Month: December 2020

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The German Söderweg

Like the biologist’s dye that stains bodily tissue and illuminates its cellular structure, the laboratory-grade opportunism of Markus Söder is a useful resource for understanding German politics. As the Minister President of Bavaria and leader of the Christian Social Union, Söder currently polls as the leading contender to replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor next year, despite not having declared his candidacy. The calculus is not strained: the CDU’s own three pretenders – Norbert Röttgen, Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz – could all cancel each other out. For all of northern Germany’s imputed reluctance to being ruled by a Bavarian, the closest election in postwar German history was between Söder’s political mentor, the Deutschmark fetishist CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, and Gerhard Schröder, who only narrowly won after he cannily channeled popular discontent about the US plan to invade Iraq. Most decisively, Söder is a Nürnberger from the relatively industrialized region of Franconia, not some primitive mountain yodeler of Berlin caricature.

From his earliest days, the German press identified Söder as a formidable political animal. After a minor deviation in childhood, when the five-year-old Söder brought home a ‘Vote for Willy’ sticker and his father enjoined him to pray for his sins, Söder slickly ascended the ranks of the Christian Social Union: president of the youth wing of the CSU at 28; CSU association leader for Nürnberg-West at 30; CSU media commissioner at 33; CSU general secretary at 36; CSU chairman for Nürnberg-Fürth-Schwabach at 41; Minister President of Bavaria at 52; and, as of last year, party chairman of the CSU at 53, with a standard CSU-majority of 87.4 percent of the party vote behind him. In what is essentially a Catholic political aristocracy – the CSU now has a room of its own in the Bavarian Historical Museum in Regensburg that follows the suites devoted to the reigns of Ludwig I and Ludwig II – Söder is perhaps only unusual in being a Protestant. Long known as the CSU’s attack dog – a reputation only aided by his beefy figure and faintly menacing, and quite possibly self-administered, haircut – Söder has been known to pick gratuitous fights with opponents. His ability to switch positions nimbly with plausible conviction, and his sheer enjoyment of political battle, has consistently earned him comparisons to Schröder. In their biography of the ‘Shadow Chancellor’, Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer note that Söder, who had a poster of Franz Josef Strauß, the Barry Goldwater of German politics, above his teenage bed, was also impressed by the pageantry of George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, which he witnessed at close range as a CSU emissary to the 2004 Republican Convention in New York (Curiously, Armin Laschet introduced this fairly critical biography of Söder at an online event in Berlin the other day, partly, it seems, as a gambit to narrow the race for the Chancellorship down to the two of them.)

How did this immaculate CSU stalwart become, over the past year and a half, an ardent progressive, posing as Merkelite Landesvater? It is one of the puzzles of contemporary German politics. The answer has roots deeper than simply the fact that Söder, with his eye on Merkel’s job, now has some appreciation for how she does it. To begin with, it’s worth recalling how drastically both he and the current Interior Minister (and preceding Minister President and CSU chair) Horst Seehofer misread the consequences of Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the German border open to asylum-seekers. In their interpretation of events, the political crisis over refugees was the uncorking of a bottle that would release all of the conservative spirits that Merkel had suppressed. As Merkel seemed to reveal her true colors – that of a delusional humanitarian – Söder and Seehofer finally thought they had her cornered. 2015–18 was the period in which they tried to finish her off by riding the wind of the right-wing backlash toward her and her policies (Needless to say, there was no principle in any of this: in his days as the Health Minister under Kohl, it was Seehofer who was regularly criticized within his own party for being ‘communist’ when it came to the destitute). Seeing no threat from the AfD, Seehofer and Söder decided to relax the CSU’s Strauß doctrine (‘Never allow a democratically legitimized party right of the CSU’) and appeared to think that the fledgling party’s promotion of more forthright Euroscepticism could be helpful. Then comes the CSU’s Austrian romance. Let us revisit those happy days:

  • Mid-December 2017: The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP, and his coalition partner, Heinz-Christian Strache of the hard-right FPÖ, presented their coalition agenda withdrawing protections for refugees at the Kahlenberg, site of a decisive 1683 battle against the Turks.
  • Early January 2018: Alexander Dobrindt, head of the CSU’s parliamentary group, published his call for a ‘Middle Class Conservative Turn’ in Die Welt (Springer’s ‘prestige’ paper). Portions of it read like a less erudite version of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.
  • Early January 2018: Viktor Orbán was the guest of honor at the CSU-Klausur, and gave an interview to Bild-Zeitung (that had been leading a pro-Kurz campaign for weeks by then): ‘We are not talking of immigrants or refugees, we are talking about an invasion’.

And so the CSU with Söder in the driver’s seat appeared prepared to go down the Austrian road: EU-critical, Putin-curious, agrarian-traditional, culture-war-trigger-happy, maximally Islamophobic neoliberal.

Then came the stunning upset. The CSU was humiliated in the 2018 October regional election. Söder lost 10 percent of the vote, much of which seemed to have been recouped by the Greens, who offer an ever more urban and online electorate the sought-after credentials of anti-racism and cosmopolitanism. With 16 seats lost in the parliament, Söder’s majority vanished. He had to build a humiliating, if not unprecedented coalition with the Free Voters of Bavaria, a hodge-podge ‘non-ideological’ party of the centre. It was now clear that the turn to the right had been a mistake. How did Söder respond? By conducting one of the most dramatic U-Turns in recent German history. Overnight he became a lover of bees and trees – calling for new regulations for their protection. He declared combustion engines would be banned by 2030. His progressivism even overshot what his party was prepared to stomach. At the CSU conference last year, Söder’s proposal for a quota of 40 percent women at all levels of the CSU was rejected by the party delegates. The CSU still has the best discipline of any party in the land, but there are audible grumblings from lower quarters. The CSU Landtag chair Thomas Kreuzer has been lately appending pointed reminders about ‘the farmers’ to Söder loyalty oaths.

What all of this reveals is not simply that Söder is now, belatedly, reforming the CSU in the same way that Merkel did the CDU. It shows that, with his eye on the Chancellorship, Söder knows that he has no choice but to forge a working alliance between main sections of export-oriented industry and the progressive middle classes. He grasps the objective pressure Merkel is under to balance the hegemonic alliance of big multinational corporations (as opposed to smaller, more conservative family businesses), moderate conservatives and urban liberals. Urbanization and export-orientation are two of the dominant forces shaping German social life: and they are moving the country in a progressive and liberalizing direction. (The AfD, caught in factional infighting, and experiencing diminishing returns on its novelty, has meanwhile become a party of last resort for disenchanted members of the state security apparatus and the Bundeswehr). Söder knows that he must divert some of the Green vote or at least make the prospect of ruling with them more plausible. The Austrian example was always an unworkable fantasy in Germany, even in Bavaria, where there are fewer traditional Catholics, the population is urbanizing, and there is a strong ‘progressive’ neoliberal ideology that emanates from BMW (Munich), Siemens (Munich), Adidas (Herzogenaurach), Audi (Ingolstadt), etc. Companies like this do not exist on the same scale in Austria; the country is 20 percent less urban than Germany; and Austrians never underwent any comparable ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, as they still prefer to think they were not responsible for crimes committed by Nazi-Germany. Despite Kurz’s relative popularity among the professional classes of Vienna, and his wing of ÖVP’s closer position to the Federation of Austrian Industries (Industriellenvereinigung), which represents big capital groups, Austrian conservatives can still cobble together a majority without the sort of urban progressives on whom Merkel has increasingly come to rely.

What are Söder’s chances for Chancellorship? It is still too early to say. He has acquired enemies all over the country, but also ardent supporters in unlikely places. As he approaches the seat of power in Berlin, he will come under much more scrutiny. It is practically a German political rite of passage at this point to plagiarize your doctoral dissertation, but if anything it’s a sign of Söder’s intelligence that he did not resort to the copy-paste method of his peers, but rather appears to have commissioned the thing wholesale, unless one is persuaded by the image of one of the busiest political operatives in the land pouring over hundreds of documents written in Kurrentschrift in a state archive to produce the 263-page thesis, ‘From old German legal traditions to a modern community edict: The development of municipal legislation in the Kingdom of Bavaria between 1802 and 1818’. That said, Söder has had a very good pandemic, which suited both his and the CSU’s authoritarian instincts. He locked Bavaria down faster, harder, and more coherently than any other state minister, and his resolute media performances played well in the liberal press. As he considers the dimensions of Merkel’s shoes, Söder is seeing like the German state: no longer the optics of the Mittelstand businessman or the farmer in the beer tent, but something more total and omniscient: Der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist.

Read on: Joachim Jachnow on the degeneration of the German Greens; Christine Buchholz’s wide-ranging survey of the political landscape under Merkel.

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Ouattara III

I call on those who called for civil disobedience, which led to the loss of life, to stop . . . These are criminal acts and we hope that all this can stop, so that after the election this country may continue on its course of progress, which it has enjoyed over the last few years.

Thus did President Alassane Ouattara respond to the violence that erupted in Côte d’Ivoire in the weeks leading up to the 31 October presidential election, leaving over 85 people dead. Yet it was Ouattara’s unlawful decision to run for a third term that had sparked the chaos. The 2000 Constitution allows for only two terms of five years each, but the incumbent argued that a series of constitutional amendments passed in 2016 had ‘reset his term count to zero’. The opposition was not impressed by such semantics and urged their followers to boycott the vote, which was subsequently marred by ‘intimidation, violence and electoral malpractice’, according to an advocacy group. Ouattara went on to win by 94 per cent with a turnout of just over half the electorate.  

With these actions, the president has followed a similar path to his predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to acknowledge Ouattara’s victory in the 2010 election triggered a five-month civil war which left 3,000 dead. Unsurprisingly, Ouattara is fearful that recent history will repeat itself. An official source briefed that he was ‘hurt and devastated’ by the wave of unrest. The self-styled ‘father’ of this West African nation attributes the discontent to ‘young people high on drugs and weaponised by the opposition’, as one of his aides put it during an emergency post-election meeting. Ouattara has reportedly expressed disappointment at his party’s ‘failures in the area of training young activists, in spite of all the efforts undertaken over the past few years’, and vowed that he would ‘[hold] officials to account’, whatever that means. Côte d’Ivoire, no less than all the other countries in the region, suffers from a surfeit of youths with little to do and even less to hope for. It isn’t difficult to incite them to violence.

The pity of it is that this 78-year-old former IMF Deputy Managing Director – with a reputation for hard work, transparency and good governance – was supposed to be different. When I met him in Paris at the turn of the millennium he was in the company of George Soros’s staff, just as the Open Society Initiative was extending significant support to the entrenchment of pluralism in the continent following decades of dictatorships enabled by the Cold War. Urbane and softly spoken, he had previously been appointed prime minister (with the IMF’s encouragement) under the ageing Houphouet-Boigny, and attempted to take over when the latter died in 1993. This ambition was thwarted by Henri Konan Bédié, president of the national assembly, who was the rightful successor as provided by the constitution. Ouattara tried again in 1995 but was prevented by an electoral code that barred anyone with a foreign parent from assuming the presidency – his father hailed from a Muslim ruling family in neighbouring Burkina Faso, which made him suspect in the eyes of Christian southerners like Bédié. But by 1999, he was identifying himself as one of the potential leaders of what many hoped would be a resurgent Africa. As he wrote in an IMF Commentary that year, ‘An African renaissance is unfolding before our eyes. Most countries, through most of their independence years, have been ruled by autocratic leaders; autocratic because, whether enlightened or not, they stood above the law.’ Now he has joined the ranks of these autocrats, tarnishing a well-regarded premiership which had seen the economy grow by a respectable 8 per cent per annum and the 2015 election return a decisive result in his favour.

International criticism of Ouattara’s stolen election has been muted; but a report by Human Rights Watch revealed widespread violence perpetrated in opposition strongholds by the security forces in league with local mercenaries. According to one eyewitness:

I saw a group coming into the neighbourhood in two Gbakas [minivans], blue taxis, and scooters . . . They were armed with machetes, knives, and guns. I went out with what I could to defend my village. The neighbourhood youth started throwing stones, and there were so many of us that they fled. One of the government supporters couldn’t escape in time, and he was beaten to death by our young people.

In the town of Toumodi the attack lasted for hours, yet no police officer intervened.

As expected, the African Union claimed that the vote had ‘proceeded in a generally satisfactory manner’, but that was par for the course as leaders in the continent tried to pave the way for similar power-grabs. Although the European Union expressed ‘deep concerns about the tensions, provocations and incitement to hatred that have prevailed and continue to persist in the country around this election’, Emmanuel Macron remained silent. ‘France does not have to give lessons’, he remarked when asked why Ouattara’s case should be considered different from that of President Alpha Condé in neighbouring Guinea. The latter ‘organised a referendum and a change in the constitution just to keep himself in power’, said Macron. ‘That’s why I haven’t yet sent him a congratulatory letter.’ But there are obvious reasons for Macron’s double-standards. As both leaders know, Macron needs Ouattara in place to perform his own sleight of hand: guaranteeing French control of the currency – not only in Côte d’Ivoire, but in six other former colonies in the region.  

After winning independence six decades ago, all the former colonies were obliged to continue with the CFA franc introduced in the aftermath of the Second World War. As French Prime Minister Michel Debré said at the time, ‘We grant independence on the condition that the independent state endeavours to respect the cooperation agreements . . . The one does not go without the other.’ This deal had four main pillars: a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (subsequently the euro); a French guarantee of its unlimited convertibility; a requirement to deposit 50 per cent of the respective country’s foreign exchange reserves in a special French Treasury ‘operating account’; and the principle of free capital transfer within the franc zone. In reality, this meant that France was able to pay its imports from franc zone countries in its own currency, thereby saving on foreign currency. It also allowed France to keep up its own exchange rate in an otherwise dollar-denominated world. French companies operating in the zone benefitted from large and stable outlets for trade, along with ‘a guaranteed freedom to repatriate their revenue and capitals without any foreign exchange risk’, given that France decided the zone’s exchange and monetary policy. The French economy as a whole benefitted from a trade surplus which provided it with a ‘far from negligible amount of exchange reserves which have sometimes been used to pay for France’s debts’, as Ndongo Samba Sylla writes in Jacobin. For African leaders specifically, the arrangement has proved ‘a mechanism to facilitate the transfer of financial resources, no matter how they were acquired’. If worst came to worst, they were guaranteed ‘the backing of the French government against political dissidents and their own people in times of trouble’. 

Ouattara has long been a staunch defender of the CFA franc, once claiming that the matter was best left to the experts (of which he, an economist, was presumably one). But the persistence of this colonial currency has long been seen as a humiliation by activists and intellectuals who want independence to mean just that. Sékou Tourè of Guinea was the only leader to opt out of the arrangement on the grounds that ‘we prefer poverty in liberty than riches in slavery’, and was promptly punished for his temerity: departing French civil servants destroyed everything in their wake, and the secret service flooded the country with fake banknotes.

As late as 2017 Macron insisted that the CFA franc was a ‘non-issue’, yet he did an about-turn in December last year, when he and Ouattara appeared in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital, and unexpectedly announced that it would be replaced by a new currency called the Eco. Macron, who prides himself on being the first French president born in the post-colonial era, claimed that he would ‘engage France in a historic and ambitious reform of the cooperation between the West African economic and monetary union, and our country’. ‘We are taking a big step to write a new page in our relationship with Africa.’ Ouattara, for his part, was less high-minded: ‘Our countries are primarily agricultural and we trade mostly with the EU. Our currency needs to be in line with our foreign trade. We decided to continue to peg our currency to the euro because it’s in our interest to do so.’

In one sense, the currency change is merely symbolic, and will make little difference to the fifteen countries that make up the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas). However, ‘Eco’ had been floated as the name of a proposed common currency for the entire region at a meeting in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, just six months earlier. So when Ouattara and Macron made their sudden announcement in Abidjan, the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, expressed his ‘uneasy feeling’ at being frozen out of their deliberations – and at the interference of the French President in what was previously a regional debate. ‘It’s a matter of concern,’ he tweeted, ‘that a people with whom we wish to go into a union are taking major steps without trusting us for discussion’ (although it ought to be said that the same Buhari had been lukewarm about the single currency at that same June meeting, counselling patience over a hasty roll-out). Ouattara, for his part, was clearly uninterested in the wider project of a single currency to facilitate trade within the region, unless France underpinned it.

For Nigeria, with half the Ecowas population and over two-thirds of its GDP, monetary union has been a long-term goal. Indeed, Ecowas was its brainchild back in the 1970s. Without the barrier of a foreign currency, the country could easily dominate Francophonie to the exclusion of France itself. The former colonial power has therefore seen Nigeria as a threat to its regional ambitions, and sought to use Côte d’Ivoire as a bulwark against its influence (going so far as to encourage the latter to recognize the would-be secessionist state of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s). In this context, it is Ouattara’s good fortune – and his country’s misfortune – that he can rely on French backing during his illegitimate third term. Sarkozy propelled him to power following the 2010 election when he deployed French troops to oust the stubborn Gbagbo; but now that Ouattara is himself proving equally stubborn, he is unlikely to suffer the same fate so long as he tows the line with Macron.

As things stand the country is at a stalemate, with the opposition, led by his veteran opponent Bédié, refusing to recognize the results and Ouattara trying to placate them with promises not to stand for yet another term. (The president has ‘made it clear to the members of his party that the ambitious ones wanting to succeed him should begin their preparations now’, according to one of his confidants). Perhaps he will succeed, perhaps he won’t; but Cote d’Ivoire, like the rest of the region, has for some time been undergoing a demographic explosion which is only now becoming apparent. 60 per cent of the population is under 24 years of age, the vast majority of whom have negligible prospects precisely as a result of the policies pursued by Ouattara’s IMF, which condemned Cote d’Ivoire to forever provide primary produce (the country is the world’s largest exporter of cocoa: an industry largely controlled by Ouattara’s son) at prices fixed in Paris. Thanks to social media, though, West African millennials have a platform to agitate against these injustices, as demonstrated by the #EndSARS uprising in Nigeria. When Nigeria’s burgeoning youth movement spreads to Côte d’Ivoire, it will have to confront not only the domestic authorities, but the French forces stationed there. The outcome will decide whether the country’s independence continues to remain nominal.

Read on: Alexandra Reza on popular mobilizations in Burkina Faso; Aminata Traoré & Boubacar Boris Diop on French incursions into Mali.

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Funeral Rites

At first you might miss Stalin in the sea of white flowers and crimson satin; then you spot his waxy dead man’s face, the black moustache that Mandelstam famously, fatally compared to a cockroach. The cadaver turns the heads of a torrent of mourners. Some are in tears, some look anxious or horrified, some wear an expression of awkward indifference, some might be suppressing a smile. There is never any question about what they’re looking at, even when the body is out of sight.  

Faces and crowds are the substance of the Ukrainian-Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, a 2019 documentary created from 1953 footage for a documentary called The Great Farewell. Squelched by the first spasms of de-Stalinization, the original film was a collaborative effort by six eminent directors, including Grigorii Aleksandrov, an early collaborator of Eisenstein’s who became famous for 1930s musical comedies, and Elizaveta Svilova, who helped create the Soviet montage documentary with her husband, Dziga Vertov. Loznitsa has already made several laconic, lyrical documentaries from archival Soviet footage: 2006’s Blockade (the siege of Leningrad); 2015’s The Event (the August 1991 putsch attempt); 2018’s The Trial (a 1930 show trial). His oeuvre, which also includes four dramas and several non-archival documentaries, centres on the Soviet experience, the Second World War, and post-Soviet identities. The archival documentaries are his strongest work, remarkably delicate and subtle despite their proximity to historical episodes of extreme violence and suffering. For State Funeral, he was working with high-quality material whose poeticism, angularity, and fine attention to mundane detail were the work of gifted eyes, product of decades of Soviet artistic experiment.

The victorious Soviets had seized large quantities of Agfacolor film stock from Germany in 1945. About half of the footage in State Funeral is in this strange, erratic colour, rose-red banners cutting across monotone building façades, oil rigs, and snowy expanses. Sometimes the same footage flickers between colour and black-and-white, as if the past is coming in and out of focus. Crowds in Moscow, Donbass, Latvia, Tajikistan, and Chukotka gather around their local Stalin statues, listening as an echoing voice on a loudspeaker details Stalin’s final illness. People stand on street corners, plucking newspapers from stands or looking over shoulders at Stalin’s printed portrait; we watch as a woman replaces a poster promising a lecture on ‘THE REACTIONARY NATURE OF SEMANTIC PHILOSOPHY’ with Stalin’s image.

Lines wrap around Moscow’s Hall of Columns, where Stalin’s body lies in state; immense crowds justify the breadth of Moscow’s central streets. Men in leather trench coats arrive bearing immense wreaths, the leaves an Agfacolor kelly green; it seems that all the flowers in the Soviet Union have been cut for this occasion. Ordinary and not-so-ordinary people trudge up broad stairs, waiting to say goodbye or simply to see the corpse with their own eyes. Women in furs, women in aprons, women in cheap padded jackets. Delegations from the Soviet Socialist Republics and from other socialist countries and parties move in clusters, stand in rows. (Loznitsa omits The Great Farewell’s footage from other countries, including China and North Korea.) Dolores Ibárruri, one of the only female dignitaries present, looks grim, almost aghast. The camera lingers on the hapless Vasily Stalin as he takes long, shuddering breaths; Marshal Rokossovsky’s cheeks shine with discreet tears. Artists sketch the corpse from life. At the end Stalin is carried away in a coffin with a ballooning front window, as if in a submersible.

In The Great Farewell, a traditional voiceover orients the audience, while a classical soundtrack instructs the viewer on how to feel. State Funeral, by contrast, provides no helpful captions, voiceovers, or talking heads. Places and people are not identified. Instead, we watch a kind of historical ballet. The first impression is of unexpected discovery, or of being thrown into another time. But where does found footage end and where does Loznitsa’s intervention begin? The crowd scenes at Stalin monuments suggest that the whole Soviet Union was wired with speakers, that faceless voices of authority could ring through the street at any moment, even in the tundra. But in 1953 film sound still had to be added in a studio. These tinny, echoing, omnipresent voices are Loznitsa’s additions. The same is true of the shuffling of feet, the rustling of winter coats, the intermittent sobs. Chopin’s funeral march in B-flat minor, which John Williams has burdened forever with the memory of Darth Vader, adds a whiff of irony. A huge Stalin portrait swings in the air, suspended by a crane, before the creak and clank give way to silence and darkness. The Sith Lord is dead at last.

There is an eerie sense of voicelessness to State Funeral; no vox populi interviews here. (‘Will you miss Stalin?’) A viewer familiar with the literature of the Soviet era will be reminded, however, of the numerous descriptions of Stalin’s death and its aftermath from Soviet and post-Soviet novels and memoirs (notably those of Evgenii Evtushenko, who later wrote a 1990 film called Stalin’s Funeral). Viewers not born in the USSR may recall Aleksei German’s gruesome, hallucinatory Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) or Armando Iannucci’s slapstick satire The Death of Stalin (2017). These external intertexts substitute for the testimony of these oddly quiet crowds. Footage of crowds moving helplessly sideways evokes the now-familiar story, suppressed in Soviet times, of the funeral stampede that killed dozens or even hundreds of people.   

State Funeral’s refusal of commentary reduces the quarrelsome Politburo members to a kind of anonymity, too. The dumpling-faced Khrushchev introduces Malenkov, Beria and Molotov before they deliver their ineloquent speeches on Red Square – but this scene comes only at the very end of the film. Until then, the viewer must rely on her own powers of recognition. If this were a film made primarily for post-Soviet audiences, we could assume that Loznitsa is trusting, as post-Soviet intellectuals still do, in the universal recognition of certain faces, verses, songs. But Loznitsa is now based in Germany, makes his films with Dutch partners and shows them at film festivals around the world. Is he suggesting that characters like Beria and Molotov are of little ultimate significance, that Soviet history can be reduced, in the end, to the one dead face that everyone on earth can still recognize? If so, why did he resist the urge to put Stalin’s name in the title? Silence, absence, redaction: more than Beria or Molotov, these are the stars of this film.

Read on: Sophie Pinkham’s deft analysis of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, the controversy-courting product of Russian oligarch largesse.

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Starmer’s War

The past few years in British politics have certainly been eventful. A series of blows distracted and divided the establishment and its opinion-makers, forcing them onto the defensive. After the financial crash and the Scottish referendum, the pace quickened with the 2015 election, Jeremy Corbyn’s victory as leader of a fast-expanding Labour Party, the shock of the Brexit result, three years of parliamentary crisis and two more elections. Now, with the backroom Brexiteers ousted from Downing Street and Starmer speeding up the purge of the Labour Party, the ruling bloc is back on the offensive. How far and fast it can proceed across the uneven terrain of pandemic, recession and Brexit remains to be seen. For the forces unleashed since 2008 are still in flux.

Take Labour. The balance of forces within the party confronted Corbyn with a huge problem from the start. At Westminster, the left within the Parliamentary Labour Party was the weakest it had ever been; a large rump of residue New Labour MPs still ruled the roost. To say that most of them loathed Corbyn would be an understatement. Two attempts to remove him failed miserably. Then came the 2017 election, which saw a Labour vote higher than the last two achieved by Blair, depriving May of her majority. Many party officials and MPs were hoping for a crushing Labour defeat. Their disappointment could be seen on their faces. The BBC and Guardian were equally distressed. How could this have happened? An informal agreement was reached. Everything possible must be done to make sure Corbyn was defeated. It was. He was.

I’ve argued before that Labour should have stuck to the line that the referendum result had to be respected, adding that since it was not of their making, the government that had called for it should implement it and that Labour would henceforth abstain on the issue. This would have been a coherent, readily understandable position. May would have pushed through a far softer Brexit than the one now on offer and the next general election would have been fought on other issues, with Labour able to build on its advances in 2017.

That this did not happen was due not just to establishment pressure but to divisions within the Labour Left. The weakest link turned out to be Corbyn’s supposedly loyal ally and Shadow Chancellor. But John McDonnell – hailed by the soft left as ‘the most radical politician of his generation’ (see Jeremy Gilbert in OpenDemocracy, Owen Jones in the Guardian, James Butler in the LRB) – had already shown his colours at the time of the Manchester bombing in the run-up to the 2017 election. Corbyn went with his political instincts, condemning the attacks while pointing out that they were not unconnected to Britain’s unending wars in the Middle East. McDonnell was scared that breaking the bipartisan taboo on foreign policy would see Labour crucified in the media, losing them swathes of support. Private and public polling proved the opposite – a majority of voters thought Corbyn was right. The media quickly buried the issue.

The same knee-jerk conformism saw McDonnell and Diane Abbott, Corbyn’s Shadow Home Secretary, join with the Labour right in dragging out the Brexit process, blocking bill after bill in the Commons. Abbott, half-jokingly, referred to Corbyn as ‘Ramsay McCorbyn’ for suggesting abstention on the May agreement. But it was never ‘Ramsay McDonnell’ for caving in to the well-funded Remainer lobby – led, of course, by Keir Starmer, whose appointment as Shadow Brexit Secretary was another sign of the weakness of the left. As a result, Labour had no real response when Boris Johnson took over as Tory leader in 2019. His speech outside 10 Downing Street was clear, coherent, determined. No more dilly-dallying. He would respect the will of the voters and take the UK out of the EU. Disastrously, Corbyn’s closest colleagues began playing around with notions of an unelected national-government coalition to stop Brexit. This was coupled with a Guardian–BBC barrage against Corbyn, insinuating he was an anti-Semite; what they really meant was that he supported Palestinian aspirations to statehood and opposed the US–UK neo-imperial wars in the Middle East.  More effective with the voters, a Tory social-media campaign targeted him as a traitor. It was a no-holds-barred blitz to finish Corbyn off. They’ve come close.

Starmer was duly elected Labour leader by 56 per cent of a demoralized membership, on a promise to ‘unify the party’. Though he prefers to proceed by stealth, his strategy is transparent. Born in 1962 to a working-class family in South London, Starmer made his name as a barrister at the liberal Doughty Street Chambers and supposedly brought a human-rights background to his appointment under Brown as Director of Public Prosecutions. But the rights protected were mainly those of police and spies. Starmer ruled not to prosecute the police killers of Jean Charles de Menezes or Ian Tomlinson, or the MI5 and MI6 officers accused of torture in Bagram and elsewhere. Meanwhile he showed up during the all-night trials of those arrested in the 2011 London riots to praise the judges for their harsh sentencing. His office notoriously fast-tracked the extradition of Julian Assange, warning Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet!!’

When he stepped down in 2013, Starmer was awarded a KCB for his efforts and offered the safe Labour seat of Holborn & St Pancras by Ed Miliband. He was part of the first failed attempt to oust Corbyn in July 2016, then stepped smoothly back into the Shadow Cabinet three months later to run the block-Brexit campaign that helped seal Labour’s fate. Once he’d won the leadership, he told members it was time to accept the Brexit result.

Starmer is not bothering to position himself with the voters. In a two-party system, he calculates that, sooner or later, exhaustion with the Tories means it will be his turn. Instead, he is trying to win the establishment’s favour – to prove he’ll be a safe pair of hands. This is why members of his claque – A Rawnsley and T Helm in the Observer, R Behr and P Toynbee in the Guardian, S Bush in the tabloidized New Statesman, which ran a typically tacky cover cartoon of its hero as a knight on a white horse – have been relentlessly parroting the same soundbites: ‘under new management’, ‘serious’, ‘professional’, ‘capable’, ‘competent’, ‘responsible’, ‘sober’. All qualities on display in October, when Starmer ran over a Deliveroo cyclist while reversing his SUV at a busy junction, en route to his tailor, and made off before the ambulance could arrive. (The Guardian tactfully downplayed the story. The right-wing press and local papers went big.)

Above all, being ‘serious’ means that only 110 per cent conformism to neo-imperial principles will do. The Tory-voting Jewish Board of Deputies – if not the hyper-corrupt, hard-right Netanyahu himself – was given veto power over Labour foreign policy. A cleansing of the party was called for and Starmer would be Cleanser-in-Chief. One of his first acts was to impose a second-rank Blairite apparatchik, David Evans, as general secretary – a yes man from the 1990s who’d made his money creaming ‘consultancy’ fees from Labour councils. Next came Rebecca Long-Bailey, Starmer’s rival for the leadership and grudgingly permitted a place in his Shadow Cabinet. To applause from the claque, she was sacked for retweeting a criticism of Israeli police techniques – a welcome sign, Rawnsley crowed in the Observer, that Starmer’s ‘unity’ would be on his own terms.

But the real feather in Starmer’s cap would be expelling Corbyn from the party. It was no secret that his office was mulling how best to use the report on anti-Semitism by the EHRC, a government-funded quango, against him. The report itself contained disappointingly little evidence. Instead, Evans was set in motion against Corbyn’s mild response to it, which condemned all anti-Semitism, highlighted the report’s finding that handling it in the party had improved under his watch, noted that opponents had over-stated its scale for political reasons and hoped that, though he didn’t accept all its findings, the report’s recommendations would be speedily implemented. For these innocuous sentiments, Evans suspended Corbyn from the party that same day (an NEC member later briefed that it was Starmer who made the decision).

A wave of outrage from local party branches was met by Evans with a ruling that motions in support of Corbyn would be out of order, along with any criticisms of the EHRC. His office duly suspended party members in Bristol West who were calling for Corbyn to be reinstated. Deputy leader Angela Rayner – who not so long ago was insisting on the BBC’s Newsnight that Corbyn had fought anti-Semitism and racism all his life – was now calling his comment ‘totally unacceptable’ and threatening that she was ready to suspend ‘thousands and thousands’. Labour-left MPs, constituency parties and members could at that point have resigned en masse, welcoming the freedom to challenge Starmer’s project from the left. They didn’t. Instead, Corbyn came under massive pressure from his closest allies to apologize – unity above all. He backed down, issuing a ‘clarification’.

On 17 November, a sub-committee of Labour’s National Executive, beyond Starmer’s control, reinstated Corbyn’s membership. Starmer angrily declared the next day that Corbyn would still be excluded from the Parliamentary Party and could not sit on the Labour benches. The upshot has been a further wave of protests from local parties – Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, Penrith, Newcastle, Bolton, Cardiff, Hastings, Hull, Carlisle. To date, a total of 80 constituency parties have defied the ban on discussing Corbyn’s suspension, passed motions of solidarity with him, or hit out at ‘diktats’ from Central Office about what party meetings could discuss. Among them are thirty constituency parties that nominated Starmer earlier this year. Fourteen National Executive Committee members have signed a letter criticizing the leader and union leaders – UNITE, the Communication Workers, the Fire Brigades – are debating withholding funds.

What’s clear is that Starmer’s purge is neither competent, professional, lawyerly or sober, but ill-considered, clumsily executed and open to legal challenge. Corbyn’s suspension was leaked to the media before he was informed of it, issued without stating what rule he had broken, overturned by the NEC panel and then unilaterally reinstated, at PLP level, by the leader’s political intervention in an internal disciplinary process – contrary to the recommendations of the EHRC, which Starmer and Evans had insisted must be followed. Starmer has stumbled into a trap of his own making. Although the November 2020 NEC elections gave him a majority (21 of 39 members, up from 18), allowing him to select parliamentary candidates and prosecute his witch-hunt more freely, it will take a rule change and perhaps a conference vote (not due till September 2021) to establish the new disciplinary machinery the EHRC wants. Any moves against Corbyn under the old system would be illegitimate according to Starmer’s own pronouncements.

Meanwhile, many of those now being suspended for criticizing the leader’s factional warfare, supposedly waged in the name of anti-anti-Semitism, are Jewish themselves. They include the veteran Jewish Voice for Labour activist Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and the socialist scholar Moshé Machover, founder of the Israeli group Matzpen, whom Evans’s office has accused of attending a Palestine solidarity demonstration. (Machover had been expelled in 2017, but was readmitted after an international outcry.) Starmer will soon have evicted more Jews from the Labour Party than any predecessor. The sign boards are already up: no non-Zionist Jews welcome. Yet Kenneth Stern, author of the controversial IHRA ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism, has himself warned against using the definition to say that ‘anti-Zionist expressions are inherently anti-Semitic and must be suppressed’. The latest twist: two East London constituency parties have forbidden motions on a charity cycle ride to raise funds for Palestinian children, citing Evans’s orders.

At the start of 2020, many voted for Starmer in the half-hope that he would ‘avoid excesses’ but keep the bulk of the social-democratic programme established under Corbyn and McDonnell. But he has already ditched the ‘Ten Pledges’ of his leadership campaign, as he boasted in an October interview with Rawnsley and Helm in the Observer. Just like Blair and Brown, he offers no serious opposition to Conservative policies and sucks up to Washington. Then, it was Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, mutatis mutandis, it is China. In July Starmer met up with US Secretary of State Pompeo to reassure him that Labour was back on the rails. As proof, he told Pompeo that Britain needed to be harder on China, not just banning Huawei’s 5G technology but imposing sanctions on Chinese officials suspected of human-rights abuses. But these are different times. Politics are much more volatile than they were in the 90s and there are signs of opposition.

From a tiny acorn, etc., or will the current Labour membership rebellion fizzle out? A lot will depend on the actions of the Socialist Campaign Group of left-wing MPs. In mid-November, only 18 of the 34 SCG members signed a call for Corbyn’s suspension to be revoked. Some of them are advising Corbyn to grovel and grovel till he’s fully reinstated. That would be a mistake, for the aim of his enemies is to destroy his standing as an honest politician. It will weaken, not strengthen the left, inside or outside the Labour Party. There are three years left before the next general elections. An Independent Labour Party with even half a dozen MPs and a membership base of perhaps 50,000 – that number have left already since Starmer took over – could mark a real advance. New Labourism failed the test in Scotland. It has lost the North and will not succeed indefinitely in Wales. The Corbyn moment of 2017 is very unlikely to be repeated inside the Labour Party itself. It’s a broken mirror.

Corbyn himself carries on as before, zooming from one online conference to another, defending the Palestinian cause, opposing US foreign policy, insisting on nationalizing the utilities and reversing NHS privatizations. His newly announced Peace and Justice Project is a positive move; amid the winter gloom of Starmer and Covid, a sniff of spring. It is a multi-issue initiative, open to those inside and outside the Labour Party, in the UK and abroad; over 20,000 people have signed up already. There will be teething troubles, no doubt, but the creation of a new political platform and online movement is a step forward. Corbyn is a well-known fan of Shelley, and as a counter to the outpourings of well-known rodents – the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg as well as Rawnsley, Behr, etc. – who have joyfully climbed back onboard HMS Labour, the concluding words of Prometheus Unbound seem to be serving him well: ‘Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.’

Read on: Tom Nairn’s classic anatomization of Labour’s Fabian head, soft-left heart and union brawn; Daniel Finn’s fine analysis of Labour’s Corbynist moment.

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NATO, Past and Future

President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other people must and must not elect, 95 percent rejoice that Trump is gone. Note, however, that while he may be gone as POTUS, there is a good chance, unless he goes to jail, but perhaps even then, that he will continue to be a powerful presence as leader of a powerful United States’ disloyal opposition.

In any case, hoping for the good old days of hyperglobalization to return, and ‘populism’ to vanish into the dark, European politicians are revelling in happy narratives of rule-bound multilateral global governance in the good old liberal international order (LIO), when an incoming American president could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a thank you just for taking office – conjuring up a past that never was, in a desperate effort to turn it into a future that never will be. In the lead are the Germans, in Berlin and Brussels (where Frau von der Leyen is working overtime to express transatlantic enthusiasm). Included in their love letters to Washington is a mysterious morning gift: a promise that ‘the Europeans’ will from now on carry a ‘larger share’ of the ‘common burden’ and accept more ‘responsibility’ for themselves and the ‘West’.

What burden? What responsibility? What have ‘we’ failed to do in the past that ‘we’ will do in the future, now that the bad President is succeeded by a good President? At issue here is the commitment of NATO member countries to raise their ‘defence’ spending to 2 percent of GDP. The pledge, made in 2002, a year after 9/11, and two years after Putin’s ascent in Russia, was renewed under Obama (and Biden!) in 2014, and the failure to deliver on it was a linchpin in Trump’s anti-NATO rhetoric. Since France and Britain had always spent more than 2 percent, not to speak of the United States, this was essentially aimed at Germany, where defence spending was and still is between 1.1 and 1.3 percent of GDP. Germans across the political spectrum, Die Linke not included, hope that if European NATO members, above all Germany, mend their ways, the United States under Biden will rediscover their love of Europe, and transatlantic relations will again be, to use a German phrase, peace, friendship and pancakes.

Meeting the 2 percent target is made both easier and more difficult by Corona: the former because with a declining GDP, constant defence spending looks like growing defence spending; the latter because after Covid-19 states will need the little public money left for rebuilding their economies and societies. The hope is that Nice Joe, unlike Evil Donald, will take the good intention for the deed and settle for less. In return Germany is willing to commit not just itself but Europe as well to the anti-Russian geopolitical strategy dear to the American military establishment, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and the Bush wing, if it still exists, of the Republican Party. (One reason the American military hated Trump was that he tried, in his blundering ways, to end the confrontation with Russia). That strategy consists of keeping Russia under pressure while breaking up its cordon sanitaire and absorbing its neighbouring countries into Western alliances, among them the EU. This includes anchoring Poland and the Balkans firmly in the Western camp and bringing in Ukraine as well (who can forget that Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, earning a respectable $50,000 a month, although he had not the faintest idea about the energy business). In the end, once Putin has gone, Russia itself may open up to ‘the West’, as it seemed to before Putin took over from the American favourite, Yeltsin. Whether this will work is of course far from certain, as is Germany’s ability to come up with the cash required for building up its military; in 2019, before Corona, the defence minister’s official estimate was an increase to 1.5 percent by 2025, while the finance minister forecast a decline (!) to 1.26 percent by 2023.

Germany’s offer to Biden, graciously made on behalf of Europe as a whole, is not without risk. If Germany met the 2 percent target, the German defence budget alone would be about 40 percent above what Russia is currently spending on its military, for which it needs no less than 3.8 percent of its GDP. Remember Obama’s remark, immediately regretted, at a news conference in 2014: ‘Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours – not out of strength but out of weakness.’ Since Germany signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1965, any additional German military spending would be limited to conventional forces, the kind that would matter in a land war. (Russian memories of German tanks approaching Moscow are at least as vivid as French memories of German tanks arriving in Paris.) German conventional superiority might encourage Russia’s neighbouring countries to drift toward the West, as did Ukraine, in response to which Russia (re-)appropriated the Crimean Peninsula. Otherwise, the Russian response to a German conventional build-up can only be an upgrading of its nuclear deterrence, which in fact seems already under way.

Most threatened by this would be non-nuclear Germany. In return for Germany renouncing nuclear arms, the United States promised back in the 1960s to put the country under an American nuclear umbrella. Whether that promise would in fact be kept in case of a European confrontation was always a matter of concern for German governments, and more than ever under Trump. To reassure Germany, the United States stationed nuclear bombs on German territory (a quite reassuring sort of reassurance one should think; nobody, not even the German government, knows how many and where), plus roughly 40,000 troops as a ‘tripwire’ for the Russians in case they chose to attack Germany. (Trump moved some of them to Poland, which greatly worried the German government.) Moreover, Germany persuaded the United States to let German bomber planes, made and sold in the US, carry American nuclear bombs to Russia if push came to shove, of course only under American or NATO command, which is the same thing. In return, Germany is willing to live with a Russia increasingly nervous about Western encirclement.

Is there an alternative for Germany and for Europe? France, like the US, wants Germany to arm itself to its 2 percent teeth (just conventionally of course) – not in the name of transatlantic harmony but rather for what is to become a ‘European army’ – an idea strangely popular among German left-liberals. France has long wanted Europe to make peace with Russia, so it would have a free hand in Africa, for its wars against ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and for rare earths and other raw materials. The idea is for European, meaning basically German, troops to fill the conventional gap in the French arsenal due to the high costs of nuclear weaponry. By trashing NATO and seeking accommodation with Russia, Trump was to some extent helpful in this; which is why the French congratulations for Biden sound somewhat less enthusiastic than the German ones. With its seat on the UN Security Council and its nuclear force – none of which will be shared with either Germany or ‘Europe’ – France feels strong enough to build Europe into a third global force, rivalling both China and even perhaps the somewhat diminished United States. Germany, for its part, hopes that Biden will spare them the choice between Scylla and Charybdis, kindly allowing them to remain under American nuclear protection without, somehow, having to alienate France and thereby undermine ‘European integration’ under German hegemony. On 16 November this year, Macron attacked the German defence minister and Angela Merkel herself in an interview with the online journal Le Grand Continent, with unprecedented abrasiveness, for not supporting his call for ‘European strategic sovereignty’ – for all practical purposes, French strategic sovereignty.

It is high time for the rest of Europe, in particular the European Left, to think about how to avoid subordination of their vital national interests under either a no longer united United States or a new round of old French, dressed up as new European, imperialist adventurism (remember Libya?) in Africa and the Middle East.

Read on: Wolfgang Streeck’s forecast for the end of capitalism.

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Negative Capability

Anglophone readers are belatedly becoming acquainted with the writing of Annie Ernaux, who turned eighty this year. A Man’s Place is the fifth work of hers to be published in English in the last two years, with a sixth scheduled for the spring. The uniform cream covers of this growing set of volumes – drawn from the two dozen she has produced over the last half century – recall the chalky landscape of the Pays de Caux where Ernaux was raised, and which has been home territory of her oeuvre. At some distance aesthetically from the seascapes of Monet and Courbet, or socially from the Rouen of Flaubert and Maupassant, in disposition her work though shares something with Flaubert’s anticipation that former classmates would blush, scandalized, at his precise rendering of ‘la couleur normande’. Ernaux’s forensic approach has likewise elicited shock and disapproval. Today a grande dame of French letters, her current English reception – cordial, at times ardent – has tended to emphasize kinship with a range of semi-fictionalized autobiographies by women that are currently in vogue, carrying appeals to the work’s universal applicability. A Girl’s Story, published earlier this year, was praised by one critic for instance as ‘a story that belongs to any number of self-consciously clever girls with appetite and no nous’.

Such critical interest is to be welcomed, but the effect has been rather to denude Ernaux’s work of its specificity. Typically occluded has been the wider shape of her oeuvre, as well as its political ethos. The macro-narrative uniting the individual texts is her own progress from rural, poverty-stricken origins; the distinctive, torqued shape of each the result of a writing life taking the measure of the social conditions in which she found herself – what she calls ‘taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part’ – and negotiating the distance travelled since. This personal history is inseparable from the shifting coordinates of post-war France, its class structure, its political, social and cultural developments, and from a critique of the country’s social divisions. Her work has been categorized as ‘auto-socio-biography’; at once deeply personal, transfixed by the detail of her life, the workings of memory and trauma, but also sociological. These are texts that are deeply embedded both in the wider history of France – Algeria, ’68, Poujade, Mitterrand et al – but also the local pigments and textures of a specific region, period, class and culture.

Two principal influences laid the ground for this project. Ernaux has described the ontological shock she experienced upon encountering the work of Pierre Bourdieu – the pain of recognition she felt at his analysis of social domination – and how, in the wake of ’68, this provided a ‘secret injunction’ to explore the wrenching nature of upward social mobility. His influence is discernible in some local habits of Ernaux’s prose. Her cataloguing of social and cultural phenomena, with its satirical after-taste, appears at times straight out of the pages of Distinction (1979). What Bourdieu elucidated for the social world, Simone de Beauvoir had done a decade earlier for the condition of women. Her autobiographical writing, which began with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), provided a formal antecedent. Ernaux’s affectless style – described by her as ‘écriture plate’ – owes a clear debt to Beauvoir; I Remain in Darkness (2019) is a recognizable progeny of Beauvoir’s own account of her mother’s last days, A Very Easy Death (1964), published when Ernaux was twenty-four. This kind of acerbic tonal mixture is also a feature of Ernaux’s style, channelled into her own now caustic, now genuine, never less than self-aware use of adjectives like ‘easy’.

The autobiographical trajectory which Ernaux’s work records, however, occurred at a different social stratum to the glittering inevitability of success and familiar grands-écoles narrative of Beauvoir, or indeed the rapid ascension detailed in Bourdieu’s Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2004). Hers was a less assured and more ordinary one. A Girl’s Story details her early departure from Rouen’s École Normale, Happening her later pursuit of a literature degree. Taking the vocational ‘Capes’ exam, Ernaux eventually qualified as a schoolteacher, and since publishing her first literary work, Les Armoires Vides, in 1974, has maintained a certain distance from the centres of cultural and intellectual life. Long-time resident of the ‘new town’ of Cergy, surveyed in her Journal du Dehors (1993), she taught at the Centre for Long Distance Learning until her retirement.

It was her fourth work, A Man’s Place – the original title is the less specific La Place – which established her reputation in France, after it won the 1984 Prix Renaudot. A stark reflection on her father’s life, this also marked an aesthetic turning point: it was the first of her writing to shed the cover of semi-fictionalization. What followed was a growing taste for writing as an unflinching exercise in self-revelation; books that treat either one episode in her life or a single topic over a more extended period. Of the recently published tranche: Happening (2019/2000) tells of a kitchen table abortion in her early twenties; I Remain in Darkness (2019/1997) her mother’s time on a geriatric ward; A Girl’s Story (2020/2016) of painful formative experiences, both sexual and social, the year she left home. Others, as yet untranslated, address her marriage, an affair, the time her father almost killed her mother, the death of a sister before her birth and its legacy. The Years (2018/2008), widely considered her magnum opus, is an outlier in this regard. A grander work of ‘impersonal autobiography’ published in 2008, it pairs her life story more explicitly with the communal movement of a generation, in an attempt to capture what she describes as ‘the lived dimension of History’.

The lineaments of A Man’s Place are dictated by moral constraints, outlined at its outset. Attempts to make the work ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’, ‘lyrical reminiscences’, ‘triumphant displays of irony’, would all be inappropriate, she notes, for relating ‘the story of a life governed by necessity’. Instead, Ernaux endeavours to simply ‘collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared’. Collation then over narration; sociology or ethnography before narrative. The approach is often one of assemblage; methodologically Ernaux is drawn to examining particular details from her memory or objets trouvés that conjure them, including the contents of her father’s pockets after his death. The undertaking is framed as a process of recovering suppressed memories: ‘I surrendered to the will of the world in which I live, where memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste.’ Throughout she grapples with how to write without betrayal; elsewhere she has written of wanting to avoid ‘complicity with the cultivated reader’. There is also an oscillation of tone, as she attempts to do justice to the multivalency of her family’s experience. ‘This was the way we lived and so of course we were happy although we realized the humiliating limitations of our class.’

Work is naturally a dominant feature of her account – Ernaux’s father’s childhood as a farm labourer, his work in factories and on building sites after the war, and then at the café-épicerie in Yvetot where his daughter was raised. We witness how being a child of the shop floor trained her in social discrimination, how she learnt to discern the contrasts between its clientele, those more or less ‘proletarian’, those who could afford to go elsewhere, those who would ask for credit. The presiding emotional tenor stems from this social stratification. Her father’s life is portrayed as ruled by the fear of being ashamed, humiliated, caught out of place. Such psychic contortion is often expressed by contorted syntax: ‘we were ashamed at not knowing what we would have known instinctively, had we not been what we were, in other words, inferior.’ This instance records the experience of a ‘we’, but the book charts the cleavage that emerges as she becomes educated. Her father’s self-consciousness about his Norman patois is inflamed by her learning to speak a different French at school; she recalls his habit of splitting up the syllables of vocabulary pertaining to her school, as if saying the words fluently would presume a familiarity from which he was structurally excluded. ‘I realize now’, she writes, ‘that anything to do with language was a source of resentment and distress’.

The book takes care to render the vocabulary and dialect of the Norman working-class life of her upbringing, though this carries a disclaimer against appreciation of the ‘picturesque charm’ of popular speech. Proust, she notes, was able to treat it purely aesthetically because it was the language of his maid; for her father patois was ‘something old and ugly, a sign of inferiority’. It is a challenge to render colloquialisms in another language; some of the finest moments of the translation involve leaving particular words or phrases intact rather than replacing them with an awkward anglicism or near equivalent. In broad terms, English readers are well served by this edition. Ernaux’s pithy but plain style is captured effectively, though the text does occasionally shade into literalism, foregoing more imaginative variants. This particular text is a republication of an existing translation; the freshly translated works such as A Girl’s Story are a little more supple. Some emendations have been made but these are not always to the good; a key articulation of Ernaux’s endeavour has been altered from ‘taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part’ to the technically more accurate, but undeniably clunky ‘unearthing the legacy which I had to leave at the door’.

The force of the book’s portrait of her father’s life as it was circumscribed by poverty and domination remains undiminished by the intervening decades. It has also been influential: we might in fact think of Ernaux as the inaugurator of a subgenre, ­one that details the writer’s poverty-stricken upbringing in Northern France, the wrench and alienation of embourgeoisement, anguished familial relations and lingering marks of deprived social circumstances. The vagaries of translation have meant the recent books of two notable descendants working in this vein have appeared in English during this same period: Returning to Reims (2018/2009) by Didier Eribon and three books by Édouard Louis, beginning with The End of Eddy (2018/2014). Both have cited Ernaux as a significant forebear, Eribon being deeply moved by her early pronouncement that she intended to avenge the world of the dominated. Collectively, their work might be said to present a diagnosis of the socio-geographic alienation brought to international attention by the revolt of the Gilet Jaunes – analysed by Christophe Guilluy as the exclusion of la France périphérique – and of the decline of the left in France and its ramifications.  

These three writers share intellectual and political allegiances: Louis’s first publication was an edited collection on Bourdieu to which both Ernaux and Eribon contributed. Some differences are indices of historical change. Louis for instance, much the youngest of the three, recounts how his family envied the workers, whose lives the books of Eribon and Ernaux relate, writing instead of the stigmatization of living off welfare. For Eribon and Louis, homosexuality takes the place of gender as another axis of discrimination. The central distinction between them though lies in their work’s wider orientation. Eribon, a sociologist and biographer of Foucault, describes his book as a work of theory that happens to be grounded in his own experience. Louis, by contrast, presents his work as expressly political. His latest work Who Killed My Father (2019/2018), is framed as an indictment of the ‘social violence’ inflicted on his father by the successive regimes of Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron. ‘I want to inscribe their names in history’, he writes, ‘as revenge’. Ernaux, by contrast, has more of a sense that her writing has the capacity to work or impress itself on us in more oblique ways – as literature, in other words. It stands simultaneously as a modern inheritor of Beauvoir, and as a counterpart to the formally experimental autobiography of Nathalie Sarraute or Christine Brooke-Rose.

While no less powerful, there is a prevailing indeterminacy to her project. Each book endeavours to put a corner of her life to rest or cajole it into a shape of some kind, but further questions, doubts and uncertainty always crowd back in. Even The Years, a text invested in ‘common time’ and therefore less troubled by the workings of personal memory, ends in a conditional tense that intimates the project remains unfinished. In this indeterminate space sits the arrangement of her mise-en-page as collocations of fragments, her record of dislocation from the past and the struggle to reinhabit it, her sense when she does of being ‘abducted’ by a former self which ‘overtakes her, stops the flow of breath, and for a moment makes me feel I no longer exist outside myself.’ If she is distinguished by the preservation of a sort of negative capability, then it is not that she is less sure of the history, personal or social she relates. The implication is instead that her abiding problematic – how to represent a life integrated with the social conditions that shaped it – will remain, perhaps forever, unsolved. The strange final sentence of A Girl’s Story enacts this in miniature. A transcribed note of intent from her diary, it stills the narrative’s motion into an imperative, carrying with it the latent suggestion that this is an ideal her writing has still yet to achieve: ‘Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.’

Read on: Perry Anderson on Macron’s leap-frog to the Élysée; Jane Jenson on varieties of French feminism.

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Welcome to Sidecar

This is Sidecar, the NLR blog. Launching in December 2020, Sidecar aims to provide a space on the left for international interventions and debate. A buzzing and richly populated left-media landscape has emerged online in the past decade, but its main English-speaking forms have been largely monoglot in outlook and national in focus, treating culture as a subsidiary concern. By contrast, political writing on Sidecar will take the world, rather than the Anglosphere, as its primary frame. Culture in the widest sense – arts, ideas, mores – will have full standing. Translation of, and intellectual engagement with, interventions in languages other than English will be integral to its work. And while New Left Review appears bi-monthly, running articles of widely varied length, Sidecar will post several items a week, each no longer than 2,500 words and many a good deal shorter.

The criteria for publication on Sidecar will be saying something – about persons, processes, events, structures – that is not being said elsewhere, but deserves to be. Political contributions will avoid repeating judgements and tropes familiar on the left – which, even where well-founded, don’t need further iteration here. Taking culture seriously means treating it critically: sceptical, deflationary – where necessary demolitionary – treatment of intellectual fashion or commercial hype (and their typical interbreeding), combined with an adventurous, exploratory attitude towards the undiscovered and overlooked. Sidecar will share NLR’s core cultural interests – world cinema, literature, the visual arts – but also seek to diversify: reviewing different kinds of books, fiction in particular, and different forms of cultural production, as well as inviting critique of daily life. It will keep a sharp eye on the mediocracy of press and TV.

Shorter forms also allow for more protean modes of expression, with a wider range of registers and tones. Equally, there will be scope for more personal writing – drawing on lived experience, in the recognition that ideas are often born or take root there. Finally, Sidecar is conceived as a space for thought, where ideas can be realized and developed; to that end, it will also encourage critical exchange.