Anatol Lieven

Anatol Lieven has drawn upon diverse expertise as foreign correspondent, academic and policy consultant to carve out a niche as a major provocative commentator on Western foreign policy. As a result, he has quietly become one of Anglo-American world’s most respected and cosmopolitan public intellectuals.

The New York Times in 2006 characterised this British-born writer as “a brilliant, fiery pamphleteer of the left”, whilst Senator Dick Clark has praised Lieven as “one of the most thought provoking and insightful writers” on the liberal camp of global politics and international relations.

Lieven’s writing is characterised by a fusion of the far-reaching and the intimate. His books combine a scholarly historical sweep with first-hand fieldwork in the areas about which he writes. But these books are as frequently vibrant critiques as dry academic studies. Over the course of twenty years he has found a voice for himself that sits somewhere between cultural mediator, pedagogue and polemicist.

The result is a body of work, particularly on the relations between Asia the West, that makes a serious plea for cross-cultural understanding, and for a new policy agenda required to meet what he sees as a number of interlocking international crises.

His writing career might be divided into three strands relating in turn to the former Soviet Union; the role of the United States in the world; and Pakistan.

The first of these interests was the subject of his début, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (1993), the work which brought this then foreign correspondent to international acclaim.  Lieven was among the only Western journalist on the ground in the Baltic nations during their transition to political and economic independence. The Baltic Revolution took the long view on this process, exploring the history and culture of the region’s peoples from ancient origins to their experience of post-Glasnost, making sense of the byzantine ethnic, racial and class structures of the constituent nations for western readers.  Consisting of Lieven’s now characteristic blend of interviews, newspaper accounts, and meditative observations on the fate of nationalism, it helped to establish his reputation, winning the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Yale University Press Governors’ Award.

Lieven continued this investigation of the post-Soviet fallout in Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (1998), and Ukraine and Russia: Fraternal Rivals (1999), works whose prescience has been noted by several commentators. Research into the complicated processes of separation and economic transformation, he argues, has given him a strong insight into the fate of capitalist experiments throughout the globe. As he told an audience at Berkeley in 2004,

With a historian's view, with an understanding of the history of such liberal capitalist revolutions over the past 200 years or so, you have a perception that in some cases, indeed, these did work -- ambiguously, perhaps; they didn't work for everybody -- but in a number of parts of the world and in our own time in Central Europe, places like Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, the Baltic states, this process has worked more or less as it was meant to work. … Historical perspective and an understanding of the underlying patterns at work, and also of the relationship between this public ideological justification and the actual economic processes which are happening in terms of the privatization of the state gave me a more distanced and accurate picture of what was happening in Russia.

The second strand of his career turned his gaze West. During his time at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Lieven’s work began to shift from examination of the story Western intervention in the post-Soviet world to the source of that intervention in the political culture of the USA. His 2004 book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism sought to explore what he considered the particular pathologies of the world’s superpower’s intellectual compass. Written at the height of global opposition to the interventionist policies of the George W. Bush administration, Lieven’s work aimed to exposes the role served by antithetical impulses toward nationalism and ethnocentrism in American political life.

The shrill and divisive response to the 9/11 attacks, Lieven argued, were neither an aberration nor a new tendency in American life. Rather, they were part of a nationalist tradition that had always been balanced between two strands. On the one hand was the role of civic nationalism. Lieven traced this familiar idea of the ‘American thesis’ or ‘American creed’, centring on democratic and inclusive civic tradition, and explored the assimilationist adaptive appeal that such ideas had exerted throughout the republic’s history. Countering this for Leiven was the "American antithesis", a populist and often chauvinist nationalism that has tended to see the US as a closed national culture and civilization at odds with a outside world filled with threats.

Lieven’s case was that the war on terror had apparently seen the former strand of nationalism lose ground to the more intolerant, irrational, and self-destructive form of national expression. The result was a patriotism that too often left no room for the patriotism of others, combining a theoretical care for all humanity with, in practice, an "indifference verging on contempt" for the interests and hopes of non-Americans. Nothing could be more distant from "the decent respect to the opinions of mankind" recommended to Americans in the early years of their independent existence.

America Right or Wrong has quickly become a classic study. And as one might expect, it has been a particular cause celebre for the Western liberal intelligentsia. The London Review of Books hailed it as "a fascinating and incisive analysis of American nationalism"; the New York Review of Books thought it “relentlessly candid … tightly written and extensively researched.... A valuable and also a troubling book on a subject that is both crucial and in many ways extremely sensitive." Lieven has recently updated the book, and defended its arguments relevance in the wake of the financial and political upheavals the nation has experienced since, in particular the rise and fall of hopes for the multilateral globalism of Obama in the face of an emerging new world order.

In 2006, Lieven pursued this ideas further in a collaborative volume entitled Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World. Authored alongside the conservative thinker John Hulsman, the book was remarkable for its attempt to forge pragmatic common ground between left and ‘neo-liberal’ programmes for American foreign engagement. The resulting shared moral tradition, it turns out “recognizes America's real strengths and weaknesses, and those of other nations," and advocated a move away from bullish assertions of the saving grace of democracy and American military power. The heroes of that tradition of restraint turned out to be Truman and Eisenhower, as well as the neglected intellectual lineage represented by Reinhold Niebhur and George Kennan. As the New York Times noted of this strikingly practical book, the fact that Heritage Institute and British academic liberalism could sustain a dialogue, and “the fact that these two thinkers have found enough common ground to write a book together is an astonishingly perverse achievement of neoconservative theory and practice. It has also become something of an inside-the-think-tanks cause célèbre.”

The third strand of Lieven’s writing career to date has seen him become a respected analyst of South Asian politics. His most recent major work was the long-awaited Pakistan: A Hard Country (2011), a complex and sustained study of that country’s current politics and prospects. As usual, Lieven undertook a great deal of on the ground research to investigate the full scope of his subject, embracing a range of first hand reference beyond the obvious areas. But in fact, this was also in part a return to old ground since Lieven had served as Pakistan and India reporter for the Times of London in the 1980s. In revisiting this culture he had a clear aim: to dispel and dismantle a number of convenient prevailing myths about the country. Paramount among these was the idea that Pakistan was on the verge of national collapse. Rather than being easy prey for Islamist conservatives, Lieven argued, the nation was in far better shape, and the issue of its stability was more of a story than its fragility the book concludes, "Pakistan is in fact a great deal more like India – or India like Pakistan – than either country would wish to admit."

Not for the first time, Lieven found himself cast in the role of correcting the easy assumptions of a complacent and ignorant Western public. The results met with qualified respect. For admirers such as Peter Oborne in the Telegraph, Lieven’s “wonderful book, full of learning, wisdom, humour and common sense” was to be praised for demolishing “the neo-conservative narrative that Pakistan is dominated by a mortal struggle between virtuous modernity and rage-filled Islamist conservatism … it is completely daft to compare it to failed states such as Somalia, Congo or Yemen.” The Observer’s Jason Burkeagreed, commenting that in “this truly excellent work” Lieven succeeded in teaching “an often ignorant public, and their usually ignorant leaders, about this complex, crucial and troubled nation. The result is a highly readable and invigorating mix of academic analysis, history and ground reporting. It should become, if not a bestseller, certainly the text of reference.”

As one might expect, however, his ambitious attempt to encapsulate a complex nation and predict its future encountered some resistance. Criticisms from Writing in the New York Times, Mohammed Hanif thought Lieven “too understanding of Pakistan’s elite … Pakistan’s nobility, if they can be bothered to read so sprawling a book, will no doubt be pleased at their portrayal.” Similarly, the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra was more critical, arguing that whilst “busy exploding banalities about Pakistan, Lieven develops some blind spots of his own; they include a more generous view of the Pakistani military than is warranted. He doesn't make clear if Pakistan's security establishment can abandon its highly lucrative, and duplicitous, arrangement with the United States, or withdraw its support for murderous assaults on Indian civilians.”  Nonetheless, Mishra concluded, the book transcended “its self-defined parameters, his book makes you reflect rewardingly, too, about how other old, pluralist and only superficially modern societies in the region work” and also amounts one “of the most clear-sighted accounts of "rising" India.” (Guardian, August 2011)

Lieven’s position is distinct among many writers who attempt to cover similar terrain with far less acclaim or authenticity. Hanif’s characterization of Lieven’s work might serve as a good summary of his sensibility and approach: “unlike so many foreign correspondents who have churned out books from the files of their journalism, he has written a book that is much more than a collection of recycled dispatches interspersed with descriptions of lavish weddings and accounts of the obligatory visits to tribal ­areas”.

Asked how those without access to his range of first-hand experience might begin to develop anything like Lieven’s quality of understanding, his solution is revealingly simple:

First of all, just read. Read as deeply as you possibly can, and as broadly as you can … Read as deeply, as widely, try to form an empathy, which isn't necessarily the same as sympathy … That is the fundamental lesson or advice I would give, and not just for this subject, but for any subject that people want to understand and deal with.

Lieven is reportedly currently underway on his own reading odyssey, writing a history of the Pashtun people. The book will surely prove the next phase in an increasingly high profile mission to shape public understanding of the age’s crucial global conundrums. A project to which he will doubtless bring his characteristic blend of academic rigour and first-hand authenticity.

Dr Tom Wright