The Parody of Democracy

Alphen, Netherlands.  23 August.  Aung San Suu Kyi said recently, “Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it”.  Some reports suggest 1700 people were murdered by a Sarin gas attack this week in a Damascus suburb.  The Assad regime or some elements of it are being blamed for the attack but it is impossible to verify.  In Egypt deposed President Mubarak has been placed under ‘palace arrest’ by a politically-savvy Army.  Indeed, the Egyptian Army leadership has so completely out-manoeuvred the opposition that at least half of those who in 2011 opposed their rule now support them, albeit conditionally.  So what can the West do?

 

In Syria the Assad regime now has a grip on power that seemed unthinkable a year ago.  The Syrian opposition is divided and out-gunned.  In Egypt the Army is clearly determined to force the Muslim Brotherhood underground.  Indeed, many in the ‘liberal’ opposition seemed to have concluded that after sampling ‘democracy’ under President Morsi they may prefer an Orwellian ‘stability’ after all.  Clearly without cohesion, direction, structure and leadership the oppositions in both Egypt and Syria are faltering whatever the Facebook or Twitter fed activism of its followers or the fanaticism of opposition fighters. 

French Foreign Minister Fabius warns of a no-fly zone if the UN confirms the use of chemical weapons by the Damascus regime, the EU warns Egypt that European aid could be cut.  Meanwhile the people of both Egypt and Syria are steadily being crushed in a meat-grinder of geopolitics, competing ideologies and plain old political cynicism.  Sadly, beyond the wringing of hands there is little the West will do to influence events in either Egypt or Syria. 

At the geopolitical level the profound split in the UN Security Council between the Western powers and China and Russia is crippling efforts at conflict resolution in both countries.   At the regional level the Saudis and their Gulf allies are all too happy to see the eclipse of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Moreover, as Baroness Ashton and the EU foreign ministers this week sat in grand deliberation about what aid to cut to Egypt’s Army-backed interim government they did so full in the knowledge that the Saudis would more than make up any shortfall in EU aid. 

However, the real cause of inaction is the West itself.  There has always been something vaguely absurd about those in the West who demand democracy as the solution to political instability.  However, as President Morsi demonstrated all too clearly in his brief time in power his view of democracy is that it legitimizes an illiberal Islamic state.  As for what the Syrian opposition would offer - who knows.

Democracies require strong and legitimate state institutions which can only develop within the framework of relatively stable domestic politics and a benign international environment neither of which are the lot of Syrians or Egyptians.  Rather, when the West talks about democracy it really means liberalism and neither incumbents nor insurgents are offering that.  Egyptians it seems now have the choice between one man one vote once.  Syrians have no choice at all.   

Instead the West is (sort of) pursuing an ‘anyone but’ strategy - anyone but Assad and anyone but Mubarak or Morsi.  Sadly, the latest tragedy in Syria simply reveals such strategy for what it is – hollow.  President Obama might be reviewing his infamous ‘red lines’ but they were cast in dust and have simply been blown away by Assad.  Efforts by the British and French to lead the EU to arm the Syrian rebels only triggered a further flow of Iranian and Russian weapons to the Damascus regime.  Trapped as it is between values and interests the collective West has in fact not got a clue what to do about the tragedies in either Egypt or Syria.

Consequently, the creed of liberal democracy as a political future for the Middle East is slowly being suffocated in the dust of Egypt and Syria.  Ironically, it is the illiberal secularist regimes that have for so long fought Islamism that is killing any hope of liberal democracy far more than Al Qaeda.  And. sooner or later the West may well have to take sides between political Islam and authoritarianism. 

Naturally, it is a choice the West will put off as long as possible.  This has nothing to do with the Middle East.  Unlike in the old days when the calculation of foreign policy was a matter for elites every Western foreign policy choice today is in fact a reflection of the West’s own internal battles over power and representation.  

Perhaps a parody of democracy in the Middle East is the best the West can hope for.  Perhaps a parody of democracy is today the West itself.

Julian Lindley-French

Labour Migration: Just Close the Curtains

Alphen, Netherlands.  19 August.  There is an old joke about the state of the then Soviet economy.  Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev are sitting in a train.  Suddenly the train judders to a halt the locomotive having failed.  Stalin shouts, “shoot the engineers.  They are enemies of the Soviet Union”.  Kruschev demurs, “No!” he exclaims, “we need a new five year plan for the railways”.  Brezhnev has a better idea. “Tovarish, there is a much better solution.  Simply close the curtains and pretend the train is moving”.  Much the same can be said about the non-policies of Western European governments faced with the next wave of EU labour migration. 
  

With the ending of transitional controls on 1 January 2014 a large number of low income Bulgarian and Romanian workers will likely move to Western Europe under the terms of the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon.  For example Migration Watch, a well-respected London think tank, suggests some 50,000 will come to Britain each year for at least five years.  Add dependents and it is quite reasonable to assume that at least 500,000 Bulgarians and Romanians will move to Britain between 2014 and 2019. 

Many years ago I stood on the old inner-German border not far from the Gudow/Zarrentin crossing.  Anyone who witnessed the Iron Curtain that divided Europe will understand that the free movement of European people’s is one of Europe’s great achievements.  Indeed, as a principle free movement defines modern Europe.  However, should free movement of peoples mean unfettered free movement of labour at a time of profound austerity? 

This weekend the Dutch Labour Party Social Affairs Minister Lodewijk Asscher warned that further migration was a threat to ‘vulnerable’ low-paid workers in Western Europe and that the EU’s leadership was failing to recognise the danger.  Asscher’s message is clear; allowing a major influx of poor, migrant workers to Western Europe at a time of economic stress is foolhardy.  For many poorer communities already reeling from the last wave of immigration it will be like pouring oil on fire.

Boston, a small market town in Eastern England with a largely agricultural workforce, is a case in point.  Since 2001 Boston has seen an increase in the non-English population of 467%.  In 2001 Boston had a population of 1727 migrants in a total population of 55,800.  By 2011 the foreign population had risen to 9790 out of a population of 64600 or 15.8%.  By all accounts Boston is a social tinderbox and will not cope with another influx of low-paid foreign workers.

Across Britain the evidence is fast growing that another tidal wave of migrants is about to cross the Channel.  Last week government announced that between March and June 2013 the number of Bulgarians and Romanians coming to Britain had soared by 25% from 109,000 to 141,000 compared with the same time last year some nine months BEFORE the ending of transitional controls.  813,000 or 60% of all the jobs advertised on COMRES, the European Commission funded website, are for jobs in Britain with money offered to cover the cost of moving country.  Keith Vaz, the Labour Party Chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, has rightly chided government for not getting over to Bulgaria and Romania to get some idea of just how many workers are planning to travel to Britain. 

Plain common sense suggests mass immigration and austerity do not mix.  For immigration to be successfully assimilated by a society healthcare, housing and education must be provided.  Earlier this year the Accident and Emergency (A&E) wards in National Health Service hospitals came close to failing.  Much of the crisis was caused by rapid inward migration.  One respected economist has said that at least 250,000 new homes needed to be built each year for the next 25 years (compared with the current 110,000) simply to meet the needs of Britain’s current 63.5 million population.  And, at least 250000 new school places will be needed in England by 2015 to educate the young of that same population.  None of the above targets will be achieved.  An already creaking infrastructure is about to suffer another shock.

The issue of immigration is destroying trust between peoples and politicians because leaders are failing to address the causes and consequences of mass-immigration – labour exploitation and the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon.  Low-income salaries are at least four times greater in Britain than in Bulgaria and Romania.  Evidence from the post-2004 mass migration to Britain highlights the role of agencies set up to recruit Eastern European workers.  They systemically exploit migrant workers and distort the labour market. 

The Treaty of Lisbon belongs to another age signed as it was before the sovereign debt and banking crisis crippled Europe.  Sadly, Brussels will never accept that reality.  Therefore, action must be taken at the national level.  At the very least prudence would suggest that the provisions allowing for unfettered labour migration should either be temporarily suspended until after the financial crisis or a strict system of work permits introduced.  If that means breaching the treaty then so be it – either suspend the treaty or abandon common sense.

To increase mass low income migration and cut public services at one and the same time is a recipe for social, cultural and political frictions.  And yet that is precisely what is about to happen.  Sadly, the collective failure of mainstream Western European politicians to confront this most strategic of issues is simply fuelling popular frustration and the politics of hate.  It is the blind madness of European elites.

Labour migration: just close the curtains and pretend nothing is happening.  

Julian Lindley-French

Gibraltar: Rock of Rages

Alphen, Netherlands. 14 August.  Signed just up the road from here three hundred years ago Article X of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht is pretty unequivocal.  “The Catholic King does hereby, for himself, his heirs and successors, yield to the Crown of Great Britain the full and entire propriety of the town and castle of Gibraltar, together with the port, fortifications, and forts thereunto belonging; and he gives up the said propriety to be held and enjoyed absolutely with all manner of right for ever, without any exception or impediment whatsoever”.  That was the “Rock” then, this is now.  Whilst the majority of Britons and Spaniards look on in a sense of bemusement this latest Gibraltar ‘crisis’ raises some interesting questions as to the validity of the old treaties that continue to shape Europe’s political space. 

First, let’s call this manufactured crisis for what it is; a blatant attempt by Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy to distract attention away from the corruption scandal that is engulfing his political party and Spain’s economic crisis. Politics like this have no place in 2013 Europe, especially between fellow EU members and close NATO allies.  The only thing that comes close to Senor Rajoy’s silly game-playing are those in UK press trying to imply a link between a departing aircraft-less British aircraft carrier and this latest Anglo-Spanish spat over Gibraltar. For the record Exercise Cougar 2013 to which the Royal Navy’s ships are sailing has been in the planning for years.  

Spain claims Britain’s occupation of the Rock is illegal.  However, until adjusted or brought to a formal end by mutual agreement the Treaty of Utrecht remains valid under international law.  Therefore, if the Treaty was unilaterally declared illegal and Spain’s action supported by, say, the EU it would bring into question every other treaty and agreement made ever since.  That would include the Final Act of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and all the various treaties and agreements signed thereafter.  In other words the Treaty of Utrecht is not only legal it remains in force.

Now, one way around this would be to say that the EU’s 2007 Treaty of Lisbon effectively nullifies all other previous treaties.  However, my sense is that such a move would set a precedent that would effectively guarantee Britain’s exit from the EU because at a stroke the EU’s treaty powers would have been greatly expanded.  At the very least a new Congress of Vienna would be needed to tie up all the treaty legal anomalies that would emerge across Europe from the Treaty of Utrecht’s arbitrary legalisation.  That of course is not going to happen.

The more serious point concerns the relationship between the parties to old treaties and the rights of self-determination of the inhabitants of disputed lands and territories.  This is a serious issue as self-determination is a not a treaty legal concept per se and the very concept post-dates most of the treaties still in force. 

Is Spain’s position good politics?  Spain is threatening to make common cause with Argentina at the United Nations in its dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands.  By so doing Madrid is implying that the views and wishes of the Gibraltarians matter not, just as they imply that Gibraltarians are neither British nor EU citizens.  Recent polls in both the Falklands and Gibraltar show clearly an overwhelming desire to remain British.  Argentina may have little regard for self-determination but for Spain and Europe it remains the cornerstone of democratic legitimacy.

Furthermore, Spain is ill-advised even to open the issue of the status of treaties.  If Spain pushes too hard Morocco may wish to re-open a debate about Spain’s two so-called “Plazas de Soberania” (Places of Sovereignty) or enclaves embedded in Moroccan territory – Ceuta and Melilla.  Ceuta was ceded to Spain by Portugal through (coincidentally) the 1668 Treaty of Lisbon whereby Melilla was conquered by Spain in 1497.  Both cities have populations of around 75,000 people determined to remain both Spanish and EU citizens.  Gibraltar is a Plaza de Soberania that just happens to be British populated by people just as determined to remain British. Sorry, but if Spain wants Gibraltar Madrid must first hand back Ceuta and Melilla.  Do that and Spain might just have a moral leg upon which to stand, even if no legal leg. 

This crisis started because the Gibraltarian authorities dropped concrete blocks in its waters to create an artificial reef which impacted upon one Spanish fisherman.  Spain reacted by blocking access to and from the Rock.  Like all such Gilbert and Sullivanesque crises they blow in and blow out like the summer rain.  Therefore, both Britain and Spain would be best advised to put the issue back in the box and quietly get on with working together to solve the many more serious issues facing Europe. 

In other words, more quiet diplomacy less silly megaphone diplomacy please.

Gibraltar – Rock of Rages.

Julian Lindley-French   

Grazie signor Letta!

Alphen, the Netherlands. 7 August.  There is a hoary old Irish joke that gets quoted far too often at conferences I attend.  An American tourist is lost in the Irish countryside (the lost Yank is always in Ireland) and asks a farmer directions to Dublin.  “Well”, says the farmer. “I would not start from here”.  Much the same can be said for the EU which must soon face its uncomfortable reality; to work the Union must either properly integrate and become a real federal state or retreat back into a loose club of nation-states.  Lost as it is in a never-never land between power and weakness the only thing today’s EU will generate will be more crises.
 

This reality was implicit in Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta remarks warning that European leaders have underestimated the likelihood of a British exit from the EU.  Indeed, he said, “It’s a huge risk...we have to prepare a discussion on trying to prevent this risk”.  What Mr Letta has bravely done is in fact to confirm that the British Question is in fact THE European Question.  With that admission maybe just maybe we can move towards an equitable political settlement that re-injects fairness and legitimacy into the EU and at the same time protects the democratic rights of all Europeans.

However, the problem as usual is dogma of the Brussels elite.  After my last blog, The Balance of Incompetents, I was harangued by a Brussels insider who told me that, “the job of the analyst is surely to dig deeper rather than hold up a flattering mirror to the rabble”.  Rabble?  Is that how much of the Brussels-elite see Europe’s people? 

The central tenet of this dogma is that in the twenty-first century the European nation-state is too small to make its way in the world. Critically, the argument does not define what is meant by ‘small’.  If power is a combination of economic and military might then according to the CIA World Factbook (it must be right then) four European states are in the world’s top ten power states.  Indeed, the arguments’ proponents seem to allude to size being defined by the extent of territory and/or population size.  If that is the case then it is not an argument that can be made.  Behind the façade large parts of China, India and Russia are virtually ungovernable.  Indeed, it is precisely the ungovernability of the EU that created the Eurozone disaster. 

Implicit in Sgr Letta’s remarks are two immediate fundamental questions that urgently need resolution; who or what is in charge of the Eurozone and can an equitable political relationship exist between those in the Eurozone and those not?  This is particularly important if this divide is to become permanent.  If the British were not so self-obsessed they would make their argument on that issue of principle rather than simply one of cost.  Indeed, whilst Sgr Letta, who is an EU-believer, calls for more Europe he is honest enough to admit that there is a “legitimacy crisis” in the EU today as typified by my Brussels ‘friend’.

There is something else that is fascinating about Sgr Letta’s remarks.  When he talks of more Europe, i.e. deeper European integration, he really means a strange hybrid form of governance that somehow combines both more power to Brussels and a balance of power between EU member-states.  One sees that in Chancellor Merkel’s remarks; embed German power within a Berlin-friendly EU and enshrine German power at the top of it.  This is a perfectly legitimate political aim for any country but it also mask THE most fundamental question Europeans must confront – who decides, what, when and how?

Clearly, the blind drive towards ‘ever closer union’ seems to have reached its zenith.  Sgr Letta implies that, as does Dutch Foreign Minister Timmermans.  Even Chancellor Merkel is cautious given that Germans have no stomach to endlessly pay for the socialising costs of European integration.  However, if that is indeed the case then the EU of today is in the worst of all political worlds.  Far from their being a federal centre subject to checks and balances imposed by the states it comprises there is instead a sovereignty black hole at the EU’s core.  Member-states may have transferred very large amounts of state sovereignty to Brussels but the exercise of such power is weak and uncertain.  This renders the EU a crisis-generator rather than a crisis manager. 

Therefore, even a modest dose of political realism would suggest the need for a new EU treaty.  However, rather than handing more power to Brussels the treaty would take power away from it.  At least such a treaty would end the competition for power between Brussels and the very member-states that created it.  

Clearly, the EU cannot stay where it is, but as to the future I would not start from here.

Grazie signor Letta!

Julian Lindley-French

The Balance of Incompetents

The European Federation Benelux Region. 31 July, 2063.  The Berlin-based European Government orders the European Federation (EF) English Regional Government to increase taxes to pay for the South-East European Regional Development Plan.  England’s first female President and European Commissioner instructs the English Regional Parliament to duly rubber-stamp Berlin’s wishes.  Comprised as it is of 60% EF appointees the Parliament duly obliges.  All of Europe’s remaining constitutional monarchies were scrapped in May 2050 on the centennial of the Schuman Declaration and the creation of the European Federation. Indeed, democracy as Europeans once knew it has long been replaced by an elite-led technocracy that governs in the name of ‘stability’. 

 

The technocracy is ‘overseen’ by a remote and weak European Parliament that acts in the name of the people but rarely has much direct contact with them.  The English still get to vote but only on minor local issues.  The United Kingdom also ceased to exist in May 2050 as England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland became part of the EF’s British Isles Region.  The last vestiges of national sovereignty were finally abandoned at the 2040 Brussels Summit which not only transferred the seat of European government to Berlin but also revealed Europe’s worst-kept secret – no decisions of any substance had been taken at the national level since 2032 and the signing of Maastricht Treaty 2. 

Fanciful?  That is precisely where Britain/England will be in 2063 if London continues to transfer national powers to Brussels at the rate that has been taking place since the 1986 Single European Act.

Last week the first reports of the British Government’s so-called Balance of Competences Review were published.  Already dubbed the Great Whitehall Whitewash the Review has thus far concluded a) the EU does not cost Britain too much; and b) the balance of competences between London and Brussels are about right.  However, the benchmark against which the reports core judgements are made are impossible to discern.  The reason is that most EU member-states can point to tangible benefits of membership but with the cost of membership to Britain so high the ‘benefits’ are at best intangible.

The aim of the Review is to demonstrate ‘fairness’.  Of course, I should add ‘or otherwise’ but thus far the Review is simply making the case for EU membership and does not begin to address inequities.  For example, of the 1.4 million advertised jobs on a European Commission funded web-site – EURES - 814,359 are in Britain – almost 60% of the EU total.  Germany’s economy is some 25% bigger than Britain’s but offers only 20% of the advertised jobs. Why and how?

On the face of it the Commission appears to be actively discriminating against British workers by offering £1000 to any British employer who will take on a non-British worker with any worker travelling to the UK offered an additional £900 to cover travel costs.  And yet over a million young British workers are mired in the despair of long-term unemployment.  How can this possibly make sense or be fair? 

Part of the problem is the FCO itself.  To be fair, those charged with preparing the Review face an almost impossible task in the current political climate.  Equally, asking the FCO to review the EU is akin to asking the Pope to review the Catholic Church and whether the Holy Father should be part of it.  In other words, the Review is “Yes Prime Minister’s” Sir Humphrey Appleby at his very worst. 

The reports thus far also critically undermine David Cameron’s calls for EU reform, the very reason they were commissioned in the first place.  Cameron is thus firmly skewered on a very uncomfortable political fence.  He should now be under no illusion as to the opposition he will face from a Whitehall elite appalled that the British people should have their say about Britain’s future place in a future EU.

And it is 'futureness' which is the essential weakness of the Review.  Indeed, perhaps the most telling indictment of the Balance of Competence Review is that it deliberately sets out to establish the ‘cost-benefit’ of Britain’s membership by addressing today’s EU.  However, the real issue is Britain's relationship with the EU of 2020, 2030, 2040 and 2050 and beyond given the reasonable assumption of  Eurozone-driven 'ever closer union'.  

A real British referendum would thus ask two questions.  Are you the British citizen prepared to accept further reduction in both the power and influence of the British Government and Parliament and see more power transferred to both the European Commission and European Parliament?  Are you the British citizen prepared in time to join the Euro?  A yes vote would by definition entail an implicit acceptance of both outcomes.

If they ever get the chance in 2017 the British people face the gravest decision over their future since declaring war in 1939.  However, it is precisely this decision that the Balance of Competences Review clouds by providing the wrong answers to the wrong questions.  For Whitehall it is any EU at any cost. 

Julian Lindley-French

Freeing Japan

Alphen, The Netherlands. 24 July.  Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I like the dreams of the future, better than the history of the past”.  To nowhere does this Jeffersonian aphorism apply more than contemporary Japan.  With Sunday’s clear victory of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party in elections to the Upper House of the Diet, Japan’s Parliament, Japan maybe about to cross a threshold between a challenging past and a challenging future.  Japan must be set free to play its full role on the world stage where it belongs. Why Abe and why now?

 

More than any other country Japan is still seen by many through the lens of the apocalyptic political settlement imposed upon Tokyo by the victorious Americans in 1945.  That must end.  World War Two’s other aggressor power Germany is steadily and rightly emerging as a respected leader on the European continent.  Berlin has earned the right to play such a role because Germany has transformed itself into a model democracy and a vital pillar of the liberal international order.  Japan is also a long supporter of the same liberal order and as competition grows between those that justify power via prosperity and those where the people still get to have a say Japan stands as a beacon for liberal democracy in the world’s strategic centre of gravity - East Asia.

 

History as ever remains eloquent.  In 1902 Britain and Japan signed the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty.  Britain then worked with Japan to build the Imperial Japanese Navy.  Of course, history will also recount that in December 1941 Britain’s support for Japan backfired spectacularly when the self-same Japanese Navy sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse off what was then Ceylon.  However, Britain’s 1902 strategic logic was impeccable.  Faced with the rise of the Kaiser’s Imperial High Seas Fleet the security of the eastern British Empire could no longer be secured by even the mighty Royal Navy.  Modern day sequestered America looks ever more like over-reaching 1902 Britain as the sun began to set on the British Empire.  

 

Frankly, America’s Asia-Pacific-centric grand strategy and the new global balance of power that is driving change needs a strong but responsible Japan.  Japan is already the world’s fifth biggest defence spender and this year Prime Minister Abe ordered the first increase in Japanese defence expenditure for a decade.  Like it or not Japan faces a China that has been growing its defence budget by over ten percent per annum since 1989.  European liberals may hate it but it is power that is driving change in Asia not ideas.  Therefore, whilst the US plays a key role in Japanese security, Japan plays an ever-more-important role in American and world security.

 

Prime Minister Abe clearly understands the new strategic balance.  However, if he is to realise his ambitions for Japan and finally escape the shackles imposed on Tokyo in 1945 Abe will need to strike a balance between strength and responsibility.  He will also have to tread carefully.  Abe has already indicated his desire to scrap the pacifist elements of the post-1945 constitution imposed upon Japan.  He may well be advised to follow Germany’s step-by-step approach to ‘normalisation’.  Rather than radically alter the German constitution, which is still based on the 1949 Allied-influenced Basic Law, Berlin chose instead to progressively re-interpret the constitution against the background of change in contemporary international relations.  Germany’s Constitutional Court has played a crucial role in the legitimisation of the use of German force which started in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia.  Japan has taken similar but very limited steps in support of humanitarian objectives in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. 

 

However, the challenge maybe Prime Minister Abe himself.  He is often accused of being a nationalist although that is much exaggerated by those who would use history to further constrain Japan’s international role and influence.  However, he is a radical and a patriot and can at time use intemperate language forgetting that for the powerful there is no such thing as a domestic audience. 

 

Equally, with majorities in both the Upper and Lower Houses of the Diet Abe now has an opportunity to move Japan and its international relations into the twenty-first century.  Critically, at least three years of stable government is in the offing together with an end to the ministerial merry-go-round which has helped make Japan an at times mercurial and unreliable partner.  

 

L.P. Hartley once wrote, “the past is another country”.  Germany has earned the right to lead because both the country and its people confronted a painful past.  Japan has never and will never confront that past in same way as Germany and Japan’s past may not quite be the foreign land it is to Germany, but it is today a distance place. 

 

Therefore, it is finally time to free Japan from the past…and for Japan to free itself.

 

Julian Lindley-French

Operation Irresolute Support

Alphen, The Netherlands. 17 July.  In 1842 Sir Charles Napier wrote perhaps the most succinct telegram in military history to mark his success at the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War - “Peccavi”, he wrote, “I have sinned”.  It was a play on words as Napier had just conquered what is today the Pakistani province of Sindh.  In another play on words NATO is ‘planning’ Operation Resolute Support to replace the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in December 2014 at the end of major combat operations.  Resolute Support is vital if Afghanistan is to have any chance of a future that is other than ghastly.  Without full American and British backing Resolute Support will be a non-starter because they remain the West’s signature powers. 

 

Sadly, all the mood music I am picking up at a high-level in Washington and London is that if this mission goes ahead at all it will be neither resolute nor offer much in terms of support to Afghanistan’s tottery government.  The US and British Permanent Representatives (ambassadors) to NATO’s North Atlantic Council are rebutting perfectly sound military guidance on the grounds of cost.  Indeed, the political reflex now is to get out at any cost. 

 

The cost is indeed prohibitive.  Afghanistan costs the US taxpayer $110bn per year and it costs $1m simply to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan for a year.  Clearly, that burden will need to be reduced drastically. 

 

In January 2012 I wrote a piece entitled, “Beaufort: Why We Must Leave Afghanistan Now, Not End 2014”.  My sense then was that support for the mission at the highest political levels in both Washington and London was very soft and consequently the campaign was not embedded in a meaningful regional-strategic political, diplomatic and economic strategy.  Indeed, I recall a conversation with a very high-level British official shortly after I had published “Plan B for Afghanistan” for the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  From his remarks it was clear men and women were dying simply to keep an arbitrary December 2014 date with political failure. 

 

The US now says it will only stay in Afghanistan if the Kabul Government enters into “bilateral security arrangements” that offer American forces immunity from prosecution.  President Karzai will enter into no such agreement because he does not want to be seen to be accommodating the soon-to-be departed Americans as he faces potentially life-or-death elections in April 2014. 

 

Washington is locked into sequestration and with relations between Presidents Obama and Karzai close to breaking point the US is threatening a “zero option”; the withdrawal of all US forces by end 2014.  Meanwhile, and not for the first time, David Cameron is demonstrating yet again an inability to grasp the strategic implications of his political short-termism.   

 

Even if Resolute Support does finally go ahead for the first such time in NATO history Britain will lose the deputy commander slot of a major Alliance mission.  Incredibly Germany and Italy are offering to take the lead in Britain’s absence.  In fact Berlin and Rome are also playing narrow politics with Resolute Support as they have no intention of leading anything.  It is simply an attempt to mask their respective failures in Libya and Mali. 

 

London says that whilst it will support the new Afghan army training academy (‘Sandhurst in the Sand’) it will do no more.  Britain “has done its bit” according to Downing Street.  The timing could not be worse.  Britain is about to make NATO the centre-piece of its 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review.  London once again will be seen to be saying one thing and doing another. 

 

The Taliban are watching on with deep satisfaction as Western ‘strategy’ collapses and see no reason to enter into meaningful peace and reconciliation talks.  Indeed, their attacks are increasing in both scale and volume. In spite of real progress on the ground over the past two years Afghanistan today looks increasingly like 1989 on the eve of the Soviet withdrawal. 

 

A desperate race is now on to establish credible Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) prior to NATO’s departure.  Indeed, whilst the Afghan National Army (ANA) is making real progress it still looks and acts nothing like a modern army.  Without training, mentoring and above all credible air power there are real questions as to whether the ANA will stand and fight in the coming struggle.

 

The greatest honour both Obama and Cameron could afford the thousands of their men and women in their national uniforms who have been killed trying to make flawed Afghan strategy work is to properly commit to Resolute Support.  Indeed, if Napier were alive today he would send London an entirely different and far less succinct telegram. He would remind his political masters just why sacrifice was necessary. “Stamus contra malo” - “We stand against evil”.  If that is not the case then why on earth did we go to Afghanistan in the first place?  

 

As for the cost; what will be the cost of complete and utter failure?

 

Julian Lindley-French  

Chapeau France!

Alphen, The Netherlands. 10 July. A very senior British general said of Operation Serval in Mali that France had “set the standard” for crisis military interventions.  Praise indeed and not easily given. One can always tell when a crisis is being managed to effect as the press lose interest.  The challenge Paris faced when four thousand French troops arrived in Mali in February was complicated to say the least.  Tuaregs had taken control of northern Mali and sought separation.  They were supported by a  particularly nasty bunch of Islamists (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Mujao) who had profited (literally) from the chaos in neighbouring Libya.  To make things worse the Malian Army, or what was left of it, was in meltdown and the country’s political system with it.  Now, with the Tuaregs having signed a June peace deal, last year’s military coup leader having apologised and elections planned for 28 July Mali has at least a chance of a future.  How did the French pull off this genuine military success?

 

Critically, Operation Serval was built on strategic unity of effort and purpose underpinned by speed, mass, precision and sustained political and military momentum.  French forces, operating alongside unexpectedly effective Chadian colleagues, drove back the Tuareg separatists and their Islamist partners.  The very shock of the French intervention opened-up very deep divisions between the two insurgent groups.

 

French commanders proved particularly effective in co-ordinating both logistics and a range of allies and ad hoc partners under French command.  Critically, France was unequivocally in the lead and for the first time US and other allied forces operated to effect under French operational command.  This success is testament to the years of joint training and efforts to improve interoperability between French forces and those of its allies.  Indeed, Operation Serval is now a model for the force generation and command of a complex coalition, something that far from being a one-off is likely to become the norm.

 

French forces were also willing to recognise where they needed support, particularly for strategic air-lift (Americans, British and interestingly Russians), air-to-air refuelling and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (the Americans and others).

 

However, for all the undoubted military success two other factors proved critical.  First, speed of reaction.  Within hours of President Hollande’s go-decision French aircraft took off from Saint Dizier air base and flew ten hours to strike key targets in Northern Mali.  These strikes knocked the Islamist/Separatist coalition off-balance from which they never recovered.  These strikes were followed rapidly by the deployment of particularly effective French Special Forces.  Like the British in Sierra Leone in 2000 the shock of a front-line Western military force interceding was sufficient to influence events decisively. 

 

Second, the application of political and military tools took place against the backdrop of deep French historical knowledge of the Malian people, the country and the wider Sahel region.  Knowledge and contacts were vital factors in Serval's success.

 

In other words, France’s strategic 'brand' allied to expert use of force proved decisive.  It was not simply ‘what’ was intervening, but ‘who’ was intervening and how.  This is something the British political leadership might wish to contemplate as they replace strategy with austerity as the key driver of Britain’s defence strategy.  For the moment Britain’s armed forces still have a well-deserved reputation for excellence but any more cuts will render both them and their strategic brand broken.

 

However, perhaps the most decisive factor in Operation Serval was the joined-upness of a French government in crisis.  From President Hollande at the top of the power pyramid through the foreign and defence ministries and onto the service and intelligence chiefs and down to the force and operational commanders Serval was well-conceived, soundly planned, expertly generated and effectively executed.   

 

France was assisted by the strategic and tactical incompetence of their adversaries, as the British were back in the 1982 Falklands War against Argentina.  And, in reality one rarely gets the chance to choose one’s crises.  Mali was ‘doable’, whereas Afghanistan and Iraq were at the very limits of ‘doability’ and Libya on the edge.  It may be that future crises will not be so accommodating to either France or her allies.

 

Furthermore, with the conclusion of this first crisis phase the political battle for Mali is still to come.  The 28 July elections will at best be flawed even if they go ahead.  And of course Serval has not stabilised the Sahel as a whole, partly because the West thinks states, Islamists peoples. Therefore, not too much strategic should be read in to Serval.

 

Equally, the French military success in Mali should not be under-estimated.  Mali is a big and desolate place and as an example of both statecraft and military craft France has every right to be proud of Serval whatever happens next, wherever it happens.

 

Chapeau France!

 

Julian Lindley-French

Egyptian Democracy 2.0?

Alphen, Netherlands.  5 July.  In a master-class of under-stated British diplomatic fudgery Foreign Secretary (and fellow Yorkshireman) William Hague said of the Egyptian Army’s ‘soft coup’, “It’s happened, so we will have to recognise the situation will move on”.  Implicit in that statement is recognition that if Egypt is to create Egyptian democracy 2.0 one would not ideally start from here to paraphrase that old Irish joke. So, what should the West now do?

 

Four principles should be adhered to: the Army return to barracks as soon as possible; a real process of political transition begins; the EU and US closely coordinate their support for the Egyptian people; and Egyptian democracy 2.0 is given every chance to succeed.  

What is happening in Egypt is fundamental change.  One in four Arabs is Egyptian.  What happens in the most populous Arab state reverberates across the Middle East.  However, Morsi’s removal opens a very uncomfortable question for those in the West who believe in democracy at all and any cost.  Moreover, whatever one thinks of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi he was elected with 52% of the popular vote, passed a constitution with the support of 62% of the electorate and has been forcibly removed from power by the Army after one year in office.  And, do not be misled by television pictures of Cairo’s Tahrir Square – 70% of a conservative Egyptian population ascribe to some form of Islamism. 

Although there is clear evidence that the now former President Morsi was resorting to ‘majoritarianism’, i.e. ruling (not governing) in favour of those who supported him and not the country as a whole, he remains the only legitimately elected president in Egypt’s history.  Morsi’s crucial mistake was his November 22nd, 2012 edict granting himself almost unlimited powers.  However, even given that mistake President Morsi should not have been removed from office after only year and for many of the 85 million Egyptians he remains the elected president.  Like it or not the Muslim Brotherhood must play a role in any future political settlement.  The alternative is unthinkable.   

However, sustainable democracy can only flourish when a) the majority of the people across the political spectrum share sufficient commonality of values; and b) all the political parties that represent them are prepared to live by democratic rules.  In Egypt neither of those preconditions for stable democracy exists.  There is no apparent common ground between the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the many secularists and others who occupy Tahrir Square and who now ironically see the Egyptian Army as their political saviours.  In other words Egyptian democracy will take time.

So, where does Egypt go next?  There is a curious political phenomenon in the Middle East.  In those Arab states experimenting with democracy almost everywhere anarchy is close to breaking out or killing people in large numbers.  Whereas those Arab states that have retained a monarchy are for the moment relatively (and I stress relatively) stable.

How does this apply to Egypt?  The first order principle is to put aside scruples about perfect democracy and work with those in power to stabilise the situation. Specifically, that means helping the process of political transition towards enduring political institutions, a free press and an independent judiciary.  Nor is Egypt Syria even if experience of the past two years would suggest that unless the West pulls what levers it has Egypt too could descend into violence and no Egyptian deserves that.  And the West does have some economic and military levers.

Therefore, instead of investing in recreating another ‘democratic’ version of a Nasser, Sadat or Mubarak, the strong man who becomes part of the problem, political transition should focus on making the Egyptian Parliament the centre of political gravity.  Parliaments have rules for democratic engagement and those that flout those rules can be sanctioned as in any other parliamentary democracy.  Here the EU could play a pivotal role. 

The US has a critical role to play with the Egyptian Army leadership as Washington provides $2bn of military aid each year and it would be fanciful to believe the generals will not have a significant political role to play.  However, some legitimacy for its role could be derived if its call for national reconciliation leads to the stability upon which parliamentary democracy rests.  The Army would swear allegiance to a constitutional head of state but in whom little political power is invested even if such a leader needs to be a statesman recognised both nationally and internationally.  Mohammed ElBaradei comes to mind. 

It is of course up to the Egyptian people to decide their future.  Critical to any successful transition will be sufficient people of an Islamist political bent willing to support Egyptian democracy 2.0.    

What is the alternative?  There can be no democracy without stability and instability in the Middle East can be murderous.

Julian Lindley-French

Snowden: Why France is Angry

Alphen, Netherlands. 2 July.  It was as predictable, subtle and French as a first tasting of a Chassagne Montrachet Premier Cru – full of hidden complexity and fascinating ‘notes’.  French President Hollande’s condemnation of Edward Snowden-alleged American spying in Europe was dramatically shrill.  “We cannot accept”, the President thundered, “...this kind of behaviour between allies and partners”, before going onto suggest that France might now scupper talks on the proposed EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).  One could be forgiven for taking French ‘hauteur’ at face value were it not for the fact that my well-informed sources tell me that DGSE, the French external intelligence service, runs one of the most effective foreign intelligence operations in North America.  So, why is France angry?

 

Many in the French elite still believe that more Atlantic means less Europe and that the next five years or so will be critical for the European Project.  It is a zero sum game view of West-West relations that could potentially cripple the TTIP and which is already doing damage to NATO. 

The first evidence that France was seeking to block the TTIP came on the eve of the recent UK-hosted G8 Summit when Paris raised the thorny issue of French ‘l’exception culturelle’.  Paris demanded, in that ‘take it or leave it’ way that France’s partners find so endearing, that French cinema and other artistic endeavours be exempted from any transatlantic free trade agreement.  British Prime Minister David ‘Short-Term’ Cameron, desperate for a diplomatic success, failed to see (or chose not to see) that this was the very French end of a very French wedge.

Chancellor Merkel is also upset by alleged US spying.  This is partly because the state abuse of information is a sensitive issue given Germany’s past and she is in the midst of an election campaign.  However, German ‘irritation’ will soon pass.  First because most US spying on and in Germany takes place in partnership with German intelligence.  Second, because Chancellor Merkel believes the TTIP could help the Eurozone economies to become more competitive by creating a single market big enough and safe enough for export-driven growth.  Third, a transatlantic single market would potentially be big enough to make it in Britain’s economic interest to stay in the EU.   Fourth, the TTIP would provide a free market alibi for further German-led European integration.

The Paris elite buy none of that.  Anti-Americanism still runs deep along the banks of the Seine.  On the statist Left French political leaders have long cut their teeth on an abiding loathing of what they see as the rampant, inhumane and unfettered capitalism of the American model.  On the Gaullist Right American power in Europe has long been seen as an affront to French honour and a barrier to French ambitions to craft Europe around France. 

 

This anti-American reflex comes to the fore at moments of political and economic stress such as today, often in combination with a none-too-subtle ‘faux grandeur’.  President Hollande’s recent assertion that France would not be dictated to by the European Commission was at the very best political irony and at worst hubris.  Paris seemed to be saying to the Commission – by all means tell all other 27 EU members what to do...but not France.

In fact it is the Germans who most concern Paris.  France is only publicly going along with the TTIP because that is what Angela wants.  And yet implicit in the Merkel Plan is a free-market world view much closer to that of the dreaded and perfidious ‘anglosaxons’ than the statist traditions upon which France is built.

Sadly, the Paris elite simply cannot face today’s revealed truth; France’s ‘social model’ view of Europe is dead.  ‘Europe’ will only have a long-term future if the EU helps Europeans to earn their way in the world.  The EU will fail if it remains as it is today, a failing, ageing coffer dam creaking under the growing weight of a flood of change.  This is precisely what many on the French Left want the EU to be - 1950s analogue political engineering in a digital age.  The creation of the TTIP would be the first step on the road to a Europe competitive in a hyper-competitive world.

The bottom-line is this; if France continues to seek excuses to block TTIP talks Paris is aligning itself with the forces of the past rather than the forces of the future.  The irony is that it is forces from America's past that will probably in the end kill off the TTIP.  An Unholy Alliance is forming between American and French farmers all of whom demand protectionism. 

There is a final irony.  France and the US tried to agree a ‘no-spy’ deal similar to that which exists between the US and UK but they could not agree what constitutes spying.  That means the Americans could at any time reveal the extent of French spying on them. 

This whole episode reveals the Snowden story for what it is; a tragi-comic farce.  Jacques Tati meets Groucho Marx - now that would be fun!

Julian Lindley-French

Ich Bin Ein Westerner

Rome, Italy. 27 June.  The ghost of Diana’s temple stands hard by.  Rome’s Aventine Hill upon which I sit mocks the remains of Nero’s monstrous Palatine across the now desolate Circo Massimo.  Where racing chariots once thundered ageing joggers now shuffle.  Around me plump oranges contemplate their final fall as if awaiting some latter day Newton to measure their worth.  If the West was born in Ancient Greece it came of age here under the Roman azure skies of ‘i azzurri’.  “Ich bin ein Berliner”; fifty years ago this week President Kennedy made his famous defiant assertion of Western solidarity at the strategic fault line of the Berlin Wall.  What today is the state of the West?

 

Kennedy’s moment has passed into strategic folklore.  However, perhaps more enduring was a speech he made the next day in Frankfurt.  Responding to threats to the Atlantic Alliance by then French President de Gaulle in the name of ‘Europe’, Kennedy warned against those who would split NATO and “give aid and comfort to the enemies of the West”.  This quote came back to me as I stood last week in the Washington office of George F. Kennan, America’s great post-war strategic architect.

Kennedy continued, “The United States will risk its cities to defend yours because we need your freedom to protect our own”.  That was 1963; this is now.

Fast forward to a meeting I attended this week here in Rome.  A very senior NATO officer observed that the Alliance no longer does strategy.  Rather, NATO is today bereft of the ability to look up and out together by the deep, interminable and oft parochial political fractures at its peak.  Consequently, strategy has been trumped by bureaucracy. 

Today, the West needs three acts of strategic maturity.  First, Washington must overcome its bombastic partisanship and recognise that the rhetoric of leadership is empty if a state cannot govern itself to effect and by example.  Second, Europeans must look out of their self-dug narrow political trench and have the courage to face the world as it is, not as they would like it to be.  December’s ‘big chat’ about the almost moribund EU Common Security and Defence Policy should be about far more than declining defence budgets.  Europe’s place in the world and its collective influence over it is now very much at stake.  Third, NATO needs a new vision.  The Alliance is a, if not the, cornerstone of the Western world security order. 

A couple of nights ago I had dinner with General John E. Allen, one of America’s most distinguished and brilliant soldiers.  It was one of those evenings when conversation flowed freely across time and place in a restaurant on the Via Antica Appia down which Roman legions once marched.  What struck me about our discussion was a strategic truism that I will hold to my heart to the day I die; the world is a safer place when the West is strong.

Yes, the West has made mistakes.  Sadly (and eternally) that has always been the fate of power in complexity.  However, error is no excuse for retreat which is precisely what happens when strategy is superseded by bureaucracy.

Kennedy’s commitment to Europe cannot and must not be taken for granted.  What is needed is a reassertion of Western solidarity and nothing short of that will now do.  As in 1963 NATO will have a central but not exclusive role to play in a renovated Western strategic architecture.  The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will be at least as important.

However the new NATO (for that is what we need) must in turn be built on a new strategic contract between both members and partners.  This will include recognition that the US commitment to Europe is only as strong as European willingness to play a full security and defence role.  NATO itself must again become the focal point for the development of efficient and effective military capabilities.  Capable partners the world over must be given real access to Alliance strategy and thinking.  Above all, strategic unity and effort and purpose between four key European actors must be purposively established however hard; Britain, France, Germany and Turkey.

It is for that reason I bang on about British military capabilities.  It is not so we Brits can sing a hearty rendition of Rule Britannia once a year at the Last Night of the Proms and not feel ever-so-slightly absurd.  It is rather to underpin the Western strategic contract with sufficient hard power so as to keep America in, get Europe up so the West can again look out with confidence and purpose.

Lord Byron once wrote, “While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; when falls the Coliseum Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls – the World”.  The Alliance is the latter day Coliseum.  If it falls or fades away then the West falls.  And the world will be a much more dangerous place for it.

Ich bin ein Westerner...and proud of it!

Julian Lindley-French