Rule of what law?

Does it matter that US special forces shot Bin Laden dead rather than arresting him and bringing him back to stand trial? I see very little evidence that this issue is on anyone's mind--but my own. And why should it matter? He was guilty, wasn't he? He got what he deserved ...

But I persist in thinking that what was needed was not Bin Laden's dead body, thrown into the sea, but a restoration of lawful process. That for me was what was so very disturbing about the World Trade Center attack, not the affront to our national pride, not even the horrific deaths themselves, but the sense that violence had invaded the civic space, encroached on the everyday lives of civilians on their way to work, marked the most ordinary of times with the threat of sudden death. And that in turn was the consequence we inflicted first on the Afghanis, then the Iraqis, and now once again the Afghanis: death from the air, drone attacks, bombs in marketplaces, sudden sectarian assault, weddings turned into holocausts, houses blown to pieces. Toppling governments and setting up clumsy occupations, we turned these countries into lawless, randomly violent zones where the 9/11 experience has lasted intermittently for nearly a decade.

Wouldn't the appropriate therapy be a restoration of due process, a return to the norms of civil procedure? Bin Laden, this notorious criminal, this fomenter of violence, would it not have been a salutary exercise to do what civilized societies do? To "bring him to justice," not in the derisory sense in which that phrase is being tossed around by President Obama and the news media to describe an act of vigilantism, of extrajudicial murder, but to bring him to what we used to mean by "justice," the careful procedural kind prescribed by our Bill of Rights and honed over centuries of careful jurisprudence. To present the evidence of his crimes in open court, to hear his defense, and judge him on the facts. To carry out a lawful sentence. Wouldn't this have established some clearer sense of what those values are for which we are so prone to fight? Wouldn't this have been a way to begin healing the raw sores of violence and war we--not Bin Laden, not the Taliban, but WE, the United States of America--have brought to this devastated region?

I listened just now to a press conference in which John Brennan of our Homeland Security department described the events of Sunday's raid. In response to a reporter's question he was quick to say that we were ready to bring Bin Laden back alive. But we knew it was unlikely he would let that happen, Brennan went on, and sure enough, he engaged our troops in a firefight, and was shot dead. But the reporters persisted. Firefight? Did Bin Laden fire on our troops? Brennan was not so sure. Did he actually have a weapon in his hand? Here the punctilious Brennan seemed to lose the thread of his story altogether, and wandered into a long digression about what sort of individual Bin Laden was, hiding in a million dollar mansion, using women as human shields (?!), sending others to risk their lives ... Now the US government has recanted its story: no women used as human shields, no firefight, Bin Laden was unarmed. Our readiness to capture him alive was just a big lie. What happened was an execution, extrajudicial murder, a crime. But still our leaders and spokespersons repeat endlessly how "justice" was done, as if that word, liberally applied in place of the actual procedures of justice, can return us to the standards of lawfulness and order that we have cast aside.

I found it reprehensible ten years ago, when Muslims chanted their support of the September 11 attacks. The crowds cheering Bin Laden's death outside the White House, at Ground Zero, here in Kenmore Square, struck me the same way. We are a brutal, bullying nation, an empire subject to no one's rules, careless of the damage we inflict. The brutal facts of Bin Laden's demise are not the most important part of this dispiriting story, but they are another step in our long descent from principle, along with the public's indifference to such questions, and the visible bloodlust that stands in its stead. U--S--A, the flag-wavers were chanting, but what does that proud name stand for any more?

Future tensions

Listening to Valérie Pécresse, France's Minister of Higher Education and Research, speak at Harvard the other day, I had the feeling that, like Lincoln Steffens visiting the USSR in 1921, I had seen the future. (Whether it works is a longer question.) Mme. Pécresse is at any rate a powerful spokesperson for this particular vision of post-modernity, articulate and witty (in English) and utterly sure of herself. French higher education in her view is barely distinguishable from research; in 90 minutes of remarks, both prepared and extemporaneous, she mentioned the humanities and social sciences only when directly questioned about them. Otherwise the intention behind her ambitious plan to consolidate universities and grandes écoles into larger research institutions on the Anglo-American model is entirely to promote France's global position in the sciences. And not just the sciences, but the applied version, what she called innovative science, the patent-generating, job-producing, technologies-of-the-future sort of science practiced most famously at MIT--her next port of call after Harvard. Behind her determination to transform the idiosyncratic, tradition-encrusted French system of research is the hope that global private industry will find France's institutions compatible as partners (as Intel and several others have recently done). To this end her ministry is pushing doctoral candidates into research roles with private companies. When her 'reforms' are complete, France's public, nationally peculiar institutions will be adjuncts to the global corporate system for which she and her boss, M. le Président, are such insistent shills.

In a sense there is nothing very surprising about all this. Johns Hopkins University was beginning to outsource its physics department to the profit sector when I was there 30 years ago. The 8-acre hole in the ground I look at from my back window, which was to be (and may still become) Harvard's new science complex, was understood to be a venture in applied inter-disciplinary science. Its guiding light, Larry Summers, sees the public/private distinction as blurry at best, and the economics of patent development and corporate partnerships inspired his pharaonic investments. With the collapse of Summers' financing scheme the project is likely to bring the university into still deeper partnership with private capital. So in a real sense Pécresse is simply, as she says, trying to bring France's university research complex up to the existing global standard.

What that means, alas, is the death knell of humanistic education as we have known it for the past half-millenium. Tomorrow's educated elite will be homines economici, trained more than educated, prepared to execute technical functions rather than to reflect on less immediate questions. It is a sober vision, whose only rationale is quantified cost benefit. This vision is not Pécresse's invention, but it is the legacy she intends to leave as minister.

As I have just read Jean-Luc Mélenchon's manifesto, Qu'ils s'en aillent tous, I find myself contrasting Pécresse's futurism with the rather quainter one offered by JLM, in every way its polar opposite. For Mélenchon's France is one that would retain its particularities. The globalizing, American influence is at the top of the list of entities he wants to "just go away." Crude economism can go too. Local cooperatives, not global conglomerates, are the productive institutions of choice, and French is the language of France's future (unlike Pécresse, who interestingly suggested that English, in her educational system, is not a foreign language but a basic tool all French children must acquire). To be clear: Mélenchon's is not the nostalgic France of Marine Le Pen (despite cynical attempts to amalgamate the two). His bedrock citizenry is a diverse population, enriched by immigration, but united in the secular fraternity of citizen power. His economy reduces growing inequalities by limiting the profits allotted to shareholders, capping the salaries of executives, and protecting the social acquisitions of working people. In many ways it is a France frozen in the modest prosperity of the trente glorieuses. And it would preserve the cultural values of the existing educational system, keeping a place for the inefficiencies of humanistic study.

Mélenchon's is the future France in which I personally would choose to live. But Pécresse's is the one that is taking shape even now, and in which the next generation will have to find its way. A bigger world, with greater material rewards for those who excel, but a restricted view of what makes a life--that is the orientation she is bringing to higher education.

When you call Europe on the phone ... a busy signal?

Scene: President Obama, en route from Chile to San Salvador on his first imperial tour of Latin America, uses the time on Air Force One to bring order to the squabbling NATO allies. Prime Minister Erdogan must first be cajoled: he can claim all he wants to his party faithful that Turkey will not be shooting at Muslims in Libya, but he mustn't block NATO's command-and-control role there. Then Cameron and Sarkozy must be placated: NATO will take a lead role (Cameron), but so will an independent authority (Sarkozy). Now if Italy doesn't get cold feet, if Norway can be reassured and Chancellor Merkel (looking at her party's declining poll numbers) doesn't make a fuss, and a couple of Arab states can be brought on board, the US can make good on its claim to play a secondary role. But meanwhile, no in-flight basketball games for the President, as he carries out his functions as Leader of the Free World.

One of my main interests in pursuing this blog is to see whether Europe, particularly the 'Old Europe' with its traditions of social democracy and post-colonial contrition, can play a significant and countervailing role on the world-stage of the 21st century. As the world system evolves from a single superpower to a multilateral system embodied in the G-7 or -8 or -20--or is it really a G-2, as China steps firmly into every power vacuum?--I, like many others, have held out hope that the European civilization, somewhat world-weary and battle-scarred, could gather its forces and bring into world affairs a degree of circumspection and civility that seemed so wanting in the America of George W. Bush and our yahoo Congress. I still think the EU has that potential.

But right now, in the face of an urgent situation in Libya and throughout the Arab world that demands clarity of purpose and deft diplomatic and military discipline, Europe seems more than ever to be looking over its shoulder for its American big brother to take charge. Who else could make those calls to order? Lady Ashton? 'President' van Rompuy? The EU's exclusion of Turkey is of course an initial difficulty, but it hardly stops there. The particularist--and nakedly political--interests of politician-statesmen like Sarkozy and Merkel, both looking at unfavorable polls, present another. And then the divergent traditions each works within: Cameron must bring his policies back to Parliament where he is primus inter pares, while Sarkozy is half-expected to act like General de Gaulle, if not Napoleon. Germany isn't sure whether it is still a pacifist nation, in rehabilitation, or one of the new world-system's Great Powers. Belgium, the Netherlands, and others to varying degrees are held hostage to nationalist, xenophobic parties whose world-view has nothing in common with the global perspective I would hope for in this virtual Europe of my dreams. And let's not talk about Italy's leadership ...

I salute for the moment the efforts of Obama and Clinton to implement the Pax Americana, with all its bellicose trappings, along lines of UN sponsorship, multi-lateral responsibility, and diplomatic consensus. In some ways an outlier like Gadhafi makes an easier test case for such an initiative than more complex test-cases like Afghanistan or Iraq. But despite the eager volunteerism of Sarkozy and Cameron, 'Europe' is in no way ready to be a co-equal partner in this venture, and I have to ask: if not now, when?

France's Brave New Political World

The political scene in France this morning is a shambles. Polls that suggested the emergence of the National Front as a major player have been strongly confirmed by Sunday's local elections, and the ambivalence of Sarko's UMP is there for everyone to see: wanting the FN's voters, the UMP managed to promote the its ideas to the point where significant numbers of voters are leaving the UMP for the FN, in effect asking, Why not go for the real thing? This becomes easier to consider as Marine Le Pen proves so much more canny than her father in banishing the more offensive parts of his message while sending a clear signal that hers is still a France for 'the French' (defined along the narrowest lines of race, religion, origin) and her movement a vindication of the white, Christian, and chauvinist identities of another age.

In response the UMP and the French Right in general still can't decide where the lines of respectability ('republican' is the term of choice) are to be drawn. This leaves considerable confusion as to whether the Right intends to team up with the Socialists against the FN, or leave open by default (i.e., abstention in the second round) an ambiguous space in which an unstated alliance with the FN can continue to form.

This dilemma is oddly mirrored on the Left by the success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Front de Gauche. Though given little attention in the MSM, consumed as it is with the marquee drama of Le Pen and her vague bleu Marine, JLM's success on Sunday is no less impressive. The FdG, barely 2 years old, stands at something more than 10%, with candidates in play for more than 200 local seats; it is, as its leaders proclaim, the clear second force on the Left, the fourth largest force nationally--and though they aren't saying so right now, a bloc without which the Left may never claim the national presidency it so desperately covets.

In yesterday's press conference the FdG's leadership strongly urged an alliance with other Left forces--the Socialists, but also Europe Ecology/the Greens--in order to exclude the FN as widely as possible from winning seats in next Sunday's second round. In the longer run, though, will the FdG be able to support a PS whose candidate is none other than the director of the IMF, one of the most visible leaders of the global capitalist system the FdG so deeply deplores? Conversely, can the PS hope to capitalize on its situation--Sarko's unpopularity, the enduring economic crisis, the threat of the FN--without running a centrist like M. Strauss-Kahn? While the Right's dilemma is all over the front pages today, the quiet triangulation between Left, Far Left, and Center (and also between socialists, communists, and ecologists) is at least as thorny.

Trying to untangle this knot I find myself turning to an unlikely source, Valérie Pécresse, a hack politician on the Right and a junior minister. With reference to the UMP/PS/FN dilemma, Mme. Pécresse makes a distinction between "differences of ideas" (that divide UMP and PS, républicains all) and "differences of values" that make an unbridgeable gulf between the UMP and the FN. Wherever this leaves the Right, its logic applies similarly to the Left. For some JLM and the FdG are symmetrical with the FN--suspiciously descended from totalitarian Communism, republican by convenience but with values fundamentally incompatible with the PS. Decades of PCF participation in the 'republican' rituals of governance may have tempered this criticism, but they haven't put it to rest.

What I hear JLM and the FdG saying today, though, and in the campaign to come, is that they represent a challenge to Center-left Socialists at the level of ideas but not of 'values.' Far from contesting the basic values of republicanism, they intend to revitalize the PS and the Republic by addressing, within its institutional framework, the dissatisfactions and the despair that are driving voters outside that republican framework and into the waiting arms of Mme. Le Pen. While it is erroneous (as polling data shows) to claim that the FN's new strength is coming from apostate voters on the Left, it is probably true that those voters in play are demographically close to the PCF's traditional base. Can JLM reach them and bring them into an enlarged alliance within a Left that really challenges current assumptions (and cannot be dismissed with Le Pen's sardonic term 'UMPS')? Are his 'values' not compatible with those of the PS to which he belonged for nearly all of his long career? The Left has a year to negotiate these difficult waters, but after Sunday it will no longer be useful or possible to ignore the existence of a well-formed bloc to the left of the PS's center of gravity.

President Rising

Leading economic theorists converged on the IMF headquarters in Washington today for a summit conference on macroeconomic policy. I gave myself the treat of watching the IMF's director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, open the proceedings with a 20 minute address, in charmingly accented and idiomatic English, in which he welcomed his academic colleagues, reviewed the themes of the day's work, and promised to attend the sessions. It was a remarkable performance from this remarkable person, in whom the strands of politician, economist, and banker come together with such force. Only a few years ago DSK, between ministerial posts, was teaching economics at Sciences Po. In another year he may be Président de la République ... or not. As he exhorted his guests to help set the new, post-crisis course for global capitalism, in which his IMF will take a leading part, I had to wonder (as I suppose he himself does) whether that other job, if he wins it, would be a vertical promotion, a lateral one, or no promotion at all.

Clearly on display in this room full of brainpower, in the roster of topics and supporting papers, and in the host institution at large, is the confidence of a world system that believes it knows where it is going. Conference convener Olivier Blanchard, describing the task at hand, makes it seem so clear: certain assumptions need to be examined, certain adjustments made to monetary and fiscal regulation, and then the global system can resume its work, spreading growth, consolidating markets, enlarging the precincts and advancing the interests of capital. It is a powerful, possibly all-powerful system, and DSK sits at its nexus.

Of course like so many others my interest in DSK is more specific: I want to know if he is going to launch a presidential campaign, and if so when, and with what success. What was merely a handicapper's curiosity until last Saturday has turned into something much more urgent: the fate of the Republic, no less. For with Sarkozy's dismal performance and the meteoric ascent of Marine Le Pen in the polls, all eyes are turning to DSK as the one sure trump card that will keep the National Front out of the Elysée Palace.

But I must say, watching DSK preside over the IMF, he seems oddly juxtaposed, with all due respect, to Marine Le Pen. Not that I mean to underestimate her, and anyone who does would be a fool. She is a fierce debater, a quick study, and her strategic instincts thus far display a discipline quite unlike her father's. And yet what she stands for, compared to DSK and the IMF, seems so small, so petty , so local. Her current mission to Lampedusa, presumably to tell the Tunisian and Libyan refugees to get back on their boats and go home, is a case in point: in the face of a wrenching political and humanitarian crisis that has galvanized the world's attention, her response is to pull up the gangplank and let history take its course somewhere else. Hers is a folkloric France, homogeneous and pure, old-fashioned in its values and without global ambitions. One can understand the appeal of such a world to a populace battered by unemployment, bewildered by demographic and cultural change, chronically anxious about the destination of a world too large to be comprehended. If she can succeed in painting her more familiar vision in vivid colors for the French voters, is it so difficult to imagine them preferring it to the more abstract, cosmopolitan, polyglot realities so perfectly embodied in DSK?

Well sure, the smart money still favors DSK, or even Sarko, to this upstart frontrunner-of-the-moment. My own admittedly remote hope is for a third alternative that has hardly shown its outlines as yet. It would question the viability of that capitalist world system, for all its power, and recall how close it brought us to the brink of collapse just two years ago. It would question whether the barely visible but no less imposing environmental catastrophe can be addressed by a system whose only rationale and modus operandi is perpetual growth. It would understand that ours is, like it or not, a world system, but would postulate a world system grounded in solidarity, not competition, exploitation, profit. It would take on the challenge of rising inequality, within the developed economies and between the less developed ones, and redistribute the vast accumulations of wealth that are the source of such instability. Such a nascent vision will be represented, however imperfectly, in the French presidential election, whether by Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Olivier Besancenot or both. It will be ridiculed and marginalized in the mainstream press, as indeed it already has been. It may never be forced to specify its ideas programmatically, which is too bad because they need the refinement that comes from public debate. That debate will most likely follow the worn path of DSK's (or Sarko's) old ideas, vs. MLP's utterly anachronistic ones. But a new synthesis of global reach with local management, in a framework no longer determined by capital's demands for growth and profit, will try to articulate itself in this coming campaign. It would be everyone's loss if the more flamboyant thematics of today's medio-political stars render it invisible.

The EU's Libyan failure

Through all the storm and stress that has marked the recent history of the European Union--voters in France and the Netherlands opposed to its voluminous constitution, then outright rejection by the Irish, now the endless controversies over how to manage a common currency--the Union has remained for many an article of faith. There must be an EU, they intone, because the world cannot dispense with the universal values embodied in the war-weary, post-colonial, globally aware, democratically committed, in short, the enlightened vision of Old Europe.

If such indeed is the ideological ballast required to keep the EU and its EMU afloat through the perilous seas of ongoing financial crisis and economic contraction, it would make all the more serious, as Le Monde's editors suggest in yesterday's edition, Europe's failure to flourish its values in the face of Libya's humanitarian disaster. But alas, the divisive, sauve qui peut side of the European mentality is what heaves into view at moments like this. Will the EU call for Gadhafi's resignation and removal? No, because two member-states, Italy and Malta, are afraid of precipitating a refugee crisis. And in a sense they are right: apparently, as I learn, the Treaty of Dublin is the vehicle by which other EU countries decline to share the refugee burden with fellow member-states unlucky enough to be the point of landfall. If those Libyans make it to Lampedusa, they're yours forever, Signor Berlusconi, and every article of the Declaration of Human Rights is yours to share with them. Don't bother to call Brussels--where Lady Ashton is busy anyhow making idle pronouncements in the absence of any clear diplomatic agenda.

Part of what is so tawdry in this scenario is the clear fact that Libya, for all the difficulties posed by its 42 years of tribal rule, is Europe's neighbor and Europe's problem. It was only yesterday that all the heads of government, from Tony Blair to Sarko to Merkel, were lining up for photo ops--and oil contracts-- with the Guide of the Revolution. And wasn't Libya supposed to be a mainstay of the Mediterranean Union?

Other voices, sometimes dismissed as demagogic or anachronistic, have questioned whether the EU idea is anything more than window dressing for an international business cartel whose mission is continued exploitation of less developed economies. I personally would like to believe in a better EU, whose espoused values are close to my own. But honestly, if the sight of a dictator shooting down his own people in the streets of the capital isn't enough to excite the EU's humane reflexes, one has to wonder what the use is of all that high-minded rhetoric.

A Star (and Crescent) Is Born?

Has la diversité opened a new chapter in French politics?

Ilham Moussaïd became a cause célèbre a year ago when she appeared as an NPA candidate in the French regional elections wearing a head scarf. As I noted a few months ago ("Au Revoir, Ilham," 12/2/10), she and some colleagues eventually left the NPA when it appeared the party was in no hurry to resolve its position regarding women, head scarves, cultural identity, and their relationship to republican politics.

Now the social service organization she helped found to address issues in the immigrant quartiers of Avignon has declared its intention to form a political party, with Moussaïd as its candidate, in this spring's local or cantonale elections.
Does she have a chance? As self-acknowledged novices she and her co-workers are modest in their immediate goals. But she proved herself a formidable presence at the microphone, under fire, during all the controversy surrounding her previous candidacy. She has a clear understanding of her own values--solidarity, equality, opportunity, cultural diversity--and the insurmountable obstacle that is the capitalist system. Within the limitations of a new, modestly funded party she will be a credible candidate.

But the stakes could grow much higher. France's 2nd-generation immigrants, citizens all, are a numerous bunch, and unlike previous smaller cohorts, they may be a lot less eager to shed their particularist identities in order to amalgamate with the larger citizenry, as republican tradition would require. Ever since the 2005 riots across the immigrant districts (if not sooner) it has seemed possible, if not inevitable, that French political establishment would have to reconsider its relationship to the ethnic identity politics we take for granted in the US. No, not in France, many say from all sides of the political spectrum, or perhaps not yet. But Ilham Moussaïd is a determined young woman, not willing to be told "no," or "not yet." Others may follow her example. The winds of change that are blowing through Tunis and Cairo, and even Tripoli and Rabat, may reach Bobigny or Clichy-sous-bois or the quartiers of Avignon. If they do, Ilham Moussaïd and other young leaders like her will be there, ready .