La tentation totalitaire - Jean-François Revel

Quiconque ne comprend pas le fonctionnement des partis communistes ne comprend rien à la politique moderne.

Le monde actuel évolue vers le socialisme. Le principal obstacle au socialisme est non pas le capitalisme mais le communisme. La société socialiste future ne peut être que planétaire et elle ne se réalisera donc qu’au prix, sinon de la disparition des États-nations, tout au moins de leur subordination à un ordre politique mondial.

Le deuxième paragraphe cité ci-dessus, est le premier de La tentation totalitaire, ouvrage de Jean-François Revel paru en 1976. Ce paragraphe n’est qu’un résumé du livre, mais une prophétie qui s’avèrerait vraie à la fin de la Guerre Froide, quand les idéologies de gauche étaient tellement discréditées que le néolibéralisme Thatchérien et Reaganien  semblaient la seule voie économique et politique. La réalité donnerait la raison à Revel : le vrai socialisme ne peut avoir lieu que dans un système démocratique où les États-nations se dissolvent progressivement : l’Europe d’avant la crise, où l’État providence a atteint toute son ampleur, et où les frontières ont reculé  d’une façon spectaculaire, en est le témoignage.

Tout allait bien selon la carte de route revelienne jusqu’à 2008, lors du collapse des banques d’investissements Américaines et des grandes sociétés financières. L’Europe socialiste a disparu, en grande partie parce que les Allemands en ont marre de financer les pensions des Grecs, mais aussi parce que les banques étaient très à l’aise avec des taux d’imposition très élevées en théorie en retour d’un environnement régulatoire très flou. Aujourd’hui, il est clair que le communisme n’est pas un choix raisonnable, mais il n’est pas évident que le socialisme européen puisse revenir dans le moyen terme : tout au contraire, les masses sans espoir tournent de plus en plus vers ce qu’on appelait « extrême droite »  dans les années 90 et 2000.

Il est difficile à recommander ce livre : d’un côté, les thèses reveliennes sur le socialisme et le communisme sont toujours pertinentes ; d’un autre côté, le livre est tellement centré sur des débats de l’époque (le Chili d’Allende, la transition portugaise, les accords de Helsinki) qu’il peut éloigner les lecteurs modernes. L’irrelevance de La tentation totalitaire aujourd’hui n’est la faute à personne : Jean-François Revel était surtout un polémiste, pas un philosophe ; ses textes étaient censés d'être datés. En tout cas, le vidéo ci-dessous est un bon résumé du livre pour les audiences d’aujourd’hui.

Carbon for Water - Evan Abramson & Carmen Elsa Lopez

Carbon for Water is a movie about a project aiming to make Kenyans from the Western Province boil water using plastic filters donated by Vestergaard, a company manufacturing public health tools such as mosquito nets and water filters.

Though the project may sound like charity, Vestergaard would make money in the carbon finance market: Vestergaard PR team was smart enough to convince the Gold Standard Foundation (one of the two major accrediting bodies) that the carbon dioxide issued by Kenyans was enough to be offset by issuing carbon permits.

Carbon for Water won the Best International Short Film Award in the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival (2011), Best Short Documentary in the California International Short Festival (2011), was picked as the official selection of the Festival international du film d'environnement (2012), and was "highly commended" at the Development & Climate Days Film Competition, a side event at COP 17 in Durban, South Africa. The film and the project were also praised by the good-doers of the World Bank.

From a public relations point of view, Vestergaard's project was tremendously successful: a movie, kudos from development partners, and carbon-finance money. The development community, in its relentless search for funds, and in the context of has been recently joined by NGO people and other kind of characters with people skills who are very good at marketing ideas and concepts -Carbon for Water is a sign of the things to come...

However, from a public policy perspective, it is unclear whether Carbon for Water had any significant impact on the lives of the people this project was supposed to help. To begin with, this project is one more in the long list of well-intentioned initiatives that compete with the State as a provider of public services. There is a reason why "public services" are called that way, and ample evidence indicates that public services tend to be under-provided by the private sector. Water being the ultimate public good, I am afraid that Vestergaard's project will eventually fail.

Also, a quick google search shows a tremendously high number of laudatory comments from NGO people and only two critical comments by a guy named Kevin Starr. I was unable to find any impact evaluation, peer-reviewed article, or anything that really tells me whether this was a good idea. I personally don't think it is, but beyond my personal preferences, I would really like to see anything measuring the impact of this initiative on the Kenyans' living standards, not on the pockets of Vestergaard's shareholders -I'm sure they made a lot of money out of this.

Journal articles, randomized trials, and impact evaluations are boring and imperfect. They are also the kind of things that NGO people (mostly school dropouts or people with the white man's guilt) and donors (bureaucrats who actually hate under-developed countries) hate. But they are a better tool to know what works than a movie.

I am unable to recommend this movie until I get some serious evidence about the benefits it brought to the Kenyans in the long run.

Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson

Imagined Communities was first published in 1983. At the time, when fights over "Marxism" and "Capitalism" were still relevant and every concept was seen through the prism of these two ideologies, the book was considered as a History book. In 1991, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book was seen as a prophecy, similar to what happened to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations after 9/11. Today, Imagined Communities is a text book for students of nationalism and culture.

At the core of Anderson's argument is the idea that books printed in vernacular language and novels allowed members of the national bourgeoisies to communicate with each other, which allowed them to create, little by little, a common discourse that eventually ended up in the struggle to create Nation-States. If one assumes that Internet and cell phones changed the way people communicate with each other qualitatively with respect to books, it is easy to stretch the argument and buy the idea that Twitter, blogs, and cell phones will create new and different discourses that might change Nation-States. There is already  some academic evidence on how Internet has already changed the way in which we read and write.

The technological support determines what is written and who does it:

The first known texts are written in hard surfaces such as stone, an expensive and labor intensive activity that could be paid for only by large organizations such as empires. That's why the first written records are laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi.

Paper, clay, and papyrus lowered the costs of writing, which became an affordable activity that allowed the transmission of non-essential ideas such as religion more easily.

The printing press lowered even more the costs of passing ideas: novels, poems, and all kind of texts could be produced massively at a very low cost. Bourgeois could read, but also write very easily.

Twitter and the Internet represent the ultimate democratization of writing: anyone with a computer can create a blog or open a Twitter account and say whatever (s)he wants, with an added value: previous means of communication had some gatekeepers that guaranteed, up to an extent, the quality of whatever was published. Printing a book might have been cheap for some sectors of society, but a would-be writer still needed to convince the printer that his work was worth it. 

Gatekeepers have totally disappeared in the Internet age, resulting in a lot of noise and polarizing voices, but also in a richer debate in some cases -the blogosphere changed the terms and nature of the debate on Economics, to mention just one field. 

Internet is putting us in a more democratic and unregulated World. The left likes the "democratic" part, and the right likes the "unregulated" part. The result, like in most undemocratic and unregulated environments, is lack of depth. The clearest example is the United States, whose Founding Fathers found inspiration in the books by Locke and Montesquieu; the Tea Party, in Sarah Palin's tweets...

Internet and cell phones are changing the political debate, and they will eventually change Nation-States, just like books turned empires into Nation-States. It is obviously too early to say whether the final result will be  a more unified humankind or a multiplicity of isolated communities. Whatever we think the final result will be is pure speculation and a result of our preconceptions about human nature.

Il Gattopardo - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quielli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

Gran novela, magistralmente comentada por Javier Marías aquí.

Rukhnama - Saparmyrat Turkmenbashy

“Prophet Noah gave the Turkmen land to his son Yafes and his descendants.”

-Saparmyrat Turkmenbashy

The Central Asian countries are natural experiments on how to build nations out of states that were constructed artificially by the former colonizer. From that perspective, they differ from former colonial enclaves in Latin America and Africa, which had to build the nation and the state at the same time. For all its faults, the Soviet Union brought (some) material progress and education to a region that was previously inhabited by illiterate nomadic shepherds.

The context of the Central Asian countries pushes their leaders to find something that justifies the existence of their countries. Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev has the idea of turning his country into a second Singapore, even though Singapore based its development on becoming a World trade center, an industrial power, and a fiscal haven, whereas Kazakhstan’s main economic activity has selling gas to Russia over the last 20 years. Nazarbayev also sponsors Astana, which used to be one of the most successful cycling teams on earth, and has even paid consultants in Washington, DC to write books to sell the idea that Kazakhstan is the next big thing.

Contrastingly, Saparmyrat Turkmenbashy (his true last name was Niyazov, but I will use Turkmenbashy because that is the name he used to write Rukhnama) decided to create a non-existent national epic and describe what he considers as “Turkmen values” to convince Turkmens that their country must exist. Rukhnama is a book authored by Turkmenbashy while he was president of Turkmenistan. Aware that Heads of State usually do not have time to write books, he offers the following explanation as the motivation to write Rukhnama:

“I want to mention my private and personal reasons for the writing of Rukhnama and the other causes which led me to begin this work. What is the meaning of the Head of State writing on philosophical matters? This has to be explained in the light of the features of the era and the duties borne on my shoulders. Of course, had we lived in another epoch, I would only be occupied with state and political affairs and these would be enough. As it is, our era falls at the turn of the new millennium. In this period, five-or ten-year programmes are not sufficient for the needs of our state. At this time, it is necessary not only to establish a state but also to create a nation, for a netion needs far-reaching moral values and criteria. We have to seek and find ways in which these kinds of criteria can be provided through moral work and traditional and moral philosophies.”

The ultimate purpose of the book is to convince Turkmens that their ancestors were not shepherds and, on the contrary, were a fundamental component in World History. The values held by ancient Turkmens should be preserved. The book devotes large portions to narrate the epic of the Turkmen nation. At one point, Rukhnama was the only book sold in Turkmenistan, and students were forced to memorize passages of it.

Rukhnama was but one of Turkmenbashy’s efforts to create a Turkmen identity. Turkmenbashy also renamed the months and the days of the week using his mother’s and his own name. Turkmenbashy forbade Turkmen women to wear makeup. In addition to building several statues of himself, he erected a moving statue of Rukhnama in the center of Ashgabat that opens in the evening while an automated voice recites a passage of the book. I understand that the moving statue is currently out of service, but the spectacle used to be accompanied by fireworks.

Turkmenbashy may seem ludicrous but he was not an idiot. He knew very well that he needed to create some kind of national identity if his country was to survive. In fact, Turkmenbashy was not very different from some European medieval kings who tried to gain legitimacy by linking their dynasties (and therefore their vassals) to some glorious character. The medieval French historians, for instance, linked Clovis I, the king who unified the Franks, to the Trojans. It is not hard to see parallels between the cathedrals of the Middle Age, with all their colors and images, with Turkmenbashy’s bombastic book: both are designed to impress the masses.

Although the book has a religious air, Turkmenbashy avoided picking a fight with pious Muslims -although he would imprison the imam of Ashgabat for refusing to recite Rukhnama in the city's mosque.  Turkmenbashy tried to place his nation within the greatness of Islam and present it as a favored nation. The following passage is illustrative:

“Turkmen is a nation cherished and beloved by Allah. I understand this truth from this fact: since Allah the Most Exalted loves the Turkmen nation, he has let them live for 5000 years. If he didn’t love them, he would have removed them from history. For this reason, the Turkmen nation bears the great duty of preserving our religion, belief, national dignity, and national values; and the duty to transmit them to future generations without any change.”

In Rukhnama, Turkmenbashy created a national epic only he knows about. He recognizes that Turkmens were mostly shepherds before the Soviet Union, but that was the result of a long decay and a neglect of Soviet historians. The reason offered by Turkmenbashy as to why the history of his country (“the most developed country in the World” after Chenghis Khan died) is unknown to everybody is quite interesting:

“The achievements of the Oguzs between the 1^st and the 13^th centuries cannot be denied. It is undeniable truth that the Parfiya State, the Gaznalys, the Seljuks, and the Koneurgenchs affected the historical and political development of the world and reached a high level of accomplishment in the cultural and economic realms. But because some historians were Arab and Iranian in origin, they tried to connect all of these historical advances with Iran, or with the Arabs and later generalized them as Turkish… Our historians, brought up in the Soviet era, did not perceive the evil intentions of those historians writing without proper scrutiny of their work, and simply repeated their views. They did not realize that these ideas form part of an invading country’s imperialist purpose.”

Rukhnama is also filled with advices on living a decent life. He obviously advocates for protecting the poor, particularly the orphans (he claims to have been an orphan himself), true friendship, and all that. From a purely literary perspective, Rukhnama is the most boring book you can read, no matter how funny the cover looks. It is like a combination of the Ancient Testament without the pornographic parts (Song of the Songs), the violent parts, and the ridiculous parts (Ex. 17: 8 - 13) with a self-help book. Going through Rukhnama is really painful, probably as much as the physical tortures suffered by those who considered it bogus.

But if you think about it, Turkmenbashy’s main problem was that he was born in the wrong century. Had he been born in the Middle Age, he would be considered a virtuous king and not a lunatic. But now, in this age when nobody believes in anything, nationalism is judged in a negative way, and people care about human rights, his methods to provide his fellow countrymen with a homeland are considered to be wrong.

Nobody will know for sure if Turkmenbashy truly believed in the idea of a Turkmen nation or if he wanted to preserve a personal fiefdom to die in his bed, instead. Judging by his public policies, the second option seems the most accurate, however. Assuming that he just wanted to have a country for himself, he justified his personal wealth in a very funny way in Rukhnama

“The Turkmen nation has access to infinite wealth. Our citizens may become richer and richer if I distribute all we have to them. But are our people ready for such richness after 70 years of poverty?

It is too early to say whether Turkmenbashy’s experiment to create a Turkmen identity failed or not. The man will have some legitimacy as a freedom fighter among those who remember the Soviet era. Additionally, he made gas and water available for free, so he will be loved by the people who will lose those benefits when they become unaffordable.