Can the EU survive another Srebrenica?

 As I write on March 2 2022 Russian artillery is shelling Ukrainian cities and there is a real prospect of urban warfare with mass civilian casualties. This is unconscionable. However to avert it, were NATO to intervene, that could provoke a nuclear exchange. That is also unconscionable. A NATO policed no-fly zone over Ukraine would be as likely to provoke this outcome as actual troops on the ground. I am pretty sure that a Europe that does not intervene as Ukrainians die for Europe, and that is how this is now understood, loses its soul.

So what to do? What I am about to suggest is, I realise, incredibly risky, and I want to make clear that I would be absolutely willing to be a civilian observer if we actually went this way. Pontificating about how other people should put themselves in the mouth of danger (as the anthem puts it) makes me queasy.

There are four non-NATO members of the EU who all have significant experience of peace-keeping. If under EU authority we were to actually do what the Russians claim to do and send a peace-keeping force into Ukraine we could end the war. There is a real likelihood that we (the Finns, Swedes, Austrians and Irish) end up in conflict with the Russians, and that pulls the French and Germans in after us, even if only in the skies. However, if neutral European troops were airlifted into Kyiv and Kharkiv, fully aware that it could not in the first instance be an effective fighting force, we make the political and military cost of shelling civilians too high, without provoking World War Three if there is conflict.

The huge problem here, of course, is that the very fact that Russia has invaded Ukraine illustrates their adventurism, and they might well escalate and be damned. NATO asked troops in Germany to act as human trip wires for decades, in a strategy designed to leave enough time to use nuclear weapons. I think a similar tactic, but this time with a view to avoiding their use, may offer a route for us not to stand idly by, but not destroy the continent either.

Ukraine, Europe, Ireland

 As I write this on Sunday 13 February, the New York Times is reporting that there are credible plans for a Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday, so this may prove to be a very unwise little blog to post, because from what I can see all the advantages for Putin lie in not invading Ukraine. He has achieved his goal, which is to get the Europeans to acknowledge that the European security architecture is not secure and that Russia has legitimate complaints that need to be addressed. His previous actions in Georgia and the Donbass restrict the sympathy in France and Germany for his view, but do not eliminate it. 

Putin is aware, as are we all, that the Ukraine crisis is useful for the US for two reasons. It creates a context where it can call on its European allies to rally around the NATO flag and so reassert American leadership/hegemony after the Trump hiatus. It also opens up a space for a power move in energy politics that would make Europe more dependent on US sources of gas. However the EU, France and Germany in particular, clearly has decided that the US can no longer be relied on to guarantee the European peace and certainly does not wish to pursue the energy transition on US terms. The EU is also strongly pursuing a strategy of digital sovereignty which is deliberately hostile to the US digital giants. One of the most important pieces of leverage the US can exert within the EU is the Eastern members' reasonable fear of Russian revanchism. If Putin actually invades all these dominos fall and the prospect of an independent European geopolitics recedes for another decade.

So how does this end? If Ukraine were to independently renounce any aspiration to join NATO, but were to be fast-tracked into the EU (which has a set of other neutrals like ourselves and the Swedes), that would meet everyone's needs, except the Americans. Ukraine gets to be firmly embedded in a robust international institution. France gets the independent European geopolitical activity and credit for solving the crisis, Russia gets to negotiate in a European space, where it can carry enormous weight. Germany can continue to denuclearise, and Europe gets the room to build the energy infrastructure linking the wind farms in the Atlantic to the solar panels in the Mediterranean that it has planned for 15 years. Russian gas enables the transition, which clearly creates its own issues, but that can be managed in what we in Ireland refer to as the totality of relationships. Over the medium term that dependency will wane.

The loser in any deal like this would be the US. This kind of deal is the European-led alternative to the strategy of containment through confrontation favoured by Washington. And Washington may be right. Russia may be an insatiable destablising international actor. The problem for Europe is that the risk of the US being led in the near future by an ethnic nationalist is higher, so over the medium term, even if one favours the more hard-line stance toward Russia, how can one be sure it will be sustained? Better to create what Mitterand called our common European home.

Putin, like Sun-Tzu, may well win the battle without ever having to fight, as long as the war he is trying to fight is for Russia's place in Europe and not the re-establishment of the Russian empire. And for Ireland? We live within constrained sovereignty, and completely understand that we simply can't do anything in international politics that threatens the real interests of our neighbours. I'm sure Ukraine understands that too. The beauty of the European model of collective security is that it allows us to have effective sovereignty, but to exercise that means accepting limitations. It also means, for Ireland, having to accept responsibility for our security, and taking up the same military stance as the other European neutrals. The Report of the Commission on the Defence Forces published this week, very much moves Irish foreign policy in this direction. 

Given the strategic setback he can inflict on the US by not invading why would he possibly resort to force? The lure of the easy military victory may prove too strong, but there are very recent examples that illustrate how little is gained by those sort of victories.

A Second Republic, Irish Citizens, British Identities

If there were to be a United Ireland it is obvious that there would then be a significant minority in the country who would find themselves in a state to which they do not wish to belong. The unhappy experience of the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland is often used as a framework for thinking about possible outcomes, but the parallel is not really relevant, though tempting. The big external systemic drivers that a post-unification society would face, such as climate change, mass migration,  the energy transition, the place of Ireland in Europe and the world, are very different from those of the aftermath of the First World War. Even more importantly the Republic of Ireland is in no way a good parallel for the Northern Ireland state of the 1920s. Even in the unlikely event of the most inflexible incorporating union with no acknowledgement of the constitutional history of Northern Ireland, Northern Unionists would still enjoy all the rights and protections of citizens of a state within the European Union. 

I was reminded that this very experience happened to my family, when I was at a dinner in Derry recently. I was swapping stories with my dinner companion and she remarked that if my great-grandfather had gone on the beach in Belfast rather than Cork I'd be Johnny Adair. That is taking it too far (though both he and I are bald, were born in 1963 and have houses in Scotland), but the key point, that if my Royal Navy great-grandfather from Salford had fallen in with a friends from Portsmouth or Chatham, or any of the other Dockyards other than Haulbowline, then I wouldn't be Irish. The Donovans he had met in Essex (and whose daughter Alice he married in 1884), and the Andrews and the Flynns he had sailed with gave him more reason to come ashore in Cork harbour than to return to the basement in Sandywell Street in which he had been born in 1860. Mortimer Cuffe's reasons for coming from St Pancras in London are less clear, but that move is another contingency.

Not long after having that conversation an old school friend who I hadn't seen for a while called and I mentioned the conversation to him and also remarked that in ancestry I was more English than Irish, to which he replied that all my schoolmates knew that about me (this was news). That conversation in Derry crystallised some ideas and stories that I had always been aware of, but never really connected. 

I've always understood that the family is fundamentally Atlantic working class and naval. My maternal grandmother was born in 1913 in Hell's Kitchen to her Irish mother, an O'Brien, and James Carter who we think was from Glasgow, and who had helped found the Marine, Port and General Workers Union in Cork. That last nugget only came to light when the new Connolly Hall invited my grandmother to an opening and her sense of family history overcame her conservatism. Everyone on my father's side was involved with the sea, mostly in unions and navies. There are still Liveseys in the US Navy; a cousin just graduated from Missou as a Naval Doctor., and her father was an official in the Boilermakers, having served himself, as had his father. One of the pleasures of historical scholarship for me in the past decades has been reading the work of colleagues like Rediker and Frykman which has given me a much deeper understanding of the long history of that maritime community.

What I never really thought through in any depth though was how British the family was. The evidence was always out in plain sight. Both my mother and father's sides of the family were English immigrants in the late nineteenth century, working and lower middle class Protestants initially, then the families became Catholic through intermarriage, but they remained fundamentally Unionist.  Family lore has it that my great-grandfather, Samuel Livesey had a bust of the old Queen and crossed Union flags in the porch of his house up to his death in 1933. My maternal uncle was born on the day of George VI's coronation and so was named for him. Two of his uncles, Willie and Ernie Cuffe, went off to war in 1939 and never again set foot in Ireland. Ernie never recovered from being shelled in Caen in 1944 and died in the Chelsea Royal Hospital. For the Liveseys especially, Irish independence was challenging not for political reasons, but because the Naval Dockyard closed, which was the main source of employment in the village. By 1928 five members of the Livesey/Russell/Flynn connection were in the Bronx.

The British and Unionist elements of my family and my experience had always been present without me being totally aware of them. Much of it was offhand comment that I only realised the import of many years later. I remember my father discussing the murder of Admiral Boyle Sommerville. This was not current affairs (it happened in 1936), but he was still really cross about it in the mid-70s. He explained to me that Boyle Sommerville helped local Cork men to find jobs in the Navy, which was a Godsend in the depression. He thought the people who had killed him were more stupid than evil, as anyone who was on the coast understood how naval recruitment worked and his recommendation was necessary. Interestingly this was exactly the view Edith Sommerville took at the time, in a letter to an American friend. Paul Durcan has a great poem that expresses how that death remained a wound, precisely because of that stupidity, "I knew then that only the sky had a roof".

There were other pieces of that heritage lying around. A friend of my father fascinated me as a child with stories of serving with Mountbatten in the Kelly on the Malta convoys in 1941. My grandmother discussing the burning of Cork was always more disappointed than incensed. Fifty years later she still took personally that the government, as it then was from her point of view, turned the Tans on the population. When times were very tough after the closure of the naval dockyard my grandfather worked and lived on the Newnham Estate at Coolmore. And these signs extended out from the family. In the music corridor of my school the photograph of the successful candidates for the Indian Civil Service in 1937 hung very close to that of the last hurling team the school put out before the ban. 

There are many continuities from this history to the contemporary experience of my family. However for all practical purposes it had no impact on my life or anyone else's whatsoever. There were some obvious signs of that heritage, like the photo of Major Cuffe in the front room, and some more subtle ones, like the absence of any religious or farmers in the family, but it never dawned on me, or on anyone else, that it mattered, even during the worst years of the Troubles. My father, whose love of hurling knew no bounds, as a member of the Cork county board worked openly to change the GAA rule demanding that members boycott foreign games without ever worrying for an instant that anyone would take any interest in his background. In some way that escapes ethnicity, culture, or heritage we, that is the family, had become Irish. 

There is a lot to say about the changes in Irish public culture in the twentieth century, and Diarmuid Ferriter's work is not a bad place to start to explore work in this area. I've always been struck by Sean Ó'Faoláin's observation in the biography of De Valera he wrote when he returned from the US in the 1940s that there was a new kind of demotic spirit about, and that even though the outcomes of the Revolution were not what he had hoped for, they were positive and interesting. I think that is right, and that social and cultural moment was the condition for the economic change that has driven the history of Ireland since the mid 1950s. It is an interesting question to work out why between my great-grandfather's death in 1933, or my grand-uncle's rally to the colours, and my birth thirty years later, what had previously been important, became less so. However for the purposes of thinking about the Unionist community in Northern Ireland, the important fact is not why that happened, but that it did.

Very often, when articulating anxiety about the prospect of constitutional change, identity becomes the matrix through which that anxiety finds expression. No-one is denying the importance of identity, but it is hard to see  a post-unification Ireland putting any constraints on expressions of British identity. One of the most obvious features of the last hundred years in Ireland has been the developing acceptance of the complexity of the cultural identities in the population. One of the reasons that immigration has, so far, not been challenging in the Republic was that ethnicity, citizenship, and identity have been disarticulated. This was not at all clear during the period of dominance by the Catholic Church of course, but more recently expressions of integral nationalism by people like John Waters just end up sounding odd. Politics in the Republic is not conducted through cultural mobilisation or negative ideation around an imagined "other". Of course there is at least some chance that misguided goodwill might import consociation, and "Ulsterise" Irish politics, but the likelihood of that has to be low. The chances are that identity issues in a United Ireland would not be particularly difficult to resolve.

Of course none of this is compelling to Unionist opinion, for whom the constitutional link to the United Kingdom is intrinsically valuable, not a best option among many. Even if that community were convinced that every practice they hold dear would be cherished and protected that would not be reason for them to accept a United Ireland. Unionist opinion has a reasoned intuition that the end of Northern Ireland will bring an end to a political and social world they have known. This is often articulated as the view that Irish identity is substantially constructed through anti-Britishness. That seems to me empirically wrong and a projection of Ulster's politics onto Ireland. But if the process of unification is to go well, it has to be acknowledged that the fear of change is not irrational. Once the structures change that will initiate a cascade effect and entirely new and unpredictable dynamics will emerge.

What I think our experience at least suggests, is that Unionism as currently constituted and understood will not survive a United Ireland. However there is no reason to fear some kind of terrible assimilation and elimination of historical memory. There has not been, and will not be, an imposition of a unitary imagined past. However for families like mine, working class with their roots in Protestantism, the prospect of release from the narrow ground and from political conservatism will, I think, create the space for change. I think we can predict with some certainty that the Northern Irish Unionist and Loyalist working class will not continue their historic pattern of voting with and for parties that are conservative. Similarly it is hard to see them adhering to nationalist parties. What I hope for is that they can recover their roots in the British radical tradition, many of the best elements of which already embedded in Irish constitutional practice. 

The Republic of Ireland owns the historic achievement of having separated citizenship from ethnicity and identity, without creating an arid public culture. If - and it can only be if - there is a United Ireland, then I have great hopes that a Second Republic will extend this experiment in positive ways. I look forward to the insight and understanding that the British citizens of Ireland will contribute to us remaining a free people, in the face of the challenges all peoples face. 

Green Jacobinism

 Adam Tooze has a really interesting review in the LRB organised around Andreas Malm's ideas on the politics of the climate crisis. AT pinpoints the view of the Zetkin Collective that the climate crisis represents a revolutionary moment without a revolutionary subject. Along with AT I am minded to take Malm's invocation of War Communism as a model of political response to climate (in)action more as a theoretical provocation than a real historical analogy. The question Malm raises is what is politically optimal if catastrophe is imminent and there are no clear saviors in sight. Climate change, in this view of the world, is to our moment what fascism was to the early part of the twentieth century.

AT does a lovely job of putting Ecological Leninism in a frame where it can be apprehended as a political option alongside the liberal reformism that is the core tactic of the climate change movement (inspired by its understanding of the success of the non-violent rights movements) or the market adaptation favored by the energy companies and their allies (I don't think these are equivalents, but that is not the topic of the day). I think it is reasonable to take it as given that neo-liberal strategies will not solve the crisis, and the outcome of a climate change rhetoric with no action will be some kind of right-wing populist reaction, which leads AT to pose the following "Malm forces us to face a crucial question: what are the social democratic politics of emergency? If his version of ecological Leninism is to be refused, what is the logic of action in the face of disaster?"

I want to suggest the answer to that question is Jacobinism, The characteristic of Jacobinism that fits the moment is that it posits an idealised subject (the people). It is precisely the mode of politics that happens when an absolutely necessary revolutionary project lacks a revolutionary subject. What holds it together is the interaction of the positive notion of a citizen, as someone who accepts the law or necessity as their own will, with the negative antithesis, the aristocrat who denies they are subject to that law (and so holds privilege). Jacobinism is crisis social democracy, or rather is the form democracy takes when it faces existential threat. When in the summer of 1792 it became obvious that civil society restored to its rights could not find an equilibrium around justice, that created the Jacobin moment, that if such a regime could not be found then it would be made. Jacobinism, because of its incoherence and heterogeneity, can never deliver from its own resources the hoped for goal. What it does is end the revolutionary situation, and create the ground for a new "normal" politics. Just to be clear, that does not require Terror (in fact I would argue that was an incredible mistake),.

The most powerful example of Jacobinism is not French, but American. The Union side in the American Civil War was effectively Jacobin. It claimed to represent the people over and above all constitution and rights, it held together a heterogeneous social alliance, that collapsed very quickly once it had eliminated the threat, the power of Southern slaveholders, but while it existed it instituted a "second founding". Marilynn Robinson's wonderful Gilead sequence of novels paints an insightful picture of what happens to a Jacobin project (Iowa, the shining star of radicalism) when the Jacobin moment passes. The Jacobin moment feels like it reveals a more profound reality, being touched by fire. Of course it does not do that, it merely brackets social and economic questions for a moment, opening space to transform the normative content of all institutions and disarm the opposition. At which point every interest again asserts itself and tries to co-opt that new space.

What will characterize Green Jacobinism will be an expanded idea of who/what is a citizen, in the sense of a subject whose integrity and moral subjecthood has to be acknowledged, beyond the human. And the aristocrats will be those who deny the extension of the political community in that way. This is already beginning to happen as green politics builds a special place for indigenous peoples and their lands. And a Green Jacobin project will share other things with the American experience, including a strong religious content. Richard Powers' novel The Overstory picks up all of these themes and anticipates the tragic vision of this kind of Jacobinism.

This has been the successful logic of action in the face of disaster, much more successful than Leninism. Of course that Jacobin moment may never find its Lincoln or Robespierre, the scattered and heterogeneous forces that accept the need for transformation may not be mobilised, or they may, but find the climate aristocrats too powerful to defeat. Strong analogies do not hold.

The End of a Very Old Song

On Saturday morning, for the first time since 1169, the larger part of the island of Ireland woke up without a constitutional or political connection with the island of Britain. Right through the twentieth century Ireland either used sterling or was in the European Community with the UK (and up to 1949 was in the Commonwealth), both forms of institutional and constitutional connection. As I write all of that has ended. The institutions of the Good Friday Agreement entangle the two states in complex ways of course, but for reasons I will explain I think those have less general significance than is generally supposed. Over the long term I think this moment will prove to be really important, and I had some thoughts about how it affects Irish policy and strategy.

The core new fact is that Ireland is now a European country and the UK is not. I would go so far as to claim that fact is the determining strategic fact for Irish policy makers for the foreseeable future, more foundational than the ongoing relationship with the UK, mediated through the status of Northern Ireland, or the relationship with the US. Why do I think that? It is because the confederal structure of the European Union offers the best chance of ensuring the well-being of the population and provides the context that gives the community the best chance of collectively acting to solve our problems, advance our interests, and pursue our values (as we discover and articulate them). 

The informing strategy of Irish international policy since the foundation of the state has been to support collective institutions. Sean Lester was the last Secretary General of the League of Nations, and there can hardly be a more telling illustration of commitment to the institutions of collective security than going down with that particular ship (though as Sam Moyn has explained, it was important to maintain the continuity of international organisations and jurisprudence, so this may not have been quite so Quixotic). The EU opens a much wider scope for that strategy and allows Ireland to have leverage on issues like climate change and international trade which otherwise would not be open to us. 

Strategic choice imposes limits as well as opening opportunities. As the EU has confronted problems like the financial crash of 2008 it has assumed new executive functions. The scope of the European Council has widened as the competence of institutions like the ECB has extended. Europe is becoming a political reality and taking on a political nature, often in ways that have not been anticipated in the treaties. That dynamic is continuing. The new trade treaty with China is a geo-political move by Europe and if some collective response to managing relationships with Russia, North Africa, and the Middle East could be achieved, that would be a real success. If (when?) a crisis analogous to the Yugoslavian crisis were to emerge in the future it is hard to imagine Europe being as inert as it was in that moment. For Ireland, accepting that the EU will take on a military aspect will be difficult, but given the US commitment to NATO is no longer taken for granted, it is almost inevitable.

That is only one of the many ways in which threads of European experience will start to weave through Ireland and the other members of the EU and pull them closer together. The constitutional frameworks that reflect European rather than British experience, which are already present in Irish structures, will, I think, become more prominent. The rights-based model of citizenship, which is fundamentally French, has been hugely important in the development of the Republic, so too has the creation of a constitutional jurisprudence. Those features are much closer to the French model of "thick" citizenship and active democratic participation than the liberal British model. As the EU develops its political practice, and in particular works out how the larger and smaller states can work together effectively, that will open up real opportunities for Ireland to operate. Europe will never be a nation state, but pretty soon there will be questions asked about the relationship between democratic participation and the European executive and judiciary. The practice of whatever comes out of that moment is more likely to echo the early-modern comity of multiple monarchies, city states, and territorial republics of continental Europe, than the incorporating union of the United Kingdom with its much more unitary model of sovereignty. 

As these dynamics make Ireland more constitutionally European, analogous to a state of the old Holy Roman Empire, it will pull it further away from the UK. This could cause real problems if there is any prospect of unity between the Republic and the North. Obviously any movement in that direction would have to be handled with enormous sensitivity and generosity. Unification would create a new entity, not simply absorb the North into the Republic. However core constitutional principles that align Ireland with the European Union, principally the model of citizenship, could not be compromised. The consociational model of representation that animates the Good Friday Agreement, is completely incompatible with the universalist model for citizenship that has been successful in creating a democratic order in the Republic and that aligns it with the EU. The entire premise of the Christian Democratic/Social Democrat model of citizenship is secularisation, which is much more than the separation of church and state. It pulls off the trick of creating a model of citizenship that has real consequence in terms of rights to participate in the public life of the community in all its aspects, supported by educational, welfare, health and other rights that enable that participation, and so is very "thick", but which is separated from the most profound identities and values of the individuals. More liberal models of citizenship are thinner (more concentrated on protecting property rights) and populism rejects secularisation and demands unitary identity as a condition of citizenship. 

The Republic was interesting, and odd, because even when the population was overwhelmingly Catholic, formal secularisation was sustained, and the difference between the citizen and the believer was respected (I realise that is a deeply theoretical position and the dominance of Catholic values and institutional perspectives is obvious for most practical purposes, but the secular norm was always there and was the ground for much of the change of the last forty years). That univeralist model of citizenship has become more important in recent years as Ireland has become a country of immigration.You can't simultaneously have a consociational and universalist model of citizenship. And this is why I don't think the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement are going to operate as a bridge between the Republic and the UK. They only have reference to the special conditions of Northern Ireland and cannot have sustained constitutional purchase. 

If Scotland secedes from the UK this constitutional problem will come to a head as the sustainability of the UK as an entity will then be in question and I doubt that in those circumstances England will sustain the transfers necessary to maintain reasonable standards of living in Northern Ireland. That would be a political circumstance that would bring the issue of Northern Ireland to a head (there are many others that could do the same thing of course). It is completely predictable that a body of Unionist opinion will only assent to a United Ireland on consociational grounds and that is likely to be unacceptable to the majority of Irish citizens, for whom being citizens is a big deal. 

This circumstance, where the UK is no longer capable of sustaining Northern Ireland, but no agreement is possible on a set of constitutional principles for a Second Republic, seems to me to be the greatest medium-term strategic threat to Ireland. If my thinking is right, and the core interest of Ireland is in its engagment with and full membership of the EU, then that is the criterion that we should use to guide ourselves through the predictable constitutional politics of the new decade. I think that being clear about that would also be helpful to the communities of Northern Ireland, who also face a very changed circumstance. In imagining a United Ireland everything would not be on the table, and a Northern Ireland trying to find safe harbour for all of its peoples deserves to know that.

Intersectionality and Democratic Politics

Over the last few days I have been inspired, and somewhat intimidated, by the discussions at the seminar on Leadership Challenges in Uncertain Times hosted by the wonderful Aspen Initiative UK. I am still trying to integrate what I heard and learned over the week, but one thought keeps coming back for me that I think might be worth sharing. We spoke a lot about some of the features of contemporary identity politics, and particularly the focus on speech acts and signals. Discomfort with attempts to police opinion are not restricted to conservatives, and Mark Lilla, for one, has articulated an anxiety that is widely shared, that the illiberalism of some expressions of these politics will be self-defeating and make it harder rather than easier to create solidarity and understanding.

Personally I have never run into anything more than what I thought were perfectly reasonable requests to be mindful of the variety of people in organisations I was running. To be honest I've always thought I've just been asked to be polite. However this is a real issue, and I have colleagues and people I admire, like Kathleen Stock, who have had a much rougher time and have legitimate grounds for complaint about how they have been treated. When push comes to shove I would stand up for the most extensive understanding of academic freedom.  That cuts both ways though; I am always amused when some right-wing scholars demand some kind of special protection for their claim about compelling arguments that somehow aren't winning in open debate. 

Coming at this issue through the gate of policing speech, policing the policing as it were, does not strike me as the most creative or interesting way to think about it. I'd like us to be mindful of the work that people involved in these issues of diversity and equality are doing and what motivates them. It may be a mystery to many people why trans issues, for instance, play such an important role in the political thinking of so many people. It may be even more challenging to see why trans issues might or can be aligned with work on  migration or cultural difference. However the idea of intersectionality is the driver of much of the work, so such a lack of understanding is no warrant to reject or ignore that work and that thinking. 

Somewhere at the heart of this work is a breathtakingly ambitious effort to articulate the conditions of global equality. People working in this mode make even people like Sam Moyn, who thinks human rights are not enough, look modest in their ambitions. They are trying to think and live through the conditions of possibility of democracy for the entire globe. The real risk takers even want to extend that imaginative inclusivity beyond our species and recognise the value and dignity of other beings. And these efforts are having effect, in cases such as the Whanganui River being recognised as a legal person. We live in a world of globalised trade, where attaching citizenship too firmly to nationality flies in the face of the reality of the patterns of movement of people and peoples. It is  obvious that global action will be necessary to respond to climate change. So this egalitarianism may be ambitious and utopian, and undoubtedly it lands in odd ways, but it does seem to be posing the right question.

If we come at the phenomenon from this direction, it does not excuse bullying, but it rescues us from the performative contradiction of looking for ways to control the speech of those trying to control the speech of others. It is not surprising that the articulations of this egalitarian desire would be raw, overstated, and uncomfortable. It also helps to understand the attention paid to marginality, since the test of equality arises on the margins. It became clear too in the many discussions during the seminar, that this kind of ambition is really cognitively stressful and demands we be tolerant of ways of thinking that may seem to some of us to be fuzzy and lack evidence. This is stressful, but as one person put it, "it's your turn" on that one. The call to leadership then seems to be to accept the question, especially if one finds oneself at odds with efforts to narrow the space of acceptable speech. Liberal conservatism is too easy, there must be a joyful, robust vision of expansive democracy.

On the Sources of (Some) of our Present Discontents

 I was watching Official Secrets with my daughter last night and I ended up thinking about the Second Iraq War for the first time in a long time. She was very young when it was happening so had only the dimmest memories and it wasn't something we'd ever discussed at length, so she was struck by how upset I remained at it. For some of us thinking is more akin to marination than cogitation and what I discovered when talking to her was that if anything I now think that war was even more of a disaster than it first appeared to be and is a crucial moment that set us up for many of our current difficulties. The us in those sentences are those of us who live in the US and Europe, but particularly in the UK. Of course the real disaster is for the Iraqi people, but I have no competence to write on that, so all I can do is acknowledge it.

If we go back to that moment in early 2003, the geopolitical world was very different. The US enjoyed a kind of cultural, economic, and political dominance that has already disappeared. Looked at in long-term view, the pivot of the US after Vietnam to effectively ally with China against the USSR had worked. Kissenger's move had set up victory in the Cold War, and laid the foundations for the development of the international order after it. To a particular geopolitical turn of mind 9/11 was a reminder that the Middle East was the remaining crucial area of instability in the international order, and a call to do something about it. It is important to remember that the people driving US foreign policy at this point were the members of Nixon's team (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Armitage, Wolfovitz, the people Paul Mann called the Vulcans) who had been entirely sceptical of Kissenger style diplomacy and believed in frank assertion of American power. Imagine how the world looks to thinkers who see Kissenger as too liberal; Joe Nye style notions of a norm-grounded international order don't even occur to them. So the US had enormous room for manoeuvre, and could have done pretty much anything, but it chose to invade Iraq as an opening move in a reorganisation of the international order, and was choosing from a constrained body of choices because of the outcome of the 2000 election. What they found out, as we all know, is that they were completely wrong about how power and the international order work. 

What seems clear to me now is that for the people pushing for war the geostrategic reason for intervention was so clear that the premise was almost beside the point. When you see the unconvincing revelation of shaky intelligence the people delivering it look like they are going through the motions. From their point of view they were going to do the right thing "free the Iraqi people" and the formalities were just that, formalities. And so we start getting in to the long-term consequences. Iraq was hardly the first time a state has lied to its population to go to war (just in case there was any doubt Poland did not attack Germany in 1939, and that whole Tonkin Gulf thing was cooked up) but the investment in alternative facts was unprecedented. The mobilisation we will need to combat climate change is of the order of war and the US and the UK undermined the very principle of rational public debate right at the point we most need it. That was the point at which the rules-based international order started to crumble, and that tendency intensified as the rights regime came under stress (torture memos). From the outside it also looks as if US foreign policy has become locked into a strategy of dominance rather than hegemony through leadership. At the end of this dynamic stands the question of whether the existing international legal and political order can be recovered or do we need to start looking for other arrangements.

Closer to home Tony Blair, and the Blairite support for the war, broke the Labour Party. For those of us of a natural Labour turn of mind Blair and his team were never the easiest option, but if that was where the centre-left of the UK was found, well then so be it. However that warrant did not extend to wars of choice, no matter how well-intentioned or honestly supported (and the egotism of turning these issues on personality clearly foreshadowed what was to come). The Labour Wars of the last decade and a half all turn on where people were on Iraq. It must be hard to be on the Corbyn side of the party and remain civil with the supporters of the Iraq war, and the hard core of anti-Corbyn was driven by the Iraq Yeomanry.

The most vivid example of the effect of Iraq on the Labour coalition is in Scotland. In the Scottish elections of 2003, held in May, Labour lost only six seats, to the Scottish Socialists, and the SNP lost more, eight, mostly to the Greens. That did not crack the mould of Scottish politics since it was hardly news that Labour faced a challenge from the left, and the effect of Iraq had not yet been to reconfigure the political spectrum. Labour had every reason to expect the Green and Scottish Socialist vote to return to them in the long run. The SNP opposition to the war, a position that aligned them with the Liberal Democrats, allowed them to break out of the nationalist constituency and to appeal to Labour voters who could not stomach the war, and they added twenty seats to their tally in 2007, which then set them up to become the dominant force in Scottish politics that now defines the local agendas. The middle class turned against Labour in 2007 and the working class did the same in 2011. 

And Iraq had huge consequence for the UK's position on Europe as well. When Blair supported the war, and so broke with the European consensus that this was, as the cliche has it, "worse than a crime, a blunder", he also reinforced the dynamics of UK nationalism that eventually drove Brexit. The CANZUK/US fantasy as an alternative to the EU, has its proximate roots in the Iraq alliance. The consequences of even trying to put the Empire back together in this form really are terrifying. As the UK aligns with the US, and tries to bring the old white settler colonies in its train, in the view that military superiority generates some kind of international legitimacy, they both drive everyone else, who rejects that view, to co-operate against them. This whole strategy for the UK looks doomed to failure, and makes the work of international co-operation against climate change unnecessarily harder. It also makes an EU-China alignment in accord with the equatorial nations most vulnerable to the early effects of climate change more likely. 

The US did not have to make this mistake, and the UK made it worse by supporting them.