Anniversary of the Somme

Tomorrow, July 1, is the hundredth anniversary of the first day of the battle of the Somme, the costliest (i.e., in terms of casualties) day in the history of the British army.

A certain magazine in 1846 on slavery

W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (Norton pb., 1965), pp.69-70 (endnotes omitted):

The entrenched humanitarians of an older generation might deplore, as Lord Denman did in 1848, the fact that public opinion on the subject of slavery had suffered "a lamentable and disgraceful change".  They might note as evidence of a narrowing of sympathy the remark of the Economist of July 25, 1846, that "the duty of England is to its own subjects, not to the natives of Africa or the slaves of the Brazils" and its yet more forthright assertion on February 26th that the slave trade was "the only practical mode which has yet been discovered by which a communication can be opened and maintained between Africa and the civilized world".

Context: Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery everywhere in the Empire in 1833.  The issue here, as Burn notes, was the future of the West Africa Squadron, which (per Wiki), "[b]etween 1808 and 1860, ... seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard."

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ETA: Off-topic but not perhaps enough for a separate post so I'll stick it here. I was at the Boston Review site just now and on their "most read" list there's a piece by James Galbraith from 2003 arguing the JFK-had-ordered-a-withdrawal-from-Vietnam thesis.  I didn't take the time to read it, just scrolled through, but was interested given the persistent harping on this point by a particular Crooked Timber commenter who doesn't seem to be posting there anymore. Call me a snob or something, but a lengthy piece by James Galbraith makes me take notice a bit more than a pseudonymous blog commenter does. Not expressing a view on the substance.   

Quote of the day

From Richard Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1915 (1974; Paladin Bks. ed., 1976), ch.4, "Liberal Initiatives: Gladstone's Ministry 1868-74":

In many ways the various reforms of the British military system during Gladstone's first ministry exemplify as well as anything the interconnectedness for Liberals of principles of morality, efficiency and economy.... The basic aim of the Liberal military policy was to shift Britain from what may be termed a 'Wellingtonian' posture to a posture characterizable as being on unmistakably Liberal principles.... Of the influences at work the most important were the 'objective' considerations: on the immediate level, a chronic shortfall of recruitment, aggravated by the depopulating effects of the famine in Ireland, traditionally a rich source of enlistment in the British service; and, on a larger view, recognition that the fundamental lesson of the Crimean War was not so much its misconduct as that it registered the end of Wellingtonian or Peninsular assumptions that Britain could be a military power on a par with the continental Great Powers.... The Liberal aim, in essence, was to leave the Indian situation more or less where it was as far as strength was concerned (there was no real alternative) but to bring home the bulk of the rest of the army, reduce it in numbers and expense and make it an efficient expeditionary army which could be dispatched where it was needed instead of being a dispersed aggregation of strategic garrisons.... Thus from being a colonial garrison army with a European interventionist frame of intention, it would become a home army with a colonial or expeditionary frame of intention. (pp.82-84)

From the file cabinet: Keegan on Churchill

It's probably just a sign of when I was born, but I have a file cabinet stuffed with hard copies of various things. Not that my files are in great shape. Just now I went to put something in the file labeled "WW1 & 2; Holocaust; Cold War" (yes, a single file for all that) and Iooking idly through it I came across a piece by John Keegan published in U.S. News & World Report of May 29, 2000. It's a hagiographic piece on Churchill on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his coming to office as prime minister in May 1940. Skimming through it I found a reference to Churchill's having become, during and especially after the war, "a hero in the United States, his mother's homeland, where he remains today the object of a cult status he does not enjoy in his own country." This cult status, especially but not only among certain American conservatives and neocons, is one reason there was a bit of a controversy when Obama a few years ago took the entirely reasonable decision to return the Churchill bust in the White House to the British embassy from which, iirc, it had been on loan.

Keegan also refers, earlier in the piece, to Churchill's commitments to "liberty" and "the rule of law." (To which I silently added an asterisk having to do with the Empire.) To give the flavor of the article more fully, I'll quote the concluding paragraph:

Churchill's sun, at the beginning of the third millennium, has risen and, if it should seem to shine fitfully at times and places, is nevertheless the light of the world. No other citizen of the last century of the second millennium, the worst in history, deserved better to be recognized as a hero to mankind.

I do think Churchill was a great war leader and that the particular moment matched his particular skills as orator and, to quote David Jablonsky, "Victorian man of action." However, the statements that the 20th century was "the worst in history" and that Churchill is the twentieth-century figure most deserving of the title "hero to mankind" are debatable. (Note: not wrong, just debatable.)

ETA: I'm reminded of a post a while back at R.P. Wolff's blog in which he went through a list of (supposed) 'great men' of the 20th cent., denying they were great, until he got to Mandela, who was, in his estimation, great (and in my estimation too, I'd hasten to add).

Maggie and Augusto

Via.

Two intellectuals and the Communist Party

The brilliant historian E. J. Hobsbawm (1917-2012; NYT obit here)  joined the Communist Party (CP) as a student at Cambridge, having earlier been a member of a Communist student group as a teenager in Germany. The brilliant novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) joined the CP as a student at Oxford. Their paths crossed briefly: Murdoch's biographer Peter Conradi notes that after her first year at Oxford, in the summer of 1939, she "attended a one-week Communist Party summer school in Surrey, where the future historian Eric Hobsbawm, then studying at Cambridge, was deeply impressed by her looks, character and intelligence...." (Iris Murdoch: A Life, p.98, citing a 1999 interview with Hobsbawm)   

Not too long thereafter their political trajectories diverged. Hobsbawm stayed in the Party for most of his life, whereas Murdoch left the CP before the Second World War ended. Hobsbawm's recent death brought out critics who charged him with blindness to the horrors of Stalinism, a charge that does not affect the bulk of his historical work, including the well-known three volumes on 'the long nineteenth century'. (To quote the NYT obit, "in 1994 [Hobsbawm] shocked viewers when, in an interview with Michael Ignatieff on the BBC, he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result." On the other hand, in The Age of Extremes, p.380, Hobsbawm wrote of Stalin that "few men have manipulated terror on a more universal scale.")

As for Iris Murdoch's politics, they turned into fairly standard liberalism, in more or less the American sense of that word (see, e.g., the chapter on politics in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals), though she was much more interested in ethics and aesthetics than political theory. Peter Conradi writes: "It could be said that all [Murdoch's] fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth...." (Iris Murdoch: A Life, p.78) That may be a bit of an overstatement but there is something in it, as anyone can attest who is familiar with, to take just one of many possible examples, Murdoch's portrait of the revolutionary theorist Crimond in The Book and the Brotherhood. Her novels do not, for the most part, take much notice of world events; an exception, The Accidental Man, in which the Vietnam War complicates the moral and practical life of a young American intellectual living in Britain, proves the rule.

Hobsbawm and Murdoch, markedly different in their interests and outlooks for most of their lives, wrote completely different kinds of books which are united only by the probability that people will still be reading them a hundred years from now. They are two of many gifted people for whom the Communist Party seemed, in the era of Depression and fascism, the right and necessary political choice.
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P.s. on Hobsbawm: The first sentence of the NYT obituary (linked above) refers to his "three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism." This is not a wholly accurate description of the "Age of..." volumes. I was glancing at my old paperback copy of The Age of Revolution several days ago, and it appears that some of the most engaging writing in it is in the chapter on the arts (ch.14).

Diamonds are aglitter but policy's stuck in the mud

Writing from London at the start of the Diamond Jubilee, Steven Pearlstein argues that the Cameron government has both economic and political reasons for easing up on its refusal to engage in "targeted investments" (i.e., spending on certain projects like a new London airport and new housing), but the memory of Thatcher is acting as an unhelpful brake on what remains of the Conservative imagination. Too bad they don't reach a bit further back and look to the tradition of Tory Democracy.

How changes in British welfare and housing policy are changing London

A bit off the usual track for this blog, but I saved this WaPo article last month and thought it might be worth linking to. Striking to an American is how actively the British government, until the recent austerity measures, subsidized rents etc. to ensure a level of socioeconomic diversity in central London neighborhoods. I think it's fair to say that a comparably far-ranging policy in the U.S. would be out of the question, regardless of the state of the economy.

From Magna Carta to the Arab Spring in under a half-hour

Pres. Obama's speech in Westminster Hall contained the soaring rhetoric one would have expected, and reading the text one can imagine it in delivery and even be moved at one or two points. There were at least a couple of things that jumped out: in one passage he equates "free enterprise" with "the market" (wrongly, I think); and the Roosevelt-Churchill chord is struck perhaps a bit too loudly at the end (don't Obama's speechwriters know about Churchill's view of the Empire? If Churchill had had his way, the British army, which Obama's grandfather, as the Pres. remarked, served as a cook in Kenya, would still be in Kenya). Still, it's hard to avoid Churchill-FDR in this context, and his speechwriters did manage to find a reasonably appropriate Churchill quotation -- something about 'the chirping bird of freedom' -- to end with.

The stuff about the U.S. and U.K. still being indispensable for leadership in the world etc. etc. is entirely predictable; what else could he say? This is not totally wrong, but even if it were he would still have had to say it. You can't get up in Westminster Hall and say "our power and influence are declining, let's decline gracefully, thank you very much." Well, I suppose you could, but you'd have to have really skilled speechwriters to make it go down.

Scotland forever

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has scored gains in local elections and looks set to win a majority in the Scottish parliament. According to the linked article: "The SNP's leader, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, promised to push for a referendum on Scottish independence during the next four years."

With the caveat that I know nothing about this (it's becoming a mantra here), I suspect that Scottish independence looked more plausible when the EU was in better shape than it is right now. Who needed Britain when an independent Scotland could get the benefits of economic integration and a common currency as an EU member? But the EU at the moment may not appear to be as strong a reed to lean on as it once did. Plus, seceding from the UK would mean no more good seats at royal weddings. Though I guess an independent Scotland could join the Commonwealth? Somehow I don't think that's in the SNP platform.

Will R2P become a 'European Monroe Doctrine'?

DPTrombly has a post suggesting that, inasmuch as European states will be willing and able to enforce the Responsibility to Protect only within a defined geographic area, R2P will come to resemble a European Monroe Doctrine, with Europe attempting to ensure certain norms of behavior by states within its sphere of influence, i.e., "Sahara, Sahel, Mediterranean rim, and Balkans."

Does the analogy work? I'm not convinced. The U.S., as DPT indicates, relied on Britain's naval power to enforce the Monroe Doctrine for most of the 19th century. And not too long after the U.S. became capable of using its own navy to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in 1904 his famous 'corollary' to the Doctrine which "declared that misgovernment (or 'chronic wrongdoing')" by Latin American governments would be grounds for U.S. armed intervention (Penguin Dictionary of International Relations, 1998, p.337). Applying this principle via his paternalistic pronouncement that "we must teach the Latin Americans to select the right man," Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Mexico in 1914 (ibid., p.573).

By contrast, R2P is less paternalistic than the Monroe Doctrine as applied by TR and Woodrow Wilson. R2P's application is limited to four circumstances: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (see M.W. Doyle, "International Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect," Int'l Studies Review 13:1, March 2011). It is not a question of teaching the inhabitants of country X "to select the right man [or woman]." A leader can drive his or her country into the ground and can be as corrupt as all get-out, but as long as he or she does not engage (or very credibly, by his or her own pronouncement, appear to be right on the verge of engaging) in genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity -- all of which, with the possible exception of ethnic cleansing, have accepted definitions in international law -- the question of R2P does not even arise.

Of course, application of R2P will be selective and considerations of the sort mentioned by DPT will influence the 'selections'. But that does not mean that R2P will be used to legitimize interventions of the kind that Wilson ordered in Mexico. Thus "European Monroe Doctrine" may not be the right description, inasmuch as it may conjure up a history of paternalistic, imperialistic interventions that I think few have any interest in defending or repeating.

Brief thoughts on 'The King's Speech'

I saw the movie last night. The climactic scene, for those few who may not have seen the movie or read about it, is the radio address George VI gave on Sept. 3, 1939. Colin Firth turns in an excellent performance, though he makes the address sound perhaps a bit less labored than it actually was in George VI's delivery: you can listen to the original here. Perhaps the most interesting clause in the speech is the remark or warning at the end that "war can no longer be confined to the battlefield," which of course turned out to be entirely and tragically accurate.

Re-reading Barrington Moore

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, published in 1966, is a modern classic of historical sociology that has been assigned to generations of students. I read large parts of it in college and again in grad school, but it was not until the other day, when I had occasion to take it down from the shelf and look at the first chapter, that it fully dawned on me why the book is so famous. At the same time, I realized that the kind of social-scientific writing on display in Social Origins is an endangered species.

The first chapter, "England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism," shows Moore's remarkable ability to outline a centuries-spanning argument in less than 40 pages, and to do it in prose of such clarity and directness that it can be understood by virtually any interested reader. The chapter's main question is why England/Britain's route to capitalist modernity culminated in parliamentary democracy (as opposed to dictatorship of right or left) and why it took the relatively peaceful and gradualist form that it did from the eighteenth century on. Compressed into a few sentences, the basic argument runs as follows: The key social-political development in early modern England was the destruction of the peasantry. This was the result of the enclosure (i.e., the seizure for private use) of common lands by landlords and their richer tenants. The enclosures were under way in the sixteenth century but accelerated in the seventeenth century, after the Civil War severely weakened the power of the monarchy, which had served as a brake on enclosing landlords and a protection for the peasants. The destruction of the peasantry effectively removed from "the historical agenda" two possibilities: the reactionary/conservative route to capitalist modernity (as in Germany, e.g.) and the social-revolutionary route (as in Russia and China). (p.30) There's a whole lot more there, but in highly oversimplified form that is the core of the argument in the first chapter.

For the moment I'm not interested in how much validity this argument has; to be blunt, I don't care whether it's right or not, at least not here. I'm certain it's been challenged and debated many times since Social Origins was published (and indeed, several of Moore's students produced major works bearing on the themes of the book). Rather, what I want to emphasize is the lucid way the argument is presented and Moore's mastery in handling multiple strands without ever losing sight of the central thread. Moreover, I don't think this clarity is entirely accidental (it's no accident, as a Marxist would say).

Although Social Origins (SO) was published in 1966, Moore began working on it years earlier, before the so-called behavioral revolution in the social sciences became so influential that even some Marxists felt they had to wrap their writing in the language of variables and falsifiability. As Theda Skocpol observed in a critical review-essay on SO published in 1973, the book "is not organized or written in the style of a scientist trying to elaborate clearly and minutely justify a falsifiable theory of comparative modernization. It is, rather, like a giant mural painted in words, in which a man who has contemplated the modern histories of eight major nations seeks to convey in broad strokes the moral and factual discoveries that he personally has made, about the various routes to the 'world of modern industry' traveled by his 'subject' countries, about the role of landed upper classes and peasantries in the politics of that transformation, and about the consequences of each route for human freedom and societal rationality." (T. Skocpol, Review of SO, reprinted in her Social Revolutions in the Modern World [1994], p.26)

That SO is not written "in the style of a scientist" is no doubt one of the reasons I was struck so forcefully by the lucidity of the opening chapter when I looked at it the other day. My reaction, at a gut level, was something like: "My God, they're not writing like this anymore, are they?" In other words, Moore stands in contrast, it seems to me, to much of the historically-oriented social science being published today, which tends to be preoccupied with methodology, weighed down with references to 'causal mechanisms' and the like, and generally no fun to read. Perhaps that is academic 'progress'. Perhaps there has been a gain in scientific precision and cumulative knowledge. Indeed, as I have written in earlier posts, I think causal explanation is an entirely legitimate goal of social science.

Nonetheless, a growing methodological and theoretical sophistication has come at a cost. With one or two possible exceptions, I know of no work of historically-oriented social science (not history, but social science) published in the last 20 years that I could put into the hands of an intelligent, curious high school student and say: "Here, you will enjoy this and find it fascinating and your life will be changed and you will see the historical sweep of human sufferings and occasional triumphs and you will want to become a historical sociologist." No. Uh-huh. Not happening.

Well, look on the bright side: Social Origins is still in print.

P.S. (added 1/5): If you think the reference to methodological sophistication in this post is a throwaway, track down the Fall 2010 issue of the newsletter of the Am.Pol.Sci.Assn. Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research and look at the essays published under the heading "Symposium: Causal Mechanisms, Process Tracing, and Causal Inference."

The UK-France defense deal

Britain and France, in an agreement reached last week, decided to co-operate on nuclear warhead testing and to set up a joint 'expeditionary' (read: intervention) force, as well as to co-operate when it comes to aircraft carriers. Britain presently has two carriers, France has one, and they've agreed that at least one of these will be at sea at any given time. According to a summary at Spiegel Online: "Britain will install catapults on a new aircraft carrier under construction so that both French and British jets can operate from it. By the early 2020s the two nations aim to combine their carrier operations." This makes some sense, inasmuch as it must be damned expensive to keep one aircraft carrier, let alone more than one, buzzing around in circles in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic or wherever.

An IR scholar who happens to be a friend was saying, when this came up in a recent conversation at a slightly drunken (on my part at any rate) dinner, that the agreement to share aircraft carriers shows that Britain and France have now established a "joint identity" -- well, maybe he didn't say that precisely, but the word "identity" was definitely used. I'm a bit skeptical about this, partly because I'm not totally sure what it means (though I have a reasonably good idea) and partly because this agreement seems to be driven primarily by budgetary considerations. Some in Britain are apparently worried about whether the French carrier, if that were the one at sea, would deploy to the Falklands if that were required. Others dismiss this concern.

The nuclear agreement would "establish a centre in the UK to develop testing technology and another one in France to carry out the testing" (BBC), starting in 2014. This is being called revolutionary and unprecedented. But is it that surprising? It's not like either country is going to use its nuclear weapons against the other. Actually, the chances of their ever using their nuclear weapons at all are, mercifully, infinitesimal. The British and French nuclear arsenals are largely status symbols, signs that their possessors are great powers, and from a security standpoint it would probably make no difference if every British and French nuclear warhead were dismantled and destroyed tomorrow. Who, after all, are they deterring? They don't work against people like the 2005 London subway bombers. You can't threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on an individual's house, for example. That would be absurd and crazy. Nonetheless, we have to at least pretend that this whole deal is a noteworthy development. Otherwise IR types would have less to argue about at drunken dinners.

Fisk on Israel, the EU, and NATO

With a sarcasm that may not be entirely unjustified, Robert Fisk blasts Israel's close political-military ties to NATO and the EU. It's no doubt the case, as Fisk writes, that Britain spends millions of pounds annually on weapons licenses for Israel and that NATO conducts military exercises with Israeli soldiers (as indicated by the recent helicopter crash in Romania in which several IDF members were killed).

Let's suppose, however, that NATO and the EU were to hold Israel more at arm's length. Would that affect its military capabilities? Almost certainly not, not as long as the U.S. is committed to $3-billion-plus in annual military aid to Israel aimed at ensuring that Israel maintains what is called in Washington policy circles its "qualitative military edge," or QME. The U.S.-Israel military relationship, and its untouchability in U.S. politics, makes the EU and NATO angles a sideshow. The problem is not so much that the U.S. gives Israel a huge amount of military hardware as that this connection is treated as effectively separate from U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In attempts to put pressure on Israel to stop settlement construction, for instance, the U.S. begins with one hand tied behind its back, since Israel knows that the U.S. would never threaten to cut down assistance or do anything else that would jeopardize Israel's QME. (Occasionally in the past the U.S. has withheld loan guarantees, but this sort of action has been very rare.) If you deprive yourself ab initio of your main source of leverage, you aren't going to be able to exercise much leverage: that's pretty obvious.

What's at stake in the British election

Courtesy of Henry Farrell, here's a link to a piece on the Foreign Affairs website about the UK election.

I read the first two paragraphs of the piece. In the second paragraph, the authors manage to work in the famous line from The Communist Manifesto, "all that is solid melts into air."

As the (generic) kids say, I'm like: O-kay, I can read the rest of this later.

UK election: the second debate

Here and (a pre-debate post) here.

Quote of the day (1)

From W.L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise (Norton, 1965), p.56:

"Harriet Martineau's two volumes, The History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, covering the years 1815 to 1846, were published in 1849; by 1855, but for the Crimean War, it would have been possible to speak of forty years' peace. Within that period British troops had been in action against Gurkhas, Pindaries, Mahrattas, Sikhs, Afghans, Burmese, Chinese, Kaffirs, Ashantis and Boers. Ships of the Royal Navy had bombarded Algiers, routed the Turks at Navarino, operated against Mehemet Ali, underwritten Latin American independence, blockaded Buenos Aires and the Piraeus, captured slavers and waged war on pirates from the Caribbean to the China Sea. Assam, Sind, the Punjaub [sic] and a great part of Burma had fallen to British arms. Quae caret ora cruore nostro? [What coast does not know our streams of blood? -- Horace; translation courtesy of a loyal reader.] It was natural that a country which lived by its foreign trade and its foreign investments should protect and extend them, in the last resort by force; it was remarkable that so many of its inhabitants did not realize that this had been done for years and treated the Crimean War as something different, not merely in scale but in kind, from anything that had happened since Waterloo."

(Actually, not so remarkable if one accepts a distinction between wars that involve more than one Great Power and wars that do not.)

The City of the Jugglers

Although I don't do it very often, it can pay to glance at journals that have nothing to do with one's field: you never know what interesting things you might turn up. The other day in the library I happened to look at the Spring 2009 issue of The Victorian Newsletter, which is devoted to William North (1825-1854), whose 1850 novel The City of the Jugglers is described by Patrick Scott as "the least known but most relevant novel of the 19th century" and "perhaps the only English novel fully to take up the challenge of 1848 and the revolutions elsewhere in Europe."* It's available as a print-on-demand paperback from the University of South Carolina Press and also available in a digital version. (Incidentally, North was also, among other things, the author of Anti-Coningsby, a satire of Disraeli and the Young England movement.)
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*Patrick Scott, "Introducing a 'Lost' Victorian Novel: The Elusive William North and The City of the Jugglers (1850)," The Victorian Newsletter #115 (Spring 2009): 7-15.

On Britain, France, and border controls

Ten of the twelve suspected terror plotters arrested in the U.K. in the recent raids were in the country on student visas (and were Pakistani nationals), leading to calls to reform the visa system, among other things. Border and immigration controls continue to be contentious, even when the threat of terrorism is not the main issue. In 2003, Britain and France reached an agreement giving each country's border police some limited jurisdiction in the other country: France in a zone in Dover, Britain in a zone in Calais. Now the two countries are working on a controversial plan to build a new center in Calais with the aim of making it easier to deport undocumented asylum-seekers, particularly Afghanis, Iraqis, and migrants from the horn of Africa, who seek entry into Britain by getting on trucks that will cross the Channel (via the tunnel).