STABILITY OR PARALYSIS

There is said to be a Chinese curse, May you live in interesting Times, complacently promoting the opposing merits of the quiet life, the predictable future and what we call “stability”. This desire for stability is very human but life is dynamic and constantly evolving; statesmen who seek to put a lid on change and direct national energies in a prescribed direction are walking a tightrope where success only comes to the fortunate and the sure-footed. “Stability” can perpetuate an outworn status quo and an unjust society. Prudent conservatism needs always to be accompanied by a clear agenda of what really needs to be preserved and what must be altered to fit the new society in which we live.

A North Korean parade, the ultimate in Stability?

There are extremes of stability. The Kim Il Sung dynasty has oppressed North Korea since 1948, 65 years of murderous nightmare and rigid totalitarianism for its luckless citizens. A revolution there is long overdue, even at some human cost. Post-Mao China retains institutionalised communist party rule and her leadership can look geriatric; a change of its ruling group every 10 years, even though imposed by a self-appointed oligarchy, is a useful reform. After Mao’s upheavals, China’s relative stability allows her to concentrate on her own distinctive and fruitful state capitalism. Russia under Putin is “stable” and is inching towards some form of free national dialogue despite an overhang of attitudes from dictatorial times. Yet Russia’s role in the world needs earnest internal debate.

Hamlet-like Obama

The West should not look on these Russian and Asiatic nations condescendingly. In our self-satisfaction, we too have our rigidities and lack of focus. The United States was once confident in its power. Now it seems diminished, with President Obama stumbling and faltering and the two great parties failing to engage the people in substantive debate. Maybe the Economic Crisis has undermined the “we-can-do-it” ethos, although financial recovery is gaining pace. Maybe a problem like Syria is just too complex and the American appetite for organising global change has understandably withered. If it has, she must now limit her commitments and review her alliances. In smaller things too, the US clings to an ultra-conservative agenda. The Constitution allows citizens to bear arms, but surely sensible gun-control can be agreed in Congress to avoid the sickening monthly massacres in schools and campuses perpetrated by unbalanced psychopaths toting freely-available AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. The US government really needs to take a grip on issues of this kind.

Europe is not an encouraging template.  It rushed into the Eurozone without adequately establishing its institutions and created 6 years misery for the Mediterranean members. Despite its manifold failures the unelected EU mandarins (Barroso, van Rompuy, Rehn et al) insist on ill-conceived programmes of austerity and now on a unified fiscal and banking regime – a classic case of “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”. The EU is a world class enterprise but its leaders have simply over-reached themselves. Retaining the Euro is given priority over the sovereignty and well-being of Eurozone members, a recipe for major trouble and instability. If such instability leads to a re-think at Brussels it would be useful, but previous leaders who questioned the Euro, George Papandreou and Silvio Berlusconi, were deposed in party coups probably orchestrated by Brussels.

Merkel wins but Europe loses?

                                                  

Angela Merkel has been the driving force behind EU austerity for Club Med. She invokes the simple good housekeeping nostrums of her “Swabian Housewife” but the issues are not so straightforward. Germany has manoeuvred herself into a system where her currency is substantially undervalued, her exporters prosper at the expense of her weaker Eurozone partners and she builds up large trade surpluses year after year. She must appreciate that this comfortable but anomalous position is untenable but Germany seems deaf to all intellectual arguments. Merkel will stay on as Chancellor following the German elections but Europe will hardly react with much enthusiasm.

Nowhere will that lack of enthusiasm be more marked than in Greece, whose citizens are in their 6^th year of self-defeating recession for which Merkel and Germany get much of the popular blame. True, the blame really lies with the many Greek politicians whose greed, incompetence and blatant embezzlement created the Hellenic mess, but Germany is a convenient and partly plausible scapegoat. The current New Democracy-PASOK coalition is an alliance of all the elements who created Greece’s crisis and is held in public derision. Alarmingly, the continuation of the coalition is polarising opinion with the Left-wing SYRIZA holding about 28% of support according to polls, but not making a profound public impact, while the noisy and violent Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, with some 15% support, gains ground. Talk of civil war is probably exaggerated but instability is growing and firm government is required. New elections might help clear the air and give legitimacy to a new regime.

Golden Dawn street politics

Britain is stable enough and threats to that stability can be overcome. There seems little prospect from the polls that the September 2014 Referendum will grant independence to Scotland, so agonising on that score should hopefully be consigned to the dustbin of history. Labour leader Ed Miliband (“Mili Minor” as he has been recently dubbed to differentiate him from his brighter ousted elder brother David)) contends that Britain needs “more socialism” – a politically suicidal belief anywhere other than in a Clem Attlee Memorial Meeting Room in Hampstead, so Labour is unlikely to surge forward. Certainly the maverick UKIP party will make hay in the 2014 European elections, maybe even winning a majority of British seats in Strasbourg but one-issue UKIP’s support will melt by the 2015 general election.

David Cameron and the Tories should win, as they are professedly Eurosceptic and vigorous ministers Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt have tackled key issues in education and health respectively for which electoral credit will be earned. Continuing a coalition with the Lib-Dems may be necessary and even be in accordance with the public mood. It is well within Cameron’s managerial competence to fix this.

David Cameron, a likely winner in 2015

Cameron’s failure to persuade Parliament that Britain should intervene in Syria was an exemplary lesson and reverberated in Washington. This brings us to the final area of instability, the “Arab Spring”. Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that the Great Powers meddle in the Middle East at their peril and the outcome is unlikely to be pleasant. Arab society is in turmoil and the various forces of religion, nationalism, secularism and democracy need to be played out on the ground by the local populations and their political leaders. Violence is endemic, but the West and Russia should not intervene and depend instead upon Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League to resolve the conflicts themselves and limit the conflagration.

Hot air only please, Mr Hague

We can tolerate the vacuous rhetoric of William Hague (and Barack Obama) expatiating upon the horrors of using chemical weapons and extolling the values of Democracy, as long as they are just words, hot air, and are not accompanied by action of any kind. The politicians will have satisfied their vanity and their publics will sigh with relief, conserve their treasure and not sacrifice any young soldiers’ lives.

SMD

22.09.13

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013