As has often been the case in recent times, the 2008 Nobel prizes for Peace, Economics and Literature seem designed to send a message to Washington. The Finnish diplomat, and former president, Martti Ahtisaari is praised for his “untiring efforts” at defusing conflicts in Namibia, Kosovo, Aceh, Northern Ireland and even his work trying to secure “a peaceful conclusion to the problems in Iraq.” The economist Paul Krugman—better known to millions of newspaper readers as the New York Times’s scourge of the Bush Administration—is cited for a theory that integrates “international trade and economic geography.” The Literature laureate, the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, is lauded for as an “explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” Given the current political climate, these choices argue for an internationalist America, one that will meet adversaries before resorting to war, a team player on the world stage, a country that acknowledges the legitimacy of cultures beyond itself.
With two foreign wars still far from over, and the prospect of further conflict with Iran – or even Pakistan – dangerously close at hand, the significance of Ahtisaari’s painstaking diplomacy is clear enough. The lessons of the recent global financial collapse are more complex. The recent crisis – panic might be a better word – has also shown how quickly a failing American economy can affect other countries. Perhaps it has also taught Washington that some of the answers to America’s domestic crises may be found abroad. Ironically enough, Paul Krugman’s current column is a tribute to the way the prime minister Gordon Brown had handled the credit freeze in the United Kingdom, allowing it to “defin[e] the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.”
Although London remains “very much a junior partner when it comes to world economic affairs” Krugman believes that Brown’s government has gone “straight to the heart of the problem — and moved to address it with stunning speed” by providing guarantees for bank debts in addition to large injections of equity into the system. Alluding to the cronyism at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which led to the government’s disastrous mismanagement of clean-up efforts after hurricane Katrina, he adds: “I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson’s fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.” Luckily, a British prime minister had the nerve to pursue a sensible alternative. How different the world today might be if Tony Blair had been able to do something similar with Bush’s policy towards Iraq.
Bushism — the collected afflictions of the forty-third president’s worldview—has seriously harmed America’s standing in the world. This administration has been characterised by its contempt for the “reality-based” community, its easy scorn of foreigners, and its willingness to revisit, distort, ignore and disregard key parts of the US constitution. This has been painful enough for those inside the “reigning civilization” but nothing short of disastrous for the large swathes of humanity beyond and below it. America’s secret prisons, extraordinary renditions and torture – created by bureaucrats who were anxious to seem tough in the war on terror, against the advice of military personnel who knew better – these have confirmed the suspicions of the world’s worst tyrants that America’s longstanding defence of human rights is completely self-serving and hypocritical.
Ironically, this worst of all presidents may have set the stage for a transformative presidency. With Reaganomics comprehensively discredited and the financial system teetering on the edge of socialism, the public is now ready to accept that government is not always the problem. Universal health insurance – which could easily have been paid for by the Iraq war, or a week of the recent stock market losses – now seems likely, as does a more rational political discussion about social security and taxes. Perhaps even more importantly, the next American president will determine the character of the Supreme Court for decades to come.
This is no small matter. In June, Justice Stevens – who joined the court in 1975, and is now aged 88 – was part of a 5-4 majority in Boumediene v. Bush, decision that upheld the right of prisoners to habeas corpus, a right denied by the 2006 Military Commissions Act. If Justice Kennedy, and either of two other senior justices, is replaced by another rigid conservative (to join Justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and to a much lesser extent, Chief Justice Roberts), the errors of George W. Bush easily have a long afterlife in the judicial branch of the US government.
Of course the Nobel committee’s choices can be interpreted less tendentiously. Finland is due for some sort of prize and Krugman is a major economist regardless of his political opinions. Moreover, there is a raging debate within the literary world about the value of the literature Nobel, especially in the wake of a recent remark by Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, that “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” Admirers of Philip Roth — Senator Obama among them— must have all shaken their heads in disbelief at this remark. Nevertheless, Engdahl’s astonishing generalisation is a sign of the times. Europe and America have grown distant, and the political consequences of that separation will be another of the challenges facing the forty-fourth president.
