Go away and just see what happens

Often enough when I go away camping in August, and am paying no attention, something dramatic happens.  In 1989, I re-entered the world of news to hear that Hungary was taking down its stretch of the Iron Curtain.  In 1991, the coup against Gorbachev took place, followed quickly by the collapse of  the Soviet Union.

A lot of stuff happened this August, but for all the import of British riots and American Russian roulette with the economy, I think the beginning of the trial of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo wins the prize.

Cairo is the place, it is Paris in 1791.  Mubarak is Louis XVI and his judges are...?

When Louis fled France in rejection of the new constitutional monarchy, and was captured doing so, Thomas Paine told the revolutionaries  that how they treated the ex-king would determine the course of the new  republican regime.  He particularly warned against blood vengeance against the traitor-king, which would lead to more blood, and even more.  He was emphatically right.

Hosni Mubarak deserves to answer to a court for his actions, but the trial has its dangers.  The course and meaning and the consequences of the Egyptian revolution may well be determined in that courtroom.  Whether the Arab Spring keeps its potential for humane progress or descends into vengeance -- we shall see.

For a less hopeful set of developments, see these reports and reflections in Syria Comment.

Advice to Arab democrats

Juan Cole lists ten mistakes made by the USA that he hopes can be avoided by the young revolutionaries of the Arab world. In the course of it he says what must not be said:

5. Make a bill of rights central to your new constitutions, and be specific about what rights people have and what actions infringe against those rights. Include electronic rights to privacy, such as freedom from snooping in private emails or warrantless GPS tracking. You have suffered from intensive secret police spying on your populations, and should know that rights to freedom of speech, worship, press and publication, privacy, a fair and speedy trial, and protection from torture are hallmarks of any democratic system. We have given up most of these essential rights to our secret police, without admitting we have done so and without calling them secret police. But you have lived through domestic surveillance and would easily recognized the violations of individual rights that have become routine in the United States and which are defended by our increasingly corrupt judicial authorities, including a whole series of attorneys-general.

And:

The blood of your martyrs for revolution is too recent and too precious, and too often belonged to young people who sacrificed a bright future, for you to squander this once-in-a-century opportunity to put liberty and democracy on a firm foundation in your countries. You are young, and you still weep at the thought of freedom, and of those who died for it. You are having your weddings at Tahrir Square to celebrate a new beginning. Be careful. Be very careful. In my lifetime I have seen the American state spiral down into a brutal tyranny that tortures, spies, union-busts, engages in illegal wars, and plays dirty tricks on dissidents. We used to have something much more like a democracy. Maybe we can learn from you how to safeguard something so precious.

Who would have thought in January that the world would look so different in July?

Susan Reynolds, There were States in Medieval Europe

This essay by one of the best of medieval historians is worth a look.

Boy, do I feel dumb! Afghan railways

I like to think of myself as smart and well-informed, more interested in world history and comparative history than other people, and sensitive to the little details that change the big picture.

I guess I have to revise that self-image. I just found out today, thanks to Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, that Afghanistan has never built a railway of any particular length, that it is not connected to the greater network of Asian railways.

Here is my excuse: back in the 1920s, Afghanistan had a modernizing King named Amanulla. After reading Before Taliban about two years ago, I was aware that he built or at least started to build, a railway from Kabul. I know that he came to a bad end and was replaced by a more standoffish government, in typical Afghan style, but it never occurred to me that this was pretty much the end of railway building in Afghanistan! The Soviet military had big plans and actually laid some track, but the anti-Soviet resistance took care to see that it didn't get very far. In more peaceful times, the Kabul government has usually been opposed to the extension of foreign lines into Afghanistan, since those plans were almost always sponsored by the government of British India or the government of Russia.

I really should have known, since I've seen lots of pictures of the Khyber Pass. If you have seen them too, you'll notice that there's nary a track, and no place to hide one, either. Furthermore, that I was teaching first-year world history, I found that it was difficult to talk about and illustrate 19th-century developments without lots of pictures of locomotives. It was the prestigious symbol of modernization and development in those times -- and into the 20th-century, too. I should've been sensitive to the fact that there are no such pictures of Afghanistan, and what pictures of Afghanistan there are have no locomotives.

The lack of rail transport in Afghanistan is not just a symbol of the country's rejection of the outside world, it is one of the major concrete policies that Afghan governments have usedto guarantee of outsiders will not, in somebody's words,plunge a knife into the vitals of the country. (Of course they have had to deal with large-scale air transport for long time now, and there are highways, but that doesn't take away from the original point. See what Eugene Robinson has to say about the prospects of mining in Afghanistan.) I am sure that not everyone feels that way about the outside world, but enough do.

If you're interested in the railways of Afghanistan, such as they are, see this excellent article on the web and its various links.

Image: somebody else's railway.

Medieval Afghanistan?

Matthew Gabriele is a thoughtful history professor who occasionally posts some of those thoughts over at Modern Medieval. This week he's got something good to say on the abuse of comparative history:

Is Afghanistan medieval? No.

Yet, people keep asking this question.

Yesterday (June 2, 2010), it was Prof. Thomas Barfield of Boston University, writing at ForeignPolicy.com. Barfield points out, quite rightly perhaps, that comparisons between the European Middle Ages and contemporary Afghanistan come fast and quick, most recently by the current UK Defense Minister, Liam Fox. Indeed, when looked at quickly, the religious and political situations seem quite analogous -- a decentralized power structure with several loci that have recourse to legitimately use violence, the permeation of religion into the discourse of everyday life, etc. Makes you wish that someone would study the intersection of religion and culture, doesn't it?

Anyway, after drawing the outlines for his comparison, Barfield concludes his essay by suggesting that any Western diplomats charged with helping modern Afghanistan should learn their medieval history, because "at least in medieval Europe, the centralized state emerged victorious."

This is what's called "neomedievalism" in foreign policy circles, and if you don't know about this, go read you some Bruce Holsinger. Basically, the idea is that all states follow the same basic evolutionary model that roughly maps onto the (Western) European experience -- anarchy, increasing centralization during the Middle Ages, finally emerging as strong, coherent nations in the 19th century or thereabouts. There are some problems with that.

Leaving aside the fact that my description of Afghanistan above (taken from Barfield's essay) could easily describe today's United States (think about it), and the fact that I would NEVER discourage people from studying the European Middle Ages, there are some other problems here. Let me count off a few, and I'm tired right now so I won't take too much time. I'll even bullet-point them:

1. The European Middle Ages are not a repository for all that people today consider "backwards" and/ or "barbaric." It is not a synonym for "religous" (let alone "Islamic") either. The people who lived during that age were more cultured and intelligent than you think they were, and they were more violent and narrow-minded than you can imagine. Just. Stop. Generalizing.
2. Relatedly again, there's something really patronizing about thinking that the European example has all the answers. We're not all on the same timeline. Historical context matters for the very simple reason that each situation is different.
3. Relatedly again, the narrative of European political centralization that Barfield's relying on is very old. It goes back to Charles Homer Haskins, who attended the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919 as an advisor to Pres. Wilson, and then to Haskins' student, Joseph Strayer, who worked for the CIA and wrote the famous On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. There's been a lot of work done since then on how this model is problematic. It's almost like me looking at Prof. Barfield's Afghani tribes and using French Structuralism to explain their behaviors. Wait a minute...

That's what Barfield's doing. It's all deep structure, isn't it? The idea here is that certain fundamental, almost transcendental, structures dominate human existence and govern individuals' actions. If you understand those structures -- best evidenced, of course, in the European example -- then you can shape them to your liking. But there's a problem with that. As Barfield himself says, "[My] medieval analogy is not an exact one, of course. Afghanistan's Sunni Islam never had an institutionalized clerical hierarchy, monasteries, or religious figures with the power of a pope." So, except for the fact that the lived religious experience of the 2 wildly different times and places are wildly different, they're the same, right? Do I have to answer that last question?

Look, Afghanistan is a mess. But it's a mess because we THINK it to be a mess -- because we don't like the way the state functions. It looks "primitive" to us and that bothers us (and, to a degree, threatens our American interests and security, were the Taliban to regain power). But it is what it is. I do know, however, that turning Karzai into Louis IX or Henry II isn't really going to solve anything and could very well make things worse.

I am not sure I can go along with Prof. Gabriele all the way. I certainly agree that Afghanistan is not medieval, but although I understand why he said "Just. Stop. Generalizing." (and perhaps beat his head against the wall for good measure), I don't think that was the right response. My top two reasons I don't think Afghanistan is medieval are:

1. The area we now call Afghanistan existed during the Middle Ages, and back then it was not much like it is now, or like France or England at that time. Studying Afghanistan's actual historical development, from home of empires (instead of football of empires) to the decentralized home of Pashtunwali, might just be more relevant than trying to visualize Afghanistan as a rather slow off-the-mark Europe.
2. These pictures. How does categorizing Afghanistan as much like medieval Europe account for the fact than an independent Afghanistan, not yet occupied by foreign forces, looked like this just four decades ago? Remember that some of the people in those pictures are still alive, in Kabul, or Peshawar, or Columbia, Maryland, or Toronto. In what way have their lives been like that of medieval Europeans? Be precise.

In some ways, we don't generalize enough in history. Generalization is all too often avoided by the prudent scholars and left to daring souls who, as a friend of mine once said, "extrapolate from the last two points on the graph." Or plunk down a handy "Western" analogy on a distant culture because it is more convenient than learning the details of its own specificity.

I wouldn't say "just.stop.generalizing." Rather, "check your generalizations carefully, and don't insist your analogy is a magic key to everything." It's not always Munich in 1938, nor Paris in 1793. The dead, as Modern Medieval says on its masthead, still have something to say, but they won't do the hard work of understanding for you.

Image: Not the Loire Valley, or the Welsh border.

The comparative present

Thanks to Brad DeLong, from whom many good things come, I have just been alerted to the existence of the publication called Business Insider, which seems to have a real predilection for charts and lists illustrating current trends. This kind of thing can be either very useful or very deceptive, but I love it, even if a given example doesn't hold up very well under strict examination. Comparative material has a lot of potential to make people think, if they don't take the first analysis they see as the final word.

Business Insider first two lists of can which I found interesting. Some readers may remember that I am skeptical about alarmism in connection with demographic crises, especially crises of shrinking population. Business Insider offers us a list of 10 countries heading for a demographic crisis, and what is interesting here is that includes both countries with too much and too little population growth, and some detailed discussion of each. I haven't had the time to read it properly myself, but at least I think it will be worth reading.

The second list discusses 10 countries that have significant oil reserves and can be expected to pump away in the "distant future," long after places like Saudi Arabia have run dry. Of course it is hard to say what the world will be like then anyway, but the list does alert me to a couple of things. One, Iran has a lot of oil, and so will continue to be a "trouble spot" no matter what the ideology of the people in charge. Two, Canada is on that list, which I find quite alarming but not entirely surprising. I would rather not be a "trouble spot."