How paranoid nationalism corrupts

From The Economist

People seek strength and solace in their tribe, their faith or their nation. And you can see why. If they feel empathy for their fellow citizens, they are more likely to pull together for the common good. In the 19th and 20th centuries love of country spurred people to seek their freedom from imperial capitals in distant countries. Today Ukrainians are making heroic sacrifices to defend their homeland against Russian invaders.

Unfortunately, the love of “us” has an ugly cousin: the fear and suspicion of “them”, a paranoid nationalism that works against tolerant values such as an openness to unfamiliar people and new ideas. What is more, cynical politicians have come to understand that they can exploit this sort of nationalism, by whipping up mistrust and hatred and harnessing them to benefit themselves and their cronies.

The post-war order of open trade and universal values is strained by the rivalry of America and China. Ordinary people feel threatened by forces beyond their control, from hunger and poverty to climate change and violence. Using paranoid nationalism, parasitic politicians prey on their citizens’ fears and degrade the global order, all in the pursuit of their own power.

As our Briefing describes, paranoid nationalism works by a mix of exaggeration and lies. Vladimir Putin claims that Ukraine is a nato puppet, whose Nazi cliques threaten Russia; India’s ruling party warns that Muslims are waging a “love jihad” to seduce Hindu maidens; Tunisia’s president decries a black African “plot” to replace his country’s Arab majority. Preachers of paranoid nationalism harm the targets of their rhetoric, obviously, but their real intention is to hoodwink their own followers. By inflaming nationalist fervour, self-serving leaders can more easily win power and, once in office, they can distract public attention from their abuses by calling out the supposed enemies who would otherwise keep them in check.

Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, shows how effective this can be. Since he returned to power in 2006, he has demonised the United States and branded his opponents “agents of the Yankee empire”. He controls the media and has put his family in positions of influence. After mass protests erupted in 2018 at the regime’s graft and brutality, the Ortegas called the protesters “vampires” and locked them up. On August 23rd they banned the Jesuits, a Catholic order that has worked in Nicaragua since before it was a country, on the pretext that a Jesuit university was a “centre of terrorism”.

Rabble-rousing often leads to robbery. Like the Ortegas, some nationalist leaders seek to capture the state by stuffing it with their cronies or ethnic kin. The use of this technique under Jacob Zuma, a former president of South Africa, is one reason why the national power company is too riddled with corruption to keep the lights on. Our statistical analysis suggests that governments have grown more nationalistic since 2012, and that the more nationalistic they are, the more corrupt they tend to be.

But the more important role of paranoid nationalism is as a tool to dismantle the checks and balances that underpin good governance: a free press, independent courts, ngos and a loyal opposition. Leaders do not say: “I want to purge the electoral commission so I can block my political opponents.” They say: “The commissioners are traitors!” They do not admit that they want to suppress ngos to evade scrutiny. They pass laws defining as “foreign agents” any organisation that receives foreign funds or even advice, and impose draconian controls on such bodies or simply ban them. They do not shut down the press, they own it. By one estimate, at least 50 countries have curbed civil society in recent years.

An example is the president of Tunisia, Kais Saied. Before he blamed black people for his country’s problems, he was unpopular because of his dismal handling of the economy. Now Tunisians are cheering his bold stand against a tiny, transient minority. Meanwhile Mr Saied has gutted the judiciary and closed the anti-corruption commission, and graft has grown worse.

Abuses are easier when institutions are weak: the despots of Nicaragua, Iran or Zimbabwe are far less constrained than the leaders of say, Hungary or Israel. But in all these countries (and many more), the men in power have invented or exaggerated threats to the nation as a pretext to weaken the courts, the press or the opposition. And this has either prolonged a corrupt administration or made it worse.

Paranoid nationalism is part of a backlash against good governance. The end of the cold war led to a blossoming of democracy around the world. Country after country introduced free elections and limits on executive power. Many power- and plunder-hungry politicians chafed at this. Amid the general disillusion that followed the financial crisis of 2007-09, they saw an opportunity to take back control. Paranoid nationalism gave them a tool to dismantle some of those pesky checks and balances.

Because these restraints often came with Western encouragement, if not Western funding, leaders have found it easier to depict the champions of good government as being foreign stooges. In countries that have endured colonial rule—or interference by the United States, as have many in Latin America—the message finds a ready audience. If a leader can create a climate of such deep suspicion that loyalty comes before truth, then every critic can be branded a traitor.

First resort of the scoundrel

Paranoid nationalism is not about to disappear. Leaders are learning from each other. They are also freer to act than they were even a decade ago. Not only has the West lost faith in its programme of spreading democracy and good governance, but China—a paranoid nationalist that is inclined to spot slights and threats around every corner—is promoting the idea that universal values of tolerance and good governance are a racist form of imperialism. It prefers non-interference from abroad and zero-criticism at home. If only they could see through the lies behind paranoid nationalism, ordinary people would realise how wrong China’s campaign is. There is nothing racist or disloyal about wishing for a better life. 

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What is Modi-Shah BJP’s ideology? You’re wrong if you say Right wing, because it’s Hindu Left

Modi-Shah BJP government is Right only on religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other.writes SHEKHAR GUPTA in The Print
 

 


Prashant Kishor, who prefers to be described as a political aide rather than a strategist, which is generally the preferred usage for him, featured in our serious conversational show ‘Off The Cuff’ this week. Neelam Pandey, a senior member of our political reporting team at ThePrint, co-hosted it with me.

At some point, we asked him the question that’s always intrigued us. Does he have an ideology? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that he’s worked with Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee, Congress-SP (Uttar Pradesh, 2017), M.K. Stalin, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, Amarinder Singh and more?

To our surprise, he said no, I am not ideology-agnostic, you can call me Left-of-Centre. And then went on to elaborate what he meant, by using Mahatma Gandhi’s example. And so on. I noticed later, incidentally, that Kishor’s Twitter bio begins with the words “Revere Gandhi…”

His claim to a Centre-Left ideology set us thinking. What if we asked any of the other key political leaders the same question today? What is your ideology? Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Andhra’s Jagan, Tamil Nadu’s Stalin, Telangana’s KCR and so on. If any of them chooses to answer that question — the answer, honest or not, will be about the same. Everyone in Indian politics now wades in the waters of varying depth somewhere on the Left side of the pool. Nobody will say I stand on the Right.

Which brings us to the trick question. What would Narendra Modi’s answer be? We are, of course, making a brave and far-out presumption that he lets us or anyone ask him such a direct question: What’s your ideology, Prime Minister sir? Now, whether you are fan or a critic, chances are, your immediate response will be, of course the Right wing.

Over the past seven years since the Modi-Shah BJP has been in power, “Right wing” has become the widely accepted usage for the party, and the ideological forces behind it. We need to examine if this passes the test of facts. And fasten seat belts. Because, I will then make the case to you that what Modi and his BJP represent today is not a domineering national force of the Hindu Right. It is, on the other hand, the Hindu Left.

The Left-Right descriptors over time have become mixed up and confusing. In governance terms, the Right means first of all, social conservatism, strong religiosity, hard nationalism, low threshold for criticism, an authoritarian outlook. On all these parameters, the Modi government and today’s BJP pass the test of being Right wing. The reason I qualify it here is that we do not get caught in simplistic binaries. On all of these, this BJP and Modi are no different from, say, the Republicans in the US or the British Conservatives. Then, we enter contentious zones. 

How do we, then come to our argument that the Modi-Shah-Yogi BJP is not a force of the pure Right or even the Hindu Right, but of the Hindu Left?

Check out the many steps the Modi government has taken on the economy in the past seven-plus years. For historical reference, look back at the previous BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It made its commitment to getting the government out of business explicit, and set up a disinvestment ministry. When the party returned to power in 2014, you would have expected it to bring that ministry back. No such thing happened, although now there is a department, DIPAM, in the finance ministry with a full secretary.

It is only now that there is heady talk of disinvestment, but not so much has happened yet, with the sterling exception of Air India. Much other privatisation is still merely talk, or sleight of hand. As in, getting one public sector giant to acquire a smaller one, and the government, as the majority shareholder, cashing out to balance its deficit. But it is, as we had said in an earlier National Interest, like genius Milo Minderbender of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 trading with himself and making a profit. Of course, using the state’s products and cash.

Actually, this gets worse than a sleight of hand often enough. Think of the LIC, or even ONGC, being made to buy another PSU the government wants to ‘disinvest’ from. A bunch of money is paid out to the government. Our complaint isn’t that it disappears into that bottomless pit called the Consolidated Fund of India. If you believed in a market economy, you would have no complaint if the LIC or ONGC paid out dividends from its profits to its only, or overwhelming, shareholder, the government. But when the government makes them buy assets from it, these companies are not necessarily acting in the best interests of the policy holder or the minority shareholder. We are not saying that it always works out to their detriment, but the fact is these are not decisions these companies’ boards are taking with these non-sarkari shareholders’ interests at the top of their minds. This is a characteristic of the Left, not Right.

The Left is also known for handout economics, large, ambitious, welfare schemes involving redistribution of large chunks of the revenues. Which is precisely what the Modi government has been doing, from the MGNREGA it inherited to Gram Awas, toilet-building, Ujjwala, direct cash transfers to farmers and the poor, free grain and so on. Have you noticed, in fact, how muted as the opposition criticism of this governments’ Budgets has been?

There is some usual sniggering about being “pro-rich” etc. But everybody also notices that taxes on individuals now are the highest — almost 44 per cent — since reform began. Add to that an average of 18 per cent or so GST on goods and services that people, especially the rich, consume. The Left would applaud this. Of course, they’d want this to be even higher. Hopefully not the 97 per cent it was at Indira Gandhi’s socialist peak, when the foundation of the parallel black economy was laid. 
An expanding, large, maai-baap (mom & dad) sarkar is something the Leftists love. See the expansion of our government in the Modi era. More and more Bhawans have come up in Delhi to accommodate a burgeoning government. Now the new Central Vista will create space for more. A comparison again with Vajpayee government. He had no hesitation selling the loss-making Lodhi Hotel in the heart of Delhi. An even bigger PSU dud was Hotel Janpath. Which, instead of being sold, has now become another set of offices and government accommodation. Samrat Hotel, next to Ashoka, ceased to be a hotel a long time ago. It has become a sarkari bhawan too. In fact, almost everyone here will be surprised when I tell you that even the new Lok Pal (do you remember we had appointed one? Okay, what’s his name?) has been given half a floor here.

Our taxes are higher than in a generation, our government is bigger than two generations and still growing, we ‘privatise’ our companies often by selling one PSU to another, now our government also decides for all of the country which Covid vaccine to have when, to be allowed boosters or not, and what can be sold in India. In a genuinely free market, there will be shops and buyers for Covaxin, Covishield, Sputnik, Pfizer and Moderna.

As with cars, consumers can choose a Maruti or a Mercedes. But not vaccines. Why? Because ours is a maai-baap sarkar. It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other. The reason we call Modi-BJP ideology as the Hindu Left.

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US-China rivalry drives the retreat of market economics

Gideon Rachman in The FT 

Old ideas are like old clothes — wait long enough and they will come back into fashion. Thirty years ago, “industrial policy” was about as fashionable as a bowler hat. But now governments all over the world, from Washington to Beijing and New Delhi to London, are rediscovering the joy of subsidies and singing the praises of economic self-reliance and “strategic” investment. 

The significance of this development goes well beyond economics. The international embrace of free markets and globalisation in the 1990s went hand in hand with declining geopolitical tension. The cold war was over and governments were competing to attract investment rather than to dominate territory. 

Now the resurgence of geopolitical rivalry is driving the new fashion for state intervention in the economy. As trust declines between the US and China, so each has begun to see reliance on the other for any vital commodity — whether semiconductors or rare-earth minerals — as a dangerous vulnerability. Domestic production and security of supply are the new watchwords. 

As the economic and industrial struggle intensifies, the US has banned the exports of key technologies to China and pushed to repatriate supply chains. It is also moving towards direct state-funding of semiconductor manufacturing. For its part, China has adopted a “dual circulation” economy policy that emphasises domestic demand and the achievement of “major breakthroughs in key technologies”. The government of Xi Jinping is also tightening state control over the tech sector. 

The logic of an arms race is setting in, as each side justifies its moves towards protectionism as a response to actions by the other side. In Washington, the US-China Strategic Competition Act, currently wending its way through Congress, accuses China of pursuing “state-led mercantilist economic policies” and industrial espionage. The announcement in 2015 of Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” industrial strategy is often cited as a turning point. In Beijing, by contrast, it is argued that a fading America has turned against globalisation in an effort to block China’s rise. President Xi has said the backlash against globalisation in the west means China must become more self-reliant. 

The new emphasis on industrial strategy is not confined to the US and China. In India, Narendra Modi’s government is promoting a policy of Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India), which encourages domestic production of key commodities. The EU published a paper on industrial strategy last year, which is seen as part of a drive towards strategic autonomy and less reliance on the outside world. Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, has called for Europe to have “mastery and ownership of key technologies”. 

Even a Conservative administration in Britain is turning away from the laissez-faire economics championed by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and seeking to protect strategic industries. The government is reviewing whether to block the sale of Arm, a UK chipmaker, to Nvidia, a US company. The UK government has also bought a controlling stake in a failing satellite business, OneWeb. 

Covid-19 has strengthened the fashion for industrial policy. The domestic production of vaccines is increasingly seen as a vital national interest. Even as they decry “vaccine nationalism” elsewhere, many governments have moved to restrict exports and to build up domestic suppliers. The lessons about national resilience learnt from the pandemic may now be applied to other areas, from energy to food supplies. 

In the US, national security arguments for industrial policy are meshing with the wider backlash against globalisation and free trade. Joe Biden’s rhetoric is frankly protectionist. The president proclaimed to Congress: “All the investments in the American jobs plan will be guided by one principle: Buy American.” 

In an article last year, Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, urged the security establishment to “move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years” and to accept that “industrial policy is deeply American”. The US, he argued, will continue to lose ground to China on key technologies such as 5G and solar panels, “if Washington continues to rely so heavily on private sector research and development”. 

Many of these arguments will sound like common sense to voters. Protectionism and state intervention often does. But free-market economists are aghast. Swaminathan Aiyar, a prominent commentator in India, laments the return of the failed ideas of the past, arguing that: “Self sufficiency was what Nehru and Indira Gandhi tried in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a horrible and terrible flop.” Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, recently decried “America’s self-defeating economic retreat”, arguing that policies aimed at propping up chosen industries or regions usually end in costly failure. 

As tensions rise between China, the US and other major powers, it is understandable that these countries will look at the security implications of key technologies. But claims by politicians that industrial policy will also produce better-paying jobs and a more productive economy deserve to be treated with deep scepticism. Sometimes ideas go out of fashion for a reason.

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The Poor and the Covid vaccine

Achal Prabhala and Leena Menghaney in The Guardian

As the UK’s vaccination programme was “knocked off course” due to a delay in receiving five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India, a far more chilling reality was unfolding: about a third of all humanity, living in the poorest countries, found out that they will get almost no coronavirus vaccines in the near future because of India’s urgent need to vaccinate its own massive population.

It’s somewhat rich for figures in Britain to accuse India of vaccine nationalism. That the UK, which has vaccinated nearly 50% of its adults with at least one dose, should demand vaccines from India, which has only vaccinated 3% of its people so far, is immoral. That the UK has already received several million doses from India, alongside other rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and Canada, is a travesty.

The billions of AstraZeneca doses being produced by the Serum Institute in India are not for rich countries – and, in fact, not even for India alone: they are for all 92 of the poorest countries in the world.

Except they’re now being treated as the sovereign property of the Indian government.

How did we get here? Exactly one year ago, researchers at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, frontrunners in the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, stated that they intended to allow any manufacturer, anywhere, the rights to their jab. One of the early licences they signed was with the Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. One month later, acting on advice from the Gates Foundation, Oxford changed course and signed over exclusive rights to AstraZeneca, a UK-based multinational pharmaceutical group.

AstraZeneca and Serum signed a new deal. Serum would produce vaccines for all poor countries eligible for assistance by Gavi, the Vaccines Alliance – an organisation backed by rich countries’ governments and the Gates Foundation. These 92 nations together counted for half the world – or nearly four billion people. India’s fair share of these vaccines, by population, should have been 35%. However there was an unwritten arrangement that Serum would earmark 50% of its supply for domestic use and 50% for export.

The deal included a clause that allowed AstraZeneca to approve exports to countries not listed in the agreement. Some countries which asked for emergency vaccine shipments from Serum, including South Africa and Brazil, were justified: they had nothing else. Rich countries like the UK and Canada, however, which had bought up more doses than required to vaccinate their people, to the detriment of everyone else, had no moral right to dip into a pool of vaccines designated for poor countries.

Paradoxically, when South Africa and India asked the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive patents and other pharmaceutical monopolies so that vaccines could be manufactured more widely to prevent shortfalls in supply, among the first countries to object were the UK, Canada and Brazil. They were the very governments that would later be asking India to solve their own shortfalls in supply.

The deal did not include restrictions on what price Serum could charge, despite AstraZeneca’s pledge to sell its vaccine for no profit “during the pandemic”, which led to Uganda, which is among the poorest countries on Earth, paying three times more than Europe for the same vaccine. (An AstraZeneca spokesperson told Politico that the “price of the vaccine will differ due to a number of factors, including the cost of manufacturing – which varies depending on the geographic region – and volumes requested by the countries”.)

As it became clear that the western pharmaceutical industry could barely supply the west, let alone anywhere else, many countries turned to Chinese and Russian vaccines. Meanwhile, the Covax Facility – the Gavi-backed outfit that actually procures vaccines for poor countries – stuck to its guns and made deals exclusively with western vaccine manufacturers. From those deals, the AstraZeneca vaccine is now the only viable candidate it has. The bulk of the supply of this vaccine comes from Serum, and a smaller quantity from SK Bioscience in South Korea. As a result, a third of all humanity is now largely dependent on supplies of one vaccine from one company in India.

Cue the Indian government’s involvement. Unlike western governments, which poured billions into the research and development of vaccines, there is no evidence that the Indian government has provided a cent in research and development funding to the Serum Institute. (This did not stop it turning every overseas vaccine delivery into a photo-op.) The government then commandeered approval of every single Covax shipment sent out from Serum – even, according to one well-placed source within the institute, directing how many doses would be sent and when.

The Indian government has not publicly commented on its involvement in the vaccine shipments and has refused requests for comment.

Last month, faced with a surge in infections, the Indian government announced an expansion of its domestic vaccination programme to include 345 million people, and halted all exports of vaccines. About 60m vaccine doses have already been dispensed, and the government needs another 630m to cover everyone in this phase alone. One other vaccine is approved for use – Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin – but it is being produced and utilised in smaller quantities. As more vaccines are approved, the pressure on Serum might decrease. For now, however, the bulk of India’s vaccination goals will be met by just one supplier, which faces the impossible choice of either letting down the other 91 countries depending on it, or offending its own government.

The consequences are devastating. To date, 28m Covax Facility doses have been produced by Serum for the developing world – 10m of which went to India. The second largest shipment went to Nigeria, which received 4m doses, or enough to cover only 1% of its population. Given the new Indian government order of 100m doses, further supplies to countries like Nigeria may be delayed until July. And given the Indian government’s need of 500m more vaccine doses in the short run, that date could surely be pushed out even further.

This colossal mess was entirely predictable, and could have been avoided at every turn. Rich countries such as the UK, the US, and those of the EU, and rich organisations such as Covax should have used their funding of western pharmaceutical companies to nip vaccine monopolies in the bud. Oxford University should have stuck to its plans of allowing anyone, anywhere, to make its vaccine. AstraZeneca and Covax should have licensed as many manufacturers in as many countries as they could to make enough vaccines for the world. The Indian government should have never been effectively put in charge of the wellbeing of every poor country on the planet.

For years, India has been called “the pharmacy of the developing world”. It’s time to rethink that title. We will need many more pharmacies in many more countries to survive this pandemic.

Understanding Populism

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn


In a March 7, 2010 essay for the New York Times, the American linguist and author Ben Zimmer writes, “When politicians fret about the public perception of a decision more than the substance of the decision itself, we’re living in a world of optics.”

On the other hand, according to Deborah Johnson in the June 2017 issue of Attorney at Law, a politician may have the best interests of his constituents in mind, but he or she doesn’t come across smoothly because optics are bad, even though the substance is good. Johnson writes that things have increasingly slid from substance to optics.

Optics in this context have always played a prominent role in politics. Yet, it is also true that their usage has grown manifold with the proliferation of electronic and social media, and, especially, of ‘populism.’ Populists often travel with personal photographers so that they can be snapped and proliferate images that are positively relevant to their core audience.

Pakistan’s PM Imran Khan relies heavily on such optics. He is also considered to be a populist. But then why did he so stubbornly refuse to meet the mourning families of the 11 Hazara Shia miners who were brutally murdered in Quetta? Instead, the optics space in this case was filled by opposition leaders, Maryam Nawaz and Bilawal Bhutto.

Nevertheless, this piece is not about why an optics-obsessed PM such as Khan didn’t immediately occupy the space that was eventually filled by his opponents. It is more about exploring whether Khan really is a populist? For this we will have to first figure out what populism is.

According to the American sociologist, Bart Bonikowski, in the 2019 anthology When Democracy Trumps Populism, populism poses to be ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-elite.’ It can emerge from the right as well as the left, but during its most recent rise in the last decade, it has mostly come up from the right.  

According to Bonikowski, populism of the right has stark ethnic or religious nationalist tendencies. It draws and popularises a certain paradigm of ‘authentic’ racial or religious nationalism and claims that those who do not have the required features to fit in this paradigm are outsiders and, therefore, a threat to the ‘national body.’ It also lashes out against established political forces and state institutions for being ‘elitist,’ ‘corrupt’ and facilitators of pluralism that is usurping the interests of the authentic members of the national body in a bid to undermine the ‘silent majority.’ Populism aspires to represent this silent majority, claiming to empower it.

Simply put, all this, in varying degrees, is at the core of populist regimes that, in the last decade or so, began to take shape in various countries — especially in the US, UK, India, Brazil, Turkey, Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic and Pakistan. Yet, if anti-establishmentarian action and rhetoric is a prominent feature of populism, then what about populist regimes that are not only close to certain powerful state institutions, but were or are actually propped up by them? Opposition parties in Pakistan insist that Imran Khan’s party is propped up by the country’s military establishment, which is aiding it to remain afloat despite it failing on many fronts. The same is the case with the populist regime in Brazil.

Does this mean such regimes are not really populist? No. According to the economist Pranab Bardhan (University of California, Berkeley), even though populists share many similarities, populism’s shape can shift from region to region. Bardhan writes that characteristics of populism are qualitatively different in developed countries from those in developing countries. For example, whereas globalisation is seen in a negative light by populists in Europe and the US, a November 2016 survey published in The Economist shows that the people of 18 developing countries saw it positively, believing it gave their countries’ economies the opportunity to assert themselves.

Secondly, according to Bardhan, survey evidence suggests that much of the support for populist politics in developed countries is coming from less-educated, blue-collar workers, and from the rural backwaters. Populists in developing countries, by contrast, are deriving support mainly from the rising middle classes and the aspirational youth in urban areas. To Bardhan, in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Poland and Russia, symbols of ‘illiberal religious resurgence’ have been used by populist leaders to energise the upwardly-mobile or arriviste social groups.

He also writes that, in developed countries, populism is at loggerheads with the centralising state and political institutions, because it sees them as elitist, detached and a threat to local communities. But in developing countries, the populists have tried to centralise power and weaken local communities. To populists in developing countries, the main villains are not the so-called cold and detached state institutions, but ‘corrupt’ civilian parties. Ironically, while populism in the US is against welfare programmes, such programmes remain important to populists in developing countries.

Keeping this in mind, one can conclude that PM Khan is a populist, quite like his populist contemporaries in other developing countries. Despite nationalist rhetoric and his condemnatory understanding of colonialism, globalisation that promises foreign investment in the country is welcomed. His main base of support remains aspirational and upwardly-mobile urban middle-class segments. He often uses religious symbology and exhibitions of piety to energise this segment, providing religious context to what are actually Western ideas of state, governance, economics and nationalism. For example, the Scandinavian idea of the welfare state that he admires is defined as Riyasat-i-Madina (State of Madina).

Unlike populism in Europe and the US, populism in developing countries embraces the ‘establishment’ and, instead, turns its guns towards established political parties which it describes as being ‘corrupt.’ Khan is no different. He admires the Chinese system of central planning and economy and dreams of a centralised system that would seamlessly merge the military, the bureaucracy and his government into a single ruling whole. His urban middle-class supporters often applaud this ‘vision.’

Brexit is a necessary crisis – it reveals Britain’s true place in the world

A determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism is bringing about a long-overdue audit of British realities writes David Edgerton in The Guardian

  

The Commons in 1966: ‘The Conservative party was the party of national capitalism.’ Photograph: Bentley Archive/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images


Who backs Brexit? Agriculture is against it; industry is against it; services are against it. None of them, needless to say, support a no-deal Brexit. Yet the Conservative party, which favoured European union for economic reasons over many decades, has become not only Eurosceptic – it is set on a course regarded by every reputable capitalist state and the great majority of capitalist enterprises as deeply foolish.

If any prime minister in the past had shown such a determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism, the massed ranks of British capital would have stepped in to force a change of direction. Yet today, while the CBI and the Financial Times call for the softest possible Brexit, the Tory party is no longer listening. 

Why not? One answer is that the Tories now represent the interests of a small section of capitalists who actually fund the party. An extreme version of this argument was floated by the prime minister’s sister, Rachel, and the former chancellor Philip Hammond – both of whom suggested that hard Brexit is being driven by a corrupt relationship between the prime minister and his hedge-fund donors, who have shorted the pound and the whole economy. This is very unlikely to be correct, but it may point to a more disconcerting truth.

The fact is that the capitalists who do support Brexit tend to be very loosely tied to the British economy. This is true of hedge funds, of course – but also true for manufacturers such as Sir James Dyson, who no longer produces in the UK. The owners of several Brexiter newspapers are foreign, or tax resident abroad – as is the pro-Brexit billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe of Ineos.

But the real story is something much bigger. What is interesting is not so much the connections between capital and the Tory party but their increasing disconnection. Today much of the capital in Britain is not British and not linked to the Conservative party – where for most of the 20th century things looked very different. Once, great capitalists with national, imperial and global interests sat in the Commons and the Lords as Liberals or Conservatives. Between the wars, the Conservatives emerged as the one party of capital, led by great British manufacturers such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. The Commons and the Lords were soon fuller than ever of Tory businessmen, from the owner of Meccano toys to that of Lyons Corner Houses.

After the second world war, such captains of industry avoided the Commons, but the Conservative party was without question the party of capital and property, one which stood against the party of organised labour. Furthermore, the Tories represented an increasingly national capitalism, protected by import controls, and closely tied to an interventionist and technocratic state that wanted to increase exports of British designed and made goods. A company like Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) saw itself, and indeed was, a national champion. British industry, public and private, was a national enterprise.

Since the 1970s things have changed radically. Today there is no such thing as British national capitalism. London is a place where world capitalism does business – no longer one where British capitalism does the world’s business. Everywhere in the UK there are foreign-owned enterprises, many of them nationalised industries, building nuclear reactors and running train services from overseas. When the car industry speaks, it is not as British industry but as foreign enterprise in the UK. The same is true of many of the major manufacturing sectors – from civil aircraft to electrical engineering – and of infrastructure. Whatever the interests of foreign capital, they are not expressed through a national political party. Most of these foreign-owned businesses, not surprisingly, are hostile to Brexit.
Brexit is the political project of the hard right within the Conservative party, and not its capitalist backers. In fact, these forces were able to take over the party in part because it was no longer stabilised by a powerful organic connection to capital, either nationally or locally.

Brexit also speaks to the weakness of the state, which was itself once tied to the governing party – and particularly the Conservatives. The British state once had the capacity to change the United Kingdom and its relations to the rest of the world radically and quickly, as happened in the second world war, and indeed on accession to the common market.

Today the process from referendum to implementation will take, if it happens, nearly as long as the whole second world war. The modern British state has distanced itself from the productive economy and is barely able to take an expert view of the complexities of modern capitalism. This was painfully clear in the Brexit impact sectoral reports the government was forced to publish – they were internet cut-and-paste jobs.

The state can no longer undertake the radical planning and intervention that might make Brexit work. That would require not only an expert state, but one closely aligned with business. The preparations would by now be very visible at both technical and political levels. But we have none of that. Instead we have the suggestion that nothing much will happen on no deal, that mini-deals will appear. The real hope of the Brexiters is surely that the EU will cave and carry on trading with the UK as if nothing had changed. Brexit is a promise without a plan. But in the real world Brexit does mean Brexit, and no deal means no deal.

Brexit is a necessary crisis, and has provided a long overdue audit of British realities. It exposes the nature of the economy, the new relations of capitalism to politics and the weakness of the state. It brings to light, in stunning clarity, Brexiters’ deluded political understanding of the UK’s place in the world. From a new understanding, a new politics of national improvement might come; without it we will remain stuck in the delusional, revivalist politics of a banana monarchy.

Why we must not let Europe break apart

The European project is in big trouble – but it’s worth defending. By Timothy Garton Ash  in The Guardian



It’s time to sound the alarm. Seven decades after the end of the second world war on European soil, the Europe we have built since then is under attack. As the cathedral of Notre Dame burned, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National was polling neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron’s movement for what he calls a “European renaissance”. In Spain, a far-right party called Vox, promoting the kind of reactionary nationalist ideas against which Spain’s post-Franco democracy was supposedly immunised, has won the favour of one in 10 voters in a national election. Nationalist populists rule Italy, where a great-grandson of Benito Mussolini is running for the European parliament on the list of the so-called Brothers of Italy. A rightwing populist party called The Finns, formerly the True Finns (to distinguish them from “false” Finns of different colour or religion), garnered almost as many votes as Finland’s Social Democrats in last month’s general election. In Britain, the European elections on 23 May can be seen as another referendum on Brexit, but the underlying struggle is the same as that of our fellow Europeans. Nigel Farage is a Le Pen in Wellington boots, a True Finn in a Barbour jacket.

Meanwhile, to mark the 30th anniversary of the velvet revolutions of 1989, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has denounced a charter of LGBT+ rights as an attack on children. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland successfully deploys a völkisch rhetoric we thought vanquished for good, although now it scapegoats Muslims instead of Jews. Remember Bertolt Brecht’s warning: “The womb is fertile still/ from which that crawled.” Viktor Orbán, the young revolutionary hero of 1989 turned bulldog-jowled neo-authoritarian, has effectively demolished liberal democracy in Hungary, using antisemitic attacks on the billionaire George Soros and generous subsidies from the EU. He has also enjoyed political protection from Manfred Weber, the Bavarian politician whom the European People’s party, Europe’s powerful centre-right grouping, suggests should be the next president of the European commission. Orbán has summed the situation up like this: “Thirty years ago, we thought Europe was our future. Today, we believe we are Europe’s future.”

Italy’s Matteo Salvini agrees, so much so that he is hosting an election rally of Europe’s rightwing populist parties, an international of nationalists, in Milan later this month. To be sure, the spectacle of a once-great country reducing itself to a global laughing stock, in a tragic farce called Brexit, has silenced all talk of Hungexit, Polexit or Italexit. But what Orbán and co intend is actually more dangerous. Farage merely wants to leave the EU; they propose to dismantle it from within, returning to an ill-defined but obviously much looser “Europe of nations”.

Wherever one looks, old and new rifts appear, between northern and southern Europe, catalysed by the Eurozone crisis, between west and east, reviving the old stereotypes of intra-European orientalism (civilised west, barbaric east), between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, between two halves of each European society, and even between France and Germany.

For anyone who takes a longer view, these mounting signs of European disintegration should not be a surprise. Isn’t this a pattern familiar from European history? In the 17th century, the horrendously destructive thirty years war was concluded by the peace of Westphalia. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th, the continent was torn apart by two decades of Napoleonic wars, then stitched together in another pattern by the Congress of Vienna. The first world war was followed by the Versailles peace. Each time, the new post-war European order lasts a while – sometimes shorter, sometimes longer – but gradually frays at the edges, with tectonic tensions building up under the surface, until it finally breaks apart in a new time of troubles. No European settlement, order, empire, commonwealth, res publica, Reich, concert, entente, axis, alliance, coalition or union lasts for ever.

Set against that historical measuring rod, our Europe has done pretty well: it is 74 years old this week, if we date its birth to the end of the second world war in Europe. It owes this longevity to the miraculously non-violent collapse in 1989-91 of a nuclear-armed Russian empire that had occupied half the continent. Only in former Yugoslavia, and more recently in Ukraine, have we witnessed what more normally follows the fall of empires: bloody strife. Otherwise, what happened after the end of the cold war was a peaceful enlargement and deepening of the existing, post-1945 west European order. Yet maybe now the muse of history is shouting, like some grim boatman from the shore, “come in Number 45, your time is up!”

 

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, a far-right party in Spain. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty

In one respect, however, this time is different. For centuries, Europe kept tearing itself apart, then putting itself together again, but all the while exploiting, colonising and bossing around other parts of the world. With the European civil war that raged on and off from 1914 to 1945, once described by Winston Churchill as a second thirty years war, Europe deposed itself from its global throne. In act five of Europe’s self-destruction, the US and the Soviet Union strode on to the stage like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet. Yet, Europe was at least still the central stage of world politics throughout the cold war that followed. Europeans made history once again for a brief shining moment in 1989, but then Hegel’s Weltgeist, the “world spirit”, moved rapidly on from Berlin to Beijing.

Today, Europe struggles to remain a subject rather than becoming merely an object of world politics – with Beijing hungry to shape a Chinese century, a revanchist Russia, Donald Trump’s unilateralist US, and climate change threatening to overwhelm us all. Both Russia and China merrily divide and rule across our continent, using economic power to pick off weaker European states and disinformation to set nation against nation. In the 19th century, European powers engaged in what was called the scramble for Africa; in the 21st, outside powers engage in a scramble for Europe.

Of course, Europe means many different things. It is a continent with ill-defined borders, a shared culture and history, a contested set of values, a complex web of institutions and, not least, hundreds of millions of people, all with their own individual Europes. Nationalists like Le Pen and Orbán insist they just want a different kind of Europe. Tell me your Europe and I will tell you who you are. But the central institution of the post-1945 project of Europeans working closely together is the European Union, and its future is now in question.

None of this radicalisation and disintegration is inevitable, but to avert it, we have to understand how we got here, and why this Europe, with all its faults, is still worth defending.

It is 1942. In a tram rattling through Nazi-occupied Warsaw sits an emaciated, half-starved 10-year-old boy. His name is Bronek. He is wearing four sweaters, yet still he shivers despite the August heat. Everyone looks at him curiously. Everyone, he is sure, sees that he is a Jewish kid who has slipped out of the ghetto through a hole in the wall. Luckily, no one denounces him, and one Polish passenger warns him to watch out for a German sitting in the section marked “Nur für Deutsche”. And so Bronek survives, while his father is murdered in a Nazi extermination camp and his brother sent to Bergen-Belsen.

Sixty years on, I was walking with Bronek down one of the long corridors of the parliament of a now-independent Poland. Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, turned to me, stroked his beard and said with quiet passion: “You know, for me, Europe is something like a Platonic essence.”

In the life of Prof Bronisław Geremek, you have the essential story of how, and why, Europe came to be what it is today. Having escaped the horrors of the ghetto (“the world burned before my eyes”), along with his mother, he was brought up by a Polish Catholic stepfather, served as an altar boy and was taught by an inspiring priest in the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. So he had also, in his bones, Europe’s deep and defining Christian heritage. Then, at the age of 18, he joined the communist party, believing it would build a better world. Eighteen years later, stripped of his last illusions by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he resigned from that same party in protest and returned to his professional life as a medieval historian. But politics somehow would not let him go.

I first encountered him during a historic occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980, when the leader of the striking workers, Lech Wałęsa, asked Geremek to become an adviser to the protest movement that would soon be christened Solidarity. Over the subsequent decade I would visit him, whenever I got the chance, in his small apartment in Warsaw’s Old Town, which had been razed to the ground by the Nazis, then rebuilt stone upon stone by the Poles. As he puffed away at his professorial pipe, he shared with me his pellucid analysis of the decline of the Soviet empire, even as he and his comrades in Solidarity helped turn that decline into fall. For in 1989, he was the intellectual architect of the round table talks that were the key to Poland’s negotiated transition from communism to democracy, and Poland was the icebreaker for the rest of central Europe.

Ten years on, he was the foreign minister who signed the treaty by which Poland became a member of Nato. When I visited him in the foreign ministry, I spotted on his mantelpiece a bottle of a Czech vodka called Stalin’s Tears. “You must have it!” he exclaimed. “A Polish foreign minister cannot keep Stalin in his office!” And so that bottle of Stalin’s Tears stands on my mantelpiece in Oxford as I write. In memory of Bronek, I will never drink it.

 

Lech Wałęsa speaks to workers during a strike at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. Photograph: Erazm Ciołek/Forum/Reuters

Having been instrumental in steering his beloved country into the European Union, he subsequently became a member of the European parliament, that same parliament to which we are electing new representatives this month. Tragically, but in a way symbolically, he died in a car accident on the way to Brussels.

Geremek’s story is unique, but the basic form of his Europeanism is typical of three generations of Europe-builders who made our continent what it is today. When you look at how the argument for European integration was advanced in various countries, from the 1940s to the 1990s, each national story seems at first glance very different. But dig a bit deeper and you find the same underlying thought: “We have been in a bad place, we want to be in a better one, and that better place is called Europe.” Many and diverse were the nightmares from which these countries were trying to awake. For Germany, it was the shame and disgrace of the criminal regime that murdered Bronek’s father. For France, it was the humiliation of defeat and occupation; for Britain, relative political and economic decline; for Spain, a fascist dictatorship; for Poland, a communist one. Europe had no shortage of nightmares. But in all these countries, the shape of the pro-European argument was the same. It was an elongated, exuberant pencilled tick: a steep descent, a turn and then an upward line ascending to a better future. A future called Europe.

Personal memories of bad times were a driving force for three distinctive generations. Many of the founding fathers of what is now the European Union were what one might call 14ers, still vividly recalling the horrors of the first world war. (The 14ers included the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who would talk with a breaking voice of the “lost generation” of his contemporaries). Then came the 39ers like Geremek, indelibly shaped by traumas of war, gulag, occupation and Holocaust. Finally, there was a third cohort, the 68ers, revolting against the war-scarred generation of their parents, yet many of them also having experience of dictatorship in southern and eastern Europe.

The trouble starts when you have arrived in the promised land. Now, for the first time, we have a generation of Europeans – let’s call them the 89ers – who have known nothing but a Europe of closely connected liberal democracies. Call it a European empire or commonwealth, if you will. To be sure, “Europe whole and free” remains an ideal, not a reality, for millions who live here, especially those who are poor, belong to a discriminated minority or seek refuge from across the Mediterranean. But we are closer to that ideal than ever before.

It would be a parody of middle-aged condescension to say “these young people don’t know how lucky they are!”. After all, younger voters are often more pro-European than older ones. But it would not be wrong to say that many 89ers who have grown up in this relatively whole and free continent do not see Europe as a great cause, the way 39ers and 68ers did. Why be passionate about something that already exists? Unless they have grown up in the former Yugoslavia or Ukraine, they are unlikely to have much direct personal experience of just how quickly things can all unravel, back to European barbarism. By contrast, many of them do know from bitter experience how life got worse after the financial crisis of 2008.

On the walls of Al-Andalus, a tapas bar in Oxford, depictions of flamenco dancers and bullfights embrace cliche without shame. Here, when I first met him in 2015, Julio – dark-haired, lean and intense – worked as a waiter. But serving tourists in a tapas bar in England was not what he expected to be doing with his life. He had just finished a master’s degree in European studies at Computense University in Madrid. It was the Eurozone crisis – which at its height made one in every two young Spaniards unemployed – that reduced him to this. Looking back, Julio describes his feelings when he had to make this move abroad: “Sadness, impotence, solitude.”

Across the continent there are many thousands of Julios. For them, the tick line has been inverted: it started by going steadily up, but then turned sharply downwards after 2008. Ten years ago, you and your country were in a better place. Now you are in a worse one, and that is because Europe has not delivered on its promises.

Here is the cunning of history: the seeds of triumph are sown in the moment of greatest disaster, in 1939, but the seeds of crisis are sown in the moment of triumph, in 1989. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that many of the problems haunting Europe today have their origins in the apparently triumphant transition after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few far-sighted people warned at the time. The French political philosopher Pierre Hassner wrote in 1991 that, even as we celebrated the triumph of freedom, we should remember that “humankind does not live by liberty and universality alone, that the aspirations that led to nationalism and socialism, the yearning for community and identity, and the yearning for solidarity and equality, will reappear as they always do”. And so they have.

The events of 1989 opened the door to an unprecedented era of globalised, financialised capitalism. While this facilitated great material progress for a new middle class in Asia, in the west it generated levels of economic inequality not seen since the early 20th century. A divide also opened up between those with higher education and international experience, and those in the less fortunate other halves of European societies. The latter felt an inequality of attention and respect from the former. Barriers to freedom of movement between European countries were eliminated while little thought was given to what Europe would do if large numbers of people wanted to enter through the outer frontier of the Schengen zone. What followed was problems of large-scale emigration, for the poorer countries of eastern and southern Europe, and of immigration for the richer ones of northern Europe – be it the internal movement of more than 2 million east Europeans to Britain or the influx of more than 1 million refugees from outside the EU to Germany.

When the global financial crisis hit, it exposed all the inherent flaws of a halfway-house Eurozone. Hastened into life as a political response to German unification, the Eurozone that we have today, a common currency without a common treasury, hitching together such diverse economies as those of Greece and Germany, had been warned against in vain by numerous economists. Absent a decisive, far-sighted response from northern Europe, and especially from Germany, the impact on southern Europe was traumatic. Not only did the Eurozone crisis drive Julio to that dreary tapas bar and people in Greece to desperate hardship; it kick-started a new wave of radical and populist politics, on both left and right, and with mixtures of left and right that don’t easily fit into that old dichotomy.

Populists blame the sufferings of “the people” on remote, technocratic, liberal elites. Europe, or more accurately “Europe”, is particularly vulnerable to this attack. For most officials in Brussels are quite remote, quite technocratic and quite liberal. Although members of the European parliament are directly elected, that parliament can at times seem like a bubble within the Brussels bubble. Although their remuneration is peanuts compared to that of the bankers who nearly crashed the globalised capitalist system, EU leaders, parliamentarians and officials are very well paid. Watching them jump out of a chauffeur-driven BMW to deliver another smooth, visionary speech about the future of Europe, before jumping back into the BMW to be swept off to another nice lunch, it is not surprising that many less privileged Europeans say: “Well, they would praise Europe, wouldn’t they?”

Earlier this year, in a shabby office in Westminster, I was talking to someone who, like me, passionately wants a second referendum on Brexit, in which the majority votes to remain in the EU. What should be our campaign slogan? Among others, he suggested “Europe is great!” I winced. Why? Because this calls to mind the toe-curling British government national promotion campaign built around the motto “Britain is GREAT”. Countries that feel the need to proclaim in capital letters that they are great probably no longer are. But also because of all these problems that have accumulated across Europe during the 30 years of peace since 1989. Europe is great for us, the educated, privileged, mobile and gainfully employed, but do you really feel like saying “Europe is great!” with a straight face to the unemployed, unskilled worker in the post-industrial north of England, the southern European graduate who can’t find a job, or the Roma child or the refugee stuck in a camp?

We are only credible if we acknowledge that the European Union is now passing through an existential crisis, under attack from inside and out. It is paying the price both for past successes, which result in its achievements being taken for granted, and past mistakes, many of them having the shared characteristic of liberal over-reach.

The case for Europe today is very different from that of a half-century ago. In the 1970s, people in Britain, Spain or Poland looked at countries like France and West Germany, just coming to the end of the trente glorieuses – the three postwar decades of economic growth – in the then much smaller European Community, and said “we want what they’re having”. Today, the case starts with the defence of a Europe that already exists, but is now threatened with disintegration. If the construction were so strong that we could without hesitation say “Europe is great!”, it would not need our support so badly.

Since its inception, the European project has had a future-oriented, teleological rhetoric, all about what will come to pass one fine day, as we reach some ideal finalité européenne. These habits die hard. Driving through Hannover recently, I saw a Green party poster for the European elections that declared “Europe is not perfect – but it’s a damned good start”. Pause to think for a moment, and you realise how odd this is. After all, we don’t say “Britain is not perfect, but it’s a damned good start”. Nor do most 74-year-olds say “my life is not perfect, but it’s a good start”. The European Union today, like Germany or France or Britain, is a mature political entity, which does not need to derive its legitimacy from some utopian future. There is now a realistic, even conservative (with a small c) argument for maintaining what has already been built – which, of course, necessarily also means reforming it. If we merely preserved for the next 30 years today’s EU, at its current levels of freedom, prosperity, security and cooperation, that would already be an astonishing achievement.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Photograph: Alamy

In a long historical perspective, this is the best Europe we have ever had. I challenge you to point to a better one, for the majority of the continent’s countries and individual people. Most Europeans live in liberal democracies that are committed to resolving their differences by all-night meetings in Brussels, not unilateral action, let alone armed force. This European Union is not a country, and will not become one any time soon, but it is much more than just an international organisation. The former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato describes it as an unidentified flying object. It may be short on mystique, on emotional appeal, but it is not lacking that entirely. The heart can lift to see European flags fluttering beside national ones, and certainly to the strains of the European anthem, Beethoven’s setting of the Ode to Joy.

For everyone who is a citizen of an EU member state, this is a continent where you can wake up on a Friday morning, decide to take a budget airline flight to the other end of the continent, meet someone you like, settle down to study, work and live there, all the time enjoying the rights of a European citizen in one and the same legal, economic and political community. All this you appreciate most, like health, when you are about to lose it. Small wonder that marchers at the huge pro-European demonstration in London on 23 March this year wore T-shirts proclaiming “I am a citizen of Europe”.

So here’s the deepest challenge of this moment: do we really need to lose it all in order to find it again? Born in the depths of European barbarism more than 70 years ago, tipped towards crisis by a hubris born of that liberal triumph 30 years ago, does this project of a better Europe really need to descend all the way down to barbarism again before people mobilise to bring it back up? As personal memories like those that inspired the European passion of Bronisław Geremek fade away, the question is whether collective memory, cultivated by historians, journalists, novelists, statespeople and film-makers, can enable us to learn the lessons of the past without going through it all again ourselves.

Julio thinks we can learn. That is why, having resumed his academic career in Spain, he is now standing in the European elections for a radical, transnational pro-European party called Volt. “The generation that I represent,” he wrote to me in a recent email, “has observed the beginning of the disintegration of the EU, because of the triumph of the Brexit referendum. Imagine exit referendums across the EU in the next 10 or 20 years; the EU could easily be dismantled … So nothing will stand if we don’t defend what we have achieved after so many generations of sacrifice.”

You don’t have to subscribe to the electric radicalism of Volt’s pan-European federalist programme to appreciate the force of Julio’s appeal. I myself think more gradualist recipes for EU reform are more realistic. There are multiple variants of pro-Europeanism on offer from different parties in this month’s European elections, most of them acknowledging the need for reform. In Britain, five parties (not including Labour) are unambiguously in favour of the country staying in the EU. What is clear is that for once, and at last, these European elections really are about the future of Europe. Across 28 countries, new parties and old ghosts compete for the hearts of voters, with close to 100 million of them still undecided how they will vote. What is called for now, in every corner of our continent, is the defence of our common European home, not with arms but through the ballot box. Your continent needs you.

Madina state and ‘naya’ Pakistan

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


PRIME MINISTER Imran Khan says naya Pakistan shall soon resemble the seventh-century state of Madina. Beginning with his inaugural address of Aug 20, he has repeated his vow on no less than 11 separate occasions. Although all Muslims acknowledge the Madina state as a model of perfection, Khan leaves unsaid just how closely naya Pakistan shall be its image. Is achieving egalitarianism and welfarism the goal? Is the Madina state also a template for Pakistan’s political and judicial reconstruction?

To create a prosperous welfare state is an admirable — and universal — objective. Serving the needs of their citizens without prejudice, a few modern states already have operational systems in place. To join them, just five minutes of serious contemplation can tell you what needs to be done here in Pakistan.

It’s almost a no-brainer: eliminate large land holdings through appropriate legislation; collect land and property taxes based upon current market value; speed up the courts and make them transparent; make meritocratic appointments in government departments; change education so that skill enhancement becomes its central goal; make peace with Pakistan’s neighbours; choose trade over aid; and let civilians rule the country rather than soldiers.

That’s pretty hard! Implementation shall need no less than a revolution, bloodless or otherwise. But if Imran Khan wants to emulate the Madina state as a political entity, it will be way trickier. Modern states have geographical boundaries, a practice that followed the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) between European powers. But for the Madina state, borders were irrelevant — where you lived did not matter.

Built around a tribal accord, Misaq-i-Madina, citizenship required only that an individual submit to the authority of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). Perhaps anticipating that his followers would someday spread beyond the oases of Makkah and Madina, he very wisely left unspecified which territories constitute Dar-ul-Islam.

How to reconcile the contradictory notion of a borderless ummah versus an Islamic state with borders? Islamic scholars from the time of Al-Mawardi (972-1058) to the anthropologist genius Ibn-i-Khaldun (1322-1406) have differed. Another, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, while residing in pre-Partition Hyderabad (India), opined that creating Pakistan as a separate entity was contrary to Islamic teachings and traditions. Instead, he said, India as a whole must be converted to Islam. This wasn’t easy and so ultimately he supported the demand for Pakistan.

Time has increased, not decreased, territorial affiliations. Everywhere, inside and outside Islam, large national armies protect borders and nationalism competes fiercely against religion as an emotive force. Imran Khan’s pledge to grant citizenship to 1.5 million desperate Afghan refugees was potentially a first step towards the Madina state, one inclusive of all Muslims.

Human rights activists were ecstatic. But, once the adverse reaction set in, Imran’s U-turn followed. He cannot be blamed alone: previous Pakistani governments refused to naturalise Bengali refugees and Burma’s persecuted Rohingya minority. Nationalism often trumps religious solidarity these days.

Moving on: what about judicial matters? Shall laws of the Madina state apply in naya Pakistan? Viewed through the prism of history, the accord negotiated by the Holy Prophet was perfectly logical at a time of bitter intertribal wars. The interested reader may consult Dr Tahirul Qadri’s PhD thesis on the Misaq-i-Madina. This lists 63 rules for determining diyat (blood money); ransoms to settle tribal feuds; life protection for Muslims and Jews; apportioning of war expenses; etc. These led to peace within the framework of Arab tribal justice.

But justice is an ever-evolving concept in every culture and religion. So, for example, 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had argued that some individuals and races are “natural slaves” better enslaved than left free. And, until 200 years ago, socially respectable Americans were slave owners. Kinder ones treated slaves better but slave-owning is now viewed as utterly abhorrent.

Among today’s Muslims, apart from the militant Islamic State group and Boko Haram and a few others, no one defends slavery. Countries legally forbid it even if slaves are to be treated extremely well. In Pakistan too, owning slaves is a criminal offence. Pakistani law also makes it illegal to barter women as goods or as booty. Owning another human being was considered okay once but isn’t kosher anymore and anywhere — and under any circumstance.

The notion of egalitarianism has evolved as well. Nearly all societies now accept, or give lip service, to the idea that all people are equal before the law. Limited to men at first, it was extended later to include women as well. In 2009, Pakistan legally recognised transgender as a separate category; earlier this year some transgender candidates ran for elections, albeit unsuccessfully.

Blood money, common in earlier times, also takes on a very different flavor. Pakistanis were outraged when a grinning Shahrukh Jatoi emerged from jail after murdering 20-year old Shahzeb Khan in cold blood. Jatoi’s wealthy parents had purchased his pardon through diyat, probably by pressuring Khan’s family. Months earlier, CIA contractor Raymond Davis had been released after the families of the two men he had killed were paid $2.4m as blood money.

The world of yesterday and the world of today bear no comparison. One marvels at the Holy Prophet’s sagacity in negotiating a better deal for all warring Arabian tribes. Still, we should appreciate just how different the world has become from those times. The combined population of Makkah and Madina was less than Kharadar’s, a typical Karachi neighbourhood. Joblessness and lack of housing were non-issues; air pollution and load-shedding hadn’t been conceived; and white-collar crime was awaiting invention centuries later. No police or standing army existed in the Madina state. There were no jails.

It is easy to see why certain religious slogans appeal to the popular imagination. In a country that is deeply unequal and plagued by huge class asymmetry, people yearn for an unblemished past when everything was perfect. But when political leaders promise to take us there, how seriously should we take them? The masses had responded favourably when Gen Ziaul Haq had raised a similar slogan in the 1980s — that of Nizam-i-Mustafa. Disappointment soon followed. Can it be different this time?

We Scots have kept our kilts but shed our historical myths – a process sadly lacking south of the border

Ian Jack in The Guardian


I had never heard of the game called “welly wanging”, but there it was on the News at Ten this week – in a report by the BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, on the traditions that give the English regions their splendid variety. The report showed some people, probably children, throwing gumboots in a field – the competitor who threw a boot furthest was the winner. It was things like this, Easton said, that made Yorkshire different from other places, which had their own traditions that were just as special to them. Some morris dancers appeared, and a man in a Tyneside pub talked about how collective hardship had forged the Geordie identity, these days manifested in a love of Newcastle United Football Club and an equal hatred of its rival in Sunderland. It all felt flimsy and sad – that “regional identity” should amount to this rickle of bones.

FacebookTwitterPinterest A welly-wanging contest in an English village. ‘So far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.’ Photograph: Alamy.

The last colliery in the north-east closed in 2005, while the last shipyard on the Tyne launched its last ship in 2006, though those masculine industries had ceased to employ significant numbers long before. The north-east is poor, but then so are many other de-industrialised parts of the United Kingdom; hardship and heavy industry alone can’t explain its particular difference. As for “welly wanging”, so far as I can tell it dates all the way back to AD2010.

Thinking of Newcastle, I thought of my late mother-in-law, who lived and died there: a sweet and clever woman blessed with good humour (“This is my last territorial demand in Europe,” she might say, requesting a cup of tea at bedtime), who in her forgetful days asked me the same set of questions more than once. “What’s your tartan? Isn’t there a Jack tartan? Have you never worn a kilt?”

My answers puzzled her – “I don’t know”, “I hope not”, “Not ever” – more by their brevity than anything else. I feel sorry for my irritation now. My explanation, that I came from a Lowland family, and had no entitlement to tartans, clearly didn’t wash. Having glanced through the window of more than one kilt emporium, she knew that the enterprise of the Scottish tourist industry had allotted a tartan to almost every surname in an old British telephone directory, often by deciding that a common Lowland name such as Taylor was really a “sept”, or subdivision, of a Highland clan such as Cameron. The clans ruled the roost.

Oddly, given that Jacks lie thick in the graveyards of the Black Isle, my surname didn’t then feature on these lists. (It does now; the Clan Jack Society registered a new design with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2012.) But I didn’t at all regret the omission. What I found impossible to tell my mother-in-law, without making a priggish meal of it, was that the whole rigmarole of clans and tartans, sometimes known as Highlandism, was largely confected in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that any reality it might be connected to was far removed from the one most Scottish people knew; and also that this feudal, claymore-wielding “identity” obscured a true history of achievement that had once made a trousered Scotland important to the world: Adam Smith, James Watt, Keir Hardie, the Forth Bridge and so on.

It could have been a long speech, and tedious to the listener. I grew up hearing versions of it. Tartanry had many enemies in Scotland, particularly inside a socialist movement that was keen to establish a more class-based and less fanciful view of history. It fought what amounted to an underground campaign against figures such as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the music hall singer and comic Harry Lauder, who with his kilt and curly stick presented a caricature of Scotland at home and abroad.  

Kilts in the 1950s were still worn mainly by Scottish regiments and public schoolboys, and often regarded by the rest of us as a middle-class affectation. Mocking evidence came from new scholarship that the kilt’s modern form – the “small kilt” – had been invented in the 1720s by a Lancashire Quaker and ironmaster, Thomas Rawlinson, to dress the workers at his Highland smelter. In the first half of the next century, the Anglo-Welsh Allen brothers printed the first colour illustrations of tartans – inspired, they said, by an ancient but never produced manuscript – that showed how different clans and families had adopted their distinctive patterns at least as early as the 16th century.

Hugh Trevor-Roper gave an entertaining account of these developments in his contribution to The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays edited by his fellow historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and published in 1983. “The creation of an independent Highland tradition, and the imposition of that new tradition, with its outward badges, on the whole Scottish nation, was the work of the later 18th and early 19th centuries,” he wrote combatively and, as it turned out, to no sartorial consequence. (Thirty-odd years later, nine out of 10 Scottish bridegrooms get married in the dress devised by the ironmaster Rawlinson.)

But his words were part of a general revaluation of Scottish history that did have a political effect. Scottish nationalism became less backward-looking, less romantic, less in thrall to fancy dress and myth. What too few people recognised – I include myself – was that no similar process was happening south of the border. England clings to history. Its view of its glorious past – as, for example, the begetter of parliamentary democracy and the lonely bulwark against Hitler – remains unmodified and may even have recently intensified. No myths have been shed.

The results are apparent in opinion polls about national identitycommissioned by the BBC, which led this week to Easton’s nightly appearance on the evening news. Welly wanging turned out to be a catchpenny sideshow, a misleading overture to more serious surveys of the states of mind of England, Scotland and Wales. All kinds of differences showed up, some unsurprising: fewer people in Scotland said that they felt “strongly British” than in England or Wales; the percentage of people in Scotland who strongly identified as Scottish was larger than the percentage in England who strongly identified as English, or as Welsh in Wales.

But the most marked contrast between England and Scotland was optimism. In England many more in the 20,081 sample said the country was better in the past (49%) than it would be in the future (17%). In Scotland, more people believed it would be better in the future (36%) than it was in the past (29%). The pollster John Curtice attributed this difference to two kinds of nationalism – defining English nationalists as those who said they were English and not British (one sixth of the sample in England), and Scottish nationalists as people who supported the SNP. More than two-thirds (70%) of English nationalists said the past was better; only 16% of Scottish nationalists felt the same. Only 8% of English nationalists felt “strongly European”; among Scottish nationalists the figure was 44%.

And so the quickening current sweeps our raft towards the waterfall, and the bones of Sir Francis Drake at its bottom.