4. The Importance of Meeting People

During the Spanish Civil War, more than thirty thousand people from over fifty nations volunteered to fight the Nationalist armies of General Franco. Many gave up jobs and left families in order to fight the emerging global threat of fascism, and to defend a nascent socialist, even anarchist republic.

They joined Republican forces that were in many cases undertrained and equipped with antique and inadequate weapons. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell vividly describes the miserable conditions of the front-line troops, dug into feces-strewn trenches with neither the clothing nor arms properly to fight the Franco’s armies, which by contrast received substantial international support from Italy and Nazi Germany.[167] Yet Orwell compellingly evokes the comradeship among the Republican troops, the abolition of traditional hierarchies and the appealing idealism of both the Spanish and international volunteers. He recounts too that anarchist principles were no obstacle to effective military organization: Although there was debate within army units—and a welcome absence of the cringing deference of many military organizations—there was also discipline, not least thanks to the unity of purpose among the troops.

Much history since has given the impression that the international volunteers were mainly middle-class intellectuals. But in fact they came from all walks of life.[88] The “International Brigade” of foreign volunteers fought in several key battles of the civil war, including a notable role in the ferocious Battle of Madrid, where Republican forces successfully beat back a Nationalist assault in the autumn of 1936. The fighting was intense and bloody: Infantry fought at close quarters, room by room, with bayonets and grenades.

Of the thirty thousand or so foreign volunteers who went to fight for their beliefs, nearly ten thousand were killed in action and another eight thousand or so wounded. Of those who survived, many returned to a less than welcoming reception in their home countries. Some were imprisoned, others were denied citizenship, while some, such as the three thousand or so antifascist Germans, were unable to return home at all.

The war in the Darfur region of Sudan has been raging since 2003. Civilian casualties are enormous, with some estimating that several hundred thousand people have been killed, and perhaps three million refugees displaced. The killing has been sustained and deliberate, leading many to depict the conflict as a planned genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of Darfur, engineered and led by the Sudanese government in Khartoum and executed by militias under its control, including the notorious Janjaweed. In 2008, the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. At the time of this writing, however, Bashir has not been handed over to the court for trial;[168] all the signs indicate that the “international community,” including the U.S., is prepared to allow the indictments to be quietly forgotten.

But nongovernmental reaction to the killings in Darfur has been vociferous. Across the world, hundreds of protest groups have demanded action to stop the killing, calling for the intervention of foreign troops either under United Nations or African Union auspices. Some protest groups, such as Not on Our Watch, were set up by famous film stars, including George Clooney and Brad Pitt.[89] Students from Swarthmore College set up a telephone hotline that immediately connects the caller to the office of their representative in Congress, whom they can demand take action about Darfur. There have been a large number of Internet petitions about Darfur, some attracting many millions of signatories.

But this vast expenditure of campaigning energy has resulted in scant additional protection for Darfuri civilians. As the war raged, the “international community’s” response amounted to a small and underequipped African Union force which, several years after the conflict began, comprised only a few thousand lightly armed troops to provide security in an area approximately the size of Spain. Even the force’s defenders make no claim that the AU force is in any way adequate to deter or prevent attacks against civilians. And indeed the killing has continued up to the time of this writing.

Some commentators have suggested that the rhetorical heat generated by Western pressure groups, and in particular their use of the word “genocide,” may have made the chances of finding a peaceful outcome locally more difficult.[90] Just as distant governments must simplify the complex realities of foreign conflicts in order to pronounce policy about them, so too did the simplifying lens of distance enable campaigners to turn a complicated and fluid situation into a compelling black-and-white narrative of good and evil, leading some to argue that the simplifications of celebrity campaigning have actually helped prolong the conflict.[91] No foreign citizen has taken up arms themselves to defend the Darfuris.

The advent of the Internet has released a wave of enthusiasts who believe that democracy can be improved—saved, perhaps—by technology alone. There are now innumerable websites where online petitions can be created and propagated on any topic, from freeing imprisoned Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to liberating socialite Paris Hilton from her brief incarceration for drunk driving. Politicians have been quick to glom on to the petition trend. The website of the British prime minister, like that of the White House, encourages their submission though there is little mention of what becomes of any petition thus delivered. The woefully undemocratic British House of Lords, where every member is either appointed or inherits their seat, recently established an equally pitiful blog site to encourage “dialogue” between their Lordships and the grateful public.[92] Even the British sovereign, to whom all Britons are subject, now has a Facebook page where the Queen’s subjects can ventilate their feelings.

Not one to miss out on a trend, China’s Communist Party, a body not best known for accountability and transparency, has launched its own discussion forum, “Direct line to Zhongnanhai.” Zhonghnanhai is the huge and secretive compound in the heart of Beijing where China’s leaders live and work. As one commentator aptly put it, “The site appears to be an effort to persuade people that the leadership is listening to their very personal concerns…. It is clearly designed to demonstrate that the leadership is attentive and sensitive.”[93] But as the Financial Times reported, although the new message board is trying to demonstrate responsiveness, it does not actually provide responses from the leaders addressed. A further problem with “Internet democracy” was revealed when such an attempt was mounted during the transition period after the U.S. presidential election of 2008. When the new administration of President-elect Barack Obama created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas “virtually” to the president, they received over forty thousand proposals and nearly a million and a half people voted on their preferences among those proposals. The most popular idea was to legalize marijuana. Legalizing online poker topped the contributions in the technology category. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funds for childhood cancer. The New York Times’ conclusion from this episode was that advocates of the Internet as the incarnation of real-time participatory democracy—“Athens on the Net”—still had some arguments to answer.[94]

There are now websites that invite views on proposed legislation, scrutiny of campaign finances and details of your representatives’ voting patterns. “See, click, fix” allows citizens to identify local problems online for government action.[95] But all these supposedly new forms of political action rely on a very traditional mechanism of political change—up/down: pressuring, scrutinizing, demanding that representatives and government take action. There has been no change to the fundamental model of politics.

It is correspondingly easy for government and other embodiments of the status quo to adopt these new technological tools, and thus neutralize any benefit. Governments are now replete with their own tech fetishists, wittering on (or twittering on) about “Government 2.0” and organizing podcasts, tweets and blogs saying more or less the same things that politicians have always said, albeit through a different medium.

Despite the repeated claim from government that the flow of information is from people to government, the evidence suggests that the true direction is the opposite. There is scant evidence to suggest that any significant government policy has been informed or altered by tweeting or the fancy online tools set up, for instance, by the U.S. State Department to encourage a “global conversation.” The basic power structure is unchanged—up/down—the only difference is the form of communication. Revealingly, the most palpable results of this “new” Web activism are to be found in the most traditional manifestations of “old” politics: organizing get-out-the-vote volunteers and, inevitably, raising money.

Celebrants of the new technological democracy often cite examples from “abroad” where technology has brought about political change, like the “color” revolutions in Ukraine or Georgia, or the “Twitter” protests against the government in Iran in 2009, and most recently the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in the “Arab spring” of 2011, where indeed it is clear that social media played an important role.

They rarely mention that there are equally many examples where technology has had a more malign effect. In Nigeria, deadly riots in the city of Jos were fueled, according to one authority, by text messages sent between rampaging mobs;[96] the same thing happened in the violence that gripped Kosovo in 2004 (described in the previous chapter). In London, the killing of a fifteen-year-old boy was coordinated by his attackers on Facebook.[169] The “Twitter” protests in Iran did not lead, yet, to the overthrow of government; many protesters ended up in the same prison very traditionally used by different regimes to house political prisoners—Tehran’s notorious Evin jail. These prisoners now include Iran’s best-known blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, who in 2010 was sentenced to nineteen years in jail for alleged collaboration with foreign governments, spreading “propaganda” against the Islamic regime and setting up “obscene” websites.

In early 2011, the dictatorial regime in Sudan learned quickly from the Mubarak regime’s mistakes in managing Internet-based protest in Egypt. Khartoum turned the Internet against the protesters, setting up fake pro-democracy pages on Facebook and arresting all those who showed up for the demonstrations advertised on the site. Eventually, activists avoided using Internet-based tools at all, returning to more traditional and covert forms of organization.[97] The lesson is stark: Power adapts to new technology, and swiftly.

After an initial spasm of excitement at the liberating possibilities of the World Wide Web, it is now emerging that China’s adoption of the Internet does not necessarily herald a new dawn of transparency and incipient democracy. Every major Internet company in China employs scores and sometimes hundreds of Internet “administrators” to search for subversive content. The city of Beijing recently advertised for ten thousand volunteers to act as monitors.[98] Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remain blocked. China is adapting search technology similar to Google’s to hunt and prosecute dissent. The search company that pioneered the antidissident algorithms is now a successful commercial company, listed on the Chinese stock exchange—a neat rebuttal of the naive equation that free markets ipso facto produce freedom of speech.

In general, the protection of basic freedoms on the Web relies on the goodwill and good intentions of the very small number of people who control its most powerful institutions: the very opposite of the ideal condition required for the maintenance of freedom and democracy. Large companies—Yahoo, AOL, Google—dominate decisions about what content may appear on the Web; one can only hope they are beneficent. Google alone controls 63 percent of Internet searches. In deciding what can or cannot be published on the Web and listed in its searches, and whether to comply with censoring governments, Google is taking decisions of immense consequence for freedom of speech. Its decision to confront censorship in China in early 2010 was a decision of great political, and not merely commercial, consequence.

As Google stood up to China, Microsoft without apology continued to offer a censored search service. Yahoo! and Microsoft have been accused by Amnesty International of abetting censorship and repression in China by supplying equipment and adapting their search engines to block certain sites and, in Yahoo!’s case, assisting the Chinese authorities in identifying online antigovernment critics. In response, they have argued that no company alone can change Chinese law, by which they must abide.

Eli Pariser of MoveOn has warned of a more subtle danger: that Google and Facebook’s filtering mechanisms are creating a “filter bubble” around us; the algorithms applied by these sites to “personalize” our Web experience are effectively rendering much of the Web invisible.[99] We think we are browsing the entire World Wide Web, but in fact we are only seeing the sites Google and Facebook’s filters deem appropriate to our interests. The Web surfer in China experiences the same phenomenon. There is no outward sign that the sites they are visiting have been vetted—or filtered—for their consumption by the sophisticated filtering technology used by the Chinese government. Unwitting, they think that they are surfing the whole Web. In this regard, they are just like Web users in the West.

As Stanford University’s Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued, it is hard always to square the interests of a commercial company seeking to expand market share with the protection of freedom of speech: “[Google has] enormous control over a platform of all the world’s data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it’s hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.”[100]

At least the Internet, it is argued, will encourage debate and interaction, albeit virtually rather than in person. But here, it appears that instead of encouraging debate among those of differing views and thus convergence, the opposite may be happening. The Web offers multiple locations to find those one agrees with, and to avoid those one doesn’t. As columnist Nicholas Kristof has commented, we select the kind of news and opinions that reflect our own prejudices back to us, an emerging news product Nicholas Negroponte of MIT has called “The Daily Me.”[101]

One result is that any clash of opinions, especially in the anything-goes anonymity of the Web, is increasingly violent, hostile and insulting. Name-calling is frequent; reasoned debate rare. Particularly when opinions differ from the party line—whether of left or right—criticism tends to escalate, and coarsen. It’s not only domestic debates that witness such growing vituperation. In China, when a Chinese fighter plane crashed, killing its pilot, after colliding with a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, the Chinese blogosphere erupted with violently anti-American and nationalist sentiment: views that the Chinese government was happy, at least at first, to allow, perhaps as a means to ventilate more general political frustrations. Demonstrations followed, and the American embassy in Beijing was attacked by stone-throwing hordes. Some demanded that China declare war on the U.S. The traditional state-controlled press, while critical of the U.S., had taken a more measured tone. The Chinese authorities struggled to contain the situation and began to downplay the issue in public. Some of the more rabid blogs were closed down. Eventually, the riots stopped. Back in the U.S., the government’s director of National Intelligence has observed that the Internet is a fertile breeding ground for terrorism, warning that, “When it comes to susceptibility to radicalization, virtual communities have become as important as physical communities.”[102]

The antagonism and hostility of political debate on the Internet reveals an essential truth of the modern condition, which is in fact a perpetual condition of humanity, but one which modernity places in starker relief: The more detached people are from one another, the more they can cloak themselves in anonymity and be shielded from the consequences of their views, the more violent, hostile and irresponsible they are likely to be. It is a peculiar but retrograde feature of modernity that its facets—the nature of modern work, communications, political interaction and the modern state itself—have heightened that detachment.

There is a form of politics which produces more consensus, a better understanding and respect for alternative points of view and a deeper acknowledgment of facts over opinion. It does not require an expensive computer or any technical equipment at all, for the Internet often excludes the poor and otherwise marginalized.[170] It is as old-fashioned as the earliest parliaments, where people gathered on a hillside to arbitrate their common business. The academic who has pioneered the technique calls it “deliberative democracy,” but really it can be called something simpler: meeting people.

After Hurricane Katrina, much of the infrastructure of New Orleans was devastated: More than 70 percent of housing was damaged and entire neighborhoods were almost completely destroyed; schools, hospitals and police stations were shut down. Nearly a hundred thousand jobs were lost, and eighteen months after the hurricane, more than half of the city’s population had not returned.

In the aftermath, plans to rebuild New Orleans confronted a ravaged infrastructure, enormous financial losses, a local government in disarray and a citizenry whose trust in government had been sorely undermined. The early planning efforts by city officials were met with anger and protest as the community struggled with the challenges of distributing resources and reviving an entire city.

Faced with this crisis of confidence, city officials decided to involve the citizens in a full discussion, in depth and face-to-face, on the priorities for the city. Most of the city’s inhabitants were still spread across the U.S., not yet able to return. Four thousand New Orleanians met in “Community Congresses” staged across the country to discuss recovery priorities for their city. As decision makers listened, citizens discussed how to ensure safety from future flooding, empower residents to rebuild safe and stable neighborhoods, provide incentives and housing so people could return, and establish sustainable and equitable public services.[103]

At the end of the deliberations, fully 92 percent of participants agreed on the “Unified Plan” for the city. Critically, this approval rating represented the collective view of the citizenry: Participants reflected pre-Katrina New Orleans—in proportion to both race and income. At earlier similar events, black and poor citizens were often severely underrepresented. This time, citizens had participated not only at home but in cities across the country where hurricane refugees were then living. Thus, the city’s new plan was discussed and endorsed not only by its officials, but also by its citizens, who overwhelmingly committed to support the plan.

There has been a more sustained experiment in such “participative” or “deliberative” democracy in Porto Alegre, one of Brazil’s largest cities. “The Porto Alegre Experiment” again shows that better outcomes result when citizens are directly involved in decisions over their own lives. In 1989, when the experiment began, the city suffered some of the worst inequality in the continent. The poor—one-third of the city’s population—lived in slums around the periphery; the rich controlled the city’s government and budget. Over the last ten years, the city has gradually developed a multilayered approach to participatory budgeting. Starting at the most local level, citizens are encouraged to participate in debates about local spending priorities—water, schools, hospitals, housing, roads. Of the city’s 1.5 million inhabitants, every citizen is informed about the budget process and around fifty thousand now take part.

According to a World Bank study, the participatory process has fostered direct improvements in facilities in Porto Alegre. For example, sewer and water connections increased from 75 percent of households in 1988 to 98 percent in 1997. The number of schools has increased fourfold since 1986. The city is at the cutting edge in developing progressive recycling and renewable energy projects. The participatory process is overwhelmingly supported by the city’s population. It has also, reportedly, encouraged a change in the tenor of local politics. Less and less a partizan contest, the common enemy is the occasional crisis. Everything is transparent, from decision making to the awarding of contracts.

These new deliberative processes are locally driven and designed for local circumstances; there is no “one size fits all.” The general benefits—of greater citizen empowerment, of greater consensus over local spending—are clear: They flow directly and crucially from the agency of those involved. People participate not to be consulted by government and service-providers but to make real decisions themselves about their circumstances. And when people are trusted and informed to make decisions, they tend to make good ones. Such deliberative processes, with real decisions as their result, are not to be confused with America’s overheated “town hall” meetings of recent memory, or the vulgar arguments on Internet “forums.” While politicians claim that they are intended as a place to hear the views of the public, the town hall meetings are not places where decisions are made. Typically, the local angry brigades line up to denounce elected officials and their plans, providing an unpleasant experience for everyone except those who enjoy public confrontation. Rational discussion and respect for the facts are, unsurprisingly, rarely the result.

In a recent book, legal scholar Cass Sunstein has noted that very often when groups of people are placed together to debate an issue, they often end up more polarized than at the beginning.[104] But Sunstein’s work also suggests how to create greater unity. The more detached groups are from society, the more extreme their decisions are likely to become. The less that a decision debated within a group actually matters, the greater the likelihood of dispute and conflict. A lesson becomes clear: When nothing is at stake, and when no one has agency, it is predictable that heated disagreement will be the outcome.

It is not only hurricane-struck New Orleans that suffers a crisis in democracy. With turnouts falling and disaffection with “politics” growing in all democratic countries, its model, like that of Porto Alegre, offers lessons applicable beyond the occasional management of disasters.

One particular example of that crisis is found at the European Parliament. Originally conceived and empowered to give European peoples a voice in EU decisions largely dominated by governments, its problems highlight weaknesses increasingly apparent in other democratic legislatures.

At the most recent elections to the parliament, extremist parties jumped at the opportunity offered by the dismal turnout of Europe’s voters—the lowest in the parliament’s history. Realizing that many mainstream voters would stay away, extreme and far-right parties made special efforts to mobilize their supporters. The result was that such parties were represented in greater number here than in their own national parliaments. The right-wing British National Party joined Italian and Lithuanian proto-fascists, Dutch anti-immigrant parties and other assorted representatives of the fringe in the home of European “democracy.”

Neither phenomenon—low turnout, extreme political parties—bodes well for the legitimacy, popularity or effectiveness of the decisions arising from the parliament. Both phenomena, however, point to a future of democratic politics, of both disenchantment and extremism, that may become more and more evident, in more established parliaments and congresses too. What is to be done?

The Financial Times recently reported an exercise which sought to address this problem, asking the question: How much longer can the EU continue as a project controlled by elites and disregarded by the masses?[105] What is the solution to this “democratic deficit”?

One answer was attempted by Professor James Fishkin, a social scientist at Stanford University. He conducted an experiment in which a balanced sample of 348 Europeans from the EU’s twenty-seven countries were brought to Brussels for a three-day dialogue on the elections and the policy issues surrounding them. This is a procedure known as “deliberative polling,” a concept Professor Fishkin introduced in 1988.

One outcome of the exercise was that many participants changed their voting intentions as a result of the dialogue. Beforehand, 40 percent said they would vote for mainstream center-right parties, 22 percent for socialists, 9 percent for centrist liberals and 8 percent for Greens. After the exercise, support for the center-right dropped to 30 percent, the socialists and liberals were almost unchanged at 21 percent and 8 percent respectively, and the Greens shot up to 18 percent. The rise in support for the Greens came about as a result of detailed discussions among the participants on climate change. Participants were asked to choose between the view that “we should do everything possible to combat climate change even if that hurts the economy” and the alternative view that “we should do everything possible to maximize economic growth, even if that hurts efforts to combat climate change.” Before the discussions, 49 percent wanted to emphasize the fight against climate change. Afterwards, this figure rose to 61 percent.

Exercises like that performed by Professor Fishkin, and the New Orleans reconstruction plan too, have shown repeatedly that when a group of people gathers together to consider their affairs and collective response to them—and, crucially, make decisions—a number of valuable benefits follow:

1. Participants pay greater heed to each other’s positions and are more likely to acknowledge the concerns that underlie other people’s political views.

2. There is a deeper consideration of facts—including scientific data—than normal political debate, composed largely of opinions, allows.

3. Partly as result of numbers 1 and 2, such exercises usually produce a greater degree of consensus within the group.

4. The group feels a much greater commitment to decisions reached collectively in this manner than to decisions imposed by any other authority.

Fishkin calls this “deliberative democracy.” It is a process of a different order from the current system, prevalent in all democratic states, of representative democracy, whereby citizens elect representatives to make decisions on their behalf. Indeed, deliberative democracy in its fullest form, where people make genuine decisions of consequence as a group, or a grassroots, community-based democracy, is in fact ultimately incompatible with representative democracy. If two mechanisms make decisions, what if their choices are contradictory? One must be supreme.

Professor Fishkin attempts to bridge this problem, and render deliberative techniques compatible, by proposing that deliberative polling, of the kind described above, should help inform the regular structures of representative democracy—the legislators and members of the executive who make up the decision makers. But despite his efforts to construct such groups as representative of the general populace—by selecting their members in proportion to the political support for different parties in the broader population—such “deliberative polling” groups fail in one fundamental regard: They lack legitimacy. They are not elected, so why should their voice, however proportionately it might represent the rest, be heard above others?

Polling—like frequent referendums—fails in another regard too. While polls may provide an indication of what people think on a particular question at a particular moment, they leave out one crucial component of Fishkin’s experiments—the deliberation: the talking, the to-and-fro, the listening, the compromise. Any citizen of California, where referendums are frequent, will recognize that they have done little to contribute to responsible and effective government of the state—rather the opposite. This is also why Internet surveys of opinion, or petitions, tend to the extreme, and are so pathetically inadequate as a new form of democracy.

In his essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” Isaiah Berlin concludes that in deciding what to do, the only option, in private life as in public policy, is to engage in tradeoffs—rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees in specific situations, adding that “a certain humility in these matters is very necessary” since we have no guarantee that any particular course we choose will be right. This is the essence of democracy: discussion of differing views and options on how we together must live, with a view—ultimately—to collective decision. The mere ventilation of opinions, whether in person or online, does not qualify.

In microcosm, it is self-evident that encounters and negotiation offer a greater possibility for respect and agreement than either the virtual chat room or a distant authority. Difficult discussions with friends or family can quickly degenerate online as misunderstandings; willful misinterpretations multiply. No one pretends that meetings in person are necessarily easier, or less painful, but somehow we are able to see and feel more and thus achieve a greater comprehension. Perhaps, above all, we simply spend more time.

Professor Fishkin’s excellent books are filled with examples of deliberative democracy, and his comprehensive analysis of why and how it works and the impressive results it clearly delivers. But by and large, deliberative democracy has remained a matter for academic discussion, and occasional illustrative, yet tantalizing, exercises of the kind that took place in New Orleans or Porto Alegre, or the experiments practiced by Professor Fishkin.

The trouble with deliberative democracy is, of course, that it poses a direct challenge to the existing constitutional order of representative democracy, where the few are elected to arbitrate the affairs of the many. Deliberative polling, while imaginative and revealing in its insights, fails to bridge the gap. For in the existing system, it is not tolerable to the existing authority for citizens to gather to sort out their affairs and make decisions with real effects: that is what governments are for!

For deliberative decision making to function properly, and for citizens to enjoy its full and evident benefits, a condition must apply which, oddly, even the most ardent academic proponents of deliberative techniques seem loathe to confess: There must be no other authority, at all.

Though it is rarely mentioned, even in the histories of that period, the Spanish civil war saw a moment, tragically brief, of real existing anarchism. In the area of Spain under Republican control, anarchists for a short while held sway, as far as that term means anything when no one was completely in charge. This was not anarchy, an absence of order, it was a society that for a period decided to govern itself not by centralized authority, but by the wishes of local communities, workers, men and women, led by values of equality and mutual respect.

This happened between 1936 and 1938, and was confined mostly to parts of Catalonia in northern Spain, including Catalonia’s capital, Barcelona. It was estimated that perhaps ten million people participated in this “Spanish Revolution” where farms and factories, and even shops and barbers, were collectivized and run along communal lines—neither owned by the state nor private capital, but run by the peasants and workers themselves. Decisions were made on libertarian principles—by those affected, without bureaucracy. In many areas, agricultural production significantly increased.

By 1938, it was over. The Communist Party in Moscow decided that Spain was not ready for proletarian revolution—at least not this kind—and ordered its cohorts in Spain, the local Communists, to suppress the anarchists. There were mass arrests, street fighting and executions. Anarchist leaders and parties were denounced. This repression was one of the reasons for the ultimate defeat of the Republicans, and the ensuing four decades of fascist dictatorship under Franco.

George Orwell’s memoir of his experience in Catalonia contains vivid depictions of what anarchism, in practice, was really like. When published, Homage to Catalonia was attacked in Britain and elsewhere, above all by Communists and the left in general, who rejected its account of Communist suppression of the anarchists, preferring Moscow’s propaganda that the anarchists were somehow in Franco’s pay or otherwise to blame for the in-fighting in the antifascist ranks.

Homage sold very few copies on initial publication. Even now, the book is rarely seen for what it truly is, and is instead interpreted as a tragic and picturesque account of failed resistance against fascism.[106] Orwell had joined a small Marxist-oriented party, POUM,[171] in order to fight fascism, but later in the book confesses that if he had the choice again, he would have been an anarchist. He describes life in Barcelona during anarchism:

Many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played out over the whole surface of the Earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.[107]

This description tantalizes with its suggestion of what might be possible if self-organized government were to become reality. Homage to Catalonia also tells a vivid story about how one generation chose very directly to tackle the problems of the world, in this case fascism. And it is to this global stage that we must now turn. For here particularly, perhaps even more than in the domestic realm, governments and their organizations claim to have matters in hand. And in general, it seems, we are happy to believe them. On the world stage, in general, the management of “international affairs” is left to practitioners like statesmen and diplomats, which I once was.

It seems at first sight a reasonable bargain. The world is complicated; it requires professionals to sort it out. But as we shall see in later chapters, the bargain, like the pact between government and voter at home, seems to be breaking down. Established systems of interstate cooperation do not seem to be producing the solutions the world needs. But there is a worse and more pernicious effect too.

Somewhere along the way, it has become accepted that in representing a state, normal moral rules are suspended. Under the catch-all moral permission of droit d’état, officials acting in the name of the state, even law-abiding democracies like Britain or the U.S. are entitled to forsake normal moral inhibitions, like those against killing or causing harm to others. If such actions are justified by the needs of the state, they are not only excused, they are explicitly available. Indeed, the good diplomat is told to reject the soft-headed morality of ordinary people if he is to practice his trade as it must be practiced—realpolitik. If death and the suffering of others are the result, this is a necessary price of protecting our own.

I have not come by this criticism by way of academic study or historical research. I know this, because once I did it. I helped do harm to innocent others, with the explicit moral cover of the state, safe in the knowledge that I would never be held to account. With the comfort of impunity, I once committed violence in the name of the state.