Blogoir (blŏg·wαr)sb. 1. A digital hybrid of blog and memoir presented on a daily basis, or not. 2.fig. A quixotic attempt to make sense of the senseless; a spark of hope. 3.v. To narrate in a not necessarily coherent way one’s life and views. Also attrib. 3. Behold yon ambassador, once indeed thus ample and conceited yet now so meagre, wan with care – methinks he doth b. too long Hen IV Pt III
In those two cases (but for very different reasons) the Centre had became the problem and duly crashed, whereas in the case of the Eurozone the majority of EU states are struggling to hold the Centre (ie Eurozone) together, even at stunning cost.
This one even has added Literature:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
You know the sinking feeling when you hear some precious moments of music from Mozart or Shostakovich used to support a TV ad or, horror of horrors, served up in a lift as "background music". Beauty has been melted down, turned into a trinket of cliché.
This has happened to the famous poem The Second Coming by W B Yeats. So vivid is the imagery and somehow so suited to our dismal times, his great lines pop up all over the place and start to sound trite.
But you have to applaud Mr Yeats’s prescience in sharing with us his poetic yet trenchant thoughts on the eurozone, and in particular the idea that “the centre cannot hold". Indeed, some people are now wondering whether the eurozone will go the same way as the Soviet Union or even the former Yugoslavia, and abruptly disintegrate...
... The problem is that keeping the Centre going also incurs unfathomable costs. EU capitals squabble furiously as they try to distribute these costs away from themselves and on to all the others. The world's markets observe this unseemly spectacle and conclude that they might be wise to call for higher interest rates to park their money in such a neurotic economic space.
No one can tell how this drama will play itself out. It's all very well the eurozone's leaders demanding that the EU Centre be held at almost any cost. Those costs are being dumped on European taxpayers who, sooner or later, are likely to insist that enough is enough. Then what?
It's in Polish. But the opening passage caught my beady eye.
In it Mr Szczerski notes the sharp tone of criticism directed in that speech towards the UK and claims that Mr Sikorski has confirmed that I "as a private Labour Party supporter" had been a collaborator on the speech.
My latest book review for LSE books was sent in the other day. A review of a compilation of blog writings by successful ex-blogger and junior Minister (under Labour) Tom Harris MP.
Here's the review. I was none too charitable, alas. The whole thing looked like a rather poor rushed job and just did not hang together in any sensible way.
I sometimes muse about publishing in book form some of my own blog writings. But it's not easy to make this work well, as the blog and book genres are quite different:
Nevertheless, these are blog pieces made public as events happened, not brutal senior private diary entries revealed to an amazed world several years later. As Tom Harris puts it in the Introduction,”the blog became an exercise in self-restraint and discipline in how to write in an interesting and even loyal away about politics … What you want is gossip”.
Which is mainly what we get. Tom Harris’ rich but inchoate views on Doctor Who, Genesis and X-Factor are shared with folksy observations on the Westminster world as seen by a busy junior Minister and diligent MP. The book is organised not by date but by themes, which themselves cast light on Tom Harris’ tabloidly parochial instincts: “How do you solve a problem like Gordon?”; “Government: better than the alternative”;“In defence of politics”;“Telly”; and so on. If the European Union was mentioned in any serious way, I certainly missed it.
There may be no better way of presenting such previously blogged material, but the themes scarcely hang together. Effective political blogging delivers what the writer hopes are insightful thoughts on the emerging issues of the day, if not the hour. Detached from the flow of events, individual pieces lose impact and context.
Anyway, no sooner had the review gone up than Tom Harris' vivid political career hit another iceberg. He was forced to step down today from his position as Labour's 'Social Media Tsar' (sic) after producing what was actually (as such things go) quite a good Downfall spoof on Alex Salmond. Which you can see here:
The squawks of synthetic indignation from the SNP might have led a Labour Party with backbone to start producing new Salmond Downfall spoofs every week for the next few years. But no. They caved. It was 'offensive'. And Tom Harris resigned.
Of course the really idiotic thing about all this is that Labour thinks it needs a 'Social Media Tsar' at all. The whole point, Labour, of social media is that it is a spontaneous crowd-sourcing Towers of Babel chaotic phenomenon in which order emerges as it does. It's utterly unsuited to any sort of political busy-body Tsardom. See?
My review led to a funny Twitter-spat out there in the social media cyberspace between me and one @RetiringViolet who may or may not be Violet but is certainly not Retiring in her efforts to portray Mr Harris as someone capable of the profound thought so firmly absent in the book I reviewed:
@CharlesCrawford@TomHarrisMP The last sentence in your review implies u think he had had no profound thought to offer in his blog/remarks
And plenty more of the same. It passed the time on the train as I came back from London after my lunch there was cancelled.
Well. When you review books, you need to call 'em as you see 'em. Otherwise what's the point? I look forward to reviewing in due course Mr Harris' major definitive tome on Political Philosophy. He has time on his hands now to write it.
Part of the problem facing the Eurozoners as they struggle to convince global markets that all is under control so DON'T PANIC is identifying what exactly is the issue which needs solving. After all, they might make a bad situation worse by misdiagnosing what needs to be done.
Views on this differ. In the interests of fair play, here is a studious article (pdf) by C Fred Bergsten and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard which argues that the Eurozone is heading for the right outcome (ie 'comprehensive economic and monetary union') by the crafty ploy of (in effect) eliminating all the wrong ones:
It is imperative to understand that it is not the primary purpose of the ECB, as a political actor, to end market anxieties and thus the euro area crisis as soon as possible. It is instead focused on achieving its priority goals of getting government leaders to fundamentally reform the euro area institutions and structurally overhaul many euro area economies.
Frankfurt cannot directly compel democratically elected European leaders to comply with its wishes but it can refuse to implement a “crisis bazooka” and thereby permit the euro area crisis to continue to put pressure on them to act. A famous American politician has said that “no crisis should be wasted” and the ECB is implementing such a strategy resolutely.
The authors point out that because there is no willingness to allow centralised EU-wide taxation, other arrangements are needed and are edging towards being created, albeit by different EU leaders playing dangerous games of bluff to help get the best deal for their corner:
The reality in the euro area is that, for the foreseeable future and unlike in the United States, the overwhelming majority of government taxation and spending will continue to reside at the member state level for reasons of political legitimacy. Only a minor part will be pooled at the supra-national level. Restricting this spending via a new fiscal compact is consequently the only pragmatic route for now, leaving other aspects of euro area fiscal integration to the future...
The Eurozoners are having to look to the IMF for huge support. But that's OK:
Euro area governments will have successfully shifted part of the costs of any future financial rescues onto the rest of the world. The rest of the world will of course extract a suitable price from the euro area for this service in the form of European political concessions in other policy areas. This could, for instance, be a good time to demand that the euro area consolidate its representation on the IMF board to a single seat and accelerate the transfer of its quota shares to the financially contributing emerging markets...
Basically, their argument goes, they'll have to do what it takes to keep the Eurozone afloat as all the alternatives are far worse. And the record so far shows that despite all the uncertainty and some poor decisions along the way, the trend is in that direction.
Read the piece as a whole. If you are a non-expert, it makes an impressive case.
So far so optimistic.
Then there's John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline, whose wonderful economics newsletters are free. Here are some of his latest observations:
For most of the past two years, European leaders have tried to deal with the problems as though they were short-term liquidity problems: "If we just find the money to buy some more Greek bonds, then Greece can figure out how to solve its problems and then pay us back. Given enough time, the problem can get solved."
They have now arrived at the understanding that it this not a short-term problem. Rather, it's a solvency problem of the various governments, which of course creates a solvency problem for their banks. They are now addressing the problem of solvency and providing capital until such time as certain countries can get their budgets under control and the bond market sees fit to provide the capital they need.
But they are completely ignoring the third and largest problem, and that is massive trade imbalances. Germany exports products to the peripheral European countries, which run trade deficits. As I have shown in several letters, a country cannot reduce private-sector leverage, reduce public-sector leverage and deficits (balance its budget), and run a trade deficit all at the same time. That is simple, unavoidable math, based on 400 years of accounting understanding. Ultimately, there must be a trade surplus if leverage and debt are to be reduced...
Greece cannot print its own money, so unless it leaves the Eurozone, it's stuck. They can default on their debt, but that means they are shut out of the bond market for some period of time. That would force them to make the spending cuts they are now resisting, as they would simply not have enough money to pay their bills.
Even with a 100% haircut they're looking at a shorter but very real depression. And because no one will sell them products they need, like energy and food and medicine, unless they can sell or trade something in return (that trade-deficit problem), they will be forced to change their lifestyles. Wages must drop or productivity rise to be competitive with northern Europe. And that differential is about 30%. I am not certain, as I have not been to Greece in a long time, but my bet is, you won't find many Greeks who think they are overpaid by 30%.
But that is what the market is going to say. And that is the third problem, which Europe is not addressing. Germany and the northern tier are simply more productive than the Southern periphery. (With the possible exception of Northern Italy, but Italy all gets lumped together, which is why many Northern Italians want to be their own country and not have to pay taxes that go to Southern Italy. I am not taking sides, just observing what we read in the papers.) Until Germany consumes more from the peripheral countries or the peripheral countries become more productive, the imbalance will not allow a positive solution...
Sign up to his work to get regular bracing top-ups.
So there it is. Two contrasting styles of beautiful writing, and two very different and clever/informed views on what is happening.
The two views of course may be compatible. A stronger and even coherent Eurozone may emerge from this fiasco - if some countries whose debts are simply unmanageable are paid off to leave it?
Of all the people in the world, you single out 50 Christian families in Beit Jala and expect those who hear you to recoil, cut to the heart by the horrors of that situation. You speak as if the world had no greater shadow to offer.
Thousands have died and are dying in neighbouring Syria, but that gets no mention from you. An entire population is repressed and religious minorities are persecuted in Iran and you say nothing. Muslims who convert to Christianity in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere are put to death, yet you are silent.
In Egypt, Coptic Christians are killed and persecuted and their churches are destroyed, yet you cannot find a sentence in which to condemn it. Christians are not allowed to possess Bibles or to worship or seek converts in Saudi Arabia, yet your voice is not raised.
Christians are murdered and their churches burned to the ground in Nigeria, but I do not hear your voice. Yet Muslims are free to worship, open schools, have their own courts, and missionize in every Western country, yet you do not point out the anomaly...
... In 1949, one year after Israel was founded, the country’s Christian population numbered 34,000 souls. That figure has grown by 345 percent. It is still growing. Between 1995 and 2007, Israeli Christians grew from 120,600 to 151,600, representing a growth rate of 25 percent. In fact, the Christian growth rate outpaced the Jewish growth in Israel in the same period.
It is not a coincidence that Christians thrive in the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East and diminish in all the Muslim states...
I liked this concluding passage which gets towards roughly what I think about the whole Arab/Israeli business, knowing so little professionally about it:
Your fifty families – if, indeed, there are fifty families – will, at worst, face a legal battle, knowing they will be vindicated if their claims are valid. Israel will not set their homes alight, nor gun them down, nor desecrate their churches nor violate their priests nor execute their converts. It will not do to them what the Muslims of Egypt have done in a long and systematic persecution. It will not do to them what the Taliban have done to Christians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will not intimidate or hector or torture or kill them. It’s time this was recognized, especially by a leading churchman like yourself.
There is indeed something baffling or creepy if not bizarre about the way seemingly normal people at Western dinner parties abruptly start to rave against Israel and ignore far worse and far bigger abuses up the road in Syria and other Arab/Muslim countries.
Read the whole thing, and then have a look round Denis' fine blog. He is not prolific, but his work hits heavy targets with unerring accuracy.
As you all know, I happen to be a fan of what the Blair government and MI6 did to help bring Gaddafi back towards what passes for the mainstream of civilisation in that part of the world, by helping negotiate the end of his elaborate MWD programmes in return for 'normalisation'.
But did MI6 go beyond some sort of unspoken and perhaps not obvious line by getting a bit too close to the Gaddafi regime thereafter? To the point of helping hand over to Libya some regime opponents, either suspecting that they might be mistreated back in Tripoli, or not bothering to think about that too much?
I have no idea. But a new wearying police investigation begins.
Something about all this is not quite right. Above all, I find it hard to imagine a pretty far-reaching step like that being taken without some sort of explicit political clearance. So when are the police going to start rummaging through the papers submitted to T Blair, J Straw and other Labour politicians leading or close to the policy at the time?
As readers know, assorted Crawfs went to a Turkish resort for a short holiday last year. The signs of feverish economic activity were there to be seen on the way from the airport - all sorts of buildings and other structures popping up in a madcap way.
Turkey is booming! Or is it?
I have not linked to the ever-gloomy Spengler for a while, but here he is with some unnerving graphs and accompanying analysis indicating that Turkey too has borrowed too much, too unwisely:
Erdogan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero.
"We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate."
Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto. In order words, Turkey provided nearly free money to bank customers. Erdogan's program set in motion a series of perverse effects. One is a sharp fall in the exchange rate...
... The result is a vicious cycle: excess credit creation weakens the currency, forcing the central bank to put up interest rates; higher interest rates push up the cost of debt service for Turkish borrowers; Turkish banks lend more money to their customers to finance the higher interest costs, so that credit keeps expanding and the currency keeps weakening.
Turkish banks continue to increase lending at a 40% annual rate, but most of the new lending will finance interest payments on the old loans. Fine. Then what?
.
So, the same old story. Political leaders believing they can defy reality and gravity, combining with banks keen to cash in. Result? A fast emerging mess.
The notable feature of the apparently looming Turkish mess - as Spengler points out - is that the booming 'Turkish model' (ie a dynamic, modernising economy with strong Muslim features) was hailed for a while as the best outcome of the Arab Spring tendency. What if that model flops too?
Spengler's view of what this means:
Now I predict that Turkey's economic crisis will undermine the stability of the Turkish state as well, leaving the Muslim world without a single enclave of stability from the Libyan-Algerian border to China's Xinjiang province...
Here at Commentator are my vivid thoughts on the way The Rules drive out common sense discretion in public services in general, and at Leeds Crown Court in particular:
Stop right there, Mr Ambassador! What would happen if the Embassy in Warsaw went out of its way at a senior level to help this one hapless citizen? That would set a precedent for the whole network -- word would get around that one person in Poland had had a lot of active support from the Embassy and the Ambassador personally, and everyone else would expect the same! Worse, it could even be a breach of their Human Rights if they did not get it!
... So there it is. After years if not decades of Citizen's Charters and all sorts of official Mission Statements, Objectives, Targets and goodness knows what other noisily proclaimed expensive initiatives intended to make public servants helpful and responsive to the public, this forlorn group of public servants were bent on driving a few taxpayers and citizens out into a howling rainstorm for no reason other than the fact that The Rules appeared to require it.
The point?
The standardisation of public service needed to deliver what, as far as possible, counts as equality of treatment for all can be achieved only by deliberately excluding competition and any serious incentives to improve services.
Those people at any level of public service finding a clear case for common sense and discretion which somehow goes against The Rules risk getting into trouble (or think they do).
And in such an uncompetitive, neurotic context The Rules breed like crazy, as we see in English education where the state's instructions to schools now run into hundreds of pages and have catastrophic results.
Outcomes deteriorate. Dumbed down stupidity and officiousness result. Confidence in the state erodes.
But as the Leeds episode shows, the public can fight back. When confronted with an obviously insane decision, politely insist that those concerned use their discretion or demand to see where The Rules say that no such discretion exists.
The officials concerned are visibly rattled by the thought that maybe, just maybe, The Rules in fact allow them to think.
Civil servants! If you have any examples of this working against good practice, just send them in. Key thing: do you think your hierarchy will support you if you do the smart thing, even if it goes against established procedure?
One of the themes of this website is how our institutions and beliefs of all shapes and sizes are struggling to cope with the way new technology creates complexity at ever-soaring rates.
In other words, the faster our machines the faster they can do things and generate information, which in turn allows us to see new patterns and connections and (therefore) try to have 'smarter' policies. Which doesn't work because our policies are too slow anyway, often out of date before they begin.
All of which, as we know, gives some advantages to small, fast, determined things who Keep things Simple (such as single-issue busybodies, terrorists, pirates, assorted Occupiers) over clunky big unwieldy things (such as the Eurozone, or even Democracy as currently constituted).
Here is a fabulous article by David Weinberger about what this means for science itself. Take a few minutes out from your busy day to read it and learn something:
The result of having access to all this data is a new science that is able to study not just "the characteristics of isolated parts of a cell or organism" (to quote Kitano) but properties that don't show up at the parts level. For example, one of the most remarkable characteristics of living organisms is that we're robust -- our bodies bounce back time and time again, until, of course, they don't.
Robustness is a property of a system, not of its individual elements, some of which may be nonrobust and, like ants protecting their queen, may "sacrifice themselves" so that the system overall can survive. In fact, life itself is a property of a system.
However, just as we realise that we can't work out what is happening at the most basic level of our own bodies, governments strain to micro-manage almost anything that moves. This way of running things is philosophically doomed to fail, and failing it is around the world.
Hayek was right. Capitalism and free markets are essentially information networks, and need to be treated respectfully as such. This in turn shows why the Eurozone is wobbling. Hundreds of millions of people are now able to examine its deepest practical and moral foundations and are finding them badly designed.
In short, the Eurozone system as a metaphor for the 'Western Social Model' is over-complex. But under-robust. It's science, see?.
We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called 'freedom of the press'.
But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as 'the press' have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?
Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?
I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.
The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.
This really matters.
Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.
Is there an elite - a 'mainstream media' - who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?
Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?
Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what 'freedome of the press' means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:
But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom ... of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters...
Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.
So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?
The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.
Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..
And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe - Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.
This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand 'legal deposit' institutions - there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters' work might be measured.
The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.
Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.
So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same - a true book about books:
A reader sent me this email message on New Year's Eve:
I just wanted to say how much I've enjoyed reading your sane and authoritative commentaries over the last year. "Spark of hope" indeed! More power to you!
What a kind thought. Sane. Authoritative. Hopeful. Powerful. Yup - that's this website!
Much appreciated.
I have looked at the numbers for readers here in 2011. According to one way of crunching them, I peaked in August with 11,500 unique visitors (ie people, not Google spiders) and hit a low in July (5200 visitors). Over the year as a whole 86,600 unique visitors swung by (some more than once, I suspect), giving 258,000 visits for the year looking at 700,000 pages.
That's just over 7000 unique visitors per month, which given the esoteric, eccentric, annoying and often rather specialist subject-matter of most posts here is OK by me.
It was again especially gratifying that some 30,000 visits lasted for 30 minutes to an hour, or even longer. Some of you really like rummaging around and spending time here. This in fact is why I decided to write a blog and not a book* about my life and times in diplomacy. With the blog I get more readers, and more interaction - a relationship.
My main problem is that I am spreading my declining intellectual jam a bit thinly these days. As well as keeping up some sort of flow of work here (latterly noticeably reduced, but there you are), I emit Tweets at @charlescrawford, write a monthly column for DIPLOMAT magazine, do book reviews for the LSE website and contribute assorted rants to The Commentator. In the last weeks of 2011 I was signed up as a Daily Telegraph blogger too. Not to forget a number of other articles for business and foreign policy websites.
That's a lot of material to create almost every day. And while I am mulling over what if anything to say next on one or other of these outlets, I have to try to earn a living by writing speeches or training or consulting or whatever comes along.
This site has not been any special money-spinner - more a money-loser in terms of the opportunity cost of generating all these words for free. The ads I added to the site this year bring in nothing much so far(!), but I have had a couple of approaches via the site for fee-paying work, including an invitation to give a keynote speech at an event in Romania later this year.
Anyway, many thanks to you all for your support and unobtrusive but wise thoughts. I hop into 2012 still nursing my gammy ankle which I twisted observing the Russian elections in early December. I'll try to be a bit more productive here this year, but don't count on my succeeding. If you don't fine me here I'll be over at one of the other places mentioned above. Or not.
Happy New Year to all
* A reader asks via Twitter - have I written enough words for a book?
Hmm - let's see.
It turns out that a normal book contains anything up to 120,000 words. If we take this one post as average, it has some 500 words. I have written 2400 posts here. Which makes something like 1,250,000 words roughly ten books. That's not counting over 30 DIPLOMAT articles at 1500 words each (three more books!). And all the other website pieces.
So that's something like 15 or more respectably long books. All written just for you. For free!
The wonders of the Internet. Maybe I should make a compendium and try to self-publish via Amazon or something. The perfect gift for next Christmas?
Here is a nicely turned interview with Polish writer Andrzej (Andrew) Stasiuk where he gives us some deliciously naughty thoughts about European nationalism and German hegemony:
Before Europe existed because it knew how to take risks, it went to sea to seek a fortune. Today it just accumulates and fears losses. I know nothing of nation states. I know nothing of states at all. For me language is of course primary. Poland survived partitions, occupations thanks to its language, thanks to the culture. Religion also played an important role in affirming the national consciousness. The Catholic Church replaced the budget, the army and taxes. Today, it is somewhat trying to do the same.
But what seems the most essential, is the feeling of uniqueness, of unity, which is worth sacrificing for. Otherwise, why not become German for convenience sake, Russian on a whim or Jewish to upset everybody? This 'Polishness' must also certainly be a sort of feeling of superiority. Don't you think so? Yes, a feeling of superiority. Unjustified, of course. But still.
Are you afraid that Germany will become a dangerous nation?
Yes, and that is very good because my country exists more when it is threatened. Without danger, without troubles, Poland is less alive and a little more inexistent. However, whenever nationalism comes knocking on the door, it feels better right away, it perks up and gets its strength back. So long live German nationalism. Which doesn't mean, does it, that we must not remain vigilant.
This is how 2011 and our civil liberties limp to an end. With a supposedly arty chair in a shop in Lewes being accused of falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act.
Look at what is going on here.
A woman designer of this tedious piece of furniture has decided to adorn it with naked women taken from old Playboy magazines. So much for the feminist argument that such images 'degrade' women - even trendy women designers like them, to the point of wanting male and female buttocks to crush down upon them!
But lo!, a 'member of the public' saw the chair in the shop window - and complained to the police!
Worse. The police did not tell the member of the public to get a life. They moved into action.
Think about that. You're walking along past the shops in earnest, self-important, middle-class little Lewes, and you see something you don't like. You are not content to shrug and put it all down to living in a free society. Nor is it enough to walk on and not buy the stupid chair. You don't want the possible embarrassment of going into the shop to argue with the shopkeeper. So you outsource all responsibility and urge ... the state to act.
Then the state acts. The police take this stupid request seriously enough to go along, no doubt keen on looking at the chair themselves. They rummage around in their modest brains and find something which covers the case (they think), namely the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.
No matter that the act is intended to cover (a) 'obscene' and (b) 'publications', neither of which obviously apply in this case. The shop was then 'politely' asked (by whom) to remove the chair from the shop window. Which, according to the Sun, was done. What would have happened if the shopkeeper had 'politely' refused, asking the police to get out of the shop and mind their own damn business?
Is this a stunning example of crass state oppression, nothing being too small or fatuous to avoid heavy-handed police intervention?
Or is it even worse, namely the state asserting to itself the right to lean upon anyone when someone claims to be 'offended' or insulted? Where exactly is free speech in that?
Or is it all these things plus jolly British seasonal eccentricity, and a chance for the bored policepersons of Lewes to get away from filling in forms and ogle a chair with boobs..?
2011 has exhausted its possibilities. Next year, please.
Here is my latest article at DIPLOMAT magazine on the ever-fascinating question of diplomatic and wider media technique in a confusing new world:
Once upon a time diplomats were rarely seen or heard in public. To do their vital work of privately communicating messages between national leaders they needed to be discreet, anonymous, detached, aloof, rarefied. In a word, invisible.
When I joined the Foreign Office in 1979 the rules on such things were clear and strict. UK-based diplomats would never appear in the British media: that was what Ministers were expected (and wanted) to do. Overseas it was slightly different. British diplomats had some discretion to respond to foreign media requests for interviews and statements, but when in doubt, they should check with the FCO News Department in London. No Foreign Minister wanted to have their breakfast ruined by opening the newspaper to find a sensational report of something unexpected or unwelcome proclaimed by an FCO official overseas.
Back then these limitations on diplomatic media appearances made sense: the media themselves were restricted. In Britain and elsewhere there were a tiny number of TV stations and relatively few newspapers. Official foreign policy pronouncements could – and should – be rationed accordingly to keep everything at a suitable level of sobriety.
This all changed. Along came new technology, CNN, the internet, Twitter and Facebook, a proliferation of TV channels available across the planet at any time of day or night, digital radio, blogging. A Tower of Babel. A tsunami of noisy words, comment, pseudo-analysis and even, now and again, some facts. The media are increasingly no longer something separate or ‘above’ the general public. The media are the general public.
Or the general public are the media...
With added free media presentation tips for getting messages out in this hubbub:
One basic lesson came through loud and clear when I trained new FCO diplomats. In a mock interview, one had to act the role of a British spokesman, the other an American spokesman. The young man tasked to pretend to be American was nervous. Yet when we played back the video, he was far more effective. In his nervousness he had said very little, but what he had said came across on the screen as conveying toughness and determination. By contrast his colleague who played the British spokesman had been relaxed and cheerful. Much too relaxed and cheerful: he came across as friendly but frivolous.
My heartfelt advice to any diplomat facing a TV or radio interview? Have only one or two (maximum three) points to get across. Sound positive and firm! Don’t feel obliged to answer the question: simply use the question as the springboard for conveying your core points, then stop.
Above all, keep it simple. The more you say – and above all the more you try to be clever – the more you open yourself up to a devastating jibe from the interviewer. Oh, and when the interview ends remember that the cameras may still be filming you until you’ve left the studio…
Even on Christmas Eve - or maybe especially on Christmas Eve - we need to be aware of those repellamt people who stroll around the Western chattering classes exploiting the historic privilege of democracy to make excuses for the inexcusable.
All the very best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all my loyal readers. Let's all look forward to a calm, stable and generally agreeable Eurozone in 2012.
Eurozone problem addict? It doesn't get better than top US economist Martin Feldstein, who has the great advantage of having said right from the start that the project as conceived was unworkable if not dangerous.
Here he is explaining in brisk terms what went wrong, before moving on to say what could and should happen next:
Single currencies require all the countries in the monetary union to have the same monetary policy and the same basic interest rate, with interest rates differing among borrowers only due to perceived differences in credit risk. A single currency also means a fixed exchange rate within the monetary union and the same exchange rate relative to all other currencies, even when individual countries in the monetary union would benefit from changes in relative values.
Economists explained that the euro would therefore lead to greater fluctuations in output and employment, a much slower adjustment to declines in aggregate demand, and persistent trade imbalances between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, all these negative outcomes have occurred in recent years.
Here is why: when a county has its own monetary policy, it can respond to a decline in demand by lowering interest rates to stimulate economic activity. But the ECB must make monetary policy based on the overall condition of all the countries in the monetary union.
This creates a situation in which interest rates are too high in those countries with rising unemployment and too low in those countries with rapidly rising wages. And because of the large size of the German economy relative to others in Europe, the ECB's monetary policy must give greater weight to conditions in Germany in its decisions than it gives to conditions in other countries...
Before the monetary union was put in place, large fiscal deficits generally led to higher interest rates or declining exchange rates. These market signals acted as an automatic warning for countries to reduce their borrowing. The monetary union eliminated those market signals and precluded the higher cost of funds that would otherwise have limited household borrowing. The result was that countries borrowed too much and banks loaned too much on overpriced housing...
One of the things I do on training courses aimed at telling people how to Write with Impact is to cite Shrek. Issues and Shrek are like onions. They have layers.
No piece of writing can address all the layers of any problem. The trick is to show awareness of other layers but focus on one or two of them to help the reader make sense of it all.
Likewise it is a good idea to take a single issue and use it to illustrate a wider point. Or to take a seemingly obscure but nonetheless interesting question and force it to the top of people's attention.
All these devices help achieve the basic rule of good (and therefore impactful) writing: if you want it to be read, make it readable.
One of the best examples from my own career came in early 2004, not long after I arrived in Warsaw from Belgrade. Poland was set to join the European Union. Colossal numbers of Poles were likely to start moving to and fro between Poland and the UK - we had decided to open our Labour market unconditionally, much to the utter disbelief of the Polish leadership.
Once those Poles started moving with the aim of getting richer faster, what would they get up to? I thought it worth analysing one possible source of income - illicit cigarettes.
I did this by spelling out in the simplest possible terms the economics for the average Pole of informal cigarette-selling, even within legal limits.
This telegram wittily called Smoking Ants - Coming Our Way? caused a minor sensation in the Cabinet Office. Officials scrambled round to change the rules to limit the numbers of cigarettes which people from the new EU member states could bring into the UK duty-free.
And, thanks to the miracles of Freedom of Information, I am pleased to share this telegram with you today. The FCO cheekily cut out a line or two on the grounds that UK relations with Poland might be adversely affected(!). But otherwise it's just as I drafted it. A nice example (if I say so myself) of drawing senior attention to an unexpected new problem by delivering work written in a bold way which no-one can avoid reading.
Diplomatic Folly Note: look out for the amusing reference to 'Trilateral' at the end. That was a footling attempt by Tony Blair to set up an inner UK/France/Germany driving force within the EU, which collapsed in no time at all in the face of the obvious objections (not least those emanating from one S Berlusconi).
Thus:
SUBJECT: EU ENLARGEMENT: SMOKING ANTS, COMING OUR WAY?
SUMMARY
1. Incentives for Poles to make a reasonable living in the UK's dodgy cigarette business. Policy contradictions.
DETAIL
2. As a non-smoking connoisseur of Balkan tobacco activities I recently met the local BAT team to talk about regional cigarette smuggling. Some striking conclusions.
The Big Picture
3. BAT have studied tens of thousands of discarded cigarette packets. They conclude that some 70 billion cigarettes are sold legally in Poland every year, with a further 20 billion smoked "illegally" (ie sold outside the official excise structure and smuggled into Poland).
4. A good proportion of this illegal trade is conducted by an army of "ants", individuals who carry small quantities of cigarettes into Poland from points East. But up to 50% of the illegal cigarette business is well organised, involving hundreds of truckloads of cigarettes each containing up to 10 million "sticks". [redacted]
5. The emergence of this lucrative illegal trade can be traced readily back to 2000, when Poland pushed up excise duties. Until then almost all the 90 billion cigarettes smoked in Poland each
year were passing through normal procedures. Smuggling soared with these new higher duties.
6. Sharp price/tax/excise differentials as between Russia, Poland and Western Europe are set to continue. Currently a pack of cigarettes which costs 50 cents in Russia sells for 1.30 dollars in Poland and up to 8 dollars in the UK. These ratios will change somewhat in the coming years as Poland raises the effective price of a pack towards EU levels, thereby giving serious new local incentives to regional smugglers (one good truckload can generate a profit of 1.5 million dollars). BAT expect some 50 billion cigarettes per year to be smuggled from Russia to Western Europe; this generates a 5 billion dollar profit - more than double BAT's own global annual pre-tax profit. Implications for UK of EU Accession
7. BAT point out that as things stand every Polish citizen is allowed to bring legally into the UK 200 cigarettes a trip. But after accession this figure jumps to 3200 cigarettes per trip. A pack of Dunhill can be bought in Poland for about £1 and be sold in a UK pub for up to £3.00. Each Pole entering the UK can hope to make a quick profit on the cigarettes of £250 per trip, not to mention extra money by importing a few bottles of cheap vodka. With a return coach fare of £50 and monthly unemployment benefit here of about £80, it is not difficult for a poor Pole to work out what to do. Better to get involved with UK officialdom by filling in UK benefit forms, or make easy money sitting on a bus?
COMMENT
8. The scale of the illicit cigarette business caused by price/tax differentials as between the UK and continental Europe is obvious and well known. It is part of a global compound interest drama: as rich countries get richer, the absolute wealth we generate gives ever-growing and vast incentives for honest people and gangsters alike to "play the margins". The cigarette price effects of EU enlargement is more of the same, albeit a great deal more of the same. But the upstream consequences of this illegality for the region are considerable.
9. Our Policy contains Contradictions. HMCE/HMT are looking at reducing the amounts of cigarettes which accession nationals can bring into the UK. Meanwhile we and our EU partners laboriously try to "train border guards and customs officials" on the EU's Eastern Borders. But only a couple of truckloads of cigarettes inject more resources into corrupting these official structures than we are injecting into reforming them. The corrupted structures then can be exploited not only by cigarette smugglers but also by human traffickers, global drug dealers and even terrorists - serious security questions here.
10. The cost of all this is not on a scale to destabilise the whole of Polish society as has happened in Serbia, to the point of the assassination of the Prime Minister. But it is a serious and systemic obstacle to reform. Scope for a new, hard look (Trilateral or in another smaller group first?) at what else might be done on the strategic level?
Despite my wretched ankle accident in Nizhny Novgorod, my interest in things Russian is reanimated.
Part of the fascination with Russia lies in the baffling issue of how in fact a society moves from rigid oppressive stupidity to something far more flexible, democratic and smart.
When the USSR broke up, no-one dealing with the issue in Russia or anywhere else was prepared for the collapse or had any intellectual framework for tackling it. The general idea was that Russia should become 'like the West', or at least 'as much like the West as was possible'.
Fine. But how? There were almost no people in Russia with any significant experience of life outside the Soviet system other than the KGB and assorted businessmen and diplomats. Where to start? What to build with?
Moreover, the whole centralised system had simply stopped. Bureaucrats had left their offices in Moscow and wandered away. Nothing was moving. Food was running low.
The Yeltsin reformers had some good ideas. They passed a simple law allowing anything to be traded, to get people doing things from energetic self-interest. This was a stunning move. Kiosks selling anything and everything appeared as from nowhere. Whereas in 1991 there was no private business in Moscow, by 1995 there was a plump Yellow Pages book listing new businesses. Russians' own creativity was unleashed after 70 years' misery.
Then came the famous Big Mac Attack, which gave Moscow regular fresh milk for the first time in seventy years.. And assorted privatisations, many of which ended up by being manipulated by clever chancers who saw the long-term potential. Leigh Turner (then Ist Sec Econ and now HM Ambassador to Kiev) wrote a stream of elegant reports to London about his adventures in buying a privatisation voucher for a share in a bread business, describing the process vividly as it affected average Russians picking their way through the paperwork.
Was this all pernicious Shock Therapy, as sundry Leftists complain? No. If anything there was insufficient Shock and no Therapy. Above all, Russia could not bring itself to haul mouldy old Lenin from his place of honour in Red Square and bury him far away somewhere. We did not press the issue, to help them make a psychological break with Communist terror. Why? I don't know.
All of which takes me back to my own visit to Red Square a few days ago. My British companion and I decided to go and check out Lenin.
There is a small fence defining a long walkway along the side of the Kremlin Wall to the tomb, recalling the days when there were long queues to pay homage to the villain. On the day we were there no-one was visiting. We nonetheless thought it impolite (and more importantly unwise) to step over the fence and go straight to the tomb. So we walked back to the end of the square dominated by a strange red brick building. At the corner was a gap, allowing us to enter the walkway.
However, a guard told us that we were not allowed to go through the gap. We had to walk round the building and start at the beginning of the walkway. "Why?" "That's the rule."
Rather than suffer this idiotic indignity, we went somewhere else.
OK, OK. Each country has its share of petty annoying restrictions and petty annoying people to enforce them. But in Russia it seems to go further than is possible to imagine. People are told to obey the rules. Flexibility and pragmatic adaption to new circumstances (here the fact that there was no queue) are unwelcome.
So how to change that set of profoundly entrenched instincts?
Luckily there is an answer now available for the first time ever. The Internet.
Chief among the inanities in his sights is something most tourists in Russia have encountered: the screaming security guard or elderly woman telling you that you cannot take pictures here, as if your photograph of that supermarket compromises Russian national security. Ternovskiy has used his blog to mobilise Russians to inform these guards and grannies that they are the ones in the wrong: by Russian law, photography is allowed almost everywhere.
“Despite the fact that there is no legal basis to ban photography in all the places it’s banned, people will still tell you it’s forbidden,” Ternovskiy says, pouring himself a cup of thyme tea as we sit in a Moscow café. “It’s like a Soviet phantom limb. Back then, every person felt himself to be in the thick of a nest of spies, there were enemies all around, everything was banned. Unfortunately, we still see this alive and well in the minds of many people today.”
And thus, bit by bit, inch by inch Russia frees its mind of communist stupidity. A long, painful haul. But at least now possible.
Things warming up a little in Russia as all sorts of people condemn serious vote-fixing in the elections last weekend.
A significant proportion of the noise against the election results comes from obnoxious groups who (a) never held any sort of honest election when they had the long years of opportunities to do so (Communists, weary old Gorby) or (b) would never hold honest elections were they to come into power (Zhirinovsky's 'Liberal Democrats'). So a Russian Spring this isn't. Yet.
That said, it takes a lot to mobilise Russia's urban youngsters to take a public stand against the Establishment, and this time quite a lot of them are doing so.
Note especially the use of social media (ie fast live crowd networking by mobile telephones, as taken to a high art by British rioters and other vanguard forces). The Kremlin has been smart to let this latest large demonstration pass without a vigorous and unpleasant clamp-down - so far.
To pass the time and take my mind off my bright blue foot, I have done a couple of quickies for the Telegraph Blog site where there has been a lot of energetic stuff about the EU Summit and all that.
We awoke this morning to various commentators and Twitteristas bewailing the fact that British intransigence has left the UK “isolated". This ridiculous assertion needs to be knocked on the head, once and for all.
If “isolated" means staying well clear of the clumsy and ultimately undemocratic eurozone project, that’s a damn good place to be. The measures needed to prop up the eurozone involve intrusive inspection of national financial affairs by Brussels and other changes (such as harmonising tax rates) which necessarily amount to surrendering national sovereignty to EU HQ. Without the protocol he demanded, David Cameron could not have stood up in the House of Commons and honourably told the British people that the UK would be spared that.
In fact, even with that protocol there would have been in serious risk of eurozone “mission creep" in legal terms had the Lisbon Trinity route been used. Not that that risk has gone away even with the proposed new treaty outside the existing Treaty structure, but it is arguably for now rather more manageable.
Now what?
The proposed new arrangements for the eurozone would have been good had they been introduced right from the start. It is not clear how far if at all they will satisfy the planet’s markets and investors now. The crisis is set to drag on.
More generally, the whole European integration ambition looks like a nervous tightrope walker wobbling more and more severely with each new step. The contortions needed to stay balanced are impressive but grotesque.
As the sheer scale of the new requirements expected in the new treaty become clear – intrusive Brussels inspection of national budgets, balanced budget constitutional provisions and so on – bits will start to fall off the bandwagon. Different local factions will demand some or other political price for conceding their support to these radical changes. Public opinion will be aroused, with demands for referenda here or there. And so on.
The best thing about writing for a national newspaper's website is the giddy delirium of the many comments one attracts, for and against. Many people seem unable to understand what one writes, or miss the self-indulgent witty touches completely, or assume that because I am an ex-Ambassador I a priori am a pompous Sir Humphrey type living on a vast pension blah blah blah.
Therefore you get stuff like this:
Charles Crawford - a breath of fresh air. I bet you don't get many invitations to opine on the BBC!
For the first time, I actually have to agree with much of Mr Crawford has to say. Perhaps he could offer his expertise of the break up of the former Soviet Union during his time in the FCO, for the government for Britain's withdrawal from the EUSSR?
Magisterial and wise as one would expect from a 'Sir Humphrey' enjoying his astronomically high pension at our expense...It's rather majestic when the British Establishment makes a 'fleet turn'; all those wonderful old ships of the line coming round. The trouble is that they need an awful lot of sea room and they already got much too close to a lee shore.
Whatever leads Crawford to the conclusion that an 'amicable separation' is on the books? Why wouldn't our former partners just screw us to the floor as much as they are able? What is the USP that would stop them, if they ever climb out of the mire where they are?
Thank you Charles for your explanation, especially posting the speech by Howe. Incredible how the same old arguments are being trotted out by the same old europhiles ignoring the twenty year interim where *nothing* turned out as predicted. And all the guff about influence--what influence? Although we have wasted a lot of treasure on the european experiment and the most worrisome aspect of our economic outlook is our closeness to the european economic (disaster) zone.
Dave has done more u-turns than a boy racer, so will have no problem with one on this matter. Has to be said, Chas is a definite Rolls Royce blogger. Maybe he could get a job as Foreign Secretary, if he was quickly ennobled.
Walked the dogs earlier - a bit cold but a nice day for it. Notably, no-one from Antwerp, Lower-Saxony, Tuscany or Valencia stopped me for a chat.Looks like the isolation has started to bite
You, sir, sound like a traitor and should be treated as such. I am thinking naked, tar, feathers, high street parade, but maybe this would infringe one or two paragraphs in the EU human rights chapter, or whatever. You display all the characteristics of an aparatchik who forgot that you are/were a servant of the people and in your generous loftiness are throwing some crumbles of your superior intellect to the benighted masses.
That last one hits it bang on the nose.
Anyway, my second one linked to this excellent Economist piece offering a detailed account of what the UK Prime Minister wanted and why he did not get it. Well worth a read if you want to look at some hard-core analysis and not a lot of heated knowledge-free opinion.
What does it all boil down to?
Not enough, if the main aim is to stop the Eurozone failing horribly as the planet's investors think we've all gone mad and draw their money out of the system.
But maybe just enough (for now) if you want to get re-elected as President of France?
Do global investors see this blood-stained arena as a sensible place to park their hard-earned money? No.
While the self-absorbed British commentariat divides into Europhile/Europhobe factions like Bertie Wooster's aunt mastodons bellowing at each other across a primaeval swamp, the real story is that the Summit did not do anything serious to tackle the eurozone's acute credibility problem.
Why did it not do more? Because top European opinion is completely divided on existential questions to do with the moral hazard involved in different eurozone rescue plans. And because step-by-step Europe's leaders have set up structures of such intricacy and complexity that it is next to impossible to identify what needs to be fixed, and then muster the practical agreement to do the fixing.
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