Tag: global politics

Repost

Briefly reposting a piece of mine from 2005, which was itself a repost from 2003.

At the end of the 1991 Gulf war there was an argument. Some people wanted to remove Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Others opposed this either because they felt it would have bad effects on the region as a whole, or more simply because it would cause unnecessary bloodshed. It was decided, in my view rightly, to end the war with the restoration of Kuwait.

Many who opposed an invasion of Iraq nevertheless hoped that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown. Part of the Iraqi population was already in revolt, and it seemed an easy and harmless thing to help things along a bit. The Iraqi security forces could be prevented from wiping out the rebellion by establishing safe areas and “No-fly zones”, which could be justified on humanitarian grounds in any event.

Unfortunately the idea, approved by the UN Security Council, was not thought through. Carried away by the prospect of getting Saddam Hussein overthrown “for free”, the long-term situation in the case that the rebellion was unsuccessful was ignored. The United Nations, a body whose purpose is peace, and empowered to sanction war only to prevent wider war, was in fact ordering a perpetual war. It is an act of war to send armed forces into another country to protect a rebel army. The U.S.A. and U.K. have, with U.N. backing, been waging war against Iraq every day for over a decade. This situation should never have been created. Once it was decided in 1991 to allow the Iraqi regime to stay in power, then for consistency’s sake Iraq should have been accorded the full sovereign rights of any other country, including the right to use force against “traitors” in its territory.

If I had made this argument at the time (which I didn’t), I am sure I would have found little agreement. I would have been told that I was putting inappropriate and outdated principles ahead of the lives of innocent people. It is only with hindsight that we can see what has come of the denial of the basic principle of Iraq’s sovereignty. The twelve year war against Iraq, with its blockades (“sanctions”), its bombings and its imminent bitter end has claimed more innocent lives than either of the two logical alternatives in 1991 would have done, even without taking into account that it was the immediate provocation for the worst terrorist massacre in history.

At its root is arrogance. GWB has been widely accused of arrogance in recent weeks, but nothing has matched the arrogance of his father and his UN supporters in believing that they could expect peace and cooperation from a foreign government while openly attempting to overthrow it in defiance of its traditional sovereign rights. GWB has the humility to recognise that to interfere in Iraq to the extent of inspecting its chemical factories and limiting the actions its security forces, he must fight a war, take the responsibility and take the consequences. The UN Security Council still has the arrogance to believe it can achieve the same ends without bloodshed.

Liu Xiaobo again

It seems that the Guardian has actually investigated and discovered (by the extraordinary method of finding someone who can read Chinese) what I merely assumed — that Liu Xiaobo is a professional front-man for American imperialism.

That isn’t such a bad thing, of course. There are many worse forces in the world than American imperialism, and many places that might benefit from a bit more of it. China might even be one of them (though I am not persuaded on that point).

What would be significant about the revelations that, for instance, his organisation has been funded by the US government, or that he was outspoken in favour of George Bush and against Kerry, or that he says “to choose westernisation is to choose to be human” would be if they changed anyone’s mind about him. Because really, it is all implied by what little we knew about him before the Grauniad dredged up translations of his writing.

And of course, the fact that a paid agent of a hostile power, openly dedicated to overthrowing his country’s government and culture, was allowed to remain at liberty for as long as he was, to my mind falsifies a lot of what is said about China today.

Non-violent revolution

In my critcism of the Nobel Peace Prize, I didn’t address the point that Liu Xiaobo is an advocate for non-violent democratic change in China.

That was because it is irrelevant. It is the violence after the government falls that bothers me, not before.

The Tsar of Russia was removed non-violently, by strikes and demonstrations – the more democratic regime that replaced him lasted a few months, a different gang replaced it, their enemies started a civil war… Long story.

The exemplar of the non-violent revolutionary is Gandhi. He succeeds, the British hand over power, there are rival factions and interests sharing it out, a partition results, social unrest – 5 to 10 million dead.

Both those revolutions might nevertheless have been good things; that’s not the point. The point is that either way, the non-violence of the first stage is pretty much insignificant. A non-violent revolutionary is only harmless if he fails.

The Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been beyond the grasp of rational criticism, but I don’t think this year’s award can be let by with just the usual cynical chuckle.

Timothy Garton-Ash says in the Grauniad CiF that the prize “hits China’s most sensitive nerve”. In fact, the offence that the Chinese government has taken is all the result of a misunderstanding. They really do have difficulty understanding the level of the West’s hypocrisy and stupidity.

To the extent the award means anything at all, it is a declaration of intent, by the Nobel Committee and all those that speak in support of it, to overthrow the government of China and replace it with a Western-style government. Garton-Ash explains that Liu Xiaobo “has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy”. It is possible to advocate respect for human rights and the rule of law within Chinese politics, but to advocate democracy is to advocate the destruction of the Chinese government and its replacement with a Western-style one.

To make such a warlike declaration in the name of peace is, of course, just the usual annual joke.

Therefore, it is reasonable for the Chinese authorities to react to the award as a declaration of outright enmity. Their reaction is, nevertheless, wrong. There are two things they do not understand.

The first is that this declaration is purely ritual. In calling for the overthrow of the PRC, the Western intelligentsia have not the slightest idea of any actual program of action; they are merely showing each other how virtuous they are. It is the equivalent of the prayers for the conversion of England that used to be said by Catholic congregations – a creed that had to be regularly affirmed, without the slightest reflection on its actual meaning.

The second is that, because of the lack of such reflection, the self-declared enemies of China actually have no inkling of what they are actually saying. “Democracy”, in the mouth of someone like Garton-Ash, is just something that goes with human rights and rule of law – it is a minor adornment of a political system, that can be increased here and there without killing millions of people.

In Britain, that is indeed what it is – as democracy crept gradually into the British system over a couple of hundred years, the system absorbed and to a great extent neutralised it, producing a comfortable and moderately stable synthesis. That is not what happens when it is introduced in one go. Then it destroys one regime and produces another, usually very short-lived, replacement. Then there is generally a settling down into some kind of civil war. France is the model, not Britain.

The Garton-Ashes and Nobel Committees do not understand that. The thought never even enters their heads. They probably assume that even the CPC leadership itself really wants democracy, but is just a little too cautious and conservative in bringing it in, and needs to be gently chivied by the likes of Liu Xiaobo.

If the Chinese really understood Western politics, they would ignore it and watch the X-factor like sensible westerners do. But it is out of place for the politicians themselves to criticise the Chinese for taking them at their word.

I don’t say all this to attack the idea of reform in China. While I am no great fan of democracy, and while the Chinese regime does have a fairly decent record over the last couple of decades, I recognise that it is bound to run into serious problems as wealth and economic freedom increase the power of rivals to the present establishment. There are already serious power struggles between central and regional governments. It may well be that political collapse is inevitable, and if so, then a somewhat Western-ish democracy would not be the worst possible outcome. Liu Xiaobo might be the nucleus of a future non-terrible government of China, and the alternative to something worse. It’s hard to say. But these aren’t the terms in which the debate is being carried on.

The End

I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I expected to write quite a lot here in that time.
The reason I didn’t is that my political thinking has pretty much come to a conclusion. I don’t like it at all, but it’s a conclusion for all that.

When Adam Smith was writing, there were many theories, public and private, about what a business ought to do. Smith pointed out, [drawing from Darwin and Malthus] (edit, yes I really wrote that, oops), that whatever theory they believed, the businesses that survived would be those which aimed at maximising profit, or those that, by coincidence, behaved as if that was what they aimed at.
The situation in politics is that, while there are many theories about what politicians should do, those politicians will succeed that behave as if their aim is to achieve power at any cost. Perhaps historically many politicians had other aims, and the successful ones were those who happened to act as a pure power-seeker would, but now there is sufficient understanding of what path will gain and hold power that those who consciously diverge from the path least will be those who win.
To be clear, I’m not simply talking about electoral politics here. I’m talking about all politics, in non-democratic systems, in the electoral process, and in the wider and more important politics beyond elections, where power lives in media, civil service, educational, trade union and other centres outside the formal government.
The trivial fact – that power will go to those that want it – is reinforced by the more effective co-operation that pure power-seekers can achieve than ideologues. A large number of power-seekers, although rivals, will co-operate on the basis of exchanges of power. The result is a market in power, and that is the most effective basis for large-scale collective action. Those attempting to achieve specific, different but related aims will find it much more difficult to organise and co-operate on the same scale.

Is it not possible, then, to have significant influence, not by competing directly with politicians but by competing with the media/educational branches of the establishment by promoting ideas? The metacontext, as the folks at Samizdata say. It is indeed possible to influence politics by doing that, and that is what libertarians have done for the last half century or so. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have good influence. Certainly some good things have happened because libertarians have changed the metacontext to the point where the things have appealed to power-seekers. But some bad things have happened that way too. The fact is that while the “background” beliefs of the electorate and other participants in politics does have an effect, there is no reason to assume that correct background beliefs cause better policies than incorrect background beliefs.
One of the most depressing aspects of activism is that on the very few occasions when you get someone onto your side, either by persuading them or just finding them, more often than not they’re still wrong. They’re persuaded by bad arguments rather than good arguments. Activism would appeal to me on the idea that I will win out in the end because my arguments are good, but in fact not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments. The idea that truth is a secret weapon that is destined to win out once assorted exceptional obstacles have been overcome is an utter fantasy.
As a result, even if you do achieve marginal influence by working for policies or ideas that would be widely beneficial, your success is likely to backfire. The other players in the game are working for the narrow interest of identifiable groups and, as such, are able to mobilise far greater resources. They also are willing to trade with other power seekers, which improves their effectiveness further. The idealist is not able to do that, because the idealist obtains only the particular powers he wants to keep, whereas the politician grabs whatever power he can, even if it is of no use to him, and that which is of no use to him, he trades. The only way to do that is to get whatever power you can, which is my definition of a politician.
It still feels like there is something noble in working for better government, even if the project appears doomed. But there isn’t. After all, most utopians from anarchist to fascist to Marxist are working for better government, but we oppose them because their utopias are unachievable and their attempts to get there are harmful. Your ideas don’t work because they’re flawed, my ideas don’t work because politics is flawed. Hmmm. Why are my ideas better than yours, again?
And that is the final straw. In truth, I have never been an activist. I have neither appetite or aptitude for practical politics, which after all is basically a people business, but I used to believe it was interesting to look in isolation at the question of what those with political power ought to do with it, so as to make the government as good as possible, in a vaguely utilitarian way. What brings my political efforts to an end is the realisation that that is meaningless. A political theory based on the assumption that a government will act in the general interest once it understands how to do so is as useful as a theory based on the assumption that the world is flat and carried by elephants. Politics has given me some entertainment over the years, but not as much as Terry Pratchett has.
If I am going to assume that governments work in the general interest, once they understand how to do it, I might just as well assume that industrialists work in the general interest, in which case all my clever arguments about the value of private property rights for resolving opposing private interests are completely irrelevant.
It’s amusing that of all the posts on this blog, one of the most important turns out to be one that I thought at the time was unimportant: this one, originally driven by my musings on Newcombe’s Paradox.
Almost all significant propositions are, implicitly or explicitly, of the form IF {some hypothetical state of the world} THEN {something will result}. In politics, the hypothetical frequently involves some person making some decision. The proposition therefore needs to take into account whatever is necessary for that person to actually make that decision – and the other effects of those necessary conditions may well be more significant than the stated result.
I came very close to making all the connections back then, even raising the significance of my facetious “if I were Führer” form of putting political propositions. I am not Führer, and never will be, and neither will anyone like me, and all my political logic collapses on that just like any other proof premised on a falsehood.
Where does that leave me? I am no longer a libertarian – I find libertarian arguments just as correct as I always did, but they are of no relevance to the real world. I could continue to comment here on the stupidities that people accept from various politicians, but I would be doing it in the same spirit as if I were judging the team selection of a football club – in full awareness of my own impotence and irrelevance. Maybe I will. It would make more sense to take up something useful, like gardening.
I can also attempt to benefit humanity by encouraging others to detach from politics as I am doing. Someone has to have power, and if you think you can get it and you would be good at it, by all means go for it. If not, then leave well alone. Be one of the ruled, and pursue whatever aims you choose without the illusion that you have the right, the duty or the capability to change the policies of the rulers. Embrace passivism.

Honduras

You say “Military Coup” like it’s a bad thing.

The constitution of Honduras has an article 239 which specifically prohibits not only the reelection of a president, but also proposing to reform it. It’s a neat idea – remember I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Thomas Paine had recommended something along the same lines with respect to monetary policy.

President Zelaya proposed a referendum to overrule (without legal justification) this article of the constitution, and was told by the Supreme Court that he couldn’t. He then had the ballots printed abroad and attempted to carry out the referendum illegally, and, after votes by both the Congress and the Supreme Court, the army was ordered to arrest him. Which they did.

Hat tip to Half Sigma, whose line is that this is no coup, but a simple exercise of law.

Assuming ½σ has the legalities straight (since Honduran constitutional law is one of those odd gaps in my knowledge) I would still say that whether this is a coup is merely a question of definition. The question matters to many people because they have an unjustified prejudice against military coups. I’ve been thinking sympathetically about the concept of the army removing the government for a while, so the idea that a coup might be legal strikes me not as a paradox but as a ray of sunshine – if nothing else, it allows me to post some of my thinking about the future of Britain without being a terrorist.

The advantage of a definition of coup that ignores the legality is that it allows me to describe what happened even in situations, like this one, where I don’t know what the law precisely is. There has been a military coup in Honduras, which I think was probably a legal one. There, isn’t that an efficient description of the situation?

The thing about constitutional legalities, as I suggested in my recent post on Iran, is that they never ultimately matter because there’s no forum where they can reliably be resolved, the competent court always being in effect one player in the political game. Some of the participants may be influenced by their perception of the legal situation, but that’s the only importance of law.

The court made the legal decision to have the president arrested, then the army made the political decision to obey the court rather than the president.

As I said in a comment at UR, For law to be preserved, law and government have to be two different things. If the law overrules the government, then it is not law, it is government. If the government can decide what the law is, then similarly, it is not law but government.

Iran Elections

Here’s what I believe about Iran:

First, I support the concept of national sovereignty. There should be no interference in the internal affairs of Iran that fall short of invading it and declaring it a protectorate. This is not so much a moral principle as a practical one – attempting to change a country’s government, with or without local allies, is an act of war.

I don’t know whether the election of Ahmedinejad was legitimate. Very possibly it wasn’t. Quite possibly it was – our view of the national mood both before and after the vote was skewed by the greater visibility of the Tehran population relative to the rural population.

The rural population is much more conservative than the city population. If we assume for the sake of argument that the vote was counted fairly, then what we are seeing resembles in some respects the situation that arose recently in Thailand. There, Thaksin Shinawatra had the support of the countryside, but was deposed by the capital city.

The difference in that case was that the Bangkok middle classes controlled the armed forces, and were able to take power through them. In Tehran, the questions appear to be whether the government is prepared to put down the revolt violently, and if so, whether the security forces will follow orders to do so.

Ultimately, the conclusion is that a government cannot survive on the support simply of a backward rural population, even if that population constitutes a majority. Note that the Islamic Republic was originally installed by the city population.

Of course, the protesters are not calling for an end to the Islamic Republic, only for the change of government they claim the election should have produced. That means they could win without the country falling into chaos (unlike, for example, the Chinese protesters of 20 years ago). If it becomes accepted that the election was rigged, there could be a very peaceful transition. Even so, if that were to happen, the proof that the Tehran mob can overrule the election result (honest or not) will not go away.

Maybe the more important conclusion to draw is that a truly national election is a very bad thing. The last few US presidential elections have produced great criticism of the “Electoral College” system, but that system is essential for producing an uncontested result. If the election is decided by the total number of votes over the nation, then it becomes too easy to add extra votes in areas where one site dominates. If you only count constituencies, then both sides can closely observe the process in the areas which are close, and in the areas which aren’t, it doesn’t matter, because the side which has the ability to rig the vote has no reason to. In Iran, suggestions that ballot boxes were stuffed with fake votes in parts of the country are plausible because the side that make the claims are not well-enough represented there to stop it.

The great advantage of democracy is that it gives the government enough legitimacy to stay in power without the massive intrusive social control that modern dictatorships normally require. Doubts over the count undermine that legitimacy, so it is essential that counts are visible enough to be trusted. That is much more important than that the system used is perfectly “fair”. I am quite disturbed that, where we have grown to trust the fairness of elections, we are throwing away their verifiability in exchange for better fairness.

Obama's Honeymoon

When I started here, my first point was that the tension between the US and Europe was not about Islam, and not about George W Bush, but was a deeper conflict of vision that was surfacing after being hidden by the cold war.

As Bush Derangement Syndrome took hold, it became even easier to misunderestimate the nature of the disagreement.  The new president has a style very much more to the taste of European elites, and so the concrete basis of the divergence in outlook is going to become more obvious.

I think Barack Obama’s honeymoon in the European media is going to last for weeks, not months.  What I didn’t expect, however, is that Bush would be rehabilitated.  But see this piece in the BBC, explaining (quite reasonably) that the financial crisis cannot be blamed on Bush.

The falling-out with Obama will be quite different from any disillusionment that Obama’s supporters in the US may suffer as expectation meets reality.  The European media are enamoured by Obama’s personality, and had a particular antipathy to Bush, but they have no concrete policy expectations for the new administration to be disappointed by.  The material disagreement between the US and Europe will carry on exactly unchanged.

The Georgian Side

The Georgian side of the Ossetian question is now coming out. Saakashvili is claiming that Georgia didn’t move against S. Ossetia until after Russian forces entered it. The cold war warrior element is making the point that S. Ossetia’s status for the last fifteen years has rested on Russian support.

I have no confidence in being able to get to the truth of the conflicting views. I dwell on the question because, as unclear as the facts of the matter are, the principles that should guide us are just as unclear too.

We can’t really talk about the reasons why South Ossetia might “deserve” to have independence from Georgia, without talking about why Georgia “deserved” to get its independence in 1991. I don’t recall any such principles being argued, but of course Croatia and Slovenia were getting all the attention at the time.

The argument for having clear and explicit rules is the formalist one that if you know in advance what position the most powerful actors are going to take, violent conflict is unlikely.

That is a weaker argument if the rules, clear-cut as they are, depend on facts which are unclear. But even so, I think it would help. One reason the facts are so unclear is that, at the end of the day, the outcome won’t depend on the facts. If it did there would be a more concerted attempt to determine what they actually are.

Retreating to what I can say in the absence of clear rules or reliable facts, I was interested that in his interview linked above, Saakashvili did not argue on the basis of Georgian claims to South Ossetia. Instead he emphasised the attacks by Russia on targets outside of Ossetia, and claimed that Ossetia was just a pretext for a Russian attack on the rest of Georgia.

Here, at last, we really do have the Kosovo precedents coming into relevance. If TV stations in Belgrade were legitimate targets in the protection of Kosovan rebels, then what gives the oil pipeline at Poti its immunity?

Another point is the effect of time. If outsiders now want to argue that Ossetia should rightly be controlled by Tbilisi, it’s too late. They’ve been successfully calling for ceasefires for over a decade, and the outcome of any genuine negotiation is never likely to be that one side totally gives in. A ceasfire is always tempting, but sometimes it can mean giving up without noticing. Sometimes the best route to peace is to fight it out. I’m not saying that was or is the case in Georgia – that depends on those pesky facts again.

Just in case you’re wondering, the sort of things I would be interested in, if there were any way of reliably establishing them, would be:

  • Why are the South Ossetians more friendly to Russia than to Georgia?
  • Would there be a reasonable way to establish borders for South Ossetia?
  • Are there internal conflicts within Ossetia?
  • What problems does independent South Ossetia cause for the Georgia? Smuggling, organised crime, control of resources?
  • What is the economic situation in Ossetia?
  • What provoked the recent Georgian offensive against S.O.?
  • How does the situation affect other issues in the region?
  • What are Russia’s other interests in the region? – I believe there were claims that Chechen terrorists were using parts of Georgia as refuges..
  • All the same questions again with respect to Abkhazia.

South Ossetia

So, Russia has sent its army into Georgia.

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

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

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

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

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

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