by Alex Evans | Dec 31, 2008 | Global system, London Summit, UK
Here in Britain, one Christmas present arrives a few days late each year: the declassification of Cabinet papers that are then made available to the National Archive under the ‘Thirty Year Rule‘. This year, the newly released documents are from 1978: the twilight period of Labour’s ill-fated Callaghan administration, famous for the ‘winter of discontent‘, when a torrent of industrial action meant that the rubbish went uncollected and the dead unburied.
You might suppose that it’s not the sort of anniversary that Gordon Brown will really want to be reminded of, not least given the obvious link back to Margaret Thatcher’s hugely successful election slogan of the time – ‘Labour isn’t working’ – and the fact that Callaghan’s administration had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout.
But superficial similarities aside, the crucial difference between late 70s Britain and late 00s Britain is that during the former, the pendulum had swung all the way to the ‘state’ or ‘public’ end of the spectrum – whereas today, we find it right over at the ‘market’ or ‘private’ end. Robert Skidelsky, writing in Prospect this month, refers to Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s The Cycles of American History, which describes this cyclical dynamic in detail:
[Schlesinger] defined a political economy cycle as “a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest.” The swing he identified was between “liberal” (what we would call social democratic) and “conservative” epochs. The idea of the “crisis” is central. Liberal periods succumb to the corruption of power, as idealists yield to time-servers, and conservative arguments against rent-seeking excesses win the day. But the conservative era then succumbs to a corruption of money, as financiers and businessmen use the freedom of de-regulation to rip off the public. A crisis of under-regulated markets presages the return to a liberal era.
As Skidelsky summarises, the 1870s saw the pendulum start to swing towards collectivism on the back of a global depression triggered by a collapse in food prices. Most industrialised countries began to raise tariffs; social protection systems were rapidly rolled out (although not in the US). The great depression of 1929-32 accelerated the process as Keynesian economics became orthodox. But by the 1970s, the pendulum was about to swing the other way, as governments pursued “free trade abroad and social democracy at home”:
The crisis of liberalism, or social democracy, unfolded with stagflation and ungovernability in the 1970s. It broadly fits Schlesinger’s notion of the “corruption of power.” The Keynesian/social democratic policymakers succumbed to hubris, an intellectual corruption which convinced them that they possessed the knowledge and the tools to manage and control the economy and society from the top. This was the malady against which Hayek inveighed in his classic The Road to Serfdom (1944). The attempt in the 1970s to control inflation by wage and price controls led directly to a “crisis of governability,” as trade unions, particularly in Britain, refused to accept them.
Large state subsidies to producer groups, both public and private, fed the typical corruptions of behaviour identified by the new right: rent-seeking, moral hazard, free-riding. Palpable evidence of government failure obliterated memories of market failure. The new generation of economists abandoned Keynes and, with the help of sophisticated mathematics, reinvented the classical economics of the self-correcting market. Battered by the crises of the 1970s, governments caved in to the “inevitability” of free market forces. The swing-back became worldwide with the collapse of communism.
But today, Skidelsky notes, the crisis is that of conservatism:
The financial crisis has brought to a head a growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of money. Neo-conservatism has sought to justify fabulous rewards to a financial plutocracy while median incomes stagnate or even fall; in the name of efficiency it has promoted the off-shoring of millions of jobs, the undermining of national communities, and the rape of nature. Such a system needs to be fabulously successful to command allegiance. Spectacular failure is bound to discredit it.
The situation we are in now thus puts into question the speed and direction of progress. Will there be a pause for thought, or will we continue much as before after a cascade of minor adjustments? The answer lies in the intellectual and moral sphere. Is economics capable of rethinking its core principles? What institutions, policies and rules are needed to make markets “well behaved”? Do we have the moral resources to challenge the dominance of money without reverting to the selfish nationalisms of the 1930s?
There’s no doubt that these are the right questions to be asking (David and I sketched out a first attempt to marshal some thoughts on this area in a paper we published just before the G20 summit in November). As Skidelsky notes, we could do worse than to aim for Keynes’s basic stance:
In terms of our pendulum analogy, he was someone who instinctively sought an equipoise: not in the timeless equilibrium of classical economics, but in a balance in political economy between freedom and control, national and international wellbeing, efficiency and morality. He was an Aristotelian, who believed that vices are virtues carried to excess. This is a good philosophy for today.
by Alex Evans | Dec 30, 2008 | Off topic
Here’s what we enjoyed reading this year:
David Steven – Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-First Century is a long book written by a big brain. It offers penetrating insights into the vicious and virtuous cycles of globalization, the changing role of the state, and the alliances we need to preserve some kind of international order. Display prominently in your office, even if you don’t get round to reading the thing.
Daniel Korski – My holiday book is Jonathan Powell’s Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland. Powell was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and responsible for pushing through Blair’s Northern Ireland agenda. The book details the time spent working behind the scenes of the Northern Ireland peace process. At a time when the West is being encouraged to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Powell’s’ account of the steps taken to build confidence and trust among all the parties, while moving towards the main aim, is both topical and instructive.
Richard Gowan – David Milne’s America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War is a brilliant portrait of a largely forgotten figure in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow – who rose to national security adviser under LBJ – was one of the most feted economists of his era, dominating thinking about economic development in a way that Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier can still only dream of. But on entering government he went berserk, demanding more and more war against North Vietnam and filtering out all the evidence that it wasn’t working. His story, told with great concision by a rising academic star, is a powerful cautionary tale about how theorists can go horribly astray when given a sniff of power – and how people who understand economics are usually particularly ill-suited to understand violence. It wasn’t quite the best book of the year, though. That was Kitty Hauser’s Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, May 2008), a spell-binding and utterly unexpected tale of how the pioneer of aerial archaeology in inter-war Britain succumbed to Communism. But this a blog for wonks not archaeologists.
Julian Evans – Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (published at the end of 2007, but the paperback came out this year so hopefully it qualifies). Taylor is a great historian of ideas, in the mould of Isaiah Berlin, building vast ideas-maps stretching centuries. In this book, he excavates the roots of secularism, and asks how it has changed our experience of the world. He’s particularly interesting on the move in the 16th and 17 centuries from an animist to a scientific world view, and the parallel shift in human identity from a porous self besieged by spirits to a buffered, isolated self that is cut off from nature and nature spirits, with a measure of autonomy from the natural world, but at the cost of loneliness and separation.
Mark Weston – I am currently writing my first book, so thoughts when reading are automatically dominated by the question of whether I could have written that. The book I most wish I’d written is Exterminate All The Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist. A coruscating but poetically written critique of colonialism in Africa, it convincingly traces a link from European abuse of Africans to 20th century genocides, and also makes understandable Africa’s continued failure to recover from this “monstrous intrusion.”
As for me, I’ve got three books of the year. First is Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power, which offers an incisive and hopeful vision of where the international development might be going next. The concern for effective states that’s been a growing theme in development thinking since 2005 is very much front and centre, but coupled with emphasis on the importance of citizens getting organised – politics is as important as institutions, in other words – and long term trends, above all scarcity issues. Second, Amanda Ripley’s brilliant The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster Strikes and Why, which is much the best discussion of individual level resilience I’ve seen to date.
And finally, a book from 1998 rather than 2008, but one which has lost none of its relevance in the intervening decade (and deserves a new edition in 2009): LT Evans’s masterly Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth. My first reaction on finding it wasn’t exactly upbeat, I’ll admit: I had already decided to call my Chatham House food pamphlet (out next month) ‘The Feeding of the Nine Billion’, so to encounter an almost eponymous book by an almost eponymous author seemed like a misfortune. But as I perused this erudite, readable and fantastically helpful tome, I realised that finding it was in fact one of my biggest strokes of luck in the project. If you’re interested in how we’ll feed a growing population at the same time as confronting the challenges of the 21st century, then this is the one must-read.
[Charlie Edwards has done his own top 10, such is the rate at which he devours tomes: you can find it here.]
by Charlie Edwards | Dec 22, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Last year I argued that: a quadripartite parliamentary select committee on national security should be created – bringing together existing select committees that focus on UK national interests, security and defence policy. The good news is that this idea is currently being toyed with in Westminster and Whitehall. The bad news is that I’m not sure our politicians are really up to overseeing such a complex system and ensuring it is made accountable to the British public.
I’ve been trawling through the uncorrected evidence of a session on national security and resilience. The evidence session was undertaken by the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence. In the hot seats were Rt Hon Bob Ainsworth (then a Minister at the MoD), Admiral Lord West (Minister for Security and Counter-Terrorism), and a range of senior officials from Government departments. I don’t think I have ever read a more thoroughly depressing, lightweight, evidence session, which not only fails to ask the important questions but largely fails to hold Ministers and officials to account. Below are the more amusing questions and exchanges from the session.
No.1: Know your brief (Ministers)
Chairman: National Security Strategy, who owns it?
Mr Ainsworth: The lead department for national security in the United Kingdom is the Home Office.
Mr Jenkin: (HCDC): Does not the Home Office lead inevitably lead us to a rather narrow definition of what a National Security Strategy is, given that, for example, our foreign policy is crucial to our national security?
Lord West: If I could just clarify – the Home Office does not lead on the whole National Security Strategy. We are responsible for the counter-terrorist aspect of it and specific Home Office duties.
Mr Jenkin: That would explain why the NSS is a bit of a Christmas tree because there is no single minister responsible for creating coherence in the National Security Strategy?
No.2: Losing the war on terror.
Mr Holloway: You have got doctrines, plans, committees, initiatives, X, Y and Z and of course it all sounds absolutely marvellous, but the reality is that we are not winning the war on terror. Do you not think we could be doing rather more in terms of dealing with the drivers of radicalisation and be a little more sensitive in our foreign policy because it might actually make your job rather easier?
No.3: ‘Overarching title’ – what a great title!
Mr Jenkins: When I heard the term “overarching strategy” I thought that is a great title, a great term. Within that do we have different departments reporting, like stovepipes, up to the top, or have the departments changed their policy, and are they working closer with each other so there are departments working at every level? How has that approach changed the operation of the MoD; and has the MoD felt its role in working through the Home Office is somewhat restrained; or is it quite happy to do that; or would it like more contacts, please?
No.4: Mum’s the word
John Smith: Without giving away any secrets, can you say hand on heart that this new joined-up approach to the national security threats on our country has actually prevented or deterred actual threat of attack or security threats against us, since you have been taking this new approach?
No.5: The Government’s ‘dilusional’ talk
Mr Holloway: Admiral, I worry about this because I think some of this talk is possibly dilusional. If you talk about having a joined-up approach in Afghanistan, which I know a tiny bit about; I lose faith in everything else you are saying about what else is happening behind the scenes. As a military man you and, I guess, I, in my pathetic military career, were always told if you wanted to win an insurgency you did not need coordination forums, focus groups, secretariat, yet more self-licking lollipop process; we were told that you had to have unity of command and unity of purpose. Do we have either in the UK at the moment on this – unity of command and unity of purpose?
No.6: Where is this coordinator?
Mr Jenkin: We have mentioned Robert Hannigan a few times and he is this coordinator. Why is he not here answering for the government on this?
No.7: Red teaming for beginners
Mr Holloway: Do you have groups of people who sit around working up potential scenarios of things that terrorists might do, areas that are vulnerable?
No.8: Spot the question
Mr Jenkin: My question follows on from this which is that we all know from the polling evidence that the public does not really like being stirred up about this subject. It makes politicians get accused of trying to frighten the public for some sort of political reasons and it is regarded with great suspicion. Is there a danger that, because we all want to avoid doing that, we are actually not giving this the profile in government that it really deserves and that we do not want to have a national security minister in the Cabinet because that would add to the anxiety of people and raise people’s suspicions more, but have we actually not got to face it and have we also not got to recognise that the public need to be made aware of these dangers because, the more aware the public is of these dangers and risks, the more alive they are to those risks and in fact the safer we will be?
by Alex Evans | Dec 6, 2008 | Conflict and security
Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable (which I’ve just started and which is shaping up to be very good) has an interesting observation on her blog about disaster behaviour during the Mumbai attacks. She starts by quoting a New York Times article on the attacks as follows:
As the city faced one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in the nation’s history, many ordinary citizens…displayed extraordinary grace….[At] the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel, a sous chef named Nitin Minocha and his co-workers shepherded more than 200 restaurant diners into a warren of private club rooms called The Chambers. For the rest of the night they prepared snacks, served soda, fetched cigarettes and then, when told it was safe, tried to escort the diners out through the back. They wanted to make sure their guests, many of them Mumbai’s super-elite, were as comfortable as possible. “The only thing was to protect the guests,” said the executive chef, Hemant Oberoi. “I think my team did a wonderful job in doing that. We lost some lives in doing that.”
As Ripley observes, the interesting thing here is that,
In catastrophes, human beings tend to hold fast to the roles they held before anything went wrong. Hotel guests, like airplane passengers, tend to play the part of the passive, obedient victims. Employees–even ones earning poverty level wages–tend to feel a profound sense of responsiblity for the guests they were serving cocktails to just moments before. A study of the Beverly Hill Supper Club fire found that about 60% of the employees tried to help in some way–either by directing the guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17% of the guests helped. People were remarkably loyal to their identities, and so it was in Mumbai.
Her conclusion:
Imagine, just for kicks, if our culture pushed everyone to have an identity as someone who helped, who took action in the face of terror and confusion, who was responsible for the safety of others. Imagine how crowded the trenches would be.
