Power, Legitimacy and the Economy

Chairman Mao declared that "power comes out of the barrel of a gun"; and over the millennia many regimes all over the world have gained and held power by the power of the sling, the arrow, the spear, the sword and the gun. The Bible tells how the pyramid-building rulers of Egypt consolidated their power over centuries by maintaining state granaries, in which crop surpluses were stored in fruitful years, which could then be doled-out to maintain the people when harvests were insufficient; whether that was due to crop failure [usually due to irregular weather] or to military intervention with the farming year [as when 'the peoples of the sea' invaded some provinces].

The comfortable delusion upon which the European Union was built is that the founder states were mature democracies, where the mass of the population acquiesced in the constitutional order and selected between political parties in regular, orderly elections; largely on the basis of their performance or promises in developing the economy. Since 1995 several states were admitted that had recently been 'democratised' after decades under the Communists gun-rule, and their dissent from the consensus established in Brussels [not least, on inward migration from outside Europe] has now become conspicuous. But [as has been pointed out before in this blog] the west European democracies were new when the Treaty of Rome was signed. Germany was fascist and brutal until mid-1945, Italy was in a similar state. France was still recovering from the hidden conflict between wartime collaborators and resistants. Smaller states with monarchies had been able more quickly after 1945 to establish a sort of normalcy, but all carried legacy issues from the war [except Sweden, which had the great luck to maintain its neutrality]. The EU had a mock-democratic parliament, which was subject to the farce of moving every month from Brussels to Strasbourg that was the proof of its impotence: if the assembly had an iota of real power the members would have opted for a fixed location.

The United Kingdom and Ireland joined the Common Market together, with the secret agenda [agreed in London and Dublin, but not shared with the broad electorate in either country] that a 'peace process' could follow in Ireland as the identities of the two states was subsumed in the European project. Before Mrs Thatcher won her infamous 'rebate', the UK was paying in massive amounts to  the Common Market funds that made similarly vast payments to Irish farmers and local authorities. A generation on, Mrs May and her pathetic cabinet seem not to know that, so they delude themselves that are avoiding the crunch on the Irish Question by putting up notions for a customs arrangement that is very much secondary to the political fudge. If the political fudge is ignored the whole Brexit project will end in violence. It is more than a coincidence that Gerry Adams has announced his intention to stand down: if there is to be a new civil war in Ireland [with inevitable excursions into the British mainland] it will necessarily be  conducted by a new, vigorous Republican high command.

If this interpretation of current events seems apocalyptic, be aware that if consent is withdrawn by a coherent component of the population in any country [or province] the men and women of violence will seek to develop that situation. Mercifully, there is no sign of such a thing happening in Catalonia; but Ireland has been a different case, for centuries.

If a regime is able to provide the mass of the people with palpable economic benefits, as the pyramid-builders did - and as the welfare state did in western Europe for the half-century after 1950 - revolt against the centralised state is rare: Northern Ireland, the Basque region and a few other cases were the exceptions that proved the rule because there were deep historical reasons for those special cases. It is significant that as the Irish Republic gained more of the advantages of a welfare economy, so the politicians in that state eschewed the IRA and their political allies more and more deeply.

Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe massive crowds have assembled to support the army and the ruling ZanuPF party in their attempt to replace Mugabe by his erstwhile deputy. 'The crocodile', as he is known, is a notorious enforcer; hitherto in Mugabe's interests. It was he who unleashed North Korean mercenaries to support his own thugs in killing at least 20,000 Matabele. It was he who organised such beatings of opposition voters in the last presidential election that the opposition withdrew from the second round and allowed Mugabe to reap his 'democratic' mandate. By all accounts he is less blatantly kleptocratic than Grace Mugabe, who was being set up as the next president. Optimists are hoping that the crocodile will metamorphose into a consensualist who can forge a truly 'national' government, but the odds are stacked against that. Once the dust settles on Mugabe's departure, Zimbabwe will revert to rule by fist and cane, supplemented - as judged necessary - by bullets: as in the case in most of Africa.

The chances of Zimbabwe approaching any credible standard of democracy within fifty years are very small.

The chances of the beneficent Brussels fantasy lasting for another fifty years are diminishing: as Mrs Merkel's struggle to build a coalition well illustrates.

More About Sovereignty: Rhodesia to Zimbabwe to Disaster [and On to Honours from the United Nations]

The arbitrarily-drawn colonial-era boundaries that still delineate the African country called Zimbabwe were set in the last days of the nineteenth century. The area had by then been recognised as having significant potential for the development of agricultural estates; and a group of entrepreneurial individuals gathered around Cecil Rhodes [a magnate who became premier of the Rand diamond and gold mining area which was settled by large numbers of Europeans, predominantly British] agreed to venture further north into this promising territory. Approval from the British state was secured, a territory called 'Rhodesia' was marked out, and a Company on the traditional lines of the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company was set up to help to fund the venture. The Rhodesia Company - which mutated into Lonrho - was essentially a trading operation. White settlers accepted land grants individually to set up their own farms [of various sizes, but much larger than those individuals could have bought in Europe or North America], and several companies and consortia also took land grants, all employing 'native' labour, and with the intention to sell their output on world markets. It was quickly demonstrated that the land was generally fertile and well-watered, and favourable for growing food crops and tobacco and for cattle ranching.

The settled pattern of agriculture cut directly across the traditional migratory lifestyle of the Shona and other peoples who were well established on the territory; and there were frictional incidents as the allocations of land to white individuals and alien-owned companies proceeded. In due course accommodations were made with the indigenous tribal groups, chiefs were given status in the pattern of civil administration, and relations between settlers and native peoples became relatively calm.

One great disruption had occurred more or less simultaneously with the development of white interest in the territory: a significant sub-set of the warrior Zulus rebelled against their famous king Shaka, and to avoid his wrath they knew they must put a significant distance between his armies and their own. Thus they migrated to the territory that was soon to be Rhodesia [later Southern Rhodesia] where they could be used by the whites as a counterpoise against the majority Shona: in effect, they were allowed to settle, provided they collaborated with the colonial regime. With that uncomfortable mix of farmer-settlers, ex-Zulus known as Matabele and Shona [who had the longer claim to the territory] Rhodesia developed as a major exporter of food [crops and beef] and of tobacco; with significant mineral production as well.

Come the nineteen-sixties and the desire of the United Kingdom to slough-off direct responsibility for the colonies, the London government lumped together three colonially-administered territories into a new Central African Federation. The economic, social and political structures of the three components were very different. Southern Rhodesia was a relatively rich segment of Africa, with hundreds of thousands of white settlers and the major city of Salisbury as its capital: there was an apartheid-type parliament, dominated by whites but with representation for Matabele and Shona.  Northern Rhodesia had a much smaller white settler and technician population than its southern neighbour, but it had a semi-democratic representative assembly; and the territory had significant wealth both from agriculture and from mineral exports, most notably copper. The smallest territory in the Federation was the poorest, Nyasaland [now Malawi]; with the lowest level of white settlement, the least-developed economy, and no effective democratic institutions. Unsurprisingly, the Federation fell apart. The convention that nobody should upset the colonial frontiers was upheld, however, so Malawi and Northern Rhodesia [renamed Zambia, after the river that runs through it] drifted into post-colonial limbo within their existing boundaries. For more than a decade the informal white-Matabele coalition continued to control Southern Rhodesia [which became Rhodesia] but it became susceptible to an increasingly aggressive Shona-led insurgency which campaigned for independence under black rule.

South Africa and Rhodesia conducted joint military operations in several other African countries where the 'freedom fighters' holed up, often with assistance from the local government and from the Communist bloc; while the fighters waged an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the Rhodesian state. The freedom fighters fell into several sections, and included some Matabele; but their movement was predominantly a Shona enterprise. It had several leaders, of whom Robert Mugabe was one. Hence, throughout Africa, he is gazetted as a hero of the struggle for liberation. The eventual collapse of the isolated settler state and the grant of formal sovereignty to the new country of Zimbabwe - named after some impressive ruins left by a forgotten people - was followed by the seizure of power by Shona factions, the brutal suppression of the Matable and the botched 'Africanisation' of agriculture which deprived the country of its export surplus.

At the age of 93, Robert Mugabe is seen from Europe as a grasping, incompetent, brutal tyrant. By c contrast,Almost throughout Africa he is seen as a man who has an heroic past, who has tried constantly [and largely successfully] to remove colonial exploitation and all its hangovers from his country: as he promised to do half a century ago. In so doing, he has ruined the economy and once-great public services - not least, the health service - have suffered.  Thus it is paradoxical that a recently-appointed African chief officer of the World Health Organisation [WHO - a part of the UN] should think naturally of appointing an African legend to be a 'Goodwill Ambassador'; and that the aid-donating west should be horrified that the chief agent of waste and pillage in a once-rich country should thus be honoured. At least, the furore surrounding the appointment has made a few people remember the past and contemplate the future of a naturally rich part of the world.