perversity of this stunning development (in his brilliantly titled book The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism (Polity 2011) – pointing out, for example, the confusion large corporations have successfully sown in the public mind as they use the language of “the market” to defend their anti-competitive (let alone anti-social) practices. Richard Douthwaite put it very pithily in his 2003 Short Circuit The system that has emerged suits nobody: in the long run, there are no winners. Even at the highest levels of society, the quality of life is declining. The threat of mergers leaves even senior managers in permanent fear of losing their jobs. As for the burgeoning list of billionaires, try though they might to fence themselves off from the collapsing social order, they cannot hide from the collapsing biosphere. Neither social democratic nor green opposition parties offer, however, any convincing agendas for change. Such agendas are available (A draft paper Working for Posterity on my website identifies many of them) but need to be proselytised by those who recognise that the issue is not the simplistic one of greater State power but rather the need for a proper balance of power between corporations, state structures and people-driven political processes. “It was not capitalism which triumphed when the Berlin wall fell – it was balance” was the opening sentence of a powerful but neglected 2000 article by management guru Henry Mintzberg which set the European model of the “mixed economy” - of the “strong private sector, strong public sector and strength in the sectors between” - against the lack of balance and of “countervailing power” in the so-called communist societies. “The current push to privatise everything will”, he warned then, “lead to the same disease as communist societies”. It is the apparent powerlessness in the face of disaster which is the most frightening of current trends.

The new terrorists

Trying to do justice to the question of how the world has changed in the past decade in 1,000 words is, to put it mildly, rather challenging! I should probably assume that other contributors to this special issue of the Romanian journal Revista 22 will have covered the obvious issues – and try to make a couple of distinctive points. So what should my line be? I thought that I might go for a heading like “The New Terrorists” and suggest that the damage the neo-liberal ideologues and financial class have done to societies is so enormous that this is the term we should apply in future to them. I’m sure I’m not the first to have thought of this – but it does seem a powerful phrase which brings together several arguments – eg Chomsky’s “manufactured consensus” (media and state manipulation of our perceptions); that people (in the developed world) feel less secure not because of islamic terrorists but because the old certainties of jobs and welfare have disappeared; and public values, space and decency are declining. Richard Douthwaite’s most recent book put this well -

As individuals, we face increasing insecurity in our working lives, on our streets and even within our homes. As societies, we face a ruthlessly competitive global economy, the threat of armed conflict, and a biosphere stressed to the point of collapse. Why is the world's climate becoming ever more unstable? Why is democracy slipping away, and ethnic conflict, poverty, crime and unemployment growing day by day? The root cause of all these problems often evades even the most intelligent and well-intentioned examination

.A fundamental question, of course, is how we notice and measure “change”. Any list of the ways in which the world seems to have changed in the last decade would include -
• The scale of migrations – caused by both economic and military circumstances
• The scale of natural disasters
• Breakdown of the international financial system
• Changes in social behaviour caused by the internet
• The rise of China
• Increased disillusionment with political action (due to the continued grip of Neo-liberalism )
• Growth of inequality and insecurity

There are, however, several problems with such a listing. First this is a rather partial and ethnocentric picture. The list refers mainly to disturbances to the comfortable western (mainly European) world. The net needs to be cast wider – to recognise, for example, that many countries in South American and Africa have seen positive political and economic developments since 2001. Hundreds of millions of people have also been lifted from poverty throughout the world (although the squalid and fragile urban conditions in which most of them live might lead some to question the significance of this index). The Arab spring may have challenged the view many had of Arab and Muslim fatalism but we have become less optimistic about the onward march of democracy. It is not just that the various tulip and other revolutions of the 2000s stalled; it is also the growing disillusionment with democracy in Europe
The metaphor of the fishing net takes us to the second issue – the way we measure change. Our view of the world is determined both by the images we get from the frenetic global media and by our fixation on the familiar. The deeper the change, the less we are likely to notice it. Historian EH Carr put it this way –

facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what we catch will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean we choose to fish in and what tackle we chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish we want to catch. By and large, we will get the kind of facts we want

.We have become fixated in the last decade on indices – for example about “good governance” and, even more recently, “happiness”. But just think of the process by which statistics about such crimes as rape and “domestic assault” have developed. When I was a magistrate in a Scottish working class town the early 1970s, “wife beating” was accepted by most circles as a natural behaviour of hard-working and drinking men (particularly unemployed or on casual work). And the incidence of rape depends on social inclinations to report it – which are lower in traditional societies than in modern cities.

Travails, conversations and travels

A new nip in the air last Wednesday night and Thursday morning – and a strong breeze. Excellent weather for scything. And I was initiated into the real scythe sharpening – with a small, very tough iron anvil as the base on which the scythe blade is held as it is hammered by a small hammer. For the serious professional, working 14 hours a day (for 30 euros), this needs to be done at least 3 times – depending on how many molehills there are! For the first time, I had a family team to help the process - with great chat ("crack" for the Irish) afterwards.
Saturday I took the kids back to Bucharest via Campulung, the apple valley and Tyrgovishte – with a brief tour of the flat and the People’s Palace. Sunday was relaxed with a visit to The English Bookshop; the usual friendly reception (unsolicited cups of coffee) and, this time, two great books - the first volume of John Fowles' The Journals; and a 2006 paperback edition of Faber's superb 1992 "Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry" edited by Douglas Dunn. This is THE collection whcih not only does justice to the voices of that century - but contains a highly informative (and poetic) introduction.
And, while on the subject of Scottish writing, here's a nice discussion on the subject of contemporary Scottish writing - if a bit superficial and ahistorical

what changed in the naughts?

Faute de mieux, I have received an invitation to write a short article for the prestigious Romanian journal Revista 22 on "the world ten years after 09/11”. I will use the blog for some brainstorming in the next few days – and would very much appreciate some comments from my readers.
The attack on the Twin Towers certainly provided the opportunity for the security interests in leading States (adrift after the collapse of communism) to regroup and increase their budgets and power. "Counter-terrorism” became the slogan behind which the State increased various surveillance and control measures over its own citizens. Defence (aggression) budgets and actions boomed; powers of detention without legal redress were increased; a generation of young muslims radicalised; and cultural tensions increased.
But the 2011 attack was by no means the only significant event over the decade. Arguably, indeed, governments and media have used the threat of terrorism to distract us all from vastly greater threats to our security and social harmony which have developed as neo-liberalism has grown apace and threatened to destroy the democratic model which was so painfully constructed in the the 20th century.

medieval Brasov

One of my daughters is visiting me (for the first time) in my Carpathian mountain house at the moment; and this has taken me into the heart of medieval Brasov for the first time for some years – seeing it not only in its new splendour but through new eyes. I normally sweep round past the Central Station on the circuit road to one of the large consumer outlets (god forgive me) but this time I took them up past the Saxon houses on Strada Lunga to the elegant square and the huge Black Church (with its Ottoman rug collection) and back via an equally graceful old road. A later walk uncovered a terrific German bookshop at the Black Church where I was able to buy many excellent guides to the area – particularly to the fortified churches. When I first visited Brasov in 1991, it still boasted 2 German newspapers and I could hear German spoken in the streets. But Kohl’s financial blandishments to the Saxon population sadly emptied the villages around here – the vaccum being filled by the gypsies. The old houses are only slowly being rescued – a visit to a winery gave the chance to see the lovely courtyards and cellars which grace the Saxon houses.