Arm Scandi: Britain’s mutual-defence pact

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. Today, from London, I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In Zimbabwe, there's a colossal wall of exquisite dry stonework encircling what was once a community of 10,000 people. The site's secrets are slowly being uncovered, but the fact that so little is known reveals much about archaeology's biases. And our final story has about a 1 in 5 chance of being a stimulating sensory experience for you. We explore an exhibition dedicated to ASMR, the thrill that some people get from simple sounds such as the folding of shirts or wrapping of presents. First up, though. Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a momentous trip this week to Sweden and Finland. He struck a collective defense agreement with both countries' leaders.

From the High North to the Baltics and beyond, our armed forces will train, operate, and exercise together.

In substance, it's a lot like Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Any of the countries will come to the other's aid if attacked. Yesterday, Finland's President Sauli Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced their backing for a bid to join NATO after decades of being formally non-aligned.

For us, joining NATO would be not against anybody. We would like to maximize our security, but it is not a zero-sum game.

Sweden is moving towards joining too, but more cautiously. Mr. Johnson's agreements provide security to both countries during what may be a long and worrying time until their membership is complete. Standing alongside Mr. Johnson, the Finnish president welcomed the announcement.

Here in Finland, we appreciate UK's strong support to NATO's open-door policy and Finland's potential membership.

It's a revealing look into how Britain is positioning itself in the post-Brexit order and into the contrast between Mr. Johnson's foreign policy chops and his reputation at home.

We flew from London to Stockholm, visited the the Prime Minister of Sweden at Hopsund, which is her country residence, a very beautiful spot. And then on to Helsinki to see the President of Finland and then back to London.

Matthew Holthouse is our Britain politics correspondent and traveled with the Prime Minister.

We caught up with him on the return leg of the journey in the British government's rather striking liveried aeroplane, which Mr. Johnson was very, very pleased to introduce a few years ago. It's got a red, white, and blue tail and gold letters down the side. It was a little bit noisy, but we joined him up front for a discussion about how he saw the progress of the war in Ukraine and also Britain's Britain's new role in the European continent.

What were the agreements that were struck on this trip?

They were fairly simple political declarations. They're not treaties as such, and they basically said that Britain would come to the aid of Finland and Sweden and vice versa indefinitely were they to be in a time of crisis or under military attack. They're coming at the time at which those two countries are moving quite rapidly towards NATO membership. Now, if they do join, it will be a huge geopolitical realignment in the Nordic region. It will reshape the whole sort of military geography and it will reshape the nature of the NATO alliance. Finland was neutral in the Cold War. Sweden hasn't fought a major conventional war in 200 years. But they are rethinking this posture because they have seen the way in which Vladimir Putin has attacked a peaceful democratic neighbour. And it means that the strategy, particularly pursued by Finland, of seeking stable relations with its neighbour has been thrown into question. Now, Jens Stoltenberg, the General Secretary of NATO, has said that they'll be welcomed with open arms. But the fact is that entering NATO will take at least months, perhaps up to a year. And that is seen as a fairly tricky period in both those countries, because that is a point at which they may be vulnerable to harassment or attack by Russia as it tries to knock them off this new course. And the Kremlin has ramped up its rhetoric about there needing to be a response if they move. So there is a real sense of nervousness around it.

But that's not to say that it's particularly likely that Britain will have to actually come to the aid of these countries, right? Russia is a little busy at the moment and isn't making much of a good show of its military.

That is the view of a number of Finnish analysts, that actually in the short term, for all the threatening rhetoric, Russia's ability actually to mount a conventional attack on Finland along its 800-mile border is fairly limited, given that they're heavily bogged down in Ukraine. Where Finnish analysts do see the principal risk is through hybrid warfare, so things like cyber warfare, disinformation campaigns. They're seeing overflights of Russian jets over their territory. These agreements should help counter that, both to bolster the region's sense confidence, but also specific cooperation on things like countering cyber attacks and disinformation.

The declaration, the solemn declaration we signed today ensures that our two nations can intensify our partnership and take it to unparalleled heights, both latitudinal and metaphorical. This is not a short-term stopgap, uh, Sally. This is not a short—

And the other thing that's worth saying is that these pacts are intended to stand whether or not they join NATO, and indefinitely. So So obviously, this stopgap period is important, but Johnson really is wishing to stress the broader picture.

So there is some real substance then to the offer that's being made here. But taking a step back, what do you think this says about Britain and its position within NATO?

So this fits within a pattern or an evolution over probably about the past decade of how Britain's emerged as a really vigorous figure on protecting NATO's eastern flank, both through its NATO obligations, but also a network of bilateral pacts and security groupings. There's lots of deployments of British troops to places like Estonia, air policing missions in the Baltic, air policing in Romania, Poland, and other places, some of which has been stepped up since the Russian invasion. More broadly, Mr. Johnson has struck a fairly firm line on the war in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion has changed the equation of European security, and it has rewritten our reality and reshaped our future.

And has really cautioned against any form of, as he would see it, a bad peace, allowing the war to become a stalemate, or as he describes it, some sort of peace negotiations based on the false arguments and the false premises on which the Russian invasion was built.

And what do the other countries within Europe make of that comparatively hawkish tone?

Mr. Johnson stressed that European nations are pulling together, that everybody's making large contributions to the war effort, and that everybody shares this analysis of the futility and the cruelty of this war. But you can see where the differences are. For example, President Macron of France has suggested that a means must be found during the peace negotiations to spare Russia humiliation, that you must find a structure that allows people to make peace. Now, Johnson dismissed this in an interview without naming President Macron. He said that actually President Putin has the capacity to make any deal he wants. He can declare total victory, he can declare that he has denazified Ukraine or whatever he wants to say, because the level of popular support for the war inside Russia, it gives him that political space to do that. So that was a very, very interesting sort of gap between those two leaders on how they see the way out.

And do you think that Mr. Johnson has been able to take a bolder approach here since Britain is no longer in the EU? Does Brexit play into this?

What Britain's sort of security and foreign policy within the European continent would be after Brexit was a big question mark. Britain declined to have a security and foreign policy agreement with the EU as part of its exit negotiations, something that caused a little bit of surprise and a little bit of dismay among some in Brussels. But it's fair to say you are starting to see the outline of how the Johnson administration particularly sees its security relationship with the European continent working, which is through NATO and through these sorts of bilateral agreements. I asked Johnson on the plane what the logic of not being part of a new security treaty was with the EU, and he suggested that he saw a need to have an independent policy, as he put it. And he said that since Brexit, Britain had been able to make decisions at speed, to be out in front and to be able to lead in a different way. Now, lots of people would say that you can do all those things while still having a deep relationship with the European Union. But I think for me, it captures something quite important in the Brexit way of seeing the world, that actually separating oneself from the structures of the European Union have given the UK sort of an impetus to sign these sorts of agreements rather than simply issuing a more terse statement from the Prime Minister's spokesman's desk at home.

So Mr. Johnson's announcement has clearly been well received in the Nordics. How about at home and elsewhere?

His personal ratings in the UK have not been good for some time, but it is undeniable that he is a very, very popular figure in Ukraine because there are many people in that country who, rightly or wrongly, think that he was the one who has helped make the difference in terms of supplying them the arms that they needed. I think you can certainly say there is quite a striking sort of duality in Johnson's character in that he's both capable of the most incredible self-inflicted wounds, like the Partygate scandal, He's often somewhat clownish. His speeches can be glib and insincere. And yet at the same time, through the Ukraine crisis, many people have seen a slightly different Johnson, somebody who makes actually some rather soaring and inspiring speeches, who've been able to see with some analytical clarity the shape of the war in a way that other leaders don't seem able to do. The guy who's actually seemed to be seeking to carve out a new place for the UK somewhere within the European continent. So he's not a simple figure. He's something of a conundrum. And many obituaries were written of his political career political career during the Partygate scandal. I think after the crisis in Ukraine, they're going to need a little bit of redrafting.

Thanks very much for your time, Matthew.

Thank you very much.

300 kilometers south of Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, lies an archaeological and engineering mystery.

I'm just trying to take it all in. You really have to kind of be inside it, don't you, just to feel it.

John McDermott, The Economist's chief Africa correspondent, visited the site, which is known as Great Zimbabwe, last year.

When you first get to Great Zimbabwe, it doesn't look like much. There are monkeys defecating on your car in the car park. There are cattle with cowbells clanging around, and a lot of the bushes overgrown. It's only when you get up to the hill complex, which is where scholars think a lot of the political and religious leaders lived, that you truly appreciate its majesty.

The civilization that inhabited that complex of winding stone walls and structures was in its prime between the 13th and the 16th centuries. It was home to about 10,000 people.

When you get through to the Great Enclosure, which is probably the pinnacle of the entire place, you're faced with this massive stone wall, more than 10 meters high, which curves around.

More than a million granite stones are stacked in the wall without a drop of mortar.

So you're left wondering, how on earth did they build this? And you get inside and you find interior walls and drains that snake underneath the stone walls and this incredibly mysterious conical tower, which nobody really knows, you know, what it's there for. It is a place of majesty. It's also a place of mystery.

So John, what do we know about the society that lived at Great Zimbabwe?

Great Zimbabwe is the prime example of a pre-colonial sub-Saharan African state. The people who lived in Great Zimbabwe, which is both the city and the broader area around it, were Shona people, who are still the most populous ethnic group in Zimbabwe today. They had leaders, both political and religious. Often those were the same people. And they also had quite a lot of connections with the rest of the world. Archaeologists have found teapots from Ming Dynasty China. There are other pots that have Arabic inscriptions. There's glass beads from Syria and Egypt, and bits of coral that have been traced back to the Indian Ocean. But it's far less understood and certainly far less visited than other marquee places such as like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat or the Egyptian pyramids.

So, John, you say it's a mystery. I mean, what do we know about the society that led to Great Zimbabwe?

Yes, it's rather stunning, and it's certainly not what a lot of people anticipate when they think about a pre-colonial African society, you know, in the middle of a landlocked country. But it's easy to be, I think, over-dazzled in a way by all of these foreign items that have been found and to underestimate the African-ness of Great Zimbabwe. It's an incredibly stunning place that was connected to the rest of the world, but it's also a profoundly African one. And the legacy of archaeological research at Great Zimbabwe is often an incredibly disappointing one. In the late 19th century, just after Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist, sent his colonial bandits north of the Limpopo River, and they discovered— I should put discovered in quotation marks— but they discovered Great Zimbabwe, and so impressed were they that they thought there was no way that this could have been built by African hands. And it took until the 20th century for people to say, hold on a minute, it was very much a Shona creation. Still though, because Rhodesia remained under white rule until 1980, and the people who ran Rhodesia had a desire to downplay blackness, and any archaeologists, including white archaeologists, who challenged their view were sent into exile.

That narrative has been changing a good deal in recent years, largely because of Zimbabwean archaeologists like Thabo Tshirikuri, I think I was born about 45 minutes away from Great Zimbabwe, but it was so near but so far because my first visit to Great Zimbabwe was perhaps when I was 21, 20, or thereabout. And, and since then I have had a very active involvement with Great Zimbabwe.

Professor Chirikure is now based at the University of Oxford. There, he has access to a collection of objects from Great Zimbabwe. He got some of them out of their museum cases to show to our correspondent Stevie Hertz.

If you're happy bringing them, do you want to bring them down? I'll leave them here.

Yeah, of course.

You trust us that much?

In a workroom of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Professor Chirikure carefully looks through a tray of jewelry. There are bright blue, red, and yellow glass beads, a chunky copper bracelet and delicate gold beads. They're simple but tiny, barely a couple of millimeters across.

So these objects are around, let's say, 800 years old. So they were made between 1100 and the 1400s. The gold was one of the mainstays of the economy of Great Zimbabwe. So a lot of local knowledge in terms of geochemical engineering. So how do you mine the ore? How do you extract the gold? You then use your skills to produce these amazing objects. But that is not the interesting story. The real interesting story is that actually the copper that we are looking at was actually more valuable than the gold.

The copper bracelets are much more substantial than the fine gold beads. Thin wire wrapped solidly around a fibrous core. It's about the width of my little finger.

Copper is reddish, and the red colour is very important in terms of the belief systems. It is one of those colours associated with the ancestors, and for that, gold does not appear anywhere closer to that. I mean, it's just soft and malleable. What do you use it for? Right? So give, give, give, give, give the gold away and let us have our copper. One of the most important things that we do as archaeologists is to try and imagine producing a knowledge in ways that resonate with local experiences, so local philosophies, local languages, as well as just local ways of doing things, even beliefs.

Abandoning these preconceived ideas of worth and value goes beyond understanding that delicate gold might be worth less than now tarnished copper. It also includes looking differently at how the community at Great Zimbabwe worked, including the class structure. Here, those rich material finds can almost be a red herring.

If we go to a place such as Great Zimbabwe, Right? It has yielded gold, it has yielded copper, glass beads, ivory, and all those kinds of things. What can we say? What can we say about class? We go into these local philosophies such as Ubuntu and so on. Class is not always expressed through material, right? Because people can redistribute wealth, right? So in other words, possession and class are two different things. If a rich person has passed on, then their wealth is redistributed amongst their relatives, both rich and poor. So there is this leveling effect in society. So that is the kind of philosophy and thinking that we were using to say, well, if we are to come up with a less colonial your understanding of what is class and what is ranking, right? How might it look like?

Our Africa correspondent John McDermott says there are two reasons why this kind of analysis is crucial. First, to ensure that places like Great Zimbabwe are added to our mental map of globally important archaeological sites. And secondly, to ensure that these ancient cultures are properly understood.

Speaking to Shadrack and visiting Great Zimbabwe and understanding his work has made concrete what is often a rather abstract ideal. For him, decolonization is about keeping all of the progress that archaeology has made in terms of material sciences and learning how to date things and so on, while also incorporating the stories and language and ideas of the people who lived in the places you're studying, in this case, Shona people. And I think there's actually a great need for it. If you look at the number of African scholars studying Africa, it is scandalously low, whether it's in economics or in history. I learned during my reporting that Just 3% of the papers that are published in 4 of the most prestigious history journals over the last 20 years were about Africa. And of those 3%, only about a tenth had authors based in, in the continent. And it's not just about representation for representation's sake. We're missing out on new perspectives, new angles, new ideas, so long as African scholars who are doing world-class research are underrepresented. Presented.

Do you quiver with pleasure when you hear hair being brushed, or pages being delicately turned, or fingernails tapping the rim of a wooden bowl? Have you ever felt a frisson when watching someone perform a mundane task such as folding shirts? If the answer is yes, you've experienced ASMR— autonomous sensory meridian response.

Henry Hitchings writes about culture for The Economist.

You may be aware of the phenomenon, though it may bemuse you, as a lot of people, perhaps around 80%, don't experience it. I do experience it, and I suppose I would say I feel it as a pleasurable tingle, a sensation a bit like champagne bubbles ticking, beginning in the crown of my head and trickling down to my shoulders. It's a feeling that for me is caused by watching or listening to certain pleasing stimuli. I get the frisson actually, curiously, from watching more than from listening. And sometimes it's from watching very humdrum, repetitive tasks. The term ASMR sounds scientific, but it was invented by Jennifer Allen, an American cybersecurity worker, to denote what she had previously called, rather more colloquially, a braingasm. Academic research in the field is still in its infancy. The first scholarly paper on the subject was published in, I think, 2015. It's unclear what the origin of ASMR is, but seemingly it's caused by the hormone oxytocin being released along the neural pathways. For individuals who feel ASMR, it can be a mixed blessing. I certainly enjoy positive experiences but suffer to some degree from what's known as misophonia, which is, I suppose, best expressed as that feeling when you're, say, at the theater and there's someone who's unwrapping a mint 20 seats away from you, and they might as well be doing it right inside your ear. A new exhibition about ASMR at London's Design Museum entitled "Weird Sensation Feels Good" opens to the public today, and I went down with my producer William In search of tingles. Ah, brushes.

If it's not too weird for you, you could listen and I could brush for you.

Yes, when you brush the microphone itself, that's much more arresting than when you run your finger over the brush.

My name is James Taylor Foster, and I'm the creator of Weird Sensation Feels Good: The World of ASMR at the Design Museum. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, and these words basically mean nothing, but they signify a culture, a community, a creative field, a site of imagination that has been growing over the last 10 years. It's much older than that, of course. I argue that it's quite primeval.

So this is the sort of textbook YouTube ASMR experience.

Hey everybody, it's GV. Today, instead of rambling, I wanted to write something a little.

You've got someone with a 3D microphone whispering, tapping, speaking in a very calculated, gentle, soothing way. Comment ça va?

Ça fait combien de temps que je t'ai pas parlé en français?

J'ai l'impression qu'à chaque fois que je fais une vidéo en français—

There can be something unsettling about ASMR, and I think that the exhibition tries to touch on that a little bit. It's quite a visceral experience. There's a work by Marc Tessier, the Skin on Phone Device, where he imagined what a phone case would look like if it mimicked his own skin. So rather than scrolling a frictionless, smooth glass surface, Instagram, for example, you were touching skin, you were stroking and pinching it. We also have another work by the artist Tobias Bradford called Immeasurable Thirst that's essentially a replica of a human tongue that sits in the room slowly dripping saliva. And I think that that work in particular is beguiling and mesmerizing, but also quite disgusting.

What we have here is a rubber tongue which looks as though it's thickly coated with saliva, and it's going up and down in a slightly sort of Mick Jagger mid-performance way. And there's one of those wonderful admonitions: please do not touch. I mean, I wouldn't touch it if you paid me. It's really extremely gross.

This exhibition plants a flag in the ground and says, hey guys, there's something interesting going on here, there's something that you might not have heard about or seen before, and it's telling us a lot about the ways in which we're living today. For me, one of the greatest compliments to a visitor coming to the exhibition is that when they step out of the Design Museum, they might hear the birds tweeting in the trees for the first time in a while. The world is full of sensorial activity, and what ASMR is doing is packaging that and it's mediating it through YouTube or Twitch or Discord. And that's a phenomenon that I think is very timely.

Weird Sensation Feels Good: The World of ASMR runs until the 16th of October. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey, and our sound engineer is Will Roe. Our senior producers are Sam Westron, Jat Gill, and Jonjo Devlin. Our US audio correspondent is Stevie Hertz. Our producers are William Warren, Rory Galloway, and Alizée Jean-Baptiste, and assistant producer Abisoye Oshondairo, with extra editing help this week from Kim Gidleson. We'll all see you back here on Monday.