Resistance Is Futile

The Weekly Standard, December 28, 2009

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive--at least if you were Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing. The one-term president of France was awarded the job in 2002 of chairing the convention responsible for designing a constitution for the European Union. He compared his fellow delegates--a dismal, handpicked, largely Eurofederalist claque--with America's Founding Fathers, and, splendidly de haut en bas (however tongue-in-cheek), told this self-important rabble that, in the "villages" they came from, statues would be put up in their honor--"on horseback" no less.

But that's not quite how it worked out. When the villagers saw the hideous blend of bureaucratic centralism, transnational control, political correctness, and daft pomposity that slithered out of Giscard's convention, they were none too impressed. The draft constitution staggered its way to approval in some EU countries, but was killed off by referenda in France and Holland in mid-2005.

Except that's not quite how it worked out. Properly speaking, those two defeats should have put a stake through the heart of the constitution. Instead the ratification process was frozen "for a period of reflection"--a dignified term for buying time to cook up a scheme to bypass the awkwardness of voter disapproval. The scheme was the Treaty of Lisbon.

It preserved the content of the draft constitution, but junked its form. The constitution that had been rejected was scrapped, but its essence was preserved under the guise of a series of amendments to the EU's existing treaties that smuggled in most of the changes which would once have been incorporated in Giscard's monstrosity. It was a stroke of genius. Dropping the "c" word minimized the legal or political risk that referenda might once again be required. It was also an insult. Neither Giscard nor the key architect of the new treaty, Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, made any attempt to conceal their view that the substance of the constitution was alive and well.

Channeling Louis XIV, Nicolas Sarkozy ruled that France's disobedient voters would be denied any further say on the matter. No surprise there, but I like to think that Merkel's coup might have caused a few pangs in the ranks of Holland's rather more respectable Council of State (the government's highest advisory body). Maybe it did, but the august if pliable Dutchmen somehow felt able to determine that the new treaty did not contain enough "constitutional" elements to require a referendum. Meanwhile, Britain's shameless Labour government just brazened things out. Labour had been reelected in 2005 on the back of a manifesto that included the promise of a referendum should the United Kingdom be asked to sign up for a revived constitution. The Lisbon Treaty was, however, cooed Messrs Blair and Brown, something completely different. There would be no popular vote.

In Ireland, though, significant changes to the EU's treaties require a constitutional amendment, and the Irish constitution can only be amended by referendum. The Irish government did not attempt to dodge its responsibilities. Nor did Irish voters. In June 2008, the Lisbon Treaty was voted down. As the treaty had to be ratified in each of the EU's 27 member states, the Irish snub should have finished it off. Except (you will be unsurprised to know) that's not quite how it worked out.

Within minutes of the Irish vote, the EU's top bureaucrat, Commission president José Barroso, announced that the treaty was not dead. When it comes to the European project, no does not mean no--as Danish and Irish voters had already discovered in the aftermath of their rejection of earlier EU treaties. Ratifications of Lisbon rolled in from elsewhere, the Irish government secured some placatory legal guarantees, setting the stage for a mulligan this October. In the event, however, the result of this second vote was determined not by the changes won by the Dublin government, but by the global financial meltdown, a blow that had brought Ireland's over-leveraged economy to its knees.

There was something almost refreshing in the lack of subtlety with which Barroso traveled to Limerick to announce--just weeks before the second referendum--that Brussels (in other words, the EU's conscripted taxpayers) would be spending 14.8 million euros to help workers at Dell's Irish plant find new jobs. In case anyone missed the point, Barroso also reminded his listeners that the European Central Bank had lent over 120 billion euros to the battered Irish banking system. Frazzled by financial disaster and fearful of the consequences of alienating their paymasters, Ireland's voters reversed their rejection of the Lisbon Treaty just a couple of weeks later.

Being a realist means knowing when to fold. In the wake of the Irish vote, a nose-holding, teeth-gritting Polish president committed his country to the treaty. This left the Czech Republic's profoundly Euroskeptic president, Václav Klaus, as the last holdout. If Klaus could delay signing the treaty (which had, awkwardly for him, already been approved by the Czech parliament) until after a likely Conservative victory in the upcoming British general election (due no later than next June), then the whole process could be brought to a halt. The Tories had vowed to withdraw the U.K.'s existing ratification and hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty before proceeding any further. Given most Britons' views (quite unprintable in a respectable publication), the result would have been to kill the treaty. The U.K. isn't Ireland. The U.K. isn't Denmark.

If, if, if .  .  .

It didn't take long for the blunt Klaus to dash those hopes: "The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it's [gone] so far that it can't be stopped or returned, no matter how much some of us would want that."

Klaus signed the treaty on November 3. Shortly thereafter the EU's leaders began maneuvering to fill two new jobs: "president" (actually president of the European Council) and "foreign minister" (the latter will rejoice in the grandiloquent title of High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy). Following a couple of weeks of intrigue, backstabbing, and secretive quid pro quos, it was agreed the new president would be Herman van Rompuy--Belgium's prime minister and thus a man who knows a thing or two about unnatural unions. But the somewhat obscure van Rompuy (what Belgian prime minister is not?) is a world historical figure when compared with the woman who has become High Representative, a Brit by the name of Baroness Ashton of Upholland, a dull hack known--if at all--for her loyalty to the Labour party. The treaty finally came into force on December 1. The age of van Rompuy had begun.

Some commentators are presenting the emergence of the Belgian and the baroness as a triumph for the EU's member states over its bureaucracy's more federalist vision. The thinking goes that by securing the appointment of two nonentities to what are (notionally) the most prestigious jobs in the union's new structure, Sarkozy, Merkel, and the rest of the gang successfully defended what remains of their countries' prerogative to decide the most important matters for themselves. To believe this is to misread just how lose-lose the situation was. In reality, the nonentities will be as damaging (maybe even more so) to what's left of national sovereignty as better-known candidates such as the much-anticipated Tony Blair. Blair would have given the presidency more clout. He would have done so, however, at the expense not only of the EU's member states, but also of the Brussels bureaucracy.

The EU's new president is, as mentioned above, technically the president of the European Council, a body formally incorporated within the EU's architecture by the Lisbon Treaty after years in a curious organizational limbo. With a membership now made up of the union's heads of government, van Rompuy, and the inevitable Barroso, it is theoretically the bloc's supreme political institution. And theoretically therefore, the stronger it is (and with a heavyweight president it would supposedly have been stronger), the more it would be able to operate as a counterweight to the bureaucrats of the EU Commission. I suspect that this would never have been the case, but with van Rompuy, a housetrained federalist (he has already told a meeting arranged by--let a hundred conspiracy theories flower--the Bilderberg Group that he favors giving the EU tax-raising powers), at its helm, the point is moot. The key, van Rompuy reportedly claimed, to high office within the EU is to be a "gray mouse," and so, to the chagrin of Blair and those like him, it has proved. Sarkozy, Merkel, and all the rest of their more colorful kind will continue to prance and to parade, and power will continue to leach away from the nation states and into the unaccountable oligarchy that is "Brussels."

"It's all over," my friend Hans told me when Klaus threw in the towel, "Brussels has won." Hans, thirtysomething, a native of one of the EU's smaller nations, and a former adviser to one of the continent's better-known Euroskeptics, comes as close to anyone I have ever met from the European mainland to being a Burkean Tory--and Hans has now given up. He would, he sighed, have to move on with his life.

With Lisbon in force, little is left of the already sharply curtailed ability of any one member-state (or its voters) to veto the inroads of fresh EU legislation. In Hans's view, the treaty means that the momentum towards a European super-state is now irreversible. With their sovereignty emasculated and, in many cases, their sense of identity crumbling under the linked assaults of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the old nation states of Europe have neither the ability nor the inclination to say no. Euroskepticism will now be portrayed (not always inaccurately) as the mark of the crank or the Quixote. "And that," added Hans, a man still at a relatively early stage in his career, "is not the way to go either politically or professionally."

Signing up, however unenthusiastically, for the orthodoxies of the European Union is now de rigueur in the continent's ruling class. And if there was once idealism behind the Brussels project it has long since been overwhelmed by another of the beliefs that lay behind it--that neither nations nor their electorates could be trusted to do the right thing. Sovereignty, whether national or democratic or both, is being replaced by oligarchy, technocracy, and the pieties of the "social market." If you live in an oligarchy, it's best to be an oligarch.

This realization is one of the reasons that the EU has got as far as it has. It has provided excellent opportunities for some of Europe's best, brightest, and lightest-fingered to move back and forth between the union's hierarchy and those parts of the private sector (and indeed the national civil services) that feed off it.

Yet all was not gloom, said Hans. A stronger sense of their own identity and a still distinct political culture meant, he thought, that it wasn't too late for the Brits to do the right thing (as he sees it) and quit the EU. He is too optimistic. While correct that most Britons are irritated by the EU and its presumptions, he overlooks the fact that they have not yet shown any signs of wanting to end this most miserable of marriages. Hans also underestimates the subtler factors standing in the way of the long-promised punch-up between any incoming Tory government and Brussels--an event that in any case has now been postponed. David Cameron's party has shelved its plans for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Now that it has come into force, modifying the treaty to accommodate the U.K. would require the assent of all the other member-states and that won't be forthcoming. A British referendum, Cameron claims, would therefore be pointless. How convenient for him.

Cameron has also made it clear that he has no intention of revisiting the U.K.'s relations with the EU in any serious way for quite some time. With Britain's economy in ruins, any incoming government will have more pressing priorities. And the passing of time only further entrenches the EU's new constitutional settlement deeper into the U.K.'s fabric--and especially the landscape in which the country's able and ambitious build their careers. That's something that Cameron may also have recognized. He appears to have concluded that it is better to win a premiership diminished by Brussels than no premiership at all, and a major row over Britain's role within the EU could yet cost the Tory leader the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The additional complication is debt-burdened Britain's dependence on the financial markets as a source of fresh funds. Investors are averse to uncertainty. They are already twitchy about Britain's disintegrating balance sheet, and a savage row between Britain and the rest of the EU would set nerves even further on edge. Then there's the small matter that such a conflict is hardly likely to help Britain persuade its European partners to bail the U.K. out in the event that this should prove necessary--and it might.

The more time passes, the more an empowered EU will insinuate itself within national life (rule from Brussels is a fairly subtle form of foreign occupation: No panzers will trundle down Whitehall). It will come to be seen as "normal," not perfect, by any means, and certainly the cause of sporadic outbreaks of grumbling, but if handled with enough discretion (it will be a while before the Commission resumes efforts to sign Britain up for the "borderless" EU of the Schengen Agreement) and enough dishonesty, it will benefit from the traditional British reluctance to make a fuss. As on the continent, protesting deeper integration within the union, let alone trying to reverse it, will be depicted--and regarded--as the preserve of the eccentric and the obsessive.

With Britain hogtied, the Lisbon structure will endure unchanged unless a prolonged economic slowdown (or worse) finally shatters the gimcrack foundations on which the EU rests. That cannot be ruled out, but if Lisbon holds, the implications will be profound for the international environment in which the United States has to operate. There is already chatter (from the Italian foreign minister, for instance) about a European army. Can it be long before there is a drive by Brussels to replace the British and French seats on the U.N. Security Council with one that represents the entire EU, a move that would eliminate the one vote in that body on which the United States has almost always been able to rely?

And to ask that question is to wonder what sort of partner the EU will be for the United States. One clue can be found in the fact that the new High representative for foreign affairs and security policy was treasurer and then a vice chairman of Britain's unilateralist Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the end of the Brezhnev era. Another comes from remarks by Austria's Social Democratic chancellor Werner Faymann in response to the speculation that Tony Blair would be appointed to the new presidency during the fall: "The candidate .  .  . should have an especially good -relationship with Obama and not stand for a good working relationship with Bush."

Leaving aside the minor matter that George W. Bush has not been president for nearly a year, it's not difficult to get Faymann's drift. The Obama administration will find the EU a reasonably congenial partner, even ally, so long as it sticks to the sort of transnationalist agenda that could have been cooked up in Turtle Bay, the Berlaymont, or Al Gore's fevered imagination. If on the other hand, Obama, or any subsequent president, should turn to policies that are more avowedly in this country's national interest, the EU could well turn out to be an obstacle. After all, in the absence of any authentic EU identity, its leadership has often defined their union by what it is not. And what it is not, Eurocrats stress, is America.

Washington will have to learn to accept surly neutrality, if not active antagonism, from the oligarchs of Brussels. The EU may not be able to do much to hinder the United States directly, but, as its "common" foreign (and, increasingly, defense) policy develops, there's a clear risk that it will be at the expense of NATO. Shared EU projects will drain both cohesion and resources away from the Atlantic alliance, not to speak of the ability of America's closer European allies to go it alone and help Uncle Sam out.

Some of this will be deliberate, but more often than not it will be the result of institutional paralysis. As a profoundly artificial construction, the EU lacks--beyond the shared prejudices of some of its elite--any sense of the idea of us and them that lies at the root of a nation or even an empire, and, therefore, the ability to shape a foreign policy acceptable to enough of its constituent parts for it to take any form of effective action. But if the EU might find it difficult to decide what it will do, it will find it easy to agree what its members cannot do. The days when Britain will have the right, let alone the ability, to send its troops to aid America over the protests of Germany and France are coming to a close.

Bowing, but this time to the inevitable, Obama has welcomed the completion of the Lisbon Treaty process, saying that "a strengthened and renewed EU will be an even better transatlantic partner with the United States," an absurd claim that one can only hope he does not believe.

Ah yes, hope.

Paying for the Piper

The Weekly Standard, June 22, 2009

France is a famously volatile place. Talk of cake can trigger a revolution. The British are made of more phlegmatic stuff. Pastry alone would never do the trick. What it takes, it turns out, are a tea caddy, jellied eels, vitamin supplements, a sandwich cage (I have no idea), Scotch eggs (don't ask), dog food, a stainless steel dog bowl, a leather bed, six "leather-effect" dining chairs, a leather rocking chair, a leather sofa, a pink laptop, toilet seats (one of which was "glittery"), horse manure, Christmas tree decorations, potpourri candles, hanging baskets, an HD-ready 32-inch television, a 26-inch LCD television, a 40-inch flat-screen television, a 42-inch plasma television, light bulbs, people to change light bulbs, a pewter-finish radiator cover, mock Tudor beams, "imperial thermostatic" faucets, rubber gloves, electric gates, private security patrols, moat-clearing, stable lights, a five-foot-tall floating duck house, and a "Don Juan" bookcase. And, of course, a newspaper: in this case the Daily Telegraph gleefully telling appalled readers that these were among the many, many items they had been asked to buy for their Members of Parliament.

If you are wondering why exactly British taxpayers should be paying for the horse manure used to fertilize David Heathcoat-Amory's garden, the beginnings of an answer can be found in the fact that many MPs have to live in two places at once. They spend most of their working week in London attending parliament, but they must also (if they wish to be reelected) "nurse" their constituencies--something that often entails having a house there. This state of affairs was said to have forced (the verb can be debated) many MPs to maintain two homes, a burden somewhat alleviated by regulations permitting them to charge the nation for the cost of running that second home. It's when you come to define cost that the fun begins. Mortgage interest, absolutely. Utility bills, sure. Moat clearing, uh, maybe not. But so far as Parliament's permissive fees office was concerned, moat clearing was indeed fine.

That the full disclosure of this state of affairs could cause trouble was no great surprise. Fears that what has happened would happen explain the prolonged and desperate struggle to exempt MPs' expenses from the "right to know" provisions of the Freedom of Information Act passed by the Labour government in 2000, a struggle that eventually ended in failure early this year. Even then some critics worried that provisions to allow MPs a limited right to "edit" what would be released might be abused. Such concerns were rendered moot when copies of electronic records of MPs' expenses--detailed down to the last gloriously petty and last ingloriously questionable claim--were leaked to the Telegraph. That newspaper splashed the story in early May and has been drip-feeding an enraged and enthralled public with further revelations ever since. The resulting scandal has ruined careers, is helping destroy a government (which was doing a good job of destroying itself), and is wrecking the reputation of the mother of parliaments.

In some respects, this has been a very British scandal. The reimbursement policy that lies at its heart was the result of typically British fudge. Its extraordinary generosity (it is likely that only a few MPs will be shown to have broken the letter rather than the spirit of the rules) was an attempt to allow politicians to keep up financially with their professional peers in a prosperous era without going through the political awkwardness of voting themselves the sort of pay increase many thought that they deserved. (Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey would, doubtless, have approved.) The scandal's minutiae are also very British--that tea caddy and the obsession with gardening--and so is the delight with which Britons, never so deferential as Americans imagine, have witnessed the puncturing of formerly mighty reputations. Puncturing? Oh yes. Pause for a moment to digest the splendid news that the MP who claimed for that glittery toilet seat was John Reid, a former Labour home secretary previously known as a Glaswegian tough guy. Previously.

And Britain being Britain, a land where acute class sensibility is curse, art form, and blood sport, there has also been plenty for snobs and their reverse to savor. The snooty will have snickered at the thought of Labour's horny-handed (in all respects) John Prescott, a former deputy prime minister who has never been slow to talk up his proletarian credentials, putting mock Tudor beams on his house. Mock Tudor! Equally the painstaking efforts by the Conservative leader David Cameron (Eton and Oxford) to persuade voters that the Tories were no longer the toffs of old will not have been helped by the fact that it was a member of his team who needed help with his moat.

And Britain being Britain, journalists have been unable to resist dredging up Macaulay's well-worn observation that there is "no spectacle more ridiculous than the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality," and as always they have a point. Some of the criticism has been overwrought and unfair, an unintended consequence of a system that compelled MPs to submit details of almost every claim, however trivial, a system that could never have made them look good, but, for all its faults, is infinitely preferable to, say, the opacity of the much more corrupt procedures for "reimbursement" of expenses that have prevailed (at least up until now) in the EU's Potemkin parliament.

All the same, those claims were made, and they are an indication that the ideal of fair play that once underpinned the UK's once largely unwritten constitutional arrangements is dying. The temptation to see the current furor as a simple explosion of jealous rage (although that emotion has undoubtedly played its part), vaguely reminiscent of the shameful, hysterical spasm of fury and grief that followed the death of Princess Diana, should be resisted. A better comparison would be with the storm over congressional overdrafts that made so much news over here in the early 1990s. Seen in isolation, that row was overdone; seen in the context of decades of one-party control of the House of Representatives, it was long overdue.

Not all MPs were at the trough. Far from it. Nevertheless, this scandal has added further tarnish to the reputation of the political class as a whole, a class already widely perceived as greedy, venal and, in the midst of an economic crisis that may yet lead to a cap-in-hand approach to the IMF, incompetent. Equally, it's worth adding that claims by MPs that the investigation of their expenses has been overly intrusive might be more sympathetically received had those same MPs not spent so long micromanaging, sometimes very punitively, their fellow citizens.

What are Britons supposed to make of Alistair Darling, the finance minister who subjects them to a bewildering, fiercely enforced range of taxes, yet appeared to feel no qualms about sticking them with bills he received from his personal tax advisers? And what are Britons to make of those MPs who "flipped" the designation of "second homes" (yes, there were sometimes more than one) for tax and other purposes, or worse still, the handful of MPs who appeared to have sought reimbursement for "phantom" mortgages? Under the circumstances, to criticize the reimbursement of the embattled Gordon Brown, the country's flailing, faltering prime minister, for the cost of the bagpiper he retained to play at a ceremony for veterans in a Scottish church may even seem a touch harsh. Harsh, but oddly, poetically appropriate: Those who paid for the piper may--finally--be calling the tune.

Swiss, Cross

National Review Online, December 10, 2009

So far, so predictable. The now infamous referendum amending Switzerland’s constitution in a way that prohibits the construction of any more minarets in the land of Heidi (there are already, um, four) has been damned by the usual suspects, including a gaggle of Christian clergymen, a babble of media, crazy Colonel Qaddafi, Turkey’s thuggish Islamist prime minister (the one who once referred to minarets as “our bayonets”), Iran’s thuggish Islamist foreign minister, Egypt’s Grand Mufti (try building a new church in Egypt), a collection of Saudi “scholars” (don’t even think of building a church in Saudi Arabia), and, of course, Jon Stewart.

Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking, but condemnation by these clowns is not by itself a reason to decide that the vote went the right way — or that holding the referendum was a particularly good idea in the first place. It’s a start, however.

It is important to realize what the referendum was — and what it was not. What it was not was an assault on the ability of Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims (roughly 5 percent of the population) to practice their religion. Their ability to worship freely is untouched, and they can build all the mosques they want — so long as they are not adorned with minarets.

But it is not unusual to find mosques without minarets, especially outside historically Muslim territories. Thus Switzerland has 150 to 200 mosques or public prayer rooms, but only those four lonely minarets, none of which — thanks to noise-pollution regulations — are actually used for the adhan, the call to prayer. Those numbers suggest that this vote is no threat to anybody’s freedom of religion. They also suggest that minarets are no threat to the freedom of the Swiss to be Swiss, but this is to miss the point. The referendum was always about more than a few towers. Voters took aim at the minarets as a way of venting their fears about militant Islam and, more generally, their unease at the ways in which their country has been — and is being — changed by high levels of immigration. The latter is a factor that should not be underestimated. Despite playing host to various international organizations, numerous banks, and countless tourists, Switzerland is at its core still a conservative, somewhat insular place, comfortable in its own skin and more than a little suspicious of outsiders. There’s a reason why the Swiss joined the U.N. (the fools!) only in 2002, and wisely continue to stay outside the EU.

The trouble is that fear and unease make bad legislators. The effect of the new rules may be mainly symbolic, but symbolism can kick both ways. It’s no great stretch to suspect that the consequences of this vote will be counterproductive. Switzerland’s Muslims, who mostly hail from the Balkans or Turkey, are a largely moderate, secularized bunch. Unfortunately, the result of the referendum — along with some of the ugly rhetoric that preceded the vote — risks changing these peoples’ sense of their own identity. There’s a danger that they will come to view themselves as primarily defined by their common religious background rather than by their very different ethnic and cultural heritages or, for that matter, their hopes of a thoroughly Swiss future. Banning the minarets may fill the mosques.

There’s also a clear risk that what is preached in those mosques will lurch in a more extreme direction. This would be a natural response to the sense of siege and resentment that the vote may create, particularly if that resentment is fanned by money and ideas from Middle Eastern sources keen to stiffen the resolve of co-religionists toiling in the land of the wicked, oppressive kuffār.

Rather than spending their time in architectural micromanagement, it would be far smarter for the Swiss to increase their efforts to integrate the Muslims in their midst, and to do so in a way that creates no special spaces, privileges (other, perhaps, than the extension to Islam of the “official” status enjoyed by other religious denominations in many cantons), or obstacles for their religion. No religion should be fenced off from the hurly-burly of debate, criticism, and ridicule. The fear of giving (dread word) “offense” should not be allowed to trump free expression. That would be true in the case of any creed, but it’s particularly true of Islam, a muscular faith with little room for clear dividing lines between mosque and state. Muslims should be free to practice their religion in Switzerland, but Islam must be made to take its chances in the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideologies essential to any open society, and to do so within democratic constraints.

You’d think that this would be an obvious, even superfluous, argument to make, but in today’s Western Europe — hogtied by the exquisite sensitivities and repressive legislation that are the hallmarks of multiculturalism — that is no longer the case. One of the most telling moments in the referendum campaign came after the appearance of a controversial — and brilliantly designed — poster in which missile-like minarets pierced the Swiss flag, and a woman clad in abaya and niqab stared out with an oddly come-hither look in her eyes. Overstated? Certainly. Harsh? Certainly. Nevertheless, in a properly functioning liberal democracy, those who disagreed with the poster would have tried to dispel its message with the force of their arguments, not the force of law. Some did. Others preferred coercion.

The poster was banned in, to name but a few places with a thing against free speech, Lausanne, Fribourg, Basel, and Neuchâtel, in a spasm of censorship that, as much as anything else, demonstrates why so many Swiss have rallied behind the SVP (the Swiss People’s Party), a distinctly rough-edged party of the populist Right that is now the largest political grouping in Switzerland (it won some 29 percent of the vote in the 2007 elections) and was the principal driving force behind the referendum. To its discredit, the SVP has more than a touch of the bully about it, with, for example, a disturbing weakness for rhetoric that is as much anti-immigrant as it is anti-immigration. Sadly, that has only added to its appeal. But a large number of more moderate voters have found that they too have been left with nowhere else to turn but the SVP, a phenomenon echoed in the rise elsewhere in Western Europe of parties prepared to stray beyond the spectrum of conventional opinion.

It’s revealing that the referendum’s results came as such a nasty surprise to those who make up Switzerland’s traditional political establishment. Their shock was an embarrassing reminder of how out of touch they have become. And no, the result was not a simple matter of Left versus Right, of hick versus sophisticate. Not only did a striking 57.5 percent of those who voted favor the minaret ban, but the ban won support across the country, including, predictably enough, the heartlands of the Schwiizertüütsch, but far beyond too.

In the end, however flawed the referendum’s focus, there was something impressive about the way voters chose to defy the wishes of those who supposedly knew better. The government opposed the measure, as did a clear majority in the federal parliament, but (such are the joys of the Swiss system) there was nothing these politicians could do to block a referendum once 100,000 citizens had formally endorsed the call for a vote. And there was little, it turned out, that they could do to influence the way the vote went. The Swiss took their decision on November 29. The timing was almost perfect. Just two days later, the Lisbon Treaty (the European Union’s constitution in all but name) came into force. The latter was a triumph for the Brussels oligarchy, a win for deception, double-dealing, and the sidestepping of electorates. The former was a victory for a straightforward, bottom-up form of democracy that is the antithesis of everything for which the EU stands.

That contrast explains why the Swiss elite has become so keen that Switzerland should sign up for the EU, a political structure deliberately designed to replace the inconveniences of popular sovereignty with the smoothness — for those on the inside — of technocratic rule. If the Swiss had been members of Brussels’s unlovely union, it is highly unlikely that their referendum would have gotten as far as it did, and it is almost completely inconceivable that its results would be able to survive review by the EU’s rampaging judiciary. As it is, the voters’ decision is likely to face legal challenges arising out of other provisions in the Swiss constitution, not to speak of those flowing from the country’s international treaty obligations.

The fact remains, however, that there has indeed been a point to this once seemingly pointless referendum. Swiss voters may have exaggerated fears of the Islamic problem that they face now (the future is a different matter), but they have taken the opportunity offered by a stupid question to give a sensible answer to the political class. Their message was clear. Switzerland must have nothing more to do with the multicultural politics and misguided immigration policies that have done so much to contribute to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in Western Europe.

It’s worth noting that such a change of tack would not be possible were Switzerland to join the EU. More critically still, it would be difficult to reconcile with the existing arrangements that govern the free movement of workers between Switzerland and the EU, not that that fact would worry the SVP overmuch. The party would relish a punchup with Brussels.

What’s tricky is that most Swiss do not yet appear to feel the same way. They have backed the free-movement agreements (and then their extension) in a total of three referenda since 2000, the most recent earlier this year. With the EU’s elites opposed to putting their own house in order (and unwilling to offer their own increasingly discontented electorates the sort of say available to voters in Switzerland), the SVP’s leaders know how vital it is for the Swiss to restore absolute control over their own borders, but for most of their countrymen this remains a step too far. It is so much easier to grumble about minarets.

It is probable, therefore, that the next stages in this drama will remain rooted in the symbolic. A leading member of the SVP has announced that forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and the wearing of the burqa in public are all problems that need to be addressed. That’s certainly fair enough (and the SVP is not the only party to think so), even if some other areas of concern for the party (such as the existence of separate Muslim cemeteries) reveal that it has not lost its taste for provocation and overreach. Ultimately, however, these are all peripheral topics when compared to the more basic question of immigration. Indeed, they can be seen as a soft substitute for tough action in that field, something that remains unlikely for now.

But it will be interesting to see how the Swiss react if the European Court of Human Rights (its judgments are binding on all members of the Council of Europe, a grouping that is larger than the EU, and that includes Switzerland) tries to ban the minaret ban.

Sometimes a nation — if it is to remain a nation — just has to go it alone.

Walking With Destiny

Paul Johnson: Winston Churchill

National Review, December 9, 2009

One of the most remarkable aspects of Winston Churchill’s sprawling epic of a life was the way that he was able to cram it all in — to do all that — in a mere 90 years. It is only marginally less miraculous that Paul Johnson has now managed to make an excellent job of summing up that life — and, no less important, offer up a good measure of the man who lived it — in a book of a little under 200 pages.

This is not a “definitive” Churchill. For that, turn to the massive official biography begun by his son and taken to a triumphant conclusion by the indefatigable Sir Martin Gilbert. Nor is it a full-length (if not Gilbertian in size) work on the lines of Roy Jenkins’s Churchill (2001), a fine, feline interpretation (Johnson rates it as the best single-volume account of Churchill’s life) made all the more interesting for having been written by a man who had, like Churchill, been Britain’s home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, although not, mercifully (he was a socialist of sorts, and a Europhile of conviction), prime minister.

Paul Johnson’s take is something else, a deft, brisk, admiring Life of a Great Man, a book for a country-house weekend, perhaps, crafted in vintage style and best read, I’d think, in the company of some vintage port. A distinguished journalist (and a regular NR contributor) and successful popular (in the best meaning of that term) historian, Johnson writes in a slightly archaic rhythm, a lavish, lively prose that is sometimes old-fashioned (“At this moment providence intervened”) and occasionally orotund (“the two worked together to bring the great fleet of measures into harbor, wafted by the winds of their oratory”). This is an author who cares about narrative, and who relishes grand, sweeping (frequently, very sweeping) judgments, faintly irritating pulpitry (“It is a joy to write his life. . . . None holds more lessons, especially for youth”), well-chosen anecdotes, and neat, shrewd observations (“Churchill had always used clothes for personal propaganda”). The resulting mix comes as a rich treat after the dense jargon and denser preoccupations that characterize the efforts of so many contemporary academic historians. Readers looking for an attempt to squeeze Churchill into the straitjacket of early-21st-century attitudes will be disappointed, as will those looking for some rote revisionism, but then they probably should not have been reading Johnson in the first place.

Despite going a little easy on his subject over what were, at least arguably, his two most notorious (and very different) blunders — the Gallipoli campaign and his 1925 decision to put Britain back on the gold standard at too high a parity — and making no mention of some of the more harebrained schemes Churchill dreamt up in World War II, Johnson shows that he is prepared to criticize, at least on occasion. Thus he takes aim at Churchill’s quixotic, last-ditch defense of the poisonous Edward the Abdicator, and at more serious, if lesser known, errors of judgment, such as the role that Churchill played in carelessly pushing 1920s Japan on a path that was eventually to transform the Japanese from allies into antagonists. There was, Churchill told the then–prime minister of Britain, not “the slightest chance” of a war with Japan in their lifetimes. The eerie intuitive sense that enabled him to be one of the first Englishmen to understand the true nature of both Nazism and Bolshevism was, this time, nowhere to be seen. Less than 20 years later, Singapore fell.

But if Johnson has (for the most part) avoided the temptations of hero worship, he has an appreciation for the heroic qualities of Churchill’s life. This is only underlined by the obvious pleasure he takes in demonstrating how far Churchill could stray from more conventional notions of how heroes should behave, perhaps most charmingly in the story of when, in 1946 and aged 17, Johnson (lucky fellow!) had the opportunity to ask the greatest of Britain’s leaders to what he attributed his success in life: “Without pause or hesitation, he replied: ‘Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.’ He then got into his limo.” A seasoned veteran both of dusty, sand-blown imperial campaigns and of the mud of the Western Front, who had, as prime minister and aged nearly 70, to be dissuaded from showing up for the D-Day landings, Churchill was a warrior as much as he was a warlord, yet somehow I suspect this is not the sort of reply, self-deprecatory and sly, that an Achilles would have given.

What Achilles would have recognized, however, was Churchill’s relentless pursuit of glory and fame. Along with his romantic ideal of nation, and his gargantuan appetite for excitement, it is as close as we can come to finding a key to understanding what drove this complex man. With the idea of an afterlife appearing as unlikely to Churchill (for all practical purposes an atheist, but in a very English way: he was, he once said, a buttress of the Church of England, “support[ing] it from the outside”) as to the heroes of the Iliad, his achievements could be the only sure route to the immortality that he craved.

In bidding farewell to the outgoing Labour members of his wartime coalition, Churchill told them “the light of history will shine on all your helmets.” To make sure that it shone on his, he became his own Homer. “Words,” he had once remarked, “are the only things that last forever.” The sole reward he requested for his services during the war was that a large quantity of Britain’s wartime papers be classified as his personal property. By effectively gaining exclusive access to so much of the official record, he was able to be among the first to get in his word (or, more accurately, more than 2 million words) on the topic of the war; and so, aided by a dedicated team, he did. The six volumes of his The Second World War were to shape our understanding of the conflict for a generation, and in no small respect they still do. They also made Churchill a great deal of money ($50 million, at today’s value, not including serialization rights), something that was never a small consideration for a man so skillful at turning ink into gold.

His account is highly partial and, even allowing for what was known at the time, it leaves out much of the story, but, as Johnson explains, “by giving his version of the greatest of all wars . . . he was fighting for his ultimate place in history. What was at stake was his status as hero. So he fought hard and took no prisoners. On the whole he won the war of words, as he had earlier won the war of deeds.” But then, given Churchill’s way with language, a talent so profound that there was a time when it seemed only his speeches stood between the island race and defeat, this could not have been an entirely unexpected result.

And it’s a mark of Johnson’s sensitivity as a writer — and his keen eye for good material — how often he is prepared to let Churchill speak for himself. If there’s a drawback to this biography it is that it doesn’t contain much fresh detail for those already familiar with the story: The only two things new to me were the revelation that Churchill couldn’t stand the sound of whistling (by contrast, Johnson relates that Hitler was “an expert and enthusiastic whistler: he could do the entire score of The Merry Widow, his favourite opera”) and the claim that Churchill’s liver, “inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child’s,” something that might suggest that this peripatetic and famously bibulous statesman regularly included Lourdes in his wanderings.

But this lack of new information, almost inevitable in a brief summary of a well-known life, is compensated for by the pleasure of rereading the quotations from Churchill, familiar, well-loved friends for the most part, that Johnson weaves through his text as the best of all guides to the man who first said them. There are the jokes, the asides, and, of course, extracts from those great, rolling, resonant speeches. To read them is to hear again that voice, a voice (in this case speaking on the threat to British India) capable of conjuring up imagery that has not yet lost its power to chill or, in what may be our own coming age of Western retreat, sound the alarm: “Greedy appetites have been excited and many itching fingers are stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict Empire.”

And then there’s this, from 1940, on the Anglo-American “special relationship”: “The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. . . . No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant [regrettably, Johnson omits that splendid ‘benignant’], to broader lands and better days.”

If I admit that rereading those words in the age of the EU, of Gordon Brown, and of Barack Obama left me sad, I hope that you will understand.

Too Small To Fail

The Weekly Standard, November 9, 2009

Independence Monument, Riga, Latvia, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

It's a measure of the tension of the times in which we live that Anders Borg, the finance minister of famously polite Sweden, has been going around threatening Latvia. Yes, Latvia. "The patience of the international community is," he growled on October 2, "very limited, and Latvia has little room to maneuver."

If it's rare for a Swede to lose his cool, it's astonishing that a small Baltic state (Latvia's population is just over 2.2 million) was the cause. But Latvia is in an economic mess that is extraordinarily deep (GDP will fall by nearly 19 percent this year), and the consequences have already spread far beyond its borders. Evidence that it was pushing back at those who have been trying to help is what triggered Borg's explosion--well, that, and the risk posed to three of Sweden's largest banks by their roughly 40 billion euros of Baltic exposure.

The story of the Latvian crisis is, if nothing else, proof of the old maxim that no good deed goes unpunished. While the underlying sources of the country's difficulties can be put down to the devastation of half a century of incarceration in the Soviet domain, the immediate cause can be found in one of the happier events in Latvian history: its 2004 admission, alongside the other Baltic states (Lithuania and Estonia), into the European Union.

The integration of large swaths of Eastern Europe into the wider European economy and, ultimately, the EU is something that even Euroskeptics concede has been a triumph: a fusion of enlightened self-interest, generosity, and strategic vision that has done much to smooth the path away from Soviet rule and Communist ways. Initial flows of capital lured to the region by the collapse of Communism were, as the 1990s progressed, supplemented by waves of investment attracted by the reassuring spectacle of former Soviet satellites rediscovering the pains and pleasures of the free market. The transformation was further accelerated by the prospect of eventual EU membership as a final guarantee that they would not slip back.

This was the way it worked in Hungary, Poland, and other former Warsaw Pact nations, and this was the way it eventually worked for the three Baltic states, the first former Soviet republics to apply for, and be accepted into, EU membership. Thus funds began flowing into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia almost as soon as they regained their independence--at a time when the prospect of losing it again to Brussels was still but a distant dream. Much of this money came from the neighboring Nordic countries attracted by an exciting local investment opportunity, historical connections (the Latvian capital, Riga, was once the largest city in greater Sweden), and a keen interest in avoiding the development of three turbulent post-Soviet slums in their backyard.

So far, so benign. But the onrush of Nordic cash overwhelmed the small and rickety enterprises typical of economies emerging from Communist rule. A huge part of the Baltic banking sector ended up in Nordic hands--roughly 70 percent of borrowing in Latvia is now sourced from banks controlled by foreign (primarily Nordic) institutions. What began as a change for the good (the Nordic-run institutions were better managed and capitalized than their local predecessors) degenerated into an unhealthy codependency as the banks financed an unsustainable boom on ultimately disastrous terms. By the time it was all over, they were essentially funding the current accounts of all three Baltic nations.

The bubbles began to inflate as EU membership loomed early this decade and ballooned after the three countries crossed the finish line. Too much money (and too much credit) was pouring into economies too small to absorb it productively, which triggered inflation, speculation, and a consumer binge. Overall government borrowing remained modest in each of the Baltic states, but debt racked up in the private sector--in Latvia it reached 130 percent of GDP in 2008. Imports were sucked into the region, and exporting industries were priced out. (Latvia's textile sector was 12 percent of the country's exports in the early 2000s; it is today only 5 percent.)

Alberta Iela, Riga, Latvia, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

As the Baltic economies roared (Latvia's GDP grew by 12 percent in 2006, and 10 percent in 2007), current account deficits soared (Latvia's peaked at some 25 percent in 2007). Fueling the inflationary fire still further, a number of EU countries (notably the U.K. and Ireland) waived the transitional period that has traditionally followed the accession of less-developed countries into the EU and opened up their labor markets to workers from the Baltic, attracting far more immigrants from the region than originally expected. That was good news for employers in London and Dublin, but it siphoned off talent back home, increasing already fierce upward pressure on wage rates and, incidentally, adding to the demographic anxieties of three small peoples that had--only just--succeeded in preserving their ethnic, cultural, and political identity after half a century of Moscow's best efforts to Russianize their countries. Not the least of the ironies facing the Baltic states is the way that their long overdue reintegration into the global economy could, by offering their best and brightest citizens better opportunities abroad, destroy the integrity and the essence of the nations they leave behind.

When economies overheat, real estate prices tend to boil over, and so it was all over the Baltic. In Latvia, house prices jumped by (on some estimates) 300 percent between 2004 and 2007. Never a healthy phenomenon, the real estate bubble had an extra malignant aspect in the Baltics as most of the mortgage lending (a chunk of it distinctly subprime) that financed it was denominated in euros--not yet the Baltic countries' currency. Back in 2004 when Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia signed up for the EU they took a seat in the waiting room for the monetary union. They were in a strong position to satisfy the Maastricht preconditions for adoption of the euro (subdued inflation, low levels of government debt, and well-managed public spending), and all three local currencies--the Latvian lats, the Estonian kroon, and the Lithuanian litas--had been pegged to the euro by 2005. Forecasts that they would be replaced by Brussels' money in 2008 did not seem out of line. Borrowing in euros looked like the smart thing to do. Euro interest rates were well below those charged for borrowing in lati, krooni, and litai and, with the adoption of the EU's single currency purportedly just around the corner, there was not supposed to be much in the way of foreign exchange risk. International (mainly Nordic) banks keen to minimize their exposure to the small illiquid Baltic currencies were only too happy to oblige: Some 80 percent of all private borrowing in the Baltic countries is in euros.

But the cash that cascaded into the Baltic countries pushed up their inflation rates to levels far in excess of the Maastricht criteria. In Latvia inflation peaked at nearly 18 percent in May 2008--up from 6.2 percent in 2004 and the 2 percent range between 2000-03. Drawn in by the prospect of near-term Baltic adoption of the euro, the flood of new money has perversely done a great deal to delay that switch (the latest predictions cluster at around 2011 for Estonia, 2012-13 for Lithuania, and, fingers crossed, 2014 for Latvia, although the IMF recently suggested that the latter date will slip still further). Foreign exchange risk was back.

And so were tough times. The inevitable bust arrived, gathering pace at roughly the same time as international financial markets were freezing up in 2008, an unhappy coincidence that made bad things worse as the (already slowing) foreign capital inflows that had done so much to sustain the boom came to an abrupt halt. To get an idea of the scale of the disaster that has struck, Latvian retail sales are running at 70 percent of 2008, the nation's real estate prices are down some two-thirds from their levels of two years before, and industrial production slumped 18 percent between June 2008 and June 2009.

The textbook response to this type of boom-and-bust would be a drastic devaluation of the currency to slash the cost of exports, discourage imports, and bring burgeoning current account deficits under some degree of control. If textbooks aren't sufficiently persuasive, markets can usually be expected to help out, and, sure enough, the lats came under strong pressure in June. But the sparse market in Baltic currencies gives them considerable protection against speculative attack. It's almost impossible to short thinly traded lati, krooni, or litai to the extent it would take to break their pegs to the euro. The fact that Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia all operate currency board systems (in Latvia's case de facto rather than de jure) under which their monetary base is essentially backed up by gold and foreign exchange reserves means it would take an almost complete collapse in domestic confidence to trigger a run on the currency.

Of the three Baltic currencies, the lats has come under the most pressure (the economic and political fundamentals are weaker in Latvia than in Estonia or Lithuania, and the Latvian central bank had to spend around 1 billion euros to defend the currency in June). Yet the Latvian authorities continue to believe that now is not the time for devaluation. Latvian central bankers told me in August that depreciating the currency is simply not the answer to the country's predicament, and they make a good case. Devaluations work best in economies where a good portion of demand can be satisfied domestically, where the export sector has a high value-added component (i.e., not textiles and the like), and when the global economy is in good shape. None of these descriptions applies to the Baltic states or the world in 2009.

The alternative approach being pursued by Latvia is an "internal devaluation" (Lithuania and Estonia have taken a similar tack) designed to rebuild its international competitiveness by purging the inflationary excesses of recent years and, while it's at it, restore badly needed fiscal and budgetary balance--in other words to generate some of the positive effects of a devaluation without abandoning the currency peg. If most countries are trying to reflate their way out of the current economic crisis, Latvia is doing the opposite. Public sector pay is slated to be reduced by as much as 40 percent (though actual cuts appear to have been less so far) as part of a budgetary squeeze that has included the closing of hospitals and schools (admittedly Latvia was oversupplied with both) and sharp reductions in both welfare payments and pensions--payments that weren't generous in the first place. Adding to the misery: Taxes are being increased. As economic cures go, this is about as tough as it is possible to get, and it has already yielded some tentatively positive results. Latvian inflation has been brought to its knees (in September it was running at 0.1 percent), the trade deficit has shrunk dramatically, and the current account is back in surplus (14 percent of GDP in the second quarter).

Advocates of a conventional devaluation retort that any signs of improvement are merely symptoms of an economy where all demand has been crushed and will stay crushed for quite some time. This is not, they argue, the sort of recovery that will persuade the nation's best and brightest to stay at home once the broader European economy has improved enough to resume hiring. Nor will it attract the new capital that Latvia so badly needs, capital that will only be further deterred as the "hopeless" defense of the peg perpetuates uncertainty over the currency's future while underpinning a real effective exchange rate that continues to rise.

Such arguments are too pessimistic--though only just--and they also fail to address the implications of all those foreign currency loans. Repaying them is already difficult within the context of a devastated real estate market and collapsing economy. Increasing the outstanding balances by 30 percent (the percentage generally thought to be by how much the lats would have to be devalued) would generate Sisyphean agony and drive domestic demand even deeper into the hole. Complicating matters still further is the fact that the affected borrowers are drawn disproportionately from the ranks of the young (many older Latvians remain ensconced in the properties they received gratis in the post-Soviet privatizations), the enterprising, and the upwardly mobile, who are the main hope of any lasting revival. (Undoubtedly a good number of them are also to be found in Latvia's governing class. Unsurprisingly they are not that keen to devalue. Would you vote yourself into bankruptcy?)

Crucially it was the harsh medicine of the internal devaluation that secured the international financial support without which Latvia's economy might have already collapsed. The country's key lenders have so far shown themselves willing to assist in propping up the Latvian currency. It's not hard to guess why, despite some rumored disagreements within the lending consortium, this strategy prevailed. The Swedish banks most heavily involved in the Baltic have all made substantial provisions against lending losses in the region (and raised major amounts of capital to replace what has been lost), but neither they nor the Swedish state that has effectively underwritten them would welcome the massive additional hit to balance sheets that would follow a devaluation of the lats--particularly as it would likely trigger devaluations (and further losses) in Lithuania and Estonia. There's also a clear risk (although less than there was a few months ago) of a domino effect--Baltic devaluations pressuring other vulnerable Eastern European currencies with the potential for extremely unpleasant implications for Western banks exposed in the former Soviet empire. To give just one example of what could be at stake, earlier this year outstanding loans by Austrian banks to Eastern Europe were reported to amount to roughly 75 percent of Austria's GDP.

It's this fear of wider contagion that largely explains the willingness of the multinational group that includes the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, and, of course, the Nordic countries to lend Latvia 7.5 billion euros (and that's before counting the indirect help Latvia has received, including critically, Sweden's support for its banks). In the wake of last year's global financial meltdown, those few billions may seem like chump change, but they represent a huge sum for Latvia (whose GDP stood at around 22 billion euros in 2008). For once, the country is benefiting from the size of its economy: It's simply too small to fail. In absolute terms a bailout of Latvia (or for that matter, any of the Baltic countries) does not involve that much money. If such a rescue can stave off catastrophe elsewhere it will be a bargain. Who needs a Baltic Lehman?

But will this support buy enough time for the internal devaluation to work? Talking to Latvian civil servants, it is impossible to miss their unease about what may happen when the bleak Baltic winter descends on a population struggling through economic disaster. Nobody has forgotten the rioting in Riga (and in Lithuania) in January, the low point of a fraught few months that also saw the collapse of Latvia's sitting government. While there was a reasonable level of confidence amongst those to whom I spoke that the social net will hold, a winter of discontent may be difficult to avoid as benefits ratchet down (unemployment benefits fall sharply after five months on the dole and are then eliminated altogether after nine months--although the unemployed remain eligible for other forms of assistance), savings evaporate, and jobs remain scarce. Unemployment now stands at 18 percent, a devastating number in a climate of deteriorating welfare support. There are indications that the economy's fall is slowing (GDP is currently forecast to decline by a mere 4 percent next year), but what few green shoots there are have sprouted too late to make much difference this winter.

Adding to the worries is the fear that the country's economic woes will be used by the ever more revanchist Kremlin to foment discontent among the roughly 30 percent of the population that is of ethnic Russian descent. Maddening symbols of lost empire, and small enough to bully, Latvia and Estonia have long been placed amongst Russia's worst enemies by Vladimir Putin. He may be unable to resist the temptation to make their problems worse.

The Latvian government's strategy appears to be to hang on grimly and hope that the global economy recovers quickly and strongly enough to pull a sensibly deflated Latvia out of the mire and into hailing distance of the allegedly (that's a debate for another time) safe haven of eurozone membership. So far this tough approach enjoys at least a degree of grudging popular support. Some two-thirds of Latvians are thought to support the defense of a currency that is a symbol of both hard-won independence and the ability of ordinary Latvians to build a better future for themselves. They have seen their savings wiped out twice in the last 20 years, first by the Soviet implosion (and the chaos that accompanied it) and then again, after painful rebuilding, by a massive banking crisis in the mid-1990s. Devaluation would look all too much like round three. Latvian officials also put a great deal of faith in the country's flexible labor markets and the resilience of a people with recent memories of times far, far harder than now. Latvians will know, I was repeatedly told, how to cope.

Maybe, but all attempts to measure public opinion are guesswork--bedeviled by societal division (ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians often see matters in very different ways) and the fact that Latvia's political parties are often little more than collections of a few friends or co-conspirators, sustained by self-interest, shared ethnic identity, and passing eddies of voter enthusiasm. They are bad at reflecting public opinion and worse at shaping it. If overall living conditions deteriorate badly this winter, there may be no one able to speak honestly to the nation or for its concerns. That's not a recipe for social peace.

There will be parliamentary elections next year and the uncertainty about the degree of support the internal devaluation will continue to enjoy helps explain September's unexpected failure of the governing coalition to pass all elements of the austere 2010 budget that was a condition for the continued support of Latvia's international lenders. This was the failure that so angered Anders Borg in early October. His mood will not have been improved by the market tremors that followed both his comments and subsequent press reports in Sweden that he had told Swedish banks to prepare themselves for the worst.

It's difficult to imagine that he would have been cheered up by the almost simultaneous revelation that the Latvian government was contemplating measures limiting the liability of homeowners to their lenders, a move that would have serious implications for a number of Sweden's banks. This proposal may have been an unsubtle attempt to pressure the Swedes into agreeing to go a little easier on the 2010 budget, but, with the furor it stirred up, it backfired. Its most controversial element--the idea that it would have retrospective effect--has been withdrawn, and the budget hiccup has been resolved with a Latvian climb-down. But these spats were a reminder that the realities that define this uncomfortable situation continue to hold true: Latvia is still both highly vulnerable and too small to fail, the codependent relationship between Sweden's banks and their Latvian borrowers continues to be both intact and unhappy, and the durability and extent of popular support for Latvia's harsh economic medicine remains an unknowable, unnerving mystery.

It's going to be a long winter.

A Proper Revolution?

Steve Pincus: 1688 - The First Modern Revolution

National Review, October 15, 2009

Infuriated by the high-church, high-Tory critiques of a British historian impertinent enough to suggest that the tercentenary of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not worth celebrating, Mrs. Thatcher’s then Lord Chancellor jibed that “academic historians never make their money by saying that the established truth is true.” I’m not sure what the late Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone would have made of a new account of that same revolution by Yale professor Steve Pincus. Meticulously researched and deftly written, Pincus’s book demolishes established truths (actually untruths) about the Glorious Revolution only to cram 1688 into a corset (“the first modern revolution”) that might be meant to be sexy, but ultimately doesn’t fit. That said, this is so evidently serious a book that old Hailsham might have been not only forgiving but even, maybe, something of a fan.

The 1688 revolution was traditionally believed to derive much of its gloriousness from its absence of significant bloodshed, except in Ireland (which, revealingly, was not thought to count), a blessing usually put down to the fact that its central drama — the overthrow of James II, England’s last Roman Catholic king — was an essentially conservative affair. According to this version of events, the replacement of James with the dual monarchy of the Dutch prince William and his wife (and James’s daughter) Mary was an easy sell, a restoration as much as a revolution, intended by a good number of its supporters to return hallowed (if sometimes fictional) English liberties to their central place in a constitution threatened by the newfangled ways of a monarch in thrall to a foreign religion and, no less sinisterly, to the absolutist ideology of “Lewis XIV” (to use the contemporary, splendid, and unapologetically English spelling), the foreign tyrant who was the wretched James’s ally, mentor, and paymaster. Yes, the Glorious Revolution may have paved the way to more radical changes in the way England was run, but so far as possible (even during the tricky 1688–89 hiatus) it did so in a way that was in accord with existing law — and who could object to that?

The distinction between this happy tale and the chaos and slaughter of subsequent revolutions abroad is obvious and, for those remaining Britons who know their history, a source of pride, clinching proof of a sensible people’s innate talent for moderation. When, in a classic exposition of both this view and her indomitable tactlessness, Mrs. Thatcher took advantage of the bicentenary of the French revolution to remind Le Monde that the Glorious Revolution was an example of the way that English liberties had evolved in a process marked by “continuity, respect for law, and a sense of balance,” the Iron Lady was making the point that the French Revolution was everything that 1688 was not — and that it was all the worse for it.

Ironically, the survival of this “Whig interpretation” of (to borrow Mrs. Thatcher’s description) 1688’s “quiet revolution” has been helped by the persistent disappointment of leftist British historians that, despite a possible near miss in the 1640s, their country has never enjoyed the imagined benefits of a “proper” revolution. Lord Macaulay and Edmund Burke, the two most influential exponents of the Whig analysis, may have shaped their narratives in a manner designed to persuade their countrymen that the revolutionary upheavals then raging on the Continent (Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second was published in 1848, while Burke was writing when the guillotine was at its busiest) were not the British way, but it was an approach that played into the hands of later, lesser writers only too keen to dismiss James’s dethroning as just another aristocratic putsch. The 1688 revolution was, sniffed Engels in 1892, a “comparatively puny event.”

That’s not Professor Pincus’s view. He maintains that the 1688 upheaval was not only enormously significant (which it was), but that it should be considered — dubious compliment — the first “modern revolution.” Sadly, he never quite succeeds in satisfactorily establishing what that term means, coming closest when he writes about “a structural and ideological break with the previous regime . . . and a new conception of time, a notion that they [revolutionary regimes] are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and . . . society,” an idea of Year Zero that is, awkwardly, difficult to square with the painstaking quest for precedent that was such a feature of 1688.

These definitional problems should come as no surprise. Stripped of its already imprecise chronological sense, “modern” is in this context too vague and too broad an adjective to mean very much: Even the most archetypically “modern” revolution — the Russian, with its strong strains of murderous millennial fantasy and traditional peasant Jacquerie — came with distinctly medieval aspects.

If there’s one thing we do know about modern revolutions, it’s their tendency to extreme violence. Unfortunately, Pincus’s determination to demonstrate the modernity of 1688 occasionally appears to have led him to paint a portrait of its convulsions in colors somewhat closer to the blood-drenched hues of revolutionary France than to the discreet, largely decorous tones that this most proper of revolutions really deserves. Even if we include (as we should) the Irish campaign and the fighting in Scotland, the Glorious Revolution can be blamed for perhaps some 20,000 deaths, almost none of them in England. By contrast, the revolution that tore England apart in the 1640s cost 190,000 lives in England alone (as a percentage of the population, a total higher than that accounted for by World War I — and in Scotland and Ireland the relative toll was even worse). It was a catastrophe so terrible, and in its social implications so potentially dangerous, that it goes a long way toward explaining the restraint displayed by the revolutionaries of 1688. That earlier conflict had come close to being a “modern revolution” — and there was little appetite to repeat the experience.

Pincus makes much of the rancorous controversies, sharp ideological divisions, and (in an attempt to debunk the argument that the revolution was little more than the maneuverings of shifting aristocratic cabals) popular enthusiasms that characterized England’s politics in the aftermath of the revolution and on deep into the 1690s. He demonstrates that these struggles had revolutionary consequences. Nevertheless, those who fought in them generally did so within well-established legal and political structures. 1688 was indeed a proper revolution, but in both senses of the word.

Another element in Pincus’s definition of a modern revolution is that it typically represents a clash not between the old order and the new, but between two conflicting visions of modernity. That’s a contention that could be disputed when it comes to some of history’s later revolutions, but it works well for 1688, in particular as an explanation of why so many conservatives were prepared to throw in their lot with the revolutionaries. As Pincus shows, by 1688 James had taken England a long way down the road to Versailles. The machinery of a Continental-style centralized absolutist state was being put in place. To add insult to injury, this was linked to an aggressive recatholicizing effort (albeit often camouflaged by bogus calls for wider religious toleration) that left little doubt that James’s ultimate ambition was to impose upon England a “national” Catholicism equivalent to the Gallicanism then being preached from French pulpits. Under the circumstances, many traditionalists, however deep their philosophical (and, not infrequently, religious) scruples about turning against their lawful king, felt that their vision of England left them with no choice other than revolt or (almost as devastating to James) sullen neutrality.

But with James consigned to history by his 1690 defeat (at the Battle of the Boyne, in the Roman Catholic Ireland that was his last redoubt), what next for England? Many studies of the 1688 revolution conclude with the former king’s final flight to France and a quick canter through the Bill of Rights (sound familiar?) and the other legislation most associated with the post-revolutionary settlement. If the biggest weakness of Pincus’s book (other than sporadically subjecting 1688 to the Eisenstein treatment) is an at times elliptical approach to narrative, its biggest strength is the way that the author takes the story far deeper into the 1690s than is customarily the case. We could argue about whether, as Pincus claims, the changes seen in those years constituted a continuing revolution, but that they were revolutionary is indisputable.

While these changes bear strong hallmarks of the improvisation and desire for compromise that are a characteristic of English political history, Pincus makes a forceful case that they were more cohesive than is usually understood. They were certainly comprehensive. By 1697, England had reset its foreign policy. Equally, attitudes to political and religious freedom had been altered in ways almost unimaginable a decade or so before, and the financial system had been restructured in a manner that was a death knell to the ancient aristocratic ideal of land as the source of wealth. The bourgeois trading and manufacturing Britain that was to dominate the planet was very clearly taking shape. Perhaps the greatest pleasure to be found in reading this book, however, comes from the prominence that Pincus gives to the debates that accompanied this transformation: often overlooked and almost always fascinating discussions that, in their sophistication, breadth, depth, and cleverness, foreshadow the brilliance of the thinking that was to emerge in America during the course of the third, and most glorious, English revolution of all — the one that caught fire in 1776.

The Borgomeister

Nosferatu the Vampyre

National Review Online, October 30, 2009

There’s a long, unrespectable tradition of vampires’ being unable to decide whether we humans are lunch, lovers, or a bite of both. My irritation at coming across a pile of Twilights and their no-less-sensitive kin heaped under the heading “undying love” in a neighborhood Barnes & Noble was thus curmudgeonly and somewhat unfair. For those who can understand my reaction (well, you are reading NRO, so you just might), and are themselves getting a little sick of the simpering-emo-tofu undead, here’s a recommendation: This weekend, celebrate both Halloween and the 30th anniversary of the release of the finest — and grandest — vampire movie of them all by watching Nosferatu the Vampyre. It’s a 1979 film by the German director Werner Herzog that transforms genre into art and an old story into something new. It never goes near a high school and rarely goes bump in the night.

Blood is sucked, not shed, there’s no gore, and there’s none of the ripping and tearing so characteristic of another type of modern vampire, those ill-bred ones oafs who choose to adopt the revolting table manners of their loutish zombie counterparts. (If you saw 30 Days of Night, you know what I mean.) The sentiments that run through Herzog’s film owe nothing to either psychotic rage or prom-night angst, but a great deal to German Romanticism, ancient profound weariness, exhausted fatalism, and hysteria — complete with a grotesquely parodied danse macabre--in the face of onrushing death. Naturally there’s also a moment of supremely noble, erotically charged self-sacrifice. Inevitably it is pointless. Yes, Nosferatu is a German film, a very German film.

Shot in Holland, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, and, in its eerie opening sequence, Mexico, Herzog’s film, which was made on a budget — under $1 million — almost as incredible as its subject matter, is a slow, stately, hallucinatory, unexpectedly lavish, unexpectedly lovely “free version” of the first filmed Nosferatu (1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Friedrich Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece).

Owing to his studio’s failure to secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s then-still-within-copyright classic, Murnau’s movie was itself something of a reinterpretation. The count lost all his hair and all his wives but gained long, claw-like fingernails, the B-movie-alien name of Orlok, and a face that was part bat, part rat, and all ugly. Unlike Dracula, Orlok’s bite lacked even the gift of twisted immortality: It was permanently fatal to others and, in what was to become a familiar addition to vampire lore, sunlight was fatal to him. Additionally, some of Stoker’s characters were edited out or jumbled around, and the narrative was shifted in time (to the 1830s from the 1890s) and place (from England to the fictional Wisborg, a blend of Wismar and Lübeck, in north Germany).

These changes were not enough. The widow Stoker successfully sued the studio (which promptly went bankrupt), and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed. By then, however, copies had already circulated across the world. The film lived on, legendary, indestructible, and illicit, ready to reappear in the form of Herzog’s allusive, elusive, and dreamlike reworking.

In Herzog’s view, Murnau’s Nosferatu is the greatest German movie ever shot. Remaking it was his attempt to reconnect with an earlier generation of German filmmakers, the “grandfathers” untainted by the Third Reich (Murnau died two years before Hitler rose to power), and, through them, to an older, better national cultural heritage. Herzog may have borrowed much of Murnau’s storyline, but the earlier Nosferatu was merely a starting point for what the later director was trying to achieve. To be sure, some of Herzog’s shots are almost exact recreations of Murnau’s, and there are instances when the modern cast adopts the mannered acting style of Weimar expressionism, but the later film has a grandeur almost entirely missing from the slightly crabbed original.

Herzog’s Dracula (“Orlok” could now be safely dispensed with) may resemble Murnau’s in his loathsome appearance, but (as played by a mesmerizing Klaus Kinski) he is a predator — not vermin, never remotely a hero, but an oddly tragic figure nonetheless: “Time is an abyss a thousand nights deep. Centuries come and go. To be unable to grow old is terrible. . . . Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing the same futility each day?”

Herzog’s Nosferatu is, in its very specifically German way, a highly romantic film. Defined by an extraordinarily beautiful cinematography, much of it of mountain, mist, forest, and waterfall (Herzog hails from Alpine Bavaria), it is frequently reminiscent of nothing so much as the vast, visionary landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the leading artist in Germany’s 19th-century Romantic movement, even as its eerie, not-quite-right grays pay tribute to Stoker’s own swirling imagery:

Everything is grey — except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a “brool” over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom.

Yet Herzog is too smart to believe that history’s dark ghosts can be kept at bay for long. When Jonathan Harker (nicely played by Bruno Ganz, a gifted actor best known in the United States, ironically under the circumstances, as Adolf Hitler in Downfall) makes his way through the thin space of the Borgo Pass into the nightmare that lies beyond, he does so to the cascading, tumbling prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold. It’s a choice that appears designed to extricate the composer from the clammy adoration of his most notorious fan, but it cannot help reminding us that Wagner’s work was the musical accompaniment to a people’s descent into a pagan intoxication — an intoxication that was in many respects an extreme, perverse expression of the German Romantic tradition that Herzog so loves.

It’s equally worth noting that before she turned to Nazi propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl, the most infamous exemplar of the film-making generation Herzog wished to bypass, was best known for starring in Bergfilme (mountain films), a typically German genre in which the mountainous landscape was as much a star as the actors and that finds some strong echoes in Nosferatu. Riefenstahl’s debut as a director was a mountain film named The Blue Light. The next movie she directed was Triumph of the Will. It is, it seems, almost impossible to return to the roots of Germany’s cultural heritage without acknowledging the evil shapes into which they were to grow.

So it’s perhaps fitting that the consequences of that evil resonate in the very locations where Herzog’s movie was shot. The sequences filmed in then-Communist Czechoslovakia were a reminder of an Eastern Europe torn apart and cut off by the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1979, this region seemed irrevocably lost as, in a different way, so much of the Lübeck and Wismar of Murnau’s Nosferatu were; many of those cities’ centuries-old buildings had been devastated by Allied bombing and, in Wismar’s case, the malice of the East German state. Despite one notable sequence featuring the same row of Lübeck buildings that Murnau had, Herzog’s Wismar (he dropped the idea of “Wisborg”) was largely represented by the Dutch city of Delft — gorgeous, intact, and, by its very architectural survival, a pointed comment on all that Germany had lost.

But destruction isn’t only physical. When Dracula brings an army of rats (Herzog imported 11,000 of them from Hungary, painting each of them gray) and, with them, plague, into Wismar, its buildings endure as the city empties out. Among the most striking characteristics of Herzog’s Nosferatu is the way the director uses images of great beauty to tell a story of great horror. This is never more so than in the film’s depiction of Wismar’s losing its elegance as its people lose their lives; the shreds of their civilization are shown unraveling in astounding, merciless sequences of ravishing desolation.

Up until and including its finale — a glimpse of apocalypse complete with a pale rider disappearing into an immense horizon of sand and cloud — Nosferatu is saturated with a sense of impending, relentless doom. The atmospheric and impeccably chosen soundtrack features a repeating motif redolent of a death knell, while the film’s heroine, Lucy (a marvelous Isabelle Adjani in a role closer to that of Stoker’s Mina) has a pallor that hints at the grave. Her languor is echoed by almost all the rest of the cast in a series of subdued, sotto performances that underpin the sense of helpless, hopeless melancholy that persists throughout the movie.

Even Dracula himself is soft-spoken, his words slow, deliberate, and almost hesitant, his voice sometimes caressing, sometimes menacing, and always weary. He comes across as an exhausted figure, still powerful, yes, but tired of his own power. He is at the crossroads of human, demon, animal, and even insect, but he is still painfully conscious of the traces of humanity within him; he is alienated, isolated, lonely, envious, and resentful. Check out the scene in a night-struck Wismar where Dracula (illuminated an almost electric blue) peers through a window that reveals a cozy, candle-lit domestic scene: Satan gazing at a Vermeer interior, and mourning, and wanting and craving. To watch Kinski’s evocative face for just those few moments is to understand how the loneliness that envelops Dracula will lead this iron-willed predator into vulnerability and danger, and to watch Kinski in this role is also to be rewarded with the sight of one legend playing, and transforming, another. If Lugosi is operetta, Kinski is opera.

And best enjoyed, I think, with a little . . . wine.

Never such innocence again

The Boy's Own Paper

The New Criterion, October 1, 2009

Tom Royden

Except for the vague impression of a heavily built, benignly gruff, occasionally encountered man with short silver hair, I cannot claim to remember my great-uncle Tom very well. Tom Royden was, I understand, an English country doctor of the old school with a lady friend down the road, a flourishing practice, a keen interest in songbirds, and a shrewd understanding of the practice of medicine that owed as much to common sense as to science. I can remember, just, being told of his death in 1966 (I was eight), and the flock of cheeping, singing, and trilling folk that moved into our house shortly thereafter.

Not so long later, four bulky, musty volumes turned up at home, each stamped with a different date from the first decade of the twentieth century, each smelling of sixty years. Battered and fine, their covers embossed with cowboys, Vikings, and other examples of the formidably tough, they had belonged to my great-uncle all his life. Now, I was informed, they were mine. They still are, artifacts of an era over long before I began, belongings of a man I never really knew, and, in some senses, an introduction to both. To read them was to be transported back from the Beatles on the transistor to Daisy Daisy Bell on the calliope, from phasers on the starship to battles on the veldt, to a time and a place that was no longer sepia, no longer then. To read them was to sit with young Tom turning those same pages on some long-forgotten Edwardian afternoon, and to wonder about the child that the old man had once been.

The four volumes in question were collections (“annuals”) of all the editions of the Boy’s Own Paper issued each week over the course of a given twelve months. Tom’s 1909 annual happened to cover the period from October 3, 1908 to September 25, 1909, but in reality it oozed the ideals, assumptions, and myths of any year plucked from the three or four decades in which imperial Britain slid from its Victorian apogee into an Indian summer of, perversely, even greater splendor. It was a period of rapid social change yet, all things considered, extraordinary social peace, a social peace of which the Boy’s Own Paper was both symptom and, in its own small way, architect.

“The prince of boys’ papers” (as the London Times once described it) was published by, of all people, the Religious Tract Society, an organization founded in 1799 to spread the word of the Lord amongst those with “little leisure and less inclination to peruse entire volumes.” The RTS soon expanded its activities to include the publication of materials designed to save souls overseas but never stopped keeping a sharp eye on those in peril back home. With Britain’s ever more literate population displaying a growing appetite for less than salubrious publications, there was much to look out for. Appalled by the public’s grimy tastes, the society’s committee met in 1878 to discuss “providing healthy boy literature to counteract the vastly increasing circulation of illustrated and other papers and tales of a bad tendency.”

The BOP (as it quickly came to be known) debuted on January 18 the following year. To guess that this worthy committee’s notion of “healthy boy literature” would be glum little pamphlets filled with clerical homilies, Gospel stories, and tales of biblical derring-do is to underestimate the subtlety of the Victorian mind. Despite a cover price (one penny) pitched low enough to put the new paper within the grasp of youngsters from almost all social classes, production values were high, complete with masthead designed by the conqueror (British, naturally) of the Matterhorn, Edward Whymper, and Latin motto: right from the beginning, the creators of the BOP were signaling that they took their paper—and its readers—seriously.

If the BOP’s packaging was good, so too, at their best, were its contents. These were crammed each week into sixteen densely printed pages (there was also a monthly edition which, like the annual, came with some extras) filled with a nicely chosen, well-illustrated blend of story-telling, practical advice, sports coverage, accounts of faraway lands, technological updates, sagas of self-improvement, competitions, puzzles, career opportunities, instructions on how to make various new-fangled devices at home, patriotic tidbits, and informative chat about hobbies, particularly the care and maintenance of pets: the first issue featured “My Monkeys and How I Manage Them” by Frank Buckland, M.A., a touch of Noah in a paper where most of the writing on pets was focused on Britain’s rather pedestrian domestic fauna. The origins of Tom’s aviary may well lie in the practical, unsentimental guide to rearing birds that was a regular feature of the BOP in his youth, and which (in the January 30, 1909 issue) included this typically hard-headed piece of advice for the owners of pigeon lofts: “Don’t keep wasters. Pigeon-pie is good.”

The challenge of the dreaded penny dreadfuls was met head-on. Amongst the stories serialized in the paper’s early editions were Nearly Eaten, Nearly Garrotted, and How I Lost My Finger, all by James Cox, R.N. (M.A., R.N.—at the BOP credentials counted). In the words of G. A. Hutchison, the paper’s founding genius and first managing editor, the BOP had to appeal to “boys not their grandmothers,” an attitude that helps explain a series of not notably grandmother-friendly articles from the 1880s dedicated to “peculiar punishments”:

It is singular that a Chinaman will prefer to die by crucifixion rather than beheading. He has the greatest horror of appearing in the next world without his head and therefore chooses a slow and lingering death rather than a quick one.

That’s the spirit.

But while, as legendary BOP contributor Dr. Gordon Stables, R.N., noted in October 1908, there was no “namby-pambiness” or “silly goody-goodiness” about the stories the paper ran, no “British boy ever found in [them] even the remotest suggestion to do that which was not right and gentlemanly,” reassuring words for the parents and schools whose approval underpinned the paper’s continued success. If the BOP had sermons to preach—it did, sometimes overtly, sometimes not—they were rooted in patriotism, decency, hard work, and fair play (the practice of clubbing seals was, noted the author of one 1887 tale, “too much like hitting a man when he is down”) rather than the peculiar intricacies of theology.

Despite the best efforts of some in the RTS (stoutly resisted by Hutchison), in the pages of the BOP, God was the God of that splendid nineteenth-century hymn, immortal, invisible, and wise, emphasis on the second adjective. He was there—around, reassuring, in charge, and basically British. There simply was no need to go on about Him. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise to find that of the two articles most directly regarding the church to be found in Tom Royden’s 1909 annual, one (from May 29) concerned the Rev. W. W. Beverage, “ministerial athlete” and unfortunately named temperance campaigner, and the other, “Athletic Parsons,” published the following week, hymned the sporting achievements of a series of sporting clergymen:

The number of parsons who take part in the first rank of games is not, of course, as large as that of those who have given up active participation after taking Holy Orders, but for all that there are some excellent representatives of muscular Christianity in the first flight of several games.

My suspicion is that young Tom will not have lingered too long over this revelation nor, for that matter, over other distinctly eat-your-greens pieces, including—hang onto your hat—a lengthy description (May 8, 1909) of what the London County Council (“a municipal mother of boys”) was doing for young people and, from August 7, 1909, “The Boyhood of Tennyson” (“his father had a delightful library”).

Mercifully, the corner of the BOP inhabited by sporting parsons, bountiful municipalities, and the doings of future poet laureates was a small one. The long-running serials, generally tales of adventure or public school, that constituted the paper’s mainstay were a source of far livelier entertainment. Tom will have begun 1909 with an issue (January 2) that included the fourteenth installment of both In the Heart of the Silent Sea (“The two boys, left unceremoniously by the screaming natives, had nothing for it but to follow in the wake of the fugitives”) and Rowland’s Fortune (“Having seen that two of the ruffians were dead, we returned to where the third lay. This was the fellow Don Carlos had beaten down with the flat of his sword”), as well as the first chapter of The Quenching of the Fiery Tide, a tale of ancient British fighting folk (“Conan, the exquisite, laughed scornfully”). The public schools were represented by The Bluffing of Mason (“Mason was a beast—everyone said so”), Mr. Lattimer’s Tax (“The two boys obeyed, one with a gleam of triumph breaking through a frown of concern; the other, pale and defiant”), and The Doctor’s Double: An Episode at Monkton School.

A large number of these once-ripping yarns now sag badly, and, as anyone who has waded through that fiery tide could tell you, others were not much good to begin with. But it’s impossible not to notice the sophistication of their grammar and vocabulary. The BOP may have had a tendency to patronize its audience, but it usually did so without talking down to them. It says a lot that amongst the writers who wrote for the BOP in its first three decades were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the BOP was “one of the first papers that grew tired of returning my MSS and published them instead”), Jules Verne, R. M. Ballantyne, and the great G. A. Henty, the author of a long sequence of novels (Wulf the Saxon, Under Drake’s Flag, The Young Carthaginian, and many, many others) often involving a enterprising young lad, stirring historical times, and a respectable amount of bloodshed.

The formula worked. Precise data are hard to come by, but the paper’s weekly readership probably peaked at around a million in the late 1880s, the highest level reached by any such publication. Thanks not least to competition from the likes of Chums and, later, The Captain, more up-market (and racier) ventures unburdened by the high-mindedness and rich-man-in-his-castle, poor-man-at-his-gate social inclusiveness that were key parts of the BOP’s ethos, the paper’s circulation fell sharply in the following decade, but it continued to boast a readership that ran easily into the hundreds of thousands and a significance in British life that was more than a matter of mere numbers. It had become, and was to remain, a national institution (a 1929 lunch to celebrate the BOP’s fiftieth anniversary was attended by both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition) and deservedly so.

Those who produced the paper clearly felt a genuine responsibility towards their readers, very few of whom would have had any chance to attend the Eton-and-Harrow surrogates where so many of the BOP’s school stories took place, settings that owed as much to the BOP’s ceaselessly aspirational creed as to snobbery. In part, these stories were, like today’s Gossip Girl, an opportunity for vicarious thrills in a privileged, inaccessible world, but, in part, they were also intended to train their readers how to behave like the public schoolboys they could never be. In similar vein, a recurrent theme that ran through stories both factual (“Boys Who Have Risen”; “Dunces Who Became Famous”; “From Wheelwright’s Bench to Academy: the story of George Tinworth’s boyhood”) and fictional (From Powder Monkey To Admiral; From Fisher Lad to Fleet Surgeon) published by the paper was that of the poor boy made good. Not everyone could become an admiral, or even a fleet surgeon, but the BOP would still do what it could to help its readers make something of themselves.

This may be the only charitable way to interpret the paper’s often shatteringly abrasive advice column, much of it written by that fierce foe of namby-pambiness, Dr. Stables, a Scottish “gentleman gypsy” and wildly prolific writer ( From Fisher Lad to Fleet Surgeon was one of his) who spent much of his time traveling the country in a purpose-built caravan accompanied by dog, parrot, coachman, and valet. A tartan-clad, fantastically bewhiskered, counter-intuitively married (he was a father of six) man, Stables was in his sixties by the time that Tom Royden was reading the BOP, but he cannot be said to have mellowed with age. His frequently questionable prescriptions (many of which can be found reprinted in Karl Sabbagh’s marvelous Your Case is Hopeless: Bracing Advice from the “Boy’s Own Paper”) placed heavy emphasis on the “cold tub” and the avoidance of a habit too ghastly to be referred to directly (readers’ letters themselves were rarely published) and little in the way of good cheer.

Even when the advice was sensible, the delivery tended to be brusque. In the March 6th, 1909 issue, G. F. D. (VITALITY) was told:

Don’t be a little fool. You are, I suppose, by this time in the hands of these quacks. Your money will go, and you’ll get worse.

But the Edwardian era was predominantly an age of optimism. Like the paper for which he wrote,Stables was no doom-and-gloom reactionary (well, not always). The previous week he had written how “the boy is improving vastly. The ordinary town lad is a gentleman compared to the boys we found in our streets in the early eighties.” Progress!

Those behind Tom Royden’s BOP were comfortable with change, but confident that it would be on the right lines and be able to coexist comfortably with the best of what had gone before. To read those issues from 1909 is to be struck by the strong sense of continuity they convey. The cover price (maintained with difficulty) was the same as it had been thirty years before, the editor Hutchison (“the experienced old captain,” in the words of one advertisement) was still at his post, and Stables was just one of a number of contributors who had been published there for decades.

Even the serials, rambling on for months (In the Heart of the Silent Sea sailed on for an exhausting thirty-three weeks) reflected this notion of permanence, a notion unsurprising in a paper published in the heart of an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set. This was the empire whose past, present, and glorious future permeated almost every issue Tom read that year, whether in poetry (“The Song of the Union Jack”; “Britannia Victrix”) or as a subtext (without much sub about it) of many of the serials or in reports from the imperial territories (“Romance of Surveying: Thrilling Stories Told by the Men Who Are Now Mapping Out Our Possessions”; “Birds’-Nesting in India”; “Rhodesia’s Thin Red Line”; “Our Somaliland Fleet”).

This was, the BOP made clear, a Boy’s Own Empire, one run by the sweet, just, boyish (the last a telling adjective in this connection) masters of George Santayana’s infinitely flattering description. The nation that built it was fair, benevolent, and, in all senses of the word, the best. When foreigners appear in Tom’s annuals, it is usually as objects of curiosity and genial, but unmistakable, disdain—an expression of a feeling of not necessarily unkindly superiority that sharpens noticeably when some of the subject peoples of the empire come into view. The BOP wins no prizes for cultural sensitivity, something that has earned it the not so genial disdain of generations of tut-tutting academic commentators with very little cultural sensitivity of their own.

Of the cataclysm that was to overturn this ordered world only a handful of years later, taking many of the BOP’s former readers with it, the only hint in the 1909 annual is this passage from a real-life account of a camping holiday in Germany by Algernon Blackwood, an author better known for stories of the supernatural than for his vacation reminiscences. On this occasion, however, the problems were caused not by ghosts, but by the Kaiser’s police:

On previous trips, when we camped too near the towns, die Polizei often came to ask us what our business was. Often, too, they were very disagreeable and troublesome, poking about in our tents, searching through our kit in the boat, evidently suspicious that we were spies of some kind.

To be sure, the BOP of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages was somewhat more militaristic in tone than it had been before, but it was so in a way that, more often than not, brings to mind Powell and Pressburger’s Colonel Blimp rather than anything more sinister. Its attitude was a manifestation of the blithe (over)confidence in British might that played such a role in the country’s fatal decision to go to war in August 1914. It was not an anticipation, eager or otherwise, of that conflict or the horrors it would bring.

The BOP made it through both world wars (although the weekly edition had been scrapped in 1913) before finally succumbing to changing tastes and publishers in 1967, just a year after Tom’s own death, to live on in memories that have grown only fonder. And not just memories. Academic disapproval now has to compete with not only indulgent nostalgia but also the implied compliment paid to the old paper—and its disgraceful archaic values—by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys (2006), which is, in many respects, an affectionate updating of the BOP, a point underlined by the fact that the cover of the British first edition was designed to resemble one of the old annuals.

Even if we don’t cheat (and we shouldn’t—that wouldn’t be the BOP way) by counting this unexpected coda as some sort of resurrection, the length of the paper’s actual lifespan—nearly ninety years —remains a tremendous achievement. The BOP’s remarkable durability was a testimony to the strength of the culture from which it sprang, a testimony to the strength of its own distinctive vision, and also to the way that culture and paper merged within the minds of some sometimes equally remarkable readers. In the introduction to his book The Best of British Pluck—The Boy’s Own Paper Revisited (1976), the author Philip Warner recalled his time as a POW of the Japanese working on the Bangkok-Moulmein railway in 1943:

Food was inadequate and appalling; the work was … exhausting; the … guards seemed scarcely sane; malaria … and a host of other diseases were rife… . Men died with steady regularity. Around was the jungle, hot, oppressive, menacing. There was really no hope of survival… . I remember one day looking round at the scene and saying to myself: “What an extraordinary situation! It’s like some strange adventure in the Boy’s Own Paper.” Suddenly it was less real, more bearable: after all BOP characters lived to tell the tale. Fantasy perhaps, but in certain conditions illusion may be more genuine than reality.

That’s the spirit.

Playing the Joker

National Review Online, August 18, 2009

If the right to vote (or not vote) for our leaders is a sign of a healthy democracy, so is the right not just to criticize, but also to insult them. Jeering, heckling, and rude, impious laughter are no less a part of the democratic process than the force-fed ecstasy of a party convention, the cheers of the shining-eyed faithful, or the complacent applause at rubber-chicken dinners. A statement of the obvious? You’d think so, but judging by some of the more overwrought reactions to a new and notably unflattering portrait of President Obama, some of his supporters need to relearn how to live with an American way of debate that is vigorous, rarely sedate, and often distinctly rough about the edges. That is not to say that this depiction of the president does not raise some troubling issues of its own — part of its force, unfortunately, if probably inadvertently, derives from the fact that it does — but those issues are, on balance, rather less disturbing than the near-hysterical response of a number of those who claim to be offended by it, reactions that suggest that too many of Obama’s disciples still believe their god-king should be allowed to float, untroubled and undisturbed, above the hurly-burly that the rest of us call politics.

The offending image, as most Americans know by now, is a photograph of Obama manipulated into an approximation of Heath Ledger’s Joker character in The Dark Knight. Its origins remain somewhat obscure, but it appears to have been based on an earlier photoshopped Obama-as-Joker created by a Chicago student. That image was not apparently a reflection of its creator’s political views (and was subsequently removed from his Flickr page). The same cannot be said of the new version. Joker-Obama has been given a blue background and a red frame. These colors combine with a chalk-white face and red slash of mouth to conjure up a harsh, scornful retort to the serene red, white, and blue of the legendary “Hope” by Shepard Fairey that did so much to shape and enhance Obama’s electoral magic.

When comparing these two clashing portrayals, we notice that in Fairey’s poster Obama’s mouth is set, serious, determined, while Joker-Obama’s is transformed into a hideous, thoroughly unconvincing smile, a smile made even more disconcerting by the subject’s staring panda eyes. His face, like that of the movie character on which it is based, is that of a madman. Fairey’s Obama by contrast is a saint, a visionary, a leader, his eyes peering out at the radiant future into which, no doubt, he intends to take us, a future summed up in only two words (first “hope” and later “change,” or was it the other way round?) that can be both noun and commanding verb, but are as empty of real meaning as the “socialism” with which the anonymous artist behind Joker-Obama captioned his creation.

Posters of Joker-Obama first appeared a month or so ago, before going viral and becoming the first anti-Obama artifact to attract a mass following in a country still littered with adoring Obamabilia. In a sense, therefore, this brutal little portrait has already done its work. The icon is chipped. A sharp, disrespectful cackle has interrupted the self-satisfied chorus of agreement with which Obama’s skillfully teleprompted sermons are usually received, a cackle made even more dangerous to the administration by the fact that mounting public skepticism over some of the Democrats’ initiatives has, for the first time since the election, created an opening that even the stumblebum GOP might manage to exploit. It is this (as much as any sense of lèse-majesté, although there is that too) that helps explain some of the outrage that this one image has generated, a tantrum rendered grimly amusing by still-fresh memories of the silence, or even approval, with which so many Democrats greeted the cruel renderings (including, naturally, one as the Joker from, naturally, Vanity Fair) of George W. Bush that scarred the political landscape throughout his term in office.

To be fair, some of those who object to Joker-Obama have attempted to clothe their complaints in something more substantive than “You can’t do that to our guy.” The word “socialism” is inaccurate, they grumble, and to the extent that the Democrats do not appear intent on reviving the spirit of Upton Sinclair they are quite right. On the other hand, we live in 2009, and the bundle of resentments, superstitions, and aspirations once dubbed socialism have evolved into a protean collection of ideas that don’t fit comfortably with traditional notions of what that antique ideological label should mean. Who needs common ownership of the means of production? With growing government intervention in the economy (even excluding the current emergency arrangements), in your pocketbook, and in the more general ordering of society, there are worse ways to describe the direction in which this country is sliding. “Socialism” may not be the most precise, the most carefully calibrated, professorially approved term to use, but as shorthand for the understandable fear that a remodeled leftist leviathan is stirring, it will do.

Others have tut-tutted that using the Joker in this fashion makes no sense because (a) the Joker isn’t a socialist and (b) President Obama is not a raving homicidal maniac — criticisms that may suggest that the literalists are now running the asylum. We are after all talking about a caricature. We can, I think, agree that — despite persistent rumors of his earlier involvement in the Biden campaign — the Joker is not even a Democrat, let alone a socialist (he is more of a nihilist, I suppose). Equally, I hope that even the most rabid of those of us on the right can admit that Obama — while not so preternaturally calm as frequently asserted — is very far from being a raving homicidal maniac. We ought also to be able to agree that using the Joker to deface (in two senses of the word) a picture of Obama was, sit down please, a joke — a pointed joke, sure, a nasty joke, maybe, but a joke nonetheless. There’s nothing much to parse here, folks, just move along.

And yet that grotesque image has made more of an impact than might have been expected. Perhaps it’s just because it represents a chance at last — after months of generally worshipful media coverage — to protest and, better, to make fun of our sainted president. And maybe it does come with a certain crude logic. You can at least make a case that the Joker is an agent of chaos, and that Joker-Obama thus taps into fears that chaos (hyperinflation, say) will soon be with us if the Democrats’ policies continue in their present direction. Maybe. But the best bet is that the real power of Joker-Obama is as a mask, a device that plays to the anxiety of many Americans (an anxiety so strong in some cases that it has given birth to the Birthers) that they do not know who Obama is, an anxiety that is the not altogether surprising consequence of his rapid rise, guarded personality, deceptive governing style, and — it’s a shame that this should be perceived as relevant, but it apparently is — an upbringing and ethnic background that differ sharply from what was once considered the American norm.

That last aspect brings us to the regrettably inevitable question as to whether the poster is any way racist. Of course, the manner in which elements in the Obama claque attempt to shut down debate by blaming (it sometimes seems) almost any criticism of the president on racism has become a cliché of contemporary American politics. And in that respect, the reaction to Joker-Obama has not disappointed. Blogging for LA Weekly, Steven Mikulan claimed “the only thing missing” from the poster “is a noose.” Over at the Washington Post, culture critic Philip Kennicott tied himself up in knots as he tried to demonstrate that applying the “urban” make-up of Heath Ledger’s Joker to Obama (rather than that of Jack Nicholson’s supposedly more “urbane” take) was a “subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument,” an attempt to assert that “Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time.”

Ridiculous, yup, but just because most such allegations of racism are ludicrous, that does not mean that all are. There is something — the whiteface — about Joker-Obama that means this poster is not a banner under which the opposition to the president should rally. To be sure, “clown white” (to use the technical term) makeup is an essential element in the appearance of Batman’s archenemy: it’s impossible to transform anybody — whether George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama — into the Joker without it. Nevertheless, even if (as I would guess) the Joker-Obama poster was created without any racist intent, it can still be read in a way that resonates very uncomfortably indeed. However much we might want to, we can wish away neither the uglier parts of history nor their continuing echoes. As a result, therefore, and regardless of the intention behind it, giving Obama the Joker’s stark white skin tone takes what would (in the case of Bush and Clinton) be simple caricature dangerously close to the badlands of minstrelsy.

Of course, most (though not all) minstrel shows featured whites in blackface rather than the other way round, but a key theme that lurked within almost all of them was the use of, to adopt a clumsy phrase, racial cross-dressing to mock and belittle black people. It’s the memory, however vague, however buried, of this, I suspect, that has contributed to both the poster’s offensiveness (to some) and, sadly, its appeal (to others). Yes, About.com (owned by the New York Times!) is, at the time of writing, running a picture of RNC chairman Michael Steele made up to look like a clown, but when I look at it all I see is a depiction of a man (who happens to be African-American) portrayed as a clown. The far more disturbing Joker-Obama is something else. Unlike Steele’s sleek clown, we are shown an unhinged, sinister trickster, with make-up that is not so much costume as (rather poorly executed) camouflage, a disguise that can at least conceivably be interpreted as a suggestion that Obama could not have been elected if he had revealed, so to speak, his true colors, a suggestion that in its most literal sense is deeply demeaning to African-Americans.

Stretching too hard, perhaps, overly “sensitive,” possibly, but both America’s troubled racial history and the current febrile state of our politics call for caution in this area — and so does clear-eyed political calculation of what it will take to beat Obama in 2012. Playing the Joker just isn’t the way to go.

Lord Ha-Ha

Peter Dickinson: Lord Berners - Composer, Writer, Painter

The Weekly Standard, August 9, 2009

It is easier to describe the appearance of Gerald Tyrwhitt (1883-1950), the 14th, and strangest, Lord Berners, than the man himself. In his short story The Love-Bird, Osbert Sitwell gave his hero (a version of Berners) a "natural air of quiet, ugly distinction." Cecil Beaton thought that Berners resembled "a bald wax figure in a cheap clothes shop," while the cat-loving author Beverley Nichols was suitably feline, claiming that there was "a legend that nobody who has ever seen Gerald in his bath [was] ever quite the same again."

The mismatch between this once-renowned aesthete's disappointing looks and his lifelong pursuit of beauty was too much fun to overlook.Understanding the elusive, talented, and complex Lord Berners is altogether more difficult. He was a composer, a painter, and a writer, sometimes of merit, sometimes less so. He was a creative force who created, in the end, not that much. He was a prankster--on occasion tiresomely so--and a parodist, a satirist, a dryly laconic, sporadically cutting wit, a surrealist in a buttoned-up suit, a modernist in a country house, and he may (or may not) have had lunch with Hitler. An introvert who knew "everyone," Berners, a lover, appropriately, of masks, manipulated his own famously eccentric image so skillfully that in many respects his public persona was, three or four decades before Andy Warhol, both protective shield and his most successful, and possibly most enduring, artistic achievement.

Under the circumstances, it's fitting that this life of Berners by the British composer, pianist, and critic Peter Dickinson is not a conventional biography--for that, turn to Mark Amory's marvelous Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (1998), essential reading for anyone looking to fill in the gaps left by Dickinson's patchy, distinctly non-narrative approach--but a fascinating collage of impressions, recollections, and analysis of different aspects of this multi-faceted individual's life, work, and career. It's impressively buttressed by a well-researched discography, a nicely reproduced selection of his paintings, some of his poems, a few unpublished writings, and even details of Berners's record collection.

Partly funded by the Berners Trust, this is Berners for completists. If you think that there's a touch of the Trekkie about the whole project, you'd be right. Dickinson "has been interested in Lord Berners for over thirty years." He has written a great deal about him, he arranged for an important revival concert of Berners's work, he was "prominently involved" in events to mark Berners's centenary, and he has done much else besides to focus attention on his lordship's career.

The book's intriguing core is made up of interviews conducted over the years with a clutch of ancients who had known Berners well, including Sir Harold Acton, the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, the widow of Britain's would-be Führer, Berners's chauffeur, and Robert ("mad boy") Heber-Percy, the much younger man with whom Berners lived for the final quarter of his life, despite the inconvenience posed by the mad boy marrying and, adding issue to injury, fathering a child.

The usual place to begin for those who agree that Berners deserves scholarly treatment of this sort is his music. Music was the art form that meant the most to him, and musically he was at the very least a minor talent from a country unable to boast much in the way of the major. He was dubbed the "English Satie" (Satie objected); he worked with Diaghilev and Balanchine. Stravinsky praised a youngish Berners as "a composer of unique talent," but it was a talent that was not exercised as much as it might have been: There was simply too much else that interested and entertained him.

In any event, as a rich man, Berners never had to produce anything. To be sure, he was an artist, but he wasn't confined to a garret--he owned a number of properties in England and abroad--nor did he starve: His table was legendary. Maybe this shrewd and remarkably (although largely self-taught) knowledgeable judge of good music just knew his limitations. (For what it's worth, his compositions do nothing for me, but then I'm no expert, nor am I an enthusiast for the serious music of that period. For those who are, I suspect that Dickinson makes a convincing case that Berners still matters.)

As for his paintings, they are a mixed bunch, competent enough, pleasant enough, but with exceptions, not enough. Kindly comparisons have been made with Corot, but the reaction of the reliably unkind Evelyn Waugh to the news that a 1931 exhibition of Berners's work had sold well was, for once, only slightly unfair: "[This] shows what a good thing it is to be a baron."

By contrast, if we discount (and we must) The Girls of Radcliff Hall (1937), a high camp roman à clef, Berners's writing, at its best, merits more than a second look. That said, to claim, as some have done, that his Far from the Madding War (1941) ranks somewhere close to Waugh's Put Out More Flags is, notwithstanding moments of sharp insight and a good joke or two, a stretch. Berners's short stories lurch from sub-par Saki to interminable whimsy.

His memoirs, however, are a delight. Taken as a whole, First Childhood (1934) and A Distant Prospect (1945) are, with the posthumously published Dresden and The Château de Résenlieu, a charming, engrossing, and frequently very funny portrait of a late-Victorian/Edwardian upper-class upbringing that is too knowing to fit comfortably into the prelapsarian myth-making so typical of many of the reminiscences of that epoch, yet is made poignant by our sense, and Berners's sense, of the civilization that was so carelessly and yet so carefully destroyed in 1914.

Tellingly, as the 20th century ground relentlessly on, the outbreak of a second world war drove Berners to the edge of psychological collapse. Not even the ruins of what had already been lost were, he feared, to be spared destruction.

These characteristically slight, slyly profound autobiographical scraps also come as near as Berners ever came to really revealing something of himself, the aesthete who came of age in a society of hearties, the Englishman with, for his time and island, an astonishing appreciation of Europe far grander, and far finer, than anything now likely to emerge from the gimcrack European Union, the fabulist who understood the loveliness, the escape, and the magic of absurdity. Not for nothing did Nancy Mitford give the lightly fictionalized Berners who appears in The Pursuit of Love the name Lord Merlin, proprietor of a hallucinatory, fabulous estate where a "flock of multi-coloured pigeons tumbl[ed] about like a cloud of confetti in the sky" and the dogs wore diamonds.

With Lord Merlin, it was impossible to know where "jokes ended and culture began." And not for nothing had Berners himself conjured up a similarly resplendent menagerie (more or less, in reality the canine jewelry came from Woolworth's) for his own estate at Faringdon. PETA types may relax: The dye used on the pigeons was harmless. And with Lord Berners, too, the border between the art and the jokes was ill-defined and unpoliced, each in their own way aspects of a far greater composition.

Determined, perhaps, to secure his hero's place in the cultural pantheon, Dickinson seems almost embarrassed by the stunts, japes, and trickster exploits that underpin Berners's reputation, but prefers, instead, to downplay them in favor of the music which, "everybody agrees .  .  . was his most important single contribution."

Everybody? This misses the point that Mitford, if imperfectly, grasped: "Lord Berners" was Berners's finest creation, that greater composition, a brilliant, if accidental, anticipation of our era, and a gentle rebuke to the conventions, pretensions, and the horrors of his own.

And that's something for which Dickinson should give this most gifted of amateurs a little more credit.