Archives For November 30, 1999 @ 12:00 am
Scotland voted on Thursday to remain within the United Kingdom – with 55% and 2,001,926 voting ‘No’ to Scottish independence, while 45% and 1,617,989 voted ‘Yes’ – after more than two years of heated debate, but also on the back of a late pledge by the three main Westminster parties to grant Scotland greater devolved powers as part of the UK. The pledge, signed by David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband and published on the front page of the Daily Record at the beginning of the week, promised ‘extensive new powers’ to Scotland.
More devolution for Scotland in the case of a ‘No’ vote was always on the agenda, but the scope of these late-promised powers is a matter of debate between the three parties and between the parties and the SNP. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood already legislates for Scotland’s health and social services, education, housing, transportation, agriculture, fisheries and forestry, environment, arts and sport, tourism, and economic development. The Scotland Act 2012 – which amended the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved Scottish Parliament – additionally gave Scotland’s Parliament the power to raise or lower the rate of income tax by 10p in the pound, uniformly across all tax bands; as well as some other minor powers relating to taxation and law and order. However the Act is not due to be fully realised before 2016, and is now likely to be superseded. At the moment the Scottish Parliament can alter the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound.
Maximum devolution for Scotland – ‘devo max’ – would imply allowing the Scottish Parliament to legislate on everything except foreign policy and defence. It is clear that any move to extend Scotland’s powers will fall some way short of this. So far, discussion around the pledge for extensive new powers for Scotland has centred upon three issues. The first is greater still Scottish authority over taxation. The SNP would like complete control over taxation within Scotland, including absolute control over income tax rates, corporation tax, and air passenger duty. The Conservatives appear ready to give complete control over income tax rates; while the Liberal Democrats would offer this and more. Labour, however, seem willing to allow the Scottish Parliament to increase tax rates as they see fit, but not to unilaterally cut the top rate of income tax.
Secondly, the pledge vowed to consolidate Scotland’s authority over its NHS. This is against a background of gesture from Westminster threatening cuts and further privatisations; but also in a context whereby the NHS in Scotland apparently faces a funding gap of £400 million. Thirdly, and related to the issue of the NHS, is the promise to retain the Barnett formula: a mechanism for allocating public expenditure levels in the United Kingdom’s four nations, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Based on population, the Barnett formula has resulted in Scotland maintaining a significantly higher expenditure per capita than England: as it stands today, Scotland spends £1,623 – 19% – more per head than England on public services.
Embellishing a timetable established several weeks ago by Gordon Brown, David Cameron announced yesterday morning in his post-referendum speech that Lord Smith of Kelvin – a former BBC governor, and chairman of the organising committee for Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games – will oversee the process towards greater devolution for Scotland. The timeline is short: detailed proposals are to be written up by October, and they should pass consultation by November before a draft bill is published in January. Any legislation will not be passed until after the general election in May, and the continued implementation of the Barnett formula is likely to prove a sticking point within the UK Parliament.
The promise of greater devolution for Scotland has brought a surge of attention to the West Lothian question, and the proposal for ‘English votes for English laws’. In short, the question – first raised back in 1977 by the West Lothian MP Tam Dalyell, in the build up to the failed Scottish referendum of 1979 – asks why Scottish MPs can vote on English laws, while English MPs cannot vote on Scottish laws as they have no access to the Scottish Parliament. The proposal suggests that where legislation only concerns England, only MPs from English constituencies should be allowed to vote.
It is easy to go back and forth over ‘English votes for English laws’. Superficially, the proposal sounds eminently reasonable; but when you realise that two of its main proponents over the past weeks and months have been Conservative MP John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, suspicions grow in the mind as the body is immediately beset by revulsion. On the other hand on Thursday night, as the referendum results filtered through via the BBC, Ming Campbell – former Liberal Democrat leader and current MP for North East Fife – agreed that, with more powers promised to the Scottish Parliament, an end to the ability for Scottish MPs to vote on English laws is not only inevitable, but logical and fair.
In fact, the proposal was part of the Conservative manifesto for 2010; but the coalition government determined to set up a commission to investigate rather than act. The McKay Commission reported in March 2013, broadly supporting procedural change; but averring that ‘Under the Commission’s recommendations, no MPs would be prevented from voting on any bill, and the right of the House as a whole to make final decisions would be preserved’ and ‘Our proposals retain the right of a UK-wide majority to make the final decisions where they believe UK interests or those of a part of the UK other than England should prevail. We expect that governments will prefer compromise to conflict.’
English laws – as opposed to UK laws – would in theory cover the areas of health, education, transportation, and culture. Foreign affairs, defence, energy, and basic welfare provision and pensions are prominent among the realms which would then remain the concern of the UK Parliament. But with greater devolution for Scotland when it comes to taxation, it is unclear to what extent England might be allowed to set its economic policy independently from the rest of the United Kingdom. This is an intractable problem with the concept of ‘English votes for English laws’, because it is arguable that given the population of England and the size of the English economy, the decisions it makes economically will always have a disproportionate impact on its partners north and west of the border.
With Scotland voting to stay part of the UK and the focus turning to the West Lothian question, what also show through upon analysis are both the strengths of the union between Scotland and England, and the divisions within English society. ‘English votes for English laws’ is a populist proposal, and might well appeal to the vast majority of the English population. But it is hard to see how, in practise, it would benefit vast swathes of the country.
In the 2010 general election, Scotland returned 41 Labour MPs to the House of Commons from 59 contested seats. This amounts to 69% of Scotland’s seats won by Labour. In the North East of England, Labour won 25 from 29 seats. In the North West, Labour took 47 seats from a possible 75; and in Yorkshire and the Humber, they won 32 seats from 54. This means that in the north of England, Labour won 66% of seats. Yet in England as a whole, the Conservatives won 298 of 533 seats; giving them an election victory – although not a majority – in the United Kingdom with 307 seats out of 650.
When it comes to politics, the north of England is ideologically and economically closer to Scotland – and to Wales, where in 2010 Labour took 26 out of 40 seats, or 65% – than it is to London and the South East. However it is without its own parliament, and without the benefits brought about in Scotland by the Barnett formula. It suffers from a lack of representation in parliament and from a shortage of investment in jobs and in cultural life. And it seems perverse that one of the consequences of the close referendum in Scotland might be the further diminishing of the north. If ‘English votes for English laws’ becomes implemented – which may not require the passage of any new legislation – then the viewpoint of northern England will be increasingly marginalised as it loses the effective balance provided by Scottish MPs, and sees Labour struggle to attain a majority on English-only issues of legislation.
Other problems are posed by ‘English votes for English laws’. Would this change require a separate parliament building, which would be the preserve of English MPs and English matters of debate – and if so, where would an English Parliament be located? Otherwise an English Parliament could simply sit in the Commons on a rotational basis: sitting two or three days a week, with the UK Parliament sitting the rest of the time. Alternately, the UK Parliament could remain intact, with Scottish MPs even allowed to debate English laws, but voting limited to English politicians.
On Thursday night, the Times political columnist Daniel Finkelstein raised the notion that, more than an English Parliament, such a fundamental change to legislative procedure could require an English executive – a vast and unwieldy undertaking, which would have wide-ranging ramifications for governmental ministers and the civil service. Labour are advertising a constitutional convention to consider the future of political process in the United Kingdom, reluctant to accept ‘English votes for English laws’, especially as David Cameron seems set to bind further Scottish devolution to the enactment of the proposal. Meanwhile on Thursday night, Labour MP Jim Murphy took a pleasantly contrarian perspective and asked, given the breadth of powers enjoyed by the Greater London Authority, whether London’s MPs should also face a limited role when it comes to legislating for the rest of England.
This argument in particular raises the potential solution of greater devolution for England’s regions. The manner and the terms of such would be difficult to agree upon. Would the present tiered system of local councils remain; would a powerful layer of government emerge at regional level, between Westminster and the local councils over England’s nine regions; or would the concept of city-regions, experimented with in Manchester and Leeds, be spread out across the country? The powers handed over would be open to dispute. And where ‘English votes for English laws’ would seemingly benefit the Conservatives, there is the view that greater devolution for the regions would play into the hands of Labour. Any shift in powers could be complemented by a more representative voting system. But to accept that the strength of feeling shown in Scotland extends throughout the UK requires significant devolution to the regions – and the development of a genuine localised politics, a process which appears both viable and necessary in today’s globalised, interconnected world.
Following the 2014 Swedish general election, which took place yesterday, 14 September, Sweden is set for a new government and a new political leader. The results show the Social Democrats with 31.2% of the vote, while the incumbent Moderate Party’s share has fallen to 23.2% from the 30.1% they won back in 2010. The Social Democrat leader, Stefan Löfven, will become Sweden’s Prime Minister, and must look to form a coalition government in trying circumstances. Sweden’s far-right, anti-immigration party, the duplicitously named Sweden Democrats, have increased their vote from 5.7% in 2010 to 12.9%, which makes them the third largest party in the country; and it is such a share of the vote that it means a minority ruling government appears inevitable. Even with the support of their usual allies, the Social Democrats cannot reach a majority in the Riksdag.
Since 2006, Sweden has been governed by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of the Moderate Party, and the Alliance for Sweden: a four party coalition to the centre-right of Swedish politics, comprising the Moderate Party, the Centre Party, the Liberal People’s Party, and the Christian Democrats. After the general election of 2006 – and following twelve years of governments headed by the Social Democrats – the Alliance for Sweden had enough seats in the Swedish Riksdag to form a majority government. Retaining power in 2010 as they beat off opposition from the Red-Greens – a three party coalition on the left, comprised of the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and the Left Party – they fell two seats short of an overall majority, owing largely to the Sweden Democrats, who entered parliament for the first time and took twenty seats.
The Red-Greens had formed their coalition explicitly for the sake of the 2010 election, and when the gambit horribly failed, the coalition quickly broke apart. In the intervening years, the Swedish public have been moved by a series of scandals involving the privatisation of state welfare and schooling; by a persistently high unemployment rate, particularly amongst the young; by more rounds of tax cuts; and by the falling performance of the country’s students, as ranked by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Hence it has proved time to restore the Social Democrats to government.
The Social Democrats have been the major party in Swedish politics throughout the last century. 1911 saw the first Swedish general election with universal male suffrage, and the emergence of a modern party and parliamentary system. In that election, the Social Democrats finished in third place, with 28.5 % of the vote: behind the General Electoral League – which, after a couple of name changes, would become the Moderate Party – with 31.2%; and the Free-minded National Association – a precursor of today’s Liberal People’s Party – which won the election with 40.2%. The Social Democrats would become the largest party in the Riksdag three years later in 1914, although Hjalmar Branting would not become the first Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden until 1920.
The general election of 1921 was the first in Sweden with universal suffrage, as women won the right to vote. Over the next decade, power shifted between the Social Democrats, the General Electoral League, and the Free-minded National Association in the Riksdag – which operated as a bicameral legislature from 1866, with the first chamber indirectly elected by county councils and municipal assemblies, and the second chamber directly elected by eligible members of the populace; until in 1970 the two chambers merged to form a unicameral assembly. From 1936 until 1976, the Social Democrats enjoyed forty years of unbroken power.
Set against this long background of Swedish politics, despite the Social Democrats’ achievement in being returned as significantly the country’s largest party, and with the ability to form a government, their polling percentage is still relatively small. At general elections from 1936 until 1970, they uniformly won over 45% of the vote. And from 1914 until 2006, their vote never dropped beneath 36%. In 2006, they managed only 35% of the vote, making them still the largest party in the country by some margin, but resulting in a loss of power up against the Alliance for Sweden. Then in 2010, as the Red-Greens coalition did its constituents more harm than good, their vote fell to 30.7%.
31.2% of the vote this time round is a minor increase, even if any increase was largely unexpected. It suggests that the Moderate Party have failed to consolidate their successes in 2006 and especially in 2010, rather than the Social Democrats reaffirming their traditional dominance. Indeed, from the same historical perspective, 23.2% of the vote is not at all bad for the Moderate Party: between 1932 and 2002, their vote never rose above 23.6%; and dropped as low as 11.5% in 1970, a year after they changed their name to the Moderates in response to the perception that they were too right-wing.
With the Social Democrats having lost their old hegemony, and a distrust of the political establishment almost as characteristic of Sweden as it is of the rest of Europe, the resulting vacuum has been largely filled by the Sweden Democrats. The other parliamentary parties have repeatedly asserted that they will not work with the Sweden Democrats; and they are likely to resist any engagement despite the Sweden Democrats now holding the balance of power between the left and centre-right. The party formed in 1988, with various connections among its early membership to overtly racist and neo-Nazi groups, including the Nordic Reich Party.
The Sweden Democrats are not alone in bearing uncomfortable former ties to Nazism: the affiliated youth wing of the General Electoral League in the 1920s was the National Youth League of Sweden, which became increasingly radicalised and began supporting the German Nazis in the early 1930s, before the General Electoral League’s leader Arvid Lindman severed the connection in 1934. The National Youth League would briefly form its own far-right political party, which received just 0.9% of the vote in the 1936 general election, before the movement fissured and fizzled out.
Still, the Sweden Democrats retained some of their old connections, along with the slogan ‘Keep Sweden Swedish’, until beginning a process of moderation in the late 1990s. Especially under the leadership of Jimmie Åkesson since 2005, the party has attempted to distance itself from the vestiges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, the party has even argued that its opposition to extreme forms of Islam amounts to strong support for sexual equality. Nevertheless, after the success of 2010, three of the party’s MPs were were forced to stand down owing to racist incidents. And the party continues to court controversy through provocative advertisements: as in 2010, when a commercial depicted a horde of burqa-wearing women chasing down an elderly Swedish lady in a race for benefits. The Sweden Democrats continue to campaign predominantly on restricting immigration and encouraging immigrants to return to their countries of origin; bolstering this thrust with what are increasingly common right-wing policies across Europe, including the renegotiation of EU membership and increased spending on defence.
While yesterday’s results mark a surge in support for the Sweden Democrats since their emergence in the 2010 election, the newest party to feature prominently in the election were the Feminist Initiative. Founded in 2005, in Sweden’s European Parliament elections held earlier this year the Feminist Initiative won 5.5% of the vote – enough for one seat, making the party the first feminist party to hold a seat in the European Parliament. Yet despite this result and much media interest – with co-founder and co-leader Gudrun Schyman appearing on stage over the weekend with Pharrell – achieving only 3.1% of the vote in the general election leaves the party short of the 4% required for a seat in the Riksdag. It also means a significant number of wasted votes, in so far as the 3.1% of votes for Feminist Initiative candidates will play no part in the construction of Sweden’s new government. But the party is well placed to continue to grow, and if the Social Democrats look more secure come the next election, more voters on the left of the political spectrum will be inclined to opt for the Feminists.
Sweden’s party system and proportional representation tend to result in the need for coalition governments. The Alliance for Sweden’s rule as a minority in parliament after 2010 was hardly an exceptional case, and weaker minority governments have been commonplace. Yet the results of this general election make the constitution of Stefan Löfven’s new Social Democrat-led government difficult to gauge. Any collaboration with the Sweden Democrats has been firmly ruled out. It is plausible that the Social Democrats will ally once again with the Green Party and the Left Party. But this would still provide only 43.7% of the vote, and 158 seats in the 349-seat parliament. Löfven and his party would then have to seek support for their policies on a case-by-case basis.
On the other hand, Löfven has expressed his openness to the possibility of partnering with the Centre Party and the Liberal People’s Party. These could add another 11.5% of the vote and an additional 41 seats. However, on the chance that they do break up the Alliance, it is unlikely that these smaller centrist parties will work alongside the Left Party. The Left Party splintered from the Social Democrats back in 1917, and as the Communist Party of Sweden had a history of cooperation with the Soviet Union. While the Green Party’s anti-nuclear and environmental focus is reconcilable with the aims of the others, the Left Party’s strong views on foreign policy and taxation, and absolute opposition to privatisation, make them an uneasy bedfellow even for the Social Democrats.
So the Social Democrats may have to forego the Left Party if they want to entice the Centre Party and the Liberal People’s Party. The Centre Party and the Social Democrats were once close, working hand-in-hand as coalition partners between the 1930s and 1950s when the former went under the guise of the Farmers’ League; but the Centre Party has moved to consolidate itself on the centre-right of Swedish politics ever since. Any union between these two will have been made more difficult still after a televised spat between Löfven and the Centre Party’s leader, Annie Lööf, in the run-up to Sunday’s election.
Responses to the release a week last Sunday of at least dozens of pictures of naked or partially clothed female celebrities can be very loosely grouped into two opposing points of view. One would decry not only those who gained, possibly traded, and then released the pictures, but also all those who knowingly viewed them – depicting both parties as either criminal, cruelly exploitative, or guilty of a pernicious and emblematic lack of restraint. The other would largely bypass the issue of distributors and viewers, and would instead assert the foolhardiness of the celebrities in enabling their images to be accessed. There certainly exist a variety of third ways: viewpoints marked by their lack of point-of-view; or those which move beyond the individuals immediately involved and more direct issues of agency to consider the processes of cloud computing. Yet these alternative perspectives have been sidelines in what quickly became a polarised debate. Certainly the apparent theft and the dissemination of images which were taken in the privacy of people’s own homes, and stored via supposedly private storage services, is just cause for anger and lament.
But actions which might seem morally wrong based upon instinct or strict logic become muddied, because of the manifold ways in which we use the internet. This applies particularly to the viewing of the nude images. So much of what we do on the internet may, upon reflection or conceived in another context, appear morally objectionable, or at least straddling an uncomfortable grey area somewhere between our moral ideals, the law, our desires, and what we feel ourselves entitled to in response to our desires and the apparent inequalities in the world. Yet many of these behaviours are now so widespread and routine that they are rarely discussed: whether we rationalise them internally or simply allow them to accrue by habit; presume that because they take place on the internet they can have little meaningful effect; or dismiss them from consideration because they don’t fit easily within popular topics of discourse.
Take, for instance, the porn industry and its practitioners, who are being remorselessly squeezed by the proliferation of free sites. When we view or watch for free pornography which we would otherwise have to pay for, we are effectively withholding money from actors, producers, and publishers, significantly restricting their incomes and the very opportunity for others to make a livelihood in what might otherwise prove a widely lucrative field. Where the porn industry is discussed, it is often with regard to the safety of performers, or within a vague dialogue which presumes – without an abundance of definite evidence or the capacity to place assertions in a wider historical context – that the ability to access free pornography tends to corrupt the minds of the young and the flourishing of healthy sexual relationships.
The economic impact of watching pornography for free is less discussed. And this implies a series of questions regarding how we value different lives and different endeavours, and how we weigh expressions of upset. Is a loud cry of anger – particularly from a well-liked famous person – or are egregious invasions of privacy of greater concern than the steady eradication of a group’s income? When we evaluate upset, do we consider and seek to take action based upon its immediate expressions, or do we attempt to identify a longer-term impact on people’s lives? All upset may be cause for lament, but clearly we prioritise when it comes to the upset we discuss and attempt to alleviate.
The argument that our actions on the internet threaten livelihoods remains, but with different layers of complexity, when it comes to the pirating of music and film. More so than in relation to online pornography, there is the concept that downloading music and film for free actually encourages investment: people engage with what they enjoy, and as a result become more likely to buy singles, albums, and DVDs; to pay for streaming services; and to attend concerts and cinemas. Perhaps with such a wealth of entertainment available, free and immediate access approaches a necessity if we are going to be able to make diverse selections as to where we then spend our money. And perhaps the ability to access content for free, even if it is unlawfully, admits many to a realm of culture from which they would otherwise be unfairly restricted.
The artistic worth and the economic viability of these two forms is implicated by the scandal concerning the released images, because many of the female celebrities involved are artists in the worlds of music and film. While piracy continues to pose its challenges to these industries, will the earning potential of these celebrities fall or rise owing to their indecent exposure? Does this matter at all given the avowed distress the exposure has caused? If the distributed pictures have served to show prominent female celebrities as ‘real’ people, with not atypical female bodies, does this shift the stress placed upon their appearances and place it instead upon their art? Of course, the logical extension to this thought would produce a requirement that people in all walks of life strip so that we can demystify their appearance and judge them on works alone.
It is also worth considering what we make of the improper exposure of art, in contrast to the improper exposure of bodies. Music albums and song demos, film scripts, settings, and costumes, and drafts of novels are all routinely leaked before their finished products are due to be released. These are invasions of privacy too – impinging on the ability of artists to create and to allow their creations the light of day only when they are ready. Such leaks can have financial consequences and creative consequences, both of which can cause emotional tumult.
Internet practises and the utilisation of social media networks bring up related issues of copyright. Photographs and videos, and especially written content on blogs and forums, can be effectively stolen and repurposed for monetary gain – but with no legal recourse for the original authors, owing to never-read clauses which give service providers rights of use and rights of licensing. And all of this is to say nothing of what is, in any moral sense, the mass theft of people’s data by governments throughout the world: a theft not only potentially of pictures, but of the very fabric of lives, from the people we correspond and talk with, to the places we go, the bills we pay, the things we watch and listen to, the websites we view, and the information we access.
Analogies between the NSA and viewers of the distributed pictures have been drawn, but these are hardly appropriate: an online viewer of illicit material is not equal to a security agency. A more accurate analogy would be towards a hypothetical situation whereby the NSA were collecting all of the data they already collect, and plastering upon the internet its most salacious aspects: viewers of these aspects would be equatable to viewers of the released celebrity images. A lurid and insatiable curiosity is one of the hallmarks of activity on the internet, but this is not criminal in itself, morally suspect rather than morally wrong, and hard to distinguish from the myriad minor ways in which we exploit people and not uncommonly debase ourselves. If ready access to music and film can prove liberating, the profusion of popular articles which comprise only paparazzi photographs – often questionably obtained – or unfounded gossip serves to corrupt the media landscape, and ultimately the way all events and issues are analysed and reported.
Returning to the celebrities involved in the photo leaks, their misfortunes encourage us to consider other peculiarities regarding our conceptions of privacy. Is age a barrier to privacy? Do we implicitly – and perhaps increasingly owing to the influence of social networks – perceive a sort of sweet spot: an age range at which others, regardless of fame, are more acceptably subject to exposure? How does interaction with celebrities through social media platforms modify our sense of them as private individuals? Is it a greater infringement to view a couple in an intimate moment than to view a person posing alone? Despite the assertions that a reasonable expectation of privacy does not and cannot subsist on the internet, it is clear that we are private people as much as we are social, and must find or build ways to keep to ourselves even as more and more of us is given online.
All of the above arguments are not mean to closely reflect back upon and elucidate the specific matter of the celebrity photograph leaks. Nor do they amount to any sort of call for an immediate and radical overhaul of our internet activities. Rather, they are an attempt to outline and think through some of the entanglements which make any thrusting response to the leaks – whether demonising those who have viewed or would view the images; or doubly demeaning the women whose photographs were stolen for some supposed lack of sophistication – feel unsatisfactory. Throughout, we ought to be conscious of the dignity of other people and the broad effects of our actions, and continually keep in mind and be willing to subtly rethink the ways we use the internet.
Yesterday was an eventful day in the uneventful life of this site. The piece I published last Thursday, ‘Crimea: A Literary Perspective‘, was linked to in an article by Gary Brecher of PandoDaily. Owing to this, my site more than doubled its previous best view count for a single day.
Gary Brecher writes a regular column for PandoDaily, entitled ‘War Nerd’. The excellent piece he published on Monday covers the situation in Crimea, and takes the full title ‘War Nerd: Everything you know about Crimea is wrong(-er)‘. It elucidates the response to the situation of US journalists and politicians, and identifies the vital role that Russian oil will continue to play amid talk of sanctions and other consequences. It builds a picture of international relations following the end of the Cold War. More, it provides a suggestive history of Ukraine across the twentieth century, and gives a concise reading list towards a fuller understanding of the region.
Brecher noted in his piece – for the sake of comparison with the referendum which took place on Sunday – a Crimean referendum of 20 January 1991. The referendum asked Crimeans whether they wanted to restore autonomy to the region, and just over 93% of voters approved. I disagree with Brecher’s analysis of that referendum; and responded in the comments below his piece. I am quoting my response in full here, because it considers more deeply some of the recent political history of Crimea touched on in my previous two articles. In short, it looks at how Crimea reemerged as an Autonomous Republic during the latter days of the Soviet Union; and at how events in the years immediately following Ukrainian independence continue to influence developments in Crimea today. My response to Brecher’s piece:
In an insightful, informative, engaging and entertaining article, the interpretation of the Crimean referendum of January 1991 is one of the few points on which I disagree with you, Gary. I think there’s just about room for the interpretation – and it is very difficult to capture the full and convoluted complexity of the various shifts in Crimea’s modern political history, certainly without writing at vast length – but I wouldn’t depict the January 1991 referendum as Crimeans voting ‘to restore their ties with Russia’.
Crimea was governed as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from the end of the Russian Civil War until 1945, when it lost its autonomous status, and was made an Oblast, essentially a region of Soviet Russia. In 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. Whether this was simply a gift, or whether it served a richer political purpose is debatable; but it wasn’t of profound significance at the time, because power in the Soviet Union was so centralised in Moscow.
The referendum of January 1991 asked Crimeans whether they wanted Crimea to regain autonomy. The vote has to be viewed in its immediate context. The Soviet Union was breaking down owing to separatist movements in numerous Soviet Republics. Through 1990, Gorbachev proposed to reform the Soviet Union, hoping that he could keep the political structure together by significantly decentralising power. Meanwhile Soviet Ukraine held parliamentary elections, and its parliament declared in July 1990 the sovereignty of the state. This was an assertion of Ukraine’s right to govern itself; but Ukraine still remained a Soviet Republic, and it was one of the Republics which began negotiating towards the end of the year Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty.
Crimea asking for a referendum on autonomy, and voting decisively in January 1991 for the ‘restoration of the Crimean ASSR as a subject of the USSR and as a party to the Union Treaty’, can be read as a response to the Ukrainian parliament’s declaration of state sovereignty. On the other hand, as an Autonomous Republic after January it was still part of Soviet Ukraine. Autonomous Republics in the Soviet Union were parts of Soviet Republics, granted much more autonomy than that possessed by mere regions. So the referendum didn’t mark Crimea severing ties with Ukraine and rejoining Russia; but it did imply a willingness to remain part of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty was never implemented: Ukraine couldn’t agree its terms, and by late 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolving. On 1 December, Ukraine held a referendum and Ukrainians voted for independence. This essentially marked the end of the Soviet Union. 54% of Crimean voters opted for Ukrainian independence, with the turnout in Crimea placed at 60%. Thus Ukraine became independent, and Crimea remained part of the newly independent Ukraine, retaining its autonomous status. Throughout 1992, the Crimean parliament made gestures towards full Crimean independence, but really sought to secure only greater autonomy from Kiev.
Perhaps more controversially – and as the refworld.org link details – in May 1992 the Crimean parliament established a Crimean constitution, and in September-October 1993 it established the post of President of Crimea. But in early 1994, after a polarising election campaign, Crimeans elected as their President a strongly pro-Russian candidate, Yuriy Meshkov. A power struggle between the Ukrainian parliament and the Crimean parliament commenced. Another Crimean referendum in March 1994 asked three questions: ‘1.3 million voted, 78.4% of whom supported greater autonomy from Ukraine, 82.8% supported allowing dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship, and 77.9% favored giving Crimean presidential decrees the force of law’. Yet after more political turbulence – with the Crimean parliament voting to oust Meshkov in September – in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post of President of Crimea, and scrapped the Crimean constitution. The Crimean parliament was forced to define a new constitution, which the Ukrainian parliament finally ratified in 1998.
So when the interim Ukrainian government today talks about the Crimean parliament’s lack of legislative power – when it comes to appointing a Prime Minister, and when it comes to calling a referendum – there is an argument that this power was taken from Crimeans by Kiev in an underhand, undemocratic, if not entirely illegitimate manner back in 1995.
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The refworld.org link referred to above, which Brecher cites in his piece, is: http://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38ec2.html
The situation in Crimea continues to develop agallop. Following events in Kiev, unidentified Russian troops have taken control of Crimea’s airports, public buildings, military installations, and ports. Amid claim and counterclaim – the apparent defection of the chief of the Ukrainian Navy, the claimed defection of thousands of Ukrainian armed forces, and allegations that the human rights of UN envoys and journalists are being abused – and with occasional clashes between opposition groups – notably that which took place on 9 March, as the anniversary of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was commemorated – a referendum has been scheduled which would decide the region’s future.
Initially proposed for May, brought forward by the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol (one of two cities – along with Kiev – with special status in Ukraine) to 16 March, the referendum will ask the populace of Crimea whether the region should unify with Russia. The referendum has been declared unconstitutional and therefore illegal by the interim Ukrainian government and by governments throughout Europe and in the United States. For a richer exploration of the contexts involved as the sequence of things shifts and continues in Crimea, it is necessary to provide some detail regarding the wider situation in Ukraine.
Amidst a political background of economic uncertainty and reliance on Russian oil, and with growing allegations of governmental corruption, the protest movement in Ukraine began in earnest on the evening of 21 November 2013. Earlier that day, the Ukrainian parliament had rejected a series of measures which called for imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to be allowed medical treatment abroad; and the Ukrainian government, and President Viktor Yanukovych, issued a decree suspending the signing of an Association Agreement with the EU. This agreement, some aspects of which have been under discussion as far back as 1999, would mean closer political and economic integration between Ukraine and the EU. It includes policy on a ‘deep and comprehensive free trade area’, on visa-free movement between Ukraine and the EU (which at the moment extends only one way, with Ukrainian citizens required to possess a visa to visit EU states), and emphasises the ‘European identity’ of Ukraine.
It is worth noting that the agreement which was to be signed represented a certain amount of progress made during Yanukovych’s Presidency. Attempts towards closer integration had largely stalled under the Presidency of Viktor Yuschenko and the twin governments of Tymoshenko. More, in suspending the signing of the agreement, Yanukovych and the government underneath him – headed by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov – were not explicitly rejecting it, and at first they continued to negotiate with the EU. However, the EU had asked Ukraine to sign the Association Agreement during the EU summit in Vilnius, on 28-29 November. That this would not now occur was taken by many pro-European Ukrainians to indicate the implicit rejection of closer EU ties, in favour of a strengthening of bonds with Russia. Russia had previously indicated that the signing of the Association Agreement would negatively impact Russia-Ukraine trade relations.
Thus, on 21 November, utilising social media and encouraged by several opposition politicians, protesters began to gather at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (‘Independence Square’), the central square in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and one which has been used for political rallies since Ukrainian independence in 1991. The number of protesters swelled from 2,000 to as many as 100,000 over the course of the next week, with tensions rising as the Vilnius summit drew to a close: Ukraine had attended, and Azarov continued to assert the government’s desire to reach some deal with the EU, but no agreement had been signed.
Throughout the following two weeks, the protests spread to other cities – notably to Lviv, close to the border with Poland – and began calling for the resignation of the President and the government. Public buildings, including the Kiev city hall, were occupied by groups of protesters. What had began relatively peacefully became increasingly confrontational. The police commenced using batons, stun grenades and tear gas, at first to halt those protesters trying to access governmental buildings, then increasingly to break up all large-scale demonstrations. The police for their part would claim that the protesters initiated these escalations by using tear gas and other explosives. The Azarov government survived a vote of no confidence in parliament on 3 December. On 8 December, the third Sunday of the protests, the number of protesters in Kiev reached at least 500,000; but a few days later the police coordinated their efforts to clear protesters from the Maidan.
Then on 17 December, President Yanukovych and President Putin signed a treaty which saw Russia buy $15 billion of Ukrainian debt, and significantly reduce the price it charged Ukraine for natural gas. The treaty also apparently gave the Russian Navy increased access to the Kerch Peninsula in eastern Crimea. Prime Minister Azarov asserted that the deal had saved Ukraine from potential bankruptcy; while suggesting that the Association Agreement with the EU was still being considered, but some way from being signed. EU ministers stated that the treaty with Russia would not prevent the signing of the Association Agreement; still, the treaty was roundly denounced by the Ukrainian opposition.
Despite this – and despite the attack on Tetiana Chornovol, a journalist and prominent leader of the protest campaign, on 25 December – the protests remained relatively peaceful from the middle of December until the middle of January. On 16 January, a series of draconian anti-protest laws were pushed through parliament. These decreed lengthy jail terms for those engaging in ill-defined ‘extremist activity’, and introduced provisions for the censorship of the internet and social media; and quickly became referred to as the ‘dictatorship laws’. In the aftermath to the passing of these laws, the protests and the response of the authorities intensified. Three protesters were killed between 21-22 January, one shot to death by the police; prominent protest leaders Ihor Lutsenko and Yuriy Verbytsky were abducted, the latter soon found dead; and police began using water cannon on protesters despite the freezing temperatures.
On 28 January, Prime Minister Azarov tended his resignation, which was accepted. He flew first to Austria, later moving on to Russia. In early February, meetings between Yanukovych and leaders of the opposition saw some movement towards compromise and constitutional reform. However, the rhetorical confrontation engaged in by both sides continued apace. On 14 February, the 234 protesters arrested since the beginning of the protests were released from custody; and on 16 February, protesters relinquished their occupation of the Kiev city hall. But on 18 February, around 20,000 protesters began to march on the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament; and in the fighting which followed, with both protesters and the police firing automatic weapons and utilising explosive devices, 20 people were killed with more than a thousand injured. A brief truce held on the evening of 19 February, but the following morning the fighting resumed. With reports of police snipers targeting civilians and leaders of the opposition, a further sixty people were killed, the vast majority from the numbers of the protesters. 21 February saw a deal reached between President Yanukovych and opposition leaders, brokered by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France. Yet this deal too did not hold; Yanukovych fled from Kiev; parliament impeached him and formed an interim government; and the situation in the Crimea began to escalate.
Russia – alongside ministers from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – has consistently alleged that the violence which has marked the protests has been initiated by the protesters. It argues that the protest movement has been infiltrated by or has contained within and enabled far-right nationalists, quick to adopt violent measures. The symbols and signa of nationalists have been apparent during some of the protest’s fiercest clashes; the Right Sector collective have been implicated in some of the protest’s most critical – and bloodiest – battles. In contrast, the protest movement and opposition leaders have squarely blamed a brutal and reactionary police force for the number of injured and dead; arguing that they were ordered by governmental ministers fighting to remain in power whatever the cost. In particular, the Minister for Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, has been labelled a criminal for supporting the use of deadly force by the Berkut, the special police force governed by his Ministry. Immediately following the deal struck on 21 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted unanimously to suspend Zakharchenko; also voting to restore the amendments made to the Ukrainian constitution in 2004, which sought to weaken the powers of the President. Zakharchenko’s successor, the acting Minister for Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, has since dissolved the Berkut.
In tune with their allegations regarding the involvement of far-right nationalists, Russia calls the impeachment of Yanukovych and the formation of a new government illegal, an anti-constitutional coup achieved by force. They point to the cabinet positions the interim government – led by interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – has afforded three protest leaders, along with four members of the controversial nationalist party Svoboda. To the protesters and to the politicians of the opposition, this marks instead the success of a popular uprising, and the deposition of a Presidency and a government who had rendered themselves illegitimate. It could certainly be argued that – disregarding any prior instances of corruption – the grotesque actions of the Berkut were sufficient to delegitimise Yanukovych’s regime. The view of the opposition is the view which appears predominant in Western Europe and North America, and it is the view strongly forwarded by the governments of these countries. One of the problems with this view, however – and preventing any clear delineation of right and wrong – is the apparent lack of political process, the apparent absence of diplomacy, which has marked events in Kiev in the aftermath of 21 February.
The deal signed by Yanukovych and opposition leaders and impelled by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France called for a restoration of the 2004 constitution to prefigure further constitutional reform; the formation of a new unity government; amnesty for protesters arrested from 17 February; and presidential elections to be held no later than December. Yet in the twenty-four hours following its agreement, protesters – who condemned the deal – continued to rally and to occupy public buildings across Ukraine. Police officers abandoned the capital, whether recalled from Kiev to face protests in their home cities, fearful of riots, or refusing to uphold Yanukovych’s position any longer. Presidential buildings became unguarded; Yanukovych hurried to Kharkiv, in the north east of the country; and the Euromaidan protesters entered peacefully and unfettered the governmental buildings of the capital. With around 40 Party of Regions MPs leaving their posts or defecting, and with the tenor in the Verkhovna Rada having fundamentally altered, a new coalition was formed and parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych. Disembodied in the east, Yanukovych responded by asserting the legality of his position as Ukraine’s lawfully elected president, and denouncing events in Kiev as a coup.
Russia had already, during the course of the protests, accused Western governments – particularly the United States – of funding the opposition. But the breakdown of diplomacy immediately following the 21 February agreement increased the sense of Western meddling and Western hypocrisy, and made Russian intervention in some form all but inevitable. Russia undoubtedly perceives the hands of the West behind the ultimate ousting of Yanukovych; and considers that attempts to reach a political compromise were abandoned once the EU and the US saw their preferred outcome emerge via extra-political means. If the West portrays itself as upholding the right for Ukrainians to decide how and by whom they are governed, free from the interference of their often repressively violent and overbearing neighbour, then Russia sees the West acting out of self-interest: heralding and supporting the attempts for independence of those who would seek closer ties with it, while decrying those who would associate with alternative areas of power.
The moral case of the West inevitably implicates democracy as the system of government which best establishes and upholds the rights of the human beings who fall under it. To this supposition, democracy itself must be opened out and questioned, both for its fundamental principles and in its historical development. It is debatable whether modern democracy, as practised in the EU and US, truly allows individuals a significant say regarding how they are governed. This covers a range of concerns, from the lack of choice afforded by too-similar politicians, to revolving door policies and the power of lobbying groups, to the bailout of big banks at the expense of taxpayers, to apparently flawed electoral systems, to a perceived democratic deficit in the governance of the EU.
A notable facet of modern democracies appears to be how efficiently they stifle protest – at an ideological level, before it comes to the legal restrictions placed upon the right to protest and excessive policing of those protests which do take place. Protesters in modern democratic societies are routinely cast and outcast as dangerous and extremist regardless of the specificities of their views. Little over a week ago, 1,000 environmental protesters protested peacefully outside the White House in Washington, over the controversial fourth phase of the Keystone oil pipeline project. 400 of these protesters were arrested, their appeals dismissed as constituting ‘an extreme position…well outside the American mainstream’. De Tocqueville warned of the ‘soft despotism’ inherent in the democratic system, and always to be considered and guarded against:
‘Thus, after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.‘
Nor can the recent history of Russian-Western relations beyond Ukraine and Crimea be dismissed. Russia can justifiably mock US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext’, given the invasion of Iraq – which Kerry voted for – based on alleged but nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, the West’s analysis of the ongoing conflict in Syria seems increasingly open to debate. One prominent study of rocket trajectories argues that the rockets which delivered sarin gas to Ghouta, near Damascus, last August could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government.
Thus Russia’s engagement in Crimea implicates Russian concern over Western influence, Western sleight-of-hand, and a breakdown in diplomacy; it has been encouraged by some of the protest movement’s association with aspects of the far-right; and it reflects Russia’s dislike of Ukraine’s change in political regime, as well as a perception that the Ukrainian political class is disorganised, self-absorbed, backed by various competing oligarchs, and incapable of providing the stability that could be conducive to its purposes as well as to the Ukrainian populace. Reading between the lines, there is a sense that many Ukrainian citizens would welcome close cooperation with both Russia and the EU, for economic and cultural reasons; but the more the situation in the country escalates, the more they are forced to pick sides. One of the reshaped parliament’s least helpful measures was its overturning, on 23 February, of a minority languages law, which allowed Russian to function as an official second language in those regions with a sizeable Russian population.
What Russia desires as the result of its excessively militarised response remains unclear. The annexation of Crimea is presumed, based upon the example set in Georgia, but any serious attempt towards this end would be met with international opposition: there would undoubtedly be sanctions, and a serious deterioration in Russia’s international relationships. Russia would have much to lose by perceived annexation: without the ethnic Russian population of Crimea to balance opinion in the west, and in response to such an outcome, Ukraine could slip decisively, electorally and ideologically, from its powers of influence. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, founded along with the city of Sevastopol in 1783, is now small and old and in need of modernisation; but access to the Black Sea from Crimea remains a strategic and economic imperative for Russia. In 1997, a partition treaty divided the Black Sea Fleet and effectively formed the Ukrainian Navy; as part of the treaty, Russia was ensured military access to Crimea, and the base of its fleet in Sevastopol, until 2017. In 2010 this agreement was extended until 2042. According to its terms, Russia are allowed to station 25,000 troops on Crimea – more than the 16,000 which Ukraine claims are currently present – but, of course, these troops are not allowed to assert themselves off base and unidentified. It is plausible that Russia is endeavouring to secure primarily its military access to the region. At this point in time, any further excursions appear as unlikely as they would be unwarranted.
More than a swift reaction to recent political events, Russia’s intervention in Crimea must be read from a longer cultural and historical perspective. The broader response from the populace of Crimea to the protests in the west of the country must equally be viewed not merely within their immediate context – portrayed in opposition to the protesters’ successes in Kiev – but with an understanding of the Crimea’s own highly distinct history and culture. The trajectory of the Crimea does not merely parallel or diametrically oppose what is happening elsewhere in Ukraine: it has unique roots and currents.
The short history of Crimea as part of Ukraine began on 19 February 1954, when the Crimean Oblast was transferred from the authority of Soviet Russia to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. The rationale behind this transfer remains a subject of debate: some have considered it essentially a gift, marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire; others have stressed the close cultural, economic, and practical links between the region and the Ukrainian mainland. In January 1991, Crimea was upgraded from an Oblast to an Autonomous Republic. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it remained part of independent Ukraine, with much autonomy and its own parliament. Across 1992 the Crimean parliament agreed to retain unity with Ukraine, but only after securing even greater autonomy from Kiev; in May, the parliament also established a Crimean constitution.
In October 1993, the Crimean parliament established the post of President of Crimea. At the same time, it agreed upon parliamentary representation for Crimea’s Tatars: the Crimean Tatars were given 14 seats in the body of 100, despite their protests that Crimea should not possess a president distinct from the President of Ukraine. After a pro-Russian President of Crimea was voted into power in 1994, in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post and scrapped the Crimean constitution. A new constitution was formed and finally ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 1998; while the treaty of friendship of 1997 regarding the division of the Black Sea Fleet calmed differences between Kiev and Moscow concerning the region.
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For those who desire a retreat from such densely political frontiers; who would extend their political understanding via other contexts; or else derive pleasure or relaxation through incidental knowledge – what follows is the long history of Crimea, seen through the eyes and down the nibs of some of the great men of Russian letters. It is a political history, a cultural history, and a literary history.
Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and much of what is now northern and central Ukraine came under Polish-Lithuanian control. The Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 ended in a truce, but one which forced the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to relinquish Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper River (plus Smolensk further north) to the Tsardom of Russia. These lands continued to rule themselves with some autonomy for the next hundred years, the period of the Cossack Hetmanate; but this autonomy was successively diminished during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), and the region came to be fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia often considers the union between Kiev and Moscow to extend back to the beginnings of the the Russo-Polish War in 1654.
The history of Crimea is distinct from the history of Kiev and mainland Ukraine. The region passed through the firm and fragile hands of the Cimmerians, Greeks, Bulgars, and Kievan Rus, among hordes of others, before the 13th century, when it became implicated in the Venetian-Genoese Wars, between the rival Republics of Venice and Genoa. The Republic of Genoa ruled Crimea for two centuries, its rule authorised by the Golden Horde which had fragmented from the Mongol Empire. As the Golden Horde itself began to fragment and dissolve, Tatars who had settled in the region came to power and established the Crimean Khanate in 1441. This Crimean Khanate, ruled by Crimean Tatars, came under Ottoman rule in 1475, but functioned as a protectorate, with significant autonomy from the Ottoman Empire.
The Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 resulted in a decisive victory for Russia. It annexed the area of land which is now southern Ukraine; and while the Crimean Khanate became nominally independent, in reality it came under Russian control and was annexed in 1783. Thus by the late 1700s, all of modern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. The lands of southern Ukraine and Crimea were referred to as Novorossiya (‘New Russia’), and many of the region’s prominent cities were founded at this time: including Sevastopol in 1783, and Simferopol a year later, both in Crimea; and further north-west, on the mainland overlooking the Black Sea, Odessa in 1794.
Odessa grew rapidly, governed in its early years by the Duc de Richelieu, becoming a free port in 1819, and emerging as a truly multinational and multilingual city: Italian was the lingua franca, spoken alongside Russian and French (Binyon, 154). Pushkin, exiled from Saint Petersburg for writing revolutionary epigrams, spent several months in the Caucasus and Crimea in 1820. He joined the company of General Nikolay Raevksy, famous for his feats on Russia’s behalf during the Napoleonic Wars; and Pushkin formed enduring friendships with Raevsky’s sons and daughters. According to D. S. Mirsky, these months, ‘spent in the company of the Rayévskys…were one of the happiest periods of Pushkin’s life. It was from the Rayévskys also that he got his first knowledge of Byron’ (Mirsky, 81). Then, between exiles, Pushkin would spend a year in Odessa from July 1823 until July 1824. The period was particularly fruitful for his work. He had begun writing Eugene Onegin in May, and completed most of the first three chapters, including Tatyana’s letter, in Odessa. Meanwhile, he published the narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray; and Odessa also proved the source for a number of his greatest love lyrics. Personal intrigue and the proclamation of atheism in one of Pushkin’s letters was enough for the authorities to force Pushkin’s departure from Odessa; he spent the next two years at Mikhailovskoe, his family estate near Pskov.
The Crimean War (1853-1856) would come to centre upon Sevastopol, after impacting Odessa along with many of the major Russian and Ottoman cities by the Black Sea. The war may be perceived as a culmination of the Russo-Turkish wars of the previous three centuries. Provisionally, it was the result of a series of political intrigues concerning the status of Christianity in Palestine, which was then controlled by the Ottomans. Ever since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Russia had considered itself the protector of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. The see of Moscow had been accepted as an Orthodox patriarchate in 1589; though rather than taking the traditional place of Rome as the first patriarchate, it was listed fifth, behind the patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. One of the consequences of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 had been the assertion of Russia’s right to protect all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule. Roman Catholic France, during the reign of Napoleon III, sought to alter this state of affairs, and began to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire demanding that it be given power over the Christian peoples and places of Palestine.
After the Ottoman Empire initially upheld the position of Russia, France undertook a show of force, sending the warship Charlemagne to the Black Sea. Cowed by the superior naval capacity of the French, the Ottomans ceded to their demands, allowing France and the Roman Catholic Church authority over Christianity in Palestine, and reverting to Latin an inscription at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, symbolically placing it under French control. Attempts towards a diplomatic resolution made little progress, and the Russian Empire responded by sending soldiers through Moldavia and Wallachia (regions of modern-day Moldova and Romania), and to the Caucasus, which it was in the long process of annexing. (Lermontov was twice exiled as an officer to the Caucasus, and depicted the region in his novel A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, in the middle of the Caucasian War). With both the Russians and the Ottomans also building their fleets in the Black Sea, this first phase of the Crimean War reached a climax with the Battle of Sinop. Sinop, historically called Sinope, was itself the birthplace of important writers, philosophers and theologians: Diogenes of Sinope is noted as the founder of philosophical Cynicism, and his witticisms, bold manners, and frequent quarrels with Plato are amusingly recounted in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers; Aquila of Sinope completed a translation of the Old Testament into Greek, the influence of which was recognised ans assured when Origen included it as part of his Hexapla: and Marcion of Sinope was ultimately declared a heretic for his rejection of the God of the Old Testament, but his writings encouraged the formation of the New Testament biblical canon. The battle which took place in the waters of Sinop in November 1853 saw Russian warships attack an anchored Ottoman patrol force, and come away with a significant victory.
This forced the hand of the French and the British, both of whom desired to prevent the expansion of the Russian Empire into the weakening Ottoman state. In March 1854, both declared war on the Russian Empire. By September, the focus of the war had turned to Crimea, and the allied forces of the French, British and Ottomans laid siege to Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and home to the Russian Empire’s Black Sea Fleet. Battles were fought in nearby towns and ports, and Sevastopol was repeatedly bombarded by the allies; despite the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in March 1855, the Siege of Sevastopol persisted throughout the year, until the Russian forces withdrew the following September.
The fall of Sevastopol meant Russian defeat in the Crimean War. The Treaty of Paris, signed in March 1856, saw the Russian Empire return land to the Ottoman Empire, and relinquish all claims to the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which became independent. France won authority over the Christian peoples of the Holy Land. Crimea – which had been devastated, and seen the departure of much of its population – was restored to Russian control, but the Black Sea was declared a neutral territory, diminishing the Russian Empire as a military force. The failed war effort had also hurt the Empire economically, and the practical and psychological ramifications had far-reaching consequences: they encouraged the Alexander reforms of the 1860s, where Alexander II – Nicholas I’s son and successor – emancipated the serfs, and later reformed the Russian judiciary and military; and they impelled the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, with Russia struggling for funds and fearing they may lose the region without recompense in future military engagement.
Tolstoy had travelled to the Caucasus in 1851, and was motivated to sign up for the Russian army, serving in the same artillery regiment as his brother Nikolay. For two and a half years he participated in the Caucasian War; he was based in modern-day Chechnya. It was during this period that he began in earnest his artistic career: he completed, and saw published in The Contemporary, his first novel Childhood; wrote and published his second novel Boyhood; and in between published his first short story, ‘The Raid’, a realistic portrayal drawing upon his experiences in the region. In 1853, he attempted to resign from the army, but as an officer, his resignation was refused owing to the onset of the Crimean War.
So Tolstoy became an active participant in the Crimean War, serving in Bucharest from March 1854, then in November travelling to Odessa, then on to Sevastopol, where he was to be based for the next year. He began work on Youth, the final novel in his autobiographical trilogy; and wrote three reports on the war, ‘Sevastopol in December’, ‘Sevastopol in May’, and ‘Sevastopol in August’. ‘Sevastopol in December’ was published in June in The Contemporary. While his first two novels had resulted in literary acclaim, this first piece of war reportage brought Tolstoy a wider reputation across Russia. ‘Sevastopol in May’, a harsher, bleaker, and anti-militaristic depiction of the war, was butchered by the censor. The three texts would be published as the Sevastopol Sketches after the war had ended; together, they comprise Tolstoy’s claim to being the first modern war correspondent (an accolade often bestowed upon William Howard Russell, who covered the Crimean War for The Times). The Siege of Sevastopol would provide another first within the realm of Russian art and letters: Defence of Sevastopol was the Russian Empire’s first feature film, premiering at the Livadia Palace in Crimea in October 1911. The Livadia Palace near Yalta, a summer estate of the Russian Emperors from the 1860s, rebuilt by Nicholas II, would host the Yalta Conference towards the close of World War II.
Numerous biographers depict Tolstoy’s year in Sevastopol as decisive for his personal and artistic development. Both Henri Troyat and Rosamund Bartlett cite a diary entry he made in March:
‘Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.‘
Bartlett comments that, ‘In a sense all of Tolstoy’s future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist’. Troyat writes, ‘The whole of Tolstoy’s future doctrine is summed up in these few lines scribbled in his notebook: refusal to submit to Church dogma, return to early Christianity based on the Gospels, simultaneous search for physical well-being and moral-perfection…The time was undoubtedly not yet ripe for a full spiritual flowering. But a slow process of fermentation had begun, deep within this unquiet soul, a subterranean and painful preparation for apostolate…in the state of perpetual mental upheaval which he lived, one idea remained constant: write’.
Tolstoy’s perspective on ‘the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery’ reverberates in the works of Dostoevsky, particularly in the Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamozov. Tolstoy’s religious and ethical views, his Christian anarchism, his pacifism, and his focus on man’s relationship with the land, would also profoundly influence foreign thinkers, including Wittgenstein and James Joyce. Still, other historians view the decisive impact of Sevastopol upon Tolstoy in material rather than spiritual-artistic terms.
Tolstoy remained at this point in his life a fervent gambler and womaniser. Orlando Figes recounts, ‘In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary ‘the loss of everything – the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there’s no point writing – I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence’. Much of Tolstoy’s life can be explained by that game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him’. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana towards the end of May 1856, after several months in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. With the family house sold and dismantled to pay his debts, he lived in one of the remaining wings and, ‘as if to atone for his sordid game of cards, he set about the task of restoring the estate to a model farm’. Tolstoy would continue at Yasnaya Polyana for the remainder of his life, leaving just over a week before his death in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo; he was buried at Yasnaya Polyana, amid thousands of mourners, in a treasured spot of the woods by his home.
The Crimean War had also seen the allied forces lay siege to Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov, in the Rostov region of Russia which borders modern Ukraine. Taganrog withstood the siege by British and French forces between June and August 1855, though it suffered significant damage; consequently, the city was exempted from taxes in 1857. In 1860, Chekhov was born in Taganrog. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1897, he was required to seek warmer climes than those of Moscow or Melikhovo, the estate twenty miles south of Moscow where he had lived since 1892. So at the end of August 1899, Chekhov sold Melikhovo and moved to Yalta, where he had built a villa. East of Sevastopol and overlooking the Black Sea, since the Crimean War Yalta had emerged as the most popular resort within the Russian Empire. Chekhov was not overly fond of Yalta, which he called a ‘hot Siberia…there is nothing here to interest me’; and he bemoaned the tendency of Russian doctors to proscribe time in Crimea for anyone suffering the slightest cough. He would have preferred to return to Taganrog, but the city did not have an adequate water supply. Still, Chekhov lived in Yalta until June 1904 when, his health deteriorating, he travelled to the spa town of Badenweiler in Germany, dying there the following month.
In Yalta – aside from receiving visitors, and spending some time with Tolstoy, who stayed at nearby Gaspra between 1901 and 1902 – Chekhov wrote his two final plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Both were written for the Moscow Art Theatre, who produced them under the direction of Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov wrote the part of Masha in Three Sisters specifically for Olga Knipper, a leading actress with whom Chekhov had corresponded since she appeared in The Seagull in 1896. The pair would marry in May 1901. Also in Yalta, Chekhov wrote some of his greatest short stories, including ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The latter begins in Yalta: a middle-aged man and a young woman, both married but visiting alone, meet there and become lovers. They return to their different lives, but eventually begin meeting secretly in Moscow. They talk to each other, they feel that they are in love, and the story ends:
‘And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.‘
Nabokov described Chekhov’s story: ‘All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written’.
Nabokov’s father would be a key figure during the next tumultuous period in Crimea’s history, as the Russian Empire succumbed to revolution and civil war. The February Revolution of 1917, centred on Saint Petersburg – which had been rechristened Petrograd during World War I, an attempt to remove all vestiges of German from the name – and in fact emerging out of protests to mark International Women’s Day, resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II, who had lost popular, political, and military support. He named the Grand Duke Michael, his brother, as his successor, but the political situation was not conducive for any succession, and Michael declined to accept until the formation of an elected Constituent Assembly, which could approve his role. It was Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, who wrote Michael’s abdication letter; and in the Provisional Government which formed under Alexander Kerensky in the absence of a ruler, Vladimir Dmitrievich served as secretary.
Kerensky’s government was progressive, but struggled to assert a new political structure. It made numerous missteps of its own; angered the populace by refusing to withdraw from the war; and suffered fierce opposition, from the Petrograd Soviet within the capital, and from the Bolsheviks further afield. It fell in the October Revolution of 1917 which saw the Bolsheviks seize power. Vladimir Dmitrievich would later write an important memoir of this period, entitled The Provisional Government. More immediately, Nabokov’s family were forced to hurry from Petersburg, and they moved to Crimea. Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, summarises the political climate:
‘Three main political currents swirled around the Crimea late in 1917: the Socialist Revolutionary influence dominant in the countryside and in the local zemstvos; the nationalism of the Tatars, one-third of the population, who during the power vacuum of 1917 had set up their own parliament to administer Tatar affairs; and the anarchism of the sailors and soldiers in the port cities, especially Sebastapol, headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. While most of the unruly sailors at Sebastapol felt themselves full of revolutionary spirit, they had little inclination to Bolshevism until heavily armed Baltic sailors were dispatched from Petrograd late in the year. A takeover of the Sebastapol Soviet in December gave Bolsheviks power in the city and set in motion the first of the region’s massacres (more than a hundred officers killed). Elsewhere the Crimea was calm, with Tatar military detachments holding the area around Simferopol.‘
It was these Tatars, making up around a third of the population in late 1917, and setting up their own government – the Crimean People’s Republic, which lasted for only one month between December 1917 and January 1918, but may be considered an attempt to form the first secular Muslim state – who would be forcibly deported from the region during World War II. The Soviet Union under Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis, and the population of 200,000 were deported, the vast majority to the Uzbek SSR. It is thought that 46% of these people died during deportation. The Tatars only began returning to Crimea during the 1980s; today, they comprise around 250,000 of the region’s population of just over two million.
Staying at Gaspra, the Nabokov family initially sought to stay out of current affairs, Vladimir Dmitrievich’s political past making him vulnerable to arrest or worse. As the Russian Civil War progressed and the Bolsheviks endeavoured to assert themselves in Crimea, World War I continued, German troops advanced and, in late April 1918, occupied the region. This was a welcome relief for much of the populace, a respite from the tension and potential bloodshed of the Bolsheviks clashing with their opponents. Crimea became a relative stronghold of the opposition, and authority in the region would pass between the Bolsheviks and their opponents over the next few years.
When the Germans withdrew from Crimea and the puppet government they had installed fell in November 1918, the Crimean Regional Government formed under Solomon Krym. This Crimean Regional Government was opposed to the Bolsheviks, but was not closely allied to the White Army, drawing its members from both socialists and non-socialists, and concerned with the specifics of the local situation. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov became the government’s minister of justice, and served until April 1919 when, weakened by its differences with the White Army, the Bolsheviks again seized power. Nabokov’s family were again forced to depart, and they eventually made their way, through Greece, to England, where Nabokov would study at Cambridge. Crimea would become the site of the last stand of the White Army: the defeat of the White Army, under the command of General Wrangel, in November 1920 effectively marked the end of the Russian Civil War. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed a year later, and converted to the Crimean Oblast, fully part of Soviet Russia, in 1945. Nabokov’s father Vladimir Dmitrievich died in Berlin in March 1922, shot in the process of defending one of his liberal political rivals from far-right gunmen.
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For the political overview of this piece, I have used a variety of news sources – including Reuters, the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Slate, and RT; online encyclopedias, notably Wikepedia; and each of the books listed below.
A selection of sources:
The BBC’s timeline of the Ukrainian crisis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26248275
A depiction of the role of the far-right in the protest movement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26468720
A New York Times piece on the fall of Yanukovych: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/world/europe/as-his-fortunes-fell-in-ukraine-a-president-clung-to-illusions.html
RT’s response to the interim Ukrainian government’s cancellation of the minority languages law: http://rt.com/news/minority-language-law-ukraine-035/
‘Facts you may not know about Crimea’: http://rt.com/news/russian-troops-crimea-ukraine-816/
On the arrest of Keystone pipeline protesters in Washington: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/03/us-usa-keystone-protest-idUSBREA210RI20140303
A study suggesting that chemical weapons used in Syria could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/15/214656/new-analysis-of-rocket-used-in.html
An opposing perspective: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/06/sarin-gas-attack-civilians-syria-government-un
Literature:
Rosamund Bartlett Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (Free Press, 2005)
Rosamund Bartlett Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile Books, 2010)
T. J. Binyon Pushkin: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2002)
Brian Boyd Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Vintage, 1993)
Anton Chekhov Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (trans. R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky) (Modern Library, 2000)
R. F. Christian (ed.) Tolstoy’s Diaries (London: Flamingo, 1994)
Norman Davies Europe: A History (Pimlico, 1997)
Orlando Figes Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin, 2003)
D. S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)
Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature (Harcourt, 1981)
Henri Troyat Tolstoy (Penguin, 1980)
These are some of the thoughts I have had, and some of the connections I have made, regarding the attack in Woolwich on Wednesday, in which a man died after being attacked with a machete. Two suspects remain in hospital after a confrontation with the police. My considerations relate more to the reporting of the attack than to the nature of the attack itself; mine is really an attempt to analyse and philosophise the aims and the rhetoric of the reporting.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This epigram – from the French ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, authored by the critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr – may encapsulate war and warmongering in general, which often seems the continual search for a common enemy, and which has only increased in scope and persistence in the age of the nation state. Yet its play upon the concept of time gives it particular pertinence for me here, and when it comes to terrorist attacks and the War on Terrorism.
The attack in Woolwich was quickly depicted as a terrorist attack; and quickly conceived as demonstrating a new type of terrorist activity in the United Kingdom, owing to its up-close nature and the bold and bloody use of a machete. Keith Vaz, the Home Affairs Select Committee Chairman, called the attack ‘totally unprecedented’; defence experts described it as a ‘departure’ from previous attacks, marking ‘a new round of terror threats in this country’. At the same time, in David Cameron’s press conference upon the attack – given in Paris, alongside François Hollande, whom the Prime Minister was visiting for a scheduled meeting – he stated ‘We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country’, before concluding, ‘and we never buckle in the face of them’.
Thus the Woolwich attack has been portrayed as both new and not-new, something appearing for the first time and something in a process of recurring. Involved here is a sort of emptying out of time which calls to mind Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity. For Giddens (the theoretical architect of the ‘Third Way’ in politics), a phenomenon of modern life is ‘time-space distanciation’, whereby time and subsequently space are made ’empty’ in that they are made distinct from any grounding contexts: with the mechanical clock and the standardised calendar, we can know the time without reference to nature and our specific locale; and with such developments as the telephone and improvements in travel (and now again with the internet), we can interact with people without being physically with them, and increasingly conceive the world in a way unlimited by what we see immediately around us.
Time-space distanciation ‘connects presence and absence’; it relates closely to ‘disembedding’, which Giddens defines as ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space’. In short, disembedded social relations are those no longer embedded in local contexts. Giddens relates two types of disembedding mechanisms: symbolic tokens – for instance, money – which are accepted as possessing value regardless of when they are used and by whom; and expert systems, where – lacking the requisite knowledge ourselves – we rely on the expertise of professionals. Giddens elaborates how the faith we place in expert systems relates to and becomes trust.
As disembedding allows us to operate without the restrictions that were once imposed by time and space, it offers us much in the way of opportunities. More, disembedding is crucial to our functioning in an increasingly complex world – our trust allows us to accept things and practices as real, even if we lack knowledge of their structure, development and coherence. Yet disembedding comes also with dangers, one of which is the acceptance of expert systems which are not expert, but contain flaws or deceits.
When it is stated that the Woolwich attack is both something new and emerging and at the same time something old and persisting, we lose our sense of the specific interaction and the contexts from which it actually emerged. The endeavour is to make us lose our grounding, and to increase our fear: an ambiguous and perverse fear that something will inevitably happen at any moment. This sort of rhetoric is typical in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and typical of the war on terrorism: there is frequent talk of phases and new stages, with speculation regarding repeat attacks, copycats, and the spiralling of incidents which may prove not to be one-offs. In the process we are encouraged to give ourselves over to expert systems, in this case to politicians and defence experts. One of these, Jonathan Shaw – former head of counter-terrorism and head of cyber security at the Ministry of Defence until last year – has written a piece for the Evening Standard advocating that the intelligence services be allowed to monitor the public’s internet activities; promulgating the ‘snooper’s charter’ which Home Secretary Theresa May is reportedly keen to revive.
Vague and unhelpful definitions and categorisations.
With the vacuum which is a product of a lack of concrete information, distanciated from the individual occurrence by the leading rhetoric of the media and politicians, meta-narratives and broad categorisations move in. In the case of Woolwich, as in the case of many of the attacks which come to be considered terrorist, these categorisations are twofold. Firstly, the attack is categorised as a terrorist attack. This is understandable with regard to Woolwich, given the recorded public pronouncements made by the two suspects; that they were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and making political statements (‘This British soldier is an eye for an eye…Remove your government’) led government sources to describe the attack as terrorist within ninety minutes of its first report.
Still, what defines a terrorist attack seems somewhat open to interpretation. A simple definition would suggest that it is any attack which is meant to provoke terror, and which carries a political motive. Yet there is no internationally accepted legal definition of what constitutes terrorism: attempts to arrive at a consensus have faltered upon differences of opinion regarding which political motives should be included in a criminal law definition, and which political motives – for instance, motives of self-determination – should not.
The second problem of categorisation is an extension of the first, and it is that where acts are categorised as terrorist, they tend also to be categorised as belonging to a particular terrorist group or organisation. In the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack, by late Wednesday evening, even supposedly liberal news sources were proclaiming the perpetrators’ association with al-Qaeda. The Guardian based their connecting of the organisation tenuously on one suspect’s reference to ‘our land’, calling the attack ‘the first al-Qaida inspired attack to claim a life on British soil’ since 7 July, 2005, and terming the suspect’s claims ‘jihadist’. The BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent wrote a piece balanced in so far as it distinguished between jihadists, political Islamists, and Muslims, and sought to interpret the typical justification for jihadist attacks; yet the concept of the piece was similarly based on an unestablished connection with al-Qaeda, the piece stating that the ‘long-feared attack’ may be rooted to ‘the heart of al-Qaeda’s violent ideology’.
It has since emerged that one of the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo, attended meetings of the Al-Muhajiroun organisation from around 2003, though the extent of his involvement with the group remains uncertain. Al-Muhajiroun claims to be a purely political organisation, focused on promoting Islam and declaiming the state of Israel; but it has links to several people convicted of terrorist activities. The organisation was banned by the National Union of Students in 2001, for disseminating hate literature; and was banned by the government from the UK in 2005. Hours ago, a friend of Adebolajo’s, Abu Nusaybah, alleged during an interview for Newsnight that Adebolajo was approached six months ago to work for MI5, but declined; Nusaybah was arrested on BBC premises shortly after making the allegations.
Other problematic terms, and parallels in Boston.
There are other problematic terms. Referring to suspects as having been ‘radicalised’ takes away their agency and dehumanises them: the phrase evokes Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of ‘machine men with machine minds’, which is evocative and interesting psychologically, but which is neither clear nor balanced news reporting. It is not a rhetoric otherwise used by media outlets; ‘radicalised’ would not be used even for those political leaders who some outlets accuse of leading their countries into illegal Middle Eastern wars. The UK terrorism threat levels are also vague, with the raising of threat levels inciting fear and substituting for substantive information.
There are clear parallels and extensions to be found in the recent Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. The decision to charge the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with use of a weapon of mass destruction is far from straightforward. A weapon of mass destruction originally referred to a chemical weapon, but now the term has no internationally authoritative definition; to be charged with the use of such can subsume an indiscriminate mixture of more specific offences. Theoretically, the phrase arguably implies a level of indiscriminate destruction greater than that carried out in Boston. Again, the term appears more politically than technically descriptive.
Where broad categorisations are so readily made, so condemnation tends to be broad and absolute. That such an attack is inexcusable and ultimately cannot be justified may be so, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t be better understood; it may surpass the sense many have of what is moral, but there remains a logic which impels such attacks and which cannot be dismissed in the face of the actions of Western states, who have engaged for much of the period since the Second World War in global programmes of regime change, arms dealings, and military action.
Finally Social Media to the Fore!
The Woolwich attack is remarkable in that the two suspects remained on the scene of the crime; with Adebolajo readily, and even casually, with a London accent, being recorded on phone camera by a witness as he made his politicised remarks. Another video has surfaced showing the two men charging towards police officers when these arrived, which resulted in the suspects being shot and detained. That the suspects remained in place and spoke so freely to witnesses meant that information about the attack, and its declared motives, rapidly spread across social media.
Both the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, initially responded to the attack via Twitter: Cameron tweeting ‘The killing in #Woolwich is truly shocking – I have asked the Home Secretary to chair a COBRA meeting’; Miliband tweeting ‘Shocked by appalling events in Woolwich. Whole country will be horrified by what has happened’. Later into the evening, the English Defence League gained a significant number of Twitter followers as they attempted to utilise social media to arrange a series of protests.
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Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, 2010)
culturedallroundman 