Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 2 September 2023
Gabon. Knock-Out Blows. Endurance. University Professions. Delhi. Hannah Forsyth. Yeats.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses of world history in the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. Dynasty, Democracy and Decolonisation in Gabon.
Governing the Multipolar World. Stabs in the Back and Countered Knock-Out Blows.
Mindful History. Endurance in War and Politics.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Professions and the Tragedy of the Modern University.
What surprised me most. BRICS+ and Delhi.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Hannah Forsyth.
Reading and Closing Verse. Yeats and Politics.
1. The Big Story: Dynasty, Democracy and Decolonization in Gabon
A military coup in Gabon removed a dynastic family that had ruled this small oil-producing state since the 1960s, when nominal independence from France was obtained. Gabon is on the Atlantic Coast of Central Africa, bordered by Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon to the north, the Republic of the Congo to the east and south. Nigeria is a little way to the North, where this large state in Africa considers whether to intervene in its neigbour, Niger, where another coup happened last month.
Gabon had held elections the previous weekend. The son, Ali Bongo, of the dynastic founder, Omar Bongo, who had ruled for 42 years, received an electoral mandate for his third seven-year term. But soldiers disputed the electoral process, and the supportive crowds appeared to confirm concerns about a corrupt family rule. Diplomats from the USA, that home of dynasts and oligarchs, muttered wishes to restore democracy. But, within days, images appeared of the loot acquired by the Bongo family over 56 rules of democratic rule in support of Western resource extraction. The CIA briefing books appears not to have explained that Gabon democracy appears to be rule by the Bongos, of the Bongos, and for the Bongos, with many side benefits for France and the USA.
There is an interesting discussion of the coup that quotes several African intellectuals here. Sanusha Naidu, senior research fellow at the South African think tank The Institute for Global Dialogue, observed that the coup was caused by “people being dissatisfied with corruption, legacy leaders, and mismanagement of their finances or mismanagement of resources that don’t lead to real development.”
But before we tut-tut about corrupt African elites and failures in decolonisation, there is a sting in the tail of her observations. Al Jazeera quoted here observing:
“It is a reaction not just to a broken system, and an undemocratic one. It’s also the fact that the democratic process in itself is raising a lot of contradictions in terms of people feeling as if they can’t trust the political process, the democratic process, and are basically looking towards the military as possibly being that institution that can actually turn things around. People are becoming increasingly intolerant of the fact that they are no longer being treated as citizens in their country. [When] elections become a means to an end, it becomes devalued.”
The coup is about democracy, its rather imperfect realisation in Gabon, and whether that worked for the people of Gabon. A simple insistence on democratic rhetoric and electoral verdict is not enough of a response. Surely, noone would claim that the path to restoring democracy is self-evident when it involves entrenching the only family ever to have ruled independent Gabon; when it ignores how they have enriched themselves selling oil to the West while leaving most of their citizens in poverty; and when the infrequently held elections provide such unconvincing results and accusations of malfeasance.
But it is not only in Gabon, and not only in Africa, that there are doubts about a broken democratic system; in which elections have become highly manipulated means to an end; and where people feel they are “no longer being treated as citizens in their own country”. These doubts and sentiments rumble loudly in the West, and in Russia, in China, and in other states of Eurasia. They have even been heard from time to time in the Great Southern Land in which I am an exile at home.
Western states too know of political dynasties and elites who cling to power well past their use-by date. The USA has known the Kennedeys, the Bushes, the Clintons and the Bidens. Mitch McConnell this week had another American Psycho-geriatric moment. That democracy that the Western world is marching to its grave, Ukraine, is notorious for its control by a small number of oligarchic clans.
Gabon exposes therefore not only the weakness of African democratic traditions. It exposes the shared fate of most of the world today. The citizens of the world live in mixed polities that contain democratic processes, pre-democratic institutions, such as the political dynasty and ‘Big Man’ politics, and post-democratic controls, such as the remorseless propaganda and manipulated information of modern mainstream media. Gabon then is a mirror to the world, and not only a state to be pitied and readied for American and French post-colonial intervention.
Gabon also may mark a wave of change for the better in Africa, and certainly in French Africa. It is another state where counter-elites have acted on decades of frustration with charades of democracy that continue Western resource extraction and neocolonialism, that enrich small pro-Western elites, and that fail to garner the wealth of their countries to the equitable development of most African citizens. In recent years, coups have overthrown defective regimes in Mali, Burkino Faso, Niger and now Gabon. There is a hope among some of the African media I have observed in recent weeks that these events will reboot African Decolonization 2.0.
I do not know enough to say whether this is false hope. But there is no reason to suppose that Africa should be trapped in poverty and Western patronising attitudes. We should recall that in the 56 years that the Bongo family ruled Gabon, China has lifted over a billion people out of poverty. In 15 years, since the younger dynast, Ali Bongo, has ruled like an African Hunter Biden, India has lifted over 400 million people out of poverty. Getting rid of kleptocrats might be good for people.
Could a new dawn be rising in Africa? I do hope so, and I will attempt over the next year to deepen my understanding of African history and contemporary affairs to reflect the emergence of yet more poles in the multipolar world.
If you know more about the realities on the ground in Africa today, feel free to leave a comment.
Have you checked out my books?
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world: Stabs in the Back and Countered Knock-Out Blows
Meanwhile, in another cauldron of the unruly multipolar world, the Ruin of Ukraine continues. I am still holding back from commenting deeply on the Ukraine War, but there were some interesting comments I noticed during the week that coincidentally resonated with my reading 1916: A Global History. In that year, some political leaders observed the catastrophe of World War One, and urged a return to dialogue and diplomacy. Their efforts were rebuffed, and losing elites engaged in fantasies of stabs in the back and knock-out blows. History it seems is repeating in 2023.
In lieu of my own commentary, you might wish to read the always excellent Big Serge’s assessment of the state of the war in Ukraine, here on Substack.
Heroic resistance and plucky counter-offensives have become stuck in the mud of a grinding “war of attrition”, perhaps reminding us all that the calculus of attrition underpins every war. Big Serge writes that
“Ukraine had aspirations of breaking open this grinding front and reopening mobile operations - escaping the attritional struggle and driving on operationally meaningful targets - but these efforts have so far come to naught. For all the lofty boasts of demonstrating the superior art of maneuver, Ukraine still finds itself trapped in a siege, painfully trying to break open a calcified Russian position without success. Ukraine may not be interested in a war of attrition, but attrition is certainly interested in Ukraine.”
He also comments that the disaster of the counter-offensive and the disappointing realisation that Ukrainian people are losing the West’s war against Russia (as blithely admitted by a bevy of American politicians during the week including that Mormon man of peace, Mitt Romney) is leading to a game of blaming anyone but the USA. Various former serving American military officers are out there saying the Europeans or Ukraine just did not repeat the brilliance of America’s blitzkrieg in Iraq in 1991. They cannot admit that Ukraine might have followed American practice of all the other endless, lost wars. The psychological shock that America is addicted to war, but not so good at winning wars is one of the dimensions that I will write about in a few weeks when I explore the war dimension of the world crisis.
In any case, the blame game has begun. Big Serge comments that
“One of the surest signs that Ukraine’s counteroffensive has taken a cataclysmic turn is the way Kiev and Washington have already begun to blame each other, conducting a postmortem while the body is still warm.”
Zelensky has blamed the west for not delivering still more arms. Western experts mutter about Ukrainian ignorance of “combined arms warfare”, which as Big Serge says uses “jargon (incorrectly) to explain away problems.”
Alexander Mercouris of The Duran has also noted that Volodomyr Zelensky, appeared to lay the groundwork, in an interview on Ukrainian television, for a ‘stab in the back’ narrative. Such an excuse would shield the Kiev leaders from criticism, and redirect blame for defeat or even collapse collapse onto doubters and prevaricators in the West. If people had not questioned Ukraine’s requests, Ukraine would have won by now. If all the demands - even for nuclear weapons in February 2022 - had been granted, Ukrainians would not be fighting this war alone. Zelenzky offered this lame rhetoric to his increasingly demoralised public. The enemies within, and not the elites on top, caused the failure of the war, so says the stab in the back narrative. We will see in months ahead how well it works in Ukraine.
Such a narrative would, however, seem to work for the American war party, including Joe Biden, as he struggles to avoid another embarrassing defeat or collapse such as occurred in Kabul in 2021. Biden can now blame the peace party in the West, and not the war party in the West Wing. He can offer a cover story to the zealous Ukrainian diaspora who vote in the US, but do not die on the steppe. He can shame any doubters, when the time comes for Zelensky to flee Kiev on an American plane, just as the Afghan leader fled Kabul with overflowing sacks of cash. The myth of Zelensky can be richly maintained in exile, with no questions asked about all those undisclosed accounts. The US and the Kiev regime, it seems, is preparing to blame Trump and the Global South for losing Kiev.
Of course, the stab in the back narrative is a reference to the stories that emerged in Germany in 1918 to explain away the reversal in fortune in war. It is likely an ancient archetype wherever and whenever there have been degraded elites defeated in war. But we also see echoes of other regrettable rhetorical archetypes from the Great War in the repeated lines that the West will “support Ukraine for as long as it takes,” and in the now deflated hopes that the Ukrainian Spring/Summer Counter-Offensive will deliver a knock-out below to Putin’s fragile, despotic regime.
In 1916 there was a peace party in Europe and the Atlantic world too. They despaired at the losses of all states, and looked for a path to negotiation, even if it meant admission that the statesmen of Europe had made disastrous miscalculations in choosing to fight their war. In Britain, one leader of this peace party was Lord Lansdowne, and he wrote a controversial piece that laid out the case for returning to the negotiation table, and pulling back from the that monumental war of attrition. Lansdowne pointed out the appalling losses, and questioned whether it was worth the sacrifice. He proposed a “thorough stocktaking” of military and foreign policy, to prepare the British Government, indeed the British Empire, to enter negotiations. He wrote:
"we ought at any rate not to discourage any movement, no matter where originating, in favour of an interchange of views as to the possibility of a settlement."
When similar sentiments have been expressed today by people as diverse as Jeffrey Sachs, Kishore Mahbubhani, John Mearsheimer or myself, the peace party have been anathematised as Putin puppets. And so it was in 1916 in Britain.
Then Prime Minister Lloyd George countered that Britain was committed to "fight to the finish." Today NATO leaders profess to fight for “as long as it takes”. Lloyd George also determined that Britain and its allies would pursue the "Policy of the Knock-Out Blow." It met the same fate as the Grand Ukrainian Counter-Offensive, and indeed the sanctions from hell that, in 2022 in Western minds, would turn the rouble into rubble and quickly sap Russia’s war effort. Woodrow Wilson made overtures in support of Lansdowne’s plea for negotiations. The liberal Lloyd George told the progressive Wilson to butt out, and used an old trope of ethnic prejudice that prevails today, with just the letter ‘p’ dropped from the slur. “Prussian military despotism," he said, was:
"broken beyond repair... Peace now or at any time before the final and complete elimination of this menace is unthinkable… It will not take 20 years to win this war but whatever time is required it will be done" [quoted in Keith Jeffrey, 1916: A Global History (2015) pp. 365-366.]
It is eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric of “as long as it takes” on Ukraine. The lesson? This stance is a feature of stubborn decision-makers, and the opting decisions of war.
Perhaps today American elites might detach from this doomed path, and look at some of Woodrow Wilson’s words from 1916, when he offered to mediate peace. Wilson reflected on the cost of war:
"If the contest must continue to proceed towards undefined ends by slow attrition until one group of belligerents or the other is exhausted, if million after million of human lives must continue to be offered up until on the one side or the other there are no more to offer, if resentments must be kindled that can never cool and despairs engendered from which there can never be recovery, hopes of peace and of the willing concert of free peoples will be rendered vain and idle." [quoted in Keith Jeffrey, 1916: A Global History (2015), p. 367]
I doubt they will, not until they feel the pain of defeat themselves. But I will continue to speak in favour of the path for dialogue and diplomacy, for as long as it takes.
3. Mindful history. Endurance in War and Politics
But it is not easy. It does take its toll. There is a war of attrition going on in all of our minds, not just the battlefields of the Ukrainian-Russian steppe. It is difficult to endure war as a citizen of democracy, when that democracy conscripts you in an enduring war against your own conscience. It is difficult to bear with the slowness of war. It does not end after a neat drama of eight 45 minute episodes. It makes you realise, along with the more general degradation of public political culture, that to live well, to live mindfully with this human historical drama unpredictably unfolding in our times, one must look beyond politics, or at least politics as spectacle.
Endurance of the wars and the politics of the day may require turning away from politics. This week I came across two texts related to two Nobel Prize winning authors that illustrated aspects of this dilemma.
I was reading the poems and a biography of William Butler Yeats in preparation for my upcoming podcast on Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature 100 years ago in 1923. Yeats was a spiritualist, a mystic, a practitioner of arcane knowledge. Yet he also took passionate positions on political issues and became a Senator in the Irish republic in the 1920s. Despite this apparent record of engagement, in 1923 St John Ervine (another Irish writer and playwright) claimed, with some personal knowledge, that Yeats was isolated from the "common life of his time", and that Ervine believed that he:
"had never met anyone who seems so unaware of contemporary affairs... due not to affectation, but sheer lack of interest. He probably would not have known of the War at all had not the Germans dropped a bomb near his lodgings off the Euston Road."
Yet Yeats wrote some of the most profound poems on experiencing the historical drama of politics, something I will return to in my podcast. Perhaps there is greater wisdom in being a non-political person?
Yeats also led me to Thomas Mann. In one of Yeats’ last poems from the latter 1930s, ‘Politics’, which I quote at the end of this newsletter, he engaged in a dialogue with his fellow Nobel laureate, the German novelist and author of the great Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks and Dr Faustus. This poem has an epigraph from Thomas Mann that expressed a common sentiment of intellectuals of the democratic age after 1918:
“In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms” (Thomas Mann)
This belief has only intensified since the 1960s, with the ethos that the personal is political. But perhaps it is also becoming a tyrannical belief that traps us in ways of thinking that do not suit our culture, our history, our lives, our endurance through too many wards, or the tawdry reality of our post-democratic politics.
It was a belief that Mann assumed in later life. In 1918 Thomas Mann had written a very different set of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. This text is controversial (discussed here and here) and I do not know it well. But it does reflects a different ethos of living in the imperfect societies of the early twentieth century in which the pre-democratic could sustain the good, the democratic could tyrannise and oppress, and the post-democratic was slouching towards Bethlehem to be born (as Yeats said in ‘The Second Coming’). I discovered this text, or fragments of it, by chance this week, and have not read it all. But here is an excerpt, that I hope you agree, has eerie affinities to our own time when we are learning that democracy is not all it is cracked up to be, and we pray that our destinies are revealed in terms better than politics.
Let me quote two passages, stripped of the more nationally focussed arguments, that resonate with my dilemma of whether to pursue a life of culture separate from politics.
First, Mann wrote of the political culture of 1918 in ways reminiscent of strands of politics in 2023:
I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. “Mankind” as humanitarian internationalism; “reason” and “virtue” as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social “desirability”; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it. But my destiny was to experience it in this way; and then, as I have already said, it is always at any moment on the verge of assuming this form: “active intellect,” that is: an intellect that is “resolved” to be active in favor of enlightened world liberation, world improvement, world happiness, does not long remain “politics” in the more abstract, figurative sense; it is immediately so in the strict, real sense as well. And – to ask the question again foolishly – what kind of politics is this?
Second, he insisted on separating the life of the mind from the political. In a society when everything personal has become totally political, this is a cry from the heart.
What provoked the deepest element in me, my national instinct, was the cry for “politics” in that meaning of the word that belongs to the intellectual sphere: it is the “politicization of the intellect,” the distortion of the concept of intellect into that of reforming enlightenment, of revolutionary humanitarianism, that works like poison and orpiment on me; and I know that my disgust and protest is not something insignificantly personal and temporary, but that here the national character itself is speaking through me. Intellect is not politics.
Source: Extract from Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). Translated, with an introduction, by Walter D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983, pp. 16-18.
Don’t forget you can enrol in my online course on Mindful History, here at Learnworlds.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive: Professions and the Tragedy of the Modern University.
Mann’s texts are fragments of the Burning Archive, but the focus of this section is my latest podcast, 116. Professions vs. Managers. The rise and fall of the professions.
In this podcast I do my second in-depth interview of a historian. Dr Hannah Forsyth is a historian of work, education and capitalism at Australian Catholic University, where she has taught global history, historiography, history of capitalism, politics and Australian Indigenous History. In 2020, Hannah gave the University of New England's Russel Ward Lecture, which can be viewed on YouTube. But hang out till next week when you will be able to watch my video interview with Hannah on my Youtube channel. She is the author of A History of the Modern Australian University (2014) and of Virtue Capitalists: the rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglophone world c.1870-2008 (2023) that is being published by Cambridge University Press this month. I spoke to her about both books in this podcast.
I was keen to explore with Hannah
What is the history behind the rise and fall of the professions?
How is their story linked to the rise of management especially since the 1970s?
And how does it all relate to what happens in the modern university?
Hannah’s thoughts on these questions are fascinating, and will connect to many readers’ own experiences in the workplace, in the public culture, and at university.
During the interview, I shared some of my own reflections and oral history of the professions and management in Victoria over my career as a bureaucrat. I also shared some thoughts on the modern university. Do let me know what you think when you listen to the podcast.
I developed some of these thoughts more extensively in a piece in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing (buy now for the full reveal)
“But I do not think [Jordan] Peterson or Scruton or Grayling have captured the full tragedy of the modern university, which plays itself out across more disciplines than the humanities. The university has broken its own way of life through its expansion over the last fifty years. It has become a vast feral city in which its citizens can no longer rely on the university to fulfil its fundamental social, moral purpose, which is, in Scruton’s words, to hand on “a store of knowledge and the culture that makes sense of it.”
I feel I have been a witness to this slowly unfolding tragedy, through my experiences of government. I have worked directly with people like Mark Burford, Peter Noonan and Terry Moran who were at the heart of education reforms since the 1980s, especially the mass expansion and concurrent corporatisation of the university through the Dawkins reforms… Universities are infected with administration. University teaching has declined. The competition for overseas student revenue, tenure and prestige in the little fishbowls of academia has crowded out any careful attention to the educational needs of students.
… We all now need to live with the broken institutions these reforms have wrecked. Back before these reforms, Michael Oakeshott wrote about the fundamental mistake of all these reforms. They turned an association that preserved culture into an enterprise that served utilitarian ends. Oakeshott wrote, “A University is not a machine for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result; it is a manner of human activity.” Universities might not today articulate their mission in this way, but they know in their bones and their sandstone feet the lost knowledge of how to be a university. When Oakeshott wrote the university still carried its precious living tradition on proud, broad shoulders. Oakeshott spoke to those who bore that living tradition when he wrote, “This knowledge is not a gift of nature; it is a knowledge of a tradition, it has to be acquired.” He could, however, sense the risk in the air: “it is always mixed up with error and ignorance, and it may even be lost.” (Michael Oakeshott The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989), pp.106-7). Lost it was. The living tradition fell from the shoulders some time in the 1980s or 1990s, and has been dragged through the mud and the dust for the last three decades.
The great unrecognised tragedy of modern government is that the zeal of reformers, the crowds of willing students and the surge of new money led to the loss of those living traditions that had been maintained successfully for centuries, with less resources and fewer people, by their host institution, the university.”
During the interview, Hannah Forsyth was more optimistic on the future of quality university education than this fragment from my burning archive. She refers to a radical sociologist, Raewyn Connell, who sees the hope of reform of universities in their democratization of the university. But if we now live in a post-democratic society, is this a forlorn hope? Might a more modest, less utopian aim be to restore association, where now enterprise rules? Might this restoration rather than reform be the way to go? Let me know what you think.
5. What surprised me most this week.
The big surprise came for me late in the week when I was watching Alexander Mercouris discuss the late withdrawal of Xi JinPing from the upcoming G20 Summit in Delhi. You can watch the comments here near the end of the video, at the 1:15:00 mark approximately. This might seem a rebuff to India, but Mercouris speculated that the dent to prestige will be remedied by BRICS-11+ in 2024 establishing a permanent administrative secretariat in Delhi. It was as if someone had watched my video in which I called for the UN Headquarters to be relocated from New York to Delhi.
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to Hannah Forsyth. It was great to connect with a working historian in my own country, even if I am an exile at home.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 116. Professions vs. Managers. The rise and fall of the professions. Interview with Hannah Forsyth
On the YouTube Channel I published a key section of the interview with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The biggest question in world history answered - Why do we change? and The BRICS Summit: Hoopla, or Historic? Does it spell the end for the US dollar as reserve currency? (based on last week’s substack pieces)
On Twitter, I had a quiet week.
On SubStack I published The World Crisis in Culture: the permanent revolution of carnival
On www.theburningarchive.com I republished sections from this newsletter, but you get them first here.
I filmed 90 per cent of my Writing in Government Masterclass.
Next week, I will be finishing off my Writing in Government Masterclass, writing the next instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis on the economy (that will likely take up thoughts about BRICS), sketching Life After Democracy, and watching out for the shortlisted books for the Wolfson history prize.
On Youtube the final instalments of the Felipe Fernandez-Armesto interview are coming out, and I may do a video on the shortlisted books for the Wolfson history prize and one of the segments of this newsletter.
On Friday on the podcast I am releasing an episode on the Nobel Prize for Literature and last year’s winner. This starts a little mini-series on the podcast on the Nobel Prize winners from 1923, 1973, 2018 and of course 2023 (announced on October 5). Please share with a friend.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I read Tokarczuk The Books of Jacob, Keith Jeffrey, 1916: A Global History (2015) and Richard Vinen, 1968: Radical protest and its enemies (2018).
I close the newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. This week it is Yeats, Politics, which I referred to above in the discussion of Thomas Mann. It is his rejoinder to Mann’s association of destiny with politics. Yeats found it in the personal. Told with irony. Please forgive the ageing sensuality of a lusty, but great poet.
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms.
‘Politics’ is from W.B. Yeats’ Last Poems 1936-39.
Until next week, take care, stay sane, and do not look for destiny in democratic politics.
Just as the fall of the “Iron Curtain” did not signal that communism as a political philosophy was broken, neither does the overthrow of the Bongo dynasty in Gabon signal that democracy is broken.