Whatever Happened To Statesmanship?

By Aditya Chakkraborrti

Political crises usually come with whoopee cushions: interludes of unwitting comedy that cut through the pomp, and point us to what's really going on. Sure enough, the three big cliffhangers of the past week have each had a whoopee moment – and they're worth noting.
Let's begin at the White House last Friday. Crunch talks on how much the government can borrow have broken down and America faces the prospect of defaulting on its loans. Barack Obama addresses the nation – only, rather than sounding like the leader of the free world, he comes off like Carrie Bradshaw griping about a boyfriend. The Republican he's been negotiating with, John Boehner, won't return his phone calls and the president's "been left at the altar . . . a couple of times". The captain of the No 1 superpower has been defeated by rightwing commitment phobia. Obama has a plaintive question for Republicans: "Can they say yes to anything?"
Next, the phone-hacking scandal. John Bercow tells this newspaper on Saturday that, in taking on the Murdochs, MPs have "rediscovered their collective balls". The speaker means this as a good thing, yet questions inevitably bubble up: just where did said orbs go, and who wielded the offending secateurs?
Finally, to Brussels on Thursday. Angela Merkel and other European leaders have struck a deal to save the euro. The most intriguing leaked section declares a "Marshall Plan" for Greece. Really?
Roosevelt's programme to rebuild war-torn Europe cost around 5% of US GDP – the lofty comparison only underlines the puniness of the euro version and elicits a snort of derision from newsrooms and trading floors across Europe. By the agreement's official release, any reference to a Marshall Plan has been scrubbed out.
These moments of light relief have a common theme. They illustrate how one missing word haunts all of these dramas. Its absence helps explain both the US and European debt crises and why, with only a little squinting, Westminster has come to resemble a government of the Murdoch clan, for the Murdoch clan, by the Murdoch clan. The word is statecraft.
True, it's a dated term. Statecraft doesn't even get its own entry in Wikipedia, and when it's pressed into service at all, it's in reference to summitry or wars. But its original meaning is the practice of using the levers of the state and of government to get difficult things done that otherwise wouldn't happen. The power to bang tables and knock heads together and face down opponents. The ability, in short, to govern.
What would statecraft look like now? In both Europe and America, it would revolve around public spending. Seen in political terms, government debt is a form of state power: using the national balance sheet to do something in the public good. So Obama could stop bending over backwards to appease Republican "nutters" (as Vince Cable calls them) and pitch an argument directly to voters. America's economy is stuck in first gear, he could say, and one in 10 of you are out of work. Changing that will mean raising the debt ceiling for a time – as the head of the US central bank and top economists agree.
And the euro crisis? Cast your mind back to last spring, when the financial crisis was confined largely to tiny Greece. Had Merkel and Sarkozy stepped in then to renegotiate terms with Athens' creditors, to sort out European banks and put in place a recovery plan for stricken economies, they could have stopped one nation's sickness turning into a costly continental pandemic.
As for Britain, any prime minister who meets News International executives 24 times in just over a year, as David Cameron admitted this month, is at least partly in the business of appeasement rather than government. Nor were the previous lot much better; it was Tony Blair's chief of staff who wrote here last week of his boss's relations with the press: "It was a battle for power and one we could not win."
Which isn't to say that the Westminster classes are completely or always impotent. The last great moment of statecraft was three years ago, when Alistair Darling hauled in crisis-hit bankers for what Fred Goodwin described as a "drive-by shooting", and all but nationalised the two biggest high-street names. Yet Labour never matched it, or even followed through. Taxpayers own RBS and Lloyds, but they have little say in how they are run.
The demise of statecraft goes hand in hand with the rise of neoliberalism, and its creed that whatever can be done by the private sector should. The political implications of that belief were best summed up by Ronald Reagan in his quip that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Modern politicians have internalised that lesson – and the result is a would-be governing class out of practice at deploying power. Sure, they can still fuss and fiddle over small things. But as the current crop of crises demonstrates, when it comes to tackling really big problems, today's ministers haven't had the training. They lack the muscle memory for government.
Instead they fret about "markets" or "credit-rating agencies" or the "voters": disparate individuals and institutions there to be tackled or negotiated with, yet who ministers conflate into monolithic objects impeding progress. What is government without statecraft? A kind of displacement activity – forever looking for someone else to blame for your own inertia.