Anastassia Tsoukala
Football Hooliganism in Europe:
Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
192 pages
£50.00
ISBN 978-0230201149

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To the horror of Western Europe’s liberal intelligentsia, the ancient alliance between popular attitudes and muscular executive force has excluded asylum seekers and radical Muslims from “normal” society. Yet the same intelligentsia that has campaigned against the unlawful treatment of these groups has turned a blind eye to the de-humanisation and denial of civil liberties affecting the young, male football supporter. Away from the headlines of asylum prisons and 42-day detention, suspected football hooligans have been demonised in a pan-European spiral of social construction, which implicates governments, the EU, police forces, and the media.

Football Hooliganism in Europe is Anastassia Tsoukala’s effort to expose this trend. Turning to the histories of European lawmaking and law enforcement, Tsoukala, a professor of criminology at Paris XI, traces the process by which the football hooligan became a modern folk devil. Despite its flaws, her book admirably attempts to redirect academic focus toward the less recognised—but no less oppressive—manifestations of the contemporary obsession with security.

As Tsoukala makes clear, the demonisation of football hooliganism is an outgrowth of a new security paradigm in which “non-traditional threats” justify disproportionate executive power. Within this frame, sub-groups like the asylum seeker, the radical Muslim, and the hooligan are violated due to pre-emptive assessments of “risk”. This process occurs independently of violence itself, facilitating the erosion of human rights across Europe.

For instance, in Britain, the Football (Disorder) Act 2000 allows authorities to ban suspected hooligans from stadiums and restrict them from traveling abroad to games through passport confiscation. Authorities can take these measures on the basis of police complaint alone. Violating the principle of proportionality and illustrating the punitive bite of civil orders, the law has allowed restriction of movement—and even detention—during “control periods” of suspected hooliganism. By the time of the 2006 World Cup, 3,286 of these banning orders were in force in England and Wales.

In February of that year, one case, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester v. Davies, deliberated on a man who received a football banning order based on a complaint, despite the failure of either policemen or CCTV footage to identify him. In another case, a man received a banning order after a bottle was thrown in a pub, even though authorities could not positively identify the man as the perpetrator. Such “guilt by membership in a disorderly group” is a common, if patchy, pattern that feeds on the arbitrary predilections of local constabularies and magistrates.

This pattern persists across Europe. In France, Law (2006)-64, ostensibly an anti-terrorism measure, bans people from stadiums who have been found guilty of certain offences. Germany, Belgium, and Italy have similar measures in place. Moreover, even after these bans have expired, offender backgrounders remain on shared databases across Europe, contrary to the stipulations of the European Convention on Human Rights. Apart from infringing on the right to freedom of movement, these civil laws circumvent the procedural guarantees of the criminal justice system, most notably the crucial tenet of “innocent until proven guilty”. In this way, bans on football hooliganism constitute a noteworthy shift from traditional criminal justice toward what criminologist David Garland has called “the culture of control”.

But do football hooligans really matter? After decades of critical work by academics, the problems and implications of persecuting asylum seekers and radical Muslims are relatively clear. But aren’t football hooligans simply a case of deviant—or, as New Labour would have it, “anti-social”—people getting the punishment they deserve? Aren’t the control orders simply a way to prevent destruction of life, property, and public order?

For Tsoukala, the answer is a resounding no. While she does not deny the realities of football violence, Tsoukala asserts that football bans reveal latent ideologies—and key contradictions—in contemporary crime-control practices. In a skillful historical survey, she explains how a concrete, continent-wide legal framework specific to sports-related violence first emerged after 39 Juventus supporters were killed during a fight at Belgium’s Heysel Stadium in 1985. She then explores how this framework exhibits overlaps with approaches to similarly imagined non-state threats, such as recent legislation designed to combat terrorism, drug networks, and riots. The genealogy provides a timely corrective to the praise heaped on the policing of the 2006 World Cup: Tsoukala demonstrates that the measures the media has lauded—police co-operation, database sharing, and cross-European passport revocation—are a triumph of self-reinforcing logic and pernicious social construction.

While her analysis of legal history is compelling, Tsoukala’s survey of academic research on the phenomenon of hooliganism displays a myopic commitment to her own arguments about the problem at hand. She hastily dismisses decades of economic, social, and psychological research on sports-related violence, most notably the work of sociologists Peter Marsh and Eric Dunning. A more thorough acknowledgment of this research would add depth and empirical force to Tsoukala’s analysis, and perhaps more importantly, would endear her to—rather than alienate her from—the academics she aims to convince.

In the end, the problem with Football Hooliganism in Europe is that Tsoukala only hints at what she might state more explicitly: that the construction of the anti-hooligan hyperbole is as much about economics as it is about a social construct. Who wins in this economic exchange? All involved: newspapers whip up a storm to sell more newspapers; police forces point to the newspaper reports and get more resources; and European institutions such as Interpol emphasise (or perhaps invent) the transnational aspect of the problem to justify their coercive measures. In this system of internal logic, actual events bear little relation to outcomes: either violence occurs, necessitating more punitive measures, or it does not, in which case the preventive apparatus is praised, extended, and replicated. To some extent, the War on Terror works the same way.

Tsoukala gives too little time to these sorts of motivations, which underlie the very social construction she indicts. But she does succeed in convincing the reader that football hooliganism matters. This contribution should not be overlooked, for the patterns Tsoukala highlights suggest the need for more critical assessment of European laws and institutions. They also speak to the continued presence of impetuous punitive measures in Europe, which discriminate against particular persons based on prejudices and assumptions.

The precedent set by banning and restricting alleged hooligans, a precedent of “punishment on the basis of suspicion”, is dangerous, and the prevalence of such bans illustrates the need to keep a sharp eye on European institutions—the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and increasingly the European Parliament—that have undermined their own “rights and freedoms” rhetoric in the treatment of sports-related violence. In short, the continued failure to critique football-hooligan bans permits an erosion of the very values Europeans claim to uphold. By highlighting this paradoxical process, Tsoukala has not merely provided a new slant on a single phenomenon; she has shown that the seemingly banal control machinery of European integration can and does infringe on hard-won rights.

Mark Baker is reading for an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

Tristam Hunt
The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Allen Lane, 2009
464 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0713998528

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If at some point an academic calls you the “global architect” of some –ism, you either have had an impressive career or you are a founding member of al-Qaeda. At the beginning of his new biography of Friedrich Engels, Tristram Hunt situates “one of the central architects of global communism” closer to the latter, deliberately conjuring the evils of Soviet state utopianism and referencing buzzwords like terrorist “insurgency” and “guerrilla warfare”. But the sulphur fog clears after the introduction. Over the course of this well-researched and entertaining biography, Hunt shows how Engels’s social and political critique was not ferocious or fanatical, but rather nuanced and circumspect. Unlike many 20th-century communists, who willingly used violence to translate their imagined utopia into practice, Engels proved much more realistic about the revolution on the horizon. Contrary to popular associations, Hunt argues, this “second fiddle” ideologue and life-long friend to Karl Marx was neither dictator nor enthusiast: in fact, he was a toff.

Unlike Marx, Engels was born into a morality-conscious family of wealthy conservatives, devoted to evangelical piety and a starchy Protestant work ethic. The air was thick with dutiful domesticity, well-groomed paternalism, and a heavy dose of religiosity. Engels, the atheist-to-be, would always remain impressed by this religious upbringing. His father owned a cotton spinning and thread producing company in the small Rhineland town of Barmen, and by 1840, it would become the empire of Ermen and Engels, stretching across Europe from the German homeland to Manchester, England. Tradition demanded Engels become a Fabrikant like his father.

Instead, he became the lifelong disruptive factor in his father’s enchanted worldview. Though the young Engels was sent to the town of Bremen to hone his business skills, he spent much of his time there fencing, drinking, skirt-chasing, and reading blasphemous books distributed by the progressive Young Germany. At university in Berlin, he embraced the “dragon seed” of Hegel, and cloaked under the journalistic pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, he began to attack the miserable conditions of mill workers in his hometown of Barmen.

During these years he met Karl Marx, whose explosive hairstyle had brought him the nickname “Moor”. Together they embarked on a communist voyage that would leave their two names inextricably connected in the history books. Upon being sent to Manchester in 1842 to become a proper merchant, the young Friedrich’s ivory tower of theoretical philosophy crumbled, and the rough and raw situation of the English working class sharpened his senses to reality. The facts spoke for themselves, and at the precocious age of 24, he wrote the chilling Condition of the Working Class in England.

Despite his criticism of the very sort of exploitation that brought his family money, Engels continued to accept a monthly allowance from his parents. In 1848, it allowed him to travel to Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century”, to write, drink, and think together with Karl Marx. A lifelong friendship was forged over the pair’s theoretical agreement about the rotten state of world affairs.

In 1848, hunted by arrest warrants and Prussian spies, Marx and his family fled to London. Engels returned to Manchester, taking up a job at Ermen and Engels, and he would devote the next 20 years to earning money as a merchant to support Marx’s work on Das Kapital. Despite his social and political views, Engels was not ashamed to openly love the lush life of a German expatriate. He became adept in the art of the English upper-crust life, dining at posh restaurants, hunting foxes, and joining half a dozen Manchester gentlemen’s clubs. Having earlier despised frock-coated philistines, he now proudly donned the patrician attire himself.

The paradox of the communist toff proves uncomfortable for those who equate communism exclusively with the hard-working urban proletariat suffering under despicable conditions. Cynics tend to chastise the champagne socialist: once one can afford it, any extravagant opinion can be tossed up and played with over port. But in choosing not to break with his origins, Engels simply gave in to necessity and practicality. He milked the system for the greater cause, giving generously until his death in 1895.

Most importantly, Engels supported Marx and his family, as well as a whole clique of loving dependants. More than half of Engels’s annual income went to funding the Marxes’ housing and education in London, family holidays, and Marx’s journalistic exploits. Marx’s wife Jenny gratefully looked forward to the letters and cheques from “Mr. Chitty”. Beyond money, Engels provided Marx with empirical facts for his treatises, as well as theoretical input and much-needed editing for the gargantuan Das Kapital. From 1870 onwards, Engels, the “General” and “Grand Llama of Regent’s Park”, pulled the strings behind the advancement of world socialism.

For a modern-day audience drilled to believe that the age of grand narratives is dead and that everything is but a Grand Failure, Hunt’s biography is refreshing. It toes the line between grounding the political ideas of socialism in their historical context on the one hand and declaring them timeless on the other. As an added bonus, the biography’s details feed the voyeuristic mind: see Marx’s 1866 letter to Engels, in which the principal architect of global communism laments the “the itching and scratching between [his] testis and posterior”. Hunt highlights Engels’s Jekyll-and-Hyde character: he was both a proto-feminist and a lover of prostitutes, both a merchant fox hunter and a loving socialist revolutionary. Yet The Frock-Coated Communist hardly forsakes political and theoretical realms in pursuit of such personal details. Hunt’s primary interest rests in recovering the left-wing criticism from Engels’s pages that remains relevant in a contemporary context: we need not re-invent the wheel to see much of what is going wrong today.

This includes engaging the fatal argument against Marxism—and, by extension, against Engels—which is that Marxism’s ideas led to Josef Stalin’s brutal dictatorship. Hunt rightly points out the flaw of such argumentation. Despite their interest in the parousia of revolution, Marx and Engels were too pragmatic to believe in the quick possibility of a workers’ paradise hic et nunc. Throughout their lives, both Marx and Engels argued against enthusiasts of all stripes. In the 1840s it was the Owenites, Charles Fourier, and followers of Saint-Simon’s utopian socialism, whom Marx and Engels deemed too reminiscent of the Radical Reformation. Their demands for equality through violence were at odds with Engels’s insistence on the necessity of authority and order. Marx and Engels were equally suspicious of Mikhail Bakunin, the globetrotting Russian anarchist, whom the early Berlin intellectuals spurned as a hot-headed grump.

Hunt notes that Engels is falsely regarded as “a pioneer theorist of guerrilla warfare”, noting that the thinker remained deeply sceptical of any sort of insurgency. In 1886, a pragmatist Engels chided Henry Mayers Hyndman, who had gathered 8,ooo unemployed East Enders for riots in the West End: “What has been achieved is to equate socialism with looting in the minds of the bourgeois public and, while this may not have made matters much worse, it has certainly got us no further”, Engels wrote. Stalin’s socialism, an all-encompassing philosophical system that cemented and centralised the tovarishch’s absolute power, would have been anathema to Engels’s ever-critical mind.

The thinking of Marx and Engels is as far from dogmatism as it is from an inevitable precursor of dictatorship. More than an ideology, it is a critical method, one that Hunt acutely applies to contemporary sweatshops in his epilogue. Occasional dictatorship and terrorism terminology fortunately turns out to be more redressing than j’accuse. Having read this book, even the last dreamy post-materialist will realise that Engels’s critique has not ceased to be explosive.

Therese Feiler is reading for a DPhil in Theology at Exeter College, Oxford.

Pia Riggirozzi
Advancing Governance in the South: What are the Roles for
International Financial Institutions in Developing States?
Palgrave MacMillan, December 2008
213 pages
£50.00
ISBN 978-0230220119

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Two years ago, the International Monetary Fund’s loan portfolio was a mere $13 billion—down 87% from 2003. In the spring of 2007, a Washington think tank hosted a debate entitled, “Is the IMF Obsolete?” In September of that year, the new managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said that the “very existence” of the IMF was in question. The “two main issues” facing the fund, according to Strauss-Kahn, were “relevance and legitimacy”.

The IMF’s relevance is no longer in question. Since the start of the global financial crisis this past fall, the IMF has lent $50 billion to Eastern European countries, Iceland, Pakistan and El Salvador—and it received a $500 billion boost at the G-20 summit in London this month. Its sibling organization, the World Bank, is on a lending spree as well. However, the legitimacy of these Bretton Woods brethren remains hotly contested, as the enormous protests taking place today in Washington demonstrates. In the post-crisis world, the crucial question is not if the international financial institutions (IFIs) have a role to play, but how the IFIs should approach their roles.

The title of Maria Pia Riggirozzi’s new book promises to answer that question from a global perspective. In its catalogue, publisher Palgrave Macmillan promises to answer the question on a “regional scale”. But the book actually asks the question from a national perspective—specifically, an Argentine one. The mismatch between the country-specific contents and the global aspirations of the title actually provides an ironic (and unintentional) commentary on the state of scholarship on IFIs. Scholars berate the IMF and World Bank for applying one-size-fits-all solutions to development challenges. Yet most scholarship on the IFIs is marketed under the same assumption: that the conclusions from one country are applicable to all others.

Amid the current global economic drama, Riggirozzi’s careful study of the power relations between IFIs and a single country is more important than ever. The core of IFI action lies in the individual relationships between IFI staff and national policymakers, and those dynamics determine if an IFI has the legitimacy it needs to be effective. Riggirozzi argues that in the case of Argentina, the IMF’s top-down model of power imposition led “not only to a loss of legitimacy, but in turn to the disempowerment of the institution”. In her analysis, the success or failure of IFI intervention is determined by how policy is made: is it a top-down imposition and conveyance of money and ideas, or is a consultation with local experts to broker policies? Riggirozzi identifies IFI staff doing both in her case study of Argentina in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis. She differentiates between divisions of the World Bank and shows the most successful IFI teams acted as sensitive, nimble “brokers” of policy ideas, not as “conveyors” or “imposers” of global best practice. Although sharply critical, Riggirozzi does not see IFI action in Argentina as an unmitigated disaster: she is more interested in understanding policy-making mechanisms than placing blame.

Riggirozzi’s analysis shows the enormous insights gained from approaching IFI interactions as specific encounters embedded in a local context. However, the generalisation in the title of the book assumes that one country’s relationship to a single IFI can serve as a description of all countries in the ‘South’ and their relationships to all IFIs. This “global” approach to IFIs encourages imprecise terminology, trivializes local political-economic dynamics and discourages inquiry into specific local grievances. It lumps all anti-IFI discourses into a single globalised bundle of discontent. But globalisation has many discontents, and each one is worth exploring individually.

Generalisations seem endemic to international political economy as a discipline, but imprecise terms are particularly prevalent in less academic discussions of international finance. The terms “international financial institution” and “global South” are commonly used (as in Riggirozzi’s title), but rarely are their exact meanings explored or questioned. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not least because this casual use helps perpetuate stylised critiques of the IFIs, which discredit them simply by referring to a pervasive stereotype that they are all part of some monolithic neo-liberal monster.

Certainly the IFIs themselves deserve some of the blame. Their geographic concentration in Washington does nothing to dispel the notion that they are agents of American hegemony. The persistent mission creep of the IMF and World Bank onto the turfs of one another makes it difficult for anyone to tell them apart. Worse yet, instances of “cross-conditionality” in which the World Bank and IMF demand the same concessions from borrowers reinforce perceptions of a singular IFI agenda.

But that agenda appears to be changing or, at the very least, evolving in the current financial crisis. In March, the IMF approved a new Flexible Credit Line framework that guarantees emergency funding—without preconditions—for emerging-market economies with “very strong track records”. The program has provided a $47 billion line of credit to Mexico. IMF officials have indicated that Poland and Colombia will receive “no-strings-attached” guarantees in the near future as well. As the IMF shows signs of greater flexibility, the question remains: will academics and activists cling to their rigid stereotyping of international financial institutions?

The idea of a unitary “global South” is even more of a leap from reality than the idea of a unitary international financial institution. To begin with, it is factually incorrect to split the world into a “rich North” and “poor South” (Moldova, meet New Zealand). Not only does the term “global south” implicitly equate poverty with geography, it assumes similarities and solidarities between nations that do not exist. For example, Riggirozzi argues that the IFIs need to empower local experts. Her choice of Argentina, with its sophisticated domestic think tanks, helps her make this case. If she had chosen Guinea-Bissau, by contrast, she might be less convincing.

If the title was her choice and a global perspective really her goal, Riggirozzi could have chosen from a variety of similar middle-income countries to underscore her conclusions beyond Argentina. Not only would a comparison of countries highlight how context-specific politics and personalities can drive international financial policy-making, it would also raise interesting questions about the degree to which IFIs are seen as “patrons” or as “partners” in different regions. Why, precisely, is it that Poland and other Eastern European countries still broadly trust and rely on the IMF? And why, as Argentina’s Economy Ministry questions the competence of IMF officials, does the leader of neighbouring Brazil say that he is “proud” to lend to the fund?

Understanding that each country’s relationship with the Bretton Woods institutions has its own distinctive flavour is critical for national and international policy responses to the financial crisis. The success of potential policies depends on their domestic palatability, which varies according to country-specific historical and political legacies. In Peru, the IMF may forever be associated with the repressive regime of Alberto Fujimori. In the Czech Republic, the IMF may eternally be intertwined with the image of Vaclav Havel, who left behind a happier, but still complicated legacy. In Argentina, as Riggirozzi’s work illustrates, what the IMF approached as “technocratic reforms” were implemented alongside ugly and unethical local political actions—such as President Carlos Menem packing the Supreme Court—and it may take many decades for the fund can live this down. In that respect, Riggirozzi delivers an important message, even if her title obscures it: whatever the role of IFIs, success depends on sensitivity to local politics—from academics, activists and the institutions themselves.

Taylor St. John is a DPhil student in Development Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her research deals with World Bank-sponsored arbitration of water disputes in Latin America.

Peter Singer
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Picador, 2009
214 pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-0330454582

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Peter Singer and Jimmy Cayne are not natural allies. Singer is an Oxford-educated philosopher, a vocal vegetarian and an anti-poverty crusader. Cayne is a high school dropout who, until recently, feasted on bacon, salmon and red wine before beginning his workday as CEO of Bear Stearns. Yet in Singer’s new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, Cayne makes a cameo appearance—not as a villain, but as a good corporate citizen.

Singer heaps praise upon Cayne’s company: “Bear Stearns—before its sale to JPMorgan Chase during the 2008 crisis—made sure that neither apathy nor selfishness prevented its leaders from doing the right thing.” Such a pronouncement would be considered lavish praise for any corporation—but especially for Bear Stearns. When the investment bank collapsed in March 2008, one industry insider called it “payback” for a “firm that seemed to be overly selfish and overly interested in their own gains”. But for Singer, Bear is a beau ideal of benevolence. The firm required all of its senior managing directors to donate 4 percent of their salaries and bonuses to charity, and it checked their tax returns to make sure they complied. In 2006, according to Cayne, the firm’s senior managing directors donated more than $45 million (£32 million) combined. “As far as I know, we are the only company that has this type of policy,” Cayne said.

To be sure, Singer and Cayne do not entirely see eye-to-eye on all matters of philanthropy. Cayne’s charitable giving goes to museums and private prep schools, among other causes. By contrast, Singer believes that “philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious”. He chastises the Metropolitan Museum of Art for paying $45 million for a single Duccio panel painting when the same amount of money could have funded 900,000 cataract operations for people in developing countries “who can’t see anything at all, let alone a painting”. Singer donates 25% of his income to anti-poverty groups each year. (All royalties from The Life You Can Save will go to Oxfam.) Comparatively, Cayne is much less generous: in 2006, his charitable trust gave gifts amounting to 7 percent of his CEO compensation. By Singer’s personal standards, Cayne is still a scrooge.

Nevertheless, Singer sees enormous potential in the Bear Stearns model of employee giving—albeit, with important modifications. Singer suggests that employers withhold 1 percent of every employee’s paycheck, which would then go to an anti-poverty organisation of the employee’s choice. Workers could opt out of the program, but the default would be to donate (and, specifically, to donate to an organisation that fights global poverty rather than a posh prep school, ornate opera house or other “dubious” cause). If major corporations, universities, and other employers adopted Singer’s suggestions, it “would yield billions more for combating poverty”.

For those who are familiar with Singer’s philosophy, the employee giving proposal will stand out as one of the more innovative elements of The Life You Can Save. To a large extent, the book rehashes arguments that Singer has already made elsewhere—starting with his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Singer argued then—as he does now—that from a financial perspective, it is relatively easy to save a life in the developing world. He cites a statistic from William Easterly—a New York University economist who is famously skeptical about the effectiveness of third-world aid. Easterly acknowledges that the World Health Organization’s efforts against malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections and measles save approximately one child’s life for every $300 (£210) spent. That is roughly the price of a new wool single-breasted suit from Marks and Spencer, or dinner for two with a fine champagne at Brasserie Blanc. When we spend our money on fine clothes or fine food, Singer says, we are valuing frivolous fun above the lives of real human beings.

Yet if every £210 suit is another child’s life, then every £21 hardcover book is a tenth of a child’s life and every £2.10 latte is one-hundredth. Does Singer’s argument imply that all luxury spending is problematic? Yes, but he does not ask us to become bare-bones ascetics. Rather, he sets out specific standards for charitable giving based on income level, and he asks his readers to abide by them. Everyone should strive to donate at least 1 percent of their income to anti-poverty efforts, he says, but someone like Jimmy Cayne should be giving close to 30 percent. (The full set of standards is posted online here.)

More than one thousand people, from China to Chile, have logged onto Singer’s website and pledged to abide by his percentage-of-income standards. Tim Harford—the Financial Times columnist who once penned an “economic case against philanthropy”—now says that Singer’s book has motivated him to donate to Oxfam. William Easterly, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is less persuaded. According to Easterly, “Mr. Singer argues from a small number of… examples that it is relatively easy to do good things for the poor,” even though much aid is wasted due to corruption and incompetence.

But Singer only needs “a small number of examples” to prove his point. Even Easterly would have to acknowledge that some aid organisations are effective. For example, the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital treats women who suffered debilitating injuries in childbirth that cause them to leak urine and feces continuously; for as little as £100 per surgery, the hospital can cure the condition with a 93 percent success rate. (Singer’s Australian publisher is giving 5 percent of its proceeds to the hospital.) As long as well-run organisations like this exist, and until they are fully funded, donors can be reasonably confident that their charitable donations are going to good use.

Granted, this is not a message that many will want to hear during a deep economic recession. As reviewer Katha Pollitt wrote in the Nation, “the gods of publishing must have had a good laugh” when they arranged for Singer’s book to come out when “so many are broke”. Yet in some sense, The Life You Can Save has appeared at the perfect moment. As a result of the financial crisis, the world has a rare opportunity to put Singer’s ideas into action.

Barack Obama has already imposed a $500,000 (£360,000) compensation cap on bank executives who receive bailout money. Gordon Brown is calling for a global code on bankers’ pay. The public is demanding some sort of change in the way that top executives are remunerated. But as one executive compensation consultant told the Los Angeles Times recently, people in his industry are “pretty damn smart” and will come up with ways to skirt the caps. Companies will compensate their CEOs with restricted shares instead of providing stock options or cash bonuses. They will offer their CEOs new perquisites that do not count toward the $500,000 cap. CEOs might be breakfasting on red wine, bacon, and salmon once again—this time, on their companies’ tabs.

Imagine, however, if Obama and Brown—instead of imposing quixotic compensation caps—forced banks to adopt Bear Stearns-style policies for top executives. Banks might implement an “opt-out” 1 percent plan for the rest of their employees. Unlike compensation caps, bankers might actually embrace such an approach. (Cayne says that most executives found that charitable giving was “incredibly gratifying”.) And unlike compensation caps, society might actually benefit as a result.

Inevitably, some senior executives will object to Singer’s stipulation that their donations go to anti-poverty efforts. They will fight for the right to donate to museums, musical groups and other organisations that Singer deems “dubious”. And whereas Singer believes that developing-world aid is almost always more cost-effective (from a life-saving perspective) than domestic aid, an argument he makes forcefully in One World (2002), it seems unlikely that Singer’s suggestion will garner support unless it allows for gifts to local causes. Even so, a plan that raises the quantity of charitable giving—regardless of which charity—is preferable to a plan that raises the quality of the executive dining room menu, and Singer’s proposal would do more than that. The £32 million from Bear executives alone in 2006 could have funded, by one estimate, 45 million meningitis or measles vaccinations in the world’s poorest places.

Of course, there still is one problem with the “Bear Stearns Plan”: there are few brands that are as associated with ignominy (though “Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC “and “Stanford Financial Group” give “Bear Stearns” a run for its money). We might call it the “one percent doctrine ”, except that Dick Cheney has already dragged that moniker through the mud. The Bear Stearns Plan is an idea whose time has come—but whose name has yet to arrive.

Daniel Hemel, an MPhil candidate in International Relations at New College, Oxford, is writing a thesis on global financial regulation. He is a Senior Editor of the Oxonian Review.

Dambisa Moyo
Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and
How there is Another Way for Africa
Allen Lane, 2009
288 pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-1846140068

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At Harvard in the mid-1990s, a young Zambian graduate student listened rapturously to Professor Jeffrey Sachs’s prescriptions to bring prosperity to developing countries through the free market. Sachs later abandoned many of his free-market prescriptions in favour of large-scale aid flows from the West to the developing world—and Dambisa Moyo, the former student in Sachs’s auditorium, felt deceived.

“It’s completely hypocritical and it was a great disappointment,” Moyo said at a recent event in Oxford. “I think he’s very dishonest… To me, as an African, the fact that he would dole out the prescriptions he does to other people [in Latin America, Poland and Russia] but doesn’t when it comes to Africa suggests to me he thinks we’re different.”

It is this sense of betrayal, not just by Sachs but by the larger international community, that fuels Moyo’s repudiation of aid as the solution to African poverty. It is the subject of her new book, Dead Aid, which makes a controversial anti-aid argument that should be read, if only to ignite discussion and force aid advocates to justify the status quo.

After setting out to debunk the “myth” that aid works, Dead Aid calls for an end to massive governmental and multilateral aid flows to Africa within five years, including all grants and heavily subsidised loans. Moyo’s claim is that turning off the aid tap will shock African governments into accountability by forcing them to innovate and find non-aid fundraising mechanisms. She spends most of the book describing the multitude of alternatives to “free money”, offering an exhaustive menu of free-market mechanisms that range from collective regional bonds and international debt markets, to small-scale development through domestic savings and microfinance. While she makes a strong argument for private sector strategies, she fails to explain how they can improve governance without the complementary emergence of viable democratic institutions and checks on executive power.

Moyo is the first to point out her argument is not new. Although it fails to engage with previous development theories and critiques, Dead Aid offers a fusion of classic dependency theory (blaming Africa’s underdevelopment on Western policies, namely aid) and free trade advocacy (promoting local growth through international trade and foreign investment). Though her ideas are clearly influenced by the tutelage of (a younger) Sachs and Oxford economist Paul Collier, Moyo dedicates her book to Peter Bauer, aligning herself with a martyr of classical liberalism, long maligned for his staunch criticisms of aid.

Despite her adept polemical positioning, Moyo’s actual diagnosis of aid’s ills remains painfully weak. In the preface, Moyo writes, “This book is a consequence of my thoughts and deliberations over the years.” Indeed, the book relies heavily on personal thoughts and deliberations rather than in-depth, or even cursory research. The first section rejects a litany of possible explanations for African poverty, leaving aid as the sole possible culprit of underdevelopment.

Instead of making a compelling empirical case for the detrimental effects of aid, Moyo launches a haphazard assault on alternative explanations for the continent’s economic stagnation. Without names or sources, she swiftly dismisses longstanding, well-researched arguments that have variously attributed Africa’s economic failures to the continent’s geography, climate change, colonial history, ethnic diversity, civil conflict and weak institutions. The reader is hardly convinced. For example, in order to shunt aside “historical factors, such as colonialism”, she proffers but a single paragraph (four sentences ending with a maddening footnote that cites the Wikipedia entry on the 1885 Berlin Conference).

Moyo repeatedly simplifies the complex challenges facing African countries today in order to overemphasise the extent to which aid is inhibiting economic growth. Ultimately, in bypassing context and the nuances of specific challenges, she weakens her own anti-aid argument. She decries aid for enabling corruption, engendering “laziness”, creating dependency, inciting civil wars and hamstringing civil society. These are important allegations, and familiar topics of conversation for any observer of Africa and development issues—but they are not grounded in evidence.

Throughout Dead Aid, Moyo insists on referring generally to the whole of Africa, and occasionally “Africans”, all the while describing Aid amorphously with a capital “A”. One cannot help but wonder what particular contexts and aid programmes Moyo has in mind, when the only “country” that appears in any detail in her narrative is an imaginary development hell-hole named Dongo, and when the only specific aid project she references is hypothetical, a malaria-net distribution scheme. Notably, this recurring hypothetical anecdote seems unlikely to fit Moyo’s own definition of “Aid”, as most “large-scale multilateral aid packages”, which go to governments, do not involve bed net handouts in rural areas. (The reference may refer to Sachs’s tireless advocacy for free bed nets throughout Africa.)

Despite serious shortcomings in Moyo’s dogmatic diagnosis, the book makes a compelling case for diversifying development funding by exploring private sector options. The list of free-market mechanisms Moyo recommends for financing growth is impressive, moving from the global to the individual scale. For example, she urges individuals to lend directly to African entrepreneurs through Kiva.org. Her big-ticket item for making the cycle stop is the international debt market, where African countries can work their way into investment viability.

Whether African countries can in the near future afford the sorts of loans that would create viable investment markets is unclear, particularly given the economic crisis that has dried up available credit across the globe. Yet Moyo reminds the reader that millions of dollars already sit on the continent in savings, money that could be invested at home, were attractive markets to emerge.

Once Western governments buy the argument that aid does not work, Moyo suggests they look to China for a development model that promotes growth. Moyo’s claim that, “in the last sixty years, no country has made as big an impact on the political, economic, and social fabric of Africa,” is dubious. But she is more focused on applauding China’s public and private “investment assault” than shoring up any sort of historical argument. Protectionists who detest the flood of cheap Chinese goods into African markets and human rights advocates who abhor China’s contentious non-interference policy will hardly be placated by Moyo’s somewhat bizarre presentation of opinion poll data, which is supposed to confirm that China’s presence is good rather than exploitative for Africans. (They may also be interested to know that Moyo was recently proposed as a board member of Lundin Petroleum, one of the Western oil companies active in Southern Sudan.)

As contentious as her arguments are, Moyo herself looks poised to become a lightning rod for debate. She vociferously decries the “glamour aid” culture, faulting it for disenfranchising African politicians and their constituencies. Yet the hubbub surrounding the release of Dead Aid reveals the irony of the book’s endeavour: if Moyo hopes to persuade Western donors and African recipients to abandon aid, she can succeed only by catapulting herself into the heart of the glamour-aid fray she so fervently condemns. So far, the former Goldman Sachs investment banker seems to be doing just that; the society pages of the Guardian recently attended one of Moyo’s book launches at the (glamorous) Hôtel Balzac on the Champs-Elysées.

At her recent book talk in Oxford, Moyo said that Dead Aid was “designed to open up dialogue”. To this end, the book is already a great success. But a “clarion call for change” Dead Aid is not. Lacking evidence and specificity, and completely disregarding the disparate, though uniformly difficult political realities of Africa’s countries, Dead Aid is neither prescription nor plan. Readers excited by the free-market optimism and private sector solutions presented in Dead Aid are left wondering just how to get involved in the apocalyptic and opaque Africa the book describes. Add the challenge brought by the global financial crisis, and surely Moyo has plenty of fodder for her next book contract (publication set for 2010).

Zoe Marks is reading for a DPhil in Politics at St. Cross College, Oxford.

When the Oxonian Review sat down with Paul Collier in his office at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, he had just returned from a visit with the US State Department, where he had briefed top American policy makers on his rescue plan for the world’s poorest countries. With the publication of his first book, The Bottom Billion (2007), Paul Collier established himself as a premier authority on international development, presenting aid solutions for the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. In his newest book, Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier moves into the contentious realm of policymaking. Collier anticipates controversy. He writes in Wars, Guns and Votes: “I am aware that I walk on a tightrope.” And he is. Wars, Guns and Votes came out in the UK last week.

A major theme of your book is that democracy can be dangerous if elections are installed without providing the critical public good of security. You propose a game plan that involves installing peacekeepers to the bottom billion countries for at least a decade. This calls for long term intervention by the international community. Could you clarify your criteria for when national sovereignty should be breached?

I think national sovereignty being breached is a melodramatic way of putting it, but there are two distinct contexts that concern us. One is post-conflict situations. Obviously, in conflict situations, when they begin, something has gone terribly wrong with the poverty; you’ve had a civil war. The record of these post-conflict periods is not very happy… about 40 percent of these countries go back into conflict within a decade, and they are responsible for about half of the civil wars that have happened. So we should be able to, as an international community, do much better than that record.

The international community has a big responsibility to the whole neighbourhood because if these situations go wrong, it is the whole neighbourhood that bears the responsibility, not just the country itself.  This is one reason why there is a case for limiting sovereignty or sharing sovereignty on behalf of the legitimate interest of the neighbourhood. The international community is providing peace through the peacekeepers and the money for reconstruction and that gives it both the power and the legitimacy to make sure that the recovery works. […]

There are three key actors and there are no quick fixes. There is the Security Council which is providing the peacekeepers. There are the donors who are providing the money. And there’s the post-conflict government which is setting the policies and also determining how accountable they are to the people. So what I propose is a contract between these three parties and to recognise the interdependence.

But what about the third actor? The local government? Don’t you think that your game plan gives Mugabe the exact propaganda he needs to say: “Look, Western policemen are taking over Africa?”

Of course he will. You can hear him say it. You have to use your brain and say who has actually got the interest of these societies? Is it Mugabe with his fine record or is it mine? The truth is that there is no appetite for a new bout of colonialism. On the contrary, the main problem is that the appetite for concern is so low, and the prevailing sentiment is: “Just wash your hands of it and do things that are decorative.” So, the difficulty is not trying to restrain a voraciously powerful West that wants to restore colonialism, it’s trying to persuade a West that is [complacent]. I was on Capitol Hill just recently and the sentiment that was expressed to me, in the case of Somalia, was: “Build a fence around it and walk by.”

And what a lot of the bottom billion countries have is not national sovereignty; it’s presidential sovereignty. Presidents won’t share power with their own citizens. It’s grotesque that Mugabe is still in power, and certainly not thanks to the endorsement of [Zimbabwe’s] people. Nor will they pool power with their neighbouring government. […]

Presidents are clinging onto power vis-a-vis their own populations and vis-a-vis their neighbours. The result is that their states are not capable of supplying key public goods, so they’ll have to be supplied internationally.

Just now, you mentioned that you went to Washington to convince people to buy into your plan. And in the book, you put yourself in the shoes of a rational dictator weighing pros and cons of allowing international intervention. If you were in front of Mugabe now and had the ear of Obama, how would you persuade them both to sign onto your plan?

I was in the State Department on Monday and talking through these issues. Clearly, the Administration has a lot of legitimacy in Africa. If there were a fair election in Zimbabwe between Mugabe and Obama, Obama would win it easily. So in terms of who is the most legitimate actor, it is clearly Obama. So the issue with America is not legitimacy but overload. It’s whether they see sufficient interest to move. And the argument has to be a combination of an ethical argument based on compassion (here are people socially integrated into the world but economically completely marginalised; they cannot provide the key public goods themselves, so we have to help them to back out of the cul-de-sac they’re in), and a degree of enlightened self-interest—that it is actually foolish to leave societies so precarious that some of them become Somalias. The strategy of building a fence around Somalia and hoping that it disappears seems to me, really, an ostrich-line strategy.

The muddle over American intervention or non-intervention has been so extreme, ranging from total non-intervention (Somalia) to total intervention (Iraq), and a new discourse coming out of Hilary Clinton is “smart power”. That’s a hopeful discourse because what she means is a minimal use of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power. And that seems to me to be the right approach because we haven’t got much appetite for hard power, but […] we can show that the minimum of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power (money, international standards, legitimacy of Obama) can make a difference.

How was your dual argument for ethical compassion and enlightened self-interest received when you actually talked about this to Washington? Did they buy it?

Oh, absolutely. There’s a lot of buy in. I’ve been amazed ever since the publication of The Bottom Billion, there’s been a huge interest on the part of government to align with the agenda. Obviously, not people like Mugabe… they’re a part of the problem.

So the State Department got on board with this?

Well, you have to ask the State Department. But they invited me, and yes, I think there’s a lot of interest both in Europe and in America.

What were their objections?

I think… one strand of opinion would be basically pessimistic and say we’ve failed and failed, there is no point in trying anymore. So there’s a lot of fatigue and despair. And the other sentiment is the sort of, “build a fence and ignore it”…

So the White House didn’t object to your plan based on shortage of resources?

No. And of course, my approach is not just saying that all we need is twice as much money as you’d ever thought of. It’s a matter of marrying money with other policy interventions such as trade, governance, security. For example, I am having a discourse with the American administration on Haiti at the moment. They’ve already done the trade deal with Haiti. So now, the thing to do is to provide the rather modest amount of money that would make it feasible to export on the basis of that trade deal.

The US government has been involved in several coups of democratically elected leaders. Given that track record, do you think it’s really plausible for African dictators to buy into your proposed bait of offering to help them put down possible coups?

What I would like to see military intervention to be used for is to discourage coup d’états. There have been three coups in West Africa in this past week. I’m sure at this very moment, African presidents really are lying awake at night worrying about coup d’états. And the tragedy of coup d’états is that they displace democratic governments just as much as bad governments. Now, I don’t think we should try and prevent all coup d’états… the international community should use its military force to restore democratically elected governments—I don’t see any ethical issue in that. It would actually be disgraceful to do anything else. We already did it in Sierra Leone and nobody accused the international community of neo-colonialism in doing that. So there is a legitimate role for force, serious force in protecting democratic governments.

Now, the neat twist to that is that once you’ve got an undertaking to protect democratic governments, there has to be one condition at least, which is that the government conducts a democratic election. If it cheats, it should not be protected. So I propose an international standard that governments could undertake to adopt on the conduct of elections. And if they adopted that standard, they would be protected, as long as they conducted the election properly. If they then subsequently cheated on an election, that cover against the coup would be withdrawn, and the withdrawal would be a signal. Knowing that, presidents would be much more weary of cheating on elections…

What I was asking was not a normative question of whether or not the US and the international community should intervene to install democratic elections. I am saying that sometimes, the US government actually intervenes to put down democratically governments. Given this track record, how can they be trusted to safeguard democracy?

That’s why it is so important to have clear rules of engagement. When is it legitimate to use military force and when is it not? America’s got a force AFRICOM and that force needs clear rules of engagement because otherwise, as you say, it is going to be treated with a lot of suspicion. But the right rule of engagement is not “never intervene”. If there were a coup in Ghana tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would be to fly in and restore the legitimate government. If there were a coup in Zimbabwe tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would not be to fly in and restore Mugabe—and so we need clear rules to delineate that.

You propose a ten-year period of peacekeeping, during which the economy of the [post-conflict] country is supposed to double. If the economy doesn’t double, what do you propose then?

First of all, there’s already a lot of peacekeepers in there, there are over 100,000 of them now, so this is the future, like it or not. So, the question is really complementary strategies to peacekeeping. Precisely because these economies go so far down during the conflict, it’s relatively easy to get strong growth post-conflict, as long as you’ve got some restoration of reasonable policies, a guarantee of security and flows of aid. So it’s not difficult to get rapid growth. If you don’t get growth, then it’s true, quite possibly you haven’t got a viable exit strategy. Then you’ve got some hard choices, but the world doesn’t come in nice easy boxes.

What are some of those choices?

Well, do you pull the troops out anyway? Or, do you say: “This is harder than we thought, this is longer than we thought.” So, take a country like Liberia or Sierra Leone, or Haiti. So far, economic recovery hasn’t been that great. So does the international community just say: “Time’s up, bye-bye?”

Personally, I think that would be very foolish. Post-conflict is often messy, so the right thing to do is to do what it takes to get recovery… the US left over 100,000 troops in Europe for 40 years to get recovery, and it was a good strategy…it was the right thing to do.

Diana Fu is reading for a DPhil in Politics at Linacre College, Oxford, and is Politics Editor of the Oxonian Review. Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Collier

Paul Collier
Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
The Bodley Head, 2009
272 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1847920218

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When development economics guru Paul Collier released his bestselling book The Bottom Billion (2007), Niall Ferguson welcomed him into the fold of the African development debate with a punch: “Now comes another white man, ready to shoulder the burden of saving Africa.” Despite the jab, however, Ferguson went on to praise Collier’s approach, which focused on four “traps” that maintain extreme poverty among the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. Ferguson called Collier’s analysis “more convincing” and his remedies “more plausible” than those offered by the other popular giants of development economics, William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.

In his newest book Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier has shifted his discussion to the failing democracies that govern many of the world’s poorest “bottom billion”. He argues that elections often create the façade of democracy in bottom billion countries rather than democracy itself. Lacking the enforcement and balance-of-power mechanisms of real democracy, these countries remain on the brink of instability and vulnerable to the sort of violence that stalls development. The post-election violence and controversy surrounding the Kenyan and Zimbabwean elections, the most recent and vivid examples of democracy gone wrong in bottom billion countries, seemed to prove Collier’s point.

Collier offers a nuanced and compelling diagnosis of the driving factors behind post-election violence and persistent bad governance in Africa’s bottom billion democracies. One such factor is inadequate information dispersal, which leaves voters in bottom billion countries in the dark about candidates’ political positions and personal histories. Suspicious of the information they do receive, voters start to make decisions based on who they think is most likely to forward their own interests, often voting divisively along ethnic or religious lines. When honesty and a record of competence fail to offer an advantage in elections, the result, Collier argues, is that “the crooks will replace the honest as candidates”. Wars, Guns and Votes drives to the root of the illiberal democracy that governs many of the world’s poorest; Collier perceptively describes how democracy in its malformed varieties promotes instability and poverty rather than peace and development.

But the analytical rigour that Collier applies to his diagnosis of bad governance in the first part of his book is then absent in his book’s final section of proposed solutions. This becomes particularly troubling when he arrives at his more provocative suggestions. For example, Collier asserts that the West, cognizant of colonialism’s sins, pays “excessive respect” to the “notion of national sovereignty”. What Western donor countries have failed to realise, he says, is that “in reality the typical society of the bottom billion does not have national sovereignty”. Rather, because they lack the ability to constrain the power of an election’s winner, “they have presidential sovereignty”, which can come in the form of democracy-backed dictatorship. We should not, Collier argues, be so ready to revere this sort of sovereignty.

For Collier, sovereignty is defined by a country’s ability and imperative to govern for the people. When bottom billion governments fail to provide key public goods like security, accountability and transparency, he posits that the “international community”—a term that he fails to define in any consistent or plausible fashion—bears responsibility to intervene and supply them. He proposes a number of methods of intervention: most notable are long-term peacekeeping and a system of shared sovereignty (the bottom billion nation would agree to “share” its sovereignty with the international community). In a post-Iraq, post-colonial world, such controversial “remedies” require great clarity of method and purpose. Collier fumbles in answering the question of when, exactly, intervention is warranted and how, exactly, it should be carried out—and confused prescriptions for intervention are, as they always have been, particularly dangerous.

Once the “international community” intervenes in a post-conflict country, how long do they stay and to what end? Collier says the international community should stay for the long haul: “Aid-assisted economic recovery is the true exit strategy for peace-keepers.” But debates on the effectiveness of long-term peacekeeping and aid are particularly contentious for good reason. To propose such measures as if their validity is obvious is to ignore studies that suggest how long-term peacekeeping and aid actually can exacerbate, rather than mitigate, unstable situations.

Collier sidesteps these issues by comparing his suggested intervention to the Marshall Plan. The vague historical comparison brushes over one of many extremely relevant differences: George C. Marshall did not doubt the sovereignty of post-war European nations in the way that Collier does in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, in a speech delivered at Harvard University in 1947, Marshall made it clear that the aid package was to be directed to the needs of Europe as stated by Europeans. He declared: “This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.”

While Marshall, in forwarding his comprehensive plan for aid, was confident in Europe’s ability to guide its own development, Collier clearly suggests that bottom billion governments cannot do the same. Post-war Europe was re-building its institutions, national infrastructure and informed electorate; that project was entirely different from the building project Collier envisions for the bottom billion.

While we might agree that intervention to quell genocide or to help a sovereign government avert disaster is justified or morally imperative, the grounds for Collier’s suggested intervention are muddled. It seems apt to compare Collier’s proposals to the Bush administration’s nation-building project in Iraq, where the strategy was to enforce peace in a post-election nation and at the same time funnel resources that would promote economic development. By most accounts, the strategy was a disaster.

While Collier does make a valuable contribution by furthering an understanding of the pragmatics of democracy’s failures in bottom billion nations, his lack of clarity on intervention treads on territory that blurs the line between aid and occupation, assistance and intervention. A respected scholar, Collier has won the confidence and audience of several world leaders; it would be irresponsible to use this influence to forward confused plans for intervention, something that, particularly in light of recent history, raises eyebrows the world over.

Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Gus van Sant
Milk
Focus Features, 2008
128 minutes

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When Brokeback Mountain (2005) hit theatres in the US, the newspaper Christianity Today began its review with a lengthy disclaimer: “After much discussion”, the magazine has “decided to review the film despite its controversial subject matter”. The editor emphasized, however, that the review was neither a “‘recommendation’ to see the film” nor a “rating of the ‘moral acceptability’ of homosexuality”.

The ambiguous, furtive sexuality of Brokeback contrasts with the militant pro-gay politics of Milk (2008), Gus van Sant’s biopic about the first openly gay elected official in the US. Thirty years after his death, Harvey Milk has become iconic—as an unapologetic organiser, as a vocal opponent of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay morality crusades, and later, after his assassination, as a martyr of the movement. But when Christianity Today reviewed Milk, there was no disclaimer or warning about the “controversial subject matter”. In fact, the magazine described the movie as “an inspiring tale of one man’s quest to legitimize his identity, to give hope to his community”.

With Brokeback, the question was whether America was ready for a blockbuster about queer relationships, however ambiguous. If the disclaimer from Christianity Today or the 2005 Best Picture award (which went to Crash over Brokeback) were any indication, the answer to that question remains unclear. With Milk, which won Academy Awards for best actor and best original screenplay last night, the question is whether America is ready for a truly robust queer politics. If the film’s warm reception from critics and pundits alike is any indication, the answer might finally be yes. Queer cinema, Brokeback included, has long been dominated by debates about who is depicted and how they are represented. But in Milk, the focus is on who is elected and how they agitate for change.

In context of US politics, it is easy to see why this change is happening now. Queer activists face a better chance of passing pro-gay legislation under the Obama Administration than they ever have in the past. In many ways, Milk’s victory in 1977 and the subsequent passage of San Francisco’s ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation foreshadowed the next three decades of queer politics.  Since then, the battles have been overwhelmingly fought at the state and local level, where even relatively modest demands for non-discrimination protections, the right to assemble and participate in public life, and benefits for same-sex partners have been won.

But the victories came only after countless setbacks. It was not until 1982 that the first statewide non-discrimination ordinance went into effect in Wisconsin, and it was not until 1989 that Massachusetts followed suit. Even today, 30 of the 50 US states still lack any such protections. The federal government has been even slower to change. Visitors suspected of being gay or lesbian could be barred at the US border until 1991; sodomy was not nationally decriminalised until 2003 in the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas; and as late as last November, it was still considered newsworthy when gay candidates were elected to any kind of public office.

Obama’s victory has to be understood in light of the series of setbacks for queer activists on the national scene. The hope that many activists placed in Bill Clinton after his election in 1992 quickly dissipated. His “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise meant that queer service members would be discharged if they acknowledged their sexuality. He also signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which defined “marriage” federally as “a legal union between one man and one woman”. George W. Bush, for his part, stalled legislation on hate crimes and employment discrimination.

In such a hostile political environment, the LGBT rights movement in the US rarely could make headlines by tackling substantive structural problems ingrained in law and policy. Instead, the movement turned much of its attention to the only front where it was routinely playing offence and winning—the politics of representation. If the presidential administration would not budge, organisations like the Human Rights Campaign could at least win symbolic victories, as in when Grey’s Anatomy ‘s Isaiah Washington was written out of the show after allegedly calling a co-star a “fag”, or when Human Rights Watch successfully pressured Mars to pull homophobic ads for Snickers.

But lately, the politics of representation seem to be going out of style. In the hyper-political climate of the recent presidential election, headline-grabbing superstars like Lindsay Lohan and Kanye West took a back seat to speculation about Nate Silver’s polling models and the width of the Bering Strait. In the end, the 2008 US election was not about being black—or female, or Latino, or Mormon, or a septuagenarian, or a hockey mom from Alaska or an average Joe from Scranton. Voters were motivated less by identity politics and more by the economy and a desire to break from the policies of the past. They wanted a candidate would improve their lives substantively in uncertain times.

The shift seems to have catalysed a strain of the LGBT movement that has been slowly amplifying its demands for actual, practicable policy change, rather than gunning for wins on the playing field of identity politics. Waves of protest swept the country after California passed the Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban in a statewide referendum. Cities and counties across the country—including Salt Lake County, the home of the Mormon Church—have passed measures that extend health insurance to same-sex partners. States such as Wyoming, North Dakota, Kansas, Montana and Utah are all considering non-discrimination bills this year. Maine is contemplating civil unions. Vermont and New Hampshire, which already offer civil unions, are mulling over full marriage rights. LGBT community members seem to be emboldened to demand actual, practicable victories that would have symbolic and material changes in the lives of LGBT Americans.

The emboldening of the LGBT movement in the US is too easily chalked up to the presence of a sympathetic president and the wave of hopeful Obamania that has swept the left. It is more diffuse and pragmatic than that. It is fuelled just as much by the Democrats wresting control of the US Congress in 2006, by a series of victories at the state level that seem to be tipping the political scales in the movement’s favour, and by the newfound support of rising political stars like Jeff Merkley, Kirstin Gillibrand, Al Franken and even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are rapidly recognising that the stranglehold of the religious right is weakening, and that championing gay rights is no longer a radical or career-killing move.  The movement is at a turning point, one that owes as much to the country’s backlash against social conservatism in the wake of the Bush Administration as it does to those activists whose perennial demands suddenly seemed moderate once the contentious issue of same-sex marriage became a prominent goal.

Issues of representation and identity politics are still valid concerns. But they are not the sum total of the movement’s goals, and they become particularly dangerous when they get in the way of larger kinds of cultural or structural change. The flare-up over Rick Warren, the controversial pastor of the Saddleback Church, is symptomatic of this type of politics. By asking Warren to give the convocation at the Inauguration, Obama attempted to reach out to the 26.3% of Americans who consider themselves evangelical Christians.

Of course, representation matters here. Allowing an evangelical who opposes same-sex marriage to give the invocation does little to challenge that sector’s monopoly on faith-based discourse. But it also offered an opportunity for progress that was overlooked in fits of rage-blindness. Instead of focusing on Rick Warren as a figurehead for the evangelical community and for the anti-gay marriage movement, activists could have stressed that Warren has been an outspoken advocate for HIV/AIDS funding, a supporter of non-discrimination laws and sympathetic to civil unions—all positions that put him squarely to the left of recent federal policy.

There is space for action if the movement is bold enough to seize it. Immediate goals include the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, which would give federal “hate crime” protection to victims targeted based on their sexual orientation, the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and federal recognition for civil unions. But all of these are widely supported by the American public already, which has left a lingering sense that the movement could be demanding—and receiving—more. Stalwarts like the Human Rights Campaign, with its massive fundraising and lobbying capabilities, are at risk of becoming obsolete in the face of local pro-LGBT rights grassroots campaigns, such as the ones that popped up during the wave of protests in California against the passage of Proposition 8.

The seismic shift in queer activism that seems to be occurring is the recognition—by activists and LGBT people themselves, if not by the iconic organisations of the movement—that the movement no longer has to play defence, reacting to every homophobic salvo fired in its direction. Instead, there is a real opportunity to show what structural discrimination and violence look like and why they need to be addressed immediately.

Milk’s Oscar nods will predictably be seen as a victory for queer visibility, and another battle that has been won on the representation front of the culture wars. But it will also celebrate a politician whose stock phrase—“my name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you”—not only failed to confront stereotypes, but strategically and unapologetically embraced them and played into them for political gain. If there is any lesson to be learned from Milk in the post-election world, it is that it may be time for the movement to take a break from Hollywood and start demanding change from Washington.

Ryan Thoreson is reading for an MPhil in Social Anthropology at Hertford College, Oxford.

Michael Kinsley
Creative Capitalism
Simon and Schuster, 2008
336 pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-1847374103

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In January 2008, Bill Gates told his fellow cash-flush capitalists at the Davos World Economic Forum that the free-market system, which had made them so successful, now needed to be “refined”. “The world is getting better, a lot better,” Gates said, but the “bottom billion” is being left behind. The solution he offered was a reprogrammed Capitalism 2.0 that would improve the lives of the world’s most disadvantaged, using profits where possible and another market-based inducement—recognition—where not. Gates dubbed his idea “creative capitalism”, a “hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others” that would serve “a much wider circle of people than [could] be reached by self-interest or caring alone”.

In January 2009, few at Davos would have said that the word was “getting better”. Many thought capitalism did not need to be “refined”; it needed to be overhauled. Gates acknowledged at the summit that his philanthropic foundation had lost a fifth of its value. But has Gates’s “creative capitalism” proposal lost its value too? (Will “creative capitalism,” like Windows, reinvent itself for a new era? Or will it go the way of Microsoft Bob, a Gates idea that turned into a fantastic flop?)

Magdalen College alumnus Michael Kinsley thinks that Gates’s notions are still relevant. (He would. His wife was a Microsoft executive before she became CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a position she has since left. Kinsley also founded the online magazine Slate in 1996 with seed money from Microsoft.) Kinsley’s new book, Creative Capitalism (2008), is a creative capitalist strategy in its own right. Kinsley convinced 40 public intellectuals—including three Nobel laureates and two former US cabinet secretaries—to contribute comments to a blog. He then packaged those comments into a hardcover book and put it on sale for £16.99, with the advance payment from Simon and Schuster distributed among the authors based on the number of words they contributed to the volume.

Whatever their disagreements, all the contributors generally esteemed the power of conventional capitalism. The difference was that enthusiasts of “creative capitalism” wanted to use free-market forces to solve problems typically left to governments and non-profits, whereas skeptics thought capitalism should be left alone to spread prosperity (and where capitalism fails, government and non-profits should pick up the slack.) In the light of the recent economic crisis, neither alternative seems particularly appealing. Now, as Kinsley admits in his introduction, “the notion of letting capitalism loose seems as appealing as letting loose a pack of rabid dogs”.

Altering capitalism for the betterment of the world’s poorest doubtless sounds even less appealing to CEOs. Under creative capitalism, big, global corporations would integrate doing good into doing business.  But for many companies, doing business currently means just staying solvent. By Gates’s logic, adopting creative capitalist approaches could aid in that effort to remain in the black. Corporations, he claimed, could improve the world and their own bottom lines by investing in underdeveloped markets. Furthermore, by acting in a socially responsible fashion, companies would generate recognition that would enhance their reputations, attracting both customers and employees and presumably producing profits.

But according to economic logic, if catering to developing countries and doing good deeds for recognition were profit-promoting, they ought to be common practice already. Furthermore, if recognition, not altruism, were the goal, corporations would be unlikely to invest in projects with real value if they could generate similarly good public relations from less expensive and less risky social investments.  (This was the reality encountered by proponents of “Corporate Social Responsibility”, the mantra of the moment before “creative capitalism” came along.)

Gates is essentially urging business to surrender some profits to do good works. At best, Gates’s logic only applies to industries with considerable profit margin; almost no one has a considerable profit margin right now. Such sacrifices seemed a questionable idea for companies in early 2008 and sound positively suicidal now. Regardless of the economic times, firms that stray too far from maximising profits might lose significant revenues and perhaps get taken over by more ruthless competitors, causing layoffs at a time of record unemployment.

Even former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (University College alumnus), who maintains that social responsibility and profit-maximisation ultimately coincide over the long term, argues that creative capitalism is doomed if it requires corporations to sacrifice profits (or share price) in the short term. As Reich acknowledges: “From the standpoint of the modern firm, the long term may be irrelevant.”

Given the current climate, stockholders are unlikely to feel any more warmly towards creative capitalism than do CEOs.  Having watched their portfolios decline precipitously thanks in part to the “innovations” of profit-hungry executives, they seem unlikely to encourage further innovations, even those for the public good.  Matthew Bishop, an editor at the Economist (and Jesus College alumnus), argues that stockholders might be open to creative capitalist strategies if companies are “transparent about what they are doing and compete for shareholder approval”. Companies can win shareholder approval, he says, by portraying social investments as examples of “enlightened self-interest”, emphasising that the investments will turn a profit in the long run.

But as Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers points out, by considering ends other than profit maximisation, creative capitalism entails a loss of accountability with regards to executive performance. “The sense that the mission is virtuous is always a great club for beating down skeptics,” he writes. Stockholders are unlikely to cede such accountability and would more probably agree with Reich: “The only legitimate reason for a corporation to be generous with its shareholders’ money is to burnish its brand image, and such a rationale will only go so far.”

With their own pockets comparatively emptier, stockholders will presumably demand that companies pursue profit maximisation exclusively, perhaps even going so far as to classify giving to charity without expecting a commensurate profit as a corporate misuse of funds not unlike the lavish retreats and expensive carpets currently being lambasted in the news.

Presumably the population most likely to continue supporting creative capitalism is that which is most likely to benefit—the world’s poorest. But the scheme is not without risks even for these individuals. Creative capitalism could even backfire and actually hamper life chances for the world’s poorest. Through its employment of productive workers, capitalism can lift individuals and nations out of poverty. But capitalism makes its greatest contributions unencumbered, and pursuing altruism as well as profit would hamper it by jeopardising corporations’ efficiency, the very thing Gates wants to channel for the public interest.  Corporations are so efficient in part because they single-mindedly pursue profit maximisation—an advantage that would be lost were they also pursing altruism.

All of this to say that we should not expect any creative capitalist innovations anytime soon. Gates’s speech and Kinsley’s book are more valuable for the discussions they have generated than for any changes they are likely to bring about in the near future. Corporate donations have already declined since late 2007, indicating that cash-strapped corporations feel charity is a luxury they currently can ill afford.

More appealing to them now is the view espoused by the late libertarian economist Milton Friedman: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” The test of Gates’s ideas will be if they resurface when the Dow does.

Elizabeth Kelly is reading for an MSc in Comparative Social Policy at Green-Templeton College, Oxford.

John Iliffe
The African AIDS Epidemic: A History
James Currey, 2006
214 Pages
ISBN 0821416898

In 1981, doctors living in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles discovered a new fatal disease. Termed GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) by medical authorities, the disease—what we now know as AIDS—triggered a national panic. Fears of contamination led to gay men being evicted from jobs, houses and hospitals. Morticians refused to handle the bodies of people claimed by the mysterious new syndrome. Theories abounded as to the routes of transmission. One theory was the ‘fragile anus, rugged vagina’ hypothesis, which claimed that while gay men were at risk of contracting the disease, straights who stuck to ‘vanilla’ sex were safe.

Across the Atlantic, European doctors registered the new disease but with an additional risk group: members of the black elite who were wealthy enough to migrate to the metropoles for treatment. As AIDS-patients from Francophone Africa filled Parisian hospital beds, the ‘African connection’ was established. Stored African blood samples were tested by Western medical researchers, and one from a Congolese man taken in 1959   was seropositive, thus confirming that the virus was present in Africa before it arrived in the US and Europe.  Age-old notions about black sexual brutality were revived in the popular and academic presses, while African governments closed ranks against this latest affront by expelling foreign journalists and medical researchers using public hospitals as their research sites.

The fact that a ‘history’ of the African AIDS epidemic has now been written, and by a distinguished Professor of Modern History at Cambridge rather than an angry activist or doomsayer, is a testament to how times have changed. John Iliffe’s The African AIDS Epidemic: A History does not put forward any radical new notions about the disease. Rather, it offers us a measured synthesis of the growing literature that now exists on the African epidemic. A respected scholar of African history, Iliffe brings to bear his knowledge of the continent and its medical history in this trenchant appraisal of the social and political dimensions of the epidemic.

Despite its currency,  HIV remains much misunderstood, even by informed publics. There is lingering confusion, for example, about the differences between HIV (the virus) and AIDS (the syndrome that results from immunosuppression by HIV). Iliffe’s account should be required reading for anyone in need of a basic scientific overview. His description of the biological mechanisms of the virus—its branching into clades and subtypes, and the intricate ways in which antiretroviral agents stop the proliferation of the disease—is lucid and instructive. Iliffe’s explanation of the origins of the virus is equally cogent. The emergence of HIV was predicated on the improved mobility which resulted from colonial transport networks, the increasing globalisation of travel in the twentieth century, and, imperatively, the introduction of Western medical technology.  Hypodermic needles and blood transfusions, the very instruments responsible for the improvements in African health standards from the sixties to the eighties, have also been crucial vectors for HIV.

In what is perhaps the most widely-read tract written on the disease, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag ends with a plea to cease framing AIDS within military metaphors: ‘The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy.’ Iliffe complies with this request.  In his account of the methods and meanings of HIV’s transmission, he inevitably confronts issues of responsibility. But he avoids the moralistic and militaristic overtones of so many other accounts (Countdown to Doomsday, Combating AIDS, and When Plague Strikes are among the more revealing, older titles), which blame African sexual mores and governmental incompetence for the emergence of the pandemic.

In this regard, perhaps the real value of Iliffe’s account comes in the second half of his book. There, he chronicles the responses to AIDS by activists, African governments south of the Sahara, and by international organisations such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Iliffe also discusses the remarkable changes resulting from the development of HAART (Highly-Active Antiretroviral Therapy), previously termed ‘Lazarus drugs’ due to their ability to restore terminal AIDS sufferers to relative good health. One of the tragedies of AIDS, as Iliffe demonstrates, has been the situation in South Africa, where President Mbeki’s desire to hit back at perceived Western charges of African sexual savagery has led him to insist that poverty, rather than HIV, is the cause of AIDS.

But in his attempt, perhaps, to avoid polemics, Iliffe remains strangely silent about the patents processes that have protected the profits of pharmaceutical corporations at the expense of the lives of HIV-positive Africans. No mention is made of either TRIPS (the World Trade Organization laws on trade-related intellectual property), nor of the Doha Declaration (2001) which ensured that countries like India and Brazil could not export their generic antiretrovirals to poor African countries unable to manufacture their own or to bulk purchase the brand-name pharmaceuticals essential for the creation of their national treatment programmes.  Iliffe tiptoes around the real barriers to treatment access: political apathy combined with the enormous power of the pharmaceutical lobby.

It is an unfortunate oversight, for the book ends up glossing over some of the most influential and distressing issues about HIV. For one thing, it costs far less to produce antiretrovirals than the pharmaceutical industry would have us believe, and many of these are in fact formulated in university laboratories with tax-payer’s funding. The patents are then purchased by powerful companies, who hike up prices by over a hundred-fold.  Information about the true amounts spent on research and development is closely guarded by the pharmaceutical industry, but the fact that companies like Merck and Pfizer feature in the ‘Fortune 100’ every year bespeaks of astronomical profit-mongering.  And in cases where national health departments begin to consider the large-scale import of generics, such as in South Africa in 2001, companies like Glaxo and Roche quickly offer to slash the prices on brand-name antiretrovirals to avoid losing their patent monopolies. ‘Drug companies,’ as the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, ‘spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only.’ Iliffe fails to consider the historical influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and the ways in which economic structures have shaped AIDS mortality.

Iliffe does nonetheless offer a judicious account of the responses of citizens to the HIV pandemic.  He documents the various and colourful ways in which Africans have organized to halt needless and mounting deaths from AIDS, and argues that Western consumers must accelerate their actions to ensure more equitable access to essential medications. Thirteen million Africans have already died of AIDS, and we have only seen the end of the beginning of the epidemic. But although we are not yet able to cure or to vaccinate against AIDS, Iliffe notes, we are able to treat and to contain it. The African AIDS Epidemic ends on a note of cautious optimism. It might just be possible to imagine a world where the tide might be turning against the virus.

Rebecca Hodes is a DPhil student in history at Balliol College, Oxford. Her thesis is about the cultural aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, with a particular focus on film.