Israel Book Review

Jews Praying In The Synagogue on the Day of Atonement by Maurycy Gottlieb (Tel Aviv Museum of Art) The Israel Book Review has been edited by Stephen Darori since 1985. It actively promotes English Literacy in Israel .#israelbookreview is sponsored by Foundations including the Darori Foundation and Israeli Government Ministries and has won many accolades . Email contact: israelbookreview@gmail.com Office Address: Israel Book Review ,Rechov Chana Senesh 16 Suite 2, Bat Yam 5930838 Israel

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (Weapons of Mass Destruction)Apr 4, 2016 by Louis René Beres. Hardcover.Rowman & Littlefield Publishers In his new book, Prof. Louis René Beres delves into the complexities of one of the most heated issues in the Middle East and all world politics. As he examines the current nuclear doctrine of the Jewish state, he also suggests that a suitably revised doctrine is in order

Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (Weapons of Mass Destruction)Apr 4, 2016

by Louis René Beres. Hardcover.Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

In his new book, Prof. Louis René Beres delves into the complexities of one of the most heated issues in the Middle East and all world politics. As he examines the current nuclear doctrine of the Jewish state, he also suggests that a suitably revised doctrine is in order

This timely and original scholarly book critically examines Israel's rapidly evolving nuclear strategy, a subject with which the author has been authoritatively acquainted for many years. Now facing an unprecedented configuration of existential threats, and, as corollary, a potentially deteriorating "correlation of forces," Israel's leaders must consider such urgent and overlapping survival issues asdeliberate nuclear ambiguity (the "bomb in the basement"); regional nuclear proliferation; Jihadist terror-group intersections with enemy states;rationality or irrationality of state and sub-state adversaries; assassination or "targeted killing;"preemption; and probable effects of "Cold War II" between Russia and the United States. As Professor Beres' new book will explain, these issues underscore the overarching complexity of critical strategic interactions in the Middle East, including more-or-less plausible synergies between Israel's chosen strategic policies, and also the expected reactions of its multiple and often "hybrid" enemies.

Throughout, the author's examination of these issues expressly references pertinent considerations of international law, especially humanitarian international law (the law of armed conflict); terrorist extradition and prosecution; and anticipatory self-defense. Surviving Amid Chaos, therefore, is a book that presents an altogether original synthesis of strategic and jurisprudential factors regarding Israel's nuclear strategy

In the final analysis, as this new book argues convincingly, Israel's nuclear strategy must spring from antecedent nuclear doctrine. What should be the core components of such a doctrine? How has this doctrine actually evolved, from the early days of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, to the present moment? What should be the core components of doctrine going forward? To what extent, if any, should these components be made explicit or recognizable? To what extent, if any, should Israel's strategic nuclear doctrine be fashioned on the assumption that there will be endlessly "shifting sands" of friends and foes in the region? To what extent, if any, should Jerusalem construct this doctrine with a view to sharing certain conceptual and operational details with Washington?

Surviving Amid Chaos addresses these distinctly nuanced and interrelated questions.

Israel's emerging strategic nuclear doctrine, we may learn from this book, can never be based upon singular threats. Always, this doctrine must always emerge from a suitably comprehensive consideration of all ascertainable security hazards, a consideration that looks at each particular threat from the much broader and more coherent perspective of vital "correlations" between them. An example would be the Iranian nuclear threat, which is examined here together with the prospect of a Palestinian state. Also discussed by Professor Beres is the role of certain relatively intangible components of enemy force correlations, especially Jihadist belief systems that promise immortality to "martyrs." Here, in the context of examining Israel's nuclear strategy, Surviving Amid Chaos considers a long-neglected source of correlative power in world politics – that is power over death.

Professor Beres' book also looks factually and precisely at different scenarios of regional nuclear proliferation, and at Israel's corresponding obligations and opportunities. Will a newly nuclear Shiite Iran spawn additional nuclear aspirants in Sunni Egypt and/or Saudi Arabia? If so, what would this suggest about possible sub-state nuclear proliferation hazards, to both Shiite (e.g., Hezbollah) and Sunni (e.g., ISIS) terrorist organizations? Should Israel plan to deal with these multiple and intersecting threats with more frequent and more devastating "self-help" resorts to preemption (including assassination and "regime targeting"), or instead by fashioning long-term strategies of deterrence? Moreover, the book inquires, is there a forseeably productive role here for the United Nations and world diplomacy, or do persistently "Westphalian" international relations render moot any such expanded collective security role?

Most importantly, perhaps, Surviving Amid Chaos focuses especially upon the question of "deliberate ambiguity," or the "bomb in the basement." Looking ahead, should Israel's strategy favor a shift to certain potentially useful forms of "disclosure," or should Jerusalem continue with its historic position of "no comment?" As the Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon, 2003), and as the editor of Security or Armageddon; Israel's Nuclear Strategy (Lexington Books, 1986) – one of the very first books to consider this question – Professor Beres looks intensely and authoritatively at these particular issues. Among other things, his book will explain why the best argument for ending deliberate nuclear ambiguity has nothing to do with simply re-stating the obvious, but rather with the deterrence-enhancing advantages of undertaking certain limited and incremental disclosures. Iran and other centers of future nuclear threat could be more durably deterred by Israel's nuclear strategy if that strategy suitably expressed the usability, survivability, and penetration-capability of Israel's indispensable nuclear forces.

Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (Weapons of Mass Destruction)Apr 4, 2016 by Louis René Beres. Hardcover.Rowman & Littlefield Publishers In his new book, Prof. Louis René Beres delves into the complexities of one of the most heated issues in the Middle East and all world politics. As he examines the current nuclear doctrine of the Jewish state, he also suggests that a suitably revised doctrine is in order

Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (Weapons of Mass Destruction)Apr 4, 2016

by Louis René Beres. Hardcover.Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Suez Crisis 60 years Later

Ike's Gamble:America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East By Michael Doran, Simon and Schuster
Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace by Alex von Tunzelmann. Harper Collins Publishers

Ariel Sharon, left, during the Sinai campaign in October of 1956. During the campaign, Sharon made the controversial decision to take the Mitla Pass. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting and Sharon was reprimanded by his superiors. He was later accused of provoking the battle unnecessarily.

Suez war began, the world was transfixed by an anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. Moscow sent tanks to crush the rebellion, demonstrating that the ostensibly anti-imperialist USSR was itself a brutal imperial power. But whatever moral advantage the West could have derived from this event was lost, because at the same moment Britain and France were invading Egypt for their own purposes.

When a furious Eisenhower sent his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to the United Nations to denounce his own NATO allies, it became clear that the Suez adventure was doomed. (Matters weren’t helped when the Soviets, in an ambiguously worded statement, seemed to be threatening Britain with nuclear war.) The British and French aborted their limited invasion, Israeli troops withdrew, and Anthony Eden resigned from office in disgrace. It was an unmistakable lesson in Cold War geopolitics: The old empires were impotent, and the new superpowers were in charge.

What lessons can we take from the Suez Crisis, six decades later? Von Tunzelmann and Doran offer contrasting answers; the major difference between them has to do with their assessments of Eisenhower, the key decision-maker in the crisis. Von Tunzelmann’s view is captured in the subtitle of Blood and Sand: “Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace.” In her view, Eisenhower is to be praised for stopping the invasion of Egypt: “He had publicly taken a stand in favor of what was right, though that meant opposing two major NATO allies, Britain and France, as well as the United States’ best friend and protégé in the Middle East, Israel.”

Eisenhower, on this view, recognized the legitimacy of Egypt’s claim to the Suez Canal, and of Nasser’s claim to embody the spirit of Arab independence. He was true to the United Nations and its principles, which he himself had done so much to establish in the Second World War. There is a strong suggestion in the book that, if America had kept on the course Eisenhower set in 1956, the rest of the world—especially the Arab world—would be better off today. In particular, Von Tunzelmann admires Eisenhower for distancing America from Israel: “Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were unusual in the 20th century: an American president and secretary of state who were able and willing to say no to Israel.”

Yet as she observes in the last pages of her book, it was Eisenhower himself who abandoned the neutralist position America adopted in Suez. Just one year later, he announced the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” which committed the U.S. to intervene in defense of any Middle Eastern government threatened by communism. For Von Tunzelmann, this was the beginning of a disastrous period in American Middle East policy that continues today: “Nations and peoples were used as assets or weapons. The enemies of enemies were falsely considered to be friends. Lines were drawn in the sand, blown away, drawn again. All of this was done with precious little foresight about where it might lead.”

Blood and Sand, with its narrow focus on Suez, can do little to explain why Eisenhower’s “campaign for peace” took this turn. But that is Doran’s whole purpose in Ike’s Gamble, whose title turns out to bear a surprising implication. If Eisenhower took a gamble for peace in 1956, Doran believes that it was ultimately a losing one. Ike may have thought he was affirming the power of the United Nations and the independence of the postcolonial world. But, in fact, by empowering Nasser, he ended up damaging both the Middle East and American interests.

The root of Eisenhower’s mistake, Doran argues, was to see the Arab world as a monolithic entity, with Nasser at its helm. In order to appear as an “honest broker” in the Middle East, Eisenhower distanced the U.S. from its traditional allies in order to accommodate Nasser, which he believed would win America the affection of the Arabs at large. What this failed to account for, Doran believes, is that the Arab world was itself riven by national enmities, power struggles, and ideological disagreements. As it turned out, boosting Egypt meant that, less than two years after Suez, the governments of Iraq and Syria were overthrown by Nasserist, pan-Arab movements. (Syria was briefly merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic.) Egypt’s rise meant trouble for Saudi Arabia, which since the days of FDR had been America’s most important Arab ally (and oil supplier). And it spelled disaster for Israel, which was forced to fight much more serious wars against Egypt in 1967 and 1973. Neither the U.S. nor the region reaped any benefits from the Nasserist order that Eisenhower helped to sponsor.

Doran spends some time at the end of the book arguing that Eisenhower himself came to regret his position over Suez. He speaks of a notional “Ike of 1958,” whose views had become more realistic about American interests than the Ike of 1956. This idea rests on fairly slim evidence, however, and Doran seems to invest it with more importance than it requires. Really, it is Doran, not Eisenhower himself, who is making the argument that Ike’s gamble was a losing one.

In doing so, he is also making an implicit but unmistakable argument about America’s Middle East policy today. Any reader of Ike’s Gamble who is even a little familiar with the current situation will be able to draw the lines connecting Ike with Obama, and Egypt with Iran. Once again, Doran implies, an American president has fallen prey to the delusion that favoring one particular Muslim state is the same thing as being honest broker with the Muslim world. And once again, this approach has succeeded only in emboldening America’s enemies and endangering its friends, especially Saudi Arabia and Israel. This makes Ike’s Gamble a timely intervention into current debates. Obama won’t read it, but Hillary Clinton should.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. David Van Reybrouck. Bodley Head. 2016.

Against Sortition

In governance, sortition (also known as allotment or demarchy) selects officers as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.Sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used today in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries orcitizens' assemblies).
The public sphere is full of analyses and lamentations about the inability of Europe’s current political parties and elites to represent their peoples/electorates/nations. Peter Mair’sRuling the Void provides an excellent history of the problem. The end of the Industrial Revolution in the 1960s-70s saw the decline of large class structures, and thus the identities that allowed parties to represent big class or occupational groups; the end of Communism and the triumph of neoliberalism left existing parties with only one ideology to choose from. Parties became state-funded agencies run by media or policy experts as there was no mass base to provide a wider pool of leadership recruits; they became a ‘cartel’ of parties and a ‘caste’ of party leaders. These are despised by an increasingly disengaged, volatile, capricious and angry electorate. The end result is nasty or irresponsible populism.

This review looks at one author’s novel approach to solving our crisis of representation. David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian author and public intellectual, wrote an excellent history of The Democratic Republic of Congo. In his newest book, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, he reprises some of Mair’s points about the decline of party-electorate linkages. His solution is to bring back sortition – that is, the selection of public officials through the drawing of lots. To Van Reybrouck, the problem isn’t democracy, it is ‘electoral-representative democracy’ and ‘electoral fundamentalists’.

Van Reybrouck argues that the electoral principle has long been understood as undemocratic. The ancient Athenian polis, whose constitution he discusses in great detail, only deployed election to offices requiring specific expertise, such as military positions; otherwise, magistracies were chosen by lot. This system found endorsement by Montesquieu and Rousseau, but was abandoned for the more aristocratic principle of election by the bourgeois meritocrats of the French and American revolutionary eras. It became the election of ‘men who possess the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue the common good of society’ (The Federalist Paper #57). This mechanism eventually became embedded in a system of mass parties: a ‘democratisation of elections’ Van Reybrouck condemns as ‘a bogus process’ aided by the redefinition of the word ‘democracy’ and the association of sortition with military conscription.

Image Credit: (Jeff Turner CC BY 2.0)

Key to Van Reybrouck’s diagnosis and proposed solutions is a specific idea of democracy, and an implicit idea of how society is organised and should be represented. Van Reybrouck seems to see elective representation itself as aristocratic, at least for offices not requiring special knowledge. ‘Democracy is not government by the best in our society, because such a thing is called aristocracy, elected or not […] Democracy, by contrast, flourishes precisely by allowing a diversity of voices to be heard’ (152-53). He wants to deal with the problem of the elite-electorate gap by collapsing it completely.

Van Reybrouck certainly makes a valuable contribution to political theory and discussion with his book, and he is a skilled author and researcher. His sketch of how classical Athens worked is one of the best parts of the book, and I would enjoy seeing him put his skills to a history of its democracy. Indeed, the book serves as a very good introduction to the history of sortition in classical, medieval and modern politics, using examples from Europe and North America. Anyone wanting to experiment with Van Reybrouck’s theories will find plenty of practical guidance here.

However, Van Reybrouck’s proposals, however innovative and fresh, only deal with a single aspect of modern disaffection: the alienation of voters from parties and politicians. That’s no small thing, but it is also not a freestanding problem. Politicians may seem like cookie-cutter reproductions of the same neoliberal PR account manager, but that is partly because free-market liberalism has been the only ideology on offer for something like a quarter century, because capital has broken free of national borders and eroded the public sphere. Those global pressures transcend national boundaries, and the ideologies that justify them do as well; simply changing the way states select officials fails to address that larger problem. Greece could pick a new government by drawing lottery balls tomorrow; that government would still have to deal with the bond markets. And Van Reybrouck’s model still relies on experts and officials to help advise the citizens chosen by lot. Nothing suggests that these counsellors would be any more ideologically diverse than the technocrats currently employed by the IMF, the European Union or various finance ministries.

Another problem is Van Reybrouck’s approach to structures other than parties that lie between the citizen and their state. It is perfectly legitimate to complain that ‘lobbies, think tanks and all kinds of interest groups’ have more access to the policymaking process than ordinary citizens (156), but he also seems to assume that those sorted into policymaking or review roles will neither be members of political parties nor engage in ‘tactical voting […] political haggling [or] back-scratching’, instead making decisions ‘according to their conscience, according to what he or she feels best serves the general interest in the long term’ (146).

This implies that there is only one definition of the general interest, which everyone can neutrally work out with enough ratiocination and good will. This ignores questions of class, race, occupation, sub-nationalism and all the other identities, material interests and philosophical concerns we carry into politics. How would this work in a federal system, where you effectively have not just one general national interest, but also the general interests of several states or provinces? From an economic standpoint, how do you come up with a general interest that distributes (or more challengingly, redistributes) resources? For all his condemnation of the first bourgeois republicans of the late-eighteenth century, Van Reybrouck borrows their ideas about a politics without party. That worked for Enlightenment liberals because they could pretend there was only one general interest, since the elected represent only one class of capital owners. He lists several examples of premodern political units that used lot-drawing, but in all of these cases, the ‘citizens’ were a homogenous group of a few thousand or ten thousand men of similar wealth.

In any case, choosing governors by lot does not automatically mean that the public will see those chosen as representing them. Sortition may produce a more representative assemblage of policymakers, but it does not actually empower ordinary citizens unless they are chosen. In Van Reybrouck’s touchstone, Athens, this was not a problem: every citizen was part of the legislature, and there were more than a thousand executive and legislative posts chosen by lot. Every citizen was in some way empowered (a task made easier by excluding most inhabitants from citizenship), and service in an executive role was almost impossible to avoid. In a modern state, this sort of mass participation is not possible, so most citizens will, at most, get to leave comments on the assembly website or vote in occasional referenda. Elections are democratic precisely because they grant choice to citizens, even if it is only a Schumpeterian choice between elites.

Finally, the book’s model for a system run on these ‘aleatory-democratic’ (‘aleatory’ meaning ‘based on chance’) lines, though very thoughtful, is also hugely complex. It involves no fewer than six types of assembly: An assembly to set the overall agenda; ‘interest panels’ to propose specific legislative topics; a review panel to prepare detailed bills; a ‘policy jury’ that would vote on the bills (but not debate them); an oversight council to handle complaints and judicial review; and a rules council to set rules for the other bodies. It is unlikely even the most educated, wonkish voter would find such a Rube Goldberg machine an attractive model. It reminded me of Olivier Bernier’s description of the legislature in Napoleonic France: ‘The Tribunat was composed of one hundred members who discussed the bills brought to it by the executive, but could not vote on them. The Corps Législatif had three hundred members who voted the bills into law, but could not discuss them’ (65).

Van Reybrouck does politics a great service by opening up our discussions of political structure and agency, questioning age-old ideas about elections, representation and the division of powers. That, and his considerable and well-presented historical research, make this book well worth reading. But in an age of such profound citizen dissatisfaction, it is far from clear we can leave something as central as representation to mere chance; leaving things to the supposedly ‘aleatory’ justice of the market is, after all, part of what got us into this mess.

Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics. Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen. IB Tauris. 2016.

Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics. Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen. IB Tauris. 2016.

Often a historian’s role is to act as a voice for the unheard or silenced, undoing the folded lies of propaganda and bias. Kazakh art historian Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen performs a rendition of this role, not so much in speaking out for the silenced but in dismantling the layered stereotypes and distorted images of Central Asia. Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics focuses primarily on Soviet approaches to portraying Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in art. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s book blends accessible art analysis and detailed historical context to create a thought-provoking exegesis of identity and the control of perceptions not just in Central Asia but in Russia too. The reader learns that the Central Asian countries’ inability to control the discourse surrounding them did not collapse with the Berlin Wall, but lives on in new guises such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat; interestingly though, where the USSR used selected images of Central Asia to buttress empire, Cohen’s Borat is used as an Other to critique the Western Self.

Much of Central Asia in Art concentrates on Socialist Realist art produced during Stalin’s stranglehold over the USSR. Socialist Realism was a homogenous supranational style developed to lionise Soviet values through realistic imagery, and was deployed in the Central Asian peripheries of the USSR to foster greater unity between Central Asian nations and Moscow. Paradoxically, this was done whilst trying to celebrate different national identities, albeit within tight constraints; indeed, as Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen asks: ‘why would a union of nations be celebrated through the persistent accentuation of difference?’ The USSR empire was a bizarre construction, as the author pithily notes, exerting a ‘constant demonstration of dominance and simultaneous denial of it’.

The book is comprised of large, beautifully detailed plates accompanied by Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s probing commentary, which, combined, give the reader a comprehensive, empathetic and encyclopaedic understanding of the featured artworks. This brings to life interesting leitmotifs, such as the Russian declaration of a civilising mission in Central Asia. For Russian audiences, artists would infantilise Central Asian nations by depicting young central Asian females ‘ready to be emancipated and which have been educated and pacified’. Frequently, whenever a painting shows Russians interacting with Central Asians, the former are often shown undertaking paternal activities, such as teaching chess or demonstrating their artistic skills. Interactions between Russian and Central Asian artistic subjects can be even more dynamic, such as in David Flekman’s Recovery of Sight (the very first image the reader sees on opening the book), in which a Russian nurse and doctor inspect a Kyrgyz woman after she has regained her vision. The painting bludgeons home Soviet messages of female and Kyrgyz national emancipation as well as Soviet modernisation.

Image Credit: Landscape as Art Exhibition 2009, Olivia Garnett’s 3-D model of Alexander Volkov, Caravan (University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment CC BY 2.0)

Modernisation is a recurrent theme of Soviet Realism: the open steppes and virginal lands are portrayed as awaiting Soviet development. In Abylkhan Kasteev’s 1930s paintings, Haymakingand Collective Dairy Farm, lush verdant landscapes exude abundance and high yield whilst Kazakhs harmoniously working together on the collective farm. Equally, depictions of urban spaces are used to press home Soviet modernisation, where a point is made by Soviet artists of electricity, culture and permanent infrastructure to nations of more nomadic historical leanings. Yuri Zaitsev’s 1935 nighttime scene, Building Site in Balkhash, represents this economic rejuvenation well, glorifying a building site not only in depiction but also in medium. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen points out that this medium brings the worksite to the plateau of high art, a ‘sacrifice for the creation of the new world’, destined to remain ‘eternal’ on a museum wall as opposed to transient press photographs.

The reader learns that the creation of art was not a one-way street for Russian artists and audiences, but rather an exercise to reconcile Russian identity too. Russian Orientalism portraying Central Asians through stereotypes, such as with watermelons and attached to the land, helped Russians situate themselves in their limbo position between the East and the West. An interesting medley of the Russian Self and Asian Other is Alexander Volkov: born in Turkestan (the former name of the Central Asian territories) and educated in St Petersburg and Kiev, he immersed himself in Central Asian culture for many decades far from the reach of Moscow. His work stands out as not being concerned with a unity of nations or modernisation, but rather for that rare thing other Soviet artists were unprepared to show: the effort and associated stresses incurred by Central Asian labour to propel modernisation. The works do not ‘openly talk about the Soviet nature’ of the exertion; but even acknowledging such toil sets him apart from many other Soviet artists. As the author points out, in art history a special mindset is required for judging artists in a totalitarian environment: usually an artist is judged by what they did, but in totalitarian states it is about what they did not do.

Despite the title implying a longer time span, the book is focused mostly on art developments during Stalin’s leadership. Few pages are devoted to art post-Khrushchev and the interesting times of independence. This is a shame as the few pages the author devotes to the 1990s and 2000s are filled with astute analysis of Central Asia grappling with identity in the midst of Boratand a globalised world. Given the author’s forensic analysis of Soviet history throughout the twentieth century, it is surprising that she has little to say about the effects of present political control by autocratic regimes in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on contemporary art (the current ‘strongman’ leader of Kazakhstan has wielded power since 1991, whilst his Uzbek equivalentwho ruled for the same time died in September of this year).

The book, however, is a visual feast and cerebral stimulant recommended to art historians, USSR specialists and dilettantes alike. It is at the forefront of an increasing historical art focus on the relationship between Central Asia and Russia, whilst building on major critiques of Socialist Realism by the likes of Boris Groys (Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin and Art Power) and Gleb Prokhorov (Art under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting, 1930-1950). Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen’s work is profound and empathetic; combined with a scholar’s comprehensiveness, this is most aptly displayed in her poignant analysis of one of the most famous pieces of Soviet art: A Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia by Semion Chuikov. Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen dissects the painting in great detail, showing the forward motion of the girl in the painting striding proudly towards the future and away from an imperialist past. With allusions to the present and Central Asia, Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen notes sagaciously:

The girl in Chuikov’s painting is forever young. The model for his painting has, however, aged. It seems that her schooling, if it took place at all, brought the Communist utopia into the village, rather than the young girl into the future [the girl never left the village]. The girl was allowed to look ahead but never managed to walk out of the village she was born in.

The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing. Alan Murie. Policy Press Shorts. 2016.

Following her 1979 election win, Margaret Thatcher proclaimed: ‘Thousands of people in council houses and new towns came out to support us for the first time because they wanted a chance to buy their own homes.’ She correctly gauged the political weather. In the thirty-five years since the introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’, over two million homes have been transferred from public to private hands, and each one at a substantial market discount.

In The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing, Alan Murie, assesses the impact of the decades-old policy, which had been intended to increase national home ownership. It is a story of winners and losers. Some tenants greatly profited. Judged by the volume of sales, the policy was an unambiguous triumph, marking – in the short term – a giant national leap towards property-owning democracy. Yet collective losses have also been borne across the generations. Where a Baby Boomer parent gained an asset, their children lost access to social rents.

The most attractive homes sold quickest, making big winners out of the early purchasers. But almost every buyer received a windfall. While flats and maisonettes were slower to sell, they were subject to very high discounts: up to 70 per cent of the market value. Right to Buy transferred public property directly to individual tenants, and in this regard, it is crucial to note the focused and positive impact that the policy had on individual lives and aspirations.

But the collective cost has been a high one. The best properties are now well out of the reach of lower income people: semi-detached houses with gardens fetch extremely high prices. And so large classes of people have become excluded from once-accessible suburbs. The privatisation of our housing stock has led to our segregation.

Image Credit: (The People Speak! CC BY 2.0)

Even if segregation is intuitively undesirable, it is not a body blow to the rationale behind the policy. The project was concerned with increasing home ownership, not demographic equality. But the slow revival of private renting crashes the kite. Many properties have now been sold on to landlords, whose tenants pay market rent. Speculators might buy properties and convert them, putting stress on stock designed for smaller numbers. Rather than delivering a property-owning democracy, private landlordism will increase over time. By definition, speculators have an advantage in the marketplace.

In different political circumstances, that might have been the end of the book. Council housing has now been largely sold off, and so at one time the Right to Buy seemed likely to pass slowly into the national memory, felt only in an increasing housing benefit bill. But it is said that history repeats itself: during the 2015 general election, David Cameron revived the scheme, promising and then delivering a new Right to Buy in relation to housing association stock in England and Wales.

This extension of the right gives the author’s analysis a pressing purchase. He charts the seldom-told history of housing associations, explaining how, through rebellion in the House of Lords, associations escaped the Right to Buy in the 1980s. And Murie also explains that, over the course of a generation, councils have transferred large amounts of their stock to the sector, so that in our own time associations have become by far the largest type of social housing provider.

In contrast to the original public sector sales, this time around there is a mechanism to provide for replacement. Housing associations will maintain their stock, drawing compensation from the government. In the spirit of our age, it is a complex and managerialist plan: to pay for the new Right to Buy, local authorities will be forced to sell ‘higher value’ properties as they fall vacant. After rebuilding, they will transfer any surplus into the new scheme, and so fund the housing association Right to Buy.

Rebuilding and replacement laces the pill; but the social impact will still be real enough. Following the pattern of the past, sales of association housing will be quickest in high value areas, further accelerating our segregation. It is also unclear how associations will respond to their new market position. Following the forced sales of historic estates, it would be rational for them to abandon their missions, leaving the poorest tenants to the market.

Feelings run high with regard to this area of policy, and Murie remains objective throughout. He explains the facts and weighs the evidence. He then concludes that government strategy has failed, and that it will fail again. The book provides a detailed, and welcome, analysis of the subject matter. However, the author’s objectivity perhaps comes at the cost of political analysis.

Such analysis would wade out into difficult waters, and the book largely keeps its feet dry. Yet without an understanding of government motivation, it is not possible to see why any alternative to the policy is so unlikely. The Right to Buy, along with other state sell-offs, has marked a seismic shift in the government’s relationship to the population. Criticisms relating to social segregation, landlordism and the abandonment of large numbers to the market only bite if it is assumed that policymakers care about collective welfare.

The author acknowledges that the new Right to Buy was forged from political exigency in the context of the 2015 election campaign. The new Right to Buy will impact on as many as 800,000 social tenants. The electoral advantage in offering discounts to this population is obvious. But from the perspective of conservative social policymakers, it is surely short-sighted. If over the course of the next generation rising private sector landlordism negatively affects the lives of many, the resulting political consequences are unlikely to be support for more of their particular brand of technocracy.

The Right to Buy? Selling Off Public and Social Housing is timely. The extension of the right to housing associations makes this analysis very important indeed. In the context of fast-moving change, the book provides a welcome and objective policy analysis.

Friday, October 21, 2016

Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration. Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss. ECPR Press. 2016.

Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration. Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss. ECPR Press. 2016.

In Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration, two prominent German political researchers, Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, offer a collection of essays dealing with contemporary European issues, the place that European citizens play in building up-to-date political institutions and the ways to solve some of the problems within what journalists, policymakers and academics refer to as the current ‘Euro crisis’. This is not the first time these authors have worked together: English readers will likely be familiar with theirseminal book on institutional design in post-communist societies, published almost twenty years ago.

In Citizens in Europe, Offe and Preuss present 22 essays published since 1983, written by one or by both of them, either in the form of peer-reviewed articles or book chapters. The main goal of this collection is to use the normative and analytical arguments presented in their earlier work to throw light on the issues that the European Union and its citizens must come to terms with if the current turbulences in the European integration process are to be endured (1). Without presenting specific policy recommendations, the authors suggest keeping the old or creating new institutional mechanisms that enforce citizens’ political participation and turn the EU into a supranational welfare state.

The book targets both a general and academic public – not necessarily current university scholars or students but readers interested in recent European developments but with minimum knowledge about many issues. The writing style rarely uses specific social scientific terms. Nevertheless, it is not a collection of journalist writings, even if the subject matter can look quite similar.

For the purpose of this review, I focus on the four most recent essays, published since the beginning of the current Euro crisis. Two were written by Offe and two by Preuss; two were first published as peer-reviewed articles and the others as book chapters. This narrowing down is necessary to provide enough material for further critical assessment, yet these four chapters are not representative as far as the discussed topics are concerned. They are, however, representative regarding the model of demonstration that typically leads the authors from the research question to different institutional solutions.

Image Credit: Lights of the Night, Europe (Mapbox CC BY 2.0)

In Chapter Four, ‘Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation be Institutionalised?’, Offe discusses institutional designs for democratic innovation to improve the functioning of liberal democracies. Two groups of innovation are currently considered as remedies for some of the observed deficiencies of democracy. The first deals with strengthening the voice of citizens and the expression of their will, such as through changes to the electoral system, making voting mandatory, allowing for direct democratic legislation, increasing the autonomy of local authorities, introducing gender quotas, etc. The second group, which Offe implicitly recommends, deals with improving will-formation through deliberations. Deliberations make citizens better informed on the issues at hand, increase the scope of citizens that are informed and have the potential to widen the social inclusion of participants.

In Chapter Eleven, ‘Constitutionalism in Fragmented Societies: The Integrative Function of Constitutions’, Preuss discusses how to reform corrupt political structures that pervade society, further political apathy and cynicism and encourage the renaissance of nationalist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic tendencies. The solution is to include within constitutional texts several vague principles open to very diverse, even opposing, interpretations. The idea is that such vagueness will invite political actors to fight in the field of constitutional interpretation and will therefore guide antagonists away from the brink of civil war (223).

In Chapter Sixteen, ‘Revisiting the Rationale Behind the European Union’, Preuss considers whether the peoples of the member states of the EU have believed, and still believe, in the dominant narrative about the Union: a narrative that sees ever-closer Union as an embodiment of lasting peace and economic prosperity. Has this story undergone changes in the course of the 60 years since the EU’s foundation? The author concludes that it is the end of the political vision of the European Union as a polity in which many peoples blend into one body whose coercive character requires the homogeneity of the rulers and the ruled. Instead, he offers a new vision in which the idea of solidarity is grounded in the mutual recognition of otherness and the development of modes of cooperation, which requires a reduction of social inequality among Union citizens.

Finally, in Chapter Twenty-Three, ‘Europe Entrapped: Does the EU Have the Political Capacity to Overcome its Current Crisis?’, Offe discusses what should and can be done to overcome the crisis with the common European currency. The solutions, as expected, require reforms within institutional settings. Among them, the author signs up to the idea of an EU-wide tax harmonisation applying to direct taxes; to an increase of taxes on high income and wealth; and to proposals for creating an EU-wide system of unemployment insurance and social assistance, which will have as a side effect a boost to mass identification with Europe as a political entity. Politically, Offe suggests strengthening the European Parliament and transforming the Commission into something like a parliament government (487).

The institutional design school is one of the main approaches within contemporary political science when it comes to suggesting solutions for acute social, economic and political problems. It is strong, especially within comparative analysis, because it can demonstrate how among several cases one significant change within institutional design can lead to different outcomes. However, the major limitation of this approach comes when similar institutional designs still produce different political outcomes, or when unexpected new outcomes emerge without significant changes within institutional designs.

Citizens in Europe is a good example of both the strengths and limitations of the institutional design approach. The essays are not formal discussions detached from empirical foundation; instead, suggested institutional solutions are grounded in comparative political experience. In other words, these solutions are expected to work as planned because they have worked in similar situations elsewhere. The possible critique of these solutions is also rather typical and comes from comparative politics too. For example, empowering citizens through deliberations (Chapter Four) may have unexpected consequences in also empowering charismatic leaders with anti-liberal and anti-democratic political agendas. Shifting the dominant discourse of the EU from liberal ideas to ideas of solidarity (Chapter Sixteen) may unexpectedly backlash; instead of taming the market beast, the result may be an impoverished, greying Europe, and the same criticism could follow each and any of the suggested economic and financial measures presented in Chapter Twenty-Three. Yet, these theoretical limitations notwithstanding, Citizens in Europe is a very useful read for people curious to find institutional ways for solving the current European crisis.