Dale Farm, St Paul's, and a lot of mixed messages

Two items have dominated news in the UK in the past two weeks: the evictions from Dale Farm, and the closure of St Paul's.

What these two things have in common is protests; more exactly, occupations of land. While the circumstances surrounding each are very different, what is more interesting is the amount of varied opinion, and the outcomes, that have resulted from those protests.

The evictions in Dale Farm, to cut a long story short, are about the rights of Gypsies, and what status they have in this country. There were hundreds of protesters at the site to help fight for the Gypsies' "cause" (I saw what looked like a Gypsy "flag" for the first time in my life), and I imagine that many of those protesters were there to defend the right of Gypsies to maintain their way of life unmolested from the state. In other words, many of those protesters were, infact, fighting for an embryonic form of anarchism, that, they imagine, still exists in the Gypsy way of life. That is what many of the protesters seemed to be fighting for; but that core belief was wrong.

Gypsies can never be confused with anarchists, or simplify the Gypsies trying to maintain their "way of life" with the principle of trying to manage a society in a rational way without the need of government (a general definition of anarchism). The reason is this: Gypsies do not manage their situation in a rational way. They do not follow laws. They do not respect the rights of others outside their community.

An interesting comparison would be ancient ethnic communities such as the Native American tribes. These also used to be nomadic, and fought against foreign "civilising" invaders, who over many decades and centuries, lost their lands until they were reduced to "reservations" where they could maintain their way of live.

I say this is an interesting comparison mostly because it is totally opposite to the "way of life" that the Gypsies hold in Europe and in the UK. The only thing that Gypsies and Native Americans share is a general tendency to a nomadic way of life. But even the Native Americans learned to adapt. While their loss of territory was a tragedy few other cultures in recent human history have shared, they still were tenacious enough to hold on to their traditions and a well-defined sense of identity. Gypsies, on the other hand, seem to have only their nomadic life as a clear cultural marker. By definition, they are lost as a culture, literally as well as metaphorically.

But it is difficult for people who live in the countries where Gypsies reside (such as Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Britain) to have much sympathy for them, and it's not hard to understand why. Not only did the Gypsies migrate to Europe from Asia, they brought their nomadic lifestyle with them. Such a lifestyle went out of fashion more than a thousand years ago in most of Eurasia; in the 21st century, it is utterly impractical.

I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of nomadic lifestyle per se; any lifestyle choice may be possible if a person at least agrees to abide by the laws and respect the rights of others. But Gypsies are the "irreconcilables" of modern life; their attitude to life is little different to that of a Mongol from the 13th century. Perhaps Gypsies should just go to Mongolia (where there are still many who have a nomadic lifestyle even today); at least they would feel less out of place. Besides, there are only a few tens of thousands of them in the UK; in crowded Britain, they are an annual headache for councils around the country; Mongolia, by contrast, has hundreds of thousands of miles of open wilderness - a Gypsy's paradise.

Talking of rights, this leads me on to the other protest in the news: that at St Paul's. In the former, Dale Farm, the occupation was about land rights, and the council evicting the Gypsies to enforce its will for the sake of the local residents. In the latter the occupation was about the Financial Crisis, and St Paul's cathedral closing because of health and safety concerns; now there is a public debate about whether or not, and how and when, to evict the occupiers camped outside.

That, at least, is the simple answer. In the case of Dale Farm, public opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of the eviction; in the case of St Paul's opinion is more even distributed. There are those on one side who remind us that democratic protest is about being occasionally subjected to uncomfortable situations; this is a more than fair comment. Then there are those who say that the church is there to defend the rights of the needy, as the occupiers claim to, so support the occupation; this is another more than fair comment. There are also those who say that such an occupation outside St Paul's obstructs right of passage of others, for example, in and out of St Paul's and the environs; this is also a fair point. Then there are those in St Paul's itself (the dean who recently resigned in protest, not among them) who say that the cathedral must remain closed to prevent any accidents to people entering St Paul's; this is completely ridiculous.

It comes to something of the "health and safety gone mad" idea, when St Paul's cathedral closes for the sake of a few people possibly tripping up over some tents. To paraphrase the occupiers, what would Jesus say? Who in the clergy decided that these tents should prevent the cathedral losing the revenue of those thousands each day who cough up the 14.50? Who indeed?

Talk about the church getting its messages mixed up: I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of the clergy's position. Will they blame the tents and "health and safety concerns" when they refuse to have a Christmas mass, if the occupation remains there for that long? I don't blame the people in the tents - I blame the idiocy of the clergy of St Paul's for using "health and safety" to provoke a public storm over an ingenious form of democratic protest.

It shows us how out of touch much of the church is with the concerns of real people, if it uses "health and safety" over some tents as an excuse to close the capital's cathedral. And it is doubly bizarre to see the media get its messages mixed up when they complain about the tents forcing the closure of the cathedral (without attacking the same "health and safety madness" operating from St Paul's cathedral), then accuse the occupiers of being "part-timers" (sorry, but maybe some of them may have jobs to go to after all?).

And the media accuse the occupiers of having no clear message!

The "New Ottomanism" and the "New Middle East"

I wrote an article about six months ago comparing the Turkish and Egyptian experiences of democracy. Now that, so to speak, the smoke has cleared a little and the pieces are falling into place after these months of the "Arab Spring", it's a good time to look at what is what and who the "winners" and "losers" are from the events of 2011.

At this point there have been three changes of government in the Arab world since early 2011 (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, chronologically in that order); one is on the verge of changing, with its leader in self-imposed exile (Yemen); there is continual mass civil unrest in another (Syria); and a fifth government (Bahrain's) only stemmed the threat of continual mas civil unrest by calling on the support of a neighbour's armed forces (Saudi Arabia) to help brutalise and terrify the majority of its citizens (the Shias). A number of other Arab governments (mostly monarchies - such as Jordan, Morocco and Oman) pre-empted mass unrest by granting some modest "democratic" reforms and subsidies.

That's the summary, and it covers most countries in the Middle East. Each of those individual countries' circumstances are unique in their own way, and I don't want to go into that much detail here. I want to look at who the "winners" and "losers" are from these events, what they mean, and their historical context.
Of the ideas I just mentioned, I'll look at each idea in reverse order.

The historical context of the "Arab Spring", while surprising most of the intelligence agencies in the world (or so it seems), with the benefit of hindsight (and a look at the cycle of ideological movements of the last few decades) things start falling into place.

Most "Middle East experts" say that Arab politics had been in a state of inertia after decades of stifling monarchical or military rule. This was because, some said, the Arabs were incapable of controlling themselves under a democratic regime; they point to the proof of the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran as proof that Arabs are incapable of "democratic revolution".
The irony here is that, in the case of Iran, they had a "democratic revolution" back in 1953 (around the same time, incidentally, that Abdel Nasser of Egypt got rid of the British-backed king to set up a military dictatorship). But Iran in 1953 was too soon for "real democracy" in the middle of the Cold War, so their elected prime minister was deposed by the West and the Shah put back on the Peacock throne. The Shah eventually proved incapable of governing the country effectively, and there was a broad-based revolution against him in 1979, symbolically headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. However, that "broad-based" revolution was soon hijacked by Islamic clerics, reaching a nadir nine months later with Khomeini backing the storming of the US embassy and a referendum that gave all powers to the Ayatollah.
The rest, in Iran's case, is a familiar story. Iraq under its new dictator, Saddam Hussein (with US backing), went to war with Iran, ending eight years later in a horrendous death toll and pointless stalemate. Iran, fancying a stab at proxy-war, supported Hezbollah in Lebanon against Israel. Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime now being ostrasized by the US, with the Cold War still in full flow, the US then armed the Islamic fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan (which included a group called "Al-Qaeda") to fight against Soviet occupation.
With the effective birth of state Islamic fundamentalism in 1979 in Iran, the nineties saw the the political wing of Islam time to grow in this decade amidst the confusion of the post-Soviet world (such as in Chechnya), as well as (briefly) in such countries as Turkey (in the brief rule of the Islamic "Refah" party).
The turn of the century saw a sudden and dramatic turn of tactics by the extreme side of political Islam. "Al-Qaeda" declared war on the US, attacked a US navy vessel in Yemen in 2000, then spectacularly attacked the US homeland with four hijacked planes in 2001. Islamic terrorism then enveloped many parts of the world, and continues to do so up to today.
The "War On Terror" posed a huge question to the Arab nations of the Middle East, with some Arabs becoming inspired to join in the "jihad" (such as in Saudi Arabia and Yemen). Arab governments, encouraged by the "anti-terror" measures being put through by the US government, and worried for their own safety, turned the screw even tighter on their peoples' rights. As instability became the norm across much of the world, this increased prices and a huge spike in the cost of living in the Middle East, especially after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the resulting occupation, civil strife and insurgency.
So by the end of the 2000s, the Arabs in general were living under regimes that were often not living in the real world; they certainly seemed to act like it, as they were mainly impervious to change, paranoid of dissent, and had a schizophrenic relationship to the West (needing their support economically and diplomatically, but still happy to insult them to their own people for domestic consumption).
Most of the Arab goverments were paranoid of their populations because of the example of Iran that had taken place thirty years before. But, while some of their populations turned to Islamic fundamentalism in either perverse inspiration or desperation, there was another Islamic model that was also on the Arab world's doorstep from another direction: that of Turkey.

Those Turkish politicans who had been involved in the ill-fated administration of the "Refah" party in the mid nineties had learned their lesson by 2001. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the AK party, was one of them, and he saw that it might be possible to "break the mould" of Turkish politics by producing a mass-supported, more modest, Islamic party that would appeal to the average person.
Although had been a democracy for most of its time as a republic (see my earlier article from six months ago comparing Turkey and Egypt), it also suffered from a straightjacket of a powerful military, an immovable civil code and a strong secular tradition. But in 2002, the AK party easily won the national elections.
The AK government under Erdogan went on to prove the critics at home wrong by creating a vibrant and rapidly expanding Turkish economy, a stable government, and a more balanced foreign policy.
The last point is the one that most interested Arab governments; prior to the AK government, Turkey's relationship to the Middle East (except Israel) was indifferent at best. By the end of the 2000s, Turkey's AK government was paying far more attention to the Arab governments than any previous Turkish government; the AK government's "good neighbour" policy of paying attention to all its neighbouring relations - the EU, Russia, Iran, the Middle East and so on.
Arab rulers probably thought that it was just good business sense on the part of the Turks; what they thought that their populations thought about it may not have been on their mind. If that was the case, it was to be a huge mistake.

So the factors that led to the "Arab Spring" can be traced more exactly: the economic instability caused indirectly by the "War On Terror"; the increased security measures against the native Arab populations (excused by the "War On Terror"); the rise of political Islam and the example of good government and good relations offered by the moderate Islamic government of Turkey. Oh, and also the new possibilities brought about in the last few years through social networking. All it then needed was a spark.

The "Arab Spring", therefore, was a result of the changes in political Islam, radicalised after the 1970s, which (for the majority) had matured by the beginning of the 2000s into something else; less extreme and direct, more pragmatic and moderate. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had the effect of transplanting an embryonic (if anarchic) democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The argument that this created a positive example for other Arab populations is, putting it politely, unproven. The Middle East for the past thirty years had been dominated by two Islamic fundamentalist powers: Iran and Saudi Arabia; one pro-West, one anti-West. The emergence of Turkey in the last ten years as a regional power changes the game; if Egypt, now more openly democratic, follows the Turkey model as seems likely, then the Middle East will become even more an even playing field rather than a battle of wills between regional powers.

I talked before of "winners" and "losers".
The prime "winner" of the Arab Spring, apart from the Arab populations themselves, is undoubtably Turkey. Turkey is the exemplar that the people behind the "Arab Spring" most readily follow; its influence in the region, already important as a power-broker and an economic bridgehead, is bound to increase. And the wily Turks are never likely to miss an opportunity to make a wide-ranging, long-term economic investment, as can be seen in Libya and elsewhere. Erdogan is the Arab populations' role model, at least until they find their own in their respective countries. This is what is meant by the "New Ottomanism": moderately Islamist Turkey regaining its former power and influence across the wider region more than a century of being either on the sidelines or the pawn of other powers.
Then there are the "losers". Strangely enough, the losers are mutual antagonists: Iran and Israel. The loss of Iranian influence is obvious enough to see; its ideological war to impose and encourage its view of Islam across the Middle East has clearly failed overall. Although there are more extreme Islamic elements within each of the countries touched by the "Arab Spring", they are clearly a minority, and the moderate view is bound to win in the medium and long term. Iran as a power is distrusted by the Arabs in general (except for the Shia Muslims), and the Arab governments in particular. Iran's only real ally in the Middle East, Syria, is fighting its own battles from within, and the ruling regime is utterly discredited. Secondly, Turkey's diplomatic focus on the Arab world, and its canny re-positioning strongly against the human rights violations of the Israeli government (especially after the "Mavi Marmara" incident), puts Israel in a corner. The only Arab government on good terms with Israel had been the former regime of Egypt; no longer. Israel is truly without friends in the Middle East or even in the neighbouring locality.

The "Arab Spring" has also put fresh impetus into the cause of the Palestinians: if the Palestinians were really smart, Israeli Arabs would organise mass demonstrations to bring Israel to a standstill, and use Erdogan as their diplomatic attack dog. That would be something that might make even the unswervingly loyal US question its principles.

The Republic Of Cambridge (Respublica Cantabrigiensis)

There has been a settlement at the site of where Cambridge is today since pre-Roman times.

Cambridge today is famous, and has been famous for centuries, for one thing: its university. The university itself has existed since around the 12th century, and its founding is in itself worth a mention.
Everyone knows about the term "Oxbridge" (the term dates from the 19th century, and was the tongue-in-cheek name of a university in a satirical novel), and the rivalry; but that rivalry infact was, most likely, born of booze. Oxford's university was founded by royal charter, and so attracted academics and students to the city. This was great for the town's intellectual reputation; it was also a boon for the boozers, too. After some time, the Oxford townspeople finally grew tired of the drunken antics of the students, and eventually some of the academics and students were forced out of the town. Banished from the intellectual Mecca of England, they chose Cambridge as their Medina; their place of exile and rebirth.

This was in the14th century. Oxford was the newer of the two cities, as it dated from Saxon times ("Ox-forde"); Cambridge, as I said, was ancient by comparison. Its original Roman name was Duroliponte; although there had been a settlement there before even then, and there are Bronze Age remains on the Gog and Magog hills just south of the city. After the Romans left, the Saxons built a town on the opposite side of the river ("Grantabrydge"), which eventually changed to Cambridge (Grantchester, a village just outside of Cambridge, still attests to this older name).

The "college" system developed over the centuries in Cambridge, as it did in Oxford. These days, Cambridge has 31 colleges; Oxford almost forty. Cambridge's oldest is Peterhouse; another half a dozen colleges were established over the middle ages, whereas much of the rest were established in the last two hundred years. Both universities act, effectively, as the custodians of their respective cities. The "college" system, for those unfamiliar with it, makes the University seem similar in arrangement to a semi-autonomous, federal republic - all the colleges are autonomous of their own budget and have their own rules and specialisations, but all fall under the umbrella of the University (arriving students are either advised which college to choose, or a suitable one is chosen for them).

A few random facts and observations about Cambridge:
1) Cambridge is the driest place in the UK; it has the smallest amount of rainfall, which maybe also explains why cycling is so common here - you're more likely to cycle if you're more certain you won't get wet.
2) Cambridge University is, apparently, the largest landowner in the UK after the Church Of England. Much of the housing development that goes on in the city is due to the University's guidance. The same goes for the "Silicon Fen"; the UK's largest IT park, also linked to the University; as well as the Science Park.
3) Cambridge is a city of around 100,000 people; Oxford slightly more. Cambridge is about pubs, churches, colleges, parks, punting and cafes. It sounds as English as you can get, but the atmosphere is extremely cosmopolitan, with a huge foreign population; students, workers, whatever. That makes the city feel very liberal; maybe surprising for a place that seems at first to represent everything about the "old establishment". It's also a Liberal city - the council has been solidly LibDem (with a Labour minority) for twenty years, with not a Tory in sight (though to be fair, Oxford has been run by a Labour council for a similar period).
4) The atmosphere in the city is therefore unique; like Oxford, though for slightly different reasons. Cambridge feels like a country town, but still has a sizeable city centre. The river dominates the city, as it runs right through the town centre, and gives plenty of space for open parkland.

While Oxford and Cambridge share many similarities, they differ on a few points.
First, the setting is different: Cambridge lies in lowland, close to the fens - as a result, the landscape looks almost like from a Dutch or Flemish painting; Oxford, meanwhile lies in a valley of low hills - a kind comparison might be to the south of France or Tuscany.
Second, the architecture of the cities are different: Oxford's style is fairly uniform - in a medieval renaissance civic style, with a city centre of graceful streets, squares and parks. By comparison, Cambridge is more like a medieval country town, with the colleges in a more varied and eclectic style, like ducal courts and palace complexes designed by a plethora of competing architects.
Lastly, both cities had important but opposing roles in forming the nation's political history. During the Civil War, Oxford became the seat of King Charles' court - in effect, the official capital during his war with Parliament (though, to be fair, many people in Oxford did not approve of the king either); meanwhile, as Cambridge was the centre of Cromwell's Eastern Association (Cromwell came from nearby Huntingdon), it acted as the unofficial "capital" of the Republican cause. Although it is a simplification to say so, symbolically, Oxford was the king's city; Cambridge was the ideological capital of the Parliament, and the English Republic.

In other words, Cambridge is the spiritual home of English republicanism.