Tag Archives: History

Models for an EU superstate?

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The United States of Europe?For those coming in late, the superstate series so far:
- The danger of Jean Monnet
- Why EU superstate conspiracy theories are nonsense
- Four points and a question for eurosceptics who believe in the advancing EU superstate
- EU competence creep, the spectre of the superstate, and how governments actually work

As I’ve set out several times, I don’t see an EU superstate as a realistic possibility at any point in the next hundred years – not even the next three hundred years. For me, this isn’t a problem. Our grandchilren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren are unlikely to have any of the same concerns that we do today – and as the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 has proven nicely, national/cultural identities are more than capable of surviving political union (hell, in Scotland’s case the national identity has arguably got even stronger since the Acts of Union). As such, if – over the course of the next few centuries – it proves to be in the best economic interest of the peoples of Europe for a “superstate” of some description to emerge from the present EU, so what? We’ll all be long dead.

But if such a superstate were to emerge, what would it look like? On one of those previous superstate posts (all of which have got healthy discussions in the comments – despite various sidetracks into insane detail about trucking and jam), helpful contributor French Derek argues that

“a federal state of 27 nations, each with their own languages, cultures, economic models, etc would be impossible to govern”

However, there are two cases where something similar to this has come about – Russia and India. Could these provide us with a vision of a future European superstate and clues about a model to follow?

Where the EU is made up of 27 member states with 23 official languages (and a bunch of other, less widely-used ones ranging from Cornish in the UK and Frisian in Denmark/Germany through more widely-used unofficial languages like Russian, Ukrainian and Romani), the Russian Federation is made up of 21 semi-autonomous republics (plus various self-governing cities, oblasts, okrugs, etc. making up a total of 83 federal subjects) and has 27 official languages), while India is made up of 28 states (and a few additional semi-autonomous regions) with 29 languages spoken by more than a million people (and 122 spoken by more than 100,000). Neither country – much like the EU – could be considered to be ethnically or religiously homogenous.

But the fact remains that both federal states continue to function, despite insanely complex internal demographics (far more so than the United States of America – the federal model most often used as a point of comparison with any future EU superstate). Naturally, the size of their populations are not entirely comparable – Russia’s population is c.145 million (about a third of the EU’s 500 million) and India’s c.1.17 billion (about twice the EU’s population), while the US’ population of c.300 million is about two thirds that of the EU. But still – India’s size is similar at 1.3 million square miles as opposed to the EU’s 1.6 million (compared the the USA’s 3.6 million and Russia’s 6.7 million) – so who’s to say that either population or geographical area is a factor in the functioning of an effective federal state?

Of course, in the case of both Russia and India (as well as, arguably, that of the US), their current situation came about after centuries of war and conquest – unlike the EU’s entirely peaceful formation – and whether either Russia or India can be considered to be effectively governed is another matter entirely. But Russia, India and the US nonetheless are all examples of large federal states that manage to work – in India and the US with more or less effective democracies that have both seen minorities elected to the highest office in the land (Obama in the US, obviously, but also Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Sikh). In both India and Russia (and arguably some parts of the US as well, with the various secessionist movements), the various federal states and regions have often retained a strong sense of identity and autonomy – just as have Scotland and Wales (among others) in the much smaller federal state that is the United Kingdom. Both India and Russia also retain some violent paramilitary nationalist/minority elements that occasionally cause trouble (much like in the federal state of Spain with ETA, or the UK with the various Irish republican groups of the last few decades).

So large federal states with complex demographics can exist and function with the constituent parts retaining their own national/cultural identites.

But can they hold together? India was far larger than it now is when under British rule – once the Raj left 60 years ago, Partition tore the country in three in a bloody horror the tensions of which remain to this day. With the end of the Cold War and fall of the Communist Party, various parts of the old USSR (Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, etc. etc.) broke away from Russia – and other regions, most notably Chechnya, have continued as part of the federation only under threat of force. The United States was torn apart by civil war less than a century after its formation.

Indeed, it’s arguable that Russia and India continue to hold together largely due to fear of “the other” – the perceived threat of the West in Russia (hence the rampant popularity of the nationalistic Putin and co), and the genuine threat of Pakistan in India (the threat of India in turn acting as a unifying device for the fragile federation of Pakistan). The United States originally came together thanks to the threat of Britain, while England emerged from the Heptarchy under the threat of the Vikings, France from the threat of England, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, modern federal Germany from a series of unifying wars with various neighbours under Bismark – and so on and so on.

In all cases, the sense of identity – “I am Russian”, “I am Indian”, “I am American”, “I am English”, “I am French”, “I am German” and all the rest – emerged due to a growing sense that another group of people were both somehow different and a threat. (Welsh national identity is a prime case in point – such a thing didn’t even exist until England started to invade what is now Wales, with the entire region made up of little more than warring tribes and principalities until they were given a unifying force, and existed as one kingdom only once – and then for just seven years – until the English conquest was completed and Wales in its current form was created. The same unifying, nationalising effect can also be seen in Scotland, where medieval English invasions likewise fostered a sense of Scottish national identity that helped bring the warring clans together.)

But what is the European Union’s threat? Who is “the other” for the EU that can foster a sense of European identity? With the current ongoing arguments over Turkish EU entry – not to mention the rise in tensions between Islam and the West of the last decade, the Islamist terror attacks in Madrid and London, and the perennial Europe-wide tensions over immigration – is “the other” for the EU going to be Islam? With the increasingly frequent stand-offs between the EU and Moscow over energy supplies and the autonomy of states on the European fringe, could it be Russia? For a while under the Bush administration and in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, it even looked like it might be America.

But whatever the “threat” – real or simply perceived – might turn out to be, it is hard to see a truly European identity begin to emerge without a greater sense of what being European is *not*. “We are American because we are not British”, “We are English because we are not Viking”, “We are Welsh/Scottish because we are not English” – this is how national identity has always begun.

So, while I disagree that the EU is too big and complex to form a superstate, I do maintain that such a thing remains unlikely. You can legislate to create political and economic integration, you can forge agreements between different territories and different cultures – but you cannot legislate or negotiate to build a sense of identity. Without that sense of identity – “I am American”, “I am Indian”, “I am Russian” – none of those three existing sprawling federations would be able to hold together. Of the EU’s 500 million citizens, how many really feel “European” to the extent that an American feels American, a Russian Russian or an Indian Indian? Hell – we can’t even agree on what Europe is – how can we know what it is to be European?

Why EU superstate conspiracy theories are nonsense

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My jokey post on the “danger” of EU founding father Jean Monnet prompted a response from the usually well-intentioned and often thought-provoking eurosceptic Ken of EU Realist (on whom I don’t mean to pick, but he’s provided me with most of the standard anti-EU lines in one handy package).

We’ve started having at it in the comments there, where he has again restated the classic anti-EU conspiracy theory:

“the basic plan [is] to unite Europe under one government… there is nothing else on the table and… each succeeding treaty follows that exact plan”

As such, a response to this, the classic EU superstate conspiracy theory, originally posted as a couple of comments there:

It all starts with Ken’s claim that “Monnet`s misquote ['Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation'] …Epitomises the aims and the methods to be employed in order to bring about a united Europe”

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Exclusive: The danger of Jean Monnet

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Jean MonnetFor as long as there have been eurosceptics, there have been arguments that the EEC/EU is part of a grand plan to create a United States of Europe. Why? Well, largely thanks to the dreams of some of the organisation’s founding fathers (from a generation, it should be noted, which had mostly lived through two world wars – but still…)

The founding father most often brought up in this context is Jean Monnet, the first Deputy Secretary General of the interwar League of Nations, and one of the key figures in organising Allied supply-lines in both world wars (not to mention the Chinese railway system, bizarrely). Now, however, he is most often remembered as a key eurosceptic bogeyman for his postwar efforts to bring Europe together – and most notably mentioned in tandem with his 1943 statement of belief:

“There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty… The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation.”

Ah, the F-word… Federalism to a eurosceptic is like the proverbial red rag to a bull (despite the key attribute of a federation being, erm… the self-governing nature of the component states, with the central federal government’s powers often being highly limited – but sssh!)

The other favourite Monnet quote, of course, is that about “the superstate”:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Ah! See the devious nature of the European elites, trying to guide us without our knowledge down a path we haven’t been consulted on! How dare they! (The fact that this quote is an entirely made-up load of old bollocks that Monnet never actually said or wrote is neither here nor there… If you repeat something often enough then it becomes true – or at least true enough to enable a justification of the ongoing belief in the veracity of the idea behind the belief…)

Perhaps because many British eurosceptics take a decidedly whiggish view of history – a teleological approach to the world that often also tends towards great man theory, in which providence and inevitability are seen in just about everything (and the Norman Conquest somehow marked the start of 1,000 years of English independence – despite it only being 944 years, despite the royal family being French Vikings from 1066, becoming Welsh in 1485, Scottish in 1603, despite the successful Dutch invasion of 1688, and despite our royal family having been German since 1714) – the fact that Monnet helped set up what was to become the EU more than half a century ago means, of course, that the EU is still headed down the path that he envisaged for it. Despite the fact that he died 30 years ago this week, and the EU is an entirely different beast to anything he had planned for the thing. (Hell – Monnet was a highly effective and efficient organiser, for starters. There’s no way he’d have come up with something as chaotic and inefficient as the current EU system…)

Anyway, even though the “Jean Monnet said it so it must be true” line of argument of the eurosceptic types convinced that the superstate is the EU’s final destination is utterly thwarted by the fact that a) Monnet didn’t actually say most of the things they attribute to him, and b) the fact that if a week is a long time in politics then half a century is an eon… Even though all these assumptions and beliefs about the much-misunderstood and mis-remembered Monnet can be shown to be based on nothing more than personal political prejudice, I can now exclusively reveal that we now have proof that Monnet is indeed a danger.

Intriguing European history initiative

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Sounds promising, from Russian human rights organisation (yes, there are such things) Memorial – recently raided by armed police. These guys are still on the frontline of history, while those of use sitting comfortably in Western Europe can, bar the odd credit crisis, often feel as if Fukuyama may have had a point.

In any case, at its most basic the fun of history was always – for me – the competing accounts of what happened, and the sheer inability of pretty much any source to be free of bias. It’s invaluable journalistic training, history – if more journalists did history at university, the quality of the press would be vastly improved. You come, Rashomon-like, to distrust every account, and so hunt for as many different primary sources as possible to get the full picture. Accept one version of history, and you risk ending up like the blind men and the elephant. (Which is why, of course, Holocaust deniers shouldn’t be outlawed. Theirs is an alternate take on history, and can – despite being just about as categorically, demonstrably wrong as it is possible for an historical theory to be – merely by existing prompt new research and new approaches that may be able to cast light on one of the murkiest episodes of human history. Flawed hypotheses need to be disproved, not banned.)

So the new Memorial European history initiative reported by Eurozine strikes me as well worth supporting:

The twentieth century left deep and unhealed wounds in the memory of almost all nations in eastern and central Europe. Often, the memory of one nation contradicts that of another. If these disparities are recognised and understood, the historical awareness of each society is enriched. If not, they can be exploited for political ends.

Some of the specifics given in the article raise some vital issues about the ongoing post-WWII, post-Soviet recovery of Central and Eastern Europe that it’s all too easy to forget in the West – with many more older Eurozine articles well worth another look in the boxout on the right, such as Isolde Charim’s Historical Myths Old and New (very good on the EU’s “foundation myth” and failure to reconcile East and West).

Europe needs to confront its bloody past openly and honestly if it is ever going to move forward as one. Yet so much of our history we fail to understand – or even learn about. Too many historical myths continue largely unchallenged in the national consciousness of every country, from the old one of Magna Carta in the UK to the newer one of the Resistance in France. Yet without an honest, open understanding of our pasts – both individual and collective – how can we possibly hope to build a better future?

Thatcher, Bruges and future Tory EU policy

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Still catching up, but it would be churlish not to mention the 20th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s celebrated (in some circles) Bruges speech, which passed the other day with the usual guff from withdrawalists. The BBC’s Nick Robinson has a fun piece on the anniversary celebrations and the Tories’ Europe problem which is well worth reading, considering the fact that they’re likely to be in power at some point within the next couple of years.

David CameronBecause the Tories under David Cameron still have no EU policy. I’ve been hunting for one for a while now (March 2008, July 2006), and they still seem no closer to working out what they even think of the thing. (It’s not just the Tories, of course – Labour are just as bad…)

The thing is, Thatcher’s near-infamous Bruges speech remains a great starting point for the Tories to set out their position on Britain’s involvement with the rest of Europe. An odd thing for someone who labels himself loosely pro-EU to say? Not really…

The speech is well worth reading in full – because it’s now become this near-mythical anti-EU manifesto for British withdrawalists (notably anti-EU “think tank” the Bruges Group, named after the speech – a think tank not afraid to associate itself with some of the more hysterical anti-EU crowd).

With such a massive reputation to fight through, it’s very easy to make assumptions about what Thatcher actually said. Listen to the anti-EU lot and you’d think that the speech was a blistering attack on the very idea of a common European future, delivered in the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth style that anyone who’s been knocking around EU-related internet forums has come to associate with British euroscepticism. (Seriously, British anti-EU types – you’re embarrassing me here… I want to feel proud of being British, and you’re making us all look like arseholes – same as those drunken tits on the Costa del Sol. Whatever happened to the old British virtues of decency, restraint and politeness?)

Yet it actually contains much that is positive towards a European Union, and fully supports continued British engagement at the heart of the process. It’s just that it doesn’t support the direction the current EU has been heading for the last 30-odd years towards greater centralisation and uniformity. Pretty much all of Thatcher’s suggestions back then are still being made to this day – and not just by eurosceptics.

Sadly, though, Thatcher’s Bruges speech is more referred to than read – and thanks to its current associations with flag-waving anti-EU nutters it is mostly ignored. Yet its overall vision for Europe remains a sound alternative to the current model, while in the details are identified many of the key problems with the current set-up, none of which have really changed in two decades. It’s got its problems, certainly – I don’t advocate everything that Maggie said by any means – but as a starting point for creating an alternative vision for the European Union, it remains both simple (if occasionally overly simplistic) and compelling. Check out the Wordle-generated word cloud of the speech (with only Europe, Community, European, Britain, British and removed – the five most commonly-used words, and in that order) – there may be a slight tilt towards an economic vision of European co-operation, but she covers a lot of ground:

Thatcher's Bruges speech word cloud

Most satisfying, though, is that it provides a healthy supply of quotes defending and advocating Britain’s close involvement with the rest of Europe (even to the point of advocating greater use of a European single currency) which can be thrown at any British eurosceptics that happen by…

“We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history…

Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. Yet from our perspective today surely what strikes us most is our common experience… It is the record of nearly two thousand years of British involvement in Europe, cooperation with Europe and contribution to Europe, contribution which today is as valid and as strong as ever…

Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.”

What are the chances of David Cameron ever making a speech containing that kind of rhetoric? The old Tory squabbles over the EU that dominated the 1990s may well have subsided, but the party leadership are still worried that they’re bubbling away under the surface. The recent campaign for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty showed how powerful anti-EU populism can be. Though the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, it did demonstrate one thing – euroscepticism remains a danger to the Conservative party. Perhaps its biggest danger.

These people will be in charge of the EU’s second largest economy – and yet even they don’t know what they are going to do once they come to power.

(On a related note, Richard Corbett may be a decidedly pro-EU Labour MEP writing in the left-wing Guardian, so just about as biased as they come on this topic, but his recent look at current Tory attitudes towards the EU is essential reading.)

The constitutional position of European Commissioners

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Today sees Britain’s new European Commissioner, Baroness Ashton, appear before the European Parliament. You never know – something interesting might crop up. Her answers to the usual written questions can be found here. Not much to get excited about, though the anti-EU crowd will no doubt leap on her first justification for her appointment:

“As Leader of the House of Lords, I steered the Lisbon Treaty through that House.”

Perhaps more interesting is a different constitutional issue – that of whether life peer Ashton can be fully independent in her new role – as raised by Jon Worth. Be warned, this one may go on a bit, and I doubt there’ll be many definite answers…

Two swordsIt is, in short, the age-old problem of whether it’s possible to serve two masters – a dispute that’s been ongoing ever since medieval times when increasingly powerful monarchs began to object to the authority of the Papacy, first properly expressed by Pope Gelasius back in 494 in what has come to be known as two swords theory. How can one swear an oath of allegiance to both Pope and monarch? What happens when they come into dispute? This was the very problem – well, part of a larger, more complex problem – that caused England’s break from Rome back in the reign of Henry VIII, the bitter Investiture Controversy during the time of Pope Gregory VII, and countless other spats down the years.

Currently, European Commissioners have to take an oath (PDF) that includes the following:

“I do solemnly undertake: to be completely independent in the performance of my duties, in the general interest of the Communities; in the performance of these duties, neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other body”

Is this compatible with Ashton’s oath of allegiance to the Queen, sworn on taking up her seat in the House of Lords? Ashton seems to think it’s not a problem:

“For the term of my mandate as Commissioner I have taken leave of absence from the Lords. This means in practice that, although I retain my title, I would not attend the House of Lords, nor take part in votes, give speeches there, or draw any allowances during the period of my mandate.”

All well and good – as according to the Code of Conduct for European Commissioners (PDF), “Commissioners may hold honorary, unpaid posts in political, cultural, artistic or charitable foundations”. But it doesn’t quite answer the question. Can you hold allegiance to the Queen while being “completely independent”?

As life peers who become MEPs have to give up their peerages (something Ashton claims she is unable to do), surely the same should apply to Commissioners – not least because they are explicitly supposed to be acting for the good of the whole of the EU, not just their respective countries. It’s an ongoing problem for British politicians, almost all of whom – if they end up sent to the Commission – will have taken not just the oath of allegiance, but the far more explicit oath sworn by members of the Privy Council (PDF):

“You will to your uttermost bear Faith and Allegiance to the Queen’s Majesty; and will assist and defend all civil and temporal Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities, granted to Her Majesty and annexed to the Crown by Acts of Parliament, or otherwise, against all Foreign Princes, Persons, Prelates, States, or Potentates.”

It’s hard not to see this as incompatible with the Commissioners’ oath to be independent and act “in the interest of the communities” – so little wonder UKIP’s Nigel Farrage raised the point on Peter Mandelson’s appointment to the Commission four years ago.

The question of where a European Commissioner’s loyalties lie is a vital one – especially with the ongoing moves to reduce their number, so that not all member states will have a Commissioner of their own nationality. Is Ashton’s first allegiance to the Queen, or to the European Union? It’s not hard to see how anti-EU types could start to ask how can she defend Her Majesty’s “temporal Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities” while working for an organisation that pushes for a pooling of national powers. But turn that around – how can pro-EU types not ask how someone who’s taken an oath to defend national powers can work for the good of the Union? It’s not like it would be hard to pass a quick statutory instrument to absolve British Commissioners from their previous oaths for the duration of their terms. So why haven’t we?

Is the Privy Council oath meaningless? And if so, why does that organisation remain part of the governance of Britain? Or is the oath the Commissioners take meaningless? And if so what does this say about the role of the Commission? Where do Commissioners’ loyalties lie – with the EU, or with their home nations? Because if it’s the latter, the Commission is incapable of fulfilling its allotted task.

Italian racism – not just against Roma

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After the worrying moves against Italy’s Roma population back in the summer, it seems that racial tensions are on the rise Italy-wide. After all, if the state’s going to sanction the persecution of one ethnic minority, why not start having a crack at the rest? In times of growing economic hardship (and it’s not like Italy’s economy’s been doing too well in the last few years anyway), finding scapegoats is always popular. And so:

In recent weeks, a Ghanaian man, Emmanuel Bonsu Foster, 22, was injured in Parma in a scuffle with the police; a Chinese man, Tong Hongsheng, 36, was beaten by a group of boys in a rough neighborhood in Rome; and a Somali woman, Amina Sheikh Said, 51, said she was strip-searched and interrogated for hours at Ciampino Airport in Rome. Last month, six African immigrants were gunned down in Castel Volturno, a stronghold of the Neapolitan Mafia…

Last week, Parliament debated whether Italy was facing what newspaper headlines referred to as a “racism emergency.”

Now that the governments of Europe seem to have decided to act in tandem to stem the credit crisis (joined around the world by countries from Japan to Brazil), the economic nationalism of the 1930s that did so much to exacerbate the Great Depression seems not even to be an option this time around. Could this in turn prevent a rise in the less savoury, more personal forms of localist resentment that caused so much trouble 70 years ago? Or is Italy, just as it became the first fascist country back in the 1920s, leading the way once again? If the current economic crisis doesn’t sort itself out soon, will such attacks against “foreigners” become more common throughout Europe? It’s not like there’s not already a sizable fear and resentment of foreigners knocking around…*

* See, for example, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights‘ Annual Report for 2007 (PDF), noting a general upward trend in racist attacks EU-wide. Some of this is certainly due to increased awareness and greater levels of reporting and recording over the last decade or so, but still.

The Great Depression: A reminder amid the ever-increasing hyperbole

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“about a quarter of the entire population, some 30 million Americans, were without any income at all. Two million vagrants… roamed the country looking for work. Twenty per cent of the nation’s school children were under-weight; in the poorest communities… over 90 per cent were affected… Bread lines stretched under choking grain elevators. Malnutrition and associated diseases like rickets and pellagra were commonplace… there were cases of starvation.

“Half Chicago’s working population… were idle… In Detroit… two thirds of the population were either out of work or on short time… In Kentucky miners ate wild greens, violet tops, forget-me-nots and ‘such weeds as cows eat’. In Pennsylvania they devoured roots and dandelions… Others consumed leftovers from restaurants, as recommended by Secretary of War Patrick Hurley. In Kansas farmers burned wheat to keep warm… In Washington lumberjacks started forest fires to earn money fighting them. In Arkansas families lived in caves… Nearly 30 states established systems of barter and in Washington State stores issued and accepted wooden currency…

“In Trieste women kept alive by eating pigeons which their children killed with stones. Peasants in Lucania lived almost exclusively on bread…

“Tax payers revolted in Burgundy, Normandy and Languedoc… Students clashed with gendarmes on the left Bank. In Chartres farmers and peasants, some carrying pitchforks, attacked the Prefect and engaged in running battles with the police…

“In Lancashire… so many mills went out of business that the smut wore off buildings: to the amazement of its inhabitants, Blackburn began to look clean. Former mill-owners were reduced to picking up cigarette ends in the street.”

From Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

Ukraine between East and West

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UkraineUkraine’s Orange Revolution was always painted (in the western media, at least) as a conflict between western-looking Yushchenko and the eastern-looking former Prime Minister Yanukovich, the man whose suspect election to the presidency sparked popular protests and an eventual turnaround back in November 2004. Yushchenko was, it is alleged, the target of an assassination plot backed by Moscow, while Yanukovich was merely backed by Moscow. When the Revolution got its way and Yushchenko came to power, it seemed the West had won.

But it was never going to be that simple, or that easy. After countless disputes between Ukraine’s various political factions over the last four years, another post-Orange Revolution government is nearing collapse thanks to yet another spat between former Orange allies President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko – and all as the aftermath of the Georgia crisis continues to rumble with the US handing Saakashvili a tidy $1 billion in reconstruction money (otherwise known as a fiscal two fingers to Moscow), and Russia announces a review of its global trade relations. Although the EU may account for 31% of Ukraine’s export market, Russia makes up 21% – and after the various spats over gas supplies over the last couple of years, you can be sure that Ukrainians are somewhat worried about just what Moscow may have planned to reassert the influence she lost with the fall of former President Kuchma back in 2004.

And so it would appear that the spread of the Georgia standoff does indeed seem likely to spread to Ukraine.

The thing is, though, that even without the squabbles between the various political leaders, the position of Ukraine was never going to be resolved by a simple election. Did Yanukovich try to steal the election back in 2004? Quite possibly. But that still doesn’t alter the fact that the country’s vote was split almost exactly down the middle.

Of course, it’s easy to label this an East vs West thing, and that’s part of it. But the actual reason is cultural and linguistic. Ukraine’s just like Belgium, in fact. The parallels are painfully evident:

Belgium and Ukraine by politics and language

You see, just as Belgium has a north/south split between Flemish and French speakers, so too it has a north/south political divide. And in Ukraine, there’s a northwest/southeast split between majority Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, echoed in political support for the “west-leaning” Yushchenko/Orange Revolution in the northwest and “pro-Russia” Yanukovich in the southeast.

So, why does Ukraine have the borders that she does? They’re a fairly recent creation, after all – with the origins of Ukraine lying in the medieval Kievan Rus’, which stretched north from Kiev through modern Belarus and Poland to the Baltic, not south and east to the Black Sea. It went on to be absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (covering much the same area – but again missing out the south and east of modern Ukraine, which was part of the Crimean Khanate, before being sucked into the similarly vast Kingdom of Poland via the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Check the maps below (very rough, I know) charting Ukraine’s geographical history up to the 19th century (when it was absorbed by the Russian Empire) – notice something?

Historical geography of Ukraine

Yep – that’s right. The Russian-speaking, Yanukovich-voting part of modern Ukraine was not, historically, part of Ukraine – it’s a later addition tacked on during the Russian Empire. During the chaotic times following the Russian revolution and around the Ukrainian War of Independence of 1919, the northwest that tried to break away as a Ukrainian state (actually, several Ukrainian states, after repeated failures to consolidate their position), while the southeast (briefly) went its own way as the Crimean People’s Republic. It was really only under the Soviets – who took the Tsars’ attempts to crush the Crimean Tatars and put down Ukranian nationalism (especially after the Second World War, where Ukrainian nationalists fought both the Russians and the Germans, depending on who was occupying the area at the time, in a campaign that lasted until 1956) to the usual near-genocidal extremes – that Ukraine’s current borders began to be fixed. In fact, you can even put a precise date on it – 19th February 1954, the day the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

So here’s the question. If northwestern Ukraine is the linguistic, cultural and historical hub of the Ukrainian people, and southwestern Ukraine has only been spliced on within living memory, why persist with the pretense that the current borders of the modern Ukrainian state are actually meaningful? They were created by the Soviet Union as a handy administrative division, not based on any of the usual factors that go into the creation of a coherent state. Artificial borders have, time and again, led to conflict and division – be it via European colonialism in Africa or the carving up of the Middle East after the First World War.

If Ukraine really is torn between east and west, in other words – and it is – and if its artificial makeup keeps leading to political stalemate and unrest – and it does – isn’t the logical thing to do to follow the Belgian example and consider splitting the country down the middle? (This would also, one hopes, have the added benefit of shutting Russia up for a while as she regains part of her old sphere of influence – and enable the EU to focus on the more “European” northwest for development and eventual integration.)

Am I serious about this as a suggestion? It’s about 50/50 at the moment. But the longer Ukraine goes without forming a stable government, the more likely an outcome this will be…

Russia: History and humiliation

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Two interesting – and thematically related – pieces look at past conflicts in relation the the Georgia / Russia spat over the last couple of days have prompted some thoughts along the old comparative history line (always an interesting intellectual exercise, as long as you don’t take it too seriously or literally).

First, over at Fistful, Douglas Muir looks at the Second Balkan War of 1912, and the impact Bulgaria’s failure to win had on that nation’s subsequent history (short version: bitter resentment, paramilitary reprisals, fighting on the losing side in both World Wars, more bitter resentment). Georgia’s failure to reassert her dominance over South Ossetia, Douglas posits, is decidedly comparible to Bulgaria’s failure to retake Macedonia and other “Bulgarian” territories in the Balkans. Or, as Douglas puts it,

“losses of national territory are hard for any nation to accept”.

Then, on BlogActiv, Stanley Crossick looks at the post-Fukuyama return of history and the possibilities of Cold War Mk.II:

“Cold War II may soon be with us – indeed will be with us – if we have still to learn the cost of humiliating the Russian Bear… Vladimir Putin has stated that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst geopolitical disaster of the 20th century: he means it.”

Russia was on the losing side in the Cold War – hell, Russia WAS the losing side in the Cold War. Russia is now weak, with a shaky economy that relies largely on the money of her erstwhile enemies. She has lost large chunks of her former territory, and has to see ethnic Russians and Russian speakers scattered throughout the lands of near neighbours where once those lands belonged to her. Meanwhile, her old enemies in NATO are pushing ever closer to her borders, sucking in former allies and making new treaties with countries that used to be Russia’s friends.

For any country, such post-defeat humiliation would be hard to bear, and breed ever more resentment of the victors – both among the politicians and the people. For a country like Russia, with a long macho culture, such humiliation is even more unbearable. But have we learned our lesson? For we have made this mistake before: Continue reading →

Russia, Georgia, the former USSR and fear

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Yes, OK. We get it. You guys have a big, powerful army and you aren’t afraid to use it.

Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Putin and MedvedevThat’s meant to discourage eastern European countries – all of whom have less then pleasant memories of armies from Russia invading, looting, raping, pillaging and occupying them for the last several centuries – from looking to NATO for help and signing up to the proposed US missile defence shield how, exactly?

Sure enough, Poland’s now signed up to the American scheme.

But the thing is, by now surely it must be obvious to Moscow that the West is not a military threat? We can’t take down a bunch of beardy religious fanatics with AK-47s – what hope do we have against a million-man army that seems to like to test out its equipment at random every few years to stop it getting rusty? All the West’s managed to do in the last few days (and this goes for the US and NATO as much as the EU) is express mild disapproval while disagreeing on precisely what form the ineffective slap on the wrist should take.

So I’m beginning to think that Russia simply doesn’t care any more. The Georgian escapade was a classic bit of imperialist aggression dressed up as humanitarian intervention, and they’ve completely got away with it. Yes, it looks as though they may well have begun to withdraw from Georgian territory now, but the message to Russia’s neighbours (well, bar China, perhaps) is clear: if we want to, we can fuck you up – there’s nothing you can do about it, and your new buddies in the West aren’t going to be any help either.

Russia’s effectively declared herself rogue – not necessarily hostile rogue, but unpredictable rogue. Riggs to the West’s Murtaugh. She’s not prepared to follow the rules, barely bothers paying lip-service to them, and has an agenda all her own. The thing is, just like poor old Danny Glover as Murtaugh, we’ve really got no choice but to be partners with her, and hope that she mellows with time. Because something we’ve all known for years is becoming increasingly obvious – there’s not a lot we can do to change Russia’s course.

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A related aside – worth developing further sometime – is the idea that Russia (much like the EU, in fact) is still trying to work out what it is for in a post-Cold War world. The old federation that was the Soviet Union has already splintered. The Russian Federation is similarly vast, similarly packed with diverse peoples and cultures – with 27 officially-recognised languages within its borders. But why?

Simple ethnic map of the USSR in 1974, leeched from the University of Texas (click for full size)What purpose does “Russia” serve? Why shouldn’t the Chechens follow the Khazaks, Estonians and Ukrainians to independence? Why shouldn’t the Chuckchis, Yakuts, Buryats, Adyghes, Kalmyks, Chuvash, Karachays, Balkars, Ingush, Khakas, Komi, Udmurts, Nenets, Khants, Tatars, Mari, Mansi or any of the other federalised subgroups?

Just as I’ve long been asking what the EU’s for now that the original idea seems obsolete, Russia has been asking itself the same question. Without the binding ideology of communism for the elites (and fear for those beneath), what has been holding what remains of the Soviet Union together? As the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia begin to thrive as part of the EU, as former Soviet territories like Georgia and Ukraine look to NATO membership and cozy up to the West – not to mention the old Russian Imperial territory of Finland (sitting pretty with the 12th highest GDP per capita in the world), what’s to prevent other parts of the Russian empire deciding that they’ve had enough?

Well, where the EU’s going for aspiration, after the brutally over-the-top actions of the Russian military in Georgia over the last week (and even more so in the Chechen wars – the second of which has technically been running for nearly a decade now), it’s hard not to see a return to federalism by fear. It’s a fine Russian tradition. Indeed, fear and repression are pretty much the only reason the old Russian Empire managed to hold itself together for so many years. Democracy in Russia has not been enough – opposition parties are still so under-supported as to be laughable. Authoritarian-seeming Putin, unafraid to act and act fast – remains Russia’s most popular leader since, erm… Stalin.

And so, it seems, we may be entering a new phase of Russian Imperialism:

“”It is clear that we need the kind of idea for which one will not be sorry to give one’s life. And the building of civil society, of the rule of law, of a prosperous society we find uninteresting. Indeed, we would rather squander everything and end our lives with suicide, than scrupulously count the credit and the debit, invest, corporatize, organize on cooperative lines, and so on. We find that tedious. We would rather try to absorb the enormous spaces of Siberia and the Far East, so that the islands of the Pacific Ocean become indigenously ours, we will fight for centuries with Europe for the Baltic States, and with Turkey for the Dardanelles – that is our way.”

(Original here, for those who can read Estonian…)

Humoristische Karte von Europa

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Via Erkan, this truly is a superb collection. A couple were familiar, but figurative mapmaking was a popular genre from the 18th through to the early 20th century, so little wonder a number from this exclusively First World War set were new. The real sell are the descriptions – so often satirists’ points can be lost over time, and even more so when the images are reproduced a tad too small. Anyway, my favourite, by Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers – hard to believe from the style that this was drawn in 1915 (and I do love the Russian giant, too big to fit fully on the map…):

Het Gekkenhuis (Oud Liedje, Nieuwe Wijs)

The Russian Ozymandias

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (image leeched from Wikipedia)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead, another of the giants of 20th century literature gone, his works already diminished from handy anti-Soviet conversation pieces for the dinner party set to dusty history source books.

The Gulag Archipelago remains his best-known book, though most people will only have read the expurgated version rather than as three chunky volumes. They may have tinkered with Cancer Ward. But, let’s face it, most people who’ve read any Solzhenitsyn will only have read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – an easy hundred or so pages of Soviet horror. Quick to read, quick to be forgotten.

While The Gulag Archipelago will be foisted on reluctant history students for decades, if not centuries to come, its catalogue of horrors becomes so vast as to be overwhelming, desensitising. This is why Ivan Denisovich is more familiar – the crimes committed by the likes of Stalin were just too vast to comprehend other than through the stories of individuals. Yes, all those mentioned in The Gulag Archipelago were individuals too, but by their sheer number they become faceless. Statistics. They blur into one, the easier to forget – as Robert Conquest noted in his (400+ page) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-famine, “We may perhaps put this in perspective… by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

It’s something Martin Amis tried to get across in his stab at writing about the crimes of the Soviets in Koba the Dread (worth a read even if you don’t like Amis or his hectoring tone), having opened with the above quote from Conquest: “We cannot understand it… It takes a significant effort of imagination…”

The Soviet gulags, like their cousins the Nazi concentration camps, are indeed all but impossible to comprehend. Without Solzhenitsyn, we couldn’t have the first chance of even trying to imagine what they were like, let alone of understanding. And yet what he tried to describe in The Gulag Archipelago still remains impossible to comprehend – the sheer vastness and hostility of Siberia, for one, remains a struggle for me to grasp even now that I’ve endured the long flight gazing down on its featureless whiteness on several trips to Japan.

Meanwhile, his best book, the work that best shows off his literary genius – August 1914 – languishes largely unread, currently up for grabs on Amazon.co.uk for just 1p. Yes, that’s one English penny. It is at once the best book about the First World War I’ve ever read and the real perfect symbol of Solzhenitsyn – vast in size, detailed in its research, beautiful in its language, able somehow to bring to life events impossible to imagine in that first month of the war, yet also marred by early censorship (pick up Lenin in Zurich – also currently going for a penny – for some of the missing bits), more known of than read, and somehow incomplete. For August 1914, all 600+ pages of it (1000+ with the restoration of the missing bits) was but the first in an intended series – The Red Wheel – covering Russia’s road to revolution and its subsequent repression.

Of this series, he completed just four books over a twenty-year period, of which I believe only August 1914 and November 1916 has so far been translated into English. It’s a masterpiece, but a difficult and ultimately disappointing one – because now he is dead and it will never be completed, destined to become, in the memorable phrase of Nina Khrushcheva (writing in The Nation on Solzhenitsyn’s 80th birthday back in 1999),

“little more than a crank’s mausoleum within which his Nobel Prize-worthy talent has been interred.”

And so, thanks in part to the sheer length of time it took him to write them, in part thanks to his unshakable public image as the guy who writes about gulags, these works that Solzhenitsyn himself seemingly hoped to make his true literary legacy languish mostly unread and, in some cases, unpublished outside his native tongue. Where his books were once unread through censorship, they now gather dust through lack of interest – and with his death, Solzhenitsyn himself is doubtless destined to join Ozymandias – a symbol of something great, yet increasingly forgotten.

We cannot comprehend the horrors of the 20th century – not the slow march into death of the Somme, not the cattle-truck convoys to the gas chambers of Belsen, and not the icy nothingness of Siberian exile – but we also cannot forget them. Even if Solzhenitsyn did, in the last decades of his life, become obsolete with the fall of Communism – a symbol of rebellion and independence so powerful that he was quickly moulded by the canny Putin to be wheeled out as a propaganda tool – and even though his works may increasingly be unread these days, he is one of the few twentieth century writers whose works we already know are important enough to be taught as history.

Yet few want to read “important” books. Better, then, to remember Solzhenitsyn the man as something separate from his actual works. The Gulag Archipelago was “important” when it first came out – since the fall of the Soviet Union it is no longer, yet it remains a truly great work of history and of literature. August 1914 was overshadowed by the earlier, “important” works on life under the Soviets when it came out. Now, finally, it can perhaps emerge from the shadows. Solzhenitsyn himself will forever be associated with the Soviet era, but perhaps now we can finally start to read his books not just for their insight into incomprehensible times, but for the beauty of their language, the knife-edge sharpness of their descriptions, and the all-pervading feeling of muffled hope amid hopelessness that is, above all, the true legacy of the twentieth century. That his final masterpiece, the Red Wheel series, will now remain unfinished seems strangely apt for a man who has come to symbolise a period in which all too many lives were ended too soon.

And still, his books remain to remind us of the horrors of war and repression, hopefully to prevent future leaders making the same mistakes, though we all know such lessons are rarely learned:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Solzhenitsyn, I hope, would be in agreement:

SPIEGEL: Are you afraid of death?

Solzhenitsyn: No, I am not afraid of death any more. When I was young the early death of my father cast a shadow over me — he died at the age of 27 — and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.

SPIEGEL: Anyhow, we wish you many years of creative life.

Solzhenitsyn: No, no. Don’t. It’s enough.

Lessons from Scotland

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On 25th July 1603 King James VI of Scotland was crowned King James I of England, sparking many of the ongoing resentments about Scottish power in England and English power in Scotland that are continuing to this day.

On 25th July 2008, Labour lost to the Scottish Nationalist Party in the Glasgow East by-election, giving the Scottish independence movement a handy boost.

1603, resentment of influential Scots; 2008, resentment of influential Scots.

405 years with the same rulers – and 301 years since the Act of Union brought the two countries together as one – and yet Scottish/English national identity is as strong as ever. The only difference? We no longer invade and kill each other when we get miffed.

Lesson learned? Political union is great.