womenandsoftpower

Britain, no longer an island

We have stepped over a line. I'm not sure exactly where it is drawn, but the image of Britain in the world this week is different than it was last week.

We are all going to have our particular take on recent events involving Britain and Iran. Most helpful to me, but as an indication of how I don't feel, was Stephen Glover's piece for the Daily Mail mourning the loss of British dignity and with it, our power.

"In this sense the hostages may be our true representatives. We are no longer an imperial or even post-imperial people, and we may not be cut out for the role of world policeman that Tony Blair would like us to play."

On the anniversary of the Falklands war, just past the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, and in the midst of a painful and confused conflict in Iraq, I'm surprised that even the Daily Mail can openly regret the loss of our imperial identity. But the question of what kind of power Britain has - and is - in the world, is worth discussing...

Hard to be soft

Charles Clarke was not the only senior government politician opening up a very public debate on the future of Labour policy yesterday. Secretary of state Tessa Jowell, speaking at a Demos forum on a new role for cultural diplomacy was doing the same - possibly unwittingly. In the cavernous, even overwhelmingly impressive Raphael Gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum, she spoke about a new approach to arts and culture as vehicles for Britain's "soft power" in the world as "a set of ideas whose time had come".

She described the fateful weekend when the London bombings immediately followed the news that London had won the Olympic bid for 2012 as a juxtaposition of "hard and soft power". In this, Jowell appeared to throw her weight behind the latter force as the way forward for the future. The best response to terrorism, she insisted, is to facilitate events where the world can come together in all its diversity and actively foster our connectedness.

Other members of the panel picked up her baton and ran with it. Referring directly to its implications for foreign policy, Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum called it a "pre-imperial idea for a post-colonial world". "Whereas, in the 18th century, we wanted to present Britain to the world. Today, our task as Britons is to present the whole world to the whole world". A typical British Museum project now is the recent introduction of Syrian Art to China.

Nobody mentioned the elephant in the room....

Fathers forward, mothers back

I was in Holland last weekend, when the UNICEF report on children was published. My family emigrated from Holland when I was three, yet I was brought up by a militantly Dutch mother, who, unlike many of her new British neighbours, gave up a promising medical career to take care of her four girls. Visiting my cousins this time, I was struck by how none of the girls had veered from that "traditional" choice.

All had jobs - from running their own consultancies to managing a chain of butchers - but none of them worked after 3pm. I smiled often to myself as the contrast between the image of Holland as radically liberal - even amoral - contrasted with the conservative reality that I was witnessing. To some extent I had run all my life from the memory of my mother "stuck" at home.

But this report re-frames that memory and those choices. As we all know now, Britain came last in the list which measures child well-being and Holland came top. Little or no socio-economic or cultural complexity is built into the findings so it is hard to take clear lessons from it. Nevertheless, coinciding with the poignant news of a third schoolboy shot down as a result of gang violence, the report has caused a wave of urgent self-examination across Britain's media and no doubt, in British homes too.

The interesting development from the Dutch model however, is that the debate is not focussing exclusively on mothers. David Cameron is echoing the views of many black commentators when he identifies the main issue as the "missing father". As child psychologists like Steve Biddulph describe, boys who have no clear male authority close to hand tend to turn to each other for structure. In this environment strong leadership and gangs thrive. What is the role of the mother in that scenario?

A new non-violent world order?

September 11 is an important date in the international calendar for two very different, indeed opposed, reasons. The one we all know is the anniversary of the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001: a deliberate slaughter of thousands of office workers in the epicentre of western superpower.

The other September 11 marks the launch in 1906 of Mahatma Gandhi's modern non-violent resistance movement, called Satyagraha, in South Africa. Satyagraha was consciously used by Martin Luther King to oppose segregation in the US, by Gandhi to win independence from the British in India, and in South Africa, by Nelson Mandela to bring an end to apartheid.

If nothing else, September 11 will always be remembered as a shocking display of two very different kinds of power. One violent, merciless and completely disengaged: to date we have no proof of the perpetrator. The other non-violent on principle, respectful and fully engaged: its strength lying in its connectedness, its universality of appeal.

I'm in New Delhi at the invitation of India's ruling Congress party to celebrate the centenary of Satyagraha. It is a moment of some irony. Only last week, on the day that the Doomsday clock moved two minutes forward by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Indian sub-continent was identified as the region most likely to use nuclear power in an act of aggression against a neighbour.

Is this invocation of the Gandhian legacy pure cynicism? Or is India playing some new game of international diplomacy that deserves some attention?

Are all men guilty?

The poignant images of five murdered women that dominated the front pages last week presented me with the usual task of explaining the issues arising from such news to my 12-year-old son. It's never easy to do so, but at least the idea that women are simply immoral for taking to the profession is beginning to lose its grip as statistics show that the majority are drug dependent and vulnerable.

However, a matching awareness that men caught in this world may also be vulnerable has not arisen, which still presented me with difficulties in explanation. Men who use prostitutes are only ever portrayed as misogynist, criminal and, worst of all, macho. Macho is worst because it suggests that the abuse of women is somehow natural to men, just one end of the spectrum of male behaviour.

I'm not going to address the culpability of those men, but I am going to question the implicit guilt of all men....

It could take a man to make Labour less macho

First published in The Guardian, 22 November, 2006

The panic is rising to the surface, and the results of today's ICM poll for the Guardian will only add to the anxiety: Cameron is winning women over while Labour has yet to find its own womaniser. Women will swing the election, and Gordon Brown - he of the "big, clunking fist" - is just not seductive enough.

Finding a female running partner would be one way to soften Brown's edges and, for many, Harriet Harman is the obvious choice to stand alongside Blair's heavyweight successor. Harman has a record of championing "women's issues" and is the highest-ranking specimen available, someone who clearly has merit equal to any man.

So why does that solution not excite me?

Women and Terrorism

An article from Scilla Elworthy, timed to last year's International Day of Peace, still as relevant this year:

One half of the population, here and in the Middle East, is barely being used when it comes either to causing terror or preventing it. Ninety seven percent of bombers and suicide bombers are male, as are over ninety percent of those conducting the so-called 'war on terror'.

Maybe it is time to consider what women would do. In fact, most governments have signed up to United Nations Resolution 1325, which is a worldwide agreement that we will include women in preventing and resolving violence. Why? Because all over the world women have shown that they're good at it.

More here.

Indra Adnan on Soft Power, Radio Four 'Analysis'

Indra Adnan interviewed on BBC Radio 4's 'Analysis' programme, 'Victims or Villains', broadcast on Thursday, 31 August, 2006 at 20:30 BST. For MP3 audio download of Indra's interview with presenter, Kenan Malik, click here. For transcript of the program, click here.

Stories R Us

Might the application of soft power in everyday life require a 'softer' way of knowing the world? Charles Tilly, American sociologist, suggests that we should validate our story-telling more:

In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations. Tilly would call “Don’t be a tattletale” a convention. The second is stories, and what distinguishes a story (“I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came in . . .”) is a very specific account of cause and effect. Tilly cites the sociologist Francesca Polletta’s interviews with people who were active in the civil-rights sit-ins of the nineteen-sixties. Polletta repeatedly heard stories that stressed the spontaneity of the protests, leaving out the role of civil-rights organizations, teachers, and churches. That’s what stories do. As Tilly writes, they circumscribe time and space, limit the number of actors and actions, situate all causes “in the consciousness of the actors,” and elevate the personal over the institutional.

More here.

How India's soft power is making inroads into China

From The Hindu:

"OM SURYAYA NAMAHA". The chant reverberates deeply as the two-dozen-strong group inhale and exhale in unison while going through the fluid motions of the Surya Namaskar. Mohan Bhandari, a yoga teacher from Rishikesh, paces up and down the room, correcting postures and whispering encouragement. But this yoga class is taking place thousands of kilometres away from the banks of the Ganga. Other than Mohan, every person in the room is Chinese.

In today's hyper-connected, globalised world, where images and fashion are translated across continents in the blink of an eye, the Himalayas are no longer the formidable boundary markers they once were. Thus, while fashion pundits might continue to argue over whether Brown is the new Black, in Beijing it is increasingly becoming evident that Yoga is the new Tai Chi.

More here.