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.

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Mind

It has been lovely over the past two days to have so many people kindly respond to the publication of Provincializing Global History. The book will have to stand on its own two legs as a contribution to the field, but I thought it might be interesting to write something about the background of concern that it emerges from. At a workshop around the book kindly organised by Sophus Reinert, my old friend and colleague John Shovlin asked me what was the predicament that we were in that I wrote in this particular way, and I've been thinking about that as a really interesting question for me.  I'm taking John's "we" in this circumstance to refer to the scholarly community and I think John is right, we are in a predicament, but that is no bad thing. John's question brought me back to a moment very early in my scholarly life when Patrice Higonnet gently intimated that if I was that committed to praxis and saw scholarly work as a projection of more profound issues then why didn't I go and directly address them. That stopped me dead in my tracks, but again in a really useful way because it made me get past an unhelpful idea about what it was to research and write history, particularly history of the changes in the use of ideas. And that is why on my PURE profile I have my tongue a little in my cheek when I refer to myself as an applied eighteenth-century historian. We have not, I feel, fully appreciated how our work uncovers latent possibilities and resources to address our current moment. Every day in my work in Dundee I see how just allowing what I know from my work and experience as an historian to inform my work with partners, has transformative effect. So our predicament, I feel, is that we are not open enough to the radical consequences of historical practice, and the kinds of hopeful, but awkward, places following the consequences of our own practice might take us. And for me that late eighteenth century moment, in which so many of the institutions and ideas that structure contemporary reality were constructed, is the most challenging and disturbing of places to do historical work. Seeing the past as full of possibility, most of which is lost, rather than as a simplified or immature version of the present and future, completely changes the way in which one approaches the archive.

The nagging question that drives the book is around the conditions of possibility of stable modern  life. Why and how did and do ordinary (a tricky word) families and individuals commit themselves to the risk and danger of social experiment, rather than relying on the reproduction of known structures and authorities? I am continually struck that over the past 250 years, despite the horrors of imperialism and slavery, the anxieties attendant on market economies, the catastrophic revolutions against modern life, and the even more damaging barbarisms inflicted by modernist utopians, the everyday miracle of a self-organising society reasserts itself, as well as its demotic virtues of equality and kindness. The hypothesis I advance in the book is that European provincial life created the context within which specific, particular experiences, of the acquisition of knowledge, of economic life,  of material culture, could be abstracted and represented in universal terms, and that in consequence a culture of reason shared between elites and subalterns emerged. And that, I think, is the key to understanding how the thread of civilisation is spun, out of reason. Since I wrote this I've been thinking about, and writing about, other contexts where models of demotic reason emerged. Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic, and his notion of double consciousness is more and more compelling to me, and I'm hoping to extend my work in his direction. My colleague Undine Sellbach has driven me to think much harder about feminist critiques of the idea of critical rationality that structures my understanding of reason. So I understand that any specific definition of reason in the book is open to challenge, but I think that does not invalidate the observation around the historical experience of the community and its significance. The book is also in dialogue (if not evidently) with James Scott's work and his wonderful notion of a popular reason that escaped the neolithic revolution, let alone the industrial. His sensitivity to the paradoxes of coercion and the importance of agency to understand stability, is, I hope, reproduced in my thinking.

This book is the first of a pair, the second being on how demotic reason relates to capitalism. One of the reasons the book took so long was the impact that Chris Desan and Sven Beckert's seminar on capitalism had on me. I kept trying to align the story about the Languedoc and capitalism in a narrative, and I just couldn't. Eventually (it takes time but I do catch on) I realised it was because they are not continuous so I have been working for a while on the hinge between the commercial societies of the eighteenth century and the emergence of capitalist globalism in the nineteenth. As Patrice says, no great work is ever finished, merely abandoned.....

Brexit, Scotland and Labour

The Scottish Labour party are holding their annual conference in Perth this weekend. The party is clearly trying to find coherent ground from which to address the Scottish Independence question from which it can point out the difference between itself, the Conservatives and UKIP. Standing on the same platform as the Conservatives in the last referendum was a disaster. It accelerated the process of reorganising Scottish politics around a Tory-SNP axis and started a cascade that will very likely end in Labour losing Glasgow city council in the May elections, the last significant element of institutional power the party now controls.

The ground they are staking out is Federalism, which makes sense as Unionism and Separatism are both taken. The party inherits some serious intellectual capital from Gordon Brown on this issue. There are proposals for a Constitutional Convention and a new Act of Union that would reconstitute the UK. This opens up a vision that extends beyond Scotland and sows the seeds for a distinct Labour post-Brexit vision for Britain. By directing attention to the nations and regions of the UK it allows Blue Labour thinking on community to find some purchase in policy.

If you a democrat of any colour and have been waiting for Labour to begin to put together the plan for a post-Brexit opposition this has to be good news.  One can put aside the reasonable objection that the English regions have shown no appetite whatsoever for any kind of thoroughgoing federalism with the observation that you can't reframe a debate if you accept the current configuration of forces as given. That is obviously the parameter that Labour would have to change to make the rest of the post-Brexit revival of social democracy credible, though they might want to dust off their notes on "Home Rule all Around".

So it is depressing that it seems impossible to elaborate this vision coherently. If Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, cannot deliver a post-Nationalist message about identity and solidarity, without implying (very likely inadvertently) that separatists are racists, then it is difficult to see who can communicate the vision. Corbyn, with his usual deftness of touch, just falls back into UK majoritarianism. Dugdale, displaying lightning footwork, totally misses the point and manages to define the new idea completely in terms of opposition to the SNP, when the goal, from Labour's point of view, has to be to make the SNP irrelevant.

It may be that Labour is burdened with a more than usually ham-fisted group of leaders who lack the intellectual heft to see through a substantial reframing of political debate. Or it may be that they are trying to do the impossible. Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK have revived big-state nationalism. Teresa May, by quickly occupying UKIP's ground and holding her own has exported the post-Brexit crisis of identity to Labour (just as I suspect the Democratic alliance in the US will be put under huge strain by the Trump phenomenon). But you can't contest for nationalist votes with a vision of a complex politically and constitutionally differentiated country. That is clearly what integral nationalism rejects. So in Scotland Labour sounds like UKIP-lite, because of its majoritarian unionism, while in England it sounds confused about the fundamental issue of the make-up of the polity. It may be that even though the federalist option is internally coherent, there is simply no reasonable way to adapt it to the UK as we currently find it.

Moreover, in Scotland, the argument for complexity and differentiation of forms of power and identity is the separatist argument. Britain was articulated by Scots in the eighteenth century as an alternative project to English nationalism. The ideas about commercial society developed in the Scottish Enlightenment created categories (like "society") that reinterpreted the development of the unitary English state as the emergence of a complex Britain and so created the conditions for a union state rather than a nation state. English radicals, like Wilkes, disliked Scottish thinkers precisely because they muddied ideas about inclusion in the English political nation. Post-Brexit, the SNP, in terms of its ideas about solidarity and complexity, is the closest thing we have to an old-fashioned Scottish and British party.

Three Days Later: The Looming Conservative Reaction

I want to cast some speculations about Brexit into the air. Having listened to and read as much as I could for the past three days I have become convinced that the Johnson/Gove wing of the Brexit alliance not only did not expect to win, they did not wish to win. Again, this is speculation, but I think their view was that a high turnout for Brexit would create a situation where their real goal, access to the Single Market without any of the social and other protections offered by the Union, would be attainable.

Listening to Francis Maude this morning it seemed that was the game he was playing. He seemed to think that exit doesn't have to mean exit. Is George Osborne moving between Paris and Berlin trying to get a diplomatic deal done that pulls that off at the eleventh hour? If so he could ask the Parliament to put the referendum aside (on the grounds of real and material change in conditions), and the political class could tough out the reaction. In that scenario the 3 million or so who have petitioned for a re-run of the referendum end up being the useful idiots for a rightward swing for Britain as the only Union that would be available would be the version adapted to the needs of the business wing of the Conservative Party. From their point of view that would be a triumph, and I think it is possible because Gove and Johnson want it too. Liam Fox this morning argued that the process would have to wait until the Conservative had chosen a new leader, making the 150k membership of the Tory party the constitutional hinge of Europe. I think that kind of chutzpah is unlikely to succeed, but Cameron resigning has bought time for Westminster to work out what to do. If he was still there it would be hard to slow up the exit process, and for the other strategy to work that process has to be avoided.

Again this is speculation, but how to assess its likelihood? Britain as European Singapore is not the project of UKIP or of the millions who vote for Brexit, so could the system downface the population and get away with it? Would the Labour right go along with the Lib Dems and the relevant Tories to get some deal of this sort through the Commons? Those questions assume the robustness of the institutions and their capacity to manage the political moment, but is that still true? There is a vacuum, not of power, but of leadership in British politics, but that can be filled in. Is there a legitimacy crisis? Is there a figure with the kind of Pittean cunning necessary to pull this off available? Nicola Sturgeon plays for the opposition, so that is not a possibility.

Finally have the consequences of Brexit simply overwhelmed this kind of thinking? Right now it is impossible to assess the consequences across Europe, but I can't see anyone there colluding with a project of this sort. At what point is it better for Europe to have England walk? Doing a deal with Scotland would soften the blow, and how long could England last alone, especially if financial services are not given easy access to European markets. And now that English Nationalism is a force in British politics it is hard to see it being bottled up.

The Early Days of a Worse Future... and some possible exits

Obviously the Brexit vote is a disaster in any way you cut it, and there is no clever "cunning of history" way to recuperate that vote. The future that the UK is in the act of choosing is unpredictable, but none of the possible futures this move open up are creative. The alliance that made this vote possible is just terrifying.

When we do stop rending our garments, then what? There is a temptation to leap to a second Scottish independence referendum as an exit, but I think that may not be the best option. There is a UDI option of course, but that is really risky, but if Scotland doesn't do that we will be in trench warfare with Westminster just to get another referendum approved, and who knows what the outcome of an ugly row with revived English nationalism would be?

The more creative move is for Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast to take the high road. Those administrations represent people who today are European citizens and have expressed the wish to remain so (obviously the same is true of London). As governments and devolved administrations with recognized international standing they have an interest, and in my view a right, to voice in any negotiations for an English exit. England may leave the EU, Ireland isn't even thinking of doing so, Northern Ireland and Scotland have a right to represent their citizens.

Moreover this would be as British a move as cricket. There is a near millennium long British jurisprudence and political theory on complex and hybrid political entities, confederations, empires and partitions. There are already entities like the Isle of Man that are attached to the Crown of England, not part of the United Kingdom and so not part of the EU. Scotland and Northern Ireland could remain attached to the crown, leave the UK, but remain part of the EU. Scotland and the two Irelands could form a new confederation on the Swiss model. There are all sorts of politically practical, constitutionally responsible models that allow the English vote to be respected, without the rest of us having to be dragged into the disastrous romance of identity that they have embraced. We could even work out a settlement in Britain akin to the Irish settlement, where anyone born anywhere on the British Isles could claim either the English or European passport (in its Scots and Irish forms), and then the Londoners could stay European too. There are resources in our shared histories that can help us avoid the worst.

For any of this to work the Republic has to be flexible and accommodating. I think that the Irish population, North and South, are constitutionally sophisticated and the Scots are obviously politically mobilized and creative. We are all European citizens this morning and have a right to retain that citizenship. It is up to our politicians to defend our acquired citizens' rights.

The UK left and the EU Referendum

There is no coherent left argument for exit, it just looks like there might be. There has been a notable lack of real enthusiasm among the UK left for the EU, and that has opened up all opportunities for the exit campaign. My suspicion is that the treatment handed out to Greece during the financial crisis is a real problem for a lot of people. The hope that the social democratic model could be saved by Europe hasn't work out. Moreover I cannot think of anyone who thinks the current shape of the confederation (and that is what it is, not a union) is optimal.

But we are not being asked what kind of European Union we want to be part of, though if it is to survive that is clearly going to have to happen and won't be at all easy. The question being asked of the electorate in the UK is in or out, and the answer has to be in.

The European Union was created because the European states system, based on the balance of power, did not work. More specifically, the three major imperial states (four if you include Russia, but that gets complicated), could not reconcile their sovereignty doctrines, and claims to act independently, with limited forms of democratization, without in turn destroying international peace. The point of the EU is to depower toxic large-state nationalism and to articulate some kind of cosmopolitanism that doesn't replace more local loyalties, but tempers them.

We should not underestimate how close to the surface the old loyalties lie. In my own view, the recent historical work on the commemoration of the First World War has gone dangerously close to celebrating the passions and commitments that drove Europeans to slaughter one another. I'm constantly perturbed by how unaware some of my colleagues seem to be of the nostalgia for uncomplicated identity that infuses their writing.

Obviously the exit of the UK will not cause a European war, but UK exit from the EU would injure, possibly fatally, the project of creating a reasonable, livable Europe. Even if we could go back to a past of independent sovereign nations and uncomplicated identities, who would want to? And the question that is really pressing is not would we want to like in that kind of Europe, but would we want to live in that kind of UK? The real nightmare is a revived agressive British nationalism that would threaten the complex, plural political experiment that, almost unnoticed, has been going on across the whole British Isles for the last thirty years.

The Demotic Virtues and Islamism: Some thoughts provoked by the Paris attacks

Like all my friends and colleagues I am appalled at the events in Paris and thankful that everyone I know there seems to be safe. It is in moments like these that it is most important to keep thinking and to find creative ways to respond to events that are designed to overwhelm our capacity for rational action, to reduce us to fear. In that spirit I'd like to explain my view that the entire strategy of Islamist groups is based on a false premise and offer some suggestions about why they may have come to their conclusions.

Islamists are trying to start a war because they think they can't lose. The point of events like last night is to polarize, to divide global society and escalate tensions and problems into hostility and conflict. The Islamists share the pessimistic analysis of modern late capitalist society put forward by many commentators on the left and the right. In their view there are no moral or normative commitments grounding our shared life in politics and society in the countries across the Western world. Countries in Europe and the Americas may enjoy tremendous political, economic and military power, but there is no cause or ideal that could sustain those countries through a struggle that was costly and difficult. We believe nothing, so when we come under pressure we will crumble. Negative liberty generates tolerance and pluralism but also narcissism, disengagement, and isolation.

In my view this analysis completely misunderstands the relationship between capitalism and democracy and how that relationship has developed since the Enlightenment. The most astounding feature of that period is the global democratic transformation. By this I mean two really specific things. The almost complete triumph of egalitarian norms and the near complete mobilization of humans into self-organizing societies. One of the great gifts given to us by global history has been to explain that risk societies emerged everywhere, and did not disseminate out of Europe. New forms of collective action and co-ordination, based on the willingness of families at first, and then individuals, to take on new kinds of risk. emerged everywhere. Self-organizing societies are the base of democratic transformation.

The rise of "society" is hardly news, but the relationship between society (in this sense) and political values has not been fully explored. It is a commonplace among historically-minded political theorists to remark that the only new political virtue to be enunciated since Aristotle is egalitarianism and much discussion in political theory turns on whether or not that is real political virtue or rather an anti-political notion. A capacious idea of citizenship can easily comprise egalitarianism because it so clearly underpins so much of the actual public and civil experience of modern societies. Moreover egalitarianism spawns most of the ethics that are recognized not as heroic or aristocratic, but demotic, of the people: kindness, mercy, fairness, justice. I'm not proposing a silly and romantic view of the people, rather observing that there are a set of demotic virtues and we, in the sense of modern late capitalist societies do believe in them. The view that our societies are morally hollow is unfounded.

It would take a lot more than a blog post to argue persuasively that capitalism does not produce "society" but is parasitic on it, and that the cultural misunderstanding that informs Islamism (and much modern conservative thought) is to collapse one into the other. What I do want to end with is a reminder that lots of groups have had success attacking liberal states and even disrupting capitalist economies. However, mobilized democratic peoples are astonishingly successful at warfare. Islamists are like slave-holders or other kinds of late-nineteenth-century elites, clinging to a culturally pessimistic vision of modern life in order to persuade themselves they can create a future. Everything they do is futile and cannot succeed.

From September 2014 to May 2015: Does the SNP become the Irish Home Rule Party?

The referendum campaign in Scotland was one of the most interesting political processes I have ever been involved with, but it is over. I had assumed that once it had finished there would be a fairly speedy return to some sort of political normality, crisis-ridden adaptation to an increasingly unstable world, but that seems to be normality these days. Instead David Cameron's speech at the very moment the "no" victory was announced has moved the constitutional question up to the level of the UK. There is is a lot to be said about this, much of it derived from the debates on the nature of governance in the modern world thrown up in the independence debate itself. Alex Bell's thoughts and Gordon Brown's book aren't bad places to start thinking about these issues and Peter Arnott's analysis of the politics of the moment  is petty sharp.

I want to think about something much more specific and practical: the election next May. That is the next point at which the elements that will have to address the constitution of Britain (in its broadest sense, cultural and social as well as political) will be resorted. Given the current state of polls Labour may win an absolute majority, but I would be surprised if they did. The key indicator (in the polls) of economic competence is against them and that indicates that there will be a swing to the Tories as the date approaches. However there seems to be next to no possibility of a Tory majority, beset as they are by UKIP and by an electoral map tilted against them.

Another factor that has not, as yet, been recognized, is the possibility of the SNP winning a lot of seats in the coming election. They currently hold six but if, and this is a big if, the "Yes" vote on Clydeside translates into an increased turn-out and a change in the pattern of voting SNP in Holyrood elections and Labour in Westminster elections, they could end up holding the balance of power in the UK come next summer.

This would actually be a terrible outcome for the SNP as they would be under extreme pressure either to support a minority Labour Government or to go into coalition with it. They would become implicated in managing the slow decline of the British social democratic compromise and in whatever constitutional settlement that Labour will favor. Their capacity to represent the forces looking for a democratic renewal across the whole of Britain and NI, not just Scotland, would be eliminated and they would become a regional party speaking to a special interest, the semi-detached wing of the Scottish Labour Party.

This was exactly the crux that the old Irish Home Rule party found itself in and it never satisfactorily solved it. Their tactical alliance with the Liberals made sense, and allowed the party to be part of a coalition interested in reform of the state, but the relationship with the Liberals caused such tension in the party that after the fall of Parnell the party lost most of its efficacy and its capacity to lead the country politically.

My suggestion, given that this is not an unlikely outcome, is that the SNP should state in their manifesto that they will not enter any coalition, support a minority government, or take UK wide office. There is no need to go to the extreme of boycotting parliament or refusing to vote on a case by case basis. Members have to represent their constituents. They have to insist that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats solve the problem of democratic reform of the UK. The SNP's proposed solution is disaggregation of the Union, their analysis is that it cannot be reformed. They have to act like they mean what they say, and not be tempted to use a tactical advantage, even to secure concessions to Scotland.

And someone should put a copy of Paul Bew's biography of Parnell in Nicola Sturgeon's hands.

Federalism, Scotland and Gordon Brown

There are now two pro-union campaigns being conducted in Scotland and they seem to be hostile to one another. The thrust of the main "Better Together" campaign for the closing stretch is emerging. The best hope they have is to maintain the sizable gender gap in favor of the union. The analysis seems to be that women in Scotland are more averse to the risk involved in independence and dislike the conflict involved in the debate. To that end there will continue to be a series of stories about nationalists as thugs, the assertion that everyone who is pro-independence is a nationalist, with the intimation, never stated, that nationalists are Nazis. This line is calculated to disenchant female voters from voting for independence. As it seems, though evidence on this is mixed, that the don't knows are breaking pro I'd expect to see efforts made to keep as much confusion in play as possible and a fairly sizable voter suppression effort. This is incredibly risky as it doubles down on the negative strategy and, more importantly, risks winning the vote without winning the argument. A slim pro-union vote on this basis would be a disaster for all sorts of obvious reasons.

The other campaign is Gordon Brown. Brown is trying to turn the independence debate into a wider conversation about governance in the British Isles, he is actually trying to win the argument. He has a book out next week, but the central contention has already been trailed in various  newspaper pieces. His argument is that the union has been the context for managing the risk involved in modern society and for solidarity in the face of financial disaster and poverty. It is the best version of the unionist argument, that the union offers a kind of universalism that transcends particular identities. This is not a defence of the political status quo and he is effectively in favor of completing Gladstone's project of home rule all around; federalizing the union. So this is a serious response to the dynamics that are the condition of the independence issue, not an attempt to win 51% of the vote.

I admire Gordon Brown and I've long thought that if he, rather than Blair, had been guiding the New Labour project then it would have been what was needed, a social democratic response to the changes  brought by Thatcherism, rather than a capitulation to them. But I fear that Brown is going to find himself a in a similar place on the independence issue. As Colin Kidd pointed out in his Guardian piece Brown has been trying to get reform of the union and democratization of the state taken seriously for the last twenty years, but without success. If his thinking about the complex relationships within the British Isles had real purchase on unionism then it would be flourishing. However the majority of the people who think like Gordon Brown on these issues are now in the pro-independence camp. They, we, think that the kind of progressive cosmopolitanism he endorses is best pursued through and by an independent Scotland. We have been here before. The Gladstonian project for reform of the union failed too.

Red and Orange

One of the continuing puzzles of the Scottish independence debate is the weak performance of the Better Together campaign. Much is made of the failure to make a "positive" case for the Union, but the case for the Union is obvious. The union offers a hedge against a series of risks, financial, military, economic and cultural. I suspect that what is meant when people complain about negativity is the complete absence of any shared project for the union. We know what it is for, in the sense of its function, but what does it do, what does it propose? There are all sorts of projects for an independent Scotland, and the utopianism that is very often decried by Unionists is, I suspect, the real advantage held by those in favour of independence.

Just why there seems to be no project for the Union among Scottish unionists isn't hard to understand. The Conservative and Unionist party cannot lead the campaign for the union in Scotland for the obvious reason, so it is left to the Labour party. However the Labour party is not a unionist party. It has all sorts of federalist and home rule roots (not as many as the Liberals) and is fully aware that the greatest electoral threat to working and lower-middle class support for the party has been unionism. You can be red or you can be orange but it is very hard to put those two identities together. In the unlikely event that Alistair Darling were to wrap himself in the Union Jack, plead with his fellow Scots to remember their loyalty to the Queen and remind them of their shared majority Protestant faith and commitment to liberty, he would actually be a Tory, a liberal unionist Tory, but a Tory nevertheless. So for obvious, structural reasons the Better Together campaign can't make a positive unionist case.

This would never have happened when Donald Dewar was around. The trap for Labour in Scotland was set when the Edinburgh Agreement excluded the "Devo Max" option from the referendum. This was initially seen as a bit of clever manoeuvring by Cameron as he forced Salmond to argue for an option that had only roughly 30% support at the time. At that point it looked like the independence issue might be taken off the table for a generation by way of a heavy defeat. However the real losers here were Labour since Devo Max was their natural equilibrium point so they ended up with the options of either supporting the Scottish Nationalist position or the Tory line, they had no option that they owned. I can't imagine Dewar, or Labour circa 1999 that still had serious Scottish representation around the leadership, would have allowed a question go the Scottish people that did not have a clearly Labour-branded option on it. So now, as the polls tighten enough to make it impossible to be semi-involved, Labour is driven to do the Tories' work for them in Scotland, and pretty much on their terms. This can get really odd and drive otherwise sensible people to say really daft things. I don't really believe George Robertson thinks that Western civilisation will collapse if Scotland votes for independence or that Alistair Darling really thinks there is any resemblance between Alex Salmond and Kim Jong-Il. These are the kinds of exaggerated statements people make when they are uncomfortable about their own positions.

Global History

We held the second of our workshops on the definition of global history on March 21st and 22nd in Dundee. The first, last June, was on finance, and this one was on communication. When we were setting these up I thought what would emerge would be a set of objects and categories that had a "global", that is to say universal, history. This expectation has not been fulfilled and a much more unexpected, and to my mind interesting, set of ideas about global history has begun to crystallize for me from our discussions.

The version of global history that seems to me to be emerging is characterized by a benign tension between two poles. The first is an insistence that a global history can't simply be a general history. This disposition is skeptical about every particular instance of global history, because it is suspicious of abstraction away from experience. However it insists that global context is absolutely necessary for the understanding of phenomena like democracy, empire or capitalism. Underlying this move is a kind of neo-transcendental argument (most explicitly deployed by Andrew Sartori in his version of global intellectual history). This asserts that since global phenomena (like the state or science) exist then there must be conditions of globality which have been and are being fulfilled. This kind of argument, that avoids prematurely defining the empirical conditions of globality, seems much more promising than defining global history in terms of trade, empire or any other phenomenon.

The second pole follows on form work done in the last decade by Anthony Hopkins and Patrick O'Brien. This is an insistence that global history is local history. The point of global history is not to identify structures with world-spanning effect. In some ways that would be too easy. The point is to convincingly argue why global context counts in particular places for particular reasons. Global is not some teleology toward which societies develop; it is more like a technique or a repertoire that a society can mobilize (with more or less success). Sophus Reinert's work on emulation is a really powerful example of how a specific text translated into a variety of contexts to very different ends. The really tough work to be done will be to explain how globally significant ideas and contexts generate radically different outcomes in different contexts. Difference, rather than identity, seems to be the them of the work that we will be doing.

Secession or Dissolution

The Scottish Government published its White Paper on the Independence Referendum today, so the phoney war is finally over and we can start to debate seriously. Very few people are going to make their decision based on issues in international law, but there are some fascinating questions. For instance, if the referendum decision is for independence, the manner in which Scotland would legally constitute itself is not clear. There is no legally defined mechanism for secession from the Union. The Acts of Union (in British and Irish Parliaments) 1801, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, were never repealed, merely amended, in the UK and were only repealed in the Irish parliament in 1962 and 1983 respectively, long after Ireland had declared a republic and left the commonwealth (1948). The British response to that was the Ireland Act of 1949, which effectively decided to treat citizens of the Republic of Ireland as if they were still UK subjects (which is why I get to vote here in referenda and don't need a passport to enter the UK). So while the Republic of Ireland effectively seceded from the Union, it did so, in a legal sense, so incrementally that it didn't establish a precedent.

So if the Scots do decide on independence does that mean they secede from the union or does that mean that the union is dissolved? Since the constitutive documents of the union are all based on the 1707 settlement (explicitly cited in the 1800 negotiations which established that the Irish Parliament had enough constitutional authority to dissolve itself, but not enough to negotiate a new treaty of union), can a United Kingdom legally exist if one of the constituting parties pulls out of it? Wales would still remain attached to the Crown and the English Parliament come what may since the incorporation of Wales long precedes the Union, but all other dependencies of the Crown of England would need to renegotiate their relationship to the English Parliament. There are quite a few entities, such as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, that are already subject to the Crown of England but not part of the United Kingdom, so there is domestic precedent for complicated constitutional machinery.

Oddly enough, if the legal situation was dissolution this would make the European issue much easier. Europe has already established that it recognises the entities consequent to a dissolution (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as successor states, so both Scotland and whatever constituted itself out of subsequent negotiations between Northern Ireland and England would be automatically members of the EU. The contrast would be with the Soviet Union. When it dissolved only the Russian Federation was recognised as its successor state and the other republics were new states, but the consequence was that it assumed all the debt of the Soviet Union. So either dissolution or secession have downsides from the perspective of England and Northern Ireland.

If we get to the point where Scotland, England and Northern Ireland are negotiating Scottish Independence, public international law is going to constrain all parties in interesting and possibly unpredictable ways. The domestic constitutional stuff could get interesting too. If there is a dissolution, given the 1707 union was an incorporating union and the Scottish Constitutional tradition was not continued, does the Kingdom of Scotland revert to the forms of 1707?

Finance, Communication and Co-­‐ordination in Eighteenth-­‐Century Empires

Finance, Communication and Co-­‐ordination in Eighteenth-­‐Century Empires

A workshop sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee, July 5-­‐6, River Rooms, Ninth Floor, Tower Building, Nethergate.

The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?

The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.

The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged.  Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.

Paper-­‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-­‐registration is essential as space is limited.

Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk) 

The Politics of the Passion

This year Holy Week falls alongside  Passover and the cycle of readings falls on Luke's Gospel, so on Sunday we had Luke's version of the Passion. Every year at Easter something new strikes me and as it happens I've been teaching about revolutionary journees and the status and nature of the event so this year Luke's historian's understanding of politics drew my attention. Luke does a great job of illustrating how everything gets out of hand very quickly for everyone. From Peter's point of view and that of the other disciples the rush of events is overwhelming. There you are on Thursday night at a seder with your friends and by Friday afternoon your best friend is being crucified. So of course you lie about your relationship to him as events are unfolding. At no point could any reasonable person think that this is going to end with a judicial murder, and this way you get to hang about and see what is going on, until it has gone so far that nothing you do makes any difference. Herod and Pilate do what good politicians do when all the options are bad. They have a huge public order problem so they play for time and when they have no other option they embrace the lesser evil, killing an innocent man, to avoid the greater of a revolt. Luke, it appears, was Greek and so he has less insight into the motivations of Judas or the Temple priests, but it doesn't take that much of an effort of the imagination to see Judas the Sicarii trying to provoke Jesus to act like a true Messiah and restore the Kingdom, or the priests desperate to sustain the Temple worship in a very difficult situation. And the Temple authorities were right that the situation was unstable and potentially catastrophic. The Temple would be destroyed not that long after the Jesus incident. The grace notes, like the women allowed to stand at the foot of the cross, or Joseph of Arimethea being give permission to take the body, ring true to an event whose momentum has pushed to murder, but has now receded, leaving the participants unsure of what they have just done.

Seen through Luke's eyes there are no pantomime villains in the history. It is a true tragedy, where everyone does the best they can, at least by their own lights. However the outcomes, read in any secular way, are all disasterous. Judas's suicide is only the beginning of the appalling political consequences. Worse are the centuries of hostilities between Christians and Jews expressed in the most odious anti-semitism only latterly overcome. The Temple, Judea and the Empire eventually fall.

It seems to me even if you are not a Christian and do not see these events as a narrative of redemption Luke's account carries a telling critique of "Machiavellian" or 'Hobbesian" separation of political ethics from morality. All the acts of "saving evil"backfire. The illusion of a political cunning operating outside our understanding of what is demanded by justice is exactly that, an illusion. The acts of calculation are as disasterous for individuals as they are for the collective. Judas ends up in despair, Peter never recovers from his sense of guilt, Pilate has to give up any idea he had that he represents law. The message here is that willing it so does not make our actions good, that moral good is intrinsic. And it seems to me that a lot of the interesting political questions lie right there, where intuitions of moral imperatives meet the demands of the liberal polity.