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‘Obama Is Certainly A European’, Prof Ash

Interview: ‘Obama Is Certainly A European’

Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash discusses the demise of Europe’s social democrats, threats to the European Union posed by populist nationalists, the imminent change of government in Great Britain and America’s rapid slide to the left.

SPIEGEL: Professor Garton Ash, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression voters have turned away from the social democrats and socialists in European elections. Isn’t this paradoxical?

Timothy Garton Ash: I think there’s an explanation for it. First, voters apparently feel that the conservatives and liberals are more competent when it comes to economic policy. Second, we are witnessing a return to nationalism as a reaction to the great crisis. And when that happens, voters tend to move to the right rather than to the left, in some cases quite far to the right.

SPIEGEL: It would seem that leftists, the critics of capitalism, would stand to benefit from a crisis of capitalism.

Garton Ash: In essence, you have two social democratic parties in Germany, just as we do in Great Britain – with some minor differences. David Cameron’s Conservatives are taking (former Prime Minister) Tony Blair’s approach, except when it comes to European policy. And there is no decisive difference between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in Germany, at least not by the standards of the last century.

SPIEGEL: In other words, we lack ideological differences, and we are all social democrats?

Garton Ash: I think so. We are not talking about capitalism as such, but about the question of which form of capitalism works best in our country. And then there is the question of competency. Our governments are behaving more and more like managers. After 10 years, voters are dissatisfied with the current management, and along comes a new one.

SPIEGEL: The left lost its identity as a result of politicians like Tony Blair and (former German Chancellor) Gerhard Schroder, who believed in the free market and abandoned old social democratic principals. Isn’t that the reason for their defeat throughout Europe?

Garton Ash: I don’t think so. In each case, the voter is voting for a version of European social liberal democracy. Perhaps a party that calls itself conservative can provide him with the better social democracy.

SPIEGEL: At least 15 percent of the new European parliament will consist of right-wing extremists, protest parties and joke parties. What does this mean for Europe’s future?

Garton Ash: If I remember correctly, Bertolt Brecht said: “The womb is fertile still, which bore this fruit.” We are deluding ourselves if we believe that the temptation of xenophobia and national populism no longer exists, and we shouldn’t be surprised to see these forces being strengthened in the course of a major economic crisis. We must make the social market economy credible again as the central solution for the middle class.

SPIEGEL: How?

Garton Ash: There are two major domestic policy challenges for the European Union. First: Creating meaningful work for the majority of society. And second: the integration of fellow citizens of non-European descent. These are two sides of the same coin. After all, what are the populists and xenophobes saying, from Latvia to Portugal, and from Finland to Greece? They are saying: We’re in bad shape, and the others are at fault. Both parts of that sentence must be addressed politically.

SPIEGEL: In Great Britain, the racist British National Party has won two seats for the first time.

Garton Ash: The same thing also happened in Romania, Finland and Hungary. There are comparable developments everywhere. Until now, the Conservatives in Great Britain have always managed to neutralize the extreme right, just as the CDU/CSU has done in Germany. This time, not only has the BNP won its first two seats, but the anti-European U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) has even won more votes than Labor. Now that’s unsettling.

SPIEGEL: Do the successes of right-wing extremists and the defeat of the left also indicate a decline in solidarity among voters?

Garton Ash: Solidarity is certainly a European value, but our willingness to display solidarity also has narrow limits, especially toward the poor, and even more so when they are of non-European origin. This stems partly from the fact that we have developed social welfare states that are difficult to sustain, especially in global competition. The integration of immigrants in the United States is easier, because there is no social welfare state there.

SPIEGEL: While Europe slips to the right, the United States, under Barack Obama, is discovering the social market economy – and is slipping to the left.

Garton Ash: Soon they’ll be more European than we are.

SPIEGEL: How do you explain that?

Garton Ash: Six years ago, we had the manifesto of Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in connection with the discussion of the Iraq crisis, pitting Europe, with its socially progressive values against the United States. In that respect Obama, in terms of his system of values, is certainly a European. This is because the middle class in the United States has experienced the brutality and injustice of the unbridled Anglo-Saxon free market economy firsthand – in the healthcare system, for example.

‘The True European Elections Will Take Place in Germany in September’

SPIEGEL: The election was a European election, and yet Europe wasn’t really the issue at all. Instead, the election was about national politics. Does this demonstrate that Europe is not united at all, but in fact divided?

Garton Ash: I like to say that the true European elections will take place in Germany at the end of September. The German parliamentary election is certainly more important for the future of the European Union.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Garton Ash: At issue is the behavior of the most important member of the European Union, which is obvious. The competencies of the European Parliament have certainly grown, and I believe that voters underestimate its true influence. Nevertheless, the European Union is no direct democracy, nor will it become one anytime soon. I believe that voters sense this, and in this regard their behavior is completely rational.

SPIEGEL: The competencies of the European Parliament have been expanded, partly in the hope that this would increase voter turnout, and yet it was lower than ever this year.

Garton Ash: I believe that voter turnout will not improve in the foreseeable future, at least not as long as we are not prepared to take the big step toward a United States of Europe, and toward direct democracy. Almost nowhere in Europe are we prepared to do this. The parliament will remain a part of the European system, but the decisive elements will continue to be the European Council, the council of ministers and the cooperation among democratically elected governments.

SPIEGEL: Doesn’t the voters’ lack of interest show that political Europe has disengaged itself from its citizens?

Garton Ash: I believe that the European project is a victim of its own success. In each country, the pro-European argument, all national differences aside, took the same form: We were doing poorly, but thanks to Europe our lot will improve. But then comes the moment when we take Europe for granted, which raises the question: What is the purpose of this Europe?

SPIEGEL: And what is it?

Garton Ash: We need, for example, a common European foreign policy, so that we can defend our interest in an increasingly non-European world.

SPIEGEL: Are the words of Henry Kissinger still applicable …?

Garton Ash: … who was searching for a phone number for Europe? I believe, by the way, that he never said that. We did a lot of research at this university and were unable to find a source for the quote. In the end, I wrote to Henry Kissinger myself, and asked: Where did you say this? His response was wonderful. He wrote: I think I must have said it. I just don’t remember when and where. Of course, there is a kernel of truth to the remark. From Washington’s standpoint, or from Beijing’s or Moscow’s, Europe does not exist as a foreign policy player. And we must begin to exist.

SPIEGEL: Do you really believe that Germany or France would give up its own foreign policy? Don’t national interests always trump European interests?

Garton Ash: Why always? Why should something that was true in the past continue to apply in the future? The deutsche mark was the epitome of German identity, and yet the Germans gave it up. The history of the European Union over the last 50 years is a history of impossible things that happened, after all.

SPIEGEL: And how do we arrive at a common foreign policy?

Garton Ash: We don’t need a United States of Europe for that. What we need, most of all, is the political will of a strategic coalition of member states. It must include Germany, France and Great Britain, but others, as well. When that happens, it will be possible to pursue a common foreign policy.

SPIEGEL: But there is a big difference between giving up a currency and giving up one’s own foreign policy. Economically speaking, the Union is accepted as a success story, but political Europe is criticized. In Great Britain and Eastern Europe, skeptics of the European Union are calling for a return to a purely economic union.

Garton Ash: We already have a common foreign policy in the E.U. today – with regard to Tehran’s nuclear program, for example. And it is also accepted by the public. Now it is time to explain why it makes sense to pursue a common Russia policy, or a China policy, and why we are stronger together than individually.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t it a vote of no confidence against Europe when voters elect someone like the Romanian Paris Hilton, the president’s daughter, Elena Basescu, to the parliament, as well as Sweden’s Pirate Party, and jokesters and odd characters like Austrian populist Hans-Peter Martin?

Garton Ash: This is an indication of two things. First, voters are saying to themselves that the European Parliament isn’t all that important, so we can afford to elect a couple of pirates. Second – and this is something we see everywhere in Europe – there is a growing, deep dissatisfaction with the political class, to the point of a pre-revolutionary mood. The scandal over the expense accounts of British politicians we are currently experiencing is only one example among many.

SPIEGEL: What is the source of this deep dissatisfaction?

Garton Ash: I keep hearing the same thing from a wide range of people throughout Europe: The parliament is a self-service shop, and the political class is merely there to pursue its own interests.

SPIEGEL: But that view is borne out by the scandal surrounding British members of parliament who used government funds to buy plasma TVs and porn films.

Garton Ash: It’s really more complicated than that. The reason for this scandal is that politicians, almost 30 years ago, lacked the courage to approve better pay for members of parliament. That’s why they created this absurd system of so-called expenses, which were in fact allowances. As a result, all MPs became expense knights. And some of them were even real knights, right?

SPIEGEL: At the moment, it looks as though David Cameron will be the next British prime minister.

Garton Ash: Indeed.

SPIEGEL: Cameron is threatening to hold a referendum over the Lisbon Treaty. That would be a declaration of war on Europe. Do you think he’ll do it?

Garton Ash: If you were to inject a truth serum into David Cameron, he would probably have to confess to his secret hope that the treaty will be ratified by then. Then the referendum would no longer be necessary. I believe that, deep in his heart, he is not a euro-skeptic when it comes to Europe. The majority of his MPs and his foreign policy spokesman, William Hague, are euro-skeptics out of conviction. He has to use this rhetoric, especially because the UKIP did so well in the European election. And that’s why it is important for the European Union that the end of the Gordon Brown administration be drawn out for as long as possible.

SPIEGEL: Cameron is now trying to forge an alliance with Polish and Czech opponents of Europe in the European Parliament.

Garton Ash: Farce begets farce. Unfortunately, the man carelessly stated a position on the question of the European Parliament in 2005, when he was fighting for the leadership of the Conservatives. Aside from that, though, he learned an important lesson from Blair: Never commit to anything. But that’s why he must now remain true to himself, and is thereby compromising the British Conservatives. Suddenly they’re in bed with Latvian friends of the Waffen SS, Polish homophobes and Czech deniers of climate change.

SPIEGEL: Is Gordon Brown truly, as they say, the worst British prime minister since Neville Chamberlain?

Garton Ash: By no means. He isn’t a bad prime minister, as far as the content of his policies is concerned. I don’t know if the inexperienced David Cameron would have handled this major crisis more effectively. But as a personality, Brown is undoubtedly one of the weakest politicians. He makes one mistake after the next. He lacks the talent to sell his policies. He looks ridiculous when he tries in vain on YouTube, where he looks like a grandfather, to sell the people a solution to the expenses affair. He is hampered by the machinery of politics.

SPIEGEL: Does he lack the charisma?

Garton Ash: He lacks it completely. He hasn’t even managed to simply come across as a direct and upright character, which is something Angela Merkel has mastered. He could have been the Scottish Mr. Merkel. But he’s too Blairist for that. He wants to manipulate public opinion, and perhaps the worst thing is to try and fail in that endeavor.

SPIEGEL: Who is responsible for the demise of New Labor? Tony Blair or Gordon Brown?

Garton Ash: If this is its death, then it certainly had a nice life. In fact, it was quite successful: three legislative periods in a row, which is something Labor didn’t manage in 100 years. Besides, the Labor government is leaving behind a fairly substantial legacy – including Conservatives, who for the better part have adopted New Labor’s approach.

SPIEGEL: Couldn’t Labor be successful again, after all, perhaps with Alan Johnson as a new party leader?

Garton Ash: As a historian, I know that everything is possible in history, except cheating death. But I would bet a bottle of champagne that even the best Labor leader in the world will not win the next election.

SPIEGEL: What kind of a bottle?

Garton Ash: A magnum bottle, I would say.

You can read this Spiegel interview with Historian Timothy Garton Ash in context here:

www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,631359,00.html

This interview was in German, it was translated from the German for Spiegel by Christopher Sultan.

Source: www.reeinternetpress.com, 21.06.2009

June 22, 2009
DARK FAMILY SECRETS OF BNP LEADER NICK GRIFFIN

By David Jarvis

SURPRISE: The 1871 Census has Griffin’s great-grandfather George as a hawker living in a van

BNP leader Nick Griffin, who last week branded gypsies “anti social and criminal”, can trace his roots to travellers hawking cheap goods from a horse and cart.

The controversial MEP’s great-grandfather George Griffin roamed from town to town in a horse-drawn caravan with his wife Esther and their children, selling china and crockery.

Census reports show he spent years living the gypsy life, never settling in one place because as an impoverished traveller he was on the margins of society and never fully accepted anywhere.

Last week Griffin, 50, who condemned attacks on Romanian gypsies in Northern Ireland, said: “We have to bear in mind that the gypsy community is notorious for its extremely high rate of criminality and antisocial behaviour.

“Everyone in Romania and eastern Europe knows this and it is one reason why their governments are so keen to encourage them to come over here.”

Yet between 1868 and 1874 records show his great-grandfather represented just such a minority. He travelled in one caravan with his while his business partner, Mary Ann Hollis, travelled in another.

George habitually lied about his age, describing himself as 25 in the 1871 Census, 41 a decade later, 47 in the 1891 Census and 58 in 1901. He plied his precarious trade in Devon and Cornwall and could often be found parked outside the London Inn pub in Liskeard.

The 1871 Census shows the caravans were parked next to the Cornish pub, noting: “Six persons not in houses”. In the column marked “Houses” it reports them as living in vans.

While George lived with Esther, 22, and his 10-month-old son George Junior in one, Mary Ann Hollis, 37, was in the second with George’s three-year-old daughter Mary Ann Griffi n and a William Huxham, 16.

He is described as a servant but probably earned his keep selling wares. In the Census column marked “Rank, profession or occupation” George is a “licensed hawker dealing in china and crockery ware”.

His lifestyle would not have fitted with the intolerant views of Mr Griffin and the British National Party which does not accept black people as members.

“Griffin has called for an immediate halt to immigration, and voluntary resettlement of immigrants legally living in Britain.

When told this week of Mr Griffin’s heritage, shocked BNP deputy leader Simon Darby said: “That will please him.” Genealogy expert Nick Barratt added: “George Griffin travelled around, scratching a living. His group will have roamed from street to street like ragtag travellers trying to survive on their wits and selling their wares.

“And it is highly likely he spent many more years living the life of a traveller before he married.

“Today we would call his group travellers and just like today they would have been marginalised on the edge of society and seen as outsiders.

“They will have been treated with a degree of suspicion and as a minority.”

Source: www.express.co.uk, June 21, 2009

June 21, 2009
Fathers have become second-class citizens

Toby Young says that Father’s Day is nothing to celebrate: today’s neutered dads have become overworked assistants to their children rather than paternal role models

I cannot say I am looking forward to Father’s Day — not if it is anything like last Sunday. I was woken at 5.45 a.m. when my wife Caroline delivered a sharp jab to my ribs. Charlie, our one-year-old, was crying and it was my turn to get up. I knew from experience that there was no prospect of getting him back to sleep. My best hope was to whisk him down to the kitchen before his howls woke up the other three. For a blissful few minutes I thought I’d got away with it. I dumped Charlie in his playpen and fished Saturday’s Telegraph out of the bin. (Caroline always throws the paper away before I’ve had a chance to read it.) I was in the process of cleaning tomato soup off the sports section when Freddie, our two-year-old, started smashing his bottle against the side of his cot. That’s like the Bat Signal as far as our five-year-old daughter and four-year-old son are concerned. Seconds later, they were standing in front of me, demanding Coco Pops.

By the time Caroline got up I was completely done in — and the day had barely begun. Next, I had to take Sasha for a swimming lesson, then drive Ludo to ‘Little Kickers’, before rushing home to pick up Freddie and take him to ‘baby music’. Two sets of friends with their children arrived for lunch, which meant I had to cook two meals — fish fingers and peas for the children, Thai green curry for the adults. After lunch, I dropped Ludo off at a birthday party, took Sasha and a friend ice skating, then arrived home in time for ‘movie night’ — a weekly institution whereby all the neighbourhood kids take it in turns to watch films at each other’s houses. It was not my turn to play host, thank God — so instead I spent the time cleaning fish fingers and peas off the kitchen floor. After that it was supper, bath and bed, a task that never takes less than two and a half hours. It is not an exaggeration to say I haven’t opened a Sunday paper in five years.

Nearly every dad I know has a similar experience on Saturdays and Sundays. We are not fathers to our children — we are their overworked assistants. Jerry Seinfeld once joked that if a Martian landed in New York and saw a bunch of humans following behind their dogs, scooping up their poop and placing it in little plastic bags, he would conclude that dogs are in charge on this planet. He would think the same about children and their dads if he landed in London on an average weekend. Indeed, not just London, but virtually any city in the western world. And unlike in Jerry Seinfeld’s example, the Martian would be right.

The diminished authority of fathers is the subject of a new book by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball. In Home Game, he records his experience of modern fatherhood and contrasts it with that of his own father, who was largely uninvolved in his childhood. He points out that in the last few decades the marital contract has been renegotiated and men have had a huge number of parental responsibilities foisted upon them without getting anything in return. According to Lewis, the modern father now finds himself in a similar position to Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘Having shocked the world by doing the decent thing and ceding power without bloodshed for the sake of principle, he is viewed mainly with disdain.’

Home Game is essentially a comic treatment of the subject — a shrewd decision on Lewis’s part. In most educated western households it is perfectly acceptable for men to joke about being treated like unreliable employees by their wives, but woe betide the beleaguered dad who tries to mount a serious critique. Modern women have succeeded in stigmatising men who dare to complain about their predicament as sexist reactionaries. Proposing that men and women should embrace more traditional roles is akin to announcing that you’ve just joined the BNP. In this respect, I am no braver than Michael Lewis. Whenever the topic comes up at dinner parties, I compare myself to a white farmer in contemporary South Africa: I cannot help looking back nostalgically at the bygone era, but recognise that apartheid had to be dismantled in the name of social justice.

I wish I had a bit more courage, particularly as I have three sons. Among advocates of men’s rights, the main focus is on the iniquities of family law — and the bias shown towards women in custody agreements is clearly indefensible. But the people who suffer most from the diminution of paternal authority are adolescent males. A recent study by the Department for Children, Schools and Families discovered that white boys do worse in their GCSEs than Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, African and Chinese boys, not to mention girls from any background. The only groups that perform worse are ‘Traveller of Irish Heritage’, ‘Gypsy Roma’ and ‘Pupil in Care’.

Boys with a Caribbean heritage scarcely fare much better. The eminent African-American sociologist William Julius Wilson has long argued that one of the reasons young black men are responsible for a disproportionately high percentage of violent crimes is because of absentee fathers.

It might seem a bit of a stretch to link absentee Caribbean fathers with the middle-class pantywaists in my social circle, but the root cause is the same. How can we expect men, whether white or black, to embrace fatherhood with enthusiasm when there are so few positive role models in popular culture? An American study of how fathers were presented on television by the National Fatherhood Initiative discovered that they were portrayed as present and involved in children’s lives in only four out of 102 prime-time shows. The same is true of British television. Frank Gallagher, the alcoholic deadbeat in Shameless, is the norm rather than the exception.

This message is reinforced at schools, where children experience their first authority figures outside the home. The number of male teachers in secondary schools fell by 50 per cent between 1981 and 2001 and the ratio of female to male teachers in primary schools is now seven to one. It is hardly surprising that women now comprise 59.2 per cent of the national student population. Why would men want to continue their education when the message they’re bombarded with in the classroom is that they’re second-class citizens?

Home Game ends with Michael Lewis’s description of getting a vasectomy — at the request of his wife, naturally. Having submitted to metaphorical castration, he decides to go the whole hog. It reminded me of the final scene in Stepford Wives, in which we see the lobotomised Elizabeth Ross wandering down a supermarket aisle. He laughs off the indignities of the surgical procedure, as he does all the other humiliations his wife and children inflict on him, but beneath the jokes there’s a palpable sense of longing for a time when fathers weren’t objects of ridicule. I know just how he feels.

Spectator

June 21, 2009
Will Iran Look More Like Turkey, or Turkey Like Iran?

Nathan Gardels

Editor, NPQ, Global Services of Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media

"Crooke’s mission in this erudite and most readable book is to reassure America and the rest of the world that Hamas, Hezbollah and the seemingly menacing Islamic governments in Iran and elsewhere are not the enemies of the West… a scholarly and closely argued critique of what passes for Western diplomacy today." –Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker magazine

ISTANBUL — The effort to forge new forms of non-Western modernity in the Muslim world has pushed Iran into bloody civil strife while Turkey swirls with persistent rumors of military plots against the Islamist-rooted government. The great historical question is whether, at the end of the day, Iran will look more like Turkey, or Turkey like Iran?

As the legendary M16 agent Alastair Crooke argues in his new book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, the Iranian revolution was a direct consequence a half century later of the forced secularization of the Ottoman Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk. With the superstructure of the Muslim ummah dismantled and replaced with the Turkish nation-state, insurgent religious movements, from the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite imams of Qum and Najaf, moved into the vacuum to reclaim Islam from the shadow of Western modernization.

Paradoxically, Ataturk’s whole modernization project is today being recalibrated by the ruling Islamist-rooted (Justice and Development) AK party, which is seeking to reintroduce piety into public life while projecting Turkey as a neo-Ottoman regional power in the Muslim Middle East instead of a mere NATO appendage or European supplicant. At the same time, Iran, the other regional power, is moving in the opposite direction: the Twittering partisans of popular sovereignty are locked in a battle with their theocratic guardians over the legitimacy of power in the Islamic Republic.

What goes around comes around, it seems. The reaction to the Great Transformation of early 20th century modernization may have given rise to what Crooke calls the “Great Refusal” of the Islamist resistance. But now the legacy of the Great Transformation in Turkey as well as the Great Refusal in Iran are facing the reverse challenges of bringing faith back into the public realm on the one hand, and democratizing a religious state on the other.

The historical cross currents are complex. In Turkey, one AK Party leader told me, by way of allaying suspicions about an Islamist takeover, that “without its Western orientation, Turkey would be just another Muslim country.” Yet, a publisher friend worries that “without the military guarding Turkey’s secular institutions, the Islamists would take over tomorrow.” And yet again his 20-something daughter, despite the ever more prevalent sight of headscarves on the street, shrugs her bare shoulders doubtfully at the idea of Turkey ever becoming a repressive religious society like Iran.

In Iran, the very idea of an Islamic Republic, borne out of the 1979 revolution, is coming apart. What we are witnessing is a contest between the Shiite idea of an imamate, where, essentially, God is the head of state, versus the Republic, in which the people rule. What happens to the legitimacy of the state when the people, through their democratic institutions, disagree with God? How can this contradiction at the very heart of the constitutional arrangement of the Islamic Republic ever be resolved?

For all its grumblings and even rumblings, the military that stands behind secularism in Turkey has not so far frustrated the democratic aspirations of the religious resurgence there. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards that are protecting theocracy have done just that: they have sought to crush the assertion of popular sovereignty.

The clerical establishment aligned with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran won’t be easily dislodged from power. Yet, once they’ve felt their power in the streets, as in 1979, neither will the people accept the suppression of their rights. By reasserting his authority after the election through brutal repression, Ayatollah Khameini has undermined the legitimacy of his rule. It may be a long, slow erosion, but the repression of legitimate aspirations is always the beginning of the end for any system of governance.

For now, the Turkish experiment in creating a non-Western, post-secular order seems more sustainable because it respects the will of the people. That is now the challenge for Iran.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com, June 20, 2009

‘This book is required reading at a time when alternative perspectives on the causes of global terrorism and new Western diplomatic initiatives urgently need to replace the failed policies of the Bush administration-led “War on Global Terrorism”.’–John L. Esposito, professor of International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University and co-author of Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think

June 21, 2009
British software used to crash Iranian websites

Union Jack behind green revolution

By Nick Farrell

A BLIGHTY web designer has noticed that an application he developed is being used by members if the Green revolution in Iran.

Ryan Kelly told Channel Four News he had developed www.pagereboot.com to automatically refresh websites such as Ebay, but said Iranians had emailed him saying they were using it to mount distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on that country’s official government websites.

He noticed that he was suddenly getting large numbers of download requests, then he started received emails from grateful Iranians saying they were using the application to attack government websites and bring them down.

There have been protests, as well as a web campaign, apparently, against Iran’s government after the results of Friday’s presidential election were announced, amid complaints of vote rigging.

Kelly took down the website because it could not handle the traffic, but after an online appeal for donations to cover the increased costs, he was able to make it available again. µ

Source: www.theinquirer.net, 18 June 2009

June 21, 2009
Internet has changed foreign policy for ever, says Gordon Brown

In exclusive interview with the Guardian, prime minister says web era ‘more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution’

Katharine Viner

Gordon Brown says foreign policy 'can no longer be the province of just a few elites'. Photograph: Virginia Mayo/AP

Foreign policy can never be the same again — and it’s all because of the internet, Gordon Brown said in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.

Referring to the so-called Twitter revolution in Iran, the prime minister said technological advances and the democratisation of information mean “foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites”.

“You cannot have Rwanda again,” he said. “This week’s events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known.”

He described the internet era as “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution”. “For centuries, individuals have been learning how to live with their next-door neighbours,” he added.

“Now, uniquely, we’re having to learn to live with people who we don’t know.

“People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents, to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you’ve got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world.”

This, he said, has huge implications. “That flow of information means that foreign policy can never be the same again.

“You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.

“Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.”

During a frank and personal interview in Guardian Weekend magazine, published tomorrow, he also discussed the return to favour of the business secretary, Peter Mandelson.

Brown said that there was now a “common purpose” between the two of them, and that the Labour party – famously resistant to Lord Mandelson’s charms, had finally come round to him.

“People are coming to appreciate his talents in a way the Labour party didn’t before … I think there’s a great affection for him now,” he added.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk, 19 June 2009

June 21, 2009