The 19th Brumaire

Neo-neo-fascism comes to Japan

2010-08-30T06:08:00.007+09:00

"This relationship toward the Thing, structured by means of fantasies, is what is at
stake when we speak of the menace to 'our way of life' presented by the Other: it is
what is threatened when, for example, a white Englishman is panicked because of
the growing presence of "aliens". What he wants to defend at at any price is not
reducible to the so-called set of values that offer support to national identity.
National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the Nation
qua Thing. This Nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties.
It appears to us as 'our Thing' (perhaps we could say Cosa Nostra) , as something accessible
only to us, as something "they", the others, cannot grasp; nonetheless it is something constantly
menaced by "them"'
Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative

Reason has taken more than forty winks in recent years, and what monsters this has brought forth. The strong-stomached amongst you can take a look at the English Defence League here. The EDL, recent recipients of a magnificent pasting at the hands of Bradford's youth, reflect a broader and highly distressing phenomenon - the return of racist mass mobilisation in the US and Western Europe. You will have noted the funnelling of the American 'tea party' movement into the frothing mob against a proposed Islamic centre on the very site from which someone may possibly have witnessed the attack on the World Trade centre if they craned their neck. As you may have seen in a widely circulated film, this movement is almost entirely white and the scent of a lynchin' is never far from their nostrils.

These Muslim baiters are the most well known version of post-liberal, neo-neo-fascism but the rot is not limited to the Anglosphere. Italy has suffered for some time from xenophobic poseurs organising through Facebook and styling themselves adherents of Ezra Pound and the Third Millenium. Now it seems the brand is emerging in Japan.

The 'Zaitokukai' (short for 在日特権を許さない市民の会 for those who know or care) have been hanging around the dingier parts of the internet for a while but recently surfaced in Kyoto to harrass children at a primary school - a primary school mark you - for the Korean community. They called the children 'cockroaches' and 'North Korean' spies. Other targets include the screening of the film The Cove and people dressed up in Halloween costumes.

These men seem a somewhat different breed to the moustache and black-boiler suit types who have disfigured the Tokyo scene for so long. People like Issuikai (recent hosts of the BNP, FN and others for an international hate-in) are still around and the Zaitokukai may well merge into them. But these groups always formed a continuum first with the Yakuza and then with the state, policing the hard borders of a soft authoritarianism. Zaitokukai, although the numbers at their events remain pitifully and mercifully small, seem to have emerged organically from Japan's frustrated petitit bourgeoisie (the group's main organizer being an Akihabara based tax accountant.)

What is striking about the group's public bullying is how closely it matches the Zizekian analysis of nationalism, and the common structure of the fantasies deployed by both the Japanese and Euro-American new-new far right. The fact that the victims are different (Koreans, other Asian immigrants, even 'white' subjects such as anti-whaling activists or Halloween partygoers) allows us to cut through the gibberish that says of the EDL and its cognates: 'they're not really fascists', 'Islam is a religion so it's not racism', 'yeah but the Muslims are a problem too' and so on ad smug infinitum.

The first thing to note about Zaitokutai's most offensive act so far is that it was directed against 'Korean' primary schoolchildren using a 'Japanese' playpark. Is this not the most perfect confirmation of the fantasm at the heart of nationalism and racism, of menacing others "stealing" the primordial jouissance ? Something similar is at work in the claim that Muslim windows must be smashed and Muslim women humiliated in order to "prevent" the imposition of Islamic laws that will supposedly end liberal Europeans' unfettered enjoyment. This is one way in which the third millenium fascists are post-liberal - borne out by the appropriation of the notion of a 'citizens' movement' simply directed against the encroaching special privileges of the minority in question. The long-running outrage about Japanese child victims of kidnapping by North Korea (appalling crime but one raised mostly by people who seem to think thousands of Koreans liked being kidnapped, enslaved and raped by Japanese forces in WWII, or made it all up) takes the same form. Zaitokukai is itself an abbreviation of 'Group of citizens who will not forgive the special privileges of resident Koreans.'

Second, these groups are the fantasmic exhaust fumes - or flatulence - of the past ten years of imperialism and capitalist crisis. This is what befuddles liberals, seeing the apparent novelty of the racists' discourse ('cultural' rather than biological, 'defence' against those who will not integrate into the host community etc) and sharing many of the basic assumptions which these movements extrapolate to a vulgar and violent extreme. The EDL and the Tea Party arise directly from the humiliations of Iraq and Afghanistan and their Islamophobic buttresses. The Zaitokukai suckle at the teat of at least a decade of Yasukuni shrine visits, slander about 'foreign crime' and the conscious promotion (akin to the geopolitical aspect of Islamophobia in the West) of the idea that Japan's war victims are special pleaders, kidnappers, fifth columnists for rogue, backward, irrational states. This is where 'frank debates about immigration' end - hounding schoolgirls out of the only home they have ever known.

A third point. The rise of these movements in the past couple of years is, as more vulgar materialists used to say, no accident. The pervasive insecurity brought about the economic crisis leads Makoto Sakurai and his sort to reach for the easiest available hate rather than the source of the problem. If this Marxist base to the Lacanian analysis is true, perhaps the old solutions it offers - united front based in the working class confronting the fascists, that sort of thing - might be worth a run even in new conditions?

THE POLITICS OF HAMAS: THE GAZA WAR AND AFTER

2009-12-27T20:16:00.004+09:00

“It [should be] possible to destroy Gaza, so they will understand not to mess with us…I hope the operation will come to an end with great achievements and with the complete destruction of terrorism and Hamas. In my opinion, they [Palestinian buildings] should be razed to the ground, so thousands of houses, tunnels and industries will be demolished…the operation will continue until a total destruction of Hamas.” Eli Yishai, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, 6th of January 2009

“There is nowhere safe in Gaza. Everyone is terrorized and traumatized.” John Ging, Gaza Director of UNRWA, 6th of January 2009

“We’re pretty much in the same situation.” Moshe Arens, Former Israeli Defence Minister, after the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza 22nd of January 2009

The Israeli war on Gaza from the 27th of December 2008 to the 22nd of January 2009 constituted, in the words of the UN Human Rights council report on the subject, ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability’ . During the assault Israel committed acts amounting to ‘possible war crimes, and crimes against humanity.’ As well as leaving nearly 1,400 Palestinians dead, the war devastated the – already ramshackle – infrastructure of the territory. Reconstruction has yet to begin, because Israel will not allow building materials to enter the territory, continuing the near total blockade it has enforced since 2007 . Aid money pledged to the Palestinians has yet to arrive because Western donor countries will not co-operate with the (elected) Hamas government in Gaza. Despite the changes in American rhetoric following the inauguration of Barack Obama, most notably the widely trailed and excessively praised speech at Cairo University, Washington persists in ignoring Hamas’s position as the duly elected representative of the Palestinians. George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, pointedly failed to visit Gaza on his trip to the region to hawk the imaginary ‘peace process’ in September 2009 . Instead the Obama administration has continued to buttress the redundant Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah president of the Palestinian authority – a man whose near-alliance with Israel against Hamas during the Gaza war has left him with neither the mandate to negotiate any deal nor the credibility to enforce one. The old Israeli line that ‘there is no negotiating partner’ has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why are Israel and its Western supporters so keen to get rid of Hamas and to blockade and bomb the Palestinian people in order to do so? The reason, they claim, is that Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist . Since Israel’s ‘right to exist’ implies the denial of the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland on the basis of equality with Israeli Jews, one might wonder why Hamas – or anyone committed to the idea of racial equality - is obliged to recognise it. Nonetheless, the objection is false: for almost the two decades of its existence, Hamas strategy has called for a generation long ceasefire (a hudna) implying de-facto recognition of the Israeli state in its 1967 borders, provided Israel withdraws to those borders and removes its settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem . It is Hamas’ insistence on the Palestinian right to resist the occupation and their refusal to negotiate terms that will perpetuate it that earns Hamas the enmity of Israel and the Western powers.

Hamas and the Palestinians are not completely isolated, however. ‘Operation Cast Lead’, as Israeli commanders dubbed the assault, provoked an eruption of popular solidarity with the Palestinians, in the Middle East and beyond. 150,000 people marched in London support of Gaza, risking arrest and police violence to do so . In the words of the Independent newspaper ‘a seismic change’ spread through British universities as students at thirty colleges occupied their lecture halls in protest . The contrast with the Arab kings, emirs and presidents-for-life, who sat inert or worse for the duration of the attack, was not lost on their long-suffering populations. The Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to Washington and head of the secret police, was moved to warn his Western backers that ‘[e]ventually, the kingdom will not be able to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel.’

The protests faced not only the physical opposition of the police but also the rhetorical attacks of those, often former leftists, who considered Hamas at least partially responsible for the war. Had not Hamas provoked Israel by firing rockets at Israeli towns despite Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005? Was not the organisation, as one fallen leftist claimed ‘an anti-semitic, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-trade union, authoritarian, clericalist movement’ seeking ‘the ultimate goal of establishing a theocratic state, where every detail of Palestinian life is governed by its hardline misinterpretation of the Qur’an’?

These arguments were, and remain, mistaken. In what follows I attempt to trace Hamas’s origins as a national liberation movement with Islamist characteristics, emerging from the failure of the previous generation of secular and leftist Palestinian organisations. Although its popularity has increased as those organisations have waned, Hamas has remained trapped in the same contradictions faced by its predecessors – contradictions brought about by a strategic perspective that divorces Palestinian liberation from the struggles for democracy and equality in the wider Arab world. The balance sheet of Operation Cast Lead, a setback for Israel but on a lesser scale than the Lebanon War of 2006, reflects these limitations.

Operation Cast Lead: Conduct and Results

Israel’s winter war on Gaza was even more brutal and one-sided than the assault on Lebanon in summer 2006. According to the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, half of the 1,387 Palestinians killed were civilians . The infrastructure of the blockaded territory was devastated by the bombing ; at the time of writing 20,000 people remain displaced and the promised $4.4 billion of reconstruction aid has been refused entry by Israel . Senior Hamas figures such as Said Siam and Nizar Rayan were assassinated and hospitals, mosques, universities, schools and government ministries hit . In troops, materiel and morale the attack on Gaza was less costly for Israel than the Lebanon of 2006, and Hamas’s resistance far less visible than that of Hizbollah. Three Israeli civilians and ten Israeli soldiers were killed . The grotesque imbalance seems simply to confirm Israeli superiority. Nevertheless, Cast Lead was a setback for Israel and its Western supporters because the war showed that Israel’s overwhelming military superiority cannot achieve a political victory. Israel lost, perhaps conclusively, the sympathy of most of European public opinion, yet failed to achieve either the stated or implicit aims of the war.

One must disentangle Israel’s strategic aims from the accompanying justifications for the war. Operation Cast Lead, Israeli spokespeople insisted with varying degrees of sincerity, was aimed at ‘Hamas strongholds’ being used to produce and fire Qassam rockets mainly at the southern Israeli towns . These rockets themselves are erratic in flight and had killed 21 Israeli citizens between 2004 and 2008 . Quite apart from the imbalance between the results of Gazan rocket attacks and the purported response to them, a reduction in rocket attacks had already been achieved by effective agreement with Hamas. A six-month ‘lull’ was agreed between Hamas and Israel in June 2008. Hamas held the renewal of this ‘lull’ to be conditional on the lifting of the blockade: according to an Israeli think tank closely linked to the IDF, ‘Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire’, which was only ‘sporadically’ violated by ‘rogue’ organizations including Fatah members .

The situation changed after the 4th of November 2008 . On that day Israel killed six Hamas operatives in an attack on one of the tunnels used by Gazans to bring in weapons, food and other necessities . In response to Israel’s killing seven Palestinians in this attack, Hamas and other organizations resumed rocket strikes against Israel. Hamas instituted another one-day lull on the 20th of December, the day the original agreement had been due to expire: Israel did not reciprocate . IDF officials announced that a full-scale military attack would begin ‘soon’ – which it did, on the 27th of January. When Israeli forces finally withdrew from Gaza, Hamas were still firing rockets.

So, if Cast Lead was supposed to end rocket fire, it failed. There was however a deeper aim behind the war. Then foreign minister Tzi Livni clarified this aim the week before Cast Lead began, saying ‘[t]he state of Israel, and a government under me, will make it a strategic objective to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza.’ The fact that the “Hamas regime’ formed the elected Palestinian government featured neither here nor there in this strategy. Hamas was to be toppled not because it refused to negotiate but rather because it wanted to do so from a position of strength. Thus the head of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence force, told an Israeli cabinet meeting prior to Cast Lead that Hamas was ‘interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms…[i]t wants us to lift the siege [of Gaza], stop attacks, and extend the truce to include [the West Bank].’ Toppling Hamas would repeat the success in the West Bank, where a US-funded and trained Fatah government polices the Palestinian population . The renewed attempt to dislodge Hamas and replace it with Fatah’s local hard-man in Gaza, Muhammad Dahlan, failed.

Cast Lead thus marked a dead-end for Israeli strategy. Israel of course holds overwhelming military supremacy over Gaza and the Palestinians. Yet it was unable to use that military supremacy to achieve its political aim of toppling Hamas - even over a malnourished people whose territory it entirely controls from land, sea and air. Indeed, Hamas achieved recognition as the representative of the Palestinians in an Arab summit convened in Qatar during the war . Israel’s inability to use overwhelming firepower and air supremacy to effect political change undermines the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ that has come to underpin Israeli strategy. Named after the Beirut suburbs (dahiya) that suffered it in 2006, this strategy applies ‘disproportionate force’ to any area Israel considers a source of enemy fire . Thus, most of Israel’s war on Gaza was carried out from the air.

The aerial assault began on the 27th of December: the largest ever carried out on Gaza, resulting in the highest one-day death toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At least 225 Palestinians were killed: 1 Israeli was killed by the Hamas rockets fired in response . The solely aerial bombardment continued for a week. 400 Palestinians were killed during this first week of the war . IDF ground troops entered Gaza on the night of the third of January 2009 . They carried out an effective pincer movement around Gaza City but avoided entering the heavily built up area itself, although resistance fighters did engage the IDF in the outskirts of the city . Although paratroopers and the elite ‘Golani’ brigade of the IDF operated in the north of the Strip and around Gaza city, they did not attempt to re-occupy the city itself . Throughout the assault the response of the ‘international community’ was predictably feeble. On the 8th of January the UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling for ‘an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire.’ The US abstained on the vote on the resolution despite having helped to write it . Israeli troops withdrew from the strip on the 21st of January 2009, while Hamas kept up a symbolically defiant spray of rockets.

Operation Cast Lead thus consisted mainly of bombardment by air, land and sea designed to smash the civil and political structures of Hamas. It failed. At the time of writing, Hamas remains in power in Gaza and no effective agreement can be reached without them. Hamas’s leaders are aware of this and are engaged in continual attempts to negotiate with the US and Israel . Without Hamas the best the Obama administration has been able to manage is a feeble photo-opportunity between its protégé Mahmoud Abbas and the resurgent Israeli right embodied in Benjamin Netanyahu. But what is Hamas? Where did it come from and why was it able to withstand the Israeli assault ?

The origins of Hamas and the dilemmas of Palestinian liberation

From its foundation in 1987, the novel character of Hamas – a self proclaimed ‘Palestinian national liberation movement’ for which Islam is the ‘ideological frame of reference’ – has confused many commentators. Hamas, is needless to say, a religious movement (‘the Islamic resistance movement’) and its rise at the expense of secular and leftist organisations has dismayed many on the Arab and Western left. Although far from the al-Qaeda affiliate it is occasionally portrayed as in the West , Hamas holds to deeply conservative positions on issues such as the free market and sexual liberation . Hamas and Hizbollah, Islamist organisations both, are the only mass organisations in the Middle East that continue to resist Israel and the US . The important political point to understand concretely is how Hamas came to occupy this position, and how its politics are likely to constrain the struggle for Palestinian liberation .

Hamas is essentially an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The MB was founded in 1928 by the Egyptian school-teacher Hassan al-Banna. At this time Egypt was nominally independent but in reality under British control, British troops having suppressed a popular anti-colonial uprising in 1919. Liberal nationalists, often landowners and industrialists organised in the Wafd party sought to win more power from Britain while discouraging any mass mobilizations that might challenge their economic position. Al-Banna’s organization responded to imperial domination and social inequality by arguing that a return to the perceived principles of the early Islamic community .

The idea of an Islamic community, morally re-invigorated and able to repel the colonial powers, appealed to a particular social base. Hassan al-Banna and his cadres emerged from the context of a economic pressure on the old middle classes and the development of a ‘new effendiyya’ of teachers, civil servants, engineers and so on . Such groups were the mainstay of other anti-colonial movements in the Arab world and beyond. Where the Brotherhood differed was uniting its petty-bourgeois cadres with some funding from landowners and industrialists to spread an Islamic revivalist message amongst the dispossessed of the cities, often recent arrivals from the countryside . Charitable foundations and hospitals were particularly useful in this strategy. Hamas in Gaza, growing out of the Muslim Brotherhood in neighbouring Egypt, has followed the same pattern. Much of Hamas’s funding comes from Palestinian businessmen, heavily supplemented by large flows of money from Gulf based capitalists, Palestinian or otherwise .

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has, of course, undergone considerable evolution and generational change in the eight decades since its founding . It is now the largest mass movement in Egypt – in the Arab world – with an estimated one million members and forms the effective opposition to the Mubarak regime . Throughout that history however, the Brotherhood has played a frequently contradictory role mediating between the Egyptian ruling elite and the poverty stricken mass of the population. On the one hand the brotherhood must appeal to the poor: on the other its upper echelons and funders seek influence in order to bring about their vision of moral revival. In particular the regimes of Gamal Abd-al Nasser and his successors have used the Brotherhood as a counterweight to the left, only then to be repress the MB themselves. As a result, the Brotherhood’s membership is continually embroiled about the best strategic option to Islamize society, which then implies division about concrete political questions. Should the movement concentrate on da”wa, reviving Islamic morality from below by evangelism and social welfare work? Should it participate in the political system? Or should it consider the regime an infidel one and oppose it by terrorist means – the option of ‘anathema and exile’?

For the most part, the mainstream leadership of the Brotherhood has pursued the path of da”wa and a piecemeal search for influence . They have tended to avoid direct confrontation with the state, particularly anything that would mobilize overly large numbers of workers and the poor. Hamas’ politics are firmly anchored in this mainstream. The predominant influence of the Egyptian Brotherhood derives from the territorial situation between 1948 and 1967– the West Bank was annexed to Jordan, while Gaza fell under Egyptian administration. Brotherhood volunteers did fight against the establishment and expansion of Israel in 1948 but their subsequent quietism left them unpopular amongst Palestinians . Under Egyptian rule the Gazan Muslim brothers, among them Sheikh Ahmed Yassin the future leader of Hamas, were subject to the same bouts of repression and legalization as the organisation in Egypt proper. Yassin founded the Islamic Centre, which became Brotherhood’s central base in Gaza. Although he was arrested in Nasser’s renewed repression of the Brothers in 1965, Sheikh Yasin and the other MB members who would later form Hamas avoided conflict with Israel .

The Israeli occupation of Gaza after the 1967 Six Day War did not alter Yasin’s focus on religious revivalism. Secular organisations such as Fatah and later the avowedly ‘marxist’ DFLP and PFLP, not the MB, took up the resistance to the occupation. The Muslim Brothers actually found their position eased by the fact that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were under one authority – an authority more favourable to da”wa than Nasser had been . Islamic centre related organizations offered the social welfare and healthcare services the occupation was unwilling to provide. Yasin’s adherents successfully muscled out the left for predominance amongst Gazan students . The rise of an Islamist current to predominance in the Palestinian resistance was a far from inevitable development, however. An armed Islamic resistance movement emerged only after the crisis of the secular nationalist organisations after their defeat in Lebanon in 1982, which formed the backdrop to the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987. This crisis -culminating in their physical destruction and expulsion from Lebanon in 1982, alongside the horrific Israeli-sponsored massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps near Beirut – resulted from their responses to the basic dilemma of the Israeli settler-colonial state and its relation to imperialism.

Settler-colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East

There are two basic kinds of settler colonialism, which produce different economic and political relations between the colonists and the colonized. In Australia and most of the Americas, the colonists simply destroyed the indigenous population (whom they outnumbered) and took their land. In Africa (Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Portugese colonies) a relatively smaller number of settlers expropriated the indigenous population but remained economically dependent on their labour . In South Africa in particular, this meant that the black working class played a crucial role in ending apartheid.

The Palestinian experience lies between these two poles. The numbers of colonist and colonized are roughly equal – the Palestinians holding a slight majority when the refugees from the Israeli ethnic cleansing of 1948 are included. Much as the more genocidally minded Israeli liberals might call for it, Israel cannot get rid of the native Palestinian population . Thus the racist idea of a ‘demographic threat’(the ‘danger’ posed by the relatively higher birth rate of Palestinians compared to Israeli Jews) is not just accepted in Israel, it has been bandied about by the Prime Minister . The Israeli dilemma then is how to get the land without the people. This is why the Israeli vision of a two state solution is to render the Palestinians politically absent even if they are physically present. The network of physical barriers to Palestinian life, such the Apartheid Wall and checkpoints in the West Bank, has partially achieved this aim .

The Palestinian dilemma, by contrast, lies in their basic weakness faced with a heavily armed settler community supported by the world’s most powerful states. Although not economically irrelevant to Israel, Palestinian labour – unlike US aid - is not vital to the settler economy. The Zionist project has always sought to exclude Palestinians from the economy rather than to exploit them productively . The closure of the Israeli labour market hurts the Palestinians much more than it does Israel. Although Gazan labour was becoming increasingly important to Israel prior to the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 , Israel was able to reverse this development at greater cost to the Palestinians. During the first intifada Gazans lost access to 80,000 jobs on the other side of the Green Line, Israel’s 1948 border . The current blockade has rendered the majority of the Gazan labour force unemployed without any significant effect on the Israeli economy. The Palestinian population is also divided between the West Bank, Gaza, Israel behind the Green Line and the refugees in the Arab world and beyond. Mass mobilization of the Palestinians always comes up against this economic limit: military resistance, on the other hand can force withdrawals and concessions from Israel but is limited by the superiority Israel derives from US aid. Without extending the struggle to the system of imperialism in the Middle East as a whole, therefore, there can be no liberation of Palestine. Confined just to Palestinian land, the history of the Palestinian struggle repeats the same episodes of heroism and militancy leading to an exhausted accommodation to the idea of some kind of ‘mini-state’ on Israeli terms.

The rise of Hamas is simply the latest episode in this history. The exhaustion of Fatah and the Palestinian left in the early 1980s arose from their detachment of the struggle for Palestinian liberation from the ‘internal’ struggles against the surrounding Arab regimes, in particular from the potential power of the Egyptian working class. The PLO, under Fatah’s leadership, followed a strategy of establishing bases in neighbouring Arab states while avoiding any challenge to the ruling Arab regimes . The regimes themselves observed no such restraint. Thus the PLO were driven from even the weakest front-lines Arab states - Jordan in 1970 and (in the midst of civil war and Israeli invasion) Lebanon in 1982. The Palestinian left in the ‘fronts’ did recognise that revolution in the Arab states was a precondition for the liberation of Palestine but their idea of this revolution was the ‘protracted people’s war’ of Mao Zedong or the guerilla ‘focos’ of Che Guevara. Although the revolutionary and proto-revolutionary movements inspired by the Palestinian left did reach the non-Palestinian populations, any attempt to establish liberated areas in the camps was doomed. Israel, the local Arab ruling class or both, would intervene to crush such areas precisely as happened in Jordan and Lebanon.

By the early 1980s then, the secular and leftist nationalists had hit a strategic dead end . Into this crisis stepped Islamic movements: throughout the Arab world and especially in Gaza. Sheikh Yassin had carefully built up a power base in the Islamic Centre of Gaza, new mosques and the university, now admitting more rural and conservative students . ‘Majd’, a militia-like offshoot of the Islamic Centre, emerged, fighting the left and violently bullying people into religious observance . An armed structure of sorts was thus already in place before the first intifada. However, it was only with the outbreak of that popular uprising in December 1987 that the Islamic Resistance Movement was officially formed . The new organisation conceived of itself as primarily a national liberation movement, albeit one which proposed ‘Islam’ as the solution to the crisis of Palestinian nationalism. The charter of the new movement insisted upon the Palestinian’s claim to all of their homeland, including that part of which became Israel in 1948. It also included a fair number of what Lenin called ‘outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices’ . So, for example, the charter considers Judaism a kindred monotheism to be protected by Islamic rule but also repeats anti-semitic claptrap found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . Such usage has now been mostly abandoned by Hamas leaders – its persistence in the organisation’s charter is a symptom of the highly unwelcome, but not incomprehensible, political confusion amongst those Palestinians who have only encountered Jews as agents of an oppressive colonial project .

Hamas’s primary appeal lay not in its charter, whatever the contents of that document. Rather, Palestinians were drawn to Hamas’s rejection of the PLO’s proposed compromise with Israel on a two-state solution. The PLO’s Tangiers Declaration of 1988 and Jordan’s renunciation of any claim to the West Bank offered recognition to Israel in return for ending the intifada . That compromise was particularly unpalatable to the Gazan population, the majority of them refugees who would be denied any prospect of return to their homes under a two-state deal with Israel. Hamas refused to join the PLO during the Intifada but carried out essentially the same acts of resistance . Hamas denounced the maneouvres of the PLO leadership in attempting to participate in (ultimately fruitless) negotiations at Madrid. Nonetheless, they remained financially and politically weaker than Fatah/ the PLO. The balance turned in Hamas’s favour as the PLO became identified with the slow surrender of Palestinian rights in the ‘peace process’ that followed the Intifada.

The ‘peace process’ (also known as the Oslo process because of the role played Norwegian mediators) comprised a series of agreements between the PLO and Israel. The first of these was the Declaration of Principles signed, on the White House lawn, in 1993. The main principle thus declared was that the Palestinians ‘recognise’ Israel – which means recognising their ethnic cleansing from their own homeland – in 78% of the land of historic Palestine. The PLO believed that this meant Israel would withdraw gradually from the remaining 22% occupied in 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel conceived of a phased withdrawal but one in which it would retain control of settlements and roads . Although Arafat and the PLO recognized Israel’s ‘right to exist in peace and security’, the Israeli reply merely recognized the PLO’s competence to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians . The agreements postponed the issues of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and settlements until final talks. This manoeuvre allowed Israel not only to maintain but to expand the occupation in the form of checkpoints and settlements. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza strip increased by 50% in the period of the Oslo negotiations between 1993 and 2000 . A Palestinian Authority was established, which would have an elected legislature and President – these would rule only over the most populous Palestinian areas, the rest remaining under Israeli or joint control . Furthermore, authority would have the task of policing the Palestinian population. The Israeli objective of ruling the land without the people was close to realization.

Hamas opposed the Oslo accords from the start and throughout. They insisted on the Palestinian claim to all of historic Palestine and the right of refugees to return. They also denounced the PLO figures who returned to run the PA and crassly enrich themselves in the manner of other Arab rulers . Hamas refused to participate in elections at this time, not because they rejected democractic procedures but because they refused to legitimate Oslo . It was a shrewd decision. As the Oslo process faltered and the PA became more and more irrelevant. Hamas did not (and does not) reject the effective principle of a two state solution. All of its major figures have stated their willingness to sign a generation long ceasefire (hudna) with Israel, provided that Israel withdraws its troops and settlers behind the 1967 border . The supreme malleability of religious language allows Hamas to preserve the image of fighting for all of historic Palestine, but in practice the hudna means recognition. Hamas was not prepared, however, to renounce military resistance until such an agreement was achieved. Thus Hamas launched a series of suicide attacks on Israeli targets throughout the Oslo negotiations, the first of these being carried out in revenge for the Hebron massacre in 1994 when an Israel settler reservist killed 40 Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque .

Hamas’s position was vindicated by the collapse of the Oslo process and the eruption of the second intifada in 2000. Israel’s tactical errors – such as the botched assassination attempt on Khaled Mesh”al, a major Hamas leader in Jordan, or the exiling of hundreds of Hamas cadres to Hizbollah’s Southern Lebanese stronghold – contributed to the movement’s rise. The main reason was political, however. The second intifada reflected Palestinian anger at a ‘peace process’ that had only made their lives worse . Hamas was identified with the resistance to that process. The intifada brought Hamas and Fatah closer as their cadres fought a common enemy. Yet the continuous Israeli assaults on Palestinian political and physical infrastructure, particularly the Israeli offensive on the urban centres in the spring of 2004, mostly weakened Fatah, who had embedded themselves deeply in those structures . At the titular head of the Palestinian political structure stood Yasser Arafat who retained, even regained, his prestige as the leader of the Palestinian resistance. Arafat’s death in November 2004 deprived Fatah of their greatest remaining claim to hegemony over the Palestinian struggle . His replacement Mahmoud Abbas appeared keener than ever to compromise with Israel.

The contrast between this weakened Fatah and Hamas at the end of the second intifada was sharp. While Abbas scuttled after the pointless initiatives of the ‘road map’, Hamas achieved the only withdrawal of Israel settlements from Palestinian land. Israeli troops and colonists left Gaza in July 2005. It is true that the territory remained besieged by Israeli air, land and sea power. It is also true that the withdrawal reflected the racial calculus of Israeli politics: ridding the state of a large and restive Arab population all the better to retain the colonies in the West Bank. Thus the Gaza withdrawal formed an integral part of ‘a new Israeli defence concept’ of unilateral separation behind a ‘hard border ’. This strategy - what one might call the ‘cage and ignore’ seeks to render the Palestinians’ physical presence politically meaningless. The apartheid wall that physically cuts Palestinian communities off from one another is a literally concrete manifestation of this strategy. Yet, Israel would not have withdrawn the settlements if the benefits of occupying Gaza outweighed the costs. It was Hamas who raised those costs. For nearly thirty years the Palestinians had been convinced that compromise with Israel was the route to regaining at least some of their land. Hamas, like Hizbollah, had shown that resistance was more effective.

The Gaza withdrawal opened the way to the ‘earthquake’ of Hamas’s electoral victory in the Palestinian legislative council elections in January 2006. Hamas decided to drop its boycott of this ‘Oslo’ institution because the Oslo accords were now plainly dead. Hamas also thought it could do very well in the elections. Their joint platform, the ‘Change and Reform list’ won 60% of the popular vote . ‘Change and reform’ is a vacuous slogan but any Fatah candidate uttering it would have been ridiculed, so firmly were they identified with stasis and reaction. Fatah and Abbas were not only unable to mount effective resistance to Israel, they were identified with corruption and mismanagement at every level . Their campaign was heavily supported by Israel and the US .

Fatah and its Israeli and Western backers were incredulous at the election result. They have been trying to change it ever since. Israel refused to recognise the new legislature and immediately imposed the (ongoing) blockade on Gaza. The US and EU – who balk at any idea of sanctions on Israel for its serial violations of international law – followed. Fatah stripped ministries of equipment and refused to co-operate with the new cabinet. The Palestinian presidency was at armed odds with the legislative body and the cabinet. Fatah militias received Jordanian and US training and funds, while simultaneously engaging in ‘national dialogue’ with Hamas under Egyptian pressure . From Hamas’s election in January 2006 Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah’s would-be ruler of Gaza, had threatened trouble in the territory. Dahlan was recorded admitting as much by an Egyptian newspaper, saying ‘I just deploy two jeeps, and people would say Gaza is on fire . . . Hamas is now the weakest Palestinian faction. They are whining and complaining. Well, they will have to suffer yet more until they are damned to the seventh ancestor. ’ Were two jeeps insufficient to ensure damnation, Dahlan could count on the support of the US. A senior US diplomat stated, in private of course, ‘I like this violence’ .

The notion, then, that Hamas ‘seized power’ in Gaza in the summer of 2007 is a deliberate myth. In the words of Dick Wurmser, then Vice President Cheney’s adviser on the Middle East: ‘what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.’ The mini-civil war between Hamas and Fatah in July 2007 essentially concerned the unwillingness of Fatah militia commanders to submit to Hamas command. Such an attitude is unsurprising but to represent the resulting conflict as a Hamas coup is a reversal of reality. ‘Iran contra 2.0’, the plan to get rid of Hamas in the summer of 2007, backfired badly on its perpetrators . Hamas fighters were able to drive Fatah underground and out of Gaza. The opposite held true in the West Bank. Abbas simply appointed a new cabinet under the former World Bank bureaucrat Salam Fayyad. Operation Cast Lead represented another attempt at finishing the work of Dahlan in 2007 and dislodging Hamas from Gaza. It failed, leaving only the familiar impasse of Palestinian politics. But will Hamas, much as they have shown the strength to resist occupation, be able to overcome that impasse?

Where is Hamas going?

Cast Lead was a setback for Israel and its backers because Israel was unable to use its military superiority to get its preferred outcome. With Hamas still in power, the axis of anti-imperialist resistance linking that organisation with Hizbollah and Iran remains unbroken. The Gaza war constitutes another blow to the project of renewed US domination in the region, already hobbled by humiliation in Iraq, the loss of a proxy war in Lebanon in 2007 and the unfolding prospect of defeat in Afghanistan. Yet, the very weakening of its position has led to some rhetorical change from the US. Western liberal commentators, having convinced themselves that Arab anger derives from religion rather than occupation and oppression, were euphoric at Barack Obama’s ability to quote the Qur’an in his keynote speech at Cairo university on June the 4th 2009. The period since the speech has seen a flurry of US diplomatic activity. Hamas has, since before the election of the Obama administration, been desperate to join in . Hamas’s politics – limited to the liberation of Palestine without challenging the networks of imperialist alliances in the region as a whole – will tend toward this conclusion and towards reaching an accommodation of sorts with Israel. The question is whether Israel will accept such an arrangement.

At the time of writing, this seems unlikely. Tzvi Lipni’s murderous gamble failed. Not even Cast Lead could out-tough Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud in the Israeli elections of February 2009. Netanyahu’s coalition is committed to further settlement expansion for reasons of ideological commitment and political manoeuvre. The choice between Labor and Liukud in Israel was always been limited to slightly different varieties of Zionism: now that the main parties are Likud and its offshoot Kadima, the choice is between right-wing Zionism and extreme right-wing Zionism. This is unlikely to change unless, as the apartheid South African state experienced in Mozambique and Angola, the military guarantee of racial supremacy collapses in the face of effective resistance of the kind offered by Hizbollah and Hamas.

The source of Israel’s military guarantee is the US, also the primary backer of the Arab regimes. Since the 1960s, Israel has closely aligned itself with the US as the watchdog of imperial interest in the region. US political and financial support is indispensable to the state. The politics of the Middle East still revolve around the division between supporters and opponents of imperialist intervention, an intervention motivated by the vital supplies of oil in the Persian Gulf. ‘Radical’ states confront ‘moderate’ ones, except that radicals can become moderate (Egypt after the death of Nasser) and moderate ones radical (Iran after the revolution of 1979 ). Such dramatic political swings reflect waves of what Tony Cliff called ‘deflected permanent revolution’ itself an outcome of the uneven and combined development of capitalism in the Middle East. The peculiar and particular importance of the resources of this region for global capitalism has produced the tendency for anti-colonial movements to confront Western hegemony in the region, then to accept it, then to be superseded by a new movement.

Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development, allied to the strategy of permanent revolution best allows us to understand the politics of resistance in the Middle East. Trotsky’s main insight was that pre-capitalist societies attempted to respond to the threat posed by capitalist states by attempting to mimic them – ‘ a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.’ Whereas in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie may have played a revolutionary, democratic role in Russia (and by extension other late developing countries) The only class with the agency and interest to carry out a thoroughgoing democratic revolution was, Trotsky argued, the working class generated by capitalist penetration. Even if few in number, the workers’ role in the most advanced sectors of production empowered them to lead the revolution . Yet the workers could not be expected to stop at a merely national democratic revolution – rather the revolution would be permanent in two senses. The democratic revolution would pass over into the socialist revolution, and over the national boundaries of Russia to the more advanced capitalist states.

The 21st century Middle East differs greatly from Tsarist Russia, but the process of uneven and combined development continues to structure its politics and therefore to open up the horizon of permanent revolution . Imperialist intervention and the occupation and dictatorship that accompany it continue to dominate the region. Capitalist penetration has produced a large working class but also an equally large collection of urban petit bourgeois groups resulting from the destruction of traditional artisan production and migration to the cities. These groups have produced most of the state functionaries and lesser intellectuals who have felt most keenly their continued subjugation . They have sought to end that subjugation – embodied most of all in the Israeli occupation – but in order to take what they imagine to be their rightful place within the system of capitalist states. Thus generations of Arab nationalists and Islamists, mostly hailing from the middle to lower ranks of state employment (including army officers) or the professions, have sought to expel imperialist influence from the region. Each has eventually come accept that influence because they did not base themselves on the one force with both the power and the interest to overthrow the capitalist order in the region – the working class . Hamas, and the broader Hizbollah-Syrian-Iranian axis to which it is linked, is likely to follow the same path.

The idea of working class revolution, and the passing over of national liberation into social struggles, is no mere slogan in the Middle East. The left is always well advised to remember Gramsci’s watchword; ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ But one must also reckon with assessments such as that of the Washington bureau chief of The Economist, a magazine not noted for its ultra-leftism: ‘in almost any Arab country, at almost any time, political and social discontent is in danger of tipping into violence—even, some insiders and outsiders are beginning to argue, into revolution.’ What is certain is that the renewed imperialist adventures of the past decade have solidified Arab opinion against ‘moderate (i.e. pro-Western) and led to an increasing identification with the resistance forces of Hamas and Hizbollah, emboldened by their ability to stand firm against Israel . In Egypt, in particular, resistance has begun to take a working class character, involving an enormous strike wave and increasingly sharp confrontation with the Mubarak regime .

Hamas’s politics, linked to the intermediary role of the Muslim Brotherhood in neighbouring countries, is likely to cut it off from this potentially powerful resistance. Like the PLO before it, Hamas avoids any challenge to the Arab regimes . Hamas are committed to fighting the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state but they are very concerned to ensure that this struggle does not extend to the exercise of popular power that may pass beyond these goals. One tangible example of the pitfalls of this strategy came when Hamas engineers exploded charges beneath the wall that separates Rafah camp in Gaza from Egypt in January 2008. Palestinian women and children physically obliterated the wall that separates Gaza from Egypt . Hamas engineers had helped by laying charges at the foundations, but it was popular power and unity with poor Egyptians that broke Israel’s blockade. Hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps half the population of Gaza, streamed through the wreckage to get food, water, medicine and everything else denied them. Egyptians organised convoys to the town of El-Arish to meet them, effectively shifting the national border . The Mubarak regime panicked, at first claiming they authorized the movement and then repressing it viciously . The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the target of much of the repression, again played a crucial intermediary role, persuading Hamas to meet Mubarak. After that meeting Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the Hamas foreign minister declared ‘Hamas will resume control over this border in co-operation with Egypt’ . To do otherwise would have meant a full-scale challenge to the Egyptian regime – something that neither Hamas nor its allies in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood were willing to risk.

Further confrontations, and possibly concessions, lie ahead between Hamas, Israel and the US. An imperial power on the back foot can ill afford to lose its one unshakably firm ally in a region of vital importance to world capitalism. Hence the weakening of US language on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, from calling for an end to settlement expansion to merely asking for ‘restraint’ . The Palestinians will still have something to resist. Hamas has proven its capacity to lead that resistance but, limited to guerilla action within the land of Palestine, it is unlikely to achieve a solution based on equality between Palestinians and Israelis. Anything less will see the leadership of the resistance pass to some other organisation. So long as that resistance continues, each attempt to crush it will result in horrors of the kind witnessed in Gaza – and a glimpse of the possibilities for real change seen in British lecture halls and Arab streets.

Israeli Spokesperson Syndrome

2008-12-31T04:57:00.005+09:00

Is it possible that Israeli politics is in a state of psychosis? There are arguments against this claim, of course. Unlike most pathologies this one seems to be contagious throughout the Western world. Consider, though, the following aspects of the condition.

Freudian Projection

Every time Israel attacks its neighbours, Binyamin Netyanhu, Mark Regev or some other polished ghoul tells the BBC that the Palestinians, or Lebanese, or Syrians had it coming. Necessary self defence, no nation in the world would stand for this, so on and so forth. The usual and correct reply to this is to remind people that the clock did not start ticking with whatever incident Israel picks as its excuse.

It is simply a lie, however, to say that the current butchery is self defence against Hamas rocket attacks. If you disagree please identify the particular attack that has prompted Israel to kill 400 people in 4 days. Hamas and Israel agreed a six month ceasefire that has just expired. Throughout that period Israel kept the people of Gaza under blockade that has left them near starvation. On the 21st of December Israel killed, according to Reuters, a "Gaza militant" - to which act Qassam rockets were fired in response. The following day a Hamas spokesman announced that the movement was ready to make a new agreement with Israel and observed a 24 hour ceasefire (two homemade rockets were fired and they didn't hit anyone). The Israeli offensive was discussed in the Israeli media throughout the preceding week, including a comment in Ha'aretz by a military spokesperson who said the attack would begin 'soon'. True to his word, in this at least. The winter war in Gaza, like the summer offensive on Lebanon, is a premeditated attack not the 'disproportionate response' of liberal myth.

Narcisstic Rage

Not only does Zionism reserve for Jews the right to return to historic Palestine, the right to build freely and the right to travel without let in that land ; it even denies Palestinians the right to fear. One is constantly struck by the disproportion between the statistics that Israeli spokespeople sputter and the carnage that appears on the monitors behind them. There are, we are told, 10% of Israelis are living in fear . They are afraid of homemade Qassam rockets, which have killed 17 Israelis in the past 7 years. Israel has killed almost 400 Palestinians in a few days. As a pro-Israeli lobbyist puts it ' the numbers are not very flattering'.

One and a half million Gazans have lived in daily fear of sickness because their hospitals have been denied supplies, of darkness because their electricity has been cut off, of hunger because the bakers are without flour and the shops are without food. Now they live in fear that the fourth most powerful military might blow them up as they cower and shiver. That's where the 150 rockets fired on Sderot (Israeli spokespeople also seem to believe that if they recite a figure and add the word 'Iran' their audience will lose its reason) and its surroundings come from. Any nation in the world would do the same, no?

Impaired Learning Response

My regular reader will recall my writing similar posts about the 2006 war on Lebanon. The Israeli establishment seems to have learned nothing from that episode. Barak, Olmert and Lipni may be praised in the bourgeois press for their admittedly keen sense of timing, but they seem without a strategy of any kind. Mahmoud Abbas must face an election very soon. Does anyone think that his disgraceful comments will win votes? Ah, but forgive my naivete. Elections are for real people. If Palestinians elect the wrong person just bomb the hell out of them until, at some never realised point in the future, they give up. Why change the pathology of a lifetime?

This is What an "Islamofascist" Looks Like

2008-05-31T23:30:00.004+09:00

Well, it seems that some readers may have missed my admittedly cryptic point - the quotation marks are the key. I was pointing out precisely that the opposition in Lebanon is made up of diverse groups of people opposed to neo-liberalism and imperialism. I was attempting to ridicule the silly term 'Islamofascism' although admittedly using some pretty gender reductionist means. So I guess I should be more careful with my juxtaposin'.

Revolutions from Above - A Popular Outline

2008-03-25T03:19:00.005+09:00

Here's the first part of my latest piece on what the modern gentleman is wearing, for M'Lady's Boudoir.

Revolution, we are usually led to believe, is either impossible or undesirable. According to this view any attempt radically to transform society is at best a dream and at worst a plan for dictatorship. Yet the capitalist world in which we live today was brought about by revolution. The world before this revolution – a process lasting from the 17th to the 20th centuries – was very different to our own. Most people lived in small rural communities. They did not have to sell their labour to a boss. Instead they were forced to give some of their crops to landlords or taxmen. Nation states, with their defined borders, standing armies, and unified markets did not exist. These societies were transformed by force to create the modern system of competition, wage labour and nation states.

By which I mean a four-part series starting in this week's Socialist Worker.

The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development in the Middle East

2008-02-15T04:42:00.002+09:00

Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development is vital for our understanding of the state in the Middle East. The theory, in particular a suggestive recent reworking of it by Justin Rosenberg, resolves the dichotomy of ideal types of states – the liberal, European contractual model need no longer be simply contrasted with the despotic Middle Eastern state. Rather, both emerge as forms of class rule under different conditions of the capitalist mode of production.

The argument is based on the assumption that modes of production exist and are important in Middle Eastern state formation. For the moment, I neglect those thinkers who do not accept this assumption so that I can outline the contribution of uneven and combined development to the theories of those who do. In the following essay I engage with the work of Nazih Ayubi and Simon Bromley. I outline their differences, and the different ways in which the theory of uneven and combined development can add to their work. Then I suggest how the theory of uneven and combined development might help analyse the state in the Middle East and the impact of external intervention on its transformation. I begin, however, with the foundational concept of the mode of production.

2. Modes of Production

A mode of production is a ‘way of producing’ composed of production relations; ‘relations of effective power over persons and productive forces’ (Cohen 1978: 63). Productive forces are the means by which human beings sustain their lives in their given environment. Production relations are patterned and change over time, Marx argues, as a result of the internal struggles that they generate. We can therefore speak of different modes of production, the development of such and the determination, in a broad sense discussed below, of political forms by these modes. Marx’s logic works as follows;

‘ The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship between ruler and ruled… It is always the relationship of the owners of the means of production to the direct producers– a relation always corresponding to a definite stage of development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret of the entire social structure.’
(Marx cited in Callinicos: 87)

We face some puzzles when we account for actual historical development in this scheme. Those that concern the discussion of the Middle East most are;

i.) the ruler-ruled relation appears also to determine the ‘economic form’ of exploitation
ii.) The sequence of modes of production and the ‘correspondence’ of production relations both to productive technique and to political forms.

These two points are the main puzzles because, like the rest of what was once called ‘the Third World’, the Middle East seems very different to the English experience from which Marx abstracted. Middle Eastern societies remain apparently divided by cleavages not related to the modes of production. Those revolutions that have taken place have produced neither proletarian nor bourgeois democracies. The Middle Eastern state takes little notice, it seems, of any productive class and keeps a very large stake in surplus extraction itself. Much of the social and political development of Middle Eastern countries seems driven by external intervention and regional war rather than class struggles inherent in any mode of production. How have the theorists of modes of production in the Middle East tried to solve these puzzles?

3. Modes of Production and theories of the Middle Eastern State; Ayubi and Bromley

One attempt to reconcile the mode of production with the non-linearity of actual development is Nazih Ayubi’s concept of ‘articulation.’ Ayubi follows Laclau and Mouffe in defining articulation as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (Laclau and Mouffe cited in Ayubi 1995:28). This definition seems tautological. Ayubi himself gives a more tangible account for the Middle East when he writes

‘modes of production in the Middle East are often not singular and uni-dimensional but rather are articulated (i.e. two or modes can often coexist and interlink)’(1995:28)

What are these interlinked modes, how do they co-exist and what effect does this articulation have? Ayubi argues, as do almost all modes of production theorists, that the pre-colonial Middle East was dominated by a tributary mode of production. Ayubi describes this mode as ‘control based’ (1995:24). That is to say, the central authority extracted surplus from the direct producers through a hierarchy of coercion. State functionaries holding non-inheritable positions, such as tax farmers, seized a physical surplus from the direct producers. The functionaries then had to give up this surplus to the centre, having taken a share of their own. The tributary mode differs from both feudalism and capitalism. In the feudal mode relatively independent non-producers coercively extract surplus from the direct producers (Brenner 1977:37). This mode differs from the tributary mode in the independence of the appropriators. In the capitalist mode appropriators are independent and physical coercion is not usually used to extract surplus from the direct producers. Ayubi contends that in the Middle East, where neither capitalism nor the state have native feudal antecedents, the tributary and capitalist modes are articulated.

The articulation of capitalist and tributary modes, according to Ayubi, is the structural cause of narrow and repressive nature of the Arab state. He uses the concept of articulation to rework the conventional analysis of Middle Eastern states as ‘rentier states’;

‘[the Arab] ruling caste is fairly autonomous from the production process and the social classes, but often excessively dependent on the outside world.’(Ayubi 1995:25).

The relationship between the Arab state and the core of the capitalist world economy is thus a ‘circulationist’ one. The ruling caste participates in the world economy only in the form of exchange.

The concept of ‘articulation’ is at first sight very close to that of uneven and combined development. It accounts for the persistence of apparently archaic forms alongside capitalist development in the Middle East. Yet rather than integrate the logic of mixed modes of production into the analysis of political forms, Ayubi removes the state from the effects of different but coexisting modes of production by arguing that the ‘fierce’ Arab polity is a result of the absence or weakness of classes in an articulated structure. A more integrated account of Middle Eastern state formation with the logic of different modes of production is to be found in the work of the political economist Simon Bromley.

Bromley begins with the same central concept of surplus appropriation proposed by Marx in my extended quotation above. For Bromley the ‘inner secret’ of Middle East politics is indeed uneven and combined development. Further – it is not only the impact of Western capitalism that was unevenly developed in the Middle East but the social formation that capitalism encountered. Bromley differentiates ‘three Islams’; that of the Ottoman Sunni urban domains where religious authority buttressed tributary extraction and merchant circulation of surplus; the pastoral nomadic lands where the Ottoman state was weak; and the more variegated Safavid Empire, which he does not fully discuss (Bromley 1994:43). This pre-existing social structure combined with the impact of capitalist penetration ‘set in train a process of uneven development’ that resulted in the distinctive characteristics of Middle East state formation. Bromley’s argument, to an even greater extent than Ayubi’s, is thus based on the concept of the uneven development of modes of production.

This uneven development of capitalism, according to Bromley, produces two problems for all late-developing societies. These are

‘first, that of consolidating state power rapidly and in difficult circumstances; and second, that of sponsoring socio-economic development in adverse international conditions.’(1994:2)

The agency that faces these problems and seeks to solve them is the state – which must transform itself in order to fend off or compete with external capitalist powers. In doing so, however, the pre-modern state encounters a quandary；

　‘the emergence of a sovereign public sphere in conjunction with the privatization of command over surplus labour provide the basis for the liberal-capitalist form of state and economy.’(1994: 44)

The state can ensure the capital accumulation to reproduce itself only at the cost of decoupling coercive force and surplus accumulation. This is because of the late arrival of these states in the capitalist mode – the unevenness of development. Here a slightly difference notion of uneven and combined development can improve Bromley’s argument. Trotsky’s theory of capitalist development as not just uneven but combined, with attendant consequences on the class formations of the late developing countries, is the basis for this improvement.

3. Combined and Uneven Development; Trotsky and Rosenberg

Trotsky’s theory of the law of uneven and combined development integrates analytically the impact of different modes of production. It does so by specifying the logic of the relevant modes and their impact on the class politics of the countries subject not just to uneven (in the sense of late) but combined development (Davidson 2006:10). Trotsky begins from the now familiar premise that ‘backward countries’ are both forced to ‘under the whip of external necessity’ to adopt the social forms of the more advanced – indeed permits them to take up the most advanced of these and outrun their erstwhile superiors. The resulting society is thus governed by ‘the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey… an amalgam of archaic with contemporary forms’ (Trotsky 1997:27). Non-capitalist classes that seek to preserve their productive power must adopt capitalist forms of organization. By doing so, their very integration into the logic of global capitalism can extend pre-capitalist political and economic forms. Trotsky explains by reference to Russia

‘[T]he very process of assimilation acquires a self-contradictory character. Thus the introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labour organisation. European armament and European loans – both indubitable products of a higher culture – led to a strengthening of czarism, which delayed in turn the development of the country’
(1997: 27).

In contrast to Ayubi’s conception of articulation as a mélange of different modalities of power and Bromley’s treatment of uneven development, Trotsky treats the contradictory outcomes as the result of the ‘laws’ of development themselves. Thus we find that non-capitalist classes, facing external pressure on the state over which they require continued control, transform their societies; ‘the solution of the problems of one class by another is one of those combined methods natural to backward countries’ (1997:30).

Trotsky’s theory has very important implications for the contractual state/ liberal state opposition with which we began. These implications are contained in his theory of permanent revolution. Under uneven and combined development, the state does not have to seek a contract with the productive bourgeoisie. Rather the bourgeoisie is nurtured (in the face of foreign competition) and protected (against the working class) by the state. Thus Trotsky argues that:

‘[u]nder pressure from richer Europe the Russian state swallowed up a far greater relative part of the people’s wealth than in the West, and weakened the foundations of the possessing classes. Being at the same time in need of support from the latter it forced and regimented their growth.’
(1997:28)

The confrontation between bourgeoisie and state depicted in the contractual Western model was impossible in the backward countries because of their combined development. The only class with the agency and interest to carry out a thoroughgoing democratic revolution was, Trotsky argued, the proletariat (1997:35). Again the combined and uneven nature of (Russian) development determined the clash. The Russian proletariat united the revolutionary fervour of the recently industrialized and oppressed with the power of mass concentrated workplaces characteristic of advanced capitalism (Trotsky 1997:32). Yet the workers could not be expected to stop at a merely national democratic revolution – rather the revolution would be permanent in two senses. The democratic revolution would pass over into the socialist revolution, and the revolution of the backward countries to the advanced.

Trotsky’s theory has recently been re-examined as a work of International Relations by Justin Rosenberg. Whereas Trotsky was concerned mainly with the impact of uneven and combined capitalist development, Rosenberg develops the theme of uneven and combined development as the most general law of historical development. According to Rosenberg political fragmentation, and hence international relations, results from the unevenness of all development – inter-societal relations result from the mutual combination of these differing developmental levels. Thus diplomacy itself is a result of uneven and combined development;

‘[T]he conditions of reproduction which define the concrete existence
of any given society are not limited to the internal structures of social relations which formed the starting point of classical social theory. They always include, by virtue of the bare fact of inter-societal existence, those external conditions which are the object of diplomatic management.’(Rosenberg 2006:320)

Rosenberg’s reworking of Trotsky thus takes the law of combined and uneven development as an overarching law. The particular distinction of the capitalist mode of production is to unite three levels of development. These are ‘empirical eventuation, societal trajectory and the ‘species-level’ increase of human capacities’ (2007: 6). That is, the overall course of human development, the development of particular societies and the conjuncture of actual events are united in the same process by the self-expanding logic of capitalism.

Rosenberg combines Trotsky and IR theory at a high level of abstraction, although applied to the case of Russian development. For a novel empirical implication of his case, we have to look to an earlier version of the argument;

‘Decolonization replaced a world of unsustainable European empires with a states system full of potential mini-czarisms, any of which might explode and drag other similar states down its new path of combined development,’
(Rosenberg 1996:12)

Uneven and combined development makes states volatile. It forces non and pre-capitalist ruling classes, which do indeed rule by personal and despotic methods, to abide by the logic of a subordinate position in the global capitalist system. They either challenge this position, or find themselves so weakened by it that another class attempts to overthrow them. In either case the result is political instability and the ‘catch-up’ policies of import substitution pursued in the sixties and seventies. Those polices and the prior phase of capitalist development produce a proletariat largely without the reformist traditions of Western European socialism. This proletariat is further subject not only to capitalist exploitation but to the international backwardness and repressive government that results from the uneven and combined development of their country. Even further; the proletariat is still connected to a large and usually poor peasantry. These are the conditions Trotsky’s permanent revolution.

Rosenberg’s contribution is in adding the element of ruling class strategy. The leading capitalist states are compelled to intervene in continual crises lest the revolution does indeed become permanent. Rosenberg thus reinterprets post World War II US policy as ‘the geopolitical management of uneven and combined development and its consequences on a world scale’ (1996: 12). This reformulation suggests a new way of looking at external intervention in the near revolutionary crises of the Middle East.

5. Uneven and Combined Development and Revolution in the Middle East

The theory of uneven and combined development adds something to analysis of revolutionary crises in the Middle East. To recapitulate the argument; the ‘fierce’ prevalent in the Middle East derives from the non-linear development of modes of production. Yet rather than being an ‘articulation’ of modes (Ayubi) or the simply uneven penetration of the capitalist mode (Bromley) the despotic state of the Middle East is a result of the uneven and combined development of the capitalist mode of production.
This uneven and combined development makes the states of the Middle East (and the Third World in general) sites of potential permanent revolution. The strategic object of the advanced capitalist states is therefore to manage the effects this uneven and combined development.

This argument suggests some lines of enquiry for the Middle East that combined external intervention with uneven and combined internal development. There is a continuum of the experience of revolutionary upheaval in the Middle East. This continuum seems almost coterminous with the strength of alliance between pre-capitalist classes and external imperialism in the context of uneven and combined development. We begin first with those countries that have had revolutions. Thus Iran, a country whose ruler was closely allied to the US but cut himself off from his traditional support base, experience perhaps the purest example of Trotsky’s permanent revolution based on the urban working class. Then we have countries such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq where mass working class organizations did exist and participated in mass upheavals against landlord governments supported by external powers. Yet those imperial powers, Britain and France, were no longer strong enough to guarantee the position of the landlord nor was the proletariat sufficiently organized to lead the revolution. Tony Cliff described this situation as ‘deflected permanent revolution’ (Cliff 1990:22).

Countries where revolutionary crises have been frustrated include Jordan and, one might argue, Lebanon. In the case of Jordan one could hypothesize that in 1970 a ruling class based on pastoral nomadic groups ( the Bedouin organized in the Jordanian army) was sustained by external intervention by Israel and hence at one remove, the US. In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States again an originally pastoral nomadic ruling class is integrated directly into the capitalist mode of production as the guarantor of the most important source of energy in that mode of production.

References

Ayubi, Nazih. 1995 Overstating The Arab State :Politics and Society in The Middle East St. Martin’s Press, New York

Bromley, Simon 1994 Rethinking Middle East Politics University of Texas Press, Austin

Callinicos, Alex 1983 The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx Bookmarks, London

Cohen, G A 1978 Karl Marx’s Theory of History; A Defence Oxford University Press, Oxford

Cliff, Tony 1990 The Deflected Permanent Revolution Bookmarks, London

Rosenberg, Justin 2007 ‘International Relations - The Higher Bullshit; a Reply to the Globalization Debate’ Review of International Studies Forthcoming

Rosenberg, Justin 2006 ‘Why is there no International Historical Sociology?’ European Journal of International Relations Vol.12 No.3

Rosenberg, Justin 1996 ‘Isaac Deutscher and The Lost History of International Relations’ New Left Review I/125 Verso, London

Trotsky, Leon 1997 History of the Russian Revolution Bookmarks, London

Fearon's Rational Reason's for War: Notes on a Critique

2008-02-15T04:31:00.002+09:00

James Fearon ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’ International Organization 49,3, Summer 1995

i. Main Concern
To explain war
3 types of explanation; 1) leader’s irrationality 2) leaders do not bear costs 3) rational leaders may still go to war
Fearon focuses on (3) because particular wars seem to have been started rationally; a rationalist explanation for war is essential for neorealism

ii. The Problem

States could reach a rational bargain without war based upon probability of winning or losing

Definition of A Rational Bargain

Fearon defines a rational bargain in the following way

2 states A and B, hold preferences over outcomes x∈X =[0,1]

A prefers outcomes closer to (1); B prefers outcomes closer to (0)

The preferences of A and B are represented in their utility function

Ua(x)= A’s utility for outcome x

Ub (1-x) is B’s utility for outcome x

These utility functions are continuous, increasing and weakly concave.

The Gains of War

A will win a war with probability p.

Ci=A,B= utility for the costs of war

Thus Ua for war= pUa (1)+(1-p) Ua (0)- Ca = pUa- Ca

For B
(1-p)Ub (1)+pUb(0)-Cb =(1- p)Ub- Cb

The Existence of a bargaining range

there exists a subset of X s.t. for each Ua (x) > pUa- Ca and Ub (1-x)>1-p- Cb.
the bargaining range, in which the outcomes for both A and B war.

So why do wars happen?

3 assumptions
i)‘there is some true probability p that one state would win’

ii) States are risk averse or risk neutral; there may have been risk acceptant leaders but ‘even if we admitted such a leader as rational, it seems doubtful that many have held such preferences.’

iii) issues are perfectly divisible on a continuous range [0,1] – possibility of linkages and side payments. Often violated by nationalistic attachment to territory

Rationalist Arguments
1) Anarchy
States go to war because there is no power to stop them.
Why? If states are rational then they know the costs of war and which one is likely to win, without reference to a central power anyway.
Does not address central question

(2) Benefits of war outweigh costs
Argument above shows that some ex ante bargain always exists that Pareto dominates war

(3) Preventive War
A declining power may attack arising power if it expects attack by that power in the future. But – doesn’t change bargaining solution

(4) Rational Miscalculation due to lack of information

States disagree about relative power – one side has private information. Why not share it?

iii. Fearon’s thesis
Private information + incentive to misrepresent => rationalist explanation for war
States have an incentive to misrepresent information in bargaining, ‘a rational state may choose to run a real risk of (inefficient) war in order to signal that it will fight if not given a good deal in bargaining.’

Commitment problem leads to preventive war

For periods t=1,2,…, A demands x. B acquiesces or fights a war; A wins with pt. Future payoffs discounted at d =>(0,1).

Uat=(pt/(1-d))-Ca and Ubt ((1-pt)/(1-d))-Cb.
No third party to ensure bargain will be kept. Let p1> p2. At t2 A demands xt= p2+Cb (1-d). So at t1 B gets war or 1- x1+d(1-x2)/(1-d). If A sets x1 =0, max Ub = 1+d(1- x2)/(1-d). But if d(p2)- p1 >(1-d)Cb then B will attack at t1.
iv. Criticisms
(1)Fearon identifies rationality with certain preferences rather than the form of those preferences. Risk averse leaders are not so rare as he says – their utility function could be convex rather than concave.
(2)‘Indivisibility’ encouraged by nationalism introduces an external explanation.
(4) Probability of withholding information should appear in calculations of relative power
(3) Fearon’s concept of the bargaining range depends upon risk aversion and neutrality– also represented as discount rates. If discount rates differ there is an incentive to risk lovers.

PROOF

The Nash Bargaining solution predicts that there is only one rational and feasible bargaining outcome

Claim #1;

There is an incentive for states to be risk lovers within Fearon’s bargaining range

I prove this by applying the Nash Bargaining Solution to the bargain between State A and State B in Fearon’s bargaining range. The Nash Bargaining Solution states that there is a unique solution to any bargaining game. In the 4 steps below I show that this solution will favour the more risk loving bargainer.

I. Assumptions

Let x∈X be an outcome in the bargaining range [p- Ca,, p+Cb].

II. Differing Utility Functions

Here I change Fearon’s assumptions by introducing different utility functions.

Let UA be a linear function UA=f(x).

To make B a risk lover, let UB be a convex function UB=yn=(1-x)n= (1- UA)n

III. The Nash Bargaining Solution

The Nash Bargaining Solution is the value of x that maximizes the product P of the
bargainers’ utilities.

Thus

P= UA(x) ∗ UB(1-x) = x(1-x)n

To find the maximum, we find the value of x that sets the first derivative of P(x) to 0.

dP(x)/dx=d(x)/dx ∗(1-x)n + (x)∗d[(1-x)n]/dx = 1 ∗ (1-x)n + x + n ∗ (-1) ∗ (1-x)n-1

= (1-x)n-1((1-x))-nx)= (1-x)n-1[1-x(n+1)].

This derivative is equal to 0 if x=1 or if 1-x(n+1)=0, i.e. x=1/(n+1).
For n>0 P(x) is positive when x<1 and 0 when x=1.

Therefore to maximize P set x=1/(n+1). This is the Nash Bargaining Solution.

IV. The Incentive to Risk Taking

In x=1/(n+1) x is the demand made by state A and n is the degree to which B is risk
averse or risk loving.

The larger n is, the more willing B is to take risks.

In x=1/(n+1) as n increases x decreases ( and consequently 1-x increases).

Therefore there is an incentive for states to be risk lovers even within Fearon’s bargaining range.

Historical Sociology and the “ontological problem of the international”

2008-02-15T04:26:00.001+09:00

A few more theoretical posts from now on, mostly just to save my own work and get back in the habit of using this site.

‘How convincing is Historical Sociology as a solution to the “ontological problem of the international” in IR theory?’

International Relations theory is a body of thought whose main concern is whether it ought to exist at all (Rosenberg 2006:307). One might call the reason for this recurrent identity crisis ‘the ontological problem of the international.’ IR theorists face the question – do the relations between states constitute a separate reality to those of wider social theory? The ontological problem of the international connects the differing schools of IR thought to wider social science. The solutions that those schools, informed by the debates of broader social theory, propose to the ontological problem of the international determine their substantive arguments. In this essay, I critique both the Neorealist orthodoxy of International Relations and the constructivist alternative, and argue that Historical Sociology provides a firmer ground for inquiry into the international. I begin by defining the problem of the international. Then I examine the concepts that proceed from the problem of the international and that connect it to the philosophy of social science; language and its correspondence to an external social reality, and the related question of structure and agency in that social reality.

The Ontology of International Anarchy

When International Relations theorists speak of the international they presuppose a number of ‘nations’ that relate to one another. This point may seem tautological. Yet in this simplistic statement lies the essence of the ontological problem of International Relations. That problem is whether the international exists at all as a separate category – and if it does, what the implications of this category are. The traditional answer, made explicit in the opening sentence of this paragraph, is that there is such as thing as ‘International Relations’. The terms mean politics amongst nations, or rather, sovereign states (Brown 2001:4). An important proposition flows from defining international relations in this way. Relations between states thus defined are anarchical, in the sense that there is no higher authority than the states themselves. The claim that a system of sovereign states must be anarchical follows from nature of sovereignty. A sovereign authority holds exclusive power, and the exclusive right to use force, over a given territory. If one authority must obey another authority, it is no longer sovereign. International Relations thus differs from domestic politics, wherein a legitimate government holds the power to compel. This argument, the core of traditional realism , seems a parsimonious and logical answer to the ‘ontological problem’. Yet a problem persists, because the proposed solution rests on very shaky claims and produces some empirically questionable propositions. The claims concern social knowledge and the relationships between states and societies. The debates on these claims and propositions connect IR theory to wider social science.

Social scientists, of which IR theorists are subspecies, confront a problem. They are humans studying other humans. Moreover, they are studying ‘societies’ - large groups of other humans. One cannot, except in a very limited sense, conduct experiments on those groups, nor assume fruitfully that their members are acting according to universal laws they do not themselves understand, since they seem to act according to intentions they have worked out for themselves just as the social scientist does (Winch 1958: 84). Debates on the ontology and epistemology of social science largely relate to this point and are replicated in IR, with a distinguishing factor. That distinction is that IR theorists are not just discussing humans within societies but societies, and the relation between them, within the globe. IR theorists thus orient themselves in relation to the following problems:

i) Of language and discourse -do international ‘facts’ exist independently of the means by which people perceive and talk about them?

ii) Of agent and structure – if an ‘international system’ does exist, what is the relationship between that system and its components?

These questions are the IR variants of the dilemmas of social science as a whole. They derive from the problem of the existence of the international I described earlier, and the answers given to these questions largely define the ‘paradigms’ of IR theory.

The mainstream schools of IR theory seem to have settled into two – neo-realist theorists influenced by Kenneth Waltz’s ‘Theory of International Politics’ and so-called ‘constructivists’ (Brown 2000: 52). The neo-realist or ‘neo-neo’ (so-called because of the common assumptions of rational choice theory by ‘neorealists’ and ‘neoliberals’) group largely follow the stream of positivist and empiricist social science. The constructivists, by contrast, derive much of their answers to the questions posed above from theories of language and discourse influenced by Witggenstein (Neufeld 1995: 89). In this essay I evaluate the positions of these schools in relation to the ontological problem of the international. I argue that historical sociology, provides a more satisfying solution to that problem.

By historical sociology I mean long-term theories of social change based on historical evidence (Mann 1994:37). Some historical sociologists of IR are influenced particularly by Marx, others by Weber others by both and more. They have in common an attempt to understand the ‘international’ as a property of social relations across time, whether those social relations be based on power or production (Abrams 1982:2) When I use ‘historical sociology’ in this essay, that is what I have in mind.

Language

The question of the existence of a specifically ‘international’ sphere is bound up with a broader one – the relationship of language and ‘social fact’. If international anarchy is a brute fact, then there is nothing to be done but to act prudently in the face of that fact. To act prudently one needs effective knowledge, provided by hypotheses tested against the available facts (Halliday & Rosenberg 1998:383). Realist scholars proceed along these largely positivist lines. Constructivists stand on the other side of the discursive divide (Brown 2000: 52). If social ‘facts’ are actually artifacts of language, then those facts cannot be the arbiter of falsehood or truth for statements (Rorty 1989: 5). As ‘language games’ change so will the social facts, such as ‘anarchy’ they construct. I now examine the neo-realist and constructivist positions on the validity of statements about international relations and propose a historical sociological alternative to both.

Neo-realism

The neo-realist view of theory (i.e. meaningful statements about the international) is clearly stated by its most famous exponent, Kenneth Waltz. Thus;

‘There are all kinds of attempts to understand and explain. And they are very interesting. But I think of theory as having to meet certain standards, and fulfill certain requirements. Otherwise it would fall into some other category, a perfectly fine category such as philosophy or historical interpretation.’
(Waltz 1998:382)

Kenneth Waltz insists, with goodish reason, that he is no kind of positivist. He makes clear that the main job of theory is to explain rather than to predict, and that ‘facts’ are already ‘theories’(Waltz 1997:913). Waltz thus goes much farther from the correspondence theory of truth than his critics concede. Even so, Waltz’s ‘standards’– the criteria to distinguish philosophies that interpret from theories that explain - are steadfastly positivist ones (Waltz 1998:380). He begins by restricting his theory – it is, he maintains, a theory of international systems, not of foreign policy, nor international trade nor anything else (Waltz 1998: 383). He goes on to deduce a theory of International Politics whose final outcome is the ‘balance of power’. Waltz is a logical if not Comtean (Neufeld 1995:25) positivist.

Waltz’s work, and by extension the ‘neo-neo’ project based on it, is positivist in the sense that it is deductive. Waltz begins with axioms and constructs falsifiable theorems upon them. His first test of the strength of a theory is whether it can be subject to the ‘analytic method of classical physics’(Waltz 1979:12). Even if theories cannot be thus analysed – IR theory being one such truculent case- they must still be subject to the rules of hypothesis testing (Waltz 1979:13). The interconnected sets of laws that Waltz proposes to test against international political reality derive from his deductive model. His first axiom concerns the organization of power. He states that there are only two ways of doing this – in hierarchical or anarchical systems (Waltz 1979:93). In anarchical systems, of which the present system of states is one, the units must be primarily concerned with their own security because there is no other guarantee of their survival (Waltz 1979:93). From these axioms about the structure Waltz derives the behaviour of states, such as the balance of power (Waltz 1998:377). I shall discuss Waltz’s ‘structural realism’ further below, but first I consider his position on the correspondence between language and social facts.

Waltz’s theory relies on positivist model of language. His picture of the international is composed of, by his own description, laws and is validated by the relation amongst those laws and between them and an accessible external reality (Waltz 1979: 7). Deduction relies upon fixed meanings of terms and axioms – if these are to be understood, in post-positivist fashion, according to context then the whole enterprise is redundant. By circumscribing the subject of his theory –to an anarchic international system- Waltz predetermines its outcomes. Waltz’s theory is indeed parsimonious. However, it is precisely the exclusion of historical and ‘second image’ factors i.e. domestic that cause the failures of his theory. I argue that historical sociology does better than Waltz’s theory because it takes account of these.

Positivists seek (among other things) laws that hold given certain antecedent conditions – without regard to the history of those laws. As Waltz himself puts it, Newton did not present a theory of apples falling in 1666 but for all time (Waltz 1998:383). The problem here is what Waltz consider analogous to the falling apple in IR. He argues that the job of theory is to explain continuities (Waltz 1979: 69). One might argue it does not go much beyond description – in Waltz’s theory moreover this description of a particular time bound system (international anarchy) is transformed into a timeless law. Yet the system of states is a historical phenomenon, not a logical syllogism. Having endowed ‘anarchy’ with very wide explanatory powers indeed one must then consider the conditions for anarchy (Rosenberg 2001:76). To do so requires a historical theory, and hence a theory of historical change such as that found in Weberian and Marxist historical sociology (Hobson 1998: 285).

Constructivism

The core of constructivism, as the name suggests, is the argument that social ‘facts’ are constructed through the conventions of language (Brown 2000:52). The facts with which IR constructivists concern themselves are those of the international states system. Alexander Wendt, the best known constructivist, draws a distinction between ‘materialist’ and ‘idealist’ theories of the international (Wendt 1999:93). Materialist theories are those, such as realism and Marxism, that hold that ‘the most fundamental fact about society is the nature and organization of material forces’; idealists, by helpful contrast believing that ‘the most fundamental fact about society is the nature and structure of social consciousness.’ (Wendt 1999: 24). Wendt, and other constructivists are concerned to investigate the ‘constitutive relationships’ of international social consciousness (Wendt 1999: 25).

Constructivists thus base their arguments on an idea of social science that distinguishes between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ kinds (Wendt 1999:69). The most important social kinds in IR theory are the components of the state system –sovereign states and anarchy. In contrast to neo-realists and neo-liberals, who follow Waltz’s deductive model of international politics, Wendt adopts a positivist epistemology (in the sense of replicable enquiry into the validity of falsifiable hypotheses) but an ‘idealist’ ontology of the international (Wendt 1999:90). The international system, for Wendt, does indeed exist as a system of states – however those states and the system that is ‘emergent’ from their interaction is composed of ‘ideationist’ material. In common with other social kinds, this existence of the international system depends on ‘the interlocking beliefs, concepts or theories held by actors’ (Wendt 1999:69).

Wendt’s ontological disagreement with Waltz leads him to stress the role of language and culture in the international system. This is not language in the sense of everyday speech but rather the shared system of meanings by which actors constitute and understand their own practices (Wendt 1999:312). Wendt criticizes other theories – which he describes as materialist or ‘base-superstructure’ models- on this basis. First he rejects the dichotomy between ‘ideas’ and ‘interests’. Rather, Wendt argues that ‘interests’ are only ever constituted by ‘ideas’ and it makes no sense to divide up causal powers between the two (Wendt 1999:135). Further, Wendt claims, one cannot give any substance to the notion of an international anarchic system outside of the inter-subjective practices of the members of that system. Wendt identifies three such cultures each producing very different kinds of behaviour – the Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian (Wendt 1999: 246).

Other constructivists have criticized Wendt for conceding too much to neo-realism (Kratochwil 2000: 76). The constructivist concern for the historical building of social kinds also has much in common with historical sociology (Hobson 1998:285). However, Wendt’s inter-subjective ontology of the international is also flawed in ways that historical sociologists can remedy. First, Wendt holds that ‘states are ontologically prior to the state system’ (Wendt 1999:143). Now, if one is only concerned with states and their system abstracted from the societies in which these are embedded, then this claim is a truism. However, and as historical sociologists such as Mann, Tilly and Spruyt have demonstrated, it is not ‘true’ in the sense of supported by empirical evidence (Halliday 1994:35). It makes more sense to consider both states and system as part of wider processes of social change (Hobden 1999:257).

The question of social change leads us to another – Wendt’s ontological distinction between the ‘ideational’ and the ‘material’. Wendt takes ‘material’ to mean simply physical (Wendt 1999:73). He then criticizes ‘base-superstructure’ models such as Realism and Marxism for failing to understand that their ‘bases’ are as much ideal as their superstructures. Social facts confront individuals as apparently solid things only because individuals cannot change them on their own (Wendt 1999:74). Now, neither Marxists nor Weberian theorists of power such as Michael Mann argue that modes of production or social power are like tables and cats. What they do argue is that there is indeed some ‘final instance’ from which such relations develop. Wendt certainly does not claim that people could simply stop believing they lived in a states system or under capitalism (Wendt 1999:311). But why not? Historical sociology provides explanations of how people hold the interests and capabilities to constitute or change social forms. In this respect it does better than constructivist ‘ideas all the way down.’

Agents and Structures

The discussion so far has concerned what the international is. As soon as one defines the international as a system of states, one must ask the question; ‘what is the relationship between the system and the states?’ Again, IR theory here joins in the wider debate on structure and agency with which social scientist occupy so much of their time (Callinicos 2006: 184). Neo-realist and constructivists have applied to states models of structure and agency derived from broader schools in social science. Claims about structure and agency in IR are particularly connected to the ontology of the international because the international is commonly assumed to be a structure above states. Below I consider the neo-realist and constructivist accounts of agency, which are closely connected to the respective arguments on the ontology and language of the international system that I have already discussed. I then present critiques of both theory grounded in historical sociology.

Neo-realism

Kenneth Waltz, and the ‘neo-neo’ school that draws on his work, gives a very definite answer to the question of structure and agency. Although his theory is essentially based on the methodological individualist model of neo-classical economics, Waltz styles it a ‘systems theory’ (Waltz 1979:71). He argues that because differing domestic arrangements produce like outcomes, a theory of international politics must concern itself with structures. Waltz says that a structure is defined by three features: its ordering principle (whether this is anarchic or hierarchical), the specification of functions of differentiated units and the distribution of capabilities across units (Waltz 1979:71). In international politics the ordering principle is anarchy and hence the units are not differentiated but alike. Waltz argues that this is so because the structure conditions the units to be alike by force of competition (Waltz 1979: 128). The only aspect in which units will differ is the distribution of capabilities, understood as power. States, all being of like kind, will thus act to increase their own power to ensure their own survival and balance against a predominant power in the system. The most stable such balance is between two superpowers. These are the claims Waltz makes for the impact of his deductive structure on its units (Waltz 1979: 128). Any attempt to understand outcomes at the unit level will bring on the dread fallacy of ‘reductionism’ (Waltz 1979:377).

Waltz’s theory either explains too little or too much. He is not concerned to explain actual state policies, only the tendencies operating on those policies. If the structure forces the agents to be alike, and like agents react in like ways to similar distributions of capabilities then there seems to be little point to these agents at all in the theory. The distribution of capabilities varies but since we know that the units always seek to increase their capabilities (i.e. power) we have already explained any interesting change in those capabilities. Once these tendencies have been deduced there seems little left to say – except perhaps analyze how the system came about, a move that Waltz explicitly rejects. Such a move would not be ‘reductionist’ but rather an expansion of knowledge to the social systems of which societies, states and their relations all form a part. By rejecting a historical analysis of structure and agency in IR, Waltz gets into empirical difficulties particularly in his illustration of how the structure forces the agents to be alike.

Waltz points to the USSR to make the claim that the system overrides unit. Waltz argues by the nineteen twenties Soviet leaders who had once asserted the downfall of the state system accepted that system because it forces states to compete as like units (Waltz 1979:127). This is reasonable argument – one might even accept stronger ones that suggest the internal social relations of the USSR were transformed by international competition (Callinicos 1991:31) Yet aside from a chance to savour the idea of Bolsheviks in a top hat and tails, this example actually gives Waltz little. The Bolsheviks were not forced to retreat because of military competition – they managed to defeat fourteen invading armies and then swept into Poland – but because the expected West European revolutions failed, not to occur but to take power (Haynes 2002:48). Why those revolutions failed is an open debate – but that debate must concern both ‘international’ and ‘domestic’ social and historical explanations. Historical sociology, by considering society, state and international system as part of wider social change provides the means to have that debate. Waltz’s theory of international politics does not.

Constructivism

Constructivists take particular aim at the Neo-realist concept of structure and agency, probably because it is an easy target. The constructivist argument bears some resemblance to that of historical sociology. The constructivist position is closely related on structure and agency is closely related to the inter-subjective conception of the international system. For Wendt, neo-realism engages in questionable ‘two step’ – units and their preferences are first constituted and only then engage in interaction governed by the logic of anarchy (Wendt 1999: 368).

Wendt rejects the neo-realist model of agent structure interaction. Instead he maintains that agents are structured by their interaction, just as structures are the creations of agent’s inter-subjective understandings – interaction is an on-going process of production and re-production of subjectivity (Wendt 1999: 368). On this basis, Wendt argues that ‘anarchy is what states make it.’ The interlocking understandings of states – agents in interaction with one another- comprise the content of anarchy and hence back to the ideas that constitute state agents. Where Waltz poses the distribution of capabilities as the only worthwhile variable in the international system Wendt proposes that ‘[d]istributions of ideas are social structures’(Wendt 1999:309). The distribution of these ideas – and the degree to which agents accept them – make up the Kantian, Hobbesian and Lockean cultures of anarchy that Wendt identifies. Moreover, these cultures can become ‘self fulfilling prophecies’ but, because they emerge from the self-construction of agents, are also subject to change (Wendt 1999:309.) For Wendt such change amongst and between agents is purely contingent – he argues there is unlikely to be any regress from the present mostly Lockean, partly Kantian system but there is no guarantee of progress to a purely Kantian order (Wendt 1999:311).

Questions of agent, structure and social change are a particular concern of historical sociologists (Abrams 1982: 3) Where historical sociology can do better than constructivism, as with neo-realism, is in the conception of agent and structure. Wendt holds on to the conception of the state as prior to the system. Historical sociologists do not fetishize the sovereign state in this way (Hobson 1998: 295). This is an important distinction because of the indeterminacy of the constructivist account of agency and structure. Now, it might be that an indeterminate theory is the best thing for an indeterminate reality. However, because constructivist theory concerns states and the states system alone as much as neo-realism does, the fluid boundaries of the two levels make for confusion. In what context do cultures take root or change? It makes more sense for the agent and structure of international politics to be embedded in a wider account of social change.

Conclusion

I have sought in this essay to present historical sociology as a more satisfactory solution to the ‘ontological problem of the international’ than the mainstream IR theories of neo-realism and constructivism. I have done so by a critique of the positions of these theories on the questions of language, agent and structure as they relate to the state and the system of states. In so doing I have relied on the alternatives provided by historical sociology – in which social facts are accessible and external but also historical, and in which states and the states system are embedded in wider historical processes.

Bibliography

Abrams, Philip 1982 Historical Sociology Bath, Open Books

Brown, Chris 2000 Understanding International Relations London, Palgrave

Callinicos, Alex 2006 Resources of Critique London, Polity

Callinicos, Alex 1991 The Revenge of History; Marxism and The East European Revolutions London, Polity

Hallliday, Fred 1994 Rethinking International Relations London, Macmillan

Haynes, Mike 2002 Russia, Class and Power 1917-2000 London, Bookmarks Books

Hobden, Stephen 1999 ‘Theorising the International System: Perspectives from Historical Sociology’ Review of International Studies 25(2)

Hobson, John 1998 ‘ “The Second Wave” of Weberian Historical Sociology; the Historical Sociology of The State and the State of Historical Sociology in International Relations’ Review of International Political Economy 5 (2)

Kratochwil, Frederich 2000 ‘Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics and the Constructivist Challenge’ Millenium 29 (1)

Mann, Michael 1994 ‘In praise of macro-sociology: a reply to Goldthorpe’ British Journal of Sociology, 45 (1)

Neufeld, Mark 1995 The Restructuring of International Relations Theory Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Rorty, Richard 1989 Contingency, Irony, Solidarity Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Rosenberg, Justin 2006 ‘Why is There No International Historical Sociology?’ European Journal of International Relations 12 (3)

Rosenberg, Justin 2001 The Empire of Civil Society; a critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations London, Verso

Waltz, Kenneth 1998 ‘Interview with Ken Waltz by Fred Halliday and Justin Rosenberg’ Review of International Studies 24 (3)

Waltz, Kenneth 1997 ‘Evaluating Theories’ American Political Science Review 91 (4)

Waltz, Kenneth 1979 Theory of International Politics New York, McGraw-Hill

Wendt, Alexander 1999 A Social Theory of International Politics Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Winch, Peter 1958 The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy London, Routledge and Kegan Paul

八月十五日の極右放送

2006-08-16T21:48:00.000+09:00

Enshrined in Tokyo's Yasukuni Jinja, it seems, are the souls of Japan's war dead and the hopes of Japan's right wing politicians. Junichiro Koizumi took his last chance to disgrace his office on the 15th of August, by paying his respects to the 'heroic souls' of the shrine - amongst them 14 souls so heroic that they were convicted as class A war criminals. This was his sixth visit to honour Tojo et al, but the first on the anniversary of Japan's defeat in the war those heroic souls and 'Showa martyrs' started. One of Koizumi's own MPs who criticized the visit had his house burned down by an ultra-nationalist, who then tried to commit hara-kiri. Suicide is the one endeavour in which I wish fascists well but it seems our hapless xenophobe couldn't finish the job. China and South Korea quickly protested Koizumi's calculated glorification of the destruction of their countries and enslavement of their people. The usual crowd of the Yomiuri, the Sankei and the right wing weeklies blustered about outside interference in Japan's affairs - nothing to say of course about Japan's really quite extensive interference in Chinese affairs of the first half of the twentieth century. Koizumi's critics have mostly mustered no more than the objection that the Yasukuni visits alienate other Asian countries. This misses the point for two reasons. One is that the viewpoint enshrined at Yasukuni, in particular the Yushukan museum, epitomises the lachrymose falsification of history ('Japan's dream of building a Great East Asia was necessitated by history and it was sought after by the countries of Asia') by Japan's racist right. This is the same as entrusting the Berlin Holocaust museum to David Irving. Second, Koizumi wants to be seen being attacked by Japan's victims. It appeals both to his own politics and to his base, who must soon choose his successor.

And here, precisely in Yasukuni's status as a poke in the eye to the comfort women and slave labourers, lies the importance of the shrine visits to the LDP. Koizumi publicly proclaimed his intention, like Nakasone, the predecessor he most resmbles, to visit the Shrine on the anniversary of Japan's defeat. He has also sought to 'break' the Liberal Democratic Party so as to make Japan a neoliberal economy and offshore ally of the United States much in the manner of Britain. This project is protected by an aggressive nationalism amenable to the LDP old guard who prosper on the corrupt proceeds of government debt in the construction industry. Koizumi must step down as LDP leader in September - his favoured succesor is Shinzo Abe whose foreign policy stance is not immediately distinguishable from that of Shintaro Ishihara. Koichi Kato, victim of the unfortunate pyrotechnics mentioned above, has said that the Cabinet Secretary 'basically does not accept the Tokyo [war crimes] tribunal.' Abe 'secretly' visited the Yasukuni shrine in April - imparting a nudge, wink, we're all war crimes apologists of the world air to his campaign. If, and when, Abe becomes Prime Minister he will not face an election for at least three years. Furthermore since the Democratic Party of Japan shares most of its polcies with part of the LDP, Abe will arleady have won the election anyway. DPJ Members of Parliament themselves visit Yasukuni, and the best that a DPJ spokesman could do was to criticise Koizumi's hesitation about choosing a day for his pilgrimage. In the last election the DPJ were roundly trounced - perhaps they ought to learn the lesson that voters don't respect people without the guts to take their own side in an argument.

Is there hope? The Asahi vox populi pieces displayed a disturbing complacency. But there were several brave demonstrations around the country including one in Tokyo on Sunday the 14th. To stop the visits to honour war criminals, however, requires a large and vibrant movement against Japan's current participation in war crimes. That, we still await.

A Festival of Resistance

2006-08-15T00:29:00.000+09:00

Every August artists and art lovers come to the Edinburgh festival. This year they were treated to an even more valuable fringe event, as demonstrators from all over Scotland protested the Israeli destruction of Lebanon.
The police, as is their wont, profusely photographed the demonstration to ignore accurately its size. The police on the demonstration itself gave a head count of 5000. Their estimate of 3000 demonstrators in The Scotland on Sunday should be taken as the Lothian and Borders' Police entry to this year's comedy awards. Since the demonstration stretched from the top of Leith Walk to the Mound at one point, a reality based estimate would be closer to 10000 people. And what people they were. They included trade unionists and students, Muslims and non-Muslims, Jews and Gentiles, the elegant and the Glaswegian. A sure sign of a large and diverse demonstration is when one meets a casual acquaintance from an entirely seperate context - as I did while waiting at the Meadows for the march to move off.

After chatting with a prospective landlady (my acquaintances are very casual) I joined the moving protest through the University district. The demonstration made its way to the US consulate on Regent Terrace. There we sat down and those at the head of the demonstration laid children's shoes in front of the consulate, to represent the hundreds of Lebanese children killed by US made bombs dropped from US made planes by Israeli pilots. We then walked around the terrace onto Princes Street - producing the exhiliration that comes from a mass of political people dominating a shopping thoroughfare.

Having reclaimed Princes Street, we turned our attention to The Mound, where the rally was to begin. The platform in front of the assembly rooms was mounted by speakers such as Aamer Anwar, Muhammad Sarwar MP, Barry Levine of Scottish Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Salma Yaqub of Respect. The latter's speech summed up the meaning of the march, referring to the transatlantic terror stramash in all the papers;
'We're here to protest against real terrorist bombing - that in the skies above Lebanon.'
The rally ended with a resounding call to converge on the Labour Party conference in Manchester on the 23rd of September. As I write, the ceasefire in Lebanon appears to be holding, a month overdue. Even more overdue is the consignment of Tony Blair, aider and abetter of Israel's month of madness, to the dustbin of political history.

Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Blame, Blame, Blame

2006-07-31T08:25:00.000+09:00

'Chutzpah' is one of the good and guttural words that the Yiddish language has bequeathed to English. A history teacher at my high school once explained the meaning of chutzpah, in contrast to the more pedestrian 'cheek', thus; cheek is when a little boy stands on your flower pot to piss through your letter box. Chutzpah is when he knocks on the door and asks how far it went. In justifying their attempt to set Lebanon back twenty years, Israeli spokespeople have displayed a level of chutzpah that would be admirable if it were not in the service of such savagery.

Those of you who have been following this dreadful business are probably still reeling from the news of around 60 civilian deaths in an Israeli attack on the village of Qana. More than half of the victims were children. Aware that we had watched the bodies incontrovertibly being pulled from the rubble, Israeli spokespeople were on hand with the same boilerplate response. The words of the Israeli Ambassador to the UN encapsulate the lachrymose brutality characteristic of Israeli "hasbara";

'Those people, including women and children, who were killed in this horrible tragic incident may have been killed by Israeli fire but they are the victims of the Hizbullah. They are the victims of terror. If there were no Hizbullah this would never have happened.'

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not record whether any of the audience objected that if Israel had not invaded and occupied Southern Lebanon for twenty years there would indeed be no Hizbullah. But no matter, when historical fact becomes part of the terrorist infrastructure, it must also be dispensed with. What is on display here is chutzpah of the most startling kind - not only must we condemn Hizbullah for killing Israeli civilians, we now must condemn Hizbullah when Israel kills Lebanese civilians. The argument is faulty in fact, logic and ethics.

First, IDF assurances are not worth the journalists they are leaked to. According to Mitch Prothero's article in Slate, Hizbullah figthers stay well away from civilian areas to avoid potential informants. That might be Prothero's impression alone - but one certainly cannot fire a rocket from inside a house. Yet YNet, (Yediot Aharanot's online news) reports a General Eshel as saying the targets were 'meticulously sifted' - including, then, the houses of the 30 odd children killed by Israel's precision bomb. Israel, then did not bomb the house by mistake and no Israeli spokesperson has said so.

A further reason to doubt the IDF reports is the cracking form that organization has in killing people and then covering it up. Ten years ago the unfortunate civilians of Qana, this time huddled in a UN Compound saw more than 100 of their number killed by Israeli artillery. At the time the IDF insisted they had accidentally hit the compound while aiming for Hizbullah rocketeers nearby - a version of events that the UN report into the incident gave extremely short shrift. Others amongst you will remember the more recent example of Huda Ghalia, whose family were blown to pieces by Israeli fire on a beach in Gaza in June. The IDF said that they had stopped shelling at the point when the family was killed and that the explosion was probably due to a buried Hamas mine. The Guardian and Human Rights Watch, based on the direction of the injuries and the timing of the hospital records, have demonstrated that this is the purest tosh. Now it seems the IDF are trying the same grotesque trick with Qana, suggesting that the dead families had been hiding Hizbullah explosives in their cellar. I leave to the reader the judgement of how base one must be to bomb civilians and then make unverifiable accusations that one's dead child victims cannot refute. Those who find the exercise too distasteful may recall instead the bombing of the UN observation post at Khiam that killed 4 UN personnel. Israeli spokespeople sputtered with outrage - not that they had killed 4 UN observers but at the suggestion this was no accident. Yet the attack lasted six hours during which time the UN post told the Israelis ten times to stop the bombing.

In a new front, best described as The War on Logic, Israeli spokespeople have justified their attacks by dropping leaflets telling the civilian population to flee. Where will they go? Israel is bombing the roads and the cities too. Since Hizbullah is composed of the residents of South Lebanon, Israel may well be right that the guerillas operate from areas in and around villages - although Mitch Prothero disagrees. We know that Hizbullah is bombing the civilians of Haifa - no Israeli, British or American would accept the argument that because Haifa is a major naval base and all Israeli Jews are conscripted into the IDF, the citizens of that town are fair game. Yet this is precisely what we are expected to take when the IDF tells us it has attacked 'logistical sites' full of Lebanese children. This is not just chutzpah. This is dreck.

Lebanon's Tragedy, Scotland's Shame

2006-07-31T01:25:00.000+09:00

In more innocent times, the most famous American cargo to pass through Prestwick airport was Elvis Presley. The 'war on terror' has seen some more unwelcome stopovers in Ayrshire. I have already written in this weblog on the 'extraordinary renditions' whose gruesome itineray has included Prestwick. The latest front in the War on Terror, Israel's destruction of Lebanon, has given 'Scotland's fastest growing airport' a new role - conduit for Israel's weapons of mass destruction.

And how destructive these weapons are - described in the Glasgow Herald as 'the most horrendously powerful non-nuclear weapons on Earth.' Last week at least two cargo planes stopped at Prestwick carrying laser guided GBU-28 'bunker buster' bombs. A further two flights at least landed on Saturday the 30th of July. The bombs are part of the yearly largesse of weapons with which the US arms Israel - and with which Israel is now busting not just bunkers but houses, roads and UN observation posts.

As we have come to expect, the transfer of heavy weaponry to the project of 'setting Lebanon back twenty years' has provoked popular outrage and official inaction. The airport responded with obtuse minutiae, redolent of a driving instructor or PE teacher ;

'We are fully compliant with the rules and regulations laid down by government authorities, including the Department of Transport, and follow any directives we receive.

“The operation of flights which have been the subject of intense media attention recently is a matter between governments and discussions with regard to their operation takes place at a much higher level than us.'

Heaven forfend that the Dept. of Transport Rules and Regulations might be excluded. One expects this sort of thing from Ayrshire middle managers thrust into the mejia, but the 'higher levels' concerned have had resort to the same jargon laden pettiness in a matter of life and death. Margaret Beckett, in direct contradiction to the airport bosses, mustered;
' it appears that in so far as there are procedures for handling of that kind of cargo it does appear that they were not followed.'

There is only one defensible procedure for cargoes of weaponry to a state that has killed 700 civilians in the past fortnight - don't handle it at all. The planes that refuelled at Prestwick had been refused landing rights at Shannon airport in Ireland. The decision to aid the transfer of US weaponry to Israel is another act of British complicity in the slaughter in the Middle East, which Condoleeza Rice and George Bush have made clear is of a piece with US policy in the region. Bush and Blair may be prepared to fight to the last Israeli to weaken Iran but ordinary Scots are having none of it. Two vocal and well attended demonstrations have already been organised by Glasgow's Stop the War Coalition and they may have forced the diversion of the flights on Saturday night. More please - and more from the Scottish Executive. Transport is one of the Executive's powers. Is it not about bloody time they used it?

Malevolent Neutrality

2006-07-17T21:42:00.000+09:00

As Lebanon's apartments and airports collapsed in flames under Israeli missiles on Sunday, the G8 issued a ringing condemnation - of the Lebanese. According to the summitteers '[t]he immediate crisis results from efforts by extremist forces to destabilise the region and to frustrate the aspirations of the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese people for democracy.' This is hypocritical tosh. The Palestinians have democratically expressed their aspirations by voting Hamas into government, and the Lebanese by giving Hizbullah 28 MPs, one of whom holds the cabinet post of minister of Labour. Israel seems intent on protecting its self image as 'the only democracy in the Middle East' by destroying the other democracies on its borders. The G8 summit is one more stain on the blotted scutcheon of the EU and US as they join Israel's blockade of the Palestinians for electing the wrong government. The Palestinian raid which captured Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit on the 25th June was followed by an intensified bloackade. On Wednesday the 12th of July Hizbullah,presumably seeking to show solidarity with the otherwise abandoned Palestinians, also attacked an Israeli patrol and captured two Israeli soldiers. If this is a war, as Ehud Olmert says and the presence of indiscriminate bombing and lying suggest, then Israel could have accepted Hamas and Hizbullah's offer of a prisoner exchange. Israel did not, responding instead with the destruction of Lebanon from ground,sea and air - an assault that has left 200 Lebanese and 24 Israelis dead. At the head of the phalanx is Amir Peretz, Israeli minister of defence. Peretz was Olmert's opponent from the left in the election this past spring and inspired the hopes of many for a new rationality in Israeli politics. The attacks on Gaza, and now Lebanon, place him as simply the latest Israeli Labour leader who flattens to deceive. The Great Powers responded to the pounding of Lebanon with the traditional display of even bloodyhandedness, calling upon Israel 'to exercise the utmost restraint.' Suitably chastened, Israeli forces proceeded to kill 34 Lebanese the following day. But the G8 are worse than irrelevant - they are complicit. President Bush - caught off record demanding that Syria 'stop this shit' - and Tony Blair have made a great fuss about Syria and Iran's support for Hizbullah. Yet every Israeli warplane that bombed a Lebanese bridge or destroyed a block of flats comes from the West.

On Wednesday the 12th of July Hizbullah launched their daring raid and in a subsequent skirmish killed eight Israeli soldiers. That night Israeli warplanes bombed much of Southern Lebanon and Beirut, including an attack on the airport. Around 35 Lebanese people were killed. The warplanes were F 16 fighter bombers. Since the United States is the only country that makes the F 16 the planes were certainly American, and probably part of the 52 aircraft sold to Israel in 2002. 'Sold' is to be taken in its broadest meaning here, since the planes were paid for with the $2.8 billion the US gave to Israel that year.

Taxpayers money was put to good use again on Friday the 14th, when Israel bombed further the infrastructure of the terrorist threat such as roads, bridges and petrol depots. 50 Lebanese were killed that day. On Saturday Israeli expanded its assault to Tripoli in the north of Lebanon where are there are few Shia and even fewer Hizbollah supporters. 18 Lebanese refugees were killed by Israeli missiles on the road to Tyre. In response to the attacks and the bombing of its headquarters Hizbullah fired rockets into Tiberias and against an Israeli warship blockading Beirut. The warship was almost certainly one of 7 vessels sold to Israel by the Federal Republic of Germany, again bought with American money.

Sunday saw 30 Lebanese killed by Israeli missiles, including a Canadian family. A subsequent Hizbullah rocket attack on Haifa killed 8 Israelis. Monday brought the Lebanese death toll, paid for by the even handed West, to over 200 people. Hundreds of people are now dead for the sake of two Israeli soldiers - so ghastly an imbalance that even Israel has changed its public aim of the operation to forcing the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah and control the Southern border. It is no surprise that Israel wants to disarm the only Arab force that has beaten it on the battlefield but the demand is both hypocritical and illogical. Hypocritical because Israel, unrecalcitrant subject of 30 UN Security Council Resolutions, is insisting upon the implementation of UNSC 1599 which calls for the disarmament of Lebanese militias. Illogical because Israel couldn't disarm Hizbullah, a force established only to resist the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon. As the past week had made clear, Israel controls Lebanon's southern border. Hizbullah and Hamas have launched rocket attacks against the military that continues to occupy their land (the Shebaa Farms between Syria and Lebanon and the siege imposed on all of Gaza). That military is the one that the Western powers should think about disarming - or at least stop arming.

Extraordinarily Rendered Democracy

2006-06-09T11:49:00.000+09:00

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb ‘to render’ as ‘process (the carcass of an animal) in order to extract proteins, fats, and other usable parts’. Was Michael Shuer,the CIA agent who created the programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’ thinking of this ghastly and appropriate usage at the time? Given the candour of his testimony ( 'I check my moral qualms at the door') to the Council of Europe report on the subject, the reference may be intentional. One cannot say, but the report on the torture by proxy of people the US suspects of being terrorists reiterates one main point and introduces another. The first, fairly well known, thing is that the US has been kidnapping people and transporting them to countries where they are, well, 'processed to extract the usable parts.' The next point is that democracy has been abused twice over – first by the commission of the torture and second by the attempts of European states to hide their complicity in it.

The Council of Europe, which British tabloids maliciously but probably not ignorantly confuse with the European Union, was established after the Second World War to defend the human rights so grossly violated in that conflict. When the Washington Post and ABC television published news of 'extraordinary rendition' and secret prisons late in 2005 the Council ordered a Swiss lawyer, Dick Marty, to write a report. Lacking investigatory power, there is much the report cannot say but it contains a useful compilation of the (sordid) facts of the case. These are that 'an unspecified number of persons, deemed to
be members or accomplices of terrorist movements, were arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported under the supervision of services acting in the name, or on behalf, of the American authorities'. The destinations to which these persons were eventually transported include Cairo, Amman, Kabul, Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay. Although the number of victims is unknown, the report relates 14 cases. The common modus operandi described in the report seems to be something like this; the suspect is captured at an airport and taken for a 'security briefing'. During this briefing, silent hooded men in black clothes beat the suspect, cut off his clothes, blindfold him and insert something into his anus. The victim is then taken on board a plane, shackled to the floor and flown to a place of interrogation - perhaps the aptly named 'Prison of Darkness' in Kabul. Three cases in particular stand out for the brutality of the treatment, the flimsiness of the accuastions against the victims and the collusion of European governments.

Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese provenance, was seized in Macedonia on New Year's Eve. He was held for three weeks, questioned about Al Quaida and then 'rendered' to Kabul. In Kabul he was subject to further brutal interrogations in the presence of American officials, despite the fact that the only evidence against him was his association with an Indonesian suspect. Such information could only have come from a local - that is to say German- intelligence source. In May 2004, after the apparent involvement of a German officer, Al Masri was dumped in Albania and made his own way back to Germany. One particularly grotesque detail is that, as the Marty relates, '[s]ubsequent media reports confirm that senior officials in Washington, including the CIA Director Tenet, were informed long before Mr El-Masri’s release that the United
States had detained an innocent man.'

A further case of guilt by association is that of Bisher Al-Rawi and Jamil Al Banna. These men, holding permanent residence in Britain, attended the same mosque as Abu Qatada, a Jordanian cleric arrested by British police in October 2002. Al-Rawi had even co-operated with the police in that operation. The British state thus proved not only unjust but ungrateful when M15 in November 2002 sent false messages to the CIA indicating that Al-Rawi and Al Banna should be arrested on a business trip to Gambia. Al Banna reports his interrogator asking
‘Why are you so angry at America? It is your Government, Britain, the MI5, who called the CIA and told them that you and Bisher were in the Gambia and to come and get you.'
The men were taken to Kabul in December 2004 - there Al Banna was offered money to produce false evidence against Abu Qatada. This he refused to do and was subsequently threatened with further imprisonment and 'shameful' acts against his family, which Marty spares the reader. The two men were transported to Guantanamo Bay, where they remain.

The testimony of another man, once voluntarily resident in Britain and now also involuntarily resident in Cuba, completes a grisly triptych. Binyan Mohammed Al Habashi was an Ethiopian refugee living in Britain. He left his family in the summer of 2001, and was arrested by Pakistani officials in Karachi in April 2002, then transferred to American hands. Insisting upon his right to a lawyer, he was told;
'The law has been changed. There are no lawyers. You can co-operate
with us the easy way, or the hard way. If you don’t talk to us, you’re going to Jordan. We can’t do what
we want here, the Pakistanis can’t do exactly what we want them to do. The Arabs will deal with you.'
And how did the Arabs 'deal' wih Habashi? He was transported to Morroco in July 2002 and remained there until January 2004. He was interrogated by Morrocans apparently in the presence of American officers; in one instance he claims that one of his interrogators
'took my penis in his hand and
began to make cuts. He did it once and they stood for a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony,
crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming. They must have done this 20 to 30
times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. They cut all over my private parts. One of them
said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists.'
During this time Habashi was subjected to the familiar refrain of the sadist with authority -'if you say this story as we read it... all this torture will stop.' It is difficult to know if the torture has stopped, since Habashi was also transferred incognito to Guantanamo Bay and is still there.

The instances I have related above from Marty's report, as well as the rest of the evidence that document contains, are all in the public domain. Thus was Blair able to dimiss the report by saying that there was 'nothing new' in it. Is there an obfuscation more contemptible than this? In common with the other European governments fingered by Marty's report, Britain 'ignored them (the renditions) knowingly, or did not want to know.' But how did they know enough to know that they didn't want to know? There is, of course, little mystery here. The British Government, and some other European states, are allied with or providing aid to the United States in the 'War on Terror', which war will spread democracy and human rights to the dictatorships of the Arab world. Yet in this war the US and its co-conspirators make ample use of those same dictatorships, their fondness for the midnight hooding and the electrocuted testicle. One does not know whether to rage first against the brutality or the hypocrisy. The grim and grotesque business does at least provide more support for what we on this side of the house have always argued - that the defence of democracy and human rights begins with opposition to the war. A welcome move in that defence is the establishment of torture awareness month, happening now and awaiting your support.

The Withdrawal Method

2006-05-24T15:37:00.000+09:00

The occupation of Iraq seems to reach a 'new turning point' roughly once every three months. Saddam Hussein has been captured, elections held, a fresh, new and sectarian constitution draughted. Yet still ever more tunnel emerges at the end of the light. The feel good announcement for the spring quarter is the appointment of a new Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri Al-Maliki. No sooner was Maliki in the job than Tony Blair arrived for a joint press conference - calling up the agreeable possibility of a journalists' sweepstake on which of the pair will last longer. Maliki gave Blair a bit of a shock by saying that Iraqi troops will replace foreign ones in sixteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces, beginning in June. This is unlikely actually to happen, since the occupiers think the Iraqi security forces are not up to the job, but Blair was expecting to announce a withdrawals of British troops starting in July. More interesting than this mix up about dates is the effect of the planned British redeployment on the Japanese troops in Iraq. The Japanese soldiers are currently stationed in the town of Samawa, in the province of Muthanna. If Muthanna is 'Iraqized' (a strange usage since it is already part of Iraq) then Japanese people will be unsure whether the Self Defence Force troops are coming home or not, as well as not knowing why those troops were really sent to Iraq in the first place.

The first troops of the 'ground self defence force' were sent to Samawa in January 2004. Since Japan is consitutionally forbidden, first of all to have an army and secondly to send armed forces overseas, one might ask how well the non-existent army could defend Japan on the territory of Iraq. At the United Nations University in the autumn of 2004 your correspondent was witness to a harangue on this very subject by Japan's former ambassador to the Netherlands. The nicotine stained functionary asserted, in the manner of a judo club senior member scolding an inferior, that Japan was fulfilling its humanitarian duty as a developed country. Indeed, the SDF forces are in Iraq,according to Prime Minister Koizumi and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to provide 'humanitarian and reconstruction assistance' to the people of Samawa. But since under the 'Law Concerning the Special Measures on Humanitarian and Reconstruction Assistance in Iraq', the Self Defence Force are forbidden to operate in the battlefield,why send soldiers at all? Japanese troops are relying upon British and Australian soldiers to protect them - as any civilian contractors would be. So why are the Japanese soldiers in Samawa and how long will they stay? The answers to these questions have little to do with the Governorate of Muthanna and a very great deal to do with Japan's relations with the US.

Upon the extension of the SDF dispatch in January 2005 Koizumi borrowed the words of the constitution for which his actions showed such low regard,saying 'extending a helping hand for another country's nation-building is in accord with the spirit of Japan's "desire to occupy an honored(sic) place in the international society."' Iraq was a nation, albeit a rather unhappy one, before the US and Britain invaded it. There can be little honour in co-operating with the exercise in nation-destruction that has followed. Yet, on the grounds that 'mutual cooperation and fostering a relationship of trust [with the USA] is essential for Japan's peace and stability' Koizumi dispatched the SDF to Samawa to prove that Japan had soldiers and they would go where ever the US needed them to. Also instructive here are the words of Self Defence Agency Chief Shigeru Ishiba as he sent off the first troops; '[t]he reason we can lead such an affluent life...it is because we have a stable oil supply from the Middle East, isn't it?' And here lies the problem for Koizumi. To placate his allies he ordered Japanese troops to participate in the occupation of Iraq. Yet those troops need the allied soldiers to protect them against the resistance to the occupation. What will happen now that Britain says it will withdraw troops from Muthanna? Ishiba's successor Fukushiro Nukaga says that the SDF will go when the British and Australian troops go. This is not good enough. If the SDF are so unecessary that they are simply waiting for the British decision then they can come home immediately. Let us hope they would be swiftly followed by all foreign troops in Iraq.

Life and Debt Film Showing

2006-05-06T16:53:00.000+09:00

Friends,
I have so far written only essay length pieces on this site. Now I want to give a brief notice about a film showing to be held in Shimokitazawa in Tokyo on the 14th of May. The film is Life and Debt, a documentary about the impact of globalisation on Jamaica. The event is organised by Spring, a group of activists doing sterling work in Tokyo and its surroundings. The event will be held in 'Heaven's Gate' close to Shimokitazawa station and will begin at 4 pm. A discussion will follow so, as they say, bring a friend and an open mind.
See You there

Harassed in Harajuku

2006-05-02T12:04:00.000+09:00

On the day before May Day I found myself particpant in, and witness to, a reminder of why the day and the movement for which it stands are so necessary. The occasion was a march in Harajuku held by the 'Conspiracy of the Precariat.' This group, who organise temporary, part time and otherwise shabbily treated employees, make up in chutzpah what they lack in discipline. The slogans of the march and rally ( Freedom and Survival!) were somewhat abstract. The violence of the police was distressingly concrete. By my own estimate, some three hundred odd riot police were on hand (and foot and club) to protect the public from fewer than one hundred and fifty demonstrators. Several arrests were made; those snatched included three activists, a van, a sound system and a balloon. Why such brutal treatment of such an unfortunately small group? The explanation begins with the rally that preceded the march.

The Conspirators held their assuredly public meeting in Onden-ku Community Centre in Harajuku. The venue was well advised since Harajuku is popular with the young and the different, those most likely to lead the precarious existence against which the conspirators ranged themselves. The heavy presence of note taking middle aged men outside the building, however, suggested more the secret policeman or the pervert (the two are far from mutually exclusive.) Perhaps one hundred people ignored the snitches and attended the symposium. The participants were noticeably younger and more female than those of other meetings of the Japanese left.The platform, two academics and a trade unionist, was somewhat conventional but a fairly interesting discussion followed their respective speeches. This discussion led naturally to the demonstration, upon which we soon set out.

At the head of the demonstration the organisers had arranged a van with a sound system, playing the cheerful trance music most likely to appeal to the Harajuku set. This van made the police very angry; most of all they were angry that they had no legal reason to remove it. Their attempts to do so say much about whom the Japanese state allows space and sound - any moustachioed xenophobe can blare racist dirges at passers by and expect no trouble. After some orchestrated scuffling the police allowed the march, which was legal and permitted, to proceed.

Harajuku's shoppers, many perhaps freeters themselves, appeared to welcome the march and many joined in with gusto. At the junction of Omotesando and Meiji Dori the police determined themselves to put a stop to such behaviour. Ranks of the riot squad amassed to bark and to bully. The police stopped the music van and arrested the driver and another particpant who ran to defend him. As they bundled these men away in a gunmetal van, the police surrounded the demonstration, violently shoving back anyone who tried to engage passers by. The slogans of the demonstration turned, naturally and humanly, to 'Give us back our friends!' This the coppers had no intention of doing and the confrontation continued for ten minutes or more. Once allowed to proceed, the march moved on again in the direction of Shibuya, remarkably still picking up passers by. Of particular note was the reaction to MacDonald's restaurants along the route. The march stopped at each of these fast food outlets and demanded 'higher wages! higher wages!' to the approval of the customers eating substandard food and the workers receiving substandard pay.

Displays of solidarity such as these were of course too good to be allowed to continue. With dreary and predictable thuggishness, the police launched another assault in the busy shopping area in front of Shibuya station. The pretext this time was the large red balloons one of the marchers had been carrying. The police violently parted the balloon from its owner and arrested both. Your correspondent and another particpant turned back to see what was going on, as did most of the demonstration. The police quickly surrounded the balloon carrier, and in the meanwhile around seven or eight of their colleagues rounded upon a leading female activist who was using a megaphone to draw attention to the brutality. The image of this courageous comrade can serve as a metaphor for the demonstration as a whole; weighing less than fifty kilogrammes and submerged in a sea of violent cop, she never once stopped dissenting through the megaphone as they forced her to the ground. Other demonstrators arrived to protest the shamlessness of the police and our comrade was released. The balloons were not so lucky; along with their owner they were taken away in the police van, hanging forlornly from the doors. It seems even reactionaries appreciate the theatre of the absurd.

Sans truck, sans music and sans balloons, the march returned to the orginal meeting place. There followed an impressive display of the solidarity and democracy from which the police did their best to protect Japanese society. After an open meeting and report of the day's, the group decided unanimously to go to the police stations and demand the release of their comrades. One of the prisoners has so far been released - two are still in custody. If you wish to support the balloon carriers against the baton wielders please send a message
I had intended to show pictures of the police at work in this report but cannot do so for legal reasons. When the other two protestors are released I will add photographic evidence.

There will be more May Days and more marches. It is likely that the state, in its tangible form as an extendable truncheon, will try to repress these also. The answer to this is not to be intimidated when police outnumber demonstrators. It is to make the demontrations too big to be outnumbered.

Policies Without Politics

2006-04-25T14:40:00.000+09:00

Multilateral organisations, those assemblies of ideology and acronyms, regularly produce documents with homilies for titles and non-sequitirs for content. It was with this thought in mind that your correspondent attended a seminar of the Inter American Development Bank on its report 'The Politics of Policies; Economic and Social Progress in Latin America 2006' . The report itself is remarkable only for its authors' ability simultaneously to state and ignore the obvious. The reaction of the audience at the seminar, made up of academic economists, ambassadors and their retinue, was rather more intriguing.

To offer up ‘The Politics of Policies’ the Bank sent two of the report’s authors. One, Ernesto Stein, is a plump, pleasant economist of the orthodox type; the other, Mark Payne, is what is known in the US as a ‘political scientist’. Their presentation, and the report on which it was based, offer little more than the commonplaces of both disciplines. They helpfully summarised the book length report into ten ‘main messages’. One usually lists points to make them more concise – a representative example of ‘Policies’ main messages reads
‘Effective political processes and better public policies are facilitated by political parties that are institutionalized and programmatic, legislatures that have sound policymaking capabilities, judiciaries that are independent, and bureaucracies that are strong.’

Punchy.

The IDB, one might object, is interested in financial performance not prose style. Perhaps, but the report is prolix precisely because it avoids anything to do with actual politics. For all the fluff about moving ‘beyond a technocratic approach to policymaking’ the authors remain certain about what makes a correct, or in their terms, ‘high quality’ public policy. The problem lies in the ‘making’. Good policies are those which in Stein’s words ‘ as technocrats we think are optimal’ – that is to say privatisation, wage cuts, lower social spending and all the other dreary panoply of neo-liberalism. It takes the specially trained obtuse not to see that the growing revolt across Latin America is directed against these policies, not the inability of governments to implement them. And one might expect such a revolt, given that the number of Latin Americans in poverty has doubled in the two decades of neoliberalismo.
At the beginning of the IPES report the wood peeps gingerly from the trees in the admission that the outcome of ‘Washington consensus reforms’ has been ‘somewhat disappointing.’ Intellectually incapable of criticizing those reforms, the authors briskly proceed to quantify cabinets, typologise judiciaries and regress re-election rates. All of this simply to repeat what one can already read in the Economist – ‘high quality policies’ are those that make businessmen happy.

Anxious to know the IDB’s quality control procedure for public policy, I asked Mark Payne, joint author of the report. Dr Payne cleared things up by explaining that good policies are ‘public regarding’ policies. But which public, and how is it regarded? A glance at point 5 of the appendix was revealing. Public regardedness, it seems, is based upon the responses of participants in the Global Competitiveness Report. That is to say, business executives are being asked about the impact of poverty, as the seminar panel later admitted. Ask a silly question…

At this sort of policy wonk bash, a lone radical is apt to feel compelled to stand up for the toiling masses. It was pleasing then, and testimony to the changes in Latin America, that the assembled high-heid yins started asking all the right questions. An experienced Chilean economist, author of a literally textbook model of international trade, protested that the word class appeared only five times in the report, and the word discrimination not at all. In his response, however, Dr Stein proved unable even to utter the word, let alone, analyse the concept, of class. Greater shock arrived when the Argentinian ambassador to Japan suggested that the report sought to promote stability at the expense of democracy. Most forthcoming was (His Excellency) the Panamanian ambassador, who attacked with vim and scorn ‘the financial policy of Wall Street’. Now, after this debate, the participants of course retired to slap backs and grease palms. Yet if the debate is being heard even here, what are they saying in the barrios and barricades? There's social progress worth writing a report about.

桜、国際化、国際主義

2006-04-14T15:35:00.000+09:00

Residents of Japan who were born in other places are often asked to take part in 'internationalisation' activities. This usually means visiting schools or community centres to explain that one's country has/ does not have four seasons and its people eat/ do not eat raw fish. The favoured nationalities with whom Japanese schoolchildren are expected to internationalise themselves are usually allies of the Japanese state. An American is always a star turn, followed by people from Western Europe or another of its overseas tendrils. Chinese people will find their mobile phones largely untroubled because if Japanese people want to do any thinking about China, the Japanese government will do it for them. This inane, sometimes well intentioned, guff makes up the efforts of the Japanese ruling class to 'internationalise'. Repugnant to that class is the quite different phenomenon of internationalism. Internationalism is a fine, and sturdy, and precious thing and it may be even rarer in Japan than in other advanced countries. Your correspondent was delighted therefore to encounter recently a group of activists trying to unite unorganised young and immigrant workers in Tokyo -as well as an immigrant worker seeking a hearty dose of organisation.

The 'Conspiracy of the Precariat', in addition to having a good eye for names, are bringing together a mix of the right type of people for 'Freedom and Survival May Day 06'. Their May Day rally and demonstration will be held on the 30th of April at 2 pm in Onden-ku Community Centre, Harajuku (神宮前隠田区民会館). The main conspirators are the "Freeter's General Union'. Freeters are those young people in Japan who work in petrol stations and convenience stores for little money and less security. Perhaps the only group worse off in the Japanese labour market are migrant workers - it was a stroke of luck, then that I met just such a worker the day before I joined the conspirators.

The worker I met was called Mali. Sri Lankan by birth, she was passing on her bike and gave a robust hello as I idled beneath the cherry blossoms. She joined me there and told me what had happened to her. She worked, very hard, in the kitchen of a local restaurant, Ton Q. I urge you to boycott this place. Four foreigners work in the kitchen there, it seems, none in the front of the resaturant. In the five years Mali had worked there, she told me, neither she nor the other foreign workers had received a wage rise. Japanese workers who started after Mali had had such a rise. She had left Sri Lanka because her husband was a drug addict. She described to me how she watched him get thinner and take all her money. She had two daughters with him - they were now safe but very far from Mali, with her sister in Sri Lanka. She had not seen her daughters for five years, and spoke to them only once a month by phone. I saw her photographs of two lively little girls, cherished each in a plastic sheath. Having told me these things, we exchanged numbers and she offered to make me a curry. I hope she has spoken to the union organisers before I enjoy her hospitality. I also hope to see as many people as possible in Harajuku on the 30th. There we can conspire for a world where cherry blossoms fall on people not ruled by need and fear.

Bellowing Through The Lobby

2006-04-07T15:14:00.000+09:00

People on the left who support the Palestinians are used to being accused, unfairly and with tiresome frequency, of anti-semitism. It is a measure of our opponent's calibre that their first resort is to call people who disagree with them Nazis; rather more intriguing is to find some of the highest panjandrums of American political science in the dock with Palestine solidarity activists and anti-capitalist protesters. Yet the flimsy slander of 'new anti-semitism' has now spread so far as to reach professors of International Relations at Harvard and Chicago Universities. Many of you are probably familiar with the stramash over the recent article in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The article is interesting but wrong. The Zionist response to it is just wrong.

Walt and Mearsheimer's argument is quite a familiar one, although its proponents are unexpected. Both men are well known to students of International Relations as authors of spotlessly orthodox works in the 'neo-realist' school; Walt's 'The Origins of Alliances' and Mearsheimer's 'The Tragedy of Great Power Politics'. Neo-realists usually argue that a state's 'national interest' is its main business. It is no surprise then that Walt and Mearsheimer judge US support for Israel against that standard and find the policy quite unhelpful. The pair propose that '‘[t]he combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world." It's difficult to disagree with this, but Walt and Mearsheimer go further - the US alliance with Israel cannot be explained by either American geopolitical aims or moral sympathy for the plucky little 'democratic Jewish state'. Indeed, the only reason for the extravagant patronage is that "the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’." Much of Walt and Mearsheimer's analysis is a fine and rigorous assault on the piffle that informs commonplace apologies for Israel. The main argument, that the 'Israeli Lobby', as they put it, has skewed US Middle East policy away from the national interest is not so sound.

Where Walt and Mearsheimer go wrong is in their idea of 'the national interest' and the strategy necessary to protect it. They begin by saying "[b]y serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it [Israel] helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states". After the Cold War, however Israel became a strategic liability; the US could not include Israel in either of its wars against Iraq for fear of alienating the Arab states. And there's more - Israel is no use in the War On Terror because "the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around." Well, and bravely, said but somewhat missing the point. Containment of the USSR, as described in Chomsky's response to the LRB article on Znet, was not the primary aim of US Middle East policy after the Second World War. The 'national interest' has always been to resolve the paradoxical presence of Western oil underneath Arab sand. But, the professors might retort, nothing alienates those oil producers more that US support for Israel. Well, the US does a pretty good job of alienating ordinary Middle Easterners without any help - after Israel the next largest recipient of US aid is Egypt's (tyrannical, corrupt, republican) government, before that it was the Shah of Iran's (tyrannical, corrupt, monarchical) government. US policy in the Middle East is a search for governments stable enough to keep the oil on tap but pliant enough not to nationalise it. The difference with Israel is that the state as a whole cannot survive without foreign help - it is impossible ever to imagine Israel, in the manner of Saddam Hussein, biting the hand that gave it such big teeth. American Presidents have understood this at least since Nixon ( whose own anti-semitism was as repulsive as the rest of his bigotries) and probably since 1967. You can find a further discussion in Avi Shlaim's book 'The Iron Wall.'

This lacuna leads Walt and Mearsheimer into all sorts of confusion in their discussion of 'the Lobby'. This they define as "shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction". Loose though this coalition may be, its real substance is the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. This committee, Walt and Mearsheimer propose, influences US Middle East policy through its "stranglehold" on Congress, the importance of Jewish voters to Presidential elections and the prevalence of the 'Lobby perspective' in the media. One needs money in politics, and a very great deal of it in US politics. AIPAC dispenses its funds to representatives who support Israel and vilifies those who do not. All very true but, as Walt and Mearsheimer must know, foreign policy is decided by the executive. The claim that Jewish voters decisively influence the occupant of that post is rather thin. As the professors inform us, the Jewish population is a small proportion of the US as a whole, it is reliably Democrat and it is concentrated in New York and California. The triage of the American electoral system ensures that no Democrat need care enough, nor Republican hope enough, to fight for these states in a Presidential election. AIPAC is well funded and well listened to - but only because the executive already likes what they have to say. Prior to 1967, as you may read for yourself in Abram Organski's 'The $36 Billion Bargain; Strategy and Politics in US Assistance to Israel', the US was no great friend of the plucky-only-democracy-in-the-Middle-East, despite the presence of just as many wealthy Jews in the US as there are today.

Where Walt and Mearsheimer do have a point, and their critics have proved them right, is in arguing that "[s]ilencing sceptics... by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate." Only a true political fantasist could imagine that Professor Walt is distributing copies of The Protocols of The Elders of Zion in the lecture halls of the Kennedy School of Government. Still, before the article was published, the usual knees were poised to jerk. First and nosiest was (who else?) Walt's Harvard colleague, Professor Alan Dershowitz. "‘[W]hat " asked the avuncular apologist for torture, "would motivate two well recognized academics to depart so grossly from their usual standards of academic writing and research in order to produce a “study paper” that contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse?" 'Misuse' here refers to the apparent quotation of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper by Ku Klux Klan has-been David Duke. That does not mean Walt and Meaersheimer are Nazis. Some sadists probably like the idea of a 'sterilised needle underneath the nail', such as Dershowitz advocates . Not one to be intimidated by logic, Dershowitz pleads once more in his response to the 'Lobby' paper "‘I simply do not understand, what is the motive? "
Come on old chap, spit it out. Professor Dershowitz seems surer of himself when he describes Walt and Mearsheimer's "charges...[as] indistinguishable from Pat Buchanan’s invocation of the U.S. government as Israel’s 'amen corner' and his reference to Congress as 'Israeli Occupied Territory,' allegations, among others, that led William F. Buckley to characterize Buchanan’s views as 'amount[ing] to anti-Semitism.'” Much better, now we know who we're dealing with. Other members of the commentariat were not so mealy mouthed. Eliot Cohen, another neo-conservative academic, entitled his piece simply ' Yes, it's anti-semitic'. Democratic Congressmen Eliot Engel also called the pair anti-semites and the New York Sun compared Walt and Mearsheimer to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

There is some vindication in all this for those of us who have long insisted that if it is just to fight against hatred of Jews it is also just to demand equality for Palestinians. If men like Walt and Mearsheimer can be accused of New Anti-Semitism, surely the slur has been reduced to its final absurdity. Still, it doesn't really matter to the accusers what people write, say or do. What matters is the charge of objective anti-semitism, much as the Stalinist show trials convicted their victims of 'objective' fascism. And perhaps this nineteen-thirties trope is appropriate, for Dershowitz et al recall vividly George Orwell's description of a propagandist ; 'simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again.'

Unilateral Separation from Reality

2006-03-29T17:42:00.000+09:00

Spring has arrived, bringing cherry blossoms and fresh Israeli governments. According to Ha'aretz, Ehud Olmert will move up from the post of acting Israeli Prime Minister, although he seems likely to remain simply an acting, rather than serious, peacemaker. Olmert's Kadima party has won 28 Knesset seats. The Likud, who want to keep all of the West Bank rather than the choicest bits on which Olmert has his eye, won 11 seats. Labour won 20 seats; Yisrael Beitenu, which promotes the expulsion of Palestinians to Jordan, follow with a remarkable 12 seats. We can learn all we need to know about the 'mainstream' of Israeli politics from the fact that Olmert seems prepared to include in his coalition Yisrael Beitenu, but not the representatives of the Arab Israelis that party is keen drive out - see http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/700363.html. Nonetheless, the editorialists are all telling us that Olmert has won a mandate to set new borders for Israel - a strange election this, in which Israeli voters give the mandate to dispose of Palestinian land, but Olmert's withdrawal plan and the reaction to it show us much about what is going wrong in the Middle East. Jonathan Freedland told us in the Guardian that 'language once confined to leftist intellectuals is now the argot of Israel's rulers'. Well, Israel's newest ruler seems to be speaking a dialect we're quite used to by now; one that lectures the Palestinians about how they must accept Israel's inalienable right to exclude them or face the consequences.

To understand this, look no further than Olmert's victory speech. Magnaminously, he offers to give up parts (only parts) of other people's land, thus 'We are prepared to renounce parts of the land of Israel so precious to us, in order to bring about the conditions for you [the Palestinians] to bring about your own dreams and to live side by side with us in peace and tranquillity.' That the parts of the 'Land of Israel' ( language once confined to Israel's religious right is now accepted by Guardian columnists) Olmert will not renounce might be precious to be Palestinians by virtue of their living in it, or that they might dream of living in it without fear of Israeli soldiers and settlers, is no part of the new Israeli dream. It cannot be, for, 'the time has come for the Palestinians to adapt their dreams to recognise the reality of Israel'. Wake up, you silly Palestinians! As if Palestinian life for the past thiry nine, if not one hundred, years has been anything but a nightmare of adaptation to the reality of Israel. But no matter - 'if they do not do this, Israel will take its fate into its own hands. We shall act without agreement with the Palestinians.' Forget the road map, it's his way or the high way.

What Olmert proposes to do, and what has brought out the starry eyes in Western pundits, is to annex bits of the West Bank, build a wall around them, and remove the Israeli settlements in the remaining cantons. The aim of this tank top gerrymandering is to 'bring about the shaping of the final borders of the state, guaranteeing a Jewish democratic state'. Aside from the odd notion that a state can be simultaneously democratic and yet restricted to one group of its citizens, and the even odder notion that it is worth guaranteeing this state of affairs, there is nothing new in concept nor in detail about the scheme. As a solution to the problem of taking Palestinian land with the unfortunate presence of Palestinians on it, the broad outlines of Olmert's new consensus were first proposed in the Allon plan in 1970. General Yigal Allon hit on the spiffing wheeze that Israel would keep the Jordan Valley,and Jerusalem and a corridor between these but avoid the trouble of repressing the bits where most Palestinians live. Presentation of this fait accompli to the Palestinians remained Labour's policy until the Oslo period - by end of which Ehud Barak was proposing almost the same plan again, with an extra morsel around the settlement of Ariel annexed to Israel for good measure. At first sight ( see Independent 30th of March 2006 http://www.independent.co.uk.html Olmert's plan differs in no significant detail except that the Palestinians will have no say in it whatsoever.

The remarkable thing about this 'unilateral separation' is the candour with which its proponents speak their aims, and the enthusiasm with which Western commentators ignore the racism that these aims embody. Editorials in The Guardian (Israel Must Aim for Peace 30th of March 2006), and the Independent (Ariel Sharon's Unlikely Bequest to His Nation 30th of March 2006) and the New York Times (West Bank Withdrawal 30th of March 2006) were eager to persuade us that Olmert's plan is a Good Thing and we should be in favour of it. The man himself knows very well why he wants to build his armour plated ghetto - in this interview (Ha'aretz 15th of November 2003) he described his unilateral solution; 'to maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem.' He said it and now he intends to do it, and with some urgency, because
'[m]ore and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.'

Far from building a wall to stop suicide bombers, Olmert's plan is to stop ' a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle'. We should do all we can to ensure that struggle emerges and succeeds. The first step is to reject Olmert's ultimatum and the brutal solipsism for which stands.