Apparently the Royals Are Tories

The royal family invited to the wedding members of the unemployed royal families of Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia (sic), various absolute monarchs (ie. dictators) from around the world (although the crown prince of Bahrain at least had the shame to decline to attend, not wanting to bring negative attention to the ceremony), representatives from Zimbabwe, North Korea and Yemen (although they did disinvite Syria and Malawi), former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, both of the Conservative party, and Guy Ritchie, David Beckham, and Elton John, but not the previous two prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown or the UK's commissioner at the European Union, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Baroness Catherine Ashton, all of the Labour Party?

Ed Miliband at least did get an invite. I would suggest that after he enjoys some wedding cake, he should add to the Labour platform the abolition of the monarchy.

Let England Shake

"The West's asleep / Let England shake! / Weighted down with silent dead / I fear our blood won't rise again / England's dancing days are done..."

So Polly Jean Harvey sang a year ago on the Andrew Marr Show, accompanied by a strange stringed instrument and a looped sample of "Istanbul, Not Constantinople," her boa and hairdress suggesting a raven (leaving the tower?) while fellow guest Prime Minister Gordon Brown looked on. At the time Nick Clegg was "soaring" in the polls, Brown was calling voters "bigoted," and people weren't so sure about David Cameron and his friends. But soon the election results were in, Brown was out, and Britain had its first coalition government since the Second World War and its first government involving the Liberals since the Great War. Then came austerity.

Harvey's excellent new album Let England Shake was released a few months ago, and it's my favorite of the young decade (though the Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem albums from last year give it a run for its money). Written on an autoharp, it has a more ethereal sound than her punkish early work, it is catchy, accessible, poetic and interesting. The songs are about her native England and about war. Several songs refer to the failure at Gallipoli in 1916, others more generally to the trenches and battles of the Great War. "Written On the Forehead" is about Iraq. Harvey commissioned photographer Seamus Murphy to make short films in England for each song. Harvey explained the reading and research into conflict that preceded the recording of the album ("I was wanting to show the way that history repeats itself, and so in some ways it doesn't matter what time it was, because the endless cycle goes on and on and on... I started wondering where the officially appointed war songwriter was. You have got your war artists, like Steve McQueen, and your war photographers. I fantasized that I had been appointed this official songwriter and so I almost took on that challenge for myself,") and the Imperial War Museum offered to make her an official war song correspondent.

"Goddamn Europeans, take me back to beautiful England, and the grey, damp filthiness of ages and battered books and fog rolling down behind the mountains on the graveyards and dead sea-captains..."

Following Polly's advice, I returned to London, the center of the world, earlier this month after an eight year absence. When I studied there in college, Tony Blair took the United Kingdom into George W. Bush's Iraq War. I watched Bush, Blair, Jose Manuel Barroso and Jose Maria Aznar give Saddam Hussein their demands from the Azores. I marched through Hyde Park in the biggest war protest in decades. I was in Amsterdam on a field trip when the bombs started falling and I had never been more ashamed of my country. In April 2011, Tony Blair is long gone, his candidacy for President of the European Council laughed off the stage (though Barroso rules the Commission blocks away from where I live in Brussels). London had just seen the biggest protests since eight years ago, however, against the coalition government's austerity measures, breaking into small riots. Trafalgar Square had been cleaned up nicely, though. I arrived during a spell of lovely warm weather and there wasn't much of a hint that anything was wrong in England. Indeed, the tea towels had been printed for the April 29 royal wedding.

I enjoyed the Imperial War Museum, which is really worth an afternoon next time you're in London. But Harvey's album is timely, the present moment reminds you that Britain's glory is past, even as cosmopolitan London still feels like the center of the world. The United Kingdom is slowly but surely drifting apart into its constituent nations. Cameron, along with Nicolas Sarkozy, led Barack Obama into a "kinetic military action" in Libya, but within a few days Britain had used up a huge chunk of its missile stockpile. The government had to reconsider its defense budget cuts. The Arab Spring generally represents a crack-up of the mostly British-imposed post-Great War, post-Ottoman order of the Middle East (the shaping of which is excellently described in David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace, which I just read). Eight Arab royals, mostly from countries with long and close relationships to London, are attending William and Kate's wedding but the crown prince of Bahrain is staying away to avoid protests as the future of the house of Khalifa is threatened by protests. A relatively modern Gulf state - the first to diversify its economy away from energy - has fallen under martial law because killing its people is the only way for its 18th century monarchy to stay in power.

The Economist's Bagehot columnist last week took the occasion of the royal wedding to suggest a republic to prevent further class-based nastiness in England. Timothy Garton Ash admits that the monarchy doesn't work in democratic theory but has a heritage value, he asks if we'd prefer a President Blair in Buckingham Palace and points out rightly that "Rupert Murdoch is a far greater threat to British democracy than our hereditary head of state." There are probably decades to go before these bright young things take the throne as King William V and Queen Catherine. The forecast in London tomorrow is cloudy with a chance of rain.

A Green Governor in Germany

I was going to write at length about the political earthquake in Germany yesterday - partly spawned by Germany's freakout about nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster caused by a real earthquake halfway around the world - but The Economist covers everything pretty well in this blog post. The Green Party has captured the minister presidentship (the German version of the governorship) of Baden-Wuerrtemberg, a wealthy, large state in Germany's southwest - population 10.7 million, larger than many European countries. They came in second place among the parties, but the two center-left parties combined did better than the two center-right parties. This weakens Angela Merkel's government as the opposition gains more power in the upper legislative chamber in Berlin, composed of representatives of the 16 Laender, or states. So just a couple things to add.

Although much of the commentary does not note this, the Green Party was actually leading in the polls months ago, before Fukushima, before Germany decided to sit out when France, Britain and the United States decided to prevent a massacre in Libya. The nuclear disaster - and Merkel's blatantly election-minded reversal of the nuclear extension, which had been the biggest success of her second term - helped put them over the top - weakening the Christian Democratic Union's case in its heartland which it has governed for 58 years, and giving to the edge to the Greens rather than their natural coalition partners the Social Democrats (SPD). But the SPD, even more so than the CDU, has been in decline from its old position as a Volkspartei (one of the two major parties). The Green Party platform resonates in Germany, and it has been pragmatic but principled enough that its environmental, energy, economic and foreign policies appeal to a growing section of the German electorate. The SPD is more economically populist - challenged from its left flank by the post-communist Left Party - as well as particularly pro-Russian - Gerhard Schroeder got on famously with Vladimir Putin, although his Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, did not. Once the party of protest, the Greens have become the most centrist of Germany's five major parties - and it is an admirable, forward-looking centrism. They also have a more pro-European outlook than the Christian-liberal coalition governing in Berlin. So congratulations to the Greens. And there is a very good chance that they soon could be leading the government in Berlin as well - although the position of Buergermeister, not Kanzler.

And Whither France?

And now, a word from France, a country I know less well than Germany, but which is still pretty important to modern Europe, and relating to the pan-European rise of the far-right which I've commented on a number of times on this blog. I read two good articles today. Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the Front National and the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, godfather of the modern European far right, has shocked France by topping Nicolas Sarkozy and Martine Aubry in a poll conducted more than a year ahead of the actual presidential election. I doubt we'll see a President Le Pen anytime soon, but indications are that she has the charisma and political skills to be an even bigger political force than her father. Additionally, with an unpopular center-right incumbent, a divided left, and focused challenger from right of the mainstream, the dynamics in the 2012 French presidential election may be fairly similar to the 2002 election. Still, I would bet we'll see either another term of President Sarkozy or a President Strauss-Kahn.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy is building a national museum of French history. Now that's controversial.

Hope Sinks In Germany

Imagine that in 2006, Barack Obama, the attractive, eloquent, inspiring politician of the future, had suddenly been felled, driven out of the Senate, by a scandalous personal failure. That gives an idea of what has just happened in Germany with Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg stepping down two weeks into a scandal that erupted when it was revealed that he had plagiarized parts of his PhD thesis. In a quirk of bad timing, the charge put him in the company of the son of Muammar Qaddafi, who was less than original in his own PhD work at the London School of Economics.

Zu Guttenberg was the shooting star of German politics, dashing, popular, (seen as) principled. Fairly unknown two years ago, he was soon the most popular politician in Germany. Descended from nobility but comfortable among the voters and personable, with a glamorous wife descended from Otto von Bismarck, zu Guttenberg served in the Bundestag from the age of 30. He became secretary general of the Christian Socialist Union - the Bavaria-only sister party of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union - in November 2008. In February 2009 he took over as Federal Minister for the Economy and Technology when his predecessor resigned. When he publicly favored bankruptcy for GM's European branch Opel - in opposition to the rest of the Cabinet - it boosted his popularity. For a year and a half, in Merkel's second government, he has been the highly visible defense secretary, planning a major reform of the Bundeswehr, ending conscription. He visited the troops in Afghanistan nine times.

Zu Guttenberg's crimes are not from the last two years of eye-catching, voter's hearts-winning service to his country, but from his quiet years in the Bundestag. When the plagiarism revelations came out, he temporarily renounced his PhD title. But soon his university permanently stripped him of it. Though Merkel defended him, having hired him "as a minister, not a research assistant," the academics of Germany demanded his resignation, the opposition would not let up, protesters shook their shoes at him. Zu Guttenberg "reached the limits" of his strength, as he announced last Tuesday. He might have survived, retaining a strong well of popularity and the chancellor's support. Other politicians in Germany and elsewhere have had their shares of past misdeeds. Unlike some of these men (in Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, for everything, and Gerhard Schroeder, for his post-chancellery business practices, come to mind, in the US David Vitter, Charlie Rangel and a host of others), the young baron apparently retains an old-fashioned sense of shame.

His face was splashed all over the weekly papers and magazines as I visited Cologne this weekend for Karnival. Zu Guttenberg leaves a "divided country" and will occupy us for a long time, Die Zeit wrote.

Let's go back to that Obama comparison. Actually, it shouldn't work. Barack Obama is an African-American whose middle name is Hussein and who spent several years of his childhood in Indonesia, a faraway, Muslim-majority country of which Americans know little. His father herded goats in Kenya in his youth and Barry grew up in an unusual but firmly middle class environment. Obama's wealth came after his 2004 political breakthrough, when his books became bestsellers. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is a noble who did not need to work and could easily afford to have a career in politics rather than in a more personally lucrative field. Obama was the great hope of the left - in a time of conservative domination of American politics - not only were his supporters ashamed of the Bush Administration, many of them also did not like the triangulating moderate policies of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Zu Guttenberg was the great hope of the right - when the right had already been in power for several years, and the left looked weak. Obama made an audacious run for the presidency after two years in the Senate. But for those two years, in 2005 and 2006, he actually kept about as low a profile as someone receiving that kind of media interest could. In his two years as a federal minister, zu Guttenberg has been as attention grabbing a Cabinet member as I can think of in any country. Of course Obama wanted the presidency, and zu Guttenberg wanted the chancellery. Obama's great chance came earlier than he planned, but he took it. Zu Guttenberg's path to the top would be blocked for some time longer by Merkel, who is still going strong in her own peculiar fashion. But he outshone everyone else on the stage. He would have become chancellor in time. A political comeback for the 39-year-old can't be ruled out, but as the first bit of post-resignation commentary I read last week concluded, he will not become chancellor now.

The zu Guttenberg phenomenon begs some hard thinking. Why did so many Germans see this man as a hero? Are there positive lessons to learn from his strengths for other German politicians? What happens now? The right remains ascendant in Europe, due to economic uncertainty and issues around immigration and Islam. I fear post-zu-Guttenberg disenchantment will add to a mix already brewing - Thilo Sarrazin's little red book, the examples of nationalist parties in the Netherlands, France, Denmark, even now Sweden - which is likely to result in the emergence of some political force to the right of the CDU in the next few years - not that it will take over the country or even get into the Bundestag in the next election, but the rise of the nationalist right in Germany obviously dredges up ghosts. And as Jean Marie Le Pen, Geert Wilders and others have shown, you do not have to take formal power in order to have influence.

After zu Guttenberg, the CDU looks weakened, likely to lose more state governments later this month. The Social Democrats and Green Party have reason to cheer, in the short run at least - they have lost a formidable opponent. But Germany has lost something big here. Merkel has lost her most outstanding lieutenant. The country's voters have lost a politician who actually inspired them - and when was the last time they really had one of those? (I'm not sure - Willy Brandt? Who also had to step down due to a bad error in judgment, although his moral standing remains far above zu Guttenberg's).

Even when I am just visiting Germany briefly, and for fun, I try to take the pulse of the country. It is the most important in the European Union, something quite obvious by now. Its performance in the euro crisis - essentially self-interested and halting - has troubled its European partners. They are not sure where the country is headed. Nor does Germany know itself.

Dark Heart of Belgium

In 1885, a large amount of territory at the heart of Africa along the Congo River, heavily populated and featuring a wealth of natural resources but little explored by Westerners, was granted to the king of the small, neutral European nation of Belgium. The idea was allow free trade and not upset the balance of European power in Africa between Britain, France and Germany. King Leopold II would also "civilize" the inhabitants of the territory. Leopold brutally exploited the Congo Free State, leading to the death of millions. In 1908, international outcry about human rights violations caused Belgium's government to take away the personal possession of its king and administer what became known as the Belgian Congo directly. Leopold died in 1909 after 44 years in power. I hear Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is a good account of the history of the Congo Free State, and it's on my to-read list.

Like 15 other African countries, the Congo became independent in 1960. King Baudouin visited Leopoldville to celebrate independence, but it wasn't an entirely friendly affair. His ceremonial sword was snatched upon his arrival. And the new prime minister Patrice Lumumba's speech was not exactly diplomatic: "For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force." Western press was outraged, as this contemporary piece from The Guardian attests. Lumumba lasted in office for less than three months in independent Congo, deposed in a coup and murdered several months later, by Congolese opponents but with the complicity of the CIA and and Belgium.

Congo's history of tragedy has continued. Belgium has been less involved, though it gives more foreign aid to its former colony than anywhere else, and there is a fair-sized Congolese population in Brussels. I often walk through the neighborhood of Matonge, named after a part of Kinshasa and lined with African restaurants and shops, on my walk home from work.

Last week, I took the tram from Brussels to the nearby town of Tervuren, where the Royal Museum of Central Africa is housed on an extensive campus near the woods. A series of wooden elephants greet you as you walk up to the doors of the massive building.

Inside a domed foyer featuring several golden statues, my eyes were drawn first to the one on my left. A bearded figure who seemed to be Leopold comforted a Congolese child. "Belgium brings civilization to the Congo," the inscription read. In another, a golden woman "brought charity to the Congo." In another, a turbaned Arab mistreated a naked Congolese woman, representing slavery, which Belgium "ended."

The museum is one of the most interesting I've ever visited in many ways. It is a treasure trove of ethnographic artifacts like masks and statues and preserved specimens of central Africa's rich biodiversity, mammals, giant birds, giant insects. But the historical element is most fascinating, and troubling. Famous for being slow to change from a proud moment to colonial adventure of particular infamy, the RMCA now does confront the dark side of Belgians in the Congo. But barely. In the least revised room, a tall statue of Leopold stands in one corner, a leopard murder cult figure stands over a sleeping man he is about to kill, and all of the Belgians killed in service in the Congo are listed in two large placards on the wall. Henry Morton Stanley, the famous explorer of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame who helped Leopold open the Congo for business, gets a mostly valedictory treatment. Leopold does not come out looking good from an exhibit on the history of the colony, I believe based on a "history-confronting" exhibition from several years ago (Hochschild, for one, was not impressed), but details of atrocities are largely left out. The independence moment is well-covered, in a fairly neutral tone, noting Lumumba's dissonance in the otherwise friendly handover of power. You can listen to a recording of the catchy "Independence Cha Cha." It doesn't say what happened to Lumumba, or the Congo, next.

A young woman grabbed us on our way out to poll us about what we thought about the museum. I like this initiative, which I've never seen before from a museum. The animals and masks are great for kids - that is what would have really fascinated a 12-year-old me. But the history exhibit needs some work. There's something unique at the RMCA - I would not tear down the statues, it presents the way things were in a way that is quite illuminating. Just do a much better job of truly delving into Belgium's heart of darkness.

This Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

The shockwaves continue to reverberate through world politics after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. I'm spending much of my time reading about the Middle East, news, blogs and live feeds - al Jazeera, The Arabist, the Guardian's live feed, Nicholas Kristof in Bahrain, and of course the young Netizens of the Middle East have all done great reporting, and I've found plenty of good commentary too.

There are far more brutal and evil men holding on to office in Iran and Libya - and surprisingly Bahrain - but one of the recently shaken leaders I'm most hoping to see thrown into the dustbin of history is unconnected to the uprisings and the Middle East for that matter, except that he claims he thought that 17-year-old Karima el-Mahroug aka "Ruby Heartstealer" was the granddaughter of his friend Mubarak.

Silvio Berlusconi has always been bad news for Italy, unfit to lead because of retention of his media holdings, more concerned about protecting himself from prosecution than leading Europe's fourth greatest power (sic). But it has never been quite as blatantly, shamelessly obvious to the entire world that this emperor has no clothes as in recent months. Tried by a jury of three women, representing the half of humanity which he has consistently debased as well as the spirit and letter of the law, I hope he is convicted and gets what he deserves.

In fact, I'm not sure Berlusconi hasn't damaged his country more than Mubarak or Ben Ali his. They were garden-variety secular dictators running repressive authoritarian systems in a part of the world that has seen little else in the past half-century. If they had never been born, similar men would most likely have played a similar role, taking off the uniform, never relinquishing power, letting their countries stagnate as the modern world passes them by. Globalization and a youth bulge have helped bring the Middle East to where it is now, awakening from false stability to a time of turbulence driven by the demands of a frustrated and young population.

Italy has the opposite of a youth bulge, it is one of the world's oldest countries per capita because contraception caught on a few decades ago. And its politicians have rarely been particularly virtuous - Bettino Craxi fled to Tunisia to avoid being jailed for corruption. But two decades ago, its political system was turned upside down by that wide ranging corruption scandal, Tangentopoli. The dominant party for 40 years vanished. There was an opportunity for Italy to move forward. And since Berlusconi lasted less than a year in his first term as prime minister in 1994, Italy did move forward, improving public finances, meeting the requirements for entry into the EU's new common currency through hard work.

But then Berlusconi was elected again. He is a unique political figure with really no discernable virtues, unless you define him negatively - if you disagree with the Italian left, Berlusconi keeps them out of power. The man certainly does not lead. He clowns, and he protects himself from prosecution for his crimes. There are able figures in the Italian government, and the country has not fallen apart, it has performed surprisingly well in the economic crisis over the past three years, while sovereign debt crises have smote Greece and threatened Portugal and Spain. But the fish rots from the head, and the head is rotting.

There is a saying that people get the government they deserve. And Berlusconi does retain popular legitimacy. But his actions and his character outweigh his popular support. Italy is a beautiful country with many wonderful people. And they deserve far better than Berlusconi for their prime minister.