Hostage politics
yesterday and today…
The release of a Swedish diplomat by Iran as part of a hostage exchange is another reminder of the unravelling of civilised norms that most states have obeyed for centuries. Embassies and consulates have become murder scenes; diplomats and consuls are fair game … not only for mobs of bandits but also, now, for other sovereign states.
Once norms begin to unravel, no norm, no state, no person, is safe. The unravelling acquires and follows an organic and stubborn logic as its consequences and effects extend, expand, and accumulate. Ministries have created special permanent offices for hostage negotiations which include a public relations apparatus. It’s become a cottage industry.
The most visible hostages appearing on the front pages of newspapers in the West and in street memorials are still those taken by Hamas last year. They are not alone. In seeing the faces of their families – along with the Israelis marching through the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere, and many more thousands of Palestinians trapped in Gaza – one has to ask: is Hamas but also the Israeli government, notably its justice-skipping Prime Minister, not engaging in a kind of mass hostage-taking?
If so, what about the people of the Donbass, and of other areas of Ukraine? Or the scores of draftees – Russians and Ukrainians, including many who have gone into exile? Are they and their families not hostages to another obscene exercise of anti-diplomacy? At what point, in other words, do such unpleasant comparisons become less an exercise in cynicism than a statement of the obvious?
Speaking of policies, hostage-taking – also known as blackmail, kidnapping, and extortion – now happens regularly in national parliaments. A bill cannot be passed or a nomination approved (where that’s required, as in the USA) unless and until every legislator gets what he or she wants. A government cannot execute a policy unless and until every loud member of the commentariat gains a pound of flesh. The celebrated ‘transparency’ of the legislative process, as with diplomacy, makes deliberation and compromise on anything almost impossible. It is sausage-making everywhere, all the time, and now in the open for all to see and deplore.
This isn’t quite mobocracy. It’s something different. A flash mob is not a classic mob. More dangerous, maybe.
Enough said. In spite of appearances, Talleyrand is not, by nature, a pessimist. Our Swedish colleague and another hostage have been released. Norms may be gone; but self-interest endures. A small space for diplomacy, then. -