The Utopian - Blog

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“In Washington nothing is ever done, and nothing is ever settled.”

Willa Cather, 1946

On the fourth day of government shutdown, 2013, it’s been helpful for me to think about a passage in Willa Cather’s book, The Professor’s House, published 88 years ago.  Cather tells the story of an aging professor looking back on the stretch of his days and finding them increasingly defined by a young former student of his, the brightest of them all, killed in Normandy on the brink of a promising career.  The student, Tom Outland, showed up on the professor’s front steps, appearing out of the American southwest at the age of 18 or so, where he had been a cowboy, a railroad man, an attendant at high stakes poker games.  He “idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to the ideal rather than to the individual”; “One of his sentimental superstitions was that he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other.”  He was an orphan; he had memorized the Aeneid with the help of a town priest.  He’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps. 

The vast middle section of the book, “Tom Outland’s Story,” outlines the great disappointment that drives the young man to the professor’s doorstep and the academic life.  It begins with winter work on a ranch, where Tom Outland and his friend, Roddy, are given a herd of cattle to take care of for the season, next to a blue mesa that during the long lazy days attracts Tom’s attention.  Hidden high up in a canyon cave, secluded from prying eyes for who knows how many hundreds of years by rivers and rocks, Tom finds the deserted ruins of a dead civilization—a proud and accomplished one, whose people have built high and well.  Tom is drawn to the hidden village, and wishes to bring knowledge of this long-dead Native American nation to all Americans, their accidental descendants.

So Tom Outland goes to Washington.  His friend Roddy—who had joked about breaking tools and equipment while they surveyed the village because, who cares?  Uncle Sam would pay them back—stakes Tom 600 dollars and his Pullman ticket east.  Tom arrives in D.C. one bright January morning and after sightseeing, gets to work.  He tracks down his elected representative, who happily meets with him, and provides a letter to the Indian Commissioner, who is also friendly but less helpful, explaining that he deals only with live Indians, not dead ones.  Tom goes back to his elected representative, who (a little more sullenly) offers him a letter of introduction to the head of the Smithsonian, at whose office Tom hangs around for a few days, volleyed this way and that by secretaries and clerks.  Eventually a kind secretary encourages him to take the chief of the head of the Smithsonian out to lunch, because only through number twos does anything get done in D.C., Tom Outland learns.  And he buys the man lunch, purchases a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem, which the chief likes but Tom has never heard of before.  The sated chief arranges a meeting with the head of the Smithsonian, who is scientifically interested in Tom’s findings but informs Tom that they just don’t have the money at the moment, though there is an appropriations bill before Congress for just this sort of thing, so perhaps best to go back and talk to Tom’s elected representative and see what kind of support he might hammer together.  Around this time Tom learns that there is another issue on the director of the Smithsonian’s mind—an International Exposition in Paris, for which Congress doles out committee memberships and sinecures.  And wouldn’t you know that the appropriations bill for that particular Exposition is also with Congress at the moment.  You can guess which gets funded and which doesn’t.

Tom goes home.  “I left Washington at last,” he says, “wiser than I came.  I had no plans, I wanted nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-coated men pouring out of white buildings.”  On the mesa, at least, he will have the comfort of the serene Indian ruins, which he can pick through and explore at his leisure.  But no story has a happy ending: off the train in Tarpin, Tom finds that his friend Roddy has sold all the valuables from the site, to a German who takes the goods out through Mexico City.  For a long time Tom can never forgive his friend.  It is the symbolic pairing to his Washington betrayal—betrayed by his own government, betrayed for cash.  Tom finds that there is no route left for him.  He jumps a train, leaves the ruins to themselves. 

Egypt and Thailand have little in common, except for one thing. In both countries, at different times, educated people who pride themselves on being democrats have ended up applauding military coups against elected governments. They had resisted oppressive military regimes for many years. But, in Thailand in 2006, as in Egypt last month, they were happy to see their political leaders ousted by force.

This perversity is not without reason. The elected leaders in both countries, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand and Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, were good examples of illiberal democrats: they tended to view their electoral success as a mandate to manipulate constitutional norms and behave like autocrats.

They are not alone in this respect. In fact, they are probably typical of leaders in countries with little or no history of democratic government. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is in the same camp. And if the leaders of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had been allowed to take power in 1991, after their early success in a democratic election, they would almost certainly have been illiberal rulers. (Instead, they were crushed by a military coup, before a second round of elections could take place, triggering a brutal eight-year civil war in which an estimated 200,000 people died.)

The aftermath of the 2006 coup in Thailand was not nearly so bloody. But the bitterness lingers among Shinawatra’s supporters – even now, when his sister, Yingluck, is Prime Minister. Street violence is a constant threat. Only the frail and ailing 85-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej still functions as a symbol of national cohesion. Without him, fighting between the rural poor and the urban elites could quickly erupt again. This does not bode well for Thai democracy. Another military intervention is the last thing the country needs.

In Egypt, things look far worse at the moment. The leader of the military coup, General Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi, has promised to confront Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood with maximum force. In two separate incidents in July, security forces opened fire on supporters of the Brotherhood as they peacefully protested against Morsi’s ouster and arrest, killing almost 200 people. Secret-police units that were active under former President Hosni Mubarak (and known for their frequent use of torture) are being reconstituted for the first time since the 2011 revolution.

None of this is either democratic or liberal. And yet many Egyptians, including some human-rights activists, have endorsed it.

One man, who was savagely stomped by a member of the armed forces in Tahrir Square in 2011, now claims that the Egyptian people should “stand together” with the military, and that all Muslim Brotherhood leaders should be arrested. A prominent democracy activist, Esraa Abdel Fattah, has denounced Morsi’s party as a gang of foreign-backed terrorists.

The army leadership is saying the same thing: Special measures, maximum force, and revived security units are all necessary to “fight terrorism.”

Some foreign commentators have been as deluded as Egyptians who back the coup. A well-known Dutch novelist voiced a rather typical response, saying that he didn’t care much what happened to Morsi’s supporters, for they were all “Islamo-fascists” anyway. And foreign governments, including that of the United States, are averting their eyes. President Barack Obama’s administration refuses to describe what happened as a “coup.” US Secretary of State John Kerry even claimed that the military was “restoring democracy.”

There is no doubt that Morsi’s government was inexperienced, often incompetent, and showed little interest in listening to views other than those of its supporters, which were often far from liberal. But Morsi’s people are not foreign-backed terrorists. Nor was Morsi an Egyptian version of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The election that brought Morsi to power gave a political voice for the first time to millions of people, many of them poor, uneducated, and religious. They may not have been very good democrats, or even particularly tolerant of different views. Many of them had opinions – for example, on the role of women, on sex, and on the place of Islam in public life – that secular liberals find abhorrent. But silencing these people by force, and calling them foreign-backed terrorists, can have only one result: more violence.

If the outcomes of democratic elections are not respected, people will seek other means to make themselves heard. Morsi’s autocratic inclinations may have damaged democracy; taking him out in a coup deals it a mortal blow.

How to bridge the gap in developing countries between secular, more or less Westernized urban elites and the rural poor is an old question. One solution is to enforce secular modernization by oppressing the poor and their religious organizations. Egypt has already endured the harsh rule of secular police states, of both the right and the left. The other solution is to give democracy a chance.

This is not possible without allowing some form of religious expression in public life. No democracy in the Middle East that fails to take account of Islam will work. But, without the freedom to express other views and beliefs, democracy will remain illiberal.

This is hard for Islamist parties to accept. Many Islamists may in fact prefer an illiberal to a liberal democracy. But liberals who truly favor democracy must accept that Islamists are entitled to play a political role, too. The alternative is to revert to illiberal autocracy. Applauding the military coup against Morsi makes this the more likely outcome.

Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College.

Some critics complain that US President Barack Obama campaigned on inspirational rhetoric and an ambition to “bend the arc of history,” but then turned out to be a transactional and pragmatic leader once in office. In this respect, however, Obama is hardly unique.

Many leaders change their objectives and style over the course of their careers. One of the great transformational leaders in history, Otto von Bismarck, became largely incremental and status quo-oriented after achieving the unification of Germany under Prussian direction. Likewise, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign-policy objectives and style were modest and incremental in his first presidential term, but became transformational in 1938 when he decided that Adolf Hitler represented an existential threat.

Transactional leadership is more effective in stable and predictable environments, whereas an inspirational style is more likely to appear in periods of rapid and discontinuous social and political change. The transformational objectives and inspirational style of a leader like Mahatma Gandhi in India or Nelson Mandela in South Africa can significantly influence outcomes in fluid political contexts, particularly in developing countries with weakly structured institutional constraints.

By contrast, American foreign-policy formation is highly constrained by institutions like Congress, the courts, and the constitution. Thus, we would expect less opportunity for transformational leadership.

But even the US Constitution is ambiguous about the powers of Congress and the president in foreign policy. At best, it creates what one constitutional expert called “an invitation to struggle.” Moreover, much depends on external conditions. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman developed transformational objectives only in response to external events after they entered office.

Crisis conditions can liberate a gifted leader from the accumulated constraints of vested interests and bureaucratic inertia that normally inhibit action in the American system. Bill Clinton, caught up in the complacent 1990’s, is said to have envied Franklin Roosevelt’s crisis conditions of the 1930’s.

In such situations, action becomes more fluid. A leader with transformational objectives faces better odds, and an inspirational style is more likely to find responsive followers and to make their role more relevant. For example, George W. Bush used the crisis conditions after September 11, 2001, in the service of an assertion of executive power, as well as to invade Iraq.

But, while turbulent times may set the stage for transformational leaders, it does not follow that bold and risk-loving leaders are always best suited to address the crises that define such periods. President George H. W. Bush, unlike his son, was transactional, but implemented a very successful foreign policy.

Whether they are transformational or incremental in their objectives, leaders need certain soft- and hard-power skills to be effective. Among the soft-power skills are emotional intelligence (self-control and the ability to use emotional cues to attract others); vision (an attractive portrait of the future that balances ideals, objectives, and capabilities); and communication (the ability to use words and symbols to persuade both an inner circle and a broader audience). For the use of hard-power resources, two skills are particularly important: organizational capacity and a Machiavellian proficiency in bullying, buying, and bargaining to form winning coalitions.

Above all, effective leadership requires contextual intelligence and an intuitive diagnostic ability that helps a leader understand change, set objectives, and align strategies and tactics accordingly. As Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, once told me, a leader must be a quick learner, test reality, be prepared to change his mind as conditions change, and act calmly in a crisis.

Contextual intelligence implies both a capability to discern trends in the face of complexity and adaptability while trying to shape events. Bismarck once referred to this skill as the ability to intuit God’s movements in history, and seize the hem of His garment as He sweeps past. More prosaically, leaders with contextual intelligence, like surfers, have the ability to judge and adjust to new waves and ride them successfully.

Leaders of this type not only adapt their style to the situation and to their followers’ needs; they also create flows of information that “educate their hunches.” This involves the ability to size up group politics and understand the positions and strengths of various stakeholders in order to decide when and how to use transactional and inspirational skills. It is the self-made part of luck.

This skill is crucial in unstructured situations, when it is often more difficult to ask the right questions than it is to get the right answers. Leaders with contextual intelligence are good at providing meaning or a road map by defining the problem that a group confronts. They understand the tension between the different values involved in an issue, and how to balance the desirable with the feasible. In particular, contextual intelligence requires an understanding of groups’ cultures; the distribution of power resources; followers’ needs and demands; information flows; and timing.

Contextual intelligence is particularly important in foreign policy, because an effective leader must understand the culture and power structure of other societies, and how they interact as an international system. With years of experience in foreign affairs, George H. W. Bush had excellent contextual intelligence. With almost no experience in foreign affairs, “W” did not. That gap proved the difference between the success of the father and the failure of the son.

Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, is University Professor at Harvard University.

European policymakers have decided that they must be seen to be “doing something” about youth unemployment. A special summit of Europe’s heads of state has been called, and a “Youth Employment Initiative,” proposed at the EU Council of Ministers’ meeting in February, aims to “reinforce and accelerate” measures that were recommended in a “Youth Employment Package” in December 2012.

This activism comes mainly in response to the latest alarming figures on youth unemployment in southern Europe, with sky-high rates of joblessness widely regarded as politically unacceptable. But there are several reasons to doubt that youth unemployment is a discrete problem meriting special treatment. Indeed, official youth unemployment statistics are misleading on two counts.

First, the data refer to those from 15 to 24 years old. But this age group consists of two sub-groups with very different characteristics. The “teenagers” (15-19 years old) should mostly still be in school; if not, they are likely to be very low skilled – and thus to have difficulty finding a full-time job even in good times. Fortunately, this group is rather small (and has been declining in size over time).

Unemployment among those aged 20-24 should be more troubling. Members of this cohort who are seeking full-time employment have typically completed upper secondary education, but have decided not to pursue university education (or have completed their university studies early).

Second, the data on youth unemployment are based on active labor-market participants. But labor-market participation averages just 10% among teenagers in Europe. (Teenage activity rates come close to 50% only in countries like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, where having a part-time job while in school is very common.)

Labor-market experts thus consider the unemployment rate a potentially misleading indicator, because a youth unemployment rate of 50% does not mean that half of the young population is unemployed. That is why one should look at the unemployment ratio – the percentage of the unemployed in the reference population – rather than at the unemployment rate.

Indeed, this indicator paints a somewhat less alarming picture than that created by the headline youth-unemployment rate of more than 50% in Spain, or even the 62.5% rate recently reached in Greece. The youth-unemployment rate in Greece does not mean that close to two-thirds of young Greeks are unemployed. Only 9% of Greek teenagers are labor-market participants; two-thirds of that number cannot find a job. The unemployment ratio among teenagers in Greece is thus less than 6%. But this figure is not reported widely because it is much less alarming.

Among those in the 20-24 age group, the difference between the reported unemployment rate and the percentage of youth without a job and looking for one (the unemployment ratio) is less stark. But, even among this age group, one finds that the unemployment ratio is often about one-half of the widely reported unemployment rate.

Moreover, one must ask how much youth unemployment contributes to total unemployment. Looking at the problem this way reveals a completely different picture from the one usually presented.

In those countries where the problem makes the biggest headlines (the eurozone’s south, with Greece and Spain supposedly the worst cases), youth unemployment accounts for less than a quarter of overall unemployment. By contrast, youth unemployment contributes relatively much more (about 40%) to overall unemployment in countries like Sweden and the UK. One could argue that the latter two should worry about their youth unemployment more than Spain or Greece should.

The fact that youth unemployment is just a part of a larger problem leads to the real policy question: Why should officials spend limited time, energy, and public funding specifically on unemployed young people, rather than on all of the unemployed?

Does a teenager’s unemployment represent a greater loss to society than that of a single mother or an older worker, who might have been providing an entire family’s only income? The loss of the value added produced by a teenager is probably much lower.

In purely economic terms, one could thus argue that youth unemployment (especially teenage part-time unemployment) is much less important than unemployment among those who are in their prime earning years. Moreover, young people have the option of continuing their education, thus adding to future earnings power, whereas continuing education is a much less viable alternative for their elders.

Europe has a general macroeconomic problem, owing to demand factors that interact with a rigid labor market, rather than a specific youth-unemployment problem. This implies that there is no need for ad hoc measures for young people, which merely risk overloading welfare systems with even more exemptions and special rules.

Daniel Gros is the Director of the Center for European Policy Studies.

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The euro crisis and Queen Elizabeth’s recent Jubilee seem to have nothing in common. In fact, together they impart an important lesson: the power of a positive narrative – and the impossibility of winning without one.

Commenting on the Jubilee’s river pageant and horse parade, historian Simon Schama talked to the BBC about “little boats and big ideas.” The biggest idea was that Britain’s monarchy serves to connect the country’s past to its future in ways that transcend the pettiness and ugliness of quotidian politics. The heritage of kings and queens stretching back across more than a millennium – the enduring symbolism of crowns and coaches, and the literal embodiment of the English and now the British state – binds Britons together in a common journey.

Cynics might call this the old bread-and-circuses routine. But the point is to fix eyes and hearts on a narrative of hope and purpose – to uplift, rather than distract, the public. Are Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and other Europeans really supposed to embrace an austerity program imposed on them because prevailing wisdom in Germany and other northern countries considers them profligate and lazy? Those are fighting words, creating resentment and division just when unity and burden-sharing are most needed.

Greece, in particular, now needs a way to connect its past with its future, but no monarch is forthcoming. And, as the cradle of the world’s first democracy, Greece needs other symbols of national renewal than scepters and robes. It is through Homer that virtually all Western readers first encounter the Mediterranean world: its islands and shores and peoples knit together by diplomacy, trade, marriage, oil, wine, and long ships. Greece could once again be a pillar of such a world, using its current crisis to craft a new future.

That vision is more plausible than one might think. Natural-gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean are estimated to hold up to 122 trillion cubic feet, enough to supply the entire world for a year. More gas and large oil fields lie off the Greek coast in the Aegean and Ionian Seas, enough to transform the finances of Greece and the entire region. Israel and Cyprus are planning joint exploration; Israel and Greece are discussing a pipeline; Turkey and Lebanon are prospecting; and Egypt is planning to license exploration.

But politics, as always, intervenes. All countries involved have maritime disputes and political disagreements. The Turks are working with Northern Cyprus, whose independence only they recognize, and regularly make threatening noises about Israel’s drilling with the Greek Cypriot government of the Republic of Cyprus. The Greek Cypriots regularly hold the EU hostage over any dealings with Turkey, as has Greece. The Turks will not let Cypriot ships into their harbors and have not been on speaking terms with the Israelis since nine Turkish citizens were killed on a ship that sought to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Lebanon and Israel do not have diplomatic relations.

In short, the riches, jobs, and development that would flow to all countries in the region from responsible energy exploitation may well be blocked by the insistence of each on getting what it regards as its fair share and denying access to its enemies.

The vision of a Mediterranean Energy Community thus seems destined to remain a pipedream. Yet July will bring the 60th anniversary of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) among France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg only six years after the end of World War II. During the previous 70 years, Germany and France had fought each other in three devastating wars, the last two of which ruined Europe’s economies and decimated its population.

These countries’ mutual hatred and suspicion was no less bitter and deep-seated than that afflicting the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, with the assistance of his counselor Jean Monnet, announced a plan for the ECSC in 1950, only five years after German troops had left Paris, with the aim of making “war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.” Schuman proposed putting Franco-German coal and steel production under a common High Authority, thereby preventing the two sides from using the raw materials of war against each other, and powering a common industrial economy. The ECSC became the core of today’s European Union.

The EU today is on the ropes, but only a few concrete steps by European leaders might open the door to similarly bold diplomacy that could restore EU and Mediterranean economies and transform the energy politics of Europe and Asia. If the European Parliament and the European Council were to take steps to make direct EU trade with northern Cyprus subject to qualified majority voting rather than consensus (and hence veto by Cyprus), the EU would be able to begin trading with northern Cyprus, and Turkey could begin trading with Cyprus as a whole. These steps could lead in turn to a Turkish, Cypriot, and Greek energy partnership that would provide positive incentives for Turkish-Israeli reconciliation.

The Schuman Plan took two years to crystalize and a decade to implement. But it gave war-torn and desperately poor Europeans a positive vision of a new future, something that Greece and Cyprus, not to mention Middle Eastern and North African countries, desperately need. Europe’s leaders will not surmount this crisis by pounding their citizens with bleak demands for austerity. They must take concrete steps, with Greece as a full and equal partner, to create a vision of real rewards from a rejuvenated EU.

The EU does not have a Queen Elizabeth. What it needs is another Schuman and Monnet.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department and a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

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A few years ago, two Norwegian researchers presented their version of a scientific-research slippery slope, with honest errors (mistaken observations and analyses) at the top and intentional fraud (plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication) at the bottom. They placed “publication bias” about halfway down the scale – but it should have been much lower. Indeed, failure to publish research results is by far the most common and worrying form of scientific and ethical misconduct in health research – and it has had lethal consequences.

Anecdotal evidence of publication bias has existed for a long time. But, as requirements for registering clinical trials have become more stringent, its magnitude has become quantifiable: the results of at least half of the clinical trials involving patients and healthy volunteers remain unpublished years after completion. Studies with “negative” results are particularly unlikely to see the light of day. But neglecting to report research can lead to distorted clinical-practice recommendations, suffering, and death.

For example, anti-arrhythmic drugs were prescribed widely – with the United States Food and Drug Administration’s approval – to heart-attack victims for more than a decade, under the assumption that reducing heart-rhythm abnormalities would decrease mortality rates. But, as the investigative journalist Thomas J. Moore reported in his book Deadly Medicine, at the peak of their use, these drugs were killing more Americans each year than were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

Following this revelation, a British research team reported a clinical trial that they had carried out more than a decade earlier. Their study had found a higher death rate among patients receiving a new anti-arrhythmic drug than among those receiving a placebo. They had not published the results, they explained, because the drug’s development had been abandoned for commercial reasons. In retrospect, however, they observed that their results “might have provided early warning of trouble ahead.”

Beyond avoidable suffering and death, failure to report research also slows the pace of scientific discovery. It is widely acknowledged that the high current level of investment in pharmaceutical research is yielding too few substantive discoveries.

At a meeting on “translational research,” a senior member of a contract-research organization – a company that provides outsourced research services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries – articulated the problem. “What really frustrates us,” he commented, “is to be commissioned by a pharmaceutical company to design an early-phase trial when we know already that it is going up a blind alley. And the reason we know that is that we’ve been up the blind alley with another company; but that experience remains unreported for commercial reasons.”

In other words, the drug-discovery process suffers from built-in inefficiency, owing to inadequate reporting. But, while waste may be tolerable, avoidable harm to patients is not. Drug-trial volunteers should not accept this abuse of their participation in research. Failing to publish the results of clinical trials is a betrayal of the implicit trust that they have placed in researchers to use their contribution to increase and improve the stock of scientific knowledge.

Nor should the public accept this squandering of resources. There is simply no justification for withholding the results of health-research studies. Publication is a moral imperative.

Iain Chalmers is a British health-services researcher, a founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, and the coordinator of the James Lind Initiative.

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Vladimir Putin’s recapture of the Russian presidency has been met with widespread derision, both at home and abroad. But the autocrat’s return to the Kremlin could be Russia’s best hope to escape stagnation.

With his open contempt for Russian society – exemplified in his mocking response to widespread demonstrations – as well as his arrogance, readiness to stifle dissent, and fear of competition, Putin has singlehandedly quashed the long-held myth that he himself propagated: personalized power can modernize the country while preserving stability.

To be sure, Putin’s Kremlin – and his corrupt cohorts – still calls the shots. And, while his decision to return to the presidency has vexed the most dynamic elements of Russia’s urban population, the rest of the country’s citizens remain unhappy but quiescent. Likewise, Russia’s demoralized intellectuals and political class, on whom the population relies to advocate change, neglect to act. The global rise in oil prices, endemic fear of change, lack of a viable alternative, and reliance on state hand-outs are keeping Russia in a state of inertia.

Moreover, Putin’s Kremlin has used the West – eager for engagement and a policy “reset” with Russia – to legitimize its authoritarian rule and to provide opportunities for its venal cronies’ integration into Western society. Indeed, by using the West to launder their dirty money, Putin and his cohorts have, in a way, avenged the Soviet Union’s collapse by undermining the West’s principles and discrediting liberal democracy in the eyes of the Russian population.

But cracks are forming in Russian society, threatening the status quo. And it is not the opposition or a popular rebellion that are beginning to destabilize Putin’s regime, but the very forces that have helped to keep it afloat.

After waiting 12 years for change from the top, Russians finally understand that their political system can be transformed only from the bottom – through popular revolution. In the absence of institutional channels for expression of their grievances over the corrupt concessions that have preserved the ruling elite’s power, they must take to the streets.

But the question remains: Will Russia this time escape its traditional final act, in which the new regime turns out to be more predatory than the previous one? Or will Russians find a way to pursue peaceful revolution?

Today, the Kremlin is contributing to its own violent demise, intentionally demoralizing Russian society. It discredits liberalism by employing liberal rhetoric and appointing liberal leaders to administer its authoritarian rule, leaving political opposition to leftist parties and nationalists.

And Putin’s return to the Stalinist practice of sending police to search opponents’ homes, combined with his attempts to ignite hostility between social groups – for example, between provincial Russia and the urban middle class – is deepening antagonism and distrust among citizens. In this way, Putin’s regime intensifies political dissenters’ longing for retaliation – thereby hindering peaceful change.

Already, longstanding tensions have begun to boil over; tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets since Putin’s 2011 announcement that he would reclaim the presidency. His return to the Kremlin has incited some of the largest protests that Moscow has seen since the 1990’s. And, while popular demonstrations have diminished – largely as a result of draconian new anti-protest laws – the more conflict accumulates beneath the surface, the more devastating the eventual explosion will be.

By censoring the media, discrediting moderate opposition, and provoking popular discontent, Putin is playing with fire. It is impossible to predict when Russia will detonate, but the system’s fissures are undeniable – and growing.

The Kremlin, far from being able to control the situation, does not fully grasp what is happening. Russia is moving toward precipice. Massive capital flight and efforts by Kremlin cronies to engineer a safe landing for themselves in the West show that, even in the eyes of Putin’s cohorts, the end of his époque is approaching.

Yet Putin’s Kremlin continues to work tirelessly to prevent the formation of a strong opposition – increasing the risk that the regime will collapse without a viable alternative. The longer Putin remains in power, the more devastating his regime’s final act will be.

Both Russia and the West must begin to plan ahead. Regrettably, Russia’s awakening corresponds with the beginning of the West’s seeming decline. Still, rather than remaining complicit in Putin’s corrupt regime, the West must help the Russian people to seek their new destiny.

And Russia’s citizens must not give up hope. Putin’s return to the Kremlin, although painful, could end up curtailing their agony by triggering the regime’s destruction. When the choice is between an outdated system’s implosion and its slow degradation, a swift, clean break typically offers better prospects for a new start.

Lilia Shevtsova is Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow.

Last Tuesday, amid the closing gasps of the Feria del Libro, we were chatting with Conrado Zuluaga; Juan Esteban Constaín mentioned the ancient practice of sortes vergilianæ, a form of bibliomancy based on opening Virgil's Aeneid at random, in the belief that the verses one finds will describe one's fate.

Many other books have been used in the same way -- needless to say the Bible is one such, perhaps the Koran is used this way among Muslims. We know the Greeks would do the same thing with Homer's poems -- would take the Odyssey, for example, open it at random, would be scared to death or die of happiness, would make their important decisions based on what they saw happening to poor Ulysses. I've known people, more or less reasonable adults -- granted they were writers -- who in moments of doubt or uncertainty would dip into Rememberance of Things Past -- a book apparently possessed of no lesser prophetic ability than that of ancient Virgil. At one point I asked a friend whether Proust's novel could really offer answers to any question; "In seven volumes of 300 pages each," came the rationally superstitious reply, "it would be difficult for it not to contain everything."

To be sure, prophecy is not what it once was: the beauty of the Virgilian Lottery has little in common with Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky"; where once we combed through the pages of the Aeneid, we now turn to the self-help section, to Chopra and Coelho. But this is not to say that we (we who live our lives among  books) have given up on older forms of superstition; we turn to them ironically, playfully, (perhaps) without believing in them. Every author of fiction is familiar with these moments -- walking aimlessly around your house, pacing in circles in your hotel room, wondering what the next line of your story will be; it is not unheard-of to resolve the problem, in the end, by opening at random some other writer's volume. I have found Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina to be of use from time to time; also an anthology of Irish poetry edited by Seamus Heany; also Philip Roth's novels. But one book has never failed me, a nine-pound tome that I always keep within reach: The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I find that opening this book will loosen the most stubborn writer's block.

My friend Hisham Matar, the Libyan author, has hit on an infallible method for discovering the character -- the literary character, that is to say -- of any book: the 11th line of the 99th page. What is written here is, according to Matar, the soul of the book, indeed it may well be a commentary on the author of the book as well. Thinking I will test it out, I dip in to some books that I have on hand at the moment. In Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee: "He does not understand." In Putrid Fatherland, essays by W.G. Sebald, the 11th line is a blank line between paragraphs; this strikes me as elegant. In A Week of 15 Years, Vladdo's memoir about the Revista Semana journal, I find a group of people playing Tetris -- is journalism the art of fitting the blocks together? I don't know; suddenly I decide to bring the two methods together, Virgil's and Matar's, and I look at the 11th line of the 99th page of my Aeneid. I find the following words: "Where are we bound, with this dispute? Why not agree, better, to a lasting peace?"

In just six months, from the end of September 2011 to March 2012, Russia was transformed. The state’s gradual decomposition – its degenerate ethos of rent-seeking and appropriation of public goods – finally pushed Russia’s citizens, especially its young post-communist middle class, into the streets. Soviet-era deference to paternalistic leaders gave way to self-confidence and distrust of established authority.

Or did it? Vladimir Putin and his regime, caught off guard by last winter’s massive protests, were on the verge of panic. But, after last month’s presidential election returned Putin to the office, the protest wave rapidly subsided. Rallies shrank to one-tenth their previous size. With expectations of immediate success unmet, the romantic impulse wilted. It was clear what to do in confronting electoral fraud; what to do later, after the defeat, was not. The protests’ leaders could formulate no new goals and slogans.

Moreover, between the parliamentary elections of last December and the presidential election in March, the authorities began to seize the initiative. Putin’s presidential placeholder, Dmitri Medvedev, proposed political reforms and started meeting with representatives of opposition parties, which also had a demobilizing effect.

The authorities no doubt perceived the decline in street activity as a victory, which they immediately sought to consolidate by using the security forces to suppress future protests. Courts hearing allegations of falsified election results generally ignored clear evidence of legal violations. To many, the protest movement had been defeated.

But there was no real victory for the country’s power elite; nor was society defeated. The protests reflected irreversible changes. Russian society has become a dry peat bog, waiting for a spark to ignite it.

Of course, the reforms announced by the government were the simulated sort that have been a staple of Putin’s rule. But, even as the authorities try to dilute their own initiatives – for example, resumption of elections for regional governors, removal of barriers to party registration, or the establishment of independent public television – they have provided new opportunities for political participation.

But what is happening in Russian society is more important. In Moscow, the presidential election coincided with the election of municipal leaders. Those in power, concerned about alienating voters, increasingly sought to hide their affiliation with Putin’s United Russia party. And the municipal elections, previously the object of widespread indifference, attracted educated, active young people – the first “unwhipped generation” in Russian history – who not only challenged the incumbents, but won.

This bottom-up process is inestimably important to Russia’s future. And Moscow is not the only example. In several Russian cities, the opposition won mayoral elections. In Astrakhan, where the opposition candidate lost because of widespread voting fraud, the scale of street protests grew ten-fold, and the entire country has been stirred by the scandal. Nowadays, opposition leaders from Moscow and elsewhere travel to other cities and join the protests or become election observers.

That activity will need to continue. When asked in a recent interview about the fate of the Putin-Medvedev regime, Medvedev, now the prime minister, said: “It is now time to calm down, because the tandem is here for a long time.” But, while the “tandem” continues to see its main achievement as “stability,” what they now mean is the regime’s ability to stay in power “for a long time.”

To guarantee their understanding of “stability,” the tandem contrasts the continuous middle-class protests with a wave of regime-orchestrated demonstrations. As a result, the country is now swollen with all sorts of phobias – against sexual minorities, against the so-called “propaganda of sex” among young people, against critics of the Orthodox Church, and, as always, against the West.

It is difficult to predict the fate of such a blinkered regime. What we can say for sure is that only a democratic Russia will be able to survive within the country’s current borders. The alternative is collapse, unpredictable and merciless. Fortunately, the awakening of Russian society, the geographic broadening of political opposition, and the advent of a new generation unshackled by Soviet habits of mind and behavior has given the country an opportunity for genuine democratic reform that 12 years of Putinism had seemed to bury.

But Russia will choose not only between Putinism and democracy. Trying to ensure stability, the regime is awakening forces that it will not be able to control. The nationalism and homophobia that Putin and Medvedev have mobilized against the liberal wave is more dangerous to them – and their plan to swap jobs with each other indefinitely – than the liberals and leftists are.

Russia can go down three paths: democracy, which would preserve the country and provide prosperity for its citizens; the dead end of Putininism; or an orgy of nationalist obscurantism. Either of the second two scenarios would increase dramatically the likelihood of Russia’s eventual disintegration.

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In recent days, we have seen an unravelling in the political foundations of the Eurozone’s fiscal compact. The most recent casualty was Mark Rutte’s government in the Netherlands. Precarious at the best of times, the government’s proposed budget cuts of up to 16 billion Euros failed to win over the Freedom Party leader, Geert Wilders. Wilders withdrew his support for the government, leaving it to rely on a spattering of small parties across the Dutch parliament. Rutte claims that the country must pass the new budget by the 30th April, the deadline given to the Hague by the European Commission, the latter donning its hat as agent of budgetary approval for national governments. Many in the Netherlands disagree and any election is likely to be cast as a referendum on the Euro.

In France, the success of the far right National Front in the first round of the Presidential elections last Sunday has put France’s role in Europe under the spotlight. One of Marine Le Pen’s most publicized demands was that France leave the Euro. Turning their attention to National Front supporters, both second round candidates – Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande – have taken the anti-EU sentiment on board. Hollande promises to redesign the fiscal compact so that it focuses more on growth and job creation. Sarkozy has begun to speak about politically controlling the European Central Bank and has taken a tough line on Europe’s immigration laws.

In Ireland, as a referendum on the fiscal deal approaches, a large part of the population is undecided. Recent polls suggest that up to 40% of the population is unsure how it will vote on the 31st May. And in Greece, the forthcoming elections may well challenge the political consensus built up behind the country’s deal with its creditors.

This unravelling of political support for Eurozone agreements is not just a product of a far right surge across Europe. Many of the criticisms of the austerity measures reflect divided opinion at the very top of public life. That more austerity only leads to lower growth, which in turn leads to higher debt levels and thus a need for even more austerity, is recognized by many as a downward spiral associated with extreme cost-cutting by governments. The IMF has for a long timewarned against draconian cuts in government budgets that could stifle rather than encourage growth. In Greece, we have heard this argument coming from the opposition for some time and in the UK the Labour and Conservative Parties agreed in the run up to the 2010 election on the need for balanced budgets but disagreed about how quickly budgets should be brought back into balance. Elite opinion lacks consensus on the modalities of austerity policies and today’s disagreements reveal some of the problems with the deficit-reduction assumptions of the EU’s fiscal compact.

It is also clear that implementation problems are an inherent feature of European governance. Taking the case of the Eurozone, the fiscal compact reflects the way in which political decision-making has become separated from the ugly business of implementing unpopular policies. EU crisis management concentrates policymaking powers within the hands of executives. In the form of agreements between heads of state, brokered behind closed doors and in ways that are intended to mutually support each other in the difficult task of ruling in uncertain times, these policies are then passed down to the level of national ministries where the cuts and belt-tightening takes effect. And it is not coincidental that the focus at the EU level is on government spending. The far more difficult and longer term task of raising competitiveness is left up to national governments.

Such a radical separation between the decisions made and their implementation is evidence of the weak authority national governments command across Europe. They hope that by presenting at the domestic level something that has already been agreed by most member states, implementation will be made easier. The pan-European nature of the deal thus reflects the crisis in authority felt by national governments. They need this separation of policymaking from implementation in order to make implementation easier at the national level. We are seeing today that it does not always work.

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Despite skepticism regarding accommodation between Islamic and global finance, leading banks are buying Islamic bonds and forming subsidiaries specifically to conduct Islamic finance. Special laws have been enacted in non-Muslim financial centers – London, Singapore, and Hong Kong – to facilitate the operation of Islamic banks and associated financial institutions.

How should these developments be viewed from the perspective of Western finance and mainstream economic analysis? Does Islamic finance really constitute a viable alternative financial system?

The very fact that such a question is asked nowadays is significant. Not so long ago, Islamic finance was superficially dubbed a zero-interest-rate system that would lead to inadequate and inefficient resource mobilization and utilization. Ironically, mainstream central bankers today routinely use precisely such policies when pursuing massive “quantitative easing.”

There are two central precepts of Islamic finance: absolute prohibition on charging interest on financial transactions, and high moral standards on the part of lenders and borrowers. Interestingly, the best economic rationale for a zero-interest-rate system is provided in John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory:

“Provisions against usury are amongst the most ancient economic practices of which we have record….In a world, therefore, which no one reckoned to be safe, it was almost inevitable that the rate of interest, unless it was curbed by every instrument at the disposal of society, would rise too high to permit of an adequate inducement to invest.”

Keynes suggested that only a very low or zero interest rate could ensure continuous full employment and distributional equity. Keynes’s endorsement of such a policy does not necessarily make it right, but his analysis does suggest that it should be regarded as a serious proposition.

Importantly, although interest is prohibited under Islamic finance, profit is not; the latter is derived from various arrangements that combine finance and enterprise. In essence, this is a profit-sharing and risk-sharing system that is based entirely on equity finance.

Islamic finance thus contrasts with the current dominant system based on interest-bearing debt, in which risks are theoretically transferred to debt holders, but in practice are socialized during crises. Other things being equal, most economists will agree that debt finance leads to greater instability than equity finance.

It follows from the second major tenet of Islamic finance that if people adhered strictly to its ethical requirements, there would be fewer moral-hazard problems in Islamic banking. Moral hazard exists in all systems in which the state ultimately absorbs the risks of private citizens.

But, whether any particular system is efficient in avoiding moral hazard is a matter of practice, rather than of theory. Many would agree that, historically, Christian morality played an important role in the rise of Western capitalism. Secular capitalism, however, has experienced an erosion of values, whereby the financial sector has put its own interests above those of the rest of society.& If the ethical values in Islamic finance – grounded in sharia religious law – can further deter moral hazard and the abuse of fiduciary duties by financial institutions, Islamic finance could prove to be a serious alternative to current models of derivative finance.

Moreover, the basic tenets of Islamic finance force us to re-think the ethical basis of modern monetary arrangements, which have evolved into a global reserve-currency system founded on fiat money. In the past, gold had been the anchor of monetary stability and financial discipline, even if it was deflationary.

The test of any alternative financial system depends ultimately on whether it is – or can be – more efficient, ethical, stable, and adaptable than the prevailing system. For now, there is no Islamic global reserve currency and no lender of last resort. But the Islamic world is the custodian of huge natural resources that back its trading and financial activities.

As the Islamic world grows in stature and influence, Islamic finance will become a formidable competitor to the current financial system. The world would have much to gain if the two systems were to compete fairly and constructively to meet people’s needs for different types of finance.

Despite skepticism regarding accommodation between Islamic and global finance, leading banks are buying Islamic bonds and forming subsidiaries specifically to conduct Islamic finance. Special laws have been enacted in non-Muslim financial centers – London, Singapore, and Hong Kong – to facilitate the operation of Islamic banks and associated financial institutions.

How should these developments be viewed from the perspective of Western finance and mainstream economic analysis? Does Islamic finance really constitute a viable alternative financial system?

The very fact that such a question is asked nowadays is significant. Not so long ago, Islamic finance was superficially dubbed a zero-interest-rate system that would lead to inadequate and inefficient resource mobilization and utilization. Ironically, mainstream central bankers today routinely use precisely such policies when pursuing massive “quantitative easing.”

There are two central precepts of Islamic finance: absolute prohibition on charging interest on financial transactions, and high moral standards on the part of lenders and borrowers. Interestingly, the best economic rationale for a zero-interest-rate system is provided in John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory:

“Provisions against usury are amongst the most ancient economic practices of which we have record….In a world, therefore, which no one reckoned to be safe, it was almost inevitable that the rate of interest, unless it was curbed by every instrument at the disposal of society, would rise too high to permit of an adequate inducement to invest.”

Keynes suggested that only a very low or zero interest rate could ensure continuous full employment and distributional equity. Keynes’s endorsement of such a policy does not necessarily make it right, but his analysis does suggest that it should be regarded as a serious proposition.

Importantly, although interest is prohibited under Islamic finance, profit is not; the latter is derived from various arrangements that combine finance and enterprise. In essence, this is a profit-sharing and risk-sharing system that is based entirely on equity finance.

Islamic finance thus contrasts with the current dominant system based on interest-bearing debt, in which risks are theoretically transferred to debt holders, but in practice are socialized during crises. Other things being equal, most economists will agree that debt finance leads to greater instability than equity finance.

It follows from the second major tenet of Islamic finance that if people adhered strictly to its ethical requirements, there would be fewer moral-hazard problems in Islamic banking. Moral hazard exists in all systems in which the state ultimately absorbs the risks of private citizens.

But, whether any particular system is efficient in avoiding moral hazard is a matter of practice, rather than of theory. Many would agree that, historically, Christian morality played an important role in the rise of Western capitalism. Secular capitalism, however, has experienced an erosion of values, whereby the financial sector has put its own interests above those of the rest of society.& If the ethical values in Islamic finance – grounded in sharia religious law – can further deter moral hazard and the abuse of fiduciary duties by financial institutions, Islamic finance could prove to be a serious alternative to current models of derivative finance.

Moreover, the basic tenets of Islamic finance force us to re-think the ethical basis of modern monetary arrangements, which have evolved into a global reserve-currency system founded on fiat money. In the past, gold had been the anchor of monetary stability and financial discipline, even if it was deflationary.

The test of any alternative financial system depends ultimately on whether it is – or can be – more efficient, ethical, stable, and adaptable than the prevailing system. For now, there is no Islamic global reserve currency and no lender of last resort. But the Islamic world is the custodian of huge natural resources that back its trading and financial activities.

As the Islamic world grows in stature and influence, Islamic finance will become a formidable competitor to the current financial system. The world would have much to gain if the two systems were to compete fairly and constructively to meet people’s needs for different types of finance.

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But let's not go so far back, lest we be accused of being "obsessed with the past," "unable to turn the page" -- such things are anathema to the US media. We are dealing, in any case, with the worst massacre of civilians in the ten years of the US intervention in Afghanistan, a disgrace on the scale of Abu Ghraib. President Obama lost no time in apologizing, just as he had apologized a few days before for the burning of Korans -- and in reaction, the Republican candidates came down on him. We can examine this reaction from a few different angles.

First and most obvious: Maybe the Republicans are chasing the vote of their party's far-right base -- but they are missing an excellent opportunity to keep their mouths shut. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, each in his own way, reproached Obama for his apology as if it were an act of treason, something reprehensible and anti-American -- more anti-American, more reprehensible it would appear, than the massacre itself. They believe that offering an apology is a dishonor to the nation; and they have convinced the extremists who follow them that Obama is ashamed of the country he leads. And so they avoid questions of flesh and blood -- questions about how to revive the economy which the Bush administration decimated, questions about how to conduct the war which the Bush administration started with untruths and distortions: The Republicans, with their love of abstract moralizing, have opened a debate over the sense of shame evidenced by the president's apology.

Of course this is an exercise in willful hypocrisy. Just watching a few of the conservatives' fainthearted debates, one can see that they too are ashamed. Whether they admit it or not, is another question. I refer to an eloquent omission: In none of the debates -- and indeed not once in the campaign so far -- has there been a single mention of the previous Republican president, a president who was in power not four years but eight. It seems for the present candidates, his long terms of office never happened: when it comes to Bush they remain silent, they pass him over, they blot him out like the crazy, filthy uncle locked away in the attic before guests come over. His name can only be handled with protective gloves; one must creep by his eight years on tiptoes, without looking. It is because of this -- the exceptionally difficult problem presented by the previous Republican president's legacy -- that it  makes sense to fill the debates with  religion and sex and jingoism. The previous Republican president will make even the most confident candidate blush with shame.