Why Russia Might Shut Off the Internet
Democrats and the Middle East
A Weekly Political News Magazine
A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1742 - April - 05/04/2019
Issue 1742 - April - 05/04/2019
Van Gogh and the City www.majalla.com
Why Nazarbayev’s Resignation May Not Reap Major Changes www.majalla.com
Editorial History is full of leaders who have ruled their countries for decades, in many ways they establish a new political structure during their tenure. It is for this reason that when a long time leader leaves his or her post, many questions are asked regarding the future of the country’s politics both in terms of its internal and foreign policies, respectively. After nearly 30 years in power, Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, decided to resign from his post. His decision was unexpected and came as a shock to most Kazakhstanis. This week’s issue of Magalla takes a special look into this decision and the implications it has for the country’s future. This week’s cover story by Maia Otarashvili focuses on Nazarbayev’s resignation. The writer argues that while the now-former president has left his post, we should not expect any major changes in the government’s policies. The main reason for this is because he still holds three executive posts which are posts that he will stay at for the rest of his life. However, his age means that he will not play a role for the far future; as such he will seek to pave the way for his family members to succeed him as president as well as cementing his name in the history books as the country’s greatest president. Ahmed Taher writes on the possible motives behind Nazarbayev’s decision. For one thing, he argued that the decision has a historical precedent behind it, namely the fact that Nazarbayev has been known to make difficult decisions that change the course of his country. For instance, as soon as he became president he decided to shut down his country’s Soviet nuclear test site, despite the fact that a possession of nuclear arsenal could be a strategic advantage for the country. The writer further praises Nazabayev’s efforts to modernize the oil and energy rich country. Like Otarashvili, Taher thinks that Nazabayev has paved the way for his family members to inherit the presidency at some point in the future. However, Taher views Nazarbayev’s decision to hand pick a close ally to succeed him is a sound one, as it ensures that his vision for the country is not halted. Joseph Braude writes on the Democratic frontrunners for the upcoming US presidential elections and compares their possible foreign policies toward the Middle East. Bernie Sanders is critical of the US’s relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia and is keen on cutting both relations, respectively. Former Vice President Joe Biden will most likely continue Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, while Beto O’Rourke is a supporter of the two-state solution and has given rhetorical support to the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal. Ali El Shamy writes a report on the new type of politician emerging in democratic states, namely the cult of personality politician. The writer compares the different kinds of cult of personality politicians and gives examples of these types; politicians mentioned in the report include Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage.
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
Issue 1742 - April- 05/04/2019
32 30 How Theresa May’s Brexit Deal Collapsed 34 A New Era in Politics
22 Motives Behind Nazarbayev’s Resignation
Europe’s Largest Party Suspends Its 26 Resident Autocrat - for Now
32 48 Abdelaziz Bouteflika: Algeria's Ailing Revolutionary Who Clung to Power
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Imposter Syndrome:
46 Agnes Varda: French New Wave Pioneer and Feminist Icon 3
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Walid Abu Rashed, wearing a yellow wig, and a fellow actor entertain children through a makeshift puppet theatre set up among the rubble of collapsed buildings in the town of Saraqib in the rebel-held northern Idlib province. (Getty)
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Two young Chinese women dressed in Han Chinese clothing take photographs of the cherry blossoms with their smartphones in the Yuyuantan Park in Beijing. Hanfu is a name for pre17-th century traditional clothing of the Han Chinese, which are the predominant ethnic group of China. (Getty)
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Algerian President Steps Down Amid recession weighed heavily on voters. Erdogan Suffers Major Setbacks in Protests and Army Pressure Local Elections in Turkey's Big Cities Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika Saudi Arabia Opens New Baghdad stepped down on Tuesday after 20 years in Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan suffered stunning Consulate and Pledges 1$bn in Loans office, and six weeks of massive nationwide setbacks in local elections as his ruling AK protests aimed at pushing him and his much- Party lost control of the capital Ankara for the for Iraq criticized inner circle from power to create a real democracy in the gas-rich nation. The announcement followed soon after a sternlyworded call from the powerful army chief for Bouteflika, 82 and ailing, to "immediately" bow out. Crowds celebrated peacefully in the capital Algiers soon after his announcement. Honking car horns, singing songs and waving Algerian flags, hundreds gathered Tuesday night at the central post office — a plaza that has become a symbol of the protest movement. Police watched from the sidelines.
first time since the party’s founding in 2001, and was on course to lose the biggest prize of all, Istanbul. Erdogan, who has dominated Turkish politics since coming to power 16 years ago and ruled his country with an ever tighter grip, campaigned relentlessly for two months ahead of Sunday’s vote, which he described as a “matter of survival” for Turkey. But the president’s daily rallies and overwhelmingly supportive media coverage failed to win over voters in the two main cities, as Turkey’s tip towards economic
Saudi Arabia opened a consulate in the Iraqi capital on Thursday in a ceremony attended by Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohamed Ali al-Hakim. “The foreign minister attended the opening ceremony for the kingdom’s new consulate in Baghdad,” the ministry said in a statement. Saudi Arabia’s King Salman will provide Iraq 1$ billion to build a sports city, state television said on Wednesday, at the start of the two-day visit to Iraq by high-level Saudi officials aimed at boosting ties. This marks the second SaudiIraq coordination council meeting, an initiative launched in 2017 to upgrade diplomatic relations. Iraq-Saudi relations were suspended following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Libyan Commander Khalifa Haftar Orders Troops to Advance on Tripoli Eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar ordered his troops to move towards the capital Tripoli, in a video message published online on Thursday. The city is controlled by a rival administration. The video was titled "Operation to liberate Tripoli”. The message marks a
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significant escalation in the conflict that has divided Libya since the downfall of dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Earlier Thursday, Haftar's forces took full control of Gharyan, a town about 100 km south of Tripoli. The capture of Gharyan after skirmishes on Wednesday with forces allied to Tripoli Prime Minister Fayez Al-Serraj followed a rapid thrust westwards by Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) from his eastern stronghold of Benghazi. Libya has been divided between the Western-backed government in Tripoli and a parallel administration allied to Haftar since Gaddafi's death after an uprising.
the past two weeks from flash floods after the worst rains in the country in at least a decade. State television said armed forces had stepped up relief efforts, airing footage of military and Red Crescent helicopters taking part in rescue operations. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Monday that U.S. sanctions - reimposed after Washington quit a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers - were impeding aid efforts to all affected communities. In a response that Zarif described as fake news, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday that Washington was ready to help via the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and accused Iran’s clerical establishment of “mismanagement in urban planning and in emergency preparedness”.
Popular Comedian Races Ahead in Ukrainian Presidential Election A comedian with no political experience raced ahead in Ukraine’s presidential election on Sunday, offering a fresh face to voters fed up
Iran Floods Force Evacuations as U.S. Denies Sanctions Harming Aid Efforts Iranian authorities ordered the evacuation of scores of villages on Tuesday as the impact of severe flooding spread further across the country, while Washington denied Tehran’s claim that U.S. sanctions were slowing aid efforts. At least 62 people have been killed in
with entrenched corruption in a country on the frontline of the West’s standoff with Russia. Exit polls and early counting put -41year-old Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who plays a fictional president in a popular TV series, comfortably ahead of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in the first round, though short of a majority. Zelenskiy’s rise coincided with voters around the world upending the status quo, propelling anti-establishment forces such as U.S. President Donald Trump and Italy’s -5Star movement to power. He must convince voters he is fit to lead a country at war and at the center of the West’s tussle with Moscow after the 2014 Maidan street protests ejected Poroshenko’s Kremlin-friendly predecessor and Russia annexed Crimea.
Britain Facing Long Brexit Delay as Stalemate Puts Divorce in Doubt Britain could ask the European Union for a long Brexit delay next week if crisis talks between Prime Minister Theresa May’s government and the opposition Labour Party fail to find a way out of the impasse over the divorce from the European Union. Brexit is now in mired in doubt, nearly three years since the United Kingdom shocked the world by voting 52 percent to 48 to leave the bloc. Supporters fear betrayal and opponents are pushing for another referendum. May, who has already delayed Brexit once, is now trying to find a way to get a divorce deal approved by courting opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn who wants to agree a much closer post-Brexit economic relationship with the EU.
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A New Chapter for Kazakhstan? Why Nazarbayev’s Resignation May Not Reap Major Changes By: Maia Otarashvili
first secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1990, he On March 19th, Kazakhstan’s president, became the republic’s president, and once the Nursultan Nazarbayev, resigned after having USSR was dissolved, he became the first president spent almost 30 years as the country’s leader. of independent Kazakhstan in 1991. Kazakhstan Under the Soviet rule, he first served as the was among the few nations opposing the USSR’s chairman of the Kazakhstan Council of Ministers dissolution, and was one of the last ones to leave. from 1984 until 1989; he was then appointed the Although rich in energy resources, the country
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relied heavily on Moscow for processing and distributing its crude oil, and this dependence continued well into Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet years. Under Nazarbayev Kazakhstan has been consistently ranked as an authoritarian state, despite the significant modernization the country has undergone over the recent decades, mostly thanks to its oil wealth. Nazarbayev’s unexpected resignation has left more questions than answers about the country’s future, and the situation merits close monitoring as his succession plans begin to unfold. Although Nazarbayev is no longer president, by most measures he still seems to be in charge. This is largely due to the many steps he took to consolidate virtually all executive power not necessarily in the presidency, but under his personality. There are four key positions, some of them lifetime appointments, he will continue to hold, giving the 79 year-old now-former president arguably unlimited power. In May 2010 the parliament named Nazarbayev the “Leader of the Nation” (Elbasy). This title granted immunity to Nazarbayev, protecting him from any criminal investigation or persecution as well as any media or public scrutiny, and guaranteeing the protection of his assets. Nazarbayev will maintain the Elbasy title going forward. A file photo dated March 2016 ,30 shows former President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev holding a joint press conference with President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junker (not seen) after their meeting in Brussels, Belgium. (Getty)
In May 2018 the parliament passed a law, allowing Nazarbayev to retain his chairmanship of the Kazakh National Security Council for life. The Council’s mandate was also significantly increased by the parliament. The National Security Council is in charge of “ensuring national security and defense capability of the Republic of Kazakhstan in order to preserve domestic political stability, protect the constitutional order, state independence, territorial integrity, and national interests of Kazakhstan.” As well as “evaluating the implementation of the main directions of state policy in the field of ensuring national security, strengthening the country's defense capability, and ensuring law and order.” Nazarbayev will also remain the chairman of Kazakhstan’s ruling Nur-Otan Party, which
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Although rich in energy resources, the country relied heavily on Moscow for processing and distributing its crude oil, and this dependence continued well into Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet years. currently occupies 84 out of the 107 available seats in parliament. He is also expected to retain his chairmanship of the Samruk-Kazyna national wealth fund. The Khazakh state is the sole shareholder of this sovereign wealth fund, which owns a number of major companies in the country, including the national rail and postal service, Air Astana, and the key energy companies: state oil and gas company KazMunayGas, as well as the state uranium company Kazatoprom. The combination of these positions will keep Nazarbayev in the driver’s seat, at least for the foreseeable future. Moreover, he will exert significant political influence in the lead up to the April 2020 presidential election, as he has already hand-picked his interim successors. Nazarbayev named speaker of the Senate and his loyal ally - Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, as the new president, who was promptly sworn in. The former president’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, will replace Tokayev as the speaker of the Senate. Immediately after taking office, President Tokayev proposed to rename Kazakhstan’s capital city Astana in honor of the former president. The resolution was swiftly approved by the parliament, and Astana is now called NurSultan, which is Nazarbayev’s first name. The city was renamed a number of times in the past. It was called Akmolinsk until it was renamed Tselinograd in 1961 and Aqmola in 1991. It was then renamed Astana in 1997 until this year. Nazarbayev’s resignation promped mass protests in Astana and Almaty. According to RFE/RL reporting, the rallies were “organized online by the leader of the banned Kazakhstan's
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Democratic Choice (DVK) movement, Mukhtar Ablyazov, a vocal critic of Nazarbaev and his government, who lives in self-imposed exile in France.” Among other things, the protesters took issue with the government’s plan to rename Astana. Dozens of protesters were detained on March 22nd, while others celebrated the Norouz holiday in the city streets. While Nazarbayev’s resignation seems mostly symbolic, and most observers expect more of the same for Kazakhstan – no major democratic openings or reforms – there are still many unanswered questions. As BMB Russia’s Kazakhstan coverage pointed out, “[Nazarbayev is] Clearly drawing from Lee Kuan Yew's model of transition in Singapore, it's hard to imagine anything could happen without his blessing. But that still leaves space for infighting that can force him to pick sides to preserve a political balance of power. Most importantly, the next president will have to continue effectively balancing Russia, China, and the West, both in terms of broader foreign policy approaches as well as for FDI.” Even if Nazarbayev manages to maintain this
Although Nazarbayev is no longer president, by most measures he still seems to be in charge. There are four key positions, some of them lifetime appointments, he will continue to hold, giving the 79 year-old now-former president arguably unlimited power
new status quo beyond 2020, his advancing age will not allow him stay in charge in the long term. His succession plan will inevitably include two key features – keeping the Nazarbayev family in charge of the country, and cementing his name in Kazakhstan’s history as the country’s greatest leader. Between his daughter’s Senate speaker position, and his close circle’s influence in Kazakhstan, continuity is likely. Afterall, no election has ever been deemed free or fair in Kazakhstan, and the country’s pseudodemocratic system is conveniently set up for
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A view of the Akorda, the residence of the President of Kazakhstan. On March ,23 2019, the Kazakh capital Astana was renamed NurSultan in honour of Kazakhstan's former leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. (Getty)
manipulation. The question of Nazarbayev’s legacy, however, is less certain. Although Kazakhstan, according to its constitution, is a democracy the government has continuously suppressed dissent and propped itself up through arrays of undemocratic moves. It has also practically eliminating any political opposition. The sparks of protests against renaming the country’s capital are a reminder that not all dissent is dead in Kazakhstan, and that in the long-term, Nazarbayev’s legacy – when and how he will be remembered - is in the hands of the Kazakh people.
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While Nazarbayev’s resignation seems mostly symbolic, and most observers expect more of the same for Kazakhstan – no major democratic openings or reforms – there are still many unanswered questions.
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Democrats and the Middle East As Democratic Primary Field Begins to Take Shape, Implications for the Middle East Remain Uncertain 14
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Bernie Sanders has proposed deep cuts to US military spending, criticized U.S. alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and called for an end, - and introduced a bill to end - U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen. known as “invisible primaries.” During the invisible primary, a large field of dozens of candidates is gradually winnowed down to a small handful of major contenders, measured by their ability to raise funds, poll highly in early voting states, and gain a large platform in national media. And while there is yet time for the landscape to change, three candidates have consistently outperformed along these three axes: Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, former Vice-President Joe Biden of Delaware, and Congressman Robert ‘Beto’ O’Rourke of Texas. Each of the three carries a different foreign policy profile, and their rise or fall in the coming contest will determine the direction of a Democratic-run government’s take on global affairs. Bernie Sanders: Frontrunner of the Left
By Joseph Braude
Senator Sanders has, by two key measures, already established himself as the potential frontrunner for the Democratic nomination: He has the largest proven national base of any Democrat to run for national office in the recent past, and has raised more small-dollar donations than all of his top rivals combined.
Although the first Democratic primary debate is still two months away and the Iowa caucus nearly a year off, the main outlines of the Democratic party’s field are slowly coming into view. These periods in American politics — after the dust settles from the last election, but before primaries are held to determine which candidates will represent the major parties in the next one — are traditionally
Over the course of the 2016 Democratic primary, 13 million primary voters cast their ballots for Sanders, giving him 43 percent of the total. This represented a formidable achievement, given Sanders’ extremely low name-recognition at the beginning of the primary and Hillary Clinton’s -40point advantage in most polls. Among living Democrats, only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
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have won more votes nationwide — and neither will compete in 2020. Sanders’ fundraising prowess is more pronounced still. In the 2016 Democratic primary, he raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. When he announced his candidacy last month, he raised nearly six million in one day — four times that of his nearest rival, Senator Kamala Harris. By the end of the first quarter, he appears to have raised between 18 and 24 million dollars -- greater than all his nearest competitors combined. Should Sanders ultimately secure the nomination, he would represent one the most left-leaning majorparty presidential candidates in American history. He has proposed deep cuts to US military spending, criticized U.S. alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and called for an end, — — and introduced a bill to end — U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen. His principal foreign policy adviser, progressive activist Matt Duss, is well known for supporting U.S. rapprochement with Iran and expressing hostility to its traditional allies in the region. Joe Biden: Custodian of the Obama Legacy While Sanders has shown his most potent strength in fundraising, so far he has lagged in national polls behind former Vice President Joe Biden. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Biden leads Sanders by roughly seven points among
Beto offered rhetorical support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, saying that “without firing a single shot, without sacrificing the life of a single U.S. service member, it was able to stop the country of Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.”
Democrats nationally. Cruicially, he also leads in the first state to vote on presidential candidates, Iowa — albeit by a more volatile margin. Biden is also well regarded with the broader public, with a net 24 percent favorability rating, significantly higher than Bernie Sanders’ net 15 percent. Despite these advantages Biden has been slow to formally announce his candidacy. He is reportedly seeking to secure commitments from major Democratic donors to offset Sanders’ strong showing. “It’s a priority,” according to one Biden ally, familiar with the former vice president’s planning. “If you don›t have a good second quarter showing, that could be problematic.” It remains an open question whether Biden can gain enough support among the donor class to offset Sanders’ decisive advantage among small-dollar donors. Biden has also struggled to win the support of progressive activists who have moved further to the left in recent years. His voting record on crime, abortion, and the Iraq war have been deeply troubling to certain progressives, who believe he is “out of step” with the party’s leftward turn. This has been aggravated by two recent allegations that Biden behaved inappropriately towards women at public events, prompting speculation of a #MeToostyle counter-campaign with negative implications for his candidacy. Should Biden overcome these challenges and win the nomination, his foreign policy would likely represent a return to the Obama foreign policy. He vigorously supported the Iran deal, and slammed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA, saying that «all it will likely accomplish is to put Iran back on the path to a nuclear weapon with no clear diplomatic way out.» Beto O’Rourke: Media Darling, Foreign Policy Unknown The third Democrat to emerge so far as a top-tier candidate is former Texas congressman Robert O’Rourke, widely known by his nickname ‘Beto’. At 47, Beto first emerged on the national stage by running a competitive race against Senator Ted Cruz in Texas, a seat long assumed to be out of Democratic reach. Although ultimately
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unsuccessful, he came within the points in a deep Republican state, the closest a Democrat had managed in forty years. Beto has also cultivated a strong following among the national media and small-dollar donors. His 2018 campaign in Texas drew more attention than any other candidate and raised an unprecedented 80$ million, largely from small-dollar donors. When he announced his candidacy for President in March, he raised 6.1$ million within 24 hours -- even more than erstwhile frontrunner Bernie Sanders. Of the three presumptive leaders in the Democratic field, Beto remains the most difficult to assess as a national contender and foreign policy thinker. His congressional record on foreign policy is thin, and his public statements have been limited
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to issues on which there exist either national or Democratic party consensus. For example, he has praised the two-state solution two the PalestinianIsraeli conflict (which most Americans support) but denounced transferring the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem (which most Democrats opposed) as “provocative.” He offered rhetorical support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, saying that “without firing a single shot, without sacrificing the life of a single U.S. service member, it was able to stop the country of Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.” Still, these are relatively thin reeds on which to base a foreign policy doctrine. At this relatively early stage in the Democratic contest, observers can be reliably sure of only one guiding principle among the Democrats vying for office: Whatever President Trump supports, they are likely to oppose.
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Why Russia Might Shut Off the Internet
The Kremlin’s Long Obsession with Central Control By Andrei Soldatov* On the morning of Sunday March 10, thousands of people gathered in the center of Moscow to protest proposed new legislation cracking down on Internet freedom. They waved placards saying “Save the Internet, Save Russia,” “Isolation—It’s Death,” and “NO to Digital Enslaving.” Kremlin
spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who was watching the protests on his TV, was unpleasantly surprised. “One of the speakers at the rally claimed that the Kremlin wanted to press a button and switch the Internet off,” he told the Russian wire agency Interfax. “It is absolutely wrong! Why aren’t they concerned that somebody on the other side of the Atlantic will press this button?”
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Peskov was echoing official propaganda, which claims that the new legislation is essential to stop the United States from cutting Russia off from the Internet. But the protesters have good reason to believe that it is the Kremlin, not some Western conspiracy, that is endangering their Internet access. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law making it a crime to publish “fake news” or “disrespect of the authorities” on social media. Another proposed bill on “digital sovereignty” aims to provide the Kremlin with the ability to cut off Russia, or a particular Russian region, from the global Internet. The two bills deal with different things—content and infrastructure—but they both have the same goal, one that Putin has wanted to achieve for two decades: depriving the people of the means to start a revolution.
General view of the anti-state internet control rally took place in the Russian Capital. Thousands of demonstrators took to the street of Moscow in a rally to protest against the tightening state control over internet in Russia. (Getty)
In 1991, Putin and his comrades from the KGB were traumatized by the unforeseen collapse of the Soviet Union. They didn’t want any more surprises. As early as 1999, Putin proclaimed that his goal was political stability—the preservation of the regime. Putin’s advisers suggested a simple solution to the threat of revolution: controlling the means by which they thought people organized. During Putin’s first term, the government brought trade unions, opposition parties, and independent TV channels to heel. But when, in the early 2000s, a series of popular protests, known as color revolutions, started in several of Russia’s neighbors—Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine—it became clear that the Russian government had targeted the wrong things. The Kremlin came to believe the color revolutions were the product of youth movements started from scratch, following—so Moscow thought—a political toolkit designed by the U.S. State Department to deal specifically with countries like Russia. Ever since, the Kremlin has been locked in an imaginary arms race with the State Department. Every unexpected political change in a neighboring country—and in Russia itself—has been seen as a manifestation of the constantly evolving tactics of the Americans. In 2011,
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In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law making it a crime to publish “fake news” or “disrespect of the authorities” on social media. when Muscovites took to the streets to protest Putin’s return to presidency, the Kremlin saw the prominent role of Facebook and Twitter in organizing the gatherings as another cunning move by Washington, which had apparently found a way to use the Internet against autocracies. Social media’s role in the protests offered a stark warning: the security services could easily fail to prevent a revolution, as protests organized on Facebook have no leaders and no offline organizations that government agents could infiltrate and disrupt. For the last six years, the Kremlin has been trying to find a solution to the Internet problem. The government has passed a barrage of repressive Internet legislation with no apparent effect. Sensitive information, such as reporting on the Russian military presence in Ukraine and Syria and exposés of Kremlin officials’ corruption, remains available online. The Kremlin hopes that the latest two bills will make a breakthrough. The so-called fake news law should help eliminate content that could provoke unrest, and the draft digital sovereignty law gives the government control over Internet traffic within Russia and across its borders. The law would require Russian Internet exchange points, through which Internet providers exchange traffic between their networks, and Internet service providers to report to a government agency about how they direct traffic and to install special equipment provided by the Kremlin. This equipment has two main functions: blocking access to information deemed harmful by the authorities and redirecting or cutting off traffic. The first is to be active all the time; the second
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is meant to be used during a crisis. Already, the government has shown how it would work. Last fall, Ingushetia, a small republic in the North Caucasus, struck a deal redrawing its border with Chechnya. Since then, Ingush protestors have staged on-and-off demonstrations against the land swap. In response, the regional branch of the FSB instructed local operators to shut off mobile Internet access across Ingushetia for two weeks in October. The same happened on March 16, during a meeting of local activists in Nazran, Ingushetia’s largest city. Mobile Internet went down across the region until the meeting ended. The Kremlin hopes that the new law will allow it to initiate similar shutdowns remotely by giving a command center in Moscow control over the equipment to be installed on the premises of all Internet service providers, Internet exchanges, and border crossing points.
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE This obsession with central control stems from Russia’s traumatized past. The Kremlin is still haunted by the ghost of the Russian Revolution. In September 1917, Vladimir Lenin told his supporters, “We must … occupy the telegraph and the telephone exchange at once, move our insurrection headquarters to the central telephone exchange.” A few weeks later, Red Guard soldiers did just that.
As early as 1999, Putin proclaimed that his goal was political stability— the preservation of the regime. Putin’s advisers suggested a simple solution to the threat of revolution: controlling the means by which they thought people organized.
Lenin’s immediate successors learned the lesson well. In the late 1920s, Central Telegraph, which operated the Russian telegraph system, built its headquarters a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, on Tverskaya Street. Control over communications, the means of possible insurrection, was essential, so the Soviet secret services were always nearby. Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin’s fearsome chief of secret police, had a spacious office in the building, as he was also a commissar of communications. Gennady Kudryavtsev, the last Soviet minister of communications, told me in 2014 that a personal lift in Yagoda’s Central Telegraph office “used to lead to the basement and then to the metro. I checked—the lift shaft was still there.” Today, the Central Telegraph building houses Russia’s Ministry of Communications, and the secret services are still close at hand. The Soviets desperately wanted to control all communications from one central location, but technology let them down. Phone lines in the Soviet Union were so bad that calls could not be eavesdropped on from a distance, so the KGB was forced to build hundreds of eavesdropping points throughout the country.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during opening ceremony for the Year 2000 celebrations in Moscow, Russian Federation on December 1999 ,22. (Getty)
These days, Russian communications technology is much more reliable, thanks to the thriving Russian IT industry. That has given the Kremlin hope that it can finally fulfill the Soviet dream of directing all of the country’s communications from one location in Moscow. It is hard to say how feasible the Kremlin’s ambition is. Many experts, including activists from Roskomsvoboda, Russia’s only independent Internet censorship watchdog, believe that Internet communications could be centrally controlled for some regions and some services, such as YouTube, but not for the entire country, and not for all kinds of traffic. The new laws may damage Russian infrastructure and leave Russians with lower Internet speeds, although the extent of the damage is difficult to assess. The damage to the international reputation of Russian Internet companies, however, is already done. Russia is one of the few countries with domestic Internet brands that enjoyed stronger reputations in the country than foreign ones. Russia’s Internet
companies were built without any government support, a source of national pride. For six years after the 2011 protests, they resisted government pressure, sometimes even publicly expressing their uneasiness with the increasingly Soviet approach to Internet regulation championed by the Kremlin. That resistance ended this year. The two biggest Russian Internet brands—Yandex (a Russian version of Google) and Mail.Ru (which owns the two most popular Russian social media sites, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki)—came out in support of the digital sovereignty law in January, when the government promised to pay for the new equipment. In a global information society, technology may help resist authoritarian governments, but the people who run the technology companies often do not. This article was ForeignAffairs.com.
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*ANDREI SOLDATOV is an independent journalist and a co-author, with Irina Borogan, of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev visits the office of Mail.Ru Group, one of Russia›s biggest Internet companies, in Moscow on March ,29 2019. (Getty)
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Motives Behind Nazarbayev’s Resignation
Nazarbayev and His New Role in Kazakhstan’s Political Sphere By: Ahmed Taher Baku- On March 19, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev said he had taken the decision to resign as president while affirming that he would remain head of the Security Council and of the ruling party, Nur Otan, and a member in the constitutional body.
Following his speech, Kazakhstan had entered a new phase in the peaceful transition of power the likes of which no former Soviet Central Asian country has seen. The decision has received scrutiny as the country is rich in oil and gas resources. It is the world’s 16th largest oil producer and the 30th largest natural gas producers. It has fifth of the world’s uranium reserves, and it is its world's top producer and exporter of, according to 2017’s estimates.
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Back in the 1990s, Nazarbayev took a bold decision and voluntarily abandoned the nuclear arsenal his country had when it was one of the Soviet Union’s republics.
Kazakhstan is also ranked the ninth in the world in terms of space as its area exceeds 2.4 million square kilometers, which is the highest among Islamic countries. In other words, Kazakstan represents geostrategic importance and has potential for international competition. A thorough reading of Nazarbayev’s decision reflects what Kazakhstan has achieved over the past 30 years of his rule. After such careful analysis, the motives behind this sudden resignation and its consequences on Kazakhstan’s future will become much clearer. There are three main points of analyses on Nazarbayev’s decision:
-1 NURSULTAN NAZARBAYEV’S DEDICATION AND SERVICE Nazarbayev was born in Chemolgan, a rural town near Almaty, when Kazakhstan was one of the republics of the Soviet Union. He served as Prime Minister of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic from 1984 till 1989, when he came to power and became the first secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. On April 1990 ,24, he
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was elected president of the Republic of Kazakhstan. He was reelected in 1991 after Kazakhstan declared independence from the Soviet Union and continued to rule the country by winning all the presidential elections that took place in the years of ,1999 2011 ,2005 and 2015. Notably, back in 2007 Kazakhstan’s parliament approved a constitutional amendment, giving Nazarbayev an exceptional right, as the first Kazakhstani President, to run for an indefinite number of terms. In mid2010-, the Kazakh parliament granted him the title, “Leader of the Nation,” and issued a law that gives him the right to serve as lifetime chairman of the country’s National Security Council. In addition to the titles granted to him during his rule over the past 30 years, Kazakhstan’s new President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev decided to award Nazarbayev the titles, “People's Hero” and “Hero of Labor” in recognition of his great role in building his nation and his strenuous efforts to maintain internal cohesion among people in the multicultural Kazakhstan. Tokayev also decided to take a rare step and rename Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, “Nursultan” in honor of the long-time leader. “We have to immortalize Nazarbayev’s great name,” Tokayev said, suggesting renaming the capital after his predecessor’s name in addition to naming the central streets of all regional centers after Nazarbayev, which was approved by the country’s parliament.
-2 NAZARBAYEV’S PREVIOUS BOLD DECISIONS Nazarbayev’s decision is in line the main policies he stuck to ever since taking power 30 years ago. Back then, he took a bold decision and voluntarily abandoned the nuclear arsenal his country had when it was one of the Soviet Union’s republics. On August 1991 ,29, Nazarbayev closed the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk (Semei). This earned Nazarbayev international recognition as in December 2009 the United Nations General Assembly dubbed August 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Testing. Similarly, when he resigned, Nazarbayev decided to take an important decision that would preserve his country’s progress and ensure its future. It’s impossible to turn a blind eye to Kazakhstan's progress and modernization in various economic
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and development fields. Kazakhstan has preceded the United Nations in its Vision 2030, when Nazarbayev announced by 1998 the launch of Kazakhstan's 2030 Strategy along with its seven priorities: developing and strengthening the national security system, ensuring internal political stability and social cohesion, economic growth based on an open market economics with high foreign investments, health, education and welfare of all Kazakhs, effective employment and development of energy resources and finally infrastructure development and formation of a professional government. In December 2012, Nazarbayez announced the Kazakhstan 2050 Strategy (aka Nurly Zhol or “the Path to the Future”), which aims to make the country one of the world’s 30 most developed countries by 2050. Interestingly, Nazabayez made this announcement before completing the targets of the 2030 plan. The main pillars of the 2050 plan were mentioned in his 2015 presidential campaign manifesto, which included five major reforms to address global challenges. These reforms called for ensuring the rule of law, industrializing, achieving economic growth, ruling a nation with a unified future and forming a transparent and accountable government. In his first speech after winning the elections, he announced his so-called "Nation Plan", which included 100 deliberate steps to implement the five reforms. It is noteworthy that Nazarbayev was able to announce the new strategy because his country has rapidly implemented some of the first strategy’s priorities, overcoming the technical gap and achieving high rates of economic growth and social progress. Kazakhstan's foreign policy also played a significant role in consolidating his success. He issued a statement on March 2016 ,31, titled “Manifesto: The World. The 21st Century” that served as a comprehensive program of action to enter this century without wars by working in accordance with three main principles: First, there will be no winners in any modern war; everyone would be on the losing side. Second, a new war will inevitably entail the use of weapons of mass destruction, which would eventually lead to the destruction of humankind. Third, the main tool for resolving all disputes among states should be peaceful dialogue and constructive negotiations on the basis of equal responsibility for peace and security, mutual respect and non-interference into domestic affairs.
The retired president will still very much be involved in the country’s political life.
In light of these three principles that govern his state’s foreign policy, many initiatives and steps were taken. Among them are: the 1992 initiative to convene the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, the establishment of Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 1995, the 2002 Eurasian Media Forum, the establishment of Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in 2003, the annual meeting of Astana Economic Forum in 2008. The outcome of all efforts was electing Kazakhstan for the first time as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council during the 2018-2017 session.
-3 KAZAKHSTAN WILL CONTINUE NAZARBAYEV’S VISION Although Nazarbayev announced his intention to step down, he remained head of the Security Council and of the ruling party, Nur Otman, a member of the Constitutional Council and President of the Assembly of People of Kazakhstan (AKP), which, in accordance to the constitution adopted after the 2007 referendum, includes members from the country’s different races and ethnicities. As such, Nazarbayev will still have a role to play in the country’s politics. As a matter of fact, Tokayev, Kazakhstan’s new president, recently said in a speech: “an authoritative opinion of the Leader of the Nation will have a particular, even, primary importance in the development and adoption of strategic decisions”. Tokayev took office as the President on March 20 following Nazarbayev’s resignation in accordance of Kazakhstan’s constitution, which states that in case of early termination of powers, the Speaker of the Senate will become the President until the next election. Tokayev already has a lot of experience in government having served as Chairman of the Kazakhstan’s Senate, foreign minister, prime minister and as director general of the United Nations Office at Geneva. Kazakhstan will most likely not change its interior and foreign policies; rather it is expected to follow the same path guided by Nazarbayev and there are three indicators that point to that conclusion. The first indicator is the fact that the retired president will still very much be involved in the country’s political life, “I am staying with you. The concerns of the country and the people remain my concerns,” he said. The second indicator is the new president, Tokayev, who was handpicked by Nazarbayev himself. “I believe that Tokayev is the person whom we can entrust the governance of Kazakhstan,” the latter commented. “Alongside me, he has been working since the first days of Kazakhstan’s independence. I know him well. He is an honest, responsible and indispensable person. He fully supports the implemented policies inside and outside the country. All programs were developed and adopted with his participation,” he explained in his speech, hinting that Tokayev will follow his path. Tokayev also affirmed in a speech: “Being fully aware of
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the full scope of responsibility of the upcoming mission, I plan to direct my knowledge and experience to ensuring the continuity of the strategic course of the Leader of the Nation.” In addition to that, he said all portraits and photographs of the First President will remain a vital attribute in public premises, civil servant buildings, and educational institutions. The third and biggest indicator, however, lies in the preparation taking place for the new president after Tokayev. Nazarbayev’s daughter, Dariga, who was deputy prime minister, was appointed as chairwoman of Kazakhstan’s Senate succeeding Tokayev. She also served as head of the Nur Otan party’s parliamentary faction. She is one of the most prominent candidates for the presidency, especially since she founded her party (the Asar party) and merged it with Nazarbayev’s in 2006 under the name “Nur Otan.” Nazarbayev previously suggested he didn’t plan to hand over power to any of his daughters, however by choosing Dariga to chair the Senate he paved the path for her to become president either in the upcoming presidential elections, which will take place in March 2020, or automatically if Tokayev were to leave office before that date. In conclusion, despite that peaceful transition of power in Kazakhstan, not much change to the state’s internal approaches and foreign alliances will happen. The transition was aimed primarily at maintaining the state’s achievements in several areas as Nazarbayev fears all his would efforts fade away if his country did not adapt to the global changes and transformations taking place. “We see that the world is changing, it is not static. Not only are
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“I believe that Tokayev is the person whom we can entrust the governance of Kazakhstan,” Nazarbayev. new opportunities arising but also new global technological and demographic challenges are growing and instability of the world order remains,” he said in his recent speech. “We must change too, together with the world. I appeal to the young generation of of Kazakhstan: Take care of the independent Kazakhstan, our common homeland, the Eternal Nation. This is our people, the land of our great ancestors. We have one homeland, one land.” “Take care of the friendship and unity of our people, our mutual trust and respect for the culture and traditions of every citizen of the country. Only in this way will we be strong, and overcome all the challenges. Only in this way will we flourish,” he stressed. These words reflect Nazarbayev's keenness to ensure his country remains unaffected after his absence. Especially after all he did for its reconstruction and following its independence. He applied all what he had learned from other countries’ experiences, especially those which were mired in political conflict after their leader left them with no contingency plan.
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Europe’s Largest Party Suspends Its Resident Autocrat - for Now Why Brussels’ Faustian Bargain With Viktor Orban Endures 26
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Since 2010, Orban has taken Hungary far enough down the road to autocracy that the NGO Freedom House demoted the country from “free” to “partly free” in its 2019 report - a first in EU history. free” in its 2019 report—a first in EU history. Fidesz’s slide into authoritarianism has drawn growing criticism from the European Parliament, including from many EPP backbenchers. But it took a blatant anti-EU campaign by Fidesz, featuring unflattering posters of Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission and one of the EPP’s own, for the EPP to take action. At a party conference in Brusselslast week, the EPP announced it was suspending Fidesz—but stopped short of kicking the party out entirely. Practically speaking, the measure accomplishes less than meets the eye. Fidesz will stop participating in internal EPP party business, but its MEPs will mostly go on as if nothing has changed, and their valuable votes and delegates will still benefit the EPP. The reason for the EPP’s soft-handed approach is simple: the party knows it stands a better chance of coming out on top in this May’s European elections if it doesn’t expel Fidesz outright. By opting for a cosmetic measure, the EPP has chosen ambition over principle. That decision may come back to haunt it.
KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSE?
Hungarian protestors hold EU and Hungarian flags during a demonstration against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban›s government and his party ‹FIDESZ› in Budapest on March 2019 ,15. (Getty)
Less than two months ahead of elections to the European Parliament, the body’s largest party is in disarray. The European People’s Party (EPP), a center-right, pro-EU alliance of more than 40 national member parties, has been roiled by a dispute over how to deal with its enfant terrible: the far-right nationalist party Fidesz, led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Orban has flouted the democratic values of the European Union and of the EPP for years. Under his leadership, the Hungarian government has sought to muzzle the judiciary. It has attacked the press and hamstrung civil society. It has also solidified party control of formerly independent institutions such as the election commission, the state audit office, the public prosecutor’s office, and the central bank. Orban’s creeping illiberalism alarmed his European colleagues as early as 2013, when some EPP members supported an omnibus report calling on European institutions to monitor Hungary’s policies.
Since 2010, Orban has taken Hungary far enough down the road to autocracy that the NGO Freedom House demoted the country from “free” to “partly
Criticism within the EPP continued to mount, particularly after Orban forced Central European University to move from Budapest to Vienna. In
By Kim Lane Scheppele*
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September 2018, the European Parliament once again chastised Orban and began a formal process, often referred to as Article 7 proceedings, to warn Hungary that it might face sanctions if it continued violating European values. The measure passed with the support of a sizable bloc of MEPs from the EPP, including some of the party’s senior leaders. Yet power politics have kept the EPP from taking more drastic action. The EPP wants to appear responsive to critics inside and outside the party who have long accused it of sanctioning a rogue government within the EU. But with elections looming, it also wants the big prize that comes with remaining the largest party in the European Parliament: the ability to name the next European Commission president, who wields tremendous agenda-setting power in the EU. Manfred Weber, the EPP’s candidate for the job, knows he may need Fidesz on board to realize his dream. Current polling suggests that the EPP, like several other mainstream parties, will take a big hit in the May elections. It will likely slump from its current 217 seats to just 178. Though it’s still on track to become the largest party, a diminished EPP will find it harder to persuade others to go along with its pick for commission president. To guarantee Weber’s appointment as head of the European Commission, the EPP will need every vote it can get—including those of the 13 MEPs Fidesz is projected to win. No wonder, then, that Weber fought hard to avoid having to censure Orban. In mid-March, Weber traveled to Budapest and proposed a compromise solution that would have allowed Central European University to stay in the city—something he had
Orban has been flirting with the idea of creating his own coalition of antiimmigration and Euroskeptical forces to wrest control of the EU’s institutions from centrist parties.
declared a redline. Yet Orban rejected the deal and failed to meet any of Weber’s not-so-onerous conditions, which included abandoning, and apologizing for, his anti-EU poster campaign. Weber had thrown Orban a lifeline, but he refused to take it. The EPP’s willingness to tolerate Orban may come down to naked political ambition. Orban has been flirting with the idea of creating his own coalition of anti-immigration and Euroskeptical forces to wrest control of the EU’s institutions from centrist parties. Projections put the number of Euroskeptical MEPs in the next parliament as high as 250. Although many of these MEPs would probably be divided across different political groups, Orban might unite enough of them to create a powerful populist force. Orban’s strategy is to campaign on two tracks. He can use the EPP to shield himself from criticism while mulling a run as the leader of a Europe-wide populist insurgency.
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Hungary›s Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrives on March ,21 2019 in Brussels on the first day of an EU summit focused on Brexit. - European Union leaders meet in Brussels on March 21 and 22, for the last EU summit before Britain›s scheduled exit of the union. (Getty)
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, and former European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering, who will review whether the Hungarian government has violated the EPP’s values. If they issue Hungary a clean bill of democratic health, Orban can return to the fold. Unsurprisingly, Orban has already moved to seize control of this process by appointing a parallel Hungarian team to educate the EPP group when it comes to town. In the meantime, however, little has changed. Fidesz’s current MEPs will retain their various committee assignments, where they guard several of the chokepoints through which any resolution to discipline Hungary must pass. A Fidesz MEP is still one of the parliament’s vice presidents. Orban’s behavior has not changed either. Fresh from his sanctioning in Brussels, he promptly renewed his attacks on the EU and the EPP. In a Sunday radio broadcast, he vowed to keep up his anti-EU poster campaign. He also warned that the EPP should not take him for granted, saying that the bloc had become a “semi-left-wing” shell of its former self and speculating that it might be time to join “some sort of new party alliance.”
THE PRICE OF AMBITION
“NO EXPULSION, NO SUSPENSION!“ At home, Hungary’s pro-government media have spun Orban’s treatment by the EPP as vindication of his leadership. Orban now claims that Fidesz was not suspended but rather voluntarily “suspended itself.” The country’s public broadcaster proclaimed that Orban had scored a “huge victory.” The governmentfriendly news website Origo declared: “No expulsion, no suspension!“ The Hungarian press is not entirely wrong. Orban remained surprisingly in control throughout proceedings that were supposedly targeting him. The terms of the suspension were taken from a motion that Orban had himself put forward. According to the final decision, Fidesz will “voluntarily” stop attending EPP meetings, voting on candidates for party leadership, and generally participating in party business. It will also accept a committee of three “wise men”—ex–
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By repeatedly ignoring its own redlines and by sanctioning Orban only as much as he was willing to accept, the EPP has sacrificed its fundamental tenets for electoral advantage. Europe, according to the EPP, is a community of values that must be defended against its detractors. But the willingness of the EU’s largest centrist collective to appease an illiberal government demonstrates that there are no values it won’t abandon if its power is at stake. Having decided to keep Orban inside the party tent for now, the EPP may struggle to hold on to its more principled member parties when Orban continues to misbehave. It may not even get Orban’s votes in the new European Parliament if he decides to defect after the election. The EPP is trying to both sanction Orban and keep his support. It may well achieve neither. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs. com. *KIM LANE SCHEPPELE is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
How Theresa May’s Brexit Deal Collapsed The Return of the Irish Question 30
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May’s premiership is now hanging by a thread. Her three-pronged strategy of blackmail, bribery, and betrayal has collapsed.
A lorry passes a poster by calling for ‹No Border› between Ireland and Northern Ireland, in a post Brexit United Kingdom, in Jonesborough, Northern Ireland on March 2019 ,25, as it crosses the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. (Getty)
By Brendan O’Leary* British Prime Minister Theresa May had hoped that the third time would do the trick. After failing twice to get her withdrawal agreement with the EU through Parliament, she was gearing up for a fresh attempt last week, until she was blocked by the Speaker of the House of Commons and by the European Council. The Speaker declared that the British government could not put substantively the same motion before Parliament twice in the same legislative session. The Council had refused to modify the withdrawal agreement, which made the Speaker’s decision unavoidable, and it later imposed unexpectedly firm terms on May’s request for an extension of the negotiating period, which had been set to end on March 29.
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May’s premiership is now hanging by a thread. Her threepronged strategy of blackmail, bribery, and betrayal has collapsed. The blackmail involved running down the clock to force MPs to choose between her deal and no deal (for which the United Kingdom is not prepared). The European Council, however, has changed that game. Under the extension agreed by the Council, the Commons must ratify the existing withdrawal agreement (provided the Speaker allows the government to put it to the House again) no later than April 12. If it does not, then the United Kingdom must choose between leaving without a deal, revoking the request to withdraw from the EU, and accepting a much longer extension of the negotiations. The latter possibility comes with a sting: the United Kingdom would have to participate in the elections to the European Parliament scheduled for May. Those elections would inevitably approximate a fresh referendum on remaining or leaving the EU. On top of blackmail, May has tried bribery. To win support for the withdrawal agreement from the small Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party, upon which her government’s parliamentary majority depends, she began discussions that implied future spending increases for Northern Ireland. Conservative ministers had earlier announced plans for infrastructure spending that would particularly benefit English districts that voted to leave but that are represented mainly by opposition Labour MPs. But the DUP has said it will not be bought, at least not on this occasion, and there do not seem to be enough pro-Leave Labour MPs to get May’s deal through. The Prime Minister’s politicking since losing the first vote on her deal in January has also included openly advertised betrayal. She has sought to rescind, reverse, or ambiguously gloss the solemn promises the United Kingdom made to the EU27-, and especially to Ireland, in the draft withdrawal agreement. The protocol in the text that drove May to this expedient is widely known as “the Irish backstop” and has become anathema to the DUP and the hardline “Brexiteers.” In baseball, the backstop prevents balls from hitting spectators seated behind the catcher and keeps most balls inside the field of play. The metaphor is not quite right for the case at hand. The backstop in the protocol better resembles an all-hazards insurance policy. It minimizes collateral damage to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, entrenched in a 1999 treaty between the Dublin and London governments. It pledges that citizens in Northern Ireland will continue to have the same rights as citizens of the Republic of Ireland, and vice versa—including
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those that derive from the Good Friday Agreement, EU law, and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Good FridayAgreement mandated cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic–and attached EU regional and peace programs. The backstop protects this goal and these projects, including 12 governmental functions overseen by the NorthSouth Ministerial Council, and, according to civil servants, over 140 related distinct economic activities. These notably encompass the agricultural and food business that has developed complex supply chains across the current border and the island’s single electricity market. Most famously, the backstop promises that no fresh physical border infrastructure will be erected on the island, between Northern Ireland and the Republic—either to collect customs or as a regulatory barrier checking goods and people moving back and forth over what will become the British-EU border. This border was unilaterally imposed by the British parliament in 1920 and was the site of political contestation and armed confrontation during much of the last century. This “no hard border” pledge applies unless and until the United Kingdom and the EU strike a new trade agreement that would render it unnecessary, or agree on technological innovations that would allow trade and traffic to continue without border infrastructure. Here’s the rub for the Brexiteers. The backstop comes into effect after a short transition if the United Kingdom and EU have not made a new trade agreement (or if technological miracles have not occurred). Such an outcome seems highly likely, given how long most trade agreements take to negotiate, and how difficult it has been to reach a draft withdrawal settlement. Making things even harder, any future trade deal will likely be a “mixed agreement,” meaning that it will contain non-trade components, which means each EU member state will have a veto on its ratification. When the backstop comes into effect, the entire United Kingdom will be forced to remain within the European customs union and would be unable to strike significant new trade agreements with third countries until it concluded its
Whether or not May, or her successor, gets her deal over the line, a backstop to the backstop is now emerging— this one in the United States, though Brexiteers, and their friends, do not seem to have noticed it.
new treaty with the EU. The Brexiteers fear is that the United Kingdom will get trapped in the backstop. The trap, however, is of May’s own making. Back in 2017, the EU and May’s negotiators drafted a protocol to allow Northern Ireland to remain within the EU’s customs and single market regulatory provisions after the transition, while Great Britain would be free to leave the customs union and to deviate from the single market. In other words, an economic border would run not across the island of Ireland but down the Irish Sea, administered at ports in Northern Ireland and Great Britain. It was a decent compromise. It recognized that Northern Ireland was different: the sole significant territory (aside from Gibraltar) in which there would be a land border between the United Kingdom and the EU. It protected the Good Friday Agreement, and respected the fact that Northern Ireland had voted to remain in the EU in 2016 (by a margin of 56 to 44 percent). And it avoided disrupting the remarkably stable Irish peace process. Within hours of the protocol being released, however, the DUP, which has propped up May’s minority government since a snap election in June 2017 left the Conservatives without a majority, signaled that it was unacceptable. These uber-British Unionists, whom May had failed to consult, feared that a border in the Irish Sea would weaken the United Kingdom’s integrity. The
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U.S. Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) speaks during a news conference on gun control May ,7 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Sen. Murphy is part of the Friends of Ireland Caucasus in Congress. (Getty)
honesty helped lead to May’s second crushing defeat. Since then the air has been thick with suggestions seeking to help May and Cox, jointly suggesting that the United Kingdom might be able to use the Vienna Convention of 1970 to break the treaty it is proposing to sign with the EU. But as their critics—and professional international lawyers—unanimously observe, the Vienna Convention allows a treaty to be unilaterally terminated only if there is an unforeseen change in circumstances. But so far, all the discussion of the backstop has focused on entirely foreseeable circumstances, which could not justify breaking the new treaty. Whether or not May, or her successor, gets her deal over the line, a backstop to the backstop is now emerging—this one in the United States, though Brexiteers, and their friends, do not seem to have noticed it. Irish-Americans played key roles in making and implementing the Good Friday Agreement. U.S. President Bill Clinton and Senator George Mitchell of Maine are the best known, but many others helped, including the congressmen Richard Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts and co-chair of the Friends of Ireland Caucus, and Peter King, Republican of New York. Neal also chairs the Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over tariffs.
DUP insisted that Northern Ireland should be treated exactly the same as Great Britain. May caved. And her solution—essentially putting the entire United Kingdom into the backstop—created her current predicament. That’s when and why Conservative MPs, afraid of the United Kingdom being trapped in the backstop as a ruletaker rather than as a joint-rule maker, became obsessed with how to eliminate or breach the backstop. One way to avoid the backstop would be to leave the EU without a deal, but that would be highly costly, and a majority of Conservatives oppose this outcome. Another would be to persuade the hardline Brexiteers and the DUP that the United Kingdom can unilaterally leave the backstop, despite its solemn pledges to the EU. Reasonable people might call this latter option a betrayal of the United Kingdom’s partners—or, to invoke an old expression, an example of perfidious Albion. In pursuit of just such a mission, May dispatched her Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, to Brussels two weeks ago to negotiate a codicil with the EU that would give London the freedom to renege on its commitments. Cox failed. He conceded that the text with which he returned did not preclude the possibility that the United Kingdom would get trapped in the backstop. His
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The Friends of Ireland caucus includes several senators— including Democrats Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Chuck Schumer of New York, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania—and dozens of Members of the House. Within the caucus, a new generation of organized Irish Americans is moving to protect the achievements of its predecessors. Prominently led by Senator Murphy and Congressman Brendan Boyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who also sits on the Ways and Means Committee, this group is focused on protecting the Good Friday Agreement and preventing a hard border in Ireland at all costs. They will have a major say in the making of any new trade agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom. If London betrays the Irish backstop or leaves the EU without a deal, it will likely get a cold reception from Congress. Organized Irish America will insist on the maintenance—or the restoration—of the Irish backstop if Washington is to agree a trade deal with London. Murphy, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, has declared that there is “no chance” of a U.S.-British trade deal if there is a return to a hard border. He has added, “We are all friends of Britain – it is an unbreakable bond – but we can’t compromise the sanctity of the Good Friday Agreement and folks [in the Commons] need to know that.” Brexiteers would be wise to recall what happened in the 1990s, the last time the United States had to choose between its special relationship with the United Kingdom and its ties to Ireland. Organized Irish America won decisively. If the Brexiteers escape one backstop, they may well find themselves trapped in another. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com. *BRENDAN O’LEARY is Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
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A New Era in Politics The Rise of the Cult of Personality Politicians By Ali El Shamy It was long believed that politicians who utilized their cults of personality were authoritarian autocrats, such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mao Zedong of China. However, in recent years we have seen a rise of democratically elected politicians and presidential hopefuls in democratic nations who do not comply with conventional decorum. Moreover, these unconventional politicians have come to rely on their cults of personality to win elections, or the very least to rally the masses behind a policy they’re pushing for. With the recent news of young comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, winning the first round of the current
Ukrainian presidential elections it seems that this trend is here to stay for the foreseeable future. While it would be easy to paint these politicians with the same paintbrush that would frankly be lazy and ludicrous since, more often than not, they tend to have differing methods for garnering support.
THE BRASH OUTSIDER As the name implies these types of politicians tend to be bold and self-assertive, they tend to be charismatic and can garner wide appeal towards different classes in society. Politicians of this category are also not afraid of facing well-seasoned,
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establishment politicians head on. Current US president Donald Trump is one example of this type of politician, as before the 2016 US elections he was largely an outsider of American politics (although he did try running for president in 2000 with a campaign that failed in its infancy stages). He was also successful in berating and in many cases, humiliating politicians on both sides of the spectrum, be they Ted Cruz and late Senator John McCain of the Republicans or Hilary Clinton of the Democrats. Another example of this politician type is the newly elected Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Like Trump, can be considered an outsider in politics as he spent most of his career in the military and he takes the brash and unapologetic approach when confronting political opponents. Unlike other politicians, the brash outsider has a better understanding of how to use social media. While other politicians usually carefully plan their posts and have advisors revising them before they’re published, both Trump and Bolsonaro tweet off the cuff posts which showcase their true opinions to the wide masses. This in your face honesty is something that many voters are not used to, as they had grown accustomed to the typical and, in many ways, boring statements that many politicians make.
Ukrainian comic actor and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy seen speaking during a press conference in Kiev. (Getty)
While it is too soon to predict whether or not Zelensky will be a prototype of a new politician, one thing is clear: we might see an increase of these nonestablishment and unconventional politicians across many democracies. labor unions were a much more powerful force in British politics and had much more lobbying power.
THE EVERYDAY COMMON MAN
Jeremy Corbyn is another brash outsider politician. Despite the fact that he had been an MP since 1983, his lack of a university degree, more modest lifestyle and working-class upbringing has made him appeal to various British voters. Furthermore, his leftist activist characteristics have caused him to become popular among university students and those who identify as socialist.
This type of politician tries to make him or herself appear as your everyday average person who lives just like any person of the masses. For instance, former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has been known to visit local pubs around the UK and have a pint with the local pub goers. This accomplishes two things; it showcases his love for an old British pastime and appeals to the working class voter base. Trump does a similar thing as he has publically shown his love for fast food; he also famously served members of the Clemson University Tigers football team a buffet of fast food during the most recent government shut down.
THE NOSTALGIA POLITICIAN
A NEW TYPE OF CULT OF PERSONALITY?
If there’s a common sentiment among people after a certain age then it’s the idea that their country or even the entire world seemed like a better place in some distant part of the past. Today, there are many politicians who appeal to people’s sense of nostalgia, this tactic can be useful especially in countries with aging populations since older people are more likely to vote in elections than their younger counterparts. British MP and staunch Brexiter, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is a perfect representation of this type of politician. While leave voters had many different reasons for their decision, there were those who felt a sense of nostalgia for the days past when Britain was a much powerful world power and there are those who are old enough to remember the blow after the Suez Crisis which in many ways ended Britain’s time as a global superpower. Mogg, in his mannerisms, speech pattern and views, is a caricature of an 18th-century imperial politician. As such, it should not come as a surprise that he ended up becoming one of the poster boys for Brexit as well as one of the individuals who project the idea that the UK can go back to its more powerful past once it’s out of the European Union.
The current Ukrainian election seems to present us with a new type of politician. While Zelensky is an outsider of politics, unlike Trump or Bolsonaro, he really hasn’t run on any particular policies or platforms. The only stance he showcases is his proEU and NATO sentiment, other than that his political vision is unclear. Also unconventional is the fact that he has used his hit TV show, Servant of the People, for his campaign. In the show, he plays a schoolteacher who is elected president; as the third season of the show aired around the time he announced his candidacy many events in the plot started to mirror his campaign. Furthermore, the production company he works for, Kvartal 95, created the political party he is representing, which is coincidentally named after his hit sitcom. His mantra of "no promises, no disappointment" really shows that he doesn’t try to show any stances and believes that he could potentially turn away voters by making ambitious promises. His campaign has also largely relied on his popularity on Instagram, a social media platform that is more popular for people under30-. While it is too soon to predict whether or not Zelensky will be a prototype of a new politician, one thing is clear: we might see an increase of these non-establishment and unconventional politicians across many democracies.
Corbyn also uses nostalgia as a tool since he tries to garner support from working class people who remember a time when
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1742 - April - 05/04/2019
Van Gogh and the City www.majalla.com
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Van Gogh and the City How the Artist’s London Years Influenced His Art By: Bryn Haworth A FRENCH ARTIST IN THE INFERNO? In the days of Queen Victoria, a traveller by the name of Gustave Doré came to witness the greatest city on the face of the earth. Twice the size of Paris, it was easily the largest concentration of humanity the world had ever seen. Though
the Frenchman called his trip a ‘pilgrimage’, he seems to have been slightly intimidated by the shrine – he was accused of inaccuracies, owing to a reluctance to sketch in public. Nonetheless, the scenes he etched have an accuracy of a different kind, a fidelity to the descriptions by William Blake and Charles Dickens of a vast conglomeration of wealth and deprivation. Doré shows scenes of people crowding the chaotic, furiously productive metropolis, travelling in various modes of transport, labouring in the fish market and slowly
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dying in cramped slums. Since that time, London has changed, but it still has the capacity to intimidate. Come back after a month away and it never looks quite the same. The town, sometimes referred to as ‘the Smoke’, is still dirty, still constantly growing bigger, upwards if not outwards, and it can still have the unreal quality T.S. Eliot saw in it: Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Van Gogh habitually painted the stars as yellow and white splotches, like irregular fried eggs. He never saw them as twinkling tamely, or as the symbols of anything, as if on a flag, but as the exuberant bursts of distant suns.
The fact that this vision was inspired by Dante’s Inferno also chimes with the French artist’s preoccupations. Along with scenes of London, Doré is famous for his illustrations of the old Italian poet’s visit to Hell. I knew Doré’s pictures as a boy, and on the few occasions my father brought us from our home in Essex, the train journey reminded me of one picture in particular. It showed a sweeping curve of terraced houses, their little backyards hemmed round with walls and the people’s washing hung out in sagging lines between them. I remember thinking that the effort to keep their clothes clean was doomed, given all the filth in the air. If you peered closer, there were tiny people pottering in their backyards, but what really struck me were the chimneys above, whole forests of them, while over the entire scene loomed railway arches. A train clattered its way across the farthest one, spewing more muck. Vincent van Gogh would later remember that train and show it chuffing over an arch in The Yellow House (1888). The slums of London, engraving by Gustave Dore (1883-1832). (Getty)
By the time of those first visits I made to London, the steam trains had long gone, and I never saw a row of terraced houses quite like Doré’s, probably because he had let his imagination get the better of him and they didn’t actually exist. I did, however, see plenty of brick houses whose yards came up to the railway lines. You could see right into their bedroom windows. I always felt sorry for the people who lived like that, their private lives exposed to the eyes of thousands of strangers by day and their sleep disturbed by freight passing through in the night. It never occurred to me that they might have grown accustomed to the din and slept as soundly as I did.
A DUTCH ARTIST IN PURGATORY? The new exhibition at Tate Britain describes how Van Gogh, a painter famed for his pictures of the radiant light of the south of France, dwelt amid the noise and the brown fog of London for a while. He spent almost three years of his formative twenties in the belly of the beast, from 5-1873. It seems on the face of it an environment he would have hated, and he did have low moods there, but one can also find enthusiastic
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Old Man at a Fireside by Van Gogh.
reports in his fifty odd letters from the time. Years later, after seeing a painting of the banks of the Thames near Westminster, he exclaimed “I felt how much I love London.” We learn that he greatly appreciated Constable and Millais, and that he was also an avid reader of English literature (Dickens, for instance, though sadly not Blake). He even drew little sketches of the city in his correspondence. There is a vast amount of information like this, but from the point of view of the exhibition’s claims, there is a very
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simple problem with it – the fact that, at this stage in his life, Van Gogh did not consider himself a vocational artist. Soon afterwards, back in Holland, he would begin to take an interest in sketching and painting people, and one might easily see the seeds of this fascination with the poor, or with workers, in the reading matter of his London years and the prints (known as ‘black and whites’) he collected, among them Doré’s series, but the stubborn fact remains that the artistic career was ahead of him, and he might well have developed such sympathies before ever setting eyes on London. For this reason, the single most interesting testament to his time in the Smoke comes from years later, mere months away from his premature death by suicide, when Van Gogh is confined to a mental asylum in the south of France. Unable to go out and paint in the open air as he preferred, Van Gogh worked instead on what he called a ‘translation’ of another artist’s work. It is a pivotal image in this exhibition, as it amounts to the only time Van Gogh painted an aspect of the megapolis. The particular aspect is Newgate Prison, a favourite location for Dickens, but also the subject of a Doré etching. The prison is no more, but it stood where the Old Bailey now stands and was a notorious place, known for its nastiness and the corruption of its guards. In the original black and white, we see men walking monotonously in a circle in some kind of exercise yard. Three guards stand and watch. The yard is at the bottom of a hexagon of tall brick walls and from above a feeble light gropes its way down from the heavens. The scene is utterly oppressive. The only relief afforded us, or the prisoners, is an uncharacteristically sentimental touch, almost worthy of Walt Disney: way up on the wall, clearly delineated against the grimy brick, two butterflies seem to promise some kind of redemption. Van Gogh’s ‘translation’ is both faithful to the original and transformative. He retains the sentimental butterflies in his signature yellow, though now they are harder to make out. The men still trudge hopelessly in the same direction, but he has
Certainly, Van Gogh was moved to do something very uncharacteristic, attempting to attack Gauguin with a razor and then, notoriously, attacking his own ear.
lit the scene far more, and with the light he has added colour. There’s a lot of rusty brown in the walls and the exercise yard is paved in blue. In combination, the shadows as the men plod and the lines of the flagstones seem to reproduce the men’s motion. From the psychiatric hospital, Vincent had written to his brother Theo asking to be sent prison scenes like this. ‘The prison was crushing me,’ he wrote, ‘and père Peyron [his doctor] didn’t pay the slightest attention to it’. So it was that his thoughts went back, not to the pleasures and excitements of London, but to the sorrows and tedium of Newgate; so much so that (as the curator of the Tate’s exhibition, Carol Jacobi, pointed out to me) one of the men is probably a self-portrait. It is not the main figure that turns its head to look at us, but a smaller figure in the background, staring out blankly. It has a ginger beard. Apart from the obvious specificity of this painting, there is little to suggest that Van Gogh really thought very much about a city he had visited so many years before. To point out, as the exhibition does, that a late portrait includes one of Dickens’ books on the table suggests clutching at straws. The room where we see one of his glorious pictures of sunflowers from his time in Arles is let down by the insistence on displaying
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Blooming Chestnut Tree, Van Gogh, Vincent Willem, 1887 . (Getty)
inferior paintings of flowers around it, by British painters that followed him. It actually seems unfair on the lesser works to force them to sit in the presence of such obvious genius. In the last room, even a triptych by Francis Bacon, a painter who pretty much shunned the outdoors, pales next to the little sketch it was based on, of Van Gogh pootling along a Provencal country lane on his way to ‘work’. What, one is bound to ask, would Bacon, the claustrophobic painter of sexual angst and apocalyptic dread, really know about the sheer joy of colour and light?
Van Gogh’s Newgate Prison. (Getty)
The aim of the exhibition is a worthy one, but in the end, it is quite unable to compete – just as the imitators’ flowers are unable to compete – with the mesmerising beauty of a handful of Van Gogh’s works. Transcendently marvellous as ever, they seem to shine with life and promise like newly-hatched dragonflies. You have to tear yourself away, prise your eyes off them almost, to look at anything else. I found it quite painful to take my leave of them.
For this reason, it seems pointless to dwell on the thesis of the exhibition. Far better to talk about the handful of pictures which steal its thunder.
VAN GOGH’S BLUE PERIOD? It is an anachronism, of course, to speak about Van Gogh’s ‘blue period’, a phrase exclusively associated with early Picasso. Nonetheless, another translated picture, this time from the earliest period in Vincent’s work, shares the colour and features of a Picasso. In both cases, the images are marked by sympathy for the plight of the poor and the lonely. The old man of At Eternity’s Gate started out as a drawing, but Van Gogh returned to it in paint. The subject, his head buried in his hands – a typical pose in the early works – wears blue trousers and a blue shirt and is seated on a chair we recognise from another picture, the simple chair he used to contrast himself with the more aggressive and frightening personality of Gauguin when they were both working in Arles. I shall return to chairs impregnated with the personalities of their occupants later. Picasso shared the interest in poverty and distress while his milieu was similar to Van Gogh’s. In his early years, the Spanish painter was often penniless and lived in some very insalubrious rooms, along with his fellow bohemians. Even after he’d achieved success on an almost unimaginable scale, Picasso had a bohemian air about him and remained loyal to the Communist Party, but he completely lost touch with the subjects of his early pictures and became increasingly preoccupied with endless variations on the nude. Into that preoccupation the Guernica picture intruded as a rare spasm of the old empathy, but otherwise a fairly heartless self-indulgence accompanied Picasso’s success. The empathy that Van Gogh took with him to London (it is hard to believe he discovered it there, and it seems to have had a lot to do with his religious upbringing) never left him. The nude was a matter of no real interest, though there is a peculiar example in this exhibition, its blockish awkwardness suggesting an exercise rather than genuine curiosity. Picasso would do more to the naked female form than simply reduce it to blocks; he would treat the nude as an endlessly malleable object, taking it apart like a schoolboy attempting to reverse-engineer a broken watch in the vain hope of making it move again. No such experiments had any place in Van Gogh’s work, but who knows, maybe his comprehensive lack of success and early death saved him from this kind of indulgence. The absence of a wider audience beyond his loyal brother and the sitters for his portraits lent his work a chaste air in comparison, a sort of privacy, like that of a diary. It would have made all the difference if he, anticipating Picasso, had been famous enough to pay for his meals by doodling caricatures on the restaurant’s napkins. Instead, the hand-to-mouth desperation of Van Gogh’s obscurity as an artist preserved his devotion to painting from any ulterior or venal motive. He could only realistically hope to
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please himself. For this reason, there is a sense that we are privy to the artist’s unadulterated experience. It is never mediated by fame or the requirements of a dealer, it is unaffected by trends or the taste of strangers, and it is entirely unhindered by a desire to impress. Van Gogh is painting because he feels the need to, and the pictures, like the long letters to his brother describing them, are the record of a private quest. Perhaps this is why the famous self-portrait (destroyed in the war) that so fascinated Bacon, of Vincent ambling though the French countryside with his canvas and brushes at the ready, is so affecting. When Van Gogh went about his business, he had no anticipation of his posthumous fame. He was as innocent of his belated success as he was ingenuous in his approach to poverty, to misery, to women, and to all the commonplace realities around him. There isn’t even a hint of protest in the picture of the man despairing at his fireside, because who would possibly hear the protest? Instead, there is the simple urgency of fellow feeling. Just as surely as we occupy the here and now, Van Gogh occupied his own time. It was not the there and then for him, as he had no illusions of artistic immortality. Van Gogh shares the same innocence as Blake’s – childlike, almost unbearably poignant – as they both found it hard to make money. They knew the same predicament of obscurity and they were both driven by what they saw, in Blake’s case with the mystic eye, in Van Gogh’s with a fleshly eye that seems to see beyond the flesh. Perhaps clear-sightedness depends on a lack of self-consciousness. Though his every action was being watched by the future, Van Gogh thought he was invisible.
mind. This absence of materialism can give his vision cosmic reach. In an article written for the New Statesman, the novelist Margaret Drabble testifies to a longstanding admiration for Van Gogh that verges, quite candidly, on hero worship. She reflects on his attitude to the night sky, a subject he claimed was always ‘on his mind’:
This ignorance of his own fame is what the elegant art galleries or the exorbitant auction houses cherish about him. He’s like an ascetic saint. The allure and mystery of his work lies in his utter ignorance of its illustrious and over-priced posterity. In an art world where everyone has to know the price of everything and the value of nothing, Van Gogh’s art doesn’t know it will ever have a price. Like St Francis, he will be canonised too late to know about it. So, when Van Gogh sees a landscape, or a person, or even a piece of furniture, he sees it with utter honesty, with his own eyes and lives alone with its beauty. Like life itself, beyond the wage slavery of the satanic mills, his work is pure value, beyond money.
He saw the stars as planets like ours, which we might reach in death. “Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.” There, he fancied, the great painters of the past might work on. He wrote to Theo: “The sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream.”
STARS, AS SEEN FROM A GUTTER
It is also a modern version of a medieval vision, as much indebted to Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s paradise as it is to the train trundling above the heads of London’s poor. Dante was able to travel through the Ptolemaic universe, and even to see earth as a puny rock from afar, because he had shed all links with the material world. The gruesome sights of hell were forgotten in the radiant light of the spheres, where the souls
Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a less worldly artist than Van Gogh. Oscar’s Wilde’s words from Lady Windermere’s Fan – that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars – might as well have been framed with him in
That idea of death as resembling a train journey across France (Tarascon is a town near Arles) manages so instantly to combine the humdrum with the sublime.
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One version of Starry Night by Van Gogh.
One version of Starry Night by Van Gogh.
of the blessed are in such a state of harmony that they form geometric shapes, constantly changing, like the murmurations of starlings at dusk. This was the kind of community of artists Van Gogh must have had in mind for the yellow house in Arles, a gathering of harmonised visionaries toiling to create beauty together. Creation has not fallen in Van Gogh. It is the abode of spirits, just like Blake’s universe. Gravity, on the other hand, comes from sin, hence Blake’s disdain for Isaac Newton, its discoverer. The opposite of sin is the everyday ease of interstellar travel. There would be no gravity to hold the community of artists down. Just as Dante had forgotten his sin after bathing in the river Lethe, so the defiance of gravity would be possible for men who had forgotten the allure of material wealth and taken to the air, maybe even living on it. This confidence in art as a spiritual medium underpins the mysticism in Van Gogh. It may not be as declamatory as Blake’s, but it is there, nonetheless, in his raptures over colour, and this colour can even extend to the apparently cold blue of the stars, in which Van Gogh saw warm reds along with the greens, lilacs and purples. He habitually painted the stars as
There is an argument for Van Gogh not being regarded as a painter at all, but as a kind of one-off pioneer of a way of seeing that no one has ever successfully emulated. He spiritualises whatever he sees. yellow and white splotches, like irregular fried eggs. He never saw them as twinkling tamely, or as the symbols of anything, as if on a flag, but as the exuberant bursts of distant suns. There are two starry night paintings. Perhaps the most famous is the one in which the night sky swirls in a huge breaking wave that Van Gogh, a great fan of Japanese art, remembered from Hokusai’s masterpiece. But there is also an earlier Starry Night which may well have been influenced by scenes on the Thames, in yet another picture by Doré, where the gaslights running along the embankment were reflected in shimmering verticals by the river. Van Gogh owned a print of the picture, but his own, set in Arles, transcends it as completely as his version of the Newgate prisoners. The picture has two figures on a shoreline and the wide sweep of a bay lined with the same gaslights, with a canopy of stars overhead. What is immediately striking is the paint. The canvas is covered in a free-flowing slick of oil, the kind of impasto he employs in his wheat fields, with diagonal strokes of the brush in the foreground, horizontal strokes in the middle that show the waves breaking up the vertical of reflected gaslight, and then in the sky a confusion of smaller, vertical and horizontal patches of dark and lighter blue, interspersed with reversed fried eggs, their ‘yokes’ emanating from white centres. The paint is so thick it has angles and picks up the light of the surroundings in different ways according to how you approach the picture, as if the stars are on a background of crumpled silver foil. When he reached Arles, he was caught up the excitement of light, even in a night scene such as this. He also painted fields, his little house, the objects inside the house. It is astonishing how little he was interested in Arles itself, with its ancient ruins (a magnificent amphitheatre, which totally failed to impress him), its civic buildings and pretty squares. None of this gets a look-in with Van Gogh; he might as well have moved to a village. Just as he was apparently unmoved by London and Paris, so the urban landscape of Arles did not fire his imagination. He did, however, paint a night scene in a street, the fried eggs of the stars above and people sitting under
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an awning of the purest yellow. He also painted another night scene, this time in a dive he and Gauguin frequented, along with the city’s night hawks, and he used colour to recreate the seediness and despair of the place, raking the floor wildly so that the billiard table looks ready to lunge out of the plane of the painting. And to do all this, he stayed up for three nights and slept during the day. The result was a waking nightmare of dissolution, The Night Café, which appears in the Tate’s exhibition only as an innocuous drawing. It is the colours that carry the sense of menace. Van Gogh spoke of the finished piece, with its ‘oppressive’ combination of red and green, as one of the ugliest pictures he had done. It is worth quoting the excited description he gave of it to his brother Theo: The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemonyellow, or pale luminous green.
The very next day he adds: In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur. And all with an appearance of Japanese gaiety. This is an exceptionally detailed insight concerning his style. Perhaps as a result of the comparison with Gauguin, who was painting the same scene (but more conventionally), Van Gogh wants to explain what he’s attempting to convey. ‘It is colour not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist,’ he says, unusually self-conscious, ‘but colour to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament.’ Who knows, this remark may even be a little dig at his fellow artist. Or else he has picked up a way of talking about art, something with a theoretical air about it, from Gauguin, after hours of heated discussion to which he was not accustomed. This element of comparison brings us to the matter of the
chairs. There are two, and one of them can be seen in the National Gallery in London. It is his own chair in the yellow house in Arles, and it is very yellow, but also has tinges of green, blue and russet. It’s a solidly built, simple chair with a wicker seat, the same chair as the old man in blue sits upon, and on the woven seat he has placed his pipe and tobacco. The scene is the kitchen. On the floor are brown tiles, raked as crazily as the boards in the nighthawks’ dive. Things did not go quite as planned in his artistic community. At first when Gauguin arrived from Brittany there was great optimism. Van Gogh had painted the sunflowers to decorate his fellow artist’s room and it was promising that Gauguin knew how to cook. But Gauguin was no angel and harmony was not his speciality. He began to criticise Van Gogh’s style. There may even have been some rivalry over a woman. Certainly, Van Gogh was moved to do something very uncharacteristic, attempting to attack Gauguin with a razor and then, notoriously, attacking his own ear. We may never know the details of
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Van Gogh’s Chair.
are a reference to the empty chair in Dickens’s study. He means a picture of the writer’s study at Gad’s Hill by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes. This would imply that Van Gogh wished himself and Gauguin dead, which is subtly different to taking a train, celestial or terrestrial. A homicidal or suicidal train, perhaps. I don’t buy this morbid interpretation. Rather, I think the mystery of the chairs is the closest we can get to a statement by Van Gogh of artistic independence. He sees the two chairs in the way only he can see them. It is an admission that artists do not belong in the same gallery, let alone in the same living quarters, and that their marriages are not made in heaven. He might not be wishing Gauguin dead as such, but he definitely wants rid of him. As we know, there was a very mundane train station close at hand.
A HORSE CHESTNUT TREE If I’m right, Van Gogh knew very well that he was doing something different to his contemporaries. He doesn’t appear to have known Blake, but there is a strong similarity in what they were aiming for: no less than a cleansing of the doors of perception in order to glimpse infinity. There is an argument for Van Gogh not being regarded as a painter at all, but as a kind of one-off pioneer of a way of seeing that no one has ever successfully emulated. He spiritualises whatever he sees. There is even a kind of animism going on.
Gauguin’s Chair
what went wrong between them both, but Gauguin was not the chaste, ascetic kind. He was worldly and cynical. Already a well-known figure in the art world he expected to sell. It’s possible he came to see his host as a simple soul, maybe even a bit of a bumpkin.
Take the utterly alive horse chestnut in bloom, displayed about half way through this exhibition. It has nothing to do with the thesis of the show or with London. It also has nothing to do with Arles or with any city, and nothing to do with art history. The only thing human about is its rapt human witness.
The best we can intuit from all this comes from the second chair Van Gogh painted, the one belonging to Gauguin. It is as close to an arrogant chair as one could imagine. In stark contrast to the simple, rugged, workaday chair in the kitchen, Gauguin’s chair is blue and red, its curves are pretentious and self-involved, it has a showiness about it that’s echoed in the flowery carpet. The colours are as oppressive as the ones in the all-night dive. On the wicker seat of this chair stand a single candle and some books. Gauguin said Van Gogh read too much, by candlelight apparently. It’s a neat bit of revenge for hurtful remarks.
Yet it is more alive than any horse chestnut I have ever seen, because I couldn’t see it the way he does, no one could, hence the disappointing efforts of his imitators. If artists are not as special as Van Gogh – and his like comes along two or three times a century – then they are jobbing, ephemeral doodlers, mere decorators really, not worth the time of day except for prettifying interiors. Van Gogh makes you impatient with other artists like the purveyors of adulterated goods. You long for the pure stuff, like this vibrant, more than real tree, and once you’ve set eyes on it, you can’t get enough. It’s a glimpse of infinity. No wonder it’s so difficult to tear oneself away.
In an article on these incredibly expressive pieces of furniture, the redoubtable Jonathan Jones suggests they
The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain, curated by Carol Jacobi, is at Tate Britain in London till 11 August 2019.
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Agnes Varda: French New Wave Pioneer and Feminist Icon Celebrating the Life of the Legendary Filmmaker Majalla - London Ages Varda, the Belgian-born director who earned the title “grandmother of the French New Wave when she was barely 30 years old, died on March 19 at age 90, leaving behind her distinctive brand of wise and deeply personal masterpieces such as “Cléo from 5 to 7,” “Vagabond,” and “The Gleaners and I”. Varda was born in 1928 to a Greek father and French mother in Brussels, Belgium, but the family moved to southern France during World War II, near the sea. The young Agnes grew up with an abiding interest in the arts and later moved to Sorbonne in Paris, earning a degree in literature and psychology before embarking on a career as a photographer. Her interest in literature and photography wound up informing her work throughout her long career. “Photography has never ceased to teach me how to make films,” she once said. As the official photographer of the Theatre National Populaire from 1951 to 1961, she discovered an interest in both theatre and film. Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, which she made at the age of 26, proved her to be an original artist. The drama, shot in a distinct visual style with a documentary feel, alternates between two narratives: a young couple examining their troubled marriage and a fishing village dealing with its collective problems. The outsider artist became a prolific filmmaker whose style which she coined ‘cinécriture’ to illustrate her unique storytelling techniques - broke with Hollywood and conventional European cinematic structures, paving the way for directors such as JeanLuc Godard and Alain Resnais. Her acclaim spans from 1955’s La Pointe Courte and 1962’s radical Cleo From to 7 up to 2000’s The Gleaners and I, and in recent years, she created a series of increasingly personal documentaries including 2017’s Faces and Places, a road-trip documentary with the artist JR in which they drove around France, capturing interesting people and places along the way. She premiered her latest autobiographical documentary, “Varda by Agnès,” at the Berlin International Film Festival in
February. The film was described by critic Guy Lodge as a “blend of memoir and cinematic TED talk,” full of whimsy and reflection. Although discovery, provocation and striving to reach an understanding of society and humanity are all hallmarks of her films, Varda refused to be restricted to only one genre or style. Over her more than -60year career in which she made 24 feature films, Varda effortlessly mastered personal and essay cinema, drama, satire and documentary. On the subjects she captures she said: “I love filming real people; I love to connect with the kind of people we don’t know so well.” Her iconoclasm meant that she did not shy away from addressing taboo topics, which exhibited a formal daring that retains the ability to astonish, with her use of the camera, cuts and montages, the mixing of documentary and fiction. Varda was also one-half of one of the most famous directorial
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French film director Agnes Varda reacts as she receives an Honorary Award during the 17th Marrakech International Film Festival on December 2018 ,2. (Getty)
Agnes Varda, French director, settling a scene of film ' Cleo from 5 to 7 'in 1961. (Getty)
duos in French cinematic history, working alongside her husband, director Jacques Demy, until his death in 1990. She worked on a number of his directorial masterpieces, including "Bay of Angels," "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort," and regularly documented life on set. An icon of feminist cinema, she was acutely sensitive to oppression and many of her movies center on women. In a 1975 interview with a French magazine, she said she didn’t have any more problems than her male cohort; making movies is difficult for everyone. At the same time, she was aware of her standing as the lone female director in the New Wave and how her presence could be used — as she put it — as an “alibiassuaging the consciences of the men.” But there were also rules. “As long as I was ‘little Varda,’ ‘little Agnès,’ the exception,” and she didn’t get in anyone’s way, she said, she was “helped out, supported and appreciated by my colleagues and companions.” Female artists of Varda’s generation were discounted or marginalized in their lifetimes then “rediscovered” years later, long after they can enjoy the recognition. However, Varda lived long enough to see herself celebrated as the feminist lodestar she was by generations of younger women. Daniella Shreir, co-founder and editor of the feminist film journal Another Gaze, said Varda will be "remembered for her representation of overlooked social movements, communities and cultures.” Shreir also points to Varda's placement of her own body on screen as a resounding feature of her work. "Throughout her self-reflexive documentaries, she put her middle-aged and then old-aged body on-screen, both confrontational and ludic at the same time. She utilized this playfulness until the end. When was unable to attend events in the last couple of years, she instead sent along a life-sized cardboard cut-out of herself, sometimes with a cardboard cat on her shoulder," she said.
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Although discovery, provocation and striving to reach an understanding of society and humanity are all hallmarks of her films, Varda refused to be restricted to only one genre or style. In 2015, Varda became the first woman to win an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival, and in 2017 the documentary Faces Places earned Varda her first Academy Award nomination, making her the oldest competitive nominee in the ceremony’s history. She also became the first woman to win a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars a few months before. With ironic modesty, Varda described herself to a German interviewer as “a little queen at the outskirts of film.” She often repeated that she didn’t care too much about the awards. “I have a lot of awards. I don’t know if it’s compensation — the money was not there,” she told Vulture. “But awards? I have a full closet.” Cannes Film Festival expressed its "immense sadness" at Varda's death. The festival wrote on Twitter: ”For almost 65 years, Agnès Varda's eyes and voice embodied cinema with endless inventiveness. The place she occupied is irreplaceable. Agnès loved images, words and people. She's one of those whose youth will never fade.”
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Abdelaziz Bouteflika: Algeria's Ailing Revolutionary Who Clung to Power Majalla - London Illustration by Ali Minadalou 1 - Abdelaziz Bouteflika was born on March ,2 1937. Some biographers say Bouteflika was born in Tlemcen, western Algeria, and others give his place of birth as Oujda, just over the border in Morocco. 2 - In 1956, at the age of 19, Bouteflika fought in the 1962-1954 war to end French colonial rule. He joined the rebellion against French rule as a protege of Houari Boumediene, a commander who would later become Algerian president. He quickly rose in through the party ranks and was appointed administrative secretary for the fifth Wilaya - Arabic for province - in 1957, effectively charging the young officer with reporting on the situation in his ancestral region. 3 - After independence, Bouteflika was named minister for youth, sports and tourism at the age of 25 in the country’s first post-independence administration under the leadership of President Ahmed Ben Bella. The following year he became the world’s youngest minister of foreign affairs - a record he still holds today. 3 - Bouteflika participated in the 1965 coup, led by Boumedience, that removed Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella (65–1963) from power and installed Boumedienne. Bouteflika continued to serve as foreign minister in the new government, and, by the time of Boumedienne’s death in 1979, Bouteflika seemed well positioned to replace him in the presidency. However, when Boumedienne
died, Bouteflika lost his mentor and his potion as foreign minister. An investigation was launched into financial impropriety. Bouteflika said the allegations were invented as part of a political plot. 4 - By the end of the 1970s, though, Bouteflika had fallen from favour at home and he left Algeria in the early 1980s and settled in Dubai, where he became an adviser to a member of the emirate’s ruling family. He returned home in 1987 but kept a low profile, refusing offers of government posts. 5 - Little is known about his private life. Official records mention no wife, though some accounts say a marriage took place in 1990. Bouteflika lived with his mother, Mansouriah, in an apartment in Algiers, where she used to prepare his meals. 6 - He returned to public life when Algeria was being ravaged. The military-backed government annulled a parliamentary election in 1992 that Islamists were on the verge of winning. In the conflict that followed, whole villages were massacred and civilians walking in city streets had their throats slit. The conflict killed an estimated 200,000 people. 7 - Bouteflika, backed by the military, was elected president in 1999 with a pledge to stop the fighting. He negotiated a truce to end the fighting and wrested power from the secretive military-based establishment known as “le pouvoir” (the powersthat-be). As president, Bouteflika focused on rebuilding the country and strengthening Algeria’s international reputation. He also granted wideranging amnesty to militant Islamist groups within
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Algeria in an effort to resolve a long-standing civil conflict. 8 - He won re-election in 2004 and again in 2009 despite having experienced health problems in 2005 when French doctors operated on him for what officials said was a stomach ulcer. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables said he was suffering from cancer. He became weaker after his mother died in 2009. The 2009 election was said to have received more than 90 percent of the vote, was harshly criticized by opposition groups, who claimed the poll was marred by widespread fraud and voter intimidation. 9 - With a cushion of foreign reserves and a population wary of major upheaval after their civil war, Algeria avoided the Arab Spring revolutions that toppled leaders across the region in 2011. But protests against poor living standards, the lack of job opportunities and services were common. 10 - Already limited by fragile health, Bouteflika suffered a serious stroke at the start of 2013 which put him into a Paris hospital for three months. He was seen little in public after returning to Algeria to convalesce. In April 2014, Bouteflika was elected for a fourth term with 81.5 percent of the vote, despite not campaigning and voting from a wheelchair. 11 - In 2016, Bouteflika tightened his grip on power by disbanding the DRS intelligence agency, considered by many a “state within a state”. Its chief, the powerful Mohamed Mediene, had been already been fired months earlier.
12 - It was announced in February 2019 that Bouteflika would seek a fifth term—ignoring the constitution’s new two-term limit—in order to continue the reforms begun in his fourth term. The announcement sparked protests, which continued to escalate in the following weeks. On March
13, as protests showed no sign of abating, more than 1,000 judges issued a statement declaring that they would not supervise the April 2019 presidential election if Bouteflika were to run, and the military indicated that it would stand with the protesters. Later that day Bouteflika
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dropped his bid for reelection but announced that the election would be postponed, the government would be reshuffled, and a new constitution would be drafted. Amid continued protests and pressure from the military, however, Bouteflika resigned on April 2.
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Imposter Syndrome: 6 Signs You Might be Highly Competent but Hugely Under-confident. By Samantha Morris “It was a fluke!’ ‘I was just lucky’ ‘If I can do it anyone can’, ‘It was someone else’s hard work or talent’, ‘I had a lot of support’ ‘I’ll be found out’ ‘I’m a fraud’ ‘I’m not that talented’ ‘I’m a one hit wonder’ ‘I’m not that good’ ‘I could do better’ ‘I was
in the right place at the right time’ ‘I don’t belong in the VIP room’ ‘how did I get here?’ ‘I’ll fail or disappoint’. Does any of this sound familiar to you? If so, it could be a sign that you’ve experienced imposter syndrome.
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It’s often thought that if you’re successful or ambitious or striving to be get to where you want to be, that you’ll feel ultra confident because you’re competent and you have the skills, knowledge and ability and even talent. However, for some people, this is simply not the case. Ella Fitzgerald once claimed that it wasn’t her voice that made her famous it was the compositions and songs. Either this was an aspect of her modest character, or does imposter syndrome really plague most of us (even if you’re an icon) For most people, being competent and skilled almost carries with it a sense of power and confidence. However, having worked in this field and also having experienced aspects of imposter syndrome in my own life, this is simply not the case. Competence does not automatically mean that you’ll feel confident (and sometimes far from it) In fact, on the flip side of experiencing competence, progression and positive development, competence carries with it the pressure of responsibility as well as your own and others’ expectations anxiety and stress. This therefore challenges any idea of success and what it might feel like and looks like for each person.
Dalmatian dog startled by white dog wearing hoodie with with spots, pretending to be a Dalmatian. (Getty)
Ask yourself how true and realistic is it that you’re a fraud? Write down all of the reasons why you deserve to experience acknowledgement, happiness and success. entrepreneurs, high flying professionals, CEOs and Directors through to celebrities, public figures and role models. The fact is that imposter syndrome can affect anyone. Where change and transition happens in life or work, promotions occur and roles evolve, there will always be the step into the unknown, the lack of a handbook or manual, the feeling that you don’t know what you’re doing, when really it’s ok not to know, or you may surprise yourself with how well you actually apply yourself. Tip: No one is superhuman! This means that there isn’t anyone in the world who has all the answers or who doesn’t necessarily stumble or who doesn’t feel under confident. So the positive outcome of this, is to know that you’re really not alone and that it’s ok not to have all the answers all of the time.
6 Signs and Tips For How To Challenge Imposter Syndrome
3. You Hold Yourself Back
1. Fear of Failure Underlying imposter syndrome is a fear that you’re a fraud, you’re not that talented and skilled and that you’ll be asked to leave the VIP room. The largest fear of all is feeling unable to fulfill, meet or exceed expectations and the fear that you’ll fail or disappoint in some way.
Self doubt and low confidence can impact personal development and can stagnate action and even living life to the full. For example, you may not want to apply for opportunities, awards or career promotions because you fear that you won’t be successful. Or perhaps you resist opening yourself up to new relationships, friendships or personal experiences for fear that you’ll be rejected.
Tip: Ask yourself how true and realistic is it that you’re a fraud? Write down all of the reasons why you deserve to experience acknowledgement, happiness and success. 2. The Pressures of Responsibility and Expectation The pressure of responsibility and expectation can affect almost anyone from a first time mum or dad and their experiences with their new born baby, to first time home owners, to students,
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Tip: Ask yourself what’s the risk of not being open to new professional or personal opportunities or relationships. What will or won’t change if you don’t at least try? Will you regret it if you don’t? Then ask what’s the absolute worst that could happen?
4. You’re Only Playing a Role Feeling and actually believing that you’re
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only ‘playing a role’ is a huge part of imposter syndrome. I’ve seen executives or CEOs who are well respected role models who feel under confident to the point that they cannot deliver a speech, or they choose to wear oversized, shapeless or bland clothes for fear that they do not deserve the attention and would rather blend into the background. Equally there are people who ‘dress the part’ but who deep down feel as though they are only wearing a mask. Tip: I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt this way. After all even William Shakespeare famously wrote ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women, merely players’. Ask yourself why you think you’re playing a role? Then ask trusted people around you to write in a little book reasons why you’re deserving of your past, current or future achievements. This will then provide a little book of visible evidence to back up the case that you really aren’t playing a role. If this is difficult to do, think and write down of all the reasons why you are deserving of where you are or what you’re striving for.
5.You Lead a Double Life Secrecy and shame are two of the biggest signs of imposter syndrome. Fear of losing your job, reputation, position, your partner, your friends and respect can be a huge catalyst for secrecy, loneliness and shame. This then impacts who you are, how you feel, and what you choose to show to the world compared to how you feel in private. For
For example, you may seem confident and in control to the outside world, but deep down you may feel vulnerable, under confident, lonely and stressed.
example, you may seem confident and in control to the outside world, but deep down you may feel vulnerable, under confident, lonely and stressed. Or perhaps you shy away from the limelight and hold yourself back for fear that you’ll be rejected. Tip: This is possibly one of the hardest and unhappiest experiences of imposter syndrome. At this point it’s important to turn to your most trusted allies, friends and family. Although sharing can be painful, it can also be a huge relief. If you’re not sure who to turn to, try researching and attending social or networking groups of people who may be experiencing similar situations. Therapy or
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Businesswoman with half her face covered by a white mask. (Getty)
coaching can also be a great way to share and explore your feeling in a confidential and safe space.
someone else achieving, but you find it difficult to accept that it is you and so you pass on the acknowledgment or success onto someone else?
6. You Overcompensate, Discount and Undervalue Yourself
Tip: Ask yourself why you’re overcompensating? What are you overcompensating for? Do you really need to do this? Does overcompensating satisfy a personal self-fulfilling prophecy, and how is this robbing you of progression and development? Then finally ask yourself how much energy do you spend overcompensating, when your time and energy could be used for self-nourishment and personal development?
Do you find it difficult to own your right to your own accomplishment and success? Do you give more than you receive? Do you undercharge clients? Are you under confident or fearful when setting either your personal or professional boundaries? Perhaps you feel as if you’re watching
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