The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy

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It is reading time again here at AFOE. I am happy to invite you to read The politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy. If you like the world to be simple and easy to understand then you will hate The Politics of Chaos.

Olivier Roy offers his readers a descriptive overview of the many and ever moving social and political currents and dynamics in the Middle East. Understanding these will give a clearer insight into many of the conflicts in the region. Roy places the conflicts within their own context and separates them from the idea of ‘a clash of civilizations’. As the title of the book suggests, there is no single formula, or a ‘geostrategy of Islam’ as he calls it, that would explain everything that currently goes on in the Middle East. In the rather provocative introduction to the book, which you can read at the Columbia University Press website (pdf), Roy States:

Far from bearing out the prevailing theory that there is “a clash of civilizations” and a confrontation between the Muslim world and the West, the conflicts and realignments affect primarily the Muslim world itself and operate along fault lines that have very little to do with ideology.

It is true that some people, in their discussions about Islam, tend to forget the actual social and political ‘realities on the ground’ and see the Muslim World as a huge monolith. Olivier Roy addresses this issue in the first chapter of the book called Who is the enemy? Where is the enemy?, in which he describes how current Western, and notably American, Middle East policy was shaped and why it failed. Talking about the failure of the democratization of Iraq he writes:

Why then, is there talk of failure? Fundamentally because, for the neoconservatives and international institutions alike, democracy is a simple question of building institutions and electoral mechanisms. (…) What is lacking in this theory of democratization is the entire political dimension of a modern society (state), and the entire anthropological depth of a traditional society.

In short, the West looked at the problems in the Middle East from a purely Western perspective that largely ignored ‘the reality on the ground’.

Olivier Roy then goes on to describe ‘this reality on the ground’ in a second chapter called The Middle East: Fragmentation of Conflicts and New Fault Lines. It would be impossible to give a decent summary of all the different actors and complex dynamics Roy describes at length in this most fascinating part of the book. To give you an idea, consider this quote:

A major problem in the Middle East is that of political legitimacy. Local nationalisms generally develop around states, not regimes, but the political ideologies on the market are supra-nationalist while the political “grammar” (the game of individual alliances and loyalties) is inter-state (all that is contained in the term asabiyya or “solidarity group”: clannism, tribalism, sectarianism). (…) And yet nationalisms remain the key to conflicts, but are undermined by internal divisions (…) which can be linked to ideologies and transnational networks.

It is in this chapter that we discover the true political, social and ideological kaleidoscope that is the Middle East. If there is one thing that does unite the countries of the Middle East, it is not a desire to bring down Western civilization but rather an ongoing search for identity (based on nationalism or religion) in a globalised world. And this search is very much influenced by the role the West has played and continues to play in the internal affairs of this region.

The complexity continues in a third chapter that is dedicated to Iran and in which Roy sheds some light on the internal dynamics of that country, its ambitions as a regional power, its nuclear programme and the Ahmadinejad phenomenon. And in the fourth and last chapter of the book Olivier Roy discusses Al-Qaeda and explains why this organization, potentially lethal as it may be, has no real future and that its activism is increasingly detached from actual political developments. As Roy states, “Al-Qaeda’s recruitment map in no way reflects the flashpoints in the Middle East” and, one of many surprising facts in this chapter, “10 to 25% of activists are converts”.

With this short summary, which does no justice to the wealth of insights and information this new book by Olivier Roy provides, I can highly recommend The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East as an excellent introduction to the diverse political and social realities in the Middle East. If you are interested in the subject, you can use this book as a primer to get a better understanding of the Middle Eastern Zeitgeist, its contemporary history and sensibilities with regards to Western influence in the region.

For more information you can visit the book’s webpages of Columbia University Press and Hurst & Co.

And, as a bonus, go have a quick browse through the books on offer in Columbia University Press’ White Sale. Today (Monday June 2nd) is the last day of the sale.

I would also like to take this opportunity to recommend two other books that I received from Hurst & Co: Iran in World Politics, The Question of the Islamic Republic by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and Hamas in Politics by Jeroen Gunning.

Rodolfo Chiquilicuatre and José Manuel González-Páramo: Here Comes The Spanish Banking Armada

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Last Monday morning when most of Spain’s citizens were busy watching YouTube videos or TV news coverage of Rodolfo Chiquilicuatre doing his bit of buffoonery at the Eurovision Song Contest, many readers of the English speaking financial press were hard at it peering into another video, the one of the Financial Times’ Ralph Atkins interviewing Spain’s representative on the ECB executive board José Manuel González-Páramo (transcript here, curiously whilst almost everyone in Spain seems to know who Chiquilicuatre is, almost no one has heard of González-Páramo).

The Spanish representative was busy trying to allay fears that European banks have become over-dependent on European Central Bank liquidity injections and in particular trying to deny that the Spanish banks are gearing their operations to take advantage of the extra help which has been made available.(In other words while the good Rodolfo was dando-nos a todos verguenza ajena, González-Páramo was simply doing his job, and dando la cara for Spain).

“I don’t think in any way the banking system is becoming addicted,” said José Manuel González-Páramo, ECB executive board member, in an interview with the Financial Times. “They are now behaving a little bit different than they were behaving before August 2007, but the reasons behind that are quite obvious to everyone.”

If González-Páramo was having to work hard to keep the Spanish end up, this was in part a result of the growing concern being expressed that Spanish banks are creating ever riskier collateral to swap with the ECB, much riskier collateral than the central bank ever envisaged. The fear is that the ECB has already accumulated too much risky collateral, and that the funding is being used to far to great an extent to keep “business as usual” going, rather than as bridge finance to enable a sizeable restructuring of the Spanish economy (which was, I think, the original intent). Just such a view was expressed earlier this month by Yves Mersch, Luxembourg’s central bank governor – who, like González-Páramo, sits on the ECB’s governing council – when he indicated that the type of collateral now being accepted by the ECB was “a matter of high concern”.

Since the global financial market crisis erupted last year, Spanish finance houses have been able to fall back on the ECB’s liquidity operations, available to a large number of banks on the basis of a broad range of collateral, including some mortgage-backed securities. Residential construction and public works were responsible, at the height of the boom, for an incredible 18% of Spain’s GDP and for 13% of total employment. All this now has to change, and is the major macroeconomic restructuring which will be the end product of the financial crisis. In the future Spain will be able to depend a lot less on household borrowing and consumer consumption to drive growth, and will now need to depend to a considerable extent on exports. That is the sea change which is (or should be) underway.

But I will not dwell further on all this here, since my intention is only a short post, and one intended to make a very simple point: our horizons about what really interests us, and what is really important to us is actually pretty restricted. For all the hard work being put in at the ECB to influence inflation expectations, they haven’t it seems to me been able to even generate sufficient interest in Spain that the proverbial man or woman in the street knows the name of the person taking the important decisions (to some extent) on their behalf.

For those of you who have the appetite to dig a little deeper into what is actually happening to the Spanish (yawn) banking system, I will simply refer you to the much longer post I have on the topic on my Spanish economy blog. And for those of you who could just as easily live without going further, well as they say, dance on, and what better way to while away your time doing that than by taking dancing lessons at the hands of Spain’s very own – and why not, let’s be honest, one and only -Rodolfo Chiquilicuatre.

Meanwhile, watch out London, watch out Frankfurt, here comes the Spanish banking armada!

Transnistria: a solution?

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A recent article over at Radio Free Europe suggests that Moldova and Russia may be getting close to a solution of the Transnistria conflict. (For some background on Transnistria, here are some articles I wrote last year.)

Now, RFE tends to be pretty Russophobe, so there’s a certain amount of mouth-breathing: Moldova has turned back to Moscow and away from the West! It’s going to become a satellite of Russia once more!

Well… perhaps. But in terms of settling the Transnistrian conflict, the deal described in the article makes a lot of sense. Continue reading →

Sarko tilts at the trente-cinq

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It’s tough to pin Nicolas Sarkozy down. He had spent the last week in apparent populist mode, hence his proposal for a redistribution of the VAT windfall on fuel taxes, and working on a plan to use France’s EU presidency to drive a clampdown on immigration to the EU. Yet he has added to this a proposal to open the door to the iconic Polish Plumber and now he has set up what looks like a straight conflict with the unions over the 35 hours. The odd thing is that one week ago he seemed content to work around the edges of the 35 hour week: endorsing what seemed like a rebuke by his labour minister to a call from Patrick Devedjian (UMP leader) to get rid of it. But the actual draft legislation seems to keep the 35 hour week only in a nominal sense while allowing so much variation above it that it would be seriously eroded. Perhaps a gambit that he can split “the France that wakes up early” from those with enough income to have a meaningful labour-leisure tradeoff. Coupled with a calculation that he can wear out the opposition over the July and August vacances. But not much sign of chastened Gordon Brown style U-turns.

Sarko the Euro-populist

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In what is no doubt part of his resurrection bid, French president Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed a  vague-sounding cap on VAT/TVA as applied to fuel.  He has a point.  VAT is an accelerator of underlying price increases, since the amount applies as a percentage of the net price and not is a fixed monetary amount (like fuel duty).  Thus any increase in the net fuel price gets 21% (in Ireland, for example) added on to it.    On the other hand, he’s also dragging in the EU, since the commission would have to approve a modification of VAT as applied to fuel.  So pending that, all he has is a proposal to “redistribute” the VAT windfall as selective subsidies or transfers.  One wonders to what extent such proposals will generate “me too” proposals in other countries — especially in the UK, where Gordon Brown will surely balk at yet another revenue drain as he deals with a summer of discontent. 

And then, a LIBRARY!

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The German newspaper whose website could be better organised has a very good article about the Gurtel, Vienna’s other great boulevard, once described as the proletarian Ringstrasse. I never knew this, though:

Wobei auf dem Gürtel früher Linksverkehr herrschte, wie in England. Siegfried Tschmul, ein Wiener Jude, erinnert sich gut daran. Als er 1938, nachdem die deutschen Truppen in Wien einmarschiert waren, eines Morgens aus seinem Fenster hinunter auf den Währinger Gürtel sah, fuhren alle Autos plötzlich rechts, wie in Deutschland. Über Nacht war der gesamte Verkehr umgestellt worden, und niemand hatte ein Problem mit der neuen Ordnung. Da sei ihm klar geworden, dass er Wien verlassen musste. Mit seinen Eltern floh er aus Österreich.

They used to drive on the left? Who knew? And the image of everyone suddenly driving on the right, the morning after the Nazi seizure of power, is better than any novelist could have invented. I liked this, too:

Denn die Rotlichtszene, lange untrennbar mit dem Gürtel verbunden, verliert ihr Publikum, vor allem dort, wo der Gürtel so schick und quirlig geworden ist. Eine der Unterweltgrößen, in Wien “Strizzis” genannt, hat den Sittenverfall schon in einem Interview beklagt. Erst seien die Stadtbahnbögen ausgeräumt und Kulturzentren eingerichtet worden. Und dann hätten sie ihm auch noch “eine Bibliothek hingebaut”.

What did the porno boss find most offensive? The library, damn it.

While Europe Napped

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Perhaps not “While Europe Slept”, but can we have a little more attention to what’s going on in Italy? As well as the fascist saluting business, and the is-he-joking-is-he-serious threats of violence, we’re seeing gypsy camps being set on fire by thugs, whose behaviour is being excused by the Northern League on grounds that the government hasn’t gone far enough in kicking them out of the country. The government, for its part, is happily legislating against people on the grounds of citizenship, and has apparently decided to forget about the Treaty of Rome and the ECHR for a while.

What genuinely worries me, though, is this trope of people working-towards-the-leader, going too far, and being tacitly understood as having the right motives. It’s traditionally one of the most effective ways to get people to do something really awful. Similarly, this parallel-police tendency is very dangerous stuff – Misha Glenny reckons the goons are being supplied by the Camorra, which wouldn’t surprise me at all. Hey, and people thought I was crazy when I suggested Berlusconi might not go when he lost the last election…

Fortunately there’s the Spanish deputy prime minister and a Hungarian MEP;

Hungarian liberal MEP and a Roma herself Viktoria Mohacsi visited gypsy camps outside Rome and Naples. According to Italy’s AGI news agency, she said that she had been “frightened and filled with horror” by what she had seen.

She referred to “[the] random night roundups, assault in prisons, gratuitous arrests and a general persecutory climate unworthy of a country which considers itself democratic.”

but this isn’t enough. The European Commission is silent. Does anyone now remember that they applied official sanctions to Austria because of the FPO’s entry in government? Yes, they consisted of marginally reducing the size of the flag on the EC representative office on the Karntner Ring or something, but at least it made the point.

One, two, many Uneuropean Unions

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We’ve occasionally played with the idea of the EU as the Borg, a new kind of political entity whose chief means of power is membership in its system of technocratic cooperation. The paradigm of this is, of course, the successful absorption of the Mediterranean ex-dictatorships and the economic development of the poor periphery – not just the ex-communist states but also places like Ireland and Portugal. Here’s something interesting, if you really like that sort of thing – Kosmopolit blogs about the changing nature of the EU Neighbourhood Policy and the various other headings under which the EU’s foreign policy falls – the Black Sea Synergy (ouch), the Eastern Partnership, the Barcelona Process et al.

The crucial insight is that rather than the potential new members (or not, but we’ll come to that) being offered a list of things they must do with regard to the EU in order to get something from the EU, it’s now a question of their being asked to do EU-like things with regard to a third country, for example to set up institutional cooperation on specific problems or monitor each others’ democratic credentials. The really interesting bit is that this doesn’t have to apply to EU membership only – it could also mean a policy of encouraging the creation of alternative EU-like communities.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the EU, so often derided as a hypercentralised bureaucratic monster, was actually a prototype of a rhizomatic form of government?

Illiberal Direct Democracy

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Over at the German-speaking version of ScienceBlogs, they’re talking about a referendum (and nobody’s going to sing a song with that as the refrain), or rather a whole package of them. Switzerland famously has a lot of referendums, but this one is interesting because it points up the fundamental tension between democracy and the republic.

So part of Switzerland voted, in a referendum, to deny naturalisation of anyone from a state formerly part of Yugoslavia. Later, the courts struck down the ban on the grounds that this decision breached the constitutional prohibition on arbitrary rule (Willkurverbot, something I can well agree with). Although it was democratic, it was illegitimate. Now, people who are cool with arbitrary rule in so far as it effects teh immigrants are trying to restore the ban by means of a federal referendum.

I’ve never liked direct democracy very much – especially not the version that’s centred on referendums rather than deliberation. And as I happened to be in Switzerland last week, I took the opportunity to confirm my prejudices. The Neue Zurcher Zeitung for this Friday carried an interesting item, which tends to deny the idea that referendums are a means of clearer, more faithful, more independent political representation. Their Parolenspiegel – “slogan mirror” would be an insufficient translation – sets out a table with three columns, one for each referendum, and 12 rows, one for each of 12 political parties. Each cell in the table contains either the word JA or NEIN, depending on that party’s view of that particular proposal. Below this, there is a further table with the same information for 22 different interest groups. Now there’s independent for you.

In footnotes to this, 24 cases are listed where the youth, women’s, or local branches of this or that party has a different position. Clearly, the citizen is offered an unparalleled choice of ways to avoid thinking about their vote, although what happens in the event of conflict is an interesting question – perhaps you put all the data in tables and use the Analytic Hierarchy Process?

Eurovision: can’t resist

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Liveblogging the first half hour, before I’m too drunk to continue.

Romania okay, will get votes but not a winner. Britain so-so, not that bad but not real Eurovision. Albania cute female lead singer in a cloak with bare midriff and a wind machine… okay.

Germany godawful! Geez — bad outfits, horrible singing, annoying song. Armenia very Armenian, strong female singer singing in Armenian (which sounds more impressive than it is; I know enough Armenian to know she’s singing the same two trite phrases over and over). Guys climbing all over each other — looks like an old Soviet circus troupe there.

Bosnia… what the hell. Bride outfits, fright wigs, laundry? Surreal, in a very Yugoslav sort of way, but not a contender. Israel, Boaz “the Yemeni nightingale” singing in mixed Hebrew and English — very handsome guy if you like ’em like that, and somehow very Eurovision-y. Shortlist.

The wife has made nachos. We have beer. Continue reading →