FOCUS Archive
We are all diplomats now - Nicholas J. Cull explores the all-embracing potential for digital public diplomacy in his article for Place Branding and Public Diplomacy journal.
It happened in November. The world was weary of war and crisis when he stole the headlines. He was charismatic. He was radical. He had a point to prove. He defied years of diplomatic convention and laid the secrets of great power diplomacy before the world. His revelations captured the headlines and shocked the establishment. In laying bare these secrets he proclaimed a new approach to international affairs and – implicitly – the arrival of a new power. Julian Assange? November 2010? No. That vignette describes events in the now distant autumn of 1917 and the actions of Leon Trotsky, then the newly appointed People’s Commissar for International Affairs for the Bolshevik government of Russia.
In November 1917 Trotsky published a number of secret treaties which had been found in the archives of the Tsar in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. In a statement of 22 November 1917 Trotsky argued that: ‘The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy.’ The documents that Trotsky published revealed a sorry tale of the backroom deals in which belligerent powers of the entente (Russia, France and Great Britain) promised various concessions of territory to the neutral nations that they sought to draw into the Great War.
Diplomacy swiftly adjusted to compensate for Trotsky’s gambit. On 8 January 1918 the US president Woodrow Wilson replied in kind. His ‘fourteen points’ on which he claimed an equitable peace could be based included ‘open covenants openly arrived at’. Others tried to give the new regime a taste of its own medicine with revelations of collusion between the Bolsheviks and the Kaiser’s Germany. In time the Soviet state learnt the value of secrecy in diplomacy and reinstated the traditional approach, reaching new heights of double dealing in the pact with Hitler of August 1939, but for a season it enjoyed the fruits of its defiance of convention. Trotsky’s revelation was a symbol that the Bolshevik state represented something new in world affairs. It was public diplomacy by leak.
The analogy with 1917 is not wholly academic. The coming (or is it a springing?) of WikiLeaks is just as indicative of a ‘game change’ as Trotsky’s gambit was ninety-six years ago. As then, while the information itself is important what is crucial is the context. In 1917 the leak required an earth-shattering revolution. In 2010 all it took to challenge the diplomatic order of the day was a single individual with a well-placed accomplice and a little technical know-how.
Now, technical know-how is at the heart of the revolution in communications technology. WikiLeaks not only required a flash drive and surreptitious data dump to acquire its trove of material, but also needed the facilities of an easily accessible worldwide web to make it instantaneously available. Technology has given one individual the communication power that was the monopoly of the nation state in the previous century.
In the wake of the Trotsky leak the great powers faced a prolonged struggle to reassert their legitimacy and did so in part by shifting to greater openness with institutions such as the League of Nations.
In the wake of WikiLeaks the powers of our own time will have to consider again the dangers of double dealing, and work to ensure that there is a minimal gap between what is claimed in public and what is practised in private. For all its regrettable corrosion of the principles of confidentiality on which so much diplomacy rests, the shadow of WikiLeaks may play the classic role once memorably claimed for an Australian opposition party and thereafter embraced by the investigative press: ‘keep the bastards honest’.
THE FOUNDATION: PUBLIC DIPLOMACY 1.0The web-based revolution in public diplomacy has been a long time coming. As far back as the late 1960s some public diplomats had been anticipating a golden age of communication made possible by a network of computers. In February 1968 America’s chief public diplomat, the director of the United States Information Agency, Leonard Marks, predicted that a world information grid of linked computers would be ‘a fundamental step toward lasting world peace … The culture of all lands must be circulated through the houses of nations as our technology permits.’
The dawn didn’t really break until the mid 1990s when the Mosaic browser system made it possible for the personal computers which had spread in the 1980s to access data platforms in the rapidly growing worldwide web.
For public diplomats the implications of this were slow to sink in. Web technology where it was used was a platform for press releases and one-way top-down communication. The pride of US public diplomacy was its system for making Voice of America available online, initially in script form but eventually as an audio stream. Journals became available online (cheaper than print) and the so-called ‘wireless file’ anthology of ‘useful’ American news and views which had been sent to embassies since the early 1930s became a website.
Amazing as it sounds now, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 found a number of US embassies still without websites. Other players around the world were more canny, realizing the value of a well-managed online identity. Cyber-image and, by extension, cyber-diplomacy became a tool in the public diplomacy toolbox. What seems to have been largely missed was the shift of power inherent in the new technology. Governments focused on how swiftly they could do what they had always done. Militaries looked to occupy cyber-space as if it were simply the modern equivalent of the prized high ground of old. Treasuries looked to save money by going ‘paperless’. But the new technology meant more than that. It was empowering the individual in a new way.
While the great powers continued (and continue) to broadcast their speeches, press releases and so forth into the ether and across the web, the audience was no longer as likely to listen. Part of the change was rooted in the sheer number of voices suddenly speaking online and the range of choices available. But as the number of websites proliferated it became possible to seek out a source closely matching one’s own sense of identity, and even to develop an identity based on an online connection. Many different imagined communities emerged online built from shared interests. Some had the potential to supplant national identity. Online communities based around radical Islamism were a case in point.
This proliferation of communities had one massive implication for public diplomacy and that was in the area of credibility. Public diplomacy relies on being credible to an audience but in this new environment polls revealed that credibility now rested not with the traditional generators of information – governments and news organizations – but with whoever seemed to be ‘someone like me’.
THE COMING OF WEB 2.0By 2004 it became clear that the internet was changing and that a new term was needed to describe the quantum leap from the old world of web-pages and email to that of social media and sites based on user-generated content. The English-speaking internet community seized on a term first coined in the specialized literature in 1999 which drew an analogy to the release of the new version of a program: a version 2.0 (two-point-oh). The term Web 2.0 was used fairly loosely to discuss the explosion of user-generated content online including blogs, the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia site Wikipedia (founded 2001) and social media sites including Facebook (launched 2004), file-sharing sites like Flikr (launched 2004) and YouTube (launched 2005). By the end of 2006 the new trend was sufficiently established for Time magazine to perceptively name ‘YOU’ as the person of the year – an honour whose previous recipients include a parade of American presidents and world statesmen.
As the web became a domain for user-generated content a variety of sectors coined varieties of the Web 2.0 formulation for their own use including Library 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Government 2.0 and even Porn 2.0. Public Diplomacy 2.0 – a sub-set of Government 2.0 – was a late entrant in the field and owed its genesis to James K. Glassman, an American journalist and commentator who served as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy for the final half of 2008. Although Glassman had a relatively short tenure in Washington DC he was a great enthusiast for the new media. He spoke of a unique opportunity to engage world opinion as never before and challenged the US Department of State to embrace the new technology.
Other ministries around the world underwent similar awakenings. Some were early adopters. In the spring of 2007 the Maldives and Sweden opened the first ‘embassies’ (or cultural centres) in the ‘virtual world’ of Second Life (launched in 2003). Many more people read about it in the old newspapers than actually visited online but that hardly dimmed the public diplomacy objective. An energetic Israeli diplomat posted to New York City named David Saranga dealt with the unenviable task of selling his nation’s offensive against Gaza in late 2008 by organizing a press conference on the social networking site Twitter (then just two years old). The herd thundered in behind them, but to what effect is still not clear.
THE FACE OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY 2.0The essential challenge of the Web 2.0 world is that it enabled the preferred source of ‘someone like me’ to become the principal point of contact for all information. In this regard it is a return to a village environment where one’s key interlocutors and sources were the hundred or so ‘like you’ who made up the village. Now each person could gather their personal ‘village’ of friends in cyberspace without regard for the limitations of geography.
This poses a problem for the public diplomacy agency seeking to utilize new media channels. As each individual’s cyber domain becomes more tailored to their own tastes and settled into a comfortable niche, the intervention of an outsider will seem increasingly incongruous. Both the US Department of State and Department of Defense have digital engagement teams participating in online discussions and ‘correcting’ misunderstandings of their interlocutors. This may be counterproductive if the intervention is judged to be at odds with the identity of the site.
The scale of successes is difficult to gauge. The number of friends on an organization’s Facebook page became the immediate measure rather than any consideration of whether real engagement was taking place as a result of the link.
More interesting was the use of YouTube. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs has launched a number of competitions for user-generated films including a contest for the best short film on the theme of ‘Democracy is’. Young filmmakers from around the world took part and their films were seen and circulated online. Winners of the first year’s competition included filmmakers from Iran and Nepal. The strategy was empowering voices who could be ‘someone like me’ and hence credible to the audiences that the US really needed to influence.
In a similar vein James Glassman launched a project to assist young international activists. He drew together a remarkable range of young people, the most famous being Oscar Morales who in the spring of 2008 had used Facebook to initiate what became an international wave of protests against the FARC guerrillas in Colombia. Their conference resulted in the creation of the Alliance of Youth Movements: a support structure for those seeking to use new technology to transform their world. Its activities include a website with clear instruction on how to set up a blog or social media campaign.
The most elaborate use of the new media was the creation of full blown joint projects in cyberspace. The State Department funded a remarkable collaboration between a school of architecture in California and one in Cairo during which the students worked together on joint projects. When they eventually met they already knew and trusted each other. It was an indication of what was possible. Yet there have been problems. They are clearest in the US official use of Twitter.
TWITTERTwitter swept to prominence in 2008. The micro-blogging site seemed to offer an ideal technology for engaging foreign audiences. Its 140 character format required the discipline of brevity but was – by design – short enough to be read on the sort of handheld devices that much of the developing world used to access the internet. The United States and many other public diplomacy actors hurried to be part of the Twitter-revolution.
The first problem that the US ran into was the question of exactly how its personnel would conduct themselves online. Would they establish a feed in a formal capacity and use it as a platform to post the links for press releases and statements or would they seek to use the site to present themselves to the world, as a way to humanize US foreign policy.
A notable public diplomat who took the second course was Colleen Graffey, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State with responsibility for US public diplomacy in Europe, a political appointee with a reputation for stridency in such issues as defence of conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Her Tweets, however, seemed trivial when set against the events happening in the world. An infelicitous message in which she mentioned purchasing a bathing suit in the midst of a meltdown in the Middle East drew particular scorn.
The new-media experts who joined the Obama administration’s foreign policy operation ran into similar problems. Jared Cohen was criticized after he memorably Tweet-ed about a wonderful Frappachino in Syria in June 2010. The real problem with the explosion of State Department Twitter sites was not their personalization but their neglect of a key dimension of the platform.
The essence of Twitter is that it opens a space not only to speak in 140 character bursts but to listen in the same way also. The State Department has paid lots of attention to how many people are following its postings, but generally forgets to think about following anyone themselves. Those who were ‘following’ others – the new technology superstars Jared Cohen, Alec Ross and Katie Stanton – turn out to have been following each other, which is to say other people tweeting in the US new media community, rather than the wider world that they were supposed to be engaging online.
The fixation with ‘broadcast mode’ in US online diplomacy is a major faux pas. It is the equivalent of going into a party and shouting about one’s self and leaving: a behaviour which is intolerable even if one is buying all the drinks, which the United States no longer is.
The first duty of a public diplomat is to listen and the new media have an amazing ability to make that listening both easier and visible. Suppose one of the US embassy Twitter sites were to begin to survey the online environment and click to follow selected writers and sites in their assigned country. Each of those writers might then receive an email saying ‘Ambassador X or US embassy Y is now following you on Twitter’. This could encourage writers to reciprocate and follow, raising the possibility that they would re-tweet an embassy message or two and pass them further along their network with the added boost of their local credibility. It would certainly create a lineup of go-to feeds to help the embassy understand its country, which would be easily taken up by others in the embassy and beyond. Their Twitter-roll could be passed on to anyone else who cared to scroll down and right click. Fortunately, there are some embassies which have realized the potential of Twitter as a tool of listening. The US embassy in New Delhi, for example, is actively following feeds in its region.
A Tweet – like any other piece of information – is welcome to the extent that it is actually of interest to its recipient. There is a great danger that a Twitter feed will become ‘spam’ if it has too much to say on subjects beyond the precise interest of the reader. It is a mistake to insist on one-size-fits-all in a made to measure world. Twitter offers the potential for an unlimited variety of feeds and rather than expecting various diplomats to become providers of wisdom on every subject under the sun, it makes more sense to use discreet feeds to distribute information on discreet issues which will be of relevance to an audience. ‘Tweet the issue’ should be the mantra of public diplomats.
As already noted the great strength of Web 2.0 is its ability to connect people to others like themselves. With this in mind it is not wholly surprising that the greatest strides in Web 2.0 at the State Department have been internal to the department. Closed sites provide a platform for tasks as diverse as accumulating and disseminating best practice, the construction of a ‘diplopedia’ wiki with background and policy discussion on particular countries, a mechanism called ‘communities@state’ to bring diplomats together around shared interests and online sounding boards to feedback to management on ways to improve conditions within the department. Richard Boly, director of the Department’s office of e.diplomacy proudly revealed how online suggestions had yielded the brilliant insight that more people would cycle to work if there were showers located adjacent to the bike storage.
THE ILLUSIONS OF PUBLIC DIPLOMACY 2.0The world of communications technology continues to evolve at an exponential rate. Science fact outstrips the science fiction of just a few years ago. At the edge of this vortex of innovation we find the practitioners of Public Diplomacy 2.0 in the foreign ministries of the world typically struggling to pull their risk-averse and information-protective agencies into the new era.
The achievements of Public Diplomacy 2.0 are notable and worthy of scrutiny but they must not be mistaken for offering some mechanism for mastery of the new environment. To think such would be to confuse a surfer with the wave he rides and to ignore the impact of the wave as it reshapes the shore.
The traditional diplomatic actors are attempting to get their message out and to engage with the world, but their competitors are doing precisely the same – often with the advantage of a local affinity – and the world is in flux, fragmenting and regrouping into new networks.
Secretary of State Clinton has argued that connectivity is an absolute good and pledged the United States to work to make the blessings of the information society as widely available as possible, but the voters of the United States will have to accept that the voices they empower will be diverse and will include some that are critical and even openly hostile.
RULES TO LIVE BYHow then should practitioners of public diplomacy – large and small – respond to this world of WikiLeaks and the wider Web 2.0 environment? The first step is to acknowledge the transformation of the world of which this winter’s online shenanigans is just one example. Whether in Tunisia or in Tunbridge Wells individuals are inherently more powerful than they have been at any time in history, more especially as they connect across networks. This global and wired public cannot be ignored and communication aimed only at its leaders will necessarily fall short.
The new technology opens a frightening aspect of chaos – the response of the diplomatic establishment to WikiLeaks had all the hallmarks of panic – but it also offers the opportunity for a new kind of politics and a new kind of diplomacy.
The first step for communicators is to acknowledge that they cannot be all things to all people. The task of public diplomacy should evolve to one of partnering around issues with those who share the same objectives and empowering those who will be credible with their target audience. Some nations are recognizing that being seen to be of help in building a network can be a valuable act of public diplomacy in its own right; hence the Swiss government has established its chain of SwissNex offices at strategic locations around the world to connect innovators with one another.
In planning new technology ventures I would propose the following. Rule 1: Be relevant. Don’t assume that what is important to you will matter to your audience: tweet the issue. Rule 2: Be cooperative. Look for partners and be ready to pass on messages from others and by the same token craft your messages so as to make them easy for others to pass them on. Rule 3: Know your audience. Understand the ways in which they use social media and be consistent with that culture as you would if you were physically entering a conversation. Understand the credibility that comes from being ‘like’ your online interlocutor. Rule 4: Be realistic. Public Diplomacy 2.0 can’t make a bad policy good any more than its 1.0 variety could. The prime need is not to say the right thing but to actually be the right thing, especially in an era of growing transparency. Rule 5: Listen. Do not let the 1001 new ways to speak that you have discovered online keep you from exploring 1002 new ways to listen. In the old media or the new, public diplomacy begins with listening.
Extracted from Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, edited by Simon Anholt. Volume 7, Number 1, May 2011; Palgrave Macmillan.
The Popular Image of North Africa and the Middle East, Keith Dinnie - an extract
Will the popular image of North Africa and the Middle East change after the Arab Spring? Keith Dinnie examines the possibilities in his article for Place Branding and Public Diplomacy journal.
The recent dramatic upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East have gripped the world’s attention in a way that has unmistakable echoes of the collapse of communism in 1989. What effect, if any, will these developments have on the reputation and image of the countries concerned?
Much will depend on whether real reform occurs or if the old regimes manage to hold onto power. Should the pro-democracy movement peter out, with a return to authoritarian rule, then it is unlikely that there will be any positive change in each country’s image. Real radical change is the basis of improvement in country image.
If democracy does take root in the region, then such a historic shift can be expected to lead to significant changes. Instead of being submerged by a somewhat negative ‘Middle East region brand’ effect, individual countries will begin to assert their own unique identity. Instead of being monopolized by the image of one political leader, countries will be able to project the full richness and diversity of their respective cultures, as Spain has done in the years following the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.
Spain’s transition to democracy and its subsequent cultural renaissance paved the way for it to become one of the countries most often quoted as an example of a successful nation brand. If real political change materializes, there is no reason why the countries of North Africa and the Middle East should not now follow a similarly positive trajectory. The obvious caveat is that these countries must avoid the post-dictator, political vacuum chaos of Iraq.
There are no limits to the creativity with which nations can attempt to project their identity to the rest of the world. On the other hand, the range of uncontrollable image determinants is very wide. They range from word-of-mouth and national stereotypes to export brands and the behaviour of a country’s citizens.
Unfortunately for most of the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, country image perceptions held by foreign audiences have been dominated and distorted by politics, whether projected by the personal image of a military dictator or a more diffuse regional image of extremism, terrorism and so on. All the other factors have been overshadowed, resulting in country images that are incomplete, inaccurate and grotesquely skewed in a negative direction.
For Egypt and Tunisia, the situation is redressed to some extent by their tourist industries. Indeed, it is unlikely that many foreigners who have visited Tunisia in the past twenty years are or were aware of the country’s leadership and political regime.
Visiting a country as a tourist may provide only a superficial impression of a country, but at least it allows personal interaction with locals and the host culture. In the absence of a significant tourist industry, external perceptions of other Middle East or North African countries are mediated to an unhealthy extent by the international media. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the striking absence of alternative image-formation factors such as sports performances or export brands, image determinants that can play a hugely significant role in country image perceptions. The country image of New Zealand, for example, is powerfully amplified by the All Blacks rugby team, whereas the country image of Japan is tightly linked with globally successful corporate brands such as Sony, Toyota and Toshiba. However, most foreign audiences would struggle to associate anything comparable with the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.
The closed nature of one-party states tends to be reflected in a lack of support for the promotion of cultural activities. The countries of North Africa and the Middle East lack influential cultural organizations such as Germany’s Goethe-Institut or the United Kingdom’s British Council, both of which play an important role in downplaying those two nations’ imperialistic past and in supporting a more cosmopolitan image. This type of soft power projection through public diplomacy has not as yet been embraced by most countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The opportunity to do so now beckons, provided that the revolutionary impulse towards more open societies does not fade away.
Extracted from Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, edited by Simon Anholt. Volume 7, Number 2, May 2011; Palgrave Macmillan.
David J. Lynch tells the story of Ireland’s boom and bust
Few countries have been as dramatically transformed in recent years as Ireland. Ireland emerged as the fastest-growing country in Europe, however just a few years after celebrating their newly-won status among the world's richest societies, now saddled with a wounded, shrinking economy, soaring unemployment, and ruined public finances. In his book When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out David J. Lynch offers an insightful, character-driven narrative of how the Irish boom came to be and how it went bust.
For more information about When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out and other titles in the History list visit Palgrave Macmillan.
For much of the twentieth century Ireland was the odd man out in Europe. While other countries rebuilt and modernised, Ireland stagnated. In the 1980s one-third of the population lived below the poverty line. Incredibly, fewer people held jobs in 1987 than had been working in 1926. Ireland was long on charm and short on almost everything that mattered to a modern economy: jobs, roads, telephone lines.
Making a phone call in Ireland required time, patience and a bit of luck. One-quarter of the country’s telephone exchanges were creaky manual museum pieces; one dated to the nineteenth century. As late as 1984 calls routinely failed to connect or endlessly rang busy. And tens of thousands of Irish men and women could only dream of such frustrations. In Greater Dublin alone, the waiting list for a telephone held forty thousand names.
Still the telephone network was positively futuristic compared to the roads. Highways in modern Ireland were all but unknown. The lack of by-pass roads skirting town centers meant that motorists journeying between any two major cities—say, Dublin and Cork or Waterford and Galway—had to pick their way through interminable local traffic in dozens of small villages. To travel from a town in the midlands to the capital—a distance of perhaps 75 miles as the crow flies—consumed a soul-crushing four hours.
And then, over the span of a decade, everything changed. A sclerotic economy, freed by bold policies and ample investment imported from the United States, roared into a growth miracle dubbed the Celtic Tiger. The culture, too, long dormant under the censorious hand of the Catholic Church, erupted in a fountain of creativity. Even the open wound of Northern Ireland healed, thanks to a peace midwived by American diplomats. Suddenly, the Irish, long on the periphery of global affairs, were at the center of everything. As 1989 dawned, growth was percolating at an annual rate of 5·6 percent versus almost nothing three years earlier. An August 1986 devaluation of the pound effectively cut the price of Irish goods on global markets, giving exporters a boost. Critically, interest rates were on the decline as well, making it easier for businesses to invest in new factories. But the job market remained becalmed: total employment in 1989 was no higher than it had been in 1974.
To create an adequate number of jobs, Ireland needed to attract the world’s best companies to its shores. It was a mark of the pragmatism and utter absence of ideology at the heart of Irish politics that Fianna Fáil, architects of the failed protectionist “Little Ireland” model throughout the party’s history, transformed itself into a fierce advocate of free trade.
By the late 1980s, foreign investment, especially from the United States, had brought manufacturers such as Fruit of the Loom, Bausch & Lomb and Digital Computers to Ireland. But the country remained a minor-league economic player. Then in October 1989, Intel, the US multinational, chose a 55-acre site on a former stud farm in Leixlip, about 15 miles west of Dublin, for its new plant. The Silicon Valley giant was drawn to Ireland by its well-educated, English-speaking workforce, low corporate taxes and generous state grants. The three-phase development promised 2,600 total jobs. The decision gave Ireland a sort of globalization seal of approval, one that elevated a chronically ill economy into a place worth a second look.
A succession of tax-cutting budgets aimed at stimulating enterprise culminated with Fianna Fáil’s election victory in 1997. The standard and top rates of personal tax fell, from 26 percent and 48 percent to 24 percent and 46 percent, respectively, as did corporate taxes, cut from 40 percent to 32 percent. Finance Minister Charles McCreevy made his biggest splash, however, by halving the capital gains tax from 40 percent to 20 percent. McCreevy slashed the gains levy over the objections of his department’s senior professionals, who feared a plunge in revenue. Instead, the government’s take soared: from IR£84 million in 1996 to IR£609·2 million by 2000.
Ireland’s robust performance, meanwhile, was beginning to revive fears of inflation. As the country entered its fifth consecutive year of strong growth, there were signs that annual price increases would near 3 percent. The currencies of Ireland’s trading partners, including the US dollar, had strengthened and a tight labor market threatened to push wages up. In the first quarter of 1998, new home prices were up 25 percent from one year earlier. But Irish officials weren’t overly concerned; the rising house prices, they said, could be explained by strong economic growth, favourable demographics—including the annual arrival of thousands of immigrants—and low interest rates. The government concentrated on growing employment while preparing for what it hoped would be an eventual ‘soft land’ for the hard-charging economy. The chief impediment was the white-hot housing market. In April 1999, the Central Bank sent a letter to all Irish credit institutions reminding them of the dangers of ‘a lending policy that is excessively flexible’. Complicating the policy challenge, the Central Bank was about to lose one of the principal tools for managing an economy: control over its money supply. Ireland was proud to be among the first 11 countries that would participate in the planned single European currency.
Joining the euro meant surrendering to the planned European Central Bank (ECB) control over both the country’s interest rates and the value of its currency. Moreover, the process of joining the euro would involve a massive jolt of adrenaline for the already supercharged Irish economy. To bring the Irish economy in line with Germany, Europe’s dominant economy, interest rates needed to drop sharply.
The economy might be overheating, but at least it was finally producing jobs. By the end of 2000, the number of those working was 40 percent higher than it had been just six years earlier. But the economy was running above capacity. Unemployment was now ‘significantly below’ the level associated with stable prices. Sure enough, inflation in 2000 hit a disturbing 5·5 percent, more than double the eurozone average. Property prices also were getting out of hand. Where once the economy had grown thanks to exporting, it was now deriving three quarters of its forward momentum from domestic demand. That was a sign that the nature of the Irish boom was changing, shifting more toward consumption than production, and that the government needed to either raise taxes or cut spending to cool the economic engine.
The Irish boom was living on borrowed time. The bursting of the internet bubble, rising oil prices, and a synchronized slowdown in the United States, Japan, and Germany all combined to halve global growth, producing ‘the sharpest slowdown in global economic activity in two decades’. As an extremely open economy dependent upon global trade, Ireland was especially hard hit. By the end of 2001, growth had ‘effectively ceased’.
But the Irish were about to get some help from friends in America. To prevent the 9/11 upheaval from capsizing the US and global economies, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to 1 percent and kept them there. The decision of the ECB to lower rates from 4·75 percent in 2001 to barely 2 percent two years later, gave a massive financial stimulus to Ireland, at times making borrowed money effectively free.
The government poured fuel on the economic fire with its own free-spending ways. The number of workers on the public payroll jumped by 22 percent in just four years. By the late 1990s, public-sector pay was spiralling out of control. In 2000, the government introduced a process called ‘bench-marking’ which was intended to align compensation for government workers with prevailing rates for similar jobs in the private sector. In theory, the new pay system would be coupled with improvements in public-sector efficiency. In practice, the head of the major teachers’ union gleefully compared the results to ‘going to an ATM’. In mid-2002, the first report of the new pay-review board recommended salary increases of up to 25 percent.
Despite a nod to prudence, the 2002 budget was a veritable laundry list of giveaways: more generous old age pensions, fatter child benefits, a 20 percent increase in provisions for free electricity for qualifying households, and even a sharp cut in the betting tax. Along with those goodies came personal tax cuts worth US$568 million as well as reductions in corporate levies valued at US$311 million. In the event, government spending in 2002 would increase 6∙3 percent after taking inflation into account, on top of an even more lavish 12∙1 percent real increase the previous year. If this were prudence, it was hard to conceive of profligacy. At a time when prices were rising in Ireland at a pace more than twice the eurozone average, the government was stepping on the economic accelerator.
The economy grew by only 2·9 percent in 2002, its weakest performance in a decade, and what growth took place was predominantly in the construction and housing sectors. Easy money from the banks coupled with stimulative government policies encouraged limitless building. In 2002, for the first time in any 12-month period, Irish builders threw up more than 50,000 homes. In 2003, more than 62,000 were built, a record quickly surpassed the following year, when more than 72,000 arose. It was as if the engine of construction, once started, could not be stilled. Despite the supply increase, prices kept rising, too. They were up 14 percent in 2003 alone and had roughly tripled since 1996. The pace was insane, clearly speculative and unsustainable. And yet the building frenzy roared on. Buying and selling homes became a national obsession.
In February 2007, housing prices wobbled and then turned down for the first time in a decade. Once property prices started to slide, the Irish economy was like a running movie in reverse. Everything had grown with property. Just as it once had made sense to buy the house today because tomorrow’s prices would be higher, now the smart move was to wait. Prices would only be cheaper next week, next month, or even next year. Once that essential truth took hold, Irish banks were doomed.
The Irish recession that began officially in mid-2008 was the steepest downturn in any advanced nation, far outpacing that of the United States. The Irish housing bubble was three times as big as that of the United States. Real house prices in the United States rose roughly 50 percent in the decade preceding 2006; in Ireland they rocketed 172 percent. So when the bubble popped—Irish house prices dropped by one-third from their February 2007 peak and kept sinking—the damage was commensurately greater. As if to prove the point, Ireland’s output in the fourth quarter of 2009 was nearly 17 percent below its peak production in the same period two years earlier. (Over the same period, US quarterly output fell by about 7 percent.) The number of unemployed jumped quickly from 101,000 at the end of 2007 to more than 267,000 two years later.
Not everything about the Celtic Tiger, however, was illusory. Much in Irish life genuinely has changed for the better. Outside of the People’s Republic of China, in fact, few societies in the closing years of the twentieth century transformed themselves so quickly. The number of Irish people at work was almost 70 percent higher than it had been in 1984. Set against the long sweep of Irish history, that was no small achievement. The world’s best companies, especially in the software and pharmaceuticals industries, now consider the island an important part of their global operations. Irish artists, musicians and poets remained able cultural ambassadors. The influence of the once-omnipotent Catholic Church has receded and, despite a handful of isolated killings involving dissident republicans, the North is at peace.
But if it is wrong to exaggerate the scale of retrenchment amid the global financial crisis that began in 2007, it is equally ill-advised to minimize either the blow that has been absorbed or the challenges that lie ahead. Ireland is not going back to the misery of the 1980s. Neither can it return to the easy affluence of the Celtic Tiger. Gone is the romance of The Quiet Man Ireland of old. Gone, too, is the high-octane, consumption-first ethos of the Tiger. Neither was sustainable. Neither was real. And good riddance to both. The current crisis may put an end to any notion of Irish exceptionalism, but with a little luck, it will leave Ireland on a sounder footing.
For those hoping for a Celtic revival, the greatest misfortune would be if the world economy rebounds so powerfully that Irish elites believe they can stick with business as usual. If the politicians and financiers aren’t compelled by circumstances to adapt, they will not. The world has changed since the 1980s, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the rise of new competitors in Asia, eastern Europe and Latin America. The global bar is being set higher, and Ireland must adapt.
Extracted from When the Luck of the Irish Ran Out by David J. Lynch. (Palgrave).
With Clearer Heads and Clearer Lenses, What Might We Learn?
Do Europeans have anything to teach their American cousins? Most certainly, argues Professor Leif Johan Eliasson of the University of Pennsylvania. In his book America’s Perceptions of Europe he makes the case for a clearer appreciation of European achievements as a way of strengthening the US in meeting the challenges of globalization.
For more information about America's Perception of Europe and other titles in the Politics list visit Palgrave Macmillan.
Americans are told from a young age that they live in the best country in the world, that others are envious and that they can do anything they want because they have all the best schools and technology. By the time youngsters begin high school, let alone college, they have joined their elders in believing that if someone somewhere else is producing a better car or TV, a more sophisticated phone or plane, or carrying out new life-saving surgery, they must in some way be cheating. The American labour unions promulgate their favourite mantra of being able to compete with anyone as long as the playing field is level, only thereafter to espouse a million excuses for other countries’ superior productivity including dismal labour standards.
Meanwhile, pundits blame foreign governments’ currency manipulation or industrial subsidies, while proclaiming lower American taxes as the solution to all ills. To crown the blame-game, ideological factions whose wealth and prosperity stems from the free flow of goods, services and ideas subscribe to that self-defeating folly called protectionism.
The truth is that most European countries, the northern ones in particular, have succeeded in part by emulating America’s strengths, while, and this is crucial, avoiding its failings; by substituting rigorous curriculum for feel-good education standards and embracing globalization, openness and adaptability as the twenty-first-century way of life.
The quintessential American question—‘what can we do to improve our competitiveness and prosperity?’—might be answered by following the European policy of lowering corporate taxes, removing the burden of health care costs (eight times more costly for an American automobile manufacturer such as Ford than for BMW, Fiat or Peugeot), while improving the delivery of social programmes. A tougher high school curriculum to prepare students for vocational training or college is also essential.
You are probably thinking there are thousands of bright, talented Bill Gates, Warren Buffets and brain surgeons-to-be across America, and you are correct. But young wizards’ enthusiasm fade when not challenged, when prevailing norms reflect declining standards. American high school students score lower than half of their European peers on international student assessment tests in math, reading and particularly science (in Europe, Finland comes out top in all three categories). If this trend continues, well-paying jobs will be lost to more competitive environments. Half of science graduate students at American universities are now foreigners who are finding better paying jobs elsewhere, lending their talent to other markets. There are not enough American students interested in science to fill domestic gaps, and while Europe has similar problems, it is now more open to attracting skilled labour than America.
It is true that European start-ups struggle to find venture capital, face more business bureaucracy and have higher first-decade mortality rates than American firms. But university-business research hubs to improve innovation, research, business and competitiveness are popping up across Europe, with good results. Investments are flowing in and businesses are benefiting from more American-inspired, business-friendly bankruptcy laws. Regarding small business regulations, it is clear that Europe is emulating the United States to improve competitiveness.
Fiscal responsibility matters. Twelve European countries led by the Germans and Dutch and including economic ‘bad boys’ Italy and Greece save more of their earnings than do Americans, leaving them better able to weather downturns. This provides greater purchasing power without racking up debt and helps explain why although seemingly overtaxed and underpaid, they import lots from America. American exports bound for Europe rose 60 per cent from 2003 to 2007, and it is not 60 cent rubber ducks in these shipments; rather, high-value goods such as transportation equipment, chemicals and computers topped the list!
Many European countries have lower annual deficits than the United States and also more realistic assumptions of economic growth over the next decade. Admittedly Latvia, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Great Britain will suffer severe budget problems until at least 2014, but American states such as New Jersey, New York and California (with roughly the same combined population) also suffer humungous deficits, all in addition to the US federal debt. Both Americans and Europeans will have to endure tax increases and spending cuts; yet European citizens will still have health care and schooling for all citizens, while their American peers may not.
European trouble spots include Greece, a laggard in information society, financial liberalization and sustainable development, and Italy and Bulgaria, where corruption remains the major concern. Italy and Greece also have huge national debts and low birth rates, leaving the country of Parma ham and the cradle of democracy the closest we have to ‘sclerotic’ western European states. Then again, the states of Louisiana, Illinois and New Jersey can give the Europeans a run for their money.
In today’s global economy, where nanosecond transactions zip across the globe, transatlantic interests overlap. The engine of much new and existing business depends in different ways on high-tech components and gadgets in nanoform, as in iPods, laptops or magnets in automobile manufacturing, wind turbines or solar cells. These all depend on access to rare-earth metals, 97 per cent of which are in China. This means Europe and the United States may soon be exchanging dependency on Middle East oil for Chinese metals. This is an area where co-operation and joint pressure against an authoritarian-led monopoly that threatens to hamstring both economies is critically important. While China owns a quarter of US foreign-owned debt, Europe is less beholden to Chinese economic adventures.
Throughout Europe cell phones are cheap, ubiquitous and cutting-edge – the same applies to internet access. Estonia, Finland, Sweden and others have most government services online and available to all citizens. Though getting better, American federal, state and local governments could learn a thing or two about information access and web page organization from their European counterparts.
The costly patent system in Europe is nothing to envy. Years of business pleas to improve competitiveness has led to no more than an agreement to use a common language in applying for patents. A one-stop-shop to approve and enforce a European-wide patent would lower costs by half. Naturally, the entire European process applies to American firms operating in Europe, so they would benefit as well. Despite these problems, a third of global technology and electronics patents are European, proving that innovation is not lacking.
This extends to the environment. Norway has a 10-year project of catching carbon emissions from factories and sinking them into deep-sea depositories, soon to be expanded in Britain. Europe has extensive experience with cap-and-trade initiatives aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Twenty-seven American states in 2009, with more to follow, are involved in some form of regional trading scheme, so American and European experiences can be mutually beneficial in improving effectiveness, thereby setting global standards.
Europeans are convinced that welfare assistance helps stave off many social ills, and since European welfare systems were institutionalized before the continent became as racially diverse as the United States, and before the globalized economy took off, they are far less likely to be dismantled in the face of economic turbulence or massive immigration. During the 2008–09 recession, when more people needed help with housing, child care and education loans, no one was thrown out on the street or forced into bankruptcy because they needed a kidney but lacked insurance.
American unemployment in 2009 was higher than the European average, and roughly 25 million American citizens were using food stamps. It is worth pondering how the Danes and others combine a flexible, easy-hire-easy-fire job market—ranked as competitive as the American—with extensive social safety nets.
At the same time critics are wrong to dismiss the American welfare system as a mere skeleton, where individualism reigns supreme and inequality and poverty abound. US public assistance is far more extensive than commonly believed even among Americans. Combining private and public spending on social programmes, the United States is a ‘middle of the pack’ country, spending more than Spain, Finland or Austria, but less than Britain, France or Sweden.
International Issues
The strongest possible endorsement of globalization is found in northern and eastern Europe, in countries such as Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic. Citizens in the five largest European countries and America are less welcoming to free trade, foreign investments and the internationalization of culture and other areas of life; this despite being the greatest recipients and providers or trade and business investments and having invented and driven the system for decades.
Americans’ views of Europeans as less willing to fight are correct. Nation building and peacekeeping remain their forte, and Europe will never match US fighting power. But a transatlantic division of labour, even if unspoken, may be mutually beneficial. Economic reality prevents the United States from having the resources to fight every war. Cuts in new weapons and equipment over the coming decade make the case for multinational production lines and increased co-operation. Both conservatives and liberals have testified that success in war, including the fight against terrorism, requires a ratio of nine-to-one non-military to military means. Yet US commitments in the twenty-first century are just the opposite. This is where Europe’s expertise compliments America’s.
In 2004, I attended a debate between two four-star generals, one British, one American. The British general argued that experience in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and parts of Africa showed that confidence-building through community patrols and involvement was the only way to win the hearts and minds and sustain long-term peace. The American general countered that this was too dangerous, while adding that Americans should not be involved in nation-building. Interestingly, the successful 2008 ‘surge’ strategy advocated and implemented by General Petraeus in Iraq, and subsequent American community involvement, has mimicked the British line.
Round and Round We Go
We see increased transatlantic harmonization of views and policies, from economics to finance, technology and international conflicts. Leaders on both sides of the pond are moving closer ideologically and responses in various surveys show similar trends. But public distortions continue, as was evident in the 2009 American debate on health care. Calling universal care socialist because it exists in a European country, disregarding all the facts, shows the enduring strength of prejudice.
Transatlantic efforts remain critical to political stability and economic growth across the world. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s argument that ‘Europe is weak and the US is blind’, implying a Europe limited in its ability to back economic power with military force and an America ignorant of cultural forces and the benefits of diplomatic endeavours, is slowly being replaced with greater EU capabilities and a diversification of American foreign policy.
The narrowing of ideological and practical differences is clear in America’s move toward the European model of a larger role for the state, visible in expanding American social assistance programmes and intervention in the economy. At the same time northern and continental European countries have adopted features of Anglo-Saxon capitalism (e.g., freer labour markets and lower business taxes). Furthermore, a 2009 survey revealed that more Americans support higher taxes on the wealthiest citizens than do French, Italian and British citizens. European and American citizens also share corresponding views on terrorism, global warming, energy, Islamic extremism and Iran’s nuclear programme, even if Europe is less concerned about China’s ascendancy.
Europeans and Americans have shared interests. In 2009, roughly 60 per cent of Europeans held favourable views of Americans and the number of Americans wanting closer ties to Europe was roughly the same, while suspicion of China’s intentions was rising on both sides of the Atlantic. For Americans it takes time adjusting to not being the sole superpower in all areas (economic, social and military). But America should welcome a strong, influential and competitive Europe that embraces many of the same values Americans hold dear, but which is also not afraid to assert its will and push its agenda in ways inherently conducive to capitalism, democracy and prosperity. In an ever more interdependent world, the potential for successful American foreign engagements can only increase when citizens’ perspectives are not clouded by myths, misperceptions and distortions of our closest allies.
Extracted from America’s Perceptions of Europe by Leif Johan Eliasson (Palgrave Macmillan)
The Secret History of Democracy, Benjamin Isakhan; Stephen Stockwell – an extract
Events in the Middle East have raised expectations for a democratic agenda. Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell detect signs of an emerging democracy in their book The Secret History of Democracy.
For more information about The Secret History of Democracy and other titles in the Politics list visit Palgrave Macmillan.
The tendency of Western media to emphasize the daily atrocities of post-Saddam Iraq has obscured success stories of Iraq’s fledgling democracy. Yet there is much evidence to suggest a return to a civic culture in Iraq, where the streets have become a locus for deliberation and debate.
Following the fall of the Ba’athist regime, a complex array of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions formed political parties and civil society movements, many of which have written policy agendas, engaged in complex political alliances and debated key issues. They also sponsor their own media outlets which have been enthusiastically read by a people thirsty for uncensored news, even if it is partisan. This was particularly true in the lead up to the elections and referendum when citizens were provided with a rich assortment of information on key policies, politicians and parties.
The subsequent elections saw millions – young and old, Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, Christian and Muslim – risk threats of violence to line the streets, patiently waiting to take part in the first truly democratic elections held in Iraq for many decades. It was the same for the January 2009 provincial elections which saw colourful campaign posters glued to walls all over the country while party volunteers handed out leaflets at security check-points. Other volunteers used more traditional tactics, such as going door-to-door, giving radio interviews or calling public assemblies where ordinary citizens were invited to grill candidates on their policies.
The story of democracy in Iraq begins immediately after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, when the nation witnessed a series of spontaneous elections. In northern Kurdish cities such as Mosul, in majority Sunni Arab towns like Samarra, in prominent Shia Arab cities such as Hilla and Najaf and in the capital of Baghdad, religious leaders, tribal elders and secular professionals summoned town hall meetings where representatives were elected and plans were hatched for reconstruction projects, security operations and the return of basic infrastructure.
Such moves were initially supported by the occupying forces. But fearing that the people of Iraq would elect ‘undesirables’ such as military strongmen or political Islamists, the United States was quick to quell these drives towards democratization and to exert its own hegemony. Members of the Interim Iraqi Government were appointed by the head of the coalition authority and, at the end of June, all local and regional elections were stopped. Decisions made by local councils were revoked, and the mayors and governors who had been elected by their own constituents were replaced by hand-picked representatives. Not surprisingly, these moves met with opposition across Iraq and prompted some of the earliest protests of the post-Saddam era.
When the coalition attempted to install a puppet government in Baghdad, senior religious figures such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani were able to mobilize thousands of Iraqis to call for a general election prior to the drafting of the Iraqi constitution. Al-Sistani took the unprecedented step of issuing politically motivated fatwas, urging his clergymen into local politics and encouraging the faithful, including women, to vote in elections.
In mid-January 2004, more than 100,000 Shia marched through Baghdad, while a further 30,000 took to the streets of Basra. They called on the US occupation to conduct free and fair national elections.
However, if it was Al-Sistani who was to have the most impact over the political landscape during the first months of the occupation, it was the younger, more radical Moqtada Al-Sadr who was to gain both notoriety and political influence in the years that followed. This began when the coalition forced the closure of two publications produced by Al-Sadr, Al-Hawza (the name of a particular Shia seminary in Najaf where a number of leading clerics teach) and the quarterly journal Al-Mada (The View). Both advocated an Islamic republic for Iraq and featured vitriolic attacks on Israel and on the American-led occupation. Thousands of protestors gathered at the paper’s office in central Baghdad vowing to avenge Al-Hawza’s closure. In a twist of irony, it was the forced closure of Al-Hawza, rather than anything printed in its pages that incited his Mahdi Army to violence.
Indeed, throughout 2004 Al-Sadr led several military uprisings against the occupation. These events helped to refine Al-Sadr’s mastery of anti-occupation rhetoric and to distinguish him from Al-Sistani as a strong militant religious leader who had both the strength and the gall to take on the United States. However, when his military campaign failed, Al-Sadr switched to (mostly) non-violent political struggle, with calls for tolerance, national unity and social inclusion, and the transformation of the Mahdi Army from militia to social welfare organization. On the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Al-Sadr orchestrated massive protests in Baghdad. Thousands travelled from all over the nation to attend one of the largest political rallies in Iraqi history.
What was particularly interesting was that Al-Sadr ordered his followers to wave only Iraqi flags, and not flags of the Mahdi Army or of other Shia Arab organizations. This was a self-conscious attempt to move the protests beyond the level of a pro-Al-Sadr, Shia-backed movement, into more of a nationalist struggle against occupation, something which would appeal to Iraqis of all persuasions. In the event, a number of Sunni Arabs attended the Baghdad protests, as well as a small contingent of Iraqi Christians.
These anti-occupation protests have become an annual event. In addition, the followers of Al-Sadr have organized other demonstrations against the lack of basic infrastructure and public services such as electricity, fuel and potable water, against the high cost of ice and against the increasingly bleak employment market.
Following up on the strength of these protests, Al-Sadr has further demonstrated his political instincts and knowledge of democratic mechanisms. For example, in 2005, he instructed his followers to collect the signatures of one million Iraqis in a petition that asked the US and coalition troops to leave the country. More recently, he launched a nation-wide civil disobedience campaign in response to raids on the cleric’s offices and to the arrest of members of his organization. In several key Baghdad neighbourhoods such as Mahmoudiya and Yusufiya, members of the Mahdi Army marched in a show of force, while in Abu Disher the streets were emptied and the stores and schools closed. Then, in October 2008, thousands of Iraqis took to the streets of Sadr City and in the south-eastern province of Missan to object to a new draft of the US-Iraqi Security pact, which would extend US troop presence until 2011. When the Iraqi government ignored the protests and signed the deal, Al-Sadr’s followers reappeared in the streets.
The key reason why the Shia Arab protests have been so effective is the fact that they make up the majority of Iraq’s population. The minorities in Iraq, such as the Sunni Arab (around 20 per cent), the Kurds (around 20 per cent) and the Iraqi Christians (around 3 per cent), cannot command such impressively large demonstrations. Nonetheless, these minorities have also been able to utilize the power of the streets to air their concerns and advocate political change. For example, the Sunni Arab minority conducted general strikes in resistance to US blockades of Sunni cities. In Ramadi, the entire town shut down for two days as US troops launched a major offensive across the Sunni region. Sunni Arab protests were to gather increased momentum as members of the former ruling minority found themselves increasingly ostracized by the Shia Arab and Kurdish dominated central government. In 2005, Sunni Arab demonstrations were held in the towns of Hit, Ramadi, Samarra and Mosul to protest the new constitution which had been drawn up without their approval.
In addition, the Sunni-Arab population of northern cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul has frequently taken to the streets to protest what it sees as the Kurdish domination of Nineveh’s regional administration. Most recently, 2008 saw the Sunni-Arab population of the Baghdad suburb of Adhamiyah protest against moves by Kurds to incorporate the oil province of Kirkuk into the autonomous Kurdish region.
At around the same time, the Kurds were conducting their own protests regarding Kirkuk. Thousands gathered in cities such as Sulaymanyah, Arbil, Kirkuk and Dohuk after the Iraqi Parliament passed a law that would see a power-sharing arrangement devised for Kurdistan’s multi-ethnic cities. The Kurds have also rallied against the inequities they see across their own region. During March and August 2006, and more recently in August 2008, largely peaceful demonstrations broke into angry protest against the regional governor’s failure to provide basic public services.
Caught in the political and sectarian cross-fire of post-Saddam Iraq, smaller ethno-religious minorities such as the Turkomans, the Faili Kurds (Shiite Kurds) and the Christian minority of Iraq (made up mostly of Syriac-speaking Assyrians and Chaldeans) are often forgotten alongside the three larger ethno-sectarian groups. While they have been the victims of violence and harassment, they have nonetheless been politically active, scoring minor successes in coalitions with the larger groups and with their own political protests. In 2008, hundreds of Iraqi Christians demonstrated across key towns in northern Iraq to express their indignation at not being able to elect their own representatives. They also called for autonomy in their ancestral homeland.
Iraq has also seen a variety of civil movements emerge that are not so much concerned with issues regarding ethno-religious rights, their resistance to occupation or their rejection of state policy, but the plight of normal Iraqi citizens – ordinary people who demand better working conditions, higher salaries, safer environments and better infrastructure. While many of these protests have occurred in specific ethno-religious areas and often organized by one ethno-religious group, their common element is the people’s struggle for a more inclusive and equitable future. For example, the Iraqi people have repeatedly protested against corruption and nepotism in their local and national governments and called for the resignation of senior officials.
Women’s rights have become a particular concern in post-Saddam Iraq. Iraqi women of all ethnicities and religious persuasions mounted protest campaigns after the invasion in 2003. Women’s rights and social justice activists joined forces in a group known as ‘Women’s Will’, which has organized a boycott of the US goods that have flooded the Iraqi market since the invasion. In June 2005 protests were organized by Islamic human and women’s rights organizations in Mosul to press for the immediate release of all Iraqi women in US custody. So effective was this campaign that the United States was forced to release twenty-one Iraqi women who had been held as a bargaining chip against relatives suspected of resistance.
Iraq has also seen the emergence of powerful workers’ movements. Iraqi doctors, nurses, taxi drivers, university staff, police, customs officers and emergency service personnel have repeatedly engaged in non-violent protests, strikes, sit-ins and walk-outs. They have done so to draw attention to poor working conditions, the pressures under which they work, unfair dismissals, ineffectual government regulation and the dangerous nature of their jobs. The nation’s largest and most powerful independent union, the General Union of Oil Employees, later renamed the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), began to flex its political muscles in May 2005 when it came out against the privatization of Iraq’s oil industry.
In June 2005, around 15,000 workers conducted a peaceful twenty-four-hour strike, cutting oil exports from the south of Iraq. This was in support of demands made by Basra Governor Mohammad Al-Waili that a higher percentage of Basra’s oil revenue be invested in infrastructure. The IFOU also demanded the removal of fifteen high-ranking Ba’ath loyalists in the Ministry of Oil as well as pay increases for the workers.
In May 2007, the IFOU threatened to strike again, but this was postponed when a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki resulted in efforts to find solutions acceptable to both sides. However, when the government failed to deliver on any of its promises, the oil workers went on strike across southern Iraq. A few days later, the Iraqi government responded by issuing arrest warrants for IFOU leaders. In the face of intimidation the union held firm, taking the further step of closing the main distribution pipelines, including supplies to Baghdad.
These indigenous, localized and highly coordinated movements reveal the strength of the Iraqi people’s will towards democracy. When given the opportunity they are more than capable of utilizing democratic mechanisms independently of foreign interference. The movements also indicate the degree to which democratic practise and culture are familiar to the people of Iraq. The Iraqi people implicitly understand that, by taking to the streets, they force their government to take their opinions into account. Another important point is that the actions of key religious figures such as Al-Sistani and Al-Sadr contradict the common belief that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Similarly, the protests conducted by the Sunnis, the Kurds and the Christians reveal that Iraqi culture, in its many rich and divergent guises, is open to democracy.
The Iraqi protest movements have revealed the strength of feeling against the United States and its self-proclaimed status as a harbinger of democracy in the Middle East. That the United States was so determined to shut down the original grassroots democratic impetus is also revealing, in that it demonstrates the US administration’s desire to exert its hegemony over the Iraqi people via an installed government rather than to foster and encourage genuine democratic reform. When the United States attempted to eschew democracy in favour of a puppet government, it was the power of the Iraqi people that put in motion a series of events that led to the formation of an Iraqi government elected by the people, in free and fair elections.
While the Iraqi citizenship’s participation in, and engagement with, democratic mechanisms such as elections, an independent press and mass demonstrations do not themselves qualify Iraq as a robust and stable democracy, they are positive milestones towards this end. Specifically, a strong protest culture is not only crucial in re-establishing a participatory and engaged public life, but it can also help to abate the many conflicts across Iraq and thereby to aid the shift towards a free, egalitarian and democratic nation.
Extracted from The Secret History of Democracy, edited by Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell (Palgrave).
The Failure of Democratic Nation Building, Albert Somit; Steven A. Peterson – an extract
Events in the Middle East have raised expectations for a democratic agenda. But as Albert Somit and Steven Peterson show in their book The Failure of Democratic Nation Building, recent experience of democracy building by the US suggests that these hopes may be misplaced.
For more information about The Failure of Democratic Nation Building and other titles in the Politics list visit Palgrave Macmillan.
Taking the oath of office for his second term, George W. Bush promised ‘to seek and support the growth of democratic movements’, declaring that democracy around the world ‘is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security’. He dreamed of transplanting Americanized democracy first in Iraq and then the greater Middle East. This new manifesto penetrated deep into the US military and civilian bureaucracies.
Announced in late 2005, a little-noticed Pentagon directive placed stability operations on a par with combat missions. In another shift toward a democracy-crusading agenda, the US Department of State unveiled the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization ‘to help stabilize and reconstruct societies’. Nation building in broken countries became a State Department priority because the ‘security challenges’ are ‘threatening vulnerable populations, their neighbors, our allies, and ourselves’.
In places as far afield as Liberia, Haiti, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and the Republic of Georgia, the United States advanced its agenda by ushering out despotic regimes or protesting authoritarian power grabs in fraudulent elections. One of the first tests for America’s initiative came from the former American colony of Liberia which had endured more than a decade of misrule and barbarity in a multisided civil war. Fuelled by ethnically based rival rebel factions, the conflict engulfed the countryside until capped by an agreement in 1997. As part of the settlement, Charles Taylor, the biggest warlord, was engineered into the Liberian presidency by a dubious election. His ascension brought neither peace nor progress. Liberia soon slipped back into anarchy, as a smouldering second countryside civil war converged on Monrovia. By late summer 2003, the West African nation had become the archetypical failed state, chaotic and impoverished.
The US insisted on a cease-fire among the warring parties and the abdication and exile of President Taylor before deploying troops from a 2,300 US Marine taskforce. Just 200 Marines actually disembarked on August 14, 2003 to supply logistical support to a larger contingent of Nigerian peacekeepers. The exercise represented a less than overwhelming display of US power. But it sufficed to change the regime and led to a democratic election well after the US armed forces departed.
Like Liberia, the Republic of Haiti shared a tortuous history with the United States. During its 19-year US military occupation in the early twentieth century, Haiti had been an American colony in all but name. The Caribbean nation captured more of Washington’s attention in the 1990s when conditions became especially onerous on the island republic. President Clinton’s displacement of the junta to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency did not bring a happy ending. After winning a second term in a 2000 election, he incited mobs to intimidate and assassinate political opponents, politicized the police and robbed the government coffers.
The Bush administration cringed at that thought of a militarized intervention. It, nonetheless, grew apprehensive at the prospect of Haitian boat people washing up on Florida beaches. Washington intensified pressure on the defrocked slum priest to resign. On February 28, Aristide boarded a US military aircraft and made a dawn departure. The United States landed 200 Marines as the lead contingent of international peacekeepers from France, Chile and Canada before a UN force arrived in June. Compared to the violent regime changes of the Afghan and Iraqi dictatorships, Haiti was a velvet-gloved operation that many Bush officials favoured.
Libya, a terrorist-sponsoring rogue state, decided to come in from the cold on the heels of the US invasion of Iraq. Pressures on the Qaddafi regime had mounted as international sanctions stifled oil production. In December 2003, Libya agreed to give up its WMD, ratify the nuclear test ban treaty and open its arms sites to international inspection. The regime also renounced terrorism. In turn, Washington and the United Nations dropped their restrictions on Libyan commerce and travel. But the US refrained from pressing for democracy or even regime change. It swallowed its democracy promotion rhetoric because deposing Libya’s authoritarian rule might play into the hands of Qaddafi’s Islamic theocratic opponents. For American interests, it was a wisely pragmatic choice.
Elsewhere, America’s diplomatic squeeze resulted in political changes that satisfied aspiring democratic populations within each of the countries but did not require a US occupation. On the Eurasian landmass, the three ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan offered positive outcomes for America’s prudent non-military tack. As the Republic of Georgia approached its November 2, 2003 elections, the US government transferred its loyalties from President Eduard Shevardnadze, the defunct Soviet Union’s last foreign minister, to the opposition. When the Columbia University-trained lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili disputed the election results as fraudulent, his followers took to the streets and seized the parliament building in the so-called Rose Revolution.
Though Russo-American tensions mounted over Georgia, Shevardnadze resigned the presidency and defused the powder keg. Rescheduled elections ran in January 2004, and the pro-Western reformer became president. He demanded the dismantling of Russian army bases, welcomed Western oil companies to construct a pipeline from Azerbaijan across Georgia to Turkey’s seaports and joined other Black Sea states in training exercises with a US destroyer.
Another significant democratic transition occurred in Ukraine. In November 2004, the Bush administration refused to accept the result of a tainted election. 17 days and nights of demonstrations were sponsored by US and European governments.
The Orange Revolution that led to an election victory for the Western-leaning reformer Viktor Yushchenko in late 2004 owed its nurturing, not its birth, to $58 million spent by the United States in the two previous years to train democratic activists, conduct public opinion surveys, maintain a website and broadcast independent radio news.
In Kyrgyzstan, the United States joined with European governments to fund and tutor the democratic opposition. Washington alone pumped in $12 million to underwrite civil society centres, which trained pro-democracy cadres, disseminated materials and broadcast Kyrgyz-language programmes. It was small money shrewdly spent.
The Kyrgyz pro-democracy movement staged anti-regime rallies in what became known as the ‘Lemon Revolution’ that ousted the repressive President Askar Akayev. That a democratically mobilized population turned out its dictator in an Islamic country encouraged US officials to take heart in their promotion of representative government in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. But the real lesson was lost that the democracy arose from within the country, not from the imposition of a non-Muslim occupation army as in Iraq.
It was in Lebanon that Washington boasted of the first regional example of the ‘demonstration effect’. The January 2005 elections in Iraq, according to this view, set off a ‘Baghdad spring’ that rippled across the Near East, particularly in Lebanon. Syrian military and intelligence units had occupied the Mediterranean country since 1976. Sceptics interpreted Syria’s intervention as an attempt to restore Lebanon to Greater Syria as it had been under the Ottoman Empire.
When a bomb killed former prime minister Rafik Hariri, an opponent of Syria’s presence, in mid-February 2005, his countrymen demanded a return of their sovereignty, genuine democracy and freedom from Syrian hegemony in what the international media dubbed the ‘Cedar Revolution’.
Internationally isolated, Syria relented. Parliamentary elections followed delivering a majority of seats to an anti-Syrian coalition. Washington saw this as evidence that the Bush strategy was bearing fruit. But they ignored the fact that the Lebanese had elections and parliaments before the US-led invasion of Iraq. Moreover, only months later Lebanon stood at the brink of civil war as the Syrian- and Iranian-sponsored radical Shiite movement Hezbollah (‘the Party of God’) consolidated its political position as a player within the Lebanese government and then provoked conflict with Israel in July 2006.
Lebanon’s largely passive ousting of Syrian rule marked a high point for the Bush White House’s democracy campaign. At the American University in Cairo in June 2005, Condoleezza Rice delivered a direct political appeal to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two of America’s closest Arab allies, to hold genuine elections, empower women and tolerate free expression. Asserting that democracy does not lead to ‘chaos or conflict’, she added, ‘Freedom and democracy are the only ideas powerful enough to overcome hatred and division and violence.’ The secretary’s claims went too far for democracy, however. It is not a panacea for all the world’s violent and dysfunctional nations. Elections, referendums and elected officials in Iraq and Afghanistan delivered neither peace nor security to their electorates.
Democratic inroads irked Russia, which interpreted Washington’s programme as a means to serve America’s geopolitical priorities. Moscow pushed back by standing behind the dictatorial Aleksandr Lukashenko in his rigged re-election to the presidency of Belarus. The Kremlin also courted Kazakhstan and other former Soviet Republics in Central Asia with the aim of imposing a Cold War-style exclusion of the United States. Strikingly, it joined with China, a sometimes hostile neighbour, in forming the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a quasi-alliance. Along with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the seemingly pro-American governments in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan also joined SCO, in which Beijing and Moscow promoted regional military cooperation and an ‘energy club’ that invited no membership from the United States. Washington’s democratization, in short, created a Sino-Russian backlash. There were other ominous developments.
While the Middle East witnessed a big shake-up in its political dynamics, the downside was the realization that it enabled regimes hostile to US interests to come to power through the ballot box. Rather than bringing harmony to Turkey, a vital American regional ally, the autonomy of the Iraqi Kurds reinspired the Kurdish minority in Turkey to wage a fresh guerrilla war that in the 1980s had claimed 35,000 lives. In this case, democracy gave rebirth to territorial conflict. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US-backed democracy push worked against American interests.
From Washington’s perspective, Egypt’s late 2005 election painted a worrisome picture. Its parliamentary contest produced substantial gains for the Muslim Brotherhood, a fivefold increase from its previous showing, despite officially organized harassment of its candidates. In neighbouring Gaza, there was another dramatic example of unintended consequences when, five months after Israel’s disengagement from the territory, the parliamentary elections in January 2006 saw a democratically elected terrorist movement, Hamas, come to power. As a spin-off from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ political victory was at the expense of the Palestinian Fatah, the chosen partner of Tel Aviv and Washington. Gazan militants fought each other and fired rockets into Israel.
In reaction to the rise of Shiite political forces in Iraq and Lebanon and to the electoral gains by Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and Gaza, other Middle East states either slowed their reform process or cracked down on democracy. Qatar postponed parliamentary elections; Bahrain backtracked and imposed a constitution calling for a second appointed legislative house to curtail the elected house’s power; Jordan placed democratization authority on the backburner; Yemen clamped down on the media; and Syria suppressed the political opposition.
Washington took note. Non-democratic stability and cooperation came back into vogue. Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s corrupt and autocratic but friendly leader, was welcomed to the White House in spring 2006. The promise of honest elections in Kazakhstan turned sour. But neither state was punished by Washington, which understood their importance as Iran made a bid for nuclear arms and Russia reasserted its influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Moreover, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were oil exporters.
As a new ‘great game’ dawned between the United States, Russia and China for advantage in this crucial hydrocarbon zone, America had less latitude to advance democracy. Instead, it had to revert to its former policy of accommodating friendly dictators.
Meanwhile, the risk of a two-sided or even three-sided civil war loomed over Iraq despite the acknowledged success of two elections. The Middle East stood apart from other arenas by virtue of its religious-based civilization and unremitting hostility to colonialism, Western cultural penetration and non-Muslim occupying forces. Washington wrongly discounted these factors in Iraq as it clung for too long at the glimpses of voters going to the polls. An election in no way guaranteed an acceptable government strong enough to govern a deeply divided society.
Other threats emerged to confront America’s stabilization goals. Chief among the immediate destabilizing powers is Iran, which oddly enough benefited most from America’s removal of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime. Instead of showing gratitude, the Islamic Republic worsened America’s Iraqi predicament by bolstering Shiite insurgents. Like the provocative North Korean nuclear test in October 2006, Iran’s growing nuclear capability and frequent threats to Israel unsettled the Middle East.
As the world’s fourth largest producer of oil, Iran presented a tough adversary. Its horde of petrodollars and its untapped crude reserves gave Tehran financial strength to resist international pressure and to fund proxy wars through terrorist-linked Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Another major destabilizing element radiating from the Middle East remains Al Qaeda and its clones. The loss of Afghanistan was a setback to these terrorist networks. But they have carved out safe havens in weak states such as Somalia, Sudan and the anarchic belts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In Europe, they have taken advantage of immigrant enclaves and open societies to launch bombings as in Madrid and London. Along with the objective of destroying Israel and putting an Islamic regime in its place, they seek to overturn apostate governments in Muslim countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Bangladesh, whether through the ballot box or subversion. At this juncture, the Middle East and parts of South Asia look far less than secure, casting into doubt future US exertions to achieve friendly, harmonious governments through the spread of democracy.
Extracted from The Failure of Democratic Nation Building by Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson (Palgrave Macmillan), 2010
Under the Shadow of Defeat, Karine Varley – an extract
Karine Varley's book Under the Shadow of Defeat is the first wide-ranging analysis of how memories of the Franco-Prussian War shaped French political culture and identities. Examining war remembrance as an emerging mass phenomenon in Europe, it sheds new light on the relationship between memories and the emergence of new concepts of the nation.
For more information about Under the Shadow of Defeat and other titles in the history list visit Palgrave Macmillan.
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY YEARS AGO
Aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War
In the wake of military defeat, nations have a talent for reinventing themselves. The pain of transition from humiliation to self-respect can be softened by a thick layer of historical reinterpretation, a retelling of the story that minimizes blunders and builds on myth. By way of example, Germany after the Great War immediately springs to mind but in a revealing study of 1870–71, ‘l’année terrible’, when proud France was crushed by the upstart Prussia, Karine Varley (Under the Shadow of Defeat. The War of 1870–71 in French Memory) shows that a recognizable pattern of self justification and myth creation was well in place by the end of the nineteenth century.
It is one of the paradoxes of nineteenth-century France that while most of the country wanted to forget the Franco-Prussian War, it gave rise to one of the greatest waves of commemorative activity the nation had ever seen. Within only seven years of the war ending, some 460 memorials had been erected while crowds of thousands faithfully honoured the anniversaries of the defeat. In 1899 one journalist complained that there were more German corpses in French paintings relating to the war than there had ever been lying on the battlefields.
If Bismarck had been looking for an occasion to launch war against France, France in turn had been looking to cut a rising Prussia down to size. Few in France doubted that the war would see a rapid French victory. Yet within a few days of the outbreak of war, French forces were forced onto the defensive, suffering heavy losses. By the end of the month, they had been pushed back to the two cities that were to symbolize the ruin of the Second Empire: Metz and Sedan. At Metz, Marshal Bazaine allowed his men to become encircled, only to surrender two months later along with 137,000 men of the Army of the Rhine. The battle at Sedan on 1 September was a disaster waiting to happen; encircled, exhausted and demoralized French forces faced an enemy twice as numerous. Physically drained by ill health, and having lost all hope of victory, Napoleon III surrendered 83,000 men, 6,000 horses and himself.
News of the defeat at Sedan brought insurrection in Paris, the overthrow of the Second Empire and the proclamation of a republican Government of National Defence ready to consider peace but refusing to surrender one inch of French soil. With Bismarck continuing to demand Alsace-Lorraine, German forces began to march towards Paris to begin a siege that was to last until 26 January 1871. As food supplies in Paris ran out, the French government sued for an armistice.
The peace divided the country with some of the major cities, including Paris, calling for the war to continue. The government’s decision to relocate to Versailles, rather than return to the capital, fuelled suspicions that reactionary rural elements were deliberately targeting republican and left-wing Paris. Socialists and left-wing extremists backed by radicalized guardsmen, artisans and workers rose up to proclaim a new Paris Commune. Clashes between forces supporting the Commune and the reconstituted army based at Versailles on 2 April marked the beginnings of the civil war which was to bring violent suppression and around a further 22,000 dead.
Had the fighting ended at Sedan it might have been written off as the collapse of the Second Empire, but because the war had resumed under the republican Government of National Defence, it became a defeat not only of the regime but of the nation as well. The defeat cast a dark shadow over France’s political and cultural development. After the humiliation and anger came soul-searching and a widespread conviction that something must have been fundamentally rotten at the very core of the nation. It was a time when every political, cultural, religious and social group competed to offer their own panacea. The war dead lay at the heart of ideas on the regeneration of France. The post-1871 cult of the fallen placed unprecedented emphasis on the mass of common soldiers, invoking their patriotic self-sacrifice to lift and unify the nation after its collapse.
In the period between 1871 and 1873, when France was under occupation and still reeling from the suppression of the Paris Commune, a wave of memorial building spread across the nation, concentrated particularly in the areas directly affected by the war. After 1873 the state’s burial of all fallen soldiers on French territory triggered bellicose nationalism and the construction of further monuments. Then the political fault lines shifted again. Revenge became secondary to tensions between radical and moderate republican memories of the war and expressions of Catholic patriotism. The early 1900s inaugurated a new phase in the construction of war memorials, inspired partly by the effects of the Dreyfus Affair, the nationalist revival and fears of the rise of socialist internationalism.
Between 1871 and 1914, military painting overshadowed impressionism for a public eager to consume images of patriotism and heroism. Reproductions in the illustrated press, postcards and prints furthered the dissemination of paintings relating to the war and the recovering army, at once responding to and fuelling a market for images of patriotism. Popular literature presented the war as a test of moral strength. As with military art, literature portrayed real and fictional tales of glory rather than the wider picture of collapse, transforming the war into an adventure story with francs-tireurs as the intrepid heroes. Spies, barbaric Germans and precociously patriotic children filled the pages of novels.
The republican consolidation of power ushered a wave of reforms designed to instil patriotism within the population. Maps of France were introduced into classrooms so that pupils would develop a sense of national belonging; they featured Alsace-Lorraine shaded in a different colour to Germany to sustain hopes that the annexation was only temporary. Gymnastics became compulsory in schools in 1880, while in July 1882 the government introduced school battalions to improve the physical fitness of the nation’s future soldiers. Recreational gymnastics, rugby, rifle and military education societies sprang up across the nation, their members seeking to reverse the physical and skills deficiencies of French soldiers in 1870. Even the Tour de France, which began in 1903, perpetuated revanchist memories of the war. During the period 1906–11, the race crossed into Alsace-Lorraine, allowing spectators the opportunity to voice their feelings on the annexation as they lined the route singing the Marseillaise. Music hall performances often harked back to the war and to aspirations of revanche, with song sheets easily available to purchase from street vendors. There was no escape even on holiday. Tourists were encouraged to forego the pleasures of the seaside in favour of a fortifying trip to the battlefields of 1870–71.
For some historians, the military parade at Longchamps on 29 June 1871 symbolizes the magnitude of French delusions. The army marched for four hours before crowds of around 9,000. Newspapers reported the event as a tremendously uplifting boost for the nation, nothing less than the beginning of the national recovery. Coming a mere six months since the war had ended, at a time when eastern areas remained under German occupation, the parade appears somewhat premature, inaugurating a cult of the army that seemed bizarrely impervious to its recent collapse. Yet such interpretations result from separating memories of the war from memories of the Paris Commune. The army at Longchamps was thus not the army that had been routed by Germany, but rather the Army of Versailles that had successfully defeated the insurgency.
The Catholic Church articulated a very clear theological explanation for the recent misfortunes; it defined republican experiments as a betrayal of the nation’s divinely ordained mission as eldest daughter of the Church and an assault on the very heart of French national identity. Whereas republicans traced their vision of the nation back to the Revolution of 1789, Catholics traced theirs back to the fifth century. Thus not only was Catholicism the religion of the sovereign for over 1,300 years, but it was a defining element in the creation of the nation as well. There was a widely held view that France had been divinely selected to perform God’s will and that any deviation from this vocation would incur due punishment. Thus in the eyes of the Catholic Church, cataclysmic events such as wars and revolutions were not the products of shifting political and social forces but God’s punishment for national infidelity.
If republican claims over the character of the nation were rooted in recent French history, republicans laid claim to a more deeply rooted concept of the nation. Having been called upon to defend the revolution in the call to arms of 1792, the French people were no longer subjects but citizens who had earned themselves a stake in the French nation. While the Catholic Church maintained that the cult of the dead provided confirmation of immortality, republicans held that immortality was achieved and sustained through the cult of the dead. They could not offer the reward of eternal life, so they offered eternal memory instead.
The most spectacular and striking aspects of the republican campaign were in the cultural sphere. The creation of Bastille Day as a national holiday in 1880 mobilized communities across the nation in an overt attempt to redefine France along republican lines. The celebration suggested that if storming the Bastille had brought political and social liberation, then moral and spiritual liberation could only be achieved once the ‘clerical Bastille’ had been demolished.
The construction of the Sacré-Coeur basilica at Montmartre was one of the most prominent manifestations of the rivalry between the Church and the republican state. Even during its construction, it represented an aggressive and unambiguous assault on republicanism that culminated most strikingly in the erection of a luminous cross on top of the scaffolding of the Sacré-Coeur on 14 July 1892. Visible across much of Paris, the basilica rivalled republican architectural symbols such as the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the centenary of the Revolution, and of course the Panthéon.
Every political, religious and social group hunted for scapegoats to exonerate themselves from responsibility for the defeat. A moderate republican interpretation of the war sought to constitute itself as the dominant memory; yet because its parameters were so narrow, excluding the experiences of the Second Empire and Paris Commune and insisting upon an entirely glorious image of the army, they were easily infringed by all those who sought to challenge this political vision of the nation.
The myths of the French resistance in the Second World War and their role in the restoration of national pride are now a familiar subject of enquiry; much less, however, is known of the representations of resistance and martyrdom that emerged with the Franco-Prussian War. The two concepts embody an idea of the nation as one of ideas not aggressive military might, and of the resilience, patriotism and intelligence of the people. In their democratic qualities, the concepts are implicitly republican, but in their glorification of suffering, they are also implicitly Christian. Notions of a racial and cultural German ‘other’ served further to reinforce this newly created self-image.
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