House Resolution 106

I agree with Ewan Watt that the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee should not have recognized the Armenian Genocide as such, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. Ewan is, in foreign policy terms, very much a realist and I do agree that the results of the Committee’s decision have already been profoundly negative – Turkey has summoned its ambassador to Washington back to Ankara for ‘a week or ten days of consultation’ but has stopped short of a recall. With US troops deployed in Iraq, a country that borders Turkey, Turkey’s strategic position and role and the desire not to alienate a country that teeters between West and East or to fuel the continuing problems between Turkey and Armenia – Karabakh and Baku-Ceyhan for instance – it seems like a poor decision.

Nevertheless, fiat justicia ruat coeli stands as a principle; if it is just, I feel it should be done, even though the consequences are uncomfortable, shall we say; to do otherwise is hypocritical and leads to a host of problems in international relations.

I question why the Committee felt the need to address the issue at all. Ewan also identifies the answer – special interest lobbying – but the implications haven’t been thought through. There are many other crimes – some committed by the US – that could be condemned.

More importantly, it is not the role of a Government to decide what history is; there can be no official version without grave risk of a government interfering unjustifiably in the process of discussion and debate. Equally, as Nye Bevan put it, ‘this is my truth; tell me yours’; whether ordained by the state or not, there is no one, true version of history, only arguments that are more or less persuasive. When the arguments are emotionally and geopolitically loaded, officially recognising a term can only cause problems and is, from a state, philosophically invalid.

As a note, I think it is wrong to use a category to encompass the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust; they are both sui generis, IMHO.

The Committee chair, Tom Lantos, put it well in his comments ahead of the vote:

Today we are not considering whether the Armenian people were persecuted and died in huge numbers at the hands of Ottoman troops in the early 20th Century. There is unanimity in the Congress and across the country that these atrocities took place. If the resolution before us stated that fact alone, it would pass unanimously. The controversy lies in whether to make it United States policy at this moment in history to apply a single word – genocide – to encompass this enormous blot on human history.

xD.

Government recognises the problem but doesn’t do enough

Two pieces of news on the Iraqi employees front. Firstly, the meeting has been moved to the Attlee Suite, Portcullis House. It will still take place at 1900 tomorrow, Tuesday 9th.

Secondly, the Government has committed itself to supporting Iraqis who have worked for the British in Iraq for over a year; that is woefully insufficient. It recognises the problem – that people who are seen as ‘collaborators’ and their families face death, but won’t help all of them.

xD.

Time to let them in

Let’s say that a company comes and offers you a job. There aren’t any other jobs and you need to feed yourself and your family. It’s a dangerous job, but the company offers to protect you. Then the company decides it doesn’t need you. Not only are you out of work, but you’re now being hunted down by people who don’t like that company. They refuse to help you.

Would you work for that company again? Would you work for that company for the first time if you saw how they treated ex-employees?

Probably not. The company in question is the UK, the employees are Iraqis employed in Iraq as translators and so on and if, for no other reason than it will make it impossible to recruit local staff anywhere in the world again, should we need to, we should give them and their families asylum in the UK. We can’t turn them away.

xD.

Bloggerheadsgate continues

Tim Ireland is back online at b-heads.blogspot.com. In other news, the London Friends of Craig Murray report that Schillings are not going to sue Craig Murray because they don’t want to give him any more publicity. While that’s good for Murray, the words ‘stable door’, ‘horse’ and ‘bolted’ spring to mind.

SpyBlog has also kindly posted Schillings’ IP range. It’s 217.33.207.160 – 217.33.207.191. You can use a widget like Tracksy to see who’s visiting your website.

Tom Wise MEP (UKIP/I&D, East of England) has, under the protection of parliamentary privilege, repeated some of the accusations made against Usmanov by Murray. The Atlantic Free Press has an MP3 of it here. The transcript of Mr Wise’s speech is now online.

xD.

Thoughts on nationalism

As I understand it, the modernist take on nationalism requires that the nation is not prior to nationalism; that is to say, nationalism may cause the nation or something causes both the nation and nationalism to come about. The nation cannot come first and therefore cannot cause the nationalism.

There are many, competing definitions of nationalism. Nationalism is a bit like a sausage – everyone knows what it is, but no-one can really describe one. Nevertheless, I like Benedict Anderson’s definition from Imagined Communities: “an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”.

To the extent of those writers with which I am familiar, the causative factor occurs exclusively in modernity. Those competing writers look for different features of modernity to explain the rise of nations and nationalism; variously print capitalism, the bureaucratic state, industrialisation in general and so on. Unfortunately, it ignores certain important facts.

Firstly, there were nations before the modern age. Two of Queen Elizabeth I’s most famous speeches, that at Tilbury and the Golden Speech, are appeals to national sentiment. The speech at Tilbury was directed to the common soldier on the ground and so must, I think, represent an upwards affiliation which precludes the common idea of the upper and priestly classes having some sort of trans-continental affiliation and the lower classes being vertically stratified by their villages.

I would say that there was also a nation at the time of the Dutch Revolt, as shown in the Oath of Abjuration, and I think (although I’m not sure) that you could say that there has been Armenian nationalism since the fifth century (or perhaps as early as the fourth with the adoption of Christianity as the world’s first state religion); certainly, the autonomy and recognition of Christianity that Armenia was granted under the Ottomans would suggest something deeper than recognition of ‘a person at the top’.

I would also contend that there was city-nationalism and pan-Hellenic nationalism (as opposed to Macedonians and/or Barbarians) in Classical Greece. All of these are imagined, political, limited and sovereign communities. City-nationalism and pan-Hellenic nationalism are not ‘stacked nationalisms’ but operate, I think, at the same level, and are co-sovereign, with one coming to the fore over the other depending on the situation at a given time.

There is a very simple riposte to the nation not possibly being prior to nationalism in the form of the Jews; there was a political desire to return to the traditional Jewish homeland since the diaspora resulting from the Jewish-Roman war of c. 70CE that formed classical Zionism. Equally, I think that Italians (by which I mean people from approximately modern Italy) in the Roman empire were a dominant nation in a multi-national empire in which some other groups formed as nations and some did not. For that reason, I disagree with Anthony D. Smith.

I do not know a huge amount about Zionism, so forgive me, fair reader, if I make some mistakes here. As I understand it, Herzl, in the late nineteenth century and partially as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, catalysed the formation of modern Zionism. What he did not do was create, ex nihilo, Zionism but build on an existing national feeling. The nationalism came, at least in a political sense, after the nation.

There is a very valid discourse to be had about the effects of the modern period and various features of industrialisation on the development of nations and nationalism; however, to say that nations are conceptually impossible before nationalism and that neither existed before the modern era is, I think, simply wrong. While it is true that nationalism grew in depth and spread across Europe at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, the two, to an extent, fed off each other. It is equally wrong to assume, as I think people do, that the rise of nationalism is a step in a teleological chain.

Given those two facts, I think it is fair to say that there is no single type of nationalism. That much, I think, is uncontroversial, as people have distinguished between civic and ethnic nationalism for some time. That simple dichotomy is, I think, grossly insufficient.

Oppressive, reactive, liberation, linguistic, cultural, state-seeking, state-having and various other adjectives can usefully be applied to nations and nationalism. I think that having more definitions, but each being more pared down, would be a lot more useful than the current catch-all definition of ‘nationalism’. After all, if I can return to an earlier metaphor, both the bratwurst and the Cumberland are sausages, but they are quite different beasts.

There is somewhere here an explanation for the failure of state-nationalism or geographically-delimited nationalism to take hold in, for instance, Africa. I would contend that the transportation of European nationalist ideals by people such as Jomo Kenyatta failed in many cases because they were trying to import a new nationalism onto somewhere that had nationalisms already operating – what might be called tribal loyalties. These nations already had members spread out across externally imposed boundary lines and so would not readily conform to something that came to replace them with a geographic definition of nationality that excluded co-nationals.

This adds into dependency theory and complex sequencing; I will not go into that at any length other than to say that the political canvas against which a nation must develop, flourish, exist or fail have changed and will continue to change.

It may be too early in the day, but I wonder if new forms of communication and collaboration may open a conceptual door to new nations. The development of print capitalism is held to be a key moment in the development of nations by Anderson and others; could the internet do the same in future? I do not mean by communication, as this is the same as before, only faster, but by collaboration – Wikipedia, for instance? It is an imagined community and has political aims (or, at least, some of its principles have political and philosophical implications) that could, conceivably, have some sort of sovereignty over how its members act.

xD.

We’re all Bloggerheads now – part two

I hadn’t really heard of Alisher Usamnov until today; I’d seen his name mentioned on a couple of blogs, but he was barely on the radar. I suspect the same was true for quite a lot of Arsenal fans – perhaps heard a bit about him, maybe read about him on a blog, nothing more.

His SLAPP against Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads has backfired spectacularly. MediaGuardian has picked it up and Boris Johnson’s site is down, too. With no disrespect to Bob Piper (whose politics I vastly prefer to Johnson’s and whose site has also gone down), the prospective Tory candidate for Mayor of London is pretty high profile. I’m sure this will make the Evening Standard, which will alert Londoners straightaway to Usmanov’s, ahem, position regarding free speech.

Mr Eugenides sums things up well:

I don’t give a shit about this character, or Arsenal FC (no offence to any Gooners out there); nor do I share all or even most of Tim Ireland or Craig Murray’s politics. But that’s far from the point. If you can be silenced for calling a businessman a crook, then you can be silenced for calling a politician a crook, too. Then it’s everyone’s problem.

(emphasis added).

Bloggers also react because it immediately affects them; while I don’t want to diminish the importance of what Usamnov has done, I wish as many people would support the Iraqi interpreters.

I hope that this will raise awareness of SLAPPs, as the case of the McLibel Two did. However, I rather doubt that it will prevent Usamnov from gaining the blocking stake in Arsenal that he desires unless pressure is put on existing shareholders not to sell to him because of his contempt for freedom of speech.

xD.