Open Democracy News Analysis

After their humiliating defeat in the 2011 elections, the Scottish Labour Party have found themselves ensnared in a circular dialogue of apology and aggressive stereotyping. Breaking out of this requires a change of focus – away from Alex Salmond and the SNP and towards the party’s professed values of social justice. 

The Scottish independence debate has many dimensions, Scottish, English, British, European and global. It is also one that the insular London political class and media have only episodically covered the last forty years, being content to rest on ‘Braveheart’ and romantic, restless nationalist stereotypes.

It is then timely and apposite that the Fabian Society in association with Compass held a discussion under the theme, ‘Debating the Scottish Independence Referendum: What Future for the United Kingdom?’ with Labour MPs, Jon Cruddas, Anas Sarwar, Deputy Leader of Scottish Labour, and Gemma Doyle, along with myself, in the Houses of Parliament this week.

The evening showed some of the many comfort zones and delusions which Scottish Labour still hold to after its 2011 Scottish Parliament election humiliation. The two Scottish Labour MPs and Anas Sarwar in particular, spoke a language of renewal and urgency but which seemed mostly devoid of real political understanding or content.

The thoughtful observations of the evening from the Labour MPs came almost exclusively from Jon Cruddas who talked with an acute eye about England, the absence of English Labour, and the shifts in the Tories with a brash, aggressive English nationalism emerging in the party. Cruddas referenced the Australian debate under Paul Keating which redefined national identity, and cited Tom Nairn and the challenge of ‘the hyper-empire of capital’.

In terms of hinterland Cruddas as well as referencing Nairn and Keating, mentioned George Lansbury’s ‘My England’ and Clement Attlee. Sarwar and Doyle, as representatives of today’s new political classes, showed their ‘thin’ external world, with not one wider reference or example all evening.

In my presentation, I suggested Scottish Labour stop talking to itself and stop using words such as ‘devolution’ and ‘separatism’ which gave the party succour and satisfaction but which were mostly meaningless to the general public. ‘Devolution’ was a narrow notion of political change and a concept born of 1970s compromise and accommodation. ‘Separatism’ which is how Labour describes the Scottish Nationalists is an archaic relic of a term which reveals much about who says it. The SNP have never been ‘separatists’ and indeed the true, serious ‘separatists’ in the UK are the fossilised, fanatic parliamentary sovereignty fetishists of Euroscepticism. Labour has to drop its own private world of language, stop talking process and embrace substance.

Labour’s obsession with the SNP has been an unhealthy one, destabilising and disorientating the party’s view of the world. Despite the fact the SNP have been on the Scottish political scene for over 40 years, Labour north of the border have yet to fully come to terms with them. The aggressive language and stereotyping which goes on between the two parties belies that these are two rather similar parties, both broad churches and both, in parts, significantly (small c) conservative.

Sarwar and Doyle presented cartoon caricatures of the Nationalists, citing ‘separatism’ many times, with Sarwar articulating a convoluted definition when challenged on Labour’s constant of use of the big bogey word. The Nationalists talked left and right, he maintained, depending on the audience (just like New Labour), and as he accurately observed, have left independence so far undefined. Doyle talked from the old hymn sheet, talking of the SNP as having cornered ‘the right wing vote’ and being just like the Tories.

Scottish Labour has a proud history and story but they are currently in a terrible place and have barely begun to realise what has happened to them. Both Sarwar and Doyle railed against the SNP Government for not using the Scottish Parliament’s existing tax powers, omitting that Labour in office for eight years had done exactly the same. Similarly the SNP’s floated idea of cutting corporation tax was trumpeted as proof of their right-wing perfidy, ignoring New Labour’s cutting of it. What this seemed to suggest was that the speakers had one rationale for an action when the SNP did it (bad), and another when New Labour had done it (good).

How does Scottish Labour get people to listen to them again? I suggested that the party apologise for 50 years of taking people for granted and for municipalism, cronyism, clientism and council patronage. Cruddas immediately spotted that this was a wider Labour malaise, to which I agreed, pointing out that it was a Scottish variant of that crisis.

So far Scottish Labour has offered a half-hearted apology for losing in 2011, but hasn’t begun to understand why it was so soundly rejected. Its public mantra has become ‘we have to stop apologising’ when the party hasn’t recognised the longer story of the machine politics it built in Scotland which it needs to take responsibility for and offer an explanation. Then and only then, people may begin to sit up and take notice.

This is not just a Scottish but a British and international debate. All evening Sarwar and Doyle defended a union which was in reality, a ‘Fantasy Island Britain’, the land of the most successful multi-national partnership in all human history, a place where redistribution and social enlightenment march proudly forward claiming the future. At no point did they engage in some of the uncomfortable realities: of the UK as the fourth most unequal country in the rich world according to Danny Dorling, and on existing trends, set to overtake, Portugal, USA and Singapore, and become the most unequal country in the developed world.

Labour needs to embrace an agenda of social justice and stop talking about the constitution and being obsessed with the SNP and Alex Salmond. Twenty years after the Commission on Social Justice was launched perhaps Scottish Labour could revisit this terrain instead of talking all the time about ‘devolution’ and ‘separatism’.

What this could involve is renewing and marking John Smith’s values and coming up with a social justice covenant for the 20th anniversary of his tragic death, which coincides with the run-in to the autumn 2014 Scottish independence vote.

A Scottish Labour Party engaged with social justice would aid people in the SNP to develop a more distinct, radical social agenda and thus improve the quality of the entire Scottish debate. It would reduce the superficial noise between these two parties and develop a debate with more substance addressing what Scottish voters want to see it engage with.

Such a politics would entail addressing how we tackle and end child poverty, challenge welfare entrapment and despair, and address the huge gap in life expectancy between rich and poor across Scotland. It could even be called the John Smith social justice covenant.

Such a move would make the Scottish debate about self-government and independence both more subtle and real. It would take it away from the politicians’ love of the abstract and grandiose and connect it to the complex choices of modern life and challenges to progressive politics.

The values of solidarity, communitarianism and inclusion have always influenced and shaped much of the Scottish debate, driven in part by a distrust of British politicians and the state. It is now crucial over the next two years that they are brought to the fore, from the implicit to the explicit. We have to ask how do we best champion social justice in Scotland and in these isles? That is what Scottish self-government and independent has to directly address; namely, the relationship between progressive values and government structures, and in so doing help all of us to make sense of how we all break out of ‘Fantasy Island Britain’ which has so served the forces of power and privilege.

The British Prime Minister and the American President are a dark shadow of the wartime coalition: well-meaning, weak men overseeing a wicked military machine. The British should not be involved.

David Cameron, for all this week’s fuss, is not the first prime minister to fly on Air Force One. Back in 1994, John Major accompanied Bill Clinton on a trip from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. (I am aware of this because I was one of a small group of reporters who joined the flight).

The reason why Mr Major and the rest of us were invited aboard was presidential guilt. Mr Clinton had disreputably awarded Gerry Adams a US visa, and was trying to make up for it. It was like no other journey any of us had made. Air Force One is like an enormous and hugely expensive penthouse flat, with bedrooms, bathrooms, offices and expensively appointed drawing rooms, the prevailing colour of which is beige. There are no rows of seats of the sort one expects in an aeroplane. But by every armchair there was a telephone, so we could ring up whom we wished, anywhere in the world. At the end of the flight, we were given a pack of Air Force One playing cards as a souvenir.

It is easy to see why British prime ministers should find this very seductive (though why Mr Cameron has brought the Chancellor of the Exchequer with him on this trip to the White House, on the eve of one of the most important Budget statements for decades, one that will further drain the finances of middle Britain, is inexplicable). The pictures at the basketball game, the meeting between two very charismatic first ladies, the opportunity for a serious private conversation with the President in the White House – all this can be valuable.

But it is also troubling, and raises questions. In recent years, Britain’s allegiance to the United States has led us into two conflicts, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been our worst military setbacks since Suez. These humiliations might have been worthwhile if the cause was good. But the post-9/11 wars have been fought in a way that has done hideous damage to Britain’s reputation as a country that claims to value freedom and the rule of law. This is almost entirely due to the readiness of a generation of British political leaders and security chiefs to offer uncritical adherence to the US.

There is no sign from this week’s official briefings that Mr Cameron has raised with Barack Obama the shameful case of Shaker Aamer, a British resident who has been held in Guantánamo for 10 years. No charges have been laid against Aamer, and he has never received a trial – a betrayal of British justice.

Nor is there any evidence that Mr Cameron has complained about the atrocious conduct of US troops in Afghanistan – the destruction of copies of the Koran, the urinating on dead Taliban, last weekend’s massacre of 16 civilians in Kandahar by an unnamed US solder. These are issues that concern Britain deeply, because our soldiers are vulnerable to retaliation.

Mr Cameron’s tragedy, like Tony Blair’s before him, is that he has made the pragmatic decision to live with this American barbarism. With British troops fighting alongside the US in Afghanistan, this makes him – and Britain – an accomplice.

On Tuesday, Mr Cameron and Mr Obama wrote a joint article for the Washington Post in which they asserted that they were “building the institutions that undergird international peace and security”. This claim is nonsense. The United States does not even belong to the International Criminal Court, which brings war criminals to justice, on the realistic grounds that it fears its own generals being held accountable for their atrocities.

The US constantly subverts the United Nations, most recently through the abuse of Resolution 1973, passed in March last year to give cover for regime change in Libya. This breach of faith with China and Russia has had terribly damaging consequences in dealing with the crisis in Syria.

The two leaders claimed to be on the side of “brave citizens across the Middle East and North Africa who are demanding their universal rights”. This is partly true. Britain and the US have not stood in the way of the Arab Spring, or at any rate not as much as all that. Nevertheless, the claim that we are on the side of human rights would come as news to the brave protesters in Bahrain, or the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, or the prisoners held for a decade without trial in Guantánamo.

The most problematic part of the article, however, was the suggestion that Cameron and Obama follow in the magnificent tradition of Roosevelt and Churchill. Not only is this vainglorious, it is palpably untrue. There is no question that back then our two great countries jointly stood for freedom and the rule of law against something dark and incomparably evil.

Though more controversial to say so, I believe that under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Britain and America stood for the same superb principles in the cosmic battle against the Soviet Union. Since then, the US, with our complicity, has again and again resorted to conduct that is wholly unacceptable by our own moral and legal codes: the use of torture and secret prisons; the kidnapping of suspects; targeted assassination, including the random killing of civilians; the systematic denial of rights to Muslim suspects which would be available as a matter of course to US or British citizens.

It is important to bear in mind that this conduct is not merely an affront to humanity and a violation of our traditions. It also strengthens and supports the teaching of al-Qaeda that the West is engaged in a war against the Muslim world, and therefore makes much more likely and risks legitimising a repeat of the kind of atrocities that struck London in July, 2005.

There are grounds for sympathy with these two world leaders, as they mouth their platitudes and tell their transparent lies. Both of them are decent, well-grounded and humane politicians. Both of them took office with a promise to end the violations of decency and justice that were such a blatant factor of the Bush/Blair era. In the case of Mr Obama, he has simply lacked the strength to confront the US military-industrial establishment. Guantánamo remains open, while new technology, enabling the use of armed robots as weapons, has opened the way to a horrifying era of targeted assassination and secret warfare.

As for Mr Cameron, he has very understandably accepted the post-war doctrine of the Foreign Office and the security establishment that our country counts for nothing without a strong relationship with the United States. But this timidity comes with a price. Without meaning to, and without really knowing what we are doing, Britain and America are systematically betraying every one of the timeless values that we fought for in our great alliance against fascism 70 years ago.

Cross-posted with thanks from the Daily Telegraph where Peter Orborne is their chief political commentator.

Kyrgyzstan aside, recent elections in Central Asia would appear to indicate that the regions’ leaders are aiming to stay in power for life. But what will happen to their regimes when infirmity strikes, wonders Luca Anceschi?

 

What lessons can we learn from the presidential election recently held in Turkmenistan? Apparently none if we focus on the domestic implications, with Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov re-elected as president with a landslide 97% of the vote. The Berdymuhamedov regime has now completed the process of consolidating its power; it can now be expected to focus on re-personalising Turkmen politics, filling the void left after the death of long-time dictator Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006. Certainly the campaign to create a cult of Berdymuhamedov’s personality is well under way.

Analysing Berdymuhamedov’s re-election from a regional perspective stimulates some interesting questions about the current trajectory of Central Asia’s post-Soviet political evolution. The vote of 12 February made a mockery of the institution of elections and this is a trend that has characterised Central Asian politics in recent years. Two of the three recent presidential elections in the region – Turkmenistan’s in February and Kazakhstan’s snap election held in April 2011 – have seen incumbents re-elected as a result of machinations from within the ruling regimes rather than an expression of popular will. In both cases there has been a high degree of regime interference in the electoral campaigns and many irregularities in the voting procedures.

On the other hand, the third electoral contest held in Central Asia in the last 12 months – in Kyrgyzstan in October 2011 – constituted the first smooth presidential transition to have ever occurred in Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In an unprecedented decision, Roza Otunbaeva decided not to run for the presidential post, opening the field to ‘fresh’ candidates.

In the context of the transmission of power according to constitutional provisions, the Turkmen election represents an interesting element in Central Asian developments – obviously, for all the wrong reasons. The Turkmen vote constitutes yet another episode in the peculiar intersection between elections and authoritarianism that has so profoundly characterised the politics of Central Asia in the last 20 years. It crystallises authoritarianism as the rule to which Central Asian governance seems to conform. Finally, it consolidates the regional praxis that supports the hegemony of incumbent leaders.

Men on a mission. Presidents (L-R) Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov of Turkmenistan and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan all appear to be pursuing lifelong reigns. None has a succession plan in place.

This latter point represents a critical element in the politics of Central Asia – one that in turn raises questions about the future stability of the region. As a rule, Central Asian leaders pursue monopolistic power and tend to stay in power for long periods of time. These factors underpin the political experience of the last two decades, during which regimes have failed to put in place practices for succession.

To date, three out of the five Central Asian states have experienced top-level leadership change since the achievement of independence. Turkmenistan’s power transition of 2006-2007 was initiated by the natural death of Niyazov, which set into motion a process of intra-elite struggle that ultimately saw Berdymuhamedov as its victor. Transitions in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan were somewhat more traumatic. While a civil war led to the accession to absolute power of Emomali Rahmon (Tajikistan), popular unrest was behind the fall of the two successive Kyrgyz regimes, headed by Askar Akaev (2005) and Kurmanbek Bakiev (2010). In this sense, the election of Almazbek Atambaev to the Presidency of the Kyrgyz Republic is Central Asia’s only power transition occurred in adherence to constitutional dictates. The recent Kyrgyz case is therefore the exception to the norm: elsewhere the transfer of power has been determined by overt or covert competition amongst members of the regime, relatively violent episodes of popular unrest and even direct military hostilities.

If leadership change is an indicator of regime insecurity, then Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are Central Asia’s most stable political systems: Nursultan Nazarbaev and Islam Karimov have retained power ever since 1991. Similarly Tajikistan’s president appears to be in a relatively stable position: Rahmon has been in office since 1994, while he was Prime Minister from 1992 to 94. While it is too early to make any assessment of the nature of Atambaev’s regime in Kyrgyzstan, the Turkmen election has confirmed Berdymuhamedov’s plans to establish long-term rule, continuing Niyazov’s way.

'Central Asia’s cultural tendency towards dynasticism appears to be secondary to the personalism that characterises post-Soviet power in the region.'

Interestingly, none of Central Asia’s current leaders has made plans for succession. While this understandable for the relatively young Berdymuhamedov (b.1957) and Rahmon (b.1952), it is puzzling that the older leaders – Nazarbaev (b.1940) and Karimov (b.1938) – have chosen not to publicly endorse a successor. Here Central Asia’s cultural tendency towards dynasticism appears to be secondary to the personalism that characterises post-Soviet power in the region. Paradoxicallly, therefore, in this sense the Kazakh and Uzbek regimes look perhaps the least durable, as it is not clear that they will outlast their current leader. 

Indeed, Central Asian leaders appear to overstep the mark in terms of wielding power, monopolising it to an extent that militates against nurturing successors. This was certainly the case in pre-2006 Turkmenistan, where Niyazov’s options for intra-elite succession were reduced by the President’s paranoid distrust of his political associates, while dynastic succession was limited by his estrangement from his own family.

Similarly, dynasticism appears not to be an option for Nazarbaev and Karimov, as both leaders do not have a direct male heir in their current family ranks (although Karimov has a son from his first marriage). Although the presidents’ daughters – Dariga, Dinara and Aliya Nazarbaeva; Gulnara and Lola Karimova – are recognisable figures in their countries (yet not necessarily popular), it seems unlikely that they could become frontrunners in a top-level power transition. If Gulnara Karimova was once thought to be in a privileged position to succeed to her father, her chances have significantly decreased after 2010, when questions surrounding her business interests circulated.

Meanwhile succession based on family ties has been widely anticipated in  Kazakhstan. At different times, Rakhat Aliyev – Dariga’s ex-husband – and Timur Kulibaev – Dinara’s current spouse – were presented by Kazakhstan-watchers as Nursultan Nazarbaev’s potential heirs. Interestingly, they have both now fallen out of favour with Nazarbaev: while former Deputy Foreign Minister Aliyev has now become a staunch (and very vocal) opponent to his former father-in-law, Kulibaev was recently dismissed from his post as head of Samruk-Qazyn, Kazakhstan’s Sovereign Fund.

In spite of their reluctance to nominate a successor, both Nazarbaev and Karimov have begun to deal more publicly with the limitations that age is inevitably imposing on their power. In an official visit to Germany in early February 2012, Nazarbaev answered several questions from German journalists about the state of his health. The president’s openness on the subject contrasts with his government’s reticence over rumours of prostatic surgery Nazarbaev reportedly underwent in July 2011. 

Karimov, on the other hand, dealt indirectly but publicly with his own mortality in a major parliamentary speech in December 2010, when he outlined a new succession procedure to be applied in the event of his death of incapacitation. Presidential concerns with age are also thought to underpin the recent (December 2011) decision to shorten the Uzbek presidential term from seven to five years. This decision may bring about a presidential election as early as this year. Some observers have commented that the aim of the current, shorter term may be to identify a successor – current Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev appears to be the front runner – and negotiate an exit strategy, ensuring that Karimov and his family can step away without fear of violent or punative retribution. Another possible explanation for the shorter term is that it could simply be another subterfuge, aimed at prolonging his time at the helm.

Whatever decision Karimov reaches on the scope of his next mandate and whatever course Nazarbaev’s health takes, political succession in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is no longer a matter for another day: it now represents the impending reality of a not-so-distant future. The stability of the two major political systems therefore appears at risk, as neither leadership has made arrangements to face the tasks posed by the departure of long-term leaders. If Nazarbaev and Karimov do not reverse this trend by placing the issue of succession at the centre of their remaining time in power, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will find themselves immersed in the same uncertainty that surrounded Turkmenistan following the death of Niyazov.

Although pre-arranged succession measures do not guarantee regime security against the emergence of instability, the Central Asian experience tells us that the lack of succession arrangements can result either in widespread instability or in the perpetuation of authoritarian practices, a situation that ultimately puts the local population between a rock and a hard place. This is exactly the scenario the citizens of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan want to avoid when their leaders exit the stage.  

Sideboxes Related stories:  Spring: coming soon to Central Asia? Lipstick on a crocodile: electoral authoritarianism in Central Asia Country or region:  Central Asia Turkmenistan Uzbekistan Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Topics:  Democracy and government International politics

This May, as part of the coalition's programme of democratic reforms, ten English cities will hold referenda on the future of the elected Mayor model. But while talk of reform is most certainly needed, what would the implementation of this mean for the future of local decision making?

This May, ten cities will hold referendums to decide whether or not they will have elected mayors.  These referendums – in Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Coventry, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Wakefield – will happen, not because local people have asked for them, but because the coalition government is imposing them on the cities.

Ministers have decided that the resounding indifference shown by voters generally to the directly elected mayor model over the last decade is unacceptable, and that people who refuse to have what’s best for them voluntarily must have it forced upon them.  

This is not an exaggeration. Eric Pickles’ initial plan was simply to convert council leaders into elected mayors overnight, and then to hold “affirmative” referendums some months later. This only changed after it had been pointed out to him on all sides (including his own) that this hardly sat easily with his much-vaunted localism policy, and that it’s tricky to claim that you are enhancing local democracy if at the same time you are removing the democratic process from the equation.

It also doesn’t help that only the Conservative element of the coalition favours the elected mayor model; the Liberal Democrats oppose them in principle on the grounds that elected councils are more democratic. Even the Conservatives find that many of their councillors will be campaigning for 'No' votes, as will many Labour councillors (though not the leadership). Expensive referendums (costing up to £250,000 per authority) are thus being foisted onto local people at the behest of only one part of the coalition as part of a stubborn belief that strong and independent leaders with beefed up powers are the answer to the problems of both local government and local democracy.

When directly elected mayors were introduced by Labour in 2000 it was fondly imagined that local communities would embrace them with enthusiasm and elect local business people, independent candidates or “celebrities”. In fact, 26 of the 39 referendums held between 2001 and 2011 produced no votes, ten of the 14 elected mayors currently in post belong to one or other of the political parties, local business people have shown a marked reluctance to put themselves forward, and most towns and cities have regarded the whole proposition with  indifference.

Hence the compulsion, fuelled at least in part by the view that if the major cities of the midlands and the north had mayors, other places would want to follow suit. In the face of this, two authorities - Liverpool and Salford – pre-empted the decision; Liverpool by doing a deal which allowed it to have a mayoral development corporation, and Salford by holding its referendum early and voting Yes (on an 18 per cent turnout).

The argument for elected mayors is that having one person with wider powers responsible for the key areas of economic development will give the cities of the Midlands and the North strong champions at the national table. But no-one has so far been able to spell out exactly what those powers will be. What’s more, it currently seems unlikely that agreement will be reached before 3 May. Thus voters will be asked to vote for (or against) a directly elected mayor with no firm idea either of what they will gain if they say Yes, or of what their communities will lose if they vote No.

The most likely scenario is that, unlike councils with leaders, elected mayors will have a patchwork of powers, with neighbouring councils having different levels of responsibility for things like economic development and transport.

However, at least with elected mayors the voters will have some choice. When it comes to Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) there is no choice at all. Forty-one police authority areas (outside London) in England and Wales will elect these individuals on 15 November, and the current structure of local police authorities will be replaced by the Commissioner and his/her Police and Crime Panel (PCP).

Amongst other things, PCCs will represent and engage with communities, set priorities for their police forces, prepare annual Policing Plans, appoint, dismiss and hold to account Chief Constables, and set Force budgets and council tax precepts. These are sweeping powers and are contentious in some quarters, but at least we know what they are.  PCPs, which will be made up predominantly of local councillors, will “publicly advise and scrutinise” the Commissioner, but will not have any real powers over policing.

Having failed to learn the lesson of elected mayors, the coalition clung to the idea that PCCs would not be political (and therefore that policing would not be politicised); in fact, all the political parties will field candidates in as many PCC elections as they can. According to a recent Huffington Post piece ministers and Conservative MPs are now trying to distance themselves from these elections as it become clear that most PCCs will in fact be current councillors, former MPs, or former chief constables, and that policing will, after November, be one of the most politicised public services in the country.

There are other issues. It is already known, for instance, that directly elected mayors are less, not more, likely to be diverse; research by the Centre for Women & Democracy, has shown that between 2004 and 2011 only 22 per cent of mayoral candidates were women (as against 30 per cent of local council candidates), and there are currently no grounds for supposing that the gender balance of PCC candidates will be any better. There are no figures for ethnic or any other diversity, but it is unlikely that very many of either the new mayors or the PCCs with be anything other than white, male, and middle class.

Local government as currently constituted is by no means perfect. But it does give local people some access to decision-making. The government’s unwillingness to look seriously at how existing democratic structures could be strengthened and developed is disappointing. Strong men – and they will mostly be men – are not necessarily the answer. 

Vladimir Putin’s support machine was strong enough to guarantee him victory on 5th March. Putin’s strength is the weakness of the opposition. But he should be worried by the divisions within his own government. His days would be counted if parts of his own elite chose to ally themselves with parts of the current opposition. In such a fragile situation, Nicu Popescu believes that the EU and US should develop a strategy that would weaken Putin and strengthen civil society.

The result of the Russian presidential election brought two months of euphoria to a shuddering halt. The expectation that Putin would return with a weaker mandate was crushed by his unexpectedly high 63% of support. And even allowing for massive fraud – a lot of it well documented – Putin emerged from this election stronger than many predicted. Most of even his staunchest critics concede that he probably obtained more than 50% of the vote even without the rigging. But while Putin is jubilant, the Russian opposition is more demoralised and disorientated than at any time since December. Between euphoria and depression, it is important to understand where Russia – its government and society – stands after this election.

The weakness of the strong

Putin is both weaker and stronger. He is stronger because he ran a successful election campaign, managing to mobilise his voters through a combination of bribing specific social groups and playing on their fears of instability and animosity towards better off Muscovites. He also (out)played the opposition at its own game by organising even bigger rallies and speechifying at meetings.

‘Putin’s victory was built on the short-term mobilisation of an otherwise barely functioning system. His triumph was that of a sportsman past his peak who still performs well thanks to steroids. And the effects might not last long.’

The institutions built up by Putin over the last 12 years may not be strong enough to fight corruption, improve the business climate, modernise Russia or fight forest fires, but they have proved capable of delivering vote rigging on an industrial scale, getting people into the street, and disorientating  and discouraging his opponents. This machine has also learned to adopt the opposition’s weapons, such as mass rallies, and reproduce them on a similar or grander scale. Certainly, public institutions forced or bribed many people to attend pro-Putin rallies. This might not have made them Putin fans, but it does not mean many of them did not genuinely fear post-Putin instability or the dangers of an Orange Revolution.   

But Putin is also weaker. His victory was built on the short-term mobilisation of an otherwise barely functioning system. His triumph was that of a sportsman past his peak who still performs well thanks to steroids. And the effects might not last long. His campaign promises to various social groups are too expensive to be delivered. But equally problematic is his ideological emptiness. Unlike in previous elections, where he focused on single campaign issues - anti-terror in 2000, anti-oligarch in 2004 and anti-Westernism in 2007 – he has not had a grand narrative for several years now. Most of the old promises he made were frustrated by Russia’s reality – corruption, dissatisfaction over subsidies to the Caucasus and the proliferation of oligarchs. Moscow tops global lists of billionaires’ homes, with 79 of them, compared to 59 for New York and 19 for Beijing. And even though the Russian economy is only a quarter of the size of that of China, the country has 101 billionaires, compared to China’s 115. For some in Russia this is something of a badge of honour, but for most it is just another sign of how skewed, corrupt and unfair the Russian economic system is.

The power of the weak  

But so far Putin’s biggest strength is the weakness of the opposition. It is not simply that it is somewhat disunited, Moscow-centric and under-institutionalised. This is the case for most opposition movements in most developing countries with authoritarian regimes. What is more serious is that it shrinks from addressing these problems. Many of its leaders prefer to travel to London on holiday rather than to Chelyabinsk to campaign.

‘The opposition is on the verge of a generational change. It needs a few more years for the current leaders to mature and build structures around themselves, for new ones to emerge and for old ones to be marginalised further.’ 

In some ways, however, the opposition is relatively united. Its leftist, nationalist and liberal factions have organised coordinated protests and other actions, with support from non-partisan journalists, bloggers, facebookers, writers, celebrity TV presenters and rock-stars. But a relatively united crowd is not a united force. A number of opposition sub-groups are visibly uncomfortable standing shoulder to shoulder with far-right groups, who in their turn dissent from what they call the ‘Bolotnaya’ (bog) oligarchy’, i.e. the group of mainly liberal organisers of the massive rallies for free and fair elections of the last months. The registered political parties, such as the Communists and Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats, do not even qualify as a proper opposition. While formally standing against Putin in recent elections, they behaved like friendly pets, not opponents. In all, the opposition’s biggest weakness is its lack of a clear mid-term agenda, an articulation of achievable goals and a lack of institutional organisation – be it political parties or country-wide associations of citizens that are politically active without being formal parties.  

Yet the opposition is changing fast. The last couple of years have seen a dramatic infusion of new blood into the left, right, centrist and nationalist wings of front-line opposition politics. The opposition is on the verge of a generational change. It needs a few more years for the current leaders to mature and build structures around themselves, for new ones to emerge and for old ones to be marginalised further.

Many opposition activists are proud that they do not have hierarchic structures and that they can organise protests on Facebook and spread the word of election fraud on blogs. The advantage of such a ‘power horizontal’ is that it is diffuse, cheap and, by virtue of its amorphousness, largely immune to attempts by the authorities to shut it down or co-opt it. But while such a system might be able to get a few thousand people out onto the streets of Moscow on a weekend, it will not be enough to face down Putin’s machine. Witness Egypt or Tunisia. Protesting youngsters may have forced Mubarak and Ben Ali out of power, but the reason why Muslim Brotherhood outfits, and not liberals, ended up in power is because they were the only ones who had an organisation. So far, Putin’s biggest advantage is that he faces a crowd, but not an organised challenge to his power. And the challenge before the crowd is to organise and articulate itself. 

Putin the unifier

For all the divisions in the opposition, Putin’s government writ large is almost as divided. The real challenge for him in the mid-term is not that the opposition will take over, but rather that parts of the government will ally with parts of the opposition to kindly, or not-so-kindly, ask him to go.

‘In this system the networks of support and solidarity between opposition liberals and government liberals, or opposition nationalists and government nationalists, are often stronger than within the individual camps.’

In fact one cannot talk of a clear standoff between the opposition and the government. The government is itself a collection of economic liberals, nationalists, conservatives and left-wingers. The opposition is in some ways its mirror image: it also consists of liberal, nationalist and left wing elements (though the relative weight of the elements is different). Putin is in the middle, keeping both camps relatively united. The government is relatively united by the benefits of Putin’s patronage, which outweighs their mutual animosity, and the opposition is also relatively united in its animosity to Putin. However, in this system the networks of support and solidarity between opposition liberals and government liberals, or opposition nationalists and government nationalists, are often stronger than within the individual camps.

The implication of such a system is that the opposition as such does not need to be stronger than Putin in order to oust Putin. Once Putin is weaker or stops being useful to a critical mass of his own elite supporters, they themselves might try to ally with parts of the current opposition in a palace coup.

The opposition’s unity will not therefore be the main yardstick with which to measure Putin’s weakness. In fact, opposition groups will be constantly jockeying for the power to control the street, which could then be used to leverage them into building an anti-Putin pact with parts of the Putinist elite.

‘The EU should move towards a visa-free regime with Russia. This will strengthen societal links with the EU and should chip away at anti-Westernism in Russia.’

In such a context, there is not much the EU and US can do. They would do best to stay away from the protesters, since too many Russian still believe in a Western plot to stage a colour revolution in Russia. Public signs of support, let alone funding for opposition activists, will not help and might do damage. But this does not absolve the EU and US from developing a strategy that would aim to weaken Putin and strengthen Russian society. The EU should move towards a visa-free regime with Russia. This will strengthen societal links with the EU and should chip away at anti-Westernism in Russia. The EU and US should also do everything possible to help enlarge the space in which the opposition operates, through robust defence of the media or individuals within the opposition from any potential harassment. The West is not a player in Russian politics and should not become so. But what it does will help define the power and weakness of both Putin and his opponents.  

Country or region:  Russia Topics:  Democracy and government

'Physical theatre' group DV8's latest production "Can We Talk About This?" is currently being performed at London's National Theatre. Sunder Katwala applauds its corporeal flare but finds a lack of serious engagement with its subject matter of multiculturalism. 

'Physical theatre' group DV8's latest production "Can We Talk About This?" is currently being performed at London's National Theatre. Sunder Katwala applauds its corporeal flare but finds a lack of serious engagement with its subject matter of multiculturalism.

"Do you feel morally superior to the Taliban?". The actor, channeling Martin Amis, wants a show of hands.

Slowly, a few hands go up, including mine. "Only about a fifth of you". That captures the reticence of London’s theatergoers – expecting a monologue, not an audience participation exercise - rather than any scientific sample of opinion on the question. 

The moment gives "Can we talk about this?" at the National Theatre the start that it wants. An 80 minute sledge-hammer polemic highlighting the dangers that Islam and multiculturalism present to free speech follows.  The play is imaginatively staged and quite brilliantly performed by the physical theatre company DV8 in a production which celebrates their 25th anniversary. Their tick-tock head movements animating talking head debates culled from broadcast debates; their contorted limbs embodying the liberal dilemmas of tolerance.

What is missing is any serious interrogation of the play's central themes of Islam and multiculturalism.

The prosecution indictment is now familiar: liberalism has lapsed into relativism, so that accusations of racism and Islamophobia prevent challenges to honour killings or forced marriages. It is vigorously prosecuted and rarely contested seriously on the stage. More often than not, the challenge to it comes from an extreme Islamism, to reinforce the core narrative about brave liberals taking on intolerance. Anjem Choudhury of the banned Al-Muhaijiroun group and its various reincarnations and his allies are, depressingly, among the most prominent Muslim voices. Except for feminist challenges to both fundamentalism and, for some, Islam itself, nobody speaks for millions of Muslims who can and do combine a sincere faith with their belief in the rule of law in liberal democracies. 

Many (rather different) voices are conflated together into a broad front of the good guys and girls. Those offered a highly sympathetic, mostly entirely uncritical, hearing include author Martin Amis; Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford; Labour MP Ann Cryer; “One Law for all” anti-Sharia campaigner Maryam Namazie; Gita Saghal of Women Against Fundamentalism; David Henshaw, the producer of the Dispatches undercover investigation into extremism in Mosques; Javinder Sanghera of Karma Nirvana, the Asian women’s centre which acts against honour-based abuse; Flemming Rose, whose newspaper published of the Danish cartoons, and the Dutch right-wing populist politician Geert Wilders are all presented as brave liberal truth-tellers.

Much can be said for many (if not all) of these voices, most especially the feminist campaigners. There is at least something to be said to challenge the arguments of some of them too. Habitually, they are asked "and were you racist?", and get to explain this was precisely the question with which their critics tried to silence them. 

It is surprising to see such a naively uncritical portrayal of the far right populist Dutch MP Geert Wilders on the National Theatre stage. Wilders features simply as a victim of censorship, wanting to show his film Fitna at the House of Lords, and being prevented by a Muslim politician, threatening a disruptive mob. In a play covering Wilders, free speech and censorship, why omit his call for the Koran to be banned? Or his proposal of a 1000 euro headscarf licence, a punitive tax on religious expression, to provide a provocative and polarising election talking point. 

During a cogent, powerful account of forced marriage and honour killings, an angry actor throws rocks from the stalls, shouting "this is Islamaphobic shit". The timing and the nature of that intervention immediately delegitimise the point. So the play contains no substantive discussion of racism, except its use as a device to shut down legitimate scrutiny. Islamaphobia is described as exaggerated special pleading. The powerful critique of the media’s coverage of Islam, put by centre-right commentator Peter Oborne, is ignored. In a play suffused in multi-media, we are never shown a newspaper headline. 

If a play about defending fundamental freedoms opens with Amis, it seems curious for it to ignore the significant controversy about his infamous (later regretted) remarks about the instinct to strip all Muslims of civil rights. 

“What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? — to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? ‘Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”

The play offers moving testimony of the victims of Islamist violence. It lacks any interest in unpacking different types of backlash over the last decade: sometimes to Islamism as an ideology, sometimes to Islam as a faith, and sometimes to Muslims as a group. 

In 2012, the play's politics simply seem very dated. This is a "political correctness gone mad" tract.

A liberal challenge to multiculturalism may have been an iconoclastic challenge in 1999. The play is offering us what has now been the dominant, orthodox narrative in the long-running British and European debate since 2005, surveyed recently by Alli Rattansi here in oD's OurKingdom. So we are played a clip of the Prime Minister endorsing the central critique of multiculturalism, in a Munich speech which contained little new to anybody paying attention to the speeches of prime ministers and home secretaries since the riots of the summer of 2001 and Trevor Phillips’ influential obituary of multiculturalism in 2004. 

Having lived in our post 9/11 world for a decade, could anybody seriously still claim that there are “a lack of voices speaking up” if that means being critical of Islam or multiculturalism, as director Lloyd Newsom writes in the programme. This conflates the genuine threat of murderous violence from extremists with a mischaracterization of a public debate dominated by obituaries for multiculturalism. These issues were debated, with more depth, on the National Theatre stage in David Edgar’s Playing With Fire, at the National in 2005.

Too much is left out. We catch just one tiny glimpse of the football hooligans of the EDL, loudly chanting "Allah, Allah, who the fuck is Allah" for a few seconds on a screen. That these populist, extreme attacks on Islam are missing from the play prevents it discussing the central importance of the symbiotic relationship between Islamist and populist far right extremism, each giving its purported enemy the recruiting poster slogans to demonstrate the conspiracy that they must fight, furthering their mutually beneficial mission of polarizing the public debate into a foundational clash of civilizations. 

The central flaw of “Can we talk about this?” is that demonstrates almost no interest in either Islam or multiculturalism, except as a destructive threat to the liberal enlightenment.

It defines multiculturalism as a doctrine which excuses wife-beating on the grounds of faith. I have personally been a critic, rather than an advocate, of multiculturalism before it was fashionable, having commissioned and published Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s critique back in 2000.  I was frustrated by the play’s refusal to give any significant voice to any plausible advocate of a democratic liberal multiculturalism, as advocated by thinkers like Bhikhu Parekh, whose major 2000 report was clear about the fundamental place of human rights, or Tariq Modood, who has long advocated a stronger account of shared national identity and citizenship within a multiculturalist framework. Strangely, the National Theatre’s programme captures some of this debate. It is missing from the stage.

Having raised my hand to Amis’ questions, the play should have been able to persuade me of its case. I take a straightforwardly liberal view of the Rushdie affair, and agree with Christopher Hitchens, shown challenging Shirley Williams on this point, that the author of Midnight’s Children certainly merits a knighthood. The play lost my support by stripping out all complexity. 

Multiculturalism is not short of obituarists. It matters which critiques of it are in play. This play made no attempt to differentiate liberal from illiberal critiques of multiculturalism; those which are a legitimate and important part of democratic discourse and those which would tear it up.

There are worlds of difference between the critiques of multiculturalism developed by Kenan Malik, within an anti-racist framework while remaining in favour of large-scale immigration, various critiques adopted by mainstream politicians such as pro-integration arguments of Jack Straw, liberal Conservatism of David Cameron, and harder versions. Nicolas Sarkozy, now putting halal meat at the centre of his flailing re-election campaign, takes the mainstream right closer to the hardline, populist polemics of Theo Van Gogh and Geert Wilders. Falling off the extreme fringe, beyond even the French NF and the English Defence League, you would find the online manifesto which Norweigan extremist Anders Breivik believed legitimized his killing spree of young Labour Party activists.

The problem is not simply that Breivik’s killing spree, in the name of anti-multiculturalism, doesn’t rate a mention. The truly uncomfortable thought is that one would have to scour the script with a fine toothcomb before finding much, if anything, in its sledgehammer critique that Breivik could object to.

"Can we talk about this" could be received as something of a companion piece to Nick Cohen's new book "You can't read this book". Cohen’s book is also, characteristically, a polemic, with a similar core thesis, challenging self-censorship, "the racism of the anti-racists" and a "squishy liberal version of apartheid". But Cohen avoids falling into the same trap because, though he worries a good deal about the use and abuse of an “Islamaphobia” charge to limit legitimate free speech, he adds a crucial rider, writing that “the accusation was not always fatuous. As the millennium arrived, racists and nativist conservatives … could develop the most unlikely interest in human rights. If liberalism gave them a new means of attack, they were prepared to feign an interest in it”. 

Lloyd Newsom’s play never acknowledges that. As a result, “Can we talk about this?” struck me as a very continental play, located primarily in the Dutch crisis of identity and post-multiculturalism since the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Van Gogh. Here, there is almost nothing to be said about multiculturalism, except to describe it is a mad advocacy of apartheid. 

The play is similarly incurious about Islam. There is certainly a case for its instinct of presenting Hirsi Ali as a heroine. It would be a less two-dimensional portrayal had the director gone beyond her undoubted personal courage, and the power of her critique of religious voices who look away from violence against women, to explore her core argument: that this is a problem with Islam itself, not with "extremist" interpretations of it. 

One scene, towards the end, goes into a trance-like stance, repeating "intepretation, interpretation, interpretation” over and over. In this most talkative of scripts, it struck me as showing a lack of interest in what the content of this debate between Muslims about the content of Islam is about. The play freezes the debate about the nature of British Islam over two decades ago, in 1989, between those marching to ban (or burn) the Rushdie book, and the brave feminists who marched in his support. We never get taken inside a mosque. The viewer would be most surprised to hear about, say, the chasing out of extremists from Finsbury Park Mosque, or the polling evidence that British Muslims demonstrate a higher level of attachment to British identity and British political institutions of any social group. 

The play ends with the briefest of soundbites from a New York debate including Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam Foundation, an ex-Islamist extremist now doing good counter-extremism work. Nawaz has been heard earlier in a brief Newsnight debate with Anjem Choudhury, which descends into a playground squabble, to Jeremy Paxman’s evident amusement. Here, he is up against Ayaan Hirsi Ali who, on the night, persuaded the New York audience to reject the motion that Islam is a religion of peace.

We see only a few seconds on stage. Nawaz trying to say that extremist Islamist violence does not represent Islam, the religion of 1.6 billion people. As Hirsi Ali talks over him, his microphone is cut off and carried away. 

Enough talk. The play is over. 

That moment of silencing, for me, symbolised something else: the argument that the play never put. 

Can we talk about that? 

Another time, perhaps.

See also: Chris Cox on a raw theatrical presentation of the dangers of the bomb

The present economic crisis stems from the gradual disintegration of 'national capitalism', embodied in national currency, from the early 1970s onwards. It needs to be properly understood as a moment in the history and anthropology of money.

The crisis of the world economy is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. In what follows I approach the crisis more generally as a moment in the history of money. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. The crisis should be seen as the collapse of the money system that the world lived by in the twentieth century. This has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971, a new regime of floating currencies emerged and money derivatives were invented in 1972. As the need for international cooperation intensifies, the disconnect between economy and political institutions undermines effective solutions.

2011/12 is the political consequence of the financial crisis of 2007/8. There is still a tendency to see the potential disaster we are living through in economic rather than political terms. In this respect, neoliberalism’s detractors often reproduce the free market ideology they claim to oppose. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today. One way of approaching our moment in history is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.

What is ending is “national capitalism”, the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism. Its main symbol has been national monopoly currency (legal tender or central bank money). It was the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of national citizens. National capitalism was never the only active principle in world political economy: regional federations, empires and globalization are at least as old or much older.

National capitalism’s origins lay in a series of linked revolutions of the 1860s and early ‘70s based on a new alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class.  These ranged from the American civil war and Japan’s Meiji restoration to Italian and German unification, Russia’s abolition of serfdom, the French Third Republic and Britain’s second Reform Act. Amongst all this, Marx published Capital and a revolution in transport and communications (steamships, continental railways and the telegraph) took place.

These new national governments launched a bureaucratic revolution in the late nineteenth century and then sponsored large corporations in a drive towards mass production. The national system became generalised after the First World War when states turned inward to manage their economies in war and depression. Its apogee was the social democracy built after 1945, what the French call les trente glorieuses.

 

Money as a source of nationhood

Money expands the capacity of individuals to stabilise their own personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society. People learn to understand each other as members of communities and money is an important vehicle for this. They share meanings as a way of achieving their practical purposes together.

Nation-states have been so successful in a relatively short time that it is hard for us to imagine society in any other way. Five different types of community come together in the nation-state:

•        political community: a link to the world and a source of law at home

•        community of place: territorial boundaries of land and sea

•        imagined or virtual community: the constructed cultural identity of citizens

•        community of interest: subjectively and objectively shared purposes in trade and war

•        monetary community: common use of a national monopoly currency

The rise and fall of single currencies is therefore one particular way of approaching national capitalism’s historical trajectory.

Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. According to Georg Simmel (in The Philosophy of Money, 1900), it is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society. At present national politics and media frame economic questions in such relentlessly parochial terms that we find it hard to think about the human predicament as a whole. But money is already global in scope and the need to overcome these limitations is urgent. My fear is that only a major war and all the losses it would bring will concentrate our minds once more on fixing the world we live in.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) is enjoying a major revival today for the good reason that our crisis is strongly reminiscent of the disaster he sought to explain then, namely the collapse of the Victorian free market ideal, resulting ultimately in The Great Depression. He listed money, along with land and labour, as a “fictitious commodity” whose unregulated exchange came close to the buying and selling society itself. He held that money and markets originate in the extension of society beyond its local core; society has to become more inclusive since none was ever self-sufficient. But conflict between the internal and external dimensions of an economy is often highly disruptive. This is why, historically and anthropologically speaking, societies have traditionally held markets at arm’s length and why acceptance of market principles at the core of modern societies invites disaster.

Mainstream economics says more about what money does than what it is. Its main function is held to be as a medium of exchange, a more efficient lubricant of markets than barter. Another school emphasizes money’s function as a means of payment, especially of taxes to the government and hence on “purchasing power”. It is also a standard of value or unit of account, with the focus again on government’s role in establishing the legal conditions for trade; while John Locke conceived of money as a store of wealth, a new form of property that allowed the accumulation of riches to escape from the limitations of natural economy.

In a little-known article, “Money objects and money uses”, Polanyi later approached money as a semantic system, like writing. He argued that only modern money combines the four functions (payment, standard, store and exchange) in a few “all-purpose” symbols, national currency. By contrast, primitive and archaic forms of money attached the separate uses to different symbolic objects or “special-purpose” monies.  Polanyi argued against the primacy of money as a medium of exchange and for a multi-stranded model of its evolution.  For him and for Keynes, it was above all a means of payment or the “purchasing power” of citizens which drives modern economies, not so much a medium of exchange for buying and selling as such.

Although this analysis was intended only to illuminate the history of money, Polanyi’s approach offers profound insight into the causes of today’s global economic crisis. Our challenge is to conceive of society once more as something plural rather than singular, as a federated network rather than as a centralized hierarchy, the nation-state. The era of national monopoly currencies is very recent (from the 1850s); it took the United States, for example, half a century to secure an uncontested monopoly for “greenbacks”; and “all-purpose money” has been breaking up for four decades now, since the US dollar was de-pegged from gold.

 

What comes after national currencies?

Since the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of fixed parity exchange rates, the world economy has reverted to the plural pattern of competing currencies that was normal before central banks learned how to control national economies in the second half of the nineteenth century through the bank rate, for example. One aspect of the crisis is that the international rule system imposed after the Second World War was systematically subverted by the creation of an offshore banking system which brought the informal economy to the heart of global finance. Nick Shaxson’s Treasure Islands (2011) provides an astonishing account of how the City of London replaced the colonial empire it lost with another based on tax havens. The separation of functions between different types of monetary instruments was also crucial to money’s great escape from the rules of the Keynesian consensus, that was institutionalised in the Bretton Woods system. Central bank control was eroded by a shift to money being issued in multiple forms by a global distributed network of corporations, not just governments and banks.

Some brief examples must serve to indicate the momentous changes that have overtaken money in the last few decades. In Switzerland today, euros are commonly accepted in shops alongside the national currency. If you pay with a card, you can often choose the unit of account (Swiss franc, euro, pound sterling, US dollar). But only francs are acceptable for payment of local taxes.

Are national currencies a store of wealth? Hardly -- they have all been radically depreciated and may even disappear; hence the flight to gold. But gold could turn out to be the biggest asset bubble of them all. As for real estate, the collapse of subprime mortgages got us into the present mess. And we have not even touched on what credit default swaps and collateral debt obligations are used for or who issues them. The shadow banking system -- hedge funds, money market funds and structured investment vehicles that lie beyond state regulation – is literally out of control.

Simmel considered money’s twin anchors to be its physical substance (coins, paper etc.) and the social institutions supporting the community of its users. He predicted that the first would wither away, making the second more visible. Radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information as a result of the digital revolution in communications has been transforming money and exchange for two decades now, confirming Simmel’s prophecy. But globalization has made national society seem a lot less self-sufficient than it did a century ago.

This process whereby markets, money and telecommunications have extended society rapidly beyond national boundaries, even as they have invaded the core institutions of domestic society, is fraught with danger. We need to extend systems of social rights to the global level before the contradictions of the market system collapse again into world war. But local political organization resists such a move. After centuries of a unipolar divergent world economy ruled by the West, ours is a multi-polar world whose plurality of associations and convergent income distribution resembles the medieval period more than any since.

 

The legacy of past mistakes

The monetary crisis that has overwhelmed the eurozone of late needs to be seen in this context. The apparent triumph of the free market at the end of the Cold War in 1989/90 induced two huge political blunders, both of them based on the premise that society should be shaped by market economy rather than the other way round. Radical privatization of Soviet bloc public economies ignored the common history of politics, law and social custom that shored up market economies in the West, thereby delivering the economy into the hands of gangsters and oligarchs. And the European single currency was supposed to provide the social glue for political union without first developing effective fiscal institutions or economic convergence between North and South.

The big mistake was to replace national currencies with the euro. An alternative proposal, the hard ecu, would have floated politically managed national currencies alongside a low-inflation European central bank currency. Countries that didn’t join the euro, like Britain and Switzerland, have in practice enjoyed the privilege of this plural option. Eurozone countries cannot devalue and so must reduce their debts through deflation or default. Argentina’s example of default after the peso crashed is directly relevant to countries like Greece and Spain today. The euro was invented after money was already breaking up into multiple forms and functions. The Americans centralized their currency after a civil war; the Europeans centralized theirs as a means of achieving political union.

The infrastructure of money has already become decentralized and global. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s or to a Keynesian regime of managed exchange rates and capital flows is bound to fail. Where are the levers of democratic power to be located, now that globalization has exposed the limitations of national economic management? The cultural logic of national capitalism leads the political classes who got us into this mess to repeat the same mistakes. Politics is a dialogue of the deaf, between those who deny the need for any political regulation of markets and others who remain trapped in the outmoded model of central bank money.

The idea of world society is still perceived by most people as at best a utopian fantasy or at worst a threat to us all. We need to build an infrastructure of money adequate to humanity’s common needs. “Economy” has multiple meanings, but the idea of putting ones house in order in a world shaped increasingly by markets combines several of them. In this conception, economy is pulled inwards to secure local guarantees of a community’s rights and interests; and outwards to make good local supply by engaging with outsiders through the medium of money and markets of various sorts, not just our own.  The trick is to manage this dialectic of internal and external forces effectively.

Our societies are becoming increasingly emancipated from their territorial base. Three things count above all in these societies -- people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must add in 2011-12 the possibility of political revolution. Europe has become the main focus once more of a world revolution. The euro crisis is a Sophoclean tragedy in which good intentions cannot remedy the consequences of past mistakes.

Sideboxes Related stories:  The Uneconomics guide to money creation Uneconomics: a challenge to the power of the economics profession Topics:  International politics

The fourth annual India Art Fair (IAF), held earlier this year, was hailed by Indian and international media as proof of an art culture come of age. The private opening was packed with the art-hungry moneyed class from all over the world, not least among them Indian buyers with an eye on potential investments. In the last few years, Indian modern art has taken its place on the international stage, and buyers in India have benefited; but there is also a hunger to experience work by international artists. The public days saw schoolchildren, students, aspiring artists and other keen spectators bypassing work by Indian mega-artists Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher to take pictures of each other by Tracey Emin’s 2011 neon, Love is what you want. A group of young Indian women at the White Cube stand were struck by Damien Hurst’s 2008 White Lies: a bright gold cabinet displaying row upon row of glittering zirconias. “I take the piece to signify something about the lies all men tell women,” said one visitor, and her girlfriends all agreed.

Behind the scenes though, the IAF was showing symptoms of three maladies that are depressingly common in India. First, the curtailment of freedom of expression; second, prohibitive taxation; and finally a certain kind of black-market money-churning that makes it difficult for international gallerists to take part.

Censorship casts a long shadow over Indian cultural life. The IAF took place in the wake of the Jaipur Literary Festival, which saw Salman Rushdie prohibited from attending through a combination of right-wing Muslim outrage and the capitulation of Indian politicians. A more insidious form of this censorship affects Indian cultural life everyday: the exercising of an unwritten moral code that encourages the banning of all manner of artistic expression from the public’s delicate gaze.

At the Everard Read Gallery, visitors were able to enjoy astonishing work by South African artist Leigh Voigt, including a painting of two cockerels poised on a crumbling, whitewashed wall and facing off against each other like soldiers from opposite sides at the India-Pakistan border in Wagah. Given the political history between India and South Africa, a sculpture of Gandhi in his dhoti also attracted attention. But the crowd didn’t know what they weren’t shown: sculptures by internationally recognised artists Bryn Werth and Angus Taylor that were confiscated at the airport by Indian customs officials on the grounds that they were too ‘lewd.’ In the world’s largest democracy, cultural and moral policing comes as part of the job at customs.

A spokesperson for the gallery who did not wish to be named said, “We had a few problems as a few works were confiscated at the airport. We have been told they will be sent back with the rest when we leave.” She added, “They were not suggestive. There are plenty of other nudes at the show.” A flick through the catalogue reveals she is right. Visitors to the stand of New Delhi-based gallery, Wonderwall, could see a photograph by an Indian artist of four (headless) female nudes, made in clay; countless other pieces celebrating and questioning our relationship with our own bodies were in evidence at other stands. 

‘Lewdness’ is in the eye of the beholder, and is a favourite charge of the Indian censor. That the censor is so arbitrary makes its prurient attitude all the more difficult to swallow. When I asked the spokesperson if the Everard Read Gallery would be coming back next year she simply said, “We thought coming this year would be a great idea. About coming back – we haven’t thought that far ahead.” It would be a great shame if they didn’t. 

Laura Williams, of the Norwich based Art 18/21 gallery, highlighted the unique challenges presented by this particular event. “The first year was a massive eye-opener for me,” she said. “If you have no experience as an international gallery coming to India, it can be a steep learning curve. International galleries need to research the market and know how it works in that region. It’s not like showing in areas which have strong institutional support for art.”

 

She was full of praise for the IAF itself. “The organization of the fair and the enthusiasm of the visiting public is impressive,” she said, “but the bureaucracy is a nightmare.” This includes the heavy customs duty, which is levied based on the value of work being brought into the country. If the work is not sold, that money is returned. Needless to say, this process doesn’t always work in a smooth or timely manner. Williams said, “If you’re showing £3 million worth of work, it’s not feasible to pay that money up front.”

That the rules don’t seem to be fixed also causes problems. The morning before the show opened, Williams and other international galleries received emails from the government demanding more duty be paid. For smaller galleries such costs can be prohibitive and, again, limit what they can show. One Spanish gallery brought work to the fair on an ATA Carnet, an international customs bond that allows temporary imports without taxation. But if the Carnet holder sells any work it must be taken back to the original country and then reshipped, with all duties paid, to its final destination, which could be back in India. A spokesperson from a leading Indian gallery with links in London admitted, “If someone was undecided about buying a piece, the extra cost and wait might be a deterrent, particularly if you are used to buying large art works and having them delivered straight away.” 

Finally, what about the healthy black-market that India has always run on? When wealthy Indians need to avoid tax, they spend big, with a suitcase full of cash handed over in a private residence to a waiting dealer in exchange for the work. Receipts are not accepted. For a first-time international gallerist showing in India, this might come as a shock: rupees can’t be taken out of the country. A quick visit to a money launderer in a central Delhi location, currency stuffed down the underwear and in pockets of suitcases: the stuff of a Bollywood remake of the Thomas Crown Affair, surely? Not so. According to my sources, that’s pretty close to what happens.

Why is the paperwork so prohibitive? Of course art is a niche interest at the best of times. In India, it has not historically been given much emphasis in the school system, forget at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Indian secondary-school students in the 1970s, 80s and 90s were streamed into science or commerce strands and then encouraged into the family business or corporate jobs. But more insidious than this marginalisation is the attitude that art is subversive, a corrupting influence that must be circumscribed to avoid the erosion of society’s perceived moral and national values.

Perhaps the only thing that will change this attitude is the increasing financial value of modern art in India. Depressing though this is, the opening up of the market has seen the growth of the private gallery sector all over the country. This means people can now see work by a wide range of artists from the Modern Masters to contemporary international superstars. There is a burgeoning scene promoting the new generation – postmodernists with a sense of irony, a significant move away from the politically earnest nostalgia seen in Indian artists born in the 1970s. Last year, for the first time in history, India had a pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Within the country, the taste is for more than purely ‘Indian’ however, and not just among the elite. International artists show regularly at the private galleries in the metropolitan cities Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. To make the most of the international nature of the fair, and perhaps for lack of opportunity to visit such spaces, young people rub shoulders with megabucks collectors at the IAF. Tickets were reasonably priced. Williams underlines that it’s the presence of school visits and interested non-buyers which makes this fair so different from other international shows such as Basel, where it’s all about buying and selling. “The IAF has a unique energy,” she said. “The question I get asked the most is not ‘How much is it?’ but, ‘Can you tell me what this work is about?’” It’s a place where school girls in grey kilts, knee socks and maroon jumpers could be seen standing next to dealers, in front of a sculpture of a naked baby curled over next to a frog. All of them perhaps reflecting on their own origins, or perhaps just wondering whether they liked the work or not. Thank goodness the customs officials can’t censor that.

This year, around 128,000 visitors saw work at 84 galleries from across the globe, proving how much enthusiasm there is when work is made accessible to public viewing. These are impressive numbers that bode well for the future of the IAF. But behind the scenes, it is clear that the government needs to do more to support the event and others like it. Cultural life thrives on access to art from all parts of the globe, which in turn relies on freedom of expression. Without such exchange in an atmosphere free of corruption, the art-hungry public, the galleries coming with great excitement to India, dealers, buyers and the fair itself will continue to be sadly shortchanged.

In the days ahead a struggle looms over women's human rights and gender justice in Egypt. Will the Muslim Sisters rise to the occasion?

On March 8th 2011 a small number of civil society and development professionals along with a few students and academics staged a celebration of International Women’s Day in Tahrir square. This was a month after the fall of Mubarak and the assumption of control by the army. It was a time of seemingly infinite possibility and boundless liberation. It therefore came as a surprise when the few hundred huddled in the middle of the square were berated, ridiculed and finally chased into the side streets and physically attacked.  This was the first appearance of what would later come to be known as the ‘third’ or ‘invisible’ hand- the hand that later tormented and killed hundreds of protestors. This hand is assumed to be operated either by the old establishment, or by the military or by Egyptians fed up with protestors: in short, it is the hand of counter revolutionary elements! However there was little sympathy for those attacked in the square. Progressive political groups were un-interested in questions of gender equality and justice.

A year later, on the 8 March 2012, a grand demonstration took place in Cairo. There were feminist, human rights activists, political parties from the socialists to the social democrats, pioneers from the 9th March movement for academic freedoms and members of Kifaya. Thousands showed up and marched from the Egyptian journalists’ syndicate to Parliament, winding their way down the heart of Cairo and through Tahrir square holding up banners demanding equal representation for women in the yet to be selected constitutional committee, and registering their anger at proposed changes to personal status laws which could mean that Egyptian women will lose some of their rights.

What a  difference a year can make! Women’s human rights have over the past year gone from oblivion and ignominy to becoming a cause celebre of the people. This past week there were daily chat shows on television celebrating women inviting labour activists, socialists, feminists, and scholars of Islam to discuss gender-based rights and women’s representation. There were also celebrations to honour veterans from the field of women’s activism, and Angham, one of Egypt’s leading divas sang a specially composed song that praises women as ‘half the world”.  Missing from these celebrations and demonstrations was the strongest and largest political force in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and their Freedom and Justice Party.

The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) organized a seminar and an all day conference on the subject, during which they distanced themselves and their position on women’s issues from the rest of the women’s movement. The women’s committee of the party has begun to formulate a gender narrative that focuses on the sanctity of the family, and on women’s reproductive roles and responsibilities. They have condemned the changes made to personal status laws over the past decade, taking a populist position that panders to the public’s perceptions - or misperceptions - of  so-called ‘Suzanne Mubarak’s laws’.  These are the legislative reforms that that have enabled women to exit bad marriages, keep custody of their children beyond the ages of 7 years for boys and 9 years for girls, travel without having to get their husband’s consent for each journey, and to contest gender based discriminations through the office of an ombudsman and the intercessions of a national machinery for women. These laws were changed seemingly by presidential fiat and appropriated by Mubarak’s entourage, but in fact were achieved by the slow and accumulated efforts of national, regional and global feminist and human rights lobbies and groups.

The FJP have been harping on nationalism and patriarchal pride. They have projected the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) as a global ‘American’ conspiracy to destroy the Egyptian Family and to impose western morality. Various young women aligned to the party have appeared on television and in public events making similar claims. This seems to be an opinion that pervades the FJP circles.

Moreover the party has vehemently condemned the newly appointed National Council for Women, and has withdrawn their own member of Parliament who was amongst the 30 members of the newly appointed board. They have plans to turn the national women’s machinery into a council for the family. Their frustrations with the Council were expressed recently - albeit in an unfortunately exaggerated gesture - when they protested the absence of Mervat el Tellawy from a panel discussion on women’s status on March 5th  2012.  Ms Tellawy did not show up because she was on the tarmac of  Shannon airport after her flight from New York to Cairo experienced engine failure, and made an emergency landing in Ireland. This, by all accounts, constitutes  a  case of ‘force majeure’; however the good sisters stormed out of the hall shouting abuse at the Council and at Ms. Tellawy.

The FJP are not alone in their opposition to the National Council for Women. Secular feminists and socialists have also condemned the new council. They have voiced concerns regarding the names of appointees, and were against the way in which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) made the appointments without consultation; the SCAF did not even consult the appointees themselves. But this is as far the convergence between secular and religious women activists go.  Other than sharing a condemnation of the NCW (for different reasons - both substantive and procedural), the Muslim Sisters and the women’s movement share little else.

The FJP narrative is Islamic in its reference points but has little to do with Islamic reformism or feminism. It is a narrative that is conservative and constrained by the deference of the women of FJP to the male members of their party. This is not only a disappointment for most observers, but is also a major problem for the FJP itself. Rather than expending some effort to forge alliances with women’s groups from civil society and other political parties to address obstacles to gender justice and to social rights, they have made common cause with their male  party members against the agenda of activists and women’s right proponents. They  have chosen an oppositional stance and condemned reforms for gender justice without really sharing their own ideas or consulting their peers on their program. At best this may reflect a lack of networking capabilities on their part; but at worst it could be a sign of elitism and sense of superiority. The sisters have chosen to remain under the wing of their triumphant brothers rather than dialogue with their diverse sisters from a rainbow of political orientations and positions! They have also ignored the venerable tradition of reformism within the theological discourses of Islam. Feminists like Omaima Abu Bakr, and theologians like Amna Nosseir are two of many who are searching for progressive interpretations of scriptures that can become a foundation upon which Muslim women can launch their activism. The women of FJP have yet to share their own theological and social program, or to reveal their biases and political positions. So far they seem to be keen on conforming with their party line, which is insensitive to issues of gender equality and justice.

The FJP have not inspired women but rather have frightened them. It is to them, I think, that we owe the robust demonstrations of this year. By failing to champion women’s rights they have made the general public, rights movements, and political parties, wake up to the women’s cause and take to the streets and the airwaves.

Now another opportunity presents itself for the FJP women’s committee to show some leadership. The cases of forced virginity tests performed on women demonstrators under detention have created public outrage. The verdict in the Samira Ibrahim case - a young woman who pressed charges against her aggressors -  was announced and a military court pronounced the doctor, who performed the virginity test on this young woman when she was in custody last year, innocent.

Will the FJP - and the Muslim Sisters - side with Samira, or will it ignore this brave woman’s fight for the sanctity of her body?

Sideboxes Related stories:  Egypt: the battle over hope and morale Egypt: the two faces of liberation Narrating the Arab spring from within Egyptian women: performing in the margin, revolting in the centre What Iran wants from female religious authority: piety - yes, expertise in fiqh - no Why women are at the heart of Egypt’s political trials and tribulations The Saudi response to the ‘Arab spring’: containment and co-option We may be stateless but we are not voiceless Women in the new Libya: challenges ahead Iranian responses to the “Arab spring”: appropriation and contestation Promise and peril: women and the ‘Arab spring’ Country or region:  Egypt Topics:  Civil society Democracy and government Equality

If it has to actually challenge the powers that be, the movement must move to real grassroots work and not canvass on astroturf

The issue of widespread corruption in public life in India is incontrovertibly a very grave one. Through its anti-corruption agitations over the past year, various middleclass groups like Team Anna – led by political activist Anna Hazare, the group led by Yoga and Ayurveda magnate Baba Ramdev, were right to foreground the issue. Supported most by the yuppie populace that resides in the major cities of India, they formed an umbrella movement demanding the enactment of the Lokpal legislation which would in turn install an ombudsman invested with sufficient powers to investigate and prosecute all three pillars of the world’s largest electoral democracy – the elected parliamentarians, the executive bureaucracy and the judiciary for charges of corruption.

For a whole knotty swad of reasons – ranging from overreach to lack of cohesive action on to major gaffes by its leaders – the movement failed to pressurise the Indian parliament to legislate the Lokpal. But the apparent failure of the movement notwithstanding, the current ‘middleclass’ of India has undoubtedly made its presence strongly felt on the stage of Indian politics. Moving beyond its rhetoric of apolitical neutrality, it is now testing the electoral waters. Whether through electoral ‘revenge’ on Congress in the Hissar polls (where Team Anna actively campaigned against its first political foe ensuring its defeat) or the plans in Goa, Team Anna, the figurehead of the middleclass movement, is making its political ambitions clear. Also what’s becoming clearer every day is that, politically and elsewhere, the middleclass is demanding its pound of flesh.

The middleclass has every right to political participation using slogans they deem fit – and no amount of derision can rob them of that right. But it is also natural to observe that after a crackling show last year inviting unparalleled media coverage, the movement has waned and appears besieged by its clever opponents. From its high point of success, when top faces of government had to eat many a humble pie in full public view, it’s not uncommon now to hear commentators writing off Team Anna. Why so? Is the fizzle-out inevitable? 

Middleclass and neo-liberalism

Those interacting in the larger urban masses in India, including this essayist, will attest that citizens of diverse incomes – from slum dwellers earning barely a few thousand rupees a month to executives of top firms earning many lakhs – all nowadays refer to themselves as ‘middleclass’. Today, the ‘middleclass’ of India has come to denote that set of urban Indian people who live in and around the big and small cities and towns of India and the majority of whose members have achieved adulthood in post liberalisation India. In fact from popular representations – such as in the media – what appears to connect the members are the shared experiences and the collective memory of the sights and sounds of neo-liberal India. Whether it is the distinction of being the generation that moved from terrestrial state run TV (Doordarshan) to satellite TV or being witness to the advent of branded consumer products as opposed to the somewhat drab life of earlier times – the current middleclass and its set of values and priorities is one which is a result of India’s accession to the ‘free market’.  In other words, the generation of people who have benefited most from the wonders of the free market and having assimilated the exposure to first world skills are currently at the productive peak of their professional lives, have become the face and voice of the eponymous middleclass. Armed with the technologies, the sensitivities and the parlance of this era, the middleclass have now taken on the political rulers of the nation.

But we must now ask, whether a movement or the class that engendered it, which bases its identity on the very advent of neo-liberalism, can ignore the socio-economic and political realities brought on by it? Jostling for space and legitimacy in the Indian political spectrum, can it ignore the massive changes which the historical act of opening up India’s economy and the following influx of global capital have induced? If it wishes to steer itself along a path with some credible chance of political success, can the experiences of other third world countries (Latin American for example) that have followed this path of feudalism to neo-liberalism be ignored? 

Right baggage

And secondly, mustn’t it now do away with the baggage of conservative ideas with which a section in the movement seeks to encumber it?

When Anna Hazare, leader of Team Anna, says that alcoholics should be publicly caned after tying them to posts, or the hands of those deemed corrupt chopped off (not to mention publicly hanging them) he highlights his incompatibility with a modern and humane India. When Baba Ramdev claims he can cure nearly everything just by making people breathe correctly (and especially in a nation riddled with public ill health) he underscores his regressive views.

It’s an unacceptable contradiction that this leading component seeks to use the most modern means - satellite TV and the internet - to propagate the most decayed and fetid of ideas under the name of morals, piety, national identity and other vague and vile words. Even if one disseminates such decayed ideas through HD TV or posts them to Facebook, the ideas do not become modern. They remain as ridiculous and malevolent as ever. They politically damage the image of the speaker and the movement beyond repair.

There is also the major issue of the strong presence of the Hindutva (right wing Hindu supremacists). Team Anna has amongst them people who trace their political lineage to anti-lower caste movements. Ramdev is of course an open proponent of Hindu theocratic governance and society. It is these elements which make the movement unacceptable to a plural Indian society. The movement must get this straight – ideas about how to belittle lower castes, other religions and other minority and/or disadvantaged identities (whether linguistic or regional or sexual) is an absolute no go. Given the irreversible plurality and heterodoxy of India’s social and cultural fabric, any group which sports the colours of hateful exclusivity, even camouflaged, will get rejected.

Since the very beginning of history, India has essentially been a coalition of disparate yet agreeing groups, beliefs and ideologies – and also a cohabitation of irreconcilable ones. The very Constitution adopted by India is full to the brim with it. Of course there are deviations – deep gashes in post-independence India like the Gujarat genocide of Muslims or the mass killings of Sikhs and Kashmiris bear bloody witnesses to them. But in totality the quantum of time which the Indian people have spent in living together hugely exceeds the times of animosity.  It must be remembered that due to his role in presiding over the carnage in 2002, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi is to date considered a heavy liability by even the closest of allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His extremism has made him such an icon of supremacy and hate that despite heavy and continuous advertisement and state sponsored media programmes projecting him as a man who can make industries with minimal governmental interference – something the yuppie sections of the Indian middleclass hails as the ultimate in achieving anti-corruption – his own party is fighting shy of projecting him as a potential prime ministerial candidate.

Indians have continually rejected extremism whether left or right and there is no reason to believe that it will make any exceptions this time. We have agreed to be run by a Constitution and not by mobs and capricious despots. So taking anti-democratic and violent positions will, very rightly, be found unacceptable to all right thinking people. If it is to survive, the movement’s leaders have to rid themselves of such retrograde mentality. Failing which, the movement has to rid itself of such leaders. The middleclass movement in its present form in India declares itself to be a new movement. To make that believable it must necessarily carve out its own identity – an identity which is neither communal nor corrupt. While the evil of corruption must be rooted out, it can most certainly not be replaced with the evil of communal theocracy and arbitrary justice.

Connecting with the masses

Given that the left, right and centre of Indian politics is showing an absolute lack of direction and vacillating like never before, the present times should have been germane to the emergence of new political formations – especially ones that hark back to the practice of ethical politics. But the movement has been more like a flash in the pan, and one of the answers lies in the lack of outreach of the movement.

The ubiquity of relatively well educated and well-heeled people, to which the movement appeals, is an illusion generated by a constrained media view that simply doesn’t cover the issues of the impoverished majority. The reality is that only a small fraction of India’s workforce belongs in the organised sector (28 million out of 397 million) and the yuppie population is an even smaller subset of that. Hence it is incumbent for the movement to win the trust of the larger masses if it is to become sustainable.

But then again to win the trust of the larger masses it must be willing to take note of the distresses which the new order has brought upon them: like the unbridled rise of corporates, their crass profiteering and the resulting loot of public resources; the unrelenting commodification of human beings and natural resources; the rapidly widening chasm between the rich and the poor; imperialism and its wars; the havoc which speculative markets wreak on food, fuel and other essential goods and services; and a myriad other issues that have cropped up in the post liberalisation era. Unless cognisance is taken of the truth that we live in a system that incentivises corruption and cronyism the dream of corruption free-India is foredoomed. The willingness to see the larger picture and bravely accept and contest the systemic issues of modern capitalism is inescapable.

Besides, a real movement must necessarily espouse real causes, giving up the luxury of being merely emotive and skimming the surface. It is not enough to vaguely posture against some faceless villain called ‘the corrupt politician’. If, for example, kickbacks taken by politicians when placing orders to private corporations irk the middleclass, then they must be willing to ask if the role of private corporations in public matters needs to be reassessed. If profiteering by those in power is deemed unacceptable then there is a need to ask if a social order based solely on the pursuit of profits is sustainable? If the amassing of money by politicians in personal accounts is unacceptable, then it must be willing to take on a system that celebrates money at any cost and treats the fatness of a bank account as the sole yardstick of success.

The movement essentially positions itself as a contrarian movement that stands opposed to the current crop of corrupt and insular politicians who rule the roost in India’s parliament and the many state assemblies. The very raison d’etre of the anti-corruption movement is its charge that the elected representatives of India are not representative enough and hence the leaders have lost the moral basis to rule. The charges are in many ways true. In a nation plagued with poverty and hunger the loot of public money in scam after scam done year after year runs into billions and billions of dollars – so yes the current crop of legislators are corrupt by no small measure. While India is witnessing hunger, suicide of debt ridden farmers and myriad other manifestations of extreme poverty at an unforeseen scale, the current parliament and set of assemblies has the highest number of millionaires ever elected – so yes the political rulers of India are not really very representative of the Indian people.

But the movement which stands against this corruption and insularity must necessarily get down on to the ground and dirty itself in the process of cleaning. The idea is to be the alternative and not merely pose the alternative. Recent local self-government elections in Maharashtra’s cities, especially Pune which was one of the nerve centres of the anti-corruption movement, throw up a telling irony. Despite ‘huge’ support for the cause of anti-corruption and spontaneous response to calls for rallies, the voter turn-out was dismal and half the city didn’t bother voting. This clearly indicates the political lethargy and superficiality of the movement in its present form. The movement must be willing to step out of the comfortable environs of media debates and TV studios and enter the arena of ground level politics. If it has to actually challenge the powers that be, the movement must move to real grassroots work and not canvass on astroturf!

The young members of the movement must steel themselves into becoming a worthy force in real politics because once in the electoral arena, tags like apolitical, neutral, young, even if genuine, are of little use. Without a concrete agenda which is sincere to its slogans and the will to follow through with it, the use of new technology will not maintain the ‘edge of the young’. Yes every new technology from emails to social networking must be used to the hilt. But the technologies by themselves are no guarantee of success. If one group can blog or tweet so can the other. The only thing that could set them apart is the message they convey. The young urban Indians who wield these technologies will have to decide what they choose to do with it. They must decide whether to go the glossy Twitterati way or take the road to Tahrir.

Country or region:  India Topics:  Civil society Conflict Democracy and government Economics Equality International politics

The globally-acclaimed film looks back to the past from a futuristic standpoint to simulate an archetypal moral tale of developmental inequality. Is that a good thing?

Praise and critical attention for Avatar (2009) over the last two years could fill several pages. The overall project framed its cinematic agents’ involvement in social movements in Brazil in a unique way. The movie was a response consistent with James Cameron’s overall artistic project but also his self-presentation as a keen traveller. An aficionado of technology, Cameron has always crafted cinematic narratives that tap into the philosophically complex relationship of human nature with ‘otherness’ - questions embracing the role of the mechanical, the alien or nature itself in emerging visions of humanity. His actual and cinematic journeys merged in more than one way – as a desire for adventure, a bold experiment in visual digital technology, but also a controversial humanitarian intervention in Brazilian environmental policies.

The plot is set in the twenty-second century around a group of army officials and scientists who set foot on a moon called Pandora with a plan to mine its precious mineral ‘unobtanium’. The pursuit of this mineral threatens the survival of the indigenous Pandoran lifeworld - the habitats, customs and memories of the local tribe of Na’vi. The military aims to infiltrate the Na’vi with the help of genetically engineered Na’vi-humanoid hybrid bodies that enable researchers to interact with natives. A disabled soldier, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is selected for this experiment. Together with lead scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) the first inter-species contact is attempted, leading to Jake’s symbolic ‘naturalisation’ into Pandora’s cultural biosphere and pacifist Grace’s unfortunate death in the heat of a military attack. The cinematic narrative is crafted as simultaneously a military exploratory journey and a journey of self-discovery that Jake commences as a soldier-spy on an exploratory mission and completes by ‘going native’. What unfolds thereafter adheres to a familiar post-colonial storyline: the destruction of ‘Hometree’ (the neural root of Na’vi memory) that stands in the way of obtaining ‘unobtanium’, signals the destruction of native life, as did the assault on ancient American, Asian and European civilizations by more technologically advanced conquerors. Avatar is in this respect a postmodern artefact emulating the structural sensibilities of history: it looks back to the past from a futuristic standpoint to simulate an archetypal moral tale of developmental inequality.

The renaming of Southern Sky column in Zhangjiajie, Hunan province in China as ‘Hallelujah’ after Avatar’s floating Pandoran Mountains shows how global image mobility contributes to the tourism industry. After having inspired the visual design of the simulated Pandoran landscapes in 2008, the municipal government promptly adopted the slogan ‘Pandora is far but Zhangjiajie is near’. Avatar’s civilizational allegory constructs links between western and eastern ideological circuits that seem to guarantee cinematic success. The Na’vi accents and the film’s soundtrack adhere, it seems, to a Pan-African theme anti-Orientalist research would immediately condemn as ‘primitivist’. There have been various hostile claims that Avatar is nothing but a primitivist fantasy. The encoding of cultural fusions in art has been controversial since time immemorial, scholars of hybridity stressing the roots of such portrayals in racist First World discourses (Nederveen Pieterse 2006). But the involvement of Cameron and his crew in Brazilian movements against state-led and corporate ‘modifications’ of Amazonian forests might diffuse such critiques. The film’s overarching plot could be traced in the commitment of Avatar’s creative leaders to ideals stretching beyond those of narrowly defined ‘politics’: like China,  Brazil inspired Avatar’s CGI work, as a political project and an opportunity for the real indigenous populations to partake in global image traffic(king) of what is threatened with destruction at home.

But I want to challenge the innocence we all display when we examine the complex politics of fabulist creativity that hooks itself upon realist projects such as that involving the Belo Monte Dam in the Amazon Rainforest – Avatar’s primary ecosystemic inspiration.

Movies, movie-makers and actors are always-already implicated in the cultural politics of their generation. James Cameron is the child of a glorious age in politics and cinema (addressed to elites and general entertainment audiences alike). As both screenwriter and director he produced work that drew on war trauma, damaged masculinity (Rambo, 1985) and technology-mediated human encounters with alien worlds (Alien, 1986; The Abyss, 1989; Terminator 2, 1991). Some of these themes return in the Avatar, for example the visual references to American war histories (e.g. the battles in Hallelujah mountains as reference to famous scenes from Apocalypse Now and the real War in Iraq)  together with all-pervasive guilt for the harm westerners cause to indigenous cultures (see the Na’vi mourning of Hometree destruction, the Na’vi anger against the army and even the musical mourning that envelops the destruction of the moon).

The transition from fabulism to politics is a hazardous business: the generation of a series of videos for the dissemination of Avatar-led activism against the construction of Belo Monte Dam (threatening to destroy indigenous ecosystems and human ecologies alike) appears to draw upon Avatar’s narrative, whereby human progress and development builds upon destruction. Cameron appears in one of these videos confessing that he has always wanted to travel to Brazil’s virgin territories and he is elsewhere depicted amongst local populations like an ethnographic investigator, a detective uncovering evidence of a coordinated crime against localities. Sigourney Weaver’s video on the same controversy gestures towards a similar humanitarian narrative, having established herself as a professional feminist icon (see Alien’s tough Ripley persona). Together, Cameron and Weaver reconstruct the archetypical ethical conundrum of developmental activism: does privileged intervention limit or enhance indigenous action? Is it merely self-serving (self-promotional) or a true humanist intervention on the side of the ‘weak’? While Cameron maps a clash between brainless macho militarists and humanist scientists, thoughtless actors and thoughtful listeners observing before they act - in short, ‘evil’ vs. ‘good’ -  there is also a submerged gender order in which subordinate masculinities (Jake the disabled soldier) serve as narrative vehicles for experiential authenticity and self-knowledge whereas the Na’vi tribes are viewed as being in desperate need of protection.

It can be argued that while Avatar’s developmental agents did not need the Belo Monte controversy to bolster their business, local activism did appear to benefit from having celebrities fronting the numerous photos of their protests (these populate Flickr’s relevant pages today). In May 2011 T. Hirsch of BBC Radio 4 repeated Cameron’s journey, by walking into the contested Amazonian field to speak to the people and transmit their observations back to the First World. But we have to ask, do such global mobilities happen for a noble cause? Where do they leave us?

 

References

Archer, M. (1995) Realist Social Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Hesmondhalgh, D. and S. Baker (2010) Creative Labour. London: Routledge.

Nederveen Pieterse (2006) ‘Globalization as Hybridization’. In M.G. Durham and D. Kellner (eds), Media and Cultural Studies, Malden: Blackwell, 658-680.

Country or region:  Brazil China Topics:  Culture International politics

Small steps forward are not sufficient to stop the overall negative current when it comes to the social exclusion of Roma. Those small steps forward will soon become irrelevant if serious reform is not put in place

The European Union displays all the signs of structural racism when it comes to Roma.  European and national policies designed to lead to social inclusion are incoherent and result in an acceleration of social exclusion and a dangerous polarization of majority and Roma communities. 

I have written before about this gathering crisis but now I want to develop a solution that could repair the irresponsibility of bureaucrats in charge of decisions regarding both Roma and non-Roma. A call for an independent, critical evaluation of European Commission action on Roma over the last 20 years might be that solution. Such an evaluation could lead to serious and much needed reform, including institutional and policy improvement, both at the EU level and within national governments. Such an evaluation should be called for by the European Parliament. 

Incoherence 

The European Commission provides by far the largest amount of money targeting the social inclusion of Roma.  Money is distributed directly via the EC (a small percentage), and by member states (a much larger amount) after consultation with the EC. 

Decisions about funding lines and amounts are made in Brussels, following largely flawed consultation processes at the national level. Governments prefer to involve non-critical stakeholders in such consultations and push their own agenda that rarely if ever is anything other than a diplomatic exercise of saving face. It never manages to attain being serious about Roma inclusion.  As there is no expertise on Roma issues within the EC, and very limited expertise, if any, within national governments, most often the results are funding lines that make no sense, and achieve little. 

NGOs with no proven expertise in the issues targeted by the EU funds write, and win, projects they cannot implement effectively. This results in a serious breakdown in trust within Roma civil society and among both Roma communities and the majorities. Unfortunately, it is rather rare that Roma NGOs have the needed financial and technical expertise to be able to implement Structural Funds. 

In a number of cases, EU funds have supported contradictory policies. For example, funds have supported both segregation and desegregation projects. They have increased the stigmatization of Roma (e.g. by providing jobs as street cleaners) and fought anti-Gypsyism with awareness campaigns that, according to some critics, have only served to strengthen negative stereotypes about Roma. 

Currently, the EC acknowledges that Roma continue to be the ethnic group in Europe most discriminated against, and that the level of anti-Gypsyism remains dangerous. EC statements can be found from 20 years ago, along the same lines. Paradoxically, however, not one EC case study mentions any failures in the many Roma projects financed by European money. After so many apparently successful projects, where are the significant improvements we might expect to see? It may be relevant that the actual amounts of money spent by the Commission to address anti-Gypsyism remain a fraction compared to what is spent on discrimination against other vulnerable groups.

According to available documents, the EC has done some great things, and nothing wrong. The same situation can be found when researching official documents of member states. No failures – just positive examples. The reality on the ground is in stark contrast to this. 

Reports commissioned by the EC are “purged “ before publication to eliminate any harsh criticism that might upset the future careers of bureaucrats in charge. Some of those reports in the past have proven to be little more than compilations of older texts. And the watered-down recommendations from all these expensive reports have been largely ignored. 

The way the Structural Funds are designed at the moment(focused on the delivery of social services) lead to the disappearance of many NGOs focused on anti-discrimination and social inclusion. Some have adapted and become social services providers. The main problem with this approach is that in the case of Roma the NGOs replace the role of local administrations and public services for Roma communities. This leads to a “ghettoization” of the Roma issue and a transfer of responsibility to Roma NGOs and bodies that lack the decision-making and administrative power to properly address such complex issues. The result is further, and increasingly dangerous, polarization of the Roma and the social majorities.

Structural racism 

In 1974 David Hughes and Evelyn Kallen defined structural racism as inequalities rooted in the way society operates, that exclude substantial numbers of people from particular racial groups from significantly accessing and participating in major social institutions. 

Now let’s look at the European Commission. A simple survey of Roma-related conferences organized by the European Commission in Brussels in the last two years shows that fewer than 1 in 5 speakers are experts with hands-on experience of Roma issues. In this general environment meaningful debate during these meetings is impossible. Recommendations made by experts were and continue to be largely ignored. Furthermore, none of the people in senior or mid-level management positions working on Roma issues have any proven academic or hands-on expertise in these issues; the same is true for the cabinets of Commissioners. Even worse, the people attending these meetings come from societies where polls show that over 70% of the population think Roma are inferior to the majority populations. Can we count on them being free of these prejudices? 

Ironically, the current Roma Commissioner comes from Luxembourg - the only EU country which claims to have no Roma, and which has a policy to keep Roma out. She has no experience whatsoever in issues linked to Roma, nor does anyone in her cabinet. The other most relevant person in charge of Roma issues is a bureaucrat from Cyprus, a country with very few Roma. She also has no proven experience in these issues. While these people, and others working on the issue, may have the best of intentions, this simply is not adequate. We cannot expect useful and relevant recommendations or policies from people without knowledge or experience. 

Despite their numbers (an estimated population of 10 – 12 million in the EU, which is larger that some EU member states), Roma are hugely underrepresented - when represented at all - in all EU structures .

So is it structural racism? It fits the definition: the way the Commission operates appears to exclude the access and participation of Roma.

A critical, independent evaluation of the European Commission 

The European bureaucracy in senior and middle management positions has no proven experience but also no responsibility or incentive to push towards serious policies targeting Roma inclusion. Such policies would require significant financial commitments and a serious reform at the EC and national levels. Criticism, reform and strong monitoring would be a must and those do not make friends. Careers in Brussels are built on strong political support, diplomatic niceties and pragmatism. Good speeches, window dressing measures and postponing any serious financial investments during the time an EC senior and medium manager is in charge of Roma issues would seem the best way to preserve intact the chances of a successful career in the EC.

I propose a critical, independent evaluation of Commission action on Roma. This would be a good first step. The European Parliament could initiate this, as a way to ensure that the next financial cycle of the EU will lead to progress, when it comes to Roma.  The evaluation should look at the efficiency of both the institutional and financial mechanisms and should present uncensored recommendations for improvements. Similar research is needed in the case of member states. 

The purpose of this exercise would not be to embarrass or blame anybody. Many well intentioned, and some truly exceptional people both in the EU and national structures, genuinely are trying their best to help. Unfortunately, they work within an institutional and policy framework that dilutes their efforts, and sometimes renders those efforts completely useless. 

The main problem at this moment is not that there is no progress. In fact, there is some progress. But the small steps forward are not sufficient to stop the overall negative current when it comes to the social exclusion of Roma. Those small steps forward will soon become irrelevant if serious reform is not put in place.

Country or region:  EU Topics:  Civil society Conflict Democracy and government Economics Equality International politics

The cynical manipulation of the category of ‘radical-Muslim’ in order to advance a political trajectory and perpetuate unqualified stereotypes is most unfortunate.

Nowadays a Muslim is never just a Muslim but also has some hyphenated identity. Obviously there are some prefixes that Muslims use such as Sunni, Shi’a, Barelvi, Deobandi, Salafi and Wahabi. However, there are a whole host of other categories such as radical, moderate, extremist, liberal, modern, fundamentalist, progressive and orthodox that are used while discussing individual Muslims. Some people, to be sure, also voluntarily append some of these prefixes when describing themselves. 

Following the attack on an Israeli embassy official in New Delhi a group of people were invited to participate in an Indian television show in order to discuss various aspects of the attack. One of the speakers on the show was Dr. Zafarul Islam Khan who is the editor of the Milli Gazette, a fortnightly English language newspaper that primarily covers and writes about Muslim issues in India. Dr. Khan on being asked whether he thought that the Israelis were being “paid back in their own coin” replied that in the past Israel had carried out similar attacks in Dubai, Damascus, Tehran and even in England. He argued that if one was to assume that Iran was indeed behind such an attack, then one also had to look at the context and background to such an incident. He finished by saying that the perpetrators of the attack should be caught, tried and punished but one should not jump the gun as far as laying blame on anyone specific. Noticeably he did not talk about Islam or Muslims in his interview and it would not be pertinent to discuss Dr. Khan’s analysis, but what is interesting is an article that appeared after the TV show. 

Following the talk show, the Jerusalem Post carried an article on February 14 by Kanchan Gupta entitled “Embassy blast mars New Delhi street’s calm.” It is a few sentences at the end of Gupta’s analysis that are relevant. He asserts that Dr. Khan, “espouses radical Islamism and routinely berates Israel while calling upon India to break relations with the ‘Zionist state.’” He then goes on to say that Dr. Khan is amongst a “handful of radicals - among India’s millions of Muslims - who know who Mughniyeh was, or care what happened to him.” It is precisely this kind of labelling that is so dangerous, provocative and indeed unnecessary. Dr. Khan’s mere mentioning of Israel’s previous actions was immediately assumed to mean that his position was informed by a radical form of political Islam. It might be convenient, though not accurate, to try and paint any criticism of Israel as one that is first and foremost dictated by religious prejudice. In a more recent article (11/3/2012) for the same newspaper, Gupta writes that the Milli Gazette has “vitriolic anti-Israel views that would qualify as anti-Semitism if India had a hate-speech law.” The sentence clearly illustrates how taking a political position against Israeli policies is seen as being implicitly anti-Semitic. 

The cynical manipulation of the category of ‘radical-Muslim’ in order to advance a political trajectory and perpetuate unqualified stereotypes is most unfortunate. If one was to look at the various issues of the Milli Gazette it becomes evident that Dr. Khan is anything but radical. He is of course a Muslim and therefore is particularly interested in highlighting issues that Muslim communities face. Does this however make him a radical? In the last issue of the Milli Gazette (16-29 of February 2012) there is a long opinion article about the various problems faced by India’s Christian community and in previous issues he has covered issues that affect India’s lower castes, tribals and other persecuted groups. 

Today, various political, economic and social exigencies have meant that an entire discourse has been created in order to justify untenable positions. Recently at a conference on identity it was interesting that two speakers, a Muslim and a Christian, began by describing themselves as secular and not fundamentalist. It is unfortunate that it was not enough for them to state their religion but instead they had to qualify their belief by making sure that this was not assumed to be of the ‘radical’ variety. 

A number of prominent Muslim leaders from different schools of thought have time and again given statements about how any form of violent or radical extremism has no place within Islam. For instance Ahmad Al Tayyib, the Sorbonne-educated rector and Grand Imam of the al-Azhar University, called a press conference to issue a statement along with the Coptic Pope Shenouda III about the need for a bill of freedom and rights. The bill contains clauses about freedom of religion, freedom of expression and thought, freedom of scientific research and the freedom of creativity to practice the arts. Noticeably the Salafist Al-Nour party boycotted the conference. 

Unfortunately the media often does not highlight these voices and instead those views are given prominence who insist on perpetuating stereotypes by manipulating appellations and labels. Recently Ayaan Ali Hirsi wrote an article in the Financial Times arguing that political Islamism was popular amongst most Muslims and that “violence was inherent in Islamic theory.” In another article in Newsweek she argued that anti-Christian violence is “a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.” Of course for many people Hirsi is an ‘acceptable Muslim’ but it is now more important than ever to not feed into stereotypes that will only serve to divide and isolate individuals and indeed communities even more. 

Country or region:  India Israel Topics:  Conflict Ideas International politics

The question remains the same - to intervene or not to intervene, but a change is needed in how we frame the debate.

"It's not a question of… if Assad leaves. It's a question of when" - President Obama last Wednesday revved up the rhetoric against the Syrian President, Bashar al Assad. But as the people of Syria continue to be the victims the brutality of his regime, it is misleading and unhelpful to talk of his downfall with such certainty. 

Obama is not alone in mobilising the rhetoric of inevitability.  In a recent interview with Al Akhbar newspaper, Samir Geagea, head of the Lebanese Forces Party, said the fall of the Assad regime will be subject to "historical inevitability".  In January, White House spokesman Jay Carney said "Assad's fall is inevitable', and as early as mid-December, Dennis Ross, a former senior Middle East adviser to President Obama in an interview with the Council of Foreign Relations' Bernard Gwertzman said that it is "almost inevitable" that the regime of Bashar al-Assad will collapse. In fact, Carney went one step further.  Speaking to governments around the world he went on to say, "it's important to calculate into your consideration the fact he will go."  Has history taught us nothing? 

As atrocities continue to be committed, shells to fall, death tolls to rise, hope become jaded and brutalities to show no sign of abeyance, couching debate in the language of inevitability is inaccurate and unhelpful at best, and deadly at worst. Politics aside, regardless of where you stand in the debate over intervention in Syria, at the very least we have a responsibility to ensure the debate is an honest one - the language used must reflect the reality of the situation and all its possible outcomes. Some commentators take a fairly extreme view, wondering whether false hopes are being given to the Syrian opposition, encouraging them to continue fighting a battle that will cost big in terms of human casualties, that they cannot necessarily win, and especially not alone. 

Obama, speaking on Wednesday, went on, "it is my belief that, ultimately, this dictator will fall, as dictators in the past have fallen." The fall of dictators is certainly one truth, you only need to look to the recent history of some of Syria's neighbours to know that dictators can be toppled. But as we keep being reminded, this is no Libya, and neither is it an Iraq, an Egypt or a Tunisia.  You only need to look to Bahrain for an example of where a popular uprising has not resulted in the fall of a regime. Talking with such certainty about any situation as it is still going on is unwise and we know better. 

It cannot be ignorance that is causing this misrepresentative terminology. Historical precedent, for one, makes glaringly obvious the folly of assuming inevitability. As Chris Philips points out in Tuesday's Guardian, Bashar al-Assad's fall is far from inevitable from the perspective of historical precedent, with other regimes in the region's recent history successfully crushing uprisings. Philips cites "Saddam Hussein's suppression of the Iraqi Shia rebellion in 1991 and the Algerian government's victory in the civil war of 1991-2000." Closer to home still, Philips looks to the Assad family's template for rebellions - Hafez Assad's bloody crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in Hama in 1982.  Whilst it is true that there are key differences (such as the more-mobilised anti-Assad international and regional community and more comprehensive media coverage of brutalities) that may yet undo Assad, it is equally possible that they may not. 

In his article in The Atlantic on January 17, Steven Cook articulated his thoughts on the reasons for this widely publicised assumption that Assad will fall - "it is largely a self-serving hunch that does not necessarily conform to what is actually happening in Syria, but nevertheless provides cover for doing nothing to protect people who are at the mercy of a government intent on using brutality to re-establish its authority." Clearly these are the words of someone firmly in the intervention camp.  Anne-Marie Slaughter of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies calls the assumption "the triumph of hope over expectation."  

The posturing on the inevitability of Assad's fall could be due to several factors, and which you think it is will be dictated by whether you are in the intervention, or non-intervention camp. It could be a desperate hope, a 'head-in-the-sand' mentality, or partially-sighted optimism.  It could be shame at a perceived failure of the international community to uphold its responsibility to protect under international law, or an attempt to buy time.  It could be out of real conviction that the regime will fall, regardless of outside military intervention (supported by a desire not to see the west throw its weight around another time in a region not its own and a belief it would do more harm that good), or it could be an attempt to warn Russia and China off continued support for Syria. For some, Obama's words, a day after Republican Senator McCain's call for US-led airstrikes on Syria, are an indicator not of the reality of the situation, but of a President in election year battling to see off any Republican one-upmanship on foreign policy issues. Assad "will" fall sounds far more Presidential than Assad "might fall, but I can't say for sure." 

Regardless of whether you believe there should be a military intervention in Syria - be it an enforced no-fly zone, the use of air power, safe zones, or arming the FSA - or whether you do not, preferring non-military options, it is misleading to speak of the inevitability of Assad soon becoming a member of the ousted despot club.  For the people still trapped inside Homs or any other of the Syrian towns and cities currently under siege - increasingly fearful, increasingly feeling abandoned by the international community, and increasingly at risk of not being around for what happens next in Syria - to speak of the inevitable is in some way to denigrate what they are suffering now. Whatever happens next, nothing is inevitable, but an honest debate is vital.

Country or region:  Syria Topics:  Conflict Ideas International politics

Come and discuss how the ideals of the Egyptian revolution were expressed through chants, banners, jokes, poems and interviews, as well as presidential speeches and military communiques.

The Arab Awakening section of openDemocracy has partnered with the University of East London to host an event series on the Tahrir Square Meme. Our second event hosts two scholars who were in Egypt from the outset of the #Jan25 revolution to offer a fresh perspective on how the language of the revolutionaries was expressed through various mediums. The event is free and open to the public and is taking place this Thursday at 6:30pm at the University of East London, Docklands Campus EBG.06, East Building (Docklands Campus is adjacent to Cyprus Station, DLR). Directions Here

Photo slideshow preview of what will be discussed

A preview of the edited book Translating Egypt's Revolution, which served as inspiration for the event

Event Details

Egypt’s revolution has echoed around the world. The word Tahrir has become synonymous with resistance and radical change. In a host of demonstrations against the Mubarak regime Egyptians first used their voices and rich humour to express grievances, to challenge the police state, to reach for freedom, to laugh at their oppressors – and even at themselves. They have since continued to press for change, producing a mass of documents, leaflets, videos and online materials.

How to communicate the meanings of this mass of written, oral and visual material? A group of academics and students at The American University in Cairo have been participants in/ observers of recent events. Samia Mehrez and Laura Gribbon talk about their unique interdisciplinary publishing project - Translating Egypt’s Revolution - a re-enactment of the infectious revolutionary spirit of Egypt today.

Translating Egypt’s Revolution is the culmination of research and translation work conducted by researchers and students of varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds who continue to witness Egypt's ongoing revolution. They have selectively translated chants, banners, jokes, poems and interviews, as well as presidential speeches and military communiques. Translating Egypt’s Revolution will be published by AUC Press in April 2012.

Speakers

Samia Mehrez currently teaches modern Arabic literature, as well as courses on translation studies and theory in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo (AUC). She is founding director of the AUC Center for Translation Studies and has published numerous articles in the fields of modern Arabic literature, postcolonial literature, translation studies, gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani, AUC Press, 1994 and 2005; Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, Routledge 2008, AUC Press 2010 and The Literary Life of Cairo, AUC Press 2011. She is the editor of a book soon to be released by AUC Press & Oxford Press, 2012, Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir.

Laura Gribbon has a BA in International Development with NGO Management from the University of East London (UEL), which culminated in a semester at the American University in Cairo (January-June 2011). She is currently studying for an MSc in Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her professional background is in youth and community relations, working in the UK and Northern Ireland on the politics of identity. Arriving in Cairo in early January 2011, and living close to Tahrir, she was often in the midan speaking to people and taking pictures. Laura is co-author with Sarah Hawas of Signs and Signifiers: Visual Translations of Revolt in Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, AUC Press & Oxford Press 2012. She is currently researching the role of martyrdom in the Egyptian uprisings of 2011/12.

The reality of war between nuclear states is beyond our imaginations, yet the issue demands public debate. As tensions rise over Iran’s nuclear programme, can theatre help us think the unthinkable? Review

The rhetoric directed at Iran and its nuclear programme has been ratcheting up for years now, but recently it has become openly bellicose. In Washington this month, the Israeli prime minister announced that diplomacy had failed and warned that “none of us can afford to wait much longer” to act against Tehran. This is, of course, a profoundly alarming prospect. The fall-out from a strike against Iran is unknowable: plenty of analysts have warned that it could trigger all-out war in the Middle East.

But as the American journalist Peter Beinart pointed out recently, unless we are experts in nuclear technology, or maintain secret sources in Tehran and Tel Aviv, most of us have no idea which move Iran or Israel will make next. It’s more a case of working out whose opinion we trust. Like many world events, the situation plays out while we look on, half-informed, half in the dark. And when it comes to war between nuclear states, which promises death on a sublime scale, we are somehow doubly removed. It’s not just that we don’t know whether or not the worst will happen; we can barely even conceive of what such destruction would look like. The gap between political rhetoric and human reality becomes a gulf.

It’s that gulf that inspired Nicholas Kent, outgoing director of the Tricycle theatre in London, to end his 28-year tenure with a characteristically ambitious two-part history of the nuclear bomb last month. Consisting of 10 separate plays, staged over two nights, and loosely linked by a historical narrative, The Blast is a smart and occasionally brilliant exploration of the individual lives and collective societies affected by decades of nuclear brinkmanship (which ultimately comes across as a childish game, played by men). 

Image from the The Tricycle Theatre website

. The plays came about after Ken was challenged by Lib Dem peer Shirley Williams, who served as Gordon Brown’s nuclear proliferation adviser. “She said you’ve got to do something about nuclear proliferation – we’re going to renew Trident and we’re not going to have the debate,” Kent told the Guardian recently. He decided that if public debate wasn’t being stimulated by other means, theatre would have to step in. “It’s not happening in parliament, it’s not happening in newspapers, on television, in cinemas. Somebody’s got to do it.”

But the plays go far beyond British shores. The first night, subtitled ‘Proliferation’, traces the history of the bomb through Britain, China, Russia, India and other nuclear states. While not promising more than a partial history, the plays nevertheless provide an illuminating overview of how we got where we are today.

The second night, ‘Present Dangers’, is set in the decade since 9/11. The race to curtail Iran’s nuclear programme is the focus of several of the stronger plays, and the backdrop to others. Refreshingly, two of them especially foreground Iranian perspectives — the viewpoints that never make it into the frame of western news coverage.

Colin Teevan’s There Was a Man, There Was No Man revolves around the death of an Iranian nuclear scientist. Who killed him is not clear. Although married to an Iranian woman, the scientist had an Israeli mistress, and was a member of the opposition party: the Iranian regime had their reasons for wanting him dead. But his Israeli mistress suspects her brother, a Mossad agent and ardent Zionist, of killing her lover as punishment for betraying Israel. In one scene, the wife sits in a hotel room in Tehran, still covered in her husband’s blood from the car bomb blast, being forced to listen to a tape of her husband having sex with his Israeli mistress. In the previous scene, the mistress was sitting on her bed in her home in Sweden, weeping at the news as heartlessly reported by her brother. The two scenes, subtly mirrored, suggest that the internecine relationship between Iran and Israel is one which both states have come to depend on. “You collude with your enemy to keep your own people in fear,” spits the Israeli woman at her brother.

And Ryan Craig’s Talk Talk Fight Fight, set in the tense backrooms of a UN summit, likens the question of whether Iran is developing its own bomb to the famous Schrödinger’s Cat experiment: both possibilities, war and peace, yes and no, exist in the same moment. The frantic pre-meetings and negotiation rehearsals are deftly done. But they are not as powerful as the actual confrontation between an Iranian negotiator and his arrogant American counterpart. Having listened to the latter expound his argument that Iran should come to heel, the Iranian explodes: “We are not unruly children to be contained and controlled!” Having pointed out that his country is hemmed in by American troops, living under the shadow of US-funded Israeli nuclear weapons, buckling under sanctions and smarting from decades of humiliation by Britain, it’s surprisingly easy to side with him — which is perhaps the provocation that Craig intends.

While most of the plays revolve around the Iranian crisis, by far the most powerful one takes place in the soft-lighted sobriety of 10 Downing Street: David Greig’s ‘The Letter of Last Resort’. Belinda Lang plays a new prime minister on her first day in office trying to write a letter to the commander of a Trident submarine, instructing him what to do if Britain is devastated by a nuclear strike and there is no one left to issue orders. There are two options: retaliate, don’t retaliate.

The astonishing thing is that this letter actually exists. The Daily Mail, the first British newspaper to find out, reported in 2009: ‘On board the Vanguard there is a safe attached to the floor of the control room. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career. He made it alone, in the first days of his premiership, and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided. It is the Prime Minister’s answer to a grim but essential question: in the event of a nuclear attack in which Britain is largely destroyed and he is killed before he has time to react, should Britain fire back?’ Here is another sort of Schrödinger’s Cat: under the ocean, locked in a box, is an unreadable letter, promising life and death at once.

In Greig’s play, at first it seems simple. Lang dashes off a letter saying that retaliation would be futile, merely adding millions to an already unthinkable death-toll. However, a diplomatic civil servant, played brilliantly by Simon Chandler, soon ensnares her with a monstrous logic. If the Prime Minister knows in her heart that Britain will not retaliate, her assistant explains, she will be unable to convince other nuclear states that Britain is capable of the supremely irrational act of retaliation – thereby rendering our nuclear deterrent worthless.

“Prime minister, there is only one rational thing you can do,” the assistant counsels, “and that’s be irrational.” Letting the logic dawn, the prime minister replies: “So you mean we pursue rationality to insane levels?” Nodding soberly, he agrees: “Yes, prime minister.” He then embarks on a florid soliloquy about the nature of nuclear weapons, which promise “abstract, philosophical death”. In their fathomless power, they are “transcendent”. And these rarefied qualities are not auxiliary to their potency, he concludes. “They are the foundation of their deterrence, prime minister.”

What makes Greig’s play so powerful – aside from its near-perfect execution and philosophical rigour – is that it uses comedy to unpack the absurd logic that underpins nuclear proliferation. As these plays make clear, the nuclear bomb is ‘philosophical’. Its promised carnage is abstract; perhaps even, as The Letter of Last Resort hints, poetic. So it’s no wonder that they can sometimes quietly drop off the political agenda. But by revealing the comic elements of these deadly serious issues, many of these plays put them in a context we can engage with. (This is not easily done, as is made clear by other plays in the sequence. The weak link in the series is Diana Son’s Axis of Evil, which, set in 2002, toothlessly lampoons North Korean apparatchiks and White House speechwriters, to very limited effect.)

It’s that engagement between audience and subject that Nicholas Kent wanted. “A lot of young people under 30 know or care little about the bomb,” he said, in the same Guardian interview, “and yet we’re about to embark on a Trident renewal programme which will take an enormous amount of money. I think it’s £80bn. It could be spent on the health service. Or theatre. Imagine if it was spent on theatre!”

Is the idea of the government scrapping Trident and spending £80bn on theatre any more unfathomable than the question of why we are spending that £80bn in the first place? Such irrational political calculations demand our scrutiny, and Kent has shown that theatre is up to task. Off stage, though, it remains our responsibility to act. Sideboxes Related stories:  The call of conscience Topics:  Conflict Culture Ideas International politics

National myths have always played an important part in Russian politics, from 15th-century ‘Moscow as the 3rd Rome’ to Soviet, and now Russian, views of USSR/Russia’s role in the region. The power of the myths is such that a putative opposition government could well end up as no more than a clone of Putin and his regime, says Mykola Riabchuk

The danger looming in some Arab countries that radical Islamists might hijack anti-authoritarian revolutions poses a similar question in respect of future anti-government protests in Russia: how powerful and how radical are the nationalists within the protesters’ camp, and how far would they proceed with their presumed radicalism if the incumbent regime were at some point to crumble?

In the short to middle term this looks unlikely, though the regime’s inability to deliver much-needed reforms in the country, to curb corruption, and to re-establish some sort of legitimacy for its rigid authoritarian policies, must all be considered potential contributory factors to the eventual inevitability of such a collapse.

Radical parties/groups or mere individuals in any political coalition are in a tricky position. On one hand, the dividing line between the radical and not-so-radical groups is often fluid and situation-related. On the other, any political opposition, especially anti-authoritarian, requires the broadest mobilization possible, involving opposition members of various colours and ideologies, who will quite naturally once more go their separate ways when victory has been achieved.

'Very few Russian nationalists are disciplined, courageous, and honest enough to recognize that the much-needed emancipation of the Russian nation from the Russian empire requires primarily that they liberate themselves from the imperial myths and complexes deeply entrenched in the Russian psyche.'

This was the case in most of the post-communist countries where democratic movements pursued an agenda that was not only anti-authoritarian but anti-imperialist and national-liberation. They all had a significant nationalist element, though this is now largely ignored or underestimated, probably because the deeply entrenched anti-nationalistic bias in Western scholarship and politics regards nationalism as incompatible with liberalism and democracy.

Russian imperialism

Russia is an imperial nation, but Russians have been always reluctant to frame their nationalism in terms of national liberation, though attempts have been made to represent Yeltsin’s rebellion against Gorbachev and the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union as the emancipation of the Russian nation from the Russian empire. Within this model of thought, Russia is usually seen as the main, if not sole, victim of Russian imperialism:

‘Russia was never an empire in the traditional Western sense of the word. If it was indeed a prison for anyone, it was for the Russians, who gained nothing from exploiting the colonies because Russia had no colonies — it had peripheries, to which it gave more than it took. One can understand why these borderlands were necessary: fundamentally the logic was based on military-political considerations. Russia is caught in the world’s crosswinds, at the heart of Eurasia, protected from enemies by neither mountains nor seas.

The use of the double-headed eagle as a Russian coat of arms goes back to the 15th century. With the end of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the Grand Dukes of Muscovy came to see themselves as the successors of the Byzantine heritage. In 1625 the double-headed eagle appeared with three crowns, interpreted as a symbol of unity between Great Russia, Little Russia (Ukraine) and White Russia (Belarus).

 

 

 

 

 

Some territories — indeed the Caucasus — were necessary acquisitions only because they at the time were the sole means of putting an end to the constant incursions and halting the aggression. But the peripheries were not subjected to systematic exploitation because the Russian tsars had not learned this European science. Alas, it was the Russian people who carried all the burdens and obligations of nation-building. If anyone was enslaved — in the direct meaning of the word — it was the Russians.’ (Konstantin Krylov blog in Russian).

The Russians were disadvantaged by their oppressive empire, whether ruled over by tsars or commissars. Their development was undoubtedly held back, but they enjoyed many privileges that other nationalities did not. As a group, they were spared from many dreadful policies, such as the extermination of the native populations (Siberia and the Far North), mass enslavement (Central Asians), genocide (Ukrainian peasants and Kazakh nomads), summary deportation (Chechens, Balkars, and Crimean Tatars), persecution (Poles and Germans), segregation (Jews), and more.

The professed self-victimization of Russians tends to obscure all these ‘peripheral’ developments, by promoting instead the myth of the ‘mission civilisatrice’. It also opens up the dangerous possibility that they will abdicate the responsibility for the colonialism and imperialism that Russians as the main imperial stakeholders do bear, and, even more dangerously, shift that responsibility on to ‘others’ – Georgians, Poles, Ukrainians and, of course, the Jews who arguably ruled the Russian empire.

Imperial myths

Very few Russian nationalists are disciplined, courageous, and honest enough to recognize that the much-needed emancipation of the Russian nation from the Russian empire requires primarily that they liberate themselves from the imperial myths and complexes deeply entrenched in the Russian psyche. The myth of a primordial ‘Slavic-Orthodox unity’ [Slavia Othodoxa] and eternal ‘Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian brotherhood’ is crucial for the entire Russian (imperial) identity. Invented at the turn of the 17th century to portray Muscovy as the dynastic-cum-political and ecclesiastic-cum-spiritual successor to medieval Kyivan Rus, it effectively derailed the eventual development of modern (national) Russian identity, as well as the modern national identities of Ukrainians and Belarusians. The newborn Russian empire successfully appropriated all the sacred, primordial, spiritual features of ‘Slavia Orthodoxa’ but imbued them also with state symbolism and a political agenda – something that never happened on that scale with similar pre-modern phenomena such as Muslim ‘ummah’ or Western ‘Pax Christiana’.

‘The post-Soviet elites quite naturally resist any radical de-Sovietization of their fiefdoms since they cannot but feel that unmaking Soviets (or imperial, heavily mythologized ‘Orthodox Slavs’) into Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians would mean, in particular, remaking obedient quasi-feudal subjects into free, self-confident citizens.’

The imperial identity that was forged in this way appeared to foster essentially pre-modern non-civic values and paternalism. Formed by specific imperial discourses and practices, it still is supported, in modified forms, by the dominant powerbrokers in both Russia and Belarus and, with some fluctuations, in Ukraine. The post-Soviet elites quite naturally resist any radical de-Sovietization of their fiefdoms since they cannot but feel that unmaking Soviets (or imperial, heavily mythologized ‘Orthodox Slavs’) into Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians would mean, in particular, remaking obedient quasi-feudal subjects into free, self-confident citizens.

Unfortunately, it is not only the Russian government that is unable to recognise the problem. With the exception of a tiny group of committed liberals, the opposition fails to see it. In some cases they may agree to look again at Russian imperialist policies in the Caucasus and elsewhere, but they do not challenge the myth of ‘Kyivan Russia’ as the cornerstone of imperial identity and a major source of imperial resentments and anxiety. Nor they are eager to promote radical de-Sovietization, even though the entire project of making modern Russians without unmaking Soviets is highly problematic.

Alexei Navalny

Alexei Navalny, one of the opposition leaders who defines himself as a liberal nationalist, explicitly supports the need to restore the ‘organic unity of Russia’s past,’ from Kyivan Rus to the USSR. [Manifesto, in Russian]. Neither ‘Kyivan’ nor Soviet myths are seen as obstacles to a new Russian identity or, more generally, the modernization of Russia. This makes him more of a liberal imperialist than a liberal nationalist. When asked openly by Boris Akunin: ‘Do you regret that the USSR is no longer in existence?’ he prevaricated only slightly:

‘Everybody wants their country to be bigger, richer, stronger. That’s perfectly normal, and it’s what I want as well. .... The USSR was destroyed not by external forces, but by the Communist Party, the State Planning Committee and the Soviet political elite. ... That is historical fact. Another fact is that the core and the foundation of the Russian empire and the USSR was our country – Russia. And Russia remains, both economically and militarily, the dominant state of the region. Our task is to preserve and build on that. ... We should not deliberately be making plans for any expansion; our task is to become strong and rich ourselves, and then our neighbors will be part of our zone of influence; they won’t have any option.’ [Akunin blog, in Russian].

While he emphasizes Russia’s soft, rather than hard, power, he can certainly be regarded as a liberal. But his intention to build on Russia’s economic and military [sic] dominance in the region sounds ambiguous enough to make all the neighbours nervous. Especially in view of his full support for recognizing the independence of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria – hardly sustainable without Russian military occupation.

Observers are probably right when they interpret the ambiguity of many Navalny statements as a pragmatic (one might say opportunistic) desire to avoid alienating potential allies from either the liberal democratic or the radical nationalistic camp. His own views, however, on two crucial issues that determine, or rather obstruct, the development of a modern civic Russian identity – the Soviet legacy and ‘East Slavic unity’ – are not very different from those of his arch-rival Vladimir Putin.

Russian nationalism: imperial vs ethnic

In this regard, two strains of nationalism that have been competing in Russia for nearly two centuries ­– imperial/statist and ethno-cultural – have something very important in common: both of them are essentially non-civic. One of them, as Igor Torbakov notes, ‘worships the state, its power and international prestige’; the other one ‘glorifies the nation, its culture and faith’. In practical matters, however, the difference is marginal: as soon as ethnic nationalists assume power, they pragmatically become statist. Realpolitik constrains radicals almost everywhere, and there are no reasons to believe that Russia, substantially integrated in the global economy and international institutions, would be any exception.

'In fact, the main problem of today’s opposition, and of Mr. Navalny in particular, is that they would most likely simply become a reincarnation of Mr. Putin and his regime.'  

Economic hardship and ethnic resentment, allied with a general discontent with ‘imperial-style’ government, have resulted in the greater ‘popularity of ethnic nationalism at the expense of the imperial variety’. However, this does not mean that radical nationalists are going to assume power in Russia or, even if they are, that they would pursue more jingoistic and fascist policies than the current incumbents.

In fact, the main problem of today’s opposition, and of Mr. Navalny in particular, is that they would most likely simply become a reincarnation of Mr. Putin and his regime. Probably less corrupt and presumably more committed to genuine reforms, but nevertheless burdened with the same national myths and which will considerably hamper any attempts to modernize the country.

Sideboxes Related stories:  Russia's liberal-nationalist cocktail: elixir of life or toxic poison? Is Alexei Navalny sent to spoil the democratic party? Mother’s boys: conversations with the parents of Russia’s neo-Nazis Russia's creeping fascism Lies and Innuendos: What happens when you take on the Russian far right The Akunin-Navalny interviews (part I) The Akunin-Navalny Interviews: part II The Akunin-Navalny interviews: part III Country or region:  Russia Topics:  Civil society Democracy and government

George Orwell’s 1937 study The Road to Wigan Pier offers a detailed and graphic account of poverty in pre-war England. On the 75th anniversary of its publication, Anthony Lock examines the contemporary relevance of Orwell’s arguments for socialism in England and beyond. 

March 8th marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s 1937 landmark The Road to Wigan Pier, a work of extreme candor on pre-war poverty in England. It is a cherished snapshot of the North in the 1930s, and The Observer, among others, have been nostalgic in printing pictures from the area for the commemoration of Orwell’s journey.

As an Orwell scholar, my interest in Wigan Pier is largely in the role it played in the road to Animal Farm and 1984. But the anniversary of the publication comes at a pertinent time - during what is the worst economic hardship since just after the Second World War. It is now being asked if Wigan Pier can be used to address present anxieties. Would Orwell think his original argument still stands for current poverty in the North of England and beyond?

Wigan Pier is significant because it was the first salient work produced by Orwell during a period where, by his own words, “every serious line” he wrote was intently written “directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism”. Having written previously on imperialism and other economic and social issues, he came to view certain aspects of  supposedly ‘liberal’ capitalism under MacDonald and Baldwin as stops on the road toward the most extreme form of oppression: totalitarian governments. Wigan Pier emerged when Orwell’s editor commissioned him in 1936 to investigate the poverty in the north of England, and it is, in accordance with this larger project, an argument that the causes of 1930s northern poverty themselves constitute a form of totalitarianism.

Orwell spent two months travelling the North, chiefly in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield, staying with families and studiously recording. Whole families living in a single room. Lavatories 150 meters away, never cleaned. Houses with half a roof. People living on a handful of slices of bread a day; a few dripping bacon scrags and cold tea. Miners tattooed blue because of the coal and dust constantly with them, travelling to work each day by means of a 3km walk underground along a path where one cannot stand up.

Orwell thought the cause of this incredible situation was a shunning of socialism, generally, and that this must be overturned. His argument is that socialism, however one may interpret it, is simply the desire to relieve social causes of oppression and discomfort. If this is all it truly is, by simple logic people should be socialists. But people are not, and circuitously the poverty remains. Class prejudices, among other things, are causes, but he writes that the paramount reason is that many recoil at the very word ‘socialism’.

Instead of speaking about sufferings and fairness, many socialists become more concerned with what they think is intellectualising, and they turn many people off by translating unemployment into Marxist jargon and caring about “ideological soundness”. The average worker, Orwell says, laughs when they hear their lives translated into the language of “dialectical materialism”.

In his developing investigation into the totalitarian, this is attributed to the way in which certain beliefs linger in the individual and collective consciousness. The most obvious manifestation of this can be seen here, when Orwell discusses a piece he saw in Worker’s Weekly. A letter to the editor, complaining of the publication’s numerous references to Shakespeare, ran:

“Dear Comrade, we don't want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare. Can't you give us something a bit more proletarian?’... The editor's reply was simple. ‘If you will turn to the index of Marx's Capital,’ he wrote, ‘you will find that Shakespeare is mentioned several times.’ And please notice that this was enough to silence the objector... That is the mentality that drives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement.”

Given 75 years have passed - years which have seen the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline in popular talk of jargon like “dialectal materialism” in general - Wigan Pier has elements that some modern readers might find distasteful, confusing, or simply irrelevant. Indeed, the length of the northern barge pole between the present and Wigan Pier’s content isn’t certain. It isn’t the most lucid read, either, and it remains debatable whether ill-feeling toward ‘socialism’ is a big cause of continuing hardship today.

But there is one striking lesson from Wigan Pier regarding poverty in 2012 that should be obvious to the modern reader, although amazingly I haven’t seen it highlighted in discussion. As someone who experienced homelessness, starvation and frontline warfare, I think it’s something Orwell would pick up on instantly.

Orwell talks of missing housing, abysmal sanitation conditions, a constant threat of tuberculosis, and no running water. In the early 21st Century, poverty, providing one isn’t homeless, is much more comfortable. The global depression has affected Britain greatly, leaving many people either unemployed or, if employed, spending all they earn. Prices for everything have gone up while the currency buys less. For some, food must be cut back to the absolute basics. And expenses must be made on commodities like the internet and mobile phones as well. Try living without those. Luxuries have become necessities but the riches come at a price. As Orson Welles says somberly in The Magnificent Ambersons – “the faster we’re carried, the less time we have.”

But at least these luxuries exist. Contrasting today to Orwell’s 1936, the only apparent differences are that poverty is more comfortable, and the reasons for the oppressive features which engender it have taken new turns. Orwell outlines miners’ costs as being “insurance (unemployment and health), hire of lamp, costs for sharpening tools, check-weighman, infirmary, hospital, benevolent fund and union fees.” Contrasting today’s income verses expenses, with wages verses inflation – figures roughly the same now as they were in 1936 - Orwell’s list of expenses, including those he mentions for the household, are analogous to what people pay today (with today’s payments including car essentials, technological necessities, and everything from train tickets to picture frames, if one purchases these).

Money doesn’t go further than it used to. But it does trade in a more comfortable climate. The outgoing expense rates and dire needs for work and housing are the same, but technological advance has provided clean houses, well-sealed, with adequate heating; the ability to access information nearly all the time and everywhere; and the ability to travel speedily around the whole globe. Gone are the northern rubicund "dust-belchers” of cities that Orwell described. Go back to 1930s standards and see if the comparison is really fair. It might knock “dialectal materialisms” out of you.

What would a cyborg-Orwell, 109 years old, remark on if he could travel again in 2012? I think, while cheering this improvement in living conditions, he’d say the same as he did the first time around - that given that the poverty and hardships that come from wage and expense balances are roughly what they always have been, socialism remains as an urgent and realisable solution. He’d probably say this because, whether or not one likes the term ‘socialism’, looked at it this way, its most vital characteristic is to resolve an imbalance which is still a major concern in 2012.

There is no Wigan Pier. Orwell only found this out when he ventured to where it should have been. Depressingly, the end to this road we’ve been discussing may not exist. Class and economic barriers may always cause problems, and instead of eradication they must merely be lowered as far as possible. It’s difficult to tell, especially when the improvement in living conditions has come so far that Orwell’s argument now seems, in places at least, inapplicable. But, if such barriers will always remain in some way, maintaining a lowered height for them will require an active concern to do this: one held understandably, keenly, and totally.

The forthcoming volume, Translating Egypt's Revolution, draws on the interdisciplinary nature of the field of translation studies today as it seeks to describe and explain the myriad ways in which the Egyptian people wrested back control of their public space and public culture in 2011. Come and debate their findings at an event at the University of East London on Thursday night.

This article is a preview of the book Translating Egypt’s Revolution, due out by The American University in Cairo Press in June 2012. Translating Egypt’s Revolution is the culmination of research and translation work conducted by researchers and students of varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds who continue to witness Egypt's ongoing revolution. They have selectively translated chants, banners, jokes, poems and interviews, as well as presidential speeches and military communiques. Samia Mehrez and her colleague Laura Gribbon will discuss their findings this Thursday, March 15th at 6:30pm at a public event at the University of East London, find out more.

The successive waves of the January 2011 uprising with its initial mesmerizing eighteen days in Tahrir have had a dramatic, immediate, and continuing impact on Egyptians and their relationship to space (both public and private; real and virtual) as has been witnessed in unprecedented online social networking, campaigns, and solidarities, as well as mass demonstrations, repeated sit-ins, and persistent protests despite the heavy cost in human life. This newfound power of ownership of one’s space, one’s body, and one’s language is, in and of itself, a revolution.

Over the past thirty years the Mubarak regime, which continues to be reproduced by the ruling military junta in post-January 2011 Egypt, has exercised increased control of both public space and public culture. These constraints have been orchestrated through the enforcement of emergency laws that legitimated detention and torture, the erratic but relentless censorship of freedom of expression, the privatization and dismantling of physical public spaces, as well as the depopulation of the city center. Such policing measures of public space and culture have minimized the possibilities of collective political activism and mobilization, thereby stifling and constraining oppositional and democratic movements for decades.

The January 25, 2011 uprising has unsettled these measures and policies and continues to resist oppressive counter-revolutionary attempts to dispossess the people of their newfound freedom. The eight chapters in this volume translate this new language of tahrir (liberation) and how Egyptians have articulated their ownership of space, body, and language through a myriad of creative performative and cultural practices whose semiotics, aesthetics, and poetics have not only inspired parallel uprisings worldwide but have also created sustaining solidarities as well as challenging resistances to the unfolding text of Egypt’s revolution. In doing so, all the contributors are committed to a thick translation of these cultural practices that engages the language(s) of Tahrir at both a horizontal and vertical level in order to render a synchronic and diachronic reading and interpretation of Egypt’s ongoing uprising.

During the early stages of this project, the contributors initially selected, read, and collectively translated some of this material from chants, banners, slogans, jokes, poems, and street art to media coverage, interviews, video blogs (vlogs), presidential speeches, and military communiqués. They predominantly worked in groups and as partners, not as individuals. This is to say that their translations, even in the chapters undertaken by a single author, are the outcome of this collective and perpetual conversation and understanding not to mention their sense of collective ownership of the translated texts.

The range and scope of the cultural, visual, and performative material, and its different linguistic registers and referential worlds, presented a great challenge to any translator, not just at the immediate linguistic level, but more importantly at the discursive, semiotic, and symbolic levels within the local and global contexts. Not only did the contributors call upon their plurilingual and pluricultural backgrounds, experiences and locations, but they have equally called upon their own academic disciplines to inform their task of translation. They have deployed insights and perspectives from across the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, comparative literature, philosophy, gender studies, Arabic literature, Middle East history, political science, journalism, anthropology, and, of course, translation studies. In so doing, they were compelled to rethink the limits of their own disciplines and, in the process, were equally empowered by translating across boundaries and beyond linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary borders without surrendering to the homogeneity, transparency, and dominance of the monolingualism of the target language, English. This volume therefore engages and reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field of translation studies and its multiple directions in research and analysis.

What follows is from the Introduction to Translating Egypt's Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, edited by Samia Mehrez, to be published June 2012.

Chapter 1, “Mulid al-Tahrir: Semiotics of a Revolution,” by Sahar Kreitim and Samia Mehrez explores the newfound relationship between Egyptians and public space as well as the emergence of resignified subjectivities that developed during the initial eighteen days of revolt in Tahrir through translating the multiple significations and connotations of the word mulid (in colloquial Arabic)/mawlid (in formal Arabic), which means ‘birth.’ The chapter explores how Egyptians succeeded in translating and revolutionizing their cultural heritage of mulid celebrations—a popular celebration of the birthday of a venerated spiritual figure—which became an integral part of the semiotic processes and rituals that brought forth and sustained the birth (mawlid/mulid) of the “Independent Republic of Tahrir.”

Chapter 2, “Of Drama and Performance: Transformative Discourses of the Revolution,” by Amira Taha and Chris Combs translates some of the most decisive and influential discursive and performative moments that shaped the early drama of the unfolding text of Egypt’s uprising. By drawing on analytical tools from the fields of translation, performance, and gender studies, as well as social movement theory, the authors translate—at both the linguistic, semiotic, and performative levels—selections from these transformative moments that impacted millions of Egyptians on social and conventional media networks by such diverse actors as activists Asmaa Mahfouz and Wael Ghoneim, former President Hosni Mubarak and General Mohsen al-Fangary, among others, molding and shaping the reactions of publics during various decisive moments of the uprising.

Chapter 3, “Signs and Signifiers: Visual Translations of Revolt,” by Laura Gribbon and Sarah Hawas reads and translates the throng of revolutionary banners and signs whose visual immediacy both established the demands of protesters and responded to the emerging political discourse as it unfolded, thereby becoming, in and of themselves, a translation of the awakening of public consciousness and a remarkable and fearless articulation of the right to language. The authors trace how these visual public signs inscribed a narrative of resistance that drew on various symbols and layers of historical, cultural, and political memory to write the story of a people in revolt.

Chapter 4, “Reclaiming the City: Street Art of the Revolution,” by Lewis Sanders IV draws on the concepts of striated and smooth space in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to translate the politics of street art of the revolution as “a performance and product of aesthetic smoothing that resists the dominant striated narratives of the state.” As the author argues, street art becomes a way for Egyptians to reclaim and reappropriate urban space, and provides “a new understanding of the city as rightfully belonging to the people.”

Chapter 5, “al-Thawra al-DaHika: The Challenges of Translating Revolutionary Humor,” by Heba Salem and Kantaro Taira focuses on the various problems and issues but also the subtleties, ambiguities, and subversive referential worlds that surround the translation of humor from a source to target culture and the extent to which notions of ‘fidelity’ and ‘equivalence’ may not necessarily ‘carry over’ in translating humor across cultures.

Chapter 6, “The Soul of Tahrir: Poetics of a Revolution,” by Mark Visona and Lewis Sanders IV shifts our attention to the aesthetics of a different register of language of Tahrir namely the polyphonic tapestry of the lyrical and poetic life of the midan that served to sustain the transcendental effect of the revolutionary experience and unite Egyptians from all walks of life through chants, songs, and poems. As the authors translate selections from this open epic of Tahrir, they situate individual texts within a larger inter-textual poetic context, reading the singular poem or song in the source language as one that draws on a myriad of other texts at a structural or thematic level.

Chapter 7, “The Army and the People Are One Hand: Myths and Their Translations,” by Menna Khalil addresses the question of how to translate the use of slogans in simultaneous support and opposition to the army from January 2011 well into the time of writing in August 2011. Egyptians have chanted “Al-gish wa-l-sha‘b id waHda” (‘The army and the people are one hand’), but they have also chanted “Ya ‘askari y abu bundu’iya, inta ma‘aya walla ‘alaya?” (‘You, soldier with a rifle; are you with me or against me?’) and “Al-sha‘b yurid isqat almushir” (‘The people demand the removal of the field marshal’), among many other chants, songs, and banners with and against the ‘askar (military), all in less than two months from the beginning of the uprising in January, 2011.

Chapter 8, “Global Translations and Translating the Global: Discursive Regimes of Revolt,” by Sarah Hawas seeks to understand the discursive politics of translating Egypt’s uprising by simultaneously situating its adaptations and appropriations as well as its deliberate mistranslations within a global neoliberal moment. By focusing on a limited number of sites of translation, the author investigates the political possibilities and stakes inherent in (mis)translating the Egyptian Revolution as she attends to what gets left out, compressed, managed, and (re)packaged in the concurrent processes of reification, reinterpretation, and reframing of Egypt’s uprising within a globalizing context that not only “depends on and requires the localization and containment of citizenship” but imposes a dominant “imaginary whose constituents include, but are not limited to: cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, diversity, democracy, pluralism, co-existence, and most intriguing of all, tolerance.”

Through the very choices of topics and texts, as well as our conscious “visibility” and location as translators, these chapters also bear testimony to the politics of selection that implicate us (as individuals and as a group) in a very particular “version” of the revolutionary text in translation. Many other layers have yet to be translated: narrative literary texts that bear eyewitness representations of the uprising, emerging forms of graphic and visual humor, the open epic chants of the revolution, translations of Islamist and of Coptic discursive and performative representations of revolt, the language(s) of electoral politics, to mention only a handful of subtexts. Given developments on the ground, and the discourses surrounding the very meaning(s) of Egypt’s revolution, both local and global—not to mention the ongoing contest over public space, freedom of expression, public culture, and cultural production—there is no doubt that this early collective and selective effort represents but the beginning of many more “versions” of the revolutionary text that have yet to be translated.

 

From the Introduction to Translating Egypt's Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, edited by Samia Mehrez, to be published June 2012. Copyright © 2012 by the American University in Cairo Press (www.aucpress.com).

Country or region:  Egypt Topics:  Civil society Conflict Culture Democracy and government

The term 'local reconciliation' may seem benign, but recent research amongst Tamils in the north of the country highlights the damaging silence hanging over the survivors of the conflict, and a determination to reach justice through transparency over past and present wrongs.

The Sri Lankan government has appropriated the term ‘reconciliation’ to construct a narrative of post-war Sri Lanka in which the rights of non-majority communities are being protected, and their concerns addressed. In reality, the policies and acts of the state show scant regard for the rights of non-majority communities, dismissing the ethno-political nature of the conflict and the need for a political solution as irrelevant.

The argument presented by Sanka Chandima Abayawardena in ‘Reconciliation in Sri Lanka means the youth must lead the way’ – that reconciliation initiatives should be conceived and driven at the local level by Sri Lankan youth – appears reasonable and benign. However, the experience of people in the conflict-affected northern areas illustrates the extent to which Abayawardena has disregarded complex ground realities, while calling upon pressure groups to understand ‘the nature of the country – what Sri Lanka is…’.

This article focuses on recent research conducted among the Tamil community in the north.

Equating calls for justice with revenge:  What do the affected say?

The call for an international intervention to establish responsibility for war crimes has been dismissed by Abayawardena as a political move aimed at ‘persecuting the Sri Lankan political and civil leadership out of anger’. Commentators such as Michael Roberts have argued that the ‘bitterness wrought by the ethnic conflict’ could be fuelling the need for retribution that they assume many Tamils feel, which in turn might lead to the fabrication of allegations of war crimes. There are also those who claim that persons affected by the armed conflict only wish for a better standard of living, jobs, access to education and healthcare, and are not concerned either about violations of human rights and humanitarian law that took place during the armed conflict, including the last stages of the war, or a political solution to the ethnic conflict.

However, research in Mannar, Vavuniya, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and the Jaffna peninsula shows that there is an acute need within the Tamil community for an acknowledgement of their singular experience of suffering during the final phase of the war, that goes beyond both a desire for revenge and the natural yearning for an improvement of their material conditions and economic well-being.

When questioned by the Committee Against Torture (CAT) in Geneva on 9 November 2011, Senior Legal Advisor to the Cabinet and former Attorney-General Mohan Peiris pointed to the issuance of death certificates for missing persons as the primary method used by the state to deal with the issue of disappearances. Mr. Peiris claimed that the issuance of death certificates would immediately bring the whole episode to a close, and provide families with certainty about what had happened to their family members. In contrast, the testimonies of many from the North, even those whose family members disappeared in the 1990s, were emphatic that they do not wish to obtain death certificates because it would thereby deny them the right to demand answers from the state concerning the disappearances.

Currently, there are over 5000 cases of disappearances on file with the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), which includes those from the 1990s. The figure therefore does not indicate how many went missing during the last stages of the war, and  families have no means of accessing information on their plight. Until very recently it was official state policy to deny there was any loss of civilian life during the war. The Department of Census and Statistics has now published data on the number of civilians who were killed or went missing during last stages of the war. However, Secretary of Defence Gotabaya’s  dismissive statement prior to the completion of the survey that ‘the real number of dead and missing is far too small to provide any substance to the absurd allegations of genocide and war crimes that have been made against our military,’ casts doubt on the government’s commitment to engage in a public dialogue on the issue.

This denial also indicates that anyone seeking answers to questions that challenge the government’s narrative of the armed conflict is unlikely to find redress: to ask about the plight of a family member whose relatives claim was last seen being taken away by the armed forces is inevitably to raise allegations of rights violations by the state. This is illustrated by the government’s only concretely identifiable response to the recommendations of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), tasking the military along with the Attorney-General to investigate allegations made against the armed forces by those who appeared before LLRC.    

The government of Sri Lanka is actively building a hegemonic narrative of the war that is solely about victory and the valiant soldier, with no public acknowledgment of the loss and grief experienced by civilians who lost family members in the armed conflict. Along with the glorification of the warrior-citizen, collective (majoritarian) memory is created through celebrations of the war victory, military parades, and the erection of memorials to members of the Sri Lankan armed forces who died in battle. Yet, there is no space for civilians to organise public events to mourn the dead, nor memorials to commemorate the lives lost. Instead, each year on 19 May, the date that marks the official end of the war, the armed forces in the North have actively prevented collective community ceremonies.

I asked Tamils in communities across northern Sri Lanka whether they felt a public ceremony to mark the end of the war and commemorate those killed was desired, and whether they had thought about convening such an event. The immediate response from every person interviewed was that since they felt they couldn’t even speak of issues relating to the ethnic conflict, they couldn’t imagine holding public events to remember the dead. This is evidence not only of the severe restrictions placed upon the freedom of expression and assembly amongst the Tamil communities, but also the alienation this population feels from the state and the majority Sinhalese community. As an interviewee said, ‘we can’t believe anything the government says as they’ve always gone back on their promise’.  

Local reconciliation based on the rule of law: an impossibility?

While concurring wholeheartedly with Abayawardena’s statement that ‘reconciliation based on the rule of law is the only way to have a lasting effect on post-war Sri Lanka’ and that ‘justice must be available for victims at a local level’, the feasibility of achieving this should be examined in the context of the current state of civil administration and maintenance of law and order in the North.

Militarization in the North is taking place in complex ways, at multiple levels. The most visible manifestations are the army checkpoint/civil affairs office at every junction in every village, and the large number of new and now permanent army camps along the A9 road from Vavuniya to Jaffna. These are the obvious, and therefore perhaps more benign, signs of militarization. The dictates of the army seem to run far deeper in the Vanni (areas formerly controlled by the LTTE), with excessive scrutiny and surveillance not only of community and non-governmental organisations, but also of any gathering of more than a handful of people. Prior notification has to be given to the army of any meeting or workshop that is held. Interviewees said  that even when notification was given, if there were participants coming from outside the Vanni – the mainland area of the north – sometimes army officers attended the meeting and observed the proceedings. Army officers would attend or check- up on smaller community gatherings, such as women’s societies and savings groups, only if the organisers failed to provide prior notification.

Sign post for the military police in Jaffna, in Sinhalese and English only. Some rights reserved.

 

The paradoxically named Civil Affairs Office (CAO), which is ‘manned’ by the military, is the best example of the entrenched presence and participation of the military in civil affairs in the North. Created during the period when residents of the peninsula had to obtain passes to travel to the South, this office has now morphed into a one-stop monitoring and surveillance unit of the army. For instance, following the end of the war all those who were released after being held at government ‘rehabilitation’ centres for alleged former LTT combatants have been asked to register with the CAO and then report back to sign in on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, depending on the edict of the local commander.  

The presence of the military has increased the insecurity of women, who constitute the majority in many villages due to the death, disappearance or detention of men. The feelings of insecurity stem from fears for their physical security, due to living in a heavily militarized environment without any male members of the family, controlled by an army which speaks a language they do not understand. The presence of the military leads women to make a conscious effort to limit movements outside of their homes and communities. These self-imposed restrictions impact adversely on their ability to access livelihood options and education opportunities Nearly three years following the end of the war most of these women do not have a viable livelihood, leaving them open to exploitation and abuse.  In this context it seems impossible for the Tamil people to believe that they can access justice at the local level.

The voices of the youth in the North

Following the end of the war, persons who the government termed surrendees (allegedly because they surrendered to the government as members of the LTTE or had links with the group) were sent to rehabilitation centres. Although termed ‘surrendees’ the voluntary nature of surrender is in question since many were detained either as they made their way to the government controlled areas or in the IDP camps. The actual number of rehabilitees is unknown but it is estimated that around 12,000 persons were sent to these centres. 

In contrast with Abayawardena’s faith in the youth of Sri Lanka, the voices of those youth who were sent to rehabilitation centres for alleged affiliation with the LTTE have effectively been silenced.

Interviews with those who were released from the centres revealed that while all experienced a sense of relief to be free from what they, at one point, felt would be a never ending ordeal, and reunite with their families, they also felt trepidation about the future – about their ability to find employment and re-build their lives free from harassment and surveillance in an environment in which they were still viewed as persons who have to be watched and monitored by the state. Since many released rehabilitees have to report regularly to the CAO (army checkpoint), they are viewed as informants for the army and so regarded with suspicion and fear by their communities. This impacts adversely, particularly upon women. For instance, one woman rehabilitee said that ‘society will talk/gossip about women who visit the army camps to sign-in. Neighbours might even break up marriage proposals by informing the prospective groom’s family about the woman’s visits to the army camp’. This limits their chances of gaining employment and places pressure on their relationship with their families, leading to familial disputes. Due to this many feel they have no future in Sri Lanka and seek to leave the country, either by applying for foreign asylum with little hope of success, or paying huge sums of money and entrusting their fate to human traffickers. In the words of one rehabilitee ‘After I finish my education, I don’t want to stay in Sri Lanka for one minute’.  

Which way forward?

The government claims it has put in place adequate measures for post-war reconciliation, rendering outside attention unnecessary. Viewed through the framework of transitional justice the state’s policies and actions do not stand scrutiny – they do not provide recognition to victims and create civic trust. In the North adequate measures have not been taken to ‘normalise’ the former conflict affected areas. Instead militarisation has become entrenched and a large military presence in the North has been formalised.

A welcome sign in English only. Some rights
reserved.

Although Tamil was made an official language in 1987 and the government launched a ten year trilingual programme in January 2012, state action illustrates limited political will to carry this through. For instance, Tamils in many parts of the country, not only the North and East, state that when they lodge complaints at the police station it is documented in Sinhala, a language they do not understand. They are then asked to sign the document indicating that it is a true record of their complaint.

 

Moreover, in the past six months alone new sign boards in Sinhala only or Sinhala and English have sprung up in the Tamil speaking North. With the lack of even minimal cause for Northerners to trust their governance structures, local reconciliation based on the rule of law as posited by Abayawardena amounts to a denial of the harm done.

The alienation felt by the communities in the North is illustrated by this statement, made by a woman who was displaced multiple times and lost 7 members of her family during the last stages of the armed conflict: ‘The President should look after the Tamils as they are citizens too. He doesn’t care about the Tamils’. In order for Tamils to feel they are equal citizens the onus is on the state to take measures, including but not limited to, demilitarization of the North, enabling people to fully and freely exercise their rights, acknowledgement not only of the violations and loss experienced during the war and provision of reparation, but also acceptance of the ethno-political nature of the conflict and commitment to provide a political solution.

The other important failing on the part of the state is its attempt to impose collective amnesia on the Tamil population in relation to the LTTE. The relationship of the Tamil people with the LTTE was, and remains, a highly complex and sensitive matter. We should remember that this relationship encompassed a nuanced spectrum of opinion within the Tamil community: from those who unequivocally supported both the LTTE’s ideological stance and methods, to those who, faced with a state unresponsive to their political aspirations, tolerated the LTTE in instrumental terms, to yet others, given the attitude of the LTTE in regard to dissent and political pluralism, simply had no choice whether or not to conform. Post-war, and post-LTTE, this is a matter that is best resolved, reconciled and come to terms with, within the Tamil community. The high profile insertion of the military into not only the civil administration, but also the civic, social and political space of the North, in a manner designed to impose a history, to control collective memory, and intrude into post-war catharsis, is not only callous, but also myopic and ultimately self-defeating for the state.

In other words, there is no better way than the path the government is currently taking to ensure the sustenance within the Tamil polity of the LTTE’s brand of hard-line nationalism, even without the LTTE.

Also read:

Reconciliation in Sri Lanka means the youth must lead the way, Sanka Abayawardena

'Reconciliation in Sri Lanka means the youth must lead the way': a sceptical response, Asanga Welikala

 

Sideboxes Related stories:  Reconciliation in Sri Lanka means the youth must lead the way 'Reconciliation in Sri Lanka means the youth must lead the way': a sceptical response Country or region:  Sri Lanka Topics:  Civil society Conflict