The Sum of All Fears

“ … the only thing we have to fear is fear itself …”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address (1933)

 "There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."

H. L. Menken, The Divine Afflatus (1917)

Let me begin here with an admission: When I look at our world today, at the end of 2015, I am afraid.

I am not afraid of terrorists, Islamic or otherwise. They want me to be afraid – that’s what terrorists do, attempt to incite terror. I know that there is an infinitesimal chance that I, or someone close to me, may become their victim; we may be in the busy centre of a large European city, or on an aeroplane – just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could also be driving along the motorway/highway/autobahn when some confused or crazy fool comes shooting onto it through the exit ramp. Or I could just be struck by lightning. But I repeat, I am not afraid of terrorists; I refuse to grant them this power over me. They are attacking the values of the open society in which I live. The vulnerability we have towards their attacks – despite all the reasonable security measures in place – is the inevitable price we pay for the values of openness and tolerance which are at the foundation of any society which truly claims to be civilized.

I am not afraid of migrants, be they refugees fleeing from war or persecution, or so-called “economic” migrants, those prepared to uproot themselves, abandon their homes, families and friends, give up everything they know in order to seek a better future for themselves and their children. I realise that their arrival will challenge the country, culture and society in which I live. But I believe that this challenge can be fruitful, creative and positive if we face up to it with courage, honesty, openness, and generosity. I accept that the arrival of larger groups of migrants will change the culture in which I live; that there will be an inevitable interaction and mingling between my (Western European) culture and the different life-experiences and traditions that these migrants bring with them. But cultures are and have always been dynamic and fluid realities, constantly shifting, and frothing, and mixing, and growing. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do with a pizza, or a vanilla latté, my grandmother would have been scandalised by Madonna and Lady Gaga, or the use of the word “fuck” on prime-time TV.

I am not afraid of Islam. I don’t much like it, but then a general attitude of scepticism and suspicion regarding all religions has been growing continuously in me in the past decades. There are aspects of Islam, particularly the ambivalence regarding violence towards non-believers in many places in the Quran, which I find disturbing. (On the other hand, there are passages of the Old Testament which aren’t particularly edifying in this sense either.) I find the cultural misogyny of most Islamic determined traditions deeply distasteful. But I am also aware that the Christian and other religious traditions have anything but a pristine history when it comes to their treatment of women – and that not all of these historic attitudes have been left behind. I believe that secularism and the freedom to believe and practice religion (in so far as this practice does not restrict the freedom of others) are some more of those basic values I mentioned earlier, those foundational values of civilized society. As long as its practitioners accept these basic values, any religion, no matter how idiotic it may seem, can be practiced in a free society. Ultimately, I believe, the basic values of the secular, open, and free society will prevail over backward-looking, exclusivist, chauvinist and fundamentalist versions of every religion, though it may take generations. And that includes Islam.

 As long, of course, as we hold fast to those values, born in the Enlightenment and matured – with much struggle and suffering – primarily in Europe and North America – in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries; openness, tolerance, secularism, participation, democracy, civil rights, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, freedom of thought and expression, a critical press, the social securing of the basics necessary for life.

But as I look around the world at the end of 2015, these are the values which I see increasingly under threat. And not only that, they are being challenged and scraped away bit by bit in their original heartlands; Europe and North America.

It is this of which I am afraid. I take Roosevelt’s observation seriously. For what I perceive increasingly in the past year is a growth of uncertainty and fear in our society. I am becoming more afraid of fear itself; more specifically of the exploitation of that fear and the consequences of that exploitation.

Living in the centre of Europe I don’t have to look far to see it. There’s Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey. Closer to home, to the east there are Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński and his PiS party in Poland. Looking west, Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France and UKIP in Great Britain. And all the other populist right-wing demagogues in many other European countries. In this context – despite the perennial tendency of US Americans to perceive their culture as exceptional – Donald Trump is also just another confirmation of a widespread trend in the developed democracies. Here in Germany, where Angela Merkel has taken a courageous stand on the question of migrants (and if you’d told me a year ago that I would find myself praising the German chancellor I’d have replied with an expletive!) and where the country has provided a safe haven for a million people this year, Pegida and the Alternative für Deutschland have been gaining in popularity.

Despite all their particularist agendas, all of these various obnoxious figures are pretty much carbon copies of each other. All feed off and exploit the same fear that is widely present in our societies. This fear has many sources, but basically it is rooted in the apprehension many (particularly those who are less educated) feel when faced with a world in which change is all prevailing, in which the shape of the future appears to be less certain and more threatening. The demagogues all put forward the same kind of analyses and strategies; retrenchment, stigmatization and persecution of those who are obviously other, building walls and fences, narrow nationalist pride, appeals to cultural (and often religious) chauvinism.

They are all offering (to paraphrase Menken) simple and easy solutions for complex problems. These solutions are not only wrong, they are dangerous. For, playing to and exploiting the inchoate fears widely present in our societies, they deny the enlightenment values which are the fundament of our societies, appealing instead to emotional irrationalities. To anyone with any sense of the sorry history of the 20^th Century it should be obvious where this leads. Make no mistake, my friends, even if these people are democratically elected, even if they keep the forms of democracy in the countries they control, regularly having themselves re-elected, they are proponents of an evil the world has already seen too much of. Putin, Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Kaczyński, Farage, Erdogan and all the others are proponents of what might best be described as fascism lite. And they are quite prepared to use many of the techniques perfected by their predecessors. To give but one example, all of them are prepared to publicly trumpet untruths and continue to do so, even when these statements have been repeatedly rationally proved to be untrue. Both Hitler and Goebbels described this strategy as “the big lie.”

So, faced with this resurgence of irrational, dangerous, fascist demagoguery, what can we do? How should we, in our ordinary little lives, react to this exploitation of fear which will, if it continues to grow, destroy the fundamental values of the societies in which we live?

 "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," is a quotation usually attributed to Edmund Burke, though in this form it goes back to Tolstoy. No matter, it gives us a strategy for responding to these attempts (far more dangerous than anything ISIS can do) to destroy the character of our societies. We must respond immediately to the facile, dangerous lies put about by these fear mongers wherever we encounter them; from friends, family members, work colleagues, acquaintances; at home, at work, in the bus, in the pub, on Facebook. Many of us are just too polite, or too apprehensive of conflict, or just too lazy (I know that all these reasons frequently apply to me) to engage here, to get involved. But, I am becoming increasingly convinced, the failure to contradict the nasty simplistic views, grown in fear and cultivated in ignorance by neo-fascist ideologues, only leads to their growth and spread. If they are not countered, they will lead us into a new Dark Age.

Images retrieved from: 

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/06/26/fear-used-turn-spirituality/ 

http://ntrsctn.com/irl/2015/09/throw-things-at-donald-trum-in-new-game-trumpealo 

  

The Sad, Mad World we Live in

Do you know the feeling, that feeling of anger and disgust at the amount of fucked-up stupidity, evil and hopelessness in the world?

Today a couple of (almost certainly) Islamicist fanatic terrorists attacked the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people. There is video coverage online of two gunmen shooting a policeman down in the street and then finishing the execution with a headshot, even as the man on the ground raises a hand, possibly in a last plea for mercy. It’s horrific in its brutality so I’m not going to post a link to the video itself here. The photo shows enough.

Charlie Hebdo is not a particularly pleasant newspaper; but that’s not what its makers want it to be. It is relentlessly satirical, regards nothing as sacred, and is prepared to lampoon anyone and anything in the news, be they pope, prophet or president, moron, mullah, or messiah. That’s their job as they see it. And it’s their right in a free, pluralistic, secular society. If you don’t like what they publish you don’t have to buy it or read it. If you feel personally damaged by something they publish you can sue them. That’s the way a civilized society works, particularly a civil society which sees freedom of expression and the press as a basic value.

One result of this barbaric event will certainly be calls from the populist (partly proto-fascist) right in France (led, no doubt, by Marine Le Pen and the Front National) and worldwide for clampdowns on Islam, and Islamic foreigners, and foreigners generally; migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The usual cacophony of ignorance, fear- and hate-mongering. Indeed, this may have been one of the perverted, calculated aims of the mad, evil bastards who planned and carried out the attack.

Here in Germany in the past number of weeks we’ve been treated to the dubious spectacle of thousands of ignoramuses marching every Monday night in the streets of Dresden under the banner of a strange organisation calling itself PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West]. According to the Saxon Interior Ministry in 2010 0.1% (around 4,000) of the population of Saxony (of which Dresden is the capital) describe themselves as Muslims [Source: Spiegel Online]. Biiiiig threat. Last Monday night, as a sign of some hope for sanity in my adopted home-country, thousands of people marched in Cologne, just a few miles down the road from me, in favour of tolerance and an open society. Cologne has 120,000 Muslims out of a population of around a million. For those who can’t do the math, that’s 12%. Around a hundred times higher than in Saxony.  

Personally, I’m not a great fan of Islam. But then, I’m not a great fan of evangelical Protestantism, traditionalist Catholicism, neo-liberal free-market capitalism, or Justin Biber either. This nevertheless doesn’t mean that I would ever contemplate or tolerate any calls for or moves to forbid people their right to believe whatever they want to and to freely profess and express those beliefs, however idiotic I may consider them to be. This freedom is one of the constituting principles of a humane civil society. It goes further; even people who profess beliefs abhorrent to these constituting principles – like, I am forced to conclude, quite a number of those marching in Dresden – have a guaranteed right to do so, as long as they don’t resort to violence, or incitement to violence, against others. That’s what a humane civil society has to be able to tolerate and, I have no doubt, any healthy civil society is well able to withstand the irritation caused by such misguided fools.

Of course, that does imply that those of us (the vast majority, I like to think) who value these basic principles of humane civility sometimes have to speak out for them and defend them.

A journalist friend just told me the story of an initial interview she did this afternoon. It was with a young man who’s been in Germany for four years now. He was born in one of those war-torn countries we frequently hear of in the news but his family fled terror and conflict when he was a child, finishing up in Iran. He spent seventeen years there and managed to obtain a degree in computer-programming before realising that, as a stateless person with no official identity-papers, he had no future in the mullah-dominated Islamic Republic. His mother sold the last of her jewels to provide the necessary money and he (alone of his family) made a long, dangerous, illegal journey, culminating in a frightening boat-trip across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece before finally ending up here in Germany four years ago.

In Germany he has the status of a tolerated (but not recognised) asylum seeker. He still has no legal papers, so that his “official” status, such as it is, can be described as stateless. Inquiries at the embassy of his native country have resulted in no practical prospects of ever getting a passport. He is given enough to live on – barely – in Germany. He is not allowed to work, although he has good training in a field where his skills are demanded everywhere. His freedom of movement here in the country is extremely uncertain, since he has no official papers. Without them he cannot open a bank account or make a contract for telephone and internet access with a telecommunications provider. He spends his life in fear of police controls, of suddenly being thrown out of the country. He has little hope for the future and has been suffering – increasingly – from depression.

No wonder.

This is one of those people the fools in Dresden seem to be protesting about. This is one of those people who will be regarded with increased suspicion and even hatred as a result of the brutality of the terrorists in Paris today.

This is someone who only wants to live an ordinary life, someone with the skills and potential to offer a positive contribution to any society which would welcome him.

The way our world is so screwed up, it doesn’t look like he’ll be welcomed anywhere.

That humane civil society I was defending earlier in this essay still has a long way to go.

Picture source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-magazine-paris-office-attack-leaves-casualties/  

Ukraine: Conflicting Narratives

“Narrative” has become one of those buzz-words or buzz-concepts which one cannot avoid nowadays. At its most basic, it simply means “story”; in the more precise cultural context in which it is generally used, it is a story told or shared within a group as an instrument to define a common reality, or at least perception of reality (whether in fact there is any difference between these two is a more complex philosophical question I have no intention of going into here). The following is an attempt to analyse the current situation in and around the Ukraine with the help of this concept.

The Conventional Wisdom Narrative

This is the one that that is prevalent in the West – in the US and (maybe somewhat less stridently) Europe. The Ukraine is a democratic post-Soviet country where the majority of the population wants more distance from an aggressive, powerful neighbour, which used to be its imperial master, and therefore wants to orientate itself more towards the West. In this, the Ukrainians are simply following the course already taken by other former parts of the Soviet Empire in the past twenty five years. All the former Warsaw pact countries, as well as the three Baltic republics, are now members of both the EU and NATO. They have been able to take advantage of the freedom they (re)gained following the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the nineties to reposition themselves as part of the “free” world, developing and deepening their democratic, economic, political and social structures to integrate themselves into the new European model which has brought such prosperity, stability, and democratic standards to those countries which have embraced it since WWII.

All the majority of Ukrainians want is to follow the same course. But Russia won’t let them. It has been consistently trying to destabilise (with varying degrees of success and failure) every attempt the Ukraine has made in the past twenty years to position itself in the western camp. Putin sees the Ukraine as an essential part of the Russian sphere of influence and is not prepared to accept, under any circumstances, a reorientation of the Ukraine towards the Western block.

During the chaos following the fall of the pro-Russian Yanukovych government at the beginning of this year, Putin judged the situation favourable for more direct action and, basically, annexed the Crimea. Though the West condemned this, there seems to have been a fair deal of international understanding for this move. The majority in the Crimea is pro-Russian, Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian. The Crimea is of major strategic importance for Russia – particularly with regard to naval emplacement in the Black Sea – and there had been special status agreements regarding Russian military interests there ever since Ukrainian independence.

Encouraged by the Crimean experience (which, he judges, he had basically got away with), Putin has now decided to repeat this process for the whole of the Eastern Ukraine, where there is much stronger (possibly even majority) support among the population for a pro-Russian course. As a result, he has been covertly – and increasingly overtly – supporting separatists in this area, who have declared the independence of the region from the Ukraine. This support has included weapons and weapons-systems, (almost certainly) military advisors, and (probably) troops. This is the kind of stuff that’s difficult to control tightly. On July 17 a group of separatists almost certainly used a military-grade anti-aircraft system to shoot down a Malaysia Airline jet, killing 298 innocent people, probably because they thought it was a Ukrainian Air Force fighter. Put bluntly, they fucked up, probably because they weren’t sufficiently trained, weren’t patched into the intelligence air-traffic control systems which would have told them that the plane they were aiming at was a civilian one, and/or were possibly even drunk.

This put Putin in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice; he never wanted this. Damage control swung into place, the Buk anti-aircraft battery used to shoot down the plane was swiftly disappeared back into Russia, jubilant posts on the web were quickly deleted (though not quickly enough), and a whole plethora of smoke-screening diplomatic, media, and PR-spin measures have been put into place.

Following the conventional wisdom narrative, my take on Putin’s tactics is this: The Crimea is essential to Russian interests, he wanted it, he got it, and he’s going to keep it. I also feel that the West (and even the Ukraine) has generally been prepared to accept this. As far as the Eastern Ukraine is concerned, my suspicion is that, while he might like to have it, he’s not set on it. Keeping some low-level conflict going there, stirring the pot, keeping the general chaos level up, is probably sufficient for him. It keeps the whole Ukraine unstable, blocks any real movement to cement the country into the Western alliance and means the levels of tension with the West won’t rise above a controllable volume. The US and EU will scream and complain and will do some little PR-spin economic sanctions (which will hurt Russia a bit, but they’re worth it from his point of view). The situation remains fluid, so he still has some freedom to act and react, depending on the way the situation develops. The downing of Flight MH17 disturbs this strategy, it ups the ante for him to a level which is uncomfortable. So I would expect the Russian position in the wake of this murderous disaster in the next weeks and months to be a mixture of obfuscation, half-assed cooperation, talking things up, playing things down, introducing red herrings and pink elephants; generally muddying the waters and judiciously stirring the shit until things simmer down.

Of course, all of this is set within the Conventional Wisdom Narrative. It’s even all true. But it’s only one narrative.

The Russian Counter-Narrative

There was a Cold War and Russia (in its Soviet iteration) lost. The whole of the Eastern European buffer-zone (aka Warsaw pact) and the Baltic Republics, which the Soviet Union occupied to protect the Rodina [the “Motherland”, a Russian expression of identity, almost mystical in its cultural and nationalist meaning], are now all firmly part of the Western sphere of influence. Russia has historically suffered on an almost unimaginable scale as a result of aggressive invasion from the West. Tens of millions of Russians have been killed and huge destruction has been wrought on them, from Napoleon to Hitler. The basic Western attitude to Russia historically has been to regard them as sub-human, Asiatic barbarians, who don’t really belong in what Gorbachev (in his boundless naïveté) called the “Common European House”.

The West simply cannot be trusted. Its leaders speak in fulsome tones about values such as freedom, democracy, and self-determination and then aggressively proceed, under cover of these phrases, to follow their deeper instinct to keep Russia weak, perhaps even destroy it completely.

In the negotiations about German reunification, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West made solemn promises to the Soviets.  "The Americans promised that Nato wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted." (Michael Gorbachev, 2008).

But the losses following the end of the Cold War go far deeper. Not only were the strategically necessary Soviet conquests in Eastern Europe gone, the losses were even greater. From Peter the Great onwards, Russia had followed a consistent path to push Christian civilization and values eastwards, in the Caucasus, Central Asia and further. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Siberia were all conquered, settled and civilized by the Tsarist Empire. What the United States had seen and realised as Manifest Destiny to the west, Russia had done eastwards. Only (unlike the US), this had never been accepted by the rest of the residents of the Common European House. Russia was not seen as expanding European values eastwards, rather as building up a dangerous barbarian Asian-infested imperium to threaten the real Europe from the East. All these 18^th and 19^th Century Russian conquests, with the exception of Siberia, are now lost. The scale of the secession of all these former Soviet Republics from Russian hegemony has only one modern historical parallel; the attempted secession of the Confederate States of America from the Union in 1861 (and we all know what that led to).

And that’s not all. The original heartland of Russia is not just Moscow-based Russia, but rather, from the very beginning, a kind of federation of three closely-related proto-nations; Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. The origin of later Muscovy and subsequent Russia, is, historically, Kievan Rus’ (9^th Century). In an exercise of (from the Russian point of view) desperate damage limitation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus could ultimately be stabilised under the firmly pro-Russian dictatorship of Lukashenko (1994). Despite continuous Russian attempts, a similar stabilisation of the Ukraine within the Russian orbit has not been possible.

From a Russian point of view, the role of the West in all this has been deeply suspect. At best, the West has been cheering on all the centrifugal tendencies within the former Soviet/Russian Unity from the side-lines. There is a widespread – indeed almost general – perception among Russians that the West has actually been actively encouraging and fomenting every possible movement towards fragmentation, when and wherever they occur. This is not simply paranoia; the involvement of a plethora of Western groups (with clear pro-Western agendas) within the former Soviet hegemony, and particularly the Ukraine, is generally accepted and well documented. To this has to be added the enthusiastic involvement of all sorts of Western business (and state-supported) interests in the massive garage-sale/robbery of practically all the national resources of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the chaos of the Yeltsin years, which led to a transformation from a state-owned to an oligarchy-owned economy in less than a decade, the consequences of which Russia is still attempting to deal with – or just live with.

This is the background to the Putin era and is essential to any understanding of where Russians are today. It explains a lot about how Putin understands himself and the goals he sets for the country he rules. It explains why Russians tend to perceive anything coming from the West (apart from consumer goods which you can buy and own) with the deepest suspicion and cynicism. It also explains Putin’s enduring popularity with the great majority of Russians. Faced with a collective psyche deeply traumatised by what his people experience as defeat, humiliation, and betrayal by the West, he’s giving them back their dignity; a sense of strength. And worth. Balm for a badly wounded soul.

Is it then any surprise that ordinary Russians are willing to believe the spin/propaganda put out by the overwhelmingly state-controlled media in their country since the current Ukrainian crisis gathered momentum? That they accept the official line that the present regime in Kiev is fascist? That dark, abstruse conspiracy theories about sinister US-agency involvement in the downing of flight MH17 are given widespread credence?

Such narratives of cultural identification are immensely powerful. For those who identify with them they supply a coherent world-view, they provide a conceptual framework which allows both  individuals and groups to define themselves and relate to the chaotic, complex wider world in which they find themselves. We all have our narratives, for the simplest and most fundamental of all is the individual personal biography, merging into family narratives, the stories which express the experiences of particular communities, moving into all sorts of larger-scale instruments of group identity such as religions and nations. They bind stories of the past, value systems and questions of the present, shared vocabularies, dialects and languages, common ways of seeing the world and interpreting individual and shared experiences to provide those contextual structures of meaning which we all need at a basic level to define our very identity.

 Narratives are also wonderfully and necessarily flexible. They are not monolithic. We all identify with and buy into multiple narratives, which – and this is centrally important – need not be consistent with each other. So, to give just one example, there are many people who manage to combine a particular fundamentalist Christian world-view with a scientific one, so that they can simultaneously work, say, as molecular biologists while denying evolution.

This particular example also offers a good illustration of how important and powerful narratives can seem to be completely resistant to what others, who do not subscribe to them, regard as self-evident “facts”. No matter how much “evidence” you bring, you will not be able to bring a creationist, whose world-view is based on a particular religious narrative which is a central element in that person’s self-identification, to abandon his position in favour of an understanding of the world based on evolutionary processes going back for billions of years. And such considerations also help to explain just how difficult it would be to persuade the majority of Russians that their perception of the “realities” of the current Ukrainian conflict, and particularly the destruction of MH17, is “wrong”.

The Realpolitik Narrative

This is the starting point and context for those who regard themselves as illusionless realists. They are adherents of a narrative encapsulated by such expressions as, “Politics is the art of the possible” (Bismarck), “France has no friends, only interests” (de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston on England), or “Those who have visions should go to the doctor” (Helmut Schmidt). It tells the story of a world where the ultimate reality is a social-Darwinist one, going all the way back to Thucydides’ famous description of the Athenian position in the History of the Peloponnesian War, “the strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must”.

Certainly this narrative is one of those which inspires Vladimir Putin. Following its premises, the most likely future scenario looks much better for the Russian position than the Ukrainian one. For all the platitudes being spouted in the EU about the primacy of international law, its members will do nothing serious to change the current status quo, one in which Russia has grabbed the Crimea and may even possibly go on to occupy additional territory in the Eastern Ukraine, or at least control it by proxy through a Russian-supported separatist regime.

There are already some indications of this. Despite economic sanctions being talked-up at the moment, France is still going ahead with the delivery of Mistral amphibious assault ships to the Russian navy. But the real test of principles against interests will develop in the coming months, particularly if Russia maintains its current aggressive position. At the moment, the EU imports around a third of its natural gas and oil from Russia. Germany’s dependence is even greater (36% of natural gas and 39% of oil). Expanding sanctions to cover this area – something that would genuinely hurt Russia – would mean the EU would have to put its money where its mouth is. Higher prices at filling stations would certainly be one result. Literally hundreds of millions of EU citizens heat their homes and power their workplaces with natural gas, a significant amount of which is imported directly by pipelines from Russia. (Just to make the situation even more complicated, the most important pipeline runs through the Ukraine.) Would anyone like to bet what would happen to Angela Merkel’s currently high popularity ratings in Germany if home heating prices rise sharply this winter or (worst-case scenario) the situation so deteriorates that no gas flows from Russia, the winter is particularly long and cold, the gas reserves are used up, and rationing has to be introduced? And this doesn’t even address the question of what consequences real economic sanctions on Russia (and Russia’s reactions to these) would have on a world economy still in a state of precarious, fragile recovery from the disaster of the Crash of 2008.

Are the leaders of the western democracies, compelled as they are to win elections at regular intervals, prepared to gamble their popularity and positions for the sake of principles? How important are the international rights of a former Soviet republic to the citizens of the West, compared with their economic well-being and comforts? How long will the shock and indignation at the killing of a few hundred plane passengers last before our short attention spans are diverted to the next crisis or scandal, driven as we are by a continuous, ubiquitous media frenzy for the next new big story?

The Realpolitik narrative teaches that interests always trump principles, that bread and circuses are always more important to the masses, and that public opinion is always infinitely malleable. The reality of the world is that it spins, and the only thing you really have to do is to make sure that your spin works.

And, anyway, nearly all the real power in the world belongs to a tiny elite of the super-rich who use their wealth to consolidate, maintain and increase their position and privileges. This is also part of the defining reality of human existence; it has always, basically, been this way and there are no good reasons to assume that it will ever substantially be different. Revolutions and upheavals may sporadically occur, but such wobbles in the basic spin of the world correct themselves relatively quickly and everything reverts to business-as-usual.

Awareness of multiple narratives

The narratives I have outlined here are not the only ones relevant to the current crisis in and about the Ukraine; I have not, for example, delineated the Ukrainian Narrative, a central one for any complete understanding of the situation there. There is also a Polish Narrative which has some significance.  I have especially avoided the Moral Narrative (which is related to but not identical with the International Law Narrative) since the complexity of that particular story would at least double the length of an essay which already threatens to be too long.

The important point is that in every complex human situation, particularly where differences and conflicts are involved, there are multiple narratives and that these narratives can be (and usually are) simultaneously contradictory and true. A realisation of this is essential for any attempt at conflict resolution. It also moves the work of conflict resolution beyond the search for simple compromise on the level of a lowest common denominator towards a search for some kind of metanarrative which can encompass the most important elements of all the narratives involved.

Writing this as I do in the summer of 2014, my thoughts inevitably turn back a hundred years, to the summer of 1914. Anyone reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a magnificent account of the beginning of World War I, cannot fail to be struck by the parallels between the aftermath of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, and the aftermath of the downing of Flight MH17. Very few people, particularly those who were responsible for making the crucial decisions, really wanted war in 1914. They all thought that they could manage a situation of brinkmanship. That the world stumbled into a cataclysmic conflict was in no small part due to the inability of the major responsible actors to realise the strength of all the other narratives which were not their own.

It is a lesson we would do well to remember.

Images retrieved from:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/07/19/article-2698106-1FCCB86300000578-472_634x423.jpg
http://escapekappertisle.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/putin-in-mother-russia-poster-2322.jpg?w=640
http://i.cbc.ca/1.2710270.1405693912!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/image.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518lVu-hASL._SY300_.jpg

   

The Debt Crisis

If there is one issue more than any other which has been exercising the public consciousness for the past four years, it has to be the question of debt.

From the bursting of the US property bubble, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the systemic threat of a global banking failure in 2008, through the first measures taken by many governments, individually and collectively, to try to head of that danger, to the current, deep-seated crisis in the Euro-zone, the theme of debt – public and private – has dominated world thinking, doings and commenting constantly, obsessively.

With serious consequences for millions; whether dispossessed hopeless home-owners in the USA, pensioners in Greece, or the more than half of the Spanish population between 18 and 30 who are currently unemployed. The “markets” are uneasy and, apparently, when “markets” are uneasy, the little people worldwide suffer.

I am reminded of nothing so much as the stereotypes of fearful, primitive, superstitious civilisations in bad adventure novels, where the natives, threatened with the outbreak of catastrophe, are convinced that they have become victims of the anger of the gods. Indeed, the analogy can be developed farther, for the general reaction of the natives in such pot-boilers is to offer ever more and ever more costly sacrifices to these angry gods, to try to propitiate them, before finally reaching the inevitable ghastly conclusion that nothing less than the sacrifice of their own children will serve to (possibly) appease the divine anger.

Substitute markets for gods in the previous paragraph and you get a description of the world of 2012.

In the past couple of months, I have intended many times to write something about this theme here. The reason I have not, up to now, is that I have a deep suspicion that most of the discussions being carried out on the subject are based on misrepresentations, subterfuges, and downright cynical lies. I am prepared to accept that many of those involved are sincere and genuinely believe the arguments they are making – but I am becoming more and more certain that most of those who really matter know that much of what they are saying is no more than platitudinous window-dressing and that they well recognise, at a deeper level, what it is really about … the retention, protection, and even expansion of power and wealth in the hands of those who have it, whatever the cost to those who do not have it.

Writing over 2,400 years ago, the famous Greek historian, Thucydides, records how the more powerful Athenians expressed their view of the world to the weaker Melians on demanding their surrender, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Since then, despite all kinds of declarations of rights and facades of agreements and legality, very little has changed.

There is a conventional view of the current ongoing global crisis and, on the basis of this view, it’s fairly easy to describe what’s going on. For various reasons – to which nobody pays much attention now – speculative trading of finance products got out of control. The result was a bubble which burst, the crash of a few financial institutions and the threat of a crash in the whole banking sector in 2008. To avert this, most sovereign states intervened, providing billions of tax-payers’ money to prop up the banks and keep the whole system going (or at least limping). The new atmosphere of sobriety and financial rectitude focussed increased attention on the deficits and borrowing debts of those sovereign states – deficits which had had to be drastically increased to provide the money to prevent the banks from failing. The “markets” became increasingly nervous about the dependability of those sovereign debts, with the result that costs of servicing such debt rose steeply for a number of countries, thus putting ever more pressure on their “real” economies, which weakened their position even further in the eyes of the markets. A vicious circle.

This problem became particularly acute in Europe, where a large number of countries within the EU had adopted a common currency, the Euro, over a decade ago. The euro had brought considerable prosperity for its members – particularly those with strong export-based economies – by significantly simplifying trade, both between its members and with the wider world. But it also created a one-size-fits-all monetary situation for the member countries and the pressures caused by the financial crisis exacerbated hidden fault-lines enormously. Countries like Greece and Ireland could conceivably have eased their situation somewhat by currency devaluation, but such devaluation was not in the interest of other countries such as Finland, Luxemburg, Austria and, above all, Germany. Ireland, for example, could have let some of its banks fail and default, but, as these debts were practically all held in Wall Street, the City of London and Frankfurt thus potentially putting the powerful economies of the US, UK and Germany under pressure, this wasn’t allowed either. The Irish were told to unconditionally guarantee the debts of their – private – banks and the then Irish government, terrified at the prospect of being otherwise abandoned by its international “friends,” meekly complied.

For nearly three years now, the Euro-zone has been trying to deal with a situation in which the debt problems (which have different causes in each country) in Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy are putting the common currency under continual pressures of all kinds on the markets, thus exposing all the other member countries to major risk. All sorts of imagery is used to describe what’s going on, the most popular one being that taken from the language of illness – the threat of “contagion.” Or the other hoary old image, beloved of proponents of the Vietnam War nearly fifty years ago, the “domino theory.” A full-scale collapse in Greece, or Spain, or Italy, would serve to knock down the economies of all the other Euro-members, even the strongest, and rapidly lead to world-wide economic recession and ultimate collapse, the scale of which would make 2008 look like an insignificant blip on the line of global progress. Europe and the world are under threat of economic Armageddon and the only way to stave this off is to get the rampant sovereign debt problem somehow “under control.”

So there has been an ongoing series of frantic conferences, and bail-out measures, and stability mechanisms, and fiscal pacts, and injections of billions by the European Central Bank, etc., etc., etc. Three countries (Greece, Portugal and Ireland) have been put into a kind of international receivership and the domestic measures their partners (and the world in general, as represented by the IMF, which is one of the “receivers”) are demanding as conditions for their continual financial support, mean that their citizens – particularly their poorest citizens – are suffering badly. And the generally touted fear is that Spain or Italy could be next; in contrast to the three already hospitalised patients, economies “too large to fail.”

And still, despite all the measures taken so far, the mighty markets are still not impressed and the Euro members are divided on the question of what sacrificial offering might suffice to appease these gods and make them mild and gentle-mannered; even more austerity, measures to stimulate growth, Euro-bonds, the expulsion of Greece from the common currency …?

I am becoming increasingly convinced that all of this is just … pardon my French … bullshit.

I do not believe that it will be possible to solve the various problems besetting the global economy in any kind of enduring fashion using any of the various tools or mechanisms suggested, because the system is fundamentally broken. It has, in fact, been basically flawed all along, because it is based on axioms and assumptions which have no foundations, which have never applied, and which are nonetheless generally presented and accepted as being unquestionably true and self-evident.

Markets are natural and, in general, self-regulating.

The price of something is its value.

The basis of relations between people is one of exchange, with each party primarily pursuing his/her own (material) advantage.

Exchange usually makes everyone happy; everyone wins, nobody loses.

The fundamental principle of morality is that one should always pay one’s debts.

Our basic nature is one of lonely autonomy and our social relations and networks are secondary, conditional and ephemeral.

Everything is quantifiable.

Money “works” and can thus, somehow, increase itself.

Continuous growth is perpetually possible – even on a finite planet with, ultimately, limited resources.

These are the basic premises on which the so-called science of “economics” is based. They are all statements which can legitimately be challenged and, indeed, would be denied by most of us with respect to the way we live our everyday lives with families, loved ones, friends, neighbours, colleagues and communities.

How do you pay your debt to your parents, who gave you life and cared for you – not only materially – until you were able to stand on your own feet? How do you quantify kindness, or love, or beauty, or joy? Can you change your friends the way you change your socks? Is not a sincere “Thank You,” frequently a more than adequate payment for a favour/debt? Is monetary wealth really a measure of respect and regard? Do you always (or even usually) weigh up your own advantage before helping someone?

Yet, if economics – particularly the conventional economics upon which we seem to base our communal lives, as in my description of the current international debt crisis above – is an unquestionable science, then why does it not seem so easily applicable to our ordinary, real lives? It seems to me that there is a deep sort of schizophrenia present in the way we understand ourselves. If we really want to find solutions for the deep problems besetting our current global societies, I suspect this will only be possible if we find ways of surmounting this strange bifocal way of seeing things.

I am no utopian, no starry-eyed optimist. The current situation is the result of long, complicated processes, and concrete decisions will have very real effects on millions of people. Much as it might seem attractive, I don’t think we can just simply push some kind of “Reset” button. But I do see possibilities and potential for us, if we reflect on the way we see and understand things and are prepared to consider alternative ways of seeing and understanding them.

To admit, for example, that our various models of economic analysis may be deeply flawed and don’t provide us with an awful lot of good answers. To accept that economics, even as far as it goes, has very little basis in any of the basic moral principles which govern nearly everything we regard as important in our lives. To give this basic morality and decency the weight it deserves in our dealings, including our political and “business” dealings with each other, a weight far superior to simplistic “economic” considerations. To chose to do things, in the words of John F. Kennedy, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” But because they are truly worthwhile.

The questions I have been asking here crystallised, in part, for me after reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. You don’t have to agree with all the author’s basic arguments to find this book compelling reading, but his analysis and the questions he asks will certainly open your mind to seeing things differently, above all, hopefully, to question the basic assumptions of the all-pervasive standard economics way of seeing things.

One final thought. The “Debt Crisis” can just as easily be called the “Credit Crisis.” The roots of the word credit are in the Latin word, credire, to believe. Credit is a basic fact of life, one of the fundamental things which keeps life going, on all sorts of levels. We believe each other, have faith in each other, trust each other, extend each other credit, in thousands of ways every day. Even on the level of conventional economics, trade, exchange, banking can only function at all on the basis of trust and faith. Yet, the whole world of the “markets” has abandoned this principle completely, and all those engaged in it seem to be operating on the principle that they are living in a vastly dangerous jungle, with every man’s hand raised against the other and where values like faith and trust are an immediate invitation to self-destruction. How sick is that?

It is no wonder, then, that the system is – possibly irrevocably – breaking down. Perhaps the first step forward would be to change our attitudes to all those involved in working in this area. Instead of admiring them as Masters of the Universe, or fearing them as powerful Priests in the Temple of the Gods of the Market, we should regard them with disdain and faint contempt; as sad and pitiable people, unfortunately condemned to work in an area where it is almost impossible for someone to work without losing their honour, their decency, and, ultimately, their basic humanity.

Pictures retrieved from:

http://assets.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/Debt-crisis*280.jpg?v=1

http://foreignpolicyblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/euro-debt-crisis-medium.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/1933633867/ref=dp_otherviews_0?ie=UTF8&img=0&s=books

[To all bloggers: Friends, you may have noticed an absence of comments from me recently on your sites. I have some kind of glitch in my Blogger account at the moment, which is making it impossible for me to leave comments. I actually can't even leave comments on my own site! Believe me, please, I'm not snubbing you. I hope to get around to doing something about it soon. Sorry!]

Frankie: Republican Presidential Candidates 2012

-          C’mon wimp, publish me on your blog this time.

-          No, Frankie, it’s not on. We made a deal. If you must use me to spew your filth, then I’ll publish your stuff over on Obnoxious. The style over there is a little more … robust.

-          Pseudo-bourgeois hypocrite! All this is nothing more than a literary fiction; when you get right down to it, I’m nothing more than a figment of your imagination anyway.

-          Maybe, but you’re not a very pleasant figment of my imagination.

-          Pleasant, schmeasant, you’re just chicken, that’s all. What a fucking schizo wimp!

-          If … and this is a hypothetical question … if I published you this time on “Attempted Essays,” would you leave me in peace – completely in peace – for, say, two months at least?

-          A month?

-          Six weeks.

-          O.k.

-          Oh, and Frankie …

-          Yeah?

-          No explicit, graphic descriptions of what santorum really is.

-          Oh … all right!

[So, here you have it, gentle reader, Frankie in all his nasty glory. Read on at your own risk …]

They like to call themselves the greatest democracy in the world – the USA. Christ, if this were really the case, then democracy in the world is in a very bad way indeed. If this is the best democracy can do, then there can still be quite a case made for absolute monarchy.

On the one hand there’s the incumbent. Free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last! … Yes, we can!, and all that other good (bull)shit. And what did America and the world get? When you come right down to it, an old-style Chicago Democrat – a man whose prime instinct is to make any deal as long as it will keep him on top. To be fair to him – not that I have any great urge to do so, fairness is overrated, something for that wimp in whose head I’m condemned to silently rage most of the time – much of the past three years have been spent dealing with the various messes that his idiot predecessor left to him. But really, Obama has proved to be so ready to make compromises, has been so flexible that he’s shown himself to be capable of kissing his own ass. Yes, we can, folks! We can withdraw from Iraq – though we leave the country completely wrecked and tens of thousands of US “military advisors” and “defence contractors” still in place. We can close Gitmo, only, er, no, we can’t, not really. We can get Bin Laden – in the middle of a country we still call our most important regional ally, which has been sheltering him for years. We can deal with Wall Street and the banks – by letting them more or less carry on the way they were going before they wrecked everything in the first place. We can deal with national and private debt … well, we could … maybe … but Congress won’t let us.

Ah, people, but the crazy thing is, the way it looks right now, he’s going to be re-elected next November. And you know what makes this craziness down-right bizarre? That this is probably the best thing that could happen to the USA and the world because, when you look at what the opposition is offering as alternatives, any rational being is forced to the conclusion that a wishy-washy, infinitely flexible Chicago Democrat boss is better than any of the various varieties of lunatic the Republicans are likely to nominate.

Let’s be thankful for small mercies. Some of the wackiest have already bowed out; Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann (because Jesus told her to). Herman Cain is gone too and as I’m writing this reports are coming in that Jon Huntsman has given up – showing, at least, that the guy seems to actually be basically reasonable and in possession of some intelligence. Of course, that’s probably what gave him the kiss of death; I’ve a feeling that the Republican party just doesn’t do reasonable at the moment.

Let’s look at some of the more interesting fruit and nut cases who are still in there and running. They’re all rich, of course, because you have to be rich to run for the presidency in the USA; proof, should proof be needed, that the country isn’t so much a democracy as a plutocratic oligarchy. And they’re all as mad as hatters.

Take Rick Perry. This is the man who wants to abolish government agencies whose names and functions he can’t remember. The guy has been governor of Texas ever since Dubya gave up that job to move on to wrecking the US and the world. Let’s face it, anyone who thinks that America is ready to elect another Texan governor just has to be a little crazy. But then, Rick is another one of those who believe that Jesus has told him to be president. Personally, watching this circus is making me think that Jesus must be more than a little confused at the moment.

Then there’s the other Rick, Rick Santorum. Jesus seems to like Ricks. Maybe that’s what’s happening; Jesus has got drunk in heaven and started roaring out, Rick for President, as a joke and every Tom, Dick and Harry who’s called Rick thinks that Jesus means him. (Apart from Michele Bachman, but her husband, Markus, has probably been taking his inspiration from the priestly caste snob in The Life of Brian who claims during the crucifixion, “I’m Rick and so is my wife!”)

... considers entering the race as a
 compromise candidate ...

In the special private funny-farm they’ve got for Republican presidential candidates, Santorum has a whole suite reserved (he thinks it’s the Presidential Suite). He’s given his name to a rather icky by-product of anal sex (and if you don’t believe me, just google santorum). [I’ve promised the wimp not to go into any more detail about this, much as I’d like to; let no one say I’m not a man of my word.] This guy’s Catholicism is so conservative that he’s been endorsed by the evangelicals, including the wonderful Mike Huckabee (just be thankful he isn’t running to, though maybe if Santorum gets the nomination he’ll put him on the ticket as VP). Santorum is so “pro-life,” he’s not just against abortion – he believes that sex is wrong if it doesn’t lead to children. Believe me, people, this guy makes Pope Ratzinger look like a dangerously radical liberation theologian. Santorum can best be described as the American equivalent of Ahmadinejad.

What about Newt Gingrich? Newt by name, Newt by nature, I say – the man has many similarities with a resentful lizard suffering from halitosis. This is the guy who, as House Speaker, gridlocked American politics back in the nineties because he didn’t like Bill Clinton (or because he thought Bill Clinton didn’t like him). He wants to build a fence between the USA and Mexico; should he be elected and succeed in this, he’s going to piss off an awful lot of rich Americans who would then have to pay decent wages for legal gardeners and household helps.

Ron Paul is a bit of a maverick. One of his basic problems is that he’s in the wrong party. Paul’s views make him a natural leader of the Libertarians but, since they don’t have any national clout, he has to settle for being a Republican. The guy has the advantage of being pretty consistent and faithful to his principles; the problem is that these principles often tend to put him outside the real world. I think he’d feel happier in an America where the South had won the Civil War – then he wouldn’t have to feel continually oppressed by big Federal Government. He’s winning a lot of support from liberal-minded people, who like his positions on (non-)intervention in world affairs with things like foreign wars, his personal abhorrence of capital punishment and his opposition to the War on Drugs. They’re fooling themselves – all Paul really stands for is asserting the rights of the individual over those of communal society and of individual states at the expense of Washington. What this would mean in practice is that in Massachusetts, Oregon and California you could get legally stoned, in Texas and South Carolina you’d probably be hanged for possessing a joint. Liberal thinking people who tend to admire Paul should not forget that one of his heroes and major philosophical influences is Ayn Rand.

It could also be argued that his age might mean that America would finish up with a president suffering from dementia. I don’t see any problem in this; Ronald (it’s morning in America) Reagan proved that this can be done without seriously disrupting daily business and the press could once more ask the interesting questions, What did the president forget and when did he forget it?

In the end, it doesn’t really matter – the way things look at the moment, Mitt Romney is going to get the GOP nomination. What a prospect! This is a man who believes that some of the lost tribes of Israel settled in America, were visited there by Jesus after his resurrection and left divinely inspired records, written on golden plates in a language called “Reformed Egyptian,” to be discovered by Joseph Smith (guided by angels) nearly eighteen hundred years later. He also believes that God doesn’t want you to drink coffee.

The man became a multi-millionaire, running companies which specialised in asset stripping and hedge funds. His business background is firmly among the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008, the consequences of which are still reverberating around the globe.

He has the advantage of being more flexible than Obama. Having introduced a package for universal health care as Governor of Massachusetts in that state, he now claims to be against “Obamacare,” though the basic differences between the two measures are minimal. Watching him throughout the campaign for the Republican nomination, he seems to be a chameleon, one capable of taking on whatever opinions necessary to attract the majority of Republican voters in order to achieve the nomination. His basic claim for suitability for the job is his long experience in business – if elected he would then, logically, run the USA as a successful CEO runs a company. One wonders how he will deal with employees – oops, sorry, citizens – who don’t live up to agreed targets and reach agreed goals.

In the end, it probably won’t make all that much difference whether Obama or Romney rule the USA for the next four years. The best you can say for them both is that most of the alternatives are a lot worse. Isn’t modern US democracy wonderful?

The wimp usually finishes up his posts with some music. I’d like to dedicate this little number to Rick Santorum.

Pictures retrieved from:

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ap_candidates_debate_jef_120107_wg.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_(Brazil_2009).jpg

Crying Wulff: Germany's Pathetic President

Herr and Frau Wulff

It being a new year and all, I’ve decided to try a little experiment here on this blog. Although I’ve lived in Germany for over a quarter of a century, German is not my first language. Apart from a few years at school, many years before I moved here, it is a language I have only learned to speak and write as an adult – and I still feel nervous about writing and publishing in it. But there is a bit of a political scandal brewing here at the moment which I feel like commenting on. Only Germans, with a few exceptions, will really have been following the story and will know all the background, so it seemed more sensible to put the first argument I want to present in German – apart from anything else, it saves me the trouble of having to explain all the tedious background to non-Germans.

For those of you who do not read German, do not despair! Following the next section in German, I will return to English, not to offer a direct translation, but to offer a few more thoughts, inspired by the current difficulties of the German president, Christian Wulff.

Wir hätten Joachim Gauck haben können …

Erinnern Sie sich noch? Es ist kaum mehr als anderthalb Jahre her, dass Horst Köhler überraschend die Brocken hinschmiss und Deutschland sich einen neuen Bundespräsidenten suchen musste.

Damals haben die SPD und die Grünen Joachim Gauck nominiert. Dieser Vorschlag war der Bundeskanzlerin und ihre Koalition nicht genehm … warum eigentlich nicht? Im Rückblick hauptsächlich, weil Gaucks Name von der Opposition ins Spiel gebracht wurde und eine Vollblutregierung nie und nimmer eine Idee der Opposition gutheißen darf. Dann und heute habe ich geglaubt, dass dies der eigentliche Grund war. Aber in jenen fernen Tagen, als Westerwelle noch Chef der FDP war, und Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg sich im Verteidigungsministerium profilierte, gab es auch von der Regierungsseite eine (angeblich) sachliche Argumentation.

Das Problem mit Horst Köhler, hieß es, war, dass er kein Profipolitiker war. Er verstand nicht, wie Sachen auf der politischen Ebene liefen, deshalb nahm er manches viel zu ernst, manch anderes nicht ernst genug. So großartig Joachim Gaucks Persönlichkeit auch sei, er wäre auch ein politischer Fremdling, in manchen Situationen eine ungesicherte Kugel. Köhler hatte gezeigt, wo so etwas hinführe, deshalb müsse jetzt ein richtiger Politiker dran. Jemand wie Christian Wulff eben …

Nun haben wir den Schlamassel. Abgesehen von eventuellen Fragen bezüglich der Finanzierung seines Hauses – und seien wir ehrlich: ist irgendjemand im Mindesten überrascht über kleinere Verflechtungen zwischen Geschäftsleuten und Politikern? – ausgerechnet ein Berufspolitiker müsste wissen, dass Drohungen gegen Journalisten und Redakteure, um zu verhindern, dass Geschichten über ihn geschrieben werden, gar nicht gehen.

Es gäbe für Frau Merkel eine Lösung für das jetzige Problem. Sie sollte Herrn Wulff den Rücktritt nahe legen und dann Herr Gauck der Bundesversammlung als Präsidentschaftskandidat der Regierung vorschlagen. Dabei könnte sie sich auf Herrn Wulff berufen und die Bereitschaft, aus eigenen Fehlern zu lernen, als positive Eigenschaft darstellen …

Let me quickly point out that the office of Federal President in Germany – in political terms – is not very important. It is almost exclusively a formal, representative office and the incumbent is not directly elected by the people but, rather, by a peculiar institution known as the Federal Assembly (composed of all the members of both houses of parliaments as well as an equal number of delegates, nominated by the provincial parliaments). Throughout the history of the Federal Republic, it has generally been used as an honorary parking lot for a senior politician, whose basic job is to spend five years looking worthy, shaking hands, and giving inspiring speeches.

It’s not all that long ago that Germany had trouble with its Federal President. In June 2010, Wulff’s predecessor, Horst Köhler resigned, basically, in a huff – an event which inspired me to write an early post here on this blog. Wulff, a professional politician who, up till then, had been Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, was chosen by the government coalition to succeed him.

In recent weeks there have been a number of reports circulating in the German media about how Wulff financed a private house purchase before he became president – it’s a complicated story involving a private loan from a wealthy businessman (or rather his wife) and a subsequent bank mortgage with interest rates which were, to say the least, generous. Questions were asked about the propriety of a political office holder being accorded this kind of friendly help. It was all stuff in that seedy grey area where elected politicians and other people of wealth, influence and power meet and move; cloudy moral areas often, where friendship and mutual advantage overlap – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

As all this was coming before the public eye, the German president phoned the chief editor of the Bild newspaper and tried to have a story killed (Wulff claims that he was only trying to have the story postponed and has since admitted that the phone-call was a “mistake”). He also apparently made some other calls, including one to the owner of Bild. The language he used and the threats he made in the call to the mailbox of the editor are claimed to have been pretty strong. What exactly was said is not officially known, since – although Wulff has done the whole public apology and repentance thing – he has refused the paper permission to publish the content of the message he left.

Leaving the question of the house financing to one side, it was his attempt to suppress reporting on the subject which, in my view, makes Wulff’s continuance in his office impossible. And expressing this opinion makes me immediately uncomfortable, not because I really have any sympathy for Wulff, but because it puts me into a situation where I find myself championing the cause of the Bild Zeitung.

Bild, the flagship of the Axel Springer publishing group, is no shrinking violet. It is a sensationalist, dumbed-down, frequently hysterical, exploitative rag, which would find itself completely at home in the grubbier corner of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. It is also Germany’s (and Europe’s) biggest circulating daily newspaper. In its chequered history it has not been loath to use its not inconsiderable power to influence the course of German politics; championing some politicians, dissing others to the extent that it has practically destroyed their careers, pushing questionable causes and occasionally fomenting public opinion in very unsavoury directions. It certainly does not need me to defend it.

Bild has also enjoyed a mutually parasitic profitable relationship with Christian Wulff for many years; this was probably why he thought he could come on so heavy in his attempt to have their story on his house financing quashed. In any case, it didn’t work; Bild not only published the piece, it also gleefully reported the president’s attempt to stop it.

He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon …

But behind all the Schadenfreude I feel watching this comedy of fools, the serious issue remains. For a head of state to try to personally muzzle any organ of the Fourth Estate is not on – even an organ as disreputable as Bild. If the president felt that the newspaper was behaving incorrectly, there were enough legal avenues open to him to have the publication of the article in question stopped; Germany’s privacy and reputation protection laws are generally a lot stricter than those in force in, for example, the UK. But Wulff, who is himself a lawyer, probably knew that he didn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

Will Wulff remain in office? The one who will ultimately answer this question is, of course, the real boss in Germany, Angela Merkel. Wulff was a member of her Christian Democrat Union up to his election (as president he is not allowed to be a member of a political party) and her nominee. Normally, I would tend to the view that she (and her president) will follow her usual tendency and sit the whole thing out. But I thought that too about the plagiarising Minister of Defence, Karl-Theodor zuGuttenberg, last year and, in the end, the public indignation at his conduct finally forced her to let him go (even if, ironically, one of his most stalwart supporters right up to the end was Bild).

As with zu Guttenberg, if Christian Wulff is forced to resign, it will be a result of widespread public opinion that his behaviour has been unworthy of a president. Should this happen, the Germans will have proved that they deserve a better president. At the moment he still seems determined to hang on to his post. But I suspect that the next weeks may well show that the most serious mistake Wulff has made was that phone-call to Kai Diekmann, the editor-in-chief of Bild. Not even because it was because it was a massive abuse of his position – but because the last enemy any mainstream politician in Germany wants is Bild.

Pictures retrieved from:

http://www.bz-berlin.de/multimedia/archive/00245/christian-wulff_2454496.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Bild_front_page.jpg