Thanks to everyone who commented on the Finalité Revisited essay. So much substance in the discussion that I wanted to highlight some of it in a post, instead of just replying in comments.
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A Little More Finalité
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Category Archives: History
Finalité Revisited
Shortly after the big round of EU enlargement in 2004, I took a look at future prospects for enlargement. At the time, I called prospective members, “largely a collection of the poor, ill-governed and recently-at-war.” Most of them are much less recently at war, many of them are better governed, and almost all of them are less poor, yet for all but a few prospects for EU accession seem to me more distant than in 2004.
What has happened?
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Panning back to Egypt…
A couple of weeks ago, the big question had ceased to be “Will there be a revolution in Egypt?” and had become “Will it matter?” The revolutionaries had demonstrated that they could endure, could divide the Army from the government and the security state, and had eventually succeeded in chasing the president out of power. But would this mean lasting change? Wouldn’t it just imply the creation of a new ruling elite, or a permanently-temporary military junta? The grey lineup detailed here were in charge, issuing statements about going back to work. This piece from David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal sketches it out, and reveals far more than it means to.
It’s easy to sketch the scenario in which Egypt blows it. The army could maintain control behind a façade of democracy and protect elites who benefited from the growth produced by significant economic reforms that Mr. Mubarak blessed. Four things have to go right for Egypt to seize the moment.
First, the young protesters of Tahrir Square have to keep the pressure on the military. A lot depends on which way they go. If they’ve been soured by privatization that engorged the cronies, will they demand the security and subsidies of the state over the risks, competition and dynamism that comes with a vibrant private sector? In short, do they want government jobs? Or a shot at being hired—and maybe fired—by an entrepreneurial company?
Of course, the policies those elites benefited from are precisely the ones he goes on to advocate, and the ones that the IMF recommended and Mubarak implemented. Wessel alludes to this further down the piece but never quite manages to say that the Egyptians hated them so much they overthrew the state. Also, although he compares Egypt with Poland after communism, he doesn’t seem to be aware that a major factor in Poland’s revolutions (1981 and 1989) was that the state got huge international loans it couldn’t pay back.
Anyway, so that was one scenario – the military guarantees some constitutional change but keeps the political economy and the power-structure Mubarak left.
It doesn’t seem to be working. Mohammed Fadel has a good rundown of the Army’s (and the Muslim Brothers’, and the 2005-era middle class dissidents’) efforts to put pressure on strikers, their eventual failure, and some of the economic ideas circulating among the revolutionaries. Apparently, the military has eventually been induced to open talks with the real trade union movement as opposed to the yellow unions that were part of Mubarak’s system. You can read their negotiating position at guess who’s.
But perhaps the best news of all isn’t economic. Here’s some incredible reportage of an incredible and very significant event – the crowds take over the headquarters of Central Security in Alexandria, and start salvaging the secret files the spooks were trying to destroy.
I wouldn’t bet on the holy-of-holies in Cairo lasting much longer – Hossam el-Hamalawy has already been down to his local station with his Canon EOS 5D and his angry mob. Guess what, that’s full of files as well.
In 1989, something similar happened – when it looked like the post-Wall East German government might be stabilising, and that it felt confident enough to tell the public that it was going to retain the Stasi although under a new name, people invaded the organisation’s offices to secure the key assets of any secret police force, the files. It was the end, really; there could be no more hoping for some sort of patched-up afterlife for the basic structure of the DDR. This time there was much more violence, and the spook toys included a sinisterly large stash of Viagra – the Stasi did a fair amount of drug dealing as part of its efforts to raise hard currency, but nothing with those implications.
There probably weren’t many documents like this one in the files at the Normannenstraße either.
The upshot includes the resignation of Mubarak’s last prime minister. In an almost uncanny echo of East Germany, he went on TV not long before the crowds moved into the secret police stations, to defend the institution of Central Security. Just like Hans Modrow did, and with exactly the same effect. His exit was announced via the Egyptian Army’s facebook profile.
His replacement is profiled here – Essam Sharaf, significantly, is both a candidate endorsed by the revolutionaries and a participant in the revolution himself, as well as apparently enjoying a good reputation with the workers’ movement as far back as 2006.
épuration, crowdsourced
I’m not sure what either Ethan Zuckerman or Evgeny Morozov would make of this, but this is quite the revolutionary web crowdsourcing project. Piggipedia is an effort by Egyptian Flickr users to pool their photos from the revolution and identify the plain-clothes cops and private thugs responsible for the worst of the violence, with a view to prosecuting them or failing that, just ostracising the hell out of them. I presume this is also going to be a rare deployment outside China of the human flesh search engine. If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does.
The most useful article you’ll read on Egypt this week
Is here. How did we get to the position where the red flag and the desert eagle were suddenly back ahead of the star and crescent? How do the Muslim Brothers and other Islamists interact with the Left? Where did those people come from?
As a Revolutionary Socialist member who was active in the 1990s recalls: “We were a kind of leftist the Muslim Brothers hadn’t met before. They couldn’t quite figure us out at the beginning. Anyway, we were still too marginal for them to bother with. We were only a few individuals.†This began to change in 1999. On a few occasions in that year, as one socialist remembers, the Muslim Brotherhood students at Cairo University allowed the Revolutionary Socialist students to speak at rallies held on campus against the US airstrikes on Iraq. The socialist students took this unprecedented opportunity as a sign of the Muslim Brothers’ recognition that they were a force that had to be given a place on the political stage. It was a step in a long, slow process of building trust.
Of Gods and Men: non-premature evaluation
In my role as the AFOE occasional film critic, off to the Curzon Mayfair for Of Gods and Men/Des dieux et des hommes. After the DICKHEADS, we’re going to deal with some much more serious terrorism in this post.
Of Gods and Men is a classic peace movie, in the sense that there are classic war movies. In fact, it mirrors quite a lot of the structure and tropes you expect from a war movie – a neat trick. The film deals with the hostage-taking and eventual murder, by unidentified gunmen, of a group of French monks in the high Atlas mountains of Algeria in 1996, during the grim worst of the Algerian civil war. The monks, to begin with, are living at peace – in fact, as we learn from some of their conversations, their elected leader Brother Christian sees their mission (that word, already) as a project in deliberately waging peace, a continuation of the alternative-leftist dream of 1968. Every time the monks have a meeting, Christian takes his seat directly in front of an icon of 1980s internationalists, the world map redrawn to make the size of Africa and Latin America more obvious.
The monks tend their land, produce honey and wine, worship. Christian is writing a book. They practice social service – one of them, Luc, is a doctor, who holds a weekly surgery for the poor. They live in apparent harmony with the Algerian villagers across the valley in their structural-tile favela settlement.
Nobody wants to be involved with the war, but the war wants very much to be involved with them. A group of Croatian engineers working nearby are murdered by insurgents. Gradually, the violence infects everything else. They try to refuse it – Christian meets with the Algerian governor, who offers to post troops near the monastery, and he refuses as a matter of principle. As a result, the monks fall out among themselves, not so much about the troops but because he has acted without getting their approval first. The war draws progressively closer, and they debate endlessly whether to abandon the whole project and go back to France, to move temporarily to a place of safety, to go back on the governor’s offer, or to stick it out. One night, the insurgents appear and demand medical assistance. Christian persuades their leader to stay outside the monastery, and they accept drugs and dressings.
Things rapidly become more serious. It becomes obvious that one side, or another, wants them dead. The insurgent leader is killed in action with the army and Christian has to identify his body, thus becoming suspect to both the insurgents and the army. A succession of monks struggle with their fear and doubt, but Christian talks them around one by one. Eventually, gunmen kidnap all but two monks (who succeed in hiding) and march them off into the mountains. They ended up dead in reality; who killed them, and how, remains a mystery.
I liked the way this film showed people at work – the monks, the Algerians, like the village haji who they hire to bring his Polish tractor and plough their patch. We see him hit a sticky patch, carefully raise the hitch, reverse, and try again. The doomed Croats boom around the site with their Caterpillars and a sort of proud working-class confidence.
I also liked the role of time. The monks initially seem to be blessed with the gift of all the time in the world, but as the film progresses, the slow progress of time becomes a source of cranking suspense and maddening waiting.
That’s another war-movie trick, of course. Among other things, Brother Bruno makes a dangerous journey through the checkpoints and the debatable lands to bring in an urgent supply run, including cheese, medicines, and several hundred rounds of communion wafers. People write home illuminatingly. One of the monks demands of their leader “What are we doing here – trying to be heroes? Martyrs?”, and his leader talks him down reminding him of the importance of their mission and his obligations to his brothers (another telling word). The characters seek out their leader one by one to talk to him in confidence, and he pays out the big cheap words used on all such occasions. After they are captured, one after the other, the hostage-takers make them read out their name, age, and monastic affiliation. (Monks don’t have serial numbers.) In fact, it’s arguable that this is how the war seeps into the monastery – the monks get pressganged into a war movie.
As well as being a great war movie about peace, it’s a pretty good peace movie about war. The Algerian regional governor honestly doesn’t want the monks to get killed, but he also has political motives – it would be welcome if they were to simply leave, but he would prefer they stay, so he can install a detachment of troops in the village and establish the government’s authority there on the pretext of protecting them. He would like to make the monks part of his counter-insurgency plan. And if the insurgents were to butcher them, despite all he could do, that would make useful propaganda.
The insurgents would much rather have the monks in place – it’s always possible to slaughter them if a dose of revolutionary terror is required, and they are a source of medical assistance. Although the insurgent leader doesn’t give Brother Christian any assurances, he does let others believe that the monks are under his protection.
And the people, it turns out, are hoping that the presence of the monks will deter the insurgents from doing anything to them, for fear of committing an atrocity awful enough to wreck their reputation. They don’t want the insurgents and they want the government still less – they want, most of all, to survive and to avoid being governed. It is telling that the villagers and the monks are the only people in the movie who practice a sort of democracy – the Algerian military, of course, couldn’t care less, and the insurgents obey their leader. But this doesn’t mean they are passive. Part of the horror is that the relationship between the villagers and the monks subtly changes, from peace to something approaching a hostage situation. After all, the villagers are in a position to denounce them to the insurgents (or the army) and then carefully see nothing.
Obviously, this situation is intolerable to both the insurgents and the military. Neither the insurgent nor the counterinsurgent will put up with people who insist on escaping from their joint demand that they take sides. In a sense, the monks are wiped out by an unconscious conspiracy between two factions desperately competing to deliver their rival visions of government to people who want no part of either. Monks don’t have serial numbers, and all the killers of the Algerian war want to impose them.
Oddly enough, the Algerian governor, with his Ottoman title of Wali, is quite a sympathetic character. A curious feature of his role is that every time he appears on screen, he speaks the unvarnished truth as a sort of bureaucratic Greek chorus. Also, he always appears in a black suit, a uniform that marks him as a survival of civilian power. In his office, though, when he talks about the people and gestures out of the window, you can’t see any people.
Nine Years Later
Osama bin Laden is still at large. The best work of art about September 11, 2001 is still John M. Ford’s poem, “110 Stories.â€
the political thought of 1890 with the genetics of 1890, in 2010
There’s been a great deal of fuss about the Bundesbank director Thilo Sarrazin’s book, in which he argues that the “upper layers” of German society ought to be encouraged to breed for fear of Muslims, etc, etc. The SZ points out here that he confesses to just making up his numbers:
Es ging um die Frage, woher Sarrazins viel zitierte, im Brustton der Faktizität vorgetragene Behauptung eigentlich kommt, dass siebzig Prozent der türkischen und neunzig Prozent der arabischen Bevölkerung Berlins den Staat ablehnten und in großen Teilen weder integrationswillig noch integrationsfähig seien. Sarrazin gab zu, dass er keinerlei Statistiken dazu habe. Er gab zu, dass es solche Statistiken auch gar nicht gibt.
But I’m not sure if anyone has pointed out quite how strange Sarrazin’s thinking is.
Für ihn ist die Unterschicht sowieso schon lange abgeschrieben, der Genpool degeneriert. Denn bereits seit dem 19. Jahrhundert sei die deutsche Gesellschaft immer durchlässiger geworden, “auffallende Hochbegabungen” hätten damals in Preußen bereits die Möglichkeit bekommen, das Gymnasium zu besuchen. “Das bedeutet aber, dass die Entleerung der unteren Schichten von intellektuellem Potential bei uns weiter fortgeschritten ist als in Gesellschaften, deren Durchlässigkeit sich erst später entwickelte.”
He thinks, or at least claims to think, that because the German (and specifically Prussian) education system has given the lower classes the opportunity to go on to higher education since the 19th century, Germany has a problem – the masses have been emptied of “intellectual potential” too early.
What strikes me as telling here is that it’s not just that Sarrazin’s political thought is trapped in the Wilhelmine era – his understanding of genetics is, too. This post of Razib Khan’s on the great early-20th century debate between the biologists who rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s work, and the biometricians, who had been trying to link data gathered on the range of human traits with the Darwinian inheritance, explains why.
The biometricians were essentially trying to operationalise Darwinism with early statistical methods. This gave them a problem; a lot, but not all, of the variation in biological traits at least seemed to be nice and smooth, movement along a well-behaved curve. With no other model of inheritance available, they assumed that genetics was a simple process of blending – children were an average of their parents. This had wide-ranging consequences; it implied that regression to the mean would apply to people. We would all eventually be average. From there, it wasn’t hard to predict that we would all, eventually, be mediocre and that racial degeneration was inevitable.
This is one of the great intellectual accident black spots – a nauseous gap in the barrier by the roadside. Experimental work, like Mendel’s, showed that something else was happening. One of the problems was that statistics itself needed to advance to resolve the debate. There is a very good reason why Francis Galton was both an important early statistician and a eugenist, and why it would eventually be a statistician, R. A. Fisher, who demonstrated that a Mendelian process was observable in the biometric data.
But by that time, the original mistake had set off a great avalanche of analogies. Social Darwinism and everything that followed from it was out there. It’s a horrific thought that its consequences have a lot to do with statistical methods, and it’s telling that Fisher published in 1918. The important point about Mendelian genetics is that it’s discontinuous – it doesn’t blend down to the average. Variation is conserved; not only will the German working class continue to produce bright kids, the elite will occasionally toss out a Sarrazin.
Hidden away in a sunlit mountain valley …
The Wall Street Journal carries a review by Trevor Butterworth of The Enlightened Economy by Joel Mokyr, former editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. This is a book which aims to explain why the industrial revolution happened in Britain before it happened anywhere else. Thoughts on the book itself will follow, perhaps. Right now, I’m more worried about the review:
The reason for Britain’s exceptionalism, Mr. Mokyr says, lies in the increasing hostility to rent-seeking—the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth—among the country’s most important intellectuals in the second half of the 18th century. Indeed, a host of liberal ideas, in the classic sense, took hold: the rejection of mercantilism’s closed markets, the weakening of guilds and the expansion of internal free trade, and robust physical and intellectual property rights all put Britain far ahead of France, where violent revolution was needed to disrupt the privileges of the old regime.
This is the first time I’ve seen ‘rent-seeking’ defined as ‘the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth’. It’s a bad definition, since we naturally tend to think of ‘political power’ as something wielded by government; this particular definition, then, will lead us to think of ‘rent-seeking’ as primarily an activity of government. Which it ain’t. Things like ‘robust physical and intellectual property rights’ may privilege any suitably placed individual or private company: Sky TV, for example. But let’s take the main point as given: at one time, Britain was comparatively liberal, France was comparatively regressive. And France did indeed experience revolution. Of course, you’d think that revolution might allow France a bit of a catch-up opportunity. Apparently not:
Such political upheaval in Europe, notes Mr. Mokyr, disrupted trade, fostered uncertainty, and may well have created all kinds of knock-on social disincentives for technological and scientific innovation and collaboration with business. Much as we might deplore too many of our brightest students going into law rather than chemistry or engineering, it is not unreasonable to think that many of France’s brightest thinkers were diverted by brute events into political rather than scientific activism (or chastened by poor Lavoisier’s beheading during the Revolution).
Admit it, people, the real thesis here is: heads the Anglos win, tails the Euro-weenies lose. I note also that ‘France’ and ‘Europe’ are treated as synonyms, but hey.
I suppose it’s mostly fairly difficult to untangle the prejudices of the reviewer from the subject, where the subject itself is a representation in writing of someone’s thoughts, but I suspect this particular review gets close to the limiting case: i.e. the case where everything you see is the prejudice of the reviewer. Stock tropes only; nothing substantial or falsifiable to be given away.
Incidentally, I think there’s a way to understand the Murdoch publications paywall: it’s journalism going Galt. They’ll come out as they went in; how else could it be? I think it’s a shame Rand had the first-handers hide themselves away in the Rockies, though; I’m imagining a South American tepui, Conan Doyle Lost World style.
Update: I’ve realised that there is a reading of ‘the use of political power …’ which brings it more into line with how rent-seeking is usually understood. This is the reading in which political power (of government) is held ready for someone outside government to make use of: government as a utility, if you like. Even on this reading, I still think it’s a poor definition. It’s understood that it costs a petitioner something to engage with government – hence there’s an efficiency argument to be made in connection with rent-seeking – but terms like ‘use’ and ‘manipulate’ suggest that policy can be flipped on and off like a light. So, how would I define ‘rent-seeking’, you might ask. Perhaps like this: rent-seeking is the attempt to influence public policy in search of policy privilege.
And a welcome to readers from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also.
You can’t expect much from a journalist at that level
Alex Perry, an Africa correspondent Africa bureau chief for Time magazine, writes on China’s involvement in Africa. In the process, he describes the DRC as a “sucking vortex”, citing the corrupt rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. Julie Hollar at FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) takes Perry to task for failing to mention US / Belgian involvement in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba (and their subsequent support of Mobutu). Perry then makes the terrible mistake of responding to Hollar in comments while not in full control of his own sense of self-importance. Self-harming behaviour (not to mention Time-harming behaviour) then follows.
Jonathan Schwarz (Tiny Revolution) summarises the Perry / Hollar spat and takes the opportunity to quote an apposite passage from Devlin’s book about his time as CIA station chief in the Congo. It’s good, so I’ll quote it myself here:
We moved onto Ambassador Houghton’s office where we were joined by Ambassador Burden for more detailed talks concerning the Congo and its problems…During our discussions, Tim brought up a delicate matter: “Time magazine plans to do a cover story on Lumumba with his picture on the front of the magazine.” He continued, “Celebrity coverage at home will make him even more difficult to deal with. He’s a first-class headache as it is.”
“Then why don’t you get the story killed?” Burden asked. “Or at least modified?”
“I tried to persuade the Time man in Leopoldville until I was blue in the face,” Tim replied. “But he said there was nothing he could do about it because the story had already been sent to New York.”
“You can’t expect much from a journalist at that level,” Burden said pulling out his address book and flipping through the pages. He picked up the phone and put a call through to the personal assistant of Henry Luce, Time’s owner.
So: Time. Apparently at the beginning it was going to be called Facts. May I just say at this point that if news reporting on the internet as we currently know it should happen to get wound up in favour of dedicated news magazine ‘apps’ running on tightly controlled platforms, then – since you can’t link from the web to the content of a proprietary app – no one will be linking to the bullshit with an explanation of why the bullshit is bullshit. It’s pretty obvious that Steve Jobs is nostalgic for the corporate futurism of the 1960s – only now he gets to implement it, woo-hoo – and it just doesn’t look as though end user selectivity features large in any part of the Jobs vision. You’ll get what you’re given and call it knowledge.
Pretty much the only part of Africa I’ve spent any time in at all is Madagascar. I’ve visited twice. They’ve just celebrated fifty years of independence from France. Andy Rajoelina has failed to gain international recognition since he took over (with the support of the army): for what it’s worth, celebrations are reported to be muted as a consequence. I think you have to give the Malagasy population credit for two things. First, they know a stitch up when they see one. Pre-Rajoelina, a South Korean chaebol had some deal under negotiation where (in broad terms) they’d produce corn and bio-fuel on some immense percentage of Madagascar’s arable land (half of it?) and then get to keep all the corn and all the fuel. In return, the Malagasy at large would get, not rent exactly, but at least the promise of being allowed to work as agricultural labourers for the South Koreans. News of this ‘deal’ prompted the ouster of Ravalomanana. You wonder if even Philip K. Dick could have foreseen it. As it happens, Alex Perry sees good things in the ‘deal-making approach’ for Africa:
For all the heat, IMF officials admit that the Chinese model for African development has some advantages. First, it’s quick. Loan talks with multilateral agencies take years. The China-Angola discussions took weeks. “With the West, there are studies, analyses and bureaucracy,” says the Western official. “The Chinese just ask what the government wants, and they don’t question or comment or judge. They just do it.”
My understanding is that the South Koreans took a similar approach: they just asked the then president what he wanted. Lickety-split …
The other thing about the Malagasy is this. When they have a coup, they generally do it with the minimum of violence and fuss. Madagascar is not a wealthy country but it’s smart enough not to waste too much time and effort on civil war when what’s wanted is a change in the administration.