In a Quiz Night yesterday the teams were each given a map of Africa with just the coastline and the boundaries of states shown. The object of the exercise was simply to identify twelve of the very many states that now litter the continent; but the impact of the map was to cause serious reflection about a whole range of issues.
One person emphasised how few straight lines there are, other than the borders of Egypt. This is such a contrast with the boundaries of the majority of states in the USA, where straight lines seem to predominate. Thus arises the observation that although the borders were mostly set in colonial times they tend to follow geographical features, notably streams and rivers [which objectively exist, and cannot readily be shifted] to save all the hassle of establishing and maintaining artificial boundary markers. Donald Trump's wall would be an inconceivable project even along a small length of frontier in Africa.
The next obvious observation was that the borders were very rarely drawn to grant territorial integrity to some ethnic group: all over the continent ethnic groups [even quite small ones] are split between states, and most states have complex ethnic composition which makes political and social compromise difficult - sometimes impossible. The world paid attention - briefly - to the trouble attendant on the two recent attempts to run a fair and free election in Kenya, which is a reasonably sophisticated state with strong institutions and functioning [though anachronistic] legal system. As the frontiers are drawn, the Kikuyu are very clearly the dominant ethnic group: therefore they have a majority in parliament. One hereditary opposition leader drawn from another tribe, whose advancing age makes it impossible that ethnic change would occur to enable his tribe to predominate, has asserted that the system is simply undemocratic and withdrew from the second-run of the election. In his terms, Kenya cannot ever be a democracy in the sense that there is an alternation between parties of government. It may be possible to form some sort of coalition, provided the subordination of the smaller populations is inbuilt into the mindset of the participants.
Some states in Africa come close to being genuinely democratic, with stable governments [think Botswana and Namibia]; but the majority do not. In some, dictators [some of them second-generation] rob the country of wealth for their own gratification; in others war lords control massive swathes of land with conscripted armies that exploit the population to grab the resources that provide the funds with which their guns and bullets are to be replaced.
For the last few decades while the Soviet Union maintained the mission to spread Communism around the world various regimes and guerrilla movements were supported; while South Africa and Rhodesia [as long as they existed in their ugly, racist form] sent expeditions and counter-guerrilla units to oppose them. The further such operations were conducted north of the Limpopo River, the more secure were the governments in Pretoria and Salisbury that armed uprisings were little threat to them. The former colonial power, Britain, ultimately intervened to close down the beleaguered Rhodesian government and force the whites there to accept black majority rule. A democratic constitution was bequeathed to the local politicians, of whom the most powerful were those who had led the various exiled armed groups. For only a couple of years, there was a semblance of following the constitution: then the largest ethnic group [the Shona] grabbed control. The Matabele, who had collaborated most effectively with the white settlers, suffered most as a brutal policy of 'Africanisation' was imposed. White settlers' farms, especially the large ones that were among the most successful businesses in Africa, were occupied and ruined. From being a major exporter of crops, the new Zimbabwe [named after a set of ruins that had been ascribed to a forgotten African 'superpower'] became a net importer of food and the economy collapsed. The president who presided over this disaster was - still is - Robert Mugabe, who is honoured all over Africa as a former freedom fighter. His position is unassailable.
Britain could not make the ex-Rhodesia a democracy. A large army from any of the former colonial 'powers' could not bring peace to Libya, the end to ethnic tension in Kenya or a terminus to any of the other conflicts and stresses to which Africa is prone; and none of the former colonists would think it worth spending scarce resources on political reconstruction in Africa. Even China has recognised the limits of its formerly-aggressive 'economic colonisation' of parts of the continent. The general opinion in even the most democratic and high-minded advanced countries is to leave the Africans to stew in their own problems: and to sell them such military equipment and luxuries for the ruling elites as they can buy, cash-on-the-nail. Nineteenth-century European children were told of their countries' 'civilising mission' in spreading their imperial control over the 'dark continent': twenty-first century children are told virtually nothing about an embarrassing post-colonial inheritance. And there the matter is left to lie.
Showing posts with label Soviet Union. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soviet Union. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 November 2017
Tuesday, 7 November 2017
Russia Today
Given his origins in St Petersburg which, as Leningrad, had been downgraded and largely left to rot under the Soviet regime; plus his subsequent career in the KGB, I am continually astonished how ably President Vladimir Putin is coping with the massive range of issues and responsibilities that fall on his shoulders.
He succeeded the drunken shell of the once-outstanding Boris Yeltsin, under whose presidency of Russia - just one of the successor states to the collapsed Soviet Union - the crumbling economy had been despoiled and brought to the brink of ruin. Crass and corrupt 'privatisation' [which had supposedly been intended to hand out shares in all major assets to the mass of the people] had enabled the most competent of the former 'fixers' to acquire control of massive corporations and rightly earn the description as 'oligarchs' and as a 'mafia'. Under the Soviet regime, especially when strict Stalinist controls and planning targets were relaxed, the economy was only able to function by factory managers and farm directors operating a massive black market in which clothing and shoes were bartered for industrial output and food, so that the towns' workers could be fed and the oppressed involuntary farmhands shod; while the factories and farms turned in less than their planned output to the official channels of distribution. This huge trade was managed by risk-takers who were occasionally arrested when one of them failed to bribe the local party officials sufficiently, or when some illicit trade became so much of a public scandal in the region where it was perpetrated that action simply had to be taken to restore some credibility to the regime.
The spread of television gave millions of people more awareness of how low the standard of living for hard-working Soviet subjects had become, in comparison to western Europe and the USA. The diffusion of access to telephones allowed millions of people - especially in western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, the Baltic Republics [which had slightly better access to knowledge of Scandinavia] and the European satellite states - to begin personal bartering to raise their own standard of living. Swapping knowledge, access to better schools and hospitals, and admission to the queue for buying cars, electrical goods, western records and properly-made jeans. This development of trade went on through the stagnant years of Brezhnev's presidency, and reached such proportions in the early years of Gorbachev's rule that his government took strenuous measures to drive this illicit trade further underground so that the government's plans to develop a real consumer economy might have some chance of success. With the collapse of Gorbachev's regime and into the chaos of the Yeltsin's years, it was only the illicit swap economy that kept most households going. as the formal economy collapsed.
Putin's achievement has been to create something very broadly like a market economy in less than twenty years. This accomplishment has been unprecedented: and it is recognised by the genuine 80%-plus approval rate that the president has received from the Russian population. The many faults of the regime, the corruption and the acts of oppression that are far too common, are well reported in the west. Those are is important aspects of life in modern Russia, which in an ideal world would quickly be rectified: but priorities have to be set, and a broad consensus of the population accepts the sequence that has been adopted.
He succeeded the drunken shell of the once-outstanding Boris Yeltsin, under whose presidency of Russia - just one of the successor states to the collapsed Soviet Union - the crumbling economy had been despoiled and brought to the brink of ruin. Crass and corrupt 'privatisation' [which had supposedly been intended to hand out shares in all major assets to the mass of the people] had enabled the most competent of the former 'fixers' to acquire control of massive corporations and rightly earn the description as 'oligarchs' and as a 'mafia'. Under the Soviet regime, especially when strict Stalinist controls and planning targets were relaxed, the economy was only able to function by factory managers and farm directors operating a massive black market in which clothing and shoes were bartered for industrial output and food, so that the towns' workers could be fed and the oppressed involuntary farmhands shod; while the factories and farms turned in less than their planned output to the official channels of distribution. This huge trade was managed by risk-takers who were occasionally arrested when one of them failed to bribe the local party officials sufficiently, or when some illicit trade became so much of a public scandal in the region where it was perpetrated that action simply had to be taken to restore some credibility to the regime.
The spread of television gave millions of people more awareness of how low the standard of living for hard-working Soviet subjects had become, in comparison to western Europe and the USA. The diffusion of access to telephones allowed millions of people - especially in western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, the Baltic Republics [which had slightly better access to knowledge of Scandinavia] and the European satellite states - to begin personal bartering to raise their own standard of living. Swapping knowledge, access to better schools and hospitals, and admission to the queue for buying cars, electrical goods, western records and properly-made jeans. This development of trade went on through the stagnant years of Brezhnev's presidency, and reached such proportions in the early years of Gorbachev's rule that his government took strenuous measures to drive this illicit trade further underground so that the government's plans to develop a real consumer economy might have some chance of success. With the collapse of Gorbachev's regime and into the chaos of the Yeltsin's years, it was only the illicit swap economy that kept most households going. as the formal economy collapsed.
Putin's achievement has been to create something very broadly like a market economy in less than twenty years. This accomplishment has been unprecedented: and it is recognised by the genuine 80%-plus approval rate that the president has received from the Russian population. The many faults of the regime, the corruption and the acts of oppression that are far too common, are well reported in the west. Those are is important aspects of life in modern Russia, which in an ideal world would quickly be rectified: but priorities have to be set, and a broad consensus of the population accepts the sequence that has been adopted.
Saturday, 28 October 2017
The Sovereign Club, Crimea and Catalonia
The Spanish king and his government are adamant that there should be no truck with a purported 'sovereign' administration that has just been announced to exist in the region/province of Catalonia. The United Nations has asserted that a 'solution' should be found within the Spanish Constitution. Washington has declared that Catalonia is simply part of Spain, and that fact will not change in the perception of the United States [which fought a very nasty civil war to preserve their Union]. Britain, France and Germany have made similar assertions: there will be no recognition of a rebel 'government' by any European Union member state.
President Putin deeply deplores the fact that the Gorbachev administration in the last stage of the Soviet Union acted in accordance with the 'Stalin Constitution' which had enshrined the myth that the state was a federation of independent [largely ethnically-based] sovereign republics. This was very particularly Stalin's constitutional speciality. He had been sent to Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century to find out how the Habsburg regime was coping with the question of Nationality in Austria-Hungary. Slovaks and Czechs were asserting that they were distinct national groups, with a right to statehood of their own. Minorities of the population spoke Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian and various forms of German in distinctive territories split between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Empire [and the latter contained a massive range of entities from the Kingdom of Bohemia to small counties that were notionally sovereign]. The heir to the throne [Franz Ferdinand, who was to be killed in 1914 thus triggering the war that ended the monarchy] was said to want to change the 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary into a 'trial' [or triple] monarchy with autonomy for the Slavs, in deference to his Czech wife.
Stalin produced a convoluted account of his thoughts on nationality, and after the revolution he was appointed Commissar for Nationalities. As the Soviet Union consolidated its absolute power over all the former Russian Empire, except Finland, it did not matter that a constitutional charade was enacted whereby the political entity was asserted to be a federation of notionally independent states. However, come the end of the Second World War, in their anxiety to keep Stalin on-side with the new United Nations, Britain, France and the USA agreed that three of the Soviet republics should each be independent members: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev - a Ukrainian - almost casually transferred the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine: it did not seem to matter, at the time. The facts that the Crimea had been hard fought for under Peter the Great and Catherine II, and was seen as strategically important, did not cause any controversy while the USSR was operated as a single hegemonic state.
However, suddenly in 1990, the USSR collapsed; while the Communist party stooges who held office as the presidents and premiers of the various [formally fully sovereign] Socialist Republics simply colluded to ignore Gorbachev and his collapsing central authority and go their own ways. The largest component of the Union, Russia, had the charismatic Boris Yeltsin on hand to crush a half-cock attempt by party old hands to reverse all the democratic changes that Gorbachev had instituted: and as head of the Russian Republic's government Yeltsin established his hold over the biggest and most complex Soviet Socialist Republic; thus of Moscow. A notional federation was established of the former Soviet Republics, while the asserted sovereign authority in each of them began doling out the national assets to their families and friends. The Russian Republic itself became the Russian Federation including all the Autonomous Republics and Regions that Russia has inherited from Stalin's manipulations of notional boundaries. Yeltsin and his associates employed American Economists to assist them with a hugely corrupt and corrupting 'privatisation', which transferred much of industry to the hands of the so-called 'oligarchs' and caused massive deprivation to the mass of the population.
Putin's rise to power came after the damage derived from Stalin's constitutional machinations and Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence had been done. In territorial terms, he has tried to rectify what he sees as two major failures: the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine and the welfare of millions of Russians whose families were settled in the southern and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the reigns of Peter I, Catherine II and Stalin's post-1945 implant of Russian speakers into territory known as 'New Russia' that he had assigned to Ukraine. Stalin planted similar minorities of Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; which has ensured that those countries have become very keen members of NATO in order to preserve their territorial integrity. Putin's attempts to make minor revisions of Stalin's and Khrushchev's cavalier actions, at the expense of Ukraine, have placed him under sanction by the western powers, who have set their faces against all tinkering with the pattern of states that was admitted to the United Nations in 1945 and subsequently. I have drawn attention previously to the idiocy of keeping the colonial frontiers in Africa: but they are also part of the stasis that goes with the present, deeply flawed concept of sovereignty.
East Germany was allowed to vanish into West Germany, and an independent Scotland arising from due democratic process would have gained international acceptance: provided it had been set on the international stage by the United Kingdom government acting as its sponsor.
On the other hand, if the Chechens declared themselves independent of the Russian Federation, President Putin could call on the UN to help him to suppress such pretension; at least, with verbal assurances such as have been given to Spain in respect of Catalonia.
The Catalans are having an exciting game; but they need to learn from history, quickly; before hotheads start getting hurt.
President Putin deeply deplores the fact that the Gorbachev administration in the last stage of the Soviet Union acted in accordance with the 'Stalin Constitution' which had enshrined the myth that the state was a federation of independent [largely ethnically-based] sovereign republics. This was very particularly Stalin's constitutional speciality. He had been sent to Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century to find out how the Habsburg regime was coping with the question of Nationality in Austria-Hungary. Slovaks and Czechs were asserting that they were distinct national groups, with a right to statehood of their own. Minorities of the population spoke Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian and various forms of German in distinctive territories split between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Empire [and the latter contained a massive range of entities from the Kingdom of Bohemia to small counties that were notionally sovereign]. The heir to the throne [Franz Ferdinand, who was to be killed in 1914 thus triggering the war that ended the monarchy] was said to want to change the 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary into a 'trial' [or triple] monarchy with autonomy for the Slavs, in deference to his Czech wife.
Stalin produced a convoluted account of his thoughts on nationality, and after the revolution he was appointed Commissar for Nationalities. As the Soviet Union consolidated its absolute power over all the former Russian Empire, except Finland, it did not matter that a constitutional charade was enacted whereby the political entity was asserted to be a federation of notionally independent states. However, come the end of the Second World War, in their anxiety to keep Stalin on-side with the new United Nations, Britain, France and the USA agreed that three of the Soviet republics should each be independent members: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev - a Ukrainian - almost casually transferred the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine: it did not seem to matter, at the time. The facts that the Crimea had been hard fought for under Peter the Great and Catherine II, and was seen as strategically important, did not cause any controversy while the USSR was operated as a single hegemonic state.
However, suddenly in 1990, the USSR collapsed; while the Communist party stooges who held office as the presidents and premiers of the various [formally fully sovereign] Socialist Republics simply colluded to ignore Gorbachev and his collapsing central authority and go their own ways. The largest component of the Union, Russia, had the charismatic Boris Yeltsin on hand to crush a half-cock attempt by party old hands to reverse all the democratic changes that Gorbachev had instituted: and as head of the Russian Republic's government Yeltsin established his hold over the biggest and most complex Soviet Socialist Republic; thus of Moscow. A notional federation was established of the former Soviet Republics, while the asserted sovereign authority in each of them began doling out the national assets to their families and friends. The Russian Republic itself became the Russian Federation including all the Autonomous Republics and Regions that Russia has inherited from Stalin's manipulations of notional boundaries. Yeltsin and his associates employed American Economists to assist them with a hugely corrupt and corrupting 'privatisation', which transferred much of industry to the hands of the so-called 'oligarchs' and caused massive deprivation to the mass of the population.
Putin's rise to power came after the damage derived from Stalin's constitutional machinations and Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence had been done. In territorial terms, he has tried to rectify what he sees as two major failures: the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine and the welfare of millions of Russians whose families were settled in the southern and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the reigns of Peter I, Catherine II and Stalin's post-1945 implant of Russian speakers into territory known as 'New Russia' that he had assigned to Ukraine. Stalin planted similar minorities of Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; which has ensured that those countries have become very keen members of NATO in order to preserve their territorial integrity. Putin's attempts to make minor revisions of Stalin's and Khrushchev's cavalier actions, at the expense of Ukraine, have placed him under sanction by the western powers, who have set their faces against all tinkering with the pattern of states that was admitted to the United Nations in 1945 and subsequently. I have drawn attention previously to the idiocy of keeping the colonial frontiers in Africa: but they are also part of the stasis that goes with the present, deeply flawed concept of sovereignty.
East Germany was allowed to vanish into West Germany, and an independent Scotland arising from due democratic process would have gained international acceptance: provided it had been set on the international stage by the United Kingdom government acting as its sponsor.
On the other hand, if the Chechens declared themselves independent of the Russian Federation, President Putin could call on the UN to help him to suppress such pretension; at least, with verbal assurances such as have been given to Spain in respect of Catalonia.
The Catalans are having an exciting game; but they need to learn from history, quickly; before hotheads start getting hurt.
Friday, 27 October 2017
JFK
The partial release of the 'secret' files relating to the killing of President John F Kennedy activated one of the most bizarre recollections that I carry. I was at the time a student, and I cannot recall any other political figure until Donald H Trump who was so well-loathed by virtually the whole of my generation as was Kennedy. He was seen as the man who had carried the world to the brink of nuclear war to intimidate the Soviet Union into withdrawing its missiles from Cuba; an occasion that produced mass rallies of students of all political opinions [and of none] in passionate protest at the threat of nuclear annihilation. He proposed that the navies of all the US allies in NATO should be merged into a 'mixed manned force' under US command. He was supporting Cuban exiles in their attempts to destroy the infant Castro regime.
When Kennedy was alive, his record was seen as at least as highly blemished as Trump's is now: though no-one denied that he had a meritorious record of service in the US Navy in the Second World War; which had caused injuries to his back that meant he was in almost-constant pain.
The president's father had allegedly made his fortune in the illicit alcohol trade during prohibition, and was reputedly the keeper of notorious actresses. These equivocal items on his record did not prevent Joe Kennedy from becoming a major supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's campaign for the Presidency, which brought him the reward of being appointed Ambassador the the Court of St James'. As US Ambassador, Joe sent Roosevelt negative messages about Britain's determination and competence to wage war. He had intended that his eldest son, Joe Junior, should in due course become US President; but when Joe was killed in the war that ambition was passed to the second son, Jack. Old Joe could not hope himself to attain such an office, in view of his highly equivocal past.
The second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, got his second name from his maternal grandfather, 'Honey Fitz', a man who had allegedly descended deeper into the murky side of New England life than did Joe Kennedy.
The Democratic party machine duly delivered a Senate seat for young Jack, whose marriage did nothing to limit his sexual adventurism. His run for the presidency was well funded by friends and family and it was widely believed that his election was achieved by the questionable delivery of a package of Electoral College votes by Mayor Daly of Chicago who controlled Cook County, Illinois.
As president, Kennedy utterly failed to advance the cause of emancipation for the deeply-oppressed black community in the Unites States. Emancipation and integration became a major motif of the succeeding presidency of Lyndon B Johnson, Kennedy's vice president; who had previously been seen as a political machine-man in contrast to Kennedy's heavily-marketed charisma. In foreign policy Kennedy was an aggressive cold warrior, prepared to 'bear any burden and fight any foe' in the cause of his understanding of democracy; which he usually equated with American dominance. The US allies were expected to give him blanket endorsement, and this is what most riled the young in the UK.
Immediately on the announcement of the president's death, there was a surge of jubilation: young people rejoiced that the greatest risk to peace had been removed. Over the ensuing twenty-four hours, however, a very different mood was disseminated by the media; and the Kennedy legend as it is still handed down was being established. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a libidinous, middle-aged and significantly disabled man: by contrast, right from the day of his death, his legend was presented ruthlessly by his courtiers and disseminated by an obedient mass media; and that version was adopted by most subsequent historians. But those who remember the way in which the media succumbed to an 'official' interpretation of Kennedy's short tenure of office have retained a lifelong suspicion of how susceptible those media are, at key times, to manipulation by the state authorities in the so-say democracies.
It was soon revealed that the supposed 'climb down' by the Soviet boss, Khrushchev, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, was in fact the result of a compromise deal whereby the USA stood down planned missile silos in north-east Turkey - close to the Soviet border - as a quid pro quo for the Soviets' withdrawal of planned missile silos in Cuba, close to the United States mainland. The world then settled down to the prolongation of the cold war, and the USA became embroiled ever more deeply in the confrontation with communism that degenerated into the Vietnam war. The Europeans who had previously been coerced by Kennedy avoided direct involvement in a land war in Asia. Harold Wilson brushed off Lyndon Johnson's plea to send 'just one battalion of the Black Watch' to Vietnam, and the perceived threat of a US takeover of the British forces was removed. Australia and New Zealand did send men to Indo-China, which gained them the status of especially close US allies that they still enjoy.
Donald J Trump's 'America first' policies are reminiscent in some ways of Kennedy's. It is not easily conceivable that an assassin's bullet could make Trump a global hero; but an equally strange thing has happened; within living memory.
When Kennedy was alive, his record was seen as at least as highly blemished as Trump's is now: though no-one denied that he had a meritorious record of service in the US Navy in the Second World War; which had caused injuries to his back that meant he was in almost-constant pain.
The president's father had allegedly made his fortune in the illicit alcohol trade during prohibition, and was reputedly the keeper of notorious actresses. These equivocal items on his record did not prevent Joe Kennedy from becoming a major supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's campaign for the Presidency, which brought him the reward of being appointed Ambassador the the Court of St James'. As US Ambassador, Joe sent Roosevelt negative messages about Britain's determination and competence to wage war. He had intended that his eldest son, Joe Junior, should in due course become US President; but when Joe was killed in the war that ambition was passed to the second son, Jack. Old Joe could not hope himself to attain such an office, in view of his highly equivocal past.
The second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, got his second name from his maternal grandfather, 'Honey Fitz', a man who had allegedly descended deeper into the murky side of New England life than did Joe Kennedy.
The Democratic party machine duly delivered a Senate seat for young Jack, whose marriage did nothing to limit his sexual adventurism. His run for the presidency was well funded by friends and family and it was widely believed that his election was achieved by the questionable delivery of a package of Electoral College votes by Mayor Daly of Chicago who controlled Cook County, Illinois.
As president, Kennedy utterly failed to advance the cause of emancipation for the deeply-oppressed black community in the Unites States. Emancipation and integration became a major motif of the succeeding presidency of Lyndon B Johnson, Kennedy's vice president; who had previously been seen as a political machine-man in contrast to Kennedy's heavily-marketed charisma. In foreign policy Kennedy was an aggressive cold warrior, prepared to 'bear any burden and fight any foe' in the cause of his understanding of democracy; which he usually equated with American dominance. The US allies were expected to give him blanket endorsement, and this is what most riled the young in the UK.
Immediately on the announcement of the president's death, there was a surge of jubilation: young people rejoiced that the greatest risk to peace had been removed. Over the ensuing twenty-four hours, however, a very different mood was disseminated by the media; and the Kennedy legend as it is still handed down was being established. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a libidinous, middle-aged and significantly disabled man: by contrast, right from the day of his death, his legend was presented ruthlessly by his courtiers and disseminated by an obedient mass media; and that version was adopted by most subsequent historians. But those who remember the way in which the media succumbed to an 'official' interpretation of Kennedy's short tenure of office have retained a lifelong suspicion of how susceptible those media are, at key times, to manipulation by the state authorities in the so-say democracies.
It was soon revealed that the supposed 'climb down' by the Soviet boss, Khrushchev, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, was in fact the result of a compromise deal whereby the USA stood down planned missile silos in north-east Turkey - close to the Soviet border - as a quid pro quo for the Soviets' withdrawal of planned missile silos in Cuba, close to the United States mainland. The world then settled down to the prolongation of the cold war, and the USA became embroiled ever more deeply in the confrontation with communism that degenerated into the Vietnam war. The Europeans who had previously been coerced by Kennedy avoided direct involvement in a land war in Asia. Harold Wilson brushed off Lyndon Johnson's plea to send 'just one battalion of the Black Watch' to Vietnam, and the perceived threat of a US takeover of the British forces was removed. Australia and New Zealand did send men to Indo-China, which gained them the status of especially close US allies that they still enjoy.
Donald J Trump's 'America first' policies are reminiscent in some ways of Kennedy's. It is not easily conceivable that an assassin's bullet could make Trump a global hero; but an equally strange thing has happened; within living memory.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Back to Basics: Political Economy [1]
As an independent backstreet blogger I am fascinated to observe the clouds of intellectual debris that flit through the internet in thousands of blogs written by people who desperately want to be regarded as innovative mainstream Economists. Most of them are academics who have contracted duties in a university or a research unit; and some - especially those who produce branded research for a bank or a commercial think tank - have a direct business interest in publishing their opinions. The academics are desperately keen to be quoted by other bloggers and their output is already systematised so that those with academic ambitions cite the number of references to their output that are made by other participants in the racket, just as they do in respect of the 'peer reviewed' academic journals. Soon indexes of citations will list references to blogs alongside references to more formal articles; and citations in blogs written by senior professors will have a higher allocation of points.
The most tragic aspect of this ballooning exocrescence of academic blogging is that almost all the participants display the usual sycophancy to the seniors who can help their careers, who might deign to mention the mini-bloggers in their own blogs.Therefore they are anxious not to step outside the orthodox boundaries of the subject as it is set out by the dominant professors. The majority of the bloggers also display a painfully serious intent to classify themselves in sub-schools within the ever-more-diffuse 'discipline' of Economics, built on phrases like dynamic stochastic general equilibrium that attracted well-deserved ridicule when it was uttered in the House of Commons: but are commended in the hypoxic atmosphere of an academics' conference.
The more intelligent mainstream Economists are forced to realise that Economics fuelled the hubris that caused the credit crunch, but they cannot yet face the fact that the 'discipline' itself has failed. Such an admission would require them to admit that they have spent their careers on presenting doctrines that have condemned their fellow citizens, and themselves, to a lower standard of living in future than should have been available to them.
Economics fails most obviously at the interface between macroeconomics and microeconomics. In principle, socialist planning is a system for directing firms' and individuals' activities day by day, with the intention that each participant delivers outputs that serve as inputs to a planned macroeconomic aggregate. Keynes was in his prime precisely at the time when Stalin's Soviet Union was claiming success for its planning mechanisms: while the world became aware of the brutality with which The Plan was enforced and the disasters [including deaths through famine] that were caused by its inefficiencies. Keynes's wife was a Russian refugee, whose table-talk frequently included information and anecdote about Soviet repression. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919] he had forecasted a strong reaction in Germany to the way the country was treated by the victorious allies at the end of the First World War, and fourteen years on he took no pleasure in seeing the fulfilment of his prediction by Hitler's National Socialists. The Nazi's economic programme was built onto a Four Year Plan controlled by a Commissioner, Goring, who took draconian powers over businesses and the trade unions. The principal objective of that Plan was to prepare the economy to support an aggressive war in Europe.
Keynes was a Liberal who deplored the emergence of tyranny in Europe and during the nineteen-thirties he was concerned that Britain must avoid an economic collapse that would allow communist or fascist ideas to capture any significant proportion of the electorate. Keynes's mentor, Alfred Marshall [1842-1924], was the great founder of authoritarian academic Microeconomics: within a decade of his death it was painfully clear that his Economics provided no prescriptions for solving the practical problems that were causing mass unemployment in democratic societies. Keynes recognised that the macro-economy, the environment in which firms and the buyers of their produce operate, must be managed actively by the state. He suggested techniques for creating employment by government intervention through taxing and spending, and by adjusting the supply of money and by manipulating the factors that determine the rate of interest.
Keynes was crucial to the management of the command economy that supplied the country and its armed forces during the Second World War, and he worked hugely hard at international negotiations in planning for the postwar settlement. The extreme demands that were made on his mind and body were at least contributory to his death from heart failure very soon after the war. Had he lived for another decade he may have addressed the mechanisms by which macroeconomic devices could be made to articulate efficiently with microeconomic systems; but posterity was denied that guidance.
The lack of effective articulation between macroeconomic interventions and the achievement of intended outcomes by firms and people has been ducked by the entire 'Economics profession' through the six decade since Keynes died. Whenever the data disclose a trend that the government decides must be addressed by a shift in macroeconomic policy, it increases or reduces the money supply, raises or lowers rates of interest, increases or reduces taxation, increases or cancels government orders to firms, and/or to increase or reduce the number and rates of pay for state employees. Recently in Europe restrictive policies have been imposed on the economies of Greece, Ireland and other heavily indebted states. Within the eurozone, in cases where the elected governments have hesitated to act in the required manner, a change of government has been imposed; composed of technocrats: - which means Economists.
Because it is outside the eurozone, Britain still has monetary independence and control of most taxation. The current coalition government came together [and will probably stay together] because the party leaders recognise that the economy is in a very perilous situation. The government is taking radical steps to reduce the rate of increase in state spending to a level where - in an ideal world - the economy in total would be growing faster than state spending, so that government spending and borrowing would become smaller percentages of the gross national product. The appearance of 'stable economic growth' that was delivered by the Blair-Brown regime was derived from increased direct spending by the government and by increased consumption by the increasing numbers of employees who were taken on in the civil service and in state agencies: supported by strong but ultimately unsustainable growth in demand arising from the bubble in the financial services sector.
De-industrialisation had been occurring by default in Britain since the collapse of traditional textiles in the nineteen-fifties: But after Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 it became deliberate policy. Coal mining, railways, shipbuilding, steel making and heavy engineering were regarded as the natural breeding grounds for militant trade unionism, so it was fashionable to argue that they should be cleared away like mosquito-breeding swamps. When the Second World War ended significant sectors of UK industry were old-fashioned and inefficient compared to newer factories in the USA and to the newly reconstructed plant in Germany. Rather than direct the bulk of the nation's disposable income into re-equipping the world's leading shipyards, aircraft factories, motor plant, electronic and chemical industries, successive Labour and Conservative governments raised taxes from industry to support the welfare state. While Germany developed the regional banks that supported the development of the Mittelstand of small and medium firms that supplied specialist products and services for industry and commerce, British banks took an increasingly dim view of industry. Within a democratic structure, Germany provided means by which firms could be funded to deliver desired growth. Britain had no such system; but nevertheless enough of industry survived, and new industries grew up - without government support - such that even now manufacturing is still a greater contributor to net national income than financial services ever could be.
Under the 2010 coalition government state spending is being held in check and employment in the public sector is being cut. Ministers talk often and grandiloquently about how the country will achieve macroeconomic salvation through the growth of real-world enterprises: but they become increasingly vague when pressed for details, and show that they are ineffectual in directing funds from state-controlled banks to promising businesses. This is the nub of the present problem: how are individual firms to be enabled to deliver the contribution that they can - and must - make to recovery? What policies can build a proper articulation between the macro-economy and the firm? This vital topic must be the subject for further bogs in the coming days.
The most tragic aspect of this ballooning exocrescence of academic blogging is that almost all the participants display the usual sycophancy to the seniors who can help their careers, who might deign to mention the mini-bloggers in their own blogs.Therefore they are anxious not to step outside the orthodox boundaries of the subject as it is set out by the dominant professors. The majority of the bloggers also display a painfully serious intent to classify themselves in sub-schools within the ever-more-diffuse 'discipline' of Economics, built on phrases like dynamic stochastic general equilibrium that attracted well-deserved ridicule when it was uttered in the House of Commons: but are commended in the hypoxic atmosphere of an academics' conference.
The more intelligent mainstream Economists are forced to realise that Economics fuelled the hubris that caused the credit crunch, but they cannot yet face the fact that the 'discipline' itself has failed. Such an admission would require them to admit that they have spent their careers on presenting doctrines that have condemned their fellow citizens, and themselves, to a lower standard of living in future than should have been available to them.
Economics fails most obviously at the interface between macroeconomics and microeconomics. In principle, socialist planning is a system for directing firms' and individuals' activities day by day, with the intention that each participant delivers outputs that serve as inputs to a planned macroeconomic aggregate. Keynes was in his prime precisely at the time when Stalin's Soviet Union was claiming success for its planning mechanisms: while the world became aware of the brutality with which The Plan was enforced and the disasters [including deaths through famine] that were caused by its inefficiencies. Keynes's wife was a Russian refugee, whose table-talk frequently included information and anecdote about Soviet repression. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919] he had forecasted a strong reaction in Germany to the way the country was treated by the victorious allies at the end of the First World War, and fourteen years on he took no pleasure in seeing the fulfilment of his prediction by Hitler's National Socialists. The Nazi's economic programme was built onto a Four Year Plan controlled by a Commissioner, Goring, who took draconian powers over businesses and the trade unions. The principal objective of that Plan was to prepare the economy to support an aggressive war in Europe.
Keynes was a Liberal who deplored the emergence of tyranny in Europe and during the nineteen-thirties he was concerned that Britain must avoid an economic collapse that would allow communist or fascist ideas to capture any significant proportion of the electorate. Keynes's mentor, Alfred Marshall [1842-1924], was the great founder of authoritarian academic Microeconomics: within a decade of his death it was painfully clear that his Economics provided no prescriptions for solving the practical problems that were causing mass unemployment in democratic societies. Keynes recognised that the macro-economy, the environment in which firms and the buyers of their produce operate, must be managed actively by the state. He suggested techniques for creating employment by government intervention through taxing and spending, and by adjusting the supply of money and by manipulating the factors that determine the rate of interest.
Keynes was crucial to the management of the command economy that supplied the country and its armed forces during the Second World War, and he worked hugely hard at international negotiations in planning for the postwar settlement. The extreme demands that were made on his mind and body were at least contributory to his death from heart failure very soon after the war. Had he lived for another decade he may have addressed the mechanisms by which macroeconomic devices could be made to articulate efficiently with microeconomic systems; but posterity was denied that guidance.
The lack of effective articulation between macroeconomic interventions and the achievement of intended outcomes by firms and people has been ducked by the entire 'Economics profession' through the six decade since Keynes died. Whenever the data disclose a trend that the government decides must be addressed by a shift in macroeconomic policy, it increases or reduces the money supply, raises or lowers rates of interest, increases or reduces taxation, increases or cancels government orders to firms, and/or to increase or reduce the number and rates of pay for state employees. Recently in Europe restrictive policies have been imposed on the economies of Greece, Ireland and other heavily indebted states. Within the eurozone, in cases where the elected governments have hesitated to act in the required manner, a change of government has been imposed; composed of technocrats: - which means Economists.
Because it is outside the eurozone, Britain still has monetary independence and control of most taxation. The current coalition government came together [and will probably stay together] because the party leaders recognise that the economy is in a very perilous situation. The government is taking radical steps to reduce the rate of increase in state spending to a level where - in an ideal world - the economy in total would be growing faster than state spending, so that government spending and borrowing would become smaller percentages of the gross national product. The appearance of 'stable economic growth' that was delivered by the Blair-Brown regime was derived from increased direct spending by the government and by increased consumption by the increasing numbers of employees who were taken on in the civil service and in state agencies: supported by strong but ultimately unsustainable growth in demand arising from the bubble in the financial services sector.
De-industrialisation had been occurring by default in Britain since the collapse of traditional textiles in the nineteen-fifties: But after Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 it became deliberate policy. Coal mining, railways, shipbuilding, steel making and heavy engineering were regarded as the natural breeding grounds for militant trade unionism, so it was fashionable to argue that they should be cleared away like mosquito-breeding swamps. When the Second World War ended significant sectors of UK industry were old-fashioned and inefficient compared to newer factories in the USA and to the newly reconstructed plant in Germany. Rather than direct the bulk of the nation's disposable income into re-equipping the world's leading shipyards, aircraft factories, motor plant, electronic and chemical industries, successive Labour and Conservative governments raised taxes from industry to support the welfare state. While Germany developed the regional banks that supported the development of the Mittelstand of small and medium firms that supplied specialist products and services for industry and commerce, British banks took an increasingly dim view of industry. Within a democratic structure, Germany provided means by which firms could be funded to deliver desired growth. Britain had no such system; but nevertheless enough of industry survived, and new industries grew up - without government support - such that even now manufacturing is still a greater contributor to net national income than financial services ever could be.
Under the 2010 coalition government state spending is being held in check and employment in the public sector is being cut. Ministers talk often and grandiloquently about how the country will achieve macroeconomic salvation through the growth of real-world enterprises: but they become increasingly vague when pressed for details, and show that they are ineffectual in directing funds from state-controlled banks to promising businesses. This is the nub of the present problem: how are individual firms to be enabled to deliver the contribution that they can - and must - make to recovery? What policies can build a proper articulation between the macro-economy and the firm? This vital topic must be the subject for further bogs in the coming days.
Saturday, 15 October 2011
Democracy, Debt and Doubt
As the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meet in an autumnal Paris they are all acutely aware of the historical context of the meeting. They have all been briefed on what happened to the global economy in the years from 1929 to 1936, and what were the particular effects of the Great Depression on their own countries.
The Chinese have studied how the impact of the depression on a country that had notionally been through a democratic revolution, but which had seen only minimal structural change in the economy, was rendered even weaker than before and more susceptible to the imperialist ambitions of Japan. Those ambitions led to one of the most brutal colonialist wars in modern history, and left the unoccupied areas of the vast country prey to warlords. The Japanese withdrawal was followed by a partial Soviet occupation [of Manchuria] and a no-holds-barred civil war in whose aftermath the communists inherited a prostrate economy and a disintegrating civil society; which the new regime began to restructure on doctrinaire lines that represented a 'historial discontinuity'.
Japanese and Russian representatives in Paris knew that the debilitating effect of the depression on the the old industrial countries had left those former 'international policemen' unable to intervene in faraway countries, which were left to pursue whatever policies were selected by their non-representative regimes: Japan decided upon reckless imperial expansion and intensified political oppression at home; while the then-Soviet Union stepped up the incompetent processes of collectivisation of agriculture and overambitious industrial expansion combined with oppression on a gargantuan scale.which left the country in an advanced state of debilitation ahead of the German invasion of 1941.
Germany, France and Italy recall all too clearly that the depression was seen as the context for the consolidation of Mussolini's power in Italy and Hitler's rise to power in Germany. The restoration of national morale in Italy and Germany under the Fascists fostered the hubris that led them into aggressive war; while the absence of such a fillip to French society and the French economy helped to ensure the collapse of France in 1940 and the willing acceptance of their occupiers and of their puppet government by most of the French.
The English-speaking countries all recognise the Great Depression as perhaps the most decisive step in the shift of global economic pre-eminence from Britain to the USA, which both suffered serious social problems as their economies plunged into the depression. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were forced to increase their autonomy from the 'mother country' during the 'thirties, in the worst of economic circumstances: only to find themselves in 1939 responding to the call to support the British war effort - which they did unstintingly, though their role in the Second World War proved to be a major step in their maturation as sovereign states. The depression also signalled the coming of the end of the British Raj in India: although the imperial power was able to mobilise the sub-continent for the war, despite the fact that the unsustainability of the regime in the postwar world was evident.
Every other participant in the present Group of 20 'leading nations' has memories of the trauma that affected them in direct consequence of the Great Depression: so they all share a determination to take any sensible steps to prevent any re-run of that cataclysm. But they lack a clear and radical economic perspective from which they could possibly devise any 'magic bullet' solution. The nature of the economic crisis is becoming clearer: its potential political fallout is recognised. But the search for a solution lies in economic policy, and the men and women who have this formidable responsibility are looking for guidance into a soup of discredited economic theory, imperfect statistics and glib back-of-a-fag-packet propositions. They will not find any answer to their dilemma in the resources that are currently available to them..
The Chinese have studied how the impact of the depression on a country that had notionally been through a democratic revolution, but which had seen only minimal structural change in the economy, was rendered even weaker than before and more susceptible to the imperialist ambitions of Japan. Those ambitions led to one of the most brutal colonialist wars in modern history, and left the unoccupied areas of the vast country prey to warlords. The Japanese withdrawal was followed by a partial Soviet occupation [of Manchuria] and a no-holds-barred civil war in whose aftermath the communists inherited a prostrate economy and a disintegrating civil society; which the new regime began to restructure on doctrinaire lines that represented a 'historial discontinuity'.
Japanese and Russian representatives in Paris knew that the debilitating effect of the depression on the the old industrial countries had left those former 'international policemen' unable to intervene in faraway countries, which were left to pursue whatever policies were selected by their non-representative regimes: Japan decided upon reckless imperial expansion and intensified political oppression at home; while the then-Soviet Union stepped up the incompetent processes of collectivisation of agriculture and overambitious industrial expansion combined with oppression on a gargantuan scale.which left the country in an advanced state of debilitation ahead of the German invasion of 1941.
Germany, France and Italy recall all too clearly that the depression was seen as the context for the consolidation of Mussolini's power in Italy and Hitler's rise to power in Germany. The restoration of national morale in Italy and Germany under the Fascists fostered the hubris that led them into aggressive war; while the absence of such a fillip to French society and the French economy helped to ensure the collapse of France in 1940 and the willing acceptance of their occupiers and of their puppet government by most of the French.
The English-speaking countries all recognise the Great Depression as perhaps the most decisive step in the shift of global economic pre-eminence from Britain to the USA, which both suffered serious social problems as their economies plunged into the depression. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were forced to increase their autonomy from the 'mother country' during the 'thirties, in the worst of economic circumstances: only to find themselves in 1939 responding to the call to support the British war effort - which they did unstintingly, though their role in the Second World War proved to be a major step in their maturation as sovereign states. The depression also signalled the coming of the end of the British Raj in India: although the imperial power was able to mobilise the sub-continent for the war, despite the fact that the unsustainability of the regime in the postwar world was evident.
Every other participant in the present Group of 20 'leading nations' has memories of the trauma that affected them in direct consequence of the Great Depression: so they all share a determination to take any sensible steps to prevent any re-run of that cataclysm. But they lack a clear and radical economic perspective from which they could possibly devise any 'magic bullet' solution. The nature of the economic crisis is becoming clearer: its potential political fallout is recognised. But the search for a solution lies in economic policy, and the men and women who have this formidable responsibility are looking for guidance into a soup of discredited economic theory, imperfect statistics and glib back-of-a-fag-packet propositions. They will not find any answer to their dilemma in the resources that are currently available to them..
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