The world’s losers are revolting, and Brexit is only the beginning

JB: From Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" (Summer 1989)

"The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again."

By Matt O'Brien June 27 Washington Post

Washington Post illustration, iStock

THE world has enjoyed an unprecedented run of peace, prosperity and cooperation the last 25 years, but now that might be over. At least when it comes to those last two.

That, more than anything else, is what Britain's vote to leave the European Union means. A British exit, or Brexit, will make the country poorer in the short run, perhaps in the long run too, and might drag the rest of Europe down with it. That's because Britain is essentially ripping up its free trade deal with the rest of Europe. But of far greater concern than just dollars and cents is that this is the most significant setback in Europe's 60-year quest for "ever closer union," and the most shocking success for the new nationalism sweeping the Western world.

Brexit, in other words, is the end of the end of history.

That, of course, was Francis Fukuyama's famous idea that, with the end of the Cold War, capitalist democracy had not only defeated communism, but also every other ideology. It was supposed to be, as he wrote, the "final form of human government." And insofar as democracies tended to work together, this implied the future would be one where competition wouldn't lead to conflict, but would rather replace it. Tariffs would come down, money would move across borders to where it was needed most, and workers would too. This meant, then, that governments weren't the only ones that would become more alike. People would as well. They'd stop being citizens and chauvinists, and become consumers and cosmopolitans. You'd have nation-states without the nationalism.

For a while, this seemed true enough. Democracy spread, war lessened and economies opened up. In turn, international groups like the European Union and World Trade Organization codified it all. As any Mumbai taxi driver could have told you, the world really was a Thomas Friedman book.

Or at least it looked that way, if you didn't stare too closely. If you did, though, you would have noticed the cracks in this liberal international order. For one, financial capitalism didn't always work so well for countries. Money moved in and out of them at the speed of a mouse click, inflating and then popping bubbles along the way. From Mexico to Argentina, Thailand to South Korea, Hong Kong to Indonesia, and, eventually, the United States to southern Europe, these capital flows magnified the economy's boom-bust cycle, with an emphasis on the bust. 

For another, global capitalism didn't always work so well for workers in the United States and Europe even as — or, in some cases, because — it pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty everywhere else. In fact, the working class in rich countries have seen their real, or inflation-adjusted, incomes flatline or even fall since the Berlin Wall came down and they were forced to compete with all the Chinese, Indian and Indonesian workers entering the global economy. You can see that in the chart below, put together from economist Branko Milanovic's data. It shows how much real incomes have increased — or not — for the whole world between 1988 and 2008. Now, the way to read this is to imagine that everyone, as in everyone in every country, was lined up from highest to lowest income. The richest people in the richest countries (and every other one for that matter) would be in the global top 1 percent, the working class in the richest countries would be around the 80th percentile, and the middle class in middle-class countries like China would be at the 50th percentile.

Globalization didn't create a lot of losers, but the ones it did were concentrated in the countries that were the driving force behind it.

This was a political powder keg. If rich-world workers were losing ground even when times were good, what would happen if we got hit by one of the financial crises the new global economy seemed to spawn every few years? Well, things would get ugly. Although, in truth, they had already started to. Right-wing populists like Pat Buchanan in the United States, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria had scored surprising near-victories, if not actual ones, in the late 1990s and early 2000s by focusing the working class's incipient ire on a "foreign" enemy besides outsourcing: immigrants. This antagonism reflected economic anxiety, cultural fear and even racial resentment. Displaced workers felt like immigrants were taking jobs and benefits that should have been theirs. They were worried about losing the one thing — their national identity — the market couldn't take. And, a lot of times, they just didn't want to be around people who didn't look, sound, or worship like they did.

It didn't take long, then, for the West's triumphal globalism to fuel a nationalist backlash. In the United States it's Trump, in France it's the National Front, in Germany it's the Alternative for Germany and, yes, in Britain it's the Brexiters. 

SO Britain's "leave" campaign was about what you'd expect, especially considering that immigration had doubled the previous 20 years as people from the E.U.'s poorest east had come looking for work. Brexiters called to "take back control" from Brussels's bureaucrats. They warned that Turkey is about to join the E.U. — it's not — and flood the country with immigrants. They said that Europe's refugee crisis has pushed them to a "breaking point" in a poster reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. And they promised to earmark the funds now being sent to the E.U. for what they claim is theoverburdened-by-immigrants National Health Services instead. Never mind that they overstated how much money that'd be by a factor of two. Their basic argument was that Britain could only stop this influx of immigrants if it ditched the E.U. and its rules mandating the free movement of people and that the elites had failed the people by forgetting there was a Britain outside of London. The only real surprise is that all this happened in Britain and not some other E.U. country, since they were smart enough not to adopt the euro and thus avoided the worst of Europe's double-dip recession.

If he were around today, Louis XV might amend what he said to this: Après Brexit, le déluge. That's not, though, because of what Brexit might do to Britain's economy, but rather to everyone else's politics. Now, of course, it is true that leaving the E.U. without getting a new trade deal almost as good as the one it has now will make Britain permanently poorer. And it is also true that the uncertainty over what any future agreement will look like will put the brakes on business investment and possibly push Britain into recession. But the economic fate of one little island isn't what has global markets on edge. It's whether the rest of Europe will follow Britain out of the E.U. and into their own portmanteaus. In other words, whether Brexit will beget Frexit, Itexit and Nexit.

It might. Right-wing populists, after all, in France, Italy and the Netherlands have already called for their own referendums on E.U. membership. And if they win, it wouldn't just tear the common market apart but the common currency as well. See, unlike Britain, all those countries use the euro. So if one of them were to leave, two things would happen: First, they'd have to change all the money in their economy, and, second, every other euro country would worry that they'd be next. That, in turn, would set off a slow-motion bank run across Southern Europe as people tried to get ahold of their euros before they could be turned into, say, liras that wouldn't be worth anywhere near as much. It'd be the mother-of-all financial crises. Which is why German, French, Spanish and Italian stock markets all fell much further than Britain's did after it voted to leave. Indeed, those markets dropped 6.8, 8.0, 12.4 and 12.5 percent, respectively, on Friday, while Britain's "only" declined 3.2 percent.

Brexit, it turns out, is more about Europe than it is about Britain.

THIS could be the beginning of the end of the euro, the European Union and the liberal international order itself. Like the French Revolution, though, it's too soon to say. Britain may yet back away from the brink. And Europe may yet fix the flaws in its currency and its bureaucracy to head off any more nationalist uprisings. Neither of those is likely, but we can't rule them out — just like we can't rule out the opposite. Brexit really might be the end of the E.U. if France and Italy follow Britain out the door; it might also be the end of the U.K. if Scotland and Northern Ireland decide they'd rather be part of the E.U. (or what's left of it); and it might even be the end of our era of economic integration if it helps propel populists to power across the continent who only care about putting their people "first." 

The E.U. may certainly seem to deserve this fate. It has let an economic fire burn across Southern Europe for nearly eight years, its only response to that has been to pour some gasoline on it, and it seems to think it has done its job now that that is down to just a smolder. Now, its first mistake was ignoring the economists who warned that creating a currency union without a fiscal union to go with it would end, well, as badly as it has. Its second one was ignoring the evidence that things were indeed going bad just as predicted, and blaming irresponsible governments instead. And its last one was all but blackmailing governments into slashing their budgets out of the misguided belief that this would get their sputtering economies growing again. It didn't. It was the economic equivalent of tossing a drowning person an anchor instead of a lifeline, because you thought they needed to get stronger and not bailed out. Which made the E.U. Europe's bête noire.

The sad irony of all this is that the E.U. was built to prevent the very kind of nationalist fervor its economic mismanagement and political heavy-handedness are provoking now. The dustbin of history exists for a reason.

And yet, and yet. It's easy for a generation that has only known peace and relative prosperity to forget that the arc of the political universe is long, and it bends toward wherever you point it. If that's toward chauvinism and isolationism, well, that's what you'll get. Europe's countries will end up with metaphorical walls around their economies, and eventually physical ones around their borders. Hungary's nationalist government is already well on its way with itsrazor-wire fences. This is a dangerous time for Europe. It has had walls before. It doesn't want them again. The only thing, then, that might be worse than the E.U. is the people who want to get rid of it. The same could be said of globalization. It might have made growth less inclusive and less sustainable than before — at least in rich countries — but it's hard to say the alternative would be better. We'd be a little poorer, and poorer countries would be a lot less able to grow.

The liberal international order isn't working for too many people, but, on balance, most economists would say it's still worth fighting for. After all, there are much worse alternatives. If we want to avoid learning that firsthand, though, we're going to need to build bigger safety nets for globalization's losers, and, in the case of the E.U., make it more responsive to voters. Otherwise, we might get the toughest lesson of all.

History doesn't always move forward.

The American Dream - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

via RM on Facebook

Tomgram: Patrick Cockburn, An Endless Cycle of Indecisive Wars

tomdispatch.com

image (not from article) from

[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Patrick Cockburn has arguably been our premier journalist of the Middle East in these last years. For the Independent, he’s produced a body of journalism about our wars in the Greater Middle East and their consequences that is simply superb. His latest book (just out in paperback), Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East, offers a panoramic look at his on-the-ground reportage from the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to Iraq in 2015. I recommend it highly. You can buy it directly from his publisher, OR Books, by clicking here.

In addition, let me remind all of you that, in return for a donation to this website of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of any one of 14 books, from an impressive range of authors, including Nick Turse and me, at the TomDispatch donation page and help keep this operation rolling. Tom]

Here’s an unavoidable fact: we are now in a Brexit world. We are seeing the first signs of a major fragmentation of this planet that, until recently, the cognoscenti were convinced was globalizing rapidly and headed for unifications of all sorts. If you want a single figure that catches the grim spirit of our moment, it’s 65 million. That’s the record-setting number of people that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates were displaced in 2015 by “conflict and persecution,” one of every 113 inhabitants of the planet. That's more than were generated in the wake of World War II at a time when significant parts of the globe had been devastated. Of the 21 million refugees among them, 51% were children (often separated from their parents and lacking any access to education). Most of the displaced of 2015 were, in fact, internal refugees, still in their own often splintered states. Almost half of those who fled across borders have come from three countries: Syria (4.9 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million), and Somalia (1.1 million).

Despite the headlines about refugees heading for Europe -- approximately a million of them made it there last year (with more dying on the way) -- most of the uprooted who leave their homelands end up in poor or economically mid-level neighboring lands, with Turkey at 2.5 million refugees leading the way. In this fashion, the disruption of spreading conflicts and chaos, especially across the Greater Middle East and Africa, only brings more conflict and chaos with it wherever those refugees are forced to go.

And keep in mind that, as extreme as that 65 million figure may seem, it undoubtedly represents the beginning, not the end, of a process. For one thing, it doesn’t even include the estimated 19 million people displaced last year by extreme weather events and other natural disasters. Yet in coming decades, the heating of our planet, with attendant weather extremes (like the present heat wave in the American West) and rising sea levels, will undoubtedly produce its own waves of new refugees, only adding to both the conflicts and the fragmentation.

As Patrick Cockburn points out today, we have entered “an age of disintegration.” And he should know. There may be no Western reporter who has covered the grim dawn of that age in the Greater Middle East and North Africa -- from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Libya -- more fully or movingly than he has over this last decade and a half. His latest book, Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East, gives a vivid taste of his reporting and of a world that is at present cracking under the pressure of the conflicts he has witnessed. And imagine that so much of this began, at the bargain-basement cost of a mere$400,000 to $500,000, with 19 (mainly Saudi) fanatics, and a few hijacked airliners. Osama bin Laden must be smiling in his watery grave. Tom

The Age of Disintegration 

Neoliberalism, Interventionism, the Resource Curse, and a Fragmenting World

By Patrick Cockburn

We live in an age of disintegration. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Greater Middle East and Africa. Across the vast swath of territory between Pakistan and Nigeria, there are at least seven ongoing wars -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan. These conflicts are extraordinarily destructive. They are tearing apart the countries in which they are taking place in ways that make it doubtful they will ever recover. Cities like Aleppo in Syria, Ramadi in Iraq, Taiz in Yemen, and Benghazi in Libya have been partly or entirely reduced to ruins. There are also at least three other serious insurgencies: in southeast Turkey, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting the Turkish army, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where a little-reported but ferocious guerrilla conflict is underway, and in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries where Boko Haram continues to launch murderous attacks.

All of these have a number of things in common: they are endless and seem never to produce definitive winners or losers. (Afghanistan has effectively been at war since 1979, Somalia since 1991.) They involve the destruction or dismemberment of unified nations, their de facto partition amid mass population movements and upheavals -- well publicized in the case of Syria and Iraq, less so in places like South Sudan where more than 2.4 million people have been displaced in recent years.

Add in one more similarity, no less crucial for being obvious: in most of these countries, where Islam is the dominant religion, extreme Salafi-Jihadi movements, including the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda, and the Taliban are essentially the only available vehicles for protest and rebellion. By now, they have completely replaced the socialist and nationalist movements that predominated in the twentieth century; these years have, that is, seen a remarkable reversion to religious, ethnic, and tribal identity, to movements that seek to establish their own exclusive territory by the persecution and expulsion of minorities.

In the process and under the pressure of outside military intervention, a vast region of the planet seems to be cracking open. Yet there is very little understanding of these processes in Washington. This was recently well illustrated by the protest of 51 State Department diplomats against President Obama’s Syrian policy and their suggestion that air strikes be launched targeting Syrian regime forces in the belief that President Bashar al-Assad would then abide by a ceasefire. The diplomats’ approach remains typically simpleminded in this most complex of conflicts, assuming as it does that the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of civilians and other grim acts are the “root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.”

It is as if the minds of these diplomats were still in the Cold War era, as if they were still fighting the Soviet Union and its allies. Against all the evidence of the last five years, there is an assumption that a barely extant moderate Syrian opposition would benefit from the fall of Assad, and a lack of understanding that the armed opposition in Syria is entirely dominated by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda clones.

Though the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is now widely admitted to have been a mistake (even by those who supported it at the time), no real lessons have been learned about why direct or indirect military interventions by the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East over the last quarter century have all only exacerbated violence and accelerated state failure.

A Mass Extinction of Independent States

The Islamic State, just celebrating its second anniversary, is the grotesque outcome of this era of chaos and conflict. That such a monstrous cult exists at all is a symptom of the deep dislocation societies throughout that region, ruled by corrupt and discredited elites, have suffered. Its rise -- and that of various Taliban and al-Qaeda-style clones -- is a measure of the weakness of its opponents.

The Iraqi army and security forces, for example, had 350,000 soldiers and 660,000 police on the books in June 2014 when a few thousand Islamic State fighters captured Mosul, the country’s second largest city, which they still hold. Today the Iraqi army, security services, and about 20,000 Shia paramilitaries backed by the massive firepower of the United States and allied air forces have fought their way into the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, against the resistance of IS fighters who may have numbered as few as 900. In Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban, supposedly decisively defeated in 2001, came about less because of the popularity of that movement than the contempt with which Afghans came to regard their corrupt government in Kabul.

Everywhere nation states are enfeebled or collapsing, as authoritarian leaders battle for survival in the face of mounting external and internal pressures. This is hardly the way the region was expected to develop. Countries that had escaped from colonial rule in the second half of the twentieth century were supposed to become more, not less, unified as time passed.

Between 1950 and 1975, nationalist leaders came to power in much of the previously colonized world. They promised to achieve national self-determination by creating powerful independent states through the concentration of whatever political, military, and economic resources were at hand. Instead, over the decades, many of these regimes transmuted into police states controlled by small numbers of staggeringly wealthy families and a coterie of businessmen dependent on their connections to such leaders as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In recent years, such countries were also opened up to the economic whirlwind of neoliberalism, which destroyed any crude social contract that existed between rulers and ruled. Take Syria. There, rural towns and villages that had once supported the Baathist regime of the al-Assad family because it provided jobs and kept the prices of necessities low were, after 2000, abandoned to market forces skewed in favor of those in power. These places would become the backbone of the post-2011 uprising. At the same time, institutions like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that had done so much to enhance the wealth and power of regional oil producers in the 1970s have lost their capacity for united action.

The question for our moment: Why is a “mass extinction” of independent states taking place in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond? Western politicians and media often refer to such countries as “failed states.” The implication embedded in that term is that the process is a self-destructive one. But several of the states now labeled “failed” like Libya only became so after Western-backed opposition movements seized power with the support and military intervention of Washington and NATO, and proved too weak to impose their own central governments and so a monopoly of violence within the national territory.

In many ways, this process began with the intervention of a U.S.-led coalition in Iraq in 2003 leading to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the shutting down of his Baathist Party, and the disbanding of his military. Whatever their faults, Saddam and Libya’s autocratic ruler Muammar Gaddafi were clearly demonized and blamed for all ethnic, sectarian, and regional differences in the countries they ruled, forces that were, in fact, set loose in grim ways upon their deaths.

A question remains, however: Why did the opposition to autocracy and to Western intervention take on an Islamic form and why were the Islamic movements that came to dominate the armed resistance in Iraq and Syria in particular so violent, regressive, and sectarian? Put another way, how could such groups find so many people willing to die for their causes, while their opponents found so few? When IS battle groups were sweeping through northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, soldiers who had thrown aside their uniforms and weapons and deserted that country’s northern cities would justify their flight by saying derisively: “Die for [then-Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki? Never!”

A common explanation for the rise of Islamic resistance movements is that the socialist, secularist, and nationalist opposition had been crushed by the old regimes' security forces, while the Islamists were not. In countries like Libya and Syria, however, Islamists were savagely persecuted, too, and they still came to dominate the opposition. And yet, while these religious movements were strong enough to oppose governments, they generally have not proven strong enough to replace them.

Too Weak to Win, But Too Strong to Lose

Though there are clearly many reasons for the present disintegration of states and they differ somewhat from place to place, one thing is beyond question: the phenomenon itself is becoming the norm across vast reaches of the planet.

If you’re looking for the causes of state failure in our time, the place to start is undoubtedly with the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago. Once it was over, neither the U.S. nor the new Russia that emerged from the Soviet Union’s implosion had a significant interest in continuing to prop up “failed states,” as each had for so long, fearing that the rival superpower and its local proxies would otherwise take over. Previously, national leaders in places like the Greater Middle East had been able to maintain a degree of independence for their countries by balancing between Moscow and Washington. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, this was no longer feasible.

In addition, the triumph of neoliberal free-market economics in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse added a critical element to the mix. It would prove far more destabilizing than it looked at the time.

Again, consider Syria. The expansion of the free market in a country where there was neither democratic accountability nor the rule of law meant one thing above all: plutocrats linked to the nation’s ruling family took anything that seemed potentially profitable. In the process, they grew staggeringly wealthy, while the denizens of Syria’s impoverished villages, country towns, and city slums, who had once looked to the state for jobs and cheap food, suffered. It should have surprised no one that those places became the strongholds of the Syrian uprising after 2011. In the capital, Damascus, as the reign of neoliberalism spread, even the lesser members of the mukhabarat, or secret police, found themselves living on only $200 to $300 a month, while the state became a machine for thievery.

This sort of thievery and the auctioning off of the nation’s patrimony spread across the region in these years. The new Egyptian ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, merciless toward any sign of domestic dissent, was typical. In a country that once had been a standard bearer for nationalist regimes the world over, he didn’t hesitate this April to try to hand over two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia on whose funding and aid his regime is dependent. (To the surprise of everyone, an Egyptian court recently overruled Sisi's decision.)

That gesture, deeply unpopular among increasingly impoverished Egyptians, was symbolic of a larger change in the balance of power in the Middle East: once the most powerful states in the region -- Egypt, Syria, and Iraq -- had been secular nationalists and a genuine counterbalance to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies. As those secular autocracies weakened, however, the power and influence of the Sunni fundamentalist monarchies only increased. If 2011 saw rebellion and revolution spread across the Greater Middle East as the Arab Spring briefly blossomed, it also saw counterrevolution spread, funded by those oil-rich absolute Gulf monarchies, which were never going to tolerate democratic secular regime change in Syria or Libya.

Add in one more process at work making such states ever more fragile: the production and sale of natural resources -- oil, gas, and minerals -- and the kleptomania that goes with it. Such countries often suffer from what has become known as “the resources curse”: states increasingly dependent for revenues on the sale of their natural resources -- enough to theoretically provide the whole population with a reasonably decent standard of living -- turn instead into grotesquely corrupt dictatorships. In them, the yachts of local billionaires with crucial connections to the regime of the moment bob in harbors surrounded by slums running with raw sewage. In such nations, politics tends to focus on elites battling and maneuvering to steal state revenues and transfer them as rapidly as possible out of the country.

This has been the pattern of economic and political life in much of sub-Saharan Africa from Angola to Nigeria. In the Middle East and North Africa, however, a somewhat different system exists, one usually misunderstood by the outside world. There is similarly great inequality in Iraq or Saudi Arabia with similarly kleptocratic elites. They have, however, ruled over patronage states in which a significant part of the population is offered jobs in the public sector in return for political passivity or support for the kleptocrats.

In Iraq with a population of 33 million people, for instance, no less thanseven million of them are on the government payroll, thanks to salaries or pensions that cost the government $4 billion a month. This crude way of distributing oil revenues to the people has often been denounced by Western commentators and economists as corruption. They, in turn, generally recommend cutting the number of these jobs, but this would mean that all, rather than just part, of the state’s resource revenues would be stolen by the elite. This, in fact, is increasingly the case in such lands as oil prices bottom out and even the Saudi royals begin to cut back on state support for the populace.

Neoliberalism was once believed to be the path to secular democracy and free-market economies. In practice, it has been anything but. Instead, in conjunction with the resource curse, as well as repeated military interventions by Washington and its allies, free-market economics has profoundly destabilized the Greater Middle East. Encouraged by Washington and Brussels, twenty-first-century neoliberalism has made unequal societies ever more unequal and helped transform already corrupt regimes into looting machines. This is also, of course, a formula for the success of the Islamic State or any other radical alternative to the status quo. Such movements are bound to find support in impoverished or neglected regions like eastern Syria or eastern Libya.

Note, however, that this process of destabilization is by no means confined to the Greater Middle East and North Africa. We are indeed in the age of destabilization, a phenomenon that is on the rise globally and at present spreading into the Balkans and Eastern Europe (with the European Union ever less able to influence events there). People no longer speak of European integration, but of how to prevent the complete break-up of the European Union in the wake of the British vote to leave.

The reasons why a narrow majority of Britons voted for Brexit have parallels with the Middle East: the free-market economic policies pursued by governments since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister have widened the gap between rich and poor and between wealthy cities and much of the rest of the country. Britain might be doing well, but millions of Britons did not share in the prosperity. The referendum about continued membership in the European Union, the option almost universally advocated by the British establishment, became the catalyst for protest against the status quo. The anger of the "Leave" voters has much in common with that of Donald Trump supporters in the United States.

The U.S. remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it once was. It, too, is feeling the strains of this global moment, in which it and its local allies are powerful enough to imagine they can get rid of regimes they do not like, but either they do not quite succeed, as in Syria, or succeed but cannot replace what they have destroyed, as in Libya. An Iraqi politician once saidthat the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.

Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of five books on the Middle East, the latest of which isChaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East(OR Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Making Art From Pakistan’s Chaos

By AATISH TASEER JUNE 27, 2016, New York Times

Detail of Imran Quershi’s installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2013. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

LAHORE, Pakistan — A drain, clogged with pink plastic bags and filled with black water, separates Bahar Colony, a Christian neighborhood, from the rest of this city. On one side is the Arfa Software Technology Park, a soaring modern complex of steel and green glass. On the other, the broken facades of low-lying brick houses are hung with rags. A sign reads: “Faith Gospel Assemblies, Lahore.”

This is the landscape of Julius John Alam’s reality — and his imagination. Mr. Alam, the 26-year-old son of a tailor, is part of Pakistan’s Christian community, some two million in a country of more than 180 million. But he is also part of something bigger: He represents the tremendous artistic energy that has come to Pakistan, even as — and perhaps because — its traumas have multiplied. A few weeks before I was to meet Mr. Alam in New York, where he is studying at the Parsons School of Design, a bomb went off on Easter Day at a park in Lahore, killing more than 70 people, many of them women and children celebrating the holiday.

“The themes I deal with are influenced by my lived experiences as a Christian,” he told me. The Christian experience is one of trauma in a country whose catalog of calamities includes terrorism, religious extremism, crime, coups and sectarian strife. This chaos has nurtured a dazzling array of artists whose work is on display in the great cities of the world.

“The confusion is a kind of blessing because there is no consensus,” Quddus Mirza, another artist, told me one hot morning in Lahore. “India has this thing about Indianness. Here, there is no identity.” It was a strange thing to say: Pakistan, founded in 1947 as a homeland for India’s Muslims, once had a very strong identity. But it has been discredited, at first through successive military coups that undermined civilian governments, and later through terrorism, insurgency and the vanishing writ of the state from great sections of the country.

We sat in Mr. Mirza’s office at the National College of Arts, where he is the head of the fine arts department. The beautiful red-brick building, in the heart of colonial Lahore, has served as an incubator — “an island of freedom,” Mr. Mirza calls it — for artists like Mr. Alam.

Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

The National College of Arts has been a vessel for a combustible mixture of individual personality and tradition. It has achieved what Nadezhda Mandelstam, the Russian memoirist and the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam, describes in “Hope Abandoned” as “the flash point in art,” which “comes through contact between what has been accumulated (or concentrated in the bloodstream) over the ages and something occurring at a single passing moment.” This has the power to “spark off new ideas and words never before spoken.”

On the day of my visit, I ran into one of the National College of Art’s most famous alumni. Imran Qureshi’s paintings have been shown at the greatest museums of the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Barbican Art Gallery in London. It’s a National College of Arts tradition that former students, no matter how famous, return to teach, and when I saw him, Mr. Qureshi was on his way to class.

He told me a story from his student years, when a class was dismissed because everyone showed their work on identical 20-inch-by-30-inch pieces of white paper. “We’re all individuals,” the teacher told them, “we all have our own style.” The class was sent away and asked to come back with materials that better reflected their individuality. Mr. Qureshi returned with old Urdu newspapers, carrying headlines of violence and unrest, on which he set to work in charcoal.

Pakistani art is unsettling. One of Mr. Qureshi’s most famous paintings depicts trees splashed with blood. And Mr. Alam’s work has a similar darkness. “The Curtain of the Temple Tore Into Two,” a white metal bathtub filled with black enamel paint, represents the sewer separating the Christians of Bahar Colony from the rest of the city. Next to it, like a tombstone, is a symbol of muted rage and anguish: a lurid red Christmas tree.

Mr. Alam had seen very little art before he began to produce it himself. There were many like him at the college, and this was part of what gave their art its power and vitality. His main influence, barring a few examples of Christian calendar art, was life itself. “During summer nights, when we would sleep on the roofs, and there would be long hours of blackouts, and the way everything would be reduced to shapes and shadows,” he said, casting his mind back to Bahar Colony. “I never thought of myself as an artist at that time, but those were the themes I returned to when I began to see myself as an artist.”

Two experiences stand out in Mr. Alam’s mind. He remembers a few years ago when the Lahore Development Authority demolished a number of Christian houses. That, he said, made him aware of what he calls the “infrastructure of power.” He came to recognize the drain as a “social divider.” The other incident came in 2014, when a mob burned alive a young Christian couple in a town not far from Lahore. Mr. Alam’s wife, like the woman burned alive, was pregnant at the time, and it brought the horror of it very near.

Upheaval is known to do good things for art. Certainly Mandelstam, who lived through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, and whose husband, Osip — the greatest Russian poet of the last century — died in a labor camp, would have understood what is occurring in Pakistan today. She would have known that for societies faced with dehumanizing levels of distress, the defiance of artists like Mr. Alam and the redemptive power of art, more generally, cease to be romantic notions. They become a form of survival.

Aatish Taseer is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Way Things Were,” and a contributing opinion writer.

English and the EU

Reuters, nbcnews.com

image from

BRUSSELS — English, the world's second language and the main working tongue of EU institutions, may no longer be an official language of the European Union once Britain leaves the bloc, a senior EU lawmaker said on Monday.

The symbolic, if impractical, move would further reduce London's influence on the continent, and infuriate the Irish.

Each member state has the right to nominate one EU idiom. Although English is the most spoken language in Europe, and an official language in three member states, only Britain legally chose it in Brussels. Ireland chose Gaelic. Malta picked Maltese.

"English is our official language because it has been notified by the UK. If we don't have the UK, we don't have English," Danuta Hubner, chair of the European Parliament's constitutional affairs committee told a news conference on the legal consequences of the British referendum to leave the EU.

Related: Iceland's Magical Run Continues With 2-1 Win Over England

English might remain a working language, even if it were no longer an official one, Hubner said, adding that keeping it an official language would require agreement by all member states.

Alternatively, rules could be changed to let countries have more than one official language, Hubner suggested.

French was the dominant language in the EU institutions until the 1990s, when the arrival of Sweden, Finland and Austria tilted the balance, amplified by central and east European countries that had adopted English as their second tongue.

EU documents and legal texts are translated into all 24 official languages of the bloc. If English were to lose that status, Britons would have to do the translation themselves.

English is also one of the three languages used to apply for EU patents. This gives English-speaking researchers and companies an edge over competitors who speak other languages.

France has never digested its linguistic defeat and imposed French as an equal working language, although the number of speakers is shrinking among Brussels officials.

Image of the day

"Weapon of Mass Media" image from

Don’t Speak, Memory

Michael S. Roth, www.wsj.com

Never forget? Actually, sometimes we should, argues David Rieff. Lasting peace is impossible without letting go of some past wrongs.

David Rieff has seen a lot of things he would probably prefer to forget. As a journalist he has covered war crimes and the macho interventionists who tried to stop them, extreme poverty and the struggle against starvation. More than a few times, in places like Rwanda, the Balkans and Sudan, he has heard people exclaim with conviction and emotion that the atrocities in these killing fields will never be forgotten.

But memory is anything but permanent. And Mr. Rieff believes that the impermanence of memory is often a good thing, since forgetting can facilitate conflict resolution. In 2011 he began to make this argument in “Against Remembrance.” Now, in this book-length essay, “In Praise of Forgetting,” he takes “another bite at the apple of memory and forgetting.”

In the “Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Friedrich Nietzsche argued against the mania for remembrance because it undermined the productive dream that one could create something truly new. Mr. Rieff picks up on the 19th-century philosopher’s notion that “life in any true sense is impossible without forgetfulness.” Likewise, he argues that authentic, lasting peace is impossible without some forgetting. The memory of past wrongs inspires efforts to somehow make up for them in the present, and under the rubric of “justice” people wind up perpetuating cycles of suffering and violence.

ENLARGE

PHOTO: WSJ

IN PRAISE OF FORGETTING

By David Rieff
Yale, 145 pages, $25

But whereas Nietzsche had deep suspicions about the pedantic, vitality-killing work of graybeard historians, Mr. Rieff is mostly concerned with collective memory, not the academic discipline of history. By collective memory he means beliefs that groups of people have about the past—a felt connection that owes at least as much to myth as it does to what really happened. Although he concedes that there is something “ethically impoverished about forgetting the sacrifices and the sufferings of those who came before,” he concludes that “in some places and on some historical occasions, the human and societal cost of the moral demand to remember is too high to be worth paying.”

Sometimes it is easy to see this, as when modern Serbian nationalists massacred Muslims to avenge a 14th-century defeat, or when some vague memory of Confederate glory inspired the killing of African-Americans in church. Memory doesn’t only heal; it kills. 

In making this case, the author believes that he is bucking conventional wisdom. But that’s just self-congratulation. Sure, all around us we hear the injunction to remember the past so as not to repeat its mistakes or to ensure that the sacrifices of heroes or martyrs will not be in vain. But we are also surrounded by techniques of forgetting that are supposed to allow us to “move on,” “get over it” or just relieve some of the suffering that comes from particularly traumatic connections to the past.

Mr. Rieff knows all this, and his praise of forgetting is qualified by commitments to memory that can provide a nourishing connectivity and not just the perpetuation of resentment and the desire for revenge. For example, he notes that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions had a “morally emancipatory effect” without stimulating the need for retribution.

“When it is possible, by all means let societies remember,” Mr. Rieff writes, “but when it is not possible . . . give forgetting a chance.” And who could disagree? Mr. Rieff wants to open a space for forgetting because he has seen that collective memory can feed an intransigent idealism energized by hostility against those who aren’t part of the collective. He prefers the “short memory” that John Kenneth Galbraith called essential for politics.

Effective politics depends on compromises that often seem like a betrayal of the past to those who want to keep alive the connection to collective wounds as the core of a group’s identity. Increasingly, groups that see their identities bound up with memories of victimization seize upon what Max Weber called a “theodicy of disprivilege”—the belief that salvation comes to those who’ve suffered most. Who has endured more, Jews or Palestinians? Or is it African-Americans? The sordid competition among groups for beatitude through traumatization has become a fact of American cultural life.

But how much forgetting is enough? The American taste for amnesia and reinvention doesn’t get enough attention in this book. Instead, Mr. Rieff wrestles primarily with thinkers in the Jewish tradition for whom remembrance is a central concern of ethics, identity and justice. He awkwardly writes that “the issue of the Jewish people’s in at least some way unique relation to memory is especially acute.” (Though that unique relation doesn’t prevent the commemoration of the Holocaust, Mr. Rieff notes, from falling into political manipulation and kitsch.)

You don’t have to be Jewish (but being a Freudian helps) to wonder how to weigh the suffering that this relation to memory has caused against the consolation it has provided. When does a “unique relation to memory” make you stronger? When is it simply neurotic, creating more suffering for you and others? Mr. Rieff doesn’t say. 

Near the end of his slim book, Mr. Rieff quotes Leon Wieseltier, whose book “Kaddish” is a magisterial meditation on memory, identity and mourning: “Memory has become our mysticism, so great that it is the generation of authenticity that it confers.” Mr. Rieff knows that this authenticity is often unearned and that the mysticism can be used to legitimate the worst forms of violence. But Mr. Wieseltier is also concerned with forms of memory—like shiva, the official seven-day mourning period following a death, and study in honor of the dead—that express love and inspire reverence. These are not practices of remembrance that Mr. Rieff, or any one of us, would want to lightly forget.

Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”