How diplomacy works

Being busy and out of London restricts me to reprinting interesting news articles I find. Here's one from tomorrow's FT:

Washington ‘hawks’ oppose EU3 incentives plan for Iran
>By Guy Dinmore in Washington and Daniel Dombey in London
>Published: May 23 2006 18:44 | Last updated: May 23 2006 18:44
>>

Opposition by US “hawks” led by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, is complicating efforts by the main European powers to put together an agreed package of incentives aimed at persuading Iran to suspend its nuclear fuel cycle programme, according to diplomats and analysts in Washington.

London is hosting on Wednesday political directors of the “EU3” of France, Germany and the UK, together with China, Russia and the US to look at the twin tools of incentives and sanctions.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, was said by one diplomat to have “gone out on a limb” in an attempt to back the EU3’s package of incentives but was facing resistance from Mr Cheney who is playing a more visible role in US foreign policy. Another diplomat said US internal divisions were holding up an agreement with the Europeans.

Some European diplomats believe that Washington will back the package – which includes guarantees for the construction of light-water reactors in Iran, promises of nuclear fuel and a new regional security forum – if Moscow endorses a tough chapter seven United Nations Security Council resolution that would require Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.

US officials would not comment on Washington’s internal debate. However, one official said the EU3 had only presented certain elements of the proposed package to the US, including the sale of a light-water nuclear reactor. The US did not respond, he added.

Ms Rice has denied reports that the EU3 asked the US to provide security assurances to Iran. Accusing Iran of being the “central banker of terrorism”, she made clear that such assurances were “not on the table”.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, has already rejected what the EU3 is reported to be offering. Diplomats are doubtful Iran will accept a deal that does not allow it to continue at least small-scale uranium enrichment. The US and EU3 have ruled that out.

Mr Cheney is said to oppose the notion of “rewarding bad behaviour” following Iran’s alleged breaches of its nuclear safeguards commitments. The hawks – who include John Bolton, the US envoy to the UN, and Bob Joseph, a senior arms control official – fear a repeat of a similar agreement reached with North Korea in 1994 which did not stop the communist regime from pursuing a secret weapons programme.

Ministers are still bruised from angry exchanges between Ms Rice and Sergei Lavrov in New York two weeks ago when the Russian foreign minister attacked US policy and condemned a tough speech directed at Moscow by Mr Cheney.

Margaret Beckett, the newly appointed UK foreign secretary, leaped to the defence of Nicholas Burns – the number three in the State Department – when Mr Lavrov targeted him, according to a western diplomat. Ministers should not attack civil servants, Ms Beckett is said to have responded.

An apology

Just a quick apology to anyone who has been sitting on the edge of their seats for the last two weeks desperate for updates here. (Ha!). I've been doing exams, which have now finished. Hurray!
Seeing Hugo Chavez described as "anti-global" in the Financial Times (no less) this week has made me start thinking about the political language of global financial restructuring, and wondering whether we need to pitch the battle at the discursive level. More on this soon possibly... after I've been to see Radiohead. Hurray!

Rays of hope

It's one of the sad paradoxes of social change - the most hopeful and progressive popular movements seem to arise only when alternatives to desperation, oppression and indignity have been exhausted. Thus the end of Tsarist autocracy in February 1917 was finally accomplished by a spontaneous popular movement, sparked by the brave women of Petrograd coming out for a rally on International Womens' Day, tired of spending hours queuing in the freezing cold for bread they might not get at the end of their 12-hour shifts in the factory. The German revolution was also a brief reaction to the horrors of the First World War and the shocking loss of life it involved.
Events hardly on the scale of the two above, and hardly a response to the cataclysms which provoked them, but following a similar dynamic, occurred on the streets of New York yesterday. In the face of a political firestorm over what should be done about them, the Latino community, and particularly those segments of it made up of recent immigrants, have begun to make their voices heard, Juan Gonzalez reports.
The debate is no doubt confused - as immigration debates tend to be, even in the US, the definitive immigrant society - and there is very little appreciation of the demographic dynamics at work. As Mike Davis' careful review of the data has shown, "While nativist hysteria has focused on supposedly ‘unrestricted’ immigration, the growth of the Latino population (32 million in 2000) is equally the consequence of higher fecundity in the context of larger, more successfully maintained two-parent families, especially amongst those of Mexican origin (two-thirds of all Latinos). Even if all immigration were terminated tomorrow, the dramatically younger Latino population (median age 26) would continue to increase rapidly at the statistical expense of ageing, non-Hispanic whites (median age 37)." (see text at note 6.)

It should be of concern that the president's answer is a massive, disenfranchised immigrant-gastarbeiter population (although it should equally be recognised that this already exists de facto to a certain extent, if not yet de jure).

Whether these movements represent a resurgent movement for racial equality, this time with a much greater focus on Latinos, or merely a temporary backlash to an extraordinarily (in political circles) hostile climate remains to be seen. Some are already attempting to recast these demands for basic rights as unAmerican particularism - which may itself add fuel to the fire. Where this all leads we shall have to see, but those who lament a loss of revolutionary consciousness perhaps ought to take note of the nature of the concerns of the new oppressed classes, and their intricate relation to capital relations. "You can't talk about globalized capital and exporting jobs and not talk about global human and labor rights for immigrant workers," Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday. "Immigrants aren't sending good jobs overseas, corporations are."

This (aside from a sensible, coherent plot, decent acting and a script) is what's missing from Hollywood's favourite film of last year.

Voters without a voice

Local elections take place in England on Thursday. Ostensibly, we are electing people to lead local councils. The fact is it doesn't matter much who is elected - the central government dictates what it wants most of the money spent on, so that local councils end up deliberating the most minor details (should X pub be allowed to open until 1am on Friday nights? Should we resurface the high street?...), powerless even to do anything much about astronomical council tax rates.
What then is the meaning of these elections? Today's FT carries a piece by James Blitz announcing that "Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, will launch on Tuesday a desperate bid to avert a serious setback for his Labour party in this Thursday’s local elections, seeking to draw a line under a week of disastrous news stories for the British government."
The news stories in question concern John Prescott's office romance and the thousand foreign criminals who were released instead of being considered for deportation, for which Home Secretary Charles Clarke ("an important cabinet ally [for Blair]" another FT story reminds us) has shouldered the blame.
It is surely no accident that the foreign-prisoner story broke when it did. Gordon Brown's allies have determined to make the local elections into an embarrassment for Blair and his allies, hoping to push him towards an early resignation. (On a slight tangent, we might wonder why the media become so astonished and outraged by foreign criminals reoffending, while British criminals' reoffending rates are unremarkable. In this week's Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins put it down to thinly disguised racism. Perhaps, but I think it has as much to do with Brown allies being able to generate a media controversy through intelligent briefing of the newspapers).

All clear enough, but what are Joe and Jo Public to do? Should they participate in this undemocratic charade, and allow the elections to become an instrument of a disagreement within the ruling party, or refuse to legitimise this nonsense, and be told by the media that low turn-out rates prove that Pop Idol is more important to people than politics? (Quite differently, politics matters to people, but the majority have freed themselves of the illusion that it happens in the House of Commons, or that elections have anything to do with it - an affliction which is increasingly confined to the wealthiest 20% of the population, and even many of them are beginning to wonder).

We need to develop an alternative means of political expression. The old modes are outdated, and have largely been hijacked by a vain few who will collude with anyone who stuffs their pockets and keeps the dream of celebrity alive for them. This is just as true of left politics, which has barely changed at all since 1789 in terms of the technology of popular expression, and in this country has suffered terribly at the hands of George Galloway's RESPECT Coalition, which drained the StopTheWar campaign of all its vitality. These stale forms need some rethinking if we are to regain the democracy and liberty which - in principle - our society holds so dear.