Polanyi saw the great catastrophes of the first half of the Twentieth Century (WWI, WWII and the Holocaust) as products of the “disembedding” of the market from society that took place with the rise of capitalism, which he argues was an intentional change instituted by the state. The most famous line is “laissez-faire was planned.” (David Graeber’s much feted Debt: The First 5000 Years reminded me, in its own way, of Polanyi.)

The second half of The Great Transformation focuses on Polanyi’s prescriptions for dealing with the disembedding, which is to create a kind of socialist society that provides basic protections for people. Indeed, many argue, most famously the political economist John Ruggie, that this is precisely what happened in the capitalist world after the end of WWII with the rise of welfare state policies, in particular in Europe but also to an extent in the United States. Ruggie calls that the era of “embedded liberalism.” After the 1980s, with the expansion of capitalist globalization and the growth of international financial markets, there was again a kind of “disembedding,” which has gotten us to where we are now.

I’ve thought about Polanyi’s analysis a lot since then. Reading a recent blog post by, of all people, Andrew Sullivan brought Polanyi up again.

Capitalism is in this sense anti-conservative. It is a disruptive, culturally revolutionary force through human society. It has changed the world in three centuries more than at any time in the two hundred millennia that humans have lived on the earth. This must leave – and has surely left – victims behind. Which is why the welfare state emerged. The sheer cruelty of the market, the way it dispenses brutally with inefficiency (i.e. human beings and their jobs), the manner in which it encourages constant travel and communication: these, as Bell noted, are not ways to strengthen existing social norms, buttress the family, allow the civil society to do what it once did: take care of people within smaller familial units according to generational justice and respect. That kind of social order – the ultimate conservative utopia – is inimical to the capitalist enterprise.

Sullivan casts his argument in the relation to that of the sociologist Daniel Bell (whom I haven’t read) but it falls just as much in the tradition of Karl Polanyi’s work on “the Great Transformation” and the subsequent writing of political economists like John Ruggie on what they called the post-war “embedded liberal” compromise. Sullivan continues:

One reason, I think, that Obama’s move toward a slightly more effective welfare state has not met strong resistance – and is clearly winning the American argument – is that the sheer force of this global capitalism is coming to bear down on America more fiercely than ever before. People know this and they look for some kind of security. In other words, it is precisely capitalism’s post-1980s triumph that has helped create the social dependency so many conservatives bemoan today.

Sullivan, who still likes to stick to his weird hybrid “conservatism,” traces the breakdown of “conservative” social values to the socio-economic dislocation, but that’s beside the point, really. Is the welfare state seeing a comeback? That might seem ironic considering the widespread push for austerity in the advanced capitalist countries (see the Osborne’s Britain, Merkel’s Greece, sequestration’s America). But considering the dislocation that the great deleveraging is causing, it might be possible. Obama’s State of the Union, far from laying out a radical Keynesian agenda, still seemed to offer some kind of pushback against the Reagan-era “disembedding.” As the New York Times wrote of the speech:

But Mr. Obama has always looked admiringly at Reagan’s success in shifting the nation’s ideological center of gravity in an enduring way that transcended the issues of the moment. While no fan of Reagan’s policies, he credited him during the 2008 campaign with changing “the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way Bill Clinton did not.”

To achieve that level of influence before he leaves the White House will require not only that he enact an ambitious legislative agenda in the next year or two but also that he provide — and sell to voters beyond his base — a compelling alternative to the conservative mantra that nearly all problems can be traced back to excess government.

As the Times rightly notes, this will require a major ideational shift in America. But there’s reason to believe it might be happening.

For background on the whole situation, you can read our own editorial on the whole fracas here or an article by the author of the censored article here. The original article is here. You can read a parody of the editorial below here. I’ll add my own thoughts at some point, but wanted to make sure that the English translation was available in all its glory. Also, I want to add that this is far and away not at all the most important thing in Egypt right now or even of interest to many people.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

By Magdi el-Gallad

I thank God for his several blessings, one of which is that I am thick-skinned: I only contemplate objective criticism. Another of God’s blessings on me is that I do not fear but my Creator, for no harm can befall me unless God has written it.

Yet another of the blessings God has bestowed on me is that, like you all, I was born of Egyptian land and have learned to cherish my Egyptian nationality and to act in the belief that my country is a major power.

The fact that we have survived decades of degeneration should not make us think of ourselves as standing in an inferior position with regards to the West. Half a century of events will eventually be written in three lines in history books and Egypt will rise, because we will not abandon it, no matter what crises we face.

Neither American writer Robert Springborg, nor British Independent’s correspondent Alistair Beach are able to grasp this culture, belief or that kind of loyalty to a nation that has taught its people to die for its defense.

Both of them, as well as others who live among us but are bedazzled by the lights of the West, are not aware that a genuine Egyptian cannot be blackmailed, pressured or threatened. They heaped pressure on Al-Masry al-Youm to publish an article for Springborg in the pilot English supplement inciting Egyptian army officers and Sami Anan, the chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, to mount a coup and seize power, particularly following the results of the first phase of elections, claiming Field Marshal Tantawi is allied to the Islamic wave.

Believing the English supplement staff were well-intentioned, I assumed they lacked sufficient experience or did not recognize who the American writer was. But because I know who he is quite well, I stopped at the article, read it over and over and decided not to run it.

I did not take into account the writer, the country he belongs to, or to its bloody practices across the world. Nor did I fear his ensuing bellowing in the Independent or Foreign Policy.

I could not care less for the broken record about freedom of speech, employed by the West to achieve its nefarious ends against us, when it suppresses those freedoms to protect its interests and national security.

Springborg and those backing him are unfortunately faced with a man who cannot be blackmailed, who is not West-struck or ultra-impressed by Western press. I think of myself as equal to them, even superior, most of the time.

For those who do not know, Springborg is the Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations, a government center affiliated to the US naval forces and a branch of the Pentagon. So, do you now know who the writer is and who is inciting Egyptian officers and the Chief of Staff to launch a coup?

He believes that the attack he and some people in Egypt are launching against me will push me to change mind on a choice I have made based on national interest. But for me, one black strand of hair from an Egyptian child in the heart of Upper Egypt is of greater value than his country or the entire West.

He works for the US Pentagon, whereas I work for the simple Egyptian citizen. He derives his arrogant power from the American arsenal, while I find protection in satisfying a poor man in some impoverished Egyptian neighborhood.

He and those allied to him are using the internet to arouse people against, while I seek refuge in the soil of may land which they want to occupy through creating chaos and inciting military coups, squishing Egypt back to square one.

He thought that our occasional disagreement with the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the Islamic wave were going to pave the way for him to realise his evil schemes. But to him I say, “Our beliefs and civilisation teach us that disagreement is a mercy but the army, Islamists, liberals and all 87 million Egyptians are citizens are breastfed to love this homeland which the West wants to hijack.”

To that Springborg and those behind him I say that we insist on refusing to run his article. Al-Masry Al-Youm’s opinion writers, of whom I am one, criticise the SCAF extensively–but they are free Egyptian citizens who do not work for the US Pentagon.

Those in the US and its servant Britain who are not happy with what I have written might as well put that in their pipe and smoke it!

I walked around Tahrir and the surrounding streets for a few hours tonight. I’ve visited a couple of times before in the past few days but haven’t been able to spend much time there, mostly because we’ve been finishing up the first edition of our new weekly print newspaper. I hadn’t really gone close to the front lines of the fighting, but that’s been okay with me. War reporting isn’t the kind of journalism that interests me. But after seeing the square again and getting close to Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which has been the epicenter of the running battle between Ministry of Interior paramilitary forces and the protesters, I’m left feeling a little haunted.

Being there overwhelms the senses. The acrid stench of teargas hovers over everything, mixing with the smoke from bonfires made of garbage and the smoke from the sweet potato vendors who burn treated wood to heat their ovens and the piss that the fighters (understandably) discharge against the walls. The endless stream of ambulances assaults your ears, as do the incessant honking of the informal motorcycle ambulances that go all the way up to the battlefront, and the chants of “Down with the field marshal!” and, closer to Mohamed Mahmoud, the bang…crash/whistle of teargas cartridges. Inside the square, you are jostled by the crowds of people, pushed aside to make room for fighters on their way back to the front line or wounded on their way to the hospitals. The eyes take in everything under the tungsten street lamps: The crying faces of teargas victims and the alien-like visages of men and women in gas mask wearers, the swirling blue ambulance lights. Perhaps this kind of scene is pedestrian for people who are in conflict zones regularly. For me, they are new.

Some people say that the square right now reminds them of the 18 days in January and February. I have to disagree. When I was here in February the feeling in the square was angry and determined, but it was also somehow celebratory. The energy seemed clearly directed at Mubarak and his regime and was fairly well articulated. Tahrir does not feel celebratory right now. The constant presence of injured and the number of field hospitals (I counted about five, but that could be wrong) keep the atmosphere from getting too carnival-like. And while there are definitely some families around, the crowd is overwhelmingly young men. I was in the square with some female colleagues and people repeatedly warned them to leave. During the January 25 uprising, the mood was angry, but this seems like a darker, nastier anger.

I don’t want to say too much about the politics of all this, but we’ve been talking a lot in the office recently about this question of “state failure” and what that could mean for Egypt. I won’t get into it in too much detail, but I generally believe that real state failure is unlikely here because most Egyptians (or maybe I should just say Cairenes, since that’s what I know best) seem to have a pretty strong sense of nationalism and commitment to the state. But when I looked around the side streets near Tahrir tonight – at the post-apocalyptic scene of toxic fumes and burning garbage and decimated sidewalks – I caught a glimpse of what I imagine state failure to look like.

If the state is failing, the blame rests on the military junta’s shoulders. The violence downtown wouldn’t exist if not for their complete refusal to meet the revolution’s demands and their complete and utter mismanagement of the transition. And as the generals have positioned themselves as the guarantors against chaos and collapse, every new instance of street violence justifies their presence. For now, I’ll stay away from conspiracy theories.

I don’t know how this will end. I believe that if the generals are going to maintain the social contract, they have to give way to the protesters demands. It’s not just Cairo where these clashes are occurring. In Alexandria and Upper Egypt and the Suez Canal cities, revolutionaries are sucking up the teargas. It has to end soon before too much of the country looks like Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

Photo courtesy of Bora S. Kamel via Creative Commons.

Your money is safe here.

With the Qadhafi regime dissolving in Tripoli and the revolutionary forces ready to take over the country, I keep thinking about a conversation I had in Istanbul six months ago that I think exemplifies the problem of Middle East “experts” these days.

I was just back from the uprising in Cairo and high on revolutionary fervor, but I was planning on staying in Turkey indefinitely and needed a way to make money besides flailing around trying to do freelance journalism about a country I don’t know very well at a time when everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere.

I swallowed my pride and applied for a position as a “researcher” at a company that writes reports on countries in the Global South to help capitalists in the Global North decide where to invest. (There are, for some reason, a number of firms that do this kind of research in Istanbul and I won’t name which I applied to.) With my experience in Egypt, I was going to work on their North Africa desk.

I went in for an interview with the head of their Africa division. I told him my thoughts on Egypt and Tunisia (whatever my thoughts were at that point…) and then the conversation turned to Libya. I believe that this was on February 19, two days after the protests started in Benghazi. Protests were also heating up in Bahrain and Yemen. I told this person interviewing me that I didn’t know much about Libya, but I questioned the Qadhafi regime’s stability and I thought that the revolutions were spread.

“No,” the Africa expert said. “Benghazi flares up like this every once in a while and then it gets quieted down. People’s investments in Libya are safe.”

Six months later, crazy Qadhafi is almost gone, added to the (I hope growing) list of Arab dictators whose time has finally come in 2011. Many people in the business of making predictions, the “experts” on whom so many businesspeople and journalists and politicians rely, are, or at least should be, kicking themselves for their inability to see the fundamental instability of the Arab dictatorship model.

I hope that the same guy is now telling people how safe their money is in Syria.

I initially wrote this a while ago, while the both the Tahrir sit-in and the US debate over the debt ceiling were going on. (Also before the London riots, which I think is a tangentially related issue.) The essay was also (very understandably) cut down to a more manageable size for publication, but I’m posting the whole thing here because I think it deals with a lot of other interesting issues about how democracy is practiced in the United States that I couldn’t get to in the GOOD piece. Also, you can do stuff like that when you have a blog. Read it after the jump.

And with that, I make yet another attempt to revive this blog. Hope I’ll be back soon. Bizarre to think that the last time I posted was on January 26

IS EGYPT A BETTER DEMOCRACY THAN THE UNITED STATES?

Over the past three weeks I have been intermittently visiting the ongoing sit-in protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, sometimes as a reporter, sometimes as a curious (and, I admit, sympathetic) onlooker. All around me, men on stages shout speeches into crackling microphones and crowds chant anti-military slogans, while Egyptians of every stripe, poor and wealthy and middle class, Muslim and Christian, leftist and liberal, engage in some level of political debate—about the role of the military in political life or the future of Egypt’s constitution or the most productive path forward for the protesters. When I stand there amid the tents, in the heart of downtown Cairo, in the brutal heat of July in Egypt, in the overwhelming excitement of a continuing revolution, I often think about politics in the United States, where I was born and raised.

“America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere,” Ronald Reagan famously said. (Let’s ignore, for now, the hollowness of this statement for Egyptians and others who have lived under the rule of Washington-backed dictators.) Since the era of Woodrow Wilson the United States has been in the business, one way or another, of promoting democracy abroad. And while it is true that the United States has one of the oldest multiparty democracies in the world, does longevity imply quality?

As I watch the current debt ceiling spectacle from almost 6,000 miles away, I am struck by how ossified American democracy appears to be. Faced with a major crisis that could fundamentally destroy the US and world economies, Washington lawmakers, ostensibly the bulbs that brighten the beacon of freedom, remain deadlocked by partisan acrimony. And of course this isn’t the first time. A look back at any of the major policy debates of the last few years reveals that this is a pattern. Any potential for creativity, in Washington or on the streets, has been stifled, it seems, by American democracy itself. Our two party system and obsession with elections has allowed us to lose sight of some of the real values of democracy, like open debate and responsive government.

Egypt, six months into a revolution that intends to re-imagine the country’s entire political life, is not yet a functioning democracy in any normal sense. A military council runs the country and continues Mubarak-era practices like torture, military trials for civilians, and harassment of journalists and dissidents. There is currently no parliament, nor technically a constitution, though (Egypt’s first free and fair) parliamentary elections are expected in November with a new constitution to be written shortly thereafter. Despite this, the spirit of democracy in Egypt is alive and well in these heady revolutionary days. Egyptians seem to be enjoying democracy more than Americans have for a long time.

***

A couple weeks ago, I found myself in a cramped, stuffy theater adjacent to a community art center in downtown Cairo, just a few blocks from Tahrir Square. The stadium-style wooden benches were packed with people, listening intently as a panel of five economists and activists discussed their visions for Egypt’s economic future. For the most part, the conversation leaned heavily to the left, but still, genuine debate was taking place about tax structures, subsidies, and priorities for the state budget. This event, organized by a prominent Egyptian online activist, is called a “Tweet Nadwa”—a forum in which activists and concerned Egyptians take their discussion off the Internet and into real life.

The Tweet Nadwa is an interesting and unique exercise, with a specific goal (bringing together bloggers and Tweeps) but it exemplifies what is happening in Egypt right now: A tremendous openness of conversation and willingness to look creatively at political assumptions and norms, from leftists who want to do away with Mubarak’s free market reforms to Islamists who want to introduce religious law. In Tweet Nadwas and taxi cabs and coffee shops, Egyptians are discussing supra-constitutional principals and presidential councils and proportional representation.

The equivalent of a Tweet Nadwa in, for example, New York would not involve questioning assumptions or proposing radical solutions. It would mostly likely be about organizing support for Democrats or Republicans (?). Indeed, to the extent that these kinds of events exist, they are in the form of MoveOn house meetings or Democracy for America meet ups. With a system as completely focused on the electoral aspects of democracy (i.e., winning elections rather than addressing issues), creativity and conversation are stifled. Certain words (like “socialism”) are conversation killers. In Egypt, where dozens of parties have mushroomed from the fertile ground of the revolution since February, there is no time yet for that kind of stale debate. In the United States, where government and public opinion are essentially paralyzed by the stalemate of the two-party system, we could benefit from this kind of open debate.

***

On February 15, 2003 I took a bus to Manhattan from my home in suburban New Jersey to join a march against the impending US invasion of Iraq. I marched up First Avenue with hundreds of thousands of other angry Americans, mostly New York-area residents, mostly middle class. We carried signs that said “The World Says No to War” and chanted “We say no to war!” But through it all, I recall there was a sense of hopelessness, a knowledge that the American president didn’t care what a million people in the streets of New York City had to say about his war. And we were right: the war was inevitable.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned from the Egyptian revolution is something that Americans seem to have forgotten since the 1960s and 1970s when my parents generation marched for women’s rights and against the war in Vietnam: Street protests can bring about change. On that grey February day eight years ago, we all went home afterwards, turned on our televisions and stewed in our living rooms, feeling livid that we weren’t being listened to. In Egypt, they don’t go home.

Sign-carrying and street-marching and slogan-chanting aren’t completely dead as means of pushing for social and political change in the United States. A few, select groups keep the art of the street protest alive. The radical left is still able to muster up a few thousand diehards to take to the streets of Pittsburgh or Seattle once a year or when the G20 or World Trade Organization convenes. CODEPINK and pro-Palestine activists know how to make a dramatic interruption to make a point every once in a while. And, of course, the far right has learned how protest rallies can be useful as a tool. Since early 2009, the Tea Party has gathered in city centers from rural towns in Tennessee to the National Mall, waving banners and flags, wearing costumes, and chanting in unison with the goal of moving the political conversation further to the right. They have largely succeeded, proving again to Americans that protesting can work. (The fact that the Tea Party is a populist movement with the support of corporate money calls into question its status as a real protest movement, but that is a conversation for another day.)

What these few remaining protest movements have in common is that they exist on the fringes of American political discourse. The so-called mainstream has been so thoroughly dominated by two political parties that most Americans feel that the best way to voice their political opinions (if they ever feel that need) is through party-based activism.

During the uprising last winter that brought down Hosni Mubarak, and to a lesser extent that continues, demonstrations in the streets of Cairo have been the domain of every political stripe, from the hard-line Salafi Islamists to the hard-line Trotskyists to the liberals who want an American-style multiparty democracy. While there are debates over the efficacy of the protests (the ongoing sit-in in particular), few Egyptians treat the act of marching in the street as fringy.

There is one notable exception to this pattern that comes to mind. Just a few months ago I remember watching from my home in the Middle East an incredible protest movement unfolding in Wisconsin in response to Governor Scott Walker’s budget cuts. Thousands of Wisconsinites, including teachers and nurses and police officers, members of the middle class and the “mainstream,” descended on the Capitol in Madison to voice their outrage. And while they did, they carried signs that said, “Hosni Walker, Elected Dictator” and “Walk like an Egyptian.”

***

I spent the night of January 8, 2008 in a crowded high school gymnasium in Nashua, New Hampshire. I had spent the majority of the day driving my parents’ car around the center of the state, up long driveways attached to secluded houses, so that I could tell a handful of surly people that, in case they had forgotten, they should go out to vote for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. While standing in the gym, I got what felt like a sufficient payoff. The future president delivered an amazing speech.

“We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change,” Obama said in the “Yes We Can” speech.

I’ve thought of that moment often during the Egyptian revolution. When I first entered Tahrir Square last winter at the height of the protests against Mubarak, I encountered a certain sensation of inspiration, of “hope” and “change” that felt familiar from the days of the Obama campaign. The difference, though, is stark.

Obama’s speech in New Hampshire drew on the legacies of labor struggle and the fight for civil rights. Drawing on some of the most impressive successes in the history of American social and political change, Obama inspired a real belief in American democracy. The struggles that the candidate referenced, though, were not tied to partisan politics or electoral victories. They were about hard-won fights for change that took place, for the most part, outside of the halls of power. The inspiration he drew on was about the potential of the unlikely minority to overcome the power.

But the power that Obama was fighting, the change he was advocating was far from revolutionary. Beneath the inspiring language and the poignant allusions was simple electoral politics. “Yes we can” meant more than anything else that we could defeat Hillary Clinton, Obama’s primary opponent.

Egypt is a long way from a perfect democracy. Remnants of Mubarak’s regime seem eager to find a way back into the government. The military may not give up power. Even after elections, there is a potential for the nascent electoral democracy to crystallize into the kind of stasis with which Americans are so familiar. (Already, a schism may be opening between Islamists and secularists, along a worryingly two-party-like spectrum.) But for now, at least, “yes we can” still feels like it means something here.

I wasn’t in Egypt yesterday because I’m in Turkey, but I have been glued to Twitter, Facebook, my Gmail contacts list, and the media reports, trying to get a grasp on the situation and getting inspired by everything I’ve seen and read.

The most exciting aspect of yesterday’s demonstrations is the sheer scale. Accurate crowd estimates are difficult to ascertain, but even the Ministry of the Interior put the number of protesters in Cairo at 10,000, which makes me suspect that the real number is much higher. Some activists suggested that there were over 100,000 people there, which seems a bit dubious. No matter what, though, the number is clearly the biggest in a long while, perhaps since the bread riots of 1977, though maybe comparable to the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But there are important differences between the 2003 protests and yesterday’s: First, in 2003, Egyptians were demonstrating against an external issue, even if it is one tangentially related to their US-backed dictator. Second, those protests were almost exclusively in Cairo, whereas yesterday demonstrations took place throughout the country.

Related to the size and geographic diversity of the protests is that they were a decentralized movement. Much of the organization and mobilization may have taken place on Facebook via the We Are All Khaled Said group (through which 90,000 people said they planned to attend demonstrations), but the turnout seems like it was much more diverse than the usual web-savvy crowd. I’ve been to a number of pro-democracy demonstrations in Cairo and it’s typical to see the same handful of activists at each. Yesterday seemed to attract a different crowd.

A friend in Cairo who was in Tahrir Square yesterday, the site of the main protest, put it this way in a Gchat conversation: “you can find cooperation between youth with beard and girls wearing foreign clothes.” Check out the video below from Al Jazeera English at around 2:05, where a older, middle-class-looking woman goes on a rant about the government. She’s not the typical Cairo protestor.

The question now is what will happen next. Can Egyptians, inspired by Tunisia, sustain a month-long rebellion and bring down their dictator? Everyone I have talked to is taking a very wait-and-see approach. An activist friend in Cairo wrote to me:

I think this is a ripe moment to call for a nation-wide strike so that no one goes to work and more people empty into the streets – but I somehow doubt that will happen. It is much easier for people to go to a mass protest/rally than to miss a day of work – a nation-wide strike really assumes certain privileges that most people (including most of the people that were out yesterday!) do not have. That’s why 6th April and 5th May and all those movements never really got anywhere.

It is still early in the day in Egypt as I write this. Demonstrations may pick up again after school and work get out. On the other hand, I’ve heard people say they fear that Egyptians will now sit back, satisfied that they made their point yesterday and unwilling to continue. Moreover, I think that after yesterday the regime will want to clamp down quickly. Mubarak, I fear, has learned from Ben Ali’s mistakes. (Good thing the New York Times was willing to give him advice!)

Yesterday’s protests were, without a doubt, violent. See this video of the police evacuating Tahrir Square with tear gas and rubber bullets for evidence. But they weren’t nearly as violent as they could have been or, for that matter, as violent as I would have expected. But the Ministry of the Interior has already stated that they will not allow more protests and if the day of anger turns into a week of anger or a month of anger, I think the government will be more heavy handed as they try to prevent a Tunisia situation. I’m afraid the future could hold lot more beatings, arrests and maybe even live fire than we saw yesterday, when three people died.

For now we have to wait and see. I’ll be sitting at my perch in Istanbul, aching to be in downtown Cairo as I watch videos of the much-hated Central Security Forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds that include my friends.

Photo by Sarah Carr from Flickr

On the Armenian issue in Turkey today:

There is huge propaganda in the schools against Armenians, but it’s not only that. It’s on the street, it’s everywhere. ‘Armenian’ is a curse word in Turkish, still. And when you ask people about Armenians, you get this blank expression. It’s like you’ve entered the wrong password and their brain just stops, and the password is ‘Armenian’. They go blank. Especially in south-east Turkey, when you see an Armenian church and ask about it people will say ‘oh, it’s prehistoric’, although it dates back only to 1915. And when you insist on this question – ‘this is an Armenian church’, ‘where are the Armenians?’, etc. – if they don’t get angry with you they will say, ‘oh, the Armenians are gone. They are gone.’ And if you ask, ‘where did they go?’ ‘They went over the bridge’. And beyond that, it’s blank again. In Istanbul there are many Armenian buildings and you don’t really see them or think about them.

On Kurds and Armenians:

Well, when it comes to the Armenians the Kurds were also the perpetrators once. Today, politically, they have accepted their responsibility, while the state hasn’t yet. The BDP, a Kurdish party, offered such a declaration, acknowledging that ‘our ancestors did such and such to Armenians, and we apologise for that’. More broadly, for the time being, there is this undercurrent among people in Turkey, and it’s also true for Kurds, where people are looking back to try and discover their roots. And having Armenian roots became kind of ‘hip’. Now and then I hear people saying, ‘you know what? My grandmother had no relatives, so we might be Armenian’, or ‘I remember my grandfather talking in a weird language, so we might be Armenian too’. Especially after the death of Hrant [Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist gunned down in 2007 by a Turkish nationalist], becoming Armenian started to be ‘cool’, and I think this represents another role for Turkish people – they don’t want to be the ‘perpetrators’ after Hrant’s death, because that killing touched their hearts, so they want to move to the ‘victim’ side by having Armenian roots.

On coming from the oppressor’s side:

Writing the book was intellectually challenging as well, because there was this ontological security issue. Although I don’t represent anyone but me, I was coming from the ‘side’ of the perpetrator, and I was telling the story of the oppressed. So do I have the right to do that? How should I do that? During my time in Oxford Bernhard Schlink, the writer of The Reader – he’s a German jurist and an author – was there giving seminars on collective memory and collective guilt, and I joined one of them. He was talking about his guilt, and his generation’s guilt, over the Holocaust. After a while, following the speech, a Palestinian Oxford student asked him what he thought about the ‘Holocaust industry’, and he said ‘there is no such thing’. I asked a question, ‘what do you think about the fact that a nation is building up its hostile foreign policy on your feeling of guilt?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ – no, he said ‘I cannot talk about it, because I am German.’ So that was a great example of this phenomenon where if you’re coming from the perpetrator’s side you’re obliged to shut up and not talk about it. And I don’t think that’s correct – we should talk about it.

That’s probably enough excerpts. Read the whole interview here.

I think the issues surrounding minorities in Turkey are, to a certain extent, unique because of the intensity of Turkish nationalism. Nationalism plays a bigger role in social consciousness here than it does in any other country I’ve been to, possibly with the exception of Israel. Chauvinism exists everywhere (we all know how common it is in the U.S.) but in relatively new nation-states like Turkey (and Israel) it is more pronounced, more public and more vehement.

After months of (sort of) planning and anticipating, Helen and I have finally arrived and begun settling ourselves in Istanbul. We’ve got a small but pleasant apartment in a hip and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, not unlike so many of our friends living in New York. The difference is that we have a balcony from which we can watch tankers and ferries glide along the Bosphorus. We’re still getting our bearings in Istanbul, learning how to get around, picking up basic phrases getting familiar with the sights and sounds and smells of Turkey’s largest city.

This seems like an appropriate time to resume my blogging endeavors and to, yet again, attempt to make the upkeep of this blog a regular habit. I’ll start by trying to explain why I’m here. Over the past few months as people asked me why Helen and I were moving to Istanbul of all places, I would often just reply with “Why not?” But there are actual reasons we decided to come to a totally new place where neither of us speak the language (yet) or have any experience.

I’ll admit off the bat that part of why we chose Istanbul is because the city seems fabulous. The weather and the food appeal to us. There is an endless supply of nice restaurants and pleasant bars and places to sit and look at the water. And there’s nothing wrong with moving to a place because it seems like a nice place to live.

There are, of course, more substantial reasons why we chose Istanbul. For Helen, an artist, the city has a large and growing arts community that is innovative and important. The neighborhood where we are now living is teeming with galleries and we’re about a quarter mile from a world-class modern art museum.

But why did I want to move here? As a journalist, I think that Turkey is an important place to be, in many ways much more important than Egypt, where I was living and working last year. This is actually the real point I wanted to make with this blog post, though I’ve kind of buried the lead now.

As the U.S. declines and other countries rise, the world is becoming ever more multipolar. This isn’t a secret and it’s not some kind of out there theory, it’s just what’s happening. For better or worse (I think for better), the United States can no longer be the sole important country in the world and other capitals will have to pick up the slack. Turkey, because of its size, its economy, its geography, is picking up a lot of this slack. I think it will be interesting to see the reconfiguring international order from this vantage point.

So there you have it. A re-inaugural blog post outlining what we’re doing here. I hope you’ll be able to follow along as I blog about my and Helen’s life together on the shores of the Bosphorus and Turkish politics, along with plenty of other stuff about food and Egypt and folk music and everything else.

Photo from my flickr account.

For some reason I find it really heartwarming that Bill and Hillary Clinton have exactly the same inane convesrations as Helen and I.

Politico runs the transcript from an interview Secretary Clinton did with some talk show hosts in Australia:

QUESTION: It all requires excellent patience, great negotiation skills. Your husband also possesses those qualities. When you two can’t agree on what to get for takeaway dinner, who wins out in that type of negotiation?

SECRETARY CLINTON: We practice different models of negotiation around important issues like that.

QUESTION: Yeah.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Because if I were to say to him, as I have on many occasions, “What shall we have for dinner tonight?” If he says to me, “Oh, I don’t care; you choose,” I know that’s a really bad answer, because then I’m stuck with the responsibility.

QUESTION: Yeah.

SECRETARY CLINTON: So I will come back and I’ll say, “All right. Well, so how do you feel about Chinese — “

QUESTION: Oh, good.

SECRETARY CLINTON: “ — or Mexican or Italian?” And if he says a second time, “I really, really don’t care,” then I will go choose. Now, contrarily, if he says to me, “What do you want for dinner tonight,” I will say, “What do you want?” Then he’ll go, “Well, I was thinking of maybe picking up some Thai.” And if I’m in a good humor, I’ll say, “That’s fine.” But if I am feeling not enthusiastic about Thai, I’ll say, “Well, maybe we should consider something else.” And he’ll say, “Well, then you choose.” (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Do you ever eat before midnight? (Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: We are very late eaters. Yes, we do. I mean, this could go on — this goes on for some time.