Author: Nicholas Karides

Supporting a football club is an entirely irrational yet easily explicable affair. It is as much about the frenzy that follows the gasping anticipation as a beautifully struck free-kick curls into the back of the net as it is about memories of childhood, bonds of friendship and the history of cities.

The more cynical among us have managed to accept football’s financialized reality but still struggle with some of the dilemmas it throws at us. It has become as much about revenues and dividends, players stats and transfer values as about passion, trophies and sporting glory. Incongruities that we accept as effortlessly as the coexistence of brutal tackles and vulgar language with moments of fair play and plain human decency.

But when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, PIF¹, the rogue state’s sovereign wealth fund with total estimated assets of €430 billion, purchased a majority stake in Newcastle United FC a last line of defense was broken. The attackers are alone in front of an empty goal.

As a Liverpool supporter I have never cared much for Newcastle. I’ll glance at its league position mostly because my uncle supports the club. The little sympathy I have stems from sketchy childhood references. Supermac Malcolm McDonald’s relentless scoring in the Seventies, Liverpool legend Kevin Keegan’s managerial spell there and the unforgettable 1996 roller-coaster at Anfield when we beat them 4-3. It was a time when Newcastle produced some of their best football and big names like Asprilla, Ginola and Alan Shearer.

The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s name is not readily associated with football let alone Tyneside. But billboards of his photograph along-side Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s were displayed outside St James’ Park last week to protest his brutal murder in October 2018. Described by the UN as “overseen, planned and endorsed by high-level officials” of the Saudi state it is just one example of the ruthless persecution of government critics. According to Amnesty International “virtually all known Saudi Arabian human rights defenders inside the country were detained or imprisoned at the end of the year”.²

It is tempting to blame Newcastle United for all this – inept and desperate as their previous owners were – but the absolute blame lies with the Premier League for allowing the deal.

No one would like to be in the shoes of lifetime Newcastle supporters. Their overwhelming majority are likely to abhor human rights abuses.

Which raises the question: How dare the Premier League place the burden of such a distressing moral choice on the shoulders of a parent forcing them to explain – or lie – to their children about the brutality of their cherished club’s new owners? How do you explain to a 10-year-old that the footballer they idolize is paid by a regime that beheads people, denies women the vote and kills journalists at will?

Sacha Deshmukh, head of Amnesty International UK, wrote³ that the way the Premier League waved this deal through raised deeply troubling questions about sports-washing and the integrity of English football. At a time when pressure must be put on the Saudi regime to end arbitrary detentions, the deal helps it fix its tarnished image.

The glamour of football is a dizzying distraction. As fans celebrate the dribbling skills of their expensive players, slick Saudi narratives will manoeuvre into the pages of match-day programmes; politically loaded slogans will flash across stadium billboards. Saudi Arabia and football glamour will merge and become accepted. Human rights will be relegated. Saudi Arabia will then sell its acceptance by the UK and the Premier League to the rest of the world.

It would be right to argue that the British government and its military industry have sold arms to Saudi Arabia for decades and that it might be too much to expect of the Premier League to ride the high ground and reject a take-over in an industry as innocuous as football. It’s a valid though cheap line of defense but it does capture the oppressive hypocrisy and widespread ignorance of our time.

Both were in full display when the rest of the Premier League clubs protested the Saudi deal but only with regard to issues of competition and financial fair play, worried that Newcastle will strike lucrative sponsorship deals with its new owners. It has finally come to this: Our weekly football experience as slick corporate standoffs between rogue Arab dictators, Russian oligarchs and American moguls.

Shameful as it is, in the end, it is in fact a pity because the Premier League has missed a huge opportunity to make a meaningful statement on human rights. It may have completely escaped them that if they can’t put human rights above all else they cannot be seen as credible messengers of their otherwise worthy No Room for Racism campaign⁴.  

They can boast of running the best football league in the world but this will count as a humiliating defeat relegating them from the one league that trumps everything else in British culture: Decency. Of course, in the new Tory ‘Global’ Britain that too is in short supply.

1 https://www.pif.gov.sa/en/Pages/AboutPIF.aspx

2 https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/saudi-arabia/

3 https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-saudi-backed-bid-newcastle-united-must-prompt-football-ownership-rule-changes

4 https://www.premierleague.com/NoRoomForRacism

Lucy Kellaway had a dream job. Her self-proclaimed title was Chief Bullshit Correspondent for the Financial Times though in polite company she’d describe herself as an observer of the peculiarities of corporate culture. Her weekly columns deconstructed corporate press releases and deflated the bloated egos of management gurus. She interviewed hot shot bankers and massacred CEOs making flatulent statements. If she showed up at your AGM it was not to value your company’s share price; she was there to expose the “heinous guff”.

After graduating from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics & Economics – the academic equivalent of a train ticket for the front carriage of the British ruling class – she took a stab at banking at J.P. Morgan and, in 1985, walked through the old doors of Bracken House for a lifetime at the FT.

She resigned in 2017, 32 years and 1023 columns later. In her book Re-Educated: How I changed my job, my home, my husband & my hair released this summer by Ebury¹ she explains why. More entertainingly she recounts how she reinvented herself and ended up teaching Maths and later Economics at inner city comprehensives in London’s poorest boroughs.

It was not so much the decision to leave her ‘swanky’ job that was ‘brave’ as her friends and colleagues discouragingly told her, but it was what she did in the transition that became the most instrumental aspect of her journey. Not only did she convince others roughly her age (she was 58 at the time) to join her but with her friend Katie Waldegrave they founded Now Teach² a charity that entices professionals near the end of their careers to consider re-training as teachers. In the midst of a teacher recruitment crisis in the UK the Now Teach website says it has been “a colossal waste” that no one had never successfully managed to recruit experienced people into teaching.

Before resigning Kellaway consulted an online life-expectancy calculator and answered a series of questions ‘mostly honestly’ and was reliably informed that she is likely to live until she is 93. She was also encouraged by the new gerontological division of old age into two classes: Young-Old and Old-Old. The former identifies those between 60 and 75, the period “when you are healthy and can still do most things.”

It is rarely considered strange when executives or politicos leap into academia and take on professorships but it does seem odd to see someone step into a secondary school classroom. The latter is of course more complicated. It’s probably a status thing as well. Now Teach maintains that this older class of professionals not only brings wisdom, experience of the world, fresh ideas, perspective and careers advice but status too and “may offer solutions to some of the more intractable problems our schools face”.

Whether they have the stamina, the patience and the willingness to suffer the huge salary cut that comes with it is another matter. In their first year qualified teachers earn between £24,000 and £30,000.

Kellaway landed in a school “built on the broken windows theory of policing where pupils who get yelled at for putting their hands in their pockets are considered less likely to throw desks or stab each other”. She agrees that such children are more likely to do their homework, get decent results and have a better start in life. But she is torn when on her very first day she sees a nervous pupil vomit during assembly.

Re-Educated is a unique and meaningful story; it is cleverly structured and despite the brutal self-analysis it is elegantly told mostly because Kellaway tells it without bullshitting. But more significantly the book captures England’s social inequalities, the deteriorating state of the education system, the difficulties of parenting and of course the mystery of the savage but rewarding experience of being a teacher.

And because once-a-journalist-always-a-journalist the book’s greatest moments come when Kellaway the journalist observes Kellaway the teacher and deftly describes her own humiliations when she loses control of her class and the stress of talking to a parent about their child’s poor performance.

When Kellaway was a child she attended the Camden School for Girls where her mother taught English. When she meets people she knew at school most don’t remember her but they remember her mother. Her mother’s death, almost a decade before she took the plunge, was the first time quitting the FT crossed her mind. She made up her mind when her father died.

Kellaway’s own daughter, Rose, also became a teacher. Unlike the Now Teach troupe Rose went straight into teaching after university. It is not right to feel jealous of your children says Kellaway but recounts how along with pride she did feel envy when a particularly difficult boy gave Rose a Christmas card on which he’d written “You’re awesome, Miss”.

One evening, after they had become colleagues, Kellaway begins to recount a difficult conversation she had with the parent of one of her worst Year 11 students. Rose interrupts her: “Mum, let’s not talk about school stuff.” Rose, writes Kellaway, “had spent ten hours at the coal face in a much tougher school than mine. And now she wants some life. I, on the other hand, am still new enough to teaching and still so in thrall to the whole thing I don’t want any other life at all”.

Kellaway confesses that she decided to leave her job at the FT because she wasn’t getting better at what she did. Her writing, she claimed, was no better than what it used to be. In fact, sometimes she thought it had actually gotten worse. On the evidence of this book that is bullshit.

1. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1120365/re-educated/9781529108002.html

2. Now Teach: https://nowteach.org.uk/

Photo from the Now Teach website

A month before the fall of Kabul, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed that Turkish non-combat forces there stay beyond the agreed withdrawal deadline. The Taliban warned that despite ‘historic, cultural and religious bonds with the Muslim people of Turkey’, they would view such a move as a continuation of the occupation of Afghanistan.

Despite the snub and the anticipated migratory pressure on Turkey the Afghan crisis has played into Erdogan’s hands domestically as well as in terms of his geopolitical ambitions. With the help of the Turkish media the crisis has deflected attention from his mounting difficulties at home, it has made him strategically more useful for the US and, crucially, it has reignited Europe’s migratory phobia.

No one will be in the mood to get tough with him now. Not that anything the EU has said or done over the years has restrained his misguided imperialism or domestic despotism.

To a large degree Erdogan’s unbroken 19-year rule has rested on his capacity to impose his narratives through the near total control of Turkey’s media. Reporters without Borders found that 90 percent of Turkish media are controlled by the government¹. The Committee to Protect Journalists counts 37 Turkish journalists in jail². In the coming weeks a Social Media Directorate will be established under the guise of regulating digital media³.

Despite this stranglehold the gap between his AK Party and the opposition CHP stands at 8.2 percent, the narrowest on record according to July polling monitored by Michael Sercan Daventry, a British-Turkish journalist⁴. It stood at 20 percent in the 2018 elections.

The British analyst Robert Ellis reported that the mood in Turkey is grim and “like the wildfires which destroyed the country’s forests it doesn’t take more than a spark to set off an explosion”. He quoted editorial sources as saying that “Drop by drop, the fury against Erdogan’s rule is accumulating.”

It is this domestic fury that will in the end bring him down. Internal resistance and the turmoil it has intermittently given rise to has always been his greatest fear. It does seem like a long shot, yet the EU can begin to contemplate what Turkey might look like after Erdogan.

It must know that handling a volatile and potentially hostile fall-out might be tougher than handling Erdogan himself. There is no guarantee that the rule of law, the respect for fundamental rights and media freedom would prevail even if he were to go quietly after the 2023 elections.

More pressingly his departure won’t mean that imprisoned human rights defenders, journalists and academics will be released. Nor can it be guaranteed that activists and dissidents, those abroad and those within, would be able to cope against a pro-Erdogan body politic unwilling to transition to an era without him. What happens to the elite courtiers both corporate and institutional that have set roots? How quickly can the secular but divided opposition regroup and how can free media re-engage?

Certainly, unlike other autocracies on the periphery of Europe, Turkey does have experience in democracy albeit the kind closely surveilled by its once invincible and not so democracy-loving military.

Erdogan’s fall will not mean a return to 2002. Religious nationalism has completely reshaped the country and has created deep divisions. The refugee crisis and the deepening economic one will still be there. On top of which there is no guarantee that if and when the toxicity he injected in the country’s judicial and educational veins is diluted that any new leadership would actually step back from his internal tactics or ambitious expansionism.

To hope therefore for ‘a new kind of politics’ would be exaggerated particularly when western democracies are incapable of attaining it themselves. The burden will fall on Turkey’s own liberal class, the moderate political elite, even the now protesting westward looking university student body and, especially, independently minded journalists and intellectuals.

Once a new Chancellor is elected in Germany the EU and the US will need to reflect closely on Turkey. They cannot afford to get it wrong this time. Sixteen years ago, in 2005, the Financial Times maintained that Erdogan’s government had made ‘enormous strides’ in meeting the conditions for EU membership but considered that Turkey was still ‘a decade away from actual entry’. Turkey and the world have changed since then but it is still absurd that membership was actually seen as feasible sometime around 2015.

Today Turkey is sitting somewhere in the 1980s. Fed on a diet of political Islam and populist notions of military prowess the majority of voters seem to have stopped looking west and have bought into Erdogan’s narrative. Not only has he convinced them not to want EU membership but many now believe Turkey to be the EU’s equal.

Accession always was and will remain an impossible prospect; clearly neither side wants it anymore. Yet a strong EU-Turkey political partnership is absolutely necessary. It will take time for a changed Turkish public opinion to see meaning in that.

The re-emergence of independent media can help a post-Erdogan Turkey re-frame its domestic priorities, gradually redefine its foreign policy orientation and create a new narrative. It might, hopefully, also help dispel some of its illusions. Among them one that predates Erdogan but which he and the media that support him have shamelessly exploited: The myth that Turkey is constantly under threat which gives it license to systematically bully its neighbours.

Photo: Chancellor Angela Merkel and Tayyip Erdogan at the G20 summit in Hamburg, 2017. Reuters/Bernd Von Jutrczenka.

1: https://rsf.org/en/taxonomy/term/145

2: https://cpj.org/data/imprisoned/2020/?status=Imprisoned&start_year=2020&end_year=2020&group_by=location

3: https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/legislation/turkey-to-open-social-media-directorate

4: https://www.jamesinturkey.com/

Until recently my favourite T-shirt slogan was one I saw worn by a middle-aged man in Bristol a few years ago. No logo, no photo or cartoon, just a traumatized man’s determined statement set in red letters: “Still Hate Thatcher”.

In a city that has been a Labour stronghold for decades, in a country that pre-Boris Johnson used to be known for its subtle humour rather than slapstick politics, Margaret Thatcher’s divisive personality has left deep scars. Much of the pain is no longer remembered; in fact these days Maggie enjoys near Churchillian status, facilitated mostly by the abject quality of the puny Tory politicians that succeeded her.

My new favourite T-shirt slogan is of the Maggie genre but somewhat hard core: A photo of a dour Henry Kissinger in his thick rimmed glasses accompanied by the words ‘Hell is Patient”.

Nasty as it might seem to those who still believe in heaven and hell it could be argued that politicians of Henry’s public exposure are game, especially at a time when posthumous myth-making and our illiterate social media world are helping airbrush their appalling pasts. In the war against creeping ahistoricism any unsavory T-shirt slogan that reminds of Kissinger’s dark side is useful.

Kissinger is 97. Born just two years before Thatcher in 1923 (they got on splendidly, the photo above is from their first meeting in 1975)¹ obituaries have been in draft form for decades. It has been 44 years since he left government yet he is the globe’s go-to master geopolitical strategist.

Despite serving under two republican presidents he also remains a pan-american icon. Yet when during the 2016 presidential campaign the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said that if elected she would consult with Kissinger on foreign policy Bernie Sanders famously said that he would never seek the counsel of “one of the most destructive Secretaries of State in the modern history of this country”.²

Clinton’s opportunistic position contrasted that of Barrack Obama. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, wrote that at various moments during a series of interviews he conducted with the former president, “I could feel the spectre of Kissinger hanging over the room.” Obama would, he said, talk openly and sorrowfully about American mistakes during the Cold War.

Kissinger became National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973. Thankfully never president though there was a period in 1974 when Nixon was wallowing in Watergate paranoia that Kissinger actually called all of the US’ foreign policy shots. Not least during the crisis that led to the Greek junta’s coup in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion.

According to Robert K Brigham, professor of History at Vassar College, Kissinger has spent much of his time out of office editing his time in office. No one, says Brigham, has cared more for their legacy than Kissinger. In the same way that he sought to protect US global interests through his policy of ‘Containment” he has sought to contain his own global brand.

It was Churchill who remarked that the past must be left to history “especially as I propose to write that history myself”³. Kissinger has done a great deal of writing. Seminal books, some brilliantly written but one-sided, Kissinger-sided, constructing narratives to suit the strategies he had sought never showing any remorse.

More ominously five years after the end of the Ford administration he put his experience – mostly his access to the US establishment – to full commercial use by setting up Kissinger Associates. The New York based geopolitical consulting firm advised clients on investment opportunities and on, what else, government relations.

Corporations sought to gain favour with the US establishment by having their interests represented by America’s top strategist. Many an American diplomat began or ended their careers at Kissinger Associates⁴.

Kissinger was no dictator. He did not have any authoritarian aspirations. He was however obsessively ambitious and self-centered and, most significantly, he preferred to act without public scrutiny.

Obituaries will no doubt highlight his euphemistically termed ‘real politic’, his controversial 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for the end of the war in Vietnam and will gloss over how he turned a blind eye to despicable crimes conducted by US autocratic proxies. They are likely to refrain from mentioning that he actually encouraged them. Christopher Hitchens was the most prominent journalist to go after Kissinger accusing him of war crimes in his 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger⁵ and calling for a formal legal inquiry. With Hitchens’ premature death in 2011 the Kissinger bandwagon marched on with few intellectuals or journalists left to confront the whitewashing of his legacy.

Hitchens used to berate religions for not offering a convincing account of paradise instead scaring their flocks by vivid representations of hell. Yet he would enjoy quoting the Christian scholar Tertullian who, he said, had decided that among the delights of heaven would be the contemplation of the tortures of the damned.

The historical record is far more important than the silliness of the afterworld. Kissinger’s duplicity and ruthlessness must remain part of this world’s record. It must never be forgotten that the careless pursuit of his personal theories, often in violation of international law, saw thousands of people in Argentina, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus and Vietnam die needlessly and thousands more endure, for lack of a better term, a living hell.

1. UPI, 18 September 1975.
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCjQbTEuoDU
3. Speech House of Commons 23 January 1948
4. With Henry Kissinger’s withdrawal in 2008 the company was headed by his former partner Thomas McLarty before it was renamed McLarty Associates. https://maglobal.com/
   McLarty had served as Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff.
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger

The 1982 hit song Eye in the Sky by the British rock band The Alan Parsons Project did not – as it had often been claimed – allude to an Orwellian type of surveillance dystopia. Music geeks have settled on the likelihood that Parsons’ co-writer Eric Woolfson, a keen gambler who spent a lot of time in casinos, had been fascinated with hidden cameras watching his moves. These cameras, still referred to as ‘Eyes in the Sky’ in the industry, monitor suspicious gambling behaviour.

Four decades later, however, the song’s lyrics accurately capture a cold reality well beyond what its writers could have ever considered. Rather unsettlingly they reflect the impact of online digital surveillance processes driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that make their own rules and read our minds:

I am the eye in the sky

Looking at you, I can read your mind,

I am the maker of rules, dealing with fools,

I can cheat you blind,

And I don’t need to see anymore to know that I can read your mind. ¹

AI-led surveillance is not just about facial recognition and the tracking of our movements in airports or during street protests. Nor is it just about self-drive cars, medicinal breakthroughs or robots taking over.

The digital realm – where we all interact with AI – allows us access to vast amounts of information and media platforms for the dissemination of our personal news and views. But it does so by systematically mining and exploiting what we as users unthinkingly provide – our raw data.

AI uses the information we gleefully submit about ourselves to classify, engage, cajole, persuade, change our behaviour and amplify our biases. It cheats us blind.

Behind casino cameras there are security people staring at monitors. No human eyes monitor the deluge of Facebook likes and shares, Google searches or tweets. Instead, there are predictive analytic processes, themselves devised by myriads of data scientists. These extract and suck in volumes of direct or indirect evidence of relationships of interest and apply so-called learning algorithms to figure out how to link, engage and then manipulate users.

Crucially, just as the cameras belong to the casino owners, these social media algorithms and processes also belong to someone – Big Tech platforms. The Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses. Those whom Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff describes as Surveillance Capitalists² : “[They] know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us.”

To comprehend the magnitude of the threat it is useful to re-examine the term AI. The word ‘Artificial’ is deliberately camouflaged in a certain techno abstraction rendering it unbelonging and irresponsible. We say ‘Artificial’ as if it is independent, otherworldly.

If, instead, one uses the term Machine Intelligence (MI) one can begin to grasp that the machines physically exist, they are actually located somewhere and that they belong to someone – the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses.

It is important to identify this aspect because it is only then that owners can begin to be held accountable. Besides professor Zuboff’s warnings, there are what USC professor Kate Crawford says are consequences that relate to the natural resources involved to maintain these huge machine and data centres. There’s the incalculable consumption of energy and the pollution they produce; the labour processes that quietly exploit crowds of workers, human – not artificial. All these are on the ground not in ‘Clouds’ in the sky.

Zuckerberg and Bezos don’t care which film you liked, which book you bought, nor which football club or political party you support. But their clients do. Facebook has 3 billion active monthly users and 7 million active advertisers. It sells the data of the first group to the second fairly cheap but many times over. Our constant supply of information is resellable, reconfigurable, malleable gold.

All it wants is for you to keep sharing what you ate and where, what you read, what you bought, what you thought, who you voted for. It “maps out the graph of everything in the world and how it relates to each other”² and sells that information to companies that then come at you thick and fast. Yet Mark or Jeff won’t allow you to look into their Machines and become quite tetchy when someone from within talks about what is happening inside.

LSE professor Damian Tambini speaks of the loss of human autonomy as a result of this increased capacity of smarter media to control the information available to us, by gathering ever more “granular” data about us. This, he says, has not only changed advertising, it is transforming politics. Democracy, he claims, faces a new vulnerability³. The entire information environment is not just being ‘managed’ for us, it is also being polluted with misinformation. Big Tech are doing the very minimum because they don’t want their business model disrupted.

Unless regulated, things will become darker and messier. The EU which is much better placed than the US and China to act has an obligation to do so quickly and decisively. Ethics, says professor Crawford, are necessary but not sufficient. What you see time and again, she says, is these systems empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police⁴.

Clearly MI is a one-way street and can if regulated properly enable sustainable growth. But it is also important for citizens to become sensitive to – and alarmed by – how its deployment and misuse is beginning to infringe on their fundamental rights and the rule of law.

If you decide to listen to Eye in the Sky on YouTube check which song Machine Intelligence will recommend for you to click on next. Mine popped up the 1985 new wave track by Tears for Fears Everybody wants to rule the World.

1. Eye in the Sky – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Tz3LlrgTA

2. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff, 2019.

3. The Council of Europe Ministerial Conference Artificial Intelligence – Intelligent Politics held in Cyprus on 10-11 June 2021 explored these issues in depth: https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/media2021nicosia

4. Atlas of AI – Kate Crawford, 2021.

Making sense of the European Union is not unlike trying to understand the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Reading his impenetrable writing can be a dispiriting exercise in self doubt. The only motive is that you feel you must understand him because he has so profoundly shaped western thought. Like Hegel, the European Union’s dull technocratic texts, its labyrinthine operations, the insufferable jargon, the vagueness of its anodyne political statements work on you like an anesthetic. But you must understand it not because it too has been an unprecedented experiment in governance and political thinking but because it affects you.  

Verbosity and originality are not the only elements that bind Hegel and the European Union. The EU’s very existence is predicated on the German philosopher’s most fundamental premise: The reason why we humans are involved in a process of perpetual change is that every complex situation we face is bound to contain within itself conflicting elements which are by nature destabilising, preventing a situation from continuing indefinitely. Hegel argued that it is this dialectical evolution of processes and ideas that constitutes history.

When critics of the EU point to its rows and endless discussions that often digress into deep existential self-examinations (think of the Euro crisis) what they are missing is that, like Hegel’s system, the EU’s awkward rationalisation and techniques of reconciliation capture the very essence of its being.

Where there are rows and late-night European Council negotiations there once would have been military tension. Where there is deadlock there could have been war. Οne could argue that war is itself an ingredient of Hegel’s larger notion of dialectical change. Βut it is the type of synthesis (apo-synthesis would have been more apt) that Europeans have chosen to avoid by collectively swearing allegiance to peace.

Hegel was certain that the unpredictable outcomes of random conflicts do lead somewhere, that there is an goal. According to the British philosopher Bryan Magee¹ Hegel considered this goal to be the greater development of the mind towards freedom.

Europe’s enfant terrible, Yanis Varoufakis, himself a devotee of Hegel’s key disciple Karl Marx, would argue that freedom is not what the Troika brought to Greece. Yet, his anti-Europeanism does not go as far as calling for scrapping the Union but for reforming it from within.

And it does need reform – badly. Another attempt will begin this Sunday with the Conference on the Future of Europe². The state of the world calls for a sense of urgency but past experience suppresses any expectations.

Every pro-European cringes at the Union’s equivocation on key issues of foreign policy and human rights (see Turkey, Russia). We are all embarrassed by how as a beacon of freedom of expression and media pluralism it can tolerate what is happening in Hungary and Poland.

Unfortunately, that is the nature of the beast. Ben Judah wrote recently that the problem with the EU is not that it is a superstate but that it is not a state. That prospect is still far – if not impossible – which means that vetoes are the way member states defend their often conflicting interests. But even here, as the political theorist Luke van Middelaar claims, the veto fosters “not conflict but agreement”. The psychological certainty of being able to block a resolution is what makes consensus possible, he says.

Hegel was a believer in the value of the state and of institutions. He maintained that in every age there is a nation charged with the mission of carrying the world through the phase of the dialectic it has reached. Until Trump it was the United States; everyone now fears it might be China.

In a conversation with Ezra Klein³ the ever-lucid Noam Chomsky was asked about the tension between US – Chinese tensions over geopolitical preeminence; that obsessive fear that America might be losing its global role.

Chomsky argued that no country should have domination of the world; neither the US nor China (the EU was not mentioned at all). He was clear that he didn’t like what is happening in China describing it as “rotten” but then retorted: “So what American values do we impose when we run the world? What American values have we demonstrated in Latin America or Gaza? When we talk about our values, let’s look at what they are … not the rhetoric but what happens.”

Europe’s strength is that it lacks the ruthlessness of the US and China. Its aversion to pursuing that type of preeminence may rise from the conflicting interests of its members states but it runs much deeper in its collective historical pain. It is curtailed by Germany’s guilt and consequent reserve; it is captured by the moment Willy Brandt fell on his knees in Warsaw⁴ and it is sustained by that moment Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand held hands at Verdun.⁵

With all its faults the EU remains the only paradigm where mature and maturing states, averse to conflict and aware of their interdependence, have come together voluntarily, recognizing that there is more value in the whole rather than in its parts. They have ceded some sovereignty so as to set up stable institutions that guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for minorities – and, now, crucially, environmental sustainability.

With a confused Britain having walked away with characteristic pomposity, the EU can now begin its slow, bland, calculated reform and to master Hegel’s rationalist model. It will never eliminate friction between its members states. It is also unlikely to ever gain global preeminence. It will for sure continue to frustrate us. And we – its citizens – will continue to misjudge and underestimate it.

1 Bryan Magee, The Great Philosophers, Oxford, 1987

2 https://futureu.europa.eu/pages/about?locale=en

3 The Ezra Klein Show: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-noam-chomsky.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

4 Photo above, 1970, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial

5 https://europa.eu/european-union/sites/default/files/eu-pioneers/eu-pioneers-kohl-mitterrand_en.pdf

I have never been to Istanbul. I am quite certain that I never will. It is a city that conjures two key references for me. The first was my grandfather’s conviction – noble in historical terms but entirely deluded in pragmatic ones – that Constantinople, not Athens, was the true capital of Hellenism, the beating heart of Christendom lost to the Ottomans in 1453. My second rather less political is of Liverpool hoodwinking Milan in 2005 coming back from a three-goal deficit to win the Champions League in one of the best finals ever.

Until very recently I had not been aware of the irony that Istanbul is also where, exactly 10 years ago, 45 states came together to sign the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence – the Istanbul Convention as it is known.

Rather unconventionally Turkey, as host, was the first country to ratify this key human rights treaty. Last month its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (once Mayor of the city), announced by decree that he was withdrawing his country from the Convention.

A bizarre move not entirely unexpected given Erdogan’s erratic autocratic behaviour. Robert Ellis, an expert on Turkish affairs, explained it as Erdogan’s attempt to woo Islamic parties and whip up nationalist fervour to counteract his waning popularity in the midst of the country’s spiraling economic troubles.

Who cares and why does it matter? It matters for the sheer absurdity of the move; that a country would take such a conscious decision to move backwards regressing to its dark Ottoman closets. More profoundly it matters for what it will practically mean to women in Turkey and how they might be protected from the volatility that Erdogan’s decree has stirred up.

It also matters with Turkey launching its campaign to attract tourists and with Europeans, tussling for months now like horses at a race track’s starting gates, ready to burst out and travel almost anywhere.

The Go Turkiye advertising campaign from where the still above is taken features three women on a boat in the Bosporus, one flirting with hovering birds and a flapping Turkish flag while a safe Istanbul lurks in the background. It’s all very carefree.

The campaign slogan is Safe in Istanbul, Safe in Turkey. Safe here means Covid-safe. Because when you feel Covid-safe any other type of safety concerns you may have wither away. And if you are Covid-safe in Istanbul, why would you care if the Istanbul Convention was trampled on by the leader of the country you are visiting, in the city where it was signed?

According to the campaigning Turkish writer Elif Shafak three women a day die in the hands of their partners in Turkey. Not the three women in the boat. Probably not women a tourist is likely to be sitting next to – Covid-safe – in any tourist boat. But three other women die every day.

It is well documented that there is a direct relationship between tourism in Turkey and the Erdogan regime. The Turkish economy will increasingly rely on tourism. Given that the EU cannot find the strength to sanction Turkey for all the rest of its considerable transgressions, one hopes that the conscience of the people of the West – not just of feminists – may show the way.

Recently the Persian-American author Roya Hakakian said she found it frustrating that Western feminists did not show more solidarity with the fight against the hijab mandate in Iran. She claimed that their support, especially of Western female leaders, was nonexistent. She was particularly angered when foreign leaders visited Iran and put on the hijab, posing with Iranian dignitaries. “Nothing can cause a greater disappointment to the local women than seeing fellow women who have the power to say No simply abide by unjust laws that Iran’s leadership imposes on them.”

Hypocrisy is inherently woven into diplomacy. In Turkey’s case it is the axis on which its diplomatic strategy is unashamedly built. You’d expect nothing less from a state that denies the Armenian genocide.

Having said that, western diplomacy can be infuriatingly hypocritical too. In fact, Turkey is often the place where that hypocrisy is exposed. Toying with sanctions for years but sustaining Turkey’s membership path for much longer, the European Union has played the game to safeguard its political and trade relations.

As a consequence European dignitaries, however reluctantly, have to visit Turkey (and Iran) and dance the dance with Erdogan (and Rouhani). But, here’s they key, tourists don’t have to.

This year’s Champions League final will again be held in Istanbul. I suspect that had the Women’s Champions League final been scheduled to be held there (it will be played in Gothenburg) the irony would have been too embarrassing for the politically correct UEFA.

Yet, it really shouldn’t make a difference. Men and women should be able to join a concerted tourist boycott of Turkey. It will not help save the three women that will die today but it would show solidarity with the women who are fighting the fight. It would also confirm that unlike their leaders individual Europeans, at their core, are not as hypocritical as Erdogan.

Further reading:

Council of Europe Treaty No 210: https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/treaty/210

Reactions in Turkey: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56516462

Elif Shafak: https://www.elifsafak.com.tr/home

Roya Hakakian: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/03/13/looking-back-at-the-land-of-no/

Academics used to have privileges not enjoyed by the majority of the workforce: job security, flexible hours, access to great libraries, a slower rhythm that afforded them the opportunity to think, create and pass on their knowledge and passion to others. “We wanted to become professors because of the joy of intellectual discovery, the beauty of literary texts and the radical potential of new ideas” Canadian professors Berg and Seeber wrote in their seminal book The Slow Professor, challenging the culture of speed and short-termism that has taken over university life.

Academia hasn’t been slow or sane for a while now. Which is perhaps why Manolis Melissaris abandoned his professorship at the London School of Economics a few years ago to move to Cyprus to pursue his passion to write fiction.

His latest book, Peer Review (Amazon 2020, pp262), is a comic thriller set in an English red brick university. The narrator, Dr Michael West, is a charming outsider, a ‘slow school’ lecturer in Social Anthropology who finds himself at the centre of a fast paced murder mystery that amid faculty meetings, research paper submissions and break downs of heart-broken PhD students negotiates our notions of ethics and justice.

Melissaris has constructed an unlikely crime story that delivers, rather cleverly, a damning verdict on the state of today’s academic establishment exposing its administrative labyrinths, the dizzying futility of conference presentations, the obsession with metrics and targets, and the consequent barbaric competition between academics.

Dr West is part social scientist, part detective, part philosopher, part sharp forensic expert and most entertainingly full-time cynic. When a teasing colleague asks him whether he has taken his cynicism medicine he retorts that he had stopped because his condition is terminal.

“Universities are like monasteries” West claims, “some find shelter in them because they have already achieved serenity in their invariably misguided certainty about what is valuable in life, their intellectual ability, the meaning of the world… others, the relatively noble ones, join academia out of confusion about the world and their own lives…”

But West also claims that academia is harsher than the ‘real world’. “What is that ‘real world’ anyway?” he asks: “People obsessed with their self-interest? Being judged by people patently inferior to you in every way at every corner? Having to bend over backwards to please those who do not deserve to be pleased? Making gains at the expense of others? The ‘real world’ gang wouldn’t last a day in academia.” Possibly a veiled critique of the demoralising culture of corporatization that has taken over education.

After six years at the university Dr West believes his time is up for promotion. His teaching is solid, his peer-reviewed publications are, he tells us, at the very least acceptable, and he feels he has done well as Director of Post Graduate Studies. But the Promotion Committee informs him that his research, though sound, lacks vision.

“The point of research in the social sciences”, the ever cynical West asserts, “is rarely ever to solve problems; it is to invent them”. Which does explain why vision is required. Younger colleagues have jumped the promotion queue. He decides to take matters into his own hands. It is here that Melissaris’ expertise shines.

As a former Professor of the Philosophy of Law having spent hours challenging students to construct abstract philosophical arguments out of real criminal scenarios, he has concocted what on the face of it looks like an implausible crime story. Its paradoxes negotiate concepts of morality, punishment, plagiarism and police corruption all the while tracking the missteps of a disillusioned faculty and the hypocrisy of those operating in the ‘real world.’

Leaving a faculty party at the local pub late one evening West returns to campus and sneaks into his Head of Department’s office with the purpose of ‘adjusting’ the crucial recommendation letter to be sent to the University Promotions Committee. He fails to hear his HoD walk into the office, as it turns out, drunk and slurring. In a state of panic he reaches for a copy of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in Savage Society which he pretends to have come to borrow. Within seconds his Head of Department is lying on the floor, dead.

We understand that when not murdered, being Head of Department is a kind of bureaucratic hard labour that sucks the life out of professors condemning them to endless meetings and cycles of reporting. The real story begins when it becomes clear that no-one in the department wants the now vacant post.

By this point I begin to think that Melissaris, who spent fifteen years teaching philosophy and criminal law in Manchester, Keele and the LSE might have been offered the opportunity to head some Department prompting him to chuck it all in and descend on Cyprus to pursue fiction writing. Who knows, perhaps it was Brexit.

Whatever the trigger, on the evidence of Peer Review, it appears that the country has done wonders for his creative energy. I can’t help thinking, however, that on arrival Melissaris may have missed the Omissa Spe inscription flashing above the gateway into Cyprus’ real world.

* Abandon All Hope – The inscription at the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is inscribed under the coat of arms adorning the cover of Peer Review.

Vaclav Havel is the finest example of the idea that the best people to run government are the people who don’t actually want the power. Frustrated when thrust to the presidency of Czechoslovakia in the early 90s he would admit: “It is almost as though I am an imposter in this job, I feel at any moment as though someone will come and divest me of my office and throw me back to prison…”¹.

Reluctant politicians are rare. When they do appear it is usually in circumstances where countries denied of democracy need swift stabilizing action to attain it. Havel was unqualified to be president but as a symbol of dissidence and an admired intellectual he seemed, in that moment, ideal for the task.

These days everybody seems to think they are qualified to be a politician. Ambitious, deluded, often backed by big money and the machinations of new technologies they construct and sustain false impressions of charisma and leadership elbowing out those who are competent and actually dedicated to public service.

The Donald Trump Circus set up tent again this week confirming that there are people who still think that being president essentially involves uttering slogans, tweeting undiplomatic incongruities, trolling enemies and grinning while showing signed documents to camera.

He is the best example of the catastrophic assumption that celebrities with a platform but especially business celebrities can smoothly transition into political leadership.

Combine this with the notion – now fully normalised – that being president is like being a CEO and government is somehow re-framed as a business, the public domain as a market and voters as consumers.

Then comes the fallacy that the market always knows best. Which covertly means it knows what is best for big money not what is best for democracy.

Everyone agrees that democracy is stuck. Many things need to be addressed to fix things. But there’s one key decision that should be easy to arrive at: While every person has the right to vote not every person should be eligible to seek the vote. Democracies have become too lax, too free-market, too democratic for their own good. Sure, everyone has a right to run for the presidency but just as the market sets rules for its traders so should a democracy for its leaders. Criteria must be set for those who seek to run a democracy, especially in systems where presidents rule as monarchs.

And it really doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact it could be rather pedestrian: There are only two full presidential democracies in the western world, the United States and Cyprus [on paper Turkey too but it is borderline western and for the time being not a democracy, and France which is however semi-presidential]. Such systems while adjusting to political culture and constitutional structure could start by setting one fundamental condition: To seek the highest office a candidate would have to have first served in parliament – a full term.

Anyone who wants to sit behind the big desk would have to toil on the benches of the institution that represents the ‘demos.’ They would need to develop a solid understanding not only of how the Legislature works but how it works with the Executive. Politics is one thing but policy-making is quite another. Debating on television is not the same as debating on the parliamentary floor. Candidates must bring evidence of their capacity for policy formulation and leave a public record of how they voted on the policies of others. They would have to debate environmental legislation and ministerial budgets, vote on social rights and international agreements, see how the Executive deviates and how parliament checks and re-calibrates.

For this to work election thresholds would have to be adjusted so that independent parliamentary aspirants can stand a chance without having to capitulate to existing party structures. This would prove the most difficult part of the experiment. But loosening the stranglehold political parties maintain on the system (in the US and Cyprus) is long overdue.

To broaden the game cabinet appointees – even if they have never held a parliamentary seat – could be allowed to pursue the presidency but only if they have served a predetermined minimum number of years in a ministerial post. Ministerial work obliges vigorous collaboration with the parliamentary machinery so this would release them of the duty to serve in parliament.

Admittedly Barack Obama, a single term Senator from Illinois before 2008, said the Senate did not prepare him for what he had to face at the Oval Office but it had been an essential education. Critics will argue that there are serving senators and parliamentarians who are useless and equally dangerous to seek the top job. They would be right. But introducing some standard of prior relevant experience anew would invite closer scrutiny of the motives and aptitude of such characters as well as test their interest in serving the public. Shallow celebrities and pseudo successful business people would be reluctant to work in parliament; they are mostly seduced to desire the top job. A would-be president must be forced to deal with a small constituency before serving the big one. The process would also oblige voters to become more conscious of their parliamentary choices aware that they may have one eye on the presidency.

In the years ahead populism, disinformation and economic hardship will increase the risk of fraudulent messianic candidates. Setting minimum standards would mitigate the chance of landing single-agenda or accidental presidents. A clown like Trump would have been reluctant to run for the House or the Senate. But even if he did not think it beneath him and had done so and won, his weak mental state and strong criminal instincts would have been exposed early.

Making the dishonest or the entirely unsuitable reluctant to enter high politics by forcing them to enter parliament first is only a small step. The upside, rather enticingly, is that sitting parliamentarians might not be too reluctant to adopt it.

1. The European, 11 May 1990.

Photo: Miroslav Zaj – Getty

What do you think the world will look like when you’re 80? is not a question one typically asks a 19-year-old. Vanity Fair put it to Billie Eilish and this is the reply they got:

“Girl, I’m not going to live until 80, none of us are… Are you kidding me? We have like 10 years left… We’ve got to help the environment. I hope that the world doesn’t say ‘it’s over for you bitches’ and then kill us all.”

Untypical pessimism for someone her age. Even stranger when you consider that Eilish has accumulated an obscene number of musical awards, has millions of followers on social media and was invited to address the Democratic National Convention that endorsed Joe Biden.

But if you put aside the oddity of a presidential candidate tagging you on Twitter [Biden wrote in November: “I’ll just say what @billieeilish said: Vote like your life depends on it.”], this musician of unsettling lyrics and mesmerizing sounds, is a very typical 19-year-old.

Typical because it is likely that her pessimism is what defines Generation Z’s collective state of mind. To be 19 today means that in the last five fairly formative years you sat through the Trump wreckage that continues to burn under the crises of immigration, race, the economy and the climate.

More notably it also means that Covid has seriously disrupted your studies suspending your sense of the future. You would be aware too that the economy that will emerge from the pandemic will not easily absorb you. On top of which you’re not sure the climate will sustain you.

It would be a mistake to think that just because Joe Biden got elected and has begun to reverse Trump’s fossil fuel rampage, is reinstating environmental regulations and has rejoined the Paris Agreement that things will get better. We are all very much on the edge of the cliff.

It may seem odd that a generation that we often accuse of residing in the digital realm would be championing nature’s cause and suffering climate anxiety. But it is happening. A new breed of young activists is emerging. The digital habitat is allowing for rare species like Greta Thunberg to flourish into instrumental figures around whom young and old are rallying.

Throwing her support for Thunberg, Eilish recently said she hoped adults “would start listening to us”.

Non-listening adults tend to forget that they too were 19 once. They forget that they too listened to the music of rebellion. Unlike Eilish, however, they weren’t too concerned about getting to 80. Not so much because they thought they wouldn’t achieve octogenarianism but because they scorned the whole idea of adulthood.

Most went by The Who’s mantra “I hope I die before I get old … talkin’ bout my generation”¹. Some did their best to live by the anthem and a great deal of talent went to waste. Those who stayed on went to Woodstock and Vietnam protests. Then there was the threat of nuclear war and nuclear accidents (both risks still around and oddly underestimated these days). Music began to engage with big causes, Anti-Apartheid, Live Aid. Awareness was raised, pressure increased, money was collected, good things happened, money was wasted, causes were resolved (partly), others were not and were forgotten. Youths became adults and lives went on.

The thing with climate change is that lives might not go on. Eric Steinberger is marginally older than Eilish. As far as I know he doesn’t sing. But he gives talks on climate change and is the founder of Climate Science² an organization made up of tens of young scientists who are uncompromisingly committed to finding real-life solutions to turn us into a zero-emission society. Not, he says, just to reduce emissions by X percent or in Y years. They want everything done now and forever.

It rings of typical youthful impatience but it isn’t. Because two things are different this time: 1) Youth has Science on its side. Steinberger is essentially facing the facts and working with, and in, Science. Thunberg’s distinctive call is “Listen to the Science”. 2) Eilish, Thunberg, Steinberger et al have the prudence and digital know-how to communicate widely, mobilise quickly and reshape mentalities across generations.

Which is why adult hegemony should give way to them. Adults must not just offer them token seats at the table or invite them to address high visibility events. They must bring them in and seek their help in reaching out to the numbers necessary to bring about change. Our adult bias that youths don’t fully understand the political complexities of (the failing) global market economy must be overcome. They know too well – we all do – that governments are slow and industries are unwilling. They have seen millions of adults willfully send a shameful specimen to the White House. They have watched us fail repeatedly.

Inevitably nature will not allow The Who and their fans to ever know what type of 80-year-olds the youths of today will become. But it is not at all natural that Eilish and her fans should feel that they are unlikely to make it that far. It’s time to listen to her generation.

1. The Who, My Generation, 1965.
2. https://climate-science.com

Photo: Vanity Fair

In 1948 John F Kennedy was 31 years old and had just been elected Democratic member of the House of Representatives for the state of Massachusetts. That year Michael Mouskos, a solemn but affable 35-year-old Cypriot deacon, was studying at Boston University’s School of Theology not far from Kennedy’s residence, on the same side of the river Charles.

Mouskos’ adopted clerical name was Makarios, which in Greek means ‘supremely blessed’. In Boston on a World Council of Churches scholarship he would abandon his studies after being elected Bishop – in absentia – to return to Cyprus where he was eventually enthroned Archbishop.

In just over a decade, in 1960, Kennedy and Makarios would rise to the highest offices in their respective countries. In the clean-shaven liberal Kennedy Americans had elected the first Catholic as their 35^th president. In the bearded black-cloaked Makarios, post-colonial Cyprus had elected its orthodox spiritual leader as its first president.

When the two men met in Washington on the 5^th of June 1962 Kennedy wryly remarked “We don’t have that option in this country, you have to choose one or the other”.

In 1962 Cyprus was still enjoying its post-colonial honeymoon with Makarios seeking to carve out a much larger role than his newly established state of half a million merited. In the midst of the Cold War he found refuge in the Non-Aligned Movement balancing precariously between the USSR and the US.

Henry Kissinger would later label him “the Fidel Castro of the Mediterranean” with US diplomats often referring to him as the ‘Red Monk’. Oddly, Christopher Hitchens, the author of God is not Great and one of Kissinger’s most fierce critics, described Makarios as “the only priest that I ever liked.”

State Department documents reveal that the US had persistently encouraged Makarios to allow the formation of a right-wing party in Cyprus that would bring some balance to the local communist party’s strong influence. The first US Ambassador to Nicosia Fraser Wilkins remarked that the sustained threat of Communists taking over the government after Makarios’ first term kept President Kennedy personally interested in developments on the island.

So Makarios’ 1962 US trip was a big deal. He arrived from West Germany where he met Chancellor Adenauer, the founder of the Christian Democratic Union CDU. Kennedy welcomed him in person at Washington National Airport¹.

Their talks focused on copper mining, US oil interests in the region and Cyprus’ water shortage. The US president acknowledged Cyprus’ important strategic position and expressed his administration’s desire to set up a Voice of America transmitter on the island hoping that Makarios would view the suggestion sympathetically.

The Cypriot president claimed to be wary of the political implications. He told Kennedy that he was keener on the establishment of an American University. An educational institution would bring a useful Western influence into the nascent republic and draw students from the region. Kennedy’s staff said they would consider it and consult with the American University in Beirut.

The two men proceeded to exchange gifts; Makarios offered Kennedy an ancient Hellenistic urn and Kennedy reciprocated with a sterling silver cigarette case by Tiffany & Co along and a table lighter.

Kennedy’s gift choice had been discussed with the Cypriot embassy in Washington with the responsible State department official informing the White House that Makarios’ undersecretary “felt that the gift would indeed be suitable seeing no objection to publicly linking his prelate with the smoking habit”.

Liberated by distance and charmed by the hospitality Makarios told Kennedy that he saw America’s newfound confidence as deriving from its president’s inspiring moral strength. Ambassador Wilkins later reported that the visit went “extremely well” and relations with Cyprus couldn’t have been better.

When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 Makarios was said to have openly wept. Though he had come to know president Johnson, JFK’s passing would make him suspicious of the US. He too would survive several assassination attempts. In one, during the 1974 coup d’état, in which the CIA had an invisible hand, the Tiffany cigarette case Kennedy gave him went missing.

Four years ago, a local newspaper² revealed that the inscribed Kennedy gift was in the possession of a 98-year old man, a labourer who had worked on the restoration of the attacked Archbishopric. He claimed the case, dented in one corner, had been given to him by Makarios himself. He had found it in the rubble and showed it to the Archbishop who said he had no use for it telling him to keep it.

Makarios died in August 1977 of a heart attack. Little attention was paid to the fact that he had been a chain-smoker.

By then Republican president Nixon and especially his Secretary of State Kissinger, who stayed on under president Gerald Ford, had managed to wipe out any good will America enjoyed in Cyprus. Not until 1981 would a full blown pro-Western party of the right enter the Cypriot parliament.

Today it is Cyprus’ ruling political force³ though considerably weakened by its controversial golden passport scheme of gifting citizenship to scores of shady investors. It has even come under criticism from its own conservative group at the European Parliament, the EPP, which is known, rather outdatedly, as the Christian Democrats.

This is an adapted version of an essay that first appeared in the book
Knowing One’s Place in 2017.

¹ Footage of the Kennedy-Makarios meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQ_hA9lPiY

² Phileleftheros newspaper, 10 November 2018.

³ Democratic Rally, ΔΗΣΥ, est. 1976, secured 32% and 12 seats in 1981.

Who would have thought that the perfidious Albion would one day turn on its own people? With all the deception, delusions and lies that the post-2016 Brexit era has normalized it should not really have come as a surprise.

The decision of the British government in the last days of the Brexit negotiations to pull out of Erasmus, the EU’s flagship student mobility scheme, is the epitome of the Johnson government’s irresponsibility and, more alarmingly, its bitterness.

For why if not to extinguish the idea of European youths cooperating and understanding each other, benefiting from other education perspectives and potential job opportunities, would you deprive them from the chance to train at European universities? Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it best by describing the end of participation as “cultural vandalism”.

What did Johnson fear? Indoctrination? That the more British students got to experience Europe’s spirit of integration, the more they would regret the decision of their elders? The government’s pitiful spin is that withdrawal was driven by concerns about cost [“extremely expensive” Johnson said] but the Tory record of irrationality and, more recently, capriciousness points to ideological resentment not prudent fiscal judgement.

This will soon be tested given the announcement of a £100m annual exchange scheme named after the English mathematician Alan Turing to enable up to 35,000 UK students to study abroad – and not just at EU universities.

Packaged as part of Boris Johnson’s vision for a Global Britain the only thing going for it is that it wasn’t announced on the side of a bus. It is odd how the more global the pretentious Tory narrative wants to sound the more things seem to be traded away and the country shrivels. Similarly, the more the prime minister talks of an open Britain the more closed and unfriendly it seems to become.

He appears completely unaware that much of the considerable “soft power” Britain had been able to project is beginning to thin. British students going to other EU universities would have also meant European students coming to the UK to appreciate so much of what Britain still has to offer in education. The Turing scheme doesn’t include that possibility for European students. 

The European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, acronymically known as ERASMUS, after the Dutch humanist Desiderious Erasmus, was first approved in 1987 by the EEC12 including the UK. By 1990 almost 45,000 students benefited. Today, no longer limited to students but open for training, adult education, faculty and researcher exchanges and more – it has enabled 9 million people to study, train and gain professional experience abroad. Records show that 200,000 British students used Erasmus since 1987.

The next phase, to run from 2021 to 2027 has a €30 billion proposed budget and will see up to 12 million people moving across the continent.

The American philosopher George Santayana claimed that “there’s wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice and it fosters humour,” while Immanuel Kant asserted that “the right to visit other countries should become a condition of perpetual peace”. Rousseau was more explicit: “I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does not known men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived”. That’s beginning to sound like a self-fulfilling Brexit prophecy.

British students eligible to participate this year would have been in their mid-teens in the June 2016 referendum. As adult voters they might one day come to punish the Conservatives not for the Erasmus own-goal but for everything else that will result from Brexit.

Had the EC opted to name the programme after a British scholar back in 87 perhaps it would not have been as easy for Johnson to pull the plug now. It would have been harder to run away from such a successful programme named after John Locke, Thomas Hobbes or David Hume.

It was Hume “the geographer of human reason’ who said that men often act knowingly against their interest. This was such an occasion. Still, who knows? If Nicola Sturgeon gets her way Hume may one day become part of the EU’s nomenclature. He was Scottish.

The Paris correspondent of The Irish Times, Lara Marlowe, wrote that her former husband, the journalist Robert Fisk, used to tease people who believed in the afterlife that he would be the first journalist to file from there. “I half expect to read his report, any day now,” Marlowe concluded in her moving article.

Fisk died on 30 October in Dublin where he had been working on the sequel to his magnum opus The Great War for Civilization. The announcement came amid the cacophony of the final days of the US election campaign and didn’t really sink in for me until much later. When it did, I was dismayed that his death, premature as it was – he was 74 – had not been allowed to make the media impact it deserved.

Then I watched Canadian director Yung Chang’s superb documentary This is Not a Movie about Fisk’s work as a foreign correspondent. It is a powerful homage to the man and to the journalism he represented and a sad affirmation of the huge void Fisk’s death actually leaves.

Armenians, Palestinians, victims of any conflict Fisk chose to cover have lost one of the most important defenders of their voice. Journalism has lost one of the most authoritative correspondents of on-the scene, fact-based, thoughtful reporting.

Fearless, opinionated, with a deep academic knowledge of the history of the countries he covered (and a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin) he had no patience for the type of parachute journalism in which reporters drop into a capital or war zone for three days to dispatch mostly out-of-historical context reports.

Years ago, he had complained to me about journalists who took up residence in the safety of Cyprus to “cover the Arab world” and about those who held strong opinions on Lebanon but rarely visited the country. He was one of a handful of foreign correspondents who, at a huge and sustained risk, stayed in Beirut during the hostage crisis in the late 80s that saw several of his colleagues including Terry Anderson, Charles Glass and John McCarthy kidnapped by Hezbollah affiliated groups.

“Journalism is bloody hard work” he would tirelessly repeat. He began writing for The Times, first from Northern Ireland and then from Beirut where he settled for almost 40 years covering the entire Middle East. It is now forgotten that he spent long periods in Cyprus in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion uncovering the systematic looting of the fenced city of Varosha by Turkish troops.

He would leave The Times in 1987 following Rubert Murdoch’s take-over when he realized that the headlines his editors wrote did not reflect the sting of his content. He moved to The Independent under the editorship of Andreas Whittam Smith and delivered front page exclusives from every front line from Yugoslavia to Iraq for the young paper’s growing readership.

In his exceptional book Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War he described how with his Associated Press colleagues Alex Efthyvoulou and Bill Foley they followed the path of Israeli jets bombing Lebanon to see the targets being hit taking what he describes as ‘calculated’ risks: “If we were hit, it was bad luck, not miscalculation”.

He was among the first journalists to arrive at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 where the gruesomeness of what had happened hit him only when he started to climb over mud hills that began to feel ‘spongy’. That day would define his later journalism. Hundreds of men, women and children had been massacred by Lebanese Phalangists in the plain sight of the Israeli Defence Forces. “These corpses would want me to tell their story,” he tells Chang. “After that, I had the self confidence in writing about brutality and war crimes that I would never have had before… that’s the end of allowing fear to make decisions for you, that’s the end of being frightened by gunmen and editors”.

Fisk was drawn to conflict and tragedy by his father’s WW1 experience who, against the rules, had taken a camera to the trenches ‘to record history’. He recounts how near the end of the war Fisk Senior had refused to command the execution party of an Australian soldier who had been found guilty of killing a British man. Warned that he would be court-martialed his father still refused sacrificing his military career.

At that moment Fisk’s eyes well up and in an awkward childlike gesture he raises his hands and softly but rapidly claps to acknowledge that Fisk Senior had done the right thing. It is a rare glimpse into the soul of this tough, compassionate and principled man.

We learn that it was aged 12, after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie Foreign Correspondent, that Fisk decided to become a reporter. When Chang later captures him at work somewhere in Bosnia where he had gone to trace how weapons shipments produced there had ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda [via Saudi Arabia, he discovers], we hear Fisk’s voice-over say: “It would be nice to believe that Foreign Correspondent, the movie, was the real thing… but the truth is that this is not a movie”.

No movie could actually do justice to Fisk’s remarkable life and unrivaled work. Chang’s documentary does because, like Fisk himself, it also achieves, rather expertly, to tell the story of the victims.

[This is Not a Movie (2020) was written by Yung Chang and Nelofer Pazira and is available on Amazon Prime UK]

There was no university in Cyprus before 1992. The first edifice of higher education I walked into was on the first day of my freshman year at Penn State. The Kern Building is an unremarkable 70s red brick square structure on the edge of campus behind the austere Fred Lewis Pattee Library.

Architecturally it exudes more bureaucracy than academia but to get there you walked past grand old buildings which you imagined had vaults filled with knowledge but which Penn State’s admission office chose to ignore for Orientation Week. It did not matter. The nondescript Kern Building was where I spent all of that first week, listening to seniors and graduate students talk about everything that was on offer outside my degree. It was where I understood what the university experience could open up. In my subconscious it is forever associated with the best time of my life.

Most first year students of the 2020-21 academic year are unlikely to have been to their campuses. Among those who have, some are unlikely to have veered out of their halls of residence. With the second wave of the pandemic many have been forced to return home. Most have probably not met their professors.

One University of Cyprus professor told me that he is likely to meet his current 1^st year students in person when they become 2^nd year students. Another, at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, unhappy at the prospect of a Zoom session with his first-year students twitted that he donned his thermals and set up a tent on campus to hold one-on-one meetings with them.

Clearly professors and students seem sick of the restrictive online environment in which they have been forced to operate. For years now any reservation about the high-tech online shift that steamrolled through tertiary education was answered by the ominous “this is where things are going” and “students these days live their lives online, this is what they know, it’s what they want”. Well, suddenly this is being challenged by the revelation that students don’t actually want that for their university experience.

They crave meaningful learning that can only derive from person-to-person contact. A real space in which a charismatic teacher conveys knowledge and insight; Cheerful or perhaps grim, but real and there. Students need the spontaneity of a class, the laughter and the grumbling. They need people that grab their attention, they need interruption, certainly the room to exchange opinions. They need the motivation that will elicit the desire to impress a teacher in the next class. All those things that can lead to more questions, to memorable moments, to more learning.

The experience of the process of acquiring knowledge is an intrinsic part of the value of the knowledge acquired.     

In our metrics-fixated and rankings-obsessed culture you wonder how student satisfaction might be rated this year. Will it be judged on the quality of the online connection or the ‘screen engagement’ of the lecturer? Universities might not dare ask the question.

There is no doubt that universities have had to deal with an unprecedented crisis. They have raised their game – in terms of technology – to meet the challenge and they have managed to keep education going. What they have done is commendable. But talk of embracing online education as the new norm once the pandemic goes away poses huge risks. It would be a mistake to consider that going back to the pre-pandemic state of affairs would be a return to normality.

That normality was already steeped in difficulties and tensions. Universities had long lost their way. Most academics I speak to are disillusioned with academia. They have felt tired for years. Tired of the corporatism, the data driven outcomes, the culture of fundraising, the low pay, the tyranny of administration, the detachment of students who are there to get a degree and little else.

The online shift will reinforce this mindset against what professor Nancy Rothwell describes as the ‘transformational university experience’ where students learn much more than what a chosen subject provides.

The crisis is a punch-in-the-face opportunity to rethink the meaning of universities altogether. Lucy Kellaway the former financial journalist turned high school teacher wrote recently that she noticed an unusual hunger for knowledge when her pupils returned from the lockdown. “Is it”, she asked, “that having been deprived of education for so long, the students now value it more?”

When university councils and senates sit to consider their post-pandemic strategies, they would do well to think beyond innovative supposedly one-way solutions and to address the old but fundamental question about why students are at university.

Perhaps it’s not just about the hot-shot job pursuit our culture has oppressively imposed on them. Perhaps it is about discovering the pleasures of learning. That might even help academics rediscover the pleasures of teaching. These two groups will always be the crucial ingredients. And they need to come together anew and in person. Any old building should do.

Photo: Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University (www.psu.edu).

Ece Temelkuran lost her country to Tayip Erdogan’s religious-nationalist populism and has since gallantly been fighting to get it back. One of Turkey’s most popular journalists she is now an international author and activist in exile. In How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship she has produced an important and eloquently written book.

Some parts will prove awkward for readers whose countries had been on the receiving end of Turkey’s bullying and expansionism long before Erdogan’s theft made it worse for the Turks themselves. But trusting in Temelkuran’s obvious sense of history and in her intellectual integrity, she is likely to be aware of some of her readers’ potential discomfort.

The good thing is that her campaign to help build a new Turkey would not only reverse the deterioration since Erdogan’s election in 2003 but could also address the ills that preceded, perhaps even triggered, his arrival.

For a long time the West’s reading of Turkey had suffered from the absence of Turkish voices able to articulate the complexity of Erdogan’s playbook. It was not easy to understand how an imperfect democracy with no theocratic symptoms where the army had a disproportional role was dragged down the path of religious dictatorship. The West’s view was partly blinkered by the size of Turkey’s market and its geopolitical value. Some European capitals played along with Erdogan not out of any misreading or ignorance but out of willful capitalist self-interest.

The legendary journalist Mehmet Ali Birand, who used to work at Milliyet where Temelkuran was also an influential columnist, used to be the go-to source for deciphering Turkey’s politics. Useful though his analysis was, Birand often spoke as a representative of Turkey. Temelkuran brings something different. She writes as a representative of a universal, stateless liberal democratic movement, who just happens to be Turkish. Her Turkish experience is authentic, her concern is genuine, her arguments are rational and convincing.  

It is a painful sign of the times that her analysis of the dismantling of Turkey’s institutions should serve as a manual on what should not happen elsewhere, and of all places in the United States and the United Kingdom.

During the early years of Erdogan’s AK Party Temelkuran toured the country and listened to the growing voice of a new formation labelled “the real people”. She became increasingly alarmed by how the marginalized, the desperate, those who claimed had been “disrespected” by the establishment, had begun to organise.

Under Erdogan the movement would soon pounce on the status quo, demand respect for their re-discovered religion. His cronies would go on to rig elections and spread fear among a retreating secular Turkish society.

Reasonable people in Istanbul would tell her “It couldn’t happen here” but it was already too late. The tactic was simple, says Temelkuran, “… spread confusion or start a fight between the established centre-right and centre-left politicians, poke away at the country’s fragile compromises and wallow in the disarray by stating that neither side was in touch with the demands of the real people…”

Erdogan distorted the narrative, reorganized financial and economic relations, steamrolled constitutional changes. He infiltrated institutions, including the judiciary and the army, imprisoned journalists, quashed any dissent and inevitably secured the devotion or submission of the masses. One morning the Turks woke up and exclaimed ‘This is not my country”.

Forced to flee Temelkuran explains how she later heard reasonable people in Washington repeat “It couldn’t happen here” just weeks before Trump’s election in 2016. She heard the same thing in London after the Brexit referendum.

The United States is not Turkey, and Trump is not Erdogan. But the hashtag #ThisIsNotMyCountry has been trending ominously in US social media feeds for some time. Trump may not be locking up journalists but he has eroded the US public’s faith in journalism. He may not be corrupting trials but he is insidiously shifting the balance in the US Supreme Court.

Information came to light this week in the New York Times on how Erdogan has actually compromised Trump by getting him to halt a criminal investigation into a state-owned Turkish bank suspected of violating US sanctions. Erdogan and his family have a stake in that bank. It is obvious that all this is not just about one country. The populist political mafia is colluding and spreading its dogma everywhere.

As the eastern Mediterranean’s tectonic plates shift and California’s winds blow reminding Erdogan and Trump who is really in charge, it is important that the US and Turkey are snatched back from these demagogue thieves and that the competent democratically-minded are returned to manage the impending crises. Their dynamic must be interrupted.

A Joe Biden victory on Tuesday could be a first step and one that would agitate Erdogan. A Biden defeat would mean that serial robberies will continue on an international scale.