Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

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History under circumstances not of our choosing

Published by peter on 2010-07-02 in Anthropology, History, Military strategy and Politics. Closed

British MP Rory Stewart writing this week about western military policy towards Afghanistan:

We can do other things for Afghanistan but the West – in particular its armies, development agencies and diplomats – are not as powerful, knowledgeable or popular as we pretend. Our officials cannot hope to predict and control the intricate allegiances and loyalties of Afghan communities or the Afghan approach to government. But to acknowledge these limits and their implications would require not so much an anthropology of Afghanistan, but an anthropology of ourselves.
The cures for our predicament do not lie in increasingly detailed adjustments to our current strategy. The solution is to remind ourselves that politics cannot be reduced to a general scientific theory, that we must recognize the will of other peoples and acknowledge our own limits. Most importantly, we must remind our leaders that they always have a choice.
That is not how it feels. European countries feel trapped by their relationship with NATO and the United States. Holbrooke and Obama feel trapped by the position of American generals. And everyone – politicians, generals, diplomats and journalist – feels trapped by our grand theories and beset by the guilt of having already lost over a thousand NATO lives, spent a hundred billion dollars and made a number of promises to Afghans and the West which we are unlikely to be able to keep.
So powerful are these cultural assumptions, these historical and economic forces and these psychological tendencies, that even if every world leader privately concluded the operation was unlikely to succeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the US or its allies halting the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the years to come.  Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa may have been in a similar position during the Third Crusade.  Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson certainly was in 1963. Europe is simply in Afghanistan because America is there. America is there just because it is. And all our policy debates are scholastic dialectics to justify this singular but not entirely comprehensible fact.

Gingery Australian politics

Published by peter on 2010-06-25 in Culture, History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Australia has a new Prime Minister, the very competent Julia Gillard.  She is the first Australian PM since 1923 not to have been born in Australia.  Gillard was born in Wales, and is Australia’s second ethnically-Welsh PM.  The first, Billy Hughes, was born in London, but grew up in Wales speaking Welsh as his mother tongue (as did his  contemporary, David Lloyd-George). No other country, apart from Britain and Australia, has had a Welsh prime minister, and Australia has now had two.   Clearly being Welsh is no bar to political success in Australia.  A greater obstacle might be hair-colour:  I believe Ms Gillard is Australia’s first red-headed prime minister.
Australia has had one other PM born in England (Joseph Cook), two born in Scotland (George Reid, Andrew Fisher) and one born in Chile (Chris Watson, although he thought he had been born in New Zealand).  It should be noted that, despite Australia’s historical links with Britain, the Australian High Court has ruled that Britain is a foreign power under the Australian Constitution, which prohibits members of parliament being citizens of foreign powers.
Australia’s very first PM, Edmund Barton, was born in Australia, indeed in the inner-city suburb of Glebe,  Sydney.  A person living in Glebe would now find themselves represented by women at every level of government:

Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney:  Clover Moore
Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for the Electorate of Balmain:  Verity Firth
Deputy Premier of NSW: Carmel Tebbutt
Premier of NSW: Kristina Keneally
Governor of NSW:  Marie Bashir
Member of the Commonwealth House of Representatives for the Federal Division of Sydney: Tanya Plibersek
Prime Minister:  Julia Gillard
Governor-General of Australia:  Quentin Bryce
Queen of Australia and Head of State:  Queen Elizabeth II.

And in this list, the Premier of NSW, Kristina Keneally was born in the USA, while Marie Bashir is of Lebanese descent and Tanya Plibersek of Slovenian. Only in America! as Yogi Berra would say.

Hey, Economics! Meet Politics!

Published by peter on 2010-06-18 in Africa, Economics and Politics. Closed

Economists are fond of simplistic generalizations, which they refer to as “laws” (in imitation of Physics, itself showing its links to Theology), or as stylized facts.   Most such are, at best, default conclusions, since there are always exceptions.  Here are several generalizations, linked in a chain of inferences:

  • A successful single European currency requires a single European monetary policy.
  • A successful single European monetary policy requires a single European fiscal policy.
  • A successful single European fiscal policy requires fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another.
  • Fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another can only be undertaken over the long term by European institutions having democratic legitimacy.
  • To achieve democratic legitimacy for European institutions, the nations of Europe will require full political union.

This is not a new argument.  I first heard it put by Zambian economist Chiselebwe Ng’andwe in a paper read to a meeting of the African Association of Political Science in Salisbury (later Harare), Zimbabwe, in May 1981, talking about regional economic unions in Africa.   Dr Ng’andwe was subsequently a Board Member of the Zambian Central Bank and is currently Chairman of the state-owned National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia. In today’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins refers back to a book about European integration by Larry Seidentop, published in 2000, which apparently makes a similar case about Europe.  Here is Ng’andwe in 1981:

Central banks play a pivotal role in the harmonization of fiscal, monetary and general economic policies.  Hence, separate central banks make it difficult to harmonize even those policy areas where joint arrangements exist such as a common tariff.
The Central bank is such an important institution for economic policy control that a joint central bank [in an economic union of states] needs total political harmony to function.  The necessary political harmony is not possible without political union.  Hence, a joint central bank and its potential benefits are simply not possible in a grouping of political[ly] independent states.  If one state wants some specific monetary policy to deal with an internal problem, a joint central bank will [op]pose some problems [policies?] unless the desired action is completely consistent with the economic and (or) political mood of the other countries.  The loss of some territorial capacity for fiscal and monetary manoeuvre entailed by a joint central bank may involve a greater loss in territorial economic growth than the territorial gain from joint economic actions. This possibility of net economic loss does not augur well for a joint central bank.  But even more important to the territorial political leaders is the loss of control over the key instruments of economic policy.  This loss can create frustrations in the internal economic and political policies of individual countries.
. . .
Another signifance of joint policy instruments lie in the capacity of these instruments to reduce imbalances in the distribution of economic benefits.   .  .  .  Even in the U.S.A. where there is practically no government industrial and commercial activities, the availability of common fiscal and monetary policies enable[s] the central government to redistribute income throughout the federal states.
This redistribution may not be enough to remove inequalities completely, but it does remove the rough edges from any regional economic imbalances.”  (pp. 13-14)

Why is this argument not, then, widely understood?  Is it that some ideas are too comprehensible – in other words, apparently lacking in complexity or subtlety – to be understood by intelligent people? Or is that the political forces which benefit from the non-democratic European status quo are so strong as to prevent the adoption of democratic structures, and to muzzle the arguments for them?  As I recall, Ng’andwe’s talk was received very coldly by his audience, most of whom were keen on economic unions (between African countries), while maintaining national sovereignty in all other respects.
POSTSCRIPT (2014-12-07):  Another aspect of the failure of economic union without political union is revealed in George Packer’s profile of Angela Merkel, a bland woman seemingly arisen without trace:  her insistence on austerity policies for southern Eurozone countries in crisis is a play to her own, intensely financially conservative, voters.  Without an over-arching federal political structure no politician in Europe has an electoral incentive to consider the good governance of the global whole, rather than just their own, local or national part.  When historical accounts are eventually drawn up for responsibility for prolongation of the Great Global Recession of 2008-?, the small-minded, economically illiterate Mrs Merkel will be one of those most culpable.
 
References:

Chiselebwe Ng’andwe[1981]:  Problems of Economic Integration in Africa.  Paper presented to the Fourth Bi-Annual Meeting of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS 1981).  Salisbury, Zimbabwe:  23-27 May 1981.
George Parker [2014]: The quiet German.  The New Yorker, 1 December 2014.
Larry Seidentop [2000]:  Democracy in Europe.  London, UK: Penguin.

Is there a writer-presenter in the House?

Published by peter on 2010-05-23 in Books, History and Politics. Closed

Rory Stewart, new British MP for Penrith and the Border, is not the only accomplished writer to enter the House of Commons in the May 2010 elections.   Joining him is fellow Conservative, Zac Goldsmith, an environmentalist journalist and now MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston, and, for Labour, historian Tristam Hunt, now MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central.  As surely befits an MP representing The Potteries, Hunt is an historian of Britain’s great industrialisation of the nineteenth century and wrote a superb life of Friedrich Engels.
Given their diverse backgrounds, it would be fascinating to hear Stewart and Hunt debate the legacies of empire on modern Britain, and how their respective constituencies – at opposite extremes of the rural-city divide – can both prosper.  Personally, I believe that commercial development of the environmental and energy sector is the only way that manufacturing in the old-world will survive this century, and this is also a sector with the potential to better connect city and country (eg, through the deployment of small-scale power-generating plants).    A web-dialog or a joint TV series, anyone?
References:
Tristam Hunt[2009]: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. (London, UK;  Allen Lane).  I reviewed this book briefly here.
Previous posts on books and articles by Rory Stewart here, here and here.

Vale: Don Day

Published by peter on 2010-05-22 in Decision theory, Heroes, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

This post is to mark the passing on of Don Day (1924-2010), former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the so-called “Bearpit”, roughest of Australia’s 15 parliamentary assemblies) and former NSW Labor Minister.   I knew Don when he was my local MLA in the 1970s and 1980s, when he won a seat in what was normally ultra-safe Country Party (now National Party) country – first, the electorate of Casino, and then, Clarence.  Indeed, he was for a time the only Labor MLA in the 450 miles of the state north of Newcastle.  His win was repeated several times, and his seat was crucial to Neville Wran’s surprise 1-seat majority in May 1976, returning Labor to power in NSW after 11 years in opposition, and after a searing loss in the Federal elections of December 1975.

In his role as Minister for Primary Industries and Decentralisation, Don was instrumental in saving rural industries throughout NSW.   Far North Coast dairy farmers were finally allowed to sell milk to Sydney households, for example, breaking the quota system, a protectionist economic racket which favoured only a minority of dairy farmers and which was typical of the crony-capitalist policies of the Country Party.  Similarly, his actions saved the NSW sugar industry from closure.   NSW Labor’s rural policies were (and still are) better for the majority of people in the bush than those of the bush’s self-proclaimed champions.

Like many Labor representatives of his generation, Don Day had fought during WW II, serving in the RAAF.  After the war, he established a small business in Maclean.   He was one of the most effective meeting chairmen I have encountered:  He would listen carefully and politely to what people were saying, summarize their concerns fairly and dispassionately (even when he was passionate himself on the issues being discussed), and was able to identify quickly the nub of an issue or a way forward in a complex situation.  He could usually separate his assessment of an argument from his assessment of the person making it, which helped him be dispassionate.  Although The Grafton Daily Examiner has an obit here, I doubt he will be remembered much elsewhere on the web, hence this post.

Update (2010-06-12): SMH obit is here.

Old Etonians

Published by peter on 2010-05-10 in History, Military strategy, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Congratulations to Rory Stewart, newly-elected Conservative MP for England’s largest electorate, Penrith and the Border.

I heard Stewart speak in December 2009, shortly after his pre-selection, at a bookshop in Penrith.  At the time, he was walking across his prospective constituency as a way to learn about it and to meet people.  He was most impressive – intelligent, urbane, witty, sincere, respectful, and also very laid-back.  He read from his book on Iraq, and talked about Afghanistan and Iraq, even quoting the poetry of TS Eliot.  The audience then had a good debate with him and with each other about do-gooding foreign wars and about the UK-USA relationship.  From their comments, I would say about half the audience were probably Labour voters.

Stewart, as good a facilitator as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, got us all to say who we were and what were our concerns.     He did not  interrupt anyone, listened attentively and respectfully (even when he disagreed), and remembered everyone’s name and profession; I’m sure he charmed some of the audience there and then into voting for him.    When someone said they’d like to vote for him personally, but could not face voting Conservative (calling it “the Work-House Party”), he laughed at the description and said this was a decision they’d have to make for themself.  He didn’t even present a case for voting for him personally while ignoring the party label, as most politicians I have known would have done at that point.    In fact, he proceeded to give an honest assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses as a candidate – if he was selling himself, this was an extremely soft-sell.

The whole event struck me as remarkable:  Here was a modern-day soldier, colonial administrator, and educator of America’s nomenklatura campaigning in rural Cumbria and doing so very explicitly on his Iraq and Afghan experience.  And, more surprisingly, people seemed to respond with great passion to his message, with its key theme being that the West needs to understand and accept the limits to its own power to change other societies.  It says something about the effect these two wars have had on people in Britain that such a message would have even been listened to seriously in a local campaign, let alone that it would resonate with people.

Some British commentators have compared Stewart to Winston Churchill, who also had had colonial military adventures and had written some damn fine and exciting prose before entering Parliament.   I think that other writer and warrior Teddy Roosevelt is a better comparison, as TR appears (from this distance) to have been more respectful of human diversity and difference than was young Winnie.    One does not have to be a Conservative to be pleased that a person of Rory Stewart’s intelligence, sophistication, integrity, courage and wisdom should now be in the Mother of Parliaments.

NOTES:
Another account of the same meeting here.   My memory is that the dog was not small, and the photographs confirm my memory.

Here is a profile from National Geographic (undated, but before Stewart’s appointment as a Harvard professor).

And here is Ian Parker’s profile in The New Yorker (2010-11-15).

Through his American mother, Winston Churchill knew TR, and once stayed with the Roosevelts in Albany when TR was Governor of New York.

Animal Farm: The Limerick

Published by peter on 2009-12-30 in Poetry and Politics. 0 Comments

The superb winning entry of a competition run by New Statesman magazine (2009-12-14) to summarize a work of literature with a limerick, due to performance poet and photographer Anneliese Emmans Dean:

From the farm they banished the people.
“Hurrah!” cried the beasts. “We’re all equal!”
But superior plotters,
With trotters, the rotters,
Took over. The End. (There’s no sequel.)

Political activists of renown

Published by peter on 2009-12-20 in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics. Closed

Recently, I have listed the teachers and writers who have influenced me, along with the managers whom I admire.  I now list the politicians and political activists whom I admire.  Some of these led conventional political careers, others were community organizers or single-issue advocates, and yet others were spies, or were accused of being such.

Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Solomon Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Michael Schneider, Bella Subbotovskaya, Paul Keating, Vadim Delone, Jes Albert Möller, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (5) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests.  Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.

Heroes: the underground railroad in Rhodesia

Published by peter on 2009-12-15 in Africa, Heroes, History and Politics. Closed

Talking about Zimbabwean history reminded me that there are some unsung heroes of Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule whom I wish to salute. These are the people who, rejecting the racist policies of the Rhodesian Front government, organized an illegal underground railroad to secretly transport black and white resisters across the border, mostly to Botswana and Zambia. The whites transported were usually resisting military conscription to fight in a war they disagreed with, a war in support of a cause they believed immoral.

I knew a couple of these railwaymen: AP (“Knotty”) Knottenbelt, who had been headmaster of Fletcher High School, a state boarding school for black boys, from where he resigned in 1969 rather than raise a Rhodesian flag; he is said to have tied the flag to the back of his car and driven it through the dust of the schoolyard in front of the assembled students before hoisting it. He later taught at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Mugabe Government appointed him to the board of the Posts and Telecommunications Corporation after Independence. Another railwayman was his bridge partner, Nick Holman (1919-2002), father of the (now former) Financial Times Africa Editor, Michael Holman. These men and their collaborators deserve praise and admiration for their great personal courage in support of a non-racial society.

One of those transported by this railroad was the late Christopher Lewis, son, grandson, and great-grandson of Rhodes Scholars.  His father, Charles Patrick Jameson (“Pat”) Lewis (d. 1975) was a lawyer in partnership with Hardwicke Holderness MP (1915-2007), and Chairman from 1961-1969 of the Constitutional Council established under the 1961 Rhodesian constitution; Christopher Lewis’s paternal great-grandfather Vernon Lewis CMG (d. 1950), was a Rhodes Scholar later appointed in 1950 Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia (being succeeded on his death the same year by Sir Robert Tredgold); Vernon Lewis was married to Ethel Amy Jameson, daughter of Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), Prime Minister of the Cape Colony between 1904-1908, who had led a failed attack against the Transvaal in 1895-1896 (later called the Jameson Raid). Another son of Vernon Lewis, John Vernon Radcliffe Lewis (1917-?), was also a Rhodesian and Zimbabwean judge.

Christopher Lewis’s maternal grandfather Leonard Ray Morgan (1894-1967), also a Rhodes Scholar, was a lifelong friend of Robert Graves whom he met at Oxford, and was Permanent Secretary for Education in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; and Christopher’s uncle by marriage was the chiShona linguist, George Fortune (1915-2012). Ian Hancock’s interesting history of liberal white opposition to the racist policies of the Rhodesia Front is dedicated to the memory of Pat Lewis. Christopher’s sister Annette was married to lawyer Anthony Eastwood (1940-2015), whose first wife Ruth Fischer (later Ruth Fischer-Rice) (b. 1939) was the daughter of Bram Fischer (1908-1975), lead defence counsel at the Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela and others. Bram Fischer was the son of a Judge-President of the Orange Free State and grandson of the only Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony, Abraham Fischer (Prime Minister 1907-1910); his wife Molly was a niece of Jan Smuts.

Well before the fall of communism, Anthony Eastwood once told me of visiting the USSR as an honoured guest and asking, as a lawyer, if he could meet a fellow lawyer. The next day he was ushered into a meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the USSR.

A wonderfully well-written but very sad memoir by Hayden Eastwood, son of Anthony and Annette Eastwood, of his upbringing was published in 2018.

References:

Hayden Eastwood [2018]: Like Sodium in Water: A Memoir of Home and Heartache. Cape Town, RSA: Jonathan Ball.

Ian Hancock [1984]: White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia 1953-1980. New York, USA: St Martin’s Press.

Lancaster bombing

Published by peter on 2009-12-14 in Africa, History and Politics. Closed

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony. 

Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company* (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status.  From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income, and property-ownership.   These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here.  Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.

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