Foreign Policy: The Small War That Wasn’t

At the time, British Prime Minister Tony Blair openly described the intervention in Kosovo as “a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship.” But the story was hardly so pure. The case for humanitarian intervention under international law was based on preventing more Serb atrocities, but in practice that meant supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—a group that U.S. officials had previously described as terrorist. It was fighting for full independence rather than Washington’s more limited goal of political autonomy. U.S. officials were aware that moralistic rhetoric cloaked political risks: Intelligence agencies privately warned that the KLA was trying to provoke Serbian massacres in hopes of persuading NATO to support its bid for independence. [...]

Milosevic then seized the advantage to ramp up the ethnic cleansing of Albanians. Only when the United States, two months into the war, insisted on a change in strategy—bombing targets deep in Serbian territory—did the momentum shift. Americans also picked up an increasing share of the operational slack, not least because of the wide gap in capabilities between U.S. and other NATO air forces. By the war’s end, the United States had conducted about two-thirds of all sorties while undertaking the majority of reconnaissance, suppression of air defenses, and precision-guided strikes.[...]

Although Russia has traditionally been a Serbian ally, the Kremlin initially positioned itself as the West’s partner in finding a solution to the crisis. The bargain was both instrumental (Russia’s economic troubles made it dependent on foreign assistance) and strategic: President Boris Yeltsin believed Russia could cooperate with Western institutions in maintaining global order. Russian diplomats even communicated to their Western counterparts that, although they would veto any U.N. Security Council resolution approving a war, they had nothing against airstrikes. As Richard Holbrooke, a U.S. diplomat, once said, “For them, it was all about respect.” [...]

When President Bill Clinton and U.S. State Department officials formally apologized for the attack, Chinese state-run media did not broadcast the news for several days as demonstrations continued. It was a strategy of stoking domestic victimization that the Chinese would return to for years afterward, most notably in the 2012 territorial disputes with Japan over islands in the East China Sea.

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The New York Review of Books: Between Two Empires

The vibrant khachkars hit the eye in the exhibition’s rooms as the manuscripts do not. But they were both produced for the same reason. Behind each lies a heroic determination not to forget. Each manuscript volume carries a colophon—a final comment added by the scribe—that begs the reader to remember him (or her, for we know of at least one woman scribe) as well as the patron and family who had commissioned the book—usually a gospel or a hymnal. Like the khachkars, the manuscripts come from a society in which memory was not simply (as it often is with us) an attic of the mind—a neutral storage space of past events. Memory was loyalty, and forgetfulness was treason.

As we walk through the exhibition, somewhat bemused by the sheer beauty of bright color set on radiant gold leaf, we should remember the world revealed to us by those humble colophons. They were often written by scribes perpetually on the move across the uplands of what are now eastern Turkey and the Republic of Armenia (and on similar slopes in what is now northwestern Iran), against a landscape shaken by warfare and caught every year in the murderous grip of a mountain winter. As one scribe explains in a colophon to a copy of the gospels written in Erzincan, on the highway from Erzerum to Istanbul, which drops in a series of great slopes beside the quiet headwaters of the Euphrates: [...]

Hence a paradox: Armenia may have been the first country whose ruler converted to Christianity. King Trdat IV did so before 312, thereby preceding Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome. But this was a decision made at the royal court, and its principal beneficiaries were a narrow elite of Christian clergymen and unmarried ascetics. Armenian society continued to run on the richer, more explosive values of a pre-Christian society condensed in legend and song. In the fifth and sixth centuries AD, one would have had to travel as far as the Atlantic, to early-Christian Ireland, or to the headwaters of the Nile in the mountain kingdom of Ethiopia, to find such a bracing combination of saints and warlords, of literate scholarship and tenacious loyalty to non-Christian oral traditions. We are looking at a remarkable phenomenon—the birth of an authentically non-Mediterranean Christianity. It was in this distinctive form that the Armenian Orthodox Church has survived up to the present day as a dynamic member of the wide spectrum of Christian communities known to us as the Eastern Orthodox Churches. [...]

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Armenia was like the Scottish Highlands of the eighteenth century—an overbrimming reservoir of military manpower and skilled adventurers of every kind. As soldiers, Armenians fought with equal vigor in the armies of Eastern Rome and Iran. They were not only military men. In the fourth century, the Armenian Prohaeresius was a leading professor of rhetoric in Athens. In the tenth century the engineer Trdat, who reinforced the supports for the dome of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was also an Armenian. The most remarkable evidence of this constant drift of a hardy and enterprising mountain people into the Mediterranean world was found on an Egyptian papyrus. It was a conversational handbook in which Greek phrases were transcribed into Armenian letters, so that the owner could discuss, in perfect Greek, the pithy sayings of Diogenes the Cynic, among others.

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Social Europe: Beyond GDP

Political outcomes in the United States and many other countries in recent years have reflected the state of insecurity in which many ordinary citizens live, and to which GDP pays scant attention. A range of policies focused narrowly on GDP and fiscal prudence has fueled this insecurity. Consider the effects of pension “reforms” that force individuals to bear more risk, or of labor-market “reforms” that, in the name of boosting “flexibility,” weaken workers’ bargaining position by giving employers more freedom to fire them, leading in turn to lower wages and more insecurity. Better metrics would, at the minimum, weigh these costs against the benefits, possibly compelling policymakers to accompany such changes with others that enhance security and equality. [...]

Likewise, metrics of equality of opportunity have only recently exposed the hypocrisy of America’s claim to be a land of opportunity: Yes, anyone can get ahead, so long as they are born of rich, white parents. The data reveal that the US is riddled with so-called inequality traps: Those born at the bottom are likely to remain there. If we are to eliminate these inequality traps, we first have to know that they exist, and then ascertain what creates and sustains them. [...]

If we want to put people first, we have to know what matters to them, what improves their wellbeing, and how we can supply more of whatever that is. The Beyond GDP measurement agenda will continue to play a critical role in helping us achieve these crucial goals.

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openDemocracy: No one rules Britain

The safest way to survive and prosper in such an environment is to join with everyone else in playing the system. Davis tells the story of Tony Dye. A top analyst and fund manager, Dye foresaw the dot‐com bubble of 2000, but “too early”. The value of his holdings did not rise with the market when others did. He was fired. When the crash occurred, they lost massively and he was vindicated. Did they laud his foresight and re‐hire him or offer some compensation? Hell no, for that would have meant they'd have had to fire themselves for screwing up. The moral drawn by his colleagues was to play it safe and get it wrong like everyone else. [...]

In the 1950s and ‘60s, ‘The Establishment’, as mapped by Anthony Sampson and others, was almost exclusively white, male, public school, Oxbridge and did run the country. Today, this order has been overturned. Bi‐partisan policies of neoliberalism have undermined public service and hollowed out the support essential to ensure a well‐governed society. Davis illustrates how the City is now driven by rough-necked outsiders alongside public schoolboys in hock to ‘greed and ruthless self‐interest’. The result is an unstable, disunited system far more extensive than the financial sector alone. He observes, “self‐interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications”.[...]

For an outsider, Brexit is the consequence of this non-system having a breakdown rather than the outcome of a well‐governed society choosing which way to relate to its continental partners. Davis has revealed the chaotic, profiteering vertigo of a rudderless system beyond government.

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Social Europe: Mass immigration and the growth of inequality

Economic inequality (in the distribution of income and wealth) has been growing in virtually every developed society. It is clear that there is no single cause, but one important driver is changes in the occupational structure. In some countries, but especially in the UK and the USA, occupational growth has polarised: there are more well-paid high-skilled jobs, there are more low-paid jobs, but there are fewer moderately well-paid secure jobs in the middle. [...]

Until the 1980s domestic servants were declining in numbers. Today professionals and managers expect to employ domestic labour to clean their houses, mind their children, etc. These jobs are overwhelmingly taken by immigrants who are often illegals. Intriguingly, the particular beneficiaries are women earners at the upper end of the income distribution – purchasing labour in the home enables them to devote more time to their remunerative career. Thus, one US study shows that, in areas with a high immigrant population, high income women spend more time at work than in areas where there are fewer immigrants. Such privatised domestic employment ensures that there is less pressure on men to contribute to domestic labour – and certainly reduces the demand for effective publicly funded childcare. [...]

This relationship between mass immigration and occupational change cannot be generalised to all periods and places. The mass European migration in the second half of the 19th century to the USA and other areas of new settlement did not have this result, nor in fact did the mass immigration to Western Europe in the post-world war period. It is, however, clear that today those who call for ‘open borders’ – the unrestricted entry of unskilled workers into the EU – are facilitating a more polarised occupational structure, more low paid workers and greater social and economic inequality.

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Politico: Why Italy’s 5Stars love France’s Yellow Jackets

The Italian government is licking its wounds after losing a high-profile showdown with Brussels over its next budget. And Di Maio’s 5Star Movement is slipping in the polls, increasingly eclipsed by its coalition partner, the far-right League led by Matteo Salvini.

“My impression is that it’s not an anti-French move but an internal objective to show the base that they are still an innovative anti-establishment party,” said Giovanni Orsina, a professor of political history at LUISS University in Rome. “They need to show activists that they are still an anti-systemic force of resistance.” [...]

The anti-establishment sentiment behind the French protests is similar to the early Vaffanculo (“Go f**k yourself”) protests that led to the creation of the 5Star Movement. [...]

5Star members generally don’t support the violence that has been seen in France, Lazzari said. “We are very pacifist as a movement but in any demo you get hooligans making trouble.”

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