Editorial

Citation

Rankin, A. (2003), "Editorial", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415eab.001

Editorial

EditorAidan Rankin

The extravagant and shameless vulgarity of Saddam Hussein's palaces became the focus of horrified media fascination in the days after the fall of Baghdad. Alongside the prisons and mass graves, they seemed to stand in themselves as symbols of repression and barbarism. For they reminded us of something we knew well already from the experience of twentieth century totalitarianism: that dictatorships are invariably – and ineffably – vulgar, that their brutality is matched by their cultural brutalism and lack of taste.

Vulgar dictatorships are by no means new. There was a rich vein of tastelessness in the Ancient World, both in the West and the Near East, and always associated with corrupt and despotic rulers. But there are two differences. The first is scale, for the opportunities to be at once grandiloquent and tawdry are greater than ever before. The second is ideology, for in the modern era vulgar despots justify themselves in terms of "the people" and mass culture. Saddam did so, in his time, as did Mussolini, as did Hitler, and as Sanda Miller reminds us, the sinister Ceausescu couple who ruled Romania as a "socialist" kleptocracy until their violent overthrow in 1989. For Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, "socialism" meant extravagant lifestyles for themselves and their friends, the suppression of personal and religious freedom, grandiloquent "people's" architecture and the philistine destruction of anything "old", anything that had evolved over time or provided a sense of continuity.

Along with the destruction of the old came the stifling of any attempt at creativity or innovation, a preference for the mediocre, the’banal and the downright ugly, a levelling-down of culture. In her wide-ranging interview with Razvan Teodorescu, Minister of Culture in the present, much more democratic Romania, Dr Miller emphasises the importance of culture in the creation of an open society, the value of the arts as a repository of humane values and a sense of proportion.

In a quite different context, Ziauddin Sardar takes up this theme in a highly contentious critique of US power. If I interpret him correctly, his underlying grievance against the USA is one shared by many Americans, especially African-Americans if we believe the opinion polls, but crossing the fault lines of class, race and faith. There is a widespread belief that the USA's corporate and political class are affected by false pride, that they have lost touch with the best US values of freedom and responsibility. The ideology of neoconservatism provides the rhetorical and pseudo-intellectual rationale for the excesses that Ziauddin Sardar highlights. It is identified with "right-wing" politics, but ironically has many of the components of the authoritarian "left-wing" ideology that once prevailed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Like "really existing socialism", neoconservatism is crudely and simple-mindedly internationalist without feeling for nuance or cultural variety, only this time it is corporate capitalism rather than "proletarian revolution" that is for global export.

The slogans and the programmes of neoconservatives often echo uncannily those of the totalitarian left: the strong state is more important than the individual, "progress" is historically inevitable, either you are with us or against us. The rise of this type of politics has been accompanied (in Britain and continental Europe as well as the USA) with a brutalisation and levelling-down of culture. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu would have loved "Reality TV", and the Orwellian title Big Brother is a testimony to the link between dumbed-down culture and a deeply unpleasant political climate. Ziauddin Sardar's book is provocatively titled Why Do People Hate America?, but his article has the more subtle heading "Why people hate us". For the rise of neoconservatism is a symptom of a loss of cultural bearings in the whole of the Western world. Slogans like "either you're with us or against us" appeal to many, because we no longer know what "us" really means. This is why we need voices such as Sardar's to cut through the vulgarity and extremism. His critique of the USA should be seen as an appeal to fair-minded Americans to use their influence wisely.

Both Miller and Sardar remind us of the dehumanising and vulgarising effects of large-scale institutions, whether their ideology is collectivist (as in the former regimes of Eastern Europe) or free-market (as in the USA and the West more generally). The need to preserve a sense of scale is as important in politics and economics as in architecture. The question of scale is at the heart of all the issues associated with European integration, with which the Economic and Social Research Council has been intellectually wrestling. As Judith Ryser reports, the problem with European integration is preserving a sense of connectedness between the political class and those they represent across Europe. In Britain, and elsewhere, the "Eurosceptics" fear a loss of human scale. It is something that "federalists" should fear as well, because it will be corrupting to the European ideal and make co-operation more difficult, not easier.

Finally, John Coleman reviews a new book by Dr Cynthia Gamble on Ruskin and Proust, both of whom are a corrective to vulgar extremism and embody humanistic values in the most positive sense.