Dr Phil Edwards meets me in the teashop by Grantham station, where he gestures towards a black girl sitting in the corner. ‘I thought you were her!’ he laughs. ‘I thought – bloody hell, what have I let myself in for!’ But as we make our way to the local Wetherspoon’s he assures me: ‘I wouldn’t have minded if it was you – I’ll talk to anyone. And besides a lot of them vote for us anyway. We’re very misunderstood, the BNP’.

On arrival at the pub, he ushers me to a quiet corner at the back. ‘I’ve done interviews in places like this before and they’ve tried to kick me out when they’ve overheard the conversation,’ he says. ‘Not that it’s any of their bloody business.’

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So, this blog revolution then, empowering of the citizen journalist and speaking of truth to the powers of the dead tree press: how’s it going? Well, to be honest we had better start by abandoning those lazy clichés: blogs are a method of communication, pure and simple. That’s it, tout court. We can have fun discussing what that method is being used for, who is using it and why, but blathering about revolutions and empowerment isn’t going to get us anywhere…

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French citizens fled Abidjan, refugees languished in Al Fasher, and allegations mounted of Rwandan incursions in the eastern DRC.

In Naivasha, Kenya, the Sudanese government and southern SPLA rebels signed peace deals on New Year’s Eve that hold out new hope for an end to Africa’s most stubborn civil war. In January, the African Union, successor to the much-maligned Organisation of African Unity, prepared to intervene in Haiti, and South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki negotiated with warring parties in both Côte d’Ivoire and the DRC, backed by mandates from the AU.

There was progress at the ballot box too. Fairly orderly elections last year in Algeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Tunisia showed that the ‘wave’ of democratisation sweeping Africa in the early 1990s was often followed by attempts to consolidate democratic rule and improve political governance. To this effect, the 13 member countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) adopted in August a set of ‘principles and guidelines governing democratic elections’, vowing to monitor compliance. Zimbabwe was a notable if problematic signatory.

Africa’s resolve to find negotiated solutions to long-standing conflicts, send its own troops to enforce peace, and institutionalise norms of democracy and good governance is born out of both negative and positive imperatives. Western donors have for decades called for reform in terms of notorious ‘political conditionality’ regimes. Today, the force that drives reform in Africa has gone beyond the fear of an external penalty. Instead, it revolves around a grand ideology of renewal that is indigenously engineered – the African Renaissance.

This idea of African rebirth has roots that stretch back a century. Its optimism about Africa’s future and its commitment to independence, progress and continental solidarity echo some of the central messages of Pan-African thought, and the words of men such as Marcus Garvey and Dr. W.E.B. du Bois.

Today, however, the primary prophet of renewal ideology is the South African president, Thabo Mbeki. As deputy to Nelson Mandela in 1997, Thabo articulated a vision of an African Renaissance and adopted it as a South African foreign policy doctrine. A year earlier, notes Eddy Maloka of South Africa’s Africa Institute, a conference was held in Dakar, Senegal, honouring the late Senegalese intellectual Sheik anta Diop, with the theme: ‘An African Renaissance at the Dawn of the Third Millennium.’

It was Thabo who sold the African Renaissance to a wider international audience by spearheading the design of a concrete development plan based on the ‘values’ of the African Renaissance – the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). Adopted by all Africa’s leaders in October 2001 in Abuja, Nigeria, Nepad is a quid pro quo between Africa and the West: a ‘new’ commitment to good governance and democracy in exchange for increased capital flows and a renegotiation of Africa’s marginal position in the world economy.

Nepad quickly won the backing of the Group of Eight industrialised countries (G8), who promised ‘enhanced partnerships’ with those African countries that commit to its values of democratic reform, and sign up to a system of political and economic ‘peer review’ based loosely on the review regime of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Europe.

Today, under the Nepad banner, bridges, dams and electricity grids are being built and 24 countries have signed up to be ‘reviewed’ (it remains to be seen whether rogue governments like Zimbabwe’s will sign up and, if they do, whether African peers will have the guts to criticize their transgressions openly and honestly).

Nepad is part of a bigger movement, which draws sustenance from Thabo Mbeki’s vision for the continent. His former political adviser, Vusi Mavimbela, wrote in 1997 that whereas decolonisation and the 1990s ‘wave’ of democratisation represent the ‘first and second moments’ of Africa’s post-colonial history, the African Renaissance is the ‘third moment.’ The Renaissance will be significant not only if it can be shown to lead to rapid change and wealth creation; it is already significant because it has redirected political discourse in Africa.

The first racially inclusive elections in 1994, which saw Mandela elected, came about through the initiatives set out by President F.W. de Klerk, following on from the previous year when both men were awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in the peaceful dismantling of the apartheid segregation. It all seems fairly straightforward: a clear-cut struggle between good and bad, right and wrong, past and future. But in reality it is not that simple. Indeed, the old saying ‘if you’re not confused, then you don’t really understand the question’ seems particularly apt.

Frederick Willem De Klerk is a puzzling character. Only a year into his presidency, in February 1990, he lifted the ban on the ANC and released its supporters from prison. Yet his political career up to that point reflects quite a different attitude. First elected to Parliament in 1969, and entering the cabinet in 1978, Frederick had a reputation as a stalwart conservative – an avid proponent of the apartheid policy that the National Party, of which he was a member, euphemistically dubbed ‘separate development’. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has criticised him for his central role within the notorious State Security Council in the 1970s and 1980s – accusing him of being ‘partially responsible’ for racial violence.

It is poignant that the question Frederick chose to tackle in his speech at the Oxford Union was how we are to know whether what we are doing is right or wrong. In his case, it seems that hindsight has become a useful gauge. ‘Justice through partition had failed; it resulted in manifest injustice. It was morally unjustifiable, irreconcilable with religion or any pragmatic principles. What we were doing was not only wrong, it was doomed to failure.’

Yet F.W. should not be treated with blind cynicism. He is not putting himself forward as a sinner looking to do penance for crimes; accepting the problems of apartheid is not a process of self-atonement for him. Eight years after leaving party politics, he knows the questions that are likely to be put to him, and he has answers for all of them. He maintains that the decision to go about ending apartheid was a process and not an opinion that changed overnight. He rejects the criticism that segregation was brought to an end on purely economic grounds, as opposed to any humanitarian sentiment. Yes, ending the regime did have economic motives, but it was not economic motives alone that ended apartheid. It came about as a result of a pragmatic political response to the circumstances of the times.

In a letter sent in 1992, Nelson Mandela appealed for President de Klerk to ‘look inside [him]self for a change of heart’. Yet Frederick maintains that he was not pushed into his decision to end apartheid by such appeals alone: ‘Long before Mandela said it, in the ‘80s we in the National Party spent more time and energy looking into ourselves than in anything else. The quantum leaps that I was able to make were facilitated by this self-analysis and this struggle with our conscience of what is right and what is wrong. What facilitated the change in South Africa was our own reassessment of what is right and what is wrong. I think the same process quietly took place in the ANC.’

Institutional Identification

Public institutions are not, and should not be viewed as neutral agents. Rather they play a wide range of functions, which influence private identity as well as political and civil society. This in turn challenges the strict separation of the private and the public sphere. It also raises questions about national identification. The increasing importance of ‘recognition’ as a political demand that characterises recent political struggles illustrates one consequence of the link between private identity and the public sphere. Moreover, there are certain types of institutions that perform a critical function as a locus for private identity. Public institutions allow individuals to participate in shared social practices and they are a source for creating the common meanings that are a basis for community. The argument that certain political, legal and civic institutions are constituted by, and draw on, common meanings, develops the idea of community in a much stronger form. It suggests that there are certain institutions that rely on and sustain inter-subjective meanings. These meanings can be understood by all participants and therefore contribute to the formation of a common language and vocabulary.

National Identification

The importance of institutional identification becomes even more significant when we consider that identification with the fate of a political community is also the only viable way of forming a national identity that can include minority groups. This line of argument makes it especially urgent for all minorities such as Muslims to take part in participatory democratic politics.

The traditional liberal approach constitutes the British public as members of a political community based on rational, liberal values. Citizenship identifies an unmediated relationship between individual and state; any involvement by citizens with voluntary, private or civil organisations must be voluntary and consensual. Contemporary approaches to the protection of minorities have supplemented toleration with a second strategy guaranteeing an individual right to non-discrimination. Although most versions of this right permit a limited measure of discrimination in the private sphere, non-discrimination ensures that minorities have access to politics, the economy and key sectors such as public services and education. This clearly affects the way in which the majority will conduct not only their private but also some of their public affairs.

One alternative to a traditional liberal definition of political community is ‘conservative nationalism’ which remains a popular mechanism for defining national identity. This strategy defines the terms of belonging to a political community according to criteria such as race, common memories, a dominant culture or a majority religion. In this context national identity becomes something that is given historically rather than as a matter of choice or negotiation. In most Western democracies, the presence of large numbers of racially and culturally diverse groups is a permanent barrier to forging a shared national identity along the lines advocated by conservative nationalists. The fear in contemporary plural states is that the inflexible use of these criteria will necessarily exclude, or coercively assimilate, large numbers of citizens.

Of these concepts, forming a national identity as ‘a sense of belonging to a political community’ is advocated and relies on citizens identifying with the common legal and political structures in the state. Even those who argue that a shared national identity is not essential accept that this ‘sense of belonging to the polity’ is vital for stable democratic institutions. In this context, diversity (of culture, ethnicity and belief) will continue to be a problem. Minorities faced with political institutions in which neither their members nor their values are adequately represented will find it difficult to view them as structures of identification. Doubts about the capacity of ‘neutral’ forms of governance to generate institutional identification inevitably take on a greater urgency in this context.

Conservative Nationalism, with its insistence that national identity can be formed around criteria such as a common language, colour, race or religion is necessarily coercive of large numbers of citizens in modern plural democracies. The traditional liberal cultural contract (which relegates issues of private identity to the private sphere) is also an unsuitable basis for responding to recent demands by minorities for recognition in both the private and public spheres. Theorists have increasingly questioned the adequacy of traditional liberalism’s focus on universal individual rights as a sufficient guarantee for minority protection. Under conditions of ethnic or cultural diversity it is argued that concentrating exclusively on tolerance and an individual right to non-discrimination may operate as a form of ‘benign neglect’ of minority groups and that multiculturalism can provide a solution.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, as a normative rather than descriptive term, requires policies that go beyond non-discrimination. Its concern is not limited to the protection of individuals against specific instances of discrimination but it also extends to ensuring the flourishing and survival of diverse groups (as a collective entity) within one political community. Some forms of multiculturalism seek to address this problem by giving overwhelming priority to mechanisms of belonging which draw on the many sources of private identity (both individual and group) such as race, ethnicity or sexuality. Where there is a conflict between the established public or national identity and these various sources of private identity, the latter should always be given preference. This form of multiculturalism can compensate for the obvious defects of the liberal ‘cultural contract’ which relegates issues of personal identity to the private sphere. It also avoids the exclusionary consequences of ‘conservative nationalism’ that defines national identity according to historically given criteria. However, seeking a solution in such an uncompromising version of multiculturalism is not free of difficulties. If participatory politics requires national identification by the minority, then this is equally true for the majority. An ‘exclusive’ version of multiculturalism which ignores the needs of the majority also fails to meet the criteria for an inclusive form of participatory politics.

All of these approaches ignore the possibility that a common public sphere can emerge which is neither neutral between cultures nor a perfect mirror for personal identity. Developing ‘a sense of belonging’ which remains attentive to both the majority and the minority, and generating a common public culture within which different groups co-exist, requires compromise and adjustment by the parties. For the minority, this means that their private identity cannot automatically be reflected in the public sphere without some limited assimilation to the shared values that are the agreed basis for a common public life. For the majority, this re-negotiation carries with it the inevitable costs of attempts to transform the public sphere and institutions: from exclusively reflecting the dominant culture, towards a common culture which also seeks to accommodate some of the most urgent needs of minorities.

Minority Protection Strategy

Institutional identification is therefore of critical importance as part of a minority protection strategy. Citizens are more likely to identify with the decisions of representative institutions and so they are an ideal forum for policies which go beyond the toleration of minorities, e.g. non-discrimination policies which impact on the majority and multiculturalism. However, affirming the potential contribution of representative institutions to minority protection generally, and multiculturalism in particular, is not synonymous with displacing the well-earned and pivotal role of judicially protected individual rights for minorities. It is rather a much-needed antidote to the cherished assumption that a judicial remedy should be the sole focus of attention. Minority groups should lobby representatives so that policy makers take their interests, and the interests of other stakeholders, into account before formulating policies.

This is not to say that representative institutions are a panacea. Minorities such as Muslims face obvious difficulties in advancing their interests through political processes in the absence of real political power and adequate representation of their interests. Simplistic appeals to political equality leave all the most intractable difficulties unanswered in this context. ‘Each citizen shall count for one’ fails to account for individuals who are a permanent minority and whose concerns are not adequately represented within the political process. However, this speaks to the need for reform rather than abandoning the role of representative institutions altogether and a focus on transforming elected assemblies at all levels.

Institutional identification is more likely where substantive issues concerning the common good are discussed. This in turn makes a unique contribution towards developing common meanings and a sense of community. In the context of complex plural states, the only viable and inclusive way of defining national identification is to ensure that all citizens can identify with key political and legal institutions. It is essential that minority issues are raised in forums and at ‘the point where people engage with the full range of political alternatives and the full spectrum of policy concerns’. The likelihood that not only a minority such as Muslims, but also the majority will treat representative institutions as structures of identification becomes critically important for minority protection and is especially important in areas of significant and controversial social reform of the public sphere. Such reform is likely to include, inter alia, the re-allocation of political, social and economic power from one group to another. Most importantly it will also have to provide political solutions to deep multicultural conflicts that require one group to make important concessions on key aspects of their principles or identity. Dilemmas concerning the acceptance and accommodation of Muslims in Britain often seem intractable. Many solutions, although not all, are likely to be found through the greater participation of Muslims in mainstream democratic politics.

by Maleiha Malik

As the local parties met to discuss the restoration of Northern Ireland’s devolved institutions, many were sceptical about the chances of any sort of compromise. As one Belfast newspaper put it, the parties were reconvening on ‘the road to nowhere’. After all the optimism and excitement surrounding the Good Friday Agreement – for which 72% of the population voted in favour – where did the political process come unstuck?

Tony Blair’s premiership dove-tailed with the arrival of Sinn Fein-IRA into ‘legitimate’ democratic politics. The Peter Mandelson interpretation argues that conciliation and negotiation have proved remarkably effective methods of drawing Sinn Fein into the legitimate political process; the longer the IRA is not in an active and open military campaign, the harder it is for them to go back to war. This is undoubtedly true. But it is only half of the story.

As the Prime Minister has on occasion acknowledged himself, since 1998 he has largely accepted the IRA’s definition of a ceasefire – the cessation of a direct military campaign against army and security forces, the bombings that make the news in London. The problem is that this is not the definition he sold to the people of Northern Ireland during the referendum for the Good Friday Agreement. Training, recruiting, importation of arms, military targeting, intelligence gathering and punishment beatings continued apace. The occasion of the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly and governmental institutions was the dramatic discovery of an alleged IRA spy-ring at the centre of the new administration. As the police ascended the steps of the Stormont Assembly buildings in the autumn of 2002, the institutions set up by the Good Friday Agreement crumbled around them.

The IRA’s continued failure to decommission – as the Prime Minister conceded – was not only an embarrassment to the British government. More significantly for the long-term future of the peace process, it has undermined those moderate unionists, such as David Trimble, who had demonstrated that they were willing to compromise with Sinn Fein. At the last elections to take place in Northern Ireland in autumn of last year, this was confirmed – Rev. Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party finally overhauled David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists as the single largest unionist party. The reason for this was simple; if this was what the Good Friday Agreement amounted to, the unionist community was no longer prepared to accept it for the sake of accommodating Sinn Fein. In the most recent estimation, the support for the Agreement among the unionist community has declined from approximately 52% to 28%.

The atmosphere since has been tense but never out of control. There have been isolated incidents of trouble over the summer but nothing on the scale of the systematic violence of previous years. Sporadic bursts of trouble in Belfast and Londonderry occurred during some of the more contentious Orange parades and in north Belfast in September, a small group of Orange bandsmen were attacked and stabbed. As I write this, there is news of an attempted murder by suspected Loyalist paramilitaries. So while economic and lifestyle surveys suggest that the general quality of life in Northern Ireland has improved since 1998, there has been no rapprochement between Protestant and Catholic working-class communities. In some ‘flash point’ areas, relations are as bad as ever. Charges of ethnic cleansing and systematic intimidation in districts where one group is predominant over the other are commonplace.

Having said that, the parties entered these talks on the back of a period of comparatively ‘good behaviour’ from the paramilitaries. Flexing of muscles and political posturing had been kept to a minimum and had not generally spilled out into cross-community conflict. The IRA in particular kept a low profile and Sinn Fein made sure that they went into the talks making all the right noises. Gerry Adams, famed in Northern Ireland for his ‘double speak’, broke new ground in describing concerns in the unionist community about the continued existence of the IRA as ‘understandable’. At the same time British and Irish governments were peddling a relentlessly optimistic line about the prospects for a political deal and a return of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Optimistic they may have been – in the background to these developments hangs the fate of a huge political gamble. There is a school of thought within both governments that has spent the last twelve months trying to pave the ground for a new political status quo in Northern Ireland, based on the coming together of the extremes. The Good Friday Agreement was supposed to be held together by a coalition of the willing: moderates from both communities, the nationalist SDLP and David Trimble’s UUP. But the floundering of that Agreement has coincided with a pronounced political decline for both parties and the growth of Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s DUP. Whether that decline was a symptom or cause of the stilted political process is academic. The point here is that the current talks have been predicated on the assumption that Gerry Adams can cut a deal with the more extreme unionists.

Many supposed ‘realists’ believe this is possible. But let us not forget that the electoral dynamics of these extreme parties have to be kept in the equation. The DUP – for so long operating from an idealistic position on the margins of the political process – has been thrust into the centre. But it has to sell any political deal as a visible defeat for the IRA. Does anybody think the IRA is ready to sign up for that?

Both the DUP and Sinn Fein can afford to play along with this political poker, both look forward to a future of electoral gains. Over the last twelve months, both parties have been happy to accede to the political marginalisation of their moderate rivals. But they have been able to do this without putting their cards on the table. One question remains – how long can the British and Irish governments afford to play along as well? These talks may provide the answer.

Speak, for your lips are free…
Speak, for the truth still lives.
– Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Tariq Ali has a penchant for taking on uncomfortable subjects. For four decades now, having been both praised and reviled by many, he has gone against the grain and lived life at an angle. As we spoke desultorily for over an hour at his office in Soho, it was impressed upon me – by this amalgam of political commentator, activist, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, broadcaster and powerful orator – that nothing is sacred and there can be no room for dogmas.

Britain is a rather secret country. The esotericism of the political establishment is seldom shared. A recent disclosure of files from 1974 reveals minutes from a cabinet meeting where the activities of one Tariq Ali were discussed. In the years that preceded, his political forays had certainly caused a great stir. In 1965 he was elected President of the Oxford Union, during which time he had risen to prominence after a series of debates with Henry Kissinger and then Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart. He was invited to dinner by Marlon Brando, arrested in Latin America under suspicion of being Che Guevara’s bodyguard, had travelled to Vietnam on behalf of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell to survey war crimes and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had sought his counsel on founding a new political movement in Pakistan.

Famously, as a leader of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Tariq led over 25,000 students to Grosvenor Square and later, in October 1968, a 100,000 strong demonstration to Trafalgar Square. It’s a subject that he’s speaking on later tonight at the National Portrait Gallery, The Crowds in the Square: Demonstrating Dissent.

But things are different now; ideas have changed. With the événements of 1989, Tariq avers in a wonderful commanding voice that carries delightful Lahori intonations, ‘I had realised that the epoch of socialist ideas had come to an end.’ Working with people like Darcus Howe (now a columnist for The New Statesman), Tariq produced The Bandung File for a number of years – a weekly magazine broadcast on Channel 4 that peeled away at the Third World. Around the same time the ex-revolutionary took up another pursuit: ‘Politics was in the doldrums and nothing much was going on in reality, so I decided to write fiction.’

Tariq’s earliest set of novels is called the The Fall of Communism Trilogy, the first of which, Redemption, is a savagely witty attack on some of his erstwhile comrades. ‘It was basically a satirical attack on the sectarianism within Trotskyism, and on sectarianism in general. I followed that up by Fear of Mirrors and then began my Islam Quintet.’

The Clash of Fundamentalisms, his seminal polemic, opens with the laconic sentence, ‘I never really believed in God.’ It follows that historical materialism came easy to him, but Tariq is not so much an atheist as he is an antitheist: every religion being a different version of the same untruth. So why the fascination with Islam? ‘The question I wanted to pose in the wake of the first Gulf War was, “Why hadn’t Islam experienced a Reformation?” I wanted to go to the roots of the problem, so I went to Spain, spent months travelling around, imagining things – I didn’t feel to write a history, I wanted to write a novel.’

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, The Book of Saladin, and The Stone Woman, all published by Verso, have bound within them the confrontations between Islamic and Christian civilisations set to a picturesque background of humour, love, heresy, betrayal and tragedy. Critics have argued that historical fiction of this rank put the author in the company of writers like Amin Maalouf, if not Naguib Mahfouz at a stretch. What about the remainder of the quintet? When can we expect the next novel?

‘Well, I need to find a writer’s retreat. After I came out with Shadows, and it was well received, my friend Edward Said told me, “Don’t just stop at Spain. Do it all.” So I’ve got to chronicle the whole damn thing. And there’s a third volume also that I’ll be looking to write, looking at the subject of renegacy.’

Renegacy? I suppose he’s alluding to the phenomenon surrounding former leftists who have since reneged their views; ‘The new empire loyalists’ as he referred to them in The Guardian nearly two years ago. In that particular piece, while confronting those who had found their way from ‘the outer fringes of radical politics to the antechambers of the state department’ – presumably people like David Horowitz in the United States – Tariq found time to chide former friends Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens for having metamorphosed into the belligerati. The attacks of September 11 drew huge rifts between a number of scribblers who are courted by the liberal press on both sides of the Atlantic.

Having earned a reputation as a caustic critic of Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and others who felt his iconoclastic fury, Christopher decided on that tragic day to throw in his lot behind the Bush administration and its ‘War on Terror’. Since then, Tariq Ali and Christopher Hitchens have met publicly on a number of occasions and, needless to say, clashed calamitously. Their disagreement has been rendered all the more dramatic by their shared history: both read PPE at Oxford, graduated with stylish thirds, held positions in the Oxford Union, developed their political grounding as soixante-huitards from the Trotskyist movement, and several years later collaborated on the Channel 4 film, Hell’s Angel that blew away the halo surrounding Mother Theresa.

The appendix to Tariq’s latest polemical work, Bush in Babylon, is a humorous dissection of The Hitch’s political writing around Iraq. Their last fracas, broadcast on DemocracyNow, sees Christopher repeatedly interjecting on the point of support for the resistance in Iraq at which point Tariq stammers, ‘Don’t be stupid and arrogant!’ ‘Ok, I’ll be quiet now,’ was the enfeebled riposte from the equally irascible Christopher.

The resistance to occupation in Iraq has been a point of contention for many. Leading into the war there was unprecedented international opposition, yet once it began there was a specious demand made to ‘support our troops’ or to ‘withdraw only once stability has resumed’. The conversationalist entertaining me, however, staunchly defends a different position.

His latest book is written very much in the style of the one that preceded it, The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Acerbic prose is luxuriantly mixed with poetry, personal reminiscence, and heavily interlarded with history. The analysis, though at times cogent, suffers from the same symptoms: a casual attitude toward scholarship and an over-reliance on single sources. Bush in Babylon (which was confiscated off me by US Customs on a visit to Chicago last November) offers a popularised history of Iraq, detailing periods of political turmoil, the roots of Western interference in the country and a thought-provoking history of resistance.

Why then, as the book begins by asking, is it that people are surprised to learn that the occupation is detested by a majority of Iraqis? ‘I think what creates this bewilderment is two things. First, there’s no sense of being occupied historically, and second, there is an arrogance in the world in which we live that says they should be so lucky to be occupied by the United States. What’s wrong with them? Why are they getting so upset? We’re doing them a big favour.’

And what are people to make of the resistance being waged against this occupation? ‘The resistance in Iraq is following anti-colonial patterns; it’s not too dissimilar to what happened in Algeria or Vietnam. And one must remember, while the British governed Iraq through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s – there was resistance of one sort or another.’

Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, once posited that there has also always been some form of cultural resistance in the face of an active Western intruder. Though Arabic-less himself, Tariq Ali has brought to the attention of the Western reader the importance of poetry as a medium of cultural resistance in the Middle East. ‘Poetry,’ Tariq tells me, ‘plays a very important role in Arab culture. It’s not an elite thing at all, which it has become in the West. In the Arab world and the Muslim world you have poetry readings attended by tens of thousands.’

It certainly is a tradition somewhat alien to the West, but bearing in mind that in the 19th century there was a strong tradition of radical poetry in Britain and the United States, I ask how culture and politics imbricate through poetry. ‘There’s a tradition where critical poems written by Nizar Qabbani, the fine Syrian poet, or Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine, is immediately picked up by ordinary people in cafés, across frontiers without any problems. The great singers of the Arab world then sing these poems; the poem is transformed and is consumed by millions.’

Somewhat less well received have been the interviewee’s scripts for the stage. Together Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton have co-written a string of political satires for performance. Their first outing was with Iranian Nights at the Royal Court Theatre, in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair. ‘We chose the theatre as a forum of choice because political theatre has a history in Europe, and the place was packed out.’ Snogging Ken, Ugly Rumours and Collateral Damage followed. The last two were scurrilous attacks on New Labour, very much in the spirit of the attacks by Harold Pinter and Hanif Kureishi, as is Tariq Ali’s latest play, The Illustrious Corpse (shown at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester and the Soho Theatre).

Having mentioned that the LIP is looking at issues around asylum and immigration, I want to know why he finds New Labour so odious. Tariq’s face contorts to evince a grimacing look full of disdain. ‘I have a visceral hatred of them and everything they stand for. These are people without any political principles at all, intent on staying in power at all cost. They will back war, privatise things even the Tories wouldn’t dream of, they are selling off schools to corporations, they are just wrecking this country.’

I sense that time is trespassing on his patience with much still to be exhausted. I couldn’t, however, possibly leave without understanding why he persists to rail against power in an age that is hardly propitious for dissent. After all, most of the people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. ‘I think it’s a case of just obstinately refusing to capitulate. Through, projects like the New Left Review, which is a cultural and political journal, the work I’ve undertaken with comrades close to me manages to sustain me.’ In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens postulates that ‘rebellion is innate’. I put the point to Tariq. He winces. I don’t know what he’s offended by more, the contention or the contender. ‘I, myself, prefer Goethe’s maxim: “the world goes forward because of those who oppose it.”’

Bush In Babylon and Clash of Fundamentalisms are published by Verso.

The UK’s so-called ‘New Vision for Refugees’ proves itself woefully inadequate, for it is not about solutions to a problem of international dimensions, so much as a self-regarding and self-interested attempt to minimise this country’s role, at the expense of refugees, asylum seekers, and less well off countries in the developing world.

If the ‘current asylum system requires those fleeing persecution to enter the EU illegally…’ perhaps part of the answer is to ‘de-criminalize’ the asylum seeker.

The old and the not so old

The modern story of the UN and refugees goes back many years. Already in 1921, the plight of some 800,000 Russian refugees adrift in Europe led the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross to appeal for action to the Council of the League of Nations. He found a positive response, with the League appointing its first High Commissioner for Refugees, Dr Fridthof Nansen, that same year. The Russian refugees, of course, were rapidly joined by others: Armenians, Assyrians, Assyro-Chaldeans, refugees from fascism, from Nazism, and from conflict.

The High Commissioner’s task then, and that of the various organisations which have followed, was to provide protection – legal and political protection – while private philanthropic organisations assumed responsibility for relief and it was left to the goodwill of governments to remove the obstacles to solutions. While much was achieved through the 1920s and into the 1930s, the very nature of the challenges posed by the rise of the Third Reich found the rest of the world wanting. As Nazism consolidated its hold, and as racial and political persecution and economic proscription became all pervasive, the League’s members cast a cautious eye on the reasons for departure. And in an all too familiar pattern, they saw the exodus, not as a human and humanitarian crisis, but as an economic, financial and social problem, a ‘political embarrassment’.

In this period of immigration restriction and economic uncertainty, widespread and concerted hostility to taking any Jews was paramount, and continued even into the period of post-war resettlement. States refused to face the costs, or to make room. Jewish refugees were not welcome because they were Jewish, because they were presumed to have the wrong skills, for geo-political reasons, or on security grounds, particularly after war broke out. By contrast, when the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, refugees were briefly found to have political significance, but at the price of coherent, people oriented strategies.

The humanitarian needs of the many thousands displaced by conflict and political developments in Europe were indeed met, but the self-interest of States was at work, and their policies also served broader political interests, allowing propagandist positions on source countries to be developed to advantage. Now, at the beginning of this twenty-first century, refugees no longer have political significance, though the need for protection is no less. As always, the primary costs, the human costs, are borne by those at serious risk if they remain, obstructed if they move.

The new order and the national dimension

Refugee protection and solutions are also matters for national initiatives and action. In 2003, however, the United Kingdom circulated proposals, which cast doubt on the premises underlying the international regime of refugee protection. These proposals assume that the ‘current global system is failing’. This premise in turn appears to be based on the assumption that the asylum process generally (which, by definition, is commonly driven by crisis and unpredictability) can be better managed, and that the perceived link between illegal immigration and asylum seeking can be broken. It is said, for example, that financial support for refugees is badly distributed; that those fleeing persecution have to enter the EU illegally, while most refugees remain in poorly resourced refugee camps in third countries; that the majority of asylum seekers do not meet refugee or other protection criteria; and that those found not to be in need of international protection are not returned to their country of origin.

Among various suggestions, the United Kingdom proposes regional protection areas (RPAs) in regions of origin, with the object of providing accessible protection ‘closer to home’. Asylum seekers arriving in Europe would be returned to their local RPA where ‘effective protection’ would be offered, where they might be processed either for resettlement in the region or, for some, for resettlement in Europe. The RPA, it is suggested, might also provide a destination to which failed asylum seekers might be sent from Europe, when immediate return to their country of origin was not possible.

Who can argue against better protection closer to home? The fact is, however, that for many refugees the idea remains just that. In the absence of concrete commitments to UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and refugee-receiving countries, it is no more than another responsibility-avoiding device, along with white lists, black lists, non-suspensive appeals, and doing away with review. Many commentators, including the European Commission, raised serious questions about the legality of these proposals and the means necessary to carry them to fruition, or noted their disassociation from the internationally agreed goal of ‘comprehensive durable solutions’, which is the fundamental premise for the international refugee regime.

Others saw the UK proposals as an exercise in burden-shifting, not burden-sharing. They remarked on their failure to acknowledge and integrate, among others, the need fully to respect international legal obligations, in particular, the full and inclusive application of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the non-refoulement principle, and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The European Commission and others noted the critical importance of addressing root causes; of access to legal immigration channels; of respect for international humanitarian obligations; and, in particular, they called attention to the need to improve the quality of asylum decisions in the European Union.

This last point is significant. In this country, we are beginning to hear a lot about the inability of the Home Office to take decent, defensible decisions on asylum applications. Over 20% of decisions are overturned on appeal, with that percentage rising to 35% in the case of Zimbabwe claims, 32% in the case of Somalis, and 30% in other cases. Strangely enough, the one element in the UK’s asylum procedure that has never been reformed in over 30 years of legislation is the Home Office, which leads one to question overall the premises underlying the recent United Kingdom proposals. Perhaps the sums currently spent on refugee determination could indeed be reduced, if the money were better spent on getting it right first time. And if the ‘current asylum system requires those fleeing persecution to enter the EU illegally…’ perhaps part of the answer is to ‘de-criminalize’ the asylum seeker.

Similarly, if the ‘majority of asylum seekers in the EU do not meet the criteria for refugee or subsidiary protection status’, then the reason why so many others use the asylum system may be due to labour market needs, implicitly condoned by governments throughout the developed world. Moreover, the reasons why ‘those found not to be in need of international protection are not returned to their country of origin’ are complex; in part, this may be due to lack of capacity in ‘sending’ States, political unwillingness to engage the issues, on either side, or again, because the labour resources provided by failed asylum seekers are acceptable, either in the long or short term.

If the government of this country were truly radical, if it were seriously interested in reforming the asylum process, it would move responsibility for deciding refugee cases away from the Home Office and into an autonomous agency — a Refugee Board, ‘front-loaded’ with trained decision-makers who would both see the claimants and decide the cases of those who came before them, properly advised and represented; a Refugee Board which would be transparent and accountable, whose decisions would be based on impartially collected, objective and credible country of origin information, unsullied by politicians and their policy goals.

But this government is not radical, and is not interested in reform. It is consequently not interested in improving the quality of first instance decision-making, so much as in resisting accountability and in ring-fencing systemic inefficiency, incompetence and ineptitude. Those who pay are refugees and asylum seekers whose enforced destitution, even during the application stage, is a declared aim of this government; and whose children are intended as hostages to fortune should the system fail once again. And those who pay are ourselves, whose essentially if not exclusively British values of fairness, due process and the rule of law are subverted by what looks to be an alien, executive authoritarianism.

Concluding remarks

If there is indeed need now for a ‘new order’ — and to survive every living system must evolve — then it will clearly need to amalgamate both international and national elements. Experience, particularly over the last ten or twelve years, has shown that the international community ignores the causes of forced migration at its peril; that refugee movements can and do contribute to instability and thus also to apprehensions for international peace and security. The evolving order will have to respond proactively, and with a view to solutions, to internal displacement, intra-State conflict, and the demographic and political pressures attaching to persistent underdevelopment.

Faute de mieux, the new order will need also to factor in States’ concerns about individual threats to security, even though the connection between forced migration and the movement of individual terrorists is tenuous. Nevertheless, recent and current experience underlines the necessity for rule of law oversight, particularly where governments are inclined to act in disregard of human rights and internationally protected values. National bills and charters of rights and freedoms may help to moderate executive excess, but regional and universal protection mechanisms will still be needed.

Finally, we need to see how essential and agreed international goals may be linked to national goals and policies. This is where the UK’s so-called ‘New Vision for Refugees’ proves itself woefully inadequate, for it is not about solutions to a problem of international dimensions, so much as a self-regarding and self-interested attempt to minimise this country’s role, at the expense of refugees, asylum seekers, and less well off countries in the developing world.

Even if one accepts the premises, the gaps are obvious, for example, in the disregard of solutions for refugees and in the failure to commit, even in principle or in outline, to long-term financial support, such as has been proposed in the case of development. In short, then, this is a time for further evolutionary steps in the international protection of refugees. But it will not be accomplished through narrow national conversations and self-interested re-writing of international commitments.

On the contrary, it is by way of the path of experience; recalling the lives lost in Bosnia and Herzegovina because of the barriers thrown up in the way of those in flight; of lives lost in Rwanda because Security Council members declined to read the writing on the wall; of lives lost at sea, because families are intentionally divided by policies designed to penalize those who would dare to seek asylum; of refugees and asylum seekers deliberately alienated and driven to destitution on our streets, because of a government’s determination to avoid accountability and because of its persistent refusal to learn from the lives of those who have escaped persecution, torture and death.

Where will the impetus for change come from? Obviously, the self-interest of States will play a role, and many governments seem destined not to learn from the past, and bound forever to underestimate peoples’ capacity for self-preservation when faced with desperate circumstances and risk to life and liberty.

The picture is not universally bleak, however. Some governments do now invest in the future, and contribute to the development of civil society in countries emerging from crisis or conflict, recognising that local stability and reasonable future prospects are a powerful incentive to stay. It is this constituency of commitment which we must seek to join and to enlarge.

If the values established and promoted by the United Nations over decades are to be preserved and strengthened, then we must be prepared to face up to those governments which appear content, often for mixed reasons, to allow the dehumanization of the refugee and the asylum seeker, and ready to build systems of control and degradation upon perceptions of the common will driven by irresponsible elements in the popular press.

Clearly, there are important battles ahead. The weight of public opinion must be secured, in the often hostile environment created by some of the media, and other battles must be fought through the courts. Both will need to be won, if the rule of law is to prevail and that human dignity and worth common to us all is to be effectively protected.

The author is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of International Refugee Law, Oxford and President of the Refugee Legal Centre, London.

This is an edited extract from Professor Goodwin-Gill’s speech for the Evan Memorial Lecture, entitled: ‘The United Nations and Refugees: Time for a New Order?’ The full text is published on the UNA Oxford Branch website http://una.oxfordcity.org/.

From these feelings it is not long before the distinction between a brown migrant and a black neighbour who has known Europe to be his home all this while is blurred, and racist feelings towards asylum ‘cheats’ are transferred to the neighbour. All over Europe, ethnic minorities who have been residents for decades feel the effects of discrimination and prejudice. The asylum seeker is all too easily obfuscated with the ethnic minority resident. In the Swiss parliamentary elections last year, one poster of the anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party – in a series of posters the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called atrocious – carried a caricatured black face and a slogan reading ‘The Swiss are increasingly becoming the Negroes’. One can only surmise the feelings of Black or Asian Swiss citizens. That party’s share of the vote also rose from 5% in 1999 to 27% last year. British history and perceptions of empire as taught in schools are loaded with racist assumptions and practices, and the intellectual and cultural atmosphere still holds up black and brown people to be fundamentally inferior, if insidiously rather than overtly.

In a recent paper on asylum seekers and state racism in Europe, Liza Schuster argues that as states devote more time, energy and money to asserting control over migration and publicise these efforts, a spiral of fear is created over an apparent loss of control. It is this fear that hardens migration policy. And it is this same fear that feeds a growing number of countries’ ‘forward-looking’ policies that may not target, but inevitably affect, their ethnic minorities.

Techniques that had supposedly been consigned to a dark European past have been revived in policy towards asylum seekers – forcible and unfair dispersal, detention and deportation. These measures are now deemed reasonable, and parallels can be seen in how ethnic minority residents are treated. French pilot Lotfi Raissi was detained arbitrarily for five months on false allegations that he trained the September 11 hijackers and released when no charge could be laid against him. He believes that he was a victim because he was Arab and Muslim, and finds widespread support for this view. Asian participants in riots in Oldham and Bradford some years back found themselves receiving sentences far harsher than those handed down to white rioters.

Alongside this concern, European states’ deepest underlying fear – something they may not wish to admit publicly but increasingly express – is an increasingly plural, multicultural Europe. Five years from now, the first majority non-white child will be born in the Netherlands. In Belgium, estimates are that that will happen in twenty years. Michael Vlahos, writing in Tech Central Station in August 2003, notes that the Arab minority in Roman Europe (France, Spain and Italy) will more than double by 2050 to stabilise at 20 to 25 % of the population, while forming a larger proportion of the working population – this is when it ‘will come to occupy – for at least a slice of historical time – a unique demographic space’. So it is a long way away, but the ‘flood’ of foreign, often brown and Muslim, residents feeds a deep-seated racism and resentment on all sides. States, consciously guided or not, therefore feel the need to stem and mediate this transformation of their societies – and asylum policy only goes so far. But the spiral of distrust this perpetuates never seems to end.

In the Netherlands, populist right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn won widespread support on his anti-immigration platform before his murder by an animal rights activist. Pim’s party directed much of its racism towards Muslim migrants who were in their view unable to respect Europe’s liberal values and diversity. This was a fallacy. As the Muslim scholar Tim Winter notes, for Muslims in Europe, polls indicate that integration is no problem when ‘it signifies an enhancement and addition to what we already are, rather than an erasure and destruction’. Demands for citizenship tests, and for integration on ‘European’ terms, fail to define the culture into which immigrants should integrate, perhaps because the notion of an unchanging culture is illusory and feeds populist sentiment.

The British tabloid press in January 2004 scare-mongered over Roma who were ‘ready to flood in’ from the EU’s new member countries when they could in May. The Sun reported that ‘tens of thousands of gypsies are poised to flock to Britain’. The Daily Express, notes Arun Kundnani, states that Roma are ‘heading to Britain to leech on us’ and then apparently espouses their cause by warning that if they are let in, the Roma will become ‘figures of hate’. These concerns are hollow, when its imagery of floods and invasions does little to mitigate such hatred. The Nazis used similar language in the Holocaust.

Giorgio Agamben recently noted that the West’s political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and ‘that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz’. I liberally extend his metaphor, but it is a tragic irony that an increasingly borderless Europe has, when it comes to asylum and migration, adopted a fortress Europe mentality and regards its citizens as inhabitants to be moulded in a certain racist image. And non-white Europeans appear to be treated as if they were in a concentration camp, battered on all fronts, even if what happened at Auschwitz decades ago is still a long way from repeating itself.

According to the Home Office website, there are two ways of becoming a British citizen. One is registration (basically for British overseas territories citizens and, in certain circumstances, the ‘stateless’), the other naturalisation. Naturalisation requires living here for five years, being over 18, sufficient knowledge of English, being of good character and not being of unsound mind. David Blunkett’s citizenship test has yet to materialise, other than in Liverpool and only in prototype form, attracting what The Sunday Express described as ‘outrage’ by its organisers’ refusal to allow new citizens to graduate to The Beatles; apparently only Elgar or Vaughan Williams will do. Outraged Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle said, ‘They are imposing high culture on others’.

Recently I went to a friend’s citizenship ‘ceremony’; it was depressingly bureaucratic affair, conducted in the sterile environment of a solicitor’s office. The lawyer was a nervous, pale sort who sheepishly asked my friend, Catarina, if she wanted to swear on the Bible (you can take the oath with or without) and could not mention the Queen without giggling. The oath itself is couched in somewhat uninspiring legalese: ‘I (insert your name here) swear by Almighty God that on becoming a British citizen I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, according to law.’ He then told her that would be five pounds, please. No fur or ermine, no questions on the efficacy of the longbow at Agincourt or the origin of Walford’s unfortunate Slater sisters and no Elgar, no Vaughan Williams. Catarina, a Brazilian, has lived here for six years, was married to an Englishman for two of them, and intends to return to Brazil in another couple of years.

I am not suggesting that a decent soundtrack to the taking of an oath would make her stay, but a recognition that a nationality is a significant part of a personal identity is no bad idea. In the process of learning what you are, learning where you are is not entirely irrelevant. Citizenship is more than a matter of bureaucracy, just as an individual is more than an economic unit, as both Marxists and Coalition forces in Iraq would do well to realise. However, the primary test of citizenship should be language. All our history and culture is encoded in language, and it binds individuals of whatever background to the area they live in far more surely than some fragments of knowledge. And the borders of language are more porous even than those of the nation state. English is a language with a comparatively massive vocabulary and a flexible grammar, open to change and innovation. New users can and do shape it according to their whim, for it allows both a unique personal identity and a collective consciousness.

In conclusion: David Blunkett, ditch the citizenship test, bring on the TEFL teachers, and sex up the ceremony.