Tag: global politics

South Ossetia

So, Russia has sent its army into Georgia.

My mental first draft was all about how there was nothing anyone could do about this, because the precedents that had been set in Yugoslavia were all in Russia’s favour. Defending a breakaway region from the army of the country which it nominally belongs to is all the rage these days.

But it seems the Ossetians’ case is far stronger than that of the Croats or Kosovans. After all, they’ve never really been ruled by Georgia, except for a few years in the chaos of the Soviet disintegration. They’ve been de facto independent of Tbilisi for years. The chain of events was an invasion by Georgia last night, followed by Russia joining in today.

After all, we do hear these days that leaders must learn to think beyond borders. Putin & Medvedev seem to have got the idea.

I’m a bit old fashioned – borders are what keep armies apart, which is generally a good thing. The good case which the Ossetians appear to have is mostly the result of the support they have received from Russia all along. Arguably, had Russia always stayed within its borders, Ossetia would by now be a comfortable and stable province of Georgia.

It should be clear that, as with microgeneration yesterday, I’m playing with concepts here rather than real facts. I’m probably more than averagely knowledgeable about the situation out there, but that’s setting the bar very damned low. I would be seriously deluded if I thought I could come to sensible conclusions about policy in the region based on the factoids accumulated from a handful of news snippets and Economist articles over a few years, plus the occasional spy novel. The only places I would be less qualified to pontificate on would be somewhere really remote and obscure, like, say, Tibet. Somehow the Ossetians have never quite got the attention of the more distant Tibetans – maybe it’s something to do with the romance of a bunch of ancient monks what live on some mountain somewhere, or, to put it another way, that it’s much easier to have sympathy for separatist rebels when you’re never likely to actually meet them. Separatist rebels are bad news, however justified their cause.

Speaking of Tibet, this all blew up on opening day of the Olympics… coincidence? I would like to think it’s just that someone was so pissed off at the thought of the next three weeks of television that they started a war just to avoid the boredom, but the connection may be more serious. The “spirit of international unity” that’s supposed to imbue the whole binge makes it less likely that anyone will really make a stink. If nothing else, various world leaders are actually attending the stupid thing, making it that bit harder to make decisions. That would seem to play into the hands of the Russians, however, and my (wholly unreliable) impression is that this was actually triggered by Georgia. Perhaps Saakashvili thought that if he achieved enough fast enough, the Russians would be less likely to respond, what with the Olympics and everything.

Myanmar

MM is back to form today after a weak outing last week. One point he makes in passing, which I have been meaning to say myself, is that the government of Myanmar would have to be completely nuts to let aid agencies stomp all over their country. It would be as stupid as the government of Iran refraining from supporting and arming its allies in Iraq.

Myanmar Faces Sanctions Unless Democracy Talks Begin, Bush Says – Bloomberg, Dec 2007

Brown calls for more EU sanctions on Myanmar – Reuters, Oct 2007

Now, it could be argued that the needs of the victim of the cyclone should outweigh political considerations. But if those needs should outweigh the desire of the Myanmar authorities not to invite their avowed enemies into their own power structure, then perhaps they should also outweigh the desire of Western governments to get their agents into Myanmar. Money could be given direct to the government, or else given to the Russians or Chinese to pass on. What’s that? We don’t want to give the money to any of those governments because we don’t like them? So much for humanitarianism over politics.

France, Britain and the United States, three of the U.N. Security Council’s five veto-wielding members, have indicated they want the council to take action to get Myanmar’s leaders to open its borders to more aid.

But China and Russia as well as some other non-veto-wielding members have opposed having the U.N. body that deals with peace and security take up a humanitarian catastrophe.

Now, it may well be that the West has good reasons for wanting to replace the government of Myanmar with one under its own influence. But the unspoken assumption is that this rightness means that the openly-stated aim of overthrowing the government should be ignored by everyone when the subject of disaster relief comes up. This is the exact same error I complained about with Iraq. “Supporting democracy” in a country that has a non-democratic government means being an enemy of that country. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it has to be remembered. The government in question is likely to remember even when we don’t.

Those people running Myanmar cannot reasonably be expected to overlook the fact that every government offering aid is determined to remove them from office in a process that is likely to end up with them being lynched. The mere fact that they ought to be lynched does not come into their calculations.

(Let’s throw this in for luck: …there is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta.)

Black Mass

As I mentioned some time ago, I planned to buy John Gray’s Black Mass when it came out in paperback. I came away from the book very disappointed.

I would guess the core of the book is the second half, which is a criticism of the Iraq war. This is a very strong attack on the overconfidence of the idea that a western democracy could be set up in Iraq, and on both the deception and self-delusion of the leading advocates of war.

That much is fine, but criticisms of the Iraq war are ten a penny. The book as a whole is an attempt to generalise from that to put neoconservatism in a tradition of rational utopianism starting with the enlightenment. Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, neo-liberalism and even Al-Quaeda itself are all described as incarnations of a single myth of an end time of perfect rule spread across the whole world by human rationality.

The problem with the thesis is that it proves too much. By the standards he sets, there’s hardly a movement imaginable that would not be able to qualify as utopian. If you imagine a better future than the present, you’re a utopian. If you rhetorically appeal to any religious or mythical glory, you’re a utopian (even if the rhetoric is obvious hyperbole). If you claim that something that worked in one country could work in another, you’re a utopian. If you exhibit undue confidence in the success of your current policy (such a rarity among politicians), you’re a utopian. I felt that the only movements that avoided being labelled as a utopian were those which, with hindsight, actually achieved durable success. Therefore Reagan, despite all his rhetoric, was no utopian, because communism was really defeated.

The book also suffers by the association of the Bush regime with actual evangelical Christianity. While this might casually appear to be consistent with the argument, every earlier version of the utopia myth Gray describes relies on actual human achievement without divine assistance. The accidental coalition between secular ex-Trotskyite empire-builders and devout backwoods millenarialists plays no part in his wider thesis.

Fundamentally, I think Gray is misunderstanding the importance of myth in politics. The point is not that people believe the utopian myth to be true, it’s that a narrative, whether an explanation of the past or a forecast for the future, feels subjectively more convincing if it accords with some myth than if it doesn’t. The follower of Marxism or neoconservatism or whatever would not say that the final victory was inevitable, but the theories of the leaders would feel more persuasive because they carried in them the essence of the myth. Some ideas are easier to get carried away by than others.

And then there’s the final chapter. Oh dear. I really don’t want Anomaly to become simply a climate denial blog, but there’s something overwhelmingly ridiculous about spending a whole book attacking political movements which you claim are apocalyptic religion in disguise, and then casually, in passing, signing up to the most alarmist of all climate change predictions in their entirety, and citing as scientific authority a book entitled “The Revenge of Gaia“. If someone could explain that level of blindness in otherwise highly intelligent commentators, and I certainly can’t, they would be making a real contribution to the understanding of political history.

The only slight indication of awareness of the contradiction in his position is the following feeble half-justification:

… In another sense the prospect is not apocalyptic at all. In wrecking the planetary environment humans are only doing what they have done innumerable times before on a local level …

In the end the point is that Gray is not against mythology, only against one particular myth:

Happily, humanity has other myths, which can help it see more clearly. In the Genesis story humans were banished from paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge and had to survive by their labours ever after. There is no promise here of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit has been eaten there is no going back. The same truth is preserved in the Greek story of Prometheus, and in many other traditions. These ancient legends are better guides to the present than modern myths of progress and utopia.

NO! STOP! The problem is with mythology as a guide to policy, not with just one myth. Myths are bugs in the mind, nothing more. The answer to bad policy based on myths is not other myths, it’s accuracy and humility.

Of course, his own continuing preference for myth might explain the vehemence of the book. His claim that neo-liberals believed in their inevitable global dominance struck me as very strange: if neo-liberal means people like me, and I normally interpret it that way, we have always inclined more to pessimism and defeatism than triumphalism, even at the end of the eighties when a few of our ideas like privatisation were spreading across the world. But of course Gray himself was one of us at one time, and if he took a millenarian view of things at the time, then, like me sticking up for the Men in Skirts, he could be expected to turn against his old ideas violently. But his error was not his liberalism, it was his mythologising, and he has changed the myth instead of keeping the politics and rejecting myth.

Gray needs to put down Leo Strauss and the Bible, and read some Pratchett.

20th Century Wars

Via L&P, a good piece in the Grauniad about the actual motivations behind the second world war. Right or wrong, WWII was a practical war against a geopolitical rival, not a crusade for justice or human rights.

Combining it with the latest excellent essays from Mencius (1, 2, more still to come), it would seem that the conventional wisdom is reversed: the first world war was an ideological war, fought in the name of democracy, while the second was a pragmatic struggle for power and influence.

It would be consistent with my theory of Humanitarian Intervention (and why not to do it), that the war fought for realpolitik has proved easier to justify in hindsight than the war fought for democratic ideology.

Sovereignty and Human Rights

Britain has a very secure government. We are blessed with a government that doesn’t have to worry much about being invaded or overthrown, and can devote its attention to vital issues such as whether people are lying on school application forms.

The people of Somalia are not so blessed. Their government does not have the resources to give its citizens ASBOs or check that only genuine garden waste is placed in the brown bins. Nonetheless, it does the best it can to provide a semblance of order and peace. Unlicensed interior design work may go unchecked, but piracy on the high seas is likely to be punished with beheading.

In one way this is a good thing, because it’s actually quite important that cargo travels unimpeded up and down the coast of Africa without being snaffled by Captain Blood and his chums. But, on the other hand, our government officially believes that for a pirate to have his head detached, anywhere in the world, is an infringement of his human rights.

Therefore, the Royal Naval captain that encounters these miscreants is in a bit of a bind. If he lets them go, trade will continue to be impeded. If he takes them home to Britain, they will get the ASBO they so richly deserve, and can then claim Asylum as potential victims of the Somalians’ inhumanity. This is likely to be frowned on by the man in the street. Dropping them off back in Somalia to have their blocks knocked off is right out.

If the Somalis had caught them themselves, there would not have been an issue. Heads would be removed, trade would flow, Amnesty International would increment a box in a spreadsheet, and we would not take our eyes off The Apprentice. But because we want, for our own good reason, to assist the Somalian government in its basic duty to order its territory and territorial waters, the otherwise harmless hypocrisy gets in the way.

The hypocrisy should go. We have our standards, and other people have theirs. If we disagree sufficiently with a foreign government, we might attempt to overthrow and replace it, but that’s a big undertaking not to be treated lightly. If we are going to cooperate with foreigners to the extent of subsidizing their infrastructure or sending our leading exponents of the hop-skip-and-jump to compete there, we need to respect their sovereignty.

How bad is Mugabe?

The history of Zimbabwe, as seen from here via the media, is slightly strange. Mugabe and ZANU took over in 1980 and ruled, if not well, then at least averagely by African standards for twenty years. Then in 2000, came the land seizures, leading to the steady disintegration of agriculture, and eventually to the utter economic failure of today.

The assumption in these parts seems to be that Mugabe went bonkers in 2000. That is possible. But it seems at least as likely, based on the scant facts presented, that he held out against the destruction of white-owned agriculture for twenty years, and in 2000 could do so no longer. As I explained in the British context, it would be out of the question for him to defend his policy change in that way.

If my guess is correct, then the most important fact about Zimbabwe politics is that there is a powerful group of armed “war veterans” who will take what they want (land) and the most powerful individual in the country (Mugabe) is unable to stop them. If that is true, then the outlook, whoever is finally declared to have won the election, is not good.

It may be that the MDC, with western support, would be able to protect private property sufficiently for the economy to start to recover. If that is so, then the basic difference between ZANU and the MDC is that the MDC would have western support and ZANU doesn’t. By a startling coincidence, that is exactly what Mugabe claims.

Aside from the destruction of the economy, the alleged evils of Mugabe are not so obvious. The level of political oppression that has been reported is what I would term mild to moderate: no worse than Russia and considerably better than China.

I suppose there’s no direction to go but forwards, and forwards means getting rid of Mugabe and starting again with a new set of rulers who can accept outside help in restraining the “war veterans”. But I expect civil war. My bet would be that Iraq will be peaceful and prosperous before Zimbabwe is.

Ingredients of Modernity

Looking at modern Western society, and comparing with the past, there are about five things we have which clearly distinguish us from past societies.

We have:

  1. Prosperity
  2. Individual Freedom
  3. Democracy
  4. Political Stability
  5. Secularism

Following Mencius Moldbug, I have been wondering, particularly, what the relationship Democracy has to Freedom and Prosperity. Is it synergistic with them, as normally assumed, or parasitic on them, as MM claims?

I’ve thrown the last two into the mix in case they are important. Much of Europe has been politically unstable within the last 70 years or so, but possibly that is long enough. The fifth ingredient is really the weakened influence of religion, or at least of Christianity; I’m not sure that secularism is exactly the right word for what I mean.

I’m prepared to accept without discussion the dependence of prosperity on freedom. The freedom to do business freely means the freedom to associate, to communicate, to hold private property, and so on – those freedoms can only be taken away at the cost of stifling economic development. This podcast went into detail, but the basic idea is simple enough.

I think it is at least equally obvious that prosperity depends on political stability. Revolutions are just so damned destructive.

So how does Democracy fit in? The pro-democracy argument is that democracy is the buffer that allows freedom and political stability to coexist; that a non-democratic state will generally be forced to curtail freedom in order to preserve stability.

Anti-democrats can argue that democracy is frequently corrosive of political stability, freedom, or both. But that argument is not sufficient. It may be that democracy does not guarantee either freedom or stability, and yet it may nevertheless be the case that the conjunction of freedom and stability depends on democracy.

Are there historical non-democratic states that were both free and stable? Some past European monarchies might be claimed to fit. For that matter, Victorian Britain was not democratic in the modern sense, due to property qualifications. Were these free enough to count? If attempting to change the government is an essential freedom, then no non-democracy can be considered free, but even without begging the question that way, it is still debatable.

And perhaps it is not freedom that is incompatible with stable non-democracy, but freedom plus prosperity. If the poor are poor enough, they have no power which needs to be recognised by the system. Once a modern economy gets going, they have sufficient resources to demand a share in power.

That actually sounds very plausible to me. But perhaps there is some alternative to democracy that can square the circle between a proletariat unconstrained by either poverty or lack of personal freedom, and a government that excludes them from power.

The best answer that MM has come with is the machine gun.

Perhaps the great tragedy of democracy is that mob power became identified with political power at exactly the last point in history at which mobs were militarily relevant. In the age of the machine gun, the military is at all time sovereign whether it likes it or not. As long as it acts in a unified and disciplined way, it can do whatever it wants. As the experience of China shows, it’s by no means always a mistake to fire into a mob. If the sovereigns of the Concert of Europe had realized that technology was on their side, the murderous degringolade of the 20th century might never have happened.

It might be the kool-aid, but somehow I’m just not able to find that convincing. Surely it can’t be that simple? I suppose the standard objection is that at some point the army will refuse to fire.

I haven’t changed my mind since July: While I accept many of the criticisms of the anti-democrats, and the proposition that democratic states preserve freedom only by restraining democracy, the costs of defending a rationally-run state seem prohibitive.

In other words, I don’t really like democracy; I think it’s basically a trick, but it’s a necessary trick. Giving the mob enough power to pacify it is less damaging than forcing it to accept not having power.

This conclusion is significant for developing countries. I think they need individual freedom, they need political stability, they need prosperity, and, in the long run, they will need democracy in order to make the new forces created by prosperity and freedom balance. Starting with democracy is the wrong way round, as without freedom and prosperity it will be only nominal.

Experiment in Basra

(A follow-up to When to Leave Iraq)

It is a couple of months since the British army withdrew from the city of Basra.

The question which I asked in March about the occupation of Iraq is to what extent the soldiers were preventing violent disorder by force, and to what extent they were provoking it by being a foreign army.

There was an early impression that the handover to Iraqi security forces had reduced violence. Iraqis say Basra quieter after British troop pullout

Looking at this month, it’s not so clear:
Iraq’s Basra police chief escapes assassination bid.
Gunmen clash with security forces in Iraq’s Basra

I think that as long as withdrawal (partial or full) isn’t catastrophic, then it’s a good thing. The kind of power struggle that is going on in Basra now is inevitable, and can only be postponed, not prevented, by hanging on longer. It may reach a stalemate or equilibrium, from which peaceful politics can continue. It’s the kind of conflict that exists in many countries. The presence of an occupying army, on the other hand is an irritant, perhaps minor at times, but one that can always get worse but is not likely to ever go away while the occupation persists.

What is hardest to remember is that, even if the politicians and generals want nothing but peace and prosperity for the country they occupy, it is very very hard to convince the people of that. When the subject comes round to the distrust of the occupying force, there is a temptation to dismiss the distrust, merely because it is unjustified. But that doesn’t make it go away.

There will be trouble when British and American troops leave Iraq, or any part of it. But there is trouble already. Unless the trouble after leaving is very much worse, then it is better to leave, because the conflicts that happen between locals move towards a solution, and the conflicts against the occupiers don’t.

Falkland Island Oil

This Guardian article (via L&P) talks about national claims to mineral rights beyond territorial waters — in particular the UK’s claims around the Falkland Islands and Rockall.

My immediate response was to the claim in the article:

the value of the oil under the sea in the region [of the Falkland Islands] is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could be up to 60m barrels under the ocean floor.

60 million barrels. At $80/barrel, that is worth a bit under 5 billion dollars, or 2.5 billion pounds — less than a third of the cost of the 2012 Olympics, and probably much less than the cost of setting up extraction infrastructure. Either The Guardian has lost a lot of zeros, or the oil in the region is utterly insignificant.Luckily, I didn’t get where I am today by believing everything the Guardian told me. Looking at Wikipedia, it appears the Guardian is confusing millions and billions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Falkland_Islands#Petroleum_exploration_and_reserves It is considered probable that more than 60 billion petroleum barrels (10 km³) have been generated in the North Falkland Basin(I also learned that 60 million barrels is about two weeks’ current production from the North Sea.)

Things to consider:

  • There is believed to be significant oil near the Falklands.
  • The Guardian doesn’t know millions from billions.
  • Liberty and Power can’t see at a glance that 60 million barrels of oil is nothing, despite the fact that the price of a barrel of oil is hardly an obscure piece of knowledge these days.
  • I was going to go on about much-maligned Wikipedia being more reliable than the Guardian, but between drafting and posting this, the Guardian has (a) corrected the error and (b) left a note explaining the correction. Perhaps I should say that Wikipedia is more reliable than today’s Guardian, in that today’s Guardian has had little time to be fixed. However, if the fact in question is actually new (as opposed to background, like the 6 million barrels), which is at least suggested by insisting on today’s paper, then we all know Wikipedia is unreliable too. So scrub that one. Full marks to the Guardian for the promptness and manner of the correction.

In the long term, we cannot hold onto valuable mineral reserves in the South Atlantic. Defending them is justifiable, but probably not practical.

The time to negotiate is now. (Well, I’ve been saying this for 10+ years, so the best time has passed, but there is still an opportunity). We want:

  • A revenue-sharing agreement for mineral rights for 50 years.
  • Rights of the inhabitants guaranteed for 50 years.
  • A Northern Ireland style arrangement with oversight by the South American partner.
  • Sovereignty to devolve to the South American partner after the 50 years, Hong Kong style.

Argentina is the obvious partner for such a deal, but not the only possible one. Chile is, I believe, the closest mainland. Venezuela has the oil production infrastructure. And if none of them offer anything decent, hey, maybe the US would like a naval base or something. Let the bidding commence.

John Gray on progress

I spotted the latest book by John Gray in a bookshop, and was a little confused because I remembered him as a classical liberal from reading his book Liberalism when I was a student. I wondered whether there was another John Gray. Wikipedia sorted me out: there is only one John Gray (apart from this one, who isn’t relevant), but his views have changed over the years.

The links from the Wikipedia article are engrossing – this attack on Blair and neoconservatism is very persuasive, and led me to the 1999 speech I referred to in my previous piece. The discussion with Laurie Taylor about the religious and utopian aspects of modern humanism chimes very closely with the cryptocalvinism theory of Unqualified Reservations blog, which I have already praised.

But one of the major thrusts of his current arguments is one that would never have struck me as being necessary to make. In the Laurie Taylor piece, particularly, he is very keen to insist that there is not really any such thing as progress. We have progressed in technology, and science is dragged forwards as a result, but morality is not on a steadily improving track.

This is so obvious: anyone can tell the difference between a machine that works and one that doesn’t, so technology does not regress unless the economy producing it is destroyed. It is hard to deny the science underlying working technology, so science tends to progress along with the technology – it can on occasionally jump ahead, and even drop back level again, but it does not fall behind.

There is no equivalent incontrovertible test between good morality and bad morality, so morality can wander all over the shop, go round in circles, or go wild. In the long run, one could say that good morality works for its society and bad morality doesn’t, but so many other things affect the success of a society – movements of power and technology – that it doesn’t constitute an obvious experimental test.

History is one damned thing after another; there is no meaning to our lives unless we choose to pick one; humanity can probably solve most of the problems it encounters, but more will come along and there is no good reason to believe they can all be solved. It’s disorienting that people I consider sensible might doubt any of these things.

Black Mass is on my paperback list, anyway.