Libya, the LSE and Globalization
In one episode of the classic BBC series Yes Minister, the eponymous Minister for Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker is faced with an embarrassing situation because of his prior association with an African coup leader. Hacker, it emerges, had known the self-appointed President of ‘Buranda’ Charlie Umtali some years earlier, when the two had studied together at the London School of Economics. Hacker is only able to avoid humiliation by securing Buranda a substantial interest free loan from the United Kingdom.
Back in real life and it is the LSE itself that has suffered embarrassment because of its association with an African dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Multiple connections have come under scrutiny, including the relationship between the university and Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif Gaddafi. A formal inquiry has been initiated by the LSE, to be undertaken by Lord Woolf, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales into matters including:
- The agreement to accept a £1.5 million donation from the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation (GICDF) in 2009 to LSE Global Governance, £300,000 of which has been received to date
- The acceptance of $50,000 paid to the university in return for the Director’s advice to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund in 2007
- The academic authenticity of Saif Gaddafi’s PhD thesis, awarded in 2008
- The agreement of a £2.2 million contract between LSE Enterprise and Libya’s Economic Development Board to train Libyan civil servants and professionals, £1.5 million of which has been received to date and payment of £20,000 for tuition of the head of the Libyan Investment Authority
- The acceptance of an award from GICDF of £22,857 to support travel costs, mainly airfares, for academic speakers to travel to Libya
The LSE’s Libyan imbroglio has already claimed the resignation of the LSE’s director, Howard Davies, but criticism has also been directed towards two of the LSE’s other leading figures, Professor Lord Anthony Giddens and Professor David Held. (At this point I should declare interest: I was taught by David Held at the LSE in a post-graduate degree course that I thought was absolutely excellent and characterised by exemplary standards of teaching. Although I only met Held on a couple of occasions, it was hard not to be carried along by his infectious enthusiasm, sheer weight of activity and passion for his subject.) The rights and wrongs of the actions of individuals have been amply debated elsewhere, including contributions by Henning Meyer, John Keane, Anthony Barnett, Colin Talbot, Meghnad Desai, David Held himself and - posthumously - Fred Halliday. The LSE’s Libyan connection has become a full-blown cause celebre.
It is worth looking beyond particulars to consider two structural forces at work, both of which are intimately associated with the politics of globalization. The first relates to the functioning of universities within the neo-liberal economic order. In states that have adopted competive education-as-private-good models of tertiary education, universities are driven to secure international and external funding, creating a pressure that will inevitably result in some unwise arrangements being reached. As Stefan Collini argued in The Guardian:
If anything, the further universities move away from being properly funded by the state, the greater will become the risk of misjudgments such as seems to have happened at the LSE.
Collini is right to point out that the LSE’s problems in relation to Libya are symptomatic of a wider crisis created by neoliberal attitudes to proper provisioning of universities.
The second structural issue is the whiggish nature of elements of globalization discourse. Undoubtedly, much globalization literature is teleological: it starts with so-called ‘ancient globalization’ and travels directionally with ‘the broadening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide interconnectedness’ as the world becomes ‘ever more globalized’. Different normative outlooks will suggest different conclusions about this trajectory: cosmopolitan liberals are may be likely to view the world through a neo-Whiggish lens, seeing a positive story of nations opening up to an increasingly just global order. It is plausible that a perspective of this kind may invite more optimistic assumptions about the likelihood of liberalisation in any given geo-political context. In the present case, after a trip to Libya in 2007, Lord Giddens wrote:
My ideal future for Libya in two or three decades' time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking. Not easy to achieve, but not impossible.
Indeed. And such an ideal outcome might be considered even more possible if the country in question were under the stewardship of a charismatic young man with a good education at the LSE.
