Solidarity: The Emptiest Word in Eurospeak

“The British can't understand Europe as they're from an island ... from an island you can't understand the subtleties of the European construction”.

President Nicholas Sarkozy, 4 November, 2011

Alphen, the Netherlands. 5 November. If the mythical European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) contained as many Euros as empty Eurospeak the Eurozone crisis would have been solved in a trice. Indeed, the two most meaningless words in the grand lexicon of Eurospeak are ‘strategy’ and ‘solidarity’ and I have heard more than enough of both over the past two days of G-Plenty. ‘Strategy’ has been so long lost to the bottomless pit of Euro-jargon that it now suffers a new meaning; to not know what to do, where to go or how. My university, Oxford, might wish to consider an Oxford Eurospeak Dictionary to explain to the former European voter the real meaning of such gibberish.

However, the emptiest word by far in Eurospeak is ‘solidarity’. They are at it again. Peter Altmeier, a German MP close to Chancellor Merkel, called on Britain to show ‘solidarity’ with the Eurozone by contributing more British taxpayers to the EFSF, whilst at the same time ruling out more money from the German taxpayer. French President Nicholas Sarkozy was plain insulting to the British in response to a question posed at Cannes by a BBC journalist. “The British can't understand Europe as they're from an island ... from an island you can't understand the subtleties of the European construction”. In Yorkshire, Monsieur le President, someone might call you an arrogant toe-rag for that kind of stupid and prejudiced statement. What we British do understand is rubbish when we hear it! Indeed, it is precisely because we British do understand the ‘subtleties’ of your European ‘construction’ that we are not right now up to our necks (only our elbows) in your mess.

The Germans and French use solidarity a lot; normally when they are defending their national interests to the hilt and often at the expense of we British. Indeed, the one thing that neither France nor Germany have ever offered Britain is solidarity. Germany actively worked against Britain in the early 1990s to force London out of the infamous ‘snake’, the precursor to the Euro at a similar moment of economics-defying politics. Over the past decade neither France nor Germany has shown any solidarity with the British in Afghanistan, with the result that as of this morning 388 British soldiers are dead. Our lads have done too much of the dying for ‘Europe’. But it has been always thus.

What thanks do we get? At the 26 October Eurozone summit Germany and France consigned the British citizen to that of a second-class European citizen through an ‘enhanced’ form of ‘integration’ from which the second biggest paymaster of the EU will be excluded. I think that is what Berlin and Paris call ‘democracy’, the third emptiest and most over-used word in Eurospeak.

So, let us get back to real reality (not the Euro version). The reason that the Eurocrisis is daily deepening is that for too long Eurospeak and the empty politics behind it has polluted economic reality. Germany and France are still trying to solve this crisis politically rather than economically. Eurospeak has thus become the problem as it underpins the alternative reality that created this mess in the first place.

Economic reality is simple; Greece must default and be removed from the Eurozone, supported thereafter by all of us via the IMF; the northern, western European taxpayer (me) must be clobbered so that the EFSF can save Italy and the rest; and the European Central Bank must be empowered to administer my money with the likelihood that more Euros will need to put into the system (I think they call it quantitative printing or ink inflation – something like that). Or, the Euro must fail. As a Dutch taxpayer I can see the train wreck heading towards me but what from what I can see rather than the brake being applied a committee meeting is underway.

Now, as a Briton, I know I am going to have to contribute more in some way because it is in my country’s interest to do so. However, before Britain does indeed contribute more of its own debt to the crisis I would rather like to see a real strategy in place as PR-Meister Cameron is about to announce said increase.  It will be via the IMF and in support of individual Eurozone members and it will cost each British household around about €2000.  And this at a time of real financial suffering.  That is real solidarity M. le President and Mr Altmeier.

My respect for the French and German people remains absolute – my annoyance is not with my fellow European sufferers. Our solidarity is real. The problem is the increasingly dismissive and arrogant European elite. Indeed, if you M. le President really understood ‘solidarity’ and acted in its spirit perhaps you might also better understand the European ‘construction’, as you put it. Maybe solidarity means something different in German and French?

So, if you want our money stop using the silly solidarity word if you do not mean it. We Britons know that when we are in trouble you will of course vanish. And please, M. le President, we know you do not like us, but if you expect us to pay please show a little more respect. We did after all liberate you French twice last century…from the Germans.

Julian Lindley-French

The Strategic Influence Game 4: Utterly Entangled America

"Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none." Thomas Jefferson

Alphen, the Netherlands. 3 November. As the G-Plenty and Not-so-Plenty meet in Cannes a big month beckons for the United States. One month hence will be the seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor which brought a formal and abrupt end to 1930s American isolationism. December 2011 will also see the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq. One year hence the US presidential elections will take place. Obama’s first term has been dominated by extracting America from Afghanistan and Iraq and NOT dealing with debt and financial disaster. Obama’s second-term (the presidential candidates on the US Right are hopelessly split and/or less than compelling) will face déjà vu all over again; how to deal with a break-out WMD state in the Middle East. The way in which Washington deals with the coming Iranian Crisis will do much to set American grand strategy on its twenty-first century course.

The International Atomic Energy Authority’s (IAEA) is about to issue a report that Iran is speeding up efforts to enrich weapons-grade uranium.  This will lead to crisis with Israel. It is thus strategic make your mind up time for America – continue as a somewhat less super-power in a constrained leadership role or join its feckless and hopeless European allies in a) global isolationism; and b) selling the family silverware to the dodgy dealers over the horizon to pay for debt obesity.

Strategy is the preserve of the relatively weak. Ten years ago there were a few in Washington (an influential few) who were mad enough to believe that America the Mighty was so strong that strategy need simply be a shopping list of America’s wants in the world. And, whilst Twain-esque reports of America’s strategic demise are hopelessly premature the United States today looks like Britain in 1911 – immensely strong on paper and yet spread thin the world over.

America has been a liberating power, but one that has always and rightly had a keen sense of the national interest. Since 1945 that power has been sustained by a strong sense of internationalism, more often than not supported by European allies the freedom from tyranny of which the US has been the ultimate guarantor. American internationalism has also been sustained by clear economic benefits for the American people. However, something profound has changed that is evident at Cannes; the globalisation which emerged from American free market internationalism is no longer working overwhelmingly in America’s favour.

Furthermore, since 911 American prestige has badly been damaged by two inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although nothing like as costly as World War Two or the Vietnam War this loss of prestige has enabled China to turn economic strength into political influence. Beijing is now on the way to becoming the new peer competitor of America in a new bipolar world. Taken together globalisation and China’s emergence on the crest of an economic bow-wave faces Washington with the most profound of strategic choices; retreat back into a form of neo-isolationism or re-commit to a new form of leadership.

The latter option begs a question; leadership of what? By now Europe should have joined the US in a form of bipolar leadership of the West in the world. Instead, Europe is retreating ever deeper into Euro-isolationism as Germany and France seek ever more incompetent ways not to deal with the Eurozone crisis. Britain? America’s hitherto ‘special relation’ has become a very little ‘power’ retreating from influence both in Europe and the wider world with a fractured society trapped in self-defeating political correctness. What price Europe for the continued commitment of America to Europe’s stability? Japan is a possible partner but is recovering from an enormous natural disaster and twenty years of stagflation. India is being India - non-aligned.

American strategic leadership will thus be far more complex than hitherto making decisive action against Iran very dangerous. Power-shift is the elephant in the room at Cannes. Like it or not the centre of gravity of future American power will be the Asia-Pacific region with the US cast as great stabiliser.  Challenges will be for the mostpart indirect with new and old technologies used to offset American power, often in league with non-state actors, such as Al Qaeda – be it cyber-attack or WMD proliferation. And, the Middle East will continue to boil as the Arab Spring creates as many autocrats as democrats.

Faced with such complexity American leadership could well be an oxymoron with the role of traditional diplomacy ever more important, with coalitions rather than formal alliances being the stuff of American foreign and security policy.  This will in turn require a big shift in the balance between American diplomacy and force. That will be a difficult call for any future American president to make. Political culture, deficit-reduction and pork barrel politics all tend to undermine American soft power. The iron triangle of political funding, defence industries and the armed forces still exerts undue influence in Washington fifty-one years after President Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex.

It was Winston Churchill who said that, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.” Let us hope so. For over sixty years American leaders have more or less ignored Jefferson’s famous dictum to avoid entangling alliances. If America is ever going to heed Jefferson’s warning now is the deficit-ridden, withdrawal moment it is going to happen. Iran will prove the test – pre-empt an Iranian bomb by attacking it; build a political coalition that somehow prevails upon Tehran or simply live with the Iranian bomb and constrain a frightened Israel.

Tough call.

Julian Lindley-French

Publish, Plagiarise, Pressure...or Perish. What is Wrong with Academia?

Alphen, the Netherlands. 1 November. What is wrong with academia?  Some 30 papers have been corrupted by false data, with at least 14 doctoral theses compromised and 150 papers going back to 2004 now to be investigated. The committee set up by the universities of Tilburg and Groningen, and which published their interim report yesterday, call the scientific fraud “considerable and shocking”. Professor Dr Diederik Stapel, Professor of Cognitive Social Psychology and Dean of Tilburg’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences is today at the centre of a storm that has made headline news on both television and in the newspapers here in the Netherlands. So is my wife for she is the Science Communications Officer of Tilburg University and has had to handle much of the fall-out from what is an all-round failure of academic ethics and rigour. But how isolated a case is this?

In my many years sitting at the cusp between academia and policy the widening gap between the two has made my own posture increasingly uncomfortable. The culture of publish or perish which seems to have been the root cause of Stapel’s alleged corruption has been eating away at academic rigour for years. The literature is now full of meaningless and pointless dross just so that arbitrary publication targets can be met, so that arbitrary funding decisions can be made.  I would not wish to cast aspertions on all my colleagues as there are still some very fine minds at work in academia. However, very few academics now undertake rigorous evidence-based research. The pressure to publish, on both students and academics, is now so great that less than academic tendencies are commonplace.

The number of times I have seen my own work plagiarised is frightening. A few years ago I attended the London launch of a major report on European defence. As I began to read the report my mouth dropped open; the first five pages were lifted directly from a report for the Bertelsmann Stiftung that I had authored. Not surprisingly I complained. Recently a student of mine submitted a paper that contained extensive extracts from one of my own publications with no attempt made to attribute the source. Now, whilst I would not of course question her taste or persipicacity, I did rather question her sanity. Indeed, it was so blatant a case that I simply had the paper re-worked before I would begin to consider it. She seemed to have assumed that because she was paying for the course she had also purchased the assessment. I fear that as universities become ever more desperate for money this kind of ‘misunderstanding’ will only increase.

But it is not over-ambitious students in a hurry that I worry about. From afar the Stapel case reeks of the stink one gets when a profession becomes a closed shop. The professorial ethos of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is everywhere in academia. Professional ‘etiquette’ means that professors very rarely question each other’s work and accept the self-serving and often incomprehensible rubbish that now abounds. This retreat from academic rigour has been reinforced by governments (and notoriously the European Commission) which too often subject universities and think-tanks to project funding. ‘Research’ is only commissioned that provides the answers the paymasters want to hear.

This in turn has tended to reinforce the left and left of centre orthodoxy and political correctness from which every western European university now suffers. All research is political in some form but today too many academics at major universities are in effect self-selected. The congregating of like-minded individuals simply adds to the creeping authoritarianism of political orthodoxy.  If 'reality' is uncovered that suggests an alternative thesis it must be ignored or explained away and its authors sidelined.

However, what has become really insidious is the way professors exploit their students. There is some evidence in the report that Stapel intimidated his students into accepting his corrupt data for years until a few of them were brave enough to speak out. I can imagine just how he got away with this. Too many professors behave like medieval aristocrats; insisting that they are above supervision, handing out patronage by hinting at future careers if students agree to undertake huge amounts of work; and ‘authoring’ subsequent publications which in reality are the fruits of others' labours. So many professorial publications are in fact written by others, only for the 'other' then to be discarded when it suits and left broken in the self-obsessed professorial wake. Burnt out careers and broken people are everywhere in academia. The whole system simply encourages the self-obsessed, the ego-maniac and the downright unfair.

Professor Stapel deserves all he will get for the damage he has done to a lot of promising young people. However, I hope, just hope, that the academic gods will also hold a mirror up to themselves, both here in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Stapel is almost certainly the tip of a very grubby iceberg.

Publish, plagiarise, pressure...or perish. Academia needs a re-think.  It could start by awarding a medal to those brave students who had the courage to uncover this fraud.

Professor Dr Julian Lindley-French