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Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1] This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English ‘history and culture’, no elaboration needed.[2] Others, such as podcaster Konstantin Kisin, appeal to broader ‘British values’—freedom of expression, women’s rights, equitable treatment of minorities, and the like.[3] These abstract principles, largely indistinguishable from the liberal ideals of, say, France or Germany, prove in turn an easy target for those further right, for whom Englishness can only be grasped as a racial category.[4] Indeed, Kisin himself seems to have had a change of heart in this regard, rebuffing ex- Spectator editor Fraser Nelson’s insistence that Rishi Sunak is English on the grounds that the former PM is a ‘brown Hindu’.[5] In their strident delineation of who is and is not English, these civic and ethnic nationalisms reveal an insecurity about the possibility of a positive account of Englishness in the manner of Orwell or his contemporaries.[6] Today’s talking heads offer an essentially apophatic definition of Englishness, approaching it through what it is not. Instead of naming features of a shared and self-evident cultural repository, they focus on those—migrants, criminals, Muslims—who allegedly fail to make the cut. This negative definition easily slides into a political programme: simply remove all offending groups and the mythic unity will return as if by magic. On the shortest-sighted model of this chronology, it is only the increased migration under recent governments, catalysed by the concurrent excesses of ‘woke’ theory, which has consigned English identity to oblivion. Talk of a ‘crisis of Englishness’ is, however, far from new. Casting our eyes for the moment only as far back as the turn of the millennium, when the threats of Scottish and Welsh devolution loomed large, we find a glut of books and television series taking the nation’s vital signs. In the manner of an anatomical dissection, Albion’s dismembered parts—the countryside, grammar schools, aristocracy, or Anglican church—are hoisted aloft for a rapt audience. Roger Scruton, in the introduction to his England: An Elegy  (2000), joins over a dozen authors pacing round England’s grave.[7] The tenor of such works varies, from the cosmopolitan excitement of Andrew Marr’s The Day Britain Died  (2000) to the all-encompassing despair of Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain  (1999). Yet we owe the most interesting artefact of this media explosion to someone born not in Old England but in Trinidad, and who is not generally judged a fusty reactionary. Darcus Howe arrived in England in 1961, soon pivoting from legal study to journalism and political activism, becoming a member of the British Black Panthers and long-standing editor of Race Today . He rose to prominence in 1970 as one of the ‘Mangrove Nine’, arrested, tried, and acquitted for protesting against police raids at The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, a legal proceeding which saw the Metropolitan Police formally admit to racist behaviour. Seven years later, as his biographers Paul Bunce and Robin Field recount, he was again arrested and tried without charge. Whilst pointedly celebrating African Liberation Day rather than the Silver Jubilee, he had performed a citizen’s arrest on a police officer who was shouting racist abuse and locked him up in a basement.[8] Howe’s radicalism can then hardly be questioned, and one might be forgiven for expecting him to condemn Englishness entirely, as a malignant discourse of chauvinism and racial superiority. This was the tack taken by the so-called Parekh report, published in 2000 by the Runnymede Trust under the title ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’.[9] But Howe has a habit of surprising, especially in his later career as a broadcaster. For his first documentary on the topic, 1988’s England, My England , Howe personally selected arch-conservative Peregrine Worsthorne to be his co-presenter.[10] Later, in the 2004 production Who You Callin’ a Nigger? , he focused on violent tensions between ethnic minority populations—a controversial topic, and one which might seem to provide grist to the mill of those opposed to migration and multiculturalism. His relationship to England and Englishness was fiercely dialectical. As he put it: Although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign ‘Motherland’ of my parents’ vision.[11] It is this dual perspective which makes Howe’s three-part television series White Tribe (2000), freely available at the time of writing on Channel 4’s website, such compelling viewing.[12] In an inversion of the colonial travelogue or ethnography, Howe roams the highlands and lowlands of England, interrogating those he finds about their self-conception, their shared rituals and practices. White Tribe  is grounded in the belief that English identity both exists—or at least existed in recent memory, for Howe can fondly recall it from the 1960s—and is, when expressed without prejudice, essentially good. Its interviewees might be arranged in a simple matrix: they are either possessed of a meaningful, historically and geographically informed sense of identity or not; and they are either racist or not. He sets off with optimism. * From the outset, the former criterion seems in distinctly short supply. The first episode opens with Howe quizzing bemused pedestrians about the content of white culture. He is met with a mixture of genuine befuddlement—‘I haven’t got a clue really’—and pessimistic historicization: ‘We set the standards for the rest of the world. Well, we used to’. But this is nothing to be gloated over, for Howe knows well the unstable mixture of melancholy and agitation which results from such loss of self. ‘Until I made this journey’, he reflects, ‘I thought white people were certain of themselves and knew who they were’. No, ‘these are people who are in a crisis. Something is finished, there’s nothing in its place’. In Howe’s Brixton neighbourhood, this sense of an ending is illustrated by way of contrast. On one side of the street presides a church, that bastion of Englishness, whose flock now consists almost entirely of immigrants. On the other swells a nightclub peopled until the early hours by partying whites, whom Howe, dipping into the register of social conservatism, disdains as ‘hedonistic in behaviour, licentious’. This opening juxtaposition is reprised as Howe speaks to Simon, a young white man living in majority-Asian Southall. Simon’s minority status invites the question of identity more pressingly than elsewhere, but it is not answered convincingly; he unfavourably compares a white population which takes little pride in their Christian religion with the Sikh community seen celebrating a festival in the streets. Blame for this inertia is placed not on migrants, or even on mass migration as a phenomenon, but on the enervating effects of consumer capitalism: ‘you buy an Easter egg, it’s done’. The Sikhs, whom Howe agrees are ‘full of certainty, full of bounce and colour’, represent a source of both envy and potential inspiration, an instructive case for a population losing its global self-evidence. In Newcastle, listless ennui makes way for pandemonic intensity. Howe encounters a group of football fans, again branded ‘licentious’, pasty faces swarming the camera as they gyrate their bodies and swig from cans of lager. There is, he admits, a ‘carnival spirit’ at play, but with a crucial proviso. ‘We had something to celebrate: freedom from slavery’, whilst this is merely a ‘celebration of nothingness’, grounded in no deeper cultural convictions than football and beer. Casting aspersions on the authentic Englishness of football may seem implausible, though here too Howe is echoing nineteenth-century critiques of the sport which condemned its violent disorder, sensationalistic media coverage, and increasing professionalization as betrayals of the properly English value of ‘fair play’, thought to be embodied by cricket. Most everything now deemed archetypally English has previously been presented as its mortal enemy. But the important point is a socioeconomic one. This hedonistic furore may, Howe speculates, be all that remains of white working class culture ‘when you take the work away’, replacing the heavy industry of shipbuilding and coalmining with a night-time economy of bars and clubs.[13] A yet more dystopian confirmation of this thesis is found at a post-industrial estate in Grangetown, North Yorkshire. As the steelworks have closed down, a mass of unemployed remain, ensnared by crime or drugs and surveilled all the while by omnipresent cameras. No Englishness survives in this ghetto, no past or future, only a terminal, degrading present. Who is to blame for this? For Howe, the culprits are clear: all those proponents of Thatcherite neoliberalism whose destructive war against trade unions and old industry saw the replacement of working class English culture with foreign capital. Quite by chance, at a Conservative party annual dinner in Skegness, he runs into a chief architect of this transformation, Norman Tebbit, delivering a speech on—what else?—the fate of Englishness under the threat of devolution. Laconic as ever, Howe points out the hypocrisy in mourning, just when it becomes politically expedient, a ‘little England which he himself wiped out’. His verbal joust with Tebbit returns us to the question of who exactly can be classed as English. Tebbit’s line is unwavering, and he insists to Howe that ‘clearly you’re not English, but you are British’, despite recognizing that on this logic the Union’s disintegration would leave Howe and millions of others in no man’s land.[14] The former Conservative Party Chairman’s argument is not just echoed by Kisin nowadays, but also—more uncomfortably—by the Parekh report, in which Englishness is deemed an inappropriate identification for ethnic minorities in Britain, too laden with ‘systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations’. Better, the report suggests, to describe oneself as British, though even this is ‘not ideal’.[15] From today’s vantage point, such reasoning seems worryingly at risk of appropriation by ethnonationalists—‘see, they don’t want to integrate anyway’. Howe wisely takes a more strident strategy, not ceding language but claiming it for himself. He bluntly maintains that being English would be ‘no problem with me’, a perfectly coherent position provided one views identity in terms of cultural consciousness rather than unflexing bloodline. Ironically, Howe’s desire to be English sets him apart from a substantial segment of his interviewees, whose primary wish seems to be to divest themselves from their own Englishness. Birmingham is becoming a ‘Yankee town’, its inhabitants enjoying basketball and barbecue food in vast shopping centres. Globalization has killed the old high street and installed in its place a never-ending strip mall. Through it roams ‘Thatcher’s working class’, linked by nothing but the relentless desire to exercise their consumer choice. In the bourgeois Cotswolds, ‘the England that I dreamt about in Trinidad’, Howe uncovers a virulent strain of Francophilia. Participants at a wine-tasting see their spiritual home over the Channel, promising a therapeutic journey into the past since, as one tippler avers, ‘France now seems to be as England was in 1955’. One can just as easily imagine Howe prowling Brick Lane, interrogating diners about whether they prefer curry to pie and mash. Viewed cynically, multiculturalism’s appeal is revealed as merely a chance for the bland British middle classes to liven themselves up a little, experimenting with new colours and flavours. Echoes of more distant regions reverberate in Yorkshire’s Todmorden, where the cotton industry has been phased out in favour of health food shops replete with advertisements for holistic medicine, reflexology, shiatsu, aromatherapy, and the like. A castle in the area is now inhabited by some forty Buddhists living in a community of meditation. Evoking Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘Western Buddhism’—the optimal ideological fetish with which to claim inner peace whilst participating in a frenetic neoliberal capitalism—Howe elegantly observes that ‘the mills have gone to the far east and the far east has come to the castle’.[16] So inspiring for early 2000s authors like Zadie Smith, all this anarchic play of hybrid identities seems to make him distinctly uneasy. Howe has some strange bedfellows in this suspicion. In White Tribe ’s second episode, focused on those self-avowedly proud to be English, he speaks to adherents of an orthodox church modelled on the pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon population. For one gentleman, who advocates for a distinctly English parliament, the ‘coming of the Normans was something like the arrival of the Nazis and Pol Pot combined’. Yet he is not, he claims, opposed to diversity—on the contrary, this is a struggle ‘against the monoculture of globalism’, epitomized by ‘McDonald’s and Coca Cola’. This logic, whereby the false difference of consumerist globalization represents an annihilation of true ethnic difference, is—as Miri Davidson has shown—often found on the far right as a tactical appropriation of the language of left-wing decolonial theory.[17] Does Englishness deserve protection as an indigenous identity? Howe is unconvinced. For one, asserting identity’s immutability would deny the possibility of meaningful acculturation to which his own life is a testament. Despite a period of fascination with his Afro-Caribbean heritage, during which he took on an African name, he is forced to admit that he is ‘more English than [he] could ever be African’. Not only is the idea that the saints of pre-Norman religion could provide a meaningful identity after the turn of the millennium far from credible, England is a ‘mongrel nation’ of irreversibly mixed genealogies. Should Tebbit, who recalls that his family came over from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, be excluded from Englishness just as firmly as Howe? Belonging, on these grounds, is either a milestone which can never be reached or one which falls victim to precisely the arbitrary flexibility its proponents are trying to evade. Defences of ‘cultural relativism’ or the ‘right to difference’ stop short of overt racism. Not everyone Howe speaks to is so subtle. Playing bingo with retired workers in Todmorden, he is initially enchanted. ‘Full of confidence and dignity’, this is ‘the last of the good England, the best of it’. Yet this sentimentality soon evaporates when one, speaking to a cameraman, proclaims the white English a ‘superior race’. Nor can Howe be accused of oversensitivity to minor slights or jibes. Indeed, he perhaps unexpectedly defends the existence of comedian Bernard Manning’s controversial Embassy Club, its humour a kind of racial war of all against all, himself stifling a chuckle at more than a few wisecracks. Learning that Manning’s son would soon take over, with a plan to turn the venue into an ‘alternative comedy club catering for the metropolitan elite’, Howe confesses that he doesn’t want to see ‘another bit of traditional English culture wiped out by political correctness’. If racially provocative humour, provided it is doled out equally, can form a healthy part of English identity, the line must be drawn at genuine hatred, the ‘mark of the beast’. This Howe encounters in both Dover and on a deprived housing estate in Oldham. His excursion to the south coast could easily have been filmed in 2025: fuelled by the tabloid press, locals fear an onslaught of swarthy, moustachioed, Eastern European interlopers arriving in lorries by night with vast wads of notes, bringing disease, muggings, and disorder. The Folkestone Road, their alleged stomping ground, is deemed a ‘no-go area’, though Howe merrily parades up and down the street and—not for lack of trying—can find no migrants there. All he manages to stump up are three mild-mannered students sitting in a local park, teenage refugees from Kosovo who politely deny having harassed any local residents. The point is not that the number of asylum seekers crossing the channel—still a central preoccupation for Fleet Street and Whitehall alike—has not increased, nor that such migration is entirely without issue. Rather, these parallels serve as a reminder that the underside of arguments against the mass movement of the 2010s and 2020s, their nostalgic projection of a prelapsarian utopia free of worries about violence, instability, or social disintegration, would hardly have been recognized as such by the inhabitants of those past times. This case is made particularly effectively by Geoffrey Pearson in his Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears .[18] Published in 1983, Pearson’s book sought to throw into question the dominant narrative that a ‘permissive revolution’ in the prior two decades had precipitated an unprecedented decline in public morals, an explosion of disorder and criminality ending centuries of peaceable stability. As Pearson shows, this supposed stability, a substantial part of the ‘British way of life’, would have been news to earlier commentators, who complained of a similar malaise not only ‘before the war’ (so often a nostalgia-infused hinterland) but back well into the eighteenth century and beyond. The 1950s Teddy Boy, Victorian garrotter, and unruly Georgian apprentice step into line as earlier incarnations of the violent, ‘invading’ migrant nowadays. Of course, the existence of prior moral panics does not automatically invalidate contemporary ones. But, given its apparent survival across more than 300 years of crisis, one suspects that the British (or English) ‘way of life’ is either considerably stronger than generally thought or in many instances just a rhetorical tool whose chief utility consists in providing an ahistoric, idealized foil to the undesirable present.[19] In Oldham, an equal sense of crisis prevails. Residents are convinced they have been made ‘second class citizens’, viewing themselves as ‘ethnic minorities’ on an estate where ninety percent of inhabitants are white and only a tiny fraction Asian. Support for the National Front and ‘Third Position’ is widespread, and a ‘racial war’ eagerly awaited. This is hatred in its most insidious form, and Howe is utterly horrified. But as unpleasant as such exchanges are, they are nonetheless instructive. For one, they reveal the emptiness of the residents’ identifications. As White Tribe ’s producer Narinder Minhas reflected: I wanted to see whether it was possible for people in places like Oldham to be white and proud but not racist—after all, it is possible for me to be Asian and proud, and for Darcus to be black and proud. But sadly, there is a thin line between English nationalism and racism. People struggle to describe their Englishness in positive terms. They often resort to negatives. Uncertain of themselves, they attack others.[20] A strong identity is a tolerant one, uncowed by the presence of the Other. Not here: overflowing aggression plasters over an Englishness almost wholly denuded of content. A similar tension characterizes the imperatives they seek to place on recent immigrants. Where one resident complains that their Asian neighbours rarely speak English, another insists that the estate must remain wholly ethnically English in makeup. Are migrants expected to integrate—‘into what?’, Howe might ask—or to segregate? Whilst seamless integration is often touted as the apotheosis of the migrant experience, this has not always been the case. Consider the verdict delivered by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson in 1964: The ordinary white citizen generally accepts his place in society and makes no attempt to gate crash places where he would not only feel out of place but is clearly unwelcome. Not all immigrants have the ability to do this and for the most part they are hypersensitive over race and colour.[21] Is this not inviting precisely the ghettoization deemed nowadays the worst possible result of migration? The twin anxieties of contamination, disrupting a prearranged social order, and isolation, refusing to enter into it, place the new arrival on the horns of a dilemma. Those migrants on that estate in Oldham, never seen but much discussed, were only those most violently impaled. Howe, for his part, strove always to escape this contradiction, advocating an ‘integration on our terms’. In this way, he asserted the right to self-definition against a presumptuous, paternalistic rhetoric which framed integration as the continuation of Britain’s imperial ‘civilizing mission’.[22] After so many failures and false starts, one wonders whether Howe will award anyone with the stamp of true Englishness. But we are in luck; there is a winner after all and her name is Mary, a member of the long-standing landed gentry in Tynedale. Joining Mary on a fox hunt, Howe is enraptured—finally, people who know who they are! This enthusiasm would hardly be surprising for a conservative like Scruton,[23] but in the case of an urban radical like Howe it surely is. And yet much connects the unlikely pair. For one, their sense that any moral objection to animal suffering is outweighed by the value of tradition. Then there is the family model Mary espouses, according to which everyone should be ‘within striking distance’, rooted rather than scattered. But their closest affinity is a shared love for butter, which ‘Blair and his olive oil crew’, as Howe puts it, are trying to sacrifice at the altar of ‘health and safety’. Butter is one symbol for identity, resisting the corrosive torrent of post-industrial capitalism. The hunt is another. Howe praises the tender detail with which it is organized, the historical care and attention to ritual which has gone into every aspect. Yet this care exists alongside the spontaneity of birthright; it is somehow unthinking, automatic, and thus—unlike so much else he has seen—wholly authentic: English. * Soon enough, the olive oil brigade had its way. Fox hunting was outlawed in England and Wales in 2004. Howe’s view of the Blairite project remained dim in the extreme. Interviewed the same year, he offered a Janus-faced view of the prior four decades: The England that I came to was the England of the patrician Tory. There was a consensus between the Tories and the working classes that was rooted, in my view, in the war, when the courage of the working classes had been immense. Margaret Thatcher wiped that away. She destroyed the working classes at their best and most powerful, and all we’re left with is office boys and girls. Mrs Thatcher worked in an office with a few people. So did Tony Blair. If you work in a factory, you work with thousands of people. If you are one of the landed gentry or you own a business, you are responsible for masses of people. Mrs Thatcher and Blair know nothing about anything. Blair never met anybody, never travelled anywhere before he started travelling as Prime Minister. And now these people are in charge.[24] If 1941’s The Lion and the Unicorn  was, as his wife Eileen Blair suggested, Orwell’s answer to the question of ‘how to be a socialist whilst Tory’, White Tribe plays a similar role for Howe.[25] But whilst one is an exhortation, a stoking of the fires, the other is an elegy oscillating between tragedy and farce, its lone positive note resounding like a trip to see the last of an endangered species behind bars at the zoo. Howe plays a man out of time, a belated modernist—a belated Englishman —finding everywhere he goes a nation which cannot live up to the promised ideal of his childhood in Trinidad. In this he is far removed from today’s left-liberal discourses around race and identity. There is nothing ‘woke’ here, no call for allyship, recognition, or education. Howe endorses the idea that one could (and perhaps even should ) be ‘proud to be white’, albeit lamenting that in practice this is often accompanied by execrable racism. Yet there is also little impression given that this prejudice might be the expression, product, or engine of any systemic privilege, buttressed and emboldened by structural advantages. Rather, a desperate, last-ditch racism appears all that a beleaguered white working class has left, having been gutted by the ‘office workers’ Thatcher and Blair—another incarnation of the ‘professional managerial class’ often blamed for an occlusion of class politics by identitarian struggles. On this framing, it is easy to see Howe’s potential allure for the populist right or the anti-woke, workerist left. This has been the fate of his lifelong friend and mentor CLR James, held up in the pages of UnHerd and Spiked  as the ultimate Marxist opponent of identity politics, a staunch admirer of ‘Western civ’ for whom issues of race never outflanked those of class.[26] It is nonetheless hard to imagine the political right of the 2020s taking much joy from a viewing of White Tribe . For one, there is a pointed historical rejoinder: any collapse of English identity must be traced back far further than the so-called ‘Boriswave’, as young rightists have taken to dubbing the surge in immigration after 2021.[27] It is surprising to recall that, just before the turn of the millennium, German political sociologist Christian Joppke was able to describe Britain as a would-be ‘zero-immigration country’.[28] So perhaps we have Blair to blame for opening the floodgates and drowning Englishness alive. But the buck does not stop there. If Thatcher succeeded in harnessing the anxieties of the petty bourgeoisie—her ‘nation of shopkeepers’—and turning them against spectres of crime, disorder, and unfairness, an approach aped to great effect by Reform UK’s Nigel Farage,[29] Howe sees the disaster beneath. This frenzy of negative identification gave cover to the erosion of the industrial working classes’ communal traditions and the elevation across society of empty ‘consumer choice’ to the primary vessel of identity and freedom. It is hard to see how the comparatively tiny population of migrants in Britain at that time can be blamed for this. One could go yet further back. Take the reactionary modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from DH Lawrence and WB Yeats to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, all labouring under a pervasive Nietzschean influence.[30] The contemporary far right often borrows from this discourse, rehashing its prognoses of decadence and degeneration, its mourning of a martial valour and nobility ostensibly replaced by mediocre equality. Yet this inevitably remains a partial ventriloquism. For earlier elitists, the great antagonist is not the migrant but the masses: the vast industrial proletariat unmoored by capitalism and progressively given political voice by democracy. It is not that these thinkers never applied a racial lens—quite the opposite—but the idea that shared English birth could meaningfully smooth over the immense hierarchical divisions within the population would have been ludicrous to them. Thus the proletariat was itself  racialized, its emergence experienced as the mass immigration of an alien species whose proliferation and empowerment would, if unchecked, destroy the very possibility of culture. On this token, the masses are scarcely human, let alone ‘English’. Clearly, Howe’s pessimistic threnody in White Tribe  cannot be placed in this tradition. The man was, after all, a socialist, a ‘black Leveller’,[31] for whom the working classes had a heroic, liberatory role to play in history. Yet his account of Englishness as a cultural repository of traditions, rituals, and relics, something embodied and lived out rather than innately but accidentally possessed, and therefore wholly at risk of historicization, is distinctly modernist in character. With it comes an implicit riposte to nationalists of every stripe: merely claiming fealty to Englishness or ‘Western civilization’ is not enough—you need to prove it. Such a challenge is now provocative in its untimeliness. Populism has come to dominate in politics over recent decades, playing off a supposedly organic whole tied inextricably together by nationhood or race against malicious forces: shadowy international ‘elites’ in league with racial or sexual minorities. Riotous, miscegenating ‘chavs’ à la Little Britain have been replaced in public discourse by a downtrodden but dignified and ethnically specific ‘white working class’. For this mass politics to succeed electorally, conditions for in-group belonging must be as inflexible as they are minimal; the focus should always be on the barbarians at the gates. Whether those in the citadel can figure out who they are is less certain—their interest lies in deferring this reckoning. An early scene in White Tribe  is illustrative. We find Howe interviewing clubbers in his Brixton neighbourhood. Under pressure, one reveller essays the idea that he is English simply because he and his parents were born in England. What is presented by Howe as an impotent cop-out has become in contemporary politics a rallying cry of generational birthright. Now, it may be an explanation for citizenship, but the incidental fact of where one was born hardly implies active belonging to culture or identity. Likewise, a piece of paper showing one’s genetic lineage is in itself just another arbitrary and worthless tautology, which tells us next to nothing about people’s ideals and behaviours. For those on the new right, however, it is the be-all and end-all of identitarian thinking, in turn forming the bedrock of their proposed immigration policies. They recurringly note, as in a recent article in the Pimlico Journal , that if following the discourse of ‘British values’ one is ‘logically forced to deny that the vast majority of British people born prior to the ’70s’ are British, and to ‘disclaim many contemporary people we intuitively know’ are British, giving the example of members of the far-right British National Party.[32] For one, such a framing drastically diverges from the historical tradition of conservative cultural pessimism, which liked nothing more than denying Britishness to those it found wanting—usually the white working class masses whose identity we are here expected to ‘intuitively’ recognize.[33] But there is another, more pressing, question: even if we leave these endogenous differences to one side, why exactly should one care about shared ethnic status? At risk of yet again vindicating Godwin’s law, let us compare—as a paradigmatic case of racial identification—Nazi Germany. Genocidal and scientifically absurd though it was, Nazi race science and its predecessors at the very least strove to be convincing. It constructed a continuum of Germanic culture stretching back through millennia and taking in a dazzling variety of influences, from Teutonic tribes to ancient Greece, Nordic territories to the Roman Empire. It established revitalizing rituals in the present, whether so-called Thingspiele  or sporting celebrations of the body and physical prowess, epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia . And it anchored all this within a teleological model of history which predicted the Aryan race to emerge necessarily victorious over its despised antagonist, establishing a ‘thousand year Reich ’. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it demonstrates well the central point: that race or nationality alone , bereft of any positive cultural or historical buttresses, is but an empty shell. We have seen the clearest example of this already, in Jenrick’s mealy-mouthed evasions. It is likewise telling that, on the page of Reform UK’s manifesto titled ‘Reform is Needed to Defend and Promote British Culture, Identity and Values’, the lone bullet point which could be seen as identifying any affirmative feature of Britishness is that which proposes to make St George’s and St David’s Days public holidays. The rest of the recommendations are purely critical: ‘reject’ the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation; ‘oppose’ cashless society; ‘scrap’ DEI and the BBC licence fee; ‘stop’ de-banking, cancel culture, ‘left wing hate mobs’, and ‘political bias in public institutions’.[34] We are, it seems, expected to believe that British culture and identity will simply spring back into existence once these pernicious influences are removed, a reassuring deus ex machina . Others veer into absurdity or kitsch when attempting to answer the question of what cultural identity they are promoting or defending. Carl Benjamin, a right-wing influencer better known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’, has gushed on social media: ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration […] People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’.[35] The stimulus? A music video from 2001 of American rock band Alien Ant Farm performing their song ‘Smooth Criminal’. Remarkable for its bizarrely twee sentimentality, the post is also a good illustration of the USA’s outsized influence on contemporary discourses of identity. If Englishness is evaporating, hope is placed in the broad tent of ‘whiteness’ or ‘white culture’, deemed more likely to survive the much-lamented ravages of wokeness and neoliberalism. Alongside endless posts of Gothic cathedrals and marble statues, impressive enough but decontextualized online into empty simulacra, we are presented as zeniths of ‘white culture’ professional figure skating[36] and celebrity conductor André Rieu.[37] Such posts are perhaps easy targets, though, as Sam Adler-Bell has outlined, this mood of vague yet aggressive nostalgia is constitutive of the entire Trumpian project.[38] With notable exceptions—we hear increasing talk of ‘Anglofuturism’, a fusionist combination of technological progress with traditionalist aesthetics, drawing on historian Alan Macfarlane to paint the Englishman as the economic individualist par excellence[39]—this applies to the UK as well. It is not, however, a cause for relief. On the contrary, as Theodor Adorno observed in the wake of Nazism, ‘it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character, precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance’.[40] Where the reliable commonplaces of pre-1945 English culture have been uprooted, populists have turned to a fetishized concept of racial identity aimed at plastering over this sense of loss and quelling an incumbent nihilism. Yet we need be neither as distrusting of identity as, for example, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, for whom identification of any kind seems a sure path to fascism,[41] nor as utterly pessimistic about Englishness as Howe, nor again as militantly but superficially fixated on it as the new right. It need not—indeed, it should not—form the basis of our politics. That it is no longer wholly ‘automatic’ does not mean it cannot be cultivated; that this process is challenging is no excuse to scapegoat others for one’s own failure. After all, there is no right to identity, though it can be a privilege. Jack Graveney Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Orwell quoted in Ben Clarke, ‘Orwell and Englishness’ (2006) The Review of English Studies 57(228) 103. [2] ‘Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick says ‘woke culture’ threatens ‘English identity’’ ( YouTube , 20 September 2024) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-xovmIxyg > accessed 15 March 2025. [3] See the attached video at Richard Tice MP, ‘Superb by @KonstantinKisin on British values. If you don’t like them or accept them, please do enjoy living somewhere else, because you would not then be welcome here’ ( X , 19 December 2024) < https://x.com/TiceRichard/status/1869695514268336189 > accessed 15 March 2025. [4] See eg Harrison Pitt, ‘Diversity, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Problem’ ( The European Conservative , 6 April 2024) < https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/diversity-not-multiculturalism-is-the-problem/ > accessed 15 March 2025. [5] See ‘Konstantin Kisin Says Rishi Sunak Isn’t English’ ( YouTube , 20 February 2025) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_P9IMe5vw > accessed 15 March 2025. [6] Compare Jenrick’s reticence with TS Eliot’s summation of English culture, quoted in Clarke (n 1) 90: ‘It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list’. Can he any longer? [7] Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Pimlico 2000) viii-ix. [8] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Jubilee 1977’ (2022) 44(11) LRB < https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n11/robin-bunce-and-paul-field/jubilee-1977 > accessed 15 March 2025. [9] See The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report  (Profile Books 2000). [10] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography  (Bloomsbury 2015) 243-4. [11] Quoted in ibid 2. [12] At < https://www.channel4.com/programmes/white-tribe/on-demand/26974-001 > accessed 15 March 2025. [13] The work of photographer Martin Parr traces a similar trajectory—compare The Non-Conformists  (Aperture 2013), black and white photographs from the 1970s of traditional and religious life in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, with The Last Resort  (Dewi Lewis Publishers 2009), 1980s colour snaps of Merseyside’s working-class seaside resort New Brighton. What distinguishes Parr from Howe is that the former has since managed to find great joy and beauty in postmodern kitsch and consumerism, albeit without entirely dispelling the suspicion of an underlying mockery. [14] Here, a yet stronger standard is applied than the infamous ‘Tebbit test’, which required of immigrants support for the English cricket team to qualify as sufficiently integrated. [15] Quoted in Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Multiculturalism and the new face of Britain’ (2003) < https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/fortier-multiculturalism.pdf > accessed 15 March 2025. [16] Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism’ ( Cabinet , Spring 2001) < https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/zizek.php > accessed 15 March 2025. [17] Miri Davidson, ‘Sea and Earth’ ( NLR Sidecar , 4 April 2024) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth > accessed 15 March 2025. Compare in a similar vein ‘Great Replacement’ theorist Renaud Camus’s denial that he is a ‘nationalist’, drawing on Orwell’s distinction in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) between patriotism—a wholly defensive posture, believed deeply but without any wish to ‘convert’ others—and the aggressive imperialism of nationalism, as embodied by Nazism. See Renaud Camus, ‘May be the word “nationalist” does not have exactly the same meaning in French and English. In French a Nationalist is somebody who thinks that his nation is the most important thing in his life, who cherishes the army and everything national, who thinks his country is better than all the other countries, etc. That is not at all my case […]’ ( X , 18 April 2025) < https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913326907246231593 > accessed 14 October 2025; Renaud Camus, ‘Voilà. Thank you, Sir.’ ( X , 19 April 2025) < https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913501782967230720 > accessed 14 October 2025. [18] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears  (Macmillan 1983). [19] Nor is Howe innocent in this respect, given his nostalgic contrasting of the atomized capitalist structures at the turn of the millennium with supposedly tighter-knit local communities in the 1960s. See Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England  (Oxford University Press 2023) for a possible corrective. [20] Narinder Minhas, ‘Look on the white side’ Guardian (London, 10 January 2000) < https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/jan/10/channel4.broadcasting > accessed 17 March 2025. [21] Quoted in Camilla Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England’ (2023) 34(3) Twentieth Century British History 534. Compare Mary Ellen Chase’s 1937 suggestion that the ‘Englishman has no objection to foreigners’ provided that ‘they remain what they are and do not attempt any approximation to him’—quoted in Clarke (n 1) 95. [22] Bunce and Field (n 10) viii-ix. [23] See Roger Scruton, On Hunting: A Short Polemic  (Yellow Jersey 1998). [24] ‘Let’s Be Reasonable’ (2004) 27(9) Third Way 18-9 or at < https://highprofiles.info/interview/darcus-howe/ > accessed 17 March 2025. [25] Quoted in Gustav Jönsson, ‘George Orwell Was a Temperamental Conservative and Ideological Radical’ ( Jacobin , 22 October 2023) < https://jacobin.com/2023/10/george-orwell-class-britain-spanish-civil-war-nineteen-eighty-four > accessed 17 March 2025. For an equally evocative duality, consider Howe’s modification of CLR James’s statement that ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’ to ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian and he lives in Britain ’—quoted in Bunce and Field (n 10) 1. [26] Benjamin Schwarz, ‘Marxists against wokeness’ ( Spiked , 28 September 2018) < https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/marxists-against-wokeness/ > accessed 20 March 2025; Ralph Leonard, ‘CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics’ ( UnHerd , 11 October 2018) < https://unherd.com/2018/10/clr-james-rejected-posturing-identity-politics/ > accessed 20 March 2025. [27] See Rachel Cunliffe, ‘The “Boriswave” problem’ ( New Statesman , 11 February 2025) < https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/02/the-boriswave-problem > accessed 20 March 2025. [28] Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Britain  (Oxford University Press 1999) 100. [29] See Dan Evans, ‘Reform won’t save Britain’ ( UnHerd , 19 March 2025) < https://unherd.com/2025/03/reform-wont-save-britain/ > accessed 20 March 2025. [30] See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Faber & Faber 1992). [31] Bunce and Field (n 10) 5. [32] Rhodes Napier, ‘No to Fraser Nelson, no to Steve Laws: towards a “third way” on British national identity’ ( Pimlico Journal , 25 March 2025) < https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/no-to-fraser-nelson-no-to-steve-laws > accessed 5 April 2025 [33] See Carey (n 30) and especially Pearson (n 18) for countless examples of this. [34] Reform UK, ‘Our Contract with You’ ( Reform UK Policy Documents , 2024) 22 < https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf?1718625371 > accessed 25 March 2025. [35] Carl Benjamin, ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration, widespread racial and gendered guilt activism, and before bankers had totally screwed the economy for their own gain. People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’ ( X , 20 January 2024) < https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1748688352365228139 > accessed 25 March 2025. The video is now missing as the initial poster’s account has been suspended, but the replies make the content clear enough, and a screenshot of the original can be provided on request. [36] ‘E’ [Elijah Schaffer], ‘White culture is beautiful. This is what they hate. Save it at all costs’ ( X , 24 December 2024) < https://x.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1871377665166569937 > accessed 25 March 2025. [37] ‘The General’, ‘White Culture’ ( X , 3 November 2024) < https://x.com/1776General_/status/1853100332768714923 > accessed 25 March 2025. Now, there is nothing wrong with André Rieu—my grandparents watched his New Year’s concerts on TV with enthusiasm—but there is no small irony in presenting such a middlebrow, commercial endeavour as a cultural climax. As one X   user commented, himself seemingly a proud neo-reactionary: ‘This is not white culture. This is Andre [sic] Rieu, he presents a bastardized kitsch variant of classical music to tasteless boomers. Idiot’. [38] Sam Adler-Bell, ‘The Music Man: Trump’s kitschy nostalgia is the point’ ( Intelligencer , 20 October 2024) < https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-town-hall-dj-set-was-perfect-for-his-nostalgic-fans.html > accessed 25 March 2025. [39] See Aris Roussinos, ‘Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain?’ ( UnHerd , 25 January 2025) < https://unherd.com/2025/01/could-anglofuturism-liberate-britain/ > accessed 4 April 2025; Lucien Chardon, ‘Why post-liberalism failed’ ( Pimlico Journal , 18 March 2025) < https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/why-post-liberalism-failed > accessed 4 April 2025; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and Social Transition  (Basil Blackwell 1979). [40] Quoted in Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael C Williams, ‘From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations’ (2022) 18(1) Journal of International Political Theory 37. [41] See Franco Berardi, ‘The obsession with identity fascism’ < https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo3.htm > accessed 4 April 2025; Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015).

A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression?   When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was not merely iconoclasm but an ‘iconoclash’, a concept discussed by the French philosopher Bruno Latour. In cases of iconoclasm, Latour notes, the act of breaking is unambiguous, its motivations and contexts clear. In iconoclashes, on the other hand, ‘one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’—or, for that matter, both.[1]   In the weeks following Colston’s felling, protests continued in cities across the UK and the US. This clash played out over social media and the periodical press as the world tried to work out what exactly it had witnessed. No consensus emerged. At least on the surface, the debates seemed to turn on the ambiguous axis of ‘history’. Following damage to the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned what he saw as attempts to ‘edit or censor our past’ and ‘pretend to have a different history’. Across the Channel, French President Emmanuel Macron promised that ‘the Republic won’t erase any name from its history’.[2]   On the other side of the disagreement, the Museum of London expressed its support for removing a statue of the slave-trader Robert Milligan at London’s West India Docks, associating the monument itself with an ‘ongoing problematic regime of white-washing history’.[3] Similarly, the British journalist Ian Cobain pointed out that the misrepresentation and erasure of historical reality has been a ‘habit of the British state for decades’, most evident in the illegal concealment and destruction of hundreds of thousands of records evidencing its colonial barbarisms.[4] Advocates for retention and for removal point the finger at each other, trying each other for crimes against the past. No surprise, then, that Professor Richard J Evans’ treatment of the subject in the New Statesman was titled ‘The history wars’.[5]   Yet Clio, the Greek muse of history, stands to one side of this symmetrical standoff, confused and, one imagines, more than a little offended. In this conflict, the stakes are not historical but above all iconographic, representational. These are not the history wars but rather the image wars, into which the past has been hastily and rather clumsily press-ganged. Only by recognising this and dispelling the projection of ‘history’ can a path out of this impasse be traced. Statues aim not to memorialise history but to escape from it, striving to transcend contingency and reach the universal. Yet under the conditions of secular modernity this attempt has become futile. The logic on which it rests is riddled with contradictions and incoherencies. Ultimately, if cultural memory is to regain legitimacy, it will have to take the opposite approach, focusing on suffering rather than ‘success’, the mass over the individual.   *   Statues are in and of themselves historical artefacts, but their subjects are extrinsic to history. Historicity is not suddenly conferred if a sculptor chooses to fashion Churchill’s face rather than any other individual’s. Calls to take down statues therefore signify not an assault on the past ‘itself’, as suggested by Johnson and Macron, but justified opposition to a particular conception of it. Juggernauts of Churchill, Colston, Milligan, and the like stand as icons of a model of the past which holds individual subjecthood and action in the highest acclaim. The individuals elected as prime movers are elevated above faceless socioeconomic forces. Overwhelmingly, they are white, male, and upper-class. The Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle pioneered this approach in a series of lectures from 1840, grouped together in print under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History . Carlyle concluded that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’.[6] Although the historical profession has largely overturned this false and discriminatory view of the past, the public are yet to do the same.   The literal concretisation of historical figures into statues epitomises deceptive attempts to reduce history to a shallow agent of culture. Statues do not preserve but annihilate the past. They remove their objects from the course of history and enlist them as representatives of an ahistorical culture. Change over time is the essence of history, but culture aspires above all to stability and constancy, so that it can entrench itself within individuals. As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno repeatedly sought to show, this hunger for permanence can have disturbing consequences. In the 1960s, he diagnosed within the post-war German population an alarming case of ‘verdinglichtes Bewusstsein’ (‘reified consciousness’). For Adorno, this malaise is characterised by a blindness, intentional or otherwise, to ‘all insight into one’s own contingency’ and to the ultimate contingency—and therefore changeability—of the world at large.[7] In the earlier work  Dialektik der Aufklärung  (1947), written with his friend Max Horkheimer, Adorno expressed this idea in an unrelenting aphorism: ‘all reification is a forgetting’, an erasure of history in the form of an unquestioning acceptance of the present.[8]   Recent insistence on the immutability of statues, along with outlandish attempts to ensure it, strongly suggest that the symptoms identified by Adorno persist today. June 2020 saw men in baggy jeans and camouflage jackets gather around a statue of the writer George Eliot in Nuneaton, ostensibly in its defence. One of these ‘defenders’, an army veteran, informed reporters without a hint of irony that ‘I’m purely here to protect our history’.[9] The content of this undifferentiated ‘history’, its twisting and turning contingency, is rendered utterly irrelevant. History becomes a scapegoat, a hollow justification. The statue itself is exposed as a simulacrum, parading the deceptive appearance of the historical but possessing nothing of its substance. In a case yet stranger, Ashbourne in Derbyshire saw a racist bust of a black man’s head moved under mysterious circumstances from the town centre to a secret location, suspected to be the garage of a local Conservative councillor.[10]   These cases are revealing precisely because of their absurdity, which drags the cultural logic of reified consciousness to its perverse and dangerous extremes. Here, a morbid fear of change reveals itself, reminiscent of the underlying assumption of Christian providentialism that ‘everything is as it should be’. Items of the utmost insignificance are hastily made into religious icons whose violation is a mortal sin. In particular, they come to resemble secularised acheiropoieta . Acheiropoieta  are Christian icons, generally of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, believed to have come into being miraculously, without human involvement. The corresponding perception of statues as immaculate conceptions of history is quickly shown to be inaccurate. After removing Colston’s statue from the Avon, the museum M Shed discovered within it a furled 1895 edition of Tit-Bits  magazine, with the scrawled names of the statue’s fitters.[11] It is hard to imagine a better illustration of appealing to the bulwark of history whilst refusing to peer beneath its bronze façade.   *   Statues are problematic and contested for reasons that extend far beyond the individuals they represent. Firstly, they attempt to smuggle individuals out of history, allowing them to escape their own time. Then, building on this, they contrive to ensure reverence and hero-worship for them. As the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed, ‘the medium is the message’. Reverence is not an emotion about which one hears a great deal nowadays. It is associated above all with the religious, with veneration and sanctity. Crucially, it is an emotional state which functions only when it is unqueried and accepted as absolute, without deconstruction or interrogation.   When it is undertaken, this interrogation delivers alarming results. No coherent moral calculus or set of ‘rules and regulations’ can justify reverence. No clear ethical boundary can be drawn which, if overstepped, would prevent one’s memorialisation. Take the example of Churchill. Much of the discussion around his ‘worthiness’ for preservation as a statue has concentrated on the extent of his racism. Defenders argue that his undeniably racist views and actions were justifiable in context, whilst critics like Professor Priyamvada Gopal stress that Churchill’s stance on race was actually ‘deeply retrograde even for his time’, such that ‘even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking’.[12]   Professor Gopal is correct, but unfortunately this is irrelevant in this context. Even engaging on the terms of retrospective moral evaluation means being drawn into a dangerous and abyssal logic, which presupposes a coherent moral calculus according to which ‘worthiness to remain’ might be established. Discussing the moral facts of any individual’s life is only useful here if we believe there is a genuine possibility of establishing whether they were a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person. Framed in the most extreme terms, we could imagine a tribunal aimed at determining whether a person’s opinions and actions crossed a clear moral threshold, sorting the sheep from the goats. Such thought experiments are, of course, absurd, and their parallels with a kind of divine judgement are no coincidence. They function only if the body making the judgement has both perfect moral knowledge and complete access to a person’s life and thoughts. Yet the fundamental prerequisites for this hypothetical tribunal are the same as those that would be needed to indict Churchill’s character. They are also the same as those necessary to sustain the reverence for which the statue form calls.   The ideal of any society is that its moral structures remain constant for such a long time, or are enforced with such completeness and efficacy, that they begin to appear absolute and extrasocietal, their contingent emergence having been masked and repressed. As this takes place, morality is de-historicised, extricated from the skein of time. Consciousness becomes reified, in line with the emphasis of providentialism on preserving existing states of affairs. Only under these conditions—in which an unquestionable transcendent standard is established and allowed to reign—can reverence be deserved and heroism possible. It is for this reason that Christian sainthood is irrevocable. Nonetheless, the Catholic church did carefully vet all candidates until the time of Pope John Paul II. It employed a genuine ‘Devil’s advocate’ and enforced a pre-sanctification waiting period of 50 years after the individual’s death, during which any untoward information about them ought to come to light.   Sainthood is, however, a decidedly pre-modern phenomenon. So too is heroism, in the form of Herculean labours, military leadership, or charismatic state formation. No longer can reverence be sustained by religious or teleologically nationalistic metanarratives. The speed and chaos of life in the twenty-first century does not admit of such lasting simplicity. As early as 1967, the French thinker Guy Debord argued that a decisive shift had occurred: social life in its authentic form had been superseded by its virtual double, a spectacle of pure representation.[13] This shift obliterated any chance of heroism in its established form, but the hero survived as an icon on the screen or a series of pixels on the television, continuing to exist only as an unreal representation. Building on Debord, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi in his text Heroes  traced the consequences of this disappearance into the virtual, finding them to be no less than murderous. Berardi writes of school shootings and murder sprees as tragic occurrences ‘at the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality’.[14] Discussing 2011’s Utøya massacre, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard writes similarly that the perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik ‘acted like a figure in a computer game, but the act of heroism he thought he was performing, and the carnage he brought about, did not belong to the world of images’.[15]   The world of images, connected with the world of numbers and the world of profits, is also a means of transcending and escaping historical reality, a world with neither past nor future. A statue stands in a public square, an avatar floats on a screen. As the former becomes impossible, the latter pervades society ever more deeply. One can be toppled, the other cannot.   *   Despite all of this, the need for cultural memory to be represented in some concrete form remains strong. Discussions are already underway as to whose statue should replace that of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College, Oxford.[16] The philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke, the first African American elected to a Rhodes Scholarship, is an understandable suggestion. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the dangerous incoherence of statues is intrinsic to their form and cannot be overcome simply by choosing a preferable subject. Is there an alternative? Supplementing existing monuments with contextual plaques enumerating the misdeeds of their subjects creates an unbearably perverse tension. A critical statue is a contradiction in terms. Rather, we must look towards a means of commemoration which is not celebratory but fundamentally negative: the memorial in its true form. Recognising that one person has suffered at the hands of another presents its own challenges and complexities, but is fundamentally legitimate. Its tether to reality is unbroken. Pain and death bear a visceral authenticity which society, for all its efforts, can never fully extinguish.   Where memorials are established, they must be porous, offering the possibility of fluid interaction with the public. The German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz is right to suggest that ultimately ‘the places of remembrance are people, not monuments’.[17] The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for example, is imbued with a distinct, personal significance by each mourner who looks upon it. Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism in Harburg, developed with Esther Shalev-Gerz and initially erected in 1986, took a more direct approach to interactivity. The Monument invited Harburg’s residents and visitors to commit to opposing fascism by inscribing their names on a 12-metre-high stele, which was then lowered into the ground until it disappeared. In doing so, it embodied a concept of remembrance in stark opposition to unchanging statues, embracing and encoding its own violation and historicity. It served as mirror and conduit, rather than opaque fortification.   Achieving real change in the symbolic representation of memory will not be an easy task. A 1957 competition announced by the International Auschwitz Committee to design a monument for the end of the Auschwitz-Birkenau rail track led to such difficulties that no memorial could be agreed upon. The English sculptor Henry Moore, who chaired the competition’s jury, was forced to admit that only ‘a very great sculptor—a new Michelangelo or a new Rodin— might have achieved this’.[18] This, as James E Young observes, is an ‘extraordinary statement’, since Moore ‘seems to concede that the project was doomed from the start, that none on the jury could imagine a winner, that, hypothetically, there might be no winner’.[19] Jochen Gerz, striving for a way out of this apparent dead end, turns Moore’s admission on its head. He invites the public to be the architect of its own memory, constructively and destructively. At the site of the now-sunken tower, a sign offers hopeful realism: ‘In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice’. Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art  (The MIT Press 2002) 16. [2] Boris Johnson, ‘It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack…’ ( Twitter , 12 June 2020) < https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1271388181343145986 > accessed 18 March 2021; Reuters Staff, ‘Macron says France won’t remove statues, erase history’ ( Reuters , 14 June 2020) < https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-macron-stat/macron-says-france-wont-remove-statues-erase-history-idUSKBN23L0QP > accessed 18 March 2021. [3] Museum of London, ‘Robert Milligan statue statement’ (9 June 2020) < https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/news-room/press-releases/robert-milligan-statue-statement > accessed 18 March 2021. [4] Ian Cobain, ‘Lying about our history? Now that’s something Britain excels at’ Guardian  (London, 18 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [5] Richard J Evans, ‘The history wars’ The New Statesman  (London, 17 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [6] Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History  (first published 1841, Yale University Press 2013) 41. [7] Theodor Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Vorträge und Gespräche mit   Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969  (Suhrkamp Verlag 1970) 104. Translation the author’s. [8] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung  (first published 1947, Fischer Verlag 2007) 244. Translation the author’s. [9] Aaron Robertson, ‘Defenders of a George Eliot statue had no idea what they were doing and I’m here for it’ ( Literary Hub , 16 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [10] Archie Bland, ‘How “racist” bust “hidden by Tory councillor” divided Derbyshire town’ Guardian (London, 12 June 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/12/ashbourne-derbyshire-racist-black-bust-tory-councillor-petition > accessed 18 March 2021. [11] M Shed, ‘After careful cleaning and drying we found someone had handwritten the names…’ ( Twitter , 11 June 2020) < https://twitter.com/mshedbristol/status/1271124618091401216 > accessed 18 March 2021. [12] Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?’ Guardian  (London, 17 March 2021) < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill > accessed 19 March 2021. [13] See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (first published 1967, Rebel Press 1994). [14] Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015) 5. [15] Karl Ove Knausgaard, The End  (Vintage 2019) 839. [16] See Ann Olivarius, ‘Rhodes must fall, but who should stand in his place?’ Financial Times  (London, 15 June 2020) < https://www.ft.com/content/336d57a8-fb23-4ec8-8333-bb8e6bc36c98 > accessed 18 March 2021. [17] Jochen Gerz, ‘Rede an die Jury des Denkmals für die ermordeten Juden Europas’ (14 November 1997) < https://jochengerz.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Rede-an-die-Jury-des-Denkmals_Jochen_Gerz.pdf > accessed 18 March 2021. [18] Henry Moore quoted in, for example, Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Ohio University   Press 2003) 157. [19] James E Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning  (Yale University Press 1993) 135.

Applause in the executive boardroom. Hands pound backs, mouths twist into smiles. A round man with a stain of indecipherable grease on his shirt collar rises to speak, gesturing inanely at an electronic display. His hands twitch with glee as he highlights data points and maps out forecasts. ‘Returns for this quarter are exceptional, a threefold uptick on last year. Our customer base has expanded markedly. Any number of substantial brand deals. And a few bookings of particular extravagance brought in half a million single handedly. Simply put, they’re dropping like flies’. Uproarious cheer breaks out once more. They had indeed sown a good harvest. Fulfilling their customers’ most neurotic requests gave the assembled board members and lesser functionaries a perverse satisfaction. In a sense, they did genuinely care. But this care was delightfully finite. After the moment of successfully facilitated self-termination, it could freely evaporate. The business model at Blaze of Glory™ ensured that client relationships never lasted too long. It had all begun with Dignitas. Geographical localization of euthanasia laws created an inevitable concentration of demand. Desperate and despairing men and women flocked to Switzerland and Belgium in the hope of outpacing the future. But something strange happened. The allure of death began to take a hold beyond those ‘expected customers’—the terminally ill, irrecoverably deformed, or incurably paedophilic – and exert an almost inexorable pull on the rest of society. Its rapturous theatricality, devil-may-care vibe, and (above all) resplendent finality proved appealing to those wishing to retroactively cement their social status or claim Warhol’s promised fifteen minutes of fame. Minor mutilations did the rounds on social media—for a time, the ‘Stigmata Challenge’ dominated TikTok—but for the real deal, the whole hog, dedicated corporations sprung up, boutique experiences which promised an extinction like no other. Centuries of media satirising bourgeois decadence promptly exited the sphere of fiction. It was a matter of months before four Chinese businessmen found themselves sat in a French villa around a fine wooden table, loaded with all manner of delicacies: quail eggs, dripping churros, a trough of bœuf bourguignon, a monumental Yorkshire pudding drenched in the thickest gravy, consuming and devouring and fucking their brains out with three supine street urchins and a buxom schoolmistress until they slowly wound up dead, gorged with fat and cream atop the table lengthways, faithful to the good old Grande Bouffe down to the smallest detail. Newspaper obituary columns burst their banks and were replaced by dedicated magazines. Martyrdoms were orchestrated with such conviction that sanctification seemed almost guaranteed; terror attacks dropped accordingly. Advertising slogans commanding people to ‘Die doing what you love!’ (or the even less savoury ‘Go out with a bang’) brought hordes of lascivious old men to the doors, swallowing handfuls of Viagra as they waited for their chance to expire as close to the moment of orgasm as possible. Countless weddings were called off after stag nights got out of hand. Television channels offered a round-the-clock programme of self-murder, a source of envy and inspiration in equal measure. This was more than an industry. Suicide had become an art, an ecstatic unity of swansong and encore. It was the chance to be, in death, all which one had not been in life. Enough. That is, I think, enough atrocity for the moment, sufficient verbal bombast. Carry on like that much longer and my thought experiment won’t have any legs to stand on. Since that’s all it is, a thought experiment, a little game to play with myself and string out in words. Think of the untapped riches that remain, from psychologizations of the workforce to population crises, government interventions to ideological counterblasts, here in particular the scope is almost endless, with pleas for a return of suicide to its former authenticity, teenage nihilists unable to cope with the realization of their nocturnal insincerities, class strugglers pressing for the industry’s nationalization and lamenting its domination by the rich, even in death the poor can’t get themselves heard, on and on it goes! Yet at the same time it goes nowhere, nowhere at all. What do I know of suicide? What, indeed, do I know of the world beyond its reconstitution as a mass of tensions and forces, concepts given tortuous names and flagellated in writing? What will this achieve? What, in short, is my right? Seek to reduce your guilt by attempting to include others within it. Turn to critique. And generalise. Raise the conceptual stakes as high as possible. The influence of a writer like Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace seeps out of the above sketch like mustard from an over-filled sandwich. The same over-stylized form and sprightly ironic tone, the same central motif of a contradiction or minor perversity magnified and drooled over ad absurdum . Spellbound by form, that glossy coat and empty shell. The prose is infected by the same sickness as its protagonists. In this respect, at least, it tells us something we already know, without hinting at the possibility of change. It appears as a monument to the inescapability of our condition. In face of such impotence, we have no choice but to laugh. We revel in it. Infinite Jest is the brick-sized proof of this; Foster Wallace observed that he set out to write a sad book and ended up with a funny one.[1] After that, he set out to write a boring one and pathetically succeeded. And then, at the age of 46, he killed himself. (DeLillo lives on, thrashing out works of increasing mediocrity.) Blame modernity: perhaps it isn’t possible to write a sad book any longer. Here, there is no tragedy, only farce. Theodor Adorno took a dim view of representational art. For him, it inevitably involved the possibility of sadistic identification on the part of the ‘audience’; even the ‘sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment’.[2] Years later, conservatives argued that kids playing violent video games would learn to associate happiness with violence, and we all laughed at them. But the issue runs deeper than this merely representative function; the status of art itself appears dangerously entangled with its offering of enjoyment. I exit a cinema showing of Schindler’s List thinking ‘what great art I have just been privy to’, caught in a terminal spiral of self-satisfaction and fawning praise for Stephen Spielberg. W. H. Auden admitted that no single line of his managed to ‘save a single Jew’, since ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.[3] Art imposes itself over the reality it seeks to depict. This is the ambivalence of aestheticization, the trapdoor lurking in the movement from reality to art to audience, in the fundamental artificiality of everything which secures art’s necessary difference from the world. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them’.[4] The lyric poet who confines himself to the nooks and crannies of his own swollen consciousness is a minor offender. Autofiction is arrogant and indulgent, but it knows its place. That Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, the most notorious project of this kind, resulted in nothing more than an angry uncle and some mundane Norwegian family drama makes clear that the exploitation at work here is trivial. Far more shameless is the appropriation of the suffering of others—thousands, millions, impersonal and uncredited—as grist for the aesthetic mill. Look above: suicide isn’t the point. What the piece wants to articulate is a certain feeling for the grotesque nature of modernity. But suicide is traduced, forced to play along in this garish masquerade. ‘The Sunday edition of the Kärtner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills”’.[5] So begins Peter Handke’s novella Wunschloses Unglück ( A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ); it is his mother who has taken this overdose. Here is no dissimulation; the quoted banality of a regional newspaper report drives home the act’s horrific reality. This is not to say that Wunschloses Unglück is anti-literary. Handke notes that ‘as usual when I am engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine’—writing as self-reification, mechanisation of the mind.[6] The artist has the privilege of separation from the world, they can write or paint themselves out of a situation and look upon it anew as something transfigured. In the case of Handke, egoistic abstraction is, however, necessarily bound by a filial adherence to the facts of his mother’s life and death. All the same, an unavoidable step is taken by the translation of experience into language, wrestling bodies and minds in motion into the inky strictures of text. For this, form is required – the true engine of prose, that which generates its meaning. Indulgence and alienation loom in this choice also. Selfishness is the inevitable outcome. Claire-Louise Bennett protests that ‘experimental’ prose is not experimental for her , but honest, the product of a background which does not correspond to the literary mainstream.[7] She makes much of being, along with Ann Quin, a working-class female writer who deploys decidedly unusual prose forms in her attempts to make sense of the world. Quin killed herself, in 1973, at the age of 37. Bennett recounts, in Checkout 19 , finding a corpse hanging from a tree on a visit to Yorkshire.[8] This may or may not be relevant. Formally, writing appears the opposite of suicide. It is the affirmation of life—even if only one’s own. But is not suicide also an act of self-authoring? Why else would we leave suicide notes? The critic often strikes me as a kind of cuckold, jerking off in the corner of the literary dancefloor. But ‘creative’ writing itself bears an essentially masturbatory character. Events, people, and feelings are co-opted in the interests of stimulating the self, fantasised about at length, and carefully fiddled with before being splurged onto the page. Autofiction, merely the most explicit variety of this, becomes autoeroticism. The same is true of reading and reception: the way in which I’m able to take such joy from a perceptive line of thought or sublime turn of phrase, without it having the slightest impact on my social or political behaviour; the impotence of the beauty I detect within argumentative and aesthetic forms alike, their incisive and interlocking geometries, motivating no single scrap of action aside from buying and reading yet more books to bask on my shelves and dehydrate in the desert sun. The miracle involved in this is that such an apparently selfish activity can not only sublimate the writer’s dysfunctional emotions but also resonate for others. Bernard Mandeville thought that private vices generated public virtues.[9] The more a decadent aristocracy gambled and luxuriated, the more money circulated, allowing all and sundry to reap the rewards. Self-consciously virtuous action could hope for no such inadvertent benefit. The Dutchman’s model is more applicable to aesthetics than economics. Through some perverse transubstantiation in the mind or on the page, the selfish scribbles of those deluded enough to call themselves writers generate a universal benefit. A scrap of daily suffering leavens and nourishes. They slice their own wrists so all can drink. ------- P.S. A retrospective confession: ‘Keep trying, try everything. And if all else fails, say that it is an essay’ (Kurt Tucholsky).[10] Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Cf. Stephen Burn (ed), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University Press of Mississippi 2012) 55. [2] Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’ (1974) I/87-88 New Left Review 85. Originally published in German as ‘Engagement’ in 1962. [3] Auden quoted in Beth Ellen Roberts, ‘W. H. Auden and the Jews’ (2005) 28(3) Journal of Modern Literature 87. [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (first published 1886, Reclam 1988) §161. Translation the author’s. [5] Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (first published 1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974) 3. [6] ibid 5. [7] Cf. Moore Institute, ‘Experimental Fiction: Rob Doyle and Claire-Louise Bennett’ ( Youtube , 25 November 2021) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJaHD6mHKdc > accessed 22 June 2022. [8] Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 (Penguin 2021). [9] Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (first published 1714, Penguin 1989). [10] Ignaz Wrobel [Kurt Tucholsky], ‘Die Essayisten’ Die Weltbühne (28 April 1931) < https://www.textlog.de/tucholsky-essayisten.html > accessed 22 June 2022. Translation the author’s.

Marcus did not know what to expect. The man with whom he had spoken on the phone made little sense. A number of names had been mentioned, people he had never heard of, and at times Marcus thought the voice on the other end of the line must have been speaking in a foreign language, unfamiliar noises which were sometimes guttural and heavy and sometimes airborne and breathy, and sometimes somewhere in the middle. All he had been able to make out was a time and address, which he scribbled down in his pocket notebook, a present from his mother. He mentioned the phone call to his colleagues at the firm afterwards and they had laughed and told him to ignore it. Marcus got the impression that they knew the precise identity of the caller; they cast each other and him a withering glance, one of exhaustion with acts of naïve moral charity. This glance and all it contained failed to dissuade Marcus. It was his first year working as a tree surgeon, a job he had obtained thanks to no small hardship on the part of his mother. School had not been for him, and he had left glad to see the back of the place but with the impression of stepping out into a great black void, a world which held precious little for him. He enjoyed being at home with his mother, helping around the house, tending the allotment down the road. Whilst he worked the family’s small plot, the world came alive and spoke to him in a voice he could understand. It radiated an energy which he greedily harvested, inhaling dirty gulps of wisdom. When rain fell, he lay there and felt dirt turn to mud underneath his skin, droplets pitter-pattering against one cheek as the other pressed down into the soil. In the corner of the allotment stood the carapace of an old oak tree. From time to time, Marcus would crawl into its cyclopic orifice, mummified in a cocoon of bark, and summon thoughts of regrowth. After a while, the tree would be whole again, his twisted legs rooted deep and gorging themselves on water, his rigid torso elephantine and stark upright, his fractal of arms and digits craning outwards to a thousand ripe eyes enthralled by a feast of light. Each time, Marcus murdered this resplendence. He had no choice. When the hollow birthed him into the sunken night, he would feel a death within him and hear a groan of ancient mortality reverberate between his bones. He could sustain but one being at a time. Marcus found himself winding his way along a country lane, towards the address he had been given on the phone. Bordering the lane was a ribbon of deep-set and seemingly impenetrable hedgerow, adorned with protuberant knuckles of red. Tarmac soon gave way to gravel, gravel to agitable dust, and a thatched cottage came into view. Densely packed behind strabismic windows Marcus could make out piles upon piles of books, blotchy embossed spines of deep burgundy and myrtle. Reading had always been a struggle for him; his aptitude for languages extended only to those of nature, of incremental growth and seasonal change. Words on the page seemed too deeply engraved, too inarguably fixed and unamenable to care. In the instant between Marcus opening his van’s door and stepping out onto the shoddy earth, the cottage’s occupant had appeared outside and was waiting expectantly for him. This transition was noiseless. It was as if the occupant, a bald and elderly man of slender proportions but penetrating gaze, had intangibly passed through his wooden door. Marcus hollered an abrupt greeting and gestured to the logo glaringly emblazoned on the van behind, as if to assure him that the visit was legitimate and well-meant. The man, whose name he would later discover was Reginald, remained silent until Marcus had almost reached him. Then, softly, he spoke: ‘Would you show me your hands?’ The request’s ambivalent innocence captivated Marcus. Its tone was that of an infant, yet it lacked any hesitation. It was conscious of its own importance but would not deign to insist. Marcus’s hands rose and presented themselves, palms up, to Reginald, who fixated upon them as on a ritual totem or unearthed relic. His mien was that of a primitivist artist stopped dead, undone in all pretensions by a deep-set nobility tantalizing close and yet utterly alien. Darting eyes inventoried their particularities, caressing each crease, mentally untangling the knot of palm lines. Each grope for understanding teetered on wonder’s precipice. The older man’s eyes widened, and his breathing deepened. After a time, Reginald took Marcus’s hands in his. These were immaculate, as if smoothed to marble over decades by the desert’s swirling sands. They were luxuriously, almost grotesquely unblemished. Conjoined with Marcus’s torn and callused digits, they evoked a coupling of the sacred with the profane. Suddenly, the old man broke off and, in a manner now sprightly and invigorated, pulling books from shelves, grandly gesticulating at framed images, almost dancing now upon his feet, indicated for Marcus to follow him inside. Marcus understood little of what was said, but he picked out names, names which evidently bore weight and yet floated, floated daintily through the room, weaving and darting between the stacks of books as if making for the exit, as if possessed of a life of their own, yet dragged inexorably back in by Reginald’s orbit, by his intimate need for them and them for him. Names like Calvino, like Petrarch, like Havemann, Joyce, Gass, like Améry or Handke, Swinburne, Enzensberger, or De Quincey, names which meant nothing to Marcus, nothing at all, yet whose pace and structure and rhythm, whose atmosphere, entranced him. Behind this cosmos of names hung a painting, a painting of a large room, large and empty, devoid of furniture, chopped in half at the waist as if looked down upon, empty that is save for three men, prostrate on their knees with their arms extended before them, their heads bowed and tilted, their hands hard at work, for they are scraping the floor, hard at work scraping the floor, and the product of their labour is curled around them in ringlets like snakeskin. Reginald finally halted and drew breath, but the atmosphere which now thronged throughout the room survived his voice. It seemed to take on mass and effervescent direction, carrying the two men out of the backdoor and into the garden. Here Marcus set about to work, unbidden, unable to hold himself back. His hands grew into tools, his fingers became sharp and incisive, tweaking and upending, his palms moulding and sifting through material. He held nothing, it was part of him, it was all part of him. And as he worked Reginald read, perched in a rocking chair which tumbled gently back and forth, his fingertips resting against the delicate gold lettering of the work’s spine, his thumb and forefinger darting forward to turn each page, his voice – his voice breathing magic into every word, magic which poured into Marcus’s ears as he worked. The young man bathed in these words, they supported him like a hammock tied between two trees, and though still he could make neither head nor tail of most sentences they upended him all the same. The saplings tilted their nascent trunks in hope of finding the voice, and the sun itself leaned back and listened as it sliced its way through the sky. In this ecstasy, this synaesthetic rapture, Marcus laboured deeper into the garden. Beyond the saplings, the hedgerows, the beds of flowers, he emerged into a glade. At the centre of this clearing stood – and here his spine tingled with sublime excitement – the carapace of an old oak tree. It could not be the same as that in the allotment, but to Marcus it seemed a homecoming nonetheless. Down on hands and knees he went, pulling himself inside, the dead and dying wood coyly scratching his skin, until he was sealed within, his thoughts focused on one end: resurrection. Spurred on by the undulation of Reginald’s voice, its variant speed and rhythm, as if he were a shaman summoning up some forest sprite or more ancient chthonic brute, this came quickly. In what felt like a matter of instants, this symbiosis of word and plant and man was complete. From his sumptuous vantage point, Marcus surveyed the garden, the house, the small smooth figure of Reginald, a smile woven across his face, his hands still clasped around the book from which he was reading. The sun was setting by now, leaving him alone in the sky. When night fell, he saw the old man rise from his rocking chair and re-enter the cottage, which also settled into sleep. The idea of returning to his prior state, of slaughtering what he and Reginald had wrought, was a sin too great for Marcus to consider. The intermingling was too narrow, the metamorphosis irreversible. He was a stylite and this tree his pillar. It was with the contentment of radical and unremitting self-sacrifice that he finally rested. The next morning, he awoke to music. Raindrops dabbled against his branches. Reginald’s words rang loud and clear. Their harmony left nothing to be desired. Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA .

On a sunny day in June 2025, I visited the celebrated writer Hwang Sokyong at his home in Gunsan, South Korea. Years spent investigating the history of state-sponsored torture had led me through Mr Hwang’s fiery accounts of the fight for democracy in South Korea,[1] and my despair over the deterioration of law in the United States led me to his doorstep. When he opened the door, and I introduced myself as ‘the Guantanamo lawyer’, he first beamed, then said, ‘I was just watching the violence in Los Angeles on the news’.   The comment made me flinch. There was little surprise in his voice, unlike the breathless tone of the US media in describing events that have been foretold for decades. We Americans are now surprised when military are deployed to quell political protests;[2] indignant when surveillance expands beyond Muslim communities;[3] shocked that concentration camps could be opened on the mainland despite the continuing existence of Guantanamo.[4] ‘History is a conflict between the pain of memory and the ease of forgetting’, said Mr Hwang. Sometimes, watching from Gitmo, it feels like Americans have been programmed to party through the suffering of others, and then forget because we felt no pain.   Guantanamo Bay is a rough place, where a few minutes under the sun will cover your neck in sweat and fill your nostrils with dust, and odd birds, or insects, of varying sizes will scurry away as you trudge towards your damp lodgings. When on the island, we become hyper-focused on the blaring injustice there. Each transgression by the guards, each untreated detainee illness triggers fury. Our clients were ‘dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean’,[5] but unlike Hamilton, some of them never made it out. America forgot about them, so we lawyers harness our anger to keep reminding the world. Vulture on top of a utility pole near the detention zone at Guantanamo Bay. From Guantanamo, we have watched democracy recede on the mainland for over two decades, with the same anger. Even the tortured men at Gitmo comment on issues like the targeting of Black Americans and the impunity of US police,[6] and the erosion of free speech or religious rights when their expression is politically inconvenient.[7] Masked ICE agents may disappear your school nurse, but as long as the autumn brings pumpkin spice everything, surely things are not that bad?   ‘Each generation feels tempted to choose comfort over responsibility’, said Mr Hwang, ‘ Forgetting is easy, compromise is tempting, and isolation is comfortable’. Sitting in his sun-filled library, it was hard to imagine him wrestling with demons during his years of imprisonment. Because of our culture of forgetting, it is also hard to imagine going to jail for opposing the sort of acts now being perpetrated by the US government, as he did. ‘Were there times when you could not speak or write?’ I asked, thinking of his torture. He did not hesitate. ‘Yes, there were times when the weight of fear or grief was too heavy. After friends were executed or after nights of interrogation, I sometimes felt paralyzed’. He paused while we sipped from our cups. ‘But it never lasted long. Silence visited me, but it could not stay. Memory broke it open again. The dead would not let me rest’.   Whose deaths will keep us awake? I’ve seen former clients die after release from Gitmo, from injuries we inflicted on them.[8] Drones under Obama decimated families; one of my clients was a young girl who came to DC to ask for justice after a drone blew up her grandmother in Pakistan.[9] None of these ‘foreign’ deaths disturbed most Americans. The brutal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor galvanized many,[10] but by the end of 2020, the protests had stopped short of achieving real reform, although ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ was now painted prominently in front of the White House.[11]    But we should lose sleep even before killings begin here at home, right? With friends, I circulated a letter to Columbia University alumni in March 2025, furious at the school authorities for facilitating the persecution of students. Many signed, but some law school alumni were incensed. ‘So you support Hamas terrorists’, they messaged, referring to Columbia students Mahmoud Khalil and Ranjani Srinivasan, sidestepping all facts and law.[12] Several formerly dear friends, now among the leadership of their powerful law firms, stayed silent. They would not sign; they had tee times scheduled. One of them said, in earnest, ‘We’re so grateful for the work that non-profit lawyers are doing right now’.   ‘Were you angry with people who did not speak out back then? Are  you angry?’ I asked Mr Hwang, about the persecution of the 1980s. This was the real reason for my visit: I needed to know what was forgivable, decades later. I needed to know from an elder that my anger might be productive, that we could still prevent the worst excesses of fascism in the US. ‘Silence is betrayal’, he said. ‘Words alone cannot change the world, but without words, no change is possible’.   He went on, animated by my own barely-concealed agitation. ‘I lost friends, I lost family, I lost years of my life. But I never lost my conviction that the truth had to be spoken. It is the difference between carrying silence like a stone and carrying memory like a torch. One crushes you, the other lights the way’.   The tremendous irony of our culture of forgetting is that the memory of the internet—the tool that destroyed our attention span—is infinite. In 1985, the book Gwangju Diary , an eyewitness account of the 1980 massacres in Gwangju, was published under Mr Hwang’s name. The now-credited author was a student named Lee Jae-Eui, but Mr Hwang was already a famed writer, had participated in the Gwangju uprising and compilation of accounts, and was willing to assume the danger of backlash. The book was officially banned, but secretly distributed throughout South Korea, and later relied upon to establish the crimes committed by the government in Gwangju.   Just forty years later, very little such toil is necessary to preserve memory of atrocities. The CIA’s internal account of my client Ammar al Baluchi’s torture at the black sites is available by quick internet search,[13] but some of the same techniques are now used on detainees at Alligator Alcatraz.[14] Graphic photographs from the US military’s massacre of innocents in Haditha, Iraq, were published online by the New Yorker,[15] a war crime forecasting the recent renaming of the Department of Defense as the ‘Department of War’.[16] Instead of risking our lives to preserve memory, we now risk our democracy for the luxury of forgetting it.   And we forfeit our own dignity. Dignity, recalled Mr Hwang, sustained South Korean activists until democratization. ‘That’s why even after defeats, the movement always returned. You cannot permanently suppress a people who know their worth. And it’s a lesson I hope younger generations never forget: democracy begins with dignity’. Watching famous technology CEOs pay obsequious homage to the White House amidst a nationwide crackdown on their customers’ right to freedom of expression, I question where, exactly, the end of dignity might be.[17]   Alka Pradhan with Hwang Sokyong.   The day after my meeting with Mr Hwang, I attended the opening of the National Museum of Korean Democracy in Seoul, based in the preserved Namyeongdong interrogation and torture center.[18] Of the museum, Mr Hwang mused, ‘A democracy without memory is like a tree without roots. It may stand for a while, but it cannot endure the storms’. It took about forty years after democratization for the Namyeongdong facility to be turned into a memorial—justice is a work in progress in South Korea, but it will be built on memory. Walking through the room where a young student protestor was waterboarded to death in the name of ‘anti-communism’, I think of the US government’s excuse of ‘terrorism’ to justify dismantling the rule of law.[19] I think of the migrants newly transferred to Guantanamo in February 2025,[20] twenty-three years after the facility’s opening. And I wonder how long it will take us to remember to remember.   The National Museum of Korean Democracy, formerly Namyeongdong interrogation facility, upon opening in June 2025. ICE vehicle at Guantanamo Bay, April 2025. Alka Pradhan   Alka Pradhan is a human rights lawyer practicing at Guantanamo Bay and before the International Criminal Court. Her writing does not reflect the opinion of the Department of Defense, and even less the ‘Department of War’. Special thanks to Professor Hyunah Ahn of Kunsan National University, for her generosity and skill in providing interpretation. [1] See eg Hwang Sokyong, The Prisoner: A Memoir  (Sora Kim-Russell and Anton Hur tr, Verso 2021); Hwang Sokyong, The Guest  (KJ Chun and M West tr, Seven Stories Press 2005); Hwang Sokyong, Mater 2-10  (Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae tr, Scribe Publications 2023). [2] Rebecca Schneid, ‘Trump Has Deployed Troops at Home Like No Other President. Here is Where He’s Sent Them’ ( Time , 11 August 2025) < https://time.com/7308904/dc-national-guard-trump-troops/ > accessed 18 September 2025. [3] Jessica Katzenstein, ‘The High Costs of Post-9/11 Mass Surveillance’ ( Costs of War , 26 September 2023), < https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/surveillance > accessed 18 September 2025. [4] Hatzel Vela, ‘Families and immigrant detainees allege “horrible” conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”’ (9 July 2025), < https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/families-immigrant-detainees-allege-horrible-conditions-alligator-alca-rcna217743 > accessed 18 September 2025. [5] Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical  (Grand Central Publishing 2016). [6] ‘Systemic racism pervades US police and justice systems, UN Mechanism on Racial Justice in Law Enforcement says in new report urging reform’ ( UNOCHR , 28 September 2023) < https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/systemic-racism-pervades-us-police-and-justice-systems-un-mechanism-racial > accessed 18 September 2025. [7] ‘USA: Free speech on campus needs to be protected, not attacked, say experts’ ( UNOCHR , 25 July 2024) < https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/usa-free-speech-campus-needs-be-protected-not-attacked-say-experts > accessed 18 September 2025. [8] ‘Former Guantanamo Detainee, Hunger Striker Emad Hassan, Dies at 45’ ( The New Arab , 2 August 2024) < https://www.newarab.com/news/former-guantanamo-detainee-emad-hassan-dies-oman-45 > accessed 18 September 2025. [9] ‘Pakistani Family Urges US to End Drone Strikes’ ( Dawn , 30 October 2013) < https://www.dawn.com/news/1052706 > accessed 18 September 2025. [10] ‘Breonna Taylor: Protesters call on people to “say her name”’ ( BBC News , 7 June 2020) < https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52956167 > accessed 18 September 2025. [11] AJ Willingham, ‘Washington, DC paints a giant “Black Lives Matter” message on the road to the White House’ ( CNN , 5 June 2025) < https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/us/black-lives-matter-dc-street-white-house-trnd > accessed 18 September 2025. [12] Leila Fadel, Taylor Haney, Arezou Rezvani, and Kyle Gallego-Mackie, ‘“Citizenship won’t save you”: Free speech advocates say student arrests should worry all’ ( NPR , 8 April 2025) < https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5349472/students-protest-trump-free-speech-arrests-deportation-gaza > accessed 18 September 2025. [13] Julian Borger, ‘CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach interrogators torture techniques’ Guardian  (London, 14 March 2022) < https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-detainee-training-prop-torture-techniques > accessed 18 September 2025. [14] Peter Charalambous and Laura Romero, ‘“It’s like you’re dead alive”: Families, advocates allege inhumane conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”’ ( ABC News , 14 August 2025) < https://abcnews.go.com/US/youre-dead-alive-families-advocates-allege-inhumane-conditions/story?id=124645763 > accessed 18 September 2025. [15] Madeleine Baran, ‘The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See’ ( The New Yorker , 27 August 2024) < https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-haditha-massacre-photos-that-the-military-didnt-want-the-world-to-see > accessed 18 September 2025. [16] Harlan Ullman, ‘U.S. Department of what? Are you serious?’ ( UPI , 10 September 2025) < https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/09/10/department-of-war-Hegseth/8911757437560/ > accessed 18 September 2025. [17] Rebecca Falconer, ‘Big Tech elite lavish praise on Trump at White House dinner’ ( Axios , 4 September 2025) < https://www.axios.com/2025/09/05/trump-tech-dinner-ceo-zuckerberg-musk > accessed 18 September 2025. [18] Yoon Min-sik, ‘Symbol of tyranny breathes new life as museum of pro-democracy movement’ ( The Korea Herald , 21 May 2025) < https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10492540 > accessed 18 September 2025. [19] Anna Meier, ‘What Does a “Terrorist” Designation Mean?’ ( Lawfare , 19 July 2020) < https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-does-terrorist-designation-mean > accessed 18 September 2025. [20] Maia Davies, ‘Trump sends first migrant detainees to Guantanamo Bay’ ( BBC News , 5 February 2025) < https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0p1ykxyzjo > accessed 18 September 2025.

On 12 January 2022, there was an attempt to destroy, or at least damage, the statue of Prospero and Ariel installed outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, on the grounds that its sculptor, Eric Gill, was a ‘paedophile’. A petition has been launched on the website of the left-wing petition organiser, 38 degrees, calling for the removal of the statue. At the time of writing (February 2022), it has nearly reached its target of 3,000 signatures. Save the Children has withdrawn its recommendation that one of the many type-fonts developed by Gill—Gill Sans—should be used in its publicity material. In the course of the media response to the attack, Gill was described as a ‘known paedophile’ who ‘sexually abused his two eldest daughters’[1] and ‘a monster, a depraved paedophile who abused his daughters and others […] a man who committed horrific sexual crimes’.[2] The Wikipedia entry on Gill has a section on his ‘sexual crimes’. The 38 Degrees petition reads: Please sign to demand that the BBC remove the sculpture depicting a naked child, created by known paedophile Eric Gill, which is above the main entrance of BBC Broadcasting House. Gill had an incestuous relationship with his sister, sexual relationships with two of his pubescent daughters and even his family dog. The BBC likes to think a naked boy submissively leaning into the raised leg of a wizard is simply a metaphor for broadcasting. To the BBC Eric Gill was a major British artist rather than a child and animal abuser. Why is this important? I believe that the BBC would regain some credibility with their reputation, if they were seen to act upon the image of a naked child created by a known pedophile. It will show that they do not approve of the crimes committed by their past stars, Savile, King, Hall and Harris and show that they don’t condone anybody who carries out child abuse . [3] Comments left by signatories include: ‘To have a sculpture made by a pedo outside a building that harbers [sic] pedos is a disgrace to decent normal people. pull down the statue and also the building the BBC is a disgrace to the British people’; ‘The BBC are a disgrace from savil to hall and all the other monsters they helped. the pedos statue want smashed into a million bits and the building burnt to the ground’; ‘Because it’s absolutely grim mate, how is there a child penis on a sculpture of all things?? We don’t even celebrate some of our greatest heroes yet we apparently support wizards and pedos, no thanks I’ll stick to dungeons and dragons’.[4] The controversy, such as it is, turns on whether it is right to admire work done by a depraved monster (‘Eric Gill’s crimes were unforgivable, but his statue is blameless’[5]; ‘Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?’[6]) and, if it is, whether such work should not be shown in a more discreet setting, perhaps adorned with some sort of explanatory text. There seems to be little disagreement over whether or not Gill can be characterised as a ‘paedophile’—‘a man who committed horrific sexual crimes’.[7] I developed an interest in Gill through my interest in the French Cubist painter, Albert Gleizes. Both Gill and Gleizes were in correspondence with the Ceylonese metaphysician and writer on traditional art, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Both were fond of quoting Coomaraswamy’s well-known dictum: ‘An artist is not a special sort of man but every man is a special sort of artist’. Neither Gill nor Gleizes knew each other but Coomaraswamy grouped them together with himself and the American engraver (friend and correspondent of Gill) Arthur Graham Carey as people assumed to be ‘mediaevalists’, though of course that wasn’t how he saw it himself. He preferred the term ‘traditionalist’.[8] I set about reading Gill and was impressed by his general philosophy on the nature of work and art, which could perhaps be summarised in the opening two paragraphs of his essay from 1918, Slavery and Freedom : That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself. That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God.[9] DH Lawrence, who disliked Gill’s prose in general (‘Crass is the only word: maddening like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in a pub—argufying would describe it better—and banging his fist’), nonetheless, and despite the mention of ‘God’, found ‘more in those two paragraphs than in all Karl Marx or Professor Whitehead or a dozen other philosophers rolled together’.[10] Gill’s life and work was a long protest against everything that ‘art’ has become in our own time. He recognised and vigorously asserted the principle put forward by William Morris that ‘art’ is just another word for work well done; he successfully established the kind of rural community life which provides the best conditions for such work; he recognised that the function of his own art form—sculpture—was inseparable from religion and that indeed all art, which is to say all work, can only realise its highest value if it is done in a spirit of worship; he detested the business spirit and mechanised production, always asserting the importance of the human over the economic. All that brought him very close to the thinking of Albert Gleizes, who also distrusted ‘art’, emphasised the importance of craftsmanship, tried (with much less success than Gill) to establish a communal way of working and living, and believed that painting and sculpture had lost their way with the Renaissance and its imitation of the external appearances of nature. Both Gleizes and Gill liked to quote the dictum of Thomas Aquinas (also favoured by Coomaraswamy): ‘Art imitates nature not in its effects but in its way of working’. It seemed to me, reading Gill, that, like Gleizes, he was one of the necessary voices of the twentieth century. The Autobiography , in particular, struck me as one of the most delightful books I had ever read. I was therefore upset when, just at the moment that I was discovering him, his reputation as a moral thinker was trashed with the publication of Fiona MacCarthy’s biography.[11] The book was published in 1989 with a great deal of publicity, including a special TV programme on Gill and an article in The Independent colour supplement, all pursuing the theme that startling revelations were to be found in it concerning sexually aberrant behaviour with his daughters, at least one sister, maybe two, and even the family dog. It is a theme hammered home by the Introduction. Gill is presented as a ‘tragic’ figure riven by contradictions between his fine religious and social ideal and his disorderly life and passions: He was taken very seriously in his day. At his death, the obituaries suggested he was one of the most important figures of his period, not just as an artist and craftsman but as a social reformer, a man who had pushed out the boundaries of possibility of how we live and work; a man who set examples. But how convincing was he? One of his great slogans (for Gill was a prize sloganist) was ‘It All Goes Together’. As I traced his long and extraordinary journeys around Britain in search of integration, the twentieth-century artistic pilgrim’s progress, I started to discover aspects of Gill’s life which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality, which few people have questioned. There is an official and an unofficial Gill and the official, although much the least interesting, has been the version most generally accepted.[12] She refers to ‘the smokescreen Gill himself and others so determinedly erected’ and affirms boldly: ‘At least I can be confident that Gill was not what he said he was. The Autobiography is full of obfuscation’.[13] And yet this is not at all the impression that is conveyed once we get into the substance of the book. Indeed, even the Introduction itself makes it plain that, whatever the details of his sexual activity, no-one who came into contact with him could be in any doubt that he regarded sex as a matter of immense importance, of endless wonder and delight and that he was, or seemed to be, completely lacking in any inhibitions on the subject, that he expected the same of all the others around him. I don’t myself share that attitude and, for the sake of the ideas that he had in common with Gleizes, I regret that he had it. But I can’t accuse him of ‘obfuscation’ on the matter. Having made this accusation, the Introduction continues: In earlier years Eric Gill had alighted on and promulgated in his own version Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Hindu doctrines of the erotic elements in art. Later on, at Ditchling, with the same conviction, he began propounding a complicated theory, or succession of theories, in which sexual activity is aligned to godliness, in which the sexual organs, far from their conventional depiction as the source of scandal, are ‘redeemed’ by Christ and ‘made dear’. It is a very radical and interesting theory, where Gill challenges Christendom’s traditional confrontation of matter and spirit, and indeed his theory is justified in part, at least for connoisseurs of art, by the wonderful erotic engravings of that period. But one senses something frantic in the zeal with which Gill exfoliated his passion, in contexts likely and unlikely, and in his evident enjoyment of the waves of consternation which followed, particularly from the monasteries.[14] When she comes to discussing the Autobiography she herself quotes, with evident relish, the wonderful passage in which Gill recounts his first discovery of the joys of masturbation:[15] But how shall I ever forget the strange, inexplicable rapture of my first experience? What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water-tap into a pillar of fire, and water into an elixir of life? I lived henceforth in a strange world of contradiction: something was called filthy which was obviously clean; something was called ridiculous which was obviously solemn and momentous; something was called ugly which was obviously lovely. Strange days and nights of mystery and fear mixed with excitement and wonder—strange days and nights, strange months and years.[16] Not much sign of ‘obfuscation’ there! Nor in the passage which she quotes with equal enthusiasm in which Gill describes the beauty of the flowers of the field as a magnificent display of sexual parts designed to entice for the purpose of procreation.[17] And accordingly invites us to see our own genitalia, male and female, as our most precious ‘ornaments’.[18] She makes the remarkable, almost perverse, observation that: ‘Gill the patriarchal figure surrounded by what at times seems dozens of his children and his grandchildren, is also a scene of pathos, fertility run wild, the all-too-logical conclusion of his “let ‘em all come” theories’.[19] She is referring to a passage, again in the Autobiography , when at the time of their marriage Gill and his wife, Mary (or Ethel as she was before her conversion to Catholicism) agreed not to bother with contraception: ‘“Always ready and willing” was our motto in respect to lovemaking and “let ‘em all come” was our motto in respect of babies’.[20] But they only had three daughters as well as one adopted son. Gill came from a family of thirteen children and he and Mary may well have wanted more but after a series of miscarriages they knew it was not to be. The ‘fertility run wild’ was the fertility of their daughters. Is Gill to be blamed—assuming it is a bad thing—for that? She says that she has ‘come to see Gill as a rather tragic figure’, because of the contradiction between his role as a model English Catholic ‘paterfamilias’ and his unruly sexual appetite.[21] What is astonishing about Gill, however, and this book confirms it, is the apparent absence of any such contradiction. Gill had sexual relations with his housekeepers, with female colleagues, the wives of his friends, his sisters (or at least one sister), and even his daughters. Yet the book gives little evidence of the ill-feeling, tension, and jealousy which such behaviour should normally have provoked. It is as if the normal rules don’t apply, and at one point, MacCarthy (following one of Gill’s Dominican friends) asks: ‘Was Gill honestly entitled to the privilege of innocence? Had he really been unaffected by the Fall?’[22] The question is an interesting one, given that Gill believed in the Fall and Fiona MacCarthy, one assumes, does not. In fact, the whole prurient glee with which the media establishment has swooped on Gill’s sexual misdeeds is interesting. In theory, sexual innocence should be an easy matter for those who do not believe that the sinfulness of sexual passion has been revealed by God. Yet here is a man who is apparently incapable of feeling sexual guilt and whose sexual activities seem to have caused no lasting damage to anyone, and Fiona MacCarthy tries to persuade herself that he was unhappy, tragic, eaten up by contradictions, even though all the evidence she gives proclaims the contrary. While MacCarthy thinks that there should have been a tension between Gill’s sexual activity and his Catholicism, Gill maintains that the two were mutually complementary. She tells us about a visit Gill paid with his then protégé, the Welsh writer and artist, David Jones, to a certain ‘big fat man with a taste for true pornography […] The walls of his flat in Lincoln’s Inn Fields were almost papered over with pornographic postcards. At the sight of these, Gill turned to David Jones, saying: “If I were not a Catholic, I should have been like this”’.[23] Again, Gill complained about his brother whose marriage was breaking up that ‘Brother Max is so virtuous by nature and so stupid and muddle-headed […] that he prefers to cast M. adrift and break up the home (thus depriving his children of all that home implies) rather than have a love affair to go to confession about’.[24] The same attitude to acknowledging sin is found in the Autobiography , in which he proclaims it as a privilege, an assertion of one’s pride in being a man and thus capable of sinning.[25] One has the feeling that having a good sin to confess was all part of the fun (one of his confessors, incidentally, was Fr John O’Connor, thought to have been the model for Chesterton’s Father Brown. That must have made things easier). He develops an argument that Catholics, confident in their membership of the True Church, can afford to take a lighter attitude to life than Protestants and agnostics, who continually have to prove themselves.[26] And, especially towards the end of his life, MacCarthy tells us, new visitors to Pigott’s, the last of the rural artistic communities he founded, had to pass through a sort of initiation test in which Gill held forth to them about Christ’s genitals which, given that He was the Perfect Man, could be assumed to have been of a goodly size. While he was receiving instruction to enter the Church in 1913, he was working on a life size marble replica of his own phallus. One feels a certain sympathy for MacCarthy. He ought to have been a neurotic and unhappy soul. It somehow seems unjust that he wasn’t. MacCarthy argues in support of her view that he was a tragic figure, that ‘a chain of destructiveness began at Ditchling, not long after his conversion to Catholicism. Perhaps a part of his tragedy is that he was both ahead of his times and behind them. His urge to experiment with social conventions, especially the prevailing sexual mores, became more obviously and more painfully at variance with the Gills’ accepted role as the ideal Catholic family, the public demonstration of fidelity and cohesiveness’.[27] In fact, Gill’s life at Ditchling Common, at Capel-y-ffin, and at Pigott’s (the three rural craft communities he founded or co-founded after his conversion to Catholicism) was astonishingly creative, not just for his own work but for his ability to attract and train loyal followers and apprentices, bringing out their own creative capacities. Of course there were immense problems, and it is quite believable that he was crushed by his workload, his financial responsibilities, and his despair at the direction in which political events were moving in the 1930s. But anyone who knows anything about the difficulties of maintaining his kind of life, and of holding such communities together, will be impressed by his achievement, especially remembering that, unlike Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, or Ashbee, he had no inherited wealth. All his ventures were financed only by his own work. The main evidence for Gill’s ‘destructiveness’ is his quarrel with his former close friend, the printer, Hilary Pepler. But though MacCarthy discusses this at some length and tells us that there is a long correspondence on the subject, she doesn’t in my view quite come to grips with it. Was it, as she hints in the Introduction, prompted by jealousy because his eldest daughter Elizabeth had fallen in love with Hilary’s son, David (whom she eventually married, against her father’s opposition)? Or did his opposition to this affair spring from an already established rift with Pepler, which he attributed to questions of finance and also (a major part of the account in the Autobiography ) to his complaint that Ditchling was more and more taking on the character of a Catholic tourist resort. This would seem to be confirmed by his withdrawal to the—at the time—nearly inaccessible Capel y Finn. MacCarthy’s account of the joyous arrival at Capel and the subsequent life there (and a couple of years later when the whole menagerie moved again to Pigotts, near High Wycombe in the Chilterns) hardly fits the idea that it was a ‘chain of destructiveness’. Gill, MacCarthy says, was both ahead of his times and behind them. Presumably it is as a sexual libertarian that he was ahead of the times, and as a Catholic family man, who loved being surrounded by children and grandchildren, that he was behind. But Gill’s sexual libertarianism is utterly different from the unhappy obsessions of modern society. He lived in a different world from that of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr, Peter Greenaway, or Tom Sharpe. What is so striking about post-war sexual permissiveness, chronically so in the case of pop music (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Ultravox, The Smiths, Prince), is the carefully cultivated atmosphere of misery and degradation that surrounds it. There is a feeling of the obsessive scratching of an itch, knowing that it will only make the wound deeper. Compare them with Gill, in a passage from the diaries which I have taken at random from MacCarthy’s book: C.L. [the discretion is my own—P.B.] came in and I drew her portrait. We talked a lot about fucking and agreed how much we loved it. Afterwards we fondled one another a little and I put my penis between her legs. She then arranged herself so that when I pushed a little it went into her. I pushed it in about six times and then we kissed and went into lunch.[28] Gill, incidentally, was a strong opponent of artificial contraception. It is a curious thing that, while he had three daughters by his wife, he does not seem to have had any children outside marriage. I think we can safely assume that he would have accepted responsibility for them if he had. MacCarthy gives what might be the answer in her account of his exchanges with Dr Helena Wright, well-known as an adviser on sexual matters and advocate of contraception. After telling her ‘You are entitled to believe in and work for a matriarchal state. Men are equally entitled to resist it’, he continues: ‘I believe in birth control by the man by means of:– (1) Karetza. (2) Abstinence from intercourse. (3) Withdrawal before ejaculation. (4) French letters’ but ‘I don’t think 3 and 4 are good. I don’t think abstinence from orgasm is necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the state of mind and states of mind can be cultivated’.[29] ‘Karetza’ is a form of sexual activity without orgasm. Gill, as we know, did not practise abstinence from intercourse. Karetza may also explain the willingness of the most improbable women to have sex with him. They didn’t take it very seriously. But this brings us to the question of sexual relations with his daughters. Considering the impact her revelations have had on Gill’s reputation, MacCarthy’s attitude, expressed in the Introduction, is surprisingly casual: There is nothing so very unusual in Gill’s succession of adulteries, some casual, some long-lasting, several pursued within the protective walls of his own household. Nor is there anything so absolutely shocking about his long record of incestuous relationships with sisters and with daughters: we are becoming conscious that incest was (and is) a great deal more common than was generally imagined. Even his preoccupations and his practical experiments [sic. She only mentions one—P.B.] with bestiality, though they may strike one as bizarre, are not in themselves especially horrifying or amazing. Stranger things have been recorded.[30] Well, yes, certainly, stranger things have been recorded. But, she continues: ‘It is the context which makes them so alarming, which gives one such a frisson. This degree of sexual anarchy within the ostentatiously well-regulated household astonishes’.[31] But what is truly astonishing is the change of mood that occurs at the end of her introduction: ‘No one who knew him well failed to like him, to respond to him. And his personality is still enormously arresting. In his agility, his social and sexual mobility, his professional expertise and purposefulness, the totally unpompous seriousness with which he looks anew at what he sees as the real issues, he seems extremely modern, almost of our own age’.[32] But maybe she is wrong about ‘our own age’ catching up with Gill’s ‘sexual mobility’. At least if the man chipping away at the BBC’s Prospero and Ariel can be taken as representative of our age. Indeed, in an article written for The Guardian she suggests that ‘Gill in 2006 would no doubt be in prison’.[33] The only deeds she records that could have landed him in prison are of course his sexual relations with his two eldest daughters, Elizabeth and Petra. This takes up one paragraph in MacCarthy’s book: For instance in July 1921, when Betty was sixteen, Gill records how one afternoon while Mary and Joan were in Chichester he made her ‘come’, and she him, to watch the effect on the anus: ‘(1) Why should it’, he queries, ‘contract during the orgasm, and (2) why should a woman’s do the same as a man’s?’ This is characteristic of Gill’s quasi-scientific curiosity: his urge to know and prove. It is very much a part of the Gill family inheritance. (His doctor brother Cecil, in his memoirs, incidentally shows a comparable fascination with the anus.) It can be related to Gill’s persona of domestic potentate, the notion of owning all the females in his household. It can even perhaps be seen as an imaginative overriding of taboos: the three Gill daughters all grew up, so far as one can see, to be contented and well-adjusted married women. Happy family photographs, thronging with small children, bear out their later record of fertility. But the fact remains, and it is a contradiction which Gill, with his discipline of logic, his antipathy for nonsense, must in his heart of hearts have been aware of, that his private behaviour was at war with his public image—confused it, undermined it. Things did not go together. There is a clear anxiety in his diary description of visiting one of the younger daughter’s bedrooms: ‘stayed ½ hour – put p. in her a/hole’. He ends almost on a note of panic, ‘This must stop’.[34] The paragraph begins ‘For instance […]’, and in the Guardian article I quoted earlier MacCarthy says that ‘during those years at Ditchling, Gill was habitually abusing his two elder daughters’ so we must assume that these are not the only examples. But, so far as I know, this paragraph is all there is in the public domain, the sole basis on which Gill has been characterised as a ‘paedophile’ (MacCarthy gives no examples of sexual relations with any others among the many young teenagers and children in Gill’s circle). We’re not told if these two incidents are typical, if similar things occurred frequently, if these are particularly bad cases, or if there is worse. Nor are we told, in the second case, if, when he says ‘This must stop’, it did stop, or if this is—or isn’t—the only case of penetration occurring. In 2017, the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, which has a very important collection of his work, put on the exhibition Eric Gill—The Body , designed to face up to this embarrassing part of its legacy. This might have been an opportunity to explore the Diaries further, but it does not appear to have been taken. Instead, the assumption was that all that needed to be known was known. To quote an account prepared by Index on Censorship: ‘awareness of this aspect of his biography is widespread and has been fully discussed and debated’.[35] The approach was to invite visitors to the exhibition to respond to the works—many of them naked bodies, lovers embracing, detailed studies of male genitalia—in light of the knowledge that they were done by a man who abused his daughters. According to a statement by the Museum director, Nathaniel Hepburn: This exhibition is the result of two years of intense discussions both within the museum and beyond, including contributing to an article in The Art Newspaper in July 2015, hosting #museumhour twitter discussions on 22 February 2016 on ‘tackling tricky subjects’, a workshop day with colleagues from museums across the country hosted at the museum with Index on Censorship, and a panel discussion at 2016 Museums Association Conference in Glasgow. Through these discussions Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft feels compelled to confront an issue which is unpleasant, difficult and extremely sensitive. It has by no means been an easy process yet we feel confident that not turning a blind eye to this story is the right thing to do. This exhibition is just the beginning of the museum’s process of taking a more open and honest position with the visitor and we already have legacy plans in place including ensuring there will continue to be public acknowledgement of the abuse within the museum’s display.[36] It was a delicate exercise. There were consultations with charities helping survivors of abuse, there were two writers in residence, helplines, and support literature for people who could have been adversely affected by the content of the show. The sculptor Cathie Pilkington was co-curator and had a little exhibition of her own, based around a wooden doll Gill had made for Petra when she was four years old. In its atmosphere of high seriousness, it was all a far cry from MacCarthy’s summing up of the life at Ditchling, where the cases of misconduct she describes occurred – she says there's no record of them occurring later: It was not an unhappy childhood, far from it. All accounts, from the Gill and Pepler children, the children of the Cribbs and the other Ditchling families, so closely interrelated through the life of the workshops and the life around the chapel, verge on the idyllic. Simple pleasures, intense friendships, great events – like the annual Ditchling Flower Show and the sports on Ditchling Common, with Father Vincent, as timekeeper, stopwatch in hand; followed by a giant Ditchling children’s tea party. There were profound advantages in growing up at Ditchling. But the children always felt – this was the price of self-containment – that it was other people who were odd.[37] Among the ‘frequently asked questions’ prepared for the exhibition, there was this: Isn’t it true that Gill’s daughters did not regard themselves as ‘abused’? They are reported as having normal happy and fulfilled lives and Petra at almost 90 commented that she wasn’t embarrassed by revelations about her family life and that they just ‘took it for granted’. Aren’t we all perhaps making more of this than the people affected?[38] The quote comes from an obituary of the weaver, Petra Tegetmeier, which appeared in the Guardian : A remarkable aspect of those liaisons with Petra is that she seems not only to have been undamaged by the experience, but to have become the most calm, reflective and straightforward wife and mother. When I asked her about it shortly before her 90th birthday, she assured me that she was not at all embarrassed—‘We just took it for granted’. She agreed that had she gone to school she might have learned how unconventional her father’s behaviour was. He had, she explained, ‘endless curiosity about sex’. His bed companions were not only family but domestic helpers and even (to my astonishment when I heard about it) the teacher who ran the school at Pigotts.[39] The Museum’s reply to the question was as follows: Elizabeth was no longer alive when Fiona McCarthy’s book was published, and those who met Petra certainly record a calm woman who managed to come to terms with her past abuse, and still greatly admired her father as an artist. I don’t think that we should try to imagine her process to reaching this acceptance as we know too little about her own experiences. So, although we are told that ‘we know too little about her own experiences’ the idea is reaffirmed that ‘her past abuse’ was a problem she had to come to terms with, despite her own statement that it wasn’t. A certain disquiet about the position of Petra in all this is expressed by some of the people involved in the project. One of the writers in residence, Bethan Roberts, wrote a short story about her called ‘Gospels’, which was posted on the Ditchling Museum website but now seems to have disappeared. The other, Alison Macleod, commented: Yes, the biography is upsetting disturbing in part and there was clearly a history of abuse that is without question. But it is made slightly more complex by the fact that the two daughters [who] were abused said they were unembarrassed about it, not angry about it, loved their father, and didn’t give the response that perhaps I’m imagining, or some people expected them to give – to be angry about it and condemn their father’s behaviour. They didn’t. So maybe they have internalised their trauma, but you could say that that response is almost patronising to the two women, the elderly women who were very clear about what they felt, so it goes into a loop of paradoxes of riddles that you cannot really ever solve.[40] The resident artist, Cathie Pilkington, carved a series of heads based on the doll Gill had made for Petra and labelled them ‘Petra’. Steph Fuller, an artistic director of the Museum who said that she had been on the outside of the project but ‘recruited while the show was on’ felt uneasy about this: The real legacy issue, which I am grappling with at the moment, is that the voice that was not in the room, was Petra’s. She was very front and centre as far as Cathie’s commission was concerned, but there is something about how the work conflated Petra with the doll and being a child victim, that I’m a bit uncomfortable about actually. There is lots of evidence of Petra’s views about her experiences, and how she internalised them, that was not present at all anywhere. It is easy to project things on to someone being just a victim and Petra would have completely rejected that. In terms of legacy how we continue to talk about Gill and his child sexual abuse and other sexual activities which were fairly well outside the mainstream, I think—yes acknowledge it, but also—how? I am feeling my way round it at the moment. There are plenty of living people, her children and grandchildren who are protective of her, quite reasonably. I need to feel satisfied that when we speak about Petra, we represent her side of it and we don’t just tell it from the point of view of the abuser, to put it bluntly. If it is about Petra, how do we do it in a way that respects her views and her family’s views?[41] According to Rachel Cooke, who was brought in as a sort of resident journalist, Pilkington had commented on the doll: ‘This is a very potent object. It looks to me just like a penis’. She continues: Her installation, central to which are five scaled-up versions of the head of Petra’s doll (one decorated by her 11-year-old daughter, Chloe), will explore different aspects of Gill’s practice, and the way we are inclined to project his life on to his work, sometimes in contradiction of the facts: ‘The tendency—if there is a picture of a figure—is to chuck all this interpretation on it […] it can’t just be a beautiful drawing or a taut piece of carving. But sometimes it is. Where, I’m asking, is Petra in all this? There are aspects to her life apart from the fact that her father had sex with her’.[42] Exactly. Though I for one was left wondering how exactly her installation—a sort of doll’s house full of little knicknacks including the doll’s heads—contributed to our understanding that Petra and Elizabeth were something other than just victims of sex abuse, and that there was more, much more, to their relation with their father than the sex. A catalogue was produced.[43] Apart from Cathie Pilkington’s installation it consisted largely of highly representational life drawings, including some of his studies of his friends’ (male) genitalia. Material that will appeal to the ‘art connoisseur’ for whom Gill expressed such lofty contempt. It leaves me wishing that he had taken Thomas Aquinas’s instruction to imitate nature in its way of working not in its effects—the renunciation of post-Renaissance representational art—more seriously, as Gleizes did when he advanced into non-representational art, an art that Gleizes claimed might eventually be worthy of comparison with the non-representational art of the oriental carpet.[44] Rachel Cooke quotes Fiona MacCarthy saying: She has watched in ‘dismay’ as the fact of Gill’s abuse of his daughters has grown to become the thing that defines him. ‘My book was never a book about incest, which is what one would imagine from many hysterical contemporary responses’, she says. ‘It was a book about the multifaceted life of a multi-talented artist and an absorbingly interesting man’. As people demand the demolition of his sculpture in public places—the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, Prospero and Ariel at Broadcasting House—she asks where this will end: ‘Get rid of Gill, but who chooses the artist with morals so impeccable that they could take his place? […] I would not deny that Gill’s sex drive was unusually strong and in some cases aberrant’, she says, ‘but to reduce the motivation of a richly complicated human being to such simplification is ludicrous’. Reducing art to a matter of the sexual irregularities of the artist, she believes, ‘can only in the end seriously damage our appreciation of the rich possibilities of art in general’.[45] MacCarthy’s book is impressive and enjoyable and does indeed give a good account of the ‘multifaceted life of a multi-talented artist and an absorbingly interesting man’. I have no problems with the mention of sexual relations with Elizabeth and Petra, which are unquestionably part of the story. But the book was sold vigorously and no doubt successfully on the basis of the scandals it revealed. That may have been the responsibility of the publisher, but MacCarthy played this element up in her Introduction, which has an atmosphere all its own and may well have been the only part most of the reviewers bothered to read. The result is that, as she says, ‘the fact of Gill’s abuse of his daughters has grown to become the thing that defines him’.[46] I have no idea why the man who attacked Gill’s statue or the people who have signed the 38 degrees petition have felt so strongly on the matter. It may well be that they themselves suffered some sort of abuse in their childhood, and I can hardly blame them for their feelings confronted with the work of a man whom they know, simply and exclusively, as an abuser. The more so when the BBC’s own ‘culture editor’ characterises him as ‘a monster, a depraved paedophile who […] committed horrific sexual crimes’. But it also needs to be understood that different kinds of sexual activity can cover a wide variety of feelings and reactions on the part of both ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’, and that a blanket categorisation that would throw Eric Gill and his relations with his daughters (unquestionably very loving independently of the sexual side) into the same category as Jimmy Savile and his relations with his victims doesn’t contribute very much to our understanding of what it is to be human. Peter Brooke Peter Brooke is a painter and writer, mainly on interactions between art, politics and religion. He has a PhD from Cambridge on ‘Controversies in Ulster Presbyterianism, 1790-1836’ (1980) and he is the author of the major study of the Cubist painter, Albert Gleizes: Albert Gleizes, For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 2001). [1] Kate Feehan, ‘Man scales BBC Broadcasting House and spends four hours destroying sculpture by paedophile artist Eric Gill’ Daily Mail (12 January 2022) < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10395493/Hammer-wielding-activist-scales-BBCs-Broadcasting-House-starts-destroying-Eric-Gill-sculpture.html >. [2] Katie Razzall, ‘The Artwork vs the artist’ BBC (13 January 2022) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-59972806 >. [3] Trevor Stanski, ‘Remove BBC Statue by Paedophile Eric Gill’ (2021) < https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/remove-bbc-statue-by-paedophile-eric-gill >. [4] ibid. [5] Andrew Doyle, ‘Eric Gill’s crimes were unforgivable, but his statue is blameless’ The Spectator (16 January 2022) . [6] Rachel Cooke, ‘Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?’ The Observer (9 April 2017) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/eric-gill-the-body-ditchling-exhibition-rachel-cooke >. [7] I should say that the use of the word ‘paedophile’ as a synonym for ‘child molester’ seems to me to be an abuse of language. To characterise someone who wants to rape children as a ‘paedophile’ is rather like characterising someone who wants to burn books as a ‘bibliophile’. [8] I discuss Gleizes’s relations with Coomaraswamy, with a glancing reference to Gill, in my essay ‘Albert Gleizes, Ananda Coomaraswamy and “tradition”’, accessible on my website at . I am the author of the major study of Gleizes: Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 2001). [9] Eric Gill, ‘Slavery and Freedom’, in Art Nonsense and other essays (Cassel and Co Ltd & Francis Walterson, 1929) 1. [10] D.H. Lawrence, ‘Eric Gill’s Art Nonsense’ Book Collector’s Quarterly (no XII, Oct-Dec 1933) 1-7, quoted in Malcolm Yorke, Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit (Constable 2000) 48-9. Yorke goes on to quote Gill saying that Lady Chatterly’s Lover ‘states the Catholic view of sex and marriage more clearly and with more enthusiasm than most of our text books’. [11] Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (Faber and Faber 1989). The book was republished in 2017. [12] ibid vii-viii. [13] ibid x. [14] ibid xi. [15] ibid 20. [16] Eric Gill, Autobiography (The Right Book Club 1944) 53-4. [17] MacCarthy (n 11) 290. [18] Gill (n 16). [19] MacCarthy (n 11) xi-xii. [20] Gill (n 16) 132. [21] MacCarthy (n 11) x. [22] ibid 214. [23] ibid 212. [24] ibid 287. [25] At least that is how I interpret the passage in the Autobiography , 223-7. [26] Gill (n 16) 164. [27] MacCarthy (n 11) xi. [28] ibid 262. [29] ibid 261. [30] ibid viii. [31] ibid. [32] ibid. [33] Fiona MacCarthy, ‘Written in stone’ The Guardian (22 July 2006) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jul/22/art.art >. [34] MacCarthy (n 11) 155-6. [35] Julia Farrington, ‘Case Study—Eric Gill/The Body’ (15 May 2019) < https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-case-study/ >. [36] Nathaniel Hepburn, ‘Eric Gill / The Body: Statement from the Director’ Index On Censorship (7 May 2019) < https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-statement-from-the-director/ >. [37] MacCarthy (n 11) 154. [38] ‘Eric Gill / The Body: Q&A for visitor services’ Index On Censorship (7 May 2019) < htps://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-qa-for-visitor-services/ >. [39] Patrick Nuttgens, ‘Unorthodox liaisons’ The Guardian (6 January 1999) < https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jan/06/guardianobituaries >. [40] Julia Farrington, Case Study (n 35). [41] ibid. [42] Cooke (n 6). [43] Nathaniel Hepburn and Catherine Pilkington, Eric Gill: the body, with Catherine Pilkington, Doll for Petra Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, Exhibition catalogue (29 April-3 September 2017). [44] Unpublished ms note in the Gleizes archive formerly kept at Aubard. [45] Cooke (n 6). [46] MacCarthy (n 11).

Introduction Gamal Abdel Nasser savoured the moment: it is 26 July 1956 and he has just announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The thousands packed into Alexandria’s Mohammed Ali Square are ecstatic.[1] This bold and highly contingent decision marked the beginning of the Suez Crisis, a complex mixture of war and diplomacy that tested the 1950s international system. Despite intense disagreement and violence, the crisis eventually reached a peaceful (if not uncontested) resolution. In this study, I will pursue a comparative analysis of international organisations (IOs) in order to understand their role in bringing the conflict to a close. Beginning with a narrative and historiographical background, the purpose of this section is to demonstrate how the introduction of new primary and secondary material can help us to understand this role and, consequently, enrich scholarship on the Suez Crisis. The crisis itself can be divided into three phases. First, after Egypt nationalised the Canal, a period of diplomatic deliberation ensued between Britain, France, the United States, and Egypt, which failed to bring about the international control of the Canal. Second, as planned in the clandestine Sèvres Protocol of 24 October 1956, an Israeli invasion of Egypt commenced on 29 October. Two days later an Anglo-French force intervened on the pretext of ‘police action’ to protect international shipping. Hostilities ended with a ceasefire on 6 November. Third, a withdrawal period began, which entailed intense diplomatic pressure on Britain, France, and Israel as well as the stationing of UN Peacekeepers (UNEF) in Egypt. UNEF supervised the withdrawal of troops, the clearing of the Canal, and the keeping of the peace on the Israeli-Egyptian border. British and French personnel evacuated by 22 December and the last Israeli troops left Egypt on 12 March 1957. Each of the crisis’ protagonists regarded their vital interests to be at stake as they entered the crisis. President Nasser felt compelled to nationalise the Canal in order to fund the Aswan High Dam project, the cornerstone of his plan for Egypt’s socioeconomic development. The West had withdrawn funding for the dam over fears of Soviet influence in Cairo; thus, by nationalising the canal, Nasser could both enrich Egypt and capture an important symbol of both the old imperialism and contemporary Western influence. Indeed, Britain had maintained a Protectorate over Egypt between 1882 and 1922 as well as a massive military base in the canal zone primarily to protect what a young Anthony Eden once called the ‘swing-door of the British empire’.[2] Regarding the 120-mile waterway as essential to communications, trade, and (increasingly) oil-supply, Britain and France had together owned most of the shares in the Canal Company.[3] The imperial powers could not accept that Nasser, who lambasted the French presence in Algeria and the British-led Baghdad Pact, would have control over a strategic interest that British leaders still regarded as their ‘jugular vein’.[4] Israel, constantly under threat from its numerous hostile neighbours and cross-border Fedayeen raids, was also unsettled by the fervently anti-Zionist Nasser. For these reasons, the botched British-French-Israeli operation had attempted to precipitate Nasser’s downfall and restore international control to the Canal.[5] Broadly speaking, three waves of writing on the Suez Crisis can be identified. The first of these was the publication of personal memoirs by contemporaries of the crisis, which, from the late 1980s, a second wave of scholars used alongside newly accessible archival material to structure a lively academic debate.[6] These diplomatic histories have understood the resolution of the Suez Crisis as a product of Britain and France’s inability to withstand American pressure to withdraw.[7] Since the turn of the century, however, historians have emphasised the importance of non-state actors in the course and resolution of the crisis.[8] International relations theory provides us with analytical tools that help us understand the role of IOs in history. I will draw inspiration from Abbott and Snidal’s argument that IOs affect agency through their ability, first, to centralise diplomatic engagement in a single, stable forum, and second, to remain independent.[9] I will also draw on Barnett and Finnemore’s idea that their ‘control over technical expertise and information’ gives them a special role in making international norms.[10] To understand IO agency, I will focus on the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Though other IOs—notably the World Bank—played a role, these three organisations embodied the three central loci of multilateralism during the crisis: diplomatic cooperation (UN), international monetary stability (IMF), and humanitarian aid (ICRC). While my comparative methodology certainly adds complexities, this type of analysis will, I hope, allow me to make new and insightful conclusions about both the collective role of IOs and their place in the wider international society approach. I will proceed as such: in the first chapter, I will investigate the aims of IOs. In the next chapter, I will outline their operations and assess the degree to which each organisation achieved its stated aims. Across both chapters, I will compare their aims, operations, and outcomes. In my final chapter, I will discuss how my research changes our understanding of the course and resolution of the Suez Crisis. I will explore an under-utilised body of archival material from the ICRC, IMF, and UN to address the questions I have outlined. The ICRC reported its aims and operations in the Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge (hereafter RICR ) whereas the IMF and UN employed press releases. Meeting minutes and resolutions from the UN Security Council and General Assembly also elucidate the organisations’ activities. IMF press releases were infrequent and relatively uninformative, so I draw on the Executive Board Series, composed of internally circulated documents that appeared before Executive Board Meetings. Whereas the RICR and the UN documents I am using were immediately available to the public, much of the IMF material was strictly confidential. The RICR was mainly of interest to ICRC delegates, other humanitarian organisations, Red Cross societies, and the organisation’s sponsors; whereas UN Secretariat documents, meeting minutes, and resolutions were generally addressed to ‘the world’, which, perhaps vaguely, we can take to mean the international community.[11] Though I rely on self-reporting by officials from each organisation, which lends itself to the presentation of activities in a positive light, I approach the sources critically and with reference to other primary and secondary sources. In this way, it becomes possible to appreciate the agency of IOs in the history of the Suez Crisis. ‘Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained’: The Aims of International Organisations Three central consequences of the Allied victory in 1945 characterised the 1950s international order. First, a superpower confrontation between the American-led West and the Soviet-led East permeated all areas of geopolitics. The rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons made the prospect of this incipient Cold War turning hot particularly frightening. Second, the power and legitimacy of European imperialism was quickly falling away. Especially after the Bandung Conference (1955), anti-colonial movements and post-colonial states increasingly challenged European political, economic, and ideological domination. Third, several international organisations, including the UN and IMF, were set up after 1945 to preserve the postwar peace. Despite the intensifying East-West Cold War confrontation and North-South contestation over decolonisation, states continued to engage with multilateral institutions through the 1950s. Sequentially, I will locate the mandate of the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN in this international order before outlining their articulated aims at the Suez Crisis and concluding with a comparison of these aims.[12] The ICRC The ICRC was founded in 1863 ‘to protect and assist people affected by war’.[13] Though technically a private Swiss association, the ICRC was mandated by the 1949 Geneva Conventions—international treaties governing armed conflict—to inspect the treatment of civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded.[14] Its role as the centrepiece between various national Red Cross and Crescent Societies and in the 1949 Geneva Conventions was justified with specific reference to the organisation’s neutrality.[15] Thus, its humanitarian role at Suez would be to implement the Geneva Conventions as a ‘specifically neutral and independent institution’.[16] By the time the Suez Crisis arrived, moreover, the ICRC badly needed to prove its worth: since 1945, it had not only lost major portions of its funding, but also the confidence of governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain.[17] Its failure to expose the Holocaust and the wholesale abuse of Soviet prisoners during the Second World War as well as its supposed anti-communist biases during wars in Korea and Indochina had especially harmed its standing in the East, though relations had improved somewhat since 1945.[18] Moving from the general to the particular, ICRC delegates had identified specific risks for the humanitarian management of conflict in the Middle East; an ICRC delegate who toured the region between January and May 1956 noted ‘l’absence de préparation pour le temps de guerre’.[19] Furthermore, in Autumn 1956, the ICRC would at the same time be stretched to address humanitarian issues arising from the Hungarian Revolution. As the first interstate war where the ICRC was tasked with implementing the untested 1949 Geneva Conventions, the Suez Conflict was expected to test the ICRC. The ICRC articulated specific aims prior to its involvement in the Suez Crisis that corresponded closely to its general mandate. On 2 November, it released the following radio broadcast: the ICRC ‘a prié les Gouvernements des pays impliqués dans le conflit…à assurer l'application des quatre Conventions de Genève’.[20] In addition, the ICRC announced that it was ‘prêt à assumer les tâches prévues pour lui par les Conventions de Genève’, which have been outlined.[21] In addition, the ICRC committed to organising the direct provision of aid.[22] Overall, an analysis of the ICRC’s mandate in international law and its press releases ahead of the Suez Crisis suggests that it aimed to mitigate the effects of war on civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded by means of the neutral allocation of aid and by coordinating the efforts of various national societies. The IMF The IMF was set up in 1946 technically as part of the UN Economic and Social Council, but in effect operated as a fully independent organisation. During the 1940s, a consensus formed among economists that one key failure of the post-1919 world order had been the resort to manipulative currency practices in the 1930s, which had led to autarky, economic stagnation, and (indirectly) war.[23] The IMF was set up to prevent a regression to capital controls by resolving balance of payments issues through technical advice and temporary credit support.[24] Thus, it is possible to conceive of the IMF’s formally economic role as consciously related to the maintenance of the post-1945 peace; the June 1956 Annual Report’s reference to the organisation’s ‘obligations to the international society’ supports this view.[25] In practice, member states, who pooled resources in the Fund, could request withdrawals of ‘tranches’ of their ‘quota’ when problems arose. This process protected the stability of the Bretton Woods international currency system, which governed monetary exchange outside of the Soviet bloc. Before 1956, however, the Fund had not made any major interventions in the international monetary system. The most revealing feature of the IMF’s aims at the Suez Crisis is that they were never publicly announced. The absence of press releases related to the crisis was not surprising given the organisation’s functions as articulated in the Articles of Agreement. The Articles mandated the IMF ‘to promote international monetary cooperation’[26] and ‘to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade’.[27] Given the technical, jargon-laden focus on economics in the Articles, it is unsurprising that political neutrality was a tenet of the IMF.[28] Article 12 states that ‘the Managing Director and the staff of the Fund, in the discharge of their functions, shall owe their duty entirely to the Fund and to no other authority’.[29] Thus, the IMF presented itself as a technocratic institution with technocratic goals. There was, however, one private reference to the Fund’s aims with regard to the Suez Crisis at an Executive Board meeting in September 1956. When Egypt’s request to withdraw its gold tranche was accepted, the IMF acknowledged that the crisis might crop up in the press; thus, it was noted that ‘if the press raised any questions on [the dispute over the Canal], the management would reply that the transaction was of a routine nature and consistent with Fund rules and practice’.[30] It appears, then, that the IMF was committed to discharging its functions apolitically and intended to treat any incidental involvement in the crisis as routine. In sum, IMF documents suggest that the organisation sought to perform its normal function as guarantor of international monetary stability and, by consequence, to remain as neutral as possible. The UN The United Nations was established in 1945 as the world’s premier multilateral organ ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.[31] Though by 1956 its membership contained a large majority of the planet’s population, Cold War divisions within the Security Council and disputes about decolonisation in the General Assembly had circumscribed its grandiose collective security ambitions.[32] Especially after disputes between the West and East over the use of the UN mandate in Korea, many feared that the organisation would repeat the sorry demise of the League of Nations. Appointed in 1953, however, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld had worked to win the trust of the Warsaw Pact countries and the Global South in order to develop collective security in the absence of Security Council consensus.[33] The UN Charter laid out shared principles that national representatives and UN officials were obliged by international law to serve. Article 1 defined the fundamental purpose of the UN: ‘to maintain international peace and security’.[34] Enshrining the ‘principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members’, the Charter commits signatories to only engage in self-defensive wars.[35] Though UN organs all worked under these shared principles, our assessment of the organisation’s aims must distinguish between the UN as diplomatic forum—the Security Council and the General Assembly—and the UN as international diplomat and civil servant—the Secretariat.[36] The two UN diplomatic forums never expressed unanimous ‘aims’ because of intense disagreement between member states, but did pass resolutions that indicated where consensus could be found. The one substantive resolution passed by the Security Council during the crisis, SCR/118, preceded the invasion of Egypt and formed part of Britain and France’s deceitful ‘agenda within an agenda’, which merely set the stage for invasion.[37] On 31 October, moreover, the Security Council deferred the crisis to the General Assembly, noting a ‘lack of unanimity of its permanent members’.[38] Thus, the Security Council professed collective aims either disingenuously or not at all. Invoking the ‘Uniting for Peace’ Resolution for the first time, an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly set three goals: a unilateral ceasefire, the withdrawal of invading troops, and the restoration of free navigation to the Canal.[39] On 2 November, GAR 997 ‘[urged] as a matter of priority that all parties now involved in hostilities in the area agree to an immediate ceasefire’; it passed with an overwhelming majority, but not unanimously.[40] Even if the General Assembly was only a diplomatic organ, it could authorise the Secretariat to take action in the pursuit of its goals—the setting up of UNEF, for example.[41] Mandated by the General Assembly, Secretary-General Hammarksjöld’s aims would then be aligned with those of the Assembly as well as the Charter. Although Article 97 of the Charter describes the Secretary-General as ‘the chief administrative officer of the Organisation’, Dag Hammarskjöld expressed an intention to use his position to broker peace.[42] For example, on 13 October 1956, a Secretariat press release indicated a desire to facilitate ‘a just and peaceful solution to the Suez problem’.[43] In addition, Hammarskjöld personally emphasised his aspiration to ‘discretion and impartiality’ in his role.[44] In sum, the Secretariat aimed to restore peace with a special focus on remaining neutral. To conclude, the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN Secretariat expressed different specific aims, but shared a commitment to neutrality and the service of their core values. Interestingly, the ICRC, IMF, and UN presented humanitarianism, monetary stability, and peace as neutral, universal goals. This presentation of neutrality and universality fits nicely into the wider discourse of twentieth century internationalism, which is defined as ‘values which were supposed to be valid to all people at all times…everywhere’.[45] These commonalities, moreover, strengthen the case for considering IOs collectively in the wider question of the international society approach to the Suez Crisis. As the dispute over the Suez Canal entered its militarised phase, then, the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN Secretariat aimed to go about protecting those affected by war, ensuring monetary stability, and promoting peace as neutral parties. ‘Acting Neutral’: The Operations of International Organisations Now for the action: in this chapter, I will examine primary and secondary accounts of what IOs did after the beginning of hostilities on 29 October and outline the outcomes that had emerged by the end of the crisis the following Spring. By referring these outcomes back to the aims I described in the last chapter, it becomes apparent that IOs for the most part achieved their articulated goals: atrocities were, by and large, avoided, monetary stability maintained, and the status quo ante bello restored. By looking at the actions of each organisation sequentially and then comparatively, I will analyse the processes employed by IOs in the realisation of their aims. With this in hand, it will become possible to assess the collective contribution of IOs to the resolution of the Suez Crisis, which will be the focus of the next chapter. The ICRC Today, our popular memory of the Suez Crisis (if such a thing exists) tends to forget the extreme threat to human security that it precipitated. That threat was all too apparent to the ICRC, however. Accounts of the organisation’s intervention in this ‘short but intensive war’ show that: it effectively supervised the implementation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, recording very few violations; it coordinated the allocation of its own aid supplies reserves alongside those of other national Red Cross and Crescent societies; and it maintained neutrality in the eyes of states during its activities.[46] These outcomes can be attributed to three core activities: diplomacy, information gathering, and coordination. Upon the outbreak of hostilities on 29 October, the ICRC’s first response was to push for the application of the Geneva Conventions. After the ceasefire came into effect on 6 November, however, the ICRC went about ensuring that civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war received proper treatment and humanitarian aid; negotiating the repatriation of prisoners; and organising the departure of Jews fleeing persecution in Egypt.[47] The ICRC’s supervision and diplomacy ensured the near universal adherence to the new Geneva Conventions. On 2 November, it issued a radio broadcast reminding all parties in the conflict the contents of the Conventions.[48] One day prior, it had used its diplomatic positions to receive guarantees from Anthony Eden that Britain would adhere to the Conventions, even though they had not yet been ratified.[49] Similarly, given the ambiguous position of UNEF in international law, the ICRC worked to receive a guarantee from Dag Hammarskjöld on 4 December 1956 that the UNEF would ‘observe the principles and spirit’ of international humanitarian law if it had to use force.[50] Thus, the ICRC used its diplomatic position to ensure that all parties in the Suez conflict would in principle adhere to the Geneva Conventions. This diplomatic position allowed the ICRC to negotiate and supervise the reciprocal transfer of prisoners. By the time the ceasefire had come into effect, Israel held some 5600 Egyptian prisoners with France and Britain in possession of a further 400.[51] Conversely, Egypt captured one Frenchman, who died unavoidably soon after detainment, and four Israelis.[52] The ICRC was essential for organising the repatriation of 48 seriously injured Egyptians held in Israel on 18 November; flights between Egypt and Israel had been banned since 1949 and no diplomatic relations existed between the two countries.[53] Using its position as Israel’s protecting power to negotiate with Egypt, it had organised the final repatriation of all prisoners by 5 February.[54] Especially in view of the difficulties faced repatriating prisoners after the 1947-9 Palestine War, the ICRC’s formally neutral diplomatic position appears to have facilitated dialogue between Egypt and Israel that would otherwise have been impossible.[55] Except with regard to the maltreatment of Israeli prisoners in Egypt, ICRC accounts suggest that the organisation’s formal neutrality and the special ability of its personnel to gather information allowed it to minimise violations of the Conventions. Newly established delegations in Alexandria, Port Said, and Tel Aviv secured permission to inspect prison facilities and the administration of occupied zones.[56] In the occupied Sinai, Dr. Louis-Alexis Gailland spoke to prisoners in Israeli, British, and French captivity, securing the release of those imprisoned unjustly.[57] On the other side of the ceasefire line, however, Egypt initially prevented the inspection of Israeli prisoners. Indeed, it was reported on 27 January that Israelis had been beaten and even tortured in captivity.[58] After further investigation, the ICRC received the almost certainly disingenuous reply from Egypt that the Israelis had fought amongst themselves.[59] Thus, the ICRC ultimately depended on the cooperation of states. The maltreatment of Israeli prisoners suggests that we cannot entirely accept the assertion in the March 1957 Revue Internationale that ‘pendant leur captivité tous les prisonniers ont été assistés, en Israël et en Égypte’.[60] Still, there is nothing to suggest that this was not mostly the case. In sum, even if it could not prevent any violations of the Geneva Conventions from occurring, it is possible for the most part to accept the ICRC’s assertion that the Suez Crisis ‘demeure très caractéristique de l’accomplissement des tâches du [CICR] dans le cadre des Conventions de Genève’.[61] The attitude of the belligerents to the ICRC suggests that its formal neutrality made it more trustworthy than various national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, which helped it to both gather information on humanitarian conditions and allocate humanitarian aid. From the start of the conflict, ‘un fonds spécial de secours aux victimes des événements est immédiatement ouvert;’ the ICRC was better placed than national Red Cross societies to allocate this aid.[62] For example, on 10 November, the Egyptian Red Crescent tried to gain access to the heavily damaged Port Said; only one ambulance of supplies was permitted entry, and only for one day.[63] Access was again denied on 26 November.[64] In contrast, ICRC delegate Maurice Thudichum was able to enter Port Said on 12 November and negotiate the passage of a large freight train of cargo across the ceasefire lines on 16 November.[65] It is clear that Britain’s understanding that the ICRC was neutral was a condition for this; on 10 November, the British army had told Egyptian Red Crescent personnel that groups entering Port Said ‘should consist of neutral and not (repeat not) Egyptian personnel’.[66] Consequently, by the time the Egyptian Red Crescent was given full access to Port Said on 12 December, the ICRC had long been running regular convoys of aid.[67] Egypt also perceived the ICRC to be neutral; despite great suspicion of European encroachment in Egypt, the organisation’s European delegates were given free reign to inspect Port Said after the British-French withdrawal.[68] Thus, because ‘‘neutrality’ was…achieved more easily by the ICRC than by the various national societies’, the ICRC provided aid where other actors could not.[69] The ICRC’s position as an international aid agency allowed it to coordinate national Red Cross societies and to convert the international community’s solidarity with Egypt into concrete aid commitments. By February 1957, forty-seven national Red Cross societies had answered the ICRC’s call three months earlier for aid to be sent to Egypt.[70] For example, Denmark and Italy donated planes for the ICRC to transport the wounded out of Israel. ICRC inspectors in occupied areas were able to distribute vaccines and other supplies, including juice, games, and cigarettes.[71] According to reports from ICRC delegates, the organisation worked ‘en liaison étroite’ with other aid agencies such as the UN Relief and Works Agency.[72] Thus, the ICRC for the most part achieved the goals it set for itself during the Suez Crisis. With the notable exception of the treatment of Egyptian prisoners, its sources indicate that it was able to inspect the treatment of prisoners and civilians, ensuring the adherence of the combatants to the Geneva Conventions in the process. Through information gathering and diplomacy, it was also able to delegate aid in ways that were not available to other organisations. Through this examination of the ICRC’s functions, moreover, an interesting observation emerges: its neutrality in the eyes of states gave it special access. The construction of neutrality, it appears, was essential to the ICRC’s achievement of its goals. The IMF To understand the IMF’s role in the resolution of the Suez Crisis, I will assess how far the IMF maintained international monetary stability as well as its neutrality. I will pursue my investigation by evaluating the extent to which the Fund approved loans according to its own rules during the crisis. With this in mind, I will assert that the Fund prevented a calamitous rupture in the international monetary system and maintained a significant though not unqualified degree of neutrality by allocating aid according to the rules of the international monetary regime and producing technical economic information. Viewing the conflict as just another economic factor on its balance sheet, the organisation avoided involving itself in politics. Even if the United States did use its disproportionate voting power in the IMF as leverage over Britain, I will seek to understand the operations of the IMF on its own terms. Overall, I find that when confronted with questions relating to the crisis, the Fund worked almost entirely according to ‘business as usual’. During the diplomatic phase of the Suez Crisis, the archives do not suggest that IMF officials were much preoccupied with the dispute, even when dealing with requests from its main protagonists. On 21 September, the Egyptian government made a request to draw its gold tranche. Noting that ‘in recent months the payments position has been complicated by international developments’, the loan was rapidly approved on 22 September as a normal response to a short-term trade imbalance.[73] In any case, it was rare for a gold tranche withdrawal to be denied. Business as usual with Egypt. It took longer for IMF staff to approve a French stand-by arrangement for its gold and first credit tranche, which it requested on 11 October. Delays arose because of concerns over the Franc’s par value and the size of the withdrawal, but not over France’s involvement in the Suez Crisis.[74] Staff were of the opinion that France’s massive current account losses were a result of ‘temporary factors’, including the import demands of the booming postwar economy, a bad harvest in 1956, and the intensifying war in French Algeria.[75] Indeed, Suez was not mentioned in any of the multiple staff reports which were considered at the 17 October Executive General Meeting where the stand-by agreement was approved.[76] The 18 October press release announcing the arrangement did not mention any political concerns.[77] Staff analysis recommended its approval on the basis that the balance of payments issue would be temporary. France was able to withdraw funds allocated by the stand-by arrangement as normal between February and June 1957. Business as usual with France. When war broke out in the Middle East the IMF moved more cautiously, albeit still according to its normal rules. Tranche withdrawals were designed to ease short-term pressures on balance of payments, rather than to support ‘large and sustained’ outflows of capital—such as a protracted war.[78] The continued presence of Israeli troops in Egypt complicated its request for a first credit tranche withdrawal on 25 January 1957; staff analysis noted that ‘the full impact of [the Suez] crisis on the Egyptian economy cannot yet be assessed’.[79] Still, on 4 February the withdrawal was approved on the basis that difficulties had arisen from the loss of dues from the closed Canal and sanctions imposed by Britain and the US the previous summer.[80] Business is more complicated, but again business as usual with Egypt. As a result of the Suez Crisis, discussions between Israel and the Fund on increasing its quota and setting a par value for the Israeli pound were stalled; the matter was removed from the 31 October Executive Board Meeting agenda because of the invasion of Egypt.[81] However, despite the continued presence of Israeli troops in Egypt, consultations continued from December to February, culminating in a long report in February 1957 on the economic situation in Israel; the report steered clear from sensitive policy matters, referencing the ‘international situation’ only once.[82] Israel’s quota was increased on 27 February to $7.5 million and on 6 March the Fund recommended that Israel’s par value be set at 1.80 Israeli Pounds to the dollar all while boots were still on the ground in Egypt.[83] Despite Israel’s recent transgressions in Egypt, its request on 15 May 1957 for a gold and credit tranche was also dealt with largely apolitically. The staff consultation document presented to the Executive Board, explained Israel’s large trade deficit with reference to increased immigration from Poland and Hungary; the words immigration and immigrant are together mentioned 11 times, whereas Suez is only (indirectly) referenced once.[84] Thus, the loan was approved, again for economic reasons. Business was more complicated and temporarily delayed, but almost as usual with Israel. No precedent existed in the Fund’s history for resolving the problem brought by Britain in December 1956. The crisis of confidence in Britain precipitated by the Suez dispute created a massive speculative pressure on the sterling that almost forced the British government to devalue and/or impose capital controls. Bank of England director C.F. Cobbold had already been warned in October by Commonwealth central bankers that ‘a further devaluation of sterling would mean the end of the sterling area‘.[85] Not only was the sterling area considered to be a binding force in the Empire and the Commonwealth, it also ensured to a large degree the stability of the Bretton Woods exchange system, financing over 50% of global transactions.[86] Thus, the importance of ‘the continued existence of the sterling area to the British government in 1956 cannot be over-emphasized’.[87] Naturally, Britain began seriously considering an IMF withdrawal request in November alongside relief funds from EXIM and the delay of lend-lease repayments due to the US and Canada. When Chancellor of the Exchequer Macmillan informed Cabinet on 6 November that the US would not allocate this aid so long as Britain maintained operations in Egypt, a sense of crisis grew.[88] Indeed, the IMF’s weighted voting system gave the United States disproportionate influence over the allocation of funds. As a consequence, Diane Kunz argues that in this position Britain had ‘complete and utter dependence’ on US support for its continued presence in Suez because to continue Britain needed money that only America could release from the IMF.[89] Diplomatic histories have conclusively demonstrated that the US used its leverage in the IMF, alongside other bargaining chips, to force a British withdrawal from Port Said by threatening to block a tranche release.[90] It does not follow, however, that the IMF failed to approach the British loan request neutrally when it arrived or, indeed, that the Fund ever contravened its rules. In fact, if we look at the way that the IMF handled Britain’s request—rather than the way that the US threatened to handle the IMF—it becomes clear that its decision making conformed to the normal technical approach. On 7 December, British Director Lord Harcourt made a request for the release of Britain’s gold and first credit tranches ($561.47 million) with its remaining quota available on standby ($738.53 million) for reasons, in his own words, entirely ‘consistent with the provisions of the Fund Agreement’.[91] It would be the technical recommendations of IMF staff and not American geopolitical interests, it appears, that decided the approval of this massive tranche release. The Executive Board was presented with a background material document that noted the ‘improvement in the situation, both internally and externally’ of Britain’s 1955 trade deficit into a surplus in 1956.[92] Staff analysis concluded that ‘reserves were influenced not only by the United Kingdom’s trading position but also by its role as banker and by the international use of sterling’.[93] During the Executive Board Meeting itself, executive director F.A. Southard remarked that ‘if the Fund did not act to bolster such a key currency as sterling…all members would regret it and…the consequences would be serious’[94] because of its status as reserve currency. The Fund granted Britain support because it recognised that the sterling’s problems resulted from a speculative attack rather than from fundamental problems with the British economy. It applauded Britain, furthermore, for avoiding the introduction of trade controls.[95] Case by case, IMF internal documents suggest that the organisation operated according to its own rules during the Suez Crisis. Even if Executive Board documents were available to top officials in member countries’ central banks, which incentivises the presentation of impartiality, I find that the willingness of the IMF to deal with Israel while it sustained troops in Egypt suggests that it was not so extensively influenced by the US, who at the same time vehemently sought an Israeli withdrawal in the UN. Still, Kunz presents the IMF as just another instrument of American economic leverage.[96] Indeed, she goes as far as to describe Britain as an American ‘client state’ because of its reliance on IMF aid.[97] However, Kunz’s view likely stems from her reliance on British-American diplomatic correspondence; in ‘The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis’, which is nearly 400 pages long, she references IMF sources just once.[98] Relating IMF documents to secondary material, in contrast, demonstrates that it is inappropriate to see the Fund merely as another weapon in America’s economic arsenal. Thus, we must circumscribe Kunz’s argument. Instead, ‘the IMF was able to act upon [loan requests] without becoming embroiled in the crisis’.[99] Turning to outcomes, it appears that the technical information and neutral decision making affected by the Fund mitigated the short to mid-term monetary problems associated with the Suez Crisis. The 1957 annual report ‘found it encouraging that difficult internal adjustments had been made with considerable success, and that it had proved possible, with the assistance of the Fund, to avoid a reintroduction of the restrictive practices [in Europe]’.[100] Indeed, after the announcement of the IMF package, staff analysis found that ‘speculative pressures [on the sterling] virtually ceased’.[101] Despite the role of direct US aid in reviving the sterling, Boughton argues that ‘a much larger multilateral package would have to be assembled to end the crisis, and the IMF was the institution that was best placed to do so’.[102] The pound retained its exchange rate with the dollar until 1967. In February, an Executive Director noted that ‘the current balance of payments was better than one would have thought possible some months ago’.[103] Thus, the IMF maintained the stability of the international monetary system during the Suez Crisis. Even if its decisions affected the diplomacy of the crisis, it has been shown that they were by and large formulated according to a neutral application of the Articles of Agreement. Like the ICRC, then, the IMF could perform its functions in no small part because its neutrality was credible. Its unprecedented achievement in keeping countries financially buoyant and open for trade in this time of crisis is captured in the Business Week headline of 30 March 1957: ‘IMF wins over the sceptics’.[104] It had put its technical powers to effective use in a testing time for the international monetary system. The UN Though the UN had been involved in the first, diplomatic phase of the Suez Crisis, its operations began in earnest after Israeli tanks rolled into the Sinai Peninsula.[105] With the military conflict in motion, the organisation’s aim became the restoration of peace with a full withdrawal by all the belligerents. In fact, a ceasefire was declared within a fortnight of the Israeli invasion and the full withdrawal of foreign troops from Egypt completed inside six months; however, it is necessary to draw direct causal links between the UN’s intervention in the conflict and the outbreak of peace. The UN affected four key processes: it set international norms and directly encouraged states to follow them; it solved technical problems; it shaped interstate diplomacy by creating a neutral forum for debate; and it created the world’s first peacekeeping force, which acted as a physical extension of its diplomacy. The UN acted as the primary shaper of norms during the Suez Crisis, a position that proceeded from the ‘strength of its [near] universal membership’ and its status as the premier diplomatic organ in world politics.[106] Crucially, the UN Charter commanded what Weiss calls ‘international legitimacy’.[107] Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions were the main vehicle by which the UN made normative pronouncements over the crisis. From the outset of the crisis, belligerents attempted to frame their actions in terms of the normative mandate of these resolutions. Indeed, even though Britain and France ended up completely transgressing the principles of SCR/118 both countries presented their invasion as a ‘police action’ to protect international shipping—i.e. in terms broadly consistent with the Charter.[108] Unfortunately for Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet, however, deliberation at the UN affirmed the opposition of most states to the invasion. The First Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly passed Resolution 997 on 2 November, which called for a ceasefire, withdrawal, and clearance of the Canal. These demands were repeated in motions passed on 4, 7, and 24 November.[109] After the British-French withdrawal, Israel was pressed further through motions on 19 January and 2 February.[110] Though some countries (notably Australia), voiced their support for the British-French ‘police action’, the General Assembly, overall, conclusively condemned the tripartite aggression with large majorities in the General Assembly.[111] On 3 November, the Egyptian representative rebuked Britain and France’s ‘false pretext of separating the Egyptian and Israel armies until a solution has been found to the Suez Canal question’.[112] In an address on 7 November, the delegate for Ceylon noted that, ‘the Assembly, by its resolution [GAR 997], rejected in unmistakable terms the explanation that their [Britain and France’s] action was a ‘police action’; it was an invasion, a military operation conducted against Egypt. In those circumstances, they have no legal or moral right to remain there’.[113] Thus, the role of the African-Asian bloc in admonishing the imperial powers is especially important.[114] Britain and France had attempted to prevent this by framing their invasion as a ‘police action’, which demonstrates a key diplomatic dimension of the Suez Crisis: UN norms mattered. The diplomatic operations of the Secretariat were also crucial in the UN’s pursuit of peace, facilitating consensus-building deliberation on the General Assembly Floor as well as behind the scenes. On 29 October, Secretary-General Hammarskjöld convened private meetings with American, British, French, and Soviet diplomats to discuss the situation.[115] Working with Canadian Foreign Minister and committed UN advocate Lester Pearson, he led backroom discussions from 2 November that helped to distil the principles of UNEF, which would replace British-French ‘police action’.[116] While it was important that the superpowers supported UNEF, the independent diplomatic action of the Secretariat was essential. Between 16 and 18 November, Hammarskjöld opened talks in Cairo to secure Nasser’s approval, spending seven hours alone on 17 November to sway his doubts about the inclusion of Canadian forces—whose head of state was the Queen of England—in the operation.[117] Nasser’s acceptance of foreign UNEF troops on Egyptian land depended on his trust in Hammarskjöld. To understand the agency of the Secretariat, we also have to appreciate its use of what I call ‘hard diplomacy’—diplomatic process that bolsters verbal negotiations with action on the ground. The Secretariat’s status as a neutral, international body allowed it to provide the technical aid needed to clear the several ships scuttled in the Suez Canal at the start of the invasion. Whereas Britain and France argued that their own engineers would be needed, Hammarksjöld organised an alternative pool of technical expertise, which was accepted because it was not deemed to undermine Egypt’s sovereignty.[118] As a result, France and Britain lost an important justification for their continued presence in Egypt. The United Nations began work in mid-December and the Canal was in full working order by 10 April 1957. The UN’s provision of neutral, technical aid, then, both resolved a material problem created by the Suez Canal—the blocking of a major seaway—and increased diplomatic pressure on Britain and France to withdraw. A more impressive example of the UN’s ‘hard diplomacy’, however, is the formation of UNEF. By establishing a peacekeeping force that was neutral and ‘fully independent of the policies of any one nation’, the security of the Suez Canal could be assured without undermining Egyptian sovereignty.[119] With the first UNEF troops entering Egypt on 15 November to supervise the Egyptian-Israeli truce, the basis for British-French occupation began to evaporate. Indeed, the forceful appeals of GAR 1121 for the three invading countries to withdraw emphasised the presence of UNEF.[120] Though only mandated to act in self-defence, these forces were a physical embodiment of the UN’s mandate for peace as Dag Hammarskjöld emphasised in a radio address to his soldiers: ‘You are the frontline of a moral force which extends around the world…Your success can have profound effect for good‘.[121] In sum, the UN was an active participant in the restoration of peace in the Middle East. First, the UN set norms that carried real weight due to the organisation’s near universal membership and commitment to high ideals. Second, the UN’s body of international civil servants in the Secretariat facilitated diplomatic engagement between states, especially through the personal work of Dag Hammarskjöld.[122] Third, this diplomatic engagement was bolstered by ‘hard diplomacy’, including technical aid and UNEF. Overall, international organisations were active participants in making their articulated goals happen. Interestingly, despite their varying aims and institutional designs, there were remarkable similarities between the operations that each international organisation used in the pursuit of its goals. The IMF, ICRC, and to some extent the UN were very active gatherers of technical information. Furthermore, the ICRC and UN facilitated diplomacy between different entities, acting both as diplomatic agents and forums of dialogue. This overlap in function can explain apparent clashes between organisations; in an address on World Red Cross Day, Dag Hammarskjöld noted that ‘when…the United Nations arranged and carried out the transfer of prisoners of war, the International Committee of the Red Cross lent valued assistance’.[123] The ICRC claimed credit for supervising the same operation—such contradictory reporting was rare, but it demonstrates the extent to which overlapping interests could lead to conflict.[124] While the IMF 1956 Annual Report noted that the UN and IMF ‘have worked together in close association, whenever their interests required it’, there is no evidence they actively cooperated during the Suez Crisis.[125] Still, IOs employed common processes in a way that allows us to consider their role in the resolution of the Suez Crisis collectively, strengthening the argument for an international society approach. Most importantly each of these international organisations sought to embody neutrality in the eyes of states both as an end in itself and as a means to achieving their goals, presenting their actions through a discourse of internationalism.[126] Thus, the humanitarian, monetary, and diplomatic rules and norms promulgated by the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN respectively held weight because they were deemed to be neutral. A Crisis for the World? It is clear that international organisations were deeply involved in making the history of the Suez Crisis. Yet in some ways this conclusion begs more questions than it answers. In this chapter, I will argue that the similarity of the processes affected by IOs and the analogous way that they constructed neutrality in the eyes of states necessitate certain adjustments to the historiography. Most importantly, international organisations must be central to how we understand the course and resolution of the militarised phase of the crisis. Though IOs were not always the principal shapers of events, their status as neutral actors with internationalist aims allowed them to exert an important agency that has hitherto been overlooked. Furthermore, the similarity of the processes that they employed supports the application of the international society approach to the Suez Crisis. I will close with some tentative research recommendations for future scholarship into the crisis International organisations were at the centre of the Suez Crisis from the first shots fired in the Sinai Desert on 29 October 1956 to the reopening of the Canal on 10 April 1957. Though they achieved their articulated goals, the role of states in this process remains to be fully examined. Indeed, most histories of the Suez Crisis have understood international organisations merely as instruments of states; however, this ignores the way that IOs shaped norms, which directed state power.[127] The UN is of primary importance here. For example, the United States exerted diplomatic and economic pressure on Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw in a large part because the UN had laid bare the way that the invaders’ actions violated international norms, which jeopardised the West’s position in the Cold War.[128] As Sir Charles Keightley, Commander in Chief of the British forces, put it, ‘the one overriding lesson of the Suez operation is that world opinion is now an absolute principle of war and must be treated as such‘.[129] In sum, ‘the UN…established norms of government but did not rule’.[130] For just this reason, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd had attempted to cast Britain’s invasion in terms of ‘an international policing role’, reflecting on 8 November that Britain ‘have heartily welcomed the idea of sending a United Nations force to the area to take over the responsibilities which we have felt bound to shoulder’.[131] A similar narrative of the crisis is repeated in Eden’s memoirs.[132] By consequence, the establishment of UNEF necessitated a French-British withdrawal. Thus, norms coming from the UN exerted agency on state action. It has been noted that international organisations pursued courses of action unavailable to states. Paradoxically, the unique ability of the ICRC to supervise the implementation of humanitarian law and the IMF to maintain monetary stability has led their influence in the crisis to be overlooked. Given the preoccupation of diplomatic historians with state action, it is unsurprising that the historiography has ignored the several problems that states did not face because of IO activity . For example, although the US aid helped to ease pressures on the sterling, it could not have resolved Britain’s balance of payments problem alone.[133] Furthermore, the ICRC’s unique position in the supply of aid to civilians, prisoners of war, and the wounded prevented human disasters and public relations difficulties for the invading powers, which were explicit concerns of British commanders in Port Said.[134] The impact of these two organisations does not appear in the state archives precisely because they were successful. Reflecting on this point, one might model the agency of IOs, then, along a continuum between ‘stage-setting’—the ICRC’s preemption and mitigation of humanitarian problems—and ‘actioning’—the deployment of UNEF. Each IO shaped the crisis in both of these ways, with the UN engaging in the most actioning, the ICRC in stage-setting, and the IMF somewhere in between. Across both of these processes, though, the construction of neutrality by IOs was a means to achieving their goals and an end in itself. Indeed, as research of their aims has shown, the neutral promotion of universal values was central to the internationalist mandates of the UN, the IMF, and the ICRC. Still, the realisation of these goals during the Suez Crisis depended to some extent on the support of the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR. For example, they both supported the intervention of a UN peacekeeping force because each wanted to bring about a British-French withdrawal without facilitating the intervention of the other superpower.[135] Still, though it was important that American and Soviet diplomats accepted the idea, the UN occupied a unique position as an international organisation designed to serve internationalist goals in the formation of an international peacekeeping force. Though the IMF acted according to its own rules in approving the massive rescue package for Britain, its approval was by then in the USA’s interests as Britain had already committed to withdraw from Port Said. In addition, circumstances at Suez did not present the ICRC with difficult questions on how to remain neutral that were faced in other conflicts.[136] Thus, if by their own accounts IOs operated as neutral actors, this depended to some extent on favourable background conditions. Overall, I contend that this study has bolstered the importance of international society as an object of analysis in international history. I have not pursued such an analysis outright, but rather have drawn inspiration from it and examined one facet of building a more holistic, international understanding of the Suez Crisis. By examining the aims and operations of IOs, I have shown that they pursued similar aims and generated influence in comparable ways. Indeed, they often interrelated in their functions. For example, the UN and ICRC jointly managed the transfer of prisoners in the Sinai peninsula. In addition, they sometimes exerted a joint influence of states, even unintentionally. For example, the flight on the sterling was to a large degree motivated by Britain’s weak position at the UN, which pushed Britain into the hands of the IMF.[137] The main point, however, is that the internationalist, neutral aims of IOs were realised through some combination of diplomacy, information gathering, technical aid, and normative influence, which are processes I have identified through primary research. This suggests that in an international society approach to the Suez Crisis individual IOs ought to be examined together. In sum, this study impels the historian to approach the Suez Crisis—and indeed international history—more holistically. In 2008, Scott Lucas noted that ‘various collections from 1991 have tried to represent Suez as a multinational affair, only to run the risk of merely re-scripting the historical play with more actors’.[138] What this study has sought to show is that future research should seek to understand the crisis in terms of international society, a singular category that brings all of these actors—and the historiographies they bring with them—together. My research throws up other future areas of exploration into the Suez Crisis. Most importantly, the Suez Crisis must be recognised as an important moment in the history of the organisations themselves. Indeed, the way that IO officials discussed the crisis reveals a palpable sense of their ‘making history’ for their respective organisations.[139] In addition, historians should build on this study to revisit state archives with international society in mind and perhaps new material will become useful. It will be important to study how different actors shaped norms and other features of international society. Furthermore, the interaction between normative rhetoric in foreign relations and domestic policy ought to be addressed. In view of postcolonial approaches, further study should go into the Eurocentrism lurking behind the ability of IOs to construct neutrality. Perhaps this study of the Suez Crisis begs more questions than answers, but it is certainly a start in the right direction. *** On 4 November 1956, Omar Loufti, the Permanent Representative of Egypt to the United Nations appealed to the sovereign nations of the world, ‘The solution of the problem is in your hands. The eyes of the world are upon you. Yours is a great responsibility’.[140] Several states responded to his call for support, but the resolution of the problem to which he referred—the Suez Crisis—could not have happened in the way that it did without the intervention of international organisations. Acting in ways that states could not, the ICRC, the IMF, and the UN together shaped the course of the crisis and contributed significantly to its conclusion. This study has shown that states did not underestimate their influence; neither should history. Asa Breuss-Burgess Asa Breuss-Burgess is a researcher, writer, and geopolitical risk analyst based in London. His work focuses on the intersection energy, climate change, and power politics in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. He holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and Politics from the University of Oxford.  Appendix: Archival Sources Washington D.C., International Monetary Fund Archives (IMF) Executive Board Minutes (EBM/169483) Executive Board Documents (EBD/169391) Executive Board Specials (EBS/169337) Press Reports (PREP/183443) Press Releases (PR/169465) Staff memoranda (SM/169374) New York City, United Nations Archives (UNA) Fonds: Secretary General Dag Hammarkjold (1953-1961) Series: Press Releases Items: S-0928-0001-04; S-0928-0001-05 UN Digital Library Security Council Documents Resolutions S/3675, S/3721 Procès Verbal S/PV.743, S/PV.751 Letters S/3649, S/3654, S/3656, S/3674, S/3679, S/3683, S/3712, S/3721, S/3728 General Assembly Documents Resolutions A/RES/377(V), A/RES/997(ES-I), A/RES/998(ES-I), A/RES/999(ES-I), A/RES/1000(ES-I), A/RES/1001(ES-I), A/RES/1002(ES-I), A/RES/1003(ES-I), A/RES/1120(XI), A/RES/1121(XI), A/RES/1123(XI), A/RES/1124(XI) Procès Verbal A/PV.562; A/PV.563; A/PV.565; A/PV.567; A/PV.572; A/PV.594; A/PV.596; A/PV.642; A/PV.652 Committee Reports A/3256; A/3275; A/3276; A/3290; A/3308; A/3309; A/3329; A/3383(Annex)/Rev.1; A/3385/Rev.1; A/3386; A/3501/Rev.1; A/3517 [1] Jean Lacouture and Simone Lacouture, ‘The Night Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal’, Le Monde diplomatique (Paris, July 2002), < https://mondediplo.com/2002/07/12canal > accessed 6 March 2022. [2] Quoted in Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (2nd edn, I.B. Tauris 2003) 7. [3] Jacob Coleman Hurewitz, ‘The Historical Context’ in William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds), Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences (Clarendon Press 1991) 19-30. [4] ibid 22. [5] Mordechai Bar-On, ‘David Ben-Gurion and the Sèvres Collusion’ in ibid 145-60. [6] For memoirs, see Anthony Eden, Full Circle: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden (Cassell 1960); Dwight Eisenhower, The White House Years vol. ii: Waging Peace, 1956–1961 (Doubleday 1965); Howard Macmillan, Riding the Storm, 1956–1959 (Macmillan 1971); Muḥammad Ḥasanayn Haykal, Nasser: The Cairo Documents (New English Library 1972). [7] For diplomatic histories, see Diane Kunz, ‘The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis’ (Yale University Ph.D thesis 1989); Kyle (n 2); Louis and Owen (n 3); W Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (Hodder & Stoughton 1996) . [8] See for example James M Boughton, ‘Northwest of Suez: The 1956 Crisis and the IMF’ (2000) 00/192 IMF Working Papers ; Norrie MacQueen, Peacekeeping and the International System (Routledge 2005) 61-79; Amy Sayward, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation changed the world, 1945-65 (Kent State University Press 2006) 56-63; Esther Moeller, ‘The Suez Crisis of 1956 as a Moment of Transnational Humanitarian Engagement’ (2016) 23(1-2) European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 136-53. [9] Kenneth W Abbott and Duncan Snidal , ‘Why States Act through Formal International Organizations’ (1998) 42(1) The Journal of Conflict Resolution 4. [10] Michael N Barnett and Martha Finnemore, ‘The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations’ (1999) 53(4) International Organization 707-15. [11] For example, United Nations General Assembly (hereafter UNGA), ‘565th Plenary Meeting’, 4 November 1956, UN, A/PV.565 80. [12] Odd Westad, ‘The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century’ in Melvyn Leffler and Odd Westad (eds), The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Vol. 1 Origins, 1945-1962 (3 vols, Cambridge University Press 2010) 1-19. [13] François Bugnion and Françoise Perret, From Budapest to Saigon: History of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1956–1965 (ICRC 2009) 2. [14] ibid 5. [15] Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field (adopted 12/08/1949), 75 UNTS 31, Art 9 < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%2075/volume-75-I-970-English.pdf > accessed 1 March 2022. [16] ICRC, Handbook of the International Red Cross , (10th ed, ICRC 1953) 305-11. [17] David Forsythe, ‘On Contested Concepts: Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and the Notion of Neutrality’ (2013) 12(1) Journal of Human Rights 65-6. [18] Gerald Steinacher, Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2017) 237-44. [19] ‘The absence of preparation for wartime’. Comité International de la Croix-Rouge (hereafter CICR), ‘De Retour du Moyen-Orient…’ (1956) 38(449) Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge (hereafter RICR) 278. [20] ‘Has requested the Governments of the countries involved in the conflict…to guarantee the application of the four 1949 Geneva Conventions’. CICR, ‘La Croix-Rouge et le Conflit de Suez’ (1956) 38(455) RICR 659. [21] ‘Ready to assume the tasks laid out for it by the Geneva Conventions’. Ibid. [22] ibid 661. [23] John Keith Horsefield and Margaret Garritsen De Vries, The International Monetary Fund, 1945-1965: Twenty Years of International Monetary Cooperation (3 vols, International Monetary Fund 1969) ii 40. [24] ibid 3-18. [25] ‘Annual Report, 1956’, 23 May 1956, IMF, SM/56/43, 134. [26] Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (adopted 27/12/1945), 2 UNTS 39, Art. 1(i) < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%202/v2.pdf > accessed 1 March 2022. [27] ibid Art. 1(ii). [28] Ian Hurd, International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practic e, (4th edn, Cambridge University Press 2021) 146. [29] Articles (n 26) Art. 12, section 4, (c). [30] ‘Executive Board Meeting’, 22 September 1956, IMF, EBM/56/48. [31] Charter of the United Nations (adopted 24 October 1945), 1 UNTS 16, Preamble < https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3930.html > accessed 1 March 2022. [32] MacQueen (n 8) 61. [33] ibid 68. [34] Charter (n 31) Art. 1. [35] ibid Art. 2. [36] Thomas G Weiss, ‘The United Nations: Before, During and After 1945’ (2015) 91(6) International Affairs 1230. [37] United Nations Security Council (hereafter UNSC), ‘Resolution 118’, 13 October 1956, UN, S/3675; Kyle (n 2) 148. [38] UNSC, ‘Resolution 119’, 31 October 1956, UN, S/3721. [39] UNGA, ‘Uniting for Peace’, 3 November 1950, UN, A/RES/377(V). [40] UNGA, ‘Resolution 997 (ES-I)’, 2 November 1956, UN, A/RES/997(ES-I). [41] For example, see UNGA, ‘Resolution 998 (ES-I)’, 4 November 1956, UN, A/RES/998(ES-I). [42] Charter (n 31) Art. 97. [43] ‘Statement by Secretary-General after Security Council Action over Suez’, 13 October 1956, UNA, Press Release SG/510. [44] UNSC, ‘751th Meeting’, 31 October 1956, UN, S/PV.751 1-2. [45] Sandrine Kott, ‘Cold War Internationalism’ in Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga (eds), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge University Press 2017) 340. [46] Moeller (n 8) 137. [47] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 63-82. [48] CICR (n 20) 659-60. [49] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 68. [50] ‘Letter from the UN secretary-general to the ICRC president’, 4 December 1956, ICRC Archives, B AG 201 139-001 quoted in Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 79. [51] CICR, ‘Le rapatriement des prisonniers de guerre dans le Proche-Orient’ (1957) 39(459) RICR 162. [52] Moeller (n 8) 143. [53] CICR, ‘L’action du Comité International dans le Proche-Orient’ (1957) 39(458) RICR 92. [54] CICR (n 51) 163. [55] Moeller (n 8) 144. [56] CICR, ‘L’action du Comité International dans le Proche-Orient’ (1956) 38(456) RICR 732. [57] CICR (n 20) 661. [58] Moeller (n 8) 145. [59] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 73. [60] ‘During their captivity all prisoners in Israel and Egypt were supported’. CICR (n 51) 158. [61] ‘Remains characteristic of the fulfilment of the tasks of the [ICRC] within the framework of the Geneva Conventions’. CICR (n 53) 90. [62] ‘Special aid funds [were] immediately opened up to the victims of the events’. CICR (n 56) 732. [63] CICR, ‘Égypte’ (1957) 39(461) RICR 283. [64] Moeller (n 8) 141. [65] CICR (n 53) 91. [66] ‘That a request was made by two Red Crescent vehicles, containing Egyptians, to proceed to Port Said and inquires if General Burns could be approached on the Subject’, 10 November 1956, TNA, JE 1094/90, fo. 371/1118906 quoted in Moeller (n 8) 141. [67] CICR (n 56) 734. [68] CICR, ‘La Croix-Rouge au secours des sinistrés de Port-Saïd (1957) 39(459) RICR 165. [69] Moeller (n 8) 142. [70] CICR (n 20) 661; CICR (n 53) 89. [71] CICR (n 56) 733; CICR (n 53) 94. [72] ‘In close contact’. CICR (n 53) 94; CICR, ‘L’activité du Comité’ (1957) 39(457) RICR 27. [73] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - Egypt’, 21 September 1956, IMF, EBS/56/28 3. [74] Boughton (n 8) 10. [75] ‘1956 Consultations - France’, 17 October 1956, IMF, SM/56/61 (Supplement 2) 2. [76] ‘Executive Board Meeting’, 17 October 1956, IMF, EBM/56/51. [77] 18 October 1956, IMF, PR/243. [78] Boughton (n 8) 5. [79] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - Egypt’, 30 January 1957, IMF, EBS/57/7 (Supplement 1) 4. [80] ‘Minutes of Executive Board Meeting’, 4 February 1957, IMF, EBM/57/5 2-3. [81] ‘Israel - Revision of Quota’, 19 October 1956, IMF, EBS/56/31, 1; ‘Par Value for Israel’, 26 October 1956, IMF, EBD/56/124. [82] ‘1956 Consultations - Israel’, 5 February 1957, IMF, SM/57/12 16. [83] ‘Minutes of Executive Board Meeting’, 27 February 1957, IMF, EBM/57/10 15. [84] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - Israel’, 13 May 1957, IMF, EBS/57/26 (Supplement 1). [85] ‘Cobbold to Macmillan’, October 17 1956, TNA, T 236/4188 quoted in Kunz (n 7) 197. [86] Kunz (n 7) 353. [87] ibid 152. [88] ibid 230. [89] ibid 246. [90] Kyle (n 2) 464; Boughton (n 8) 19. [91] ‘Use of the Fund’s Resources - United Kingdom’, 7 December 1956, IMF, EBS/56/44 1. [92] ‘United Kingdom - Background Material’, 7 December 1956, IMF, SM/56/83 7. [93] ‘1956 Consultations - United Kingdom’, 11 February 1957, IMF, SM/57/14 19. [94] ‘Executive Board Meeting’, 10 December 1956, IMF, EBM/56/59 3. [95] ibid. [96] Kunz (n 7) 1. [97] ibid 5. [98] See footnote in ibid 279. [99] Boughton (n 8) 5. [100] Horsefield and De Vries (n 23) i, 441. [101] ‘1957 Consultations - United Kingdom’, 10 December 1957, IMF, SM/57/101 4. [102] Boughton (n 8) 26. [103] IMF, EBM/57/10, 11. [104] ‘IMF Wins Over the Skeptics’, 30 March 1957, IMF, PREP/57/3. [105] Edward Johnson, ‘The Suez Crisis at the United Nations’ in Simon C Smith (ed), Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and Its Aftermath (Ashgate 2008) 170. [106] Weiss (n 36) 1226. [107] ibid 1227. [108] UN, S/3675; UNGA, ‘567th Plenary Meeting’, 7 November 1956, UN, A/PV.567. [109] UN, A/RES/997(ES-I); UN, A/RES/998(ES-I); UNGA, ‘Resolution 1002 (ES-I)’, 5 November 1956, UN, A/RES/1002(ES-I); UNGA, ‘Resolution 1120(XI)’, 24 November 1956, UN, A/RES/1120(XI). [110] UNGA, ‘Resolution 1123 (XI)’, 19 January 1957, UN, A/RES/1123(XI); UNGA, ‘Resolution 1124 (XI)’, 2 February 1957, UN, A/RES/1124(XI). [111] Peter Lyon, ‘The Commonwealth and the Suez Crisis’ in Louis and Owen (n 3) 257-274; UN, A/PV.567 126-7. [112] UNGA, ‘563rd Plenary Meeting’, 3 November 1956, UN, A/PV.563 46. [113] UN, A/PV.567 124. [114] Ibid., 106; UN, A/PV.563 59. [115] Kyle (n 2) 277-88. [116] M. Tudor, ‘Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: UN Peacekeeping Missions and the Formation of the Post-Colonial International Order, 1956-1971’ (Manchester University Ph.D thesis 2020) 47. [117] Manuel Fröhlich, ‘The ‘Suez Story’: Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and the creation of UN peacekeeping’ in Henning Melber and Carsten Stahn (eds), Peace Diplomacy, Global Justice and International Agency: Rethinking Human Security and Ethics in the Spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld (Cambridge University Press 2014) 334. [118] ibid 330. [119] UNGA, ‘Second and final report of the Secretary-General on the plan for an emergency international United Nations force’, 6 November 1956, UN, A/3302 2. [120] UNGA, ‘Resolution 1121 (XI)’, 24 November 1956, UN, A/RES/1121(XI). [121] ‘UN Pamphlet on UNEF’, 1 March 1957, UNA, S-0313-0002-12, 17 quoted in Tudor (n 116) 64. [122] Fröhlich (n 117) 308. [123] ‘Message from United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld on World Red Cross Day’, Security Council Action over Suez’, 3 May 1957, UNA, Press Release SG/591. [124] CICR (n 53) 93. [125] IMF, SM/56/43 141. [126] Eva-Maria Muschik, ‘Managing the World: The United Nations, Decolonization, and the Strange Triumph of State Sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s’ (2018) 13(1) Journal of Global History 122. [127] See for example Kyle (n 2); Lucas (n 7); Nigel John Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955-59 (Macmillan 1996); Simon C Smith, Ending Empire in the Middle East: Britain, the United States and Post-war Decolonization, 1945-1973 (Routledge 2012). [128] Peter G Boyle, ‘The Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis’ (2005) 90(4/300) History 564. [129] Sir Charles Keightley, 11 December 1957 quoted in Kyle (n 2) 392. [130] Muschik (n 126) 125. [131] Tudor (n 116) 61; UN, A/PV.567 112 [132] Eden (n 6) 522-27. [133] Boughton (n 8) 26. [134] Moeller (n 8) 144. [135] John C Campbell, ‘The Soviet Union, the United States, and the Twin Crises of Hungary and Suez’ in Louis and Owen (n 3) 247. [136] Michael N Barnett, The Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press 2011) 133. [137] Kyle (n 2) 464. [138] Scott Lucas, ‘Conclusion’ in Smith (n 105) 239. [139] Bugnion and Perret (n 13) 80; Horsefield and De Vries (n 23) i, 426; UNGA, ‘594th Plenary Meeting’, 24 November 1956, UN, A/PV.594 295. [140] UN, A/PV.565 80.

The largest protest movement in Iraq’s history, Thawrat Tishreen of 2019, shouldn’t have achieved so little. The movement pursued well-tested tactics, which had succeeded elsewhere, against a weak Iraqi regime for months on end, refusing to be swayed by brutal repression, token concessions, or elite co-option. [1]  Despite the sustained mobilisation of a massive, cross-sectarian, cross-class coalition around a core set of clear demands, Thawrat Tishreen resulted in incidental, though not entirely insignificant, political gains, but failed to change its primary target, Iraq’s Muhasasa system of sectarian power sharing. In this piece, I will argue that this failure is best explained by the decentralised, diffuse character of the Muhasasa system, the weakness of which engenders opposition by failing to deliver robust governance, but, paradoxically, also enables its durability. Other factors did contribute to Thawrat Tishreen’s failure: the protest movement suffered from some organisational weaknesses; the political machinations of different factions in Iraq like the Sadrists undermined the cause; and exogenous factors such as foreign intervention and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role. Nonetheless, these obstacles acquired causal force because of the dynamics of the Muhasasa system and would not have otherwise created such significant difficulties for the opposition.   This essay will proceed as follows: (1) I will contextualise and analyse the salient features of Thawrat Tishreen, especially its organisation, its demands, and responses to the protests; (2) I will argue that, despite limited political successes, the movement should be coded a failure; and (3) I will establish that, above all else, the intractability of the Muhasasa system made failure very likely. I demonstrate this argument (3) by (a) pursing a deeper analysis of why the nature of the Muhasasa system made success unlikely; (b) outlining ways in which the protest movement was deficient, while linking the significance of these deficiencies back to the Muhasasa system; and (c) accounting for exogenous factors, which played a role, but are not of primary significance. Conversely, I will not attempt to fully explain the historical development of Iraq’s Muhasasa system or its subsequent trajectory, but rather focus on why Thawrat Tishreen failed to bring about its demise.   Thawrat Tishreen has attracted attention from scholars, analysts, and practitioners focused on the MENA region both because of its significance to the domestic politics of Iraq and its occurrence alongside the other protest movements of the ‘Second Arab Spring’ of 2018-19. [2]  Scholarly attention has broadly sought to situate the protest movement in Iraq’s post-2003 politics, assess its aims, and suggest reasons for its failure. I draw on these academic interventions to a certain degree but also rely heavily on articles published by think tanks, newspapers, and NGOs during and after the crisis. I also utilise polling data, protest datasets, and analyses of social media posts. Furthermore, I have drawn inspiration from informal conversations with academics, diplomats, activists, and citizens of Iraq. To situate my piece, then, in the emerging discourse on Thawrat Tishreen, my main goal is not to contribute new primary material, but rather, as the dust settles, to take stock of contemporaneous data and analyses of events. I focus on (1) the extent to which Thawrat Tishreen should be coded a failure and (2) the determinants of failure, because these two questions are still the main objects of contention in both academic and quotidian discussion around the uprising.   1. Context, Events, Organisation, and Responses   Thawrat Tishreen did not come out of nowhere. Since the US-led invasion of 2003, Iraqi politics has been characterised by violence, instability, and elite infighting, breeding widespread discontent. Iraq’s 43 million strong population is composed of three main sectarian groups: Shi'i Arabs (c. 61%), Sunni Kurds (c. 20%), and Sunni Arabs (c. 15%). [3]  The 2005 Constitution attempted to resolve the sectarian question, which had been a thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime and the main priority of the Shi'i-dominated Iraqi opposition, by introducing a consociational sectarian power sharing agreement, the Muhasasa system. The word ‘Muhasasa’ comes from the Arabic for ‘apportionment’ and, in political terms, stipulates that the Iraqi government is divided among sectarian groups in an informal quota system. In institutional terms, the Presidency is reserved for a Kurd, the position of Prime Minister for a Shi'i and the Speaker of Parliament a Sunni. Cabinet positions are allocated roughly in proportion to the share of the population made up from each group, and a certain level of representation is guaranteed for Iraq’s Assyrian and Turkmen minorities. [4]  In practice, this results in a system of political economy in which the Iraqi state is divided by deeply entrenched patronage networks, political advancement depends on factional loyalty rather than competence, systemic corruption based on sectarian affiliation is rampant, and foreign interference through political parties and non-state armed groups is widespread. [5]   The Iraqi government formed in 2005 took over the reins of a very weak state. After wars against Iran in the 1980s and the US-led coalition in 1990-91, as well as severe sections and multiple uprisings in the 1990s, the Iraqi state was all but dismantled by the US-led invasion of 2003 and the Coalition Provisional Authority’s campaign of ‘De-Ba'athification’. Institutional fragility, the US occupation, and the dysfunctional politics of post-2003 Iraq led to major civil wars from 2006-8 and 2013-17. This weakness was compounded by a reliance on oil, which makes up 99% of Iraqi exports, 85% of government budget, and 42% of total GDP. [6]  While Iraq’s oil wealth is considerable, it is largely siphoned between different factions as part of the Muhasasa arrangement, leading to acute governance failures. Especially after 2011, Iraqi citizens began protesting against government dysfunction, corruption, foreign influence, and the excesses of the Muhasasa system. [7]  These protests increasingly acquired a non-sectarian character despite the sectarian nature of Iraqi politics.   The outbreak of massive protest in Iraq in 2019 can be traced to several domestic drivers but must also be contextualised in regional and international terms. The 2010-11 Arab Uprisings ‘missed’ Iraq in the sense that no major, sustained protests broke out and the Iraqi system was never threatened by popular mobilisation. Nonetheless, like other states in MENA, Iraq was experiencing the demographic pressures of a youth bulge in the 2010s, with 67% of its population under 30 years old by 2019. [8]  Indeed, major protest movements also broke out in Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon in the 2018-19 period. While there were strong links between the protests in Iraq and Lebanon where a similarly ‘sectarianised’ political economy exists, the eruption of protest in Sudan and Algeria was largely incidental. Overall, though, the 2010s was a particularity ‘revolutionary’ period for the MENA region as a whole.   In the context of rising corruption, economic problems, unemployment, sustained US and Iranian foreign penetration, and appalling governance failures—road, electricity, water, and sewage systems in much of the country are not functioning—government legitimacy in Iraq was steadily decreasing through the 2010s, with lower and lower turnouts at elections. [9]  So why 2019? On a basic level, Iraqi society has spent most of the post-Saddam Hussein period either recovering from the trauma of 2003 invasion and 2006-8 civil war or facing down the threat of Daesh up to at least mid-2018. Thus, these critical existential challenges to Iraq as a unified country precluded the formation of such a large-scale protest movement. Two immediate triggers, moreover, precipitated the extraordinary protests that began on 1 October 2019. First, the security forces’ violent suppression of a protest by holders of advanced degrees in Basra on 25 September generated widespread outrage on social media. Second, the demotion of Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi from the prestigious Counter Terrorism Service to a position in the Ministry of Defence on 27 September stoked anger against perceived Iranian influence in Iraq. The demotion of Saadi, who was celebrated as a war hero in Iraq’s defeat of Daesh, was interpreted by many as another capitulation by Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to Iran-aligned factions in the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), who opposed Saadi.   Nothing, however, could have predicted the scale, intensity, or duration of the protest movement, which lasted from October and petered out by early March. [10]  Berman, Clarke, and Majed’s dataset (fig 1) of weekly protests coded by main demand usefully elucidates the goals of the protestors and separates the protests into four main phases: escalation, dispersion, resuscitation, and demobilisation. [11]  A few key events are worth reflecting upon in this narrative. First, the ‘escalation’ phase was fuelled both by the protests’ original demands and by anger at the violence of state and state-affiliated actors, including the PMF and other non-stated armed groups. With the resignation of Abdu-Mahdi, the escalation phase came to an end, however protests were sustained through December by calls for more systemic reform. Massive protest was resuscitated in January, first by reactions to the assassination of Qasem Souleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of the PMF; and second by anger at the failure of the political elite to form an alternative government to Abdul-Mahdi by the so-called ‘Nasiriyah deadline’. The final demobilisation of protest was the result of several interlinked factors, which will be the focus of part (4).   The decentralised, non-hierarchical leadership structures of Thawrat Tishreen make it difficult to definitively ascertain its goals, but the bottom line is that protesters wanted an end to the Muhasasa system’s institutional division of the state along sectarian lines. Protestors also demanded fresh elections, accountability for regime violence, the technocratic improvement of public services, better employment opportunities, and the erosion of foreign influence by the USA and Iran. Berman, Clarke, and Majed’s dataset (fig 1) utilises local, Arabic-language newspapers to categorise both non-violent and violent popular mobilisation according to their primary demand. As the figure shows, protests were overtly political in character, calling for new elections and changes to the political system. Chants such as ‘No to Muhasasa, no to political sectarianism!’ and ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’ were widespread. [12]  Large scale analysis of protestor signs found on social media provides another effective mode of delineating Thawrat Tishreen’s main goals. Numan’s research employs exhaustive research on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to identify and code 2113 distinct protestor signs; his findings sustain the assertion by most commentaries on the movement that Thawrat Tishreen was overtly anti-sectarian and cast itself strongly in terms of Iraqi nationalism, with about 50% of all protestor signs containing the uniting symbol of the Iraqi flag. [13]   In organisational terms, Thawrat Tishreen was characterised by massive, spontaneous youth mobilisation, initially organised through local networks and social media, but later coordinated by committees of activists. Like the first phases of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, leaderlessness was a defining feature of the protests. [14]  Crucially, protestors did not mobilise according to class or sectarian identity, but rather Shi'i and Sunnis united across sectarian lines around Iraqi nationalism, even if some political parties were more energetic than others in sending their supporters to protest. [15]  It is worth noting, however, that protest was concentrated in Baghdad and the Shi'i-dominated South, and a majority of protesters were working class. [16]  Action was overwhelmingly and intentionally nonviolent, manifesting through demonstrations, sit-ins, the occupation of squares, and the construction of barricades. In many activist spaces, an air of ‘fun’ and ‘communitas’ emerged, a feature of Iraq’s protests that was shared in Lebanon. [17]  Still, the use of nonlethal violence on the part of protestors was not uncommon, for example, with the burning of Iranian consulates or attacks on buildings. Attacks on security forces were sporadic and usually in response to state or state-affiliated violence.   In contrast to the avowed nonviolence of the Tishreen protesters, regime and especially regime affiliated forces meted out considerable repression, resulting in the death of at least 600 protesters, the injury of over 20,000, and incalculable trauma. [18]  This ranged from internet blackouts and curfews on the one hand to the intimidation, beating, torture, kidnapping, and killing of protestors on the other, often by hidden snipers overlooking occupied public squares. Repression inflicted by non-state actors, primarily non-state armed groups and anti-Tishreen political parties, was generally more violent and brutal than that of the regime. [19]  The facelessness of repression by non-state and state-affiliated armed groups further shielded the government from accountability.   2. Political Successes, Failed Revolution   Thawrat Tishreen failed to realise its core aims, even if it did not accomplish nothing. Following Chenoweth and Stephan, I define success as the ‘full achievement of its stated goals within a year of the peak of activities and a discernible effect on the outcome such that the outcome was a direct result of the campaign’s activities’. [20]  It has been noted that the organisational form of Thawrat Tishreen prevented the coalescence of a single, definitive list of aims, but it has also been shown that certain core demands were common across the entire movement—better governance, the reduction of foreign influence in Iraqi politics, the improvement of the economic situation, and, centrally, the end of the Muhasasa system of sectarian power sharing. In this section, I argue, contrary to some commentators, that Thawrat Tishreen had some significant successes before reflecting that, despite these successes, the revolution should be considered on the whole a failure. [21]   In direct response to sustained pressure from the Tishreen protests, Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi resigned on 29 November despite repression and attempts behind the scenes to keep him in power. In addition, the Council of Representatives passed a significant electoral reform law on 24 December, which responded to the demands of protestors by eroding the power of the political establishment in picking candidates and establishing an independent High Electoral Commission. Early elections were scheduled for July 2021. Furthermore, when he was finally able to form a government in May 2020, the new Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi formed a more technocratic cabinet than Abdul-Mahdi, compensated the families of killed protestors with 10 million dinars each, better mitigated foreign influence, and held several meetings with Tishreen activists. [22]  Since Thawrat Tishreen, moreover, a new ‘culture of perpetual protest’ has emerged in Iraq. [23]  Largely rooted in the legacy of Thawrat Tishreen, this holds Iraqi politicians more accountable to some degree, but also has been coopted and instrumentalised by many political factions that are deeply tied to the Muhasasa system. [24]  The longer term effects of Thawrat Tishreen on Iraqi political culture remains to be seen.   Overall, however, public opinion data and a more thorough analysis of political developments demonstrate that Thawrat Tishreen ought to be considered a failure. While the revolution forced Abdul-Mahdi to resign, the Muhasasa system remains in place. Prime Minister aspirants Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi and Adnan Zurfi both failed to form governments during the protests because they did not command the support of the Muhasasa political class, and Kadhimi only succeeded because he did. [25]  Kadhimi succeeded because he was able to balance different sectarian factions against each other as well as placate both the USA and Iran. Government formation witnessed the same costly and corruption-ridden ‘horse-trading’ of previous ministries. The ‘early elections’ of 2021 brought about a political crisis that lasted over a year and was emblematic of everything the Tishreen protestors had rallied against. To make matters worse, only 36% of eligible voters turned out to vote in 2021, demonstrating a lack of faith in politics. [26]  While Kadhimi was perhaps more skilful at mitigating the power of non-state armed groups, the actions of non-state actors during the protests remains unpunished and these groups retain a powerful role in Iraqi politics. For example, while both Kadhimi and his successor, al-Sudani, were temporarily able to restrain violence between non-state armed groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah and US forces, the Israeli assault on Gaza that followed the 7 October attacks has led to several fatal exchanges between the US and Iran-affiliated groups. In addition, the Iraqi economy remains dependent on oil markets, having been hit hard by COVID in 2020 with a contraction of 10% and an 18.5% devaluation of the Iraqi Dinar against the dollar. [27]   Polling data, moreover, evidences the widespread perception that Thawrat Tishreen failed to change the Iraqi system. In 2021, Arab Barometer found that just 22% of Iraqis trust the government. [28]  Only 3% believe corruption is ‘not at all’ a problem, 68% felt corruption was ‘to a large extent’ prevalent, and, perhaps most worryingly, just 27% believed the government was working to crack down on corruption. Negative perceptions of democracy have increased since 2019; 72% of Iraqis link democracy to their country’s poor economic performance and 67% link democratic government to indecision and problems, even if 68% of Iraqis still believe that, despite democracy’s problems, it is a better system than others. [29]  Nonetheless, 37% of Iraqis expressed a desire to emigrate, with the figure rising to 48% for 18-29 year olds. [30]  This widespread discontent reflects the underlying problems that drove Iraqis to protest in 2019. At the same time, it demonstrates that Thawrat Tishreen failed to bring about systemic change.   3. Strength through Weakness: Muhasasa as the Primary Cause of Failure   The fragmented character of the Muhasasa system caused Thawrat Tishreen to fail. Not only does the nature of the system make meaningful reform very difficult, the structures of Muhasasa gave causal force to other factors which would not otherwise have undermined the revolution. I will demonstrate this part of my argument by (a) dissecting the aspects of the Muhasasa system that make reform so difficult; (b) explaining how the organisational structure of the protests contributed to failure—not because of inherent deficiencies per se, but as a result of their relationship to the Muhasasa system; and (c) outlining the role of exogenous factors, while also pointing out the ways in which their causal significance was enhanced in the context of Muhasasa.   a. The Intractability of the Muhasasa System   The last two decades have shown Muhasasa to be a poor system of government in Iraq, and yet its very frailty became a lifeline during Thawrat Tishreen. The system of factional bargaining and internal division is rooted in an elite pact model whereby disparate, mutually antagonistic elites representing distinct sectarian groups share an interest in the continuation of the system of rule, even if they are perpetually in competition over how the spoils of government are allocated. [31]  As a result, the resignation of individual politicians does not precipitate systemic change because, unlike the (temporarily) successful 2010-11 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, there is no Ben Ali or Mubarak to remove and replace with a democratically elected executive. [32]  In short, there is no king whose head the revolutionaries can cut off. Furthermore, Muhasasa’s system of power sharing means that any attempts to bring about meaningful reform are likely to be interpreted by some political actors in sectarian terms, which risks the outbreak of violence and, in the worst case, civil war. Non-state armed groups are another source of its durability; they pressure the state to do their bidding, advance the interests of foreign powers, coordinate illicit economic activity, and intimidate, abduct, and assassinate opponents. [33]  To provide a visual analogy, Muhasasa operates like a chain of people holding hands in a circle, leaning back away from one another. It is hard for the ring to move in any single direction, but also nearly impossible for one hand in the chain to pull away without being pulled back into the fold or precipitating total collapse.   Strong financial incentives exist for the continuation of the Muhasasa system. [34]  Competition over state resources, primarily derived through oil rents, has defined post-2003 Iraqi politics from the beginning. [35]  Indeed, between 2005 and 2018 the government payroll expanded from $3.8 billion to nearly $36 billion. [36]  Although corruption is very difficult to measure, through confidential interviews with high ranking members of the Iraqi political elite Dodge has estimated that around 25% of government resources are lost through contractual fraud. [37]  Non-state armed groups and affiliated political parties benefit directly from access to these resources, but also use their elevated position to extract tolls at checkpoints and attract foreign patronage, mainly from Iran. As Majed forcefully argues, Muhasasa is intimately bound together with a system of political economy of corruption by design. [38]  Factions have consciously fought ‘over’ the state with this system in mind. As one PMF affiliate, Mohammad al-Basri, put it: ‘Do they really think that we would hand over a state, an economy, one that we have built over 15 years? That they can just casually come and take it? Impossible! This is a state that was built with blood’. [39]  Ultimately, the nature of the political system, financial incentives for its perpetuation, and a perception by groups of having ‘won’ control over portions of the state make the Muhasasa system extremely difficult to reform.   b. Deficiencies in the Organisation of the Protests   The organisational structure of the Thawrat Tishreen protests weakened the movement, but primarily because of the correspondent form of its target, the Muhasasa system. As a result of the targeting of opposition figures by non-state armed groups, as well as the protesters’ rejection of mainstream politics, the protests were largely leaderless, preventing them from offering clear alternatives to the political elite. [40]  Much like the first wave of the Arab Uprisings, the protestors demanded that the political class reform itself. Unlike the 2010-11 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt where protestors had a single, unified state to rally against, the internal fragmentation of Iraqi institutions into siloed sectarian groupings made it more difficult to effect change. Furthermore, at the 2021 elections Tishreen activists failed to set up political parties that could attract widespread support. Scholars have noted that revolutionary movements in democracies often face this obstacle because they arise from diverse, negative coalitions. [41]  The non-hierarchical organisation of Thawrat Tishreen is a case in point.   It must be noted, however, that non-hierarchical, negative coalitions have succeeded in regime change elsewhere, with the uprisings of 2010-11 being the most obvious example. [42]  With this in mind, Thawrat Tishreen’s organisational patterns must be understood as deficient primarily in relation to the system they were targeting. First, the demand that the Iraqi political elite reform itself was precluded by the strong incentives for elite collusion. Second, no alternative ‘pacted-transition’ option existed; in Grewal’s comparison of the 2018-19 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, he suggests that the opposition in Sudan (temporarily) succeeded because an organised civil society arranged a transitional pact with the regime under the aegis of the Sudanese Professionals’ Association. [43]  In contrast, the target system of oppression in Iraq is diffuse and hard to pin down, which makes a packed transition impossible.   c. Exogenous Factors: Political Contingency, Foreign Interference, and COVID-19   Prevailing narratives often suggest that Thawrat Tishreen was brought down by exogenous factors such as Iranian influence, the political machinations of Muqtada al-Sadr, the assassination of Qasem Souleimani by the USA, or the COVID-19 pandemic. While all of these factors were relevant, they—like the organisational form of the protests—acquired causal significance primarily by affecting the operation of the Muhasasa system.   Iraq is so vulnerable to foreign interference to a large degree as a result of the Muhasasa system. Indeed, this is partially by design. The Coalition Provisional Authority approved the system of sectarian power sharing proposed by Iraqi Shi'i exiles in the 1990s because the US envisioned future influence being channelled through these structures. The actual result has been the massive expansion of Iranian influence in Iraqi politics. For example, Iran controls several political parties and non-state armed groups to a considerable degree, using them to assault Tishreen protestors and as part of its ‘Axis of Resistance’ against American forces. Despite its often radical rhetoric, Iran should be understood as a counterrevolutionary actor, especially in Iraq where Tishreen reforms threatened its interests. [44]  Partially as a result of Iranian penetration of Muhasasa, respect for Iraqi sovereignty by external powers like the USA or Türkiye is lower than for most states in the world—hence the Trump administration’s decision to conduct a drone strike on an Iranian government official, Qasem Souleimani, and Iraqi citizen Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on 3 January 2020 without any prior Iraqi authorisation. The effect of these attacks was to rally many Iraqis against America, taking some of the pressure off Iran.   Another direct result of the assassinations was the split between the Sadrists and the Tishreen movement. [45]  Muqtada al-Sadr leads a broad-based political movement in Iraq that emphasises Shi'i Islamism as well as social justice. From around 2015, Sadr became increasingly willing to ally himself with secularist protest movements and supported the Tishreen protests in autumn 2019. After Tishreen organisers refused to join Sadr’s 24 January anti-American protests, however, the powerful cleric withdrew his support for the movement and directed his ‘Blue Helmets’ to join the attacks on protestors. With the PMF leader Mahdi al-Muhandis assassinated, Sadr saw an opportunity to bolster his leadership credentials among the various anti-Tishreen Shi'i groups that compose the PMF. [46]  The Sadrist reversal had far-reaching effects—many of the millions of Sadrists who had protested as part of Thawrat Tishreen were now violently attacking its protesters—but it did not kill the revolution by itself. Instead, it must be recognised that the decision of one faction to change sides could only have been so pivotal in the context of, first, a political system as convoluted as Muhasasa and, second, a decentralised, non-hierarchical, negative coalition like the Tishreen movement. [47]  Foreign interference and political machinations played such a significant role primarily because of their interaction with the highly intractable Muhasasa system. By the time Iraq introduced COVID-19 response measures in March 2020, the durability of Muhasasa had broken down the bulk of Thawrat Tishreen’s support. [48]   4. Conclusion   I would like to end by restating my two main contentions: (1) Thawrat Tishreen achieved certain important political successes but ought overall to be considered a failure; and (2) the movement failed primarily because of the intractability of the Muhasasa system. Although other factors, including the character of protest mobilisation, foreign intervention, the political machinations of the Sadrists, and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role, the decentralised and entrenched Muhasasa system endowed causal agency to these factors, which would otherwise have been less important. It must be noted that the full effects of Thawrat Tishreen remain to be seen. As Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein, post-civil war political trajectory continues to unfold, time will tell whether the foundations laid down by Thawrat Tishreen prove central to future attempts at establishing a more just and robust system of government in Iraq. Asa Breuss-Burgess Asa Breuss-Burgess is a researcher, writer, and geopolitical risk analyst based in London. His work focuses on the intersection energy, climate change, and power politics in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. He holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and Politics from the University of Oxford.  I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Killian Clarke for his guidance and support throughout my research. In addition, I am immensely grateful for the counsel and inspiration of Yehya Abuzaid, Haley Bobseine, Dr Aaron Faust, Mustafa Afif Abdulazeez al-Nuwab, Dr Angeline Turner, and Dr Joseph Yackley. Of course, all opinions expressed in this piece, and the mistakes therein, are entirely my own. [1]  For successful cases that used similar methods to Iraq, see Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works   : The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press 2011). [2]  Leonid Issaev and Andrey Korotaev (eds), New Wave of Revolutions in the MENA Region   : A Comparative Perspective  (Springer 2022). [3]  The remaining 4% identify with various other minorities, including Christians, Yazidis, Assyrians, and Turkmen. Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Iraq’ in The World Factbook 2021 (Central Intelligence Agency 2021). [4]  Toby Dodge, ’The Failure of Peacebuilding in Iraq: The Role of Consociationalism and Political Settlements’ (2020) 15(4) Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 460. [5]  ibid 459-75. [6]  The World Bank , ‘The World Bank in Iraq’ ( The World Bank , 1 June 2022) accessed 16 June 2025. [7]  Hafsa Halawa, Iraq’s Tishreen Movement: A Decade of Protests and Mobilisation, (Istituto Affari Internazionali 2022) 7. [8] Maria Fantappie, ‘Widespread Protests Point to Iraq’s Cycle of Social Crisis’ ( International Crisis Group , 10 October 2019) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/widespread-protests-point-iraqs-cycle-social-crisis > accessed 16 June 2025. [9] Turnout reached a low point of 10% in Basra at the 2018 election. Renad Mansour, ‘Why Iraq’s Elections Were an Indictment of the Elite’ ( World Politics Review , 18 May 2018) < https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/why-iraq-s-elections-were-an-indictment-of-the-elite/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [10] Halawa (n 7) 7. For the inherent unpredictability of a revolutionary episode, see Charles Kurzman, ‘Can Understanding Undermine Explanation? The Confused Experience of Revolution’ (2004) 34(3) Philosophy of the Social Sciences 328-51. [11]  Chantal Berman, Killian Clarke, and Rima Majed, ‘Theorizing Revolution in Democracies: Evidence from the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq’ (2023) 15 < https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2023/359-8 > accessed 16 June 2025. [12] Arwa Ibrahim, ‘Muhasasa, the political system reviled by Iraqi protesters’ ( Al Jazeera , 4 December 2019) < https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/4/muhasasa-the-political-system-reviled-by-iraqi-protesters > accessed 16 June 2025. [13] Haitham Numan, ‘The Multimodal Framing Demands by Protesters’ Signs in Social Media: Meaning and Sources of Visual and Textual Messages: The Case of Iraq’ (2022) 15(3-4) Contemporary Arab Affairs 19. [14] Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press 2017) 153. [15] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 9. [16] Fanar Haddad, ‘Perpetual Protest and the Failure of the Post-2003 Iraqi State’ ( MERIP , 22 March 2023) < https://merip.org/2023/03/perpetual-protest-and-the-failure-of-the-post-2003-iraqi-state/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [17] Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press 2013) 129-150; Rima Majed, ‘“Sectarian Neoliberalism” and the 2019 Uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq’ in Jeffrey G Karam and Rima Majed (eds), The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution  (Bloomsbury 2022) 85. [18] UNAMI and OHCHR, ‘Human Rights Violations and Abuses in the Context of Demonstrations in Iraq October 2019 to April 2020’ (August 2020) < https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/human-rights-violations-and-abuses-context-demonstrations-iraq-october-2019-april-2020 > accessed 16 June 2025. [19] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 16. [20] Chenoweth and Stephan (n 1) 14. [21] Higel, for example, significantly downplays the achievements of the movement in Lahib Higel, ‘On Third Try, a New Government for Iraq’ ( International Crisis Group , 8 May 2020) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/third-try-new-government-iraq > accessed 16 June 2025. [22] Andrey Mardasov, ‘Revolutionary Protests in Iraq in  the  Context of Iranian-American Confrontation’ in Issaev and Korotaev (n 2) 95. [23]  Haddad (n 16).  [24] Renad Mansour and Benedict Robin-D’Cruz, ‘The Basra Blueprint and the Future of Protest in Iraq’ ( Chatham House Blog , 8 October 2019)   19 < https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/10/basra-blueprint-and-future-protest-iraq > accessed 16 June 2025. [25]  Raad Alkadiri, ‘Can Mustafa Kadhimi, the Latest Compromise Candidate, Repair Iraq’s Broken System?’ ( LSE Blogs , 21 April 2020) < https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/04/21/can-mustafa-kadhimi-the-latest-compromise-candidate-repair-iraqs-broken-system/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [26] Lahib Higel, ‘Iraq’s Surprise Election Results’ ( International Crisis Group , 16 November 2021) < https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/iraq/iraqs-surprise-election-results > accessed 16 June 2025. [27] Arab Barometer, ‘Arab Barometer VI: Iraq Country Support’ (2021) 6 < https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/Iraq-Arab-Barometer-Public-Opinion-2021-ENG.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [28] ibid 10. [29] Arab Barometer. ‘Democracy in the Middle East & North Africa’ (2022) 4-9 < https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/ABVII_Governance_Report-EN-1.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [30] Arab Barometer (n 27) 9. [31]  Haddad (n 16).  [32] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 6. [33] UNAMI & OHCHR (n 18) 27-36. [34] Haddad (n 16).  [35] Zahra Ali, ‘Theorising Uprisings: Iraq’s Thawrat Teshreen’ (2023) Third World Quarterly   1–16.  [36] Dodge (n 4) 469. [37] Toby Dodge, ’Iraq’s Informal Consociationalism and Its Problems’ (2020) 20 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 148. [38] Majed (n 17) 76; Ali (n 35) 4. [39] Quoted in Fanar Haddad, ‘Iraq protests: There is no going back to the status quo ante’ ( Middle East Eye , 6 November 2019) < https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/iraq-protests-there-no-going-back-status-quo-ante > accessed 16 June 2025. [40] Majed (n 17) 83-4. [41] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 2. [42] Chenoweth and Stephan (n 1);   Bayat (n 14). [43]  Sharan Grewal, ‘Why Sudan Succeeded Where Algeria Failed’ (2021) 32(5) Journal of Democracy 102. [44] Danny Postel, ‘The Other Regional Counter-Revolution: Iran’s Role in the Shifting Political Landscape of the Middle East’ ( New Politics , 7 July 2021) < https://newpol.org/the-other-regional-counter-revolution-irans-role-in-the-shifting-political-landscape-of-the-middle-east/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [45] Mansour and Robin-D’Cruz (n 24) 6. [46] Benedict Robin-D’Cruz & Renad Mansour, ‘Making Sense of the Sadrists: Fragmentation and Unstable Politics’ ( Foreign Policy Research Institute , March 2020) < https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/iraq-chapter-1.pdf > accessed 16 June 2025. [47] Don Jacobson, ‘Millions rally in Iraq to demand removal of U.S. military forces’ ( United Press International , 24 January 2020) < https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/01/24/Millions-rally-in-Iraq-to-demand-removal-of-US-military-forces/7411579868399/ > accessed 16 June 2025. [48] Berman, Clarke, and Majed (n 11) 10.

Introduction   Arendt’s account of modernity and The Human Condition  (1958)[1]   Opening the final section of The Human Condition  (1958), ‘The  vita activa  and the modern age’, Hannah Arendt references a quote by Franz Kafka:   He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition.[2]   With the advent of space flight, humankind had decisively located Archimedes’ point—the hypothetical vantage point from which one can view the entire Earth, and perhaps even move it. For Arendt, this event marked the continuation of a centuries-long trend, beginning with Galileo’s invention of the telescope, whereby scientific and technological progress alienated humanity from its natural, earthbound existence. In this essay, I will explore two dimensions of Arendt’s opposition to the Space Race: firstly, the Space Race as antithetical to humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, as embodied by her concept of ‘earth alienation’; and, secondly, the Space Race as symbolic of a rejection of human political existence, this being exemplified by the civic republicanism of Arendt’s ideal polity. Taken together, Arendt’s writings on space illuminate her broader theory of the relationship between technology and modernity, for the space race ultimately serves as a metaphor for the technicalisation of modern life, which alienates human beings from the essential realities of the world. Her utopian vision of the modern American republic acts as an antidote to these ills.   This discussion must be located within Arendt’s account of modernity and the basic conditions and activities of human life, as outlined in The Human Condition . For the purposes of this essay, two of Arendt’s   basic conditions of human existence are of particular importance. The first of these, the condition of ‘plurality’, is at the core of her critique of the Western tradition of political thought since Plato. In opposition to the tendency of political philosophers to fetishise the lone individual, she presents plurality: the fact that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.[3] Human plurality is the foundational condition of political life, because politics necessarily takes place in the spaces and interactions between people.[4] The second condition, that of ‘natality’, is ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’.[5] If all politics requires plurality, political action is made possible by natality, which reflects the human capacity to take initiative and begin anew, the wellspring of all political acts.   These conditions, plurality and natality, have a close and co-constitutive relationship with the three basic activities of active human life, or the vita activa , which Arendt contrasts with the vita contemplativa , the life of contemplation. She identifies these activities   as follows. Firstly, the activity of labour , the natural, cyclical activities undertaken by animal laborans  (man as a labouring animal) to meet physical and biological needs, for instance by farming crops for consumption. Secondly, the activity of work , those ‘higher’ forms of production through which homo faber  (man the maker) creates the objects that together comprise the stable, enduring world of human ‘artifice’. Finally, the activity of action , ‘the political activity par excellence’, those activities performed in the public realm, with deliberate intent and in concert with others.[6]   Arendt does not put forth a political programme in The Human Condition . It was neither intended to present an exhaustive list of the activities undertaken by human beings, nor to make claims about human nature  as such. This reflects Arendt’s view that the activities and conditions of human life are not immutable—in fact, technological developments have the potential to fundamentally disrupt them. She gives the example of future scientific advancements enabling the artificial creation of human life, thereby disrupting the condition of natality, the emergence of life itself.[7]  The Human   Condition  traces the development of the human condition and its associated activities through the lens of modernity.   Arendt’s account of modernity is structured around four key features: world alienation, earth alienation, the rise of the social, and the victory of animal laborans . These features reflect two stages in the development of the modern age. The first, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, ‘corresponds to world alienation and the rise of the social’; the second, from the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘corresponds to earth alienation and the victory of animal laborans ’.[8] While ‘world alienation’ and ‘the rise of the social’ are   also linked to Arendt’s account of the Space Race, this essay will foreground its connection to ‘earth alienation’ and ‘the triumph of animal laborans ’, as the two features of modernity which correspond   to the advent of the twentieth century, and which—in contrasting ways—embody the phenomenon of the Space Race.   Philosophical context   Arendt’s understanding of alienation has its origins in the thought of Martin Heidegger, with whom she critically reengaged throughout the 1950s. Although this essay will not explore his philosophical doctrine in detail, two foundational concepts are of critical importance for understanding Arendt’s analysis of the Space Race: alienation and disclosure. Alienation refers to Heidegger’s belief that formal or technical modes of thought, as found in scientific and technical disciplines, estrange human beings from the object they seek to understand.[9] This prevents them from knowing ‘Being’, understood as the unknowable source that emanates from all beings, including human beings. Conversely, disclosure refers to Heidegger’s belief that humans can only know Being when they stop attempting to force knowledge of it through formal and technical means.[10] Only then will Being ‘disclose’ itself to them.   Arendt’s interpretation of alienation is particularly relevant to Part 1 of this essay; her reworking of Heidegger’s theory of disclosure is central to Part 2. This reflects the fact that many political and historical phenomena, including the Space Race, can become allegories for alienation and disclosure. Within this framework, Part 1 will analyse the Space Race as a rebellion against humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, with particular reference to the concepts of earth alienation and the triumph of animal laborans .   The Space Race as a rebellion against humanity’s natural, earthbound existence   Situating the Space Race   Earth alienation refers to humanity’s attempts to escape from the ‘shackles of earth-bound experience’, as demonstrated by the drive towards the conquest and exploration of space.[11] Given that the Earth ‘is the very quintessence of the human condition’, it is perhaps unsurprising that in the prologue to The Human Condition , Arendt calls the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, an event ‘second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom’.[12] Yet her account of the relationship between the Space Race and earth alienation must be situated within her thought on science and technology.   In the cultural discourse of France, West Germany, and the United States—the countries in which Arendt ‘spent significant amounts of time during the 1950s’[13]—the thorny problem of technology, and humanity’s ability to control its growing technological powers, was a recurring theme. In Einfü̈hrung in die Metaphysik  (1953), the published version of lectures given in 1935, Heidegger praises National Socialism for staging an ‘encounter between global technology and modern humanity’.[14] He analogises the USA and USSR to technology, and Germany to modern humanity. Although Arendt departs, of course, from her mentor’s invidious comparison between the United States and Germany, she shares his concern with technology ‘as a feature of modernity’,[15] as do many other twentieth century theorists with whom she is critically engaged, including Max Weber and Karl Jaspers.   Arendt’s concern with the Space Race as earth alienation therefore reflects a broader problem with which she, with Heidegger, was consistently preoccupied: the ‘technicalisation’ of modern life. This term refers to the ‘growing artificiality’, driven by technological development, which was replacing humanity’s natural environs with man-made artifice.[16] In the twentieth century, existing debates about technicalisation were revived by key developments of modernity:[17] automation,[18] space flight, and nuclear fission, with its potential to provide a limitless energy source or ‘destroy all organic life on earth’.[19] In the post-war era of ‘Big Science’, with vast amounts of government funding funnelled into scientific research, a sense of technological possibility abounded.[20] However, this sense of possibility was both utopian and dystopian, as reflected in the contrasting cases of astrofuturism and Arendt’s thought on technology.   Astrofuturism: A contrast case   Astrofuturism, a genre of science fiction writing and expression of utopian dreaming, developed in American intellectual and popular culture after World War II, although its historical roots lie in nineteenth-century imperialism and the myth of the colonial ‘frontier’.[21] Its central preoccupation is with ‘an escape from terrestrial history’ by eschewing humanity’s earthly limitations for the final frontier of space.[22] As with the Space Race and the atomic age, there exists a tension between war and peace in astrofuturism, which encompasses visions of American space colonisation—evident in the militaristic fantasies of authors like Robert Heinlein—as well as the ‘utopian, socialist hopes’ of contemporary astrofuturists like Kim Stanley Robinson.[23] Central to all astrofuturism, however, is the ideology of ‘techno-utopianism’: the belief that technological progress is both imminent and a potential cure for social, political, and economic ills on Earth.[24] As Imre Szeman notes, techno-utopian discourse is ‘employed by government officials, environmentalists, and scientists from across the political spectrum’, as well as by astrofuturists.[25]   Astrofuturism and techno-utopianism significantly influenced, and were influenced by, the Space Race. Their utopian vision thus offers a useful context and contrast case for Arendt’s more dystopian thought on science and technology. Space, for Arendt, is far from an astrofuturistic ‘site of renewal’.[26] While she does not believe a reversal of existing technology is possible or desirable,[27] her writings, from The Origins of Totalitarianism  (1951) to The Human Condition  (1958) to ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (1963), reflect two major concerns about modern technology: firstly, that humanity’s lack of control over its rapidly developing technological powers may spell catastrophe, and secondly, that, in the modern age, the natural is gradually being subordinated to the artificial and technical, facilitating the rise of consumer society.[28]   The Space Race as earth alienation   Arendt understands the Space Race as the culmination of a deeply rooted tendency within modern scientific and technical knowledge. This view is also reflected in her treatment of nuclear power, which supports her diagnosis of the alienating consequences of modern technology. As Brent Ryan Bellamy writes, in contrast to the techno-utopian discourse surrounding space flight and nuclear energy, the militarisation of both phenomena with the development of atomic bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) returned ‘terror … to the technological object’.[29] Arendt’s worries, however, are ontologically oriented. She is less concerned by the destructive power of nuclear technology than by its tendency to divorce ‘technical capability from social understanding’.[30] The inability of the general public to understand nuclear technology makes ‘conscious’, informed decisions about its use difficult, if not impossible.[31] For Arendt, this is an example of what happens when technical knowledge is divorced from ordinary speaking and thinking.   Arendt’s second concern, relating to the triumph of the ‘artificial’ and the technicalisation of modernity, is embodied by the Space Race as the pinnacle of earth alienation. She traces the origins of earth alienation to Galileo’s invention of the telescope in 1609, which first alienated ‘man from his immediate earthly surroundings’.[32] With Galileo’s discovery of the Archimedean point, human beings, now capable of imagining themselves at a vast distance from Earth (see fig 1), began to feel that they were ‘terrestrial not by nature’ but only by chance.[33] To leave Earth behind seemed fitting of their true nature as ‘universal beings’.[34] This is the phenomenon of earth alienation. Fig 1. Archimedes’ lever (unknown, Mechanics Magazine 1824). Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 8 June 2021. The crucial result of the discovery of the Archimedean point, then, was a rebellion against aspects of the human condition which were previously ‘earthbound and subject to contingency’.[35] This event marked the beginning of earth alienation and, in fuelling the corresponding development of the natural sciences and astrophysics, led to the technological advances which, many centuries later, gave birth to nuclear fission and the Space Race. The Space Race both embodies and facilitates earth alienation, and its use of technology to escape Earth is symbolic of the triumph of the ‘artificial’ over the ‘natural’. For Arendt, this is evident in the creation of ‘new heavenly bodies’ in the form of satellites like Sputnik I[36] and in the astrofuturist dream of space colonisation. The central figure in Arendt’s analysis is, of course, the astronaut. As she writes in ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’, which was published after the departure of USSR probes to the Moon in 1959, and the launch of the first American satellite in 1962:   The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man—the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropocentric considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.[37]   Here it is appropriate that Arendt should treat the astronaut as a ‘symbol’. Lying behind her portrait of a man cut-off from the world by man-made instruments, we catch a glimpse of Heidegger’s metaphysical account of how technical knowledge alienates man from ‘Being’. Arendt’s critique of the Space Race, particularly as it relates to the supremacy of technical language and instruments over the natural world and ordinary language (as in the above passage), can be viewed as an allegory for Heidegger’s concepts of Being and alienation, as outlined in the introduction to this essay. The Space Race, as the embodiment of earth alienation, is the highest form of Heideggerian alienation. Earth itself is a symbol of Being, while the artificial technologies of the Space Race and the atomic age are symbols of the alienation of knowledge from Being—and, ultimately, of humanity’s disconnect from the primal reality of the world, for this is how Arendt conceptualises ‘Being’.[38]   As the logical outcome of earth alienation, Arendt’s Space Race marks a key event in the technicalisation of modernity: the gradual replacement of humanity’s natural surroundings with the man-made and the artificial. Crucially, for Arendt, technicalisation is not inherently undesirable.[39] Human artifice has ‘strongly positive connotations’ for her, as the reflection of homo faber ’s capacity for invention and in the classical tradition, which equates human artifice with civilisation.[40] The great danger of technicalisation, however, is that it accelerates existing patterns of consumption . The logical result of this acceleration is that society will eventually be subsumed by ‘an enormously intensified life process’—an infinite process of production and consumption—until a ‘true consumers’ society’ dominates.[41]   As a result of her deep commitment to the idea that human beings are tethered to the Being from which they devolve, Arendt views the conditions of human existence as fundamentally worldly , where the world acts as a proxy for the notion of Being. It is for this reason that Arendt argues that the colonisation of space would pose ‘the most radical change’ imaginable to the human condition.[42] As the embodiment of earth alienation, the Space Race represents, for Arendt, a rejection of humanity’s natural , earthbound  existence—understood as humanity’s attachment to Being—and thus a rejection of the capacity of the human being to be at home in the world. This is the fundamental thought that lies behind her idea that the Space Race symbolises the triumph of the artificial over the natural, which is itself characteristic of the technicalisation of modernity and the rise of consumer society.   The Space Race as the triumph of animal laborans   At the same time, however, Arendt also puts forth a differing conception of the ‘natural-artificial’ dichotomy as it relates to modernity, and here the Space Race plays a different role. In this account, modernity ‘has brought us too close to nature … by elevating labor … to the highest point within the vita activa ’.[43] Labour is the most natural of human activities because it exists to fulfil our base biological needs. Its rise over work and action is the phenomenon which Arendt labels ‘the triumph of animal laborans ’, the second defining feature of modernity since the twentieth century. Her account of the relationship between labour, nature, and modernity must be understood in relation to her history of modern science, as outlined in ‘The vita activa  and the modern age’, the final section of The Human Condition .   Here, Arendt posits a relationship between ‘science, secularization and the emergence of modern politics’.[44] She argues that, from the sixteenth century onward, the development of the natural sciences supported secularisation by undermining popular faith in the divine. Secularism and the precepts of the natural sciences became the foundation of modern politics and philosophies of history. She finds evidence of this in Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, which justifies ‘experimental interventions’ into society guided by natural laws.[45] Crucially, it is also demonstrated by the victory of labour, the only activity within the vita activa  which is driven by an eternal, cyclical ‘process’ much like the processes of the natural sciences.[46]   This account of secularisation and modernisation is pessimistic, a fact exemplified by Arendt’s treatment of the Space Race. In this alternative account of modernity, the Space Race represents a rejection not of humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, but of human consciousness  as it currently exists. From the distance of the   Archimedean point, all human activity resembles a ‘large-scale biological process’, akin to watching the operations of an ant colony from a great height, rather than the result of deliberate human and cultural innovation.[47] With the publication of Earthrise  in 1968, a decade after Arendt’s publication of The Human Condition , the Archimedean point became image (see fig 2). This reduction of human life to a process signals the triumph of labour, that eternal biological process, over work and action. Fig 2. Earthrise (William Anders 1968). National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC, USA. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 8 June 2021. Arendt finds two repercussions following from this account of labour and the Space Race highly concerning. The first of these is that a species of labourers, as humanity will become, lacks the judgment necessary to control its growing technological powers. Her second concern—that the transcendental nature of space travel might disrupt the human psyche—filtered into the popular culture of the era. In his short story ‘The Dead Astronaut’, JG Ballard writes of relic hunters who collect the mummified corpses of astronauts killed in orbit, treasuring the remains like ‘the saintly bones of medieval shrines’.[48] Yet the remains of a NASA astronaut turn out to be radioactive—he ‘was carrying an atomic weapon!’[49] Ballard’s tale of cursed bones echoes premodern superstitions about the ‘reckless handling of sacred objects’, rewritten for the space age.[50] It is possible to imagine an Arendtian reading of Ballard’s dead astronauts, cut off from life by their instrumental cocoons, but Ballard’s gore seems to owe more to Mary Shelley than Martin Heidegger.   Other writers of the period rejected Arendt and Ballard’s pessimism. Although not explicitly, these writers are often ‘thinking with Arendt against Arendt’.[51] They deploy her categories of natality and plurality—the miracle of life and plural human existence—to argue that in (temporarily) leaving Earth behind, human beings’ connection to their home and one another is strengthened, rather than disrupted. The publication of Earthrise (see fig 2) energised these responses, as captured by a line from Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Riders on the Earth’ (1968):   To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.[52]   Ambiguities in Arendt’s account of modernity   Ultimately, Arendt reconciles her contrasting accounts of modernity by labelling them a paradox: the triumph of animal laborans  over homo faber  and zoon politikon  (the political animal) has transformed   human beings into ‘human animals unconscious of their capacities and responsibilities’.[53] Such a species is ill suited to exercise the ‘earth-threatening powers’ bestowed upon it by technological development and earth alienation.[54] Nevertheless, Arendt’s assessment of modernity, the role of ‘nature’ within it, and the relationship of the Space Race to the ‘artificial/natural’ dichotomy retains a fundamental ambiguity. The modern era is both ‘too natural and too artificial’[55]—not only in a paradoxical sense, but in a manner which obscures the boundaries of the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘artifice’ themselves.   Arendt’s concern with the Space Race also contains a strongly normative element. The Space Race is anathema to her ideal of human political existence. This is because action, particularly action as a spatially grounded phenomenon , is integral to Arendt’s conception of ‘the good life’. In The Human Condition , she does not explicitly link the Space Race to her account of action and the public realm. As such, while Part 1 of this essay was drawn directly from Arendt’s writings on the Space Race and modernity, Part 2 is my own interpretation, and aims to elucidate the full implications of the Space Race for Arendt’s ideal of human political existence. It might thereby contribute to existing bodies of literature examining her writings on technology and modern politics.[56]   The Space Race as antithetical to Arendt’s ideal of human political  existence   Action and the public realm in Arendt’s ideal polity   Kei Hiruta rejects the common narrative that Arendt is an anti-utopian thinker.[57] Arendt belongs to a group of émigré intellectuals and liberal critics of totalitarianism, including Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon, and Karl Popper, who argue that the utopian impulse is inherently totalitarian because the utopian ‘blueprint’ demands the punishment or eradication of all that fails to meet its impossible standards.[58] While Arendt certainly rejects the blueprint narrative of the classical utopian tradition, Hiruta argues that her writings display another kind of utopian dreaming, which consists of ‘an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities’.[59] For Arendt, this ideal polity is the modern American republic, reimagined in the civic republican tradition of thinkers from the ancient Greeks to Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville. America’s primary appeal is that it enables its citizens to live ‘the good life’ in Arendt’s understanding of the term, within which public political participation is central.   Politics, in this account, is the process of active civic engagement in the public realm. The public realm is the site where many unique individuals meet and act together to begin things anew, thus reflecting the conditions of plurality and natality. Action in the public realm symbolises hope and possibility. This is why the meaning of action, for Arendt, is exemplified by moments of revolution—she often references the American Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—where the enactment of something new lays the foundation for the attainment of greater freedom. However, freedom, in Arendt’s account, is not freedom of choice in the liberal tradition. It is the capacity to do something new or unexpected, thereby actualising the condition of natality, the miracle of life itself.[60]   Action is not without its drawbacks, and The Human Condition  should not be read as a treatise on its assets relative to labour and work. Just as Max Weber draws attention to the irreversible and unintended consequences which result from political action, Arendt notes that action is ‘boundless’ and ‘unpredictable’.[61] Nevertheless, the public realm is of profound importance to Arendt because of the benefits which accrue to the individual, political life, and to human civilisation, from human beings acting together in the public realm. For the individual, action in the public realm is a crucial means of disclosing one’s identity—that which makes a person ‘who’ they are.[62] For political life, action is essential: it is the means by which human beings constitute political communities, develop a sense of political agency, and form opinions and judgements in concert with the diverse perspectives of their peers.[63] For human civilisation, the public realm enables the remembrance of great deeds, words, and individuals long gone, and it functions as the ‘locus of a civilisation that transcends generations’.[64]   Some of the themes implicit in these benefits—the ability of the individual to shape politics through action, the centrality of political agency, and the importance of remembrance—should be understood in light of twentieth-century experiences of war and persecution. These led to a revival of ‘anti-materialist, epic and tragic values’ in many émigré intellectuals, including Arendt.[65]   Yet the most important characteristic of the public realm, for Arendt, is that only in the public realm can reality disclose itself . As Margaret Canovan notes, the critical importance of the disclosure of reality to Arendt must be situated within two contexts.[66] The first of these is The Origins of Totalitarianism , where Arendt highlights an open public realm as a necessary site of resistance to the ‘ideological fictions’ of totalitarian regimes.[67] The second is her intellectual engagement with Heidegger, who claims that Being is disclosed in those spaces that people create together, when individuals stop thinking about Being using formal and technical instruments. The difference between humans and animals lies in this ‘unique human capacity for experiencing reality in its fullness’.[68] Arendt’s theory of action, then, should be read as an allegory for the suspension of formal thought that allows Being to disclose itself to humans. With this allegory, Arendt de-alienates humans from the world and one another. In her account of action as it relates to politics, then, politics is a de-alienated ‘relatedness to others’, to oneself, and to Earth.[69]   Specific to Arendt’s account of disclosure is her new definition of the ‘space’ in which reality discloses itself. Heidegger was uninterested in participatory politics, but for Arendt the space of disclosure is the public realm, formed by the discourse and action of plural human beings. In other words, reality can only be disclosed in a free and open political realm—‘the opposite of the regime to which Heidegger gave his support’.[70] In her chapter on ‘Action’ in The Human Condition , Arendt focuses on the transformative importance   of disclosure to the individual. Their own reality, identity, and sense of self as a unique individual, in contrast to the homogeneity of animal laborans , can only be affirmed through interactions with their fellows in the public realm.[71] Without this, human beings are ‘deprived of things essential to a truly human life’.[72] Seen in this light, in treating political action as the condition of self- and world-disclosure, Arendt locates participatory politics as the great antidote to the technological alienation of human beings from the world that she allegorises to the Space Race. The Space Race should be viewed as antithetical to Arendt’s ideal polity because its technological basis threatens to disrupt the existence of the public realm, and thus the disclosure of reality.   The Space Race as antithetical to the public realm   In the space age of the 1950s-1960s, informed by a sense of technological possibility and such discourses as astrofuturism, humanity’s colonisation of space was viable, even imminent. As late as 1974, the front page of The New York Times declared ‘Proposal for Human Colonies in Space is Hailed by Scientists as Feasible Now’.[73] Within this context, the Space Race disrupts the existence of a different kind of space to the space of Being, namely the physical space of the public realm. The public realm has two core features: the ‘space of appearance’ and the existence of a ‘common world’. The polis , or space of appearance, is not a physical location but a space for   action which is created and re-created by the interactions between individuals. The polis  requires, however, a physical foundation from which this space of appearance can emerge: a ‘common world’, involving physical and temporal proximity between people and their shared world of artifice.[74] People must meet with one another, in physical spaces and institutions, to hear one another’s opinions, discuss and debate political issues, and act in concert to achieve political goals. Spatiality is central to the ‘common world’, and thus also to the public realm, to Arendt’s conception of citizenship, and to her ideal of political life. The Space Race, therefore, is antithetical to Arendt’s ideal of humanity’s political existence—antithetical to her utopia, although she would not have termed it as such.   Conclusion   This essay has explored two dimensions of Hannah Arendt’s critical writings on the Space Race: firstly, the Space Race as a rejection of humanity’s natural, earthbound existence, as embodied by the concept of ‘earth alienation’; and, secondly, that the Space Race is antithetical to her ideal polity—as exemplified by the modern American republic—because it serves as an allegory for the technological disruption of the public realm and the disclosure of reality. The Archimedean point, located by the astronauts of the Cold War Space Race, threatened to alienate human beings from the reality of Being, the Earth, and one another—a dystopian prospect indeed. Clare Francis   Clare Francis graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in summer 2020, where she placed first in Human, Social, and Political Sciences (HSPS). She was Co-President of Trinity Politics Society and wrote for and edited the Cambridge Globalist . She intends to work in foreign affairs. [1] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition  (first published 1958, University of Chicago Press 1998). [2] ibid 248. [3] ibid 8. [4] ibid 176. [5] ibid 9. [6] ibid 7-8. [7] ibid 268-9. [8] Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, ‘Hannah Arendt’ in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy  (Fall edn, 2019). [9] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time  (John Macquarie and Edward Robinson trs, SCM Press 1962) 91-107. [10] ibid 256-9. [11] Arendt (n 1) 265-7. [12] ibid 1-2. [13] Waseem Yaqoob, ‘The Archimedean point: Science and technology in the thought of Hannah Arendt, 1951-1963’ (2014) 44(3) Journal of European Studies 199, 204. [14] ibid 204. [15] ibid. [16] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [17] Benjamin Lazier, ‘Earthrise, or the Globalization of the World Picture’ (2011) 116(3) American Historical Review 602, 604. [18] Brian Simbirski, ‘Cybernetic Muse: Hannah Arendt on Automation, 1951-1958’ (2016) 77(4) Journal of the History of Ideas 589, 590. [19] Arendt (n 1) 148-50. [20] Malisa Kurtz, ‘Utopia…: Science Fiction in the 1950s and 1960s’ in Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (eds), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction  (Cambridge University Press 2018) 201-2. [21] De Witt Douglas Kilgore, ‘Introduction: The Wonderful Dream’ in De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space  (University of Pennsylvania Press 2003) 1. [22] ibid 1-2. [23] ibid. [24] Kurtz (n 20) 202. [25] Imre Szeman, ‘Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’ (2007) 106(4) South Atlantic Quarterly 812. [26] Kilgore (n 21) 2. [27] Yaqoob (n 13) 207. [28] Arendt (n 1) 268-9. [29] Brent Ryan Bellamy, ‘…or Bust: Science Fiction and the Bomb, 1945- 1960’ in Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (eds), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction  (Cambridge University Press 2018) 220. [30] Simbirski (n 18) 594. [31] ibid 595. [32] Arendt (n 1) 251. [33] ibid 263. [34] ibid. [35] Yaqoob (n 13) 211. [36] Arendt (n 1) 268-9. [37] Hannah Arendt, ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (first published 1963; The New Atlantis , Fall 2007) 1 < https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-of-space-and-the-stature-of-man > accessed 1 May 2021. [38] Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought  (Cambridge University Press 1992). [39] Arendt (n 1) 132. [40] Canovan (n 38) 109. [41] Arendt (n 1) 132-3. [42] ibid 10. [43] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [44] Yaqoob (n 13) 200. [45] ibid 200. [46] Arendt (n 1) 308-16. [47] Arendt (n 37) 1. [48] JG Ballard, The Dead Astronaut: 10 Stories of Space Flight  (Playboy Press 1968) 2. [49] ibid 6. [50] Umberto Rossi, ‘A Little Something about Dead Astronauts’ (2009) 36(1) Science Fiction Studies 101, 107. [51] Patchen Markell, ‘Arendt, Hannah (1906-75)’ in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought  (2014). [52] Quoted in Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination  (Johns Hopkins University Press 2001) 259. [53] Margaret Canovan, ‘Introduction’ in Arendt (n 1) x-xi. [54] ibid x-xi. [55] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [56] Canovan (n 38); d’Entreves (n 8); Kei Hiruta, ‘An “Anti-Utopian Age?” Isaiah Berlin’s England, Hannah Arendt’s America, and Utopian Thinking in Dark Times’ (2017) 22(1) Journal of Political Ideologies 12; Markell (n 51); Simbirski (n 18); Yaqoob (n 13). [57] Hiruta (n 56). [58] ibid 12-3. [59] ibid 12. [60] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [61] Arendt (n 1) 192. [62] ibid 178. [63] d’Entreves (n 8) 1. [64] Canovan (n 38) 111. [65] ibid 139-40. [66] ibid 110-2. [67] ibid 111. [68] ibid 112. [69] Arendt (n 1) 210. [70] Canovan (n 38) 112. [71] Arendt (n 1) 208. [72] ibid 58. [73] Walter Sullivan, ‘Proposal for Human Colonies in Space is Hailed by Scientists as Feasible Now’ The New York Times (New York, 13 May 1974) 1. [74] Arendt (n 1) 198-99.

Singapore-based corporate darling Hyflux made sure that it ticked all the right boxes when it came to governance and regulatory compliance. But its recent fall from grace is a cautionary tale on how management styles, charismatic CEOs, and directors’ personal interests can work against even the toughest corporate governance framework.   Grit and Persistence: The Rise of CEO Olivia Lum   In her 2015 speech to students at the National University of Singapore, Olivia Lum not only extolled the virtues of grit and hard work, but revealed some very personal details. The founder of much-lauded water treatment company, Hyflux, recounted how, in the early days, she would worry about paying next month’s rent.   It was a difficult, decades-long, journey that started in 1989, when Lum sold both her house and car to start Hyflux as a sales agent for large multinational companies. In 2003, Hyflux was listed on the Singapore Exchange (‘SGX’). In 2006, UK-based Global Water Intelligence recognised it as Water Company of the Year. Over the years, Lum’s personal fame also rose. From 2002 to 2005 she was a Nominated Member of Parliament. In 2011, she was named the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year.   Yet a decade later,   in November 2022, Lum, along with a former CFO and four independent directors, were charged with violations of the Securities and Futures Act[1] for non-disclosure of information relating to Hyflux’s sale of Tuaspring, its integrated water and power plant.   The Appearance of Corporate Governance   Hyflux certainly appeared to be at the forefront of Singapore’s regulatory compliance regime.[2] Its annual reports made the required disclosures on the sixteen principles of the Code of Corporate Governance (the ‘Code’). With the exception of a departure from Principle 3 on the separation of the Chairman and CEO roles, there was nothing noteworthy about the disclosures. The company also had an internal Code of Conduct and Ethics. In 2006, it published its first sustainability report—in accordance with Global Reporting Initiatives—a year ahead of when such reporting was made mandatory.   As a prominent business personality, Lum gave many interviews over the years where she pointed to corporate governance as one of Hyflux’s core values.[3] No one in Singapore’s business community could have expected the circumstances of the Tuaspring sale.   The Tuasping Debacle   In 2016, Hyflux decided to sell Tuasping, but couldn’t complete the sale by December 2017. Nevertheless, Tuasping remained on the balance sheet, and on March 2018, a KMPG audit report showed a healthy liquidity position.   Just two months later, Hyflux announced that it had run out of cash to pay creditors. An impairment loss of SGD 916m was recorded in 2018—the true extent only confirmed when the Public Utilities Board valued it at a negative purchase price and took over the business at zero dollars. Retail investors suffered losses on perpetual capital securities that Hyflux had issued.[4] In November 2020, Hyflux was placed under judicial management and, two years later, Lum and other executives were charged with violations of the Securities and Futures Act. Lum was also charged under the Companies Act for Hyflux’s non-compliance with accounting standards. In May 2023, three KPMG auditors were issued with orders by the Public Accountants Oversight Committee.   But to really understand how and why Hyflux got to this point, it can be instructive to look over the preceding years—marked by an exodus of senior executives, an uneven balance of power on the board, utilitarian-style leadership, a lack of director independence, and a toxic internal culture.   A Dominant CEO   In 2018, Hyflux’s key management committee consisted of five persons (see Appendix 1). Between 2013 and early 2014, Hyflux’s CFO, COO, and Deputy CEO, all resigned. Analysts at the time noted that the stock market hardly reacted to the resignations—an indication that the market based its evaluation of management quality solely on Lum.   With dual roles as chairman and  CEO, it’s undeniable that Lum had an overbearing influence on the management team. The arrangement was a departure from Principle 3 of the Code, but the board explained that vesting the two roles in Lum ‘provides the Group with strong and consistent leadership’.[5]   Using Finkelstein’s model[6] of power dynamics, it is possible to score key management personnel on the dimensions of structural power, ownership power, expert power, and prestige power. Applying this framework to Lum places her as a dominant figure in the management team—with the highest power score by a large margin​ (Appendix 2). On the one hand, this placed Lum as a visionary who could chart the company’s course. On the other hand, domineering CEOs often lead to conflict avoidance and cognitive blindness, which results in weak boards.[7]   Hyflux did appoint a Lead Independent Director to address the balance of power issue in accordance with the Code. However, the company failed to strengthen its structure for risk and controls where the Code was silent. For example, it didn’t have a chief risk officer, and its Risk Management Committee met only once in 2017.[8] Also, the Head of Internal Audit was not part of its broader management committee.[9]   Lack of Board Independence   The board of directors is responsible for supervising management. In Singapore, a combination of statute[10] and general law imposes duties on directors. The Singapore courts have stated that ‘[t]he ‘interests of the company’ is not just profit maximisation. Neither is it profit maximisation by any means’.[11] In a survey, close to 91 percent of Singapore directors agreed that directors are ‘permitted to take into account the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders when performing his functions’.[12] Generally, research indicates that boards function more effectively when they are independent of management.[13]   The Hyflux board comprised Lum and seven independent directors, including lawyers and finance professionals (See Appendix 3). The proportion of independent directors far exceeded the requirements of the Code. However, there were questions about whether the board was truly independent.[14]   Over the years, some of these independent directors had other relationships with the company that made them non-independent. Until 2005, Gay Chee Cheong was deemed a substantial shareholder.[15] Between 2013 and 2015, Gary Kee was an executive director. Until 2010, Christopher Muragasu was employed as senior vice-president of corporate services. Between 1996 and 2006, Muragasu’s sister held a number of positions, including COO, Deputy CEO, and as a senior advisor. Teo Kiang Kok’s brother was vice-president of business development between 2005 and 2008.   Between 2005 and 2010, Kok’s law firm, Shook Lin & Bok, provided legal services to Hyflux and earned fees totalling SGD 364,000. Lee Joo Hai, a partner at professional services firm BDO LLP, had similar potential conflicts of interest. Between 2005 and 2008, BDO Raffles provided internal audit services to Hyflux, earning fees amounting to SGD 186,000. While this was below the SGD 200,000 annual threshold that determines a director’s independence, the perception of a potential conflict of interest remains. Kok and Hai also served together on two other boards. The Code is silent on such interlocking directorships, but research has identified them as a threat to directors’ independence.[16]   The Impact of Utilitarian Morality   The academic literature indicates that corporate governance regulations tend to be informed by the utilitarian foundation of morality—which aims to produce the best consequence for the greatest number of persons—while ignoring deontology and virtue ethics.[17] Deontology concerns fundamental duties that should be followed regardless of consequences. Virtue ethics emphasises traits such as honesty and diligence.   However, for directors, a utilitarian application is far from straightforward. The interests of multiple stakeholders need to be considered when making decisions in the ‘best interest’ of the company—and ‘best interest’ is not limited to shareholders’ interest in maximising profits. For example, the risk-reward profiles of shareholders and perpetual note holders might be different when the company enters a new market. Also, for a company with a strong CEO who also has substantial shareholdings and a board that is arguably less independent than it looks, what is in the ‘best interest’ of the company will depend on the CEO’s vision and management style.   When a CEO applies corporate governance rules based mainly on utilitarianism, the rules are simply treated as conditions to be fulfilled in order to pursue bigger corporate goals—without a deeper regard for the reasons behind the rules. In this scenario, director’s duties are not linked to categorical imperatives, but are a means to an end. There are concerns that utilitarianism alone might not promote behaviours in line with ethical and societal norms.[18]   Lum’s management style was clearly aligned with utilitarianism: results alone were important, regardless of how they were achieved. When, for example, Hyflux was preparing a bid to run Singapore’s first water treatment plant, Lum told staff—who spent months working nights in preparation—that, ‘This is the only chance we can make it big’. And when speaking about Hyflux’s values, such as its ‘can-do’ spirit, she said that they are critical because they ‘helped us win contracts and deliver projects’.[19]   A Toxic Company Culture   Employee reviews can provide an insight into company culture—which can in turn contribute to poor ethical decisions by management. Glassdoor reviews of Hyflux reveal employee concerns about a ‘toxic’ culture—‘top-down’, not receptive to feedback, involving ‘micro-management’, and ‘fast-paced’ .[20]     A top-down approach can deprive employees and directors of their voice, and consequently personal responsibility for their actions. Modern supporters of utilitarianism accept that ethical decisions need to be agent-centric—that the actor must be themselves rather than a neutral third-party observer thinking in the abstract.   Also, a fast-paced environment that does not value individual opinion is not conducive to deliberate thinking that is less vulnerable to biases—what Kahneman calls System II thinking.[21] Research indicates that people make more rational decisions when slow, deep thinking is activated.[22]   Finally, when individuals are given space to be themselves, they have more capacity to process their emotions and reach a more balanced view of ethical issues. Research shows that emotions are related to a deontological way of thinking.[23] In the classic Fat Man trolley problem, while pure, rational calculation may lead us to push a man onto the tracks to save more lives, it is emotions that hold us back from hurting him with our own hands. Emotions can be a counterforce to utilitarianism, which is inadequate by itself.[24]   Conclusion   The Hyflux case clearly shows that corporate governance can be complied with on paper, and publicly, but its actual application can be difficult to evaluate. Management and media might paint a picture of a company guided by purpose and values, but this can differ from employees’ reality.   It’s critical to understand how  management are making ethical decisions, both in the normative and the behavioural view, their personal and outside interests, and how corporate culture can be shaped to nudge them into making better decisions. Andrew Leo Andrew Leo studied accounting at the National University of Singapore and University of Cambridge. Based in Singapore, he currently works as an accountant in a global asset management company and serves as vice chairperson of the audit and risk committee of a large charity. He is interested in internal controls, corporate governance, and leadership. Appendix 1: Key Management Personnel (2018) No. Name Title 1. Olivia Lum Executive Chairman and Group CEO 2. Lum Suat Wah Group Executive Vice President and CFO 3. Wong Lup Wai Group Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer 4. Cheong Aik Hock Group Executive Vice President and CEO of Tuasping 5. Chang Cheow Teck Group Executive Vice President, Operations Appendix 2   Note: Scores are on a simplified basis based on publicly available information.   Appendix 3: Board of Directors (2018) No. Name Role Committee(s) Profession 1. Olivia Lum Executive Chairman and Director Nominating, Investment CEO 2. Teo Kiang Kok Lead Independent Director Audit, Nominating, Remuneration, Risk Management Lawyer 3. Lee Joo Hai Non-Executive Independent Director Audit, Risk Management Accountant 4. Gay Chee Cheong Non-Executive Independent Director Audit, Nominating, Remuneration, Investment Investment Management 5. Christopher Muragasu Non-Executive Independent Director Nomination, Remuneration, Risk Management Formerly Hyflux’s senior vice-president of corporate services 6. Simon Tay Non-Executive Independent Director Risk Management, Investment Lawyer 7. Lau Wing Tat Non-Executive Independent Director Audit, Risk Management Investment Management 8. Gary Kee Eng Kwee Non-Executive Independent Director Investment General Management, Consultant; Formerly Hyflux’s Executive Director for Finance and IT [1] Securities and Futures Act 2001. [2] Singapore’s corporate governance framework comprises rules found in the Companies Act 1967, the Securities and Futures Act 2001 and, for companies listed on the SGX, the Listing Manual and guidelines set out in the Code of Corporate Governance. The Code is based on the ‘comply or explain’ principle that is set out in the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance report (the Cadbury Report), and adopted in the Combined Code (now known as the UK Corporate Governance Code) in 1998. [3] ‘The boldness to dream’ Leaders Magazine, Inc. (January 2012) < https://www.leadersmag.com/issues/2012.1_Jan/ROB/LEADERS-Olivia-Lum-Hyflux-Ltd.html > accessed 12 August 2022 [4] Amir Yusof, ‘“We have not lost faith”: Hundreds of Hyflux investors gather to express concerns at Hong Lim Park’ ( Channel News Asia , 30 March 2019) < https://web.archive.org/web/20211205091648/https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/we-have-not-lost-faith-hundreds-hyflux-investors-gather-express-concerns-hong-lim-park-896896 > accessed 5 December 2023. [5]  Hyflux Limited, ‘Hyflux Ltd Annual Report for FY2017’ (2018) < https://links.sgx.com/FileOpen/Hyflux%20Ltd%20Annual%20Report%20for%20FY2017.ashx?App=Announcement&FileID=498672 > accessed 12 August 2022 . [6] S Finkelstein, ‘Power in top management teams: dimensions, measurement, and validation’ (1992) 35(3) Academy of Management Journal 505-538. [7] E Heemskerk, K Heemskerk, and M Wats, ‘Conflict in the boardroom: a participant observation study of supervisory board dynamics’ (2017) 21 Journal of Management & Governance   233-263. [8] Hyflux (n 5). [9] ibid. [10] The Companies Act requires directors to be honest and diligent in carrying out their duties. Singapore courts have indicated that these statutory duties are based on general law expectations for directors to act bona fide in the interests of the company ( Ho Kang Peng v Scintronix Corp Ltd ) and exercise due care and diligence ( Falmac Limited v Cheng Ji Lai Charlie ). [11]  Ho Kang Peng v Scintronix Corp Ltd  [2014] SGCA 22. [12] P Koh and HH Tan, ‘Directors’ duties in Singapore: law and perceptions’ (2019) 14(1) Asian Journal of Comparative Law 37-63. [13] James D Westphal, ‘Collaboration in the Boardroom: Behavioural and Performance Consequences of CEO-board Social Ties’ (1999) 42(1) The Academy of Management Journal 7-24. [14] Kenneth Cheng, ‘Hyflux’s fall from grace: What went wrong’ ( TODAY , 23 May 2018) < https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/hyfluxs-fall-grace-what-went-wrong > accessed 12 August 2022; Mak Yuen Teen, ‘Hyflux’s board ticked boxes but let down stakeholders’ The Business Times (24 May 2019) < https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/columns/hyfluxs-board-ticked-boxes-let-down-stakeholders > a ccessed 12 August 2022 . [15] Mak (n 14). [16] ibid. [17] Abhijeet K Vadera and Gerard George, ‘The morality of doing business purposefully’ SID Directors Bulletin (2018) < https://www.sid.org.sg/images/PDFS/Publications/DirectorsBulletin/DirectorsBulletin_4Q2018.pdf > accessed 12 August 2022. [18] ibid. [19] Hyflux (n 5). [20]  Hyflux employee reviews about senior management ( Glassdoor , 2023) < https://www.glassdoor.sg/Reviews/Hyflux-senior-management-Reviews-EI_IE39115.0,6_KH7,24.htm > a ccessed 12 August 2022 . [21]  Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin 2011). [22]  ‘Gained in translation’ The Economist  (17 May 2014) https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2014/05/17/gained-in-translation  accessed 12 August 2022 . [23]  Norbert Paulo, ‘Law, Reason, and Emotion? The Challenge from Empirical Ethics’ (2017) 103(2) Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 239-259. [24]  Arthur Dobrln, ‘Three approaches to ethics: principles, outcomes and integrity’ Psychology Today (18 May 2012) < https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/am-i-right/201205/3-approaches-to-ethics-principles-outcomes-and-integrity > accessed 12 August 2022 .

Abstract   The authors, faculty members at Northeastern University and Boston University, highlight the shifting values and priorities of their Millennial and Gen Z students as they prepare for work in the innovation and entrepreneurship fields. In their classes with both undergraduate and graduate students, they explore the rich intersection between creativity, business, and social impact.   In alignment with worldwide trends, their students want to launch ventures that are meaningful, economically viable, and socially responsive to the challenges of our time. As witnesses to increasing economic disparity, the effects of climate change, political upheaval, culture wars, and pandemics like Covid-19, these generations see clearly that business models based only on profit are outdated. The next generation is demanding a shift in the profit-driven paradigm toward one that is inclusive and responsive to a triple bottom line: People, Planet, and Profit.   Gen Z and Millennial students want to solve problems that truly matter while honouring their individuality; they want to make a positive impact in their communities in a way that is also financially sustainable.   The authors share case studies that emphasize the importance of integrating their four part Make/Care/Strategize/Implement (MCSI) Framework into the fabric of organizations from the visioning stage to implementation:   MAKE like artists CARE like activists STRATEGIZE like entrepreneurs IMPLEMENT like organizers   By implementing the MCSI Framework, the next generation of entrepreneurs will have the building blocks necessary to embrace a more holistic, sustainable approach to business that lays a foundation for a lifetime of meaningful, impactful work.   Bringing Meaning to the Marketplace   Let us paint a picture for you. Or better yet, we will share our story in three acts:   Act 1: Individuals   We see a need for the next generation of students to gain entrepreneurial skills to develop meaningful ventures for the future. Starting with artists and arts administrators, and branching out across university silos to incorporate students from across disciplines, we create graduate and undergraduate courses and introduce the Make/Care/Strategize/Implement (MCSI) Framework.   Act 2: Community   We host a symposium, Art and Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact,  utilizing the MCSI Framework, and confirm that imaginative thinking, strategic partnerships with key stakeholders, and clear measurable outcomes are essential to inspire meaning and hope during complex times, not just for students but for broader community-based audiences. This symposium is a catalyst for what is now the largest conference for students interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, IDEA  Con , hosted annually by Innovate@BU, Boston University. [1]   Act 3: Society   With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and a host of other challenges, we recognize the importance of the integrated MCSI Framework to develop a human-centered economy. Through intentional, strategic integration of creativity, higher education can take the lead in providing a clearer sense of purpose and promoting innovative solutions amongst its students.   Act 1: Individuals   The Beginning: Teaching Professional Skills to Artists   Art students (visual, performance, and music) spend thousands of hours perfecting their craft with little space to gather the tools they need to market their work. Many art students graduate with highly developed artistic expertise in their chosen disciplines but lack the entrepreneurial skills necessary to create the impact they want, and arguably the impact society needs.   When we were asked to co-create an experimental course called Cultural Entrepreneurship  within the graduate Arts Administration program at Boston University, we welcomed the challenge to teach artists and arts administrators how to reimagine new revenue streams that support their creative expertise and competencies. With backgrounds in   arts, social impact, political organizing, and entrepreneurial consulting, we as instructors emphasized a practical and experiential learning-based approach.   As faculty members, we are committed to unlocking students’ creative and entrepreneurial mindsets, and our courses help students to recognize their potential to be change makers. We challenge our students to create vibrant, economically viable ventures that extend from their visionary entry points as artists and arts leaders. Introducing our students to the vocabulary of startups, from Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to Return On Investment (ROI), we teach the distinctions between various business models, including nonprofit, for-profit, and benefit corporations. While this is basic information for business students, it is rarely talked about in art schools.   Cultural Entrepreneurship as an academic discipline has had a 20+ year history in the UK, drawing international attention with the publication of John Howkins’s book, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas . [2] Nonetheless, in the context of Boston University’s arts administration program, the introduction of this class in 2013 was groundbreaking. Since the course began, we have taught thousands of students, many of whom continue to remain in contact with us. As of 2023, over 40% of those surveyed have launched their own ventures, as both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, at the intersection of Arts & Culture, Business & Technology, and Social Impact.   We treat our course as an incubator for real-world startup ideas, taking students through ideation, testing, and pitching their new ventures. Our students are excited and energized by this learning-by-doing approach. For many, this is the first time they are learning about the workings of the rapidly evolving creative economy, along with the challenges and opportunities for art entrepreneurs.   Our students are growing and thriving, using words such as ‘transformative’, ‘exhilarating’, and ‘eye opening’ to describe their experiences in our class. We have tapped into a desire for a new definition for success: one that includes financial viability, but also creative engagement and social relevance. This makes honing a creative, entrepreneurial mindset an important professional skill. Our primary focus when we first started in 2013 was to teach artists and arts administrators the importance of keeping an eye on the broader markets and communities while also fulfilling their individual creative purpose. We created a safe community-oriented classroom that encouraged students to get comfortable taking risks while developing their entrepreneurial skills and perfecting their artistic crafts so that they could generate their own economic opportunities.   While we started by teaching artists the skills and language of the innovation and entrepreneurship world, our interdisciplinary approach has now expanded to students from various disciplines. We use a framework that teaches a creative mindset to serve a broader population.   It was in these first classrooms that our MCSI Framework originated:   MAKE LIKE ARTISTS:  While creativity is inherent in every individual, we help students access it and integrate creativity into their day-to-day lives. Using the Creative Re/Frame M.A.K.E. Framework we help students get Messy to activate idea generation, be Awake and Aware of opportunities around them, Keep going through their challenges and Enjoy the process.   We offer our students the tools and techniques to foster a creative mindset, unlocking imagination to envision new strategic and innovative solutions.   CARE LIKE ACTIVISTS:  Caring for the larger community makes for better business and for deeper personal fulfilment. Using a Creative Re/frame C.A.R.E Framework, we help students hone in on the powers of Curiosity, Awareness, Responsibility, and Empathy and connect these elements to unique organizational value propositions.   STRATEGIZE LIKE ENTREPRENEURS:  Using design thinking, we empower our students to develop their ventures step-by-step. By right-sizing and strategically structuring business models, students can successfully set specific, measurable, and achievable goals.   IMPLEMENT LIKE ORGANIZERS:  We help students translate ideas into action. Urgency, tasks, timelines, and measuring impact are crucial for success. We stay highly focused on final products aimed at the systemic change needed to create long-lasting impact.   CASE STUDY: BENDADA MUSIC FESTIVAL [3]   Inês Andrade, a doctoral candidate in performance classical piano at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, traveled from Lisbon to her family’s home of Bendada, Portugal. While she had driven the mountainous windy roads countless times in her life, this year was different. She had been asked to perform a Christmas concert in the newly inaugurated Casa da Música da Bendada , a well-appointed music school built with funding from a European Union grant. The building was beautiful; its soundproof practice rooms and a modern concert hall overlooked the valley below. But aside from the Christmas concert, the hall was largely empty the rest of the year. The town of Bendada has had a long history with music, starting in 1870 when the Sociedade Filarmónica Bendadense  was established. This musical history, combined with the economic demise of the region from the 1970s, got Inês thinking. She was performing in a gorgeous music hall, and she realized this was an opportunity to create something more. The seed for the Bendada Music Festival was planted. ‘I always knew I wanted to do more with music than just perform concerts’, she says. ‘I wanted to create something that could make an artistic and economic impact that could help revitalize the whole community. My community’.   As a committed artist dedicated to piano from an early age, Inês had the artist’s discipline to finely hone her expertise, connecting to a purpose that she then shared with others. Inês came to the first part of the MCSI Framework (Make Like an Artist) from an authentic entry point. As an artist, she channelled her creative practice to an intention that fuelled and inspired both herself and others.   Back in Boston for her final semester prior to receiving her doctorate, Inês enrolled in the Cultural Entrepreneurship class. Inês used the course to workshop her vision and build skills using the MCSI Framework to:   Make Like an Artist by building on her credibility as a well-established musician. Care Like an Activist by owning her authentic connection to the town of Bendada, its long history as a music centre, and undertaking research to more fully understand its current plight. Strategize Like an Entrepreneur by networking to build a sustainable funding model. Implement Like an Organizer by partnering with the Portuguese Secretary of Economic Development, Portugal State Tourism office, and the Boston University community.   Integrating the four pieces of MCSI, Inês was able to turn her idea into a viable international program that has had a quantifiable impact in the region and beyond . But she knew she couldn't do this alone, nor did she want to. She formed a formidable partnership with a fellow doctoral candidate in performance piano, Edoardo Carpenedo. Edoardo took the same graduate class the following year so they could have a common language and vision as they prototyped their venture they founded together, the Bendada Music Festival.     In the summer of 2024, the Bendada Music Festival completed its 9 th  year with a record number of students, ranging in age from 14 to 22 years old. Music teachers from around the world, and corporate, community, and governmental partners, all gathered to enjoy captivating concerts. Thousands of audience members from local communities came together in unique concert venues ranging from 12 th -century castles to 16 th -century churches. The local community participates in the Bendada Community choir, hosts a folk festival in the town square alongside the music festival, and houses students in individual homes. Along with the hundreds of students and instructors who hone their skills through the festival each year, Bendada citizens participate as musicians and concert goers, and restaurants and hostels benefit from the increase in tourism and revenue. Act 2: Community   The Ripples: Recognizing the Need for MCSI in a Larger Context   As impact-oriented educators as well as community-based professionals we wanted to share our learnings in the classroom with a larger audience. We set out to create an opportunity for our students to network with innovators within the corporate, nonprofit and political arenas, as well as to share our resources and learnings with the broader Boston community so that it was not sequestered to the campus. We understood the importance of igniting the power of interdisciplinary partnerships to scale the impact of what we were creating in the classroom. Building on the MCSI Framework, we partnered with the BU’s College of Fine Arts, Questrom School of Business, and the BU Arts Initiative to introduce a unique, creative public symposium: Arts & Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact .   Tapping into our own collective creative mindset to make  our vision a reality, we cared like activists, reaching out to cross-disciplinary stakeholders to work with us to infuse energy, hope and purpose into a welcoming space. We strategically  built cross-disciplinary alliances across the campus as well as the city to create an impactful agenda. And we  implemented  a rich, community-based, inclusive conference filled with energy, hope, and measurable outcomes at Boston University on 11 November 2016.   The theme of the conference was optimism and hope. We planned to model how the arts and business communities could work together toward a common good, despite being unlikely bedfellows. We incorporated our students into conference planning through an Ambassador program and invited our communities from outside of the university. The planning committee agreed that it would be best to hold the event after the US Presidential election. The 11 November 2016 date seemed ideal—the event would happen toward the end of the semester but not too close to the holidays. Three days before the symposium,   surprising election results revealed a very divided country. And as any good organizer, innovator, entrepreneur, or improv actor knows, our job was to remain nimble while working with dynamic variables.   After the US Presidential election, the direction of our symposium shifted from confidence to confusion, from optimism to uncertainty. We were bringing together Boston’s business and arts community after a highly divisive election. We asked ourselves, ‘How can we acknowledge the tense post-election climate without being political? How can we maintain a tone of collaboration and promote goodwill among people who potentially held opposing beliefs?’. Originally, we thought that the symposium would offer innovative networking opportunities; now we feared that the audience would be unable to span their differences.   Our sold-out crowd filled the newly renovated Boston University Graphic Design department’s space. Attendees from Boston-based for-profits, nonprofits, and government agencies gathered with higher education administrators, faculty, and students to explore the question, ‘What happens when art and business join forces to create stable economic opportunities and build vibrant communities while addressing societal needs?’.   To acknowledge the political sea change, we updated our introductory slide deck to include a Toni Morrison quote: ‘This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no time for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal’. We knew that no matter how people voted or what political views they held, we stood by the belief that the arts have the power to connect, fortify and help us to build equitable, healthy, empathetic, respectful communities that benefit everyone.   To our delight, the tone of the symposium honoured our original vision to create an atmosphere of hope and possibility, but with even more energy and focus. Not only did artists need economic opportunities, but it was abundantly clear that businesses needed creative partners to help reimagine new ways forward. We began to think about the potential for arts and business collaborations to develop in a larger socio-economic context.   When Boston University’s BUild Lab IDG Capital Student Innovation Centre opened their doors in 2017, we partnered with them as creative practitioners in residence to expand upon the model of the Arts & Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact   symposium to design and grow what is now the largest cross disciplinary student innovation conference in the USA, IDEA Con. [4]  Fast forward to October 2024 and IDEA Con, now with over 700 participants registered from 25 colleges and universities, incorporated an exercise from the MCSI second module of CARE Like an Activist through interactive CARE Cafés with all the participants in the auditorium.   These CARE Cafés were introduced by first posing the questions: ‘Where does creative innovation come from? And ‘What are problems worth solving?’. The CARE Cafés provided an opportunity for attendees to verbalize to each other what motivates them to get involved in something beyond themselves by exploring their CARE: an acronym for Curiosity, Awareness, Empathy, and Responsibility.   Prompts included:   WHAT  big problems are you curious about? HOW  do you want to address these problems? WHERE  do you think this interest/desire comes from? WHY are you the one to address this? Why now? WHAT  is your unique entry point into this problem? WHO else do you want to talk with to explore this problem/opportunity?   Once attendees had an opportunity to gather their individual ideas through a journaling exercise, they were put in two long lines and participated in a time-based speed dating-like activity. By giving individuals an opportunity to explore what they care about and articulate it to others, we allowed them to make authentic connections with a larger community, hatch partnerships, and deepen their sense of meaning from the event.   In addition to the CARE Cafés, IDEA Con highlights young creative entrepreneurs by giving them opportunities to share their stories in five-minute, TED Talk-style presentations. These speakers follow the MCSI Framework, inspiring attendees to tap into their own wellspring of curiosity. Over the years IDEA Con has featured student innovators such as:   Max Bard . [5]  A graduate of Boston University’s MFA program, Max is an interdisciplinary artist who uses recycled materials for his pieces with clients ranging from Google to national parks and galleries. IDEA Con hired Max to create a sculptural piece during the day-long conference emphasizing the theme of sustainability. His pop-up artist studio on the first floor of the Questrom School of Business at IDEA Con was an interactive practice inviting attendees to comment, share and discuss his piece in real time emphasizing the importance of Making like an Artist.   Ellice Patterson . [6] While studying for her MS from Boston University, Ellice was also establishing her non-profit organization Abilities Dance Boston that uses dance as a tool to advocate for intersectional disability rights. Ellice was a speaker for IDEA Con and modelled the importance of Caring like an Activist by creating a venture that aligns with her belief that dance should be inclusive of all body types. Her dance troupe then joined her on the stage to share their work and a performance with the audience.   Anj Fayemi . [7]  A rap artist and computer scientist from Nigeria, Anj was studying at MIT when he stumbled across a problem he was uniquely suited to solve. He was getting ready to release a new album and wondered, ‘How can artists use technology to directly interact and grow their fan base?’. He founded his for profit company, Rivet, in his third year at MIT and shared his story at IDEA Con from ideation to implementation underling the critical aspects of Strategizing Like and Entrepreneur and Implementing Like an Activist.   While continually refining the MCSI Framework, we have had opportunities to introduce the approach to thousands of students, professionals, and international dignitaries. We have found that no matter the age, experience, or industry there is a deep connection to incorporating the four quadrants of the MCSI Framework to make more meaningful work. The MCSI Framework clarifies and encourages participants to pay attention to the distinct puzzle pieces starting with authenticity and ending with solving problems that matter.   Act 3: Society   Reframing Future Economies   We have arrived at Act 3 in our story. In Act 1, our goal was to introduce entrepreneurial skills to art students, which we then grew into an interdisciplinary approach to creative entrepreneurship integrating our MCSI framework. In Act 2, our perspective broadened to reveal how the MCSI framework can serve a larger community through the symposium Arts & Ideas in Action: Arts + Business + Social Impact and later, through the IDEA Con Student Innovation Conference.   Our Gen Z and Millennial students are acutely aware of the uncertain economic future with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and a host of challenges including climate change, economic disparity and political unrest. They seek employment that reflects their triple bottom line values, provides financial security and offers hope for the future. If they can’t find these opportunities in existing companies, they are committed to building new ones. And our students are not alone—in the Deloitte 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey: Waves of Change: Acknowledging progress, confronting setbacks, 22,000 Millennials and Gen Z’ers across 36 countries responded with a deep concern for unethical business practices and political unrest. [8]  With businesses holding the locus of power in our time, Millennials and Gen Z’ers look to business leaders to rise up to address economic greed, disparity and the impending impacts of climate challenges.   Researchers from UK-based research organizations, Nesta and Pearson, assert that the future will require both human and machine capacities. As automation and artificial intelligence expand in the workplace, so will the need for deeply human skills like ‘originality, active learning and the fluency of ideas’. [9] The MCSI Framework offers student innovators the opportunity to cultivate and integrate deeply human skills into their ventures. As educators, we believe higher education is poised to lead a paradigm shift, providing students with the language and tools to become our future creative, caring, and strategic innovators.   We have arrived at the end of Act 3, but the curtain does not close. Universities are poised to play a key role as incubators for interdisciplinary collaboration and socially responsible innovation. Through a holistic approach that integrates making, caring, strategizing, and implementing, together we can create the meaningful businesses of the future. Wendy Swart Grossman and Jeannette Guillemin Wendy Swart Grossman is both a faculty member at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University as well as a co-founder of Creative Re/Frame, LLC.  With a background in global presidential politics and NGO and non-profit social impact organizations, she infuses creativity into her classrooms and client spaces to drive authentic community centered change to amplify the voices of her students and clients missions.    Jeannette (Jen) Guillemin is both a faculty member at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University as well as a co-founder of Creative Re/Frame, LLC. With a background spanning arts leadership, counseling, and experiential learning, she integrates creativity and reflection into her classrooms and client collaborations to cultivate ethical leadership, foster resilience, and spark community-centered innovation. [1]  See ‘IDEA Con 2024’ ( Boston University ) < https://www.bu.edu/innovate/events/idea-con/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [2]  John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas  (Allen Lane 2001). [3]  See ‘Bendada Music Festival’ < https://bendadamusicfestival.com/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [4]  See (n 1). [5]  See ‘Home’ ( Max Bard ) < https://maxbard911.com/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [6]  See ‘Abilities Dance Boston’ < https://www.abilitiesdanceboston.org/ > accessed 19 December 2024. [7]  See ‘Where we began’ ( Rivet ) < https://www.rivet.app/about-us > accessed 19 December 2024. [8]  ‘2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey’ ( Deloitte ) < https://www2.deloitte.com/cn/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/genzmillennialsurvey-2023.html > accessed 19 December 2024. [9]  Hasan Bakhshi, Jonathan M Downing, Michael A Osborne, and Philippe Schneider, ‘The Future of Skills Employment in 2030’ ( Pearson and Nesta , 2017) < https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/the_future_of_skills_employment_in_2030_0.pdf > accessed 19 December 2024.

Blue and white, occasionally with touches of yellow, ceramic tiles adorn not simply the façades and interiors of countless Portuguese buildings, but also the design imaginary of the nation. Spanning abstract and geometric patterns to illustrative figurations in engrossing detail, azulejos tiles are a firm fixture of Portuguese design. Their distinctive palette misleads many into locating the etymology of azulejos in azul , the Portuguese word for blue, which tidily frames the ceramic tiles within their popular discourse as an aesthetic of Portuguese monumentality—an ornament of national identity and strength. However, the term finds its origins in al-zulayj , the Arabic term for a small, smooth polished stone, which twofold troubles categorizations of the ceramic tiles—both highlighting their complex function as an architectural material and illuminating a complex and often forgotten period of Portuguese history and identity. Since the 8 th century, when al-Andalus Muslims sailed from North Africa, occupying the Iberian Peninsula and in so doing introducing their ceramic compositions, azulejos have stood Janus-faced at the complex intersection of utility and ornament. They have solidified as a distinct aesthetic of Portuguese national identity while simultaneously gesturing at the assemblages of influences which constitute the nation.    It was precisely this reflective quality, this hybrid language of azulejos, that stood as a threat to the Second Portuguese Republic. Under controversial dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, the Estado Novo (New State) fascist regime sought to create a so-called modern image and so saw the brief disappearance of the ceramic tiles from Portuguese design. The resulting architectural style of Português Suave (Soft Portuguese) articulated in concrete a national identity without memory. This period of absence, and the re-emergence of azulejos following the Revolução dos Cravos  (Carnation Revolution), brings into stark relief the politics that underscore the unique design qualities of the ceramic tiles. Indeed, the Portuguese struggle against the Estavo Nuovo  fascist regime is a struggle of memory against forgetting, of azulejos against concrete.    Hybrid Materiality   Azulejos fall somewhere between decorative art and architectural material. This hybrid position of ornament and design is reflective of the more complex politics which underscores the ceramic tiles. Azulejos are an ornamental art form with a specific functional capacity: their composition of porous clay covered by a protective glaze reflects light and insulates against humidity and corrosion from salty air, making them an ideal design material for Portugal’s Mediterranean climate. [1]  Scholars are unanimous in their praise for the sleek efficiency of the material, accrediting its function as the source of its widespread and ubiquitous presence in the Portuguese design imaginary. João Miguel dos Santos Simões, one of the first and only scholars on azulejos and the founder of the Museu Nacional do Azulejo (National Azulejos Museum), describes how the ceramic tiles transcend their utilitarian function as a protective parietal finishing, taking on a monumental spirit as a ubiquitous part of Portuguese culture. [2] Indeed, the ceramics can be found in all realms of Portuguese life: lining the walls of secular sites like train stations, restaurants, bars, fountains, and murals with triumphant historical scenes; composing the political sphere in the contours of monuments and parliamentary buildings; enclosing the domestic sphere in geometric and floral motifs which adorn the fa ç ades of homes; and articulating sacred space, composing altars and icons for Catholic worship. Yet these expressions of Portuguese monumentality are not a Portuguese invention, but rather a vestige of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation. In this way, the azulejos are always gesturing as much away as towards Portuguese national identity—serving as a testament to the past as it builds the future. The concept of hybridity illuminates the genesis of the aesthetic and conceptual layers of the ceramic tiles, illuminating the complex relationship of medium and message. The azulejos represents not only the fusion of ornament and design, but also embodies the memories of strength and weakness in Portuguese history.    The history of the azulejos illuminates not simply their hybrid and complex language, it also exists as a politically urgent practice of memory. Azulejos are vestiges of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, which lasted over five hundred years, from the 8 th  to the 13 th  century (711-1492 CE). Currently, there is a lack of English-language scholarship discussing this period of Portugal’s design history, especially concerning the al-Andalus occupation of the Iberian Peninsula and its influence, and particularly regarding azulejos ceramic tiles. Also notable is that most English-language Portuguese scholarship avoids the mention of the al-Andalus within discussions of azulejos. It is therefore necessary for scholarship to explore this forgotten history and unpack the politics of memory. While the precise genealogical evolution of the azulejos is underexamined, and is not the subject of this paper, through the assemblage of visual analysis with the historical records which do  exist, it is possible, and indeed urgent, to locate the azulejos within its al-Andalus Muslim origins.    Materiality of History Azulejos are a composite material. They are composed of a porous clay-based ceramic body, the terracotta, covered by a protective glassy phase, the glaze, which operate together to form a larger pattern or image. The term azulejos describes their function as smooth polished stones operating within a mosaic composition, many of which have the interlocking curvilinear, geometric, and floral motifs characteristic of Islamic art and design. [3] It is possible to surmise that Portuguese azulejos find their lineage in zellij  (الزليج), a form of Islamic mosaic tilework characteristic of Islamic architecture from the end of the first millennium. Zellij are a mosaic composition where an ‘architectural surface is entirely covered by a pattern arrangement of small pieces of tile which have surface glazes of different colours’. [4] A precise historical visual analysis of al-Andalus zellij  tile against the azulejos is not possible, as al-Andalus architecture and art were either completely destroyed or whitewashed and appropriated after the Reconquista, the period of military campaigns waged by Western European Christian kingdoms in order to retake the Iberian territories. In fact, scholars note that nothing remains from the al-Andalus period of occupation or the first Portuguese kings. [5] However, a comparison of traditional Portuguese azulejos with traditional Islamic zellij  can illuminate their shared genealogy.    Some of the earliest azulejos can be found in the Palácio Nacional de Sintra (The Palace of Sintra), a site which is not only replete with ceramic tiles but also the nationalistic gestures which obscure their history. The Palácio Nacional de Sintra  was originally the residence of the al-Andalus Taifa of Lisbon, set up as the palace of the Islamic kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula. The interior walls of the palace are still adorned with ceramic tiles, but critically they are not the original zellij  tiles from the 10 th century, rather being azulejos from the 15 th  century. Most scholarship on azulejos locates their origins during this period, citing this palace as one of the first instances of the ceramic design and attributing their introduction to King Manuel I of Portugal (r. 1495-1521 CE). The azulejos stand as an import of luxury within this national narrative—a whim of a monarch’s visit to Seville, Spain and the Alhambra palace in Granada as an exercise in national taste. Indeed, the palace is celebrated as a testimony to the Portuguese reconquest and early affirmation of nationality. However, a comparison of decoration choices accredited to King Manuel I with traditional architectural Islamic tile design hardly illuminates the beginnings of a national tradition and aesthetic of strength, rather gesturing towards the unshakable influence of 500 years of occupation.  Sala dos Brasões, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias One of the earliest examples of Islamic tile decoration is the Qubbat al-Sakhra  (قبة الصخرة or ‘The Dome of the Rock’). The edifice sits atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is a holy site for Muslims, enclosing the Foundation Stone that lies at the heart of the structure, which is believed to be the location of the miraji (ascension) of the Prophet Muhammad. The Qubbat al-Sakhra historically functioned and continues to serve as a shrine and important site of pilgrimage since its construction in 692 CE. [6] It is therefore reasonable to surmise this site would have held great importance and influence for the al-Andalus Muslims, making it a suitable site for comparison through which to examine the Islamic influence of the Palácio Nacional de Sintra .    The Qubbat al-Sakhra encloses the Foundation Stone in two ambulatories and an exterior wall. The exterior wall has an octangular structure with a raised circular platform that is capped with a golden dome. There are four entrances, each aligned with a cardinal direction. Marble clads the lower register of the exterior of Qubbat al-Sakhra , while faience, or tin glazed ceramics tiles, form a zellij  composition on its upper registers. The glazed tiles, which dazzle in hues of blue with accents of green and yellow, are composed of precise shards of ceramic placed together to form abstract geometric and floral patterns, as well as calligraphy. This aniconic imagery is characteristic of Islamic design, which avoids direct reflections of sentient beings in art which decorates religious and holy sites. [7] The placement of the tiles on the upper registers of the exterior structure function to draw the eyes towards heaven, urging an ascent of vision and thought which echoes the journey of the Prophet Muhammad. Each tile seems to gesture in kind with one another towards the creator of such sites of beauty, speaking in glistening rays a reflection of gratitude and wonder.    The interior of Qubbat al-Sakhra is similarly ethereal, as the light from the windows which line the octagonal wall illuminate the ceramics which grace the interior of the dome. Golden zellij compositions shimmer atop supporting columns with corinthian capitals. Swirling vegetative motifs compose two rows above the columns and seem to swirl upwards towards the glistening golden and bejewelled dome interior, itself comprised of a geometric rhythm of gilded teardrops contoured in a deep red, which seem to fall from the eyes past the body and towards the rock which the Qubbat al-Sakhra houses. The ceramic tiles crowd together like the pilgrims who come to admire the site they adorn. Ibn Battua, a 14 th -century travel writer, described the Qubbat al-Sakhra  as ‘a building of extraordinary beauty, solidity, elegance, and singularity of shape […] Both outside and inside, the decoration is so magnificent and the workmanship so surpassing as to defy description’. [8] Here, the zellij  composition works in harmony with the architecture of the building to accentuate the excellence of either, and articulate a beautiful testament to the Islamic faith.   The Palácio Nacional de Sintra  has perhaps less lofty goals despite its similar use of ceramic tiles. Here, despite their kindred function, the azulejos gesture not towards the divine, but rather towards the Portuguese body politic as articulated by King Manuel I, and reflectively towards the Islamic kingdom who occupied the territory and its people for half a millennium. Originally constructed by the al-Andalus, following the Reconquista  and subsequent forceful expulsion of Muslims from Portugal, the Palácio Nacional de Sintra was quickly vandalised, its walls whitewashed by King João I (r. 1385-1433). The history of the palace during the reigns of successive kings is unknown until the reign of King Manuel I, who refurbished the Palácio Nacional de Sintra in the early sixteenth century with ceramic tiles. Importantly, these azulejos would adorn the very walls whitewashed of their previous al-Andalus zellij compositions—a gesture widely considered to be the origins of the azulejos tradition must thus be seen as a move to obscure their history. Most scholars cite the waiting room to the palace meeting chambers (known today as Sala dos Árabes,  or in English, the Arab Room) as an iconic origin of the Portuguese tradition of azulejos, making it an important site of consideration of the hybrid gesture inherent in them.   Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias The  Sala dos Árabes  is a primary site of reception for the Palácio Nacional de Sintra , and the nation whose monarchs it houses. As a waiting room for the palace’s meeting chambers, the Sala dos Árabes offers itself as a vital impression to visiting guests as well as a reminder to ruling monarchs, seeking to communicate the national identity of the Kingdom of Portugal through its design. Similarly to the Qubbat al-Sakhra , Sala dos Árabe s has multiple entrances, showcasing the splendour of the interior to multiple wings of the palace. Different from the Qubbat al-Sakhra  is the availability or accessibility of the space, as the palace was reserved for visiting monarchs and other dignitaries; its design articulates a projection of national identity among a selected audience. As a site of reception, one was invited into the space by Portuguese monarchs in a political gesture echoed on the walls. The Sala dos Árabes  has a low ceiling, accentuated by its wooden material which works together with the white walls to further visually narrow the space. At the centre of the room is a marble fountain, which rises from an abstracted star based into a bronze sculpture of cherubs holding an acorn, a symbol of growth and expansion. This sculpture emerges from a blue tile segment on the floor which is echoed on the room’s walls. Interestingly, in opposition to Qubbat al-Sakhra , it is the lower register of the Sala dos Árabes  which is adorned in ceramic tiles while the upper register remains empty.  Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias  Blue, green, and white, with accents of yellow, glazed ceramic tiles adorn the Sala dos Árabes  in undulating geometric patterns. The principal pattern has an interplay of quadrilateral shards which create a three-dimensional effect of cubes, which together seem to form the waves of an abstract ocean. This motion, however, has little place to go as the tiles are reserved to the lower half of the room and trapped by the wooden ceiling. Through their shared use of blue ceramic tiles, the azulejos seem to gesture towards the foundation, highlighting the water as a site of reflection instead of the sculpture as a site of projection into the future. Atop the wall azulejos are accent ceramic tiles which secure the building in an arrangement evoking the top of a fence, protecting or perhaps entrapping the occupants of the Sala dos Árabes . These ceramic tiles are cut and arranged into fleur-de-lys, which were often used to mark the north direction on a compass rose by Portuguese cartographers. [9]  This reference to exploration seeks to celebrate Portugal’s growing colonial empire during the Age of Discovery, where the azulejos function as a medium of this national identity as a thalassocratic empire. Importantly, the resulting trading empire from Portugal’s imperial maritime network funded the voyage which inspired King Manuel I as well as his import of the ceramic tiles, yet this projection of power is undercut by the medium of their articulation. The projection of strength King Manuel I intended for the ceramic tiles is simultaneously a humble gesture, attesting also to voyages of the al-Andalus in their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula—a history hidden just beneath the surface of the azulejos of Palácio Nacional de Sintra .   Sala dos Árabes, Palácio Nacional de Sintra © Caroline DeFrias Many scholars fondly note the journey of King Manuel I to Seville and Granada, Spain, admiring his excellent  taste and financial prowess as the introduction of the azulejos tile tradition to Portugal. The resulting history of the azulejos is significantly better documented, and in virtually all scholarship the 15 th  century is regarded as the origin of the ceramic tile tradition. As this history is more easily accessible, it will be quickly summarised. In the 16 th century, expedited by the Spanish Expulsión de los moriscos  (Expulsion of the Moriscos), the decree of King Philip the III which forced all remaining Muslims in Spain to either convert or leave the country, Portugal took off in earnest as not only a consumer, but a producer of azulejos. As Christian Portuguese tradesfolk began creating the ceramic tiles, the subjects of azulejos increasingly tended towards naturalistic artistic creations, becoming a visual language of Portuguese national identity, depicting its history, influences, and exploits for the next five centuries. This is the monumentality Simões speaks of—the ubiquitous presence as a uniquely Portuguese quality—which dismisses the politics and history of the medium itself.   Materiality of Erasure   As important as it is to uncover the past of the azulejos, it is equally valuable to examine their erasure. Chiefly, the whitewashed walls upon which King Manuel I introduced what many scholars refer to as the first use of ceramic tiles in Portugal function astutely as a metaphor for the history of the ceramic tiles they obscure. Indeed, the practice of whitewashing, a principle means of the erasure and destruction of the visual legacy of the al-Andalus occupation of Portugal, emerges—through a consideration of the work of the Swiss modernist architect Le Corbusier—not simply as the forgetting of past subjugation but an exercise in the purification of a national identity.   Le Corbusier first discusses the need for a ‘loi du blanchiment’ (law of whitening) as a cleansing moral act which expunges decorative art in favour of a ‘purity’ of body, sight, and mind, during a 1923 interview early in his career. [10]  For Le Corbusier, whiteness is both the effect and means of cleanliness, against a surface making disease and impurity visible. This measure of control was characteristic of his career in international design, characterised by the recurring gesture of an eradication of difference and a particular disdain for ornamentation. Art historian Mark Wigley argues that Le Corbusier’s whitewash ‘exposes every dimension of life in front of it to judgement’. [11] Yet another necessary dimension of gesture is concealment; it is necessary to consider that which is behind  the whitewash. The projection of cleanliness requires not simply a clean exterior, but the erasure of the material which previously stood where the whitewash now resides. Le Corbusier’s logic of purity emerges as a rejection of tradition, articulating a hyper-presence which requires not simply that one constantly attend to the present moment so as to maintain the aesthetic of cleanliness but also that one obliterates any indication of a past.    The whitewashing of the Palácio Nacional de Sintra , and doubtlessly countless other sites yet unexplored, stands as an attempted cleansing of the Portuguese body politic. Following the logic of Le Corbusier, the whitewash stands as an attempted purification of national identity through the obfuscation of the al-Andalus tiles. Yet this venture is incomplete, as the resurgence of azulejos, despite any nationalistic intentions to project strength and obscure origins, still gestures towards their Muslim origins and therefore the diversity of influence and experience which constitutes Portugal’s national identity. Unfortunately, however, the calls of modernists like Le Corbusier would be answered in earnest, the call for a sleek international style and its implications of national purity zealously executed within Portugal’s own modern period, as administered by the Estado Novo regime. This period oversaw the disappearance of azulejos from Portuguese architectural design, cited by the regime as a movement towards simplicity and efficiency and against ornamentation. However, it is precisely the hybrid language of the azulejos—the paradoxical message of national strength articulated in the medium of historical vulnerability—which made their continued use during the Estado Novo  period an impossibility. Estado Novo  (New State) was one of the longest surviving authoritarian regimes in Europe. It began with the military coup d’état of 28 May 1926, then declared the Revolução Nacional (National Revolution), now known simply as the 28 May Revolution, which ended the unstable República Portuguesa (Portuguese Republic). Also known as the First Republic, República Portuguesa was the complex 16-year period which followed the end of the Portuguese monarchy. The First Republic attempted and ‘fail[ed] to democratise and modernise the country’, [12] instead fostering growing unrest and distrust formed between the ideals República Portuguesa  espoused and their failed political materializations, caused in part by and coupled with the economic instability resulting from the First World War. Historian José Miguel Sardica describes how ‘within a few years [of the turmoil of República Portuguesa ], large parts of the key economic forces, intellectuals, opinion-makers and middle classes changed from left to right, trading the unfulfilled utopia of a developing and civic republicanism for notions of “order”, “stability” and “security”’, [13] which paved the way for the coming authoritarian regime. The 28 May Revolution established the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship), which predicated itself on a ‘deep scepticism regarding the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy’, [14]  later crystallised in the 1933 constitutional referendum which institutionalised the Estado Novo  one party state led principally by António de Oliveira Salazar. [15]  The so-called ‘New State’ was an authoritarian regime concerned with enforcing the nova ordem  (new order) of a modernised Portuguese nation. [16]   From the moment Salazar seized power, he committed himself to the construction and promotion of ‘new public buildings as achievements that were in stark contrast with the inertia of the previous parliamentary regime’. [17] The resulting architectural style originally promoted as Estilo Português  (Portuguese style), now known as Português Suave  (Soft Portuguese),   sought to articulate a ‘future-orientated modernity’ [18] for the Christian fascist state, which included the discontinuation of the azulejos as a design material in all realms of Portuguese design and life. Português Suave  sought paradoxically to articulate a ‘more international language and a national style’, [19] achieved through the displacement of traditional techniques, materials, and styles in favour of a somewhat anonymous, austere, and efficient modernist style. Ponorama: Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo ( Portuguese Magazine of Arts and Tourism ), a publication overseen by the Estado Novo  regime, described in a 1941 article entitled ‘Campanha do bom gôsto’ (‘Campaign for good taste’) the kind of modern design identity the Estado Novo  promoted:    Good taste is imposed even in technical areas. […] Experience teaches scientists, engineers, architects, builders, that the artistically and scientifically correct solutions are always the simplest, the most elegant, the most attractive [ O bom gosto impõe-se mesmo nas áreas técnicas. […] A experiência ensina aos cientistas, engenheiros, arquitetos, construtores, que as soluções artística e cientificamente corretas são sempre as mais simples, as mais elegantes, as mais atraentes .] [20]   Modernist Portuguese architects responded to this imperative, designing sleek buildings which adhered to the principles of simplicity of form and material. These calls can be understood in relation to the modernist architectural movement more broadly, as architects and designers who worked for Salazar’s regime were encouraged to attend international fairs, subscribe to foreign journals of design, and maintain acquaintances and professional relationships with foreign designers. [21] The resulting fierce rejection of the past must be understood not simply within a Portuguese context, but alongside an analysis of International Design and the implications of its implementation.   The Salazarian regime was preoccupied, like other European fascist regimes, with newness. During a 1940 commemoration of the Estado Novo  he stated: We are not just because we were, we do not live just because we have lived, we live to carry out our mission and claim to the world the right to do it. [ Não somos só porque fomos, nem vivemos só por termos vividos; viver para bem cumprir a nossa missão e perante o mundo afirmamos o direito de cumprir-la ]. [22] This sentiment resonates with Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture , which itself is an appeal to ‘disdain the work of so many schools, so many masters, so many pupils, and to think thus of them: “they are as disagreeable as mosquitoes”’. [23]  The modernist identity emerges for both as a rejection of the past, which resulted in a nova ordem  (new order) or l’esprit nouveau  (new spirit) of a hyper-present orientation. For Português Suave , this impulse lived not only in the architecture but the design materials; principally, in the exclusion of the azulejos.   The fall from grace the azulejos experienced during Português Suave  is typically associated with the material’s ornamentation, framed within modernist discussions of efficiency of material. Concrete instead became a favoured material, [24] constructing buildings which stood in austere, lacklustre silence compared with the ceramic tiled buildings which preceded them. The Praça do Areeiro (Areeiro Square), constructed in the midst of the Estado Novo regime from 1938-1949 by architect Luís Christino da Silva, stands as a testament to this forgetting—its edifice seeming to yearn for memory, for azulejos. Typical of Português Suave , the buildings of Praça do Areeiro utilise reinforced concrete as their primary medium, and highlight its smooth form in large, looming, plain walls. A marble base of archades evoke a robust sense of uniformity and strength, accentuated by a slight horizontal stripe which emphasises the scale of the buildings. The upper register of the buildings has uniform rows of square windows against a plain concrete facade, which upon close analysis reveals itself to be made of evenly placed rectangular concrete panels. This style is both a representation and trace of the lost contours of traditional Portuguese architecture which maintains similar structure but crucially maintains a stripped down, simple aesthetic. During the 1940s, Salazar sought to restore  much of the capital’s architecture through ‘sharpening’ or ‘correcting’ their facades as a testament to his commitment to restore the values of Portugal’s past and future. [25] Importantly, this restoration of Portuguese identity omitted its most perhaps monumental medium: the azulejos replaced by concrete panels.   The Português Suave decision to retire the azulejos functions as a complex political gesture to not simply modernise Portuguese design but also purify Portuguese identity. The azulejos function as a design structure which builds other structures, a story with which other stories are told; they are a complex hybrid language that remembers aspects of Portuguese history and identity which the Estado Novo regime in particular would like to forget. In particular, the azulejos attest to the presence and significance of the al-Andalus Muslim occupation of the territory for 500 years. The erasure of ceramic tiles from the so-called modern Portuguese nation functions as a politics which seeks to kill politics; an eradication of difference, of time, and of history. The urgency of uncovering the history of the azulejos, of not letting it be lost in false nationalistic narratives, and of maintaining their place within Portuguese design history and practice, is a struggle precisely against a fascist regime which seeks to eliminate opposition in service of power.   It is important to note the countless historic azulejos are visible in Portugal today. Despite their distaste for the ceramic tiles, the Estado Novo  regime did not remove azulejos from all historic buildings. In fact, regardless of their lack of favour during Português Suave  and the imperative to be modern delivered by the regime, many Portuguese architects such as Raul Lino maintained a strong affinity for the ceramic tiles. Interestingly, Lino maintained a close personal relationship with Salazar, and did not use the ceramic tiles in his work, though he wrote passionately of their possibilities. Lino took issue with the increasingly ‘amorphous, spiritless, faceless aspect of the Western metropolis’ that was taking over Portuguese design and felt the azulejos stood as an integral articulation of the ‘eternal spirit of the Portuguese people’. [26] Soon after the Revolução dos Cravos (Carnation Revolution), which ended the near 40-year rule of the Estado Novo  regime, the azulejos returned as a design material; a triumph not of will, not of determination or power of a fixed national identity, but an embrace of a democratic, fluid, and hybrid nation.    The urgency of memory does not end with a singular recollection nor the fall of one fascist regime, but rather requires constant attention and care for history. Currently, the azulejos are under a different threat of disappearance: commodification. The manufacture of contemporary azulejos is principally for tourist markets which covet the ceramic tiles as aesthetic objects, often disregarding their design value and history. The implications of the commodity fetishism of azulejos are yet unexplored. Likewise, an inquiry into how this reflects the contemporary national identity of Portugal remains unwritten. There is an urgency to attend to this emerging history, as the lust for azulejos has grown so strong that numerous historical sites in Portugal are filled with gaping holes, thieves having removed the ceramic tiles for sale on the black market. The commodification of the azulejos appears to be eradicating its history twice, removing both the idea and the object. As more scholars emerge to build robust histories of the movement and design of these ceramic tiles, further questions and knowledge can be gleaned about the nature of Portuguese identity.[27] Caroline DeFrias Caroline DeFrias (CDF) is an artist-academic, currently operating in Mi’kma’ki territory in Kjipuktuk (so called Halifax, Canada). Their work, through a variety of mediums and disciplines, seeks to explore the construction of gallery space and the encounter of the art object, notions of inheritance and identity in relation to immigration and (re)settlement, as well as the ethics and pathos of the archive. They hold a Combined Honours with distinction Bachelor of Arts from the University of King’s College in Social Anthropology and the Historiography of Science, with a certificate in Art History and Visual Culture, and are pursuing a Masters of Fine Art in Art History from Concordia University. [1]  Catarina Geraldes, ‘The Integration of Azulejos in the Modernist Architecture of Portugal as a unique case in Europe’ in Marluci Menezes, Dória Rodrigues Costa, and J Delgado Rodrigues (eds), Intangibility Matters: International Conference on the Values of Tangible Heritage (LNEC 2017) 139-147. [2]  João Miguel dos Santos Simões, Estudos De Azulejaria  (Imprensa Nacional Casa Da Moeda 1956) 268. [3]  Oleg Grabar, ‘What Makes Islamic Art Islamic?’ in Islamic Art and Beyond, volume III, Constructing the Study of Islamic Art  ( Routledge 2006), 247–251, 248. [4]  Donald N Wilber, ‘The Development of Mosaic Faiënce in Islamic Architecture in Iran’ (1939) 6(1) Ars   Islamica 16. [5]  See eg Mark Cartwright, ‘Portuguese Empire’ ( World History Encyclopedia , 21 July 2021) < https://www.worldhistory.org/Portuguese_Empire/ > accessed 1 July 2024.         [6]  Erdal Eser, ‘The First Islamic Monument Kubbet'üs-Sahra (Dome of the Rock): A New Proposition’   (2017) 23 Pesa International Journal of Social Studies 135-147. [7]  Grabar (n 3) 250. [8]  Quoted in Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, ‘The Dome of the Rock (Qubbat Al-Sakhra)’ ( Khan Academy ) < https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/west-and-central-asia-apahh/west-asia/a/the-dome-of-the-rock-qubbat-al-sakhra#:~:text=The%20Dome%20of%20the%20Rock%20is%20a%20building%20of%20extraordinary,surpassing%20as%20to%20defy%20description > accessed 1 July 2024. [9]  Maria Fernanda Alegria, Suzanne Daveau, João Carlos Garcia, and Francesc Relaño, ‘Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’ in David Woodward (ed), The History of Cartography, Volume 3, Part 1: Cartography in the European Renaissance  (University of Chicago Press 2007) 956-1068, 1033. [10]  Le Corbusier quoted in Guillaume Janneau, ‘L’Exposition des arts techniques de 1925’ (1923) Le Bulletin de la vie   artistique 64. [11] Mark Wigley, ‘Chronic Whiteness’ ( e-flux Architecture , November 2020) < https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/sick-architecture/360099/chronic-whiteness/ > accessed 1 July 2024.   [12] José Miguel Sardica, ‘The Memory of the Portuguese First Republic throughout the Twentieth Century’ (2011) 9 e.Journal of Portuguese History 63. [13]  ibid 67. [14]  Raquel da Silva & Ana Sofia Ferreira, ‘The Post-Dictatorship Memory Politics in Portugal Which Erased Political Violence from the Collective Memory’ (2018) 53(1) Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 26. [15]  ibid. [16]  Fernando Rosas, ‘O salazarismo e o homem novo: Ensaio sobre o Estado Novo e a questão do totalitarismo’ (2011) 35(157) Análise Social 1033. [17] Rita Almeida de Carvalho, ‘Ideology and Architecture in the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’: Cultural Innovation within a Para-Fascist State (1932–1945)’ (2018) 7(2) Fascism 146. [18]  ibid 155. [19]  ibid 154. [20]  ‘Campanha Do Bom Gôsto’ (1941) 1 Ponorama: Revista Portuguesa de Arte e Turismo; my translation. [21]  De Carvalho (n 17) 159. [22]  António de Oliveira Salazar, Discursos e Notas Políticas: 1938-1943 , vol 3 (2nd edn, Coimbra Editora 1944) 259; my translation. [23]  Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture  (14th edn, Dover Publications 1986) 84. [24]  De Carvalho (n 17) 170. [25] Ellen W Sapega, ‘Image and Counter-Image: The Place of Salazarist Images of National Identity in Contemporary Portuguese Visual Culture’ (2002) 39(2) Luso-Brazilian Review 47. [26]  De Carvalho (n 17) 163. [27] Possibilities for future research include the exploration of the ceramic tiles within Portugal’s own imperial project; and the complex meanings and evolution of the azulejos in Brazil, India, the Philippines, East Timor, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea. Attending to the history of the Portuguese export of the ceramic tile will further critical studies into the nature of Portuguese imperialism and colonialism, as well as the national identity that fostered them.