Chris Bertram

Up at Alderman Moore’s allotments in Bristol there’s a new young fox with a very healthy-looking coat. He came by to say hello yesterday.

Thinking back over the past two decades, which of the following events that took place since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) are the important moments when something different could have been done that might have saved us from being in the situation we are in? How might history have unfolded differently? Are there key events to notice in Asia, Africa and Latin American that ought to be on the list? What is cause and what is merely symptom? Please suggest additional key moments in comments.

• The decision of the US Supreme Court to award the Presidency to George W. Bush instead of Al Gore (2000)
• The attacks on the Twin Towers (2001)
• The decision by Bush, supported by Blair, to invade Iraq (2003)
• The failure of policy-makers to anticipate and avert the financial crisis (2008)
• The failure of European leaders to manage the Eurozone crisis so as to avert mass unemployment etc (2009- )
• The Arab spring (2010- )
• The “migrant crisis” in Europe (2015-)
• The Brexit vote (2016)
• The election of Donald Trump (2016)

If Crooked Timber readers have not had enough of Brexit reflections from me today, there are more over at the LRB blog where I use Benjamin Constant’s distinction between the liberties of the ancients and the liberties of the moderns to illuminate, I hope, the false promise that with sovereignty Brexit brings freedom.

I recently finished reading Quinn Slobodian’s excellent Globalists, which, for those who don’t know, is an intellectual history of neoliberalism focused on the “Geneva school”. As with all good history, the book did not contain quite what I expected it to. I expected to read of the European Union as a kind of realization of Hayek’s ideas from the 1930s aimed at putting economics (and private property) beyond democratic control, a reading that gives some support to “Lexity” narratives about the EU. But the picture that emerges from Slobodian’s story is much more complex than that. In fact, the Common Market emerges as a messy compromise between German neoliberals who did want a rules-based order putting economics beyond politics and French agricultural protectionism and neocolonialism. This results in a split within the neoliberal camp between those who see EU’s regional governance as a partial step towards the legal insulation of economics from the folly of economic nationalism and those who see the EU as economic nationalism writ large, with the latter camp putting their faith in international protections for markets, competition and capital embedded in the WTO.
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A brief note stating my view of the decision of the British government to award leading “gender-critical feminist” and philosopher Kathleen Stock the Order of the British Empire for “services to higher education”. Nobody thinks that Stock has been awarded this honour for her work in aesthetics, nor that she has made contributions to higher education in the UK that exceed those of thousands of other university employees. Rather, Stock’s award has to be seen as just another example of Boris Johnson’s government using its powers of patronage to prosecute an “anti-woke” culture war. Other examples of this were the appointments of David Goodhart and Jess Butcher to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the granting of a peerage to a leading member of the Spiked! (ex-Revolutionary Communist Party) network, Claire Fox. Many of these decisions appear to have been taken at the behest of Trade (but also Equalities) minister Liz Truss, who recently made a bizarre speech name-checking Foucault and suggesting that local councils, somehow influenced by Foucault, had put race and gender equality ahead of teaching children to read and write. Truss has also made a point of referencing the conflicts around trans rights in articles for the Daily Mail. Goodhart, the new EHRC commissioner, has been a vocal supporter of the “hostile environment” policy that led to the UK’s Windrush scandal; Butcher is on record as saying that women who are subject to workplace discrimination should find ways round the problem rather than bringing formal complaints. Nobody reflecting on the values and agenda that led to Butcher’s appointment can believe that the government which gave Stock an OBE has a serious commitment to the interests of women. In a parallel case in which the Trump administration had used its powers of patronage to honour “gender-critical feminists”, I have no doubt that American philosophers who have applauded Stock’s award would see it for what it is: the instrumentalization of discretionary power to fight the culture war. I’ve deliberately avoided going into Stock’s views in this post, although I am not a fan. Rather, I’ve confined myself to things that everyone on this side of the Atlantic who is reasonably well-informed about the facts, including, I suspect, Stock herself, knows to be true. (Comments turned off on this post.)

Quiet around here, isn’t it?

I’ve just finished watching Netflix’s new Turkish miniseries Ethos, set in Istanbul and directed by Berkun Oya. This has been very little reviewed in the Western press, as far as I can see. The Guardian’s what-to-watch for December doesn’t even mention it. And yet, I think it is one of the most compelling dramas I have seen for a while. The eight episodes link characters from diverse backgrounds linked through Meryem, a hijab-wearing house cleaner who is seeing a psychiatrist, Peri, because of recurring fainting episodes. She lives with her brother, the permanently angry Yasin, a nightclub bouncer and his depressive wife Ruhiye. Meryem cleans the flat of Sinan, a philandering playboy. We get to see a spectrum of Turkish life from devout village people to sophisticated urbanites and a world where women actually dominate the action (the men are passive, confused, at the mercy of events). The soundtrack is wonderful and the acting superb, as is the lingering cinematography. I’ve avoided posting spoilers, which disables me from saying too much about what happens, but it might help to know that Gülbin’s family is Kurdish, and to be primed to think about what is happening when the Hodja’s daughter, Hayrünnisa, leaves the house in the final episode. Some of the interest is Turkey-specific but there’s much that’s more universal, such as the clash between the educated urban set and the more religious “rednecks” from out of town. Give it a try!

I took part in a debate today with Martin Ruhs (Oxford) for Migration Mobilities Bristol on labour migration. I’ll put in a link to the full discussion when it is available, but meanwhile, here are my opening remarks:

We live in a world where extreme poverty coexists with great wealth and where the accident of birth with one nationality rather than another has more bearing on someone’s life prospects than anything else. We also know that migration from poor countries to wealthy ones is more effective in addressing global poverty than just about anything else. Migrants from poor countries to wealthy ones gain access to more productive economies, earn higher wages than they would have at home, and send back valuable remittances to a degree that vastly exceeds the value of foreign aid programmes.

Meanwhile, wealthy countries need migrant labour to do the jobs that too few of our own citizens will do: agriculture and food, social care, health, construction, hospitality. (Jobs, actually, that once were invisible but which COVID has brought home the value of.) But immigration is also a hot-button electoral issue and nativist parties have enjoyed great success in promoting restrictionist policies that pander to anti-immigrant sentiment among electorates.

In response to this conflict between what is economically desirable (for both sides) and what is politically palatable to electorates, many economists have argued for the idea of a trade-off between openness and rights, suggesting that we can make the labour migration that “we” need more palatable to electorates to the extent to which the inferior and temporary status of those migrants is made concrete by depriving them of some rights. Here, migration is conceived of in transactional terms: “We” get a flexible and exploitable labour force, perhaps plugging key skills gaps; “they” get more money and voters don’t feel threatened that these incomers will displace them in “their own” country.
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