Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 8 July 2023
New Book. Multipolar Democracy. History and Progress. Atlantic Charters and Crusades. No Catastrophe, Yet. Time of Troubles. Second Coming.
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. My new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and NATO.
Governing the Multipolar World. Multipolar democracy.
Using History Mindfully. History and progress do not rhyme.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Atlantic Charters and NATO Crusades.
What surprised me most. No catastrophe, yet.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles.
Reading and Closing Verse. The Second Coming.
Have you checked out my books?
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.
So, on with the newsletter….
1. The Big Story
If I may be indulged a small reprieve from big world news, and comment instead on a big news story in my small personal world. My latest book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, is published, and will be available for purchase as paperback and e-book from 14 July.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat is a memoir and collection of essays on government, politics, work, writing, and bureaucracy. It includes my reflections over the last dozen years on politics, government, power, and the most challenging social and political issues of our time, from democracy to political crisis, from mental health to child sexual abuse, and from alcohol to the pandemic. It tries to show what a bureaucrat can be, beyond the usual typecast images. I share my hidden life as a thinking, writing government official. It contains my writing on governing, and how ordinary virtues can govern democracies better.
Completing this book is big news for me. The process of pulling this book together and writing the memoir sections over the last six months has helped me leave behind the many disappointments and losses of my 33 year career as a minor government official. It has freed me to pursue this new life as an independent author. I hope you will consider buying this book when it is available from 14 July. I will provide a post with more details of its publication at the end of next week.
In big world news, the major story is the failure of the Ukraine offensive and signs of growing strains in the Atlantic alliance ahead of the Vilnius NATO Summit on 11 and 12 July. I will reserve comments on those issues until next week’s newsletter.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
The Economist magazine has issued an infographic from its Global Democracy Index that claimed only 8 per cent of the world lives in a ‘full democracy’. Australia and Britain made the cut; the USA was delisted as a ‘flawed democracy’.
Western thought on modern political institutions tends to claim “our democracy” is the unique asset of the West. It is a modern polite way of claiming that that ‘Western civilization’ is superior to others. This claim by the West to possess democracy is a core part of the Anglo-American imperial world view. The standard history we have is that democracy was invented in Athens, and then mysteriously passed from its death to the Magna Carta in England, and then on to find its most perfect home in the United States of America. Westminster is the mother of parliaments. Magna Carta is strangely honoured in America. The Founding Fathers transcribed the perfect constitution from a communion with God. Anglo-American universities, think-tanks and surveys of opinion-leaders, such as The Economist magazine, have spread the good word ever since, and get to determine the health of democracy around the world.
Multiple histories of democracy now show a more global, pluralistic history of political thought. Many traditions, institutions, ideas and virtues have helped to make the many forms of democracy around the world today. In truth, Western civilization is only one of several civilizations that has developed democratic processes and institutions to respond to the problems of governing.
This truth has recently been widely proclaimed by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. For several years now he has asserted that India is the Mother of Democracy, and his claim is founded on a broad base of Indian history. When Indian historians and people refer to India as the mother of democracy they are referring to several specific traditions, institutions, ideas and virtues. The British or the West want to say they taught Indians democracy, but it is not correct.
We might be better off seeing democracy as a process, rather than a fixed form of government. It does not belong in one place, or a single source. Like many good ideas, it has many parents. Patterns of governing form within cultural spheres, rather than a model of diffusion from a single centre. We need to think about governing and democracy in the way that historians now think of civilisations, generated through multiple processes - state-building, reciprocal altruism, kiship affiliation, redistribution - not as a single path of diffusion from the home of democracy, whether that is conceived of as Athens, London or Washington. Forms and institutions of governing spread across the networks of societies across the globe, not only guns, germs, knowledge, technology, faiths and goods.
You can read more on this topic in my paid subscriber only series on the World Crisis or Polycrisis - Political Disorder: how to live with pre-democracy, democracy and post-democracy.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
One persistent cognitive distortion about the flow of events in history is to cast them as a narrative of progress or evolution or maturation. In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto highlights the effect of this mental habit on many histories of civilizations. The idea that civilization is progress has been especially widespread, but also has a lot to answer for. It is very comon, and very wrong.
“The language of evolution bears a heavy responsibility for misleading people into thinking that civilization is a superior way of organising life, simply because it happens late in history. Societies do not evolve: they just change.”
The same point may be made about political order and democracy. Political orders do not evolve, and never reach the end of history. They just change.
On this theme, I am developing an online course on mindful history or how everyday historians can use history to make wise decisions, whether in personal life, at work or community roles, or in relation to the big events of the public stage. My idea is that a simple process to engage with history, but also to detach from fixed ideas about the past, can help us all live well in the present. I pitch the course to help “everyday historians,” that is all of us. Stories of the past can help us explore, appreciate but not get trapped by the realities of a complex world. I plan to have this course open for enrolment before the end of July. More news soon.
If you are interested, please let me know with a comment.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive.
On the podcast this week I gave a rapid fire history of the Altlantic, structured around seven key dates. These dates provide glimpses into the multipolar history of the Atlantic Ocean, and the chameleon-like character of the Atlantic idea, institutions, alliance and civilization.
950-600 BCE The Late Bronze Age shared culture on the Atlantic Rim of Europe and Northern Africa from Gibraltrar to what we now know as Britain.
783 CE The Viking/Norse Attack on Lindisfarne, and later spread of Norse, non-Christian, non-classical culture to the “West”, but also to Russia and Eurasia.
1492 CE The critical year of the West European voyages that unlocked the Atlantic winds and current system, and enabled the formation of a trans-Atlantic community.
1497 CE The mass conversion of Portugese Jews (many of whom had fled from Spain) leading many of them to settle on São Tome that became an offshore island base, like Cape Verde and Port Royal, for the Transatlantic Trade in slaves taken from Africa.
1812 CE The 1812 War between the USA and Britain, coinciding with Russia’s War against Napoleon that liberated Europe, that ended the enmity between the father and son Anglo-American Empires and turned them against both their Spanish heritage and their Russian rivals.
1941 CE The proclamation of the Atlantic Charter by Roosevelt and Churchill on a boat on the Atlantic Ocean, while the USA still had not entered the war despite the German armies surrounding Moscow and Leningrad after Operation Barbarossa.
1999 CE The NATO bombing of Serbia and Montenegro, and its partition of former Yugoslav states that transformed the Atlantic alliance from a defensive alliance to a warmongering crusade in pursuit of Western ideals of democracy.
I focussed my discussion of the fragment of the Burning Archive on the Atlantic Charter. You can read the Atlantic Charter here. Here you can also read Winston Churchill’s annotations of the draft charter.
I compared this 1940s media stunt to the announcement by Joe Biden and Winston Churchill in June 2021 of the New Atlantic Charter. The new version is rightly less celebrated.
I ended the story with the 1999 bombing of Serbia. This event continues to echo down to today. It has been referred to multiple times during the Ukraine-Russia-NATO War, and we should always remember that the defensive Atlantic Alliance bombed the civilians of Serbia mercilessly during this time, and even bombed the Chinese Embassy. The past is not dead. The past is not even past.
The significance of this event is not just a personal view or that of one side in the current world conflicts. On the podcast I quoted from Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations, on the NATO bombings. His words are prescient, and show how much the ‘brain dead NATO’ (in Emmanuel Macron’s words) needs to manufacture enemies to justify its continuation, and to conceal the competing interests and differences of Europe and USA. On even of NATO Vilnius summit on 11 and 12 July it is worth quoting Fernández-Armesto’s words from two decades ago at length.
The collapse of Soviet power did not, at first, weaken the Atlantic system - though it will surely do so in the long run, since without a common threat Europe and America will cease to have common interests. Now, instead of needing them as allies against communism, America wanted the Europeans as partners in global policing. From the last years of the twentieth century, as America’s share of the world economy shrank, the costs of global peacekeeping soared. A world ‘safe for democracy’ now had to be defended against the terrorism of irrational cults and factions, and the menace of rogue states under unpredictable dictators.” (Civilizations, p. 535)
He observes that this led to a reinvention of the Atlantic Alliance, and a dedication of NATO to American Progressive ideals, rooted in imperial exceptionalism
Just war theory had to be extended to the point of distortion to justify a new role for the Atlantic alliance as a ‘humanitarian’ warrior, bombing people into compliance with a moral menu essentially unchanged since Woodrow Wilson involved America with the world: self-determination., democratic forms, non-aggression.” (Civilizations, p. 535)
But this humanitarian warrior conducted cruel bombings of civilians, and created legal sophistry to justify the establishment of a military base in the self-determined pseudo-state of Kosovo. The dispute between Serbia, NATO and Kosovo still simmers today. The precedent set by the crusading blunderers would be later quoted by Russian Foreign Ministry lawyers to support a similar act of national separation in the Donbass in 2022. Fernández-Armesto concluded:
Though NATO propaganda tried to justify it [bombing of Serbia and Montenegro] as a ‘war for civilization’, it was really undertaken to save face… When the Atlantic alliance finally breaks down, and western civilization is split by political schism, this thoughtless warmongering may be seen as one of the acts which deservedly condemned it, exposing its flaws, underming its ‘civilized’ credentials.’ (Civilizations, p. 536)
These words were published in 2000. They echo loudly today as NATO induces the Ruin of Ukraine, and justifies it as another ‘war for civilization’, another Northern Atlantic Crusade for Democracy.
5. What surprised me most this week.
I was quite worried at the start of this week about the riots in Paris exploding and the threats of an attack by Ukraine on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant leading to a true catastrophe. Let us hope these pleasant surprises of non-events continue for a while yet.
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to Russians with Attitude for using some of my material in their podcast, and promoting my recent article on the death of Ivan to their large readership. Thanks to to all subscribers who joined after reading that piece.
For decades, Ivan the Terrible and the events of the Time of Troubles have been for me a rich source of imaginative contemplation on power, history and the world. I am also grateful to them; I embrace the monster, the chaos and the tragedy. They are the stuff of history. How we tell stories from this material, however, is our choice. Increasingly, I want to tell stories of compassionate comedy, rather than divisive tragedy. The latter ends in ruins. Comedy shows us a way to the spring after the ruins.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 108 Atlantic Romantics, Part II: How NATO emerged from Atlantic History
On the YouTube Channel I published a walk and talk video, Political Disorder by the Lake, on the idea of collapse in Russia and France, a video The Superpowers in the multipolar world are not who you think, on the idea of and number of “superpowers” or great states in the multipolar world, and some shorts built recapping some key points from my podcast 107, Atlantic Romantics Part 1.
On Twitter, I had a quiet week, detoxing a little from too much news after the week of the Russian “civil war.” I did tweet out a fragment from 13 Ways that related to the sense of crisis in the world today, quoting from Yeats poem, A Second Coming.
On SubStack I published The Singer at the Enigmatic Death of Ivan the Terrible
Next week, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat is released on 14 July. I will be writing the next instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, Social Fragmentation (full article will be available to paid subscribers). I will also write a piece on The Time of Troubles.
On Tuesday I plan to release a video on Youtube from the series on the major powers of the today’s multipolar world. On Friday on the podcast I will either produce a special episode for the release of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, or do an episode on the NATO Vilnius Summit.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I read some more of Pushkin, The Captain’s Daughter, which provides a perspective on the Pugachev Rebellion in Russia in the 1770s. I also dipped back into Chester Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (2001).
I close the newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. This week a stanza from Yeats, The Second Coming, which widely quoted of course for its line that the centre cannot hold. This short lyric is always contemporary.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
You can read the whole poem in many anthologies or here.
Until next week, take care, and stay sane.
Great stuff as always.
Thanks heaps for Felipe Fernández-Armesto!
As for "I am developing an online course on mindful history or how everyday historians can use history to make wise decisions," China's Imperial Archivist was selected for the very qualities you have identified.
As Chinese leaders have done for millennia, Xi Jinping uses history to make wise decisions. One of the first reports he receives on any situation catalogs its historical analogues and discusses their applicability to the moment.