Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the effect of the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union generated much satisfaction among many Americans, Europeans, and others who, with justification, saw the evils of that empire as proof of the failures of the Communist system on which it was based. No political system hitherto invented provides protection against the worst instincts of rapacious rulers and their acolytes, and many of those who thought that Karl Marx had done so found themselves contemplating their fate in the gulag, where tens of millions perished while Soviet bigwigs partied in their dachas. The theoretical merits of Communism turned out no better in practice than Nazism or Fascism, whether tested in Russia, China, or Cambodia.

But the world may yet come to appreciate the seven decades of Communist control over the Soviet empire for what it did to constrain the Russian reach for global power. Communism’s end-justifies-the-means produced conditions under which fear, and hence corruption, suppressed initiative and innovation. Communism’s inherent inefficiencies spawned an economic system destined to disintegrate in a globalizing world. The Communist imperialists extended their power over a vast colonial empire reaching from central Asia to central Europe, requiring massive investments in policing as well as armed intervention. Entire populations (for example the Chechens and the Tatars) were exiled to remote desert areas at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, then “pardoned” by more moderate rulers to return to their abandoned abodes where Russians had taken their place. To the wider world, Russia’s Cold-War leaders might threaten “we will bury you,” but the cost of their ruthless rule inhibited their capacity to do so, and the Cold War stayed cold except in proxy settings.

Now Russia is the “free and open” society that might have emerged from the Revolution a century ago, its lost empire a national preoccupation, its former colonies resentful, its Communist-era settlers abandoned to newly sovereign governments, its allies near and far looking to Moscow for succor. In their unconstrained social-spatial engineering, the dominant Russians of the former U.S.S.R. redrew boundaries and awarded territories and peoples to “republics” of which they were not historically a part on the arrogant assumption that all Soviet member states would be Moscow’s vassals in perpetuity. Thus a Soviet dictator in 1954 capriciously transferred the Crimea Peninsula to Ukraine as a reward for Ukraine’s contribution to the Soviet Union’s well-being, not imagining that, before the end of the century, Ukraine would be a sovereign state in fact rather than in Communist mythology. As a result, millions of Russians today find themselves under the government in Kyyiv (Kiev) rather than Moscow.

The Slavic diaspora in what Russians still call their “near-abroad” continue to arouse nationalist emotions in the new Russia. Millions of Russians have returned to their ancestral home, but many more remain beyond the border, from Kazakhstan to Estonia. And others – Slavs as well as non-Slavs – who allied themselves with the Communist cause during the Soviet period also have Moscow’s attention. Indeed, while the current crisis in Georgia has been simmering for years, its escalation relates directly to the last convulsions of another Communist collapse, that of Yugoslavia, and its largest fragment, Serbia.

The devolution of the former Yugoslavia initially yielded five states, of which Serbia was the largest and in many ways the most complex, with Hungarian, Montenegrin, and Kosovar (Albanian) minorities under Belgrade’s government. The Hungarian minority in the north did not agitate for secession, but coastal Montenegro left the Serbian fold in 2006 without serious problems and became another of Europe’s ministates, with a population below 700,000. The Muslim majority of Kosovo, landlocked leftover of the Ottoman period and numbering about 1.8 million, victims of Serbian subjugation during the devolutionary period and inalterably opposed to further Serbian domination, attained independence in 2008 with the support of the United States and a majority of (but not all) European states. Russia vociferously objected to Kosovo’s independence, supporting the Serbian position that Kosovo is a historic part of the former kingdom and vowing to veto any application it might make to join the United Nations.

While the international community’s attention was focused on the Kosovo issue, the simmering trouble between Russia and Georgia worsened, and it was no coincidence. Even as Moscow continued to object to Kosovo’s recognition, Russian military equipment and troops began to converge on two stretches of Russia’s international border: those of Abkhazia, a corner of Georgia on the Black Sea coast, and of South Ossetia, in the Caucasus Mountains. While Georgia was one of the 15 Socialist Soviet “republics,” these two pockets of Georgia – as well as a third, Ajaria, also on the Black Sea coast – were simply administrative acknowledgments of ethnic-minority realities. Indeed, the Ossetians straddled the border between Russia and Georgia: North Ossetia lies one small entity removed from Chechnya, and South Ossetians make up just 3 percent of Georgia’s population. Russians and Russian military “peacekeepers” strengthen Moscow’s presence in this enclave of Russian loyalty, and in Abkhazia, too, the Russian presence outnumbers the 2 percent Abkhazians. Even before the intervention of August 8, 2008, the government of Georgia had little control over either piece of the “near abroad.”

It has been the stated objective of the Tbilisi government to assert its jurisdiction over the three minority territories on its margins, but Moscow has obstructed this initiative in various ways, ranging from the closure of transport routes (and thus commercial traffic) between Georgia and Russia to the award of Russian passports to residents of Abkhazia and North Ossetia. Newspapers and other media commentary in Russia ask why, if Kosovo can be wrested from Serbia because locals there want independence, the same rights cannot be accorded to North Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian commentators are arguing that Georgia’s suppression of Ossetians and Abkhazians is no less ruthless than that of Kosovars by Serbia.

But by militarily intervening as the Russians have, including the bombing of targets in Georgia itself, Moscow appears intent on creating a crisis that will demonstrate its capacity and willingness to wage war for its interests in the “near abroad” despite serious risk of potentially uncontrollable escalation. Kosovo may have been part of the kindling, but Russia resented NATO encroachment toward its borders, American-planned construction of missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, EU involvement in Ukraine’s long-range plans (Georgia has also proclaimed its hope to join the EU, and you will see the EU flag, beside the flag of Georgia, stand behind President Saakashvili’s desk during interviews) and other slights. One question is whether Russian bombers will target the Georgian section of the oil pipeline linking the Caspian Sea reserves to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another is whether, should Russia impose a naval blockade on Georgia, Ukraine will deny it the use of its Crimean naval bases, potentially drawing Kyyiv into the conflict and creating a motive for Russian action there as well.

A belligerent Russia has already choked off the flow of natural gas to Europe during a dispute over payments, has allowed a murder case (allegedly by a Russian agent in London) to damage relations with the United Kingdom, has turned a blind eye to criminal activity in Moldova, has obstructed efforts to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear practices, has imprisoned business leaders deemed politically inconvenient in ways chillingly reminiscent of gulag times, and has sent bombers flying into airspace in the Cold-War mode. The brutality of its post-Soviet campaigns against Muslim Chechens was seen in context of the wider “war against terror”, but the destruction now being visited on Georgia suggests that a new page has been turned.

ShareThis

Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the recent events in Belgium.

Once again, Belgium – that is, Belgium’s future as a country – is in the news. It is in a way the ultimate irony that the European Union (EU) member whose capital serves as the headquarters of the world’s foremost experiment in supranationalism teeters on the brink of disintegration. Sophisticated, bureaucratic Brussels, Francophone island in Belgium’s Flemish-speaking north, represents multicultural cooperation to EU enthusiasts across Europe, but foreign intrusion to Flemish nationalists in its immediate hinterland. The collapse of one of the EU’s founding members, a key participant in the Benelux union that preceded the EU itself, would signify a failure that could have serious ramifications for the entire project.

The rise of Flemish nationalism and the default of Belgian federalism are not, however, unique to this small, prosperous country whose very survival is linked to the EU experiment. Europe’s growing integration is animating nationalist sentiments among locals in many of the EU’s 27 member states, and central governments try in various ways to defuse the associated political pressures. The European map is replete with cultural minorities that see themselves threatened with a loss of identity in Europe’s economic and political homogenization, and some of these minorities have national aspirations, viewing the EU’s still-formative period as an opportunity to strengthen their autonomy. The partition of

Czechoslovakia created two states for such cultural majorities and is often cited by others (in Catalonia, Scotland, Corsica, the Basque country as well as in both Belgian Flanders and Wallonia) as the prototype for their own aspirations. Separatists may be aware of the ultimate futility of their campaigns, but some of them nevertheless punctuate their activities with violence. The European political scene is anything but placid.

Thus the fate of Belgium will be of particular significance for the EU. Overcoming devolutionary forces by demonstrating the economic and social advantages of representative membership is the whole idea, and in general it has worked. The list of states aspiring to join the EU, including not only Turkey but also Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine and even Georgia, is longer than that rejecting the option (Norway, Iceland and Switzerland), and only one entity has left the EU when the opportunity arose, namely Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). But if a state at the very heart of the EU, and one of its greatest beneficiaries, fails to accommodate its centrifugal forces, it will constitute a setback that will raise doubts among members and would-be members alike.

Flemish-Walloon negotiations having failed, should the EU seek to intervene? Might an EU transitional administration give the parties time and space to renew their efforts? The prospects appear dim: Flemish nationalism is again on the rise, with visions of independence and, ironically, eventual full membership in the EU. Resentment of French-speaking Belgians runs deep; xenophobia is rife. The Flemish flag waves over public buildings and town squares in the northern provinces; advertisements promoting the economic advantages of Wallonia in commercial publications barely mention Belgium at all. That two cultural communities with so much in common could find themselves at this impasse casts doubt on the whole EU enterprise.

ShareThis

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry, and will be published in August. In the article below he looks a Beatles’ revolution.

On 21 August 1940, Winston Churchill famously declared, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The RAF had been dominating the Luftwaffe in the air and Churchill saw an opportunity to bolster British morale amid the fire, smoke, and death on the ground. In Liverpool less than two months later and during the Blitz, a mother would celebrate the Prime Minister’s resolve by naming her son John Winston Lennon, someone else to whom many would owe much and no less so than for what he contributed in another turbulent August.

On 11 August 1968, the Beatles announced “National Apple Week” and launched their own label, Apple Records, as a declaration of independence from corporate media. In many respects, they were babes in the woods with the wolves of the industry at their heels, but during a summer of increasingly violent riots and protests, Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr defied expectations of their demise. In August 1967, their manager and friend Brian Epstein had died after naïvely mixing drugs and alcohol, leaving the band and their finances in shock and disarray. Almost immediately, the Beatles went into a brilliantly destructive tailspin, launching one ill-fated venture after another: a divisive retreat to India with the Maharishi, a clothing store on Baker Street renowned for shoplifting, and the Boxing Day disaster of their film, Magical Mystery Tour. A year after Epstein’s death, they returned to what they knew best: making records.

Apple released three charting records on 30 August 1968: Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by Paul McCartney), Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea” (produced by George Harrison), and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Revolution.” Both the Hopkin and Beatles disks would climb to the top of British charts, but where the former simply updated a nostalgic Russian ditty, the latter broke new ground in more ways that we can discuss here. In particular, Lennon’s “Revolution” challenged the violence that the Rolling Stones seemed to be embracing in “Street Fighting Man.” Although a master of obfuscation (consider “I Am the Walrus”), Lennon openly and plainly questions politicos of every stripe while striking down a path he would follow for most of his short life, his most poignant articulation coming with “Imagine” (1971).

Released a little over a week after soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia quashing the Prague Spring democracy and only days after Chicago police rioted against war protesters, “Revolution” scathingly chastised the chattering of authority, right and left. Rather than the catalyst for revolution that Richard Nixon had imagined Lennon to be, the Liverpudlian born in a milieu of bombs and death called upon a generation to stop and to consider the consequences of violence and demagoguery. Evoking his stature as a Beatle, he essentially asked everyone to step back and take a deep breath. He succeeded in taunting both conservatives and radicals, but he also gave voice to reason. In that summer of human conflict, his cynicism rang true.

ShareThis

Below we have excerpted part of the introduction from the 40th anniversary edition of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment.  This book, the definitive work on Stalin’s purges, provides an eloquent chronicle of one of humanity’s most tragic events.  Robert Conquest is the author of some thirty books of history, biography, poetry, fiction, and criticism.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Art and Sciences. He is at present a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 did not come out of the blue.  Like any other historical phenomenon, it had its roots in the past.  It would no doubt be misleading to argue that it followed inevitably from the nature of Soviet society and of the Communist Party.  It was itself a means of enforcing violent change upon that society and that party.  But all the same, it could not have been launched excpet against the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of Bolshevik rule; and its special characteristics, some of them hardly credible to foreign minds, derive from a specific tradition.  The dominating ideas of the Stalin period, the evolution of the oppostionists, the very confession in the great show trials, can hardly be followed without considering not so mch the whole Soviet past as the development of the Party, the consolidation of the dictatorship, the movements of faction, the rise of individuals, and the emergence of extreme economic politics.

After his first stroke on 26 May 1922, Lenin, cut off to a certain degree from the immediacies of political life, contemplated the unexpected defects which had arisen in the revolution he had made.

He had already remarked, to he delegates to the Party’s Xth Congress in March 1921, “We have failed to convince the broad masses.”  He had felt obliged to excuse the low quality of many Party members: ‘No profound and popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of filth, without adventurers and rogues, without boastful and noisy elements…A ruling party inevitably attracts careerists.”  He had noted that the Soviet State had “many bureaucratic deformities,” speaking of “that same Russian apparatus…borrowed from Tsardom and only just covered with a Soviet veneer.”  And just before his stroke he had noted “the prevalence of personal spite and malice” in the committees charged with purging the Party.

Soon after his recovery from this first stroke, he was remarking, “We are living in a sea of ilegality,” and observing, “The Communist kernal lacks general culture”, the culture of the middle classes in Russia was “inconsiderable, wretched, but in any case greater than that of our responsible Communists.”  In the autumn he was criticizing carelessness and parasitism, and invented special phrases for the boasts and lies of the Communists: “Com-boasts and Com-lies.”

In his absence, his subordinates were acting more unacceptably than ever.  His criticisms had hithero been occasional reservations uttered in the intervals of busy political and governmental activity.  Now they became his main preoccupation.  He found that Stalin, to whom as General Secretary he had entrusted the Party machine in 1921, was hounding the Party in Georgia.  Stalin’s emissary, Ordzhonkidze, had even struck the Georgian Communist leader Kabanidze.  Lenin favored a policy of concilation in Georgia, where the population was solidy anti-Bolshevik and had only just lost its independence to a Red Army assault.  He took strong issue with Stalin.

It was at this time that he wrote his “Testament.”  In it he made it clear that in his view Stalin was, after Trotsky, “the most able” leader of the Central Committee; and he criticized him, not as he did Trotsky (for “too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs”), but only for having “concentrated an enormous power in his hands” which he was uncertain Stalin would always know how to use with “sufficient caution.”  A few days later, after Stalin had used obscene language and made threats to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, in connection with Lenin’s intervention in the Georgian affair, Lenin added a postscript to the Testament recommending Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship on the gournds of his rudeness and capriciousness- as being incompatible, however, only with that particular office.  On the whole, the reservations made about Trotsky must seem more serious when it comes to politics proper, and his “ability” to be an administrative executant rather more than a potential leader in his own right.  It is only fair to add that it was to Trotsky that Lenin turned in support in his last attempts to influence policy; but Trotsky failed to carry out Lenin’s wishes.

The Testament was concerned to avoid a split between Trotsky and Stalin.  The solution proposed- an increase in the size of the Central Committee- was futile.  In his last articles Lenin went on attack “bureaucratic misrule and willfulness,” spole of the condition of the State machine as “repugnant,” and concluded gloomily, “We lack sufficienct civilization to enable us to pass straight on to Socialism although we have the political requisities.”

“The political requisities…”- but these were precisely the activity of the Party and governmental leadership which he was condemming in practice.  Over the past years he had personally launched the system of rule by a centralized Party against- if necessary- all other social forces.  He had creaded the Bolsheviks, the new type of party, centralized and discilpline, in the first palce. He had preserved its identity in 1917, when before his arrival from exile the Bolshevik leaders had aligned themselves on a course of conciliation with the rest of the Revolution.  There seems little doubt that without him, the Social Democrats would have reunited and would have taken the normal position of such a movement in the State.  Instead, he had kept the Bolsheviks intact, and then sought and won sole power- again against much resistance from his own followers…

…In destroying the Deomcratic tendency within the Communist Party, Lenin in effect threw the game to the manipulators of the Party machine.  Henceforward, the appartus was to be first the most powerful and later the only force within the Party.  The answer to the question “Who will rule Russia?” became simply “Who will win a faction fight confined to a narrow section of the leadership?” Candidates for power had already shown their hands.  As Lenin lay in the twilight of the long decline from his last stroke, striving to correct all this, they were already at grips in the first round of the struggle which was to culminate in the Great Purge.

ShareThis

Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela. Elleke Boehmer, author of Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction, is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.. In the piece below Professor Boehmer recounts moments spent observing ‘on the ground’ the symbolic legacies of Mandela during a research trip to South Africa at the end of 2006 and in 2008 – legacies at once durable yet intangible.

November 2006, the new Johannesburg. South Africa’s largest city is a capital of crime, as always, but it is also more exuberantly on the move than ever before. The security walls are higher than during the apartheid years but the inner-city malls are vibrant with cultural confidence, heightened today by the luminous purple of the blooming jacaranda trees. And Mandela, the name, the international image, forms an indelible part of this atmosphere, even now, years after he stood down as president.

It’s not only because I’m sensitized by writing about Mandela that I’m picking up on the widely broadcast references. Madiba seems to be the universal emblem for all that is celebratory in this country still struggling to shake off its legacy of social and economic division. Much that is edgy, far-sighted, and integrative about these racing streets, like the new steel Mandela bridge sweeping from the university district into the inner-city, feels like a tribute to him.

P.W. Botha died yesterday and the newspaper billboards wired up on lampposts in amongst the jacaranda flowers announce Mandela’s words of tribute to his old rival. In a leafy suburb my friend and I visit the Nelson Mandela Children’s Foundation, a fine house set in a manicured garden, which also houses the Oprah Winfrey Foundation: two transnational black icons nestled side-by-side. Downtown in Kort Street, a row of shops so short it does not appear on the city map, is Kapitan’s Indian restaurant, where Mandela once acquired his taste for prawn curry. Kapitan’s is the only venue from the cosmopolitan 1950s that has survived, though today it is closed, the shuttered shop-front unwelcoming.

Come to think of it, though the marks of Mandela are pervasive they are at the same time strangely elusive. Like a presiding genie, Madiba feels to be all around, an eminence about to be perceived just round every corner, and yet he is nowhere to be pinpointed. What does Mandela mean to the city’s citizens today? We travel to the Constitutional Court, where Johannesburg’s infamous Fort prison once stood, through which Mandela and Gandhi passed. The ‘permanent’ installation showing Mandela’s cell, complete with prison blanket, has been temporarily shut down for refurbishment. Beyond a dismantled archive, will we be able to find the palpable presence of Nelson somewhere, under this perfect blue African sky?

We drive to my friend’s favourite shop, in an upmarket shopping centre, which sells a variety of expensive retro-chic t-shirts bearing the image of Steve Biko and Drum magazine covers. However Mandela’s image, now too clichéed, too establishment, decorates no cap or t-shirt. Only outside on the pavement a street-trader sells clay fridge-magnets of Nelson in his trademark Madiba shirts, alongside other tourist trinkets.

We continue on to the Nelson Mandela Square nestled within the even more upmarket conurbation of Sandton City. Here a bronze statue of a gormlessly smiling Madiba in jive-step, paid for by public subscription, towers over a series of smart restaurants catering for an upwardly mobile clientele. Among the shoppers strolling by, few other than the tourists bother to squint up at the strangely uninspiring figure blocked against the sun.

The question arises, has Mandela the commercial trademark of the Rainbow Nation come to overshadow his other points of cultural reference in the showcase of the new South Africa—his significance as an HIV/AIDS champion, a unifying national myth? Is he now at once too popular and too predictable to be acknowledged as the cornerstone of the country’s self-perception, especially from the insecure perspective of the current ANC government? Forty-four years ago, when he was arrested on the main road from Durban to Johannesburg only miles from where my best friend once lived, he was as a man-on-the-run at once more distant and yet ubiquitous to his people than he is as one-time leader now.

A mark of the many roles Mandela played in his life-time—from Creon in a production of Antigone to Black Pimpernel—is that he is cited as a logo and heroic image within so many areas of cultural reference in this country whose story of moral triumph he authored. Yet it is in the nature of a symbol to be partial, not to encapsulate the whole story—especially remembering that its actual referent is here in this city today, walking about perhaps in his Houghton garden. The new South Africa both equates to the Old Man’s creation and yet, populous twenty-first-century country that it is, multiply exceeds it. Sandile Dikeni reminds us: ‘My people are this many and more and their collective name is bigger than that of Nelson Mandela’.

In Lewis Nkosi’s 2006 Bildungsroman Mandela’s Ego, the boy Dumisa grows up in Zululand with the sense of Mandela as his life-mentor—the invisible household-spirit shaping the different stages of his life. Most South Africans could be described in the same terms as Dumisa. Mandela is the myth that they have lived and in some cases died by. Once again, his legacy extends everywhere through their lives, like a quiet music, yet he is nowhere to be precisely located.

Outside the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town where Mandela once presided, another street-trader has a stall under the historic oak trees. He is among tens of other street-traders here in the one-time Dutch East India Company gardens. A short way off, as the ironies of historical proximity have it, stands a statue of Cecil Rhodes pointing north into Africa, at the base of the statue, Behold Your Hinterland. The stall is more or less within the direct line of Rhodes’s imperial gesture. The other stalls here on the oak avenue sell the usual fare: painted clay elephants, tin-can insects. This is why the street-trader in question stands out. His wares compared to these others are unique. No, this isn’t batik, he explains, but cloth cured in varying densities of rooibos tea. The subject of these painted cloths, none affordable to locals, is African wildlife. The only human subject is Nelson Mandela, full-face, once again smiling, hopeful, staring out into South Africa along the sight-lines marked by Rhodes.

The ironies of historical proximity. Mandela and Rhodes. Botha and Mandela. Mandela, one journalist observes, is the icon who outgrew his country. Much as did Rhodes one hundred years ago. Already the world’s politicians are lining up to pay tribute to Mandela on his 90th birthday. Yet I am told that he himself would prefer to spend the day in quiet, perhaps in his garden, which, even in prison, has been his preferred refuge in times of trouble across the great length of his life.

–

June 2008, a jaded Johannesburg. Only two weeks ago South Africans desperate for jobs and opportunities launched xenophobic attacks on Zimbabweans and other African migrants. The Rainbow nation’s bright colours are faded almost to invisibility. I arrive in the city to discuss my book and everywhere two strong responses confront me. Yes, people say, Madiba is still our national success story. But, at the same time, we feel we are running out of hope, running out of myth, unless the great elderly man once again makes himself heard.

Throughout I have been struck by the number of times people have asked whether I have met Mandela. Have I been touched by him, in the flesh? Across his career Mandela has persuaded people through the tangible force of his personality. But now, it is clear, his fellow South Africans are in need of his presence as never before. They want feel his guidance but they sense that he is withdrawing from them, not into myth, but into deep old age. They see that his message of hope for the future based in hospitality, in getting on together, has never been as pertinent as now, but they know, too, that his message requires his presence.

South Africans today are as hungry as they ever were for the Mandela myth, yet the future will have to find innovative new ways of making that myth real in their lives.

Elleke Boehmer’s Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction publishes in the UK today. Her previous books for OUP include the anthology Empire Writing, and she edited Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys. She also published her latest novel, Nile Baby, in June with Ayebia Clarke Publishing.

ShareThis

James W. Jones is Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Psychology, at Rutgers University. His book, Blood That Cries Out From the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism, looks at what makes ordinary people evil. Jones argues that not every adherent of an authoritarian group will turn to violence, and he shows how theories of personality development can explain why certain individuals are easily recruited to perform terrorist acts. In the article below Jones argues that understanding people who turn towards terrorism is the first step to halting their violent acts. Check out Jones’s webpage here.

How much do we really know about terrorism? The short answer is “a lot” and “a very little.” “Terrorism” — as the cliché about one person’s terrorist being another’s freedom fighter suggests — is more often used as an epithet or a bit of propaganda than a category useful for understanding. There is general agreement that terrorism is not an end in itself or a motivation in itself (except perhaps for a few genuinely psychotic individual lone wolves). No movement is only a terrorist movement; its primary character is more likely political, economic, or religious. Terrorism is a tactic, not a basic type of group.

The first step in clarifying this topic of “understanding terrorism” is to become clear about the purpose of our attempts to understand terrorism. Part of the confusion over the understanding of terrorism results from the more basic confusion of not knowing what we want our explanations of terrorism to do for us. Before we undertake to “explain” terrorism, we should be clear as to what we want this “explanation” to accomplish? Many hope that understanding terrorism will help predict future terrorist actions. Others hope that it will help devise effective counter-terrorism strategies. Will a psychological, or political, or military, or religious understanding of religious terrorism aid in those goals?

I know from my work in forensic psychology that predicting violent behavior in any specific case is very, very complicated and very rarely successful. And dramatic acts of violence that change the course of history — the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand that lit the match on the conflagration of World War I, the taking hostage of the American embassy in the Iranian revolution, the 9/11 attack — are rarely predictable. We can list some of the characteristics of religious groups that turn to violence and terror. I have studied some of the themes common to Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist groups that have turned to terror. We can also outline the steps that individuals and groups often go through in becoming committed to violent actions. The NYPD has done exactly that in a recent study. But I remain skeptical that any model will enable us to predict with any certainty when specific individuals or groups may turn to terrorism. There are warning signs we should be aware of. But these are signs, not determinants or predictors.

As for counter-terrorism, it is an important strategic principal that one should know one’s enemy. We succeeded in containing the expansiveness of the former Soviet Union in part because we had a detailed and nuanced understanding of the Soviet system. Understanding some of what is at stake religiously and spiritually for religious groups that engage in terrorism can help devise ways of countering them. So a religious-psychological understanding of religious terrorists’ motivations can be an important part of the response to them.

In the months following 9/11 I often heard demagogues on the radio say that psychologists (like me) who seek to understand the psychology behind religiously motivated violence simply want to “offer the terrorists therapy.” The idea that one must choose either understanding or action — that one cannot do both — is an idea that itself borders on the pathological and represents the kind of dichotomizing that is itself a part of the terrorist mindset. Such dichotomized thinking, wherever it occurs, is a part of the problem and not part of the solution. I worked for two years in the psychology department at a hardcore, maximum security prison. But I never thought of that as a substitute for just and vigorous law enforcement. Understanding an action in no way means excusing it; explaining an action in no way means condoning it.

There is, however, a deeper issue here. Understanding others (even those who will your destruction) can make them more human. It can break down the demonization of the other that some politicians and policy makers feel is necessary in order to combat terrorists. The demonization of the other is a major weapon in the arsenal of the religiously motivated terrorist. Must we resort to the same tactic – which is so costly psychologically and spiritually – in order to oppose terrorism? Or can we counter religiously motivated terrorists without becoming like them?

ShareThis

Marhsall Goldman is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at Wellesley College and Senior Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. In his book, Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia , Goldman chronicles Russia’s dramatic reemergence on the world stage, illuminating the key reason for its rebirth: the use of its ever-expanding energy wealth to reassert its traditional great power ambitions. In the article below Goldman reflects Russia’s role in increasing energy prices.

As energy prices rise to record heights, most consumers are unaware that it’s not only OPEC members who are the beneficiaries, but Russia which today actually produces more petroleum that Saudi Arabia. Russia has been the world’s largest producer of petroleum several times in the past including at the beginning of the twentieth century and again in the 1950s. But its role today when energy prices are at record levels has made Russia an especially important economic and political power, more so than ever before in the country’s history.

In more recent times, the bounty brought in by Russian petroleum exports has transformed Russia from near bankruptcy in August 1998 to levels of prosperity unmatched not only in Soviet but Czarist history. The Russian government today has built up nearly $500 billion in foreign currencies—not bad considering that less than a decade ago, in 1998, Russia’s treasury was effectively empty. Moreover the Russian company, Gazprom, the world’s largest producer of natural gas has just recently become the world’s second largest corporation as measured by the combined value of its corporate stock, a distinction that until just recently was held by General Electric. Today only Exxon-Mobil is larger than Gazprom, but Prime Minister Putin has promised that he will do all he can to help Gazprom reach first place. More than that Putin has begun to question why it is that the dollar is the world’s currency standard. As the US dollar loses value, the ruble has strengthened, gaining 20 per cent in recent weeks.

Not surprisingly both Putin and his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev his successor as President, have begun to demand that the ruble be included as a world currency (not bad considering that only a few years ago the ruble was not even convertible into other currencies) and that Russia have a say in selecting the leaders of international financial groups such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Given the likelihood that energy prices will remain at high levels for some time to come, it is likely that Russia will seek to use its new wealth to reassert itself as both an energy and a political superpower.

ShareThis

Shuja Nawaz is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within, which is based on 30 years of research and analysis.  It is a critical analysis of the nature and role of the Pakistan army in the country’s polity as well as its turbulent relationship with the United States. Learn more about Nawaz at www.shujanawaz.com.

For anyone who has been following the US-Pakistan relationship over the years, the most recent clash in the Mohmand Agency bordering Afghanistan was to be expected. The wonder is that it did not happen sooner. This relationship has been marked by ups and down ever since the 1950s when the US signed up Pakistan as an ally against the Communist threat. In what was later described as a “hoax” by a senior State Department official, the US-Pakistan military alliance turned out to be nothing more than empty words, with Pakistan seeking to bolster its defense against India and the US wanting a seamless fence of allies stretching from Turkey through Iran to Pakistan to prevent any Soviet incursion toward the oil fields of Iran and Iraq and the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. The US has always been looking for short-to medium-term strategic aims. Pakistan has been thinking very long term. That has been the disconnect.

Even after the shotgun wedding between Presidents George W. Bush and Pervez Musharraf after 9/11, it became clear that there was a Trust Deficit between the two allies. Pakistan fully expects that the US will decamp from Afghanistan once again (having done so in the late 1980s after the Soviets exited the country) suddenly, leaving a mess behind for Pakistan to handle. The abrupt US shift of attention from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003 helps feed that Pakistani perception. A resurging Taliban in the border regions and a rising militancy inside Pakistan have been the legacy of the most recent US involvement in Afghanistan. Once the US leaves, Pakistan will remain, stuck inside its geographic reality and its concomitant evils: Taliban, Al Qaeda, and all.

When the recently departed NATO Commander American General Dan K. McNeil warned Pakistan that it might expect US action if it did not stop the Taliban from using its borderlands for attacks on Afghanistan and NATO forces there, the writing was on the wall. What happened in Mohmand Agency two days ago, with the US intruding into Pakistani territory in what a Pakistan army spokesman termed an “unprovoked and cowardly” attack will have deeper repercussions.

It will further weaken the ability of the fledgling civilian government to call the shots in Pakistan, allowing the army to take center stage. And it will further raise public ire against the US, whose image has suffered dramatically inside Pakistan for having supported an autocratic military ruler, Musharraf, against the will of the people of Pakistan for the past eight years.

The US needs to rein in its forces in the border region and engage the Pakistan army in vigorous behind-the-scenes discussions on what needs to be done by both sides to bring the temperature down. Otherwise, Afghanistan may become an even hotter zone than it is today with the Pakistan army entering the fray against the US effort to stem the Taliban attacks from the volatile border region. And Pakistan’s internal politics may take a turn to the extreme and nationalistic right; washing away the centrist coalition that now tenuously holds power at the center.

ShareThis

A couple of weeks ago I brought you the Meet the Author film of Dr Rana Mitter talking about his new book Modern China: A Very Short Introduction. Today, I bring you a short interview I did with him for OUPblog. Rana Mitter is an Oxford University lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Politics.

OUP: Given China’s alleged performance on human rights and environmental care, was it right to award them this year’s Olympics?

RANA MITTER: Yes. China is a growing power, and is here to stay. If we want to change it, we have to engage with it. Furthermore, more open-minded forces in China are given strength if it appears that China’s attempts to change are met by friendly response from the outside world. This does not mean covering up our disagreements with China - but discussing them in a mutually understanding way.

As my VSI shows, China has rarely been closed to the world - it is much more “normal” that is it part of the world system.

OUP: Obviously hosting the Olympics means that the world’s media will be converging on China this year. With their media being notoriously restricted, how do you think China will handle the media of the Western world? Do you think the country will open itself up to the cameras?

MITTER: The recent openness after the terrible earthquake of May 2008 shows that the Chinese government understands it needs to be more open about what goes on in China. There are still many areas where China should be more open in its media - but it has a lively media scene and is a long way from places like North Korea or Burma.

OUP: We can see that cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong are booming, modern places where the people and commerce are thriving. Is this improving the quality of life outside the major cities?

MITTER: As my VSI shows, rural incomes are growing more slowly than urban ones - yet they are growing. China’s growth has made everyone richer, but it is also true that China is much more unequal than it was under Mao.

OUP: Can we expect China to displace the USA as the world’s superpower?

MITTER: Not for a long time. China still needs to work out what kind of state, culture and society it is. Until it is confident in that identity, as the US became, it will not be able to export that sense of self to the rest of the world. That, not nuclear weapons, is why the US has been so successful.

OUP: Once people have read your VSI, which five books would you point them towards next?

MITTER: Well, I hope they might go on and try my other books! But turning to great books by others, among those that they might find powerful are:

History: Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me
History: Henrietta Harrison, The Man Awakened from Dreams
Politics: Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen
Politics: John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Society: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, China’s Brave New World

ShareThis

I recently lunched with the publicity director at Kodansha’s US office. In the interest of full disclosure, OUP distributes Kodansha books in the US, so it gives us an excuse to lunch at nice restaurants each season to talk shop. As we whined about the media and dined on the Parisian/Maghreb fare at Barbes on 36th St., our conversation took the inevitable turn to books and authors we were excited about on our respective Spring lists. I confessed I favored working with Ashraf Ghani & Clare Lockhart on their book about fixing failing states in this crazy mixed up world we live in. I confessed that as a young idealist in the 80s I dreamed of changing the world, but Ghani & Lockhart were actually doing it. They were consulting with world leaders of foreign governments and trying to make the world a better place. I confessed that it gave me a rush and chills to think that somehow I was contributing to their great good efforts, that I was living what i had only dreamed of doing as a boy in upstate New York.

Jennifer nodded. Then she got a gleam in her eye and she told me all about her fave title on the Spring 2008 Kodansha list, A Geisha’s Journey: My Life As a Kyoto Apprentice. It was a book about young Japanese girl who sets out to master the ancient art of being geisha. I was fascinated as Jennifer spoke about young Ruriko’s transformation from a 15 year old school girl into the adult geisha, Komomo.

Komomo is appearing in NYC this week and a brief interview with Komomo appears below.

Event Notes:

On Friday, May 23 at 1 p.m. there will be a signing and permformance at Kinokuniyya (Bryant Park Store), 1073 Avenue of the Americas.

At 3:30 there will also be an informal signing and performance at the Ippodo Gallery, 521 W. 26th Street.

On Saturday, May 24 at 3 p.m., Komomo will be appearing at Kiteya Soho, 464 Broome St., New York, NY (near Greene St.). She will be autographing books and performing.

Komomo will also teach a two-day geisha workshop at the Japan Society on May 21 and 22. She will participate in a lecture featuring Ogino on May 22. (Sorry! This is sold-out).

OUPblog: In the book, you expressed some uncertainty before you became a geisha. What doubts were going through your mind?

Komomo: I wasn’t sure if I was ready to become a full geisha because they are required to entertain the customers with their “skills in the arts” much more than an apprentice. Also, I thought that perhaps I should experience the outside world at that time because I thought I might miss opportunities.

OUP: “Geisha Experience Tours” – in which everyday women are dressed as apprentices and are professionally photographed in popular sites throughout Kytoto – have become very popular lately. Do you feel that these tourist excursions have commercialized or tarnished the image of the geisha profession?

Komomo: I think so. If everyday women walk in the city in geisha costume, I want them to somehow indicate that they are not professional geisha.

OUP: You lost many freedoms when you made the decision to become a geisha. How difficult was that for a teenager to live under such restrictions?

Komomo: I once thought about quitting the apprenticeship without becoming a geisha because I wanted to be free and to choose whatever I wanted to do in the outside world – I wanted to go to university, study abroad, etc.

However, as I mulled it over and over, I realized I hadn’t achieved anything that I could be proud of. Whatever path I decided to take, I thought I would need to have some kind of expertise to contribute – otherwise no one would take me seriously. I decided to continue my work in the hanamachi (geisha district) because I thought, even if I had freedom, it wouldn’t do me any good until I achieved something and found something to be proud of. At that time, though, I felt like I was in limbo – like I still had a lot to accomplish.

OUP: Is there anything you miss about the outside world or anything that you regret you’re missing?

Komomo: I think it’s never too late to start anything. If there is something that I want to do, I will do it. There is nothing that I regret.

OUP: What do you do in your free time?

Komomo: Once in a while, when I get free time, I usually dine out and go shopping with my friends.

OUP: What does the future hold for you? Do you still have the option of marrying and having a family while being a geisha?

Komomo: I believe that being a geisha is a lifelong profession—we can continue to work as a geisha regardless of age. However, in today’s hanamachi in Kyoto, geisha usually quit their jobs when they decide to get married. This might change in the future, though. Unlike the old days, geisha don’t have a danna (a rich man who acts as a geisha’s individual patron), therefore, if we want to continue working as a geisha, getting married might become an obstacle.

ShareThis