In his editorial marking the triumph of Fethullah Gülen in our global intellectuals poll a month ago, David Goodhart described the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to get the country’s ruling AK party banned as “the most important conflict in Europe.”
Well, the conflict is over and AK has survived. Yet the party’s—and Turkey’s—troubles are far from over, says Nicholas Birch in a web exclusive for Prospect. The old coercive system, which has led to modern Turkey’s history of parties being banned and military coups, may be over, but it is not at all clear what will replace it.
Also this week: Lesley Chamberlain marks the death of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. His accounts of life in the gulag killed off any lingering affection for the Soviet system among European leftists, says Chamberlain, but his own relationship with the motherland was complex and nuanced.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, under the weight of multiple police investigations, announced last week that he would not be competing in the upcoming September 17 primary of his Kadima party and would yield the premiership to the next party leader—as I suggested he would in my Prospect article on Marwan Barghouti. Who will replace him? Olmert has made it painfully clear that his own preference is transport minister and former military chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, rather than the other main contender, foreign secretary Tzipi Livni.
This has more to do with geo- than with personal politics. Livni has long been outspoken about Olmert’s tribulations, publicly speaking out against his scandals and calling on him to resign, while Mofaz has been more the loyalist. Yet were Livni to win, it’s likely that the peace talks with the Palestinians would continue more or less along the lines that Olmert has laid out, with Kadima falling in line with the left-of-centre Labor party leader and current defence minister, Ehud Barak. The centre-right Mofaz, on the other hand, could be expected to adopt blocking tactics, aligning with right-wing parties like Likud and even the ultra-right Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel B’teynu party—which has called for Israel to hold on to West Bank territories and even for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens living inside Israel’s 1967 borders.
If Mofaz does win the Kadima primary, it is also possible that the current government will simply fall and the country will go to new elections. If the polls are to be believed, hardliner Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu would become Israel’s next prime minister—which would certainly not auger a continuation of the Olmert peace initiatives. So will Olmert’s legacy be to scuttle his peace efforts—which he has promised to maintain during his last days as prime minister—in order to gain vengeance against Livni and others who have called for his downfall? Stay tuned.
The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years—two secretaries of state, a national security adviser, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time Warner, congressmen and women, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and on, and perhaps later this year it will be capped by the election of a black president. What a difference from the 1960s, when only sport, the arts and preaching were open to ambitious blacks. Even in the 1970s, as I long ago documented in Encounter magazine, middle-class professional blacks were beginning to roar ahead in sizable numbers, closing the gap with their white peers. Thank you Martin Luther King.
But like America’s infrastructure, neglect has meant that the cracks beneath are once again coming to the surface. Not, as in the past, in the form of civil rights agitation or riots, but in the shearing of family ties, educational failure and the appalling state of health and morbidity among American blacks. The “benign neglect” of Patrick Moynihan, social affairs adviser to President Nixon, has moved to malign neglect. Not that recent presidents have ignored the issue, but their various plans pale before the ambitions of Lyndon Johnson’s far-sighted “war on poverty,” which was sabotaged by the Vietnam war. Another such war is now needed.
The basic statistics have been thrown into relief by a new report, “The Measure of America,” published by the American Human Development Report, which is modelled on the UN annual report of the same name. The UN report was the brainchild of the late Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, and based on the work of the Indian Nobel economics laureate Amartya Sen.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: measuring American development’
Edward Luttwak’s last cover story for us, a provocative essay arguing that the middle east was of small and declining strategic significance, proved so irritating to so many that it remains one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published, to judge by our website traffic. (It’s also being turned into a book. The film rights may still be available.)
Now Luttwak is back with another dose of far-out contrarianism: George W Bush’s presidency, he argues, far from being the foreign-policy catastrophe almost everyone, left and right, takes it to be, has actually been a stunning success. With the admittedly rather glaring exception of Iraq, Bush’s aggressive foreign policy has successfully rolled back the global tide of jihadism and brought recalcitrant governments in the Muslim world on side. “You’re either with us or against us”—the Bushism most commonly invoked to stand for what is supposed to be the president’s dunderheaded black-and-white view of the world was and remains, says Luttwak, exactly the right slogan and the right attitude.
Please vent your spleen below.
Mugabe stole the Zimbabwean election with violence and intimidation. But Morgan Tsvangirai unwittingly helped him. How did this hitherto brave leader lose his bearings so badly, and what will the consequences be—both for Zimbabwe, whose warring factions are now in fragile talks, and for the MDC, which is also riven with deep faultlines? Stephen Chan, who reported from inside Zimbabwe between the first presidential poll and the run-offs, looks ahead.
There is, it seems, a yawning chasm between what US voters think their presidential candidates know about the world, and what they actually know.
In a July poll asking which candidate had better knowledge of world affairs, McCain came out with a 63-26 advantage.
This is in spite of the fact that Obama one of the few senators to vote against the Iraq war, on the basis that it would spark a long and bloody Shia-Sunni struggle, and now proposes a troop withdrawal timetable which the Iraqi government is in complete agreement with (neither of which his opponent can claim). Obama also took the initiative on Zimbabwe over a year ago: in June 2007, he sponsored a senate resolution condemning Mugabe’s disregard for democratic processes and calling for action to prevent further violence before the election.
Meanwhile, McCain has consistently failed to show he knows the difference between Shias and a Sunnis, still thinks there is a country called Czechoslovakia, and is worried about problems on the “Iraq/Pakistan border.” (No such border exists.) One wonders if wilful ignorance is the only criteria needed for a “strong foreign policy rating.”
The 10,000 crowd at the Fez festival of world sacred music were ecstatic—some literally so—when Mohamed Abdou (left) took centre stage on 15th June. The Saudi Sinatra is virtually unknown in the west, but in the middle east he is a multimillion-selling superstar. Backed by the magnificent syncopated strings of Abderarahim Mountassir, with a full mixed choir and desert percussion, the white-robed crooner rocked the casbah, or, more accurately, the magnificent gates of Bab Makina, surely one of the world’s most exotic venues, with a selection of hits old and new. His repertoire deals poetically with the poetry of the desert, sand, night and palms, but mostly Allah.
Non-believers were thin on the ground, perhaps because the event was unhelpfully billed as “Monotonous Chants of Heijaz,” but Prospect contributor and world music expert Joe Boyd and myself were converted. File under “you had to be there,” but George W needs to know that Islam has some of the best tunes.
What kind of man is Robert Mugabe? How did the internationally feted liberation hero of the 1970s turn into the blood-soaked tyrant of today? Heidi Holland, who knew Mugabe when they were both anti-Ian Smith activists in the 1970s, attempts to answer these questions in Dinner with Mugabe, her new “psychobiography” of the Zimbabwean president. Tom de Castella reviews the book for Prospect here. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe-watchers will not want to miss Stephen Chan’s dispatches from Harare for Prospect online, to my—entirely unbiased—mind the most in-depth and informed coverage of the Zimbabwe election crisis to be found in western media.
Also this week: Derek Brower explains how oil subsidies in the developing world are keeping the price of oil sky-high—and how they are playing havoc with the assumptions of market economists.
His identical twin brother may have been ousted as prime minister last year, but President Lech Kaczynski of Poland is doing a good job of maintaining the family tradition of intransigence in foreign policy. Just as the dust was beginning to settle following the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon treaty, the Polish president—never known for his Europhilia—has said that he will refuse to sign the treaty. Now other wavering countries, including the Czech Republic, may find it tempting to postpone ratification.
This all adds up to a big headache for France, which takes over the presidency of the European Union today. Before the Irish vote, Nicolas Sarkozy had looked forward to the opportunity of hosting a grand ceremony in Paris at which the Lisbon treaty would come into force and the EU would move on from its current tiresome phase of navel-gazing. Yet in an interview to mark the beginning of the French presidency, Sarkozy suggested that he understands that there is a difficulty with the EU’s attitude towards the democratic rights of its citizens, and that many people are beginning to wonder if the union is better equipped to “protect” them than member states. Sarkozy plans to travel to Dublin next week to meet Irish voters and listen to their concerns over Lisbon and the direction of the union.
Whether or not the Irish referendum was lost on grounds that had little to do with the Lisbon treaty, as many argue, the union cannot continue to reform and develop without the support of its citizens. Any ratification procedure that seems directly to go against the will of voters will lead to the continuing distancing of the European Union from ordinary people, and this is not sustainable in the long run, particularly if the union is going to expand to take in the Balkan countries and particularly Turkey. So while it is perhaps understandable that European politicians would express frustration that a few hundred thousand voters in Ireland can hold up what is seen as a necessary streamlining process, perhaps they should be looking a bit further ahead and thanking the Irish for drawing everyone’s attention to something that is long overdue. Sarkozy, to his credit, seems to have realised this—amd perhaps he has found a mission for the French presidency—making us fall in love with the EU again—that will turn out to be even more glorious than the one he had envisaged.
Barack Obama’s ability to raise money from literally millions of supporters online has already, and justifiably, attained the status of legend: it’s the kind of watershed in campaigning that only comes along once in a generation. Despite all the coverage, however, I hadn’t quite realised how impressive his online edge over Hillary Clinton has been over the last twelve months until I typed both their names into google trends. The result, which portrays as a graph the number of times each of their names has been entered into google as a search term, can be seen here.
Then again, if all Hillary’s supporters could spell, we might have seen something rather different…
Obviously, the Democratic primary contest has hogged the bulk of the US news cycle. Still, google’s current Obama/McCain match-up must be of concern to Republicans: it shows a worse-than two-to-one deficit online. George Bush, meanwhile and predictably enough, trails both candidates. And don’t even ask about Gordon Brown, who as far as the internet is concerned has barely crept ahead of a certain predecessor even after a year in power.
Here’s a challenge, though. Can you think of another politican who might rival Obama in the google stakes; or is he truly the world’s most sought-after political figure? Come to think of it, is there someone else whom Obama-mania may be toppling from even His lofty perch?
Latest Comments
RSS