Right Reason

Peace in the Middle East?

 

O tempora! O mores!

-Cicero, In Catilinam

  

In the past three days both Barack Obama and John Kerry have published op/eds about their foreign policy in the Middle East under the guise of writing about violent extremism, as if it’s the violent extremism of, say, Green parties that’s the problem . As can be expected from op/eds from people in their positions, they said little and meant even less. 

  

If I were an optimist, I would praise the international division of labor as being a civilizing force that unites all of mankind into peaceful cooperation, but I’m not and so I won’t. Doing so, anyways would be, as Arnold Kling points out at AskBlog, giving into wishful libertarian thinking. 

When I think of peace in the middle east Edmund Burke’s line from Letters on a Regicide Peace that "men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites" quickly comes to mind. Like Mr. Kling, I tend to favor the conservative civilization versus barbarism lens when it comes to the institutions of the Middle East. I don’t know how valid institutional analysis will be to regions like Syria in prescribing good institutions because I don’t know if those institutions would even have legitimacy. 

Herein lie the problem about Mssrs. Kerry and Obama singing the praise of communities organizing around peace in their op/eds: Communities in Syria and Iraq aren’t necessarily going to be pulling together towards peace. Many will be pulling together to help support the Islamic State assert its territorial claims in the region. It really all comes down to culture and whether local cultures can even support civilly liberal societies. Those who put faith in Arab Spring underestimated how much good institutions are contingent on culture if they are to emerge.

A passage from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is well worth quoting on this point: "Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."

 

 

If I were to give advice to a Middle Easterner wanting prosperity, I would recommend that he, but especially she, look elsewhere. Maybe Europe, but most likely the United States. In a sense, I write off the entire region as a failed state. ISIL has grown to the point where peace-loving Middle Easterners have to take up arms against it. Patriotic duty summons Kurds and the Shia population in Iraq to arms.  

That’s not to say that Middle Easterners are evil and vicious people. I think that they may be just as virtuous as Westerners. Plus, I think that a century of horrendous foreign policy from Paris, London, Washington DC and Moscow have all ensured that at least this generation of Middle Eastern states will be eventually sorted into the ‘having failed category.’ That Iraq, for instance, would eventually collapse to sectarian violence was a matter of time. Nevertheless, I think that their culture lacks the regard for liberalism and bourgeois dignity necessary to really give 

 

The country I’d be most optimistic about (not counting Israel, since it really isn’t culturally apart of the Middle East) would probably be Iran. Persia has had a thriving secular culture for centuries before the 1979 revolution, evidenced by the fact that wine continued to have been produced until the Ayatollahs put a stop to it. Wine continues to be sold in volume on the black market there today. Even women's hairstyles of the last one hundred years reflected a growth of Western culture in Iran that was suddenly put to a halt with the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, though the same could be said of the same thing throughout the Muslim world at the period. Unfortunately, the foreign policy of Western countries are doing their best to isolate the nation. In doing so, however much Western nations may be talking the fight against Islamic terrorism, they push opinion there ever more behind the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Republic. 

A Meditation on Democracy

 

Simon V Montfort, comte de Leicester

On this day in 1265, Simon de Montfort summoned the first Parliament to Westminster Palace. After seizing power after defeating the Plantagenet King Henry III, who still remained king but who had to surrender his son Edward as a hostage, de Montfort was loosing his grip on power. His mandate to power was defeating a great noble in power and his allies were drifting away, concerned with both de Montfort’s treatment of Henry as well as his use of foreign knights. Whatever one’s opinions about monarchs, it’s a curious historical accident that Simon de Montfort, who certainly ruled no less autocratically as the worst Plantagenet kings in his short reign as quasi-king, would come to be known as a progenitor of democracy.  

And that brings me to the main topic of the day: In “One Cheer for Democracy”, the Adam Smith Institute’s Eamonn Butler provides us with a classical-liberal meditation for the day:

Today (20 January) is hailed in the UK as Democracy Day – the 750th anniversary of the establishment of the first parliament of elected representatives in Westminster. Let’s not get too dewy-eyed. We classical liberals are democrats, but we are sceptical democrats. Yes, some (minimal) functions require collective action. We think that the public, not elites, should make those decisions – and that representative government is probably the best way to do it.

But we are fully aware hat the democratic process is far from perfect. It is not about reconciling different interests (as markets do), but about choosing between conflicting interests – a battle in which only one side can win. Democracy is tainted by the self-interest of electors, of representatives and of officials; it can produce deeply irrational results; and all too often it leads to minority groups being exploited, and their liberties curbed, all in the name of ‘democracy’.

Any democracy worth praising wouldn’t take de Montfort as its ancestor. Simon de Montfort was a warlord who gained immense power by surreptitiously marrying the king’s youngest sister, whose aggressive campaigns in in Gascon saw him being summoned back to England to face a trial and who continued to advocate war in France even while all hope for holding the old Angevin realms died out. Although it is certainly romantic to think of a figure waging war against the king for the rule of law and for democracy, to think of de Montfort motivated principally by those concerns would be fantasy. 

William Gladstone, that great liberal statesman, repeatedly proclaimed that he would support the masses over the classes. At its root, praiseworthy democracy is an outcome of our bourgeois era. With the great enrichment of the masses has come their demand that they have a voice in politics. While I’m certainly skeptical of representative government, I’m not skeptical of economic prosperity and one does lead to another. We’ve just got to be careful, on this Democracy Day (let’s just assume we’re all British for the day), that we’re careful to identify the way the arrow of causation goes.  

So, one cheer for representative government. Three cheers for prosperity! 

Jokowi Wins in Indonesia

 

 

For those looking for some good news in politics, turn your attention to Indonesia. From The Economist's "Indonesia's democracy: A new kind of president":

THE wait is over. After taking two weeks to count 135m ballots from 480,000-odd polling stations across the vast archipelago, Indonesia’s Election Commission (the KPU) has at last confirmed that Joko Widodo has been elected president. The commission said that Mr Joko, the governor of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, and his vice-presidential running mate, Jusuf Kalla, won 71m votes at the election on July 9th. That represents 53.2% of the valid votes. The losers, Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa, won 62.6m votes, or 46.9%. Mr Joko was victorious in 23 of the country’s 33 provinces. His winning margin of 8.4m votes, or 6.3 percentage points, was even wider than had been predicted by most of the respected pollsters on the night of the election. 

Mr Joko, known to all as Jokowi, is due to start his five-year term as leader of the world’s third-largest democracy on October 20th. He will be like no leader Indonesia has had before, with roots in neither the army nor an established family. This sets him apart from his early patron, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who is the daughter of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno and was president herself from 2001 to 2004. Instead Jokowi rose up through local government, a product of the far-reaching political decentralisation that was introduced after the overthrow of Suharto, Indonesia’s late dictator, in 1999. A former furniture-seller, Jokowi was elected mayor of Solo, a medium-sized city in central Java, before becoming Jakarta’s governor in 2012. He has a reputation for being a man of the people. 

As the third-largest democracy in the world, if Indonesia can maintain the institutions of a liberal civilization, then there is hope for liberalism in the future. There is more to liberalism than democracy, but the election of a civilian from a humble beginning is a sign of hope for the political plight of poor nations across the world as they are hurled from the rule of the military to the rule of cronies and back again.

 

The election of a bourgeois candidate is certainly a sign of hope for the prosperity of world-wide liberalism, and it should remind us that the most important political victories aren't necessarily about having the right policy so much as having the right identity. Buttressed by bourgeois dignity, the liberal civilization can be a hardy weed, but without that identity it can easily wither and die as soon as policy changes. We therefore shouldn't look at Jokowi's victory as a victory of democracy so much as a victory for bourgeois dignity.