Auntie American

Followers of this blog may have noticed an affection for the USA which pre-dates President Obama’s visit on Monday.  To be honest, Johnny Cash’s voice is enough of a contribution to the world to warrant the celebration of the United States, but Johnny Cash’s voice AND the out-take reels featured at the end of Burt Reynolds movies?  What a great country.  Added to many people’s list of things to love about America in recent years is the oratory of President Barack “we like you much better than the last guy” Obama.  This week we were treated to our own Irish helping of the great man speaking, a beautiful oral monument both to American optimism and Presidential avoidance of detail.   Yes, in the end he didn’t say much but unless he was prepared to pick up the tab for the country as well for the pints at Ollie Hayes’ pub, there wasn’t much to say.  Hopefully his trip will encourage him to think of us when next he meets with the IMF.  Instead we were given some American optimism and self-belief and we were reminded that of all the nations on earth we have a stronger claim to share in that American identity that most, and that’s enough for me.  It goes without saying we need to feel good about ourselves, so thanks Pres.  Did you know though that Obama is actually the Warlord of the US Empire?  This is what I’ve been told by a number of Waterford City Centre lampposts in the last week, through the intermediary of the Socialist Workers Party.  Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party (not to be confused with the Workers Party or Socialist Workers Party, keep up) said last week that he has nothing against the American people, just their political leadership, but as Americans keep electing Presidents he doesn’t like, he must find that a little bit annoying?  So I’ve been thinking about what this sometimes popular European youth activity known as anti-Americanism is.  Well, let’s reflect on that pejorative term: Warlord of the US Empire.  That’s basically correct.  He’s the commander-in-chief of the greatest war machine the world has ever seen which projects its power with the help of a network of alliances; some, such as NATO, based on common values and interests, some, such as Turkmenistan, based on retainers and free Dallas DVD box sets.  This second set of allies closely resembles the “informal empire” model pursued by the British in early part of the 19^th Century . That power was misused on an epic scale in Vietnam, poisoning generations of Left inclined people against US foreign policy.  Worse in my opinion was the refusal of successive US governments to countenance democratic wealth redistribution in Latin America, because while Vietnam was a misguided application of the relatively sound Truman doctrine, overthrowing democrats like Allende and Árbenz had no justification whatsoever. In other words, for every Johnny Cash and Burt Reynolds for whom we should thank America, there’s always a Lady Gaga for whom we should not.  Is there any innocence in US military might or must it always be regarded as aggressive and imperialist?  Well, America was the world’s biggest economy for more than forty years when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, yet it had a tiny army by the standards of the day (admittedly, the navy was pretty big).  Over the course of the next four years it tooled up and successfully destroyed the urban infrastructure of Japan and Germany - which is what war is all about – but then invested enough US taxpayer’s money in both countries for them to join the US in the top three world economies within twenty years.  I’m not sure if that’s unique in world history, but it’s certainly atypical.  Since then, America’s military muscularity has remained intact, embedded, in a European context, within NATO.  NATO is commonly regarded as an absolute evil by the anti-American lobby here - bogeyman threatening our neutrality - but it never fired a shot in anger for its first fifty years.  When it did, it did so to detach Kossovo from Yugoslavia.  That war was possibly unnecessary, probably illegal but certainly in no one’s economic interests.  NATO was established to counter a communist threat which generated such hysteria in the US in the 40’s and 50’s that our cultural memory of that threat is that it was irrational and fictional.  It wasn’t, just ask any of your Polish friends in Ireland today.  Another way of looking at the military power of the US is to make a comparison with the countries that come just behind it according to Jane’s Defence Weekly: France, Russia and China – who would you prefer was number one?  America is not always on the side of the angels, but I’m not sure if it’s the evil empire either.  The real problem is that it’s always on one side or the other, when you have the world’s most powerful military you don’t have the luxury of neutrality – who did Europe turn to end the Bosnian War? Clue: it wasn’t Ireland.  And the other root of anti-Americanism perhaps has more to do with Johnny Cash and Burt Reynolds.  The cultural, economic and military reach of the US is such that everyone has an opinion about the place.  Americans, to be fair, don’t always have an opinion about everyone else (but think about it, when is the last time you expressed strong views on Bhutan?).  They do have an opinion of us, and it’s generally a benign opinion.  I don’t know if that will do anything to get us out of our mess, but it can’t hurt.

Old Man in a Hurry

That went well. Of course our attitudes to the British Royal Family have softened under the influence of Northern power sharing, increased pluralism in Irish society, historical reconciliation and most of all, Hello! magazine.  For the most part the country enjoyed having the Queen over, and rediscovered an affection for the Royals that was taboo for the last one hundred years.  But it was there.  There’s still a Queen’s Terrace in Waterford, and a Kings Terrace, tucked in behind the Garda barracks.  Most of our bigger thoroughfares were renamed after independence in favour of Irish patriots, with Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and Wolf Tone being the main beneficiaries, and my own favourite Michael Davitt not doing too badly.  The rebranding must have run out of steam before the local authorities got the Queens Terrace.  It’s remarkable though that a significant city centre street adjacent to our O’Connell Street retains the name not of a British Royal but a British Prime Minister. A Prime Minister who started his long political career as a High Tory, opposed the catholic emancipation, electoral reform and the abolition of slavery. It seems that Gladstone’s conversion to Free Trade in the 1840’s was the catalyst for a gradual move to Liberalism that would end with giving the vote to the working class, supporting trade union recognition for London dock workers, opposing imperial expansion at the very height of the British Empire and finally walking away from politics over the establishment’s refusal to allow the Irish govern themselves (hence the Waterford street name).  Liberal has become a dirty word for many commentators today, characterized as nothing more than a craven surrender to reaction under the guise of multiculturalism, a middle class combination of irrational distrust for the West and an inexplicable embrace of world music.  The Liberalism of Gladstone was a robust, evangelical and very effective creed.  Imagine winning an election in Britain in 1880 by suggesting that perhaps Zulus and Afghans had as much right to protect their homes from attack as an Englishman had? Suggesting that the solution to the Irish Question was to ask the Irish? While his support of striking London dockers in 1889 (when he was in his late seventies) was greeted with the kind of shock normally reserved for those who broke wind in front of the Queen.  He remained a dedicated Free Trader however and was opposed to the socialism-light tendencies of the new Liberals who revered him.  In a country where the main political parties are (or were until February) the  “Soldiers of Destiny” and the “Family of the Gaels” its hard sometimes to identify the conservatives, monetarists, liberals, and social democrats on the Irish political landscape, but this week we undoubtedly said goodbye to our own Liberal colossus, Garret Fitzgerald.  Gladstone’s Free Trade ideology was alive and well in Garret Fitzgerald’s belief in the European project and there was a Gladstonian sense of fairness at work in his attempts to deVaticanise the country in the face of fierce conservative opposition. Liberalism also informed his attitude to the north, the simple belief that northern unionists couldn’t be ignored, the traditional position of southern nationalists who impotently shouted “united Ireland” from their armchairs for sixty years.  Like Gladstone however he was pragmatic and was prepared to pursue his policy of not ignoring northern unionism by ignoring northern unionism to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement.  He had his critics and the country’s economic crisis hadn’t improved hugely when his defeat in 1987 seemed to signal the failure of his project.  Like many Liberals from the French Revolution onwards, his battles with conservatism did nothing to endear him to the Left for whom market freedom can be as offensive as social freedom can be to conservatives.  Life is tough in the middle, just ask Nick Clegg.  Gladstone’s growing radicalism in old age earned him the title of an Old Man in a Hurry.  Garret Fitzgerald too was full of enthusiasm for his new projects when I got the chance to meet him in March.  Being in possession of that kind of intellect at the age of 85 must have a hurrying effect.  Anyway, may be rest in peace, and may history show that he had a bigger impact on Irish life than Hello! Magazine.

Multiculturalism

When did Ireland become a multicultural country?  I think it was in the mid-nineties sometime, between the decriminalization of homosexuality and Jason Sherlock winning an All Ireland medal with Dublin. I don’t know, I wasn’t here.  I spent most of the nineties in Amsterdam, now there’s a multicultural city; Indonesian food, Moroccan rap, Afghan coats, sexual license and sexual licenses.  The Dutch will tolerate anything as long as there’s some bitterballen at the end.  Multiculturalism though has moved on from the wholly positive good it was perhaps regarded as in the eighties and nineties, to something a little more tarnished.  In Ireland it was embraced by some elements of society as part of a broader rejection of the incredibly dull and, as it emerged over the nineties, incredibly malign old Ireland.  All to the good, but when multiculturalism is used as a stick to beat people with, its not surprising that, rightly or wrongly, some people might come to resent the stick. In an Irish context some would therefore like to see this modern innovation called multiculturalism rowed back, abolished, handed over to the Dutch.  Except that multiculturalism is nothing new to any country, and certainly not to Ireland.  Just look at the arrival today of Queen Elizabeth, the first British monarch to visit Ireland since 1911.  The official line is that Britain is our neighbour, trading partner and friend and as such a state visit is entirely appropriate.  No argument with that, but it’s a fiction of course that Britain is just another country. The British identity is intermingled with our own.  It was trouble with the Irish (and the Scots) that necessitated the creation of Britain in the first place.  To create a purely Irish, Gaelic identity is possible of course but requires an incredible act of will and asceticism and leaves you with a fundamental contradiction, that an Irish person who doesn’t speak English or listen to British pop music or follow the Premier League is an Irish person who’s quite unlike the average Irish person.  There’s always been more than one culture here.  When the Queen alighted from her flight this afternoon, she seemed I thought genuinely happy to be here. Was it familiarity?  Did the Guard of Honour remind her of her mother’s favourite regiment, the Irish Guards, who carried her coffin to the grave and in whose uniform her grandson got married last month?  When she was shown around the gem of Georgian Dublin, Trinity College, did she think of all those Georges – her ancestors – who give their name to this architecture and in whose great empire the Irish capital was the second city? And what about her favourite sport? You know the one that consists of the British aristocracy, horses and Irishmen?  She may never have been to Ireland before, but who needs to if you go to Cheltenham every March.  Yes, the Queen and Philip are as comfortable with the Irish as most English people are.  And what about us?  We know them well of course, but is there any danger of the respect we intend to show the visiting Royal Family of our neighbours turning to affection, even – perish the thought – nostalgia?  Could we possibly be discovering out inner Brit?  Last week Peter Robinson – a hate figure in the republic twenty five years ago - was re-elected First Minister of Northern Ireland, a respected politician who dedicated his re-election to a murdered Gaelic Football playing Catholic policeman from Tyrone.  With the troubles over, we can in Ireland recognize that cranky, Low Church Ulster Unionist dissenter tradition Robinson comes from as being something which owes much of course to the Cromwellian revolution but which is also a type Irishness, just not the official one.  And maybe that will allow Peter Robinson to discover his inner Irishman.  With the ongoing thaw reinforced by this week’s visit perhaps the Irish and British identities can flow more freely between one another, interact and reveal one of Europe’s great secrets: that the Irish and the British actually get on with each other really well.  Now that’s multiculturalism.  Out of respect to those who are still pretty uncomfortable about today’s proceedings, I won’t label that a good thing, but it's certainly interesting.

Bored to Debt

Ireland's current budget deficit stands at 18 billion Euro.  Do you have any idea how big the number 18 billion is?  It's almost half the total number of times you've heard the words "the banks" in the last three years.  Scary. Ireland’s debt problems are simple to understand and even simpler to solve.  We can’t pay what we owe, so no one will lend to us.  If we renege on the banking debt, then the markets will lend to us again, the economy will return to growth and we’ll be okay.  But then we will have enough money to pay what we owe, and therefore will be expected to pay it back.  This will cripple the economy and we’ll have to renege on our debt, which will allow for sustained growth, which will lead to economic collapse.  I noticed this line from the excellent BBC economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders this week: “Everyone says that heightened talk of a Greek default is proof that last year's bail-out has "failed". But you could make a strong case for the opposite”.  That’s just my problem; it seems you can argue the opposite on everything in the unmerciful crapfest that is our recession.  Our children’s future would be bright if it wasn’t so dark, if we weren’t broke we’d be rich, perhaps we don’t need the money at all and the whole country could tackle the debt within twelve months if we just decided to do without clothes every November.  Worst of all though is that after three years we’re still talking about the crisis, and nothing else.  No matter how bad things get for our country, the overwhelming sensation is a profound, deadening sense of boredom with it all.  No wonder our poor media got a little excited by Morgan Kelly this week.  Think about what it’s like for us journalists, we’ve been reporting the same story for three years, called “You think things are bad now, well listen to this…”  It’s like being asked to report on the Eurovison Song Contest and finding someone has locked the doors behind you.  From this Eurovision, there is no escape.  As succession of incomprehensible Europeans colleagues sing the same horrendous tune over and over again and you’ve got to think of a different way of describing it each time.  So when Morgan Kelly proposed a sort of nuclear option, of course people got excited.  If you had to listen to Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley for three years running and then Cliff Richard came out to sing Congratulations you’d be happy too.  Many commentators delighted in his description of the management of Ireland’s banks as being comprised of "faintly dim rugby players".  I can just picture the yelps of knowing amusement from his academic colleagues enjoying their leafy Saturday morning with the Times.  Now I don’t want to come across all Jim Larkin and that, but, eh, didn’t we know that Ireland's ruling elites were a bit dim?  I mean, isn’t that the point of the mess we’re in?  Like Stephanie Flanders, Morgan Kelly – notwithstanding comparisons this week which made me think of some kind of cross between Christopher Walken and Carol Vorderman - is no doubt is a very capable observer of this mess.  Everything he said could be right, everything could be wrong, I don’t know.  All I know is that his intervention has done nothing to lift my sense of terrified boredom.  I now make a solemn promise never to blog about the banks or Eurovision ever again.  And I'm going to keep the promise about the banks. 

How to get rid of your Royals

Didn’t the British enjoy their Royal Wedding? Much more, I think, than they thought they would.  Part of it was a pay-off for 28 years of inoffensiveness by Prince William.  But there were other pleasant surprises for the British; the street parties, the international coverage, the rediscovery of half-forgotten tradition, the sound of six Rolls Royce Merlin engines flying overhead, the four day weekend, and the bridesmaid’s derriere – if enjoying that was wrong, who wants to be right? Each major Royal occasion in the UK prompts the obligatory lackluster British republican debate. The traditional image of a republican in Ireland is of a scary individual in a beard with possible access to firearms, explosives and/or the Irish language.  In Britain, those identifying themselves as republicans tend to be the kind of pallid figures in corduroys that attend Liberal Democrat party conferences.  As with proportional representation, their views are rational and inarguable but fatally flawed by the fact that nobody cares.  There’s a time to get rid of your Royal Family and the British, I fear, have missed their opportunity and are stuck with the Windsors.  It does prompt the question though, how do you get rid of your Royal Family? It’s not easy, and it requires something more than a clear victory in the Oxford Union debate.  You need the correct set of circumstances: a reactionary king, an angry people and someone with the guts to say the world won’t end if we kill the prognathic bloke in the crown married to his cousin (although sometimes the world does end).  Despite the lobbing off of the head of Louis XVI in 1793, when Europe went to war in 1914, there were just three major republics in the entire continent.  One was the long standing kingless state of Switzerland.  There was also France, obviously, although the monarchy had been restored there after the revolution and would have been brought back again in the 1870’s except the royalist dullards couldn’t agree on their candidate for King.  The other one was Portugal, which had only become a republic in 1910 following the assassination of the King and for good measure, his heir in 1908.  That's the way to do it.  Every other major state was a monarchy, although popular movements had secured varying degrees of parliamentary constraint on their monarch’s prerogatives over the course of the 19^th Century.  Still, for many getting rid of the king was a frightening prospect. The First World War awoke in mainstream public opinion the disturbing but perhaps also thrilling realization that those who ruled over them were at best stupid, at worst criminally insane.  The three major monarchs were dethroned at the end of it.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in 1914 the world’s powerful warlord, was sent to grow vegetables in Holland by a population stunned to be defeated at the end of so costly a war.  He blamed the Jews.  Karl of Austria-Hungary, a well-meaning mediocrity, was told to leave Austria and so repeatedly asked the Hungarians if he could be their king instead.  He was repeatedly turned down and died in exile.  Russian communists didn’t do exile.  Their emperor was gunned down with his entire family by the Bolsheviks who, true to their creed of equality, would spend much of the next thirty years killing families throughout Russia.  Czar Nicholas II had been hopelessly out of his depth, but remains an unsympathic figure.  Better men that him died in the First World War.  The Balkan states had relatively new royal families, most of them cheap German imports, and as such unreliable and likely to break down.  The politically interfering Greek Royal family were on and off the throne more often than a prince with the runs on his wedding day.  They were finally given their marching orders in 1974.  The Greeks had one popular king, Alexander, but, inevitably perhaps, he died defending his dog from two monkeys.  The royal families of Bulgaria and Romania were turfed out by the communists, which, along with the boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest, remains the only truly popular action taken by the communists in their forty years in power.  The Serbian Royal family was also abolished by the communists, but they had already felt the wrath of the people in the past.  King Alexander of Serbia made all the wrong moves attempting to reverse the tentative liberalism of the emerging state.  In 1903, at the instigation of the Black Hand (the terrorist organization that brought you the First World War) he was hunted down by a mob in his palace and stabbed to death with his wife, disemboweled and thrown onto a pile of manure – now who wants to do that to Wills and Kate?  Probably the last significant political decision taken by a monarch in Europe was the complete opposite situation, where the king lined up with the democrats against reactionaries.  Juan Carlos had only been handed back the throne of Spain by an aging Franco in the hope that he would help maintain the latter's unique brand of Catholic Fascism.  Juan Carlos instead allowed democratization. In 1981 the Civil Guard attempted to launch a coup when Juan Carlos told them to cop themselves on.  The coup failed and the King was feted throughout Spain.  Fair play you might think, but JC had only to look at his eminently more sensible protestant compatriots to the north in Britain, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.  They had allowed their political power to atrophy over the centuries to the point where they were too inoffensive to depose.  Like a boring dinner guest, people will put up with them as long as they behave and bring the wine, or the case of a royal family, the odd public holiday.  For keeping quiet, the royal families of Europe get to lead a fabulously and anachronistically privileged lifestyle. Nice.

Bin Gone

Maybe the dancing in the streets was a little inappropriate but the death of Osama Bin Laden must be cathartic for most Americans.  He was a bona fide villain for the US, the last foreigner responsible for the deaths of so many Americans in their own country was George III, but I don’t think The Madness of Osama Bin Laden is a likely Oscar contender in two hundred years time.  There are few who’ll mourn his death, those that do have their own corners of the internet to do so.  However there is a significant portion of world opinion which objects to any form of American military action, regardless of who it’s against or what motivates it – one of the long-term consequences I think of Vietnam (not finding weapons of mass destruction doesn’t help).  Disdain at the news seems to have emerged in two forms; first that this action will do nothing to combat the causes of terrorism, or second, that the whole story is a fabrication. The internet is the natural home of the Conspiracy Theorist and insisting that this event didn’t happen is a believable option for many.  Conspiracy Theorists seem to inhabit a Cartesian nightmare where no perceptions can be trusted and reality can only be understood by the stuff that’s in your head.  I was tempted to blog about Descartes but his Meditations cause the same kind of headaches one experiences trying to figure out the sequence of events in the Back to the Future trilogy, so I gave up.  The other issue, that terrorism is caused by injustice and inequality, a point alluded to by our own Taoiseach today, is an easier one to address.  Terror isn’t always caused by injustice.  One of the first modern terrorist campaigns was conducted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s and 1870s as a direct reaction against the imposition of justice, i.e. fair treatment of former slaves.  The men in white hoods fought the US Civil War all over again and this time won, condemning generations of black Americans to a condition not much improved on slavery.  Of course the KKK perceived an injustice, but they were wrong.  It is the ugly truth that sometimes terrorism is a poor man’s way of fighting a war; partisan groups fighting the Nazis were regarded by their enemies as terrorists, the ANC were branded terrorists and not just by white South Africa, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a party founded by Menachem Begin, a man who by modern standards must be regarded as a terrorist.  In fact every guerrilla campaign – including Ireland in the 1920’s - contains elements of terrorism, it is up to supporters to decide if these tactics are justified or not, or if they can ever be justified.  But surely Bin Laden is a much simpler case? Take the regimes which harboured him, Sudan and Afghanistan.  Fighting injustice? Really?  Sudan is one of the few counties in the world which tacitly allows slavery and has spent most of the last twenty years engaged in a racist genocide on its own people.  Taliban Afghanistan we all know about, the treatment of women, the closure of schools, the destruction of culture, the public executions.  I can’t see the concern for the little guy from Bin Laden which naturally comes out of, for example, Che Guevara (who was considered a terrorist by his enemies and was more than capable of a cold-blooded killing or two).  In fact, there were few people murdered on 9/11 who grew up with the level of privilege enjoyed by Osama Bin Laden, certainly none of the muslims his followers killed that day.  The killers themselves were similarly from well-to-do backgrounds.  Now there’s no reason a rich person can’t look at the world and decide to tackle its injustices, and do so effectively. But growing up in a wealthy family and then dedicating your life to increasingly nihilistic killing under the vague cover of some bizarre interpretation of Islam is very hard to fit into a narrative about “injustice”.  Whether it makes the world a safer place remains to be seen, I suspect not, but I also suspect I could be wrong – that’s a journalist for you.  Either way, good riddance.