I also note that Ray Takeyh writes in the Washington Post today:

“The most remarkable aspect about the events in Iran since June has been the opposition’s ability to sustain itself and to generate vast rallies while deprived of a national organizational network, a well-articulated ideology and charismatic leaders.”

Whether this opposition can be considered of the left or the right insofar as these terms are understood in the UK, or simply the basically decent, is another debate, but, given the extent to which my Twitter feed is full of comment from Iran, I have to wonder about the extent to which the internet explains this very welcome sustaining quality. It seems to be proving quite a handful for the Iranian regime, as bloggers of the left may prove for a Cameron government.

All of which makes me doubtful about Evgeny Morozov’s argument that the web helps dictators most of all. That said; I agree with Crabtree that “the internet is not intrinsically amenable to either left or right”, while also agreeing with him that the full potential of the web has not yet been exploited by the British left, though this may be changing and continuing to do so.

Must Europe wither? It surely shall if we do not wake up and smell the coffee and move on from the navel gazing and introversion that have marked recent years. Tony Blair suggested three years ago that the big distinction in politics was between open societies and those which were closed. “If you take any of the big motivating debates in politics today”, argued Blair, “each essentially has, at its core, this question: ‘Do we open up? Albeit with rules and controls, or do we hunker down, do we close ourselves off and wait till the danger has passed? Is globalisation a threat or an opportunity?’” The EU has chosen to hunker down, to close itself off, not just to Turkey but to a world that is hurtling towards a G2 in which there is no place at the top table for Europeans.

British pro-Europeans, like Nick Clegg, must have watched these developments with horror and wished that the EU could turn itself around and open itself up. The conclusion of the Lisbon process offers a great opportunity for this and Blair’s candidacy for the EU presidency offers the leadership and gravitas necessary to achieve this. Even his advocates, such as Charles Grant and Will Hutton, do not fail to find fault with Blair. Yet “the message” Grant hears “in places such as Beijing, Delhi and Washington is that if the EU wants to be taken seriously, it should choose a big name as president”. Is there another big name candidate? No. Thus, the choice is to be closed (and deride Blair as a ‘superstar’ unworthy of support as Clegg did today) or open (and go for Blair precisely because he is a superstar in the capitals that now matter most).

It is not just a betrayal of Clegg’s pro-European credentials for him to fail to back Blair, it is an abdication of his profession. Politics exists, after all, as J. K. Galbraith knew, “in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable”. Clegg may find Blair unpalatable; so do Grant and Hutton, to some extent. But Turkey getting into bed with Iran is the first of many disasters that shall befall the EU if it continues on its current trajectory. It is because Grant and Hutton have retained the ability, unlike Clegg, to distinguish between the unpalatable and the disastrous that they are able to bring themselves to support Blair.

“The voters of Norwich North could hardly have elected anyone who was more of an obvious recruit to the old politics”.

And Wheatcroft doesn’t think David Cameron has really woken his party from death. “There’s something not quite right about Cameron and his team, something fishy, something dodgy”, he argues. He continues:

“Looking back, Labour chose a silly line of attack when they banged on about Cameron’s background. “So we bombed the wrong Ira?” Ali G said to an American who explained that the real threat had been Iran and not Iraq. Labour got the wrong “on” when it sneered at the school Cameron had attended and the foolish club he joined at Oxford. But few choose where they are educated, and some of us would rather a veil were drawn over the things we did at 20. The really damaging “on” wasn’t Eton or Bullingdon but Carlton: Cameron’s choice of career, not as a barrister or soldier or even journalist, but PR man for a shoddy TV company”.

This work did not even instill in Cameron a proper understanding of what is done by Ofcom; the regulator of the sector in which he was working. That doesn’t seem a solid grounding for anything; least of all running the government. But PR is today so prevalent in politics, as Colin Byrne naturally seems pleased to note, that Wheatcroft’s suggested line of attack may not have occurred to Labour strategists.

Chloe Smith doesn’t herald a new politics and it isn’t clear whether the prevalence of PR in politics is moving us in this direction or whether, in tending towards the superficial over the substantial, it is delaying the re-assessment of the fundamental purposes of politics which will be required to truly produce a new politics. The revolution may be televised but it won’t be spun into being and the claim that Chloe Smith represents a new politics is a claim sadly typical of someone who chooses a career as a “PR man for a shoddy TV company”.

“Assuming that (Benjamin) Netanyahu does not take the world by surprise tomorrow, confront his nationalists head on, pledge a total settlement freeze, and commit himself to a Palestinian state during his premiership, then the American response will be all-important. Tomorrow night will be a crucial test for the Israeli Prime Minister. The day after, an almost as crucial one for the President of the United States”.

As much as the Guardian reports that “Netanyahu (tonight) said for the first time he would accept an independent Palestinian state”, he cannot really be said to have confronted his nationalists head on. This is because, as the Guardian report, ”Netanyahu’s conditions were strict. He said the Palestinians could not form an army or sign military agreements with any other state”. Moreover, he “also praised the Jewish settlers who live in east Jerusalem and on the occupied West Bank and refused US calls for a halt to all settlement growth”.

Macintyre defined tonight’s speech as “Netanyahu’s moment of decision” but the way in which he faced it means that tomorrow is one of President Obama’s moments of decision. He will have to decide whether to maintain his pressure on Israel in respect of settlements against the backdrop of Iran’s disputed election - which creates another moment of decision for Obama.  

This disturbing context might suggest that Obama will tone down his rhetoric but Peter Beinart explains why the opposite may be the case:

“He’s taking on Netanyahu where the Israeli Prime Minister is weakest. Israelis may not be thrilled about freezing settlement growth, but it’s not an issue like Iran’s nuclear program, which they consider important enough to risk their relationship with the U.S. over. A poll published in Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, on June 5 found that 56% of Israelis would rather cave on the settlements issue than face sanctions by the U.S”.

Beinart goes on to say:

“Netanyahu has bigger fish to fry. He knows that sometime in the next year or two, he could well end up paying a visit to the White House to ask for U.S. support for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. For an Israeli Prime Minister, alienating a U.S. President is almost always bad politics, but it’s particularly bad politics when you need his help to stop what you’ve called an existential threat. If Israelis decide Netanyahu can’t negotiate with the U.S. effectively over Iran, they may demand that he be replaced with someone who can”.

Obama has been right to tackle Israel over settlement growth and, oddly enough, events in Iran may make it easier for him to push back against Netanyahu. What is happening in Iran makes it even more important to Israel to retain American support, which, under Obama, they are more likely to get by changing their line on settlements. This is to say nothing of how America responds directly to events in Iran. That is another moment of decision. They do come thick and fast in the White House.

“How times change. When George Bush’s treasury secretaries first visited China, Wall Street was booming, America’s economy was growing and the president’s emissaries routinely lectured their Chinese hosts on the need for freer financial markets and a more flexible yuan. But as Tim Geithner, the current treasury secretary, prepares to make his maiden trip to Beijing on May 31st, Wall Street is synonymous with greed and failure, America’s economy is on its knees and it is the Chinese who have been doing the lecturing. With America’s budget deficit soaring and the Fed’s printing presses running at full speed, China is complaining loudly of the risks that inflation and depreciation pose to its huge stash of dollars, and arguing for an alternative to the greenback as the world’s reserve currency”.

This came after 21 May when the magazine revisited the notion of decoupling: “emerging economies (have) become more resilient to an American recession, thanks to their strong domestic markets and prudent macroeconomic policies”. This was a popular thesis a year ago but lost ground as the global slump hit. However, the Economist argues that the idea may be regaining credibility, with China key to this regained credibility.

“China is exhibit A of this new decoupling: its economy began to accelerate again in the first four months of this year. Fixed investment is growing at its fastest pace since 2006 and consumption is holding up well. Despite debate over the accuracy of China’s GDP figures (see article), most economists agree that output will grow faster than seemed plausible only a few months ago. Growth this year could be close to 8%. Such optimism has fuelled commodity prices which have, in turn, brightened the outlook for Brazil and other commodity exporters”.

Anatole Kaletsky has also noted the significance of economic linkages between China and Brazil, as well as China and South Africa.  

“Commodity-producing countries such as Brazil and South Africa have obviously benefited from China’s overtaking of the US and Europe as the world’s main consumer of raw materials. As long as the Chinese economy keeps growing, Brazil is assured of demand for its iron ore and soya, South Africa for its platinum and coal. Thus the success of the huge fiscal stimulus package announced by the Chinese Government in December has turned out to be much more important for these countries than similar measures in the US or EU”.

So, as Kaletsky puts it, this has meant that America has sneezed but much of the world seems germ-free. The role of China in this trend might suggest that in contrast to decoupling, we are witnessing a coupling of economies to China rather than the US. Kaletsky goes on, however, to make an observation that is more supportive of the decoupling thesis:

“Even more important than the growth of trade with China is that many of the emerging economies, including Brazil and South Africa, have had the financial resources to implement their own independent stimulus packages”.

This capacity of emerging economies to take forward their own stimulus packages appears to be part of a changed world order, with China – twenty years after Tiananmen Square – pivotal to this changed order. Yet, as Martin Jacques, will argue in a new book that he will launch with an event at the RSA on 22 June, “we have barely begun to understand what life will be like when China rules the world”. The blurb on the RSA website about this event goes on to state:

“For well over 200 years, we have lived in a Western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern is inextricably bound up with being Western. The twenty-first century will be different. The rise of China, India and the Asian tiger economies means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively Western. The West will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer.

“The central player in this new world will be China. Continental in size and mentality, China is a ‘civilization-state’ whose characteristics, attitudes and values long predate its existence as a nation-state. Although China is clearly influenced by the West, its extraordinary size and history mean that it will remain highly distinct, and as it exercises its rapidly growing power it will change much more than the world’s geopolitics. The nation-state as we understand it will no longer be globally dominant, and the Westphalian state system will be transformed; ideas of race will be redrawn”.

This is why Jacques argues that we are moving into an era of contested modernity. But Kaletsky still frames the rise of China in somewhat western terms by observing:

“The story of South Africa and Brazil in the past decade (has enabled a) transition successfully to pluralistic, liberal free-market democracies.

“Whether China ever manages a similar transition is, of course, the great historical question of the 21st century. But if it forces China to direct economic development towards the needs of its own citizens, rather than the tastes of US consumers, the financial crisis is likely to accelerate China’s evolution into a pluralistic market economy, rather than slowing it down”.

“Car ownership in China – an important badge of middle-class status – is only 2-3 per cent”, as the Financial Times recently observed. The economic development of China will expand this middle-class, which may lead to the kind of transition that Kaletsky envisages. That said; China has already changed massively in the past twenty years but the grip of the Communist Party upon power in China seems more secure now than it did at the time of Tiananmen Square. Why? 

“As a result of the effective combination of governance reforms and co-opting the rich and the middle class”, the Financial Times explains, ”few analysts believe the party will face a serious threat over the next decade”. These governance reforms mean that the Communist Party is a very different beast from what it was twenty years. Change in China is likely to be such that it will face further calls to evolve in coming years. This will lead, claims the Financial Times, to “pressure to introduce deeper political reforms”. But will these reforms lead to China taking the kind of transition to western democratic norms as foreseen by Kaletsky or will they result in the Chinese producing a governance model that takes the “highly distinct” form anticipated by Jacques?

As well as the internal management of the increased power held by China, there are, of course, questions to be asked about the external use of this power. On the eve of Barack Obama’s much heralded speech to the Muslim world, for example, it is interesting to note that the Economist also recently concluded: “If China is at all serious about joining America as a global leader, this is the time for it to shoulder its responsibility by helping to punish Mr Kim”. Mr Kim, of course, is the leader of North Korea. Things which definitely can’t be decoupled are the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. The ambitions of the later are a key point of context to Obama’s speech. However, the coupling of North Korea and Iran also, in turn, couples together the efforts of the US and China to respond to the ambitions of North Korea and Iran.

This is a profound change to the world order but is to say nothing of the ”neo-colonialist” tendencies that some see in Chinese “land grabs” in Africa. We have grown used to the empire of liberty, as a current Radio 4 series describes the US, dominating a unipolar world order but, perhaps, we should be preparing for another empire, quite possibly with less regard for liberty, as liberty is generally understood in the west, to be a significant player in a multipolar world of contested modernity. Given that we have elections to the European Parliament tomorrow, one wonders what Europe’s role will be in such a world. Sadly, marginalised, I fear, unless we can quickly raise our game very dramatically.

“The relationship between the US and China will become more central, with India waiting in the wings. The relative economic weight and power of the Asian giants seems sure to rise. Europe, meanwhile, is not having a good crisis. Its economy and financial system have proved far more vulnerable than many expected. Yet how far a set of refurbished and rebalanced institutions for international co-operation will reflect the new realities is, as yet, unknown”.

It is towards global institutions, like the IMF, the World Bank and the UN, that we must first look for the refurbishment that our Chinese century requires. However, Wolf’s comment – along with the criticisms of Charles Clarke, Wolfgang Münchau and Helmut Schmidt that my last post also noted – would seem to suggest that the EU too is also ripe for some refurbishment.

In absence of such refurbishment – or at least an improved claim upon output legitimacy – Europe can expect to drift ever further from the real crucible of global politics as this century progresses. The seeming addiction of Europe’s body politic to navel-gazing and nation-centric politics – exemplified by the current EU elections in which anything other than EU issues are being discussed - is corrosive in its inability to rise to the bigger global picture as set out by Casale. The longer Europe persists with this inward-looking, complacent, arrogant attitude the more likely this global picture is to take a form that is displeasing to European values and interests.

China is ascendant and hardly seems to have an excessive respect for the Copenhagen criteria. India may be closer to satisfying such criteria but Russia and Iran seem likely to increasingly feature amongst the global picture and the stuff of the Copenhagen criteria are as much of a joke to them as the idea, pace Francis Fukuyama, that history has ended.    

History moves on. But the EU seems increasingly left behind, as its poor response to the economic crisis well illustrates. The Copenhagen criteria embody the kind of values with which Fukuyama presumed that history had ended and so, in this sense, they seem more univeral than European values. Nonetheless, the way that history has developed since Fukuyama made this claim would suggest that, perhaps, these values are not necessarily quite so universal after all – at least not yet. The EU needs to raise its game if these values are not to become not so much universal as the preserve of Europe and north America.

Alastair Crooke provided this revelation in a talk he gave to City Circle on his new book Resistance. This book argues that the heritage from which my politics flows is one in which individualism remains “the organisational principle around which society, politics and economics are organised”. My social democratic views might seek to humanise markets and the individualism upon which markets are based. But, ultimately, they accept them. In contrast, it is argued, political Islam rejects markets in favour of a world view that insists upon a primacy for “human beings behaving to one another with justice, equality and compassion”.

My objectives, therefore, parallel those of political Islam: justice and equality. However, political Islam doesn’t understand these objectives in a way that John Rawls would recognise. This divergence derives, Crooke suggests, from different conceptions of the ‘essence of man’. His book cites an Iranian cleric who says that “the message of the Iranian Revolution to today’s world lies in hoisting up the banner of the essence and the truth of man … and to show that the concepts upon which Islam is based are identical with human objectives throughout history, but from which we have diverged under the influence of the modern world”.

Just as, according to Crooke, ”the Prophet Mohammad did not see himself as founding a new religion” but, rather, providing “a ‘reminder’ of truths that everyone knew”, so too the Iranian revolution is said to be a ‘reminder’ of truths about the ‘essence of man’ that the modern world has allowed itself to forget. These truths involved “the command to build a community in which men and women behaved with compassion, with respect for others – whatever their standing in life – and in which there was a fair distribution of wealth. In short, Islam is about the experience of daily living in such a society … Muslims are commanded actively and literally to fight daily for justice and for human respect and compassion. It is the revival of this radical message of social justice that lies at the centre of the Islamic revolution”.        

In reviving this radical message, claims Crooke, the Iranian revolution stood against both the occupation of Iran by western powers and the occupation of Iranian minds by ways of thinking that the western world has produced but which have diverged from the ‘essence of man’. As a product of the west, I inevitably find this difficult to properly understand.

However, Crooke’s central argument is that this dispute about the ’essence of man’ is at the core of the conflict between Islamism and the West. When Crooke asked the Iranian cleric citied earlier about this conflict “he did not give the answer that this conflict was all about a tussle over power and sovereignty, as many westerners instinctively assume; nor did he mention foreign policy as its immediate cause; and most certainly, he did not attribute it to ‘envy’ at western ‘achievements’”. Instead, the cleric said that “what we are facing is a conflict between two civilisations; between two views about living. Recognising these two different ways of living is the main task facing us in terms of thinking and learning”.

I accept the importance of this task. Not least because conflicts are unlikely to find a happy resolution if their true causes are not properly understood. I do not accept, however, that if I should complete this task, assuming that I am able with a mind so bathed in the western world, that I will conclude that my mind has necessarily been occupied by modes of thinking that have entirely forgotten the ‘essence of man’. This would be to accept that understandings of justice and equality that derive from individual rights are alien to this essence. Thus, I would be abandoning the tradition of Kant and all that it has bequeathed, such as universal human rights as codified by the UN. This is a step far too far for someone who sees the breaches of these rights in Iran - ”torture, executions and the suppression of legitimate dissent are still being replicated in Iran”, according to Amnesty International - as being as contrary to this essence as anything that I can imagine.

Nonetheless, I look forward to completing Crooke’s book. This might be a small step towards overcoming the misunderstandings that exist between the west and the Islamic resistance. It would be wonderful to move beyond these misunderstandings to a debate about the nature of justice and equality and to means of realising these concepts. I do not presume that the tradition of Kant has a monopoly of wisdom on what is meant by these concepts but remain certain that torture, executions and the suppression of legitimate dissent are in conflict with these concepts. Any understanding of these concepts that sanctions such abuses strikes me as faulty. But, perhaps, that is just because my mind is occupied?

Or, alternatively, just as the Soviet Union didn’t reflect what Karl Marx’s thought was all about, these abuses are not what the Islamic resistance is all about? This may be so but my sense is that there is a much greater risk of such outcomes when rights are defined not on the level of the individual, as in Kant’s tradition, but on a community level, as Crooke seems to indicate is the preference of the Islamic resistance.

Crooke claims not to offer a “clash of civilisations” thesis as conclusions akin to those of the Islamic resistance do feature in western thought, particularly in the Frankfurt school. “The leaders of the Frankfurt School, like our Shi’i cleric of today” became “increasingly pessimistic … about a conversion to a different set of values achieved through critical thinking and the stimulation of the public’s critical facilities … They, like our Iranian interlocutor, disagreed with western claims for ‘modernity’ profoundly: western politics was not satisfying man’s deepest needs – far from it”.

It is striking, to me, that the Frankfurt School was born out of Karl Marx’s thought. Marx himself largely defined communism in negative terms: the absence of the exploitation and alienation that he saw as generated by capitalism. The ”false consciousness” – or mind occupation – that so concerned the Franfurt School was said to prevent this capitalist stage being overcome but, ultimately, classical Marxism argued, the tensions within capitalism were such that it had to give way to communism.

Bernstein was a revisionist in that he argued against this historic inevitability. Indeed, he argued, as Crosland later did, that capitalism had so adapted since the time of Marx that it was compatible with the values of justice and equality, which they propagated. In contrast, Marx saw morality as contingent upon the dominant class of the historical age. Therefore, Kant was not an inspiration to Marx, as he was Bernstein, so much as an articulator of the dominant bourgeoisie, individualist morality. Bernstein could compromise with the market system but Marx could not; just as Crooke claims that social democrats are defined by their compromise with the market and the Islamic resistance demands its rejection.

So: social democrats and Islamists need to debate the extent to which justice and equality can be reconciled with the market, as well as whether rights are properly defined on the level of the individual or the community. I am sure that I have much to learn from Islamic thought but I see the debate between social democrats and Islamists as replaying many of the themes that western politics and philosophy has played out over the past 200 years between the traditions that follow from Kant and those who follow from Marx. Bernstein created social democracy by moving from the later to the former camp – but in doing so reconciled himself to the market in a way that Islamists contend forgets the ‘essence of man’.