Week 27: Stockholm Syndrome
A trip up to Stockholm to recharge on the energy of cities.
I’ve been up in Stockholm this week. While some may feel the need to escape cities to either relax or recharge, I find myself in the opposition situation of needing to be in a city to feel myself again. This is not due to a need to socialise – I rarely drink, have little interest in going to the club, and my default setting is absolute verbal silence. Rather I enjoy being amongst the multitudes. I like the energy of cities, even if I am not particularly energetic myself.
There is also a sociability of cities that I like – an idea distinct from being social. Instead this is the sociability of manners – the millions of little cooperative choices that are made as people go about their daily business and negotiate the urban environment. You don’t need to be overt or even conscious of these acts of cooperation, they are built into the nature of the cities. To be urbane is to engage in these little courtesies as part of your essence.
Cities form because of how advantageous it is to be surrounded by people of different interests and skill-sets. This makes cities curiosity hubs. If you are interested in humanity then cities are your petri dishes. They are where we can truly examine ourselves as a species. Not with cynicism, but with interest at the dense web of activities we pursue. My favourite places in the world – London, New York, Mumbai – teem with this life. And, of course, there’s nothing I enjoy more than making my way around them via public transport.
In Stockholm, the Tunnelbana is an amazing way to experience the city. For a city with a metropolitan area of just 2.5 million people it is an extensive and glorious public investment that completely shames far bigger cities (looking at you, Melbourne). With the city being built on quite a hilly archipelago, the Tunnelbana is also a work of engineering genius. It also happens to be world’s longest art gallery, with 90 of the network’s 100 stations featuring some form of paintings, mosaics, sculptures or installations. As well as its spectacular use of rock formations. Coming from an aesthetically disinterested country like Australia this is fascinating (and disheartening).
Although I spent much of the visit in the Stockholm City Library – with its magnificent rotunda – I also had time to meet with my friend and colleague, Larissa Stünkel. Larissa is one of the rare European experts on the Pacific Islands, which is how we came to know each other (even though my knowledge is vastly inferior, we had been working in the same space). However, at present she works for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Nordic programme.
A couple of years ago, Larissa and I wrote a profile on the former prime minister of Fiji, Frank Bainimarama, for Foreign Policy magazine. We have another article planned on Taiwan’s relations with the Pacific Islands – albeit one that keeps getting pushed down in our to-do lists. Taiwan needs to be very creative in how it approaches its foreign policy given its unique status as effectively a country, but one that other countries have to pretend isn’t. Its engagement with Pacific Island countries draws upon Taiwan’s indigenous peoples and languages as a major cultural bridge. Something that, importantly, Beijing can’t replicate.
This Week’s Reading and Listening (a bit less than usual)
The Rest is Politics – Leading – Michael Ignatieff
Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart
The Rest is Politics podcast has a sister podcast called Leading, where Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart interview major public figures. This week’s episode features Michael Ignatieff – a highly acclaimed historian and writer who has held posts at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of Toronto. As well as recently being the president of the Central European University. He is also has the indignity of being a failed politician.
Since Canada’s formation in 1867 the Liberal Party had only ever been either the government or the official opposition. They had seen numerous other parties form and disintegrate around them and become one of the most successful parties throughout the West. This changed though under Ignatieff’s leadership, when at the 2011 federal election he led the party to its worst ever result of just 34 seats, and the status of being the third party in the House of Commons (and losing his own seat in the process).
Ignatieff’s book on the experience – Fire and Ashes – is an extraordinary account of hubris and humility. About the misguided attempt to pivot from academia to politics and the folly of societies seeking a “philosopher king” to be their leaders (an idea Canada clearly rejected. At least with Ignatieff, a case could be made the Pierre Trudeau fit this bill).
This interview takes this theme of lessons learned from this failed venture.
N.B. While on the Leading podcast, I didn’t link to it a few weeks ago, but their interview with former Irish president Mary McAleese is a fascinating and utterly compelling listen. Not only due to her very Irish gift of the gab, but as someone whose life has been lived through and extremely close to the Ireland’s turbulence and change – both in Northern Ireland and the Republic. Probably the best interview they have done so far.
Women On The Frontlines Of Pacific Peacebuilding
Heather Wrathall and Sharon Bhagwan Rolls - Australian Outlook
“Historically, women have been viewed as passive victims of violence and insecurity rather than agents of change and critical actors in peace and security issues. Marginalisation from highly masculinised formal security structures hides the vital role women play in security more broadly. In the Pacific, for instance, women were leaders in peace movements during civil wars in Bougainville and Solomon Islands. In these fragile contexts, women have been security providers rather than victims.
In the spirit of strategic humility, Australia’s foreign policy within the Pacific should have a keen awareness of the significant contributions diverse Pacific women and their organisations make as mediators and negotiators in conflict prevention, conflict transformation, restorative justice, and peacebuilding. The work of these organisations is a core component for advancing the WPS agenda through the region, and is intrinsic to broader security calculations.”
The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party
David A. Graham – The Atlantic
“This small-c conservative Democratic Party is the product of at least three converging currents. One is that the party has achieved many of its biggest goals in recent years, and has now shifted toward defending and consolidating those victories. Second, the changing demographics of the parties mean that some of the Democratic Party’s most powerful backers are the winners of society as it exists now. Why would they want transformative change? Third, and relatedly, the Trump-era Republican Party has abandoned much of the party’s old orthodoxy in favor of radicalism on domestic and foreign affairs. The pendulum of two-party politics seems to require that one party represent a “conservative”—in the literal sense—viewpoint.
The affection for the status quo among Democrats also reflects how the party has changed. For decades, its base included the white and black working classes, labor, and immigrants—all groups that had a vested interest in major structural reforms to American society. The Republican Party, meanwhile, included the business classes, white-collar professionals, and other elites, and, after the civil-rights era, white southerners interested in protecting the region’s racist hierarchy. Those coalitions have fractured somewhat. Democrats are still overwhelmingly the party of minority voters; they have lost white working-class support, but have gained a great deal of support among elite professionals.”
Family Court Files: Parental Alienation ‘Used To Silence Claims Of Abuse’
Hannah Summers – The Bureau Of Investigative Journalism
“Parental alienation is commonly described as a child’s unjustified hostility or rejection of one parent for no reason other than that they have been manipulated – whether consciously or not – by the other parent.
The concept stems from the theory of parental alienation syndrome. That was introduced by the American psychiatrist Richard Gardner and broadly interpreted as a means of refuting mothers’ claims of child abuse. The notion of a “syndrome” became widely discredited but the concept of parental alienation as a pattern of behaviour has gained traction in courtrooms worldwide.
In the last year, MPs, women’s rights groups, academics and organisations such as the United Nations have raised alarm about the use of parental alienation as a litigation tool to counter claims of domestic or sexual abuse.
Concerns have been raised about professional acceptance of the concept and the quality of experts used by the courts in parental alienation cases. There is also a culture within the family court system that seemingly results in the minimisation of abuse allegations by children and their parents.
In the forthcoming weeks and months, [The Bureau of Investigative Journalism] will dig deeper into the issue and examine how the family courts are handling allegations of abuse in private law cases.
Most of these hearings take place behind closed doors. That means public awareness of private law proceedings is limited to the small number of published judgments – or what is documented by journalists who have successfully got the strict reporting restrictions that apply to family cases lifted.
But, in May, private law cases were brought under a family court reporting pilot that has been running in three key locations in England and Wales since January in a drive to improve transparency.
For the first time, journalists are allowed to report what they observe in these high conflict cases about child contact as long as the families remain anonymous.”