• Robert Marks [2010]:  A timeline of the Global Financial Crisis. (Initial version published in the Australian Journal of Management, and since updated.)
• Larissa MacFarquhar [2010]:  The deflationist:  How Paul Krugman found politics.  The New Yorker, 2010-03-01, pp. 38-49
• John Lanchester [2009]:  Outsmarted:  high finance vs. human nature.  The New Yorker, 2009-06-01, pp. 83-87.
• Anon [2009]: The other-wordly philosophers.  The Economist, 2009-07-18/24, pp. 70-72.
• Anon [2009]: Efficiency and beyond.  The Economist, 2009-07-18/24, pp. 73-74.
• John Cassidy [2010]:  After the Blow-Up:  Laissez-faire economists do some soul-searching – and finger-pointing.  The New Yorker, 2010-01-11, pp. 28-33.
• Paul Krugman [2009]: How did economists get it so wrong? The New York Times, 2009-09-06.
• J. Doyne Farmer and Duncan Foley [2009]: The economy needs agent-based modeling. Nature, 460, 685-686 (2009-08-06).
• Mark Buchanan [2009]: Economics: meltdown modeling. Nature, 460, 680-682 (2009-08-06).
• Jonathan Jarvis [2009]:  Crisis of Credit (Animation).

We can do other things for Afghanistan but the West – in particular its armies, development agencies and diplomats – are not as powerful, knowledgeable or popular as we pretend. Our officials cannot hope to predict and control the intricate allegiances and loyalties of Afghan communities or the Afghan approach to government. But to acknowledge these limits and their implications would require not so much an anthropology of Afghanistan, but an anthropology of ourselves.

The cures for our predicament do not lie in increasingly detailed adjustments to our current strategy. The solution is to remind ourselves that politics cannot be reduced to a general scientific theory, that we must recognize the will of other peoples and acknowledge our own limits. Most importantly, we must remind our leaders that they always have a choice.

That is not how it feels. European countries feel trapped by their relationship with NATO and the United States. Holbrooke and Obama feel trapped by the position of American generals. And everyone – politicians, generals, diplomats and journalist – feels trapped by our grand theories and beset by the guilt of having already lost over a thousand NATO lives, spent a hundred billion dollars and made a number of promises to Afghans and the West which we are unlikely to be able to keep.

So powerful are these cultural assumptions, these historical and economic forces and these psychological tendencies, that even if every world leader privately concluded the operation was unlikely to succeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the US or its allies halting the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the years to come.  Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa may have been in a similar position during the Third Crusade.  Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson certainly was in 1963. Europe is simply in Afghanistan because America is there. America is there just because it is. And all our policy debates are scholastic dialectics to justify this singular but not entirely comprehensible fact.

Australia has had one other PM born in England (Joseph Cook), two born in Scotland (George Reid, Andrew Fisher) and one born in Chile (Chris Watson, although he thought he had been born in New Zealand).  It should be noted that, despite Australia’s historical links with Britain, the Australian High Court has ruled that Britain is a foreign power under the Australian Constitution, which prohibits members of parliament being citizens of foreign powers.

Australia’s very first PM, Edmund Barton, was born in Australia, indeed in the inner-city suburb of Glebe,  Sydney.  A person living in Glebe would now find themselves represented by women at every level of government:

Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney:  Clover Moore

Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for the Electorate of Balmain:  Verity Firth

Deputy Premier of NSW: Carmel Tebbutt

Premier of NSW: Kristina Keneally

Governor of NSW:  Marie Bashir

Member of the Commonwealth House of Representatives for the Federal Division of Sydney: Tanya Plibersek

Prime Minister:  Julia Gillard

Governor-General of Australia:  Quentin Bryce

Queen of Australia and Head of State:  Queen Elizabeth II.

And in this list, the Premier of NSW, Kristina Keneally was born in the USA, while Marie Bashir is of Lebanese descent and Tanya Plibersek of Slovenian.

Technorati Tags: Julia Gillard, Billy Hughes, David Lloyd-George

• A successful single European currency requires a single European monetary policy.
• A successful single European monetary policy requires a single European fiscal policy.
• A successful single European fiscal policy requires fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another.
• Fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another can only be undertaken over the long term by European institutions having democratic legitimacy.
• To achieve democratic legitimacy for European institutions, the nations of Europe will require full political union.

This is not a new argument.  I first heard it put by Zambian economist Chiselebwe Ng’andwe in a paper read to a meeting of the African Association of Political Science in Salisbury (later Harare), Zimbabwe, in 1981, talking about regional economic unions in Africa.   In today’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins refers back to a book about European integration by Larry Seidentop, published in 2000, which apparently makes a similar case about Europe.

Why is this argument not, then, widely understood?  Is it that some ideas are too comprehensible – in other words, apparently lacking in complexity or subtlety – to be understood by intelligent people? Or is that the political forces which benefit from the non-democratic European status quo are so strong as to prevent the adoption of democratic structures, and to muzzle the arguments for them?  As I recall, Ng’andwe’s talk was received very coldly by his audience, most of whom were keen on economic unions (between African countries), while maintaining national sovereignty in all other respects.

References:

Chiselebwe Ng’andwe [1981]:  Problems of Economic Integration in Africa.  Paper presented to the Fourth Bi-annual Meeting of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS 1981).  Salisbury, Zimbabwe:  May 1981.

Larry Seidentop [2000]:  Democracy in Europe.  London, UK: Penguin.

Technorati Tags: Larry Seidentop, Chiselebwe Ng’andwe

Given their diverse backgrounds, it would be fascinating to hear Stewart and Hunt debate the legacies of empire on modern Britain, and how their respective constituencies – at opposite extremes of the rural-city divide – can both prosper.  Personally, I believe that commercial development of the environmental and energy sector is the only way that manufacturing in the old-world will survive this century, and this is also a sector with the potential to better connect city and country (eg, through the deployment of small-scale power-generating plants).    A web-dialog or a joint TV series, anyone?

References:

Tristam Hunt [2009]: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. (London, UK;  Allen Lane).  I reviewed this book briefly here.

Previous posts on books and articles by Rory Stewart here, here and here.

Technorati Tags: House of Commons, Tristam Hunt, Rory Stewart

This post is to mark the passing of Don Day (1924-2010), former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the so-called “Bearpit”, roughest of Australia’s 15 parliamentary assemblies) and former NSW Labor Minister.   I knew Don when he was my local MLA in the 1970s and 1980s, when he won a seat in what was normally ultra-safe Country Party (now National Party) country – first, the electorate of Casino, and then, Clarence.  Indeed, he was for a time the only Labor MLA in the 450 miles of the state north of Newcastle.  His win was repeated several times, and his seat was instrumental in Neville Wran’s suprise 1-seat majority in May 1976, returning Labor to power in NSW after 11 years in opposition, and after a searing loss in the Federal elections of December 1975.   In his role as Minister for Primary Industries and Decentralisation, Don was instrumental in saving rural industries throughout NSW.   Far North Coast dairy farmers were finally allowed to sell milk to Sydney households, for example, breaking the quota system, a protectionist economic racket which favoured only a minority of dairy farmers and that was typical of the policies of the Country Party.  Similarly, his actions saved the NSW sugar industry from closure.   NSW Labor’s rural policies were (and still are) better for the majority of people in the bush than those of the bush’s self-proclaimed champions.

Like many Labor representatives of his generation, Don Day had fought during WW II, serving in the RAAF.  After the war, he established a small business in Maclean.   He was one of the most effective meeting chairmen I have encountered:  He would listen carefully and politely to what people were saying, summarize their concerns fairly and dispassionately (even when he was passionate himself on the issues being discussed), and was able to identify quickly the nub of an issue or a way forward in a complex situation.  He could usually separate his assessment of an argument from his assessment of the person making it, which helped him be dispassionate.  Although The Grafton Daily Examiner has an obit here, I doubt he will be remembered much elsewhere on the web, hence this post.

Update (2010-06-12): SMH obit is here.

Technorati Tags: New South Wales, Don Day

I heard Stewart speak in December 2009, shortly after his pre-selection, at a bookshop in Penrith.  At the time, he was walking across his prospective constituency as a way to learn about it and to meet people.  He was most impressive – intelligent, urbane, witty, sincere, respectful, and also very laid-back.  He read from his book on Iraq, and talked about Afghanistan and Iraq,  including quotations from TS Eliot.  The audience then had a good debate with him and with each other about do-gooding foreign wars and about the UK-USA relationship.  From their comments, I would say about half the audience were probably Labour voters.

Stewart, as good a facilitator as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, got us all to say who we were and what were our concerns.     He did not  interrupt anyone, listened attentively and respectfully (even when he disagreed), and remembered everyone’s name and profession; I’m sure he charmed some of the audience there and then into voting for him.    When someone said they’d like to vote for him personally, but could not face voting Conservative (“the Work-House Party”), he laughed at the description and said this was a decision they’d have to make for themself.  He didn’t even present a case for voting for him personally while ignoring the party label, as most politicians I have known would have done at that point.    In fact, he proceeded to give an honest assessment of his own strengths and weaknesses as a candidate – if he was selling himself, this was an extremely soft-sell.

The whole event struck me as remarkable:  Here was a modern-day soldier, colonial administrator, and educator of America’s nomenklatura campaigning in rural Cumbria and doing so very explicitly on his Iraq and Afghan experience.  And, more surprisingly, people seemed to respond with great passion to his message, with its key theme being that the West needs to understand and accept the limits to its own power to change other societies.  It says something about the effect these two wars have had on people in Britain that such a message would have even been listened to seriously in a local campaign, let alone that it would resonate with people.

Some British commentators have compared Stewart to Winston Churchill, who also had had colonial military adventures and had written some damn fine and exciting prose before entering Parliament.   I think that other writer and warrior Teddy Roosevelt is a better comparison, as TR appears (from this distance) to have been more respectful of human diversity and difference than was young Winnie.    One does not have to be a Conservative to be pleased that a person of Rory Stewart’s intelligence, sophistication, integrity, courage and wisdom should now be in the Mother of Parliaments.

Technorati Tags: Rory Stewart, Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt

Because informants working for espionage agencies provide information on a regular basis to an employee of that agency, informants and their agents often develop quite close relationships.  Each has a secret which he or she usually cannot tell to other relatives or friends or colleagues – informants cannot usually divulge their information-passing actions to those around them, and agents usually do not divulge the names of their informants to their fellow employees.   Each also has to trust the other to some extent, and so the pair can develop quite a close relationship with one another; examples can be seen in Larry Devlin’s account of his close relationship with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Robert Baer’s account of his time working for CIA in the Middle East.

If our Robert had indeed been an informant (paid or unpaid) for CIA, then we would probably expect the agency to release him from that relationship when he was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.  If he had developed a close relationship with his agency handler, then becoming PM would mean he would no longer have a close, neutral confidant.     Is this then why Mugabe became close to Lord Christopher Soames, the temporary Governor sent by Britain to oversee the election and the transfer of power at Independence?  Their relationship became so close that Mugabe asked Soames to stay on (as Governor? as President?) for a couple of years after Independence, a request Soames declined.   Is this also why Mugabe met weekly with his political enemy, Ian Smith, for about 18 months following Independence?    Until it fell apart in 1981, their relationship was sufficiently close that they were able to dance with each other’s wives at official functions, such as the ball held for the African Parliamentary Union meeting in Zimbabwe in 1981.

The closeness of both these relationships (Mugabe-Soames, Mugabe-Smith) has always struck me as odd.   But, if true, an ex-informant seeking another regular confidant could explain them both.

References:

Robert Baer [2002]: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. Crown Publishing Group.

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo.  New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

Technorati Tags: Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe, Christopher Soames, Robert Baer, Larry Devlin

From the farm they banished the people.
“Hurrah!” cried the beasts. “We’re all equal!”
But superior plotters,
With trotters, the rotters,
Took over. The End. (There’s no sequel.)

Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Paul Keating, Vadim Delone, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (4) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests.  Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.