The American Conservative

Isn’t it about time we got a little angrier and a little more scandalised? On 5 May we will troop up to the polling booths having endured four weeks of unfathomably banal soundbites, platitudinous drivel and vapid party political broadcasts — and we will do so because we believe it is our duty and because we have faith in the process. General elections and the whole notion of parliamentary democracy is as British as steak-and-kidney pie. We have it and many others do not, much to their disfavour. We trust it and we have implicit trust in ourselves not to abuse it. ‘Vote early, vote often’ is nothing more than a little joke, isn’t it? — unless you’re speaking from Harare or Chittagong or Kiev.

Well, not this time, maybe. This time around we will be participating in an election which, simply put, has been loaded in favour of the government. Not just because it will take many thousands more voters to elect a Conservative MP than a Labour MP, of which more later. Almost without question, there will be frauds committed and again, almost without question, the overwhelming majority of these frauds will favour the Labour party. We all know this, the government knows this and has even accepted as much by signing up to legislation to make postal voting more secure — but only after the election has taken place. In other words, it will benefit from the fraud and only then maybe change the law. Isn’t that scandalous?

Labour is treating the British ballot box with the kind of holiness and reverence one might expect of a bunch of Zanu-PF officials in some fly-blown corner of Matabeleland. If Robert Mugabe wanted to score an instant and hilarious propaganda coup against the ‘homosexual gangsters’ of the Blair government, he could do no better than to dispatch a team of election monitors to Britain to cover this election, and their first stop should be the Midlands. ~Rod Liddle, The Spectator

Most of us, when emerging from intellectual childhood into intellectual adolescence, pass through a phase of earnest search for certainty about the world. For instance, George W. Bush recently read a book (by a Mr. Sharansky, we are told) and enjoyed a revelation. He discovered, as he informed us in his Inaugural Address, that he is a Menshevik, with Zionist leanings. This is not too surprising. Verbiage about magical crusades for humanity has a powerful appeal for adolescents. The verbiage discovered by Bush Jr. is in the air we breathe and has been ever since Marx, taking his cue from the Gettysburg Address, conflated the Declaration of Independence of the free American states with the power-friendly Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Objectively considered, without superstitious awe of his office or sentimentalism about “good intentions,” Bush is a liar and a criminal. Nothing surprising about that either. That is commonplace for heads of government. What is unusual in this case is that the head of government is an ignorant fool and a spoiled brat. We have entered into the stage of imperial decadence in which a clueless inheritor of the throne is a tool of his courtiers, though, like all courtiers, they must occasionally endure an outbreak of petulant self-assertion or manage a tangent of eccentricity by their lord.

The Framers and ratifiers of the federal Constitution were hardly conversant with the concept of “personality,” but they were highly conversant with the histories of empires and monarchies and how rulers’ defects of character had introduced distortions into the state. But about the only consideration of character that came into their view in regard to the president was that he might become too ambitious and employ his considerable powers to the detriment of the public. This was not too worrisome since it could hardly be thought that the man who would emerge from the electoral process could be other than one long and widely known for integrity, patriotism, and exceptional services to his country. The Union would not be held hostage to accidents of birth.

The Founders’ assumption held true until 1836, when Martin Van Buren demonstrated that one could become president merely by being a politician, by working the system and cultivating the support of his popular predecessor. Expansion of the patronage and the electorate had brought the methods of Aaron Burr’s Tammany Hall to national politics. Lincoln nailed down the point with a vengeance by becoming president with 39 percent of the vote and hardly any record of public service at all. Presidents have since occasionally been men of distinction and service, but the general trend has been downhill. ~Clyde Wilson, The Old Republic

Dr. Wilson is correct in his comments on the people’s worship of the president as a celebrity and on the adolescent mind of the current president. It will be of interest that Prof. Lukacs also observed and decried both in Democracy and Populism, even seeing the same puerility and unserious character in Reagan that he sees in Mr. Bush. That accusation of superficiality and immaturity would surely anger Dr. Wilson’s Reagan follower even more that Dr. Wilson’s thoughtful remarks about the emptiness of Mr. Reagan’s “legacy” and the need to abandon such “legacies,” but they are all part of the same problem: celebrity politicians cannot help but be shallow and immature to some extent, as they are here to entertain us and it is by the surface appearance and style that celebrities are judged.

As long as we need to have politicians we venerate and can be enthusiastic about, as if we were a throng of cult devotees or screaming groupies rather than sober, rational people, we will have the most vacuous, insipid and superficial rulers whose chief duty is to please the crowd and assuage fears. The therapeutic state is here, and politicians have become the equivalent of glorified “self-help” gurus (the last thing they would counsel, of course, is any sort of self-reliance, since this would make them redundant).

Simply put, democracy is and has been degenerating into a brutish populism most often in the form of nationalism. The Modern Age has ended, and something very different and terrible is being born before our very eyes. This is the general theme of John Lukacs’ new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, and in the course of fleshing out this argument he interprets and discusses the history of modern ideologies and the “misreadings” of that history by later generations. He attacks a number of shibboleths of political discourse, and likely has something to infuriate someone of every political persuasion. Sometimes exaggerated, sometimes profound, only occasionally falling into the convenient conceptual stereotype, his book is always interesting and engrossing..

It was fortunate that I delayed the ‘publication’ of my review of John Lukacs’ latest book, as I opened my American Conservative today to find a very smart, insightful and concise review by Dr. Paul Gottfried, who managed to say many of the things I had been thinking and expressing less effectively than I would have liked. Dr. Gottfried answered the many inaccurate or distorted images of the past American and contemporary European Right that Prof. Lukacs presented, and addressed Prof. Lukacs’ rather sanguine view of Bolshevism and his consequent undue contempt for anti-Communists of all kinds with the criticism that it required, so I will not cover this ground yet again, except where I might add a comment or two. Prof. Lukacs’ professional preoccupation with the study of Hitler has led him to the false impression that Hitler dominates the minds of modern populists and nationalists, which Dr. Gottfried notes is certainly not true here and scarcely true anywhere in Europe.

For the latter-day constitutionalist and the young civics student alike, Lukacs has the perfectly obvious but largely unacknowledged observation: mixed government as a reality has ended. Observing that Tocqueville once wrote admiringly of the American judiciary and lawyers, because of their restraining influences on democracy, Prof. Lukacs now notes that these no longer fulfill the same functions. “Democracy has become unlimited, untrammeled, universal.” This is certainly the plague of our age, and one that thoughtful observers ought to regard with great alarm. The ideal of mixed government was to provide balance between competing interests and to prevent concentrations of power in any one part of the body politic. With this now at an end the dangerous concentrations of power appear to have no remedy and contemporary political theorists, if we may call them that, are at a loss to speak in any language other than that of increased democracy and more rights.

Prof. Lukacs reminds us that the terms conservative and liberal have ceased to have any meaning in Western societies, and the terms Right and Left are only slightly more useful. Of the Right he notes that historically it has not been populist, but it now most certainly is, “which is perhaps a main argument of this book.” For most who would consider themselves Rightists today (whether they would actually fit Chilton Williamson’s excellent definition of the same is another question), the accusation of populism is not really an insult. What Prof. Lukacs’ book explains to his audience, in a sense, is that the charge of populism very much ought to be taken as an insult by Rightists. It is certainly a contradiction and a subversion of their own principles.

But if one part of the book is about the degeneration of democracy (of which Prof. Lukacs is clearly not much of an admirer in its unmediated form) into rude populism, the other is the collapse of those motivated by fear under the pressures of those motivated by hatred. It is also fair to say that the book is an homage to Tocqueville’s insight and genius, and an attempt in a new work to continue, in a brief but sweeping and often profound way, the sort of political and cultural analysis in which Tocqueville excelled.

The statement that the “diverse combinations of nationalism and socialism marked most of the history of the twentieth century” is undeniably true, with certain qualifications, and as true for America as it is for every other part of the world. In America, he notes, Republicans have been the predominantly nationalistic party (and, I might add, scarcely more so than today) and Democrats the predominantly socialistic party, but as American political observers are only too aware the convergence between the two positions and parties is common. Lukacs speculates that the Democrats may have been declining over the past fifty years as much as they have because of their dearth of nationalism in our age of rising nationalism.

Though the book does not address the problems of the export of populism and nationalism to the non-Western world in the wake of decolonisation and again today, Lukacs’ book would be perfectly accompanied by George McCarthy’s brilliant review of Hotel Rwanda in the April 2005 issue of Chronicles. Having viewed the film just last night, I can attest that Mr. McCarthy’s review was one of the most accurate and insightful I have ever read. Seeing the way in which mass media, in this case RTLN “Hutu Power Radio,” fed the populist insanity of the Rwandan genocide demonstrates in graphic fashion Prof. Lukacs’ concern for the pervasive effects of mass media on our politics and culture.

One of the most valuable points in the book is the attention to non-material historical causes, and its general challenge to the bias towards privileging material causes in historical scholarship. He focuses particularly on “the accumulation of opinions”: “But it is the accumulation of opinions that governs the history of states and of nations and of democracies as well as dictatorships in the age of popular sovereignty. It is the main ingredient of nationalisms, the cause of wars, and of the majority support of fanatical speakers like Hitler, or of the less enthusiastic but majoritarian support of less than mediocre presidents.” Naturally, those who accumulate, disseminate and shape those opinions are the real power-brokers.

For Lukacs, nationalism is aggressive and self-centered, and by this last term he means it very specifically as the love of oneself or those like oneself. His explanation of the problem with this generalised, abstracted form of a natural affinity for one’s people will not be satisfying to many who regard themselves as non-nationalist patriots (who in turn place love of their own people ahead of and against abstract national identity): “The love for one’s people is natural, but it also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one’s country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one’s family.” Lukacs’ interpretation is intellectually tempting, but somehow fails finally to convince. How is the love of family more akin to the love of country than to that of one’s people? Surely, at some level, filial love is the most basic and instinctive–thus the least ‘deeply human’, to work from Lukacs’ definition–of all forms of love.

Herein lies what is one of the central disagreements I have, not just with Prof. Lukacs’ interpretation here, but with the entire ‘attitude’, if you will, of two Rightists of European origin, Lukacs and the late von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who have found volkisch and ethnic things terribly disturbing. Boden, yes, Blut, no; Kultur, maybe (but presumably not in some volkisch sense!). There is a constant desire to find some way to align attachment to country with a cosmopolitan outlook–one might be tempted to say that breadth, not depth, is the cultural ideal of these men. This is, in a way, an admirable desire to return to the way that Europe was before 1914 or, really, before 1870, but just as one need not loathe another landscape to love one’s own as one’s own so one need not loathe or exclude other nationalities to love one’s own people–it is a deficient and weak love of one’s own people that causes men to lash out against foreigners in hatred and violence in the sense decried by Lukacs. It is political populism that makes love of one’s people conformist and monolithic, not the love of one’s people that makes populism into the drive for brutal and crude homogeneity. What is more, it is fluid social boundaries, which disrupt ethnic communities, that exacerbate and encourage hostility to foreigners. I fear that Prof. Lukacs, usually so careful about causality, has gotten the order here precisely backwards, and has mistaken the effect of populism for the essential character of a love for one’s own people.

As he says later, “Patriotism is always more than merely biological–because charitable love is human and not merely “natural.”” This last line is most telling–the presumption, no doubt shaped by extensive study of twentieth-century European ideology, that love of one’s people is “merely biological” or the prejudice that an affinity for the “merely biological” is less than virtuous. (Is love for one’s parents less admirable, less virtuous or less human simply because it is based more in biological similarity than, say, love for one’s wife or friends?) First, ethnic and national identities are obviously not “merely” or even entirely “biological,” though they are rooted in the reality and perception of biological similarity.

The biological bond is vital because it is the means by which the generations are linked so that the culture of a people can be transmitted and reproduced, and because the specific content of one’s culture will often be shaped by the experience of one’s biological ancestors. Their history and the customs we receive from them cannot be separated, nor can the fact that we would probably not have received them if we were not their descendants. (That there are descendants who remain in ignorance of their ancestors’ ways is lamentable, but does not disprove the vital importance of the biological link–it only shows that biology is necessary, but not sufficient for cultural reproduction.) However, as natural as these affinities are to a certain extent, a sense of veneration for and duty towards the habits and customs of one’s ancestors–the method by which the “merely biological” and the cultural unite to convey the full heritage of one’s people–is something that is taught through cultural means: language, symbols and practices.

“Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and a cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism.” This is undoubtedly shaped by his experience and interpretations of central European history. It is not obvious that the love for one’s own people should be so easily collapsed into the term ‘populism’, of which I believe it is usually a perverse distortion. In other words, patriotism and love of one’s people are not necessarily premised on entirely different things–populism and patriotism are. The frequent confusion of love for one’s own people with populism and/or nationalism in the middle of his book have created a number of problems that need not have existed.

I will return to one area that Dr. Gottfried covered, because it was the least convincing and least satisfying element of the book for me and requires further comment. Lukacs makes a dismissive remark about Robert Taft in a footnote, which really seems neither worthwhile or apropos, but which symbolises, in a way, one of the messages of the book: the Communist threat has always been exaggerated, and the real threat everywhere is nationalism. “In December 1941, three days before Pearl Harbor, Senator Robert A. Taft proclaimed that while “Fascism” appealed to only a few, Communism was a much greater danger because it appealed to many. (This when Hitler’s armies stood a dozen miles from Moscow.)” The irrelevant mention of Pearl Harbor is a not-so-subtle dig at the non-interventionist Taft’s foreign policy views, as if his lesser concern about the threat of fascism was somehow proven even more wrong by the attack at Pearl Harbor (which would be to see Imperial Japan as fascist, which is really stretching things quite a bit.) Where Hitler’s armies were was, as Taft might have said, beside the point: the political idea (one of those non-material causes) motivating Hitler’s armies could only be carried forward by conquest, and was defined in some measure by domination, while communism had the potential to be adopted in various climes and nations without the support of foreign armies with the same equally devastating and disastrous results. Historically, Taft was right: fascism has appealed only to a few nations in very specific circumstances and died in 1945 never to return, while communism, or at least the trappings of communism, was adopted as the banner of revolution and/or independence in over a dozen countries with effects far more lasting and extensive in Asia than any form of fascism ever had anywhere. Officially, communism still lives and its heirs continue to degrade and oppress hundreds of millions of people. Even if some anti-Communists have been nationalist populists of the worst kind, this does not diminish in any way the gravity of what communism represented. And fascism does have limited appeal. Nationalism in any given country may have perennial, significant power, but at the same time its very nationalism serves to limit the potential effects of any one nationalist movement.

Nonetheless, as much as Prof. Lukacs is a careful scholar very much concerned with the integrity and proper use of language, he will sometimes fall into what I regarded as lazy stereotypes and categorisations of individuals in their political alignments. Thus Huey “Share Our Wealth” Long and Fr. Coughlin are listed in the same sentence with Col. Lindbergh as men of the Right in the time of Roosevelt. Perhaps this is because he has elsewhere identified Long as a Populist rather than a Progressive, which puts him in the nationalist, and unfortunately somehow inevitably Rightist, category of this interpretation of twentieth century American history? Regardless of how it happened, it is blatantly wrong. In my view, these two men shared little more than a common antipathy to certain policies of the Roosevelt administration: they were both opposition men, but they were attacking from entirely different sides and were concerned with very different things. One might as well make Wallace and Thurmond fellow travelers.

The conclusions are hard to ignore: there is no undoing of the Democratic Age, much as we might hope for it, and faith in constitutions and parliaments is also increasingly useless. The internal contradictions of populist “conservatism” are simply inaugurating another stage of nationalist frenzy, of which the needless, gratuitous and aggressive attack on Iraq might serve as a convenient symbol. (Prof. Lukacs clearly abhors the Iraq war and the reason for it that he sees–it was a war for popularity, he says–but the war itself and its direct relation to his theme are not subjects that he covers.) The cult of celebrity and its corrosive effects on our society, also discussed today by Clyde Wilson in a slightly different context, has taken hold of the public through the mass media. This cult has, as I would put it, induced a spirit of servility and adoration that might only be comparable in the past to enthusiasms for favourite charioteers in the Circus. That people used to fawning over famous nonentities should then elect one president and virtually worship him is also not very surprising.

There are a some final statements that I’d like to add in response to one of the more bizarre and inexplicable comments towards the end of the book that touch on Orthodoxy. Their importance should not be exaggerated–it is only a few sentences on one page–but they simply make no sense. Regardless of his few complimentary asides about Vladimir Putin, Prof. Lukacs demonstrates a strange lack of understanding of the state of modern Orthodox nations and their history. He would hardly be the first to misunderstand the Christian East, and hardly the first historian or serious writer to ascribe something like “Constantinism” to the character of Orthodoxy, but I believe his observations here are quite mistaken and in need of correction. Add to this the rather bizarre remarks about the ‘good’ that came from the Russian Revolution (it prevented Tsarist Russia from dominating a post-WWI Allied victory), which I tried to take in the spirit of an historian’s counterfactual imaginings rather than as any serious statement that the creation of the USSR was preferable to a Tsarist-dominated eastern Europe, and one can certainly see some flawed elements in the work. Of course, I may be biased on this question: I am both Russian Orthodox and a student of Byzantine history. But I am also an admirer of Prof. Lukacs’ work and his reputation as an historian, which these odd remarks do not advance.

“Constantinism” is an invention of the Reformation and Enlightenment. It has nothing to do with the Orthodox world (and whatever might be comparable in Byzantine history, it was not invented by Constantine I). When it has existed, it has been an attempt by Westerners to imitate a Byzantine church-state arrangement they never understood. “Constantinism” is at best the conscious institution of a pseudo-Byzantine arrangement between church and state in England and the German principalities (which, in the great ironies of history, was eventually transferred to Greece when the Bavarian monarchy took control of that country in the 1830s) that bears no real relation to the imperial relationship to the Orthodox Church in Byzantium. At worst it is simply the scurrilous liberal libel against Byzantium for its erstwhile “Caesaropapism” and the Church’s supposed identification with the empire to some compromise of Her integrity. This is a scandalous falsehood, and anyone remotely familiar with the late Byzantine period in particular ought to know how ludicrous it is. It is even less convincing for the less enduring Balkan dynasties, and only slightly more credible in the Russian case. There have been moments in history when modern nationalism has corrupted and divided Orthodox peoples, but these have been, on the whole, relatively few.

“Among the Eastern, Greek and Russian, Orthodox churches of eastern Europe the nationalist and populist characters of the different national churches remain largely what they have been for almost one thousand years.” This statement is unacceptable and untrue. There was no nationalism properly so called in the middle ages, as Prof. Lukacs surely must know, as there were no self-conscious nations organised on that basis, but on the basis of dynastic rulers. There was scarcely any nationalism in the Orthodox lands in the sense that he means it until the late 18th century with the introduction of Enlightenment ideas. Bishop Germanos raising the Cross together with the Greek revolutionaries was historically the exception, not the rule.

Nor is it more acceptable to say this: “That was, and remains, the consequence of what we may call Constantinism (since it began with Constantine the Great): the willingness of churches, and of their peoples, to accept and even to venerate and worship (and on occasion sanctify) the authority of monarchs, dictators, imperial rulers, when these invite their churches to assist them at their maintenance of law and order.” Of course, it was not in the East among the Byzantines that the churches stepped in to help maintain law and order, but in many areas of the medieval west in the absence of any secular authority to do the job. In the late seventh and then again in the early tenth centuries certain elements of canon law were incorporated into secular law. Earlier, the two were clearly distinct, but one would have thought that the greater Christianisation of the law would not have been objectionable. Surely the only real, Christian objections to a “Constantinist” arrangement is that it somehow compromises or sullies the Church by making some disreputable deal with the powerful. When disreputable manipulations of the Church did occur, then some element within the Church would react against it and gradually triumph. What he describes does not apply to St. Constantine’s reign, nor to that of any other Byzantine ruler, even the most obnoxious and interventionist ones: no Christian prelate or Church Father from the entire Byzantine period ever told other Christians to “worship” the authority of their rulers–they worshiped God. In an age of mass populism, I should also have thought that veneration of authority was not something of which one ought to be ashamed.

I have some doubts that Prof. Lukacs inquired that deeply into the circumstances of the Orthodox churches in eastern Europe over the past 1000 years. Had he done so, he would have been aware of the vast complexity and diversity of conditions that prevailed in the Orthodox world at various times. He would not be satisfied if someone made gross over-generalisations about European history or the very technical political distinctions that he made in this book, and neither should he be satisfied to make such gross oversimplifications about an entire area of the European and Christian world. His judgement about Orthodox churches vis-a-vis “Constantinism” might hold true for post-Petrine Russia–but once again the relative subjugation of the Church followed Westernising reforms–but even here it is misleading, because then what we are speaking of is not “Constantinism” but “Petrism” or, more accurately, Westernisation.

Still more curious was Tony Blair’s immediate determination to go to Rome. No prime minister has ever attended a papal funeral before, and with good reason. Britain is not a Roman Catholic country — though admittedly anyone who has read the British newspapers over the past few days might be forgiven for supposing that it was. The papacy stands for autocratic and hierarchical principles and attachments to ancient dogmas that are alien to the British state.

Not merely that, but Rome is emphatic that the Church of England, where the Prime Minister is at any rate nominally a communicant, is heretical. As far as the Vatican is concerned, the Anglican settlement is illegitimate and has no merit. Pope Leo XIII made this plain in his papal bull, Apostolicae Curae, of September 1896, which declared that Anglican orders ‘have been and are completely null and void’. This means that so far as the papacy is concerned, the Archbishop of Canterbury is no more than an old man in a skirt, though no Roman cardinal or bishop would be rude enough to express such a view. This is what made it such an audacious decision by the British Prime Minister to decide at once to abandon his duties to the British Crown and travel to the Vatican instead. ~Peter Oborne

Even as someone who fondly remembers our scarcely lamented Loyalist cousins and was well-versed as a child in the Protestant mythology of England and America, still invoked even today by Mr. Oborne, I often forget that there are a few (although admittedly very, very few) who still believe that the British monarchy means something and that the Church of England actually bears some relationship to the identity of the people of the United Kingdom. These few must truly be the oldest of the old guard, and I don’t write this really to ridicule them, but to marvel at how they can possibly maintain their commitment to institutions that have become something so very different from what they were or were supposed to be.
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The notion that an all-powerful, centralized state should provide monolithic solutions to the ethical dilemmas of our times is not only misguided, but also contrary to our Constitution. Remember, federalism was established to allow decentralized, local decision making by states. Yet modern America seeks a federal solution for every perceived societal ill, ignoring constitutional limits on government. The result is a federal state that increasingly makes all-or-nothing decisions that alienate large segments of the population.

This federalization of social issues, often championed by conservatives, has not created a pro-life culture, however. It simply has prevented the 50 states from enacting laws that more closely reflect the views of their citizens. Once we accepted the federalization of abortion law under the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, we lost the ability to apply local community standards to ethical issues. It is much more difficult for pro-life advocates to win politically at the federal level. Those who seek a pro-life culture must accept that we will never persuade 300 million Americans to agree with us. Our focus should be on overturning Roe and getting the federal government completely out of the business of regulating state matters. A pro-life culture can be built only from the ground up, person by person. For too long we have viewed the battle as purely political, but no political victory can change a degraded culture. A pro-life culture must arise from each of us as individuals, not by the edict of an amoral federal government. ~Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)

Social problems kept in check during the authoritarian era of former president Askar Akayev are already surfacing in Kyrgyzstan, three weeks after he was removed from office by protesters angry at election results, grinding poverty and corruption by the ruling family.

On 7 April, tension was raised when people began to seize land on the southern outskirts of the capital Bishkek, demanding that they be granted legal title that they say they were deprived of under the former regime. They say they are part of a 14,000-strong movement demanding access to lucrative real estate close to the capital.

Protest leaders established headquarters in traditional dome-shaped yurt tents on the edge of the city, while others roped off land plots they said corrupt Akayev-era officials had prevented them from buying.

But the protest has attracted a number of opportunists eager to exploit the current lack of substantive authority in the country, like Muratbek, a poor southerner who came north to the capital to seek a better life. When he heard rumours of the land grab, he was quick to join in.

“This is the land of people and everybody has a right to it. Moreover, we overthrew Akayev and we are entitled to be rewarded for that,” Muratbek told IRIN, pointing out the plot he says he now owns, delineated by string from that of a neighbour’s. ~Reuters

For those uninterested in such legal niceties as property rights or the lawful transfers of title, I’m sure the Bishkek land grab seems wonderful. But it is yet another example of the lawlessness and disorder that has attended the Kyrgyz coup from the beginning. The difference between the land seizures in Kyrgyzstan and those in Zimbabwe seems mainly to be that the Kyrgyz coup leaders are not openly encouraging this activity, but remain, as they have been since the beginning, utterly powerless to stop it. They have ridden a wave of discontent and now find themselves helpless to stem the tide as it now threatens their rule. Either the Kyrgyz coup leaders will follow the methods of the 1848 revolutionaries in Vienna and suppress their poorer fellow revolutionaries, or they may find themselves unseated by those more willing to “reward” the people. Practicing demagogy and then failing to keep control of the people who have been incited simply becomes open lawlessness. This is the face of “people power” in action.

Vladimir Putin has stepped into an acrimonious debate over who will succeed him by publicly suggesting for the first time that he could run for a third term as President.

Speaking on a visit to Germany, Mr Putin ruled out changing the Constitution to run for a third consecutive term in 2008, but said that he could, in theory, stand at the next election in 2012. ~Timesonline.co.uk

Barring a president from seeking more than two consecutive terms is an effective check on an incumbent using the advantages of office and prestige as president. For someone once in presidential office to leave and then recapture the office four years later is politically very difficult. Only someone confident in his democratic appeal and political message could reasonably expect to succeed; authoritarians bent on extinguishing free expression, as Mr. Putin has been caricatured, do not risk giving up power voluntarily.

The reason to prevent a president from running for a third consecutive term is, as it was here, to prevent any chance of an individual so successfully manipulating the machinery of government that he can no longer be ousted by any challenger in an election. What does this story tell us about Mr. Putin? If there is any truth in it, it means that Mr. Putin respects the letter of the Russian constitution, he does not intend to use his pliant majority in the Duma to increase his power indefinitely into the future (which he could probably easily do), and he entertains the possibility of allowing the Russian public to re-elect him at a later date with the very real possibility that, viewed from hindsight, the public will find that his tenure as president does not merit another opportunity. That the predictable leftists (Khakamada) and Western lackeys (the Yabloko party) find fault with this statement reveals their own impotence and irrelevance.

The opposition should be thrilled that Putin has given them any opportunity to revive at all. They carp and belittle his statements because they are perfectly well aware that neither Khakamada nor Yabloko’s representative could carry better than 10% of the vote in a real contest. All of this underscores that there will be a contested Russian presidental election in 2008. If Putin’s successor has significant advantages in institutional support, political leverage and popularity, then that is a mark of Putin’s success as a politician and power-broker.

The Netherlands will reject the European Union constitutional treaty in a national referendum on June 1 unless government and business can mobilise support rapidly, Dutch politicians are warning.

The outcome could prove academic if opinion polls prove accurate and the French reject the treaty three days earlier on May 29. Growing Dutch scepticism, however, could feed anti-EU sentiment in France, and vice-versa, making the Yes campaigns more difficult.

Regardless of the French outcome, which recent polls predict will lead to a rejection of the treaty, the Dutch referendum will go ahead.

However, should France back the constitution, the Netherlands – a founding member of the EU – could bury it. ~The Financial Times

Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward Germany, the United States should take a page from another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension, the British peacefully allowed the fledging United States to rise as a great power, knowing both countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them. Taking advantage of that same kind separation by a major ocean, the United States could also safely allow China to obtain respect as a great power, with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to mount a challenge. However, at present, little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such expansion, which would run counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than neo-containment, might avoid a future catastrophic war or even a nuclear conflagration. ~Ivan Eland

Mr. Eland’s parallel with pre-1914 British policy towards Germany is very perceptive. In the pre-Dreadnought era, British supremacy was so unquestioned that Germany could never have realistically challenged it, yet in transforming its military and adopting a confrontational posture with Berlin Britain managed to create at once a threat and a nemesis that had not existed before. The problem of Taiwan, and the perceived need to develop a navy capable of retaking it, even if America supports Taiwan, has spurred the development of what might become the first really formidable Chinese navy since the Ming dynasty. The unnecessary external pressure from America, and the encouragement this instills into Taiwanese independence politics, is helping to make China look to naval power for practically the first time in the modern era. We are in the process of provoking a threat and a real adversary in the Pacific that need not have existed.

Mr. Eland’s observation is just the sort that only non-interventionists seem able to make. Just as it is part of the interventionist narrative of the 20th century that the Central Powers were the villains and their “autocracy” had to be combated, the same idea of defending free Taiwan from the admittedly far worse, more oppressive (than the 1914 German government, that is) Chinese goverment is accepted as a sort of obvious moral commitment.

In the same way that Irving Kristol argued that we have an obligation to any “democracy” anywhere because of “shared values,” because we are supposedly an “ideological nation,” the pro-Taiwan lobby (many of whom are among the most belligerent interventionists elsewhere) somehow sees extending yet another disastrous guarantee to yet another East Asian country against its exceedingly nationalist-communist neighbours as a natural extension of the idea that, as Mr. Bush foolishly said in his Inaugural Address, “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” (Question: have we ever come out better for any of our East Asian adventures, or have they all been mistakes with unacceptable costs?) The case of Taiwan shows better than anything that this statement is not simply a mistake or a delusion but a deliberate falsehood. Anyone who believes our vital interests include nuclear war, or even the risk of nuclear war, for Taiwan possibly belongs in a sanitarium, but he should not be making foreign policy for this country.

Pope John Paul II will be remembered as the Pope who helped spark the carnage and killing and displacement of the Balkan conflicts. By recognizing Croatia, he started the ball rolling that resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. It was his act of recklessly and arrogantly recognizing Croatia that was partly to blame for the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. He could have chosen the path of negotiation, rapprochement and reconciliation that many world leaders were counseling at the time. Instead, he chose confrontation and conflict. He chose something that he must have known would lead to war.

Diplomatic recognition is a matter appropriate to the political. The Pope should have focused on religion, not politics. Like Alojze Stepinac before him, he chose politics and Croatian nationalism over religion. He contributed greatly to the wars that destroyed and dismembered Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In the West, of course, the Pope will be remembered as the man who brought down Communism, while traveling relentlessly and providing interfaith outreach on a scale not seen by any previous pope. But his legacy will be remembered differently in the Balkans. He failed to acknowledge the Roman Catholic role in the Ustasha genocide of World War II. He failed to take a stand on the continuing and ongoing genocide of Orthodox Christians in Kosovo-Metohija. He had an opportunity to use his enormous stature and respect in the eyes of the world to make a difference for peace, but he chose not to do so. In the end, he only exacerbated the historic conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. He made matters worse. In the Balkans at least, his legacy will be one of failure. ~Carl Savich, Balkanalysis.com

Mr. Savich’s impassioned and serious article is an important balance to the endless streams of praise for the Pope’s specifically political activities. In fairness to the Vatican and Pope John Paul, recognition of Croatia by Rome alone could not have unleashed all of the evils of the Balkan wars, but it did materially contribute to the drive for recognition of the secessionist states by Germany, then governed by the heavily Catholic Christian Democratic Union government of Helmut Kohl.

It is important to qualify Mr. Savich’s account by noting that had Rome refused to recognise Croatia it is very likely that Germany, with its own connections to its former satellite, would have done so for the continuation of its own Ostpolitik. In the end, it was Germany, and the European Community and US along with it, that made the destruction of Yugoslavia possible. The Vatican did, however, lend its moral authority to encouraging this tragic and unnecessary war, and the late Pope was responsible for that.
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