By Sunday morning, a different Charleston again is on show. Gentlemen in smarter, greyer suits, ladies in Sunday best go to church. There are more churches in Charleston than anywhere else in the United States of America, earning it the right to be known as the ‘Holy City.’

Yet, say that you are considering venturing up past the Visitor’s Centre and towards the expressway, where the Greyhound Station stands at the end of a row of budget motels and you would be considered some kind of a holy fool. This is where good ol’ Charleston meets the rest of America; motels inexplicably called something different online and in practice, soul food shacks and gas stations where the cashiers are protected by bullet-proof glass. Asked if he were going to let a young black man with exaggerated movements in a baggy white tee cut into line ahead of us, the answer was a meek nod and the most non-threatening smile possible.

This is an example, but a potent one, of America’s failure to connect people. Barely connected by transport, culture or business, the outskirts of Charleston simply don’t connect to the centre. Multi-million dollar homes give way to what are still practically shacks as you cross literal and metaphorical railways lines on the last bus home, in the early evening.

The South Carolina Primary is an early caucus. It’s advantage to the Republican Party is that as the third primary in the string leading to the Presidential Nomination, its conservative and religious members check the tendencies of any early, unexpected front-runners.

At this point it is worth reminding ourselves who the candidates for the Republican nomination for the Presidency of the United States are.

Mitt Romney – a man with a perfectly respectable record as Governor of Massachusetts, who is forced to run against this in order to secure the nomination. A businessman who claims he is well versed in creating jobs, but was more noted for rationalising them, and a Mormon who is notable for the infrequency of his converts (that last contradiction could be a metaphor for Romney’s entire existence).

Newt Gingrich – a man whose career has been a campaign against infidelity, political and sexual, and whose private life is a study in it.

Rick Santorum – a largely unpleasant piece of work.

Now, here is a snippet from a New York Times summary of a debate in South Carolina, back in November 2011.

8:40 P.M.Perry Says He Would Zero-Out Foreign Aid Budget

Mr. Perry suggested tonight that he would zero-out the foreign aid budget to all countries around the world, rethinking aid to friends and foes alike.

The governor of Texas cited Afghanistan, Pakistan and India as examples of countries that would no longer get any money from the United States at the beginning of a Perry administration.

He said countries would then be forced to prove that they deserve any money.

“The foreign aid budget in my administration will start at zero dollars,” he said. “Zero dollars. And then we’ll have a conversation.”

Year Zero

This is the essential position of this year’s Republican caucus. It is unwise to hold detailed policies, in response to social ills, since they could be rubished, like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax reform, or adopted by the current Administration. Yet the danger of being seen as obstructive is the tactic that Barack Obama is banking on, and the Primary system obscures this trap from Republican eyes.

Instead, the Primary system, which might be the most uninformed debate possible in America, encourages all candidates to start from scratch. Romney’s record in government counts for nothing, Gingrich’s ‘lessons learned’ from 1996 are forgotten, and serious thought surrounded the candidacy of Rick Perry, who not only could not remember one of the three departments of government that he would scrap, but more worryingly, could remember that he wanted to scrap the Education department.

Charleston is home to a monument to John C. Calhoun, remembered as one of America’s greatest Senators. Calhoun too excised the lessons of his past experience, when he turned his back on the policies of municipal improvement in order to favour nullification and slaveholding. A less tasteful memorial, on the way out of town, read as follows:

150 years ago, April 1861, shots were fired on Fort Sumter, and the Beast Lincoln had his war.

Most of the remainder of the South remains fixated with the legacy of Martin Luther King Jnr, whose birthday January 15 is. King’s legacy remains complicated, but imagine how short a shrift his ideas would have had, if they had been prefaced with the suggestion that every Church, every Union and every Movement simply start from the beginning, or take a long pause, while they figured out how to regulate the lives and choices of their individual members.

The Republican Party has ceased preaching and thinking and is hoping to win the 2012 Presidential election on tactics and advertising alone. This may be an interval, to make way for the inconvenient Primary season, or it might be a result of places like Charleston, which venerate foolish idols, sacrifice self-government to division and seek not to replicate their success elsewhere, but exclude the outside world.

There is every chance that these protests could multiply week on week, but that would take a sustained level of interest and a sense that results were achievable. The Presidential elections in March provide an obvious finish line for both the protestors and the establishment – if these go ahead relatively smoothly, Vladimir Putin will regain the Presidency, Hilary Clinton will desist poking her nose into things that don’t concern her, and the Russian people will go back to their slavish indifference to politics. On the other hand, if the elections fail to give Putin a mandate to govern, the result could be a democratic revolution, violency, or anarchy.

What are the Protesters Doing?

(An interesting look at who the protesters are, albeit taken in the heat of the moment)

It would seem helpful to summarise the events that have taken place largely off the front pages over the past few weeks, since they are of some importance. One of the striking features of these protests, just as was true of the Arab Spring, and indeed, many of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989, is that these are spontaneous and without leadership. An admirable amount of the protests have been organised online, to the extent that meetings of the organising committee are streamed and speakers selected for rallies by popular vote.

Meanwhile a number of the participants have become fodder for the media. The strongest voice is that of Alex Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger, whose fifteen day prison sentence for affray did him little damage with the masses. Navalny has the twin advantages of being anti-corruption out of principle and being unsullied by association with politics. He has resonated with the protesters, who, if they sometimes seem crude in their language, as Anne Applebaum points out, are merely reacting to their surroundings:

No wonder his thuggish style and occasionally vulgar language seem so perfectly in sync with the thuggish and vulgar society around him. No wonder they seem an appropriate response to Russia’s thuggish and vulgar leadership.

Then there are the darlings of the media, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Nemtsov (a Deputy PM under Yeltsin). Neither have huge credibility inside Russia, given the economic and social crises of the 1990s. They in many ways encapsulate the reasons Russians put up with Putin for so long.

Mikhail Prokhorov is the best hope for reformist in the forthcoming elections, unless Navalny should actually run and discover some influential backers. An oligarch, and owner of the New Jersey Nets, Prokhorov fell out with the Kremlin over interference in the political party he led for a short while, The Right Cause. Given that the other alternatives to Putin include the xenophobic Vladimir Zhirinovsky (whose party are ironically titled the Liberal Democrats), and the Communist General, Gennady Zyuganov, Prokhorov would be a favourable candidate in Western capitals, but is compromised by his wealth and former association with the Kremlin in ways that Navalny is not.

Then there is Alexei Kudrin, the former finance minster who can take much of the credit for rebuilding Russia’s (official) economy in the past decade. Kudrin left over a disagreement with Dmitry Medvedev (at its most reducible, the quarrel is over spending, with Medvedev accused of profligacy), but retains close links to Putin, making a return likely at some stage. Nonetheless, his speech in favour of immediate political reform was considered dynamite.

What is the Government Doing ?

While the establishment has not given the clear impression of panic, it has been wildly inconsistent in its reaction to the crisis of legitimacy. Putin has previously shown signs of recalcitrance at the idea of six more years in the Kremlin, and his contempt for the protesters is merely a symptom of his frustration with the country. The lame duck President, Dmitry Medvedev has striven to be all things to all people and has failed, a metaphor for the past four years if ever there was one. Mocking the protesters and condemning foreign provacateurs, while promising to tale ideas for political reform by mid-February (making changes before 4 March incredibly unlikely), Medvedev looks bereft of ideas and friends.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the raft of appointments over the past couple of weeks. Sergei Naryshkin, one of the Kremlin’s hands-on economic managers, is the new Chair of the Duma, to be replaced in the Presidential Administration by a siloviki, Sergei Ivanov.

The most interesting change is the reassignment of Vladislav Surkov, by far the most unusual character in European politics, to the Prime Ministerial office, where he will oversee political modernisation (in Russia, this would could mean anything from liberalisation to enhanced surveillance techniques). Surkov is a Mandelson par excellence, who even as he creates and destroys political parties, gives the impression that he is a force for pluralism. His bizarre interview last week, in which he warned that ‘the system’ had changed for ever, could be read as a plea for changes before the protests get out of hand. His verdict on his new post, that ‘stabilisation eats its own’ (not to mention his comment that he was too odious for the public eye), could as easily be taken seriously as it could be thoroughly discounted.

What Happens Next?

Levada poll: 25% of Russians support a revote for the Duma, but 56% oppose the dissolution of the new Duma.—
Kevin Rothrock (@agoodtreaty) December 30, 2011

The first signs of caution

The last few days suggest that personnel are critical to the continuation of the Putin regime. Institutional cliques are all well and good, but as the row between Britain and Germany over surviving Stasi files has revealed, some KGB agents were perfectly willing to sell names to the CIA. Reliable people matter, and to the extent that there are still people around that Putin can trust and has worked with, they will fill the key posts.

This leaves the option of brazening out the protests, in the hope that they can be bought off by slow-moving reforms. Unless the protests reach a critical mass, either because someone in the government makes a silly throwaway comment, or because the police go in heavy and a video of some poor student having his head bashed in goes whizzing round the Internet, many of the professional people currently protesting will be tempted to stand down.

Even so, the March elections present a dilemma. Cheat again and you risk inflaming the protests. Don’t cheat and you run the risk of losing your mandate, if not the election. This even presupposes that Putin can prevent party officials and local fixers from committing violations, although the few brave members of United Russia speaking up for due process are a refreshing indication of the party renewing itself.

One of the overlooked facts about the Duma elections is that they have brought a considerable amount of fresh blood into Russian politics. Should the protest movement translate into a coherent political party or greater activism on behalf of the various factions (left radicals, nationalists, liberal) that make up the movement, then future elections could lead to a very different political makeup.

Even if Putin is successful in winning the Presidency in March, with little accusation of fraud and a clear majority of the votes, it will be difficult to claim a mandate for doing nothing. Now that reforms are being openly discussed, and the media is openly reporting dissent, there is not only an incentive to introduce reforms but an expectation. Whether they carry through may be a question for another day.

Why this prejudice? It is true that in the early days, when Saracens went on a ten-match winning streak, the main attacking threat was one of arial bombardment, followed by a chasing loose forward. Brian Moore must have been in his element to see so many kicks properly chased up.

Today, the gameplan is different, as indeed it has been for two years. Yet Saracens are still accused of not allowing teams to play their natural games. Aha! The truth is out, because this has nothing to do with Saracens and everything to do with the fans on the end of a drubbing.

Take The Big Game 4. Saracens started the game like tyros and profited from it. Had they not butchered a lineout (against type), the first score might have been earlier than Strettle’s interception, but we’ll settle. As for the number of penalty kicks won, three of those first half penalties were for not releasing the player, but does anyone call Quins cynical? Did the ref go to his pocket?

What is most bizarre is that the most cynical teams are often the most admired. Richie McCaw doesn’t know the meaning of onside, and I don’t know where to start with the French, but both teams run the ball well because they start with the basics. If I was to say anything about Saracens, it wouldn’t be that they were ‘too good’, but that they were hopeless at finishing teams off. I have seen many needlessly exciting games this season, especially since Saracens put fifty on Leicester in a rare show of ruthlessness.

If these so-called fans are so keen to seen open, end to end games, there is always the Barbarians, or the Harlem Globetrotters for that matter. To me, it isn’t rugby to keep losing the ball, or to miss tackles just to see if the player will get ten metres further up the field. Frankly, losing dramatically isn’t even sport, unless you’re the underdog, in which case that’s life.

Harlequins had been waiting a long time for this match. Their ascent under Dean Richards checked by the ugly fallout from Bloodgate, they are finally back at the top of the tree, unbeaten in ten league games even after visits to Leicester and Gloucester, honours even with Toulouse after a feisty Heineken Cup double header and selling out 82,000 seats at Twickenham after three ‘Big Games.’ The delay in coming out and the pre-match fireworks suggested that they wanted to savour the moment. Unfortunately, Saracens were sharper and more disciplined, leaving Quins with the inevitable slur of the post-Christmas hangover accusation.

Much of the pre-match talk was of new England prospects, and there are certainly plenty on both sides. However, the importance of this match to the league also deserved a talking up. Had Harlequins won, they would have been thirteen points clear at the half way point of the season and odds on for holding onto that lead come May. Defeat will keep them honest, and open up the contest.

Both sides are capable of producing flowing rugby but are becoming renowned for big hits and tight defences, and both sides of their games were on show early on. A crunching tackle on Nick Evans and a looping run from David Strettle opened the game.

The momentum and referee not unjustly behind Saracens, the opening twenty minutes provided opportunities to attack but the first points came from practically identical penalties conceded by Harlequins holding onto the tackled player. Owen Farrell kicked flawlessly, adding a superlative to his name with each of his four penalties and one conversion. A lineout in Quins’ twenty-two should have offered Saracens the chance to get the first try, but an early jump meant that it was bungled. Not long after, however, Strettle was alert to a careless pass from prop Joe Marler on his own twenty-two and stole in under the posts.

Saracens scored their final points after only twenty-five minutes, taking three from a collapsed scrum. The next forty were painfully tense, with Quins in almost permanent possession due to Nick Evans’ clever tactical kicking and a number of errors by Saracens, with first time starter Peter Stringer struggling to get kicks away cleanly. Nonetheless, at half time Harlequins had only two penalties to their name.

The break did not bring the visitors a respite and the pressure began to tell. After Nick Easter of all people threw a miss-pass to release Ugo Monye down the wing, only a diving tackle from Strettle averted a score. The Saracens winger was injured in the process, but not before laying a strong maker down for the England selectors.

Another man looking to make a statement was Marler, for England and for his teammates, and he was the recipient of the pass that made their second half try. After going through several phases of hard-fought rucking on the Saracens line, Andy Saull was pulled out of position and Marler strolled in.

That more or less ended the spell of Harlequins dominance and opened up the game, with Saracens starting to win penalties in the scrum. The introduction of John Smit and Matt Stevens on either side of the scrum added weight and led to a big drive on the hour mark, while Chris Wyles, on for Strettle, made a telling break. For the most part, defence outweighed attack, with Brad Barritt, Ernst Joubert and Andy Saull all outstanding.

Three more clear chances arose; two for Harlequins and one for Saracens. First, Mike Brown fielded a Hodgson kick, dummied and shimmied his way out of his own twenty-two before unleashing a move that went through three more pairs of hands before being brought down. Then Easter found a gap, but his pass was too high for Maurie Fa’asavalu to hold. Immediately afterwards, James Short nearly went over in the corner after a sixty-metre move from a lineout, showing that there was space available, but again, sheer bloody-minded defence and a tackle by Monye at full tilt maintained the status quo.

It is easy to characterise a match with long periods of no scoring as dull, and indeed, both teams looked too exhausted at times to pull off the incredible. Such is the game these days in the Northern Hemisphere, that defensive efforts are fast outstripping attacking developments. Another way of looking at the difference between the two sides in the last twenty minutes is that while Saracens used all of their substitutes, Harlequins changed only three players over the course of the match.

That said, the will to attack is not gone, and both teams were adventurous from deep. This bodes well for England, who often seemed to have time on the ball this year but no ideas. Danny Care’s energy behind the Quins scrum establishes him as one of the two scrum halves in the Elite Player Squad, but Ben Spencer will be close behind with more performances like this. Farrell and Barritt arguably outplayed Jordan Turner Hall, while Nick Easter and Chris Robshaw looked powerful but slow in comparison to Saull and Joubert. Mike Brown showed vision at full back, Alex Goode a sure touch. On the wing, both Monye and Strettle excelled, while in the front row, Stevens frequently got the better of Marler in the second half.

Whoever makes the EPS, and plenty from both of the top two teams in the country deserve to, the coaches will have to go some way to replicate the intensity of the club game, and think long and hard about how they are going to unlock defences. For these two clubs, there are another eleven games to go in the regular season, plus the Heineken Cup to worry about. Building on these performances is going to be critical.

Harlequins: Brown; Stegman, Hooper, Turner-Hall, Monye; Evans, Care; Marler, Brooker, Johnston; Vallejos, Robson; Fa’asavalu, Robshaw, Easter.

Replacements: Williams for Stegman (34), Gray for Brooker (58), Fairbrother for Johnston (58).

Not Used: Lambert, Matthews, Wallace, Bolt, Clegg.

Saracens: Goode; Strettle, Farrell, B Barritt, Short; Hodgson, Stringer; Gill, Brits, Nieto; Borthwick, Kruis; Brown, Saull, Joubert.

Replacements: Wyles for Strettle (42), Stevens for Nieto (46), Botha for Kruis (50), Spencer for Stringer (60), Smit for Gill (60), Powell for Farrell (73), Wray for Brown (73), George for Brits (77).

Attendance: 82,000.

Referee: Wayne Barnes (RFU).

It was extraordinary the degree to which everything ultimately revolved around this one man. In almost all the Forum’s major decisions and statements he was the final arbiter, the one person who could somehow balance the very different tendencies and interests in the movement. In this sense, as in Solidarity, many decisions were not made democratically. Yet a less authoritarian personality than Havel it would be hard to imagine.

Timothy Garton Ash

Having learned all those lessons, we should all fight together against arrogant words and keep a weather eye out for any insidious germs of arrogance in words that are seemingly humble.

Obviously this is not just a linguistic task. Responsibility for and toward words is a task which is intrinsically ethical.

Vaclav Havel

The revolutions that broke out across Central and Eastern Europe in the winter of 1989 and afterwards were similar in style and unique in content. Everywhere, economic decline, the absence of Soviet military force and popular protest caused governments to panic and the true face of communism to be seen, discussed and disavowed.

Yet each nation brought its own characteristics and created its own figureheads. Germany’s revolution was determined by the flood of migrants through the Berlin Wall and Helmut Kohl’s call for reunification, Hungary’s by the assistance of Austria’s embassy – two practically dissolved marriages back on track, however briefly. Poland was wrenched away from the USSR by a trade union movement and two months of round table negotiations, led by the garrulous shop steward Lech Walesa. Ukraine came into being surprisingly, practically at the whim of corrupt Leonid Kuchma and the new, chaotic Romania was sired by the mob that dragged Ceausescu from his palace and executed him.

Czechoslovakia rode an idiosyncratic wave. The last of the major revolutions of 1989, it was also the most intellectually charged. The last major moment of optimist, the Prague Spring, had taken place in 1968, when much of the world was convulsed by protest movements and existentialism was at its height. In 1977 the arrest of the psychedelic rock band Plastic People of the Universe were arrested led to the artist’s manifesto Charter 77 and in 1989 it was the students again, who in protesting against the regime were given the first bloody nose but continued to go out onto the streets and march.

For Vaclav Havel to emerge as the nucleus of this movement still took a leap of imagination, as Nelson Mandela’s centrality to the end of apartheid was surprising after his many years of imprisonment. Havel had a little of Mandela’s personal charisma, had authored not only Charter 77 but other essays that drew attention to the regime’s true nature and had been to jail twice for his beliefs. Yet only the Czechoslovakians would look to so peculiar a man to coordinate their negotiations with the regime and become their first post-communist president.

Havel’s contribution to 1989 survives in his literature, which will be amply discussed in the wake of his death. His later political career is more complex, but equally interesting in many ways. Havel himself would admit that he was hardly a political man by nature, and by an large he left domestic policy to his long-time Premier, Vaclav Klaus, whose keen Thatcherism he nonetheless disagreed with.

There was always a difficulty in telling whether Havel was an especially serious or playful President. He would lecture audiences on the meaning of truth and openly voice self-doubt. Yet his writer’s eye and sense of spectacle were also a part of the new Czech Republic. The guards wore new uniforms, designed by the costumes man from the film Amadeus. Most amusingly, when Havel had a set of mysteriously locked doors in the Prague castle busted open, they found a full communications suite, which he used mischievously to send a New Year’s Greeting to Gorbachev in Moscow.

External relations were Havel’s specialty, which he mastered in his own unique way. It is now easy to see the extension of NATO and the enlargement of the EU as a natural result of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, but Havel played his part in both, winning over a cautious Bill Clinton (with the help of a Lou Reed concert), and in coalition with the heads of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia (the Visegrád group), successfully pounding on the doors of Europe. His celebrity made introductions easy, but he was a shrewd and influential player in European history. Oh, and he convinced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to pay for new chandeliers on Castle Hill.

Much of the eulogising that has accompanied the news of Vaclav Havel’s death would have embarrassed the playwright dissident, just as the constant acclaim of high office embarrassed him on a frequent basis. Just a few months after becoming the President of Czechoslovakia, as it then was, Havel told an audience that “The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.” To the surprise of many, Havel made good on his promise to go back to the theatre and writing after leaving office.

Havel may have stood for a romantic notion of Europe, as some have insinuated. He certainly sought to promote democracy and freedom as a necessary part of the human condition, in thought and deed. Thanks to Havel and at his invitation, Radio Free Europe moved East, to Wenceslas Square. If he was criticised late in his second term for siding with George W. Bush over Iraq, he might have pointed out that non-alignment was a luxury that his part of Europe did not have. His closeness to the Euro-Atlantic alliance, as well as his celebrity, ensured that security in Europe remained a pressing concern, and not merely a token element of complacent speeches.

An artist who exceeds his welcome can be reviled more than an artist who was never popular in the first place. Vaclav Havel never became a figure of contempt like Yeltsin, was never trounced in an election like Walesa or Gorbachev, and for all the worthy eulogies, was and is genuinely missed in Europe.

In Hitch 22, Christopher Hitchens remarked that one of his many literary friends announced to another quite gleefully over breakfast that he had been asked to write another’s obituary for the Times, which famously stockpiles its memorials just in case. The other stayed quiet, fully aware that he had already submitted his tormentor’s obituary some weeks before.

I delve into the unglamorous mechanics of how these words reach our retinas because the medium of writing could not be more important to my subject. How and what Christopher Hitchens wrote was the very measure of him, as almost all his friends and acquaintances acknowledge, and how his death at the relatively untimely age of sixty-two occasioned so many obituaries distinguishes him from each melancholy rememberance. Almost everyone is remembered, somehow, but few people are really celebrated.

Hitchens was hardly anything if not a writer, and a writer’s writer at that. He saved his most approving words and his most genial conversation for other writers, frequently offering a drink to young hacks in his adopted hometown of Washington, taking long boozy lunches with the Bloomsbury set in the 1980s and 1990s (the word games were legendary).

Politics, and politicians were distinctly on the other side – people to be watched and critiqued. The Clintons were his particular bete noir – he found Bill questionable in his approach to women and campaign monies, Hilary a compulsive liar and a coward for the way she sacrificed a meaningful intervention in the Balkans for a health care reform that was never achieved. Henry Kissinger he never could stand and wished to bring to trial. Such is the way of the professional journalist.

Ideas were also important, and marked the difference between Hitchens and the Gonzo school of journalism, which he claimed not to care a great deal for. Hunter S. Thompson could drink similar amounts and savaged Richard Nixon with words as savage as Hitchens ever deployed, but his journalism was fundamentally theatrical and more passionate than rational. Hitchens could hate and poor scorn over a person simply because of their beliefs, hence his critique of Mother Theresa, the woman whose resistance to female emancipation merely entrenched policy.

Hitchens’ tendancy to demolish words that could be used to describe him makes it difficult to pin him down. He considered neo-conservative a misonomer, pointing out that he was rarely conservative, and liberal wishy-washy. His lack of interest in political economy made his socialism a practical non-starter, despite his early Trotskyism. In a recent interview, Hitchens, trying to synthesise his militant atheism and support of the War on Terror admitted “I have one consistency, which is against the totalitarian… the enemy who tries to get inside your head.”

In time, I rather hope that the ‘Hitch Slap,’ the frequently-employed and entertaining verbal putdown, takes a back seat to the calm and considered way that Hitchens went about his business. Taking eighteen months to die is a miserable and unromantic misfortune, but to do so with courage is the best that can be asked of a man. Hitchens did that, as indeed he had been courageous and ignorant of self-pity for most of his life.

This was a man who collected his mother’s body after her self-murder and channelled the tragedy into his fury at the state of Greece and later Cyprus, who chose to tour his book God Is Not Great not amongst Britain’s middle-class intellectuals, but in America’s Bible Belt, and who not only defended the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but practically agitated for them in a way that was sure to have an affect on his liveihood.

Being called a ‘drink-soaked, former Trotskyist popinjay by George Galloway probably rescued Hitchens from ignominy at one point, but a shrewd marshalling of the facts, a brilliant sense of when to press home the advantage and a not insignificant ego meant that of the many challengers who hoped to best him, and finally convince him of his mistake, few if any went home satisfied.

Had Hitchens lived in some other place, at some other time, his influence could have been radically different. Born an Arab, he may have rotted in a Saudi jail, or been the chief protagonist of the Arab Spring. Active during the French Revolution, he would surely have cavorted with Danton and may have made the equation against Robspierre swing the other way. An upper-middle class Brit, in a country that resembled ‘Weimar without the sex,’ Hitchens was no revolutionary, but always challenging nonetheless. An American citizen for much of his life, he wrote in his biography that ‘the only revolution retaining any verve was the American one.’ This may have made little difference in Egypt, Syria or in Putin’s Russia, but Hitchens’ writing was a corrective to the hypocrisy in American foreign policy that welcomed any ‘son of a bitch, so long as he was our son of a bitch.’ Such a statment would now be virtually unthinkable.

Testimonies from politicians seem strangely out of place, given Hitchens’ anti-political, ideological background. Nonetheless, the debate with Tony Blair in Toronto not so long ago was a watershed in polite, well-informed debate between the religious and the atheistic, and the former Prime Minister played a genuine, well-meaning tribute. Few would believe that the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, had previously interned for Hitchens, but there too was an influence.

There will be many imitators, mostly inferior in language or courage. Johann Hari is one journalist who failed to reach the heights of his hero, and others will smell power or sense themselves to be on unsafe ground and retreat. Yet that ferocious love of liberty will also be coupled with a more generous soul in less gifted individuals and will make the political impulse relevant and vital for another generation at least.

Protestors gather in London to call for the resignation of Putin and Medvedev

“Ne Revolutsiia,” they chanted in response to the provacateurs in their mist. No revolution. In Russia, even a protest that brings a hundred thousand people onto the streets carries an enormous weight of historical baggage. On one of the first days of protests, calls to march on the White House (the seat of the legislature, not the executive) were not merely disregarded but encouraged the protestors to head home rather than revisit the painful memories of 1993.

It is rarely understood by the West that Russians are as suspicious of Western democracy as Vladimir Putin, largely blaming foreign forces for the events of the 1990s and the disintegration of the political for the default and subsequent inflation. Hence United Russia’s large measure of popularity over the past decades. Putin promised a steady hand on the tiller, and war on any of the get-rich quick oligarch’s who threatened the stability of the country.

That stability increasingly means less and less in a Russia that is struggling with the after-affects of the financial crisis of 2008. Pressure on pensioners is especially toxic, but soaring property prices in Moscow will also have left a large number of losers. That said, economics may not be key. The internet as a forum for discussion and the hated draft of the country’s young men will also have fuelled dissatisfaction.

What has surprised people is the willingness of the Kremlin to allow these protests to proceed – indeed the democratic process is usually only allowed to endorse decisions already taken. Despite an attempt to match the number of protestors with 50,000 riot police in Moscow, no violence was reported and arrests were not on the same scale as on the first and second days of the protest. Given that many of the protestors leaders were in jail as a result of their exhortations, this was not always a given.

Moreover, many have remarked on the media’s coverage of yesterday’s protests, which in contrast to previous days was fulsome. This bodes ominously for organisers of the poll, including the election chief Vladimir Churov, and for current President Dmitry Medvedev, who is seen as tarnished by the fraud.

The moderation of the protests has legitimised them in the eyes of the government, who fear losing power. The opposite is not yet true, and it is undeniable that the protests have acquired an anti-Putin dimension (“Russia without Putin”). Professional pride and a lack of alternatives will ensure that Putin is a candidate in March, whilst Sergei Mironov of A Just Russia has also confirmed that he will stand and will not seek to govern in a coalition with United Russia, an irony for an initially Kremlin-sponsored party.

The election results have been declared valid, leaving little room for manoeuvre. Putin could seek to broaden his coalition, which seems implausible for the reasons mentioned above. The most likely solution for Putin is to brazen it out, throw resources at the election in March and hope the protestors can be bought out.

The risk is that this election does not deliver a genuine victory and that the protestors see no reason not to repopulate the streets. Moderation and patience have been a hallmark of the Snow Revolution, but hope could outlast both.

Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you: online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…—
John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) December 05, 2011

Then, things started to go wrong. In the wake of the congress at which Medvedev nominated Putin to stand for the Presidency for a third time in March the financial minister, Alexei Kudrin, resigned. A nationalist march in early November drew 7,000 angry young men to the streets and not long ago, Putin was booed at a martial arts event. Kremlin political operators blithely ignored the signs and resorted to their tried and tested strategy; cheating.

Blog – Putin and the Loss of Trust in United Russia: wp.me/pxTeJ-9e—
Josh Black (@OutoftheBlack) November 12, 2011

The elections were still widely expected to produce a comfortable United Russia victory as most of its competitors had been banned. The Communists, part of Putin’s nostalgic Sovietism, and Just Russia, stage managed by the Kremlin, were expected to act as a safety valve, but a low turnout (60%) and a high protest vote counterracted the usual ‘merging of party and government’ as reported by the OSCE.

Saddest press conference ever – Medvedev/Putin reaction to Duma results – tinyurl.com/7ajfsu3—
Jesse Heath (@russiamonitor) December 04, 2011

There were some positive results – United Russia held their 99% of the Chechen vote, but the tired and disappointed expressions on the face of Putin and Medvedev spoke volumes. Putin formally headed the United Russia list and it was his face on the billboards, by and large. Medvedev, soon to be Prime Minister, we are led to believe, was there to face the music.

Whose speech was more misjudged is difficult to say. Medvedev spoke for six to seven minutes, mentioning democracy repeatedly. Putin merely snarled a token acknowledgement of the state of the country and declared that this bode well for the stability if the country.

Crowd chant "vor dolzhen sidet v tyurme" (a thief should be in prison). Putin's soundbite on Khodorkovsky, turned around to refer to Putin—
Shaun Walker (@shaunwalker7) December 05, 2011

It was an inadequate performance in any case. Tonight, thousands again took to the streets of Moscow to protest in a disorganised fashion. Despite being caught unprepared, the police were out in force and arrested many, including the talismanic anti-corruption campaigner, Alex Navalny, who was intimately involved in both the march in early November and tonight.

There it is: speaker says this is the "Russian Tahrir."—
Julia Ioffe (@ioffeinmoscow) December 05, 2011

Talk of a revolution is immature in the short term. The three scenarios in which one could conceivably happen are each as unlikely as each other. Firstly, Putin and Medvedev could decide that the regime is fatally flawed without greater concessions to democracy, introduce limited measures and see public opinion outrun them. Secondly, the protests could spiral in a way that sees political actors (especially the fresh blood in the Duma) begin to act independently. Thirdly, Putin could lose the Presidential election in March. As the Arab Spring has again proved, revolutions do not require leaders, only the hints of a faster way out of the mess the country is in.

Nonetheless, Putin will want to work up his popularity both before and after the March election (assuming the polls are still a true and fair reflection). Medvedev is not widely regarded as a strong leader and disappointed liberals by caving into Putin’s re-election, so could easily be fired. Yet that would leave Putin without a buffer from a) public discontent and b) political pressure from the Duma.

Biggest gains in the Russian elections look to be military (Communists) and welfare (Just Russia) budgets. Limited scope for a Kudrin return—
Josh Black (@OutoftheBlack) December 05, 2011

The election has delivered a large left wing protest vote (not surprising given hindrances on Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces). Just Russia’s leader, Sergey Mironov, has in the past said that he wanted Putin to win elections. Nonetheless, he will have demands for spending on welfare budgets he would like to see extracted before delivering another such endorsement. The communists are more hardline and will not support the government explicitly. However, they will also frame the debate around welfare and military spending.

Unemployment is in the region of 10%, and disproportionately affects young men. Inflation has dropped massively as a result of credit restrictions. This suggests that Russia will try to use its huge foreign reserves (third largest) to purchase goodwill. Currently, the budget only balances when oil prices are at $115 a barrel. That seems improbable, given that it has been so high only twice in the past five years.

To get the WTI oil price, please enable Javascript.

What then will happen? Unlike Egypt there is no ecumenical structure to rear protest, the regime is not yet ageing and sclerotic and the finance is available to buy off dissent. That will merely kick the can down the road. The re-emerging middle class and the entrepreneurs who want Russia to remain in the first rank of nations will not suffer higher spending forever, hence Kudrin’s resignation. An alliance of old biddies and young unemployed men are warming to Navalny’s critique of ‘the party of crooks and thieves.’ Moreover, the gas simply will not last forever. That means that reform may prove unavoidable, if not irresistible, in the long term.

Whether that will wash with the alliance of business and politics that currently runs Russia is the critical question. It would be strange if the oligarchs, who have benefitted so much from the regime, were the cause of its downfall but in Russia stranger things have happened.

Well worth reading – and reflecting on – Polish FM Radek Sikorski's speech in Berlin yesterday. mfa.gov.pl/files/docs/kom…—
Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) November 29, 2011

Radek Sikorkski’s speech in Berlin on European integration yesterday was too good to go unmentioned, even though it has already been picked over by newspapers as good as The Economist and the Financial Times. The Polish Foreign Minister is erudite and has a sound grasp of history, but it is the content of the speech, as much as it’s jokes and examples that makes it compelling.

The thrust of the argument is that the model on which the EU is based is flawed. It is singularly ambitious, but lacks the raw instruments of power. In place of the current hotch potch, the EU should be able to review national budgets and sanction governments that break the rules in a way that threatens growth. The Commission would be hacked back, to make policy making more effective, the Parliament fixed in one location to increase accountability and a large amount of discretion reserved for individual treasuries to maintain sovereignty over the means of growth.

That said, the move would entail a huge loss of sovereignty and could take years to execute. That does not make it worthless, but since the EU’s baby steps have failed to remove it from the rapidly approaching danger, it is an interesting signpost that will be acceptable to smaller countries because it is within the framework of the EU (though the Polish opposition have already called it more or less treasonous) and to Germany so long as it is robust.

The urgency within the EU is, or rather should be, increasing day by day. The latest piece of bad news is that Germany has now outstripped Italy and France in the market for credit default swaps, while borrowing on the back of national bonds has been affected by low take up (Germany) and high rates of interest (Italy). Credit default swaps are relatively new, poorly understood and even more badly regulated – they may not cause defaults, save in extreme cases such as when insurers go bust on the back of huge market shifts (AIG), but they increase the attractiveness of a default to unpatriotic fund managers (of the kind in this BBC video) and are dangerous for those entities being speculated on because:

a) They appear safer than useful creditors, such as industry or national governments;
b) They reward investors for spotting over-extended creditors, rather than growth areas; and
c) They can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As such, Europe would be well advised to understand, and most likely crack down on these financial instruments (as Nicholas Sarkozy has proposed and Angela Merkel appears to be considering – in the case of naked shorting only). This will not be popular and may limit the Eurozone’s ability to finance itself, as fund managers will not be able to hedge their bets. Hence the need for a new, credible financial instrument, the Eurobond while institutional reform gets off the ground.

Offending the EU and its members for the sake of domestic consumption has been Mr Cameron’s strategy ever since he took his party out of the European Conservatives grouping and set up a new, eurosceptic grouping in the European Parliament. The affair earned him a tongue-lashing from David Miliband, but if that was the worst of it, no more senior member of the Shadow Cabinet need retort than Baroness Warsi – keen as ever to go to war.

Yet the strategy of carping at the margins has failed, and embarrassingly so. France, an awkward partner, aside, the effect on Mr Cameron’s relationship with Angela Merkel has been disastrous. Last week the German Chancellor, undoubtedly the political centre of gravity in the EU at present, warned Britain to avoid substantial amendments to any new treaty to regulate the Eurozone. Mr Cameron could claim, with well-worn earnestness that ‘they started it’ but Ms Merkel could as easily repeat the claims of the British Labour Party, that is not a time to play politics in the midst of a serious crisis.

That Mr Cameron went alone to the meeting with Angela Merkel, as well as to see Jose Manueline Barroso and Herman van Rompuy, is revealing. Moreover, he did so at a point when the figureheads of Central European countries are substantially parroting his own agenda.

First, there is Slovakia, the most reluctant contributor to the bailout of Greece. As the second poorest member of the Eurozone, it is not hard to see why, especially as the financial crisis has already claimed one government.

Second; Poland, whose Prime Minister, Donald Tusk has just accomplished the unique feat in post-Cold War Polish politics of being reelected. Moreover, Poland has the honour of being the only economy in the EU not to go into recession in the past four years. In an eloquent and wide-ranging speech to Parliament, Mr Tusk set out his plans to tackle a looming pension gap, reform farmers’ national insurance and promote growth through the tax system. In practically the same week, the Polish EU Presidency settled on a 2% rise in the EU budget to keep pace with inflation, contrary to the more profligate demands of the European Parliament, which wanted 5%.

Third; Hungary, whose Prime Minister, Victor Orban recently spoke at the London School of Economics. Mr Orban admitted, in Steve Hilton-esque terms, that his country had a ‘growth problem,’ but that it was well poised for investment nonetheless through its renewed infrastructure and culture.

Finally, Romania, who alone in the EU seem to be speeding towards some form of growth.

The thread linking these countries is a wariness of the Eurozone, of which only Slovakia is a part. Hungary, which is threatened with a downgrade to ‘junk’ status by the ratings agencies (and a politically unreliable government), may be the hardest to believe when they call for stringent benchmarks (Mr Orban specifically questioned the timing of the higher capital quotas for banks, now 9%), but it is nonetheless in the interests of these countries, as of all, that the Euro is maintained by common standards of solvency to avoid devaluation or the attentions of short sellers.

Poor countries largely, they are understandably keen to see investment in infrastructure and their economies continue. Having caught up to some extent with the established EU members, that could be either focused in key areas or come from the private sector, so long as there are credible markets to their east.

In a pithy turn of phrase, Mr Tusk pointed out that in the EU, everyone is invited to dinner. However, if you are not at the table, you are most likely on it. This is the distinctive attitude that Britain has taken to the EU, and it is unlikely to be constructive. It has alienated Germany with its defence of finance and has failed to seek new allies amongst the governments of Europe. Having given up a share of the rebate under Tony Blair, it has failed to push for the removal of protectionist subsidies in favour of ones that open up investment and undertaken the same hectoring tone of President Obama over the Greek debt crisis; sort out your mess so I can jolly well carry on blaming you for my own.

Perhaps the only point on which Mr Cameron could conceivably differ from those Central European countries named above is over Russia, where Mr Cameron has recently been touting Britain as open for business. Overturning uneasy British relations with Russia is not a bad decision but it should be recognised that as an emerging market, Russia will naturally look for partners to do business with, if the political costs are not too high. At the moment, pushing for the expansion and reform of the EU would not hurt Mr Cameron’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, and should be strongly considered, if Messrs Tusk, Orban and Radičová still see fit to associate with Britain amidst its own growth problem.

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Postscript: A really good article from MP Denis MacShane on the Conservatives’ EU isolation at Progress makes similar points.