There are some signs that the ALP is gearing up to follow the example set by Tony Blair in Britain. Mark Latham, the most vocal advocate of Blair’s approach to government, the Third Way, has been returned to the shadow front bench, charged with the task of working out why the residents of Sydney’s outer suburbs failed to vote Labor. Lindsay Tanner, who disowns the ‘Third Way’ label but advocates a similar policy agenda to that of Latham, has positioned himself as a major player in the reform process. More generally, the rhetoric of reform shares many parallels with New Labour: the emphasis on community and participation, as well as the ritualistic blaming of the Trade Union movement for all the Party’s present ills.

On the face of it, Blair’s two landslide victories in comparison to the ALP’s six years in opposition seem to offer an obvious model for Labor. But when looked at more closely, Blair’s ‘landslide’ victories are not all they’re cracked up to be.

It ought to be recalled that New Labour won its second victory with around only 25 per cent of the eligible vote. Some commentators suggest the true figure may be closer to 20 per cent of those eligible to vote, given that many people who have dropped off the electoral roll to avoid paying the poll tax have never bothered to re-register. The 2001 British General Election was distinguished by having the lowest total voter turnout since 1918 when voter turnout was disrupted by the war. This year, only 58 per cent of the population bothered to vote. Labour MP Jack Straw tried to put a positive spin on this, claiming that the low turnout reflected widespread contentment with the government. Those with a firmer grip on reality attributed the lack of participation to voter apathy.

While comparisons with Britain and Australia are difficult to sustain because of differences in the nature of the political and electoral systems, party and political culture, the point here is that despite the appearance of landslide victories, there is no mass groundswell of popular support for Blair and New Labour.

Furthermore, if the ALP does go down the New Labour path, they will have to contend with the fact that the Liberals have already pinched most of the Blair agenda. Mutual obligation, social capital, social inclusion and all the rest of the New Labour lexicon regularly pop up in speeches by Howard Government ministers. Sounding like your opponent, even if there is a substantive difference in your policy, is not a smart strategy for a party that many perceive to be lacking in conviction.

If not the Third Way, then where to for Labour?

Part of the problem faced by Labor is its failure to develop new constituencies. The fact is that constituencies — as the term suggests — are constituted; they do not occur naturally.

In the 1950s and 1960s Menzies expanded home ownership, a consequence of which was to create a swathe of middle-class voters imbued with conservative Liberal values. Whitlam attempted to create a coalition constituency among young white-collar workers, women voters and the alternative lifestyle movement, by expanding government services. His time in office was, however, too brief to consolidate such groups.

In the 1980s and 1990s the ALP flirted with white-collar voters and the green vote, while its own policy settings (deregulation, privatisation etc.) contributed to the destruction of its core support in organised industrial labour. And therein lies the problem for Labour today: it is much easier to create constituencies with the resources of government than it is from the relative obscurity of opposition.

If current media reports are accurate, the ALP leadership is currently trying to woo so-called ‘aspirational’ voters. These are people who have no strong party allegiance, are working or lower middle-class, but aspire to ‘something better’. Such voters are the main target of Blair’s New Labour and Howard’s Liberals.

Barring a messy leadership change or a major scandal, the ALP’s pitch for the aspirational vote is likely to fail. The reason?

By the time the next election rolls around, the Liberals will have had around nine years to cultivate this constituency as their own. Moreover, in order to appeal to the aspirationals, the ALP will have to sound and look like the Liberals as much as possible. In other words, we will see a repeat of its recent election performance, where the ALP appears as the poor man’s aspirational party.

If the ALP is to avoid a repeat of its recent performance, it needs to reach beyond the aspirational voters to build and consolidate new coalitions of constituencies to outnumber the aspirationals. This might include those who rejected the Party in favour of the Greens at the recent election and, as far out as it may seem now, those who protested outside Crown Casino on September 11 2000.

To use a key phrase favoured by the proponents of the Third Way to characterise their approach, this would be to think the unthinkable.

Christopher Scanlon is Associate Editor of Arena Magazine

Words failed onlookers in the moments immediately following the attacks. Footage showed hundreds of stunned, mute and dust-covered New Yorkers. The scenes were disturbingly familiar — many eyewitnesses were reminded of a movie set, yet another Towering Inferno. While these disaster-film images were too easily absorbed, their implications defied immediate description.

This was remedied in typically blunderbuss style by President George W. Bush, who broke off a primary school lesson to announce that his government would investigate ‘to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.’ This statement suggested that the culprits were not merely a few disparate individuals, but ‘folks’, or even its homophonous ‘Volk’, implying a unified, coherent grouping of people. Significant elements of the American public took this as a cue for directing anger towards specific nationalities, ethnicities and religious affiliations. The days following 11 September saw an upsurge in attacks on Muslims and even Sikhs, compelling Bush to speak from a mosque calling for restraint.

Without being able to pinpoint a culprit or motive, Bush identified these events as attacks on freedom by advocates of evil and terror. The massively ambitious aim of this new war was to ‘rid the world of evil’. Bush quoted apocalyptically from Psalm 23, while former president Bill Clinton also identified ‘evil forces’ as the perpetrators. This Old Testament rhetoric was rapidly adopted by the international media. Immediately under its masthead, the Age dramatically proclaimed a scenario of ‘Good versus evil’. The military buildup around Afghanistan has been given the remarkably biblical name ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (formerly the even less tolerable ‘Operation Infinite Justice’), both names betraying anxiety over the status of future retaliation. No location or method is suggested in these labels (as in ‘Desert Storm’). Instead, they gesture towards a precariousness of objective and uncertainty of duration.

In this rhetoric, evil is embodied by rogue individuals. Remove the villains and evil ceases to be. Osama bin Laden was quickly singled out, though persuasive evidence of this connection is yet to be made public, despite claims by Tony Blair and Alexander Downer of its existence. Bush seems to imagine himself as leading an oversized moral rabbiting expedition. ‘We will smoke Osama out’, he declared, ‘and get him running’. Another twist upon the same theme was Bush’s sheriff-like declaration that bin Laden was ‘wanted, dead or alive’. Bush is clearly more comfortable inhabiting the moral universe of the Wild West than the complex, demanding sphere of international diplomacy.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has contributed a vivid array of organic metaphors to this new verbal war. In the days following the attack we heard that terrorist networks needed to be uprooted and destroyed. The villains became unwanted weeds who should be removed forever from the garden of goodness. The terrorists operated in ‘cells’ that should be excised, like cancerous growths. Powell and his colleagues believe the coming conflict will be a dirty, muddy business. Soldiers will be struggling against other soldiers and inhospitable terrain. Despite repeated assertions of the novelty of the present situation, such possibilities sound disturbingly familiar.

Gone is the euphemistic high-tech military language of the last dozen years — of surgical strikes, smart bombs, pin-point accuracy and minimal collateral damage. Military campaigns in the Persian Gulf and Balkans saw the rise of a disembodied rhetoric of engagement, where precision technology took the place of messy hand-to-hand fighting. Talk of star wars missile defence shields has been replaced by Star Wars rhetoric of virtuous Jedi knight-figures taking on the dark side. Acknowledgements are being made that the billions spent on whizz-bang surveillance gadgets has been misdirected. Calls are being made for increased ‘human intelligence’ in the place of such solecisms as ‘digital intelligence’ and ‘military intelligence’.

In a stunning rhetorical move, Bush extended the threat to Muslims in general by announcing that the new war was a ‘crusade’, echoing the call of some Taliban extremists for a Jihad. To call this comment inflammatory is an understatement. A crusade, in this context, cannot be separated from the historical attempt by Christians to expel Muslims from the Holy Land. Not only has the language of Bush and his sidekicks often seemed ill-considered, but it has also been thoroughly unmemorable. We are yet to hear a ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech, or a phrase as pithy as Churchill’s claim that never ‘was so much owed by so many to so few’. Bush’s rhetoric has operated at the least demanding, most elementary possible level, entirely lacking substantial political ideas, such as anti-totalitarianism or a defence of egalitarian principles. It aims not to cohere a population around meaningful political goals, but instead functions as a child-like fantasy of eliminating baddies and banishing monsters. Tony Blair has contributed a mood of moral seriousness, repeatedly intoning upon the ‘utmost gravity’ of the situation, though his discourse too falls into reductive invocations of evil.

Formal political dissent in the United States has been almost entirely absent, with the single senator who called for restraint subsequently receiving death threats. Democratic processes fail when public exchange is discouraged and political leaders display unanimity. Informed, critical perspectives become invisible and discouraged when the United States asserts that the only options are being with us or against us. It is no coincidence that this contraction of public debate is being accompanied by previously unthinkable constraints on civil liberties. Independent thinking and genuine dialogue have been the first casualties in the new shadow fighting.

While Bush continues to conjure a sufficiently nefarious villain, missiles begin flying towards Afghan civilians. I suspect a chasm will gradually emerge between Bush’s condescending, simplistic political language, and the enormous suffering that such a frenzied demonisation will produce in Afghanistan. The hollowness of this political rhetoric is likely to fail over time, as the burden grows of drawn-out military action. I doubt that such B-movie language of good against evil can sustain the necessary force of persuasion as soldiers arrive back home in body bags.

At no other time has a war existed at such a crucially linguistic level. The precise shape of this rhetoric matters enormously, as it literally defines the otherwise unknown enemy. Unfortunately, the simplified and moralistic language of response has so far only stirred up anti-Muslim feeling and calls for immediate bombing. As the United States confronts the difficulties of military retaliation, the rhetoric of description needs to gesture towards deeper understanding. If a reasoned and appropriate response is to emerge to these horrific attacks, the first critical conflict is the war of words.

Douglas McQueen-Thomson is Assistant Editor of Arena Magazine.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

William Empson, ‘Missing dates’ (1937) in Complete Poems (2000)

During the 2001 electoral campaign (as for years before) political journalists puzzled over the personality of Tony Blair. The American observer Joe Klein, for example, commented after a day on the campaign trail:

Blair does have a rather synthetic quality, ‘A man without a hinterland’ Roderick Nye, the policy director for the Tories, says. And there is an indescribable something missing from his public persona … He recently acknowledged enjoying The Simpsons. But he always leaves one wondering if moments like The Simpsons revelation are, somehow, tactical — the latest planned attempt at humanization. (New Yorker, 4 June 2001)

He compares Blair to President Clinton in this respect. However comparable in policy terms, he says, the two remain oceans apart as public personae. On election day itself the Guardian published another attempt by Klein at reading the oracle:

Even now, as he approaches a likely second landslide, no-one seems to know how Tony Blair feels as a person or, more to the point, who he is. This is both extraordinary and mystifying. He is about as familiar as a public figure can be. We know that he is religious … But there remains an ineffable something missing. There is an antiseptic, impenetrable, stainless-steel brightness to Blair. There are no rough edges, few edges of any sort …

These are very perceptive comments, but they may also be out of focus. The absence of a readable ‘hinterland’ and of ‘rough edges’, spontaneity somehow rendered contrived or deliberate, a somewhat super-human demeanour salted by affectations of impulse or immediacy: these are indeed enigmatic as individual traits. However, they are also perfect descriptions of Britishness. They seem to delineate a social, collective ethos rather than personal idiosyncracies.

The identity which they replicate is also rather out-dated: a ‘Britishness’ which was — rather than the confusion of the present. But there may be good reasons for this. Like Blair’s increasingly prominent religiosity, it may be felt as a necessary condition of acceptability. After all, we know political parties are among the most conservative of social bodies, and in this case they live in the most profoundly conservative of states. These frameworks compel the present to embody the past — however much ‘radicalism’ is spouted at the same time.

The effect is indeed that of a magician who has made a compact with a ghost — the haunting presence of a spirit, ‘elusive’ mainly in the sense of significantly detached from interlocutors and the contemporary public. Yet the detachment gives him a certain leverage over his audience. The mixture of phlegm and steeliness which Klein noted creates a space of surmise. Beholders are usually tempted to think that if they behave correctly, then he might still produce what they want out of the enigmatic hat. Blair never quite escapes the suspicion of not quite being himself — as distinct from pretending to be his own self. But this edgelessness can also be interpreted as a constantly moving promise. Liberal commentators who on 6 and 7 June ended up urging readers to vote New Labour after all (‘critically’, in spite of blatant failure, etc.) did so entirely in those terms: ‘He may yet still … ‘ (and so forth).

‘Identity’ in this sense is a fusion of the personal and the social, which also means ‘national’. Nobody ever doubted for a second that Mrs Thatcher or John Major were English, however loudly they orated in the name of Britain. No one would see Gordon Brown as other than Scottish, however hard he fights for the Union. The Welshness of former party leader Neil Kinnock was legendary, even though he opposed Welsh devolution as expensive parochialism. But Tony Blair? The absent or fog-shrouded hinterland means that he is somehow just ‘British’, or possibly English-British — enough of the former to reassure, but with the emphasis strongly on the latter. This is surely the source of that ‘synthetic’ dimension Klein identifies.

‘Britain’ is of course by definition a nationless identity. Different components of it tend to project on to it what they wish or need to see. Immigrants hope ‘nationless’ means (or can be made to mean) ‘multi-national’, or ‘multi-cultural’. Fascists hope it means ‘racial’, the figurative common blood of Aryanism. Middle-Englanders trust it will go on just meaning what it used to mean, ‘for all practical purposes’. The Scottish, Welsh and Ulster-Unionist servants of synthetic statehood want it to go on including them — which it can now do only if everybody is kept in line and forcibly restored to British belief and traditions.

No doubt much in Blair’s personal story contributed to today’s persona: the Scottish and North-Eastern background, formation at Fettes Public School, on the ‘outer ring’ of the old indoctrination system; an ideologically salient environment (Communism to Thatcherism); ‘finishing’ in Oxford, where with a rock band he underwent a famous Zeitgeist moment of adaptation; and then his legal training with Lord Irvine of Lairg. A leader persona is formed by the synthesis of such factors with institutional constraints — in this case, the ultra-Great-Brit Labour Party, which just as Blair joined up was discovering that it could lose its Socialism a lot more easily than its Britishness. It needed a figurehead shaped for the latter, and relatively uncontaminated by the former. And in Tony Blair, it found (so to speak) Dr Jekyll without Mr Hyde: a rare hybrid capable of ‘fronting’’the Movement’s transformation into the neo-liberal world bequeathed by Mrs Thatcher.

The factors making Blair ideal for ‘New Labour’ also help to dispel worry about what he may turn into. After the election, for example, we find one of Scotland’s finest political analysts still perplexed by the problem. ‘Will the Real Tony Blair Stand Up?’ Iain Macwhirter asked in the Sunday Herald (10 June 2001). ‘It is strange and a little scary, that we know so little about the Prime Minister’, he comments, even after electing him with two landslides:

In the past, Tony Blair perhaps felt that he had to be all things to all men — and women. That to make Labour electable it had to win Sun readers as well as the Guardian’s. But after Landslide 2 he has no longer any excuse for ideological evasion (and) … can no longer allow his party and personality to look as if they are a media creation. He now has to walk the walk. And this he intends to do.

Labour is going to get much tougher, he concludes. I’m sure this is right. But I doubt if it will be because the ‘real’ Blair finally emerges. What we have seen so far is what we are likely to get. No alter ego is waiting to pounce. But there is a seriously threatened Britishness, which New Labour’s leader is bound to take ‘personally’. Quite apart from the vexing dilemma of the Euro-currency referendum (which will have to be won in all four countries of the United Kingdom), there is the question of the Barnett Formula and winning the next elections in Scotland and Wales — while keeping the Northern Ireland Agreement alive. All these will require a sustained barrage of no-nonsense Union triumphalism from the Prime Minister and his watchdogs (primarily the Scottish contingent).

Tony Blair is essentially a vehicle of ‘transformism’ — trasformismo as it was once called in Italy — the mechanism of theft and adaptation by which Left becomes Right, or vice-versa, always in the name of the State. No longer possible without devolution, New Labourite transformation demanded in compensation an ultra-British accentuation of the dominant climate, and a corresponding change in popular attitudes — precisely what the aggravated, even hysterical, populism of the first New Labour government has been seeking to achieve. The Greenwich Dome was intended to be a mighty landmark for that direction in affairs — the enduring symbol of a United Kingdom reborn and ready for another century. As the whole world knows, it was a farce. There was nothing — or nothing suitable — to fill it with. Like ‘Britain’, its historic contents and purpose had been lost, and no amount of money and cultural striving could put them back again. So it turned almost at once into a poison sac, an abscess of miserable disputes and corrupt hand-outs which was miraculously kept more or less out of view during the recent electoral campaign. ‘Dr Britain’ was triumphantly reinstalled on a quarter of the votes. Now the poison will have at least four more years, and quite possibly nine or ten, to slowly fill the whole bloodstream of the British state-nation.

In retrospect one may also see the sense of the Blair-Brown conundrum more clearly. Whether or not, as was rumoured, they arrived at some kind of compact about leadership after John Smith’s death, the choice was never between ‘England’ and Scotland. Labour may indeed have been chary about another Scottish leader, but the quandary was in any case resolved by Blair’s Britishness. It is doubtful if many wanted an English captain in any emphatic or ethnic sense. Absence of ‘hinterland’ and cloudy religiosity were much safer, and made up for suspicions of shallowness or brashness.

What was safer then is probably even more necessary now. ‘England’ has become more politically salient since 1995, and the Scottish Parliament is likely to challenge the economic basis of the 1998 Scotland Act — the fiscal dependency of the block grant. However, these and other problems seem likely to underwrite Tony Blair’s leadership rather than demolish it. Who else in the ranks of New Labour can ‘speak for Britain’ in just his easy fashion? None of the Westminster Scots, for sure. Soon, they will all be preoccupied with ‘saving the Union’, a project even more hopeless than the Millennium Dome.

Tom Nairn is Professorial Fellow in Politics at Monash University

All that has now changed magnificently. Today, depression has become recognised as a key social problem now and for the future. Across the OECD, public health campaigns strive to increase awareness of the condition as an illness, to urge people to know the symptoms, to not feel shame about presenting to a GP or psychiatrist with the condition. Narratives of depression — from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation to Kay Redfield Jamieson’s An Unquiet Mind — were joined by depression subplots in mainstream TV shows such as Party of Five. In Australia, the focus on health initatives targetted five areas, one of which was depression, and this was followed up by the launch of Jeff Kennett’s mental health initiative on the area. Newspapers began to run series — such as the recent five-day extravaganza in the Age — which explored the phenomenon from all angles, and with impressive degrees of sophistication on issues such as psychotherapy versus drugs, depression and self-definition, and so on.

Suddenly it seemed everyone could quote the WHO observation — made in its Global Burden of Disease study — that depression was set to become a leading public health burden of developed countries by the year 2020. Everyone knew someone who was on Prozac, or one of the dozen or so other new generation anti-depressants. Everyone could talk about serotonin, the mysterious brain chemical that seemed to be running the show.

Indeed, as the nineties wore on, the new hyper-awareness of depression became alarming in itself. As the Prozac wave crested, it seemed as if every second person was on the drug, if only for a few months. Passages in people’s lives that would have hitherto been classed as being ‘down in the dumps’ were self-medicalised, and GPs reported many cases of people turning up and specifically requesting the drug. That the drug was helpful for many people whose depression could not be alleviated by psychotherapy alone — people whose neurochemistry had become ‘stuck’ — and for many hitherto intractable problems, such as high-repetitive obsessive-compulsive disorder (repeated hand-washing and the like), was not contested. What was in doubt was the many people who reported improvement for minor depressions that the drug was never intended to alleviate, and those who reported feeling ‘better than well’. The latter were from a depressive sub-group classed in the official manual as ‘dysphoric’ — those who had a persistent ‘endogenous’ unhappiness: one that was unrelated to external events. Many of these people — who had hitherto been regarded as substantially untreatable — responded ‘well’ to Prozac, and became substantially brighter. Many psychiatrists found this disturbing, since the definition of dysphoria as a medical condition was already controversial. Was it indeed a pathology, or simply one feature of the ecology of personalities that made up a complex society? What was being medicalised in a modernised US was a sort of personality type that would have been seen as appropriately ‘serious’ or possessed of ‘gravitas’ in another culture — such as a Scandinavian or Calvinist one. The capacity of Prozac to transform personality confounded the easy divisions that had hitherto been made between normal and pathological mood states. New anti-depressants came to market and it was realised that they treated different aspects of the overall state known as ‘depression’. Some were then marketed as a cure for ‘social phobia’ — the overwhelming hypersensitivity to negative aspects of social encounters. Many believed that such a targetting had less to do with a concerted attack on disease x or y than it did with the need to pseudo-differentiate products in a crowded market.

Yet as the prospect of a new and challenging relationship between psychiatric drugs and humanity was opening up — one in which it would be possible to shape one’s mood and personality by the use of different drugs in different combinations — the backlash began. Prozac was accused of being a contributing factor in a number of murders and suicides — charges which manufacturer Eli Lilly successfully defeated in court, or settled out of it. That the drug could tip a small number of users into sudden moods of suicidality had been acknowledged in original studies and was a documented side effect. Nevertheless the hype about the drug as a wonder substance with no drawbacks had drowned out persistent and increasing reports of frequent and widespread side effects — anxiety attacks, jitters, excess energy, sexual dysfunction and many others. By 1997 studies were beginning to show that the drug induced tolerance — meaning that discontinuation would create withdrawal effects and that increase of dosage might become necessary. In retrospect of course this is a bit of a no-brainer, so to speak — it should be obvious that any externalisation of a self-regulating system like neurotransmitters will make those drugs part of the whole system. Anyone regularly using anti-depressants is to some degree a chemical cyborg.

Yet such was the cultural desire for a ‘magic bullet’ that would blow away the blues that these obvious features of any medication were forgotten. Despite the bitter lesson of tranquilisers — the last magic bullet, and far more harmful than anti-depressants — the belief in an existential free lunch had become widespread.

In vain did psychotherapists point out that cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy (CBT) — in which the client is encouraged to gradually reflect on and change negative mental frameworks and assumptions — was found to be as effective as chemicals in the treatment of depression, and that the use of CBT with medication greatly diminished many of the emotive side-effects, such as increased anger. Not only was the cultural bias tilted towards chemicals, but the economic structure of the health industry made it difficult for people to get CBT — or any sort of psychotherapy — even if they wanted it. The vast majority of people presenting with depression would be treated by a GP and no other specialist, and the bulk-billed GP’s average consultation time is adjudicated at around 10 minutes. The increasing numbers of people presenting for depression began to wear many GPs down emotionally — the last thing many were willing or able to do was to ask people to open up further.

The state of play by the end of the 1990s was better in some respects — people were increasingly capable of identifying themselves as depressed and in need of assistance — but worse in others. The public health approach to the issue had constructed depression as a sort of emotional RSI, an inevitable by-product of contemporary living. The implicit assumption was that fundamental conditions of everyday life should remain unreflected upon, and the condition isolated and treated as an individual occurrence. While this was now more sophisticated than purely physical medicalisation — the literature now speaks of depression as a ‘biopsychosocial’ problem, and identifies issues such as social isolation, stress, and so on — it foreclosed inquiry into the meaning of an increase in depression as a social phenomenon.

Furthermore, a shift in the process of self-understanding had begun to occur, with people’s reading of themselves as ‘systematic’ beings — rather than as selves or souls — starting to become a dominant mode by which behaviour is interpreted. This was not a new phenomenon of course — everyone learns to recognise the effects upon themselves of, say, drunkenness, and to distinguish between their ‘intrinsic’ and chemically induced emotions — and this sort of self-understanding is vital within a limited scope. But to give oneself over to this sort of thinking about one’s whole personality is to make it impossible to interpret any given emotion as a meaningful event? Angry? That’s a rush of adrenalin. Stressed, nervous, hunched, tired — your cortisol is out of whack. Feeling low? No, you’re serotonin deficient.

It is the last of these conditions that has become so visible, and a shorthand for the spirit of the age. People such as Tom Peters, the management guru who authored In Search of Excellence, talk of themselves as serotonin-deficient, thus turning their existential state into a physical condition — a piece of bad luck, over which he has triumphed. That the fluid, unstable, chaotic structures that he advocates for corporations and society might have something to do with his ‘deficiency’ is not explored. More critically, the UK social psychologist Oliver James talks of a ‘serotonin-deficient’ society, pointing out that people would appear to be somewhat less happy overall than they were in 1950. James’s aim is to document the way in which many features of social life which maintained people’s baseline level of contentment — social closeness, more manual labour as a component of work — have been diminished, leading to higher levels of base dissatisfaction. Much of his criticism is directed towards the enthusiastic and unquestioning adoption of hi-tech solutions by the ‘third way’ Blair government. Nevertheless the formulation of ‘serotonin deficient’ is inherently technocratic, since the frequent response may be to ‘fix’ the serotonin levels as an act independent of any contextual life change.

Art critic Robert Hughes told everyone who interviewed him at the time of the release of American Visions, his mammoth book on American art, of the depressive collapse he had suffered prior to the composition of the book, and the manner in which he used anti-depressants (and CBT) to jack himself out of it. True, in earlier times he might have used something more dangerous and damaging, such as amphetamines, or the vast amounts of coffee that Balzac drank in order to churn out work for publishers, but such substances have more of an immediate and noticeable impact — the side effects are more noticeable and a separation between self and substance more easily established. In Hughes’s case the irony of using a chemical to make meaningful a project that should have been inherently meaningful — the deep contemplation of art — seems to have been bypassed. Any question that the depression may have been bound up with the project, and indicative of a need for deeper reflection, was lost. What, one might ask, is so visionary about art if chemical alteration is required to contemplate it? What meaning does it, or anything have?

The point being ignored here — and in the public health approach to depression — is that shifting the definition of one’s mood from being ‘miserable’ to being ‘depressed’ has become a category shift, in which two competing versions of human being are ranged against each other. In some cases this may be unquestionably and absolutely valid — a hypoglycemia sufferer may fall into a sudden and major depression due entirely to a drop in blood-sugar levels, and with no external existential causes. Interpreting one’s world in the light of one’s mood in such a case would clearly be disastrous and in error.

Yet such cases are comparatively rare in the vast swathe of people complaining of depression — and often used to avoid contemplation of existential causes. Most people who have fallen into a persistent state of bleakness and inability to feel pleasure may well have fallen into a state of depression that has a specific chemical correlative — that is to say their serotonin/adrenalin levels may no longer be responsive to good events in their life. (The analogy would be that of a motor falling below a certain rpm and stalling). On the other hand, they may be in a persistent circle of what cognitive-behavioural therapists called ‘crooked’ or ‘rigid’ thinking that leads them to think of their situation as hopeless and moves them towards the state of ‘learned helplessness’ that the psychologist Marvin Seligman defined as a root condition of depression. Or they may have childhood trauma, or a genetic predisposition, or any combination of these.

The core fact is that to invite someone to recategorise themselves as ‘depressed’ is to ask them to recategorise themselves from subjecthood to objecthood. In other words the response to a condition whose principle characteristic is the absence of meaning is to have the person redefine themselves as a thing, as a point of relationship between different systems — social, chemical, linguistic, etc.

This criticism has been made before, by writers such as R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatric movement in the 1960s. But much of that work came to be seen as no longer useful due to the excessive claims that it made for a totally humanistic approach that had no biological component. The later tendency of such writers to sometimes celebrate ‘schizophrenia’ as an excessively sane response to insane social conditions was also taken up by its opponents. Despite the fact that Laing and others never ceased to insist that mental illness was frequently a tormenting condition that was in need of alleviation, the general reaction to all things sixties that set in in the late seventies swept any form of critical psychiatry into the tidybin of history. Increased findings of possible evidence of a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia — the jewel in the crown of psychiatry — gave medical and systemic models a crucial increase in legitimacy. Although many of the insights of Laing and others into the ‘politics of experience’ were incorporated into diagnosis and the practice of the psychotherapeutic session, the broader criticism of diagnosis as a political and social act was forgotten.

In the rush to establish depression as a social problem to be recognised and addressed, the surrender of full personhood has been encouraged for a variety of reasons, credible and otherwise. Pundits such as Lewis Wolpert, author of the book and TV series Malignant Sadness, have mounted substantial campaigns to frame depression as an ‘illness’, ostensibly to relieve the sense of shame felt by those who see it as individual weakness and failure. The line is that it can ‘happen to anyone’ and that it is important to pass through the experience as efficiently as possible — to cut it out of one’s life as one would remove a diseased appendix from the body. Such an approach locks in easily to a ‘human capital’ approach to self, especially in the intellectually trained professions where the minimum level of cognition and focus required for effective performance may be higher than in other spheres. The intellectually trained worker is thus a valuable piece of equipment whose continued functioning must be ensured at all costs. Increasingly businesses have become aware of the need for a flexible approach to depression and stress, largely because they’ve been losing too many highly trained and experienced staff. The intellectual property lawyer who bails out to open a muffin shop, the IT genius who takes off to ride around Australia … twenty years ago ‘burn out’ was largely restricted to professions such as advertising and social work, where the work practice entailed free-form creative and emotional responses being channelled into specific and routinised tasks. Increasingly the management of the psychological mechanisms of individual workers has become a vital task in managing the production process and business has sought to incorporate the therapeutic model into human capital management. In 1999, for example, the Business Council of Great Britain devoted much of its lobbying budget and campaigning time to persuading the government to retain tax deductible status for stress counselling and psychotherapy for work-related issues, both for the individual employee and the company providing them. Mental health had become as significant an economic issue as trade union legislation, tax regimes and the like.

The current Australian initiative is in the same mode. There was an initial fuss when it was discovered that major pharmaceutical corporations were possibly to be involved in the funding of the inquiry — in the same way that they’re involved in the funding of numerous conference and research programs across the psychiatric field, often as not focussed on the relative efficacy of chemical and non-chemical treatments — and this link was severed. Nevertheless, the personnel of the inquiry will predispose it to models of depression which are systemic and non-contextual, rather than those which have an existential and social-historical perspective. Aside from athlete Nova Peris-Kneebone and actor Garry McDonald — the latter there due to his much publicised breakdown — the personnel of the initiative is tilted towards the medical and the psychiatric. There is no philosopher, no social theorist or sociologist, no historian to give a more reflective and wide-ranging consideration of the multidimensional social phenomenon.

Whatever more immediate commercial motives some of the participants in the initiative may have, there is no doubt of the sincerity of the majority of its participants in their desire to address the issue. Yet it is precisely because their thinking about the issue is constrained within the ‘biopsychosocial’ model — depression as social problem, rather than depression as social symptom — that such initiatives threaten to be more about increasingly sophisticated processes of social control, rather than liberation. Any genuine inquiry into the complex social phenomenon known as ‘depression’ would generate a degree of reflection on social life that would question the widest possible range of assumptions.

For if there were to be any short answer to the question of the causes of the ‘depression epidemic’ the answer would be ‘just about everything’. Many of the particular features of contemporary life in information-industrial societies serve to take human beings out of their comfort zone, from sunlight deprivation to lack of muscular exercise to the increase in periods of isolation throughout the day. The neurobiological mood maintenance system evolved to predispose humans to seek out these things, and contemporary life has removed them. Closed systems of meaning — religion being the primary example — that framed life and gave a sense of imminent presence to its most chaotic aspects — have collapsed under the impact of the scientific world view. Without such legitimating overviews — and in the absence of a ‘heroic’ style left movement which would give meaning to struggle — poverty and social exclusion have come to be seen as mere and total deprivation, an unameliorable helplessness and denial of the pleasures and powers of a consumer society. The extension of the market into every aspect of life has drained everyday life of much of its particular and sensual character …

One could go on with this, but there is little need. The particular critiques of contemporary life have been widespread and generally known since the 1960s, yet they’ve received the ‘Chesterton’ treatment — found difficult and not tried, honoured more in the breach than the observance. To read a book like Earth in the Balance — Al Gore’s passionate plea for a sustainable world and its trenchant and detailed critique of instrumental rationality, you would think that the Frankfurt School had finally found their political champion — were you not aware of Gore’s record as an unfailing agent of US corporate power across the globe. The shelves of self-help books take for granted the cultural problem of the collapse of religion and the rich structures of tradition, yet authorise the belief that such meanings can be rediscovered by the use of the particular artifacts and atomised rituals of such practices. In other words it is the limitations of the tradition of classical sociology — including Marxism, and the critique it offered — that now stand in the way of the cultural dilemma of which the ‘depression epidemic’ is the harbinger.

Depression may look like an individual predicament, but this is clearly the surface structure of a deeper event — the collapse of social meaning within the depressed person. That can and does occur in most cultures. All cultures, even the most myth-girdled of kinship societies, have some concept of something like depression or spiritual disturbance — often rendered as someone ‘not being in their right head’ or a similar sort of phrase.

What may be new now is that the collapse is occuring both within and without, for larger numbers of people. If people are increasingly less bound up in each other — in networks of obligation, co-operation, familial relation — and less bound up with specific meaningful places and things, then the burden of making a meaningful world falls back wholly on the self, who is obliged to be the point at which a whole world is held together. This is now taken as second nature by most people, and an era in which one was defined largely by class, church, nation, association, order, brotherhood and so on falls away. The oft-heard phrase — ‘only you know what’s right for you’ — is a measure of this attitude, and of the contradiction it carries within it. If the only thing that makes the meaningful world for person X is that person X has chosen it from the remorseless stream of images, persons and possibilities that characterise contemporary life, then person X is caught in a process of diminishing returns. In such a precarious existential situation, the slightest stumble — a lost job, a failed relationship, the normal disappointments of everyday life — can precipitate a fall into the abyss.

The contemporary person has less of a ‘ground’ to them, and when they fall they’re more likely to fall for ever. Hence the newest and most numerous victims of the ‘depression epidemic’ are those whose selves are under construction — pre-adolescents of the ten-to-twelve-year-old range, for whom a number of anti-depressants are now manufactured in orange and lemon flavours. This is the substructure of depression as a social form, and why adversity and difficulty increasingly present themselves to people not as hardship, or as ill-fortune, or as oppression, or as woe, but as partial or total subjective collapse and shutdown.

Furthermore, the cultural cycle can be a vicious one. As more people commit themselves to the chemical technology of anti-depressants or the social technology of psychotherapy, the degree to which encounters between persons are actual encounters between situated, authentic people responding to their present world diminishes. The sense that the other may not be a present person, but a chemically transformed series of reactions adds to the general sense of social non-meaning. Once again, this is something that people understand as part of the round of social life with more visible drugs, à la the expression ‘it’s the beer talking’. The idea that psychotherapy is a ‘social technology’ is less well understood. Clearly some forms of therapy open people up to a more real and authentic relation to the world. Others — such as neurolinguistic programming (NLP) — rely on changing people’s behaviour in order to adjust them socially, without opening out to a less circumscribed relationship to the world. In that respect, the division between chemical and social techniques for social adjustment can be seen as partial. They are both processes for putting the world ‘in brackets’ as a way of dealing with problems of meaning associated with it.

The number of people for whom this process is necessary has been vastly overstated — in a social debate about depression in which every aspect of the condition has been thoroughly worked over, except that of a widespread and growing feeling of meaninglessness.

Marxist approaches — from the visionary social analysis of the 1844 Manuscripts through the sixties works of Marcuse and Fromm — have emphasised that the subjective ‘alienation’ felt by many people is an expression of the ‘objective’ alienation — of labour and self — that occurs within capitalism. But the hope that a society in which alienated labour has been replaced by free life activity will have substantially solved problems of personhood and meaning is a hope based on the assumption of a ‘whole’ human being who will leap, entire and of herself, from the alienated shell of the distorted and crushed personalities produced by capitalism. In fact a post-scarcity communist society would find the creation of meaningful frameworks of social and psychological life one of its major challenges. Marxist social critics rightly accuse psychotherapy of adjusting real human beings to an unalienated world. Yet the Marxist critique too — one that has become a staple of mainstream Sunday colour magazine treatments of such issues — fails to go deeply enough into the way our selfhood is put together by deep, abiding and irreplaceable forms of obligation and social connection. These social forms could not be maintained within a society whose sole maxim was that ‘the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all’.

Such rarefied discussion might seem abstruse in the face of this ‘biopsychosocial’ phenomenon. But if the WHO figures are correct and depression is trending upward in all postmodernising societies, then that discussion cannot be avoided forever. The scattered and fragmented social phenomenon of depression will become a, perhaps the, major social phenomenon to be addressed. Just as the natural world became the ‘environment’ in the 1960s — at the point when it was on the way to ceasing to be any sort of environment capable of sustaining life — so the ‘inner nature’ of social and psychological life will become the focus of sustained social attention when it is starting to become unsustainable on a wide scale. Like salinity carried in a river system, the problem of social meaning in a culture of hyperindividualism and disconnection deposits grain by grain until one day it is suddenly clear that the land has become salt.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other,
as just as fair,
And having the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear …

Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’

Twelve months have gone by since Mrs Ewing’s famous words: ‘The Scottish Parliament which adjourned sine die on 25 March in the year 1707 is hereby reconvened’. Sine die meant ‘with no day’ set for return or recommencement. But now the day has come. Just as the new Welsh politics began with the succession to Alun Michael, that of the Scots will really begin through the election of Donald Dewar’s successor.

Dewar himself will be remembered in all time to come, a singular and honourable man who presided over the rebirth as no other could. However, it in no way diminishes his integrity or other great qualities to say he was not the leader required for forging a new identity. No such leader existed in 1997 — and certainly not in the ranks of Scottish Labour. We are dealing with a feature of Scottish society here, not just a Party fault. In pre-1997 Scotland, leadership was generally disliked and distrusted. The institutions which had kept Scotland in being under the Union were overwhelmingly corporate — rule-bound and committee-managed. They favoured conformity, and an oppressive sort of moderation – keeping your head down at best, ‘doing as ye’re telt’ at worst.

In contrast with all that, ‘charisma’ has become the usual term for a modern style of emblematic, inspirational leadership. It conquered Britain with Thatcher, and now we get doses of it from Blair every day. But it took the Scots to invent anti-charisma as a way of life, and they have resisted this magic. That was what angered Thatcher: not merely her policies but her person fell on stony ground here.

Yet while a nation may survive in such terms, it cannot be reborn through them alone. This has been the underlying problem of the provisional Parliament on Edinburgh Mound, from Mrs Ewing’s first day onwards. It had to facilitate a new birth, or be nothing. But the forces of novelty demand more leadership than the old reflexes are able to generate. Political parties (including the Scottish Nationalist Party) are inherently conservative in that sense. The salience of the Independents and women derives from their detachment.

McBaffie’s grief

Sometimes patterns can be clearer from a distance. In a new diagnosis the American prophet of globalism Francis Fukuyama perceives what he regards as the new chaos in Britain as reflecting ‘the overwhelmingly social democratic political preferences of the Scots’. These were brought to life again under Thatcherism, then given legislative voice by Blair (Prospect, May 2000). While deploring such instincts, the author of The End of History at least acknowledges their historical reality and coherence. It follows from his critique that there was never the smallest chance of self-rule in Scotland not turning into something more than London intended.

This fact deeply depresses the remaining supporters of ‘devolution’ — the old non-GM brand of home rule pioneered by James Callaghan in the 1970s. Blair took it over in 1997, without understanding the mutation which had occurred in the meantime. He thought there was still a faithful tribe up north, constitutionally incapable of doing other than his bidding. Such weird ironies often come to mind these days, especially in Edinburgh High Street or around the Lawnmarket. Here history’s abstractions have turned into personal surprises, and you run into them on the pavement or in pubs. Take Hugh McBaffie for example.

Not every reader will know ex-Provost McBaffie, though most will have met someone like him. This dour native of the mid-Scottish uplands (‘Shug’, or occasionally ‘Shuggie’, to everyone in his constituency) appears sunk in dyspeptic gloom these days, and the condition has got worse since he was rewarded with his seat on the Scottish Parliament last year. In fact no one would be too surprised to hear of him resigning to spend more time with his family. While Parliament is in session Hugh can all too often be seen slumping in the brown fug at the back of Deacon Brodie’s or The Ensign Ewart. After his seventh recuperative fag and third or fourth pint he presents the appearance of a happily dying bat. I have sometimes overheard his expostulations and (not without an obscure twinge of guilt) committed them to what started life as a political notebook. I realise now that the notebook has become more like a diary of extinction.

What seems to gall him most is the women — or more accurately, ‘wummin’. When he signed the Constitutional Convention, McBaffie imagined a Scots Parliament for worthies of his own sort — the matiness of Lodge and lounge-bar translated into nationhood. Thus would Lanarkshire provinciality have been guaranteed for all time. Instead, he now finds everything solid melting into air. Girls have a hand (frequently the upper hand) in matters vital to his constituents: the manhood of Section 28, sex education, the reform of Council Housing, transport — even electoral reform. These wummin are mainly from his own party, which is the worst thing of all. It means that a dreadful thought lurks implacably at the bottom of each pint-glass, and drives him on to another. For gender-shift implies earth-shift, not mere policy changes. Novelty is emerging, of a deeply uncomfortable kind owing nothing to ministerial alibis and the haverings of think-tanks.

Down at Westminster the 1997 influx of women MPs made little real difference — a surprising fact all commentators have been forced to admit. Somehow the existing mainframe of power has neutralised them. Millenium Dome and Blairite rhetoric notwithstanding, it was quite safe to put Baroness Jay in charge of reforming the Upper Chamber. But if Independents and young females are upsetting things in Edinburgh, and even becoming leadership contenders, this can only be because the new structures are opening other avenues.

‘Knowing how way leads to way’ is how Robert Frost put it in the famous poem. ‘I doubted if I should ever come back …’ And of course that’s it, there is no way back for Hugh and his pals. In 1976, when Jim Sillars took the noble but premature risk of founding an independent Scottish Labour Party, he quoted the same poem at its inauguration in Stirling. No-one could then have known it would take a quarter of a century to make the break. Yet that very spirit of initiative has at last come into its own. The old world of Scottish institutionalism enabled the Parliament to exist – and began to die on its feet when the first cry was uttered. Already, the voice snuffling in the back of the pub comes from beyond the grave.

Travails of a prince

A certain austerity and rectitude is natural to new regimes. They construct their own customs by forced distinction from the parent – the lax or corrupt state of times past. This should not be confused with American political correctness. Machiavelli observed the same thing at work five centuries ago, and noted with gleeful malice how nothing was more repugnant to cronies and hirelings of the previous state. They always dismissed it as fuss and bother, and against ‘human nature’.

What this genteel phrase means in 2000 is of course the British way — the customs of a contracting power structure which has over a quarter of a century sought to counter-balance decline by an awesome concentration of authority, first within the hands of one woman and now of one man. Party power became Cabinet power; then even that was condensed into a single person, an elected dictator who wields sovereignty for (it would appear) ever-lengthening spans of time.

Blair today would be the envy of Machiavelli’s Renaissance Prince. His subjects currently assume he will still be around in ten years time. Lady Jay’s scheme for a New House of Lords would have won the admiration of Cesare Borgia himself. How many Scottish cronies are, at this moment, plotting their fifteen-year stretches within her theme-park of servility?

Such circumstances impose a strange dilemma on any re-emergent leadership in Edinburgh. People don’t necessarily put it this way; but I suspect most feel that a new leadership is needed, related to a renewed national identity. Yet at the same time an instinctive Scottish reaction to Blairism may be reinforcing the old anti-leadership allergy. This is the deeper axis of the succession struggle. Republican-minded Independents and women may be finding it easier to seize the initiative — but they must also confront a strengthened and stupid reaction striving at all costs to believe there is a way back. With help from Brian Souter as well as Westminster, it now wishes to embalm this past of macho bonding, enervating routine, women in their place, and little-by-little – the culture of the old Scottish reservation. The kailyard has become the graveyard.

The zombie faction wants to avoid upsetting the British Prince (and his Chancellor). Some appropriately subfusc friend of McBaffie’s would be ideal after Dewar. But what if it’s simply too late for a Scottish Alun Michael? In that case the dilemma becomes cruel indeed: anything they do will now risk opening Pandora’s box farther. It’s easier to take refuge in the pub, or in Section 28.

On the untravelled road

But in sober reality the box is open already. In a quite foreseeable future Blairism will disintegrate like Thatcherism before it. There is unlikely to be another British Prince in that old twentieth-century sense. As way then leads to way, London and Edinburgh will tend to be ruled by different parties, and the Scottish Parliament will have to define a firmer constitutional position for itself. The Scotland Act, with its ridiculous parade of reserve powers and prohibitions, was born an anachronism and will soon grow intolerable to both sides. Nobody can say whether this will mean independence, but it can hardly avoid meaning more independence than the Parliament enjoys at present.

Pandora’s box is now creaking open in England as well, and will soon lead to a renegotiation of all matters British. In that renegotiation, the Scottish government will have to acquire a new status beyond the feeble parameters of Devolution. A kind of de facto independence will be unavoidable. Consciously or not, today’s Parliament is preparing itself for that moment. And I must say — by contrast with recent developments at Blair Towers — Edinburgh has so far little to reproach itself for.

It could not help being weighed down by the parties and personnel of an ancien régime. Yet it has striven to distance itself from the latter’s customs. It dealt creditably with the Beattie Media scandal and (in Iain Macwhirter’s memorable phrase) saw off ‘the dung-beetles’ of an emergent Lobby system. It administered a unanimous reproach to Westminster by urging repeal of the 1701 Act of Settlement, on the grounds that this discriminates against the Catholic faith (Blair replied with a cloudburst of lame excuses). Andrew Cubie’s admirable Report on funding Higher Education was commissioned and accepted, again putting British policy to shame. The Parliament agreed — in my view too readily, but certainly not illiberally — to a redrawing of the Anglo-Scottish sea boundary that favoured English law. Albeit with some foot-shuffling, it has resolved to repeal the misery of Section 28 on homosexuality. It has taken the first steps towards the demolition of feudal landlordism. In spite of the coalition government’s last-minute cowardice, Members of Parliament have voted to abolish the contemptible business of warrant sales.

On these and other subjects, as well as around the plans for the new parliament house at Holyrood, an embryo assembly has in truth stood up rather well to contrived populist hysterics and scumbag journalism. It looks like a tough brat, increasingly able to learn from hard, marginal experiences — as the Scots always did, long before 1707. The Scottish press has been over the whole period largely a poisoned chalice from the past; but the forces of the new have not succumbed to its cankered girning. They are simply too strong, and likely to impose themselves through the confusions of a collapsing United Kingdom.

No-one can know yet whether Enric Miralles’s monument near the parliament will be another Angel of the North. But at least it will now be given the chance — in which case it is guaranteed instant sanctification in tourist brochures, as the embodiment of Scottish identity. It will probably be another everlasting tribute to Dewar, in fact. Has he always really felt he might be on the untravelled road of an independent time to come? The routes diverge more with each day that passes, and remedy is none for sleep-walkers of the familiar track:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Tom Nairn is the well-known Scottish author of many books on nationalism and politics including After Britain

What will arrive on the banks of the Yarra in September? What is the role of the WEF?

The WEF was born as a yearly ‘European Management Forum’ of Euro-corporates, held in Davos, Switzerland. It was funded by the European Commission until 1987, when it became the WEF and started to claim global reach. Its membership reflects its class orientation, and includes the most prominent transnational corporations, 1000 of which make up the WEF ‘Foundation Members’. In addition there is a club of ‘Global Growth Companies’, 300 ‘Industry Governors’, 300 Global Leaders of Tomorrow’, ‘World Economic Leaders’ from both politics and business, ‘World Media Leaders’ from 100 media groups, 100 ‘World Cultural Leaders’, and ‘Forum Fellows’ from academia and the heads of national economic research organisations.

The WEF aspires to be an agenda-setting Forum. It is, in its own modest opinion, ‘the foremost global partnership of business, political, intellectual and other leaders of society committed to improving the state of the world’. With the diffusion of neo-liberalism, and consequent advances in corporate globalisation from the 1980s, the WEF has taken on an unprecedented role as a rallying point for global elites, and as a vehicle for class power. Clearly the WEF can’t set the agenda and certainly can’t determine the outcomes – it is not a conspiratorial cabal standing over society. Rather, it is a class grouping fully embedded in social relations, that self-consciously takes on the role of planning for collective class interests. It seeks to influence the political agendas and respond to the prevailing challenges – and in this respect, as Kees van der Pijl argues, it is the first ‘true International of capital’.

The forum has been remarkably successful; since 1971 the ‘state of the world’ has dramatically improved for many of the participating corporations. WEF strategising drove the neo-liberal agenda in the 1980s, bringing together politicians from the ‘pretender’ states of the newly industrialising world, as well as from the OECD states, to map out an agenda with transnational corporation business executives. It offered a proactive forum, removed from the public gaze, and played a central role in diffusing neo-liberalism. The model was presented as the solution to crises of accumulation experienced in the 1970s and early 1980s, and was highly effective in extending the reign of the market.

This success has come at the price of built-in uncertainty and unstability. Globalised neo-liberalism had led to a dramatic redrawing of the boundaries of capitalism. Temporal boundaries have melted away with the speeding up of circulation; spatial boundaries have been superceded with the growing transnational reach of corporations; even socio-psychological boundaries have lifted, with the increased commodification of life. A newly empowered transnational capitalist class has emerged triumphant, presiding over the new landscapes of accumulation. But class hegemony is by no means assured – uncharted territory imposes incalculable risk. Speeding circulation compresses business cycles, confidence rests on ephemera, ideological symbols embody so-called ‘fundamentals’, speculation rules. Corporate transnationalism exhausts social and physical environments, and the fall-out becomes uncontainable as corporations are pincered by investor and consumer volativities. Deeper commodification disassembles social solidarity and generates powerful imperatives for cultural survival, often carried through the new modes of social communication.

As a result, since at least the mid-1990s, neo-liberal prescriptions have been widely discredited. Exponential rises in executive salaries, and in corporate accumulation, along with a dramatic concentration of economic power across all sectors, offer clear evidence of the success of neo-liberalism as a class strategy. But neo-liberal globalisation has also brought unprecedented levels of global inequality, and undreamed-of degrees of financial instability, environmental exhaustion and social dislocation. The neo-liberal triumph has created new sources of opposition, the impacts and responses have been unremitting, and advocates have been forced onto the defensive. The high water mark was 1995, when the OECD declared it was marking out a ‘global vision for the year 2020, a New Global Age’. But already a political revival, inspired by social democratic ideas, and expressed in a new form of social liberalism sometimes described as the ‘Third Way’, was sweeping the OECD.

As neo-liberal prescriptions have unravelled, there has been an urgent revision of the WEF’s neo-liberal project. The WEF has left behind its market fundamentalism, and now is charting a new agenda for corporate globalism, one that embraces rather than rejects ‘the social’. The massed ranks of analysts, consultants and advisers, from credit-ratings agencies, management consultancies, inter-governmental institutions and non-government organisations, have entered the fray, battling to define the new accumulation paradigm. There are continuing efforts to enhance ‘market discipline’, to suppress the advancing crises, to institutionalise transnational class power, and render neo-liberal globalism irreversible. Yet there is also deepening dissent amongst policy-making groups. There is a rethinking of neo-liberalism even amongst the most elite institutions: as Hans-Peter Martin and Herald Schuman demonstrate, many of the most powerful players in global capitalism are questioning the ‘dictatorship of the market’. Primary advocates and beneficiaries of neo-liberal globalism, such as George Soros and Ted Turner, both of whom had embarked on paternalist interventions – the imaginatively branded ‘Soros Foundation’ and ‘Turner Foundation’ – began expressing sincere regrets at the social costs of neo-liberalism. Other elements, as van der Pijl highlights, went further and increasingly have embarked on a rethinking explicitly ‘mobilised against yesterday’s prescriptions’. These have much wider ramifications, potentially enabling ‘a deepening of democracy, a reappropriation of the public sphere by the population, and eventually a more fundamental transformation away from class society’.

Recent developments have only strengthened the leverage of this dissenting segment. Institutional crises of legitimacy have accumulated, with the OECD shelving its ‘Multilateral Agreement on Investment’ in 1998, the temporary ditching of the World Trade Organisation’s ‘Millenium Round’ in 1999, and the advancing crisis in the International Monetary Fund’s global regime of ‘structural adjustment’. Add into the equation the continuing crisis in ‘transitional’ post-communist societies, especially Russia, and the severe jolt delivered to the ‘newly industrialising countries’ of East Asia by financial ‘contagion’ in 1997-98, and the impending bursting of the infotainment bubble, then the challenges to neo-liberalism begin to seem irresistable. Expressing this, there have been the dramatic public explosions against neo-liberal globalism: Geneva 1996, Cologne 1998, Seattle 1999, Washington 2000.

For the first time in many years, ‘anti-capitalist’ protest has returned to the capitalist heartland, and to the global stage. These protests open up the ideological space for the articulation of alternative guiding principles, putting on the agenda the possibility of transformation away from the current malaise. As the promotion of capitalist discipline is questioned, protest targetted at the agents of neo-liberal globalism gains remarkable political leverage. In this political climate WEF meetings start to take on a special significance. Since 1996 the WEF has attracted increasingly militant opposition, and it has responded by attempting to re-chart the neo-liberal project. The WEF response is to deliberately avoid the appearance of backroom strategising, and instead to seek a higher public profile, attempting to reground its legitimacy by being seen to engage with prominent advocates of the emerging alternatives. The WEF is thus placing itself at the centre of debates about the revision of neo-liberalism, asserting that Davos can play ‘important role in forging the new geometry’.

Reflecting this, the WEF has reached out to those ‘excluded’ by neo-liberal globalism – notably non-OECD governments, such as Mexico and South Africa, and critical Non-Government Organisations, such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). In 1998 Hillary Clinton argued the role of NGOs and other representatives of ‘civil society’ had to be enhanced, while John Sweeney, from the AFL-CIO, focused on issues of distribution, arguing markets had to ‘work for the majority and not simply for the few’. In 1999 Vice-President Al Gore appeared with Kofi Annan, who appealed for a ‘global compact’ between business and the United Nations founded on ‘core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards, and environmental practices’. In 2000 President Clinton shared the millennial limelight – somewhat blurred by Seattle – with Tony Blair. Davos policy debates are now couched in terms of ‘institutional accommodation’, ‘corporate responsibility’ and ‘global dialogue’, with sessions in 2000 on ‘responsible globality’, ‘inclusive prosperity’ and ‘sustainable development’. Perhaps most cynically, the WEF’s ‘World Competitiveness Scorecard’ – a yearly league-table of ‘how national environments are conducive or detrimental to the domestic and global competitiveness of enterprises’ – was supplemented by an ‘Environmental Sustainability Index’ at Davos 2000. At the same time, as Jane Kelsey highlights, a new ‘World Economic Community’ Internet link-up between 10,000 key economic decision-makers (an Internet ‘hotline’ for concertising corporate responses) is being constructed.

The contest is on to establish a revised normative and institutional framework for the global economy. The WEF is claiming a central role in shaping the agenda, and some, such as the ICFTU, are willing participants in the process, taking heart in the WEF’s apparent willingness to become an advocate of ‘globalisation with a human face’. But the key question is whether the WEF should be permitted to drive this agenda. Should a forum that is dominated by corporate interests be encouraged to take on the role of mapping out future frameworks for global governance? Should it be granted recognition and legitimacy in this agenda-setting process? Or, rather, should its role be challenged, and alternative sources of legitimacy be asserted?

There was a telling moment at Davos 2000 when the assembled executives refused to vacate the conference chamber to enable a security check before Clinton’s speech. The US President’s Security Service was forced to back down after a corporate ‘sit-in’. Clinton’s speech went ahead: even the President of the United States has to respect the wishes of the corporate club. Perhaps he should have joined the thousand protestors outside the conference venue, and joined the democratic movement against corporate power.

There will be similar protests outside the Melbourne regional summit of the WEF in September. In 1999 the summit lobbied for regional governments to back the coming WTO ‘Millennium Round’, arguing that trade liberalisation was inevitable and needed to be extended into ‘free and fair competition, protecting intellectual property and foreign investment’. In 2000 we can expect much rhetoric about inclusiveness and sustainability. Just as the Casino poses itself as a ‘family entertainment’ centre, so the Melbourne WEF meeting will be spinning the rhetoric of corporate responsibility. There will be plenty of ironic moments and opportunities to politicise globalised neo-liberalism and put up the alternatives. Perhaps this is what lies behind the comment, from Melbourne’s Lord Mayor, that the forum will be a ‘huge opportunity for the city’.

James Goodman works in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney

Gerard Henderson, one of our local clear thinkers, is both illustrative and to the point. ‘[T]here is little governments can do about the process of globalisation. People want to trade and people want to move … it is almost impossible to resist such developments.’ He goes on: ‘For a small trading nation like Australia, there is no alternative … A country with the population size and economic might of the US might be able to take a stand against aspects of globalisation. Likewise, possibly, the European Union. But not 19 million strong Australia.’ Then comes the clincher: ‘Not without a significant decline in living standards.’

Gerard Henderson has much support for his position. He certainly won’t be contradicted by the economic experts who regard the protestors as quite insane. Nor will he find resistance from Third Way thinkers — Tony Blair or Anthony Giddens for instance — who assume there is no alternative to globalisation as we have known it.

Yet with such a strong version of reality on the side of the global economy why have the protests gained such support? And in taking up this question it should be kept in mind that the WTO protests do have a larger picture with a definite momentum. This can be illustrated by reference to world-wide phenomena, but there is more than sufficient local material to make the point. Take for a start the meteoric rise and fall of One Nation, a party which rode the wave of deep resentment towards global restructuring and had mainstream politicians in fear of the political abyss. And as the political fortunes of One Nation sank like a stone, the forces of protest renewed themselves. They removed the most powerful politician in Australia, Jeff Kennett, and now John Howard is in their sights. Don’t talk to this embattled sector about the high living standards offered by globalisation.

What Gerard Henderson and others assume is that while there is pain, disruption, even loss of livelihood, there is no choice. Globalisation is just one of those tragedies of economic development, like the industrial revolution. Some people get hurt, but the greater good emerges given time.

In the face of this common sense those who protest against it have little to say that can shake it. They know they are against it. They know they are increasingly shut out of the core practices of social life and are, at best, being managed as problems. But to shake the common sense view and shape politics in a definite direction requires much more: a perspective which can locate how it is that globalisation has these effects, and which can then be drawn upon to develop social policy in a plausible alternative direction.

It is here, of course, that commentators like Gerard Henderson win hands down, for the moment. They win because there are no self-evident plausible alternatives, a situation the Left is reluctant to face. Certainly the socialist utopia has no credibility, and the implication of most commentators that to reject globalisation is to reject modernity in favour of a village level of development rings true for too many.

A policy which can cut through conventional globalisation needs an awareness of what is unique to global culture and economy: its capacity, through the combination of the market with the full range of high technologies, to render most, if not all, of social reality as elements of a market calculus. This universality, this capacity to reduce all particulars to a general value, laid the ground for what the economic rationalists called the ‘level playing field’. It was the renewed power of this market which has swept aside public institutions since the early 1980s.

At the same time it is this very universality of global culture, mediated as it is by the various high-tech media forms, which undermines all particular relations and institutions. What is a strength is also a weakness. While globalisation claims to re-assert the local, it nevertheless undermines diverse expressions of culture or economy based on particular social relations. Thus the emphasis on the ‘local’ in the global/local divide is more an expression of need and of loss than a practical reality with institutional force. And it is this structural process which gives the lie to the implicit hope in writers such as Gerard Henderson that things will balance out over time.

Neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx faced such a bleak reality. Prior to ‘their’ market lay a community structure they assumed and built on. Here Smith found the basis for an ethics, while Marx found the basis for a politics. And these structures were composed of particular social relations — this family, that community, ‘our’ history.

In other words today’s global market is by no means merely a market. The fusion of the market with the new powers of high technology allows it to combine economy and culture in a new way. The nineteenth century could be characterised as having boundaries between the market and cultural contexts — a prior community — which was its foundation. These particularistic cultural settings had the effect of limiting the reach of the market because they co-existed with it. They limited the ‘freedom’ of that market.

The postmodern market, on the other hand, reaches into and reshapes those social forces which Smith and Marx took for granted. It is this background force which allows Gerard Henderson to speak with such confidence, even though he has no grasp of its special powers. He has history on his side, he might well conclude.

Yet just as the share market today experiences jitters even as it celebrates its latest triumph, he has no reason to feel too confident. A social order built on the global market is inherently unstable, as evidenced in processes which systematically destroy all local institutions and social relations. And its savagery towards stable work is legendary. Even in the heart of the booming techno-sector no job has security, as 16,000 Telstra employees have just discovered. Hence the ‘irrational’ vehement opposition to — and bitterness towards — the global way. Yet instability will not in itself turn the tide. It is the emergence of a social idea able to contain the global market which is the crucial matter. Such an idea combined with a social determination to make the idea practical would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons.

The novelty of our situation lies with this special power of the global market over us: firstly the sheer power of its apparatus to devour and shape all social relations; secondly the widespread belief, shared by protestors, economists and Gerard Henderson alike, that there can only be one market structure in social affairs. These two aspects join to close off social policies which could contain and manage globalisation.

In fact there have been many types of exchange historically. Some have coexisted with others for long periods of time. For example reciprocal exchange, which does not rely on the money form, is as old as human society. Its structures today still make a crucial mark on the formation of selves in co-operative relations with others, although increasingly they are truncated. With the economic market itself there are also important distinctions to be made. In his investigation of the meanings of the market, Marx emphasised the universality of its medium of exchange. This is a crucial insight but it can be overstated. Postmodern globalisation allows us to see this is a relative question. Some markets are regional. Their sphere of exchange is regional and hence they depend upon particular individuals and communities. Such markets emerged in the first instance around restricted mediums of exchange. Others have a more universal character but still are particular to a nation. These obviously contrast with global markets.

If reciprocal exchange has managed to co-exist with markets before the emergence of the global market, the same cannot be said for money markets. The policy problem is that our only experience of market exchange has been through one dominant form of exchange. Once there were regional markets. We know them only as traces within the national market. In the year 2000 it is now possible to tell a similar story about the national market. Now it ‘survives’ as it can within the logic of the global market. What most people assume is that there should only be one form of market exchange. And notably, today, that is the global logic of info-money.

A choice between a global market and a national market has little to recommend it. The choice is too stark and is not viable. But in the face of an all-consuming global market the co-existence of other market structures as well as reciprocal exchange which better preserve particular social relations and regional identities is a choice which is non-negotiable. Only then would the space for cultural choice open up and allow sectors within our economy which are not at the mercy of the global market. Then global diversity would mean something. The social policy question becomes one of how to have at least two markets which co-exist, employing mutually exclusive mechanisms.

It would be novel historically, and test the social and practical imagination of us all. But it is an alternative to what we have come to know as ‘globalisation’. Could this become one of the social policy issues at the World Economic Forum which is to be held at Crown Casino, Melbourne on 11–13 September, 2000?

An extended version of this editorial can be found in Arena Journal No. 14

Like a funhouse mirror, the brutal mass-bombing and shelling of Chechnya by Russian forces resembles a distorted version of NATO’s bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo. And while there are differences, as Clinton and Blair are keen to point out, the complicity of the West in the Chechnya situation is both real and multilevelled. Firstly, Russia has taken a leaf out of NATO’s manual on how to wage contemporary warfare. Secondly, the United States has long been a supporter of Russian attempts to dominate Chechnya. Finally, the muted response by the West to such overt barbarism has as much to do with investments in the global economy, natural resources, and ideological attempts to restrain perceived growth of fundamentalist Islam as it has to do with the issues of opposing a powerful and nuclear-capable nation.

Despite some coverage, the media response, in proportion to the amount of killing and terror that is evident in Chechnya, has been restrained. While Russia over the past six weeks has relentlessly bombed cities and villages, resulting in indiscriminate destruction, causing over two hundred thousand people to flee to neighbouring Ingushetia, there has been precious little coverage in the media of a crisis that equals, if not surpasses, the one in Kosovo. Whereas dozens of television cameras were able to convey the multifaceted scenes of terror in Kosovo, we are yet to see anything comparable in Chechnya. One can speculate on the reasons for this. One is that Russia has ensured that media contact is minimal – it is fighting its own version of an ‘information war’. Few reporters are willing to go to an area made so obviously dangerous by random bombing, combined with threats of kidnapping. Russian shelling has destroyed local media structures, along with everything else. The lack of television coverage means that Russia can deny much of what it is doing, the attack on Elistanzhi and the bombing of five Red Cross vehicles (killing two staff and twenty-five civilians) being two notorious early examples.

Another reason may be the effects of the new post-1989 division between so-called Central Europe and what remains of the East, a kind of replication of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘new poor’ at a national/regional level. In other words, if it is not in ‘Europe’ then it does not get priority – at some level it does not even exist. Perhaps it is all too much to cope with so soon after Kosovo. Here we have another example of forced movement, bombing from above, except that the same side is doing both the bombing and the forced emigration. Yet if Kosovo remains in limbo, with little in the way of positive results, if the ‘humanitarian’ values espoused as the reason for the high-altitude bombing in the Balkans have withered with time, is it not possible to find a degree of convergence between NATO-style abstract destruction in the name of humanitarianism, and the more obviously odious form destruction takes in Chechnya?

Since the breakup of the USSR, the republic of Chechnya has been a source of consternation for Russia. Claiming an independent heritage and a different ethnic composition (largely Muslim), Chechnya also contains much of the rich oil and gas deposits of the Caucasus. In 1994 Russia attempted to submit Chechnya to its will, first through what is known as the Russian ‘Bay of Pigs’ disaster, when Russian soldiers disguised as Chechens attempted to infiltrate the region, and were comprehensively routed. Six months later this was followed by open invasion. In the end Russia withdrew, having sustained large casualties in fighting a vicious ground war. There have been subsequent incidents of Chechen terrorism, including several bomb attacks in Moscow in ‘retaliation’.

This time, it is different. Russia has followed the model of the United States in Iraq and NATO in Kosovo and has conducted war at a distance. When the weather is clear Russian airplanes have made over 150 sorties a day. On 3 November the Russian airforce commander complained that his pilots had dropped so many precision-guided bombs that they were running short. At the time of writing the bombing has increased. Not that precision seems to have been of much importance. The city of Grozny is decimated, its central marketplace and hospital destroyed. It may even be that the airforce and army do not even know what they are hitting, with many Russian pilots having received minimal training. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent reports that the most common sound in Chechnya is that of the notoriously inaccurate Grad missile launcher.

There is no doubt that in the short term many in Russia are reaping the benefits of this new style of mediated destruction. The approval ratings of Prime Minister Putin have soared as he vows to teach a lesson to the ‘bandits, terrorists and gangsters’ in Chechnya. That this can be done without apparent risk of the humiliation and defeat of Russian soldiers, as in the first war, means that Putin’s military posturing has made him currently the most popular Russian politician. By conducting this ‘safer’ NATO-style war, Russia gains a double revenge – against Chechnya after the humiliations of the 1994-6 war, and against the West – as Russia reasserts itself after being largely left out of the negotiations in Kosovo. The assertion of national power also provides a useful deflection away from the recent money-laundering scandal that rocked Moscow.

There is also a more material gain. It seems that Russia is determined not only to liquidate Islamic rebels (an attempt which has largely failed), but also to regain control of the Caucasus via first gaining control of Chechnya – the gateway to the rich energy resources of the Caspian and Central Asia. Notably, Russia’s ‘recovery’ has been led by profits generated from oil and gas. Indeed Russia’s current account surplus may top 20 billion US dollars, thanks to oil and gas revenue, something that was no doubt made clear to the IMF on a recent visit.

The West has been slow to criticise Russia for conducting the form of abstract terrorism it is now engaged in. Reasons are easy enough to find. Firstly, the Clinton administration has been a long-time supporter of Russia’s attempt to dominate Chechnya. Indeed in the first campaign of 1994-6 President Clinton was highly vocal in his support for Russia, comparing Russia’s ‘struggle’ with Chechnya to America’s civil war, even going so far as to call Boris Yeltsin a Russian Abraham Lincoln. The fact that Chechnya is largely Muslim, and the fact that bombs had been planted in Moscow by Chechens has allowed the rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism’ to flow freely. In December last year the New York Times declared that ‘Mr. Yeltsin is justified in using military force to suppress the [Chechnya] rebellion’. Only very recently, Madeline Allbright expressed US support for Russia against fundamentalist terrorism. Al Gore has said that he will be even tougher than Clinton on Muslim fundamentalist campaigns of violence. This general tenor has created a paradoxical effect upon the world stage. At the same time as President Clinton was ordering Indonesia to get out of East Timor (albeit without real commitment), his administration was supporting a savage invasion of Chechnya, in the name of a war on terrorism. While support has recently waned in the light of Russia’s open and ‘disproportionate’ campaign of terror, this complicity explains the West’s muted criticism, and both the United States’ and Britain’s affirmation at this point that they will not attempt to impose sanctions.

The relation between Russia and the global economy points toward a further level of complicity. Some commentators have called for the United States to stop financial assistance to Russia, as this is clearly, at some significant level, underwriting the war on Chechnya. Yet, while this may happen, the United State is reluctant because of the effect this might have on the global economy. As Rupert Cornwall writes, ‘Economic sanctions could backfire by triggering loan defaults or a repeat of Russia’s 1998 financial crisis that might destabilise international markets’ (Independent, 6 November 1999). For a number of reasons then, it would seem that the hands of the United States are tied. If Prime Minister Putin thumbs his nose at the West, gaining in popularity as he does so, it is perhaps this knowledge that the West simply cannot afford to risk another financial collapse that underscores his immunity to criticism.

After the disaster in Kosovo, and after the destruction of the Chechen republic, it is increasingly clear that the only solution to such racial and territorial aggression is a strengthened United Nations able to intervene on the ground and outside of regional or national interest. While this is a tall order, it is the only realistic possibility. In the last six months we have seen that neither the United States nor NATO is able to act as the world’s policeman. The style of intervention – abstract killing at a distance, the generation of genuine, if often fleeting, upwelling of humanitarian support via media concentration – has proven highly selective, as well as ultimately ineffective. Now Russia has used the methods of the West in a brutal parody of Kosovo-style intervention. The West is unwilling to act due to varying degrees of complicity, its media almost turning a blind eye to the problem.

Note: For the full version of this article, see issue 44 of Arena Magazine.