Author: John Lloyd

Corruption: Greasing the Wheels of the World

Published by John Lloyd

One December evening in the late ’90s, I met a friend in a Moscow restaurant. I drank two zero-alcohol beers that night—an eccentric posture, in a Russian-Georgian restaurant—and then drove back to my borrowed flat in a car lent to me by my successor as the FT’s Moscow Correspondent. In Russia, no alcohol is permitted at all when driving—a law fashioned, it would seem, to allow the city’s GAI (Gosurdarstvennaya Aftomobilnaya Inspektsiya, or state traffic police) to supplement their low pay. As I was passing one of the new luxury hotels, a thick bundle of clothes propelled on boots and topped with a badged fur shapka waved his stick before my windscreen and motioned me to pull over. He told me to wind down my window, and stuck his head in. “Dikhnite!” (“Breathe!”) he instructed. Then he smiled, stepped back, saluted, and told me to get out of the car. He asked for my passport, and as he looked at it he told me I had been drinking. Yes, I admitted, but only zero-alcohol beer. …

The Search for a Politics of Community

Published by John Lloyd

After COVID-19—when that moment finally arrives—will be a bleak time for most. Debts must be reckoned with; cuts must be made; seasons of possibly violent political struggle will not be avoided. But COVID-19 monopolises so much news media time and content, that it has frozen or put out of most minds large social and political issues with which democracies will have to contend in due course. They may have to deal with them to remain democracies. One of these, which still intrudes into the news, is the migrant issue. Last week, a Kurdish-Iranian family drowned in the English Channel, reportedly forced onto a frail boat for a desperate voyage to the UK. The pity of this tragic incident, which claimed the lives of two adults and three children, kept it in the news for a couple of days. Then the migrant issue receded again. Still, it waits. “The West,” Israeli political scientist Martin Van Creveld has observed, “is rather like a besieged castle, the waves battering against the walls. They [the 80 percent of the …

Is China the Governance of the Future?

Published by John Lloyd

In his 2009 book When China Rules the World, Martin Jacques notes with satisfaction that “as a Chinese world order begins to take shape, the American world order is eroding with remarkable speed.” His widely praised book is highly complimentary to the present Chinese polity and to its president, Xi Jinping—Jacques sees the huge nation as an example to developing countries, especially in its creation of what he calls a “proactive, competent, and strategic state.” Jacques is one of the most enthusiastic boosters of China in the West, and his book aims to show that an increasingly dynamic China will soon lay a claim to global hegemony. Since its publication, he has increasingly acted as the country’s promoter, welcoming its growing strength and hoping it will take its rightful throne as soon as may be. His commentary does make clear, although without adverse comment, that China lacks democratic institutions. Nevertheless, his emphasis is on its efficiency and its strategic thinking—an ability, he writes, that the US, “locked in old ways of thinking” and with “hardened …

The Closing of the High Street Theatres

Published by John Lloyd

In his book, Think Like Amazon, John Rossman, the former director of Merchant Integration at the everything store, invokes Captain Ahab, “the monomaniacal character at the heart of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.” Ahab, writes Rossman, is a man obsessed with the capture of a great white whale, and each of Amazon’s 560,000 employees worldwide—not to mention those eager to emulate Amazon’s success—should likewise be obsessed, but with perfection, customer satisfaction, and “becoming inspired to develop and expand beyond your current products, services and business model.” This isn’t, he reassures, the kind of obsession that takes Ahab and his ship to the bottom of the sea, “but it’s not bad to have people on board with a little Ahab in them… being ‘nice’ all the time can be a liability for your team.” The Amazon philosophy—more to the point, the Amazon practice—is to dominate every market into which it moves. The hyper-competitiveness cultivated by its executives, the voracious acquisition of every kind of product, and the refusal to be “nice” to staff all take their cue …

The Russia Report

Published by John Lloyd

A report released this July by the UK’s House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee is more concerning than its relatively restrained prose appears to indicate. It shows us that Russia is an enemy determined to undermine liberal values and institutions, and it exposes a galaxy of details of Russian malignity—an alarming reminder of just how deep and how dangerous the threat is. Much of the report rehearses what is already known about Russian efforts to hack into democratic states’ networks to influence citizens’ voting, and to produce results which will benefit Russia’s foreign strategy—that is, whatever is bad for the West is considered good for Russia. These hacks included intervention in the 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence, where a vote for secession would have meant the break-up and weakening of the United Kingdom—a plus for Russia denied by a substantial vote to remain in the union, at 55–45 per cent. Then, in 2017, hackers entered the networks of the new French party, République En Marche, and leaked a large number of emails which were …

Twilight of Democracy—A Review

Published by John Lloyd

A review of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (July 2020), 224 pages. Historian and journalist Anne Applebaum’s new book The Twilight of Democracy sees a democratic world, as Rupert Brooke saw his world at the onset of World War I, “grown old and cold and weary.” So weary of democracy’s institutions and processes, so coldly contemptuous of the liberals of the Left and Right who administered them, that many of those who previously supported these central pillars have instead embraced one or another form of right-wing fundamentalism. This may manifest as nostalgic yet virulent nationalism, or reactionary Catholicism, or an invocation of Great Leader-ism which is, she writes, “at once serious and unserious.” Illustrative of the last of these types, she says, is Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish anti-immigrant party Vox, who was filmed riding a horse to the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings—unserious, because plundering popular culture for the purposes of rousing self-glorification is so obviously crass; serious, because it is rousing, nonetheless. The title of Applebaum’s book communicates the seriousness …

The Passing of the Second Imperial Age

Published by John Lloyd

In the half-millennium of modern European imperialism, from the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century to the withdrawing roar of the British and French empires in the 20th, there was one truth on which all of these powers, often at war with each other, could agree. That was, land which could be designated terra nullius (“no-one’s land”) could be taken—indeed, had to be taken—by one of the powers, or another power would get it. So empires conquered large swathes of territory in Africa, India, the Middle East, South-East Asia, North America, and Australasia, most of which was regarded as unoccupied. They did so in pursuit of precious metals and stones, for settlement and defence (of other lands already seized), for points of supply to their ships, in order to demonstrate their power, and—the most cited reason in polite society, even more polite if put into French—for the mission civilatrice or the mission religieuse. That last of these—the obligation to deliver Christianity to uncivilised heathens—is sometimes dismissed as merely the hypocrisy of pious icing layered over …

The Room Where It Happened—A Review

Published by John Lloyd

A review of The Room Where It Happened—A White House Memoir by John Bolton, Simon and Schuster (June 2020), 592 pages. Donald Trump’s White House is fast approaching the end of its first term. Meanwhile, the consequences of the administration’s early insouciance about the onset of COVID-19 are manifest across a country experiencing a ferocious new surge in cases. The US President offers his leadership to those who would scrap the sheltering and distancing rules, characterising them as the imposition of a despised bureaucracy—evidence, as one protestor put it, of a “Communist dictatorship.” Trump is, in most moods, fond of Communist dictators, as China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un have been pleased to discover. The head of his National Security Council (NSC) from April 2018 until September last year, John Bolton, fears and hates them. These two men, both in their early 70s, were yoked together for 18 months, a period that ended in predictable acrimony, and which has now produced a memoir from Bolton. Several books have already sought to illuminate the malign …

After the Virus: The Way We Live Next

Published by John Lloyd

How will we live, or be forced to live, after the pandemic? “I don’t know” is—according to Paul Collier, the famed development economist—the most honest answer to this question and others related to the cause, rise, treatment, and decline of the current pandemic. This is, after all, an unprecedented disease of rare speed and communicability, for which there is no cure and no agreed political and social response. Yet, contradicting himself within weeks, Collier wrote a similarly powerful essay in which he argued that centralisation had failed, and devolution from those who pronounce from on high to those who practice on the ground is necessary. Perhaps he was merely demonstrating that, in this maelstrom of conflicting arguments, no-one, no matter how distinguished, can wholly know his own mind from day to day. In any case, agnosticism is as unwelcome to journalism as it is to governance. And journalists, who operate under fewer constraints than governments, can at least consider some likely alternatives, while remaining alive to the possibility that unknown unknowns will continue to turn up, …

Italy and the EU: The Hard and Stony Road Ahead

Published by John Lloyd

“Too many,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on April 16th, “were not there on time when Italy needed a helping hand at the very beginning. And yes, for that it is right that Europe as a whole offers a heartfelt apology.” And heartfelt the apology probably was. For weeks, von der Leyen and her colleagues had been receiving frantic pleas for assistance from the Italian government, and little had been forthcoming. By mid-April, Italy was at last beginning to pull out of the dire circumstances that had placed it at the top of the world’s league of COVID-related death: At its grisly peak at the end of March, nearly 1,000 Italians a day were perishing from the virus, a terrible figure that will, as in other countries, almost certainly turn out to be an underestimate. It was still in great need of help—from the EU, above all—but it was no longer the worst place in the world. It was time for the EU to display some public contrition. But, for several reasons, …