Little People With Agency.

No, not that Agency.

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Human beings can only tolerate a certain degree of complexity. In our ideas and beliefs and in our understanding of the world, we have to stop at a certain point, so that we can get on with the rest of life. Few of us have the time or background to study and interpret the mass of events and controversies that surround us, and so, as I have several times pointed out, we tend to fall back on prefabricated ideas and systems of thought, often influenced by popular culture, which enable us to feel we understand what is happening without having to expend an impossible amount of effort to do so.

Institutions are the same. This applies obviously to governments, but also to international organisations, and to the media, to think-tanks and universities, and to any organisation whose staff are expected to comment on, or produce ideas about, events in the world. There is no time (and increasingly less time) to research and evaluate, to look into deeper causes and to explain the full complexity of problems. Deadlines have to be met, decisions have to be taken, grants secured and solutions put forward. So there is often a competition, not to explain a problem as such, but rather to fit it into one of a series of competing frameworks and models, which generate an analysis and a course of action which suits the objectives of the organisation, or strengthens its position in the political market.

Simple frameworks are, of course, the most successful, because they require the least reflection and the least expertise. The dominant model for explaining how nations interact with each other, and the one that seems instinctively most satisfying, is a kind of crude realism or neo-realism (OK, they are pretty crude theories anyway, I know) which sees the world as an arena of conflict in which countries compete for influence, based on their size, wealth and military power. In such a world, rich countries dominate poor countries, powerful countries dominate less powerful countries, and so forth. To identify a dominant partner in a relationship, it is just necessary to make a crude comparison of power. When there is no dominant player, or one player is becoming stronger, there is competition for power, which leads inevitably to war.

Put like that, the explanation does indeed seem crude and reductive, and some in the international affairs community would claim that they never said that, or if they did, they didn’t mean to. Yet if you actually look at some of what passes for reflection and analysis in the media, or for that matter in the Editorial Board of Foreign Affairs, then this is essentially what you find, albeit sometimes obscured by fancy technical jargon, And of course as a model for understanding the world and making judgements about the future, it is hopelessly inadequate; not that that discourages its practitioners, since the alternative is the cultivation of expertise and reflection, which is hard work.

We can see these habits of thinking everywhere in coverage of current events. Commentary on Ukraine largely boils down to, US=big country, Ukraine=small country therefore US is the completely dominant partner. Similarly, it is argued that US=big country, China=big country therefore conflict and war are inevitable. Whilst this kind of reductive thinking leaves out virtually all the subtleties that actually determine how international relations and crises play out, it has the advantage of simplicity. Someone with no knowledge of the Ukraine problem is thus able to say, ah yes, it’s obvious that the US is the dominant partner, so all that matters is what happens in Washington.

My argument is that this way of thinking has never been true, and that below the surface impression of “great power competition” there has been a much more complex picture. Now that patterns of power in the world seem to be changing, what was always there simply becomes more obvious, as we see the configuration of the beach better with the receding tide. Once we realise that large and powerful nations are not always the dominant players in a given situation, then much of the current confusion is dispelled. But the accepted model can’t cope with this.

Once upon a time, it was thought, the world was divided neatly into two, and everything was “pro-western” or “pro-Soviet.” When the Soviet Union collapsed, this theory suggested that the United States must therefore be the sole dominant power in the world, able to decide everything. With the rise of China, and the partial return of Russia, the world seems a much more confusing place, and is now interpreted in terms of “competition” between China and the US in Latin America, or between “the West” and Russia in parts of Africa. This is an interpretation in which only the interests and objectives of major powers matter. What it omits, obviously, is the interests and objectives of all other countries, who are reduced to the status of Non-Playing Characters, and denied any agency at all.

This is fine, until one of these Characters actually starts demonstrating agency of their own, and that throws the system into confusion. Things happen which are not supposed to happen, and pundits react to this by seeing the hidden hand of major powers behind unexpected turns of event. That the people of a given country might genuinely wish to get rid of their government, and might actually have the agency to do so, is not in conformity with the dominant model. It follows that Dark Forces must actually be behind such events.

For much of history, Great Powers left each others’ vital interests alone. Ancient empires would come into conflict (and Ottoman expansion was a major factor in European politics until the seventeenth century) but states generally did not think of the world as a kind of zero-sum game in which every square mile had to be owned by someone, in competition with someone else.

This changed, of course with the Cold War, which in the minds of many in national capitals resembled Alice’s game of chess being played all over the world. It was never really like that, but it was intellectually and politically satisfying to divide the world into “pro-western” and “anti-western” or “progressive” and “reactionary.” Again, the concept that the countries and movements that were being so classified might have agency was completely absent from the discussion.

This led to some fairly extreme misinterpretations. Because the Soviet Union supported wars of “national liberation” in Africa, from Algeria to Angola, it was supposed that Moscow must be behind all these wars. They essentially took place in countries with sizeable European settler populations (other African countries obtained independence peacefully) and the various groups that sought to expel the settlers and take power for themselves, unable for obvious reasons to get help from the West, turned to the Soviet Union (more rarely to China) and adopted the fashionable Marxist-nationalist rhetoric of the time. Some western capitals were naive enough to take this at face value, and to assume some gigantic geopolitical competition throughout the continent for control of resources, rather than the opportunistic exploitation of the situation by all sides.

The most extreme example was, of course, South Africa. The visceral anti-communism of the apartheid regime, deriving in large part from the influence of the Dutch Reformed Church, and the fact that only the South African Communist Party really opposed apartheid from the start, produced a perfect circle of suspicion and conflict. The further fact that most of the top leaders of the ANC were Communists (including Mandela) and that the Soviet bloc were the most important supporters of the ANC, simply confirmed, in Pretoria’s eyes, that there was a Soviet master plan (the “Total Onslaught”) to overthrow “the last Christian democracy in Africa” and take control of the Simon’s Town naval base, from where western trade could be interdicted. These paranoid ideas would have mattered less if they had not been at least partly accepted by the West, stuck as it was in a Cold War global competition mindset.

Actors outside “the West” (or the “Free World” if you insisted) and the “Soviet Bloc” were thus mainly pieces to be rearranged on the chessboard, and the subjects of competition for power. It was enough to characterise Pakistan as “pro-western” and India as “pro-Soviet” and you could delude yourself into thinking you had explained something. All “anti-western” or “anti-colonial” movements were thus thought to be Soviet-inspired, from the Irish Republican Army to the Baader-Meinhof group, to liberation movements in Africa, as we have seen, to ETA in Spain, to anti-government forces in Latin America to …well, more or less everything really. Great was the stupefaction of Cold Warriors when all of these conflicts failed to end with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yet even at the time, the wiser and more informed knew that this was nonsense. Dissident political groupings and anti-government forces needed support and training, and there were a limited number of options. The Soviet bloc and close allies, including Cuba and Algeria, were pretty much the only option if the West thought you were acting against their interests. (China was much more complicated.) For Moscow this was fine, and helped advance the cause of world revolution at limited cost. (They never supported movements acting directly against western interests.) For the movements concerned, it was largely a question of repeating the right slogans and supporting Soviet foreign policy, as well as a degree of Soviet influence. As Nelson Mandela remarked towards the end of his life, nobody seemed to have realised that, rather than the Communists using the ANC, the reality was the other way around.

The corollary of locals not having agency is that only the activities of the Great Powers mattered. This, by extension, meant that they massively overestimated their own influence on events. The Soviet Union was handicapped by its Marxist-Leninist frame of reference, which led it to think that it was the natural leader or champion of the international proletariat, which in turn accepted and welcomed Soviet leadership. It also led to the creation of largely fictitious political entities such as the “Afghan working class.”

The West’s vision was less narrowly ideological, but probably more egoistic. This applied especially to the United States, suddenly finding itself engaged all over the globe after World War 2, influenced by doctrinaire anti-communism and perceived “rivalry,” and with little practical experience of dealing with other nations or understanding of their concerns. The idea that the United States had played a major role in the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, for example, flattered the egos of many in Washington, although it wasn’t really true. But it did avoid giving the Afghans (or the Saudis for that matter) any agency.

The most obvious example of failure of the state-driven, power-related interpretation of the world is provided by the complete western inability to understand Political Islam, by which we mean (simply) the idea of the creation of a theocratic community of believers, with no national boundaries and with no distinction between political and religious power. It obviously does not fit into crude state-based paradigms of national rivalry and domination, therefore. Understanding this, of course, requires the ability to understand in turn that some people, including the well-educated, actually believe in the literal truth of their religion and act accordingly. By coincidence, three events in 1979 within a few months of each other could have encouraged western governments to sit up and take notice. They did not do so.

The first, little reported at the time but with enormous ramifications subsequently, was the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by some 600 armed militants, protesting against not (as might have been fancied) the repressive policies of the Saudi government, but rather that these policies were not repressive enough. They were especially protesting about increasing secularisation and contacts with western states. Even with advice and help from the French Gendarmerie, it took two weeks, and heavy casualties on both sides, to finally recapture the mosque: the remaining militants were publicly beheaded at sites around the country. Yet the régime’s reaction was not a crackdown on Political Islam, which was too powerful for that, but rather attempts to appease its adherents, for example by a large programme of Mosque-building abroad, and the despatch of fundamentalist imams to Muslim communities in the Maghreb and in Europe, with consequences that are now visible to all. At the time, the West simply had no frame of reference to understand this event, which is why it was little mentioned.

By contrast, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran the same year, and the replacement of his régime by a fundamentalist Islamic one, but this time Shia and not Sunni, could hardly be ignored. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of Iran to western, and especially American, regional policy at the time. It was seen as a client-state of the US (and indeed this was a criticism frequently made domestically) and the absolute key to the US strategic position in the region. But it turned out that the Americans had neither the degree of control over, nor the insight into, Iranian affairs that they liked to think they had (a failing we’ll return to.) They depended for their information largely on Iran’s own feared secret police, and on English-speaking, vaguely western-minded government officials and “civil society”  representatives. They had very few Farsi speakers. They had no ability to take the pulse of the Street, not any apparent interest in doing so, and, like other western governments, were completely ignorant about the religious dimension to the protests. Iranian dissidents living in the West were almost uniformly secular and left-wing, and the great fear of the West was of a Soviet-organised popular rising. Only that, perhaps, can explain the improbable decision to send the Ayatollah Khomeini back from his exile in France to Tehran, where he swiftly organised a transition to a theocratic state.

And it was that transition that so shocked and befuddled the West. In an age of galloping secularism, the very concept of a theocratic Muslim state was utterly unfamiliar in policy circles, even though specialists had been studying Political Islam at least since the formation of the Muslim Brothers in the 1920s. It had been assumed that Iran was “modernising” and secularising, and for many countries (notably the United States) the shock of the discovery of such ignorance and such inability to understand, let alone control, the situation was so great that it was easier to pretend that the Islamic Revolution had never happened, or would be over in a year or two.

The last event was the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan at the very end of the year. We know that the Soviet leadership was worried about the country disintegrating into chaos, and about the effect that might have on the Muslim republics in the south of the USSR. But the West, stuck in its great power mentality, and in the middle of a transition to much tougher anti-Communist line, opted to treat the invasion as a simple expansionist enterprise, which those on the political Right had always warned against. Indeed, many figures on the Right argued gleefully that their worst fears had been confirmed, and that the next target would be Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. The recognition that the Soviet move was essentially defensive, and controversial even within Moscow (the KGB was against it, for example) only happened much later.

The obsession with the relative power of national actors, and the assignment of non-state actors to spear-carrying roles, produced massive problems of simple comprehension at the end of the Cold War. Every day between about the end of 1989 and the middle of 1992 seemed to bring some completely unexpected development, as long-ignored historical differences and grievances surfaced again. The disappearance of the Soviet Union itself was too much for many western pundits to swallow: those of us who as early as the beginning of 1989 realised that things were about to change radically were labelled “Gorbymaniacs” for our pains. It’s worth looking at the May 1989 NATO summit communiqué, for example, which, largely because of British intransigence, still treated the Soviet Union as a potential enemy. Indeed, for several years afterwards, there was a belief on certain parts of the western Right that the whole thing must be a conspiracy, a deception operation intended to lull the West into a false sense of security. It was not until well into the 1990s that they finally, grudgingly, accepted that things had changed.

For many traditional-minded state-based thinkers, all of the problems of the world had stemmed from Soviet interference. The disappearance of that country should, logically therefore, have led to an outbreak of peace and happiness. In fact, of course, hardly had the last brick from the Berlin Wall been sold to a collector, than fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and soon after in the Former Yugoslavia. Suddenly, it looked as if all sorts of people with names we could not pronounce in countries we scarcely knew existed, had acquired agency of their own, and as if, in the words of one US Diplomat I heard, “history is going off in directions it has no right to.” Moreover, it turned out that the ability of the West to resolve, or even influence, these conflicts was much less than hoped and expected. Through Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, through Afghanistan and Iraq, through Yemen and Syria and the Sahel, crises obstinately turned out to be much more intractable that the West expected. After all, it reasoned, the West now had no competitor, and the US was, was it not, the first Hyperpower? So how could it be that these little people were not doing what they were told?

Well, perhaps they never had. To begin with, whilst the idea of international politics as consisting essentially of large states dominating small ones and competing among themselves, may seem persuasive in first year International Relations courses or the editorial offices of the Washington Post, for anyone with practical experience on the ground, it’s a hopeless oversimplification. The basic error is the assumption that international politics is a zero-sum game, from which the winner alone benefits. Yet the reality is different, especially if we realise that relationships between states are complex and multi-dimensional, and often develop in surprising and unexpected ways.

A few brief examples will perhaps clarify that. So the continued stationing of US forces in Japan after World War 2—initially just a side-effect of the Korean War—helped reduce tensions in the area, and fears (however exaggerated) of the return of Japanese nationalism. In turn, this permitted postwar Japanese governments, conscious of the pacifist mood of the country after the terrible events of the 30s and 40s, to cultivate a very different international policy and image. Likewise, although the entry of Germany into NATO was originally just a question of generating forces to meet a postulated Soviet attack, it did inadvertently solve the “German problem” after World War 2 by tying Germany into a military alliance where it had no national headquarters and was not capable of conducting independent military operations. Many of its neighbours were pleased to hear that. Finally, the French military presence and political involvement in West Africa after independence brought stability and growth compared to other parts of the Continent. Of course there is always a price to pay, and in all these cases there was a sacrifice of national independence, and a degree of popular hostility.

But nothing is ever one-dimensional in politics, and indeed to some extent the political and economic “rent” that smaller states gain from such institutions and situations is the reason why they continue. After 1989, smaller European states were happy to see the continuation of NATO as a counterbalance to historic Franco/German dominance of Europe, and rivalry between them. Likewise, smaller members of the EU were prepared to give up much of their autonomy to Brussels because the larger members would have to give up correspondingly more. Similarly, an African country hosting a US military facility might gain status in the region, and feel safer from attack by a neighbour. After all, for most of history, small powers have looked to larger powers for protection: when your Big Brother is tougher than his Big Brother you feel more secure.

Indeed, the manipulation of large nations by small nations for their benefit is one of the least-studied parts of international politics, mainly because it appears counter-intuitive, and is often hidden. Yet there are any number of examples which make perfect logical sense. So Saudi Arabia, for example, a large and sparsely populated country with a tribal political system, could never hope to defend its borders, or even to guarantee the survival of the ruling House of Saud. Buying defence equipment from abroad, and bringing in very large numbers of foreigners to support and train Saudi forces, created  a disincentive to any state that wanted to attack the Kingdom, as well as an incentive for foreign states to support it, since their personnel were effectively hostages there. This had, of course, to be balanced against the opposition from fundamentalists referred to earlier, but when the careful balancing act was working, it did ensure the security of the country and its ruling House in a way that probably nothing else could have done. Moreover, it’s generally true that once a major power is committed in that way, it winds up supporting and excusing its notional client state.

This does seem to have been what happened with the misguided Saudi adventure in Yemen. The US was reluctant to publicly fall out with its close ally, whatever it may have thought privately, and seems to have been trying to limit the damage. The Saudi Air Force was in the past simply regarded as a flying club for Princes, and it had little operational experience. In particular, the Saudis had no experience of targeting, and, although I have no special inside knowledge, it seems likely that the US gave them targeting help in the hope that the whole process would be less wantonly destructive than would otherwise have been the case. This is typical of the complexities that result when large states tie their interests to small states they cannot ultimately control.

This applies even more to personalities than it does to states, and the West has been manipulated for generations by those it has supported. From initial hopes of domination to ultimate dependence, the boot has often shifted gradually to the other foot. Think of the last years of the Republic of Vietnam, where the incompetence and corruption of the ruling elites was known to all, but where there was no alternative but to find excuses for them. In Afghanistan, the involvement of senior political and military figures in the heroin trade was an open secret, as were the weekend trips to Dubai with a briefcase stuffed with banknotes, but because the West had supported, trained, and in some cases selected these people, nothing could be done without making the West look stupid.

The same problem can apply at an individual level. After the end of the fighting in Bosnia, the West tried to micromanage politics in Bosnia, but without the traditional Ottoman and Communist tools of bribery and threats, which the locals at least understood. Milorad Dodik was installed as Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska, less for any virtues he possessed than because all of the alternatives were worse. He was considered the most “pro-western” candidate, and this judgement survived years of disappointments and accusations of corruption. But as one western diplomat gloomily remarked in my presence “Dodik is the only Dodik we’ve got,” so the West continued to support him until it became impossible. And I remember being surprised by the appointment around the same time of an extremely young and inexperienced politician to the post of Finance Minister there. “Oh, he was the only one we could find who studied economics and speaks English” was the explanation.

And thereby hang a number of tales. Those who believe that the West (and especially the US) is capable of micromanaging the affairs of entire states, as the Soviet Union was once said to do, have no idea of the complexity of what they are suggesting, nor of the limited capacity of the West to do it. Now of course, the argument is different at different levels. A small state may well agree to sign a communiqué or support a Security Council resolution because it’s not worth an argument with a large state. OK, we’ll save our opposition for something more important. Maybe that’s followed by a bilateral declaration and even a plan of work, which we can sign up to, but which will encounter all sorts of unexpected delays and obstacles where it conflicts with our objectives. Maybe in the end nothing really gets done.

And the biggest problem, of course, is language. For simple instruction and training, this is less of a problem, provided you have a competent interpreter. Likewise, an Ambassador or a visiting senior official might have their own interpreter or be provided with one for high-level meetings. But you can’t run a complete bilateral relationship like that without considerable risk. Interpreters often become de facto intermediaries, helping to smooth over potential problems, but of course that only works if they are competent (and you generally have no way of judging this) and if they are being honest with you. During the decades of the large-scale western presence in Bosnia and Kosovo, few of the foreign nationals spoke what was tactfully called “the local language” and almost none spoke Albanian. Everything depended on hordes of interpreters, some very good, some less so, and almost all reporting to one (or more) of the local intelligence agencies. Essentially the same thing happened in Afghanistan. Should we be surprised that, in the end, very little of what the West wanted was ever accomplished in either case?

It is, of course, possible to learn languages. But there’s a big difference between being able to get around, hail a taxi, order a meal in a restaurant, and being able to use a foreign language in a professional environment. And from that to working with foreigners in their own language and according to their procedures is another massive leap, which takes years of training and preparation. And then of course even under ideal conditions, you only know about the meetings you are invited to, and the documents you are allowed to read, if indeed you are capable of reading the local script at all. There will, inevitably, be meetings you never hear about, and decisions taken when you are not there. There will be networks of which you are not a member, and information you may not even know exists. Conversely, you will particularly respect and believe those who are capable of speaking English.

And of course there are also social factors and working methods. There are many countries where informal links and hierarchies are more important than formal ones. There are also many cultures that abhor public disagreements, so visitors will be received politely, and given comforting replies to demands. Such societies don’t like saying “no,” but it’s notorious that “yes” in certain parts of Asia doesn’t mean “I agree” but rather “I understand what you say.” I have been at more than one meeting in that part of the world where I have had literally no idea what was going on beneath the surface.

Talk is cheap, and agreement is easy in principle, so large states can often claim to have convinced or even coerced smaller states into doing what they want. Sometimes, this is true enough, but in general westerners underestimate the resourcefulness of small states, who often know how to play large states off against each other. So the idea of Africa as a passive victim of neocolonialism, popular in the 70s and 80s and still encountered today, has to be judged alongside real studies of how actual African states survive in the international system and their governments try to achieve their objectives, as recounted by authors like Christopher Clapham, and more recently Patrick Chabal. Like Jeffrey Herbst from a different perspective, they argue that western theories of international relations (which of course I am also questioning here) simply do not take account of the realities of Africa. And if you want a textbook example of shameless   manipulation and exploitation of the West by a small and entirely aid-dependent state, you have only to look at Rwanda after 1995.

For that reason, a lot of the talk about countries and movements being “puppets” of large states is severely exaggerated and disconnected from reality. It’s also reductively two-valued. The answer to the question “is Hezbollah a puppet of Iran?” is not “yes” or “no” but rather that the reality is very subtle and complex, and influenced in part by domestic Lebanese factors. Likewise, the idea of Ukraine as a western (or even American) “puppet” is hopelessly naive, for the reasons given above among many others, but neither is Ukraine a wholly independent actor. Indeed, there are many countries in the world —like Ukraine—where the question is all the more meaningless because the country is not a unitary actor anyway. The most you can say is that shifting coalitions with different degrees of power are influenced by shifting coalitions of foreign actors. That’s why the the tedious history of the Saudi “involvement” in the attacks on the US by Al Qaida in 2001 is so pointless. Saudi Arabia is not a unitary actor for this purpose, and different factions of the power system can act in different and opposed ways.

Nonetheless, this crude and mechanistic way of thinking about the world has its political advantages. For the West, it enables “friends” and “enemies” to be easily identified, and thus the blame to be placed on the shoulders of “enemies” who are believed to”control” groups and factions. It also means that coercing actors into signing documents or agreeing to courses of action can be presented as a political victory. It all makes the world a simpler place.

It’s also easier for the media in the widest sense. How do we explain a period of instability leading to a coup in an African country? Well, it turns out that a local businessman close to the new junta had business contacts with Russian mineral companies, so the hand of Moscow is obvious. Or alternatively, two of the junta apparently attended US Staff Colleges twenty or so years ago so it was the CIA. Or more generally, this is a resource-rich country so it must be great-power rivalry. We can go back to writing about football. The idea that perhaps the minerals the country has are not rare or expensive, that the government that was overthrown was especially corrupt and nasty, that the plotters came from an ethnic group that was discriminated against and denied promotion: all this just complicates the issue and requires us to give little black men agency.

And of course it’s often useful for politicians to seem to have no agency. A good rule in politics (see the Russia! Russia! nonsense) is that when all else fails, you blame foreigners. This has been especially useful for politicians in West Africa and the Maghreb seeking to excuse their own failings and corruption by endlessly invoking “neo-colonialism”: there has been an outbreak of it recently. But increasingly, local populations are starting to lose patience with such tactics, not least because they know that their leaders, for all their rhetoric, are deeply involved with the West, own properties there and send their children to the best schools and universities. Some extreme examples—Algeria comes to mind—have regimes that trade on nothing but resentment about the past and complaints about the present, but recent events show that this no longer works very well.

Going back to where we started, relations between states and with local actors have always been more complex than major powers have been prepared to recognise, but this has been obscured to some extent by the West’s dominance of international institutions and the international media. It’s not that the situation on the ground is necessarily changing that much, it’s rather that on the one hand patterns of informal cooperation are becoming formalised (BRICS being the obvious case), and that nations no longer see the need to disguise open differences with the West. Here, the experiences of Ukraine, and even more Gaza, have been decisive. In the past, the West has recovered from disasters effectively by blaming the locals. We gave them the right ideas, we gave them the training and equipment, we seconded the people, we gave them the money, but they just couldn’t do it. That’s an excuse that was already wearing thin after thirty years of failure from the Balkans to Afghanistan. Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to wash for Ukraine, still less for Gaza. In the end, it turns out that this pushing-small-states around business is a bit more complicated than International Relations students have been led to believe.