Time and Loyalty History and Nationalism

Partly inspired by this post by Vilno I am writing about different aspects of nationalism-now here I seek to look a bit at the role history plays in nationalism. Observe the Low Countries from space-and how lacking it is is in natural borders. It is history not Geography that has created the nations and states that exist within it.

Partly this can be explored using the example Vilno gives Belgium. For a start why should the overwhelmingly Catholic southern Netherlands not have joined in the 1830revolt that created modern Belgium? Vilno I think rightly identifies history as the major reason. They'd been subjects of the Dutch state for centuries- and thus identified with it. -while a mere fiteen years had been the case for what's now Belgium.

I think there are other reasons Wallonia at least was experiencing enormous economic growth for example which would have aided self confidence (the legacy of Belgium's early industrialisation can be seen in a map of European railways-they're cantered on Belgium|. Over centuries loyalty had been given to a state in whose wars Dutch Catholics had fought. Meanwhile a modus operadi to their second class status had been set up(note the king of the Netherlands abdicated in part because marrying a Catholic was so unpopular!) - Dutch Catholics may have wished to change the status quo but they had adjusted to it. The same was not true of Belgium Catholics-indeed the Habsburgs had been much more intolerant of Protestants than the Dutch state was of Catholics. Thus it was a shock to become second class citizens-and they battled it fiercely.

Lastly I suspect history mattered another way- the Spanish Netherlands/Austrian Netherlands/south Netherlands/ Belgium had been the result of a massive Dutch gain in 1815- the south of the Netherlands proper was part of the Dutch patrimony-the core of the state the heartland . The Southern Netherlands by contrast was territory that had been acquired but was not central to part of the nation. It's notable that in public perception the former can become the latter (and the latter the former) one reason why Algeria was so divisive o long for France and then abandoned by 90%-even very rightwing and nationalist Frenchman no longer regarded it as of the heartland. In a sense it’s a kind of mental map of the land-which effects how hard people will fight for it. Mahinda Rajapaka’s mental map of Sri Lanka clearly includes the whole island- and for that he is willing to use the military to make this a living reality. If he and his electorate did not the reality on the ground would not exist.

Simple length of time a border has existed then is enormously powerful effect on national identify- because nationalism is to a certain degree the story people tell themselves about whose side they are on. However odd a border may appear it can work given enough time - German Belgium’s seem as far as I can tell quite happy with being Belgium-even though it is pure historic accident they are on the side of the border they are and they used to be violently opposed . Similarly a rebellion against grievances like the American (and if successful the Confederate one) can by providing a legacy of blood and enmity create a new nation.

There is also another way history can influence such decisions and that is much more subtle by the changes in what cleavages matter. Vilno emphasise the importance of the rise of literacy. I think that's part of the story but I would put it differently what matters is what matters for the operation of the state. So as the state rose in its impact what language it operated in mattered more and more (obviously the rise of literacy further helped expand this). Once you have government schools or government jobs-then what language they are in matters a great deal indeed it strikes me one explanation for the rise of Flemish nationalism post war is that the size of the Belgium welfare state. By contrast under the Austrians the language of the rulers (German) was barely used below the ruling council of the whole of Belgium (I'm not sure even they used German rather than Latin) - a set of civic and ecclesiastical bodies used a wide variety of languages as they saw fit the "German" nature of the state did not matter.

Again this is not a matter unique to Belgium. For example the Czechoslovakian government post World War 1 fired around half of its German civil servants because they failed an exam in Czech! If any one policy decision explains why the Nazis in Czechoslovakia were as popular among the German community as to be the biggest party not just among them but in the entire country that would be it.
Similarly where a state (however secular) continued to use religion as a marker for treatment then it could still stay as the ultimate marker. An example of this is the population transfers between Greece and Turkey after the Greco-Turkish war. The language of the treaty arranging the repatriations uses the "Christian religion " and the "Muslim religion" as markers-and indeed thousands of Greek speaking Muslims entered Turkey and thousands of Turkish speaking Christians Greece. Thus even though the Turkish regime was militantly secular religion remained a powerful marker of the Turkish state- unless you are broadly "Muslim" (under a broad definition that includes Muslim atheists and Alawites) then it is very difficult to be Turkish however secular you or your government are.

Finally another historical issue that matters is confidence and feelings of strength. Flanders was the poor backwater of Belgium in the 19th and early 20th century-by the post war era they're superior growth led to a huge surge in Flemish confidence that in turn helped precipitate the surge in nationalism.

God and Soil Nationalism- Religion

This post by Vilno inspires me to briefly exmaine the protean nature of national identity. I don't wish to comment on his post but rather to use it to make some points about national identify.


One is the importance of religion as Vilno rightly points out the rebellion that crated modern Belgium was on religious lines-religious not ethnic. The fact that Flemish is much closer to Dutch than French as a language was simply not nearly so important. It’s important to realize this is not some unique exception. Ireland can perhaps best be understood as the part of the British Isles that failed to become fundamentally Protestant- it was Catholic inhabitants of Ireland not Gaelic ones who became Irishmen- there would never have been enough support for independence if it the divided had been linguistic. . More secular is German nationalism -not usually thought of as a confessional based nationalism-and rightly so. On the other hand the modern southern boundaries of Germany were essentially deliberately created by Bismarck to make a clear Protestant majority in the new "Reich". Even more remarkably in one referendum on the Germany borders after World War one Protestant Polish speakers voted by over 90% to be in the new Germany rather than the new Poland -so even in Germany nationalism had a religious component.

Or rather it might be truer to say that that was the case for Polish nationalism- Polish nationalism had been an elite obsession throughout the nineteenth century (for example this books shows the famous 1848 rebellion led to massacres of nationalist rebels without encouragement from the has burg authority-indeed to their slight horror). This owed a great deal to the indifference even hostility of the church- the leading Polish prelate in "German Poland" (Poland at that time being divided) in the 1870's didn’t' even speak Polish properly! Bismarck’s vicious Kulturkampf ironically partly out of paranoia of Polish nationalism predicated the end of this state of affairs as the cleary and laity identified Polish nationalis with the struggle for their faith- by the early 20th century Polish nationalism was a mighty popular force. To this day Polish Catholicism and Polish natoinalism are almost inextricably linked.

Religion can often be mixed up with issues of national identity today elsehwere as well. This is not just rue in pious countreis. The former Yugoslvaia was exceptioaly secular among it's population-but the division between Serb, Croat and Bosnick are essentially religous in nature-even if this difference is one of what church or mosque you don't go to. This can be true even in Finland often identified (probably wrongly but it can't far from it) as the most secular country on earth. Nonetheless One candidate for the Presidency of Finland was however repeatedly interrogated in 2006 on how a Catholic could be president of Finland!

Indeed more generally my understanding is that religion is exceeded only by language as a cleavage that determines national identify.

But cleavages are not the only thing that determines national identity. As Vilno rightly points out that so does history-and that raises another important aspect -history-to which I will return at a subsequent point

The picture shows the flag of Finland- adopted after World War 1-which as you can see is a religious symbol.

Abraham Kuyper Neglected Titan

In these posts and particularly this one I have sought to show just how crucial Abraham Kuyper one time Prime Minister of the Netherlands, founder of the Anti-Revolutionary Party was to the development of Dutch Politics in the early 20th century. Among other things he founded it's first mass political party, pioneered popular politics founded the religious coalition that dominated Dutch politics for decades, split traditionalist Protestants, converted many of them to a more plural model of politics and massively weakened aristocrats within their ranks, introduced the modern Dutch school system and coalesced the entire system of "pillarisation” that dominated the Netherlands for many decades and still matters today. Indeed even the current Prime Minister of the Netherlands has talked about him very favourably as his political inspiration and stated he is a "Kuyperian heart and soul" - a rare feat for a political eighty years dead- I imagine for example Barack Obamaa and George Bush would be delilighted to get such an epitah from any head of government in a century.

It should be noted this only covers part of Kyper’s importance- he was hugely important outside domestic politics (to which he gave many other contributions I lack space to list- and many others I’m sure I’m ignorant of). For example in Foreign Policy he played a significant role strengthening the natural Dutch tendency to side with the Boers in the Boer War and lean (as a neutral) to Germany in World War 1. Theologically he was hugely important- his failed attempt to purge liberals who would not subscribe wholeheartedly to the Reformed confessions led him to lead a significant breakaway form the Dutch Reformed church and he latter organised a merger with latter sececessions to form the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands- a third force in the Dutch theological world. In a (very narrow and in the light of subsequent history slightly ironic) sense this may have been the first significant "fundamentalist" secession denomination. He led the first major secession break in protest at the modernism of the late 19th century on the grounds it was incompatible with the Reformed Faith and was supreme among clergymen in the creation of a new denomination formed of groups that papered over their huge differnces out of a common hostility to protestant liberalism

Kuyper was also a huge influence on Princeton Theological Seminary which ended up being crucial to the first significant American Fundamentalist (so defined) denomination the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. To this day he is a big influence on some of the more intellectual sections of American Evangelicalism including (but not confined to)the "religious right". At the same some of his views such as Presumptive regeneration and his rejection of a sharp notion of "infelicity" of scripture laid the foundations for some more liberal types of Christianity!

Nor did this exhaust Kuyper's titanic contributions. He was also one of the foremost writers of his age- even being on a committee concerning the Dutch language! He founded (as part of his religious work essentially ) the Free University of Amsterdam as an alternative to secularising universities - to this day it is one of the Netherlands a leading university. In its early days it was the subject of strong persecution and attempts to exclude it’s graduates from government jobs-but he grew so mighty that he was able to overturn and overule this.

So in politics, in theology in the Dutch language even in the history of academia he was a true Titan who played a transformative and giant activity In British terms he was like a combination of William Gladstone, Robert Cecil (3rd Marquis of Salisbury) Thomas Chalmers, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Ashley Cooper 7th Marquis of Shaftesbury, and Bishop John C Ryle all rolled into one!

And yet my suspicion is that even the extremely well educated average reader of this blog would never have heard of him- and as I said it's incredibly difficult to find good works in English on him or his activists. Why is this -and what does this illustrate about the nature of current Historiography?

I thick by far the most important reason is that he was after all Dutch. This is partly a strong (and in a sense) justified bias against small countries- though the Netherlands dwarfs Ireland Demographically. More problematically I think this is due to the linguistic barrier. Dutch is a language very few Dutch people know partly because of its small demographic base and partly due to the proflicany y of the Dutch in foreign languages in part due to the excellent education system Kuyper did so much to shape. . If Kyper had been Prime Minister of Canada- a less historically significant country at least in that era I suspect he'd been much better known to Anglo-Saxon historians.

But I don't think that bad reason is the only one. Partly this is due to neglect of or contempt of religion's importance for history in general -and particularly late 19th and 20th century politic. This is the dead hand of the "secularisation thesis"- that society naturally follows a development where organised religions and traditional orthodox ideas gradually dimities in their hold. Kuyper is an enormous embarrassment for such theories and so like many such is politely ignored.

One should add that the changes of the Netherlands over the last few decades in the direction of secularisation and sexual liberalism (both generally exaggerated by outsiders but still very real) add to amnesia about it's interesting past.

Another is increasingly specialisation in the type of history people do. Kyper's contributions cross an incredible number of fields including electoral politics, political ideology, theological history, diplomatic history and educational. To sum up his contributions would require incredible breadth in terms of our modern historical discipline - a Gibbon is rare indeed among modern historians.

Still in however small a way I hope I have shown the enormous importance and achievements of this now obscure figure. Like or loathes his achievements he did “great things” in the true sense of the term.

Pilarisation and Power

So how did this system of "pillars" or Spheres" Kuyper helped build work?

The fundamental factor to realise is that this is not just about something that affects the political-it's about something that affects every course of life. Kryper's and his associates theory of Sphere sovereignty both reflected and shaped this. ON the one hand it was (at least in one sense) just a good description of Dutch life- secularism (increasingly the secular labour based sub culture), Catholicism and Reformed traditionalism (itself like secularism increasingly divided) decisively shaped peoples entire way of life in every detail from leisure time to sexual views to attitudes to foreign peoples-there was in Holland no general "sphere" of values -though no doubt Kryper wished there was . The tendency of western nations in general to adopt such tendencies in the early 20th century is often underrated-it is often used to understand the politics of Germany for example though it's often disputed how the divisions should be seen Protestant, Catholic, Social Democratic or National, catholic and Social Democratic for example. It strikes me such an informal pillarisation can actually work quite well to understand lands Like the UK, the United States or Spain it is not really used for as well.

AT the same the power of Sphere Sovereignty and it's increasing domination as an ideology in the early 20th Century Netherlands was to make this even more a reality than it was when Kryper began his carer-and make the Netherlands the paradigm of such. For one thing government funding was divided between intuitions both formally and informally. This was not just true of education but was true for example of administrative jobs and government appointments. So pervasive was this system of deals that in the late twentieth century it was even true of many major Dutch corporations-who for example often deliberately split senior positions between Catholics and Protestants.

What affected the ability? One was the cohesiveness of the different pillars-that is however strong a system of pillarisation was as it obviously varied from pillar to pillar-how much people really identified with a pillar rather than broader society, how much the party could rely on its support base come hell or high water. of the different pillars Catholics, Protestants, socialist and liberal I would say that the Catholics probably had the strongest pillar in this regard- the amazing strength of all catholic institutions in the Netherlands into the 1960's is amazing to behold. Conversely the liberals were almost certainly the weakest. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this was they lacked former intuitions outside the party-they tended to be close for example to the main business confederation but there was no formal ties the way there was between the ARP and major protestant papers. The result was the liberals having been the dominant tendency into the early 20th century withered away over the 20th century. It was only when Pillarisation really took knocks in the 1960's that they made a revival. Nor is this just psychological information of interest only to political anoraks. The values of the liberal party were in constant decline for the decades after the turn of the century. For the first few decades secularism was gradually marginalised in Dutch public life- so much so the labour party and even more avidly the liberals themselves formally disowned it. Particularly by the mid 20th century free capitalism was also on the back foot in Holland- as the welfare state and to some degree others form of government intervention grew sharply. It's not a coincidence that the collapse of pillarisation saw the reversal of such trends.

Another important factor was the attitudes of the different blocks to each other. NO matter how strong a block was given all were far off a majority the attitudes of other pillars was crucial to public policy. So the Catholic party was one of the two largest parties consistently from the first world war to the 1960'#s and in government consistently-but was unable to liberalise processions through the countryside in the face of the united opposition of the protestant" majority. This was why Kryper and even after his death his Anti-Revolutionary Party were so crucial-and so powerful at driving the agenda in the early 20th century. This dominance was not just over the blocks but also over the Christian Historicists, the more establishment, aristocratic, and theocratic alternative from within his own block.

Essentially every other block preferred the ARP to the alternatives. The Seacoasts preferred them to the alien and papal linked Catholics and to the hopelessly bourgeois Liberals (and initially the more aristocratic Christian Historicists). The Catholics preferred them to the hostility of the secular parties and the more theocratic Christian historians. The liberals preferred them to the "superstitious" "backward" and "alien" Catholics and to the terrifying Socialists (at least once the Socialists were a powerful enough force). The Christen historicist’s unsurprinsgly preferred their fellow conservative Protestants to the rest of the political spectrum. At the same time Catholic and Secularists alike preferred tee more Pluralistic ARP to the notion of a party that wished to restore their status to the traditional marginal one- one tolerant for the early modern era it should be noted but not tolerant ) . Thus the ARP was the fulcrum party. Even post war this endured to some degree and gave the ARP an influence out of proportion to their number. In the interwar period they essentially set the governing agenda of the Netherlands. The importance of these factors is well illustrated by Vilno in this typically excellent post.

The image above is that of the symbol of the Netherlands-the royal crest. In the early 20th century the continuing dominance of a monarchist, conservative Protestant house as the supreme symbol of the nation well illustrated the continued dominance of the Protestant side of the Netherlands through their well built ideological hegemony.

Terrorists and Gangs

I'm linking to an article I've written for the liberal conspiracy on Terrorism and its relationship to Gang Violence- I think there is something interesting lurking there about the nature of the terrorist threat that we face. Increasingly I have to say I'm coming to a very pessimistic conclusion. Not that we won't defeat Al Qaeda, I think that eventually Bin Laden and his cronies will be caught. But that we will increasingly see this kind of violence repeated all over the world by different groups from different cultures. There is a huge mixture of things going on with terrorism- but I think investigating the nature of violent so called third generational gangs is the way to go. Can I make a plea incidentally that people don't comment here but go and look at the broader article on the Liberal conspiracy site- I think the point is made with more evidence over there and its probably easier to argue if everyone has seen the evidence.

Sarkozy's voters

Just posted an article at Bits- its about the rather amazing news about the French election. According to post election polling, Sarkozy the rightwing victor lost every age group save the retired. Amongst those over 65 he won 75% of the vote whilst winning somewhere in the forties in every other demographic. Its interesting- I'm not sure maybe Vino could enlighten me but this might be the first election decided in this manner- ie where simply winning the pensioners has won you the election. I've pontificated about some of the implications- but it is a fascinating statistic.

The Rise of Radical Islam in Europe

This is an interesting talk from Jonathan Paris in London about the problems of Islamic radicalisation in Britain and France. The basic argument of the talk is that the real problems of British and French islamic radicalisation are problems of what he calls preceptisation. He argues that tackling the preceptors of such a faith is a very important part of the war on terror and a part that is neglected. Neither dealing with the problem as the Americans do using the instruments of military power nor dealing with it as the Europeans have done up until now by using criminalisation- banning the terrorists and not political Islamists. He suggests that political Islam- the kind of Islam which stresses that all Muslims have the same identity and should reject other claims of identity- that a death in Palestine is more important to a Muslim Yorkshireman than the death of a white Yorkshireman and that they should feel that more. He argues that there is a slippery slope whereby Muslims are influenced by Imams into the Muslim Council of Britain and then into Hizb and then into terrorism- he suggests that a wide tolerance of political Islam allows a few to cross the borders into terrorist activity. I should add that the talk and the discussion afterwards is worried but not hopeless- as the speaker brings up there have been cases- Indian immigration from Uganda to Britain- and as participants bring up- Sri Lankan immigration- immigration can work and there is no reason that it can't work.

There is an interesting discussion afterwards about demography and about the integration of Iberian Muslims into their societies and Pakistani Immigration not to mention any generational gaps- these are all interesting points and deserve to be raised. There is an interesting problem brought up to do with general (not just Muslim) identity shopping and Belgian problems with Islam. Personally on the demographic argument it is worth remembering that population change is often accompanied by a change in the nature of the population- so for example its not a problem to have 100 million non-political Muslims and see your entire population change its complexion doesn't matter if those Muslims are not politicised. Muslims are not the same and neither is their evolution into political Islam inevitable. Another question raised is the problem of indigenous terrorism- particularly anti globalisation movements and the religious right.

The preceptor argument is one I have some sympathy with. Solutions to it are very complex- throwing out people from the country is something I have some sympathy with- the British government needs to be tougher on this than it has been, though there are obvious problems- the question of people's rights is important- in my view we ought to be tougher in our interpretation of the laws on inciting racial hatred which for instance would catch many radical speakers for their attacks on Jews. Excluding the Muslim Council of Britain from discussions seems to be a sensible position and from government funding- why exactly the Muslim Council should be argued with when they are elected by no-one I have never understood- especially as their ambition is to create a Muslim constituency which would vote and sway power in order to acheive the aims of Political Islam. We should bear in mind though, unlike one questioner that Halal food in schools is not threatening- no more was the fact that my school had kosher food- when it comes to male doctors and women that is a different matter but rigidity on secularism is not sensible. He is right to call upon the West to look to moderate Muslims- a recent British initiative which is anti-sectarian- the New Generation Network run by Sunny Hundal and others is a step towards that, towards a view of the community which is anti-racist but also anti-MCB. Considering moves forwards is difficult, getting girls and young women involved to resist models which are avowedly sexist is a good step- women are a natural constituency to overthrow the preceptors. The solution also lies in stating again and again that Muslims are different from each other and not similar, and that under the skin we all share a common humanity.

There are plenty of issues here to consider- one interpretation is not sufficient- Olivier Roy has a different idea whereby he ties together nationalism and Islam in a synthesis. One paper isn't the answer- but the preceptoral model is a useful one- and quite how you erode the influence of imams, cousins or youth workers is an interesting one- or even Al-Jazeera- is a great problem. This is an interesting discussion- I don't think that this paper gives final answers- there isn't much detail in his talk and its more principles and also there are no Muslim voices in the audience, something that would be interesting to hear in such a debate. This is a contribution- probably better than some- but this represents a contribution- not a final one and I'm tired so I may not be commenting well- its a beggining though and we need more discussion.

Occasionally the conversation slips into what I have called Islamic Essentialism (mostly on the part of the questioners and sometimes but seldom of the speaker talking loosely about demography), but the chairman at the end sums up what I think is an important point that the place we want to arrive at is where citizenship embraces all citizens irrespective of race or creed in political allegiance and in peace.

By the way I don't have any answers- but am merely thinking on my feet largely as I listen to the talk- so my analysis may be faulty- there are other perspectives that should be acknowledged as well- but the idea of preceptorial roles being at the centre of this is I think an interesting one and we do need to think about how we deal with the ideological threat that convinces people to blow up their fellow citizens.

The Legend of Napoleon

On 1st March 1815, a group of ships containing 1,100 men drifted off the southern French coast, they put into land and began a revolution whose consequences reverbrated through the history of France for the next hundred years. They brought within them the exiled Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. Within days, Bonaparte's small band of companions had marched through France receiving support, especially from the units sent to oppose him by the terrified Bourbon government in Paris. By the 20th March, Napoleon and his band reached Paris. The experiment of reviving the empire was however shortlived- on 18th June 1815, Napoleon was defeated by a combined British and Prussian force near the town of Waterloo. Napoleon was exiled to St Helena and died in 1821, his cause one might have thought was lost. Though as any historian will tell you, of course that isn't quite true because his nephew Napoleon III 30 years after the death of Napoleon himself became a second Emperor of France. Sudhir Hazareesingh presents some rather interesting evidence that even that does not tell the full story- that under the seamless restoration of the French monarchy lurked regrets for the reign of the Emperor and for what he represented- for what Hazareesingh calls the legend of Napoleon, a factor he feels lay behind not merely the revival of Bonapartist politics in the second empire but also lay behind the fundamental instability of restoration France after 1815.

Hazareesingh has accumulated a great deal of interesting evidence demonstrating how the cult of Napoleon grew up. Looking into the local French archives, he has found evidence of all sorts of Bonapartist activity- peasants and townsmen arrested for chanting Bonapartist slogans, for using the colours of the tricolour and not the monarchy, for distributing via networks of travelling salesmen and women Bonapartist artefacts- busts, medals and even books. Sites like the gates by which he had reentered Grenoble or the inn where he had slept the night of March 1st became tourist sites, attracting visitors who wished to witness the imperial myth. Moving onwards Hazareesingh shows how this cult of Napoleon became allied to other forces against the Bourbon monarchy. Bonaparte stood for the French Revolution and his image became Republican in form. This started in Napoleon's brief second stint in power, when he summoned Benjamin Constant, the noted French liberal intellectual, to draft a new Bonapartist constitution. Seizing on that statesmen and scholars as various as Constant himself, Victor Hugo and the French liberal conservative Adolphe Thiers were able to see in Bonaparte the France that they wished to recreate.

Giving vitality to the cult of the Emperor, Hazareesingh spots the former members of the Napoleonic armies. At one point France had had over a million men in arms- mostly very young, indeed so young that they became the shock troops for Napoleon III's later coup in 1851. These men provided a human connection with the feats of Napoleon I, they gathered together to remember him, from 1857 the roughly 400,000 veterans who were still alive were given special medals to wear and processions were held in their honour. (The last survivor from the Grand Armee died in 1906 in Poland- direct memory of the Napoleonic wars lasted until then.) Perhaps the most vivid memorial erected by the troops was erected by Louis Petit, a soldier from 1812 to 1815 who rebuilt his house in the village of Saint Riquer in the shape of Napoleon's hat! The troops and Napoleon's political successor, Napoleon III, created a Bonapartism that was more liberal than Bonaparte himself. The great general became remembered as a great lawgiver, a French Solon, who had been forced by perfidious Albion and her German and Russian allies into war, as a Napoleonic veteran wrote in a poem of 1859, Napoleon's diplomacy's other name was peace. His acheivements were no longer seen as imperial but as popular as well- as one French author argued Napoleon was the only King the French loved because he was the only popular King of France.

Hazareesingh's account of the effects of Napoleonic stories upon French politics is convincing. The presence of a large number of decommissioned men within a society creates tensions- especially if those men become defined by their wartime experience. In the divided France of the 19th Century where royalists hated members of the Grand Armee that was not surprising. He is right to note the parallels in modern French history- the cults both of Joan of Arc and of Charles de Gaulle, especially the latter, bear examination alongsides that of Napoleon. One might mention the interwar reputation of Petain as well as the incarnation of the French spirit at Verdun. Napoleon's significance can't be underrated.

My only quibble with this volume lies not in the account of the history- but the implication that such imagining of politics through a historical figure is a unique French preoccupation- think of the way that British Conservatives squabble over the figure of Winston Churchill, how American conservatives discuss Ronald Reagen or Pakistanis regard Jinnah, Turks Attaturk for that matter. These historical figures become metaphors by which we discuss present politics- just like Napoleon was for the 19th Century French. Just like Napoleon, Churchill say has become associated with causes which he, a British Imperialist to the core, would never have understood. The historical dangers are evident- and Hazareesingh may be right that Napoleon's cult has contributed to the illiberalism of French liberalism- but he is wrong to insist that this is a uniquely French phenomenon. The content of the myth, not the fact of having myths itself, explains that perception.

Having said that, for an introduction to French politics in the 19th Century- particularly the era from the fall of Napoleon through the rule of the Kings both Bourbon and Orleanist to the second Bonapartist restoration under Napoleon III- this volume presents an interesting survey. The myth of Napoleon was undoubtedly created in those years and sustained as an ideology of opposition and then as a way to legitimate the new regime. Its dominance in the discourse of the French imagination of their own past meant that it formed their thoughts about their own nation, in many ways features of its story lie behind senses of France that French people have today. Whether it reflected the actual emperor is another matter- but the myth contributed to what we think France is today- as such it is a key part of the history and politics of our own day. As such, Dr Hazareesingh has performed a great service by exploring it, bringing the past to life whilst also illuminating the nature of politics in France in the present.

Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty

Europe has a Parliament but it lacks a political culture. Most of its citizens barely know who is their European MP, let alone how each national party groups together within the Parliament. There has never been a European continent wide campaign- despite the attempts of the socialists to draft a common manifesto- for European elections. In yesterday's Guardian though, Josh Freedman Berthould worried that such a political culture might be just born with the formation of a party called Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty.

This new party is made up of a disparate individuals from various parties on Europe's far right- from Alessandra Mussolini to the Austrian Freedom Party to various Rumanian and Bulgarian rightwingers to an ex-Ukip MP- and according to that ex-Ukip MP, Ashley Mote, the only purpose for the Party lies within the European Parliament- Mr Mote disavows his new friends' domestic policies preferring to concentrate on their European policies. So should Freedman Berthould be worried?

There is obvious a rise of the far right going on in various parts of Europe for various different reasons at the moment. Freedman Berthould though is worried about something far more precise- he worries that there may be a nationalist movement gathering pace on the European stage, a movement that he feels might use the new common political culture to vault into power in various countries as protectors of Christian Europe. I disagree though- and this grouping needs more attention before we can show why he is wrong. Let me clarify that there is a very old idea of European Christendom as opposed to the Islamic East- not for nothing was the fall of Constantinople greeted hysterically across Europe in 1453. That kind of European identity doesn't originate from recent times but goes back far earlier- we may not like it but its part of our history. It may be growing at the moment under the pressure of the war on terror, I suspect that gas prices in Russia will also result in Russophobia quite possibly increasing as well and the admission of Turkey will be a controversial issue for years.

Given that is there something new going on- is this group something vastly new. I don't think it is. Europe's relations with the Ottoman Empire were always more complicated than mere division- the French always saw the Ottomans as a natural ally against the Empire as did many others- in the end national interest trumped the conception of Europeanness. In the end what we saw was that local political cultures trumped this vague Christian identity. I don't want to go further into a very complicated area- but there is something in that complication. But in that context look back at Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty- what they are is not a single European rightwing party arising out of a single political culture. Rather what we are seeing is a rather incoherent group of in some cases soldiers of fortune who have come together because it offers them all a renewed respectability. They want a grouping because it gives them access to privileges and funding- but there isn't that much in common between them- they all resent not merely the approach of the Muslim immigrant but also the touch of other European nations. The Western Europeans resent Polish plumbers, the Eastern resent German capitol. Historically it has taken the emergeance of a single charismatic figure to embed the far right in a polity- Le Pen in France say- this group though can never be led because it has no coherence- indeed its coherence is to seek for disbandment.

That isn't to say that this group can't do massive harm through destroying parts of the single market and providing a voice for racist reactionaries in the Parliament- we should prick up our ears and do our best to make sure that they are unable to take their seats again. The danger is in the details of leglislation being ammended by racist deputies.

But neither should we think that this represents a single European fascist party and the claiming of a European identity by it- European identity remains vaguer and much weaker than national identities and until it becomes stronger, European continentalism will remain weaker than its constituent nationalisms.

The situation may change- but its my feeling that Berthould Freedman thinks that a European political culture is more powerful than it actually is. I may be wrong...

The Cosmopolitans of Medieval China

Rightly there is a good post over here which points out that China has always been a cosmopolitan and open place- many of the links on the Asian history carnival I posted yesterday would back that up. The author at Granite Studio provides some good evidence of Chinese openness and the way that would indicate that China has never been this hermetically sealed place that people imagine it to be- the interesting thing is how more and more historical research posits that we have more in common than we have as differences. As we discover more about the ancient and medieval world, we discover more links binding civilisations together.

We can use civilisations to explain each other. That the Fall of Rome which I referred to in my last post was not inevitable is proved by the fact that a similar empire survived similar pressures in the East- China maybe was more lucky than Rome was but its example proves that Rome might have survived. Equally China has for years as in Erik Ringmar's work on giraffes- see the Asian Carnival below- formed an interesting comparitor for European development. Recent studies of Chinese modernisation have argued convincingly that Chinese intellectuals as far back as the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735-1796) looked to Europe. European intellectuals in the eighteenth century also looked to China and more and more will in the future look to China.

The world of Samuel Huntington with the inevitable conflict of civilisations was described by Bernard Henri-Levy on Radio 4 as really rather stupid and actually rather disgusting recently- seldom has a judgement been more appropriately true than Henri-Levy's on Huntington and the Granite Journal makes that clear in his post on Chinese openness.

Bryan Ward Perkins The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has been the subject of more historical monographs than possibly any other historical issue. Thoughts about it have ranged impressively from the implausible to the impossible (at some times even to the inedible food the Romans might have consumed). Great historians and philosophers from Montesquieu and Gibbon to Momigliano have tackled the question and come to various answers. Part of the problem is the geographical extent of the empire- from the Euphrates in the East to the Atlantic in the West, from Scotland in the North to the Sahara in the South and the geographical extent that any historian wishing to understand its fall needs to master- the rumblings which brought down the Romans may have started as many as three centuries before the fall of Rome in wars conducted in Northern China.

Facing such a massive project, providing as Bryan Ward-Perkins, an Oxford historian, seeks to do an explanation and account of what this event meant is something almost impossible to do. Ward Perkins rightly stresses the elements of contingency in the destruction of the West Roman state- at various points the West Romans could have succeeded in stopping the barbarion advance but because of bad luck or bad decisions failed to do so. His tale is one of the sudden erosion of a tax base upon which a proffessional army depended- every invasion by a barbarion army to acquire a piece of the empire left the empire weaker than before to respond to the next one. Particularly significant was the crossing of the meditereanean by the Vandals in 429AD and their conquest of the province of Africa: Africa had been the hinterland of the Western Empire, supplying the rest of it with tax revenues and grain, once it had fallen to barbarion depredations- there was no area of the West that was not a frontier and not under pressure.

From there on, Ward Perkins supplies a narrative of collapse. His barbarions invaded in order to acquire the fruits of economic sophistication- to join the Roman system. They actually ended up destroying it. The economy never recovered its vitality or sophistication and as it lurched into the seventh century, various areas in the West had regressed to a level of sophistication last seen in the Bronze Age. The archaeological evidence presented is definitely impressive- from the fall off in pottery production, to the loss of trade networks, the end of graffitti and the end of the tiled roof, what Ward Perkins indicates is a massive loss in living standards for the European population. Based on the record, he also infers a loss in population concommitant with that- though as the population left fewer material artifacts the exact loss can't be quantified.

Ward Perkins's book is definitely a useful corrective to anyone who argues that the decline of the Western Empire was a painless transition. As in a joint interview with Peter Heather (who has also written a recent book about Rome which will be referred to later and which I read just before beggining this blog) he muses- the main thrust of the book's argument is to concentrate upon this perspective. Ward Perkins shows what happened to the Roman empire after the invasion of the barbarians was horrible- the decline in economic sophistication was mirrored in his view by mass confiscations of land and ethnic tensions that persisted for at least a couple of generations.

This book like all books about Rome is limited by its viewpoint. We are seeing the Roman empire from the West, most recent scholarship has concentrated on the East of the empire and in particular the Levant and Egypt, Ward Perkins therefore is a useful corrective. But anyone who hasn't read say Peter Brown's Word of Late Antiquity ought to supplement this book with it, the story of the empire was a story of Constantinople as well as Rome. Again the empire's destruction involved other peoples. Peter Heather, referred to above, in his account concentrates far more on outside the empire to explain what happened. If Ward Perkins makes sense of how the empire collapsed- the loss of tax revenue- then Heather has a much more interesting account of why. Heather postulates that the West was denuded of troops to meet the growing Persian threat in the East and that just as in Byzantium with the Islamic invasions, so in Rome with the German the Empire was caught out by the swift development of peoples outside the empire. The Goths the Romans faced in the fourth century were a much more sophisticated people than the Germans they had faced in the 1st Century.

Ward Perkins's vista therefore is limited to an interior view of the Western Empire. His other limit is that there is very little cultural history here- again this is a useful corrective to histories which have prioritised the cultural in recent years. But in order for a general reader to get a sense of what the Roman empire's collapse felt like to the average Roman, it is well worth reading about the role of saints, the importance of the Church and growing internecine conflict between Christians and pagans that continued through fourth century.

Despite this, what Ward Perkins has provided us with is an up to date and sophisticated account of the impact on the West Roman empire of the barbarion invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries- this is an excellent book. It has its limitations but there are few books about Rome which don't- what it does is capture the importance of the networks of economic sophistication in the ancient meditereanean and the speed of collapse once they were removed. One can almost feel the shock of specialised workers as their industries closed thanks to lack of trade and they were forced back onto the land to work as ordinary farmers- this loss and destruction of specialisation is one that haunts a modern society which is even more specialised than the Roman.

Having said that, the situation in the Roman empire remains unique to it. As Edward Gibbon commented at the end of the 18th Century there are plenty of reasons to argue that there is no sdubstantive barbarion threat today- the more immediate threats to our civilisation lie not in the Hunnic horseman but in the nuclear weapon. Having said that if Ward Perkins's account of the Roman collapse describes the effect of a prolonged disruption of trade routes upon the ancient Meditereanean accurately, then we should beware any disruption in our global trade from either nuclear calamity or even protectionist impulse.

This is though not a book about politics but a book about history and its worth bearing in mind how contingent Rome's fall was. As a book about that fall it is a superb reconstruction of what happened in the West, and provides a useful corrective to current historiography- its worth though remembering that this subject is so big that it overflows the confines of any recent book and even from my paltry knowledge I would reccomend at least reading Brown and Heather to supplement the view here. This book was intended after all to supplement their views- and in doing that it succeeds.

A Woman in Berlin: A diary of the fall of the Nazi Regime

In 1945 German resistance to the Russians, British and Americans finally collapsed. It was the Russians who reached Berlin first, arriving in the capitol in late April and early May 1945. What then followed has become well known in the last couple of years. Going by Anthony Beevor's estimates its assumed that around 2 million women were raped in 1945 by the invading Russian forces, that figure includes Poles and Russian women who were with the Russian army. In Berlin the figure was somewhere between 95,000 and 130,000 women, many of them raped several times, many of them gang raped. The explanations for this orgy of sexual violence have been found in the trauma of the Soviet soldier, who had both come through the killing fields of the Eastern Front, the most vicious front of the most vicious war in human history, and who had earlier endured the long reign of Stalinist terror at home. When added to the 6 million Jews, who contrary to Iranian propaganda, were slaughtered in the Holocaust, the millions of soldiers dieing on each front, the massacres in China and the gulags in Russia, these rapes seem like a final installment in the chronicle of horror unleashed on Eurasia by the German and Russian dictatorships.

Understanding though the specific details of each victim that we can elucidates the status of every victim. Instead of feeling statistics, we can start to feel pain. The pain of the rapes that happened over Germany in 1945 struck very deep and this diary of a woman journalist brings that out. The anonymous diary titled A woman in Berlin conveys something of what it felt to be a woman alive in Berlin as the Soviet men rolled through. The grim humour, better one woman jokes a Russki on top than a Yank overhead, echoes throughout a tale that is filled with repeated atrocity. This is a chronicle of unreleived sexual violence. She is raped by soldiers, officers, gangraped by groups of Russians and lives in perpetual fear. Her friends too endure massive hardship- one nineteen year old girl was raped by three different soldiers one after the other, then she had marmalade smeared into her hair and coffee grains scattered over her face. The repetitive nature of the violence offered numbs the senses, but its the physical details which shocked me again and again, take for instance this description of a rape:

The one shoving me is an older man with grey stubble, reeking of alcohol and horses. He carefully closes the door behind him, and not finding any key, slides the wing chair against the door. He seems not even to see his prey, so that when he strikes she is all the more startled as he knocks her onto the bedstead. Eyes closed, teeth clenched. No sound. Only an involuntary grinding of teeth when my underclothes are ripped apart. The last untorn ones I had. Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger's hands expertly pulling apart my jaw. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth

It isn't pleasant to read, I assure you it isn't pleasant to write, even though all I'm doing is copying it out of a book, but how much worse to have experienced that again and again and again. The book takes us through the journey of someone who suffers repeatedly in this way- it changes the woman and it changes her friends. It gives them for a start a kind of collective identity as women and a collective despair with men. As they queue up once stability is restored to collect ration books and get jobs, the chat amongst the women is of how many times they've been raped and how they will deal with their husbands about it. Fears of sexual disease and pregnancy also proliferate- our diarist notes that conversation became coarser, that things unmentionable before became mentionable. And also running throughout is another theme, that the experience changed completely her and other women's reactions to men. The fear created lasted long after authority was restored- she notes that when she goes out in the evening, she never sees women. Also in her eyes, men become diminished, parasites or rapists. She is unbeleivably, unimaginably fair to many Russians that she meets who don't deal badly with her- I can think of three men she mentions by name- and all three are recorded scrupulously fairly. Very few times does she unleash a generalised hatred despite her experiences of all men or all Russians- a hatred I am sure that lesser mortals such as myself would find easy to slip into. Despite this the psychological damage is emmense and the diary is a record of the damage done even to someone who sought to protect her own personality under enormous stress.

Men being powerless, what we see is that women begin to adapt various survival strategies. Our heroine turns herself into a virtual prostitute, protecting her own building and her partners in her flat by sleeping with Russian officers as they move in and out of Berlin. Her prostitution is exploited by others- most importantly by her male co-lodger who seems to do nothing but eat and complain. The violence of prostitution is also key to this book: our heroine at one point hurts so much bodily that she has to beg her Russian officer to be gentle, but she can't ask him to stop making love to her for fear that then a source of protection and food would fade away. The sense of blissful relief that she evokes when she ends her diary and is able to sleep on her own in her own clean sheets is one of the most powerful images of the whole book- it makes the stretching out of limbs seem like another Eden, a demi paradise.

Coping strategies through this book are emmense- I've mentioned the physical coping strategy of prostitution but she coped in other ways too. She coped in part by becoming numb- time and time again she refers to the need just to keep on living, not to enjoy or appreciate life but just to keep going. Fascinatingly, in a way that illustrates her education, she draws upon that: using images out of Horace, Virgil, Aeschylus, Shakespeare and others to understand her situation. Furthermore filtered through the book are her own memories of her own past- the moment she met a Dutch Jew in Paris, her lover, her first kiss and other moments which she uses to make analogies to present situations, even if depressing analogies. These are her psychological resources.

This is one of the most amazing documents of wartime Europe I have ever read. Beevor thinks that its genuine and I see no reason to doubt that assessment from a leading historian of the period. It is such a rich source. The internalisation of Nazi propaganda is fascinating to see- we deal in this book with a worldly and intelligent woman yet even she is stunned that the Soviets can provide better rations than the Nazis. The speed with which the Germans turned on Adolf is also interesting- she mentions that defeat made people hate the government- look what your Adolf did to us they repeat to one Nazi. The unbeleivable thing though about this diary is its record of continual and terrible atrocity, these women were not killed but they were smashed, violated in the sovereignty of their own persons.

There is one last question that does need addressing whenever one thinks or writes about this kind of subject and that is the nature of German war guilt. I can feel some in my audience twinge at the thought of prioritising the German loss over Jewish and other losses in World War Two. The film Downfall has been criticised for this. This document is different- the German crimes in the war are alluded to, interestingly they are used by a man to dismiss woman's suffering as a fair exchange for the suffering the Germans' committed in the East- an intriguing bargain to say the least and one that made me as a man shiver at the moral complacency of the comment.

But this document does not seek to be a total account- this is a diary and we can't treat it like a history- this is a diary of one woman's experience in Berlin from April to June 1945, it includes what she experienced and not what she didn't. What she describes was a reality of acute suffering and it is just that it becomes part of our record of the war, though it is a mere part. There are of course grim ironies within all this- one couple that she records suffering hugely are a Jewish couple who somehow had managed to survive the Nazi regime by hiding and then on the moment of their release, the man is shot and woman abused. In a further irony, as Linda Grant commented in a Guardian review of the book, these same troops who raped this woman may well have been amongst the troops that liberated Auschwitz. We need to read documents like this- not because they obscure the other suffering of the second world war or the guilt of Germany for inaugurating the Holocaust- but because they illuminate the very nature of suffering itself. This woman, whoever she was, was a casualty of the second world war and her diary gives us an insight into how the victims of that or indeed any conflict feel in their degredation.

The Second World War and its horrors (even the ultimate horror of the Holocaust) are almost cauterised, cleansed by their names, by the statistics, but being brought face to face through three hundred pages with the gashes upon the soul inflicted by repeated rape and gang rape, not to mention prostitution, makes one turn back to all the evil atrocities of the period and suddenly realise they weren't numbers on a scorecard of infamy, but souls tortured, and in many cases murdered. Each person had their own separate individuality and each one suffered in ways we cannot even imagine, to perceive one person's suffering gives us an emmense insight into what that kind of experience is like.

I have failed in my account of how this book effected me and why everyone should read it- like other great works about that most terrible period in European history- like Solzhenitsyn or The Pianist or Primo Levi or indeed many others, it makes you want to cry. The repeated terror both leaves you wishing to comprehend and realising you never will because though you can share the words, you can't share the experience. We live in a world where rape is still too common everywhere. Moreover we live in a world where rape used as atrocity and gang rape used as atrocity like this are still happening, in places in Africa and other areas of the world, and the only thing that I as a male blogger from Europe can do is leave you with a final and to me heartbreaking quotation- this is our diarist reflecting on what she would live for after the war,

When I was young the red flag seemed like such a bright beacon, but there's no way back to that now, not for me; the sum of tears is constant in Moscow, too. And I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I beleive in progress? Yes to bigger and better bombs. The happiness of the greatest number? Yes for Petka [a rapist] and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure for people who comb out the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment? I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again, I would always be anxious I could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence. Perhaps Art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes for those that have the calling but I don't. I'm just an ordinary labourer I have to be satisfied with that... What's left is just to wait for the end.

I don't think I really need to add anymore except for the fact that I have failed to do either a tragic period or a tragic book the justice they deserve in these few lines.

Michael Ledeen and permanent war

This post from the National Review deserves to be analysed and understood: I'm going to quote the whole post in order to let everyone see exactly what is said,

Thanks to Cliff, and to Dexter Filkins for getting someone to admit, once again, that Iran and Syria are all over Iraq.

Victor says we should first stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's skipping a step. It is impossible so long as the mullahs rule in Tehran and Assad commands in Damascus. It is a regional war. If we continue to misunderstand it, if we remain locked in this fundamental error of strategic vision, we will endlessly respond to our enemies' initiatives, playing defense in one place after another. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, tomorrow in Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopea and Eritrea (that is the mullahs' game plan), then in Israel and Europe, and finally here at home. We do not need intelligence agencies to know this, all we need to do is listen to our enemies, who announce it at the top of their lungs.

There is no escape from this war, and we haven't even begun to wage it. Once we do, we will find that we've got many political and economic weapons, most of them inside our enemies' lands. I entirely agree with Victor that Iran and Syria are fragile, brittle, and anxious. They know their people hate them, and they know that revolution could erupt if we supported it.

Of course, as Victor says, our leaders may be so demoralized that we could just surrender in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the realists and the antisemites desire. But that would only delay the reckoning, and ensure that the war will be far bloodier. Sigh.

What Ledeen is arguing for here is a defence that involves perpetual offence. Ledeen's argument is that if there ever is a threat to the West in the world, we need to smash that threat before it smashes us. In my view the view expressed here relies on a number of questionable assumptions,

a. that the enemy faced in Iraq is the same entity as the enemy faced in Afganistan
b. that the Middle Eastern states that oppose us have the same policy as regards the West
c. that the solution to the West's unpopularity lies in more invasions of other countries
d. that the Islamic fundamentalist threat in the West is driven by Middle Eastern regimes
e. that there is a single mind or minds at work behind a strategy of destroying Western civilisation.

All of those assumptions I regard as untrue- to take them one by one

a. the enemy in Iraq and Afganistan are not the same- in Afganistan there are people fighting against us because they are Pashtun, because we have destroyed the Opium crop, because they resent the imposition of central authority upon the country, because of local rivalries, because of fundamentalist Sunni Islam, because of friends and relatives killed by us in the invasion and because of straightforward hatred of foreigners. Only the fifth reason would lead one to suspect that the conflict would spill over the boundaries of Afganistan. In Iraq many of the same reasons apply though there are also Shia fundamentalists- who unsurprisingly won't join the Sunnis either.

b. That would require us to agree that Syria and Iran have had the same policy towards us. Well that consistently would be untrue. Syria and Iran have sought to ally but Syria is a Baathist regime, Iran a fundamentalist one. Syria is Allawite, Iran is Shia. They may be allied, they may grow closer together but at the moment they are not identical. Nor are their allies- Hizbollah, Hamas, the PLO and all the regiment of allies that Mr Ledeen would conjure up for them have all got different interests and different agendas.

c. There is an argument that if something like the Iraq war hasn't worked- it might not be wise to do the same thing the second time. There is always the Melchett argument from Blackadder to contend with, when the general endorses British policy at the front by saying that "Doing exactly what we did eighteen times before this, is precisely the last thing that they'll expect us to do now" or his other famous statement that everyone getting slaughtered in the first five minutes might "depress" the men in the trenches. Mr Ledeen seems to think that as we've started a civil war in Iraq, we should see what would happen in Syria if we invade.

d. The Islamic fundamentalist threat in the West seems to have very few connections to regimes in the Middle East. Yes there are some but not many. It seems to come out of free media like Al-Jazeera and a sense of Muslim greivance. (Oh and just to inform members of the rightwing American commentariate- Europe is not Saudi Arabia nor is it likely to become Saudi Arabia anytime soon.)

e. As far as I've seen all sources agree that Al Quaeda doesn't have a leadership structure but is a franchise used by terrorists. A strategic mind is hard to sense behind the whole insurgency in Iraq which pits Muslim against Muslim, nor behind the terrorist campaigns in the West, nor behind the events in Afganistan. What is happening is a series of local conflicts motivated partly out of a sense of Islamic greivance against the rest of the world particularly the west but in many situations having more localised causes.

Michael Ledeen needs to go back and rethink what he has written. In many ways the world is more dangerous than he beleives, there is no Hitler out there whose head on a platter will signal the end of terrorism from Muslim individuals. There is a civil war in Iraq which we are in the middle of. There is an insurgency in Afganistan which we are coping with but those are not neccessarily linked. There are various phenomena here, not just one phenomenon and to think otherwise is to be intellectually lazy. There maybe reasons to destabilise the Middle East- Iranian nuclear weapons- but the need to chop off the head of the Islamist Hydra isn't one of them.

MEMRI

This is a very interesting interview with the head of the organisation, MEMRI which transalates documents from the Arab world into English and other languages. MEMRI has often been accused of being a pro-Israeli organisation- its head Yigal Carmon was involved in Israeli intelligence right up until the early nineteen nineties. This interview though shows that Carmon is at least someone who likes complexity- who recognises for instance that Abu Mazen has spoken publically, on three separate occasions, not merely against the efficacy of terrorism as a strategy for the Palestinians but against its morality as well. Clive Davis notes on his blog how Carmon is also pretty subtle in arguing that European Islam is not a 'they' but a collection of individuals who respond in different ways to integration.

There are two more difficult aspects of Carmon's interview though that I find questionable. Firstly he paints a very rosy optimistic picture of the effect that George Bush has had upon the Arab world- that isn't the picture more generally given out and though I have no expertise in the matter I would be interested to see some evidence for Carmon's line that Bush has made things change. Secondly he attacks the idea of multi-culturalism and opposes it to the French system of republican citizenship. His quotations refer to ghettoising and I think that there is a difference between an approach of multiculturalism- effectively respecting other people's cultures but placing them under the same law and a policy of ghettoising which is placing them under different laws. In the first case- a Muslim girl who flees who patriachal father can claim the protection of the law- in the second her father can claim the right from his law to take his daughter's liberty. That is a key distinction.

Overall though its an interesting interview- and deserves to be read.

Charles Krauthammer accuses Europe of anti-semitism

Charles Krauthammer, a Neo-conservative commentator in the United States, has just written a column which illustrates exactly the problem with neo-conservative commentary in the United States. His column is about the film Borat and he argues that Sasha Baron-Cohen in Borat satirises the wrong people, Baron-Cohen goes for the redneck evangelicals who sing anti-semitic songs in Arizona and Krauthammer objects. He suggests that the Jews haven't had a better friend than America since King Cyrus, that Truman and Nixon were the greatest friends of Israel in the 20th Century but told anti-semitic jokes, that Baron Cohen ought to look at Venezuala, Iran and particularly his home continent Europe for evidence of anti semitism rather than at the evangelicals in the United States, who are Krauthammer concludes,

the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost

There are two important mistakes made here- the first is that supporting or attacking Israel is nothing to do neccessarily with anti-semitism. An argument could be made for example by an anti-semite that Israel as a country was a good thing because all the Jews could be exiled to it. Furthermore much of the support for Israel on the Christian right comes not out of philo-semitism or the idea that Jews are individuals just as Christians are who deserve love and hatred on exactly the same terms, but out of a desire to advance the day of the Lords coming- a day on which Jews in Israel would be amongst his first victims. The Christian Right's desire for Israel to prosper therefore is part and parcel with a possible anti-semitism- as this Salon article makes clear

Their Jewish allies usually choose to ignore the fact that the Christian Zionist's apocalyptic scenario ends with unsaved Jews being slaughtered and condemned to hell.

In the same piece Salon makes clear as well how the Christian Right's agenda at home in the US, for school prayer and an increased identification of the state with the church is hardly welcoming for Jews in American society. If one takes for example this column by Greg Koukl, the message that Christianity amongst religions is uniquely right and uniquely good and that other religions like Islam and one presumes Judaism are wrong and lead to evil is neither subtle, true nor philosemitic. America is a complex society and these are only some views- but Krauthammer is wrong to conclude that there aren't strands on the evangelical right which are anti semitic and also wrong to conclude that being pro Israel means you aren't anti semitic.

The second of Krauthammer's mistakes is more greivous though- whereas the first is about the self identity of America as philosemitic- something hard to attack when American attitudes are compared to Iran and given the complexity of American society and its general tolerance something that is probably quite true of many (especially those outside the evangelical right)- his second mistake is about Europe and like the mistakes made by Mark Steyn and others shows how Krauthammer's view of the world is distorted and quite frankly ignorant. Europe is not anti-semitic. It has anti-semitic elements- just like America does- it has temptations towards anti-semitism and whereas in America those tempting voices lie often on the right (and can hide behind the idea that if you are pro-Israeli you can't be anti-semitic), in Europe because of the reputation of Israel they lie often on the left (and hide behind the argument I voiced above that being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-semitic). Europeans are more hostile to Israel than Americans but as we've seen above hostility or support for Israel is not the same as hostility or support for Jews. One can condemn what is happening in Gaza and be philo-semitic and many Jews one should note do. One can condemn it and be anti-semitic- but the decision about whether you are pro or anti-semitic lies in your attitudes to Jews- not your attitude to Ehud Olmert.

Krauthammer infers that there are large ammounts of anti-semitism in Europe (without any qualification) just like Steyn and others do because he can find a couple of examples of anti-semitic statements. A Norwegian intellectual, some discontented French youths and the infrequent torching of synagogues by often Muslim youths incriminate an entire continent of 300 million people in anti-semitist desires which he tells us are rising to levels unseen since, yes the Holocaust. Krauthammer needs to recall that most of the synagogues in Europe don't get burnt down (no comfort for those whose place of worship has been burnt down but crucial nonetheless), that Europe consists of vastly different countries with vastly different social problems- that a statement about Britain is as likely to be true in Poland as one about Texas is to be true about Quebec.

Krauthammer's two errors- the conflation of anti-semitism and disapproval of a particular government (especially given the recent appointment of Leiberman, a government that is far from ideal itself) and the idea that an entire continent thinks the same way and the comparison of the position of Jews in Europe to Jews in Europe in 1940- are real errors that Krauthammer needs to confront.

The Perils of Events: A review of Fatal Purity, Robespierre and the French Revolution

Maximillian Robespierre has stood for many years as the incarnation of the French Revolution. Dr Scurr in her new biography of the revolutionary attempts to grasp what motivated Robespierre and swept him for a brief yet bloody period to the summit of French politics. As with many revolutionaries what we know about Robespierre's early life is shrouded in mystery and distorted by politically inspired calumny, Dr Scurr attempts to navigate a shrewd course through unpromising sources. It is when Robespierre arrives at the centre of French politics that Dr. Scurr's powers as a biographer become more fully exposed and her ability to see how this uncompromising figure was able to paraphrase a critic of Gladstone not only to have the political ace of trumps up his sleeve but to beleive at the same time that playing that ace was in the public interest.

Robespierre emerges from this biography as a man whose good intentions were unparralelled- Scurr is confident enough to label him by his nickname, the Incorruptible throughout the text. His incorruptability proceeded from a disdain for personal emotions- Danton is supposed to have quipped that he found more enjoyment in bed with his wife than at revolutionary tribunals, Robespierre, Scurr rightly argues, disagreed fundamentally. Unlike many of the other brilliant personalities of the French Revolution, Mirabeau who overshadowed him until dieing through illness, Camille Desmoulins a schoolfriend who perished on the guillotine or Jerome Petion who took pride in being Mayor of Paris before his corpse was located, Robespierre vaunted his incorruptable virtuous nature. Comparing himself at one point to Rousseau's God, an allseeing wise leglislator, Robespierre argued that he and he alone was the guardian and true perceiver of the public interest and that disagreement was evidence of disloyalty to that interest.

The tragedian cites in a character a fatal flaw which brings a man down and destroys him in the end, which perverts his sense of justice and leads him to abandon all the things that he had stood for. In Robespierre's character, as presented by Dr. Scurr, there were many flaws but two things in particular stand out as to explain why this man ended up performing the actions that he performed. The first consists in his situation. Dr. Scurr's biography is at its strongest in presenting to us the maelstrom of the revolution- she rightly perceives that revolution and revolutionary terror was terrifying not merely for its victims but for its perpetrators. Once signed the warrent for the King's execution was a warrent for his executors' execution. Mercy once denied could not be expected. In this atmosphere of increasing paranoia and justified fear, a man like Robespierre who frequently collapsed from psychosomatic illness after taking difficult decisions, was pulled further and further from his own ideas. Fearing the dagger, he pressed it into former friends' backs for fear that they might be traitors. In the end this fear led to prioritising the public business over all else- on the death of friends who were assassinated such as Marat, the Incorruptible one turned back to the public business immediatly. The revolutionary leader's arrogance and talent for self-dramatisation allied itself to his paranoia (were part of his paranoia) and turned him into a prosecutor searching always for victims.

The second of Robespierre's flaws was his idea that rather than policy difference or actual treason, the substance of politics was the intentions of politicians or citizens. Robespierre held an opinion much like that expressed by Ireton or Cromwell that intentions made the good citizen. He beleived that betrayel was a matter of the heart and mind, not a matter of concrete action. Therefore he endorsed execution after execution, refused compromise and argued that nobody once found guilty could again be trusted. This kind of politics based on intention and incorruptibility has its contemporary resonances. Robespierre's alliance of this to an extreme paranoia led to the demise of his political opponents and the deaths of thousands. Robespierre in this sense deviated from his fellow revolutionaries like the Abbe Sieyes, in that he unlike them had no sense of a political system- he had idealised schemes of democracy- but blamed the sins of government not upon the system of government but upon the individuals involved. Thus devoid of empathy and basing politics upon ethics, he largely turned politics into prosecution- a prosecution of the characters of those that opposed him.

Maximilian Robespierre's emotional history remains veiled in mystery- we know little about his early years. What we can say though is that a lack of empathy- a lack of sense of how other men thought and could think about politics in a different way to him- meant that he was an incredibly successful revolutionary. Without a sense of empathy or of scruple about attaining his ends, he was vicious and brutal, cutting gordian knots before other politicians saw them. But without those senses, his political career ended up in sabotaging his own political objectives- destroying the revolution he devoted his career to in an orgy of violence and allowing both the Directory and Bonaparte to suggest that chaos had preceded them.

Dr Scurr does end up being, as she wished to be, a critical friend of the revolutionary leader. She shows both the idealism and incapacity at the root of his character. This is a complicated and well developed portrait of both the revolution and the man.

Giraffes

Erik Ringmar in December's issue of the Journal of World History approaches one of the most interesting questions in World History- why China didn't want to explore the world, but Europe did- by looking at different countries and how they reacted to the first import of giraffes into their midst. He takes three giraffes- one that was exported to the Florentine Medici regime in the 15th Century, another that arrived in China in the same century and a third that arrived in France in the 19th Century. From the reactions to these relocated giraffes, Ringmar hypothesizes three models of looking at the outside world- the first medieval Florentine of exoticist curiosity, the second Confucian of analogising the world to refer to China and the third scientific of using the giraffe to constitute an instance of a new law. From these three outlooks, he argues warily we might suggest why China didn't attempt to conquer the world- with neither the curiosity of the Florentines nor the universalism of the European scientist, the outer world simply became an extended metaphor for the Middle Kingdom.

There is much to rejoice in in this delightfully lighthearted article. But there are also things to criticise. He himself recognises that three giraffes or even three reactions to three giraffes do not a history of civilisation consist, they indicate but do not prove. More seriously, Ringmar is too happy with a postmodernist view of the world, too happy with Florentine medievalists and too unhappy with western scientists to completely understand the importance of his giraffes. Western science was never a method to exclude people, rather by universalising knowledge it was far more inclusive than the Florentine or Chinese model. The key difference between the two fifteenth century giraffes and the 19th Century one, is that whereas in principle noone who was not Florentine or Chinese could understand or appreciate the Florentine or Chinese reaction to the giraffe there, in 19th Century Paris, noone who was not a scientist could understand the reaction- science as it knows no colour boundary is a far more inclusive category than Florentine or Chinese which definitely did know colour boundaries. Furthermore by separating out a good enlightenment led by Diderot from a bad scientific enlightenment, Ringmar fails to understand how both enlightenments were the same enlightenment. As Isaiah Berlin made clear the monist attitudes of the enlightenment were held by reformers like Diderot as much as by conservatives like Paley. A racist scientific movement did exist, but perhaps it is a testament to the strength of universalism even in Paris in 1829 that its racism faded as we enter the twentieth century.

The most important and least stressed (obviously its comparative history!) part of Ringmar's article though is how similar our giraffes were. Not in themselves, though no doubt they were similar giraffes (probably slightly confused at being involved in a historiographical experiment let alone at travelling several thousand miles to be stared at!) but in the reactions they provoked. Ringmar's work shows us thousands of human faces, delighted and excited, staring at these giraffes, trying to work them out. The mechanics of astonishment seem to be culturally indeterminate- though the elite understandings of the giraffe may not be. There is something as well in his idea of an inward looking China and an outward looking Europe during these centuries- though warnings from hoary history Proffessors about generalisations flood through my mind at that point (Tang China was definitely more adventurous than dark age Europe etc etc)- and maybe its worth stressing in that context the fact that the Florentine and French regime were involved in an international competition which the vast and swelling Chinese empire never was involved in until the 19th Century, or never involved in with as many other developed states. This is a wonderful article and a true breath of fresh air to find amidst all the scholarly articles which take themselves too seriously- for anyone who is interested in the curious detail and even the comparison of curious details in history go over and read particularly in this article curious details illuminate the whole of a vast question- that's what a farsighted giraffe would do I am sure.

Incidentally if people want to think more about some of the issues raised here (though not unfortunately the travel journals of Giraffes- unfortunately the Internet which doeth all things has not yet provided that essential resource)- Radio 4 did a fascinating program on Chinese science earlier this year- for those merely interested and amused by our giraffes striding through history- we ought to remember as a last thought what Ringmar's research shows- the French were right, a giraffe is a giraffe and more interestingly so is a human a human, the funny thing is that giraffes see humans and humans see giraffes in much the same way when they are introduced for the first time.

LATER AND THANKS TO DAVE IN THE COMMENTS I ought to say as well that beyond giraffes, Ringmar has his own blog which is one of the best on the net- really good fun- though by having such a blog he has selfishly ruined the perfect ending to my article- anyway its well worth a read and has lots of good stuff on it- including a post about a new book which I am sure takes the whole subject of the west, Europe and China onto a new level- my guess is that its a level so high that Erik is the first to survey it, apart from that is the giraffes.

MUCH LATER- on a similar theme I've just written an article on Bits of News which analyses a different approach from Ringmar's to the problem of the reasons for China's relative disinterest in global empire in the early modern period.

The American Option: Anti Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century

The French farmer Jose Bove, shown here, became famous within France for his antiglobalisation activities- including the destruction of a McDonalds Resturant. Bove and his supporters capitalised upon a long established trend within French and indeed European political discourse- fear, repulsion and genuine disdain for their neighbours across the Atlantic. Many books have been written on this subject- some by Americans and the odd Europeans who see anti Americanism as a form of totalitarian, democracy hating, snobbish, failure driven drivel from a set of European imperialists who resent the fact they have been passed by another nation and can't recognise America's unique role on the world stage- others written by anti Americans themselves have isolated the causes of anti-Americanism within Europe as stemming from America's failure to live up to its promise, America's failed policies and hypocrisy especially in the Middle East.

The problem is that neither of these answers really explain the fact that European anti-Americanism has been around for a lot longer than either American hyper power or even this model of American society. Also such analyses fail to see that the same leftbank intellectuals in France who support Bove will go home and watch films like A Bout de Souffle, that model themselves on all American heroes like Humphrey Bogart. Europe's relationship with America has always been ambivalent and complex, as Jessica Gienow-Hecht explains in this article from the American Historical Review. Dr Gienow-Hecht chronicles in various different countries the various shades of anti-Americanism- what she comes up with is that America as an entity shifts in anti-American discourse- its role is to annex xenophobia at an imagined place to a cause located in one's own country. Disdain the sexual libertinism of Rock and Roll and you can locate it in America and cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war. Refuse the proffered hand of globalisation and you can blame the farce upon an imagined America and declare your opposition to it. Its much better to see your opponents as quislings to either cultural cringe or economic control than respect their arguments.

Of course the most profound conclusion of all of this is that there is another country that would fit very readily into Dr Gienow-Hecht's analysis and that is America itself. The model of the first Anti-Americanism might be found in such commentators as Bill O'Reilly who scorn the secular progressive trends within their own country- the model of the second fits very adequately Michael Moore. There is an obvious distinction- both O'Reilly and Moore proclaim themselves patriots- often the anti-American European is a more passive welcomer of what bits of America he regards as good, but as numerous commentators have pointed out within the shell of an anti-American lies the snail of a philo-American.

The image of America therefore is being used in Europe in order to talk about European problems- sometimes to oppose particular policy positions especially in foreign policy (there are moments and places in the world where failures of American foreign policy are crucial to anti-American sentiment)- but just as in the United States, what is unique about America as a nation and a concept is the way that all sides of the debate fuse those two categories. America unlike France or Britain is Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, decadence, military power, global economics, capitalism and all sorts of other values- it is code for those terms. Your attitude to America ultimately depends whether in America or elsewhere on your attitude to the complex set of values and concepts attached to the brand America, some of them contradict, all of them are complexly related and an anti-American onetime can be a pro-American another- but whatever anti-Americanism is, it isn't simple.

Islamic Nationalism

Apologies to readers for not getting to this quicker but this is an important lecture from the leading scholar of political Islam, Olivier Roy. Roy points to the fact that the Islamist movements of the last fifty years are changing their complexion yet again, turning once more to become nationalists and unify nationalism and religion. Roy opposes two paradigms of evolution towards Islamic radicalism- the first being that of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in democratic Turkey and the second being that of the Taliban. He advocates making deals with the Erdogans of the world, or at least allowing them to assume power before the Talibans of the world seize power. He also argues that Islamist movements are trying to annex to themselves the ideal of an uncorrupt man campaigning in the national interest- incorruptable because he is religious.

Roy's image is interesting because it is precisely the image used in many religious societies evolving towards the concept of nationality. We can see say in 17th Century England that rather than loyalty to rulers, loyalty to a public interest and consequently a concern with the ethics and corruption of rulers became more and more important. As I have noted before, perhaps one of the things that is happening in the Middle East is that thanks to the proliferation of new media like Al-Jazeera the ideals of democracy aren't becoming more important but the idea of incorruptibility is. What the consequences of this are may in the long term be to push the Islamic world towards democracy: whether the electorates of those countries will discover that corruption may be an institutional not an individual flaw. While it seems an individual flaw, Islamism will seem increasingly attractive to a number of people who beleive that a clean religious conscience equals an incorruptible moral one.

This stress on corruption might be another varient of the heresy against democracy diagnosed in my last post- in both cases the problem is an avowed monism- an idea that there is one answer to political problems and that the problem of politics is either in finding it or implementing it correctly. The problem is that neither corruption nor inexpertise explains why politics often fails to satisfy the public: it often fails to satisfy them because they disagree with it and because its impossible to satisfy everyone.