Curious Quotes #4
The dynamic of revolution, according to Winston Churchill, in an essay on Leon Trotsky, " Alias Bronstein":

"He had raised the poor against the rich. He had raised the penniless against against the poor. He had raised the criminal against the penniless. ... In vain he turned his gaze upon the wild beasts."

From Great Contemporaries, 1937.

IDS Speech
Have a look at Chris Brooke's Virtual Stoa for an excellent close reading of Ian Duncan Smith's speech to Conservative Party Conference. Pertinent points are made most amusingly.

Victoria Lill and I watched highlights last night. So cringe-worthy was it that Vicky half hid behind her coat. Despite his coaching in hand gestures etc, IDS still has a strange lolling movement of the head when speaking. It makes him look uncommitted.

His jibe at Charles Kennedy was extraordinarily lumpen, and a bit rich coming from the party of Winston Churchill.

Siim's Website
Another of our ever industrious Princeton students, Siim Sikkut. has a blog here. Go and have a look. It's very interesting.

Siim hails from Estonia, so Irish bloggers might be particularly interested in perspectives from another small nation that experienced unhappy relations with a larger neighbour.

Siim was a little underwhelmed by Stonehenge. Indeed, I've always thought that Ireland's New Grange is more awesome, though quite as mysterious. This could be simply my national chauvinism, of course.

He also links to an interesting site on the United States' 100 most important historical documents. They do not seem to include NSC-68, [NSC for National Security Council], a 1950 position paper penned by Paul Nitze. This shifted from the Kennan doctrine - that the Soviets were agressive but not millenarian, and that the US should concentrate on containment in the European theatre - to the militant position that "A defeat anywhere is a defeat everywhere."

The document won widespread acceptance after the 'Great Leader' of baleful repute, Kim Il Sung, invaded South Korea. US military expenditure, until then facing cuts, was quadrupled.

This had a crucial role in putting the US on a permanent war-footing, arming it for global cold war and now neo-con interventionism. Immediately, it reversed the US's anti-imperialism, as it faced down leftish national liberation movements. It also helped create a space for McCarthyism and allowed the National Security state to grow apace.

National Poetry Day
Today is National Poetry Day. My first ever published writing was a poem: at the age of 8 in the Ballymena Guardian. George Friel, who worked in the forestry office with my dad, introduced me to a journo, but didn't tell me why. The hack snapped a photo of me looking dreamy, and this accompanied my school-prize winning effort in the next week's paper. It is now sadly lost to me, but I remember it was called Creation, and contained the imperishable lines " ... then God changed his mind / and the dinosaurs had to go."

Anyway, here is an extract from John Hewitt's The Coasters. I wanted to use it as a preamble to my book on Ulster Unionism in the 1960s, but Bob Purdie, in his excellent account of the civil rights movement, Politics in the Streets, got there first.

You coasted along.
And all the time, though you never noticed,
the old lies festered;
the ignorant became more thoroughly infected;
there were gains, of course;
you never saw any go barefoot.

The government permanent, sustained
By the regular plebiscites of loyalty ...
Faces changed on the posters, names too, often,
but the same families, the same class of people.
A Minister once called you by your first name.
You coasted along
and the sores suppurated and spread.

Now the fever is high and raging;
who would have guessed it, coasting along?
The ignorant-sick thresh about in delerium
and tear at the scabs with dirty finger-nails.
The cloud of infection hangs over the city,
a quick change of wind and it
might spill over the leafy suburbs.
You coasted too long.

This can count as my Curious Quote #3.

Tony Judt on
Tony Judt writes in this week's New York Review of Books (here) that:

"The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."

From this he argues that a modern, bi-national state would be the functional equivalent to our multi-cultural liberal democracies.

I think that there are all sorts of problems with this. As I've blogged before (Ethnic Myths versus Liberal Democracy?, scroll down), I think far too much is made of the difference between wicked ethnic nationalism and nice civic nationalism. All nationalisms are based on an imagined community, whether this be based on a constantly reiterated ideology ('the American dream') or an acculturating historical origin myth ('racy of the soil'). In practise, both elements tend to co-exist. Both forms can be malign - fascism, 'manifest destiny' or whatever - or benign. US nationalism is no less nationalism for being mostly benign in its current form.

All nationalisms posit an 'imagined community' of common ideals and origin that encourage people of the same country to identify with each other even if they have never met. Classes, which may well have opposed immediate material interests, can fumble a considerable level of co-operation, even based on limited (usually unequal) self-sacrifice in the 'national interest'. This sentiment is productive, depending on contingency, of all sorts of constitutions, from totalitarianism to liberal democracy.

The US is an immigrant country, the EU is accepting (with greater or lesser grace) an increasing number of immigrants. Does this represent post-nationalism? Well, it's far from the racialist fantasies of various nationalist ideologues, but in fact the mechanisms are similar to classical nation-making. Immigrants buy into a new national myth, at the inevitable cost of abandoning previous identities. Immigrants to the US identify with the myth of America as home of the vigorous, discarding the decadence in the Old World, relying on rugged individualism. Each generation outdoes the last through cumulative self-betterment under-pinned by liberty. (The only possible 'out-group' in all of this is African-American. They, of course, cannot readily adopt the self-image of pioneering voluntary immigrants, one of wave upon wave of 'pilgram fathers').

It's more tricky in Europe, where there is a greater importance given to the notion of individual embeddedness in the nation through ancestral lineage. Historically, immigrants have married into 'native' families, thus acquiring psychological citizenship. Despite multi-culturalism, this is unlikely to stop. Europe is adopting a weaker form of 'ideological nationalism', but I think this really only permits toleration for immigrant ‘guests of the nation'. It might require inter-marriage to fully absorb the latest waves of immigrants. In the mean time, immigrants after the first generation tend to adopt the norms and culture of wider society quite quickly, which serves much the same purpose.

The point is immigrant groups must be absorbed if they are to be integrated. If they retain an oppositional stance to the host culture, they will either be dysfunctional or they will develop a counter-nationalism. Genuine multi-culturalism, where ethnic cultures are maintained rigidly, is destabilising and ends either in chronic disaffection (the 'race' question in the US perhaps, Northern Ireland certainly), or in the emergence of new nation-states.

Of course the 'host' national culture is not static. The absorption process is rendered easier by the dialectic of native / settler. But we should not kid ourselves that it is a balanced process. Through weight of numbers and domination of the apparatus of state and cultural diffusion, the 'native' ideology sets the parameters.

So I think Judt's view of view of post-nationalist, cosmopolitan America / Europe is naive.

More crudely, how did we get from the "late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law"? Well, two world wars, massive ethnic cleansing (particularly of Germans from 1944) and the elimination of stranded sub-national enclaves. Where this didn't happen (Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia), all our 'advanced' ideas on citizenship were impotent in rooting out ethnic hostilities.

For the chattering classes, like the pre-modern aristocracies, cosmopolitanism is perhaps natural. They flit from place to place on jets, they speak with other members of the elite in a lingua franca, they subscribe to liberal internationalism the way their forebears subscribed to Christian internationalism. For the rest, nationalism is a comfort, bringing a sense of community and pride. It need not be intrusive. The American's call it Patriotism. It is not the last refuge of the scoundrel, but a pleasing texture to life. It is why we pay attention to the political institutions of our democracies.

The Jewish state of Israel is a nation, like the US, like France, like Ireland. It rests on a common myth, it binds individuals of multifarious identity, it could conceivably absorb immigrants even of non-Jewish background (it would not be impossible to universalise aspects of the Israeli national myth). But unrestricted immigration of Arabs would certainly destroy the idea of the Jewish nation. Arabs, understandably, will not buy into the Israeli nation. This would mean self-effacement of an extraordinary kind. It would not be a new cosmopolitan Israel, on the model of cosmopolitan Italy or whatever, but a new phenomenon altogether; quite probably an anti-Israel.

Who knows, a bi-national state might be the way forward for Palestine / Israel (though I have doubts). But it would not be the equivalent to London, New York or Geneva. It would be simply a permanent system of crisis control, like the Irish Good Friday Agreement.

On a final point - might there be a genuine post-national cosmopolitanism? Well, possibly. But it would be on the basis of atomised society, without historical memory, social solidarity or collective aspirations. It would be a human dust of consumers in a hyper-capitalism. Maybe the decline in voting at elections indicates that this is where we are going. I'm not sure that democracy would long survive in the way we know it.

Curious Quotes #2

Lionel "Curtis made the strange suggestion [to W, B. Yeats on 20 January 1923, in the approach to civil war in Ireland] that WBY and his friends set up voluntary armed vigilante forces to police the streets."

R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. The Arch Poet (Oxford, 2003), p 708, footnote 68.

Maybe Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon & Tom Paulin could tool up and man the North Belfast peacelines.

Curious Quotes #1
I plan to post one curious quote every day. It won't happen, no doubt, but here goes anyway.

22nd September, 1973
Edward Heath, on presenting trophies to to worthies, including an Ireland team, at the finish of the Ryder Cup golf tournament at Muirfield, Scotland:

"Today proves, and my own sport [yachting] proves, there is no north or south - there is only one Ireland. In fact, it is more than that today. It is Great Britain and Ireland ".

Pics
I have added some new photos to my pictures page here.

Polar Bear Express
I find that one of the Princeton Students Richard Michaelis & I have been teaching, Kathy Li, has a website, here. It is much more interesting than mine, so go have a look. The vibrancy of American-English, as displyed in Kathy's blog, puts my so called Irish blarney (or, of course, 'moider', an archaic word for fevered ramblings) to shame.