Christopher de Bellaigue
Iranians on the streets of Tehran marking the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein in 680
Iran’s electoral controversy of last June is starting to seem like a quaint irrelevance next to the conflict that the two sides are now waging for possession of the country—not simply its institutions and resources, but also its identity and culture. The end of the struggle will almost certainly mean defeat for one party, and not, as once seemed possible, co-existence. There will not only be political winners and losers, but moral ones too. Iranian tradition holds that fortune favours the righteous, and all the characters in this latest epic lay claim to that mantle.
The crisis is part of a struggle between Iranians who want their country to join the community of nations that is roughly in agreement on both the challenges facing the human race and the mechanisms for tackling them, and those who don’t. The supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main challenger in the June election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, present themselves as modern, plugged-in internationalists. Since the crisis began, they have adeptly used the internet to circumvent the state and publicise their cause to foreign media outlets. The state, on the other hand, has sought solace in principled isolation. Like Kipling’s cat, Iran walks on its own.
Iran withdrew into itself after the revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic’s semi-democratic, semi-theocratic system of government, topped by an institution known as the Guardianship of the Jurist, is unique. Its participation in the world economy is largely restricted to trade: Iran sells oil and buys capital and consumer goods. Its role in world diplomacy is mostly confined to pursuing its own, anti-western agenda. Ideas and information must get around walls of censorship and official indifference, and sometimes never do. Few Iranians, for instance, seem to know about global warming.
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Andro Linklater
I live in an ancient farmhouse in Kent that boasts a cat slide roof, a chimney stack leaning like the tower of Pisa, and a living room whose ceiling is supported by an immense wooden beam low enough to stun anyone taller than a jockey. In other words, it looks like a quintessential English country cottage.
But quaint though the roof, chimney and beam now seem, these three elements are evidence of a revolution in human affairs. Looking at them, I can recreate the events of almost 500 years ago, like a detective surveying a murder scene.
For sometime in the early 16th century, my predecessor in the house was infected by a radical new idea, one that changed him so profoundly that he altered the shape of the building to reflect the new way he thought about himself and his neighbours. And like a mental epidemic, this idea then spread from southeast England and gradually extended across the country. Two generations later colonists carried it to North America. From there the contagion spread to the Pacific, and around the globe from Nova Scotia to New Zealand. It is now so deeply embedded in our psyches that it is hard to recognise the pervasiveness of its influence.
The new idea was easily described—that land itself could be an individually owned, tradeable commodity—but its origins were old and complex. Land ownership rights began to be recognised under the common law as early as the 12th century; a market for land existed in the 14th century, and in some exchanges cash payments were involved; and the practice of fencing off individual parcels of ground, the enclosure movement, began in the 1480s. During the course of the 16th century, however, one crucial element was created that linked all these elements together in a single financial nexus. An almost imperceptible change in mortgage law introduced the principle of fairness, or equity, to deals that involved lending money against the collateral value of a chunk of earth. Today, anyone who has a mortgage is aware of the concept, if only through the small-print warning on the agreement that begins: “Your property may be at risk…” But that phrase encapsulates a near 500-year-old principle of momentous significance. It not only underpins the modern mortgage market, it shapes societies around the world—from the abandoned sub-prime mansions of Arizona at the heart of our current economic crisis, to the aspirant property owners of Shanghai who may yet bring us out of it.
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Tomas Hirst
Russia's powerful prime minister has more to gain from keeping Medvedev in tow
Following Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in session, a veritable flurry of articles have appeared effectively declaring his candidacy for the 2012 presidential election. Yet I still feel that this is unlikely.
As journalists looking at Russia from our western pedestal, it’s all too easy to see intrigue and infighting without having to try (or think) too hard. “Look!” we say, “Putin won’t deny that he’s going to run.” And in the umbrella-stabbing world of intrigue that is Russian politics this surely means he’s going for President Dmitri Medvedev’s jugular.
Yet here’s a more pertinent question to ask: why would he declare himself out of an election that is still, in terms of recent developments in the Russian political landscape, an age away? He is the most powerful politician in the country, and singlehandedly (sorry Dmitri) drove the party United Russia to victory in the parliamentary elections last year. Without him, or faced with the prospect of being without him come 2012, his party’s position, along with the president’s, would be greatly weakened. And as history has shown, perceived weakness and division is nearly always punished by democratic electorates.
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Richard Reeves
Tony Blair suggested three years ago that the big distinction in politics was between open societies and those which were closed. How far Blair meant to endorse Karl Popper’s view in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) is not clear—Blair, for his many virtues, is no philosopher. But in the early years of New Labour the direction was open markets, a more open democracy and a freer, more liberal society.
Blair removed the difference between the age of consent for gay and straight sex, introduced civil partnerships and tougher anti-discrimination laws. Popperian or not, he shared a liberal conviction that people should be able to construct lives according to their own notion of the good. Labour also presided over the biggest wave of immigration ever, adding more than a million to Britain’s population. And a halting start was made to open up democracy, with what historian Tristram Hunt calls “a magnificent devolution of power” to Scotland, Wales and London. There are entries on the other side of the ledger, too: centralisation in Whitehall; civil liberties damaged by Asbos and detention without trial; and the retreat from thorough-going reform of parliament or rejuvenation of tired party politics. But, on the whole, Blair justifiably claimed to have made Britain a more open nation.
Such openness matters, Popper thought, because the search for a utopian social end-point was doomed. Historicism, the view shared by Marx and Plato that societies evolved to an ideal state, led only to totalitarianism. Nostalgia for a golden age was just political cover: “We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of the closed society,” Popper concluded. “If we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and the insecure, using what reason we have to plan as well as we can.”
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Peter Kellner
For 40 years I have been a devotee of public attitudes data, both as a journalist and now as president of the polling company YouGov. When the New York Times first coined the term “the second superpower” to describe world public opinion, I thought: “Yes! I help to give this superpower its voice.” But I have come to believe that giving public opinion direct political expression is a dangerous folly.
Nevertheless, following the Westminster expenses scandal and the backlash it has created, a range of populist, direct democracy measures are now being proposed, particularly by the Conservatives. At their heart lies a tool virtually unknown in Britain until the latter part of the 20th century, but which Labour has encouraged and the Conservatives now embrace with the fervour of repentant sinners: the referendum. If David Cameron becomes prime minister, we face not only a referendum on the EU, but a blizzard of local votes on council tax and other issues. Cameron, along with some on the left, is also considering open primaries to select MPs and petitions to recall (or depose) them if enough voters disapprove of their actions. Also on the agenda are a sharp reduction in the number of MPs and California-style ballot initiatives, meaning the right to table further referendums. Yet I believe almost all of these will lead to worse government.
Direct democracy is superficially attractive. Politicians think it puts them in touch with the people, and it is popular with an electorate now used to being asked its opinions, not least through popular votes on programmes like Britain’s Got Talent and Big Brother. But it hollows out the accountability and legitimacy of parliament just when these should be strengthened. Indeed, taken together these mooted reforms could lead us down a slippery slope towards the California model, where referendums and recalls have destabilised politics, seen schools and hospitals go broke, and civil liberties threatened. The time has come to reassert the case for a robust representative democracy, in which politicians listen to the concerns of voters, but do not surrender their judgement to them, or to the polls that people like me produce.
Referendums are a recent addition to British political life, beginning in their modern form in an argument about Welsh pub opening times in the mid-1960s. A handful followed in the 1970s, over Northern Ireland, Europe and devolution.
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Christopher de Bellaigue
“However this struggle ends,” said a perspiring middle-aged woman at the first of the monstrous anti-government demonstrations in Tehran on 15th June, “something in Iran has changed forever.” She gestured over her shoulder, back along the broad, sun-baked Azadi Street, at the solid mass of Iranians behind her, marching, chanting and showing the victory sign. This event, many participants said, was easily the biggest show of popular discontent since the Islamic revolution of 1979. Unlike other rallies of recent years—state-sponsored affairs dutifully attended by government employees— this one was illegal, self-policed, and exuberantly good-humoured.
I walked with the marchers for much of the three-mile route. To begin with, concerned to deter possible attacks by armed anti-riot police or members of the Basij—a big, highly ideological force of reservists—nervous-looking organisers husbanded the crowd into compact blocks. Then, as the afternoon wore on, and people kept arriving in their thousands and the slogans grew in wit and ribaldry, so the participants’ sense of their own invincibility seemed to increase. As the day ended, vendors of ice cream and faludeh, an Iranian sweet, did brisk business. The crowd, one policeman was quoted as saying, was well over 1m strong. Of the riot police and the feared Basij, there was as yet no sign.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president of the past four years, stands accused by these and many other Iranians who took to the streets in the following days, of perverting the presidential election of 12th June, which—so his interior ministry announced—he won by a landslide. For much of a generally lacklustre campaign, Ahmadinejad, a polarising populist admired by many poorer Iranians for doling out loans and handouts, and proclaiming his desire to serve the common man, had been the candidate to beat.
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Archie Brown
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it’s worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People’s Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
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Moataz El Fegiery
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo today is meant as a fresh start for America’s relationship with the Muslim world. But the simple fact of choosing Egypt, a bellwether state in the Arab world, matters just as much. The Bush administration, in another Cairo speech by Condi Rice in 2005, pushed it pro-freedom agenda by openly criticising Egyptian democracy, embarrassing the government and bolstering Egyptian human rights activists. Bush’s mistakes in Iraq ultimately lead such words to be associated only with unwise military intervention. But even this should not entirely over-shadow the real successes of some US democracy promotion policies; successes Obama would do well not to forget when he speaks tomorrow.
The speech is something of a diplomatic rebirth for Egypt itself, and an end to a recent diplomatic freeze with the US following President Mubarak’s first White House visit in five years. This freeze was in part a legacy of pro-democracy pressures from both Europe and the US between 2003 and 2005, which implicitly helped to trigger a wave of popular opposition protests unprecedented in the country’s history. The Egyptian authorities, in turn, were forced to show relative tolerance, both towards demonstrations and increasingly vocal criticisms of political and social conditions. Similar tough love strategies had also begun to show democratic chinks of success in Iran, the Middle East’s other key strategic state.
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Andrew Feinstein
Since democracy came to South Africa in 1994, 16th December has been celebrated as a day of reconciliation. But this year it may instead hark back to its apartheid incarnation, when it marked the bloody defeat of Zulu king Dingane by early Afrikaner pioneers. For it is on this date that a group of former ANC leaders will launch a new political party, the most significant split in the organisation for almost 50 years.
Those who have quit the ruling party and emerged as leaders of the new entity—which may be called the Democratic Congress—include former defence minister, “Terror” Lekota, the former premier of the rich Gauteng province, Mbhazima Shilowa, and a host of other less senior leaders who back former president Thabo Mbeki.
It was Mbeki’s precipitous removal from office by the Jacob Zuma-led ANC in late September that galvanised his supporters into action. The controversial Zuma, who defeated Mbeki for the ANC presidency in December 2007, forced Mbeki to step down as the country’s president seven months before his term was due to expire, after a judge ruled not only that long-standing corruption charges against Zuma should be dropped, but also that they were politically motivated, driven by Mbeki.
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Michael Kenny
Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy
by David Marquand (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25)
In this major new account of 20th-century British history, David Marquand depicts Harold Wilson as a politician who preferred to see the trees to the wood. It’s a witty and useful metaphor to bear in mind when approaching the literary genre that has grown up around the political history of 20th-century Britain. Many of Marquand’s predecessors placed us right in the middle of a beguiling cacophony of personalities, rows, plots and crises. We know a lot about some of the trees of our past political life as a result—but less about the pattern and nature of the wood. Against this backdrop, Marquand’s offering is striking in its ambition. Within it, both trees and wood get a thorough and thoughtful airing.
No doubt some of Marquand’s insights stem from the proximity afforded by his political career—first at Westminster as Labour MP for Ashfield, then with Roy Jenkins at the European commission, and subsequently as a founding member of the SDP—as well as his status as one of the leading political intellectuals and commentators of his day. And yet he chooses to remove all traces of himself from his narrative. This combination of close-up judgement and self-absence is revealing. It suggests the ethos of the era when the author came of age: the more austere and formal world of 1950s high politics, when the ideals of public service, civic duty and high-minded liberalism were in the ascendant. Not for Marquand the self-indulgence of political history as gossip, or of political commentary that takes the form of loudly-stated opinion.
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