Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics, Fred Halliday has an impressive output of articles, research papers, books (17), the latest being 100 Myths about the Middle East. His Middle East specialism is complemented by studies on the theory of international relations, and in particular on the role of social change and revolutions in international politics. He is currently based in Spain researching as part of a project, on 'Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism' funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
"I find it hard to name my 'favourite' research project but I can say that it is wonderful to have two years to do research on what has been the intellectual love of my life, the critique of nationalism and the aspiration, often fraught and misused, for an internationalist political identity. This research is thanks to a Leverhulme research grant, designed for people in their middle and late career years who want to have time to do something different. At the moment I am based as a visiting scholar at the Barcelona Research and Documentation Centre, CIDOB. This is headed by Narcis Serra, a former mayor of Barcelona and Spanish Minister of Defence, a very influential figure in Catalan political and cultural life, and, not least, a graduate of LSE.
Spain is a natural place for me to work. Over more than a decade, I have had working relations with three research institutes in Spain (CIDOB in Barcelona, HEGOA in Bilbao, and CIP in Madrid), I can now more or less lecture in Spanish. Also, for reasons I cannot claim to understand, this is a country where more of my books get read than anywhere except the Middle East. Spain has at the moment the most politically alive government in Europe. Of great relevance for my work, this is where many of the conflicts of globalisation and nationalism are being played out.
Barcelona is a very cosmopolitan city and it is, in some ways, the only Mediterranean city to have survived as such. Think of Algiers, Salonika, Trieste, Alexandria, once all Mediterranean cosmopolitan cities. Now, along with Istanbul, only Barcelona can really be said to have communities of people who interact and transcend their different backgrounds. But there are many tensions here as well and there is corruption from globalisation.
Much of my research career has, however, been concerned with the Middle East, an association I have, for all its travails and turmoil, greatly enjoyed: it certainly beats the Northern Line on a Monday morning. Some of my researching experience has been quite unorthodox, not exactly the paradigm of what we teach as 'Research Methods'. In the 1970s I stayed in caves with Omani guerrillas, cows and goats and was then banned from that country for many years - Arabia without Sultans, published in 1974, did not go down well there. But at the end of the 1990s I was asked to do some lectures there. When I met the Minister of Information, he said 'the British' had stopped them inviting me but made me welcome with a question: 'is communism really finished?', and I said, 'yes, you can relax!'. Then he asked me if I wanted tea or coffee.
Another research project that I really liked was talking with Yemeni immigrants in Britain in the 1970s, staying with them in Cardiff, Liverpool, Sheffield and other places where they had settled over the last 100 years. Most didn't speak English. This experience led me to conclude that in order to write about immigrant communities in the UK you need to know their country and language first. That was my Orwellian bit, getting to know a Britain I would not otherwise have seen.
And another project which I recall vividly was a series of radio interviews organised in 1995 by the BBC with the people who had most influence on American policy in the Cold War - Henry Kissinger, Robert Gates, George Kennan, Robert McNamara and Paul Nitze, they were all very courteous and informative. We tried to do the same with the Russians but there were not enough senior people who could interview in English.
My latest book, 100 Myths About the Middle East, I wrote in a different way, as a set of random reflections, but out of my forty years of reading on, and visiting, the Middle East. It is my first, and probably last, post-modernist book, you can start on any page and read backwards or forwards.
As for unfulfilled projects, I am fascinated by the way that international events are reflected in literature. For example nobody has ever done something comprehensive on the literature of the Cold War. A lot of literature comes up critiquing their own nationalism, through literature, the myth and the violence: I am struck by the critique of Austria, the critique of national myth, orthodoxy, through the work of the recent Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jielinek. Before her, many others, not least another of my heroes, James Joyce, did the same.
These days, I think there is far too much complacency, in academic and political life. For example, there is too little open discussion in Brussels about the problems of the EU or, more generally, about the central, not marginal or criminal, role that violence plays in globalisation. Too much social science is formal, without substantive engagement. I do not have the answer to questions but I think there is a history of thought and a lot of things from the past that we can learn from.
I have enjoyed being an academic. And I am not sure I would have been good at anything else - I do not have the stamina to be a lawyer, or the nerves to be freelance writer. And, provided you have a gift for it, an appetite for it, and you realise that your salary will not match up to what a lot of others are getting, put it this way, you are being paid to read, discuss ideas, sometimes to travel and to meet interesting and motivated young people. I say that I don't have air miles but I do have former students, in many countries. Coming up to 60, I now want to change how I work, but never to stop."