*dusts off blog*
After a long hiatus, greetings, again, from Oxford! I realise I’ve done a rather awful job of updating from the City of Dreaming Spires (or, as a friend of mine back at Georgetown called it, the City of Screaming Squires) over this last term. The only excuse I’ve to offer is this: when I tell people back at home that my terms at Oxford are only eight weeks long, their immediate reaction is to think that, because they’re very short by American standards, I’ve somehow gotten off easy. This, I’m afraid, could be hardly farther from the truth. My Oxonian friends and I have struggled to find the best way of conveying what the Oxford term is like, and, if I may use an athletic metaphor, it is less a marathon than a sprint, but it is a very, very long sprint during which the powers that be give you very few, if any, opportunities for a water break. My term at Oxford has been over for two weeks now, and, still, I feel like I have not yet caught my breath because, you see, even after students have moved out (or “gone down,” to use proper Oxford terminology), tutors still see fit to saddle us with vacation work. As such, I’ve had a lot of fun reading Marx’s Capital during my supposed time of relaxation!
I do have quite the backlog of subjects about which I’ve been meaning to blog. For the time being, though, in light of recent political developments back in the States, I will share a quick anecdote from last term. I was sitting in my Command and Transition Economies tutorial and discussing the privatisation programmes that various post-Communist governments in Eastern Europe and Russia undertook during the early 1990s. At the risk of oversimplifying the literature, the general scholarly consensus — and the conclusion that my tutorial partners and I reached in our essays — was that initial efforts at privatisation unleashed market forces at a time when the needed economic and political institutions were not in place, resulting in corruption, poor corporate governance, etc. Emphasising the market triumphalism that characterised the early 1990s, my tutor said, with not a little touch of condescension, “It was as if everyone thought that the market was good and the state was bad.”
My tutorial partners both laughed, suggesting that they found such an idea to be patently absurd. I smiled too, but, inwardly, it occurred to me that “market good, state bad” is an extraordinarily prevalent political attitude among most Americans. It is worth pointing out here that one of my tutorial partners hails from Sweden and is very conservative in the European sense: she is sceptical of liberal immigration policies and further European integration, but the fundamental concept that the state is an acceptable actor in public life remains unchallenged. Here in the UK, parliamentary elections are due to happen in May of this year, and it is the first time since Tony Blair’s New Labour came to power that the Conservative Party has a good chance of taking control of the government, yet to be conservative in Europe and to be conservative in America now means two entirely different things. If one looks at the Conservative Party’s draft manifesto on health, for instance, you won’t find any denunciations of “socialised medicine” or “government takeover of the private sector,” as we have back in the States. Rather, it states quite explicitly, “As the party of the NHS [National Health Service], we will never change the idea at the heart of our NHS – that healthcare in this country is free at the point of use and available to everyone based on need, not ability to pay.”
Try imagining the Republican Party running on a platform like that.
