Oliver Kamm on Nick Cohen's What's Left?
Michael Givel
Spring 2007 Book cover What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen Fourth Estate, 2007, 405. pp.
Oliver Kamm
In January 2007, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, played host to
a day-long conference under the title 'A World Civilisation or a Clash
of Civilisations'. It was a singular business. The allusion in the
title betrayed a misunderstanding that the political scientist Samuel
Huntington, author of the thesis of the clash of civilisations, was
prescribing Western universalism. It gave, however, the patina of
intellectual inquiry to an obviously exhortatory event. A set of
prefabricated conclusions concerning the alleged moral imperialism of
Western Enlightenment values - on whose behalf I was one of the fall
guys invited to speak - was served at public expense to a
self-selecting audience of political activists.
There was an irony here beyond mere absurdity. It was identified in a
recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Nick Cohen: 'What made
this vignette of ethnic politics in a European city worth noting is
that commentators for the BBC and nearly every newspaper [in the UK]
describe Mr. Livingstone as one of the most left-wing politicians in
British public life. Hardly any of them notice the weirdness of an
apparent socialist pandering to a reactionary strain of Islam, pushing
its arguments and accepting its dictates.'
Few indeed notice; and the politics of Ken Livingstone are but one
constituent of a notable current of political weirdness. This is the
subject of Cohen's book What's Left?, a cogent and impassioned essay
on how ostensibly progressive movements more than made their peace
with political and even theocratic reaction. Among Cohen's strengths
is his ability to make sense of this perverse phenomenon without doing
violence to its eclecticism. This is worth bearing in mind when
considering some of the defensive critical reactions to the book.
There is a distinction - not an especially fine one, either - between
a synoptic view and a monocausal one.
Another of Cohen's characteristics is that he has an acute wit remote
from the sort of remorseless jocularity of a P.J. O'Rourke. This is
just as well given the character of those he describes. There is
nothing hilarious about, for example, the libels perpetrated by a
far-Left magazine against honest journalists reporting on the Bosnian
war. But there is a great deal that is ridiculous about the
haplessness of John Major's government. Suddenly Cohen can deploy an
arresting phrase that is also funny: 'Living through the Major
administration was like being trapped in a railway carriage with a
party of bent accountants. For seven years. The Tories in their
decadence managed to be simultaneously sleazy and tedious.'
In foreign policy, especially its pitiful acquiescence to Slobodan
Milosevic's murderous aggression, the Major government exemplified
this combination of amorality compounded by imaginative torpor. A
central part of Cohen's case - under the ironic chapter heading
'Tories Against the War' - is the coincidence of view produced by the
Balkan wars of the 1990s. Bizarrely, parts of the Left, which ought to
have recognised the atavistic forces driving xenophobic Serb
nationalism, started parroting an ostentatiously unsentimental realism
indistinguishable from the line of Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind,
successive Conservative Foreign Secretaries.
The supposed radical sage Noam Chomsky, in The Prosperous Few and the
Restless Many (1994), considered whether the West should bomb Serb
encampments to stop the dismemberment of Bosnia, and tortuously
concluded 'it's not so simple'. Actually, it was. Nato's military
intervention secured an end to the conflict and an admittedly messy
agreement at Dayton. Realism turned out to have been a prisoner of the
inflexibility of its own assumptions; it had not been realistic at all
about the nature of the conflict and the utility of force. Its ally in
quietism had been an Old Left with an instinctive aversion to US
intervention, and in some cases a nostalgia for the myth of Yugoslav
Communism. (The current chairman of CND, Kate Hudson., a member of the
Communist Party of Britain, made an unintentionally revealing comment
in her otherwise evasive purported history CND: Now More then Ever:
'Britain had a tradition of good relations with Yugoslavia, and
particularly Serbia, resulting from its stand against Nazi Germany in
World War II. Many regretted the break-up of what had been a
progressive and open socialist society that had found a federal and
peaceful solution to the complex diversity of communities in the south
Slav state.')
The recrudescence of aggressive nationalism in the Balkans set parts
of the Left alongside reaction. Cohen deals at length with similar
forces when applied to the other great issue of international politics
in the 1990s, the threat to Middle East peace arising from a bellicose
despotism in Iraq. Kanan Makiya is a central figure in Cohen's
account. His Republic of Fear did more than depict Saddam Hussein's
depravities. It described a system of thoroughgoing totalitarianism
under which a 'new kind of fear drove through all private space'.
Cohen describes Makiya as an Iraqi Solzhenitsyn. The analogy is apt -
for the reactions Makiya evoked as well as for the message he
expounded.
On his expulsion from the land of his birth, Solzhenitsyn was famously
and conspicuously not invited to the White House by President Ford.
The exigencies of realpolitik - whose principal exponent, Henry
Kissinger, was behind Ford's decision - took precedence over honouring
a heroic witness in the struggle against totalitarianism. Makiya was
also spurned by those he had thought were on his side: the radical
Left whose cause was his own, yet which would not countenance military
intervention to rebuff Saddam's annexation and plunder of Kuwait.
(Indifference to the sovereignty of small nations was, not
coincidentally, another characteristic of Kissingerian foreign policy:
think of East Timor.) Iraq's suffering in the 1990s was a direct
result of the continuation in power of a tyrant who committed
genocidal atrocities and enriched himself through the corruption of
the oil-for-food programme. Recall, however, the most vocal campaigns
on the Left to do with Iraq: not so much an uninterest in that
nation's suffering as an energetic attribution of it to that same
porous sanctions regime. It is small wonder that by the end of the
decade, as Cohen records: 'The hideous choice for Makiya, Iraq and all
those who professed to believe in human rights was this: either they
would have to wait for [Saddam's] death and the deaths of his sadistic
sons Qusay and Uday, or they had to accept that the only way to remove
the Baath was foreign invasion.'
The fact that Cohen accepted the logic of this position and supported
the US-led overthrow of Saddam in 2003 is taken by some critics as
undermining his argument. In a notably incompetent Guardian review (in
which the Times columnist Matthew Parris - an opponent of intervention
in Afghanistan, never mind Iraq - was cited as one who had formerly
supported the Iraq War and repented), Peter Wilby crowed: 'Far from
accepting the war's aftermath as the left's vindication, [Cohen] sees
the post-invasion period as the most damning proof yet of its
wrong-headedness.'
Well, yes it is, because it illustrates Cohen's thesis without his
having to point it out. Having likewise supported the Iraq
intervention, I considered then and do now that there was only one
reputable form of the anti-war argument. This was what the philosopher
Michael Walzer, an opponent of military action, argued at the time and
in retrospect: '[T]he campaign against the war should never have been
only an antiwar campaign. It should have been a campaign for a strong
international system, designed and organized to defeat aggression,
control weapons of mass destruction, stop massacres and ethnic
cleansing, and assist in the politics of transition after brutal
regimes are overthrown.' (Michael Walzer, 'Can there be a moral
foreign policy?', in E. J. Dionne, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Kayla
Drogosz (eds), Liberty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and US
Foreign Policy in an Unjust World, (Washington: The Brookings
Institution, 2004), p. 50.)
This was not the message of any anti-war campaign. It was not the
message of the Left. It is not, either, a description of how the
international order works, and it might have become a cause that an
internationalist Left could have agreed to work for. Instead the
dominant message on the Left is of a different tenor. It is a tragedy
of the botched and culpably insouciant policy of the Bush
administration that Iraq's population has not been protected from
terrorist fanaticism, and that this appalling experience has made it
much less likely that necessary interventions - as were mounted in
Kosovo and Sierra Leone - will be mounted in future. Yet there is
scant support in most left-wing discussions for the emerging civil
society of Iraq, or recognition of the urgency of inflicting a
decisive defeat on the combined forces of the Baath and al-Qaeda.
Likewise, comment among liberals about the theocratic tyranny of Iran
is almost invariably couched in language assuming the bellicosity of
the Bush administration, rather than of support for Iranian dissidents
and condemnation of the mullahs' serial nuclear deceptions. That we
are in this position is genuinely a mark of dishonour for the Left,
which in important respects did get the principal foreign policy
issues of the 1990s right. (No institution was more right and timely
in assessing Milosevic than The Guardian; or in perceiving the
brutality of Saddam Hussein than The Observer.)
Cohen is strong in dissecting this malaise. He is also thorough in
presenting historical antecedents. There are memorable vignettes and
even important historical finds. Cohen has located and resurrected the
notorious pamphlet by Eric Hobsbawm and Raymond Williams as student
Communists supporting the Soviet invasion of Finland. He acidly cites
Williams's much later admission that: 'We were given the job [by the
Party] as people who could write quickly, from historical materials
supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did
not know very much about, as a professional with words.' (To get the
measure of how scandalous this remark is, consider that Hobsbawm was
made a Companion of Honour in 1998. He has made important scholarly
contributions to 19th century history, but he has never to my
knowledge denounced his own early work in the cause of historical
falsification.) Cohen, as you would expect, finds much material for
comment in the venomously ludicrous George Galloway and - for
connoisseurs of British far-Left politics - the late Gerry Healy, of
the long defunct Workers' Revolutionary Party.
The cast of characters is in fact so exotic that it has provoked a
persistent - or perhaps coagulated - theme of Cohen's critics. This
takes the form of a shrill cry of 'not me - but someone else'. And
this is only trivially true. Of course Gerry Healy, a corrupt and
stupid rapist, is not the face of the mainstream Left. Nor is the
Respect Coalition - a heterogeneous movement in the sense only that it
comprises, in the phrase of Christopher Hitchens, worshippers of the
One God lined up with worshippers of the One Party State - an
organisation representative of anyone bar the parliamentarian whose
vanity is its foundation. But Cohen is pointing to something else,
more fundamental and insidious.
Over the past century, the Left's demands have made extraordinary
gains. Material advancement, universal education, civil rights, sexual
equality, and rights for homosexuals (not yet, unfortunately,
extending to marriage and adoption rights) are features of modern
Western democracies that have been secured by social pressure and
legislative reform. Almost in a fit of pique, liberals seem determined
on obliviousness. It is as if there were - as the literary critic
Lionel Trilling termed it - an adversary culture. When the most
virulent opponents of Western societies express their demands in the
language not of a common humanity but of superstition and bigotry, the
first instinct of the upholders of the Enlightenment ought to be a
statement of militant opposition. In what passes for modern
liberalism, the first instinct is commonly instead to inquire of - in
the uncelebrated clichi - the root causes of that hatred. The late
Paul Foot, of whom Cohen himself wrote an admiring obituary, was so
far steeped in this form of thinking that he surmised in his Guardian
column in October 2001 that the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia
had been one of the contributory factors in provoking 9/11. Those who
pursue, on their own account, holy war against Jews and other infidels
in fact object to sexual oppression only in the sense that they
believe there isn't anything like enough of it going on.
Unsophisticated though it may be to say so, a Left worth its name and
honouring its traditions ought to be defending the principles of
secularism, science and liberty rather than worrying about the offence
they might cause. Yet the principle of a common citizenship under law
is - from my experience at least, and recalling that Livingstonian
conference in January - a sectarian and even fringe position on the
Left. When the declared leaders of religious and other groups assert a
claim to be heeded in public debate, they speak as sectional
interests. Every time you hear the word 'community' in a BBC report
try replacing it with 'lobby', and you'll get some idea of the
prominence of these demands. A democratic society does not elevate
group identities; it aims to supersede them. What's Left? is a
spirited and elegant exposition of what ought to be axiomatic on the
Left, and extraordinarily is not.
Oliver Kamm is a columnist for The Times, an advisory editor of
Democratiya, and the author of Antitotalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case
for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (Social Affairs Unit, 2005).
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