Beards and Ballots

Right now I am reading The Lost Revolution: the Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party. This tales the tale of one side of the Provisional-Official split of the Republican movement in the early 1970s. The Officials took a leftward course that ultimately saw the Official IRA declare a ceasefire and disappear into the shadows while Official Sinn Féin became first Sinn Féin - The Workers' Party and then just the Workers' Party. It is a big book and it covers a lot of stuff. As a busy man, it will take me an age to read it, so rather than wait to write a long review of it, I will instead just throw out a few titbits as I go along.

At the moment, the book is covering the early 1970s and the immediate aftermath of the Provisional-Official split. I am struck by how badly the Provisionals come out of this. In some respects, this is not too surprising – the Provisionals tend to come off badly in anything not written by their apologists, and the book is based heavily on interviews with their Sticky* rivals. But even with that, the Provisional do come across as a bunch of reactionaries who split off because they wanted no truck with the leftward path of the Officials; after the split, the Provisionals seemed to have been blessed with a maniacal tendency that had a fondness for exploding no-warning car-bombs in central Belfast.

Several decades later, the Provisionals followed the Officials down the leftward path and declared their own IRA ceasefire. They also started taking seats in Irish elected assemblies, now sitting in government in a devolved Northern Irish government. One theme of Hanley and Millar's book is the way the Officials blazed a trail only belatedly followed by others, with this being a particularly striking example.

In fairness to my friends from the Provisional side of the split, the Officials (and their descendants in the Workers Party, Democratic Left, Labour and so on) do not come across as saints here either. It is worth remembering that many respected figures in Irish public life today cut their political teeth in an organisation that killed its political enemies and was funded by extortion. Still, there is sometimes something to be said for just forgetting the past.

image source (includes lefty review of the book)


*The Officials became known as the Stickies (or Sticks), because their badges were fastened by adhesive; the Provisionals used pin fasteners, but the name Pinheads never stuck

"The Battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939" by Antony Beevor

I have been reading this chunky book on and off for an age, and now I am finished. This book is a completely rewritten version of a book Beevor wrote on the Spanish Civil War ages ago, with the opening of the Soviet-era archives being what most justified a new take on the war. People who are interested in publication histories and versions of books may be interested to learn that this new book was originally published in Spain, and that it has been somewhat truncated for the Anglophone world.

So yeah, the Spanish Civil War. It's a depressing business, really. The bad guys win. The good guys never look they ever have a chance of winning. And the good guys aren't actually that good, being either total cockfarmers or total losers (or both). Just in case you have never heard of the Spanish Civil War, it began when some generals staged a coup against a leftist government. On one side we have the Nationalists – an alliance of right-wing generals, fascists, monarchists, Catholic traditionalists, and a bunch of weird monarchists called The Carlists; the Nationalists received considerable external support from Hitler and Mussolini. The other side, the Republicans, was a leftist hoe-down of liberal republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists, together with some regional parties; the USSR gave the Republicans a degree of ambiguous support.

The Nationalists won for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they were far better at submerging their differences and uniting against the common enemy. Beevor shows well how the various Nationalist factions were willing to settle for an outcome that (for them) was often suboptimal, but which was better than letting the other side win. The Republicans remained internally divided, with the most bitter tensions being between the communists and their enemies and between centralisers and regionalists. The Nationalists also received much better support from their external allies, with the military assistance of Nazi Germany in particular playing a major part in their victory. The Republicans did receive support from the Soviet Union, and could not have continued the war without it, but nothing they received matched the power of the forces sent from Germany. The Soviets also tied their support to the advancement of their allies within Republican Spain while charging the Republicans exploitative rates for it. The third reason for the Nationalist victory was the grossly incompetent leadership of Republican forces, with battle after battle seeing the same failed offensive tactics being employed. The Nationalists did also make mistakes, but they seemed far more able to learn from them.

It strikes me that the two underlying narratives in this book are Franco's inexorable march to victory, and the extent to which the communists in Spain were total cockfarmers. You never really get any sense that Franco could have been stopped – he had so many cards in his favour that victory for the Nationalists seems almost pre-ordained. But the actions of the communists ultimately helped him on his way. While Soviet support played a key role in keeping the Republicans in the game, it came with an extra dollop of communist paranoia, Soviet advisors and secret police operatives bringing the show trial mindset to Spain. The Republican zone saw the emergence of a mini-police state, with the real or perceived enemies of the Spanish communists and the USSR suffering imprisonment or summary execution.

The effect of communist influence on the military field was perhaps more pernicious. Arms were often refused to units whose commanders refused to join the Spanish communists, and the Soviet advisors saw to it that the Republican war effort followed the stultifying line emanating from Moscow. This saw all efforts focussed on set-piece assaults by massed infantry, with the Republic staging a series of disastrous offensives that could have been lifted from the Western Front of the First World War. Communist paranoia meant that all failures were attributed not to bad military doctrine, unrealistic expectations, poor planning, or an unexpectedly vigorous response by the enemy, but to the influence of Trotskyist-Fascist fifth columnists, so military offensives were often followed by witch-hunts and purges in units that failed to meet their objectives.

But in this day and age, pointing out the failings of communists seems about as relevant as denouncing the double dealing of the Girondins. Does a study of the Spanish Civil War offer any useful insights into the conflicts of today? Eh, I'll have to come back to you on that one.

Book: "100 Myths About the Middle East" by Fred Halliday

Are you the kind of person who likes to begin everything you say with "Actually, I think you'll find…"? Then this is the book for you, because in it Fred Halliday takes and repudiates a hundred widely held propositions about the Middle East. Halliday does all this with an acerbic writing style that displays a contempt for lazy formulas or uncritical thought processes, but he does this without drifting into the kind of facile contrarianism of someone like Christopher Hitchens. Halliday seems less to be saying that stupid people believe his 100 myths, but that anyone who pays attention and applies thought to these questions should be able to see through them. This book is very critical of the kind of duckspeak that masquerades for analysis on the part of the War on Terror's supporters, but he is equally dismissive of the knee-jerk positions of many Islamists and those on the political left. I would still nevertheless class this book as belonging in broad terms to the world of the left, if only because of its evisceration of arguments and propositions advanced by Bush and the neo-cons.

One thing that is striking in this book is Halliday's dismissal of arguments based on the claimed essential natures of the various Middle Eastern religions, or on the idea of peoples in the Middle East having fixed national characters or their being locked into permanent and timeless conflicts. Rather, Halliday sees the nature of a religion or a "national character" as being moulded and shaped by contemporary circumstances and objective conditions. This kind of analysis is broadly Marxist, in the sense of seeing culture as being a dependent variable rather than the other way round. It seems nevertheless to fit well with any kind of serious analysis of the region and the religions that came from there, given that one can see how all of these have changed and behaved differently in separate historical periods. Perhaps arising from this kind of viewpoint, Halliday seems especially hostile to the idea that a solution to the problems of the world is for the leaders of the middle-eastern religions to engage in some kind of interfaith dialogue. While this kind of ecumenical get together sounds entirely laudable (and is not without its merits), seeing it as the main way forward is to give a load of self-appointed bearded fuckwits* the right to speak for everyone else, excluding the voices of the secular or those of heterodox religious ideas.

The book also comes with a useful and somewhat ironic list of terms used to discuss either the Middle East or the War on Terror. And just in case you are wondering who this Fred Halliday chap is, he is an International Relations academic who focuses on stuff to do with the Cold War, the Middle East, and International Relations theory.

This is not the third in my troika of books about the Middle East, but it can be approached as one of the other useful books about that region.


*OK, so not all leaders of the three great monotheistic faiths are bearded or fuckwits, but you get the idea.

BOOKS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST: "The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World" by Avi Shlaim

Before discussing the book itself, I need to quickly talk about the Israeli New Historians. These fellows set themselves the task of approaching their country's history the way historians are meant to – by looking at documents and the historical record to establish what had actually occurred in the past, rather than by simply regurgitating self-serving national myths. In a young country like Israel, with a carefully cultivated narrative around its founding, this kind of approach proved rather contentious, uncovering as it did events and counter-narratives that many would prefer to see forever buried.

Avi Shlaim is one of these New Historian people. His back academic work was the book "Collusion Across The Jordan", about the then largely obscured negotiations between the Israeli leaders and King Abdullah of Jordan around the time of the Israeli state's founding. "The Iron Wall" is a more general work, covering the relationship between the Israeli state and the Arab World; in this context, the Arab World includes both the various Arab states as well as the Palestinian people living inside what became Israel and in the territories it came to occupy. In time, the book covers the period from the foundation of the Zionist community in Palestine in the early 20th century to the election of Ehud Barak as prime minister in 1999. At this stage of the game the book cries out for a second edition, given subsequent events and the rather naïve note of optimism on which the book ends.

Shlaim's book takes its title from an article written in 1923 by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky was committed to the establishment of a Jewish state in what was then Palestine, but he acknowledged a key obstacle to the project – the Arab majority population in Palestine (and, the Arabs generally beyond the territory's borders). Other Zionist leaders had fudged the issue of what to do with these people and how the emerging Jewish state would deal with them. Jabotinsky called a spade a spade, and foresaw that as the Israeli project advanced the Arabs would increasingly resist their expropriation. Jabotinsky argued that attempts to conciliate or negotiate with the Arabs were pointless, at least initially, as their wish would be to destroy the Zionist colonies and re-establish their authority in the country. Jabotinsky proposed instead to erect a metaphorical "Iron Wall" of military might around the Zionist project. Eventually the Arabs would realise that this Iron Wall was unbreakable, that the Israelis could not be defeated, and then it would be possible for the Zionists to negotiate with them and reach some sort of accommodation (that would presumably see them permanently reduced to second class citizenship or some such status).

Jabotinsky remained an oppositional figure within Zionism, but Shlaim's assertion is that his Iron Wall doctrine became the established model on the Israeli side for dealing with the Arabs. Shlaim sees this in the tendency of the Israeli state for much of its history to make early resorts to force and to happily choose escalation over the defusing of tensions. Part of Shlaim's argument, though, is that successive Israeli leaders have had a less sophisticated understanding of the idea than Jabotinsky himself, in that they have failed to register that the Iron Wall has done its job and convinced the Arab World of Israeli permanence, in that the Israeli state has been slow to pick up on opportunities to pursue negotiations and non-violent options with its neighbours.

OK, so that is the theoretical underpinning of the book. What you actually get when you read it is an account of Arab-Israeli relations based on documentary research and interviews with many leading figures. The story is mostly told from the Israeli point of view, probably because of the difficulties an Israeli researcher (or indeed anyone) would have consulting archives or conducting serious research in most Arab states. It is basically an account of interstate politics in the Middle East, from an Israeli point of view. The Israeli point of view is one of perspective rather than sympathy, however, in that Shlaim is not an apologist for his government's actions. He does not gloss over situations where Israel appears to be in the wrong, and where he feels the situation warrants it he is happy to criticise Israeli actions (one criticism sometimes made of this book is that it is too critical of Israel).

The section of this book I found most interesting was the one dealing with Israel in the 1950s, perhaps because I am more familiar with the later periods. In this period, after Israel had won the war that led to its formation, the Israeli state is generally seen as being surrounded by enemies hell-bent on its destruction, but Shlaim argues that this perspective is somewhat illusory and one deliberately cultivated. He suggests that this period was one in which Israeli leaders, wedded to the militarist ideas of Jabotinsky, missed numerous opportunities to move Middle Eastern politics onto a more pacific course. He talks in particular about various back-door negotiation channels open in the early 1950s with Nasser and about how countries, ultimately buried by an Israeli raid against an Egyptian military position (in retaliation against an attack on Israelis by Palestinians). He also asserts that Jordanian and Syrian posturing against Israel was reactive, whereas Israel was always keen to escalate any encounters.

And so it goes. While the section on the 1950s was the most interesting to me, I reckon that anyone with a beginner's interest to the Middle East would find all of this book very interesting. One thing, though, that I would like to read is a more pro-Israel book, albeit one written subsequent to this and to the work of the New Historians – that is to say, a book which is still putting a pro-Israel slant on events, even if, unlike earlier books, it is not just ignoring or explaining away events that do not fit its narrative. Can anyone recommend me such a work?

The Iron Wall also features a fascinating photo of Kissinger leering at Leah Rabin.

BOOKS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST: "A History of the Middle East" by Peter Mansfield

NEW SERIES. People are often confused about the Middle East. To help them, I am going to recommend three books that people should read if they want to get a better handle on the region. I will also mention a couple more books that people might find interesting if they want to explore the area in more detail.

I should mention one thing – the term "Middle East" is these days somewhat contested. Following the publication of Edward Said's book "Orientalism", there has been much more self-criticism in the West of how other parts of the world are written about. Some consider that referring to a region as the Middle East defines it by its relationship to the West as an Other, objectifying the region and its people; as against that, one could of course say that the term "the West" defines Europe and North America by their relationship to people further to the east. A variety of circumlocutions are sometimes used to try and replace the Middle East term. These include "The Arab World", "West Asia", the horrible acronym "MENA", and so on. They are all, in their own way, rubbish, so for want of anything better, I am going to stick with referring to the region as the Middle East, as does my first book.

My first book is in fact "A History of the Middle East" by Peter Mansfield. Mansfield, now deceased, was an interesting fellow. He started his career in the British Foreign Office, but resigned in protest over Suez*, thereafter making his living as a journalist and writer. His book is, as the title suggests, a history of the region, from the dawn of time to the present day. Mansfield's triumph is to have written a relatively short book that is very easy to read and that feels always like it is telling you just enough so that you know the key aspect of what it is covering without being buried in extraneous detail.

The edition I have of this book was written in 1991. Since his death in 1996, the book has been revised again by some other bloke, though it has not been brought into the post-Saddam Hussein era yet. Nevertheless, if you want an overview of the Middle East, this is the book for you.

I also recommend "The Arabs", another book by Mansfield. This provides a history of the specifically Arab World, and then profiles each individual Arab country.


*if you don't know what I mean here by Suez then you should read this book

HI DERE I BOROW BOOK

These are the books I currently have on loan from the Spy School library.

Palestine in Crisis: the Struggle for Peace and Political Independence after Oslo, by Graham Usher

Notwithstanding the bombastic first part of the title, this seems to be a book about the development of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian society after the signing of the Oslo accords. I am currently interested in the institutional history of the PA, so this book is right up my alley.

"Palestine in Crisis" is the kind of title any book on Palestine written in the last 60 years could have.

When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, edited by Robert I. Rotberg

I have borrowed this because I am interested in the theoretical end of how countries go badly wrong, even if I find the "failed state" model somewhat problematic.

State Formation in Palestine: Viability and Governance during a Social Transformation, edited by Mushtaq Husain Khan (with George Glacaman and Inge Amundsen)

I think this covers similar ground to Usher's book, but is a bit more academicy, being a series of papers on different aspects of the "crisis-ridden progress in Palestinian state formation". Looking at the blurb again it seems like it is going to outline and critique the idea that the PA's collapse results from largely internal factors. Deadly, these guys are writing my thesis for me!

The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: from Oslo to al-Aqsa, by Nigel Parsons

This seems to cover similar ground to Usher's book, but looks more academic and was written more recently (after the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada).

Semi-Presidentialism in Europe, edited by Robert Elgie

I just can't get enough of that semi-presidentialism.

Current Library Loans

I've got a load of books on loan from the library of my university. I bet you are wondering what they are, so now I will tell you.

Robert D. Putnam (2000) Bowling Along: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

You know, that book about how people don't like joining things any more because they'd rather sit at home watching shite on TV (or posting to their stupid internet blogs). I borrowed it partly because the subject sounds kind of interesting, because it is kind of zeitgeisty, and as an example of good social research that has managed to say things which have resonated with people.

This book has lots of graphs showing things going down.

Robert Elgie (1999) Semi-Presidentialism in Europe

Robert Elgie is my thesis supervisor, though I've not met him yet as I don't actually have a thesis topic. I reckoned reading one of his books would be a good idea, partly just to be a lick and partly because I might end up doing some research on this semi-presidentialism business. What is semi-presidentialism? Well, in presidential regimes like that of the USA, executive power is completely focussed on this president guy elected (indirectly) by the people? On the other hand, parliamentary regimes like Germany have a purely ceremonial president appointed by parliament, with executive power being focussed on a premier whose power comes from their ability to command a parliamentary majority. In a semi-presidential regime, you have an elected president and also a premier requiring a parliamentary majority to govern; France is the classic semi-presidential regime.

As I said, I may do research on semi-presidentialism. I am thinking of looking at the politics of the Palestinian Authority through this kind of lens, though I might of course do something completely different.

Stephen R. Weart (1998)Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another

As you will recall, I am interested in that democratic peace hypothesis thing. I picked up this book more or less at random to see what kind of explanation people throw out for this observable phenomenon.

Duncan Green (1995) Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America

In some ways I am just playing catch-up on the Latin American course I did last semester, in others laying the ground work for Peadar Kirby's development course in the autumn. This is the first edition of this book, and the only one you can borrow on long loan. The more recent second edition is perhaps more interesting, as its subtitle is the more exciting The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America.

Mancur Olson (1965) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups

I gather this book is quite famous. I also reckon it might be the anti-Bowling Alone, as Olson comes across as seeing groups as a bit dodge and hostile to the natural desire of most people to be left alone. That, anyway, is something I picked up from reading Tom Garvin's Preventing The Future, a book I really ought to get round to reviewing.

James Der Derian(ed) (1995) International Theory: Critical Investigations

As you know, I love theory. I would like to do research guided by some of the more wacky International Relations theories. If you're into that kind of stuff, Der Der Derian is your only man.

John L. Esposito(ed) (1997) Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform?

Political Islam, very interesting.

Adam Przeworski et al (2000) Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990

I have had this book recommended to me when I expressed an interest in doing research that sought to compare the economic performance of different regime types. This book has lots of complicated looking tables showing all sorts of important variables.

I always feel sorry for multiple authors who aren't the first named on a book... it must be really annoying to endlessly see yourself cited as "et al".

Adam Przeworski (1991) Democracy and the Market: Political |and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America

I have borrowed this for similar reasons to Przeworski's other book. In this one it seems like he is trying to show how political institutions affect economic outcomes.

I hope I actually read these books.