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Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human rights activist. In 2014, she was abducted from her hometown in Iraq, Kocho, by the Islamic State, as part of the Yazidi genocide. After her escape, she founded Nadia's Initiative, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence. In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Denis Mukwege for her fight to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflicts. CJLPA : Throughout history and to present day, we see that whenever armed conflict arises, rape and brutality against women and girls follow. Just recently, we see it repeat in Palestine, Israel, and Ukraine. Outside of war, we see it embedded in society with high rape crimes, forced marriages, inability to choose what we do with our body (whether wanting an abortion or the force of FGM). We expect more for women’s rights. Despite acclaimed efforts from the UN, NGOs, and Member States, in your opinion why does inequality remain a leading global crisis to combat?   Nadia Murad : This is a really interesting question, and you are right because women, wherever in the world they live, are still not afforded true equality.   This inequality is historical, systemic, and cultural. It exists because no one in power has ever felt the want or need to change it. Why would they?   To truly combat inequality, we need to completely rethink the way we approach society.   From their earliest years, children need to see gender equality modelled at home. Both boys and girls should have access to secondary schooling, where the curriculum promotes equality, and the infrastructure of the school building allows girls privacy when changing for sports lessons and access to facilities and necessary products when they have their periods.   Additionally, equality needs to be built into our systems. That begins with basic rights like bodily autonomy and equal pay—but carries on into meaningful female representation in politics, the judiciary and in policy work.   I think we need to look very carefully at our world and ask if it is working well as it is—or do we need to change the way we think?   CJLPA : Further to the above, what are the biggest disappointments from the international community and their responses in respect to helping the victims of sexual violence from armed conflicts? This could be inaction during the conflict, perhaps enabling it (funding state actors responsible), or the response in helping victims after.    NM : I am always disappointed when survivors, like me, give so much of ourselves to tell our stories on a public platform, just to be met with kind words but little meaningful action. From the earliest records of history to the first written stories and poems, women have been used and abused in wartime. For thousands of years it has been accepted. As we saw in Iraq, this abuse is not a momentary loss of morals in the midst of battle on the part of the perpetrators. It is a tactic deployed to break not only the women, but their communities as well. In Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used rape as a weapon of genocide. I have been calling for 9 years for the ISIS militants who raped my friends and family members in Iraq to be tried for their crimes. Thousands of Yazidi girls have given testimonies to investigators—at personal cost. Yet only 3 militants have been to court on the charge of genocide. I am disappointed that the international community and the Iraqi government isn’t moving faster here. After all, unless we start showing the world that these kind of heinous crimes will not be tolerated, then sexual violence in conflict will continue with impunity for perpetrators.   This perhaps feeds back into your first question about inequality. Perhaps the international community doesn’t see rape and the ensuing lifelong trauma as problematic enough. It still accepts rape, which mainly happens to women, as simply a side effect of wars begun by men.   CJLPA : What has been overshadowed and not emphasized enough in our world and yet is fundamental for our understanding in helping the victims of the targeted violence against the Yazidi women, and victims from all armed conflicts?   NM : I don’t believe enough emphasis is placed on survivor-centred policies. Only survivors know what they need and what is best for them and their communities for the long term. That’s why Nadia’s Initiative works with and for survivors in Sinjar to rebuild infrastructure like schools and hospitals, but also run educational and economic programs and projects. A photo from Nadia's recent trip to Sinjar. She is embracing a mother at the cemetery at Kocho (Nadia's village). The mother told Nadia that she is terrified she will die before she can be reunited with the bodies of her sons. 400 men were murdered in Kocho in August 2014. I think that authorities and organizations are often not practical enough in the help they give the victims of conflict related sexual violence. These survivors, who are often stigmatized, need meaningful reparations to rebuild their lives. This could come in financial form, but also in psycho-social support or help with housing.   There is also another dimension to the support we can give survivors, and that is how they are treated by investigators and reporters. These vulnerable women are at risk of retraumatisation every time they re-tell their story. This is why I happily put my name to the Murad Code, which is a code of conduct that investigators and reporters should adhere to when speaking to survivors. It allows them agency and control whilst promoting honesty and safety throughout the process.   CJLPA : For you, what is the meaning of ‘justice’?  Can we ever find ‘justice’ for even the most grotesque crimes against humanity such as those inflicted on the Yazidi women and girls? If so, how?   NM : I am often asked this question and I have come to believe that justice is multifaceted. For my community it is certainly judicial; our attackers must be held accountable in court for the evil crimes they committed against us. However, justice can also be more practical; we must rescue the missing women and girls so families can be reunited and reparations can be granted so lives can begin again. Justice can also be more emotional; it can be having a space to grieve for our lost loved ones and it can be found in the acknowledgment of our pain. And, justice can also be found in healing and surviving, in showing the ISIS militants that they did not succeed in eradicating the Yazidi community.   CJLPA : How would you like to see the perpetrators held accountable for these crimes?   NM : My counsel, the barrister Amal Clooney, and I, have been advocating for the implementation of a hybrid court. It would be an internationally supported tribunal which would sit in Baghdad and act as a continuation of UNITAD (the UN team which is investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq). There are a vast number of fighters to process, more than any national court could process at scale, so there would have to be international cooperation and financial backing. This hybrid court would need to be operated in tandem with another country which could then hold homegrown and foreign fighters accountable for the crime of genocide. At the moment they are charged with ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’ which is far more anodyne than the genocide charge of which they are also guilty.   CJLPA : Can you walk us through what happened to the Yazidi women and children upon their escape? What reparations did they receive and to what extent were they supported psychologically and financially?   NM : Everyone has a different story. I lived in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp with survivors from my family and then was taken to Germany as a refugee. Thousands of other girls like me are still in camps, without access to privacy, education, or employment. Although the Iraqi government promised reparations—and I am pleased that some Yazidis have benefitted—it has been increasingly hard for many survivors to access them.   It is worth saying though that at least two thousand Yazidi women are still in captivity and we also need to work hard to get them home.   CJLPA : Further to the above, can you speak about the support that is missing for victims currently?   NM : I think that policymakers are often fixed on the short-term and the quick fix for survivors. However, rebuilding communities sustainably requires long-term vision and planning. That's why my initiative plans for decades rather than days. We run economic empowerment and educational programs. We help women set up businesses and then give the support they need to succeed.   Survivors need to know they have a long future in which they can be safe, active, and equal participants in their communities.   Nadia at the Yazidi Genocide Memorial in Sinjar, opened October 2023 and built using funds from her peace prize and USAID. It was a project led by Nadia's Initiative and the International Organization on Migration. More details available at . CJLPA : How can the international community help prevent sexual violence from occurring in conflicts? Are there countries currently that you have seen have begun an inspiring change in their policy that other countries should follow?   NM : The international community must start prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict so that it is universally acknowledged that it is not acceptable in any country, in any instance. Germany has led the way in prosecuting its ISIS citizens—but much more needs to be done globally.   CJLPA : You have devoted your life to combat the sexual violence occurring in conflicts and to help save women and children falling victim to these inhumane crimes. You are constantly meeting with policymakers, NGOs, the UN, and going before the courts. How has this experience been to date? Do you find they are responding with the urgency needed?   NM : There is never enough urgency. When I wrote my book, which details the horror of my experience, I said that I wanted to be the last girl this happens to. But I haven’t been the last. There have been so many more which is heartbreaking. It’s not due to a lack of political will, but a lack of political action. I don’t advocate at the UN and with other policy makers just for Yazidi girls, but for all girls. And if we want to keep our girls safe, there has to be a stronger framework.   CJLPA : Further to the above, what laws—domestic and international law—do you think need to change in order to ensure accountability? Inaction is a crime in itself. It is one thing to hold the perpetrators accountable, but what about the countries that are able, but unwilling to help?   NM : I believe that you are right when you say that inaction is a crime in itself. I often think of the governments who looked the other way when my community was under brutal attack. One of the first steps they can take now is to officially recognise the murder of Yazidis in 2014 as a genocide. The second step is to adopt universal jurisdiction so that more foreign fighters can be prosecuted. Beyond that I would advocate for reparations for survivors to be put into law. I have been advocating for reparations for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), not just in Iraq, but in other countries where sexual violence has been used in conflict, including in Ukraine, where I asked the President of Ukraine to consider passing a law that will enable survivors of CRSV to receive reparations.   CJLPA : You created The Murad Code Project which is a set of guidelines aimed at building a community of better practice for, with, and concerning survivors of systematic and conflict-related sexual violence. Can you briefly walk us through what prompted you to this initiative and your hopes for how it will be used moving forward? NM : When I first started telling my story, I was interviewed by many investigators and reporters. Some of them had my best interests at heart and treated me with kindness and gave me agency. However, many did not.   I was not always aware of how my story would be used and I was subjected to questioning that was heartless. Therefore, I wanted to lend my name, experiences, and expertise to a code that worked to protect other survivors from this.   The Murad Code lays out the bare minimum of standards that interviewers should adhere to when they speak to traumatised survivors. It has also been translated into a number of different languages so that survivors know how they should be treated by their interlocutors.   I hope that eventually it will be put into policy frameworks, as well as newsrooms, so that survivors are treated as people with agency, not a walking headline.   CJLPA : What is a final message you would like to send to the reader, in the name of spreading awareness and inspiring hope?   NM : There is always hope. Even when the world seems dark, there are good people working for justice, peace, and a stable future. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is a qualified lawyer in England & Wales specialising in public international law.

Abstract Expressionism emerged amid a tense post-war climate, as a new genre of art that seemed so devoid of representational form or meaning that it could not be political. However, it was precisely this apparent apoliticality that made it so intensely political. Historiography on the topic has followed what I am inclined to call a ‘top-down’ trend. As outlined by Eva Cockcroft and Frances Stonor Saunders, those in power consciously used the art of the Abstract Expressionists as a means of cultural diplomacy or propaganda to influence the opinions of both Western and Russian intelligentsia. In this sense it provided a riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism.[1] It is important to note that this view was precipitated by the 1967 exposé which revealed the CIA’s political involvement in the Cultural Cold War, and it has been supported since.[2] By contrast, revisionist interpretations, such as Kozloff’s Artforum  piece, have sought to present the parallels between ‘American Cold War rhetoric’ and the individualistic philosophy of Abstract Expressionism as purely coincidental. They cite the lack of evidence of political manoeuvres and agreements between arts institutions—such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—and the US government.[3]   To evaluate the extent to which Abstract Expressionism was an ideological weapon, one must explore the intentions of the actors involved in the structure of the cultural-diplomatic operation— if that is how one characterises the movement. It is necessary to analyse the objectives of artists within the movement, as well as subsequent interpretations by critics and those at the forefront of the American conservative backlash. It is more plausible that the political significance of Abstract Expressionism was created by those with influence—such as art critics and the heads of cultural institutions, whose opinions carried intellectual weight—than by artists. MoMA enthusiastically supported Abstract Expressionism through exhibitions abroad, and there were suspicious links between its leadership and that of the CIA, as highlighted by Louis Menand and David and Cecile Shapiro. These facts further endorse this view.[4] Abstract Expressionism was in many ways a riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism, but the discourse between these two movements is beyond the scope of this essay, which instead interrogates the institutional processes behind this politicisation of the American art movement. Although individuals at all levels of influence had the political agency to engender combative ideology, those in the upper echelons of the political structure were markedly energetic in their promotion of art as a tool of war. They ensured Abstract Expressionism was rendered a weapon in the Cultural Cold War.   In many cases, artists did not produce work with a political purpose in mind. Art critics were largely responsible for constructing the combative personality of Abstract Expressionism. ‘Abstract Expressionism’ encompassed such a wide range of abstract art that those within it were reluctant to label themselves a collective. Yet, a common feature of Abstract Expressionist works was the absence of distinguishable or referential subject matter, and therefore any apparent political leaning. However, if one were to emphasise the significance of the artist’s agency, as Stonor Saunders does in her view that it is ‘hard to sustain the argument that the Abstract Expressionists merely “happened to be painting in the Cold War and not for the Cold War”’, then the artist’s political affiliation would become of interest to the historian.[5]   Harold Rosenberg, an influential art critic and outspoken supporter of Abstract Expressionism, proposes an argument from individualism for the artist’s personal agency. However, this interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is flawed. Rosenberg asserts that the new ‘American Action Painters’ were distinct because of their ‘consciousness of a function for a painting’, tacitly implying the possibility of the politicality of Abstract Expressionists.[6] However, his argument that the ‘act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence’ contradicts this. It suggests that the artist’s work is inextricable from biographical influences, and therefore that one is incapable of creating work with a meaning or motive different from those of their artistic upbringing.[7] Furthermore, when applied to Abstract Expressionism in the context of the Cold War, the argument invalidates that of Stonor Saunders. The infamous Jackson Pollock had previously worked in the workshops of Communist-sponsored artists. He had also collaborated with Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Mexican Communist Party member and supporter of Stalinism. Had Pollock’s artistic life been truly inseparable from his work, his art could be read by Rosenberg as ‘communistic’. Cockcroft believed that the alignment between American Cold War ideals and ‘the way many Abstract Expressionists phrased their existentialist-individualist credos’ was ‘consciously forged’. This is unconvincing, yet so is Max Kozloff’s argument that it was coincidental.[8] New York School artists were more probably concerned with creating the first internationally influential American artistic movement than with using their art as a propaganda weapon. This was instead done by those in power. We must therefore view the artist and the influencer as working within individual yet intersecting spheres.   The compelling rhetoric of American freedom that critics and officials applied to Abstract Expressionism engendered a pugnacious artistic climate. There was debate between art critics such as Alfred Barr and American conservatives on the movement’s ‘communistic’ leanings. This debate demonstrates how art was not merely ‘for art’s sake’, but was viewed as a propagandistic battleground. Barr countered conservative assertions, such as those of Representative Dondero, in a 1952 New York Times  piece. It exemplifies the rhetoric of individualism that both critics and state figures repeatedly used as a riposte to Socialist Realism and the oppressive nature of Soviet totalitarianism.[9] Barr stated that ‘the modern artist’s non-conformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictators’ propaganda’. These statements dismiss the ‘communistic’ leanings of Abstract Expressionism and reframe it as a symbol of political freedom.[10] Moreover, Socialist Realism came to be included in the US artistic sphere, for example with MoMA’s 1946 retrospective exhibition of the Lithuanian-born American Socialist Realist artist Ben Shahn, strengthening the US’s philosophy of freedom. Giants of capitalist business, such as Rockefeller, appeared open to funding art like that being displayed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Although the US government itself exported art, without critics such as Barr and Rosenberg, as well as the actions of MoMA, Abstract Expressionism would have been a futile and apolitical ‘weapon’.   MoMA’s economic connections exemplify how a Manhattan-based oligarchy used Abstract Expressionism to further the political interests of American capitalism. MoMA’s funding, leadership, and very foundation were supported overtly by American financiers, and covertly by the CIA. The establishment of MoMA in 1929 was enabled by the support of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Nelson Rockefeller controlled it throughout the 1940s and 1950s—the peak of its cultural-diplomatic ventures. Cockcroft compellingly asserts that one must look to patronage and the ‘ideological needs of the powerful’ when analysing the success of an artistic movement.[11] It is difficult to maintain that MoMA would have had free rein without its Rockefeller benefactors. As giants of American capitalism, the Rockefellers would surely have supported the exhibition of a movement which advertised the US’ rhetoric of freedom. One might disregard the connection between a person’s wealth and their politics. Nonetheless, it is not a far-fetched possibility that Nelson Rockefeller, a high-profile Republican and one-term Vice President, would have supported US cultural-diplomatic ventures against the Soviet intellectual threat. The US arts sector was privatised, unlike its European counterparts. This let what David Caute describes as ‘the pantheon of ever-ready demons of patronage’ influence American psychological warfare, and thus Cold War politics.[12]   MoMA’s International Council energetically displayed Abstract Expressionism abroad, demonstrating how the movement was used as cultural propaganda directed at Western European intellectuals. MoMA’s purchase of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and subsequent curation of its exhibitions there between 1954 and 1962, was the first time a Biennale pavilion had been autonomous from government ownership and influence. However, much like for Abstract Expressionism itself, the apparent apoliticality of this was more likely a front. MoMA’s leaders had vested interests in the fight against communism. Abstract Expressionism already had a support base in Venice at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo—she had given Pollock one-man shows in 1943, 1945, and 1947. MoMA exhibited Willem De Kooning’s work in a US pavilion at an international event in 1948. Cockcroft argues that its private ownership made this pavilion free of ‘the kinds of pressure of unsubtle red-baiting and super-jingoism applied to official governmental agencies’.[13]   MoMA aggressively exported Abstract Expressionism across Europe through exhibitions in the late 1950s. ‘Modern Art in the United States’ toured Europe in 1956. The largest of its five sections dedicated to ‘Contemporary Abstract Art’ comprised 28 paintings by 17 Abstract Expressionists. In 1959, ‘The New American Painting’ was shown in eight European countries. The tour would have exposed Western European intellectuals, many of whom might have been Soviet travellers, to an artistic movement which stylistically promoted American ideals of freedom of personal expression. It ran contrary to the Socialist Realism of the USSR, an explicit form of propaganda.   The US government passionately endorsed cultural diplomacy through art, both covertly and overtly. As mentioned, there is evidence, albeit dubious, of CIA influence on MoMA’s leadership. Thomas Braden, executive secretary of MoMA in the late 1940s, went on to join the CIA as Supervisor of Cultural Activities in 1951. Braden enthusiastically supported the export of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon in the ‘propaganda war’.[14] He defended this in his 1967 article ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’: given that the Cold War was ‘fought with ideas instead of bombs’, ‘to choose innocence [was] to choose defeat’.[15] Furthermore, René d’Harnoncourt and Porter A McCray, both from Roosevelt’s Center of Inter-American Affairs, later joined MoMA. McCray, described by Cockcroft as a key figure in the history of ‘cultural imperialism’, joined as director of the museum’s international programmes.[16] However, state intervention was more direct in some instances, with open government sponsorship of exhibitions. In 1946, the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs curated ‘Advancing American Art’, an exhibition which used $49,000 of government money to purchase 79 paintings. Although its art was not exclusively abstract, the collection was overwhelmingly Modernist, providing an apt riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism.   The most explicit and successful example of Abstract Expressionism’s deployment as a Cold War weapon was at the American National Exhibition’s visit to Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in 1959. Its open sponsorship by the USIA (United States Information Agency) is significant. The USIA helped censor the work of ‘avowed communists … or persons who publicly refuse to answer questions of Congressional committees regarding connection with the communist movement’.[17] David and Cecile Shapiro assert that almost anything was a potential target for ‘congressional pot-shots’. This supports traditional interpretations that emphasise the role of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon in the Cold War. Critics had so successfully fostered a connection between Abstract Expressionism and the ideals of the American psyche that the State was willing to promote it. Marilyn S Kushner asserts that despite Pollock’s Cathedral  (1947) and Lachaise’s Standing Woman  (1932) being seen   as ‘grotesque and mocking’, the art at the exhibition was seen as a ‘manifestation of a free society, much as was originally intended by the USIA’.[18] Pollock’s brash handling of paint, his cold colour palette, and his non-representational subject matter may have contributed to Soviet disdain. They were antithetical to the vibrant colours used by artists such as Taslitzky, and the highly naturalistic scenes, frequently of a political subject matter, painted by Gerasimov.[19] This display of American values in the heart of the Soviet world sparked questions of political freedom, particularly from young Soviets who were interested in what forbidden ideals they had been sheltered from. It was an aggressive form of propaganda.   Abstract Expressionist works were not, therefore, inherently weapons of the cultural Cold War. Harold Rosenberg, in ‘American Action Painters’, said that Abstract Expressionists created an ‘environment not of people but of functions’, that ‘his paintings are employed  not wanted ’ (my italics).[20] Abstract Expressionism was not   created with the purpose of being a psychological weapon against communism, but those with intellectual influence politicised it and made it such. It was this ‘middle stratum’ that engendered and buttressed cultural diplomacy through art. I have taken a hierarchical approach to analysing the impact of different strata within the cultural-diplomatic structure—from the artists, to the critic, to the museum, to the state. This approach demonstrates that critics created the weapon through politicising the apolitical Abstract Expressionism and aligning it with American ideals. Furthermore, MoMA, allied with the state, physically exported and mobilised art as propaganda, using the weapon created by critics. First came the fashioning of a culture that was anti-communist, and thus anti-Socialist Realist. Along with this came the dissemination of a belief among US art critics that Abstract Expressionism was the superior movement. Second came the aggressive physical exportation and touring of the artworks across Europe, including to Moscow in the late 1950s, in an attempt to woo Western intellectuals with the ‘benefits’ of capitalism. These currents were mutually supportive, bolstering the idea that art could be political. Regardless of whether the US government was successful in its psychological war against the Soviet Union, the argument that Abstract Expressionism was used as a weapon in the Cold War is persuasive. Mina Polo   Mina Polo is a second-year undergraduate in History at University College London, interested in cultural history. In 2021, she hopes to take further her research on jazz diplomacy and its impact on the American Civil Rights Movement. [1] Eva Cockcroft, Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War. Pollock and   After: The Critical Debate  (Harper and Row 1985) 125-33; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War  (Granta 1999). [2] In March 1967, Ramparts Magazine  exposed links between the CIA and the National Students’ Association (NSA), revealing the extent of the alleged Operation Mockingbird. In May of that year, Thomas Braden’s Saturday Evening Post article ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’ unveiled the   connections between the CIA and US cultural programs. [3] Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War’ in Francis Frascina (ed), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (Routledge 2000). [4] Louis Menand, ‘Unpopular Front: American Art and the Cold War’ The New Yorker ; David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, ‘Excerpt from “Abstract   Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting” Part 3’ in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique  (Yale University Press 2005). [5] Stonor Saunders (n 1) (as quoted in David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford University Press 2008) 546). [6] Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (first published 1952) in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press 1959) 24. [7] ibid 28. [8] Cockcroft (n 1) 126. [9] Alfred H Barr, ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’ The New York Times  (New York, 14 December 1952). [10] ibid 22. [11] Cockcroft (n 1) 125. [12] Caute (n 5) 541. [13] Cockcroft (n 1) 129. [14] Shapiro and Shapiro (n 4) 441. [15] Thomas W Braden, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’ The Saturday Evening Post  (20 May 1967) 14. [16] Cockcroft (n 1) 127. [17] As quoted in Shapiro and Shapiro (n 4) 339-40. [18] Marilyn S Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959’ (2002) 4(1) Journal of Cold War Studies 19. [19] See the paintings The Strikes of June, 1936 (Boris Taslitzky 1936), and Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin  (Aleksandr Gerasimov 1938).   Gerasimov won the Stalin Prize in 1941 for this painting. [20] Rosenberg (n 6) 38.

Introduction   The principle of parliamentary sovereignty has been a long-held tenet of the UK’s unwritten constitution. AV   Dicey outlined its features in 1885. However, 87 years later, the UK became a member of the European Economic Communities, with the European Communities Act 1972 providing the domestic legal basis for EU law in the UK. Lord Denning described EU law as ‘an incoming tide […] [that] cannot be held back’.[1] However, others, such as Professor Phillip Norton, likened the relationship between the UK and EU as a ‘patchwork quilt’, with the UK consistently being in a position of ‘playing catch-up of trying to make sense of the constitutional consequences of different treaties negotiated since membership’.[2] This is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between EU supremacy and the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty.   As a result of membership to the EU, the UK became subject to the extensive doctrine of EU supremacy, firmly established by the CJEU in Costa v Enel  in 1964. In 1991, the House of Lords (in Factortame ) were required to set aside primary legislation which was found to be incompatible with EU Law provisions.[3] The ruling in Factortame  gave rise to numerous arguments that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the doctrine of EU supremacy were incompatible. This argument was a significant driving force behind the UK leaving the EU. This essay explores two questions. Firstly, the position of parliamentary sovereignty while the UK was still a member state of the EU, and in particular whether or not EU supremacy and parliamentary sovereignty were in fact incompatible. Secondly, whether leaving the EU helped to restore a traditional notion of sovereignty, by examining the role and development of the courts in Miller  (No 1)[4], devolution and the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022.    While the primary focus is the legal effect that the UK’s EU membership and subsequent withdrawal had on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, discussions regarding Brexit, Parliament, and the constitution are inherently influenced by politics. In 2009, Vernon Bogdanor argued that the UK is ‘as a nation notoriously uninterested in our constitution’, due to the nature of the constitution. As such, he notes that ‘constitution’ has two meanings. Firstly, it can refer to ‘a selection of the most important legal rules regulating the government and embodied in a document promulgated in a particular moment in time’.[5] Regarding the second meaning of ‘constitution’, Bogdanor asserts that ‘anyone living in an organised society must certainly possess a constitution’.[6] It is in this category of constitution that the UK falls. However, since conversations around the UK leaving the EU began, the UK’s constitution and parliamentary sovereignty in particular have been brought to the forefront of parliamentary debates, which have consequently been amplified by the media.[7] This has shaped public opinion on the relationship between EU membership and parliamentary sovereignty and brought the topic of the UK’s constitutional arrangements to a more prominent position compared to the suggestion of Bogdanor in 2009. Furthermore, while the question of devolution and its effect on parliamentary sovereignty is undoubtedly an important one, it is nonetheless a complex area within the UK’s constitution. In light of this complexity, and constraints on space, this essay will focus on devolution in Scotland.   This essay ultimately puts forward the view that EU membership was not incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and that sovereignty was still able to operate in a meaningful way following Factortame . This is on the basis that while EU membership undoubtedly resulted in a move away from the traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty, this change resulted from a natural evolution of an uncodified principle rather than a single revolutionary change. In light of this natural evolution, it is argued that the act of leaving the EU alone cannot amount to the restoration of the traditional interpretation of sovereignty in the nineteenth century.   The Position of Parliamentary Sovereignty throughout EU Membership   Following the Treaty of Rome (1958), the European Economic Community (EEC) was formed. The initial member states were comprised of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy. The EEC, therefore, formed the basis for the EU. The EU expanded from a body solely focused on the economic integration of member states, into a complex and sophisticated legal system, enacting legislation throughout a large range of policy areas.[8] With the EU enacting significant amounts of legislation, in such an extensive range of areas (in addition to various requirements as to how it should be integrated into domestic law), the question arises as to how this legislation is followed uniformly and consistently throughout the member states. This question was first raised in Costa v Enel .[9]   In Costa , the issue was whether pieces of national legislation could prevail over community law where the two were in conflict. The Italian government argued that community law had been ‘transposed into the Italian legal order by national legislation’.[10] However, the CJEU, in their preliminary ruling, reasoned: ‘By contrast with ordinary principles of international treaties, the EEC treaty had created its own legal system, which on entry into force of the treaty, became an integral part of the legal systems of that member state and which their courts are bound to apply’.[11] The CJEU stated: ‘The transfer by the states from their domestic legal system to the community legal system of rights and obligations arising under the treaties carries with it a permanent limitation on their sovereign rights’.[12] The decision was a clear statement from the CJEU in regard to the doctrine of EU law supremacy—where domestic law and community law are in conflict, community law will take precedence.   The subsequent German case of Internationale Handelsgesellschaft [13] demonstrated how far the doctrine of EU supremacy could extend. At issue was whether or not EU law can take precedence over the fundamental rights enshrined in the German constitution where the two were in conflict.[14] The CJEU held that the government could not take recourse to the legal rules or concepts of national law in order to judge the validity of community law.[15] Costa  and Internationale Handelsgesellschaft demonstrate the wide-reaching effect that the doctrine of EU law supremacy has upon the domestic legal systems of EU member states. This brings us to the question of how the doctrine of EU supremacy has been received within the UK’s unwritten constitution and legal framework.   In 1972, the UK became a member of the EU. This was facilitated within domestic law via the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA 1972).[16] The UK constitution is unwritten, meaning that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty is not codified formally. Nonetheless, the principle has historically been written about and defined by writers such as A V Dicey. In 1885, Dicey outlined three key elements of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Firstly, parliament can make or unmake any law that it chooses. Secondly, parliament cannot bind its successors. And finally, no other institution can set aside or override an act of parliament.[17] The first significant UK case concerning the potential conflict between the doctrine of EU supremacy and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty came in 1991 in Factortame .[18]   The Factortame  case arose following the implementation of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. S 14 required vessels to register in order to be able to fish in British waters. However, to do so, the vessels were required to either be British-owned or be managed from within the UK. Therefore, any vessel which did not meet these requirements was unable to be re-registered under the new provisions. 95 (predominately Spanish-controlled) vessels were unable to re-register under the act.[19] The Spanish vessels sought a judicial review, claiming that this provision infringed on their rights granted by EU law. A key question arose as to whether the appellants could be granted interim relief. While the House of Lords agreed that the appellants would ‘suffer irreparable damage’[20] if they were not granted interim relief by temporarily suspending the provision, they held that the national courts did not have the power to grant such a measure[21] and sent the case to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling.   Regarding this, the CJEU held that ‘the obligations on national courts to apply community law having direct effect and to protect rights which the latter confers on individuals includes the obligation to consider whether interim protection of rights claimed against the authorities of a member state should be granted in order to avoid irremediable damage and, where appropriate, to grant such interim relief’.[22] It has often been suggested that the ruling demonstrates how the UK’s membership in the EU, and therefore the acceptance of EU supremacy, was incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty since an institution other than Parliament was obliged to suspend the enforcement of a provision from an Act. Therefore, the Parliament of 1988 had been bound by the Parliament of 1972.   This was the view taken by William Wade. Writing in 1996, following the Factortame  decision, Wade states: ‘While Britain remains in the community, we are in a regime in which Parliament has bound it’s successors successfully, and for which it is nothing if not revolutionary’.[23] Wade goes on note that while the 1972 Act was being passed by Parliament, there was much debate as to whether entering the EU would bind Parliament’s successors. However, ultimately, ‘members were assured that the sovereignty of Parliament would remain intact because it was legally indestructible’[24] on the basis that any provision made under the Act could be repealed and that Parliament remained free to repeal the 1972 Act whenever it chose. While recent history has demonstrated the latter remained true throughout the UK’s period as a member state, Wade nevertheless ultimately argues that ‘Parliament’s powers had suffered a seismic change’ following Factortame .[25] However, the extent to which this could be considered to be true has been subject to debate.   In the House of Lords ruling on Factortame ,[26] Lord Bridge asserts that there was clear jurisprudence surrounding the doctrine of EU supremacy prior to the UK joining the EU. Therefore, ‘whatever limitation of its sovereignty when it enacted the European Communities Act 1972 was entirely voluntary’. Furthermore, Lord Bridge goes on to state that ‘similarly, when decisions of the CJEU have exposed areas of UK statute law which have failed to implement Council directives, Parliament has always loyally accepted the obligation to make appropriate and prompt amendments. Thus, there is nothing in any way novel in according supremacy to rules of community law to those areas to which they apply’.[27]   The statements of Lord Bridge therefore give rise to the suggestion that parliamentary sovereignty was not drastically changed as a consequence of the UK being a member of the EU. While some change to parliamentary sovereignty did occur, the changes were not as ‘seismic’ as Wade asserts. Mark Elliot notes that the constitutional significance of disapplying an Act of Parliament ‘was reduced to little more than background to the litigation’. Furthermore, Elliot highlights that while it was only Lord Bridge who spoke about such issues in his judgement, this was only insofar as to highlight that, as noted earlier, Parliament voluntarily accepted a limitation on its sovereignty by enacting the ECA 1972. However, Elliot also notes several ways in which the domestic courts could have responded to Factortame . Firstly, the House of Lords could have held that ‘the primary responsibility of the UK Courts is to give effect to the most recent expression of Parliament’s will’ and consequently enforced the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 in question, regardless of their compatibility with EU Law. However, as Elliot notes, ‘such a response would have implied a very rigid understanding of the domestic constitutional order and notion of parliamentary sovereignty’, notwithstanding the difficulties which would arise as a consequence of the UK breaching its international obligations. The second approach explained by Elliot highlights that the approach adopted by the House of Lords was more ‘intermediate’ in nature. Thus, instead of the UK constitution being fixed and unmoving, it is, ‘flexible enough to accord to EU law some degree of priority over incompatible domestic legislation’.[28]   Upon this view, it can be suggested that Wade’s approach fails to consider any form of flexibility in domestic constitutional law. Paul Craig highlights that Wade’s analysis of the traditional view of sovereignty is based, in part, on the reasoning that ‘Parliament is sovereign in the sense there depicted because it accords with the reasoning of Coke, Blackstone and Dicey’.[29] While this accords with Elliot’s rigid interpretation of how Factortame  could have potentially been decided, this ultimately was not followed by the Court. Therefore, Wade’s strong adherence to the traditional notion of sovereignty fails to consider the possibility of flexibility and, consequently, any degree of a natural evolution of sovereignty and how this may affect its operation.   At the time of the Factortame  case, Dicey’s writing on parliamentary sovereignty was already over 100 years old. In addition to this, sovereignty, alongside other principles of the UK constitution, remains formally uncodified. Due to the uncodified nature of parliamentary sovereignty, it is impossible for it to not be subject to change or evolution as society evolves. While membership to the EU has changed Dicey’s traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty, such a change ultimately highlights the existence of the ability for sovereignty to evolve and adapt to the needs of modern society. In Factortame , sovereignty was shown to be flexible enough to encompass the doctrine of EU supremacy. Consequently, Wade’s strong assertions that sovereignty suffered a ‘seismic change’ in the wake of Factortame  and that this was ‘nothing short of revolutionary’ seem diminished.[30]   NW Barber arguably takes a more extreme view than Wade and states that parliamentary sovereignty no longer existed following Factortame . Barber asserts that ‘when the pre-1991 interpretations are considered, it is clear that the rule ceased to be a feature in the British Constitution after Factortame ’.[31] However, the role of the courts under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998) can be seen as evidence to challenge this view. The HRA 1998 was enacted to give effect to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) within domestic law. However, in situations where courts cannot give effect to a provision in a way which is compatible with convention rights, courts do not have the power to strike down incompatible legislation. Section 4 only allows for higher courts to make a declaration of incompatibility. However, such declarations do not ‘affect the validity, continuing operation or enforcement of the provision in respect to which it was given’.[32] It is therefore the decision of Parliament to amend any provisions deemed incompatible with convention rights. Although Lord Hope notes that the court’s ability to interpret legislation under s 3(1) is ‘far-reaching’,[33] the fact that the courts cannot strike down legislation and such power remained with Parliament suggests that parliamentary sovereignty did in fact continue to operate following Factortame . This is on the basis that powers granted to the courts under s 4 ultimately respects that Parliament is the ultimate law-making body.   Overall, concerning the question of whether EU Membership infringed on parliamentary sovereignty, it can be shown that while there was a move away from the traditional interpretation of sovereignty as a result of EU membership, the principle was nonetheless still able to operate while the UK was a member of the EU. This is on the basis that this represented a natural development of a long-standing uncodified principle. Therefore, sovereignty was able to adapt and change to fulfil the requirements of EU membership while still being able to operate meaningfully.   The Courts and Parliamentary Sovereignty    The case of Miller  (No1)[34] arose amid the Government’s attempt to use prerogative powers in order to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU),[35] which enables member states to begin the process of leaving the EU. Article 50(2) requires that the member state notifies the European Council of their intention to withdraw. Once this notice has been given, a two-year period begins in which a withdrawal agreement must be negotiated between the member state and the European Council.[36]   Following the 2016 Referendum, Prime Minister Theresa May’s government attempted to use prerogative powers to trigger Article 50. Gina Miller, alongside other applicants, challenged this use of prerogative powers. The case was brought on the basis that once notice had been given it could not be reversed. Consequently, the use of prerogative powers would ‘pre-empt the decision of Parliament on the Great Repeal Bill’ which would amount to ‘altering the law by ministerial action […] Without prior legislation’.[37] Delivering their judgement in January 2017, the Supreme Court highlighted the comments of Lord Denning in Blackburn v Attorney General , which outlined the general position of treaty negotiations: ‘The treaty making provisions of this country rest not in the courts but the Crown […] When ministers negotiate a treaty […] They act on behalf of the country as a whole’.[38] However, despite recognising this general position, the court noted that withdrawing from the EU would ‘constitute as significant a constitutional change’[39] as joining the EU in 1972. Accordingly, ‘it would be inconsistent with the long-standing and fundamental principle for such a far-reaching change to the UK constitutional arrangements to be brought about by[…]ministerial action alone’.[40] Additionally, it was noted that EU law created a distinct source of law and legal rights which had become ‘inextricably linked’ with domestic rights and obligations from other sources of law.[41] It was the view of the majority that the government could not trigger Article 50 using prerogative powers and instead required the consent of Parliament via an Act of Parliament in order to do so.[42] This led to the passing of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017.   The reasoning of the majority has been criticised. Mark Elliot puts forward the view that the majority’s assertion that major constitutional changes can only be made by legislation ‘lacks support in authority, imports into law a novel and highly imprecise criterion by which prerogative powers are delimited and rests upon normative powers that are unarticulated and notably absent’.[43] Despite this, there has been support for the court’s ruling, suggesting that it essentially accords with existing common law principles.[44] An example of such a principle can be seen in the Fire Brigades Union case in 1995, where Lord Browne-Wilkinson stated: ‘It would most surprising if, at present day, prerogative powers could be validly exercised by the executive as to frustrate the will of Parliament […] and to an extent, pre-empt the decision of Parliament’.[45] Therefore, for Barber, Hickman, and King, the decision upholds the sovereignty of Parliament.[46] In this light, the Supreme Court’s decision to prevent the Government from using prerogative in Miller (No. 1)  can be seen as the Court maintaining Parliament’s sovereignty and it’s law-making power, albeit in what has been considered an unorthodox way.   Throughout the UK’s membership to the EU, the nature and role of the domestic courts have undoubtedly developed and altered.[47] However, this is in no way novel, as there have also been instances of the courts developing in order to meet the circumstances and challenges of the time. One historical example of this is the development of the Court of Chancery in the Middle Ages. Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the legal system in England was fragmented and varied depending on the area, with no official records.[48] The common law system which subsequently developed during this period comprised of very rigid and inflexible principles which would often lead to unfair outcomes.[49] Individuals could petition the King to adjudicate on their issue. Sir John Baker highlights that as far back as King Alfred, coronation oaths referred to a ‘clear royal duty of ensuring equitable judgements’.[50] This function of the King was in time delegated to the Lord Chancellor and eventually led to the development of the Courts of Chancery. The Court of Chancery was much more flexible than that of the Common Law courts, having powers that the Common Law courts did not.[51] The two courts operated separately alongside one another until the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, removing the Chancery and Common Law courts and replacing them with the High Court (which was split into the Chancery, King’s Bench and Family Divisions)[52] which are still seen today.[53]   The above illustrates that the development and evolution of the Constitution and other similarly important areas have arisen when needed to address areas of the law considered deficient. While membership to the EU can be considered a catalyst for some of the developments seen in recent decades, the evolution of constitutional principles can nonetheless be shown to not be limited to the period in which the UK was a member of the EU. On this basis, as the evolution of parliamentary sovereignty cannot be solely attributed to EU membership, the act of leaving the EU alone cannot restore a traditional notion of sovereignty due to other factors which may influence development.   Devolution and Parliamentary Sovereignty   Another significant constitutional development which has had a more direct impact on parliamentary sovereignty, is the implementation and development of devolution. In 1973, the Kilbrandon Commission recommended that devolution of some powers should occur, with Scotland and Wales having their own elected assemblies. Professor Norton highlights that there are both political and economic benefits to devolution: it allows individuals in devolved regions to have ‘a greater sense of attachment to the [political] process’ and resources can be more easily allocated where needed.[54]   Despite support for devolution in the early 70s, devolution in Scotland was not facilitated until the late 1990s with the Scotland Act 1998. While Scotland was already considered to have a significant degree of ‘administrative devolution’, the 1998 act nonetheless developed this in two distinct ways. Firstly, by ‘conferring legislative competence on the Scottish Parliament’, and, secondly, ‘create[ing] new institutions for political representations in Scotland’. These developments allowed Scotland to have a greater degree of control over law and policy and has been said to have created a greater divide between Scotland and Westminster in this regard.[55] The subsequent Scotland Acts of 2012 and 2016 further widened the powers of the Scottish Parliament.[56]   The implementation of devolution has given rise to a debate on whether the UK has developed into a ‘Quasi-federal’ state. Nicholas Aroney highlights that while the UK has traditionally been considered a ‘unitary state’, the development of devolution has ‘given creditability’ to this debate. Furthermore, Aroney notes that while devolution has created a degree of federalism in the UK (due to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland having their own elected legislatures), there are important differences between the UK and traditional federal systems. Firstly, due to the powers of the devolved legislatures being granted by virtue of the Westminster Parliament, instead of a written constitution binding the two. Secondly, due to the level of asymmetry fundamental to the system. Aroney argues that this is because while Wales, Scotland and Northern Island’s devolution frameworks are ‘tailored’ to each territory, England does not have a corresponding devolved institution and is instead governed solely by the Westminster Parliament.[57] With the above in mind, it can be argued that devolution does not strictly accord with Dicey’s traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty, due to an institution other than the Westminster Parliament having the power to make laws. While the Westminster Parliament does retain the ultimate law-making power in the UK and therefore remains sovereign in that sense, devolution can nonetheless be shown to represent another development away from Dicey’s interpretation of sovereignty.   The potential side-effect of quasi-federalism on parliamentary sovereignty can be seen in the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill) 2022. The bill seeks to sunset all retained EU law by the end of December 2023, unless explicitly specifically saved by a Minister. However, in regard to retained EU law that falls under a devolved competence, the bill allows a Minister of said devolved legislature to save it from being sunsetted. However, it has been noted that the powers under the bill have been drafted so widely that ministers of devolved nations could potentially save all retained EU law and devolved competence from being sunsetted.[58] In regard to Scotland specifically, the 2016 Brexit referendum saw the majority of Scotland voting to remain in the EU. In light of this, the Scottish Parliament may elect to save all retained EU law which falls under its competence. A consequence of this would be a greater divergence of laws between Scotland and Westminster which would have further impact on the operation of parliamentary sovereignty. Furthermore, this course of action also does not align with Dicey’s interpretation of sovereignty.   Overall, the implementation of devolution in the UK represents a further development in the operation of parliamentary sovereignty away from Dicey’s traditional interpretation of it. Therefore, in light of such a significant constitutional development, an attempt to restore the traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty can be shown to be a far more complex endeavour than simply withdrawing from the EU.   EU Withdrawal and Parliamentary Sovereignty   The European Union (Withdrawal) Act (EUWA) 2018 sought to deal with the ‘wide-ranging impact upon the law of the United Kingdom upon exit of the European Union’. Its primary aim was to create a framework whereby the roughly 20,000 pieces of EU-derived legislation could be preserved in domestic law upon the UK’s exit from the EU.[59] While the Act makes wide-ranging provisions for various types of retained EU law (REUL), this essay will focus on the continuation of EU supremacy and the extensive powers given to ministers to correct ‘deficiencies’ left behind by EU law.   S 5 of the EUWA outlines the circumstances in which the principle of supremacy continues to operate. While s 5(1) states that supremacy does not apply to legislation made on or after completion day, s 5(2) states that ‘Accordingly, the principle of supremacy of EU law continues to apply on or after [IP Completion] day so far as relevant to the interpretation, disapplication or quashing of any enactment made on or before [IP completion] day’.[60] While Elliot and Tierney note that limiting the scope of EU supremacy to pre-exit legislation was a sensible course of action, the continued use of the word ‘supremacy’ was problematic.[61] This issue was explored by the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in their report on EUWA when it was still in bill form.[62] Despite the committee agreeing with the policy aims behind the provision[63] they highlighted several issues with how the government sought to achieve it. Firstly, they expressed concern with the ‘vagueness and ambiguity’ of the provision, in particular in regard to the types of retained EU law the principle is to continue to apply to,[64] in addition to ‘which forms of domestic law […] are intended to yield to retained EU law because of the supremacy principle’.[65]   However, the most significant issue highlighted by the Constitution Committee was the question of how EU supremacy could be ‘meaningfully’ maintained following exit day,[66] saying that the continuation of supremacy ‘is a fundamental flaw at the heart of the bill’.[67] While the Committee made several suggestions as to how to remedy this, the Government declined to make any changes and the bill was enacted with EU supremacy still operating post-exit from the EU. S 1 of the EUWA expressly repeals the ECA 1972 upon exit day. Therefore, the continuation of a fundamental EU-derived principle (especially as one as strongly contested as supremacy) without its domestic legal basis seems somewhat nonsensical. Moreover, it strongly suggests that leaving the EU has been unable to restore a traditional notion of sovereignty.   Another significant provision of the EUWA is Section 8, which provides: ‘A Minister of the Crown may by regulations make such provision as the minister considers appropriate to prevent, remedy or mitigate (a) any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively, or (b) any other deficiency in retained EU law, arising from the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU’.[68]   The passing of secondary legislation into law is a very different process to that of primary legislation and can be done in several ways. For example, an affirmative procedure requires the approval of Parliament before it is passed into law whereas, with a negative procedure, a draft of the SI is laid before Parliament and will automatically come into force unless a motion is passed to annul it within a fixed period.[69] It has long been recognised that while the use of secondary legislation has increased, along with the importance and complexity of its contents, the parliamentary time dedicated to its scrutiny has decreased. Additionally, Philippa Tudor highlights that there is a ‘Scarcely acknowledged […] democratic deficit in the current parliamentary scrutiny arrangements for domestic delegated legislation’.[70]   The issue of a ‘democratic deficit’ is still relevant to s 8 of the EUWA: the provision contains an extensive Henry VIII power. Such powers are defined as a ‘clause in a bill which enables ministers to amend or repeal provisions in an Act of Parliament using secondary legislation, which is subject to varying degrees of parliamentary scrutiny’.[71] In their report of the (then) bill, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution highlighted a number of concerns with the inclusion of such a wide-ranging Henry VII power. An initial concern related to some of the language. In particular, the use of the word ‘appropriate’, which the committee stated was ‘subjective and wide’. The Faculty of Advocates stated that the use of the word meant that any changes made would be ‘in essence a matter for the minister’s opinion’.[72] Furthermore, concern was also expressed as to the open-endedness of the provision.[73] While it was noted that some Henry VIII powers were needed to facilitate withdrawal, it nonetheless recommended that the use of these powers should be limited. While s 8(7) does contain some restrictions on the use of the power, the committee concluded that they were not sufficient to ‘minimise the delegation of excessive powers to the Executive’.[74]   The most significant area of concern related to how delegated legislation made under the Act was to be scrutinised. Scrutiny procedures are outlined under schedule 7. The vast majority of regulations would be subject to the negative procedure,[75] whereas only a limited number would be subject to the affirmative procedure.[76] Examples of the types of instruments which would require an affirmative procedure include ones creating a new public authority, or transferring new powers to said authority.[77] However, the most worrying was the ‘made affirmative’ procedure, which allows a minister to create and approve a statutory instrument without parliament’s approval in situations that the minister considers to be urgent.[78] In order to remain in force, the regulation must be approved by both houses within 28 sitting days.[79] Concern for this procedure was expressed by several groups and individuals providing written evidence to the committee. The Public Law Project stated: ‘The potency of powers that could be exercised in ‘urgent’ cases is hard to overstate. Ministers could deprive people of their liberty and Parliament could do nothing about it’.[80] Furthermore, Professor Alison Young noted the practical effect of the procedure, stating that regulations would ‘remain lawful even if the measure itself is not approved within a month and new regulations, can be made, presumably, if still urgent through the same procedure’.[81] The EUWA 2018 ultimately provided the executive with wide-ranging legislative powers, while also providing parliament with limited opportunity to effectively scrutinise the legislation being made. Despite this, s 8(8) did place a limitation on the use of s 8 to two years after exit day, seemingly limiting the long-term impact of the provision on parliamentary sovereignty.   However, this may not be the case following the enactment of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023.[82] The bill published under Liz Truss’s government, and was taken forward by Prime Minster Rishi Sunak with the principal aim of the bill is to sunset ‘all EU-derived subordinate legislation and retained direct EU legislation’.[83] It also changes the name of retained EU law to ‘assimilated law’.[84] The effect of the bill has been described as a ‘reversal of the natural order’[85] as large amounts of EU-derived legislation will automatically be sunsetted by the end of 2023 unless chosen by a minister to either be saved, or preserved until 2026 at the latest, instead of individual pieces of legislation being chosen to be sunsetted. It is thought that there are over 2,000 pieces of retained EU legislation, spanning over 30 different policy areas.[86] The bill encompassed important EU-derived legislation such as the Working Time Directive,[87] but not primary legislation such as the Equality Act 2010.   Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society, has highlighted several concerns arising from the bill. Fox notes that automatically sunsetting such a large volume of retained EU law would be an ‘abdication of Parliament’s scrutiny and oversight role’.[88] Furthermore, she has noted that the bill moves democratic oversight of retained EU law away from Parliament.[89] This is evident in the extensive powers given to ministers, in clauses 12, 13,14, and 15, to revoke or alter retained EU law. Clause 15 (now s 14 of the Act) arguably contains the most extensive powers—giving ministers the power to either revoke secondary REUL without replacing it[90] or make an alternative provision that they deem to be ‘appropriate’.[91] However, as noted by George Peretz KC, the alternate provisions do not have to match the ones that they’re replacing.[92] Similar to s 8 of the EUWA, the bill grants considerable law-making provisions to the executive, while simultaneously limiting parliament’s ability to scrutinise legislation and assert its sovereignty. During its second reading in the House of Commons, the bill was strongly opposed by opposition MPs—being labelled a ‘vanity project’, ‘not fit for purpose’, and that it would result in ‘chaos and confusion’.[93] Some changes were made to the Bill prior to its enactment although the content and aims have largely remained the same. Most notably, instead of the automatic revocation of all retained law, any legislation that it to be revoked is listed in schedule 1. While this does provide for greater legal certainty, this is still affects a significant amount of legislation across a broad range of policy areas. Furthermore, the Act still removes parliamentary oversight over assimilated law and places it with ministers instead. Therefore, the Act can be shown to remain problematic for the operation of parliamentary sovereignty and its traditional interpretation.   Regardless, taken together, s 8 of the EUWA, and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, represent a significant shift in the balance of law-making powers away from Parliament and towards the Executive. Consequently, Parliament’s ability to effectively scrutinise and control what legislation is passed has also been significantly curtailed. Therefore, both the way in which Brexit was facilitated in Parliament and the way in which retained EU law has been dealt with following exit day has meant that a traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty has not been restored by leaving the EU. This is on the basis that Parliament’s legislative powers have been significantly weakened by the substantial powers granted to the executive. It is difficult to determine for certain what the future holds for the operation of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, however recent years have undoubtedly shown several attempts from the executive to diminish its power.   Conclusion   Traditionally, discussions into the precise nature of the relationship between the doctrine of EU supremacy and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty have been portrayed has being relatively clear cut, in the sense that they were either compatible or incompatible with one another. However, such portrayals have been rooted in nineteenth-century interpretations of sovereignty, and consequently fail to take into account the degree of flexibility which is intrinsic to the UK’s unwritten constitution. In light of this, while membership to the EU can be shown to represent a move away from this traditional interpretation, it cannot be said to be completely incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty due to the latter’s inherent ability to evolve. Similarly, the act of leaving the EU has not been able to restore this traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty, due to other factors external to EU membership which have shaped and influenced parliamentary sovereignty into the form which operates today. While the UK leaving the EU has closed one avenue of constitutional evolution, it is by no means the end. Katie Ann Twelves   Katie Twelves graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Hull. During her time at Hull, she developed a particular interest in UK public and constitutional law. In February 2023, Katie was invited to present the above paper at the 15 th  Trinity College Dublin Law Student Colloquium. She is currently studying for a Master of Laws in Legal and Political Theory at the University of York, with a dissertation project examining reform of the House of Lords. [1]  HP Bulmer Ltd v J Bollinger SA  [1974] CH 401 at 418 per Lord Denning MR. [2] Phillip Norton, Governing Britain  (Manchester University Press 2020) 167. [3]  R v Secretary of State for Transport ex parte Factortame Ltd (No 2) [1991] AC 603. [4]  R (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5. [5] Vernon Bogdanor, The New British Constitution  (Hart Publishing 2009) 6. [6] ibid 8. [7] See eg Nicholas Watt and Rowena Mason, ‘EU Deal: Cameron vows to put Commons sovereignty “beyond doubt”’ Guardian  (London, 3 February 2016) < https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/03/eu-deal-david-cameron-uk-parliament-sovereignty-beyond-doubt-boris-johnson > accessed 3 August 2023. [8] Paul Craig, ‘Development of the EU’ in Catherine Barnard and Steve Peers (eds), European Union Law  (3rd edn, Oxford University Press 2020). [9] Case 6/64 Costa   v Enel  [1964] ECR 585. [10] Robert Schütze, ‘Constitutionalism and the European Union’ in Barnard and Peers (n 8) 78. [11]  Costa (n 9) [593]-[594]. The court also stated that, ‘The integration into the laws of each member state of provisions which derive from the community […] make it impossible for the states, as a corollary, to accord precedence to a unilateral and subsequent measure over a legal system accepted by them on the basis of reciprocity’.  [12] ibid. [13] Case 11/70 Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH   v Einfuhr-und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel [1970] ECR 1125. [14] ibid [1]. [15] In its reasoning, the court stated: ‘The validity of such measures can only be judged in the light of community law. In fact, the law stemming from the treaty, and independent source of law, cannot because of its very nature be overridden by rules of national law […] without it being deprived of its character as community law and without the legal basis being called into question. Therefore, the validity of a community measure or its effect within a member state cannot be affected by the allegations that it runs counter to whether the fundamental rights as formulated by the constitution of that state or the principles of a national constitutional structure’ (ibid). [16] European Communities Act 1972. Of particular relevance is s 2(1) which states: ‘All such rights, powers, liabilities, obligations and restrictions from time to time, created or arising by or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the treaties and all such remedies and procedures from time to time provided for or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the treaties are without any further enactment to be given legal effect or used in the United Kingdom shall be recognised and available in law, and be enforced, allowed and followed accordingly; and the expression ‘enforceable Community right’ and similar expressions shall be read as referring to one to which this subsection applies’. [17] AV Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (Macmillan & Co. 1885) 3. [18]  Factortame (n 3). [19] Case C-213/89 R   v Secretary of State for Transport, ex p Factortame Ltd (No 2) [1990] [1]. [20] ibid [10]. [21] ibid [11]. [22] ibid [66]. [23] HWR Wade, ‘Sovereignty – revolution or evolution?’ (1996) 112 LQR 571. [24] ibid 573. [25] ibid 574. [26]  Factortame (n 3). [27] ibid per Lord Bridge at [659]. [28] Mark Elliot, ‘sovereignty, Primacy and the Common Law Constitution: What has EU Membership Taught Us?’ (University of Cambridge Legislative Research Paper series, Paper No. 24/2018). [29] Paul Craig, ‘Sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament after Factortame’ (1991) 11(1) Yearbook of European Law 222. [30] Wade (n 23) 574. [31] NW Barber, ‘The afterlife of parliamentary sovereignty’ (2011) 9(1) International Journal of Constitutional Law (2011) 152 [32] Human Rights Act 1998, s 4(6)(a). [33] Lord Hope, ‘The Human Rights Act 1998: The Task of the Judges’ (1999) 20(3) Statute Law Rev 185. [34]  Miller (n 4). [35] Consolidated version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Article 50. [36] Mark Elliot, ‘The Supreme Court Judgement in Miller: In Search of a Constitutional principle’ (University of Cambridge Legal Research Paper Series, Paper No. 23/2017). [37]  Miller (n 4) [36]. [38]  Blackburn v Attorney General  [1971] 1 WLR 1037, at 1040. [39]  Miller (n 4) [81]. [40] ibid. [41] ibid [86]. [42] ibid [101]. [43] Elliot (n 36). [44] Nick Barber, Tom Hickman, and Jeff King, ‘Pulling the Article 50 “trigger”: Parliament’s Indispensable Role’ ( UK Constitutional Law Association , 27 June 2016) < https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2016/06/27/nick-barber-tom-hickman-and-jeff-king-pulling-the-article-50-trigger-parliaments-indispensable-role/ > accessed 5 January 2023. [45]  R   v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex parte Fire Brigades Union [1995], 2 AC 513, per Lord Browne Wilkinson at [552]. [46] Barber, Hickman, and King (n 44). [47] See Steven Gow Calabresi, ‘The United States: Creation, Reconstruction, the Progressives, and the Modern Era’ in The   History and Growth of Judicial Review, Vol 1: The G-20 Common Law Countries and Israel  (Oxford University Press 2021). [48] Sir John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History  (5th edn, Oxford University Press 2019) 12 [49] Graham Virgo, The Principles of Equity and Trusts  (4th edn, Oxford University Press 2020) 6 [50] Baker (n 48) 12. [51] Virgo (n 49) 6. [52] ibid 7. [53] A more recent example of the courts developing and having a lasting impact can also be seen in the development of Wednesbury Reasonableness. First outlined in Associated Provincial Picture House Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223, which developed a test to assess whether a decision of a public authority can be considered reasonable. Outlining the principle, Lord Greene stated: ‘A person entrusted with a discretion must […] Direct himself properly in the law. He must call his own attention to the matters which he bound to consider. He must exclude from consideration matters which are irrelevant to what he has to consider. If he does not obey these rules, he may truly be said to... be acting unreasonably. Similarly, there may be something so absurd that no sensible person can ever dream that it lay within the powers of the authority (per Lord Greene at 229)’. The test still constitutes an important element of judicial review; see comments of Mrs Justice Lang in Worthing Borough Council v Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities [2022] EWHC 2044 (Admin) [37]). [54] Norton (n 2) 168 [55] Aileen McHarg, ‘Devolution in Scotland’ in Jeffrey Jowell and Colm O’Cinneide (eds), The Changing Constitution  (9th edn, Oxford University Press 2019) 271. [56] Norton (n 2) 169. [57] Nicholas Aroney, ‘The formation and amendment of federal constitutions in a Westminster-derived context’ (2018) 16(1) Int J Constitutional Law (2018) 41. [58] Monckton Chambers, ‘Webinar on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill’ ( YouTube , 30 September 2022) 58:00 < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5gQlkRadKA&list=FLAkDukVPOfZCvrVhx-lBhrA&index=3 > accessed 5 January 2023. [59] Mark Elliot and Stephen Tierney, ‘Political Pragmatism and Constitutional Principle: The European Union (Withdrawal) Act’ (University of Cambridge Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 54/2018). [60] European Union (Withdrawal) Act (EUWA) 2018, s 5(2). [61] Elliot and Tierney (n 59). [62] House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, European Union (Withdrawal) Bill 2018, 9 th  report of Session 207-2019. [63] ibid, para 79. [64] ibid, para 81. [65] ibid, para 84. [66] ibid, para 88. [67] ibid, para 89. [68] EUWA (n 60) s 8(1) [69] ‘What is Secondary Legislation?’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/secondary-legislation/ > accessed 4 January 2023. [70] Philippa Tudor, ‘Secondary Legislation: Second Class or Crucial?’ (2000) 21(3) Statute Law Rev   149. [71] Henry VIII Clauses’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/henry-viii-clauses/ > accessed 4 January 2023. [72] House of Lords Select Committee (n 62), para 163. [73] ibid, para 187. [74] ibid. [75] ibid, para 214. [76] ibid, para 216. [77] Ibid [78] EUWA (n 60) s 7, para 5(2). [79] ibid s 7, para 5(4). [80] ‘The Public Law Project—Written evidence (EUW0034)’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/constitution-committee/european-union-withdrawal-bill/written/71272.html > accessed 4 January 2023. [81] ‘Professor Alison L Young, University of Oxford—Written evidence (EUW0003)’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/constitution-committee/european-union-withdrawal-bill/written/69634.html > accessed 4 January 2023. [82] Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, HC Bill, Session 2022-23, 204. [83] ibid 1(1). [84] ibid, clause 6 (1). [85] Monckton Chambers (n 58) 10:20. [86] Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ‘The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022’ ( UK Government ) < https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-retained-eu-law-revocation-and-reform-bill-2022 > accessed January 5 2023. [87] ‘Directive 2033/88/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 November 2003 concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time’ OJ L 299. [88] Ruth Fox, ‘Five Problems with the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill’ ( Hansard Society , 24 October 2022) < https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/publications/briefings/five-problems-with-the-retained-eu-law-revocation-and-reform-bill > accessed January 5 2023. [89] ibid. [90] Retained EU Law Bill (n 82), clause 15(1). [91] ibid, clause 15(3). [92] Monckton Chambers (n 58) 24:40. [93] Layla Moran MP, HC Deb, 25 October 2022, Vol 721, Col 229.

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.