Tag Archives: European Union

The Bridge on the Neretva (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

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“To look at it is good; to stand on it is as good.” (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

THE COVER OF nearly every edition of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon prominently features the same extraordinary architectural, cultural, and pontine monument found in Mostar, Herzegovina (see page banner above).  Rebecca West called it “one of the most beautiful bridges in the world,” which to me only suggests she hadn’t seen every bridge in the world.  Elegant in its simplicity, its centrality on the Neretva river, dramatically emphasized by its towering height over the deep and narrow culvert, and its rustic setting, all contribute to the aesthetic effect of the bridge.  It is virtually impossible to take a bad picture of the Stari Most (“Old Bridge”) and it is hard to imagine the city without its signature span.  (Although the words Mostar and Stari Most are clearly related, they do not mean the same thing.  Mostar is derived from mostari, “bridge-keeper”.)

Stari Most (cc) National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, date unknown.

It may have been this bridge on the cover, more than anything else, that drew my attention to the book initially and eventually to the tortured history of Yugoslavia.  It appeared to me ancient, alien and alluring, staggeringly beautiful, unreachable.  It was a goal for years to see it and stand on it myself.

Stari Most is a pedestrian bridge in both senses of the word: it simply joins the two sides of the city straddling the Neretva and was designed for foot traffic.  Motor bridges came later.  Walking it can be a challenge especially if you are, like me, prone to vertigo.  (I had the same heart-pounding experience walking the Stari Most as I have driving the high, narrow Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland.)  The Stari Most deck itself is graded at a steep 10 degrees, cobbled and ribbed.  The walk feels precarious (at 6’4”, my center of gravity towers over the low parapet) but is worth the experience.

1999 study by Prof.dr. Milan Gojkovic, Belgrade.

The bridge’s signature feature—what accentuates its height, position, and weightless feeling—is also its central structural element: the pointed arch.  On first glance, the arch may appear to be a true semi-circle, a commonplace of Roman architecture. It is created, in fact, by the superimposition of a smaller circle at the top of the arc of a larger circle.  As a result, the deviation of the curve from a true circle is extremely subtle. 

While a familiar architectural feature today, the pointed arch – sometimes called an ogive arch – is an Islamic engineering innovation first exhibited at Qusayr ‘Amra in present-day Jordan in the early 8th Century CE and most famously known from the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.  The pointed arch distributes load more efficiently and allows for the construction of tall, lightweight, open structures.  Although the precise means and time of transmission are unclear, there is no doubt that the European gothic arch, the hallmark of Christian medieval engineering, is derived directly from the pointed arch of Islamic provenance.

Goat’s Bridge, Sarajevo. (cc) Julian Nyca

As unique as the Stari Most is, its basic elements are common throughout the former Ottoman lands.  While visiting Sarajevo in 2010, I walked to the “Goat’s Bridge” upriver on the Miljacka: simple, utilitarian, sturdy (see above).  The Mehmet Pasha Sokolovic bridge (below) in Visegrad, Bosnia – arguably more famous than the Stari Most as the centerpiece of Nobel Prize-winning Ivo Andric’s novel The Bridge on the Drina – exhibits the same feature over ten arches.

The Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge over the Drina River, ca. 1900. Library of Congress

The history of the Stari Most is straightforward.  Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent commissioned the bridge, attributed to Mimar Hayruddin, in 1557 CE.  Replacing a wooden span, it was completed by 1567 CE.  (Legend has it Hayruddin was so apprehensive of the arch’s structural integrity that he planned his own funeral in advance of what he was sure would be a complete collapse of the span.)  There it remained a lovely architectural jewel to be encountered by adventurers from Evliya Çelebi and Joseph Hammer to Rebecca West.

During the wars of succession of the former Yugoslavia, Mostar became the battleground of two consecutive conflicts: the Croat/Bosnian war against Serb-dominated federal Yugoslavia and, following Croat gains from that battle, the siege of Mostar by Croatian national forces and local irregulars.  As a symbol that also physically linked the Catholic Croatian right bank to the Muslim Bosnian left bank of the Neretva, the bridge became a primary target for Croatian gunners on November 8, 1993.

You can see its destruction here:

It is hard to watch something so beautiful destroyed.  There is some satisfaction, to me at least, that something that looks so light and delicate withstood such pounding as long as it did.

The Croatian-Bosnian war ended with a ceasefire in 1994.  Yugoslavia broke up into sovereign constituent republics and plans were immediately made to rebuild the bridge.  A multinational and multilateral coalition raised the money and recovered original building materials from the riverbed for reconstruction that started in 2001.  The new bridge was inaugurated on July 24, 2004.  It was this span that I visited and crossed in 2010.

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“What Forever Stirs in the Human Heart”

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I have been critical of President Barack Obama’s rhetoric on matters of war and peace, here and in my recent book. I respect and admire his ease, eloquence, and ability to communicate on virtually all other issues (“Between Two Ferns” was risky and unintuitive, but it is now clearly a contemporary masterstroke of political communications), but when it comes to matters of warfare, force and power he clearly struggles to articulate himself.

Not so in Belgium. Speaking first in Flanders, he captured the tragedy of the First World War while affirming European unity and transatlantic fidelity. Then, in this speech in Brussels, he rallied our allies again in the “battle of ideas” against the aggression of Russia in Crimea by taking on directly the sophistic arguments Moscow has made during recent weeks: that Crimea is no different from Iraq, or Kosovo, or Libya. No, he said, they are different, and here’s why: We actually stand for something. Russia is acting out of naked political interest. It was important not just for somebody to say that out loud, but for the President of the United States to say it. We used to say with more conviction that the office was the leader of the free world. It means something again given the sharp cynical shift in the Kremlin.

It is easy to overlook the symbolic importance of the speech’s location. Belgium is a small, bilingual country historically coveted and overrun by its neighbors. Its own domestic situation has been scrambled by the inability of the language communities (three if you count the German minority in the south) to get along. And yet Brussels hosts both NATO and the European Union, two of the most successful experiments in international comity ever attempted. The President’s themes, heightened in this capital, are subtly broadcast to Europe’s most recent bilingual hot-spot, now pawed by a covetous larger neighbor that once possessed it.

Given this context, we cannot deny the political nature of this speech. It was not simply a statement of abstract principles. It was designed to rally NATO Allies and partner countries to the United States in order to isolate and weaken the current leadership in Russia. In that, the speech uses the power of dozens of states in lieu of force as a bulwark against the violence, real or implied, threatened and applied, by Russia. Given the situation Russia is in — no longer the Soviet Union or leader of the Warsaw Pact, and surrounded by the cowed and abject neighbors of its near abroad — the country faces perhaps its most serious political and economic situation since the end of the Cold War.

It has been argued better by others that NATO’s military position remains strong against Russia. The flip side of the other coin of that argument is that NATO’s expansion has provoked Russia’s reaction. But that ignores how the West has included Russia in the G8, NATO, the OSCE, the WTO and other international organizations, accorded Russia the respect as an equal, all the while preserving peace, security and prosperity among a growing community of democratic nations.

Moreover, we must understand the choice that Russia — or any other country inside or outside the membership of NATO and the European Union — must make about war and peace.  The United States has fought many of its former Allies, with Russia, and yet the idea of fighting our friends today and war in Europe is considered an absurdity. The expansion of NATO and the European Union is an unmitigated good. It constantly pushes out the boundary of peace, security and prosperity. That community is for Russia’s taking if only its leadership made the choice to accept it.

Matters of war and peace are inherently political decisions like these. As the president made plain, they are not inevitable, driven by historical exigency, immutable racial hatred, or power dynamics.  As I have argued before, political decisions are moral choices, which means we are in control, always.

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Thinking Through Ukraine

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(via The DailyKos)

I was at NATO when Russia invaded its neighbor, Georgia, in August 2008. The action caught anyone not paying attention by surprise. The experts knew it was long in coming. I’m sure the same is for the unfurling crisis in Ukraine, which nonetheless doesn’t help us steer a course away from general war on the Black Sea, the doorstep of the European Union.

At the time of that short, brutal war I remember there were many calls for NATO to intervene and a tremendous amount of frustration that the Allies did not. But a French colleague pointed out to those of us assembled in my division — we were short-staffed during the August holidays — that NATO’s contribution at that point was not to inflame the situation but to defuse it. The European Union, led by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, led the political charge to end the war within a week.

I remember a little-noted post scriptum to that war — NATO’s inadvertent (I think) contribution — that may be useful to keep in mind in this crisis. That was the introduction of the NATO Standing Maritime Group 1 into the Black Sea after fighting had ended. SMG1 entered the Black Sea on a planned and routine patrol — either it was deliberately allowed into this highly primed theater or nobody thought to turn it back — and the Russian reaction was hysterical. After the Russians sank the small Georgian fleet and basically did what they wanted across the country, SMG1 fundamentally altered the force dynamic in the theater. SMG1 really got the Russians’ attention, and it suggests to me that Moscow will never pick a fight with an equal or superior adversary if it can avoid it.

It’s probably obvious, but an excellent commentary by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noted that the territorial grab in Crimea is not an isolated action but opens a second political front for Moscow. The revolution in Kiev was a green light to similarly minded activists in Moscow that thuggish regimes have their weaknesses, especially if the military can be sidelined. By mobilizing the armed forces against Ukraine, Russia both moved to crush the nascent west-leaning government in Kiev and communicated clearly to the domestic Russian opposition what consequences would follow for attempting to duplicate what happened there in Moscow.

This action also plays into the Kremlin’s interests by forcing our eyes off of other crises where it has waning influence, like Syria and Iran. Moscow can continue to back its client state and Damascus can destroy its internal opposition and rebellion (and weaken its neighbors with refugees) while we are diverted by Ukraine and Crimea. But we are powerful enough not to be distracted and must continue to pressure Syria and Iran while also resolving the crisis in Ukraine.

While Russia may look strong at the moment, it’s important to recognize that the country is acting from a position of weakness — and that the country’s action in Crimea is a fundamental and tremendous risk. If the Kremlin fails in Crimea or Ukraine, the weakness of the regime will be virtually impossible to ignore. No amount of propaganda about fighting fascists and the intransigent enemies of Russia will be able to cover for a failure of this kind. And with this failure, the domestic Russian opposition to the Kremlin will feel emboldened to move against the regime just as the opposition did in Kiev. So instead of being in a position of strength, in reality the Kremlin is extremely exposed. When Vladimir Putin fails, he will lose everything. So he can’t afford to fail, which is what makes this crisis so particularly dangerous.

Another reality I learned from the war with Georgia was the entangling nature of Russia’s relationship with the West. I think we were far more worried about this state of affairs than the Kremlin, but it was important and interesting (if not a little infuriating) to stop and deliberate on all the ways that NATO (and more broadly, the United States and the European Union) cooperated with Russia on issues and initiatives of mutual interest. We on the NATO staff literally cataloged all the ways we were working together with Russia, which still has a diplomatic mission on the same compound at NATO Headquarters. At that time, we were working together on overflight rights for resupply to to Afghanistan, nuclear disarmament (both START and the more concrete aspects of securing fissile material), ballistic missile defense, anti-piracy, anti-terrorism, energy security, and the High North. We’re still working with Russia on all those things, more or less — not least or more recent of which was the successful execution of a safe and secure Winter Olympics. All of these issues of mutual interest (and undoubtedly more) are on the table if we escalate this crisis.

It’s important to consider that the political situation in Ukraine may not be as polarized or volatile as it appears. Consider the map at the top of this post. Much as been made about how the country is split between western Ukrainian speakers and eastern Russian speakers. But a view of a linguistic map (and the CIA World Factbook) demonstrates the picture is far more complex than that. First, Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers blend fairly evenly throughout most of the country, especially in Kiev. The exceptions are the extreme west and extreme east. Second, Ukrainian-speakers are the outright majority in the entire country. Only in the south and the far east do Russian-speakers hold something close to an absolute majority, which explains in part why the Kremlin seized Crimea (which includes Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet), first.

So the larger lesson is: don’t take the linguistic or ethnic divide as concrete or immutable. Nobody has polled the Ukrainians about this situation. Nobody knows how much Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers have intermingled and inter-married. Nobody has even bothered to ask them much about what’s going on in their country. Only the most radical elements are speaking out. Do we want to make decisions about war and peace and secession and rebellion based on what we see on television or have read on the Internet just in the last few days?

What can we do? Other observers, not least of which include individual Allies, have been maddened by the endless emergency sessions of the UN, OSCE, EU and NATO, which have issued a stream of statements but taken no tangible action. Here is what we could do, almost immediately, for Ukraine in its time of need that doesn’t involve military provocation:

  • Deliver $15 billion in loan guarantees to secure the country financially.
  • Grant Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plan (MAP) status, fast-tracking the countries for NATO membership.
  • Finalize the Eastern Partnership with the European Union.
  • Prepare to ship LNG to Ukraine (and Romania and Bulgaria).
  • Prepare to airlift humanitarian, medical and food supplies to Ukraine.
  • Impose sanctions on Russia’s leadership.
  • Prepare to close off European trade with Russia.

It’s important to know that the force differential favors Ukraine in the East-West face-off. While Ukraine may be at a disadvantage right now facing Russia, Ukrainians are fighting on their own territory and with the support of the West. A variety of military options are available to NATO and Ukraine’s European backers. I hesitate to offer them here because I am not an operational or regional expert. But suffice to say NATO controls access to the Black Sea and the North Atlantic, and could control at will the airspace over the Black Sea. The Russian Black Sea Fleet is made up mostly of anti-submarine ships, which are vulnerable to surface combatants and aircraft, and as one observer noted, “The Italian navy alone could easily destroy it.” Any action taken by NATO or even by any individual Ally would fundamentally alter the military balance in this nascent conflict to Russia’s detriment.

But getting to a point I made earlier, that’s what makes this conflict so potentially dangerous. Putin can’t afford to lose. And the escalation ladder goes right up to the nuclear trigger. While I think cooler heads will prevail, and I think it’s possible for everyone to fight without drawing in that option, those are the stakes involved. Indeed, that has to be in the back of everyone’s mind, if for no other reason than that was how one proxy war was brought to a close. The 1973 Yom Kippur War ended when the United States put its nuclear weapons on worldwide alert following a Soviet resupply to the embattled Arab armies. The alert got Moscow’s attention, and, not willing to escalate the crisis, both superpowers forced their proxies to the negotiation table. But in this situation, can we be sure the bluff won’t be called?

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Some Dreamers of the Impossible Dream

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The Church of St. John, Ohrid, Macedonia (via The Guardian)

With nods to George Kennan, Joan Didion, and Cervantes, enjoy this excerpt from my book, The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy about an extraordinary visit I made to Macedonia in 2006 published in The Foreign Service Journal.

Although I wrote this many months (even years) ago, the article is particularly apropos given very recent events in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It documents the activities many young people in the region are making to turn toward each other and articulate a new future for themselves and their countries.

Once again I send my sincere thanks to the editors of The Foreign Service Journal for agreeing to publish this article.

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Plenums and Power (Power v. Force III)

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A plenum convened in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on February 9, 2014 (via Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso)

The past two weeks have been astounding to witness in Ukraine and Bosnia- Herzegovina. While I haven’t been able to follow quite as intimately what has happened in Ukraine, media reporting from that country has been very good. In Bosnia I have several friends, and I heard my colleague and friend Jasmin Mujanovic, a New York-based academic (and apparently inexhaustible tweeter), speak on a panel yesterday to a packed house at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs about the dynamic events in that country.

It’s been very interesting to note the similarities, as Jasmin’s co-panelist Janusz Bugajski did yesterday, between the two countries. In both countries, citizens took to the streets to protest a sclerotic and unresponsive political system, widespread and petty corruption, and a sluggish economy. In Ukraine and Bosnia, people want closer ties to Europe and the West (if not necessarily the European Union).  I would note, as Gene Sharp has noted, that initial protests were sparked — or helped organizers to consolidate demonstrations — around a singular provocative event. In Ukraine, it was President Viktor Yanukovich’s refusal to proceed with closer ties with the European Union that brought thousands of people onto the street. In Bosnia, it was the federal parliament’s inability to issue identity papers and passports, effectively rendering a new generation of children identityless, that brought thousands of mothers out to demonstrate.

And critically, in both countries peaceful demonstrations were set upon by overreactive security services to which the protesters reacted violently. In Bosnia, protesters attacked municipal buildings in almost every major city in the country. In Ukraine, protesters stood their ground and fought back against the security services. In both cases, there were echoes of the first response against Egyptian security in Tahrir Square, when the people had just enough power to counter the force of the government to prevail. This is an important, if unsettling, development. Because in both cases, the government may still have the monopoly of force. It depends entirely on whether the military will side with the government or stay off the domestic battlefield.

But here the two countries diverge. In Bosnia, the initial violence almost immediately abated. It’s clear from those I’ve heard from that seeing the burning buildings reminded too many of the war from 20 years ago and peace was quickly restored. This is an extraordinary development. The Bosnian army or, for that matter, the small European Union force contingent in the country, was never called up.

In Ukraine, it appears that Western pressure — public calls by US civilian and military officials and their counterparts in the European Union and NATO, all of which have worked diligently during the past 20 years to build strong institutional and personal relationships with Ukraine’s military establishment — paid off by keeping the Ukrainian army (for now) out of the political power struggle. That kept bloodshed to a minimum, at least, and avoided the precedent we’ve seen in Egypt of making the military establishment a political kingmaker or outright ruler in the country.

Unfortunately, while the Ukrainians figured out a way to counter the initially violent response of the state, and in such a dramatic way, this essentially means there is no rulebook for the way forward in the country. The opposition, now in control of Kiev and, presumably, the western part of the country, could reach out to the Russian-leaning east  and Crimea. But if divisions in the country become acute there is no precedent for the peaceful sharing of power across the entire country. If Crimea wants to join Russia or parts of the country want to break away or become autonomous, it may require the army to enforce union. And why not? Kiev was defended with force and won fairly the same way — that is to say, violently.

But in Bosnia something more astonishing took place and continues to take place. People have abandoned violence entirely to assemble spontaneously in municipal “plenums” and issue collective demands to their own local authorities. This has led to the resignation of at least five cantonal governments. Bosnia’s “federal” government structure, imposed by the Dayton peace accords, is Byzantine and bloated to an extreme. Exhausted and exasperated by this internationally imposed, ethnically dominated, and thoroughly corrupt system, Bosnians are now asserting their own, direct, democratic axis of power to demand that their government respond to them and their needs.

It is important to note, particularly in the context of the regional and linguistic divide in Ukraine, that the protests in Bosnia have asserted themselves as Bosnian rather than ethnic, religious or linguistic. This is a critical development. While limited to the Federation, Bosniaks and Croats have reached out to Serbs in the Republika Serpska and have been rewarded by several individuals and organizations rallying to them in reaction to a political system that helps none of them and punishes all of them equally. While I’m sure there are some who are trying to make the same argument in Ukraine, I think the dividing line is far more stark in that country.

While the concept of the assembly is as old as democracy, it is amazing that the Bosnian plenum is so fresh and new to this wave of popular uprisings against thuggish and sclerotic regimes. De Tocqueville wrote admiringly of American civil society and our town hall culture. Hannah Arendt wrote about citizens’ assemblies (she unfortunately wrote about the early “soviets”) as a unique expression of democratic power and direct governance. She also wrote about the concept of politics as an open space where people could gather to discuss issues of common concern — the more open, the more free and dynamic a political space is. That is exactly what we are witnessing in the Bosnian plenums.

What makes them more extraordinary is that the plenums themselves are opening a political space between the people and their own, nominally democratic and elected governments. The Dayton constitution, exacerbated by ethnic chauvinism and sheer political myopia, had simply closed off politics to most Bosnians. The plenums have very effectively crowbarred open the political space again. Where once we saw Solidarity seated on one side of the round table from the Communist Party in Warsaw — forcing the political space open between the people and their government — today we see the Bosnian plenums assembling down the street from the governments that purport to represent them in Sarajevo, Tuzla,  Zenica and elsewhere.

As a result, I am more optimistic about events in Bosnia than I am in Ukraine. I am not fatalistic about what will happen on the Black Sea, but I am concerned that the recourse to violence there will beget more violence. The protesters in Bosnia recognize their power in the plenum.  That is an extraordinary, unique and genuine contribution to political and democratic development that, if successful, should be a model for us all to emulate.

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A Centenary’s Legacy Beneath Our Feet

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The battlefield at Verdun, France (Wikimedia Commons)

The new year brings the centenary commemoration of World War I in Europe, whose legacy reverberates through our history, policy and literature. From the peace experiments of the European Union, NATO and the United Nations to the tendentious borders of southeastern Europe and the Middle East, World War One continues to affect us in our every day. In its fratricidal horror it has become, in some sense, Europe’s civil war. To me its sound down the decades makes William Faulkner’s adage — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — all the more resonant and poignant.

While living in Belgium I was immediately struck how the legacy of the combat from that war, and the wars that followed, continued to lurk just beneath the topsoil.  I visited Verdun, the site of a year-long Franco-German engagement in 1916 resulting in a million deaths. (Such casualty figures are almost impossible to imagine today, but just look at the Congo.) To achieve this death toll, the belligerents fired at least as many artillery rounds, and probably many more. The result is still plain on the battlefield, etched by communication trenches (see picture above): the landscape looks like a snapshot of the ocean during a storm, roiled by waves. The churned earth, now smooth, conceals the bodies of the dead and untold number of unexploded artillery rounds. Visitors are strongly advised to keep to the cleared and marked trails.

The village of Fleury-devant-Douamont was completely destroyed during the fighting. The cliche of wiping something “off the map” is too often bandied about in global affairs today. But in the case of Fleury and for many French communities during World War One, it is important to remember that the map is the only physical record left of them.

Back in Brussels, a bomb from World War II was excavated during the construction of the new NATO Headquarters complex across Boulevard Leopold III. (We were instructed to remain indoors while the bomb was detonated.) This was alarming but hardly surprising. The entire area had been commandeered by the Nazis as a military airfield during the war, so unexploded ordnance (UXO) — Allied and German — were bound to be left behind.

In fact, Belgium and Germany have some of the most active UXO disposal teams in the world working on their own soil. I’ve seen reported Belgium responds to more than 3,000 reported UXO cases a year. Germany has had four deaths in recent years trying to clear UXO from World War II. Japan is also very active disposing of UXO from the Pacific campaign. This is an awful legacy of both world wars just among our Allies. UXO from more recent conflicts, or conflicts among belligerents involving our proxies, or among countries that don’t involve us at all, implicate a far greater legacy.

I am deliberately avoiding the subject of landmines, which has attracted its own attention for all the appropriate reasons. I’ve also written previously about the legacy of chemical weapons dumped at sea. It seems to me, in the centenary of World War I — in a vastly changed world, with all the belligerents from that conflicts now partners, Allies and friends — that there is something important to be understood about the century-long legacy of that conflict, which is buried right at our feet. And that is: we shouldn’t have to cope with the same legacy, with our new friends, more than one hundred years hence.

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The Nobel Prize for Politics

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Alfred Nobel (Wikimedia Commons)

The controversy and dismissive snark over the awarding of the European Union the Nobel Prize for Peace has sparked some discussion about the nature of the award.  I have long considered the Nobel Prize for Peace a kind of ultimate award for politics, bestowed for entering the arena and advocating and affecting extraordinary change on the international level.

We certainly cannot blame the committee for occasionally getting it wrong or engaging in aspirational choices. No one’s (or one body’s) judgment is perfect. The committee’s choices are more often than not quite extraordinary people and institutions who deserve more attention and notice than they have received so far, and live up to their reputation as our world’s finest representatives. Even President Obama was probably misinterpreted as an aspirational choice.  His award was more likely a political punctuation mark to an historical campaign that opened a new volume in our long, dramatic and often tortuous racial history.  It was the committee’s homage to Martin Luther King, a grand epigraph for an extraordinary new era dawning. Working overseas and watching the world’s reaction to his election, the Prize suited the international community’s understanding of his — and our — achievement, an American Velvet Revolution.

I could argue with the current award because it goes, amorphously, to the European Union – a large, multinational, multilateral, and multi-agency organization that has a difficult enough time defining itself as the awards committee might define it.  Moreover, Alfred Nobel specifically designated the peace prize in his will to a person working towards concord, disarmament, or peace conferences.  This places, I believe, a specific onus of specific moral agency on the individual, and the committee has forgotten the primacy of people’s action in achieving real, lasting political change by awarding the European Union this prize.

It is true that the Nobel committee has awarded many (nearly a quarter) of the peace prizes to institutions or “peace congresses,” (a favorite of Nobel) and in many respects this is worthwhile and appropriate because individuals can only do so much before they must use civil society, organizations and assemblies to achieve meaningful political ends.  One man shouting in a forest is alone and unheard and ineffective unless the trees follow him.  

But somewhere along the way the size and scale of the organization becomes either governmental or quasi-governmental, bureaucratic and automated.  That is what the European Union and the United Nations are today, for example. They are by design and in fact very different from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (the U.S. chapter of which I worked for) and Mèdecins Sans Frontiers, which are private groups created by individuals to come together around a common cause to achieve some moral end.  I think this is the root of the confusion over the awarding of the prize to the EU.  You would no more award the EU the prize as you would the Internal Revenue Service.  There is no connection between the moral and political agency of a public organization and the organization’s duties itself, which are defined by somebody else — their leaders, the voters, the citizens. There is a much closer connection to an individual’s moral agency, or a smaller, private organization’s activities, and the prize.

I admit there is little discussing what the EU has achieved, as it has progressed and consolidated an awesome counter-historical experiment in peace and reconciliation in Europe after hundreds of years of war, conflict, and race hatred. Peace and democracy have spread west, then east, and now poise on the brink of the Balkans; former warring parties there are reconciling in order to join. It is an exceptional model other organizations (the African Union is only the most specific) have followed. This is all to the good.

But who did this and by what political agency? Politics is an intimately human endeavor and it must be articulated, led, and followed.  Adenauer, Schuman, Spaak – these men sketched the architecture of the Union. King  Juan Carlos eased Spain towards democracy and reintegration with Europe.  Stepjan Mesic negotiated Croatia out of its nationalist past toward a future with NATO and the European Union, transforming the Balkans in the process.  Political change does not occur by happenstance, bureaucratic inertia, or the pure “administration of things”.

The EU operates by consensus.  This means that all at once the EU is at the same time the most political and least political major multilateral institutional in the world.  What I mean by most political is that every significant decision the EU takes must be argued and debated out and then agreed to by each and every member state.  So when a decision is made, the EU can act powerfully and effectively, but under no individual country’s leadership.

But like the United States under the Articles of Confederation, it is incapable of acting without consensus, which limits its range of action.  It also has no mechanism to act politically – under this definition I mean contentiously – forcing not simply compromise but a majority solution that requires less than the whole in order to act as a whole. (The bargain being the losers will be winners under a different arrangement later.  Under the current system, there are no winners and no losers, simply all or nothing.)

The missing mechanism of contentious political action has been noted before, of course, and it is a signature aspect of European political culture.  Europeans are unwilling to cede sovereignty to a federal structure, a decision that is important to respect.  But it is also important to understand how that limits the European Union to take decisions on truly contentious issues such as war and peace.  And in that case, it places into question whether it can achieve Nobel’s vision of peace, disarmament, and international concord.  Only under the robust action of then-French President Nicholas Sarkozy did the EU, for example, lead on ending the war between Russia and Georgia, but it’s not clear whether the agreement brokered will be both just and lasting.

Politics is hard.  The individuals and groups who have won the prize worked hard, sacrificed much, and fought hard, and often for very little. There is perhaps no better contrast than that of Aung San Suu Kyi, who visited the United States recently. Awarded the Peace Prize more than 20 years ago, she endured two decades of house arrest, during which her husband died abroad and she was denied access to her family. Her father, who negotiated her country’s independence, was assassinated and expunged from his nation’s historical record. She was maligned by the ruling junta for years. Her initial election to the Burmese assembly was annulled, and she was only recently (re)elected as a single representative to the parliament after years of single-minded effort.

It is hard to imagine a single member of the European Parliament from Western Europe tolerating so much for so little.

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The How and the What of Public Diplomacy

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Not your usual European ministerial (Radio Praha)

My not-last post about the U.S. State Department’s public diplomacy snowballed some additional thinking about the tradecraft.  There really is no better way to illustrate good public diplomacy than through comparison and case studies; that is, examining what other people and countries are doing to reach the public.  I don’t think we do enough of that.

My concern since leaving NATO has been the gulf between the how and what of public diplomacy.  The what is strategic communications – the big think determinations about audiences and resources and message — 50,000-foot decisions that of course have to be made, but I’ve long been concerned that much can be lost between the high-altitude determinations and the ground-level PD where real people actually live.

The how is actually talking to the rest of the world, the last three feet, public diplomacy’s most strategic real estate.  It’s the how that we should be focusing on, and I’m concerned that both the academy and the State Department do very little toward teaching the mechanics of the how, which is where public diplomacy is made or broken every single day.  We make strong strategic judgments – in fact, strategic communications and public diplomacy policy are the rare arenas of conciliation and agreement in Washington – but those decisions are often fumbled in the execution.

I have always been a practitioner, so I like to look at the examples of others’ practice. Here, I’d like to look at the 2009 Czech Presidency of the European Union.  Every Presidency – held by a nation in the European Council for six months, a blink of the eye in American political life – is a unique opportunity for each country holding the office to promote itself and the European Union.  It is, then, a moment for the country to put its stamp not only on the Union but on Europe itself, to sell the idea of Europe to Europeans, and Europe to the world.

I lived in Luxembourg during that country’s presidency in 2005, which was marked (in my memory) by the epic exhaustion of what seemed to be the entire government of that very small country.  Nonetheless, as this welcoming site makes clear, the country’s motto is not “Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn” (“We want to remain what we are”) for nothing.  European presidencies tend to be fairly bland affairs.

Not so for the Czechs, who branded their presidency “Europa to osladime,” which observers were slow to note was a wry double-entendre.  It means, literally, “We will sweeten Europe,” but loosely translated it means “We will stir things up.”

The Czechs applied this double-entendre masterfully in this video produced to introduce the presidency.  It is perhaps the most playful political production I’ve ever seen, and it moves so fast and is over so quickly you might miss all the jokes.  (You can watch an annotated version here.)  All of the characters are well-known Czech personalities, arrayed around a table as if bored government functionaries at one of the thousands of interminable European ministers meetings (a subtle comment, no doubt from the euroskeptic Czech president Vaclav Klaus).  There’s a famous hockey player, a goalkeeper, an obsessive architect, a chemist, a ballerina, a fashion model, and an orchestra conductor.  And they’re all playing around with sugar cubes.

Why all these sugar cubes?  You need to be Czech to get the joke, and here the double-entendre slides into triple-entendre: the sugar cube was invented in Dacice in Czechoslovakia in 1843.  Did you get all that? It only took 30 seconds.  Short and (dare I write it) sweet.

“We Will Sweeten Europe” (Czech Tourism)

The Czech presidency used the cubes as a branding theme for the entire Presidency, although it didn’t go much beyond the videos and these posters. (I loved the Central European design and I still have some of their swag.)

That’s what the Czechs got right.  It’s almost incredible to me that a government approved something so clever, playful and even a little snarky.  (This site claims the initiative was dreamt up by the Czechs’ European affairs ministry, though I’m sure the story is much more complicated than that.)  But a government did, so something had to go wrong (Vaclav Klaus would no doubt agree with me). So what did they get wrong? Enough.

The Czech government commissioned David Cerny to complete a major art installation for the Presidency.  European public art projects are fairly common and usually forgotten (sometimes, in the case of the Euro, even torn out), but not this one.  Cerny built an enormous series of allegorical sculptures of the European countries.  Some were clever – Sweden bundled flat in an IKEA box.  Some were incomprehensible – Luxembourg obscured by a “For Sale” sign.  And some were simply and horribly offensive: Bulgaria, which was depicted as a squat toilet (in the waning days of communist rule, Bulgaria forcibly expelled more than 100,000 Turks).

“Entropa” (David Cerny)

Gone mostly unremarked was Cerny’s cleverest touch: all the countries were laid out in a huge plastic model mold, as if Europe just needed some glue to assemble yourself.  Of course the installation caused an outcry.  It turned out, too, that Cerny had committed outright fraud: to win the commission he had claimed that artists from the entire Union had participated in creating it (as part of the competition’s rules), when just he and three assistants built it.

I found the whole episode entirely bizarre but mostly because I, along with most of Europe, couldn’t even see the “Entropa” in person.  It was hung in the European Council Justus Lipsius building at Place Schuman in Brussels.  This building is normally closed to the public.  You would think that something paid for with public funds could be viewed by the people who paid for it. The furor over the installation, then, ironically brought the artwork more visibility than it would have ever otherwise had.

This matter of visibility is a common error, I should remark, of many institutions that commission public works like this.  I remember at NATO when we had about a dozen large multimedia boxes, very clever units, built for the Bucharest Summit in 2008.  They went on display first at the locked-down Summit location in Bucharest and then were left at our Headquarters behind two or three layers of security.  At both locations, after enormous expense building them, they had very little foot traffic.  I suggested at the time that we buy some space at Brussels Zaventem airport, but nothing came of it.  I don’t know what happened to the boxes.

The larger point to be made here is that you must shoulder both the risk and reward in public diplomacy, but by concentrating on the how you do these things you’re more likely to get the reward when you take the risk.  The Czechs were clearly very capable of getting the how very right but they also got it very wrong.  (That, appropriately to my mind, demonstrated everything that is both right and wrong with the European experiment: spirited and smart and clever but also deeply cynical and occasionally deaf to the public if not outright corrupt.)

The presidency, by the way, was a political fiasco.  The Czechs were true to their motto: they really stirred things up, but it was pretty sweet, too.  Looking back, I can’t help thinking, isn’t that what public diplomacy is all about?

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