Archive for the 'In the news' Category

Prospect’s new issue - flirting with Stalin

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on August 27, 2008
in Europe, In the news and Inside Prospect
. 11 Comments

Our cover story this month is an uncompromising attack on Russia’s intelligentsia, the liberals and intellectuals who after 1991, argues Arkady Ostrovsky, were presented with a one-off opportunity to drag their country into the modern world. Instead, they got mired in irony and bad art, and were all too easily seduced by Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist vision of Russia’s future and his exploitation of public nostalgia for Soviet greatness. Communism is dead, and will not return. But the absence of a liberal voice in Russia means that the most powerful force in that country, as the Georgians have just discovered to their cost, is likely to remain old-fashioned belligerent nationalism.

Let us know what you think in the comment boxes below.

Power’s world: How not to deal with Russia

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on August 18, 2008
in Europe and In the news
. 3 Comments

That bar, the Red Star, on the far side of eastern Europe is closed. So why is the Black Star on this side still open, and even extending its drinking hours?

Once the Warsaw pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping Nato going. The threat it was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Let the EU take the strain, by trade, investment, diplomacy and political intimacy, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot, while America has led its quest for influence by application of the Bush doctrine of “preventive war.”

As Mark Leonard wrote in Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, his clever little book of three years ago, “the contrast between the two doctrines is stark. The Bush doctrine attempts to justify action to remove a ‘threat’ before it has a chance of being employed against the US. It is consequently focused very closely on physical assets and capabilities, necessarily swift in execution and therefore short term in conception, and unavoidably entirely military in kind. The European doctrine of pre-emption, in contrast, is predicated on long-term involvement, with the military just one strand of activity, along with pre-emptive economic and legal intervention, and is aimed at building the political and institutional basis of stability, rather than simply removing the immediate source of threat.” This is why Nato is no longer needed in Europe.

Continue reading ‘Power’s world: How not to deal with Russia’

Policy Exchange and Cameron

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on August 13, 2008
in British politics and In the news
. 0 Comments

What’s happened to Policy Exchange? The centre-right think tank that was expected to fulfil the IPPR role of Number 10 in-house tank once the Tories swooped to victory at the next general election has not only lost its director, the controversial Anthony Browne, to Boris at City Hall, it has now produced an eccentric report on the future of northern cities that David Cameron, with one eye on those Labour heartlands, has described as “insane.” PX, as it is known to fans, was under Browne’s watch often accused of being too close to the Cameron project, just as the IPPR was in the early days of New Labour. It’s not clear who’s running Policy Exchange at the moment—Browne’s departure was announced almost a month ago but the organisation does not yet appear to have found a successor—but might this indicate a decision on the think tank’s part to reassert independence as the Tories move closer to government?

Power’s world: against self-determination

Published
by
Jonathan Power
on August 11, 2008
in Europe and In the news
. 1 Comment

Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi peninsula. There are disputes over all of these territories but only one, the last—over a sizeable oil-rich wedge of land between Nigeria and Cameroon—has been taken to the International Court of Justice (World Court) for adjudication. Why not the others? There is no good reason. In the latest situation, we see hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian.

Six years ago, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, confronted with growing tensions with Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsula, which had long been ruled by Nigeria, decided to resist the advice of his minister of defence—who was pushing for a military solution—and to turn the dispute over to the World Court. Newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo and public opinion was nationalistic, but the president held his course even when, in 2006, the court ruled in Cameron’s favour. Bakassi is now being turned over to Cameroon.

Unlike South Ossetia, there was something important to fight over in Bakassi—large quantities of oil—but Nigeria nonetheless swallowed its pride. This does sometimes happen, though not as often as it should.

Continue reading ‘Power’s world: against self-determination’

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on August 5, 2008
in Europe, In the news and Inside Prospect
. 3 Comments

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.

The tragedy of Tsvangirai

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on July 30, 2008
in Africa, Foreign affairs and In the news
. 6 Comments

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.

Sarkozy’s mission of love

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 1, 2008
in Europe and In the news
. 0 Comments

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.

Prospect’s new issue—a victory for the surfing Sufis

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 26, 2008
in Europe, In the news and Inside Prospect
. 10 Comments

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.

Luttwak, Obama, apostasy and New York Times self-hatred

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 5, 2008
in In the news, Media and United States
. 1 Comment

For many, the most exciting thing about Barack Obama’s victory in the Democratic race is the prospect of a US president who will take concrete steps to improve America’s tarnished reputation in the rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world. Andrew Sullivan indulged the thought last year in his hymn of praise to Obama in the Atlantic: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”

Not so fast, said Prospect author and professional contrarian Edward Luttwak. Writing in the New York Times, Luttwak suggested that Obama’s chances of healing relations with the world’s Muslims would be crippled by his own personal history. Obama’s father was, famously, a Muslim, but renounced his faith, and Obama is a practising Christian, as we know from the Jeremiah Wright controversy. According to Muslim law, wrote Luttwak, Obama’s birth to a Muslim father, even one who had left the faith, made him an apostate. And apostasy in the eyes of Islamic clerics is the worst of crimes. The usual sentence is execution, and Islamic law states that any Muslim who kills an apostate shall be spared punishment. At the very least, said Luttwak, this would make security for the president on trips to Muslim countries even more of a headache.

Luttwak likes to ruffle feathers, and usually gets a response—his article “The middle of nowhere,” published a year ago in Prospect, which argued that the world would do best to ignore the increasingly irrelevant middle east, remains, I think, the most-read piece on our website. (The book of the same name is being published later this year.)

And Luttwak certainly got a response this time. Such a fierce one, in fact, that the NY Times conducted its own inquiry into Luttwak’s thesis, interviewing five Islamic scholars, and found, more or less, that Luttwak was talking complete bunkum. In a fine contribution to what is steadily becoming a grand tradition of self-flagellation at the Grey Lady, the newspaper’s public editor wrote: “Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture… With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view.

On the probability of not dying

Published
by
William Davies
on May 29, 2008
in British politics, Economics, Health and medicine and In the news
. 1 Comment

If in doubt, the Old Left would nationalise or regulate. If in doubt the New Right would privatise or deregulate. And if in doubt, the soupy left-right blend that now unites us has its own default option: quantify and publish.

Today The Guardian reports that the government is preparing to publish the death rates of patients undergoing major surgery at NHS hospitals in England. Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty with a promise to publish New York-style ‘crime maps’, detailing the areas of London that suffer from the worst crime.

The practice of tabulating and comparing ‘outputs’ has been growing in policy for a number of years now. The production of rankings is always the highlight of the World Economic Forum’s World Competitiveness Report, in which nations around the world are placed on a chart from the most competitive to the least. And New Labour has been infamous for its league tables, especially in education. The hope in such cases has been to create incentives to alter managerial strategy or try harder. Revealing a country to be the 35th most competitive in the world is meant to be a wake-up call for them to do better (unless it’s France), as well as to give businesses an indication of where not to invest.

This policy trick is now being performed for the benefit of individual citizens, thanks to two developments. Continue reading ‘On the probability of not dying’