Battling for Hong Kong’s Soul

 

Louisa Lim, Indelible City:

Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

(Riverhead Books)

When the United Kingdom turned control of Hong Kong over to the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1997, China pledged that the island city would retain a high degree of autonomy for fifty years: its robust capitalist system would remain intact and its governmental system, based on something approaching democracy and the rule of law, would continue. That pledge, reduced frequently to the mantra “One Country, Two Systems,” was underpinned in 1984 by a Joint Declaration that had been hammered out between Britain and China after two years and twenty-two rounds of negotiations.  But as Louisa Lim details in her elegantly written, heartfelt, yet altogether dispiriting account, IndelibleCity: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, the “One Country, Two Systems” pledge now seems like a bad joke. China has turned this once free society into an authoritarian one.

The “One Country, Two Systems” pledge, although resting entirely on Beijing’s good faith, with no mechanisms to monitor or ensure compliance, nonetheless held precariously through the first decade of the 21^st century.  But in the century’s second decade, as Hong Kongers asserted their desire for greater democracy, China reneged on its pledge.  Ever harsher assertions of Chinese control over what is known euphemistically as a “Special Administrative Region of China” have seen pro-democracy activists, lawmakers and journalists jailed, major political parties shut down, voting rights curbed and freedom of the press and media undermined.  China’s endgame, Lim argues, is now “total dominance” (p.252): it views Hong Kong’s systems and its attendant freedoms as a “threat to its own security (p.259).”

At the core of Indelible City is Lim’s account of resistance to the power of the Chinese Communist Party  in the 2010s, especially in 2014 and 2019, when Hong Kongers turned out in massive numbers to demand democracy, human rights, and the principle that Hong Kongers should rule Hong Kong.  Lim witnessed these demonstrations first-hand, as both a journalist and a participant. After growing up in Hong Kong and working there as a journalist for many years, she found herself not only writing about the collapse of the familiar world she had known since her earliest years but also working actively to prevent it.

Lim recognizes that participating in events as an individual and detailing them as a professional journalist require tricky balancing.  Although she tried earnestly to preserve her professional neutrality and objectivity, she found herself continually asking whether she had fallen short of the standards of her profession. Yet, gradually, the feeling that she had to “choose between being a journalist and being a Hong Konger” (p.207) gave way to the uneasy realization that she was both, not one or the other.

The first mass demonstrations that Lim covered, in 2014, known as the “Umbrella Movement” (because many demonstrators used umbrellas as shields against the police), were organized as a protest against proposed reforms which would have limited Hong Kongers’ capacity to choose their city’s Chief Executive to candidates approved by Beijing.  The Umbrella movement was followed by even more significant demonstrations in 2019 against a proposed extradition provision that would have allowed Hong Kongers suspected or charged with criminal acts to be tried on the Chinese mainland under the very different Chinese system of justice, threatening Hong Kong’s traditional role as a refuge for mainland dissidents and activists.

Beijing imposed a new National Security Law on Hong Kong in the following year, 2020, which effectively criminalized dissent, with broad and vague definitions of sedition, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces (a similar law had been proposed but not adopted in 2003).  Since 2020, this law has been used to further tighten China’s grip on Hong Kong.  The organization of demonstrations on the scale of 2014 and 2019 is now far more perilous, and none appear likely in the foreseeable future.

Although there were multiple causes underlying the 2014 and 2019 demonstrations,  in Lim’s view they all “revolved around one core issue: identity” (p.151), an issue that Lim digs into deeply. Throughout Hong Kong’s colonial history, Great Britain competed with China to define the city’s identity, but, as Lim shows, Hong Kongers defied both as they sought to define their own identity. These battles “for Hong Kong’s soul,” (p.231), as Lim terms them, cast critical light on Hong Kong’s turbulent recent years.

* * *

About one third of Indelible City concentrates upon how Great Britain controlled Hong Kong territories from the 1840s up to 1997. In a century and a half of colonial rule, Britain did not establish genuinely democratic institutions in Hong Kong.  It did not endow its subjects with full citizenship, the right of abode in Britain, or universal suffrage. But it nonetheless provided a framework within which democratic institutions could emerge and potentially flourish – more by accident than by an “imperial masterstroke,” Lim writes, driven by a “confluence of misplaced personal initiative, misunderstanding, and overreach” (p.70-71).  Born “in fits and starts,” Hong Kong’s current plight is rooted in what Lim describes as “century old acts of piecemeal acquisitions that bear revisiting” (p.71).

In the first such acquisition, in 1842, Hong Kong became an official British Crown Colony when the Qing dynasty ceded Hong Kong Island through the Treaty of Nanjing.  The treaty put an end to what was known as the First Opium War between the Britain and China,  fought over the right to import opium into China.  In 1860, Britain acquired the Kowloon peninsula at the conclusion of the Second Opium War with China.  Finally, in 1898, through what was known as the Second Convention of Peking, Britain acquired the third and largest tranche of land that makes up contemporary Hong Kong, known as the New Territories, 92% of present-day Hong Kong’s land mass. Rather than a permanent concession, the Chinese agreed to a 99-year lease, terminating in 1997. The British minister in Beijing surely thought this was forever, Lim speculates, probably never imagining a China strong enough to demand its return.

By the 1850s, Britain had a flourishing trading station free from Chinese jurisdiction. Many who were low on the social totem pole in mainland China came to Hong Kong and made their fortunes.  In the 19^th and early 20^th century, Hong Kong allowed “opportunistic and hardworking migrants, both British and Chinese, to reimagine their lives, though few saw it as a permanent home” (p.81).  British colonial administration was mostly about “control and regulation of the local population, rather than governance” (p.71).  While the British “preoccupation with justice brought order to the new colony,” Lim writes, it also “cemented in British minds a view of the incoming Chinese migrants as deplorable” (p.78).

From the 1840s onward, moreover, two competing historical narratives shaped Hong Kong.  For the British, Hong Kong was a “moneymaker, a ‘future Great Emporium of Commence and Wealth,’” (p.78), as Hong Kong’s first British Governor put it.  But in Beijing, the Nanjing Treaty of 1842 was seen as the first “unequal treatment treaty,” imposed by what the Chinese considered the gunboat diplomacy of imperial aggressors.  Hong Kong’s loss marked the start of China’s century and a half of “humiliation by foreign powers, a matter of national shame that could only be eased with the island’s return to its rightful owner” (p.78-79).  For both Britain and China, the competition between the two contrasting historical narratives was part of the effort to define Hong Kong identity.

Throughout British rule, Hong Kongers were told that they were “purely economic actors” (p.154).  Lim writes that she herself was “shaped by Hong Kong values,” in particular a “respect for grinding hard work and stubborn determination” (p.4).  But, somehow, latent civic values also became part of the Hong Kong mindset, including an “almost religious respect for freedom, democracy, and human rights” (p.16).  Over time, Hong Kong became a “place of refuge and free thinking… a sanctuary for Chinese dissidents and revolutionaries, a place where taboo topics could be discussed, and forbidden books sold in tiny bookshops tucked up narrow staircases”  (p.159).

Extensive business and family ties to mainland China also led many Hong Kongers to identify culturally with the mainland.  The Cantonese language spoken in Hong Kong was another identity marker.  Although often viewed as a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese is incomprehensible to most Mandarin speakers, Lim indicates.  Hong Kong identity, she suggests, should be considered “plural, more like a constellation of evolving and overlapping self-images rather than one fixed point of light” (p.154).

Through what Lim terms  “gritty perversity,” (p.64), Hong Kongers also sought to forge their own identity in ways that fit neither the British nor the Chinese historical narrative. With no great war heroes or statesmen or even heroic acts capable of becoming the stuff of myths, Hong Kongers invented icons that tended to be “antiheroes in the form of discriminated-against outsiders and bullied misfits, people who resisted and continued to do so despite the overwhelming forces allied against them” (p.64).  Antihero number one for Lim is the so-called King of Kowloon, Tsang Tsou-choi, an eccentric calligrapher whose drawings appeared repeatedly at key points in the demonstrations of the 2010s, long after his death.  Lim begins with the King, as everyone called him, and circles back to him throughout.

A “toothless, often shirtless, disabled trash collector with mental health issues” (p.6), the King was obsessed with a jutting prong of the Kowloon peninsula that he believed had originally belonged to his family and had been stolen by the British in the 19^th century.  In the 1950s, he began a furious graffiti campaign in which he accused the British of stealing his family’s land. Viewed then as a “crank and a vandal,” (p.19), the King continued his campaign against the British until the 1997 handoff, when he turned it against China.

The King gained famed and notoriety for his idiosyncratic Chinese calligraphy, easily recognizable by its misshapen, unbalanced characters.  Proficiency in calligraphy was a critical measure of one’s cultivation in traditional China – “both the apogee of all art forms and a tool of power” (p.17).  The King was known and loved for breaking calligraphic rules with “brushstrokes that screamed his illiteracy” (p.18).   For Lim and Hong Kongers of her generation, the King’s work was a “celebration of originality and human imperfection… He broke all the rules, repudiating traditional Chinese behavior” (p.7).  In the early 2000s, the King “seemed to be everywhere” (p.165).  He was the subject of a rapper group’s song and made a commercial for a household cleaning product.

The King died in 2007, but in death became a symbol of the city’s “radical search” for its distinct “social and cultural identity through endless negotiations with its colonial past and neocolonial present” (p.160).  He had raised issues of territory, sovereignty, and loss “at a time when no one else dared to think about them” (p.11).  In their continued acts of defiance, “no matter how small,” the Hong Kong protestors of the 2010s were “following the lead of their dead King” (p.11).  Those acts of defiance “helped to define what it meant to be a Hong Konger” (p.154).  At the heart of that definition was an intensified commitment to democratic values and what Lim terms an “appetite for autonomy” (p.218).

* * *

The method of choosing Hong Kong’s chief executive precipitated the 2014 Umbrella Movement, an eleven week “explosion of discontent, desire and above all hope” (p.181).   After the departure of the last British governor in 1997, Hong Kong’s chief executive was chosen by a committee composed of representatives of Hong Kong’s business elite. The long-term goal was for direct nomination and election by Hong Kong voters by 2017. But in 2014, the Chinese National People’s Congress proposed limiting the ballot to two or three candidates nominated by a 1,200-member Selection Committee.  Universal suffrage was still the long-term goal, the Committee added, but must be achieved only through a “steady and prudent path”  (p.182).

In an early demonstration challenging the proposed nomination procedures, protestors were met with tear gas, the first time Hong Kong police had used this heavy-handed tactic since the 1997 takeover.  Seen as a huge betrayal, the tactic prompted a previously unimaginable numbers of persons to take part in a subsequent demonstration, later estimated to be 1.2 million, roughly 1/6 of Hong Kong’s population. But despite the massive demonstrations, the Umbrella Movement ended without even a symbolic victory. While the Chinese proposal was withdrawn, the chief executive continued to be chosen by the Hong Kong committee of business elites, not the people.

Lim sensed at the time that the fight for democracy in Hong Kong had been lost and the movement crushed, with its leaders imprisoned and marginalized. Many young people were trying to find a way out. Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms were being “salami-sliced away with accelerating speed,” she writes. “One Country, Two Systems was tilting to favor One Country over Two Systems” (p.188-89).  But the 2014 Umbrella Movement can now be seen as “only a dress rehearsal for the carnival of discontent that would explode onto Hong Kong’s streets five years later” (p.183), when the hope for a more democratic Hong Kong once again surged, only to be snuffed out even more ruthlessly.

The 2019 “carnival of discontent” was triggered by a proposal by the Hong Kong government, acting at the behest of Beijing, to alter its extradition laws to permit the rendition to mainland China of alleged criminal suspects, where they would be subject to arbitrary detention and even torture in a legal system with no presumption of innocence.  The proposed legislation threatened the independence of the city’s judiciary, its rule of law, and its status as a political refuge for mainland dissidents and activists, the “very things to which Hong Kong attributed its success” (p.16), Lim writes.

On June 19, 2019, over a million demonstrators, over 1/7^th of Hong Kong’s population, took to the streets to protest the government’s plans to change the existing extradition law, drawing an eclectic crowd that included “all who elevated principle over pragmatism, hope over experience” (p.211).  Putting her journalistic hat aside, Lim and her teenage son participated in the demonstration.  The police used tear gas on the crowd and deployed rubber bullets, with Lin and her son nearly caught up in the police riot.  One week later, a still more massive protest took place, with an estimated 2 million people turning out.

The second protest, which Lim covered as a journalist, targeted the extradition changes but also gave voice to a broader set of demands that had been added to the protestors’ agenda: investigation into police brutality, amnesty for those arrested, retraction of the “riot” label the government used to describe the protests, and genuine universal suffrage. As she witnessed the protest, Lim felt a surge in her love for Hong Kong and her identification with its doomed democracy movement.  She considered the moment a “triumph of idealism” for a people “long stereotyped by their colonial masters as motivated only by the pursuit of money” (p.211).

In early September 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lamb withdrew the extradition proposal.  But it was “far too late,” Lim contends. The battle for Hong Kong’s soul had “already spilled over its borders, causing clashes between Hong Kong supporters and mainland Chinese on campuses around the world.” (p.231).    Lim, who by this time had taken a teaching position in Australia, found that she couldn’t discuss the Hong Kong situation safely in her new location.

Protests and violence continued during much of the remaining portions of 2019.  At one point, Lam called the protestors enemies of the people, a “chilling phrase straight from the Chinese Communist Party lexicon,” (p.235).  The November 2019 elections resulted in a substantial boost to the protest movement,  with 17 of the 18 district councils flipping from pro-Beijing to pro-democracy majorities. But this “did not change a government that had never been answerable to the people” (p.23), Lim observes.

The National Security Law of the following year is anti-climactic in Lim’s account. In addition to proscribing sedition, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces in the vaguest terms, the law appeared to allow if not require those suspected of violating the law to be tried on the mainland.  In August 2021, a law allowing the government to impose exit bans went into effect. “Even the freedom to leave was being denied” (p.260), Lim writes.  Historically a place of refuge, Hong Kong had become a “place that people were fleeing from” (p.257).   China’s maneuvers were now producing Hong Kong boat people.

* * *

In the 2010s, the Hong Kong of Lim’s exhilarating yet ultimately disheartening story was on the “front line of a global battle between liberal democratic values and an increasingly totalitarian Communist regime,” with a tiny dot on the map somehow managing to “unsettle the world’s newest superpower with the power of its convictions” (p.34).  Although Lim retains hope that China has not fully snuffed out Hong Kong’s pro-democracy aspirations, her story leaves little reason to support her optimism.  At the heart of Indelible City is a cruel irony:  a full-throated pro-democracy movement did not gain widespread public support in Hong Kong until China intensified its efforts to exert its control over the island. The movement was anything but too little, yet we can now see that it came far too late.

Thomas H. Peebles

Paris, France

October 19, 2023

 

 

 

 

Testing Britain’s Commitment to Decolonization and the Rule of Law

 

 

Philippe Sands, The Last Colony:

A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (Weidenfeld & Nichols, 2022)

For many across the globe, the 1960s were above all the decade of decolonization.  In 1960, the United Nations for the first time directly addressed the legality of colonization under international law when the General Assembly approved Resolution 1514, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” The resolution characterized foreign rule as a violation of human rights, affirmed the right to self-determination, and called for an end to colonial regimes. The decade saw over 30 colonies, mostly in Africa and Asia, gain their independence from Great Britain, France and other European powers. But the Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States was also a global fact of life throughout the 1960s, reaching the brink of nuclear war in the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Decolonization and the realities of the Cold War converged in 1968 when the Indian Ocean Island nation of Mauritius gained its independence from Britain. In granting independence, Britain split off an area known as the Chagos Archipelago, located about 2000 kilometers north of Mauritius’ capital city, Port Louis, from the rest of the newly independent nation to form a new colonial entity, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).  Two years earlier, in 1966, Britain and the United States had secretly concluded an agreement to locate an American naval base on the Chagos Archipelago’s largest island, Diego Garcia, to support US military operations across the Indian ocean.

Part of the agreement for the Diego Garcia base involved the “resettlement” – forcible deportation – of the entire local population of the Chagos Archipelago from what was in most cases the only homeland its residents had ever known.  The deportations took place between 1968 and 1973.  Although Britain came under criticism immediately for the deportations, it was not until a half century later, in 2019, that an international tribunal squarely determined that Britain’s detachment of the Chagos archipelago had been contrary to international law under UNGA 1514 and that Britain could not legitimately claim sovereignty over the archipelago.

That tribunal was the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ principal judicial organ, located at The Hague in the Netherlands. In addition to resolving contentious issues between member states, the ICJ is also empowered to give advisory opinions on “any legal question” requested either by the UN’s General Assembly or its Security Council.  A UNGA advisory opinion was the route that Mauritius pursued in the Chagos case.

Mauritius was represented before the ICJ by Philippe Sands, a London-based international human rights lawyer who has also litigated high-profile cases involving Chile, Congo, Rwanda, and the ex-Yugoslavia, to name just a few, as well as writing prolifically on and teaching international law. In his most recent work, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy, Sands walks his readers through the Chagos case, allowing us to see the strategies, thinking, and legal maneuvering required to get the case to The Hague and present it effectively before the ICJ. He uses the litigation as a springboard to demonstrate how the international justice system operates at the ground level in a case that in his view goes to “the heart of any system of justice, how the rule of law protects the weak and vulnerable from the excesses of the powerful” (p.130).

The major issues at The Hague, involving the applicability and scope of UNGA Resolution 1514 and conflicting claims of sovereignty, may sound abstract and coldly legal.  But they are significantly less so in Sands’ account because he explains them through the eyes of Madame Lisby Elysé, whom he describes as his book’s “beating heart” (p.x).  Like most in her community of 1,500, located on an island within the Chagos archipelago, Madame Elysé is Black, a descendant of enslaved plantation workers. She dropped out of school early to assist her family and can neither read nor write.  In 1973, when she was 20, recently married and then pregnant, British authorities informed her with almost no advanced notice that she had to leave her island home.  She was allowed to bring one suitcase.  She and the other members of her community have never been allowed to return permanently, although they have been accorded the option of occasional subsidized returns, euphemistically termed “heritage visits.”

The path to The Hague for Madame Elysé and her fellow Chagnossians was long, with many preliminary stops.  Along the way, they brought numerous cases in courts in London challenging the legality of the detachment and subsequent forced deportations; took a trip to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg; and engaged in an arbitration proceeding in Istanbul, all before convincing the UNGA to refer the case to the ICJ for an advisory opinion.  As Sands takes his readers along this path, he never loses sight of how the case affected Madame Elysé and her fellow islanders.

Tying together the diverse strands of Sands’ narrative yields a withering account of Great Britain’s relationship with its former colony.  A state policy of forced deportations as recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s now sees shocking.  But even more shocking in Sands’ account is the degree to which 21^st century Britain, backed by the United States, continues to this day to defend the deportations and assert sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, despite the ICJ decision and a subsequent, nearly unanimous, UNGA resolution which had the effect of affirming the court’s decision.

* * *

To understand the Chagos case’s long journey to The Hague, Sands provides a useful textbook overview of the basic principles and institutions of the post-war international legal order, connecting them to the era’s decolonization movement and to modern notions of human rights and self-determination.  The major documents and instruments creating that legal order, such as the initial UN Charter of 1945, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1949 Geneva Convention, avoided directly addressing the future of colonial regimes, an indication of British and French influence on the drafting process.

UNGA Resolution 1514 redressed the evasions and omissions contained in the early post-war documents and instruments. Passage of the resolution in 1960 rendered colonial domination “illegitimate for the first time in modern international society,” Adom Getachew wrote in Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, reviewed here last year.  Under Resolution 1514, self-determination became a human right, with colonialism itself becoming an international crime. The resolution was adopted by an 89-0 vote, with 9 countries abstaining, including Britain and France.  The   United States was on the cusp of voting yes until President Eisenhower overruled his diplomats and ordered abstention, purportedly upon the personal request of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.  Britain’s official position on Resolution 1514 was that it accepted self-determination as a “principle” although not as a legal “right” (p.34).

But the internal deliberations over Mauritian decolonization which Sands has unearthed suggest that Britain had difficulties accepting self-determination even as a principle. In discussions leading up to independence, Sands indicates, Britain informed the surprised Mauritians that it intended to retain the Chagos archipelago but did not mention the plan for the naval base at Diego Garcia. Facing international condemnation when the detachment arrangement came to world attention, Britain’s Colonial Secretary warned that Britain needed to move quickly before the Mauritians and the world at large learned of the United States’ place in the arrangement, which might “lay ourselves open to an additional charge of dishonesty” (p.44).

To avoid an “additional charge of dishonesty,” the Foreign Office instructed its Ambassador in New York to tell the UN that the Chagos islands “have virtually no permanent inhabitants” (p.44), a “big lie” (p.47) in Sands’ words. But the British Ambassador to the UN was uncomfortable with the word “virtually,” fearing it might raise questions over what that qualification was meant to suggest and advised that it would be preferable to proceed on the basis that there were “no permanent inhabitants” (p.4) on the islands. The word “virtually” was excised, resulting in an even bigger lie.

When one of the Foreign Office’s legal advisors expressed reservations about this approach, which he considered fraudulent, another countered that there was nothing wrong in law or principle with the forced deportations because Britain could “make up the rules as we go along” (p.45).  The Foreign Office stressed that Britain needed to be “very tough” in managing the public relations fallout from Mauritius and that Chagos should become a place with “no indigenous population except seagulls” (p.47).   Several suits were filed in London in the 1970s and 1980s challenging the forced deportations from Chagos, none of which provided the primary relief Madame Elysé and her fellow Chagnossians sought: the right to return to their home islands.

* * *

The major breakthrough in the Chagnossians’ quest to reach The Hague occurred decades later, in 2010, when British Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced the creation of a vast “Marine Protected Area” around the Chagos archipelago.  The Marine Protected Area was intended to protect marine biodiversity, burnish Britain’s environmental credentials and, not incidentally, cast its policy toward the Chagnossians in a more favorable light.  Diego Garcia was excluded from the special area. Although the proposal was warmly received by environmental groups, no one in Mauritius was consulted about British plans for the area.

Sands’ direct involvement in the case began a few months after Miliband’s announcement, when he conferred with Mauritius’ then-Prime Minister Navi Ramgoolam, a member of the English bar, who wanted to find a way to challenge the lawfulness of the Marine Protected Area.  The two focused upon the novel idea of seeking relief through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which had been finalized in 1982 and ratified by more than 150 countries after more than 10 years of negotiations.

Although many of its terms addressed technical matters like fishing rights and the delimitation of sea boundaries, the UNCLOS also contained new rules on the protection of the marine environment and on the “common heritage of mankind,” giving all states rights to mineral resources under the seabed.  The treaty can thus be considered a “post-colonial instrument” that “sought to give effect to the principle of self-determination” (p.62), Sands writes. He and the Prime Minister settled upon attacking Britain’s new policy on several technical grounds, including that it violated Mauritius’ fishing rights around Chagos, coupled with a broader challenge that Britain was not Chagos’ “coastal state” under the UCLOS –  a direct challenge to the legitimacy of both the detachment of Chagos at the time of independence and Britain’s continued assertion of sovereignty over the archipelago.

The UNCLOS provided for arbitration of disputes, along with dispute resolution at the ICJ and at a new International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.  For strategic reasons, the Prime Minister and Sands decided to pursue the arbitration route, with Mauritius launching proceedings in December 2010. A single document supported its application, a United States cable intercepted and published by Wikileaks, which quoted a British official telling the United States that we, Britain, “do not regret the removal of the population” (p.88-89), and suggesting that Britain intended to harness the Marine Protected Area to “extinguish forever the Chagnossians’ ability to return” (p.89), a positive side effect for a project that had already won the approval of environmentalists.

The arbitration panel’s decision, delivered in March 2015, produced a limited victory for Mauritius. The panel unanimously ruled in Mauritius’s favor on the technical issues it had raised. But it declined to rule on which of the two countries was the “coastal state” under the UNCLOS, the broader challenge to British sovereignty, or on the effect of UNGA Resolution 1514 on the case.  Two dissenting arbitrators, however, agreed with Mauritius’ position on both sets of issues. This partial victory led Mauritius to conclude that the time was ripe to petition the UNGA for a referral of the Chagnos case to the ICJ for an advisory opinion, which it did in June 2017.

The June 2016 Brexit referendum, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, provided Mauritius with an unexpected boost at the UNGA.  Sands notes how British ministers were “waxing lyrically about a new Empire 2.0” (p.101), enough by itself to scare many UNGA member states, less lyrical about British Empire 1.0.  But the “brutal reality” was that Britain “could no longer rely on the unqualified support of EU members and their networks across the UN”  (p.101).  Both within and beyond the EU, Britain’s authority had “suffered a major collapse” (p.102), Sands writes.  Britain fell far short in its effort to defeat the referral resolution, which passed the UNGA by a comfortable margin, with 94 member states voting in favor, 16 against, and 65 abstentions.

There were nine factual and legal points that Sands considered essential to the Chagos case at the ICJ, and he explains how these had to be tailored to appeal to judges from a wide variety of legal systems and cultures. But he and his legal team also wrestled with how to present the human side of the case to the judges. They opted for a video statement from Madame Elysé.  In an intense address of less than 4 minutes, delivered in her native Créole and translated into English and French, she conveyed the circumstances surrounding her forcible uprooting from her home in 1973 with “clarity, force and passion” (p.4), revealing that she had lost her baby during the passage out of her native island.  She finished by telling the court that as she reached her last years, she had one overwhelming desire:  to return home, to the island where she was born.

The United Kingdom’s legal representative urged the court to dismiss the case as a “bi-lateral sovereignty dispute” outside the court’s authority, although he provided assurances that Britain supported the court and the international rule of law. He expressed “deep respects” to the Chagnossians, conceding that the manner – although not the fact – of their removal had been “shameful and wrong” (p.126-27).    He expressed no commitment to allow the Chagnossians to return. That Britain had paid compensation over the years was “amends enough” (p.127).

In its decision, announced in early 2019, the ICJ rejected Britain’s argument that the case was simply a bilateral territorial dispute. The court found that the Chagnossians had been “forcibly removed” and “prevented from returning” (p.132), actions contrary to UNGA Resolution 1514.  Rather than creating a new rule, 1514 had declared an existing rule of customary law, “one that no state voted against” (p.132).  Because the detachment of Chagos had not been based on the “free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned” (p.133), it followed that Britain’s continued assertion of sovereignty over the archipelago was a “wrongful act” which should end “as rapidly as possible” (p.133). The resettlement of Mauritian nationals, the ICJ concluded, involved issues “relating to the protection of human rights” (p.133), but those were for the UNGA to address.

A few months later, the UNGA adopted a near unanimous resolution (116 nation-states in favor, 55 abstentions, and 5 no votes) which amounted to an affirmation of the ICJ decision, stating that the Chagos archipelago “forms an integral part of the territory of Mauritius” and demanding that Britain “withdraw its colonial administration … unconditionally within a period of no more than six months.”    To date, that withdrawal has not happened. Rather, Britain continues to cling to the notion that it retains sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago and has not recognized Madame Elysé’s right to reinhabit the island of her birth.

Although Mauritius’ Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth and British Prime Minister Theresa May met in the aftermath of the ICJ decision and UNGA resolutions, those meetings ended with May’s defiant written response that sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago “will be ceded when the British Indian Ocean Territory is no longer needed for defense purposes” (p.136), flatly rejecting return of the Chagnossians. The stream of diplomatic notes, press statements and answers to parliamentary questions on Mauritius, Sands indicates, almost invariably begin with the same words:

The United Kingdom has no doubt about its sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, which has been under continuous British sovereignty since 1814.  Mauritius has never held sovereignty over the Archipelago and we do not recognize its claim  (p.146).

This absence of doubt is particularly striking, Sands writes, “since the British have never been unable able to persuade any international judge – not even one – to express support for its claim to the archipelago. This raises serious questions about the country’s purported commitment to the rule of law. Two Prime Ministers and five Foreign Secretaries have embraced lawlessness, for reasons that are unclear, hoping to tough it out and make the problem go away”  (p.146).

* * *

Sands’ work also raises  questions about Britain’s commitment to the rule of law. It is a piece of advocacy, in which Britain’s consistently hardline positions seem almost cartoonish, leaving the reader wondering whether there may be more substance to those positions than what Sands presents here.  But if Sands is writing more as a lawyer than a journalist or historian, this searing work nonetheless represents a clear victory in the court of public opinion for Madame Elysé and her fellow Chagnossians – and for international justice.

Thomas H. Peebles

Bogotá, Colombia

June 1, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Day World War II Really Started

 

Brendan Simms & Charlie Laderman,

Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War

(Basic Books)

Why did Adolph Hitler declare war on the United States, the world’s mightiest industrial power, on December 11, 1941, four days after a surprise Japanese attack had obliterated the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7^th?  That  question has puzzled many historians in the decades since December 1941.  It is also the question that Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, history professors at Cambridge University and King’s College London, respectively, wrestle with throughout Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War. 

The two authors challenge what they term the “dominant narrative” that considers Hitler’s declaration an “inexplicable strategic blunder” (p.x).  Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an official in the administration of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, for instance, characterized the declaration as “totally irrational” (p.356).   Both at the time and in the years hence, many have considered the declaration little more than the impulsive outburst of megalomaniac dictator with illusions of controlling ever larger swaths of the planet.

Simms and Laderman proffer convincing reasons to reconsider the dominant narrative.  They readily admit that Hitler’s declaration of war was a “strategic blunder,” yet in their interpretation it is fully explicable in rational terms.  Hitler was convinced that war with the United States was inevitable.  In his mind, Nazi Germany was already at war unofficially with the United States, which through its Lend Lease program was openly assisting Great Britain and the Soviet Union, which the Nazis had invaded in June 1941. Given his conviction that war with the United States was inevitable, the Führer made a “deliberate gamble” (p.x) to strike America first.

Hitler declared war on the United States “out of fear that, if he did not, the United States would overwhelm Germany at a time of its choosing” (p.359), the authors write.  Hitler anticipated that for the foreseeable future after the Pearl Harbor attacks the United States would be distracted by the conflict in the Pacific and kept from interfering in the European theatre.  He was driven by “his geopolitical calculations, his assessment of the balance of manpower and matériel, and, above all, his obsession with the United States and its global influence” (p.x).  The authors describe this strategy as a “catastrophically mistaken one, as it turned out, but one that made sense to him given the information available and the lens through which he interpreted that knowledge” (p.x).

Between December 7^th and 11^th, the world’s attention was focused at least as much on American president Roosevelt as on Hitler.  The day after the attacks, Monday, December 8, 1941, the United States Congress by a nearly unanimous vote granted Roosevelt’s request for a declaration of war against Japan.  But Roosevelt did not mention either Germany or its European ally Italy in his famous “day of infamy” address to Congress, leaving unanswered the question whether the United States would join the on-going European conflict.

Roosevelt had long considered Nazi Germany a far greater threat than Japan to the United States, and to democracy and world stability.  But even after the Japanese attack, large portions of the public and the Congress remained isolationist, unwilling to support American involvement in a European war, and Roosevelt was reluctant to take the country into a war without strong public support.  As the world learned on Thursday, December 11^th, Hitler, not Roosevelt, made the next move.

By all accounts, Hitler had no advance knowledge when or where  the Japanese would strike and was genuinely “surprised” and “ecstatic” (p.127) once he received word of the Pearl Harbor attack.  But until he delivered an address before party faithful at the Reichstag in Berlin on December 11^th, no one other than his closest confidants knew how he planned to react to the attack.  In what the authors consider the most important speech of Hitler’s career, both ideologically and strategically, the Führer returned to themes and obsessions that had dominated his thinking for over twenty years: the “supposed power of international Jewry, the evil of plutocracy, the hostility of Roosevelt, the centrality of race and space” (p.280). He then went on to announce that Germany would join its allies, Japan and Italy, in waging a war that he maintained had been forced upon them by the United States and Great Britain.

Simms and Laderman contend that Hitler’s declaration of war on December 11^th makes that day “arguably the most important twenty-four hours in history” (p.354).   On the morning of the 11^th, they write, the Asian and European conflicts were “essentially siloed in their separate theaters” (p.x).    Later that day Hitler instantly transformed the conflicts into a fully conjoined world war, in which the United States would “deploy its preeminent economic power to create the most powerful military machine in global history”  (p.398).  More than Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States “created a new global strategic reality and, ultimately, a new world”   (p.357).

After an extensive and useful introductory background chapter, Simms and Laderman develop these macro points through an intense micro account of the five-day period, from December 7 to December 11, with each day meriting separate chapter.  Each chapter moves seamlessly between the actions and reactions of the major protagonists of the drama, often on an hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute basis.  In addition to Germany and the United States, the protagonists include Japan, the catalyst for the drama; Great Britain, which declared war on Japan a few hours prior to the United States; the Soviet Union, which the United States and Britain encouraged to join the war in the Pacific against Japan; Italy, Germany’s underperforming ally; and China, already fighting Japan.  There is also a final chapter, an epilogue entitled “The World of December 12, 1941.”

Hitler’s American Gamble is the “first study to investigate this critical period in such extensive detail” (p.xvi), Simms and Laderman claim.  They seek to recreate the “uncertainty of these five crucial days in global history” (p.xvi) — among the 20^th century’s “most fraught” yet “least understood” (p.ix) moments — to get “closer to the truth of these moments as they were lived” (p.xiv).    How Hitler and Roosevelt might react to the Pearl Harbor attacks constitutes the main dramatic thread running through the granular day-by-day narrative, but hardly the only one.

Germany, Italy and Japan, known as the Axis powers, were working feverishly during the five-day period to finalize the terms of an agreement designed to formalize verbal commitments Hitler had made earlier in the year to Japanese diplomats that Nazi Germany would “intervene immediately” (p.35) should Japan find itself at war with the United States.  Japan did not fully trust Hitler and was anxious to hold the Führer to his verbal commitment.  On the Allied side, both Britain and the Soviet Union were deeply concerned about interruptions to their receipt of armaments, equipment, and materials from the United States under the Lend-Lease program as the United States turned its attention away from Europe to focus on Japan and the Pacific.

Stepping back from the day-to-day recounting of events and looking at the five-day narrative as a whole, the most striking theme of Hitler’s American Gamble is the degree to which different forms of racism infected the views and moves of all major actors.  Hitler’s omnipresent anti-Semitism stands out, a far more central factor in his decision to declare war on the United States than is commonly realized.  But the authors detail flagrant racism on all sides of the conflict.

* * *

The agreement which German, Italian and Japanese diplomats were working on during the five-day period was intended to update the defensive Tripartite Pact of September 1940, in which the three powers had agreed to support the others militarily if they were attacked by a “power at present not involved in the European War or in the Japanese-Chinese conflict” (p.23), commonly understood to mean the United States.  The updated agreement went beyond the defensive terms of the Tripartite Pact.  The three Axis powers agreed to wage war against the British Empire and the United States to a successful conclusion.  They also promised not to enter into separate peace negotiations without the agreement of the other two and committed  to “collaborate closely after the end of the war for the purpose of establishing a just new order”  (p.323).

The German language version of the updated agreement was signed by the three parties at 11:00 am on Thursday, December 11^th, the day of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, with the Japanese and Italian versions not signed until after the speech.  Hitler referred to the agreement in his speech, an indication that his commitment to Japan played a significant role in his decision to declare war on the United States.

The agreement reflected the Axis powers’ shared hatred and resentment of the “Anglo-Saxons,” as they called the United States and Great Britain, and what they termed the Anglo-Saxon “plutocratic” capitalist system, which in their view controlled the world.  The Axis countries considered themselves the world’s “have nots,” living at the mercy of the Anglo-Saxon “haves,” who were “denying Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo – the three have-nots – their rightful place at the world table” (p.15), as Simms and Laderman put it.  Hitler claimed that he had been a “have-not all my life,” a dig at Roosevelt’s patrician origins, and that he was acting as the world’s “representative of the have-nots” (p.27).  The Pearl Harbor attack was interpreted in the Axis countries as part of a “wider struggle of the have-nots against the Western haves, and of the Japanese and German peoples against the Anglo-Saxons” (p.170).

Another crucial part of the five-day drama for which the authors provide regular updates is how badly the war was going for Germany on its Eastern Front during that week.  Nazi Germany had broken a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in June 1941 – “Hitler’s Soviet Gamble” – and invaded the country, making stunning initial advances through Ukraine and Western Russia in the summer of 1941.  But by early December 1941, the German incursion that was headed to Moscow had ground to a halt.  With the Soviet army clearly on a roll, a “seismic change in the course of the war lay directly ahead”  (p.83).  Much of the bad news apparently did not make it to Hitler.  Only in the aftermath of his momentous Reichstag address did the Führer became aware of how bleak the situation actually was in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet successes in the late fall 1941 were due in no small part to the Lend-Lease program, which Hitler considered his proof that the United States was already at war with Germany. The program, which had officially gone into effect in May 1941, allowed the United States to remain formally non-belligerent while supporting both Britain and the Soviet Union in their war efforts.  The United States was already behind in its commitments under the program in early December when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor.

While American officials tried to assure both Britain and the Soviet Union that the flow of supplies under Lend-Lease would continue unabated after the attacks, the reality was that the United States had shifted from the “arsenal of democracy” to a “besieged wartime belligerent with its own vital munitions needs” (p.296).   Immediately after Pearl Harbor, some adjustments were made to previously agreed-upon schedules, with allocations for a short time made on an ad-hoc, day-by-day basis.  But by the end the week, it was clear that Lend-Lease would “not only continue but be greatly expanded” (p.379).

* * *

If Hitler’s decision to strike the United States preemptively has some indicia of rationality, given the lens through which he interpreted information, as the authors contend, that lens was grotesquely distorted by his anti-Semitism.  In Hitler’s twisted mind, “world Jewry” and “international Jewish finance” were Germany’s implacable enemies, pulling the strings of the plutocratic Anglo-Saxon capitalist system.  Political leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill were essentially puppets of Jewish financiers, making European Jews bargaining chips which Hitler thought he could use against Roosevelt.

“Inspired by his conspiratorial view of worldwide Jewish influence,” the authors write, Hitler believed that the “threat of further violence against European – especially central and western European – Jews would deter their supposed agent, Roosevelt, from intervening directly in the European war”  (p.xiii).  Throughout the autumn of 1941, Hitler had made the connections between US policy and the fate of European Jewry increasingly explicit.  But if Hitler thought that threatening European Jewry with destruction would deter American intervention, there is “no evidence that the situation was understood in these terms in Washington” (p.56), the authors note.

Jews lost their value as bargaining chips once Germany declared war on the United States.  The authors characterize the declaration as a death sentence for the Jews of western and central Europe.  Whether the entry of the United States into the war was the “decisive factor or merely an accelerant” (p.362), Hitler’s war of annihilation against western and central European Jewry entered a new and more deadly phase after December 11, 1941.  In the authors’ view, the systematic murder of European Jews in the months and years after December 11^th was “primarily, though not exclusively, driven by Hitler’s anti-Semitic antagonism toward the ‘plutocratic’ powers” (p.387).

But the authors also emphasize repeatedly how far along the deadly war of annihilation of European Jewry already was during the five-day period.  On Monday, December 8^th, the first Jews were gassed to death at a camp in Poland.  Wednesday the 10^th brought an effective end to the Crimean Jewish community.  During the week, Jews in Latvia were systematically murdered, and a train from Dusseldorf loaded with Jews headed east, one of the earliest deportations of German Jews.  The infamous Wannsee conference, where top Nazi leadership decided upon an official policy of extermination of European Jews, was originally scheduled for this five-day period but was postponed because of Hitler’s Reichstag address and took place one month later, in January 1942.

On the Allied side, the authors emphasize repeatedly how Anglo-American policy makers viewed Japan through a lens of deeply engrained racial bias, leading to a “systematic underestimation of Japanese capabilities” (p.43).  Reflecting “underlying racist assumptions,” there was widespread reluctance to believe that the Japanese could “build and deploy sophisticated weaponry, and there was widespread skepticism about their fighting qualities” (p.43).   This led to recurring assertions that Japan had attacked the United States at Hitler’s request, acting as his “cat’s-paw in Asia” (p.209).  The suggestion that “German planes, and even Nazi pilots, had led the Japanese assault” was an indication of the “long-standing racially charged insinuations that the Japanese were incapable of perpetrating such sophisticated operations” (p.209).

President Roosevelt himself, the authors indicate, did not “credit the Japanese with agency of their own” (p.358).   If Hitler saw Roosevelt as the agent of the Jews, the American president “portrayed the Japanese as a mere instrument of Hitler” (p.69).   Roosevelt told his cabinet, hastily convened on the evening of the attacks, that the Japanese had responded to “pressure from Berlin” to “divert the American mind, and the British mind from the European field.”  (p.153).   In a nationally broadcast “fireside chat” on Wednesday, December 10^th, Roosevelt, trying to focus the country on the danger which Nazi Germany posed, accused Germany of “instructing Tokyo to attack the United States in order to share the spoils of war” (p.262).

Much like the “Anglo-Saxons,” Hitler considered the Japanese a “second class race.”  But for a white racist he nonetheless entertained a “remarkably positive” (p.9) view of Japan.  His admiration for Japan’s militancy in the Pacific led him to term the Japanese the “Prussians of the Far East” (p.229).    In Japan, the conflict was widely perceived as a “war with white people”  (p.365)

Challenging white imperial rule in East Asia, the Japanese appealed to the “racial solidarity of the rest of the world and to the anti-colonialism of the Indian and Asian nationalists resisting Western imperialism” (p.365), the authors write.  But after Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, out of deference to their European allies, Japanese journalists and intellectuals were instructed to drop references to “whites” and the “yellow race,” and write instead of “Britain and America” or, simply, the “Anglo-Saxons.”  The Japanese also launched what they called “Negro Propaganda Operations” to exploit historical discrimination in the United States against African Americans.

* * *

In their deeply researched and lucidly written work, Simms and Laderman demonstrate that Hitler lost his American gamble in no small measure because of Roosevelt’s restraint after the Pearl Harbor attacks.  Hitler’s declaration of war on Thursday, December 11^th solved Roosevelt’s most urgent problem, how to unite the country in combatting Nazi Germany.  By plunging his country into an “unwinnable war against the greatest industrial power on earth,” the authors write, Hitler landed “exactly where he did not want to be” (p.358) and exactly where Roosevelt wanted him.  Although the United States had “long stood on the cusp of world power,” it was Hitler’s declaration, the authors conclude, that “supplied the final push” (p.398).

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

March 13, 2023

 

 

 

Reinventing the International Order

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire:

The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

(Princeton University Press)

As World War II ended, European colonial empires of the 19^th and 20^th centuries — British and French especially, but also Belgian, Italian, and Portuguese — were breaking apart, to be replaced in the post war period by newly independent nation-states throughout Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.   The United Nations counted 51 member states when its founding charter was signed in June 1945.  By 1970, UN membership had more than doubled to 127 member states.  But serious theorizing about potential pathways to decolonization and independence had been underway at least since the World War I era.  In Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Adom Getachew, an Ethiopian-born scholar presently teaching at the University of Chicago, seeks to capture the multiple and often conflicting strands of thought that aspired to define the direction of the 20^th century anticolonial independence movement.

Uniting these strands, as Getachew’s sub-title suggests, was the notion of “self-determination,” roughly the notion that the newly independent states themselves and not their former colonizers should determine the terms of independence.  Getachew highlights a bold strand of thinking about self-determination, developed in the 1930s by a handful of thinkers from what she terms the “Black Atlantic,” i.e. Western sub-Saharan Africa and the black Caribbean.  These thinkers emphasized the racial disparities and economic inequalities that had shaped the international global order.

“Anglophone Black Atlantic” is a more precise term for the world Getachew depicts.  The thinkers she focuses upon were all English speakers, schooled in the United States or Great Britain and, with one exception, became early leaders of newly independent English-speaking countries while doubling as political theorists.  That exception was W.E.B. DuBois, the ubiquitous American scholar and educator who functions as Getachew’s lead character.  Over the course of more than a half century, DuBois provided the intellectual glue for the Black Atlantic vision of self-determination.

Prominent francophone anticolonial nationalists from the Black Atlantic, such as Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, do not figure in Getachew’s analysis.  They favored retaining strong administrative ties to France, both as an “effort to ward off the limits of independent statehood,” and as a “demand for an equal share in the wealth the colonies had produced” (p.116).  Martinique, along with its Caribbean neighbor Guadeloupe, became an administrative department of the French state in 1946.  Senegal and most of the French colonies in sub-Saharan West Africa, by contrast, became independent states in the early 1960s.  Getachew also refers to Asia intermittently, but her focus is not there.  India’s Mohandas Gandhi, arguably the most consequential single figure of the 20^th century anti-colonial movement, is nowhere mentioned.

For Getachew’s Black Atlantic thinkers, the right to self-determination was “never conceived as the culmination of their worldmaking aspirations,” but rather as a “first step in political and economic transformations, both domestically and internationally” (p.92).  Their goal was a “thorough-going reinvention of the legal, political and economic structure of the international order” (p.25). That reinvention began by recognizing the “foundational role of New World slavery in the making of the modern world” (p.25).

When DuBois famously observed at the first Pan-African Congress in 1900 that the “problem of the 20^th century is the problem of the color line” (p.6), he had in mind the entire colonized world, not simply the Jim Crow American South or the United States more generally.  Over the course of the century, Black Atlantic thinkers went on to reiterate and amplify DuBois’ insight, “centered on a critique of colonialism as a dual structure of slavery and racial hierarchy” (p.67).  Getachew returns continually to DuBois’ insight and its ramifications.

This emphasis does not quite make her work an international version of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, the project spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones that seeks to demonstrate the centrality of slavery to the founding and subsequent history of the United States.  But by highlighting what she terms the “racial hierarchy” of European colonization, Getachew lays a foundation for a subsequent work that would globalize the perspective of the Times’ project.

The most concrete manifestation of Black Atlantic “worldmaking after empire” was a quest to build supra-national institutions that would link if not bind newly independent states together.  National independence required international institutions, some Black Atlantic thinkers reasoned.  Getachew zeroes in on two short-lived and unsuccessful projects, the West Indian Federation and the Union of African States.  Both faltered in the 1960s due to “deep disagreements about the precise balance between federal union and independence of member states” (p.110).

Getachew’s Black Atlantic thinkers also manifested their commitment to worldmaking through two resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) which they championed: Declaration 1514, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” and the “New International Economic Order” (NIEO).  The former, passed in 1960, served as the political declaration of independence for the emerging independent states, placing colonization outside the boundaries of the international legal order.  The NIEO, adopted in 1974, sought to “reestablish economic equality as the central ideal of the postimperial world” (p.9).

Worldmaking After Empire began as Getachew’s dissertation at Yale University and is written in dense academic prose that some readers may find slow going.  But those willing to take the time will find a rigorous analysis of an influential strand of anti-colonial thinking which, with its emphasis upon the global order’s racial disparities and structural economic inequalities, remains salient today.  Getachew’s narrative is roughly chronological, starting with World War I and the version of self-determination which American president Woodrow Wilson brought to the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference.

* * *

In his famous 14 points presented to the US Congress prior to traveling to Versailles, Wilson called for a “free, open-minded and absolutely impartial” adjudication of colonial claims, in which colonized peoples should have an equal say in determining their future.  But Wilsonian self-determination proved to be a highly qualified principle, predicated upon “preparation for self-rule” (p.177).

Self-determination was “not a given right,” as Wilson put it, but one “gained, earned, [and] graduated into from the hard school of life” (p.45), his way of saying that self-determination was a principle reserved mainly for people of European descent.  Getachew terms Wilson’s version of self-determination a “racially differentiated principle,” fully compatible with continued colonial rule, a principle to be used primarily to ward off worldwide Bolshevik revolution and preserve “white supremacy on the planet” (p.43).

Wilson’s 14 points also proposed the creation of a League of Nations, a recommendation adopted by the Versailles conference but subsequently rejected by the United States Congress in a humiliating rebuke to Wilson.  Arthur Balfour, Britain’s representative to the conference, expressed what Getachew considers the League’s de facto official view of race and racial hierarchy at the conference: if it was “true in a certain sense that all men of a particular nation were created equal,” Balfour opined, that did not mean that “a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European” (p.22).

Yet, Ethiopia, and Liberia, two African nations not part of European empires, managed to become members of the League.   From the start, they were plainly second-class members, primarily because of the continued existence of slavery within both states.  Although slavery had been explicitly banned by the 1926 Anti-Slavery Convention, forced labor – not quite slavery, but close — remained a central practice in every colony.  Britain and France successfully lobbied for the exemption of forced labor from the 1926 convention.  Slavery was thus “disconnected from colonial labor and cast as an atavistic holdover in backward societies” (p.53), Getachew writes.

For the League, the continued existence of slavery in two of its member-states served as evidence that Africans “could not rule themselves and their territories in ways that conformed to the standards of modern statehood,” making European oversight and intervention the “only mechanism that could secure humanitarian norms in Africa”  (p.59). Perversely, Benito Mussolini justified the 1936 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in which Italy engaged in overwhelming and unnecessary violence that included illegal use of mustard gas, indiscriminate killing of noncombatants, and the torture of captured soldiers, as the logical fulfillment of the League’s aims of abolishing slavery and developing backward states.

For DuBois, Italy’s invasion confirmed that “economic exploitation based on the excuse of race prejudice is the program of the white world.” (p.68).  The League of Nation’s concern with slavery in Ethiopia and Liberia was a thin pretext to permit European powers to “dominate native labor, pay it low wages, give it little political control and small chance for education or even industrial training,” while extracting the “largest possible profit out of the laboring class” (p.68).

As World War II ended and the United Nations came into being in 1945, DuBois found the situation eerily reminiscent of 1919, with abundant reference to universal principles that again applied differently to the colonized world and did not foresee the end of colonial rule.  The United Nations Charter, for example, contained only two references to self-determination, both of which were subordinated to the larger aim of securing “peaceful and friendly relations among nations.”  DuBois worried that by not addressing international racial hierarchy and colonial domination, the world had not yet learned the lesson of two world wars.  We have conquered Germany, he wrote, “but not their ideas” (p.72).

 By 1960, worldmaking in the form of federation had become a “central strategy for securing international nondomination” (p.108).  But the two Black Atlantic federation projects that Getachew describes, in the Caribbean and Africa, both failed to overcome concerns over ceding too much sovereignty to central authorities (surprisingly, both sides developed arguments based on the 18^th century experience of the American colonists breaking away from Britain to form the United States).

The West Indian Federation came into being in 1958, with a federal parliament and executive authority that governed ten Caribbean island states.  But the federation vested only limited powers in the federal government, with no independent sources of revenue.  With the federation’s constitution under reconsideration in 1962, Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago’s president, advocated a stronger federal state as the best means to achieve both independence and national unity.  Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Michael Manley, successfully lead the opposition to Williams’ push for more centralization, signaling the federation’s demise.

Across the Atlantic, Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah insisted that only a continent-wide government could ensure Africa’s place in world affairs.  Total surrender of sovereignty was “not necessary to create a strong and effective union”  he contended.  Equality among states “could be maintained within the union” (p.136).  Rejecting the French model of some sort of fusion with the colonizer, Nkrumah further argued that any integration that included European states would “preserve and deepen economic dependence” (p.117).   

Nkrumah’s proposed draft constitution for a Union of African States closely resembled the robust federal government which Williams had unsuccessfully proposed for the Caribbean.  It ran into a similar opposition, led by Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe.  Speaking for many African leaders, Azikiwe feared that a centralized organization would “undermine the independence anticolonial nationalists had sought to secure” (p.134), weakening the sovereignty of individual, independent African states and, with it, their legal, national, and cultural pluralism.

1960 was also the year the UN General Assembly passed Declaration 1514.   A “watershed moment in the history of decolonization” (p.107), Declaration 1514 was viewed as correcting the omissions of the UN Charter and superseding the Wilsonian version of self-determination.   Its effect, Getachew contends, was to make self-determination a human right and colonialism itself an international crime. She characterizes Declaration 1514 as the instrument through which colonial domination became “illegitimate for the first time in modern international society” (p.99), with racial hierarchy abolished and sovereign equality extended to all members states.

As a supplement to the political independence which Declaration 1514 recognized, Jamaica’s Manley and Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere spearheaded the push for the NIEO, which passed the UNGA in 1974.  In what Getachew terms the “biggest departure for the postwar international legal order” (p.145), Manley and Nyerere contended that the formal political independence and legal equality attained over the course of the prior two decades had “masked the material inequality through which powerful states reproduced their dominance” (p.163).   Rebalancing these inequalities required a more equitable share of the wealth which newly independent states had helped to produce.

Manley and Nyerere focused on ownership of natural resources, the relationship of newly independent states to multi-national corporations (which Manley saw as the 20^th century heir to imperial-era trading companies), and unequal trade relations between developing and developed nations.  For Manley and Nyerere, NIEO was the “international corollary to the effort to institute socialism at home” (p.168).   But the NIEO’s demand for greater international equality and equity proved to be a step too far for the world’s economic powers.

Daniel P. Moynihan, United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-1970s, became one of the NIEO’s most vocal and visible critics.  Moynihan derided the NIEO as the product of former British colonial subjects who had over-imbibed in the doctrines of Fabian socialism under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and were “seeking to internationalize the lessons of British welfarism” (p.176).  The impoverished economic conditions of the world’s underdeveloped countries, Moynihan contended scornfully, were “of their own making and no one else’s” (p.177).

Critics to the left of Moynihan pointed out that the NIEO had nothing to say about the domestic distribution of wealth and resources.  Self-determination, they argued, had been “concerned solely with the absence of alien rule and disconnected from democratic self-government”  (p.177).  Civil wars in Nigeria and the Congo led many newly independent states to prioritize zealous protection of sovereign prerogatives, raising questions about their internal stability and capacity to respect such democratic norms as pluralism, political dissent, and human rights.  John Rawls’ influential 1971 work A Theory of Justice spurred many advocates of global justice to shift their focus from protecting the sovereignty of newly independent states to protecting the rights of individuals within those states.

Further undermining the Black Atlantic vision of self-determination was the United States, the principal architect of the post-World War II international order.  Getachew notes America’s “gradual abandonment” (p.178) in the 1970s of the United Nations and other key multilateral institutions.  The end of the Cold War in the following decade gave rise to what she terms a “new era of unrestrained American imperialism where the principle of sovereign equality was curtailed, and the United States was freed from even a rhetorical commitment to a rule-bound international order” (p.179). Three decades after the end of the Cold War, Getachew perceives a “striking return to and defense of a hierarchical international order” (p.179).

* * *

The Black Atlantic vision of a reinvented international order did not survive the neo-liberalism of the 1980s.  But a host of contemporary global crises hitting former colonies much harder than their colonizers — climate change and access to Covid-19 vaccines come immediately to mind – serve as reminders that vestiges of 19^th and 20^th century colonial domination remain part of today’s international order.  The time may therefore be ripe, Getachew concludes with a slight hint of optimism, for “reformulating the contours of an anti-imperial future and enacting new strategies to realize this vision” (p.181) – a time in other words for another reinvention of the international order akin to what Black Atlantic thinkers boldly set in motion in the 1930s.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

June 9, 2022

 

The Authoritarian Playbook for Uprooting Democracy

 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020)

In late November of this year, the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) issued its annual report showing democratic slippage and authoritarian ascendancy throughout the world, with the United States included among the world’s backsliding democracies.  The report’s ominous conclusion was that the number of countries moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving toward democracy.  Less than a month later, US President Joe Biden opened a “Summit for Democracy,” in Washington, D.C., attended virtually by representatives of more than 100 countries, along with civil society activists, business leaders and journalists.  Alluding to but not dwelling upon the increasing threats to democracy that the United States faces internally, Biden described the task of strengthening democracy to counter authoritarianism as the “defining challenge of our time.”

The short period between the IDEA report and the democracy summit coincided with the time I was grappling with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, a work that provides useful but hardly reassuring background on today’s authoritarian ascendancy.  As her title suggests, Ben-Ghiat finds the origins of the 21st century version of authoritarianism in the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, appointed in 1922 by King Victor Emmanuel II to head the Italian government as Prime Minister, an appointment that marked the end of Italy’s liberal democratic parliamentary regime.

Ben-Ghiat defines authoritarianism as a political system in which executive power is concentrated in a single individual and predominates “at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of government” (p.5), with the single individual claiming that he and his agents are “above the law, above judgment, and not beholden to the truth” (p.253).    A professor of history and Italian Studies at New York University and a leading academic expert on Mussolini and modern Italian history, Ben-Ghiat uses her knowledge of the man called Il Duce and his Fascist party’s rule in  Italy from 1922 to 1943 as a starting point to build a more comprehensive picture of leaders who have followed in Mussolini’s footsteps – the “strongmen”  of her title, or “authoritarians,” two terms she uses interchangeably.

Ben-Ghiat divides modern authoritarian rule since Mussolini’s time into three general historical periods: 1) the fascist era of Mussolini and his German ally, Adolph Hitler, 1919-1945;  2) the age of military coups, 1945 to 1990; and 3) what she terms the new authoritarian age, 1990 to the present.  But  Strongmen is not an historical work, arranged in chronological order. Ben-Ghiat focuses  instead on the tools and tactics selected strongmen have used since Mussolini’s time.

In ten chapters, divided into three general sections, “Getting to Power,” “Tools of Rule,” and “Losing Power,” Ben-Ghiat  elaborates respectively upon how strongmen have obtained, maintained, and lost power.  Each chapter sets forth general principles of strongman rule, to which she adds illustrative examples of how specific strongmen have adhered to the principles.   For Ben-Ghiat, the key tools in the strongman’s toolbox are propaganda, violence, corruption and, most originally, virility.  Each is the subject of a separate chapter, but they are “interlinked” (p.7) and each is referred to throughout the book.

Ben-Ghiat’s cast of characters changes from one chapter to the next, depending upon its subject matter.  At the outset, she lists 17 “protagonists,” authoritarian leaders who are mentioned at least occasionally throughout the book, including such familiar contemporary leaders as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.  But eight dominate her narrative: Mussolini and  Hitler, who personified the Fascist era, with Mussolini making an appearance in nearly every chapter; Spain’s General Francisco Franco, a transition figure from fascism to military coup, a fascist in the 1930s and a pro-American client during the Cold War;  Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who modeled himself after Franco and embodied the era of military coups; and four “modern” authoritarians, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, who served as Italy’s Prime Minister in three governments, from 1994 to 1995, 2001 to 2006, and 2008 to 2011; Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who followed Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic attempt in the 1990s to establish neoliberal democratic institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union; Libya’s Muamar Gaddafi, more a transition figure from the age of military coups to 21^st century authoritarianism; and yes, America’s Donald Trump.  Reminding readers how closely Trump and his administration adhered to the authoritarian playbook appears to be one of the book’s main if unstated purposes.

Among the eight featured authoritarian leaders, all but Gaddafi rose to power in systems that were in varying degrees democratic.  How authoritarians manage to weaken democracy, often using democratic means, is the necessary backdrop to Ben-Ghiat’s examination of the strongman’s playbook.   All eight of her featured leaders sought in one way or another to undermine existing democratic norms and institutions.  Ben-Ghiat excludes strong women political leaders, such as Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, for this very reason.  No woman leader has yet “sought to destroy democracy” (p.5), she argues, although she does not rule out the possibility that a future female leader could meet the authoritarian criteria.

Among the featured eight, moreover, only Gaddafi could be considered left of center on the political spectrum.  The other seven fit comfortably on the right side.  While there would be plenty of potential subjects to choose from for an examination of strongmen of the left – Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro all come readily to mind – Strongmen is largely an analysis of right-wing authoritarianism.  For Ben-Ghiat, as for President Biden, combatting this form of authoritarianism constitutes “one of the most pressing matters of our time” (p.4).

* * *

From Mussolini and Hitler to Berlusconi and Trump, the strongman’s rule has been almost by definition highly personal.  Strongmen, Ben-Ghiat argues, do not distinguish between their individual agendas and those of the nation they rule.  They have proven particularly adept at appealing to negative emotions and powerful resentments.  They rise to power in moments of uncertainty and transition, generating support when society is polarized, or divided into two opposing ideological camps, which is “why they do all they can to exacerbate strife”  (p.8).

A strongman’s promise to return his nation to greatness constitutes the “glue” (p.66) of modern authoritarian rule, Ben-Ghiat argues.  The promise typically combines a sense of nostalgia and the fantasy of returning to an imagined earlier era with a bleak view of the present and a glowing vision of the future.  In the chaos of post-World War I Italy, Mussolini invoked the lost imperial grandeur of the Roman Empire.  Putin speaks nostalgically of the Soviet era.  Trump’s 2017 inaugural address cast the United States as a desolate place of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” (p.58), the dystopian picture of contemporary America which underpinned his ubiquitous slogan Make America Great Again.

Franco and Pinochet were typical of right-wing authoritarians who organized the path to the glorious future around counterrevolutionary crusades against perceived leftist subversives.  But in what are sometimes termed “developing” or “Third World” countries,” the return to national greatness focuses more frequently upon the remnants of foreign occupation.  Rather than leading a revolt against pre-existing democratic institutions and norms, anti-imperialist leaders like Gaddafi use their peoples’ “anger over the tyranny of Western colonizers to rally followers,” while adapting “traditions of colonial violence for their own purposes” (p.36), Ben-Ghiat writes.

To gain and maintain power, strongmen utilize a style of propaganda which Ben-Ghiat describes as a “set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is”  (p.93).  From Mussolini’s use of newsreels and Hitler’s public rallies to Trump’s use of Twitter, authoritarians have employed “direct communication channels with the public, allowing them to pose as authentic interpreters of the public will”  (p.93).

Propaganda, moreover, encourages people to see violence differently, as a “national and civic duty and the price of making the country great”  (p.166).  General Franco murdered and jailed Spanish leftists at an astounding rate, both in the Spanish Civil war, when he was supported by Mussolini and Hitler, and during World War II, when he remained neutral.  His claim to legitimacy rested on the notion that he had brought peace to the land and saved it from apocalyptic leftist violence.  But his real success, Ben-Ghiat writes, was in “creating silence around memories of his violence” (p.232).

Augusto Pinochet, fashioning himself in the image of Franco, also strove to present an image of Chile as a bastion of anti-communist stability.  But central to Pinochet’s rule was the systematic torture and execution of Chilean dissidents and leftists, “not [as] isolated sadism but state policy” (p.165), according to an Amnesty International report. Pinochet’s secret police agency, the DINA, drew upon neo-Nazis living among the country’s large German population to execute its mission of “cleansing Chilean society of leftist influence and making Chile a center of the international struggle against Marxism” (p.178).

Gaddafi envisioned himself as the center of an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist world, and bankrolled a wide range of revolutionary and terrorist movements across the globe while adopting terrorist methods at home to eliminate Libyan dissenters. He used television to present violence as mass spectacle, subjecting dissenting students to public, televised hangings, including the  entire trial and execution of a dissident in 1984.  And Donald Trump’s calls for Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment and allusions to her being shot, shocking to many Americans, were “behaviors more readily associated with fascist states or military juntas” (p.62), Ben-Ghiat writes.

Almost invariably, strongmen use the power of their office for private gain, the classic definition of corruption.  In tandem with other tools, such as purges of the judiciary, corruption produces a system that tolerates criminality and encourages broader changes in behavioral norms to “make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture, or sexual assault” (p.144).  The term “kleptocracy,” much in vogue today, refers to a state in which the looting of public treasuries and resources often appears to be the central purpose of government.

Joseph Mubuto Sese Soko, the staunch anti-communist leader of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) from 1965 to 1997, appears here primarily to illustrate what US Representative Stephen Solarz termed in 1991 the “kleptocracy to end all kleptocracies,” in which Mobutu set the standard by which “all future international thieves will have to be measured” (p.14).   Mobutu’s country, awash in raw materials estimated to be worth in excess of $24 trillion, has the dubious distinction of being the world’s richest resource country with the planet’s poorest population, according to Tom Burgis’ insightful study of kleptocratic African regimes, The Looting Machine (reviewed here in 2016).    By the time he was forced into exile in 1997, Mobutu had amassed a $5 billion fortune, but Zaire had lost $12 billion in capital and resource flight and increased its debt by $14 billion.

New patronage systems allow the strongman’s cronies and family members to amass wealth, offering power and economic reward.  Vladimir Putin places oligarchs in competition for state resources and his favor, treating the country as an entity to be exploited for private gain.  While he poses as a nationalist defender against “globalists,” Putin uses global finance to launder and hide money.  He and his associates have removed an estimated $325 billion from Russia since 2006.  By 2019, 3% of the Russian population held 89% of the country’s financial assets.

Silvio Berlusconi maintained a curious and secretive relationship with Putin that almost certainly benefited him financially, typical of how Berlusconi normalized corruption by bending the institutions of Italian democracy to “accommodate his personal circumstances,” and by “partnering with authoritarians and elevating himself above the law” p.161).  He retained control over his extensive holdings in television, publishing and advertising, putting family members and loyalists in charge.  The vastness of his media empire “made it hard to police his mixing of personal and business interests”  (p.159).  While Italy remained a nominal democracy under Berlusconi, he turned the Italian government into what Ben-Ghiat describes as a “vehicle for accumulating more personal wealth and power on the model of the illiberal leaders he so admired” (p.246), alluding to his particular partnership with Putin and an even stranger partnership with Gaddafi.

Ben-Ghiat goes beyond other discussions of authoritarianism by highlighting the extent to which virility — a cult of masculinity —  enables the strongman’s corruption by projecting the idea that he is “above laws that weaker individuals must follow”  (p.8).  Displays of machismo are “not just bluster, but a way of exercising power at home and conducting foreign policy,” she writes.  Far from being a private affair, the sex lives of strongmen reveal how “corruption, propaganda, violence and virility work together.” (p.120).

In portions of the book most likely to appeal to adolescent males, Ben-Ghiat details the unconstrained sex lives of Mussolini and Gaddafi.   Paradoxically, Gaddafi afforded Libyan women far more independence than they had enjoyed before he came to power in 1969.  He promoted women as part of his revolutionary measures, while privately constructing a system – modeled, apparently, on that of Mussolini – to “procure and confine women for his personal satisfaction” (p.132).

Silvio Berlusconi “used his control of Italy’s television and advertising markets to saturate the country with images of women in submissive roles”  (p.134).  The young female participants in Berlusconi’s famous sex parties often received cash to help them start a business, a chance at a spot in a Berlusconi show, or a boost into politics.   Bare-chested body displays constitute an “integral part” of Vladimir Putin’s identity as the “defender of Russia’s pride and its right to expand in the world”  (p.121), Ben-Ghiat writes.

As to Donald Trump, the infamous Access Hollywood tapes which were released amidst the 2016 presidential campaign, in which he bragged about groping non-consenting women, did not sink his candidacy.  Instead, the revelations “merely strengthened the misogynist brand of male glamor Trump had built over the decades” (p.138).  Trump’s campaign and presidency seemed dedicated to “[r]eclaiming male authority,” Ben-Ghiat contends, which meant “creating an environment in which men can act on their desires with impunity” (p.139).

Gaddafi was the last of the authoritarians who used violence openly as a tool to maintain power.  In the social media age, mass killings often generate bad press. New authoritarians need to gauge the tolerance of elites and the public for violence.  21^st-century strongmen like Putin and Recep Erdogan tend to warehouse their enemies out of public scrutiny, preferring targeted violence, information manipulation and legal harassment to neutralize dissenters.  They use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to “target critics and spread hate speech, conspiracy theories, and lies” (p.111), and attempt to impoverish opponents and potential opponents by expropriating businesses they or their relatives might own.

Ben-Ghiat’s book appeared just before the 2020 American presidential election, weeks before the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, and before the notion of a “stolen election” took hold amongst a still-mystifyingly large portion of the American electorate.  But her insight that today’s authoritarians use elections to keep themselves in office, “deploying antidemocratic tactics like fraud or voter suppression to get the results they need” (p.49 ), reveals the extent to which former president Trump and a substantial segment of today’s Republican party, especially in key “battleground” states, are working off the strongman’s playbook.

* * *

After an apt dissection of  the way authoritarianism threatens the world’s democracies, Ben-Ghiat’s proposed solutions may leave readers wanting.  “Opening the heart to others and viewing them with compassion” (p.260) can constitute effective pushback against strongman rule, she argues.  Solidarity, love, and dialogue “are what the strongman most fears” (p.260-61).   More concretely, she emphasizes that to counter contemporary authoritarianism, we must “prioritize accountability and transparency in government” (p.253).   Above all, she recommends a “clear-eyed view of how strongmen manage to get into power and how they stay there” (p.250).  This deeply researched and persuasively argued work provides just such a view, making it a timely contribution to the urgent contemporary debates about the future of democracy.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

December 30, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

The Case for Evidence-Based Optimism on International Human Rights

 

Kathryn Sikkink, Evidence for Hope:

Making Human Rights Work in the 21^st Century

(Princeton University Press) 

The idea of international human rights – rights that transcend national boundaries and state sovereignty – crystallized in the post-World War II period with the adoption of the initial charter of the United Nations in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.  Promulgated under the auspices of the United Nations, the UDHR is considered the founding text of today’s international human rights law.  As Kathryn Sikkink observes in Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21^st Century, there is a compelling simplicity to the idea of international protection for human rights: “if your government fails to protect your rights, you have somewhere else to turn for recourse” (p.57).

Today, there are several treaties and conventions supplementing and complementing the UDHR.  Almost all the world’s countries have ratified some or all of these instruments, while numerous international and non-governmental organizations, institutions, and practitioners monitor compliance and otherwise seek to advance the international human rights agenda across the globe.  The idea of international human rights has become, Sikkink writes, “one of the dominant moral and political discourses in the world today” (p.8).  And yet.

The general public seems convinced that human rights abuses are worsening and widening across the globe, not diminishing, and there is much to support this view in just about any edition of a daily newspaper: China’s assault on its predominantly Muslim Uyghur population; crackdowns on democracy proponents in Myanmar and Hong Kong; refugee crises brought about by civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia; extra-judicial killings in the Philippines; and Russian targeting of political dissidents, to name only a few.  Moreover, one year ago, the respected watchdog organization Human Rights Watch issued a withering report on the United States, finding that it was moving “backwards” on human rights, flouting international human rights and humanitarian law.

In addition, there is no shortage of academics taking aim at the international human rights movement.  Assiduous readers of this blog will recall Stephen Hopwood’s, Endtimes for Human Rights, reviewed here in 2016.  Eric Posner has produced a work with an equally gloomy title, The Twilight of Human Rights Law.  And Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World was the subject of an extensive roundtable exchange that my colleagues at the Tocqueville 21 blog organized in 2018.  These and other works make different points, but together constitute what might be termed “human rights pessimism,” a now-substantial body of thought calling into question both the legitimacy and effectiveness of the post-World War II human rights movement.

Sikkink, Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, seeks to counter the various manifestations of human rights pessimism with “evidence-based optimism,” an optimism grounded “not on wishful thinking, but on an effort to understand more comprehensively the strengths and weaknesses of human rights data” (p.13).  She describes her purpose as “not to deflect criticism or to diminish concern with human rights crises, but to clarify some of the terms of the debate, the types of comparisons being used, and the kinds of evidence that would be more or less persuasive in supporting and evaluating claims” (p.8).

Methodically, but with a scholarly zest, Sikkink scrutinizes the pessimists’ challenges to the distinct but related issues of the legitimacy and the effectiveness of the modern human rights movement.  In this context, legitimacy turns principally on the notion that forms the crux of Hopgood’s case against the modern human rights movement: that its core principles are the product of the world’s most prosperous countries, especially those from Western Europe and North America, imposed upon its least prosperous ones, in Asia, Africa and Latin America – the “Global North” and “Global South” respectively, to use common shorthand.  Sikkink responds by demonstrating the often overlooked contributions of diplomats, lawyers, and intellectuals from the Global South to the body of thought that preceded the UN Charter and the UDHR, along with their contributions to those instruments and to the development of international human rights law after promulgation of the UDHR.

Measuring human rights effectiveness and such related matters as “progress,” “results,” and “success” constitute what Sikkink terms the “single biggest unrecognized and unnamed source of disagreement among human rights scholars and within human rights movements” (p.31).  Such measurement requires rigorous application of social science methodologies, Sikkink insists.  She gives unsatisfactory grades to most of the human rights pessimists, primarily because they frequently measure not on an empirical basis, using qualitative and quantitative data, but rather against an ideal standard of what would be commendable in a more perfect world.

* * *

Sikkink lays out a convincing case that the international human rights movement’s origins lie at least as much in the Global South as in the Global North — maybe more.  She places particular emphasis upon the Latin American contribution to the movement.  The idea of international protection of human rights, she suggests, probably originated with the early 20^th century Chilean jurist Alejandro Álvarez, who in 1917 proposed the idea of international protection for individual human rights to the American Institute of International Law.

Álvarez saw international protection for human rights as a means to bolster rather than undercut state sovereignty, particularly as a weapon for the weaker states of Latin America to contain the greater raw power of the United States.  Álvarez’s ideas were later taken up and expanded by other jurists and scholars from both Latin America and Europe.  This circulation of ideas, Sikkink writes with Hopgood in mind, is “very different from the crude understanding of some scholars today, who claim that human rights ideas all started in the Global North and were imposed upon the Global South” (p.63).

At the San Francisco Conference of 1945 which established the framework for the UN, the British and French delegations resisted formal declarations of rights out of concern for their colonies; American representatives worried about Southern legislators interested above all in protecting racial separation; and the Soviet Union was less than enthusiastic about formal declarations.  Despite this resistance, the Charter emerged with seven human rights references, a testament to the work of delegations from outside  the Global North,  especially those from Latin America. The references reflected “not the language of the great powers,” Sikkink writes, “but rather that of the Global South.”  They were “adopted by the great powers in response to pressure from small states and civil society” (p.71).  Without these references, Sikkink finds it unlikely that the UDHR would have been drafted at all.

But the UDHR was not the first detailed enumeration of rights adopted by an inter-governmental organization.  Several months earlier, in April 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia, 20 Latin American countries and the United States approved the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.  All of the rights enumerated in the American Declaration appeared subsequently in the UDHR.  Latin American representatives, for example, were responsible for language about duties finding a place in the final version of the UDHR, reflecting their more communitarian and less individualistic vision of freedom in modern society, and they managed to insert an article into the UDHR about the right to justice.

Sikkink counters a related argument that Moyn and others have advanced that the human rights movement lay largely dormant after the UDHR’s adoption until the administration of American President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.  Rather, the movement gathered force in the 1950s through the mid-1970s, Sikkink contends, as jurists and diplomats, especially but not exclusively from the Global South, fought to “ensure the creation of institutions with the power necessary to enforce human rights” (p.97).  During these decades of Cold War confrontation, the United States was largely on the sidelines, prioritizing instead its support for anti-communist regimes, many with dubious human rights records.

The decolonization movements of the 1950s and early 1960s linked independence and notions of national self-determination to democracy and human rights.  The anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa, in Sikkink’s view the most important and sustained human rights struggle of the Cold War period, explicitly embraced the notions of human rights embodied in the UDHR.  In 1965, Asian and African countries, led by India, spearheaded passage of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

Work also continued during the 1950s and 1960s on the two most consequential follow-up instruments to the UDHR, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), drafted over the course of 15 years and opened for ratification in 1966.  The Carter administration helped “activate and eventually consolidate” (p.28) these institutional developments, Sinkkink writes with emphasis, but they had been underway for the previous thirty years (why human rights became a priority of the Carter administration is the subject of Barbara Keys’ Reclaiming American Virtue, reviewed here in 2015).

In measuring effectiveness and what constitutes human rights progress, Sikkiink explains that the difference between empirical comparisons and comparisons to an ideal might be thought of as two different types of lenses or yardsticks: a comparison to the ideal “involves contrasting what has actually happened with what should happen in an ideal world, whereas empirical comparison contrasts what is actually happening to what has happened in the same country in the past or to what is happening in other countries at the same time” (p.3).

As a skilled social scientist, Sikkink expects human rights critics to be clear about their methods.  When comparing cases to the ideal, the ideal should be explicit, not implicit. “This allows others to evaluate the arguments and the quality of the evidence and judge the work, “ she writes.  Too many critics “take for themselves the luxury of criticisms without making their own suppositions sufficiently clear” (p.48).  Applying empirical data to a cross section of key human rights issues across the globe – the status of women, the prevalence of torture and the frequency of the death penalty among them — Sikkink makes the case that there is real progress in the world, after all.  By “looking more carefully at the history of human rights and at current trends we can find hope for progress in spite of struggles and backlash,” (p.247), she concludes.

Evaluating the effectiveness of the human rights movement also needs to consider what Sikkink terms the “information paradox”: the more intense the focus on human rights, the more violations are likely to come to light, especially as reporting improves.  That doesn’t necessarily mean the number of violations are increasing.  Inadvertently, “as the reports accumulate and are taken up by the media, they may also convince people that human rights movements are not making any progress at curbing such violations”  (p.14).

As in much of social science, measuring effectiveness in human rights involves identifying correlations.  On the positive side, democracy and human rights are “intimately related,” Sikkink writes, and, “so far in human history, it is hard to have one without the other.  That does not mean that democracy inevitably leads to human rights; it just means that democracy is a necessary, but not at all sufficient, condition for human rights progress” (p.131-32).   Although there is general agreement among scholars and specialists that democratic political institutions reduce repressive behavior, “research indicates that democratic institutions mainly contribute to decreased repression only after a certain high democracy threshold is reached” (p.193).

On the negative side, there are “risk factors” that signal the potential for increased human rights violations, among them war, particularly civil war; the presence of insurgent groups and separatist movements; ideologies that exclude and dehumanize certain people or groups; and poverty.  Sikkink does not include economic inequality among the risk factors, and treads lightly around the topical question whether there is a correlation between rising economic inequality and the human rights movement.

Such inequality is usually attributed to “neo-liberalism,” a shorthand reference to government policies, often associated with the Thatcher and Reagan years, favoring less-regulated markets, open international trade, and privatization of some former state functions, frequently accompanied by reductions in social safety net benefits.  Some commentators contend that the relationship between human rights and neo-liberalism is one of “complicity,” that human rights policies somehow make possible neo-liberal policies, while Moyn argues that the human rights movement has been “powerless against inequality” (p.38).

Sikkink respondsthat human rights policies can reduce economic inequalities.   The human rights movement has made significant inroads in reducing gender inequalities, for example, with an impact on overall economic inequality.  But more fundamentally, while mitigating economic inequalities is a laudable goal — both within and among nation-states – it is best achieved by policies like more progressive taxation, closing tax havens, preventing money laundering and cracking down on corruption.  Human rights movements, she contends, “don’t have to be the only tools for fighting inequality” (p.239).

 * *

Sikkink does not pretend that the modern human rights movement is flawless.  But her spirited defense of an imperfect movement should be reassuring, offering evidence-based reasons not only to reject despair but even to hope that the movement in the 21^st century can continue, as it has done in the past, to deliver empirically measurable progress.

Thomas H. Peebles

Paris, France

May 31, 2021

 

 

Is Democracy a Universal Value?

 

Larry Diamond, Ill Winds:

Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Penguin Press) 

Stanford professor Larry Diamond is one of America’s foremost authorities on democracy – what it is, how it works in diverse countries throughout the world, how it can take hold in countries with little or no history of democratic governance – and how it can be lost.  Diamond brings a decidedly pragmatic perspective to his subject.  His extensive writings focus in particular on how to sustain fragile democratic governance.  He rarely dwells on classical theory or delves into the origins of democracy.  He is more likely to provide an assessment of the prospects for democracy in contemporary Nicaragua, Nigeria or Nepal, or most anywhere in between, than assess the contribution to modern democracy of, say, Thomas Hobbes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, Diamond’s bottom line seemed to be that democracy had the upper hand in most corners of the world – the Middle East being at best a giant question mark – and was steadily extending to numerous countries that had hitherto been considered unlikely places for it to take hold.

That was then. Today, Diamond says that he is more concerned about the future of democracy than at any time in the forty plus years of his career.  He begins Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, a distinctly more guarded assessment of democratic prospects across the globe than his earlier writings, by noting that the march toward democracy began to slow around 2006.  The independent Freedom House, which tracks democratic progress worldwide, found that 2017 was the twelfth consecutive year that the number of countries declining in liberty significantly outstripped those gaining.

Rather than democracy, it is now authoritarian government — sometimes termed “illiberal democracy” and often associated with nativist, xenophobic “populism” — that seems to be on the rise across the globe.  Throughout much of the world, Diamond notes, authoritarian governments and their autocratic leaders are “seizing the initiative, democrats are on the defensive, and the space for competitive politics and free expression is shrinking” (p.11).  Today’s world has “plunged into a democratic recession” (p.54), with democracy finding itself “perched on a global precipice.”  If authoritarian ascendancy and democratic erosion continue, Diamond warns, we may reach a “tipping point where democracy goes bankrupt suddenly – plunging the world into depths of oppression and aggression that we have not seen since the end of World War II” (p.293).

Diamond’s sub-title reveals that the “ill winds” of his title are blowing chiefly from a Russia rife with “rage,” and a China abounding in “ambition,” while the United States stands by “complacently” rather than blowing in the opposite direction, as it once did.  If the United States does not reclaim its traditional place as the keystone of democracy, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, and their admirers “may turn autocracy into the driving force of the new century” (p.11).  Emboldened by the “new silence from Donald Trump’s America,” the “new swagger” emanating from Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia have allowed autocrats across the globe to “tyrannize their opponents openly and without apology”(p.58).

Diamond starts his urgent and alarming assessment with general, introductory chapters that provide a working definition of democracy and summarize the present world wide crisis, for example, “Why Democracies Succeed and Fail,” “The March and Retreat of Democracy,” and “The Authoritarian Temptation.”  He then devotes a chapter to each of his three main actors, the United States, Russia and China.  From there, he moves to a series of recommendations on how established democracies can counter the forces that seem to be leading many countries away from democracy and toward authoritarian styles of governance.  His recommendations include combatting public corruption (the “soft underbelly of authoritarian rule;” p.192); and making the Internet safe for democracy (the “global fight for freedom is inseparable from the fight for internet freedom;” p.259).

In a book about the future of global democracy, Diamond’s recommendations are oddly U.S. centric. They are mostly about how the United States can promote democracy more effectively abroad and render its internal institutions and practices more democratic.  There is little here about what other established democracies – for example, Great Britain, Germany or Australia — can do to be more effective abroad or more democratic at home.  Diamond moreover breaks little new ground in this work.

Few readers are likely to be surprised to learn that Russia and China constitute the world’s major anti-democratic actors; that Hungary and Poland, both part of the European Union, the quintessential  democracy project, are among the most prominent countries moving away from democracy and toward authoritarianism; or that countries otherwise as diverse as Turkey, India, the Philippines and Brazil are moving in the same direction.  Nor does Diamond venture into unfamiliar territory when he argues that the United States under President Donald Trump appears to be more on the side of the authoritarians and populists rather than those seeking to institutionalize democracy in their countries.

But Diamond is an accomplished  salesman for democratic governance, the product he has relentlessly pedaled for over four decades, and his salesmanship skills are on full display here.  Amidst all the reasons he provides for pessimism about democracy’s worldwide prospects, readers will be reassured to find more than a little of the optimism that characterized his earlier works.  Although authoritarians may seem to be on the rise everywhere, people across the globe are not losing their faith in democracy, he argues.   Democracy for Diamond remains nothing less than a “universal value” (p.159).  The world’s democracies quite simply “have the better ideas” (p.225), he writes.  But is modern democracy up to the task of halting and reversing the world’s authoritarian turn?  Is it capable of countering effectively Russian rage and Chinese ambition?  These are the questions Diamond wrestles with throughout this timely and passionately argued work.

* * *

For Diamond, democracy at its core is a system of government where people choose and can change their leaders in regular, free and fair elections.  Such a system should also include strong protections for basic liberties, such as freedom of speech, press and religion; protection for racial and cultural minorities; a robust rule of law and an independent judiciary; trustworthy law enforcement institutions; and a lively civil society.   Diamond says little here about the economic systems of countries seeking to establish and sustain democratic institutions.  But at least since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, most democracy experts agree that market economies allowing for free enterprise — along with ample room for state regulation in the public interest — are most compatible with modern democracy.

But sustaining democracy over the longer term depends more on culture than institutions, Diamond argues.  A country’s citizens need to believe in democracy and be “willing to defend it as a way of life” (p.25), in which case the level of economic development and the precise design of institutions matter less. When democracy lacks broad support, it will “always be a fragile reed” (p.25).   And the paramount component of democratic culture is legitimacy, the “resilient and broadly shared belief that democracy is better than any other imaginable form of government.  People must commit to democracy come hell or high water, and stick with it even when the economy tanks, incomes plunge, or politicians misbehave” (p.25).

Democracy is hardly restricted to those economically advanced countries we call “Western” (“Western” and “the West” include not just the countries of Western Europe and North America but also prosperous democratic countries that are not geographically part of the West, such as Japan and New Zealand).  A country does not have to be economically well off to institutionalize democracy, Diamond insists. Many African countries have made earnest starts.  But successful transitions to democracy nonetheless remain strongly linked to economic prosperity, he argues, citing the examples of Greece, Spain, Chile, South Korea, Taiwan and South Africa.

But Russia and China are undermining democracy in all corners of the globe, each blowing its own “ill winds” across the planet.  In Russia’s case, they are the winds of “anger, insecurity, and resentments of a former superpower;” with China, those of “ambitions, swagger, and overreach of a new one” (p.130-31).  Both are investing heavily in efforts to “promote disinformation and covertly subvert democratic norms and institutions” (p.12).   Among today’s foes of democracy, only two leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, have “enough power and ambition to undermine the entire global liberal order” (p.161).

Russia experienced some shallow and tentative moves toward democracy in the 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  But since Putin assumed power in 2000, the movement has been almost exclusively in the opposite direction.  Deeply insecure about the legitimacy of his rule, Putin believes that the West is “seeking to encircle Russia and keep it weak” (p.111).   The 2013-14 “Eurormaidan Revolution” in Ukraine, which brought down Viktor Yanukovych, a key autocratic partner, infuriated Putin.   The United States had “toppled his closest ally, in a country he regarded as an extension of Russia itself,” as an American journalist put it.  “All that money American had spent on prodemocracy NGOs in Ukraine had paid off” (p.112).

Russia has mastered the use of social media to “stimulate division, increase social and racial unrest, and undermine the self-assurance of the major Western democracies – and work to divide them from one another” (p.112). Its most dramatic targets were Hilary Clinton and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Clinton “would almost certainly have won the Electoral College if there had been no Russian intervention” (p.118), Diamond asserts, although he offers no evidentiary support for this assertion.  In hacking the 2016 US election, Putin succeeded in both of his apparent aims: to “sow division and discord in American democracy . . . [and] to punish Clinton and elect Trump” (p.118).

But the 2016 election was just one instance of Russia’s use of social media disinformation campaigns to undermine liberal democracy.  These campaigns, assaults “on truth itself” and  on the “very notion that there can be ‘an objective, verifiable set of facts” (p.119), often aim to strengthen extremist political forces within established democracies.  They “do not need to – and do not really aim to – persuade democratic publics that Russia’s positions are right, only that a democracy’s government and political leaders cannot be believed or trusted” (p.119).  Russia under Putin has sought to wreak havoc within the European Union, aiming in particular to end the economic sanctions that Europe and the United States imposed on Russia in retaliation for its aggression in Ukraine.  Russia almost certainly provided significant illicit funding to the Brexit campaign, Diamond contends, helping to tip Britain into leaving the European Union, a “major achievement for a Kremlin that has the destruction of European unity as one of its major aims” (p.121).

But Diamond emphasizes that Russia is a declining power whose “malign intentions and nationalist bravado cannot disguise its outstripped economy and shrinking importance to the twenty-first century world” (p.124).  In the long run, the “ambitions of a rising China, not the resentments of a falling Russia” represent the greatest external challenge to global democracy.  Today’s China, still recovering from what many Chinese consider a century of humiliation at the hands of Japan and the West, is the world’s “most dynamic power” (p.144), with global reach and power that will “increasingly and inevitably dwarf Russia’s” (p.124).

China seeks hegemony over all of Asia and the Pacific, Diamond argues.  It also increasingly aspires to challenge the United States for global leadership, “economically, politically, and, some believe, eventually militarily” (p.131).  Its military spending is now second only to that of the United States and it may catch America militarily “sooner than we care to imagine” (p.142-43).  China has already established a claim to global dominance in such  transformative technologies as artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, and electric cars.

Manipulating social media massively and aggressively, China is also building a “sweeping surveillance state that aims to assess every digital footprint of every Chinese citizen and then compile each person’s ‘social credit score.’” (p.236).  It readily shares its “Orwellian tools” with other a autocratic regimes, “threatening an ‘Arab Spring in reverse’ in which digital technology enable ‘state domination and repression at a staggering scale’” (p.237).

China’s foreign aid goes disproportionately to the world’s autocrats, many of whom think that China has developed a secret formula.  While some authoritarian regimes dislike China’s heavy-handed attempts to win influence and gain control — sometimes considered a new form of colonialism — others are lured to China’s side by “money, power, ambition, and simple admiration for its sheer success” (p.144).  In addition to assisting the world’s autocracies and countries that could bend in that direction, China also focuses on influencing the world’s democracies.

Diamond sees China playing a longer and more patient game than Russia in its dealing with the West. Through media deals, investments, partnership agreements, charitable and political donations, and positions on boards of directors, it is seeking wider and deeper infiltration into what Diamond calls the “vital tissues of democracies” (p.133): publishing houses, entertainment industries, technology companies, universities, think tanks, non-governmental organizations.  Favorable views of China, he notes, exceed that of the United States in much of the world.

Prior to Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential candidacy, Diamond considered the United States uniquely qualified to lead the global resistance to Russian rage and Chinese ambition.  Since Trump became president, however, the United States appears to be more on the side of the authoritarians and populists rather than those seeking to institutionalize democracy in their countries – or, at best, on the sidelines while Russia and China seek to extend their influence and undermine democracy.  If there is any upside to the Trump presidency, Diamond notes, it is that it provides a glimpse into the alarming consequences of world without American leadership and steadfastness, a “far more frightening and dangerous place, with muscular, corrupt dictatorships dominating large swaths of the globe through blatant coercion and covert subversion” (p.287).

Trump’s unremitting insistence that the United States is being cheated by its friends and allies has propelled the country “down the self-defeating path of ‘America alone’” (p.301).  His decision to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 2016 twelve-nation Pacific Rim free-trade agreement, “so visionary and so necessary,” constitutes in Diamond’s view the “most grievous self-inflicted wound to America’s global leadership since the creation of the liberal world order after World War II” (p.144).  US withdrawal from the TPP amounted to a “massive gift to authoritarian China and a body blow to democratic aspirations in Southeast Asia” (p.144-45), serving  as a “stunning symbol – and accelerator – of both China’s rise and America’s descent.  As the great democracy that dominated world politics in the twentieth century retreated, the great dictatorship that aims to dominate world politics in the twenty-first could hardly believe its luck” (p.145).

Diamond provides an extensive set of recommendations on how the United States and other advanced democratic countries can deliver more sustainable assistance to aspiring and fragile democracies to counter Russia and China.  Priorities need to be combatting kleptocracy, public corruption, and international money laundering; making the internet safe for democracy; and improving  public diplomacy through  smarter uses of “soft power” to counter Russia and China’s “sharp power.”

Kleptocracy, a recent term now frequently used for high level state corruption, involves the theft of state resources that could have advanced the public good but instead were diverted for private gain – hospitals and schools that were not built, for example – and by definition constitutes a crime against a country’s citizens.  Kleptocracy depends upon using the international financial system to “move, mask, and secure ill-gotten fortunes across borders,” posing the “single most urgent internal threat to democracy,” a threat which renders fragile democracies “all the more vulnerable to external subversion” (p.184).  Many of the world’s democracies, not least the United States, are complicit in providing refuge for the ill-gotten gains of the world’s kleptocrats.  Global transfers of untraceable funds have enabled a “stunning array of venal dictators and their family members, political allies, and business cronies to acquire property and influence in the West as well as to corrupt democracy and the rule of law within free nations” (p.184).

Diamond’s recommendations for combatting public corruption and international money laundering are for the most part US-oriented (e.g. modernize and strengthen the Foreign Agents Registration Act; empower the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to conduct its own investigations).  But he also offers some general recommendations that all the world’s advanced democracies could and should follow (e.g. end anonymous shell companies and real estate purchases).

Today, moreover, the Internet and related technologies – email, text messaging, photo sharing – have the potential to uncover public corruption, as well as highlight human rights abuses, expose voter fraud, and organize demonstrations.   These technologies played a major role in the protests in 2011 that brought down Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak; and those that challenged Iran’s blatantly fraudulent 2009 elections.   But many modern authoritarian regimes – not just Russia and China — have developed sophisticated means to to “manipulate, manage, vilify, and amplify public opinion online” (p.234). Freedom House considers  growing state level manipulation of social media one of the leading causes of the steady eight-year decline in global Internet freedom.  Making the Internet a safe place for democracy requires a “concerted partnership among democratic governments, technology companies, civil-society groups, and individual ‘netizens’” (p.229).

Diamond also provides a set of recommendations for how the United States can fine tune its own internal democratic mechanisms through, for example, adoption of ranked choice voting, reducing the gerrymandering of legislative districts and the influence of money in politics — worthy objectives, but markedly out of line with the priorities of the Trump administration and today’s Republican Party.  Looking beyond the Trump administration, however, Diamond argues that the tide of authoritarianism can be reversed.

Few people celebrate authoritarianism as a superior system, “morally or practically” (p.225 ).  There are no large-scale surveys of public opinion showing a popular groundswell for authoritarianism.  Rather, in  surveys from every region of the world, “large to overwhelming majorities of the public, on average, said that democracy is the best form of government and that an unaccountable strongman is a bad idea” (p.159-60).  Within even the world’s most tenacious autocracies, “many people want to understand what democracy is and how it can be achieved.  Even many dictators and generalissimos know and fear democracy’s allure” (p.225).  In this networked age, “both idealism and the harder imperatives of global power and security argue for more democracy, not less” (p.200).

* * *

The best way to counter Russian rage and Chinese ambition, Diamond counsels, is to show that Moscow and Beijing are “on the wrong side of history; that people everywhere yearn to be free, and that they can make freedom work to achieve a more just, sustainable and prosperous society” (p.200).   Yet Diamond makes clear that checking the worldwide authoritarian tide depends to an unsettling degree upon the United States reversing its present course and prioritizing anew the global quest for democracy.

 

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

June 26, 2020

 

 

Exploring Joseph Conrad’s World

Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch:

Joseph Conrad in a Global World (Penguin Press) 

               Joseph Conrad, born Konrad Kurzeniowski in 1857 to Polish parents in present-day Ukraine, spent most of his adult life either at sea or writing novels in his adopted homeland, England.   Conrad is one of a handful of authors in the last two centuries who have made their mark writing in an acquired rather than their native language (others include Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Koestler; I reviewed a biography of Koestler here in 2012).   In The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Maya Jasonoff aims, as she puts it, to explore Conrad’s world “with the compass of an historian, the chart of a biographer, and the navigational sextant of a fiction reader” (p.9).  Jasonoff, a professor of history at Harvard University,  skillfully uses each of these tools to produce a masterful account of the late 19^th and early 20^th century world that shaped Conrad’s personal life and literary output.

Conrad set his novels in the late Victorian period, a time when the British Empire was at its height and Europe’s powers were scrambling for territory in Africa and Asia.  He offered stories about places that his English-speaking readers considered exotic, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  But they were discomforting stories that in different ways highlighted the darker side of imperialist adventures.  His most famous work, Heart of Darkness, detailed a boat trip into what was then known as the Congo Free State, a trip in which the lines between savagery and civilization, madness and sanity, seemed to blur.   Conrad developed similar themes in The Secret Agent and Nostrodomo, novels about Asia and a fictional Latin American country that resembled Paraguay.  Jasonoff concentrates her study on these works, along with The Secret Agent, a novel about Russian anarchists operating in London.

Jasonoff recognizes a form of international connectivity — globalization — emerging in Conrad’s lifetime.  By the first decade of the 20^th century, she writes, there had “never been such global interconnection – and never such manifest division” (p.285).  Democracy advanced, as liberal revolutions challenged autocrats and women stormed for the vote.  “But imperialism intensified as a handful of Western powers consolidated their rule over the majority of the world’s people. Rising prosperity went with increasing inequality. More conversations across cultures came with more elaborate theories of racial difference” (p.285).  Conrad grasped this interconnectedness and elevated it to a central motif for his writings.  Wherever he set his novels, Jasonoff writes, Conrad “grappled with the ramifications of living in a global world: the moral and material impact of dislocation, the tension and opportunity of multi-ethnic societies, the disruption brought by technological change” (p.11).

Jasonoff, who took her own tour down the Congo River as part of her preparations for this book, divides the work into four parts: “Nation,” focusing on Conrad’s youth; “Ocean,” his years at sea; “Civilization,” an ironic reference to Conrad’s trip to the Congo in 1890 and writing Heart of Darkness nearly a decade later; and “Empire,” how Nostrodomo reflected Conrad’s late life views about a globalized world of empires and competitive nation-states.  Throughout, she shows her stripes as an historian with concise,  ingeniously detailed treatment of the times and places depicted in Conrad’s novels, juxtaposed with her analyses of the novels themselves.  As an able biographer, moreover, she does not neglect her subject’s enigmatic personal life.

* * *

               Konrad Kurzeniowski’s father Apollo was a member of the Polish landed nobility, the szlachita. But Apollo was also a fervent Polish nationalist, a political activist who dedicated his life to the cause of independence for Poland, which had been partitioned between Austria, Russia and Prussia in 1795.  The young Konrad’s mother Ewa died when the boy was eight and Apollo passed away when he was 12, leaving the task of raising the orphaned lad to his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. To Tadeusz, Apollo had been “feckless, quixotic, and fatally incapable of supporting his family” (p.45). Tadeusz hoped to shape the young Konrad into a “pragmatic Bobrowski, not a dreamy Korzeniowski like his father” (p.45). Uncle Tadeusz continued to support Konrad financially until the young man was well into his adult years (throughout much of the book, Jasonoff uses the birthname “Konrad” interchangeably with “Conrad”).

As Konrad neared twenty, he felt a need to get away from from Kraków, where he was living with his uncle, and especially from the ruling Russians, who were looking to conscript him into military service.  He had grown up “obsessed with the idea of becoming a sailor.”  Sailing may have seemed a “completely fantastical notion for a young man who’d been raised hundreds of miles from the ocean.”  But Konrad had been “adrift his whole life. Going to sea just made it official” (p.49). Surprisingly, Uncle Tadeusz allowed him to leave for Marseille, where Tadeusz had connections with the extensive Polish diaspora there, including a cousin who owned a shipping company.

Bureaucratic hurdles prevented Konrad from working on French ships, and the young man experienced one of the lowest points in his life.  He ran out of money, tried unsuccessfully to get it back in casinos, and even attempted suicide.  Uncle Tadeusz went to Marseille and tried to convince Konrad to return to Kraków.  When the young man refused, he and his uncle decided that he should try to join the English Merchant Marine. Konrad had a bad experience on one ship, the Mavis, left it and departed for London, never writing again about Marseille or this part of his life.

The young man arrived in London in 1878 without a firm command of the English language.  His initial impressions upon arriving in London were “as if he’d wandered into a novel by Charles Dickens. Everything he knew about London he’d learned from Dickens” (p.62).  His Dickensian vision “lit the way from Konrad Korzeniowski, the bookish son of a Polish writer, to Joseph Conrad, a critically acclaimed English novelist . . . On the rare occasions that Conrad wrote about his early life, it was these first years in London that he most often recalled” (p.62).  In an insightful passage, Jasonoff shows how London at the time of Conrad’s arrival was already the center of a globalized empire and a melting pot offering many freedoms that distinguished it from Eastern Europe.  Conrad never lived more than an hour or two from London again. But he spent most of the next decade and a half, to 1894, in various capacities as a professional mariner.

More than in London, it was at sea that Konrad Korzeniowski “turned into Joseph Conrad” (p.93), Jasonoff argues.  For over fifteen years, Conrad sailed to the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Africa on some of the longest routes that sailing ships regularly plied.  He learned to speak English on British ships, where native-born Britons were usually in the minority.  For Conrad, a sailing ship represented a “distinctive – and distinctively British – sense of ethics” that called for “experience, training, courage, perception, creativity, adaptability, and judgment” (p.109).  Conrad “transformed the British sailing ship into a gold standard for moral conduct.  It became for him what Poland had been for his parents, a romantic ideal that served as a guide for life” (p.94).  Sometime toward the end of the 1880s, Conrad started to write fiction – “the beginning of a lifetime of writing about sailors, ships, and the sea” (p.94).  But Conrad resisted the label of “sea writer.”  Stories about the sea were, for him, “stories about life” (p.108).

* * *

                    Conrad’s most famous story about life, Heart of Darkness, was based on his own trip in 1890 down the Congo River as captain of a Belgian steamer.  Conrad kept an extensive journal of what he observed, most of which worked its way into the story he started to write in December 1898.  None of Conrad’s other works of fiction, Jasonoff notes, could be “so closely pegged to contemporary records of his experience” (p.205).  The novel was published in 1898.  Its narrator, Charles Marlow, tells the story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the Thames in London of his effort to locate Kurtz, an ivory trader in the Congo.  Marlow discovered that Kurtz, a “prophet of civilization” who “promised civilization while snatching ivory,” had become a “savage lord” (p.204).

On its face, Heart of Darkness appeared to be what Jasonoff describes as the “quintessential river story, running from here to there: a journey from Europe to Africa, overlaid by metaphorical journeys from present to past, light to dark, civilization to savagery, sanity to madness” (p.205).  But by nesting Marlow’s experience in Africa inside the telling of his story in England, Conrad warned his readers against the complacent notion that “savagery” was far from “civilization.” “What happened there and what happened here were fundamentally connected. Anyone could be savage. Everywhere could go dark” (p.237).

The extent to which Conrad’s fictional portrait of the Congo accurately depicted its actual conditions did not become fully known until years later.  But Jasonoff captures well the “appalling greed, violence, and hypocrisy” (p.3-4) of the regime of Leopold II, King of the Belgians.  She colorfully describes Leopold as an “outsized man, usually the tallest man in the room, with a nose like a mountain slope and a beard like a waterfall foaming over his chest” (p.173-74).  Determined to be a geo-political player on par with those from the larger European powers, Leopold sought to “open up to civilization the only part of the globe which it [had] not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness in which entire populations are enveloped” (p.173-74).

From 1885 to 1908, Leopold privately controlled and owned what was known as the Congo Free State, about 75 times larger than Belgium.   He used his personal control to strip the county of vast amounts of wealth, especially ivory and rubber.  These labor-intensive industries were serviced by locals who were forced to work through torture, imprisonment, maiming and terror.  Beneath a veneer of idealistic principles, the Congo Free State was, in Jasonoff’s words, the “most nakedly abusive colonial regime in the world” (p.205).

                 Lord Jim, published in serial form in 1899-1900 and in hardcover in 1900 was based loosely on the scandal of the S.S. Jeddah, a British-flagged, Singapore-owned steamship that perished at sea in 1880, carrying Muslims from Singapore to Mecca.  The story revolves around the abandonment of a ship by its British crew, including a young British seaman named Jim.   Jasonoff likens Jim to the main character of Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a man who had “‘dreamed of battles all his life’ only to run away from the field the very first time he fought” (p.145).  Lord Jim remained Conrad’s most popular work for so long that, twenty years later, he “complained about critics who measure his new books against it” (p.144).  The novel appeared at a time “when Europe and the United States had colonized virtually all of Africa and Asia” (p.144-45).  It told of Europeans in Asia “not from the veranda of a British colonial bungalow, still less an armchair in a London club – but as Conrad had seen them, from the steamer’s deck” (p.145).

Although Nostromo was Conrad’s only major work about a place he had never been, Jasonoff prefers that we look at it as a “novel about every place he’d been” (p.283).  The novel came out in book form in October 1904, with the sub-title, “A Tale of the Seaboard,” a tale of the coast (the novel started out being about Italian immigrants in Argentina; the title is a clumsy translation of  “our man,” nostro unomo, in Italian).   A coast was something new in Conrad’s work, Jasonoff writes. The “border of land and sea, a coast could be both barrier and meeting place – a voyager’s point of departure, the place where an invader lands.”  In Nostromo “outsiders, conspiracies, and families” met the “themes of honor, community, and isolation he had [previously] set at sea” (p.278).

                  Nostromo takes place in Costaguana, a New World creation that Conrad made up, based primarily upon what he had read about Paraguay. The main storyline concerned the poisoning impact of the San Tomé silver mine on individuals and corporations, particularly British and American. Charles Gould, a native of Castaguano of English ancestry, believed the mine could bring peace to a war torn country.  But the extraction of silver only heightened the country’s unrest.

The secret to Nostromo’s “extraordinary prescience,” Jasonoff argues, was that Conrad “folded between its covers his own ‘theory of the world’s future’” (p.283). In Nostrodomo, Conrad anticipated the “ascent of an American-led consortium of ‘material interests,’” which would “dictate the fortunes of new nations” and “make imperialism continue to thrive whether or not it had the word ‘empire’ attached to it” (p.283).  Jasonoff finds it “ironic if not surprising” that Costaguana, a place Conrad had fabricated, “felt so stunningly real to readers.  Conrad had fashioned his ideas of Latin America from precisely the same kinds of books and newspapers his audiences might have read.  Nostromo thus confirmed their stereotypes” (p.279). Readers and reviewers in the United States in particular read Nostromo as a “vindication of all their prejudices about Latin America” (p.279).

                    The Secret Agent was set in London and dealt with anarchists, the only major Conrad novel not set at sea. Based loosely on the plot to kill Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881, The Secret Agent was Conrad’s “tribute to his beloved Dickens” (p.70-71).  More than anything else Conrad wrote, The Secret Agent “mapped the contours of his early life” (p.81) – the novelist Joseph Conrad writing about Konrad Kurzeniowski, as Jasonoff puts it.  Some critics characterized The Secret Agent as a novel written by a “foreigner,” criticism that stung Conrad badly.  The Secret Agent captured an irony of Conrad’s life: he couldn’t go back to Poland, yet he worried that he didn’t really fit into his adopted country either.

* * *

                   Conrad’s major novels conspicuously lack meaningful roles for women. There are no contemporary clues, moreover, whether he had sexual relationships with any women during his sailing days, in Europe or beyond, Jasonoff indicates.  He had one odd attachment to Marguerite Poradowska, a widow living in Brussels whose recently-deceased husband was a distant cousin of the Kurzeniowski family.   Their relationship appears to have been primarily on paper, in “effusive, emotionally charged correspondence between the two” (p.165).   Eight years older than Conrad, and in a way part of the family, the new widow was a “‘safe’ repository for Konrad’s intimate confessions, and in the coming years he poured them out in sometimes dozens of letters per year.  Marguerite became the first woman with whom the adult Konrad formed a sustained emotional relationship” (p.165).

Then, suddenly, their correspondence ended and, seemingly out of nowhere, Conrad announced “solemnly” (p.227) in a letter in 1896 to another woman he had had his eye on that he was about to marry Jessie George, an 18 year old working class girl from Peckham, nearly twenty years younger than her future husband.  In a letter to a cousin in Poland, Conrad described George as “small, not at all striking-looking person (to tell the truth alas – rather plain!) who nevertheless is very dear to me” (p.228). Marriage did not frighten him, he indicated, because he was “accustomed to an adventurous life and to facing terrible dangers” (p.227).

Conrad’s friends “couldn’t believe he had married such an uneducated, unrefined person” (p.230).  But the marriage worked.  George had qualities that Conrad “needed and craved: an even temper, good humor, patience, an impulse to nurture” (p.230).  The couple had two sons, Borys, born in 1898, and John, born in 1906.  During Conrad’s peak years as a writer, the family lived together in genteel poverty in rural locations outside London (Conrad had long since spent the inheritance he received from his Uncle Tadeusz, who died in 1893).

In the summer of 1914, Conrad took his family of four back to Poland, at precisely the moment when European-wide war broke out.  His son Borys later served in the war.  He was gassed and shell-shocked in the last weeks of the conflict and came home to convalescence.  As an expatriate living in Britain, Conrad became increasingly involved in Polish affairs during the war years and their aftermath.  Following in his father’s footsteps, Conrad sought to protect Poland from what he termed “Russian barbarism” and Germany’s “superficial, grinding civilization” (p.292). He wrote a formal note to the Foreign Office in 1917, advocating “an Anglo-French protectorate” as the “ideal form of moral and material support” (p.297) to defend Poland from its more powerful neighbors.

In April 1923, Conrad arrived in New York for his first visit to the United States, where he was surprised to learn what a celebrity he was. Despite his concerns about American imperial overreach, he enjoyed the visit and appreciated the Americans whom he met.  He died in August 1924 at his home near Canterbury, at a time when the entire family, including his first grandchild, had fortuitously gathered for Bank Holiday weekend.

* * *

               Jasonoff sees many similarities between today’s globalization and the iteration Conrad wrote about.  Ships and sailing remain central to the world’s economy.  Today, “Internet cables run along the seafloor beside the old telegraph wires.  Conrad’s characters whisper in the ears of new generations of anti-globalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists” (p.7-9).   Conrad’s world thus “shimmers beneath the surface of our own” (p.7), she writes.  Conrad’s world may have been  one where cynicism, hypocrisy and cruelty too often prevailed.  But through her formidable use of the tools of the historian, biographer and fiction reader, Jasonoff manages to cast much light on the darkness of that world.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

May 20, 2019

Honest Broker

 

 

Michael Doran, Ike’s Gamble:

America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East 

 

       On July 26, 1956, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser stunned the world by announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal, a critical conduit through Egypt for the transportation of oil between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Constructed between 1859 and 1869, the canal was owned by the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company. What followed three months later was the Suez Crisis of 1956: on October 29, Israeli brigades invaded Egypt across its Sinai Peninsula, advancing to within ten miles of the canal.  Britain and France, following a scheme concocted with Israel to retake the canal and oust Nasser, demanded that both Israeli and Egyptian troops withdraw from the occupied territory. Then, on November 5^th, British and French forces invaded Egypt and occupied most of the Canal Zone, the territory along the canal. The United States famously opposed the joint operation and, through the United Nations, forced Britain and France out of Egypt.  Nearly simultaneously, the Soviet Union ruthlessly suppressed an uprising in Hungary.

       The autumn of 1956 was thus a tumultuous time. Across the globe, it was a time when colonies were clamoring for and achieving independence from former colonizers, and the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for the allegiance of emerging states in what was coming to be known as the Third World.  In the volatile and complex Middle East, it was a time of rising nationalism. Nasser, a wildly ambitious general who came to power after a 1952 military coup had deposed the King of Egypt, aspired to become not simply the leader of his country but also of the Arab speaking world, even the entire Muslim world.  By 1956, Nasser had emerged as the region’s most visible nationalist. But he was far from the only voice in the Middle East seeking to speak for Middle East nationalism. Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq were also imbued with the rising spirit of nationalism and saw Nasser as a rival, not a fraternal comrade-in-arms.

       Michael Doran’s Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East provides background and context for the United States’ decision not to support Britain, France and Israel during the 1956 Suez crisis. As his title suggests, Doran places America’s President, war hero and father figure Dwight D. Eisenhower, known affectionately as Ike, at the middle of the complicated Middle East web (although Nasser probably merited a place in Doran’s title: “Ike’s Gamble on Nasser” would have better captured the spirit of the narrative). Behind the perpetual smile, Eisenhower was a cold-blooded realist who was “unshakably convinced” (p.214) that the best way to advance American interests in the Middle East and hold Soviet ambitions in check was for the United States to play the role of an “honest broker” in the region, sympathetic to the region’s nationalist aspirations and not too closely aligned with its traditional allies Britain and France, or with the young state of Israel.

       But Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former high level official at the National Security Council and Department of Defense in the administration of George W. Bush, goes on to argue that Eisenhower’s vision of the honest broker – and his “bet” on Nasser – were undermined by the United States’ failure to recognize the “deepest drivers of the Arab and Muslim states, namely their rivalries with each other for power and authority” (p.105). Less than two years after taking Nasser’s side in the 1956 Suez Crisis, Eisenhower seemed to reverse himself.  By mid-1958, Doran reveals, Eisenhower had come to regret his bet on Nasser and his refusal to back Britain, France and Israel during the crisis. Eisenhower kept this view largely to himself, however, distorting the historical picture of his Middle East policies.

        Although Doran considers Eisenhower “one of the most sophisticated and experienced practitioners of international politics ever to reside in the White House,” the story of his relationship with Nasser is at bottom a lesson in the “dangers of calibrating the distinction between ally and enemy incorrectly” (p.13).  Or, as he puts it elsewhere, Eisenhower’s “bet” on Nasser’s regime is a “tale of Frankenstein’s monster, with the United States as the mad scientist and the new regime as his uncontrollable creation” (p.10).

* * *

      The “honest broker” approach to the Middle East dominated the Eisenhower administration from its earliest days in 1953. Eisenhower, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and most of their key advisors shared a common picture of the volatile region. Trying to wind down a war in Korea they had inherited from the Truman Administration, they considered the Middle East the next and most critical region of confrontation in the global Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.  As they saw it, in the Middle East the United States found itself caught between Arabs and other “indigenous” nationalities on one side, and the British, French, and Israelis on the other. “Each side had hold of one arm of the United States, which they were pulling like a tug rope. The picture was so obvious to almost everyone in the Eisenhower administration that it was understood as an objective description of reality” (p.44). It is impossible, Doran writes, to exaggerate the “impact that the image of America as an honest broker had on Eisenhower’s thought . . . The notion that the top priority of the United States was to co-opt Arab nationalists by helping them extract concessions – within limits – from Britain and Israel was not open to debate. It was a view that shaped all other policy proposals” (p.10).

         Alongside Ike’s “bet” on Nasser, the book’s second major theme is the deterioration of the famous “special relationship” between Britain and the United States during Eisenhower’s first term, due in large measure to differences over Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Nasser (and, to quibble further with the book’s title, “Britain’s Fall from Power in the Middle East” in my view would have captured the spirit of the narrative better than “America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East”).  The Eisenhower administration viewed Britain’s once mighty empire as a relic of the past, out of place in the post World War II order. It viewed Britain’s leader, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in much the same way. Eisenhower entered his presidency convinced that it was time for Churchill, then approaching age 80, to exit the world stage and for Britain to relinquish control of its remaining colonial possessions – in Egypt, its military base and sizeable military presence along the Suez Canal.

      Anthony Eden replaced Churchill as prime minister in 1955.  A leading anti-appeasement ally of Churchill in the 1930s, by the 1950s Eden shared Eisenhower’s view that Churchill had become a “wondrous relic” who was “stubbornly clinging to outmoded ideas” (p.20) about Britain’s empire and its place in the world.  Although interested in aligning Britain’s policies with the realities of the post World War II era, Eden led the British assault on Suez in 1956.  With  “his career destroyed” (p.202), Eden was forced to resign early in 1957.

       If the United States today also has a “special relationship” with Israel, that relationship had yet to emerge during the first Eisenhower term.  Israel’s circumstances were of course entirely different from those of Britain and France, a young country surrounded by Arab-speaking states implacably hostile to its very existence. President Truman had formally recognized Israel less than a decade earlier, in 1948.  But substantial segments of America’s foreign policy establishment in the 1950s continued to believe that such recognition had been in error. Not least among them was John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.  There seemed to be more than a whiff of anti-Semitism in Dulles’ antagonism toward Israel.

        Describing Israel as the “darling of Jewry throughout the world” (p.98), Dulles decried the “potency of international Jewry” (p.98) and warned that the United States should not be seen as a “backer of expansionist Zionism” (p.77).  For the first two years of the Eisenhower administration, Dulles followed a policy designed to “’deflate the Jews’ . . . by refusing to sell arms to Israel, rebuffing Israeli requests for security guarantees, and diminishing the level of financial assistance to the Jewish state” (p.99).   Dulles’ views were far from idiosyncratic. Israel “stirred up deep hostility among the Arabs” and many of America’s foreign policy elites in the 1950s ”saw Israel as a liability” (p.9). Without success, the United States sought Nasser’s agreement to an Arab-Israeli accord which would have required limited territorial concessions from Israel.

       Behind the scenes, however, the United States brokered a 1954 Anglo-Egyptian agreement, by which Britain would withdraw from its military base in the Canal Zone over an 18-month period, with Egypt agreeing that Britain could return to its base in the event of a major war. Doran terms this Eisenhower’s “first bet” on Nasser. Ike “wagered that the evacuation of the British from Egypt would sate Nasser’s nationalist appetite. The Egyptian leader, having learned that the United States was willing and able to act as a strategic partner, would now keep Egypt solidly within the Western security system. It would not take long before Eisenhower would come to realize that Nasser’s appetite only increased with eating” (p.67-68).

        As the United States courted Nasser as a voice of Arab nationalism and a bulwark against Soviet expansion into the region, it also encouraged other Arab voices. In what the United States imprecisely termed the “Northern Tier,” it supported security pacts between Turkey and Iraq and made overtures to Egypt’s neighbors Syria and Jordan. Nasser adamantly opposed these measures, considering them a means of constraining his own regional aspirations and preserving Western influence through the back door.  The “fatal intellectual flaw” of the United States’ honest broker strategy, Doran argues, was that it “imagined the Arabs and Muslims as a unified bloc. It paid no attention whatsoever to all of the bitter rivalries in the Middle East that had no connection to the British and Israeli millstones. Consequently, Nasser’s disputes with his rivals simply did not register in Washington as factors of strategic significance” (p.78).

           In September 1955, Nasser shocked the United States by concluding an agreement to buy arms from the Soviet Union, through Czechoslovakia, one of several indications that he was at best playing the West against the Soviet Union, at worst tilting toward the Soviet side.  Another came in May 1956, when Egypt formally recognized Communist China. In July 1956, partially in reaction to Nasser’s pro-Soviet dalliances, Dulles informed the Egyptian leader that the United States was pulling out of a project to provide funding for a dam across the Nile River at Aswan, Nasser’s “flagship development project . . . [which was] expected to bring under cultivation hundreds of thousands of acres of arid land and to generate millions of watts of electricity” (p.167).

         Days later, Nasser countered by announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal, predicting that the tolls collected from ships passing through the canal would pay for the dam’s construction within five years. Doran characterizes Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal as the “single greatest move of his career.” It is impossible to exaggerate, he contends, the “power of the emotions that the canal takeover stirred in ordinary Egyptians. If Europeans claimed that the company was a private concern, Egyptians saw it as an instrument of imperial exploitation – ‘a state within a state’. . . [that was] plundering a national asset for the benefit of France and Britain” (p.171).

            France, otherwise largely missing in Doran’s detailed account, concocted the scheme that led to the October 1956 crisis.  Concerned that Nasser was providing arms to anti-French rebels in Algeria, France proposed to Israel what Doran terms a “stranger than fiction” (p.189) plot by which the Israelis would invade Egypt. Then, in order to protect shipping through the canal, France and Britain would:

issue an ultimatum demanding that the belligerents withdraw to a position of ten miles on either side of the canal, or face severe consequences. The Israelis, by prior arrangement, would comply. Nasser, however, would inevitably reject the ultimatum, because it would leave Israeli forces inside Egypt while simultaneously compelling Egyptian forces to withdraw from their own sovereign territory. An Anglo-French force would then intervene to punish Egypt for noncompliance. It would take over the canal and, in the process, topple Nasser (p.189).

The crisis unfolded more or less according to this script when Israeli brigades invaded Egypt on October 29^th and Britain and France launched their joint invasion on November 5th. Nasser sunk ships in the canal and blocked oil tankers headed through the canal to Europe.

         Convinced that acquiescence in the invasion would drive the entire Arab world to the Soviet side in the global Cold War, the United States issued measured warnings to Britain and France to give up their campaign and withdraw from Egyptian soil. If Nasser was by then a disappointment to the United States, Doran writes, the “smart money was still on an alliance with moderate nationalism, not with dying empires” (p.178). But when Eden telephoned the White House on November 7, 1956, largely to protest the United States’ refusal to sell oil to Britain, Ike went further. In that phone call, Eisenhower as honest broker “decided that Nasser must win the war, and that he must be seen to win” (p.249).  Eisenhower’s hardening toward his traditional allies a week into the crisis, Doran contends, constituted his “most fateful decision of the Suez Crisis: to stand against the British, French, and Israelis in [a] manner that was relentless, ruthless, and uncompromising . . . [Eisenhower] demanded, with single-minded purpose, the total and unconditional British, French, and Israeli evacuation from Egypt. These steps, not the original decision to oppose the war, were the key factors that gave Nasser the triumph of his life” (p.248-49).

        When the financial markets caught wind of the blocked oil supplies, the value of the British pound plummeted and a run on sterling reserves ensued. “With his currency in free fall, Eden became ever more vulnerable to pressure from Eisenhower. Stabilizing the markets required the cooperation of the United States, which the Americans refused to give until the British accepted a complete, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal from Egypt” (p.196). At almost the same time, Soviet tanks poured into Budapest to suppress a burgeoning Hungarian pro-democracy movement. The crisis in Eastern Europe had the effect of “intensifying Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s frustration with the British and the French. As they saw it, Soviet repression in Hungary offered the West a prime opportunity to capture the moral high ground in international politics – an opportunity that the gunboat diplomacy in Egypt was destroying” (p.197). The United States supported a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of invading troops. Britain, France and Israel had little choice bu to accept these terms in December 1956.

       In the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, the emboldened Nasser continued his quest to become the region’s dominant leader. In February 1958, he engineered the formation of the United Arab Republic, a political union between Egypt and Syria that he envisioned as the first step toward a broader pan-Arab state (in fact, the union lasted only until 1961). He orchestrated a coup in Iraq in July 1958. Later that month, Eisenhower sent American troops into Lebanon to avert an Egyptian-led uprising against the pro-western government of Christian president Camille Chamoun. Sometime in the period between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the intervention in Lebanon in 1958, Doran argues, Eisenhower withdrew his bet on Nasser, coming to the view that his support of Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis had been a mistake.

        The Eisenhower of 1958 “consistently and clearly argued against embracing Nasser” (p.231).  He now viewed Nasser as a hardline opponent of any reconciliation between Arabs and Israel, squarely in the Soviet camp. Eisenhower, a “true realist with no ideological ax to grind,” came to recognize that his Suez policy of “sidelining the Israelis and the Europeans simply did not produce the promised results. The policy was . . . a blunder” (p.255).   Unfortunately, Doran argues, Eisenhower kept his views to himself until well into the 1960s and few historians picked up on his change of mind. This allowed those who sought to distance United States policy from Israel to cite Eisenhower’s stance in the 1956 Suez Crisis, without taking account of Eisenhower’s later reconsideration of that stance.

* * *

      Doran relies upon an extensive mining of diplomatic archival sources, especially those of the United States and Great Britain, to piece together this intricate depiction of the Eisenhower-Nasser relationship and the 1956 Suez Crisis. These sources allow Doran to emphasize the interactions of the key actors in the Middle East throughout the 1950s, including personal animosities and rivalries, and intra-governmental turf wars.  He writes in a straightforward, unembellished style. Helpful subheadings within each chapter make his detailed and sometimes dense narrative easier to follow. His work will appeal to anyone who has worked in an Embassy overseas, to Middle East and foreign policy wonks, and to general readers with an interest in the 1950s.

Thomas H. Peebles

Saint Augustin-de-Desmaures

Québec, Canada

June 19, 2017

Portrait of a President Living on Borrowed Time

Joseph Lelyveld, His Final Battle:

The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt 

            During the last year and a half of his life, from mid-October 1943 to his death in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential plate was full, even overflowing. He was grappling with winning history’s most devastating  war and structuring a lasting peace for the post-war global order, all the while tending to multiple domestic political demands. But Roosevelt spent much of this time out of public view in semi-convalescence, often in locations outside Washington, with limited contact with the outside world. Those who met the president, however, noticed a striking weight loss and described him with words like “listless,” “weary,” and “easily distracted.” We now know that Roosevelt had life-threatening high blood pressure, termed malignant hypertension, making him susceptible to a stroke or coronary attack at any moment. Roosevelt’s declining health was carefully shielded from the public and only rarely discussed directly, even within his inner circle. At the time, probably not more than a handful of doctors were aware of the full gravity of Roosevelt’s physical condition, and it is an open question whether Roosevelt himself was aware.

In His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the New York Times, seeks to shed light upon, if not answer, this open question. Lelyveld suggests that the president likely was more aware than he let on of the implications of his declining physical condition. In a resourceful portrait of America’s longest serving president during his final year and a half, Lelyveld considers Roosevelt’s political activities against the backdrop of his health. The story is bookended by Roosevelt’s meetings to negotiate the post-war order with fellow wartime leaders Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, in Teheran in December 1943 and at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945. Between the two meetings came Roosevelt’s 1944 decision to run for an unprecedented fourth term, a decision he reached just weeks prior to the Democratic National Convention that summer, and the ensuing campaign.

Lelyveld’s portrait of a president living on borrowed time emerges from an excruciatingly thin written record of Roosevelt’s medical condition. Roosevelt’s medical file disappeared without explanation from a safe at Bethesda Naval Hospital shortly after his death.   Unable to consider Roosevelt’s actual medical records, Lelyveld draws clues  concerning his physical condition from the diary of Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, discovered after Suckley’s death in 1991 at age 100, and made public in 1995. The slim written record on Roosevelt’s medical condition limits Lelyveld’s ability to tease out conclusions on the extent to which that condition may have undermined his job performance in his final months.

* * *

            Daisy Suckley, a distant cousin of Roosevelt, was a constant presence in the president’s life in his final years and a keen observer of his physical condition. During Roosevelt’s last months, the “worshipful” (p.3) and “singularly undemanding” Suckley had become what Lelyveld terms the “Boswell of [Roosevelt’s] rambling ruminations,” secretly recording in an “uncritical, disjointed way the hopes and daydreams” that occupied the frequently inscrutable president (p.75). By 1944, Lelyfeld notes, there was “scarcely a page in Daisy’s diary without some allusion to how the president looks or feels” (p.77).   Lelyveld relies heavily upon the Suckley diary out of necessity, given the disappearance of Roosevelt’s actual medical records after his death.

Lelyveld attributes the disappearance to Admiral Ross McIntire, an ears-nose-and-throat specialist who served both as Roosevelt’s personal physician and Surgeon General of the Navy. In the latter capacity, McIntire oversaw a wartime staff of 175,000 doctors, nurses and orderlies at 330 hospitals and medical stations around the world. Earlier in his career, Roosevelt’s press secretary had upbraided McIntire for allowing the president to be photographed in his wheel chair. From that point forward, McIntire understood that a major component of his job was to conceal Roosevelt’s physical infirmities and protect and promote a vigorously healthy public image of the president. The “resolutely upbeat” (p.212) McIntire, a master of “soothing, well-practiced bromides” (p.226), thus assumes a role in Lelyveld’s account which seems as much “spin doctor” as actual doctor. His most frequent message for the public was that the president was in “robust health” (p.22), in the process of “getting over” a wide range of lesser ailments such as a heavy cold, flu, or bronchitis.

A key turning point in Lelyveld’s story occurred in mid-March 1944, 13 months prior to Roosevelt’s death, when the president’s daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger confronted McIntire and demanded to know more about what was wrong with her father. McIntire doled out his “standard bromides, but this time they didn’t go down” (p.23). Anna later said that she “didn’t think McIntire was an internist who really knew what he was talking about” (p.93). In response, however, McIntire brought in Dr. Howard Bruenn, the Navy’s top cardiologist. Evidently, Lelyveld writes, McIntire had “known all along where the problem was to be found” (p.23). Breunn was apparently the first cardiologist to have examined Roosevelt.

McIntire promised to have Roosevelt’s medical records delivered to Bruenn prior to his initial examination of the president, but failed to do so, an “extraordinary lapse” (p.98) which Lelyveld regards as additional evidence that McIntire was responsible for the disappearance of those records after Roosevelt’s death the following year. Breunn found that Roosevelt was suffering from “acute congestive heart failure” (p.98). He recommended that the wartime president avoid “irritation,” severely cut back his work hours, rest more, and reduce his smoking habit, then a daily pack and a half of Camel’s cigarettes. In the midst of the country’s struggle to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, its leader was told that he “needed to sleep half his time and reduce his workload to that of a bank teller” (p.99), Lelyveld wryly notes.  Dr. Bruenn saw the president regularly from that point onward, traveling with him to Yalta in February 1945 and to Warm Springs in April of that year.

Ten days after Dr. Bruenn’s diagnosis, Roosevelt told a newspaper columnist, “I don’t work so hard any more. I’ve got this thing simplified . . . I imagine I don’t work as many hours a week as you do” (p.103). The president, Lelyveld concludes, “seems to have processed the admonition of the physicians – however it was delivered, bluntly or softly – and to be well on the way to convincing himself that if he could survive in his office by limiting his daily expenditure of energy, it was his duty to do so” (p.103).

At that time, Roosevelt had not indicated publicly whether he wished to seek a 4^th precedential term and had not discussed this question with any of his advisors. Moreover, with the “most destructive military struggle in history approaching its climax, there was no one in the White House, or his party, or the whole of political Washington, who dared stand before him in the early months of 1944 and ask face-to-face for a clear answer to the question of whether he could contemplate stepping down” (p.3). The hard if unspoken political truth was that Roosevelt was the Democratic party’s only hope to retain the White House. There was no viable successor in the party’s ranks. But his re-election was far from assured, and public airing of concerns about his health would be unhelpful to say the least in his  re-election bid. Roosevelt did not make his actual decision to run until just weeks before the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

At the convention, Roosevelt’s then vice-president, Henry Wallace, and his counselors Harry Hopkins, and Jimmy Byrnes jockeyed for the vice-presidential nomination, along with William Douglas, already a Supreme Court justice at age 45. There’s no indication that Senator Harry S. Truman actively sought to be Roosevelt’s running mate. Lelyveld writes that it is tribute to FDR’s “wiliness” that the notion has persisted over the years that he was “only fleetingly engaged in the selection” of his 1944 vice-president and that he was “simply oblivious when it came to the larger question of succession” (p.172). To the contrary, although he may not have used the used the word “succession” in connection with his vice-presidential choice, Roosevelt “cared enough about qualifications for the presidency to eliminate Wallace as a possibility and keep Byrnes’s hopes alive to the last moment, when, for the sake of party unity, he returned to Harry Truman as the safe choice” (p.172-73).

Having settled upon Truman as his running mate, Roosevelt indicated that he did not want to campaign as usual because the war was too important. But campaign he did, and Lelyveld shows how hard he campaigned – and how hard it was for him given his deteriorating health, which aggravated his mobility problems. The outcome was in doubt up until Election Day, but Roosevelt was resoundingly reelected to a fourth presidential term. The president could then turn his full attention to the war effort, focusing both upon how the war would be won and how the peace would be structured. Roosevelt’s foremost priority was structuring the peace; the details on winning the war were largely left to his staff and to the military commanders in the field.

Roosevelt badly wanted to avoid the mistakes that Woodrow Wilson had made after World War I. He was putting together the pieces of an organization already referred to as the United Nations and fervently sought  the participation and support of his war ally, the Soviet Union. He also wanted Soviet support for the war against Japan in the Pacific after the Nazi surrender, and for an independent and democratic Poland. In pursuit of these objectives, Roosevelt agreed to travel over 10,000 arduous miles to Yalta, to meet in February 1945 with Stalin and Churchill.

In Roosevelt’s mind, Stalin  was by then both the key to victory on the battlefield and for a lasting peace afterwards — and he was, in Roosevelt’s phrase, “get-at-able” (p.28) with the right doses of the legendary Roosevelt charm.   Roosevelt had begun his serious courtship of the Soviet leader at their first meeting in Teheran in December 1943.  His fixation on Stalin, “crossing over now and then into realms of fantasy” (p.28), continued at Yalta. Lelyveld’s treatment of Roosevelt at Yalta covers similar ground to that in Michael Dobbs’ Six Months That Shook the World, reviewed here in April 2015. In Lelyveld’s account, as in that of Dobbs, a mentally and physical exhausted Roosevelt at Yalta ignored the briefing books his staff prepared for him and relied instead upon improvisation and his political instincts, fully confident that he could win over Stalin by force of personality.

According to cardiologist Bruenn’s memoir, published a quarter of a century later, early in the conference Roosevelt showed worrying signs of oxygen deficiency in his blood. His habitually high blood pressure readings revealed a dangerous condition, pulsus alternans, in which every second heartbeat was weaker than the preceding one, a “warning signal from an overworked heart” (p.270).   Dr. Bruenn ordered Roosevelt to curtail his activities in the midst of the conference. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, wrote that Roosevelt had “all the symptoms of hardening of arteries in the brain” during the conference and gave the president “only a few months to live” (p.270-71). Churchill himself commented that his wartime ally “really was a pale reflection almost throughout” (p.270) the Yalta conference.

Yet, Roosevelt recovered sufficiently to return home from the conference and address Congress and the public on its results, plausibly claiming victory. The Soviet Union had agreed to participate in the United Nations and in the war in Asia, and to hold what could be construed as free elections in Poland. Had he lived longer, Roosevelt would have seen that Stalin delivered as promised on the Asian war. The Soviet Union also became a member of the United Nations and maintained its membership in the organization until its dissolution in 1991, but was rarely if ever the partner Roosevelt envisioned in keeping world peace. The possibility of a democratic Poland, “by far the knottiest and most time-consuming issue Roosevelt confronted at Yalta” (p.285), was by contrast slipping away even before Roosevelt’s death.

At one point in his remaining weeks, Roosevelt exclaimed, “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta” on Poland (p.304; Dobbs includes the same quotation, adding that Roosevelt thumped on his wheelchair at the time of this outburst). But, like Dobbs, Lelyveld argues that even a more physically fit, fully focused and coldly realistic Roosevelt would likely have been unable to save Poland from Soviet clutches. When the allies met at Yalta, Stalin’s Red Army was in the process of consolidating military control over almost all of Polish territory.  If Roosevelt had been at the peak of vigor, Lelyveld concludes, the results on Poland “would have been much the same” (p.287).

Roosevelt was still trying to mend fences with Stalin on April 11, 1945, the day before his death in Warm Springs. Throughout the following morning, Roosevelt worked on matters of state: he received an update on the US military advances within Germany and even signed a bill, sustaining the Commodity Credit Corporation. Then, just before lunch Roosevelt collapsed. Dr. Bruenn arrived about 15 minutes later and diagnosed a hemorrhage in the brain, a stroke likely caused by the bursting of a blood vessel in the brain or the rupture of an aneurysm. “Roosevelt was doomed from the instant he was stricken” (p.323).  Around midnight, Daisy Suckley recorded in her diary that the president had died at 3:35 pm that afternoon. “Franklin D. Roosevelt, the hope of the world, is dead,” (p.324), she wrote.

Daisy was one of several women present at Warm Springs to provide company to the president during his final visit. Another was Eleanor Roosevelt’s former Secretary, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, by this time the primary Other Woman in the president’s life. Rutherford had driven down from South Carolina to be with the president, part of a recurring pattern in which Rutherford appeared in instances when wife Eleanor was absent, as if coordinated by a social secretary with the knowing consent of all concerned. But this orchestration broke down in Warm Springs in April 1945. After the president died, Rutherford had to flee in haste to make room for Eleanor. Still another woman in the president’s entourage, loquacious cousin Laura Delano, compounded Eleanor’s grief by letting her know that Rutherford had been in Warm Springs for the previous three days, adding gratuitously that Rutherford had also served as hostess at occasions at the White House when Eleanor was away. “Grief and bitter fury were folded tightly in a large knot” (p.325) for the former First Lady at Warm Springs.

Subsequently, Admiral McIntire asserted that Roosevelt had a “stout heart” and that his blood pressure was “not alarming at any time” (p.324-25), implying that the president’s death from a stroke had proven that McIntire had “always been right to downplay any suggestion that the president might have heart disease.” If not a flat-out falsehood, Lelyveld argues, McIntire’s assertion “at least raises the question of what it would have taken to alarm him” (p.325). Roosevelt’s medical file by this time had gone missing from the safe at Bethesda Naval Hospital, most likely removed by the Admiral because it would have revealed the “emptiness of the reassurances he’d fed the press and the public over the years, whenever questions arose about the president’s health” (p.325).

* * *

           Lelyveld declines to engage in what he terms an “argument without end” (p.92) on the degree to which Roosevelt’s deteriorating health impaired his job performance during his last months and final days. Rather, he  skillfully pieces together the limited historical record of Roosevelt’s medical condition to add new insights into the ailing but ever enigmatic president as he led his country nearly to the end of history’s most devastating war.

 

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

March 28, 2017