We go to Provence every Summer. We used to fly and rent cars, but a few years ago decided that it would be more fun to take our own car and drive down slowly, taking our time, keeping off autoroutes, staying in small hotels and generally decompressing, until by the time we get to Arles, it feels as though we’ve never been away. France is a staggeringly beautiful country and driving south through its heart is like watching an absorbing road movie, as the landscape, topography, architecture and climate changes.

This year, driving north on our way home, we started out one morning from our hotel in the countryside near Lyon and drove for five hours to northern Burgundy without leaving roads that had been built by the Romans nearly two millennia ago. You can’t travel in France — especially in Provence, but also elsewhere — without being struck by the evidence of the astonishing reach and achievements of the Roman empire. The road network is the example that strikes me — more than the viaducts, coliseums, arenas, theatres and temples that impress others (for example, the incomparable Ina Caro). For not only is the modern French road system often built on the roads the Romans built, but we still make roads everywhere using the same basic formulae that they laid down.

But then comes the question that has preoccupied historians from Edward Gibbon to Mary Beard: how could an empire that accomplished all this fall apart? For fall apart it did. From which thought it was just a short step to brooding on the current state of the American republic and its associated empire. It’s impossible to watch what has been happening over there, not just in the current election campaign but in the last decade or two as the country’s politics became steadily more dysfunctional, and not ask if the country might be entering a period of chronic decline.

After all, its infrastructure is decaying — to the point where some people think that that fact explains Amazon’s long-term drone-delivery strategy: the company wants to take to the skies rather than relying on a decrepit road system. And although the US remains a superpower in military terms, the RAND Corporation recently released a study arguing that “improving Chinese military capabilities challenge the assumption that the United States would emerge an early and decisive victor in a war with China. The report noted that the advanced strike capabilities of each side, combined with the shrinking of the military gap between them, could make such a war intense, highly destructive, and yet protracted.”

Now I know too that this decline-of-the-American-empire idea is a recurring journalistic trope. (Gore Vidal was always going on about it.) It’s impossible to know if the country is indeed on the skids, and there are lots of reasons (including the power of its transnational corporations and the resulting ‘soft power’ that flows from them, its mastery of electronic surveillance and of new military technologies and the global system of alliances that its post-war diplomacy created) for thinking that its time hasn’t come. But as the election campaign grinds on there’s that nagging thought about how great institutions rot from within. After all, it was dysfunctional politics that ultimately did for the Romans. In the space of a hundred years Rome was transformed from a Republic with democratic institutions into an empire under the control of one man, Augustus.

The historian Mark Mazower, in his FT review of Gareth Stedman Jones’s new book on Karl Marx, asks:

“The question this book raises is what [Marx’s] value is for us today. The answer is not hard to find: Marx remains an outstanding model of how to stand outside capitalism and subject it to critique on the basis of something larger — the ability of an economic system to serve human needs. Communism may have failed. But it can scarcely be said that contemporary capitalism — with its intensifying tendency to inequality, its propensity to crisis, its hollowing-out of political institutions and its casualisation of the labour force — has succeeded. So long as we persist in our tendency to have off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the fragmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment. “

FT 6/7 August 2016

This from a lovely essay on Trump by Martin Amis:

“Trump can sense when an entity is no longer strong enough or lithe enough to evade predation. He did it with that white elephant, the Grand Old Party, whose salaried employers never saw him coming, even when he was there, and whose ruins he now bestrides. The question is, Can he do it with American democracy?”

Sometimes I love the Financial Times. The other day the Brexiteering MP Bernard Jenkin had a piece in the paper arguing that leaving the EU was actually a simple matter. Under the headline “There is no such thing as hard or soft Brexit Britain should look to leave the EU as swiftly and simply as possible” he wrote:

“Leaving the EU is in principle straightforward; much easier, in fact, than joining since it is not necessary to change domestic laws and regulations. All the laws and regulations that apply by virtue of Britain’s membership can remain perfectly aligned with those of the rest of the EU until they may be changed at a later date. This is how the UK gave independence to the countries of the British empire.

There are two crucial legal components of Brexit. The first is Article 50, the procedure laid down by the EU treaties by which we disapply these treaties to the UK in international law. This is implemented by an act of Parliament, which is the second component. This need be no more than a few clauses, including one to repeal the European Communities Act of 1972, which currently implements EU law into our domestic law, and another to incorporate all the EU laws that apply directly in UK law into UK statute. That is what Brexit is; there is no “hard” or “soft” option.”

There then followed a fascinating comment thread, which, as you might expect include commenters who knew a thing or two about the subject, and certainly more than the unfortunate Jenkin.

For example, this from ‘goldbug’:

“I have many, many questions for Mr Jenkin, but I will focus only on one. You suggest that repatriating the 17,000+ laws and regulations provided under the 1972 European Communities Act will be a straightforward exercise, a stroke of the Parliamentary pen. Bravo. But as I’m sure the learned gentlemen is aware, law consists not just of written law, but also of the case law developed by the courts over many years to clarify what has been written. This is a crucial element of the legal system, and these judgements are relied upon by all legal advisors and practitioners.

So might I simply enquire as to what case law will apply when the court that made these judgements – the European Court of Justice – is no longer a part of our legal system? Anyone operating under these laws or regulations will need to know. Will English courts continue to rely on decisions made by the ECJ? Until what point? And how will anyone trying to operate a business be sure whether they are protected by those decisions or not? Which court will hear any challenges to those decisions, and under what authority?

Sorry, that’s turned into five questions. Funny how these simple questions have a tendency to do that.”

Lovely stuff!