Author: Oliver Eagleton

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Animatron

In May 2020, the radio station France Inter commissioned a series of prominent writers to reflect on the consequences of the pandemic. One of the first invitees was Michel Houellebecq, reporting on the home front while holed up in his Paris apartment. The tenor of most other interventions was one of hopeful transition, that COVID would mark a civilizational watershed, leaving behind a world indelibly changed. Houellebecq disagreed violently: ‘After lockdown we will not wake up in a new world; it will be the same one, just a bit worse.’ COVID was ‘a banal virus, unglamorously related to some obscure flu illnesses, with poorly understood survival conditions, unclear characteristics – sometimes benign, sometimes deadly, not even sexually transmissible: in short, a virus without qualities’. This banality appeared crueller still given the response – the ways in which the victims had been hidden, abstracted, dehumanized in past months. In his intervention, Houellebecq wondered until what age elderly patients could ‘be resuscitated and cared for? Seventy, seventy-five, eighty years? It depends, apparently, on which region of the world one lives in; but never has the fact that not everyone’s life has the same value been expressed with such quiet impudence; from a certain age onwards, you are practically already dead.’

Indignation at the contemporary treatment of death, along with empathy for the private suffering of the dying, emerges as the animating force of Houellebecq’s latest novel, Anéantir, which arrived in Francophone bookstores in January. The set-up is as follows: the year is 2026, and Paul Raison is an advisor to his friend Bruno Juge, the Minister of Economy and Finance. Trapped in a tired marriage with Prudence, another senior civil servant at the same ministry, he dreams of one-night stands with Juge’s wife, Evangeline. Presidential elections are underway, and Juge is planning to run on a modernizing platform after delivering a reasonably performing economy for the previous five years. Videos of the minister’s beheading surface online, made with such ingenuity that the department’s specialists find themselves at pains to figure out who composed the clips. A series of mysterious cyberattacks then occur, shutting down traffic in several international ports. At this point though, the novel changes gear, as Paul leaves Paris to visit his father, on life support after suffering a stroke. The homecoming involves his sister Cécile, a loyal Le Pen voter and born again Catholic, now married to an unemployed notary. We also get glimpses of Paul’s mother Suzanne, a conservationist, and his brother, Aurélien, an archivist at the Ministry of Culture married to a displeasing woman named Indy. The novel ends with Paul’s own descent into purgatory after a cancer diagnosis.

‘A political thriller veering into metaphysical meditation’ was the polite summary given by one French critic; another spoke of ‘a book written in the minor key’. Many were less polite. Promoted as both a personal reflection on faith and a world undergoing rapid deglobalization, the novel’s 730 pages suggest a Wagnerite symphony, but Anéantir (‘Annihilation’, though the meaning is closer to the German ‘Vernichten’, literally ‘nothingify’) is closer to a string of sonatas, orchestrated with little sign of editorial interference. While the cyber warfare and broken supply chains of the opening pages conjure the same lure of the contemporary as the Islamist takeover of Soumission (2015) or the périphérique revolt of Sérotonine (2019), these incidents rapidly fade from view as the book suddenly transitions into a hospital memoir, growing more and more claustral, dragging itself from one sonata to the other without ever settling on a unifying theme. We hear Paul’s thoughts on presidents, televisions, vegans, the far right, fantasy films, yet none of this amounts to any clear declaration of intent or desire. The novel simply continues, aimlessly, like a device stuck on shuffle mode, switching from one track to another. 

To the habitual houellebecqien, the constitutive elements of Anéantir may feel familiar – reminiscent of the competitive sociability of Extension du domain de la lute (1994), the neurotic professionals of Particules élémentaires (1998), the vaudeville treatment of the art world in La carte et le territoire (2010), the meditations on religious feeling in Soumission (2015), the social upheavals of Sérotonine (2019). But there is an unmistakeable diminution. The novel reads as if it was written compulsively and in haste, the range of themes is remarkably less grand in scope, and the tone is uncharacteristically mellow. Its goals are clear enough: Houellebecq hopes to rescue death from its contemporary dehumanization as exemplified in the state response to the pandemic. This is paired with openly congratulatory portraits of the healthcare workers and general practitioners who helped France weather its plague years (in his acknowledgements, Houellebecq devotes a word of thanks to specialists at a French hospital, who helped him with technical details on medical care). Yet this is not what the novel initially promises, nor what we’ve come to expect from Houellebecq.

A degree of strategic aimlessness has long been part of his repertoire, and indeed once provided us with Houellebecq at his most exhilarating, whether in the opening party scenes in Extension du domain de la lutte or the closing visits to the psychiatrist in Sérotonine. Such moments approximate the repetitively psalmodic style of Thomas Bernhard, an influence that was made manifest in 2019 when Houellebecq was pictured trying on Bernhard’s jacket during a visit to the late Austrian author’s country estate. The admixture of personal and political also has precedent: Soumission simultaneously dwells on the religious and existential concerns of its protagonist, Sérotonine their depression and ailing sex life. Yet in Anéantir, the balance has shifted, with its long flight of interiority taking Houellebecq’s writing closer and closer to Bernhardian monologue. Bernhard, however, was consistent in his refusal to engage in conventional storytelling. ‘Whenever signs of a story begin to form somewhere, or even when I just see in the distance, behind a prose-hill, the indication of a story emerging, I shoot it down.’ The resulting oeuvre was one in a dizzying state of mid-air suspension, castigated by Baudrillard as little more than onanism for the Viennese bourgeoisie, but consistently captivating in its own right. In Anéantir, however, we have stretches of writing which could only be described as ‘animatronic’, intimating a sense of style where there is, in fact, none:

It was still rather vague but you could feel the beginning of spring, there was a sweetness in the air and the vegetation felt it, the leaves were shedding their winter protection with a quiet shamelessness, they were showing off their tender areas and they were taking a risk, these young leaves, a sudden frost could at any moment destroy them.

Or:

He began to wonder whether he would have been better off coming by car; it was a pleasant surprise to discover that there was a car park in the courtyard of the hospital. Its brightly coloured facade reminded him a little of the one at Saint-Luc Hospital in Lyon. After the PET-Scan, the prospect of a spinal tap and a gastrostomy, this façade. Decidedly, he thought with a mixture of ambiguous feelings, he was increasingly following in his father’s footsteps.

In a passing assessment from 2004, Perry Anderson noted how ‘the steady drone of flat, slack sentences’ in Houellebecq’s work ‘reproduces the demoralised world they depict’. Here even the affect is missing, flatness without its imitative correlative. What might explain such passages? One factor may be that Houellebecq, far from a natural born member of the establishment, has gradually developed a proximity – a cosiness, even – with parts of the French power elite. France, beholden to its republican heritage, is unique in the close relation between its literary stars and political class, consecrated through institutions such as the Académie. The Charlie Hebdo killings of 2015 marked a point of escalation: Houellebecq featured on the cover during the week of the shootings and Soumission was released the same day, with the murders prompting a rallying round of the French establishment in the name of free speech. New Philosophers such as Alain Finkielkraut subsequently celebrated the book as an authentic portrayal of France’s impending ‘Lebanonization’. The effect has been an inevitable weakening of his oppositional stance.

This proximity is encapsulated by the fact that the minister and presidential candidate in the novel is based on Bruno Le Maire, current Minister of Economy and Finance and personal friend of Houellebecq. They first met when the latter’s dog was held up by Irish customs and help from the diplomatic service was required. The two have been exchanging emails ever since about ‘German Romanticism, economic affairs, and Rilke’s poems.’ Anéantir bears unfortunate traces of this friendship. In a recent debate with Éric Zemmour, Le Maire claimed that France was now ‘nearing a growth and employment rate equal to that of the trente glorieuses’. Houellebecq picks up this theme in the book, claiming that the ingoing president was able to restore France’s competitive edge by recharging the nation’s ‘knowledge economy’. The very same ‘knowledge economy’ was once the bane of the French working class in his novels, and these passages could perhaps be read as ridiculing Macron’s attempt to modernize a hopelessly declining country. Yet in the run-up to the last election Houellebecq confessed that, given his recent change of station, he ‘now obviously supports Macron’. Such are the dangers of a writer immune to self-theorization.

In Anéantir this inability for introspection is compounded by an even more destabilizing development. The central subject of Houellebecq’s original novels – the nihilist neoliberalism of the 1990s and 2000s – has become less reliable as a target. As a raw capitalist reflex, neoliberal policies will retain their attraction. But they are hardly election winners anymore, as the current contest in France makes plain. Macron and Le Maire might be Europe’s ‘last neoliberals’, yet they are operating in a landscape far removed from that which the first neoliberals had to navigate. Along with a return to religion, Houellebecq had long predicted that neoliberals might one day adopt the protectionist platforms of their opponents. Yet what to do when the ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ of the 1990s become the ‘zombie Catholics’ of today? The great portraitist of the neoliberal subject has lost his model; in the resulting confusion, the natural pivot is to existentialist cliché: death, faith, Jacob wrestling with the angel, love eternal and so on.

‘Every writer knows the temptation of irresponsibility’, as Sartre used to say. And there has always been a place for smaller feelings in Houellebecq’s work, much as Schopenhauer’s practical philosophy – a source of lasting inspiration to the novelist – ended in unconditional devotion to his poodle. But it is grating to see a writer once antinomic to the ruling order now appear essentially subdued by it. The unrelentingly bleak vision of French life in Houellebecq’s finest novels, which tied together the personal and social dimensions of despair, seemed to implicitly ratify almost any anti-establishment movement (though never openly supportive of the Gilets Jaunes, it appeared that they had a shared object of critique). The characters in Anéantir however do not appear as the resigned victims of neoliberal restructuring. Rather, we see men and women outside of history, facing a godless universe as Christians without a church. The novel may reference nearly every contemporary political orientation – from right-identitarians to anarcho-primitivists to deep ecologists – but all appear merely as unwitting agents in a ‘gigantic collapse’, a naturalised disaster personified by Paul’s father’s comatose state. In this way, Anéantir is more Blaise Pascal than Michel Clouscard, the protagonist (Paul Raison) merely a cipher for modern man’s incapacity to face up to the transcendental.

If this is indeed Houellebecq’s last novel, as he proclaims in the acknowledgements, it is an underwhelming finale. Incensed as he may be by the indignities of the dying, he has remarkably little to say about the causes or material circumstances of their suffering. The pandemic is ultimately just an avenue for his growing spiritual preoccupations, increasingly detached from brutalities of the social. Houellebecq was once able to write compassionately without succumbing to religious delirium. In a 1993 essay on the city of Calais, for instance, composed after the French vote on the Maastricht Treaty, he gave readers a portrait of a déclassé France filled with spleen and anger at its tormentors, but also deeply admiring of its victims:

Calais is an impressive city…even if it was razed to the ground during the Second World War. Saturday afternoon one does not see a soul on the street. One passes by abandoned store windows, immense deserted parking spots (without doubt this is the city with the most parking space in the whole of France). Saturday evening is a bit jollier, but it is a particular kind of jolliness: everyone is inebriated. In bars one finds a casino, with a set of machines at which the Calaisians come to waste their benefit payments. The preferred walking spot Sunday afternoon is the entry tunnel to the Manche. Behind the bars, families pushing baby carriages watch the Eurostar pass by. They handwave to the foreman, who hoots in response before being swallowed up by the sea.

Christopher Prendergast, ‘Negotiating World Literature’, NLR 8.

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Nun Chai Stories

Highway of Zojila Pass, a high mountain pass between Srinagar and Leh at 11575 ft, 9 Km stretch. Highest Indian National Highway. Black and white image.

A popular image from the 1970s shows an eight-handed Hindu goddess superimposed over a map of the Indian subcontinent. Sitting astride a lion, Bharat Mata or Mother India clutches a set of vaguely symbolic objects: a prayer bead, a lotus, a quill; a Trishul or trident, a sword, a sickle. Over her flowing hair, she wears a gem-studded crown which neatly obscures Kashmir. The picture speaks with crude eloquence to Indian imperialism in the Himalayan region, much of which it has occupied since Partition. (There are now under fourteen million people living in Indian-administered Kashmir as opposed to four million in Azad Kashmir or Free Kashmir, the arid north-western part controlled by Pakistan. China sits on a few villages in the far-eastern reaches.) For Indian nationalists, Kashmir is as a mystical, contradictory place: both national treasure and troubled borderland, an ‘integral part of the country’ – the phrase is repeated – that threatens to slip away.   

Part of the problem for India is that it has no historical basis for claiming Kashmir. For centuries, the Kashmir Valley has been ruled by outsiders: it was annexed by the Mughal Empire in the late 1500s, taken over from 1750-1840 by Afghan and then Sikh warlords, and after the Anglo-Sikh war of 1846, purchased for seven and a half million rupees from the British East India Company by Dogra mercenaries. From then until 1947, the Hindu Dogras lorded it over the Muslim peasantry – the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims, 85 to 15, has stayed roughly the same since the fifteenth century – even bringing back the corvêe. Crucially, Kashmir was never part of the British Empire, whose subjects shared a colonial identity, whatever their other differences.

In Constitutional terms, Kashmir was a ‘Princely State.’ This meant that Maharaja Hari Singh had the right to accede to either country created at independence. He flirted with both options until Nehru lost patience and forced the issue in October 1947, sending in the newly minted Indian army, who were met by Pakistani forces entering from the northwest. Skirmishes continued till 1948, when the United Nations Security Council called a ceasefire and drew up a Line of Control (LOC) demarcating Indian and Pakistan-held territory. Kashmir was partitioned. What’s often forgotten is that over two hundred thousand were killed in massacres inflicted by the departing Dogra mercenaries, with support from paramilitaries sent north by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ever-resourceful fascist organization that later set up the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). This is how the atoot ang or inseparable limb of Kashmir was joined to Mother India.

The Security Council had mandated a plebiscite on the national question in Kashmir, which Nehru agreed to and then put off indefinitely. (King Hassan followed his lead in Western Sahara.) In 1953, he arrested Sheikh Abdullah, the charismatic leader of the National Conference (NC) party, which stood for Kashmiri Azadi or independence. For the next four decades, democracy in Kashmir meant rigged elections, press censorship, random arrests, and the transformation of the NC into a client regime. When armed resistance broke out in 1989, the state enforced democracy more bluntly.

By 1990, there were three hundred fifty thousand soldiers in Kashmir; that number has more than doubled thirty years later. Ostensibly sent to track down militants, they have effectively occupied the valley – erecting check-posts and spreading barbed wire, grabbing land for barracks and torture centres. An estimated seventy thousand has been killed, and another eight thousand ‘disappeared’, their bodies missing. A tiny minority of the victims are militants. The preferred method is a ‘fake encounter’, in which a civilian is murdered and labelled an insurgent. The army has also opened fire on public demonstrations, in recent years blinding and killing stone-pelting teenagers, who are risibly classified as ‘agitational terrorists’. While the insurgency petered out in the mid-90s, counterinsurgency has only intensified. Today, Kashmir is the most militarized region in the world.

In August of 2019, the ruling BJP abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which had given the Kashmir assembly the sole right to determine who could purchase land in its territory. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act also dissolved the state, splitting it into two ‘union territories’ to be controlled by the federal centre. Kashmiris are clear this legal coup paves the way for setter colonialism. In the build-up, there was an ominous influx of troops into the valley, presumably sent to spread news of the abrogation from door to door. The Indian government completely shut down the state’s internet access, which was only partially restored four months later.

Kashmir remains under siege. The Legal Forum for Kashmir, a human rights monitor, recorded 257 political killings in 2021: of 163 militants, 46 civilians, and 48 armed forces. In November, Khurram Parvez, an activist who has tirelessly chronicled state impunity, was himself put in jail under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), the crown jewel of Indian Penal Code, which allows for the arrest of anyone that might endanger national security. Under a new media policy, Kashmiri journalists have been harassed for publishing ‘anti-national’ content. Like everything else, the response to Covid-19 has been militarized.

*

How has India managed to get away with the occupation? In the first place, it has faced next to no domestic resistance. There was a time, in the 1950s and 60s, when socialist politicians like Ram Manohar Lohia could make the case for Kashmiri self-determination in mainstream newspapers – a state of affairs that seems apocryphal today. The space has been entirely ceded to Hindu nationalists and their liberal holograms, who alike place the integrity of Mother India above such things as democratic aspirations and human rights. (The parliamentary left – represented by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – opposed the abrogation and has urged Modi to uphold human rights. But self-determination remains a bridge too far for them.) The media has merrily played along, vilifying Kashmiris as separatists and Islamist fanatics while piously worrying after our under-paid soldiers.

Nor has the United Nations covered itself in glory. After calling for a plebiscite in 1948, it’s done little to hold India to account, now and then expressing ‘concern’ over human rights abuses. As for guardians of the liberal order, their strong words on Xinjiang contrast bitterly with the silence on Kashmir. ‘The cautiousness – or timidity – of western politicians is easy to understand,’ Pankaj Mishra has observed. ‘Apart from appearing as a lifeline to flailing western economies, India is a counterweight, at least in the fantasies of western strategists, to China.’

Mishra was writing in the summer of 2010, when mass protests broke out on a scale that drew comparisons to the Palestinian Intifada. The trigger was the murder in Kupwara district of three civilians who were lured into the hills with the prospect of jobs by soldiers, who shot them, planted weapons on their bodies, and no doubt pocketed a tidy sum for their efforts – a system of financial rewards has been put in place for nabbing or killing militants. ‘There’s a very important link between these incentives and the occupation of Kashmir,’ according to Khurram Parvez. ‘Stop this corruption, and I don’t think the occupation will even last a day.’ (Anna Politkovskaya said as much about counterinsurgency in Chechnya.) When the truth came out, so did demonstrators onto the streets of Srinagar, who were in turn greeted by police violence.

On 11 May, a seventeen-year-old boy, Tufail Mattoo, was returning home from tuitions when he was hit in the head by a tear gas cannister tossed by police. The intense protests that followed his killing lasted through the summer. The protestors’ demand was unequivocal – ‘Go India. Go Back’ was chanted and graffitied on walls – and as was the state response. In four months, 118 civilians were killed. Many were teenage boys, some even younger. This endless cycle – state crimes leading to protests leading to more state crimes – is why Kashmiri anthropologist Muhamad Junaid compares the Indian occupation to an ‘ouroboros’, after the mythical dragon that eats its own tail.

The 2010 Intifada forms the backdrop to Alana Hunt’s artbook Cups of Nun Chai, published in 2020 by documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak’s press Yaarbal Books. (This is their second title, following Witness (2017), an extraordinary compendium of photographs by Kashmiri photojournalists.) An Australian artist and writer, Hunt first grew interested in Kashmir in the late aughts, while doing an MA in aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Visiting the region with friends, she was horrified by what she saw, and felt powerfully if obscurely compelled – like Joe Sacco was in Palestine – to expose the atrocities that the Indian government was keeping quiet. Hunt was back in Australia by the time the Intifada broke out, which made it impossible for her to record voices on-the-ground, even as she wanted to commemorate the protests. ‘Cups of Nun Chai is born of that juncture,’ she writes in the introduction.

An oral history of a kind, the book is made up of 118 conversations Hunt held over two years with people in Australia (mainly), India and Kashmir. The rules are simple: over a cup of ‘nun chai’ – a salty tea popular in Kashmir – she speaks about the occupation, adapting their discussion into a two-to-three-page narrative. Each entry is accompanied by a close-up photograph of the interlocutor’s hands holding the teacup. ‘Cups of Nun Chai is a search for meaning in the face of something so brutal it appears absurd,’ she writes. ‘It is an absurd gesture when meaning itself becomes too much to bear. It is also a memorial, grounded in the killing of 118 civilians.’

Tea-drinking as an act of witness? The conceit is less naïve than it is seems. Like the Parisians clueless of Algeria in Chris Marker’s La Joli Mai (1962), most of Hunt’s interviewees know next to nothing about Kashmir, which, paradoxically, makes for fruitful dialogue. They ask commonsensical questions –


‘Is it a war over resources or religion?’

‘If the UN is so good, why don’t they step in and do something to help Kashmir?’

‘Is it something to do with India and Pakistan?’

‘Does Kashmir have its own politicians, or are they governed by India?’


 – that she patiently answers, filing in the historical and political background, offering a useful primer on the occupation. Their more wide-eyed observations – ‘When people are mourning, they are being killed!’; ‘They are killing children!’ – carry a simple moral force, burning through the justifications of the Indian state. The discussions also fill a void in the cultural discourse on Kashmir, which tends to be presented in the media as a conflict zone and nothing more. Kashmiri poet Uzma Falak addresses this tension in her lyric essay, ‘Life or Siege?,’ included in the volume:

How much silence makes a siege?

And how much sound ends it?

What makes a siege a siege?

When do we stop calling it so?

For how long does a siege last?

Does the Siege interrupt [our] Life or is [our] Life

merely in the way of an undying Siege?

What is a siege in a [perpetual] siege called?

What is more persistent – Life or Siege?


Hunt, however, foregrounds the lived experiences of Kashmiri people, who have responded to her project. In 2016, on the anniversary of Tufail Mattoo’s murder, her recorded conversations began to appear as a column in Kashmir Reader, an independent Srinagar newspaper founded in 2012 and known for its investigative reporting, which has kept the Indian censors busy. A month later, the popular military commander Burhan Wani was killed by security forces, prompting the largest protests seen since 2010. On cue, the Reader was banned for three months. Archival images of its pages (and, it seems, of some Indian publications) are interspersed throughout the book. The headlines allude to Kashmir’s dismal political situation – ‘JKPCC chief demands ban on use of pellet guns’; ‘Shutdown marks 1994 Kupwara Massacre.’

*

Most of the conversations take place in Sydney, where Hunt is based. Mainly friends and acquaintances, her interlocutors are curious, well-intentioned, and basically liberal in their political outlook – though she might have spoken to some conservatives too. The discussions tend to begin with uncertainty. Confronted by the scale of violence – ‘Isn’t that akin to genocide?’ – many wonder, with a mix of embarrassment and outrage, why so little global attention is paid to India’s crimes. ‘I doubt that anyone in my journalism class has ever heard of Kashmir,’ a student confesses. ‘None of this has been in our media,’ a friend complains. They guess this is because India is in the United States’ good graces, which is part of the story. Another factor, which Hunt alludes to obliquely, is that Kashmiris have been largely denied ‘the permission to narrate’ their own experiences – to borrow a phrase from Edward Said. All mainstream Indian politicians, and most of its liberal intellectuals, describe the occupation as an ‘internal matter’, as if the whole point was not Kashmir’s rejection of imposed state boundaries.

As the facts sink in, people are curious to know what life is like in the valley. Drawing on her own experiences and the stories of her friends, Hunt describes the overwhelming presence of the army. ‘I had seen the soldiers, thousands and thousands of them,’ she writes. ‘On street corners, on top of buildings, in their barracks, in trucks and armored cars, in orchards, under trees . . . I have seen stones fill the surface of an almost empty street.’ Hunt is also attuned to the more insidious ways in which India is disfiguring the landscape. For instance, she notes that Chinar trees – a recurring image in the towering Kashmiri-American poet Aga Shahid Ali’s verse – have been declared state property, along with the land on which they are planted, which obviously discourages people from growing them. ‘This makes the most majestic and iconic of trees in Kashmir an enemy of the people,’ Hunt caustically reflects, ‘and the people are made any enemy of it.’

Hunt speaks to Aboriginal people who immediately grasp the parallels between Australian and Indian state-creation. ‘That’s the same story here,’ the late Gija painter Rusty Peters tells her, describing settler massacres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one of which his uncle narrowly escaped. In staging such moments, Hunt seems to critique ‘the whole idea of a map and of a nation,’ though she does not spell out what an alternative to a state-based order would look like. (For a more in-depth discussion, see recent books by Claire Vergerio, Mahmood Mamdani, and James C. Scott, who Hunt cites in passing.)

Two years after Tufail Mattoo’s killing, Hunt finally arrives in Kashmir. Here she speaks to students, professors and activists, who alike greet her with affection – she is clearly a cherished visitor. The scholar Sheikh Showkat Hussain compares her project to the Kashmiri tradition of fatheha-chai, in which neighbors take responsibility to feed a mourning family for three days after a death, and on the fourth, nun chai is drunk to mark the end of grieving. Indian citizens will have to speak up against the occupation if we too hope to someday be accepted by Kashmiris as neighbours and not jailers.  

Read on: Alpa Shah, ‘Explaining Modi’, NLR 124.

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Fog of War

Accounting for the descent of the European state system into the barbarism of war – for the first time since the collapse of Yugoslavia and NATO’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade – needs more than lay psychiatry. What made Russia and ‘the West’ engage in an unrelenting wrestling match on the edge of the abyss, with both sides eventually falling off the cliff? As we live through these monstrous weeks, we understand better than ever what Gramsci must have meant by an interregnum: a situation ‘in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born’, one in which ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’, like powerful countries turning their future over to the uncertainties of a battlefield clouded in the fog of war.

Nobody knows at the time of writing how the war over Ukraine will end, and after what amount of bloodshed. What we can try to speculate about at this point is what the reasons may have been – and human actors have reasons, however crankish they may seem to others – for the uncompromising brinkmanship on the part of both the US and Russia. What a scene: escalating confrontation, rapidly dwindling possibilities for either side to save face short of total victory, ending with Russia’s murderous assault on a neighbouring country with which it once shared a common state.

Here we find remarkable parallels, as well as the obvious asymmetries, since both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time denied it.

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv.

At some point, the Russian regime apparently concluded that this creeping erosion, domestic as well as external, would continue unabated unless dramatic action was taken to stop the rot. What followed was the military build-up around Ukraine from Spring 2021, accompanied by the demand for a formal commitment from Washington to henceforth respect Russian security interests – seeking an open conflict instead of a hidden one, perhaps in the hope of mobilizing the spirit of Russian patriotism that had once defeated the Germans.

Turning to the American side, one finds a grudge going back to the early 2000s, after Boris Yeltsin, America’s post-Soviet placeman, turned over the farm to Vladimir Putin in the wake of the economic and social disaster caused by American-advised ‘shock therapy’. Putin’s initial quest to join NATO under the auspices of the New World Order was rejected, despite all his efforts to help Washington in its invasion of Afghanistan. Russian objections to the 2004 enlargement of NATO – now threatening its northwestern border – were met by Bush and Blair’s declaration of the ‘open-door’ policy for Georgia and Ukraine at the 2008 Bucharest summit.

The American political establishment, led by the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, began to treat Russia as a rogue state, much like that other country that had extricated itself from American control, Iran. Where in the past there had been a Red under every American bed, now the self-invited guest was a Russian – a distinction that many Americans had never really learned to make in the first place. Even Trump’s election in 2016 was attributed by the losing party to covert Russian machinations, which politically killed Trump’s initial attempts to seek some sort of accommodation with Russia. (Remember his innocent question about why NATO still existed, three decades after the end of Communism?) By the end of his term, in order to mend fences with the American deep state and the voters, he had returned to the tried-and-tested anti-Russian stance.

For Trump’s successor Biden, as for Obama–Clinton, Russia offered itself as a convenient arch enemy, domestically and internationally: small economically, but easy to portray as big on account of its nuclear arms. After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from Germany’s Sonderweg exiting coal and nuclear power at the same time. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would make it impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration had talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2; in return Germany agreed to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

Thus Western unity was back, greeted by the jubilant applause of the local commentariats, grateful for the return of the transatlantic certainties of the Cold War. The prospect of entering battle in alliance with the most formidable military in world history instantly wiped out memories of a few months before, when the US abandoned with little warning not just Afghanistan but also the auxiliary troops provided by its NATO allies in support of that once-favoured American activity, ‘nation-building’. No matter also Biden’s appropriation of the bulk of the reserves of the Afghan central bank, to the tune of $7.5 billion, for distribution to those affected by 9/11 (and their lawyers), while Afghanistan is suffering a nationwide famine. Forgotten too is the wreckage left behind by recent American interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya – the utter destruction, followed by hasty abandonment, of entire countries and regions.

Now it is ‘the West’ again, Middle Earth fighting the Land of Mordor to defend a brave small country that only wants ‘to be like us’ and for the purpose desires no more than being allowed to walk through the open doors of NATO and the EU. Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank. Keeping pro-American governments in power in the former Soviet satellite states, which may be costly, makes for an attractive burden-sharing under which ‘Europe’ pays for the bread while the US provides the firepower – or the imagination of such. This makes the EU in effect an economic auxiliary to NATO. Meanwhile, Eastern European governments are happier to trust Washington with their defence than Paris and Berlin, given the former’s proven trigger happiness and its invulnerable home base. In return for US protection through NATO, and Washington’s patronage in their relation to the EU, countries like Poland and Romania host US missiles allegedly defending Europe against Iran, while unfortunately having to pass over Russia on their way.

The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status. EU extension to Ukraine and the West Balkans, even to Georgia and Armenia, is considered by the US as ultimately for Washington to decide. France in particular may still object to further enlargement, but how long it can hold out, especially if Germany can be made to pick up the bill, is anybody’s guess. (Though formal EU accession procedures for Ukraine are not yet underway, von der Leyen has announced: ‘We want them in.’) Moreover, Poland being strictly anti-Russian and pro-NATO, it will now be hard to punish it by cuts in EU economic support for what the European Court sees as deficiencies in its ‘rule of law’. The same holds for Hungary, whose wayward leader, Orbán, has turned increasingly anti-Russian. With the American return, the power to discipline EU member states has migrated from Brussels to Washington D.C.

One thing EU-Europeans, especially those of the Green kind, are currently learning is that if you allow the US to protect you, geopolitics trumps all other politics, and that geopolitics is defined by Washington alone. This is how an empire works. Ukraine, a house divided between an astounding collection of oligarchs, will soon begin to receive enhanced financial support from ‘Europe’. This will, however, be no more than a fraction of what Ukrainian oligarchs are regularly depositing in Swiss or British or, one assumes, American banks. Indications are that, compared to Ukraine, Poland and even Hungary are, to use an American simile, as clean as a hound’s tooth. (Who could forget the salary Hunter Biden enjoyed as non-executive director of a Ukrainian gas company whose principal owner was then facing a money-laundering investigation?)

What remains a mystery, obviously not the only one in this context, is why the United States and their allies were for the most part happy to discount the possibility of Russia responding to continuing pressures for regime change – in the form of ‘Western’ denial of a security zone – by deepening an alliance with China. It is true that historically, Russia always wanted to be part of Europe, and something like Asiaphobia is deeply anchored in its national identity. Moscow is for Russians the Third Rome, not the Second Beijing. As late as 1969, Russia and China, both Communist then, clashed over their mutual border on the Ussuri River. Now, with Russia cut off from the West for an indefinite future, China, short of raw materials, may step in and provide Russia with modern technology of its own. As NATO is dividing the Eurasian continent into ‘Europe’, including Ukraine, against Russia, as a non-European enemy of Europe, Russian nationalism may, against its historical grain, feel forced to ally with China, as foreshadowed by that strange picture of Xi and Putin standing side by side at the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Would an alliance between China and Russia be an unintended result of American incompetence, or on the contrary, an intended result of American global strategy? If Moscow were to team up with Beijing, there would be no prospect anymore for a Russian-European settlement à la française. Western Europe, in whatever political form, would more than ever function as the transatlantic wing of the United States in a new cold or, perhaps, hot war between the two global power blocs, the one declining, hoping to reverse the tide, the other hoping to rise.

Only a Europe at peace with Russia, one that respects Russian security needs, could hope to free itself from the American embrace, so effectively renewed during the Ukrainian crisis. This, one presumes, is the reason why Macron insisted for so long on Russia being a part of Europe, and on the need for ‘Europe’, as represented of course by himself and France, to provide peace on its Eastern flank. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has for a long time, if not forever, put an end to this project. But then, it was never very promising to begin with, given Germany’s felt dependence on American nuclear protection, combined with German doubts about all-too-fanciful French global ambitions, re-defined as European ambitions to be funded by German economic power. And Russia may with some justification have questioned if, under these conditions, France would be able to push the US out of the European driver’s seat.

So the winner is… the United States? The longer the war drags on, due to the successful resistance of Ukrainian citizens and their army, the more it will be noticed that the leader of ‘the West’, who spoke for ‘Europe’ as the war built up, is not intervening militarily on behalf of Ukraine. In case there was war, the US has given itself a special leave of absence, as Biden made clear from the start. Looking at its record, this is nothing new: when their mission gets out of hand, they withdraw to their distant island. Nevertheless, as Germans look on, wondering where the US is, they may start to feel some doubt about the American commitment to come to their nuclear defence. That commitment, after all, underlies German membership in NATO, German adherence to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and the housing of 30,000 or so American troops on German soil.  

In this context the special budget of €100 billion, announced a few days into the war by the Scholz government and devoted to fulfilling the promise, going back to 2002, to spend 2 percent of Germany’s GDP on arms, looks like a ritual sacrifice to appease an angry God who one fears might abandon his less-than-true believers. Nobody thinks that had Germany actually lived up to the 2 percent NATO demand, Russia would have been deterred from invading Ukraine, or that Germany would have been able and willing to come to its aid. It will also take years for the new hardware, of course the latest on offer, to be made available to the troops. And it will be hardware of exactly the sort that the US, France and the UK already have in abundance.

And not to be forgotten, the entire German military is under the command of NATO, meaning the Pentagon, so the new arms will add to NATO’s, not Germany’s firepower. Technologically, they will be designed for deployment around the globe, on ‘missions’ like Afghanistan – or, most likely, in the environs of China, to assist the US in its emerging confrontation in the South China Sea. There was no debate at all in the Bundestag on exactly what new ‘capabilities’ would be needed, or what they will be used for. As in the past, under Merkel, this was left to ‘the allies’ to determine. One item could be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), beloved by the French, which combines fighter bombers, drones and satellites for worldwide operations. There is scant hope that there will at some point be a strategic debate in Germany on what it means to defend your own territory, rather than attack the territory of others. Can the Ukrainian experience help start this discussion? Unlikely.

Georgi Derluguian, ‘A Small World War’, NLR 128.

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Mithridatisation

In September 2020 Sir Geoffrey Nice announced the creation of the Uyghur Tribunal to ‘investigate China’s alleged Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, against Uyghurs, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations’. On 23 March last year, 17 British MPs signed a parliamentary motion condemning the ‘Atrocities against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang’. On 6 May, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing entitled ‘The Atrocities Against Uyghurs and Other Minorities in Xinjiang’. Between October and December, ‘atrocities’, ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ filled the pages of the international press from the Guardian to Turkish dailies to Ha’aretz. On 20 January this year, a majority in the French parliament ‘officially recognised the violence perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China against the Uyghurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide’.

The words ‘atrocities’, ‘massacres’, ‘genocide’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘torture’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ are used interchangeably in such denouncements. In other cases, reference is often made to ‘war crimes’. These terms have become so embedded in the news cycle that they scarcely induce any reaction at all. Their routine inflation weakens their capacity to appal, to stir, even to prompt reflection.

We rarely pause to consider that up until the end of the nineteenth century, such categories were alien to political discourse. They were exceedingly rare objects of moral indignation (see, for instance, Bartolomé de las Casas on the massacre of the indios), which had not yet solidified into justifications for political or military intervention. Nobody had ever been convicted of ‘war crimes’. Acts committed during war were never considered more culpable than the war itself. Vanquished enemies were enslaved or deported, but they weren’t cast as criminals; defeat – and everything it implied – was punishment enough.  

The substantive difference between ‘war crimes’ and ‘atrocities’ is that the former are tried and convicted once a war is over, as a sanction against the defeated party and legitimation for the victors. ‘Atrocities’, on the other hand, are more often mobilized in the interest of waging war; they are one method by which modernity constructs an enemy. The same act can be defined as an ‘atrocity’ before a war is declared and a ‘war crime’ once a war is over. The Uyghurs are certainly persecuted and oppressed by the Chinese state, but the persistent use of ‘atrocities’ by the Western security establishment is a semantic escalation that signals a political transition: away from peaceful diplomacy, towards New Cold War confrontation.

Before the Enlightenment, jurists used the word ‘atrocity’ when discussing punishment – though never with critical intentions, Foucault tells us, for the atrocity of the supplice (torture, quartering) was seen as proportionate to the atrocity of the crime, a formula which laid bare a specific conception of power: ‘a power exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations…for which disobedience was an act of hostility…a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them’. It was to eliminate this form of punishment that the Enlightenment introduced a new conception of atrocity, to substitute forms of retribution ‘not in the least ashamed of being “atrocious”’ with ‘punishment that was to claim the honour of being “humane”’. Atrocity was ‘the exacerbation of punishment in relation to the crime’, a novel surplus, irreducible to the accounting of crime and retribution, an excess in relation to the existing economy of infringement.

Another century was needed, however, for the atrocity to acquire its political definition. The first deployment – to my knowledge – of the term ‘atrocity’ by a Western statesman (who, in fact, used it as evidence of a ‘just’ cause for a possible war), was in an invective Gladstone addressed to the Ottomans in 1896: ‘…this is not the first time we have been discussing horrible outrages perpetrated in Turkey, and perpetrated not by Mohammedan fanaticism, but by the deliberate policy of a Government. The very same thing happened in 1876’, but the Sultan’s government, ‘declared that there were no atrocities, no crimes committed by Turks or by the agents of the Government’. Should the Sultan continue to commit these crimes and massacres, Gladstone concluded, ‘England …should take into consideration means of enforcing, if force alone is available, compliance with her just, legal, and human demand.’ 

It wasn’t just any politician, then, who inaugurated the discourse of ‘atrocities’. For over forty years (1852-94), Gladstone dominated British politics (he was Prime Minister for 13 years, Chancellor for another 13, and leader of the House of Commons for 9). It was Gladstone, above all, who invented humanitarian imperialism, or ‘liberal imperialism’ as it was then known, whose heyday would come in the American Century.

Why is it that atrocities hardly appear as an issue in the fifty preceding centuries? Because atrocities were taken for granted. It was common knowledge that power kills, tortures, sweeps away. Nobody threatened to wage war on Charles V for the ‘atrocities’ committed by the Landsknechte when sacking Rome (1527). Before the second half of the twentieth century, the United States never even questioned the genocide of native Americans, the victims of which were in the tens of millions.

Nowadays, atrocities mark the limit of acceptable or legitimate violence. Indignation towards them has become a key part of political etiquette – a means of demonstrating one’s respect for the rules of war, just as one would display one’s manners in a distinguished salon. Like all etiquette, this involves a great deal of hypocrisy. Outrage at ‘excessive violence’ serves to soften or conceal the ubiquitous violence described by Nietzsche, whereby humans inflict harm simply because they can. Exhibiting concern for atrocities is a means of of civilizing the struggle for global power, as if a more ennobled form could somehow change its content. This discourse has the effect of reintroducing an ideological element to war that was largely absent since the peace of Westphalia (1648). Peter the Great of Russia fought the Swedish king Charles X not for ideological reasons, not for civilization, not for good to prevail over evil or to put an end to any genocide, holocaust or massacre, but simply and purely to accrue more power.

The principle according to which only just wars should be fought, or, better still – that a war should first be ‘rendered just’ before it is waged – is a somewhat bizarre and thoroughly modern idea, rooted in the confluence of three long-term tendencies. The first is the Reformation, with its exigency for a redemptive motive for every human action (even for profiting). The second is colonialism, and the notion that wars against the colonized served to civilize them (what Kipling famously called ‘the white man’s burden’). Third is the emergence of public opinion. For it is before this audience that atrocities are paraded in order to justify moving against a constructed enemy (the absence of ‘public opinion’ is another reason why the issue had never been raised in preceding millennia). The atrocity must create a scandal, otherwise it’s ineffective. From this perspective, the politics of atrocities is a symptom of mass communication: first newspapers, then radio and TV, now social media.

In the 1890s, Britain witnessed the triumph of popular newspapers: from 1854 to 1899 the number of dailies in London grew from 5 to 155. Millions of readers were suddenly distressed by stories of atrocities taking place in exotic countries; dark skins, naked bodies, violence. It’s no coincidence that the first great revelations of this type came from the Congo, then the Amazon: atrocities against the ‘savages’. In 1885, the Berlin Conference assigned the Congo to the Association Internationale Africaine, an ante litteram NGO – or ‘humanitarian’ association – which had once employed the famous American explorer Henry Morton Stanley (‘Dr Livingston, I presume?’), and was controlled by the Belgian King Leopold II. This stretch of property measuring 2.6 million km2 was intended to resolve the rivalry between two major colonial powers in Africa, Britain and France (the birth of Belgium in 1830 was a consequence of the defeat of Napoleon, cutting off France’s northeastern provinces, which were integrated into Belgian Walloon). It’s not surprising, then that the campaign against the Belgians’ atrocities in the Congo flared up at exactly the moment Gladstone delivered his speech, nor that it was fanned by the Anglophone press.

When the British government commissioned the Irish diplomat Roger Casement to write a report on the matter, completed in 1904, the document served to establish the rhetorical canon for all future reports on atrocities: accounts of genocide, famine, farced labour, imprisonment, torture, rape, mutilation. One particular episode, reinforced by photographs, struck contemporaries’ imagination: the hands of dead enemies were amputated, so that local conscripts to the Force Publique (the Congo’s military police) could prove that they had really used their bullets, rather than pocketing them. The report enjoyed a global reception, thanks also to Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1907) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo (1909). As a result, in 1908 the Congo was transferred from Leopold’s private holdings to public ownership by the Belgian state.

Casement also wrote the second great report on atrocities: those committed in the Peruvian Amazon’s Putumayo region, where he was sent to investigate in 1910-11, as the company that held the right to exploit the area’s rubber was registered in London and hired Barbadian labour – that is, British subjects. Here the report also certified mistreatments, malnutrition, forced labour, rape, murder, amputations, torture. In 1911, Casement was knighted for his findings. On the extraordinary life of this figure who went from international human rights superstar avant la lettre to concluding his earthly sojourn on the gallows at Pentonville, two texts are worth reading: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Roger Casement: Sex, Lies and the Black Diaries’ (2004) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2012).

A great contributor to the dissemination of Casement’s report on Putumayo was the then British ambassador in Washington, Lord James Bryce, noted in the United States for his book American Commonwealth (with its lapidary verdict: ‘in Latin America, whoever is not black is white, in German America, whoever is not white is black’). With the advent of the First World War, it was Bryce that London would entrust in 1915 with the task of compiling a report on German atrocities committed in Belgium. The Bryce Report collected testimonies of various ‘outrages’ perpetrated by German soldiers, but global public opinion was particularly enflamed by one specific case, so much so that it would be cited by states that had until then remained neutral – Italy, the US – as justification for entering the war. The report outlined that ‘a third kind of mutilation, the cutting of one or both hands, is said to have taken place frequently’. A form of historical lex talionis: a decade earlier, photos circulated that showed the Force Publique practicing the very same punishment, now subjected to the Belgians that had introduced it.

The truth is, even if the Germans committed countless ‘outrages’, these specific accusations eventually proved unfounded, though they were still taught in French elementary schools in the 1930s. This leads us to the problems involved in campaigns against atrocities. For one, do they correspond to reality, or do they bend it to their advantage, in order to make the bad guys look a little worse? What’s more, not all atrocities become an object of scandal. Despite its similarity to the very worst of the Putumayo incursions, the British colonists’ hunting of aboriginals in Tasmania never generated comparable clamour.

Finally, efficacy. Sometimes scandals provoked by atrocities prove to be sharp tools. King Leopold’s crimes forced the Belgian state to take the reins of sovereignty in Congo; German atrocities in Belgium facilitated the entry of neutral powers into the war; the Nanjing massacre of December 1937 prepared American public opinion for war against Japan; the My Lai massacre in March 1968 accelerated Americans’ revolt against the Vietnam War; the atrocities at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 built the foundations of the anti-Serbianism that precipitated intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

Yet there are just as many incidents that produce no such results: after the Putumayo ‘scandal’, Peru wasn’t sanctioned, and indigenous Amazonians continued to be oppressed, if more discreetly. In Rwanda, after the massacres of 1994 everything was forgotten. In such cases, the horrors registered in photographs and documentaries were initially transformed into a sort of monster by which humanity was transfixed, eager yet impotent to fathom the sheer quantity of evil for which it was responsible. The scandal became an occasion for contemplating the heart of darkness inside each of us. But it also induced an inurement to horror. An unintended consequence of the proliferation of campaigns against atrocities has been a kind of mithridatisation, in which we all become peaceful cohabitants with monstrosity.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Tor Krever, ‘Dispensing Global Justice’, NLR 85.

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Rigorous Beauty

Freedom in art is never simple. This is the basic lesson of modernism. Rule follows rupture. Technical restriction opens onto formal innovation, and vice versa. As Theodor Adorno observed in Aesthetic Theory (1970), the artists who came to matter most to twentieth-century modernism ‘rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom’ generated by invention and revolt, than ‘they immediately sought once again after ostensible yet scarcely adequate order’.

This dialectic, linking freedom and constraint, is everywhere apparent in Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty, the first show of the artist’s prints at a UK public museum, which runs at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 18 April 2022. Hanging opposite the entrance, Freefall (1993) is the first work encountered. Two metres tall and one and a half wide, of a surpassing chromatic richness, it is unlike any woodcut I have ever seen. Frankenthaler wanted it as large as possible. Working with her frequent collaborator, the printmaker Kenneth Tyler, she adapted her process to fit this demand. Blue is the print’s major note, produced by spraying varying densities of coloured pulp onto a vast sheet of paper that was then stamped with twenty-one jigsawed woodblocks to produce the finished work. As in her paintings and those of her abstract expressionist peers, the extent of Frankenthaler’s surface area allows for a great deal of variation in tone and value. In Freefall’s upper reaches the pigment is dense, and the blues are rich and dark, almost navy. These lighten to ultramarine further down and to the left, at first tentatively, then emphatically, before seeping out into whites, blacks and yellows along the field’s bottom edge. The gradations in Frankenthaler’s colour imply a transparency, a gradual opening up of the visual field, like looking into the faraway distance. This exhilarating effect is compounded by the work’s structure. The image is organised around a diminishing series of irregular rectangles – four at my count – each of which mimes the shape of the frame, like windows opening onto windows, views onto views.

Freefall (1993)

In 1952, aged twenty-three, Frankenthaler made the painting Mountains and Sea by soaking thinned paint into unprimed canvas to form a stained image united to its ground: an expansive field for colour, unbounded by line. She called this method ‘soak-stain’. Like Freefall, her paintings have an endlessness and openness to them. Critics have responded to these qualities: her work is typically written up in terms of spontaneity and freedom. She could speak this way herself. ‘No rules’ reads a quote of hers, printed on the wall just inside the entrance to the exhibition. She says the same thing in a video halfway through, speaking over footage of herself at work in Tyler’s print studio. But the curation at Dulwich – which sets maquettes, preparatory paintings, and proof after proof alongside the finished prints – implies the opposite: that innovation, of the kind she undoubtedly achieved, demanded the most rigorous generation and application of new rules, new technical procedures, new forms of control.

Seeing Radius (1993) hung next to its maquette, one begins to understand why Frankenthaler – whose entire practice as an abstract painter might seem opposed to the rigidities of woodblock printing – devoted so much time and effort to this medium. By the time of her death in 2011 she had been making woodblocks for almost forty years: her first such print, East and Beyond (1973), ushered in half a lifetime of experimentation. It is shown here, alongside representative examples from each of the subsequent decades. Why such consistent application? The woodblock procedure implies clean lines, small scale, a limited colour palette. Her paintings sought the very opposite. ‘This was part of my problem’, she reflected in 1977, ‘how to adjust my gesture, my language, my mark, within the jigsaw’s’ – that is, the woodblock’s – ‘rigid laws?’ This was no simple endeavour. The surface of the Radius maquette is thick, rucked, ridged with coloured paper pulp. This would have been anathema to her paintings, which never project from the wall as this maquette does. Instead they shimmer and recede. In the final, printed version of Radius, however, tactility has been abolished. Colour, dyed straight into the paper then laid on through six woodblocks, floats in veils of thinned green.

Radius was the result of an exacting process, passing through the dense materiality of the maquette to create a final impression of hazy spontaneity. Precision is the lodestar of these artworks, even, perhaps especially, where they seem most imprecise. ‘This does not bother me’, reads Frankenthaler’s handwriting, attached to an arrow pointing towards the blending of colours along the horizontal edge of Essence Mulberry Working Proof 5 (1977). Alongside the final Essence Mulberry (1977), the exhibition contains two ‘working proofs’, one ‘progressive proof’, and three ‘trial proofs’. In fact there were sixty-five proofs in all, each of them found wanting. What the voluminous proofs show is a continual probing – after what exactly? With the exception of Working Proof 1, which fills the whole field with swaying, tree-like shapes, each proof contrasts a rectangular colour field with a large, unmarked area of Japanese Maniai Gampi handmade paper.

Frankenthaler invented her ‘guzzying’ technique for this series. She would use odd tools – a power sander, a cheese grater – to scratch and mark the surface of each woodblock, producing pits and gaps in the colour that compound the effects of the grain. This is most exaggerated in Essence Mulberry Trial Proof 19, where the deep blues and reds of the coloured field are rent by lighter patches that merge into floating, vaguely anatomical vertical forms. The final print of Essence Mulberry is more restrained. It is a balancing act reached between the pigment, the paper, and the wood grain formed from the four blocks of oak, birch, walnut, and lauan plywood that combined to make the image. Frankenthaler’s colour seems to follow the lines of the wood grain, deep red at the edges swaying and fading into blues made purplish by flecks of leftover red before pulling away at the rough expanse of paper.

Essence Mulberry (1977)

Frankenthaler knew what she was working with. The paper on which Essence Mulberry is printed is a marvel: thick, coarse woven, ragged at the edges. But Japan was more than a source of exceptional materials. Engagement with calligraphy and zen philosophy thread through the entire history of abstract expressionism. The title of East and Beyond, no less than its multi-woodblock technique, signals that, right from the start, Frankenthaler wanted her printmaking to point Eastwards. Most of the works here invoke Japan in one way or another: whether via technical procedures, papers, pigments, or some less tangible (more exoticized?) idea of the nation on the part of the artist.

One series is titled Tales of Genji (1998), after Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel and an unparalleled record of courtly life in Heian period Japan. Shikibu, another exceptional woman artist – wealthy, cultured, working within and against constraints marked out by her gender – must have felt like a fitting precedent. Frankenthaler collected ukiyo-e prints, those eighteenth and nineteenth-century works of Japanese art in which the technique of using multiple coloured woodblocks to mass produce a diversity of tone was first pioneered. When speaking about printmaking, her discourse was filled with references to ukiyo-e masters like Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. The prints in the Tales of Genji series respond to their work. Tales of Genji V uses no fewer than twenty-nine woodblocks to deliver forty-nine colours. The blocks have been ‘guzzied’, producing a calligraphic effect, forming characters that seem almost recognizable. The result is a haze of navy and pink wrapped like a body around a central red figure.

What was the price of all this beauty? Born and raised on New York’s Upper East Side, the daughter of a Supreme Court Judge, Frankenthaler was not the only artist of her generation to fall under suspicion of practicing a kind of elite aestheticism. The same thing happened to Joan Mitchell – also wealthy, also a woman. ‘Detached and uninvolved’ was Grace Hartigan’s judgement upon seeing the first batch of soak-stain paintings in 1953. Hartigan was living hand-to-mouth at this point, trying to find time to paint between temp jobs and rent crises. To her, Frankenthaler’s massive, ethereal veils must have looked intolerably otherworldly. Dismissing them in her journal – ‘I believed her to be talented, but this show makes me wonder’ – Hartigan raised questions about modernism, autonomy and beauty that already had deep roots. An eagerness to read (and dismiss) Frankenthaler’s art in terms indexed to her gender is part of the story. But the relation between beauty and detachment reaches further, across the whole history of modernist painting.

In another room, set apart from the exhibition, a small show called Monet x Frankenthaler is running concurrently. Here two paintings hang side by side: Water Lilies and Agapanthus (c.1914-1917) by Claude Monet and Feather (1979) by Frankenthaler. The pairing is instructive. The Monet is a classic late work from the Giverny period: lily pads, water, weeds, purple agapanthus flowers. Nothing of modernity or capitalism; no hint of city or banlieue. A far cry from Déville-lès-Rouen in 1870, where Monet had painted toxic chimney stacks belching soot over the old town. Even the suburbs of his Argenteuil period have disappeared. Social art historians from TJ Clark to Thomas Crow have seen weakness in the withdrawals of Monet’s late painting: a giving up of the attempt to grasp modernity and nature in imperfect synthesis; each step into the garden another flight into fiction. ‘Detached and uninvolved’ would not be a bad precis of the critical terms here.

Feather (1979)

Frankenthaler’s Feather does interesting things in the context of this critique. It is a mist of thinned acrylic: pink, orange, and green seeping across the field, acquiring no density; smudges of unmixed white sitting on top of the haze like catch-lights cutting through fog. Its dominant terms are natural: light and moisture. But like the plastic paint the image is made from, the effect is synthetic, the colours artificial. The wash of pink at top right looks more like street-level neon than a sunlit garden. At points, where the colours have blended, they form a sickly brown. Beauty comes close to ugliness; nature approaches artifice. In this conjunction, Monet’s painting takes on a different tone. Its brushwork is frenetic, dissolving into a hatch of dislocated strokes and raw canvas at bottom right. And the perspective in which he rendered his scene is extraordinary, just as disorientating as Frankenthaler’s fog. Monet’s painting lurches, from a side-on view of the agapanthus flowers, towards a tipped-forward, top-down vantage on the lily pads. It cycles through painterly modes, trying on technical procedures and discarding them as it goes. Side-by-side, both of these paintings invoke nature, but in a manner that becomes more queasily dislocated the longer you look at them.

Frankenthaler was an artist who worked by conjoining extremes: freedom and constraint; abstraction and (hints of) figuration; nature and artifice. In this she was typically modernist. There is a photograph by Alexander Liberman of her waltzing with Barnett Newman at the New York world’s fair in 1964: abstract expressionism’s most extreme proponent of economy and rigour arm in arm with the style’s most extravagant champion of beauty. Newman’s paintings combine massive, rigid geometries with huge areas of colour. He and Frankenthaler are often counterposed in the critical literature: straight lines versus soak-stains. Unlike her, he never smiled in photographs. But here he beams at her like a child. Looking at the photo, I am reminded of the ways in which gender can overdetermine the contrast between two artists. As this exhibition makes clear, Frankenthaler was just as rigorous an artist as Newman. It is by mediating such concepts as discipline and beauty that her art acquired its lasting value. 

Read on: Zoe Sutherland, ‘The World as Gallery’, NLR 98.

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News from Natoland

Since 3 December 2021, when the Washington Post ‘broke’ the story – based on some aerial photos of tents in a field and other helpfully selected nuggets of US intelligence – the Anglophone world has been subjected to a highly orchestrated media campaign, trumpeting at top volume the ‘massive’ and ‘imminent’ Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the absence of any actual news to report, unnamed US security officials are wheeled out like clockwork to issue pronouncements, NATO figures (Stoltenberg, Borrell) are pushed forward to fill any gaps. Daily front-page headlines hammering home the threat of war have been backed by a loyal chorus of opinion-makers, remarkably unanimous in their views.

Sotto voce, the cat had already been let out of the bag as to the Biden Administration’s main goals. American officials were ‘pushing European countries’ to create a ‘common prescription’ against Russia, a New York Times piece heavily briefed by US security had announced three weeks before. In London, the broadsheet press jumped to, the Financial Times reliably out-hawking Washington, with the Economist piping up alongside. Even the LRB felt obliged to join in with a particularly aggressive piece, whose author was apparently unaware that Georgia, not Russia, had invaded South Ossetia in 2008.

What tropes do the warmongers offer? First, Putin is the unilateral source of aggression, mobilizing a vast invasion force out of the blue for ‘imminent’ action. Second, NATO’s expansion is non-negotiable. Third, it is impermissible under the ‘rules-based [read: US-led] international order’ for borders to be redrawn by force. Fourth, national sovereignty must be inviolate; Ukraine must determine its own foreign policy. What are the realities?

First, far from unilateral, the Russian force is the same as that mobilized last spring in response to NATO’s two-month ‘Defender Europe’ exercise, involving 28,000 American and European troops on Russia’s borders, backed by ostentatiously aggressive US-UK naval operations in the Black Sea. The Russian counter-mobilization on its own side of the border was, as the US acknowledged at the time, ‘standard operating procedure’.

Moscow was also alarmed when the Biden Administration winked at the Ukrainian military’s use of drone warfare in the Donbas in October 2021, when aerial weapons were strictly prohibited by the Minsk agreements – and the lethal escalatory effects of drones had just been demonstrated by Azerbaijan’s 2020 war on Nagorno Karabakh. The Biden Administration had also stepped up NATO exercises in Ukraine itself – the summer 2021 Cossack Mace exercise in the south, between Odessa and Crimea, for example.

Militarily, in a broader perspective it is NATO’s forces that have been on the offensive, advancing 800 miles eastward over the last thirty years, deep inside the borders of the former Soviet Union and now penetrating the Russian-speaking heartlands. The Kremlin proved at first gullible and slow-witted in responding to this, both Yeltsin and Putin willing to swallow US assurances, and then – after the Bush-Blair 2008 diplomatic thrust to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia – often inept and clumsy in formulating a more resolute response.

But NATO expansion – subordinating the advanced-capitalist European heartlands to US military command – is a voluntarist imperial strategy, not a question of national defence. Ideologically and strategically, Washington’s liberal-international militarism – dividing the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ states and pledging to regime-change the latter – is a recipe for war, as Stephen Walt has argued. The commentariat’s cry – ‘no sphere of influence for Russia!’ – neglects to add that this is because the US presumes to command a global sphere. Where US interests collude, redrawing borders by force is not a problem – viz. the green light for Turkey’s occupation of northern Syria, not to mention Cyprus, or Israel’s of southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights, or the de facto US-Israeli protectorate in northern Iraq. Relatedly, under the ‘rules-based order’, national sovereignty is at Washington’s bequest. The vice-regal language of operatives like Victoria Nuland, selecting Ukraine’s next prime minister after the toppling of pro-Russian Yanukovych in 2014, speaks volumes about realities on the ground.

Amid the general hysteria, we should welcome even mildly dissenting voices. In addition to Walt, Simon Jenkins warns that NATO’s treatment of Russia virtually guaranteed a chauvinist reflex. Like Anatol Lieven, Jenkins argues that the way forward lay in implementing the confederal constitutional arrangements of the Minsk accords – largely blocked by Kiev’s objections to Donbas ‘home rule’ – plus an end to NATO expansionism, Russian withdrawal and the reinstatement of Ukraine’s borders. Countering narratives of unilateral Russian aggression, Adam Tooze extends the analysis he first developed in Crashed. Anatomizing ‘sphere of influence’ realities, Peter Beinart calls for de facto recognition that Ukraine will remain a buffer state. Rajan Menon and Thomas Graham have proposed a moratorium of 20-25 years on Ukraine’s NATO membership. Robert Kaplan calls for Finlandization. Ross Douthat ponders how the Biden Administration could conduct a successful retreat.

More analytically, David Hendrickson has highlighted the ‘super-aggressive but also super-cautious’ approach of the Biden Administration, following the script of Anders Åslund and others at the hardline Atlantic Council to ‘restore Moscow’s respect for the international rules-based order’ – further militarization of the region under NATO, step-by-step integration of Ukraine in the outer circles of NATO membership, putting the Crimea and Donbas back on the table and ending Nord Stream 2 – with a focus on Ukraine ‘from day one’, as a Biden official said, while at the same time, under pressure from the China hawks, avoiding any large-scale commitment of US forces. That meant gearing up the Old World allies for action.

If the British media has been the most frenzied in Europe, UK politicians have followed suit. Johnson’s warmongering – and Labour leader Keir Starmer’s avid backing for it – was analysed here by Oliver Eagleton. Now Starmer has launched an attack on the UK peace movement, Stop the War – one of the few groups to organize against the current escalation. Assuring Guardian readers that ‘Labour’s commitment to NATO is unshakable’ – as if the party’s shameful Cold War and Blairite record left any room for doubt – Starmer rails that Stop the War is ‘giving succour to authoritarian leaders’ and ‘showing solidarity with the aggressor’.

This is the tired old slogan raised against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the 60s. In the latter case, those of us who founded the VSC were proud to stand with the Vietnamese people against the US bombers and napalm. Many of us opposed both the entry of Soviet troops to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. My own position on Afghanistan was to oppose both the Soviet occupation in December 1979 and NATO’s ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in 2001 (see The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan, Verso 2021).

The millions who marched in Europe and the US in 2003 against the coming invasion of Iraq were not supporters of Saddam, whose authoritarian regime had been nurtured, cultivated and armed for many decades by the United States and its NATO allies. They rightly foresaw the carnage and destruction Bush and Blair would be inflicting on the Middle East and fought to stop it. Do Starmer and MI5 regard Simon Jenkins as a sinister figure in hock to Putin? And let’s not forget the support given by NATO members to the royal torturers and killers who rule Morocco and Saudi Arabia today, inflicting the bloodbath on Yemen. If moral grandstanding is the basis for war, why didn’t the London blowhards stay on in Afghanistan?    

Let’s revive a few more memories. Who backed Putin’s murderous assault on Chechnya in 1999-2000, and watched contentedly as its capital Grozny was razed to the ground? Clinton and Blair did – the latter rushing to Moscow to be the first to congratulate Putin on his subsequent election victory – with other NATO members looking on. Russia was then considered a loyal subordinate, since it backed the West on most issues – not least throwing open its bases to aid the NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Tony Wood’s fine analysis in NLR provides chapter and verse on Putin’s role in the Chechen tragedy as well as the collusion of NATO members at the time.

What has changed is that NATO’s auto-pilot expansionism has put it on course to swallow Ukraine and Georgia, which Russian raison d’état is bound to resist. At the same time, Russia’s blundering militarized response may have served to weaken its hand by throwing away the strongest card it held in Ukraine – the friendship of the Russian-speaking or Russia-oriented half of the population. In 2008, when Bush and Blair pushed through NATO’s ‘open door’ policy to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, barely 20% of Ukrainians supported joining NATO. The majority was split between supporting a military alliance with Russia or maintaining the neutral status enshrined in Ukraine’s 1990s constitution (it was altered by the Zelensky government in 2019 to set national goals of EU and NATO membership).

By 2014, after the Maidan uprising, Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing low-level war in the Donbas region, support for NATO had risen to 40%, but with another 40% of Ukrainians still against. (Ukrainian pollsters now excluded the populous Donbas and Crimea regions, which also affected the figures.) In the western regions – more integrated into EU economic networks via migrant workers in Poland – there is now majority support for joining NATO. But as Volodymyr Ishchenko has written, many Ukrainians feel that NATO membership would forfeit still more of Ukraine’s sovereignty while increasing tensions with Russia, escalating internal divisions among Ukrainians and dragging the country into another of the US’s ‘forever wars’, one of which has just ended in humiliating defeat.

The Western media attack-dogs have been congratulating themselves that, whatever else, their propaganda onslaught has united NATO. Not quite. The relentless spotlight of the past twelve weeks has also shown up its fissures. Germany’s chief naval officer, Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, was forced to resign after telling a military think-tank in New Delhi that all Putin really wanted was a little respect: ‘My God, give him respect! That costs so little, really nothing at all. It is easy to pay him the respect which he desires and really deserves. Russia is an ancient country, Russia is an important country. Even we, India, Germany, need Russia, we need Russia against China.’

The admiral was posing a Maoist-Althusserian question: the NATO masters of war must decide between Russia and China – which is the primary and which the secondary contradiction? Nixon’s visit to Beijing undoubtedly helped to weaken the Soviet Union. Yet the West-China collaboration made the PRC the political-economic force it is today and re-subordinating it will be difficult, if not impossible. Given the Biden family’s lucrative involvement in Ukrainian affairs, not to mention the Clinton-DLC investment in the bogey of Russian trolls swinging the 2016 election, the current administration is unlikely to attempt a parallel move in Moscow. Washington still seems bent on forging a pan-Eurasian counter-hegemonic alliance. Putin and Xi duly issued a joint statement from the Beijing Winter Olympics against the expansion of NATO and deepening economic ties, not least increasing Russian gas imports to China.

The official response to Admiral Schönbach was swift. The new German Minister of Defence, Christine Lambrecht, a Social Democrat in the Starmer mould, suspended Schönbach immediately from all duties and titles. Embarrassingly, however, the retired General Harald Kujat, a senior figure in the German armed forces and former Chair of NATO’s Military Committee, then gave a TV interview (that rapidly disappeared online): ‘If I were still in office I would have stood up for Admiral Schönbach, and tried in every way to prevent his dismissal… it must be in our interest to achieve a sensible result, to de-escalate and arrive at a relaxation of tension with Russia, of course with consideration of Ukrainian security interests as well.’ Even within Natoland there are differences: Johnson-Starmer preach war-war, many Germans favour jaw-jaw.

British posturing is designed mainly to stress to the White House and Pentagon that a Brexited Britain can be even more loyal than in Blairite times. The dog-like coital lock could be permanently sealed with cement. Meanwhile, Starmer accusing Stop the War of supporting authoritarians shines a light on his own politics. He will do whatever he’s asked to by the British state. If tomorrow Putin is designated a friend, Starmer will go along. He certainly knows something about authoritarianism himself, having expelled dozens of dissident Jews from the Labour Party and suspended his radical predecessor on spurious charges. In McCarthyite fashion, he might proscribe the peace movement altogether and try to force its Labour supporters to quit. He could go further than Blair by making support for NATO a necessary pre-condition for party membership. It would be just an extension of weaponizing anti-Semitism and effectively outlawing criticisms of Israel.

Stop the War is not a political party. It has Tory supporters, as well as many who favour Scottish independence. Its aim is to stop wars waged by the US or NATO, whatever the pretext. The politicians and the arms merchants who back these wars do so not to enhance democracy, but to serve the hegemonic interests of the world’s largest imperial power. Stop the War and many others will carry on the task of opposing them despite threats, slanders or blandishments.  

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Springtime for NATO’, NLR I/234.

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Geringonça’s End

On 27 October 2021, the budget put forward by Portugal’s ruling Socialist Party (PS) was voted down by the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and Left Bloc (BE), resulting in the dissolution of Portuguese parliament, the collapse of the government and an early general election. The subsequent national ballot, held on 30 January, saw the PCP and BE lose half their elected positions while the PS gained an absolute majority. The PCP fell from 6.33% of the vote to 4.39%, the BE from 9.52% to 4.46%. Although the polls showed an increasingly close race between the PS and the centre-right PSD towards the end of the campaign, on election night the former surpassed its 2019 performance by five percentage points – enough to elect more representatives than every other party combined. Its 41.5% gave the PS 119 seats out of a total 230. Turnout rose by almost 10%.

This means that for the next four years, the centre-left Socialists, led by prime minister António Costa, will be able to govern without the need to negotiate with the two main parties to their left. The day after the election, the CIP (Confederation of Portuguese Business) issued a statement welcoming the result and declaring its intention to present ten major proposals to the government, suggesting changes in fiscal policy and the social security system. The implication was clear. Whether or not the PS follows these prescriptions to the letter, the state will now be more susceptible to capitalist influence, both domestic and international. The so-called geringonça has come to an end.

The geringonça, or ‘contraption’, was the name given to the political solution that emerged from the 2015 legislative elections, in which no party received the necessary vote share to form a majority. Although the PS won fewer votes than a coalition headed by the PSD, it was able to form a government thanks to the support of PCP and BE representatives. Their confidence-and-supply deal with the PS brought to an end the administration led by Pedro Passos Coelho (PSD), who, since 2011, had implemented the Troika’s austerity agenda. The geringonça – an arrangement unprecedented in Portugal’s democratic history – suffered its first setback in the 2019 elections, when the left parties’ vote share declined and their joint legislative programme with the PS was not renewed. From then on, the PCP and BE voted with the government on a case-by-case basis. 

Now that the geringonça’s gradual decline has given way to its downfall, it is worth recalling the origins of the term. In a parliamentary debate in late 2015, the former deputy prime minister Paulo Portas remarked, ‘This isn’t a real government, just a kind of contraption.’ The left proudly appropriated the insult and divested it of its disdainful implications. It was indicative of a specific historical moment, when old fissures between the ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ left seemed less relevant, and new political experiments seemed necessary to rupture the austerity consensus. Six years later, the situation is different. The PS’s priorities are more remote from those of the PCP and BE. The cooling of relations seen in 2019, when the three parties abandoned their formal parliamentary agreement, has since morphed into open hostility. 

The PS blames the end of the geringonça on the supposed extremism and intransigence of its partners. According to the Socialists, the PCP and BE were insisting on including a number of impossible demands in last year’s budget, such as raising the monthly minimum wage to 850 euros and repealing labour laws introduced by the previous right-wing government. For their part, the PCP and BE attributed the geringonça’s breakdown to the PS’s desire to govern from the centre – which, so they said, prompted António Costa to engineer the failure of his own budget to precipitate a political crisis and snap election.

It is difficult to make sense of the surprising election results, not least because we still do not have the data from exit polls carried out on election day. We do not know, for example, which parties PS voters supported in past elections or who benefitted from the increased turnout. However, there are various indications that many of those who previously supported the PCP or BE have now switched to the PS. This shift was already apparent from polling conducted after the failure of the budget, which suggested that the PS’s line had more cut-through. Yet this trend seemed to accelerate in the final period of the election campaign, in response to news that the PSD was progressively eroding the PS’s lead, raising the possibility of a right-wing coalition. Left-wing voters were evidently spooked by the prospect of a geringonça of the right, bringing together the centre-right PSD with smaller parties like the ultra-neoliberal Iniciativa Liberal (IL) and neofascist Chega.

Yet if tactical voting contributed to the decline of the PCP and BE, there was no parallel misfortune for the far-right. The PSD roundly failed to overtake the PS, whereas the IL and Chega emerged from the elections greatly strengthened. They increased their number of deputies from one apiece to 6 and 12 respectively. Whereas left-wing voters lent their support to the PS to ward off the right, their right-wing counterparts made no such compromises – with the result that the PS exceeded expectations while the PSD undershot them. In this conjuncture, the PS consolidated its position as the most effective instrument for maintaining Portugal’s social and political status quo. In turn, the radical right affirmed its place as the most effective force for channelling discontent.

Among the many reasons why tactical voting did not take hold on the right was the strategic nous of its new parties. Since its establishment in 2017, the IL has excelled in political communications. It has galvanized opposition to a number of specific policies – social welfare, progressive taxation – while crafting a wider platform that identifies businesses and entrepreneurship as the key to Portugal’s future structural transformation. Meanwhile, Chega has combined its attacks on the Portuguese Social Income programme and racist talking points (particularly anti-Roma ones) with an anti-elite message, presenting itself as the only party capable of making a clean break with establishment politics. In both cases, though by different means, the insurgent right has come to be seen as the sole agent of change. Its two main outlets have mobilized forms of individualism and nationalism which, in recent decades, have become increasingly naturalized in Portuguese society.

The successful manoeuvring of the insurgent right contrasted with its rivals on the opposite end of the spectrum. Although the PCP–BE opposition to the October budget was partly motivated by an immediate political disagreement with the PS, it also signalled a longer-term strategy. The PCP and BE had voted through several previous budgets in which the PS refused to countenance their core policies and dragged its feet over key promises. This caused the steady depletion of the left’s negotiating power and the erosion of its electoral relevance. The hope of the PCP and BE, in withdrawing their support for the budget, was to preserve their political autonomy while forcing a realignment in the geringonça to confront the problems of the post-pandemic era. The left parties reckoned that, if the PS had won the election but not an overall majority, it would have been forced to choose one of two paths: either reopen dialogue with its partners, or come to terms with the center-right.

This attempt to shift the centre of political gravity was an obvious failure. In the end, the price of preserving the political autonomy of both parties was higher than expected. Between October 2021 and the national ballot, the PCP and BE found themselves in an ambivalent position, denouncing the policies of the government while also seeking to revitalize the geringonça. Communicating this ambivalence to the electorate was no easy task. Many former PCP and BE voters ended up viewing them as obstructionists who had mounted a premature and – in the light of the rising of the far-right – irresponsible gamble. Hence the exodus to the ultra-‘responsible’ PS.  

The poor performance of the PCP and BE has elicited two competing explanations on the Portuguese left. The first is that the PCP and BE ended up betraying their revolutionary principles by placing all their hopes in the revival of the geringonça, and are now paying the price for that betrayal. The second is that the leaderships of both parties committed a grave error in voting against the budget: a mistake that evinced their impenitent vanguardism and unwillingness to explore the opportunities for legislative reform created by the geringonça, as well as their sectarian attitude towards the PS.

To these theories we may add a third conjecture: that the problem lay not in an abandonment of revolutionary politics, nor in the leaderships’ reluctance to cooperate with the PS, but in the relationship between these two dynamics. That is to say, the gap between the left’s revolutionary ambitions and its reformist constraints could perhaps have been navigated more effectively if the geringonça, having begun as a parliamentary compromise, had become a political movement in itself.

It is worth considering how most of the ‘victories’ of the geringonça were achieved. These were, above all, the result of intra-party negotiations, in which extended parliamentary wrangling would occasionally issue in new social policies. Rather than giving fresh impetus to the social mobilization that actuated the struggle against the Troika until 2015, the geringonça established a contractual and representative relationship with voters. This gulf deprived forces to the left of the PS of alternative means of self-expression or social mediation. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the BE – whose popularity relies to a large degree on the vicissitudes of media coverage and parliamentary performances – suffered more losses than the PCP, an organization with deep grassroots support.  

Meanwhile, throughout the years of the geringonça, the PS managed to build a reasonable amount of trust with the electorate. Counterposing their moderate social democratic programme to the memory of the austerity inflicted by the right, the Socialists took advantage of Europe’s economic rebound and claimed credit for the popular social policies passed with the help of their left-wing partners. In the wake of the pandemic, large sections of the population desired greater institutional stability, and the PS was best placed to provide it. Looking ahead, the left must confront the perennial question on which the geringonça foundered – how to combine institutional action with social mobilization? – if it hopes to challenge PS hegemony.

Translated by Lisa Leak.

Read on: Daniel Finn, ‘Luso-Anomalies’, NLR 106.

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Away from the Guns

I.

Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard-based naturalist who died on 26 December 2021 at the age of 92, was often misunderstood by the left. When he launched the field of sociobiology in 1975, he was charged by the Sociobiology Study Group – a critical group set up by Marxist geneticist Richard Lewontin – with trying to ‘justify the present social order’. His work, applying the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution to the interpretation of behaviour, appeared to give a new gloss to discredited biological determinism, and suggest that there was a natural basis for such undesirable characteristics as xenophobia and male dominance.

Despite the conservative implications of some of his work, Wilson did not consider himself a man of the right. In his own words, he was a ‘Roosevelt liberal turned pragmatic centrist’. He considered himself a feminist, and furiously rejected charges of racism. His major intellectual goal, which he termed ‘consilience’, was to unify the sciences through a narrow version of Darwinism. He hoped that the essential questions about art, society and religion could be addressed, in part, as questions about genetics. His major ethical concern was to defend the biosphere, challenge human exceptionalism and cultivate respect for the non-human species he studied. Awareness of the ‘limits of human nature’, achieved by viewing humanity ‘from a distance’ – from a termite’s-eye-view, one might say ­– would undermine anthropocentrism.

He was also a pugilist ‘roused’, as he once wrote, ‘by the amphetamine of ambition’. Nothing could have been more ambitious than to use population biology to explain animal behaviour at every level. In his advice to young scientists, he urged followers to avoid research fields blazing with intellectual battle: ‘march away from the sound of the guns’, he said, before adding, ‘make a fray of your own’. This is what Wilson did, through thirty books on insect civilization, island biogeography, human nature, ecology, extinction, the origins of social life and the roots of creativity, among other themes.  His turn to environmentalism, including his ‘half-earth’ solution to mass extinction, made a significant impact on the ecological left. 

And, if one could forgive his political obtuseness, he wrote beautifully. His descriptions of his field work were excitable, evocative, and dense with delighted observations and perfectly pitched metaphors. This gift won him mass audiences and two Pulitzer Prizes.

II.

Born on 10 June 1929 in Birmingham, Alabama, Wilson was raised in a South beguiled, as he wrote in his memoir, by ‘her antebellum dream of the officer and the gentleman’. It was a chaotic childhood, with unhappy parents. When he was seven, in the summer of 1936, he was sent to stay with a family on Florida’s Perdido Bay while his parents fought. He spent two days, in this ‘season of fantasy’, exploring the life on the shore, enthralled by marine life and the evidence of ‘alien purpose and dark happenings in the kingdom of deep water’. The same year, he blinded himself in his right eye in a fishing accident. To this injury he credited his attention to smaller creatures, such as butterflies and ants. Finally, in the winter of 1937, his parents divorced, and he was sent to the private Gulf Coast Military Academy in Gulfport, Mississippi, which he described as a ‘carefully planned nightmare engineered for the betterment of the untutored and undisciplined’. He was gleeful when the Academy was visited by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and populist governor of Alabama Jim Folsom, whom he admired.

Unable to serve in the army during the Second World War, due to the impairment of his right eye, he studied biology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he was also briefly drawn to the radical left. It was, however, the Darwinian revolution that would capture his imagination. The ‘modern synthesis’, as it was dubbed by Julian Huxley, combined Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics. R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright had deployed mathematical population genetics to show that continuous, small-scale genetic mutations could provide the missing mechanism of heredity in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This discovery catalysed Wilson’s conversion from his Baptist upbringing to secular humanism.

The ambition of the modern synthesis was expansive. Influenced by the Vienna positivists, many of its pioneers sought to unify the sciences: a factor in Wilson’s later effort to shoehorn sociobiology into every possible field. It was also infused with the ambition of human improvement, through eugenics. Wilson hoped, in the spirit of pre-war progressivism, that the ‘jerrybuilt foundation of partly obsolete Ice-Age adaptations’ in humanity could be refined through ‘conventional eugenics’.

Fired up by the new discoveries, Wilson would begin his first survey of Alabama ants at the age of eighteen, start his PhD research at Harvard three years later in 1950, join Harvard’s faculty in 1956, and go on, with population ecologist Robert MacArthur, to develop the theory of island biogeography. He would also develop the insights of British evolutionary biologist, W. D. Hamilton, whose obscure paper on the evolution of altruistic traits, ‘The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour’, he read in 1964. Hamilton was struggling to gain an academic position, in part due to his views on eugenics. His theory of ‘inclusive fitness’ argued that the unit of selection was not the organism, but the gene. Since related organisms shared so much genetic material, there was an advantage to kin altruism. Wilson had already become interested in social biology through his study of ant societies. Hamilton’s theory suggested to him the possibility of launching a new discipline.

III.

Wilson first systematically applied Hamilton’s ideas with his 1971 book, The Insect Societies. However, it was with Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), and On Human Nature (1978), that he made his fray. In Sociobiology, he sought to explain the social behaviour of insects, birds and primates with the Hamiltonian principle that each organism, a ‘temporary carrier’ of its genes, was ‘the DNA’s way of making more DNA’. Behaviour, being adapted to its environment, must be governed by its genetic make-up.

Like Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’, also influenced by Hamilton’s work, this way of talking about DNA was pungent mythmaking. In ascribing ultimate agency to genes, Wilson’s metaphor implied a rigid genetic determinism. In Sociobiology and On Human Nature, however, he emphasized the importance of emergent properties, acknowledged that ‘genes have given away most of their sovereignty’, foregrounded the human ‘flexibility’ allowing individuals to ‘play roles of virtually any degree of specification’, and stressed that there were choices to be made ‘among our innate natural propensities’. He rejected claims for a genetic basis of hierarchy and downplayed IQ, a fetish of the right, as ‘only one subset of … intelligence’. In an interview with the New York Times, he explained, ‘I see maybe 10 percent of human behaviour as genetic and 90 percent environmental’.

Nonetheless, Wilson insisted, human nature did restrict social choice. There was, he suggested in Sociobiology, a likely genetic basis for xenophobia, war, the nuclear family, spite, homosexuality, creativity, entrepreneurship, drive and mental stamina. Citing the work of ecologist Garret Hardin, he suggested that ‘human territorial behaviour’ was genetically founded, with the result that when tribes compete over scarce resources, ‘xenophobia becomes a political virtue’. In arguing for the possibility of ‘homosexual genes’, he explained that the ‘homosexual state itself results in inferior genetic fitness,’ and could only be explained by ‘kin selection’: though he was unsure whether ‘such genes really exist’. Of the nuclear family, then under sustained criticism from the feminist movement, he insisted that it was the ‘building block of nearly all human societies’, and that the ‘formalised code’ governing kinship relations had not changed much since hunter-gatherer society. Of universal competition and hierarchy, he explained that the ‘best and most entrepreneurial of the role-actors usually gain a disproportionate share of the rewards, while the least successful are usually displaced to other, less desirable positions.’

Most controversially, in On Human Nature, he tentatively lent credence to ‘racial’ variations. While acknowledging that ‘almost all differences between human societies are based on learning and social conditioning’, he cited research finding ‘significant average differences’ between races in ‘locomotion, posture, muscular tone, and emotional response’. One did not have to believe in ‘biological equality’ as a condition for affirming ‘human freedom and dignity’, he averred. But, without displaying the slightest historical sensitivity, he accepted the framing of variation in terms of the monstrous pseudo-concept of ‘race’. This is notable given the placatory tone of the book, and its effort to distinguish him from crude reductionists and reactionaries.

Wilson’s ahistorical description of species behaviour in terms of the categories of twentieth-century capitalism – neither the ‘nuclear family’ nor ‘entrepreneurship’ are human universals, for example – implied that it would be very difficult to change behaviours like competitiveness, racism or sexism by changing the environment. Later, writing in the New York Times Magazine, Wilson guessed that ‘the genetic bias’ between the sexes was ‘intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and most egalitarian of future societies’, although he qualified this as ‘only a guess’ which could not justify ‘anything less than sex-blind admission and free personal choice’. But such a ‘guess’, like the value-laden claims peppering the last chapter of Sociobiology, is indistinguishable from ideology.

Wilson’s claims provoked the formation of Richard Lewontin’s Sociobiology Study Group. Lewontin wrote to the New York Review of Books to warn that discredited biological determinism was being presented as breakthrough research. Ironically, Sociobiology had cited Lewontin’s work several times. Demonstrators began to turn up at Wilson’s lectures, charging that he was legitimizing sexism and racism. Wilson was bitter over the attacks. He considered Stephen Jay Gould, a leading critic of his work, a ‘charlatan’, and framed the battle as one between ‘science and political ideology’, in which Marxism was ‘mortally threatened by the discoveries of human sociobiology’. The sociologist Ullica Segerstrale argues in Defenders of the Truth (2000) that the critics showed ‘astounding disregard’ for what he had written. There is some truth to this: Wilson was frequently misquoted, and wrongly treated as a biological determinist making a case for sexism and hierarchy.

Yet, as Philip Kitcher wrote in Vaulting Ambition (1985), by far the best review of the controversy, this was ‘a dispute about evidence’, not the validity of sociobiological research. Wilson’s most trenchant critics were not extreme culturalists. Lewontin, Leon Kamin and Steven Rose, in Not in Our Genes (1984), rail against the ‘denial of biology’. In part, Wilson acknowledged, there was a dispute about the validity of ‘plausibility arguments and speculation’. As Kitcher put it, when the costs of being wrong are sufficiently high, ‘then it is reasonable and responsible to ask for more evidence’. Not only was there little to no evidence for human sociobiology’s most controversial claims but, as Rose would argue, this style of reasoning posited speculative ‘distal’ (evolutionary) mechanisms for human behaviour such as sexism and xenophobia, when ‘proximal’ (political or social) causes better explained the data. An underlying theoretical issue, as Gould wrote, was Wilson’s stringently adaptationist version of Darwinism which resulted in the false inference that any behaviour that contributed to fitness, and was universal, must have come about through natural selection, and thus be under what Wilson called ‘genetic control’.

IV.

Despite Wilson’s middle-of-the-road politics, the ideological refrains bookending his ambitious salvo resonated with a wider turn to the right. A form of pop sociobiology vastly more vulgar than anything Wilson endorsed held that human destiny was ‘hard-wired’, a claim that entered the conservative ‘common sense’ of the era and fed into human sociobiology’s rebranded successor, evolutionary psychology.

And there is a further, revealing chapter in Wilson’s political opacity. Between 1987 and 1994, according to a recent exposé in the NYRB, he corresponded with the ‘race realist’, J. Phillipe Rushton. Rushton, based at Western University, used Wilson’s work on island biogeography to explain ‘race differences’. Wilson and MacArthur had suggested that the reproductive success of species in islands was determined by the advantages of ‘r/K’ selection. Species that produced large amounts of offspring were ‘r selected’. Those that produced fewer offspring with more parental investment were ‘K selected’. Rushton thought that black people were ‘r selected’ while white people were ‘K selected’.

Wilson did not see a racist pseudoscientist mangling his work. He saw, instead, a ‘courageous’ academic being persecuted. He acted as an academic referee for Rushton’s article, and lobbied Western’s faculty on Rushton’s behalf when he was investigated for academic misconduct. There is no evidence that Wilson was a wholehearted supporter of ‘race realism’. In his 2000 introduction to Sociobiology, he observed that ‘statistical racial differences, if any, remain unproven’. Yet given his claims in Sociobiology and On Human Nature, it cannot be written off as an error of judgment. Rather, Wilson’s predicates, and his historical ignorance, inclined him to credit views that were at odds with his liberal politics.

Wilson’s Darwinian ecological precepts had other political ramifications. An emphasis on the struggle for survival in conditions of competition for scarce resources underlined the biological limits conditioning human civilization. Yet Darwin also stressed the evolved dependencies between organisms, and the necessity of cooperation. As Wilson wrote, humanity had been an ‘ignorant’ steward of the planet, having ‘scarcely begun to conceive of the possible benefits that other organisms will bring in economic welfare, health, and aesthetic pleasure’.

In the latter half of the 1970s, Wilson, alarmed by reports of catastrophically declining biodiversity, embraced the cause of environmentalism. Alongside other ecologists he formed part of the ‘rain forest mafia’. In the same year Sociobiology was published, he wrote of the urgent need for an ‘applied biogeography’ to reduce the rate of biodiversity decline. His biogeographical work with MacArthur had found that the diversity of the population declined with island size. The reduction and fragmentation of natural reserves under pressure from human industrial and agricultural expansion was reducing the ‘islands’ available for biodiversity. A vital source for this view of the value of biodiversity was Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s argument, in his programmatic statement of the modern synthesis, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), that genetic diversity was a store of variability that enabled species to survive changing environments.

Wilson sought a biological foundation for his ethical convictions. In 1979, he coined the concept of ‘biophilia’, suggesting that humans have an ‘inborn affinity’ for other forms of life. The biophilia hypothesis, speculative and based on ‘thin’ evidence as he acknowledged, was an effort at moral persuasion aimed partly at states and scientific establishments, whom he exhorted to invest in research and conservation strategies. Through the 1980s, Wilson wrote copiously and passionately on the threat of extinction caused by the destruction of ecosystems, including a stint editing the journal BioDiversity in 1988. Against ‘spurious’ claims that humanity was merely acting as another ‘Darwinian agent’ by causing species’ extinction, he noted that the ‘rate of extinction is now about 400 times that recorded through recent geological time and is accelerating rapidly’.

This implicitly called for drastic changes to production and consumption. However, like most in the rain forest mafia, Wilson wrote in an eco-Malthusian register. ‘While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world,’ he wrote, ‘humans have become too numerous.’ The ‘problems of Third World countries’, he explained, were ‘primarily biological’. ‘Various forms of biological excess’ such as ‘overpopulation’ contributed to deforestation, soil erosion, famine and disease: a position that highlighted the danger of applying Darwinian concepts to complex social problems

Perhaps Wilson’s most implicitly radical suggestion was his ‘half-earth’ thesis. ‘Large plots,’ he wrote, ‘harbour many more ecosystems and the species composing them at a sustainable level … A biogeographic scan of the Earth’s principal habitats shows that … the vast majority of its species can be saved within half the planet’s surface.’ One suspects that such conservation was not just a defence strategy. It spoke to an occulted utopian impulse in his work. As he wrote in The Future of Life (2001), the encounter with wild nature reminded one of ‘the way life ought to be lived, all the time.’ Which is to say, with curiosity, sympathy and a sense of mystery. In his nature writing one finds precisely the transcendental impulse to which he appeals in The Creation (2006), a plea to the fundamentalist Christians in whose tent he was raised to help save the earth. Again, though, Wilson tended to view the issue as a moral struggle against the worst of the human nature. ‘We are still too greedy, shortsighted, and divided into warring tribes to make wise, long-term decisions. … Imagine! Hundreds of millions of years in the making, and we’re extinguishing Earth’s biodiversity as though the species of the natural world are no better than weeds and kitchen vermin. Have we no shame?’

Wilson continued to rethink the human condition in view of his version of Darwinism. Having decided that Hamilton’s concept of ‘inclusive fitness’ had ‘crumbled’, he wrote in The Social Conquest of the Earth (2012) that humans were shaped by the legacy of two types of selection: group selection favoured ‘honour, virtue, and duty’ whereas individual selection favoured ‘selfishness, cowardice and hypocrisy’. Since group selection could never totally overwhelm individual selection, the ‘human condition’ was one of ‘endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us’. This was elegantly parsimonious: deceptively so given the mass of data on which it relies. Despite its fabular feel, it acknowledged the variety of contradictory human behaviours built into our biological potential.

V.

Wilson was a great naturalist, but also a moralist. Much of his later work seems to be an effort to alert the species to its dark side and limit its damage. His contradictory sociopolitical legacy, and methodological narrowness, cannot but sour the left’s response to him. Yet he was not an ideologue, but a serious scientist. His problematic political speculations represent a fraction of his output. And there is much to critically admire, and radicalise, in the ambition and intellectual breadth with which he studied, catalogued, explained, valued and defended the multitude of life on earth.

Read on: Richard Seymour, ‘Patterning Slowdown’, NLR 131.

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Levelling Off

With Johnson on the ropes over lockdown parties, reception of the Westminster government’s Levelling Up white paper last week was bumpy. The Guardian was ‘profoundly disappointed’, the Telegraph excoriating of an ‘alphabet soup’ of bureaucratic meddling. Attention swiftly returned to moral outrage at the prime minister’s besmirching of Saint Keir Starmer over the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a BBC celebrity and serial child-sex offender, while Starmer was its Director. Starmer’s defenders included Johnson’s own long-serving policy chief, one of a number of senior aides to flee Downing Street in recent days.  

Fulfilling an election pledge to ease the country’s huge regional inequalities would seem important for the Tories’ prospects of retaining the forty or so rustbelt seats in the Midlands and northern England snatched from Labour in 2019, on which their Commons majority depends. But even allowing for the pandemic, it’s taken them a while to get around to it. Hard-right positions on public order and immigration, not to mention a New Cold War foreign policy at Washington’s behest, became apparent some time ago. But regional policy was thrown overboard by Thatcher in the early 1980s, and the current crop of neo-Thatcherites are having to make it up as they go along.

As a rule, talk of ‘levelling up’ doesn’t preview radical measures to come, but rather indicates a wish to forestall them. The term first became common currency in Westminster in the 1860s, when Disraeli’s Tories battled disestablishment of the Anglican Church in British-ruled Ireland. Instead of abolishing the Protestant ascendency, why not set up an inquiry to look at ways to level up Catholic endowments? A century later, Thatcher in Opposition set entrepreneurship and meritocracy against socialistic ‘levelling down’ through high tax and spending. Though it didn’t become part of her repertoire, one of her acolytes, George Osborne, austerity chancellor under Cameron, more recently spoke of building up the North rather than pulling London down. Anyway, it’s not a bad phrase – better than Major’s stale ‘citizen’s charter’ when the Tories were last in a fourth consecutive term in office.

The author of the new Levelling Up paper is Andrew Haldane, seconded to Whitehall from the Royal Society of Arts. Haldane retired last year as Bank of England chief economist after being passed over by Johnson for the post of governor against the advice of the prime minister’s then advisor, Dominic Cummings. In banking and Tory circles (they still overlap), Haldane isn’t what is called ‘sound’. The Financial Times describes him as ‘a free thinker but not a team player’. He comes from a working-class background in Leeds and studied at Sheffield and Warwick, bypassing Oxbridge altogether. In a loose-tongued speech to the Institute of Government, Haldane described his time at the Bank as ‘thirty years of hurt’, drawing on a 1990s football song. The speech was dotted with references to colleagues who had risen further than him – the Bank’s last three governors: Mervyn King, Mark Carney, Andrew Bailey – whose careers Haldane jokingly claimed to have lost sight of.

Haldane became the Bank’s expert in inflation targeting in the becalmed years between the fiasco of an overpriced sterling’s forced exit from the European Exchange Rate mechanism in 1992 and the financial-sector’s implosion in 2008. He subsequently ventured out on a regional roadshow in the name of rebuilding public confidence in the Bank’s operations. The FT pointedly notes that his interest in regional inequalities came despite the Bank lacking a mandate in this area. Haldane closed his tenure at Threadneedle Street by publicly warning of ‘a dependency culture around cheap money’ that had emerged since the launch of quantitative easing in 2009 and been exacerbated by the emergency response to Covid. He urged ‘immediate thought, and action, on unwinding the QE’, fearing a lasting inflationary spiral.

An unorthodox mind but an inflation hawk, Haldane has crafted a white paper that reads better than most, with a historical sweep on the rise and fall of great cities from Jericho and Constantinople to Renaissance Italy. But it offers little in the way of financial stimulus. ‘The cash has already been allocated’, a Treasury source pre-briefed the Telegraph. Haldane rules out ‘dampening down the success of more prosperous areas’, talking instead of spreading opportunity. Gone is Johnson’s earlier suggestion of temporarily relocating the House of Lords to York while Westminster undergoes repairs. Instead, the paper extends George Osborne’s model of legislating for directly elected local mayors as brokers for additional discretionary funding from central government. It pins its hopes on improved coordination across Whitehall to meet twelve overarching targets covering such diverse matters as improving broadband coverage, boosting education and skills, and fostering local residents’ ‘pride in place’. The targets are styled as ‘missions’, a reflection perhaps of the North’s regression in the Whitehall mind – from the ‘growth points’ of the 1960s and the urban ‘regeneration’ projects of New Labour to the current language of colonial evangelism (or is it a fantasy quest?). The missions run until 2030, a far-off date for a Johnson administration whose shelf life can now be counted in days.  

The Times recently published opinion-poll evidence that voters ‘were inherently sceptical about a policy that relies on growing the size of the economic pie for everyone’, and would be happy instead to see London levelled down. The upshot of local-devolution initiatives over the past two decades hasn’t been economic, but political: the creation of springboards for aspirant politicians to prove their popular appeal away from the dead-eyed ranks of Westminster. Today there is Johnson, former mayor of London. Tomorrow, probably, Andy Burnham, the ex-New Labour minister running Greater Manchester and itching to replace Starmer at Westminster. Further down the line is Ben Houchen, the 35-year old Tory mayor of Teeside, adept at pulling in favours from Whitehall and instrumental in the Conservatives’ byelection win in Hartlepool last May. Houchen warns The Times that if Johnson falls, the Tories will ‘go back to square one, where the old politics of a southern Conservative Party fails to reach out to the whole country’. But it is the 2019 Tory intake from traditionally ‘red wall’ Labour seats, less well assimilated to Westminster and fearful of their electoral prospects, who have taken a faltering lead in attempts to topple the prime minister.

You could say that uneven development is what goes on in the background in Britain while voters are dangled tiny counterbalancing measures of regional aid or organisational fixes. Haldane’s white paper attributes the UK’s regional problem to a miscellany of historic factors: ‘globalisation, technological progress, advances in transport, logistics and power, and the shift from heavy industry to knowledge-intensive sectors, as well as the rise of foreign holidays and shift from technical training to university education’. The City of London isn’t named in the 305-page document, except in a couple of graphics, though Haldane is in a position to appreciate its weight on the regional scales. It registers on the political scales again too, now that the passions of Brexit have been spent. Chancellor Rishi Sunak, one of the forerunners to replace Johnson, is a former Goldman Sachs analyst and hedge-fund manager; his Labour counterpart Rachel Reeves was an economist at the Bank of England. ‘In the end, the City work around whatever government is in place’, former Barclays chairman John McFarlane told the Sunday Times in 2019, when Corbyn and McDonnell still loomed. Work around: to fix a problem, to circumvent.

Read on: Tom Hazeldine, ‘Revolt of the Rustbelt’, NLR 105.

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Constituent Power

Geo Maher: The role of grassroots popular power – or what is often called constituent power – in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution is generally misunderstood or ignored. How do you understand its place in recent Venezuelan history?

Reinaldo Iturriza: The process of popular subjectification represented by Chavismo remains under-analyzed. The emphasis is almost always placed on the figure of Chávez himself, while the unique historical conjuncture that made his leadership possible is relegated to the background, and in particular the influence of that popular subject without which Chávez would be inconceivable. Something similar happens with the Caracazo, the street-level rebellion of 1989 which many now see as the proximate origin of the Bolivarian process. I am convinced that the general misunderstanding of Chavismo is directly related to the inability to interpret that popular uprising. As uncomfortable as it might be, we shouldn’t forget that the protesters of 1989 were initially vilified by analysts both on the right and the left. At best, the Caracazo was viewed as a pre-political explosion: a food riot, born out of the need to loot basic necessities. In my opinion, though, what happened was a general challenge to the status quo – one that managed to put the state on notice.

After the Caracazo, everything changed. What we sensed intuitively then, we can today affirm wholeheartedly: it was only a matter of time, and of force. We simply needed a political vehicle that was capable of translating the majority’s rejection of the system into a viable alternative. We found it in Chavismo.

GM: Almost ten years ago, just before you took the reins of the Commune Ministry, we discussed the question of internal democracy within Chavismo, the PSUV, and threats to the Bolivarian process – including the relationship between the leadership and the barrios. At that time, you spoke of the need to dismantle a political logic that viewed the people as mere beneficiaries of the government. Does this logic persist? Has it deepened?

RI: This political logic, which we could describe as representative, clientelistic – a welfare logic – has gained much more ground than we would want. Over the past five years, the population has experienced wage devaluation, high inflation rates and then, towards the end of 2017, hyperinflation, with all its destructive impact on social bonds. Since 2014, we saw shortages of consumer goods and long queues to access commercial establishments. The humiliation of trying, often in vain, to stock up on essential products, became practically normalized in Venezuelan society. Amid all this, there were successive waves of anti-Chavista violence: first in 2014, then in 2017, when the country was pushed to the brink of civil war, and finally in 2019 with the self-proclamation of an unknown legislator as ‘interim president’, supported by the US.

Against the backdrop of these events, there emerged what I have referred to as the humanitarianization of anti-Chavista discourse: framing the material and spiritual deprivation of the popular majority as a ‘humanitarian crisis’, which leaves in its wake ‘victims’ whose plight can only be resolved by humanitarian intervention. The effect of this so-called humanitarianism was the dehumanization of the people, reduced to a state that Agamben would call ‘bare life’ – entirely dependent on outside help. However, Chavismo did not counter this discourse, as I think it should have done, by creating conditions for the expression of popular power. On the contrary, the idea that the underprivileged people needed to be ‘protected’ by the government was entrenched. Which is ironic, because in reality it was the opposite that happened: throughout these years, the majority decided to protect what they still considered their government, despite its many errors.

GM: Venezuela has endured a triple crisis that started around 2012: an economic crisis rooted in the exchange rate that quickly threw the entire economy into chaos; a leadership crisis provoked by the death of Chávez in 2013; and the aggression, internal and external, that the enemies of the Bolivarian process unleashed in an attempt to put an end to this experiment in participatory democratic socialism. How do you see the overall balance sheet of the past decade?

RI: I would start by saying that, in general terms, the balance sheets that have so far been drafted by the left are insufficient. Too often, half-truths are repeated and concrete explanations – especially those related to the economic situation – are systematically concealed. It seems to me that the experience of recent years has produced a kind of interpretive shock. One way this manifests is the idea that, after Chávez, we lost course completely, the Chavista political class betrayed the revolutionary programme, and the present crisis is the inevitable result of that betrayal. It seems to me that this narrative is reductive and moralistic. Needless to say, when one accuses an entire political class of treason and tries to explain everything based on this accusation, one is not exactly demonstrating the kind of analytic rigour that Marx deployed in The Eighteenth Brumaire.

It’s true that the death of Chávez prompted a realignment of forces within the government. Some tried to defend the programme of the Bolivarian revolution, as set out in the Plan de la Patria and the Bolivarian Constitution, while others tried to wash their hands of it. As such, contradictory policy decisions were made. Yet these differences did not emerge from nowhere, nor were they merely a symptom of incompetence or inefficiency; they were rooted in class contradictions and political antagonisms within Chavismo itself.

To fully explain such shifts, we need a clear analysis of how fissures within the PSUV came to the fore after Chávez’s death. That, in turn, requires a complete picture of how Venezuela’s class composition has changed since the Bolivarian revolution. Let’s take as true the premise that the working class no longer represents the centre of gravity for government policy, and that this centre has been shifting towards sectors of the bourgeoisie, both within our borders and of course beyond them. The important question then becomes: Since when? When was the tipping point? What mediations help us explain this shift from one historical moment to another? Likewise, if we accept that, toward the end of 2015, the historic Chavista bloc began to fracture and we began to confront a Gramscian crisis of authority, it is necessary to ask why this was able to happen. How was it expressed? What are its political implications? A comprehensive account of Maduro’s tenure must answer these and other questions with political and intellectual honesty. 

GM: During this century, there has been much talk of participatory socialism across Latin America. But only Venezuela has experienced a systematic process of building a new society, beginning in 2006 with the communal councils and continuing in 2009 with the communes. What is the status of the communal project today? How does it interact with the country’s triple crisis?

RI: With the communal councils and later the communes, the foundations were laid for building a more democratic society. The fact that these foundations have managed to survive, upheld by thousands of working-class people throughout the country, is in itself a very important victory – however depleted they may be at present.

Invariably, however, Venezuela’s economic downturn led to a popular retreat from politics. The public sphere contracted. And as the crisis worsened, many who were part of the communal network changed their priorities: day-to-day material realities had to come first. Meanwhile, government support for these spaces dropped off. State functionaries believed it was a waste of time to pour effort and resources into building popular power – especially if those resources were scarce. It was easier to govern through patronage and clientelism, even if this meant undermining the revolution’s social base.

At some point in 2017, if memory serves me right, the government issued a directive that the spokespeople of the communal councils would not be elected by an assembly of citizens, as required by law, but would instead be handpicked by the party. If this order had been implemented, it could have meant the total liquidation of the communal experiment. Indeed, this was the outcome in places where popular organization had been significantly weakened. But, thankfully, in many other places the will of communal leadership prevailed and the directive was resisted.

I remain convinced that communal leadership is the true vanguard of the revolutionary process. The communal spaces must be taken seriously in any plan for national reconstruction. The latter necessarily involves strengthening those experiences that put their faith in social property. Twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have been anywhere close to even asking questions like these.

GM: When the PSUV was founded, it was on the promise of being the most democratic party in the world. Disappointment soon followed. When the grassroots rejected pro-government candidates, many were appointed by decree, and the years since have seen the party become less a vehicle for permanent democratic debate than a space for intra-elite power struggles. Yet, recently, after a fierce campaign, Ángel Prado, spokesman for the El Maizal Commune, prevailed in the party primary to become the official PSUV candidate for Simón Planas municipality in Lara State, before winning the post in the country’s mega-elections on November 21st. How important was this victory, and how do you see the state of internal democracy within the PSUV?

RI: After the popular retreat from politics that I have mentioned, Chavismo was defeated in the 2015 parliamentary elections. In light of this setback, the Chavista leadership increasingly appealed to clientelism as a campaign strategy. Yet, contrary to what some PSUV politicians claim, this often provoked fierce resistance from the population. The idea that it is possible to win an election by literally buying the support of voters shows profound contempt for the people – and they know it. As such, the government’s approach can only guarantee victory if a significant part of the population abstains. For reasons that are frankly difficult to understand, this was precisely the tactic adopted by most anti-Chavista parties after their victory in 2015: abstention. These pawns of the US bet on delegitimizing of the Venezuelan government by opting out of the electoral process, but they ultimately played into its hands.

Ángel Prado’s victory is of the greatest political importance for several reasons. First, it showed that, despite countless obstacles, Venezuela’s popular machinery is still capable of defeating the bureaucratic and clientelistic machinery. After all, it was the former that guaranteed Chávez’s electoral victories time and again, and Maduro’s first victories as well. On 8 August, during the PSUV’s open primaries, those who controlled that bureaucratic machinery in Simón Planas municipality – a clique gathered around the outgoing mayor – tried to disenfranchise the majority. First, they launched a crude patronage campaign, distributing food, medicine, fuel, electrical appliances and money in a discretionary way. But they also resorted to violence, seeking to intimidate the people who supported the communal candidacy. On the night of 7 August, the first physical attacks occurred, and these continued throughout election day. Finally, since the bureaucracy controlled the polling stations, they tried to suppress turnout by slowing down the process. Many people were exhausted after hours of waiting and went home without being able to vote. But despite all these maneuvers, comrade Prado won 47.9% of the votes, beating his rival by an almost 10% margin.

What factors explain this astonishing victory? For one thing, Prado is the symbolic figurehead of the El Maizal Commune and commands great moral authority among its members. He prioritized direct contact with the people: touring almost the entire municipality, speaking to constituents and, above all, listening to them (whereas much of the party leadership had long disappeared from the territory). His campaign was disciplined and well-organized. Because it was confident that it represented the majority, it was able to withstand the undemocratic tactics of the bureaucracy, which it nonetheless refused to needlessly antagonize or provoke. Simón Planas could therefore be said to represent, on a small scale, a phenomenon that can be identified throughout almost the entire country: effective organizing against elites within the PSUV. Prado’s election has shown that it is possible to defeat this new class – whose eventual overthrow will, I hope, enable the Bolivarian Revolution to recover its lost vitality.

Julia Buxton, ‘Venezuela After Chávez’, NLR 99.