Hugh Pope

Author, Reporter, Editor

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Writer of books on Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Formerly Director of Communications & Outreach and Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group. Ex-Turkey & Middle East staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
  • “Oh Sultan of All the Horizons, how I miss you!” (Actually, not).

    “Oh Sultan of All the Horizons, how I miss you!” (Actually, not).

    To hammer home the universal relevance of deliberative democracy, I treat every speaking opportunity as a possible nail. Hitting this one cleanly, though, was a challenge: my comments were to be made from the front bench of an Oxford Union debate about the Ottoman Empire.

    Oxford University’s famed debating club invites speakers for and against a topic, and the audience then votes for one side or the other. The motion set for us was “this House regrets the demise of the Ottoman Empire.” The topic was familiar: I lived, reported, and wrote books about Turkey for more than three decades. When I stood up in the chamber on 20 November, the essence of my argument was that:

    • Regretting the past is futile and blocks thinking about ways to progress
    • Histories show it’s a myth that the Ottoman Empire brought centuries of peace, justice and equality
    • All empires are sustained by oppressive force.
    • None of the Ottomans’ dozens of subject peoples regret the demise of this top-down political construct, including the Turks
    • The Oxford Union, like the British political system of which it is a part, should move on from old-style duelling debates to deliberation on topics of real relevance to its members and the public interest
    • Voting against regret and imperial nostalgia would be a vote for new, improved democratic practices, like decision-making by randomly selected citizens’ assemblies.

    The full text of my speech is at the end of this article. You can see photos from the evening here. The full debate will be shared here in a couple of weeks.

    The arguments

    On our big night in Oxford, I shared the opposition bench with four others. An Australian student, Oliver Douglas, went first, rejecting all forms of empire. Historian Attila Pók then talked of how his native Hungary still viewed Ottoman occupation as a national tragedy. Constantinos Filis said the same for Greece. The Ottomans had earned their demise, he added, as they fell deep into debt and lost control of their sovereignty. Turkish author Kaya Genç quietly and persuasively showed how Turks today have no wish to resurrect the past.

    Ayşe Osmanoğlu wearing the Order of the House of Osman. (Photo: Oxford Union)

    The star on the bench for the proposition was Ayşe Osmanoğlu, a writer and descendant of the defunct Ottoman dynasty. Her ancestors may not have been perfect, she said, but gently asserted that they ruled over a wide geography for centuries, brought peace, gave rights to minorities and avoided forced integration. American academic Carter Findley then talked about his books on the long-running themes of Turkish history. The bravest speech of the evening came from Turkish film director Atıl İnaç, who, tragically, had heard a few hours before that his mother had unexpectedly died. Clearly in shock and unable to get back to Turkey that evening, he courageously went on with the show.

    The proposition bench: Atıl İnaç (L), Ege Havlucu (top), Carter Findley (R), Ayşe Osmanoğlu and Kubilay Ahmet Küçük (bottom). (Photos: Oxford Union)

    Their comments were bracketed by two Turkish students, Ege Havlucu and Kubilay Ahmet Küçük. Havlucu asked the House to regret not the Ottoman regime, but the traumatic bloodshed as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and as the republic was born. Küçük rehearsed with passion the assertion that the Ottomans were much better and more tolerant than their historical peers.

    My fellow speakers on the opposition bench: Oliver Douglas (L), Constantinos Filis (top), Kaya Genç (R) and Attila Pók (below) (Photos: Oxford Union, except for Kaya Genç by Hugh Pope)

    Our side won the debate. 196 people rejected the motion to regret the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, walking through the left side of the great gothic door to the chamber labeled “Noes”. 111 people chose the right hand side to vote with the “Ayes” in favour.

    Debate vs deliberation

    The evening was intense and lots of fun. We heard several clever people making points I hadn’t considered before. Three of the students made short, clear, powerful interventions, luckily supporting our side opposing the motion. But ever since co-editing and finding a publisher in 2023 for my father’s posthumous book The Keys to Democracy, my eyes have been opened to the benefits of deliberation. I was ultimately frustrated by the process of a “debate” focused on such an I’m-right-you’re-wrong outcome.

    I didn’t go much to the Oxford Union much as a student. Perhaps wiser now about why debates frustrated me, I found it more fun four decades later. (Photo: Oxford Union)

    The main speakers were not expected to respond to each other. There was little sign of coordination between them to streamline the information flow. The occasional rhetorical flourish made the chamber come alive, but these seemed more entertaining than persuasive. A significant amount of what was said consisted of broad assertions mixed with too few facts, or too many obscure facts drowning out a structured assertion. The couple of hundred people in the audience had little chance of distinguishing between the two. Distractingly, between speeches, a good portion of those attending churned in and out of the chamber.

    Oddly, Ayşe Osmanoğlu was the only woman among the ten speakers. Although women were well-represented among the Union officials and the audience, no women were among the half dozen students who made comments from the floor.

    If faced with a real-life decision made in this old-style parliamentary manner, I wouldn’t have wanted to obey it. The yes-or-no debate only strengthened my faith in citizens’ assemblies, the epitome of deliberative democracy. These consist of a group of ordinary citizens randomly selected and mandated to solve a big, knotty problem for their organisation, community or country. Guided by impartial facilitators, they are briefed by accredited experts from all sides of the question, deliberate in small groups and then vote on a new policy. Only what achieves a two-thirds majority counts and the assembly’s final report takes minority opinions into account.

    Forging a new Oxonian elite

    There was more for a deliberative democrat to learn from observing the Oxford Union, perhaps the most famous training ground for the UK’s political elite. Some surprises were refreshing. If earlier on in its 200-year history the club’s members were stalwart champions of imperial expansion, the former British Empire has certainly now struck back.

    The union’s president, Moosa Harraj, scion of a political family in Punjab, is the fourth Pakistani to hold the post. Incoming treasurer Matthew Chiu is from Hong Kong. Student speakers came from Australia and North America. And these are only the ones from Britain’s former dominions. Looking back later, I realised that of all the Oxford Union officers I personally met or speakers I heard, I was probably one of only two who were “mainly” British. But I was born in South Africa, am also a Belgian, and have lived in all kinds of places but Britain for more than four decades. So the most born-and-bred British person of this group was arguably Ayşe Osmanoğlu, the princess wearing a necklace of Ottoman stars and crescents and the Order of the House of Osman. Her perfectly pitched speech would have been the one most at home on a highbrow BBC radio program.

    This multi-ethnic, international mix will in the coming years doubtless transfer to London to enrich the diversity of Britain’s rulers. The elite of Oxford’s student groups did just the same move after my time at the university. Now as then all had seamlessly assimilated the breezy Oxonian corporate culture.

    Oxford Union President Moosa Harraj (seated centre next to Korea’s Hwang Dong-hyuk) with speakers proposing the motion (seated right) and those opposing (seated left). Committee members and guests stand behind.

    Confidence amid chaos was at the heart of it. Union committee members showed their officer calibre, shuttling their confused guests through a fast-moving succession of drinks parties, a three-course dinner, formal photographs and processions. Something cut the power supply to the debating chamber a couple of hours before the debate. But a generator was found and the lights went back on. The 150-year-old building was still brain-crampingly cold, forcing people to pull on coats over their formal wear. One speaker donned his safari hat too. “I thought I’d left power cuts behind in Pakistan,” Harraj muttered into his microphone.

    The club juggles its guests with insouciance. Flattered by our speaker invitations, at least two guests had flown all the way from the US for the evening. But we were just bobbing sticks in a stream of celebrity showboats that Oxford students see all the time. Former US Vice-President Mike Pence had dropped by a couple of days before. And the real guest of honour at our debate dinner was Korea’s Hwang Dong-hyuk, creator of the Squid Game. Even though his world-conquering Netflix series is all about winner-takes-all survival, he sometimes seemed as bewildered as us by these high-powered students and their laser-sharp focus on network and careers.

    Hwang Dong-hyuk (L), creator of Korea’s hit Netflix series the Squid Game, observing the Oxford Union’s real-life game of the survival of the most ambitious. (Photo: Hazel Pope)

    Back in my day, I had little idea that such contacts might open great doors in the future. As I tried and failed to catch the eyes of students to talk to in the Union bar, I realised how blasé my attitude must have seemed to visiting grandees. Indeed, nothing holds a student’s attention like a fellow student, who might prove useful right now. “Even to get elected to the committee, you end up spending your whole life trying to win support on Instagram messenger,” Union official Boldizsar Paladi-Kovacs confided as he guided us round the premises. “That’s why I gave up thinking of going for Union president.”

    My pro-sortition convictions deepened as we passed the photo portraits on the walls of past Union officers whose victories in student elections had paved their paths to national power. “Ah, there’s Boris Johnson when he was president of the union,” one union official said, pointing out the former prime minister’s infamous mop of pale hair. “Of course, you all know the story about how votes for his opponent [when he failed to win election the first time round] were found in a chimney here.”

    A school for power

    The photos present more proof of the Union’s intimate role in the British establishment. During the Cold War, the British secret service insisted that the faces of Union officers be rubbed out, in case Soviet spies spotted them. Every face in some frames is wiped out with a white blotch. Weirdly, the names were all left in. It reminded me of the grassy bank of the Cherwell river running through Oxford that was known as Parsons’ Pleasure. Here we used to punt past often elderly, naked male sunbathers. The clever ones, my late father enjoyed pointing out, would bury their faces in their newspapers, but leave everything else hanging out. “After all, your face is how you are normally recognised,” he’d explain.

    It’s hard for a visitor not to be in awe of the Union’s Victorian grandeur and its ingrained pomp and circumstance. Unshakeable traditions feature white-tie-and-tails costumes for top officials and a great crescent-shaped table that Prime Minister William Gladstone designed for Cabinet meetings a century and a half ago. Its curves were clearly designed to allow one person to dominate and epitomised the top-down culture of British imperial power. “Gladstone wanted to look into all his ministers’ eyes to see if they were lying,” our guide Paladi-Kovacs suggested.

    Posing with the desk used by Prime Minister William Gladstone to keep a close eye on members of his government. (Photo: Hazel Pope)

    This sense of being suddenly in the power of the Oxford Union was reinforced by the just-in-time experience of visitors. It wasn’t just us outside speakers who weren’t sure what was going to happen next, one student explained. The president is elected for just one term, and committee members have to stand for re-election every term. “Unsurprisingly, there’s little continuity,” they said.

    There were reasons too that our hosts might be distracted. The Union is in the grip of a very British scandal. Harraj’s would-be successor next term, George Abaraonye, was voted out of office after he gloated on social media over the September shooting of US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Even Harraj has had to fight to keep his presidency. Top speakers cancelled Union appearances, new memberships dropped by a quarter and revenues were badly hit. Overspending on our debate dinners, apparently, was part of the problem. This high drama will doubtless further prepare everyone involved for future UK political life.

    Oxford Union President Moosa Harraj proposes toasts to his guests and Rosalie Chapman (seated centre). (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    The recent scandal brought another rite of passage. Raising a glass of port, Union President Harraj reserved his last toast after dinner for “my girlfriend, Rosalie”. That was apparently a reference to misogynistic, dismissive tabloid coverage of his partner. In fact, Rosalie Chapman’s robust social media posts celebrate the fact she’s the first in her family to go to university, recently got one of the top degrees in her subject, can give a fine speech and has been elected multiple times to committee positions in the Oxford Union.

    Something to believe in

    Watching the construction of this new elite as a visitor was certainly less stressful than actually being one of the students. Back then, I did join the Oxford Union in my first term, but I rarely went. I was put off by the febrile politicking of ambitious students and never saw much difference between power-hungry political parties.

    I now felt glad that fate had led me to something I could believe in, namely deliberative democracy and random selection. I enjoyed planting the seeds of these ideas in my speech, even if I don’t know how these landed with the union officers or the bulk of the chamber.

    But I did learn a new word after my final appeal for “this House” to stop regretting the end of oppressive empires. My guest for the evening, my teenage niece Hazel Pope, overheard two students in the audience react to my final proposal to embrace new citizens’ assemblies, not regret old imperial rulers. “Based” was the word they whispered. This expression has moved from describing a cocaine user, Google says, to becoming “a compliment to show approval of someone’s confident, courageous, and authentic behaviour.”

    Our side’s victory in defeating the pro-empire proposition of the debate felt good. But hearing of this openness to new ways of doing things tasted sweet too.

    My speech

    Here’s what I wrote for my speech, more or less as delivered:

    Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It’s a great honour to be here.

    Before we get into what to think about the Ottoman Empire, I want to draw your attention to a paradox.

    Most of us in this room are or have been members of Oxford University. I daresay those of you still studying here are quite enjoying the experience.

    But here’s the thing. To “regret the demise of the Ottoman Empire” is to choose a world that is run as some kind of eternal groundhog day.

    If you are an undergraduate, say, the question before you tonight is like asking you whether or not you want to live in student digs forever. I am sure you would all agree that the novelty would soon pall.

    In short, a vote for this motion means a vote never to change, never to develop, never to progress.

    I put this choice in stark terms to underline this point: when we talk about the demise of the Ottoman Empire, we are talking only about the collapse of a political construct. A construct that, like all empires, was based on conquest, force, elite rule and extortion.

    We are not being asked if we like the style of this or that palace, the cadences of a ghazal poem, or the beauties of an Iznik tile. The question begins and ends with, do we wish that this constitutional arrangement had persisted until today?

    Our argument is that it could not have survived, and should not have survived.

    The gallant proponents of the motion on the other side of the aisle have painted charming pictures of various aspects of life in Ottoman times. Some of them genuinely believe that the Ottoman Empire brought peace, integration and justice. The reality for its subject peoples was different.

    Most evidence-based surveys of the Ottoman Empire – present company included – show that there was no pax ottomana. Fighting was a constant on the Ottoman frontiers and internally too. As Ayşe Osmanoğlu’s fine books point out, her own ancestors were locked up for decades in a palace by the Bosporus.

    Full justice was impossible because non-Muslim minorities were, by law, second-class citizens. The empire also often lashed out at Muslims who did not adhere to the orthodox Sunni version of the faith. In short, Ottoman pluralism didn’t offer equality, it was a strategy for imperial control.

    Similarly, there was no single Ottoman realm or Ottoman citizenry. It was a patchwork of peoples, faiths, provinces and autonomous satrapies that masked all kinds of inequalities.

    Foreign visitors to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, now Istanbul, often wrote of their thrill at its cosmopolitan vibrancy. But I would like to share with this House the published view of Edhem Eldem, a wise academic and another descendant of the Ottoman dynasty. Because of domestic inequalities and oppressive rule, he says, the city may always have been wonderful for foreigners to visit, but it was so difficult for its native people to live in that they often just wanted to leave.

    I am sorry that we won’t be hearing from Zülfü Livaneli on the proposing team this evening. I feel that, like many of Turkey’s intellectual elite, he could only have helped our opposition to the motion.

    This famous writer and singer made a fine film in praise of the man who deposed the sultans, Kemal Ataturk. He is an outspoken member of Ataturk’s Republican People’s Party. He is a free spirit who sings songs with titles like “Oh Liberty!”. He is not known for laments called “Oh my lord sultan of all the horizons, how I miss you!”

    Sympathy in Turkey for the republic is strong indeed. While researching my own book on the country, Turkey Unveiled, I met the late Hümeyra Özbaş, a grand-daughter of the last sultan. She ended her days holding court in the Kismet hotel on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Hümeyra told me that many members of her family were secretly proud of the way Kemal Ataturk beat off the invading forces of Britain, France, and Greece to create a truly independent state of Turkey.

    Now, there has been a recent fad for films in Turkey that portray early Ottoman sultans as all-conquering heros. This neo-Ottomanism is often not historically accurate. But to some extent it succeeds in its main aim. This is to add a veneer of glamour and legitimacy to the current Turkish government and its strongman leader.

    That’s why the phenomenon of neo-Ottomanism should not be taken as evidence of Turkish regret for the past. The only regret I feel is the way the Turkish authorities have made some historic parts of Istanbul, like Eyüp, look like a kind of Ottoman Disneyland. They have stripped centuries-old mosques of their patina and scrubbed them as clean as shopping malls. This is just another way to manufacture an Ottoman-themed endorsement for strong, central rule. It’s why the current government of Turkey, not all of its people, would be with the ayes tonight.

    Don’t just take it from me. In the 100 top-grossing films of all time in Turkey, there’s only one with such an Ottoman theme. It’s called “Conquest 1453.” Despite having one of the biggest budgets in Turkish film history, it comes in only at number 48.

    There is also one minor Turkish film, the Ottoman Republic, that imagines what the country might have looked like had Ottoman rule survived. It is a farcical comedy, the sultan is presented as a bumbling incompetent and the country as a small, unimportant stretch of Anatolia under US mandate and European control. Again, no regrets here.

    As you listen to the other side, please remember that dozens of countries and peoples emerged from the Ottoman collapse. And in none of them – Arabs, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgars, Yezidis or Alevis – is there any sign of significant nostalgia for its demise.

    Of course, there is admiration of today’s Turkey in the region. Turkish Airlines flies to more places than any other airline. Turkey’s diplomatic outposts around the world rival those of the US and China. Turkish companies build metros, shopping malls and kitchen appliances for half the neighbourhood. But these are achievements of the Turkish Republic after it freed itself from the shackles of the past.

    Even the Turks do not regret the Ottomans’ passing. For sure, invasions by Britain, France, Russia and Greece a century ago made the transition to a republic bloody and deeply traumatic. But the overall improvements since then are so clear that I could find no polls on the question we are discussing tonight. I could find a proxy, however. A 2024 Pew Research poll shows that 56% of adult Turks want, if they could, to join the European Union. Sounds to me like they’ve moved on.

    Let’s probe a little deeper. Who is doing the regretting that we are so earnestly debating? I suppose we imagine ourselves as “the right-minded people of the world”. But we speak of “this House”.

    “This House” is in many ways a descendant of another empire, the British one. Many politicians who ran that Empire sharpened their rhetorical skills in this same chamber. The British forces under their command played a critical role in bringing down the Ottoman Empire. And the last sultan slipped out of Istanbul in 1922 aboard a British warship.

    “This house” must therefore be honest with itself. Yes, there may have been brief tactical alliances between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, as during the Crimean War.

    These British policies had little to do with the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire itself. They were about domestic politics (busts of Gladstone and Disraeli), commercial interests and the goals of superpower diplomacy like building British maritime power and limiting the reach of Russia.

    An institution like this House, so entwined with the British establishment, cannot airily undo the past and easily regret the demise of an Empire it did so much to destroy.

    Tonight you may hear counter-factual imaginings about how the Middle East might have remained more peaceful if only the Ottoman Empire had remained in control. Please put these fanciful ideas to one side. Wars and uprisings were endemic.

    Indeed, the Ottoman Empire had already shown it could not resist early pressure from the two biggest drivers of Middle East conflict in the 20th century: the creation of the state of Israel, and the lust for control over Middle East oil.

    So the real point to focus on is that the world needs to move on from all empires, which have always relied on force to maintain control. We should not be regretting the passing of authoritarian despotisms.

    What this House should be channeling is the naturally egalitarian, collaborative instincts of our fellow humans.

    Seeing the yes-or-no format of the debate in this House tonight makes me feel even more strongly that we should all be moving on from this binary, polarised duelling about policies.

    We should be trying to create new structures for decision making around the world, like randomly selected citizens’s assemblies.

    We should hurry forward with humanity’s journey from point-scoring debates to deliberation in the public interest, from inherited hierarchies to full equality, and from empire to self-government,

    So I appeal to this House to reject this motion. Let the past be what was, frankly, a not-so-attractive past. Please vote for all of us to be free to embrace a more equal, democratic future.

    The Oxford Union in full flow. The opposition is on the right, with Oliver Douglas speaking. (Photo: Oxford Union)
  • Governments are floundering. Can citizens’ assemblies help?

    Governments are floundering. Can citizens’ assemblies help?

    Rulers in many countries are struggling to meet public expectations. Elections fail to produce stable governments. Disinformation spreads alienation. Selfish hierarchies hollow out law and tradition. Trust in elected politicians plumbs new lows. Authoritarian ideas and leaders fill the void.

    Surprisingly few people, however, question the electoral systems that are a central part of the mess. What can the partisans of citizens’ assemblies – and other deliberative, participatory, broad-based ways of public decision-making – do to persuade other people that their form of democracy offers a better way to run our lives? 

    The scale and urgency of the challenge was a defining theme when, for a week in Brussels this October, I joined 270 fellow members of the international movement to develop such a new constitutional architecture. It was the biggest meeting yet of the Democracy R&D network, which has grown by leaps and bounds since 30 people founded it in Madrid just seven years ago. 

    Compared to most conferences and talking-shops I’ve attended, deliberative democracy get-togethers have definitely been the most meaningful and fun. Democracy R&D 2025 in Brussels was no exception (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    These activists mostly seek to develop and popularise the use in public decision-making of citizens’ assemblies. Like juries in courts of law, these assemblies are groups of everyday citizens – from a dozen to 200 people – who are chosen by lot to find a solution to tough local or national problems. They meet for several days over weeks or months, are briefed by experts, deliberate on what they hear and take votes on the best way forward. None are exactly the same, but most follow the same principles. A typical template is this one by DemocracyNext, a non-profit on the cutting edge of international thinking on the topic.

    Exponential growth

    Citizens’ assemblies have grown fast since the first of the modern era was held in Vancouver, Canada, in 2004. The movement lost count of the total after the number reached 713 in 2023, but for sure their spread around the world has continued exponentially. For instance, 51 new citizens’ assemblies were held in 2024 in Germany alone. 

    Citizens’ assemblies show a way out of the deepening paradox in countries ruled by elected governments. An average 63% of adults in 12 high-income countries are dissatisfied with the way democratic governments are working, a figure that has steadily risen from 49% in 2017, according to a Pew Research poll from June 2025. The paradox is that 77% of adults told a separate 2024 Pew poll of 24 countries that they are convinced that elected governments is basically a good system.

    The movement for deliberative democracy, by contrast, maintains that squabbling political parties, polarised societies and self-centred leaders are not bugs that can be fixed, but fundamental flaws of the electoral system. This idea is gaining ground, despite people’s paradoxical faith in voting for representatives. An average 70% of people, the 2024 Pew poll showed, now also think of direct democracy as good (defined broadly as when “citizens, not elected officials, vote directly on major national issues to decide what becomes law”). 

    In the UK, more than half of respondents from all four major political tendencies told an April 2025 YouGov poll that they would trust members of a citizens’ assembly more than members of parliament to take a policy decision in their own interest.

    “Connect, get out there, make more people understand what we’re trying to do. Give people the tools to make participation happen where they are.” Anthony Zacharzewski opens the second day of the Democracy R&D conference in Brussels (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    Looking back with pride, Anthony Zacharzewski of the Brussels-based non-profit Democratic Society told the Democracy R&D conference of the change since he started out more than a decade ago. Back then, in “every conversation I had about participatory democracy, the question was: ‘What is participatory democracy?’ …. We really had to knock on every door. Now the phone is ringing and people come to us.”

    But the new democrats have by no means won the argument. The 2024 Pew poll showed there is also clear support for top-down, non-citizen-based alternatives. 58% of people favoured rule by experts, 26% rule by a strong leader and 15% rule by the military. And to judge by myriad speeches, workshops and dinners at the Democracy R&D conference in Brussels, the deliberative movement still needs to find more internal cohesion, popular traction and funding.

    Barbed wire can’t protect a house from rotting within

    Since last year’s Democracy R&D conference in Vancouver, the electoral success of Donald Trump in the United States has fanned fears that autocratic rule is running away with the race. Alarm has grown over the rise of the authoritarian right in Europe, and the multiple failures of several traditionally strong north European powers to form stable governments after elections. 

    Zacharzewski pointed out that President Trump’s elimination of USAID and all its funding programmes meant that in a developing country like Kosovo, two thirds of the people working on democracy lost their jobs overnight. “This is repeated right away across the world, even in Europe, where national governments are making similar cuts,” he said.

    Recently, too, European states have prioritised defence, not governance, throwing new resources into drone technology, cybersecurity and military spending. For instance, the European Union is proposing to quintuple security spending in its next seven-year budget starting in 2028. Several speakers at this year’s conference worried this neglected improvements to democracy – a domain that, in theory at least, gave Europe its competitive edge in the first place.

    “A strong defense on the outside of Europe, protecting a weak democracy on the inside, is asking for problems,” David Van Reybrouck, the Belgian writer, poet and political philosopher told the conference-goers. “We’d be repeating on a continental scale what has happened in Israel on a national scale. A dilapidated house [won’t repair itself just because] you put some barbed wire around it.”

    The deliberative wave: conference goers in front of the Flagey building in Brussels (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    Just €3.6 billion in the EU’s next €2 trillion budget is earmarked for democracy-adjacent activities. Conference speakers urged activists to work harder on getting more funds directed towards democratic innovation. This includes not just citizens’ assemblies but developing ideas like participatory budgeting (allowing groups of citizens a say over part of a government budget), using artificial intelligence to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of assemblies, and multiple choice “preferendums” on new policy instead of simplistic and easily politicised yes-or-no referendums. 

    As it happens, the EU has just held a randomly selected citizens’ panel (its name for a citizens’ assembly) on what priorities should guide the budget. Ironically, the 150 citizens did not explicitly recommend the funding of more citizens’ panels. 

    Still, the first of the seven EU citizens’ panels organized since 2021 did recommend that citizens’ assemblies should be encouraged. The citizens allotted to the latest panel also said the format represented the EU well and that they were satisfied by the experience of democracy by lot. As for stronger defence, the panel ranked it only seventh of their 23 priority recommendations (healthcare, youth jobs and infrastructure spending came out on top). “Very quickly, we realised these discussions are incredible,” an EU budget official who attended the panels told our group. “You can ask more from citizens and trust them more than most people think.” 

    An EU official praises the contribution of a recent European Citizens’ Panel to policy making on tackling hatred. (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    The European Commission wants to hold more more citizens’ panels. It invited democracy conference attendees to meet members of its panel held in 2023 on tackling hatred in society, some of whom are still involved in briefing EU officials on their findings. As one EU official from the directorate general involved said to the deliberative democrats: “We found common ground. We were amazed by the [panel’s] recommendations. We are advancing on those.”

    Breaking through

    The growing number of citizens’ assemblies being organised by powerful entities like the European Commission, Germany’s parliament and France’s President Emmanuel Macron is not the only good news. More and more thoughtful celebrities are also ready to endorse them. From the English-speaking world, these include author and comedian Stephen Fry, political podcaster Rory Stewart, the late UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, British actor Riz Ahmed and cookery author Delia Smith.

    Even India’s Mahatma Ghandi would count as a supporter, according to a conference speech by Yves Mathieu, head of French citizens’ assembly organiser Missions Publiques. He pointed out that Ghandi defended a democracy of directly participating citizens when he said: “If you do something for me without me, it’s against me.” 

    Many at the conference said the deliberative democratic movement, having devoted its early attention to conceiving and building a new model of doing democracy, must now focus more on mobilising this model to catch up with autocrats and oligarchs. “The sector of deliberative democracy is obsessed with design,” Van Reybrouck warned. “Design matters, but we cannot afford to stay and to remain nerds only. We have to become campaigners as well.”

    One sign of new activism is the Sortition Foundation‘s new campaign in the UK for a randomly selected citizens assembly to take the place of Britain’s antiquated House of Lords. But public advocacy on this scale is still a rare initiative, given the cash-strapped nature of most democracy non-profits.

    At one conference workshop – on citizens’ assemblies organised without an official mandate – we dove deep in search of new ideas. One of the organisers was Sofie Furu, of Norway’s SoCentral non-profit, which this year joined several Norwegian civil society groups to organise a major citizens’ assembly on the country’s oil fund.

    “We know that [the citizens’ assembly model] works, we have seen the magic. But autocrats are way ahead in the communications game and we need to stop being a nerdy little club,” Furu warned. 

    Ideas to do better voiced during our workshop included these suggestions:

    • Streamlining terminology, since the meaning of words like sortition are obscure to many
    • Bringing more coherence to the mosaic of organisations working for more deliberative democracy
    • Writing into national laws and constitutions the role of and resources needed by citizens’ assemblies
    • Spending more time and effort convincing politicians that citizens’ assemblies can help achieve politicians’ own public policy goals
    • Outreach to ordinary people along the lines of the Camarados and their “public living rooms”

    My personal favourite, suggested by another participant at my table, was to add the simple tagline “Get lucky!” when using the phrase “citizens’ assemblies”. It captures the inspiring sense of empowerment and joy that develops among randomly selected people when they attend and engage in well-organised assembly.

    Dutch citizens’ assembly organiser Charley Fiedeldij Dop collects ideas at her workshop to popularise the cause (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    Champions, terminology, taglines will likely just be part of the time, familiarity and personal advocacy it will take to bring deliberative democracy into the mainstream. There’s still far to go to match classical Athens, democracy by lot’s first and last great success: the ancient Greeks believed their extraordinary civilizational breakthroughs were due to their democracy of randomly selected decision-makers. Here and now, on average just 5% of people reached by post or phone to be told they have won the civic lottery to be part of a citizens’ assembly actually say they will join in.

    The quest for an ideal

    Several deliberative democrat speakers in Brussels are now more comfortable calling themselves part of a movement. Activists share a faith in the ideals of greater participation, the representative power of random selection and the benefits of greater public engagement. But it’s not clear precisely what the movement’s most favoured new constitutional arrangement is. 

    A draft paper circulated to conference-goers suggested a “system goal” for future discussion and development: “People from all walks of life benefit from more inclusive, fair and informed decision-making on tough, politically-gridlocked issues because lottery-selected deliberations are a go-to decision-making method (institutionalised or not).”

    Such dense language reflects the evolutionary approach that most deliberative democracy activists prefer, despite the fact that a system change to democracy by lot would actually be revolutionary. This careful approach is not surprising in a movement that has minimal ideological convictions and is still trying to find its feet. But what did strike me more this year in Brussels than last year in Vancouver – and perhaps it was only because I kept asking people provocative questions – was that younger participants seemed keener to hone a more radical approach to rally round. At the same time, others are convinced a hybrid mix of elected politicians and randomly selected bodies goes far enough as a goal. One reason is that established activists are often concerned about threats to credibility and government funding. 

    To build participatory democracy into a default attitude in government bureaucracies, argued Democratic Society’s Anthony Zacharzewski, activists need to shift from being “people who are doing experiments around the edge, and thinking about these big new ways of reforming the state, into people who are able to work with the state and work with politics as well … [that means] never quite getting what you want … We may need to grow up.”

    Another formulation for a harmonious transition came from Gaetan Ricard-Nihoul, a senior official at the European Commission’s directorate for citizens’ engagement. She said: “We have to show the virtuous circle between voting and the participatory stuff.”

    Not every participatory democrat agrees. One UK non-profit, Humanity Project, opposes elections, seeks to create an “assembly culture” from the ground up, and radiates radical urgency. Its website uses a headline font of cutout printed letters more often associated with ransom demands. It recruits citizens for “popular assemblies” that are not chosen through expensive random selection, but from whomever local organizers can mobilise. There is “no need to wait for permission from anyone … Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, we’re building something big enough to change things at every level,” the non-profit says.

    At the Brussels workshop on assemblies with no local or national government mandate, University of Westminster academic and author Graham Smith noted that: “Some of us will work with such groups publicly. Others will offer help in private. Others might want to blackball them … We will have different positions on whether to give them support, ignore them or try to kill them off.”   

    Willice Onyango – a deliberative democrat from Kenya – takes delivery of a copy of my late father Maurice Pope’s posthumous book, The Keys to Democracy (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    The movement’s lack of clarity over its ambition is no small issue, even for a newcomer to the field like me. I would be disappointed to abandon an eventual goal of a society ruled by a system of pure sortition – even while recognising that this might take another century or so. I became a follower of the movement as I edited The Keys to Democracy, a posthumous book by my late father Maurice Pope, a classicist and admirer of ancient Athens. What convinced me were his arguments about the forgotten power of full, mandatory popular civic engagement and the scientific beauty of randomness.

    Brussels: the shining city on the hill? 

    The more I think of a world without elections, the more conscious I am of a gap in the ideological dimension. It’s not that I would want democracy conferences to resemble a meeting singing hymns to the same religious or ideological belief. That would be impossible anyway: the new democrats’ diversity of approaches and lack of specific ideology is too great. But many deliberative democrats do feel that their cause will make the world a better place, and that a more decisive spirit might get there quicker.

    Sortitionists are not oppressed heretics and are unlikely to emulate the 17th century English religious dissidents who boarded the ship Mayflower and headed to the US to build a new world. But I can’t help thinking it would help define what is possible if an organisation, a community, or even a town chose to join an experiment to see what happens if its key public decisions were entirely taken through randomly selected panels or assemblies.

    One chapter of my father’s book lays out what a sortition-based utopia might look like. He imagines a scientific community on Antarctica being the only survivors of a nuclear apocalypse that wipes out the rest of the world. The group goes on to repopulate New Zealand with an entirely new political structure. In reality, a more likely candidate to be sortition’s shining city on a hill might actually be Belgium, or more specifically, my own home town of Brussels.

    The time seems ripe. Belgium’s national politics are near-paralysed by squabbling parties and multiple governments based on regions and language groups. The electoral gridlock is worst in Brussels, which is both a city and one of Belgium’s three federal regions. It has been unable to form a government for more than 500 days since the last elections in June 2024. Popular confidence in politicians is plummeting. 

    David Van Reybrouck speaks to democracy conference-goers in a Brussels municipal hall overlooking the city (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    “Every year we lose between one and 2% of people [in Belgium] still believing in democracy,” David Van Reybrouck said in his speech. “It doesn’t seem a lot, but after 10 years, it’s going very fast.”

    Already in 2011, Belgium was left without a national government for more than 500 days after an election. This had inspired Van Reybrouck to lead the organisation of one of the world’s first citizens’ assemblies, the G1000, to try to plot an alternative path forward for the country. Since then Belgium has played a pioneering role in the world of deliberative democracy.

    In 2019, Belgium inaugurated the world’s first permanent citizens’ assembly as part of the parliament of the East Belgian German-speaking community. It is made up of two parts: one is permanent in the sense that it chooses the topics for the second part, which are one-off citizens assemblies; the first part’s membership is regularly refreshed with new members. The assembly is now onto its seventh policy topic. In 2023, the Brussels region also created a permanent climate assembly, again the first permanent one of this type in the world, in which a subgroup of the group of 100 randomly selected citizens chooses the topic for the next one. Two other regional Belgian parliaments have refreshed their chamber’s policy committees by mixing in three randomly selected citizens for each parliamentarian. The national parliament has now also agreed that future assemblies that have a government mandate can use the national electoral register for their random selection procedure, considerably reducing the cost of any such exercise.

    Random selection is putting down local roots in the city. By chance – of course – my wife Jessica Lutz was chosen by lot to join a panel of citizens from our own sub-district, which meets every three months to adjudicate on projects and priorities for the commune. “Being part of a decision-making structure, with people that I would never otherwise meet, makes me realise how important it is to take everyone’s perspective into account. I also see how when you bring things down to practical decision-making, differences between people aren’t so big. And even though our panel is very small, I see how empowered everyone is by having a say in where our tax money goes,” she told me.

    The idea of sortition is becoming mainstream. Alexandre Helson, seventh-generation head of one of Belgium’s fine ginger biscuit makers Maison Dandoy, wrote in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir in October: “What if we [citizens] pick up the baton, after the elected ones have tried for months to find common ground? What if we dared to do a big, participatory citizens’ assembly? [It would] restore confidence and remake democracy into what it should be: the slow construction of a common language.”

    In an opening speech to the democracy conference, Fatima Zibouh, a Brussels veteran of the original G1000 citizens’ assembly in 2011, described a city ripe for a new form of governance. She pointed out how different the city is from Belgium’s two main federal states, Dutch-speaking Flanders and mostly Francophone Wallonia. With 40% of Brussels’ population not having Belgian nationality, and 74% having one parent born outside Belgium, it is actually the most diverse city in Europe, she said. 

    “Radical inclusion is not just being invited to the party or being asked to dance, but helping to design the party, to shape the space itself,” Zibouh said. She has now also called (in an open letter in Le Soir newspaper) for a randomly selected “B1000” assembly for Brussels to think up a citizens-based alternative while politicians bicker on about their next coalition government.

    The instinct to cooperate

    Whether in Brussels or far beyond, it’s still hard to imagine decision-making citizens’ assemblies being written into constitutions without a major breakthrough in public opinion by the movement for deliberative democracy, a change of heart among political leaders or a much greater availability of resources. Getting approval for advisory ones remains uphill work.

    “We are both desperate for money and coming across as a luxury item … how do we communicate the value of what we do better?” Zacharzewski said. “If we are doing this as a collective of fragile organizations, always trying to close the next budget … we will never be able to let our thinking and our work rise to the scale that needs to be at.”

    Direct democracy activist Cynthia Mbamalu makes a point in Brussels. Her group Yiago Africa organises people’s assemblies in Nigeria at the local government level because “democracy is beyond votes and elections.” (Photo: FIDE)

    But the movement is growing. New democrats working on new, deliberative ways to channel the human instinct to work for the common good came to Brussels from all over the world. It’s a mostly “northern” movement so far – indeed, richer countries have got a lot to fix with governance at home before preaching to others – but a record tenth of participants came from the global “south” this year.

    And despite the high-level reasons for angst, the conference bubbled with presentations about the uptake of citizens’ assemblies in the Balkans, in Africa and in eastern Europe. Adam Cronkright gave a pre-screening of his documentary “Goodbye Elections. Hello Democracy,” a superb fly-on-the-wall account of a US citizens assembly about Covid-19 held online during the pandemic and due for release in 2026. One inspiring participant told of an assembly in Ukraine where the allotted group insisted on going ahead with the meetings in a bomb shelter despite ongoing Russian attacks.

    Adam Cronkright’s documentary is based on footage taken during a US citizens’ assembly on the fraught topic of Covid-19 (Photo Hugh Pope)

    Cooperation has always been a default feature of humankind. Arguably, it’s what made us what my late father would have called the Top Species (so far). Societies have always found ways to channel this instinct through religions, ideologies, or moral codes, as in the Victorian era. Even criminal gangs create rules to collaborate. Authoritarians exploit this tendency too, prioritising themselves and imposing collaboration through force and oppression. 

    Our democracy conference in Brussels refreshed my conviction that most people actually want to work together in the positive public interest, and long for an agreed, decent way to do so. And that a great group of people is working hard to harness this cooperative instinct as a force for good.

  • The Gareth Rules on writing for policy impact

    The Gareth Rules on writing for policy impact

    It makes a welcome change to step aside and look back. Such a chance arose last week when I joined a few ex-colleagues for dinner with our old boss Gareth Evans, the long-serving former Australian foreign minister. Evans took over a small outfit called The International Crisis Group in 2000 and over the next decade turned it into a powerhouse of global conflict analysis. In various ways – in my case, a lucky two-year overlap at the end – we had been part of that adventure. 

    What struck me most was our debate over Gareth’s formula for policy impact and why it worked so well. At its best, we agreed, it worked like this: bestow trust and responsibility on far-flung country directors; give them time to write long, ground-breaking reports on how to avoid or end conflict; put their reports through an editing regime to bring out the best in what they were trying to say; mobilise resources for weeks-long advocacy tours; and harness the work to board members who accessed the top level of governments around the world.

    With such support, I loved the fifteen years I spent at Crisis Group after Gareth, Nicholas Whyte and others not at our dinner took me on as the director of the Turkey & Cyprus Project. There was also the joy of working for a non-partisan organisation. For sure, I had been given resources and rigour at my previous employer, The Wall Street Journal. But I had crashed out. I felt exhausted by reporting the folly of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq for a newspaper whose opinion pages so wantonly fanned the flames of war.

    Gareth reminded us of the terrible fight he had had with Crisis Group’s US board members who blocked the organisation’s attempts to oppose the Iraq invasion. He remained proud that Crisis Group managed to publish at least some of the basic facts about what lay ahead. But it was too little, too late to blunt the George W. Bush administration’s war-mongering intent.

    There were high points, too. Gareth now laughed about the day in 2006 when rumours swirled that Crisis Group was in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize. Television teams were even ready down in the lobby. But the award went to Muhammad Yunus for his micro-finance bank in Bangladesh. Suddenly the television crew wanted to interview not Gareth, but one of the humblest members of our IT staff who happened to hail from Yunus’s homeland.

    Still, being a Nobel runner-up was quite an achievement. Gareth, now 81, says he has written all the books he wants to write (more than ten of them) and has long cut back his once legendary sixteen-hour-plus workdays. But he keeps his fiery style. His Australian expletives remain richly undeleted, as does his swashbuckling chorus line of “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” 

    I remembered how those of a gentler disposition were physically scared to offer up work for his appraisal, which could indeed be terrifyingly scathing. He was unrepentant about the demands of his style, arguing that rigour was vital in his quest to win respect for his organisation in chanceries around the world as “professional, professional, professional.” Another key to any success, he believed, was the high performance he got from “high maintenance” staff that others found demanding or difficult to manage. 

    Building up Crisis Group, he said, was one of his proudest achievements, a close second to his decade “inside the tent” as Australian foreign minister. He reminisced about creating the organisation’s stylebook with, under the letter G, the “Gareth Rule”: namely, that he could override any of the other rules. He still almost always rejects any editing of his own outputs, he said. “I spent half my life editing other people, why should I let anyone touch my own writing?”. 

    We raked over the coals of why today’s non-profits are losing their fire. They now struggle to find stable funding, to choose good boards, to manage themselves openly, to maintain first-hand experience of countries in conflict and to make work on thematic topics genuinely unique. One of our former colleagues, Neil Campbell, noted that in the corridors of European power in Brussels, the word “advocacy” itself has become a taboo. Another ex-Crisis Grouper with us, Andebrhan Giorgis, lamented the apparently unstoppable rise of authoritarian governments round the world.

    In short, many rules have changed. The all-male profile of our dinner speaks for itself (even if accidental). Few non-profits likely implement one of his old impact-seeking diktats, namely that even in their own offices, staff should act the part of suited-up diplomats. And the old ruler himself reckoned that, compared with his heyday of the post-Cold War, Western-led order, the era has passed when then youthful, plucky non-profits like Crisis Group could achieve such an extraordinary and outsize role.

    Still, Gareth said, “it was a magical time.”

  • Reconnecting with Turkey’s Olympian heights

    Reconnecting with Turkey’s Olympian heights

    Twenty years ago, my wife Jessica and I fell in love with a remote, mountainous corner of Turkey. Deeply forested and rooted in antiquity, its steep valleys are overseen by a majestic peak soaring 2,365 metres (7,760 feet) above the nearby Mediterranean Sea. 

    We took on a two-acre plot of land on the flanks of the mountain range, hard to reach and initially bereft of road, electricity or water. Living in a campsite for five months, we built a house, The Lazy Olive. But over the years that followed, we were so busy struggling to cope with small details that, without wanting to, we lost touch with the big picture of our surroundings. 

    The Lazy Olive with Mount Olympos in the background

    From the outset, I had wanted to scale the summit of the great peak of Mount Olympos, also known as Tahtalı in Turkish. (A number of high mountains in Turkey have inherited the name Olympos from antiquity, but are separate from the more famous Mt Olympus in neighbouring Greece). But, after a first eight-hour trek over a nearby mountain twenty years ago, I never made time for more.

    This April, however, I was determined to get back to what had initially attracted us to Olympos and the raw beauty and unspoiled, 70 km-long coastline of the Beydağları National Park. 

    Once a week, I set out to discover what had lain at our doorstep for so many years: the Lycian Way, a 760-km, 35-day trail along the coast of the Lycian peninsula pieced together from ancient village paths by British pioneer Kate Clow in the 1990s. Turkey’s first long-distance trail has since become famous in the hiking world.

    I soon worked out that there were a dozen good sections of the Lycian Way that would work well as day trips from The Lazy Olive. I wanted to start with a reprise of that first walk in 2005. Jessica joined me. From our front door we went up and over Musa Dağ, or Mount Moses, which spreads across our horizon when we sit on the terrace of our house. 18 km and 10 hours later, exhausted, we reached the beach at Adrasan. 

    Jessica ascends through a strawberry tree forest on Mount Musa/Musa Dağ

    One 3 km stretch climbed a steep 620 m in elevation through a close-packed forest of smooth red-trunked strawberry trees. Stony escarpments, earthen forest tracks and silent paths carpeted in pine needles led us to another world. We marveled at how the inhabitants of the two millennia-old port city of Olympos below had built a second stone city near the peak, perhaps to avoid the scourge of pirates.

    The experience made me feel a little foolish. We had spent too many of our vacations scouring building supplies shops as big as cathedrals, shuttling between government offices on mind-numbing bureaucratic errands, and enduring long, sweltering drives to distant towns. We always needed something: parts for broken water pumps, esoteric natural pool essentials or yet more makeovers for The Empress, our 1987 ex-Turkish army Land Rover.  

    Now we were finally walking those walks. We reconnected with the amazing fact that all this natural beauty was just a footpath away from our house.

    Thistles on the canal road

    For the next stage, Jessica and I hiked 11 km along the contour track that runs alongside our village’s small agricultural canal to the water springs in Ulupınar. Every grassy bank was thick with offerings to spring, like daisies, red poppies, vibrant white-and-yellow camomile, purple thistles, salsify heads of seed like giant dandelions, and a flower with a delicate display that truly earns its name of white lace. 

    Then I did a round trip of 18 km from Ulupınar that passed through Beycik, the high mountain village which would be my jumping off point for the route up Mount Olympos. I wanted to build up confidence: the 700 m climb in height up to Beycik was just half the 1,400 m I’d have to manage to reach the top of the mountain (and the same on the way down). It wasn’t the only thing that made me anxious. Hiking apps are all very well, but the Lycian Way can be elusive to follow. From a couple of trips up Mount Olympos by a cable car installed in 2007, I also knew that up at 2,365 m (7,760 ft) the sun cuts like a knife, the air is thin and cold, and the last 3 km to the summit climbs through trackless-looking screes of bare, uneven stones.

    A welcome break with Hanife at Göl Yaylası, last stop on the Lycian Way path up Mount Olympos

    All started well on the day. After an hour, the path literally wound through a delightful, informal cafe built out of wood from the forest. A pint of fresh-pressed orange juice from the proprietor, Hanife, further raised my morale. Continuing uphill, I briefly overlapped with a Turkish hiking group. They had driven four hours to the starting point, and, after the eight-hour climb and descent, they would be driving four hours home the same night. Their commitment added to my sense of occasion.

    The path was steep but not vertiginous, with many rocky outcrops from which to admire the Mediterranean coastline far below. The resinous pine trees common on the lower slopes gave way to high-altitude cedars with their feathery layers of branches spreading out like cirrus clouds. Great ancient trunks lay in clearings, bleached as white as bones, while the forest floor was bushy with bright green cedar saplings to take their place.

    A glimpse of Çiralı beach and Genoese bay through the cedars of Mount Olympos

    My training walks had shown me how the Lycian Way can split into confusing parallel or side trails, but up here walking was more straightforward. Cairns, wooden signposts and the occasional crossed branches – not to mention my favourite Belgian walking app – kept me on track. 

    At the treeline, I paused, intimidated by the bare, steep slope of broken stones ahead, all between the size of a brick and a bollard. I detected the path that snaked upward, nearly invisibly. A young Australian caught up with me and we kept each other company for the last hour of gruelling climb. She’d chosen to come to Turkey by chance after an artificial intelligence search told her that the Lycian Way was one of Europe’s top 10 long-distance trails. We took our minds off the ascent by talking about the rest of her 25-day walk and her work on indigenous Australians’ adaptation to climate change. We soon reckoned that remote rural family cultures in Turkey and Australia had a surprising amount in common. 

    Together we closed on the summit. I marveled at the ugly concrete angularity of the Swiss-built cable car station, a blockhouse that one day could be chosen for the denouement of a James Bond film. I hadn’t expected how it took my breath away to reach and look over the last crest before the station’s perimeter fence. The other side of the mountain plunged steeply away to reveal the whole western coast of the Lycian peninsula at our feet, from the resort town of Kemer to a white line by the sea that marked the port city of Antalya, 45 km distant.

    Ducking through the wire into the cable station’s realm brought a jarring change from the  beauties of the ascent. We found a seat on the restaurant terrace amid an east-meets-west mix of people in flip-flops and t-shirts. Cartoon Olympian god statues served as mute selfie buddies, squeals rang out as a bungee trampoline heaved people high over the escarpments and pilots of two-seater paragliders stood ready to transport the bravest on a soaring shortcut back down to the sea 8 km away. 

    After a bracing Turkish coffee, my Australian companion and I were ready to stage our own flight from the tourist bubble and back into nature. At the treeline, she turned north to her next village host. I headed back south, down the way I had ascended. I wished that like her I had metal-tipped alpine walking sticks to give me purchase on the stonier surfaces. I scavenged fallen branches to serve as rough wooden staffs, but had to plant them down so hard they kept breaking. 

    For the rest of the afternoon I felt privileged to have the great mountain back mostly to myself. In fact, apart from the Turkish hiking group and the Australian, I only saw three other people on the Lycian Way during that whole late April day. When I got back down to the café, and gratefully accepted more orange juice and some succulent stuffed cabbage leaves, Hanife told me it was rarely busy. The peak seasons from February to mid-April and from October to November, she said, bring at most 50-60 hikers a day.

    Nine hours after I’d left the Empress in Beycik, we were reunited and I started the drive back to The Lazy Olive. There have been many rewards for the past 20 years we’ve spent on the building, maintaining and managing the occasional renting out of our second house in a hard-to-reach place. But my exhilarating four April walks from Adrasan beach to Mount Olympos – in all, 54 km along and 3 km up and down – made me remember why we fell in love with this part of Turkey and started this adventure in the first place.

    Mount Olympos at sunset

    When we’re not there, we rent out The Lazy Olive through AirBNB or VRBO. To see more walks from the house there’s a YouTube video playlist too.

  • Breaking up with my long-cherished notebooks

    Breaking up with my long-cherished notebooks

    My notebooks long seemed to me to be priceless. For 43 years, they helped me pin down the chaotic rush of war zones, wise words from unexpected people and the gist of long discussions that might stretch deep into the early hours.  

    By the end, their number grew to some 200 notepads and booklets, spanning all shapes, colours, sizes and qualities of paper. They had ranged over more than 30 countries, crossing and recrossing borders hundreds of times. They had moved with me from homes in Damascus to Beirut, Manama, Tehran, Nicosia, Istanbul, and, finally, to five boxes in my attic in Brussels.

    Some of the least intelligible notes were from the most dramatic days of my work, visits to warfronts. On the left, some of my notebooks from a year in Tehran in 1985-86. On the right, wearing a perfunctory chemical warfare suit, I felt green with shock after a terrifying day with the Iranian forces who briefly conquered Faw, the southernmost point of Iraq.

    I never thought I’d take my leave from these core ingredients of my working life. The notebooks were survivors. Even briefly misplacing one on a reporting trip would trigger a traumatic panic, as if the whole journey risked being in vain. Yet when I needed to make space in my attic this summer, most of them did not pass the final edit. To my great surprise, I was able to bid farewell to all but a shoebox-full of them.

    Home-made shorthand

    A lot has changed to make me ready to let them go. For a start, many were probably only fully understandable by me. Sometimes I scribbled stuff down without dates, without full names, without places. My handwriting is not always that legible, and reading my home-made shorthand, which omits the vowels, takes some practice. I can still work most of it out.

    But as I leafed through each notebook, considering its fate, I realised the contents were highly fragmented. I never focused for long on one topic or one country. Many notebooks bounced between several countries, like one that jumped from Saudi Arabia, to Lebanon, to Washington DC, then to the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus.

    My dependence on them in pre-digital days was augmented by the back page or two that tracked my treasure hunt for contacts in each new location. Names, telephone numbers and addresses were culled from chance meetings, trips off the beaten track, friendly colleagues, local journalists, stringers and diplomats. Stuck into one notebook from Sudan, I found a mimeographed list of the entire government. (I only managed to reach one of them, the prime minister, in his lounge at Khartoum airport late one night. Then, before we’d exchanged a full greeting, the power cut out and all went black – and silent. No notes needed.)

    It dawned on me too that the forces propelling me on those journalistic journeys were usually random. There were few sustained trails of enquiry that would be useful to me or any future researcher. My magnets were the zig-zagging pinball of the news, which country had finally surrendered to my faxes begging for a visa, or the determination of my editors that I serve up new topics and places that I had never written about before.

    That’s why I often reported on idiosyncratic subjects. A Soviet aluminium smelter in Tajikistan that history had forgotten. How Albanians dealt with their leader’s obsession with concrete bunkers. What happened when reconstruction experts, wanting an authentic floor for a new version of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, went to Turkey looking for hazelnut shells. I greatly enjoyed tracking down such stories, but my reporting notebooks added little to what was published. 

    Notebooks everywhere, especially when you don’t need them (left). It looks like wobbly A4 paper was in action in 1983 (right) as I tried to get a straight answer from Lebanon’s mercurial Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. (Photo on right courtesy of Jack Dabaghian).

    Notebooks, too, were mostly just a starting point for me. The closest I usually got to long-form writing in them were a few drafts of lead paragraphs while sitting in a taxi on my way to my office or hotel, a pointless record at the best of times. Blinking green computer terminals had just arrived when I started in the trade, and when I couldn’t use one I chose either normal paper or, rarely, my typewriter. 

    Only once do I remember writing anything in a notebook that was intended to last. That was when I found myself in an Iranian helicopter streaking low over a southern desert war front into banks of smoke and exploding Iraqi bombs. I began scribbling a goodbye note to my first wife. I was too terrified to make any literary or even emotional sense, and stopped half-way through. As I sifted through the stacks, I found the right notebook. But the fond farewell had disappeared. In some previous editing, I had already torn it out.

    Just once or twice, I found a page where I couldn’t resist writing in real time. Here I am on board the Azerbaijani ship Ghassan Aliev after it docked in Baku, ending my three-day struggle in 1993 to get out of the Turkmen port of Krasnovodsk (now Türkmenbaşy) and across the Caspian Sea.

    “Huge crush of sweating Azeris trying to find places to get off. Enterprising lads and one old man leap over to a flying pontoon at deck level. “Hey,” shouted one man. “You’re not in Turkmenistan now.” It was a premature call to order as we heaved through. Material-wrapped baggage bombarded the quayside, causing the crewmen lowering a stairway to join in the frequent swearing of “what animals.” After that, crew abdicate responsibility for order completely. In the bar/restaurant/purser’s lobby, one man shouts “What a stupid nation we are.” Last remnants of Soviet order are commands that snap through the intercom at all times of day and night: “No smoking except in the restaurant.”

    That page seems born of a rare situation where I had extra time on my hands. I soon gave up any idea that there might be literary passages worthy of a hero writer. They are different. For instance, take Ernest Hemingway.

    In 1956, Hemingway unexpectedly recovered his notebooks about life in 1920s Paris from a trunk he’d forgotten that he’d left in the Ritz Hotel. Later published as A Moveable Feast, he talks of watching a beautiful woman with hair “black as a crow’s wing” from his seat in a café. Then he jots down: “You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and pencil.”

    Perhaps my relationship with my notebooks would have been deeper if, like Hemingway, my work had involved haunting Paris cafés drinking Rhum Saint James and downing Portuguese oysters. I can only console myself in the knowledge that Hemingway used school notebooks too.

    Living in the moment

    The lack of grand asides, emotional depth or narrative context in the notebooks was also because the notes were meant to feed stories written up within a few hours or days. I felt little motivation to jot down any sights, sounds, smells, or my side of any conversation, especially since I was often busy taking photographs too. Even the date did not feel necessary. I’m observant and have a fair memory. I was living in the moment, everything seemed obvious. I knew I would remember it all while writing my piece.

    The variety of subjects I was juggling with meant that I often felt I was skating on the surface of stories. In parts of just seven of the pads above are an interview in Pakistan with Imran Khan, my homemade Palestine Liberation Organistation handbook, a mimeographed Sudanese government list, my Arabic political vocabulary book, notes from the Iran-Iraq peace talks in Geneva in 1988, a London energy conference …

    The passage of time hasn’t wiped out such memories, some of which returned as I handled my old companions on the road. But each of the many stories has moved far, far on. The notebooks seemed to have gone past their expiry date. They added little intriguing or new.  

    Another big reason for my sense of the notebooks’ disposability is doubtless that most of them have already had an afterlife. If there was a logic to where I went and what I did beyond the news, it was my quest to fill in gaps in more personal, longer-form narratives. The notebooks had already refreshed my memory as I wrote books in the 1990s and 2000s on Turkey, Central Asia and the wider Turkic World, and the Middle East. The scene in Baku port, for instance, features in Sons of the Conquerors. But even back then, I noticed that my on-the-job jottings were less inspirational or complete than I expected. 

    Also, I religiously kept the published versions of my articles, even though I know that they too are only part of the overall story. I once had a lot of my first drafts as well. Especially when writing about the Middle East, I found these of more long-lasting value than the long, highly edited, front-page stories that appeared in a publication like The Wall Street Journal. In fact, the way the editing process produced a pattern of omissions became an unexpected but critical part of the narrative of my Middle East memoir Dining with al-Qaeda. 

    In either case, notes taken for ephemeral daily news stories or longer-form books were now unable to tell a compelling story on their own. Reading the notebooks again sometimes felt like coming back to an untidy kitchen counter after making a meal that I have already eaten.

    The changed mechanics of reporting

    What I found on the pages before consigning them to yellow garbage sacks also made me realise how much has changed in the way we work.

    A traveller or reporter now would find it hard to imagine how difficult the mechanics and context of foreign reporting could be in the 1980s and early 1990s. Landing somewhere for the first time before cell phones and the internet would mean becoming almost completely detached from your previous bubble and total absorption in a new one. Even if available, communicating in real time with the office or home could be ruinously expensive. 

    It wasn’t always easy to get proper notebooks in poorer countries. A misty eyed lady celebrity accompanied me on an emotionally rough trip to Iraq in 2002 (left) and in 1992-93 some racy teenagers saw me through another freezing winter on the collapsing former ex-Soviet periphery. In the middle, a list of contacts grows on the back page.

    My 1990s notebooks prominently featured obscure international telephone numbers and log-on codes. Reporters of my generation had to spend many, many futile hours trying to make technology work. To get a better line to our newspaper’s computers to file our stories, many of us learned to dismantle the wall sockets behind our hotel beds and then attach crocodile clips from our computer modems to the bare telephone wires.

    Indeed, the stories written from these notebooks went back to newsdesks in a great variety of ways. Early on, I handed letters to people in queues in airports, sent telegrams, endlessly typed telex tapes, wore out my thumb on an amateur radio transmit button, hunted for Kurdish militias with satellite faxes and dictated to the legendary blind transcriber at the old Los Angeles Times (overall, one of the fastest and most accurate methods). I once even bought a half-barrel of diesel to power a generator so that two Sudanese Army radio operators could send my story by morse code (it was diligently transmitted, but never arrived). 

    Before the vast pool of knowledge in personal computers, Google maps and the internet, one also had to keep track of basic facts for oneself. For a trip to the northern front line of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, I had stapled a smudged and incomprehensible photocopy that supposedly showed where the border was. Alongside the notebooks were hundreds of neatly filled cards in boxes to collect, say, tidbits about Iran and Islamic revolutionaries. There were also slim green hardback notebooks with pages sorted by the letters of the alphabet. One of these tracked the rival factions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Another kept my mind sharp on Arabic political terminology.

    Early notebooks logged many long-dead conversations with foreign diplomats. We used to look in awe at Western embassies as critical sources of not just international perspectives but also guidance and wisdom about a country. That gradually wore off, and disappeared after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even so, many of the Middle Easterners we interviewed still thought we were, at best, just another representative of their old colonial oppressors or, at worst, another kind of spy.

    Quality not quantity

    As I went from news agency reporter to newspaper correspondent to an analyst for the International Crisis Group, my taste in types of notebooks seems to have improved. I started off in Syria, Lebanon and Iran with notebooks that differed wildly in quality, from some that were little better than kitchen paper to others that were as good as parchment.

    When I joined the hallowed Wall Street Journal and was given one of their bottomless American Express credit cards, I moved on to high quality reporting pads. Later, as I transitioned to analysing ideas for peace-making at Crisis Group, a European consul general invited me to lunch in his country’s Istanbul palace and told me how he felt free to speak since I was no longer a journalist. I felt self-conscious about my ever-present spiral notepad. I decided to go upmarket to the Moleskine-style writing books that I saw some diplomats using, now that they were actually visiting me in my own office.

    From index cards (top left) to Moleskine’s smooth writers’ notebooks (the black ones), I’ve taken notes on every conceivable kind of folded piece of paper, pad and machine. But in the end, notes are just one part of the process of producing an article or book.

    Looks and experience made no difference to how many of those notebooks I kept. Diplomats might now be talking to me more freely, but, as far as I could tell, the substance of what they said was mostly the same. In fact, the lack of on-the-ground reporting made the contents less interesting. However clever it sounded at the time, second-hand geopolitical analysis does not age well. 

    Selecting samples

    My decision to let my notebooks go was also informed by my experience of a far more daunting task over the past two years: trying to put some order into 50 boxes of letters, diaries, loose photographs, albums and commonplace books accumulated on both sides of my family over more than 200 years. 

    These included the papers of my late father, Maurice Pope, a classics professor and author with wide interests. I had to prepare these for Cambridge University’s Department of Classics archives. Before taking them there in April, I asked archivist Rebecca Naylor what she wanted. 

    “You should put in all varieties of record. But remember, no archivist keeps everything,” she said. “To control the sheer volume of material, our final and essential step is to make sample selections.”

    A lot might not be kept, in other words. “Archives are never used as the depositor expects them to be exploited,” Rebecca explained. “The hope is that interesting, intelligent, observant people embody a repository of experiences of an era that is no more.”

    “Even about small things?” I asked. “My great-grandmother May’s account of her honeymoon is just a few lines a day, and she gives away almost nothing about herself. She just lists things like boarding the boat across the English Channel, catching the horse-drawn ‘diligence’ where the railway line ends, and attending Anglican church services in German hotel drawing rooms.” 

    “Well, people do discard stuff because there is Just So Much of It,” she replied. “So as centuries roll on, the exasperated winnowing means eventually very little is left of what ultimately becomes the deep past. Imagine if you now had the account of a Tudor honeymoon, if honeymoons were even invented by then! The burden is not on us to ‘get it right’ for all perpetuity, just to fashion our own chapter of recollection and reflection, then pass on the baton to the next generation.” 

    Notebook in hand (left) as Turkey’s then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan makes a point, although the notes are actually being taken by the tape recorder on the table.

    I kept the sample of my notebooks only partly in hope of saving the geopolitical equivalent of a Tudor shopping list. I mostly wanted reassurance that I was right to break with my hoarding habit. As I took farewell photographs of them all on a table, I also realised that what I wanted most was not to read them, just to see them again. 

    Letters and diaries

    I was also guided by more of archivist Rebecca Naylor’s advice: “The genre most people cull before they donate to an archive is letters. But these are often the most valuable records, in terms of information.”

    The same applied to my reporting notebooks, I realized. My letters, diaries and photographs from the same time are much better at bringing the past back to life. That’s not all. Going through all those family papers quickly taught that if diary entries are too functional, if a photo doesn’t have the names or place on the back, if a letter isn’t clearly dated and properly signed, if an album has no captions, their content loses most of its meaning.

    Indeed, by far and away the best notebooks from my four decades on the reporting road were the rare ones I kept in diary form. Once was while trying to avoid trouble in Iraqi Kurdistan while I waited for the 2003 US-led invasion to start. Even better were the ones from surrepetitiously reporting in 1999 on Xinjiang in western China, where foreign journalists weren’t supposed to work. While talking to the deeply oppressed Uighur community, my then travelling companion (and future wife) Jessica Lutz and I would hurry back to our hotel to write down everything while our memories were absolutely fresh. 

    In these diaries, we both found that we gave a better account of what was said to us and noted details absent from other reporting books: the clapping wings of startled doves, the angry eyes of a horse being shod while suspended in the air from a mediaeval wooden frame, our Uighur interlocutors’ shockingly deep fear of the Chinese, the explosive tang of Chinese flash-fried chunks of snakes and snails at a roadside stall, and the thick, soft satisfaction of Uighur noodles. Perhaps most importantly, I had something missing from my other notebooks: what I actually said or thought to myself.

    I kept these diaries and letters, of course. I decided that the rest of my much-loved notebooks had now served their purpose. The cutting room floor could be swept. As I move on, I’m already writing more letters and being much more diligent about keeping a diary.

  • Citizens’ assemblies inch into the mainstream

    Citizens’ assemblies inch into the mainstream

    Citizens’ assemblies have earned a significant new seal of approval.

    Alongside its successful commentary on global events, the UK’s top political podcast The Rest is Politics stands out as a running indictment of electoral representation as a system of government, implicitly at least. But the main hosts, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, had so far failed to follow the logic of their own arguments and to propose alternative methods to take important national decisions.

    They have now done so with an intentional endorsement of citizens’ assemblies as their preferred way forward for democratic reform.

    Citizens’ assemblies are randomly selected groups of people from a community or country – a process also called sortition – and are mandated to solve a tough policy problem. They meet for a number of days, hear from experts, deliberate among themselves and adopt whatever ideas receive a supermajority vote of approval.

    You can hear Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s comments about citizens’ assemblies from 34m30s on their 3 April 2025 podcast Question Time: India’s moment, Qatargate, and do young Brits want a dictator. Or watch on YouTube from here.

    The UK’s current form of representative government “feels increasingly strange”, Stewart says. Campbell adds: “the system is creaking and the respect for it is not there.” (For a select transcript, see below).

    Millions of people around the world listen each month to The Rest is Politics podcast, which is most influential in the UK. Campbell and Stewart’s endorsement is another step for sortition toward the British mainstream, where citizens’ assemblies are not yet widely discussed.

    The unusual formality of the segment was in answer to a specially chosen question about a citizens’ assembly in Cumbria on climate change. It is part of a growing recognition that the world’s 250-year-old experiment in elections-based government has run out of steam and that we need to evolve new democratic processes.

    Credibility and legitimacy

    Campbell and Stewart’s comments give credibility and legitimacy to citizens’ assemblies – just two decades old in their modern form – and the greater deliberative democracy movement.

    At least four national citizens’ assemblies have already been held in Britain on Brexit, on nature, on climate and on democracy. (One of the best global lists of several hundred citizens’ assemblies held around the world in recent years is here).

    The UK has also seen several smaller, randomly selected citizens’ panels and juries at the local level as well, dealing with topics from the climate to traffic schemes.

    The podcasters focused on the concrete step of reforming the UK’s upper house of parliament, the House of Lords. In Stewart’s mind, this could mean adding a new third chamber. They could also have mentioned a campaign started by the Sortition Foundation to replace it entirely with a House of Citizens (the petition is here).

    How such a permanent assembly would work is the subject of much debate. Stewart envisions it as a body for vetting legislation by the elected assembly. However, existing new permanent randomly-selected assemblies, for instance in Paris and Belgium’s German-speaking community, don’t go into detail on individual policy challenges. Their job is to commission other temporary citizens’ assemblies to address each tough policy choice.

    The podcasters also discussed the advantages of the Swiss model of direct democracy, which is actually rather different to a sortition-based system.

    Details, details! What’s important is that these influential podcasters have now put real proposals on the table to talk about.

    Here’s Rory Stewart (slightly edited for clarity and length):

    Excited by an alternative model

    “I think that our system of democracy, which is this kind of representative system where you send people … off to parliament to speak on behalf of their constituents, feels increasingly strange. You can feel this all the time when you talk to people. They’re like: ‘I voted for this person, [but] they don’t really represent me.’ What [voters] mean is that this person is often not saying anything they believe in, they find it very difficult to relate to this person. How am I supposed to represent people with a completely different identity to me? People say, you know: ‘Rory you’ve never lived on benefits’, ‘You’re not from a minority background’, ‘You’re not a woman’, and all this is completely right.

    France’s Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life votes to approve a proposal in Paris, 9 January 2023. Photo: Hugh Pope

    “I am increasingly excited by an alternative model, which is the model of citizens’ assemblies. I’m not sure it fixes everything, but citizens’ assemblies … are like a jury, a totally separate system. It works on sortition, so you randomly select people and then you bring them together for a period of time to discuss policy issues. It’s usually quite well-organised, so there’ll be experts that can be brought in to talk about things and they discuss together.

    “The great thing about it is that it is not party political. It’s ordinary people. It’s not a question of one person representing others. It’s 300 people who are very, very democratically diverse, discussing things and in my experience it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about climate in Cumbria or bicycle lanes in London, or talking about abortion in Ireland. Actually you end up with a much more thoughtful non-partisan discussion.

    “Members of parliament hate it. They say Parliament is a citizens’ assembly. [MPs] are pretty anti-democratic, they’re pretty terrified about the idea of ordinary people having a view. They somehow think they are much more qualified and know what they’re doing … I’ve got an instinct which I can’t quite prove yet but that if Britain went down more of a sort of a Swiss citizens’ assembly devolved model, it would end up in a much, much happier place than trying to cling on to the old style of elite representation.”

    Creating a new system

    Stewart has talked about his enthusiasm for the idea of citizens’ assemblies in past podcasts, although he stopped short of actually calling for action. Campbell has typically been more muted, supporting the ultimate rights of elected representatives and prime ministers. Now, for the first time, both explicitly supported trying it out. Campbell put it like this:

    “I’ve been disappointed that there hasn’t been more [work on citizens’ assemblies] given that this is a [new Labour] government that’s talked about … change in our politics. They are going after hereditary peers, I’m all in favour of that. More devolution, [I’m] all in favour of that … I sort of feel the system is creaking, the respect for it is not there in the same way that it was. The only way you’re going to maybe rebuild that is to create a new sort of system, [in the making] of which people feel much more directly involved.

    Participant makes a point at a session of France’s Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life in Paris, 9 January 2023. Photo: Hugh Pope

    “You will always have to have somebody leading the country, a Prime Minister-type figure. You will always have to have legislative, decision-making bodies who have final votes on situation. But I completely agree with you.”

    Solving big social and moral issues

    As an example of what’s going wrong, Campbell pointed out the fate of the UK parliament’s November 2024 unusually free debate on assisted suicide. Even though the open discussion of the bill caught the public imagination and the government declared its support, it is now unclear how the proposed changes will turn out. In contrast, he noted, a 2018 Irish citizens’ assembly did help Ireland solve the country’s decades-long impasse on abortion.

    “It’s incredible what happened with … the abortion issue in Ireland. That was driven by people,” Campbell said. He suggested doing citizens’ assemblies on “these big social and moral issues, in particular. If we took them out of Westminster, and built that citizens assembly model [to deal with them], and then at some stage brought them back [to the elected parliament].”

    It makes me happy to see the needle moving, and I look forward to reporting on the next milestone.

    Meanwhile, if you’re interested to find out more about how these highly experienced experts in UK government have already eviscerated current ways of doing politics, I kept track here.

  • A fork in the road with my inner American

    A fork in the road with my inner American

    The crisis between the transatlantic powers used to sound like a distant thunder. Now that the storm has broken, it feels like it’s tearing apart something inside myself. That’s because even though I identify mostly as an Englishman, as a Belgian citizen and in general as a would-be European, like many others on the old continent, I’ve long also felt partly American.

    I’ve worked half my life with Americans. I admire the energy, high standards and efficiency Americans often bring to the workplace. I’ve grown up with American culture, music and humour all around me. As a child in 1964, I crossed the larger-than-life continent with my parents in a car that felt as wide as a room. Since then, I’ve visited more times than I can count, sometimes for months at a time.

    The US decision to publicly eject Europe from the construct that both have shared for 80 years or longer feels like being kicked out of the house.

    It’s not just that I know how many Americans are funny, hospitable and generous (and several have reached out to share their shock and pain at recent developments). It’s also as if the supplier of my favoured brand of mental software just told me that support will be discontinued.

    The junction ahead

    This parting of the ways didn’t start with President Trump. I first realized that irreconcilable differences had arisen between Europe and the US when President George W. Bush bamboozled the transatlantic alliance into joining him on his foolish campaign into Iraq (a principal theme in my book Dining with al-Qaeda).

    Whatever Donald Trump’s personal ability to manipulate his audience, the US change of heart now is clearly about more than than just him. Enough Americans voted for Trump and his America First message to win two elections, the last one after he tried to maintain power by force on 6 January 2020. They thus endorse Trumpian greed, all-out competition and selfishness – perhaps exactly because the time has come when many Americans cannot fully live the old American dream.

    Such ideas are contagious – the UK in the 2010s is a case in point, culminating in the tragedy of Brexit – but I think most Europeans still want to live under a regime that stands for values that are more sharing, caring, fair and collaborative. EU countries like Belgium where I live may higher taxes, but in terms of income they are some of the world’s most egalitarian countries. The US is in the top tier of unequal countries.

    Striking out more independently as Europeans will be hard and time-consuming. It’s not just because of that soft power the US has in all of our heads. The current EU architecture is built round the assumption of dependence on the US. Whether this is the result of Europe’s idealistic pacifism or lazy dependency, asking the current set of leaders to create a credible, autonomous, defensible system is like asking an invertebrate animal to grow a backbone.

    Still, evolution can happen. America was a British colony for a century and a half before it decided (with initial difficulty) to fight to go its own way. Ukrainians discovered a unifying ethos even though – prior to Moscow’s intervention and then invasion – many had felt much in common with the Russian-speaking world that they knew so well.

    Consciousness is growing in Europe that stronger internal solidarity will be needed survive and flourish in a multipolar world dominated by the US, China, to some extent Russia and perhaps soon India. To get anywhere, we are all going to have to upload new, primarily European mental software.

    Perhaps the change will be helped by remembering that Europe’s lack of unity is as much the result of American preference as by European choice. Already twenty years ago, I remember chatting with a senior diplomat in the US embassy in Ankara who off-handedly commented that “of course we never really want the EU to add up to anything.”

    Readers of of this blog will not be surprised to hear me say that that to achieve all this, we will also have to upgrade our European democracy. Perhaps a similar change in America would have avoided the transatlantic bust-up in the first place. That means broader-based ways of taking public decisions about what we want to achieve. We need to be less vulnerable to capture by special interests, fake news merchants and financial titans.

    Europe and its citizens

    What political system can give Europeans the required sense of active agency in their own affairs? Polls say people in most richer countries are fed up with the current way we organize our politics. At the same time, surprising numbers of people believe the best way forward is to choose strong leaders with Trump-style charismatic personalities or bold visions to sort things out with more authoritarian rule.

    It might strike democrats as unwise to switch horses at a time of threats and potential crisis. But that would be to underestimate the problem. Right-wing populists have got where they are by exploiting popular dissatisfaction with the electoral system. Unlike most advocates of democracy based solely on elections, authoritarians have already evolved to make themselves more attractive. Leaving things as they are will only augment the authoritarian advantage.

    From a different perspective: if democrats are to outflank the authoritarians, it also won’t work to just elect someone new. It is the whole system of elections that has got us into this mess.

    To be sure, elections have been a crucial democratising force as suffrage widened over the past 250 years. But they no longer work well. The system is lost in polarised party politics, elite capture and subservience to financial powers. Shiny campaign promises are rarely possible to implement. Short-term politics usually crowd out long-term interests. Today’s elected charismatic leaders too often turn into tomorrow’s dictators.

    To rebuild people’s trust in their rulers will mean going beyond the tired model of government by elected representatives. Instead, we will have to come up with a robust new system for people to rally around that offers transparency, justice and solid defences against corruption.

    One promising idea to re-engage citizens that is gaining popularity is the citizens’ assembly. Here’s how it works: a randomly selected group of people from a community or country are brought together for several days to solve a tough problem by listening to experts, deliberating among themselves and finding super-majority support for their chosen course of action.

    Several hundred have now been held around the world, with numbers rising sharply in recent years, especially in Europe. Just this weekend, the EU started a new round in its series of randomly selected citizens’ panels. This group of 150 citizens chosen by lot have the satisfyingly large remit of looking at the new EU budget. It’s a fundamentally new approach to building a credible, legitimate policy input representing the informed popular view.

    The EU’s experienced translators are still vital for the smooth operation of these democratic innovations. But the technological breakthroughs of the last decade mean that Europe language differences may become less of an obstacle to mutual understanding than they once might have been. The spread of English as a second language among European youth may also help, even if that is a paradox, since this is another result of American soft power.

    People are hungry for a new way forward, as I experienced once again this weekend in my hometown of Brussels. Within 24 hours of sending just one email, one hundred people from all over the country had signed up to discuss ideas for democracy with the Belgian non-profit G1000 – one of Europe’s first to advocate for deliberative democracy and to organise citizens’ assemblies. French- and Flemish-speaking participants worked side by side, equally alarmed by the situation.

    Importantly, citizens’ assemblies are not designed to be a vehicle for any subset of a population, from language groups to liberals and left wingers. Random selection brings everyone into the room. And face-to-face deliberative democracy techniques have a track record of side-lining polarisation. The policies that they propose almost always depend on attracting the votes of at least two thirds of their participants.

    Beyond rearmament

    While random selection has the potential to represent European citizens one day, joint European action will never happen in the absence of a critical mass of people who feel primarily European. Re-arming, keeping up with technology and disentangling all our command-and-control systems from our American other half will be pointless unless we can forge a sense of European common identity, purpose and solidarity.

    We can begin by finding European principles, values and intellectual outputs, and consciously supporting them. To be serious about this ultimately means creating ideals that we Europeans will be ready to die for. God forbid that this would ever be Europeans fighting Americans, which I neither expect nor want. It’s more about a Europe that has found a true new centre of gravity – unfortunately, without America as a full partner.

    Creating a trans-national European consciousness will mean learning new European names to follow, tuning into neighbours in a language we both understand, and sharing emotions in new ways. For instance, there must be many more European personalities like Arjen Lubach in the Netherlands, someone who is quite as funny as Jon Stewart of New York’s Comedy Central. I happen to understand Dutch, but I wouldn’t be able to follow a Spanish or German equivalent. Reducing our dependency on America won’t work until we find a critical cultural mass that is as relatable and satisfying to fill its place.

    Elites must also push themselves to go further than a dependence on US policy writing, however good they are. A strong lead is being given in the UK by Alastair Campbell of the The Rest is Politics podcast, in which he deliberately makes time to read and talk about European media. Such sharing and legitimizing the work of fellow-Europeans will be essential.

    The tactical supremacy of the void

    A nearby example of European perspectives worth spreading is an interview with Italy’s Antonio Scurat by reporter Danny Ilegems in this weekend’s Belgian daily newspaper De Morgen. Scurati makes trans-continental sense, is authentic and relevant to European experience and challenges.

    A professor in Milan, Scurati is just publishing the last of five volumes of his fictionalized life of Benito Mussolini, the 20th century Italian dictator. Here are some points he makes that seem significant to me:

    • We call populo-fascists mad because they aim to blow up the world as we know it.
    • Even Germany’s Adolf Hitler called Mussolini “crazy”, but he wasn’t. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini had no ideology, feelings or principles, beyond what he called “the tactical supremacy of the void”. He cynically filled this empty vessel with lies and anger. The ultimate pragmatist, he is a more relevant fore-runner of today’s opportunistic populist right than the highly focused Hitler.
    • Populism crosses the line to fascism when it starts using violence, whether in reality or as a threat. This is now happening more and more. Scutari gives as examples Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu killing Palestinians and Trump’s actions on 6 January 2020, which led to the killing of five people during the assault on the US Capitol.
    • Don’t expect to recognise fascism by a return of blackshirts and militias; rather, expect hybrid descendants of populism and traditional fascism. Scutari sees Elon Musk as a hybrid of Mussolini and Dr Strangelove, and militias like the US Proud Boys or Oath Keepers as “folkloric” rather than true fascists bent on the violent seizure of power.
    • Europe needs strong army, one that is specifically designed to defend rather than attack. (I agree about the need for strong defence but couldn’t help wondering what a defensive army looks like – Albania’s old bunkers? The Maginot Line? The Great Wall of China? The Byzantine walls protecting Constantinople? Switzerland and its cupboard in every home with food reserves and a gun?).
    • Europeans are mentally unready for any kind of existential war in which they would have to be ready to die for their beliefs, country or alliance.
    Top left: The Byzantine walls of Constantinople (photo by Arif Aşçı); Right: China’s Great Wall (Johanna Pope); Bottom left: Albanian bunkers near the border with Greece (Hugh Pope).

    Divorce is a painful new beginning

    We still don’t know where the unravelling of the transatlantic alliance will end, but it’s not the only shocking separation we’ve experienced in recent times. The UK’s split with the EU was a terrible wrench. It supplied yet more proof about how much the current system of political parties and elected representatives is vulnerable to manipulation and unfit for the defence of common interests.

    At first, I was surprised at the public tears at the breakdown of the transatlantic relationship shed by former top German diplomat Christoph Heusgen at the Munich Security Conference this year. I remember him as a calm and efficient foreign policy aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel, when I used to visit the chancellor’s offices in Berlin in my days as an International Crisis Group project director working on Turkey and Europe.

    I’m now beginning to understand Heusgen’s reaction. This transatlantic divorce – just like the real thing in our personal lives – might be a “Liberation Day” for some, but it is going to tear apart much more in us than we initially realized. The US has started a revolution, and revolutions don’t just mean a new beginning. They usually sweep aside the old way of doing things too.

  • What’s not new in Gaza

    What’s not new in Gaza

    A review of “The Hundred Years War on Palestine: a History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance”, by Rashid Khalidi

    We talk a lot about the “news”. It’s a shame there is not a better supply of something we might call “olds”. Because when the world gets confused by a storm of what looks like new information, the best antidote is often a fair, intelligent and honest dose of history.

    A case in point: the “news” of last week’s new orgy of violence in Gaza, in which Israelis killed more than 400 Palestinians in a single night. Or the way this week that Israel struck and killed yet another brave Palestinian journalist, this one in his car.

    If you feel the same, help of a kind is at hand: Rashid Khalidi’s excellent A Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conflict and Resistance. Reading it over the past month did not make me feel optimistic about any imminent slowing of the killings or resolution of the underlying dynamics. But it was in many ways a relief.

    I found it deeply reassuring to see the Palestinian story laid out from the 19th century onward, calmly, expertly, authentically and accessibly. The book contains many of the facts that are missing in the news, facts that anyone who wants to try to end the assymetric Israeli/Palestinian duel will have to master and take into account.

    Indeed, for me it is in the same league of essential background reading that I and others in my 1980s generation of Middle East correspondents found in David Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch or Jonathan Randal’s Going all the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and the War in Lebanon.

    As one might expect from the scion of a leading family of Palestinian dignitaries from Ottoman times until today, Khalidi describes many “olds” that most of us can’t remember. For instance, in the late 1930s, he shows exactly how old imperial Britain ruthlessly suppressed the emergence of Palestinian institutions, paving the way for Israel even as it (sometimes) fought the old Jewish “terrorists”.

    Unlike much of what I remember reading from the Palestinian side in the past, Khalidi is succinct and avoids too much competitive victimhood. He addresses with clear-eyed honesty why Palestinians have struggled so much to form a truly coherent national representation. He criticizes the Palestinian leadership for several wrong turns, like, for instance, suicide bombing.

    The book is highly contemporary too. Originally published in 2020, the quality of the argument is shown by the seamlessness with which Khalidi’s 2024 afterword is easily able to encompass and explain the current phase of the war in Gaza.

    Hand-holds on history

    Khalidi’s precious hand-holds on history allow us to regain our critical faculties when judging key issues right now. Some examples:

    • Anti-Palestinian commentators often allege there were amazing Israeli/US deals that the various old Palestinian leaderships walked away from. But were there really any viable offers?
    • The new Israeli state has created a new sense of nationhood for the Jewish inhabitants, most of whose families arrived from somewhere else. But is it fair to deny that a similar sense of nationhood exists for the Palestinians, whose families have been there for much longer, and who have now been fighting for Palestine for more than a century?
    • Does Israel’s special history mean that it can helpfully be understood as a latter-day colony as well as a nation state? Put another way, is it fair to deny the Palestinians the mantle of taking part in a liberation struggle?

    Importantly, reading this book gives the lie to those spokespeople from Israel’s radical government and its supporters who frame the current round of violence as being uniquely caused by Hamas’s bloody breakout on 7 October 2023.

    For instance, if the problem didn’t begin on the 7 October, when did this all really start, and why? Which side is the victim? Is it morally superior to rip a human being into pieces with a knife or by pressıng a button on a joystick? And when did the US and its Western allies become joined at the hip with the Israeli project – regardless of what the Israelis decided that project would be?

    A reader of Khalidi’s account will lose any sense of surprise that the US fully backs Israel in Gaza, regardless of what Israel does there. Indeed, he shows how the trend has been towards having ever-more indistinguishable policy positions. (Even in my day, a great paradox about reporting for US media was that the Israeli press sometimes seemed freer to write about the situation than we were).

    As for the rulers of the nearby Arab states who might be expected to help Palestinians, Khalidi shows time and again how “most of these dictatorial leaders are beholden to the US and are valuable clients of American defence, aerospace, oil, banking and real estate interests.”

    Eliminating the Palestinians and Palestine

    President Trump’s proposal to deport Palestinians from Gaza went even further than the public statements of most Israeli spokespeople. But the overall idea isn’t new. Khalidi shows how getting rid of the native population of areas inhabited by Jews was part of the original old thinking, starting with founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border,” Herzl wrote in his diary in 1895.

    Khalidi’s command of the back story also explains how Palestinians never managed to break the chain of international agreements that blocked their right to be heard on equal terms. These range from London’s 1917 Balfour Declaration through Britain’s 1922 League of Nations Mandate over Palestine to UN Security Council 242 in 1967. “In order to be recognized,” Khalidi points out, “the Palestinians were required to accept an international formula designed to negate their existence.”

    Best of all, having Khalidi’s thoughtful voice in my head is a welcome counterweight to the ugly line so often repeated in the “news” by supporters of the Israeli government’s actions: that somehow Hamas and the Palestinians brought this whole volcano of destruction on their own heads.

    After reading all these “olds”, I’m little closer to knowing exactly what formula can solve all the competing forces over Palestine. When I published my own book on trying to understand the Middle East in 2010 (Dining with al-Qaeda), I argued for one state of Israel/Palestine in which all inhabitants had equal rights. (As seen in the picture above, Khalidi graciously introduced Dining with al-Qaeda alongside his own book of the same year, Sowing Crisis, at an event in New York’s Strand Books.)

    Universal principles

    In his new book, Khalidi highlights the need base any solution on respect universal principles and human rights. That seems to point in the same general direction of a one-state solution for both Palestinians and Israelis, even if he doesn’t say so explicitly. Still, he reminds us that the one-state idea is much older than many remember and was adopted by the Palestinian leadership in the 1960s (a key change of its original radical policy, and an opportunity that outsiders ignored at the time).

    Khalidi also believes that exposing the colonial side of the undeniably potent Israeli nation state is essential to “making the true nature of the conflict evident … a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other … absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights must be enshrined in whatever future scheme is ultimately accepted by the two societies.”

    Will the all-or-nothing Middle Eastern actors and their foreign supporters ever get there? Khalidi sees signs of hope in growing awareness of Israel’s real actions in parts of US society, youth and public opinion. He points out that encouraging such an enlightenment was long ignored by Palestinian leaders.

    But reading his account of all the waves of war against Palestine and the Palestinians – often enabled by the US – does not give the reader much confidence that a new turning point will come anytime soon. The events and what people say about them over the past century seem to have the same blood-red threads running through them. Khalidi has done a great job in showing us how to see them for what they are.

  • To be or not to be a bestseller

    To be or not to be a bestseller

    A bestseller, the dictionary informs me, is not a book that reaches an abstract number of sales. It simply means it is among the top of its class. Even so, this was the last word I expected to be applied to my late father Maurice Pope’s posthumous work, The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.

    The Keys to Democracy may not have made it to any New York Times lists (yet). But for Imprint Academic, the UK publishing house that put it out two years ago today, the book has pride of place on its home page among the four listed as “best sellers.”

    Better still, publisher Keith Sutherland told me this week, Imprint Academic will put out a paperback version in September 2025.

    I still find it hard to believe the book’s good fortune. It was written more than three decades ago. We in the family long thought the manuscript was lost. Then, after my father’s death in 2019, my mother found the typescript in his library.

    My brother Quentin and I edited the text, and we are thrilled at the continuing endorsements, reviews and interest in hearing more.

    Just the other day, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, French author of insightful books like the The Death of Democracy – as well as being a University of Columbia professor, former head of UN Peacekeeping Forces and my old boss at International Crisis Group – wrote in spontaneously after ordering my late father’s book. He said that while he didn’t agree with everything, The Keys to Democracy “truly convinced me that sortition is a way to restore the dignity of each and every human being, and is part of the answer to the ills of our societies.”

    I hope such reactions mean that more and more people in the world – perhaps triggered by recent advances of authoritarian government in many countries – agree that we need to evolve a better new way forward than electing yet more politicians. This just perpetuates the system that got us into this mess.

    In his book, my father proposes to replace elections with a new system of randomly selected “panels” of ordinary citizens. These panels are much the same as what has become the fast-expanding idea of citizens’ assemblies, in which a randomly selected group of ordinary people from a community or country are mandated to solve a tough policy problem. They hear from experts, deliberate among themselves and, after ranking all ideas by votes among themselves, propose whatever commands a supermajority. Choosing by lot is also known as sortition. Some call the vision of this eventually becoming the basis of all government “lottocracy.”

    The Keys to Democracy is not a typical political science book, however. My father may have been an academic classicist by training, but he was a successful writer too and wanted the book to be a good read and to draw on all his learning. He mixes in lessons from ancient Greece and the subsequent history of government, the limitations of the renaissance, the efficacy of the Anglo-Saxon jury system, the mathematical breakthroughs of sampling and opinion polling, and a defence of the philosophical and scientific beauties of randomness.

    Over the book’s second year, my favourite shoutouts include:

    The best book I’ve read all year! – Mette Spencer, sociologist and peace activist

    I am loving this posthumously published gem of a book . . . strongly recommended. – Erica Benner, political philosopher

    Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This masterful balancing act between the idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of his concept and sets it apart from other similar books. – Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, political scientist

    I want to emphasize again how much I enjoyed reading this book. Pope is an interesting mind, and even the reader that still scoffs at the idea that our political systems should be more random will find things to enjoy in the boldness and ingenuity of his arguments and the breadth of his interests. – James Kierstead, classicist and think-tanker

    You can find links to all the news and reviews about The Keys to Democracy here. Keep scrolling down to find the most recent ones! And a big thank you to everyone who has helped this book on its way up from a long-lost typescript on a bottom library shelf.

  • Sherlock Holmes’ adventure by the Bosphorus

    Sherlock Holmes’ adventure by the Bosphorus

    Set between Istanbul and London, dancing over more than a century, hovering between fact and fiction, Andrew Finkel’s debut novel is connoisseurs’ delight. Jewels glimmer, capes swirl and mother-of-pearl inlay glistens from every page of The Adventure of the Second Wife: the Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan. A deep and easy familiarity with life in Ottoman Turkey is interleaved with Sherlock Holmes in shape-shifting exploits. The complexity of the overall story is a minor masterpiece in itself.

    In the end. there is a solution to the mystery at the heart of the book. Or is there? Each time I try to fit the book’s narrative together, it seems to come out slightly differently. It’s like a truth about the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul that Finkel shares early on in the story:

    I would say that to understand this story you also have to understand Istanbul, but I am not convinced such a thing is possible. I do not pretend the city is Eastern and inscrutable. In many ways it is friendly and familiar. But it is devious, like the pub raconteur who, while you work out if he is spinning a tale, has you buy him another round. On each visit I made, I felt I had come to a different place. It was like watching a time-lapse kaleidoscope of urban sprawl. Istanbul is a city where things change with a whir, and where standing still feels like falling through air.

    When I finished The Adventure of the Second Wife, I went through some passages again so I could appreciate the text with new knowledge. I wasn’t sure that I’d understood the role of all the characters, even if all the loose ends seemed tied up. A tricky trompe-l’oeil is that the story feels so authentic: one could read it thinking that it was all historical fact. But I felt a certain bewilderment since – when I thought it through – some twists in the plot simply could not be real. It’s actually impossible to see the joints between fact and fiction, like the immaculate marquetry Finkel has us believe that the last great Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II conjured up for his private office.

    Forced into the harem

    Indeed, history books say that Abdulhamid was a skilled carpenter – but was he that good? I’m almost ready to believe it, because Finkel’s account of Abdulhamid’s inner brooding, off-the-cuff kindnesses and occasional cunning cruelties are so compellingly imagined. He describes a man happiest with his Belgian mistress as a young prince, but who finds himself as sultan “forced to to reject bourgeois monogamy for an oriental harem.” Abdulhamid is always a target of assassination and obsessed with his network of spies. But he is taken aback when his private voicing of approval to one woman for her particular “amatory skill” spreads to all the palace women, who assume he wants the same. This surprise came even though he “knew full well that his nocturnal wanderings had to be recorded for dynastic purposes.”

    Sultan Abdulhamid II is only the most memorable of the many characters who lingered in my mind after I closed the book. I can’t remember when I last read an original story about Sherlock Holmes, the great 19th century fictional detective, and the original Dr Watson, his loyal sidekick and chronicler. So it was a surprise to get to know a key collective character that is a mainspring of the novel’s action: a global network of fans of the two sleuths, constantly hungry for new insights into their heros, and their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

    Finkel also gives us a modern Dr. Watson who leads us through much of the narrative, whose flaws, erudition and ancestry eventually make him fully part of it. And of course there is a train of Ottoman princesses who blend into one another at the heart of the story, damaged, melodramatic, yet each putting their own stamp on a role they had not sought.

    Sifting the evidence

    The format of the novel is refreshing, too. The story unfolds through the eyes of multiple characters giving testimony, writing short stories, translating articles and voicing parts of the narrative. They are interleaved with beguiling photographs of remnants of Ottoman Istanbul, illustrations from 1890s London magazines and picture postcards of the era, which all serve to confuse and confirm the factual and quasi-factual foundations of the novel. The hardback is lovingly designed and produced by publishers Cornucopia/Even Keel, adding to the pleasure of the read.

    Indeed, the multifaceted timeline and people with more than one name make it hard at times to remember all the characters, as when you open a new puzzle and are overwhelmed by a sea of look-alike pieces. Concentration and a readiness to sift evidence – of course – can be needed to understand completely who’s who on first encounters. But as with looking into the movement of a grand watch, one can pause, work out where the action is going and pick up momentum again, while still admiring the clever complication. 

    Another pleasure that kept me moving forward is that Finkel’s writing is splendid, especially the take-no-prisoners wit of the dialogue. Innumerable insights into life and people range from an angry outburst by a Turkish professor “unused to being contradicted” to an English housewife happy that her husband studies the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, since it’s “the sort of pastime that men are meant to have to stop them getting underfoot.” 

    Three of the photographs from the text, two on the left by Jürgen Frank, on right by Fritz von der Schulenberg

    The power of complexity

    Finkel is a long-time follower of Turkish politics (and, full disclosure, an old friend from my days on the Istanbul journalistic beat) and he likes to juggle with what he calls the “power of complexity and the complexity of power.” In one memorable passage, a soldier is posted in an Ottoman palace to guard Abdulhamid after the sultan’s dethronement in 1909, but goes off limits, finds himself in a dark room and is offered a light for his cigarette – and discovers he is alone with the ex-ruler.

    The soldier nearly choked on his own smoke. What was he to do? By rights he should have summoned the officers outside, but then he would have to explain his own presence in the room. He had become a partner in the Sultan’s crime. ‘To own the man, give him something to steal’ is the proverb and a roundabout way of saying that leading a man into temptation is a surer means of securing his loyalty than having him swear a flowery oath of allegiance.

    I admired too the connections that Finkel weaves through the book: the links between Ottoman Turks, British Victorians and the Indian part of their empire; the strands of continuity in Turkey, from the universal Islamic caliphate to the secular national republic that formed on its core after 1923; Ottoman Constantinople morphing into modern Istanbul; and more universally, the conjecture that the world’s whole population can be divided into either more active Sherlocks or more passive Watsons. 

    By the end of the tale, a new world had opened up for me in which “the Game” of a Holmesian investigation is always afoot, ready to dart in a new direction. The dark-bearded Abdulhamid II of many a stiff black and white photograph had come to satisfyingly to life. I even felt at home with the likes of a “professional courtier” who is “like an executive happy to serve Coca-Cola today or Pepsi tomorrow … equally at home in Buckingham Palace as … in Yıldız Palace or on a mission to the Emir of Afghanistan.” 

    What a remarkably original book!

    Receiving a copy of The Adventures of the Second Wife in London not that far from Baker Street – R-L: Caroline Finkel, wife of the author, Ottoman expert and author of Osman’s Dream; my wife Jessica Lutz, holding the book; the author Andrew Finkel; and myself Hugh Pope in appropriately Holmesian cape.
  • Proportional representation: a cure for democratic ills, or a distracting red herring?

    Proportional representation: a cure for democratic ills, or a distracting red herring?

    “An election that only one party wins, with a simple plurality, operates as a kind of factory setting for American democracy, one that we have neglected to update, despite radically changed circumstances.”

    This week’s New York Times opinion piece on How to Fix America’s Two-Party System is a fine read, and not just because of clever metaphors (as above) and some gorgeous scrolly graphics. Authors Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman also clearly lay out how “two parties competing in winner-take-all elections cannot reflect the diversity of 335 million Americans.”

    A graphic tellingly portrays six main groups of US political sentiment that might form the basis for future parties (one slide can be seen below). The advocacy for more members of the House of Representatives is spot-on (a congressperson now represents on average 760,000+ people). And the case against single-seat, gerrymandered constituencies is well put. After all, the authors point out that 90% of seats are “not competitive”, that is, they are won by a landslide. Voters therefore almost never chose the winning candidate, but one of the two current parties does.

    The last slide from a superbly designed New York Times overview of political opinion in America – and the new political party groupings they might define.

    No doubt, proportional representation is better than winner-take-all elections, just like an aristocracy is usually better than one-person rule, or a law-abiding king may be better than an oppressive tyrant. Wegman and Drutman are right to point out that in many other states, notably in Europe, this way of allowing many and more varied parties to win seats in parliaments produces more representative government.

    “An exact portrait”

    To define the ideal representation that democratic reformers are aiming for, the New York Times authors do well to cite John Adams. The US founding father wrote in 1776 that the US Congress “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should feel, reason and act like them.”

    My late father Maurice Pope had the same ideal for representation when he considered the pros and cons of proportional representation in his posthumous 2023 book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model of Citizen Power. He shows how proponents of this system go back to mid-19th century figures like English philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill and Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics don who enjoyed thinking up new systems of electoral representation (when not writing children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Caroll).

    Maurice Pope’s conclusion is that proportional representation can never get far toward to this “exact portrait” of society, even if it is an improvement on winner-takes-all elections. The book’s central argument, after all, is that systems based only on voting favour the wealthy and well-connected, concentrating power in the hands of factions and the few. This line of thinking also goes back a long way, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to writers in the 20th century like Italian-German political sociologist Roberto Michels. Here’s an excerpt from The Keys to Democracy:

    Proportional representation is not a recipe for introducing democracy, but for improving oligarchy. Its tendency is to make government more responsive to the will of the broad majority and to dampen the mad swings of two-party politics. These are both desirable ends. It also encourages an increase in the number of effective political parties. From the liberal point of view, this is a good thing too. If the ideal is for as wide a range of serious opinions as possible to be represented in political debate, then four or five parties are as much an improvement on two parties as two parties are an improvement on one.

    But from the democratic point of view, it is a red herring. Proportional representation still works through political parties. Indeed, it gives them and their organisations even greater importance. The main parties will play a steadier part in government than with a system of alternating periods of office and the small parties will also be able to exercise a genuine influence on events. If parties become more powerful, so do the party-organisers.

    The consequence is inevitable. The individual voter’s effectiveness will be strengthened and so will the grip of Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy”. This would be a paradox if voting were a democratic device. As soon as one realises that it is not, the paradox vanishes and becomes a truism. What strengthens an electoral system must also strengthen an oligarchic one, for they are two sides of the same coin. (pp. 22-23).

    A lottery winner

    Since elections deliver such poor results, Maurice Pope and many in the new movement for deliberative democracy argue, a better way to achieve best-in-class representation is by using sortition, that is, the random selection of regular citizens to decision-making bodies. The world now has a version of this, citizens’ assemblies, of which more than 1,000 have been held in the past decade. Groups of 20-200 citizens are chosen by lot to meet on a tough policy question, inform themselves from experts, deliberate as a group and build up a new policy based on what most participants agree on.

    Six philosophers discuss moral perspectives on assisted suicide with France’s randomly-selected Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life (Paris, 2022-23). Photo: Hugh Pope

    Such representation is still far from perfect. This new method of taking decisions is still little known, so typically only 5% of randomly issued invitations get a positive answer. That means that there is a second lottery (known as stratification) to choose from among those who say “yes”. This makes sure the profile of participants in the assembly matches the make-up of their community. To get closer to the “exact picture” would need a legal requirement to attend, as happens with jury service.

    So much for representation. Another issue beyond the scope of this article is Wegman’s and Drutman’s idealistic hope that several new parties would be able to easily make compromises on policies and form governments. Chronic difficulties right now around exactly this issue in the proportional systems of Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium point to grave potential obstacles here.

    Back to utopias

    It’s wonderful, though, that The New York Times is debating such constitutional questions on its opinion page. My late father always regretted the absence of constitutions and utopias from political debates over the past 200 years.

    Such constitutional speculation was common in the Renaissance, becoming highly influential in government design during the American and French Revolutions. One sign of the un-fashionability of such talk today is that – amid the glowing reviews of The Keys to Democracy – there’s some disapproval of the chapter in which Pope develops his own political utopia. More encouragingly, however, I’ve heard that one Ivy League university has assigned students precisely this chapter from the book as part of a politics course on new ideas.

    My eyes rolled too when I first read the manuscript in the 1980s. I am ashamed to remember my exasperated comments like: “Dad, what planet are you living on?” But I now love the story of his utopia, a community of scientists that organises itself when marooned on Antarctica after a nuclear war lays waste to the rest of the world. The scientists experiment and gradually build a completely new political system in which executive, legislature and judiciary take decisions entirely in randomly selected assemblies.

    My late father admits that in normal circumstances, no society starts from scratch, so in reality such structures can only evolve. But ideals serve a motivational purpose, even if they take time to materialise and rarely in exactly the form we expected. It is at the very least refreshing to read about “a community that had discovered how to live at peace with itself and that had cured itself of the fatal human disease whose first symptom is group loyalty and which ends in blindness and mutual destruction” (p. 164).

  • The crisis of governance in Belgium and Europe

    The crisis of governance in Belgium and Europe

    “I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them.”

    I had not heard of Luc Bertrand before my weekly dip into the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. But he made me think this weekend when I looked at the Saturday edition’s in-depth interviews, a window onto what my neighbours in and around Brussels are thinking as well as life beyond the world of English-speaking media. 

    Bertrand, 73, seems to have it all. He stands atop a Belgian family conglomerate (Ackermans & van Haren) with roots in shipping, banking and the late 19th century, when Belgium was one of the most technologically advanced and richest countries in Europe. But he is full of gloom about bad governance and the bottomless fiscal swamp that Belgium and Europe now find themselves in.

    De Morgen’s headline trumpets him saying that “European industry is being swept off the map.” Bertrand lists the elements of his argument with clarity: a fragmented and over-regulated continent unable to foster innovative companies, especially in technology; a Europe that gives advantages to fatal Chinese competition, but can’t get the same rights to grow in China; a Europe that equalled the US a generation ago, but now only produces 70% of what Americans manage; and in Belgium, out-of-control budgetary deficits, under-investment and over-consumption, leading to the plight of young couples who pay 60% tax and can’t afford to buy a house to live in.

    “Europe has allowed itself to fall asleep,” Bertrand said. “We have the best engineers in the world, but none of the best seven high tech companies are European.”

    A dead end

    What struck me most were this captain of European industry’s concerns about the dead end of politics in both his country and also Europe more broadly. Right now, Belgium is off the end of the scale of political dysfunction, still unable to form a new federal government after elections in June that (once again) left several parties squabbling over how they might cooperate to form a cabinet. Neighbouring France, Germany and the Netherlands are doing little better, and the UK is barely out of the post-Brexit woods.

    Bertrand points out that it’s not just the way so much time is lost first campaigning for votes and then forming governments (in Belgium this has already taken more than a year twice in the past 15 years). The quality of government dialogue with business has suffered too. Fifteen years ago, Bertrand said, a minister might gather a half-dozen relevant industrialists, invite them in and listen to the conversation. Now, he says, industrial bosses get invited to events by the score and then only get lectured at. 

    “Today … we live in a vacuum,” Bertrand said. “Politics itself is less powerful. We only hear about obstacles and compromises, from morning to night. We hold elections, and six weeks later we still don’t know who won. Then all the parties behave as if they are the ones who are victorious. I ask myself a lot of questions over democracy in this land. I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them. This is not just a problem in Belgium. In one [European] country they are tending towards authoritarianism, another is just a democracy in name.”

    The paradox

    When describing the policymaking that he wants, Bertrand gives the example of his conglomerate. He says family interests mean that investments come first and they can take long-term decisions, avoid deficits and smooth the peaks and troughs between good and bad times. He would also like a “moderate Elon Musk” to cut out Belgium’s unfunded government spending.

    But here’s the paradox: for him the way to get there is to go backward to cosy two-party electoral politics. The family seems invested in this old route. His daughter Alexia Bertrand is Budget Minister in the outgoing government and a high-ranking member of one of the centre-right parties in talks to form a new government.

    It’s ironic that someone so observant and keen on innovation can find no better response to the current failure in governance than a repeat of the party-based electoral formula. That is what got us into this mess in the first place.

    After all, Belgium has seen some of the exciting experiments in deliberative democracy. Brussels is home to the best-selling author of Against Elections, the pioneering David van Reybrouck. Concerned Belgians convened one of the earliest citizens’ assemblies, chosen by lot during a government breakdown already 15 years ago. Five years ago, eastern Belgium’s German-speaking community set up the world’s first permanent citizens’ assembly. There are several other examples of new ideas to use randomly selected groups of citizens to make policymaking work more efficiently – and take the long-term view that Bertrand and many others want to see.

    In late December, Belgium passed its latest 200-days-without-a-government mark. To judge by Luc Bertrand’s comments about where his conglomerate’s investment is going – places far from Europe that are actually growing – we haven’t hit the bottom of the cycle yet.

    Still, Belgium’s past success, the individualism of its people, the diversity of Brussels and a relative lack of inequality do still give me grounds for hope in the country. And perhaps Belgium is so original and good at evolving new tools of deliberative democracy precisely because the country is well ahead of others in Europe in the cycle of stagnation of a once-rich industrial state.

  • Understanding the lessons of the Middle East

    Understanding the lessons of the Middle East

    Anger, despair and a sense of impotence at new death and destruction in the Middle East were among the reasons I got out of the business of writing about the region. Indeed, up to now, I’ve had no idea what I could usefully add to all that’s being said about still-expanding consequences of the war in and around Gaza since 7 October 2023. 

    Which you might find odd, since I was a Middle East correspondent for three decades, including in all the places still consumed by conflict. 

    Iranian offensive into Iraq’s Faw peninsula, January 1986 (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    The reasons for my reticence go deep. I believe in context as well as details. I worry about empathising one side’s story rather than the other/s. I’m fearful of consequences for friendships and, to be honest, perhaps comfort zones too. 

    My caution is also informed by professional experience. University studies of Persian and Arabic make me look naturally partisan. Life as a reporter makes me reluctant to comment on matters I haven’t researched myself. Many years as an analyst seeking ways to defuse and end conflict at International Crisis Group taught me there’s little point in saying anything if it doesn’t offer at least a potential, long-term route out of the crisis in question.

    It is also dispiriting that nothing has changed or seems about to change in the blanket US, British and European official backing of Israel. And I still have that censorious voice in my head, drummed in by years of far-away editors and in-my-face spokespeople, warning me that just writing that last sentence means that, for balance, I now have to say something cautionary about one or more of Israel’s or the US’s enemies. 

    But I still listen to the news every day, to brave reporters and indispensable aid workers like those from the UN Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA). I observe my daughter’s TikTok feed overflowing with desperate Palestinians begging for attention. I hear out the Israelis, both the my-way-or-the-highway types and those who don’t think that everything their government does is right. 

    Apart from the scale of the violence, I’m still not sure how much has really changed. Everything I read or hear seem to be reruns of qualitatively similar stories we used to report on more than 40 years ago. And just as it did so many times in the past, the escalation is spreading out from the Middle East in all kinds of ways, including to my new home in Europe. 

    The juggernaut will find us everywhere, even if we try to escape it. The sheer quantity of deadly developments seems to have reached a new critical mass. Events now proceed faster, and are more flagrantly naked in their ambition or blood raw in their desperation.

    My first botcast

    So I decided to ask NotebookLM what about my many experiences I could usefully share with a neutral onlooker. For those who have not used this miraculous new Google machine, it’s like having a second brain. You upload content and NotebookLM analyses that content (and no other source) in the light of everything that Google knows. Which is a lot.

    To see what real people say about my book, please go to hughpope.com/mideast

    In this case, I simply uploaded one piece of work on the Middle East of which I am particularly proud, my book, Dining with al-Qaeda: Making Sense of the Middle East. It was first published in 2010, and I put out a paperback in 2022 with some minor updates and better photos. It lays out everything that I saw, heard and what I thought about the pattern of events. I didn’t give Google any of the reviews, old articles or supplementary material. 

    I then asked NotebookLM to explain what my three decades of experiences, findings and arguments said about the Middle East that could usefully be applied to analyse or resolve the current, post-7 October situation. I also asked it to phrase its response in such a way that would not offend any friends (that little voice never goes away).

    Tilting the balance toward peace

    To be specific, I asked: What seven policies can you extrapolate from the book that could strengthen any outside powers who actually wanted to tilt the balance toward peace in today’s Middle East? 

    Here, it replied, are the seven things your book suggests such powers should do:

    • Embrace a one-state, democratic solution in Israel/Palestine in which Israelis would “fully share the country they have conquered with its native Palestinian inhabitants,” including equal rights and representation
    • Adopt even-handed policies, especially in the case of the US
    • Engage with Iran diplomatically and acknowledge its legitimate interests and concerns
    • Reassess restrictive visa policies, promote people-to-people connections and foster a more positive image of the West in the Middle East
    • Counter authoritarianism in the region by promoting good governance, provide assistance to civil society organizations, advocate for greater political freedoms, and hold authoritarian leaders accountable for human rights abuses
    • Promote cultural understanding by moving beyond simplistic stereotypes, engaging with a diverse range of voices, fostering cultural exchanges and encouraging media coverage that goes beyond sensationalized headlines
    • Address economic disparities by supporting economic development initiatives, promoting fair trade practices, and investing in education and job creation programs in the region.
    In 2004, it was heartening to see some US-Iraqi cooperation over the rebuilding of Mosul University after the US take-over of Iraq. But all the damage was done by the US invasion in 2003. (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    Well, these mostly mild suggestions don’t have the blistering clarity of UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese cataloguing the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian presence in Gaza and the occupied territories. But it does sound like the kind of thing I would say, in that I believe policy recommendations should usually only include what a state has the power to do and would make some difference if sustained over time. 

    “Surprisingly relevant”

    But, I asked NotebookLM, why should anyone listen to me? What contemporary usefulness could there be in an account of experiences from the 1980s-2000s?

    The “valuable insights” in Dining with al-Qaeda “remain surprisingly relevant to the situation today,” the machine replied. This “valuable historical lens through which to view current events” highlighted “the persistence of certain patterns and the challenges of achieving lasting peace and stability in the region.” 

    Specifically, it said, the book:

    • Highlights a recurring pattern of pro-reform uprisings followed by state failures in the Middle East, noting the brutal survival tactics of regional regimes
    • Critiques the United States’ continuous entanglement in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and argues that the US failure to break free from a cycle of intervention often exacerbates conflicts and creates unintended consequences
    • Explores the enduring power of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, highlights their reliance on corruption, control of information, and suppression of dissent to maintain power … all this resonates with the challenges faced by pro-democracy movements across the region today
    • Reveals through personal experiences and journalistic observations a deep-seated criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians … challenges the prevailing narrative surrounding the conflict, highlights the suffering of Palestinians living under Israeli rule and notes the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States 
    • Argues that oil wealth allows regimes to maintain their power structures and resist calls for change
    • Provides insights into various cultural and societal dynamics in the Middle East, such as the role of Islam, the challenges faced by women, and the influence of tribalism … these observations offer valuable context for understanding the complex social fabric of the region

    So there you have it: a set of policy recommendations for me to say and the reasons why I can plausibly say them. I’ve smoothed some of the phrasing but the content is neither more nor less than what NotebookLM suggested. And of course it is what I suggested too, in the form of my book, the only input I gave it. 

    Mourner in Syria after the death in 2000 of its long-serving strongman, President Hafez al-Assad. (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    NotebookLM also gave me a recording of its two robot podcasters discussing the book. That alone is a technological marvel. If you haven’t heard one of these “pure” botcasts before – NotebookLM calls them “audio overviews” – you must listen to at least a bit of it. Yes, there are a couple of slips, there is something synthetic about it and I had to cut out some repetitions. But it’s true to say that the underlying patterns of Middle East crisis haven’t changed much, and so it sounds like what I might say. It even inspired me to dig up a selection of photos from my reporting days. They fit, mostly.

    Double checking

    Just to check, I then uploaded the relevant reporting about the Middle East situation from Crisis Group, which does a good non-partisan job of rounding up all the latest information all sides agree to. I then asked NotebookLM if that added anything to change its mind. No, it said, the report “underscores the ongoing relevance of Dining with al-Qaeda in several ways”.  (It did however note that the book did not specifically focus on Iranian influence in the region as the “axis of resistance”, a term that has become popular in the past decade). 

    I loaded up three Israeli perspectives – from a right-wing US group lobbying for Israel, a retired Israeli colonel opposed to his country’s strategy, a liberal explainer article in the US magazine Jewish Currents and a centrist commentator. NotebookLM retained its general endorsement for relevance, especially in giving the broader context and complexities. However, it noted that Dining with al-Qaeda was originally published before social media and so missed that dimension, made no detailed argument on a one-state policy for Israel and would benefit from re-evaluation of some time-sensitive recommendations.  

    Finally, I also uploaded Francesca Albanese’s UN report on Gaza, and asked the same question. “The UN report adds a layer of urgency and gravity to the issues explored in Dining with al-Qaeda. It reinforces the book’s relevance,” NotebookLM replied.   

    Perhaps it is just telling me what I want to hear, or rather playing a new version of my old words back to me. All the same, what an extraordinary machine!

    For good measure, this is what WordPress’s AI-generated image made of this whole article …
  • Lessons in governance from “The Rest is Politics” podcast

    Lessons in governance from “The Rest is Politics” podcast

    “PEOPLE HATE politicians. What has the worst approval ratings in America, continuously? Congress … [That’s why] Donald Trump, in not sounding like a politician … actually manages … to win over a certain number of people.”

    This kind of throwaway insight is typical of what has made me — and millions of others — an addict of The Rest is Politics podcast. I have learned so much from the presenters and guests. In the UK, they include communications guru Alastair Campbell and writer-politician Rory Stewart. The US branch is led by financier Anthony Scaramucci, a former pro-Trump political activist, and reporter Katty Kay (who said the above in episode #33).

    But after two years, hundreds of episodes and more than two thousand kilometers — I listen while I run — I keep wondering about an inherent ambivalence in the shows.

    In short, I feel that these cutting-edge experts and their world leader guests are not teaching me about what makes the political world go round. They are talking about what’s blocking it from getting anywhere at all.

    Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart (Photo: Goalhanger Podcasts).

    Put another way, the heart of the shows is an insiders’ account of high politics. But at best, the elected governments of the world’s richer countries come across as lost in transition. The deeper the podcasts dive, the more these electoral systems seem to be in trouble. Fundamental reform seems urgently needed. Or maybe a transplant.

    In the article below, I’ve put together examples of how The Rest is Politics describes this collapse of national and even global governance.

    I do so in the hope these leading lights of our age will draw more conclusions when their analysis shows how broken the current system of electoral representation is, as well as to share with other listeners a new way of learning from these excellent podcasts too.

    Crying out for change

    To my ears, the drumbeat of the presenters’ critique sounds compelling. Political parties are selfish and dysfunctional. Most lawmakers have little or no knowledge of the laws they vote on. Some leaders may begin their careers with good intentions, but the system empowers charismatic me-first types and then puts impossible strain on people who make it to the top. Few if any politicians have enough time, authority or energy to fulfil their tasks effectively.

    The presenters are aware of the irony that the kings in their parade of global events may be wearing no clothes.

    “I do think there is something fundamentally wrong with our politics,” Campbell put it once (episode #163). “It’s partly what gave us Brexit. It’s partly what gave us this succession of pretty useless prime ministers. And it’s partly what’s making people frustrated that the Labour Party is not coming in with that sense of real … radical change that the country is crying out for.”

    Yet the podcasters’ chorus line remains traditional: if only we try harder, if only we tweak things here or there, if only we find somebody better, we can make the existing system work.

    And so I go on listening, hour after hour, to the apparently doomed political intrigues of people who are struggling — and failing — to do just that.

    Since there is so much wisdom and so many good intentions in these podcasts — even among the politicians who appear on it — it is fair to ask: what is their conclusion, the essential core of their message about what can change?

    Flirting with reform

    Campbell and Stewart occasionally flirt with reforms or alternative ways of getting the right decision makers into power.

    King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrive for the state opening of the UK parliament, July 2024 (Photo: House of Lords press office)

    Both agree on doing something about the UK’s upper chamber of parliament, the House of Lords. Both talk much about using more proportional representation and transferring more power to the lower House of Commons. Both also like the sound of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, if only in a sort of opinion-polling capacity.

    Campbell recognizes the problem. ”There is a paradox,” he says (episode #299). “We are having more and more elections, more and more people voting, but we are not necessarily a more democratic world.”

    But they do not seriously discuss options for going ahead with any of these, let alone back any firm, specific plan.

    There’s been a noticeable drop in discussion of alternatives, for instance, since July when Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour Party were elected in the UK. It’s not the first time. Campbell remembers (episode #180) a plan to introduce proportional representation being much discussed by his Labour Party before their 1997 election victory. “Once we got into power,” he said, “that sort of went on to the back burner.”

    The podcasters’ unwillingness to take their rich experience of political dysfunction to a logical conclusion also applies to their books published this year.

    Campbell’s But What Can I Do? recognizes a population discouraged by their elected leaders’ poor performance. He talks much about the frustrated potential energy he feels in his contacts with the public, especially the young. He wants to channel this willingness to engage into political activity.

    But — judging by what he says on the podcast — this is simply asking them to throw themselves into the same system of pointless political trench warfare that he says demotivated them in the first place.

    Stewart’s Politics on the Edge powerfully describes the toxicity of his decade in the UK parliament and government. To improve the situation, he suggests more checks and balances, more transparency, better lobbying regulations, civic education, more judicial independence and new ways for parties to select parliamentary candidates.

    But these praiseworthy ideaswould treat the symptoms rather than the cause that is now hard baked into the system: the demands made on parties and politicians doomed to fight eternal elections. The damaging results include short-term policies that fail, rising unpopularity and their current crisis of lost authority.

    Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci of The Rest is Politics US discussing Donald Trump

    In the US, with its more optimistic streak, Kay and Scaramucci go less far down this road. As they roll their eyes at politicians’ behaviour and detail public disappointment, they occasionally look back into history for insights and explanations, even re-reading texts by the US founding fathers. But I can’t remember them questioning the system itself or suggesting fundamental changes.

    Really hollow

    One of the gravest problems that emerges from my take on the podcasts is the role of political parties in the existing parliament.

    “Something about the way that party politics works in the House of Commons has really meant that debates and scrutiny of legislation is almost meaningless today,” Stewart says (episode #206). “The Commons feels really hollow,”

    A year before, Stewart had gone ever further (episode #140), citing a civil servant telling him that “the House of Commons was a complete waste of time, never bothered to look at the detail, never scrutinised anything.”

    Stewart’s account of his own career in politics makes clear why those elected don’t bother to engage. A minister is simply not allowed to oppose a law backed by their party, and if they do, they are dismissed from office; any ordinary MP that does the same will never leave the backbenches.

    A weird sect

    One of their guests went further (episode #86 of Leading, a companion podcast to The Rest is Politics). Nick Clegg describes the three “bubbles” of his career: Brussels, where he was a member of the European Parliament, the UK parliament, where he was Liberal Party leader and deputy prime minister, and his current Silicon Valley job working for Meta (Facebook).

    “Of those three bubbles, the worst by a long shot is [the UK Houses of Parliament in] Westminster,” he says. It’s “stuck in the 19th century … architecturally designed for conflict not conversation … like a weird sect … a pastiche of a Harry Potter boarding school.”

    This prompts Stewart to slam “the incredible poor quality of so much of it … I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee and chaired the Defence Committee … we knew almost nothing about the world … we didn’t really hold ministers to account … speeches in parliament were of such pathetically low quality … nobody [was] paying the slightest attention … [the government was free to act] like an elected dictatorship.”

    In other episodes Stewart points out how members of parliament have no job description (episode #224). He often notes how impossible it was to balance of his work as a constituency MP and that of representing the national interest as a foreign office minister by, say, travelling to the places affected by any policies. His book excoriates politicians as “grotesquely unqualified”.

    For his part, Campbell points out there is no external audit of parliament, like, for instance, the never-ending inspections endured by Britain’s schools. Before the 2024 UK elections, Campbell (episode #180) goes as far as to say that “radical fundamental change” is needed, that he is “on a journey” on this topic and that the Labour Party manifesto should be offering what he called an “electoral review”.

    Yet none of the podcasters ever stop to imagine a future that simply does away with the political parties that both rule and corrupt the system.

    Sleepless in London, penniless in Paris

    Two leaders who join the program describe an environment that gives little hope that an impeccable new leader will somehow get elected and miraculously sweep the problem away.

    Alastair Campbell & Rory Stewart interview Nick Clegg

    “It is widely underrated that politicians need to be made of very stern [stuff],” Clegg underlined (episode #87, Leading). “You’re taking most decisions, highly consequential decisions, often at very great speed, based on imperfect information, with very great consequences, in a sleepless state … We create a whole cast (and caste) of decision makers who are in a state which is the worst state in which to take decisions. They’re knackered.”

    Former President François Hollande of France tells listeners (episode #69, Leading) that the new generation is simply not interested in coming to the rescue.

    “Nobody in the elite wants to make politics. When I was a student, the main [idea of] success was to be a member of parliament, perhaps minister and if possible president. Now in the elite, politics is considered the wrong way. Now people want to be on boards, economic circles. Not in politics,” Hollande says. “It is hard in politics. You [face intrusions] on your private life, you do not have any revenues and wages in comparison with business. You can be defeated in elections. You have no holidays, no weekends, never. Why be committed? … Social media is harsh, cruel… in France, the political system is broken.”

    Exposing the rottenness

    So what is the alternative, and who will come together to find it? Probably not the politicians, or at least not yet.

    Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell

    Film star and ex-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger cites Albert Einstein to the podcasters (episode #43): ”The same mind that created the problem is not able to solve it.” Another problem is what historian Dominic Sandbrook observes on a sister podcast (episode #35, The Rest is History): “To be a politician is to be divisive.”

    Stewart and Campbell spend more time discussing the problem than the causes, and even worry that they are being too critical.

    Campbell (episode #168) says he agrees with a lot of the negativity in Stewart book, but adds that “I worry that your basic message is that “politics is all terrible”.”

    Stewart retorts that “I do believe that in order to change you’ve got to begin by really delving into the problems, we’ve got to expose where the rottenness is … we have had a mafia code of silence around parliament for a long time.”

    An unshakeable faith in elections is the clear motor driving the dysfunctional system of parties, politicians and polarisation that they describe. But none of the podcasters question the idea — which only evolved in the 19th century — that voting is where democracy begins and ends.

    CItizens’ assemblies

    Despite their faith in the legitimacy of elections, however, Campbell and Stewart have at times been ready to toy with fundamentally different approaches. This was especially evident at the peak of their frustration in the final months of the Conservative Party’s time in power in the UK from 2010–2024.

    Stewart in particular finds much to like in one potentially radical alternative: citizens’ assemblies. These are groups of citizens from a community or country, randomly selected by lot, a process also called sortition. Participants meet over several days to learn from experts, deliberate and propose solutions to a common policy problem.

    “I am very attracted by sortition, the basis of how juries are selected, and it’s how ancient Athens worked,” Stewart said (episode #173). “I am very interested in what happens if you do it from the whole public … a genuinely representative sample of people … This would take power away from parties, which I like.”

    Campbell is the more reserved of the pair — saying only “we both think they are a good idea” (episode #224) — but Stewart is enthusiastic. At one point (episode #199) he said citizens’ assemblies are “the most exciting thing that’s facing democracies around the world.”

    Stewart praises random selection as a way of getting a wide range of points of view working on an idea (episode #173). Later he points out (episode #269) that: “Real truth emerges quite slowly through giving people space and time to debate and explore ideas. Maybe change their opinion a little bit.”

    Even so, for both Campbell and Stewart, such assemblies can only work in an advisory capacity, or, in Stewart’s case, possibly as a third British House of Citizens alongside the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

    Taking the people into account

    One notable guest, economist Kate Raworth, firmly advocated the use of citizens’ assemblies as the way forward. She did so in answer to Campbell’s lament that China’s dictatorial capitalism is getting ahead of “democracies with very, very short timeframes” (Leading episode #22).

    Group discussion at the Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life, Paris, December 2022 (Photo: Hugh Pope)

    “Many politicians will say: “I know what I need to do, I just don’t know how to get reelected when I’ve done it”,” Raworth responded. “That’s why you’re seeing some of the most progressive places say: “Let’s hold a citizens assembly, use sortition. Let’s bring together a randomly selected group of around 100 citizens, residents of our place. Let’s introduce them to experts who can introduce them to the scale of the topic and see what they come up with. Time and again, what’s coming out of these citizens’ assemblies is that these people — who are not trying to get reelected, because they are citizens thinking of the long view — have come up with far more ambitious policies than politicians feel they are able to.”

    When Campbell worries that these policies might not be implemented, Raworth rises to the challenge, pointing out that what’s needed is for governments to commit to “taking into account what the people of this nation are saying they want to happen.”

    That would be a wonderful development indeed. But the podcasters changed the subject back to economic growth. As usual, they fail to take their analysis to the logical conclusion that a new democratic system is needed.

    Reflecting later in the episode on their conversation with Raworth, Campbell recognized that “our current politics” made him feel impotent to make any of her “idealistic” suggestions come about. He added: “The only way to you’re actually going to do this is if you live in a dictatorship.”

    Shaken to the core

    The Raworth interview is not the only time that The Rest is Politics podcasters note that the conclusion that some people are drawing from the mess they describe is not a desire to see bottom-up democracy like citizens’ assemblies, but more top-down, authoritarian rule.

    So which is it to be? How much time do the richer world’s governments have to find an alternative to their current dead end? Who will lead the way?

    Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg opined (episode #87, Leading) that: ”I find myself more of an anti-establishment politician after five years in government than before … There’s so much that needs to be shaken to the core.”

    Yet, as so many top establishment politicians before him, Clegg has been rewarded at Meta with a lucrative job at the pinnacle of the existing system. Normally, this is one way that rich companies control parties and politicians, who need money and support to win elections.

    Unusually, though, Meta is both part of the problem, as its algorithms tear down the old order — whether empowering individual access to information or feeding polarisation–and offering possible solutions, as it experiments in sortition-based online deliberation within its global community of billions. But again, we hear nothing about that.

    Back in the UK, “it could not be clearer that people don’t just think that the country’s stuck. They think politics is part of the problem,” Campbell proclaims (episode #154). “If it’s a part of the problem, you have to change it.”

    But what should that change be? Perhaps only a new podcast series called The Rest is Democracy could fully answer the question. My running shoes are ready.

  • What’s next for deliberative democracy?

    What’s next for deliberative democracy?

    “Inspiring”. “Magical”.  “Achieving consensus”. 

    Such words are rarely applied to a policy-making process. But praise for citizens’ assemblies was on many people’s lips during a recent week of trainings, workshops and events in British Columbia on the progress of deliberative & participatory democracy. Held in the Canadian province in September, they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the modern world’s first randomly selected citizens’ assembly, held in Vancouver in 2004.

    Since that little-heralded event, perhaps 1,000 citizens’ assemblies have now been held all over the world. Most have been held in the past few years and the number is rising fast, particularly in local politics. The deliberative movement’s main network, Democracy R&D, which started out with a conference of 30 people in Madrid in 2018, attracted 200 practitioners and experts to Vancouver for its conference this year. Symbolising the enthusiasm, Leonora Camner (pictured below), chief executive of Democracy Beyond Elections, boasted a new tattoo in the form of a kleroterion, a machine used in ancient Athens to assign citizens to policy-making committees.

    Today, citizens’ assemblies are an evolving technique for taking hard decisions in the public common interest. Also known as civic assemblies or citizens’ juries, they bring together between 30 and 200 participants chosen by lot from the relevant community or country. Usually meeting for several days over a number of weeks, the citizens first get to know each other, learn from experts about the challenge at hand, deliberate among themselves and then propose solutions. They are thus much more heterogenous than, say, elected parliaments, which are dominated by charismatic, relatively wealthy people like party politicians or lawyers. Yet citizens’ assemblies routinely adopt suggestions that achieve consensus, which usually means over 80% approval.

    “People who profess to be helping are not. [This electoral system,] it’s a European construct and it’s falling apart,” said Shane Pointe (pictured above), a Canadian Indigenous leader who came to bless the opening of the Democracy R&D conference in the name of his ancestors. “We need to take action, my friends from round the world! We need to spread the word that we need to participate. We are the sacred medicine that is going to help us heal democracy.”

    Changing the world

    The recommendations of that first 2004 British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on voting reform won 57% support in a province-wide referendum – a notable success, even if it fell short of the 60% needed to change the law that day. “It was a global first,” Peter MacLeod, the doyen of Canadian deliberative democracy activists, told an anniversary reunion of participants. “It may not have succeeded [in B.C.], but it still changed the world.”

    MacLeod remembered how Irish academic David Farrell attended the 2004 assembly to brief participants on Ireland’s voting system, but went home convinced that actually random selection might be the future. This led directly to the Irish citizens’ assemblies that in the 2010s broke the country’s political logjams on same-sex marriage and abortion. 

    The week of democracy meetings in British Columbia showcased more evidence of deliberative democracy’s potential to act as an antidote to public frustrations: alienation from partisan politicians, domineering parties, bad decision-making and anger about the poor performance of electoral systems in delivering efficient government. 

    “Polarisation was the first thing to fall,” remembered Shoni Field (pictured on the right of the second row above), addressing fellow alumni of that first Vancouver assembly in the same downtown building where they met in 2004. She remembered how at first she and other members didn’t believe they would be able to achieve consensus. But “finding things in common was much easier than expected. We got to feel confident and connected … like magic.”

    Politicians have not yet handed decision-making powers to such assemblies, but they have become readier to commit to serious discussion of their recommendations. In Canada, some 50 citizens’ assemblies have taken place since 2004, many of them local, like one that began in September on B.C.’s Vancouver Island. The mayors of Vancouver Island’s two main municipalities, Victoria and Saanich, welcomed 48 randomly selected citizens who will deliberate on a long-stalled plan to merge or not to merge (pictured below). 

    “Few people get the chance to do what you’re doing. Design something new!” the mayor of Victoria, Marianne Alto, told participants at the opening meeting. Her counterpart from Saanich, Dean Murdock, was equally encouraging. “You are bringing your lived experience and representing the community. Our commitment is to put your recommendations in front of the voters,” he pledged.

    How far can deliberative democracy go?

    It is still early days for deliberative democracy. A week of discussions among these new democrats revealed several lines of debate and innovation, from techniques of random selection to formulating an overall theory of change.

    For instance, few of the advocates for deliberative democracy gathered in British Columbia publicly advocate that random selection should completely replace elections in selecting most decision-making bodies, as was the case during the glory days of ancient Athens. But there is no clear end point, either.

    “I want evolution, not revolution! Trying to change everything at once would lead to chaos. At a time when our democracies are already under extreme pressure, nobody wants that,” said Emily Jenke, joint chief of Australian assembly organizers democracyco. Zakia Elvang, managing partner at Danish advisory group We Do Democracy, pointed out that the goal should be to find out where elected politicians are feeling pain and to do something about it. “Inviting citizens in should help politicians, not be a threat to them,” she said.

    The few people who do envisage a world run by random selected bodies – a process also called sortition or lottocracy – generally acknowledge that it could take a century or more to achieve. As my late father Maurice Pope pointed out in his The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power, elections themselves took centuries to emerge. Universal suffrage was a long-unexpected result of the gradual displacement the discredited rule of kings, popes and nobles.

    Still, advocates of deliberative democracy have become more ambitious in recent years. For instance, discussion of citizens’ assemblies has now eclipsed the attention once given to the early innovation of participatory budgeting, which emerged in the 1990s to give citizens a role in advising government entities on spending a small part of their annual outlays. 

    How can sortition work better? 

    Even in today’s all-digital age, a surprising first hurdle to random selection is getting access to complete lists of citizens to choose from. Some countries allow access to at least rolls of voters; in others, organisers of civic assemblies have to contract the job out to public opinion researchers or pollsters, which can be expensive.

    Typically, only about 2%-5% of the citizens who are randomly selected respond positively to their invitation to serve in assemblies. A second round of random selection from this pool (known as stratification) makes sure that the final choice of assembly members reflects the demographics of the community, for instance balancing gender, age, location, language, education, and economic status. 

    However, assemblies are therefore biased towards the kind of people willing to say “yes” to such invitations. Also, these selection criteria lower the individual chances of acceptance to personality types who say “yes” most often. In European-populated countries, for instance, this means a low personal chance of attending for older, educated, better-off white men.

    The only real solution to full representativity – as proposed by some, including my late father in his book – is to make attendance mandatory, as with service in court juries. This is unlikely for now, at least until sortition becomes far better known and widely accepted. 

    In the meantime, participants in Democracy R&D suggested a number of steps:

    • Do more research on what makes people opt in to join assemblies, and then act to persuade people who are randomly selected to decide to accept. Facilitators from Germany’s Es Geht Los, for instance, go door to door to persuade those chosen by the computer to join assemblies and have raised acceptance rates to as high as 25%.
    • Avoid putting too many criteria into the stratification (for instance relating to education or wealth), since motivated citizens may try to manipulate the system with false answers to get into the assembly. A sensible maximum is about six criteria.
    • Create a large number of possible, stratified assemblies from the pool of acceptances by candidates, then choose one of them from a hat. This makes the final selection of any single individual fairer. The German parliament did something like this with the final selection of its new Citizens’ Assemblies. MIT professor Bailey Finnigan (speaking to audience above) also designed a scientific algorithm to even out an individual’s chances of selection – which she charmingly called the “Goldilocks” method.
    • Absent mandatory service on citizens’ assemblies, build up as comprehensive a list as possible of all people in a community who in principle agree to join a future assembly that can then be used by all citizens’ assembly or jury organisers.

    Can AI help deliberative democracy?

    According to some participants, AI could plausibly open to multitudes of people the deliberative democracy that today is only available to smaller groups. Enthusiasts imagined that highly trained bots could do facilitation, allow participants to interrogate in-house databases of expert briefings more easily, transcribe conversations or synthesize conclusions from hundreds of transcripts at once. Indeed, a first fully tech-enhanced experiment is already under way in Oregon in the Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness. 

    Sceptics about the role of AI worried that the essence of the magic of citizens’ assemblies is in the human contact, trust and civic love that is so much more easily built up face-to-face.

    Can citizens’ assemblies be institutionalised?

    For some deliberative democracy non-profits, institutionalisation is the way forward. A start has been made, with some success, in Belgium’s German-community parliament, the municipality of Paris, a climate assembly for the Brussels region and a new Europe-wide body on the future of the EU. Each experiment is different, but a basic principle so far is that one randomly selected group chooses topics for other ad hoc, time-limited citizens’ assemblies to address.

    Sceptics worry that institutionalisation could bring hierarchies, import a mentality of doing a paid jobs and lose the deep feeling of public service currently felt in shorter citizens’ assemblies. “I worry that permanent citizens’ assemblies could lead to over-bureaucratisation,” said the leader of one pan-European non-profit.

    How can the advantages of democratic deliberation become more widely known?

    One of participants’ frustrations is how little-known sortition still is. Despite a constant drumbeat of dissatisfaction with the performance of elected governments, mainstream news stories about alternative methods of decision-making is sparse. “The lowest-read articles [I write] are the ones about citizens’ assemblies,” syndicated California democracy columnist Joe Mathews told the Democracy R&D conference.

    Yet it is remarkable how very few, if any, citizens drop out of an assembly, despite the intense work, usually over weekends. In fact, it’s frequent to hear them say that the experience was a highlight of their lives. Such alumni often become ardent advocates of the process. More could be done to mobilise them to spread the word, even if such alumni are still a small group in the world.

    Such interest in sortition as there is in mainstream media seems to occur at moments of peak anger with and unpopular governments and then to disappear in the wave of hope when a new party takes power. For instance, before the last elections in the United Kingdom, a Labour Party adviser suggested citizens’ assemblies might be part of a victorious Labour Party program, but the party later backtracked. “As soon as they won, citizens’ assemblies suddenly became the last priority,” noted the chief of an international democracy non-profit.

    Another suggestion to broaden experience of citizens’ assembly would be to do more with the randomly selected first pool of those who do say yes, often numbering a few hundred people, who are not chosen in the final stratification. For instance, they could be invited to a special outreach session of the assembly in which they could discuss the issue at hand with those who were selected.

    Improving terminology, or awareness of it, could also help. The word sortition is little known or understood. Some say citizens’ assemblies should be known as civic assemblies (to include, for instance, unregistered refugees). Some worry the word democracy itself may be off-putting and means different things to different people. One issue is that people now associate democracy entirely with voting, even though until the 18th century democracy (“rule by the people”) was mostly used to describe direct popular authority, channelled through the random selection of classical times. Another difficulty is that because people now think democracy means voting, and because elected governments are in such disrepute, the word democracy can now trigger hostile feelings.

    Ways Democracy R&D conference participants suggested to popularise the process included ideas to: build up better data and stories on citizens’ assemblies and their impact, and use these to craft a compelling theory of change; mobilise assembly alumni as spokespeople; win over politicians – critically, before they take power – to understand that citizens’ assemblies can bring support and legitimacy and not threaten their elected roles; stress that citizens’ assemblies are more representative of diversity than elected bodies and are better at blocking special-interest groups; and better link deliberative democracy to what the wider public cares about.

    How can work on deliberative democracy get funded?

    Non-profit types often wring their hands about finding funding for their work. The world of deliberative democracy has a particularly difficult time raising money, with some organizations reporting close calls with fate. 

    Small donations on a large scale are unknown for democracy NGOs, perhaps since deliberative democracy is not (yet) a cause with an emotional punch that can attract the attention of the general public or a passing donor in the street. At the other end, big national funders to organisations doing democratic improvement are often linked to elected politicians, who can worry that supporting alternatives to elections might cut off the branch on which they sit.

    Additionally, the field is new and untested, with very few organizations older than a decade. “The funders are sometimes out of touch,” the chief of one international democracy NGO told me. “Look at what happened with the Brexit referendum. Tens of millions of pounds were spent to swing the campaign against Europe. And with sortition, donors give us $100,000-$150,000 and then ask us, why haven’t you changed democracy?”

    One encouraging difference is that deliberative democracy does attract rich individuals frustrated with the electoral system, a number of whom have set up their own non-profits and take an active interest in deliberative projects. Time will tell if they can coordinate to build up a broader movement.

    How fast will change happen?

    Although the Democracy R&D network has grown rapidly to more than 100 organisations and 100 individual members since its founding in 2018, involving perhaps 400 people in total, few members expect a rapid global conversion to sortition. “The revolution will be a slow one, and it will happen in local administrations first,” predicted a founding member from Brussels, where next year’s conference takes place.

    Still, the number of citizens’ assemblies being held round the world is rising in a logarithmic curve. I came away from my week in British Columbia sure that all the energy, new ideas, focused organizations, and idealism mean that the deliberative wave will not subside soon. The challenge for these new democrats is how to connect the solutions they offer – like citizens’ assemblies – with the now widespread recognition that public trust has been lost in electoral processes and the governments they produce. Or at least, how to make that connection before the argument is won by the forces who are currently far ahead in this race: the one-third of the population in richer countries with electoral systems who suggesting that authoritarian rule is the answer. 

    Canada’s Peter MacLeod (above right) urged the new democrats in Vancouver not to flag in their efforts, noting the ultimate success of the last big democratic wave in 1790-1830. In that period, the American and French revolutions spurred the replacement of monarchs, archbishops and aristocrats by then more effective elected governments. “Don’t underestimate the the ability of a small group of people to change the world [even if] it took another 120 years to full enfranchisement,” he said. “We have to keep delivering assemblies. Democracy’s second act has started.”

  • Sensing a Turkish Upswing

    Sensing a Turkish Upswing

    I’d like to make a bet that Türkiye – the official name for Turkey since 2021 – is about to make a comeback after years of disastrous economic policies, fear-mongering leadership and regional turmoil.

    Being invited this week by the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels for a discussion with Turkish Treasury & Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek felt like reliving the start of a memorable upswing back in the late 1990s. Back then, against the odds, Ankara quelled years of political chaos, conquered runaway inflation and successfully wooed the EU for an invitation to join the club.

    If we believe Minister Şimşek, President Erdoğan has abandoned an economic ideology that kept interest rates artificially low and drained foreign currency reserves. Şimşek says he is getting a grip on inflation, promising it will decline after peaking at 70% this month. His past year running the budget has already brought an improved balance of payments, inflows of cash and a lower cost of borrowing. Similarly to the self-imposed stabilization package of the late 1990s, he seemed to have a good economic outlook to talk about.

    When I asked him whether any political reforms would follow his recent budgetary measures, he talked up the long-moribund Turkish candidacy to join the EU. He  invoked a longing for a “European anchor”,  the EU’s “rules-based system” and an “engine” to bring the country back into a “virtuous circle.” His numbers showed how close the two sides remain in economic terms: for instance, the EU accounts for two-thirds of inbound Turkish investment, 41% of Turkish export sales, and 41% of tourists to the country.

    The Turks have had a rough decade, going through the crushing of the country’s Kurdish movement, alarming wars close by, the inflow of 3.6 million Syrian refugees, a terrible earthquake in February last year and (as ever) financial crisis. But already during my most recent visit in April, I had the impression an upswing is in the offing. It isn’t just that the opposition swept to power in key municipal elections in March and – despite much Islamification of public spaces over the past two decades – Islamic sloganeering is not such a central fixture. From digital government, to a lack of power cuts, to better roads, to how people talk, things just seemed to be working a bit better.

    In Brussels, Şimşek answered questions openly and showed a gentler side of the country long missing from the public stage. “We’d like to mend fences,” he offered.

    I asked Şimşek if anyone he met officially in Brussels or other European capitals had responded favourably to his message that “Türkiye is ready”. The minister demurred. Such European encouragement as he received, he said, was more personal than institutional. But “they seem constructive”, he added, and “markets are coming round.”

    Just as in the 1990s, a good portion of Şimşek’s Q&A discussed the question of whether Turkish leaders really wanted to join the EU at all – and vice versa. The minister himself preferred, like many Turkish leaders in the past, to plea to focus on “the process”, not the end goal, to see what happened if and when convergence worked.

    European participants in the audience seemed to doubt that EU leaders would go that far. When it came to re-embracing the goal of Turkish membership of the EU, “Europe is not ready,” said economist André Sapir, my fellow panelist and a Bruegel Senior Fellow. Former top EU official and ambassador to Ankara, Stefano Manservisi, noted from the audience that even the unique 1995 customs union with the EU was invented to keep the country out.

    Indeed, Türkiye’s EU progress report for 2023 points out that accession talks are “at a standstill” since at least 2018. The report is stiff with phrases like “no progress”, “backsliding,” and “serious deficiencies.” As in the 1990s, issues of human rights and rule of law stand out as big obstacles to any normalization.

    At the same time, much has changed. One of Şimşek’s slides showed how the old unspoken European prejudice that the country was “too big, too poor and too Muslim” is now at least partly wrong. While purchasing power per capita was just 40% of the European average in 2001, it’s now reached 74%.

    Indeed, when I started living in Istanbul in the 1980s, there were just 30 often ageing planes in the Turkish Airlines fleet. That’s about the number of planes I saw last month from one window of Istanbul’s vast new airport, possibly the biggest in Europe. Turkish Airlines says that today’s fleet of over 440 planes serves 272 destinations in more countries than any other carrier in the world.

    That’s not all. An economy whose leading exports were hazlenuts and figs in the 1980s now sells drones that change the course of foreign wars. Compared to the 1990s, little armed conflict now happens inside the country. And the 3m-4m people of Turkish origin in EU states are now far better integrated and rising in European societies, changing perceptions of their mother country.

    It may be that if technocrats like Minister Şimşek can get Türkiye’s act together, European leaders may accept his revival of Ankara’s old argument that collaboration with a country with its size and growth could be an advantage for the EU, whose combined GDP has now fallen to 17.5% of the global total from 28.6% in 1980. It’s possible too that Europeans can learn to look with new eyes at a richer, potentially better-run, and, dare I say, still relatively secular country.

    I remember the December 1999 moment that the EU issued its invitation to join, an amazingly proud and happy day for many Turks. It kick-started years of real progress. Perhaps a more constructive approach from both sides could be an opportunity to bring back those happier days again.

    +++

    Postscript on 15 October 2024. I think I won my bet. Four months after writing this, The Economist published this article (10 October 2024):

    Europe | Struggling back

    Turkey ’s long hard struggle with inflation: High interest rates are starting to do the trick

    Setting interest rates in Turkey is like skiing in pre-lift days. Going down is the easy part. Climbing back up is gruelling, and takes ages. The country’s central bankers have been doing so since the summer of 2023, and they still need more time.

    They do have something to show for their pains….The economic team he appointed has won back the trust of foreign investors…”

    It’s nice to see the country’s economy stabilize. Unfortunately, it’s no quick cure for the pain of constant transitions and uncertainties that continue to bedevil the lives of many ordinary Turks.

  • Full circle for ‘The Keys to Democracy’

    Full circle for ‘The Keys to Democracy’

    “All those who would trust a Citizens’ Assembly to take decisions for them, stand up!”

    Half of the 50-strong audience rose to their feet in response to the question posed by Bridie Nathanson, co-founder and joint animator of the Brussels debating club Full Circle. 

    A sign of changing times? The unexpected endorsement of deliberative democracy came before my fellow pro-Citizens’ Assembly presenter and I had even begun to speak: Eva Rovers, co-founder of the Dutch deliberative democracy organizers Bureau Burgerberaad, and myself, co-editor of my father Maurice Pope’s posthumous book, The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, published exactly a year ago.

    Ideas do sometimes travel faster than you realize. One of them is certainly that of the Citizens’ Assembly: the idea that good policy proposals to solve polarizing problems can come from a group of people randomly selected from a community. This method is also known as sortition. The randomly selected members meet, inform themselves, deliberate with the help of facilitators, hear everyone’s views and find new ways forward. 

    When my classicist father first typed a manuscript proposing similar kinds of assemblies in the 1980s, as a modernized version of ancient Greek democracy, none of his usual publishers would touch the work. Now there have been at least 800 sortition-based Citizens’ Assemblies around the world since the first one in British Columbia in 2004, most of them in the past decade. 

    Belgium, where I live, has a permanent Citizens’ Assembly for the German-language community, and the city of Paris has one too. The German Bundestag is running a series of three. In Britain, columnists and podcasters are increasingly referencing, even approving of the concept. It even (briefly) surfaced as a 2024 UK election campaign issue when a Labour Party adviser said these assemblies were a good idea.

    Photo by Julius Proost

    When Bridie gave me the floor, I spoke a little about how my mother Johanna found the lost manuscript of The Keys to Democracy in the family library after my father’s death in 2019, the publishers Imprint Academic took it on and it is now endorsed by many in the fast-growing field of sortition studies. But mostly I spoke about the experience of being an official observer at France’s recent Citizens’ Assembly on the End of Life.

    I wanted the audience to hear and feel how inspiring it was to see ordinary people from a cross-section of society – from an immigrant baggage handler at Charles de Gaulle Airport to a high official of the French Central Bank – all contribute to discussions and reach a clear decision. Over 75 per cent of the 184 citizens endorsed the idea of possible assisted death, but 95 per cent – that is, including those who were against it – endorsed the report, because it had taken their views on palliative care and other mitigating alternatives into account.

    The Assembly was inspiring too because of the sense of collaborative joy shared by the citizen participants. I spoke of my amazement that my father, a proud but shy person who spent most waking hours in his library, had understood how random selection would empower people to simply represent themselves. “Democracy liberates,” he foresaw (p. 171). “The less that people feel belittled and the more that they feel they belong to society, the greater will be their zest for life and the more fruitful the energy that they will display.”

    Eva Rovers, photo by Julius Proost

    Eva Rovers told the story of how she pivoted from art history to deliberative democracy in response to what she saw as the failure of the current government system to come up with policies to deal with the climate emergency. The organization she leads is at the forefront of Citizens’ Assemblies taking off in municipalities all over the Netherlands.

    Organized well, she said, Citizens’ Assemblies are proving good at finding innovative solutions to tricky problems. She gave the example of how one Assembly discussing the expansion of a nuclear power plant came up with an unexpected formula to quell disquiet in the coastal province of Zeeland. One of the ideas it suggested was that housing for workers should, after the completion of the project, be offered for occupation first to families of local people. “No architects would ever have thought of that on their own,” she said.

    Our Full Circle discussion afterward seemed intrigued by deliberative democracy, even if not all participants were convinced that Citizens’ Assemblies could ever replace elections. My view, refined over my past year of book talks, is that any change will of course take time. Limiting the power of kings started (in England, anyway) 800 years ago; originally aristocratic parliaments took centuries to become the locus of power; and when parliamentary electorates began to expand beyond the elites, it took nearly two centuries to get to universal suffrage in most countries.

    But it’s been more than a decade now that groups like Freedom House have recorded backsliding in the long global expansion of elected representative government. Polls show how many people are frustrated at the failure of elected bodies to make decisions in the public interest. I also argued that if we don’t find a path to more efficient government by expanding democracy beyond the confines of party politics and elections, even more people will be attracted to another seemingly more efficient alternative: authoritarian rule.

    For sure, it may take many more decades before a majority of the population accepts the idea of giving Citizens’ Assemblies (or whatever develops from them) the full right to make recommendations, let alone have decision-making power. But engaging with so many people open to new ideas for better public decision-making, and seeing several more copies of my late Dad’s once-spurned book on sortition being sold, I feel it is not crazy to hope that change is on its way.

    Photo by Jessica Lutz
  • Writing for Policymakers

    Writing for Policymakers

    One day, a Turkish colonel bellowed at me across a hushed meeting table around which sat 43 representatives from 19 Turkish government departments: “Mr. Pope!” he roared. “Your report talks about peace. But they are burning my flag! If terrorists burned your flag, what would you do?”

    It’s the beginning of one of the stories I told this week in a lecture about “Writing for Policymakers”, given to final-year students of Security Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. It’s the third year they ask me to their campus in The Hague to talk about my experiences reporting on and trying to mitigate armed conflict. This time there was a special challenge, since among the audience was my youngest daughter Scarlett and her fellow last-year friends. As ever, I was struck by how much more aware and diverse students are today than at least I was back then (whenever that was).

    I told them that writing for decision-makers is the art of getting a message across to people who have little time to read – and who sometimes don’t even want to listen. So planning is needed. I structured the talk along the four elements I argued are essential: how to focus on realistic goals; choose the right content; know your audience; and think through which tools to use.

    The same bill of fare applies to many forms of commentary on the topic that I normally address, armed conflict. It doesn’t matter whether it’s advocating a specific policy or policies, which I used to do for the International Crisis Group, or the more subtle art of presenting data and analysis that could inform policy, which is the mission of my present job at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).

    Among the things I try to stress:

    • Timing – not just catching the news wave, but realizing that, in a crisis, most ministry advisers have wrapped up their position papers by early in the morning
    • Keeping it short, clear and simple – often only possible after you’ve made yourself a master of the subject in a long-form report
    • Having patience – sometimes for years
    • Practicing your lines – and honing and repeating them until your audience has learned them too
    • Personal outreach – few people change their minds through reading something by someone they haven’t met
    • Talk to everyone in the room – and everyone they listen to as well, be it TV, radio, podcasts or just their friends

    Along the way I wove in stories about situations where things worked well and not so well for me. Like the way I was completely non-plussed about the Turkish officer’s question about flag burnings. In my home country, after all, people wear the national flag on their underwear.

    “Colonel!” I riposted, in a voice as close to his roar as I dared. “You’re right! It is a terrible thing to burn a country’s flag. But this is a trap to make you act as angry as you feel inside! I urge you to see this as a provocation, to rise above it and not be deflected from the wisest course of action.”

    This may have had little if any long-term impact on making Turkey, now Türkiye, a country in which everyone – Turks, Kurds and many less numerous ethnicities – can live happily under one flag. Terrible fighting resumed three years later. But that day, as our high-powered meeting broke up for tea and cakes, for once I had the feeling that the message had landed.

  • A ‘thank you’ to Iraqi Kurds in the name of foreign reporters

    A ‘thank you’ to Iraqi Kurds in the name of foreign reporters

    I’m writing with news of something I’ve helped work on for over the past 18 months with one of my heroes, American writer and ex-international correspondent Jonathan Randal. It’s called the Kurdistan Mental Health Project. It’s a ray of hope at a time when people are enduring several conflicts around the world that once again are killing, maiming and uprooting lives.

    Thanks to this project, a gift in the name of the foreign correspondents and researchers who have covered Iraqi Kurdistan’s ordeals, 30 young psychology graduates and practitioners will begin on 16 January 2024 being trained across Iraqi Kurdistan at the start of a two-year course on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

    This ‘talking’ treatment is a first step to help Kurds move sustainably beyond their traumatic history: brutal campaigns by Saddam Hussein, the genocidal Islamic State assault on the Yezidis and other violence that has scarred the region. Despite Kurdish society’s pressing need for access to contemporary psychological treatment, there is not much beyond medication and/or denial being done to overcome the personal and collective damage done by these ordeals.

    You can find out more about the Kurdistan Mental Health Project here on the website of the Anglo-Kurdish charity that thought up the project. The therapy is being taught online by a group of teachers linked to Oxford University and being coordinated on the ground by an Iraqi Kurdish training center.

    The first two years of the project are being paid for by an anonymous gift in the name of friends of Kurdistan, many of them journalists, who researched in or reported on the region. In part, this is a ‘thank you’ to all the Kurds who so generously helped those who travelled there. Despite the risks, they ensured our access to people and safety getting in – and out – of Kurdistan to inform the outside world about their long-suppressed cause.

    Ideally, the project will find new backers to run four years more, at which point we hope the Kurdistan Regional Government will keep it going. You can scroll down to the bottom of the page from here to sign up to a newsletter that will post occasional updates about the project. Or if you like, click here to find out how to make a private donation, if you like.

    We’d love it if you would please help spread the word, which we hope would attract support from outside governments (some are already interested) and the bigger foundations already present in Iraqi Kurdistan. Such institutional funding is likely the best way to get the Kurdistan Mental Health Project on its legs.

    Please do forward a link to this post to anyone you think might like to hear about this, or post a few of your own words on social media with a link to project’s page on the charity website, perhaps accompanied by a picture of yourself in action in Iraqi Kurdistan and the hashtag #kurdistanmentalhealth. These would both be wonderful ways to show solidarity with this initiative.

    Hugh Pope (then a freelancer mainly with The Independent), Jonathan Randal (the Washington Post) and John Pomfret (then with the Associated Press) rediscovering Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 after it had shaken off the rule of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. At that time, there was surprising hope amid the newly liberated ruins of villages razed to the ground by Saddam’s forces. But the shocking legacy of decades of oppression endures.
  • A New Start in the New Year

    A New Start in the New Year

    A new year, a new organization, a new job! I feel very lucky and wish everyone a wonderful new start in 2024 as well.

    From today, I’m joining ACLED, the pre-eminent global researchers, analysts and publishers of data on political violence. I’ll be Chief of External Affairs, coordinating public-facing workstreams like publishing, communications and direct organizational outreach.

    The new role is part of the rapid expansion of ACLED – short for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project – as its unique database of conflict events gains traction with strategists, policy-makers and assessors of risk. The dataset was started just 18 years ago by the chief executive Clionadh Raleigh, also professor of political violence and geography at Sussex University, as part of her PhD work on six West African countries. She and executive director Olivia Russell have now presided over ACLED’s growth to cover all of the world’s 243 states and territories.

    That now includes the United States. In fact, ACLED’s most recent publication Riding the Tide: the Shifting Identity of the Proud Boys since the Capitol riot profiles that country’s far-right groups ahead of elections in November. ACLED data shows exactly how groups like the Proud Boys are on the up and the Oath Keepers are down, and how the Proud Boys jump opportunistically onto far-right political bandwagons: for instance, first demonstrating in support of Trump in 2020-2021, then against abortion in early 2022, and then mainly anti-LGBTQ+ in late 2022-2023.

    On top of widening and deepening its rich treasure chest of data, ACLED now wants to build up its presentation of what it finds, its own analysis of what it means, its support for data literacy and its reputation beyond its home audience in the data elite. I’ve already had fun meeting my new colleagues while working part-time over the past several months, even if I do now feel somewhat daunted by the challenges of my first fully remote workplace: some 250 collaborators in 50 countries all over the world and not a single office.

    As we build up our young communications department, we are hiring, too, so do check out the careers section of ACLED’s website. If you or anyone you know would like to help us to spread the word about how policy and other decisions can be made better if based on what’s actually happening on the ground, please do apply or encourage others to do so!

    My new job brings to a close a delightful two-year sabbatical after my 15 years with the International Crisis Group. I spent much of the time editing and getting published my late Dad’s long-lost book on The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power. I was also fortunate to be inducted into the world of sortition-based democratic reform, which actually has great potential for defusing conflicts too. (Above is a picture after a presentation of the book in Belfast in October with Art O’Leary, the Irish government’s electoral commission chief, Polish academic Joanna Podgorska-Rykoka and Trinity College Dublin sortition expert Peter Stone). I will be unable to stop myself blogging from time to time about breakthroughs in the use of groups of randomly selected citizens to deliberate and take decisions in the public interest.

    But for now, at least, it’s back to trying to understand armed conflict and, I hope, helping people find new ways to make the world a more peaceful place.

    Happy New Year!

  • Broken democracies and Latin grammar: can we blame it all on Plato?

    Broken democracies and Latin grammar: can we blame it all on Plato?

    Where did my late father get the idea that random selection could fix our broken politics? This is one of the most frequent questions I’ve been asked after working on editing Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power, published in March.

    As far as I know, when my Dad was writing the book in the mid-1980s, he knew of nobody else working on sortition, that is, deliberation and decision-making by randomly selected, ordinary citizens. (In fact, there were some, but in those pre-internet days few of them knew each other either). He was a diligent scholar and he would surely have cited anyone he’d heard of on the same track.

    So I could only look back in his own work. And after publication of The Keys to Democracy, Prof. Josine Blok, a former colleague of my father’s pointed out his 1988 academic paper “Thucydides and Democracy“. The paper contradicts traditional arguments that the meticulous classical Greek historian took the side of oligarchy and (to me, at least) proves its thesis that Thucydides “is not a hostile witness to democracy.” My father openly sides with (ancient, sortition-based) democracy, stating that “indeed, I believe in it.” Already in his 1976 book The Ancient Greeks: How they Lived and Worked, he had launched a robust defence of Athenian democracy against its “scornful dismissal” by mainstream academic experts.

    Prof. Maurice Pope addresses a classics convention in Crete in 1962

    But his convictions dated even further back. Recently, sifting through his papers prior to sending them on to the archives of Cambridge University’s Department of Classics, my mother chanced upon an essay from 1955 in which my Dad voices many of the same points of view. In this opinion article published in the Cape Times of South Africa about the teaching of Latin – he was then a professor at Cape Town University – he is clearly already rehearsing the pro-sortition themes that reach full bloom in The Keys to Democracy.

    This text is taken from his best draft. I have only added the Cape Times’ headline, a little punctuation and some context/missing words. There’s an explanation of his time in South Africa here.

    +++++

    Place of tradition in study of classics

    By Maurice Pope

    “There is a movement among [South African] Provincial Educational Authorities to change the matriculation [exam] regulations in such a way as to encourage the learning of a Bantu language instead of Latin. It is the old problem: should education emphasise past tradition or present needs? Professor Haarhoff is a strong upholder of the value of the past, and gave his reasons on this page in January. This was some time ago and I do not want now to analyse them. Briefly, he takes the view that a study of the past can teach lessons for the present and transmit ideals we should not fall below.

    “Now this argument gives the impression that the incentive of scholarship is the desire to preserve tradition. But tradition is a rather personal thing. If one likes it, one calls it ‘the wisdom of the past’; if not, ‘the dead hand of the past’. In fact, scholarship can be justified in a less subjective way, and the case is worth putting, since it is so little known.

    “History is originally just fun – like foreign travel. The motive is curiosity, to broaden experience rather than repeat it. This is children’s history – Herodotus. But in practical adult life, history is still born from the desire to change. Routine, as [philosopher Alfred N.] Whitehead pointed out, forms 99% of the world. One copies blindly. Only when we need to change a part of the routine are we forced to find out the reason for it. This means history. To take an example, education is a routine in this sense, or an institution. Team games at school form part of the pattern. As long as they are unquestioningly accepted, nobody will trouble to find out their history.

    “Now imagine somebody wanting to abolish them. Protests would be immediate. [People would say that] games promote health, strength, courage, endurance, discipline, esprit de corps and every other desirable quality. But these qualities were not lacking in early times, though team games at school only began in the Victorian era. Indeed, games seem to have been encouraged at first for quite different motives. Now, one of the things our abolitionist will undoubtedly have to do is to point all this out. The defence will try to overturn his arguments. There is an immediate demand for history. But that is not all. The premium is on accuracy, since neither side will want the stick to break in their hands. There is not such need for accuracy if you are only using history to point an unquestioned moral.

    “Primitive societies are content with myth. The societies which enquire the most accurately and honestly into their past are the progressive ones that are continually breaking away from it and changing their traditions – like modern Europe and classical Greece. The reason is that the defenders of a tradition will always plead its absolute necessity. Since experiment in human affairs is not so easy, the reform party will have to show that this necessity was not so apparent before the tradition began.

    “Assuming this is a true account of things, let us come back to our first question. What are the particular functions of Latin and Greek scholarship? Partly, of course, the classics are just an educational technique. Partly, they are still practically necessary.

    “The Roman Church still uses Latin; so to a less extent does [Rome]. One cannot get very far with an understanding of most modern European literature and language without it. Latin will certainly survive to the degree made necessary by these things. The more interesting question is how far Latin is needed in getting back behind the origins of our present routines, whether in thought or behaviour? The answer is: much less than formerly. There is a curious recession of scholarship. The Middle Ages knew little of the ancient world. The Renaissance revived knowledge of classical Latin, as it found there humanistic justification for human morality, which the theocracy had said could only be found in theism. But it knew little of Greece. Greek became steadily better understood, but [even] at the end of the 18th century it was still interpreted in the light of Latin. Homer was judged by Virgil, Aristotle’s Poetics by Horace and so on. The emphasis then shifted back until nowadays almost all classical scholars prefer things Greek to things Roman. Recently, indeed, interest has begun to recede further still – to the Bronze Age origins of classical Greece.

    “I think the reason for this is that we have largely emancipated ourselves from blindly following patterns set for us by Rome. We have not yet emancipated ourselves from Greek. In the one field [we] have done so – science – the improvement has been enormous. The Aristotelian view of the physical world was not however upset without struggle. Galileo spent almost as much time attacking Aristotle’s cosmology as explaining his own, Bacon in attacking his logic. Since then, science has continually progressed.

    “The humanities though are still in a mediaeval state. The only difference is that they rest less on Aristotle than on the authority of Platonic metaphysics. Almost all our views on human nature and human reason – and our consequent prejudices against an experimental or scientific approach to human problems – are buttressed by arguments invented by Plato. These appear convincing because they are made to support each other in a most elaborate philosophical system.

    “But it is possible to argue that the whole system is just a large-scale rationalisation of Plato’s own personal prejudices and dislike of the Athenian democracy as fickle, progressively vulgar, incapable of wise or decisive action, ultimately a failure. This verdict on democracy, together with the proofs why it must be true, have been relayed through the ages until it has become almost a habit of mind. But it is still Plato’s verdict. How much is it justified by facts, how much a project of wishful thinking? One is driven to analysing Plato’s arguments and motives, and to finding out the truth about Athenian history.

    “This is only one example of a largely unquestioned pattern of modern thought which originated in Greece. There are many other equally important ones in the spheres of art, literature, philosophy and especially religion.

    “To sum up: any live society will constantly find its traditions out of date and want to change them. Their defenders will plead historical necessity. To overcome them, more history is needed and thus there arises a continual demand for scholarship.

    “This, I think, is the ultimate raison d’être for classical scholarship. It is a rather more exciting one than the preservation of tradition, but I am not very much concerned about its propaganda value. A society that faces up to its contemporary problems, and tries to solve them, will know about its past; if it is afraid of making adjustments, it will eventually lapse into myth and ignorance. The choice is not one that educationalists can make alone.

    “It seems at the moment rather unlikely that the problems which necessitate going back to Greek sources will arouse enough general interest for Greek to revive in schools as classical Latin revived at the Renaissance. But if they do, fifth-century Athens may prove as exhilarating a spectacle for its freedom from an all-embracing metaphysics as the Roman republic was at the time for its freedom from an all-embracing theocracy.”

    ++++

    For me, this essay shows that my father was into random selection from the beginning of his working life. And at least by his late 20s, he had developed a mission to push back against Platonic ideas, if not Plato himself. Or as my Mum puts it: “your father was always talking about sortition.”

    In Chapter 8 of The Keys to Democracy, ‘In Defence of Randomness’, he makes his main attack on Platonic or ‘noumenalist’ ideas. This doctrine holds that true reality can only be found in ‘noumena’, or things that exist in themselves and can be understood only by intellectual intuition, without the aid of the senses. Overturning this philosophy goes the heart of what he was trying to achieve by rehabilitating sortition and putting ordinary citizens in the driving seat. As he put it in The Keys:

    The noumenal approach is also covered by the early twentieth-century English mathematician and philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead’s remark that “the European philosophical tradition … is a series of footnotes to Plato.” Its origins go back to the late fifth century BC when the intellectual battle between democracy and oligarchy was at its height. Its political bias is manifest. As soon as we accept that there is a distinction to be made between mind and matter, soul and body or appearance and reality, we can hardly avoid taking sides and assuming that the former of each of these pairs is superior and comes first. Ideas are perfect as ideas, but are spoiled when they are translated into practice. Spirit is pure, flesh is gross and sullied. Knowledge exists (in heaven or in theory) and answers are right or wrong depending on how closely they approximate to that knowledge. These noumenal notions, embedded not only in our philosophy but in our everyday language, encourage a model of society in which wisdom, conferred by knowledge, is the preserve of the few at the top while the many down below have only unorganised desires...

    There has only ever been one school of thought that has ever tried to work these attitudes of mind into a coherent system of philosophy, including ethics and metaphysics: that of the Epicureans. They derived the principles of moral conduct from the satisfaction of instinct, which they called pleasure. They accounted for the existence of the world not, as Aristotle had done, by assuming a single prime mover behind everything, but by the opposite, an infinite number of prime movers each endowed with the ability to initiate an infinitely minute spontaneous movement...

    … It may be thought that one of the consequences of noumenalism is just as damning to its claim to be taken seriously as the picture of the Epicurean atoms with their unpredictable swerve. The discrimination which asserts that mind is superior to matter can be used to distinguish man from animal, civilised man from savage, sage from fool. It can then be continued within ourselves. Reason, our godlike faculty, can be distinguished from appetite. It can then be asked, whereabouts in us the reason is located: in the heart, in the head, or in some other part? …

    … the whole hunt is also absurd. Reason, if it exists at all, must exist not statically in a particular place, but dynamically as the function of an organism. The chase now goes into reverse. Organisms are complex entities themselves and exist within a context of others. There can be no such thing as an organism that functions in isolation. This is true all the way up the scale. There cannot be a brain without a body. The purest philosopher is not independent of his hormones for either the strength or the direction of his thought, nor is he independent of his environment. He is affected by language, time and place, by the opportunities offered by his society and by its constraints. So is everybody. But it works the other way too. For in the shaping of society, all members of it, philosophers and fools, young and old, living and dead, have played or are playing some part, however miniscule.

    Furthermore, nobody, whether philosopher, poet, scientist or politician, can tell what is going to influence his thoughts in the next three days or weeks, let alone in the next three or thirty years. All that he can be certain of is that, if he is going to be alive and operational at all, the remarks, writings and actions of other people will be constantly affecting him. He will certainly not be occupied the whole time in making pure deductions from his existing store of experience or (as Bacon put it) in spinning cobwebs out of his own substance. We are all members one of another. We all may affect each other. Such interactions are not confined to human beings. The unforeseen act of an animal, an insect or a wave on a beach may either dramatically or minutely alter the course of our lives.

    Seen in this perspective, the Epicurean model of the myriad upon myriad of infinitely small, unmoved movers begins to look less absurd and less remote. It is not obviously less true to reality than the noumenalist one of mind, purpose and knowledge. And when we put flesh on the Epicurean vision and adapt it to the political world, of course it gives a democratic picture. It shows us all the members of a society contributing, each a little, to its total life. In the noumenalist picture, by contrast, the lives of the many have no value except as instruments to execute the designs of the leaders.

    [pp. 118-20, abridged]

    Can we really blame it all on Plato? I don’t know, but American philosopher Richard Farr wrote a nice, short, skeptical take on the question here.

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  • Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy

    Maurice Pope’s book The Keys to Democracy

    This is a guide to The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power by the late classicist Maurice Pope. As you’ll see below, the book has been endorsed by many, including columnist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (“strongly recommended“), leading Yale professor of politics Hélène Landemore (“visionary“) and the Belgian pioneer of democracy by lot David van Reybrouck (“extraordinary“).

    You can order the hardback either directly from UK publisher Imprint Academic, from bookshops like Barnes & Noble or globally from Amazon (e.g. US, UK, AU, DE, FR). It is also available as an ebook on Kindle and on B&N’s Nook.

    Links to public presentations and discussions of the book are here. You can also read the preface online.

    Video highlights of a debate at Wadham College, Oxford, to launch the book in March 2023.

    Reviews and endorsements are below, with the most recent entries added at the bottom of this page.

    +++++

    This is a visionary, luminous, wide-ranging and profoundly humanistic book … Maurice Pope saw the potential of democracy by lot to fight corruption, to improve the quality of deliberation, to build on ordinary citizens’ common sense and diversity, and to educate and spread in the body politic the fundamental ethos of social equality.

    —Dr. Hélène Landemore 

    Professor of political science at Yale University and author of Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century.

    +++++

    The apogee of a career’s thinking as a radical-minded classicist … The Keys to Democracy remains unique in its philosophical breadth and scope. And in its vision, it is still bolder than many on offer. 

    —Dr. Paul Cartledge 

    Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University and author of Democracy: A Life

    +++++

    Maurice Pope was obviously something of a visionary, predicting the modern reincarnation of sortition in the form of citizens’ assemblies years before the recent “deliberative wave” was even a tiny ripple on a few disparate ponds. He was also incredibly knowledgeable and insightful. His arguments and reasoning as he sets out the case for sortition are still highly relevant today.

    —Dr. Brett Hennig

    Director and Co-Founder, Sortition Foundation, Cambridge, UK, and author of The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy

    +++++

    Maurice Pope’s book provides a compelling basis for the next democratic paradigm. He makes it clear that what we refer to as ‘democracy’ today is rather an oligarchy of elected elites—and that it was intentionally designed as such. It’s why we need to reclaim the true meaning, values and processes of democracy. Pope shows us why the ideal of government by the people is not only desirable, it is also possible if we return to democracy by random selection of representatives (sortition). It gives us hope.

    —Claudia Chwalisz

    Chief Executive Officer of DemocracyNext and former lead of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s work on Innovative Citizen Participation

    +++++

    Required reading for our times. Innovation in democracy has never been more needed now that climate change requires long-term collective action underpinned by democratic consent—over decades to come. This bold proposal combines Maurice Pope’s insights into ancient methods of democracy with a brave vision for the future that overcomes the limits of representation.

    —Dr. Heather Grabbe

    Open Society European Policy Institute and University College, London

    +++++

    Maurice Pope’s call for random selection-based democracy is a powerful, pre-emptive herald to the current expansion of citizen participation. It has the distinctive merit of connecting the field of sortition design to wider historical trends and political philosophy. In doing so, his book adds invaluable intellectual ballast to the quest for better democratic practices. Pope’s masterful tract shows that today’s attempts to involve citizens in politics should not be dismissed as an ephemeral fad, but have deep roots in political concerns and debates extending back many years.

    —Prof. Richard Youngs

    Senior Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, professor at Warwick University and author of Rebuilding European Democracy: Resistance and Renewal in an Illiberal Age 

    +++++

    Informed by a learned and entertaining sweep of the pedigree of democracy, this erudite book makes a cogent case for the merits of sortition as a means of revitalising citizen engagement and improving the quality of political decision making, while not hiding the obstacles to its adoption in the years ahead. At a time of growing cynicism, it should be read by anyone seeking creative ways to boost trust in politics.

    —Michael Keating

    Executive Director of the European Institute of Peace and former Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General in Somalia

    +++++

    Those of us who yearn for citizens’ assemblies to be better respected, understood and used as a transformative tool for democracy will find much solace and hope in Maurice Pope’s pioneering book. Having a work of such calibre and prescience at our side will surely help many hitherto covert sortition supporters come out of the closet once and for all.

    —Annika Savill

    Formerly the Executive Head of the UN Democracy Fund, the Senior Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan and the Diplomatic Editor of the UK’s Independent newspaper

    +++++

    Awe-inspiring … [Maurice Pope] was an intellectual dark horse.

    —Dr Edith Hall

    Professor of Classics, Durham University and author of Aristotle’s Way and Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

    +++++

    Maurice wrote his book decades ago. Couldn’t get it published. Too crazy an idea. Until now! 

    —Jefferson Smith

    Democracy Nerd podcast host

    +++++

    A masterpiece of thinking and writing, and a pleasure to read … I love the book.

    —James Harding

    Editor and founder Tortoise media, former director of BBC News and ex-editor of The Times.

    +++++

    It’s an astonishingly brilliant book. It thinks through many of the things that political theorists and political scientists have been gradually groping towards over the last 40 years. It is radical, but also realistic. It recognizes that the full utopian vision is not going to come about any time soon, that many of the changes in democracy have been gradual processes that have taken hundreds of years to develop.

    —Dr Alan Renwick

    Professor of Democratic Politics at University College London, Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit and author of The Politics of Electoral Reform: Changing the Rules of Democracy.

    +++++

    Encountering the book … is like discovering a time capsule: we peer into the mind of a genius whose work reaches out from the past and yet, in its perspicacity and ambition, stretches way ahead of us. It’s also a delight to read. Pope’s voice speaks through the text in his breezy style and inimitable wit; the anecdote and humor that he peppers throughout make his points pop in your mind. And they’re big ones...

    Pope was … a visionary, and his plan’s more revolutionary than The Communist Manifesto. What’s incredible about it is the context of its writing. In the late 1980s—and certainly with the fall of the Soviet Union—citizens of the West were being told repeatedly that we’d reached “the end of history.” There were no alternatives, Thatcher declaimed, to liberal capitalism and the elective oligarchy that’s got us by the throat. Yet deep in the bowels of his study, this brave, brilliant man was working out an audacious dream for democracy entirely on his own. Reading the result is like being invited in and given a cup of tea in one hand and a stick of dynamite in the other—except the dynamite explodes your mind. The author’s out on a limb here; yet every place he leaps, he finds his feet. The epigraph from Chesterton above actually omits the full phrase: “All real democracy is an attempt, like a jolly hostess, to bring the shy people out.” Maurice Pope is that host, and his feast’s a joy.

    —Nick Coccoma

    Review in The Similitude, 5 April 2023.

    +++++

    It’s surprisingly a lot more relevant today than when Maurice Pope originally wrote it. He was echoing his experience in understanding classical and Athenian democracy and the ways they used instead of elections, which he was very sceptical of. They used sortition, basically random selection, to put ordinary people in control of decision-making and government. Recently there’s been a lot of experiments in this, in Ireland, where they used it to reform their abortion law, and they are about to use it to discuss their neutrality, and in France where they’ve used it in … . carbon and environmental issues and euthanasia issues. So it’s a fascinating book on how random selection can be a more democratic tool than elections.

    —Jeremy Shapiro

    Director of Research at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Speaking on Mark Leonard’s World in 30 Minutes, 28 April 2023.

    +++++

    Un livre né d’une belle histoire : d’abord refusé par les maisons d’édition il y a plus de 30 ans, le manuscrit a été retrouvé par son fils @hugh.pope, qui l’a édité et publié. Un livre précurseur sur les assemblées tirées au sort. Hugh Pope m’a raconté cette histoire incroyable lors d’une rencontre au Parlement.

    A book born of a lovely story: first turned down by publishing houses more than 30 years ago, the manuscript was rediscovered by his son, who edited and published it. A pioneering book on randomly selected assemblies. Hugh Pope told me this unbelievable story during a meeting in parliament.

    —Magali Plovie

    President of the French-speaking Parliament of the Brussels Region in Belgium. Magali Plovie chose The Keys to Democracy as one of her three picks for “inspirational reading on democracy this spring.” May 2023.

    +++++

    Of all the things I’ve read on sortition, it’s the most Socratic ... Recommended!

    —Nicholas Gruen

    CEO of Lateral Economics, Australia, during our May 2023 podcast discussion about the The Keys to Democracy.

    ++++++

    Not a bad stylist, your Dad. Not a bad writer at all.

    —Michael Goldfarb

    Broadcaster, ex-NPR correspondent and host of FRDH Podcast “Democracy in Crisis: One Idea for Fixing It“. 4 June 2023.

    +++++

    A lot of people recognize that something is going pretty badly wrong. We have clearly lost confidence in core institutions … people feel they have been disregarded and ignored and given a pretty poor hand and they recognize that it might actually undermine the stability of what they expect. They are prepared to think … maybe we’ve got to change.

    One of my most radical proposals … in a column two weeks ago, is that we should complement representative democracy with Athenian democracy, which is, we can’t have everybody in a room but we can use citizens assemblies. We want ordinary people engaged in political discussions.

    There’s been much more work in this area around the world than even I had realized even when I wrote that … I have a very dear friend, very brilliant, Nicholas Gruen, an Australian economist who’s written a lot on this subject, with whom I have very long conversations.

    This then led me into the modern literature on sortition: there’s a new book, JUST published, authored [by the late classics scholar Maurice Pope], long after his death, by [his son] Hugh Pope … on this subject, which I strongly recommend.

    I thought this is an idea which at least should be resurrected. If we want democracy to work in the long run and we’re not very happy with where we are we should start opening up the debate into whether we have got the best settlement.

    Remember, the representative democracy we have is established within the framework created, broadly speaking, by Simon de Montfort rather a long time ago in the 13th century. We have made it more democratic but there’s no particular reason why it’s God-given, it is possible to ask ourselves whether we could do this better in one way or another. I think that’s a question we should be considering.

    —Martin Wolf

    Financial Times’ chief economics commentator and its best-read columnist, in conversation with Tortoise media’s James Harding at the KITE ideas and music festival, 11 June 2023.

    +++++

    Over the years we have come to learn that in this country [Belgium] voting is compulsory, but citizens’ panels are not going to be compulsory. This argument has been slowly creeping into the field of deliberative democracy, “Ala, let’s not make it compulsory”.

    And yet if you read about what people were thinking about it in the 1980s, and I’m in the middle of the process of reading The Keys to Democracy, the book recently published just a few weeks ago. It was written by Maurice Pope who was a professor of classics at Oxford – and his son Hugh Pope, who is sitting on the front right there, you took care of your Dad’s manuscript.

    He wrote an incredible book in the 1980s which unlike all his other publications did not find a publisher, because it was seen as completely maverick, this book – all of a sudden, I mean – it’s extraordinary, first of all because the entire gist of deliberative democracy is in there. With one difference: he thinks it should be mandatory.

    —David van Reybrouck

    Belgian poet, playwright, novelist, co-founder of the G1000 democratic reform NGO and pioneering author of Against Elections. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy–Europe (FIDE) on 22 June 2023.

    +++++

    I didn’t want to read [Maurice Pope’s manuscript] until I had written my own book on democracy, and now that I have read it, I wish I was as perceptive as Pope.

    —Lewis H. Lapham

    Founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and author of The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay (1993). From a letter to Jonathan McVity, the literary agent for The Keys to Democracy, 7 December, 1992.

    +++++

    In the year 2023, a book came out, and I have it in my bag, that had been written in the late 1980s by the Oxford classicist Maurice Pope. [He] couldn’t find a publisher in his lifetime. When it was published posthumously, readers discovered a visionary chapter on the future of global governance. I quote: “Unfortunately, the United Nations is the creature rather than the master of the sovereign states that compose it. It is not a house of representatives but a diplomatic rendez-vous.” As an alternative, Maurice Pope pleaded for a global assembly drafted by lot that would represent the world population. He realised the prospect was distant and the practical challenge immense, but he none the less concluded with the following words: “A forum of this kind would make for peace far more than one where government representatives make propaganda speeches. There is no other institution in sight that can offer any kind of promise to cure group rivalries, national, racial, religious and ideological that so dangerously divide humanity.”

    —David van Reybrouck

    Belgian poet, playwright, novelist, co-founder of the G1000 democratic reform NGO and pioneering author of Against Elections. Speaking at the Einstein Forum on 1 July 2023.

    +++++

    “I’d love to debate the pros and cons of this system [of sortition] for longer because it seems like it has a lot to recommend it …. The interest [of co-editor Hugh Pope] is clear and the enthusiasm is inspiring, and I’m not at all surprised that people you talk to about this are infected with the same enthusiasm …. This has been a very interesting topic for me personally, and I hope for our listeners, partly because it is quite different from what we normally talk about. But I think it still fits squarely into the science of policy mould … the book you’re looking for is written by Maurice Pope, edited by Hugh Pope, and it’s called The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power.”

    —Toby Wardman, host of the podcast of the Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), during an interview about sortition with Hugh Pope.

    +++++

    “The Keys to Democracy. Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power was written twenty years before this interest in sortition took off [in the past decade]. Maurice Pope (1926–2019) was a classicist, an expert in the ancient Cretan script called Linear A and author of a captivating study of ancient scripts “The Story of Decipherment” (1975) …

    “The quality of the argument is in my view quite uneven. Some of the political analyses and in particular the historical sections suffer from oversimplification, generalisation, and special pleading. For instance: “The political ideals and most of the political practices of Western civilisation go back through Venice and ancient Rome to classical Greece.” (p. 115). No, they don’t, this is simply not true, nor is Pope’s account of how sortition got “lost” in the course of history. On p. 123, Pope contends: “It would be possible […] to define history itself as the story of how experts have been proved wrong. For otherwise […] it would not be history at all, but current practice. […examples in] the history of science. Being history, it is possible to tell which side was wrong.” This view of history is simply bizarre. If Pope resorted to such sweeping statements to help easy reading, I don’t think they are the proper means to that end.

    “But, making up for such drawbacks, Pope offers excellent observations on deliberation as a crucial ingredient of democracy and on the potential of sortition to prevent oligarchisation (the “law of Michels”), meritocracy and other problematic forms of hierarchy. Sortition enables implementing the equality of citizens and bringing their engagement in policy making about. Importantly, Pope points out that sortition, whenever it is employed, must be rigorous and compulsory to be effective, and allotted bodies must be selected from the whole population (p. 167; complemented by the outstanding comment by Potter in the appendix). He underlines that allotted panels of citizens must have moral authority and real responsibility (to which should be added a transparent system of accountability). Written with an open, engaging style, The Keys to Democracy is set to win a wider audience for its important and pressing message.”

    —Prof. Dr. Josine Blok

    Professor of History and Art History at the University of Utrecht and Chair of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History. Excerpt from full review in H-Soz-Kult, 18.09.2023.

    +++++

    “The great strengths of Pope’s writing are his independence of thought and his evident sincerity. Coming early into the field, and being a classicist rather than a political scientist, Pope was clearly breaking new ground, following his own logical train of thought. He was thus free from the burden of formulaically making connections to prior writings and from the petty-political considerations of self-promotion. This unique situation made a thoroughgoing impact on the book as a whole.

    At the conservative end [of authors about sortition] sortition-based institutions are … seen as a way to infuse the system with new blood or new vigor … At the other end …. the current, elections-based system is [seen as] inherently (and by design) anti-democratic.

    “The Keys to Democracy does not fit comfortably into either of those positions or in any one position on the spectrum between them. Befitting his background as a classicist, Pope’s attitude toward the elections-based system is radical… a complete replacement of the electoralist system by one based on sortition.

    “… Other aspects of Pope’s narrative are less trenchant. In terms of policy outcomes of oligarchical rule, Pope is rather vague. It is only by implication, when in his sketch of utopia he discusses decreased economic inequality, that it turns out that this is a problem that he is hoping sortition will address. Other than that Pope asserts that elites tend to hinder progress being too committed to the status quo, but it is not made clear what progress is to be expected by democratization. Democracy is desirable as an ultimate goal, an inherently liberating power, rather than as a tool for certain public policy objectives…

    “Despite the familiarity of much of the argumentation, and beyond the unorthodox explicit rejection of participatory ideas on the grounds that they are not democratic … Pope is offering an epistemological theory of sorts making a connection between truth and form of government...

    “Pope’s book is certainly an important document. It presents an independent assessment of the politics of our society and the role that sortition could play in its democratization. It could be thought of as an alternative intellectual history of sortition, challenging the conventional thinking on this topic. It is neither a “rabble-rousing” manifesto nor a systematic cohesive analysis but a loosely-knit collection of ideas. Many of those ideas are not new to the field but others are novel and provocative even today, almost 40 years after the book was originally written.“

    —Yoram Gat

    Editor, Equality by Lot, an informal group interested in the deliberate use of randomness (lottery) in human affairs. 7 October 2023

    ++++

    “When reading the book, it’s hard not to forget yourself. It’s hard not to forget that the book – although published nowadays – comes from decades ago! For it is deeply contemporary! And today more than ever it fits the political reality. It fits perfectly. It complements the ongoing debate around the world about possible ways to renew democracy, which is without a doubt in crisis.

    “Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This perfect balancing act between an idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of the book. Pope is well aware of both the possibilities and limitations associated with the proposed model. He tries to discuss his concept in a clear manner, referring to numerous evidences and evokes images that work on the imagination. His narrative is engaging. The idea to describe a fictional situation after a disaster is great. We move with the author to another reality and begin to feel like members of this surviving community. We follow their fate and wonder, what would I do in such a situation, what would I decide, a supporter of what solution would I turn out to be? It’s an incredibly interesting experience …

    “… At the time Pope proposed random selection … could the idea of a random selection of politicians be taken seriously? … I fear not. However, when the shortcomings of representative democracy become all too apparent and begin to trouble both established and post-communist countries, it becomes clear that the changes Pope wrote about must come.

    “Was it necessary in the period when Maurice Pope came to his brilliant conclusions? Perhaps not, and perhaps that period in history and its circumstances would have meant that the topic would have been pushed to the periphery. Today it will no longer be pushed aside because the anti-democratic tendencies are too strong to be ignored.”

    —Dr Joanna Podgórska-Rykała

    Author of Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government (Routledge 2024) and professor of political science at Krakow University. This extract from her paper delivered to the annual conference of the Political Studies Association of Ireland, 21 October 2023.

    +++

    “The best book I’ve read all year! I go round talking to people about it and they think I’m sort of weird to believe in this thing … “

    –Prof. Dr. Metta Spencer

    Veteran Canadian sociologist, author and peace activist, who interviewed me in her podcast episode #609. See also the write-up on pp. 36-39 of her quarterly Peace Magazine.

    +++++

    I am loving this posthumously published gem of a book . . . strongly recommended. 

    –Erica Benner, philosopher and author of Adventures in Democracy: the Turbulent World of People Power. Facebook post on 4 January 2024

    +++++

    The Keys to Democracy, although conceived thirty years ago, remains remarkably timely. And today, more than ever, it fits perfectly with contemporary political realities. The book contributes meaningfully to the ongoing global debate on possible ways to renew democracy, which is undeniably in crisis …

    [The book] fits perfectly into the body of research on random selection and its possible applications in politics and decision-making processes … Pope’s contribution focuses prmarily on providing historical evidence and philosophical arguments for the broader application of randomization. However, the author does not stop there; he proposes an innovative yet highly concrete governance model. For Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This masterful balancing act between the idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of his concept and sets it apart from other similar books.

    Despite the passage of years, Pope’s narrative and arguments remain highly relevant – perhaps even more so than ever … Maurice Pope would be surely be pleased to appear in our reality for a moment and catch a glimpse of what is happening today in the area he studied so passionately.

    –Prof. Dr. Joanna Podgórska-Rykała

    Polish political scientist, specialist in deliberative democracy, especially citizens’ assemblies, and most recently author of Deliberative Democracy According to the Decision-Makers. This review was published in English and Polish in the Polish review Law, Economics and Sociological Movement, 86(4), 307-310. It is based on her talk at the 2023 Political Studies Association of Ireland (see above).

    +++++

    This is an enjoyably idiosyncratic book. Since Pope wrote it long before the recent surge in interest in allotted ‘citizens’ assemblies’, ‘deliberative polls’ and the like, he was free to sketch out an argument on a then-novel topic unencumbered by more recent technical literature. That didn’t stop him drawing on a wide range of sources, from Georges Gallup and Grote through the Unitarian anarchist Lysander Spooner to James Wycliffe Headlam’s now forgotten Election by Lot at Athens (1891).

    The argument against ‘noumenalism’ is one of the most gloriously eccentric in the book. Ultimately, though, it seems somewhat beside the point. Few sceptics of sortition are likely to be won round by Pope’s argument that what counts ‘in the metaphysics of democracy’ is that we view randomness as ‘noble’ rather than ‘base’ (p. 120). The material that Jonathan McVity says Pope cut from this chapter (p. 187), which aligned sortition with Karl Popper’s emphasis on democracy as a matter of conjectures and refutations, might have proven more persuasive.

    A more serious problem for me is the radically and almost exclusively sortitive nature of Pope’s utopia. Pope’s ideal democracy is one from which all the other institutions that democrats (even participatory democrats) have been favourable to in the past (referenda, mass assemblies, elections) are excluded.
    Since we currently have elections, parliaments, and so on, this means that Pope’s Kallipolis is much more distant than his occasional advocacy of only ‘gradual’ and ‘piecemeal’ (p. 166) change might suggest.    ..

    Pope’s arguments against referenda, moreover, are somewhat unexpected, coming as they do from a such a great democrat. The idea that people would have to ‘master the issues’ for referenda to ‘command respect’, but probably won’t because it takes too much time and effort (p. 70), is one that could equally well be turned against his allotted bodies. And the argument that plebiscites don’t lead to ‘a harmonious decision’ (p. 73), while seemingly confirmed by the Brexit referendum, leads us out of the territory of majoritarian democracy altogether and into the world of consensus-based systems.

    Before I conclude, though, I should note that I think that many of Pope’s basic intuitions are broadly right. What we have now is not really the rule of the people. Experts should have a place in our democracies (even an honoured place), but ultimate control should be in the people’s hands, especially when it comes to decisions about ‘the ends of public policy’ and about what is ‘fair, just and moral’ (to quote, as Pope does on p. 128, the US political scientist Harwood Childs). Sortition offers a promising way out of (or, at least, a method of mitigating) the dysfunctions of our current party politics. Even if I don’t find all of Pope’s arguments for these conclusions similarly compelling, reading his book only strengthened me in these convictions.

    I also want to emphasize again how much I enjoyed reading this book. Pope is an interesting mind, and even the reader that still scoffs at the idea that our political systems should be more random will find things to enjoy in the boldness and ingenuity of his arguments and the breadth of his interests. And anyone who has had their cautious suggestions about the potential of sortition dismissed as ludicrous will marvel at the confidence and independent-mindedness with which Pope sets out his arguments, even the ones that ultimately fail to persuade.

    For those of us who have previously felt isolated in our klerophily, there is also a feeling of partial vindication, with many of Pope’s intuitions now taken seriously by a whole subculture of academics and activists. That’s something that would no doubt have delighted Pope, even if some of his proposals have now been superseded. (Minority representation now tends to be ensured in citizens’ assemblies not, as Pope suggested, by calculating a minimum number of members needed to make their presence nearly certain, but through the more direct method of stratified sampling.)

    There is, finally, one last reason why I think the publication of this book so many years after it was first written should be welcomed. Pope’s politics seem marvellously heterodox, and this volume contains plenty of offhand remarks that should enrage dogmatists of both the left and the right. At the same time, he was clearly a certain kind of Englishman, with an unimpeachable classical education (at Sherborne and Oxford) as well as a fine library, from which he gazes out at the reader in the frontispiece.

    At a time when groupthink and tribalism seem more and more common, one of the book’s final services may be to remind the sortition movement of how diverse the paths are that lead us towards randomness, and of how crucial it will be to treat people truly randomly if we are to reap the benefits of continued democratic liberation for all.

    –Dr. James Kierstead

    Research Fellow, The New Zealand Initiative, Wellington, New Zealand. From his review of The Keys to Democracy published on 21 January 2025 in Polis, the Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought No. 42 (2025) 157-171.

    ++++

    The Keys to Democracy truly convinced me that sortition is a way to restore the dignity of each and every human being, and is part of the answer to the ills of our societies.

    –Jean-Marie Guéhenno

    Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of Conflict Resolution at New York’s Columbia University, former head of UN Peacekeeping Forces and former president of The International Crisis Group.

    ++++

    Dr Peter Stone (right) at the 2023 Annual Conference of the Political studies in Dublin with (L-R) Art O’Leary, chief executive of Ireland’s Electoral Commission, Dr Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, a political science professor in Poland, and myself Hugh Pope, co-editor of The Keys to Democracy.

    I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for over 25 years. .. Pope offers a rich and sophisticated treatment of sortition and its relationship with democracy that anticipates many of the debates that only really got underway after his death. Pope’s book may have taken decades to publish, but now that it is here it fits into those debates perfectly. Welcome home, Maurice. We’re glad you finally made it.

    –Dr Peter Stone

    Associate Professor, Political Science Department, Trinity College, Dublin, from the beginning and end of a detailed 16-page review in The Journal of Sortition (Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2025).

    ++++

    ++++

  • Unintended consequences and the US attacks on Iran

    Unintended consequences and the US attacks on Iran

    The US bombing of Iranian targets today got me thinking about how US actions in the Middle East have often propelled it into places that it had no apparent inkling about beforehand. 

    I studied Persian at university, lived for year as a journalist in Iran and made several trips to the country during three decades of reporting all over the Middle East. I’d say that it’s worth bearing in mind that few people are good at predicting the future anywhere, and that we can expect plenty of unintended consequences:

    Iranians are in my experience one of the more secular and pro-American peoples in the Middle East, and many people there are indeed sick of the oppressive Islamic Republican regime. But that will likely evaporate when under direct attack. I remember how even some ordinary Iraqis warmed to the idea of Americans taking down Saddam Hussein in 2002. But when the US actually attacked in 2003, bitter enmity ensued.

    The US bombing is no bolt from the blue. In fact, the action feels like the long-awaited Phase II of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. A subsequent attack on Iran was often on the agenda of the right-wing Israeli, pro-Israeli and neo-con columnists who so compellingly urged President George Bush to attack Iraq after 9/11. We can debate why it is that Israel has so dearly wanted the US to do this (to distract from actions in Gaza and the West Bank, to tie the US to Israel, or now to prolong the political life of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against corruption allegations, etc). But it is clear that Netanyahu and right-wingers like him have been trying to embroil the US in wider Middle East for decades, and that Netanyahu is the person who is most absolutely delighted about this turn of events. It will be harder than ever to separate whether the US or Israel is responsible for what’s happening.

    Let your actions match your words, if you care about your image. Outsiders listening to Israelis or Western media outlets talking about fear and consequences of Iran’s scattershot attacks on Israel often weigh this against how Israel does not allow any direct reporting of the fear and consequences of Israel’s own far more concentrated and devastating attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. 

    Iranian soldier on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war, in which the US supported Iraq. Faw, January 1986. Photo: Hugh Pope

    When states call their rivals “terrorists”, it always gives me pause. The US public may not normally notice it, but there has never really been a moment when the US has not been in some kind of war with Iran since 1979, when Islamic Revolutionaries took American diplomats hostage for more than a year. (Note: none of the diplomats were killed, and the US had orchestrated the coup that put the previous Shah on the throne and maintained his sometimes oppressive regime in power for 25 years). The 46-year-long US punishment of Iran has not just been in the form of punitive sanctions and exclusion from the global order. It has backed bloody action against the country by Iraq, by Israel and in some cases its own forces.

    Beware of what you wish for. Regime change would be another coup. There seems to be no organised force or organisation ready to assume control. That means that there will be an extended struggle for power in Iran, deep instability and threats to things the world holds dear like access to the oil & gas of the Gulf.

    The law of unintended consequences always applies. Egypt’s autocrat and Gulf Arab monarchies are on the US side for now, but are the people? Saudi Arabia was on the US side in 2001, but I remember interviewing Saudis highly sympathetic with the 9/11 attacks on America. Indeed, that cataclysm was dreamed up by an ex-Saudi, Osama bin Laden, and 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis. Often they were fired up with anger about the US alliance with an Israel intent on crushing Palestinians. No change there either.

    Europe may think it is a neutral actor watching from the sidelines but it is not and will be drawn into all the messy consequences as well.

    I can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel on this. But I did take solace from reading Branko Brkic in the excellent British Journalism Review (oddly, the only publication I regularly read almost cover to cover). Here he skilfully puts the argument that:

    “History is never kind to autocrats and bullies, thugs and their enthusiastic helpers.The pendulum always swings back. Humanity one day might very well forgive … still, it cannot forget.“

  • Norway’s citizens want to share their fortune with future generations and the world

    Norway’s citizens want to share their fortune with future generations and the world

    Each of Norway’s 5.5 million inhabitants has a theoretical $300,000+ stake in the country’s $1.8 trillion Oil Fund. But what would they actually like to do with it? Who should decide that? And how?

    This post was first published on 12 June 2025 as a DemNext Deep Dive by DemocracyNext, a thought leader on citizens’ assemblies where I’m an International Advisory Council Member. For this article, I spoke with members and organisers of Norway’s Future Assembly on the Oil Fund.

    Norwegians have struggled for decades over whether the world’s largest investment fund is their private nest egg or a golden opportunity to exercise their global conscience on matters like climate change, sustainable economic policies or development aid. To strike the balance, a coalition of seven Norwegian non-profits this year organised the most representative forum yet: a randomly selected citizens’ assembly.

    Members of Norway’s Future Assembly, Oslo 2025. Photo: Regine Skogmo Grøtte/LNU

    The 56 members of the Framtidspanelet, or Future Assembly, met from January to April 2025. The organisers asked them to learn and deliberate about the future use of their huge Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), usually called the Oil Fund. Norway set up the Oil Fund in the 1990s to absorb state oil and gas profits, invest them abroad, and shield the domestic economy from ups and downs. The government can spend the Oil Fund’s investment income, set at a limit of 3% of the fund’s value. This usually amounts to 20% of the government budget.

    The idea was that the assembly’s recommendations might spark a national conversation on the topic, particularly ahead of Norway’s next general elections in September 2025.

    A common-sense path

    After weighing all the information presented to them – including the Oil Fund’s legal duties to manage Norway’s surplus hydrocarbon revenues, ensure financial stability, and benefit future generations – the Future Assembly did more than look at spending. The citizens mapped out common-sense, long-term ideas for Norway that balanced domestic needs and global responsibilities.

    The citizens grouped their 19 recommendations into five main themes that gave decision-makers a clear and holistic view of what a fully informed nation likely thinks the priorities should be:

    🧭 Draw up new spending and ethical guidelines for the Oil Fund, notably to strengthen its ability to respond to crises

    🧑🏾‍🤝‍🧑🏻 Upgrade Norway’s democracy with better civic education and more citizens’ assemblies

    😷 Shoulder global work on public health, medical research, and the climate crisis

    ☀️ Back reduced consumption and develop sustainable energy projects, even if investment risks are higher and returns are lower

    🏫 Support Norway’s domestic need for more education, defence, research, and innovation.

    Future Assembly member Jonas Krogh makes a point. Oslo, 2025. Photo: Geer Barstein/WWF

    “Norway’s oil money should not just be the world’s biggest piggy bank,” 31-year-old Assembly member Jonas Krogh told DemNext, speaking from his home in the southeastern city of Fredrikstad. “It should help make the world a better place.”

    More citizens’ assemblies

    Remarkably, 89% of assembly members backed recommendation #5 that “citizens’ assemblies should be used more and, if they prove effective, become a permanent part of the parliament’s permanent decision-making processes.” The members asked politicians to commit to listen to and assess the recommendations from citizens’ assemblies so that more people have a “concrete and direct” participation in politics, more diverse voices could be heard and more social groups could give input for decisions.

    Members of Norway’s Future Assembly, Oslo 2025. Photo: Regine Skogmo Grøtte/LNU

    The assembly also called for an independent Commissioner for Future Generations, more civic education in schools, and more direct tools “to vote on major matters of principle”, alongside strengthened “education about politics and the democratic process.”

    “Taking part in this process has taught me that it helps to talk with people who think differently from me — and that we can find common ground. Personally, I’m surprised by how my views have changed on topics I never thought I’d reconsider,” Bjørnar Hansen, a 63-year-old from the central Norwegian town of Brønnøy, was quoted as saying in the final report.

    Hansen was not alone. All citizens signed the report’s introduction to say that, “many of us have experienced this as one of the most meaningful things we have been part of … this has been democracy in practice. A reminder that we are not just citizens – we are also co-creators of the future.”

    As Jonas Krogh put it to DemNext:

    “A lot of people may have felt it was anti-climatic that we did not recommend specifics like new roads or free lunches in schools. Most of us, when we started the assembly, also thought we’d be very exact about how we’d spend our Oil Fund money. As time went on, these thoughts got pushed away. We realised that in the grand scheme of things what an individual is so passionate about is not so relevant. We are not experts and we can leave these details to others. We all met around the fact that we want the money for our future generations. What we care about is other people than ourselves.”

    The full article – which has more details about the organisation of the Framtidspanelet, the citizens’ assembly’s impact on Norwegian decision makers and likely affect of its recommendations on the Oil Fund – is available to subscribers to DemNext’s newsletter here.