Splintered Sunrise

There is something of an identikit aspect to peace processes, isn’t there? I mention this only as a result of reading the latest column from the compulsively readable Nebojša Malić at antiwar.com. Even when I disagree with Nebojša, which is regularly, he always has something interesting to say.

So, the latest column derives from Nebojša’s recent visit to his native Bosnia, and his impressions of how the place has changed. For a start:

The war’s physical scars in Sarajevo have mostly healed. Several burned-out buildings still remain, but the rest have been repaired and renovated. The city actually looks better today than even in 1984, when it last received a facelift for the Winter Olympics. Old Austrian-era buildings, gone drab with soot and smog over the course of the 20th century, now sport light ochre, burgundy, beige and even green facades. Communist-built public housing in western parts of the city, once depressingly concrete-gray, now sports cheerful blues, greens, yellows and reds.

Yeah, our own urban regeneration is a bit like that. Nebojša continues:

And yet, only the buildings are cheerful. The people grumble. Work is scarce. Those who do work are sucked dry by a myriad of taxes and fees, levied to support a gargantuan bureaucracy. Bosnia-Herzegovina has more government officials per capita than anyplace else on the planet. And after paying all the local, provincial and entity taxes, Bosnians pay a crushing 17% VAT on everything they buy.

Hmm. Definitely something there for the peace studies curriculum. Go on…

Shiny stores filled with expensive goods line Sarajevo’s main streets, but there are few shoppers inside, and fewer buyers. The only burgeoning businesses are cafes, bars and eateries. There is never enough capital for entrepreneurs, but there is somehow always plenty of money for new mosques, or inflammatory war memorials.

Substitute murals for mosques, and you could almost be in Norn Iron. But what I like best is Nebojša’s description of the Bosnian parliament:

To make matters worse, occasional live TV coverage of the Parliament looks like a lowbrow reality show. Many of the legislators can’t string together a coherent sentence. Others communicate strictly through callous insults and outright slander. Diatribes and rants are common. There are a few honorable exceptions to the cesspool that is the Bosnian Parliament, but their presence only underscores the general rot.

Can we twin these guys with Stormont?

Београд, 17. фебруар 2008. године - Председник Владе Републике Србије Војислав Коштуница истакао је данас поводом једностраног проглашења лажне државе на тлу Србије да је до овог незапамћеног безакоња довела деструктивна, сурова и неморална политика силе коју спроводе САД.
Сајт Владе Србије преноси обраћање у целини.

Поштовани грађани Србије,

Данас, 17. фебруара противправно је проглашена лажна држава Косово на оном делу територије Србије који се налази под војном контролом НАТО пакта. До овог незапамћеног безакоња довела је деструктивна, сурова и неморална политика силе коју спроводе САД. Овим чином је целом свету дато на знање да Америка силу ставља изнад Повеље УН и да је спремна да самовољно, безобзирно и грубо крши међународни поредак зарад својих војних интереса.

Стављајући насиље изнад начела међународног права, САД су применом слепе силе понизиле и натерале ЕУ да погази принципе на којима почива сама ЕУ. Америка је присилила Европу да је следи у нечувеном насиљу које демонстрира над Србијом. Европа је данас погнула главу и због тога ће и она бити одговорна за све далекосежне последице које ће ово насиље имати по европски и светски поредак. Тиме је, пре свега, понижена Европска унија, а не Србија. Србија је одбила да се понизи, држећи се чврсто права и одбијајући да се повинује сили.

Једнострано проглашење лажне државе под старатељством САД и ЕУ, представља завршни чин политике силе која је започета агресијом и безумним бомбардовањем Србије и потом настављена доласком НАТО трупа на Косово и Метохију. Никада се као данас 17. фебруара није јасније показала истина зашто је Србија дивљачки разарана под НАТО бомбама. Прави темељ лажне државе Косово чине бомбе којима је НАТО рушио Србију. Зато треба рећи праву истину да иза ове лажне државе стоје, пре свега, војни интереси НАТО пакта, што је и потврђено Анексом 11 Ахтисаријевог плана. Само тако је могла настати оваква лажна држава, а она заувек остаје лажна макар за њено признање западне земље жртвовале цео светски правни поредак и ризиковале мир.

Председник САД, који је одговоран за ово насиље, и његови европски следбеници, биће црним словима уписани у историју Србије, али и у сваку историју међународног права и на њему заснованог светског поретка.

Добро нам је познато колико је опасна, сурова и слепа политика силе коју спроводе САД. Али и са тим сазнањем Србија је одлучно и једном за увек поништила све одлуке о проглашењу једностране независности, и све будуће акте који буду произилазили из ове противправне одлуке. Србија је поништила и одлуку ЕУ о нелегалном слању мисије у Покрајину, која је такође донета услед немоћи Европе. Овом одлуком Владе Србије утврђен је основ државног и националног програма Србије за Косово и Метохију после 17. фебруара.

Грађани Србије, за Србију не постоји и никада неће постојати лажна држава независно Косово на њеном тлу. За Србију су сви Срби и сви грађани у Покрајини који поштују нашу државу пуноправни и равноправни грађани Србије. Зато за све њих важе закони и институције Републике Србије. Од данас морамо показати још већу бригу и солидарност са нашим народом на Косову и Метохији. Сва министарства имају налог да раде и обезбеде значајно боље животне услове, да обезбеде нова радна места и покрену инвестиције у покрајини. Држава Србија ће повести највећу могућу бригу за сваког свог грађанина на Косову и Метохији. И на овај дан су наши министри са својим народом у Покрајини.

Упозоравамо да је на Косову и Метохији од доласка НАТО трупа убијено и протерано много Срба, а безбројне куће, древни манастири и цркве су спаљени. Од када је НАТО дошао сувише је зла и насиља нането Србима. Због тога ни по коју цену не сме доћи до нових невиних жртава на Косову, до нових прогона и нових рушења. Насиља према Србима било је превише и они који су преузели одговорност за безбедност у Покрајини морају апсолутно испунити своју обавезу.

Желим још једном да поновим да је Србија стара држава, а српски народ стари европски народ. Кроз вековну државотворну историју као народ искусили смо каква све зла може да учини страна сила. Али смо се кроз нашу историју још боље уверили у снагу права и правде и вредност слободе. Право, правда и слобода водиће нас све док у потпуности покрајину Косово и Метохију не вратимо тамо где јој је и место у уставноправни поредак Србије. И док политика силе мисли да је данас тријумфовала правећи лажну државу, милиони Срба већ мисле о дану слободе који мора доћи. Нико још никада није успео да спречи српски народ да оствари своју слободу. Све оно што не будемо могли ми данас да урадимо, урадиће сутра нова и боља покољења од нас. Косово је Србија и увек тако мора бити.

Грађани Србије, морамо заједно целом свету показати да се противимо разбијању наше државе и да не признајемо насилно стварање лажне државе на нашој територији. Противећи се политици насиља која се спроводи над Србијом, морамо јединствено подићи глас у знак подршке нашим сународницима и грађанима на Косову и Метохији. Влада и парламентарне странке заједно ће организовати мирне протесте широм Србије и договорити се када ће у Београду бити први велики протест. На овим протестима наше достојанство мора бити изнад силе против које се боримо. Силу оставимо насилницима који су се њоме обрукали за сва времена, а ми покажимо моћ права, правде и покажимо колико волимо и поштујемо слободу и слободну Србију са нашим Косовом и Метохијом. Док постоји српски народ Косово је Србија.

Via NSPM.

Since it’s the big story, I suppose I’ll have to do something on the Kosovo UDI. We won’t get a consensus, but there are a few issues around this that are worth teasing out.

The first thing is that, while there are disputes in international law around the issue of unnegotiated secession and border changes, IR theory frowns on it very heavily. And indeed it’s extremely rare for secessionist para-states to get recognition. This of course goes back to the American Civil War, when foreign states (Britain in particular) refused to recognise the Confederacy in case their colonies started getting ideas. Now the days of the old-style colonial empires may be nearly (although not totally) over, but we’re also left with the still-rumbling question of ethnic separatism. Madrid’s cold feet over Kosovo are not, I suggest, entirely unconnected to the Spanish state’s increasingly draconian attempts to outlaw Basque nationalism, and the periodic rows with the Barcelona government about the Catalan autonomy statute.

But then, the lesson of this affair, and we’ll see it illustrated in other ways, is that precedents don’t count for nothing when the Empire has made a decision.

There are a couple of other interesting points I’d like to explore, which involves going back to the original break-up of Yugoslavia. Brussels, on a rather dubious self-awarded mandate, decided that it was going to manage the break-up, and set up the famous Badinter Commission, a panel of judicial activists, to legitimise what it was going to do. Suffice to say, the Eurocrats then went on to flout the rulings of their own pet panel.

To cut a long story short, Badinter determined three main things. First was an a priori determination that Yugoslavia was in “a state of dissolution”, which wasn’t necessarily obvious or inevitable at the time, and the only remaining question was the division of the spoils. Well, whether or not the dissolution was inevitable pre-Badinter, it certainly became so afterwards, and that was no accident.

The second point was that the six republics of Yugoslavia were the units of self-determination, and that republican borders were inviolable. This was problematic from the point of view of Yugoslav constitutionality. Nobody really understood the unworkable 1974 constitution (I suspect that was deliberate on the part of Kardelj), but there were two types of self-determination enshrined there. The republics and autonomous provinces were held to be the organs of regional self-government (although the Republic of Serbia was neither fish nor fowl, having an enormous West Lothian question in Kosovo), but self-determination was also vested in the nations (narodi) of Yugoslavia. This, in ambiguous Titoist style, was the pay-off for having 40% of Serbs outside Serbia. It also explains the explosive nature of Tudjman’s downgrading of Serbs in the Croatian constitution from constituent nation to ethnic minority, which remains their status today. A constituent nation has certain inherent collective rights. An ethnic minority has whatever right the government chooses to give it. The point was not lost on Serbs who never really wanted to be part of Croatia in the first place.

But anyway, the “international community” determined that republican borders were sacrosanct. The purpose behind this was to pre-empt any Serb claims on parts of Croatia or Bosnia. This also meant, however, that Kosovo became an internal Serbian affair, which is how international governments treated it for most of the 1990s. The distinction never much bothered the anti-Serbian racists in outfits like the ICG, who seem hell-bent on re-establishing the borders of 1942, but the chancelleries of the Empire were a good bit more cautious. At least until late 1998, that is. And even after the 1999 war, the question of sovereignty was put on the back-burner for a while. In reviving it of late, there have been a few Jesuitical legal arguments, but the basic line of Imperial spin has been, well, that was then and this is now.

It would be a mistake, however, to see the reluctance to depart from the “republican borders” formula as purely down to legal issues. Once the formerly sacrosanct borders become malleable, that opens up a whole other can of worms. The elephant in the room of course is Republika Srpska. There is the Sandžak question, which could be mighty destabilising. There is the Felvidék question currently exercising the government of Slovakia. Above all, there are the Albanian irredentist movements in Macedonia (currently controlling around a third of the country), Montenegro, Serbia’s Preševo Valley and Greece (although that last one might be a tough nut to crack). And so on.

The third thing to issue from Badinter was the concept of “standards before status”. This was actually a rather good idea, in that aspiring states would have to meet certain standards of democracy, the rule of law and respect for minorities before getting international recognition. Trouble is, the Eurocrats then immediately broke this rule on grounds of realpolitik. Macedonia met the required standards but didn’t get recognition, through being blackballed by Greece and failing to have lined up a powerful sponsor. Croatia, on the other hand, flagrantly failed to meet the required standards but did get recognition on the insistence of the German government.

The embarrassing thing is that the Empire did set standards for Kosovo to meet before getting recognition. Not a single one of them has been met. And yet, recognition will be forthcoming because the Powers have decided so, and to back down now would involve an unacceptable loss of face. Also, it will annoy the Russians, which is just the sort of “democratic geopolitics” that led to the Khmer Rouge holding Cambodia’s UN seat for a dozen years after they were overthrown. And if I was the Russians, I’d be sorely tempted to follow through on my threat of recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Yes, behind all the chest-beating about the glories of humanitarian intervention there is a whole tangle of hypocrisy and naked power politics. But, in a situation where the spiv Milo Djukanović and the ethnic cleanser Hashim Thaçi are the agents of “democracy” against, er, the elected government in Belgrade, what do you expect? By the way, I give Thaçi credit for being able to say with a straight face that Kosovo will be judged on how it treats its Serbian minority. If there’s one left, that is.

My position, as it happens, is a more pragmatic one. I don’t claim to stand on the high moral ground of universal values, but I do think there are standards you can apply. And I also hold to the realist position that a strong moral case in the abstract doesn’t always equate to good policy.

For instance, as I’ve said before, there is a strong case in the abstract for Kosovo Albanians having the right to self-determination. In the here and now, I’m opposed to independence for Kosovo because the place is run by a bunch of mafiosi, its economy is based on the trafficking of drugs, arms and women, and giving this basket case the attributes of statehood will make a bad situation worse. (And why does Kosovo need a new flag when it could use the good old Jolly Roger? Although Montenegro might have a prior claim.) There’s an even stronger case for Chechen self-determination, but that isn’t very appealing when the actually existing Chechen separatist movement is dominated by crazy jihadis. And, before I get accused of being a terrible Slavophile, I’m also opposed to a declaration of independence by Republika Srpska, on the grounds that a decentralised Bosnia represents the best chance of avoiding a return to war.

Note that all these positions are conditional and all could change if circumstances change. It may not provide the easy satisfaction the interventionists get from venting about “evil Serbs”, “evil Russians”, or increasingly these days “evil Muslims”, but it’s less likely to lead you up ideological dead ends.

And, by the way, there are lots of de facto para-states knocking about. If we are going to back the idea of “standards before status” and all that malarkey, how come Kosovo can get the thumbs up but the Empire continues to pretend that Transnistria, South Ossetia, Karabakh or Abkhazia don’t exist? Or, for that matter, Somaliland?

Rud eile: I was sorry, although not surprised, to hear about the death at 59 of Brendan Hughes, a genuine republican hero. Brendan had been in very poor health for a long time, and it’s to his credit that he spoke out for what he believed in when he could have just fitted in comfortably to the peace process environment. He remained to the end a voice for those seeking an alternative to the GFA process, and was interested in political alternatives rather than just a reversion to old-style militarism. It’s a pity that he never got to see the emergence of a political alternative, because there’s still no credible one in sight.

Yes, the EU’s diplomatic SWAT team came through in Boris Tadić’s knife-edge victory over Tomislav Nikolić. With a margin of barely 100,000 plus change, we can assume that Brussels plenipotentiary Solana played a big role in ensuring the correct outcome, what with giving the electorate the impression that membership of that Napoleonic monstrosity and the associated milk and honey conditions were within their grasp if only they voted the right way. Having already pulled that stroke in the Montenegrin independence referendum, I guess we should thank Javier for demonstrating that you can indeed fool most of the people most of the time.

As I remarked a little while ago, this is one of those situations where language takes on an Orwellian cast. You may think “democracy” is all about a process whereby the people vote for their leaders and can, at least in theory, sack them via the ballot box. That sort of holds true in the metropolitan countries, but in the colonies it’s all about guaranteeing correct outcomes. After all, as the presidents of Venezuela and Belarus have discovered, you can win multiple elections and still be a “dictator”.

The Palestinians have some experience of this. You’ll remember that they democratically elected a Hamas government. Following which, the US, EU and Israel helped engineer a coup by the defeated Fatah in the name of “democracy”. Serbia too is a place where “democracy” has a specialised meaning. On the one hand, it means that the Radicals and Socialists must be kept out of government no matter how many votes they get. On the other, democratic governance in Serbia requires that the country’s two small neo-Jacobin parties, the G17 Plus and the Liberal Democrats (who, as Nebojša quips, are neither liberal nor democratic) must have a major share in power no matter how few votes they get. Your Serbian punter, who will have vivid memories of the “democratic” state of emergency that followed the Djindjić assassination, tends to be rightly cynical about this sort of rhetoric.

It’s probably partly due to the fact that this is Serbia, a country with a severe image problem despite seven years of rule by supine “democrats”, that there aren’t howls of outrage about the Eurocrats interfering in the electoral processes of a sovereign state. But there are other things going on here as well. Yes, you’ve got some unreconstructed Serbophobes crawling out of the woodwork (hats off to Ian Traynor of the Grauniad, who I often read for comedy value), but the thing that’s been most striking about the reportage from Belgrade has been its Cold War tone. There’s been a bit of chest-beating about the Radicals’ role in the Yugoslav wars of secession, when they were indeed involved in some pretty gruesome activities, but actually the media pack have been much keener to go after Nikolić on the basis of his pro-Russian foreign policy. The Eurocrats’ mutterings about Serbia possibly becoming another Belarus also come under this category. Those pesky Serbs and Belarusians, and about half of the Ukrainians, just haven’t grasped yet that their geopolitical role is to make like Latvia and be a useful bulwark against Tsar Vladimir.

The Kosovo question comes into this as well. There can be no doubt that Boris wouldn’t have won if he hadn’t neutralised the Kosovo issue by adapting to the national consensus of defending Serbian sovereignty and rejecting the Albanian separatists’ demands. Belgrade-based diplomats and imperial chancelleries have been spinning to the media that Boris doesn’t really mean what he says. Or maybe he does mean what he says, but he’ll acquiesce in what the Empire does. And, once foreign powers have carved out 15% of the national territory, most Serbs will accept the fait accompli and the Serbian body politic will be purged of the nationalist virus. Yeah, cos that really worked well at Versailles.

Now, let me say up front that I accept there is a strong case in the abstract for Albanian self-determination in Kosovo. I am however opposed to the current independence programme for a number of reasons, partly to do with protection of minorities or the lack thereof, partly to do with unnegotiated secession being extremely illegal under international law, but mainly because Kosovo is a de facto mafia state that, with the attributes of sovereignty, would just show up the Pirate Republic of Montenegro for the comic-opera concern it is. US and EU policy-makers know Kosovo is a disaster in the making, but they seem hell-bent on pressing ahead, apparently on the grounds that not pushing through independence would result in a massive loss of face. Then there’s also the possibility, that, with hardly any Serbs left in the province, the Albanian gangs would turn on the international troops and NGO workers.

This is all by way of being an object lesson for interventionists, in two ways. The Kosovo problem, as well as the simmering Bosnian protectorate, remind me of a conversation I had some years ago with a Greek political scientist. He remarked of the Cyprus question that this was absolutely typical of the Yanks and the West Europeans – they could have mediated a negotiated solution between the local parties decades ago, but they preferred to manage a problem rather than solve it, leaving a low-level dispute where they could continue to have long-term influence. Trouble is, these long-running disputes have a habit of turning around and biting you in the ass.

The second aspect is that the strong showing of the Radicals has put the willies up the Belgrade diplomatic corps in no uncertain fashion. Their huge vote, in a high turnout, goes against the conventional wisdom that the Radicals had a stalwart but rather elderly and rural core vote (this is important also for journalists who spend all their time in Belgrade talking to trendy Anglophone metrosexuals) and were completely incapable of breaking out of that core vote – so, the Radicals could only prosper if there was a low turnout. There’s a lesson here as well. Let’s say you spend a decade and a half treating a country like shit. Even when the “democrats” take over, you still treat the country like shit. Let’s say the “democrats” turn out to be not only undemocratic but, in large part, up to their ears in criminality and corruption. Let’s say the economy is down the dunny, and the response of the Empire is to demand more “free market reforms” like the ones that put it down the dunny in the first place. Would you expect the natives to be grateful to the missionaries, or would you expect them to get the pot boiling?

Amongst all the excitement around the US election, it’s easy to forget that politics goes on in less important countries. Currently, for instance, the presidential election in Serbia, which is fascinating in a number of ways. Latest news is that we are heading for a run-off between incumbent president Boris Tadić and his perennial opponent Tomislav Nikolić, leader pro tem of the Radical Party while Vojislav Šešelj remains sequestered by the Hague Inquisition.

Let me say at the outset, or before Jim Denham denounces me as a fascist at any rate, that I’m not in the normal run of things a great enthusiast for the Serbian Radicals. I’m not exactly an ideological soulmate of the SRS, and the party contains a lot of, shall we say, colourful characters that people worrying about their respectability might like to avoid. So why do I find myself warming slightly to these fuckers?

Mostly, I have to say, this is down to spite. And very largely it’s down to the Empire’s definition of “democracy”, which acquires a specialist meaning when it comes to Serbia. “Democracy” in this context means that the Radicals must never be allowed to form a government no matter how many votes they get. Hence the frenzied activity from the diplomatic SWAT teams in Belgrade, most notably the EU scheduling accession talks for between the two rounds so as to benefit Tadić. At least that’s the theory – with support for EU membership bobbing around the 50% mark, we shall see whether being the Empire-backed candidate proves a vote-winner.

Ah, you might say, but the SRS is a pretty nasty outfit – just look at the activities of paramilitaries not a million miles from the SRS in the Bosnian war – so isn’t it justified to keep these guys out of power? I don’t deny the force of this argument, but it might hold more water if it wasn’t for plenty of other dodgy characters in the Balkan region being fully rehabilitated as “democrats”. And if US and EU diplomats in Sofia hadn’t spent over a decade agitating to keep the Bulgarian Socialist Party out of power. The BSP, by the way, dumped its old Stalinism pretty quickly and has long since been a moderate social democratic party, but it was believed by the Big Civilised Powers to be too responsive to the concerns of its voters. QED.

Bulgaria, in case you’ve forgotten, is an actual member of the EU. Some other recent entrants, notably the Romanians and the Slovaks, have had bruising experiences of being treated like redheaded stepchildren by Old Europe, which, EU rhetoric aside, continues to view the Ruritanian states to the east as not quite up to snuff. And even that isn’t enough for some of our more virulent interventionists – one notes our old chum Marko Attila Hoare calling for Brussels to get tough with Greece, apparently on the general principle that the uppity Orthodox need to be taught their place.

So let’s get back to Serbia. I have no doubt that the Powers, not to mention their cheerleaders, would really like to see Čeda Jovanović, the candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party, in the top job. Young Čeda, who is invariably described as “charismatic” by the London and Washington media, was a protégé of slain prime minister Zoran “Little Slobo” Djindjić, and is a strong partisan of Serbia going along with whatever the Empire wants. This means singing the praises of the “free market”, which means cutting social programmes and flogging off state assets to US and EU corporations rather than the Russians. It means getting into the EU, which regards Serbia as a coconut colony, and NATO, which actually bombed the country not many years ago. It means immediate independence for the mafia-run province of Kosovo. Unfortunately for Čeda, though this stuff will get him good press abroad and the plaudits of the swankier end of Belgrade’s café society, it cuts little ice with the peasants.

Which is why the Empire is lumbered with poor old Boris Tadić, who is a waffling surrender monkey rather than an enthusiastic surrender monkey. Boris will usually do what the “international community” wants if he’s put under enough pressure, but he also wants the great unwashed to vote for him. Which is why the Yanks and EU have pressurised the Kosovo mafiosi into delaying their declaration of independence until Boris is safely re-elected. And what’s on offer there is what the Powers are calling “supervised independence”, which is not what the Albanian separatists want, and this most likely means a repeat of the 2004 pogrom of non-Albanians is on the cards.

And what of Nikolić? Well, Nikolić is no pearl of great price to say the least, but he has one thing going for him. That is that he isn’t a surrender monkey, which is why the Powers have determined he can’t be allowed to win. More to the point, there is an alternative programme on offer to simply going along with Washington and Brussels. Nikolić is nowhere near as stridently anti-EU as he used to be, but his support for national sovereignty and his call for closer ties with Russia and other countries that don’t regard Serbia as the Heart of Darkness has a lot of resonance. It also exerts a pull on the supporters of prime minister Vojislav Koštunica, a layer who will act as kingmakers.

Why is this important? As Nebojša Malić perceptively points out, this is a rare case in these times of voters actually having a choice between different policies and programmes. American voters don’t get that kind of choice, nor do their counterparts in Britain or Ireland, and in most of continental Europe the acceptable spectrum of political opinion is narrowing daily. And our leaders have the cheek to lecture countries where there still is a choice on the low quality of their democracy. Mar dhea!

And if you have the language skills, as ever there is plenty of intelligent commentary to be found on NSPM.

So, with all the exciting events in Burma, which could turn out to be either brilliant or horrible, what should be done? Let us turn for enlightenment to the people who have a plan for every country in the world, those Cambridge nerds playing at being neocons, the Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society, who are just getting a swish new website up. And I discover from their swish new website that they do indeed have one of their grandiose “strategic briefings” [pdf] out on Burma.

This is rather good in terms of hostages to fortune. Scoopie expert Ben Caldecott writes of the repressive nature of the Than Shwe junta, and notes that “Foreign exchange dollars, now primarily obtained from a rapidly growing oil and gas sector, are used to fund arms purchases from Russia, other former Soviet Republics, China and now India. These are almost undoubtedly used to violently oppress the Burmese people and enforce government authority.” Quite so, although Ben unaccountably fails to mention Israel as a major arms supplier.

Ben then ponders the possibility of a US-led invasion, or “armed intervention” in Decentspeak. He then rules it out for a number of reasons, notably Imperial overstretch, the likelihood of seriously annoying the Chinese (this could be the late Senator Scoop’s famous affinity for Maoist China coming into play) and the chronic weakness of the opposition, who don’t much look like providing a stable environment for investors. No, Ben has a better idea:

For this to be effective, a diplomatic compact should be created to push forward a political solution in Burma. This group would be made up from the most important regional stakeholders, such as China, ASEAN, Australia and India, as well as the United States and the European Union. The mandate of this group would be clear: to bring together Burmese stakeholders and facilitate a peaceful political settlement, that would transition Burma into a safe, secure, democratic and viable nation state.

Yup, a Contact Group. Never heard of that one before. And one involving Australia and the European Union, forsooth. Moreover, Ben goes on to posit that a successful transition would involve the Empire offering inducements to the Tatmadaw that their interests would be protected in the new Burma. Finally:

Of importance to all potential regional members of the compact, is a growing Burmese economy that provides stable access to its significant natural resources and large potential market. This would benefit all in the region and provide additional business opportunities for Indian, Chinese and ASEAN firms. The best way to ensure that Burma’s economic development proceeds is political change.

This might explain the general air of Grauniad drippiness, which is far from the muscularity we would expect from the Scoopies. It therefore comes as a relief to find our old friend Attila the Hun holding forth on the future for democratic geopolitics in Greater Europe. What this boils down to, when we cut out all the guff about Hitler, Stalin and Chomsky, is that Europe is gravely threatened by the twin dangers of “Russian meddling” and “Serbian expansionism”. There are a number of ways Attila proposes to deal with these threats. The first is to grant immediate sovereignty to the mafiosi currently running Kosovo. The second is to abolish the Bosnian Serbs’ autonomous republic negotiated at Dayton, although Attila is willing to let them keep the Serbian flag and Cyrillic alphabet. “Experience shows that it is precisely over such symbols that nationalism mobilises, and we should do well to defuse potential Serb resistance to Bosnian reintegration by avoiding giving offence in the purely symbolic realm,” opines Attila. Well, he’s convinced me. The Serbs who rose in arms against a Muslim-dominated government in 1992 would certainly acquiesce in it now, if only given some beads and feathers to occupy their little peasant minds.

And, following all this, a rump Serbia which accepts its place as an imperialised backwater and perpetual whipping boy of muscular liberals could be brought into the EU to further strengthen the cordon sanitaire against Russia. My God, he really doesn’t like his Orthodox Slavs at all. I expect the Bulgarians will be getting it in the neck before long.

I am also quite taken by the Scoopies’ online gift shop. For two pounds ten bob you can outfit yourself with a Scoop Jackson Society lapel pin, so other neocon nerds can recognise you at a glance, and for a mere fifty quid you can go to a gala dinner with Irwin Stelzer. Could you be bad to that?

I’ve been tempted to comment on the spat between Nick and Johann, but that’s been quite adequately covered elsewhere. But I do want to make a few comments on Decency, and I’ll come back to these points in greater detail later. In particular, I’ve been meaning to write about the uses and abuses of Orwell for quite a while. But for the time being, let’s take three basic points: on the apple not falling far from the tree, on the incidence of multiple Orwells, and on the linguistics of Decency.

Firstly, as has been observed on multiple occasions, the Decent Left, and especially its more ideological wing, contains a huge proportion of former leftist sectarians. This shouldn’t be surprising. People rarely outgrow completely their early selves, much as they might like to believe otherwise. A good example is the late Monty Johnstone. It is well known that, prior to becoming the CPGB’s expert on Trotskyism, Monty had himself been a Trotskyist, during the Second World War, when it was neither fashionable nor profitable. This was not only important for his hatchet work – many a Trot made himself look an idiot by debating Monty, only to find Monty knew much more Trotsky than they – but arguably played a big role in his long-term dissidence within the CPGB.

Hitchens Bros are another good example. Pete, of course, likes to paint himself as a conservative nowadays, and affects the air of an old-time Home Service announcer, but he retains an SWP streak a mile wide. As for the Dude, on reading his recent biography of Orwell I was struck by its resemblance to Cliff’s Lenin. Not stylistically – Chris is still a much better writer than Cliff – but structurally. It is in fact a book about the kind of man Orwell could have been had he been lucky enough to have the Dude around to advise him. So it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, surprising that British Decency embraces lots of superannuated sectarians, many of whom retain their sectarian habits.

Secondly, Orwell. Many of the journalistic Decents, and I’m thinking especially of Cohen and Wheen, hail poor old Orwell as their precursor. Well, there were at least five different Orwells, depending on the period, so it depends very much on the Orwell you mean. Nick claims as his role model the Orwell of 1936, picking up his rifle to go and fight fascism in Spain, but this is more than a little disingenuous. Firstly, Orwell’s actual politics of his Catalan period – his semi-Trotskyist period in other words – would instantly repel Nick. They would seem to him Chomskyan, or even reminiscent of the Nick of yesteryear. Actually, the Orwell that seems to inspire Nick and Francis (Aaro I discount as owing more to Ehrenburg) is Orwell’s wartime writing, and not even the good stuff – most of that writing was pretty lively – but the large percentage of his wartime writing that consisted in heaping abuse on those intellectuals who continued to hold positions that Orwell himself had held only a little while earlier.

Finally, the role of linguistic criticism in analysing Decency. Wheen and Cohen (who nicks his writing on this wholesale from Wheen) may not recognise the linguistic turn in philosophy, but the linguistic turn recognises them. Let’s start with the application of cant phrases. To take an easy example, when the Engageniks say “racism”, they don’t mean racism. They mean anti-Semitism, and they are so promiscuous in that allegation that it has no meaning from that source, except to mean “people we don’t like”. Similarly, if you read a Guardian article on Serbia by Ian Traynor, it’s a fair possibility that Traynor will be writing about “democrats” versus “extreme nationalists”. Leave aside Traynor’s prejudice and incomprehension – you need to understand that, when Traynor refers to “democrats”, he usually means Sonja Biserko, Nataša Kandić and the little coterie of neo-Jacobin farmhands in Belgrade who actively want the Yanks to occupy their country; meanwhile, “extreme nationalists” refers to, er, most of the population, including principled anti-nationalists who, for whatever reason, baulk at the full Imperial agenda. Now apply this to the Eustonite discourse on the need to support “Iraqi democrats”. If this isn’t an entirely platonic reference to entirely hypothetical people, it usually excludes most of the Iraqi people, including most of their elected representatives. In fact, sometimes it seems to refer exclusively to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

I’ll just conclude with Baudrillard. The linguistic turn in philosophy does not claim that there is no reality outside language. What it does posit is that language is a means for ordering cognition, and we can’t have unmediated knowledge of reality. The most we can hope for is to achieve a working approximation. Got that?

Now, there is no shame in not understanding Baudrillard. Alex Callinicos, the Greatest Living Philostopher Known to Mankind, doesn’t understand him. Nor does Johann Hari. Then you have the dumbed-down version from Wheen. What all these characters in common is that none of them seem to have read, or understood, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Rather, they prefer the weasel argument of referencing the title and taking it absolutely literally. What Baudrillard meant was not that there wasn’t a war – his essay dealt with the gap between the actual war experienced in the Gulf, and the simulacrum of war experienced by the media audience in the West (or better, the global North).

Now, let’s apply this to Decency. Orwell, let’s remember, picked up his rifle and went to Catalonia to really fight fascism, putting his life on the line in the process. During the Balkan wars, there was a segment of the commentariat who thought that “fighting fascism” was coterminous with writing op-ed pieces calling for the bombing of the tribe they had decided to be the epitome of evil. The laptop bombardiers of Farringdon were, in a magnificent vindication of Baudrillard, virtual warriors playing at fighting a virtual war against a simulacrum of a foreign nation. This might have been amusing, but it was intensely aggravating for those of us who went out to the Balkans and tried to do some useful work, only to be derided as “appeasers” or even “Chetnik fascists” by people whose only contribution had been to hold forth over lunch at the Gay Hussar.

And so it goes. We hear endless calls to “fight fascism”, “show solidarity”, “support democrats” and “take sides”. What this seems to boil down to is “write columns in the Observer” and “slander the people we used to agree with”. Hear that? It’s Baudrillard chuckling, and Orwell spinning in his grave.