The surprise winner of the Prospect/Foreign Policy global intellectuals poll is Fethullah Gülen, a US-based Turkish Sufi cleric with an international network of 5m followers, many hundreds of thousands of whom propelled him to a landslide victory (see the full results here).
Those who had a pop at Prospect for pandering to the forces of pseudo-democratic populism by running such a poll will feel vindicated by the result. After all, the fact that the Fethullahçi—the collective noun for Gülen’s followers—successfully mounted an orchestrated campaign for their man does away with any claim of objectivity made for the poll (not a claim we ever made, of course).
Yet on the other hand, as I describe in my piece that accompanies the results, perhaps we can see in Gülen’s victory the emergence of a new kind of public intellectual: one whose influence is expressed through a personal network, with the help of the internet, rather than more traditional institutions like journals or universities.
And Gülen himself has strong links to Turkey’s ruling AK party, which finds itself on the receiving end of an attempt to ban it by the country’s secular establishment. As David Goodhart describes in his editorial, this is probably the biggest political battle in Europe—and anything that draws our attention to it must be a good thing. (Ehsan Masood explores Gülen’s life and work here.)
If you have any questions about the poll, or the various voting campaigns that it spawned, post them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Is the west on the verge of a new cold war with Russia, as the Economist correspondent Edward Lucas suggests in his new book of the same title? Hardly, says Stephen Kotkin, a Russia specialist at Princeton University, writing in the new issue of Prospect.
Kotkin suggests we all calm down a little. Just as the chaos and impoverishment under Yeltsin’s rule in the 1990s hardly amounted to a liberal democracy, despite the wishful thinking of western analysts, the authoritarian tendencies at home and muscle-flexing abroad that characterised Putin’s reign do not make contemporary Russia an international menace that demands confrontation.
Kotkin also detects in new fears about Russia’s totalitarian turn traces of America’s long-established religiously inspired concern about the west “losing” Russia. For Americans, he writes, Russia has for over 100 years been seen as, in some way, America’s “dark double,” a colossal Eurasian riposte to the civilised, democratic values of the west.
Although it’s not officially affiliated with the government, this rather sweet site dedicated to the Republic of Kosova (30 days old today!) seems to me to represent an intriguing development in international politics—internet diplomacy.
Taking it upon themselves to speak for their nation, the site’s organizers are running a real-time list of gratitude dedicated to those countries that have recognized the Republic and those who have indicated their intention to do so—as well as some handy facts and figures. Did you know that countries that formally recognize Kosova make up 66.39 per cent of the World’s Total nominal GDP?
In an age when what people find out at the click of a mouse has an intimate long-term relationship with what they believe to be true, this web-based scrapbook of a fledgling nation is doing its bit for Kosova’s legitimacy, and represents a real-time record of the process that will make or break the Republic. It may not change the world, or melt cold Russian hearts. But the message at the top of the page really is rather endearing…
When Dmitri Medvedev was elected Russia’s new president on Sunday, the west issued a huge collective shrug. His victory was a foregone conclusion, given the endorsement of outgoing president (and incoming prime minister) Vladimir Putin, and most analysts assume that the new president will continue to take orders from his predecessor—that power will merely shift from the Kremlin to the White House (the Russian seat of government). Certainly, Medvedev’s victory speech, in which he vowed to continue Putin’s work, did nothing to dispel that view.
Yet there is an alternative, more optimistic take. In a new web exclusive for Prospect, Kiev-based academic Andreas Umland argues that there are reasons to believe that a Medvedev presidency could see Russia put the brakes on its slide towards authoritarianism. In 1989, before entering the political mainstream, Medvedev was associated with the electoral campaign of a pro-democracy activist agitating for a seat in the USSR parliament. And much more recently, a series of comments he has given in speeches and interviews suggest a man far more comfortable with the language and ideas of liberal democracy than his predecessor.
Umland acknowledges that before putting any kind of reformist programme into action, Medvedev will need to consolidate his hold over the presidency and ensure that he is able to exercise the constitutional powers vested in him after his election victory. But if he is able to prove equal to this task, we may one day see the March 2008 election as the point at which Russia elected its second Gorbachev.
Also this week: as Peter Hall’s production of Uncle Vanya begins its national tour, Lesley Chamberlain asks what Chekhov would have made of modern Russia.
Look out later for Alex Renton’s first-person reportage from Gaza.
While the FA’s attempt to, er, internationalise English football may not have gone down well in every corner, the Champions League, whose knockout stage starts tonight, shows that football can help create a “public space” across national borders. So argues Uefa’s Jonathan Hill in a web exclusive for Prospect.
Also new on the site today is international law and Yugoslavia expert Ana Stanic’s take on the Kosovan declaration of independence. There was no other realistic option than independence, says Stanic, and while Russia and Serbia have no choice but to deal with the new dispensation, there’s certainly a lot they can do to make life difficult both for Kosovo and the EU and Nato missions.
Finally, Cuba-watchers following today’s surprise announcement by Fidel Castro may like to revisit this piece from our June 2007 issue, in which Bella Thomas returns to Cuba after several years to find that despite Fidel apparently on the verge of death, very little seems to have changed on the island.
Yesterday’s unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo marks the end of the legal limbo the province has found itself in since 1999, when the UN took over its administration following the Nato attack on Yugoslavia. But the focus on Kosovo’s political status has tended to mask the deep economic and social challenges faced by what is now Europe’s newest country, argues Dominik Zaum in a web exclusive for Prospect.
Also today, see Moni Mohsin on the Pakistani elections. She argues that with no saviour waiting in the wings, the most we can expect is that the party leaders will do their best to atone for past crimes by respecting the results and behaving themselves in opposition.
We’ll have another batch of web exclusives later this week.
It is a little known sidebar to the Kosovo conflict of the late 1990s that a temporary car park in Islington Green was briefly annexed by the KLA. At the time I had offices across the road, above Regulation, a retailer of torturing equipment for S&M gays—but hey, this was north London.
I used to park my Mafia staff car—a stately black Mercedes—on a weekly, cash-only account of varying amounts. My new friends the Kosovan refugees rewarded me—for my custom, for having a cool car, shaved head and for bothering to talk to them at all—with a gaudy red and yellow keyring emblazoned with a black eagle and the initials UÇK. The car park chieftain, proud (nay, amazed) to be free to walk the streets of London, emotionally made me an honorary member of their brotherhood and invited me to invest in a scheme he was developing involving renting rooms in Soho to provide work for pretty girls. I politely declined.
I did a bit of publishing business with Russia at the time. Checking into Pulkovo Airport after an enervating couple of days in St Petersburg I was vividly made aware of the significance of my kitsch gift. Passing through the metal detectors I was marched to a side room and interrogated as to my connections with the Kosovo Liberation Army, darlings of Islington and the rest of the free world, symbols of a tortured and oppressed majority, but not so well thought of in the Slav-inclined CIS. A desperate mobile call to a friend—a crime writer, PEN activist and former Amon special forces operative—and all the roubles I had left got me on the plane home. The kleptocratic Russian customs folk contemptuously returned the keyring—it’s somewhere round the house to this day.
So welcome to independence, Kosovo. I can’t imagine the Russian view has changed that much. For this particular westerner, ill-informed involvement with the KLA yielded a couple of hours of tension and a dinner party anecdote. I fear the west may pay a bigger price for backing the lesser of two evils back in those terrible days of Balkan conflict. Still, how were we to know those sad-eyed Albanians in their black leather jackets would turn out to be genocidally jihadist neo-Nazis? We were too busy helping them usurp the genocidal Serbian neo-Nazi Christians (in their black leather jackets).
Barack Obama has been taking foreign policy advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. At first glance, this may seem an odd choice for the anti-war presidential candidate—after all, back then Brzezinski was known as the hawk’s hawk, supporting plans to arm the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviet invaders in 1979-80 and urging President Carter to take decisive action to protect the Shah in Iran when his position came under threat.
But almost 30 years later, Brzezinski has become one of President Bush’s harshest foreign policy critics, speaking out particularly forcefully against the war in Iraq. In the new issue of Prospect, he talks to Jonathan Power about American foreign policy, the urgency of ensuring a swift exit from Iraq, and why it is that the US always seems to get it wrong with Iran.
Our website also features a second Power interview, with Georgi Arbatov, who in the 1980s became known in the west as one of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy mouthpieces. Power describes the background to the two interviews here.
Was Gordon foolish not to sign the EU treaty along with the other heads of state, as almost everyone seems to think? I’m not so sure. When British people are pressed to think through what they want out of Europe, a sensible majority grudgingly accept the benefits of the single market and the need to pool sovereignty on some things - but what the British have always been allergic to is the supranational aspects of EU symbolism, precisely those things on display in Lisbon today. So for Gordon to distance himself from the pomp and ceremony while still signing up to what is valuable about the EU may be populist, but it is not completely unreasonable.
In any case, it turns out that the whole premise of the treaty was false. The EU is not suffering from gridlock as a result of enlargement, as many predicted; indeed, if anything, it is working better now with 27 members than it did when it had 15. This is not what either Eurosceptics or Europhiles want to hear; the former never accept the EU might be working well, and the latter are wedded to the logic of “gridlock” as a justification for the latest round of institutional reform. That is why a remarkable report by Helen Wallace, the noted pro-EU academic at the LSE, got so little publicity earlier this week. Wallace points out that of the EU decisions that are subject to complex co-decision rules, the number that went through on the first go actually rose from 34 per cent in 2003 to 64 per cent in 2005 (easing to 59 per cent in 2006), after the first wave of enlargement. Moreover, about 90 per cent of EU decisions continue to be made by consensus and the number of pending cases at the European court of justice is falling. Even the arrival of Romania and Bulgaria is failing to screw things up.
The election of Abdullah Gül as Turkey’s president is the latest chapter in the increasingly tense cold war between the country’s ruling AK party—often eccentrically described in the western press as “mildly Islamist”—and the army, guardians of Turkey’s secular, “Kemalist” constitution. The story is well rehearsed, but to recap briefly—earlier this year, the AK party put forward Gül, then foreign minister, as its candidate for president. The army, concerned by Gül’s Islamist past and particularly by the fact that his wife wears the hijab, let its displeasure be known and even hinted that it might intervene militarily, as it has done in the past, to preserve Turkey’s secular status.
After a constitutional court had annulled the first parliamentary vote on the presidency on a technicality, Turkey’s prime minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, called a general election for late July, which the AK party went on to win by a landslide. With its strengthened mandate, the AK party again nominated Gül for the presidency, and this time he won handsomely.
The AK vs army story has meant that in recent months the running sore, for Turkey, of its Kurdish minority has largely been ignored in the western press, but as Christopher de Bellaigue reports in the new issue of Prospect, the AK party’s national election success extended to the Kurdish areas, largely at the expense of Kurdish nationalists. AK’s success over the last few months demonstrates not only the threat the party poses to the Turkish secular establishment, but also to the Kurdish nationalists’ claim to be the sole representatives of Turkey’s Kurds.
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