Demonstrators form a human border wall with quotes from President Trump during the Women's March in New York, January 20, 2018. Erin Lefevre/ Press Association. All rights reserved.

When President Trump declared a national emergency for ‘virtual invasion purposes’, he gave new meaning to the Latin maxim ‘necessitas legem non habet’ (necessity has no law). There is only one sense in which Trump was speaking truthfully when he declared a national emergency to combat a ‘foreign invasion of our Southern border’. Many other Presidents before him have issued emergency decrees. President Obama signed one to fight the Swine Flu epidemic. So did President Carter during the Iran Hostage Crisis. And President Bush was reacting to a very ‘real’ crisis when he issued a national emergency following 9/11.

Yet when Trump declared the border crisis a national emergency, even he seemed aware that he was putting the cart in front of the horse. In order to run for President, he created a solution to a non-existing problem; a wall to keep ‘rapists’ from entering the United States. To do so he wanted a wall. And now as President, he required funding in order to build the wall, which meant that he must manufacture a national emergency in order to transcend the rule of law.

In that sense, Trump is fulfilling a campaign promise, not by constructing a border wall, so much as by constructing a border crisis: the rhetorical legitimization of extra-legal measures in order to enact the politics of an illegitimate Presidency. This power to determine between what constitutes a ‘real’ or an ‘imagined’ threat echoes the Napoleonic decree of 1811, in which only the Emperor could determine which cities were ‘legally’ at siege, and hence worth defending.  

So it matters little at this point whether or not there is a ‘real’ crisis at the border. The xenophobic phantasmagoria of ‘gang-monsters’ ‘invaders’ or ‘hordes’, allows Trump to circumvent the political process altogether and commit the United States to the slaying of a giant windmill. 

But there is more at stake here than just a fool’s errand. In the interim, a domestic and partisan battle will ensue, equally destructive and factitious in nature. This form of politics, in which there is no tangible threat, but the paranoid illusion of existential foes, constitutes not just a state of emergency, but also a state of exception; in other words, the true goal of the state of emergency is not to build a wall, but to render the ‘building of the wall’ into a perpetual state of political antagonism and reactionary infighting. 

In order to make sense of this we can look to the German legal theorist, and later legal ideologue of the Nazi regime, Carl Schmitt. 

Schmitt and the ‘essence of the political’

In recent years there has been a resurgent interest in the writings of the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. In particular he sought to provide a legal foundation for the Nazi regime, and was known as the ‘crown-jurist of the Third Reich’. While we distill the relevance of his work for political theory, we must consider the various ways in which Nazism shaped his views, and acknowledge how his views in turn were constitutive to Nazism. 

Based on lectures written for the Deutsche Hochschulein Berlin, his most well-known work is ‘The Concept of the Political’. In it he seeks to determine an‘essence’ of the political. Schmitt argued that the political is the primordial sphere upon which all other domains are based (religion, economics etc.) The reason that it influenced all other spheres was its capacity to distinguish between friends and enemies, or, in other words, that all spheres become ‘political’ once they have to face the problem of distinguishing between friend and foe. Since the political realm is the one most essential to identity-formation (being that by which the State determines friends and enemies), all other spheres must ultimately fall within its sphere. In a broader sense –and this is where the authoritarian element of his argument is most apparent – the central function of the State, and thereby of the democratic process, is that of identifying existential threats. Schmitt believed not only that strongmen leaders could thrive on the rhetorical figment of the enemy, but that the very essence of the political rests on the powers required to detect such a foe. He called this a ‘state of exception’. 

The state of exception functions along the lines of a simple paradox: in order to identify the existential threat to a society, one must first be rid of one’s internal and domestic opponents. Only then can the true threat of a foreign enemy be neutralized. This means that a state of emergency can only be fulfilled by implementing a state of exception whose purpose is to silence or neutralize domestic opponents and mobilize nationalist reactionary forces. The logic is simple: the real threat can only be combated once the internal agitators are rooted out. 

In the Nazi regime, this took the form of the invention of ‘The Jew’ and the subsequent arrest and vilification of all those as conspiratorial accomplices who dismissed the existence of any such plot. Only then could an entirely fictive anti-semitic conspiracy theory be manipulated into a genuine genocidal counter-conspiracy. The state of exception was vital to this horrific process. In the pursuit of domestic opponents, the Nazi regime could convince itself of its own necessity. As soon as Hitler came into power, he signed the ‘Decree for the Protection of the People and the State’, essentially suspending the constitution as well as personal civil liberties. 

This is why the Italian scholar Giorgio Agamben defines totalitarianism as “the establishment, by means of a State of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the elimination not only of political adversaries, but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into our political system.” Only then, and for this purpose, can a genuine state of emergency be imposed. The state of exception functions to normalize and integrate the necessary legal framework to enact a wholesale reactionary conspiratorial politics. This is more than just mere scape-goating, it is the internalization of extra-legal processes into the legitimization of the regime itself. 

The key point for Schmitt is then that the friend/enemy distinction can constitute the political regardless of the manifestation of a ‘genuine’ or existing crisis. The process of distinguishing between friend/enemy never has to be completed. When one swings at windmills, it’s always those next to you who have to watch their heads. The saying goes that in any authoritarian society ‘the leader can never be trusted, but he must always be believed’. Schmitt knew as well as anyone that ‘the political’ rests on faith, and not on truth. This, for him, was the essence of the political – the perpetual pursuit of fictive enemies to root out genuine hidden foes. 

Plutarch already recognized this when he wrote that the wise man ‘can profit from his enemies’. (De capienda former inimicis utilitate). The idea of the foreigner, the outsider, and the enemy can be translated into any one-size-fits-all form of authoritarianism, in which one’s ‘love of country’ becomes determined by the extent to which one follows the leader in his paranoid pursuit. In order to cast out the leader’s opponents, legal processes can be swept away like so much flotsam, into the ether of paranoid rhetoric.

The paranoid style

In Trump’s rambling declaration of a State of Emergency, he seemed to take a paradoxical attitude to the crisis itself. He began by declaring ‘an invasion’ of ‘monstrous gangs’, but then quickly moved into a defensive position, stating that such emergency measures were in fact ‘very common’ and had been signed for ‘far less important things.’ But “why hadn’t they been important?”, he stated rhetorically. “They hadn’t been very exciting”. 

In this he was inadvertently obeying the American historian Richard Hofstadter, who theorized the so-called ‘paranoid style in American politics’. In the paranoid style, the truth content of any given statement is at best secondary to the mobilizing function of paranoia as a political shibboleth. In other words, friends are those who follow the paranoid leader in his obsession, whereas anyone who argues against becomes an extension of the perceived enemy. This is the true danger of a state of emergency; that it creates an ongoing state of exception, in which all political acts are interpreted as part and parcel to this battle. The paranoid ‘style’ is therefore, similarly to the state of exception, a process in which the normal political experience is deliberately suspended, in order to achieve the perception of a sort of clean slate.

Hofstadter’s insight is that the paranoid style requires not only conspiratorial rhetoric (i.e. the identification of an enemy), but that it elevates all politics into a paranoid modus operandi; in other words, the suggestion that all politics is inherently conspiratorial, and that the only ‘truth’ of the political exists in obtaining the force to obstruct or eliminate one’s opponents. 

This means that the political leader who employs the paranoid style must always contradict himself. His nation is both the greatest on earth, and the most threatened: the strongest and the most vulnerable; his people both the most loyal and the most disloyal. Each of these contradictions was evident in Trump’s state of emergency announcement. America has the greatest military but fears invasion by a couple of thousand refugees. America has ‘the best people’ but the wall was not built because ‘some people did not step forward’. The statistics demonstrate a ‘massive crisis’ but are also all ‘fake’ and not to be trusted. 

The convoluted mass of paradoxical statements cuts right to the core of the state of exception; a politics in which nothing is as it seems and all speech bounces back aimlessly in the empty corridors of power. For the paranoid nationalist, America is always both the boldest and the weakest country, stronger than ever, yet about to crumble, perpetually triumphant yet always on the losing side. These contradictions are not merely the projections of a rambling President. They are the duplicitous doubling implicit in the paranoid style, and constitutive of the state of exception.

The border wall as America itself

Before we can even consider what makes the border crisis ‘real’ or ‘fake’, we must come to understand what the function of reality (or the accusation of a lack thereof) means in this context. The dark irony is that the paranoid individual always envisions a sort of absolute state that is somehow also more free since it will enforce the parameters by which to ‘see through’ the façade of the status quo. 

The process by which this dangerous form of reactionary thought becomes supposedly ‘democratic’ is an evolution of what Spinoza called the ‘absolutely absolute state’ (omnino absolutum); a strong State in which everything that is not forbidden becomes obligatory. In other words, a freedom that is so absolute that it requires a practically totalitarian enforcement against those who seek to restrict it. The totalitarian subject thereby always believes himself to be the immanently most free one, living in a system that imposes a strictly extra-legal system to first protect, and then enforce, the public good.

Trump’s stance towards the wall, which he has called ‘big and beautiful’ here takes on the very characteristics of that public good. The wall not only symbolizes the outer border of an ethno-nationalist American ‘conservation’ –  a nationwide gated community – but symbol of the sublime function of the nation itself. Similar to the proverbial Chinese Wall, which is used colloquially as everything from a trade barrier to an ethical dividing line, the relationship to the original façade becomes largely lost in the signifier of the wall itself. The same is true with Trump’s border wall. The more he speaks of it, the more it comes to signify a grander, more nationalist, more ethnically ‘pure’ vision of America itself. 

This is why the wall is fundamentally racist. It precludes the notion of a nation that has to be protected at all costs from the Latino taint. This is why the rightwing pundit Ann Coulter has called immigrants ‘culturally deficient’ and ‘worse than ISIS’. Terrorists want to eradicate American society. Immigrants, on the other hand, seek to integrate. The message is clear. The US must be purified along ethnic, racial, and cultural lines. The wall is not just a symbol, but a physical manifestation of this racist fantasy. 

This means that America does not really need the wall to keep foreigners out. Instead, having becoming estranged to itself, America now requires the wall as a symbol of national cohesion, and as a false idol to a racially ‘pure’ conception of society that fits within the prejudices of the far-right and its corresponding media outlets. 

As Trump has gone to great lengths to explain, the wall is a real, physical, insurmountable barrier. The idea is that the wall is so ‘real’ that it too will bring about a return to a similarly corporal rediscovery of the white nationalist American ethic. This should not just be interpreted as Trump giving in to the demands of the far-right media establishment, but as further indication that the wall prefigures a state of exception rather than a state of emergency. The exception is in this case one in which the wall becomes the physical placeholder for an illusionary and deeply racist vision of American society. 

The real danger

Democracies are surprisingly brittle things. Like sandcastles facing the tide, they require careful management and constant vigilance to keep the waves from slowly eroding their foundations. It is a sad irony that most democracies crumble from within. And this occurs precisely when extra-legal measures are enforced to ‘protect’ the essence of the society. Carl Schmitt, for all his ideological shortcomings, recognized that the ‘essence’ of the political does not really exist, but is made manifest only in that energy invoked to protect an ideal politics from perceived enemies. 

The real danger of Trump’s border crisis is that it sets the conditions for a perpetual politics of paranoia. The real battle will not be at the border, but between those who see the border wall as an extra-legal manipulation, a manufactured crisis, and those who think it cuts to the core of what American society should stand for. In the dialectic between these two vision of legality, between that of the governing mechanisms of Congress and a President who believes Congress to be the enemy, a dangerous void is forming in the essence of American politics itself.  

The only way to begin countering this threat, and breaching the gap between the real and the imagined, the paranoid and the factual, is to identify ‘the Wall’ not as a state of emergency, but as a state of exception. This is a form of politics for which Trump requires no funding. It is a wall he can build without any bricks or mortar. The wall between ‘friend’ and ‘foe’, between ‘patriot’ and ‘traitor’ and between ‘American’ and ‘Other’, is one that is already being built. History teaches us that the effects of this state of exception can be disastrous. And in the totalitarian outcomes of a society in which no one really believes in anything any more, the truly unthinkable can be made manifest, until it materializes into an all too real, horrific, reality. 

No matter whether the wall is ever built, the façade of American democracy is already crumbling. 

The flag of US capitalism, red and gold to honor our fallen comrades. Credit: Wikimedia/HHemken.CC BY-SA 3.0.

What is normal?

Is it the right for white men to own slaves?

Is it the idea that freedom can be realized through wage labor?

Is it a society in which democracy is viewed as compatible with an economy run by a small number of massive banks and corporations?

None of this is normal. But while slavery is no longer seen as acceptable, capitalism seems ordinary. Just as Europeans colonized most of the world’s peoples and justified this as the ‘natural’ way of things with racist, Eurocentric ideology, so the tendency in American history is to read the past through the lens of the present: to take what appears as normal today and see it as the regular order of things for all times.   

But in many respects capitalism was not always a normal or natural part of American life. This was especially the case in the American north in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, the family farm remained a mainstay of rural life. And in cities, artisanal production organized around masters, journeymen, and apprentices tended to be the norm. Of course, there were capitalist interests involved in the colonial endeavor from the start; it was a private joint stock company - the Massachusetts Bay Company - that aimed to profit by sending settlers across the Atlantic in the 1600s.  

But the social relations that formed in the northern colony and pushed expansion to the western frontier were not exactly ‘capitalist’. The typical small farm of the period was organized around a patriarchal, gendered hierarchy in which men tended to push their families to the frontier, leaving little choice but for their wives and children to join them. They were the rulers of the household, hunting and farming while their wives took care of household chores. However, the goal of social life was not profit, and wage labor was seen as a form of social dependence against freedom. In other words, freedom and wage labor were not necessarily viewed as compatible.

Similarly, an artisan controlled his own schedule and tools, and owned what he produced. The artisan’s labor was not alienated from him - what he produced was not owned by another - but controlled by him: his patriarchal freedom was defined against being a dispossessed wage laborer.

This is not to be idealistic. The northern social structure was organized around racism, sexism, and patriarchy. There was a mix of capitalist and non-capitalist elements at work, particularly as tensions grew between settlers who saw the frontier as a zone of independence for their farm-based lifestyles, and capitalist speculators who viewed the west as a great space for profits. But the point is simply that capitalism itself, and capitalist labor, was not necessarily ‘normal’.

In the south though, capitalist slavery was normal. It was not so for the slaves themselves, of course, who were brought to the south with their entire lives and bodies controlled by white masters, not just their labor time. But it was normal for politicians, slave owners and poor whites who worked as patrollers at night to capture slaves who had escaped. Racial inferiority was seen as the natural way of things; after all, classically-educated slaveowners read that even Aristotle had said that some people are naturally slaves and others naturally masters.

The normality of slavery was extinguished with the Civil War, wherein somewhere between half to three-quarters of a million people were killed. As slaves rushed to northern lines, and northern military leaders gradually realized it was in their interests to free the slaves (at least in the rebelling states) to strengthen their forces and weaken the south, the north, driven by slave resistance, abolished slavery in the confederacy.

After the war, as the south was reconstructed, the goal of the north was essentially to rebuild the south on the basis of capitalist wage labor. Rarely were ex-slaves given ’40 acres and a mule’. Instead, they were hired as wage laborers or became sharecroppers. As freed blacks pushed to become independent farmers and the white elite worked to resubordinate black plantation labor, so a new class balance was reached as the owners of land and tools allowed freed blacks to work on farms, so long as they paid a price to their former masters who could sell their production for profit.

Meanwhile in the north, capitalism increasingly became naturalized. By the 1880s, western expansion was driven less and less by the family farm and increasingly by the power of capital as apprentices and journeymen became wage laborers, masters became capitalists or workers themselves, and family farms were replaced by agribusiness. The Midwest became the breadbasket of America as the far west, from Montana and Nevada to New Mexico and California, was developed by railroad and mining companies. While some family farms persisted and were granted land by the Homestead Act of 1862, the west, like the rest of a country born through the racial cleansing of native peoples, became a massive zone of resource extraction.

Overall, by the late 1800s capitalism had effectively become the norm. By this time both the Democratic and Republican Party’s ideologies of freedom and democracy meant, essentially, freedom for capital to control the United States.

As recent polls have shown, millennials have become increasing critical of capitalism and increasingly supportive of socialism. Symbolized by the popularity of politicians including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, this younger generation appears to be looking for a different way forward.

This is complicated by the fact that many Americans have little idea what socialism means, though more often than not the term is used to refer to increased corporate taxes and better welfare programs rather than the rearrangement of our social lives away from profit maximization and wage labor towards cooperation and the collective management of work. 

But if anything is clear from this history it is that capitalism isn’t normal, even in the case of America. And if capitalism isn’t normal, we can certainly imagine other ways of organizing ‘normal’ social life.

James Parisot’s new book is How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West,published by Pluto Press.

Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new type of beginning. Photo by Amro Ali.This may include a school of thought, a political philosophy or even an ideational movement – all cross-fertilized through a deeper engagement with the Arab world. 

“We need to find ourselves, and each other, on the streets, from human to human crowd.” Photo by Amro Ali.“These streets lose themselves in infinity … a countless human crowd moves in them, constantly new people with unknown aims that intersect like the linear maze of a pattern sheet.” – Siegfried Kracauer on Berlin, “Screams on the Street” (1930).

Dislocating the Arab future from the grip of the political bankruptcy and moral morass in the Arab world might appear remote and relegated to the domain of quixotic dreams. But does it need to be that way? As communities are unsettled, resistances triggered, a chorus of voices fired up, waves of bodies set in motion for justice, and a range of emotions roused even when they no longer have an appetite, can the continued onslaught on reality not also reinvigorate political thought?

The procession of dislocation that materialized in 2011 has been viciously derailed since. Now, to coherently embark upon a regenerated starting point in this long journey of political redemption, a “we” is required: This feeds from new political ideas, collective practices and compelling narratives that are currently re-constructed and brought to life in a distantly safe city.

Berlin is where the newly-arrived Arab suddenly (but not always) recognizes that the frightful habit of glancing over the shoulder – painfully inherited from back home – gradually recedes. All the while, a new dawn slowly sets in among the meeting of peers in this new city: As such, Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new type of beginning, one that turns heads in the direction of matters greater than the individual; and it generates a realization that the grey blur that nauseatingly blankets the future can actually be broken up.

Following the 2011 Arab uprisings and its innumerable tragic outcomes, Berlin was strategically and politically ripe to emerge as an exile capital. For some time now, there has been a growing and conscious Arab intellectual community, the political dimensions of which to fully crystalize is what I wish to further explore.

When the storm of history breaks out a tectonic political crisis, from revolutions to wars to outright persecution, then a designated city will consequently serve as the gravitational center and refuge for intellectual exiles. This is, for example, what New York was for post-1930s Jewish intellectuals fleeing Europe, and what Paris became for Latin American intellectuals fleeing their country’s dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

Against those historical precedents, the Arab intellectual community in Berlin needs to understand itself better, moving away from an auto-pilot arrangement, and become actively engaged with political questions that face it. In effect, there is a dire necessity for this community to acquire a name, shape, form and a mandate of sorts. With a vigorous eye to a possible long-term outcome, this may include a school of thought, a political philosophy or even an ideational movement – all cross-fertilized through a deeper engagement with the Arab world.

This is certainly not about beckoning revolutions and uprisings, nor to relapse into the stale talk of institutional reforms. If anything, there needs to be a move away from these tired tropes of transformation – away from quantifiable power dynamics that do not address matters that go deeper, into the existential level that shores up the transnational Arab sphere. This is the very area where the stream of human life animates a language of awareness and the recurring initiative helps to expand the spaces of dignity for fellow beings. Yet, this area is currently ravaged in a torrent of moral misery and spiritual crisis.

So here we are: Between Berlin’s spirited idiosyncrasies and an Arab community maturing away from “ordinary” diasporic pathways lies the foment of the politically possible.

“I was born in Tunisia, lived in Egypt, and gave my blood in Libya. I was beaten in Yemen, passing through Bahrain. I will grow up in the Arab World until I reach Palestine. My name is Freedom.” This popular streak, and variations of it, could be heard throughout the Arab world in February 2011 when hope for revolution was at its peak after the fall of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Within it, freedom is a wanderer that carries contagions as it roams across Arab borders.

Syria was not yet in the verse. The revolutionary moment there would launch in March 2011 and it would be the Syrians that would pay the highest price of an ephemeral euphoria that evaporated into the terrestrial orbit of actual change. In its stead, wandering freedom turned into a dystopian monster as hundreds of thousands became themselves forced wanderers. The Mediterranean Sea, long celebrated for its grace and splendour, became a morbid burial ground of people fleeing for safety.

Buttressed by the refugee waves, an intellectual flow of academics, writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and activists, among others, from across the Arab world gravitated towards Berlin as sanctuary and refuge. This took place against the backdrop of a long-established Turkish presence (initiated by the 1961 Guestworker Treaty) and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 refugee intake that partly shaped the post-2011 Arab transition.

A unique Arab milieu began to take form as new geographic, social, and cultural conditions necessitated a reconstruction of visions and practices. The exile body built on the embers and mediated on the ashes of a devastated Arab public left burning in the inferno of counter-revolutions, crackdowns, wars, terrorism, coups, and regional restlessness. It was that public that authoritarian regimes had worked so hard to contain and that everyday people battled courageously to reclaim. Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze at the close of 2010 and, ever since, opened possibilities for claims and struggles.

The pre-2011 ghost still haunts the Arab community that settles in Berlin. Photo by Amro AliThe newcomers to Berlin were thrown under the weight of newfound political obligations to their countries of origin. They did, after all, depart with a guilt-ridden sense of unfinished business. The Arab uprisings brought about a hiatus between the “no-longer” and the “not-yet.”1 The individual transitioned from bondage to freedom that broke the chains of work and biological necessity. The result was an imagination unleashed to see humans thrive in freedom and exhibit their capacity to make a new beginning, only for the subsequent journey to be stomped upon by the weight of the jackboot and silenced by the thud of the judge’s gavel hammer.

Yet in this gap of historical time, individual greatness and the passion of public freedom blossomed while a new character formed through the tear gas, streets, protests, and coffeehouses. In a marvellous transformation, they could “no longer recognize their pre-2011 self.”2 Hence, the arrival in Berlin not only came with an incomplete political consciousness, but an anxiety to resist a return to the “weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs,”3 as German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt conveys it. This denotes a pre-political spectre that rips the individual from group agency, and obliterates their biography from history. That is to say, the pre-2011 ghost still haunts the Arab community that settles in Berlin and learns to move within the terrain of hospitality and enmity.4

On the one hand, this new community navigated between the support and collaboration of German institutions, civil society, universities, cultural spaces, left-wing politics, churches, mosques, the large Turkish community, and a fluctuating German sense of responsibility to the refugee crisis.

On the other hand, the Arab community is menaced by local racism, a growing far-right movement in the form of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Arab embassies, foreign security agencies and reactionary sections of the diaspora. Moreover, its members are thrown down and disoriented by the modern malaise of the “Inferno of the Same”. This is how Berlin-based South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han aptly describes a world of unceasing repetition of similar experiences masquerading as novelty and renewal.

Consequently, we are seeing love – with all its earmarks of commitment, intimacy, passion, and responsibility – struggle to swell through the ranks from relationships to community-building in a world of “endless freedom of choice, the overabundance of options, and the compulsion for perfection.”5

Not only is fragmentation fomented by the upheaval caused by exile and transition, the individual in general struggles to flesh out a position towards a world that has become increasingly noisy and blurred. A world that has scrambled the once-relatable relationship between time and space, now under the neoliberal storm is turning responsible citizens into hyper-individual self-seeking consumers, discharging a plastic one-size fits all repetition of behaviour that precludes deeper forms of unity and a communal spirit.

Nonetheless, even with the challenges it confronts, the Arab community is unfolding in the shadow of complex socio-political ecologies and wide-ranging entanglements that are arguably unprecedented in modern history. Hitherto, most forced Arab migrations have happened on a country by country and era by era basis, such as Libyans fleeing Gaddafi’s regime in the 1970s, or the Lebanese fleeing the civil war in the 1980s. Moreover, transnational Arab relocation to the Gulf was primarily spurred on by economic factors, to say nothing of their residency that hinged on the shunning of any hint of politics. In contrast, we are currently witnessing the first ever simultaneous pan-Arab exodus consisting of overlapping legitimacies – beyond culture, religion, nationality and economics – born of the Arab Spring.

This new exile marvel is brewing in a cultural flux with questions that are only beginning to be raised. Exile is meant here, as Edward Said writes, as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”6 Additionally, exile transpires irrespective of one being banished from the homeland, living in legal limbo, studying at university, or even one who recently acquired German citizenship. We are talking about exile as a mental state,7 where even if you faced no political persecution if you chose to return to your country of origin, you would still feel alienated by a system that can no longer accommodate your innate or learned higher ideals.

For example, in late 2015, I attended the screening of a Syrian film in Kreuzberg titled True Stories of Love, Life, Death and Sometimes Revolution. During the question and answer session, a fellow country man in the audience asked the film’s co-director, Nidal Hassan, “What can we Syrian artists even do now given that we are in exile?” Hassan replied entrancingly: “We were in exile even in Syria…we just have to continue to change the world through our practices.”

From another angle, Dina Wahba, Egyptian doctoral researcher at Berlin’s Freie Universität, evocatively pens the exile consciousness: “I get out, look around, and realize how beautiful it is. I feel guilty that I’m here, while some of my friends are in dark cells. I also feel guilty that I’m here and not enjoying all this beauty. Crippling fear has crossed the Mediterranean and taken over my mind. Fear is a strange thing. I cannot go home, but neither can I make a home here.”8

As such, the sense of exile in Berlin is deepened by a wide-ranging emotional spectrum: From an all-consuming survivor’s guilt vis-à-vis those that stayed behind down to a pleasant stroll through Tiergarten Park in which a nagging thought might arise that whispers, “if only back in Cairo we had such large free unmolested spaces to breathe in.”

Arab Berlin, since 2011, has sprang a swathe of energetic pockets of creativity and thought. Yet, there is something missing in these hyper-present moments: the dynamic spaces from theatre to academia to civil society volunteering are fragmented and rarely talk to each other, not to mention the disconnect from the wider Arab community. You cannot help but sense that the creative and intellectual efforts are hurled into a void rather than being taken up by a greater political current that can extract these experiences and marshal them towards a pre-eminent narrative.

This problem, if we can call it that, is not unfamiliar to the city’s inherent contradictions. Strangely enough, it still echoes Siegfried Kracauer’s 1932 essay “Repetition”. The cultural critic and film theorist wrote that Berlin “is present-day and, moreover, it makes it a point of honour of being absolutely present-day… His [the inhabitant’s] existence is not like a line but a series of points… Many experience precisely this life from headline to headline as exciting; partly because they profit from the fact that their earlier existence vanishes in its moment of disappearing, partly because they believe they are living twice as much when they live purely in the present.”9

The irony, therefore, is that the strength that makes up the Berlin tempest that unleashes the creative and intellectual Arab energies, also happens to be its dissolution as its intense present breaks with past and future. That is to say, the exile might pursue the present as a way to escape or numb the trauma or crippling melancholia haunting the past, and anxiety saturating the future. But this can often mean the self is reduced to individual interests with the exciting present acting no more than a euphoric smokescreen of collective advancement.

How does one obstruct the trap that enmeshes the Arab Berliner? Photo by Amro Ali. As the late sociologist David Frisby writes about Kracauer’s idea, the crux is this: “This moment of presentness itself, however, never remains present. It is always on the point of vanishing. Hence the endless search for the ever-new and the permanent transformation of consciousness of time in metropolitan existence.”10 This makes for the need to chase the next project or seek out the next donor, which is not simply driven by excitement as much as it is foisted upon today’s entrepreneur of the self. As they self-exploit in their respective enterprise, the individual is made into “master and slave in one.” 11

Nonetheless, excitement is intimately tied to a never-ending present. Thus, the questions that arise: How does one interrupt this endless fluidity and “recycling” of presents? How can one address an animated present that seems somehow ruptured from building up on the past and navigating into the future? How does one obstruct the trap that enmeshes the Arab Berliner? How, that is, to alter the individual’s scattered series of points that Kracauer alluded to and move towards a meaningful line that elevates the exile’s relationship, not only to their life trajectory, but to an existential understanding in the body-politic that potentially pushes a narrative greater than the individual?

One way to understand this body-politic and appreciate Berlin’s intervention in this novel community, as well as the attempts of its members to make meaning of their new-found roles and the political environment that shapes them, would be vis-à-vis other cities. This serves to examine the elephant in the room, however prudently: Why cannot other western cities with large Arab populations qualify as the intellectual exile hub?

Western cities like London, Paris and New York would have been the expected post-2011 intellectual hubs given the large number of Arabs present within them. Yet, they have arguably all fallen behind Berlin. This cannot simply be explained in terms of dynamic diversity and cultural production, which is certainly not lacking in either of these three cities. Rather, they all appear to have a relative absence of ingredients that lead to the blossoming of a full-fledged political exile community like we are witnessing in Berlin.

To start, there seems to be a common view among Arab and Muslim groups that London is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists, while Berlin offers more space for pluralism. But London’s biggest hurdle, in fact, might be the high cost of living. To take a simple example: One has to think twice before buying an expensive London tube ticket. In contrast, Berlin’s U-Bahn and S-Bahn are affordable, which alone speaks volumes for the necessity of mobility required in community building. The repercussions of Brexit also diminished the grand city of London in many eyes and worsened an already difficult visa entry.

Paris, while popular with Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Lebanese, and Syrian intellectuals, is generally viewed as closed off and limited to the Francophone world. Also, the historical legacy of colonialism will generally taint any initiative coming out of London and Paris. While New York is clouded by US foreign policy and the current administration, the security mesh makes it burdensome to enter the country. Moreover, high living costs and distance from the Arab world also complicate its appeal.

To be sure, there are cultural trends that unfold across all these cities post-2011, which is why similar community formations should be encouraged. However, the cultural and political dynamics that materialise in Berlin, backed with intensity and creativity by wide-ranging institutional and grassroots support, summons Berlin and the Arab exile body to be assigned into a shared conversation.12 If one listens closely, the hoofbeats of Arab history are reverberating out of Berlin more than any other western counterpart.

On this note, Istanbul is frequently touted as the Arab exile hub, and indeed it could easily rival Berlin had it not been for some conveniently overlooked factors. Arab activities are largely permitted if they correlate ideologically with, or not speak against, Erdogan’s illiberal government. One might raise the question as to why would this be a problem if a gracious host is enabling an Arab community to thrive that would, in any case, only be concerned with external issues?

For a start, this selfish approach deflects from the grim reality that sees Turkish academics and journalists censored or imprisoned, a grave matter that should raise concern among Arab democratic aspirations. It is one thing, and understandable, to be grateful to a majestic Istanbul that gives one abode and freedom to flourish. But it is an unsettling hypocrisy to trumpet the city as a free intellectual hub while ignoring its own Turkish citizens who are attacked for voicing thoughts that deviate from the official line. Fundamental values that are compromised, particularly this drastically, are no longer values but more like hobbies. A draconian environment that divulges its effect on Turkish skin will inadvertently skew Arab intellectual development and ultimately make it difficult to garner a better representation of exile voices and thought processes.

In light of the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, one wonders if Turkey’s entangled relationship in the region does not furnish Istanbul with sufficient geographical and mental distance to render it beyond scrutiny. Had this gruesome act taken place in the Saudi embassy in Berlin, the consequence, one could reasonably speculate, would have come at a higher price for the Saudi crown prince. The weight of Germany and the EU might have been enough to abort or postpone a planned assassination.

This is not to rule out the immense potential of Istanbul’s Arab community. After all, Khashoggi himself saw the city as a “base for a new Middle East.”13 It is just that the current political incarnation comes with many bouts of wariness that need to be better understood, discussed, and thought through carefully. Thus, if current developments hold, we can expect in the distant future two competing Arab schools of thinking to emerge out of Berlin and Istanbul.

Yet, unlike Istanbul, London, Paris, and New York (vis-à-vis the US) which cannot claim historical “neutrality,” the function of Berlin works strangely well as it is linked to a peculiar backdrop: The contemporary Arab approach towards Germany is premised on the notion that it was never a colonizer or invader of Arab lands. The 1941-43 Afrika Korps is given little attention in Arab historiography (although this should not detract from the dark ties that some Arab elites pursued with Nazi Germany).

In other words, Germany was never a colonizer like France or Great Britain, nor does it have an aggressive foreign policy like the US, let alone evokes ambivalence like Turkey does. Arab positions are then deducted from this negative admiration that is rarely questioned in the popular Arab worldview. However, this obfuscates the stealth colonial endeavour that lacks theatrics. German companies like Siemens and ThyssenKrupp have long been implicated in the “colonial dynamics of economic subjugation” that deepens, for example, Egypt’s chronic underdevelopment, corruption, and even the skewed “technological conception of modernity,” as Omar Robert Hamilton argues.14 Yet, Germany walks away unscathed and gets praised as the country of organisation, discipline, efficiency, and Mercedes Benz.

The idea of Germany rarely arouses a divisiveness and antagonism that would aggravate Arab security officials or activists. The paradox of its power is that the savagery Germany committed in the first half of the twentieth century skirts around the Arab world. While German orientalism is not alien to Arab scholarship, this is not what is usually or immediately deplored in Arab scholarly circles and the Arab imaginary regarding Germany – to that country’s stroke of luck.15 Even strong German support for Israel does not elicit the same degree of Arab anger towards it as with the US and UK, partly because of the sound popular view that Germany is coerced by historical guilt. So, in a sense, Germany is conditionally, if not grudgingly, let off the hook.

However, this endeavor is more about Berlin than Germany. A city not only telescopes political dynamics of community building, but it will always exist timelessly as “an important crystallization of human civilization and its discontents.”16 By coming to terms with Berlin as a political, social, and cultural laboratory, it will be possible to illuminate the current Arab community that is shaped by a historical pattern of sites of sanctuary and exile agency.

The German art critic Karl Scheffler perhaps immortalized the essence of the German capital in 1910 with the words, “Berlin dazu verdammt: immerfort zu werden und niemals zu sein” (Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being).17 What Scheffler thought to be a disadvantage because of the city’s “lack of organically developed structure” turned out to have hidden advantages.18 As German writer Peter Schneider observes, the word werden, “becoming”, encapsulates notions such as on the “cusp of becoming”, “up-and-coming,” “new Berlin,” the impeding effort to transform itself but not quite there yet.

Berlin’s grotty pockets and incompleteness electrifies you with the truth about the world as it is. Photo by Amro Ali.These themes of liminality strongly resonate with the self-perception of the growing Arab intellectual community’s idea of rebuilding, transforming and becoming. Berlin’s imperfection, sketchiness, and incompleteness, furnish a sense of freedom and growth which the compact beauty of London and Paris can never provide. If every space is “perfectly restored”, this then can lead to exclusion and a sense that all spaces are occupied.19 If Kracauer glorifies and mourns both the intense and disappearing “presentness” of Berlin, Scheffler inadvertently redeems it. He points to a realm of possibilities that presentness can eventually spill over into something by the simple fact that it is able to keep its thinking and creative residents within a sense of motion.

Compare this to other European cities (the cities of being?) where, for example, the element of surprise that traditionally accompanied travel is ironed out as tourism is homogenized, streamlined, securitized, and packaged into recognizable templates – English speaking locals, ease of WIFI access, TripAdvisor-determined accommodation. All this sees individual movements and curiosity follow predictable routes and rituals. Berlin is anything but immune to this, but the totalizing wave and façade is often punctured from the city’s anarchist protests to anti-establishment graffiti, and most importantly, a culture of political vibrancy and pluralism.

This phenomenon helps recalibrate the senses back to modern predicaments. Whereas Prague’s glistening Disneyfied streets and conventionally romantic spaces tells you reassuring lies about what the world wants to see, Berlin’s grotty pockets and incompleteness electrifies you with the truth about the world as it is. While the post-war Berlin story – that saw Cold War divisions, reconstruction, and reunification – is anything but straightforward, we can come, as a result of such past tensions, to appreciate the current political and intellectual landscape of Berlin in the way it accentuates the idea of human value.

The marriage between city and thought is critical in understanding the exiled Arab body politic undergoing a collective soul-searching struggle, beyond the initial wandering of freedom, which is evident in the intellectual and everyday subtext. There will need to be a deeper gaze into maghfira (forgiveness), tasalah (reconciliation), inikas (reflection) on past mistakes, as well as the notion that the nation-state that brought many ills to the Arab world no longer makes any sense. Therefore, the concept of the city will need to spearhead the decolonization of nation-state models and replace it with more humane ways of governance. As such, the Arab community’s exploration of forgiveness, reconciliation, and reflection comes with the aid of complementary themes embedded in Berlin’s code.

The concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung means working through and coping. Here, the past is incorporated into present experiences. It was once used in a positive way, describing that you had to deal with the past, but has become increasingly ambivalent. The term bewältigen means not only confronting the past, but also getting over it or getting done with it (it can also mean mastering a task or learning to do something for the first time). It has been overused but still serves as a beneficial term. Perhaps the strongest instantiation is Aussöhnung, which means reconciliation. Connected to Biblical motifs and rarely used in everyday conversation, it can be employed to describe coping with the past by reconciling opposites or parties that have hurt each other. Berlin, therefore, is that paradigmatic backdrop and soundboard to the slowly maturing elements running through the political Arab community.

Towards that end, Berlin will need to be actively thought of and treated as one critical hub and safe space to reconstruct alternative narratives and futures20– a space that will require a physical presence and minimal reliance on the digital sphere of social media and communication technologies. A physical presence should be emphasised over any other collaboration, including the much-loved Skype conferencing. We have hopefully learned the lesson of 2011: The digital can only take us so far, and the communities existing in cyberspace will never be a match for the real world of organizing and politicking. Certainly, the digital will be complementary, but never its replacement.21 Han would argue, “it takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd. The digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses. Individuals who come together as a swarm do not develop a we.”22

To reemphasize, this is about Berlin. A gifted Syrian poet in Hamburg or a lustrous Moroccan film director in Munich are of little use unless they physically make the trip to the German capital, disclose their identities and make their presence felt. Better put, “meet, merge, emerge” as Australian author Stuart Braun pithily states in his aptly named book, City of Exiles: Berlin from the outside in.23 No digital mechanism can ever be a viable substitute to the world of shadows. There needs to be a resistance to the levelling effect brought on by the digital topology that deceives with its pseudo-egalitarianism and smooth open spaces yet fragments responsibility. It does this by promoting arbitrariness and non-bindingness that undermine promises and trust that are required to bind the future.24

This stands in contrast to the real world’s nooks, corners, crannies, and alleys that filter and impede the information pollution and the armies of trolls, and permit slowness, mediation, and trust processes back into the collective fold.25 The orderly and measured disengagement from social media is one way to avoid the recurring problem of disintegration of one’s efforts, scattering of thoughts, and inability to hone in on matters down to their essence. Without going all out Luddite, it is to reign back the digital swarm that leads to the exile’s continued captivity between a sensationally feel-good-but-not-going-anywhere present and an open abyss that devours all efforts.

The political should thus not simply be understood as a destination where a Syrian has to wait for that momentous day to return to a post-Assad land (if the obvious needs reminding, even sinister dictators and their regimes cannot cheat mortality and the laws of history). Rather, it is to think and engage politically in the present and be tested within the society of Berlin.

For example, I remember a few years ago, a group of Syrians started a charity “giving back to Germany” which handed out food to the homeless. While charity is always to be commended, justice needs to be at the forefront of one’s goals of becoming better acquainted with the political problem that not only leads to homelessness, but also to understand it in much more nuanced ways than what the political can popularly imply. To illustrate this, the German population is suffering from a loneliness scourge.26 The communal capital stored within many Arab spaces can be unloaded (through volunteering and specially-designed outreach programs) into these German voids. Loneliness, a growing phenomenon in this hyper-individualised world (and one that is making inroads into Arab cities), has political implications from the way people view minorities to voting patterns, and therefore it needs to be treated as a political problem. From this, a problem is recognised, engaged with, new lessons learned, adding further experiences and wisdom to the Arab body-politic repository.

A conference in perpetual motion. Photo by Amro AliThere is something unsettling about attending a brilliant symposium on Middle East studies in Berlin, only to leave with the predictable knowledge that it will fall into a black hole. Even if publications and podcasts were produced, it reaches only a few, and certainly not the wider Arab civic body in question. A continual dialogue with the public needs to be fostered. Think of it as a conference in perpetual motion: To widen the net to young Arabs to engage in political thinking without the need to enrol them in formal structures of learning; to translate complex academic theories into digestible intellectual gems, which could be as simple as rewriting or summarizing conference notes to be pinned up on a board in an Arab café in Neukölln. The intellectual exile body will need to forge an intimate relation with café staff, barbers and other occupations critically-positioned within common social spaces. The “antiquated” flyer will hold more weight than a Facebook post as the mere act of handing it to someone restores an invaluable human transaction that makes bonding and togetherness more realizable than what social media can offer.

It would be a delusion of utter proportions to think the mosque and church have no place in this endeavour. Any project to live out one’s secular fantasies is doomed. There needs to be a move beyond the spaces of smoke-blowing chatter over Foucault versus Deleuze and the echo chamber it entails. This is not a matter of merely tolerating faith because it is deeply rooted in the Arab community. Rather, it implies coming to terms with the constructive role faith can play in an increasingly alienating environment and, therefore, that it needs to be better framed and understood rather than overlooked by intellectual currents.

Put differently, the frequent sound of church bells should not be read as annoying (as I often hear Germans and visitors complain), but an encouraging sign that the church, along with worker’s unions, form a bulwark against neoliberal dehumanization. This is done by keeping shops closed on Sundays for leisure and holding the consumer-frenzy Black Friday and Boxing day type sales of New York and London at bay.

On a similar wave length, no Ramadan ever passes without the cynics moaning how the holy month slows down Muslim efficiency in the workforce. Apart from this generalization, we need to ask, is slowness a bad thing in this overheated world? In a system obsessed with sucking every last ounce of productivity from the workforce and running them down into complacent cogs in the hyper-capitalist machine, then along comes Ramadan throwing in a wrench and declaring: no, it is better to reach the outer limits of your humanness by reorienting attention back to the family, community, charity, sacrifice, and empathy with the poor and hungry, as all this has more depth and meaning than a cold abstract GDP. By carefully rethinking such facets and others through, we can gradually rehumanize the political.

It must be remembered that whether one identifies as intellectual, activist, dissident, artist, filmmaker, and so on, one has chosen to operate more vividly within, what Czech thinker Václav Havel describes as, the “independent life of society.”27 This implies any expression that ranges from self-reflection about the world to setting up a civic organization with the aim of materializing the “truth” or living within the truth. Havel’s line of thinking was nurtured under authoritarian rule in 1970s communist Czechoslovakia, however it has some resonance to Arab Berlin, and certainly much more resonance in the current state of the Arab world in which it is a struggle to live creatively and with thought.

Merge the stream of evolving Arab politics with German progressive politics. Photo by Amro AliThe Arab barber and Arab author in Berlin may have developed from the same background that brought them various shades of pain, except the latter is disproportionately more noticeable, given a special title, and a de facto voice to speak for others. The barber’s expression of truth is demoted as it is seen to fall below the boundaries of societal “respectability” and creative norms. The practice of faith might not only be his attainment of truth, but his coping mechanism. However, attaining truth can materialize in numerous other ways: If a Syrian barber is tending to a Palestinian customer, they might get into a conversation of a common struggle, evoking sympathy, empathy, and kinship. He might not let the patron pay if he sensed financial hardship. He could decide to put up a picture of Aleppo before the war as a reminder of what was lost but will someday be regained, even with its rubble. What looks like the everyday mundane is, in actuality, the desire to incrementally expand the spaces of dignity wherever one traverses.

The Arab author is simply one manifestation of the same political spectrum that produced that barber. The author just happens to be one of the most visible, most political, most clearly articulated expression of Arab grievances. Yet the author should not forget that he or she developed, consciously or not, from the same background and reservoir as the rest of society and the upheavals of the Arab Spring. This is where they draw their strength and legitimacy from; and this society has a very large reservoir of pain, unhappiness, confusion, and uncertainty. But when the intellectuals and activists not only recognize the futility of separation from that background, but also return to and engage with it, not as shewerma-buying customers but as citizens-in-exile in an ever-expanding conversation with moral obligations, the securing of a steadfast future is aided.

Arab Berlin would need to build a reciprocal relationship with Arab cities, beyond the institutional level. Currently, the two candidates most receptive to new ideas are Tunis and Beirut.

These would form the intellectual bridgehead cities to the Arab world. It should not be presumed, however, that Tunis and Beirut will be painless to engage with simply based on the appearance of liberty. The Lebanese capital is extremely volatile and is prone to be the wildcard of Arab cities. Tunisian gains of greater freedoms are betrayed by a brain-drain and inertia in Tunis as a result of endemic corruption and the inability to push deeper reforms. Nevertheless, there is a reservoir of latent possibilities in this novel relationship with these two cities that needs to be explored.

This arrangement is needed, or is perhaps a first step, until Cairo, the only Arab city that can move ideas by its sheer weight, is someday restored back onto the path of political maturity and intellectual openness. Perhaps this approach is also a modest attempt to address a deeper problem: One of the causes of the tragic downward spiral in the region was the historical shifting of the ideological Arab gravity centres to Riyadh, hauled away from Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. It is not that these three cities lost their cultural capital as much as their clout was reined in by the reckless vision of Gulf oil money. The ageless beauty and humility of Gulf Arab culture – one that was at the forefront of environmental care – was ripped apart as it descended upon an accelerated hyper-modernity devoid of politics, and the region keeps on paying the price in countless catastrophic ways because of the Gulf’s ineptitude and irresponsible adventures.

This whole endeavor is under no illusion with regards to the obstacles faced. The cynics will assert the specter of the far-right and xenophobia will hamper the efforts of the Arab exile body. Perhaps, but rather than being spectators on the sidelines, the idea is to merge the stream of evolving Arab politics with German progressive politics, as well as to actively hold a mirror up to official German hypocrisy that preaches a human rights discourse yet sells deadly weapons to dictatorships (Egypt being the top importer of German armaments).28 Moreover, the world’s problems are interconnected more deeply than we could ever imagine and addressing this needs to be realized on a city, as opposed to national, level which is within human grasp.

The other evident challenge is the visa regime. To avoid being consumed by the consular labyrinth, a focus should not be placed on importing more intellectuals into Berlin, but rather, to make do with who is available, who is able to move there, and who is able to visit or pass through. More crucial even is to gradually raise a generation that thinks in new political ways. In this, the greatest challenge I believe will be the absence of a global momentum – that only shows up in rare cycles – to galvanize the community. Momentum versus little of it is the difference between a packed public lecture with audiences sprawled across the stairs and floor, sacrificing thirst and inconvenience, to feel part of something big, as opposed to a dozen regular attendees subjected to the speaker’s voice echoing in the room. The painfully long intervals between momentums will need to be filled with thinking, reading, writing, and gatherings, geared towards slowly building up the community. Because when the momentum arrives unannounced, there will be no time to finish reading a book or stay seated to the end of a theatre play.

The manipulation of identity will be another obstacle thrown by the Arab skeptics, particularly in official capacities, as well as their supporters, who might insinuate that something coming out of a western city is not as authentic as an Arab or Muslim one – despite the political currency emerging from an Arab body. Remember, we are dealing with Arab regimes that decry western human rights as not applicable to them all the while, for some “inexplicable” reason, granting exceptions for Western arms, neoliberalism, consumerism, torture methods, higher degrees and so forth.29 The same regimes that sing tone-deaf nationalist rhetoric and loyalty to the homeland, and yet it is not unusual to see a growing number of the elite’s children studying, working, and living in places like London and Rome with no intention of returning home.

The identity neurosis underpins the same mentality that accepts being vomited upon by Gulf capital that turns the thriving Arab cultural realm into vast wastelands simply because, as one of the superficial subtexts hold, the finance is coming from a Muslim country, and therefore something must be going right. As if the insertion of an air-conditioned sleek mosque in a mega mall rights the wrongs of the eviction of local communities, destruction of age-old mosques, and state appropriation of their lands under the flimsiest of pretexts to build that mall. Progress does not come off the back of cement trucks. The shredding of a political value system in the Arab world is why Arab Berlin exists in the first place. In any case, the bridgehead cities partially address this identity concern by repelling the superficial charges that will potentially unfold in the future.

We live in an era that is mostly nameless, faceless, and spiritless – compounded by the very neoliberal forces that strip people stark naked before the monster of mutant capitalism. This monster knows no vision, no direction, no narrative, no meaning, no choreography, and no conclusion.30 It only knows addition and acceleration that operates through consumer desires, emotional manipulation, and false promises that repeatedly drag humans away from the realm of authenticity.

This beast of anti-politics has, not surprisingly, been eagerly adopted by liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. Undoubtedly, much worse for the latter as the deliberate weakening of political pluralism, civil society, institutions, and freedom of speech, incapacitates the ability to hold back the deluge of socio-economic dehumanization. This is a crisis without the shrill dramatics of a crisis because it is quiet, smooth, seamless, and well internalized. But as with any crisis, only by naming it and giving it shape can we attempt to limit the formless threats that have yet to come. By determining something as a crisis, Jacques Derrida would argue, “one tames it, domesticates it, neutralizes it…One appropriates the Thing, the unthinkable becomes the unknown to be known, one begins to give it form, one begins to inform, master, calculate, program.”31

A city that feeds on its nerves? Photo by Amro Ali.Perhaps one way to approach this is to return to an obscure article written in 1870 by Syrian intellectual Salim al-Bustani in the al-Jinan journal. Titled “Ruh al-Asr” (Spirit of the Age), it was most likely formulated as a response to the well-known German equivalent, Zeitgeist. Ruh al-Asr was a literary and philosophical theme that was constituted by a “metaphysical force in terms of its moral imperatives of liberty, freedom, equality, and justice.”32

Like many of his Arab contemporaries, al-Bustani was clearly seduced by the “liberality” and “human progress” blowing from West, yet he implored his readers to defend local traditions and values as encroaching abstract principles would not make a tenable replacement. Specifically, he disdained Arabs selecting European customs for no other reason but simply because they are European33(a phenomenon that still protrudes its long arm into the post-colonial era). He grew concerned at the West’s peripheral extremes of nihilist and anarchist violence, a precursor to the modern Islamist variant, that would violate the moderation and disruption of the momentum of Ruh al-Asr. As illustrated through the role of heroines in al-Bustani’s stories, the momentum of Ruh al-Asr largely centered on intelligence, common sense, and decency, with the aim of helping and lifting the individual through reading and learning, and refining society away from corruption.34 Ruh al-Asr, hence, is a phrase we might need to revive and imbibe with new meaning.

This endeavor to breathe new life into Ruh al-Asr could have been better facilitated had Germany, or Berlin specifically, still had a strong altruistic Zeitgeist – a term which has regrettably been reduced, in a best-case scenario, to fashion trends and fads, and, worst-case, the purview of the far-right. I say this because a compelling Zeitgeist could ideally provide a backdrop and soundboard to its Arabic counterpart.

Zeitgeist, since the early nineteenth century’s era of romanticism, has often guided some sort of enlightening or dark spirit in the German public sphere. With Berlin at the epicenter of the Cold War, Germans could identify themselves, or sympathize, with ideological markers – Marxist, anti-Soviet, pro-US – that may have clarified where they stood regarding political matters. A Zeitgeist came in various incarnations. For example, in the 1970s, the left-wing Red Army Faction (Baader Meinhof) terrorist group could, despite the violence they inflicted, draw sympathy from large sections of West German society, particularly the intellectual and student scene. But Zeitgeist could also propel the same strata of Germans into supporting peaceful measures like the anti-nuclear protests and environmentalism of the 1980s.

While viewing a 1970s documentary on Berlin long ago, the English commentator’s closing words etched into my mind: “This is West Berlin. A city that feeds on its nerves, a town that has learned to live in isolation, to flourish under tension. In spite of Detente, still a frontier post, living in some sense from day to day. Truly a phenomenon of our times and a lesson for our generation.” That Berlin no longer exists. The welcome removal of the existential threat (however euphoric) has diluted collective forms of political spirits. A one-off massive demonstration against neo-Nazis is not a sustained political spirit as much as it is a political culture reactive against Nazi encroachment. The latter, however, should not be trivialized, as such a massive protest and discourse still puts Berlin ahead of the western pack who still struggle to build up a meaningful response to the wave of xenophobia and an angry far-right.

In a reunited Germany and in a new unipolar world where the ascendency of the US cemented free market economics upon the debris of communism, a desperate RAF – the German century’s last controversial, political-turned-criminal child, disfigured by the Zeitgeist – issued a “discussion paper” in 1992 titled “We Must Search for Something New.”35 But it was too late, utopia had sailed away; not only for the RAF, but it seems for other German political currents, too, in tune with the rest of post-cold war Europe, if not the world. In turn, what would be considered “big” and “new” became the monopoly of technology and markets.

Big ideas have generally receded since the reunification of Germany, a matter that can be glimpsed in the current clinical management style of Merkel. This shows how far the country has come since, for example, the dynamic leadership of Willy Brandt (West German chancellor, 1969-1974). In fairness, leaders generally respond to the international environment of their times and frame their actions accordingly. But they do set the tone for public thinking.

Ask a German with non-immigrant roots in Berlin as to what inspires or moves Germans today, and you will be surprised not at the answer, but how long it takes to get an answer. As if the question is something that has not crossed their minds before. Understandably, the hesitancy seems to be governed by historical wariness of Germans being inspired in murky directions. But it is also because many will sincerely confess that individual self-interest has assumed the helm. When a worthy response does come out, it is usually akin to battling climate change or helping refugees. Consequently, the inability to mould a coherent and compellingly humane narrative has partly thrown Zeitgeist to the mercy of a resurgent far-right.

At times you do see flickers of a beautiful human spirit. In the summer of 2015, there was an upsurge against the increasing dehumanization of refugees and many Germans came on board to support the mass refugee intake; also revealing a transitory leadership quality in Merkel who proclaimed “Wir schaffen das”(we’ll get it done). Yet, this revived altruistic Zeitgeist barely lasted six months, it was ripped apart in the early hours of the new year 2016 in Cologne by drunk refugees who reportedly attacked German women. This, however, raises the hindsight point: there is something very problematic about a Zeitgeist and ideals that welcomes the refugee only to easily dismantle the whole endeavor upon being tested by one, albeit serious, incident.

Even if Arabs were to somehow reanimate Ruh al-Asr, they will still feel intellectually orphaned in a Europe that has lost its political imagination. Nevertheless, rather than being spectators, the Arab exile body needs to envision itself collectively engaged with the forces that are holding back the far-right tide. Together, they aid in reviving, however modestly, the better nature of the German imagination, contribute to battling the global depletion of political thought, and push out parallel democratic narratives against the germination of Arab authoritarian ones.

But before all this, it needs to be ultimately asked: What is our Ruh al-Asr? There is no easy response. In the revolutionary honeymoon days of 2011 and 2012, this could have effortlessly been answered heterogeneously, but today, it is wanting. It certainly is not to accept the continued drive towards entrenched repression in the Arab world. To engage with the question, it would need to go deeper, way beyond discussions of solutions to the Palestinian problem or Egyptian authoritarianism.

It needs thinking at the existential level of our moral quagmire. Not only are our publics duped into cheering massacres or muted over the killing of a journalist in a consulate. The normalization of their lives toward biological and work processes also robs them of any higher attainment of the common good. We thus need to go back to basics and redefine every single word that permeate the lives among us: citizen, city, state, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Sunni, Shiite, exile, justice, happiness, education, Inshallah, and so on. To also ask, why do they matter? Questions need to be raised on the region’s Christian, Nubian, Berber, Amazigh, and other non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities, and how they can be raised to a dignified equality.36 It will require the ability to shed light on the refugee not simply or only as an object of sympathy, reform, or potential terror, but to elevate him or her as an intellectual producer. To understand what constitutes the better parts of our Ruh al-Asr is to delineate a new way of framing the world. To fight the freak reality of maskh (shapelessness) and be salvaged from the terror of the same.

Rather than a prescription for an Arab utopian future, it is better to consider present realities to build a new manual of thought, drawn from the lived veracities of the Arab world along with the experience of displacement, migration, movement, exile, alienation and settlement in Berlin into the narrative. But it adds one key question – where to next? It is to compose a new story in a relatively secure space by building up partially, for example, on Arendt’s methodological assumption: “That thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.”37 In other words, whatever framework of thought develops should be an ongoing endeavour made responsive to our assessment and reconstruction as we confront shifting circumstances while voyaging across the treacherous terrain of memory, history, political imaginaries, narratives, and counter-narratives.

The grey blur that nauseatingly blankets the future can actually be broken up. Photo by Amro Ali.Facing similar transcendental questions of his time, al-Bustani struggled to make sense of the Arab future in the shadow of colonialism. From his 1875 short story, Bint al-Asr, “Daughter of the Age”, he invokes the spectre of uncertainty following the influx of European influences: “These things are taking place at a time whose meaning, like the uncertain light of dawn, is yet unclear. Therefore, the minds of many people, too, are not clear. Even strangers (Europeans) are in the dark, like the natives. This state of affairs shows that the country is suffering under the burden of a cultural situation whose values are in an uncertain state of transition.” 38

Al-Bustani faced a different moment of truth in which he wondered and wandered, as to what will eventually come out of this confusion for his fellow Arabs. Nowadays, we face that confusion again, just as we have faced it numerous times since al-Bustani’s day. For God knows what tomorrow brings, but the journey will draw from and humanize the symbolic capital that was born in 2011, as well as to reinvigorate it in novel ways that opens up new pathways. The galvanizing moments of 2011 was when desire and the imagination were given free reign until they were torpedoed by blood, remorse, despair, and exhaustion. More than ever, what is needed is to judiciously rekindle desire and imagination but, this time, to reign it in with knowledge and discipline.

We need to produce new personalities and thinkers who will further aid in tapping into the curiosity, relentlessness, inventiveness, and ingenuity of a heartbroken community; to adopt emerging texts as guides, imbibe philosophical thinking into the heart of upcoming ventures, and to produce books worthy of inheritance to the generations yet to arrive; and we need to encourage not only the learning of the German language and refining our approach to the Arabic language, but to be constantly conscious that political thinking is inescapably structured by the words we use and evade, and therefore a revitalized vocabulary is needed to question and discuss the taxonomies of power. But above all, we need to come to terms with our mortality that humbles us into the awareness that our milestones are heirlooms of past struggles, and the fruits of our efforts might only sprout beyond our lifetime. One is not expected to do everything, but nor should one relinquish their responsibility to do something worthwhile for others.

By breaking through Kracauer’s words of anonymity and aimlessness at the opening of this essay, we need to find ourselves, and each other, on the streets, from human to human crowd to an animated body-politic, becoming that new people on the Berlin scene with names, aims, and voices, that intersect with what is just and good. The surge of different rhythms harmoniously complementing the other will reveal larger than life meanings, sounding off a special melody that will be worth listening to.

Footnotes

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 205.

2. Amro Ali, “The Hidden Triumph of the Egyptian Revolution,” Open Democracy (25 January 2016), https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/amro-ali/hidden-triumph-of-egyptian-revolution

3. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 4.

4. “…the foreigner…has to ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc…That is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country?” Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 15.

5. Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). 1.

6. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 173.

7. As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once put it: “Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.” See Adam Shatz, “A Poet’s Palestine as a Metaphor,” New York Times (22 December 2001), https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/22/books/a-poet-s-palestine-as-a-metaphor.html.

8. Dina Wahba, “Diaspora Stories: Crippling Fear and Dreams of a Better Home,” Mada Masr (16 August 2018),<https://madamasr.com/en/2018/08/16/opinion/u/diaspora-stories-crippling-fear-and-dreams-of-a-better-home/>.

9. David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Social and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1985). 142.

10. Ibid. 141

11. Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 49. As Han notes, neoliberalism has transformed the oppressed worker into a free contractor, and class struggle has given way to internal struggle within one’s inner being. This is set up so that anyone who fails to succeed has to feel shame and cannot blame anyone but themselves. Therefore, governments, institutions, society, and structural factors, are absolved of any responsibility.

12. A number of institutions and initiatives have been central to the German-Arab cultural exchange and collaboration. Among them: Free University, Humboldt University, Forum Transregionale Studien, the Goethe Institute (and its support of institutions such as the Arab Image Foundation); German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and its support of Arab artists and intellectuals (e.g. Akram Zaatari, whose films often show in the short competition of the Berlin Film Festival); Transmediale (which formerly ran the Arab Shorts Program); the Barenboim-Said Academy which is not only a site for Arab arts, intellectual exchanges and conferences but, perhaps, the largest scholarship program for Arab musicians in the world. Overall, the spectrum is wide, from the various foundations of the political parties and the Foreign Office, to the neighborhood dynamics in Neukölln along Sonnenallee street.

13. Sarah El Deeb, “Saudi Writer Saw Turkey as Base for a New Middle East,” Associated Press News (21 October 2018), https://apnews.com/5643bc71beaf43249527f1e0d14dd67b.

14. Hamilton frames his argument through the work of political scientist Franz Neumann who interestingly wrote in 1944 that“foreign trade may be a means of enriching a higher and better-organised nation at the expense of the less industrialized. This is the essence of foreign trade even under conditions of free competition… We believe that on the world market, commodities are not exchanged at their value, but that, on the contrary, a more industrialized country exchanges less labor for more. Foreign trade, under conditions of free competition, is thus the means of transferring profits.” See Omar Robert Hamilton, “Industrial Colonialism: Egypt, Germany and the Maintenance of the Modern World,” Mada Masr (5 July 2018), <https://madamasr.com/en/2018/07/05/opinion/u/industrial-colonialism-egypt-germany-and-the-maintenance-of-the-modern-world/>.

15. Perhaps two historical anecdotes can capture the essence of the Arab imagination’s complex juxtapositioning that endorses Germany over other European powers. When Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Damascus in 1898, he approached the tomb of Saladin and stated: “Let me assure His Majesty the Sultan [Abdulhamid II] and the 300 millions of Muslims who, in whatever corner of the globe they may live, revere in him their khalif, that the German Emperor will ever be their friend.” The Kaiser laid a wreath with the words “A Knight without fear or blame who often had to teach his opponents the right way to practice chivalry.” The speech was soon translated into Arabic, to great fanfare. The Kaiser’s speech made Saladin a political symbol in the Arab world (up until then he was seen only as an important historical figure). The Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi even composed an ode to the Kaiser. The perceived contrast was not lost on the Arab world when French General Henri Gouraud, reportedly, at the end of World War One, kicked the tomb of Saladin and proclaimed: “Awake, Saladin. We have returned. My presence here consecrates victory of the Cross over the Crescent.” This insult later seared into the memory of the Syrian resistance against the French. See Doğan Gürpınar, Ottoman/Turkish Visions of the Nation, 1860-1950(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 87; Anthony Billingsley, Political Succession in the Arab World: Constitutions, Family Loyalties, and Islam (New York: Routledge, 2010). 214.

16. Sharon M. Meagher, Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings (Albany: State University of New York, 2008). 4.

17. Peter Schneider, Berlin Now: The City after the Wall, trans. Sophie Schlondorff (New York: Macmillan, 2014). 7.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. It was not a coincidence that Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studienheld a conference in 2018 titled “Imagining the Future: The Arab World in the Aftermath of Revolution.” https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/workshops/workshops-seit-2006/imagining-the-future-the-arab-world-in-the-aftermath-of-revolution.html.

21. Coming from the Arab world where the physical public sphere is repressed, social media makes much sense. However, it is quite a sight to ponder when I look at my digitally-immersed (which I am not always innocent of either) Arab colleagues and the privacy-obsessed Germans.

22. Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. 13.

23. Stuart Braun, City of Exiles: Berlin from the Outside In (Noctua Press, 2015). 13.

24. Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. 52-53.

25. Ibid. 45.

26. “Two Thirds of Germans Think the Country Has a Major Loneliness Problem,” The Local Germany (23 March 2018), https://www.thelocal.de/20180323/two-thirds-of-germans-think-the-country-has-a-major-loneliness-problem

27. Václav Havel and Paul R. Wilson, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 177.

28. Sofian Philip Naceur, “Q&A with German MP Stefan Liebich: Revealing German Arms Exports to Egypt,” Mada Masr (16 November 2017), https://madamasr.com/en/2017/11/16/feature/politics/qa-with-german-mp-stefan-liebich-revealing-german-arms-exports-to-egypt/

29. Given Egypt epitomizes this duality, I recommend reading Mohamed Naeem’s translated essay: “Ever since its inception, the idea of Egyptian modernity was imagined as a choice between authenticity and modernity. In the popular consciousness, modernity had to be scrutinized by a lens of virtue and propriety. In short, we must take from the advanced West what suits us and abandon the rest — ‘we’ referring to the dominant classes, their interest and lifestyles. So things like ballet, malls and American consumption patterns are marks of advancement, but democracy and gender equality are alien concepts that undermine the identity and particularity of the nation.” See Mohamed Naeem, “Mother of the World, against the World and Outside of It,” Mada Masr (9 June 2016) https://madamasr.com/en/2016/06/09/opinion/u/mother-of-the-world-against-the-world-and-outside-of-it/.

30. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 30-31.

31. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 71.

32. Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1983). 170.

33. Ibid. 167.

34. Ibid. 177-178.

35. Jeremy Peter Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 306.

36. It is not lost on me that an Arab exile body is already inherent with tensions that dislodges voices who do not easily subscribe to the Arab label.

37. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. 14.

38. Moosa,The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction. 166.

DCMS chair Damian Collins. Image: Damiancollins.com

Britain’s electoral law is “not fit for purpose” with regulations governing elections “hopelessly out of date for the internet age”, according to a damning Commons report on “fake news”.

The report from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee responds to work done by openDemocracy, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr and others into the dark money and data influencing the Brexit vote and British politics more widely, calling for significant changes to the way elections and referendums are run in the UK.

Damian Collins, chair of the Committee responsible for the new report, said its investigations over the last 18 months  points to democracy being “at risk” from the “malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day.”

Among the numerous recommendations in the report are calls for the government to urgently reform current electoral communications laws and to address the issue of overseas agency involvement in UK elections, including Russia.

Much of the 108 page report covers the territory of “dark money” and the unidentifiable sources of influential political campaigning, which have been highlighted by openDemocracy investigations over the past two years.  

Russian interference

Collins repeated his committee’s previous demand to the government to reveal “how many investigations are currently being carried out into Russian interference in UK politics.” He said the government needed to order an independent inquiry into the “impact of disinformation and voter manipulation” in recent elections, including the 2016 UK referendum and the 2014 Scottish referendum.

Key sections of the lengthy report will make for uncomfortable reading for Facebook and its founder, Mark Zukerberg. In no unclear terms, the MPs accuse two senior Facebook executives of “deliberately” misleading their committee. Zukerberg’s own claim that Facebook has never sold user data is dismissed in the report as “simply untrue.”

Collins himself takes aim at Zukerberg, saying that although the Facebook boss may believe he is not accountable to the UK Parliament, “he is to the billions of Facebook users across the world.” The report pulls no punches stating: “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law.

The report directly accused Facebook of “deliberately” seeking to frustrate the work of the DCMS committee by giving “incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers.”

Commenting on the report, Collins said: “The big tech companies are failing in the duty of care they owe to their users to act against harmful content, and to respect their data privacy rights.”

Arron Banks

Alongside its focus on social media platforms, the committee’s analysis of fake news also examined recent political campaigning and funding.

How the pro-Brexit campaign Leave.EU operated and was funded has been the subject of openDemocracy probes. The report says that from evidence received from the Information Commissioner's Office and from the Electoral Commission, “it is clear that a porous relationship existed between Eldon Insurance [a company controlled by Arron Banks] and Leave.EU.”

openDemocracy were the first news organisation to reveal that staff and data from Eldon was augmenting the work of the pro-Brexit campaign co-founded by Banks, Leave.EU.

The report says that Banks and his deputy, Andy Wigmore, showed a “complete disregard and disdain for the parliamentary process” when they appeared in front of the committee. “It is now evident that they gave misleading evidence to us… They are individuals, clearly, who have a passing regard for the truth.”

Data misuse

The operations of the Canadian political consultancy and tech company, Aggregate IQ, are also examined in the report. AIQ have worked on both the recent US Presidential primaries and for Brexit-related organisations, including the designated VoteLeave group during the 2016 referendum. The report says that the way AIQ operates “highlights the fact that data has been and still is being used extensively by private companies to target people, often in a political context, in order to influence their decisions.”

The report offers a stark warning, saying, this “is far more common than people think.”

On the issue of targeted advertising and the control of political campaigning, the report is equally stark, stating: “Electoral law is not fit for purpose and needs to be changed to reflect changes in campaigning techniques.”

openDemocracy has consistently argued that a new era of absolute transparency is necessary if our democracies are to survive. The report echoes this, saying the era of physical leaflets and billboards has effectively moved online to utilise micro-targeted political campaigning. Collins’ committee says the government should now carry out a “comprehensive review of the current rules and regulations surrounding political work during elections and referenda.”

This adds to the pressure on the government to address the inadequacies of current electoral laws that have previously been identified by the Law Commission in 2016 and more recently by the Electoral Commission itself.

The DUP-CRC connection

The lack of transparency in political advertising – addressed in-depth byopenDemocracyinourworkon“darkmoney” – is illustrated in the DCMS committee report by an examination of the Constitutional Research Council, the Glasgow-based unincorporated funding organisation. The CRC, whose sole office holder is its chairman, Richard Cook, donated £435,000 to Northern Ireland’s  Democratic Unionist Party. The money, the biggest political donation in Northern Ireland’s history, was largely spent on pro-leave advertising during the 2016 referendum.

openDemocracy broke the story on the financial connection between the CRC and the DUP cash.

The report reveals that the DCMS committee twice wrote to Cook asking him to reveal the source of the £435,000 donation. Cook replied that he was “greatly amused” by the committee’s letter before accusing Collins and his colleagues of “spreading fake news and disinformation about him.” He has still not revealed where the money came from.

The report concludes that “there is an absence of transparency surrounding the relationship between the CRC, the DUP and Vote Leave.” The committee accuses the CRC of “deliberately and knowingly” exploiting a loophole in electoral law to funnel money to the DUP.

Although the government had an opportunity last year to confirm its previous promise to change Northern Ireland’s electoral laws on donations which would have revealed the identity of the individual or group behind the record donation to the DUP, the promise was never kept.

The report however recommends that the government extend the transparency rules around political party donations in Northern Ireland from 2014.  It states: “We urge the government to make this change in the law as soon as is practicable to ensure full transparency...”

On foreign influence in political campaigns in the UK, the report says that while the government accepted evidence of Russian activity in the Skripal poisoning case, it has been “reluctant to accept evidence of interference in the 2016 UK referendum. It states: “The UK is clearly vulnerable to covert digital influence campaigns and the government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of the targeting of voters, by foreign players during past elections.”

An activist of the public association Crimean Solidarity is praying near the Crimean Garrison Military Court, while there is a meeting on one of the “Hizb ut-Tahrir cases”. Photo: Taras Ibragimov. All rights reserved.In December 2018, Russia’s parliament approved a bill, proposed by President Putin, that would partially decriminalise the infamous Article 282 of its Criminal Code. But law enforcement in Crimea are in no hurry to implement it.

Article 282 provides criminal liability for incitement to hatred or social hostility, but it has become notorious as a tool for punishing Russian citizens for reposting on social media. Rights campaigners have been criticising the article’s “elasticity” for four years now, since it began to include online materials – it was previously only used against people making statements in public or the media – and imposed stiffer penalties (prison sentences from two to five years, up from the previous four year maximum).

This change in legislation has meant that any internet or social media user is at risk of prosecution. According to the latest figures from the international We are Social agency, which specialises in social media research, nearly half of all Russian citizens (47%) are active social network users and 85% go online every day. Practically every user posts content that the local law enforcers might count as extreme and report for “neutralisation”.

Article 282 is the main driver of convictions for cases of “extremist propaganda”. The official statistics available show that the number of people convicted under it have been growing year on year: in 2016 there were 502; in 2017, 571 and in the first half of 2018 the figure rose to 381, including 29 underage offenders. And the overwhelming majority of sentences – 96% in 2017, according to the Sova research and information centre – were imposed for materials posted online, and for reposts rather than original material.

“A law against incitement to hatred is necessary, and similar legislation exists in most European countries,” says Sova specialist Maria Kravchenko. “But we don’t need to use it for any old insults: it should be mainly reserved for incitement to violence or discrimination against people of different genders, races, ethnicities or religions. In every case, law enforcement need to weigh up the level of danger to the public that a statement, including one posted online, might provoke. But our law enforcers are often governed by other criteria.”

Russian law enforcement agencies, while paying lip service to official reporting systems, often bring charges verging on the absurd. And since there is a consensus between them and the judges, such cases are not thrown out by the courts.

Russian law enforcement agencies, while paying lip service to official reporting systems, often bring charges verging on the absurd

Take, for example, a sentence of 15 months in an open prison for Maxim Kormelitsky, for reposting a photo of people “insulting religious believers” by bathing in a water-hole; five months of community service for Pavel Volkov for reposting a video showing an arson attack on a Jewish restaurant, and two and a half years in an open prison for Alexander Kruze for reposting four photos on social media that showed “signs of incitement to totally violent activity” against communists, Jews, people from the Caucasus, Asians and members of power structures (Kruze claimed that the reposts were part of a survey he was carrying out for his graduation project).

These kind of cases led to ever more frequent and louder calls for the decriminalisation of Russia’s anti-extremist legislation. By autumn last year, even quite unexpected figures and structures – the Russian Orthodox Church’s Synodal public relations department; the Mail.Ru social media group (which owns VKontakte); Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the Federation Council, as well as numerous human rights organisations and the Presidential Human Rights Council – were proposing a relaxation of the law.

“Anything and everything could be seen as extremist, and lack of legislative clarity could lead to abuse of power”, said the Council’s head Mikhail Fedotov.

In September last year, a Plenary Session of Russia’s Supreme Court passed amendments to the law, clarifying how extremism cases should be treated. Judges, for example, were given a recommendation to discover whether a defendant had deliberately incited hatred and hostility, and to assess the level of danger to the public arising from the posts in question. In other words, they should take into account the context and the comments made by the poster, whether they were posting or reposting, the number of hits and audience reactions to the post and indeed the entire content of the defendant’s online home page. There was also a recommendation on the part of judges to take into account other known information about the poster – whether, for example, they belonged to some radical ideology, were members of extremist groups or had been charged with administrative or criminal offences for extremist activity. “Just posting or reposting extremist material or even some ‘likes’ can’t in itself be grounds for criminal proceedings,” said the Deputy Chair of Russia’s Supreme Court Vladimir Davydov.

Immediately after these amendments were passed, prosecutions under Article 282 began to decrease. But a real surge in closed investigations came after the passing of a presidential law on partial decriminalisation. New amendments ensure a criminal offence if an individual has faced administrative charges for similar activities in the previous 12 months.

Crimea is different

At the same time, Russian law enforcement has been slow to close cases where members of any political opposition group are being prosecuted. In annexed Crimea, human rights campaigners and lawyers have noticed that this process is being drawn out, and on occasion – signs of blatant sabotage.

Since Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, the number of cases tried in Crimea under Article 282 has reached double figures, with the defendants mainly either Crimean Tatars or activists opposed to the politics of the local government. High profile cases include those of the pro-Ukrainian activist Larisa Kitayskaya, who was given a suspended sentence of 10 months for “spreading Russophobic ideas on the internet”; Gulsum Aliyeva, daughter of a defendant in the notorious Hizb ut-Tahrir case in Yalta, who was accused of reposting a non-existent quotation from Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin on Facebook; and pro-Russian activists from Sudak, Dmitry Djigalov and Oleg Semyonov, who were fined 300,000 and 50,000 roubles respectively after an official accusation of “insulting the dignity of Bulgarians” on a YouTube video – in fact it was for uncovering the local authorities’ corrupt practices. The stiffest punishment was reserved for Emil Minasov, a Crimean Tatar from Sevastopol – 15 months in prison “for the repeated distribution of extremist material on social media”.

Alexey Ladin, a lawyer. Photo: Alina Smutko. All rights reserved.“The main thing for the system is to observe the formalities,” says Alexey Ladin, a lawyer with the Agora international human rights NGO. “The law enforcement agencies are still, unfortunately, accountable in terms of their quotas (the “stick system”). Their results are judged by the number of criminal cases sent to court and ensuing guilty verdicts. In other words, the entire might of Russia’s law enforcement system is concentrated on churning out as many criminal trials as possible, including those connected with terrorist and extremist groups. Which is why their number goes on increasing year on year. This, of course, logically suggests that either the police are fabricating criminal cases, or the number of extremists and terrorists in Russia is rising in an arithmetical, or possibly even geometric progression.”

In Crimea, Ladin is defending six Article 282 cases over social media publications. In the second half of January 2019 alone he succeeded in halting a criminal prosecution of four of his defendants.

But this success was preceded by numerous rejections of legal applications, requests and complaints to investigators and in court. According to Ladin, this is to do with the specific situation in Crimea: the need to refuse defence counsel on something, to block its work if it’s humanly possible. The case of farmer Ismail Ramazanov is a good example of this situation.

The case of Ismail Ramazanov 

At about four am on 23 January 2018, FSB officers began a search at the house of farmer Ismail Ramazanov in the village of Novy Mir, near Simferopol. After carrying it out they drove Ramazanov away to an unknown destination.

Ramazanov was only able to see family members and his lawyer the following evening after Irina Kirillova, a judge in the Simferopol district court, transferred him to a pre-trial detention centre. This was when I, attending the court, learned that the police suspected Ramazanov of making extremist statements against “a group of ethnic Russians” on the Zello internet radio app. (Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media watchdog, blocked the app after it had become the main means of coordination for long distance truckers during their nationwide strike against the introduction of the “Plato” road tax in 2017).

Ramazanov not only pleaded his innocence, but told the court that during the search law enforcement officers had planted rifle cartridges on him, beaten him up and tried to strangle him with a towel, demanding he give evidence against himself. They then continued to beat him in the van that they drove him away in. They also refused him food and drink right up to the court sitting (over 35 hours after his arrest).

“They lifted me up off the floor (in handcuffs) and sat me in a chair,” Ramazanov told me later. “I was just in my underpants. There were three or four men in the room: Shambazov (Artur Shambazov, a former Ukrainian SBU officer who joined the FSB, its Russian equivalent after the annexation and who has been frequently accused of beating other Crimean political prisoners) was open about who he was, whereas Maksimenko (Alexander, a police officer, probable instigator and main witness in the case) wore a mask. There were several more cops in masks and camouflage gear with FSB chevrons. They started to question me – I didn’t answer. One of them went round the back of my chair, stood behind it, threw a towel round my neck and started strangling me. Meanwhile, two other guys beat me in the kidneys and stomach. I started screaming and Shambazov and Maksimenko stuffed a jacket in my mouth. The door to the living room was closed – my mother, father, brother and other FSB people were on the other side.”

Ismail Ramazanov at his home in the village of Novy Mir, in the room where he was tortured by law enforcement officers. Photo: Taras Ibragimov. All rights reserved.In court, Ramazanov was in such a bad way that he couldn’t stand. Ladin, his lawyer, asked for an ambulance to take him to hospital for a medical examination, but the prosecuting council objected and the judge supported his decision. She also refused him house arrest and sent him to pre-trial detention in Simferopol for a month. 

For six months after this, Ramazanov’s detention was extended every month without any explanation. At each hearing, Alisa Glukhova, the investigator, claimed that arrest was necessary in order to carry out some investigations, but after five months nothing had happened. Ladin assailed the prosecution with statements and requests for tests on the cartridges (to prove that they had been planted); identification of, and direct confrontation with the law enforcement officers who had searched Ramazanov’s house (to identity his assailants) and the main witness in the case (to uncover him as an FSB officer), as well as lodging complaints against the court for its inactivity and investigative red tape, not to mention the falsification of evidence by a new investigator, Dmitry Kosyakin. But the lawyer’s requests were all refused.

Six months after his arrest, Ramazanov’s fortitude and Ladin’s perseverance began to bring results. On 12 July the court didn’t extend Ramazanov’s arrest, replacing it with a written undertaking not to leave town and on 16 July he left the detention centre. In early August, the case was sent back to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation and three months later, the charge against Ramazanov (of illegal possession of cartridges) was lifted for lack of evidence (effectively an admission that they had been planted during the search).

Ismail Ramazanov, his father and lawyer Alexey Ladin (left to right) congratulate each other upon learning of the closure of the second criminal case against Ramazanov. Photo: Alina Smutko. All rights reserved.After the passing of the Russian Supreme Court’s amendments, Ladin requested that the case against Ramazanov be closed and an Article 282 case, on the grounds of a lack of direct intention and insignificance. But prosecutor Kosyakin refused. After the partial decriminalisation of Article 282 the lawyer made a second request for the closure of the case, but Timofey Piven, the new investigator assigned to the Ramazanov case, stubbornly refused to talk about it. In the end, Ladin gave up waiting for an answer and made an official complaint to the court on the grounds of its inactivity. And it was only at a court sitting on 16 January this year that Piven finally appeared with an order confirming a successful outcome for the defence.

All the charges against Ramazanov, who endured torture and six months in detention, have been lifted. Ladin is planning to bring a lawsuit demanding that his charge of illegal arms possession be lifted and he be given an official letter of apology from the prosecutor’s office. “This is an important point and we will insist on it. The procurator must apologise, in the name of the state, for the police having illegally and groundlessly engaged in Ismail’s persecution,” he says.

The case of Evgeny Karakashev

The case of another of Ladin’s clients, an anarchist from Yevpatoriya called Evgeny Karakashev, has much in common with the criminal prosecution of Ismail Ramazanov.

On the morning of 1 February last year, the FSB carried out a forcible search of Karakashev’s parents’ house: people without any insignia of any kind broke into the house without identifying themselves, flung Evgeny to the floor, manhandled and handcuffed him. After the search, he was driven away in an unknown direction and it was only in the evening that they allowed him to call a friend to ask him to find a lawyer.

In court the next day, police investigator Algiz Abushayev stated that he couldn’t remember how long Karakashev had been handcuffed (“it could have been five minutes or three hours”) and “suggested” that he go with him to the police station, to which Karakashev “voluntarily agreed”. Meanwhile he was confined in a cage in the courtroom, with an enormous bruise adorning his forehead.

The parents of Evgeny Karakashev listen to the explanations of the lawyer Alexey Ladin after the meeting of the Yevpatoriya city court on the case of their son. Photo: Taras Ibragimov. All rights reserved.Like Ramazanov, Karakashev was charged under two articles of the Russian Criminal Code: the infamous Article 282 (“incitement to hatred and hostility”) and Article 205.2 (“public calls for terrorist activity”). According to the investigators, he had posted a video calling for terrorism on his VKontakte page in late 2014, and in January 2017 he had posted, in a chat room of 35 people, a text containing signs of “propaganda of an ideology of violence” and “calls for instigating terrorist activity”.

As with Ramazanov, the main proofs of Karakashev’s guilt were evidence given by a partisan witness who was under law enforcement control and the conclusion of a dodgy linguistic expert who had figured in other politically motivated cases in Crimea. The investigator on the case had, for example, initially sent only half of Evgeny’s chat room conversation for expert evaluation, having first deleted “inconvenient” statements made by the activist, such as “But I’m not asking anyone to do anything”. And it was only on Ladin’s insistence that the dialogue was examined in its entirety.

“Law enforcement and the courts had worked out simple and quick scheme to fulfil their quotas. What’s absurd is the fact that the law enforcement agencies have begun to forget that they are supposed to be working for the public good, rather than the public needing to help them earn more stars on their epaulettes, prizes, gratitude and so on,” says Ladin.

Karakashev has not confessed to the charges against him, and considers the case against him a result of his civic activity

Karakashev has not confessed to the charges against him, and considers the case against him a result of his civic activity. He had actively campaigned against property development near Yevpatoriya, and participated in protests against police misconduct in Crimea, after which he had been invited several times for a “chat” with law enforcement. Likewise, since January 2018, Russian left-wing activists and anti-fascists have been under pressure, with a string of cases against them.

Karakashev has been in pre-trial detention since 2 February 2018. On 25 January, the North Caucasus district military court in Rostov-on-Don carried out a preliminary hearing of his case. On the prosecutor’s initiative, the jury dropped his Article 282 indictment, since that particular charge had been decriminalised. His lawyer had previously lodged a request that his criminal prosecution be dropped for want of evidence of a crime, but investigator Abushayev turned him down, claiming that there was enough evidence to show that Karakashev “was pursuing the aim of inciting a non-specific group of persons to commit negative actions designed to arouse social discord related to his calls for violence”. The charge of public incitement to terrorist action still stands, and the activist could be sentenced to up to seven years behind bars. The first actual court session will take place on 8 February.

The case of the “Russian Spring” supporters

It is not only Crimean Tatars and pro-Ukrainian activists that are facing prosecution under the steamroller of Russia’s anti-extremism legislation: in principle, anyone who disagrees with the regime is at risk.

A good example is the case of the pro-Russian activists from Sudak, Dmitry Djigalov and Oleg Semyonov. They, as members of the “Anticorruption Bureau of the Republic of Crimea” civic organisation, spent a long time keeping tabs on the unscrupulous activities of the regional authorities. As a result, in July 2017 they were subject to a house search and charged with “insulting a group of people of Bulgarian ethnicity” in a video they posted on YouTube in August 2016.

Pro-Russian activists Dmitry Djigalov (center) and Oleg Semyonov (right), convicted under Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code. Djigalov is wearing the chest medal "For the liberation of the Crimea". Photo: Taras Ibragimov. All rights reserved.On the video Semyonov, sitting in the office of United Russia Crimean MP Ivan Shonus, criticises the Bulgarian government for its failure to invite a Russian delegation to a celebration of its national holiday, which marks the liberation of the country from Ottoman rule in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. In the course of his remarks he uses a derogatory term. Djigalov recorded the whole scene and posted it on his social network channel. The activists didn’t admit any guilt over the incident, but the main witnesses, people connected with local senior officials, told the court that they had watched the “Bulgarian” video and “were very offended by the way they had been humiliated”.

The court found Djigalov and Semyonov guilty and fined them 300,000 and 50,000 roubles (£3523 and £587) respectively. Semyonov also spent six months in a pre-trial detention centre in Simferopol for allegedly breaking the travel restrictions he was subject to. Afterwards, and until the end of the court proceedings, he was kept under house arrest.

The Crimean Tatars who “insulted” Russians

In January 2018, two other Article 282 cases were also closed. The defendants were two young Crimean Tatar women, Elina Mamedova and Gulsum Aliyeva. Mamedova was accused of inciting hostility and “insulting a group of people of Russian ethnicity” for three reposts in VKontakte in 2014-2015. On 13 June 2018, the FSB conducted a search of her parents’ house in the village of Chekhovo, near Yalta. Elina herself was arrested and questioned, but released on undertaking not to leave the area.

During Mamedova’s first police interview, the investigator recorded her responses in her words, not Elina’s. When the young woman asked why her answers weren’t being written down verbatim, the officer replied that it was difficult to write everything down word for word and that it wasn’t important anyway. The lawyer assigned to Mamedova by the court, present at the interview, remained silent.

“That first interview was recorded in phrases straight out of Article 282,” says Alexey Ladin. “Mamedova allegedly said, ‘I incited hostility and hatred’, ‘deliberately, conscious of the public risk of my actions’, ‘with the aim of insulting Russians’ and so forth. A person who wasn’t a legal professional wouldn’t even know these expressions.” 

During Mamedova’s first police interview, the investigator recorded her responses in her words, not Elina’s

The lawyer made two requests to the court to drop the charges against Mamedova, on the grounds both of lack of criminal intent and insignificance and of the decriminalisation of Article 282. The first time round, the request was denied by investigator Astemir Agzagov, but the second time it was satisfied, and the case against Mamedova was closed on 11 January.

The case against Gulsum Aliyeva has however been pursued more thoroughly through the courts. Gulsum is a Crimean Tatar activist and the daughter of Muslim Aliyev, a defendant in the Yalta Hizb Ut-Tahrir case. Since her father’s arrest, Gulsum has been an active human rights campaigner and journalist.

On 19 July last year, the FSB carried out an inspection”of the Aliyevs’ house in the village of Verkhnyaya Kutuzovka, near Alushta on the southern coast of Crimea. It was more like a search. The whole house was turned upside down in a search for a mobile phone used by Gulsum to access social media, and furniture and sanitary fixtures and fittings were smashed. Witnesses brought by the police attempted to carry out body searches of family members, and in response to remarks made by Nadjiya Aliyeva, the young woman’s mother, admitted that they were also police officers.

Najiye (left) and Gulsum Aliyeva, the spouse and daughter of the person involved in the Yalta “Hizb ut-Tahrir” Muslim Aliyev, after being searched in their home. Photo: Taras Ibragimov. All rights reserved.In the end, Gulsum was subjected to a preliminary examination, and on 10 August she was charged with reposting a photo of the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin together with his non-existent quotation, which supposedly begins with the words, “Russia is the most odious, wretched to the point of nausea country in the whole of global history” and ends with the slogan, “Death to the Russian occupiers”, which was the thing that grabbed the officers’ attention most closely.

“This statement was reposted by 50 or so people. So why did they come for Gulsum, rather than me?” asks lawyer Lilya Gemedji, who was present at the investigative activities at the Aliyev house. Crimean Tatars generally believe that the criminal case against Gulsum was intended as a means of putting pressure on the “Crimean Solidarity” organisation and its activists, who report on all politically or religiously motivated court cases on the peninsula.

On 25 January, during a court inquiry into a complaint from Ladin about the inactivity of the investigator Anton Guliy (who was ignoring a request for the case to be closed because of the decriminalisation of Article 282) the investigator announced that he had dropped Aliyeva’s prosecution under that article. At the same time, however, Guliy sent the case papers to the Alushta prosecutor’s office for a decision on whether to charge the activist with an offence under Article 20.3.1 of the Administrative Code. So Gulsum will probably be the first person in Crimea to be tried under the new code.

The results of decriminalisation

The president’s relaxation of Article 282 is arousing mixed feelings among human rights campaigners. On the one hand, the availability of an administrative charge is better than nothing. There is a clear directive: a first offence will only attract a penalty under the Administrative Code: a fine of up to 20,000 roubles (£235), up to 100 hours of community service or two weeks detention. But legal specialists are now expecting a surge in administrative incitement cases.

“This measure will allow people charged with inciting hatred to avoid harsh punishment and a criminal record,” say the experts at Sova. “But we need to bear in mind that the procedures for charging people with administrative offences and establishing proof at their hearings are significantly less complex than for criminal cases, so we may expect a considerable rise in the number of cases of incitement to hatred.”

The vagueness of the criteria for “incitement to hatred or hostility” is also still with us: they are now the responsibility of a motley crew of linguistic experts around the country. And then there is the phrase “any social group”, which the human rights people insisted on outlawing. In some cases, the “social group” boiled down to members of law enforcement, police service employees, government officials and so on. Another downside is that with administrative offences, the publication date is irrelevant (a six year statute of limitation operates in criminal cases such as those covered by Article 282). Someone can be charged on the basis of something posted in the early 2000s, since the action limitation period – one year – is counted from the moment of publication. And the Administrative Code now also covers legal entities as well as individuals: the authorities can bring charges against websites and media editorial staff.

People look at the convoy near the Kyiv district court of Simferopol in anticipation of the defendants in one of the “Hizb Ut-Tahrir case” in the Crimea. Photo: Taras Ibragimov. All rights reserved.It’s also worth remembering that no one has outlawed criminal prosecution for “extremist” online posts linked to another article of the Criminal Code, Article 280, which covers public calls for extreme actions, attracts prison sentences of up to five years and is just as often used by Russian law enforcement agencies against internet users.

Improvements include the fact that people previously convicted of offences under the first part of Article 282 can now ask for a review of their sentences, and alleged offenders’ names can be removed from Rosfinmonitoring’s list of terrorists and extremists, which could lead to significant financial problems for defendants, whatever the decisions reached by the judges. On 23 January, for example, Yalta’s municipal court exonerated pro-Ukrainian activist Larisa Kitayskaya, who had been given a 22 month suspended sentence for “spreading Russophobic ideas” on the internet. The initiative for reviewing the sentence was, moreover taken by the prison service’s Yalta department and Kitayskaya was totally baffled by the decision.

In any case, the use made of the new legislation will depend not only on the law enforcement agencies but also on the views of civil society and the way lawyers will work with it.

“The legislation is still to be ‘rolled out’ across the country,” says Alexey Ladin. “How effective the law enforcement agencies will be in using the new article of the Administrative Code to protect public interests and their own as well (to fulfil quotas for cases and convictions) will depend to a large extent on NGOs, peoples’ moods, the work of my colleagues in law. I just hope law enforcement will hear the government’s message – that there should no longer be any absurd cases brought under Article 282 – and use it in administrative cases as well.”

A poster with New Year's greetings from the "head" of the "DNR" Denis Pushilin in Donetsk. Photo: Sergey Averin / RIA News. All rights reserved.“Who’s the junta now?” joked residents of Luhansk in November 2017, referring to a well-known propaganda term for the post-Yanukovych Kyiv authorities. At that time two years ago, armed men in camouflage suddenly appeared outside the “Luhansk People’s Republic” (LNR) administration building, blocking the people inside.

In Luhansk today, people are too used to the mysterious arrests, deaths and disappearances of self-declared public officials and field commanders to be scared or surprised. In what is now something of a tradition, those in power usually point the finger at the Ukrainian security services or “diversion groups”. But people have stopped believing them. Clearly, the local leadership in Luhansk and their anonymous “curators” in Moscow – which, by 2017, locals were already talking about online– have been ridding themselves of superfluous leaders, bringing their own version of order to the territories under their control in the process.

November 2017 turned out to be the finale of the conflict that suddenly erupted between leader Igor Plotnitsky and the “Minister of Internal Affairs” Igor Kornet in Luhansk. This ended in the highly unpopular Plotnitsky fleeing to Moscow, and Leonid Pasechnik, the former head of the “Ministry of State Security”, becoming the new leader of the “Republic”. At the time, social media users in Luhansk welcomed their own “Maidan”, which went ahead without any participation from the local population, who didn’t have a clue what was happening, but were, however, happy that something, at last, was happening. For this half-destroyed and extremely impoverished region, things couldn’t get any worse.

“Donetsk has attacked Luhansk!” declared the admin of a local VKontakte forum at the height of the absurdity. (Indeed, this forum had more or less replaced the “official media”, which actually reported no real information.) The “Little Green Men” in the “capital”, which at that time was still under Igor Plotnitsky’s control, turned out to be from the “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR) to the south, whose leadership had long failed to come to an agreement with their colleagues in Luhansk. It’s unlikely that anyone two years ago thought that Igor Plotnitsky, who was run out of Luhansk, would turn out to be “lucky” when compared with Alexander Zakharchenko, head of the “DNR”.

31 August 2018: the "Separatist" cafe in Donetsk, after a bomb attack killed Alexander Zakharchenko. (c) Ukrinform/Zuma Press/PA Images. All rights reserved.Indeed, a far more effective “departure” awaited Zakharchenko, the same kind that had previously removed popular local commanders – Arsen “Motorola” Pavlov (blown up in his apartment block lift in October 2016) and Mikhail “Givi” Tolstykh (killed in a rocket attack against his office in February 2017). Naturally, according to the authorities, they were killed by a “Ukrainian diversion group”. Then, on 31 August 2018, in the centre of Donetsk, an explosive device killed Alexander Zakharchenko as he entered the “Separatist” restaurant to attend a memorial service for the popular singer Iosif Kobzon, a Donbass native and friend of the “Republic”.

Just like the commanders “Motorola” and “Givi”, Zakharchenko, the “first elected head of the DNR”, was later honoured in an exhibition dedicated to “heroes of Novorossiya” at a local museum.

A naked year

The events of November 2017 in Luhansk left no doubts that the unrecognised leadership of the “LNR” (and thus the “DNR” too) did not have control over the “power block” – the armed forces, security services, police. Apparently, it did not have significant control over local media either, which were formally monopolised by the “state”.

“No comment.” Armed men without insignia in the centre of Luhansk, 21 November 2017. Image still via "ГТРК ЛНР" / YouTube. Although the Luhansk television and radio company remained loyal to Igor Plotnitsky until the end, the main news agency of the “Republic”, much like the “people’s militia” (that is, the army) opted for neutrality. The Luhansk “prosecutor’s office” was considered Plotnitsky’s praetorian guard. It was during a “passionate” interrogation conducted by these men that former “Prime Minister” Gennady Tsypkalov died in 2016, after Plotnitsky accused him of preparing a “coup d’etat”. “General Prosecutor” Zaur Ismailov, who quickly resigned after Plotnitsky chewed out Kornet in public for the first time, instantly reinvented himself as “Minister of Justice” after Plotnitsky fled the “Republic”.

At the same time, the fundamental difference between the two “Republics” was that, despite the obvious disorganisation of power in Luhansk, no new prominent opposition leaders had come to replace their liquidated colleagues. In Donetsk, certain individuals still speak out against the current regime, and use their real names while doing so. Even if those who do so are liable to be “taken to the basement”, where they can have their legs broken or face torture, as in the case of Roman Manekin, a prominent Novorossiya propagandist. Most likely, this is why Plotnitsky’s departure did not result in any mass expose of former representatives of the local authorities, as happened in the aftermath of Alexander Zakharchenko’s death in Donetsk.

Roman Manekin, an individual with a fairly vague line of work (media sometimes call him a journalist, sometimes a political scientist), is a native of Makiivka and a Russian citizen who returned to Donetsk region after the beginning of the “Russian Spring”. In two years, he was detained twice. In autumn 2017, Manekin mistakenly reported that Alexey Dikiy, the rather odious “Minister of Interior Affairs” in Donetsk, had been arrested. He then went on to justify this mistake by saying that, in the information vacuum created by the local leadership, “the Republic lives on and is managed by rumours”.

Roman Manekin. Source: YouTube.Even former Russian volunteer fighters felt they had to intervene in Manekin’s case, raising the issue publicly with Russia’s Foreign Minister. Manekin provoked little sympathy in these circles. He started his strange career in the “Republic” as a fiery apologist of Alexander Zakharchenko, under whom the most prominent fighters, both local and external, were gradually forced out of the region together with leaders such as Igor Girkin and Igor Bezler. Manekin’s situation looked to be an example of extreme arbitrary rule.

The second occasion that supporters and sympathisers of Manekin had to worry came in November 2018, when he once again disappeared after publishing a lengthy petition on Change.org that called for the “illegal” “elections of the head of state and “parliament” in Donetsk to be stopped. In the year that passed between these two disappearances, matters in the “Republic” once again changed fundamentally.

Romantics and rabble-rousers

The downing of Flight MH17 in July 2014 attracted far too much unwanted attention to the Russian presence in the unfolding military conflict. This attention centred on Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a former FSB officer and military adventurer, and his then close comrade, political technologist Alexander Borodai. At that time, the “leadership” of both “Republics” were hardly in control of the territories they had seized: different field commanders who had seized parts of the region were coming into serious conflicts with one another – in effect, localised wars. In mid-August 2014, the “Head of the Republic” Valery Bolotov and “Minister of Defence” Igor Girkin were, in effect, run out of Luhansk and Donetsk. Borodai, who “resigned his position” a few days before, transferred power to Alexander Zakharchenko, who was then “legalised” following “elections” in November 2014 – much like Igor Plotnitsky who took Bolotov’s post. It was obvious that these simultaneous shifts in the two self-proclaimed “Republics”, which had no formalised relationship to one another, could happen only on the will of someone on the outside.

In the aftermath, the new self-proclaimed leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk began to remove – also with support from outside – the most ambitious, ideological and uncompromising commanders and political figures, simultaneously sorting out some personal differences. As a result, two prominent militant leaders in Luhansk, Alexey Mozgovoy and Pavel Dremov, died in 2015. In the best mafia traditions, they both died in car bombs (Dremov died en route to his own wedding). In Donetsk, until the deaths of Givi and Motorola, most assassinations took place without this kind of drama. The leading lights of the “Russian Spring”, such as Andrey Purgin or Alexander Khodakovsky, were quietly pushed out of power, with the “state” media forbidden to make any further mention of them.

September 2018: Pavel Gubarev, together with Ekaterina Gubareva, registers his candidacy for the post of "head" of the "Donetsk People's Republic". Source: YouTube. Only the former “People’s Governor” Pavel Gubarev and his wife Ekaterina Gubareva, who became a “Deputy of the People’s Council”, managed to hold on to their levers of power (however weak they may have been). Given the absence of any political parties in the “Republic” – this role was performed by “civic movements” under the de-facto control of the authorities. The Gubarevs were not permitted to register their own organisation. As a result, Ekaterina joined a movement called “Free Donbass”, which entered the local “parliament” as a kind of “constructive opposition” force, together with the Zakharchenko-controlled “civic movement” “Donetsk Republic”. (The Gubarevs, meanwhile, still refuse to define themselves as the “opposition”, preferring the term “alternative”.)

In autumn 2018, when a congress of the “Free Donbass” group was supposed to put Ekaterina Gubareva at the top of their pre-election candidate list, she was detained on her way to the event. In the end, the event went ahead without her participation, and Gubarev was not included in the candidate list. Gubarev himself was prevented from participating in the “elections” for head of the “Republic”: the authorities declared the signatures of his supporters, collected as part of the “registration process”, to be fake.

Andrey Purgin, the first “Speaker” of the “Republic’s” parliament, was also unable to participate in the November 2018 elections. He was one of the fathers of the “Donetsk Republic” civic movement, which was formed in Donetsk back in 2006 in order to promote the same ideas and values that other participants of the “Russian Spring” would come to use publicly in 2014.

Andrey Purgin. CC BY 3.0 Andrew Butko / Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.Four years after the events of 2014, the authorities simply refused to issue Purgin a passport, which local “legislation” required of any candidate.

Individuals close to Zakharchenko, including his right-hand man Alexander “Tashkent” Timofeyev, had wound up in Russian territory soon after the murder of their leader at the end of August.

Their participation in the election was, therefore, highly unlikely. Indeed, a campaign to expose Timofeyev soon began in the “Republic” – it was suddenly revealed that “Tashkent” had been robbing local businessmen and the “state” itself.

Alexander Khodakovsky, a former volunteer battalion commander who had managed to retain his popularity, was also prevented from balloting: he was not allowed to leave the Russian Federation.

Given there were no prominent political figures left either in Donetsk or Luhansk, the candidacies of the “acting heads” of the “Republics”, Leonid Pasechnik and Denis Pushilin, remained essentially unchallenged. The remaining candidates were hardly known even in political circles and participated, it seems, to provide an illusion of competition.

What went wrong

It’s difficult to say when exactly the clouds started to gather over Alexander Zakharchenko and what was the last drop for his Moscow curators. The general disorganisation and poverty reigning in Luhansk under Plotnitsky made the neighbouring Donetsk “Republic” look a stronghold of stability and progress. But when you took a closer look – often thanks to Khodakovsky, Manekin and the Gubarev family – it became obvious that this stability was achieved by the gangland-style raiding of local businesses and the monopolising of industrial plants. Formally, these activities were carried out for the benefit of the “state”, but in fact, as is now claimed, were done in service of Alexander Timofeyev, who combined the posts of “Minister of Income and Tax” and “Vice Prime Minister” in Donetsk after Zakharchenko himself took on the undefined functions of “Prime Minister”.

January 2015: The head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, poses with students of Donetsk University after a press conference. Photo: James Sprankle / DPA / PA Images. All rights reserved.That this illusive stability was fragile became clear in summer 2018. Due to a lack of oversight and a multitude of violations, the “Republic” failed to gather a full harvest. Prices shot up, flour disappeared from supermarket shelves. Information about the reasons and scale of the food crisis began to seep out into the public sphere, mostly via anonymous channels on Telegram and social media. Just like in Luhansk, with its lack of political opposition, these channels became the new media in Donetsk. Rumours Zakharchenko being summoned to Moscow and “inspectors” from the centre traveling to the “Republic” began to surface.

Zakharchenko had previously had the ear of Vladislav Surkov, Russian presidential adviser responsible for matters in the unrecognised territories. And, for a time, he and Timofeyev were able to test their luck with this system. Armed groups began appearing outside an unexpected range of “Ministries” – the “Ministry of Income and Taxes”, in particular. By spring 2018, Zakharchenko already had his own mini-army in the form of a personal security team. Zakhar Prilepin, a rather odious Russian writer who had found a place in Zakharchenko’s circle, also managed to find his own brigade of militants. All of this should have annoyed Moscow, which was supposed to have exclusive control over the irregular fighters, now combined into a single force. In mid-2018, the curators had attempted to disperse these units or “integrate” them into “official” “armed forces”, but this only happened after a change of power in Donetsk.

In November 2018, Zakharchenko’s “legal” term in power was supposed to come to an end. In Luhansk, another round of “elections” was needed to “legalise” Pasechnik, who had temporarily headed up the “Republic” on the “request” of Plotnitsky. Media and social networks had been discussing the coming elections since the beginning of the year. But at the beginning of August, “civic organisations” of both “Republics”, under the control of the self-proclaimed leadership, came out with almost simultaneous calls to extend the rule of Pasechnik, Zakharchenko and the “People’s Councils”, in order to give them time to implement the pseudo-states’ “development programmes”, passed in Donetsk and Luhansk after “society-wide discussion”.

Perhaps the Moscow curators, busy blackmailing Kyiv with the prospect of illegal elections in these territories, were behind these attacks. Ukrainian public officials and politicians were far from burning with desire to extend legislation, mandated by the Minsk Agreements, on the “special rules on local self-government in certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions”. The Minsk Agreements provide for the possibility of local elections, which have still not been held in the “Republics”. District council leaders are, instead, appointed by Donetsk and Luhansk. After Zakharchenko’s death, it was the “local opposition” that raised the fact that the “elections” were being postponed, and the President of Ukraine eventually extended the law.

Donetsk is angry

Alexander Khodakovsky, the battalion commander who disappeared from public view back in May, announced his “return” to Donetsk on Facebook at the end of October.

Online, he explained his six-month-long absence by referring to “reasons that will take a long time to relate”, and said that, at his request, an assistant had been managing his social media accounts. Khodakovsky claimed that during this period, when he refrained from public statements (either voluntarily or by force), he had been “close to the centre of decision-making”. One of these likely decisions, according to Khodakovsky, was to unite the Donetsk and Luhansk “Republics”.

Denis Pushilin, known locally as "Mavrodyevich" for his role in 1990s pyramid schemes. Source: smdnr.ru.Some believed that Igor Plotnitsky was responsible for dividing the “people of Donbass” between Donetsk and Luhansk. In fact, the two pseudo-states had begun to merge under Zakharchenko, when Plotnitsky had been turfed out by Pasechnik – the almost full “sychronisation” of legislation and removal of border control, though this didn’t stretch to unification. In the five years of the “Republics’” existence, no one had ever publicly explained why there were two of them.

Meanwhile, both pseudo-states were undergoing a far clearer process of integration with South Ossetia, a part of Georgia which had broken away at the beginning of the 1990s. In 2008, the Russian Federation recognised the territory, maintaining it under almost total control. South Ossetia, the only “state” which had “recognised” the east Ukrainian “Republics”, had become a central link in their trade chain with Russia back in 2014. Payments were organised via the South Ossetia “International Clearance Bank”, which has had a branch in Luhansk since 2014 – and a branch is due to opened in Donetsk.

On the whole, everything that has happened since Plotnitsky’s departure, the death of Zakharchenko and especially the “elections” of 11 November speaks to the formalising of Russian control over these self-proclaimed states in eastern Ukraine. The experiment of summer 2014, to transfer all power in the region to local “miners and tractor-drivers” under supervision from Moscow, failed. Control has thus had to be localised.

Journalists have already looked into the mysterious Donetsk “Prime Minister” Alexander Ananchenko, who appeared after the “legal” division of powers between the head of the “Republic” and “Head of Government” in the wake of Zakharchenko’s death. Everything that we know about Ananchenko is that he was born in Makiivka and worked, until recently, in Russia. Before he began working in the “government”, he was an advisor to the CEO of Vneshtorgservis, a holding company registered in South Ossetia which is run by a former public official from Irkutsk. Indeed, it was Vneshtorgservis that took over management of all the large industrial plants in the “Republics” after Ukraine introduced a trade blockade in 2017. Ananchenko attracted attention first and foremost because of his lack of biography – he’d never made a public announcement, there was only one photograph of him available online (where he turns away from the camera).

October 2018: Alexander Ananchenko (right) completes an agreement with Vneshtorgservis. Source: smdnr.ru.It’s a similar story with the “Minister of State Security” in Luhansk, Anatoly Antonov, who was appointed after the “coup” in Luhansk. Previously, Antonov served as deputy “Minister of State Security” in Donetsk. Alexander Khodavkosy claimed that Antonov also came from Russia. In the year that he spent at the post, Antonov was never once caught in public. His photograph can’t be found on his “Ministry’s” website or that of the “Government”. It seems likely that “Anatoly Antonov” is a cover name for Luhansk’s new head security official.

Local users on social networks tend to call the new head of the Donetsk “Republic” by the nickname “Mavrodyevich” after the founder of a well-known Russian pyramid scheme. (Before the war, Denis Pushlin was involved in this scheme in Donetsk.) Indeed, it’s hard to find a person less respected among the local establishment in Donetsk. Having spent three years as part of Donetsk’s discredited power structure, Pushilin, it is worth noting, did not participate in the events of the “Russian Spring” or any combat operations. He became head of the “People’s Council” in 2015, after pushing out the more authoritative Andrey Purgin. In other words, Pushilin does not have blood on his hands, and in that sense, could continue talks with Kyiv – a fact that has annoyed and insulted many locals no less than his pyramid-scheme past.

In Donetsk, people instantly realised what their neighbours in Luhansk failed to in November 2017: Moscow had carried out a “state coup”. Then, without sparing funds, agreements or local moods, it placed rather doubtful appointees in key posts, thus taking responsibility for the actions of the new de-facto authorities. But this responsibility also covers the negative ratings that these authorities will inevitably accumulate. Previously, even in the darkest days, locals could hope for a future in the form of the half-mythic “Russian World”, which new rulers would lead them into – just like other rulers had, once, lead them to the triumph of communism. Now everyone understands that the “Russian World” has already arrived in the region, with “Mavrodyevich” as its public face. Not even Kyiv could have come up with a more anti-Russian project.

Supporters of Nicolás Maduro as seen in front of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) in Caracas, Venezuela, on January 10, 2019. Xu Ye/ PA Images. All rights reserved.

Sporting a smart liquiliquisuit withthe vest buttoned up to his neck as worn by the men of the plains - which, by decree of the Executive Power, has become the "National Dress Code" -, Nicolás Maduro announced the good news.

Venezuela, he said, will soon be a "branded country": a major international tourist commodity. Dollars will finally start pouring in to benefit its desponded people. Facing an audience that was and could only be his own, he revealed the slogan of the campaign: "Venezuela Open to the Future".

The hedonistic utopia came with pictures of packed-full beaches, sophisticated cocktails and, of course, hot mulatas - pure enjoyment, beyond the class struggle that usually fills the official discourse.

Outside the Venetur Alba Caracas Hotel, the word "future" had other meanings, all of which are related to danger. The political conflict in Venezuela is so deep that everything is divided in two: there are two markets - one white, one black -, and two kinds of dollars.

For the first time in the history of Latin American instability, a civilian has staged a coup against a quasi-military government headed by a civilian 

There is a Parliament controlled by the opposition, which has been declared in contempt, and a Constituent Assembly acting as another Congress. A Supreme Court sits in Caracas and another one in exile.

The same happens with the attorneys general: there are two of them. And there is, finally, a more dangerous duality: two presidents - one, Maduro, the winner of presidential elections whose legitimacy is being interpreted in two different ways; and another, Juan Guaidó, a self-proclaimed "interim" president who has been blessed by the US and 60 other countries.

For the first time in the history of Latin American instability, a civilian has staged a coup against a quasi-military government headed by a civilian – an unsustainable contradiction.

Another fall of the wall effect?

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the American invasion of Panama, the connection between these two historical events and the Venezuelan tragedy is rather peculiar.

The followers of Guaidó are convinced that the humanitarian aid that the anti-Maduro coalition will be sending in across the Colombian and Brazilian borders as of February 23 will gather mass support and become the equivalent of what happened in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in 1989.

Maduro, the "worker-president", will be the new Erich Honecker, he will go into exile and the foundations of the Bolivarian project will be swept away. If not, they predict a fate similar to that of Panama’s Manuel Noriega. For the former to happen, the military front, which currently supports the government, must split.

An officer disobeying at the border would have a domino effect - it's that simple, they reckon. The latter scenario, on the other hand, implies a US invasion - and Guaidó is considering it already.

An agonizing model

The survival of the Bolivarian political model is being questioned as never before. Immolation or last rites: these seem to be the options. But how has this come about? How has it reached this point of apparent no return?

Madurismo’s diagnosis of the situation is unwavering: the collapse of GDP - 44% since 2013 -, the mass exodus and the criminality have all been caused by Washington’s and its domestic allies’ financial choking of the Venezuelan economy. However, not "everything" is attributable to the United States and, in order to understand it, we must refer to the same parable that Hugo Chávez drew on the rubble of the Fourth Republic.

Madurismo’s diagnosis of the situation is unwavering: the collapse of GDP - 44% since 2013 -, the mass exodus and the criminality have all been caused by Washington’s and its domestic allies’ financial choking of the Venezuelan economy. 

The "Eternal Commander" came to power promising redemption for the usual losers. As Fernando Coronil points out in his essential The Magical State, Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela, "Chávez invited them to stop watching from the stands, to come down to the main court and participate in a story that would finally be theirs".

In practice, he mended social wounds through the redistribution of the oil rents. Coronil’s explanation of the new ways in which Chavism used black gold is based on a line of reasoning he borrows from Indian anthropologist Veena Das. In her book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Das argues that "subaltern rebellions", when facing massive structures of domination, can produce "just one night of love" but not "a whole loving life".

This is what happened in Venezuela. In other words: the promise of Bolivarian progress was unsustainable from the outset. Under the prevailing circumstances, the State, through sheer will power and the international prices of crude oil as a determining factor, could only produce "acts of magic instead of miracles".

Twenty years later, 96% of Venezuela’s income in dollars comes from the same productive matrix. And the government is importing even the rice, sugar and flour in its social assistance packages.

There was not a Cuban-like revolution

Even though Maduro is fond of speaking of "revolution", the structure of property in Venezuela has not changed, as it did in Cuba. The leadership takes its wishes for reality: even when support for the government was at its highest, 40% of Venezuelans were against it.

It is striking how Chavismo has failed to learn from the errors of previous historical experiences. Fidel Castro’s obsession with accelerating the phases of the revolution in Cuba led him, in 1968, to set a high goal for himself: building at the same time Socialism and Communism.

The so-called "revolutionary offensive" had very unfortunate effects and led to the nationalization of most things - even barbershops. Chávez did not want to do any less and carried out expropriations often with no clear aim in mind.

The other lesson not learned has to do with Popular Unity’s Chile. "I am not the president of all Chileans", said Salvador Allende. Chavism dug that same rhetorical trench. And his opponents, turned into enemies, acted symmetrically. The result has been a zero-sum game.

A third mirror was hung on a Miraflores’ presidential palace wall to reflect China in the sixties. Chávez promoted communes inspired by one of the most disastrous undertakings of Maoism, the “Great Leap Forward".

The initiative, based on self-management, contained, according to the "Eternal Commander", the true seeds of Socialism. It did bear some fruit in the rural areas but failed resoundingly in a country where more than 90% of the population live in cities, some of which are extremely violent.

Although it was intended to do away with bureaucracy and minimize the role of the State, it boiled down to trying to "plough the ocean", to use Simon Bolivar's expression, mostly due to economic deficiencies and collective practices derived from scarcity and the black market.

Chávez’s initial distributive feat had a defective original imprint: it was achieved manu militari

Currently, it is just a device for patronage. The opposition sums it up in perhaps a simplistic but not altogether wrong equation: food in return for rhetorical loyalty.

Chávez’s initial distributive feat had a defective original imprint: it was achieved manu militari which obviously offered a flank to not only the wealthy sectors for questioning the Commander’s democratic values.

Maduro has deepened the dubious democratic practices. He often says that the Bolivarians have won 23 out of 25 electoral contests, but his opponents respond with a long list of accusations: on the one hand, Chávez's attempt to establish indefinite presidential reelection; on the other, the limited acceptance of his stumbles at the polls. In 2008, when the opposition won the mayoralty of Caracas, the "Eternal Commander" built from scratch a parallel administration, with its corresponding budget, and then redrew the electoral boundaries to avoid tripping on the stone of defeat so easily.

To win elections is not enough

Maduro succeeded Chávez and won the elections by a very narrow margin: less than one percentage point. Radicalizing a process in conditions such as these, of near parity, was utter nonsense.

In the midst of economic adjustment and external indebtedness, Maduro took unpopular measures. The opposition, whose democratic credentials are far from immaculate, went over his head. The streets became the territory for the dispute.

Maduro was miserably defeated at the 2015 legislative elections. The opposition gave him six months to pack his bags. The president decreed an economic emergency and then the Electoral Council prevented a recall referendum. Straight away, the Supreme Court of Justice declared that Parliament was in contempt.

When the political confrontation moved to the public space again, scoring many more casualties, a Constituent Assembly was called to act as a counterweight to the legislative body. Negotiations to find a negotiated solution never came to fruition, both parties reproaching each other for the successive failures.

Supported by historical, sentimental voters, Maduro was re-elected in 2018 under conditions of undeniable advantage. He ran against token candidates. Some of the leading opposition leaders were banished and others called for abstention, so that his new term could only portend greater setbacks.

This is how we reached the current ruinous present, a situation that just cannot go on any longer. Disaffection at what is left of Chavismo is now not only a phenomenon of the middle class and of some of historical figures who have severed their ties with the "worker-president". It has now reached the popular sectors.

Maduro still counts on a social base, but it is hard to know how thin a line separates support, with its compensations, from simulation and fatigue. The forthcoming decisive hours will reveal it.

This also applies to the military front. Augusto Pinochet proclaimed his adhesion to Allende hours before the coup of September 11, 1973. We know what happened later: he was the cruellest of converts.

Finally, at this point, the Venezuelan conflict has ceased to be a domestic-only issue and has become a piece of the Trump administration in the board of its disputes with China and Russia for unrelated reasons.

There is something Maduro is right about: Venezuela is part of a higher objective for the most illiberal sectors in the US who are seeking to completely redesign the region politically.

There is something Maduro is right about: in addition to its oil, gas and gold, Venezuela is part of a higher objective for the most illiberal sectors in the US who are seeking to completely redesign the region politically. This means Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua as the next steps.

Elliot Abrams' comeback in Washington's conspiratorial vanguard embodies these wishes. From his proven hawkish hand in events in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras in the 1980s, we can deduce what the outcome of the conflict is likely to be and what shape the future could take.

Will it resemble 1989 Communist Germany or Romania? Will we see the rubble of Iraq and Syria? None of the possible criticisms that can be levelled against Madurism, from its authoritarianism and its cult of uniforms to its dubious transparency, justifies a violent solution to this historical disjunctive.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to find a negotiated solution.

Signboard replaced outside hometown of Mesut Ozil in Turkey, removing photo of him in a German jersey in July 2018. Gurkay GüNdogan/Press Association. All rights reserved.

The recent case of Mesut Özil has shown a severe rupture in relations between German-Turks and German natives, which has been a long time coming, but went unrecognized while the football national team put it in the shade. However, it was precisely because of the earlier sporting success of the German squad that the Özil case escalated into a fierce conflict. Three crucial ingredients played a role in this escalation: the failure of political messaging on national football-team diversity, some setbacks in Germany-Turkey relations, and the rise of the populist radical right in both Turkey and Germany.

The staging of Games of Belonging

International football events include Games of Belonging for immigrant footballers;a play that evolves in three acts. In the first pre-match act, an approaching international football fixture prompts the media to ponder whether immigrant players feel they belong to nation X or Y, Germany or Turkey. National belonging here is a zero-sum game: the more one belongs to nation X, the less one is able to belong to nation Y.

In a matchday second act, nationhood is performed symbolically. A case in point is Özil’s 2010 handshake with German chancellor Angela Merkel in the locker-room after an international match against Turkey in Berlin, when he was booed by German-Turks. It was ironic that Özil scored against the national team of his “ethnic roots”, which demonstrated the zero-sum game impeccably. Here was a second-generation German-Turk opting for Germany and shaking off his ethno-cultural backpack with the goal that he scored.

Act 3. In various after-match episodes separate from the event, those subjected to these belonging debates become active participants and insist that their choice for one nation does not fairly represent their transnational feelings of belonging to both Germany and Turkey equally. As many other immigrant footballers around the globe have proclaimed, Özil has also repeatedly stated that he would prefer to play for both national football teams if international football regulations made it possible.

Disenchantment and the growth of a nativist backlash against Games of Belonging

In 2009, Özil forfeited Turkish membership, after he chose to play for the German football national team. He was framed as an “ethnic traitor”, a “Turk who had defected”, lost touch with his “roots”. On the other hand, Mesut Özil was celebrated as the poster boy for immigrant integration politics in Germany, where he was, for instance, awarded a national immigrant integration prize in 2011 and seen as one of the most influential role models to promote second- and third-generation German-Turks’ identification with Germany.

After the 2018 photo with Erdogan, Özil’s reconciliation with his Turkish identity was widely recognized. On the other hand, Özil was denounced for paying court to an autocrat, which was framed as the one thing a “true” German would not do. In fact, as many pundits contended, native political and national football association representatives were very busy wooing autocrats themselves in former years. But immigrant national team footballers have to accomplish more than natives. Any slippage, and immigrants’ full national membership is questioned. Natives on the other hand, may risk being banned from the national football team in a worst case scenario, yet their national belonging remains beyond question.

Publicphotos of Özil and Erdogan have appeared regularly since 2011, and he always prayed before matches, sharing a post of his pilgrimage to Mecca before the 2016 European Championship. Özil was neither fully reconciled to his Turkish identity at that stage nor banned from German national identity, though the AfD party had unsuccessfully tried to create a scandal around events related to Özil before 2018. Why then was there no escalation before 2018?

To begin with, the interplay of the rise of populist radical-right parties in Germany and Turkey with failed political messaging by traditional parties aggravated the political context for national football-team diversity.

After ongoing blame-games from 2016 onwards, German-Turkish relations suffered a severe setback. Disenchantment with traditional parties grew after their promises to tighten the screws on Erdogan were not in the end delivered. When racial outnumbered economic concerns, segments of the national conservatives from right to left identified the AfD party as the only saviour capable of standing for “German values” (most notably, democracy) and defending them against “the Sultan of the Bosphorus” and his German-based Turkish supporters.

Ever since the 2017 election campaign, traditional parties have pursued disenchanted national-conservative voters by raising a critical voice on the ”Turkish issue”. Özil could not escape the recurring nationalist German-Turkish blame-games expounded by the already established populist radical-right in Turkey and its consolidating counterpart in Germany. Failed political messaging by traditional parties, and unmet promises, facilitated the mainstreaming of radical-right narratives which defended secessionist expressions of nativist nationhood.

Finally, the economic exploitation of national football-team diversity caused frustration among German-Turks. In his post-World-Cup statement, Özil lamented the racism against him because of his Turkish and Muslim identity. Özil sided with French Karim Benzema and Belgian Romelu Lukaku, stating: “I am a German when we win, an immigrant when we lose.”

For Turkish immigrants, the case of Özil reflected the frustrating double logic they encountered over the decades. They were turned to enthusiastically when needed to rebuild the country (and its economy) but soon discriminated against once the work was done. German-Turks united against such an obvious anti-Turkish racism. And the repeated charges of Nazism raised by Erdogan against Germany even made some identify ‘cultural traits’ of racism among Germans. The latter marked a dangerous trend, as such propositions very quickly “close down” ethno-cultural boundaries, resulting in ethno-cultural fragmentation and polarization.

This frustration of immigrants can only be prevented if ethnic diversity is communicated, explicitly or implicitly, as a basic democratic right instead of a conditional economic promise of success. In fact, if ethnic diversity is linked to economic success, it may soon be connected to failure as well. Merkel’s “golden handshake” in 2009 and the absence of protection for Özil in 2018 are a good example of how easily “things have changed”. 

Failed messaging culminated in a frustrated backlash against immigrant integration politics, while the German majority and Turkish immigrants were on their way to “opening up” their horizons vis-à-vis each other. In 2018, the mainstreaming of radical-right narratives in Germany and Turkey exploited the Mesut Özil case and painted German-Turkish games of belonging in a nativist light. It seems very unlikely that international football will introduce transnational regulations for immigrant footballers in this current period of ‘ethno-national rebirth’.

Yesterday morning, the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published its long-awaited final report into disinformation and ‘fake news’. The report – which follows a long and at times dramatic investigation – is full of interesting and insightful details about political microtargeting (the targeting of political messaging to relatively small groups of people) and the spread of disinformation.

But the report’s myopic focus on one company – Facebook – means that it misses the bigger picture – including the internet’s dominant variety of capitalism.

It is of course welcome that attention is being paid to these problems, and there is much in the Committee’s report that’s good. The report is undoubtedly right to find that Britain’s electoral laws are woefully inadequate for the age of the algorithm and are badly in need of reform. Its recommendation that inferences drawn from analysis of other data about people should be more clearly considered to be personal data likewise seems eminently sensible.

Is it ok to manipulate people to extract their money, just not for politics?

But there are also clear shortcomings. Focusing on disinformation itself as a target for regulation brings an obvious problem. By calling for interventions based on ‘harmful’ content, the report asks the Government to step into the dangerous territory of regulating lawful political conversations between people. Are private companies to be mandated to police these communications on the Government’s behalf? There are numerous good reasons why this is deeply undesirable (not to mention incompatible with human rights laws).

The biggest oversight, however, is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.

‘Surveillance capitalism’, as it’s known, involves gathering as much data as possible about as many people as possible doing as many things as possible from as many sources as possible. These huge datasets are then algorithmically analysed so as to spot patterns and correlations from which future behaviour can be predicted. A personalised, highly dynamic, and responsive form of behavioural nudging then seeks to influence that future behaviour to drive engagement and profit for platforms and advertisers. These targeted behaviour modification tools rely on triggering cognitive biases and known short-cuts in human decision-making. Platforms and advertisers extensively experiment to find the most effective way to influence behaviour.

Without looking at surveillance capitalism, it’s impossible to understand microtargeting in its wider context. It’s impossible to understand the desires for profit and market position driving these practices. And it’s impossible to understand that the same behaviour modification tools are sold to advertisers, political parties, and anyone else who’s willing to pay. Without considering these practices within surveillance capitalism more generally, the report seems to implicitly accept that manipulating people through psychological vulnerabilities is fine if you’re doing it to extract their money, but not if you’re doing it for politics.

Notably, both Google and YouTube, its subsidiary, were largely omitted from the report. They get the odd mention, but it’s clear that the Committee was too fixated on Facebook to pay them sufficient attention. Google invented surveillance capitalism and remains arguably its foremost practitioner, with significant influence over the world’s access to information. And YouTube (also running on a surveillance business model, naturally) has serious problems of its own in terms of promoting violent extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. This led the academic Zeynep Tufekci, writing in the New York Times last year, to describe YouTube and its video recommendation system as “[maybe] one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century”.

It's not “fake news” that’s the problem, it’s the algorithms that disseminate it

This brings us to the second aspect missed by the Committee: the increasingly prevalent algorithmic construction of reality. Take disinformation. As noted above, the report focused on false content itself. This seems to have missed one of the key routes by which an individual piece of content can become a systemic problem worthy of attention. In the grand scheme of things, a YouTube video about a wild conspiracy theory doesn’t really matter if it’s only seen by 10 people. It matters if people watching relatively innocuous content are driven towards it by YouTube’s recommendation system. It matters if it’s algorithmically promoted by YouTube and then seen by 10 million people.

Platforms might argue that they can’t be held responsible for the content they host or for the actions of their users (outside of things which are clearly illegal). But recommending content is not simply hosting it, and it is not a neutral act. Platforms selectively target content (including advertising) through their recommender systems so as to show us what they think will keep us engaged with their services, bring them revenue, and help them build market share. Make no mistake – through these platforms we do not get a true picture of what’s going on in the world. The spaces we inhabit online are viewed through the lens of corporate desires. What we encounter is algorithmically mediated to suit the platforms’ interests. While microtargeting is increasingly recognised as manipulation, this is a softer, perhaps more insidious form of corporate algorithmic influence.

Unsurprisingly, various actors have learned how to game these systems to boost the audience for their content, including conspiracy theorists and extremists. And bots and other fake accounts are often being used to take advantage of the algorithmic construction of online space to manipulate content rankings. This allows them to game trending topics so as to shape discourse more generally, and drive fringe ideas into the mainstream (a common misconception of bots holds that they are usually intended to change the opinion of real users with whom they come into contact).

The influence wielded by surveillance platforms through personalisation gives them significant means to shape the online public sphere. They are, of course, motivated by profit and duty to shareholders rather than by public good and duty to wider society. You might think that this is fine – they are, after all, private corporations. But while television, mass media, and the advertising industry have long shaped our world, never before have private companies had such influence over the construction of the everyday reality we inhabit. Never before have they exercised such influence over the private activity of individuals talking to other individuals about their lives. They do so without any democratic legitimacy, and with little transparency over their processes or accountability for their actions.

To properly address the problems of manipulation, disinformation, and violent extremism fermenting on online platforms, future regulation must properly acknowledge the role of surveillance capitalism – not just through targeting tools but in the algorithmic construction of online spaces. Future regulation should recognise that content isn’t necessarily the problem in and of itself. It must consider the active role of platforms in promoting content, and establish minimum standards for doing so (in the form of paid-for advertising or otherwise). This approach benefits from largely sidestepping much of the content regulation debate. Regulating the use of technical systems by corporations rather than intervening in communications between individuals means that people should still be free to post, view, or share anything that is not illegal. Freedom of expression demands nothing less.

Surveillance companies’ exorbitant profits and their influence on the construction of our reality is in large part driven by their use of recommender systems. That must come with responsibility in some form for what they’re algorithmically disseminating. They will argue that being more careful with recommender systems could result in lower revenues. In 2018 Google brought in $136 billion; Facebook took $56 billion. They can afford to take the hit. Perhaps that should be understood as the cost of doing business in future. This industry wouldn’t be the first to have its practices and its profits reined in by regulation for the good of society.

Because of its restricted focus, the usefulness of many of the solutions proposed in the DCMS Committee’s report is somewhat limited. That’s disappointing. But all is far from lost, and there are other directions for progress. To get there, we need to think bigger than Facebook. It’s time to acknowledge the role of surveillance capitalism in these systemic issues. It’s time to recognise that the problem isn’t just content – it’s dissemination and amplification by algorithm to maximise profit at all costs.

Euronews screenshot.Dozens of Somali refugees killed in Saudi airstrikes off Yemen, 2017. Youtube.

While Brexit is giving UK residents a break from media focus on desperate people attempting to reach wealthy Europe by crossing the Mediterranean by sea, a few figures should help to put things in perspective, as the issue will surely soon re-emerge in the headlines.

Xenophobia remains a fundamental rallying cry of the right throughout Europe, including the UK, and is all too frequently manifested through Islamophobic populism. This has already led to the implementation of anti-migrant policies by most regimes but particularly the far right ones in Eastern Europe.

This last year, they have been joined by the new Italian regime’s rhetoric and action in turning away humanitarian ships rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. The hostile environment for migrants in Europe has led to a massive drop in arrivals: while many more than one million people arrived in 2015, only 144,000 did so in 2018. A few migrants who had managed to reach northern France and in particular the Calais of ‘jungle’ notoriety took to small boats to reach the UK: about 500 did so in 2018, including 200 in the last two months of last year.  Some might wonder why this did not happen earlier, but this event gave the British government a temporary public relations respite from Brexit as Secretary of State Sajid Javid rushed to Dover to stem this terrifying influx!

A hidden migrant crisis in the Gulf of Aden

Meanwhile, more than 160,000 people arrived in Yemen in 2018 alone. Just to be clear this means that more desperate people crossed the Red Sea into Yemen than crossed the Mediterranean heading for Europe. 

Yemen is in the midst of an internationalised civil war and suffering from the world’s worst humanitarian crisis according to the UN’s Secretary General. There has been no outcry about a ‘migrant invasion’ from any Yemeni Minister of the Interior, whether from the internationally recognised government or the Huthi movement who control the capital Sana’a. Indeed Yemen has received and accepted close to a million Somali refugees since the 1990s, allowing them to work and live in the country, as Yemen is the only country in the Arabian Peninsula to recognise the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Prior to the current war, the country’s authorities have been impressively hospitable to Somali refugees, though not to the thousands of Ethiopians and others who have crossed the Red Sea.

Migrants crossing into Yemen only make the headlines either when the Saudi-led Coalition planes bomb a boat crossing and kill its passengers (including people leaving on boats commissioned by UN agencies to repatriate them to the Horn of Africa) or when sufficiently large numbers of corpses wash up onto the Yemeni shores of the Arabian Sea. In both cases, they get little more than a few lines in obscure media.

The main route has also changed as a result of the war: while more than 70% of people crossed the Red Sea between 2010 and 2013, since then the figure has dropped to less than 20% with most heading for the Arabian Sea coast.

Who is heading for Yemen and why?

So why are more people still heading for Yemen than leaving?  Who are they? And why do thousands head for a country in the midst of an internationalised civil war where millions are starving?  Shouldn’t travel be in the other direction, with Yemenis trying to escape the disastrous conditions in their country?

Yemen is hardly ever the intended destination of these migrants. While travel to Saudi Arabia and the UAE via Oman used to be difficult in the past, travel conditions have become far more dangerous and expensive in recent years. At the beginning of the current decade, the Saudi regime built a fence along most of the border from the Red Sea coast eastwards to control immigration, and the situation has obviously worsened dramatically since the Saudi-led coalition has intervened in the civil war throughout the country since 2015. In 2018 the cost for getting from the southern Yemeni coast to Saudi Arabia was about USD 1200. But travelling to Saudi Arabia from east Africa via Yemen is significantly cheaper than reaching the southern coast of the Mediterranean, a trip costing at least USD 3000, a price which ignores possible ransoming and imprisonment by criminal gangs as well as the actual sea crossing.

Last year alone, 160,000 people in east Africa were sufficiently desperate to head for a country on the brink of famine and in the midst of a war. The overwhelming majority (92%) are Ethiopians and the rest are Somalis. Three quarters of them are adult men while women form 16% of the migrants and children, mostly boys, form 10%.[1] They head for the southern Arabian Sea coast of Yemen, for two main reasons: the Red Sea coast is now a military zone with naval forces of the coalition firing at fishing boats and anything else that moves; on the African side much of the coast is in Eritrea.[2] The southern Arabian Sea coast is more easily accessible from the different departure points in Somalia, both Berbera in ‘independent’ Somaliland and Bossasso in the ‘autonomous’ Puntland. 

In the past 5 years, more than 700 corpses have been recovered on Yemen’s southern coast including 156 in 2018.[3] Crossing into Yemen is the cheapest part of the trip, with fares ranging from USD 120 to USD 200. While many of those involved are aware of the war in Yemen, some are not. Amazingly thousands still cross in the belief that they will have an easy ongoing trip to their ultimate destination, Saudi Arabia. Once in Yemen, many seek additional income and try to find work, usually as unskilled labourers in agriculture and as car washers and other informal jobs in towns. This was difficult in the pre-war period and is almost impossible now the war is on.  Some fall into the hands of criminals and are ill treated and ransomed, on a scale smaller than that found in Libya but sufficiently significant to be notable.

Most Somalis have left their homes because years of drought have made it impossible to cultivate the land and have killed their livestock, leading to worsening poverty, and destitution. Another reason is insecurity in their home areas. Although war has abated in Somalia, it is hardly a haven of peace and prosperity. In addition possible ill-treatment in Yemen has resulted in changed strategies for Somalis: while before 2011 many of them headed for Yemen as a final or temporary destination, since the beginning of this decade and, even more so, since the outbreak of war, their destination is Saudi Arabia, with no intention of remaining in Yemen.

Similarly Ethiopians, who now form the overwhelming majority of migrants, the thousands heading for Saudi Arabia, via Yemen, have clearly not noticed that their country is currently the great economic success story we read about occasionally in western media. Poverty, drought, lack of employment are key factors pushing them to face the risks of this very dangerous journey, regardless of the high risk of failure. Of 42,000 people expelled from Saudi Arabia in the 10 months starting mid-November 2017, 46% were Ethiopians, while 51% were Yemenis. The trend has accelerated with the changes in labour regulations in Saudi Arabia and in 2018 Saudi authorities have deported about 10,000 Ethiopians a month.[4] 

Although many have failed, very few have abandoned their ambitions and taken up the International Organisation of Migration’s offers of repatriation: between 2010 and 2018, only 24,000 returned home under these auspices,  77% of them Ethiopians and 16% Somalis. Of course, regardless of the risks, all migrants heading for Saudi Arabia, whether Ethiopian, Somali or Yemeni, dream of success and wealth after a few years of work in Saudi Arabia.

What about Yemenis?

Very few Yemenis try to escape the war. Most of those who head for Saudi Arabia do so to earn money and feed their families as they have done for the past half century. The new Saudi regime has introduced tough measures to ‘saudi-ise’ its labour force and reduce employment opportunities for foreigners as well as make their residence conditions expensive and unappealing. These measures have affected Yemenis as well as many other nationalities and probably reduced the number of Yemenis in Saudi Arabia to below one million. However arrivals since 2015 also include the leaders of the internationally recognised government, their attendants, and some of the war profiteers.

Other than the majority in Saudi Arabia and about 100,000 people of Yemeni origin in the United Arab Emirates, the war has led to the creation of new Yemeni communities in other neighbouring Arab states: Oman has received about 50,000 Yemenis since the war started. In Jordan 14.500 and in Egypt 8000 were registered with UNHCR by the end of 2018, representing a fraction of the Yemenis present in both these countries. Most Yemenis in these countries are professionals as well as political exiles who are maintaining more acceptable living standards and they also include people who have been unable to return to Yemen as a result of the coalition closure of Sana’a airport since mid-2016.  

By contrast most of the few thousand Yemenis arriving in Djibouti are poverty stricken war-related refugees. A very few Yemenis have headed for Europe through the unofficial routes used by African migrants: the International Organisation for Migration recorded 326 Yemenis in the first 11 months of 2018, while a total of 353 had reached Greece in 2015[5], reflecting both Yemenis’ reluctance to leave their homes and the difficulties they encounter when travelling internationally. 

Within Yemen itself, population movements have been massive: overall since the war started 3 million have been displaced, many of whom return home as soon as fighting abates in their areas, so about 1 million remain displaced. In the second half of 2018 alone, with the coalition military offensive against the city and other parts of the Hodeida governorate, more than one million people were displaced until the December 18 ceasefire, going to other parts of Yemen, often where they had relatives, but basically escaping from the air and ground attacks which led to heavy civilian casualties.

In conclusion, while this article has provided a few figures, readers should remember that each one of the individuals who make up the thousands and millions is experiencing the tragic, painful and frightening suffering associated with the tragedies described in the stories you can find on numerous websites and social media. So this represents a multiplicity of horror stories. Migrants heading into Yemen are facing extreme hardship conditions in addition to entering a country at war where most of the population are also suffering from famine conditions. What does all this say about living conditions and prospects in their own countries? 

[1]  IOM Mixed Migration in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, January-June 2018.

[2]  Surprisingly no Eritreans appear to go to Yemen, they mostly head directly overland to the Mediterranean sea, at far higher cost, ranging from a minimum of USD 1800 to about USD 4000 per person, and that excludes the ransoms many have to pay when they are taken hostage by traffickers.

[3] Reuters 4 December 2018

[4] Reuters, ibid

[5] Data from IOM

Credit: Flickr/BRosen. CC BY-ND 2.0.

In Donald Trump’s recent State of the Union speech to Congress he called for unity whilst simultaneously trashing the Democrats on everything from border walls to Russian intervention in American elections. Something similar is happening on this side of the Atlantic with Brexit, where calls for national consensus are accompanied by a steadfast refusal to allow any of the discussion and flexibility required to reach it. Many of us feel deeply uncomfortable in polities that spew so much hypocrisy, vitriol and hate.

I’ve got a fair amount of experience trying to reach out to people I disagree with, or even fear a little, by running something called the Echo Chamber Club over the last few years. Every week I researched the news and opinion articles that people like me were probably consuming, and then disseminated counterpoints that I thought subscribers would find challenging. As a result of this experience I now frame the debate around polarisation in the following way: “how can we be different but still get along?” How can we respect what’s incommensurable about our views and values without resorting to violence and oppression?

My aim is not to create consensus, since I think it’s a good thing to have diversity in ideas. Instead, I look to ensure that we feel more comfortable in working alongside those with different opinions – or at least in talking and listening to them in a search for common ground. If we can’t even do that, then permanent division is inevitable, and with it the ever present danger of a low-grade civil war. How can we transform our democracies and daily practices to avoid this damaging outcome?

Since it’s easier to answer this question in a particular context let’s take a few concrete examples. First, the ongoing conflict between someone who’s opposed to abortion - a pro-lifer - and someone who believes that women have the right to abortion, a pro-choicer.

I am firmly in the pro-choice camp, and I’ve found it hard to understand how anyone can call themselves both pro-life and a feminist. But it turns out that some women do exactly that, so I chose to investigate the other side’s mission and claims.

One group, the New Wave Feminists, base their arguments on pacifism. They are against war, the death penalty and torture, so they feel it would be a contradiction for them to be in favour of abortion. Their aim is to create a society where no woman would feel the need to have one. They write: “Look, we don't work to make abortion illegal. We work to make it unthinkable and unnecessary. And we do that by getting to the root of the need for it.”

Feminists for Life is a similar group whose slogan is “Women Deserve Better.” They seek to eliminate the reasons that drive women to abortion by advocating “practical resources and holistic support which address the unmet needs of pregnant women, parents and birthparents.” This group seems a little more extreme because they implicitly state that abortion should be illegal, though they also write that women themselves should not be prosecuted for seeking one. And, they say, “We should criminalize anyone who withholds child support, fires a woman from her job because she is pregnant, refuses to accommodate her pregnancy, expels her from school, or threatens violence - any act that forces her to choose between sacrificing her child and sacrificing her education, career plans, or safety from violence.”

When I look at these two groups, I realise that we have some things in common. I would also like to make motherhood a more economically and psychologically comfortable position for those who choose it. I don’t want to stigmatise it, and I recognise that women have abortions for many complicated reasons, but I can see we have a common goal.

So I have a choice. I can choose to view these women as feminists through their own description of their identity, or I can reject their view of the world and claim that I know better. Through one lens I see only conflict, and through the other, I can see a potential way forward. One mindset helps us to work together and the other does not.

Let’s look at a different example with similar implications. Claudia Sternberg, Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni and Kalypso Nicolaïdis have written a fantastic book on “The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis,” which examines a wide range of journalistic pieces written in Germany and Greece as the latter looked bankruptcy in the eye.

They found many points of view from both countries. Some journalists attempted to understand each other, and often learned something about themselves in the process. Yes, there was stereotyping: some Germans wrote editorials lambasting the Greeks for being ‘extravagant’ and ‘lazy,’ while some Greeks portrayed the German’s as ‘cruel’ and ‘stingy.’ And, of course, there were plenty of references to how Germany behaved during two World Wars.

However, at least some of the journalists on each side reached out to try to understand the perspectives of the other by describing them in ways they might actually recognise. This led to the admission that both countries were interdependent because they shared the same currency. Because they had to work together to avoid the Euro’s collapse, they had to respect people who lived in other countries and value their concerns. As the authors concluded, “if many journalists or politicians chose to resort to offensive and stereotypical depictions of the Other during the crisis, this was not for a lack of alternative discursive options.”

What lessons can be learned from these examples? For me the most important is the principle of ‘mutual recognition’ in guiding processes of negotiation between conflicting groups with confidence, respect and esteem.

First, confidence: to understand others you must understand yourself - meaning that you must be confident that your own emotions, values and contributions to society are valid. What’s more, you must feel confident in your ability to enact change, and recognise that your actions have consequences. In this way, you recognise yourself as a morally responsible human being.

Second, respect: when you are confident you can take a look at others, recognising that they too have valid emotions, values and contributions to society. They are also responsible human beings and deserve equal recognition for being so. We are all entitled to rights that respect our humanity.

Third, esteem: through respect we understand that all people have equal rights. Adding esteem into the equation extends those rights to the equal expression of our differences. In the modern world we need an abundance of difference to uphold complex societies, so we should hold difference in esteem.

So far so good, but there are some obvious objections to this framing. The first concerns presumptions of equality where power is asymmetrical. In the case of Germany and Greece, for example, Germany was in a much more powerful position, so how could recognition be ‘mutual?’

The answer is that, although recognition requires input from all sides, it takes more commitment from the stronger party, because it is much easier for them to dismiss the concerns of the weak. The continued denial of recognition from those in power can only lead to instability. Groups have to go through a difficult and respectful process to find genuine common ground, as opposed to an artificial consensus.

Secondly, why should we ‘recognise’ misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views as valid? The theory of mutual recognition helps us turn this question on its head. Those with these views don’t respect the humanity and identities of others; instead they deny recognition to women, people of colour, Jews and immigrants. The frame I’m presenting provides a way of understanding and communicating why these attitudes are so damaging and how we might combat them, since we can simultaneously expose racism and misogyny and look to understand other aspects of the identities of such groups which are not bigoted or xenophobic.

Theories like this can help us to address division and polarisation, because without them we can’t understand where the problem comes from or how to handle it in terms other than opposition. So, for example, in my pro-choice/pro-life example this is how I re-framed seemingly-irreconcilable positions: when I approached the pro-life feminists I was already confident in my own identity as a feminist, but I also took steps to recognise them by understanding their own ideas on their own terms. I understood their interpretation of feminist values and respected them as feminists. Through this examination, I returned to reflect on my own ideology and recognised where there were similarities, and equally importantly, where I had to stand my ground if we were to ever have a future negotiation. This is the process of mutual recognition: try and find some commonalities and see if you can negotiate around the differences.

I try to follow the same process in the rest of my personal life and work. It takes a long time, and it can be very hard. A disagreement never lasts for half an hour. Instead it’s a process that takes days if not weeks. There are no quick fixes when it comes to conflict, but having a structure can help. Practicing confidence, respect and esteem provides a useful way to build bridges in divided communities. I hope you’ll try it.

US Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the Army Transport Logistics base in Warsaw, Poland on February 13, 2019 on the occasion of the Middle East summit which has as it's main focus Iran which is deemed as a threat to security in the region. Picture by Jaap Arriens/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

If - god forbid - a war begins, then I, a man without country who has never claimed to make sacrifices for the people of Iran because I am not arrogant enough for saying that, a man who assumes no adjective but godless, will return to Iran to defend my motherland against my adopted mother [America].

Thus writes Mohsen Namjoo‬, one of the most renowned and influential artists in contemporary Iran, in his latest book, Four Essays. As he himself implies, there’s a contradiction in asserting that you are a man without country and claiming to defend the motherland should it comes under attack. But this is a contradiction many exiled Iranians experience these days

Today there are thousands of Iranians living abroad who were writers and artists and journalists living and working in Iran, striving to improve upon the reality of their lives and their country. Then someone in the government decided that they had gone too far, that their activity posed a threat to “national security”, which is practically a euphemism for putting any challenge to the full dominance of the government in every aspect of life in Iran. Their books were censored, their meetings were raided, their concerts were canceled. They were prosecuted for non-violent political activities and many of them ended up in jail. Life became so hard they abandoned their country, their families, their loved ones. They scattered around the world and, like Namjoo, became men and women without country.

Recently, as the nuclear deal saga unfolded, they saw how Iran, having fully complied by the terms of the deal, is being punished with brutal, unjustifiable sanctions. Like Namjoo, this gross injustice hits them in the stomach, urges them to go out of their ways to defend their country against bullies and intimidators, even though it is still run by the very people that ruined their lives. These exiled Iranians know full well that the Twitter trolls and other accounts that support the incumbents in Iran will take advantage of their position and interpret it as support for their masters, but at this point, as the country faces serious threats to its very fabric, those calculations seem out of place.  

Namjoo’s choice of words helps us resolve this seeming contradiction. He says that he is willing to defend Motherland (Maam-e Vatan‬) against his adopted mother (Maadar-e Nakhandeh). He could have chosen words without familial undertone. But this usage is telling, as the sanctions have driven the issue out of politics. This is now a family matter. The sanctions have targeted the very existence of the country, and the Iranians, even those immune to its economic effects, feel the impact in the most visceral, immediate fashion. Trump’s crudeness, his brazen disregard for human suffering, and the pathetic silence of US allies, only occasionally broken by lukewarm, winking reprimand, makes us, Iranian exiles, set aside the fact that the current rulers of Iran have forced us out of our home. ‬‬

In his seminal book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks to this sentiment: “It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it [Nationalism] as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with 'liberalism' or 'fascism'.” Nation is pure construction, something imagined into being. It is a fundamentally irrational concept. One never meets the vast majority of her fellow-compatriots and has no rationale to entangle her fate with theirs, yet so many have sacrificed their lives for this imagined commune, and will do so in the future. It is a visceral, emotional connection, much similar to what one feels towards her family members. It is a strong, irrational emotion, something like love or hate, or, as a stranger puts it to Mr. Ai in Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness: “No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear.”

So let us recast this issue in familial terms: for many exiled Iranians the Iranian government has been an abusive, cruel father that tormented them so much they walked away from the family. Some started a new life and tried to forget the past, many stayed in touch and continued the struggle to fix the family. Now, for many of us these long years of harsh economic sanctions amount to watching a big bully beating up our abusive father. In this case, no matter how much you hate the father, when you see that scene you will run ahead to defend him. There’s a reason why people from fragile, embattled nations tend to be more sensitive about jokes or insults to their homeland, compared to those who experience no immediate threat to their countries. People from volatile parts of the world become protective of an ailing, battered parent, no matter how much they might despise them. Donald Trump’s success has to do with him convincing a sizeable portion of American voters that America is a weakened, fragile nation embattled by Muslims and Latinos, in urgent need of a strongman to protect it.

The sanctions are interfering with a painful, yet overall strong family dynamic in Iran. The sanctions force Iranians to suspend their struggle against their abusive father, fearing that the interfering strangers would manipulate their demands and grievances. Moreover, the sanctions are damaging the economy to the extent that providing basic commodities has already become a challenge. As a result, people will be less involved in politics, in movements that pursue real, substantial change, for empty stomachs never prioritize politics. If the intention, as stated, is to stymie the government so that the nation would rise and take it down, that’s the worst strategy to fulfill it.

Truck driver in the parking lot for heavy trucks behind the Moscow ring road. Photo: Ilya Pitalev / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.A widespread strike of grain hauliers in the south of Russia is gaining momentum. Their main grievance is low rates of pay for their work, but they are also protesting against the bribes they are forced to pay highway police. The protest started as a conflict between the drivers and the export companies that offered low rates for their deliveries. Unless they hugely overload their trucks (and thus break the law), drivers end up working at a loss.

This situation has created a domino effect, dragging several social, economic and legal issues into the equation. According to Gruzavtotrans organisation, there are now several thousand drivers involved in the strike – and it is affecting Russia’s Caucasus regions. The authorities, meanwhile, prefer to turn a blind eye.

The miserly rates paid by companies for the transport of their grain – 1.43 roubles (less than £0.02) a kilogramme – force drivers to overload their trucks in order to avoid making a loss. But driving overloaded vehicles is not only illegal (official fines are 150,000-500,000 roubles, or £1,770-£6,000), it is hazardous for all traffic on the roads, and creates prime conditions for corruption. Drivers often pay bribes to take excess loads through highway police checkpoints.

But they are so tired of this situation that they have organised a protest action, uniting nearly 5,000 people across Krasnodar and Stavropol provinces as well as Rostov, Voronezh, Kursk and Astrakhan. So far, they’ve halted the delivery of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain to ports and dragged corruption into the headlines.

What constitutes overloading?

To understand the current situation, it’s useful to know what constitutes an “overload” for grain trucks. A standard truck can transport 20-25 tonnes – but the drivers are paid by the kilogramme, and the low rate they are paid makes it not worth their while to move with that kind of load. So they raise the sides of their trucks and load 50, and sometimes even 70 tonnes: this makes their trip profitable, although it also creates a hazard for all other road users.

“Several times I’ve witnessed an overloaded truck breaking an axle or losing its wheels on the road,” Krasnodar car enthusiast Alexander Savin tells me. “And a breakdown like this immediately turns into a traffic accident affecting every vehicle nearby. Chunks of iron and shreds of tyres fly all over the place, the truck’s side panels open and the grain pours out onto the road. Other road users slam on their brakes and either slide into a ditch or collide with one another. People can be injured or even killed, and all because of overloading.”

Trucks carrying excess loads are also a hazard for road surfaces: in 2017, for example, the Krasnodar regional authorities were forced to pass a law limiting the movement of heavy goods vehicles on busy roads during the hot summer months – the sun-warmed asphalt was literally melting under their weight, producing troughs that required major repairs. The grain trucks were, of course, not the only culprits, but their contribution was considerable.

War over a few kopecks

The most flagrant legal irregularities begin when an overloaded grain truck approaches a Russian highway patrol checkpoint. Officially, it should be stopped and refused permission to travel further. But in practice, this is not what happens. Bribery is one of the main issues that the conflict between the truckers and the grain companies has brought to light.

“Unfortunately, the drivers know exactly how much they have to pay at each separate checkpoint to enable them to pass through unhindered,” Vladimir Matyagin, chair of the all-Russian Gruzavtotrans (“Goods Transport”) Association tells me.

“And the sums vary with the regions: the closer to the Black Sea ports, the larger the sum. In the Rostov region, for example, it is 3,000 roubles (£35) per truck, and even more in the Krasnodar region. So if you’re driving from Volgograd to Novosibirsk, for instance, the overall sum can reach 10,000 roubles (£118). And, believe it or not, this all has to be taken into account. Drivers end up in a ridiculous situation: on the one hand, they need to overload their vehicles to avoid making a loss – while on the other they have to bribe the Highway Patrol guys to turn a blind eye.”

Traffic police officer. Photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0: InfoPro / Flickr. Some rights reserved.The aim of the strike is to put an end to this system of payments. It’s basically a war on corruption: if the checkpoints refuse to let trucks with excessive loads through, the truckers will just not drive anywhere at the current low rates. And the companies will then have to raise the rates to an acceptable level. For the moment some truckers have, nonetheless, agreed to carry excess loads and are not taking part in the strike.

There are other reasons for this protest, too. “The action was triggered by an increase in the price of fuel,” Andrey Gruzdenko, one of the protests’ most active (and public) participants tells me. “The thing is that the overloading issue has been around for a long time, but it was always down to the individual driver. If he had an excess load, he would earn more, but he made some money even without one. Now diesel prices have rocketed and absorbed all the truckers’ profits. It’s completely impossible to avoid overloading: there would automatically be a loss on your trip.”

The Gruzavtotrans association didn’t initiate this protest, but is in contact with the drivers and helping them stick up for their rights. The current strike has no official leader or staff who would coordinate the actions of everyone involved in it. Truckers from different regions only have contact with one another via internet messaging, which they use to coordinate actions.

According to Gruzavtotrans’s Vladimir Matyagin, the association’s activists have even made a video, secretly shot at one of the Southern Federal District’s checkpoints, where you can see an inspector allowing an overloaded truck through on a stamped document received in return for cash. The video has been sent to law enforcement agencies, but they are yet, it seems, to receive a response.

“At the moment, the drivers want their rates to be raised by a very small amount,” says Alexander Tipikin of the Rostov branch of Gruzavtotrans. The present rate is 1.43 roubles per kilo. “The truckers would be satisfied with 1.75 roubles per kilo. So it’s a question of an extra 32 kopecks a kilo. There are currently 200 people on strike in one district of Rostov region alone, and their actions are blocking access to the ports for 90,000 tonnes of grain.”

According to the association, although there may only be 12,000 grain trucks registered in Russia’s Southern Federal District, up to 7,000 drivers, from various southern Russian regions may be involved in the strike. They aren’t organising open rallies or standing around holding placards: they just aren’t going to work. Indeed, people involved in the protest are afraid to talk to journalists and, with a few exceptions, try not to give their names. One obvious reason for this is a recent hike in fines for taking part in unsanctioned rallies: they can now reach 50,000 roubles (around £600) – a hard blow to middle-income families.

It’s paradoxical that the people who are holding the protest are, at the same time trying not to draw too much attention to themselves, for fear of punitive measures on the part of the authorities and the grain companies. The strike has been not only impromptu, but anonymous.

The activists talk about the need to create a proper grain hauliers trade union to protect their interests, but at the same time this strike began spontaneously and has no connection (at least at present) with the activities of the Organisation of Russian Truck Drivers (OPR), which was set up in 2017 after protests over the introduction of the“Platon” transport tax.

The driver at the protest action of truckers opposing the Platon system in the parking lot of the Mega-Khimki Mall in the Moscow Region. Photo: Grigory Sysoev / RIA News. All rights reserved.“We know about this strike in southern Russia, but we aren’t taking part,” says Mikhail Kurbatov, a member of OPR’s coordinating council. “In the first place, we have very few activists in the Southern and North Caucasian Federal Districts, and the people involved in this strike don’t yet want to join OPR. In the second, our goals don’t really coincide with what the strikers are after. The OPR aims to resolve all issues using legal means. We try to have input into the legal regulation of goods transport, whereas strikers just want a higher rate for their work. Our aims are more global, theirs are more local.”

“Over the course of this season, about two million tonnes of grain have been unloaded at Krasnodar regional ports alone”, says Alexander Korbut, the vice-president of the Russian Grain Union. “And the striking truckers have now blocked the delivery of another 80-100 thousand tonnes. But this is a mere drop in the ocean – less than five percent of the overall grain harvest. The figures tell the tale of the protest – it might make inconvenient and unpleasant reading for certain grain trading companies, but it has no effect on the general picture.”

The situation is also affected by drivers who are not taking part in the strike and are continuing to work at the old rates, overloading their trucks while trying not to draw attention to themselves. They still represent a majority of truckers (around 60%, according to both Gruzavtotrans and the Russian Grain Union).

Meanwhile, protesters visit strikebreakers at their homes and at grain terminals, persuading them to join the action. Some have agreed to join the strike; some haven’t. And like the strikers themselves, they are trying their hardest to avoid drawing attention to themselves – they are, after all having to break the law daily.

This strike is unlikely to end in victory for the truckers. It’s not just about the lack of solidarity, coordination or organising committee, but the low numbers. It appears that the grain export companies and Grain Union have not seen them as a serious risk, and are choosing to wait the situation out.

Nataliya Gumenyuk is an international journalist and head of Hromadske Ukrainian TV channel.Natalia Gumenyuk is a leading voice both inside and outside Ukraine. A co-founder and currently head of Hromadske, a leading independent news channel, Gumenyuk has reported extensively on Maidan, Donbas and Crimea, as well as the Arab Spring. In November 2013, Gumenyuk wrote "From a Euromaidan in Ukraine" for openDemocracy, where she talks powerfully about the distinction between protest symbols and external points of view and the reality of protest on the ground. 

Here, we talk to Gumenyuk about the main obstacles to democratisation in Ukraine — the war in Donbas, and silence about its consequences for Ukrainian society.

The 2014 Revolution of Dignity was not just a political turning point for Ukraine, but also a moment of emotional uplift. Do you think that the last five years have seen increasing disillusionment with its aftermath?

I don’t use the word “disillusionment” lightly. I was never disillusioned, because we went to the Maidan with the feeling that we knew things would happen differently after a period of time, differently than at the peak of the revolution, and that we had to be prepared for that.

To be disillusioned is naive. Even when I wrote a book about the events of the Arab Spring, I knew full well that the media would be initially enraptured by it, but would soon be talking about an “Arab Winter”. Five years after the Maidan, we can see that this is normal. People are at their best in extraordinary circumstances, and they showed their best qualities and aspirations at that time.

We need to accept that even selfish people can be unselfish for three months during a revolution. We spend all our time talking about what we didn’t succeed in achieving after Maidan. I’m not interested in talking about what went wrong: I’m interested in working out how to actually change the system. What can make that happen – a team that can infiltrate the system or the professionalism of an individual leader? There are strong individuals who have headed ministries and achieved their goals. But other activists have failed in similar circumstances.

"Even selfish people can be unselfish for three months during a revolution"

Ukraine’s post-Maidan history also needs to be seen in a global perspective. In Egypt, activists didn’t get involved in government and didn’t create a party. In Ukraine, some activists did go into government, but they also didn’t create their own party, and scattered themselves among a number of political forces.

Now we’re going to have an election and it’s clear that they need to unite, to become a single force. At the same time, we have always grumbled that we needed a two party system, two normal parties that aren’t based around individuals – right at a time when the whole world is going back to creating personal movements and parties are dying out, to be replaced by charismatic leaders.

So, you feel that changes in Ukraine’s governmental system have taken place very fragmentarily. What has produced the best result? And where has change yet to take place?

The most important things that have failed to happen are the privatisation of large companies and the reform of the defence and law enforcement agencies. The sectors that involve large amounts of money are the hardest of all. This has nothing to do with people forgetting the ideals of the Maidan: they were demanding the resignation of the Minister for Internal Affairs even then.

When a country is under threat, it’s easier to use law enforcement to convince the population that security is more important than freedom – and stick to that one simple message. This is a painful story that has allowed some people not to introduce changes and others, the activists, not to press their advantage home.

What has succeeded is a change in the logic of the civil service machine: administrative reform that assumes that the loyalty of every Ukrainian official and bureaucrat is to the state and not a political movement or the party that is in power. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but in general, from the Defence Ministry to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, you will always find a critical mass of people loyal to the state. Changes in the health service structure or, for example, competitive processes for the post of railway chief, are theoretically open to all. Tenders and government contracts have become genuinely transparent and officials are afraid to steal.

Lugansk landscape, 2017 year. Photo: Tatyana Goncharuk for oDR.Another interesting thing is the reform of the state-owned Naftogaz, the equivalent of Russia’s Gazprom. This has been one of Ukraine’s most successful reforms and I think it was allowed to happen because it was a question of survival. There is, after all, a war going on. Ukraine depends on Russia for its energy, and if you don’t create a transparent system, which is essential where relations with Russia are concerned, you’ve already lost and thrown in the towel. Naftogaz makes deals with Gazprom – in other words, has direct relations with Russia. You either have them or you don’t – there’s no middle way.

Even oligarchs and governmental bodies at every level realise that energy is something that both the West and Ukraine need. So they pushed through this reform: they have independent management that includes experienced people from other countries, they have everything under control, it’s a normal company. This shows that, given the political will everything should, in principle, work. The logic makes sense.

In this pre-election standoff, do you feel that any of the presidential candidates understands the importance of loyalty to the state, and not to a party?

No. I wouldn’t say that they are doing the opposite, but we need to look at the latest popularity ratings. The candidates all have a very low level of support (10-15%) and none of them has a mission statement of any kind. Yulia Tymoshenko is the only one with some kind of written plan. Some of the stronger young politicians, those who have been heads of ministries and not just rank and file MPs, realise that their chances of the presidency are very slim, which means that they shouldn’t retreat into a hard opposition role, but slog for another five years and try again.

Are the ideals of the Maidan still relevant for candidates?

They are absent from the candidates’ programmes, but then that is such a Holy Grail, of which you can always say that “this wasn’t what we stood for at Maidan”. The formula can always be vulgarised, but in general those ideals were just a benchmark, a final argument.

Let’s talk about the role of the media. How do you think their ways of working have changed since the Maidan; how has their structure changed, what has happened to them?

I can see two factors here. Ukraine has high quality independent media – but they have to operate in an oligarchic market in a country where there are dozens of national TV channels, all of them owned by politicians. Before the Maidan there were even more media outlets, all owned by oligarchs. But they all had the same editorial policy: they showed either Yanukovych propaganda or they just avoided political issues and made tabloid entertainment TV.

During Maidan, a window of pluralism opened. Live shows and debates appeared on TV; there were new faces and new subjects for discussion. And now, five years on, each oligarch has been plugging their agenda ever harder through their media groups. They flourish, they are numerous, they are still growing in number and among them are not just pro-presidential propagandists, but openly pro-Russian ones. Take, for example a project linked to former Yanukovych aides: in late November 2018 they opened a new, large TV channel called “Nash” [“Ours”]. They have the most expensive studio ever built in Ukraine. And you wonder who these people are – you don’t know them and have no idea how this scale is even possible.

A journalist’s view of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, 2015. (c) Sergei Chuzavkov / AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Another, even bigger issue is the fact that we’ve moved from TV companies to whole media empires that pour enormous amounts of money into online platforms. This is a big problem for independent media: the internet used to be their territory, now they have to fight to get through to their audience.

Another obvious problem is polarisation of society: everyone sits in their own bubbles. We invent means of communication, think about going out into the regions and talking to people there, but you can’t get people to sit down at the same table. And this is not just a question of the war and Russian aggression. Public service broadcasters everywhere, not only in Ukraine, have lost their popularity: people don’t trust them and only switch on the one channel whose message they agree with.

You can talk about ideology, but when you are dealing with a war, conservative views will always prevail, and for a long time. This is the tragedy of Russian aggression after the Maidan. This is the revenge. It’s the only thing that can drag Ukraine backwards.

We at Hromadske also have to fight for our audience: it’s quite large for an independent channel, but much smaller than the oligarch-owned TV channels. And I realise that there are real reasons, connected with the flow of cash into digital technology: these media buy their traffic, artificially exaggerate their figures on YouTube – it’s all to do with money.

This can demotivate you: you’re making high-quality programmes and you know that no one’s going to tell you that they’re boring and uninteresting because both the format and visual imagery are good. And then you start to think: maybe people don’t actually want high quality news programmes? But we’re not downhearted. I genuinely believe that they are in urgent demand by a part of society.

What developments could you see happening for other independent media after the elections?

The elections aren’t the main issue for me – I can’t see anything really changing afterwards. Things could become worse, or marginally better, but it will all be going in the same direction. I don’t see these elections being historic ones that will decide the fate of our country. Fortunately the time has passed when each election was a cause for concern. I realise that there is Opposition Bloc, which will take 15% of the vote, but I can’t see them taking power. The major issue facing Ukraine is Donbas.

Ukraine has to reform and move ahead, and it’s difficult for a democratic country to do so when it’s at war. Corruption is a huge problem, but a war is the main argument for clamping down on freedom and compromising on human rights issues. You can talk about ideology, but when you are dealing with a war, conservative views will always prevail, and for a long time. This is the tragedy of Russian aggression after the Maidan. This is the revenge. It’s the only thing that can drag Ukraine backwards.

The war is the same kind of trump card as “we didn’t stand on the Maidan for this”.

Of course. The war is seriously traumatising society because the conflicts and problems created in Crimea and Donbas will haunt future generations. A generation is growing up in Donbas for whom this conflict is the norm. Seven percent of the region’s land has been occupied – at first glance that doesn’t seem like much. Many people no longer remember how things were different before, how the European Football Championship came to Donetsk in 2012, and Donetsk was seen as a European city. I think it’s dishonest to develop a country and pretend that you’re not at war, that it’s all happening somewhere else.

I was worried that some kind of military issues or hate speech would arise during the presidential election campaign. This is always on the agenda in any country where there’s a war. But I have to admit that the politicians are acting with caution, they avoid putting forward proposals that could spark conflicts. We all realise that nothing will be decided in the course of this year, no one will even speak about it.

"It’s dishonest to develop a country and pretend that you’re not at war, that it’s all happening somewhere else"

Even during the month-long State of Emergency in Ukraine in December 2018, the conversation didn’t change. For the first week, people in the regions didn’t know what to do and what it meant and they panicked. But the most obvious result was a restriction on male Russian citizens entering the country.

If someone terrible is elected, that will be the Ukrainian people’s choice, like it or lump it. I’ll accept it. Back in 2010, I had the distinct impression that it wasn’t us, the population that elected Yanukovych: the power dynamics and the resources pumped into the campaign suggested it was a seizure of power. But today, none of the political parties have that kind of money.

What role do the media play in the Donbas conflict, and how has the conflict affected the media in its turn?

Over the last few years, people have been forever asking me about fake news and propaganda. Take the StopFake project, for example: for five years they have been finding some subject to write about every day. There’s a massive volume of material, on a huge scale – it’s even incomparably greater than all the talk about Brexit in Britain. I think that Ukrainians have been sort of inoculated against it. There are people who claim that “Poroshenko organised the shooting at the Maidan”: you have to take it as read that some people will believe it.

The problem with the Russo-Ukrainian war isn’t, in the first instance ,about disinformation, but about the fact that people are actually fighting and dying there. I hate it when people look for the hand of the Kremlin when it isn’t there. But if we’re talking about the roots of the conflict, and look at the particularities of the war with Russia, it’s a question of military technology that can produce destruction on a mass scale. And the Ukrainian Army naturally employs it in return. If they are firing on you with “Grad” rocket launchers, you’ll return fire with them as well. This isn’t some kind of uprising where fighters have got hold of AK47s. The difference between this war and skirmishes in Palestine, for example, or ISIS operations, is that they haven’t had any of this technology. If you’ve been to the front, you’ll see that Donbas is on a different scale altogether.

Children's playground is used as a military checkpoint, Donetsk region, 2017. Photo: Tatyana Goncharuk for oDR.This is both a good and a bad thing for Ukraine. Bad because of the number of dead: a single mortar shell can kill 10 people. But unlike the conflict in the Balkans, where the aggressors and their victims lived, and still live, on the next street, fighters in Donbas can’t see who they are killing. 

In all these years of war, the Donbas has seen very little hand-to-hand or close fighting, and, strangely enough, this is a good sign. About 10,000 people have died there, and 30,000 have been wounded (3,000 of them members of the Ukrainian army), and we have no idea of the number of casualties among the separatist forces. But seeing someone being killed is rare.

The forces on the Ukrainian side have all been artillery. They didn’t see the faces of the people they killed. And it was the same on the other side, and people know this. In other conflict situations, things can be very different. I’ve been reading about the Khmer Rouge, for example, and about a man who still lives a street away from someone who tortured him. Or in the Balkans, for example, neighbours were killing each other. That hasn’t been happening in Ukraine, there hasn’t been such close contact or personal animosity. There have been some situations of this kind, of course, but it has been a question of perhaps a few hundred dead, maximum. All the others were victims of mines or shelling; anonymous killings. It’s not blind hatred. Your commander orders you to fire a Grad rocket: you don’t take a knife and stab a specific person to death. People don’t talk much about this, but it is very important.

This conflict has also so far not involved aviation. Mariupol, for example, could be razed to the ground by a single bomb, and that’s warfare on a different level. And the military are well aware of this as well. You only have to remember what happened in Aleppo to realise what we have avoided and are so far still avoiding. There was, of course, the incident in November when Ukrainian Navy vessels were fired on and captured by the Russian FSB coastguard as they attempted to pass through the Kerch Strait on their way from the Black Sea to Mariupol. It was a telling moment, but it mainly affected the armed forces.

Captain Volodymyr Lisovoy, one of 23 captured Ukrainian naval personnel currently held in Moscow. Photo: Kommersant Photo Agency/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.The media’s role in fanning the flames of this incident and the conflict in general is difficult to pin down – there are always difficulties with contractual arrangements and red lines that are difficult to avoid crossing, to avoid suggestions of treachery or weakness.

I have a big problem with the oligarchic groups; I think they are bad for Ukraine. Their populism game and frequent lying do nothing to resolve the conflict, and Russia’s disinformation campaign is not just propaganda. It is a system for promoting a certain political line using the full might of the security services and with its entire arsenal, from the Foreign and Defence Ministries to private companies and the so-called government-supported NGOs working together in unison.

We at Hromadske have rejected opinion journalism. It may not be a popular decision, but we have chosen factual journalism, pure reportage. A war situation generally prompts a need for media to boost public morale, apportion blame and create myths. In such an emotional situation, even voicing an opinion can hit home and cause hurt. And at the same time there is very little information available and people don’t know for sure what’s happening, but they all have their own take on the situation.

Ask anyone, even a Minister, what’s going on and they don’t know, but they do have an opinion. Information is lacking and many of these opinions are based on outdated or incorrect information – on what was happening five years ago. In Donetsk, for example, there is no chaos. Shop-raiding stopped in October 2014, but people are living under a harsh regime, a military dictatorship. It’s horrific, but conditions are completely different from five years ago: people can be sentenced to corrective labour – drunkards, for example, have to plant lawns – and there is a curfew in operation. And when somebody in Kyiv describes the situation as though it was still April 2014, talking about chaos and plain clothes police with Kalashnikovs staggering along the streets, people stop listening to them. And this kind of thing can erode trust.

When I argue, I don’t see myself as rejecting someone else’s opinion: I’m simply relating facts and showing people that their arguments may be weak because they are based on outdated facts, whilst if we want to move forward and take decisions we need to know what is happening now, today.  

Paraopeba muddy river on Sunday (27/1/2019), after the rupture of the Vale S.A. mining dam in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. (Photo: Cadu Rolim/Fotoarena/Sipa USA). PA Images. All rights reserved.

What is the value of human life when it stands in a way of profit?

This is the alarming question that comes up when we draw a comparison in responses to the two recent dam collapses in Brazil - the 2015 Mariana disaster and the January collapse of the Brumadinho dam - with their counterparts in Europe, in particular the 1998 collapse of the Los Frailes dam in Aznalcollar, Spain and the 2010 failing of the Kolotovar dam in Hungary.

News of the recent human and environmental catastrophe in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil, where, according to the Ministry of Civil Defense, the collapse of an iron ore tailings dam killed at least 165 people with almost 160 people still missing, feels like being transported straight back to 2015. Described as “Brazil’s worst environmental disaster” the then collapse of the Mariana iron ore tailings dam, which killed 19 people, displaced 375 families and is located only about 120 km away from the sight of the recent disaster, evidently achieved little in terms of the urgent progress in environmental laws that would bring more control over Brazil’s huge mining industry and ensure the protection and dignity of human and natural life. 

Like in the 2015 Mariana dam collapse, there is evidence showing that the Brazilian mining ore giant VALE knew of the frailty of its dams in both cases.

Like in 2015, there is evidence showing that the Brazilian mining ore giant VALE knew of the frailty of its dams in both cases. In 2013 environmental agencies such as the Brazilian Instituto Prístino were already showing their concerns over the Mariana dam’s safety. And now, only a few days ago Reuters published an exclusive investigation of a report from October 2018 entitled ‘Geotechnical Risk Management Results’. Conducted by specialist engineers, the report classified the Burmadinho dam as “two times more likely to fail than the maximum level of risk tolerated under internal guidelines”. A point of further concern, as Reuters reveals, is that nine other dams out of the 57 examined were placed in “attention zone”. 

And like in 2015, little has been done to put VALE and the whole of Brazil’s mining industry under stricter control.

Like in 2015, little has been done to put VALE and the whole of Brazil’s mining industry under stricter control. In fact, in both cases the company was just about to significantly expand its production right before the two accidents occurred, while accepting no responsibility for its personal role in causing the damage. In a 2012 ceremony organised by an advocacy Public Eye and Greenpeace Switzerland, VALE was already awarded the distinction of being a corporation with the most “contempt for environmental and human rights” in the world. Constructions in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest, resettling families in Mozambique for the purposes of coal exploration, or the expelling of the indigenous Karonsi’e people in Indonesia for constructing a nickel mine, are just some of VALE’s exploits that justified the shameful award. 

Indeed, most of the victims of Brumandinho’s collapse are Vale employees and their families who might receive some sort of compensation for the experienced damage, but in the Mariana case compensations were especially problematic as the victims mainly pertained to the indigenous communities living in the area, such as the Krenak tribe, which was significantly affected by the collapse of the dam. 

Two European precedents

Los Frailes mine, province of Seville, Spain. Photo: Ecologistas en Acción. All rights reserved.

When the zinc, copper, lead and silver mining dam in Aznalcollar, Spain broke in April of 1998, a deluge of heavy metal spread across nine municipalities of Seville province, including Europe’s most important wetland reserve, the Doñana national park. The environmental consequences of the disaster were enormous: right after the dam’s collapse the entire aquatic life of the nearby Guadiamar river vanished and over 30 tons of dead fish were collected from the shores.

After a significant investment of at least €300 million in decontamination travails, a decade later environmental scientists declared the soil surrounding Aznalcollar to have “recovered reasonably well”. 

Only four months after this encouraging announcement, in October 2010, Europe witnessed another dam collapse. Near the city of Ajka in western Hungary, a collapse of a dyke in one out of the eleven waste reservoirs surrounding the Ajka aluminium plant caused a spillage of red and grey sludge - accumulated in over 50 years of aluminium production - into the area. Ten people were killed as a result of the disaster, several hundred injured and sixteen settlements affected. 

The 'Red sludge' alumina plant accident, Hungary. Photo: Ministry of Public Administration and Justice. All rights reserved.

Immediately following the disaster, the Hungarian government passed a law that would allow the state to take control over companies responsible for environmental catastrophes. It imposed a thirteen-member board to supervise MAL Hungarian Aluminium, which lasted for almost a year. One of the results of this pressure was the company’s switch from wet to dry technology, a lot safer in terms of protecting the waste inside the dams and capable of preventing a potential collapse of dams on account of natural movements in the soil.  

What happened with the companies operating the dams, the Swedish multinational Boliden Apirsa in charge of Aznalcollar and Magyar Aluminium Zrt (MAL), which owned the Kolontar plant, after the accidents?    

Although Boliden’s culpability for the collapsing of the mine in Aznalcollar could not be proven retroactively, the accident did lead to a reassessment on waste legislation and the need for greater control over waste management across Europe and Spain.

In both cases, the companies in charge of the mining production tried to exempt their culpability by claiming they received all the required permissions from the responsible state authorities. While the Spanish court adjudged that the main cause of the dam’s collapse was the ‘unpredictable defect’ in the structure of the dam, the proceedings in Hungary brought about a more hopeful resolution. The Hungarian court placed primary responsibility for the dam’s collapse to the structural fault of the tailing pond. However, it recognised that the negligence of MAL’s personnel held a secondary culpability as well. In fact, the state liquidated the company in 2013, placed it back into state ownership and arrested its executive director and a few other officials. 

Although Boliden’s culpability for the collapsing of the mine in Aznalcollar could not be proven retroactively, the accident did lead to a reassessment on waste legislation and the need for greater control over waste management across Europe and Spain. Thus, in 2007 Spain passed a law on Environmental responsibility, which includes the responsibility of operators to prevent, avoid and repair environmental damage. 

Following the Kolontar disaster, Hungary proposed the creation of a European Industrial Disaster Risk-Sharing facility. This co-funded initiative would provide immediate emergency relief in case of environmental disasters, as well as promote further research on ecological safety of mines and similar extraction industries.  

The Hungarian state liquidated the Aluminium producer MAL in 2013, placed it back into state ownership and arrested its executive director and a few other officials.

The two accidents, while not completely effective in terms of proving the shared responsibility of extraction industries for the damage, did result in significant changes to environmental legislation and our general thinking on the importance of ecological safety. 

What the two cases showed to be the most significant obstacle in demonstrating the role of big corporations in environmental disasters was the weakness in supervision of the governments that, in many cases, granted the companies with licenses based on insufficient assessments of potential risk analyses. 

The problem here is primarily twofold. First of all, these companies bring a lot of profits to the states and the worry that money will continue to rule the game applies to the case of Brazil in particular. 

Secondly, it shows the state of our environmental thinking especially in the political arena. On account of cuts into ecological organisations and their general budget deficits, environmental safety agencies are often lacking the money and personnel to actually conduct research that would predict potential risk scenarios that these dams pose to our environment. Not only are we in a dire need to provide more funding to environmental protection agencies, we also need a radical shift in our ecological thinking. If we want things to change  - and at this point it is actually about the need to rather than the want to change - we need more ecological imagination, as Leslie Davenport writes in a recent openDemocracy article. 

The changes in environmental legalisation as well as the attempts of both governments to hold the responsible companies accountable for the damage caused, are some of the lessons from the European disaster management that could inspire Latin American authorities in their actions. 

Furthermore, we have recently witnessed some hopeful developments especially important for countries like Brazil, abundant in natural resources and as such the greatest potential victim of industry profiteers.  

We have seen the power that social movements can have in special circumstances even when the enemy they are facing is unrestrained profits at all costs. Environmental catastrophes affect various different communities and touch upon a plethora of environmental and human rights challenges we are still presently facing. In Chile, for example, we are witnessing the formation of alliances spreading across different movements with indigenous activists pairing up with students and ecological movements pushing for a change. It is in this kind of solidarity that I believe the future of this resistance lies. 

People make their way across the Peace Bridge in Derry. Brian Lawless/Press Association. All rights reserved.

“Out of Ireland have we come. Great hatred, little room,

Maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb.

A fanatic heart.”

Excerpt from Remorse for intemperate Speech, William Butler Yeats

After waves of democratisation, waves of EU enlargement, we face now waves of Euroscepticism. Among the many arguments claiming to explain why the EU narrative is losing ground, the following deserves some comment: “peace”, for the EU’s founding fathers, the Robert Schuman generation, initially a convincing argument, is nowadays oversold.

First, we may ask if peace is really automatically guaranteed by the EU framework. A closer look at the UK’s EU membership instructs us that the euphemistically called “troubles” — or, technically, “low intensity conflict” in Northern Ireland — significantly marked the 30 first years of its membership (taking the year 2005 as one among various possible benchmarks for the end of the Northern Ireland conflict). Until the 2016 Brexit referendum, peace was granted for some 10 years. But while walls were torn down in Berlin, 48 “interfaces” (“peace lines”, “peace walls”, etc.) were erected and 31 refurbished in Belfast between 2000 and 2017.

Second, it’s obvious to everyone that the UK’s EU membership considerably softened the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. And this to such an extent, that it almost evaporated while the troubles gradually “disappeared”. Doubtless, EU membership contributed to this “peace by piece” process. Bizarre that many acknowledge this only now.

Third, the “unforeseen” consequence of Brexit is a wake-up call for the U2 generation: how many joined in the singing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1983) or “Miss Sarajevo” (1995) but were looking the other way?!  

“Where Does Europe End?” was somehow a trendy question in the early 1990s. Sarajevo? Istanbul? were the tentative responses. We were all looking eastwards. Completely neglecting the fact the “western front” wasn’t quiet at all. Neither the IRA’s second ceasefire (1997), nor the Good Friday Agreement (1998) were by then on the horizon. But we were just looking away. Today, we won’t.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

There are of course many issues at stake nowadays: the ups and downs of the EU, the lack of convergence and the unfinished economic union, clear signals of de-consolidation and de-democratisation, irreversible climate change, the emergence of a new world order and, last but not least, the fate of the United Kingdom indeed. But let’s not forget the issue here: peace in Northern Ireland.

So, how to preserve peace?

First, we have to change software and consider borders differently: not as an arbitrary line of demarcation that divides, drives out and excludes, but as a common territory that is a zone of exchanges. The border is viewed in this light as a relation to the “other”; a skin or an interface that, by virtue of its porosity, binds and emancipates.

Typically, the Union’s cross-border cooperation model may virtually reunite the still divided Ulster province. The special EU Programs Body (SEUPB) that currently implements the EU’s PEACE IV (€ 270m) and INTERREG VA (€ 283m) programmes — of course threatened by Brexit — should be guaranteed and further developed.  

Second, Europe is made up of variety, the European Union being only one among various players. Europe is nowadays a complex multi-layered structure involving different types of partly overlapping integration and territorial cooperation schemes of varying depths and degrees of institutionalisation. Europe is thus already today a multilevel and multi-floor Europe with plurilateral governance and multispeed arrangements.  

While the national level is gaining ground and the EU marginalized, other actors such as the Council of Europe, the OSCE and UNECE could fill the gap with well-designed cross-border programmes in order to soften the border and support most effectively the key “Backstop” option.

Third. Culture and art-oriented organisations, peace-building groups, grassroots anti-sectarian and anti-racist organisations, such as Belfast Exposed, Compassionate City of Belfast, Belfast Interface Project andTrademark Belfast–  to name only a few, working on the interface between communities to develop positive relationships, must receive wind in the sails. Their effective contribution to come to term with legacies of the past, to develop respect for cultural difference and diversity will in the coming weeks play an absolutely key role. 

The UK seemingly leaving the Union, leaves neither Europe, nor History. It is time also for a new sensibility and a great refusal: we refuse to liquidate peace.

Image: The Labour MPs who announced their resignation from the party yesterday. Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA Images, all rights reserved.

This week’s split of several MPs from the Parliamentary Labour Party comes as no surprise at all. It’s been clear since the moment of Corbyn’s election as leader that a section of the most right-wing and/or most ambitious MPs would simply never be able to reconcile themselves either to his leadership or to a Labour Party composed mainly of his supporters. This is probably a large section: about a third of the current PLP would be a reasonable estimate.

This isn’t just because of the political differences between them. It definitely isn’t because Corbyn is an anti-semite, or indifferent to antisemitism. It has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the leadership’s stance on Brexit. It has everything to do with the fact that that stance has not been dictated by the City of London and the CBI.

The politics of the Labour Right

It’s interesting to try to parse the precise political affiliates and character of the eight. The collection of MPs who have left might seem to come from notionally different strands of the Labour Right. Although he has flirted with a Blue Labour, anti-immigration position (as he has with many others), Chuka Umunna has had most success at convincing Blairite true believers that he is their natural leader: cosmopolitan, pro-business and rich. Mike Gapes, by contrast, belongs to that strand of the traditional, Gaitskellite Labour right that has never really got over its disappointment at the end of the cold war, and tries to compensate by hating pro-Palestinian campaigners and millennial Corbynites as much as they once hated the USSR. But they both nominated Blairite candidate Liz Kendall for the leadership: as did all of the eight apart from Chris Leslie.

In fact what seems apparent is that the notional difference between an ‘old right’ tradition represented by the Labour First organisation and the Blairite faction represented by Progress has now almost entirely broken down. Since the moment of Corbyn’s leadership election the two networks have been acting entirely in concert in their efforts to prevent Momentum from gaining influence in constituency parties and to undermine Corbyn and his supporters at every available opportunity. There is no longer any clear or stable ideological difference between them, and it seems evident that the clearest way of understanding their position is in basic Marxist terms. They are the section of the party that is ultimately allied to the interests of capital. Some may advocate for social reform and for some measure of redistribution, some may dislike the nationalism and endemic snobbery of the Tories more than others; but they will all ruthlessly oppose any attempt to limit or oppose the power of capital and those who hold it.

One reason for the erasure of difference between them is the changing composition of the British capitalist class itself. Going back to the 1940s, the old Labour Right was traditionally allied to industrial capital: manufacturers and the extraction industries. The Blairites have always been allied to the City and the Soho-based PR industry. But the long decline of British manufacturing, and the financialisation of the whole economy, has left a situation in which industrial capital is now an almost negligible fraction of that class. Today, in the UK, all capital is finance capital. So on the Labour Right, they’re all Blairites nowadays. A very similar process can be observed taking place in the centrist mainstream of US politics right now, as anti-Trump neocon Republicans and Clintonite, Third Way Democrats increasingly converge upon a common political agenda (this observation was made very persuasively by Lyle Jeremy Rubin on the latest episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast).

Whatever their political lineage, most MPs and their supporters on the Labour Right are therefore not just reluctant to engage in any radical project of social transformation. They are deeply and implacably opposed to any such project. This isn’t to say that they are bad people. It’s a perfectly reasonable position for anyone to take, in the Britain of 2019, that there is simply no point making vain efforts to limit or oppose the awesome power of the City and the institutions that it represents. In the era of globalisation, of China’s rise and the Trump presidency, anyone could conclude that it can only be counterproductive to try to work against it. Many of us take a different view, believing that without severely limiting the power of capital, and soon, the planet itself is probably doomed. But a difference of view is what it is. It shouldn’t lead to moral condemnation.

Appalled and disgusted?

A good example of the latter is the model motion circulated earlier this week by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (a long-standing, small, Bennite factional organisation). The motion begins with the line “This CLP is appalled and disgusted that seven MPs elected by Labour voters have rejected our party and crossed the floor to assist our opponents.”

I regard myself as sharing almost all of the politics, objectives and analysis of CLPD. But this is unhelpful. Apart from anything else, it is disingenuous. We all know that the Blairites simply have a completely different conception of politics, of the useful function of the Labour Party, and of the kind of role they want to play, than do we on the Labour Left. No supporter of Corbyn or CLPD wants to have these people representing us in parliament. To claim that we are disgusted is to imply that somehow, we naively imagined that we were all on the same side. This is, at best, to admit to profound naivety and stupidity. At worst, it is simply dishonest. Why pretend? Why not just accept, calmly and clearly, that these perspectives simply cannot be contained within the same party, and wish the splitters all the best in pursuing their own agendas?

By all means, we should be pointing out that the splitters, and the allies who have just joined them from the Tory Party, are clearly servants of a very particular set of class interests and a very narrow conception of what progressive politics looks like in the 21st century. But the language of outrage only makes us look like we don’t understand the situation.

As I’ve pointed out before most of the Blairite MPs became Labour MPs on the basis of a particular implicit understanding of what that role entailed. According to this understanding, the purpose of a Labour MP is to try to persuade the richest and most powerful individuals, groups and institutions to make minor concessions to the interests of the disadvantaged, while persuading the latter to accept that these minor concessions are the best that they can hope for. That job description might well entail some occasional grandstanding when corporate institutions are engaged in particularly egregious forms of behaviour (such as making loans to very poor people at clearly exorbitant rates), or when the political right is engaged in explicit displays of racism or misogyny. But it doesn’t entail any actual attempt to change the underlying distributions of power in British society; and in fact it does necessarily, and structurally, entail extreme hostility towards anybody who proposes to do that.

It is crucial to understand that what I’m describing here is not a moral or ethical disposition. It doesn’t make you a bad person to have taken up the role I’ve just described. It’s the simple logic of having a particular place in a system of social relationships, and being allied to a particular set of interests within it.

The crisis of the political class

In wider British society, the immediate political base for the centrist MPs is obviously wider than City millionaires; though not much wider. It is in fact very narrowly rooted in the managerial class: very senior managers in the public and voluntary sectors, a larger section of affluent, property-owning salaried employees in the private sector. Any anthropological investigation of a local Labour Party branch is likely to confirm this claim: it is precisely the people from this narrow demographic who are still the most enthusiastic about Blair, or Umunna, and the most vitriolic in their detestation of Corbynism. Of course there are many exceptions to this characterisation (there always are), but the general tendency is clear and unsurprising. The narrow professional political elite of journalists, lobbyists and politicians is, in a certain sense, the leading cadre of this wider managerial class; so it is natural that the latter look up to the former.

Again: there’s nothing wrong or morally reprehensible about this. There’s nothing wrong with being a senior manager, with a vague commitment to an ideal of social mobility and a dislike of the Tories’ explicitly reactionary politics, who really admires Chuka Umunna. There’s nothing wrong with being that, and with violently disliking the people to your left, who probably wouldn’t do that much to limit your own wealth and immediate institutional power if they got into office, but who wouldn’t let you or people like you or the people you most admire run the country to quite the extent that you are used to.

The problem is that in British public life (well, English public life in particular), there is a strong prohibition on ever acknowledging that there are such things as class differences and class interests. And no social group dislikes thinking in such terms more intensely than the professional and managerial classes (and this includes most journalists and political pundits). It is absolutely central to their specific view of the world that such vulgar realities never be acknowledged or discussed, and to assume that only Communists or violent right-wing populists could possibly want to break this liberal taboo.

This is arguably quite different from the perspectives of actual full-blooded capitalists for example: who, when pressed, will often admit that their only aim in life is to make money and keep it, and that they really don’t give much of a damn about ideology, or about the question of who gets hurt. The political elite, along with its most enthusiastic followers in the managerial class, cannot make any such admission to others or to themselves, partly because their whole job is to come up with clever stories about the world and to mediate between the interests of different social groups. If they can’t present themselves as neutral, honest, professionals just trying to make the world a better place, then just what good are they for anything? (This is why the fantasy narratives of Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, are such a key element of their culture: Sorkinism presents a universe in which political wonks, journalists and tv personnel are all just honest, hard-working professionals doing their best to make the world a better place, and doing a damned good job of it. Again, see Chapo Trap House’s several dedicated episodes for the best critique available of this phenomenon.)

This is also the political elite who cannot acknowledge even to themselves that what is motivating their politics right now is a defence of a set of elite privileges. Which is why they need a narrative like the one about ‘Labour antisemitism’ in order to justify their actions to themselves and others. It would be very difficult indeed for any objective observer to concur with Joan Ryan's claim today that Tony Blair and all previous Labour leaders unstintingly "[stood] up to racism in all its forms", and that antisemitism "simply did not exist in the party before [Corbyn's] election as leader" (as Ryan should presumably know if she’s actually spoken to Luciana Berger). It would be clear to an objective observer that the right has been using the claims that Labour is "institutionally anti-semitic", and blind and inactive where issues do arise, in a cynical and shameless fashion to try to justify their implacable hostility to Corbyn.

For months, campaigners on the Right insisted that the only way Corbyn could demonstrate his commitment to fighting antisemitism was by accepting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full, despite the fact that even the original author of that definition had publicly disowned it as not fit for purpose, and Labour’s modification of it was a clear legal improvement. No sooner had the Labour NEC finally accepted the definition, then campaigners switched to claims that ‘complaints of antisemitism were not being properly investigated’, despite the evidence that complaints were now being investigated considerably more thoroughly than they were whilst the Right, under McNicol, retained control of the party bureaucracy.

So it is important to understand why a certain section of the public are so willing to believe this narrative. The reason is that they are members of a particular social group that crystallised and came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, as the traditional professional classes declined (having been subsumed into the public sector during the post-war years, then battered into resentful compliance along with the rest of that sector by Thatcher and her successors). It is this group - the professional political elite and their most loyal followers amongst the wider managerial class - that is now suffering a traumatic and disorienting existential crisis.

Neither the professional elite nor the managerial class ever enjoyed much authentic legitimacy amongst the wider public. The broader public deferred to their new bosses for as long as they got the compensations offered by an ever-expanding consumer culture, enabled by cheap credit and Chinese imports. Since 2008, fewer and fewer members of that wider public have been offered the same compensations, and so the authority and legitimacy of the political / managerial class has been in terminal decline. Both Corbynism and the Brexit vote are symptoms and examples of the public finally refusing their authority.

That is why Brexit represents such a traumatic existential crisis for these elites, and why they cannot separate it from Corbynism in their collective imagination. It is clearly absurd, in objective historical terms, to blame Corbyn for Brexit, or to keep demanding that he ‘come out’ against it when his doing so would make no difference at all to the parliamentary reality (there is no majority in the house of commons for a people’s vote). But the members of this declining, delegitimated social elite have experienced both Brexit and Corbynism as part of exactly the same process; the process by which the people that they have governed and managed for a generation have turned around and rejected their authority and their world-view. Embracing the idea that Labour is institutionally antisemitic and racist, and that Brexit is Corbyn’s fault, are understandable psychosocial responses to the experience of this historical trauma. (And again, Chapo Trap House’s excellent recent analysis of the way in which claims of antisemitism have been mobilised against the Left in the US is pertinent). Such a response allows the members and partisans of this elite to tell themselves that they are defenders of liberal values, so that they do not have to face up to the fact that, in opposing Corbyn, they are defending nothing but their own sectional privileges and those of their corporate liege lords. What these stories are not is rational, descriptive accounts of any kind of objective social reality, that can be reasoned with politically or morally.

What do we do?

For the Labour left, the political conclusions to be drawn from this analysis are stark, but important. As I’ve already suggested - we should not be responding to the behaviour of the centrists with simple moral indignation. Their entire project is to wrap up their defence of their own elite interests in a language of moral indignation – accusing the Left of racism, of being responsible for Brexit, of ‘bullying’ (ie expecting elected representatives to be accountable to members and constituents). But the more that we respond to them with our own language of outrage and betrayal, the more that we legitimate these fairy-tales, rather than exposing them for what they are.

By the same token, it is crucial not to fall into the sentimental trap of imagining that if only we are nice enough to them, then we will be able to prevent the Right from doing everything in their power to prevent the success of Corbynism. The split was always going to happen, and the only thing we could truly do to stop it would be to let the neoliberal centrists have control of the party once again. Tom Watson’s recent interventions make this very clear. He calls movingly for a kinder and gentler approach to politics, expressing moral outrage over the horror of antisemitism. But what he wants is a shadow cabinet reshuffle to represent ‘the balance of opinion in the Parliamentary Labour Party’. Presumably he doesn’t want one that would actually represent the politics and views of the current membership: if it did, then it probably wouldn’t include Tom Watson.

Either we’re going to give them what they want - full control of the party once again - or we’re not. And if we’re not, then they will do everything in their power to damage our cause. Because there can be no real doubt that this is the aim of the split, and that the long-term split is planned to come in waves rather than all at once, and this has been planned not because it is the most effective way to launch a new party, but because it will maximise the long-term damage to Corbyn’s Labour.

This is a surprisingly unpopular view amongst mainstream Corbynites. The caricature of Corbynites is that they are all wild-eyed sectarians, hell-bent on deselecting every MP to the right of Chris Williamson. This isn’t true at all. Frankly, I think it isn’t true because many Corbyn supporters are actually rather naive about the political character of the Labour Right. They, like Corbyn himself, do not actually see the world in terms of Marxist (or Gramscian) political sociology; rather they see it in moral terms, as a conflict between decency and justice on the one hand, greed and militarism on the other. They know that the majority of even the most right-wing Labour MPs are not Bad People, and so they assume that sooner or later they will come round to supporting Corbyn, if only he shows willing to address their legitimate concerns on Brexit and antisemitism.

This is just a categorical analytical mistake. Corbyn could convert to Judaism, apply for Israeli citizenship and call for a People’s Vote tomorrow: their attacks on him would not relent for one second unless he agreed to give up control of the party; or at least to commit to a policy agenda approved by Merrill Lynch.

The view that there is no point trying to prevent the right from splitting is also unpopular because, for all of its radicalism and democratic potential, mainstream Corbynism remains a left-wing version of Labourism. Labourism is the ideology that assumes that the Labour Party and only the Labour Party must be the vehicle to bring socialism to the UK, and that the only route to that objective must lie through the securing of a parliamentary majority for Labour in the House of Commons. The problem now is that if there is a significant split in the party, then it will put Labour back in the position it seemed to be before the 2017 election: unable to realistically aspire to a parliamentary majority of its own, forced to face (if not to answer) uncomfortable questions about its possible future relationships with the SNP, the Greens, even the Liberal Democrats, in a complex ecology of parties, factions and tendencies. The Labourist imaginary abhors this vision. It wants to live in a world in which the Labour Party, alone, united under a relatively progressive leadership, can win a large parliamentary majority against a once clearly-defined opponent (the Tories), and implement a progressive programme. It wants, very very much, to live in 1945.

The trouble is we don’t. We don’t live in 1945, and the ideological differences between the Blairites and the Corbynites are of a different existential order to the ones between Bevanites and Bevinites in the 1940s. They may have hated each other, they may have had entirely different attitudes to both capitalism and communism. But they didn’t represent social constituencies whose interests simply could not be reconciled even in the short term. The miners, the skilled engineers and even the manufacturers all stood to make immediate gains from the success of Labour’s programme, as did all their leaders.

This is unlike the current situation in some key ways, although it is similar to it in others. Many of the managerial class in fact have a great deal to gain from a Corbyn victory, because their own children are suffering so badly from labour-market precarity and unaffordable housing (and this, as much as Brexit, is why so many of them voted Labour in 2017). But if they are going to achieve those gains, then they will have to make some significant concessions to groups lower down the social hierarchy. In the public sector, for example, senior managers may well have to accept some relative reduction in their salaries and some increase in the autonomy of those they manage. This potential loss puts them in an ambivalent position, potentially supportive of Corbyn’s agenda, but anxious about what it might cost them. But their symbolic leaders in the media and full-time political elite have absolutely nothing to gain, and can only lose, from the success of Corbynism. For this reason, they simply will not stop trying to do everything in their power to drive a wedge between their followers and the rest of the Labour Party. There’s no point pretending that they might.

At the same time, there is no point pretending that in the volatile world of 21st century politics, the political divide between those inside the party and outside of it is the most important one that matters. There are members of every other party - even the Tories - who have more in common with Corbyn’s ideological agenda and more sympathy for his political programme than do those MPs who are reported to be considering joining the split. More importantly, there are members of every other party - even, indeed, the Tories - who are less clearly aligned with class interests that are inimical to Labour’s project.

Political success is always about leading complex coalitions of interests. The Labourist fantasy is that all elements of such a coalition can always be contained inside the Labour Party. As the split deepens, it will become apparent that Labour’s remaining vote and support will not be enough on its own, or even after another period of considerable growth, to win the battles that Labour needs to win.

Labour must seek to lead a coalition of progressive forces. All parts of that formula are important. It cannot keep pretending that all sections of the Labour Party are even potentially progressive in character. It cannot afford to ignore the existence of progressive forces outside of Labour or the need to make common cause with them. It must seek to lead that coalition. Nobody is suggesting that it submerge its identity or dilute its programme: that isn’t what leadership means.

But Labour must also be alive to the specific political objective of the ‘Independent Group’. There is a clear international precedent for the path that they are taking, in trying to establish a centrist party that could only ever be small, only ever appeal to the managerial class, and never hope to command a mass base, while pursuing a pure neoliberal agenda. In Germany, the Free Democratic Party conforms to precisely this description, only ever winning around 10% of the vote. From this position, it has held the balance of power in almost every West German and German parliament since 1948. 

It’s always been logical that the legatees of the Third Way would eventually opt for this as their ideal political model. Labour, the traditional party of the organised working class, was always a strange and uncomfortable home for them in many ways. The problem for Labour is that if this group manage to establish this position for themselves, then they will pose a permanent obstacle to progressive government unless a very broad-based movement can be built to stop them. In 2016 and 2017 many of us hoped that the dream of Labour becoming a million-member party might be realised. There seems little chance of that now. Ultimately the social and political terrain of 21st century Britain is still too complex and too variegated for any one organisation to unite that many people. But we still need a million-member movement, if any chance of real progress is going to come onto the horizon. This is the movement that Labour must seek to lead, and must accept that it can never entirely contain. 

If the Labour leadership really wanted to engage with the current situation meaningfully, this is what it would do. It would not retreat into ideological purism. It would not lift another finger to prevent the Blairites from leaving the party. It would convene a national conference, inviting Greens, social democrats, communists, socialists, liberals, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, trade unionists, NGOs and others to discuss the political and social crisis facing the country. The explicit aim of the conference would be to find an inclusive and effective road-map to take the country beyond neoliberalism. Those who share no such commitment need not be included. But everyone who shares it should, including those stalwart social democrats of the old Labour right who retain some authentic commitment to a political objective other than defeating Corbynism. This would be a meaningful way of neutralising the charge that Labour is not a broad church, and would help to isolate those elements who want to claim the mantle of diversity in order to sustain the neoliberal order.

Is this exactly the right solution? I don’t know. Maybe there are many other possible answers. But I know that the question is the right one: how do we assemble all of the potential allies at our disposal, to build an alternative to neoliberal hegemony, without getting bogged down in pointless debates with those who only want to defend it? That’s the question that the party and the leadership must now answer, if the splitters – who want nothing more than to maintain neoliberal hegemony – are not to get their way.