WORDS AND PICTURES

CarneRoss was a British diplomat, negotiating sanctions on Iraq and promoting the Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier to the UN prior to the invasion in 2003. He left the diplomatic service following his testimony to the Butler Review and is now a vocal opponent of established statecraft. He outlines his vision of improved public engagement in politics and governance in his book The Leaderless Revolution.

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED June 2014

RF: Central to your work is the value of agency; of people acting; not merely talking, consuming or servicing. But looking over history we perhaps have a greater overall sense of political agency now than at any other time? Is there a meaningful comparison to be made between a 20 year old woman in Madrid, for instance, today and her counterpart 50 or 500 years ago; in terms of their sense of political agency?

CARNE: I’m not sure; a sense of agency is subjective. My concern is that a life of considerable agency for individuals is very possible in the modern world; arguably more possible than it ever has been. But that agency is constrained unnecessarily. That is a great pity for us, in terms of the meaning we may feel in our lives; but also a pity because it denies the possibility of any profound political change.

RF: I suggested a woman in Madrid. As of today the Spanish banks remain supported; bond holders are paid; there is record unemployment; record suicide rates; record homelessness; record bad debt; 700,000 households in Spain have no income at all; not a job or a penny of social security. Last year the Citizen’s Security Law was passed licensing EUR 600,000 fines for protesters. The King has gone, and the streets appear to be full of large crowds waving the red, yellow and purple flags of the Spanish Republic. This is a slightly unfair question to ask you but how many of your former colleagues in the diplomatic services have read Homage to Catalonia? Almost all of them, hardly any of them?

CARNE: I have no idea! To a particular kind of English person it is a very familiar book so I’m sure a lot of them have read it. But Spain epitomises the problems I have talked about. An economic crisis has spawned a political crisis of profound disillusionment; manifest in mass demonstrations during and after the financial crisis. The Los Indignados movement, which has now emerged as a new political party called Podemos, which translates as, ‘Yes We Can’. 

The King’s abdication is a particular moment of reflection for Spain on its current dispensation and constitution. I am not on the ground with the demonstrators, but I daresay some of it is about anti-royalist feeling spawned by the corruption that has been associated with the royal family in recent years.

RF: I ask particularly about your former peers because it is one thing to be inculcated into a group-think in a closed cult, if you grow up a Mormon for instance, but it is quite another to have read Orwell, to have read Joseph Heller, to have listened to John Lennon and to still choose brutality and elitism.

But perhaps the intellectual basis is Hobbes’ Leviathan? But which is taken as an article of faith? How do you bring about an apostasy of nationalism? Can we rid ourselves of a faith in the monopoly of violence, the monopoly of the issuance of currency and today the monopoly of secrecy and privacy?

CARNE: Well to go back to Homage to Catalonia, the thing about Orwell and Joseph Heller is they are placed in a particular location in the literary intellectual cannon. Homage to Catalonia is presented as a romantic moment in European history; the failure for a republicanism in Spain, partly through infighting about which Orwell is very vivid in the book.

The Spanish Civil War is often just remembered for that; the romanticism of the international brigades and the self-defeating nature of the republican movement. When much more was going on in Spain, including the so-called Spanish Revolution where collectives of workers and peasants took over their own businesses, particularly in Catalonia. Orwell, who was an intellectual giant of the left, says he would have been an anarchist. But that part of his writing is ignored. How one changes the intellectual understanding of the role of the state and the permissiveness of state violence; well I think it’s beginning to happen in small ways.

The Snowden revelations are chipping away at the simplistic assumption that the state is always right and the exchange of our freedoms for security is a fair exchange. There is a generational component to this. You would not have seen an Edward Snowden character 20 or 30 years ago. There is a growing scepticism of the state and its automatic rights over us and I hope that converts into a much more critical relationship between the population and the state. That would undermine the simplifications of a work like the Leviathan, which is such an outdated piece of work in so many ways.  

RF: Well one can attempt to rationalise a counter position; the fabric that prevents violence exists between individuals; if violence is lifted above that fabric it becomes unmediated; consolidated and pliable; handing the state a monopoly on violence is not safeguarding it from use, it is turning violence into a resource that can be extracted or harnessed.

CARNE: Yes, it is legitimising violence.

RF: But better than merely a conceptual defence is evidence; of the alternatives actually working. Evidence of self-organising systems that flourish and are robust.

CARNE: There are two compelling types of evidence. Revolution is necessary both in politics and economics. In the workplace, cooperatives; of which there are several outstanding examples; show how agency, profit and benefits can be shared in a successful and competitive enterprise.

John Lewis, very familiar retailer to the British, has flourished in one of the most competitive environments in the modern economy. The workers share the benefits, and have agency over the future of the company and are generally a great deal happier than typical employees of big companies.

In Spain, the Mondragon Group is successful across many sectors. It is Spain’s seventh largest company, a collectively owned conglomerate. So there are examples of cooperatives that are very successful and that is a model I wish others would emulate more widely.

As for the political change there are some examples. The Porto Alegre experiment, where direct democracy was instituted to govern the city’s affairs. This is a city of 3 million people in Brazil, where 50,000 people a year take part in deliberative debates on how to spend the city’s budget. The empirical evidence of success is very clear, in fact documented in a World Bank study that looked at the city ten years after the experiment began. They looked at equality, living standards, fairness in the distribution of resources, transparency and corruption. There were dramatic increases in the provision of primary education, health, sanitation, healthcare; basic public services. It is not surprising because when everyone is included in decision making, everyone gets a greater share of the benefits. It shows direct democracy can work at scale.

RF: Perhaps a worthy example of a representative government is Costa Rica? A prosperous stable country with no standing army.

CARNE: Yes absolutely. Small states often enjoy greater political consensus; a greater sense of mutual cooperation than bigger states where national politics is more contested and often violent. Critics would argue that Costa Rica benefits from an implicit security guarantee from the United States but I don’t think Costa Rican’s would see it that way. The Costa Rican model is something other people should perhaps aspire to; it is possible to live without the threat of international violence and maintain the state.

RF: I recently spoke to Stella Creasy, the British Labour MP . She talks about government not being a customer complaints desk. I think it takes quite a lot of courage for a serving MP to promote that message.  It seems governments are aware they have got themselves into a pickle; they sense they can’t solve the problems of government intervention with more government intervention?

CARNE: Politicians in supposedly democratic countries know there is growing disillusionment with political institutions. I live in the US, where one has to declare oneself “Antipolitics” in order to get elected as a politician. The standard phrase for prospective Senate candidates is that they are against the Washington system. So politicians get it, but disillusionment will not be solved by mere words. It will be solved by renegotiating the contract between government and the people. Saying ”We’re not a customer service agency;” I don’t want to trivialise what she’s saying, but I don’t think it’s done so simply.

People will only take responsibility for political decisions when they have been part of making them. Today people feel entitled to hate politicians but do not feel responsible for the consequences of government policy. When you just give yourself permission to criticise everything you are not contributing to a better outcome. You have to contribute by participating.

RF: Governments have, for many years, intentionally or not, continually dissolved the organic systems that facilitate, and also restrict individual agency. They have replace that with central control and now perhaps they regret that because they cannot actually fulfil the responsibilities they have taken.

They are caught in a trap because they cannot solve the problem of having taken everyone’s agency with more government intervention. But what governments have shown themselves to be very good at is conditioning people. So should governments seek to condition people to want agency? Should the public call on the government to do that? I suppose if I think of “conditioning” in a good way it would be like a gym instructor who’s going to get us in shape again?

CARNE: I don’t think governments can condition people into wanting more agency. People have to take it. It has to be bottom up to be authentic and effective. I agree that governments are dimly realising the denial of agency is having a negative effect. Things like the British Tory concept of the Big Society where giving people control over their local libraries and leaf clearing in their local parks is considered to be restoring the agency and sense of community which has been destroyed in recent decades.

Governments have sought to atomise society.  But this is also an economic force. The politics and economics of the current political system are indivisible. You can see in the destruction of unions a deliberate attempt to destroy collective agency, to reduce the power of workers to their individual bargaining rights. It is a political economic phenomenon that has to be corrected. I don’t see any chance that a politician, however well intentioned; (and I’m not sure they really are well intentioned because I think most of this is cosmetic;) of fixing the crisis of agency. There has to be an economic component and it has to be bottom up.

RF: You talk about diplomats guessing what the public wants, having assumed the right, in a largely unaccountable context. But as you say, commerce and government are deeply intertwined.  I do not sense that when you were a diplomat you had executives from BP leaning over your shoulder asking for copies of your work, but officials must be aware of the commercial implications of policy. How was the grubby world of commerce manifest inside the diplomatic service?

CARNE: In two ways, one general and one specific. It is assumed from the day you become a diplomat that British economic and trade interests are priorities in a way that human rights or the promotion of democracy are not. Your mental framework is shaped such that almost any policy deliberation gives priority to British commercial interests. It was assumed for instance that Britain’s commercial interests should be calculated when addressing war crimes in the Sri Lankan civil war; perhaps even given priority. Somehow there is an equal bargain between commercial interest and accountability for war crimes.

The second very specific manner in that big business lobbies senior government officials constantly. This is very concealed, in a way that it is not in the US, to its credit. Lobbying in the US is open and brazen. In UK and Europe it is much more subtle. But when I was working on oil sanctions on Iraq, we would often have senior executives from BP and similar companies claim they were British, even though these companies are not really British, they are multinational.

They would come and lobby my Ambassador and I for their particular interests; that Britain not prejudice their interests extracting oil in Iraq. They were unhappy the Saddam government preferenced French and Russian companies for future oil exploration licenses, to the detriment of British oil companies. They were very explicit about that.

I do not remember human rights NGOs getting the same kind of access! It was assumed big multinationals had the right to make that pressure felt; they should have an open door. Had I or other diplomats shut the door on them and said; “This is not legitimate pressure,” we would have been admonished.

Any country’s foreign policy is about national interests, competing with other national interests. Even with climate change there is a win-lose mentality; if the other guy gets some kind of benefit then you must have lost.

There is a more basic fallacy in the way modern diplomats think about international affairs. They are very attached to Kant’s notion that democratic republics can produce world peace. In his book Perpetual Peace Kant talked about peace as the outcome of this cooperation; but today this is transformed into a belief that international cooperation in places like the UN can produce worthy global outcomes and can manage common goods like the world’s atmosphere. I don’t see that working. That model is a failure because states think of their interest in lowest common denominator terms not the collective interests of humanity.

Unborn children, who will suffer the consequences of climate change, have no representatives. Nature has no representative. Diplomats have an incredibly narrow concept of what a good outcome looks like.

RF: That owes a lot to the history of diplomacy; to court emissaries. The other corrosive legacy of that history is secrecy. To start a war you need a narrative that blames the other side and that is only possible where secrecy between states prevails. Should the first principle of national interest actually be the eradication of secrecy in international relations? If you make it impossible to blame the other side for walking away from the table you make it exponentially harder to go to war?

CARNE: If you get rid of secrecy you will get rid of the state. You will see the Emperor has no clothes. You will know what really goes on between states does not justify secrecy or the place in a hierarchy that we have given it.

Transparency would considerably enhance security. We would see whether declared threats or war provocations are real. We would see the machinations of states in all their tawdriness.

But I would add to your point that today states like ours do not even seek to justify war because “The other side started it.” All they need to suggest now is some future threat, which was of course the justification for the invasion of Iraq and is the justification for drone strikes today. It is just the potential for groups of people to commit violence against Americans or Britons.

Breaking down secrecy is necessary for global security; to demonstrate that states are not looking to our collective human interests. In that light I applaud what people like Edward Snowden have done.

RF: It brings us to another point you have made relating to the Panopticon; Jeremy Bentham’s idea of “All watching all.” Huge investment of regulatory energy goes into maintaining the privacy of money. But digital money is not naturally fungible; the natural state of a digital coin is that it carries a unique history; an audit trail. I know you consider banking regulation a very important issue. Shouldn’t I be able to filter my wallet to say, “I don’t want dollars that have passed through arms companies?’” Could that be the mechanism for correctly internalising negative externalities?

CARNE: I do not necessarily buy the assumption that digital currencies; i.e. non-state currencies are automatically more transparent. You could argue the opposite. There are substantial allegations against currencies like Bitcoin that criminals, enjoy the lack of transparency these currencies offer.

RF: But those are market misunderstandings, I think. The digital domain; whether it is a currency or anything else; the natural state is auditable. As it stands today, a member of the public cannot see the full ledger of how money is moving through society, but that is not because the technology doesn’t naturally offer that information, it is because there is a regulatory investment in protecting that information. So my point is that fungible money is money laundering. Money laundering is a tautology. And we can have liquidity without needing to pretend that every coin has the same history.

CARNE: Yes, you are right; but digital currencies have a long way to go. I would like to see that evolution happen quickly. In terms of secrecy of the financial system, I am more concerned about those who enjoy considerable wealth are able to move their money in secret to evade taxes and their responsibilities to society.

I am also very concerned about the way banks operate; it is more opacity than secrecy. So much of the way they conduct themselves is difficult for outsiders to understand, they get away with extremely irresponsible behaviour. Banks are rent seeking institutions, protected by the state, subsidised at our expense. A transparent non-state controlled system would rebalance the playing field.

RF: When you look at a normal marketplace, a market in a town square, one market trader can see the inventory of another, he can see what customers rock up to their stall, he can see how much they are buying for and when the other market trader leaves at the end of the day he can see how much inventory the guy has left. It all happens in the public domain; there is no relationship between private information and the ability of market participants to make a profit. But we seem to forget that that could be equally true in the banks.

CARNE: Absolutely. A precondition of real competition and market efficiency is transparency and that doesn’t exist. Instead we have a global system that is defended as a free market, as real competition that benefits everybody. If you are an entrepreneurial and successful and innovative you will get your rewards. but the system does not work like that at all. Instead we have a system of power centres, often big companies, who can play government to extract rents and protection for their monopolistic behaviour.

It is not an open market in any way. And people think the internet is going to open markets and be beneficial to all of us. Actually there is evidence the complete opposite happening. The network effect allows big internet companies to monopolise in a way that unprecedented in its rapidity and power. Companies like Ebay and Google control entire markets. That power is not being controlled by governments.

RF: It is hard to imagine legislators acting fast enough, even if they were minded to do so…

CARNE: These companies present themselves as transparent and innovative. Somehow because they are on the internet they are morally or politically better than predecessors. This is not the case. The only way regulate monopolies is public legislation. We do not see that because these companies have immense lobbying power.

RF: Monetary policy seems to be creating ever larger and more frequent financial crashes; or grotesque price distortions. It might be responsible to erect what I think of as a “Strong Man Radar.” When you look at today’s political landscape; for instance people like Nigel Farage, Ron Paul or Jeremy Clarkson, who are the people’s champions positioned to step forward and deliver “Unity at whatever cost?”

CARNE: In volatile situations, people who claim to offer unity and strength; clarity of purpose; are a clear risk. I do not know who they are. It often comes from an unexpected place. One of the interesting things about fascism is that often it is quite junior people who emerge, perhaps from the army. But that may not be the case today.

The only successful prophylactic is a dissemination of power to a much broader group of people. If people themselves have power they can resistant those who claim they alone can bring a better outcome. I think it is a severe danger. It is becoming more dangerous. People become disaffected their political and economic disempowerment is deepening.

RF: And debates become more polarised. What are your views on the likes of Ron Paul? On one level your vision of decentralised, free society; of self-organising systems; could be described as libertarian. But it seems that you are able to articulate an uncompromising vision of where we should be without the hard edges that make many people queasy in the face of libertarian rhetoric. I do not think you would class yourself as a libertarian?

CARNE: There is an important distinction. Libertarianism tends to focus on the rights of the individual above all. The belief that individual self-interest is good for society as a whole; it can produce good social outcomes; social harmony. It asserts that unregulated individual action is the way forward.

I argue that we each have a responsibility to the community. and that responsibility is primary. If we do not take the needs of others seriously, we will make no progress in our individual ambitions.

The idea that we can, in untrammelled fashion, pursue our own ambitions is a total fallacy, belied by every piece of research into social behaviour.

We only get things done together, we only have peace when we take the needs of others into account. That can only be done through close consultation and cooperation. That is my vision of how society should go; in contrast to the libertarian view.

The European and American debates are also very different on this. In the US the right classes itself as anti-government and the left as pro-government. It argues the government is the answer to social and economic injustice.

One has to be incredibly careful about where one places oneself in this political debate. I do not see myself as part of the Ron Paulian libertarianism or the kind of anti-government rhetoric of the Tea party.

RF: There is an abiding preoccupation with dismantling the architecture of government and less consideration given to the array of systems we might want to replace it with. This creates the impression of a moral vacuum…

CARNE: That is a huge problem. But it is a mixed bag. I take very seriously the fact that Rand Paul and his father Ron are the only two people to have stood up for Edward Snowden; to say Snowden was doing something helpful.

When the Snowden revelations broke, the entire political establishment was profoundly hostile to him and lined up to denounce him as a traitor. It was only Paul who stood up for him. It is also only Rand Paul who has demanded some level of accountability for drone strikes; that the administration produced a legal justification for the killing of Americans by US drones.

I applaud those actions. But there are real contradictions in their position. The Tea Party is very hostile to immigration and that seems a very anti-communitarian thing. I favour immigration, I’m a cosmopolitan. I do not believe any of us has a unique right to this planet, to this territory. The accident of birth should not deny people the opportunities we enjoy. If they were true libertarians I would be more supportive of their positions, but they’re not.

RF: You cannot dismantle the state and then put a massive fence around your country.

CARNE: When you dig into their positions they favour a strong state in areas like law and order. They are not arguing that the US justice system is unjust. Though again, Rand Paul has suggested that; which is remarkable; but by and large the Tea Party right does not argue that. They strongly favour a punitive legal justice system.

RF: Ron Paul has shown some courage in attempting to articulate the truth when his peers are clearly appalled by his candid remarks. But there is something unnerving about the implacable certainty of the ideological position.

The impression I get from your writing is that, having recognised the importance of human agency,  the tactics for achieving that are open to debate. There is simply no need for the rigidity of policy. I guess that is the point of being an anarchist?

CARNE: I am anti-certainty in all things. Anybody who proclaims themselves certain of particular viewpoints is inevitably going to be proven mistaken. The trouble with libertarianism and anarchism to a degree, is that they are very easy critical platforms; they are very good places from which to deconstruct everything else. Their failure is often in presenting a positive vision of what would replace a state based system. I do not believe in perfection; we are all trying to make the best of things. It is messy, it is not perfect.

The other problem is that for many Americans the libertarian position is associated with Southern exceptionalism and in particular racism. That freedom from government is also freedom to discriminate; to behave as you wish towards others. That is why on the left in America there is immense scepticism of people like Ron Paul; though it is worth noting his son has made interesting points about the racism of the US justice system; which is undeniable.

RF: He has been directly accused of racism. I have never heard him say anything racist. But you have a duty to work very hard to explicitly articulate your position on issues of race, and you particularly have that responsibility if you have a large number of undoubtedly racist people following you around and cheering. If I were followed by those people, they would be in no doubt as to my contempt for their views.

CARNE: That is absolutely right. You have to stake out a positive position, when there is that kind of atmosphere hanging around. Clearly Nigel Farage in the UK Independence Party has made that decision, to an extent.

But it is complicated in the US because there is a subtle language of race which doesn’t sound like racism to a European ear. It is called dog whistle politics. Messages are not overt but implicit in the language; and of course there is also a message in what you do not say; in what you emphasise over something else. You see that a lot in right wing politics. They talk about issues of acute interest to whites and ignore issues of importance for African Americans. The discrimination of the criminal justice system, for instance. One has to be very sensitive to that. As an English person living here it has taken a long time to learn the lexicon of these subtle terms.

RF: One final question. I have avoided picking over the Iraq war, because it is something you have talked about in depth on other occasions. But the Chilcott enquiry is due out… at some point… in the potentially not too distant future… hypothetically maybe at least… What do you expect to come from that?

CARNE: My expectations are very low. Justice delayed is justice denied. These public enquiries just serve to deny the possibility of real legal accountability; for what I regard as criminal behaviour by our government and certain officials and ministers and the Prime Minister. Public enquiries are an anaesthetic for the public. The problem has been investigated; the lessons will be learned; the day the Chilcott enquiry report comes out the Prime Minister, whoever it is, will stand up and say; ”This is a very serious report and we shall learn its lessons, and implement immediately all of its recommendations.” And everything will go back to as it was.

What I saw in government is very serious and systemic. It is the culture of government, not just a few decisions or individuals. It is highly unlikely Chilcott will address that.