Show us the money - Prospect Magazine

Vote for World Thinker of 2013: p20
issue 205 | april 2013
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
april 2013 | £4.50
Show us the money
What I’ve told Cameron
about tax dodgers
show us the money
paul collier
Plus
Does Eastern Europe
still exist?
Anne Applebaum
Apes and atheists
AC Grayling
If I ruled...
michael morpurgo
Racist bargain
of the New Deal
John kay
Oh brother!
Jeb for President?
Diane roberts
Exclusive: records of
UK’s Middle East role
bronwen maddox
Think Tank Awards—Enter Now
3
prospect april 2013
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ISSN: 13595024
Tax attacks
David Cameron has made clear that cracking down on “tax
dodgers” will be a big theme of this year. He kicked it off with
a showy speech in the snows of Davos in January. He has one
good chance to make progress this summer, when Britain
hosts the leaders of the G8, the group of (self-defined)
economic powers. The trouble is that his remarks don’t
suggest he knows how to do it—or is prepared to take the
steps he should.
He should read Paul Collier (p26). Very likely, in a sense,
he already has; in his Davos speech, he complimented the
economist by name for his work on curbing tax avoidance, and Collier is also
advising the government on the G8 agenda, although he writes here in a personal
capacity. But Collier has done here what Cameron has not, at least in public:
spelled out the steps that might recoup some of an estimated $21 trillion of global
potential tax revenues. Britain is in a strong position, given that many lawyers
and banks that help to set up offshore companies are in London. There is little
incentive for Britain to act on its own as companies, or their profits, would slither
to other domains. But it should apply leverage on the others to act.
The G8 should change the tax codes to make these manoeuvres illegal. But
Cameron is shying away from this point; on his recent Indian trip, he said that
he would not change the law. What, then, is he relying on to oblige companies
and people to pay more tax? If the answer is only public condemnation of those
felt not to pay an undefined “fair share,” that would be regrettable. In civilised
countries, the payment of tax is one of the central bargains between people and
government. When many countries are struggling to pay down deficits, it is
inevitable and right that governments look everywhere for more revenue.
At the same time, the terms of that bargain need to be clear. Companies have
a legal obligation to shareholders to do what they can within the law to maximise
profit. Individuals have a right to be confident that if they have observed the
law, they have discharged their legal obligations to the Revenue. That does not
represent all their obligations to society, of course, but they are entitled to know
where the legal obligation ends and the moral one begins.
That is one reason why Peter Kellner’s polls (p33) are disturbing. People, it
seems, condemn much more strongly the legal avoidance of tax by big companies
and rich individuals than they do the breaking of the law, on a small scale, by
people not so well off. A sense of fairness underpins that reaction, of course. But
the lack of interest in the legal boundaries is unhealthy, and encourages a nasty
sense that the court of public opinion is always right.
Cameron should change the law to tighten the loopholes that Collier clearly
describes. To rely instead on people to pillory those companies or individuals who
transgress an invisible line is not good for the country, and not just because it
jeopardises the foreign investment that Britain needs. Anything else is an evasion
of the responsibilities of his own job.
5
prospect april 2013
Contents
April 2013
Features
This month
6If I ruled the world michael
morpurgo
8Recommends
10Letters
plus stephen collins’s cartoon strip.
Opinions
12Fear itself: Roots of US conflict
john kay
13Cameron’s mistake on working hours
katinka barysch
26It’s time to tackle the tax dodgers
paul collier
plus How dodgy are we?
peter kellner
36Does Eastern Europe still exist?
East beats west.
anne applebaum
Life
64Teenage myths
Does adolescence exist? lucy maddox
65Leith on life
My fear of dental hygienists. sam leith
66Matters of taste
Eggs are not just for Easter.
wendell steavenson
42Apes and atheists
Are animals moral beings?
ac grayling
Enter the 2013 Think Tank Awards
14More than Scottish
douglas alexander
16Lawyers without degrees
dominic raab
16Here comes Jeb
diane roberts
18Pistorius on the precipice
justice malala
68Wine
Where is the “new world”? barry smith
World thinkers 2013
20Who are the world’s top thinkers?
Vote for your favourites.
46George of Arabia
Exclusive: disclosure of records
An MP’s colourful tour.
bronwen maddox
Science
54Delusions of a
“besotted
technophile”
Will we build
conscious
computers?
raymond
tallis
55The month
ahead
anjana ahuja
50Russians once lived here
The country is drinking itself empty.
oliver bullough
Arts & books
70Europe’s 500 year war
The bloody struggle for supremacy.
josef joffe
74The elusive JM Coetzee
Unravelling his strange new novel.
ruth franklin
76Art’s last revolution
How Pop won.
jason farago
78Katie Mitchell: a director at war
Britain’s introverted theatre.
james woodall
79The month in books rose jacobs
Fiction
80The Infatuations javier marÍas
Special report: UK energy
57Stumbling towards a crisis
dieter helm
62Is solar still worth it?
andy davis
The
Endgames
84The generalist didymus
84Enigmas & puzzles ian stewart
86The Prospect List Our pick of events.
88The way we were
Abdications. ian irvine
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6
prospect april 2013
If I ruled the world
Michael Morpurgo
If I were God I’d wipe you all out.
W
hat do you mean, if? I do rule the world. For goodness sake, I was the one who thought the whole
creation thing up in the first place. Don’t you
people understand anything? Clearly not. That
was the big mistake I made, of course, you lot, people. The world
without you would have been just fine, but I had to go and set
you up as the species who would look after the world for me, the
way I wanted it looked after. Silly me. I gave you intelligence. I
gave you free choice, of a kind anyway. I made you in my own
image too. What was I thinking of? Sheer hubris. I admit it, I
got it wrong the first time. But being God has its advantages. If
I want a second chance, I have a second chance. And this time,
believe me, I shall do it right.
Write to Prospect magazine, I thought, tell them what’s coming, warn them, just so they know it’s God that rules. A bit of history might be helpful first, since most of you don’t know any, and
those who do may not believe it. As some of you might know, I
tried flooding before—big time—but when I look
back, I left it too late. There were simply too
many Noahs down there, already too clever
by half, too many boatbuilders, too many
arks. Which is why the floods didn’t achieve
what I really wanted.
My idea was to wipe out mankind and
womankind almost entirely, but not quite,
so that never again could you could set yourselves up as tyrants over the rest of the earth, my
earth. Never again could you think of yourselves
as gods. Never again could you inflict the horror and suffering of war on the world. You
weren’t made like that, you became like
that. But I messed up. I wasn’t ruthless
enough. This time I’ll minimise humanity, make you so scarce you hardly count.
And I shall choose my Noah better. I will
make sure that the new Noah and his
kind will be wise and generous-hearted,
not manipulative, arrogant, selfish, warlike and greedy. For them the party’s
over. You can tell them that from me.
So it’s wipeout time again, people.
This time, my plan is foolproof. A sudden
ice age is all I need to do the job. Mankind, arrogant as ever, will of course
think he’s brought it on himself,
which I suppose he will have, in
a way. As God I shall simply be
hurrying up the whole process of
your so richly deserved destruction. I shall encircle the globe in
a freezing shroud of ice and snow.
Those creatures I want to survive will survive, I’ll make sure of
it. But this time round, both man and mosquito will be strictly
limited—yes, alright, I admit it, the mosquito was a mistake too.
It will no doubt surprise some readers of this august magazine to learn that, as God, I am both a creationist and evolutionist. I mean, think about it. Who do you suppose pointed Charles
Darwin in the right direction in the first place. Accident? No,
God-given evolution. (My miscalculation was not to have provided more Darwins and Mozarts and Shakespeares). Of course
it’s all about natural selection, but I do the selecting.
So back to the Big Freeze. It will last a few decades, a century maybe, during which time the earth will have cleansed itself
sufficiently—it’s quite capable of that, I got that bit right—and
a renewed and better world can begin. And those of you that
do survive, the very few—not the happy few necessarily, rather
the thoughtful few—will have learnt the lesson, that you have to
share what has been provided for you, live in harmony with one
another and with your fellow creatures, and nurture the world
about you. This time, I’ll get it right.
Of course you could avoid the whole unpleasant and rather
chilling experience; you could put things right yourselves.
You could abandon all war and oppression. Simply ban
it. It’s easily done. There’s a wonderful anthem I hear you
sing in Europe sometimes—and when it comes to wars,
you Europeans have been the worst of all,
by the way—about how all peoples of
all nations are brothers and sisters,
all part of the same family. Great
tune, great words. But, for
God’s sake, don’t just sing it!
Join hands across the seas
across the nations, yes,
and across the religions too, and learn
to live in peace and
freedom. I doubt you
will though. I have
rather lost faith in
you, just as so many
of you have lost faith
in me. But it’s not
too late, never
too late.
Michael Morpurgo,
author of “War
Horse,” is an
award-winning
novelist and
playwright, and a
former Children’s
Laureate.
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prospect april 2013
Prospect recommends
Five things to do this month
18th-century silk designer Anna
Maria Garthwaite. Coinciding
with the 250th anniversary of her
death this year, the programme
includes talks about her life and
her distinctive, intricate brocades. The festival also showcases
the landmarks of Huguenot London, among them Hawksmoor’s
magnificent Christ Church, completed in 1729, and a sumptuously restored silk-weavers’ house,
where guided tours are conducted
in silence. Some of the buildings
tell a larger story about the East
End, such as 19 Princelet Street:
built for French weavers, it later
housed a concealed synagogue and
is now a museum of immigration.
Dance
The Rite of Spring/Petrushka
Sadler’s Wells, 11th to 13th April
Few pieces of music have been such
a recurring inspiration as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A century
old this year, the work is as youthful as ever, constantly refreshed as
it is by choreographers seeking to
interpret its enigmatic myth, from
Vaslav Nijinsky to Pina Bausch.
Michael Keegan-Dolan’s dance
company unveiled their own version in 2009. Transferring it specifically to Ireland, it divided critics
like a guillotine. Now revived as
the first work in a series of three
events entitled “A String of Rites”
commissioned by Sadler’s Wells to
mark the centenary of Stravinsky’s
masterpiece, its radical reworking
of the sacrificial myth is ripe for
reassessment.
In spite of the liberties that
Keegan-Dolan takes with the story
—bringing it out of prehistory into
a modern age of cigarettes and flat
caps, shifting the gender focus and
reversing the polarity of the ending—it digs deep into Stravinsky’s
extraordinary music to read the
truth in its entrails. This production
includes dancers in animal masks
and men removing their clothes to
put on dresses before a deity known
as The Chosen One. It all adds up
to an intense and absorbing blast of
theatrical voodoo.
Neil Norman
Getting the Rite right: Stravinsky’s groundbreaking work turns 100
Mohamed Bourouissa’s photographic series Périphérique. Some
works take Birmingham, the UK’s
second largest city, as their subject—Christiane Baumgartner’s
diptych Ladywood, using video and
woodcut, which was inspired by
reflections of a railway bridge onto
the canal, and Beat Streuli’s 2001
Pallasades, video of passing crowds.
There is a strong emphasis on
photography and film, perhaps
because these forms are particularly adapted to the fleeting, elusive life of cities, where significant
events can erupt in moments and
innumerable human interactions
take place daily against a backdrop
of mute architecture.
South Bank mini-institution in its
own right.
The programme opens with a
play by Tanya Ronder, directed by
her husband Rufus Norris, which
declares itself in one simple sentence: “Six generations, nine performers, 30 characters and one
very special piece of furniture.” As
those performers include the top
talent of Rosalie Craig and Paul
Hilton, and as the show is designed
and lit by Katrina Lindsay and
Paule Constable, there’s no hint
of the project being a mere sop or
“add-on” to the NT’s core repertoire. Like any good shed-owner,
artistic director Nicholas Hytner
must be hoping for a result.
Emma Crichton-Miller
Michael Coveney
Art
Theatre
Festival
Metropolis: Reflections on the
Modern City
Gas Hall, Birmingham Museum & Art
Gallery, from 23rd March
In 2008, for the first time, more
of the world’s population lived in
urban than rural areas. By 2050,
70 per cent of us will live in cities. Most young artists already do.
“Metropolis: Reflections on the
Modern City” presents 60 works
in different media, by over 25 contemporary international artists,
inspired by the urban experience.
Created in recent years, these
works span the globe, from a frantic Beijing (in Miao Xiaochun’s
monumental photographic work
Orbit) to the marginal Paris of
Table
The Shed, National Theatre, from
9th April
Every home should have a shed,
somewhere to store things that
might be useful later, somewhere to
mess about and experiment. Such
is the philosophy behind the red,
box-like structure arising in front
of the National Theatre on the
South Bank this spring. The Shed
is a short-term replacement for the
Cottesloe, the NT’s third auditorium, which is closed for redevelopment until this time next year.
New, semi-improvised spaces have
a habit, though, of sticking around
longer than intended, and it’s quite
possible the Shed will become a
Huguenots of Spitalfields
Various venues, 8th to 21st April
This festival, celebrating the
legacy of Huguenots in London,
was inspired by a modern bronze
sculpture which stood in Spital
Square until April 2012. It was
a monument to the work of
Huguenot silk weavers, French
protestants who in the 17th century
sought refuge in Britain from
religious persecution. To raise
funds for a permanent memorial,
the Huguenot Society and the
Spitalfields Trust have collaborated
on this fortnight of talks, historic
walks and exhibitions, as well as a
huge craft fair on 13th April.
At the centre of events is the
Laura Marsh
Film
The Place Beyond the Pines
On release from 12th April
It opens with a swaggeringly audacious sequence: the camera pulls
out from Ryan Gosling’s tattooed
torso as he pulls on a leather jacket.
It follows him, in one unbroken
shot, as he saunters through a fairground into a circus tent, bestrides
a motorbike and roars into a caged
globe where he and two others
perform crazy, literally over-thetop stunts, round and round. The
crowd screams: so much testosterone in a tinny microcosm.
This is radical—melodrama for
men. Director Derek Cianfrance
uses revved-up action and close,
gorgeous digital photography to
tell the story of two young fathers,
Gosling’s stunt biker and Bradley
Cooper’s obsessive cop. The plot is
heavy on coincidence but then the
film is structured in triptych form,
with portraits of the two (who intersect briefly) followed by a third section featuring their sons as they
reach maturity. Gosling’s elegant
vulnerability contrasts with Cooper’s muscular nerviness as both
struggle to escape destructive patterns and be good (manly) men.
There are clichés—the women for
example are confined to tears or
pleas—yet the characters retain
dignity and individuality. This is
a heightened emotional ride with
irresistible moments of heartpounding tension.
Francine Stock
10
prospect april 2013
Letters
Shades of blue
What an honour for our book to
be reviewed by the eminent Roger
Scruton (“Postmodern Tories,”
March). But what a disappointment his argument is based on
prejudices about Tory modernisers, rather than the actual content.
It is odd to criticise modernisers for wanting to improve the perception of the Tories: the primary
purpose of a political party, after
all, is to get elected. But this is not
the book’s only objective, despite
Scruton’s accusation that we lack
appreciation and conviction for
Conservatism. British Conservatism derives from several philosophies. Scruton narrowly emphasises preservation: Conservatism is
much richer than this. We need not
solely be reactionaries.
The book actually draws on
Conservative insights about the
importance of markets, relationships and ownership for maintaining a free and prosperous society
as social composition and norms
evolve. Pity Scruton had nothing
to say about these detailed policies.
Ryan Shorthouse
Director, Bright Blue
The problem for Scruton, and all
“Conservatives,” is that the Tory
party is primarily about money
—it was hijacked by neoliberal
economists in Thatcher’s day and
became, de facto, a postmodern
party of the City. True, there are
still old (and quite a few young)
fogies prancing in from the shires
but, by and large, money in the
Tory party trumps conserving. It is
a party of monied philistines who,
in the main, care only about money
and for whom the environment,
the arts and abroad (unless it can
be exploited) do not mean a thing.
John Ellis, Prospect website
Crow and Cuba
Bob Crow almost had me (“If I
ruled the world,” March). I kept
nodding my head to most of his
suggestions. That was until he
mentioned that his model for ruling the world was my country of
origin, Cuba. Even allowing for the
rose-tinted glasses he must have
been wearing when he sat down
to write, he must have noticed the
disparity between his dreams and
the harsh reality.
He wouldn’t be able to bring
back the concept of public meetings, because public meetings not
approved by the Communist Party
are banned. He wouldn’t be able to
restore local democracy because
that word is anathema to the government that has reigned unchallenged for more than 50 years. He
wouldn’t be able to cut through
“the army of pundits, opinionformers and self-appointed experts” because they are the backbone of the Cuban state and they
all sing from the same hymnsheet
held very firmly by the Castro
brothers. Lastly, as a trade unionist in Cuba, Crow would have just
one of the following choices: toe
the party line and forget about the
workers, grass his own comrades
up in order to keep up his status or
be critical of the government when
necessary and face up to the consequences, including jail.
Mario López-Goicoechea, London
Green challenge
Sam Knight has drawn attention
to a darker side to our long-term
future (“The thin green line,”
March). Climate change is the
greatest threat humanity has ever
faced and I am glad that Prospect
has debated the options available.
I must, however, take issue with
your editor’s comment that, “I, for
one, have more confidence than he
does in people’s ability to devise
technology to tackle the problem.”
There is no argument that technol-
ogy has greatly enhanced the fuel
efficiency of cars and there are
many other examples. But emissions are continuing to increase.
There are two reasons: an increase in population and affluence.
So technology will have to achieve
far more than it has done. Can it
achieve more than the population
growth multiplied by the renminbis
in Chinese pockets? I doubt it.
Robin Sellwood, Truro
Inside Israel
If Henry Siegman is an expert on
the Middle East (“Last chance for
a two-state solution?” February),
it explains a lot about the chasm
of misunderstanding that exists.
As a left-wing Israeli citizen who
has never voted for Netanyahu and
thinks that his current policy of expanding settlements is sheer folly, I
still take issue with Siegman on the
entire slant of his article.
The biggest underlying obstacle to peace today is rooted in
the generations educated to hate
—just look at the textbooks and
summer camps of the West Bank
and Gaza. Israel in this respect
has undergone a sea change and
there is a majority that will accept
a two-state solution. Netanyahu
has been re-elected with a much
Cursive letters
Philip Ball’s article on joined-up
handwriting provoked a huge
response. Here is a selection of
letters—see more online.
The article took me back to primary schooldays, 60 years ago,
when the requirement to transfer
from printing to the cursive form
became the bane of my youth .
Until I was eight I had written,
contentedly, in neat print. Then
at junior school I was told I must
write like a “grown-up.” Alas I
could not then or now use cursive
writing satisfactorily. The result
was many unhappy hours both in
the classroom and at home.
I was forced by one teacher
to write over and over again
the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd
Psalm—at least I have never had
trouble remembering the words!
However each poor attempt
brought recriminations and
sometimes physical punishment.
At home my father just muttered
about “bad workmen blaming
their tools!” This process caused
reduced majority and the people’s
rejection of the extremists among
the settlers is very clear.
My decision to write was
prompted by the statement that
Israel is on a “certain road to
apartheid.” The term “apartheid,”
like “Holocaust,” has become
common currency without regard
to its accuracy or meaning. I invite
Siegman to visit my local mall in
Mevasseret, just outside Jerusalem, where Jewish and Arab Israelis mingle in equal proportion. We
shop, eat, exercise side by side; we
use the same washrooms; some of
the security guards are Arab Israelis from Abu Ghosh, just down
the road, which is also frequented
by Jewish Israelis enjoying the
restaurants. (On the other hand,
Jewish Israelis venturing or straying into a Palestinian area in the
West Bank have to be rescued by
the security forces...)
The situation is far more nuanced than Siegman and other
observers from the outside seem
to grasp.
Jill Harish, Israel
Mandela the actor
It is worth remembering that Nelson Mandela’s political approach
was always governed first and fore-
11
Letters
prospect april 2013
more unhappiness than anything
I recall from my childhood.
It was a relief in my first job
to be told to write as I pleased—I
happily went back to a half-print
mode, which I use to this day.
Peter Maddox, Swansea
There’s little sadder than college
graduates being unable to produce anything more with pen and
paper than what appears to be the
printing of a first grade student. A
truly educated person should be
capable of producing more than
infantile block letters, which are
taught to the very young so they
might learn the alphabet and
develop fine motor skills. Such
training is not meant primarily to
teach writing any more than using
a keyboard teaches handwriting.
Cursive writing demands that the
writer take the time to produce
legible characters. If one must
produce a printed document in a
hurry, then use a keyboard.
Louis Candell, Prospect website
Children learn to read “typed”
script in books. This is really a
most by consummate opportunism (“Latter day saint,” April). He
was a talented actor, able to adapt
his image to suit his audience and
message. In fact—and here I differ
from Justice Malala—it was only
during the Defiance Campaign in
the 1950s that Mandela publicly
expressed support for non-cooperation in the Gandhian mould, and
even so he wrestled with a more
racially-specific Africanist politics.
In the early 1960s his pacifist tendencies were rapidly superseded
with the move to armed struggle.
Elleke Boehmer, professor of
English, University of Oxford
Cold rationality
I truly shuddered at the thought
of Peter Singer, the “moral” philosopher, ruling the world (“If I
ruled the world,” February). A
world ruled by a man of such cold,
specious rationality would be a
dark place indeed. His advocacy
of euthanasia for new-born disabled babies if their parents calculate that their lives are not worth
living and his insistence that rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness are the prerequisites to
be defined as a human, are chilling concepts. Still where there are
losers, there are always winners.
third form of writing, and there is
a good argument for being fluent
in print, cursive and typed.
We could skip basic print, and
instead teach young children to
write cursive letters but not to join
them (they lack the co-ordination). But we should teach cursive;
people’s handwriting evolves into
something that suits them, which
is usually a combination of both.
Elle Martini, Prospect website
I reject the notion that teaching
children to write in two different
forms creates unnecessary challenges. I learnt to write cursive in
third grade. The fact that the letters look so much like the same
letters in manuscript meant that
it wasn’t difficult to pick up at all. I
was frustrated that we were asked
to repeat writing the same letter
so many times when once or twice
would have sufficed.
We should not treat children
like fragile dolls. They can handle
a lot more than adults give them
credit for. Even learning to write
in two different ways.
Stephanie Rojas, Prospect website
The baa-lambs and pussycats that
he values so much more than the
lower ranks of humanoid would
have a lovely life.
Simon Jarrett, Middlesex
Sepia-tinted schools
It was no surprise to see Toby
Young’s response to your YouGov
poll on schools’ performance (“Letters,” March), but I’ll bet he didn’t
expect to find his retrograde views
so sepia-tinted by all the other articles in your March issue. The children in his school are going to live
to 100, their leaders focused not on
social progress but tribal politics,
in a world dominated by climate
change, cultural mixing and regional conflict. I would hazard a
guess they will not find in-depth
knowledge of 20th-century British
war leaders particularly useful, and
that the grounding in Latin and
rote-learned hand-based calculation he offers his rows of compliant
young charges will leave them at a
distinct disadvantage to those with
modern languages, skills in applied
mathematics and a creative spark.
In fact
The act of stretching and
yawning simultaneously is called
“pandiculation.”
Oxford English Dictionary
If corporations founded by
Stanford alumni were to form an
independent nation, it would be
the 10th largest economy in the
world, with an annual revenue of
$2.7 trillion, as professors at that
university recently calculated.
London Review of Books, 7th
February 2013
Daylight Saving Time was
suggested as a joke by Benjamin
Franklin, who proposed waking
people earlier on bright summer
mornings so they might work
more during the day and thus save
candles.
Discover, 12th March 2009
Cooking lessons at UK schools will
become compulsory for children
aged seven to 14 from September,
as the government aims to ensure
they can make up to 20 dishes
before taking their GCSE exams.
Sunday Times, 11th February
2013
In 1835, for the first and only time
in history, the US had no national
debt.
Network World, 8th January 2013
Three of Fidel Castro’s sons, Alexis,
Alexander and Alejandro, are
named after Alexander the Great
QI, 1st November 2012
Sneezing, searching for a tissue
and nose blowing are responsible
for 2,500 car accidents a week in
winter. On the motorway, drivers
can travel 50ft with their eyes
closed while sneezing.
Daily Mail, 15th February 2013
Ben Gibbs, Ely
Have your say: Email letters@
prospect-magazine.co.uk. More at:
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
“Life just flashes by, doesn’t it?”
12
prospect april 2013
Opinions
Bitter legacy of the New Deal 12
Time for Cameron to win in Europe 13
A Scottish parent 14
Legal lives 16
Bush number three? 16
South Africa’s precipice 18
John Kay
A history of division
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins
of our Time
by Ira Katznelson (WW Norton, £22)
The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt
secured the survival of lightly regulated capitalism and liberal democracy, not just in the
United States, but in Western Europe and
other parts of the world. In this sense, the
New Deal does represent, as the subtitle of
Ira Katznelson’s new book proposes, the origins of our time.
But this is a familiar theme, perhaps the
most rehearsed in modern American political history. What has this new and lengthy
book to add? Katznelson, a distinguished
scholar and professor at Columbia, writes
elegantly and his book easily repays the reader’s attention despite the familiarity of the
basic narrative. But Katznelson’s particular
interpretation of these events emphasises the
ethical compromises essential to the achievement of Roosevelt’s goals—and makes the
claim that these compromises framed the idiosyncratic state of American politics today.
The most important ethical compromises
were the accommodation with other totalitarian regimes needed to achieve the defeat
of the most immediately threatening totalitarianisms, in Germany and Japan,
and the willingness of northern liberal economic reformers to make
congressional alliance with racist
Southern Democrats.
At Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam,
Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill
went beyond any simple alliance
of convenience with Stalin. While
this is familiar, the story of the Roosevelt administration’s flirtation with
Mussolini’s fascism—more benign, often
ludicrous, yet also ultimately sinister—makes entertaining reading.
But much of Katznelson’s analyA gun control campaigner,
left, is confronted by a
member of the Natioal
Rifle Association
sis is concerned with the political influence
of the south. He drives home again and again
the extent to which the passage of New Deal
measures through Congress was dependent
on the support of representatives and senators from the southern states, many of them
virulent racists whose tone and words sound
worse than loathsome to modern ears. If the
price of the New Deal was the continuation
of lynching in Louisiana, then that was the
price that was paid.
Perhaps politics is the art of compromise;
but should there be limits to compromise?
Katznelson postpones that central question for 500 pages, then deals with it fleetingly with a reference to Israeli philosopher
Avishai Margalit’s distinction between compromises and rotten compromises. Rotten
compromises, Margalit argues, are those
that create or sustain an inhuman regime:
Margalit believes that America’s second
world war alliance with Russia was, in these
terms, admissible but the population transfers agreed at Yalta were not. This discrimination between these two compromises
seems to owe more to utilitarianism and hindsight
than a clear moral line, and leaves unanswered the genuine dilemmas faced by Roosevelt and his associates: should they have
contemplated the collapse of American
society and economy, or allowed Nazi control of Europe, in order to avoid repugnant
associations with southern racism and Soviet
communism?
There is another distinction which
Katznelson acknowledges, although also
briefly. Compromise between people who
recognise legitimacy in alternative points of
view is not the same as compromise which
reflects only realities of force and power. A
compromise between partners on where to
dine out differs from a compromise with a
mugger who may be appeased by the contents of your wallet.
Compromises of the first kind are necessary because of different interpretations of
a shared goal, and
predicated on an
underlying belief
in a common
interest.
Com-
© reuters
Is compromise impossible in American politics?
promises of the second kind represent only
an accommodation of conflicting individual
interests. Roosevelt’s compromises with the
south and the Soviet Union were evidently
compromises of the latter kind.
And American politics today seems to
operate in such a way that compromises
between Republicans and Democrats, and
between president and Congress, will also
represent the accommodation of inconsistent demands rather than an agreement on
the means of pursuit of shared objectives.
Katznelson is surely right to see the dysfunctionality of modern American politics as the
result of the absence of any agreed sense of
a common good on domestic issues. America’s debate over abortion pits two groups
shouting “right to life” and “right to choose”
13
opinions
prospect april 2013
against each other, while Europe’s mediated
politics has mostly reached some messy and
ill-theorised consensus. European states easily reach consensus on healthcare and gun
control; the United States cannot. And the
repeated congressional standoffs over fiscal policy reflect the difficulties of finding
compromise when different sides perceive
no legitimacy in the position of the other
while none enjoys sufficient formal power to
enforce its will.
But is this aspect of American exceptionalism really a legacy of the New Deal?
Was that era “the origin of our times” in this
sense? Tainted compromises with southern
interests were hardly new to American politics in the 1930s: the issue had been central
to American politics since the time of the
founding fathers. The system of checks and
balances they put in place required endless
compromise and restricted the capacity of
the executive to develop, or pursue, any single conception of the common good. Given
the debased concept of public interest which
characterised the totalitarian regimes America defeated, that may have been no bad
thing. But a system of checks and balances
in which no concessions are made to the
legitimacy of other views may easily end—
as today—in gridlock and sequestration.
Katznelson’s analysis is another reminder for
readers outside the US of how much the special character of American politics reflects
the direct and indirect influence of its history of slavery and segregation.
John Kay is an economist and author
Katinka Barysch
The EU battle Cameron can win
The working time directive is ripe for change
In his big European speech on 23rd January, David Cameron said he wanted radical reform of the European Union or, failing
that, a series of unilateral opt-outs. The only
piece of EU legislation that Cameron singled
out for review in his speech was the working
time directive.
This directive has become the bugbear
of many eurosceptics. They use it to highlight how the EU is meddling in social policy and other areas that should be left to the
nation state and how EU regulation is strangling the UK’s otherwise liberal economy.
The working time directive is flawed in many
ways. But its impact on the wider economy is
marginal. It is not a reason to leave the EU.
The directive was part of a bunch of
social rules and health and safety standards
that the EU adopted in the early 1990s, to
sweeten European market liberalisation for
workers and trade unions. Britain implemented the directive only in 1998, after Tony
Blair gave up Britain’s opt-out from what
was then called the social chapter.
However, Britain immediately used the
opt-out clause. This means that British
workers and their bosses can agree to disregard one of the directive’s core rules, namely
that an average working week should not
exceed 48 hours. Most British workers are
bound by the directive’s other rules, for
example that workers should have a day
off each week and four weeks annual leave.
Around 6m British workers gained another
week of paid holiday as a result.
Initially, Britain was the only country to
use the opt-out. Then the European Court
of Justice, in the Simap and Jaeger rulings
of 2000 and 2003, declared that on-call time
that doctors, carers and fire-fighters spend
at their workplace counts as working time,
even if they are asleep. Many EU countries
did not like this strict interpretation. And
so 15 of them have opt-outs, mainly for their
health sector.
What is more, some EU countries implement the working time directive poorly. The
European Commission admits that there
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are infringements in 22 out of the 27 EU
countries. Unions are furious that the Commission has never taken an EU government
to court over this.
Does the directive harm the UK’s economy? No. First, long hours do not always
yield competitiveness. The average Greek
works almost 700 hours a year more than
the average German. Yet German industry
does much better, in part because German
workers are more productive, helped by better machinery, skills and management.
Second, the opt-out gives British business plenty of flexibility. There is a broad
trend away from the long-hours culture (the
number of workers usually putting in more
than 48 hours has come down from 4m to
opinions
3.3m since 1998). But working hours tend to
rise when the economy is doing well and fall
in a recession.
That leaves the health sector as the main
trouble spot. Surveys show that most British surgeons think that the working time
directive puts patients at risk. It forces hospital doctors to hand over to one another
too often and does not leave junior doctors
enough time to learn on the job. However,
hospital doctors too have the right to opt
out of the working time limits and many do,
although the British Medical Association
tells its members not to. Experts say that the
reason why the directive is harder to digest
for the NHS than for other European health
systems is that UK hospitals rely so heavily
prospect april 2013
on junior doctors, that there is a shortage of
specialised surgeons and that some hospitals
suffer from poor management.
Given that most EU countries do not fully
implement the directive, Cameron is right to
ask the EU to have another look at it. The
directive has had the biggest impact on hospitals, care homes and other 24-hour public services. It is desirable that doctors and
nurses work decent hours. But since public services are not traded, it should be left
to member states to set their own rules. If
Cameron argues this in Brussels—rather
than calling for a UK opt-out—he might be
pushing against an open door.
Katinka Barysch is deputy director of the Centre
for European Reform
Douglas Alexander
There’s more to life than being a Scot
The SNP’s world view is narrow—and wrong
In her speech in December, Nicola Sturgeon,
Scotland’s deputy first minister and deputy
leader of the Scottish National Party said
this: “My conviction that Scotland should be
independent stems from the principles not
of identity or nationality but of democracy
and social justice.” And contained within
that short statement is a chasm of error and
a misunderstanding of both the past and the
present.
It misunderstands the past because the
great advances such as the welfare state,
trade union rights, the NHS—even the Scottish parliament and Welsh and Northern
Irish assemblies—were secured by the votes
of people all across Britain.
Social justice is not just for Scotland, but
is a universal ideal: a statement of solidarity and connectedness with neighbours. So
when Labour opposed Margaret Thatcher
during the 1980s, we didn’t do so because
her policies injured Scottish sentiment, but
because we believed they offended basic values about how people should live together.
The Scottish Trade Union movement saw
its role over the past two centuries as not simply building better conditions in Scotland,
but building better conditions in Britain. As
Gordon Brown pointed out in his Campbell
Edinburgh Castle: “Social justice is not just
for Scotland but is a universal ideal”
Christie Lecture last year, the organiser of
the first trade union in the 1790s, the London Corresponding Society, was a Scot. And,
of course, the first leader in parliament of
the British Labour party after it was formed
in the early 1900s was a Scot, James Keir
Hardie.
The SNP’s claim to social justice also
misunderstands the present. And it does
so deliberately and out of necessity, in the
absence of an alternative argument.
Today we have a Conservative-led government—the nationalists’ claim relies on the
spurious assertion that our friends, family
and colleagues across the rest of the UK are
not commited to social justice. That explains
my difficulty with recent SNP rhetoric of
Scotland as “a progressive beacon.”
I reject a cultural conceit that relies upon
a single stereotype of voters in the rest of
the UK as somehow irredeemably different
from Scottish voters. The problem, as with
any stereotype, is not just that it is untrue
but that it is incomplete. The SNP’s characterisation of the rest of the UK reflects what
the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”
Adichie points out that our lives and cultures are composed of many overlapping
stories. If we only hear a single story about
another person—or nation—we risk a critical
misunderstanding.
The nationalists present one story of the
UK, in which there is no possibility of Scots
being truly similar in outlook to other people across the UK, and no possibility of feelings more complex than incomprehension.
It must be disorientating, indeed painful for
the Scottish nationalists to be confronted
daily with the accumulating evidence that
the change Scotland wants is different from
the change they promise.
The inconvenient truth for the nationalists is that their disagreement is not with
their political opponent—it is with the overwhelming opinion of people in Scotland.
This is not a party political fight. It is a conflict between the sovereign will of the Scottish
people and the settled will of the SNP. Opinion polls confirm that the SNP’s independence plan is viewed as an analogue offering
in a digital world.
On a personal note, if I try and make
sense of my life primarily through a lens of
national identity, then the effect is to flatten
my experience, and overlook the many other
stories and experiences that make me who
I am. I feel proudly and passionately Scottish. But, parenthood, if I’m honest, matters
much more to me than nationhood.
Douglas Alexander is shadow secretary of state
for foreign & Commonwealth affairs and MP for
Paisley and Renfrewshire South
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16
opinions
prospect april 2013
Dominic Raab
Lawyers do not need degrees
Time to remove one of Britain’s great glass ceilings
Many people dream of a career in one of the
professions, but struggle to fund those aspirations. In a 2012 report for the government,
Alan Milburn estimated that the professions
would account for 83 per cent of new jobs in
Britain in the next decade. But, he argued:
“Across the professions as a whole, the glass
ceiling has been scratched but not broken,”
adding “the graduate grip on the labour
market is still strong.”
Take law. The development of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEX)
has allowed over 20,000 qualified legal executives to enter the profession, mostly via a
non-graduate route. Legal executives often
specialise in areas such as conveyancing,
family law, probate and litigation. Training is typically spread over five years of combined study and work. For the trainee, it
costs around £7,000 for the first four years
(while he or she is earning), compared to over
£20,000 for pursuing a degree first. Over 80
per cent of CILEX members have parents
who did not go to university. Just 2 per cent
have a parent who was a lawyer. Half said
the cost of the graduate route would have
deterred them from becoming lawyers.
Yet, there remain glass ceilings. Much of
the work legal executives do has to be supervised by a solicitor, irrespective of the experience or ability of the individual. In practice,
this is a major disincentive to legal executives setting up their own high street practices. Even when they can do the work, they
are still tied to solicitors.
This makes little sense. The restriction
limits the aspirations of legal executives,
and checks their ability to compete with
solicitors on a level playing field. CILEX is
applying to the Legal Services Board for
independent practice rights, which would
enable legal executives to break into this
new territory. Subject to meeting the criteria
to ensure proper regulatory supervision, the
application should be approved.
Likewise, BPP Law School is seeking regulatory approval to set up a work-based legal
apprenticeship that can lead to full qualifi-
cation as a solicitor—without a degree—
within five years. Various high profile law
firms have expressed an interest.
Extending non-graduate access to the
legal profession would also yield economic
benefits, by expanding competition and promoting innovation. Legal fees have risen
above inflation for the past five years. Many
people are dispensing with unaffordable
legal advice. On one estimate, one in five
consumers foregoes necessary legal advice.
Over half cited cost as the reason. The current regulatory barriers to becoming a solicitor, or setting up an independent firm as a
legal executive, stifle the provision of high
street legal services like probate and conveyancing at more competitive rates.
Government should back these initiatives. Breaking these glass ceilings would
reduce legal costs, expand consumer choice,
cost the taxpayer nothing—and help pioneer
non-graduate access into the professions.
Dominic Raab is Conservative MP for Esher &
Walton
Diane Roberts
Oh brother!
Jeb Bush is running for president—already
John Ellis Bush, better known as Jeb,
George W Bush’s cleverer brother, appears
to be running for president. I say “appears”
because he has not said so in plain English.
But he is beginning to grow the unmistakable plumage of a candidate.
A book is the traditional non-announcement announcement of White House aspirations and he’s just published Immigration
Wars: Forging an American Solution. It’s a
truth universally acknowledged that a politician in possession of a publishing contract wants more than literary glory. Ever
since JFK won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for
Profiles in Courage, most candidates have
introduced themselves to the nation, or
reminded the nation of their existence, via
hardback. Even vice-president Joe Biden,
Texas governor Rick Perry and pizza mogul
Herman Cain have hunkered down with a
ghostwriter and produced something with
which to score free media attention.
Immigration Wars is a substantive and
thoughtful look at American immigration.
But that doesn’t matter. It allows Jeb Bush to
put himself out there, reminding the nation
of his existence. He appeared on all five of
the major political TV programmes: NBC’s
Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union, Fox
News Sunday, ABC’s This Week with George
Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s Face the Nation—
on the same Sunday. This is known as the
“full Ginsburg,” named after Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer William Ginsburg, thought to
be the first person to pull off such a media
coup. On every show, Bush insisted he was
not running for president—sort of. As he said
on CNN: “I’ve decided to defer any consideration of it until the proper time to make
those kind of considerations, which is out
more than a year from now, for sure.”
But it’s never too early to deal with his
surname problem: “I don’t think there’s any
Bush baggage at all,” he told Fox News. “I
love my brother, I’m proud of his accomplishments. I love my dad, I’m proud to be a
Bush.” Then there’s that other Floridian, the
senator who also has an immigration plan
and who is spoken of as a potential Republican star in 2016. On NBC, David Gregory
asked, “Who’s the hottest Florida politician
right now? Is it you or Marco Rubio?”
As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Rubio was Governor Bush’s pro-
tégé, implementor of his privatise-everything
priorities; now he may become Bush’s rival.
Even in the scrum of a Republican primary
campaign, there won’t be room for two sunshine state conservatives. Not that it would
be much of a contest: the big money would be
sucked into Bush’s orbit. Rubio would have to
wait his turn. Gregory’s question irked Bush,
who accused the media of being like “crack
addicts”—Gregory was a bit taken aback. As
was the nation. Bush amended his accusation: “OK, heroin addicts. Is that better? You
really are obsessed with all this politics.”
Imagine: politics on a political TV show.
Bush’s recent interviews illustrate some of
what consultants might call his “challenges”
as a candidate: he can be arrogant and shorttempered. Moreover, accusing reporters of
being junkies isn’t terribly smart, what with
his daughter, Noelle, being sentenced to ten
days in prison in 2002 after a rock of crack
cocaine was found in her shoe while she was
undergoing court-ordered rehab.
Mind you, being rude to the “lamestream
media” doesn’t cost conservative votes. On
the contrary: in 2012, Newt Gingrich made
loathing the press part of his platform.
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18
But flip-flopping on important policy positions is riskier. During the last presidential
campaign, Jeb Bush moved towards the centre, suggesting that if Republicans want to
win elections they should stop demonising
immigrants, and remarking that Reagan
would struggle with the rigid orthodoxy of
the contemporary GOP. He also supported
giving the undocumented a “path to citizenship.” Now he has reversed himself, at least
opinions
in his new book, where he says, “a grant of
citizenship is an undeserving reward for conduct that we cannot afford to encourage.”
His limp explanation is that the book was
written before Republicans lost the 2012
election, as if he had no idea back then that
alienating Latinos was a bad idea. Now Bush
says he’s “assured” the likes of Rubio, who is
working toward immigration reform, that he
is on the “same page.”
prospect april 2013
Perhaps Bush, who left elected office in
2006, is just out of practice. Perhaps he’ll
just write another book for 2014, when the
primary campaigns start to gear up. In the
meantime, he can polish his act and say stuff
like, “I’m not saying yes, I’m just not saying
no.” Yep, he’s running.
Diane Roberts is a professor of English at
Florida State University and a commentator for
National Public Radio
Justice Malala
South African shadows
The nation is on the precipice
Last month, nine South African policemen
catapulted our country yet again into the
international headlines by dragging taxi
driver Mido Macia down the street from
behind their van. He was later found dead
in his cell. But now I am reading of another
horror, that did not make the international
headlines. It was not captured on someone’s
mobile phone.
Two men died after they were set alight
by a mob in the Freedom Park informal settlement near Rustenburg. This is the
town now famous for the massacre of 34 mineworkers by police
at Lonmin’s Marikana mine
on 16th August last year.
“One of the two men was
already burnt beyond recognition whilst his counterpart was still in flames
with a wooden table placed
on top of his dead body [when
police arrived],” a police spokesman said.
The story takes me back to
the 1980s, when suspected police
informers were “necklaced”: tyres
doused with petrol put around
their bodies and burnt alive.
It is easy for one’s mind
to leap back to the violence of those times. Dirk
Coetzee, the man who
started the apartheid
government’s police hit
squads in 1980 to kill liberation activists, has just
died aged 67. He personally
murdered seven activists.
Violence and brutality is in the news everyday in South Africa. We are a nation that is
in mourning, asking ourselves why this happens. Why are we like this? In the weeks
before and after Reeva Steenkamp, the girlfriend of Oscar Pistorius (above) was found
dead at his house, reports of other cases,
such as gruesome gang rapes, had the country in shock. Then there was the case of the
nine policemen videoed dragging the taxi
driver down the street. Once again, unbidden, the question has come to haunt us: are
we an inherently violent and brutal nation?
Graca Machel, Nelson Mandela’s wife
and a revered international activist, said at
the memorial of the taxi driver that “South
Africa is an angry nation.” “We
are on the precipice of something very dangerous with the
potential of not being able to
stop the fall,” she said. “The
level of anger and aggression
[in this country] is rising.
This is an expression of
deeper trouble from the
past that has not been
addressed.”
Machel’s
assertion
reflects a country at sea.
Many of us are looking
back at the past and particularly at apartheid violence, and trying to sift some
meaning from that. Others, such
as President Jacob Zuma, refuse to
acknowledge the truth.
“South Africa is not a violent country—it is certain people in our country
who are violent. By and large, we are not—
we are peace-loving people,” Zuma told
traditional leaders in the week of the burial
of the taxi driver. We are keenly aware that we
are not the miracle “rainbow nation of God,”
as Archbishop Desmond Tutu memorably
put it. Our violence is splashed on the front
pages of the world, and it hurts.
Like Zuma, some of us are in denial about
our problem. Others wallow in self-pity and
ask why we are like this. It cannot be poverty, because by developing world standards
we are a prosperous nation. It surely cannot
be apartheid’s fault alone (Zuma said “the
apartheid system could only be sustained
through violence, and violence became
entrenched”). So what is it?
Some, such as Oscar Pistorius’s father
Henke, blame South Africa’s violent crime
rates on the African National Congress.
“It speaks to the ANC government, look
at white crime levels, why protection is so
poor in this country, it’s an aspect of our society,” he told the Daily Telegraph. The Pistorius family owns 55 guns. Pistorius senior, as
many have pointed out, fails to recognise that
the overwhelming majority of crime victims
in South Africa are black. Such analysis of
violence, crime and its brutal nature is plentiful in South Africa. Helpful answers are few.
For many other South Africans, though,
the recent attention on South Africa’s violence is a call to arms. Non-governmental
organisations such as the excellent Sonke
Gender Justice Network have been the
heroes of the battle to eradicate genderbased violence. In a country where at least
65,000 sexual offences were reported last
year, and convictions hover around only
4,000, many of these NGOs have been toiling alone to assist victims and push government to act. They continue the good fight.
Yet, as illustrated by the numerous vigilante murders that occur across the country and violence of other kinds, we are still
a nation that merely talks and fails to act.
Depressed as we are by all these things, and
much as we analyse and talk on radio shows
and in newspaper columns, South Africa is
still caught in the headlights. Not much that
is concrete is happening to make us a less
violent and brutal country. And we weep,
and are shamed, and every day is another
horror.
Justice Malala is a South African political
commentator and columnist
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3/11/13 9:36 AM
20
prospect April 2013
Who are the world’s top thinkers?
Vote on who you think should be crowned the world’s most
important thinker of 2013
Prospect has assembled an international list of leading thinkers to identify those engaging most originally and profoundly
with the central questions of the world today and to provoke debate about the role of intellectuals in public life.
Who is on the list?
We have drawn up a list of 65 people, based on recommendations from our
10-strong panel. Candidates have to be alive and still active in public life. They
must be distinguished in their field and have influence on international debate.
We gave credit for the currency of the candidates’ work—their influence over the
past 12 months and their continuing significance for this year’s biggest questions.
The panel: Anne Applebaum (author), Philip Campbell (editor, Nature), Amy
Chua (professor at Yale Law School), James Fallows (national correspondent for
The Atlantic), Stephanie Flanders (BBC News economics editor), Bernard
Henri-Lévy (philosopher), Bronwen Maddox (editor, Prospect), David Miliband
(politician), Anna-Maria Misra (historian) and Strobe Talbott (president of the
Brookings Institution). Panellists were not permitted to nominate themselves.
How to vote
To see detailed biographies and to vote for your top three, please go to:
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/worldthinkers
The results will be announced in the May issue of Prospect, on sale from 25th April.
17. David Grossman, novelist. Israel.
Peace activist and author of To The End of the
Land
18. Chen Guangcheng, lawyer and civil rights
activist. China.
19. Ramachandra Guha, historian. India.
Author of India After Gandhi
20. Jonathan Haidt, psychologist. US.
Author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People
Are Divided by Politics and Religion
21. James Hansen, climate scientist. US.
Pioneer of global warming studies and head of
the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
22. Peter Higgs, theoretical physicist. UK.
Predictor of the “Higgs boson” particle, the
existence of which was proved at CERN in July
23. Wang Hui, political scientist. China.
Author of The End of the Revolution: China and
the Limits of Modernity
1. Ali Allawi, economist, writer. Iraq.
Former finance minister of Iraq and writer of
The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation
2. Anne Applebaum, journalist. US.
Columnist for the Washington Post and author
of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe
1944-56
3. Katherine Boo, journalist. US.
Author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life and
Death in a Mumbai Slum
4. Margaret Chan, health policy expert. China.
Director-general of the World Health
Organisation
5. Ha-Joon Chang, economist. South Korea.
Professor of economics at Cambridge University
and author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You
About Capitalism
6. Paul Collier, development economist. UK.
Director of the Centre for the Study of African
Economies at Oxford University
7. Richard Dawkins, biologist, author. UK.
Founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for
Reason and Science and author of many books
including The God Delusion
8. Mario Draghi, economist. Italy.
President of the European Central Bank
9. Jared Diamond, anthropologist. US.
Author of The World Until Yesterday: What Can
We Learn From Traditional Societies?
24. Daniel Kahneman, psychologist. Israel/US.
Author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
10. Esther Duflo, economist. France/US.
Author, with Abhijit Banerjee, of Poor Economics
25. Ivan Krastev, political scientist. Bulgaria.
Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies,
Sofia, and author of Can Democracy Survive
When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?
11. Mohamed ElBaradei, politician. Egypt.
Egyptian opposition politician
12. Asghar Farhadi, filmmaker. Iran.
Filmmaker and director of A Separation
13. Niall Ferguson, historian, columnist. UK.
Author of Civilisation: The West and the Rest
14. Francis Fukuyama, political scientist. US.
Author of The Origins of Political Order
15. Ashraf Ghani, politician. Afghanistan.
Chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness
and of the Afghanistan transition coordination
commission
16. Jeremy Grantham, investment strategist. UK.
Investor and co-chair of the Grantham
Foundation for the Protection of the Environment
26. Paul Krugman, economist. US.
New York Times columnist and author of End
This Depression Now!
27. Christine Lagarde, economist. France.
Head of the International Monetary Fund
prospect april 2013
21
who are the world’s top thinkers?
28. Hilary Mantel, novelist. UK.
Author of Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall
and Bring Up The Bodies
52. Theda Skocpol, sociologist. US.
Professor of government and sociology at
Harvard University
29. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, political
scientist. US.
President of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace
53. Anne-Marie Slaughter, political scientist. US.
Professor of politics and international affairs and
former director of policy and planning for the
US state department
30. Elon Musk, businessman. South Africa/US.
Entrepreneur running startups in commercial
space exploration, solar energy and electric cars
39. Carmen Reinhart, economist. US.
Author, with Kenneth Rogoff, of This Time Is
Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
40. James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu,
political scientist and economist. US/Turkey.
Authors of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of
Power, Prosperity and Poverty
41. Hans Rosling, statistician. Sweden.
Founder of Gapminder, an organisation
promoting global development
31. Alexei Navalny, activist, lawyer, blogger.
Russia.
54. Zadie Smith, novelist. UK.
Essayist and author of NW
55. Andrew Solomon, writer. US.
Author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children
and the Search For Identity
32. Moisés Naím, journalist. Venezuela.
Author of The End of Power: Why Being In
Charge Isn’t What It Used To Be
56. George Soros, philanthropist. US.
Author of Financial Turmoil in Europe and the
United States
33. Martha Nussbaum, philosopher. US.
Author of The New Religious Intolerance:
Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age
42. Arundhati Roy, writer, activist. India.
Author of The God of Small Things
43. Oliver Sacks, psychologist, writer. UK/US.
Author of Hallucinations
44. Michael Sandel, philosopher. US.
Author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets
57. Hernando de Soto, economist. Peru.
President of the Institute for Liberty and
Democracy, Lima
58. Nicholas Stern, economist. UK.
Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment
59. Sebastian Thrun, computer scientist.
Germany.
Director of the AI Laboratory at Stanford and
CEO of the online university Udacity
60. Roberto Unger, philosopher. Brazil.
Professor at Harvard Law School and former
“minister of ideas” for Brazil
34. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, economist. Nigeria.
Nigerian finance minister
61. Craig Venter, biologist. US.
Head of the J Craig Venter Genomics Research
Institute
35. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez,
economists. France.
Economists working on problems relating to
income inequality
62. Steven Weinberg, theoretical physicist. US.
Author of Lectures on Quantum Physiscs
63. Ai Weiwei, artist and activist. China.
45. Sheryl Sandberg, businesswoman. US.
Chief operating officer of Facebook and author
of Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead
46. Fernando Savater, philosopher. Spain.
Essayist and columnist for El País
64. Shinya Yamanaka, stem cell researcher.
Japan.
President of the International Society for Stem
Cell Research (ISSCR) and joint-winner of 2012
Nobel Prize for Medicine
47. Eric Schmidt, businessman. US.
Chairman of Google and author of the
forthcoming book The New Digital Age
36. Steven Pinker, psychologist. US/Canada.
Author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: A
History of Violence and Humanity
37. Jean Pisani-Ferry, economist. France.
Director of the European think tank Bruegel
38. Raghuram Rajan, economist. India.
Chief economic adviser to India’s finance
ministry
48. Amartya Sen, economist, philosopher.
India. Author of The Idea of Justice
49. Robert Shiller, economist. US.
Author of Finance and the Good Society
50. Nate Silver, statistician. US.
New York Times blogger
51. Robert Silvers, editor. US.
Editor of the New York Review of Books
65. Slavoj Žižek, philosopher. Slovenia.
Author of The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
ADVERTISING FEATURE
CREATIVITY KEY
TO A BRIGHTER
FUTURE
IT IS WELL-KNOWN THAT OUR INCREASINGLY COMPLEX AND INTERCONNECTED WORLD FACES UNPRECEDENTED
ECONOMIC, GEOPOLITICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES IN THE YEARS AHEAD. THE QUESTION OF WHETHER
WE HAVE THE FORESIGHT, CREATIVITY AND INVENTIVE CAPABILITY TO OVERCOME THESE RISKS IS LESS CERTAIN
I
t is relatively easy to identify the
myriad risks emerging from the
increasingly interdependent
systems on which civilisation
depends. Climate, water, energy,
technology, demographic, economic,
financial and political systems all appear
overstressed and vulnerable to sudden,
catastrophic failures.
There are endless outpourings and
overwrought metaphors about black
swans perfect storms, fragility, stress,
anxiety and looming meltdown. The
media creates a ratchet effect and the
language is becoming more extreme.
These narratives run deep, as
business and political leaders,
economists, commentators and the
public begin to see that these systems
are connected and layered in mysterious
ways. The result is an explosion in fear
of the unknown.
What is missing from the economic
and political dialogue is a focus on the
underlying forces of creativity and
systemic invention in critical areas
illustrated in our earlier essays on
nanotechnology, solar power, water,
regenerative medicine, intellectual
property and a new world order.
Blinkered policymakers?
Sceptics argue that political and
corporate leaders seem to stand idly by,
paralysed by a fear of taking risks, or by
C000662_Prospect_March_V5.indd 4
narrow self-interest, leaving them
apparently incapable of addressing the
challenges of the age.
It seems true, for example, that
scientists and policymakers appear to
be wrapped in a deadly embrace,
searching endlessly for overwhelming
proof that biosystems are on the brink
of collapse before they go about
attempting to articulate a sense of
purpose, or a vision of the world they
want to create.
There is no doubt that
policymakers have a record of benign
“Policymakers have a
record of benign or even
deliberate neglect”
or even deliberate neglect, allowing
both man-made and natural systems to
evolve with little thought for strategy
or design principles. This leaves them
vulnerable to runaway, non-linear
failures — the unintended
consequences of policy errors and
shockwaves.
This is contrary to everything that
has been learned about 9/11, the
financial crisis, Katrina, Deepwater
Horizon and, going further back, the
Challenger space shuttle disaster. The
message contained in a series of
Congressional reports and the mea
culpas of economists is that
policymakers lacked not only
understanding of complex systems, but
imagination. Lack of understanding
breeds policy inaction, or intervention
that creates more complexity and so,
paradoxically, increased risk.
Embrace radical innovation
It is not simply a failure of what we
might call negative imagination but,
more importantly, creative imagination.
This is all the more challenging
because invention is often framed as a
source of risk — think of the
controversy surrounding genetically
modified food, or early work on stem
cells. Frame the world in the language
of risk and it is difficult to imagine
hope.
Some of this is of course justified,
but politicians, economists and
commentators are not, on the whole,
inventors themselves. Wearing their risk
hats, they tend to discount the possible
impact of invention when they look
forward.
Unless we are determined, our
simulated futures are modelled on our
past, which means, among other things,
that we discount radical innovation,
particularly if it challenges our
worldviews and belief systems. Political
leaders find it difficult to win over
sceptical voters — the argument that
11/03/2013 11:57
“we must act and pay now for the
benefit of future generations” is not a
pathway to securing votes.
this has led to a policy and
regulatory environment that
misallocates capital and inventive
capacity away from the real economy
and ecologically sustainable growth.
Secret inventors
this is all compounded by the fact
that breakthrough inventions are
largely kept hidden — for good reason.
New, yet often invisible trade routes,
transporting ideas, rather than silk
and spices, are being built at an
ever-increasing rate. but why are they
invisible and why are they shrouded in
so much secrecy?
the conventional explanation is
that there are two creativity-driven
business models shaping future
innovation and, in turn, how we see
the creation of future value.
the first is based on speed of
invention, design excellence, trade
secrets, know-how and rapid execution.
a variation on this model places
emphasis on experimentation,
collaborative networking, trust and fast
failure. it is most obvious in media
markets and academia.
the second is increasingly intense
patent development, which is being
extended by collaborative patent
cross-licensing, patent pooling and the
creation of patent-centric partnership
networks.
here lies a paradox: the business
model of choice is collaborative, open
and networked, yet protection of
intellectual property is a critical source
of competitive advantage. So for all the
talk about openness and transparency,
vital secrets remain.
there are deeper forces shaping
the increasingly secret world of
invention. We are accelerating into an
environment in which ideas and
intellectual capital are critical to
nations and corporations. this in turn >
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Missing from the economic and political dialogue is a focus
on the underlying forces of creativity and systemic invention
in critical areas illustrated in our earlier essays
>
means that ideas and rights protection
are vital. At the same time, web
technology encourages infinite
replication and copying. Worse,
electronic security is limited and
no-one — even with the best of
intentions — can yet control hacking
and cybercrime. Intellectual property
theft is a dominant and pervasive
security issue.
Secrecy is also driven by more
personal factors. Inventors keep their
ideas under wraps to preserve their
personal competitive edge or for fear of
theft.
Creative people are mavericks, but
they face strong social pressures.
Innovative ideas often meet barriers,
because they threaten the vested
interests embedded in the cultural
status quo. Those interests can be as
much driven by mindsets and defences
against anxiety as commercial interests
and power.
C000662_Prospect_March_V5.indd 6
Inventors are not well protected, so
fear of competition frames secretive
behaviour. Nor do inventors codify
ideas in terms that are easily
understood in conventional language
— new ideas demand new lexicons.
The best way to foresee the
future is to invent it
Against this background, radical
invention is often hidden from
policymakers, corporate leaders and
economists alike.
Policymakers can only generalise
that investment in new concepts will
actually deliver. It is a strategic act of
faith that demands vision and risk, with
uncertain outcomes — not a
comfortable place to be in times of
austerity.
For economists, the challenge of
navigating uncharted waters is acute
but barely recognised: radical invention
cannot be dismissed as a set of
unknowns that are assumed to be
neutral in economic models.
Breakthroughs in science and
technology will shape future markets.
The same challenge is critical for
corporate, city and national leaders and
two related factors are becoming clear.
“Radical invention
is often hidden from
policymakers, corporate
leaders and economists
alike”
First, the best way to navigate
complex markets is to understand
better the flow of ideas and inventions.
Second, as markets become
interdependent, complex and
uncertain, inventive capability is the
key predictor of future success. Just
look at the ebb and flow of sentiment
11/03/2013 11:57
about Apple, Facebook and BlackBerry,
or the analysis of development spending
and patent volumes emerging from
China, or competition to be a leader in
graphene research.
Put another way, there is a growing
realisation that the best way to foresee
the future is to invent it.
The question then is not only where
we might look for inventive, productive,
real economy growth, but how to look.
Historians invest heavily in
separating world history into time
periods and particularly economic or
industrial eras. So many would say that
we have been through transport,
industrial and computer revolutions and
will soon emerge into the era of
robotics, artificial intelligence and social
machines.
Yet the most important, radical and
disruptive systemic revolution on the
horizon is in plain sight: a shift to
products and services that improve
human well-being. This means not just
in the worlds of health and care, but the
well-being of the natural environment.
This is where the traffic in ideas is
growing exponentially and where many
creative people are finding a sense of
purpose and meaning. The risk and
only solution to improving resilience
and performance.
As far as policy is concerned, the
core emerging narrative is that over the
next few years, governments and
corporations will invest above all in
ecosystem security, in part for reasons of
economic stability, but also to maintain
social order, as is clear in China.
We can expect a shift in attitudes
not just because of public opinion, but
because governments and policymakers
will begin to recognise that investment
in well-being and sustainable
technologies — which themselves will
generate returns in the real economy
— is a better way to resolve the sterile
arguments presented in the no-win
debate of credit expansion versus
Systems designers and
austerity, particularly in the west.
governments: on the move?
A new way of thinking is on the
New business models are gaining ground
horizon. Many parts of the puzzle are
to deal with these myriad challenges.
about to click into a new order, like the
Collaborative trust networks, built by a
pieces in the suddenly-changing
new breed of systems designers and
integrators will become a key component patterns of a kaleidoscope. There is no
substitute for creativity, for people
in the emerging industrial revolutions.
determined to invent the future or for
The boundaries between industrial
investigative, intelligence-driven
categories, such as water, energy and
agriculture, are already breaking down as foresight that aims to find the traces of
system-wide technological, economic and the all-important new trade in ideas —
so that early stage investment capital
political strategies are recognised as the
can be directed where it is most
needed.
innovation agendas are converging. We
can see this in part through research and
development spending and patent
volumes.
While these are important and
necessary indicators, they are not in
themselves sufficient. We rely on
sophisticated investigative intelligence
and modelling techniques that have
predictive power and help deal with
inherent ambiguity and uncertainty. Yet a
single creative idea, hidden away beneath
the surface, can change the world. So this
is not simply about expert foresight, but
how we think about the future: we have
very powerful personal and cultural filters
that sway our judgment.
Commissioned by Coutts from
Peter Kingsley, PJR Limited, 2013
OPEN COLLABORATION NETWORKS AND INVENTION
Enterprise software
SAP, Oracle and IBM, which provide enterprise software that illustrates the workings of globalised trade, have more than
11,000 partners in their ecosystem — 900 in software development.
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+PSFEPWGMIRXM½GVIWIEVGLMRZSPZIWQSVIGSEYXLSVWLMTXLERIZIVFIJSVI'VSWWFSVHIVGSPPEFSVEXMSRMR)YVSTIMWTEVXMGYPEVP]QEVOIH
[MXL9/+IVQER]WLS[MRKNSMRXTYFPMGEXMSRWMRX[MGIEWQER]EWEGGSVHMRKXS½KYVIWJVSQ8LSQWSR6IYXIVW;IFSJ
7GMIRGI8LIVIEVIEPWSWYFWXERXMEPKVS[XL½KYVIWXLEXWLS[GSPPEFSVEXMSRFIX[IIRXLI97ERH'LMREERHFIX[IIR'LMREERH.ETERSZIV
the same period.
Water industry
The water industry is on the brink of substantive change, driven not only by emerging, potentially catastrophic shortages,
but also by increasingly strong interconnections between water, energy, agriculture, climate, demographics and broader
political, social and economic systems. Crucially, it is also shaped by growing creativity and investment in advanced science and
technology.
C000662_Prospect_March_V5.indd 7
11/03/2013 11:57
26
prospect april 2013
Features
Tax: the tip of the iceberg 26
Peter Kellner: How dodgy are we? 33
Does Eastern Europe still exist? 36
Apes and atheists 42
Exclusive account of an MP on tour 46
Russians once lived here 50
In pursuit of
the $21 trillion
David Cameron has one chance to target the tax dodgers—here is what he should do
paul collier
S
tarbucks has done the world a great service. The techniques it used to avoid paying much corporation tax
in Britain, in the 15 years since its coffee shops first
appeared on the country’s high streets, while legal, have
made the issue apparent and important to the British
electorate. On the £3bn sales it has achieved in Britain since 1998,
it has paid only £8.6m in corporation tax, a ratio that has pushed
the previously arcane question of “corporate transfer pricing” to
the centre of political debate. Starbucks could not have chosen a
better moment: for the first time in years, the UK government has
a chance to do something about it.
Starbucks’s behaviour is the tip of an iceberg of corporate opacity. We cannot know how important it is, although estimates are
enormous. Private financial wealth sitting in tax havens seems to
be of the order of $21 trillion, of which around $9 trillion is from
developing countries. Some miniscule jurisdictions, such as the
Cayman Islands, have become the legal home of trillions of dollars
of corporate assets through offering the unbeatable attractions of
zero taxation plus secrecy. Some industries are now dominated by
tax havens: half the world’s shipping is registered in them.
It is difficult to see how this state of affairs can be in either
the British or the global interest, but it can be addressed only
through determined international cooperation. Abuse has persisted, and indeed escalated, because the opportunities for intergovernment cooperation are grimly limited: a reflection of the
deficit in global economic governance. The world must make do
with such opportunities as it has and the most practical forum
to get things started is the G8, the annual meeting of the heads
of the world’s major economies—the US, Japan, the UK, France,
Germany, Italy, Canada, and Russia, as well as those of the European Commission and European Council. This year, by rotation,
Britain is the host, and will hold the summit on 17th and 18th
June in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland. The G8 is a rare and prePaul Collier is professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik
school of government, University of Oxford. He has been assisting the
UK government with the G8 agenda. This article is written entirely in a
personal capacity
cious opportunity: a private discussion among these leaders of
an agreed economic policy agenda. Britain, as host, proposes an
agenda which is then determined by agreement. While the presidency of the G8 does not confer authority, it offers the power
to persuade. David Cameron rightly plans to keep the meetings
small and closed, increasing the chances of honest discussion.
Launching practical actions to tackle corporate opacity would
benefit not only Britain and its G8 partners, but Africa which
has suffered the consequences of tax avoidance and corruption
for decades.
Does the G8 matter anymore? Hasn’t it been superseded by the
G20 which includes the big emerging market economies? Given
the shift in the balance of the world economy, the G20 is certainly
necessary. But the governments of the G8 cannot expect others
to behave in the global interest if they are not prepared to lead by
collective example. If the G8 is not prepared to act, it is unlikely
that the larger, more disparate grouping of the G20 can reach
agreement. The G8 has lost prestige as emerging economies have
grown, but it retains the capacity for politically heavyweight economic cooperation for the global benefit.
The last time Britain presided over the G8 was Gleneagles in
July 2005: remember the ubiquitous white wrist bands which
declared “Make Poverty History”? Tony Blair made poverty history by lining up G8 leaders to pledge doubled aid to Africa. Gleneagles was ostensibly Africa’s moment, but it coincided with
the apogee of British political delusion. It followed on from The
Commission for Africa, Blair’s panel and report into the future of
the continent, but the sought-for headlines, “Blair saves Africa,”
should more truly have read “Forget about Iraq.” Britain’s extra
overseas aid nestled among the wider profligacy of Gordon
Brown, then chancellor, underwritten by the credit bubble. But
although the Gleneagles display of global leaders pledging more
aid appeared to reflect British authority, in reality it reflected a
forced solidarity, as Gleneagles immediately followed the bombings on the London Underground. Behind the show of linked
hands they were seething at being bounced, and had no intention
of complying.
in pursuit of the $21 trillion
27
© Gunnar Pippel
prospect april 2013
An island escape: “private financial wealth sitting in tax havens seems to be of the order of $21 trillion”
28
in pursuit of the $21 trillion
T
he socially costly means of corporate tax avoidance is to
shift profits through transfer pricing. The plain vanilla
form of transfer pricing is for the subsidiary of a company which is based in a high-tax jurisdiction to sell
its output to one in a lower-tax jurisdiction at a price below its
true value. Or, with equivalent effect, it might buy an input that
was over-priced. The result is that the arm of the company in the
high-tax country will pay less tax than it would have done—often
far less tax. Profits that might be taxed will have been transferred
to the arm of the company in the low tax country.
The distinctive aspect of transfer pricing is that profits are
shifted between countries by the artifice of accountants and lawyers rather than by relocating real economic activity. The scope
for transferring real economic activity is naturally bounded by the
economic characteristics of locations. While a firm might decide
to relocate manufacturing from France to Britain, for example, it
is not going to relocate it to the Cayman Islands.
In contrast, the scope for shifting profits through transfer pricing is unbounded: the profits from manufacturing, whether in
France or Britain, can potentially all be assigned to a company
registered in the Cayman Islands. Lest you think such shenanigans are hypothetical, Jersey has become the world’s largest
exporter of bananas.
In turn, this distinction feeds back on whether tax competition
is moderate or intense. Being major locations for real economic
activity, no G8 jurisdiction has found it advantageous to cut tax
rates to the floor. But there are over 700 independent tax jurisdictions, most fundamentally ill-suited to real economic activity.
Since each of them can be the location for ownership of a company, competition between them has been so intense that it has
remorselessly driven their corporate tax rates to zero: hence the
tax havens. When combined with the web of reciprocal tax treaties originally intended to avoid double taxation, we arrive at what
Pascal Saint-Amans, head of taxation at the OECD, aptly refers to
as “double non-taxation.”
G8 countries woke up to plain vanilla transfer pricing decades
ago. They now contain it through scrutinising the prices used for
intra-corporate transactions and comparing them to third-party
prices. But even plain vanilla remains a severe problem in Africa
since the typical tax authority lacks the capacity to scrutinise
© reuters
Now is not then: in eight short years the world has turned
upside down. The glamour has shifted to the G20, Western prosperity has turned into austerity and, while we decline, Africa is
accelerating. China, not Britain, has become Africa’s patron: it has
even donated the new headquarters of the African Union. And, as
an African leader said to me, “if the West starts lecturing us on
governance, we’ll say: ‘Berlusconi?’”
So if the days of profligacy and preaching are over, what is
Britain’s role at Lough Erne? Are we there merely to make the
tea for a bunch of superseded politicians reminiscing about
former triumphs? No. No! NO!!! There is important work to do,
and only these few can do it. The countries of the G8 are now
themselves beset by the corporate opacity that Africa has faced
for decades. By putting our own house in order, we will at last
truly be doing something beneficial for the global poor. The G8 is
now far more important than in the easy years of the rising tide.
Corporate opacity is hugely profitable both for those who
exploit it and those who create it. It exists because it is profitable
and it persists because, by design, it is below the radar. Despite
being the key global economic actors, it is astoundingly easy for
international corporations to conceal their cross-border transactions. Governments have done far more to curb concealed movement of workers across borders than concealed movement of
corporate money. This is not because the consequences are more
serious but because illicit migration, though concealed from border agencies, is apparent to voters. Tax avoidance and corruption,
the consequences of corporate opacity, matter greatly. I will take
them in turn.
The opacity of international corporate structures makes it
much easier for companies to take advantage of the substantial
differences in tax rates between jurisdictions to avoid tax legally.
Some of these responses are reasonable and others socially costly.
A reasonable means of corporate tax avoidance is to relocate production to those jurisdictions that offer lower tax rates. Variations
in tax rates between these jurisdictions largely reflect reasonable
differences in national economic policies. Potentially, to induce
relocation countries could engage in a race to the bottom in taxation in which all governments lost. But more realistically the scope
for relocation merely discourages egregiously damaging corporate tax rates.
prospect april 2013
Opportunities for global cooperation on tax avoidance “are grimly limited.” David Cameron must use the G8 presidency to press for action
30
in pursuit of the $21 trillion
and compare prices. For example, when I discussed with the Zambian tax authority why the copper companies were paying so little tax despite the high world price of copper, its officials ruefully
explained that there were few smart accountants in Zambia, they
all worked for the companies, and their job was to minimise tax.
While there are transparent global markets in refined metals, with
observable prices, there are no equivalent markets for ores. So, a
mining company which sells its ore to a parent company abroad
for refining can potentially use a notional ore price that keeps
the subsidiary at break-even. Given the growing importance of
resource extraction to Africa, this is of enormous consequence.
The G8 can do a lot to help Africa and other poor regions tackle
this sort of corporate abuse. As the G8 tax authorities have demonstrated, mis-pricing can be contained by scrutiny. With the
notable exception of South Africa, the region suffers because
being divided into so many tiny jurisdictions, building the necessary capacity in each national tax authority is unviable. The remedy, both for resource extraction and more generally, is to provide
guideline price information internationally, using both prices on
global markets and standardised conversion factors from them
to the unobservable prices such as those for ores. Officials of the
OECD want to create such a database, and the G8 could give it
political impetus. International companies operating in Africa
would then be required either to use these guideline prices in their
accounts, or to report and justify deviations.
The transfer of skills from the tax authorities of South Africa
and the OECD would complement the provision of data. One
idea is to establish “Tax Inspectors Without Borders,” whereby,
on request, staff could be seconded for a few months. Working
alongside local officials, they would combine doing with teaching. Instead of being left to find a needle in a haystack, African
tax authorities would at last stand some chance of curbing transfer pricing. I am under no illusions as to the ingenuity of corporate accountants or the weak capacity of African tax authorities.
This approach might only work for a decade while new avoidance
strategies evolve. But the battle against tax avoidance is like that
against disease: the only viable approach is repeated changing of
the locks.
The problem of tackling transfer pricing in G8 countries is
tougher. Plain vanilla has been superseded by more sophisticated
ways of shifting profits. The technique that is now used to avoid
corporate tax is not the mis-pricing of transactions but the mislocation of activities. High-value intellectual property is legally
located in tax havens where it has not been produced. The essential feature of a tax haven is not that it offers low taxation, but
that it is the legal home of profits that have not been generated by
any real activity located there. Subsidiaries in higher-tax jurisdictions purchase the right to use intellectual property that is owned
by companies registered in tax havens, thereby transferring profits to them. The Starbucks scheme, while legal, was of this type.
It is difficult to determine what a reasonable rate of payment by
the British subsidiary for the rights to use the Starbucks brand
might be, and quite possibly the rate that Starbucks adopted was
within this wide range. But should companies be free to assign the
ownership of rights such as these to tax havens like the Netherlands Antilles, which have played no part in generating the value
of the brand? The creation of brand value could more reasonably
have been assigned to the United States, but such a profit transfer would have increased the overall tax liability of the global corporation. If that had been the alternative to leaving the profits in
Britain, Starbucks might have argued—entirely plausibly—that
prospect april 2013
the brand value for the British market was created by marketing
conducted in Britain.
Curbing the mis-location of ownership is complicated: there is
no ideal technical fix. Some academic economists go so far as to
argue that corporate taxation is fundamentally flawed and should
be replaced by other taxes. This is not going to happen. Practical
approaches to limiting mis-location are based upon overruling the
way that the corporation has assigned its profits between jurisdictions. The problem is what to put in its place.
One approach, known as presumptive taxation, is to require
the company to report its global profits and then apportion them
between jurisdictions according to some readily observable yardstick of activity, such as the wage bill. Despite its evident attractions it has three substantial problems: unfairness, inefficiency
and politics. If wages or capital are used as the basis for apportioning profits then high-income countries will get the lion’s share
of profits even if most value is added in poor countries. Applied to
resource extraction it would be grossly unfair: mines are profitable because they extract natural assets which belong to the country. It would be inefficient, because assigning profits on the basis of
some input would be equivalent to taxing it. Firms would respond
by using less of it. But what utterly kills presumptive taxation is
the politics: any observable yardstick for the assignment of profits produces winners and losers among the major countries and so
the losers will block it. There is no serious prospect of a wholesale
switch to presumptive taxation.
“There are few smart
accountants in Zambia, they all
work for the companies and
their job is to minimise tax”
Any workable scheme has to leave tax havens as the losers while
protecting the interests of countries in which real productive activity is located. There is now scope for such a deal because the US
government, traditionally hostile to all presumptive taxation, has
woken up to the fact that transfer pricing is costing it revenue.
A simple alternative to presumptive taxation is for companies
to be required to report the apportionment of their global profits. Transparency alone could discourage much tax avoidance
because it could impose damaging reputational costs. If you think
this is fanciful, I quote from a recent report on tax avoidance by
the Institute of Chartered Accountants. It concludes that “as with
most other commercial matters on the edge of the law, an ethical
judgement may need to be made as well as a legal one.” It recommends the benchmark of being willing to defend the arrangement
in the public domain. Arrangements such as that of Starbucks fell
short of this benchmark. The company’s management has volunteered to pay more tax on falling sales, inadvertently emphasising
the current disconnection between tax and genuine profits.
If transparency is not enough, then there are possibilities that
are less drastic than the full monty of presumptive taxation. For
example, reporting could be supplemented by internationally
agreed rules under which tax authorities are empowered to set
aside the labyrinth of corporate structures. There might even be
an adjudication process, with the tax authorities of countries with
significant real economic activity acting together in cases of egregious disconnection between the allocation of profit and activity between jurisdictions. At present, such possibilities struggle
32
in pursuit of the $21 trillion
to make progress in technical committees of the OECD at which
mid-level officials from finance ministries are inclined to regard
success as narrowly defending the national interest. A challenge
for David Cameron is to generate political commitment on such
matters that strikes a balance between empty grandiosity and the
minutiae of excessive specificity. He needs to know his brief but
not drown in it. A test of success is if officials grasp that returning from international tax meetings with preservation of the status quo is not victory.
Corporate opacity not only assists tax avoidance, it is the key
vehicle for corruption. In Africa, and other poor regions, corruption is a huge impediment to decent economic and political governance. If corruption is the concern, does this take the G8 back
to preaching? After all, isn’t it Africa that is corrupt, not us? With
reason, African leaders often point out that it takes two to tango:
the bribing foreign company as well as the bribed official. Corruption is illegal everywhere, but honest African political leaders and
officials face overwhelming difficulties in enforcing legislation
because corruption is difficult for them to prove and its proceeds
are easy to conceal. In principle, it is much easier to discourage
corporate bureaucracies from paying bribes than individual officials from accepting them.
One way to discipline companies is to bring transparency
into their payments to governments and public officials. On payments to governments, America has recently made reporting a
legal requirement for US-listed resource extraction companies,
through the Cardin-Lugar amendment to the 2010 Dodd Frank
Act. On curbing bribes to public officials, Britain recently made
the major advance of the Bribery Act, which came into force in
July 2011. Other G8 countries are already moving on one or the
other of these fronts. The European parliament is considering an
equivalent of Cardin-Lugar. The US has recently clarified and
tightened the application of its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Following a bribery scandal, Canada is in the process of doing the
same. The G8 has the momentum and the opportunity to move
collectively to common high standards on both revenue reporting and corruption. Only common standards can provide a level
playing field for international competition. Berlusconi recently
protested that Italian companies should be free to bribe their way
prospect april 2013
into contracts, but thankfully he will not be representing Italy at
Lough Erne. Other G8 leaders are unlikely to be so shameless.
Will President Vladimir Putin go along with the majority? Well, as
the current host of the G20, in April Russia is convening a major
conference on tackling corruption in government and business:
the Russian sherpa (the senior official orchestrating it) has just
invited me to address it. Manifestly, the Russians are aware that
they have a reputation to live down. For this very reason they may
not wish to be an obstructive exception at the G8.
O
f course, for a truly level playing field, although
common standards across the G8 would be a major
advance, they need to extend beyond the G8. But G8
adoption is the essential precursor to the G20, the
wider group which includes the main emerging economies, being
prepared to take these matters forward.
Africans who say “it takes two to tango,” though right in spirit,
are wrong in detail. Corruption takes three players: the briber, the
bribed, and the facilitator. Corrupt money is laundered through
fake companies and untraceable bank accounts. The lawyers and
bankers who facilitate these transactions are not based in Lagos
and Nairobi; they are in London and New York. African governments are impotent to address money laundering, but the G8
could close it down. By targeting the facilitators the G8 could complement the Cardin-Lugar and Bribery Act approach of targeting
companies. A bribe would not only become more difficult to conceal as it left a company’s bank account, it would become more difficult to conceal as it entered the account of the bribe taker.
Fake companies, known as “shell companies,” are the major
vehicle for bribes. A study by the World Bank of 150 known cases
of grand corruption found that shell companies were important in 70 per cent of them. A shell company conceals its real—
“beneficial”—owners. It is astoundingly easy for lawyers to
establish such companies. Researchers conducting a recent experimental study for Griffith University in Australia sent more than
7000 emails to law firms—“corporate service providers”—around
the world requesting one to be set up. Included in some emails,
on a randomised basis, was incriminating information indicative
of corruption: a premium on normal fees was offered to maintain
secrecy. In these cases, the number of law firms demanding identity documents (an international requirement allowing the owner
to be traced) fell. G8 countries were high in the global league table
of the legal lackeys of embezzlement. The study concluded:
“Untraceable shell companies are in practice widely available. Despite their regular pronouncements to the contrary,
rich, developed countries are delinquent in enforcing the
rules on corporate transparency, doing significantly worse
than developing countries, and three times worse than
the oft-reviled tax havens. Even customers who should be
obvious corruption and terrorism financing risks to any
provider exhibiting any risk-sensitivity are still regularly
offered untraceable shell companies.”
Richard Dawkins’s goldfish
Untraceable beneficial ownership of companies, whether based
in tax havens or elsewhere, has been a concern of the Financial
Action Task Force. The FATF is a technical group of 34 major
countries with the power to blacklist those financial systems that
do not meet adequate standards of transparency. Since September 2001 its primary concern has been to curb terrorist finance
where it has had some success. While the FATF can set rules and
make recommendations, it is up to each country how vigorously
prospect april 2013
in pursuit of the $21 trillion
they are implemented. Beyond the high-profile issue of terrorist
finance, the FATF has lacked the coordinated high-level political
support for its work to be sufficiently effective. Compliance with
its anti-money-laundering procedures has tended to degenerate
into a culture of box ticking. The law firms and banks to which the
rules apply have not been sensitised to why they matter.
In the tussle between scrutiny and profit, scrutiny can only
win if those tasked with doing it recognise its social value. For the
beneficial ownership of all companies to become either a matter of public record or at least readily ascertainable by legitimate
authorities, a new approach is needed. It would combine tighter
responsibility for reporting, increased investigative effort, tougher
penalties, and automatic exchange of information.
The responsibility for reporting should rest with people who
have something to lose from misrepresentation. A minimalist
approach would be for the lawyers empowered to establish companies as “legal persons” to be subject to public certification as fit
and proper persons to perform their duties—as with notaries and
doctors. They would then face the risk of being struck off and unable to practice. Currently, we regulate the birth certificates of people far more closely than the birth certificates of companies.
There is an undoubted need for a major increase in investigative effort. In Britain the authorities currently investigate only
around a thousand of the 280,000 annual reports of transactions
which give grounds for suspicion. The deterrent effect of penalties for non-compliance can be increased both by increasing those
penalties and by making conviction easier. For the typical lawyer
the threat of jail is likely to be a more potent deterrent than that
of a fine. In the context of a low probability of detection, fines are
liable to be factored in as a cost of business. The most straightforward means of increasing the risk of conviction is to lower the
threshold of evidence by imposing strict liability—which means
no excuses are accepted. We apply strict liability if a firm pol-
33
lutes a stream, but not if a lawyer registers a company without
ascertaining beneficial ownership. Finally, while money can be
moved between jurisdictions at the speed of light, the exchange
of information between authorities is voluntary and so currently
sometimes moves at the pace of an uncooperative bureaucrat.
Information needs to be stored in compatible systems and, subject to safeguards, exchanged automatically.
Corporate opacity is not inadvertent: it is the cumulative
achievement of the sustained effort of some of the most brilliant
professional minds on the planet. These people should hang their
heads in shame. In advanced economies their actions undermine
the tax base and the public spending essential for the maintenance
of decent living standards. Worse, their actions bleed the world’s
poorest societies of tax revenues, and facilitate the mass looting of
the public purse. The resource booms of the current decade are
Africa’s decisive opportunity: if the history of plunder were to be
repeated it would be a tragedy of awesome proportions.
Professional brilliance has enabled the accountants, lawyers
and bankers who facilitate these evils by exploiting outdated
systems to stay within the letter of the law. This is sufficient to
unshackle greed from the constraints of conscience. That is why
we need a top-level push from the G8; a push which David Cameron is in pole position to initiate. Although London is a major
centre for the construction of corporate opacity, it would be a mistake for Britain to act alone. While it might look heroic, it would
not address the problem facing poor countries—shell companies
would merely shift elsewhere. But by offering to put our house
in order as long as other major financial centres do the same, we
face the other G8 leaders with an opportunity that they would be
irresponsible not to seize. Even once launched, it may take civil
servants some years of coordinated and laborious effort to bust
corporate opacity. But without focused and determined leadership at Lough Erne it will not get started.
How dodgy are we?
People are less angry at illegal practices by individuals than legal avoidance by companies
peter kellner
L
iars, cheats and crooks have always been with us. So
have accountants who hunt for fancy tax loopholes
on behalf of greedy clients. We have never liked any
of them; but when times were good, the economy was
motoring and government had money to spend, we worried more
about other things. Today, when money is tight, the mood is different. Tax-dodging and welfare-fiddling are not only morally
offensive; they also starve the government of revenue it badly
needs. The cost to the rest of us, in higher taxes or lower public
spending, is more keenly felt.
But which affronts us more: the moral turpitude or the lost
cash—the welfare cheats who lie in order to claim extra benefits, or
the millionaires who tell no lies and use legal, but artificial, means
to minimise their tax bill?
YouGov’s latest poll for Prospect suggests that, when push
Peter Kellner is president of YouGov
comes to shove, rich tax avoiders—companies as well as individuals—offend us most. They should be the top target for government action. However, just to make life that bit more difficult for
ministers juggling with their priorities, Conservative voters do
not see things in quite the same way as everybody else.
First, our survey posed six frequently discussed ways in
which different people try to keep, or get, more cash for themselves. Not surprisingly, the one that attracts the greatest opprobrium is rich individuals engaging in tax evasion—lying about
their income in order to keep their tax bill down. Eighty-eight
per cent say this is “never” or “rarely” acceptable (although 8
per cent of the public—that’s more than 3m people—say it is
sometimes, or usually, acceptable).
The proportion that condemns rich people who don’t lie but
use legal, if artificial, forms of tax avoidance is lower, but still
overwhelming: 73 per cent.
Between these two are the big majorities who think it is
34
how dodgy are we?
never, or rarely, acceptable for those not living in poverty to
claim extra welfare benefits by cheating (82 per cent) and those
who are appalled by companies that keep down their tax bill by
using internal accounting devices to shift profits from Britain to
low-tax countries.
A smaller number, but still a clear majority (64 per cent), condemns parents who lie to claim extra benefits to make ends meet,
but a substantial minority, 30 per cent, say this can sometimes be
acceptable. The only one of the six activities that divides Britain
down the middle is individuals such as plumbers, decorators and
electricians who charge “people like you less if you pay cash, when
you are sure that they will not pay income tax and/or VAT on what
you pay them.” As many as 44 per cent say this can be acceptable,
while 48 per cent say it is always or almost always wrong.
So, overall, there is widespread condemnation of cheating
and avoidance of all kinds, with the partial exception of cash-inhand small traders. However, when we move from asking separately about the six activities to a comparative question—“which
two are the most unacceptable”—a sharper picture emerges.
The top three public hates are the activities of rich people and
companies, even if they operate within the law. It seems that
public priorities are driven more by the lost cash than outright
dishonesty. Welfare cheats score much lower, and here there
is more of a cash/morality trade-off, with more people (26 per
cent) saying one of their top hatreds is individuals who are not
poor lying to boost their income by £40 a week—and far fewer,
11 per cent, condemning parents of children living in poverty
lying to claim twice as much, £80 a week.
It’s clear that these rankings are driven by a widespread perception that legal tax avoidance by companies and rich individuals costs the government more than illegal tax evaders and welfare
prospect april 2013
cheats. They are probably right. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs tries to estimate the money lost each year through avoidance
and evasion. HMRC’s estimate can only be a best-guess, of course:
by definition, much of the lost cash goes to people and activities
they have not tracked down; but it thinks tax avoidance currently
costs at least £5bn a year, while fraudulent welfare claims cost
£1.2bn and cash-in-hand moonlighting £1.9bn a year. And some of
that fraudulently-claimed £3.1bn goes to well-off crooks, dishonest landlords and sophisticated scams: the total amount going to
“ordinary” small traders and welfare cheats is probably much less.
However, Conservative voters have a different take from
Labour and Lib Dem supporters. By 55-40 per cent, Tories think
the government’s priority should be to clamp down on tax evaders
and welfare cheats, rather than the legal tax avoidance activities of
big corporations and rich individuals. By large margins, those who
support Labour (by 72-20 per cent) or the Lib Dems (by 63-31 per
cent) hold the opposite view.
Finally, we asked people if they had dodged the tax or welfare
system themselves. As YouGov conducts its surveys online, people tend to be more honest about sensitive questions than in telephone or face-to-face polls, which require admission to a stranger
of questionable behaviour. However, common sense suggests that
our figures are still underestimates of the true position.
Nevertheless, it’s notable that 18 per cent of our respondents
admit to having paid small traders in cash to help them evade tax
and/or VAT—that’s equivalent to 8m adults. And 5 per cent, or
more than 2m, admit to cheating in order to pay less tax or claim
extra welfare benefits. As might be expected, they are less censorious than the wider public of tax-dodging activities. But the differences aren’t huge. With them, as with people as a whole, the
picture is clear: morality matters, but money matters more.
Avoiding tax: the public view
What is morally acceptable?
Rich individuals lying about
their income (tax evasion)
%
Individuals NOT in extreme
poverty who lie to claim
extra benefits
88
4
4
Companies minimising
tax by paying lower
tax in other countries
82
4
Always/usually
acceptable
4
6
Sometimes
acceptable
Individuals using legal
methods (off-shore tax
schemes) to minimise
tax
73
78
7
Rarely/never
acceptable
Parents who lie to claim
benefits to provide for
their family
9
7
7
Workers such as
decorators, who charge
less for cash
10
6
9
7
Parents with children in
poverty getting £80 extra
a week in benefits by lying
11
A worker doing a significant
part of their work for cash
to reduce their tax bill
6
48
11
An individual saving
£10,000 a year in UK tax
by lying about income
37
Those NOT living in extreme
poverty who lie to get an
extra £40 a week in benefits
26
Not sure
17
less UK tax a year using legal
tax avoidance methods
44
A rich individual saving
£1m in UK tax using legal
methods of tax avoidance
41
64
21
Which two of these, if any, Which should the
are MOST unacceptable*? government’s
priority be?
A company paying £10m
27
8
None 5 Don’t know 6
Reduce the amount of
tax legally avoided by
companies and rich
individuals exploiting
loopholes
54
%
36
Don’t
know 10
Minimise
illegal tax evasion and
false benefit claims
*A small number of respondents ticked only one option
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prospect april 2013
Does Eastern Europe
still exist?
Forget the clichés, learn the lessons
anne applebaum
I
n February 2009, the Economist ran a cartoon which featured caricature versions of Angela Merkel, Nicholas
Sarkozy and Gordon Brown, then the leaders of their
respective countries. The three were sitting at a luxuriously
appointed dining table, their faces frozen in exaggerated
horror. All were contemplating a giant bill, at the top of which
was written, “for the rescue of Eastern Europe.” The accompanying article, just to drive home the point, was entitled “The bill
that could break up Europe.”
Eastern Europe, the article warned in dire tones, had been
financially damaged and politically weakened by the international economic crisis. Eastern Europeans had been “on a binge
fuelled by foreign investment [and] the desire for western living
Anne Applebaum holds the Philippe Roman Chair in history and
international affairs at the London School of Economics for 2012—13.
This article is based on a lecture sponsored by LSE Ideas. She also runs a
programme on global transitions at the Legatum Institute
standards,” they had botched or sidestepped reforms and they
had “wasted their borrowed billions on construction and consumption booms.” Eastern Europe should of course pay the price
for its own profligacy, the Economist intoned, but Western Europe
might well have to step in: After all, if Eastern Europe were to go
down in the flames of financial crisis, then proper Western countries like Ireland and Greece might be affected as well.
The rest, as they say, is history. Eastern Europe did not collapse, or at least not all of it, or not all at once. But Ireland and
Greece did both go down in the flames of financial crisis, and
Spain and Italy nearly did too. Even now, Portugal is still touch
and go, Britain is likely to enter a triple-dip recession and France
has soaring unemployment. To put it bluntly, the Economist
was…wrong. Four years after that 2009 article, the rich Western countries are not sitting around a metaphorical dining table
dispensing largesse to their poor eastern cousins. Instead, they
are wrestling with one another on top of that table or begging
prospect april 2013
does eastern europe still exist?
37
Development in Warsaw: though it once was, “Eastern Europe is no
longer a single entity”
for scraps to save themselves, while some of the unwanted guests
from the east are, like Slovakia, which is a eurozone member,
actually contributing to their rescue.
Now, there are a number of conclusions I could draw from the
predictive failure of this cartoon. Clearly, the first and most obvious is this: beware of caricatures in the Economist, as they will
soon be out of date. The second conclusion, however, is that it is
now time to lay aside all of our common prejudices about Europe,
and start thinking about the continent a little differently. Let me
put it more strongly: after the events of the past four years, we
should really toss out every stereotype, every cliché and every
assumption that has ever been made about Europe’s political
geography. East versus west, north versus south, none of it really
makes sense of what is going on any more.
The first and sharpest economic crisis in Europe after 2008
started not in the east but in Iceland, far to the west. The deepest
recession was not in the traditionally slow south, but in Ireland,
until recently part of the dynamic north. The bad debts accumulated by British financial institutions exceed, by many tens of billions, the combined governmental debt of Poland and the Czech
Republic, two countries that had no domestic banking failures to
speak of. When it went bankrupt, the government of Latvia buckled down, carried out an austerity program, pulled through and
is now back at 5 per cent growth. The Greeks, by contrast, faced
with the same prospect, rioted, protested, had to institute a government of national unity and wound up having its economic policy dictated by the EU.
Slovakia, a country which had 10 per cent growth rates a few
years ago, also experienced a collapse and a major recession in
2009 but has now returned to 4 per cent growth. Poland has
not suffered a recession at all, and has grown, cumulatively, 20
per cent since 2008. In general, members of the former Eastern
Europe pay lower rates on their bonds, reflecting the fact that
international markets have confidence in them. The Czechs pay 2
per cent, the Slovaks pay 2.1 per cent and the Poles pay 3 per cent.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese pay almost 6 per cent, the Italians
nearly 5 per cent—and the Greeks, 10 per cent.
Instead of dragging down Europe, the eastern half of the continent is now a major contributor to growth and wealth all over
Europe. Indeed, the exports of the 15 countries of “old” Europe
to the 10 countries of “new” Europe doubled over the past decade. Britain’s export to the 10 countries that joined after 2004 rose
from €2.2bn in 1993 to €10bn in 2011; France’s, from €2.7bn to
€16bn, Germany’s from €15bn to €95bn. One occasionally hears
someone grumble that EU enlargement is one of the causes of the
current crisis. But the facts point to the opposite conclusion: without enlargement, economic turmoil might have come far earlier.
This is not to say that everything in Eastern Europe is going
well. But then, Eastern Europe cannot really be described anymore with a single word like “well” or “badly,” because Eastern
Europe is no longer a single entity.
Once upon a time, of course, it was. When correctly applied,
the term “Eastern Europe” is not a geographical term but a political term. It is also an expression that belongs to particular historical period. Properly speaking, it refers to the nations that were,
between 1945 and 1989, dominated by Soviet-style communism.
Often, it also included the nations that were part of the Soviet
Union after 1917 or 1918, at least those considered “European”
and not Asian. Either way, this was not a region which was ever
culturally or ethnically homogenous. Its inhabitants were Catholic, Greek-Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox,
Lutheran, Baptist, Jewish and Muslim. They spoke Slavic languages, Romance languages, Finno-Ugric languages, Baltic languages and German. They lived in cosmopolitan cities like Berlin,
and they lived in isolated rural communities without electricity or
running water.
Between 1945 and 1989, this otherwise disparate group of
European nations did, briefly, have quite a lot in common. Some
of the resemblance was superficial: posters with hammers and
sickles, May Day parades, identikit airlines that served poison
instead of coffee, for example.
But some of the resemblance was serious. They all had to contend with a legacy of bad economic decisions. The nationalisation
of industry, central planning and a state-dominated retail sector were universal. So were fixed prices, fixed exchange rates and
import-export controls. It is incorrect to assume, as many do, that
the fundamental nature of communist economics was so very different in Hungary, Slovakia, Armenia or Albania. It is a myth,
for example, that there was no agricultural collectivisation in
Poland. Larger Polish estates were converted to collective farms,
as I know because I own a house that used to be part of one.
But since the fall of the Berlin wall, the nations of what we
used to call Eastern Europe have taken very different directions. The economist Anders Åslund has written, accurately,
that despite some of the theoretical debates which took place at
the time, in practice there were really only three economic paths
which individual countries could take after the break-up of the
Soviet empire. They could, like the Poles, the Czechs, the
38
does eastern europe still exist?
Slovaks, the Hungarians and the Balts, choose the path of radical reform, leading to liberal democratic capitalism. They could,
like Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova or Kazakhstan, become
rent-seeking states, crony capitalist societies whose businessmen
make money not through economic competition but through a
symbiotic relationship with corrupt state bureaucrats. Or they
could, like Turkmenistan and Belarus, re-establish state despotism and swap the language of Marx for nationalism and brand
new cults of personality.
These aren’t clean divisions, of course. Romania and Bulgaria
started out with crony capitalism, made more liberal reforms over
time, but now are facing real opposition to the corrupt elites who
remain. Russia started out with some of the most radical reforms
in the region, but lapsed into crony capitalism when the reforms
stopped. Yugoslavia broke up into bits, each of which took a different path, and was dragged down by civil war.
But my point is that there wasn’t, and isn’t, anything else.
There is no state in the region which selected a happy path
between communism and capitalism, because there was no such
path. There was no Third Way. Those countries which attempted
a “kinder” and more “gradualist” transition simply got stuck with
more corruption. If their business elites learned how to make
money from controlled prices, export controls or state sales of
natural resources, and if those same business elites took over politics, then crony capitalism became permanent.
Few of the successes and few of the failures were either predictable or predicted. In 1990, nobody guessed that Estonia would
become a mini-tiger, or that Russia would be ruled by a cabal of
billionaires. Nobody imagined that Poland would be a more stable member of the European Union than Hungary. On the contrary, the predictions for Poland, a country with a spotty history
of democracy in the past and, at that time, one of the worst-performing economies in the region, were overwhelmingly negative.
One writer in Foreign Affairs predicted in 1990 that a rapid transition to capitalism would produce “instability” in Poland, largely
because, he implied, Polish democracy would soon lead to the
return to power of a 1930s-style right-wing mob.
As it turned out, a given country’s immediate pre-war history
was not necessarily a good guide to its post-1989 success. Nor was
its religion, its geography or its size. When examined closely, neither the alleged Catholic-Protestant divide nor the mythical “Asiatic” cult of the dictator stands up to scrutiny either. If religion is
so important, why has Catholic-Protestant Hungary lately fallen
into such a funk? If geography is so important, why has post-communist Mongolia become such a roaring economic success? The
once-profound divisions between culturally identical East and
West Germany cannot be explained away so simply either.
So what, then, was the source of success and failure? Why were
some able to carry out radical reforms while others were not? As it
turned out, there were a few historical experiences that mattered
a good deal, but they weren’t necessarily the ones that anybody
pointed to in 1990. It made a big difference, for example, whether
a country had been dominated by Soviet-style communism for
40 years or for 70 years. A clear line divides the region into two
camps: those countries which were part of the Soviet bloc from
1945, and those which joined in 1918. This line not only separates
the old Warsaw pact bloc from the Soviet Union, it also puts the
Baltic states and Western Ukraine on one side, Russia and Eastern Ukraine on the other. This was a line, in other words, between
societies that still contained people who had been brought up
with pre-Soviet values and those that did not.
prospect april 2013
There was also a difference between those countries that
had an active opposition movement in the 1970s and 1980s, or
at least an active and self-organising civil society, and those that
did not. Slovenly and inefficient dictators like General Jaruzelski
of Poland produced more active citizens than those, like Nicolae
Ceausescu, who were still using terror to suppress their critics in
1988 and 1989.
I
f I were to isolate the single most important factor in determining whether a given post-communist country succeeded or failed in its transition to liberal capitalism, in
fact, I would point to this: the existence, or absence, of an
alternative elite. And by alternative elite I mean something specific. Not just a few economists, but a larger class or group of
people who had worked together in the past, who had adopted an
alternative set of values and who, by 1989 or 1990, were at least
somewhat prepared for government.
In Poland, the alternative elite existed because memories of a
pre-communist past were recent enough to be real; because of a
national tradition of resistance, most recently against Nazi occupation but historically against the Russian and Prussian empires;
because the Polish economy was so full of holes that black marketeers—i.e. small capitalists—could operate freely; because borders were relatively open so that these black marketeers could
trade; because those relatively open borders meant that people
knew how life was lived in the western half of Europe; because
the Polish Catholic church was not destroyed, and thus it could
provide both an alternative source of values as well as a physical space for opposition to meet; because Cardinal Wojtyla was
elected Pope John Paul II, and because he came to Poland in 1979
and drew mass crowds; and so on. Similar lists could be made
for Hungary, East Germany, indeed for Lithuania and Estonia.
Some of these contributing factors might be connected to a coun-
prospect april 2013
does eastern europe still exist?
39
© Chris Niedenthal//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Polish shoppers crowd into a newly-opened supermarket to stock up
on desirable and expensive goods imported from Germany in 1990
try’s particular historical destiny, culture and location. But some
of them were accidents.
If the existence of an alternative elite was important, however, it was even more important for that alternative elite to have
a clear sense of direction. And in the case of the central Europeans, there was never any doubt about this direction. When working as a journalist in the region in 1989 and 1990, people told me
again and again, “we want to be normal.” And “normal” in 1989
and 1990, meant Western Europe: Western European democracy
and capitalism, a Western European welfare state, Western European political parties, Western European media. There was no
desire for experimentation: the question was “do we move faster
towards Europe?” or “do we move slower towards Europe?” Those
who moved faster avoided being stuck halfway.
Another important ingredient of success was the lack of natural resources. And here I am not referring merely to the famously
negative impact that oil and gas have on exchange rates, entrepreneurship and economic diversification. I am talking about the
enormously negative impact that natural resources have on political life in new democracies. If there are no oil wells to steal, then
no one will try to manipulate the political system so as to make it
easier to steal them. There are one or two “oligarchs” in Poland
and the Czech republic, mostly connected to the gas industry,
but there isn’t a whole class of them, dedicated to corrupting the
entire state in order to enrich themselves, as there are in Russia,
and to some extent in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
There are other ingredients of success, such as having a free
press, or even a free-ish press, which aspired to some higher
standards of reporting, and which could ensure a free flow of
reliable information. But this, of course, was a by-product of the
alternative elite and its samizdat publishing wing.
It was also very important that the new rulers of the new
democracies had, at least to some degree, thought about what
they wanted to do before they arrived. All through the 1980s,
Polish, Czech and Hungarian economists had been holding informal meetings to discuss how it might be possible, someday, to
privatise and decentralise their economies. At the time, these
were pipe dreams: all of the conversations were theoretical, and
this particular group of economists was thought to be somewhat
bizarre and perhaps rather fringe. But when they suddenly and
unexpectedly got the opportunity to carry out their plans, they
were ready. Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s first finance minister,
was one of them. Václav Klaus, until recently the Czech president,
was another. But again, I suspect that this was once again the byproduct of the fact that all of them had a clear sense of direction.
Where do we want to go? Western Europe. How do we want to get
there? Fast.
Much less important, as it turned out, were the precise techniques deployed. In particular, the exact method of privatisation, although this was a central topic of debate and discussion at
the time wasn’t in the end nearly as important as the speed with
which privatisation was conducted, and the perceived fairness of
the process. Voucher privatisation, stock market privatisation, all
of these could work, as long as they were conducted more or less
transparently. In retrospect, no one was happy with the way privatisation went in their country. But those who were most unhappy
were the ones who didn’t do it at all.
Perhaps, then, I could add one more element to the picture.
Whoever took charge, in 1990, had to understand the need for
a radical break with the past. Former communists, such as Ion
Iliescu, president of Romania in 1990 were generally worse at
understanding this than former opposition leaders, such as
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who was prime minister of Poland in that
same year. It was also very good if whoever took charge did so in
an atmosphere of serious crisis. Poland in 1990 seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. Hungary, by contrast, wasn’t that bad, and successive Hungarian governments have long felt that all they need
to do is make a few adjustments.
In practice, this means that Hungary has never been able to
shake its addiction to borrowing and budget deficits. Worse, Hungarians seem permanently sunk in perpetual gloom—though
maybe they were always like that. A close Hungarian friend of
mine, when confronted with the imminent eurozone crisis, metaphorically threw his hands up in the air. Why is it, he wailed, that
“every club we join immediately falls apart?”
But I’m not Hungarian, I’m American, and therefore I’m more
interested in the optimistic half of this story. Let’s step back for a
minute: it’s now 2013. Who would have thought, in 1989, that the
eastern half of Europe would survive a financial storm better than
the western half?
And who would imagine that I would be able to say that there
are now more lessons the west can learn from the east than vice
versa? A few months ago, I made this point at a conference in
Vienna, to a crowd which listened indulgently but unbelievingly,
and fired mocking questions at me afterwards. I’d established
the fact that Eastern Europe as a meaningful political concept
had disappeared, and that the nations of what used to be Eastern Europe have gone their separate ways. Everyone nodded, but
didn’t draw the obvious conclusions.
And no wonder: in Austria, as in the UK, the notion of “Eastern Europe” does live on as a kind of prejudice. When newspa-
does eastern europe still exist?
prospect april 2013
© David Turnley/CORBIS
40
Bucharest, December 1989: Romanians celebrate the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s government
pers use the expression “Eastern European,” it is usually code
for backward, primitive and possibly criminal. Murder suspects
are often described as having “Eastern European accents”—as if
speakers of a Latin language like Romanian or a Slavic language
like Bulgarian all sounded alike. There is also a tendency, especially in the UK, to think of Eastern Europeans as belonging to
one of two categories: Romanian and Bulgarian labourers, on the
one hand—whom we want to keep out of the country because they
might work harder than the natives—and on the other Russian
oligarchs, for whom all doors are opened and to whom everything
is for sale, and around whom are clustered dozens of British lawyers, bankers, real estate agents and other middlemen who see
the possibility of profits.
That kind of prejudice makes it more difficult for the western
half of the European continent to draw any lessons from what we
used to call “the East.” But it’s also foolishly short-sighted: within
Europe there are several countries that managed to turn around
utterly disastrous economies, evade the temptations of the farright and the far-left and which have carried out major structural
and political reforms during periods of political tumult. Better still, one or two of them recently repeated this feat for a second time, during one of the worst international banking crises in
recent memory.
It is worth looking closer at the very instructive comparison
between Latvia and Greece. In the wake of the 2008 crash, the
Latvian government slashed public spending, fired a third of its
civil servants and reduced salaries of those remaining while refusing to inflate the currency. The country’s GDP declined dramatically, falling 24 per cent in two years. But as Latvia’s economy
plunged in 2010 and 2011, there were no strikes, no protests, no
fury: the Latvians, who have been occupied by others for so long,
see economic viability as a matter of life and death, a key component of national sovereignty. Not only did the nation accept the
need for a change of course, it re-elected the prime minister who
imposed it. And then the recovery began. Latvian GDP is now
growing at more than 5 per cent, and the budget deficit has been
dramatically reduced.
In Greece, by contrast, relatively smaller budget cuts have led
to a GDP decline of 18 per cent since the crisis began. They’ve also
led to strikes and riots. The Greeks have voted their politicians
out of office more than once, shown increased support for a fascist party to compete with the already existing far-left parties and
thrown petrol bombs at banks. There are some technical explanations for the differences. Budget cuts were applied differently in
Greece and Latvia. The Latvians hit bureaucrats hard, but pensioners less so. Perhaps more importantly, they also made the biggest cuts right away. As they learned in 1990, drawing out a crisis
creates more pain over time.
The Greeks, by contrast, have made cuts slowly and never convinced either their public or their creditors of their commitment.
Bureaucrats are protected while pensioners suffer. Uncertainty
persists. People and capital continue to flee the country and
although the crisis has stabilised it has not been resolved.
There are also political differences. Latvian politicians did
explain to their fellow citizens the real reason for the cuts. They
reminded them of the need to preserve national sovereignty. By
contrast, none of the Greek parties has found a way to persuade
Greek voters of the need to change their way of thinking. Instead,
anti-German rhetoric is at an all-time high.
Why then don’t the Greeks instead try earnestly to learn from
the Latvians, as the Latvians once tried earnestly to learn from
the French or the British? I suspect the explanation lies, as I say,
prospect april 2013
does eastern europe still exist?
in the misleading term “Eastern Europe,” and in those connotations of backwardness and crime.
But the world changes in strange ways, and one of the strangest is the way in which that same exact term—“Eastern Europe”—
now seems to have a completely different connotation when used
in places like Tunisia or Libya. I’ve been to North Africa several
times since the Arab spring, and every time I’m there I find that
people there are extremely interested in me—but not because I’m
American, or because I’m a journalist. They are interested in me
because I have a longstanding connection to Poland, a country
which they regard as a role model.
D
oes Eastern Europe hold insights not only for Western Europe, but for other parts of the world, North
Africa in particular? The culture of Eastern Europe
and the culture of North Africa are not similar. There
is no alternative elite in North Africa of the kind which existed in
Poland and Hungary, and the majority does not believe that “normal” means “West European” (although a minority does, as I’ve
learned in both Libya and Tunisia). Although there were dissenters of many kinds in pre-revolutionary Egypt, they were largely
suppressed, except for those surrounding the mosque and the
football pitch. The result: the Muslim Brotherhood was the only
political “party” with any organisational capacity after 2011. And
Egyptian football clubs are the only organisations that can reliably be counted on to create major protests, as they have recently.
Yet neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the football fans
arrived in power with any clear ideas about Egypt’s economy.
There was no political or economic equivalent to the Polish and
Hungarian economists who were plotting the post-communist
future in the 1980s either there or in Libya, where the economy
had been largely organised for the personal benefit of the Gaddafi
family, and where a new leadership—drawn from the exile community and the leaders of the armed revolution—is now starting
to analyse the country, starting largely from scratch. In Tunisia,
the friends and relatives of the old ruling family are still thought
to pull most of the economic strings. Radical change is not in
their interests. In many Arab states the opportunity to start making changes arrived only in 2011 and the alternative elite is only
just now beginning to form. These revolutions, in other words,
have only just begun.
And yet there are similarities, parallels and common experiences worth exploring. Certainly I’ve found, while talking with
Tunisians, Egyptians and more extensively with Libyans that
they are extremely interested in the Polish experience, though
not because Poland’s past history resembles their own. They are
interested because the issues they face are so similar. Here’s an
example: in 1990 Polish journalists, like their North African counterparts, had to create newspapers and new radio stations from
scratch; had to privatise the state media; had to figure out how to
write libel laws that would neither penalise journalists too much
nor allow newspapers to publish irresponsibly; and had to write
new laws governing the airwaves as well as laws on media ownership, designed to prevent monopolies. The solutions they found
were probably quite different from those that the Libyans will
eventually discover, but the outlines of the various problems are
the same. As a result, when I was in Libya last year, I discovered
that the journalists all wanted to hear how the Poles had done it.
The Polish experience is also important in another sense. The
British, the French, the Italians and above all the Americans are
not necessarily the most popular nations in Egypt or Tunisia, and
41
the World Bank is not the most beloved of institutions. Not everyone wants to be told what do by the friends of their former dictator, or by their former colonists. It is much more palatable, and
indeed much more relevant, to take advice from a Czech or a Serbian who has already lived through a revolution and witnessed its
aftermath. Instead of producing a stern lecture about the freedom of the press, a Slovak can tell stories about what it’s really
like to be a journalist in a barren media landscape, where all of
the major television stations are still controlled by members of
the old regime and where freedom of information is a theory, not
a practice. Instead of a theoretical harangue about the rule of law,
they can explain how hard it is to get judges to think differently
about their relationship with politicians, and how hard it is to find
lawyers willing to relearn their trade from scratch.
Counter-intuitively, the lessons which the former Eastern
Europe can bring to North Africa are specific rather than general.
The Poles and the Slovaks can’t tell the Egyptians much that is
relevant about, say, the place of religion in contemporary politics.
Their experience is useful not as theory but as practice—here’s
how we wrote our new commercial code. Here’s how we reformed
our police force. Here’s how we helped teachers bring a new curriculum to schools.
Or, of course, here’s how we failed to deal adequately with
the policeman of the old regime, here’s how we failed to insure
that privatisation was fair, and here’s how we failed to prevent
our newspaper industry from being taken over by oil and gas oligarchs who push their personal and business agendas. Learning
about what didn’t work is sometimes as instructive as learning
about what did.
But before you are able to learn anything, you have to be willing to listen—and this leads to a paradox. In most of the world,
the transformation of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic,
Slovakia, the Baltic States and even Romania and Bulgaria are
regarded as examples of miraculous success: peaceful transitions
from dictatorship to democracy, examples to be studied and copied and learned from. This is an achievement which should be
placed at the centre of European foreign policy. At this time of
financial uncertainty, this a sliver of hope which Europe can offer
to the rest of the world: here are some paths to success.
If that doesn’t happen, and I’m afraid that it won’t, this is
because in Europe, the term “Eastern European” is still in use,
with all of the old connotations and all of the old prejudices
attached. So let’s abolish the term, or rather confine it to history.
Eastern Europe, in the old sense, no longer exists.
“I’m saving all my work until they force me to do it”
42
prospect april 2013
Apes and atheism
The scientist Frans de Waal has some entertaining stories about chimps but he is
too tolerant of religion
ac grayling
I
t was once regarded as a cardinal sin to anthropomorphise
in discussing non-human animal emotion. The danger
of “reading in” empathy, sympathy, concern and (perish
the thought!) altruism was so great, and the conservative
impulse to regard all behaviour as explicable solely in terms
of food-finding and gene-bequeathing so compelling, as to make
generations of ethologists shut their eyes to anything else. The person who, almost single-handedly, has effected a revolution in this
regard is the primatologist Frans de Waal, whose new book, The
Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates,
has just been published.
For de Waal there are no sharp differences between the great
apes and their human cousins in respect of emotions and intentions. Indeed he sees no difference, only a continuum, in the emotional lives of mammals in general; he freely cites empirical work
showing that rats and elephants also display concern for others
with varying degrees of obviousness. Chimpanzees and macaques
take this even further.
As a result it is now far more acceptable to talk of prosocial
behaviour among apes in the same emotional terms as we apply to
humans. In his writings de Waal goes the whole way, unapologetically describing the apes he studies as feeling grief, anxiety, resentment, jealousy, sympathy, concern, affection, need and regret. His
big point is that human morality is an outgrowth of the capacity
for empathy evident not just in other apes, but in mammals in
general; and with colleagues he explores the neurological basis of
empathy in the mirror neurons which enable mammals to represent—indeed, to literally experience themselves—what others are
experiencing.
Uncommonly among scientists, de Waal is knowledgeable
about philosophy, especially moral philosophy, which interests
him because of his thesis about the origin of morality in the mammalian capacity for empathy. Most scientists think of philosophy
in the form of its “postmodern” aberration, which is what they
encounter at its scientifically ignorant and posturing worst. De
Waal takes the better forms of philosophy seriously, and engages
with it well; his strictures on utilitarianism—the “greatest good
for the greatest number” theory—are both swingeing and apt, not
least in being convincingly backed by empirical observation of primate behaviour.
In the opening chapter of his 2005 book, Our Inner Ape: The
Best and Worst of Human Nature, de Waal tells the story of Kuni, a
bonobo chimp who cared for a starling that had stunned itself by
flying into the glass wall of her enclosure. She climbed a tree to lift
the bird up so that it could fly away; when it was unable to get far,
she watched over it until it recovered and flew off. In other anecdotes of cross-species empathy de Waal tells of whales trying to lift
AC Grayling is a philosopher. His latest book is “The God Argument: The
Case Against Religion and For Humanism” (Bloomsbury)
an unconscious human from the bottom of a tank, of chimps sympathising with injured people, and (of course) dogs reacting sensitively to the moods of their human companions.
It is hard to resist the implication that de Waal draws from this,
that empathy is essential to the social character of social animals,
and a more than sufficient evolutionary source of human morality. What else could underlie bonding, mutual awareness of needs,
sharing and co-operation, and the readiness with which group harmony is restored after outbursts of conflict, than recognition of the
emotional states of others? His early empirical work in primate
ethology was on competition, deception and conflict resolution
among chimpanzees (his first book Chimpanzee Politics, published
in 1982, reported the outcome), and it led naturally to this view
about the emotional continuum with human beings. The view was
highly controversial at first, but de Waal has been progressively
winning the argument ever since; and by extending his ethological
studies to include elephants he has secured the ground for saying
that empathy is the evolutionary basis of human morality.
Surveying the case he makes, it is now hard to see how his forerunners in ethology could have been so stiff-necked about “anthropomorphising,” given every other obvious continuity between
humans and the rest of mammalian nature. Indeed one does not
have to have spent years studying chimpanzees to see the point—
one has only to live with a dog.
De Waal’s new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, addresses a
matter that he says he had left insufficiently clear in earlier books.
The move from descriptions of primate co-operation and conflict
resolution to human morality might be a natural one for many
people, but to those for whom morality and religion are inextricably linked it is not so obvious. His book is intended to explain the
point to them.
The book is, however, an oddity. Besides the stated aim it is a
mixture of memoir, a repetition of de Waal’s now familiar views,
and a hostile discussion of the “new atheist” movement. The result
is a somewhat unfocused ramble, the main point of which, apart
from rehearsing the already-won “apes R us” argument, appears
to be to distance himself from the “new atheist” attack on religion. He is himself an atheist, he tells us; as an educated scientific Dutchman from secular Europe where religion is a minority if
sometimes noisy sport, what else could he be? But he does not like
the “new atheists,” and takes the view that religion, though false,
has a role, and should be left alone.
Why, he asks, are the “new atheists” evangelical about their
cause? “Why would atheists turn messianic?” He cannot see why
Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens,
Daniel Dennett and others attack religion and believers, and why
they robustly and even aggressively argue the case for atheism.
He can see why the advocates of religion do it; the more believers, he says, the more money they get. (Here, as a sympathiser, he
should perhaps recognise that some religionists sincerely believe
apes and atheism
43
© Cyril Ruoso/ JH Editorial/Minden Pictures/Corbis
prospect april 2013
A bonobo chimpanzee; there are no sharp differences between human and primate emotions, says Frans de Waal
they have the Truth that will save us, and might be trying to be
helpful; not all of them want money.)
Well: here is the answer to de Waal’s question. Some atheists
are evangelical because religious claims about the universe are
false, because children are brainwashed into the ancient superstitions of their parents and communities, because many religious
organisations and movements have been and continue to be antiscience, anti-gays and anti-women, because even if people are no
longer burned at the stake they are still stoned to death for adultery, murdered for being “witches” or abortion doctors, blown up
in large numbers for being Shias instead of Sunnis… One could
go on at considerable length about the divisions, conflicts, falsehoods, coercions, disruptions, miseries and harm done by religion,
though the list should be familiar; except, evidently, to de Waal.
He might respond with the usual points: on one side the char-
ity, art and solace inspired by religion, and on the other side Hitler and Stalin as examples of the crimes of atheism. And the usual
replies have wearily to be given: non-believers also engage in charity and make great art, and their love and care for others provides
solace too; and the totalitarianisms are just alternatives of the
great religions at their worst, possessing their own versions of the
One Truth to which all must bow down. (Incidentally, Hitler was
not an atheist—”Gott mit uns,” (God with us”) said the legend on
Wehrmacht belt buckles—and Stalin was educated in a seminary,
where evidently he picked up a few tricks.)
An anxiety to protect religion from invidious comparisons
with science leads de Waal to devote several pages to how fallible human scientists are, suffering confirmation and disconfirmation biases (that is, looking for the evidence that will support their
pet hypotheses while ignoring counter-evidence), gripped by
44
apes and atheism
professional jealousy and rivalry, quashing new findings that upset
their cherished successes in discovery, and the like. He then says,
“Science is a collective enterprise with rules of engagement that
allow the whole to make progress even if its parts drag their feet.”
And that surely is the essential point. By contrast, religion is a collective enterprise with rules of engagement designed to make no
progress and to punish those who wish to vote with their feet.
Interestingly, de Waal himself tells us why his view of religion is so benign, moving him to say that it is no more harmful
than the false beliefs we have in the cinema when we know that
Leonardo di Caprio does not drown on the Titanic but we still
shed a tear for the character he plays. The reason is that he was
brought up a Catholic. Oh those Catholics! How well they know
to sink the barb so deep that it cannot come out. Protestantism
has never achieved either the psychological finesse of Catholicism, or the total swamping effect of Islamic belief, in exerting a
hold over the human mind, other than by fear and bullying, which
are the instruments of Calvinism, or the barefaced promises of
wealth and success which bring the singing arm-wavers to today’s
megachurches.
He tells us that the Roman Catholic church never formally proscribed Darwin’s Origin of Species, as if this exculpated them from
every other effort made to resist the march of science, as for example in burning Giordano Bruno at the stake and forcing Galileo
to recant on pain of the same fate, both for accepting the Copernican geocentric view. De Waal insists that religion’s opponents
are wrong to say that if religion had its way, we would still believe
that the earth is flat—his reason being that the ancient Greeks
already knew that the earth is a sphere. What then does he make
of the fact that in 1615 Cardinal Bellarmine warned a scientifically
minded monk against the Copernican view, on the grounds that
Psalm 104 explicitly states that God has “fixed the foundations of
the earth that it might never be moved”?
If de Waal thinks this is all “mere history,” let him look around
at the creationists and intelligent design “theorists” trying to subvert the teaching of biology in today’s schools, opposing stem cell
research, preventing girls from going to school in some Muslim
countries, persecuting homosexuals—and so on again through
the familiar litany. And he still wonders why some atheists are
evangelical?
In any case he has the nature of the debate wrong. Atheists,
whether new or old (the “new” is a canard), are mostly not interested in pursuing the metaphysical debate about whether the universe contains or has outside it supernatural entities or agencies of
presents
Michael Sandel
in conversation with
AC Grayling
prospect april 2013
some kind—gods and goddesses, fairies and so forth. As Jonathan
Swift said and de Waal quotes, who expects to reason a person out
of something they were not reasoned into? Their militancy—for
such indeed it sometimes is, for the good reasons sketched above—
is about secularism, not metaphysics; it is about the place of the
religious voice in education and the public square where it is at
best an irrelevance and at worst a cancer.
For historical reasons the religious voice is vastly over-amplified in the public square —in England where 3 per cent of the population go regularly to services in the state-established Church,
26 bishops (plus a number of life peer ex-bishops) can sit in the
House of Lords, voting on legislation that affects the whole population (not just of England but the United Kingdom at large).
There are at least four religious programmes on the publicly
funded BBC every day. There are prayers before each day’s sittings
of both chambers of Parliament. An “act of worship” is statutorily
required in state schools each day. Again one could go dismayingly
on. This is one reason why children give up believing in the tooth
fairy and Father Christmas, but the equally contentless belief in
gods and goddesses (or at least one such) falters on, so reinforced
is it in these publicly supported ways.
Only think: the dates of English school and university spring
terms are set according to when Easter falls, and the date of Easter
is set by the phases of the moon—this in the 21st century! This
seemingly trivial point is the tip of an iceberg of the way that the
superstitions of our prehistoric ancestors still distort lives today.
Now, de Waal invokes the mirror neuron-generated capacities
inherited from our evolutionary mammalian ancestors to explain
the basis of morality, and with this I agree. But one would not want
the evolutionary history of all aspects of our psychology to entail
that, merely in virtue of that fact, they should all be left as they
are. A large part of moral reflection is devoted to overcoming or
tempering the evolved capacities for aggression, greed, concupiscence and partiality that disrupt rather than enhance community
living. These, too, are inherited along with capacities for empathy and concern and what these make possible in the creation of
social bonds.
The chimp and bonobo stories in de Waal’s writings are, as
always, entertaining and charming. These animals have an emotional life not too distant from humans, but free of the perversions and limitations of sexuality that have been forced upon us
by the religions de Waal defends. His stories make me think that
were reincarnation true, quite a few people would not mind being
reborn as bonobos.
Join Prospect for an evening of
debate between two of the world’s
leading thinkers as they discuss
markets and morals, the role of
religion in public life, the future
of liberal democracy
and what philosophy
can offer modern
politics
Wednesday 8th May, 7pm,
Ondaatje Theatre,
Royal Geographical Society
Prospect subscribers: £12.50
General ticket: £16.50
General ticket + 3 month
subscription to Prospect: £20
For more information and to
purchase tickets visit:
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/events
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13/03/2013 16:46:28
46
prospect april 2013
George of Arabia
Prospect discloses an exclusive account of one of Labour’s most colourful MPs
as he toured around the tinderbox
bronwen maddox
A
collection of parliamentary papers obtained by
Prospect and published here for the first time sheds
new light on Britain’s relationship with the Middle
East and western engagement in the region.
The 140 pages are the detailed notes of a threeweek trip by George Brown, MP and deputy leader of the Labour
party, as well as former foreign secretary, to meet political leaders across the Middle East and Gulf from 29th December 1969
to 19th January 1970. The account of his visit, which features
moments of high comedy (see over), transcribed with more vividness, incredulity and exasperation than any government scribe
would commit to paper today, includes reports of his conversations with Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel, Mohammed Reza
Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of
Egypt. In 23 days, Brown visited eight countries and attended
more than 100 meetings.
Part of the interest of the account is the freshness and intimacy of the conversations between the leaders and Brown. The
MP (who died in 1985) was not formally representing the UK on
the trip. But he was still a leading figure in the party, despite the
excessive drinking which had contributed to his exit from Harold
Wilson’s government (it was Brown’s agent who coined the
phrase “tired and emotional” as a euphemism for intoxication, to
describe his client’s state after a long flight). The accounts, which
fill out the more formal picture presented by government papers
already available under the old 30-year-release rule, appear to
owe some of their colour to the observations of Gwyn Morgan,
an irreverent Welshman and senior Labour party official who
accompanied Brown on the trip.
The deeper interest, however, is in the portrait of the region
in the final year of Britain’s role as the pre-eminent foreign influence. Prime minister Harold Wilson had declared in 1968 that
he would withdraw troops from “East of Suez” by 1971 (including Malaysia and Singapore), marking the effective end of Britain’s colonial ambitions in the region. In 1970, British officials still
enjoyed easy access at the highest levels across the region, but
were confronted with conflicts and disputes they had little power
to solve. Much is barely recognisable now; the extraordinary transformation of the Arab states by oil wealth had barely begun. Yet
many of the themes—and even the language—of Brown’s trip are
claustrophobically the same today, while the roots of the conflicts
which have proved intractable for four decades are clear.
The conversations were dominated by Israel’s 1967 annexation
of what is now called the West Bank and by the way that Britain
was hemmed in on all sides by expectations and recriminations.
In meeting after meeting, Brown was blamed by Arab ministers
for the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which supported the creation of
Bronwen Maddox is the editor of Prospect
“a national home for the Jewish people,” in Palestine, and at the
same time by Israelis for his advocacy of UN Security Council
Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the 1967 war, which called
for Israel’s withdrawal from all territories occupied in the conflict. At dinner with Golda Meir, “her attitude could be summarised in her own words as ‘not an inch of territory will I give up,’”
the account records.
Echoing the attempts of the British government to pick an
increasingly impossible path through the region’s allegiances,
Brown adroitly tried to appeal to all sides, citing his pedigree as
an oppressed Irishman to Palestinians in Ramallah, and in Israel,
the fact that his wife was Jewish. He commented throughout the
trip that he had “never ceased to oppose the existence of the state
of Israel at the time of its creation,” having argued instead for “a
federation of the whole of Palestine.” But, he added, “there came
a point in time when you had to come to terms with what existed.”
When Iraqi ministers began to quote the Balfour Declaration at
him, “Mr. Brown exploded and said that if one was going to quote
history one should at least quote it accurately,” the account reads.
“He went on to recite how in 1948 it was the Soviet Union and
America who had pressed for the creation of a Zionist state and
that Britain had not supported this.”
The Iraqi meetings were particularly antagonistic. Brown told
the minister of culture and information that, “‘So far as the British were concerned, and Europe in general, the public hanging of
Jews in Iraq had done tremendous damage to the image of Iraq.’
The minister looked most uncomfortable and replied, ‘I appreciate your advice as a friend, and I wonder if you could tell me how
we can obtain more help from the BBC Arabic Service.’ And on
that evasive note the meeting ended.”
More widely, Brown accused Arab leaders of a central part in
perpetuating the deadlock and suffering. “The [Palestinian] refugee problem could have been solved by now,” he told Iraq’s foreign minister, “and the reason it had not been solved was that
the Arabs wanted it to remain an essential part of the political
problem.” As a socialist, he said, he “regretted deeply the terrible
Report of Brown’s meeting with the shah of Iran, 13th January, 1970
george of arabia
47
© Associated Newspapers /Rex Features
prospect april 2013
George Brown: the former foreign secretary toured the region in the year before Britain pulled out its military forces
conditions under which the refugees existed.” According to the
record, the minister replied that, “It did not matter a hang about
the suffering of the Palestinian refugees. What had to be taken
into account was the fight for the homeland.”
Brown noted at one point that the mayor of Ramallah had told
him that if necessary, the Arabs could wait 100 years for a solution. But in a refugee camp he had met “some of the constituents of the mayor, poverty-stricken, scantily clad, hopeless and
in despair, and they, unlike the mayor, could not afford to wait a
hundred days let alone a hundred years.”
His frustration made few inroads. In words that have proved
prescient, the Kuwaiti minister of oil and finance responded that
“in his view there was no possibility of a short-term solution and
the dispute was likely to drag on for years and years.”
A second theme is the ambitions of Iran as a regional power,
with an eye to the imminent British military retreat from the
Gulf, not least from Bahrain, to which it laid claim. “Mr. Brown
began by saying how pleased he was to see the shah looking so
well,” the account runs. “In truth he looked a little bit drawn and
pale.”
The meeting at the Niavaran Palace, with its chandeliers, mirrored walls and 30ft high ceilings, was steeped in time-honoured
Iranian disdain for its Arab neighbours. Iranians, the shah said
drily, “considered themselves to be experts on the subject of the
Iraqis,” and “in everything that the Iraqis did, it was possible to
see the hand of the Soviet Union.” (His prime minister had previously told Brown that “the Shaikhdoms… were living in conditions of thirteenth century feudalism.”) The shah held that “the
trouble with the Arabs was that they could stir themselves up
into a frenzy by their own oratory and vituperation,” adding that
“this was what committed President Nasser to the Six Day War
[in 1967].” The shah, reinstated to power in 1953 by the US with
Meeting Nasser in Cairo, 4th January, 1970
The president of Iraq, in Baghdad, 11th January, 1970
48
george of arabia
prospect april 2013
British help, was direct about the ties with Britain. “Iran did not
hoard hard money,” the shah said. “She spent it and any increase
in revenue from oil would almost certainly be spent on arms purchases from Britain.”
A third theme is the fear of Soviet-backed socialism and for the
region to be a proxy for the cold war. “It was clear that the Bahrainis considered Nasser an instrument of the Soviet Union,” the
account says. Nasser, in a meeting full of sparring, warned Brown
that it was “really quite dangerous” to visit the British ships
trapped in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal (see below).
The coup in Libya of 1st September, 1969, led by Muammar
Gaddafi, then a 27-year-old army captain, runs as a thread of
nervousness through many of the meetings. Shaikh Ahmad, foreign minister of Kuwait, offered that he had met the leaders of the
Libyan revolution at the recent summit in Rabat, “and they were
mere boys,” implying that they would not last.
That, at least, proved a gross misjudgement of the ability of
the region’s leaders to hold on to power and to keep their countries and their conflicts immobilised in many ways—the reason
why this account is still so resonant today.
At the beginning of the war between Israel and the combined forces of
the United Arab Republic (now Egypt), Jordan and Syria in June
1967, the UAR sank ships at both ends of the Suez Canal. That blocked
the waterway and caught 14 ships travelling north through it at the
time. The ships, four of them British, were trapped in the Great Bitter Lake section of the canal, and were to remain there until 1975. In
the following passage (transcribed with the original punctuation), one
bank of the lake is described as belonging to Israel, which took the Sinai
peninsula during the war.
get Mr. Challis of the B.B.C. to agree that there was really no story
in what had happened that morning.
After another five minutes Mr. Brown issued a final ultimatum
and said that if there were no car in ten minutes he was going to
hold a press conference, announce the reasons for his departure
and get the next plane out of Cairo. Mr. El Feki became even more
agitated when Mr. Brown instructed Miss Elliott to ring up the
Embassy and find out the time of the next plane out of Cairo. Miss
Elliott left the room to give the impression that she was making
this call.
To Mr. El Feki’s great relief, two cars appeared within five minutes and the party departed at 8.30 a.m. Mr. El Feki telephoned
Miss Elliott in a state of agitation and asked her to cancel her
request to the British Embassy at once for fear of the press hearing of it. Miss Elliott promised she would do this although the call
had in fact never been made in the first place.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Morgan went in one car and Mr. Challis followed in his own car, chuckling at his story. Mr. Brown prophesied more disaster to come, probably in the shape of a puncture at
some check-point, before they reached their destination. For the
only time in his life Mr. Morgan was forced to concede that Mr.
Brown really did have divine powers. At the very first check-point
on the outskirts of Cairo the car in which they were travelling had
a puncture.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Morgan transferred to the car in which Mr.
Challis was travelling and the immaculate Major Helmi removed
the chauffeur of the second car and took over the wheel himself,
still not using his gloves. Then began two and a quarter hours of
absolute nightmare driving, with a total disregard for everything
else on the road from large Sam missile trailers to children, dogs
and chicken[s]. He drove at a speed which hardly ever went below
100 kph. One magnificent dog was killed without the flicker of an
eyelid and thousands of Egyptians must have had their lives considerably reduced by fright.
Eventually they reached the Great Bitter Lake after passing through very heavily guarded check-points and battalions of
troops at battle stations in the battle area of the Ismailia side of the
Great Bitter Lake.
The party got on to one of the Canal launches and were taken
on board the S.S. Port Invercargil where all the British crew members, both from Invercargil and the Scottish Star, were gathered.
A boat was sent round to collect the captains of the other ships in
the Lake, American, Czech, Polish and West German. There was
a tremendously enthusiastic reception, very enjoyable discussion
and buffet lunch was served.
“At 7.30 a.m. Major Helmi, the escort from the Ministry of War,
turned up at Shepheards Hotel [in Cairo], dressed immaculately
and holding a pair of leather gloves, which he certainly never wore
at any time during the day. Although Major Helmi had his gloves
he did not have a car. Apparently he was under the impression that
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs were providing the cars which the
party had been using on previous days, whilst the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was under the impression that the Ministry of War
were providing a military car.
Mr. Brown was most agitated at this delay. Mr. El Feki was
roused from his bed to which he had retired only three hours earlier after having met Dr. Horace King, Speaker of the House of
Commons, who had arrived on a delayed flight in the early hours
of the morning. Mr. El Feki tried to sort out what was by this time
taking on, at least in Mr. Brown’s public utterances, the shape of a
plot to sabotage the visit to the Bitter Lake. Mr. El Feki appeared
dishevelled and slightly dopey from sleeping tablets, but with
remarkable speed when informed by Mr. Morgan that Mr. Brown
was actually ringing President Nasser’s office. The unfortunate
Major Helmi had retired in the face of a torrent of abuse from Mr.
Brown to make innumerable telephone calls to complement the
innumerable telephone calls which were being made from a different telephone box by Mr. El Feki. Mr. Roland Challis, the B.B.C.
correspondent resident in Cairo who had been given permission
to accompany the party to Bitter Lake, was despatched to fetch
his car which Mr. Brown threatened to get into and drive down
towards the Suez Canal, daring anybody to stop him.
Eventually Mr. Brown retired to his room to await the outcome of all this frantic activity. Mr. El Feki opened the door of
Mr. Brown’s suite and asked for a whisky at 8.15 in the morning.
Everyone there adjourned to the balcony overlooking the Nile
where Mr. El Feki attempted to get Mr. Brown to agree that in
a situation like this one had to be philosophical. In between
attempts to assure Mr. Brown that there was no plot to prevent
him from visiting the Bitter Lake, Mr. El Feki was doing his best to
george of arabia
49
© getty images
prospect april 2013
There then arrived two Egyptians, one was the Director of the
Canal Shipping Agency, Mr. Sammy Samia. Mr. Brown asked the
Captain of the Ship, Captain Hart, whether there were any problems. The Captain replied in the affirmative, saying that the Egyptians were now imposing a £25 landing fee on every individual
who landed on the Egyptian side of the Lake, and this made it
impossible for people to go to Cairo. Mr. Samia denied that such
a charge existed. Mr. Brown said that whether it existed or not, he
was only concerned with what happened from that moment on
and promptly produced a form of agreement that there should be
no such fee in the future which Mr. Samia and Mr. Brown formally
sealed. Captain Hart was able to announce to the other Captains
that this charge was now being removed.
The only other request from the officers was that Mr. Brown,
when he went to Israel, should try to persuade the Israelis to
allow the ships to recover three launches that had broken away
and drifted to the Israel bank. Without these launches, communications between the ships were extremely difficult. Mr. Brown
agreed to do his best.
The ship’s crew also urged Mr. Brown to appreciate how useless they felt their continued occupation of the ships to be. Mr.
Brown said he was not sure that the Companies would necessarily
be in agreement with all the crews but he sympathised with them a
great deal. (Mr. Brown did in fact raise this matter with President
Nasser at his second meeting with him and the President said that
the crews could leave at any time.)
On arrival at the ships Mr. Brown had been greeted by hooters
of both the British and Polish ships sounding the victory sign. On
departure the crews sang “For he’s a jolly good fellow” and there
were genuine signs of deep appreciation for Mr. Brown’s efforts to
visit the ships. Mr. Brown was told that the British Embassy had
not sent a representative since June and the Ambassador himself
had never been. The crew were particularly peeved by the lack
of visit at Christmas time from a representative of the British
Embassy, whereas visits had been made by the French and Polish
Ambassadors respectively. In this regard Mr. Brown’s visit lifted
British divers on a ship sunk in the Suez Canal during the 1967 war
morale considerably and enabled the crew to feel a little more
capable of holding their own with the ships of other nations.
By this time it was quite clear that the party would have to
move very speedily to get to Cairo in time for the 5pm meeting
with President Nasser. Already a lunch appointment in Cairo with
Mr. Haikal and Mr. Arafat, the leader of Al Fatah, had had to be
cancelled.
Mr. Brown insisted that the unfortunate but still immaculate
Major Helmi should try to get a helicopter to fly the party back
to Cairo. Mr. Challis, the B.B.C. correspondent, was most sceptical, pointing out that in his six months in the UAR he had never
seen a helicopter in the sky, let alone been inside one. Mr. Brown
merely said “If you want to ride by helicopter Brother, stick with
me. If you want to go back with the Mad Major, get into the car
and go.” Mr. Challis decided to sit it out. After a great deal of cajoling and bullying and telephone calls culminating in one to the
Minister of War himself, a helicopter was promised. The party
was driven about 20 miles towards the Ismailia road and in the village of Abou Hesseir were diverted from the main road onto a military airfield where a large helicopter was waiting on the tarmac
with a crew lined up to receive Mr. Brown. The Air Commodore
who was in charge of the whole station received the party and Mr.
Brown, Mr. Morgan and a palpably stupefied Mr. Challis got on
board what turned out to be the luxuriously furnished helicopter
of President Nasser.
They flew very low under radar to the old Cairo Airport. Mr.
Brown was allowed to fly the helicopter for a matter of seconds,
much to the consternation of Mr. Morgan and Mr. Challis. They
landed safely and returned to the Hotel. Mr. Brown made his
appointment with President Nasser.”
To read the 140 page account of George Brown’s trip to
the Middle East, go to www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
50
prospect april 2013
Russians once lived here
Drink is emptying the country
oliver bullough
D
riving towards the Russian village of Yeski on
Christmas Eve was like entering a 19th-century
painting. The unscarred snow stretched away to
dense walls of conifers. Log houses clustered in the
village centre. And, all the time, on the horizon,
the strong vertical of the church bell tower gave a focus to the
composition.
If you wanted to invent a landscape that told viewers that they
were in Russia, in an eternal Russia of smallholders and snow and
Orthodox Christianity, this would be it. It is an illusion, however.
The log houses are empty, their gardens without footsteps and
their chimneys without smoke. The forest is advancing on the
fields in armies of saplings. The church windows gape empty, and
its onion domes are shattered.
Yeski’s church is one of thousands built during Russia’s period
of imperial glory, designed to lift the hearts of the peasants and
trumpet the wealth of their lords.
Now, its crumbling walls broadcast a different message, dire
tidings of the country’s collapse. Only a run of scaffolding beside
the bell tower hints that someone is at least trying to keep this
church, and indeed the whole village, from collapsing altogether.
In the 1980s, Yeski’s population numbered more than 2,000.
It had three schools, hundreds of cattle and a collective farm.
Now, it is home to 78 people, of whom almost half are pensioners. There are a couple of dozen cows. Any children here—I saw
none—are bussed out for their education.
“Most people are old, and families are rare; there are five of
them here. There is no future, no work,” said Galina Antoshkina,
60, as we walked through the snow on her way to open the village shop.
“Many people died, many people left. We are an ancient village, older than Moscow, but in five years time we’ll be gone. Yeski
will exist only as a memory.”
I did not mention it to Antoshkina but, by the standard of Russian villages, Yeski is pretty well off. It is in the Tver region and
within an easy day’s drive of Moscow, so in the summer it will
throng with holidaying Muscovites who have bought its houses
as second homes.
Its permanent population of 78 is healthy compared to the
20,000 Russian villages that were abandoned altogether between
1991 and 2010. Of the 133,000 still-inhabited villages in Russia,
more than 80,000 had fewer than 100 inhabitants when the census-takers called. Of those, 35,000 others were home to fewer than
10 people, and will be dead too when the pensioners who live there
succumb to old age and isolation.
Russia’s rural depopulation is part of a broader demographic
crisis whose consequences are so enormous that they are almost
Oliver Bullough’s new book “The Last Man in Russia” will be published on
4th April by Allen Lane
impossible to grasp. Beginning in the 1960s, life expectancy
began to fall, while around the same time the birth rate dropped
below the level needed to sustain the population. The problems
accelerated after 1991, when the Soviet collapse destroyed much
of the country’s economy, but they long pre-date it.
According to official figures, deaths have exceeded births in
Russia by 13m since 1992. There are still 143m people in Russia—
a drop of 4m from the peak—but that total would not be nearly so
high had large numbers of people from other ex-Soviet states not
immigrated to escape the still-worse situation elsewhere.
President Vladimir Putin has declared that it is his goal to stabilise the population at present levels, then gradually increase
it once more. However, Demoscope Weekly, the respected and
independent Russian demographic research organisation, predicts that by even the most optimistic—and, thus, least likely—
predictions Russia cannot have more than 136m people by 2025,
and 128m by 2050. The US Census Bureau forecasts that Russia
will be home to just 109m people by the middle of the century,
meaning that the faded superpower’s population will be smaller
than that of Uganda.
This affects every aspect of public life. Russian military strategy—not least when fighting the Germans during the second
world war—has been forever based on the assumption that it has
unlimited manpower. It no longer does.
We in Britain agonise about having only 3.2 people of working age to support every pensioner, but Russia will have just two
working-age adults per pensioner by 2026.
A woman was waiting outside the two-storey log-built shop as
Antoshkina and I walked up. While Antoshkina fumbled with
the keys, the woman leaned forward and vomited quietly into
the snow, then straightened up, panted, leaned over and vomited again, this time noisily and at length. When Antoshkina had
the door open, the woman bought a 70cl bottle of vodka and
walked out again, without saying a word.
The shop’s fridge held just four cans of Fanta, a can of
7-Up and some pickled mushrooms, but its shelves
held 15 bottles of vodka, four of brandy, nine of
wine and two of the sparkling wine Russians
call shampanskoye. With the woman
gone, Antoshkina looked
51
russians once lived here
at me and shrugged.
“We don’t live, we survive,” she said.
Russians have, of course, always been famous for liking their
vodka. In pre-revolutionary villages drinking was the major form
of entertainment, but it was restricted by the drinkers’ spending
power. Peasants got rich, so they got drunk, so they got poor, so
they got sober.
In the latter Soviet years, when people had salaries and no
one much minded whether they worked or not, such limits fell
away. The production of spirits trebled between 1940 and 1980,
and the consumption of all alcoholic drinks increased eightfold.
The average Russian now drinks three times the volume of spirits drunk by a German, and five times that of a Portuguese (and
that excludes consumption of moonshine, which does not make
the statistics).
Conspiracy theorists speculate that the Soviet state liked a
drunken population, since this made it easier to control. That
may be true, and it is certainly the case that the government was
hooked on the revenue from alcohol as much as
the population was hooked on the oblivion it gave.
Taxes earned from drink were greater than the
defence budget by the early 1970s.
The trouble was, of course, that the same
drinking that was financing the government
was destroying the population. In 1965, the
first year for which the Russian government presents statistics, 119,170 Russians died from “external causes,” the
majority of which are connected to
alcohol (car crashes, murder, suicide, poisoning, drowning). By
1995, that number had almost
tripled. In 1965, 419,752 Russians died from problems
with their cardiovascular system, which
are
overwhelmingly caused by
drinking and
smok-
ing. By 1995, that number had more than doubled.
Russia, therefore, doesn’t have so much a population problem as a vodka problem. And that is a symptom of something
very troubling. When a nation decides to drink itself to oblivion,
it has clearly—through civil war, repression, collectivisation, war,
surveillance and exploitation—been abused past the limits of
endurance.
Mikhail Gorbachev is the only national leader to have made
an effort to rid the country of this plague. He severely restricted
access to alcohol, grubbing up vineyards and closing shops. Average life expectancy and the birth rate jumped, but Russians were
furious and few policies did so much to undermine his popularity.
Within seven years he was dethroned, his country had vanished
and public health worsened catastrophically.
Politicians attached to their careers have since been careful
not to follow his lead. They focus instead on spending their petrodollars on vanity projects like the Sochi Winter Olympics, rather
than trying to wean the nation off its favourite tipple. Vodka is
available everywhere. The nearest town to Yeski is Bezhetsk (its
population has fallen from 28,500 to 24,500 in the last decade)
where one ordinary food shop had two three-metre long shelves
full of vodka, another of brandy, another of assorted spirits,
another of wine and a fridge full of beer. It had no bread.
Politicians can point to recent improvements in the demographic picture to justify inaction. The relative prosperity
brought by high oil prices and Putin’s increases in pensions and
public salaries have helped push life expectancy to almost 69
years, still a little lower than Gorbachev’s achievement, but a
post-Soviet high nonetheless (the average Briton, for comparison, can expect to live more than 80 years).
An echo from the baby boom of the hope-filled and alcohollimited 1980s has pushed birth numbers up too (helped by Putin’s
government increasing payments for a second child), and deaths
outnumbered births last year by a mere 2,500—the best figure in
decades. But the damage has been done, the cohort about to give
birth to the next generation is half the size of the one before it, and
the Russian population is set on a path of inexorable contraction.
This slow decline of the Russian nation is a problem not only
for Russia’s military, budget and economy but also for anyone
who loves Russia and its culture. And among those people is Svetlana Melnikova, the woman responsible for the scaffolding on
Yeski’s church.
A formidable great-grandmother with a torrent of white hair,
an angora head scarf and a black astrakhan coat, she invited me
along on a tour of the ruined churches of the Tver region, hoping
to show me how saving churches would help save the country.
The church at Yeski: between 1991 and 2010,
20,000 Russian villages were abandoned
all pictures © oliver bullough
prospect april 2013
52
russians once lived here
prospect april 2013
Left: Antoshkina in the village shop. “We don’t live. We survive.” Middle: Father Gennady takes confession on Christmas Day at Poreche.
The fate of Russian churches has been a common concern for
patriots since at least the 1970s. Artist Ilya Glazunov, who specialises in medieval battle scenes and other glorious national epics
and who is patronised by Russians from Putin down, depicts the
miseries of the country’s present via its derelict churches, the sky
visible through their domes.
Ironically, under the atheist Soviet system, churches that were
not demolished were well preserved. They were by far the bestmade buildings for miles around and were used as storehouses,
libraries or barns, often with minimal alteration, meaning many
of their frescoes survived barely scathed. It was the closure of
the collective farms that sealed their fate, since it took away any
incentive to maintain them, which is a shortcut to collapse in the
extreme Russian climate.
Melnikova sees the country’s failure to do anything to protect its heritage as symbolic of the hypocrisy and corruption of
a generation that professes higher ideals but is interested only
in money.
“Everyone now believes in God, they drive past in their jeeps
and cross themselves. But they don’t give a rouble. The patriarchate does not give anything to old churches. If you open them,
you have to pay a salary for a priest,” she said.
Thousands of village churches—the precise number is
unknown—are in a parlous state, so Melnikova has no illusions
she alone can solve the problem. But, with the kind of determination shown by her dissident friends in the 1970s, she sees doing
something as always better than doing nothing.
“When the churches are in ruins, they are used as public toilets, young people drink beer in them. But when we restore them,
the atmosphere changes. There is so much depression in the villages and when you repair the most beautiful building you give
the village a centre,” she said.
Russians, in Melnikova’s clear-eyed view, are disorientated,
bewildered and disenfranchised. They are exploited by foreigners
and betrayed by their compatriots. They have lost control of their
own destiny and sunk into gloom as a result. Therefore, rather in
the way you might advise a depressive to take up swimming just
to get them out of the house, she wants to mobilise Russians to
restore churches.
“Russians need a higher goal. They will not live for sausage
alone, for material things. That doesn’t interest them. The Soviet
government understood this. They gave the youth a higher duty,
the construction of communism. But this new government does
not understand it. It just wants money. A Russian needs a spiritual idea, not a material one,” she said.
“Diagnoses like ‘alcoholism’ no
longer reflect the problem.
What is going on today is more
aptly described as ‘pervasive
human degradation’”
“The salvation of village churches could be a higher ideal for
young people. They happily come to our volunteer days to work.
What else have they got to do? They drink, they sit around, they
take drugs, they have nothing. They are bored.”
She is not alone in her gloomy assessment of the country’s
young. According to a 2011 Unicef study, some 20 per cent of
young Russians suffer from depression compared to an average
of 5 per cent in western countries. The United Nations agency
said 45 per cent of girls and 27 per cent of boys consider suicide.
The situation is, if anything, yet more dreadful in rural areas.
Collective farms could have become joint stock companies after
1991 but lacked capital and expertise. Subsidies are almost nonexistent compared to those available in western countries and
prospect april 2013
russians once lived here
53
Right: Svetlana Melnikova of the Village Church Organisation. “When the churches are in ruins, they are used as public toilets”
more than half the farmers who launched private enterprises
have given up.
In 1974, one in eight rural children were listed as having a congenital defect, most often because of alcohol in utero, according to anthropologists Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova and Ilya
Zaslavsky, but now the picture is far worse.
In their book The End of Peasantry?, published in 2006, they
write: “The situation is apparently past the point when diagnoses like ‘drinking,’ ‘binge drinking,’ and perhaps even ‘alcoholism’ reflect the true meaning of the problem. What is going on
today is more aptly described as ‘pervasive human degradation,’
‘profound degeneration of a genetic pool,’ and so on. While such
qualifications may sound harsh, they are not off the mark at all.”
It is this slide towards extinction that Melnikova wants to counter. She is herself not a regular churchgoer but believes church
buildings and services provide centres for communities that are
all but irreplaceable.
Her Village Church Organisation has put a roof on the Yeski
church, and will put in windows this year, keeping out the weather
until a time comes when a full restoration is affordable. The operation will cost around £50,000. That would be small change for
the Russian state, which is dropping £6.5bn on the Sochi Olympics—but is a massive expense for a shoestring group like hers
which relies on donations and paid restoration jobs to finance its
campaign.
And is it worth it?
“Yes, it’s good what she’s doing,” said Antoshkina, the shopkeeper. “She’s trying to help, and if the church is restored maybe
people will come back to the village and there’ll be work again.”
A glimpse of the future Melnikova is plotting for Yeski came
the next day, Christmas Day, in the still more remote village of
Poreche, which somehow kept its church open and functioning
throughout the Soviet years. The ceiling might have been marbled with damp but the wood stoves kept out the cold, candles
blazed beneath the icons, and a couple of dozen parishioners were
present for the service and to receive communion and counsel
from Father Gennady.
Outside, a car had turned up to sell sausage to the faithful and
a pair of friendly dogs begged scraps from anyone who bought
some. In its unassuming way, Poreche looked warm and welcoming, like a community, while Yeski looked like a nuclear winter
populated only by the alien skeletons of giant hogweed.
And even if nothing comes of her work, and the 50 villages
where she and her volunteers have struggled vanish anyway, at
least the churches will remain.
“These are monuments of Russian culture,” she said. “Look at
the pyramids, and at Rome. They are still there and we need to do
the same too. When the barbarians come, at least this way they
will know Russians once lived here.”
54
prospect april 2013
Science
Delusions of a “besotted technophile”
Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 scientists will have created conscious computers. Rubbish, says
Raymond Tallis
R
eaders of How to Create a
Mind: The Secret of Human
Thought Revealed must be
able to handle disappointment, although after running the gauntlet of a jacket plastered
with plaudits for the author—“worldrenowned inventor, thinker and futurist” and a “restless genius”—they may be
inclined to blame themselves. But they
shouldn’t. The recipe for minds is withheld and human thought can rest in the
knowledge that its secret is safe. Safer,
I would venture, than it was before Ray
Kurzweil started writing this book.
Conceptual confusion runs through
its 300 pages like “BRIGHTON ROCK”
through Brighton rock, in part because of
Kurzweil’s lackadaisical engagement with
the sophisticated, if inconclusive, literature on the philosophy of mind of the last
50 years. He seems only dimly aware, for
example, that the computational theory of
the mind—central to his thinking—has been
exposed to pretty savage criticism. One can’t
help wondering whether, if Kurzweil had not
established his reputation as an electronic
engineer and as the progenitor of the much
discussed notion of “the Singularity,” this
book would have got past the slush pile.
There is no doubt about his engineering credentials. In the 1980s and 1990s,
Kurzweil led a team which developed techniques—“hierarchical hidden Markov models”—that enabled machine recognition of
voices and natural language processing,
and are now exploited in all sorts of devices
such as car navigation systems you can talk
to and Google Voice Search, where you can
speak your queries instead of typing them.
His success in this area inspired him to turn
an electronic engineer’s gaze on his own species and the future it seemed to be making
for itself. Most famously, in The Singularity
is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, he
joined a long line of prophets, including distinguished thinkers such as Samuel Butler,
who have predicted a time when machines
would be so powerful they would leave our
current intellectual capacities for dead. For
Kurzweil, the combination of ever more powerful computing techniques, robotics, genetics, neuroscience and nanotechnology will
enable us to build superbrains that are non-
biological in origin and no longer subject to
the constraints the flesh is heir to. Immortality could be on the cards, not only through
re-programming our bodies and reversing
ageing but by “uploading” our minds on to
a computer and storing our entire memory,
personality, skills, and history safely out of
reach of decay and death.
Creating a mind, according to Kurzweil,
will require us to manufacture an artificial
neocortex, replicating the functions of that
part of the brain where, so the orthodoxy
goes, our thoughts and the upper storeys of
human consciousness are located. The replica will be much more powerful than the
original because it will utilise lightning-fast
electronic circuits rather than the comparatively sluggish biological ones nature has
served up. In order to do this, of course, it is
necessary to understand how the originals
work. Luckily, this has been cracked already.
For, by a happy coincidence, the neocortex is a device for recognising patterns—
hence Kurzweil’s “pattern recognition
theory of mind” (PRTM)—just like the voice
recognition software he invented so many
years ago, which, also like our brain, can be
trained by exposure to experience. The patterns detected by brains and software are
hierarchical, thereby economically capturing what Kurzweil believes to be the intrinsically hierarchical nature of the patterns in
the universe. Building on the work of Swiss
neuroscientist Herny Markram, he speculates that the pattern recognition modules
in the neocortex are composed of about 100
neurons and these are Lego-like “building
blocks of knowledge for perception... [The]
acquisition of memories involves the combination of these building blocks into complex
constructs.” These, according to Kurzweil,
are “patterns organised as lists” which will
come as a surprise to many psychologists for
whom memory is, as John McCrone has put
it, “a living network of understanding rather
than a dormant warehouse of facts.”
He develops PRTM in some detail, flitting
back and forth between software engineering
and neuroscience, but this does not disguise
the fundamental flaws in his manner of talking about brains, minds and computers. He
is a professor of transferred epithets. In common with countless others, Kurzweil talks
about the brain, and even small parts of it, as
if it were a person, with small assemblies “recognising” or “predicting” patterns, “considering their inputs” and forming “expectations”;
he even writes about individual spindle cells
being “involved” in “moral judgements.” This
is not problematic for Kurzweil since he sees
mind-like stuff everywhere: the world itself
“is based on information”; even individual
carbon atoms are capable of creating “rich
information structures.” So beneath the surface differences, persons, minds, brains and
computers are all busy doing the same things:
information processing, choosing between
alternatives, guiding outputs, and so on. A
dizzying circulation of terms between these
items creates the illusion that the mind-brain
barrier has been broken down so that it is fine
to talk about the brain sometimes as a computer and sometimes as a person.
A
bout two-thirds of the way through
his book, Kurzweil declares that
“a mind is a brain that is conscious” and acknowledges that
consciousness is “one philosophical [sic] difference between human brains and contemporary software programs.” This reminder of
problems of consciousness, in particular its
puzzling association with certain living creatures, sends him on a random walk that takes
in the ethics of abortion, “the western-eastern divide on consciousness and the physical
world,” Steven Wolfram’s cellular automata
and quantum mechanics.
Very little of this is to the point and his
engagement with bits of contemporary philosophy of mind is unfortunate. To describe
Wittgenstein as “a major architect” of existentialism on the strength of the supposed
influence of Philosophical Investigations on the
existentialists is a novel take on the history of
ideas. (For the record, there is little evidence
that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger or
Sartre accessed Wittgenstein’s unpublished
or even unwritten thoughts by pre-cognition.) His elementary and almost insultingly
perfunctory treatments of the question of
“free will” and “identity” are mercifully brief.
After a half-hearted discussion of
“qualia”—those fundamental constituents of
consciousness such as the feeling of warmth,
the experience of redness, the taste of wine,
that stubbornly resist being assimilated into
the world-picture of objective physical sci-
prospect april 2013
55
science & technology
The month
ahead
ANJANA AHUJA
© Scott Fensome/age fotostock/SuperStock
Mark Walport will be nobody’s fool
as he becomes the government’s chief
scientific adviser on 1st April. Walport,
who headed the Wellcome Trust for a
decade and succeeds John Beddington,
wants a starring role for scientific evidence in policymaking. He has cited the
environment and the ageing population
as areas he plans to get stuck into. He’ll
be setting out his stall at a conference at
the Royal Society on 18th April, called
“Future directions for scientific advice
in Whitehall.”
Organised by Cambridge University’s Centre for Science and Policy (www.
casp.cam.ac.uk), it will feature speakers from the department for environment, food and rural affairs, and from
the government’s “nudge unit” (the
Behavioural Insights Team). It will also
discuss whether civil service reform will
lead to a more comfortable relationship
between science and government.
Creating a mind: we are on our way to building artificial “superbrains,” claims Kurzweil
ence—he seems to lose interest in consciousness. This may be because, he concludes,
“the question as to whether or not an entity
is conscious is... not a scientific one.” Indeed,
he asserts that “when machines do succeed
in being convincing when they speak of their
qualia and conscious experiences, they will
indeed constitute conscious persons.” This
would seem to licence the absurd conclusion that, if you are fooled into believing a
machine is conscious, that machine is aware
and indeed self-aware as people are. The wearisome familiarity of Kurzweil’s confusions
is occasionally alleviated by amusement at
his vanity. A 146-page paper he published in
2010 found, according to his own estimate,
that no less than 86 per cent of the 147 predictions he made in the 1990s have proved “correct” or “essentially correct”. And he assures
us that according to “one of my key (and consistent) predictions” (he’s said it more than
once so it must be true) our first encounter
with a non-biological entity able to deceive us
into thinking it is conscious will take place in
2029. Which month, he does not say.
Many of Kurzweil’s predictions are based
on his “Law of Accelerating Returns”.
According to this, technical capabilities such
as supercomputing power and the spatial
resolution of brain imaging will continue to
grow at their present exponential rate. This
will underpin ever more successful attempts
to understand and replicate the functions
of the human brain in order “to expand our
tool kit of techniques to create intelligent
systems.” The future lies with “self-organising, hierarchical recognisers of invariant selfassociative patterns with redundancy and
up-and-down predictions.”
This may or may not turn out to be the
case but such items do not sound terribly like
anything that might be described as humans,
post-humans or even conscious beings,
except when they are described through the
anthropomorphising eyes of a besotted technophile. Anyway, I would like to bet that his
dream of a future of technicians “waking up
the universe, and then intelligently deciding
its fate by infusing it with our human intelligence in its non-biological form” will belong
to the 14 per cent of his predictions that will
be proven wrong.
Raymond Tallis is a philosopher and retired
professor of medicine at Manchester University
The question of whether human
genes can be patented takes centre
stage in the US Supreme Court on 15th
April, when the Association of Molecular Pathology challenges the validity of US patents held on breast cancer
genes by Myriad Genetics. While lawyers argue whether the patents amount
to a legally indefensible dominion over
nature, cancer charities will picket the
court in protest at Myriad’s monopoly. Myriad holds European patents on
breast cancer testing but does not currently enforce them in the UK, enabling
the NHS to get away with offering its
own tests. For now.
The two-week Easter holiday looms,
along with the alarming prospect of
bored, chocolate-fuelled children. I
am torn between the delightfully soggy
London Wetlands Centre (www.wwt.
org.uk), which promises an Easter eggstravaganza on how egg-laying is part
of nature’s life cycle, and the Royal
Observatory Greenwich (www.rmg.
co.uk), whose daily interactive family show, “From Atoms to Aliens,” will
teach youngsters how to search for
aliens. I’m always partial to a planetarium: it’s the perfect spot for a surreptitious parental snooze.
Anjana Ahuja is a science writer
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energy
Special report
57
Is Britain’s energy policy on track?
April 2013
Stumbling towards crisis
How did the
politicians
let this happen?
asks Dieter Helm
E
renewables means a higher total capacity is needed on the system, since when the
wind doesn’t blow something else has to
generate the electricity.
It does not take a genius to work out that
as the old stations close, and little else is
added, eventually the gap between supply
and demand will close up, with nasty consequences for prices. Even the regulator,
Ofgem, appears to have finally realised this.
Unfortunately, the incumbent companies have little incentive to come to the
rescue. Higher prices mean higher profits. In most markets, high profits attract
entrants. Investment by the private sector
is, however, a voluntary activity, as the government is discovering. In energy, that
© John Giles/PA Archive/Press Association Images
nergy crises are often triggered
by surprises—from the Arab oil
embargo in the early 1970s to more
recently the Fukushima disaster. Britain’s energy crisis is, however, unlikely to be a surprise. It has been
coming for a long time, masked by the
economic recession, and seriously exacerbated by a combination of fundamental misunderstandings about markets and
market design, poor regulation, an enor-
mous bet on marginal and expensive technologies, and a stubbornness in the face of
mounting concerns.
The facts are widely known and not
much in dispute. Many of Britain’s power
stations are old, built against the assumptions of the very different energy world
of the 1960s and 1970s, when Britain was
relatively energy intensive. All our coal
stations are pre-1980, and the first and
second generations of nuclear power stations are coming to the end of their lives,
if not already shut down. The renewables
have made little contribution so far, and
they are intermittent, so until mass storage comes along, they do not remove the
need for conventional generation. More
Britain’s energy crisis has been coming for a long time and has been brought about by misunderstandings, poor regulation and stubbornness
58
investment takes time. Security of supply
is a system problem, and not necessarily
a problem for the incumbents. For them,
it is better if nobody invests, giving them
much higher returns on their existing
power stations. After a decade of unprecedented mergers and acquisitions—coupled
with a good dose of financial engineering—
most of the big players are in poor shape
to do much investing anyway. Bashing the
companies might make good politics, but
it makes lousy economics.
If these facts are well known, how
did the politicians and the regulators at
Ofgem let it happen? Or, perhaps more
accurately, how did they create the conditions for the coming crisis? Ofgem led
the way by forcing through a set of ill-conceived market reforms at the end of the
1990s. Ofgem made the economic mistake
of thinking that the electricity market
would automatically guarantee security of
supply, voluntarily creating the necessary
excess supply margin of capacity to absorb
demand shocks, and all without being paid
for directly.
From Margaret Beckett to Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and now Ed Davey,
a succession of politicians made things
much worse with a deeply flawed underlying narrative and set of assumptions about
future energy markets. The main components were: a conviction that oil and gas
prices would go ever upwards as a result of
“peak oil” and “peak gas” (the theory that
fossil fuels are finite, so supply will inevitably decline, causing prices to rise); a belief
that if only enough subsidy from customers was spent on the current generation of
renewables they would become cost competitive, and make a difference to global
warming; and a naivety about the relationship between energy efficiency and energy
demand. From these beliefs followed the
prediction early on in this government’s
life that the current policies would lower
total customers’ bills by 2020.
The story that knits these assumptions
together runs roughly as follows. Ministers after the last election “knew” that the
oil price would increase sharply, and that
gas prices would remain linked to oil and
would be volatile. (No mention was made
of the volatility caused by wind). It was
therefore only a matter of time before they
surpassed the costs of wind and rooftop
solar. All we had to do was build lots of
wind farms and install the current solar
technology and all would be well—reinforced by a good dose of energy efficiency
and perhaps some new nuclear power stations. Indeed, the argument ran that if
there was an error it was not pushing on
much faster in this decade with more current renewables.
In this fantasy world, pity the poor
Americans. They would be lumbered with
energy
all these incredibly expensive fossil fuels
whilst Britain would bask in the warm
glow of cheaper wind farms. Energy intensive industries would presumably flock to
Britain’s safe haven of cheap energy, outcompeting the US. America as a result
would be an economic basket case, stuck
with its dependency on oil and gas, and its
energy companies would be lumbered with
stranded fossil fuel assets. It would also,
on this view, suffer from the lack of all the
new green jobs and world-beating renewables industries that Britain would have
developed.
“From Margaret Beckett to
Ed Davey, a succession of
politicians made things
worse with a flawed set of
assumptions about future
energy markets”
You might think that as the evidence
mounted there might be a pause for reflection. But not so. As the evidence has
mounted, as the US marched on towards
energy independence, lots of new jobs
were created in the new shale oil and gas
industries in the US, and energy intensive industries began “re-shoring” to the
US from China and elsewhere, so campaigners intensified their efforts to kill off
gas in Britain. Their argument is that to
build more gas power stations now would
be to lock Britain into a high-carbon world
going forward. The hardliners simply want
most new gas power stations banned—and,
above all, shale gas banned.
The carbon and methane consequences
of gas are serious, but the campaigners are
wrong about the role of gas in the transition to a low-carbon world. Globally, the
alternative to gas in the next decade is not
wind farms but coal. Wind is a low density
intermittent energy source. There is not
enough land and shallow water to build
sufficient wind farms to make much difference to global warming. Across Europe,
new coal power stations are being built—
notably in Germany, based on very dirty
lignite, itself subsidised. Existing coal
stations are working hard, driving up
emissions too. Gas has half the carbon
emissions of coal, and as the US has demonstrated, switching to gas is driving down
carbon emissions there, whilst coal is driving them up across Europe.
In the wider world—which is what matters for global warming—coal is being
added in frightening amounts. Between
now and 2020, China and India may add
between 400 and 600GWs of new coal,
even if the Chinese do all the environmental things they say they will in their
12th Five-Year Plan. To deny that gas has
prospect april 2013
a transitionary role to play in halting this
dash for coal is to condemn the world to
temperature increases well beyond the
aspirational limit of two degrees. As I
argue in my book, The Carbon Crunch, a
more sensible and balanced way forward
is to build some current renewables, put a
big effort into the more promising future
renewables and use gas as a transitional
fuel instead of coal—more like the American approach, and less like the European.
In the meantime, it is worth diverting
just one or two of the tens of billions going
into offshore wind into Carbon Capture
and Storage (CCS). The North Sea is one
of the best places in the world to try out
this technology—shallow, with depleted
gas fields and pipelines already in place.
It might not work, but then again it might,
and if it did it would provide another transitionary lifeline.
For Britain, new coal investments are at
least limited by the emissions standards.
Here it is less a question of coal versus gas,
but rather gas or nothing much else—at
least in this decade—unless the government gets a derogation from the EU Large
Combustion Plant Directive limiting noncarbon emissions from existing power stations, and is allowed to keep running old,
dirty coal power stations.
T
he department of energy and
climate change (DECC) is confident that, notwithstanding current policies, the bills are going to
come down because they assume
that measures to increase energy efficiency
will drive down demand far enough to offset the higher unit prices. This confidence
is based upon two assumptions: first, that
there are lots and lots of energy efficiency
opportunities that are already profitable
and, second, that higher energy efficiency
will drive down the demand for energy.
DECC believes that its flagship Green
Deal will see a transformation of the housing stock, and that there will be little or no
rebound—the spending of the energy savings on yet more energy for things like air
conditioning. The hype around the Green
Deal already looks embarrassingly overdone, and since energy efficiency (a good
thing) reduces the cost of energy, economics suggests that overall energy demand
will go up, not down, as it has for the last
200 years. It is high prices, not energy efficiency, which reduces demand. Energy
efficiency and energy demand are two different things.
Customers already struggle to pay. By
2015, possibly a quarter of all households
will be spending more than 10 per cent
of their total income on domestic energy
bills, of which already over 10 per cent is
made up of various policy levies.
A much-ignored golden rule of
Natural gas – abundant, flexible
and central to meeting Europe’s
energy needs and challenges
A world leader in natural gas
www.bg-group.com
Total Politics_275mm x 210mm_Jan12_v1.indd 1
10/01/2012 17:18
60
energy
prospect april 2013
“A much-ignored golden rule
of energy policy is that the
customers actually have to
be able to pay”
“To meet targets, Britain has to build wind farms, no matter what the consequences for security and price”
energy policy is that the customers actually have to be able to pay. It is hard to
avoid the conclusion that the wall of costs
coming from current policies is unsustainable, but surprisingly few draw the corollary—that it will not be sustained.
Add all this together and the outline of
an energy crisis is pretty clear. Britain may
of course get “lucky” in energy terms as it
has since 2008. The economic crisis may
continue, GDP may fall, and hence energy
demand may stay subdued. But that is a
poor bet and anyway in such a depressed
situation the bills issue would probably
be overwhelming. Recovery and a lower
exchange rate mean a gradual rebalancing—more manufacturing means more
energy demand, and economic growth
drives consumption.
S
o what is to be done? Having dug
a very big hole, the first step is to
stop digging. Unfortunately there
are two separate but related reasons to doubt that the spades are
about to be put away soon: the EU renewables directive and the energy bill.
The renewables directive requires that
Britain generates at least 15 per cent of its
total energy from renewables (as defined
by the EU) by 2020, and since we cannot
do much about transport and other main
uses of energy in the short run, this means
that a massive 30 per cent of Britain’s electricity will have to come from renewables
if this target is to be met. Given the tar-
get date is so short term, we can only meet
it by building a lot more wind farms, fitting more solar panels, and burning more
biomass—whatever the security and price
consequences. With the current electricity
price at around £50 per megawatt hour,
onshore wind costs around £100 MWh
(not including the full system costs of its
intermittency), offshore wind about £160
MWh (again not including the full system
costs) and the early subsidies paid for by
customers for rooftop solar anything up
to £240 MWh—even if the target could be
met, it is probably unaffordable.
The energy bill before parliament is
about to make things worse. It is extraordinarily complex given that the challenges
are pretty simple. It layers more and more
instruments and interventions on top of
the current morass of detail. Just to understand the interventions is beyond most in
DECC. Every technology has its special
subsidies, and DECC is about to embark
on yet more picking of “winners.” The
unintended consequences of the overlaps
and interactions of the interventions are
unlikely to be trivial.
It is not too late to radically simplify
the energy bill. What is needed is sufficient
investment in power stations to provide
roughly a 20 per cent capacity margin, to
insure us against shocks and keep a lid on
prices. The government needs to recognise that this excess capacity will not be
produced by the market. It needs to fix
the margin, and then auction the slots to
meet it. These auctions need also to meet
the carbon budgets and the decarbonisation trajectory. Such an approach is of
course anathema to many of the current
recipients of subsidies. Imagine asking offshore wind to bid against other technologies to meet the carbon target—to reveal
their true costs and have them tested by
the market. Ministers probably would not
like this either. Imagine revealing through
the bids the extraordinary subsidies they
have been handing out to the “winners”
they have picked.
Added to this setting of the margin
requirement and the capacity auctions,
other decisions need to be made quickly.
The nuclear saga cannot go on. For 12
years governments have decided that they
don’t want nuclear, and then that they do,
that nuclear needs no public subsidy and
then that it does, and that a waste solution
should be found first, and then that it is not
urgent. The current approach to nuclear
is a close replica of that of the late 1970s.
The plan is to try out a number of different
technologies and providers and see if they
work. So Hitachi is pitched against EDF,
with Westinghouse in the background. It
is time to recognise that nuclear is a political technology that requires a long-term
political consensus and a national industrial policy for its supply chain. Either do it
properly or don’t do it—but the middle way
looks at best very expensive.
Government also needs to decide what
it is going to do about the most expensive
MAKING ENERGY WORK
If we told you that Britain has
an energy sector to be proud
of would you believe us?
Let’s look at the facts: Britain has the most
competitive energy market in Europe and
some of Europe’s cheapest energy prices.
Throughout the current economic
downturn, the energy sector is one of the
few areas of the economy that has never
stopped recruiting. Between 2008 &
2011, the sector created 54,0001 jobs
spread across all regions of the UK.
In terms of economic impact, every pound
spent in the energy sector adds more to
the economy than a pound spent any
where else1 and in the last 6 years,
RWE npower has spent over £4.5 billion
providing new energy infrastructure
for Britain, more than any other
energy company2.
to a low carbon economy is unprecedented
– equivalent to building the London
Olympics infrastructure twice each and
every year.
In 2012, our profit across our retail and
generation activities was just 5%. The
perception of energy companies, and the
lack of trust in the sector, is something we
know we have to tackle – but a reasonable
debate about the energy sector can only
be achieved if we start with the facts.
The Energy Bill is a critical piece of
legislation. If the people of Britain are
to support these policy decisions,
and if Britain is to attract the level of
investment it really needs, the required
changes must be well thought through
and implemented swiftly and effectively
– and at the lowest cost to consumers
and businesses alike.
Energy is the lifeblood of modern society.
If we don’t get energy right, nothing
else can work as well as it should do.
The scale of new investment required to
ensure security of supply and move us
We want to work together to change
energy for the better, but customers
must be at the heart of every change
we make.
Prices
Profit
Bills
Copenhagen 12.16
Consumer perception of energy company
profits is 10x greater than reality
Rome 8.17
Berlin 7.07
WHOLESALE
ENERGY COSTS
Paris 6.47
GOVERNM
GOVERNMENT
RNMENT
COSTS
1
SUPPLIER COSTS
Ernst&Young Powering the UK, 2012
Bloomberg New Energy Finance report for Greenpeace UK
*Prices include energy, distribution
and taxes
2
43.2%
16.4%
16
4%
London 4.74
Gas price (€ cent per kWh)*
Ofgem / The Times, 2012
What makes up
an energy bill?
17
7.2%
.2%
17 2%
NETWORK COSTS
23.2%
23.2%
– Average
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– Supplier
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metering and operating costs
– Government costs include cost of carbon
62
energy
renewables. Offshore wind in particular
has inherent cost characteristics that are
going to be very hard to shift. Many European countries have just pushed the biomass button, whatever its environmental
merits. Some 50 per cent of all the qualifying renewables in Europe will be biomass.
The obvious solution is to seriously try to
renegotiate the renewables directive’s targets, timetables and what counts within
its definitions. To date there is no evidence
any minister has tried. Given the underlying rationale has long gone, that is where
DECC should be targeting their efforts. It
is worth bearing in mind, too, that should
the Conservatives win the next election,
the energy crisis is scheduled to happen in
the middle of a promised EU referendum
campaign. The risk of prices shooting up
because of very inefficient directives is not
going to make the case for staying in the
EU any more persuasive.
Beyond the details of the peculiarly
British energy crisis, it is time for Europe
to raise its game. The 2008 EU climate
change package has not made much difference to global warming and is driving
up European energy costs, while the EU
emissions trading scheme is close to collapse. After the 2014 European elections,
with a new Commission, there will be a
good opportunity for a rethink in the face
of rampant US energy competitiveness.
It would be nice to think that ministers in Britain will take that opportunity
to radically simplify energy policy. Sadly
history suggests that they will continue
to pile one layer of interventions upon
another until the system collapses. Energy
policy tends to get reformed after a crisis,
not before. That date is fast approaching.
As the government ploughs on with the
energy bill, others will prepare for another
energy review immediately after the election in 2015.
Dieter Helm is professor of energy policy at
the University of Oxford and author of “The
Carbon Crunch” (Yale University Press)
“To be honest, I don’t think the garden
does need it anymore.”
Is solar still
worth it?
With a big enough
roof, yes, says
Andy Davis
W
hen those in power want
something to happen, history shows they can create irresistible incentives
to make it so. The Bank
of England keeps bond yields at extreme
lows by summoning yet more electronic
money into existence. The department
of energy and climate change scatters
photovoltaic solar panels across Britain’s
rooftops using only the power of public
subsidy.
Being the sort of investor who likes
someone else to take the risk and leave me
with the reward, I didn’t take much persuading to call in the solar panel installers
in spring 2010. At that point, the government was offering a subsidy of around 43p
per kilowatt hour of power the panels generated—more than four times the market price. And since this already-generous
feed-in tariff was tax free and would rise in
line with retail prices for the next 25 years,
I could find nothing to dislike about the
proposition, try as I might.
It has indeed been a sweet deal, yielding 7.9 per cent in 2012 despite the dreary
weather. But since our panels were
switched on, the world has changed and
the subsidy for new installations has fallen
by about two-thirds. So are panels still
such a cracking investment (leaving aside
the question of whether you care about
any environmental benefits)?
The answer is yes, and no. On the face
of it, the deep subsidy cut looks as if it
should have killed off the investment case
for solar panels. However, you also need
to factor in the steep drop in the cost of
having panels fitted over the past couple
of years.
According to the Energy Saving
Trust, the capital outlay has dropped
pretty much in line with the subsidy—the
approximate cost of one kilowatt of solar
capacity has fallen from nearly £6,000 in
late 2010 to about £2,000 today, reflecting
a number of factors including a collapse
in the price of the panels themselves and
improvements in their efficiency (size-forsize, today’s panels generate more power
than those available a couple of years
ago). That leaves the returns pretty much
where they started, at somewhere between
prospect april 2013
7 per cent and 9 per cent a year (depending on the weather), tax free and index
linked.
In a world where it has become unbelievably hard to find any other way of
making a safe index-linked net return of
7-plus per cent, the case for putting a portion of your money into panels remains
compelling.
There are, however, a fair few caveats to
consider alongside that superb yield. The
most obvious are to do with your property.
Do you live in an area that gets enough
sunlight to make it worthwhile? Does your
roof face the right way? Is it made of the
right materials? Is it listed? Do you own or
rent it? And so on.
Assuming you can pass the suitability tests, the next question is the size of
your roof (or land, if you plan to get really
ambitious). The point is that although the
likely rate of return has remained stable,
the cash income you will receive has fallen
sharply—an 8 per cent return on £2,000
is no match for an 8 per cent return on
£6,000. So for most of us, the roof area we
have available will determine how big an
allocation of capital we can make to this
very attractive asset class.
“On the face of it, the deep
subsidy cut looks as if it
should have killed off the
investment case for solar
panels. But there are other
issues to factor in”
Is it still worth the trouble? The answer,
I think, is yes—install panels (if you can)
and then look to increase your exposure
by investing in other people’s renewable
energy projects using your self-invested
personal pension. Thankfully, there’s
a growing number of ways to do this via
organisations such as The Trillion Fund
and Abundance Generation. Your returns
from this route won’t be explicitly index
linked, although they should still comfortably beat inflation. They won’t be immediately taxable either, if held inside a Sipp,
but will incur charges from the intermediary that arranges the investment for you.
For my money, it still stacks up both
because of the potential returns and for
two other reasons: this is an asset class
totally uncorrelated to the rest of your
portfolio (the sun still shines when the
markets go down), and it offers a partial
hedge against your inescapable exposure
to ever-rising energy bills.
Andy Davis is Prospect’s investment
columnist and the winner of the 2012
Wincott Prize for personal financial
journalism
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prospect april 2013
Life
© Heide Benser/Corbis
The truth about teenagers 64
Leith on life: my deepest darkest fear 65
Matters of taste: Easter feasts 66
Wine: where is the “new world”? 68
Myth of the teenager
Does the stroppy adolescent exist? asks Lucy Maddox
Teenagers often get a bad press. There
are easy stories to be mined here: ASBOs,
underage drinking, “hug a hoodie,”
drug use—even, recently, the teenager
who drugged her parents to access the
internet.
These are not new stereotypes. As a
shepherd in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s
Tale puts it, “I would there were no age
between 10 and three-and-20, or that
youth would sleep out the rest; for there
is nothing in the between but getting
wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” Change the syntax, and this description could easily fit
in many newspapers today.
Are the stereotypes fair? Is the idea
of wild adolescence rooted in evidence?
There are two sorts of arguments. On the
one hand, neuroscientific evidence seems
increasingly to suggest that this is a true
developmental phase of its own—teenagers behave differently because their
brains are different. On the other, some
argue that teenagers behave differently
because they are learning to handle so
many new situations, and if we hold stereotypical ideas about their behaviour, we
risk underestimating them.
Take the latter argument first. Philip
Graham, a professor of psychiatry who
has written extensively on what he perceives to be a misconception, believes that
although hormonal and physical changes
are occurring, most teenagers are not
risky or moody. Graham sees teenagers
as a stigmatised group, often highly competent yet treated as if they were not. He
argues that teenagers need to be acknowledged as potentially productive members
of society and that the more independence and respect they are given, the more
they will rise to the challenge.
“Once young people reach the age of
14, their competence in cognitive tasks
and their sexual maturity make it more
helpful to think of them as young adults,”
says Graham. “Media coverage is almost
uniformly negative. Adolescence is a word
used to describe undesirable behaviour in
older adults. Young people of 14, 15 or 16
prospect april 2013
are thought to be risk-takers… they are
people who are experimenting. They are
doing things for the first time and they
make mistakes. Would you call a toddler
who is learning to walk and who falls over
all the time a risk-taker? These people are
just beginning something.”
Graham places less importance on the
conclusions of research into risk-taking
and on adolescent brain changes—“Not
to say there are not a small minority who
do take dangerous risks but I think the
results have been over-generalised to justify the stereotype.”
Instead, Graham argues that the way
teenagers make decisions is related to
encountering situations they haven’t
dealt with before. “If they are moving
into new types of social situation they do
need more help with that.” He likens it
to learning to drive, something you need
expert help with at any age.
However, neuroscientific evidence suggests a basis for the teenage stereotype.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a professor at
University College London, has specialised in researching the adolescent brain
using a variety of techniques, including
functional brain scanning. Although also
concerned that teenagers can be vilified
in the media, Blakemore rejects the idea
that adolescence is entirely a social construct: “If you look throughout history at
the descriptions of adolescence they are
similar, and also in different cultures. Of
course this is not to say that all adolescents are the same, but there is quite a lot
of evidence that during this period of life
there’s an increase in risk-taking, peer
influence and self-consciousness.” Blakemore’s research suggests that during the
teenage years the brain is still developing the capacity for certain sophisticated
skills, including problem-solving, social
skills and impulse control.
Blakemore and other researchers
describe a gradual development of brain
areas related to planning, inhibiting inappropriate behaviour and understanding
other points of view. They also suggest a
less linear development of the system in
the brain that recognises and responds
to rewards. “Teenagers tend to be more
self-conscious,” said Blakemore. “They
show more risk-taking when their peers
are present.” Their social brain is changing and so is their ability to plan, inhibit
impulses and make decisions.
“Research by Laurence Steinberg at
Temple University in the US has shown
that adolescents tend not to take into
account future consequences of actions.
For example if you offer them a choice
between having £10 now and £100 in six
months, whilst adults tend to wait for
the larger amount, most adolescents are
more likely to go for the lower value now.
65
Life
Life in the future doesn’t hold so much
importance.”
It might make sense, then, that a teenager trying to decide whether to tell a
lie in order to go out, or to try an illegal drug, might be influenced more by
the reward of the night out or the novel
experience, or peer congratulation, than
by longer-term negative consequences.
“It’s not that teenagers don’t understand
the risks,” says Blakemore. “It’s just that
for some teenagers, in the moment, this
understanding goes out of the window.”
Despite their different views, both academics conclude that teenagers could
benefit from being treated according
to their development. Graham suggests
friendly advice-giving. It is important to
“recognise their desire for autonomy,” he
says. “They want to do more than they
can. We should treat them differently
because they are inexperienced... and first
experiences are important. A bad experience can put you off something for a long
time.”
He does not advocate tolerating too
much difficult behaviour, though: “Adolescents are influenced by the stereotype
as well. If they expect to get away with
being ‘bolshy’ for example… I don’t think
we should be particularly tolerant of bad
behaviour in adolescence.”
Blakemore thinks that we should
adjust the way we try to motivate teenagers: “Anti-smoking campaigns, for
example, might be more effective if they
used short-term social negatives like
bad breath as a disincentive, rather than
longer-term health consequences. And
we perhaps expect too much. “We expect
them to act like adults but their brains
aren’t yet completely like an adult brain.
Maybe we should be more understanding. Teaching adolescents about how their
brains develop might be helpful.”
Whether you attribute adolescent
differences in decision-making to brain
development or lack of experience, educational aims could include the handling
of social dilemmas. Parents might be able
to help by being explicit about the pros
and cons of a situation, considering other
people’s views or negotiating in a transparent way. We should also bear in mind
that teenagers are often uniquely affected
by economic and political challenges such
as high unemployment levels.
In my view, adolescence is a tricky
time, where individuals often struggle
to find their own identity in the face of a
sometimes hostile outside world, whilst
needing peer support. Both Blakemore
and Graham are more phlegmatic. “Every
time’s a tricky time,” says Graham. “You
try being my age.”
Lucy Maddox is a clinical psychologist for
children and adolescents
Leith on life
Sam Leith
A mortal fear of dental hygienists
What’s your deepest darkest fear? Mine,
I’ve come to realise over the course of time,
may actually be dental hygienists. This,
please feel free to refrain from pointing
out, explains why my teeth are smelly and
caramel-coloured and I’m going to spend
the last decades of my life eating only soup.
Why hygienists? It’s dentists, I know,
that scare most people more—with their
whining drills, needles dripping anaesthetic and enthusiasm for kneeling on your
chest and ripping things out of your face
with pliers. Many a case of dental caries,
to be sure, has gone untreated as a direct
result of Laurence Olivier’s performance in
Marathon Man. Hygienists are regarded as
their more or less herbivorous cousins.
That’s the way I felt, back in the day. For
most of my twenties my beef with hygienists was not that I feared them, but that
I simply couldn’t see the point of them.
With dentists, at least, you knew where
you were: if you have a hole in your tooth,
the dentist is the go-to guy. The procedure
might not be pleasant, but at the end of it
you’ll either have no hole in your tooth, or
no tooth. Badda-bing badda-boom.
Hygienists, on the other hand—they
did... what, exactly? Oh, sure, they were
pleasant enough. When I was a child, my
mother would take me along once every
few months. The process involved disclosing tablets, which were actually super-fun:
you chewed this tanninous little purple
disco biscuit and then grinned. All the
plaque on your teeth was lurid red. Then
you brushed it off. You always had that
trade-off: did you give your teeth a massive
scrubbing before you went to the hygienist
so as to impress them; or did you let things
slide so you looked cool, like a vampire, at
disclosing tablet time? Big choice for an
eight-year-old.
Like the Jesuits, who are said to maintain that if they get their hooks into the
child the adult isn’t going anywhere (I paraphrase), hygienists use the fun of disclosing tablets to sucker you into the habit of
visiting them. When you’re a grown-up,
they change the game. Now you’re having
tartar scraped off your teeth with bloody
great billhooks, or this incredibly gritty
paste whizzed over your molars with what
feels like some sort of spinning rubber pad.
The visits got marginally less pleasant,
but the sense of pointlessness remained.
Even to a child (vide the disclosing tab-
let dilemma) it seemed manifest that the
hygienist was only really able to assess
your teeth on the basis of the last brushing
you did. And the advice, from adolescence
onwards, never changed: brush your teeth
(twice a day, little circles, have you thought
of an electric toothbrush?) and use dental
floss. Why, I always wondered, did I need to
shell out once every six months to be told to
use dental floss? Why did you need a framed
diploma on your wall to tell people to use
dental floss? Good advice, no question—
but once you’ve heard it, y’know, it’s pretty
much gone in.
It’s only recently that I have started to
suspect that my blustering belief in the
pointlessness of dental hygienists may be
cover for something more sinister: mortal terror—terror because the dentist may
mean physical pain, but the hygienist means
facing up to mortality.
Your teeth don’t grow back. Unlike your
skin, your bone marrow, your brain cells and
most of the rest of you they won’t regenerate. They don’t fight the passage of time.
No matter how much you floss you’re not
growing a fresh layer of enamel. Every chip
and knock, every acid-bath of fizzy water or
orange juice (who knew these health-giving
things were betraying us?) does its damage
and that damage stays done.
The dentist is actually fixing stuff, while
the hygienist is simply taking a sober look
at your mouth, and telling you how much
closer, each time, you are to fissures, cavities, exposed dentine, agonising pain from
ice cream, tea etc. It’s a six-monthly warning
on the nearness of your approach to “sans
teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
There are some tips offered for delaying the
inevitable (“Brush! Use dental floss!”), but
what one tends to hear in that formula is not
“delay” so much as “inevitable.”
On my last visit—where I learned inter
alia that the enthusiasm with which I
brushed, in the hopes of not losing the
enamel on my teeth, was directly responsible for, er, losing the enamel on my teeth—
my hygienist got particularly perky. She
peered into my mouth with the look of a
cat that has just discovered a particularly
plump and uncoordinated mouse in the bottom of a cardboard box.
“Oh look!” she said. “Dear, oh dear; your
teeth are completely flat. You’re grinding
them in your sleep. Carry on like that and
you’ll go right through the dentine.” There
was some discussion of gumshields and
such. She turned to her assistant, brightly.
“We’re seeing more and more of this these
days, aren’t we? I think it’s the recession.”
It’s not the recession that’s making me
grind my teeth, I would have said if I hadn’t
had a mouthful of billhooks and vacuum
tubes. It’s dental hygienists.
Sam Leith is the author of “You Talkin’ To Me?
Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama” (Profile)
LIFE
Matters of
taste
Wendell Steavenson
Eggs are not just for Easter
Damascus at Easter, not so long ago, before
the war. In the Christian quarter of Bab
Touma, the Christian marching bands—
teenagers in khaki military shirts with
coloured scarves knotted over their shoulders—drummed and trumpeted the Easter
parade through the ancient alleys. A pink
and blue fluffy Easter bunny was carried on
a litter so large that it got stuck at a narrow
bend. Behind it, on another palanquin, was
a giant egg, ruffled with ribbons, dressed up
like a bride. The processions moved on in the
early evening to a church courtyard where
the banging and crashing of drummer boys
and girls drowned out the muezzin calling
prayer through a loudspeaker, as Jesus was
shown making his tortured progression to
Calvary in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the
Christ, projected onto a wall.
There are two Easters; one that commemorates the crucifixion of the son of God
and one that belongs to the egg. No circular conundrum here: the son of God is not
a chicken; the egg came first. Wherever I
have travelled I have found eggs in various
prospect april 2013
guises of springtime festival: decorated,
hunted, played with, eaten; the original germinant, hope of life, new life, reproduction,
resurrection.
There were traditionally plenty of eggs
to be used up before the Lent fast—hence
Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) and Shrove Tuesday, with its pancakes. Trace the oval curve
through folklore: in Poland and Russia they
paint patterns on eggs in wax, like batik; the
imperial family commissioned Fabergé to
cover them in diamonds and filigree gold. In
Greece and the environs of Byzantium they
dye them red for Christ’s blood and bake
them into the crusts of Paschal bread, itself
enriched with egg yolk and spices. Some say
the egg represents the resurrection, a reference to the story in which Mary Magdalene
took a basket of boiled eggs to feed the
women who went to the tomb. When she saw
that Christ had risen, the eggs turned red.
In Lebanon, children hard-boil eggs and
play tapping competitions to see whose will
crack first.
In the 19th century, the Cadburys made
eggs from chocolate as soon as they had
invented the process for tempering cocoa
butter to hold solid shapes. These days we
hunt them as far as the White House lawn; in
the American south they make devilled eggs
for any celebration but especially for Easter,
spicy with Tabasco and paprika, and display
them on special plates made with individual
egg-shaped indentations.
The symbolism of Christian egg stories
carry a whiff of reverse engineering. Eggs
© Khaled Al-Hariri/Reuters/Corbis
66
Children carry baskets of brightly coloured eggs at Easter Day mass in Damascus
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are everyone’s. In Egypt, the Sham El Nessim festival, literally the “Smelling of the
Zephyrs,” is as old as the Pharaohs and is
celebrated by Copts and Muslims alike by
picnicking in the open air and eating fermented Nile river fish and boiled eggs. When
I was living in Tehran I remember Nowruz,
the ancient Zoroastrian festival of spring
equinox, falling that year at the same time
as Moharram, the Shia month of mourning. The Ayatollahs had tried to stamp out
Nowruz with its rites of fire jumping and
painted eggs, but in the bazaar I remember
brisk business for Nowruz presents.
I will celebrate this Easter in Jerusalem, the city of two Easters, Orthodox and
Catholic. The Jewish Passover is traditionally around the same time. Families gather
and recite the Exodus story around the seder
plate; bitter herbs for enslavement in Egypt,
charoset of dried fruit and honey to represent the mortar of the pyramids. Children
play hunt the matzah. Eggs are dyed brown
with onion skins or chopped up into a slurrylike salad or salted. In her book of Jewish
food, Claudia Roden recounts a Sephardic
recipe of eggs cooked slowly overnight so
that their whites are mahogany and their
yolks umber coloured and creamy. Symbolic
meanings are variously ascribed: mourning,
birth and death; the cycle of life; the continuity of Jewish life; the destruction of the
temple. An Israeli friend of mine told me,
only half jokingly, the other day: “My father
always told me we dip the eggs in salt water
because the Jewish nations’ balls [in Hebrew
‘eggs’ is slang for testicles] got wet and salty
crossing the Red Sea. Who knows?” He
smiled at me, and we swapped eggy tales
and wondered at the universality of something that seems to hark back earlier than
any religious explanation. “It’s all based on
the same stuff,” he said.
Wendell Steavenson is an associate editor of
Prospect
Wine
Barry Smith
New world—not so new
Many vine growing regions resent the
description of their wines as “new world.”
As they will tell you, they have been making
wines for well over a hundred years. It simply took the rest of the world time to discover
what they were producing. In the last three
decades we have caught up with wines from
Australia, California, New Zealand, and
more recently Argentina, Chile and South
Africa. Each of these regions have placed
LIFE
their stamp firmly on particular grape varieties. The savoury shiraz from Australia,
the forceful Californian zinfandel, and the
richness and tropical fruit New Zealanders found in sauvignon blanc. Producers all
over the world have been seeking to discover
what extra flavour dimensions their regions
could give to familiar varietals. Argentina
had spectacular success with the malbec
grape, previously known for producing the
black wines of Cahors. When it was grown
at high altitude in Mendoza, on the edge of
the Andes mountain range, it found extra
floral notes and a rich fruit core of blackberry and blueberry flavours. The Chileans
achieved similar success with the dark and
coal-like carmenère grape. Meanwhile, in
South Africa, winemakers found additional
notes and a ripeness in chenin blanc.
New wine regions are being discovered,
all the time, each hoping to make its mark
by producing something distinctively local
but celebrated globally. However, the later
one joins the search for success, the harder
it is to find promising grapes that are capable of rejuvenation. Not surprisingly, it’s the
major players in the new world economy who
are keen to develop their nascent wine industries, and China and Brazil are both developing fast. While the former created a new wine
culture, the latter has taken an existing one
to a new level. So far Brazilian winemakers
have only been producing wines for the home
market but as the quality has continued to
rise, it is time the rest of the world knew more
about these wines.
Almost a century ago, an Italian community moved into Brazil’s Rio Grande do
Sul and started making spumante. For red
wine they planted the nebbiolo grape on
slopes like those of their native Piedmont.
From here grew the wine industry you can
see thriving today in the Vale dos Vinhedos,
close to the city of Bento Gonçalves, and near
Pinto Bandeira. The nebbiolo vines no longer
exist. They were pulled up and replaced by
merlot and cabernet sauvignon in the hope
of making fashionable, international wines—
so many producers feel they have not made
it as winemakers until they produce a “Bordeaux blend.” This is a mistake and it’s much
better to fashion a wine from grapes more
suited to the climate. Cabernet franc is much
more successful in the high but humid conditions in southern Brazil, where the concentration needed for cabernet sauvignon is
hard to achieve. A particularly good example comes from one of the largest and oldest
producers, Casa Valduga, established in 1875.
Their young winemaker, Daniel Dalla Valle,
endlessly strives for better quality in all his
wines. The last 30 years have seen enormous
improvements; but he wants to go further.
“Give me another 30 years and see what I can
do,” he tells me. I like the ambition.
So far, the search for Brazil’s flagship
grape has proved elusive. And with so few
prospect april 2013
options left to explore, producers have been
experimenting with unlikely varietals such
as tannat, a thick-skinned grape that fared
much better in Uruguay. But they have no
need to worry. Brazilian winemakers are
exceptional at making sparkling wines using
the méthode champenoise—the traditional and
labour-intensive method of turning the bottles by hand. This is producing fine examples
of lees-aged wines from a variety of chardonnay and pinot noir blends. Cave Geisse led
the way in 1979, after Chilean-born Mario
Geisse left his job at Moët et Chandon to
start it up. He now produces several cuvées
including a Brut rosé from 100 per cent pinot
noir aged in oak barrels. The wines show
complexity and distinction.
And Geisse is not alone. Along with Casa
Valduga, smaller producers like Don Giovanni are turning out excellent wines. Perhaps the greatest success for Brazilian
winemaking comes in the form of Sparkling
Nature—a zero-dosage wine made from
fully ripe grapes. In brut wines, the dosage of
sweet liqueur added during bottle fermentation can be anywhere between six to 12 grams
per litre; and while in France there is a growing craze for zero-dosage champagnes, these
are often austere and acidic wines due to the
lack of ripeness in the grapes. By contrast,
the ripeness found in the hills surrounding
Pinto Bandeira allows winemakers to produce elegant and palatable wines, which let
the quality of the fruit speak. Don Giovanni’s
Nature, with its elegant bubbles and gentle
mousse combines fruit, freshness and leesderived complexity. A pity that this wine is
not known outside Brazil: it should be. It’s the
epitome of a wine culture that began with the
early makers of spumante. If only they had
preserved their nebbiolo grapes who knows
what we might be drinking now.
The reds will come in time as a new generation of winemakers master the arts of grape,
place and technique. Already, there are signs
of significant developments at Almaúnica. It
may be a while before we see Brazilian wines
join the ranks of the internationally available
new world wines, but they will come and they
will be worth waiting for.
Barry Smith is editor of “Questions of Taste: The
Philosophy of Wine” (Signal Books)
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prospect april 2013
Arts & books
Europe: the struggle for supremacy 70
JM Coetzee’s slippery fiction 74
Pop art gets old 76
Britain’s iconoclast director 78
The month in books 79
The 500 year war
Since the 15th century Europe has been the bloody battleground in a continent-wide struggle for
power, says Josef Joffe. But today war seems a distant threat. What changed?
Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453
to the Present
by Brendan Simms (Allen Lane, £30)
Diplomatic history—the history of interstate politics—has fallen on hard times in
the academy. Half a generation ago, a piece
in the Chronicle of Higher Education claimed
that the discipline had become boring, elitist or irrelevant. Its “corps is shrinking, losing
academic prestige and tenured positions,”
reported the author. After all, diplomatic history is about princes and potentates, “mainly
about dead white males.” Whatever the
righteous tone of the article, the facts cannot
be gainsaid. “Real history” is now bottomup—social, gender and economic history.
Chronology—who did what and when—has
yielded to category: “Industrial Revolution”,
“Slavery,” “Colonial Conquest,” or “Cold
War.” Classics like AJP Taylor’s Struggle for
Mastery in Europe (1954) or William L Langer’s European Alliances and Alignments (1931)
now look like ancient history. Departmental
careers are being made from smaller bricks.
Hence the big surprise of Brendan
Simms’s Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present. At 690 pages it is big
in heft and ambition, sweeping across half
a millennium of European history. Aficionados of the craft should cheer the arrival
of Simms’s brainchild. There is nothing in
the recent literature to match it. Even Paul
Kennedy’s bestseller Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers is now 26 years old.
Aficionados might also feel envy. Not
only has Simms bitten off a huge chunk of
history, he has mastered it with style and an
awe-inspiring command of the literature (the
footnotes run on for almost 100 pages). He
deserves a prize just for this Herculean feat
of synthesis. Another one might beckon for
breaking the mould of traditional, that is,
state-centred, diplomatic history. The narrative weaves together grand strategy and
domestic politics, economics and ideology,
and the European as well as global strands
of a story that is about “us”—the west with
its triumphs and tragedies, its magnificent
achievements and untold cruelties. How
did this 500-year story come to an end in the
aftermath of the two world wars, with Europe
pacified and “communalised,” fighting no
longer in the trenches but over the euro and
the EU budget?
To map a boundless ocean of detail that
spans 500 years, one needs a theme. Simms’s
plot is the “struggle for mastery,” a term borrowed from AJP Taylor, and not a bad one.
In the author’s words: “The fundamental
issue has always been whether Europe would
be united—or dominated—by a single force”
—from Charles V of Spain via Napoleon to
Hitler and Stalin. The permanent arena of
hegemonic strife was Germany in its manyhued guises: “because of its immense economic and military potential.” Germany
“has also been the cockpit of the European
ideological struggle”—from the religious
wars to the cold war.
Should Simms be quite as Germanocentric? It’s true that the blurry landmass
between the rivers Rhine and Vistula, known
as the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” until 1806, was the fulcrum
of Europe’s strategic balance. But as an old
saw has it, this strange creature was none of
the above: neither holy, nor Roman, nor German, nor a nation. Certainly it was not a real
empire with real power. Prey rather than
predator, it was the locale, not the engine
of great-power conflict. The German philosopher Leibniz had it right when he complained in 1670: “The Empire…is the ball
which [the powers] toss to one another, the
battlefield on which the struggle for mastery
in Europe is fought.”
So, who did the struggling? Some 500
years ago, the nation-state—make that
“dynastic nation-state”—began to bestride
the European stage as the most muscular
and dynamic actor. Unified by royal conquest
and defined ever more by language, ethnicity
and recognisable borders, England, France
and Spain proved best-equipped to play the
game of expansion. So were the nation-states
that pushed onstage later: Prussia-Germany,
Russia and the United States. Meanwhile,
empires kept dying. The first world war killed
the Wilhelmine, Ottoman, Romanov and
Habsburg empires; Britain’s and France’s
went after the second world war.
Once the theme is “mastery,” the “balance
of power” cannot be far behind. “Mastery”
shouts: “more for myself!”, but “balance”
growls: “never!” For those who dimly remember 16th and 17th-century Europe as a
religious abattoir—Papists decimating Protestants, Islam besieging Vienna—Simms
offers a salutary lesson in realpolitik, which
is another word for the “balance of power.”
Francis I of France (1515—47) had no qualms
about enlisting the Ottomans against his
arch-enemy Charles V, the Holy Roman
Emperor and “Most Catholic” ruler of Spain.
Francis did not mind having the “infidel” on
his side if that enabled him to “undermine
the Emperor’s power… and to secure all other
governments against so powerful an enemy.”
Similarly, the thirty years war, which
claimed one-third of central Europe’s population, was a religious conflict only on the
surface. In fact, it was a mortal struggle
between two Catholic powers, France and
Habsburg, in which both allied with Protestant nations. Under Louis XIV, France once
more played the Turkish card against Christian Europe. Time after time, power and
interest trumped ideology, most dramatically in the two world wars, when the democracies fought side-by-side with tyrants both
dynastic and Bolshevik.
B
undling national narratives—
the stuff we learned in school—
into a European saga, Simms
also reminds us that the stage
has always been a global one. Striking out
across the oceans, the great powers fought
for booty and turf to finance their wars on
the European battlefield. When the flow of
Latin American gold and silver dwindled, so
did Spanish power in the 17th century. Yet,
Simms fails to stress the opposite causal link,
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© The Art Archive/Ashmolean Museum
prospect april 2013
The battle of Pavia, 1525, at which the forces of Francis I of France were overwhelmed by those of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V
with colonial conflict triggering war on the
home front.
The prime example is the seven years
war, erupting in Europe in 1756. Europeans
are wont to ignore that it had started two
years earlier in North America, where it was
known as “French and Indian War.” Fighting for control over North America, the British and French began to cast around for allies
in Europe. Britain snagged Prussia while
France recruited Austria, Russia, Spain and
Sweden. What began in America became the
original first world war, prosecuted on both
sides of the Atlantic, in India, West Africa,
South America and on the high seas. When it
was over, French and Spanish power in North
America was broken, and the world became
English, so to speak.
Simms might also have stressed the enormous global consequences of this war. Amer-
icans are taught how the rapacious Brits
under “Mad King George” forced them into
revolt with extortionist taxation. In fact,
those colonists were ingrates. Britain had
saved them from the French and their Indian
allies, running up a huge debt in the process. Now the proto-Americans, free-riders
in modern parlance, refused to pay their fair
share. We know how the story ended—with
the British expelled, and their former protégés set on the road to global primacy.
In Europe, this “first world war” brought
another giant-to-be onstage who had been
nurtured by Britain: the Prussia of Frederick the Great. The story of Prussia highlights
the age-old question of balance-of-power politics: Who opposes whom, and when? Prussia’s best asset was its army, extracted from a
small population with a thoroughly modern
tax and draft system. Prussia was not a state
that built an army, but an army that built a
state. It emerged suddenly as a great power
among the established players and so was
bound to disturb Europe’s natural order.
Frederick was soon encircled by all the
great powers, except for Britain. This was
the “nightmare of coalitions” that would torture Germany for the next two centuries. To
dispel it, the “Hun” fell for the cult of the
offensive: don’t wait, attack first. The strategy worked nicely at first, but brought about
precisely the global coalitions that stopped
Germany in the 20th century. Frederick’s
Prussia, though, was saved by good luck and
British subsidies. Instead of repaying the
favour, Frederick’s heirs went after Albion in
both world wars, with Britain barely holding
on. Supposedly the master of the European
balance of power, Britain made the same
mistake—balancing against the wrong
72
rival—twice more.
Britain miscalculated its interests again in
the 19th century when it held the ring for Bismarck while he defeated Denmark, Austria
and France—and conquered Germany, to
boot. Britain’s former protégé had become a
supersized Prussia—the “Second Reich” that
was too big for Europe, but too small to dominate it. An ancient distribution of power was
unhinged, and the long fuse to the first world
war was lit.
Britain blundered a third time after 1919,
when it pulled back from the Continent,
ignoring the resurgence of Germany until it
was too late to stop Hitler. Like the famous
quip about the British empire, German primacy was acquired in successive fits of British absentmindedness. It took the United
States and Soviet Russia, Europe’s great
flanking powers, to defang Germany as a
threat to Europe’s “public tranquillity.”
So, as the rise of Germany shows, when
it came to the classic demands of balanceof-power politics—knowing who to oppose
and when to oppose them—Britain got the
answer wrong three times. This said, the
starring role in the “struggle for mastery”
should still go to Britain, and not to the
“Holy Roman Empire,” as Simms seems to
think. Equilibria don’t arise spontaneously;
they need an organiser who recruits and
maintains anti-hegemonic alliances. Henry
VIII was the first to make the point with his
maxim Cui adhaero praeest—“prevail shall
those whom I support.” By 1577, his daughter Elizabeth was the “Umpire betwixt the
Spaniards, the French, and the Estates,”
gushed an admiring chronicler. “France
and Spain are... the Scales in the Balance
of Europe, and England the Tongue or the
Holder of the Balance.”
This is how Winston Churchill articulated
Britain’s central tradition: “For 400 years the
foreign policy of England has been to oppose
the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the continent... It would
have been easy... to join with the strongest
and share the fruits of his conquest. However,
we always took the harder course, joined with
the less strong powers, made a combination
among them, and thus defeated the continental military tyrant whoever he was.”
Churchill’s is the prototypical, if idealised,
rendition of British grand strategy throughout the ages, which Palmerston cast into
general law. It enjoined Britain to, in Palmerston’s words of 1840, “watch attentively
and to guard with care the maintenance of
the Balance of Power.” Britain engineered
those Continental coalitions that laid low
Habsburg-Spain, the France of the Bourbons
and Bonapartes, and the Germany of the
Hohenzollerns and Hitlers. This narrative
amends Simms’s interpretation in two ways.
One is to stress the centrality of Britain,
which the author, perhaps wary of “Anglocentrism,” downplays at the risk of miss-
arts & books
ing out on the difference between conductor
and orchestra. Others might bang the kettle drum, but Britain held the baton. Using
a second corrective lens, we might look more
closely at the music sheets to distinguish
between the main themes and the variations.
Such a lens would reveal that the “struggle
for mastery” wasn’t an inchoate free for all.
Seemingly a swirling melee, the struggle
was in fact a series of “dominant conflicts,”
a term coined by Johns Hopkins scholar
George Liska.
M
asterfully blending theory and
international history in his day,
Liska is almost forgotten now
(and thus ignored by Simms),
perhaps because the clarity of his style did
not always match the brilliance of his mind.
(Full disclosure: Liska was a professor of
mine who taught me much of what I know
about international relations and diplomatic
history.) He defines a “dominant conflict” as
one that would not only “raise the winner to
preponderance,” but also transform the system’s “culture and structure.” So pace Palmerston and Churchill, the game wasn’t just
about mechanical equilibria of power, but
also about the very “constitution” of Europe.
In the crunch, realpolitik did trump ideology, “supping with the devil” sounding the
basso continuo of the struggle. Yet behind
the question “who shall rule?” always lurked
“what shall Europe be?”—liberal or absolutist, under one God or under many? Just
imagine Europe falling to Catholic Spain,
the battering ram of the Counter Reformation. Or to Napoleonic tyranny, operating in
the guise of national liberation. Or to Nazi/
Stalinist totalitarianism. These were the ultimate stakes in the blood-drenched annals of
Europe’s wars. Hence the “dominant conflict,” fuelled by both interest and ideology,
makes for a more revealing perspective than
the “balance of power,” a strictly mechanical
concept.
Henry VIII and Elizabeth fought against
not only the power, but also the ideology of
Spain—Roman Catholicism with its claim
to universal empire. In the course of the civil
war and the Glorious Revolution, England
became Europe’s first liberal state, embroiled
in two parallel “dominant conflicts” against
both Spain and France. These lasted for centuries, the struggle for possessions and maritime control being aggravated by the clash
between absolutism and constitutionalism.
In the 20th century, the “dominant conflict”
was driven by Nazi Germany and communist
Russia. Again, the stakes were both power
and ideology, like Siamese twins.
These one-on-one contests drew and
redrew Europe’s map and “constitution” for
500 years. Indeed, they defined Europe until
the game changed for good. The turning
point was the intrusion of the United States
as protector and pacifier after the second
prospect april 2013
world war. Suddenly, there was a player in the
game who was stronger than the others and
so sterilised fear and ambition. In this perspective, the US should be seen as the true
father of the European Union. Why resume
fighting within when safety was assured from
without? During the cold war this enabled
arch-enemies like France and Germany to
link hands under the umbrella of America’s
strategic might.
Five hundred years after it bestrode the
stage as driver of history, the European
nation state began to lose the hardest core of
its raison d’être—to be the guardian of security. To grasp this stunning transformation,
it helps to highlight another factor Simms
might have rendered more explicit. By way
of shorthand: the nation state made war, and
war made the nation state. Its competitive
advantage fed expansion, and war fused state
and nation. Take war out of the system, and
the nation state will have to give.
Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella,
France under the Valois, England under the
Tudors, Russia under Ivan and Peter, Germany under Bismarck and Wilhelm—their
careers are uncannily alike. First, a core state
conquers the nation, then it uses its new muscle to strike out beyond. In turn, war abroad
favours an even stronger state at home, which
eliminates competing centres of power,
monopolises loyalties and dismantles barriers to economic growth. The best example is
revolutionary France. Attacked by the dynastic powers for ideological reasons, it was centralised by the Jacobins who dispatched
aristocrats and liberals to the guillotine. Riding the nationalist fervour, they invented the
force-multiplier of universal conscription,
the levée en masse, that propelled Napoleon
all the way to Moscow. In Stalin’s Russia and
Hitler’s Germany, as well, totalitarian mobilisation was the child of war, and war was the
father of the supreme state.
That bloody journey has now come to an
end in a Europe both pacified and democratised. Everybody now belongs to the same
(secular) church. There is little left to fuel
the next “dominant conflict.” But wait! The
European saga reveals yet another pattern:
the hegemonist always rings twice. Charles
V of Spain, who stood at the beginning of
the permanent conflict with France, was followed by Philip II, him of the armada, who
took on England. The “Sun King,” Louis XIV
of France, was followed by Napoleon, and
Kaiser Wilhelm II by Adolf Hitler. By that
reckoning, Russia, defeated in the cold war,
should have another go. Will it?
Simms is a historian, not a soothsayer,
and so his book ends on an appropriately
agnostic note—with a series of questions.
But the odds are that Europe’s career as
arena and wellspring of history’s most consequential wars is over. The fires of ambition
and ideology have burned out, and as long
as the United States remains a power in
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74
Europe, it will provide security in situ, which
its in-and-out forebear Britain would not do.
Britain’s grand strategy was “offshore antihegemonism.” As Castlereagh, the foreign
secretary who helped managed the coalition that defeated Napolean, put it in 1820:
“We shall be found in our place when actual
danger menaces the system of Europe; but
this country cannot, and will not, act upon...
principles of precaution.”
These days, Germany—Simms’s starring actor—is again number one on the Continent, but what a difference defeat and
democracy have made! Prussia is gone, and
so is the warrior culture that once thrust Hitler’s panzer armies to the gates of Cairo and
arts & books
Moscow. Chancellor Angela Merkel deploys
only currency reserves, not battle-hardened
shock troops. The EU is the “Holy Roman
Empire of Democratic Nations,” that has
made war inside Europe inconceivable. As
in centuries past, the contest over the “constitution” of this empire has not ended, but
it is peaceable to the point of boring. The
contenders are the usual suspects: Britain, France and Germany. Yet there is no
“tyrant,” as Churchill had it, on the horizon—the oppression by Brussels being confined to the curvature of cucumbers or the
wattage of light bulbs.
How about Europe as such becoming a
great power? Well, yes, if… If it acquired the
prospect april 2013
character and clout of a real nation-state,
with a democratic sovereign below and a
legitimate ruler on top, with a European
identity and culture, with a credible army
and a global vocation. Europe has none of the
above. Its leader is the Brussels bureaucracy
beholden to a feeble parliament. Its default
language is English, and its pop culture
American. Europe is happy and secure as it
is. Never in the past 500 years has it enjoyed
so much tranquillity. So why budge? As
Napoleon’s mother Letizia famously mused:
“Pourvu que ça dure”—provided it lasts.
Josef Joffe is editor of Die Zeit. His new book,
“The Myth of America’s Decline,” will be
published by WW Norton in the autumn
He always slips away
JM Coetzee’s new novel is a profound existential comedy, says Ruth Franklin. But what does it all mean?
The Childhood of Jesus
by JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker, £16.99)
“I am not sure he is wholly of our world,”
a medical officer says of the title figure in
JM Coetzee’s 1983 novel The Life and Times
of Michael K. The same could be said of
Coetzee himself, and the austerely bleak
novels that he has been steadily turning out
over a career that now spans nearly four
decades. Bare and abstract, these works
often take place in an unnamed, perhaps
even indeterminate location, involving
characters who are more like the shadow
puppets of a mystery play than the fully
realised psyches animated by most contemporary novelists. Radically simple in
their language yet evading neat interpretation, Coetzee’s books often have the feel
of allegory, though not in the classic sense
in which symbols readily match up to their
referents. They are, rather, like chamber
works played slightly out of tune, in which
the unresolved dissonance becomes an
essential quality of the performance, jarring the reader out of his or her preconceptions about how fiction works.
Yet despite their otherworldly tenor,
Coetzee’s novels have always seemed to
be commentary on the world in which we
live, though it is an oblique commentary
that dances in circles around reality rather
than plodding alongside it. Throughout
his career, Coetzee has been preoccupied
with the notion of justice—together with
its dark shadow, the brutality of the powerful toward the powerless—as perhaps only
a South African writer can be. His early
work Waiting for the Barbarians, which
appeared in 1980, told the story of a man
called only “the magistrate,” an officer of
an unnamed empire that is obsessed with
defending itself against a tribe of barbar-
ians native to the land, and the trouble he
finds himself in after committing a gesture
of humanity toward one of the despised. In
Michael K, a novel that bears comparison
not only to the works of Franz Kafka but
also to those of Samuel Beckett and Albert
Camus, the title character is living by his
wits amid a raging civil war. Over and over
he is picked up by the police and forced
to do hard labour or confined in concentration camp-like conditions, despite having committed no crime. These works,
published during the years of apartheid,
cannot but be read as a reflection of that
regime of terror, although neither offers an
easy political lesson. “Did you not notice
how, whenever I tried to pin you down,
you slipped away?” the medical officer in
Michael K laments.
Coetzee’s later books have explored
the after-effects of apartheid even as his
main preoccupation has shifted to different injustices—most notably the cruelty of
humans to animals, with occasional forays
into global politics. In Disgrace, for which
Coetzee won his second Booker Prize in
1999 (the first was for Michael K), the middle-aged professor David Lurie is forced to
resign after being caught in an affair with
a student. He goes to stay with his daughter Lucy in the countryside, where the two
of them are the victims of a brutal attack
by a group of young African men. He is
bewildered by Lucy’s refusal to tell the
police the details of her assault (she was
raped) and her lack of interest in prosecuting the criminals. She withdraws into her
own world, leaving him to fill his days by
volunteering at the local animal shelter, a
place of “last resort” where the only way to
heal is to kill. “This is the only life there is.
Which we share with animals,” Lucy tells
her father early in the novel. The question
of whether we must meet the same fate is
left unanswered.
Coetzee’s vision, it should be clear, is
deeply moral. It is not, however, an explicitly religious vision: God plays no obvious
role in his scenarios of the inhumanities we
perpetrate against man and beast. So the
apparently unironic title of the new novel,
The Childhood of Jesus, comes as a shock.
But it is soon evident that this book—
deeply absorbing and uncanny, but even
more opaque than what we have come
to expect from this writer—is no Nativity story. What it has to do with Jesus is
Coetzee’s latest unanswered question.
A
man and a boy have arrived in a
city called Novilla. We are told
nothing of its location except
that the residents speak Spanish.
The two are unrelated; they met aboard the
ship that brought them to this new world.
During the journey, the boy lost a letter
he had with him that presumably identified his parents. Now the man has become
his de facto guardian, resolving to find the
boy’s mother. Their names—given to them
by the authorities upon their arrival—are
Simón and David, but more often they are
simply called “man” and “boy.”
Where have they come from, and what
happened that caused them to lose everything, even their identities? The novel
explains that new arrivals at Novilla are
“washed clean by the passage here,”
untroubled by memories of their previous lives. (Coetzee has long been fascinated by the notion of the castaway, a man
washed up on a foreign shore, like Robinson Crusoe, with nothing to identify who
he is or where he has come from.) “What
are we here for?” David asks Simón early
on. Simón ignores the philosophical impli-
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prospect april 2013
JM Coetzee: his novels, including the 1999 Booker Prize-winner Disgrace, are “radically simple in their language yet evade neat interpreation”
cations of the question. “We are here for
the same reason everyone else is. We have
been given a chance to live and we have
accepted that chance… There is nowhere
else to be but here.”
Life in Novilla is straightforward, if not
exactly easy. Simón and David are given
an apartment and an allowance. Simón
finds employment on the docks as a stevedore, where he enjoys the camaraderie
of his fellow workers. A detached benevolence characterises all personal affairs. On
the first day, when Simón has no money for
food, the foreman offers him the contents
of his own pocket. Over lunch, the stevedores debate philosophical questions, and
in the evenings they gather at the Institute, which offers free classes in everything from Spanish to drawing. A music
teacher named Elena offers David free lessons. “There are more important things
than money,” she tells Simón. “Music, yes,
but also how one lives.”
Are they in paradise—or hell? There is
something creepy about all this placidity.
It is as if everyone has been lobotomised.
When Simón and Elena begin sleeping
together, they “do the business of sex.”
Blandness pervades everything: even the
local food is unseasoned. But the residents
of Novilla are satisfied, or seem to be, with
exactly what they have. Only Simón wants
more. He cannot tolerate the absence of
strong feeling—the stevedores’ lack of
ambition, Elena’s matter-of-fact approach
to sexual relations, even the lack of pleasure to be taken in eating. This is more
than just the old struggle between the
body and the head, from which virtually
all of Coetzee’s male protagonists suffer.
When Simón complains that he is continually hungry, it is because he cannot fill his
soul—with work, with thought, with love.
Coetzee’s novels have often showed
more of an interest in philosophical problems than in emotional ones; a certain
coldness pervades them. This is a writer
who is deeply, relentlessly serious. A profile that appeared in the New Statesman
some years ago noted his “almost monkish
self-discipline and dedication” and cited
a colleague of over a decade who “claims
to have seen him laugh just once.” It is
something of a relief, then, to discover real
humour in this novel. Part of Simón’s frustration in Novilla is that no one seems to
get his jokes; everything he says is taken at
face value. Perhaps Coetzee feels the same.
To be sure, the humour in this novel
tends to be of the existential variety. At
one point Simón visits the local bordello,
Salón Confort, where he must fill out an
application, in which he goes on at length
describing the attributes he desires in a
“therapist,” the duration of their meetings and so on. The acceptance letter never
arrives, and he rues his honesty on the form.
“Someone young and pretty,” he wishes he
had written, “thirty minutes will do.”
But the novel seems to be utterly serious in its insistence that David is a kind of
Jesus figure. One day Simón and David go
on a hike that leads them to a gated mansion. Behind the fence, a woman is playing tennis. When Simón sees her, he is
convinced that she is David’s mother, via
a kind of immaculate conception. (Her
name happens to be Inés—meaning “pure,
holy, chaste.”) And the woman consents.
She moves into Simón’s apartment and
accepts David as her son.
76
The symbolic evidence continues to
mount. David’s best friend is named Fidel,
“faith.” (Fidel’s mother is Elena, “light.”)
After Inés tells David a story about a son
who sacrifices himself for his mother, he
becomes obsessed with it. He refuses to
believe in the concept of infinity, and insists
to Simón that he can speak in his own language. “He looks into the boy’s eyes. For
the briefest of moments he sees something
there. He has no name for it. It is like…
Like a fish that wriggles loose as you try to
grasp it. But not like a fish—no, like like a
fish. Or like like like a fish.” When a teacher
tells him to write “I must tell the truth” on
the blackboard, he writes instead, “I am
the truth.”
But the meaning of all this is not at all
obvious. If the boy is a saviour, what does
he offer salvation from? In Disgrace, David
Lurie—he and the boy share that biblically
loaded name—muses, as he prepares euthanised dogs for cremation, that “he may
not be their saviour, but he is prepared to
take care of them once they are unable,
utterly unable, to take care of themselves.”
He cannot save the dogs from death, but
he can ease their passage into it. Simón has
complained that his life is “not enough…
I wish someone, some saviour, would
descend from the skies and wave a magic
wand and say, Behold, read this book and
all your questions will be answered. Or,
Behold, here is an entirely new life for
you.” But as far as the novel is concerned,
he is already living a new life. Simón seems
to be the only one who cannot abide the
death-in-life conditions in Novilla: bloodless, passionless, without history or promise of future.
I couldn’t help imagining how the expe-
arts & books
rience of reading this book would have
been different if it only had a different
title, one of Coetzee’s usual abstractions: A
New Life, say. But the imposition of Jesus
wrenches the book beyond obliqueness into
a symbolic universe where it does not quite
seem to fit. One tries to pin it down, and it
slips away, like a fish. Or like like a fish.
I
n the years since apartheid’s end, the
South African writers who came up
from within it have begun to direct
their attention to other subjects. Some,
such as André Brink, have turned their gaze
inward on the history of their country; others have leaned out into the world at large.
Coetzee is in the second category. In recent
years his writing has attended, often polemically, to the major political issues of the 21st
century: the war in Iraq, Guantánamo, the
corruption of American power.
In his 2007 novel, Diary of a Bad Year,
which incorporates essays on contemporary politics written by a Coetzee-like figure, the writer compares the situation
of Americans during the Bush years to
the shame white South Africans feel for
“the crimes that were committed in their
name.” That shame, of course, is what animated Coetzee’s great political novels of
the 1980s. But the difference is that America’s crimes were committed not only in the
name of American citizens, but with the
goal of keeping the world safe from militant Islam. Thus the shame that spreads in
the wake of these crimes is not limited to
Americans, but is a blight on all. It is not
Americans alone who must save their honour in the face of torture and unjust imprisonment, but everyone. “Inasmuch as it is a
world-hegemonic power, [America] is in an
prospect april 2013
important sense my country too, and everyone else’s on the planet,” Coetzee wrote
recently.
This remark appears in a recently published book of correspondence between
Coetzee and Paul Auster (Here and Now:
Letters, 2008—2011). Though the letters
span the period during which Coetzee
must have been working on The Childhood
of Jesus, he never writes specifically about
the novel. But there is a fascinating passage in which Coetzee reflects in uncharacteristically blunt terms on the nature of
writing itself. The writer, he suggests, is a
kind of sacrificial figure:
“There is a lot of romantic bullshit
spoken about the writing life, about the
despair of confronting the blank page,
about the anguish of inspiration that
won’t come, about unpredictable—and
unreliable—fits of sleepless, fevered creation, about the nagging and unquenchable self-doubt, and so on. But it’s not
entirely bullshit, is it? Writing is a matter
of giving and giving and giving, without
much respite. I think of the pelican that
Shakespeare is so fond of, that tears open
its breast in order to feed its offspring on
its blood.”
But sacrifice does not always equal salvation. As a writer, Coetzee can no more
absolve us of the world’s corruption than
David Lurie, faced with a roomful of dogs
to be euthanised, can pre-empt their fate.
The dissonance of his works is a way of
expressing that failure: life as a perpetual
series of chords that will not resolve.
Ruth Franklin is a contributing editor at The
New Republic and is currently a fellow at the
Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She
is working on a biography of Shirley Jackson
The last revolution
Four decades ago someone asked Clement Greenberg, America’s most influential
art critic and the high priest of abstract
expressionism, what he thought about
Pop art. It seems Marilyn Monroe silk
screens did not impress him. “It will probably last the way the pictures of Gérôme
or Bouguereau… have lasted,” Greenberg predicted—naming two French academic painters now overshadowed by the
Impressionists. “It is nice small art and it
is respectable, but it is not good enough to
keep high art going.”
As so often, though, Greenberg turned
out to be on the wrong side of art history.
Pop hasn’t just endured; it has triumphed,
and on both sides of the Atlantic its visibility is greater than ever. On 14th April
the Museum of Modern Art in New York
opens a years-in-the-making retrospective of Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born
American sculptor best known for massive
reproductions of everyday items—an ice
cream cone, a lipstick. (It’s something of
a homecoming: Oldenburg’s brother Richard was director of MoMA for 22 years.)
And after stops in Chicago and Washington, a remarkable and eye-opening exhibition devoted to Roy Lichtenstein is now
on view at Tate Modern in London, which
includes not just the artist’s comic bookstyle paintings, but sculpture, drawings,
and collage.
More than Minimalism or abstract
painting, Pop has become the defining
style of the 1960s—and 50 years on, not
© Claes Oldenburg
Pop changed the art world forever, says Jason Farago
Claes Oldenburg with his ice cream cone
© 1965 – 77 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: mumok
prospect april 2013
only have the prices for Pop art
reached stratospheric heights,
but its critical and cultural
credibility has never been more
solid. It is decidedly establishment now, and visitors to
MoMA or the Tate today look
at this work with very different
eyes. The shift that these artists effected—assimilating mass
culture into high art—is taken for granted
now, and their impostures now inspire
more veneration than shock.
Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and their
colleagues were responding not just to
the explosion of commerce and commercial images in the years after the second
world war, but the homogenisation and
banality that went along with it. Shocked
critics misunderstood Pop as a dumb celebration of mass culture; the art historian Michael Fried lamented Oldenburg’s
“naive aesthetic” in 1962, while the New
York Times, in 1964, called Lichtenstein
“one of the worst artists in America.” But
lowbrow subject matter was not an end in
itself, nor was its use especially innovative.
The Dadaists had integrated the ephemera of popular culture into their work long
before, and in London Eduardo Paolozzi
was reworking pulp novel covers as early
as the late 1940s.
Something bigger is going on in Lichtenstein than mere translation. His paintings play a double game—they expose
the emptiness of manufactured popular
imagery, but they also chip away at the distinction of art, and the social structures
that produce that distinction. And Oldenburg’s early plastic sculptures, which he
sold himself at illogical prices in a packedto-the-rafters New York storefront, were
hardly just goofy knick-knacks; they called
into question the most fundamental rules
of both art and economic exchange. It was
arts & books
77
Taking the Mickey:
Oldenburg’s giant Mouse
Museum (1965–77) which contains
display cases with nearly 400 objects
the same with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes,
Wayne Thiebaud’s gumball machines, and
Ed Ruscha’s gas stations: Pop may have
been cool in appearance, but it was radical
in consequence.
In one way, the stakes of Pop are clearer
to us than they were to contemporary audiences. Compared to 1963, in 2013 it’s much
easier to see past mere subject matter, the
Coca-Cola bottles and Mickey Mouse cartoons, and dig into the political and social
resonances that Pop has always had within
it. (The exhibition “Sinister Pop,” which
closes at New York’s Whitney Museum of
American Art on 31st March, did an excellent job showcasing the darker dimensions
of the movement, how it reflected everything from the war in Vietnam to racial
discrimination.) Not only that: the values
of Pop has been so triumphant that today
we have no expectation, when we go to an
art gallery, of some pure aesthetic experience beyond the “real world” of economic
flows, mass media, or even geopolitics. Art
now is simply a constituent component of
one giant image stream, and Pop offers a
rare opportunity to interrogate the rules
that govern it and to think about how it
can be disrupted or remade.
At the same time, Lichtenstein and
Oldenburg should also remind us of the
much lower stakes of our contemporary
artistic moment, when the category of
“art” is so capacious, and the reach of the
market so wide, that there’s no longer any
real possibility of making as large a splash
as they did. Pop looked straightforward,
even mundane, to its first viewers, but it
ended up shaking the very foundations of
culture. The kind of exclusionary judgement that Pop upended is now a thing of
the past, though, and not even the most
critical or disruptive practices can produce
the slightest wobble in the supremacy of
the art market—a market in which Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and especially Warhol
are now blue-chip commodities. Pop really
was an artistic revolution. But the most
important and most sobering lesson to be
learned at MoMA and the Tate this spring
is that it might have been the last one.
Jason Farago is a New York-based writer and
critic
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prospect april 2013
Remaking Strindberg
Director Katie Mitchell is at war with Britain’s parochial theatre culture, says James Woodall
moderns such as Martin Crimp and Simon
Stephens, as well as a groundbreaking,
video-savvy adaptation of Virginia Woolf ’s
novel The Waves, have attracted as much
vitriol as admiration.
“Britain’s most overrated director,”
brayed Alastair Macaulay in the Financial Times in response to her 2005 National
Theatre production of Strindberg’s A
Dream Play. He compounded the attack a
year later by claiming that Mitchell “lays
out a play on a slab like an anatomy lesson and makes performance art with its
entrails.”
I do not allude to these barbs with
Mitchell, though we are here in fact to talk
about Strindberg. Her German version of
Miss Julie, created at the Schaubühne in
2010, visits London’s Barbican at the end
of April. The play is performed, radically,
solely from the point of view of the servant, Kristin (the wonderful Jule Böwe).
Inventive use is made of live video again,
a technique evolved from Waves (as the
production was actually called). There’s a
score for a cellist. In one important scene,
when Kristin falls asleep, 20 pages of
Strindberg are skipped and, instead, the
sleeper’s dreams are imagined.
For traditionalists it’s the kind of thing
to guarantee cardiac unhappiness. Mitch-
© Stephen Cummiskey
On a cold Berlin morning I’m in the café
of one of Europe’s great theatres, the
Schaubühne, to meet the director Katie
Mitchell. Given her reputation as a fierce
iconoclast, encountering Mitchell in person is a surprise. The first things you notice
about her are a winning friendliness—she
smiles openly—and intense pale blue eyes.
In a high laugh she apologises for being
late. She’s been waiting in the wrong café:
her favourite, next to the Schaubühne.
She’s in Berlin for The Yellow Wallpaper, a production based on a short story
by the late 19th-century American writer
and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Mitchell is a ferociously hard worker—for
the Schaubühne she’s devised a technologically complex staging, set in modern
Germany, which uses gauzes, water and
five live cameras. In the play a post-natal
depressive hallucinates about another
woman behind yellow wallpaper and tears
it all off. It’s in the mould of Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion, Mitchell explains.
Back home, Mitchell shows in this vein
have earned her a reputation for bleakness.
Some critics hate her. True, her aesthetic is
severe; she strips plays down, turns them
inside out and challenges them. Her visually driven stagings of classics (Greek, Russian, Scandinavian), and of work by British
Katie Mitchell’s new adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie makes inventive use of live video
ell’s 2006 NT chiaroscuro remake of Chekhov’s The Seagull, for example—English by
Martin Crimp—had some, public and critics alike, groaning in their seats. Then, in a
Times interview in a year later, the National’s chief Nicholas Hytner rounded on
“dead white men”—certain well-known
critics—for dissing Mitchell not just
because of her high-art “Europeanness”
but, more controversially, her sex (Hytner was also defending Kneehigh’s Emma
Rice).
Let’s nail that jelly. Prominent women
theatre directors in Britain have been rare,
but things have, interestingly, changed
even since the men-critics episode. Along
with Emma Rice, Marianne Elliott has had
regular successes at the NT. Josie Rourke
now runs the Donmar Warehouse. Vicky
Featherstone is about to take over at the
Royal Court. Erica Whyman is second in
command at the Royal Shakespeare Company. When it comes to women making big
theatre waves, are we past misogyny?
“No,” Mitchell says. “And it’s the same
in Germany. Anywhere. Lots of things
knotted together create the problem. Part
of it is biology and therefore to do with children [Mitchell has a seven-year-old girl].
Another strand is connected to a different way of perceiving and experiencing the
world. Because one way, the male, dominates, the other way can be seen as wrong,
as opposed to being celebrated as different.
Maybe it’s also to do with behaviour, presentation. Selling.”
Mitchell should know. After Oxford in
the mid-1980s and assisting at the Royal
Shakespeare Company she took off for
Russia and Eastern Europe to explore theatre there, and, back in the UK, founded
an influential but financially threadbare
company, Classics on a Shoestring. She
wanted to do her own thing, based on her
foreign discoveries. She enjoyed and enjoys
difficulty.
In a parochial theatre culture, it was
always going to be a fight. Mitchell’s schooling was Continental. Theatre in many nonEnglish cultures, especially German and
French, is seen as a forum to discuss, dissect and even quarrel with well-known
plays, which can confer disproportionate
authority on a director. The British mainstream famously resists textual sabotage,
and this is what Mitchell has been repeatedly accused of. An actor who worked for
her in the 1990s observes: “She is a bit
hard core and this marks her out. But she
doesn’t mind the knocks.”
Today, at 48, Mitchell is invited to top
prospect april 2013
theatres across Europe. She directs what
she likes, opera included (from Aix to the
Royal Opera House), with a British production team she’s worked with for years.
Shows in Britain are piling up for 2014—
The Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic, Così
fan tutte at English National Opera—and in
2009 she got an OBE. Until December of
79
arts & books
last year she’d been an associate director of
the National for a decade.
With success like that, the knives will
be out for her production of Fräulein Julie.
Mitchell, who’ll ignore them, makes no
inflated claims for the show:
“It’s a simple experiment. You can get
the whole story with the subtraction of
acres of material. I do this only because it’s
a very owned play. My production visited
Ingmar Bergman’s theatre in Stockholm,
which was scary. I thought the audience
would fall ill. But they were fine! They had
a vertiginous time.”
James Woodall is an associate editor of
Prospect
The month in books
April’s selections span from the earliest origins of life to a satirical look at the “rise of
Asia” in the 21st century, says Rose Jacobs
Over a decade after the
beginning of the “war on terror,” the language of good
versus evil and with us or
against us is as unpalatable
as it’s ever been. David Cannadine shares the distaste.
His latest book, The Undivided Past (Allen Lane, £20), appears to
have been spurred by a deep aversion to this
sort of binary thinking, both in contemporary politics and among his fellow historians. To divide the world by religion, nation,
class, gender, race or—most egregiously,
perhaps—“civilisation” is to deeply and dangerously, and sometimes willfully, misunderstand history, he argues. The book is a
pleasure thanks to Cannadine’s clear writing and sweeping summary of centuries
of (largely western) thought, as well as his
sharp dissection of writers ranging from
Gibbon to Marx to Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. Of course, embracing “our common humanity” rather than
focusing on difference is easiest done from a
place of satisfaction and safety; class struggle, independence movements and battles
for equal rights have a track record of changing, and often improving, the status quo.
Without these frameworks, what will?
To write one novel in second-person narrative may be
regarded as a stunt; to write
two looks like masochism.
Mohsin Hamid has already
proved his formal dexterity with The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In How to Get
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99), he multiplies the feats. The
book is loosely constructed as a literal how-to
guide—move to the city, befriend a bureaucrat, and so on—though each chapter soon
settles into classical storytelling, narrating
the life of a poor boy made good. One senses,
however, that here, being a self-made man
is about much more than wealth. In a chapter that ruminates on life and death, we are
told: “There was a moment when anything
was possible. And there will be a moment
when nothing is possible. But in between
we can create.” On top of the self-help conceit, Hamid adds a second formal trick, universalising his tale by leaving his characters
nameless, his places untied to a map. That
this enhances rather than detracts from the
emotion of the story demonstrates the power
of his prose.
Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s
Orange Prize-winning Half
a Yellow Sun, published in
2006, was set in Nigeria, but
her short stories since have
plumbed the bifurcated
existence of African immigrants in the west—people
struggling to adjust to new lives abroad even
as that adjustment moves them further from
home. Americanah (Fourth Estate, £20)
lets these themes breathe in the larger space
of a novel, as well as taking on the tricky topics of race in America and the UK. Ifemelu,
a spirited Lagos native, moves to the US as
a young woman and navigates the labyrinthine path to a semi-settled life there, eventually earning a living writing a blog about
“American Blacks (Those Formerly Known
as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” Her
childhood boyfriend meanwhile tries, and
fails, to thrive in Britain. While both stories
are movingly and often subtly told, a wider
cast of paper-thin characters at times undermines the project.
Adam Rutherford’s Creation: The Origin of Life /
The Future of Life (Viking,
£20) is a book in two halves.
The first sleuths its way
back in time and deep into
the oceans to probe the
moment chemistry first
produced biology. The second half studies recent efforts to re-engineer the genetic
code. Rutherford, a geneticist, journalist
and broadcaster, can get a bit breathless
in his descriptions: complex life, we learn,
includes “you and me and yeast and snakes
and algae and fungus, flowers, trees and
turnips.” I found the section on synthetic
biology (genetic engineering as an applied
science) mystifying, less for the breakthroughs described than the decision to
spend large chunks of it making “the case
for progress”—a case that critics of GM
foods or GM animals will find unconvincing and the rest of us will find unsurprising. But the suspenseful origin-of-life tale
is erudite and thrilling.
In Small Wars, Far Away
Places (Macmillan, £25),
historian Michael Burleigh—author of The Third
Reich, which won the 2001
Samuel Johnson Prize—
traverses the globe in the
two decades following the
second world war. This, he argues, was a
time when American isolationism and distaste for European colonialism gave way to
a policy of Soviet containment that ensured
the cold war would become a global ideological conflict. The narrative is, by the
author’s own admission, geographically
and temporally discursive, an arrangement that pleasingly echoes its characters’
peregrinations. In Burleigh’s telling, diplomats, revolutionaries and world leaders
alike stepped forward, back and sideways—
a shuffle often smoothed, in hindsight and
for political purposes, into a more straightforward march. Burleigh, who writes a blog
for the Daily Mail and penned an occasionally vitriolic work on terrorism in 2009,
is here as ready to acknowledge the cruelty and foibles of western presidents and
prime ministers—on the left and right—as
he is those of Stalin, Mao or any number of
politicians and soldiers trying to throw off
their colonial rulers. But for all he admits
the Americans at the time were, as a rule,
both self-righteous and self-serving, they
get many an approving nod.
Rose Jacobs is a journalist based in Munich
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prospect april 2013
Fiction
Javier MarÍas
Javier Marías is Spain’s most celebrated
living novelist. His work has been
translated into 32 languages and has
won many international literary awards.
WG Sebald wrote of Marías that, “he
uses language like an anatomist uses the
scalpel to cut away the layers of the flesh
in order to lay bare the innermost
secrets of that strangest of species, the
human being.”
The passage below comes from the
beginning of Marías’s new novel The
Infatuations. The narrator, María Dolz,
describes how she became obsessed with
a couple who would come each morning
to the café where she ate her breakfast.
It was not until later that she discovered
the identity of the man, when she saw
his photo in a newspaper after he had
been stabbed to death.
The Infatuations
T
he last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was
also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which
seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was
his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he
had never met, a woman with whom he had never
exchanged so much as a single word. I didn’t even know his name,
or only when it was too late, only when I saw a photo in the newspaper, showing him after he had been stabbed several times, with
his shirt half off, and about to become a dead man, if he wasn’t
dead already in his own absent consciousness, a consciousness that
never returned: his last thought must have been that the person
stabbing him was doing so by mistake and for no reason, that is,
senselessly, and what’s more, not just once, but over and over, unremittingly, with the intention of erasing him from the world and
expelling him from the earth without further delay, right there and
then. But why do I say “too late,” I wonder, too late for what? I have
no idea, to be honest. It’s just that when someone dies, we always
think it’s too late for anything, or indeed everything—certainly too
late to go on waiting for him—and we write him off as another
casualty. It’s the same with those closest to us, although we find
their deaths much harder to accept and we mourn them, and
their image accompanies us in our mind both when we’re out and
about and when we’re at home, even though for a long time we
believe that we will never get accustomed to their absence. From
the start, though, we know—from the moment they die—that we
can no longer count on them, not even for the most petty thing,
for a trivial phone call or a banal question (“Did I leave my car
keys there?” “What time did the kids get out of school today?”),
that we can count on them for nothing. And nothing means nothing. It’s incomprehensible really, because it assumes a certainty
and being certain of anything goes against our nature: the certainty that someone will never come back, never speak again,
never take another step—whether to come closer or to move farther off—will never look at us or look away. I don’t know how we
bear it, or how we recover. I don’t know how it is that we do gradually begin to forget, when time has passed and distanced us from
© Extracted from “The Infatuations” by Javier Marías (Hamish Hamilton,
£18.99 © Javier Marías 2013
them, for they, of course, have remained quite still.
But I had often seen him and heard him talk and laugh,
almost every morning, in fact, over a period of a few years, and
quite early in the morning too, although not so very early, in
fact, I used to delay slightly getting into work just so as to be
able spend a little time with that couple, and not just with him,
you understand, but with them both, it was the sight of them
together that calmed and contented me before my working day
began. They became almost obligatory. No, that’s the wrong
word for something that gives one pleasure and a sense of peace.
Perhaps they became a superstition, but, no, that’s not it either:
it wasn’t that I believed the day would go badly if I didn’t share
breakfast with them, at a distance, that is; it was just that, without my daily sighting of them, I began work feeling rather lower
in spirits or less optimistic, as if they provided me with a vision
of an orderly or, if you prefer, harmonious world, or perhaps a
tiny fragment of the world visible only to a very few, as is the case
with any fragment or any life, however public or exposed that life
might be. I didn’t like to shut myself away for hours in the office
without first having seen and observed them, not on the sly, but
discreetly, the last thing I would have wanted was to make them
feel uncomfortable or to bother them in any way. And it would
have been unforgivable and to my own detriment to frighten
them off. It comforted me to breathe the same air and to be a
part—albeit unnoticed—of their morning landscape, before they
went their separate ways, probably until the next meal, which, on
many days, would have been supper. The last day on which his
wife and I saw him, they could not dine together. Or even have
lunch. She waited twenty minutes for him at a restaurant table,
puzzled but not overly concerned, until the phone rang and her
world ended, and she never waited for him again.
I
t was clear to me from the very first day that they were
married, he was nearly fifty and she slightly younger, not
yet forty. The nicest thing about them was seeing how
much they enjoyed each other’s company. At an hour
when almost no one is in the mood for anything, still less
for fun and games, they talked non-stop, laughing and joking, as
Fiction
81
© Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
prospect april 2013
if they had only just met or met for the very first time, and not as
if they had left the house together, dropped the kids off at school,
having first got washed and dressed at the same time—perhaps
in the same bathroom—and woken up in the same bed, nor as if
the first thing they’d seen had been the inevitable face of their
spouse, and so on and on, day after day, for a fair number of years,
because they had children, a boy and a girl, who came with them
on a couple of occasions, the girl must have been about eight and
the boy about four, and the boy looked incredibly like his father.
The husband dressed with a slightly old-fashioned elegance,
although he never seemed in any way ridiculous or anachronistic.
I mean that he was always smartly dressed and well coordinated,
with made-to-measure shirts, expensive, sober ties, a handkerchief in his top jacket pocket, cufflinks, polished lace-up shoes—
black or else suede, although he only wore suede towards the end
of spring, when he started wearing lighter-coloured suits—and
his hands were carefully manicured. Despite all this, he didn’t
give the impression of being some vain executive or a dyed-inthe-wool rich kid. He seemed more like a man whose upbringing
would not allow him to go out in the street dressed in any other
way, not at least on a working day; such clothes seemed natural
to him, as if his father had taught him that, after a certain age,
this was the appropriate way to dress, regardless of any foolish
and instantly outmoded fashions, and regardless, too, of the raggedy times in which we live, and that he need not be affected by
these in the least. He dressed so traditionally that I never once
detected a single eccentric detail; he wasn’t interested in trying
to look different, although he did stand out a little in the context
of the café where I always saw him and even perhaps in the context of our rather scruffy city. This naturalness was matched by
his undoubtedly cordial, cheery nature, almost hail-fellow-wellmet you might say (although he addressed the waiters formally
as usted and treated them with a kindness that never toppled over
into cloying familiarity): his frequent outbursts of laughter were
somewhat loud, it’s true, but never irritatingly so. He laughed
easily and with gusto, but he always did so sincerely and sympathetically, never in a flattering, sycophantic manner, but as if
responding to things that genuinely amused him, as many things
did, for he was a generous man, ready to see the funny side of the
situation and to applaud other people’s jokes, at least the verbal
variety. Perhaps it was his wife who mainly made him laugh, for
there are people who can make us laugh even when they don’t
intend to, largely because their very presence pleases us, and so
it’s easy enough to set us off, simply seeing them and being in
their company and hearing them is all it takes, even if they’re
not saying anything very extraordinary or are even deliberately
spouting nonsense, which we nevertheless find funny. They
seemed to fulfil that role for each other; and although they were
clearly married, I never caught one of them putting on an artificial or studiedly soppy expression, like some couples who have
lived together for years and make a point of showing how much
in love they still are, as if that somehow increased their value or
embellished them. No, it was more as if they were determined to
get on together and make a good impression on each other with
a view to possible courtship; or as if they had been so drawn to
each other before they were married or lived together that, in
any circumstance, they would have spontaneously chosen each
other—not out of conjugal duty or convenience or habit or even
loyalty—as companion or partner, friend, conversationalist or
accomplice, in the knowledge that, whatever happened, whatever transpired, whatever there was to tell or to hear, it would
always be less interesting or amusing with someone else. Without her in his case, without him in her case. There was a camaraderie between them and, above all, a certainty.
T
here was something very pleasant about Miguel
Desvern or Deverne’s face, it exuded a kind of
manly warmth, which made him seem very attractive from a distance and led me to imagine that he
would be irresistible in person. I doubtless noticed
him before I did Luisa, or else it was because of him that I also
noticed her, since although I often saw the wife without the husband—he would leave the café first and she nearly always stayed
on for a few minutes longer, sometimes alone, smoking a cigarette, sometimes with a few work colleagues or mothers from
school or friends, who on some mornings joined them there
82
Fiction
at the last moment, when he was already just about to leave—
I never saw the husband without his wife beside him. I have no
image of him alone, he only existed with her (that was one of
the reasons why I didn’t at first recognise him in the newspaper,
because Luisa wasn’t there). But I soon became interested in
them both, if “interested” is the right word.
Desvern had short, thick, very dark hair, with, at his temples, just a few grey hairs, which seemed curlier than the rest (if
he had let his sideburns grow, they might have sprouted incongruously into kiss-curls). The expression in his eyes was bright,
calm and cheerful, and there was a glimmer of ingenuousness
or childishness in them whenever he was listening to someone
else, the expression of a man who is, generally speaking, amused
by life, or who is simply not prepared to go through life without enjoying its million and one funny sides, even in the midst
of difficulties and misfortunes. True, he had probably known
very few of these compared with what is most men’s common
lot, and that would have helped him to preserve those trusting,
smiling eyes. They were grey and seemed to look at everything
as if everything were a novelty, even the insignificant things they
saw repeated every day, that café at the top of Príncipe de Vergara and its waiters, my silent face. He had a cleft chin, which
reminded me of a film starring Robert Mitchum or Cary Grant
or Kirk Douglas, I can’t remember who it was now, and in which
an actress places one finger on the actor’s dimpled chin and asks
how he manages to shave in there. Every morning, it made me
feel like getting up from my table, going over to Deverne and
asking him the same question and, in turn, gently prodding
his chin with my thumb or forefinger. He was always very well
shaven, dimple included.
They took far less notice of me, infinitely less than I did of
them. They would order their breakfast at the bar and, once
served, take it over to a table by the large window that gave
onto the street, while I took a seat at a table towards the back.
In spring and summer, we would all sit outside, and the waiters
would pass our orders through a window that opened out next
to the bar, and this gave rise to various comings and goings and,
therefore, to more visual contact, because there was no other
form of contact. Both Desvern and Luisa occasionally glanced
at me, merely out of curiosity, but never for very long or for any
reason. He never looked at me in an insinuating, castigating or
arrogant manner, that would have been a disappointment, and
she never showed any sign of suspicion, superiority or disdain,
which I would have found most upsetting. Because I liked both
of them, you see, the two of them together. I didn’t regard them
with envy, not at all, but with a feeling of relief that in the real
world there could exist what I believed to be a perfect couple.
Indeed, they seemed even more perfect in that Luisa’s sartorial appearance was in complete contrast to that of Deverne, as
regards style and choice of clothes. At the side of such a smartly
turned out man, one would have expected to see a woman who
shared the same characteristics, classically elegant, although
not perhaps predictably so, but wearing a skirt and high heels
most of the time, with clothes by Céline, for example, and
earrings and bracelets that were striking, but always in good
taste. In fact, she alternated between a rather sporty look and
one that I’m not sure whether to describe as casual or indifferent, certainly nothing elaborate anyway. She was as tall as
him, olive-skinned, with shoulder-length, dark, almost black
hair, and very little make-up. When she wore trousers—usually jeans—she accompanied them with a conventional jacket
prospect april 2013
and boots or flat shoes; when she wore a skirt, her shoes were
low-heeled and plain, very like the shoes many women wore
in the 1950s, and in summer, she put on skimpy sandals that
revealed delicate feet, small for a woman of her height. I never
saw her wearing any jewellery and, as for handbags, she only
ever used the sort you sling over your shoulder. She was clearly
as pleasant and cheerful as he was, although her laugh wasn’t
quite as loud; but she laughed just as easily and possibly even
more warmly than he did, revealing splendid teeth that gave
her a somewhat child-like look, or perhaps it was simply the
way her cheeks grew rounder when she smiled—she had doubtless laughed in exactly the same unguarded way ever since she
was four years old. It was as if they had got into the habit of taking a break together before going off to their respective jobs,
once the morning bustle was over—inevitable in families with
small children, a moment to themselves, so as not to have to
part in the middle of all that rush without sharing a little animated conversation. I used to wonder what they talked about
or told each other—how could they possibly have so much to
say, given that they went to bed and got up together and would
presumably keep each other informed of their thoughts and
activities—I only ever caught fragments of their conversation,
or just the odd word or two. On one occasion, I heard him call
her “princess.”
You could say that I wished them all the best in the world, as
if they were characters in a novel or a film for whom one is rooting right from the start, knowing that something bad is going
to happen to them, that at some point, things will go horribly
wrong, otherwise, there would be no novel or film. In real life,
though, there was no reason why that should be the case, and
I expected to continue seeing them every morning exactly as
they were, without ever sensing between them a unilateral or
mutual coolness, or that they had nothing to say and were impatient to be rid of each other, a look of reciprocal irritation or
indifference on their faces. They were the brief, modest spectacle that lifted my mood before I went to work at the publishing house to wrestle with my megalomaniac boss and his horrible authors. If Luisa and Desvern did not appear for a few days,
I would miss them and face my day’s work with a heavier heart.
In a way, without realising or intending to, I felt indebted to
them, they helped me get through the day and allowed me to
fantasise about their life, which I imagined to be unblemished,
so much so that I was glad not to be able to confirm this view or
find out more, and thus risk breaking the temporary spell (my
own life was full of blemishes, and the truth is that I didn’t give
the couple another thought until the following morning, while I
sat on the bus cursing because I’d had to get up so early, which
is something I loathe). I would have liked to give them something similar in exchange, but how could I? They didn’t need
me or, perhaps, anyone, I was almost invisible, erased by their
contentment. A couple of times when he left, having first, as
usual, kissed Luisa on the lips—she never remained seated for
that kiss, but stood up to reciprocate it—he would give me a
slight nod, almost a bow, having first looked up and half-raised
one hand to say goodbye to the waiters, as if I were just another
waiter, a female one. His observant wife made a similar gesture
when I left—always after him and before her—on the same two
occasions when her husband had been courteous enough to do
so. But when I tried to return that gesture with my own even
slighter nod, both he and she had looked away and didn’t even
see me. They were so quick, or so prudent.
The
NEW EDITION
Military
Balance
2013
‘The Military Balance is the unique and vital
resource on which informed public debate of
the world’s armed forces is founded.’
William S. Cohen, former U.S. Secretary of Defense
‘Quite simply the definitive resource on
current military and strategic affairs.’
Edited by The International
Institute for Strategic Studies
Choice
The Military Balance is The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual
assessment of the military capabilities and defence economics of 171
countries worldwide. Offering region-by-region analysis and comprehensive
data on weapons and defence economics it is an essential resource for
those involved in security policy making, analysis and research.
Key features of The Military Balance 2013 include:
❱ New sections on trends in contemporary armed conflicts in
Afghanistan and Syria, as well as trends in defence capability areas, with
a focus on equipment, technological or doctrinal developments.
❱ Detailed analysis of regional and national defence policy and
economic issues for selected states.
❱ Updated graphics feature on comparative defence statistics, with focus
on defence economics and major land, sea and air capability concerns.
March 2013 • Pb 978-1-85743-680-8 • 572PP
To find out more please visit: www.tandfonline.com/tmib or for more
information please contact: reference@routledge.com
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)
is the world’s leading authority on political-military
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military, defence commentators, journalists, academics
and the informed public.
TMIB-115x180-ad v2.indd 1
11/03/2013 18:07
Prospect - can leaders… - 115x180mm)_Layout 1 18/02/2013 14:37 Page 1
The Sir John Cass’s Foundation Lecture
Can Leaders Make a Difference to Organisational Performance?
I
n this lecture Andrew Pettigrew, Professor of Strategy and Organisation at the Saïd Business School, University of
Oxford, will introduce the field of Business and Management research by exploring one of its central questions.
He will explore what is known and not known about the links between leadership, change and organisational
performance. Are the biggest leadership challenges for the future not just in the familiar territory of institutional
change, but the much more difficult area of changing large, complex systems?
Thursday 18 April 6 – 7.15pm followed by a reception
In partnership with:
FREE. Seats allocated on a first come, first served basis.
Charing Cross, Piccadilly
Routledge/BritAc.indd 35
10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
13/03/2013 12:49
84
prospect april 2013
The generalist by Didymus
Enigmas & puzzles
The lion’s share
Ian Stewart
A lion, a leopard and a cheetah were meeting to agree
how to divide up the savannah into hunting grounds
for each species.
They agreed that the lions would have half of the total
area minus 4,200 square kilometres. The cheetahs
would get two thirds of the lions’ share plus 1,000
square kilometres. The leopards would get the average
of what the lions and cheetahs got.
“What about the hyenas?” asked the cheetah.
“ The hyena representative has declined to attend,”
said the lion.
The three cats knew that the hyenas generally took
whatever they could steal and there was no point in
agreeing anything with them anyway, but courtesy
required them to allocate something.
“Let’s give them one twelfth of the total area,”
suggested the leopard. Everyone agreed. They then
calculated the four shares, which between them
covered the entire area, and the lion declared the
meeting closed.
What was the lion’s share?
ACROSS
1 The Roman name for
Winchester (5,8)
8 The vocal apparatus of the
larynx (7)
12 Neolithic stone circle on
Mainland in Orkney (4,2,7)
13 Such bowling was legalised
in cricket in 1864 (7)
14 Hooves (7)
15 Palindromic village with
a summertime ferry
connection to Kylerhea on
Skye (7)
16 This pie’s a poppet (5)
17 An avalanche (9)
18 A muscle surrounding an opening (11)
19 System by which authors receive a royalty payment each time their books are borrowed from a library (6,7,5)
23 “He loves me, he loves me not” flower (2-3,5)
24 Agreed standards for polite online behaviour (10)
28 Madame Goldschmidt’s nickname (7,11)
33 Extremely old-fashioned or primitive (11)
34 Asian peninsula which includes Burma, Cambodia and Laos (4-5)
36 French département in Picardy, capital Laon (5)
37 Heavy knitted blankets or shawls (7)
38 Hi-hat stand, tom-toms and snare, eg (4,3)
39 Northumbrian castle which featured as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films (7)
40 The setting for Coot Club (7,6)
41 Paying attention (7)
42 Attire for graduation day (8,5)
DOWN
1 Commas in Colmar (8)
2 Rare pottery from a village on the River Taff (8)
3 Three-act prose play by Ibsen which is critical of 19th century marriage norms (1,5,5)
4 An inlaid ornament (7)
5 US creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises (6,5)
6 Old Scottish tax levied for the expenses of catching and prosecuting criminals (5,5)
7 Last Year’s location of Alain Resnais’ 1961 film (9)
8 MP for Liverpool whose
119 days as prime minister
during 1827 is the shortest
ever (6,7)
9 Pertaining to a fish’s gill-
cover (9)
10 An entrance beneath St Thomas’s Tower; a novel by Dennis Wheatley (8,5)
11 Turned head over heels (12)
20 The grub of the crane fly (13)
21 13th century epic about fierce Scandinavian heroes descended from Odin’s great-grandson (8,4)
22 The Houses of Bishops, Clergy and Laity in the Church of England (7,5)
25 Optical instrument for
projecting images of transparent or opaque objects (11)
26 Not varnished (11)
27 Genus of ornamental plants of the spurge family (10)
29 Eventually (2,3,4)
30 Daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (9)
31 Southport’s Royal golf course (8)
32 Capital of the ancient Hittite
empire (8)
35 An itinerant tinker (7; A not E)
Last month’s solutions
Solutions across: 1 Write-off 6 Red admiral 13 Liane 14 Nandu 15 Saxifrage 16 Impala 17 Land on one’s feet
19 Awareness 20 Beaufort Sea 21 Despair 22 Azulejo 23 Aisne 24 Oedipus Rex 25 Jack Warner 30 Incus 33
Nigella 35 Roadmap 36 Waldgravine 37 Alexandra 38 Tristram Shandy 39 Stop it! 41 Rhodesian 42 Kaval
43 Sturm 44 Tenderfoot 45 Stansted
Solutions down: 2 Reappraised 3 The Blue Lamp 4 Orne 5 Fingal’s Cave 6 Roundabout 7 Disengage 8
Dixon of Dock Green 9 Infusoria 10 Analepsis 11 Elsie and Doris Waters 12 Central European Time 18 Der
Rosenkavalier 26 Adam-and-Eves 27 Anabaptists 28 Noms-de-plume 29 Bluejacket 31 Calcicole 32 Sightread 34 Glissando 40 Olla
Last month’s solution
There are 8 flies and 12 spiders.
Suppose there are f flies and s spiders. Then 6f+8s = 144, and
6s+8(f+1) = 144. Solve these equations for f and s by your favourite
method. One way is to subtract the second equation from the first,
to get 6(f-s)+8(s-f) = 8, that is, 2(s-f) = 8 so s-f = 4. Now s = f+4 so 144
= 6f+8s = 6f+8(f+4) = 14f+32. Therefore 14f = 112, and f = 8. Then s =
f+4 = 12.
How to enter
The generalist prize
One winner receives a copy of
the Penguin Underground Lines
boxset (Penguin, £60), a set
of 12 books, each inspired by a
tube line, to celebrate the 150th
anniversary of the London
Underground. Writers include
John Lanchester, Camilla
Batmanghelidjh and Danny
Dorling.
Enigmas & puzzles prize
The winner receives a copy of Invisible in the Storm by Ian
Roulstone and John Norbury (Princeton University Press,
£24.95), which recounts the history, personalities and ideas
behind the use of mathematics in weather forecasting from
the turn of the 20th century until the present day.
Rules
Send your solution to answer@prospect-magazine.co.uk or
Crossword/Enigmas, Prospect, 2 Bloomsbury Place, London,
WC1A 2QA. Include your email and postal address. All entries
must be received by 12th April. Winners will be announced in
our May issue.
Last month’s winners
The generalist: Alan Day, Bath
Enigmas & puzzles: Rob Hull, London
Download a PDF of this page at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
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86
prospect april 2013
Our pick of the best public talks and events in April
Monday 8th
When worlds collide: physics
in the movies
Jordi José, academic
University of York, Ron Cooke
Hub Auditorium, Heslington,
7pm, free, 01904 322 622, www.
york.ac.uk
Tuesday 9th
Art and industrialists in late
imperial Russia
Beryl Williams, academic
University of Sussex, BSMS
Teaching Building, Falmer,
6.30pm, free, 01273 606 755,
www.sussex.ac.uk
The great plagues: lessons
from the past, warnings for
the future
Richard Evans, academic
Museum of London, London Wall,
6pm, free, 020 7831 0575, www.
gresham.ac.uk
Death and destruction in the
red beds of Russia: the largest
mass extinction of all time
Mike Benton, academic
Univesrity of Cardiff, Main
Building, Park Place, 6.30pm,
free, 029 208 74830, www.cardiff.
ac.uk
Thursday 11th
Greece on the eve of the 19th
century: between myth and
reality
Fani-Maria Tsigakou, curator at
the Benaki Museum, Athens
British Museum, Great Russell St,
WC1, 1.15pm, free, 020 7323 8181,
www.britishmuseum.org
Friday 12th
Fringe benefits: Olympia’s
shawl and French fashion
Therese Dolan, academic
Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly,
W1, 6.30pm, £12, 020 7300 8000,
www.royalacademy.org.uk
Monday 15th
The art of association: the
formation of egalitarian social
capital
Danielle Allen, academic
British Library, Euston Rd, NW1,
6.30pm, £7.50, 0843 208 1144,
www.bl.uk
The Tokaido Road: four
centuries of travel from Tokyo
to Kyoto
Nigel Caple, artist
Swedenborg Society, Bloomsbury
Way, WC1, 6.45pm, free, 020
7828 6330, www.japansociety.org.
uk
Wednesday 17th
Developing new solar cells—
cheaper, or more efficient?
Neil Greenham, academic
Royal Society, Carlton House
Terrace, SW1, 6.30pm, free, 020
7451 2500, www.royalsociety.org
Thursday 18th
Conflict resolution
Ian Ritchie, director of the City
of London Festival; Simon
Keyes, director of St
Ethelburga’s Centre for
Reconciliation and Peace; Tim
Connell, academic
Barnard’s Inn Hall, EC1, 2pm,
free, 020 7831 0575, www.
gresham.ac.uk
Saturday 20th
Welcome to Plato’s cave
Rick Lewis, editor of Philosophy
Now
Bishopsgate Institute, Bishopsgate,
EC2, 2.30pm, free, 020 7387 4130,
www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org
Wednesday 24th
Gridlock: why global cooperation is failing
David Held, academic
University of Durham, Durham
Castle, 8pm, free, 0191 334 2000,
www.dur.ac.uk
Tuesday 23rd
Shakespeare’s inhumanity
Kiernan Ryan, academic
University of Hull, Staff House,
Hull Campus, 6pm, free, 01482
465 315, www.hull.ac.uk
Vox populi: the referenda
experience in Scottish local
government since 1868
Irene Maver, academic
University of Glasgow, Boyd Orr
Building, University Avenue,
5.30pm, free, 0141 330 2000,
www.gla.ac.uk
International trade and the
environment: the pollution
haven hypothesis
Brian Copeland, academic
University of Nottingham,
University Park, 4pm, free, 0115
951 5469, www.nottingham.ac.uk
Sebastian Faulks CBE: A Possible Life
Sebastian Faulks, author
Stratford-upon-Avon Literary
Festival, Shakespeare Centre,
Henley St, 7.30pm, £12, 01789
207 100, www.
stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk
Thursday 25th
A promise to Malala—children’s literature and Education for All
Sarah Brown, charity
campaigner and wife of former
prime minister Gordon Brown
Newcastle University, Herschel
Building, King’s Rd, 5.30pm, free,
0191 222 6942, www.ncl.ac.uk
Friday 19th
Iron from the sky: the potential influence of meteorites on
ancient Egyptian culture
Diane Johnson, project officer
at the Centre for Earth,
Planetary, Space &
Astronomical Research
Royal Society, Carlton House
Terrace, SW1, 1pm, free, 020 7451
2500, www.royalsociety.org
Explore it online and add your own
To see a wider list of events and add details
of your own, go to
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/listings
Listings are free. We’ll print our pick of
the best in the magazine each month and
highlight recommended events online.
Friday 26th
The popular reception of relativity in Britain
Katy Price, academic
Royal Society, Carlton House
Terrace, SW1, 1pm, free, 020 7451
2500, www.royalsociety.org
Monday 29th
Volcanology applied to emergencies
Stephen Sparks, academic
University of Cambridge,
Churchill College, Storey’s Way,
7pm, free, 01223 337 733, www.
cam.ac.uk
Tuesday 30th
The US deficit habit: what are
its causes and what lessons
does history offer for breaking it?
Iwan Morgan, academic
University College London,
Wilkins Building, Gower St, WC1,
6.30pm, free, 020 7679 2000
Time to debunk reform?
Conceptualising change in the
medieval church, 900-1200
Julia Barrow, academic
University of Leeds, Parkinson
Building, Woodhouse Lane,
5.30pm, free, 0113 343 3614, www.
leeds.ac.uk
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prospect april 2013
The way we were
Abdications
Extracts from memoirs and diaries, chosen by Ian Irvine
Bulstrode Whitelocke, Oliver
sidered death preferable to that step;
Cromwell’s ambassador to Swebut still he took it...
den, sends home an account of
“He insisted especially on the
the abdication by Queen Chrisnecessity of proclaiming his son
tina on 5th June 1654:
Emperor, not so much for the advan“About nine o’clock this morning
tage of the child as with a view to
the Queen, being attired in her
concentrate all the power of sentiroyal apparel and robes of purments and affections. Unfortunately,
ple velvet, with her crown upon
nobody would listen to him.”
her head, and attended by all her
officers and servants, came into
Revolution breaks out in Berlin
the room prepared for that occaon 9th November 1918; Kaiser Wilsion, where was set a table with a
helm II abdicates. His first cousin,
rich carpet, and five great cushKing George V, writes in his diary:
ions laid upon it. Most of the gran“We got the news that the German
dees and officers were present.
Emperor had abdicated, also the
Upon one of the cushions was laid
Crown Prince. ‘How are the mighty
the sword of state; upon the secfallen.’ He has been Emperor just
ond cushion was laid the scepover 30 years, he did great things
tre; upon the third cushion was
for his country, but his ambition was
laid the ball; and upon the fourth
so great that he wished to dominate
cushion were laid the keys. The
the world and created his military
Queen being come into the room,
machine for that object. No one man
after a little pause made a short
can dominate the world, it has been
speech to the company, to this
tried before, and now he has utterly
effect: ‘My Lords and Gentlemen,
ruined his country and himself and I
You have before this time been
look upon him as the greatest crimacquainted with my resolution to
inal known for having plunged the
resign the crown and government
world into this ghastly war with all
of this kingdom into the hands of
its misery.”
my most dear cousin the Prince
Greta Garbo as Queen Christina of Sweden, surrounded by
[Charles Gustavus]...’
On the abdication of King Edward
her court, in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 film Queen Christina
Having thus spoken, the
VIII, 10th December 1936, Chips
Queen desired that some of them
Channon, the Conservative MP,
the least doubt in my mind that the only
would take the crown from off her head, but
writes in his diary:
thing he could do was to descend once more
none would do it; she then called to Grave
“The dreadful day dawned coldly, and my
from the throne. I communicated to him
Tott and the Baron Steinberg, expressly
limbs were numb and chilled. The telephone
all the particulars I had just received, and I
commanding them to do it, but they refused,
began early, and I talked to the Duchess of
did not hesitate to advise him to follow the
till again earnestly commanded by her; they
Kent who told me that all was over... At 2pm
only course worthy of him. He listened to
then took the crown from off her Majesty’s
Honor [his wife] and I left for parliament as
me with a sombre air, and though he was in
head, and laid it down upon the fifth cushI had secured her a ticket. The House was
some measure master of himself, the agitaion on the table. After that was done, some
full, for there has not been an abdication
tion of his mind and the sense of his posiothers, by her command, took off the royal
since 1399, 537 years ago [of Richard II]. I
tion betrayed themselves in his face and in
robes with which she was clothed and laid
thought everyone subdued but surprisingly
all his motions. ‘I know,’ said I, ‘that your
them down upon the table. Then the Queen,
unmoved, and Lady Astor actually seemed
Majesty may still keep the sword drawn, but
having thus divested herself of these ensigns
to enjoy herself, jumping about in her frivowith whom, and against whom? Defeat has
of royalty and resigned her crown, being now
lous way. Baldwin [the prime minister] was
chilled the courage of every one; the army is
in her private habit, made courtesy to the
greeted with cheers, and sat down on the
still in the greatest confusion. Nothing is to
Prince and to the rest of the company, and
front bench gravely. At last he went to the
be expected from Paris, and the coup d’etat
retired into her own chamber.”
bar, bowed twice, ‘A message from the King’
of the 18th Brumaire cannot be renewed.’
The Queen left Sweden, converting to
and he presented a paper to the Speaker
‘That thought,’ he replied, stopping, ‘is far
Roman Catholicism the following year and
who proceeded to read it out. At the words
from my mind. I will hear nothing more
eventually settling in Rome.
‘renounce the throne’ his voice broke, and
about myself. But poor France!’ At that
there were stifled sobs in the House. It was
moment Savary and Caulaincourt entered,
After the defeat of Waterloo, Napoleon
a short document, more moving by impliand having drawn a faithful picture of the
abdicates (for the second time) on 22nd
cation than by phrase, to the effect that the
exasperation of the deputies, they persuaded
June 1815. Count Lavallette, his private
King could no longer remain on the Throne.
him to assent to abdication. Some words he
secretary, recalls in his memoirs:
The Speaker was tearful, but very few othuttered proved to us that he would have con“I came to [the Emperor] without having
ers were.”
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