April 13, 2013 · 3:30 pm

Kissinger on North Korea

Yesterday Henry Kissinger was at Yale to share a bit of his wisdom at a conference on American diplomacy. He had something to say about pretty much every part of the world, but what intrigued me most was his take on North Korea. The real danger, he argued, lies not in a possible attack from the North, but rather in the consequences of a collapse of the regime in Pyongyang. He is certain that North Korea will never start a war, because doing so would be suicidal. Its military capabilities are enough to inflict damage on Seoul, but a war would certainly lead to defeat and an immediate overthrow of the regime. The latter, he argues, will inevitably happen within the next 15 years or so, war or not. The regime is simply too inefficient and lacking in legitimacy.

Once the regime is gone, South Korea will be unwilling to accept a Chinese client state to replace the Kim-dictatorship. China, on the other hand, will certainly not accept a unified, pro-American Korea. This is not only due to security concerns, but also because of the sacrifices China made during the Korean War. According to Kissinger, this constellation could be a classic case of a regional crisis becoming a global one by sucking in China and the United States. Right now, Washington and Beijing should not get too distracted by Kim Jong-Un’s threats and use the crisis to start talks on the real problem: What to do with post-dictatorial North Korea.

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April 12, 2013 · 6:42 pm

Reading Tip

Interesting article by Cambridge historian Brendan Simms, in which he argues that the “German Question” has dominated European politics since the 15th century and is at the heart of the EU’s current crisis. By that he means the fact that Europe’s countries were almost always preoccupied with the fact that Germany was either too strong or too weak. I am not entirely convinced, after all a similar argument could be made that all of European politics has always revolved around the French or Russian question, depending on your perspective. But an interesting read nonetheless.

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/europe/2013/03/cracked-heart-old-world?fb_action_ids=10100466727466823&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=timeline_og&action_object_map=%2210100466727466823%22%3A313329792126024&action_type_map=%2210100466727466823%22%3A%22og.likes%22&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

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April 2, 2013 · 10:04 am

Why We Need a More Critical Perspective on Polish Partisans in World War II

I case you missed it (I guess you probably have), a little diplomatic row has been going on between Poland and Germany over the past two weeks or so. Bone of contention is a three-part TV film that recently aired on the German channel ZDF, called “Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers). The film follows the lives of five young Germans between the years 1941 and 1945. Two of them become soldiers and end up committing atrocities in the Soviet Union, one of them sleeps with a Gestapo-commander to advance her career, one of them signs up for the red cross, where she denounces a Jew, and the fifth, a Jew, escapes from the train to a death camp, joins Polish partisans and survives the war. The film’s message is simple: War can bring out the worst in people, and in some way or another, it fundamentally changes everyone.

The film has caused a positive stir in Germany because it urges people to critically reconsider the role their own grandparents played in the war. In Poland, however, it led to an angry outcry. The reason is the film’s depiction of the Polish partisans of the AK (Armia Krajowa, Home Army), the largest nationalist partisan group in Poland. In the film, AK fighters go on anti-Semitic rants, claiming to “drown Jews like cats”, decide to let Jews die in a stranded train rather than open the doors and let them out, and kick the newly admitted Viktor out of the group once they realise he is a Jew. The Polish ambassador to Berlin expressed his “shock” over such a “grotesquely one-sided” depiction of Polish resistance, claiming that the movie is trying to blame other nationalities for the destruction of the European Jews, thus somehow lessening German guilt. Multiple TV networks and newspapers have joined in on the criticism, largely echoing the ambassador’s arguments.

A look at the historical facts indicates that the filmmakers have done their research diligently. Numerous official statements by the AK leadership made it unequivocally clear that Jews were not considered to be part of the Polish Nation. On November 10 1942, the AK’s commander-in-chief set out the group’s position vis-à-vis the Jews: Active resistance against Nazi mass murders would only begin once they systematically targeted Poles (i.e. not Jews).  Although some exceptions are known, Jews were generally deemed unreliable and not admitted into the AK, and the group’s leadership similarly refused to absorb Jewish partisan groups. Antony Polonsky, a well-respected historian of Jews in Poland, argues that the leadership “was not sympathetic to the plight of individual Jewish fugitives, seeing them as security risks likely to endanger its own position.” Furthermore, AK-commanders often referred to Jews as “Bandits”, echoing Nazi-terminology. In his survey of over 9000 testimonies of Jewish survivors after 1945, Polonsky finds that a majority of the encounters Jews had with the AK were negative. Several statements claim that AK-fighters searched for Jews and murdered them. A Jewish man called Zelman Baum claimed that he “feared the Poles no less than the Germans”.  Karolina Kremer saw her entire family murdered by Polish partisans, only to face them again a year later, in 1944:

AK  bandits hunted us like wild animals … I came across a wall of AK people. (The leader) asked me to come closer to me and came up behind me with a rifle. “Now you’re a dirty Jewess who has fallen into my hands. From my hands you will surely not escape.” I started to cry horribly pleading with him to spare my life. I knelt down and started kissing his legs hoping he would not kill such a young person. “No one will help you. Your dead body will be lying here”, he said, showing me the place. I started screaming at the top of my lungs, got up and ran into the nearby shrubs. He shot at me several times unsuccessfully.

There were also cases in with AK fighters helped Jews, but they seem to be the minority. In sum, it would have almost been a distortion of history had the film not depicted the AK fighters as anti-Semites.

Hundreds of thousands of Poles risked their lives during the war hiding Jews, and their heroic acts must never be forgotten. However, it is equally clear that anti-Semitism was rampant in Polish society, and nowhere more than within the ranks of the AK. The film does not blame the AK for the Holocaust, not one bit. It simply points out that the AK’s anti-Semitism made the destruction of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis easier to carry out.

The unwillingness of many Poles to accept a negative depiction of the AK is part of a dangerous trend in Eastern Europe: The nationalist hero cult. While Poles are unwilling to see the AK-fighters as anything other than knights in shining armour, Russians have increasingly reverted to the old Stalin cult, ignoring his mass murders and praising him for his role in defeating Nazism. The surprising popularity of proposals to change the name Volgograd back to Stalingrad is just the most recent example. This cult is dangerous because it leads to a propensity to glorify totalitarianism (in the case of Stalin) and racist nationalism (in the case of the AK). Some of the women and men who bravely fought against the Nazis murdered Jews. Accepting this may be painful for some, but refusing to do so only makes things worse in the long run.

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March 24, 2013 · 11:42 am

Reading Tip

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-diamonds-are-a-sham-2013-3

This article explains how the fact that everyone today buys diamond rings for their engagement is the result of one incredibly successful ad campaign by De Beers in 1938. If you consider the imprint global demand for diamonds has left on post-colonial Africa (Sierra Leone is the most famous case), a re-evaluation of the role ad agencies play in global politics might be in order. Interesting stuff.

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March 22, 2013 · 10:29 am

The rise of corporate money in politics

A couple of weeks ago, I heard the former governor and ambassador Jon Huntsman talk about the current state of U.S. politics. He argued that the biggest problem facing America’s democracy is the disproportionate influence of private money on politicians, which he effectively labelled as corruption. This claim was quite surprising. Not so much because it is new (it certainly isn’t), but because it came from a Republican. After all, the supposedly pro-business GOP has always received the lion’s share of corporate donations, a fact that put Mitt Romney at a significant financial advantage in last year’s presidential election.

Marxists tend to argue that democratic governments have always been in the hands of big capitalists, and yet the case of the United States puts this claim into question. The current influence of corporate money on politics in Washington is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon and the culmination of a development that began less than 50 years ago. The founder of modern corporate political activism was Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, vice president of General Electric in the 1940s and 50s. The post-war years were a time when unions were stronger than ever before and Keynesian demand management had pretty much become the consensus choice of economic policy. Boulware perceived this liberal consensus as an existential threat to the very future of American prosperity. Union leaders, he argued, were socialists that prevented the country “from progressing to that better material and spiritual America” of individual freedom.

His response to this threat were a number of management tactics that became known as Boulwarism. As GE vice-president, he rejected any kind of compromise with unions and spread anti-union propaganda among his employees. But, most importantly, he supported conservative politicians such as Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan received campaign donations from Boulware in 1966, and the then-governor of California wrote a letter to Boulware thanking him and promising that he would “fight back against government’s increasing lust for power over free enterprise”. Boulware urged other businessmen to follow his lead. Many did, and he gained an immense influence in American conservative circles. His legacy was, in the words of historian Kimberly Phillips-Fein, to instill “the sense in a part of the business community that ideological and political engagement was an appropriate, legitimate and absolutely essential part of being a businessman”.

While Boulware may have provided the ideological foundation for today’s corporate involvement in politics, the overall financial commitment by companies was still comparatively small. This changed in the 1970s. Much like their predecessors in the post-war years, many businessmen in the early 70s felt threatened by the New Left, student radicalism and the still persistent Keynesian consensus.

The lawyer and future supreme court judge Lewis Powell, who at the time sat in the board of directors of several large corporations, argued that “the overriding first need for businessmen is to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival”. The conclusion he drew from this observation was that corporations needed to use their funds to influence politics. He published these views in a memorandum that circulated widely among conservatives. In the following years, conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation sprung up, financed by businessmen who, as in the case of Joseph Coors, were greatly impressed by the Powell Memorandum. The new corporate activism of the 1970s was perhaps most visible in the growth of lobbying. In 1971 only 175 companies had registered lobbyists, eight years later 650 had. Similarly, the number of PACs grew from 89 in 1974 to 821 in 1978. The 1970s also saw the transformation of the Chamber of Commerce into an effective lobbying organisation. The Chamber had 1400 Congressional Action Committees with 20 members each, who were in charge of lobbying local legislators.

The third big transformation in corporate political involvement after Boulwarism and the 1970s obviously took place in the wake of the Citizens United v FEC verdict of 2010. We all know the story of the rise of Super PACs and I won’t describe it in detail here. What is interesting is a comparison of the three transformations. Both Boulwarism and the Powell Memorandum were born out of a strong sense of threat and general weakness. Boulware and Powell believed that government and public opinion were controlled by left wing radicals and by organised labour, and that Businessmen had to pour their money into politics if they wanted to save the free market.

A case can be made that the Super PACs are ballooning in a similar environment. One only has to look at Donald Trump’s post-election twitter rant to understand how threatened many conservative businessmen feel by the most liberal president since who knows when (LBJ?). (http://mashable.com/2012/11/06/trump-reacts-to-election/) We tend to view corporations’ influence on politicians as a sign of their strength, and in a way it is. But history shows us that the political activism of businesses is just as much an expression of their perceived weakness.

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March 3, 2013 · 7:08 pm

Horror Movies as a Mirror of History

 

by Johanna Wilson

Horror films in the silent era had their limits as far as subtlety went. They couldn’t do creepy music, footsteps, strange breathing. So, it was with the advent of sound in the 1930s that we start to see horror movies make their mark. Monsters and murderers no longer had to stand on screen looking vaguely menacing for the audience to notice them, and plots started to become more developed. Early horror films were mostly set in distant lands and times, where men in cloaks with thick accents waited to pounce. The greater technical effects available enabled the creation of two horror powerhouses, Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931) and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster (1931), whose influential performances you’ll at the very least know through their parodies. With an unsurprisingly large amount of the national budgets of Europe going to World War Two in the 1940s, Hollywood dominated horror film production. These films continued to stress how scary the rest of the world was, with monsters standing in for war as reasons for not leaving America. Even then you weren’t safe. Go somewhere as seemingly innocuous as Wales, you might end up as a werewolf (The Wolf Man, 1941). Alternatively the horror could strike at home; marry a Serbian instead of an all-American girl and you really only have yourself to blame when she turns out to be a cat monster (Cat People, 1942).

The 1950s saw constant fear of nuclear war. This meant one thing – monster movies from the likes of stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen; films about science, bombs and technology that goes too far. This was the age of horror B-movies, where quality became less important as they mainly targeted teenagers. These movies were about action; comprehensible plots and realistic monsters were strictly optional. 1954 saw Ishiro Honda making the first kaiju (roughly ‘giant monster’) movie – Godzilla. Yet it’s rather more solemn watching a film about a monster mutated by nuclear radiation destroying Tokyo when you consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been obliterated by nuclear bombs less than a decade before. The message you get from all these films is about not playing God.

The 1960s saw the sexual revolution, cults, the rise of acid and a lot of other things that had people terrified, while the 1970s saw a general malaise. Horror had come back home. It was no longer the atomic monsters or the creepy foreigners you needed to look out for. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1967) helped make the zombie genre what it is, but is ultimately an indictment of everything he saw as wrong with American society. The breakdown of the family pervades these films; you can’t trust your spouse (Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining) or your kids (The Omen, The Exorcist). This period was also seeing the economic recovery and growth of cinema in other countries – the horror scene was becoming more varied.

The 1980s were when an ability to create better special effects and the need to keep shocking audiences caused the emergence of the ‘slasher’ film. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Friday the 13th and so on had one unrealistically strong psychopath killing loads of people in pretty graphic ways. Horror movies were as explicit as possible, and were appealing specifically to horror fans through endless sequels. So, what were directors in the 1990s to do but turn away from supernaturally strong and comically OTT murderers, and start going for more realistic serial killers? Silence of the Lambs, Scream and Se7en brought the horror home to us. The bad guys weren’t going to get us in our dreams, but they were smart, they could be charming and they were real. Their humanity was what made them terrifying. Then at some time after the millennium, we decided that we’d seen it all before, and thus rose the ‘torture porn’ genre. Heavy on torture and nudity, light on plot. You know the kind: Hostel, any of the numerous Saw movies, The Human Centipede. Movies that you watch with friends and then have no desire to ever re-watch. Film-makers also started to remake older horror movies like their lives depended on it. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Zombies made a huge comeback, from Shaun of the Dead to the Resident Evil films. There’s been a huge rise in foreign horror movies reaching our screens: k-horror (Korean) and j-horror (Japanese) are two of the big ones, giving us strange ghostly girls and psychological breakdowns (The Ring, Tale of Two Sisters).

At the end of the day, horror films are like the best monsters – they just refuse to die. The horror genre adapts to each generation’s fears. It used to be technology could save you, now your mobile phone and TV can be haunted. Zombies used to be the shambling undead raised by voodoo. Now they’re created by contagious super-viruses. Monsters may not be made with atomic bombs any more, but toxic waste dumping and other eco-crimes are doing the same job. Vampires are still hanging out in our bedrooms, but now instead of wanting us as their undead brides, they’re… Actually no, wait, they still want to marry us but now that’s romantic. Apparently.

This article first appeared in The Bubble, an online student newspaper at Durham University.

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February 23, 2013 · 2:14 pm

Will the Eurozone Collapse? Lessons from the 19th Century

Not a week went by in 2012 without some much-echoed warning about the Eurozone’s imminent collapse. Every election in some European fringe state, every meeting of the ECB board, every phone call by Angela Merkel was interpreted as an event that would either save or doom the common currency. Behind this panic lay the belief, regularly expressed in The Economist’s briefings, that the Eurozone was so flawed in its construction that it either had to choose the path of radical reform and become some form of fiscal union, or break apart.

Surprisingly, the crisis of the European treasury bond markets appears to be over now, and yet the Eurozone has neither collapsed nor transformed itself into a fiscal union. This development defies the logic of everything we have read over the past year. And yet, a look at the 19th century indicates that a breakup of the Euro was perhaps never as likely as most journalists and economists liked to claim.

The Euro is usually portrayed as a bold experiment without precedent. This view ignores the fact that much of 19th century Europe had something of a common currency for many decades: The Latin Monetary Union. Last summer, I wrote a lengthy feature on the union for Die Welt am Sonntag. Those who can read German can take a look at it here: http://www.welt.de/finanzen/article108413049/Schon-1908-tricksten-die-Griechen-beim-Geld.html.

The Latin Monetary Union was formed by Belgium, France, Italy and Switzerland in 1865 and soon included Greece, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Austria-Hungary. Unlike the Euro, back then the coins of each state could keep their name, but they became mutually exchangeable at a fixed rate of 1:1.

The union soon slid into serious crisis because, guess what, fiscally irresponsible Greece and Italy abused the union’s flawed construction for their own financial gain. I will spare you the economic details (you can read more about it in Luca Einaudi’s “From the franc to the ‘Europe’: the attempted transformation of the Latin Monetary Union into a European Monetary Union, 1865-1873“, in Journal of Economic History, Vol. 53, No.2, 2000), but essentially the coins were based on a bimetallic standard that overvalued silver. Italy and Greece, chronically on the verge of bankruptcy, printed a myriad of silver coins and paper banknotes that soon led to an outflow of coins into the union’s other member states, where they caused inflation.

The states of the south lived above their means, and the fiscally prudent states of the north, in this case Belgium and France, paid the bill. The nature of public opinion in the latter was quite similar to that in Germany today, and Belgium came very close to leaving the union at least once. The union never really worked, and yet it weathered numerous financial crises and stayed intact until World War I. This longevity was due to the fact that a breakup would have cost France and Belgium dearly, since the overvalued silver coins would have immediately lost a lot of value.

Even though the union was dysfunctional and in an almost permanent state of crisis, it lasted for more than 30 years after Belgium first threatened exit and was only destroyed in the wake of the disastrous First World War that took down the old European economic order.

There are many differences between the Latin Monetary Union and the Euro and I do not mean to imply that the Euro will last a long time because its predecessor did. Compared to the Euro, the LMU was a rather loose network that didn’t even apply to banknotes. But what the example of the LMU shows us is that a monetary union can be quite resilient even if it doesn’t really work. As long as the political will is there and the cost of breakup significant enough, we shouldn’t be surprised if it survives without radically reforming itself. It took a World War to break up the Latin Monetary Union, and it may take a lot more than an election victory by Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday to doom the Euro.

 

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February 11, 2013 · 2:40 pm

Not the first Pope named Benedict to resign

Given how old and frail pretty much every Pope tends to get at some point, it is surprising how rare it is for  them to step down for reasons of bad health. A couple of Papal resignations are known from the middle ages, but none of them had any apparent connection to health. In 1415, Pope Gregory XII resigned in an attempt to end a schism in the church. In 1294, Pope Celestine stepped down after only six months in office, apparently because he didn’t enjoy his new job.

The most interesting case dates from the 11th century. In 1032, a man with the remarkable name Teophylactus of Tusculum was named Pope Benedict IX at the age of only 20. He became one of the most scandalous Popes ever, supposedly holding orgies in the Papal palace on regular occasions. Some sources suggest that he was openly gay.

In 1045, his godfather John Gratian paid Benedict a large sum of money to get him to resign. Benedict agreed and stepped down. But shortly after he changed his mind, returned to Rome with an army and deposed his successor, none other than John Gratian himself (now Pope Gregory VI). Benedict was deposed by the German king Henry III in 1046 but became Pope once again in 1047 after his successor had died. German troops intervened and kicked him out of the Papal palace in 1048, and he was finally excommunicated a year later.

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February 9, 2013 · 1:05 am

Mali’s Crisis and the History of State Failure in Africa

The French military intervention in the civil war in Mali has drawn numerous comparisons to the European and American engagement in Afghanistan. In both cases, Western powers sent soldiers into more or less failed states to fight violent Muslim extremists in remote and almost inhospitable areas. The warnings that Mali could become a second Afghanistan echo the fear of a drawn out conflict that cannot be won by conventional means. While the similarities between the two cases are striking, the crisis in Mali is in many ways distinctly African: Its story of state failure is typical of the continent’s post-colonial history.

In his book “States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control” Jeffrey Ira Herbst, a professor of international relations and political science at Princeton University, offers an intriguing historical explanation for why Mali is too weak to control its own territory. His book is based on Charles Tilly’s famous argument that effective states are a consequence of war. In order to beat their enemies in combat, rulers have to collect taxes, raise armies and build up an infrastructure. In other words: War creates a strong incentive to build up a functioning administrative apparatus. This incentive, Herbst argues, was never present in Africa.

In Europe, high population densities created a need for agricultural land and led rulers to constantly fight over territory, which in turn led them to improve their state structures. In contrast, population densities in Africa have always been considerably lower. Fighting over territory simply wasn’t worth the effort in most cases and in this more peaceful environment African rulers rarely had an incentive to create effective state structures. This weakness of African administrative structures persisted through the colonial period. The Imperial powers had divided up Africa amongst themselves and largely refrained from fighting over territory. This lack of warfare combined with the European powers’ desire to run their colonies on the cheap meant that the imperial rulers saw no pressing need to extend and improve their administrative structures. In consequence, Africa’s colonial states had little more than formal control over most of their territories.

Upon independence, Africa’s newly founded states quickly decided to keep their boundaries from colonial times. Their own political and economic weakness and the unwillingness of the international community to tolerate state-on-state military aggression gave African leaders a strong disincentive to attack their neighbouring states. Few African countries thus faced threats from abroad and in consequence war as a state strengthening factor continued to play only a negligible role. According to Tilly, the weakness of African states such as Mali boils down to the fact that their borders have been uncontested.

Tilly’s argument is certainly controversial. Explaining the weakness of African states simply with demography and geography leaves out important ethnic and cultural factors. But his claim that the presence of external threats is crucial to state formation is compelling and can certainly explain part of Mali’s predicament. For decades, Mali’s rulers faced no threat to their territorial integrity from abroad. Aid money was always there to fill government coffers, and staying in power was merely a question of appeasing the urban population and military elites. In consequence, it is not surprising that the improvement of effective administrative structures into the poor north never happened.

The rebellion of the northern Touareg suddenly changed everything. The influx of heavily armed fighters for the first time created a foreign force strong enough to threaten the Malian state. In consequence, the task of creating a strong Malian state has suddenly become extremely urgent. The military coup in the capital Bamako in early 2012 was justified with the need to create a stronger government to counter the threat from the North. While the Putschists did little to actually strengthen the state, their actions indicate that Mali’s elites have realized that something has to change.

Paradoxically, the rebellion posed both an existential threat to Mali and a unique opportunity to reform its state once and for all. For a time it seemed as if Mali’s elites had their backs against the wall and had no choice but to try radical reform. After all, the Malian government in its current form was certainly unable to beat the rebels. The French military intervention has removed the existential threat posed by the Islamist rebels for now, but it has also removed a strong incentive to reform. Mali’s government now knows that it does not have to improve its administrative apparatus to ensure its own survival as long as the French are there to save it. Francois Hollande’s intervention has saved Mali in the short run, but it may well have doomed it for the future.

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