Jonathan Ford in The FT
Some six years ago, British minicab company, Addison Lee took Transport for London on a journey through the law courts that ended up in 2015 at the European Court of Justice. At issue was a rule that allows only black cabs to use London’s bus lanes.
Hardly an EU matter you might think, worrying about transport policy in Britain’s capital. But think again. The minicab company argued not only that the rule infringed its freedom to provide services; it was also illegal state aid. Letting black cabs use a bus lane was, in effect, selective support for a specific participant in the wider taxi trade.
Admittedly the argument did not prevail in Luxembourg and London’s bus lanes remain limited to buses and traditional taxis. But while the ECJ failed to deem the policy state assistance, it did not entirely rebut the principle.
The justices recognised that TfL’s policy could affect trade between member states because it potentially made it harder for European-owned minicabs to penetrate the market. The definitional ratchet of unfair state aid turned gently another notch.
“It illustrates how the definition of state aid has expanded over the years,” says James Webber, an antitrust partner at the law firm Shearman & Sterling. “Originally designed to contain industrial subsidy competition, state aid is now much wider than commonly assumed, covering many public spending decisions such as infrastructure investment and tax changes which could be seen to benefit a specific region, sector or even just to incentivise desirable corporate behaviour.”
Quite right too, you might say. Unfettered subsidy competition is not only wasteful; it is ultimately pointless, for any advantage is lost if it descends into a free-for-all. Which is why it was so uncontentious when Theresa May conceded early in Brexit negotiations that the UK would stick with EU state-aid rules. But in practice what has been signed up to is far from uncontentious. The prime minister’s agreement has contrived to put the UK into a uniquely disadvantageous place, forced to follow the EU’s state-aid rules but not protected by them in return.
The mischief lies in the so-called Irish backstop, which would leave the whole of the UK still subject to single market regulation in state aid even though the country was formally outside the EU. As a consequence, Britain will continue to apply not only those substantive state-aid rules that existed at exit, but any new ones too.
The rules are only part of any state-aid decision. What really matters is the discretionary power possessed by the commission to approve or disapprove — sometimes with conditions — any plans member states propose which trigger state-aid concerns. That is inevitably a political process. The UK’s Hinkley Point nuclear project was generously state-aided. But the commission blessed it because two big member states — Britain and France (which was supplying the technology) — had the clout to ram it through.
While that clout disappears along with Britain’s representation in Brussels at Brexit, UK interests are in theory protected because the discretionary power passes from the EU to the Competition and Markets Authority. But really it does not. In practice the UK regulator will have to get the European Commission’s sign-off, and the final arbiter will be the ECJ. And that is just in Great Britain. In Northern Ireland, the commission will remain in total control of the whole process itself.
Its discretion may not be used in Britain’s favour. Not only will the UK no longer have insider clout, but it will also be seen as a strategic competitor. Just last week, the foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt was in Singapore, talking admiringly about its economic model, which extends fiscal support to favoured industries. It remains to be seen how keen the commission will be to sign off fiscal measures designed to enhance UK competitiveness and offset any exit bumps.
Worse, Britain’s anomalous backstop status may mean that while it cannot protect its own industries, it will be defenceless against EU states dangling subsidies to encourage British companies to relocate. State aid in the EU is not problematic if it attracts jobs to the union from non-EEA countries. European goodwill is the only backstop here.
There is no certainty too that this will be unravelled in any trade deal. Given the permanence of the backstop, the EU has no incentive to offer Britain more favourable terms than the ones in the withdrawal agreement.
The deal would unwittingly lock Britain into a regulatory iron maiden of Brussels’ manufacture. As with such contraptions, extraction once inserted may prove harder than clambering in.
Showing posts with label state. Show all posts
Showing posts with label state. Show all posts
Monday 7 January 2019
Thursday 1 November 2018
Finally, the Tories are discovering the state can be a force for good
Martin Kettle in The Guardian
Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.
But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.
Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.
May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.
These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.
The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.
Illustration by Mitch Blunt
According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.
The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.
This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.
His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.
This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.
May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.
May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.
This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.
The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.
The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”
According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.
The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.
This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.
His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.
This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.
May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.
May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.
This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.
The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.
The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”
Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.
But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.
Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.
May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.
These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.
The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.
Sunday 20 May 2018
To Save Western Capitalism - Look East
The East could have something to offer the mighty West, where we are seeing glimpses into capitalism's true nature. Antara Haldar (The Independent) on the rise and fall of civilisation as we know it
Austerity in Athens: the eurozone crisis hit Greece not once but twice (Getty)
While liberal democracy was the part of the programme that got slapped on to the brochure, it was a streamlined paradigm of neoclassical economics that provided the brains behind the enterprise. Neoclassical economics, scarred by war-era ideological acrimony, scrubbed the subject of all the messy stuff: politics, values – all the fluff. To do so it used a new secret weapon: quantitative precision unprecedented in the social sciences.
It didn’t rest on whimsical things like enlightened leadership or invested citizenship or compassionate communities. No, siree. It was pure science: a reliable, universally-applicable maximising equation for society (largely stripped of any contextual or, until recently, even cognitive considerations). Its particular magic trick was to be able to do good without requiring anyone to be good.
And, it was limitless in its capacity to turn boundless individual rationality into endless material wellbeing, to cull out of infinite resources (on a global scale) indefinite global growth. It presumed to definitively replace faltering human touch with the infallible “invisible hand” and, so, discourses of exploitation with those of merit.
When I started as a graduate student in the early 2000s, this model was at the peak of its powers: organised into an intellectual and policy assembly line that more or less ran the world. At the heart of this enterprise, in the unipolar post-Cold War order, was what was known as the Chicago school of law and economics. The Chicago school boiled the message of neoclassical economics down to a simpler formula still: the American Dream available for export – just add private property and enforceable contracts. Anointed with a record number of Nobel prizes, its message went straight to the heart of Washington DC, and from there – via its apostles, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank radiated out to the rest of the globe.
It was like the social equivalent of the Genome project. Sure the model required the odd tweak, the ironing out of the occasional glitch but, for the most part, the code had been cracked. So, like the ladies who lunch, scholarly attention in the West turned increasingly to good works and the fates of “the other” – spatially and temporally.
One strain led to a thriving industry in development: these were the glory days of tough love, and loan conditionalities. The message was clear: if you want Western-style growth, get with the programme. The polite term for it was structural adjustment and good governance: a strict regime of purging what Max Weber had called mysticism and magic, and swapping it for muscular modernisation. Titles like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else jostled for space on shelves of bookstores and best-seller lists.
Another led to esoteric islands of scholarship devoted to atonement for past sins. On the US side of the Atlantic, post-colonial scholarship gained a foothold, even if somewhat limp. In America, slavery has been, for a while now, the issue a la mode. A group of Harvard scholars has been taking a keen interest in the “history of capitalism”.
Playing intellectual archaeologists, they’ve excavated the road that led to today’s age of plenty – leaving in its tracks a blood-drenched path of genocide, conquest, and slavery. The interest that this has garnered, for instance Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, is heartening, but it has been limited to history (or worse still, “area studies”) departments rather than economics, and focused on the past not the present.
As far back as the fifties ... the economy was driving the society, when it should have been the other way around (Getty)
Indeed, from the perspective of Western scholarship, the epistemic approach to the amalgam of these instances has been singularly inspired by Indiana Jones – dismissed either as curious empirical aberrations or distanced by the buffer of history. By no means the stuff of mainstream economic theory.
Some of us weakly cleared our throats and tried to politely intercede that there were, all around us, petri dishes of living, breathing data on not just development – but capitalism itself. Maybe, just maybe – could it be? – that if the template failed to work in a large majority of cases around the globe that there may be a slight design error.
My longtime co-author, Nobel Prize winner in Economics and outspoken critic, Joseph Stiglitz, in his 1990 classic Globalisation and Its Discontents chronicled any number of cases of leaching-like brutality of structural adjustment. The best-selling author and my colleague at Cambridge, Ha-Joon Chang, in Kicking Away the Ladder, pointed out that it was a possibility that the West was misremembering the trajectory of its own ascent to power – that perhaps it was just a smidgen more fraught than it remembered, that maybe the State had had a somewhat more active part to play before it retired from the stage.
But a bright red line separated the “us” from the “them” enforcing a system of strict epistemic apartheid. Indeed, as economics retreated further and further into its silo of smugness, economics departments largely stopped teaching economic history or sociology and development economics clung on by operating firmly within the discipline-approved methodology.
So far, so good – a bit like the last night of merriment on the Titanic. Then the iceberg hit.
Suddenly the narratives that were comfortably to do with the there and then became for the Western world a matter of the here and now.
In the last 10 years, what economic historian Robert Skidelsky recently referred to as the “lost decade” for the advanced industrial West, problems that were considered the exclusive preserve of development theory – declining growth, rampant inequality, failing institutions, a fractured political consensus, corruption, mass protests and poverty – started to be experienced on home turf.
The Great Recession starting 2008 should really have been the first hint: foreclosures and evictions, bankruptcies and bailouts, crashed stock markets. Then came the eurozone crisis starting in 2009 (first Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Cyprus; oh, and then Greece, again). But after an initial scare, it was largely business as usual – written off as an inevitable blip in the boom-bust logic of capitalist cycles. It was 2016, the year the world went mad, that made the writing on the wall impossible to turn away from – starting with the shock Brexit vote, and then the Trump election. Not everyone understands what a CDO (collateralised debt obligation) is, but the vulgarity of a leader of the free world who governs by tweet and “grabs pussy” is hard to miss.
So how did it happen, this unexpected epilogue to the end of history?
I hate to say I told you so, but some of us had seen this coming – the twist in the tale, foreshadowed by an eerie background score lurking behind the clinking of champagne glasses. Even at the height of the glory days. In the summer before the fall of Lehman Brothers, a group of us “heterodox economists” had gathered at a summer school in the North of England. We felt like the audience at a horror movie – knowing that the gory climax was moments away while the victim remained blissfully impervious.
The plot wasn’t just predictable, it was in the script for anyone to see. You just had to look closely at the fine print.
In particular, you needed to have read your Karl Polanyi, the economic sociologist, who predicted this crisis over 50 years ago. As far back as 1954, The Great Transformation diagnosed the central perversion of the capitalist system, the inversion that makes the person less important than the thing – the economy driving society, rather than the other way around.
Polanyi’s point was simple: if you turned all the things that people hold sacred into grist to the mill of a large impersonal economic machinery (he called this disembedding) there would be a backlash. That the fate of a world where monopoly money reigns supreme and human players are reduced to chessmen at its mercy is doomed. The sociologist Fred Block compares this to the stretching of a giant elastic band – either it reverts to a more rooted position, or it snaps.
It is this tail-wagging-the-dog quality that is driving the current crisis of capitalism. It’s a matter of existential alienation. This problem of artificial abstraction runs through the majority of upheavals of our age – from the financial crisis to Facebook. So cold were the nights in this era of enforced neutrality that the torrid affair between liberal democracy and neoclassical economics resulted in the most surprising love child – populism.
The simple fact is that after decades on promises not delivered on, the system had written just one too many cheques that couldn’t be cashed. And people had had just about enough.
The Brexit vote in 2016 followed by the election of Trump ... and the world had finally gone mad (Getty)
The old fault lines of global capitalism, the East versus West dynamics of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round, turned out to be red herrings. The axis that counts is the system versus the little people. Indeed, the anatomies of annihilation look remarkably similar across the globe – whether it’s the loss of character of a Vanishing New York or Disappearing London, or threatened communities of farmers in India and fishermen in Greece.
Trump voters in the US, Brexiteers in Britain and Modi supporters in India seek identity – any identity, even a made-up call to arms to “return” to mythical past greatness in the face of the hollowing out of meaning of the past 70 years. The rise of populism is, in many ways, the death cry of populations on the verge of extinction – yearning for something to believe in when their gods have died young. It’s a problem of the 1 per cent – poised to control two-thirds of the world economy by 2030 – versus the 99 per cent. But far more pernicious is the Frankenstein’s monster that is the idea of an economic system that is an end in itself.
Not to be too much of a conspiracy theorist about it, but the current system doesn’t work because it wasn’t meant to – it was rigged from the start. Wealth was never actually going to “trickle down”. Thomas Piketty did the maths.
Suddenly, the alarmist calls of the developmentalists objecting to the systemic skews in the process of globalisation don’t seem quite so paranoid.
But this is more than “poco” (what the cool kids call postcolonialism) schadenfreude. My point is a serious one; although I would scarcely have dared articulate it before now. Could Kipling have been wrong, and might the East have something to offer the mighty West? Could the experiences of exotic lands point the way back to the future? Could it be, could it just, that it may even be a source of epistemic wisdom?
Behind the scaffolding of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, sites of capitalism under construction, we are offered a glimpse into the system’s true nature. It is not God-given, but the product of highly political choices. Just like Jane Jacobs protesting to save Washington Square Park or Beatrix Potter devoting the bulk of her royalty earnings to conserving the Lake District were choices. But these cases also show that trust and community are important. The incredible resilience of India’s jugaad economy, or the critical role of quanxi in the creation of the structures in what has been for the past decade the world’s fastest-growing nation, China. A little mysticism and magic may be just the thing.
The narrative that we need is less that of Frankenstein’s man-loses-control of monster, and more that of Pinocchio’s toy-becomes-real-boy-by-acquiring-conscience; less technology, and more teleology. The real limit may be our imaginations. Perhaps the challenge is to do for scholarship, what Black Panther has done for Hollywood. You never know. Might be a blockbuster.
Photos Getty
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a place where peace and prosperity reigned. Let’s call this place the West. These lands had once been ravaged by bloody wars but its rulers had, since, solved the puzzle of perpetual progress and discovered a kind of political and economic elixir of life. Big Problems were relegated to either Somewhere Else (the East) or Another Time (History). The Westerners dutifully sent emissaries far and wide to spread the word that the secret of eternal bliss had been found –and were, themselves, to live happily ever after.
So ran, until very recently, the story of how the West was won.
The formula that had been discovered was simple: the recipe for a bright, shiny new brand of global capitalism based on liberal democracy and something called neoclassical economics. But it was different from previous eras – cleansed of Dickensian grime. The period after the two world wars was in many a Golden Age: the moment of Bretton Woods (that established the international monetary and financial order) and the Beveridge report (the blueprint for the welfare state), feminism and free love.
It was post-colonial, post-racial, post-gendered. It felt like you could have it all, material abundance and the moral revolutions; a world infinitely vulnerable to invention – but all without picking sides, all based on institutional equality of access. That’s how clever the scheme was – truly a brave new world. Fascism and class, slavery and genocide – no one doubted that, in the main, it had been left behind (or at least that we could all agree on its evils); that the wheels of history had permanently been set in motion to propel us towards a better future. The end of history, Francis Fukuyama called it – the zenith of human civilisation.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a place where peace and prosperity reigned. Let’s call this place the West. These lands had once been ravaged by bloody wars but its rulers had, since, solved the puzzle of perpetual progress and discovered a kind of political and economic elixir of life. Big Problems were relegated to either Somewhere Else (the East) or Another Time (History). The Westerners dutifully sent emissaries far and wide to spread the word that the secret of eternal bliss had been found –and were, themselves, to live happily ever after.
So ran, until very recently, the story of how the West was won.
The formula that had been discovered was simple: the recipe for a bright, shiny new brand of global capitalism based on liberal democracy and something called neoclassical economics. But it was different from previous eras – cleansed of Dickensian grime. The period after the two world wars was in many a Golden Age: the moment of Bretton Woods (that established the international monetary and financial order) and the Beveridge report (the blueprint for the welfare state), feminism and free love.
It was post-colonial, post-racial, post-gendered. It felt like you could have it all, material abundance and the moral revolutions; a world infinitely vulnerable to invention – but all without picking sides, all based on institutional equality of access. That’s how clever the scheme was – truly a brave new world. Fascism and class, slavery and genocide – no one doubted that, in the main, it had been left behind (or at least that we could all agree on its evils); that the wheels of history had permanently been set in motion to propel us towards a better future. The end of history, Francis Fukuyama called it – the zenith of human civilisation.
Austerity in Athens: the eurozone crisis hit Greece not once but twice (Getty)
While liberal democracy was the part of the programme that got slapped on to the brochure, it was a streamlined paradigm of neoclassical economics that provided the brains behind the enterprise. Neoclassical economics, scarred by war-era ideological acrimony, scrubbed the subject of all the messy stuff: politics, values – all the fluff. To do so it used a new secret weapon: quantitative precision unprecedented in the social sciences.
It didn’t rest on whimsical things like enlightened leadership or invested citizenship or compassionate communities. No, siree. It was pure science: a reliable, universally-applicable maximising equation for society (largely stripped of any contextual or, until recently, even cognitive considerations). Its particular magic trick was to be able to do good without requiring anyone to be good.
And, it was limitless in its capacity to turn boundless individual rationality into endless material wellbeing, to cull out of infinite resources (on a global scale) indefinite global growth. It presumed to definitively replace faltering human touch with the infallible “invisible hand” and, so, discourses of exploitation with those of merit.
When I started as a graduate student in the early 2000s, this model was at the peak of its powers: organised into an intellectual and policy assembly line that more or less ran the world. At the heart of this enterprise, in the unipolar post-Cold War order, was what was known as the Chicago school of law and economics. The Chicago school boiled the message of neoclassical economics down to a simpler formula still: the American Dream available for export – just add private property and enforceable contracts. Anointed with a record number of Nobel prizes, its message went straight to the heart of Washington DC, and from there – via its apostles, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank radiated out to the rest of the globe.
It was like the social equivalent of the Genome project. Sure the model required the odd tweak, the ironing out of the occasional glitch but, for the most part, the code had been cracked. So, like the ladies who lunch, scholarly attention in the West turned increasingly to good works and the fates of “the other” – spatially and temporally.
One strain led to a thriving industry in development: these were the glory days of tough love, and loan conditionalities. The message was clear: if you want Western-style growth, get with the programme. The polite term for it was structural adjustment and good governance: a strict regime of purging what Max Weber had called mysticism and magic, and swapping it for muscular modernisation. Titles like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else jostled for space on shelves of bookstores and best-seller lists.
Another led to esoteric islands of scholarship devoted to atonement for past sins. On the US side of the Atlantic, post-colonial scholarship gained a foothold, even if somewhat limp. In America, slavery has been, for a while now, the issue a la mode. A group of Harvard scholars has been taking a keen interest in the “history of capitalism”.
Playing intellectual archaeologists, they’ve excavated the road that led to today’s age of plenty – leaving in its tracks a blood-drenched path of genocide, conquest, and slavery. The interest that this has garnered, for instance Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, is heartening, but it has been limited to history (or worse still, “area studies”) departments rather than economics, and focused on the past not the present.
As far back as the fifties ... the economy was driving the society, when it should have been the other way around (Getty)
Indeed, from the perspective of Western scholarship, the epistemic approach to the amalgam of these instances has been singularly inspired by Indiana Jones – dismissed either as curious empirical aberrations or distanced by the buffer of history. By no means the stuff of mainstream economic theory.
Some of us weakly cleared our throats and tried to politely intercede that there were, all around us, petri dishes of living, breathing data on not just development – but capitalism itself. Maybe, just maybe – could it be? – that if the template failed to work in a large majority of cases around the globe that there may be a slight design error.
My longtime co-author, Nobel Prize winner in Economics and outspoken critic, Joseph Stiglitz, in his 1990 classic Globalisation and Its Discontents chronicled any number of cases of leaching-like brutality of structural adjustment. The best-selling author and my colleague at Cambridge, Ha-Joon Chang, in Kicking Away the Ladder, pointed out that it was a possibility that the West was misremembering the trajectory of its own ascent to power – that perhaps it was just a smidgen more fraught than it remembered, that maybe the State had had a somewhat more active part to play before it retired from the stage.
But a bright red line separated the “us” from the “them” enforcing a system of strict epistemic apartheid. Indeed, as economics retreated further and further into its silo of smugness, economics departments largely stopped teaching economic history or sociology and development economics clung on by operating firmly within the discipline-approved methodology.
So far, so good – a bit like the last night of merriment on the Titanic. Then the iceberg hit.
Suddenly the narratives that were comfortably to do with the there and then became for the Western world a matter of the here and now.
In the last 10 years, what economic historian Robert Skidelsky recently referred to as the “lost decade” for the advanced industrial West, problems that were considered the exclusive preserve of development theory – declining growth, rampant inequality, failing institutions, a fractured political consensus, corruption, mass protests and poverty – started to be experienced on home turf.
The Great Recession starting 2008 should really have been the first hint: foreclosures and evictions, bankruptcies and bailouts, crashed stock markets. Then came the eurozone crisis starting in 2009 (first Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Cyprus; oh, and then Greece, again). But after an initial scare, it was largely business as usual – written off as an inevitable blip in the boom-bust logic of capitalist cycles. It was 2016, the year the world went mad, that made the writing on the wall impossible to turn away from – starting with the shock Brexit vote, and then the Trump election. Not everyone understands what a CDO (collateralised debt obligation) is, but the vulgarity of a leader of the free world who governs by tweet and “grabs pussy” is hard to miss.
So how did it happen, this unexpected epilogue to the end of history?
I hate to say I told you so, but some of us had seen this coming – the twist in the tale, foreshadowed by an eerie background score lurking behind the clinking of champagne glasses. Even at the height of the glory days. In the summer before the fall of Lehman Brothers, a group of us “heterodox economists” had gathered at a summer school in the North of England. We felt like the audience at a horror movie – knowing that the gory climax was moments away while the victim remained blissfully impervious.
The plot wasn’t just predictable, it was in the script for anyone to see. You just had to look closely at the fine print.
In particular, you needed to have read your Karl Polanyi, the economic sociologist, who predicted this crisis over 50 years ago. As far back as 1954, The Great Transformation diagnosed the central perversion of the capitalist system, the inversion that makes the person less important than the thing – the economy driving society, rather than the other way around.
Polanyi’s point was simple: if you turned all the things that people hold sacred into grist to the mill of a large impersonal economic machinery (he called this disembedding) there would be a backlash. That the fate of a world where monopoly money reigns supreme and human players are reduced to chessmen at its mercy is doomed. The sociologist Fred Block compares this to the stretching of a giant elastic band – either it reverts to a more rooted position, or it snaps.
It is this tail-wagging-the-dog quality that is driving the current crisis of capitalism. It’s a matter of existential alienation. This problem of artificial abstraction runs through the majority of upheavals of our age – from the financial crisis to Facebook. So cold were the nights in this era of enforced neutrality that the torrid affair between liberal democracy and neoclassical economics resulted in the most surprising love child – populism.
The simple fact is that after decades on promises not delivered on, the system had written just one too many cheques that couldn’t be cashed. And people had had just about enough.
The Brexit vote in 2016 followed by the election of Trump ... and the world had finally gone mad (Getty)
The old fault lines of global capitalism, the East versus West dynamics of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round, turned out to be red herrings. The axis that counts is the system versus the little people. Indeed, the anatomies of annihilation look remarkably similar across the globe – whether it’s the loss of character of a Vanishing New York or Disappearing London, or threatened communities of farmers in India and fishermen in Greece.
Trump voters in the US, Brexiteers in Britain and Modi supporters in India seek identity – any identity, even a made-up call to arms to “return” to mythical past greatness in the face of the hollowing out of meaning of the past 70 years. The rise of populism is, in many ways, the death cry of populations on the verge of extinction – yearning for something to believe in when their gods have died young. It’s a problem of the 1 per cent – poised to control two-thirds of the world economy by 2030 – versus the 99 per cent. But far more pernicious is the Frankenstein’s monster that is the idea of an economic system that is an end in itself.
Not to be too much of a conspiracy theorist about it, but the current system doesn’t work because it wasn’t meant to – it was rigged from the start. Wealth was never actually going to “trickle down”. Thomas Piketty did the maths.
Suddenly, the alarmist calls of the developmentalists objecting to the systemic skews in the process of globalisation don’t seem quite so paranoid.
But this is more than “poco” (what the cool kids call postcolonialism) schadenfreude. My point is a serious one; although I would scarcely have dared articulate it before now. Could Kipling have been wrong, and might the East have something to offer the mighty West? Could the experiences of exotic lands point the way back to the future? Could it be, could it just, that it may even be a source of epistemic wisdom?
Behind the scaffolding of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, sites of capitalism under construction, we are offered a glimpse into the system’s true nature. It is not God-given, but the product of highly political choices. Just like Jane Jacobs protesting to save Washington Square Park or Beatrix Potter devoting the bulk of her royalty earnings to conserving the Lake District were choices. But these cases also show that trust and community are important. The incredible resilience of India’s jugaad economy, or the critical role of quanxi in the creation of the structures in what has been for the past decade the world’s fastest-growing nation, China. A little mysticism and magic may be just the thing.
The narrative that we need is less that of Frankenstein’s man-loses-control of monster, and more that of Pinocchio’s toy-becomes-real-boy-by-acquiring-conscience; less technology, and more teleology. The real limit may be our imaginations. Perhaps the challenge is to do for scholarship, what Black Panther has done for Hollywood. You never know. Might be a blockbuster.
Thursday 5 April 2018
Spasms of Resurgent Nationalism are a Sign of its Irreversible Decline?
Rana Dasgupta in The Guardian
What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.
The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.
But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.
What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.
The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.
The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.
But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.
Presidents Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Vladimir Putin of Russia in Ankara. Photograph: Reuters
If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.
It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.
The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.
Let us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state: the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world. The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities – the template for modern European life.
By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today – in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike. Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.
The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes – omniscience and omnipotence – were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state’s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.
During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere. But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves – more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur. Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development. For a few decades, state power was monumental – almost divine, indeed – and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known.
The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.
The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state. We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise – but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.
There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind. And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.
If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.
It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.
The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.
Let us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state: the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world. The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities – the template for modern European life.
By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today – in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike. Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.
The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes – omniscience and omnipotence – were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state’s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.
During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere. But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves – more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur. Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development. For a few decades, state power was monumental – almost divine, indeed – and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known.
The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.
The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state. We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise – but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.
There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind. And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state. The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.
US president Donald Trump in Washington. Photograph: AP
Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.
The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it. He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult – blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state’s impotence. He cannot heal America’s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look “tough” – declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders. He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset – US citizenship – whose value he can “talk up”, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels. Like Putin or Orbán, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.
These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: political authority is running on empty, and leaders are unable to deliver meaningful material change. Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: hatred of foreigners and internal enemies, for instance, or the euphoria of meaningless military exploits (Putin’s annexation of Crimea raised the hugely popular prospect of general Tsarist revival).
But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. As Putin’s Russia has shown, chauvinism is more effective than we like to believe. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: deep down, they know to be scared of what will happen if the power of the state is revealed to be a hoax.
In the world’s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the “normal” mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today’s fractured Middle East. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.
Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out – and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.
Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states. And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.
If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.
The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma), Hissène Habré (Chad), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia), the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Moussa Traoré (Mali), General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).
Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.
The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it. He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult – blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state’s impotence. He cannot heal America’s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look “tough” – declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders. He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset – US citizenship – whose value he can “talk up”, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels. Like Putin or Orbán, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.
These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: political authority is running on empty, and leaders are unable to deliver meaningful material change. Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: hatred of foreigners and internal enemies, for instance, or the euphoria of meaningless military exploits (Putin’s annexation of Crimea raised the hugely popular prospect of general Tsarist revival).
But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. As Putin’s Russia has shown, chauvinism is more effective than we like to believe. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: deep down, they know to be scared of what will happen if the power of the state is revealed to be a hoax.
In the world’s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the “normal” mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today’s fractured Middle East. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.
Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out – and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.
Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states. And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.
If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.
The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma), Hissène Habré (Chad), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia), the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Moussa Traoré (Mali), General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).
Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán. Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images
Such countries were generally condemned to remain what one influential commentator has called “quasi-states”. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizens.
Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker. The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: with the UN’s moral rejection of foreign rule came a universal imperative to respect national sovereignty, no matter what horrors went on behind its closed doors. But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: at least 15 million died in the proxy wars of that period, in theatres as dispersed as Afghanistan, Korea, El Salvador, Angola and Sudan. And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals.
There was nothing stable about this cold war “stability”, but its devastation was contained within the borders of its proxy states. The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries – and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all. Destroyed political cultures have given rise to startling “post-national” forces such as Islamic State, which are cutting through national borders and transmitting chaos, potentially, into every corner of the world.
Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces – whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity. Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building. Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.
Such a network currently extends from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north. This eats away the old political architecture from the inside, making several nation states (such as Mali and the Central African Republic) essentially non-functional, which in turn creates further opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Several ethnic groups, meanwhile – such as the Kurds and the Tuareg – which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories. It is in the world’s most dangerous regions that today’s new political possibilities are being imagined.
The west’s commitment to nation states has been self-servingly partial. For many decades, it was content to see large areas of the world suffer under terrifying parodies of well-established Western states; it cannot complain that those areas now display little loyalty to the nation-state idea. Especially since they have also borne the most traumatic consequences of climate change, a phenomenon for which they were least responsible and least equipped to withstand. The strategic calculation of new militant groups in that region is in many ways quite accurate: the transition from empire to independent nation states has been a massive and unremitting failure, and, after three generations, there needs to be a way out.
But there is no possibility that al-Shabaab, the Janjaweed, Seleka, Boko Haram, Ansar Dine, Isis or al-Qaida will provide that way out. The situation requires new ideas of political organisation and global economic redistribution. There is no superpower great enough, any more, to contain the effects of exploding “quasi-states”. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay.
Let us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself. The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – “national self-determination,”, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate. Today, after a century of lugubrious “international relations”, the only aspect of this principle we still remember is the one most familiar to us: national independence. But Wilson’s original programme, informed by a loose international coalition including such diverse visionaries as Andrew Carnegie and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), aimed for something far more ambitious: a comprehensive intra-state democracy designed to ensure global cooperation, peace and justice.
How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law? The new order of nations only made sense if these were integrated into a “society of nations”: a formal global society with its own universal institutions, empowered to police the violence that individual states would not regulate on their own: the violence they perpetrated themselves, whether against other states or their own citizens.
The cold war definitively buried this “society”, and we have lived ever since with a drastically degraded version of what was intended. During that period, both superpowers actively destroyed any constraints on international action, maintaining a level of international lawlessness worthy of the “scramble for Africa”. Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: gangsterism. The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: the US is today dependent on lawlessness in international society, and on the perpetual warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence.
Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition, the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed. In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future. All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection. But such passports are difficult to get.
That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself. The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century. It will be remembered that the group’s most triumphant publicity was associated with its penetration of the Iraq-Syria border. This was presented as a victory over the 1916 treaties by which the British and French divided the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Isis’s PR arm issued the Twitter hashtag #SykesPicotOver – and inaugurated a century of Mesopotamian bombing. It arose from an entirely justifiable rejection of a system that obstinately designated – during the course of a century and more – Arabs as “savages” to whom no dignity or protection would be extended.
The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. And, while revolutionary groups attempt to destroy the system “from below”, assertive regional powers are destroying it “from above” – by infringing national borders in their own backyards. Russia’s escapade in Ukraine demonstrates that there are now few consequences to neo-imperial bagatelles, and China’s route to usurping the 22nd-richest country in the world – Taiwan – lies open. The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create.
The three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen. First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces. Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility. And third, the illegitimacy of an “international order” that has never aspired to any kind of “society of nations” governed by the rule of law.
Since they are all rooted in transnational forces whose scale eludes the reach of any one nation’s politics, they are largely immune to well-meaning political reform within nations (though the coming years will also see many examples of such reform). So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse.
Such countries were generally condemned to remain what one influential commentator has called “quasi-states”. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizens.
Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker. The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: with the UN’s moral rejection of foreign rule came a universal imperative to respect national sovereignty, no matter what horrors went on behind its closed doors. But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: at least 15 million died in the proxy wars of that period, in theatres as dispersed as Afghanistan, Korea, El Salvador, Angola and Sudan. And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals.
There was nothing stable about this cold war “stability”, but its devastation was contained within the borders of its proxy states. The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries – and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all. Destroyed political cultures have given rise to startling “post-national” forces such as Islamic State, which are cutting through national borders and transmitting chaos, potentially, into every corner of the world.
Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces – whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity. Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building. Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.
Such a network currently extends from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north. This eats away the old political architecture from the inside, making several nation states (such as Mali and the Central African Republic) essentially non-functional, which in turn creates further opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Several ethnic groups, meanwhile – such as the Kurds and the Tuareg – which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories. It is in the world’s most dangerous regions that today’s new political possibilities are being imagined.
The west’s commitment to nation states has been self-servingly partial. For many decades, it was content to see large areas of the world suffer under terrifying parodies of well-established Western states; it cannot complain that those areas now display little loyalty to the nation-state idea. Especially since they have also borne the most traumatic consequences of climate change, a phenomenon for which they were least responsible and least equipped to withstand. The strategic calculation of new militant groups in that region is in many ways quite accurate: the transition from empire to independent nation states has been a massive and unremitting failure, and, after three generations, there needs to be a way out.
But there is no possibility that al-Shabaab, the Janjaweed, Seleka, Boko Haram, Ansar Dine, Isis or al-Qaida will provide that way out. The situation requires new ideas of political organisation and global economic redistribution. There is no superpower great enough, any more, to contain the effects of exploding “quasi-states”. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay.
Let us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself. The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – “national self-determination,”, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate. Today, after a century of lugubrious “international relations”, the only aspect of this principle we still remember is the one most familiar to us: national independence. But Wilson’s original programme, informed by a loose international coalition including such diverse visionaries as Andrew Carnegie and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), aimed for something far more ambitious: a comprehensive intra-state democracy designed to ensure global cooperation, peace and justice.
How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law? The new order of nations only made sense if these were integrated into a “society of nations”: a formal global society with its own universal institutions, empowered to police the violence that individual states would not regulate on their own: the violence they perpetrated themselves, whether against other states or their own citizens.
The cold war definitively buried this “society”, and we have lived ever since with a drastically degraded version of what was intended. During that period, both superpowers actively destroyed any constraints on international action, maintaining a level of international lawlessness worthy of the “scramble for Africa”. Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: gangsterism. The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: the US is today dependent on lawlessness in international society, and on the perpetual warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence.
Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition, the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed. In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future. All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection. But such passports are difficult to get.
That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself. The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century. It will be remembered that the group’s most triumphant publicity was associated with its penetration of the Iraq-Syria border. This was presented as a victory over the 1916 treaties by which the British and French divided the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Isis’s PR arm issued the Twitter hashtag #SykesPicotOver – and inaugurated a century of Mesopotamian bombing. It arose from an entirely justifiable rejection of a system that obstinately designated – during the course of a century and more – Arabs as “savages” to whom no dignity or protection would be extended.
The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. And, while revolutionary groups attempt to destroy the system “from below”, assertive regional powers are destroying it “from above” – by infringing national borders in their own backyards. Russia’s escapade in Ukraine demonstrates that there are now few consequences to neo-imperial bagatelles, and China’s route to usurping the 22nd-richest country in the world – Taiwan – lies open. The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create.
The three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen. First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces. Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility. And third, the illegitimacy of an “international order” that has never aspired to any kind of “society of nations” governed by the rule of law.
Since they are all rooted in transnational forces whose scale eludes the reach of any one nation’s politics, they are largely immune to well-meaning political reform within nations (though the coming years will also see many examples of such reform). So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: AP
This is not a small endeavour: it will take the better part of this century. We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions. From the standpoint of our present, they will seem impossible, because we have not known any other way. But that is how radical novelty always begins.
The first is clear: global financial regulation. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation states, materially and symbolically. There is no reason to heed those interested parties who tell us global financial regulation is impossible: it is technologically trivial compared to the astonishing systems those same parties have already built.
The history of the nation state is one of perennial tax innovation, and the next such innovation is transnational: we must build systems to track transnational money flows, and to transfer a portion of them into public channels. Without this, our political infrastructure will continue to become more and more superfluous to actual material life. In the process we must also think more seriously about global redistribution: not aid, which is exceptional, but the systematic transfer of wealth from rich to poor for the improved security of all, as happens in national societies.
Second: global flexible democracy. As new local and transnational political currents become more powerful, the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable. Nations must be nested in a stack of other stable, democratic structures – some smaller, some larger than they – so that turmoil at the national level does not lead to total breakdown. The EU is the major experiment in this direction, and it is significant that the continent that invented the nation state was also the first to move beyond it. The EU has failed in many of its functions, principally because it has not established a truly democratic ethos. But free movement has hugely democratised economic opportunity within the EU. And insofar as it may become a “Europe of regions” – comprising Catalonia and Scotland, not only Spain and the UK – it can help stabilise national political upheaval.
We need more such experiments in continental and global politics. National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations. Oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments – this was always part of Wilson’s vision and its loss has been terrible for humanity.
Third, and finally: we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing. Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.
If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult. Your mobility – as a Finn – is also very different. But in a world system – rather than a system of nations – there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility. Deregulating human movement is an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following.
Contemporary technological systems offer models for rethinking citizenship so it can be de-linked from territory, and its advantages can be more fairly distributed. The rights and opportunities accruing to western citizenship could be claimed far away, for instance, without anyone having to travel to the west to do so. We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth? What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq or Afghanistan?
On the eve of its centenary, our nation-state system is already in a crisis from which it does not currently possess the capacity to extricate itself. It is time to think how that capacity might be built. We do not yet know what it will look like. But we have learned a lot from the economic and technological phases of globalisation, and we now possess the basic concepts for the next phase: building the politics of our integrated world system. We are confronted, of course, by an enterprise of political imagination as significant as that which produced the great visions of the 18th century – and, with them, the French and American Republics. But we are now in a position to begin.
This is not a small endeavour: it will take the better part of this century. We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions. From the standpoint of our present, they will seem impossible, because we have not known any other way. But that is how radical novelty always begins.
The first is clear: global financial regulation. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation states, materially and symbolically. There is no reason to heed those interested parties who tell us global financial regulation is impossible: it is technologically trivial compared to the astonishing systems those same parties have already built.
The history of the nation state is one of perennial tax innovation, and the next such innovation is transnational: we must build systems to track transnational money flows, and to transfer a portion of them into public channels. Without this, our political infrastructure will continue to become more and more superfluous to actual material life. In the process we must also think more seriously about global redistribution: not aid, which is exceptional, but the systematic transfer of wealth from rich to poor for the improved security of all, as happens in national societies.
Second: global flexible democracy. As new local and transnational political currents become more powerful, the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable. Nations must be nested in a stack of other stable, democratic structures – some smaller, some larger than they – so that turmoil at the national level does not lead to total breakdown. The EU is the major experiment in this direction, and it is significant that the continent that invented the nation state was also the first to move beyond it. The EU has failed in many of its functions, principally because it has not established a truly democratic ethos. But free movement has hugely democratised economic opportunity within the EU. And insofar as it may become a “Europe of regions” – comprising Catalonia and Scotland, not only Spain and the UK – it can help stabilise national political upheaval.
We need more such experiments in continental and global politics. National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority: they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations. Oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments – this was always part of Wilson’s vision and its loss has been terrible for humanity.
Third, and finally: we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world. It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing. Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth. But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.
If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult. Your mobility – as a Finn – is also very different. But in a world system – rather than a system of nations – there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility. Deregulating human movement is an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following.
Contemporary technological systems offer models for rethinking citizenship so it can be de-linked from territory, and its advantages can be more fairly distributed. The rights and opportunities accruing to western citizenship could be claimed far away, for instance, without anyone having to travel to the west to do so. We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth? What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq or Afghanistan?
On the eve of its centenary, our nation-state system is already in a crisis from which it does not currently possess the capacity to extricate itself. It is time to think how that capacity might be built. We do not yet know what it will look like. But we have learned a lot from the economic and technological phases of globalisation, and we now possess the basic concepts for the next phase: building the politics of our integrated world system. We are confronted, of course, by an enterprise of political imagination as significant as that which produced the great visions of the 18th century – and, with them, the French and American Republics. But we are now in a position to begin.
Wednesday 17 January 2018
The “Inefficient” State Mops up the Disasters caused by “Efficient” Private Companies.
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Again the “inefficient” state mops up the disasters caused by “efficient” private companies. Just as the army had to step in when G4S failed to provide security for the London 2012 Olympics, and the Treasury had to rescue the banks, the collapse of Carillion means that the fire service must stand by to deliver school meals.
Two hospitals, both urgently needed, that Carillion was supposed to be constructing, the Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool, are left in half-built limbo, awaiting state intervention. Another 450 contracts between Carillion and the state must be untangled, resolved and perhaps rescued by the government.
Fire services ready to deliver school meals after Carillion collapse
When you examine the claims made for the efficiency of the private sector, you soon discover that they boil down to the transfer of risk. Value for money hangs on the idea that companies shoulder risks the state would otherwise carry. But in cases like this, even when the company takes the first hit, the risk ultimately returns to the government. In these situations, the very notion of risk transfer is questionable.
Nowhere is it more dubious than when applied to the private finance initiative projects in which Carillion specialised. The PFI was invented by John Major’s Conservative government, but greatly expanded by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Private companies finance and deliver public services that governments would otherwise have provided.
The government claimed that the private sector, being more efficient, would provide services more cheaply than the private sector. PFI projects, Blair and Brown promised, would go ahead only if they proved to be cheaper than the “public sector comparator”.
But at the same time, the government told public bodies that state money was not an option: if they wanted new facilities, they would have to use the private finance initiative. In the words of the then health secretary, Alan Milburn: “It’s PFI or bust”. So, if you wanted a new hospital or bridge or classroomor army barracks, you had to demonstrate that PFI offered the best value for money. Otherwise, there would be no project. Public bodies immediately discovered a way to make the numbers add up: risk transfer.
Nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted
The costing of risk is notoriously subjective. Because it involves the passage of a fiendishly complex contract through an unknowable future, you can make a case for almost any value. A study published in the British Medical Journal revealed that, before the risk was costed, every hospital scheme it investigated would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. But once the notional financial risks had been added, building them through PFI came out cheaper in every case, although sometimes by less than 0.1%.
Not only was this exercise (as some prominent civil servants warned) bogus, but the entire concept is negated by the fact that if collapse occurs, the risk ripples through the private sector and into the public. Companies like Carillion might not be too big to fail, but the services they deliver are. You cannot, in a nominal democracy, suddenly close a public hospital, let a bridge collapse, or fail to deliver school meals.
Partly for this reason, and partly because of the inordinate political power of corporations and the people who run them, governments seek to insulate these companies from the very risks they claim to have transferred to them. This could explain why Theresa May’s administration continued to award contracts to Carillion after it had issued a series of profit warnings. Was this an attempt to keep the company in business?
If so, it was one of a long list of measures designed to privatise profit and socialise risk. PFI contracts specify that if there is a conflict between paying the private provider and delivering public services, the payments must come first. However deep the crisis in the NHS becomes, however many people must have their cancer operations postponed or be left to rot on trolleys, the legal priority is still to pay the contractor. Money is officially more valuable than life.
If a PFI consortium is contracted to deliver maintenance and ancillary services, these non-clinical functions are ringfenced, while the clinical services delivered by the public sector must be cut to make room for them. This forces public bodies to respond perversely to a funding crisis: nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted. Many of the contracts cannot be broken for 25 or 30 years, regardless of whether or not they still meet real needs: again, this insulates the private sector from hazard, leaving it with the public. The risk lands not only on the state but also on the people. Carillion leaves behind a series of scandals, such as the food hygiene failure at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital, and the failings at the Surgicentre clinic it ran in Hertfordshire, revealed in a horrifying report in the Observer. Similar crises have attended many other deals with private providers: operating theatres flooded with sewage, power cuts which have left nurses to ventilate patients on life support by hand, school buildings falling apart, useless services continuing to be delivered while essential services are cut.
None of this was unforeseen. Some of us warned again and again during the New Labour years that this programme would prove to be an expensive fiasco. Even the Banker magazine predicted, in 2002, that “eventually an Enron-style disaster will be rerun on a sovereign balance sheet”. But the government didn’t want to know. Nor did the Conservative opposition, whose idea it was in the first place. Nor did the other newspapers, now apparently scratching their heads and wondering how this happened. There is no joy in being proved right, just immense frustration.
Risk to a company is not the same as risk to those who own and run it. The executives keep their payoffs. The shareholders take a hit on part of their portfolios, but limited liability ensures they can walk away from any debts. The company might disappear, but ultimately it’s just a name and some paperwork. But the risks imposed on the people – including the company’s workers – are real. We pay for these risks twice: first, when they are nominally transferred to corporations; then again, when they are returned to us. The word used to describe this process is efficiency.
Again the “inefficient” state mops up the disasters caused by “efficient” private companies. Just as the army had to step in when G4S failed to provide security for the London 2012 Olympics, and the Treasury had to rescue the banks, the collapse of Carillion means that the fire service must stand by to deliver school meals.
Two hospitals, both urgently needed, that Carillion was supposed to be constructing, the Midland Metropolitan and the Royal Liverpool, are left in half-built limbo, awaiting state intervention. Another 450 contracts between Carillion and the state must be untangled, resolved and perhaps rescued by the government.
Fire services ready to deliver school meals after Carillion collapse
When you examine the claims made for the efficiency of the private sector, you soon discover that they boil down to the transfer of risk. Value for money hangs on the idea that companies shoulder risks the state would otherwise carry. But in cases like this, even when the company takes the first hit, the risk ultimately returns to the government. In these situations, the very notion of risk transfer is questionable.
Nowhere is it more dubious than when applied to the private finance initiative projects in which Carillion specialised. The PFI was invented by John Major’s Conservative government, but greatly expanded by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Private companies finance and deliver public services that governments would otherwise have provided.
The government claimed that the private sector, being more efficient, would provide services more cheaply than the private sector. PFI projects, Blair and Brown promised, would go ahead only if they proved to be cheaper than the “public sector comparator”.
But at the same time, the government told public bodies that state money was not an option: if they wanted new facilities, they would have to use the private finance initiative. In the words of the then health secretary, Alan Milburn: “It’s PFI or bust”. So, if you wanted a new hospital or bridge or classroomor army barracks, you had to demonstrate that PFI offered the best value for money. Otherwise, there would be no project. Public bodies immediately discovered a way to make the numbers add up: risk transfer.
Nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted
The costing of risk is notoriously subjective. Because it involves the passage of a fiendishly complex contract through an unknowable future, you can make a case for almost any value. A study published in the British Medical Journal revealed that, before the risk was costed, every hospital scheme it investigated would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. But once the notional financial risks had been added, building them through PFI came out cheaper in every case, although sometimes by less than 0.1%.
Not only was this exercise (as some prominent civil servants warned) bogus, but the entire concept is negated by the fact that if collapse occurs, the risk ripples through the private sector and into the public. Companies like Carillion might not be too big to fail, but the services they deliver are. You cannot, in a nominal democracy, suddenly close a public hospital, let a bridge collapse, or fail to deliver school meals.
Partly for this reason, and partly because of the inordinate political power of corporations and the people who run them, governments seek to insulate these companies from the very risks they claim to have transferred to them. This could explain why Theresa May’s administration continued to award contracts to Carillion after it had issued a series of profit warnings. Was this an attempt to keep the company in business?
If so, it was one of a long list of measures designed to privatise profit and socialise risk. PFI contracts specify that if there is a conflict between paying the private provider and delivering public services, the payments must come first. However deep the crisis in the NHS becomes, however many people must have their cancer operations postponed or be left to rot on trolleys, the legal priority is still to pay the contractor. Money is officially more valuable than life.
If a PFI consortium is contracted to deliver maintenance and ancillary services, these non-clinical functions are ringfenced, while the clinical services delivered by the public sector must be cut to make room for them. This forces public bodies to respond perversely to a funding crisis: nurses might be laid off, but the walls will still be painted. Many of the contracts cannot be broken for 25 or 30 years, regardless of whether or not they still meet real needs: again, this insulates the private sector from hazard, leaving it with the public. The risk lands not only on the state but also on the people. Carillion leaves behind a series of scandals, such as the food hygiene failure at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital, and the failings at the Surgicentre clinic it ran in Hertfordshire, revealed in a horrifying report in the Observer. Similar crises have attended many other deals with private providers: operating theatres flooded with sewage, power cuts which have left nurses to ventilate patients on life support by hand, school buildings falling apart, useless services continuing to be delivered while essential services are cut.
None of this was unforeseen. Some of us warned again and again during the New Labour years that this programme would prove to be an expensive fiasco. Even the Banker magazine predicted, in 2002, that “eventually an Enron-style disaster will be rerun on a sovereign balance sheet”. But the government didn’t want to know. Nor did the Conservative opposition, whose idea it was in the first place. Nor did the other newspapers, now apparently scratching their heads and wondering how this happened. There is no joy in being proved right, just immense frustration.
Risk to a company is not the same as risk to those who own and run it. The executives keep their payoffs. The shareholders take a hit on part of their portfolios, but limited liability ensures they can walk away from any debts. The company might disappear, but ultimately it’s just a name and some paperwork. But the risks imposed on the people – including the company’s workers – are real. We pay for these risks twice: first, when they are nominally transferred to corporations; then again, when they are returned to us. The word used to describe this process is efficiency.
Friday 15 September 2017
Pakistan's Intelligence Agencies: The Inside Story
Abbas Nasir from the Dawn archives of 1991
Over the last two decades, the role and scale of Pakistan's intelligence agencies has grown over and above their prescribed functions, to the extent that their operations, often undercover and at odds with even each other, have earned them the reputation of being a "State within a State".
Expanding the theatre of their operations to cover major foreign and domestic policy areas, the workings of the three key intelligence agencies, the ISI, the MI and the IB, have assumed more controversial proportions than ever before.
On a freezing December day in Islamabad, MNA Dr Imran Farooq, ordered the maintenance staff of the MNA hostel to service his room heater. The staff took down the gas heater, only to discover a device that didn't belong there taped to its back. Noticing that there were batteries attached to it, they immediately became alarmed and summoned the bomb disposal squad.
Being experts at their job, the members of the bomb squad soon allayed the perturbed MNA's fears that the device was not a bomb of any sort. Instead, they said, they had discovered a powerful transmitter that was being used to bug the MQM MNA's room.
While the federal interior minister was quick to order an inquiry into the affair, the MQM blamed the former PPP government for bugging Dr Farooq's room. The real culprit, however, is still to be identified.
A few days earlier, a heated debate in parliament had focused on the activities of our intelligence agencies as being "rather over-extended”. As the range of intelligence operations came under discussion, the fact that their agencies were maintaining files and tapes – not only on all politicians in the country, but many non-political civilians as well – drew the wrath of many MNAs of all political shades. Finally, Speaker Gohar Ayub tried to round up the debate, not only by ordering a select committee to look into the matter, but also admitting that “we have all been the target of intelligence agencies.” He even quipped that in the seventies, he knew that he had been code-named ‘Sabra-7’, by the intelligence agencies, which were constantly shadowing him.
Clearly, one constant factor emerged from all the grievances aired in parliament — everyone, under every regime, had either ordered spying on the opposition or had themselves been the target of such ‘special attention’. What was debated in the open forum of the National Assembly, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as the scope and direction of the operation that the intelligence units now take under their purview.
The other thing that can be said with certainty about them is that the intelligence set up in the country is one of the best organised in the business, functioning like a well-oiled, super-efficient machine.
National security theorists in Rawalpindi argue that such a setup is vital to any country which is placed in Pakistan’s strategic geo-political situation. “Given the hostility that the very creation of the country generated and the consequent environment in the subcontinent, Pakistan’s security concerns are legitimate and genuine,” says a retired officer who has served in one of the key intelligence cells of the country.
While this view links the country’s security, and even survival, to the efficiency of its intelligence agencies, it is becoming increasingly clear that the civilian psyche on the other hand, can never appreciate the thorough institutionalisation of these agencies in the running of foreign and domestic policies. One of the reasons for this is because, by their very definition, secret intelligence agencies do not subscribe to the open way of consultative or accountable operation that is central to any democratic system.
The mushroom growth in the size and scope of intelligence agency activities may be linked, to some extent, to the role they have been assigned in Pakistan’s short but eventful history. The events of the last 43 years teach us that the line between the concession of an inch and the taking of a mile has become very thin in this country.
The evolution of the ISI (the Inter-services Intelligence Directorate) in its present form can be traced to the assumption of office by former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He took over power after the disastrous 1971 war with India, which saw the Pakistan defence forces take a humiliating beating, followed by the creation of Bangladesh.
"You see, Bhutto had served as Ayub’s foreign minister. His education and orientation made him develop an international vision. He realised that an intelligence agency organised on modern scientific lines would enhance foreign policy options at his command,” says an ex-army officer, as he explains the rise of the ISI from his viewpoint.
“Although the ISI existed well before Bhutto came to power, it grew tremendously at that point, because the prime minister sought a greater role in the region for Pakistan. In fact, as the country embarked on its nuclear programme, more and more funds and leeway came the ISI's way," says another officer who served in a senior position during the Bhutto years before retiring in the late seventies.
Another interesting insight is offered by a defence expert. According to him, Bhutto chose the ISI to be the premier agency because he could accomplish two tasks with it. The first related to the country's foreign policy and the second to self preservation, as only a services intelligence agency could look into the army itself and keep Bhutto abreast with the mood and the sentiment in the forces.
This part of history also had its ironical twists. It is widely believed that Bhutto promoted General Zia as the army chief, superseding several far more senior and well-reputed lieutenant generals, because the DG of the ISI had recommended him as the most “reliable and loyal” choice for the coveted post.
It was no coincidence then, that when Bhutto was overthrown, Lt General Ghulam Jilani was retained as the DG of the ISI. Jilani remained one of the most trusted Zia lieutenants for a number of years, both as DG and later as the governor of Punjab.
While Jilani was the governor of Punjab, he made a decision that would create obstacles in the path of the PPP for years to come. He plucked a young industrialist from relative obscurity and nurtured him as a civilian alternative to the PPP leadership. The young man would be prime minister one day. To this day, Jilani remains Nawaz Sharif’s key mentor.
However, many army officers agree that much of the disrepute that came the ISI's way also dates back to the post-Bhutto years. General Zia naturally saw the PPP as an arch enemy which had to be contained at all costs.
Consequently, the whole state apparatus, and the key intelligence agencies in particular, were all geared up to attain this objective. To this end, the agencies were given a full clearance to operate as they chose, so that very soon their reputation as 'surveillance agencies' catapulted to that of a much higher-profile operation that came to be labelled and feared as 'the state within a state'. Midnight knocks, arrests, extorted confessions and phone taps became the order of the day.
The man who directed a major part of this operation from his relatively modest and obscure office in the ISI headquarters in Islamabad in the eighties was a certain Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad, better known in the army circles both for his cunning and the colour of his eyes, as 'BiIIa' (the cat).
As a young colonel, Imtiaz Ahmed was in charge of the ISI Karachi Det (detachment) when Bhutto was overthrown. He led the famous raid on Bhutto’s 70 Clifton residence, which led to the discovery of some ‘‘important and incriminating” documents. Imtiaz, belonging to a family from Mianwali that was close to General Jilani, reportedly soon earned Zia's admiration and trust.
He was elevated to the influential position of assistant director-general (internal security) at the ISI and headed the dreaded political cell there for several years. Imtiaz wielded enormous power and at times was said to have even bypassed his own DG to report directly to Zia.
Knowledgeable quarters credit Imtiaz with masterminding the idea that would later cause irreparable damage to the PPP. Slowly but surely, he built up an image of the PPP that would convince the whole defence set-up that the Benazir Bhutto-led party was a national security threat. In fact, it has often been said in army circles that it was his national security threat perception, coupled with the blundering style of government, that resulted in Benazir's sacking as the prime minister years later.
ISI observers claim that for many years Imtiaz remained the eyes and the ears of the establishment and watched every move that Benazir made. In fact, sources close to General Zia say that Imtiaz, a master at fabricating evidence, once even sought the general's permission to plant certain photographs in the newspapers that would bring the PPP leader into disrepute. Despite his known antipathy for the PPP, Zia was reportedly firm in denying permission for this excess and did not allow manufactured photographs to be published.
The growth of tile ISI, however, did not remain restricted to the regional role that Bhutto sought for it, nor did it expand solely on the basis of the role that Zia assigned to it in domestic politics. In 1979, Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan, and Pakistan suddenly found itself as a frontline state in the US-Soviet Cold War.
With the exit of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the arrival on the scene of Republican Ronald Reagan, the US stepped up a covert operation to organise resistance in Afghanistan. By the mid-eighties, this operation had become a multibillion dollar exercise. Although the CIA was solely handling the Washington end, the ISI became actively involved at the Pakistan end of it and neatly transformed itself into a major conduit for arms and money earmarked for the mujahideen.
But again, it was not only these changed circumstances that propelled the ISI into this task. To some extent, the agency was prepared for it already. During the Bhutto years, for instance, after the prime minister had identified the western neighbour as a threat that had to be addressed, the ISI had found and nurtured a young Kabul engineering graduate named Gulbadin Hekmatyar. The ISI not only funded and armed Hekmatyar, but also organised his line of communication inside Afghanistan.
All this manoeuvring was to be used to exert pressure on any Kabul government that harboured any wish of rekindling the Pakhtunistan issue. And these pressure tactics had worked wonders when they were applied to President Daud in the seventies. In a quick volte-face from the belligerent posture he had adopted, Daud had rushed to Murree for talks with Bhutto and had promptly made very conciliatory noises.
However, when the CIA-ISI tie-up went into effect, the Pakistani agency slowly acquired a far more sophisticated and scientific outlook. It is said that some officials, including the then DG, Lt General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, benefited in more than one way from the covert operation. In fact, the explosion at Ojhri camp (the munitions depot for the Afghan resistance in Rawalpindi) was described by some quarters as having occurred because 'stock taking' measures were on their way after charges of pilferage.
The inquiry ordered by the then prime minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, into the incident, according to knowledgeable quarters, was one of the reasons for his undoing. The major factor, perhaps, was the very system that General Zia had visualised for the country in the mid-eighties. This system not only created friction between the parties that shared power in the country, but also contributed to the growth of intelligence agencies which worked at cross purposes with one another.
Although Junejo was handpicked by Zia to be the prime minister, the man soon showed that he had a mind of his own. As Junejo's ambitions grew, so did the Directorate of the Intelligence Bureau (DIB), the civilian intelligence agency which had previously played second fiddle to the ISI. Although the stated functions of the DIB assign it an important role, for years it had suffered neglect both in terms of staffing, funding and orientation. All that the rulers, including Bhutto, assigned to the DIB was the policing of opposing politicians.
Under Junejo, the DIB chief, Rathore turned the once sleepy agency into a vibrant organisation, but all its counter-intelligence was restricted to looking out for anti-Junejo government moves rather than anti-state actions. The irony, of course, with intelligence agencies the world over, is that, though they work for the same country, they often become each other's bitterest rivals. The same was the case with the DIB. It embarked on an ambitious exercise in which it started tapping the telephones of the Army House – where General Zia lived – to the extent that the DIB was monitoring every move made by Zia and the members of government close to him.
For its part, the ISI was monitoring Junejo and his cronies. And though by the time the Ojhri blast took place, General Rehman was serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, he still wielded considerable influence over the ISI. Even though Major General Hamid Gul had been appointed as DG of the ISI, General Rehman was still running the Afghan wing of the ISI. Therefore, Junejo’s inquiry into the Ojhri explosion so angered Rehman that, apparently, he presented Zia with doctored tapes of Junejo’s alleged phone conversations. Sources say that despite the fact that until then Zia had been willing to tolerate Junejo, these tapes quickly changed his mind and he finally decided to get rid of his prime minister.
Months after Junejo's sacking, both Zia and Rehman died in the Bahawalpur crash. But their legacy remained, to the extent that the system that Zia had evolved continued to remain intact, in the sense that the intelligence agencies continued to transcend the parameters of the growing role assigned to them.
Although Brigadier Imtiaz had operated in obscurity until then, his name exploded to the fore as he became instrumental in the formation of the IJI before the 1988 polls and pioneered the concept of one-to-one contests in the elections. An expert in ‘psych-war ', he was the main architect of the IJI election strategy, to the extent that image-building slogans such as “jaag Punjabi jaag, teray pag noon laga daag” were attributed to his genius.
When Ms Bhutto took over as prime minister, she insisted on the removal of Brigadier Imtiaz from the ISI. Naively perhaps, she forced the appointment of a retired Lt. General, Shamsur Rehman Kallue, in place of Hamid Gul, who was promoted and given command of the prestigious armoured corps in Multan. Having a man of her choice posted as DG of the ISI and naming a retired major, Masud Sharif — who was described as a "blundering fool" — to head DIB, she relaxed. Obviously, she had not realised that the agencies that had been described as a 'state within a state' could hardly be neutralised through a couple of postings and transfers.
Moreover, she was never even chastened by the fact that, instead of her nominees, a couple of serving officers nominated by the COAS General Mirza Aslam Beg, remained in charge of the Afghan and Kashmir policies.
Subsequently, whatever was removed from the jurisdiction of the ISI after Kallue took over, was soon thrown into the lap of the military intelligence. The military intelligence immediately expanded its theatre of operations, as Benazir sought to cut the ISI to size. In effect, therefore, no qualitative change really occurred in the system of the intelligence units that had become used to conducting independent foreign, and to some extent, domestic policy operations.
However, the Benazir Bhutto government did make one decision of real consequence. It appointed a committee headed by a former chief of air staff, Air Chief Marshal (retd) Zulfikar Ali Khan, to look into the working of the intelligence agencies, and to suggest measures to delink them from politics as well as to improve their functioning. But the report of this committee, which was reportedly compiled after the air marshal interviewed scores of intelligence personnel, is now unlikely to see the light of day in the changed circumstances.
In the present situation, however, it is not clear what roles are being assigned to the three major agencies. But with the appointment of Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad as the chief of the IB, it can be surmised that the establishment still sees the PPP as a major threat.
What one can hope for is that the days of the midnight knock do not return to Pakistan. The intelligence agencies, which now have to counter the Raw-Mossad nexus – particularly in the regional nuclear context – could do well to draw a clear distinction between anti-government and anti-state activities.
The crucial question that still needs to be addressed is whether these agencies operate under the watchful eyes of an elected government or are they still so strong that they are themselves instrumental in installing or toppling such governments.
Over the last two decades, the role and scale of Pakistan's intelligence agencies has grown over and above their prescribed functions, to the extent that their operations, often undercover and at odds with even each other, have earned them the reputation of being a "State within a State".
Expanding the theatre of their operations to cover major foreign and domestic policy areas, the workings of the three key intelligence agencies, the ISI, the MI and the IB, have assumed more controversial proportions than ever before.
On a freezing December day in Islamabad, MNA Dr Imran Farooq, ordered the maintenance staff of the MNA hostel to service his room heater. The staff took down the gas heater, only to discover a device that didn't belong there taped to its back. Noticing that there were batteries attached to it, they immediately became alarmed and summoned the bomb disposal squad.
Being experts at their job, the members of the bomb squad soon allayed the perturbed MNA's fears that the device was not a bomb of any sort. Instead, they said, they had discovered a powerful transmitter that was being used to bug the MQM MNA's room.
While the federal interior minister was quick to order an inquiry into the affair, the MQM blamed the former PPP government for bugging Dr Farooq's room. The real culprit, however, is still to be identified.
A few days earlier, a heated debate in parliament had focused on the activities of our intelligence agencies as being "rather over-extended”. As the range of intelligence operations came under discussion, the fact that their agencies were maintaining files and tapes – not only on all politicians in the country, but many non-political civilians as well – drew the wrath of many MNAs of all political shades. Finally, Speaker Gohar Ayub tried to round up the debate, not only by ordering a select committee to look into the matter, but also admitting that “we have all been the target of intelligence agencies.” He even quipped that in the seventies, he knew that he had been code-named ‘Sabra-7’, by the intelligence agencies, which were constantly shadowing him.
Clearly, one constant factor emerged from all the grievances aired in parliament — everyone, under every regime, had either ordered spying on the opposition or had themselves been the target of such ‘special attention’. What was debated in the open forum of the National Assembly, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as the scope and direction of the operation that the intelligence units now take under their purview.
The other thing that can be said with certainty about them is that the intelligence set up in the country is one of the best organised in the business, functioning like a well-oiled, super-efficient machine.
National security theorists in Rawalpindi argue that such a setup is vital to any country which is placed in Pakistan’s strategic geo-political situation. “Given the hostility that the very creation of the country generated and the consequent environment in the subcontinent, Pakistan’s security concerns are legitimate and genuine,” says a retired officer who has served in one of the key intelligence cells of the country.
While this view links the country’s security, and even survival, to the efficiency of its intelligence agencies, it is becoming increasingly clear that the civilian psyche on the other hand, can never appreciate the thorough institutionalisation of these agencies in the running of foreign and domestic policies. One of the reasons for this is because, by their very definition, secret intelligence agencies do not subscribe to the open way of consultative or accountable operation that is central to any democratic system.
The mushroom growth in the size and scope of intelligence agency activities may be linked, to some extent, to the role they have been assigned in Pakistan’s short but eventful history. The events of the last 43 years teach us that the line between the concession of an inch and the taking of a mile has become very thin in this country.
The evolution of the ISI (the Inter-services Intelligence Directorate) in its present form can be traced to the assumption of office by former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He took over power after the disastrous 1971 war with India, which saw the Pakistan defence forces take a humiliating beating, followed by the creation of Bangladesh.
"You see, Bhutto had served as Ayub’s foreign minister. His education and orientation made him develop an international vision. He realised that an intelligence agency organised on modern scientific lines would enhance foreign policy options at his command,” says an ex-army officer, as he explains the rise of the ISI from his viewpoint.
“Although the ISI existed well before Bhutto came to power, it grew tremendously at that point, because the prime minister sought a greater role in the region for Pakistan. In fact, as the country embarked on its nuclear programme, more and more funds and leeway came the ISI's way," says another officer who served in a senior position during the Bhutto years before retiring in the late seventies.
Another interesting insight is offered by a defence expert. According to him, Bhutto chose the ISI to be the premier agency because he could accomplish two tasks with it. The first related to the country's foreign policy and the second to self preservation, as only a services intelligence agency could look into the army itself and keep Bhutto abreast with the mood and the sentiment in the forces.
This part of history also had its ironical twists. It is widely believed that Bhutto promoted General Zia as the army chief, superseding several far more senior and well-reputed lieutenant generals, because the DG of the ISI had recommended him as the most “reliable and loyal” choice for the coveted post.
It was no coincidence then, that when Bhutto was overthrown, Lt General Ghulam Jilani was retained as the DG of the ISI. Jilani remained one of the most trusted Zia lieutenants for a number of years, both as DG and later as the governor of Punjab.
While Jilani was the governor of Punjab, he made a decision that would create obstacles in the path of the PPP for years to come. He plucked a young industrialist from relative obscurity and nurtured him as a civilian alternative to the PPP leadership. The young man would be prime minister one day. To this day, Jilani remains Nawaz Sharif’s key mentor.
However, many army officers agree that much of the disrepute that came the ISI's way also dates back to the post-Bhutto years. General Zia naturally saw the PPP as an arch enemy which had to be contained at all costs.
Consequently, the whole state apparatus, and the key intelligence agencies in particular, were all geared up to attain this objective. To this end, the agencies were given a full clearance to operate as they chose, so that very soon their reputation as 'surveillance agencies' catapulted to that of a much higher-profile operation that came to be labelled and feared as 'the state within a state'. Midnight knocks, arrests, extorted confessions and phone taps became the order of the day.
The man who directed a major part of this operation from his relatively modest and obscure office in the ISI headquarters in Islamabad in the eighties was a certain Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad, better known in the army circles both for his cunning and the colour of his eyes, as 'BiIIa' (the cat).
As a young colonel, Imtiaz Ahmed was in charge of the ISI Karachi Det (detachment) when Bhutto was overthrown. He led the famous raid on Bhutto’s 70 Clifton residence, which led to the discovery of some ‘‘important and incriminating” documents. Imtiaz, belonging to a family from Mianwali that was close to General Jilani, reportedly soon earned Zia's admiration and trust.
He was elevated to the influential position of assistant director-general (internal security) at the ISI and headed the dreaded political cell there for several years. Imtiaz wielded enormous power and at times was said to have even bypassed his own DG to report directly to Zia.
Knowledgeable quarters credit Imtiaz with masterminding the idea that would later cause irreparable damage to the PPP. Slowly but surely, he built up an image of the PPP that would convince the whole defence set-up that the Benazir Bhutto-led party was a national security threat. In fact, it has often been said in army circles that it was his national security threat perception, coupled with the blundering style of government, that resulted in Benazir's sacking as the prime minister years later.
ISI observers claim that for many years Imtiaz remained the eyes and the ears of the establishment and watched every move that Benazir made. In fact, sources close to General Zia say that Imtiaz, a master at fabricating evidence, once even sought the general's permission to plant certain photographs in the newspapers that would bring the PPP leader into disrepute. Despite his known antipathy for the PPP, Zia was reportedly firm in denying permission for this excess and did not allow manufactured photographs to be published.
The growth of tile ISI, however, did not remain restricted to the regional role that Bhutto sought for it, nor did it expand solely on the basis of the role that Zia assigned to it in domestic politics. In 1979, Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan, and Pakistan suddenly found itself as a frontline state in the US-Soviet Cold War.
With the exit of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and the arrival on the scene of Republican Ronald Reagan, the US stepped up a covert operation to organise resistance in Afghanistan. By the mid-eighties, this operation had become a multibillion dollar exercise. Although the CIA was solely handling the Washington end, the ISI became actively involved at the Pakistan end of it and neatly transformed itself into a major conduit for arms and money earmarked for the mujahideen.
But again, it was not only these changed circumstances that propelled the ISI into this task. To some extent, the agency was prepared for it already. During the Bhutto years, for instance, after the prime minister had identified the western neighbour as a threat that had to be addressed, the ISI had found and nurtured a young Kabul engineering graduate named Gulbadin Hekmatyar. The ISI not only funded and armed Hekmatyar, but also organised his line of communication inside Afghanistan.
All this manoeuvring was to be used to exert pressure on any Kabul government that harboured any wish of rekindling the Pakhtunistan issue. And these pressure tactics had worked wonders when they were applied to President Daud in the seventies. In a quick volte-face from the belligerent posture he had adopted, Daud had rushed to Murree for talks with Bhutto and had promptly made very conciliatory noises.
However, when the CIA-ISI tie-up went into effect, the Pakistani agency slowly acquired a far more sophisticated and scientific outlook. It is said that some officials, including the then DG, Lt General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, benefited in more than one way from the covert operation. In fact, the explosion at Ojhri camp (the munitions depot for the Afghan resistance in Rawalpindi) was described by some quarters as having occurred because 'stock taking' measures were on their way after charges of pilferage.
The inquiry ordered by the then prime minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, into the incident, according to knowledgeable quarters, was one of the reasons for his undoing. The major factor, perhaps, was the very system that General Zia had visualised for the country in the mid-eighties. This system not only created friction between the parties that shared power in the country, but also contributed to the growth of intelligence agencies which worked at cross purposes with one another.
Although Junejo was handpicked by Zia to be the prime minister, the man soon showed that he had a mind of his own. As Junejo's ambitions grew, so did the Directorate of the Intelligence Bureau (DIB), the civilian intelligence agency which had previously played second fiddle to the ISI. Although the stated functions of the DIB assign it an important role, for years it had suffered neglect both in terms of staffing, funding and orientation. All that the rulers, including Bhutto, assigned to the DIB was the policing of opposing politicians.
Under Junejo, the DIB chief, Rathore turned the once sleepy agency into a vibrant organisation, but all its counter-intelligence was restricted to looking out for anti-Junejo government moves rather than anti-state actions. The irony, of course, with intelligence agencies the world over, is that, though they work for the same country, they often become each other's bitterest rivals. The same was the case with the DIB. It embarked on an ambitious exercise in which it started tapping the telephones of the Army House – where General Zia lived – to the extent that the DIB was monitoring every move made by Zia and the members of government close to him.
For its part, the ISI was monitoring Junejo and his cronies. And though by the time the Ojhri blast took place, General Rehman was serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, he still wielded considerable influence over the ISI. Even though Major General Hamid Gul had been appointed as DG of the ISI, General Rehman was still running the Afghan wing of the ISI. Therefore, Junejo’s inquiry into the Ojhri explosion so angered Rehman that, apparently, he presented Zia with doctored tapes of Junejo’s alleged phone conversations. Sources say that despite the fact that until then Zia had been willing to tolerate Junejo, these tapes quickly changed his mind and he finally decided to get rid of his prime minister.
Months after Junejo's sacking, both Zia and Rehman died in the Bahawalpur crash. But their legacy remained, to the extent that the system that Zia had evolved continued to remain intact, in the sense that the intelligence agencies continued to transcend the parameters of the growing role assigned to them.
Although Brigadier Imtiaz had operated in obscurity until then, his name exploded to the fore as he became instrumental in the formation of the IJI before the 1988 polls and pioneered the concept of one-to-one contests in the elections. An expert in ‘psych-war ', he was the main architect of the IJI election strategy, to the extent that image-building slogans such as “jaag Punjabi jaag, teray pag noon laga daag” were attributed to his genius.
When Ms Bhutto took over as prime minister, she insisted on the removal of Brigadier Imtiaz from the ISI. Naively perhaps, she forced the appointment of a retired Lt. General, Shamsur Rehman Kallue, in place of Hamid Gul, who was promoted and given command of the prestigious armoured corps in Multan. Having a man of her choice posted as DG of the ISI and naming a retired major, Masud Sharif — who was described as a "blundering fool" — to head DIB, she relaxed. Obviously, she had not realised that the agencies that had been described as a 'state within a state' could hardly be neutralised through a couple of postings and transfers.
Moreover, she was never even chastened by the fact that, instead of her nominees, a couple of serving officers nominated by the COAS General Mirza Aslam Beg, remained in charge of the Afghan and Kashmir policies.
Subsequently, whatever was removed from the jurisdiction of the ISI after Kallue took over, was soon thrown into the lap of the military intelligence. The military intelligence immediately expanded its theatre of operations, as Benazir sought to cut the ISI to size. In effect, therefore, no qualitative change really occurred in the system of the intelligence units that had become used to conducting independent foreign, and to some extent, domestic policy operations.
However, the Benazir Bhutto government did make one decision of real consequence. It appointed a committee headed by a former chief of air staff, Air Chief Marshal (retd) Zulfikar Ali Khan, to look into the working of the intelligence agencies, and to suggest measures to delink them from politics as well as to improve their functioning. But the report of this committee, which was reportedly compiled after the air marshal interviewed scores of intelligence personnel, is now unlikely to see the light of day in the changed circumstances.
In the present situation, however, it is not clear what roles are being assigned to the three major agencies. But with the appointment of Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmad as the chief of the IB, it can be surmised that the establishment still sees the PPP as a major threat.
What one can hope for is that the days of the midnight knock do not return to Pakistan. The intelligence agencies, which now have to counter the Raw-Mossad nexus – particularly in the regional nuclear context – could do well to draw a clear distinction between anti-government and anti-state activities.
The crucial question that still needs to be addressed is whether these agencies operate under the watchful eyes of an elected government or are they still so strong that they are themselves instrumental in installing or toppling such governments.
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