Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 564

The Middle Eastern Revolutions That Never Were

Bloodshed, fragmentation, and repression portend a Middle Eastern future very different from the democratic dreams that many Western observers and some young locals entertained in 2011 and 2012. When the so-called revolutions of the region began to produce instability and violence, some analysts suggested there was no need to worry. What was happening in the Middle East was a process, albeit a painful one, that was common to countries that had undergone transitions to democracy. Yet it turns out that Egypt is not France and even Tunisia, the Arab Spring’s lone “success story”, is not Poland. For various political, structural, and historical reasons, unlike Western Europe of two centuries ago or Eastern Europe of two decades ago, authoritarian instability, not rocky democratic transitions, is the Middle East’s new reality.

The Middle East is not actually different from other regions of the world with the exception of Europe. Most transitions do not succeed. Their failures can radicalize politics and, historically, authoritarianism, not democracy, has been the norm across the world. Yet this kind of macro-level comparison only reveals so much. Beyond establishing that the Middle East is not exceptional, it does not tell observers why democratic change was thwarted and violence both within and in some cases between societies has become so widespread. The failures in Iraq—authored by both Iraqis and Americans—have certainly had an impact on the region. Syria’s conflict is a vortex pulling in fighters, proxies, money, and weapons while spinning out violence within and beyond. The emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in territory taken from the Syrian and Iraqi governments is destabilizing in a different way. Yet Iraq’s wars, Syria’s destruction, and the “success” of the Islamic State do not explain why Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, or even non-Arab Turkey, look the way they do. The failures of democratic development or, in Turkey’s case, democratic continuity or maturation, are just as much a cause of this ghastly moment in the Middle East as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s barrel bombs. What went wrong?It has become common to refer to events of 2011 as the “revolutions of the Middle East.” Perhaps this is just shorthand for people who do not really know the difference between a state, a regime, a dynasty, and a revolution, but this does not make it any less misleading. Yes, people in a number of Middle Eastern countries rose up and deposed their leaders. New leaders or caretakers emerged, some declaring that they would “protect the revolution” and prepare the society, or the nation, for democracy. Revolutions, when properly defined and understood, are far more complex affairs both in origin and outcome, however. A successful revolution requires an “actual change of state and class structure.” Regimes can change within state structures (as in Tunisia) without constituting a revolution; dynasties can change within regimes, too, (as in Egypt) in ways that fall far short of a revolution.Moreover, revolutions, which are radicalizing by definition, do not always lead to democracy. Remember that it took the modern archetype—France in 1789—a long, long time to reach a stable democratic outcome, and history provides several prominent examples in which revolutionary upheavals resulted in no democracy at all, but in bloodier and more radical forms of authoritarianism: Russia in 1917, China in 1949, and Iran in 1979, to name but a few. Hard as it may be for the Manichean American mind to imagine that there might be a third or a fourth possible outcome between the status quo ante and democracy, that is exactly the case in the Middle East. It is important to understand this because what the Arab uprisings produced is an important part of today’s Middle Eastern puzzle. In significant ways, they left some countries stuck between an old, discredited political order and a hoped-for yet unattainable democratic political system, with a third force benefitting from the contested political space in between. The failure to sweep away ancien régimes left the forces of progressive political change vulnerable to better-organized and well-financed opponents who do not share their vision anymore than they support the old order. These opponents are mainly Islamists of one kind or another, but the relative positions of the old order, the new democrats and the Islamist forces differs from country to country. To understand this let us look more closely at Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.Egypt: Longtime Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak may have found himself holed up in a villa under virtual house arrest in Sharm el-Sheikh almost a month after protesters first poured in Tahrir Square, but the political and social order over which he presided and from which they benefited remained intact. In Egypt, there was no purge of the Armed Forces, the General Intelligence Directorate, or the Ministry of Interior. The judiciary was untouchable. And the caretaker governments that administered the country for the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which assumed executive authority on February 11, 2011, were made up primarily of people who served Mubarak. It is true that shortly after Mohammed Morsi came to power in mid-2012 he did sack the intelligence chief, Major-General Murad Muwafi, pushed out longtime Minister of Defense Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, and fired other senior commanders, but this amounted to little more than personnel moves that ambitious, lower-ranking officers enabled. The Morsi government never achieved control over the main instruments of state from the armed forces; had it been able it do so, it might have been in a position to make a genuine revolution. But the very same people Morsi promoted brought him down and jailed him eleven months later in large part because the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Morsi was a member, threatened the actual (as opposed to formal constitutional) social and political order upon which the officers and their allies ruled the country.The real institutions—the laws, regulations, rules, and decrees—that are the foundations of Egypt’s social and political order can be traced back to the 1950s and the Free Officers’ struggle to consolidate their power after toppling the Egyptian monarchy. Paradoxically, Egypt’s leaders have sought to reinforce the (erroneous) idea that they were building a democracy. Since 1956, all of Egypt’s constitutions have set out an array of freedoms and liberties. Egypt’s 2014 constitution is no different, paying homage to “democracy as a path, a future, and a mode of living.” Yet like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat, and Mubarak before him, President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab, and the cabinet of ministers have—absent a parliament—produced laws that restrict the press, curb the right to protest, and stifle the activities of nongovernmental organizations. Sisi has also unveiled a terrorism law that recycles aspects of previous laws, but goes a step further by rendering thought a crime.Egyptian legislation has often rescinded in practice the personal freedoms and political rights that the constitution protects in theory. Sisi’s new restrictions are merely the latest iterations in this pattern now stretching back some six decades. Complementing these formal institutions, in the sense that they are written down, are uncodified norms rooted in past practices that reflect the way things get done because that is the way things have always been done. The formal and informal rules that shaped people’s expectations and behavior in Egypt have not been broken through four years of political turbulence. The discourse may have changed and for a time people may have been bolder in criticizing the government, but Egypt today looks more like it did before the uprising than what the people who instigated the demonstrations dreamed it would be. It may be Sisi’s Egypt, but it is an innovation of Mubarak’s Egypt, which was built on Sadat’s Egypt, which was in turn an evolution of Nasser’s Egypt.Rather than revolutions, the end of both Mubarak and Morsi’s reigns were salvage exercises intended to reset what the coalition that took part in and supported the military’s interventions believe to be Egypt’s natural political order. In certain ways, both men were ousted to prevent fundamental alterations to a regime that served the interests of the military, the judiciary, and the intelligence services so well. Had Gamal Mubarak succeeded his father in an informal dynastic mode, it would have broken the informal institutional link between the military and the presidency that has made the armed forces senior command so powerful over time. Morsi broke whatever deal he struck with Sisi in the summer of 2012 and sought to remake Egypt consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s moralizing authoritarian worldview, which meant he also had to go. As for the revolutionaries, activists, and others who sang in Midan al-Tahrir for days after two Presidents were toppled in eighteen months; they were dupes.Tunisia: Former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, may have fled to exile in Jeddah on January 14, 2011, and the constitution of 2014 is certainly a departure from the Ben Ali period. Yet the rapturous reporting on it, which creates the impression that congenial Tunisians came together in the spirit of compromise and consensus to produce “the one Arab Spring success story” is highly misleading. Tunisia’s constitution is the product of a rather nasty political fight—as institution building usually is—that pitted very different visions of Tunisia’s future against one another. The constitution represents a draw that has not carried over into electoral politics. The parliamentary and presidential elections held in late 2014 resulted in a soft restoration of the old order. This should not be terribly surprising given the fact that, as in Egypt, the social order that prevailed under Ben Ali survived his fall. Ben Ali and his extended family controlled a shockingly large part of the economy. They are gone—now living in Jeddah, Paris, and Montreal—but the political class that collaborated with them stayed on. They have continued to benefit from an economy that the former leader rigged in their favor.There was, of course, the chance that in post-Ben Ali Tunisia the forces that coalesced to drive him from power would alter this reality in a new political system, but they came up short politically. Tunisia’s new President, the 88-year old Beji Caid Essebsi, served modern Tunisia’s founder, Habib Bourguiba, as minister of interior, defense, and foreign affairs, and was the President of the Chamber of Deputies in the early Ben Ali period. That did not necessarily make him an ally of Ben Ali, who sought to outmaneuver the “Bourguibists” after he came to power in a place coup in 1987, but this was an incumbent-level political contest, not a struggle over the system. After the elections in late 2014, Essebsi and his party, Nidaa Tounes, sought to form an exceedingly narrow coalition government that intended to keep the Islamist al-Nahda Movement, which held the second largest bloc of seats in the parliament, out of the government. Electoral math made this impossible, resulting in a far broader coalition government in which the two biggest players check each other. This stalemate may prove to be good for Tunisian democracy because it forces parties to work together in ways that reinforce negotiation, compromise, and consensus. Yet this kind of political equilibrium is also vulnerable to disruption from unanticipated events. What the Tunisian case ought to teach Americans—and any other remedial comparative politics student that may happen to be around—is that it is possible to move from a system in which there are sham elections to one in which there are real elections and still not produce anything like a revolution.The March 2015 terrorist attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis that killed 21 people and the murder of 38 tourists on a beach in Sousse three months later may have constituted that disruption. The resulting anti-terror law, which is almost a hundred pages long and was reportedly debated for a mere three hours, revives many of the same problematic provisions of legislation that existed under Ben Ali, including the death penalty; it also increases the time a suspect can be held without charge from six to fifteen days. The most troublesome part of the legislation is its overly broad definition of what constitutes terrorism. This has often been the way governments in the region have hammered political opponents and justified widespread abuse of human rights as well as the violation of personal and political freedoms that national constitutions guarantee.This dynamic should be very familiar to Tunisians. After Ben Ali’s 1987 takeover from the ailing, erratic, and autocratic Bourguiba—the first so-called Jasmine Revolution—there was considerable hope that the new leader would break the grip of vested economic interests that had developed around Bourguiba’s state-directed development and allow greater political contestation. This optimism was misplaced, however. Ben Ali, who had been a police general and minister of interior, cracked down on political competitors, specifically al-Nahda, after the 1989 general elections. Although it garnered only about 15 percent of the overall vote, the Islamists did well in districts surrounding the Tunisian capital, far outstripping the totals of all secular parties with the exception of Ben Ali’s party, the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (the Democratic Constitutional Rally, known by the acronym RCD). Based on the results, al-Nahda’s leadership demanded that the government recognize the group as a political party (its members ran in the elections as independents), which was subsequently denied. In response, al-Nahda’s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, insinuated that the government’s unwillingness to grant his group legal status would not stop its activists and supporters from taking over the political system. Ghannouchi’s challenge provided Ben Ali the opportunity to repress al-Nahda, positioning himself as the guarantor of Tunisia’s secular orientation in the face of “militant Islam.” Tunisia had never been a democracy, but the late-1980s crackdown was the basis for the fearsome police state and kleptocracy that Tunisians rose up against two decades later.The challenge of the self-proclaimed Islamic State is, of course, far greater than Ghannouchi’s 1989 rhetorical threat, which is why the new anti-terrorism law passed so handily. Al-Nahda’s current deputies supported the law, either confident of the democratic progress that Tunisia has made in the almost five years since Ben Ali’s fall or they were constrained politically to vote for the law, lest they be accused of sympathizing with extremists. It is more likely the latter given who Essebsi is, his worldview, and his party, which represents the social class that benefited most from the old political order. The very fact that the government has resurrected Ben Ali-era laws, decrees, and regulations to meet their current political and security challenges is not surprising. If the more ambiguous aspects of these measures are leveraged to impose Nidaa Tounes’s will on the political arena, the second Jasmine Revolution of 2011 will end up looking similar to the first.Libya: Libya may have come closest to a successful revolution, but what was left behind after Muammar Qaddafi was pushed from power and killed is just as salient for the country’s future trajectory as it is for other places around the region. While Tunisians and Egyptians who sought to live in more open, democratic, and just societies have had to confront the institutional and social legacies of the old order, Libyans face an entirely different problem. Qaddafi’s “Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya ”—the latter being the combination of two Arabic words, jama‘a and hurriyya, meaning community and freedom respectively—conveyed the idea of direct democracy in which decisions both large and small trickled up to those who would execute the will of the people. After Qaddafi fell in October 2011, at least some observers hoped that Libya may have had an advantage—relative especially to Egypt—in a transition to democracy. The supposed benefit in Qaddafi’s radical approach to governance for Libya’s new leaders was not that Libyans had become well-practiced in the consensual decision-making and compromise that was allegedly intrinsic to the Jamahiriyya—this was all nonsense—but rather that the country was left with few formal political institutions to speak of. It is easier to pour novelty into a vacuum than into a deep-state political machine.This was an interesting idea that made intuitive sense, and the elections for the General National Congress in July 2012, in which a non-Islamist, moderate coalition earned a plurality in the new body, seemed to many a harbinger of Libya’s democratic potential. Yet Libya’s blank slate created its own set of unique problems that made it extraordinarily difficult to build a functioning political system of any kind, much less a democratic one. A range of informal linkages and associations based on deeply engrained affinities defined by tribe, region, and city filled the void, contributing to the country’s fragmentation and violence.Institutional Interests Intertwined with the idea that the uprisings were not revolutions, new leaders in the Middle East have not built political systems through which people can hold officials accountable. They have not written electoral laws that provide a level-playing field for established politicians and the newly mobilized. They have not drafted laws that make personal and political rights sacrosanct. Rather, in the face of internal challenges, new leaders have used force and coercion—the tried and true tactics of authoritarians—to bring their societies to heel. This is likely a function in part of worldview. Neither of Egypt’s post-Mubarak leaders, nor those vying for power in Libya, nor Tunisia’s Essebsi, come from traditions that value democratic ideals. Yet as much as worldview matters, the institutions that shape people’s behavior and expectations in a society matter even more in the political trajectory of states.In the contested aftermath of the uprisings in the Arab world or the political challenge that was the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, leaders there also discovered or resurrected institutions that helped them resolve their internal political problems. Indeed, Turkey is particularly instructive in this regard. Although it did not experience an uprising like those in the Arab world, the political unrest that began in May 2013—which has never actually ended—revealed that, like Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans, and others in the Arab world, manyTurks also wanted an end to arbitrary government, police brutality, corruption, and crony capitalism within what everyone acknowledged already was a reasonably mature electoral democracy.The Turkish protests never reached the scale of the Egyptian uprising, but they nevertheless rattled the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In response, the Turkish leadership leveraged existing institutions or crafted new ones to meet the challenge the protests represented. Demonstration organizers were subsequently arrested on terrorism charges, social media came under new restrictions, and nongovernmental organizations identified as sympathetic to the protests confronted a zealous enforcement of regulations that governed their operations and financing. By late 2013 and early 2014, with a number of government ministers, AKP-affiliated businessmen, and even members of then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s family implicated in a corruption scandal, the Prime Minister and fellow party leaders politicized the investigation, undermined the constitutional prerogatives of the police and prosecutors, and ensured that their core constituency would never accept the outcome of the inquiry by blaming it on foreign elements jealous of Turkey’s success. In his effort to reestablish political control, Erdogan went beyond manipulating institutions or discovering new ones to meet his specific needs. Instead he and the AKP disregarded existing rules, regulations, and laws.The reason why these expedient responses to political challenges will have a profound impact on countries of the Middle East well into the future has to do with the very nature of institutions. Because they reflect the interests of those in power, institutions tend to be “sticky.” When they change—absent a genuine revolution—they do so based on a state’s prevailing laws, decrees, rules, and regulations. That is to say, when institutions change, the existing institutional setting shapes the direction and quality of this evolution. This transformation most often has less to do with the needs of society, more to do with the needs of an elite seeking to guarantee the benefits they have come to enjoy as a result of their advantageous political position. The rigged nature of these systems tends to produce a range of socioeconomic and political pathologies—large gaps between wealthy and poor, rule by law as oppose to rule of law, little social mobility, massive security sectors, subsidies, and extremist ideologies—which can radicalize societies, producing violence and instability that in turn justify the authoritarianism of regimes.Yet what was left after the uprisings and how elites (or competing groups of elites) have sought to leverage this detritus only tells part of the story of the region. Flowing directly from the rigged natures of the Tunisian or Egyptian political systems or the distinct lack of order in Libyan politics, another potent catalyst for instability, uncertainty, and violence has emerged: identity.Who Are We?When protesters descended upon the now-famous squares of the Arab world in late 2010 and 2011, one could not help but share in the exhilaration of the people in the region who were finally refusing to give in to pervasive fear that their leaders had cultivated over many decades. This was certainly novel, but in many ways they were seeking the answers to questions people in the region have been asking since the 19th century when Islamic reformers, nationalists, and liberals began grappling with the problem of European political and cultural imperialism: Who are we? What kind of governments do we want? What is the proper relationship between religion and society? What is our place in the global political order?By the mid-20th century, Britain and France had left or were driven out of the region and new elites like Nasser in Egypt, Houari Boumediene in Algeria, Tunisia’s Bourguiba, and later others such as Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein in Syria and Iraq respectively, rose to lead the modernization and institutionalization of their respective countries. Under their leadership questions about nationalism, identity, and citizenship were seemingly resolved through the experience of the anti-colonial struggle and a semblance of secular-tinted progress. The sentiments of the age were captured in the Algerian revolutionary triplet, “Algeria is my country, Islam is my religion, and Arabic is my language”, which was a muscular and defiant statement of who Algerians were after 130 years of French colonialism. Yet a similar phrase could have been coined in nearly any of the countries of the Middle East.The Arab leaders who came to power after the first wave of decolonization eventually became a conservative old guard who replaced revolutionary ardor with tired platitudes. Few in the Middle East today remember the triumphs of this bygone era—independence, nationalizations, and reforms that briefly produced educational opportunities and social mobility. In a region where the median age is well below thirty in all but two countries, the vast majority of Arabs have instead experienced failing social contracts, police brutality, and official indifference. Nevertheless, Arab elites continued to define national identities through a mixture of old school anti-colonialism, economic nationalism, and historical mythologies sprinkled with paeans to the importance of Islam as a civilization as much or more than as a religion. During the Cold War, some Arab countries leaned either a little or a lot toward the Soviet Union—Egypt before 1972, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, South Yemen for a time—which burnished their progressive pretensions without actually making their societies progressive; others, including all the monarchies, leaned toward Western countries, including the United States. After the Cold War ended, even leaders who still held themselves out as nationalists par excellence applied neoliberal economic reforms hatched at the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), survived in part on assistance from the West, purchased copious amounts of weapons from those same countries, and consorted with American and European elites at places like Davos. This was a world that did not make sense to Middle Easterners.When Arabs chased Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh from power and threatened the Assads in Syria, they gave themselves an opportunity to redefine who they are. Yet they have failed, at least thus far, to do so. To varying degrees, both Essebsi and Sisi have offered narrow visions of what it means to be Tunisian or Egyptian, leaving no space for al-Nahda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and what they represent in their respective narratives. On a visit to the United States last spring, Essebsi declared that he was hopeful about his country’s political future because al-Nahda was becoming “Tunisiafied”, as if the group and its supporters had come from somewhere else and that their values were not a genuine manifestation of Tunisian society. Suddenly, in Egypt today, to support the Muslim Brotherhood is to not be authentically Egyptian, denying the central place the Brothers have played in forging Egypt’s national identity in the 20th century. To deny that the Islamist worldview has a place, albeit not an exclusive one, in the identity of these countries is ahistoric, polarizing, and likely destabilizing.Of course, identity has long been a hotly contested issue in the Middle East; it has been central to the Arab and Turkish political dramas for as long as these countries have existed. In the uncertain environment that emerged after some Arab leaders were deposed and others put in jeopardy, the question of identity took on a new urgency, however. Without a deeply held and widely believed sense of what it means to be from someplace, ideological rivalry, ethnic tension, sectarian differences, violence, and authoritarianism fill the void with often devastating results. For the Middle East this not only means a setback for democracy, but also the deaths of many thousands. It is from this disorienting environment that the Islamic State, with its grotesque beheadings, enslavement of women, massacres of Christian sects, and other outrages, has come to the fore.Although its constituent parts existed for at least a decade before the Arab uprisings, the Islamic State is a representation of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the failed aftermath of the Middle East’s version of people power. That is to say that, while the nihilism of ISIS captures the attention of the West, its grand religious and political project offers Middle Easterners (as well as Central Asians, Europeans, and some North Americans) a sense of citizenship and authenticity. The group has been so “successful” where it has failed before precisely because of the present moment of capacious failure—of Arab nationalism, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of Islamism, and of the social media-cohorts’ push for democracy—when many Arabs and Muslims are engaged in an existential struggle to define their societies and their individual place in them.Turkey always seems like an outlier, reinforcing for some the erroneous assumption that there is something about the Arab world that renders it susceptible to misrule and political calamity, but the Turks are the exception that proves the rule about identity. Conventional accounts of Turkish politics since the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rise to power often use “Islamist” and “Islamism” to describe the party, but these terms have become one-dimensional and suggest parallels to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood without capturing the true nature of Turkey’s ruling party. The AKP’s Muslim-ness is less targeted and more diffuse than Islamism, and while it certainly belongs within a broad classification of Islamist groups in the Muslim world, its underlying philosophical concerns and agenda are quite different from those organizations.This difference is a function of the Turkish experience in which Muslim-ness involves a style of politics and a social setting in which piety flows through society. Limits on alcohol consumption or women donning the hijab reflect this religious sensibility, but Muslim-ness is broader. Toward this end, Erdogan and the AKP have made exploration and expression of one’s Muslim identity not only safe and acceptable, but also valorized. Erdogan himself personifies the new Turkish man whose singular quality is being both proudly pious and Turkish. And the new Turkish woman, best represented by the wares of upscale fashion houses like Zühre or its down-market cousin, Armine, is quiet, confident, gorgeous, and covered. What is striking about these developments is how unremarkable they are in a political setting where not long ago, the hijab and public expressions of religiosity were indicators of reactionary backwardness.For all of the AKP’s success, however, this Turkish Muslim-ness is hotly contested. The roughly half of the Turkish population that has never voted for the AKP rejects its worldview and deeply resents Erdogan’s effort to establish the hegemony of Muslim-ness through the manipulation or disregard of Turkey’s political and social institutions. This helps explain why a modest protest over a small park in central Istanbul quickly became large demonstrations among those who believed their own sense of Turkishness was being marginalized. Turkey has been unstable ever since.The struggle over identity is visceral, which tends to radicalize Middle East political arenas further and thus makes it more difficult to reconcile competing visions for the future. For example, it has become relatively easier to crush the Muslim Brotherhood as Egypt’s elites have reinforced the notion that the group is somehow alien to Egyptian values, culture, and history. Egyptians and others in the region thus tend to define these conflicts in existential terms or as a fight for the hearts and souls of their country. Identity may be an issue with a long history of use and abuse by elites in the region seeking political advantage, but it has come to the fore in the post-uprising era in novel ways that have contributed to the destabilization of the region with devastating consequences.The often-ferocious effort that leaders of the region have had to exert in an effort to maintain political control reveals a gap between the locus of political authority and competing ideational notions over what Middle Eastern societies should look like. This, of course, raises the question of the viability of the state in the region. It is certainly true that the Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni, and Libyan states have become increasingly irrelevant—or not relevant at all in the latter two cases—over the past four years, but even with the conflict and contestation over identity in the region, it is premature to declare the death of the Middle Eastern state. Analysts may be guilty of overstating it, but both borders and a sense of nationalism within the system remain salient. It is important to remember that the conflict in Syria was originally over who got to rule the country and how. The same can be said for Iraq, though Kurds and at least some Anbaris have long resisted central control from Baghdad. In the countries that have not erupted in violence, the durability of the state remains an empirical question. Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for example, do not seem to be plagued with the kinds of underlying problems related to identity as other places in the region, but in the event of a crisis, the pathologies present in states that are quite clearly failing may arise.American Perceptions and ChoicesIt seems that the present instability and resurgent authoritarianism will be a feature of the Middle East for some time. It is almost certain that in the coming American election season the Middle East will not be addressed in a serious manner. Instead, Americans will hear platitudes about “protecting the homeland” and “American leadership” and a re-litigation of the Iraq War. This is unfortunate because now is a propitious moment to debate the difference between President Barack Obama’s retrenchment and other, more directly involved approaches to the complex and multilayered problems buffeting the region.Disentangling the United States from the Middle East was a policy that was borne of regional developments since 2011, but also a principle on which the President ran for office and to which he has generally remained faithful. It was based on the belief that after two inconclusive wars that were a drain on national resources, the American people had little interest in staying in (or returning to) the region in force. It was also the result of a judgment that in the increasingly chaotic aftermath of the Arab uprisings, the fragmentation of Iraq, and the deliberalization of Turkey, the United States cannot shape politics in countries where people believe they are engaged in existential struggles.These were not conclusions based on faulty assumptions. In Egypt, for example, freezing military aid in 2013 following Morsi’s overthrow and the resulting campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood made the country neither more democratic nor less unstable. Demands that Iraqi leaders rule inclusively ran counter to every incentive and constraint of politics in Baghdad. There was always the possibility than an early intervention in Syria would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, though it also could have made matters worse. No one will ever know, but the facts remain that Americans had little desire to get in the middle of what had been an uprising that morphed into a civil war and in turn became a struggle among a dizzying array of extremists groups, the Assad regime, Assad’s opponents, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia.As the death toll has piled up and Tehran has scored a number of tactical and strategic victories, America’s allies in the region and Obama’s opponents at home have been withering in their criticism. The White House’s “lack of leadership” is widely thought to have contributed to the maelstrom engulfing Syria, Iraq, the Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, and Libya. There is some logic to this. American caution encouraged regional powers to take matters into their own hands, which only seemed to intensify the conflicts underway. It was nevertheless difficult to determine what the Administration’s critics meant by “leadership” other than bringing down the Assad regime, unequivocally supporting Sisi, and confronting Iran rather than negotiating with it.The region has proven to be so unstable, however, that the White House has changed direction, if it has not exactly changed course. With $2.5 trillion in sunken costs, a tenacious threat from the Islamic State, and the prospect that the country will break up, Iraq has returned to the top of the American foreign and security policy agenda. Washington has resumed security assistance to Cairo and, despite a fair amount of ill will on both sides, the United States and Egypt are set to rebuild frayed ties. It has also become increasingly clear that the Obama Administration was moving toward some kind of change in its hands-off approach to Syria, angling for some kind of negotiate settlement in the wake of the July 14 Iran deal. But now that reversal itself seems to have been reversed, as Russian initiatives have, for the time being at least, made a political settlement less rather than more likely.Whoever becomes the next American President will likely continue to act upon the Obama Administration’s conviction that the United States has been “overinvested” in the Middle East. Yet “leadership” is no panacea. The Middle East looks the way it does today because of outcomes the people who live there have produced. The Middle East has always been hard for outsiders to manage short of suffocating force; it is now harder. The revolutions that were not to be, a cadre of leaders intent on leveraging the institutions of the state for their own interests, and a prevailing sense of failure and disorientation, have fueled unprecedented instability and violence. Policymakers should get used to it, because it will be the story of the Middle East for at least a generation to come.

Russia Probes Undersea Cables

Putin is looking for vulnerabilities in the global system and, thanks to a pervasive culture of indifference to national defense, he is finding them. The New York Times has the must-read story today:

Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.

How many other vulnerabilities have the Russians and others found? What kind of priority do a President and Congress, who seem content to let the sequester determine their defense budget priorities, place on keeping this country and its allies safe?

The internet has become an indispensable tool for private business, government, academia, journalism and ordinary Americans. And it is also a major vulnerability—a gap in our system of national defense and protection against crime that is growing daily. The lack of urgency about this issue may one day look as bad, or worse, as the poor attention to security in the months and years leading up to 9/11.The warning bells keep ringing, and the politicians don’t wake up.

What Prison Reformers Miss

Federal legislation reducing sentences for non-violent offenses is well on its way to becoming one of the first major bipartisan domestic achievements of Barack Obama’s presidency, and similar measures are being tried in several states. But top-down policy changes—whether implemented from Washington D.C. or state capitols—may only go so far in reducing the prison population.

Much of the action on sentencing has to do with how individual prosecutors exercise their discretion. According to the prominent defense attorney Harvey Silverglate, the real culprit in over-incarceration is a draconian prosecutorial culture, so the types of macro-level policy changes currently being considered won’t have much of an effect. Silverglate writes in a recent Boston Public Radio op-ed:

It is sometimes said by us criminal defense lawyers – with a dose of cynicism – that in the halls of justice, justice is often done in the halls. What we mean by this tongue-in-cheek phrase is that the informal processes among prosecutors, lawyers, defendants and witnesses has more to do with whether true justice is rendered than any of the phenomena discussed by [at a recent White House panel]. By inviting only higher-ups to engage the President, [the moderator] limited the panel to discussions of macro policy and left out how those policies play out on the ground – particularly the ways that prosecutors routinely misuse their power. […]

The panel only briefly touched upon the toxic plea bargaining culture that has developed throughout the country. U.S. Attorney Walsh proposed that mandatory-minimum sentences be reserved only for the most violent offenders. But he failed to mention a practice that goes hand-in-hand with these sentences: government cooperation in exchange for lower sentences. Endowed with the immense power of imposing long prison sentences, a prosecutor can single-handedly get a defendant to say almost anything about almost anybody.

Silverglate’s observations are consistent with the views of Fordham Law professor John Pfaff, whom David Brooks interviewed for a New York Times column last month:

Pfaff’s theory is that it’s the prosecutors. District attorneys and their assistants have gotten a lot more aggressive in bringing felony charges. Twenty years ago they brought felony charges against about one in three arrestees. Now it’s something like two in three. That produces a lot more plea bargains and a lot more prison terms.

I asked Pfaff why prosecutors are more aggressive. He’s heard theories. Maybe they are more political and they want to show toughness to raise their profile to impress voters if they run for future office. Maybe the police are bringing stronger cases. Additionally, prosecutors are usually paid by the county but prisons by the state, so prosecutors tend not to have to worry about the financial costs of what they do.

Cautious efforts to cut back mass incarceration, especially of drug offenders, are worth supporting and we think many of policy changes currently being considered are good ones. But if they are serious about reducing the number of people behind bars, prison reformers shouldn’t be satisfied with getting legislatures to pass laws marginally reducing jail time for certain crimes; they should also look at how the process actually plays out “in the halls.” Real criminal justice reform is not as simple an endeavor as many people seem to think.

A Constitutional Crisis in Portugal?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written a bit of a barn-burner over at The Telegraph this weekend:

Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

He deemed it too risky to let the Left Bloc or the Communists come close to power, insisting that conservatives should soldier on as a minority in order to satisfy Brussels and appease foreign financial markets.

Some of Pritchard’s rhetoric is clearly overdone; an action by a democratically elected official may be controversial, and may be unwise—but this isn’t a coup. However, moves like this risk undermining support for EU longterm in Portugal—and elsewhere in the EU.

The core problem remains: on issue after issue after issue, the name of the EU is being invoked to justify policies that growing numbers of European citizens don’t just oppose, but actively hate. There are good arguments for forced acceptance of refugees to draconian austerity policies, but imposing them on unwilling people is a dangerous thing to do.At the moment, the EU is in trouble from Lisbon to Latvia, and there are no signs yet that the powers that be have found a way forward. The EU with all its faults and flaws is one of the most important pillars of global stability in an increasingly shaky world; the steady erosion of Europe’s cohesion and esprit is a terrible thing to watch.

When God Goes Away, Superstition Takes His Place

Human beings feel instinctively that the visible reality that we live in day to day is connected to something larger and more mysterious. When belief in God goes away, the hunger for meaning and connection with a truth beyond the business of daily life remains. The New York Times:

Like many Europeans, Marianne Haaland Bogdanoff, a travel agency manager in this southern Norwegian town, does not go to church, except maybe at Christmas, and is doubtful about the existence of God.

But when “weird things” — inexplicable computer breakdowns, strange smells and noises and complaints from staff members of constant headaches — started happening at the ground-floor travel office, she slowly began to put aside her deep skepticism about life beyond the here and now. After computer experts, electricians and a plumber all failed to find the cause of her office’s troubles, she finally got help from a clairvoyant who claimed powers to communicate with the dead. The headaches and other problems all vanished.

People who think themselves too rational for religious belief end up believing in “astral forces”, ghosts and other phenomena. Sometimes these superstitions take the deadly form of political ideologies that fanatical believers take up with religious fervor—communist atheists murdered tens of millions of people in the 20th century in the irrational grip of an ugly ideology. They scoffed at the credulity of religious believers even as they worshipped the infallible insights of Stalin. Similarly, the Nazis presented their faith as an alternative to the “outgrown superstitions” of historic Christianity.

It’s something very much worth remembering: a world without faith in God wouldn’t be a more rational or more humane place.

PC Mayhem at Wesleyan

Anyone who may have been hoping that the 2014-2015 academic year represented “peak PC”, and that we would have to endure fewer headlines about campus “microaggressions”, “safe spaces”, and “trigger warnings” in 2015-2016, take note: The latest news out of one elite liberal arts college suggests we still have a ways to go. Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post has a good piece on the mayhem that ensued after a Wesleyan student, Bryan Stascavage, wrote critically about Black Lives Matter in the school newspaper:

Within 24 hours of publication, students were stealing and reportedly destroying newspapers around campus. In a school cafe, a student screamed at Stascavage through tears, declaring that he had “stripped all agency away from her, made her feel like not a human anymore,” Stascavage told me in a phone interview. Over the following days, he said, others muttered “racist” under their breath as he passed by.

The Argus’s editors published a groveling apology on the paper’s front page. They said they’d “failed the community” by publishing Stascavage’s op-ed without a counterpoint, and said that it “twist[ed] facts.” They promised to make the paper “a safe space for the student of color community.” This self-flagellation proved insufficient; students circulated a petition to defund the newspaper.

The Wesleyan student government obliged, voting to strip funding from the Wesleyan Argus in order to “save paper.” Rampell notes that this case is the latest example of a troubling new trend in campus PC movements:

Typically the censorship threats that student journalists face come from authority figures like these school administrators; peer-on-peer muzzling seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.

One incident does not a trend make, but judging by this controversy, it looks like the wave of PC that caught media attention last year is still going strong; this year’s crop of college students—or at least, a critical mass of them—are seemingly just as eager to silence dissent as their predecessors. There’s no reason to think that campus politics will be any more sane for the foreseeable future. That raises concerns, not only about health of our educational institutions, but about what will happen when today’s coddled students graduate, grow up, and are expected to wield real power.

Sand Causes Cancer, Say British Fracktivists

Green activists have found a new way to villainize hydraulic fracturing in Britain: claiming that sand, one essential component of the sluice pumped at high pressure into horizontal wells to “frack” shale, will give people cancer. The Times (of London) reports:

[Activist group Friends of the Earth] distributed thousands of leaflets asking for donations to help stop fracking. The leaflets said fracking would expose communities to chemicals that could cause cancer because it involved “pumping millions of litres of water containing a toxic cocktail of chemicals deep underground . . . [which] could end up in your drinking water”.

The leaflet said that the group had already helped people in Lancashire prevent fracking by Cuadrilla, the company which had two applications rejected by the county council this summer. When Cuadrilla complained to Friends of the Earth that it did not use toxic chemicals, the group replied listing the evidence on which it based its claims. It wrote: “We understand that Cuadrilla used a significant amount of sand to frack the well at Preese Hall [in Lancashire in 2011]. Frack sand tends to contain significant amounts of silica which is a known carcinogen.”

By this logic, greens ought to be calling for the quarantining of beaches—to hear these activists tell it, the sand you’d be tanning on there would be as big a cancer risk as the UV rays you might be soaking up.

This kind of campaigning isn’t unique to this specific green group, either. It’s part of a pattern of behavior employed by the modern environmental movement, in which sober analysis of important policy decisions is overrun by overwrought and often emotional rhetoric—baseless fear-mongering. For a group that prides itself on being joined at the hip to science, greens show a remarkable tendency to ditch the facts when it’s convenient to serve their point, and this latest sand-causes-cancer campaign is a great example of that.The world needs a better, smarter green movement. Environmental concerns pervade a wide host of issues, and our planet deserves a better class of champion.

The Unbearable Lightness of Freedom

Le monde, monotone et petit, aujourd’hui,

Hier, demain, toujours, nous fait voir son image:

Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui!

—Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”, Les Fleurs du Mal

The existence of irrational economic agents had always been the dark ride, the secret fault in any economic theory

—Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the TerritoryFrance, 2022. After a disastrous second term for President Francois Hollande, France’s mainstream political parties suffer crippling losses in the first round of presidential elections. In the run-off, the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a new party running on an Islamic platform led by Mohammed Ben Abbes, a savvy and charismatic politician, face off. The country is being convulsed by a wave of urban violence—violence that is largely being downplayed by a cowardly media afraid to play into the FN’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Paranoia and conspiracy theories dominate conversations. Is France headed towards a military coup? The center-right UMP and the Socialist Party decide to support Ben Abbes in a bid to block the FN from acceding to power. They negotiate a deal: the Muslim Brotherhood gets to keep only the Education Ministry while compromising on other portfolios.Islamists, it turns out, unlike the French political elite, understand the importance of education in deciding a country’s fate. French higher education progressively turns Islamic: the Sorbonne is bought out by Saudi Arabia, professors are required to convert, women are compelled to wear the hijab, and programs are rewritten to integrate Islamic teachings. Rimbaud’s rumored late conversion to Islam becomes official dogma.At the same time, security across the country is, almost magically, reinstated; unemployment drops dramatically, largely thanks to strong fiscal incentives for women to stay home. Like a Muslim De Gaulle, Ben Abbes reorients the European Union towards the Mediterranean Sea, integrating North African countries in its ambit. His policies are popular among the French. The country seems to have finally found a new driving force after decades of decline and doubt.All this provides the backdrop to the life of Francois, a disillusioned Sorbonne literature professor, the narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic novel, Submission—a novel that quickly became the number one bestseller in France, Germany and Italy upon its publication.In Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen visits his sister, an orthodox Jew, who disapproves of his lifestyle in the strongest terms: “You have no values. With you it’s all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.” Allen replies: “Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan, and win!” Add Islam to the mix and you can almost certainly sell a ton of books, too.Submission was bound to become a literary sensation. It is the work of France’s most famous and controversial living writer, a man with an unparalleled talent for pressing into the country’s deep-rooted insecurities. For his troubles, Houellebecq has been accused of misogyny, racism, sexual obsession and vulgarity. Houellebecq’s universe in Submission is cynical and nasty to the point of caricature, filled with grotesque and complacent journalists, and spineless and uncultured politicians. (He even takes an inelegant jab at my former boss, MP Jean-Francois Copé’s looks; I did not dare raise his claim at literary immortality the last time we met.)Understandably, much of the attention was focused on the book’s politics and whether the book was “Islamophobic”. Houellebecq’s previous statements provided critics with ample ammunition: in 2001, he was sued for hate speech for claiming “Islam [was] the dumbest religion” during a promotion tour for his book Plateform, the plot of which culminates in an Islamist terror attack against a sex vacation camp, whose victims get blamed for disrespecting local cultures. Houellebecq however now says he misspoke and has learned to appreciate Islam. Actually, as many reviews have noted, the only really smart and visionary political figure in the book appears to be Ben Abbes himself, with his successful mix of social conservatism and free-market policies. Nevertheless, the very scenario of a Muslim takeover of France deftly plays into the current national anguish over decline and the country’s lost identity.The French political and cultural context prior to the book’s publication only fueled the fire. The Front National, running on a populist anti-immigration and anti-EU platform, finished ahead in the 2014 European elections for the first time in its history. The year’s two bestsellers are Thank you for this moment, a memoir by Hollande’s former partner which recounts the President’s philandering and cynicism; and The French Suicide, by a prominent right-wing polemicist Eric Zemmour, who denounces the French elite as having fallen prey to neoliberalism, Islamic radicalism, American pop culture and European bureaucracy all at once.Coincidentally, Submission was published the very day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The Charlie cover at the time of the attacks depicted an ugly looking Houellebecq, surrounded by flies, joking about his losing his teeth. Bernard Maris, a left-wing economist for the paper, who was murdered in the attacks, was a friend of Houellebecq’s, and had written a book about the economic theory of his novels. Just after the attacks, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared in a TV interview that “France is not Houellebecq, it is not intolerance and fear”. It is almost as if, after finally receiving the coveted Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and The Territory, a novel that was hailed as his most mature, but also considered his tamest, Houellebecq had decided to throw maturity and caution to the wind in a bid to become the official novelist of the extreme right, reigniting the tradition of the French reactionary novel.It would be naïve to believe that Houellebecq, a master provocateur, didn’t know exactly the kind of attention he would be getting when writing this novel. Ever since the start of his career, Houellebecq has divided readers, critics and commentators. His second novel, The Elementary Particles, was awarded the Prix Novembre, a prestigious literary prize in 1998. But when the award’s founder denounced the jury’s choice, new patrons were quickly found and the award was rechristened as the Prix Decembre.Submission hits a French society struggling with issues of Muslim integration and national identity right in the solar plexus. But conflating the novel’s reception with its bigger themes would be missing the point. Houellebecq does not have a political program, nor is he interested in offering policy prescriptions or endorsements. Contrary to Zemmour, he doesn’t show nostalgia for a lost glory. His concern is not with ideological struggles or French Grandeur. “That’s the difference between me and a reactionary,” Houellebecq said in 2010 interview with the Paris Review. “I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe.”You will be hard-pressed to find anyone saying this is Houellebecq’s finest work. The descriptions of French society and politics are clichéd and often lazy. There is a lot of sloppy exposition: entire elements of the political storyline are unveiled in long, canned conversations with a domestic intelligence agent who, conveniently, happens to be married to one of Francois’ colleagues. Another teaching colleague also just happens to be linked to right-wing anti-immigrant groups, and initiates Francois into their underground culture. Seriously: good luck getting tenure at Sorbonne when you hang out with hardcore nationalists as a hobby. The satirical ending is way overblown: the narrator, Francois, a university professor, is lured by the new Sorbonne director into converting to Islam to keep his position, and is in addition offered three wives and a lavish salary paid by the Gulf monarchies.But one shouldn’t read Submission for its plot. Indeed, the various cheap shortcuts Houellebecq takes in setting up the storyline obscure his major strengths as an author. His talents are much more sharply on display in his previous works. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the French political system in 2022 is to Submission what Charles Lindbergh’s rise to the White House in 1940 was to Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America: a farce allowing the author to explore deeper issues. And the issues Houellebecq obsessively returns to time and again have rightly earned him recognition as one of the most important living European novelist.Houellebecq catapulted himself into the French literary world by offering a brutal and refreshing break with decades of stylistic narcissism culminating with the Nouveau Roman experiment—a style that Paul Morand, a popular chronicler of life in the roaring twenties in France once ridiculed as “I’m hard. I come. I ejaculate. How new!” The Nouveau Roman was the literary equivalent of Godard’s New Wave cinematography, an exercise mostly devoid of social or political context—or any plot for that matter. Houellebecq reaction to it was to rehabilitate the tradition of the 19th century French realists such as Balzac and Flaubert. His works, at their best, examine in excruciating (and often hilarious) detail the implications of socio-economic changes on the daily lives of his miserable characters struggling with sex and the dullness of office life. His observations make him something akin to a sociologist of loneliness and eroding community life—echoing scholars like Harvard Professor Robert Putnam who, in Bowling Alone, lamented the decline of the civil society dynamism in modern America that had so impressed Tocqueville when visiting the United States.The Elementary Particles opens with the following lines—in many respect a summary of Houellebec work and worldview:

This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries are at best indifferent and more often cruel.

While they don’t bowl, Houellebecq’s characters in Submission watch YouPorn videos to check if their tastes are still in touch with fellow men (“within minutes it became clear that I was an utterly normal man”). Everyday life revolves around elusive attempts at connecting: prepared microwaved meals give their consumer the “sense of participating in a collective experience, disappointing but egalitarian”. The mood is redolent of how Chuck Palahniuk’s characters in Fight Club look for a sense of community by visiting support groups for testicular cancer patients (“to see what real suffering is about”) before senselessly beating each other up in underground clubs. Ben Abbes and the politicians described in Submission never actually appear in the novel. They are only background to Francois’s atomized life.

In his first collection of poems, Rester Vivant (Stay Alive), Houellebecq makes his project clear: “the first poetic undertaking consists in going back to the roots: suffering. (…) Suffering is the necessary consequence of the free interplay of the system’s parts.” What is this suffering about? It’s about the impossibility of love and human connection in our postmodern liberal societies. His first novel, Whatever (a poor translation to the original French title L‘extension du Domaine de la Lutte, literally The Extension of the Domain of the Struggle) is the story of a sexually frustrated computer programmer struggling to hook up during a workshop retreat. Like most of Houellebecq’s central characters, Raphael Tisserand, a 28 year old virgin, is at the same time awkward and bored, observing with cold detachment the social play in front of him, unable to participate, too aware of the “absolute separation between his individual existence and the rest of the world.” He analyzes the false promises of modern existence: increased freedom, especially sexual liberation, has only extended struggle, competition and anguish to areas of private life that were once secure.

In societies like ours, sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their lives, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what known as the ‘law of the market’.

The vocabulary is clearly Marxist, but the undertone is quite conservative.

Despite some graphic descriptions, the sex in Houellebecq’s books is anything but glamorous. It is crude and unsatisfying, an impossible quest for the pleasure and vitality promoted by society. A female characters breaks her back in one orgy too many in The Elementary Particles. Submission’s narrator thinks he’s glimpsed a rare insight into happiness during a threesome with two prostitutes, but quickly falls back into anguish. The renowned Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted that modernity has rendered all social connections more “liquid”—giving primacy to transitory desire rather than any final sense of completion. Life becomes a quest for the means of attaining pleasure, and for how to attain the most pleasure. Performance and quantity displace everything solid and permanent. In Houellebecq, economists and their language rule everywhere.Houellebecq is the novelist of postmodern man’s disillusionment. Tricked into believing individualism necessarily leads to happiness, the postmodern man pantomimes the supposedly carefree rituals of the young. But in truth, he is desperately lonely, cut off from both his male peers and from the women for whose sexual attention he is bitterly competing. Houellebecq’s characters were promised something else. They are well-educated, urban, upper middle class figures. The social contract supposedly stated that their economic success should bring recognition and fulfillment. Why do they feel so miserable? Submission’s narrator ponders:

I had no more reason to kill myself than most of these people did. On reflection, maybe even less. My life was marked by real intellectual achievements. In a certain milieu –granted, a very small one- I was known and even respected. Financially, I had nothing to complain about. Until I died, I was guaranteed a generous income, twice the national average without having to do any work. (…) The mere will was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man. I was incapable of living for myself, and who else did I have to live for?

This question is not new, it has long been described as a risk inherent to the development of liberal societies. Tocqueville already warned against the dangers of individualism in democratic countries: “Democracy makes every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

Houellebecq’s novels describe a quest to find a way to overcome the suffering, to recreate community and love, or even to overcome the very need to search for it—“the curse of desire”. The means is murder in Whatever, the erasing of sexual drive with cloning in Elementary Particles, the setting up of a sexual tourism travel agency in Platform, the creation of a new species of advanced humans in The Possibility of an Island, and… conversion to Islam in Submission.Is religion the answer? The narrator of Submission would like to believe so. A scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a 19th century writer who went through a mystical conversion to Catholicism, Francois attempts the replicate the same experience and embarks on spiritual journey to Rocamadour, a destination for pilgrims in Southern France. He experiences a holy epiphany in front of the statue of the Black Virgin. But much like with his earlier experience with the two prostitutes, the revelation is short-lived: “After half an hour, I got up, fully deserted by the Spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body, and I sadly descended the stairs that led to the parking lot.”Where Catholic spirituality fails, Islam offers Francois a compelling alternative. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission”, Radiger, the new Muslim dean of the Sorbonne, says in the book’s key scene. Islam, an ideology in expansion, strong and confident, offers the narrator—and indeed the whole country—an accessible framework for a complete and easy life. And it turns out, it is what everyone has been waiting for. Francois converts because he is offered predictability, security, recognition, and status. Yes, the university grants him three wives. But even more importantly, they will be chosen for him. The burden of having to make decisions as a free man is, at last, taken away.In this, Houellebecq’s intellectual challenge to liberalism is much more troubling than the quite frankly preposterous fictional prospect of a Muslim takeover of France. That people will not willingly submit is central to liberalism’s survival: citizens must bear the responsibility of choosing and questioning, rather than relying blindly on external authority. We want to believe that only fear, violence or lack of education—exterior factors of constraint—should prevent people from naturally wanting to be free. At the end of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Winston Smith is brought back to obedience to Big Brother only through torture. That some people, especially the educated and informed characters of Houellebecq’s novels, might rationally choose submission goes against liberalism’s very core. It is partly the result of Houellebecq’s exceedingly pessimistic take on his fellow men. But he is not (just) a bitter misanthrope. He does not blame his characters for their resignation or their weakness. He empathizes with their struggle. A depressive and lonely figure who wrote his first novel while working anonymously as a part-time computer repairman at the National Assembly, Houellebecq is well placed to find sympathy is his narrators.Submission therefore is a success—despite its many flaws—because it really does tell us something about the times we live in. As the English translation hits American bookshelves this week, Europe is grappling with self-doubt and is flirting with toxic populism and cynical resignation. Even with its shortcomings, the novel brilliantly manages to distill the intellectual questioning wracking the continent. Can European societies recover? Can Europe give a new sense of purpose, identity and bond to its citizens, while still keeping with its liberal tradition? Or will Europeans turn to more totalitarian ideologies, and to populist demagogues, as they forsake the lonely, thankless and exhausting individualist project demanded by modern liberalism?The French population’s immediate reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks—taking to the streets in unprecedented numbers to defend Republican principles and freedom of speech—seems to provide, as Manuel Valls noted at the time, an eloquent refutation of Houellebecq’s pessimism. Yet none of that has prevented thousands of disaffected youth, born and raised in Europe, from leaving their families to join the ranks of ISIS in Syria.In a way, I wish Houellebecq had written that novel instead: no one would have been more apt at describing the disintegration of families, the quest for meaning, the boredom, the yearning for violence and sexual misery that explain this terrifying phenomenon. Perhaps next time. In the meantime, we have Submission, a very imperfect novel from an important writer.

Uber and the Transportation Revolution

For all of the debate on the ways that Uber and its peer ride-sharing companies affect the labor market for transportation, there seems to be relatively little interest in how the transportation revolution could bring about environmental or social change. Yet, as these services are increasingly shifting their focus from individual trips toward carpooling for riders heading the same ways, these potential benefits are worth consideration, too. According to data compiled by Uber on the first 100 days it operated its carpooling service (UberPool) in China’s fourth largest city, Shengdu, it spared the city an extra 885 tons worth of CO2 that would have been emitted had each traveler ridden alone. From VentureBeat:

The emissions savings is something that anyone who has been to one of China’s major cities should be glad to hear about– China has among the worst levels of air pollution anywhere in the world.

In truth, 885 tons is nothing to shout about in the grand scheme of things. Emissions from the global shipping industry, for example, are said to amount to around 1 billion tons per year. But cars and trucks still account for nearly one-fifth of all emissions in the U.S., and those numbers are likely even higher in fast-growing countries like China.Remember, this is just one city (albeit China’s fourth-largest, with a population of more than 14 million). The numbers really start to add up when accumulated across hundreds of cities around the world, especially if you take into account huge emerging markets like India.

As Uber continues its push into the often overcrowded cities of developing countries, the emissions savings could be significant. And while one is leery to take the word straight from the horse’s mouth, it seems plausible that the company will make the data available for verification. For a company running a gauntlet of legal and regulatory opposition, sharing these data on the benefits of its service would certainly be in its interest.

Yet, as Tyler Cowen argues at Marginal Revolution, the success of Uber may leave consumers less, not more, happy with their transportation options. As he puts it, if the overall number of vehicles decreases because individuals have less need for personal cars, so will the flow of “available vehicle time.” Thus, the decrease in supply (and increase in demand) will drive prices and wait times higher.Ultimately, it’s hard to predict how large both Uber’s role and the effect of that role will be in the future of transportation. What is clear, however, is that a fundamental change in the way that people move from place to place is coming, and the potential benefits to society—from emission reduction to savings on infrastructure construction and upkeep—are huge. Still, nearly all of the discussion surrounding ride-sharing is singularly focused on the destruction of the taxi industry, rather than the creation of new, transformative transportation options. While policymakers and politicians may have their eyes on the issue, they’re looking at it the wrong way.

Ukrainians Head to the Polls

Ukrainian elections are this weekend, and they look like they will bring bad news for President Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko isn’t on the ballot himself, as the elections are local, but any hopes he may have had of consolidating power look dim. AFP:

The public’s frustration at the West’s refusal to arm Ukrainian forces and only provide financial help, with tough austerity strings attached, has bolstered the odds of the far right and the pro-Russian groups gaining ground.

Such an outcome could prompt Poroshenko’s loosely-knit coalition to splinter which would in turn imperil his pledge to apply for EU membership by 2020 and to make the shrivelled Soviet-era economy transparent and streamlined.“With poverty growing, people may come out running to vote for the populist parties,” Anatoliy Oktysyuk of Kiev’s International Centre for Policy Studies told AFP.

It’s unclear how pro-Russian groups will fare in the election, but whatever the specific results, the general theme is likely to be a splintering of power. This will make Poroshenko’s job much harder; to push through his reforms and stand up to Russia, Poroshenko needs as much political backing as he can get. With 142 parties competing in 25 elections and 209, 914 candidates running for 869 seats, it’s hard to imagine Poroshenko emerging with an organized base of support.

As we’ve said, instability is good for Putin—indeed, fomenting it is his primary goal in Ukraine. A more fractious Ukraine makes the development of a modern, stable economy more difficult.Drawing connections between domestic politics and the behavior of foreign actors is a fraught business, but it seems worth mentioning that Western leaders’ half-hearted support of Poroshenko can’t be helping him. Perhaps, had German Chancellor Angela Merkel given him more material assistance, Poroshenko and his allies would have a better campaign platform.