Yurii's Realm

I have long embraced the Heisenberg principle of nationalism: the closer you look at a  nation-state, the more likely it isn’t there any more.  Today’s case in point, Ukraine.  Yurii Andrukhovych seems to recognize this perspective in his 1993 novel Moskovodiada, where he itemizes the titles of Olelko II, king of Ukraine, descendant (so he says) of he Riurykovychs and Dolgorukiis:

Sovereign and Ruler of Rus-Ukraine, Great Prince of Kiev and Chernihiv, King of Galicia and Volhynia, Master of Pskov, Peremyshl and Koziatyn, Duke [Hertzog] of Dniproderzhynsk, First of May and Illich, Great Khan of Crimea and Izmail, Baron of Berdychiv, of both Bukovyna and Bessarabia, and also New Askan and Outer Kakhovka, rhe Wild Field and the Black Forest of Arkhysenior, Hetman and Protector of the Cossacks of the Don, Berdiansk and Kryvyi Rih, Tireless Shepherd of the Hutsuls and Boikos, Lord of All the People of the Ukraine, including Tatars and Pechenegs, peasant farmers [malokhokhlamy] and salo-eaters, with every Moldavian and Mankurt, on Our Pure Land, Patron and Pastor of Great and Little Slobidska Ukraine, and also Inner and Outer Timutorokan, the glorious descendant of all the ages, in a word, our proud and most eminent Monarch.

--Reprinted in Andrew Wilson, The Ukranians:  Unexpected Nation (2000; new material 2002—and I gather there is a new edition from 2009).

Ernest Renan says that history is as much about forgetting as remembering. 

Stuff I Did Not Know about the Brothers D

I lived through the Eisenhower/Dulles years--some of the time, in Washington itself.  But here are some things I never grasped until today:

• John Foster Dulles was the savage foe of everything he was a savage foe of, yet he exposed his neck to the thuggish Joe McCarthy, and why?   Apparently because he remembered how Woodrow Wilson rebuffed Congress and paid for it with the loss of his entire program, perhaps even his life.  John Foster was determined not to make the Wilsonian blunder. He knunckled under to McCarthy because he remembered Wilson.

• Allen Dulles as head of the  CIA may have made more mischief than John Foster as Secretary of State.  Foster bloviated; Allen sent in spies.  Yet Allen was not a clever man; he had no aptitude for analysis and no fully-developed world-picture.  He just loved gossip and intrigue.

• Henry Luce the publisher-potentate  and Allen operated on a common premise: if the guy in the field reported something contrary to what you believe at your desk at home, fire the guy in the field. 

• True that Dwight Eisenhower as President sent no American forces into battle.  But he thought coups against foreign governments were okay, presumably because the ones who got hurt were the other guys'.

Such is what I glean from The Brothers Dulles by Stephen Kinzer.  More anon.

Bernard Lewis Again

Followup notes on Bernard Lewis and his Notes on a Century; Reflections of Middle East Scholar. For a man of 96, and one who has placed himself t the center of the passions (if perhaps not the actions of his time, Bernard Lewis has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled life. Grant the odd kerfuffle: a public feud here, a grotesque lawsuit there (Paris, actually), a failed marriage back home--grant all this and grant also that it's a good thing he had a few such encounters or his life would have been boring almost beyond tears. He found his calling early; he got people to pay him what he enjoyed doing, and since before most of his professional peers were born, he has pretty much defined the study of Islam in the West.

Almost boring, then, in its virtually uninterrupted fecundity. Lewis has produced more polished works--monographs, overviews, (semi-) popular accounts, polemics--than many of his aspiring competitors have years in their lives--more than half of all these, in retirement. He has played a dominant role as one who explains Islam to the West, but he has made any number of particular contributions of his own--on slavery under Islam, for example, on the Muslim view of the West, perhaps most important on the place of Jews under Islam. Recognizing that a memoir is only a record of a life--not a life, still on reading Lewis, one is hard put to figure out how he got it all done. For Lewis appears also to have been an indefatigable globe trotter; for all his time in the library, he must have spent a comparable amount of time in the airport departure lounge, on his way to conferences, seminars, festschrift presentations, consultations with potentates and whatnot. Among his many talents, Lewis seems to have been a natural guest: cultivated, affable, easy to have around, an adornment to almost any scholarly gathering. When Lewis says "and so I told the Pope," he means just what he says: he is talking about a real Pope and a real conversation. Thus we get to enjoy the amusing ironies that accompany a Jew explaining Islam to the head honcho among the Catholics.

Of course Lewis' role as the primo interpreter of Islam in the west has not been quite as sedate as his memoir might suggest.  Far from anodyne, he has built his life around a worldview and a model of scholarship that have put him in the center of contention not only of how we understand Islam but for how we conduct scholarly issue.  He doesn't really elide these issues in the memoir; rather he presents them with a kind of austere dignity that makes it easy to overlook just how fraught these issues may be.  In this light, perhaps the centerpiece of the book is a chapter/essay articulating his view on the place of the scholarly inquirer.  It's as good an introduction to the topic as you might imagine; I'd rank it alongside Max Weber's great lecture, "Science as a Vocation,"   But perhaps the critical word here is "inquirer:" scholarship, on Lewis' presentation, begins with the unknown, not known, with hypothesis, not with thesis.  It's a view not always evident among his adversaries nor even (dare one say it) among his friends.  But Lewis makes a strong case for the proposition  as a guiding principle in his own life.

Beyond the basics, I'd say the easiest way to understand Lewis s in terms of three other public figures, two of them obvious linkages, the third perhaps less so.


The first, as Lewis explains with bleak irony, is Osama bin Laden.  By the sheerest chance, a book by Lewis entitled What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response appeared in bookstores just weeks after 9/11.  It gave Lewis a kind of minor/major celebrity that  most academics only dream of.  "Osama bin Laden made me famous," Lewis observes with no particular relish.  "I was interviewed, quoted, filmed, and I even made the front page of The Wall Street Journal."


No doubt Lewis' new-found notoriety was enough to dismay the second of the defining figures in his life--Edward Said, the doyen of what has come to be known as "post-colonial studies."  In his pathfinding Orientalism (1978), Said had done Lewis the courtesy of singling out Lewis for special venom.  The two continued to define and redefine each other until the end of Said's life (he died in 2003).   Lewis, with the gift of longevity, has the last word.  He states his case crisply and with vigor, but I wouldn't say he overdoes it.

The third may be not quite so obvious a choice.  I'm thinking of Abba Eban, known to the world as Israel's public face at the United Nations during the critical formative period for the new Jewish state.  But "public face" scarcely does it: by his dynamic and magnetic presentation, I suspect Eban did as much as, or more than, any one person to breath life into the new nation.

Lewis calls Eban "Aubrey," his non-public name.  He doesn't discuss Eban at length in the book; he doesn't mention that he spoke at a memorial service for Eban (who, like Said, died in 2003), where he declared that they had been friends for 70 years.  But it is almost uncanny how closely those two lives parallel.  They were born just over a year apart; they grew up in modest circumstances in London.  Each achieved a dazzling record at University, in each case not least because of their knack for languages.

From there, their careers part, although they run in parallel.  Eban, far more the public man, devoted the larger part of his career to Israel and to Zionism.    Lewis sustained a passionate curiosity about Israel (late in life, he said he visited there every year).  But his main public presence was in the Muslim countries--Turkey first, but so many other states as well.  What's remarkable in retrospect is how much these two men, Eban and Lewis--three, if you count Said--continue to define so much of what we know, or thought we knew, about Islam and Israel and the Middle East.

Who's Yer Daddy, Mitt?

Bonasera: .... Then I said to my wife, "For justice, we must go to Don Corleone."

Don Corleone: Why did you go to the police? Why didn't you come to me first?

Bonasera: What do you want of me? Tell me anything. But do what I beg you to do.

I suppose politicians have always gone hat in hand to the person who pulls the strings--the archbishop's man of business, the clerk with all the file cards. the ward boss.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, riding high at the end of his third term, got himself some grief when he settled the vice-presidential nomination by telling the troops to "clear it with Sidney."*

But have we ever seen anything more embarrassingly supine than the spectacle of Mitt Romney beginning the foreign policy phase of his presidential campaign by going to the capital of a foreign country and meeting with his big donors behind closed doors?  And this at the beck of a prime minister who won't even show him the courtesy of remembering who he is?

I suppose we have to grant the candidate this much, though: I suspect it isn't really his idea. I don't think even this candidate would be so clueless to think he can gain points among the homies by beginning with a kowtow to a foreign leader. And probably not Netenyahu's either--he who I suspect cares far more about showing that he can make an American presidential candidate jump when he snaps his fingers than he is in the more paltry question of who actually wins the race. That leaves the remaining suspect: the money man, Mr. Casino himself, Sheldon Adelson, the 35th richest man in the world, to whom Romney's few hundred millions are a rounding number. In perspective, Adelson probably doesn't understand politics nearly as well as he thinks he does, but if you have that kind of money, nobody will ever clue you in.

Don Corleone: That I cannot do.
Bonasera: I will give you anything you ask!

Undocumented bonus: I asked my friend Ignoto to clarify this stuff about showing up on the eve of Tisha B'av, the solemn anniversary of the destruction of the first and the second temple? Was it another flatfooted gaffe, like telling the Brits they don't know how to run an Olympics, or can he spin it as a gesture of solidarity with a beleaguered people. Ignoto responds:

Well, technically, it's worse to show up on the Shabbath.

It is not a biblical holiday, but a rabbinic one, which means the rules are much less strict.

Interestingly, the fact that the T'ish fall on the Shabbath this year means that the fasting is on the following (this is a product of rabbinic (Tisha B'av) vs Biblical (Shabbas).

This means that those attending banquets would be violating Tisha B'av -- although some people no longer observe since Jerusalem was captured.

He can't spin it as a show of respect, but Netanyahu said it was ok.

That last is perhaps the killer argument, not so? Netenyahu says it's okay, end of story...

Oh wait folks, there's more (link).
--

*In fairness, Roosevelt survived.   Dewey tried to beat him over the head with the remark but without success.  Fun footnote: apparently some unreconstructed old laborites now run a weblog  named "Clear it with Sidney."

Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin Meditations Approaching the Birthday of a Great Nation

Kindleberger (citing Forelich and Oppenheimer) on the Dutch:

Holland was the leader among the seven provinces, however, and as in political science theories of leadership, had to pay for the privilege of leading and being repaid in prestige, by taking on a disproportionate share of the totality... During the Dutch golden age of the seventeenth century, the issue was not troublesome. It became salient in the decline ....

[P. 90] I suppose any number of people have made a similar observation about America's truculent insistence that it be allowed to maintain (=pay for) so much of the world's defense. And the more you think of it, the more tempting it is to generalize. I wonder if something in the same nature persists when the blue states so cheerfully (heh) sustain the burden of paying the dependency bills of the red states. Similarly I can hear the old fashioned paterfamilias husband proudly and loudly boasting that "my wife will never have to work!"

Further afield, I suppose the same analysis might help to clarify the willingness of the tiny Nordic countries to puch above their weight in peacekeeping and suchlike: grant them the worthy motive of generosity, still there is a payoff (and who can begrudge them?) in enhanced self-esteem.

And--though this really is a bit of a stretch--I wonder if it might help to explain the stubborn unwillingness of the Germans to pick up any more of the tab for the trouble in the south. After all the Germans have had their experience with hegemony, thankyouverymuch, and it's not a pretty thing to remember. As in: we Germans are happy to stay home and tend to our knitting--why don't you do the same? Not saying they are right in this, of course, just trying to clarify what is going on.  

As the great Franco-German once said, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

Mead on Just About Everything: Waiting for a New Edition

I'm still noodling away  God and Gold. Walter Russell Mead's  everything-I-know-about everything summation of issues in Anglo-American foreign relations.  I put it it on my Kindle, oh, I can't remember how long ago, and I never seem to give up on, always expecting that the end must around the corner. Which is to say it is a vastly self-indulgent book, would have been much better a hundred or so pages shorter. Still, Mead is a shrewd and mostly balanced observer, wonderful at individual aperçu, and diverting at clever formulations of complex issues (I do think the Walrus and the Carpenter gets done to death though). It also excites a sense of giddy hilarity to read a foreign-policy commentator who is so unapologetic an apologist in the tradition of grand whiggery, someone still willing to base his analysis on such rocks as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Thomas Babington Macaulay. If we had to locate Mead anywhere in time, I'd nominate August 1, 1740, the occasion of a grand celebration of the accession of George II to the throne of Great Britain--itself the venue for the first performance of Rule, Britannia!  (cf. infra).

To be fair, Mead understands what he is up against here, and he strives to identify and respond to (the many?) important objections to an analysis rooted so deeply commitment to the Anglo-American tradition.  He is at once self-confident and forthright; you can see him struggling not to be dismissed as "breezy."  But there is a gorilla at this garden party.  Specifically, Mead published on October 9, 2007, when we were still able to ignore the storm clouds of the gathering financial storm, just about a year away from the collapse of Lehman and the Week that Changed Everything.    Breezy he may not be, but jaunty is out there on the verge.  It is hard to imagine anyone writing with the same kind of easy self-confidence today.

BTW if Mead is too given to the short-compass insight, it may be that his natural forum is the Blog.  Check him out here.

A Note on Nye, and the Nature & Purpose of Reading

Still trying to buff up my international relations skill set, I've more or less finished (i.e., with a bit of cheating) Joseph Nye, The Future of Power, and why would that be, exactly?  Nye is a smooth and engaging expositor; and he offers a subtle take on an important topic: power is more complicated than you might think; let me show you some of the permutations of power.  So far so good, although I found myself getting strangely impatient with it all, almost as if I already knew just about everything that he had to say.

This last is an illusion, of course:  if by "I knew," I mean "I could have written this book," then surely I did not know what he had to say: Nye articulates a lot of important stuff that I don't think I had seen written down elsewhere, certainly not nearly so comprehensively or so well put.

And?  Well, and one of two possibilities, I think.  One--perhaps the more dramatic--that Nye's views, once articulated, have become so much a part of second nature that we take them almost for granted.  This is a recognizable phenomenon: I suppose it is true of, say Isaac Newton's Principia.  But Nye's publication date is last February 11, and I doubt that any such whirlwind has coursed through our intellectual life (the blinds would have rattled).  The other, more subtle possibility--that Nye is articulating what was inchoate in the minds of a lot of readers, thus ready and able to shout "hats off, gentlemen!"  This is a far more provocative and potentially insidious possibility, because it remains so hard to tell  the difference between one who truly gives voice to the incipient consciousness of the audience and one who merely articulates the conventional wisdom.  I haven't quite made up my mind on Nye; I lean tentatively to the former, but if he really is as original as some of his press would suggest, how come we understand him so well?

Loosely related question: on what morning did the New York Times' Thomas Friedman wake up and find that he had gone from being a foreign-policy guru to being the butt of a mean joke?

Must-read: Steve Clemons on Chalmers Johnson

Steve Clemons' fine appreciation of Chalmers Johnson, who died yesterday at 79, is worth every moment of your time, even though it concentrates on the earlier, more "conventional" (?) portion of his career when he was merely a daring and original foreign policy conceptualist, before his evolution into a kind of a gadly, the thinking man's Noam Chomsky.   I'm sorry I discovered Johnson only a few years ago but while he may be gone, he leaves behind a body of work that will reward careful attention for years to come.

Also worth your time:  James Fallows here and here.

Walter Russell Mead Advises the Young

Hint to the youth: Anytime a young intellectual is trapped in a nasty spot like this, squatting in a foxhole with anti-Semites and assorted tinfoil hatters, your first thought should be, “Where did I go wrong?

Walter Russell Mead. He's exploring the issue of whether/why Israel is "special:"

The simplest, most elegant answer to this problem to say that the Israel lobby is different from all other lobbies. It is the one and only exception to the rule that domestic politics don’t matter: The Jews are so rich, so focused and so good at what they do that they have built a lobby that is unique in the world.

There are only two problems with this approach. The first is that the idea of a uniquely powerful Jewish lobby is catnip for anti-Semites. As I’ve repeatedly said, you don’t need to be an anti-Semite to hold this view, but this idea (that the Jews have a wealthy, well connected and ruthless power lobby that is like no other and that this cabal manipulates the political system the way that a puppeteer dangles marionettes) draws angry loners and anti-Semites like ants to a jelly jar.

For a fuller account of Mead's views, go here.