Sicilian Notes

Appointment

2006-09-27T23:58:00.000+01:00

I have agreed to join Associated Newspapers Ireland as Chief Political Commentator for the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Mail on Sunday.

A Noteworthy Quote

2006-09-25T15:17:00.000+01:00

I am going through Irish Times archives at the moment (exciting, I know) and came across a line worth mentioning. The date is September 3rd 2002. The quote:

Mr Cheney and others have indicated that the inspectors issue is largely irrelevant to their thinking on the need to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.

I trust the Irish Times will not go unreminded of its own assessment the next time it argues that regime change and democratization were post facto rationalizations for Saddam's overthrow.

Dr. Rory Miller on Irish-Israeli Relations

2006-09-18T14:13:00.000+01:00

Dr. Rory Miller of Kings College London features in an important extended interview with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, available here. Readers with any interest at all in Irish foreign policy should be sure also to acquire his definitive history of Irish policy towards Israel and the Palestinian organizations, Ireland and the Palestine Question 1948-2004.

Complacency Is Not A Virtue

2006-09-17T22:10:00.000+01:00

It is often levelled as a criticism of the Bush administration that the world is now less safe as a consequence of the policies they have pursued and today's Sunday Tribune poll shows 80% of us in Ireland sharing that view, (incidentally, the corresponding figure for American opinion is 76%). The extent to which this is a criticism rather than simply an observation is quite arguable. I for one would concur with the judgment concerning safeness, adding only that just about every alternative shaping of post-9/11 grand strategy would leave us worse off short of more adroit execution. But leaving that aside, though doing so relieves critics of their burden of arguing for better alternatives, it remains for critics to acknowledge precisely how dangerous are the times in which we live as a minimal starting point for further comment.

It is, for instance, probable that we will live to see nuclear terrorism in the West before too long. That is the opinion of, amongst many, Graham Allison, who writing recently in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argued:

In sum, my best judgment is that based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. Developments in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea leave Americans more vulnerable to a nuclear 9/11 today than we were five years ago. Former Defense Secretary William Perry has said that he thinks that I underestimate the risk. In the judgment of most people in the national security community, including former Sen. Sam Nunn, the risk of a terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil is higher today than was the risk of nuclear war at the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Reviewing the evidence, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events like earthquakes, has concluded: "It's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen."

It is not permitted in such times to resign oneself to partisan attacks on the current American administration or flippant digs at Western efforts at fighting the war. To do so carries about as much credit as blaming Western diplomacy for the debacle in France would have merited in 1940. And much commentary at the present time is well beneath even that in terms of seriousness or responsibility. Only an honest acknowledgement of the genuinely challenging history we are living through combined with a good-faith consideration of how we might now proceed counts as morally permissable engagement for those passing judgment. Nor should that count as a particularly onerous burden for those entering the debate.

It is becoming fashionable, most astonishingly, to argue in a sort of superior and knowing way that the threat is exaggerated by Western governments for political gain or more sinister purposes. Witness the recent discussion in Foreign Affairs. We forget rather hastily that the only reason 9/11 has not recurred in comparable form is because of a ceaseless and vigorous effort at apprehending the literally thousands of active Islamist terrorists plotting more such attacks and the good fortune that to date efforts at exploding airliners and releasing chemical attacks have been disrupted before coming to pass.

Complacency is only possible for those who choose not to see the blindingly obvious, and morally culpable to a very incriminating degree.

Politics In Ireland

2006-09-13T13:46:00.000+01:00

The fantastically useful Politics in Ireland site is up and running. It's has an excellent facility for sorting online writing on politics in Ireland by party or politician. Check it out.

Michael McDowell Leading the Progressive Democrats

2006-09-12T19:34:00.000+01:00

Versions of the following pieces were published in the Irish Daily Mail and Ireland on Sunday on Friday, Sunday, and Tuesday of the last week and are republished below in the order they were printed.

Friday September 8th

Michael McDowell was on his best behaviour yesterday but he wasn’t fooling anybody. Before Mary Harney ever took over the leadership of the Progressive Democrats, it was McDowell who famously declared that the party could only ever be either radical or redundant. As he watched Mary Harney declare herself redundant yesterday, he must have been wondering not only if his hour at last has come, but also that only radical changes can save a party now facing its sternest test yet.

Mary Harney’s resignation came at a time of her choosing, but we can be sure it did not come at a time of her party’s choosing. Nine months before an election is not the time to change leaders if there is any choice in the matter. Until the memoirs come out we can only guess whether Harney chose to save her dignity or sabotage her Minister for Justice. Perhaps she simply saw the writing on the wall. After doubling the number of PD seats in the Dail, Harney knows that it can only go downhill on results night next May.

Bowing out graciously in the sleek surroundings of Dublin’s Merrion Hotel gave Harney a dignified send-off, but expect the coming leadership struggle to be brutal. So close to an already tough general election, this month’s race won’t just be about choosing a new leader, but about a new ideological vision for Ireland, and about raw political survival.

The harsh truth facing the Progressive Democrats is that they have all but lost their special place in Irish politics. It’s not all that long ago in historical terms that the party was the third largest in the Dail with fourteen TDs. With the country on the brink of real economic disaster, the PDs were an answer to necessity and the waste of tax-and-spend policies under Garret Fitzgerald and the governments before his. When the country’s finances hung in the balance it was no surprise that the PDs crested to a level of support that seems unimaginable now.

The cruel irony is that the PDs have become victims of their own success. Don’t expect either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael to admit it, but both the big parties have been forced to accept the basic truth of the PD message that market economics work and government spending doesn’t. To be sure, we’ll never be free of pet projects and politically motivated giveaways – and the next budget is on course to be a disaster on both counts – but nobody in Irish politics is even arguing for tax increases of any great size let alone a return to the days when the need for change was strong enough to bring the PDs into being in the first place. Even in the present government it’s been hard to see where Fianna Fail ends and the PDs begin. Charlie McCreevy, out in front with a tribute yesterday afternoon, might as well have been a PD himself. In the Department of Enterprise and Employment job there’s been little if any difference between Michael Martin and Mary Harney, with Martin buying into Harney’s proven policies without even so much as a little tinkering around the edges. ‘No to one party government’ may have been a winner for McDowell at the last election, but it didn’t mean much once the cabinet posts had been divided up.

Just as the other parties won’t admit that the PDs were right, the PDs won’t admit that they are basically out of a job. Where it gets really tricky is what they individually say when asked what makes them so special anymore. In the coming leadership election, the choice for members won’t just be who they want to head up the party, but whether it's time to slip into the mainstream of Irish politics or strike out on a bold course. Liz O’Donnell is the candidate of the ‘softly, softly’ approach. Michael McDowell, needless to say, represents the alternative. Suddenly, the PDs have to ask themselves again whether its time to be radical. It won’t be an easy question to answer.

For a start, the PDs have to face up to the fact that the self-proclaimed party of slim and efficient government has been in office for nine years of waste and incompetence. It’s not easy now to turn around to voters and promise to fine-tune government spending when you’ve been part of the problem for so long. We still lack any real competition in healthcare, transport, energy, or communications in Ireland. These are all major areas of the economy that have resisted the sort of bracing change that catapulted the country generally towards success in the last fifteen years. In each case, the fingerprints at the scene of the crime are those of the government. Whether as the dominant player in the market or through burdensome regulation, the government has failed entirely to force these sleepy sectors into the twenty-first century.

A generation ago the PDs would have risen to the task with an uncompromising political zeal, but you really can’t call yourself the party of enterprise and opportunity and still leave whole chunks of the economy in the economic dark ages. At any point in the last four years, the PDs under Harney could have chosen to break ranks with a tired and unimaginative Fianna Fail and taken a stand on opening up these disaster areas. It really doesn’t take two terms of government to get around to it. If you’re the party of free market economics it shouldn’t take two months. It only takes a little courage.

If it’s too late for the PDs to rescue their economic credentials – and it probably is – it’s not too late for the party to mark out space elsewhere. As the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell now stands in line to the PDs leadership and at the head of the country’s war against criminals. It’s time now for McDowell to shake himself out of the comfort zone, drop the air of unreality that crime fighting in Ireland has had in the face of surging violence, and start putting criminals behind bars at a serious rate.

It’s an opportunity both to do the right thing and to save his party. The party that sounded the alarm as Ireland’s economics fell apart can now sound the alarm as law and order falls apart in neighbourhoods across the country. The difference gun crime makes is immense. It puts up costs for everyone in business, leaves us all at risk, and victimises the most defenceless most mercilessly. Turning up the heat in the war on crime is long overdue – it would also break the image of a party working for a narrow professional base by doing neighbourhoods on the front line a service when they need it most.

Once in a while, politics enters defining moments. The emergence of the PDs in the first place was exactly on such moment. The landscape hasn’t been the same since. Harney’s bombshell is both a crisis and an opportunity for the party. Just as in the early days of the PDs, there’s no shortage of targets to take on. What remains to be seen is whether they have the imagination to strike out from their traditional policy areas. A new leader will take over at a critical moment for the party, but with the country slipping in competitiveness and with violent crime seeping across our cities, it’s a pretty critical moment for the rest of us too. We may not need the PDs anymore, but we still need their original ideas. It’s time for the party to step up to new challenges and justify itself to the voters.

Sunday September 10th

Michael McDowell yesterday had the look of someone who had played the scene out in his mind a long time ago. For the first time since records began, the Minister had nothing to say to reporters while arriving at the Department of Justice. Nor, it turned out during the day, did he need to say a word himself. The military precision with which the declarations of support rolled in from around the country ensured that by the time Mr. McDowell strode out of his Department into a hazy Friday evening, the election for the leadership of the Progressive Democrats was all but his.

That was the easy part. Now, McDowell is going to have to do rather more than sit in his office notching up the professions of support. The public – as he will be reminded the morning after the victory party – is likely to take a little more persuading. Indeed, McDowell is inheriting a party whose level of support in the polls is less than the statistical margin of error. Worse, with not one of the eight PD seats safe next May, the party’s very existence is hanging within the political margin of error. Let McDowell enjoy his weekend of triumph. He’s unlikely to enjoy what follows.

Where did it all go wrong for the PDs? This is a party, after all, that was for one brief spell the third largest in the Dail. After being in government for two terms and seeing their once radical economic ideas accepted grudgingly by rivals as simple common sense, they could be forgiven for feeling entitled to more than two percent support.

In truth, the PDs have only themselves to blame. It’s no good having successful policies if you don’t actually get out there and argue for them. Take Sinn Fein, who have dramatically disastrous policies on pretty much every issue going, but who still pound the pavements and rope in votes. Whether through complacency or lethargy, the PDs have become one of the laziest parties in the Dail. Indeed, one of the reasons a leadership challenge is so unlikely is that one-time favourite Liz O’Donnell has done so little with herself over the last few years that voters have forgotten about her and supporters given up on her. The party doesn’t even run candidates in most constituencies and bizarrely sat out the last European election.

Take money matters as an example of complacency. Nobody in the major parties would even dare argue for significant tax increases these days. To compare the situation now with the sorry state of affairs when the party was formed demonstrates just how comprehensive the PD victory has been on economics. Nor has it just been a victory of words – astonishing growth over more than a decade speaks for itself. Yet when was the last time you heard a PD politician claim credit for that little success? True, they weren’t the only ones involved and you can’t reduce something as complex as the nation’s finances to one party’s agenda, but the PDs can’t complain that they don’t get the credit if they don’t put themselves out there and ask for it.

It’s time now for the PDs to reassert their role as the government watchdog and open up on government waste and incompetence in all its forms. McDowell actually has a unique opportunity suddenly. Until this weekend, it’s been all but impossible for the PDs to attack government mismanagement because they’ve been part of the problem.

Now, with a change of leader, McDowell could do us all a favour by selling out his coalition partners in the interests of a hard-hitting campaign against the rampant misuse of taxpayers' money. It would take courage, but there is a desperate need for someone at the top levels of government to champion the consumer and the taxpayer and McDowell has the perfect opportunity to save our money and his party by standing up to the budget free-for-all being cooked up in Fianna Fail headquarters. McDowell should make a public pledge against government waste and be ready to collapse the government if Bertie insists on buying the marginal seats at the next election.

McDowell needs to bring the skill and imagination he showed on Friday when he wrapped up the party’s support to the trickier task of shaping a new manifesto. The thing is, there is a whole set of issues out there that are going for the taking. Nobody, to take another example, is making the argument for real tax cuts in the future. Yet when government waste is as rampant and as visible as it is at the moment, you don’t have to work to hard to convince taxpayers that they could do a better job of spending their money that their politicians are doing. With Brian Cowen planning a splurge with the budget surplus, McDowell should argue that if the government taxed more money than it needed, then it should simply give it back to the people – that’s you and me – who earned it in the first place.

But most importantly, the PDs should branch out. They should branch out geographically and politically. It’s a joke to call yourself a national party and yet to be limited to a small fraction of the country’s constituencies, but it’s also a mistake to run as a party of government and yet leave whole chunks of the policy agenda to the other parties. It’s time, after billions of money for no return, to give up on the tinkering approach and go straight to the source of failures in energy, transport, and, for that matter, health – government mismanagement. As a glance at the experience in neighbouring countries shows, public services simply do not work when the government is both paying for the service and actually providing it itself. Now nobody wants to start cutting people off, but there is a real opportunity for a courageous leader to break the mould of failing services by opening up the actual provision of services to the efficiencies of innovative independent enterprise. The government can still pay the bill, but let’s not pretend any longer that they can manage the business. Making that basic distinction between payer and provider is the shortcut to efficiency and it’s a tried and tested model for reform that could be applied across the board. Nothing would do more for buses and trains in this country than opening them up for the next Michael O’Leary and as the most energy vulnerable country in Europe we simply don’t have a choice any longer when it comes to competition in the energy market. If McDowell is looking for targets, he could worse than start right there.

But where McDowell really needs to get busy is with the most critical set of targets of all – the country’s burgeoning criminal underground. This is where McDowell – if he is prepared to raise his game and take on his critics – could really mark out space for himself. At every level of the criminal justice system in this country stands a well-funded, ideologically driven criminal rights movement that works tirelessly and shamelessly to reduce convictions, reduce prison time, and convince us that its not criminals who are to blame for crime but ‘society’, ‘inequality’, or ‘exclusion’. At a time when many in the public debate have lost the ability to make basic distinctions between right and wrong and to blame the aggressor not the victim, McDowell can and should take on those making excuses for criminals and wake up to the growing reality of a crime problem that for far too long he himself has minimised as a passing storm when in truth it is in danger of becoming a permanent fact of life in Ireland.

When your party is on two percent, there’s nothing to lose that hasn’t already been lost. The opportunity is there for unapologetic leadership and if McDowell is prepared to break the mould he may well find that the rewards are there too.

Tuesday, September 12th

Michael McDowell made a lot of promises in the banqueting hall of Dublin’s Westin Hotel in his first appearance as PD leader, but we can be sure of the truth of at least one of them – “I will not disappoint the media”. Indeed, he won’t disappoint anyone who thinks Irish politics has long been in need of a shot in the arm and a break with the politics of flabby consensus. Whatever else can be said about his sudden elevation and political instincts, it’s fair to expect some excitement. McDowell’s greatest tests lie ahead in the short months this side of the election, but if he can turn yesterday’s triumphal posturing into tomorrow’s transformative policies – and the PDs have a habit of surprising their critics – he’ll be well on the way to claiming a unique and well-deserved place in Irish political history.

McDowell is a fighting politician who will need all his brains to lead his party to electoral success in May, but he must be credited with a vital insight – tinkering with the problems we’re all facing isn’t a solution, it’s an avoidance of the problem. It remains to be seen if McDowell’s policy platform is up to scratch – and it will be a day of truth for his leadership when the manifesto is agreed – but in recognising that radical change is sometimes the wisest course of action he has opened up the possibility of urgent and overdue changes.

At a time when his coalition partner is prepared to sell out the nation’s finances to buy the election, McDowell yesterday stood up for economic prudence and slim government. Despite pursuing his running war of words on crime statistics, he yesterday bowed to the obvious and promised to prosecute the war on criminals with the vigour it deserves. When ‘social justice’ is being used as an excuse for politicians to take control of more and more of the economy, he emphasised that all social policy has to be built on strong finances to be possible. And with the alternative government flirting with the fringes of Irish politics in a bid to make up the numbers, McDowell had the honesty and the punchiness to target the inevitable “far-left” baggage in a Fine Gael and Labour coalition. It all signals the courage and conviction needed to rescue Irish politics from the swamp of trendy buzzwords, giveaways, and government by opinion poll. Not bad for the first day on the job.

It’s now time for the Minister to live up to his fine words. There’s nothing unforgivably wrong with a flight of oratory and combative positioning – especially after unanimously claiming the leadership – but only if it’s backed up by the hard work of practical politics and meaningful reform. McDowell’s past record on that count is pretty mixed. He’s quicker to announce reforms than complete them. More worrying, despite posing as the embodiment of principled politics, the PDs have been known to cave to pragmatic dealings when it suited. Now that fully five of the thirteen PD Oireachtas members sit in the Senate it’s long forgotten that the original policy platform McDowell drafted called for the body to be abolished altogether – though McDowell to his great credit didn’t take a seat for exactly that reason. Worryingly though, despite his cutting criticism of the Fine Gael led coalition in his speech yesterday, he’s freely admitted in the past that as recently as 1999 he agreed to meet with John Bruton to discuss rejoining the very same party. That lust for power is not necessarily a fatal flaw – at best if could fuel the drive to make deep and vital changes – but there are real limits to how much he can compromise before he becomes just another figures in the ‘politics of failure’ he yesterday so bitterly and justly attacked.

McDowell put his credibility on the line yesterday with a promise to double the number of PD seats by this time next year. When you remember that it was against all the odds that Harney pulled in even the eight seats they currently have it’s clear that this is a challenge and a half. But McDowell’s political instincts are sharper than those of many of his critics. At the formation of the PDs he predicted Fine Gael would lose twenty-one seats at their next election. He was almost spot on, only two out as they lost nineteen on the day. His ‘no to one party government’ stunt last time out shifted opinion at the last moment. This time, he’ll need to drag his parties out of their suburban comfort zone and get stuck into the neighbourhood problems and rural issues that stand between the PDs and truly national representation. The PDs are probably the Dail’s laziest party when it comes to building constituency support and they’ve nobody to blame but themselves for being ghettoised in fashionable postcodes.

In truth, despite the image, the rich are the last people who need the PDs. Where there’s money, there’s always a way to keep it – as the scandals and tribunals of recent years confirm. Government waste and spending – the politics of the taxpayer-funded giveaway – are most lethal for the small businessman and ordinary taxpayer who get squeezed hardest by the drop in opportunity, competitiveness, and openness. Left-wing politicians like to speak in the name of the poor, but the economics of state dependency leave vulnerable individuals tied to an impersonal and incompetent welfare system. Small government, economic vitality, and personal responsibility towards friends and family make for an immeasurably more humane and successful approach. When monopolies are broken-up and services freed from management by bureaucracy, it’s the consumer and the average family who feels the gains first. McDowell should look to the example of young PD newcomers like Ben Doyle in southwest Dublin who are out on the pavements in places the PDs would never before have ventured as the way towards electoral rejuvenation and take on internal critics who would prefer the party remains the preserve of cosseted south Dublin professionals.

Back when Des O’Malley was dithering about forming the PDs in the first place, McDowell wrote to him to quote no less a statesman than Charles De Gaulle who had remarked that ‘people get the history they deserve’. After years of electoral ups and downs and hand-to-hand political combat, McDowell may be flattering himself with the remark as he contemplates his recent victory. He should remember it as he plots the coming campaign. This is no time for half measures – either for his party or for the country. McDowell may have indulged himself in a little Latin yesterday, quoting Virgil to declare that ‘fortune favours the brave’, but if he’s the intellectual he’d like us to believe he is he’ll know that Machiavelli, that great strategist of power politics, added to Virgil’s words by emphasising that fortune only dictates half of man’s fate – the other half is a matter of will.

All eyes yesterday were on McDowell at the rostrum, but high above him in the aristocratic banqueting hall chosen for the occasion were sculptures of two ancient goddesses, one holding an anchor, the other a scythe. Trust the PDs to park themselves in the middle of privilege and plasterwork, but if there’s a ‘McDowell code’ to be unravelled, it’s that he needs to lift anchor on the stagnant politics of Fianna Fail vote-buying or his party as a whole is up for the chop. PD leadership is not for the faint-hearted and when the political system is filled with shameless operators prepared to buy public support with public money, neither is politics itself if justice is to be done. McDowell proved yesterday that he is a man of promise whose instincts chime with the times but he will need to roll up his sleeves and choose daring over business as usual if he’s to fulfil his promise.

Some rights reserved.

McDowell's Leadership

2006-09-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

The third of my pieces since Harney's resignation is in Tuesday's Irish Daily Mail. Once they're no longer on the market, I'll publish the set online, if the editors are kind enough to grant me the permission to do so.

Various

2006-09-10T23:46:00.000+01:00

Some quick recommendations.

First, Foreign Affairs have a provocative roundtable on the state of the threat from al-Qaeda five years after 9/11. Of deeper and richer analysis, and as a very valuable effort both at putting al-Qaeda in historical perspective, is Audrey Kurth Cronin's paper in the most recent issue of International Security, 'How Al-Qaida Ends'.

I have been reading the newly established blog by Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman. Rachman is a serious commentator in touch with current research and exactly the sort of informed voice that is, alas, conspicuously absent in a lot of Irish coverage of world affairs. I might add that more often than not I'm finding myself in disagreement with him, but usually learning something nonetheless.

As Monday is the fifth anniversary of 9/11 - astonishing in one sense to think it's been so long given how vividly the day remains to the memory - I link to a piece of mine slightly akwardly titled 'Death and Purpose in Iraq'. It's not my best piece on reflection, and it deals with Iraq rather than the War on Terror generally, but perhaps bears mentioning on the day we're in.

Incidentally, to my regret, pressure of commitments will limit postings to this blog to short posts like this and republications of the odd piece from my print journalism, at least until October. Readers disastisfied with the service are offered a full refund.

Update 1: Newseum has a valuable archive of September 12th front pages.

Update 2: And a photo-essay.

Blogging Conference

2006-09-08T09:51:00.000+01:00

Damien, Mick, Suzy, and Cian announced this morning the 'Blogging the Election conference'. Details here.

Memo to Politicians

2006-09-07T20:16:00.000+01:00

If you're going to resign, don't do it at five in the afternoon. Lowly scribes have deadlines you know.

Rory Miller in the Jerusalem Post

2006-09-07T14:39:00.000+01:00

The Jerusalem Post interviews Dr. Rory Miller on Irish-Israeli relations. One JP typo on Dail seat numbers, but an excellent piece.

Open University

2006-09-05T15:48:00.000+01:00

The New Republic, one of America's most distinguished political magazines, if a little left of this blog, has launched a very exciting groupblog titled Open University. According to the blurb:

It's dedicated to thinking about not just the news of the day but also the news from the academy: Controversies in campus politics that warrant thoughtful discussion. Scholarship from our various disciplines that we think deserves a broader hearing. Ideas we had in doing our research that seem eerily relevant to something we read in The New York Times today.

Sounds like good reading, and efforts to date have been first-class blogging.

Adams in Israel

2006-09-04T18:43:00.000+01:00

Assuming the schedule doesn't change, I am due to speak on BBC World Service tomorrow morning on Gerry Adams in the Middle East, particularly his meeting with Hamas. The program broadcasts worldwide but can be heard online here. It's the 10-11 slot.

Of Antiquarian Interest

2006-09-04T17:45:00.000+01:00

Intellectual fashions change surprisingly quickly. A friend of mine, a political philosopher in America now retired, took great pleasure in telling me when we first met that at the time he wrote his thesis on Adam Smith the foremost theorist of market economics was considered 'of antiquarian interest'.

I missed it at the time, but Francis Wheen had a stimulating article in the Guardian on Marx at the beginning of July. I'm not much of a Wheen fan personally. His 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World' badly caricatured Fukuyama's End of History thesis (even to the point of misquoting him, as Douglas Murray deftly exposed in Neoconservatism). But the Marx article was notable for its blurb:

Karl Marx's Das Kapital is a ground-breaking work of economic analysis. But, argues Francis Wheen, it is also an unfinished literary masterpiece which, with its multi-layered structure, can be read as a Gothic novel, a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire.

Anyone who's actually read any of Capital (and there can only be a few who've put themselves through the whole turgid thing) might demur from the view that the work is a 'literary masterpiece', but when Marx is being read for his literary references its fair to ask if he's worth reading at all. It's akin to reading Charles Dickens for economic analysis.

The kiss of death for any thinker is to be thought of as particular to time and place. That's why 'antiquarian interest' is so prejorative. By definition, it denotes that which isn't of interest generally, or rather of interest to our times. It is, of course, an academic way of making contary ideas parochial, by studying them as pertaining to a specific thought-world and set of circumstances.

Of course, in discerning what matters, a key question is whether a writer speaks to permanent problems or is indeed limited in time and space to the contingent. Plato may go out of fashion, but no canon could plausibly be constructed without him. That Marx has barely survived one generation after the end of the Cold War bodes ill for those who would insist on the 'timeless relevance' of his work, to take one of the more improbable claims recently made of his importance.

UN in Lebanon

2006-08-31T19:48:00.000+01:00

Myself and Professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University will be discussing the UN's performance in Lebanon on Newstalk tomorrow morning at about 7.40.

Trials of the Philosophers

2006-08-26T12:13:00.000+01:00

I suppose Socrates had it worse, but Bertrand Russell had his share of trials and tribulations. Not least, as Edward T. Oakes, S.J. reports in an amusing post that impressively combines blogging and nominalism, the post-lecture encounters with members of the public:

Bertrand Russell liked to tell the story of the time he gave a lecture after which an elderly lady came up to inform him that the universe actually rested, as the Hindus rightly knew, on the back of a turtle, to which he, in true tortoise mode, snappily replied, “And just what does the turtle rest upon?” to which she (allegedly) said, “Oh sir, you don’t understand, it’s turtles all the way down.”

Al Gathafi Speaks

2006-08-26T11:58:00.000+01:00

Lybian despot Muammar al-Gathafi (to use what seems to be his preferred transliteration) has a blog. You can read his thoughts on how to solve the Kashmiri crisis, the African cultural revolution, and Fifa.

What a world.

Eating Out

2006-08-25T13:11:00.000+01:00

I don't eat out as much as I'd like to, which is probably no harm, but I got a kick out of Trevor White's Ten Commandments for dining out. For instance:

9. When a man is served before a woman, that also means you’re welcome to leave before paying. If you regard chivalry as ancient gibberish, you don’t deserve to eat well.

And he has a book out too.

I would, however, take issue with his magazine's list of 'Dublin's Top Ten Bars'. At the risk of losing lifelong friends, any top ten list that includes The International is rather suspect.

Incidentally, posting here will be light through the next few weeks as I prepare for the start of the academic year in September and work on some writing that's nearing deadlines.

War of the World

2006-08-24T22:58:00.000+01:00

A version of this article was published in the June/July issue of Magill Magazine.

War of the World, Niall Ferguson Penguin, £25, 816pp

Britain, it is often said, lacks intellectuals. Niall Ferguson is proof to the contrary. Drawing on a dazzling array of sources and fields as diverse as evolutionary psychology, economics, and European literature, War of the World aims at no less than a reframing of the standard historical narrative of the last hundred years.

Accounting for the sheer violence of the last century provides Ferguson with his focus. He breaks with standard narratives of great power rivalry and ideological conflict to posit ethnic division, economic instability, and imperial decline as the lenses through which causes of conflict can best be discerned. Along the way he positively revels in upending conventional wisdom, but neither Ferguson’s playfulness nor his weakness for whistle-stop television histories should mislead. This is a serious work of scholarship.

Ferguson has been best known for his innovative applications of economics analyses to history since revealing the explanatory force of the comparative cost at which countries in the First World War killed enemy soldiers. War of the World has much of the same. Checking the economic record against the course of events throws up telling insights, such as the revelation that for every nineteen tons of additional steel produced in the Stalinist period, approximately one Soviet citizen was killed, or that European stock markets and investor confidence in peace held up almost until the very last moments before war began in 1914. Though not all of the examples adduced relate to Ferguson’s arguments – he’s too much of a storyteller to discard irrelevant vignettes, which is either an irritant or a pleasure depending on your taste and time – by recreating investor expectations and checking the sequence of events against the rise and fall of economic fortunes he deftly dispenses with such canards as the Depression causing European fascism and the Great War being foreseen in advance.

Ferguson’s emphasis on imperial decline is particularly persuasive. While attributing war to imperialism is no new move, Ferguson fruitfully distinguishes between periods of imperial strength and stability, such as the late nineteenth century and its economic boom, and the later decline of empires in Eastern Europe and Asia. The unprecedented globalisation and growth of the nineteenth century would not, he argues, have been possible without empires. Similarly, twentieth century strife in Eastern Europe and East Asia are best explained by reference to imperial weakness not strength, with the incorrigible tendency towards ethnic division filling the resulting power vacuum. (Though a longstanding prophet of American imperial decline, Ferguson holds back from applying the logic to the future, but presumably sees a similarly dark future of regional conflict if the US retrenches as he expects it will have to.)

This economic approach combines with Ferguson’s grasp of grand strategy in War of the World’s most successful passage, an extended examination of the appeasement period of the 1930s. Specifically, Ferguson challenges the received view that Chamberlain had bought badly needed time at Munich to argue that Britain in fact lost its strategic edge. Weighing the economic, military, and strategy balances of 1939 and 1940 against those that existed in 1938, Ferguson cogently demonstrates that “the tragedy of 1938 is that the British and French governments so completely misread the balance of power at the very moment it tipped most strongly against Germany”, arguing that “rather than flying back and forth like a supplicant, Chamberlain should have sat tight in London, declining to take calls from Germany”.

Despite various moments of brilliance, one feels that the book could have used a most strong-minded editor. Though Ferguson reveals the work to have been ten years in the making, it has the feel occasionally of having been rushed to print, presumably to meet the television tie-in. Several of the Excel graphs are incompletely labelled and the footnotes were ditched at the last minute, which will frustrate anyone trained to check sources routinely. The required space could easily have been reclaimed by excising some of the less necessary detours through twentieth century history and concentrating on the arguments for the causes of conflict.

Nor does the most provocative claim get full play. Ferguson argues that far from marking the end of history and the ringing victory of liberal democracy, the twentieth century marked an epochal shift of power from the West towards the East. Despite the importance of this claim, the last fifty years of the century are covered at a gallop. Attempting both to reconceptualize the causes of twentieth century conflict and to demonstrate Western decline in the same volume is probably an instance of authorial overstretch. The trajectory of Ferguson’s output over the last decades suggests he may do the job properly later, which is something to look forward to if he does, but the volume at hand could have benefited from a tighter focus.

Written with verve and sprinkled with fascinating details, War of the World definitively recasts the shape of twentieth century history, putting 1989 in its place and demonstrating what it means to recognise that history did not end with the fall of communism.

First Things Blog

2006-08-21T21:56:00.000+01:00

This is just a plug for the excellent First Things blog. Thanks to the generosity of a friend I've been a subscriber for several years to the print issue and nothing makes my evening like arriving in to see a new issue has arrived. The blog started up a few months ago, and I seem to remember mentioning it at the time, but in the last month or so the number of contributors has increased sharply and it's now amazingly lively, all the more so as the magazine itself is usually unapologetically rich fare intellectually.

And if you're looking for the 'Beer Blessing' from the Rituale Romanum, they have it right here. (Yes, really!)

Misuses Of History

2006-08-21T09:11:00.000+01:00

I read Oxblog daily, and was rather surprised when doing the morning rounds clutching a restorative mug of coffee to see my own name. I remembered after a minute or two. Myself and Peter Nolan sent them a short piece on the misuses of recent Irish history when discussing Hezbollah.

Blogging From The Front

2006-08-20T21:05:00.000+01:00

Ross Frennet, known to some readers of this blog, is blogging from the front in Syria, Israel, and the Lebanon. Quite a way to spend a summer and quite an example of blogging adding value.

The International Community At Work

2006-08-18T00:05:00.000+01:00

France, leading the force, pledges two hundred troops. Germany none. Ireland says we won't send troops if, you know, they might get shot at and stuff. Makes you proud, doesn't it? Nothing like living in a pretend country for idyllic unreality.

Normally it takes a few months for the international community to demonstrably prove its failure. It's only taking days this time.

Israel should point to Hezbollah's continuing violations of the ceasefire arrangments, the inability of the Lebanese army to disarm it, the tragic farce of the 'international force', and resume the job it left unfinished at the soonest opportunity, this week, using the ground operations that proved militarily highly effective in the last days of the recent fighting.

It won't, but it should. As Hezbollah grows in strength and Iran in boldness, it will have to attempt the job again soon in any case, only not at a time of its choosing and against a resurgent enemy. Rarely is strategic logic so clear-cut, the enemy's intentions so openly laid out, and the inevitability of future conflict so transparent. Weakness of will and mendacious advice and pressure from abroad endanger Israel more and more gravely by the day. Hezbollah's paymasters are pursuing a nuclear bomb and have promised to destroy Israel, not once, but repeatedly and clearly. I haven't felt so alarmed by the state of the world since September 2001. Disaster is the norm in history, and peace never an entitlement but an achievement.

Update 1: And just for good measure, two states in the 'international force', Malaysia and Indonesia, don't recognise Israel's right to exist. Nice one Kofi.

Separating Bush From His Doctrine

2006-08-17T09:57:00.000+01:00

The Telegraph reports astonishing poll numbers from the Spectator. Along with a collapse in British confidence in President Bush and the trans-Atlantic alliance, the survey reveals that:

When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism only 12 per cent said it should be more conciliatory, compared with 53 per cent who thought it should become more "aggressive" and 24 per who wanted no change.

A quick observation. The poll reveals at the same time a very hawkish stance on the part of the British public generally, alongside deep antipathy to the US and President Bush. Importantly, the two are recognised as quite distinct. On the face of things, there is no good reason to read low levels of support for the US and Bush as an implied criticism of forward defence. On the contrary, a majority are looking for a more "aggressive" stance. How many of that majority are angry at the trans-Atlantic alliance precisely because they've not been assertive enough in the last three years? At least a substantial part, one would think.

As I read it, the poll probably shows up deep structural support for the basics of the Bush doctrine or preventive war, democratization, and fighting Islamist terror as a war rather than a crime problem. Those elements, assuming they're what the British public has in mind when calling for a more "'agressive' foreign policy", suggest that the Bush doctrine has a life beyond its creator.

Two and a half years is not a long time in a conflict that is likely to last as many decades if not longer, but it's only that long until the Bush administration will have ceded office and Blair's stay in power will have ended. But it would be foolish to imagine that international politics would be substantially different for that. Once you separate public support for forward defence from the administrations in power at the moment, deep support for taking the fight to the enemy shows up as a structural feature of public opinion. That, and the fact that the choices will be limited by the enormity of the threat, mean that a return to anything approaching 1990s 'normalcy' is simply not on the cards.

(Norman Podhoretz at Commentary Magazine has just published an important essay 'Is the Bush Doctrine Dead?' that puts things in historical context and persuasively argues for the enduring validity of the basics of the Bush Doctrine.)

Welcome To The Blogosphere

2006-08-17T00:21:00.000+01:00

Graham Neary is blogging. Knowing Graham to some extent I expect great things.