Inside The Sausage Factory.

The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao.

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Last week, I made a passing comment about the amateurish and disorganised nature of the international campaign to try to bring an end to the slaughter in Gaza, comparing it with what a competently organised campaign might look like. Slightly to my surprise—since I thought I was stating a self-evident truth—this annoyed a few people, here and on other sites. But then I reflected that the episode actually illustrates a wider, fundamental problem, which is the difference between the reality of how the political sausage is actually made, and the assumptions and expectations of those who seek to understand or even influence things from outside the factory. So I thought this might be a good moment to put on our protective gear and our masks, and venture inside the factory and see how things are generally done.

It is obvious that under some circumstances outsiders can and do influence the way the political sausage is made, but the first thing to understand is that this influence doesn’t necessarily flow from the strength of any arguments, let alone the intensity with which outsiders hold their opinions. In my experience, just as much with causes I am sympathetic to as with causes I disapprove of, this is the biggest single intellectual obstacle faced by outside campaigners with strong moral views. The more strongly they hold these views, the more difficult it is for them to imagine that there are others who genuinely don’t hold these same views, and perhaps have opposite views as strong as theirs: it is fatally easy to imagine that moral fervour alone can carry all before it. I’ve come across a number of NGOists who seem genuinely puzzled that when they instruct their government on how to behave, from their assumed position of moral superiority, the government doesn’t immediately obey. But that’s not the way sausages are made, nor (to use perhaps a more precise metaphor) the way that ingredients are chosen.

The first and most important criterion for successfully influencing the recipe is competence: neither money nor political bluster in themselves can substitute for that. And a group of people outside a shopping centre waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Free Palestine, whatever that means exactly,” doesn’t strike me as very competent or effective if the purpose is to help the population of Gaza. If the purpose is to feel good about yourself, and symbolically involve yourself in the sufferings of Gaza, of course, that’s a different issue. But in fact there are examples of well-planned, well-coordinated outside political campaigns available, which had a measurable effect on the development of some international crises. Let’s look at a couple of classic ones.

In 1992, after the outbreak of fighting in Bosnia, the Muslim government in Sarajevo, lavishly financed by the Gulf States, turned to US public relations companies to try to further what was always its main objective: getting the US into the war on its side. Although they did not quite succeed in doing this, they did greatly influence the US media, and the NGOs close to the Clinton campaign, and this in turn had a big influence on actual US policy under Clinton. Identifying their key audience (the media, NGOs and university students) they set out to discover what sort of atrocity stories would most mobilise that audience. What people still think of as the reality of the Bosnian war (genocide, mass rape etc) was based on stories that were constructed, fed to and uncritically retailed by a complaisant and cooperative US media. All it took was money and organisation. A similar example fifteen years later was the Darfur Solidarity Campaign, whose only objective was to get the US government to intervene militarily in Darfur. Lavishly funded and with branches in every main US university, its only questionable characteristic (pointed out by Mahmood Mamdani—yes, Zoran’s dad) was that literally none of the money went to help the Fur people: all of it was spent on lobbying in the US. And of course in both cases the relationship with the reality of the situation on the ground was, let’s say, ambiguous.

I’ve had this kind of conversation several times with the community that cares deeply about such issues, and it always goes the same way. “If you want to succeed, you need organisation, discipline and a willingness to land a few illegal punches.” “But we are morally in the right. We don’t stoop to such tactics.” “Well, then the other side will. How serious are you about winning?” In the end, the answer tends to be “not very,” insofar as winning almost always involves moral compromises. I don’t want to be unfairly critical of NGOs and similar groups here, since we’re dealing with a basic component of human nature after all, but it is true that, compared to working for a government, let alone a public-relations company, you are more likely to want to think well of yourself if you work for a humanitarian NGO. or a political lobby group. Indeed, more even than governments, such organisations tend to get pulled towards purely performative campaigns and activities that look good, and unlike governments, they find it hard to preserve a sceptical detachment.

On this point, I recall one conversation with a worker from a large humanitarian NGO many years ago, where we were discussing the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in Africa, mostly left over from massive Soviet and Chinese deliveries during the Cold War. I agreed that it was a problem: I had seen some of the effects on the ground. Well, she said, that’s too big a problem and we can’t do anything about it. But we can campaign to end arms exports from the UK instead. Did she know what was the largest market for UK defence equipment, I asked? No. Well it was, and I think still is, the United States. But that’s not the point: the point is to find a magical, symbolic substitute for the problem which cannot be solved, and mount a performative campaign around it. There’s a very close analogy with the 1997 Ottawa Convention to ban land mines. In those days, there were a very large number of such mines, mostly in Africa and again kindly donated by the Soviet Union and China. Some areas were impassable, and life was difficult and dangerous for local populations, the more so since there were few if any reliable maps. What was needed was a long-term, well-funded campaign to train locals in safe mine disposal techniques. But this was an area for technical specialists, and at least a decade of unglamorous and dangerous efforts would be needed. You can’t mount a PR campaign about that, so why not press for a ban on new production of landmines instead? This was easy to do, because mines are the quintessential Poor Man’s weapon (as Afghanistan was soon to show) so western states happily pushed for the Treaty. Problem solved. And then a couple of years later, stories started appearing on the nascent Internet complaining that, in spite of the Treaty, people were still being killed and injured in Africa by landmines. What did they think was going to happen, I wondered? Did they think that the Treaty would cause mines buried in the soil in Africa to spontaneously destroy themselves out of shame? I’m still not sure, all these years later.

But let’s assume for the rest of this essay that people have genuine objectives to which they are genuinely committed, and want somehow to influence the sausage-making process. But to do that you have to understand it. The first thing to realise is that what you read, or study, about government and political decision-making is at best a necessary abstraction, and at worst a fairy story. Now I don’t intend by that to encourage the equally fantastical accounts of secret cabals and world governments that have been popular for centuries now, but rather to argue, if you like, that the Tao of government that can be described is not the real Tao, and indeed never can be. Political Scientists and Constitutional Lawyers publish books and give lectures about formal structures and processes. These structures and processes do indeed exist, but they exist at the level of form, without reference to content. Thus, laws may be described as originating in government, being debated in public, being introduced in a lower Chamber, discussed, voted upon, agreed, sent to an upper chamber, amended, passed back, further debated, resubmitted to the upper chamber, agreed, passed to a Constitutional Court for validation, and then signed into law by a Head of State. Fine, but what does that tell us? Nothing really, except about the formal processes and structures. It doesn’t tell us why laws or initiatives are introduced in the first place, why they may be supported or opposed, why governments place more or less emphasis on certain laws and initiatives, why and how they may be modified or why they may even be withdrawn. Nor does such a structure say anything about the political system: much of the above is applicable to the system of the old Soviet Union, where its Parliament did occasionally manage to modify proposed legislation.

You will also have read about the famous Separation of Powers between Executive, Legislature and Judiciary. Again, these institutions and functions exist, but these days power is very often integrated rather than separated. To begin with, in what is known as the Westminster model of government, where the largest party or coalition forms the government, it is precisely because the Executive controls Parliament that it is able to constitute itself as the Executive. In France today, where the system is similar but not identical, the Executive has lost control of Parliament, and is having to try to survive on a day-to-day basis. And for that matter, the textbooks of Constitutional Law written under the Fifth Republic are now shown to contain a whole series of conventional judgements about how the system is supposed to work that look a bit shaky. It turns out, for example, that the powers of the President are largely a matter of custom: and that what the Constitution says isn’t very clear, to put it mildly.

Even then, the personnel of the alleged three branches of government, not to mention the local and national bureaucracy, the security forces and others, generally tend to know each other, come from much the same background, and may even be related by family or marriage. This is the nomenklatura I discussed recently. And the boundaries between alleged “separate” powers are becoming more permeable all the time. A good example is the increasing political influence of the judiciary, both national and European. Much legislation involving issues like human rights is being used by campaigners in ways it was never intended, to deal with subjects that had not been thought of at the time. Judges are thus playing a political rule in telling Parliaments what laws they may or may not pass, based ultimately on their own personal opinions. This is particularly the case with the European Court of Human Rights, whose cavalier treatment of national Parliaments is raising hackles in many countries, not just the UK, and produces unpredictable, and often incomprehensible decisions. So the various departments of the Sausage Factory don’t seem to be working the way the organisation chart says they should, and it turns out that Quality Control and Marketing are actually married to each other.

So the best that can really be done is a level of understanding equivalent to a Sausage Factory seen from the outside. Lorries arrive bearing dead pigs. Lorries depart bearing prepared sausages, workers are seen entering and leaving, it is known that pigs are raised and slaughtered elsewhere, and it is observably the case that sausages are sold in shops. Occasionally, small teams of visitors may be allowed in, usually with some kind of hygiene or health and safety function. On odd occasions the factory may be unaccountably closed. Reports may even be published. But of the actual making of sausages, much is speculated but little is actually known for sure. Occasionally, recipes purporting to come from the factory appear, and are analysed by excitable food journalists. But for the most part, those who know do not speak, and those who speak do not know.

Government is like that to some extent, with the proviso that the Tao of government decision-making is anything but a simple and linear process. But it does follow its own logic that we have discussed a number of time before: the logic of forces acting on bodies, the logic of actors, objectives, resources and relative success and failure. In most cases, this logic is structurally driven, which is to say that the merits of the argument itself tend to be secondary to the political issues surrounding it. A classic example is Brexit, where at all stages from the decision to hold a referendum to the last moments of negotiation, the underlying issue of the value to Britain of being in Europe received little if any attention from the government. The promise to hold a referendum was a sop, ironically, to the vocal minority in Britain who did actually feel strongly about the subject. So hold a referendum, win it (as had happened in 1975 after all) and the subject would go away. But the government, uninterested in the subject as such, put little effort into the Remain campaign, other than to try to bully and intimidate the voters into doing the Right Thing. The inevitable defeat could have been handled very differently if any Conservative leader had actually thought about the merits of the case, and the interests of the nation, but that was not to be. David Cameron resigned to avoid taking responsibility for his disastrous series of decisions. At that point, any reasonable government would have thought just a bit about the national interest, played for time, and engaged with European partners. But Theresa May decided to make a mad dash for the Exit for reasons that were narrowly personal and political, only to fall at the second-last fence and be taken off to be rendered down, and replaced by Boris Johnson, about who… no I can’t bear to go into that. From first to last, the overwhelming priority of the Conservative Party, all it talked about internally and the overwhelming influence on its negotiation choices, if you can call them that, was its own political survival. Indeed, from the point of view of the national interest, or even mundane logic, many of the decisions it took were absolutely extraordinary.

That is a well-known agony played out in semi-public, which gave a startlingly crude, almost caricatural example of how political decisions are often taken. But the same things happen daily, when what are essentially procedural issues take priority over any questions of principle or even fact. Often, day-to-day decisions are taken because of some temporary balance of political advantage within or between parties, which may look different next year. (The same often applies at the international level, as we’ll see.) And many decisions are taken by default or just take themselves, because nobody can summon up the energy to oppose them in an organised fashion. And in many other cases, where issues of principle do arise, they are completely different from those used as a public defence, and often have no connection with any public “debate” there might be.

A good example of the sausage recipe being prepared according to rules never acknowledged in public would be the decision taken in the 1980s to replace the Polaris nuclear system on British nuclear missile submarines with the Trident. I’ll discuss it as an example because I was around at the time, although not directly involved. Now nuclear doctrine for any nuclear power, whether declared or not, largely consists of things you can’t say, or don’t want to be precise about, and Britain was no different. The British had been involved in nuclear weapons development from the start, and clung to an independent nuclear capability—at some considerable cost—as part of retaining Greatish Power status with the demise of the Empire. The list of unacknowledged reasons for the decision is long, and not necessarily internally coherent. After the 1962 “Skybolt Crisis,” there was little alternative but to buy the US Polaris system, and by the time its replacement came due, the choice of Trident (compared with the astronomical costs and uncertainties of trying to develop and produce a missile body nationally) pretty much imposed itself. Instead, the British invested heavily in upgrading their warheads, guidance system and national command and firing chain. But why remain a nuclear power? To understand this we have to forget about war-fighting and sabre-rattling, and put on a different pair of glasses.

To begin with, inertia is always easier than change. To give up nuclear weapons would have been to demote oneself voluntarily to Division II of world powers, along with Germany and Canada, and probably to surrender the UK’s permanent seat in the Security Council. It would be to concede primacy on European defence issues to France, and to lose a great deal of influence with the US, as well as also losing a great deal of influence in anything to do with nuclear arms control, non-proliferation or disarmament negotiations. And for what, exactly? It would have been an act of political self-mutilation.

Of course, there were many positive reasons as well, some contradictory, which is the nature of politics, after all. The British had dug themselves, in traditional fashion, into a position of quiet but real influence with the US on nuclear issues, and made themselves a privileged interlocutor: the only one outside the US, and, for many parts of the US government an easier interlocutor than some of its other parts. British nuclear weapons diluted the influence of the US in the Nuclear Planning Group, and in discussions of nuclear issues generally, which was something many European nations welcomed. The French were on the whole supportive: it made the UK more of a competitor, but it also took the spotlight somewhat off their own nuclear status, and made their own P5 position easier to defend. They also saw Trident as a potential component of a European independent nuclear force (in practice Franco-British) some way down the line, and indeed a spur to bilateral military cooperation generally. Conversely, many European nations would have been unhappy if France had been the only nuclear power in Europe, and saw the British as a useful balancing factor. For its part, the US also found it helpful not to be singled out as the only nuclear power in the Integrated Military Structure. And of course there was the atavistic fear of being left alone again as in 1940: the British were no more confident than any other nation that the US would actually side with Europe in a crisis with the Soviet Union when it came to the crunch, whatever the Washington Treaty said.

This, of course is only the tip of the iceberg, and there were many other positive and negative arguments in favour of staying a nuclear power: there were effectively none against, other than internal budgetary ones. But by definition few of these arguments could actually be made publicly, and it’s interesting that virtually none of them had anything to do with published nuclear doctrines, or with the luxuriant academic literature on deterrence and escalation theory that proliferated at the time. People like poor Bernard Brodie might as well have been living in a parallel universe. But it’s also true that, whilst there was a very active (or at least noisy) public “debate” during the 1980s, there was little engagement on the kind of issues that were actually important, and which did figure in the open strategic literature. There were a few sceptics who argued against Trident on economic or political grounds, but the opposition in general came from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its satellites, whose approach eschewed practical arguments altogether, and emphasised moral condemnation, and the pre-emptive demand that the government should do what they were told. Yet for all their blazing moral fervour, CND were unable to understand that they represented a minority of public opinion (never more than a third), and that their moral certainty did not automatically entitle them to any special political status. This collision of approaches—the severely practical, even sordid, versus the apocalyptically moralising—inevitably produced nothing at all. Indeed, in my observation at least, CND were not interested in how the sausage of nuclear policy was made and consumed, and took no steps to inform themselves. Some, certainly, believed that the Trident missiles were liquid-fuelled, that they were stored inside the boats with warheads attached, and that a single slip could cause an atomic explosion that would destroy half of Scotland. None of this was actually true, but then that wasn’t the point.

I’ve dwelt on this episode partly because I was there, but mainly because it shows in a very pure, almost caricatural, form, the difference between assumptions about how decisions are made and influenced in government as seen from the inside, compared with the outside. A comparable modern example is obviously Ukraine, where policy staggers on from defeat to defeat simply because there are so many internal factors that making going back impossible, even if few of them can be publicly discussed. Indeed, Ukraine is a good example of my observation that decisions often ultimately take themselves: in Ukraine as with many similar disastrous errors, it’s impossible to say exactly when a given major “decision” was actually taken. This is why historians write such long and complex books on the “origins” of wars, and whether they were inevitable. What tends to happen in practice is that crises proceed with agonising slowness through innumerable trivial decisions: this meeting, that bilateral, this communiqué, that decision, this policy paper…. and at a certain point people like me look up from their desks and stare at each other, asking “how the **** did we get here?” A European government official who fell asleep in 2017, and awoke five years later after the start of the Ukraine war would almost certainly feel the same way once he or she had recovered from the shock. In reality, only historians stand even a chance of presenting that in a comprehensible format, and only long afterwards. And only historians, perhaps, can ever really hope to disentangle the mess of factors that in practice always make going forward an easier short-term decision than going back, even when going back is obviously the right thing to do.

The fact that unforced, maturely reflected and deliberate “decisions” are rare in politics is one of the key things to understand. Oh, decisions may be formally taken and recorded, but in many cases that is the least important stage of the process. Politicians write memoirs largely to try to persuade their publics that the decisions they were forced to make or couldn’t escape were in fact the product of careful thought and much debate, but only the hopelessly naive believe that that happens very often And in any case, there is almost never any time to stop and think about major decisions. Whilst at the macro level events in a major crisis may seem to move slowly and deliberately, at the tactical level everything is a blur of activity, one micro-decision piled on top of the next, until it’s sometimes hard to remember what the original problem actually was. The question, Should we even be doing this? is never actually posed because there isn’t time. It’s always, What shall we say at tomorrow’s meeting, or The NATO Secretary General is calling in an hour: what do we want to ask him? The failure to understand this simple point accounts for the naivety of much commentary on current (and for that matter immediately past) crises, and the incessant efforts to find satisfying “decisions” and “plans.” After all, human beings will go to the most enormous and elaborate lengths to try to impose patterns on major events because no fear is deeper than the fear of chaos. As the distinguished Scientific Intelligence expert of World War II, Professor RV Jones, famously said of his experience in wartime government:

“No set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated.”

Or if you prefer, it’s more comforting to wield Occam’s Food Blender than Occam’s Razor. With enough effort, you can always get a result, even if it’s an unattractive sludge.

Even in Jones’s day, there was already a tendency for decision-makers to become overwhelmed with information. And modern technology hasn’t helped. Thirty years ago, communication between capitals and overseas representations was limited to encrypted telegrams, faxes and letters sent by diplomatic bags. These days, decision-makers in western capitals will be harassed by hourly emails from around the world, and may spend half their days in video calls with Embassies and other capitals, going endlessly and pointlessly over the same subjects, without getting anywhere.

But this is only an extreme case of the way in which political decisions are most often taken, in times of peace just as much as in times of crisis. In politics, even the simplest thing is potentially complicated, because most things are connected with most other things, and decisions made in one area will have (perhaps unforeseeable) consequences elsewhere. The problem is that few of these connections are systematic, and many contain contradictions. Attempts to find overall patterns in politics, therefore, are doomed to failure because the connections between different subjects may mean different things to different actors, and are anyway not reducible to patterns of dominance and submission, or even necessarily influence. The result is that very often, governments will decide things according to priorities that involve secondary rather than direct consequences, and the result may seem inexplicable at first sight.

So quite frequently, governments will decide to drop an initiative on a relatively unimportant subject because the level of public opposition is such that it’s just not worth devoting the time and effort to defending it. Now notice that this doesn’t mean that the majority of the public is against, it just means that the balance of forces is such that it’s less work, and less effort, which will have to be diverted from other things, to let the subject go. It is therefore very much a question of priorities, and many routine issues are handled in tis way. At completely the other end of the scale, British participation in the Second Iraq War was a massively important priority for the government of the day, and public opposition, albeit quite extensive, didn’t qualify as one of the deciding factors.

The same applies, finally, to relations between states, which are at the best of times highly complex, always multi-dimensional and often trail historical baggage with them. Most states will go along with most initiatives of states they have good relations with, most of the time. Anything else would waste effort, create problems and invite reprisals. So if your neighbour, the current chair of your regional organisation, is especially keen on an initiative, you’ll probably go along with it, even if it’s of no interest to you, or if you have some actual reservations. There’s little point in gratuitous opposition: after all, you may be the chair next year, and may have an initiative you want to push. You can see the same dynamic in documents produced after important meetings of international groupings, where great efforts are made to disguise differences, and paper over different interpretations. And as I often tell people, it’s always interesting to see what a document doesn’t contain, since often subjects that are too controversial between partners are quite often dropped, to avoid problems and preserve harmony.

The last generation has seen a general homogenisation of the ruling class and its parasites which have only reinforced all these tendencies. This is most noticeable in Europe, where initiatives like the ERASMUS scheme have brought future elites to study together at an impressionable age. Twenty years later, after a passage through European institutions, after a thorough immersion in neoliberal certainties, often marrying each other, often with social circles consisting exclusively of like-minded people, reading and watching the same media in several languages, such people begin to accede to positions of power. Whilst it would be unfair to call them clones, the fact is they share a body of assumptions about the world, and a series of unquestioned norms, which not only make them internally very homogeneous, but also separate them from the wider assumptions and norms of the societies they govern. In such a context, their arguments and debates are internal and personal, and often on points of detail: public opinion does not count. Their status within the wider group is established by competition with each other, not by generating public support, which is anyway to be distrusted. So there was never any need for anyone to put “pressure” on European leaders over Ukraine: they were all of the same mind anyway, and what mattered was what their peers in other countries thought, not the opinions, or even interests, of their populations. And like bright students at some international higher education institution, they were always trying to go one better on each other and impress the teachers with ever-more radical proposals: send troops to Ukraine, bring back conscription, try to break up Russia. These ideas don’t have to make sense, because they are simply part of the endless competition for status and prestige among the new elites.

Europe is an extreme case, but regional specialists can recount the hidden structures of politics that typify different parts of the world. In West Africa, for example, clan, family and business linkages stretch across artificial post-colonial boundaries, and bring surprising combinations of people together. And at the most general and basic level, we need to abandon once and for all naive Realist paradigms of endless international conflict and struggles for dominance. As I have pointed out repeatedly, nations and their governments cooperate much more frequently than they oppose each other: if that were not so, nothing would ever get done. And amazingly enough, nations often genuinely agree with each other, or at least see themselves as having common interests.in particular initiatives.

Nor is it true, finally, that big nations simply push small nations around: as I’ve pointed out many times, manipulating large nations is an art-form in many parts of the world. But in any event, not all relations have to be ones of dominance. Here’s an imaginary example. Let’s imagine the government of a littoral state in Africa with a large natural harbour, approached by the US to sign an MoU to enable their ships to visit from time to time, and to establish a small permanent shore presence. The government thinks about the issue. It will be a political status symbol in the region, the Embassy will probably be upgraded, there will be financial benefits and jobs, and there will be frequent US visitors. Careful negotiation of the MoU can probably bring other benefits: let’s say we propose it comes up for re-negotiation every two years. Almost certainly the US presence can be leveraged for free training and some surplus naval equipment, as well as a possible intelligence relationship. And the US personnel are useful human shields in the event of foreign attack or domestic conflict. With a bit of luck, this will make the Chinese take an interest in the country as well. The downside, of course is ships’ companies arriving several times a year for a run ashore and doing what ships’ companies habitually do. So we’ll make sure the MoU covers compensation and similar subjects. And so on: just another day in the sausage factory.

In the end, the message to take away is essentially that the process by which governments decide to do things, or often have decisions forced upon them by circumstances, is a lot more complex, a lot more complicated and a lot less rational than you might think from observing the Sausage Factory from a distance. But this judgement needs to be tempered. First, political decision-making is not random: if it doesn’t exactly follow rules, it does follow observable tendencies, and with experience it’s often possible to work out what is probably going on under the surface. Second, the formal aspects of politics and government have their importance, and we mustn’t fall into the trap of dismissing them just as pure theatre, or some kind of cynical facade. Indeed, if you’ve ever spent time backstage in a theatre you’ll appreciate the analogy between what the audience see, and the controlled chaos that goes on behind.

But one of the tendencies we can identify is that moral fervour counts for little unless it is allied to clear objectives and an organised and disciplined approach, and unless what is being asked is within the government’s power to give, which it often isn’t. Part of this disciplined approach is to make yourself thoroughly familiar with the question: nothing is easier to bat away than simple speculation or ill-informed assertions. Another part is to be very clear and precise about what you are asking, or asking for. A generic jeremiad against western policy towards Gaza, for example, will evoke a generic cut-and-paste response. Even if that response goes out under the name of a Minister it’s unlikely that person will have read it. What governments dislike (and I speak from experience) is well-informed, detailed criticism, which is expressed in moderate terms and asks precise questions or makes precise and realistic proposals. This creates work, in research and preparation of the reply. Influencing the recipe in the Sausage Factory is never easy, therefore, but there are ways of making it less difficult. Just remember that nothing in politics comes easily or for free.