We are fanatically obsessed with public self-exposure

Terry Eagleton put it in the LRB (1 June 2000), ‘a fanatically voluntaristic (volunatary action) society’, obsessed with public self-exposure and suspicious of ‘reticence or obliquity’ (deliberate obscurity of speech or action)

Whether you’re conscious of it or not, whether y­ou like it or not, the verified self is the governing calculus of your life, the spectrum on which you, as an individual, are plotted from cradle to grave. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon explained, you must be ‘noted, registered, enumerated, accounted for, stamped, measured, classified, audited, patented, licensed, authorised, endorsed, reprimanded, prevented, reformed, rectified and corrected, in every operation, every transaction, every movement.

The one border we all cross

• The one border we all cross, so often and with such well-rehearsed reflexes that we barely notice it, is the threshold of our own home. We open the front door, we close the front door:  Do you appease household deities, or leave a lamp burning in your tabernacle? Do you quickly pat down pockets or bag to check you have the necessary equipment for the journey? Or take a final check in the hall mirror, ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’ You lock the door. You’ve crossed the border.  For the rest of our lives we will be crossing boeders, small and big.
• 
  
• Which makes one reflect on Pascal’s warning that all humanity’s misery derives from not being able to sit alone in a quiet room.

• cgnitive mapping is the way we mobilise a definition of who we are, and borders are the way we protect this definition. All borders – the lines and symbols on a map, the fretwork of walls and fences on the ground, and the often complex enmeshments by which we organise our lives – are explanations of identity. We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become. 

No free holiday for Blair when he visited Branson on his Island.

this is an extract  a review of Tom Bower's book on Tony Blair which appeared in the London Review of Books

Deliverology

David Runciman

• BUYBroken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power by Tom Bower
  Faber, 688 pp, £20.00, March, ISBN 978 0 571 31420 1

Bower is good at capturing both the inadvertent humour and the inadvertent horror of the netherworld in which Blair came to move, an uneasy mixture of celebrity, charity and wonkery. His post-2007 career has allowed him to indulge all his worst instincts in these directions, along with his burning desire to make a lot of money, which seems to have been there all along. 

However, he hasn’t had it all his own way. Bower recounts what happened when Blair bumped up against another of his favourite subjects, the notorious do-gooder and skinflint Richard Branson. As a ‘face for hire’ providing consultancy advice for various ‘green’ ventures, Blair offered his services to Branson, who was dabbling in this area. ‘Almost inevitably,’ Bower writes, ‘Blair accepted Branson’s invitations to visit Necker, part of the British Virgin Islands, but eventually discovered that the tycoon refused to reimburse him for advice.’ Maybe there is no such thing as a free holiday after all.

The truly scary parts of Bower’s book don’t really concern Blair at all, or his intimate circle, or even his ever growing property empire or his flirtations with the international arms trade. It comes when he strays into the orbit of the Clintons, who have long inhabited the same netherworld in which he now operates. Blair hooked up with Branson via Bill Clinton, whose foundation has its finger in many of the same pies that Blair has been trying to access on the speechmaking/fundraising/deal-brokering circuit.


More than once, as I read Bower on Blair the international deliverologist, I found myself wondering what a no-holds-barred exposé of the Clintons’ activities over the same period would look like. It’s a chilling thought. Hillary Clinton is very likely to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency. She may well be facing Donald Trump, a candidate she should have no difficulty beating, other things being equal. But other things are not equal. The way Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have conducted themselves since leaving office is a hostage to the fortunes not just of their personal reputations but of the political causes they still represent. It is sometimes said that Clinton and Blair should shoulder the blame for making politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders so appealing to their erstwhile supporters. But that’s probably as it should be: parties move on

For the Socialist every event is a unique indictment of things as they are.

To the socialist, every

incident of his life, every gesture of his mind, is a unique indictment

of things as they are.

 He stands for the whole waste of human stuff in a

world which has not learned how to economize itself, whose every detail

is accidental in a general chaotic absence of social design.

Angela Merkel will she and her' Merkelspeak' be gone by the end of the year?

I worry about what is happening in Europe and what I most worry about is the future for my children. Angela Merkel does not have any childre.  Maybe that is of no signifcance, yet it is a fact that she will not worry about her children as I worry about mine, because as pointed out she does not have any.

Perhaps the citizens of Germany are her children but read extracts from this article in the London Review of books

Tomorrow

Wolfgang Streeck

• BUYEurope’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt byMartin Sandbu
  Princeton, 336 pp, £19.95, September 2015, ISBN 978 0 691 16830 2

and you might wonder that Mekel's treatment of German citizens  is a strange way to treat your chidren

Last year, the refugee crisis offered Merkel another opportunity to demonstrate just how fast she can change tack. Once again, media coverage influenced her decision-making, just as it would a few months later when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn in her policies.

In July a PR event, part of a government campaign to encourage cabinet members to meet ordinary citizens and listen to their ideas, went wrong. One of the young people invited to take part in a ‘dialogue’ with Merkel on the environment, the 14-year-old daughter of Palestinian asylum seekers, unexpectedly complained in front of the TV cameras that her family, who had been living in Germany for four years, might be sent back to the Lebanon at any moment. She asked, in flawless German, why she wasn’t allowed to stay in Germany ‘to enjoy life like everybody else’. Merkel said something like, ‘we cannot take in everyone, much as we might want to.’ The girl began to cry. Not knowing what to do, Merkel started patting the child’s head with a helpless expression on her face. The result was widespread outrage on social media. A few months later, the authorities told the girl’s family that they could stay in Germany for at least another year.

What Merkel called ‘showing a friendly face in an emergency’ was meant to shame those who, during the euro crisis, had enjoyed the cartoons of Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in Nazi uniform. By opening the German border while the French and British borders remained closed, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground occupied for so long by those accusing the German government of sado-monetarism, or worse.

Merkel, who in October 2010 claimed that ‘the multikulti approach [had] failed, absolutely failed,’ this was no longer a problem.

When Merkel declared the German borders open, there had been no cabinet decision to this effect and no official statement in the Bundestag. Since the opposition didn’t ask, as Merkel knew they wouldn’t, nobody knows to this day what sort of order, legal or not, by whom and when, was given to the police. The Interior Ministry is still refusing requests from leading figures (including the former president of the constitutional court, who was preparing a legal opinion on the matter for the Bavarian government) for access to the ministerial decree that should have been issued to the border authorities.

There were good reasons for asking questions. The refugees, more than a million of them, who arrived in Germany in 2015, all arrived from safe third countries. Under German and European law, they had to register in the country where they entered the European Union, and then wait to be assigned a legal residence in a member state. Merkel seems to have decided that she could safely ignore all this. When anyone complained that this was both a huge stress test on German society and a giant social engineering project, Merkel regally announced that if she had to apologise for ‘showing a friendly face’, ‘then this is not my country’ – an extraordinary statement for a democratically elected leader to make. In fact, as the Energiewende demonstrated, she has for some time been governing not like a parliamentary leader but like a president with emergency powers. For some time, inquiries into the wisdom of her immigration policy were answered by her entourage – which in this case included all the Bundestag parties – by claiming that the mere expression of dissent ‘played into the hands of the right’, a potent rhetorical device in Germany. Until Cologne, concern over the government’s handling of the refugee crisis was effectively suppressed.

Merkel did not shy away from Obama-style nationalist pathos, employing it in her annual summer press conference on 31 August, when she told her compatriots: ‘Germany is a strong country … We did so many things, we can do that. We can do it, and where something gets in our way, it has to be overcome.’ For six months she evaded all constitutional checks and balances, enjoying the praise showered on her by, among others, Time magazine, which made her Person of the Year 2015. She was talked about as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, and even Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January turned into a Merkelfest when the guest speaker in the Bundestag, an Austrian writer who survived the Holocaust, told her audience that ‘this country, which eighty years ago was responsible for the worst crimes of the century, has today won the applause of the world, thanks to its open borders.’

What about Europe? And why dwell so long on the refugee crisis when I’m supposed to be discussing a book on the euro crisis? The answer is that Merkel’s immigration policy offers an object lesson in what other countries can expect from Germany acting European. Just as the United States sees the world as an extended playing field for its domestic political economy, Germany has come to consider the European Union as an extension of itself, where what is right for Germany is by definition right for all others. There is nothing particularly immoral about this; indeed Germans think it is supremely moral, as they identify their control of Europe with a post-nationalism understood as anti-nationalism, which in turn is understood as the quintessential lesson of German history. Very much like the US, German elites project what they collectively regard as self-evident, natural and reasonable onto their outside world, and are puzzled that anyone could possibly fail to see things the way they do. Perhaps the dissenters suffer from cognitive deficits and require education by Schäuble in the Eurogroup classroom?

One problem with hegemonic self-righteousness is that it prevents the self-righteous from seeing that what they consider morally self-evident is informed by self-interest

especially with a postmodern leader like Merkel who, free from substantive commitments and constitutional constraints, has perfected the art of staying in power by means of unpredictable changes of course

Turkey, which was supposed to put an end to the illegal trafficking of migrants to Greece – on a country, that is, whose human rights record suggests it may not be particularly careful when dealing with Syrian or any other refugees. Of course, Turkish co-operation had a price, and though Merkel had in the past steadfastly opposed the country’s bid for EU membership, now, having changed tack again and speaking on behalf of Europe as a whole, she promised Erdoğan expedited negotiations on accession as a reward for preventing the Syrian refugees she had invited to enter Germany from entering Greece. When Turkey demanded money too, Merkel chose to see this as a matter for ‘European solidarity’, just like the funding of the new EU border protection agency, Frontex, which patrols the Greek and Italian coastlines. European borders become German borders, and by implication Europe becomes Germany.

The result of all the equivocation, double-talk and Merkelspeak, this difficult-to-disentangle mix of self-interest and sentimentality, is an immense political and institutional mess caused by the imposition on Europe of German policies disguised as European policies to which, supposedly, there is no alternative. This includes a restructuring of the citizenry through immigration, not just in Germany where it might seem economically or demographically expedient, but also in other European countries where it definitely isn’t. The result is rapidly rising anti-German sentiment in the form of anti-European sentiment, not only among political elites but also, most powerfully, among the electorate. 

There is no BEING there is only BECOMING

"There is no Being but Becoming" was the first of HG Wells
mental discoveries; and finding years later that Heraclitus had said the
same thing, he came to regard the pre-Aristotelian metaphysics as the
right point of departure for modern thought.