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Humanitarian relief projects now require co-operation between a broader range of actors to deliver both immediate aid and long term sustainable recovery.

The context of humanitarian relief situations is changing, characterised by two issues at the heart of Habitat 3. The first is how climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of urban hazards. This second is the rapidly expanding population of the world’s cities. Traditionally, humanitarian projects have delivered rapid responses to disasters in urban settlements and left the longer-term issues to the development agencies.

This changing context has spurred relief actors and NGOs to recognise the need for on-the-ground collaboration in post-crisis situations. Collaboration between affected local communities, relief workers, local and national governments is essential for the immediate post-disaster recovery as well as for creating long-term sustainable development and resilience. All this is reflected in the launch of the “Global Alliance for Urban Crises”, which recognises how urbanisation has defined our global reality. The alliance addresses the need to adapt the way humanitarians respond to the new reality of crises by including over 65 organisations, including development and urban specialists.

Relief workers: using cluster systems

In the past, relief agencies have had a tendency to be territorial, working in silence and addressing separate issues. The new context now demands togetherness to incorporate environmental, social, economic, political and cultural factors into both long and short term relief operations. The change has seen relief operations go beyond immediate disaster-relief such as building emergency evacuation centres, transitionary shelter and water delivery. They are expanding to provide permanent risk-informed housing, re-building the water-system and advocating policy.

The cluster system is a way of incorporating all the different sectors present on the ground in a post disaster situation. This allows for increased communication and co-ordination to effectively cover all the issues present. Habitat 3 discussions have emphasised over and over again the importance of communication to prevent barriers to sophisticated relief and development.

Community involvement: “We often forget what people can provide”.

The importance of this idea was echoed in the “Neighbourhood Approach” - discussed in a shelter and housing provision training session on the final morning of the conference. The building-blocks of this model I found really credible and interesting, which included:

• Community mobilisation and participatory urban planning
• Protection and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)
• Reducing interruption to urban livelihoods
• Assessing and restoring the markets

Teaching the local community how to also effectively respond to their own needs is critical to improving resilience. The neighbourhood approach ensures sustainable long-term planning and infrastructure which increases resilience to disasters and addresses community-identified priorities. Engaging the local government in the affected region helps collaborative efforts as they can provide knowledge of pre-existing systems and services which aid workers can make use of.

Technical skills:

DRR has become an important focus of the New Urban Agenda, which emphasises the need to build resilience in cities. This requires tailored expertise and technical skills beyond basic shelter construction and rubble-clearance. This has caused more architects, urban planners and engineers to be involved in the humanitarian scene than ever before. The emergence of this multi-disciplinary approach has the potential to be one of the most important advancements for post-disaster recovery yet. Humanitarians can learn much from these technical professionals who bring creative and innovative aspects to resilience-building in cities. If they work together, humanitarians can provide the political and social knowledge to adapt these approaches to different sensitive contexts. However, discussions this week have acknowledged the vast capacity shortages in terms of urban planners, but thankfully the importance that Habitat III has placed on planning may pave the way to encouraging more people to take up the profession.

Architects and urban planners also have much to share in the “build back better” aspect of post-crises situations. Training of locals, especially engineers and masons, in risk-sensitive designs is vital to increase the resilience capacities of cities. These include aiding the implementation of no-build zones in precarious areas, safe-building codes and a comprehensive system for recording land-tenure.

The new challenges of climate change and rapid urbanisation means humanitarians need to be taking a much more holistic approach to improve the scope and quality of relief operations, both in the short and long term. Habitat III has identified this challenge but it is up to everybody else to rise to it.
 

Lydia Darby (@lydiadarby_) is studying a BA in International Relations and Politics. Her interests lie in conflict and disaster risk-reduction, recovery and development, as well as the empowerment of women and youth. She will be exploring how these issues intersect in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda. To keep up to date with the GLI team’s commentaries and policy pieces from HABITAT III, or for outputs by GLI teams at other international events please see here.

Photo credit: Abhisek Sarda via Foter.com / CC BY

Following Pezeshkian's victory, CMEG economist Mahdi Ghodsi explores replicating reformist-era economic growth, the challenges of international sanctions and domestic structures, and the institutional reforms needed for sustainable development and public welfare.

Pezeshkian might be able to overhaul Iran’s economy if conditions were like the reformist Khatami era

This Sunday (28 July 2024), the Islamic Republic’s highest authority, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, endorsed Masoud Pezeshkian as President. With President Pezeshkian, the economy might take a different path that has not been at play since 2005. As shown here in Figure 1, the reformist era during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) saw a historic high for the Islamic Republic in average annual GDP growth and its main components, which came on the heels of the so-called reconstruction era during his predecessor, President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989–1997).

Growth during the Khatami era was driven by significant increases in investment, household consumption, and government expenditures, allowing the economy to employ an additional 5.7 million between 1997 and 2005. During this period, employment growth outpaced population growth, resulting in 29.7% of the population being employed in 2005, compared to 24.2% in 1997. Furthermore, the average annual inflation of the consumer price index (CPI) during the two-term Khatami presidency stood at only 15%. It was an era of growth and minimal double-digit inflation.

To replicate the economic improvements of the 1997 to 2005 period and further Iran's economy and people's welfare, implementing similar policies under a similar environment could be considered. However, today’s Islamic Republic is much more autocratic, and the monopoly of power in the hands of its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his selected bodies has made the country’s political and economic institutions much more extractive than in the Khatami era. Iran is now targeted by much more severe U.S. extra-territorial sanctions, with its economy being more isolated than back then. Therefore, only if substantial institutional reforms are undertaken, average growth rates of around 4%, as experienced during Khatami’s reformist era, driven by industrial growth rather than oil exports, could be expected.

For instance, in 2002, net inflows of FDI relative to GDP and its growth skyrocketed, reaching a historic post-1970 high (see Figure 41 of this report), following the legislation of the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPPA) by Iran’s Parliament that year. Currently, with the most restrictive forms of U.S. secondary sanctions and the increasing desire in Europe to list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, the situation is more tense than during the Khatami era.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, U.S. President George W. Bush included Iran in the “axis of evil”. At that time, Washington was just beginning to introduce sanctions and garner consensus in the international community. Today, therefore, Pezeshkian would need to reduce the level of targeted sanctions to at least those of the early 2000s to allow for similar growth rates as seen during the Khatami era. Since Pezeshkian seems to have been a planned choice by Khamenei, it seems that the Supreme Leader himself has decided to pursue the path as suggested by Pezeshkian during his presidential campaign, i.e. to alleviate the country’s economic crisis by removing U.S. sanctions. To this end, the most important policy is to return to negotiations, or as Khatami had framed it back then, a “Dialogue Among Civilizations”.

Providing an environment to create jobs should be the priority

As noted in this article, Iran’s most critical problem over the past decade or so has been negative growth of net investment. Shrinking stock of capital and rusty infrastructure have not allowed the economy to employ as many people as the population demography was demanding. Only 29% of Iranians are officially working now, which imposes an enormous burden to feed the other 71% of society. Investment needs to be substantially increased in the years to come so as to provide the required capital to employ the population who remained unemployed in their most productive years (i.e. between the age of 18 and 35). To increase investment, the uncertainties due the Islamic Republic’s domestic and international politics, as well as societal discontent would need to be de-escalated as soon as possible. In fact, to reduce uncertainties, policies ought to converge with society’s expectations from the state. This would mean, inter alia, issues of discontent including the brutal enforcement of the hijab upon Iranian women ought to stop. Only reforms at this scale and scope could help return society to its productive and cooperative form. Otherwise, if Pezeshkian cannot meet society’s expectations (e.g. freedom of dress code but also that of the media, press, social relations), his support base would fall behind his electoral base, leading to a further loss of legitimacy of the political system as a whole. That, in turn, would increase the uncertainties and the political risk of another societal uprising, which would exacerbate the environment for doing business and investment growth.

Pezeshkian can improve Iran's economy only with institutional reforms and removal of sanctions

Important obstacles to economic growth in Iran are international sanctions and its blacklisting by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which also increase the costs of exports. Such additional transaction and trade costs have reduced the competitiveness of Iranian sectors in international markets. If the Islamic Republic does not pursue a change in foreign policy, the poor economic conditions will persist – and the higher average annual growth experienced during the 1997–2005 reformist era will not materialize. Since the presidential candidates are selected within a set of policy choices determined by Khamenei, Pezeshkian, as president, is unlikely to have a difficult path persuading the Supreme Leader towards sanction removal. However, Khamenei has always distanced himself from the policies implemented by presidents to avoid taking responsibility in case of failures. Furthermore, the new President may face significant resistance from other hardline factions in the political system (the IRGC, the Parliament, the Expediency Council, the Guardian Council, and the Judiciary), who may be inclined to continue to sabotage any efforts to foster relations with the West to remove sanctions on the crippled economy. Such sabotage during the Hassan Rouhani presidency (2013–2021) led to the collapse of the implemented JCPOA and Khamenei emerged victorious, seeing his argument vindicated not to trust Washington.

After the announcement of the election results, the financial market in Iran reacted slightly positively, anticipating better economic conditions as a result of a potential opening of the economy and reduction of international tensions. The rial, the national currency, appreciated in the unofficial market from 618,000 rials per U.S. dollar (USD) on 30 June 2024, i.e. prior to the second-round election, to 596,000 rials per USD on 6 July 2024, i.e. after results were announced. The Tehran Stock Exchange also responded positively, showing gains.

This suggests that Pezeshkian would need to quickly implement his election campaign promises to remove sanctions, commit Iran to comply with FATF standards and regulations, create a better investment environment, improve social policies such as removing the so-called morality police tasked with overseeing the implementation of mandatory hijab rules, and lifting internet filtering. If he fails to achieve progress on any of these fronts swiftly, market expectations will diverge from ongoing realities, leading to increased uncertainty and the continuation of protest movements. Should this happen, Iran may face a severe negative shock, resulting in the further depreciation of the rial, rising import prices, higher inflation, more stringent international sanctions, reduced oil revenues, continued difficulty in implementing expansive fiscal policy, shrinking investment, and rising unemployment, which would also be highly detrimental to the Islamic Republic’s economic stability and political survival. However, if comprehensive reforms are not prioritized, particularly by eliminating the monopoly of power held by the Supreme Leader and his selected Guardian Council, and other hardline factions of the system, there is no hope for fostering a prosperous economy. Iran’s real GDP per capita is still lower than its peak in 1976, demonstrating a failing political system lacking institutional capacities for sustainable development. Therefore, without institutional reform, the Iranian economy will likely continue to suffer even more in the medium to long run.

An important aspect is that the distribution of rent and resources will shift towards reformists and those closer to Pezeshkian. Since the public sector accounts for approximately 70% to 80% of Iran's total GDP, the president plays a crucial role in diversifying the country's resources according to his chosen direction. For three consecutive years, former President Ebrahim Raisi (2021–2024) redistributed the national budget from the people to the Islamic Republic’s “trinity” of security-military, propagandistic, and commercial-clerical apparatuses, by increasing taxation on the private sector. Whether Pezeshkian's policies will change the structure of the budget in favor of the nation rather than the political system and lead to an increase in public and private investment, thereby creating jobs and eradicating poverty, or else continue the inflationary policies of direct cash handouts initiated during the hardline populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad era (2005–2013), remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, a society striving to regain its lost power against the brutal political system of the Islamic Republic is carefully observing the next policy choices of Iran’s new president Pezeshkian. However, as Supreme Leader Khamenei’s grip on power is much tighter than before, and as experienced during previous presidencies, there remains little hope for society to see meaningful improvements in their lives.

Dr. Mahdi Ghodsi is a Senior Fellow and Head of the Economy Unit at the Center for Middle East and Global Order (CMEG). He is an Austrian–Iranian economist with the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) and an external lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU).

Photo by Kamran Gholami

Brad L. Brasseur explores the current problems in creating good education for the poor in developing nations and looks at some of the solutions.

The United Nations recently claimed that the Millennium Development Goal that focused on primary education increased global enrolment from 83% to 91%. Despite these gains, today it is estimated that 124 million children do not attend school and 757 million adults are illiterate.

The nearly one billion people without a proper education is distressing as a good education is a proven foundation for alleviating poverty, sustainable economic progress, healthier lifestyle and enhanced social development. Inexplicably, the international community continues to fail the global poor by not creating access to legitimate education programs that allow them to conquer poverty.

The UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDGs) on education may have achieved some progress but overall it was ineffective as it concentrated more on the quantity of children attending classes rather than the quality of education at every age group.

Substandard education was highlighted in an UNESCO report that stated over 29 million children dropped out of school in Sub-Sahara Africa each year. The reason can be attributed to the children not receiving a high level of education as in most cases classroom sizes are too big and teachers are unpaid, inexperienced or have no training.

As a result, of the poor quality of education, an uneducated parent is more focused on their short-term needs and neglects the long-term benefits of education and thus pulls their children out of school to work. This can be seen as a result of the UN not making great gains in improving adult education. Since the parents have not personally experienced education improving their quality of life, they miss the advantages for their children and thus remain trapped in the cycle of poverty.

Other education problems include; ineffective, outdated, or irrelevant curriculum that does not teach students the most essential skills for success where they live. Plus, many children have the impossible task of concentrating without having the correct nutrition to properly think as schools lack funding for food programs. Such food programs can also be an added incentive for parents to enroll their children, as they will receive free food.

Fixing Education in the Developing World

In September 2015, the UN announced that one of the new Sustainable Development Goals (the new MDGs) would be improving the ‘Quality’ of global education. This time around the new goal is more broadly focused on all levels of education and aims to eliminate gender and wealth inequalities.

While this is a step in the right direction, ultimately achieving quality education, will involve increased investment in infrastructure, teacher training, curriculum development, classroom materials, technology, food programs and lowering schools fees. Most importantly the ultimate goal should be ensuring any program is focused on learning and not just attendance.

Today no universal education model will work for every country, as each education system must be adapted to the local and cultural dynamics that exist in every unique location. This means that national governments should give local leaders, parents and teachers greater educational autonomy, including increased input in setting the curriculum in their region.

More emphasis needs to be put on teaching skills that are applicable for obtaining jobs in each specific region. For example, a place like Palawan Island in the Philippines, which was voted the most beautiful island in the world but is also one of its poorest regions in the country, should focus more on tourism skillsets, such as learning languages. Mineral rich countries like Peru or the Democratic Republic of the Congo should put more value into teaching skills aimed at securing legitimate jobs in industries by developing better math, science or geography programs that can produce engineers or geologists (one of Peru’s highest paid professions).

Education Innovations Can Be part of the Solution

There is hope for improving global education as successful innovative ideas are being used by many organizations, such as One Laptop per Child, who have developed and distributed millions of durable, economical, low powered laptops that allows rural children to digitally access updated textbooks, classes and information.

Also, in isolated rural areas Internet problems have been solved by Alphabet’s Loon project (Google’s holding company) as they have developed technology that can supply Wi-Fi access to isolated rural areas by launching balloons into the sky. In fact, India is attempting such a project to combat their low Internet user rate and fight their weak education level.

Plus, Bangladeshi based NGO BRAC, has been successfully providing quality education to the poor with their non-formal primary education program, which has a dropout out rate of less than 5%. In addition they have a thriving adult education program that puts emphasis on women by teaching them to read, write, and share their resources so they can successfully run businesses.

Another great innovator is The Economist 2015 innovation award winner Bridge International, who has developed a low cost model for building nurseries and primary schools that delivers high quality education in East Africa.

These innovations can advance global education but need to be combined with increased global investment into the education sector. Corruption and the lack of knowledge of the importance of education means that governments are not investing enough money into their education sector and sometimes even spend more on their military.

Moving Forward

Developed countries can also take some of the blame as Kevin Watkins from Overseas Development Initiative has previously stated that only two percent of yearly international global aid given to developing countries is invested into education. To combat this, countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia and EU countries must put stricter conditions on their aid and make sure that it is invested effectively in the education sectors of developing countries.

Obviously, education is not the only solution to achieve sustainable human and economic development, but it is undoubtedly the foundation for true progress. In the next decades, with the help of increased investment and utilizing advances in technology, we have a great opportunity to give the world’s poor a quality education and with it the tools to alleviate poverty.

We can use South Korea as an example, as in the 1960s, they were a poor country with a horrendous education system and today they have transformed into an economic powerhouse by having one of the best education systems in the world.

Brad L. Brasseur is a Canadian international development specialist who has traveled to over 80 countries in the world, while working in several NGOs, including extended time on education programs in Peru and Ukraine. You can follow him on twitter at: @brbrasseur.

“This is the single most important event at Habitat III”, says the panellist at the Cities, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction special session. The challenge of climate change and the associated risks of urban hazards should now be one of the world’s top priorities. On day three of the UN’s conference on sustainable urban development, I explore the emphasis placed on climate change mitigation and investment in disaster-risk reduction strategies at the heart of that development.

The cycle of urban poverty is both caused and amplified by hazards. These hazards are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. Whether natural, technological or cultural – they range from extreme storm surges to water scarcity. The need for collective action to reduce the global production of greenhouse gases to mitigate these effects was strongly emphasised in the opening of the special session.

The causal link between poverty and exposure to natural disasters has been discussed frequently over the first three days of the conference, addressed specifically at a number of NGO-led side events. There has been a particular focus on the vulnerability of the urban poor and the need to build resilience to natural catastrophes.

A low income settlement that suffers from a multitude of urban hazards will stay poor. When citizens lack the human capital and resources to pull themselves out of poverty they will pass it to the next generation and so the cycle continues. Poverty increases vulnerability to the point where hazards become disasters. Citizens living below the poverty line are more susceptible to disasters due to a lack of risk-informed, coping capacities. They also lack the financial, social and policy support structures that are essential for urban resilience. Acute shocks also undo any previous capacity gains, reinforcing the cycle.

Inhabitants of the poor urban peripheries in Haiti were the most vulnerable to the devastating consequences of the earthquake in 2010. The lack of commitment and motivation from the government to implement disaster risk-reduction (DRR) strategies during the rebuilding process ensured the urban poor also suffered greatly in this years’ hurricane.

Breaking the Cycle: The New Urban Agenda makes a commitment to creating resilient cities that invest in DRR strategies. This has been echoed across the conference to foster proactive engagement with DRR. Discussions suggested a move from reactive to proactive risk-based approaches was needed, which carry higher economic costs in the short term but are imperative long-term investments. By including disaster-risk reduction in poverty alleviation and sustainable development approaches, we are able to mitigate the human, economic, social and environmental losses of acute shocks which continue the cycle of poverty.

How? By using the guiding principles of the United Nations’ “Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction” at every level from grassroots to national governments. Only through fostering horizontal collaborative relationships between multiple-stake holders can this be achieved.

1) By understanding the risks, especially to vulnerable people. Dialogue with communities and engaging with those living in risk-prone areas rather than stigmatising them is important for this. Are residents aware that they are exposed to certain hazards? Is there a coping strategy in place? This community level, bottom-up approach has been emphasised as fundamental in Habitat III discussions so far.

2) By strengthening governance and institutional responses. For example, appointing a Chief Resilience Officer in local governments to lead implementation processes and share data. Good governance in DRR processes is frequently understated. It can be the sole enabling factor of risk-informed urban design or it can be the cause of gross neglect (such as non compliance with safe housing designs) leading to massive loss of life.

3) Through long-term investment in risk-reduction and response. Multi-stakeholder collaboration generates essential funding and helps build community capacities. It also aids the development of smart solutions based on community priorities. These include multi-hazard warning systems and effective national and localised risk-strategies based on evidence and data. The benefits of investing in resilience strategies rather than rebuilding are overwhelmingly evident.

4) Finally, the “Build Back Better” principle embedded in the New Urban Agenda is the process of rebuilding a stronger and more resilient city than before. It involves actually applying the lessons we have learnt and not just identifying them.

Something interesting that has come up during discussion is how important small-scale acts such as improving shelter, water and sanitation in low-income, vulnerable areas are not considered DRR strategies. These incremental improvements lessen everyday chronic stresses, aid the alleviation of poverty in low income areas and improve health standards. All of these make individuals more resilient to shocks and stresses. I believe that incorporating investment in basic service provision can hugely benefit not only the urban poor’s poverty cycle but also their resilience to withstand hazards. My second issue is that there exists a blindness in how to implement these strategies in low-income settlements if they lack critical funding or the good governance necessary.

A thorough commitment by national and local actors to implementing the range of effective disaster-risk reduction and management strategies will be critical in breaking the cycle of poverty and promoting development in urban-hazard prone areas in LDCs.

Lydia Darby (@lydiadarby_) is studying a BA in International Relations and Politics. Her interests lie in conflict and disaster risk-reduction, recovery and development, as well as the empowerment of women and youth. She will be exploring how these issues intersect in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda. To keep up to date with the GLI team’s commentaries and policy pieces from HABITAT III, or for outputs by GLI teams at other international events please see here.

Photo credit: Earthworm via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I argue that there is a movement toward using social, scientific, military, and other public and private resources to advocate in favour of sameness. This is different from traditional conservatism. It is a dangerous religion that memorialises a state of "good enough" that occurred some time during the Clinton administration. This movement, which I term monotonism, basically says that things were OK in the mid-1990’s and resources should be spent on making the world more like it was when Warren Christopher reassured people what was happening in Rwanda wasn’t genocide or when Rivers Cuomo reassured people they could both be cool and wear glasses.

There are monotonist environmentalists: There are people who want the climate to be roughly what it was in the 1990's. There are people who want the world to be inhabited by the same animals that existed when Animal Planet became a television channel. There are people who want the same types of power generation to be popular (wind, solar), unpopular (hydro, coal), and underutilised (geothermal, tidal) as during the Clinton administration, regardless of what any pesky intervening science or research might have found.

The same problem afflicts political theorists, many of whom are stuck in the 1990's idea that less-blatantly-rigged elections are the "special sauce" that lets anyone mix up a handy batch of democratic bliss. I encounter these people with staggering frequency – to them, the issues in Africa, China, India, and elsewhere are essentially the same as twenty years ago (in reality, the key issues are wildly different today in all three places). Often caricatures from a generation ago dominate discussions of places like China and Russia, despite sweeping change in both places (not everything in these places is better, but nearly all of it is different from in 1995).

Even technology suffers from this. The "everything touchscreen" world envisioned in the 1990's (when Patrick Stewart interrupted his Shakespearean career to take command of a starship running a beige version of the Microsoft Surface interface) is now here. The iPhone and iPad, also 1990's Star Trek-esque, were nice when they were new and continue to enjoy occasional timid, unimaginative improvements. But a person from the mid-1990’s would not be amazed by technology today; it might take the person a day or two to adjust. Air travel, credit cards, and even Internet browsers don’t look or feel or function wildly differently from the mid-1990’s.

Cars are marginally improved since the 1990's in quality and safety, though few great advances have been made. The antilock brakes and airbag systems of today are slight tweaks of what were revolutionary improvements in the 1990's. Traffic in nearly every major urban area is worse, not better, than in 1995, and dramatically so in cities like London, Beijing, Cape Town, Singapore, and Melbourne. Even cities where it seemed traffic couldn’t worsen substantially, it has – including Hong Kong and Tokyo. One notable exception to this grinding non-progress is taxicabs, where nearly every major city worldwide has undergone a substantial upgrade of its taxi vehicles since 1995.

Most social and dietary norms are the same as in the mid-1990’s; this is unsurprising, as twenty years is a short period of time. Japanese still save too much, while Americans still save too little. Americans are still primarily monolingual, while the Swiss continue to lead the world in polyglottery. “Calories available per dollar” continues to increase, a trend gradually and predictably continuing since 1975. As in the 1990’s, most children worldwide grow up playing with toys made in China, but watching movies made in America. In percentage terms, American children are four times as likely as their Chinese counterparts to consider themselves "remarkable" or a "genius" - the same as the first time this study was run in 1994; a Chinese student is roughly eight times as likely to get a perfect score on the international math boards as the American student (who is perhaps too busy believing he or she is a remarkable genius or, as Chuck Palahniuk unforgettably put it, a unique and beautiful snowflake).

Volatility in the “good” world continues to show higher variance and directional-change frequency than the “bad” world. Since 1995, the street price of cocaine in metropolitan American (an index kept by the US DEA) remains more stable than any OECD country’s currency (1995-2012) or any major export commodity (on delta against CBOT dataset 1995-2012). The price of vegetable calories (derived from USDA TYP0-08 subtracted from the aggregate retail estimate) has varied more than the price of gold (a high-variance commodity in recent years), while the price of a McDonalds hamburger has stayed remarkably stable.  The same patterns hold true for five-year subsets of the same data.

Legislatively, the world is stuck in the mid-1990’s. Still limited to university campus debates are serious discussions of legalisation of illicit drugs or building a functional market in transplant organs. The laws discussed in the New York Times thusfar in 2013 have included the Assault Weapons Ban, the Violence Against Women Act, and anti-stalking/bullying/harassment legislation – all of which were drafted (and passed) by the 103rd Congress in the mid-1990’s. The debates over taxes, urban gentrification, and opportunity for young people today are reminiscent of the 1990’s, though one or two newspapers has leaned further right or left. Still, there is no nationwide (let alone worldwide) agreement as to how much it should help your application to Chicago or Harvard or Oxbridge if you are poor or black or brown; there is even less agreement as to how much it should hurt your application to these places if you are Asian or the nephew of the (in)correct so-and-so.

This whole concept of monotonism reminds me of Gibson's untitled 2009 essay which appears at page 43 of the new, and very good, compendium of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor.

In this essay, Gibson explains his generation dreaming of the Future with a capital F. Today, children look ahead to a meandering and everlasting now (consciously with a lowercase n). I see this difference in my childhood conversations with my father, who was a “Future with a capital F” type of guy even in the 1980’s when the news about the future was quite gloomy. Having grown up in the wake of the Second World War, his childhood occurred in a world defined by achievements in science: rocketry, military technology, space exploration, the transistor and solid-state electronics, early computers, widespread childhood vaccination, and the list goes on. It was a time of technological wonder and scientific triumph. My parents were entering college when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, and there was a feeling in their early adulthood of great progress and social inertia.

I always envied the seemingly limitless optimism and hopefulness that I’ve always attributed to the mix of scientific and social progress in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The 1980’s had little of this excitement. There was a distinct feeling by that point that stagflation would be prolonged and painful, that the Cold War was a waiting game of fragile politics and proxy wars that would ruin all sorts of countries with nice climates, and that the eulogies of the disco era would last at least until the year three thousand.

Perhaps this contrast between the 1950’s/1960’s and the 1980’s explains why the mid-1990’s seems such an attractive compromise point to return to, both economically and socially. It is, on nearly all fronts, from a Western developed-world perspective, a time when things were “good enough” for most. The Cold War was over, it was a time of plenty, and a series of self-fulfilling prophecies professed by various elected leaders had been fulfilled.

But why can’t we strive to do better than “good enough”? Is monotonism so seductive, so intuitively inviting, that we should ignore avenues to improvement? Is our current predicament so locked up in the permafrost of misery that throwing the lorry into reverse is better than facing the road ahead?

Gibson’s piece offers insights in this regard, as well. The present is as complex as we want to make it; we control our experience of the presence to a staggering degree. And we can choose between a limping, impotent, meandering now and an invigorating, creative, interesting Future. How?

One thing worth examining is that the relationship between budgetary health of the wealthy countries and the amount of exotic stuff being researched seems positively correlated. When there is “extra money” (and anyone who has ever worked for Westminster or Washington knows there is simultaneously always and never “extra money”) lying around, it gets spent on faster computers, faster airplanes, and so on. But it also gets spent on exotic research.

Cold War research (we now learn from declassified papers from both America and Russia) veered into the bizarre, looking at the possibility of telepathy, teleportation, robots on the bottom of the sea, and machines that could turn lumber into biscuits. It didn’t all work – much of it failed. But these ridiculously ambitious projects are what capitalises the F in our now-lowercase future. And the gains from this type of research are simply too remote for shareholders to bear, so the private sector is unlikely to engage in this research.

I’m, in much of my writing, a tireless advocate of tiny government and a society dominated by corporations and the private sector, where major long-term directional decisions occur after proxy battles among shareholders rather than screaming among policy wonks. But I don’t believe the space race could have been conducted with private funding alone. And I don’t think many of the civilian advances that grew out of 1950’s and 1960’s projects (these include everything from Velcro to Pyrex to Concorde) would have come out of private labs or private experiments.

You may say, at this point, that I’m advocating government research and development spending as a species of entertainment. And, in a way, I am. If we want the best and brightest people working on the hardest problems (and I believe we do and that encouraging our brightest people to do things that test their intellectual limits is an essential part of a meritocratic society), then we have to attract them. People don’t work for Apple or Google or Microsoft simply because they want a fancy business card or a big paycheck; people work at these places because they believe they will be able to put their talents to use building interesting things and solving interesting problems and, most importantly, working with interesting people.

The sad part about the decline in public spending on more exotic projects (and I’m not saying we should stop fixing sidewalks and instead build cool robots, but that there’s a middleground) is that it kills the interest of the next generation in doing this type of work. The “f” in future begins to shrink to an ever-smaller font, eventually becoming a sad subscript of its Philip K. Dickesque glory. So, I propose that policymakers have a role in making sure the next generation has cool companies to work for, cool people to work with, and cool projects to work on in the future. Perhaps, after a decade or two of work (in both the public and private sectors), we can renovate the dilapidated “f” in future and capitalise it once again.

After all, can we really expect top achievement and motivation from the next generation when we only offer a lowercase [f]uture to look forward to?

Alfredo Toro Hardy analyses where Latin America belongs.

In his seminal book The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington makes a distinction between a Latin American Civilization and the Western Civilization. In his words: “Latin America, however, has a distinct identity which differentiates it from the West. Although an offspring of European civilization, Latin America has evolved along very different path from Europe and North America…The West, then, includes Europe, North America, plus other European settler countries such as Australia and New Zealand”. (Huntington, 1996, p. 46).

Old prejudices

Behind this apparent courtesy of granting Latin Americans their own civilization, lie old prejudices. A quote by Kenneth Clark in another seminal book, Civilisation, gives us its full extent. When explaining why Spain was excluded from his tale of the Western civilization he says: “…but when one asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill, the answer is less clear. Don Quixote, the Great Saints, the Jesuits in South America? Otherwise she has simply remained Spain”. (Clark, 1969, p. XVII).

How can this be said about a country that has produced Greco, Velasquez and Goya; Miro, Gris, Dali and Picasso; Quevedo, Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca; Perez Galdos and Garcia Lorca; Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset; Suarez and de las Casas; Vives, Moratin, Jovellanos or Feijoo; Ramon y Cajal and Marañon, and so many others? Only ignorance or outrageous bias can explain it. Ignorance, of course, is ruled out.

Clark’s prejudices respond to an longstanding tradition that goes back to the sixteenth century: The “Black Legend”. According to it, inquisition, intolerance and counter reform were Spain’s three main traits. It was a vision linked to Spain’s Charles V, mighty opposition to religious reforms. Or to Phillip II’s feud with Elizabethan England, or to his bloody crush of dissenters in present day Netherlands. And, of course, to the tale of Spain’s excesses in its American conquest.

Needless to say that there was much more than a grain of truth in the Black Legend. However, the blunt denial of everything that Spain has done for the cause of civilization, as exemplified by Kenneth Clark’s words, defies all standards of objectivity. This bias has been transmitted to Spain’s offspring in the Americas and is at the base of Huntington’s position.

In the fringes of the fringe

All that aside, however, Huntington touched a sore point of debate within Latin America itself: Is it part of the Western Civilization or is it not? Even well-known Mexican intellectual Leopoldo Zea refers to: “The two Americas - the Iberian and the Western one”. (Zea, 1976, p. 18).

Behind this distinction lies the idea that the Iberian Peninsula itself was not properly Western. Indeed, for many, Spain and Portugal did not fully belong to the West. This, not only because of the many centuries in which they were under Muslim control, but because the Renaissance and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment, scarcely reached them. Spanish intellectual Américo Castro wrote that Spaniards are not entirely Westerners, in the same manner in which Venezuela´s Arturo Uslar Pietri referred that Slavic and Iberian Europe didn’t properly fit within the central nucleus of Western Europe. (Uslar Pietri, 1981, pp. 243-245).

However, upon arrival to the Americas, Iberians did not form a settlers’ society as the English did in Northern America, Australia or New Zealand. Much to the contrary, they mingled. Initially, with the indigenous population. Subsequently, with the slaves brought from Africa. This gave rise to an acculturated society. In other words, Latin America would represent a fringe version of the Iberian fringe model.

What is the Western World?

Are thus Latin Americans part of the Western World?  A brief background is in line before trying to provide an answer. Western civilization is the result of the interweaving between the Classical tradition - meaning the legacy of Greece and Rome - and the Judeo-Christian one. Renaissance and Enlightenment, have also to be added, but not on equal footing.

There were several instances in which the emergence of such civilization could have been aborted. The first of them came with the invasion of Greece by the Persians. As subjects of an Asian king, the Athenians would have never had the opportunity to develop their unique democratic culture. But also Roman predominance could have been cut short. If instead of a “Carthago delenda est”, there would have been a “Rome delenda est”, no Classical tradition would have emerged.

Something similar could be said of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Jews might have never returned from their imprisonment in Babylon. Christianity, on its part, may have never become what it did, if Saint Paul had not converted into this new religion. Nor would Christianity and the Roman Empire have fused, if Emperor Constantine had not prevailed in the civil war that took place within the so called Roman Tetrarchy.

Tons of “contrafactual history” could thus be written in this regard. In the end, though, a very particular mixture of traditions and knowledge, which were able to survive against all odds, became the essence of Western Civilization.   

A Latin American way of being Westerners

What entitlement does Latin America have in relation to this heritage? Arturo Uslar Pietri provides the answer:

“Colonization was a process of incorporation unto the Western values. Family, home, urbanization, social relation, the situation of women and children, came to us by way of the Church and the Law of the Indies, directly from Roman law by way of the Castilian Statutory Code of the ‘Siete Partidas’. The concept of law, of the State, of crime and punishment, of property, came to us in a straight line from the Justinian Code. We do not have any other legal base, nor do we have any other conception of the human being and its dignity. During five centuries we have been submitted to the Western culture, which is not only ours but also the only one we have. We certainly belong to it, but in our own way. We have a Latin American way of being Westerners”. (Uslar Pietri, 1979, p. 278).

But, what does he mean by a “Latin American way of being Westerners”? To begin with, it must be remember that Latin America is an acculturated society, which by extension entails a mixed identity. However, even if powerful influences moved in every direction within this acculturation process, not all of its three original components contributed in equal measure to the final product. Within this mix, Indigenous and black heritage had to submit to the cultural hegemony of the Iberians. The latter remained the undisputed guiding force, determining language, religion, law, family values, architectural traditions, and the like.

Latin America’s culture is Roman-Catholic, Latin, Scholastic and Thomist. Meaning, a group of fundamental Western traits. Even accepting the limitations of Iberians as full members of the Western World, and adding to it the acculturation process that took place in the New World, Latin Americans still remain Westerners. They are, however, within its periphery. Theirs, is an acculturated society with a clearly dominant Roman-Christian heritage that co-exist, sometimes peacefully, sometimes wistfully, and even belligerently, with the values of its other cultural identities.

Latin America within the Global South

As such, even if they are within the borderline of Western civilization, they are still part of it. Their location, although very close to the walls that encapsulates this world, remains inside them. Their peripheral neighbourhood, though, has easy access to the exit gates of such civilization. As inhabitants of the Western World’s fringe, they are able to move with total ease inside its walls. At the same time, however, they can easily cross outside and watch such walls with a critical and even surprised perspective. Few other Westerners, if any, enjoy of this particular duality.

Where does this place Latin America within the Global South? Contrary to countries like India, Indonesia or Vietnam, to mention just a few examples, it cannot claim a distinct identity. Colonization in its case was not a superficial phenomenon that altered the essence of its ancient societies, as it happened in the three abovementioned cases. On the contrary, it erased most of its pre-Columbian memories. (Mann, 2011, Chapter 1, Loc 748). With the exception of certain areas in the Upper Andes and in Middle America (or for the matter in the jungles of the Amazon), where the Indigenous populations remained barely untouched, acculturation distinctively prevailed. An Iberian led acculturation.

Two reasons can explain this disconnection with the past: Diseases and religious overzealousness. Smallpox, measles, typhus and other European illnesses to which the Indigenous populations had no resistance, reduced them to around 12 percent of the original total of about 30 to 40 million in 1500. According to John E. Kicza, without such demographic catastrophe, modern Latin America would more closely resemble Africa or India, were the European impact, although significant, did not radically alter old societies. (Kickza, 2004, p. 20; Restrepo, 2014, p. 51). Religious fundamentalism took care of the rest, as in the process of expunging paganism, Iberians destroyed and swept away, as much as they could, the memories, the knowledge and the identity of the Indigenous civilizations.

As a result, contrary to the bulk of the Global South, Latin Americans are still within the boundaries of the Western World. However, their peripherical nature allows them to relate equally easy with those inside or outside its walls. As a matter of fact, they are ideally suited to bridge these two worlds.

Alfredo Toro Hardy, PhD, is a retired Venezuelan career diplomat, scholar and author. Former Ambassador to the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Ireland, Chile and Singapore. Author or co-author of thirty-six books on international affairs. Former Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Princeton and Brasilia universities. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and a member of the Review Panel of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.

Photo by Pixabay

References                   

Clark, Kenneth (1969). Civilization. New York: Harper & Row Publishers.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1966). The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Mann, Charles C. (2011). 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Colombus. New York: Vintage Books.

Restrepo, Luis Fernando, “The Cultures of Colonialism” in Swanson Philip, Editor (2003). The Companion of Latin American Studies. London: Routledge.

Uslar Pietri, Arturo (1979). Fantasmas de Dos Mundos. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral.

Zea, Leopoldo (1976). El Pensamiento Latinoamericano. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel.

Kicza, John E., Editor (2004) The Indian in the Latin American History. Oxford: SR Books.

It is widely accepted that the humanities today are in a desperate situation, or already dead. This is a brief essay about why they will live forever.

In a time of much uncertainty, many students (parents) have turned to business and STEM for employment and security. Enrollment for philosophy, history, et al. has “collapsed,” while universities and the state do little. The UK aims to becomea “science and technology superpower” by 2030, while the U.S. and China now “fight for global leadership” in science and technology. None of this is new. An early Cold War surge in STEM support and interest, brought a massive fall in humanities degrees during the 1970s. Thus, it may help to know why these subjects will not only survive, but endure. 

______________

The three most powerful individuals of the 20th century never lived to see it. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin could hardly have imagined the forms of wealth, revolution, and science that have emerged in their names. Nor, in darker tones, the realities of collapse, totalitarianism, and genocide.

Smith, Marx, and Darwin were not kings or military commanders. Nor were they political leaders, spiritual authorities, or charismatic prophets. They were intellectuals. Their field of effort and the origin of the influence they exerted were in the realm of ideas. The systems of thought they articulated, in the hands of followers, detractors, demagogues, reformers, radicals, and many others, proved the substance of transformation. It is impossible to talk about or comprehend the rise of modern economics and the capitalist system—a system that profoundly altered the nature of the world—without calling upon Adam Smith. Marx wished to destroy this system and release a more equitable future, yet his thought became the inspiration for revolutions and wars that swept away entire societies and ended the lives of many millions of people. As for Darwin, his ideas were key to redefining the universe of living things and their relation to human beings, while enfeebling forever the explanatory power that religion had commanded for so many centuries.  

The conflicts and debates that led to these developments are far from over. If the past two centuries have revealed anything, it is that engagements over fundamental ideas—those that are elemental to liberalism, autocracy, to changes in the norms and organization of society—have gone raging on, with no prospect of an end. The battle over free markets and government power can hardly be called settled. The collapse of the Soviet Union hasn’t deleted state control from the globe or ensured the future of democracy. Modern biology hasn’t eliminated anti-science or forced fundamentalism into the shadows. The confrontations waged over these and other primary matters have an unyielding history to them that continues to be lived on a daily basis. No group, nation, or party has won the battle of ideas.

Contemporary society, in short, has been built over time from the materials of thought. This means not only grand theories or visions of progress, but ideas about freedom, justice, equality, race, education, the nation-state, and more. Employed in the context of institutions and political decision-making, such concepts are often called by other names—policies, principles, schemes, plans—but they all come back to basic, underlying philosophies about the nature of society and how it should work. Ideas, therefore, are not mere mental substance. Operating through leaders, the public, interest groups, communication media, and individuals, they are the determining substance of the modern world, and for that reason charged with emotion.

This understanding is far from new. Writing in the 1850s, Victor Hugo put it in striking terms: On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste past à l’invasion des idées - “One can resist the invasion of armies, never the invasion of ideas.” A few decades later, the infinitely quotable historian, John Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) remarked: “The great object, in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific is to get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own…” Then, too, John Maynard Keynes: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” Writing in the interwar years, Keynes can be forgiven for noting only two types of thinkers. In truth, a greater taxonomy has delivered us to the present.

In considering Smith, Marx, and Darwin, we can say they were all progeny of the Enlightenment. At base, they all shared ideas about truth as secular, society as changeable, and science as progressive. The Enlightenment was a critical era of separation from what had gone before. It was when, in the words of Jonathan Israel, one of the period’s most assiduous scholars, everything known became available for questioning, and in many cases, rejection, reform, or replacement. Not every received view was attacked; not all forms of privilege were challenged. Nonetheless, a great number of the most fundamental concepts about the nature of human beings and social reality were indeed contested, placed in doubt, and then, over time, supplanted.

Yet, thought and act at the time and in the next century were not universally progressive by any stretch of the imagination. Advances in favor of liberal values did not foreclose the continuing vigor nor reactionary response of their opposite. Neither did they themselves reject or prevent the growth of certain countering ideas. This, too, has been a key aspect. Intellectual leaders who argued for freedom, tolerance, and the individual were often unready to extend these values to women or the lower classes. They found reason to aggressively oppose slavery in words even while providing the rationale for it through the concept of race, as a scientific category, and racial hierarchy, as a natural ranking of innate mental and physical abilities. Colonial empires continued the enslavement of millions well into the 19th century. Western governments, moreover, imposed their will over entire peoples and continents well into the 20th. How to explain this, and its unbroken legacy to the present?

The Enlightenment created both the measure of its success and possibilities for failure. The march to progress, in other words, has taken many backward and ugly turns. Many today question whether such progress has even taken place. How to define it, after all, in what terms? Such is no less urgent to answer today as in 1918 or 1945. Ideas, as Lord Acton perceived, do have a life and dynamism that transcends any single era or interpretation. In the hands of successive generations, they are altered and reshaped, stripped of unwanted material or color, stretched to extremes, made to support acts and decisions that their creators would have hated and feared.

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” mentioned only once in a book of 800+ pages, was twisted into the notion that markets have an innate, near-supernatural power to self-correct and must never be touched or toyed with lest they unleash economic evils. It is a concept that has served certain views over time yet could not have been predicted from any open-minded reading of Wealth of Nations. Marx, in his own day, is reputed to have said, “I am not a Marxist.” As some scholars have commented, if not for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose versions of communism would make him tremble with despair, Karl Marx might be less well-known than Rosa Luxemburg. With Darwin, exploitive misinterpretations of his theory, natural selection, have impacted domains as disparate as geopolitics, early education, and literary criticism.

The 20th century, for reasons that emphasize world conflicts, the Cold War, artistic movements, and more, has been called the age of “ideological struggle.” Was the 19th century, with its own revolutions (political, industrial, cultural), imperial rivalries, belief in national destiny, and racial “science,” any less so? And what of today? What of the ideas that have impelled global terrorism, that have torn and embittered western democracies, that have aided the worldwide rise of strongman, re-mythified the powers of technology, and failed to deal with the climate threat?

It would be exceedingly foolish, in other words, to believe that the power of ideas has diminished in any way. The current century will continue to see conflicts, bright and dark, in the realm of guiding thought—in ideas that are the conscience behind national, institutional, and personal decisions. In the end, therefore, the humanities may shrink, even retreat for a time. But their death would mean society no longer has any interest in itself, in the world, in humanity, in the future.

Note: This essay is adapted from the introduction to The Shape of the New, which I co-authored with Daniel Chirot.  

Photo by Cine Insomnia

Helidah Didi Ogude argues that a long history of neoliberal state policies have left a US welfare system unfit for purpose and a citizenry wrongly held responsible for their own precarity.

Speaking to supporters at a 2017 rally in Missouri, US President Donald Trump promised that welfare reform would be one of his administration’s priorities. Echoing and reinscribing strongly held neoliberal suspicions about those that seek social welfare, he said: “I know people, they work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn’t work at all.  And the person who’s not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off.  And it’s not going to happen.  Not going to happen!”

In April 2018, Trump signed an executive order directing US federal agencies to strengthen the work requirements for various welfare programs, including food stamps, Medicaid, and housing programs. Trump Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue succinctly captured the position of the Administration, claiming that “long-term dependency has never been part of the American Dream.”

This “American Dream” is a core mythology of neoliberalism, one which implicitly and explicitly endorses individualism, self-reliance, and the cardinal idea that all can make it if they simply work hard. These myths have been successful in creating not only an unethical, minimal, and mean welfare state, but also a largely insecure and demoralized citizenry. Prior to COVID-19-related shutdowns, and as of March 13, there were already 7.1 million unemployed Americans. With the more than 22 million workers that have since become unemployed, the real US unemployment rate is closer to 18%. This alarming figure reflects an already existing minimal and apathetic welfare state that, prior to this crisis, drove a vast number of Americans to the margins of the US economy and excluded and shamed them from seeking the social welfare they require to build resilience against such shocks. In the current political moment, this economic precarity is sustained by Trump’s right-wing administration that seeks to bring about an increasingly small state and a bloated and powerful corporate elite. However, those on the “other side of the aisle” have frequently assisted in this endeavor.

In this context, the term neoliberalism requires clarification - while it is a widely used phrase, it is often poorly understood and misapplied. Neoliberalism constitutes a set of political economy practices that assume human well-being is best nurtured through strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. It prescribes individual freedoms and needs as supreme. A neoliberal state represents the interests of multinationals and financial capital; its interventions in the market, if any, are restrained to a minimum. Author and academic David Harvey notes that neoliberalization is a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.” The critical contention here is that the process of neoliberalization, the bedfellow of free market capitalism, allows the dominant class to entrench and expand its social control.

COVID-19 and the dire socioeconomic damage it’s inflicting on so many in the U.S. have made it important to reflect on the ethics of the welfare system and whether it advances the political project of creating a “decent society.” In trying to understand this moral space, a good starting point is the work of political scientist Sanford Schram. In his chapter “The Deep Semiotic Structure of Deservingness,” Schram tries to make sense of the discourses that have enabled the framing of welfare dependency as a “manifestation of the pathologies of the poor, and most especially black, underclass.” These in turn led President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress to declare “The end of welfare as we know it” in 1996. Schram argues that the discourse espoused then, as well as today’s popular assumptions, are anchored in the contrast between “two central subjectivities: the deserving autonomous, self-sufficient individual and the underserving dependent who fails to exhibit the independence assumed to be central in the making of the liberal citizen who can be counted on to act for himself or herself.”

These two pervasive subjectivities reflect some of neoliberalism’s central tenets. They are useful entry points for understanding the way some economists as well as others engaged in public policy formulation theorize the role of the state. Critically, although Trump’s administration is discursively committed to the assumptions underpinning those two subjectivities, their assumptions are not held exclusively by the right-wing populist class, but also by others on the political spectrum (such as the Democrats).

Neoliberalism and The Perversity Thesis

In the same chapter, Schram argues that social welfare discourse in the US has been dominated by the so-called perversity thesis. This idea, which originated with political economist Albert O. Hirschman, draws on both classical liberal economic theories and Christian morality. It asserts that “contrary to the apparent reality that offering financial aid to the ‘poor’ was a kind of charitable act of assistance, such interventions actually undermined the natural order of things and corrupted individuals who took such succor so that they lost the ability to practice self-discipline and to exercise personal responsibility.”

Two assumptions underlie this thesis. First, the term natural order of things implies that government intervention (a seemingly benevolent “charitable act”) necessarily disrupts a so-called ordinary way of functioning – that is, a society in which the market determines welfare outcomes and the state plays a minimal role at most. For advocates of a neoliberal state, the COVID-19 virus and the attendant request for unemployment benefits are ostensibly an instance of market failure, a disruption of the “way things should work”. As such, only now is the government’s temporary intrusion in the natural order justifiable.

Second, the perversity thesis implies that those in need of welfare are in that position because of a lack in “self-discipline.” This pathology, however, is not ascribed indiscriminately. It is deeply gendered and racialized. For most, the figure of welfare is the so-called welfare queen: a promiscuous, ill-disciplined African American woman with a cigarette in her mouth, a baby on her hip, and many other malnourished children at her feet. Despite the fact that most welfare benefit recipients are in fact white, racial and ethnic minorities as well as women remain the primary targets of this stigmatization and shame.

The notion that reliance on welfare is caused by a lack of self-discipline ignores the structural and historically contingent sociopolitical and economic ideologies and practices that have produced contemporary income inequalities and chronic joblessness. These same ideologies and practices are all inflected by race and gender. In a sense, it has become widely understood that the widespread impoverishment of US minorities is of their own doing, a notion discursively reiterated by mainstream media and certain policy actors. This, as activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor says, “rationalizes the social and economic disparities between African Americans [and other marginalized communities] and the rest of the population and absolves the economic and political systems from any real responsibility.” This is a crucial point. For example, minorities are over-represented in confirmed COVID-19 cases across the US, yet this discursive pretext places blame on the minorities themselves for contracting the disease. Meanwhile, it ignores pre-existing conditions such as housing and food insecurity that limit minorities’ ability to engage in physical distancing measures, all the while absolving the government of any responsibility.

In contemporary discourse, the perversity thesis uses mythologies like the American Dream to affirm a reverence for self-reliance on the one hand and a deep suspicion of perceived individual failure on the other. This is echoed by Trump himself, who frequently asserts that he is a self-made businessman who hates the idea of failing. Trump, as well as many others across the political spectrum, characterize failure as an indigent quality, one that reflects an individual’s inabilities, rather than the broader environment that affects a person’s opportunities and welfare outcomes. In doing so, they sustain the falsity that poverty is a legitimate outcome or an unfortunate, inevitable reality. Poverty is portrayed as a badge of failure rather than a consequence of economic structure. In this line of thinking, notions of individualism, inequality, and hyper-consumerism – widely accepted neoliberal norms and values that emphasize the individual, entrepreneurial qualities, material difference, and excess – are accepted forms of truth, of reality, and represent the way many people view the world and evaluate others. 

An Unethical, Mean and Minimal Welfare State: Makings of a Demoralized Citizenry

At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump claimed that “it’s time for all Americans to get off of welfare and get back to work.” This very brief quote contains important ethical considerations. On the one hand, Trump denigrates being on welfare, while also unequivocally asserting that the sole solution to overcoming a position of poverty is getting back to work. There are two questionable arguments at play here. First, he claims that the indecent jobs on offer could in fact propel people out of poverty and need for welfare. Second, he suggests that returning to work is for Americans’ own benefit, rather than a guise to ensure that the working class sustains an economy that benefits the corporate elite. In his book Market Reasoning as Moral Reasoning: Why Economists Should Re-engage with Political Philosophy, political philosopher Michael Sandel sharply criticizes this kind of ethical reasoning, noting that some of the most “corrosive effects of markets on moral and civic practices… involve the degradation that can occur when we turn all human relationships into transactions.” In other words, the neoliberal state subordinates the lives of everyday people to a mechanistic and unfeeling market system.

The combination of welfare’s profound stigmatization and an inability to sustain a decent life through one or more jobs can have dire consequences for the mental well-being and self-perception of welfare recipients. Research shows that identity and self-perception have a significant influence on decision-making. For instance, stigmatized individuals’ behavior and actions risk reinforcing stereotypes, distorting their performance as a result.

Schram affirms this in his analysis of welfare reform in the 1990s, noting that “just like any good discourse, ‘welfare dependency’ then becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy, making itself real, manufacturing the reality that it claims pre-existed it.” The poor (or those in precarious economic positions) internalize the notion that they are at fault for their poverty, and that they are undeserving of support. They also internalize that to escape poverty, their allegedly deficient behavior requires changing.  This is the perverse generation of a demoralized citizenry.

For policymakers, framing welfare in this way influences their policy emphasis and priorities. The social welfare reforms of Bill Clinton’s administration, continued by Republicans since, have shifted the location of welfare discourse. It is no longer about the redistribution of income to the poor. It has instead become a “behavioral-modification regime” that seek to make individuals “self-disciplined so that they, in turn, will become self-sufficient.” The dependency metaphor thus serves to distract the public and policymakers from the underlying issues that create dependency to begin with: structural poverty, income inequality, inadequate education and jobs, sexism, racism, and more. To quote Schram, this discourse “operates more like a metonymy in which a contiguous reference point is emphasized rather than the original object of concern. The poverty that precedes welfare dependency is ignored.” (emphasis my own)

COVID-19 has laid bare the economic fragility of so many. Yet, it is neoliberalization that enabled this fragility in the first place. Its roots are in a demoralized citizenry, misguided policymakers, and a market-based system that primarily sustains the capital of the elite class, while the pervasively touted benefits and pursuit of the American Dream are used to intellectually and politically pacify the public. And so, as Trump insists that the US economy re-open so Americans can “get back to work” because the US “is based on that,” it should be underscored that prematurely returning to work at the expense of one's health and the health of others, is a decision informed by economic precarity and the internalized shame of prolonged reliance on unemployment benefits. What is absent, however, is an acknowledgment that this logic is twisted: it is not you that has failed, but rather the neoliberal state that has failed you.

Helidah Didi Ogude, originally from South Africa & Kenya, is a PhD Candidate in Urban and Public Policy at The New School, New York and is also an alumna of the Global Governance Futures– Robert Bosch Foundation Multilateral Dialogues program.

Photo by Harrison Haines from Pexels

Daniel Ghezelbash and Mary Crock examine recent Australian policy towards asylum seekers.

The question of how to deal with asylum seekers arriving by boat (Unauthorised Maritime Arrivals, or UMAs) has featured as an electoral issue in Australia since the first Vietnamese refugees landed on Australia’s shores in 1976. Even so, the recent federal poll broke new ground. The incumbent centre-left Labor government and the opposition centre-right Liberal National Coalition engaged in a veritable ‘race to the bottom’ as each attempted to outdo the other with harsh border control policies. The rationales given by the two parties varied slightly.  For Labor the issue was framed in terms of the need to deter asylum seekers from risking their lives at sea. For the Liberal/National Coalition led by Tony Abbott, boat arrivals were decried more broadly as a threat to public order and national security. The conservatives prevailed handsomely on a platform that included a promise to stop the boats.

In this article we examine the key elements of the new government’s border protection policies. We evaluate the compatibility of the new measures with Australia’s international legal obligations. The non-refoulement obligations contained in the Refugee Convention operate to prohibit the removal of a refugee to place where they will face persecution on one of the five convention grounds (race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership of a particular social group). Collectively, similar obligations under the major human rights treaties (ICCPR, CRC and CAT) forbid removal of a person to a country where they might face death, torture or other gross mistreatment. These non-refoulement obligations also extend to ensuring that a person is not sent to a country which might in turn send that person to a country where they face unacceptable risk. The article concludes with an analysis of the potential impact on Australian society of the government’s rhetoric vilifying asylum seekers.

Regional Resettlement and Offshore Processing

The most concerning and expensive of the Abbott government’s election commitments is its determination to continue the regional resettlement and offshore processing policies (re)introduced by the Labor government in 2012. Under the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Arrangement, UMAs can be transferred to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to have their claim for refugee status assessed under PNG law. Those found to be refugees, will then be settled in PNG. The government also inherited an arrangement with the tiny island state of Nauru which allows for the transfer of UMAs for the processing of asylum claims. Nauru has made it clear that it cannot permanently resettle these people. Rather, recognised refugees will be held until a third country can be found to resettle them.

That is the theory. UMA arrivals have slowed markedly since the election in September – down to between 100-200 a week from a peak of over 1500 a week in August. However, global pressures such as the war in Syria mean that ‘stopping the boats’ is highly unlikely. It is only a matter of time before the smugglers realise that the government’s capacity to deflect its boat people is dramatically finite.  In fact there is evidence that most of the asylum seekers transferred under the Labor government have since been brought to Australia to make way for the Coalition’s crack-down. The exercise in laundering refugees is an expensive one and may explain the price tag of $11 billion mentioned by the new Immigration Minister as the cost of the outgoing government’s asylum seeker policy.

The concern of many is that offshore processing arrangements do not contain adequate safeguards to ensure that Australia complies with its obligations under the Refugee Convention and other Human Rights instruments. Transfers to Nauru and PNG are being carried out pursuant to non-binding diplomatic assurances that asylum seekers transferred there will not be sent back to countries were they are at risk of refoulement. Such assurances are difficult to monitor and impossible to enforce. Persons transferred to Nauru or Manus Island may indeed be at serious risk of refoulement. Those detained in PNG are also at serious risk of physical harm – both from disease that is endemic in the dirt poor state and from the lawlessness of a restive population opposed to accepting the transferees.

There are added problems in the government’s stated goal of transferring all UMAs to offshore processing facilities within 48 hours of arrival. Minister Scott Morrison has stated ‘if people are fit to get on a boat, they’ll be quickly deemed fit to fly.’ The 48-hour turn around target, however, has been criticised as it does not provide sufficient time to carry out health checks and to screen for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis or typhoid. Without such testing, there is the risk that persons with acute or chronic illnesses may be sent to remote offshore facilities where they will not have access to required medical treatment, or that there may be break out of communicable disease in these remote offshore centers.

Turning Back the Boats

Another pillar of the government’s border control policy is a commitment to turning back boats to Indonesia where possible. Since being elected, the government has distanced itself from statements made in opposition indicating that they would physically tow boats back to Indonesia. Instead, they assert their policy is to turn boats around to Indonesia where it is safe to do so. The distinction is important when considering the impact of each action from the perspective of the Indonesian government. The act of an Australian vessel physically towing an asylum seeker boat from international waters to an Indonesian port without Indonesia’s permission would be a major incursion on Indonesian sovereignty. Returning boats without Australian vessels entering Indonesian waters is less problematic. However, the distinction becomes less important when considering Australia’s obligations towards asylum seekers under international law. In either instance Australia will be in breach of its non-refoulement obligations if returning a person to a place where they face persecution contrary to the UN Refugee Convention, or to a situation where they are in danger of death, torture or other mistreatment. Either towing or turning back boats may also be contrary to the law of the sea where a boat is unseaworthy such that the lives of passengers may be at risk.

Temporary Protection Visas

The Abbott government has committed to the reintroduction of temporary protection visas (TPVs) for certain classes of asylum seekers. The new TPV regime will target two groups. The first are the more than 30,000 UMAs in Australia awaiting the processing of asylum claims. Second are future arrivals who come to Australia without a visa and/or who are not immigration cleared (whether they arrive by boat or plane). Asylum seekers from these two groups who have their claims for refugee status recognised will be issued with temporary 3-year visas. They will barred from sponsoring family and will have to make a fresh claim for asylum to obtain a new temporary protection visa once their three year visa expires.

Temporary protection visas were used in Australia between 1999-2007. As we have discussed elsewhere, these visas encourage rather than discourage irregular migration because families cannot be sponsored by regular means. This leads to more women and children making the perilous journey by sea. TPVs also had a devastating impact on the well-being of asylum seekers, with a 2006 study finding that TPV holders had dramatically higher levels of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder when compared to permanent visa holders.

Fast-Track Assessments and Removal of Independent Review

Policy documents released by the Coalition government before the September election indicate a commitment to removing access to independent merits review and to introducing a fast track assessment removal process for UMAs. The only avenue of review under the new system will be before a single departmental case officer. A new process will be established to fast track the processing of asylum claims deemed to be without merit. Based on the UK’s Detained Fast Track System and the US’s Expedited Removal regime, asylum seekers subjected to the process will have the first instance assessment of their claim fast-tracked. An automatic rapid review will follow if the initial claim is rejected. Where a claim is rejected upon review, the asylum seeker will be placed in rapid removal procedures.

Robust assessment procedures and access to independent review are essential for ensuring the quality of refugee status determinations. Without such procedures, there is the risk that genuine refugees will not be recognised as such and deported back to a place where they will face harm, placing Australia in violation of its non-refoulement obligations. The UK’s Detained Fast Track System on which the Coalition’s new policy is based has been criticised as being unsuitable for adequately assessing complex cases. The importance of an independent review body for preventing non-refoulement is underscored by the fact that such a high proportion of asylum claims are overturned by the RRT. Between July 2012 and March 18 2013, the RRT overturned 74 per cent of first instance decisions rejecting asylum claims by persons who arrived by boat. That means that without access to such review, a significant portion of asylum seekers may be subject to refoulement.

Rhetoric of Exclusion

Alongside the substantive changes in policy, the Abbott government has adopted rhetoric which demonises asylum seekers and risks damaging Australia’s multicultural society.  The Department of Immigration and Citizenship has been renamed to the  Department of Immigration and Border Protection. The new border protection initiative has been named ‘Operation Sovereign Borders‘, and a three star general has been appointed to head up the operation. A recent directive to immigration staff recommends that boat arrivals be referred to as ‘illegal migrants’, rather than as ‘irregular maritime arrivals’, while ‘clients’ are now to be known as ‘detainees’. The collective impact of these changes is to portray asylum seekers arriving by boat as a threat to Australia that must be curtailed. Similar tactics employed by the conservative government between 1997 and 2007 had a devastating impact on Australia’s multicultural society. It was no coincidence that these years saw an unprecedented number of citizens and permanent residents wrongly arrested, detained and even deported. Many, like Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon Alvarez were mentally ill and/or physically handicapped.  These were also the years that brought inter-racial rioting to Australia. One might well ask whether Australians really have the stomach to return to such divisive and destructive policies.  Only time will tell.

Daniel Ghezelbash is an Adjunct Lecturer and PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. His dissertation compares measures adopted by the United States and Australia to deter asylum seekers. In particular, it examines the use of mandatory detention, interdiction and extraterritorial processing and the judicial response to these policies in each jurisdiction.

Mary Crock is Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. She is co-author (with Laurie Berg) of Immigration, Refugees and Forced Migration: Law, Policy and Practice in Australia(Federation Press, 2011).

This post first appeared on e-International Relations.

This is the first chapter in a forthcoming Global Policy e-book on modern slavery. Contributions from leading experts highlighting practical and theoretical issues surrounding the persistence of slavery, human trafficking and forced labour will be serialised here over the coming months.

Many different practices and experiences have been described by activists and politicians as forms of slavery, or as equivalent to slavery. Common examples of include exploited workers seeking better pay and conditions describing themselves as ‘wage slaves’, or revolutionaries accusing tyrannical political regimes of unjustly ‘enslaving’ their subjects. Over the last three decades, there has been a major investment in the concept of ‘modern slavery’, which is also closely associated with the related categories of human trafficking and forced labour. While each of these categories means different things from a legal standpoint, the finer distinctions between them frequently get lost, with modern slavery, human trafficking and forced labor frequently being portrayed as essentially interchangeable and equivalent. This lack of precision at least partly stems from the potency of slavery as a symbol of extreme abuse. For many campaigners, the specifics of slavery tend to be overshadowed by the powerful images which slavery evokes.

Since any number of different practices have recently been described as ‘slavery’, we are faced with the question of what counts as slavery in our world today. It is much harder to answer this question now than it was in the past. For the vast majority of human history, slavery was a legally recognised category that was officially regulated and defended by governments and religious authorities. While different historical slave systems had different features, they were nonetheless broadly defined by a series of publicly recognised rules which governed the status of the enslaved. Individuals who were enslaved were in little doubt as to their status, since there were elaborate systems in place that carefully codified how they could be sold, inherited or manumitted. These systems were in turn defended by layers of violence and surveillance, which were designed to collectively keep the enslaved in their ‘rightful’ place, and to prevent and punish resistance. Thanks to the passage of numerous laws outlawing slavery throughout the globe, our world today is now organised on quite different terms. There remain no shortage of horrific examples of exploitation, vulnerability and coercion, but the elaborate systems that regulated and defended slavery as a distinct institution have been almost entirely dismantled, although their legacies still continue via enduring systems of discrimination, privilege and white supremacy.

How do these and other changes impact how we go about approaching slavery today? Should we favour a narrow approach, since historical slave systems displayed a number of distinctive features which sharply separated enslavement from other categories of exploitation? Should we instead favour a broader approach, since many of the abuses associated with historical slave systems have not come to an end despite numerous laws outlawing slavery? When political activists refer to ‘modern slavery’, should we be reluctant to ask too many questions since they are seeking to improve the world? Does insisting upon a strict definition play into the hands of people who are abusing human rights? Or do we risk slavery becoming meaningless if all kinds of abuses can be now classified as forms of slavery? Does embracing a broad approach end up diluting and decentering the historical atrocities of Transatlantic enslavement and its legacies?

There can be no easy answers to these types of questions. Different people will have different perspectives and interests when it comes to determining what counts as slavery. On this issue, as with many other issues, the infamy and iconography of Transatlantic enslavement continues to cast a long shadow. Thanks to the cataclysmic experiences associated with centuries of Transatlantic enslavement, slavery is commonly recognised as epitomising the ‘worst of the worst’ as far as exploitation, vulnerability and coercion are concerned. When different practices are described as forms of ‘slavery’, or ‘slavery by another name’, this typically involves politically motivated efforts to harness the historical notoriety of Transatlantic slavery in order to highlight specific examples of exceptional levels of abuse that continue to be found in the world today.

Classification via comparison

Organised political opposition to slavery as a general institution most strongly emerged in response to the severe and systemic abuses that defined Transatlantic enslavement over nearly four centuries. As is well known, this historic catastrophe had far-reaching consequences for many parts of Africa, which experienced major transformations due to the political economy of enslavement that emerged from Europe’s rising demand for slaves to work in the colonial Americas. This in turn led to the cumulative horrors of the voyage to the Americas, which involved a concentrated period of severe suffering, trauma and death. Enslaved Africans who were fortunate enough to survive this transcontinental forced migration were then subjected to an extremely exploitative and abusive slave system that was primarily defined on the basis of racial difference and ruthlessly structured around economic calculations and capitalist markets.

The emergence of organized political opposition to slavery was heavily influenced by these distinctive features. From the eighteenth century onwards, the severe abuses which defined Transatlantic enslavement would come to be attributed to a sharply demarcated, economically exploitative, and racially defined institution which could also be legally abolished, and thereby ostensibly ended. Opponents of slavery generally had no problem identifying who the enslaved were – or how they differed from non-slaves – because slavery was a clearly demarcated legal category with a venerable historical pedigree. Enslavement also had an intimacy and immediacy which was derived from all kinds of lived experiences. Despite the fact that not all Africans in the Americas were enslaved, the entrenched association between slavery and race also further ensured that slavery was widely regarded as institution which stood apart from other practices.

While there were many aspects to the case against enslavement, there were two themes which stood out: the ownership of human beings and extreme dominion and exploitation. These themes were central to the overall case against slavery, because they were foundational to arguments regarding the core features which clearly set slavery apart from other institutions. Transatlantic enslavement would come to be defined in terms of powerful images, spectacles, and testimonials of extraordinary suffering and abuse: chains, ships, whips, auctions, death. This iconography has a complex and contested history, as scholars such as Saidiya Hartman have demonstrated, but these images have nonetheless established a series of markers which have played key roles in shaping how Transatlantic enslavement has been connected to contemporary practices. There continue to be efforts to minimize or excuse the atrocities of Transatlantic enslavement, as the lingering popularity of the Confederate battle flag in the United States demonstrates. However, this denial has limited traction within modern slavery circles, where there is a consensus that Transatlantic enslavement defines the absolute worst of the worst.

This iconography of Transatlantic enslavement has major consequences for efforts to classify contemporary forms of exploitation. Whenever questions get asked regarding the status and severity of different forms of exploitation, the main benchmark for comparison tends to be Transatlantic enslavement, human property and extreme exploitation. As scholars such as Igor Kopytoff have argued, comparisons between Transatlantic enslavement and other forms of exploitation tend to be structured around subjective appraisals of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ treatment, which in turn function as primary benchmarks for assessing the relative severity of specific practices. When treatment serves as the main benchmark, comparisons usually unfold in two different directions: distancing or equivalence (figure two, below). On the one hand, we have distancing, where other forms of exploitation end up being classified as less ‘severe’ than Transatlantic enslavement. They are therefore classified as either lesser evils and perhaps even positive goods. On the other hand, we have equivalence, where other forms of exploitation end up being classified as equivalent to Transatlantic enslavement. They are therefore classified as the worst of the worst. Efforts to classify abuses according to levels of treatment also tend to be influenced by broader ideas about innocence and vulnerability, which mean that the exploitation of women and children tends to be regarded as more extreme than that of adult males, especially in contexts where exploitation is associated with sexual activities. Treatment is a crude and incomplete benchmark, which does not necessarily do justice to many aspects of experiences of enslavement, but it is nonetheless widely used as a primary framework for classification.

The politics of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’

There is a hierarchy at work here which is worthwhile teasing out in more detail. Recent comparisons between Transatlantic enslavement and other forms of exploitation typically locate Transatlantic enslavement at an exceptional position at the apex of a spectrum of exploitation, vulnerability and coercion. This hierarchy can be visually represented in terms of a triangle (figure one, below), with Transatlantic enslavement occupying a position at the upper most point, with other categories or ‘levels’ of exploitation and vulnerability being located further down the triangle based on subjective appraisals of their ‘lesser’ severity. The key point is that comparisons between these sorts of categories exercise a major role in shaping how people think when they are faced with questions of how different practices should be classified. Many different historical practices could also potentially be located on this triangle (the Spanish and Portuguese continue to disingenuously and incorrectly declare that their slave systems were ‘mild’ based upon self-serving comparisons with the French and English). In this context, however, I am chiefly concerned with how the classification of current practices is defined by this hierarchy.

Figure One: Benchmarking contemporary practices against Transatlantic enslavement

Figure Two: Equivalence and Distancing

This contemporary focus is reflected in the other categories which have been included here: ‘lesser’ forms of servitude, exploitative ‘free’ labour, and ‘normal’ labour and living conditions. None of these categories are straight-forward. Firstly, we have servitude, which is an umbrella term which is usually understood to include slavery as a subcategory, with other forms of servitude including serfdom, pawnship, and indentured, bonded and forced labour. The language of ‘lesser’ servitudes, which comes from the work of international lawyer Jean Allain, refers to practices that are said to fall just short of slavery, but which nonetheless share core features in common with slavery in terms of overall forms of exploitation, or levels of treatment.

Next we have exploitative ‘free’ labour, which comes with all kinds of complications. Whenever ‘free’ labour gets compared to slavery – or ‘unfree’ labour more broadly – the terms of the comparison almost invariably end up casting free labour in a highly favourable light. This is politically significant, since it portrays ‘free’ labour as a condition which is positive or desirable, and in turn suggests that people should be thankful to be ‘free’. Although freedom is commonly associated with many positive virtues, the accompanying language of ‘choice’ or ‘consent’ can frequently end up obscuring more than it reveals. In theory, free labour involves workers negotiating a deal with an employer regarding their service. If the employer uses direct coercion to compel them to start work, or to continue to work, then their labour is said to become ‘unfree’. However, there will be many occasions where desperate workers lack viable alternatives, and therefore ‘freely’ consent to highly exploitative conditions. There are currently hundreds of millions of ‘free’ labourersacross the globe who routinely endure terrible and irregular wages, unsafe and unhealthy workspaces and homes, sexual harassment and assault, and bullying and abuse. They may well be formally free to leave, in the sense that they retain the capacity to seek out other forms of work, but their capacity to exercise any kind of individual ‘choice’ is nonetheless constrained by their precarious status and a shortage of viable alternatives.

‘Free’ labour will always be a deeply political issue. Classifying specific abuses as forms of slavery, or as equivalent to slavery, typically involves a political and ethical argument that they represent exceptional cases of exploitation and abuse that belong at the very apex of this triangle as the worst of the worst. Where does this leave many other cases of exploitation and abuse that fall short of this threshold? Does targeting these ‘exceptional’ cases mean excluding ‘non-exceptional’ forms of exploitation? Do cases of exploitative ‘free labour’ become desirable, or unremarkable, because they are said to fall short of the threshold associated with slavery? Should the primary focus be severe forms of labour exploitation or all forms of labour exploitation?

‘Exceptional’ cases and everyday systems

Some of the issues at stake here can be illustrated by thinking about labour practices in global supply chains. As is well known, the last three decades have seen numerous international corporations engage in a race to the bottom, with most aspects of production processes and supply chains being relocated to countries in the Global South with lower wages, less regulation, and fewer workplace protections. For corporate executives, the main goal of the global supply chain is to maximize corporate profits while minimizing their political and legal liability by subcontracting many aspects of the production process to outsiders. Major corporations exercise their market power to drive down costs per unit, since their numerous suppliers in the Global South have limited capacity to bargain for better returns or less demanding production cycles. This combination of low prices and high expectations means that companies further down the chain are under sustained pressure to minimize wages and working conditions. Contracts get subcontracted and then subcontracted again, creating multiple layers between the corporation and the worker who ends up producing the actual goods that the corporation required.

How should workers towards the bottom of these global supply chains be classified? Do they belong in the ‘free’ labour category, or do their circumstances sometimes rise to the threshold of slave or unfree labour?  When faced with the question of classification, should we primarily focus upon similarities with slavery, and thereby advance an argument that their exploitative working conditions can classified as the same as, or as bad as, slavery (i.e. equivalence). Should we alternatively concentrate upon differences, and thereby advance a counter argument that they cannot be equated or associated with slavery, and therefore belong on a much lower rung within the above hierarchy (i.e. distancing)? Not everything belongs at the tip of the triangle, but the dividing line in the middle between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ also raises challenging questions as well. 

How specific practices get classified is rarely neutral or disinterested, but instead gets shaped by competing agendas and interests. It should come as no surprise that corporations and supply chain subcontractors are keen to create as much distance as possible here, since no company wants to be known for sanctioning or practicing modern slavery or unfree labour. It is for this reason that someone like Ivanka Trump, whose ‘Trump’ branded products are made by precarious and vulnerable workers in places such as Indonesia, is able to publicly denounce modern slavery as an ‘ugly stain on civilization.’ The stain of modern slavery gets defined and demarcated in a way which leaves everyday systems of labour exploitation outside the frame.

Questions of classification usually involve both legal standards and lived experiences. Take, for example, the legal arrangements which typically govern migrant workers who travel internationally to countries in Middle East to work on constructions project or in private households. These workers are regulated by employment contracts and visa arrangements which are laid out in laws and policies, but they also continue to be subjected to numerous forms of exploitation and abuse. Various historical parallels can also be made here. When the Transatlantic slave trade was legally abolished, the British, French and Portuguese turned to indentured labour schemes, which saw millions of workers from India and elsewhere sign contracts which were subsequently bought and sold in ways that resembled slave trading. How much weight should we assign to contracts and consent? How important are the lived experiences of the workers? How should we respond when some migrant workers are treated in one way, while others have different lived experiences? There are an estimated 23 million migrant workers in the Arab Middle East. They are not always treated the same, but the systems under which they labour have been carefully designed to leave them vulnerable and precarious.

Laws and regulations can sometimes help to clarify the terms of this debate, but they are unlikely to provide a definitive resolution, since there will invariably be further disagreements regarding how they should be written, and on what basis they should be applied. We should not expect to reach a lasting consensus when it comes to whether or not any number of exploitative practices found in our world today should be classified as the same as, similar to, or entirely separate from slavery, and therefore merit being equated with or distanced from Transatlantic enslavement.

These dilemmas are magnified by the fact any effort to draw a line between slave and non-slave, – or ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ – will always be inherently political. Whenever slavery is the primary yardstick against which other practices are measured, then systems and cases of exploitation which end up being classified as ‘bad but not all that bad’ can appear unremarkable, or even desirable. This in turn has all kinds of political advantages for individuals, companies and governments that directly benefit from their operations. Hundreds of millions of workers are subject to highly exploited ‘free’ labour within supply chains and migration systems. Should the focus be all workers, or only workers who are deemed to be abused to an exceptional degree? While it may seem obvious that both exceptional abuses and everyday practices should both be addressed, this is rarely how things actually work out in practice. Selectively focusing upon the ‘exceptional’ will always be a politically appealing way of sidestepping systems of everyday abuse.

Joel Quirk is a Professor of Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research focuses upon slavery and abolition, human mobility, social movements, repairing historical wrongs, and the politics and history of Africa.

Photo by lalesh aldarwish from Pexels

A second wave of global protests following the Arab Spring has brought youth onto the streets to voice their frustrations. United across time-zones and cultures, these young people are responding to shared challenges of political and economic exclusion. But no longer settling for a change in leadership, protesters are using new forms of mobilisation to challenge political monopolies and expand public engagement.

Early in 2019, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was ousted following months of youth-led street demonstrations. Today, protesters continue to demand the end of military control over the country. Around the same time, in April, another long-standing dictator, Omar al-Bashir, was deposed by mass youth demonstrations in Sudan. Following Al-Bashir’s departure protests continued against the military transitional government.

We are witnessing similar uprisings by youth in Lebanon and Iraq, which have forced the resignation of each country’s sectarian-based governments. Demonstrations continue as the youth demands a complete end to sectarian politics. In Hong Kong, youth protests, which started as an opposition to an extradition bill, have now grown to demand the resignation of the territory’s Chief Executive and full autonomy from mainland China. In Haiti, thousands of young people seeking to oust President Jovenel Moïse came out to the streets in September to protest poverty, inequalities and government corruption.

The year has also seen millions of young people from different walks of life, united across cultures and time-zones, come out to the streets to demand urgent action to tackle climate change. Among those, many were secondary school students below voting age, worried about the world they will inherit due to politicians’ inaction and denial of global warming. Likewise, the relentless non-violent resistance of the Extinction Rebellion movement has been confronting environmental inaction.

Although youth have always been at the forefront of political protests, those of the Arab Spring in 2011 marked a new era in youth political activism. Apart from deposing entrenched dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, the Arab Spring revolutions also became a catalyst for a series of youth protests and social movements all over the world – from the Y’en a Marre in Senegal, the Los Indignados in Spain, the Occupy Movement in various countries including the UK and the #FeesMustFall in South Africa, to the Umbrella Movement in Honk Kong and #BlackLivesMatter in the United States, to mention just a few.

What is waithood?

The world has never been so young, with more than 50% of the global population aged below 30 in 2012. Most of these young people live in developing countries, with sub-Saharan Africa having over 70% of its population aged below 30. The majority of young people, in both developed and developing countries, are largely excluded from major socio-economic institutions and political processes.

I contend that young people all over the world are experiencing waithood, a prolonged period of suspension in which people’s access to social adulthood is delayed or denied. Whatever their class background, many youths cannot afford to form families and households and are unable to become fully independent and partake in the privileges and responsibilities of adult life.

Apart from material deprivations waithood is also marked by political marginalisation, a lack of voice and a loss of dignity. While young people in developing countries have been experiencing waithood as a result of failed neoliberal structural adjustment policies, bad governance, corruption and an absence of civil liberties in developed countries after the economic crisis of 2008 drove youth unemployment rates to historically high numbers, creating what some have dubbed the ‘boomerang generation’ – young people returning home and depending on their parents after graduation. Most young people in the West can no longer live according to societal standards for material and social well-being and are disengaged from politics. While the experiences of waithood are not entirely new, they have become more widespread and exacerbated due to failed neoliberal economic policies, and the increased political marginalisation of youth in this globalised world.

Beyond the disparities in their material, cultural and political situations, young people in rich and poor countries are affected by similar problems of political and socio-economic exclusion, and restricted futures. This struggling global generation has had enough. They are out in the streets to make their voices heard and to claim for themselves a political and socio-economic space.

I argue that, for all their diversity in terms of geography, focus and immediate consequences, these movements appear to have one important thing in common: young people struggling with waithood and political marginalisation play a central role. I also argue that the most recent wave of youth protests seems to have learned a few lessons from the shortcomings of the Arab Spring.

Horizontalism after the Arab Spring

The young no longer trust the state’s willingness and ability to find solutions to their problems. They are constituting themselves into organic voluntary associations of individual citizens, activists, bloggers, public communicators and community organisers striving to create new forms of political engagement, based on broad, decentralised, horizontal and consensus-based approaches to socio-political mobilisation – exhibiting what some have called ‘horizontalism’. This horizontal approach to political mobilisation and engagement has allowed them to depose long-standing leaders, expand the political space for public participation, broaden the boundaries of individual freedoms and challenge the state’s monopoly on political discourse.

Nevertheless, these movements continue to wrestle with how to make more meaningful political interventions beyond street protests, and how to achieve deeper systemic transformations than only the replacement of unpopular leaders. Until very recently, once old regimes fell and the enthusiasm and energy of street protests waned, young activists often found themselves divided. The broad unity forged during the protests dissipated as they struggled to define a new political role for themselves. And old, and more established, political forces moved in to occupy the vacuum. Those were the cases in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, and Senegal in 2012 and Burkina Faso in 2015.

It appears that this second wave of youth protests has learned a few lessons from the Arab Spring revolutions. Young protesters are not settling for a mere change of leadership and are instead staying on the streets to prevent another set of corrupt leaders from governing and making decisions on their behalf.

In Algeria, after ousting Bouteflika, young protesters continue to demand the end of military control and a full restructuring of the political system and are boycotting the upcoming elections. They claim that electing a new president under the existing system would simply perpetuate the military’s grip over power. In Sudan, protesters continued to demonstrate until they forced the military transition government to accept a civilian-military coalition to manage the transition and prepare new democratic elections. In the recent elections in Tunisia, in September 2019, young people disappointed with the post-Arab Spring government came out in unprecedented numbers to vote them out. They overwhelmingly elected Kais Saied, a non-establishment candidate with no political affiliation, regarded as ‘clean’, honest and non-corrupt. Here horizontal politics allowed young Tunisians to mobilise and use the ballot box to redress the mistakes of the past.

In Lebanon, young people’s critique of the status quo is transcending sectarian divides. For the first time, sectarian leaders, who in the past enjoyed complete loyalty as each sect’s protectors, were directly challenged by their own communities. From the Sunni prime minister Saad Hariri, the Shiite speaker of parliament Nabih Berri, the Christian foreign minister and son-in-law of the President Gebran Bassil, to the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, no leader has been spared as demonstrators shouted ‘thieves, thieves, thieves!’. Despite the government’s resignation, young Lebanese are vowing to stay the course until this sectarian, kleptocratic system is radically changed.

Young Hong Kongers dealing with scarce employment and extraordinary high housing costs are leading political demonstrations calling for the resignation of China’s backed leader, Carrie Lam, and demanding Hong Kong’s full autonomy from the mainland. What started as a protest against legislation morphed into a broader protest against a leadership that is not responding to youth aspirations. The youth-led climate change movements have surmised that beyond isolated interventions a global coalition with persistent non-violent actions (marches, strikes and boycotts) is vital to pressure leaders to act on climate justice. The overall message in all these protests appears to be ‘keep going’, ‘stay on the streets’, ‘stay the course’, ‘do not relent’ against the stratagems of these entrenched regimes.

However, so far, young people continue to avoid the structures and political ideologies that turn protest movements into formal political parties. They reject the established political order based on doctrinaire, hierarchical and authoritarian models of mobilisation and participation as inadequate and corrupt. Their investment in novel technologies and new forms of mobilisation, deliberation and consensus-building stands as a self-conscious counterpoint to multi-party politics, religious sectarianisms and dogmatic debates over representative democracy. While the horizontalist approach foregrounds the agency of youth and their capacity for creative and innovative engagement, its ‘rhizomatic’ nature makes it difficult to contend for political power within the current political landscape.

It is too early to know the extent to which this generation will indeed manage to effect profound and long-lasting socio-economic and political transformations. What is clear is that this waithood generation that may seem to be doomed to lurch between a sense of inadequacy, despondency and lack of fulfillment is courageously challenging the establishment. The bourgeoning of youth protests and social movements dealing with a variety of issues, from socio-economic grievances, political freedoms, women’s and LGBTQ rights to environmental and climate justice shows that this generation realises that they are a force for change.

Contemporary youth activism, and its uncompromising refusal of current political cultures, underscores the potential for redrawing and redesigning the bounds of political imagination and fostering new ‘politics’. Something, clearly, is waiting to be articulated in this relentless refusal of ‘the political’ by the younger generation. Radical and systemic change will take time. It might even take more than a generation, but young people in waithood have already started this process. As Franz Fanon predicted, as a generation, they seem to be discovering their historical mission and seeking ways to fulfil it.

Alcinda Honwana is Strategic Director at LSE's Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and Centennial Professor at the Department of International Development. She is also a Visiting Professor of Anthropology and International Development at the Open University, where she held a Chair in International Development. Professor Honwana has been an Inter-regional Adviser on social development policy at the United Nations and a Program Director at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York.

This first appeared on Africa@LSE.

Image: thekirbster via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

To mark Europe Day, 2019 – Charta 2020 is a vision for a democratic and egalitarian European Union, and a demand to recognize 20 European public goods that are essential to the reshaping of any future European political space.

The Agora Europe Series is proud to present Charta 2020, the first charter of European public goods. Charta 2020 is a vision for a democratic and egalitarian European Union and a demand to recognize 20 European public goods essential to reshaping any future European political space. It outlines the conditions for European integration across 20 public goods that we Europeans should endorse to make Europe a better and safer place for all citizens and residents. By definition, a public good is a good that eludes both rivalry and exclusion, a good made available for everyone, such that no one will be competing with another for them, nor be excluded from their use. Charta 2020 is promoted by Agora Europe and several other organisations and has been collectively written by many international activists and academics ( see below for full list) at the European University Institute on February 15, 2019 and presented at the European Parliament on March 20, at the Italian Chamber of Deputies on April 16, at Maastricht University on April 29 before the Spitzenkandidaten debate, and at Columbia University on May 8. The transnational joint launch of #Charta2020 is scheduled for Europe Day on May 9, 2019.

Charta 2020

A Charter of European Public Goods

We, the citizens of Europe, believe that our European unity and our citizenship are intertwined and do not rest solely on fundamental individual rights or on treaties between democratic states, but on some more basic and concrete public goods, which ask to be defined, declared and protected. This has been the very purpose of the European Union since its inception: to create and sustain through time some vital public goods and promote them globally.

By definition, a public good is a good that eludes both rivalry and exclusion; a good made available to everyone so that their enjoyment does not rest on competition and does not involve exclusion. Public goods are predicated on the principles of non-exclusion and non-rivalry. This amounts to saying that even those parts of a society that have not directly participated in the definition and actualization of these public goods can benefit from them.

Charta 2020 defines some of the main European public goods. We believe they are at the heart of Europe’s purpose and its commitments towards its citizens. We think they should become an object of debate at all levels of society in Europe. This Charter offers a new frame of discussion to elaborate and propose a new agenda for the EU in the next decade. It advocates a renewed EU commitment by enabling its citizens to collectively create and sustain those public goods that underpin their commitment to the European project.

An essential of self-government, public goods could through time become objects of our political desire. Today, this aspiration is stifled by technocratic governance from above and by ethno-nationalism from below. Against both agendas we believe that the discussion on the European public goods belongs to the arena of politics. It belongs to the EU political space and to us citizens as its primary actors.

Section 1: European public space

1. Political Europe

Europe is a political space. The provision of public goods depends on it. The institutional recognition of the integrated nature of the European polity is the necessary premise for the stable provision of public goods to the benefit of all European citizens. The institution of the European political space depends on a generation of citizenship beyond norms and treaties and on our reconceptualization of borders. While the construction of genuine transnational and democratic institutions will take time and effort, empowering new practices is a task within immediate grasp. Additionally, the sustainability of our common civic and economic space will only be ensured if we allow ourselves to be protagonists of a political sphere of discussion that is rich in ideas and open to dissent, uniting the member-states horizontally and vertically: through their porous borders and from the local levels up to Brussels. European citizens deserve a genuinely transnational representation through which to claim and advocate for essential public goods. European citizens ought to have enhanced direct participation in the European political process.

2. European Citizenship

European citizenship creates a bond between the European Union and its citizens that is defined by rights and duties, participation, and belonging to a common political space. These rights – economic, social and political – concern not just those people who exercise their freedom of movement in another member-state but all the EU citizens as such. Yet still today, the recognition of these rights remains fragmented, incomplete and fragile. To offer a solid basis for sustainable integration of Europe, EU rights must be defended, unified and made permanent by opening up the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and allowing for a more equal and direct access to justice for all citizens and residents. Permanent legal residents in the European territory must be granted as much participation as possible at every level for the government of common interests and the protection of their rights.

3. European Democracy

The democratic legitimacy of the EU derives not only from representative democracy but is also secured by participatory and deliberative democracy. Citizens are therefore called upon not only to contribute through the electoral process to the government of the EU, but also through their day-to-day participation in EU processes as expressed in public consultations, EU citizens initiatives and campaigns, petitions to the European Parliament, complaints to the EU Ombudsman and other avenues of participation. Access to these avenues must be promoted so as to equalize access to the EU political process. In addition, to set up a European political space calls for the emergence of genuinely transnational parties and movements. Democratic politics goes beyond mere institutions and involves mutual horizontal openings of national publics and bottom-up practices of associations, unions and citizens.

4. Peace and Right of Hospitality as a Shared Responsibility

Europe is based on principles of peace and reconciliation. This idea developed as a reaction against totalitarian and despotic states and achieved momentum with the end of the Second World War. Since then, the European political space has been dedicated to the promotion of solidarity and responsibility as its ultimate public goods. To be lasting, peace needs to be sought not just within the continent but also externally. It requires not just state-to-state engagements within Europe but also global engagement outside Europe across frontiers. The development of political institutions within a network of international law has been the primary condition for further commitment to a civil culture of good will, generosity, and hospitality. There must be coherence between the internal and external dimensions of EU actions. Defensive alliances cannot be ruled out in a world of conflicts and potential threats, but they must be redefined in order to exclude expansionist policies and the arbitrary definition of collective enemies. This ensures that the European project is not about the projection of EU values, but about their universalization within and outside EU borders. From the time of Ulysses’ travels, hospitality and inclusiveness are at the heart of our shared culture and can be extended beyond EU borders on the basis of a shared responsibility. In a world where there are a growing number of stateless people, the practical commitment to these principles requires the creation of an International Humanitarian Passport. This can be issued in cooperation with the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees. It can ensure that people who for reasons of health, age, necessity and vulnerability are at risk can secure a safe haven in the EU.

Section 2: Migration

5. Freedom of Movement

Freedom of Movement means the right to choose, for all individuals on European soil, a safe location in which human rights, including social and economic rights, are fully guaranteed and respected. These rights are universal and inalienable. They have to be combined with respect for humanity, dignity and solidarity.

6. Sea Rescue and European Solidarity

Given the number of deaths of migrants occurring at the borders of Europe and in the Mediterranean Sea, search and rescue measures must be the first priority of European action. These measures must be funded from European budgets and be in full compliance with obligations within the relevant maritime and human rights conventions. Search and rescue missions must be fast, effective, and expeditious. On the principle of European solidarity, the responsibility for reception of those rescued and landed must then be shared by all the European member-states. Those rescued must be supported, and not subject to criminalization or other mistreatment.

7. Common European Asylum System

The Common European Asylum System must allow asylum seekers and refugees to move freely within the European space. This system should be guided by the principle of integration with full recognition of economic and social rights. The adopted framework should seek to enlarge the protection of all those in the European space and to guarantee safe passage and assistance, in the context of environmental and geopolitical global evolution.

8. North-South Cooperation Across the Mediterranean Space

The security paradigm should not be the foundation for the external dimension of European migration and asylum policy. The lawful basis of asylum and migration practices should be grounded in a dialogue between the countries of origin, transit and destination. It should also highlight the responsibilities and key role of regional integration players and supranational actors. Policy makers can in this way enhance their understanding of the process of migration, thus enabling them to adapt policy frameworks for the future in a way that is both practically relevant and ethically sound, with an eye to developing sustainable legal pathways to migration that take full account of the geopolitical realities of the day.

Section 3: Economy

9. European Workers Compact

Europe remains a highly uneven economic space: workers in some regions benefit from decent wages, conditions, and pensions, while workers in other regions lack access to the most basic living wages. Capital, operating across the Single Market, can exploit these differences to drive a race to the bottom as member-states chase investment. The European Workers Compact sets a new EU standard for wages and working conditions that applies to all workers, regardless of age, gender, or immigration status, and it sets the criteria for their harmonization across the European Union. Only by building worker power evenly across the EU can we make European citizenship meaningful in the economy.

10. Universal Basic Services

A crisis of poverty persists in large pockets of the European Union, with 118 million people lacking access to basic services like food, water, healthcare, and shelter. The EU can commit to eradicating poverty by guaranteeing these services universally. These efforts would constitute a welfare state at the European level, setting standards for basic services and investing necessary resources to member-states in order to achieve them.

11. Green Public Investment

Austerity has starved Europe of investment and sustained its crisis of unemployment. A massive Green Investment Program can both end the regime of austerity and unleash an EU-wide green transition to a zero-carbon economy, creating millions of green jobs in industry, agriculture, and infrastructure. Europe should seize the opportunity to lead the world in an ecological revolution.

12. Tax Justice Authority

The last three decades have seen a sharp rise in wealth inequality across Europe. This transformation is largely by design: Europe is riddled with tax loopholes and haven jurisdictions – an affront to the principle of solidarity. The EU should empower a common Tax Justice Authority that will set the guidelines to eliminate tax havens and illuminate Europe’s banking sector, recovering fiscal resources for member-states and restoring trust in a shared European citizenship.

Section 4: Culture

13. Culture and Data

Democratic tradition requires that cultural production, artefacts and intellectual resources are accessible to all and widely diffused across Europe, to be discovered and explored freely in their richness. Cultural freedom and freedom of speech, the press and association must be guaranteed. Europe should protect culture from the worst effects of the market and support independent cultural production. Europe’s model of new technologies should not only put citizens in control of the use of both their personal and non-personal data, but also employ these data and intellectual property regimes to fuel innovation rather than protect incumbents.

14. Education

Across the centuries, the history of Europe is interwoven with its educational traditions: paideia, cultura animi, studia humaniora and Bildung have been the precious treasures which have shaped our ideas of human being. Europe is a learning community where education is the principal tool for inheriting critically our common past and for living actively our common future. In this framework, we strongly assert an education built on these important pillars: relation through dialogue, social and individual emancipation, tolerance, critical thinking, difference as a positive ideal. High quality instruction requires investment, and society as a whole benefits from universal free access to public and equal education in a long-life learning perspective.

15. Cultural Heritage

The core of European heritage is diversity. It encompasses many aspects, including our different languages, landscapes, paintings, music, ways of life, styles of thinking and of having fun. The European Union should preserve and improve this richness of different habits and ideals: it is a public good in which everyone can recognize herself in an open process. Each culture can be conjoined without losing different identities in order to produce new ways of living together: different approaches can lead towards a future which is up to the challenges of modernity. Europe can symbolize the fragile but powerful possibility of caring for a multifaceted whole including different cultures.

16. Processes of Emancipation and Autonomy in Europe

European culture is characterized throughout its history by a continuous recomposition of the political space, determined by new subjects that demand to be taken into consideration: the fights of workers, of women, for recognition of minorities, for equality and for sexual and gender freedom (for example) characterize European culture as a process of emancipation. Social and economic transformations lead to ever new movements of self-determination which are characterized by cultural elements and innovations. Europe should be an emancipatory project and promote the cultural projects of these new subjectivities.

Section 5: Environment

17. Equal Rights and Dignity for Humans, Animals and Plants

Life on earth is threatened by our system of production, based on limitless growth on a finite planet. Fighting climate change requires: switching to renewable energies and high energy efficiency models, decarbonization, protecting biodiversity, soil, water, securing safe air quality, and promoting innovative and existing technologies focused on using natural resources responsibly. By involving workers, minorities, young people and women’s perspective on care in an ecological revolution, Europe can create green and quality jobs and thereby a system of production that ensures the flourishing of humans and nonhuman nature.

18. Food Production and Health

We need new rules to redirect the subsidies towards organic agriculture patterns. A radical change in rules and financial priorities is the only way to reduce emissions and use of pesticides. Industrialized food production, agriculture and farming are responsible for 20% of CO2 emissions world-wide. New EU legislation is thus required to stop the exhaustion of soil, urban sprawl, land-grabbing and overfishing, free the sea from plastic, and preserve the restorative power of landscapes.

19. Critical and Responsible Consumption

Modifying our lifestyle to develop human capabilities and social relations must take precedence over material wealth. We need a circular economy (zero waste) and an enhancement of local production and consumption (zero km). This includes fair trade with countries outside the EU and redressing country-city inequalities. Additionally, in order to achieve long-term decarbonization, the Paris Agreement needs to be implemented as well as enhanced.

20. Fight Inequalities, Ensure Equal Access to Resources

Fighting inequalities and ensuring equal access to resources imply repaying the ecological debt of the Global North towards the Global South, which is also one of the causes of forced migration. Carbon pricing has to be based on the redistribution of wealth that ensures that countries in the Global South are supported in reducing their emissions and developing their economy. Benefits and costs of the transition to an ecological economy must be divided fairly. Costs should be levied in a progressive fashion that does not contribute to further inequality or precarity within or across EU member-states. A fundamental transformation towards a more efficient use, reuse and recycle of our production and consumption patterns is necessary.

Project Coordinators

Caterina Di Fazio and Rui Tavares

Sections and Section Coordinators

1. European Political Space Étienne Balibar, Caterina Di Fazio, Nadia Urbinati
2. Migration Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Daniel Innerarity, Satvinder Juss
3. Economy David Adler, Lorenzo Marsili, Claus Offe
4. Culture Alberto Alemanno, Niccolo Milanese, Kalypso Nicolaïdis
5. Environment Elena Pulcini, Nora Räthzel, Miguel Vatter

Contributors

Intro. Alberto Alemanno, Caterina Di Fazio, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Rui Tavares, Nadia Urbinati, Frédéric Worms

1. Etienne Balibar, Caterina Di Fazio, Michele Fiorillo, Lorenzo Marsili, Petar Markovic, Gian Giacomo Migone, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Teresa Pullano, Andrea Sangiovanni, Philippe Schmitter, Rui Tavares, Nadia Urbinati
2. Cristina Blanco Sío-López, Mattia Ciampicacigli, Andrea Costa, Caterina Di Fazio, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Daniel Innerarity, Satvinder Juss, Cécile Kyenge, Virginie Lefèvre, Marco Maddalena, Titus Molkenbur, Sara Prestianni
3. David Adler, Emanuele Felice, Lorenzo Marsili, Gian Giacomo Migone, Claus Offe, Peppe Provenzano, Philippe Schmitter, Nadia Urbinati
4. Alberto Alemanno, Carlo Cappa, Paola Giacomoni, Alexandra Jouclard, Niccolo Milanese, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Pasquale Terracciano, Carlo Varotti, Giulia Valpione
5. Suzana Carp, Monica Frassoni, Darian Meacham, Elena Pulcini, Nora Räthzel, Valentina Sardella, Miguel Vatter

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Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes explores the inequalities creating two very different pandemics in Brazil and elsewhere.

In contrast to recent epidemics that impacted almost only developing countries (as those caused by the Ebola virus in 2013-15 and the Zika virus in 2015-16), the coronavirus pandemic is hitting both the global south and the global north. However, this pandemic is everything but an equalizer: it not only reveals various forms of inequality but is likely to also reinforce them.

The virus spreads in a socially unequal world, implying that people experience the pandemic differently and suffer its consequences differently, depending on their country, social class and gender. From a social point of view, the international spread of the virus has in this way created two pandemics and is likely to create two post-pandemic worlds: one for people in the global north (as well as upper- and middle-class people in developing countries) and another one for the poor in the global south.

After emerging in Wuhan, the virus ‘used’ mainly the bodies of the well-off to spread internationally, initially to developed countries, later to affluent people in the global south (returning from holidays or business trips) and then to the poor. As poor people in the global south – as well as their governments – often lack resources to prevent, detect and respond to pandemics, a socially different type of pandemic emerged.

In Brazil, for example, while upper- and middle-class people started working from home almost overnight and stockpiled food and water, others remain at a crossroads. Their options are either: i) trying to work (even if demand has in general plummeted), which requires physical social interactions over the course of the day, thus increasing the risk of getting infected and infecting others; or ii) staying at home, which means not earning any money and still remaining at a higher risk of getting infected due to over-crowded houses, lack of water and household hygiene items, or poor sanitation. Therefore, not only the availability of resources to respond to the pandemic is a privilege for a few; the capacity to afford the consequences of social distancing is also conditioned by various types of inequalities.

Conditions to prevent, detect and respond to the pandemic, as well as the consequences of social distancing are unequal because the availability of at least seven types of resources is unequal: healthcare, fiscal capacity, labour, space, education, information, and leisure. These dimensions are all correlated to one another but for the sake of clarity they are analysed separately.

Concerning health, half of the world’s population lacks access to essential health care services. For them, the coronavirus pandemic is much more a matter of life and death than it is for the other half. Research comparing health security capacities in 182 countries in the context of Covid-19 found that 28% of countries had a preventative capacity of levels 1 or 2, as well as that 23% had a response capacity of these same levels (in which 1 is the lowest and 5 the highest capacity). The number of physicians is extremely unequal: while the United States has around 25 physicians per 10,000 people, India has 8 and Mozambique only 0.7. This is made worse when associated to a lack of sanitation and access to drinking water, as this makes people more likely to have comorbidities and therefore less likely to survive if infected. This is the potential situation of 60% of the world population, who do not have access to safely managed sanitation. In addition, washing hands is a luxury for many: basic handwashing facilities are not available for 40% of the world population, let alone soap or hand sanitizers.

This results to a great extent from inequalities in the fiscal capacity of governments. Low levels of taxation imply a lack of funding for public goods, essential to prevent and respond to a pandemic. While in OECD countries the tax-to-GDP ratio is around 34%, in a sample of 26 countries in Africa this ratio is on average 17%, severely constraining their capacity to invest in health care. Moreover, the pandemic is severely slowing down economies, which can be in part compensated by fiscal stimuli measures, a limited tool for poor countries. Weak fiscal capacity also has an effect on their costs of credit, further restraining their ability to respond to the pandemics and stimulate the economy.

Regarding labour, working from home or not working at all is a luxury for a few. In the global north, those unable to work from home are often protected by a social safety net (even if imperfect), but this is either non-existent or very limited in the global south. Staying at home imply a huge sacrifice of income, especially among people working in the informal economy. In Brazil, 40% of workers have informal jobs, which means they are not entitled to sick pay or various other social safety services. For example, there were 6.2 million maids in Brazil (almost exclusively women) in 2015, of which 70% had informal jobs. According to Débora Freire, from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the poor’s income is expected to decrease 20% more than the average in Brazil due to the pandemic. This implies that poor people in the global south are likely to sacrifice the basics: rent, food, water, electricity, gas and essential medicines, making them more vulnerable to the virus and the consequences of an infection.

In times of social distancing, another scarce resource is space. The WHO and various governments have recommended social distancing, but this is a luxury that poor people often cannot afford, especially in urban areas. If they manage to work, they are likely to interact with customers, other employees or other passengers when using public transport. If they stay at home, over-crowded houses and neighbourhoods may prevent social distancing. As emphasized by Gilson Rodrigues, a community leader from Paraisópolis, the second-largest favela in São Paulo, it is impossible to put the elderly into quarantine when there are 10 people living in a two-room house.

Another resource is access to education. Children from affluent families are more able to get their education from home. They can keep their access to knowledge through various types of resources they have (books or a simple conversation with their parents), as well as online activities maintained by private schools. The poor will lack all of this.

Another unequally distributed resource is information. Information about the risks of the pandemic and what to do about it is more easily accessed, filtered, understood and applied in the developed world and among affluent people in the developing one. The lack of credibility from state authorities and the over-abundance of information make poor people more susceptible to believe in conspiracies about the virus, speeches from populist leaders, as well as Pentecostal or neo-charismatic priests. For example, a few of the main religious leaders in Brazil have exhorted people to keep going to the church or told people not to watch news about the pandemic, all of this propagated through social media.

This is what the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called an ‘infodemic’, a process in which not only the virus but also rumours spread fast, creating a cacophony of conflicting information. Furthermore, as reliable information is produced disproportionally more in rich countries, they tend not to target the poor in the global south: washing hands and staying at home, for example, is suited more for affluent people than for the poor. Language barriers are another often-overlooked aspect aggravating this imbalance: reliable information is produced mainly in only a few languages, leaving a large number of people with either non-reliable or non-information at all. Finally, because the virus began spreading in cold temperatures, the available data on infection refers mainly to weather conditions that prevail in richer countries, leaving considerable uncertainty regarding the conditions of its transmission in the tropics.

Last but not least, leisure is also unequally distributed. Upper and-middle class people can remain entertained in quarantine in a way that the poor cannot: they have more access to gadgets, apps and broadband internet connection. They also have more space at home, making them more able to have relaxing or fun activities, as well as to get physical exercise. In a situation of quarantine, this is likely to reduce levels of stress.

It is true that the poor in the global south may benefit in many ways from activities conducted in the global north: research on prevention, detection and response to pandemics; quarantines and border restrictions, as those imposed in various places in Europe; and production and distribution of science-based information. It is also true that they benefit from social distancing measures valid for the whole society, as the number of mass gatherings events decrease, as well as the overall number of physical social interactions they have each day.

However, inequalities across countries and within them condition how people experience the pandemic, who is hit harder by social distancing, who is more likely to survive, and who will recover faster after its end. This indicates the need to expand not only access to sanitation, healthcare and drinking water, but also to housing, social safety nets, and reliable information, all of which should be seen as foundations of global public health policies.

Dr Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes, Researcher at the Institute for Applied Economic Reseach (Ipea), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Thanks to André de Mello e Souza for comments and suggestions on this piece.

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

As Great Britain basks in the warm glow of the London Olympics, east of East London, at the site of the next Olympic event in the Russian seaside town of Sochi, a quite different sentiment has been brewing.

"Beyond London 2012 Olympics: Blood in Sochi 2014" reads a popular tweet on the #nosochi2014 handle. For the 2014 Winter Olympics is being held in the former Circassian capital, an area claimed to contain mass graves of a million people who were killed during ethnic cleansing by Russia.

A letter to Jacques Rogge, Head of the International Olympic Committee, explains further:

“The region of the Black Sea coast in the North Caucasus saw a monstrous genocide perpetrated against the native Circassians at the hands of the Russian state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Russo-Caucasian war was a bloodbath that resulted in the extermination or exile of more than 90% of the indigenous inhabitants of this region. Indeed, the Circassian sea coast from Anapa to Abkhazia became a massive cemetery for our nation….

Frankly; we are shocked at the cynical behavior or demonstrated by Russian leaders. While displaying the great beauty of Kransnaya Polyana*, meaning Red Valley, (*the mountainous area above Sochi that will host the skiing, bobsledding, snowboarding and luge events at the winter Olympics) these officials did not consider it relevant to explain that it was so named because of the Circassian bloodshed in the final battle for independence…

Russian leaders are prepared to invest billions of dollars in a bid to hold the Olympic Games, and explain that this is in an effort to strengthen friendship between nations. However, over four million Circassians live dispersed in fifty countries of the world, and Russia refuses to invest any resources in the return of these exiled peoples to their homeland.”

Given that the Winter Olympics is scheduled to take place on precisely the 150th anniversary of the Circassian defeat, and with an estimated 5 – 8 million people living in exile from their homeland today, it seems inevitable that the Circassian activists will use this irony of history to bring their cause to a world audience.

And this is not the only issue bubbling away as Russia prepares to re-brand itself to the world, and showcase Sochi as an example of new, modern Russia.

In stark contrast to a recent statement by Dmitry Chernyshenko, Chief Executive of Sochi 2014, that “we are developing awareness that Russia has changed a lot, and that we are democratic, we are friendly, we are transparent,” in recent weeks Human Rights Watch has reported that tens of thousands of migrant workers from Central Asia, Ukraine, Serbia and Turkey are toiling in slave like conditions in a construction frenzy to complete Olympic infrastructure in time for the commencement of the games in February 2014.

The workers say they were lured to work as contractors on Olympic sites by the promise of regular wages, a 40 hour working week, paid accommodation, food and protective equipment. Yet in reality they are made to work 7 day weeks, 11 hour days, and are often not paid at all.

A complaint was apparently lodged with Russia’s labour inspectorate in March 2012 – the complainants are yet to receive a response.

There are reports of local communities being uprooted, as authorities exploit the fact that many Russian families built their homes on land leased from the state, thus they are technically not registered landowners. Instead of recognising these families’ rights to private and family life, Sochi authorities gave the land to Olympstroy, the state company building the Olympic venues, then sued homeowners for illegal construction of their homes to avoid liability for displacement compensation.

After Vancouver and London hosting Pride Houses for LGBT athletes, staff members, families, friends and spectators, a Russian court has upheld a ban on a LGBT Pride House at its Olympic event, with Judge Svetlana Mordovina declaring that a Pride House would be “propaganda of non-traditional sexual orientation which can undermine the security of Russian society and the state, [and] provoke social-religious hatred, which is the feature of the extremist character of the activity”. Moscow’s highest court then upheld a ban on gay pride marches in the capital for the next 100 years.

And the Pussy Riot verdict on 17 August 2012, which sentenced three young women to jail for 2 years for the performance of a song criticising president Vladimir Putin, coupled with the recent criminal charges against opposition activist Aleksei Navalny, is a sobering reminder of Russia’s interpretation of freedom of expression, and its ongoing efforts to silence dissent emanating from civil society.

Of course, human rights abuses in connection with Olympic events are not specific to Russia. Identical problems in Beijing involving forced evictions, abuses of migrant workers and media censorship are well documented. It has even been suggested that the Beijing Olympics led to an overall deterioration of human rights in the country. Likewise, the human rights community is keeping a close watch over Rio as it prepares for the next Summer Olympics.

So once again, the modern Olympic movement finds itself in an ethical predicament. Is it appropriate to host Olympic events in countries that allow human rights abuses to occur in preparation for the games? Or should countries be required to demonstrate a genuine commitment to equality and human dignity for the privilege of hosting the games?

On one view, given that the Fundamental Principles of Olympism enshrined in the Olympic Charter include blending sport, culture, and education to “create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles” (Fundamental Principle #1); placing sport “at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” (Fundamental Principle #2); and giving every individual the possibility of practising sport without discrimination of any kind (Fundamental Principle #4), the answer must be a resounding ‘no.’

Unsurprisingly, this is the view of organisations like Human Rights Watch, which argues the IOC urgently needs to focus on human rights reform. In 2009 HRW presented a formal proposal for a permanent mechanism integrating human rights into the Olympic process.

Yet, there are also arguments that we should be silent about human rights issues to avoid politicisation of the games. For this reason the British Olympic Association required all athletes in Beijing to sign a pledge to not make pejorative political statements about the host nation.

Indeed, the London Olympics showed us that despite huge (over 9 billion pounds) government spending on Olympic venues in a time of severe austerity measures and the longest period of recession in decades, displacement of local communities, a last minute security disaster ,and a very unclear legacy program, even ‘multiculturalist lefties’ have lauded the games as a positive experience for the nation and the international community alike.

There is no other event that brings together people from more countries than are recognised by the United Nations. Thus we can only hope that when the flame is reignited in Sochi in 2014, we will again be pleasantly surprised.

A meditation on the ‘millennials’ and several of the discussions at Team Syntegrity 2017.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

Allen Ginsberg. Howl

Feelings have always played a role in politics. In many ways, politics is the art of persuasion and reasonable arguments can only mobilize people to a limited extent. In struggles, such as electoral disputes or a union organizing a strike, one will find a complex mixture of rational arguments and sentiment-infused discourses. No successful politician has ever managed to rise to the top solely on cold argument.

Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe that the importance of feelings in politics has reached a level seldom seen in modern history.

Put together a group of middle-class well-meaning young people from the northern hemisphere to discuss the recent events overcoming the world: xenophobia, Brexit, Trump, feminism, the future of the European Union, capitalism, etc., and the relevance of the politics of feelings will immediately arise. Some have called this emotional, well-meaning generation the “millennial” generation. There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of this concept, commonly found in marketing lingo. On the other hand, their influence has a mostly negative connotation for some, as being too “soft”, and even “lazy”. This article aspires to shed some light, beyond a judgmental view, on the millennial generation, on how politics can and has adapted to its cultural context, and the challenge it entails for us in struggling to defend a progressive political view.

There are reasons to believe the millennial generation has an important revolutionary potential. It is bizarre because one of the characteristics of this generation is its deep immersion in consumer culture. However, to understand the way it interacts with politics, one of the most important aspects to consider is its main driver. Much like the epic hippie movement of the 60´s, the hunger for profound, pure and radical connection with the “other” seems to be its main motivation.

What another generation sought in rock, hallucinogens, and new esotericism, this generation craves and explores through the internet and pop culture. It is ironic that when society seems to have achieved a level of connection like never before, the hunger for connection has only grown.

The politics of goodness

“An enemy is someone who´s story we still have not heard” is the aphorism, made famous and criticized by Slavoj Zizek, which sums up a certain value underpinning millennial multiculturalism. For the last few decades, the issue of identity has defined the debate in cultural politics. One could talk of two ways of understanding the public sphere in the cultural politics of a liberal democracy: on the one hand, a traditional view which emphasizes equality, and, on the other hand, a view which emphasizes diversity.

The first one, related to processes which gave birth to the modern nation state, intends to consolidate and protect public space as one where citizens can integrate into the community as equals. The relation of each citizen with the state is individual. Every individual is king in his private space and an obedient follower of the nation state in the public arena. The second one, multiculturalism, adds complexity to this relationship by recognizing a series of intermediate groupings, between the citizen and the state, which may adhere to their own set of rules and conventions. A classic example of the tension between these is the debate about the use of the burkha and other religious symbols in public schools. While a liberal non-multicultural view would tend to defend the equality with which every citizen integrates into the nation state and, therefore, would forbid the expression of religion in public schools, a multicultural view would defend the expression of religious diversity in schools, to make articulate the different groups (religions) that form the national community.

Multiculturalism itself tries to juggle this tense balance between an ideal of universal comprehension of the other and a radical differentiation from that same other. Zizek cites the case of Haiti as an example. As the young nation acquired its independence it was infused with both a strong black identity, as recently emancipated slaves gained their freedom and were ready to govern for the first time, as well as the influx of the French Revolution liberal and universalist views. The result materialized in the 1804 constitution which firstly defined Haiti as a black republic and, subsequently, defined all inhabitants of Haiti as black, no matter what the colour of their skin was.

It is relevant to mention that the multicultural view, over recent decades, especially since the 80´s, is linked to one cultural struggle in particular: the rebellion against the hegemony of white, straight, first world, man. This is in the context of important achievements by anticolonial and anti-discrimination social movements. This struggle has been fought around issues of symbolic violence executed upon non-hegemonic groups (women, non-white, not straight, etc.). However, some have argued that behind the “politically correct” effort of multiculturalism a dose of racism and first world views imposition may lie. Possible evidence of this is the emergence of a xenophobic, anti-Muslimism right, portraying themselves as defenders of gender diversity (such as Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands). In any case, as Edward Said so brilliantly showed in the case of western representation of the east, no matter how good the intention might be, the representations of the other tend to show more of one's intimate drives than the actual people being represented. In this difficulty to “comprehend” the other lies the main difficulty of millennial multiculturalism. Political correctness might be enough when what is sought for is simple tolerance or peaceful existence, but it seems to completely miss the point when what is looked for is a deep connection to that other.

A good example of this difficulty can be shown in pop culture through the Netflix series Sense 8. In this science-fiction story, the “superpower” protagonists have a supernatural empathy within their group of eight people. Eight individuals, distributed all over the world (Mexico, USA, England, South Korea, Kenya, India, and Germany), represent human diversity, with special emphasis on LGBT diversity. As these people discover, they belong to a species different from homo sapiens, the homo sensorium. They start to explore the implication of knowing and feeling everything the other one does. In this millennial multiculturalist utopia, a Mexican homosexual actor, a German jewellery thief, and an African bus driver´s differences are mere superficial marks all of which enrich a sublime interior encounter.

So one of the main questions underlining the plot is how did homo sapiens overcome the empathetic apes, and gain control of the world? The unsettling innuendo is that the answer lies in individualism, egotism and the invisible hand – that is to say, capitalism. The reason this is unsettling is that liberal multiculturalism, brought to its logical extreme, seems to challenge the capitalist basis on which it originally formed and tend towards a form of radical communitarianism. Paradoxically, the millenial consumerist notion of instantaneous profound connection with each other, can eventually subvert the faith in capitalism´s capability to bring forth truly emancipatory identities. In that sense, it seems there is a revolutionary potential in millennial multiculturalism. For those trying to build a political platform, from the left and in the first world, this potential may be crucial.

Brexit

There are many reasons why Brexit won, but undoubtedly a lot of it had to do with the incapability of traditional politics to engage with the youth. Young people, even though overwhelmingly against Brexit, simply did not go to vote that day. Traditional politics lacked that new grammar necessary to translate this hunger for deep connection with its revolutionary potential.

This draws a sharp contrast with what Jeremy Corbyn achieved in the last general elections where youngsters voted in the masses. Again, there are many reason for this, but perhaps Corbyn´s speech at Glastonbury may give us a hint of this capability to engage with millennial youth and its revolutionary potential.

As Jeremy Corbyn took his place in front of the thousands of young people who assisted the festival (a festival originated back in the 60´s), among major pop icons like Radio Head or Ed Sheeran, the Labour leader touched base on at least three major issues in a ground-breaking speech.

Firstly, politics are something close to everyone, or as he put it “Politics is actually about everyday life. It’s about all of us, what we dream, what we want, and what we want for everybody else”. In other words, a clear reference to the politics of feeling, grounded in our day to day life, and the relationship between individuals.

Secondly, he made a clear call for multicultural inclusion, by appealing to the common universal link between all human cultures: “When people across the world think the same, cooperate the same, maybe in different languages, in different faiths, in different cultures, peace is possible, and must be achieved”.

And, finally, the truly millennial touch, the possibility of sublime connection with the other:

"It's that sense of unlocking the potential in all of us that I find so inspiring, and I'm inspired by many poets and many people, and I think we should adopt a maxim in life, that everyone we meet is unique, everyone we meet knows something we don't know, is slightly different to us in some ways.

Don't see them as a threat, don't see them as an enemy, see them as a source of knowledge, a source of friendship, and a source of inspiration.”

However, there is a limit to how much the politics of goodness on their own can fuel a political project. It may be really hard for the progressive liberal to comprehend, but it is perfectly possible for a national inhabitant to feel absolutely empathetic with immigrants, and yet support Brexit if he believes it will somehow improve his living conditions or those of his family or immediate community.

In that sense, perhaps there is something to learn from Haiti's experience, in their notion of inclusive patriotism. Examples of this discourse are to be found in the national popular thesis of Iñigo Errejon in Podemos, and certainly in the proud French discourse both of Mélenchon and Macron. In these cases, nation state identity is linked to a community that embraces differences. The Podemos notion recognizes the internal national diversity of Spain while at the same time reinvigorating the patriotic feeling which is perhaps paramount. This discourse has another advantage, it opens the communication between the millennial views and the more traditional sense of national communities. The future of progressive politics, despite many progressives, seems to be patriotic, and struggling with the far-right xenophobic nationalists for what the “nation state” means. As Pablo Iglesias once put it: “the nation is, above all, our public hospitals, and public schools”.

The politics of anger

The politics of anger move. They tend to mobilize an important portion of the population in very intense and short-lived movements. It is not a force that can steadily push a project, but it is vital to understand key moments of change in scenario. Basically, this type of politics can be summarized by the notion of perceived injustice caused by someone. Someone, somewhere is having a party to which we are not invited.

There is nothing inherently leftist in this feeling. In fact, these last few years have seen the rise of proto-fascist movements feeding on it.

One could, therefore, make the distinction between two types of politics of anger: one directed upwards, towards the elite, and one downwards, towards the immigrant population. It is a dangerous explosion of energy that can shoot any which way, and has become increasingly relevant in a set of decisive events that have occurred in recent decades.

As the world came to be ruled by politicians defending the Third Way, some started to dream of an ‘end to history’, where political discussions could be reduced to minor administration of private interests, without any sort of radical change horizon. Under the idea of achieving a limitless consensus, traditional left and centre left parties implemented a pro market agenda even more brutally than the right parties. These parties sought to overcome class struggles, substituting left and right economics with wrong and right public policies, and ended up enabling a huge financial market that hypertrophied until, in 2008, it imploded.

For the first time in centuries, a generation was going to be poorer than the generation that preceded it, with an important decline in middle income. Those traditional blue-collar voters of the leftist parties started to turn their back on the parties that had abandoned them. And they are angry.

The debacle of the Third Way parties, abandoned by their historical voters, has left these parties incapable of containing the emergence of a neo-fascist populism. Right-wing populism stands for the real malaise of blue collar workers and points its finger at migrants, even poorer than those workers themselves, as responsible for their sufferings. Where the second to last in line is forced to struggle with the last in line, xenophobic fascism soon emerges. The true parents of the emergence of this popular neofascism are the leaders of the Third Way, who with their indifference and opportunism did not hesitate to sacrifice the middle classes and the social tissue, suffocating any glimpse of social organization and solidarity in attempts to resist their neoliberal reforms of the 80´s and 90´s.

A clear example, few are more responsible for Donald Trump´s victory than the Democrat establishment blocking Sanders´ alternative. This was another example of the Third Way paladins, seduced by the promises of TTP or TTIP, who were then surprised by its crashing fall when faced with the worker class reaction. Those who disguise themselves in a discourse of responsibility, while demolishing the democratic foundations of countries with their centre-wing fundamentalism, are the ones responsible for delivering governments to neofascism.

What then can the left do in such a scenario? How can we give an answer to the mayhem of the radical free market without falling into xenophobic frenzy? How to answer the suffocating nationalism of Trump or Brexit?

Part of the answer must be the notion of inclusive patriotism already discussed in the politics of goodness. However, this approach has a very limited effect. Right wing nationalism feeds off an essentialist view of the nation. The nation under this discourse does not require individuals with agency, socially constituted alongside their networks and local communities. It is an identity plea which is nurtured by the very lack of grassroots organization. What allows it to set the poor local worker up against the poorer immigrant worker, is its refusal to recognize the category of worker class uniting both.

Faced with the growing consolidation of xenophobic nationalism, the alternative of the left is to deepen democracy by recognizing and strengthening social movements and citizenship in general, in the struggle against those few who have benefited from their impoverishment.

There are real reasons to be angry, but not towards the fellow worker. Both Trump and Sanders had the same diagnosis: a small elite, whose interests were defended by Third Way leaders behind both party lines, have enjoyed an increase in their gains never seen before, while the middle classes suffered. The difference was the answer they gave to this diagnosis. While Trump pointed his finger at immigrants, Sanders called for fairer distribution of the wealth hoarded by the élite.

The lesson for the left, in terms of the politics of goodness, is the notion of inclusive patriotism. In terms of the politics of anger, the lesson for the left is the deepening of democracy, the importance of democratic tissue, through the empowerment of social movements.

And once again, something similar can be said of Corbyn´s campaign. He himself, in that same Glastonbury speech put it like this:

“But what was even more inspiring was the number of young people who got involved for the first time. Because they were fed up with being denigrated, fed up with being told they don’t matter. Fed up with being told they never participate, and utterly fed up with being told that their generation was going to pay more to get less in education, in health, in housing, in pensions and everything else.”

“…. Is it right that so many people live in such poverty in a society surrounded by such riches? No, it obviously is not. And is it right that European nationals living in this country, making their contribution to our society, working in our hospitals, schools and universities don’t know if they’re going to be allowed to remain here? I say, they all must stay and they all must be part of our world and part of our community, because what festivals are about, what this festival is about, is coming together”.

Nonetheless, the politics of anger remains a danger. On the one hand it is inherently fleeting, but more importantly, it is a loaded gun that can shoot in many directions. As Walter Benjamin said, in every emergence of fascism there is a failed revolution. It is of the utmost importance that we are capable to construct a movement beyond anger, to ensure that its fruits are not more anger, but a more solid democracy.

The politics of reason

The politics of goodness and anger may seem opposites, but, in reality, they are deeply related. They are both politics of exceptionality, politics of the moment of outburst. They have little to say about the more boring aspects of politics-as-usual. The true opposite to both the politics of goodness and anger are the politics of reason. And in these times when good old-fashioned political reasoning is discredited, here is the case for its defence.

The left lives in times of few certainties and many questions. Perhaps recognizing this should be one of the main issues at hand. The lack of answers in the left is especially clear in the question of “the day after”. As Zizek has put it, the left has overcome some of the tendency to marginality which marked the 90´s, but is still faced with few answers about how to approach the day after winning the elections. One example of this is the case of Syriza, where inclusive nationalism, attempting to defend popular sovereignty against the extreme austerity measures imposed by the EU, and supported by a strong democratic basis, shown by the referendum, was simply not enough.

Faced with this void, is the only option for the left to defend liberal advances and resign from its historical structural struggles? On the one hand, as the contradiction between the egalitarian promise of democracy and market instrumental logic becomes increasingly evident, it seems undeniable that the left of our times must recognize and defend the basis of liberal democracy. But, on the other hand, there can be no relinquishing of the horizon of a radically different social order, if we are not to succumb to Third Way hypocritical pragmatism.

In any case, as Chantal Mouffe has stated, our socialism is becoming increasingly similar to that (unfulfilled) promise of radical equality which underlines democracy, while the defenders of the free market are becoming increasingly blunt in their disregard for popular sovereignty and democratic standards.

To be yet more explicit, I believe there is a case to be made not only for democracy, but specifically for the democratic republic, to recover the republic for the left, as the institutionalization of popular will. Certainly, the democratic republic and the law are fundamental for the poor. The struggles of workers, all along our history, as of all social struggles, are inscribed in the ink of law. As Iglesias once stated, they are written in the blood of those who fought for the recognition of those rights.

Law in the service of majorities is one of the main weapons in the fight for a more democratic society. The powerful need no rule of law: the only rule they need is superior strength. There is still so much to defend from the Enlightenment and modern values. There is something essential to be learned from the Spanish revolution in the potential of republican ideals against the emergence of fascism. Faced with the populist right nostalgia for the past, and the Third Way obsession with renovation, our proposal should be for the future. We should, in the most complex sense of the word, be for development. Namely, faced by the market nation, we must defend the citizenship nation. Not the one with the idealizing and sanctifying capital “N”, but rather we should defend a modest and concrete nation that is born out of grass roots organization and empowerment of civil society. Our nation is our schools and hospitals. It is, to sum up, that nation of the welfare state and the entrepreneurial state, beyond the exacerbation of tribal identity.

Ye are many – they are few

A lot has been written about why different projects of the left have failed. The notion of recuperating the modern values of the republic may help, but it is still a vague notion.

Yes. There is something to be said for the left learning from its many failures. But perhaps the time has come to start thinking about possible victory and what this would look like. Corbyn´s speech ends with the following quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Masque of Anarachy’: “Shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you: ye are many – they are few!” Only by hope turning plausible will the “many” eventually overcome the “few”. For the time being, as we awkwardly try to find a way, let us know when to lead and when to listen, when to feel, and when to reason.Is the new left a space for radicalism or transversality? Is it a vindication of the tradition of the left, or the emergence of new unprecedented forces and social groups? 

As Errejon expressed, either of those categories of the adversaries are traps. The only answer that can impregnate the playfield and give us any chance of victory is “neither and both”. Opposite to what the populist right and the Third Way pretend, there is no contradiction between deep and open democracy and republican popular sovereignty. Those who have consolidated a low intensity democracy with a huge concentration of power, are responsible for endangering the republican rule of law. An inclusive nationalism, a deep and radical democracy, and a republic which embodies popular sovereignty are some key ideas in that struggle.

The time has come to rethink and reshape our comfortable trenches. In times dominated by the politics of feelings, we who believe in a different, more just, way of organizing society must walk a thin line, recognizing the importance of feelings, avoiding any temptation to intellectual disdain towards the millennial generation, while still defending the values of the republic.

Up to a point, it is a game of numbers. In order for the left to outnumber its adversaries, broad alliances are needed. That is why an astute combination of the politics of goodness and of anger, of discourse appealing to new millennials and to traditional blue collar voters is necessary. This alliance seems to be one of the challenges of our time. The other one is what to do the day after. And that is a major challenge.

Noam Titelman is a social activist. In 2012 he became president of the Student Federation at Santiago’s Catholic University, one of the oldest and largest universities in Chile. This piece first appeared on:

Photo credit: Millennials Elizabeth Hahn CC BY 2.0

Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil by Derek Edyvane. New York and Abingdon: Routledge 2013. 160 pp, $140 hardback 978-0-415-89047-2, e-book 978-0-203-08572-1

Derek Edyvane’s Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil is an ambitious monograph on political and moral philosophy. It raises pressing questions about our uncertain times by investigating ‘what is really at stake in ongoing debates ... about public morality and the general sense of ethical crisis in modern life’ (p.14). Edyvane aims at contextualising the political debate on this issue, and providing moral grounds to define civic virtue and public morality even under conditions of endemic conflict within pluralistic societies. This twofold ambition leads to a dense articulation of arguments covering two themes: a discussion of what public morality is and how is it shaped, and an attempt to see how civic virtue can emerge from this.

As the title forewarns, this virtuosity does not originate from the good, but from evil. From the first of its nine chapters until the end, the book challenges the distinction in political theory between positive and negative politics. While the former relates to aspirational measures based on the hope that goodness can be achieved, the latter deals with preventive actions due to the fear of evil that must be avoided. Edyvane’s model goes beyond that interpretation by suggesting the existence of an asymmetry between aspirations and preventions, alternatively inspiring positive and negative politics. Edyvane proposes that rather than aspiring to ideals of good, actors may just want to avoid threats to their ordinary existence. Given the difficulties today in bringing to light and defining shared societal values, public morality should rest not on idealistic projects, but on a positive interpretation of contingency: ‘In this way, to perceive the inevitable tension between the claims of aspiration and those of the preventive ethic and to perceive the impossibility of ethical completeness and perfection in human life as we know it may also be to perceive beauty. These are some reasons in outline, then, to suggest that the reality of perpetual discord in the soul need not connote sickness or malfunction, but might rather indicate life and liveliness’ (p.140).

Accordingly, the book’s leitmotif opposes the allegory of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, or ‘a tale of the continuing possibility of virtue in a world devoid of sovereign goodness’ (p.9), to Plato’s aspirational one of the cave. In The Road, ‘The father and the son do not despair, they keep going’ (p.9). Thanks to the objective reliability of feelings, they experience the relative goodness of their resolve to ‘keep going’ and not ‘give up’. Indeed, ‘in the domain of public morality, we must acknowledge the sovereignty of evil’ (p.9), and the fight to mitigate the impending sovereignty of evil becomes the only way to ground public morality.

Instead of seeking an absolute good, Edyvane emphasises the more concrete intrinsic value and personal satisfaction in preventing greater evils. Avoiding disasters that the sovereignty of evil may bring about must be seen as the source of moral agreement for what politics must be, thus grounding positive forms of (procedural) justice, civic friendship, and a sense of ordinary hopefulness towards the future: ‘Even supposing that our real situation, our ‘ethical crisis’, is more faithfully reflected in The Road than in the cave, the possibility of virtue may yet persist’ (p.9).

Edyvane’s preventive ethic as a source of public morality and civic virtue adopts a destabilising perspective. Referring to the ancient Spartan and to the British post-Second-World-War times of preventive ethic of austerity – “in both contexts austerity possesses a clear ethical dimension that today lacks” (p.71) – Edyvane’s “non-substantive procedural” (p.79) ethic is presented as the acceptable solution to deal with the presence of unavoidable compromises within society over what is truly moral (p. 102), while also obtaining the result of preventing the greatest evils and catastrophes of human life. Without cynicism or pessimism, civic virtue deals with the record and defence of those positive actions providing an acceptable level of goodness and, more importantly, preventing the appearance of greater evils. Indeed, ‘While the allegory of the cave suggests that our present inability to make sense of practices of civic virtue need only be a temporary condition – just until we emerge into the world of sunlight – the allegory of the road suggests that what we have is all there is’ (p.9).

Edyvane argues that public morality should be based on the profound reconsideration of our scepticism towards the uncertainty under which we live by seeing it as a source not only of reactive and preventive measures, but also of intrinsic positive values to defend. He concludes that ‘Uncertain times call for uncertain citizens’ (p.145), and that the moral value of ‘keeping going’ not only helps us to agree on the positive measures to maintain that existing condition, but also leads to the possibility of unexpected but fortuitous goodness. The prevention of worsening conditions of life due to great evils depends on a serene vision and recognition of the already valuable presence of many positive aspects within our current conditions of life.

While the book commands intellectual respect, it is very hard to agree with several arguments that it develops. It advances an indulgent moral posture, with adaptable citizens (p.144) looking towards future events with a ‘hopefulness without hope’ (p.126) that reminds us of Derrida’s messianic without messianism. However, Derrida’s view of ontological indetermination and undecidability as features of life is different from Edyvane’s. Indeed, referring to Kolakowski, Edyvane affirms the sovereignty of ‘evil … which undermines and subverts the very notion of a moral narrative and the basic ability of men and women to formulate ethical aspirations’ (p.57). He claims that evil is sovereign by appealing to moral arguments recovering Hume’s tradition of judicious spectator, emphasising the objectivity of bad sensations. However, religious experiences (e.g. Christian martyrs) teach us how sensations cannot be trusted to establish moral objectivity, given that physical suffering can be voluntarily preferred in order to root out evil. It appears arbitrary to treat a lack of consensus on what is good as a normal feature of life, and to regard physical suffering as worse than transcendental evil. Similarly, Edyvane’s claim that ‘there are no straightforwardly right answers in the domain of public morality’ (p.143), it could be argued, paradoxically rests upon an assumed answer.

If follows that grounding public morality on the rehabilitation of our worst feelings of fear, however disguised as acts of maturity and bravery, means abandoning our call to attempt to eradicate evil. Moral duties are certainly not always applicable as a prescriptive rule independent from any contextual evolution. But virtue has to be understood, I would contend, as either finding or adapting the right answer in respect to new circumstances.

This is why only those who want evil serve it as sovereign, while virtuous people, according to varying contextual priorities, always search for the morally good option. Finally, the book mentions but does not define sovereignty. Improving this and other points, perhaps through a rigorous reading of the theological dimension of sovereignty, could help us to see why evil cannot be (and must not even be considered) sovereign.

Elia R.G. Pusterla is Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics. He attained a PhD in Political Science from the University of Geneva with a dissertation entitled “The Relations between Switzerland and the European Union and the Credibility of Sovereignty”, which elaborates in a new and distinctive way upon the concept of sovereignty by proposing its political claim as a communicational process of arguable credibility.

The meeting of the Media and Social Norms Collaborator (MSNC) – The Behavioural ScientistsRespond, was held on the 22nd of May 2018, bringing together scholars, practitioners and students in the fields of media and social psychology to explore how theory can be bridged with practice to create normative change through media interventions. 12 people were in the room at the London School of Economics in London, and another 8-10 participated over Zoom. Participants and curious friends were from around the globe – from San Francisco to Melbourne, including on-ground organisations from Africa and Asia[1]. This was the second convening of the MSNC collaborator. Here are 2 perspectives on the impact of the meeting and the impacts of the collaborator model.

The Media and Social Norms Collaborator: An Academic’s View

Dr. Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington

I was delighted to have the opportunity to participate in the third Bridging Theory and Practice Seminarheld at the PBS department, centered on the development of the Media & Social Norms Collaborator. Back at the first meeting of the Collaborator in September 2017, I was struck by how many processes we study in social psychology which were at play in the work of practitioners and donors in the field of social norms and behaviour change. This meeting gave me a chance to talk about my research themes in a way that touched on these struggles, inviting the Collaborator to think about potential bridges between emerging research and practical challenges.

Back in September, as the Gates Foundation voiced their struggles in nailing down the role of social norms in the decision-making of different community members, I thought of my own work on how experiencing poverty shapes the influences one brings to bear as one makes decisions. The second meeting gave me a chance to elaborate on this: talking about how the salience of poverty can narrow the circles of normative influence, making us more likely to be shaped by the behaviour of those we know, as opposed to someone with the credentials of an official position or qualification, but with whom we are not personally connected. This point was picked up by my colleague, Michael Muthukrishna, who presented a theoretical framework for systematically studying the choices people make about whom to copy in their behaviour.

Another key aspect of poverty is the feeling of having less than others, triggering an anxiety about social status that is likely worsened by mass media depictions of wealth and material possessions at the ‘top’ of society. With this in mind, it was inspiring to hear, in the work of Well-Told Story and the Population Foundation of India, how mass media can be used to do just the opposite, giving a voice to those at the bottom of society and presenting role models who challenge inequalities in a number of spheres. Well-Told Story’s Shujaaz set of programming, targeting young people in Kenya and Tanzania as a response to youth involvement in interethnic election violence, also touched on issues central to my second research theme: the political psychology of conflict between groups. Here, I highlighted how group memberships can be manipulated by political leaders in order to whip up populist discontent among marginalised communities, warning that the role of concerns around racial and ethnic superiority are as prevalent now as ever, in both rich and poor countries. This connected with the insights given by another colleague, Ilka Gleibs, on how social norms are embedded in social identities, which are malleable and open to mobilisation as contexts shift.

I don’t generally consider myself someone who does research on social norms, or who studies behaviour change interventions in a Global South context. However, I do identify as a researcher trying to understand the universal influence of power and inequality on the human mind in diverse cultural and societal contexts…yet who has so far only conducted lab or survey studies in the UK and the US! It’s thus an exciting challenge for me to think about how my research speaks to questions concerning the ‘hot topic’ of social norms in the development sphere, and could be conducted in a way that takes the challenges of cultural diversity and social intervention seriously. The journey along the bridge from theory to practice might be long, but with this set of ongoing conversations, it feels like we’re on the way.

The Media and Social Norms Collaborator: A Students View

Kalee Lee, MSc Psychology of Economic Life, LSE

Prior to being a MSc Psychology of Economic Life (PEL) student at LSE,  I studied Environmental Management and Technology for my Bachelor’s degree and worked as a consultant in the field of international development and corporate social responsibility for several years. You may be wondering why I chose something so different for graduate school – to be honest I had no clue about where the Master’s degree would take me, but I was fascinated by the unconventional purpose of the programme – to cultivate ‘change agents’ who make the world a better place by leveraging social values and technologies with a realistic psychology.

As a newcomer to the field of social psychology, the MSNC meeting was a valuable occasion for me to learn from the practitioners in the social norms space about career options. Perhaps more importantly, it was interesting to see how the gap between theories and practice can be bridged by being a part of the conversation between psychologists at LSE and representatives from organisations around the world who are working in the field.

I really liked the presentations of the behavioural scientists from PBS with different research interests. From the intertwined relationship between social norms and social identities to how the mass media represent normative behaviours biased towards the middle class, they broadly enriched my understanding of the complexity and applicability of norm psychology. I also learnt a lot from the sharing of a practitioner from Oxfam, who works in the economic empowerment of women – that an intervention may do more harm than good if not tackling the norm well; the importance of understanding gender norms in rural areas, as well as how simply introducing normative change could avoid the necessity of infrastructure investment. These approaches are very different from the infrastructure or economics based projects I did when I was an international development consultant, and they made me reflect a lot on the effectiveness and merits of each approach.

Some participants of the MSN meeting

At the end of the afternoon session, Dr. Gleibs asked a question: ‘Who are we to decide and change the norms of a local community?’, which stirred up a series of ethics discussion around the table, such as the encounter between the ‘right knowledge’ (usually from the Western perspectives) and ‘local knowledge’ (from the locals who receive an intervention). I really appreciate the fact that, be it the contributors of this meeting or academics at PBS in general, modesty, humanity and reflexivity are always the norms of discussion within the collaborator, and I will remember this when carrying out my work in the future, especially when it comes to working with groups who are in a disadvantaged position.

Another career insight that I gained from the MSNC meeting is that a job title shouldn’t limit how I apply what I learnt at PEL. It is rather rare to see vacancies in the social norms space on job boards, and there isn’t a straightforward career path for PEL graduates. However, as pointed out by Dr. Cislaghi, interactions between social norms and other disciplines are ubiquitous. A cool idea or intervention may fail simply because of not paying attention to basic norms. For instance, some scientists found a simple way to disinfect drinking water to reduce childhood diarrhoea in rural Bolivia, which was to put a bottle of water on one’s rooftop under the sun. However, despite an extensive promotional campaign, only a small amount of households actually did so, because it was considered a sign of one’s poverty. With the training of PEL, I am confident that my sensitivity towards human sentiments will enable me to adopt a more human-centred approach for problem-solving, preventing the unforeseen influence of social norms from impairing the expected outcome. This skill is highly relevant as long as human-beings are involved in the work I do in the future.

If you are interested in a short report of this meeting, please contact kavita@simplicityconsulting.co.uk.

[1] Members of the Media and Social norms collaborator include LSE, LSHTM, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Well Told Story, Population Foundation of India, Center for Social and Behavior Change Communication, Ashoka University (Delhi), Frog Design, Care International, the Overseas Development Institute, Georgetown University and Oxfam International.

This post first appeared on Psychology@LSE.

Image credit: Mike Linksvayer via Flickr (CC0 1.0)

In the wake of the rise of nationalist sentiments in Western nations, Senni Salmi examines how Finland arrived at its inclusive narrative.

The term nationalism is not in fashion. Right-wing populism attached with ethnonationalism has gained ground in several European countries, which has made many liberals associate nationalism with racism. The big nationalist march held in Poland a few weeks ago raised concerns among Europeans due to the high number participants hailing from fascist and far-right backgrounds.

Rejecting this type of radical nationalism, which is exclusionary and tends to favor isolationist policies, should not lead to the conclusion that promoting nationalism is a bad thing. We need to look beyond the far right parties and recognize that nationalism is a valuable means for achieving social cohesion. In light of Finland’s 100th anniversary on December 6th, this article seeks to explain why today’s Finnish nationalism, which is based on a set of core values rather than ethno-cultural notions, is both inclusive and uniting in the face of internal and external threats.

Rethinking the concept

Fears of nationalism in its radical form are warranted, and those who are concerned should not let not let nationalism be defined by radicals. Then how can a country develop a shared sense of national consciousness that promotes equality and inclusion?

Sir Paul Collins has argued that a sense of shared national identity is important in order to foster and maintain the high levels of generosity and compromise that European countries are known for. However, this shared identity cannot be political or religious and therefore it needs to transcend political divisions and religious pluralism in favor of a broader and more inclusive community. Inclusive nationalism, seen as a political agenda, is currently not realized according to Collins because “the left lacks the will to nationalism; the right lacks the will to inclusion”. His thoughts should be an eye-opener for center-right and center-left parties. Lawrence Summers has also put forward an idea about how to pursue a third way between dangerous ethnonationalism and abstract globalism, which he calls responsible nationalism. His suggestion is to put more emphasis on maximizing the welfare of the citizens, rather than pursuing the abstract global good. These proposals on how to rethink nationalism are important for those who shape political agendas, but the Finnish example urges citizens and voters around Europe to consider what kind of actions and values actually make their countries strong.

The important question to ask oneself is whether convictions and symbolism are more important than cooperation and freedom. Sometimes, strong ideals can cause political leaders to put their party before their country and stand in the way of cooperation. This applies not only to far-right parties but also idealists, who aim to make their internal political philosophy the goal of foreign policy.

With a broad, shared national consciousness, people will be predisposed to work together to defend the country’s freedom and common ideals. This means that everyone’s voice is heard and that the checks and balances are held in place, but also that idealist approaches sometimes need to be abandoned for the sake of national security. Opinions on energy, defense forces and international treaties will always vary, but in critical situations politicians should be able to set aside party divisions.

The Finnish example

Finland has had its share of far-right fringe movements as well as a populist party in government. However, the dominant form of nationalism in Finland has little to do with opportunistic groups that exploit nationalist rhetoric.

After 100 years as an independent nation, Finland appears remarkably stable as it heads into the future. This stability stems from the institutions and the citizens, who trust in their institutions as well as in each other. The Finnish institutions are inclusive, and give everyone a seat at the table.

Finland is committed to protect minority groups, and both the Swedish-speaking Finns and Sami have a special place in the constitution. The public authorities must provide for the cultural and societal needs of the Finnish and Swedish speakers on an equal basis, and the indigenous Sami have linguistic and cultural self-government.

Constitutional democracy is not only majority rule, but also protection of minorities. At the same time it is vital for cohesion and political unity that there is something that unites people beyond their cultural group affiliations, and that something is citizenship. At the end of the day you can be a Swedish-speaking Finn or Romani Finn, but you are first and foremost a Finn.

Inclusive institutions do not only function as a uniting platform for all citizens, but also play a crucial role in shaping shared values. Attachment to the values of equality and freedom, rather than ethnicity is characterizing for the shared identity. Public institutions that enjoy the respect and trust of citizens lead by example.

First and foremost, the Finnish education system fosters the individual potential of all students, while at the same time promoting equality. Students are not separated into different classrooms on the basis of their performance, and additional help is provided to those who need it. Education is given in both Finnish and Swedish, and although the languages of instruction differ, the curriculum is the same.

The endorsement of multiculturalism is part of the curriculum guidelines, and students are allowed to retain their foreign language, but for them too, a Finnish perspective and values are embraced.

The Finnish Defence Forces is another prime example, as most men are required to serve 6 to 12 months of military service, and women can also apply for voluntary military service. These types of institutions bring citizens of different backgrounds together and teach them solidarity, regardless of ethnicity and socioeconomic background.

To a great extent this unity could fit the description of constitutional patriotism, the idea that people are united by attachment to democratic and constitutional values, but it is questionable whether this type of attachment can be strong enough to generate the kind of solidarity and willingness to defend one’s country that prevails among Finns. In the end, the role of emotions like empathy and trust toward fellow citizens – captured in so many beautiful Finnish proverbs – is equally important. The Finnish proverb “kaveria ei jätetä” – no friend is left behind (wounded or even dead brothers in arms are always brought home) – which originates from the Winter and Continuation wars, has a special place in the Finnish mindset. As in school, nobody is left behind in the military. To this day, the main reasons behind the great unity among conscripts are the guiding ideas of helping the weak, and working together.

A shared vision for security

National security is an issue that unites Finland across political affiliations. In a time of emerging threats such as information warfare, that increasingly target the individual, it is important for states to spread security awareness among all citizens.

Defense is viewed as a collective responsibility in Finland, and the willingness to defend the country is the highest (71%) in Finland among all European countries. Stories about the Finnish soldiers who fought back the Soviets have left a legacy of heroism that continues to inspire a high commitment to defend freedom. The collectivism is played up strongly in everything related to security. At the end of the day, being a Finnish citizen trumps other political identities, and this allows for cohesion in matters of national defense. The Finnish example suggests that a balance between individualism and collectivism is possible.

Finnish political institutions create conditions for inclusive and consensus-based political decision making, and offer a potential lesson for other countries as well. A long tradition of consensuality and coalition governments does facilitate this, but it is not a must – a shared view of national security and willingness to cooperate on fundamental questions is enough.

The last few years have shown that underestimating the importance of cohesive defense policy can lead to rash decisions. The return of geopolitics came unexpectedly for many European countries, forcing them to reevaluate their readiness, while Finland had remained determined to keep its territorial defense credible. Many neighboring countries had to realize that it is easy to lose defense capacity, but not to rebuild it. As a solution, NATO deployed additional troops in the Baltic States, and both Sweden and Lithuania recently reintroduced military conscription over security concerns. Defense policy needs to be continuous and stable, which is a feat more easily achieved with an underlying vision that everyone agrees on.

“Together”

Undoubtedly, a shared past and certain traditions have a role in shaping the Finnish national consciousness, and the Independence Day celebration is a good example of this. Many pay visits to war graves and light candles. Invoking the sacrifices of past generations do not in the case of Finland contribute to a national anger toward foreigners, but serve as a reminder of the gratitude for freedom. The courageous soldiers, but also citizens, politicians and diplomats are to thank for delicately performing a balancing act, and for fighting for what they believe in.

The Finnish independence centenary celebrations have mostly involved typical Finnish traditions, but there has been less debate about what actually constitutes Finnishness. More thought has been given to what Finland will look like in ten or even 100 years from now, and what Finland aspires to be like. The theme of this year has been “together”, and the celebrations have shown that the way forward is by fostering an inclusive civil society. Celebrations have been inclusive in the sense that they have been very diverse, and naturally, open to the public.

To conclude, Finland would not be this strong and perseverant without an inclusive system of institutions, trust for one another and the widespread willingness to set aside disagreements in order to cooperate for the sake of a greater good. Thus, the Finnish example shows that nationalism need not be dismissed as a problem, but can in fact be put to more constructive ends than is currently the case in much of the Western world.

Senni Salmi is a visiting fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations. Co-written with Emanuel Örtengren, Visiting Fellow, and Oscar Karlsson, Finnish reservist and student. This post first appeared on the Center for Transatlantic Relations'  blog and is reprinted with permission. 

Image Credit: Johan A via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Scott Montgomery explores the ongoing struggle for academic freedoms on US campuses.

Academia in America is having a moment, and it isn’t a good one. Angry articles and commentary, position statements, political fury, plus the requisite sludge of disinformation, have been circulating for months, with few signs of stoppage. It is a new chapter in the culture wars, intensified by the conflict in Israeli. Much media attention has targeted topics that are truly important—academic freedom, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), the role of higher education in an open society.

In truth, struggle over these issues has been building for more than a decade, particularly as DEI policies have normalized across the U.S. Everything exploded after the October 7 mass terrorist attack by Hamas and subsequent reprisal war launched by the Netanyahu government. There quickly came university position statements, attacks from wealthy donors, faculty speeches and declarations, and student demonstrations. Predictably, too, it has been an opportunity for right-wing actors to renew their attacks.

Campuses nationwide have been in the gunsights of conservatives for decades, who view the leftward tilt in university politics and teaching as sacrilege. The tilt is real, dating especially from the Vietnam War era. It leaned further in the 1990s, as the right headed into extremist, xenophobic, and more openly anti-intellectual territory. But the cycle of response has been especially accentuated since the invasion of Iraq and rise of Islamophobia, the populist racism that surfaced during the Obama Administration, and then the apotheosis under Donald Trump, whose white supremacist sympathies wore no veils. Though DEI policies had begun a decade before, particularly in California, the flagrant illiberalism of the Trump years kindled fires of outrage throughout the intelligentsia and helped accelerate installment of such policies.

It is now a question of some weight whether DEI has gone too far. The controversy has swept up nearly all other conflicts over academic freedom at this point. Conservatives are not the only ones who speak in opposition, though their tactics of book banning and state intrusions on campus decision-making are especially autocratic and worrisome. But it is also traditional liberals, not all of them white, who feel DEI has, in some cases, become an intolerant orthodoxy of its own.

There seems little doubt that excesses have occurred. An example from my own state (Washington) is a progressive college that created a special “Day of Absence” when white students, staff, and faculty were advised they should not appear on campus (a professor who objected was harassed into resigning). Meantime, there are university departments who have effectively refused to consider any candidate who hasn’t shown “commitments and capacities” to further DEI “through research, teaching, mentoring, and/or outreach and engagement.” A current instance along these same lines brings us back to California, where state officials created a DEI Plan for community colleges (2 million students, 61,000 faculty) to incorporate related principles “into teaching and learning, grading, annual evaluations, and faculty review/tenure processes” (the plan has since been dropped).

“There is a difference,” says PEN America, an organization dedicated to free expression, “between protecting a…faculty member’s right to include D.E.I. programming, and mandating that they do so, especially in higher education.” Nonetheless, related rules of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” language, candidate responses, and more have been put in place by university administrators and department committees, not only in the humanities and social sciences but in the sciences and engineering. Saying such rules are only guidelines isn’t convincing and feigns innocence. One result is that self-censorship is widespread among faculty who question the ultimate value of rigorously policing their own speech and course material for anything that might possibly offend any of their students, who are now highly tuned to such transgressions. There are also genuine concerns of being “found out” as a partial or non-believer and suffering the collegial, reputational, and perhaps promotional consequences.

To be sure, the situation can be easily exaggerated. Claiming that “ideological activism is replacing intellectual inquiry as the primary mission of universities” has been a febrile refrain of the right for decades. As a means to raise awareness, DEI has had real successes. But as a command sensibility of categorical norms, it generates understandable fear and resistance.

A scandale majeur occurred on December 6 when three university presidents, all from high-prestige schools, went before a hostile Congressional committee. They were questioned by one of their own graduates, who proceeded to attack and humiliate them over the issue of whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their institution’s code of conduct. Before the eyes of the world, they each gave the same answer: “it would depend on the context.” As widely noted, had the inquisitor referred to the genocide of Black people, the answer would almost certainly have been immediate with no bother about “context.” Whether the same might be true for Latino, Asian, or Native American people remains unknown. Either way, it was a poor showing, both for their high offices and their larger role as women in positions of elevated leadership.

Presidents Sally Kornbluth of MIT, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) must have known they were walking into a trap. They consulted with lawyers beforehand. Either in spite of such consultation or because of it, they were not ready for the aggressive interrogation by Congressperson Elise Stefanik (R-NY), graduate of Harvard Law School. Stefanik, a known, outspoken loyalist of Donald Trump and a denier of the 2020 election, leaned over them like a great insect, eager for blood. The weak replies as much as opened a vein for her.  

Stefanik has been excessively proud of herself. Two of the three, after all, lost their jobs. Though Harvard’s Claudine Gay resigned due to revelations of plagiarism, uncovered by the conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, the scandal of her testimony was the initiating factor.

Claims the presidents were sacrificial lambs, as well as accusations of racism aimed at Rufo and helper, are misguided. They fail to capture the reality that calls for presidential ousters have spread irrespective of race. They also warp the true nature of the event and the fallout from it. Finally, they distract from the larger picture, which goes to the heart of what kind of institutions universities should really be.

It’s essential to note, for example, how the resignations have come together with other happenings. This includes the widespread student protests that rose in the wake of October 7, a large majority of which came to be oriented against Israel and strongly in favor of Palestinians. A significant contingent even cheered Hamas for its terrorist mass murder. This also included some faculty, one of whom was “exhilarated” by the attack, who largely charge Israel with war crimes. Even after its president resigned, the UPenn presented its MLK (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Social Justice award to a prof who signed a letter proclaiming Israel guilty of “genocide” and “apartheid.”

Student protests had become overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel before the December 6 testimony of the university presidents. But these marches, too, brought forward questions about the ambit of DEI—how truly “inclusive” is it? If Jews are now considered “white”—as they were not for most of modern history, up to the 1950s and 60s in the U.S.—is it outside the purview of DEI to deal with antisemitism? The number of antisemitic acts on campus (and off) shot up by nearly 400% in the first month after the Hamas attack and has exceeded those of Islamophobia to date. But then the claim rushes in that Zionism qualifies as a form of “settler colonialism.”

This is a highly charged idea originating in academia, dating from the years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War (when Israel took possession of Gaza and the West Bank), expanding in use since the second Palestinian Intifada (2000-2005). As concisely put by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, the situation of the Palestinians in Israel has been taken as representative of “the justice-seeking dispossessed throughout the world.” The effect has been to ignore that nearly half of the Jews who formed Israel in the late 1940s were themselves refugees, not colonials. They fled persecution or were exiled from surrounding Arab countries, abandoning their homes and assets. This does not at all reduce the calamity of what happened to the Palestinians. But it does underline that the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple matter of victims and victimizers. None of this is relevant, however, to contemporary views that accuse the (white) “Zionist political project in Palestine” of racial (non-white) cleansing.

Which brings us to the matter of academic freedom and thus the role of universities. It was Noam Chomsky, I believe, who said that a true test of any institution’s belief in such freedom is whether it would allow Adolf Hitler to present his ideas on German history and “the Jewish question.” Today, this sounds outrageous. But Chomsky had a point.

In 2015, the University of Chicago famously published a short essay on what academic freedom means. Then president, Robert J. Zimmer, and Provost Eric D. Isaacs, appointed a group of scholars to write a concise statement of principle. It says that an institution’s commitment to “debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, [or] immoral…” And further: “Although members…are free to criticize and contest [such ideas] they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.” The university’s mission is thus “to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.” (my italics)

Zimmer did the greater community of academia a much-needed turn by pursuing this powerful statement. More than 100 colleges and universities have endorsed and adopted the report’s principles. In truth, the 2015 statement was partly modeled on a similarly brief statement in 1967, the Kalven Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. This spoke of the need “to provide enduring challenges to social values, practices, and institutions,” to be not the voice but instead the neutral “home and sponsor of critics.” It has been observed that the Kalvin Report was not itself entirely “neutral” in its own motives, being in part a response to student demands the university divest from apartheid South Africa. This does not invalidate the ideas just quoted—which have much relevance to the present—but it does suggest how they can be abused to mask other, objectionable priorities.

A problem exists, however, with “neutrality,” a widely used term that too easily implies forced unconcern or inertness. Universities, viewed from the inside, are never “neutral” about any major issue. The diversity of relevant expertise, interpretation, opinion, and discussion is real. A key reason why any position statement by a university president counts as an absurd misrepresentation—or an apparent attempt to impose norms. There are a few exceptions—when the university’s very existence may be threatened, or when there is public debate about the purpose, worth, and credibility of higher education itself. But a far better action to have taken in the wake of the Hamas attack would be to remain silent at the official level while creating opportunities for students and the public to learn, e.g. a lecture series that reviews the history of Palestine and its conflicts, offering a podium for various viewpoints, plus venues for faculty and student discussion. 

At the last, the university has never been, nor can it be, the moral conscience of society and the nation. Six decades ago, the public intellectual Paul Goodman, in The Community of Scholars (1962), took postwar higher education to task for failing to be what his title describes. Instead of “small cities,” foreign to society yet “active in the world,” self-run and full of “practicing philosophers” who understood what lay beyond the walls of the campus and textbook, they had become training centers, forgetful of origins, vulnerable to outside pressure. These were exaggerations that worked better as omens.

But Goodman was on the mark with something else: any real community in this setting, he said, needed to be protected, so that, in comparison to society, members were drawn together by “different rules of truth and evidence that cannot be disregarded when it happens to be convenient.” The greatest threat to academic freedom is the same as that to freedom of speech—the autocratic state. It is when a university ceases to be truly independent, acting either as an extension of such a government or as one itself, that it becomes its own worst enemy.

Scott L. Montgomery is an author, geoscientist, and affiliate faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. He has 25 years' experience in the energy industry, where he worked on projects in many parts of the world. His many technical publications include papers, monographs, articles, and textbooks, mainly focused on cutting edge hydrocarbon plays, technologies, related impacts and issues.

The views and opinions in this post do not reflect those of Global Policy, Durham University or Wiley. They are the author's own.

Photo by Zino Bang

‘White trash,’ ‘dumbass libtard,’ ‘right-wing fuckhead:’ have we all gone mad?

Q: “Why are you such a dumbass?

A: Why are morons like you allowed to breathe and steal air from human beings?”

If someone approached you in this way, would you work with them on common problems? Unlikely isn’t it, yet this kind of exchange is increasingly routine—I took this one from the Facebook page of my own community in the Catskills.

“Welcome to America dumbasses. You can start your ‘No Hate Army’ but understand we still hate you.”

Thanks for that, Country Boy @jump396. Maybe you’re the “beer drinking, meat eating, gun owning, terrorist hating, liberal destroying, flag flying, America loving, commie killing, motherfucker Obama warned you about” that I see on bumper stickers at my local shopping mall.  

“You should be sent to ISIS to be killed with real knives” for putting on a Trump-themed version of Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park. Oh really—have you ever seen ISIS in action? Yes that’s right I’m a “libtard”—the increasingly-popular shorthand for ‘retarded liberal’ among those who see liberalism as a ‘mental illness’ and progressives as ‘diseased.’

Those of us on the left don’t like to think of ourselves as part of this noxious trend—it’s always ‘them’ not ‘us’ that creates the problem—but here’s a selection from my own recent twitter feed in reference to people (a.k.a human beings) who voted for Donald Trump: ‘right wing fuck-heads,’ ‘white trash,’ ‘redneck morons,’ ‘Nazi scum,’ ‘dumb white bitches,’ ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘fascists’ and ‘brain-washed religious fanatics.’

To me, these responses seem like a form of madness in which differences of view are magnified into the mental and emotional equivalent of the Berlin Wall; symbols of tribal identity to be displayed with pride in the ‘scorn wars’ that are rapidly unfolding in America and beyond. This isn’t just disagreement, but disagreement that’s whipped up and manipulated with potentially grievous consequences for democracy in a body politic whose arteries are hardening.

The result is a low grade civil war with steel tipped edges, ready to explode into violence at any moment—at a baseball field in Virginia, or on a commuter train in Portland, or inside an African Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. Right kills left kills right keeps right on killing. I don’t care who wields the knife or the gun.

This development is incredibly important. Don’t tell me that language is irrelevant, that politics is a ‘contact sport,’ that I should just toughen up and stop being such a ‘snowflake.’ Violent language is a form of violence, both directly harmful to its targets and an antecedent of actual, physical aggression. But the poison goes much deeper than this, seeping into our relationships, our attempts to solve our problems and our efforts to build community.

When there is no genuine communication, the possibilities of negotiated consensus decline, opening the way for conflicts between different versions of the truth, each sustained by their own exclusive structures of knowledge, discussion and social media. Both left and right may think that only their ultimate victory will guarantee success, so each is determined to unravel the achievements of the other once in power.

But throughout recent history, periods of growth with equality have been based on a broader consensus across society that protects a core set of goals: social and economic security, health and education for all, a clean environment and a strong democracy—the things required for everyone to flourish even if many other differences remain. A consensus like this existed in the US and much of Europe after World War II for around 30 years, though racism and sexism abounded.

By definition, these ‘common interests’ can only be found through democratic struggle and debate—we can’t find them unless we look for them together. But that presupposes a capacity and a willingness to engage across the lines of difference. What happens when both of these things are eroded?

It’s not difficult to see how we got ourselves into this mess: a climate of fear and insecurity makes people more susceptible to demagogues and others who benefit from division—special interest groups like the National Rifle Association, for example, ‘shock-jocks’ on radio stations, politicians in search of a constituency, and websites that show you that there really is a conspiracy against you, an enemy who must be destroyed.  

Places where people of different political views can meet and engage with one-another are much more difficult to find now that the old cross-cutting member-driven federations like Parent-Teacher Associations have been replaced by single-issue and other exclusive groups, and virtual spaces on the Internet have not replaced them.

Trading insults is also cathartic, perhaps more so than many of us might admit. It’s a way of channeling all your inchoate frustrations into a single, visible target—Trump or Clinton, the left or the right, pro-choice or anti-abortion; a chance, at last, to ‘let it all out’ against those who you think have ignored or belittled you. This isn’t a conversation but a wrestling match, ‘mano a mano,’ no prisoners taken and no surrender.

What’s difficult is figuring out what to do about these problems, and who blinks first. At the personal level we’re presented with the most elemental of questions: when you meet that other human being, who do you see? White trash, or the firemen who volunteer to come to your rescue, the farmers who grow your food, and the guys who plough your roads throughout the winter?

Likewise, if you voted for Donald Trump, do you see liberals as ‘retarded,’ or people just as wondrous as those you love who happen to have a different view about abortion, gun control and government regulation; people who have the same rights as you do to love and marry who they want, to make their own decisions over their bodies and to be protected from police brutality?

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum your responsibility is the same: break the cycle, even if ‘the other side’ initially rejects you. That’s what emotional maturity looks like in practice. We’re supposed to be building the “beloved community” as Martin Luther King once put it, not the beloved political party or social movement (important as they are). And in a community there should be a place for everyone, barring the violent extremists who have to be monitored and dealt with through the law.

At the political level we need new institutions that bring people together in common projects, re-orienting incentives away from division and exaggerated conflicts towards joint accountability and decision-making, in which everyone has a role, and which promote the widest possible level of economic, social and political security. People are much more likely to reach out and make connections with others when they don’t have to fight for survival, respect or recognition. Like rocks in a stream, the sharp edges of our differences can be softened over time as we knock against each other in collective action.  

Obvious priorities include removing winner-take-all election systems and other practices like gerrymandering which accentuate the polarity of politics and make consensus building much more difficult. For example, under the “Fair Representation Act” recently introduced by Representative Don Beyer, congressional districts would have multiple representatives, each elected through “ranked choice voting.” The result would be more rural Democrats, more urban Republicans, more third-party politicians, and more pressure to collaborate on legislation that affects the shared needs of all constituents.

The same goes for civil society, which is supposed to be the place where “strangers can meet and not draw the knife” as the writer John Keane once put it. That means mixing people of different views and backgrounds together in voluntary associations—a reversal of most current trends. “Standing shoulder to shoulder with people across our differences and creating new understandings and visions together is where the real transformative potential lies,” say activists Peroline Ainsworth and Kiran Nihalani on the basis of their experience of women’s co-operatives in south London.

Even social media can be used in this way, though it’s never a substitute for doing stuff together, face to face and hand in hand. Check out the Echo Chamber Club for example, or Jeff Rasley’s experiment on Facebook that invented some basic ground-rules for debate between his pro- and anti-Trump friends—most importantly, you can attack an idea or a politician but you can’t attack each-other. It’s not just that we need to ‘hear each-other’s stories;’ we also have to share each-other’s struggles and experiences—difficult as that may be.

As our political differences spiral downwards into tribal warfare, will these counter-cultural experiments be enough to restore some harmony in our relationships with others? Harmony is a very powerful idea, and a common aspiration once we remove ourselves from the shock-jocks and filter bubbles that push us in the opposite direction. My dictionary defines it as “concord, agreement, the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole.”

I love that vision, but does harmony really require agreement? I don’t think so. Political and cultural disagreements are much more enduring than I had ever imagined, seemingly hard-wired into human beings and the societies they create. Difference is the ‘new normal’ you might say, so it’s vital to look for patterns and relationships that preserve a diversity of beliefs while negotiating more common ground—an orchestra that doesn’t require a ban on trumpets or music from only one composer.

That’s a task that challenges many of our assumptions about politics, activism and the structure of communications. It urges us to abandon a fixation on aggregating enough power to finally destroy our enemies, in favor of transforming power relations so that new alliances can be built. My guess is that most people would prefer it that way. After all, we have to live with people we don’t agree with in our communities; we can’t just find different ways to hate them.

When will there be harmony? Not when all our disagreements disappear. That sounds like a fantasy. But there’s no reason we can’t unite with some of our differences intact. In fact that’s the only way we’ll survive.

Michael Edwards is a writer and activist based in upstate New York, and the editor of Transformation. His website is www.futurepositive.org and his twitter account is @edwarmi. This post first appeared on:

Photo credit: Tim Evanson via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

Scott L. Montgomery helps outsiders to understand America’s gun debate.

I have been asked by colleagues in Europe, once again but more insistently, about guns in America. After the latest, horrific school shooting, this time in Florida, they’ve sent me queries. Why are there are so many assault-type firearms in the U.S.? Why do so few limits exist on who can own them and where they can be carried? These colleagues do not ask why such shootings occur. As a German friend noted, “All our societies have angry and disturbed people. America is the one place where they can buy guns as easily as groceries, in volume, at a neighborhood store.” Much curiosity is aimed at the National Rifle Association (NRA), which fights to the death against any controls on gun ownership. How can such an organization exist? 

The situation is sufficiently fraught for me to feel anxious about providing answers in print. But they are needed and not mysterious. Moreover, they are not about fetishism, frontier traditions, or protection. They are about ideas and a vision of society that relates to the larger reactionary crisis in liberal democracy we are now living through. This isn’t often noted in discussions, so let me clarify. 

During a 2015 speech after a college shooting where 10 students were killed, President Obama posed the question that was on many minds: “Does anybody really believe that more guns will make the country safer?” The NRA, after all, had come forward to deliver precisely this message—if students and faculty had weapons, the shooter would have been quickly stopped. Obama’s question, despite its tone, was rhetorical. 

For decades, NRA spokespeople have been appeared on cue and make defending statements after each new horror. The effort to choke any momentum for gun limits has been aggressive, scripted, unapologetic, and effective. This was true even after the appalling murder of 20 young children at a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The NRA knows its position  makes it appear heartless and cold-blooded. But it sees this as an unavoidable result. Any new gun law, after all, no matter how minor, no matter how locally applied, translates as an attack on the organization’s core mission. Its representatives must, therefore, seize control of the discourse, or at the very least impose a competing language that can divert attention and rephrase the issue in mainstream media. 

Consider its routine, public claims. Repeated steadily, relentlessly since the early 1990s, not only by NRA reps but by local and national politicians beholden to the voting power of the organization’s membership, they are now well-known to all Americans. Even media outlets as elevated as the New York Times have felt the necessity to state that the NRA supports “law-abiding citizens” and “individual rights…for hunting, self-defense, sport.” Wayne LaPierre, the most oft-cited spokesperson for the organization, has been both vituperative and canny in his language, employing aphoristic, bullet-like statements, easy to remember, intended for widespread echoing by the media, to whit: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” “Laws can’t control the lawless.” “It’s not paranoia to buy a gun; it’s survival; it’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that.” Fear of criminals is clearly not what motivates the NRA, however. If it were, there would be little reason to go to war over a federal gun registry or background checks; on the contrary. 

The NRA’s actions to fully normalize gun ownership and to weaken or defeat any politician working against this goal, have been pursued at the local, state, and national levels. State laws are a particular focus. Between 2004 and 2013, the organization gained at least 230 victories in such laws. Opponents are wrong when they attribute such success to campaign contributions. It is simply untrue to say that the NRA has Republican “balls in a money clip,” to repeat Jimmy Kimmel’s colorful phrase. In fact, it gives little money to politicians. Instead, it addresses voters directly, spending millions of dollars (the amount rises dramatically under Democratic presidents) to lobby its own members, which may number 5 million, using mailings, phone calls, website videos, and more. Why give cash to candidates, after all, when you can work the electorate directly? 

While its clout in Congress is less than total, the NRA has nonetheless repeatedly proven an ability in elections to seat and unseat members, especially in the House of Representatives. This is enough to make most Republicans quake in a light breeze. In truth, the NRA’s actual influence reaches well beyond its own membership, to gun-owning conservative voters everywhere. This is because it has installed the question, “How do you stand on the Second Amendment?”, as one of the primary determinants (abortion, of course, being another) of whether a candidate is a “true conservative” or just a RHINO (Republican In Name Only). Over the past three decades, with the rise of more extreme conservatism in the U.S. and the loss of moderate Republican voices in Congress, the NRA’s power has grown. 

The impacts have been nothing short of breathtaking—or, if you happen to have kids in school or college, terrifying. Only a few numbers are needed to describe how far gun fever has gone. Today, with about 4.4% of the world’s people, the U.S. has half the guns owned by private citizens. Today, there are over 64,000 stores where guns can be bought in America, compared to 11,000 Starbucks. Today, no fewer than 36 states (72% of the country), many of which restrict the sale of fireworks and require a license to drive a car, hunt rabbits, or catch a fish, do no such thing when it comes to buying an AR-15 assault rifle (or a dozen of them), plus enough ammo to invade a small country. From 1994 to 2004 when an assault weapons ban was in effect, massacre shootings (¬>6 deaths) claimed 47% fewer lives than in the previous decade. But when the ban was allowed to expire in 2004, such deaths over the next ten years increased by 340%. The logic of “more guns, fewer laws” thus seems to defy sanity. What, finally, is driving the NRA agenda?

Some hint can be found in the claim that owning guns is a “right enshrined in the Constitution.” Despite all the routine invocations in front of the cameras, the real emphasis here isn’t on the Constitution. Equating guns with rights, therefore with democratic individualism and legitimacy, counts as clever and effective. But it doesn’t stop there. “We are the largest civil rights organization in the world,” LaPierre says. And he means it. 

In his most recent remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, delivered just after the Florida school shooting, he is more direct and revealing. This is likely due to a new and more dangerous opponent—students themselves, who have marched and argued and appeared on media and at the White House demanding change. To counter this, LaPierre not only ranted about arming teachers in every school, he invoked the greatest threat in the lexicon of conservative evils. He warned his audience: “you should be anxious and you should be frightened.” For if Democrats (whose chances look good for the midterm elections this fall) ever win control of the government again, the country will leap into the arms of “socialism.” In that case, “our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever.” 

 As a core part of the extreme right, the NRA holds fast to the idea of a direct link between guns and freedom. There exists, and always will exist, a requirement to arm the citizenry against the government, for only a weaponized public can keep federal power in check. By this calculus, a gun becomes far more than a symbol; it is the physical embodiment of individual liberty. Not owning one leaves you either a helpless victim of any tyrant or minion to the same. The murdered children in Newtown, like those in Florida, thereby become sacrifices to freedom, unintended martyrs to an ideological battle that must be kept burning like an eternal flame. “Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights” were the words aimed at Newtown parents by Republican poster-boy, Sam Wurzelbacher (“Joe the Plumber”). Their deaths must not be “exploited by gun-grab extremists…The future of our very liberty lies in the balance...”

 Moderates and liberals I’ve talked with often dismiss such talk. They hear it as either “mere rhetoric” or voices from the lunatic fringe. They find it hard to believe or accept that millions of people, no matter their conservative outlook, actually treat such ideas seriously. Far more likely, they feel, is the impact of “dark money”, funds given by plutocrats and corporations to the gun lobby and right-wing organizations to buy members of Congress. Seeing guns as freedom seems too “loony”—the word of dismissal glued to far-right conservatives like Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and 60s, whose thinking nonetheless found its time a few decades later. The error of not taking these ideas seriously enough has proved perilous. Naïve incredulity has surely aided the NRA’s success.

In truth, the fundamental concept of a need to protect freedom from government power, physically if need be, has a long history in the US. It appears on a spectrum that begins, as historian Gary Wills puts it, with the concept of skepticism toward government, as a “necessary evil,” and ends with Thoreau’s dictum “That government is best which governs not at all.” The NRA is essentially a version of Thoreau, armed and dangerous, standing its ground. 

    Aggressive fear toward government, in particular, harks back to Thomas Jefferson and the anti-Federalists of the 1780s and 90s. These men saw in government a constant trend toward tyranny: “the natural progress is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground,” in I Jefferson’s words. It is an idea with roots in the Enlightenment struggles against aggressive monarchy and that Jefferson, based partly on his deep learning in classical Greek and Roman writings plus those of “moderns” like Locke and Montesquieu, strongly promoted until he himself became president in 1800. Jefferson battled John Adams in 1800 for the presidency, in one of the ugliest elections in U.S. history. Both sides felt the survival of the nation hung in the balance, justifying libelous attacks, personal insults, and newspaper invective of an unrestrained order. Jefferson indeed saw the Federalists as perilous to liberty. Yet once in office, he found his own principles of weak federalism and a national defense based on local militias impossible. By purchasing the vast Louisiana territory without Congressional support, he overstepped limits on presidential power. He quickly saw, too, that militias were no match for British or French armies in the Napoleonic era, and in 1802 founded West Point to train a professional officer corps. 

To the NRA, however, this metamorphosis from small government libertarian to president with expanded powers counts as irrelevant. It is the younger man that matters, he who supplies a good many of the organization’s quotations from the founders to prove kinship. The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action even has a webpage devoted to such quotes. It should not shock us that they make no reference to Jefferson’s deep learning as a model for today’s gun owner, nor his understanding of foreign nations, appreciation for science, or other cosmopolitan elements. Pithy phrases amputated from context make few such demands. Even George Mason, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton have found utility as (unpaid) loyalists of the NRA cause. Of course, that such men would join hands to argue that every citizen walking America’s streets needs to be armed, preferably with an AR-15, is so far removed from the case as to make one delirious. 

In truth, a recurrent focus for colonial thinkers of the Revolutionary era, but for the anti-Federalists above all, was the subject of power, understood to be the dominion of some over others. Bernard Bailyn, in his classic work The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, devotes some space to discussing the deep anxieties these thinkers invested in this concept of power. He writes: 

The image most commonly used was that of the act of trespassing. Power…has “an encroaching nature”; “…if at first it meets with no control [it] creeps by degrees and quick subdues the whole”…Sometimes it is motion, desire, and appetite all at once, being “restless, aspiring, and insatiable.” Sometimes it is like “jaws…always opened to devour.” It is everywhere in public life, and everywhere it is threatening, pushing, and grasping…What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.” (p. 56-7). 

Compare this excellent description with a passage from Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), a work that has served since the 1960s as a gospel text for American conservatism: 

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty. Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men. And power, as Lord Acton said, corrupts men. [Government, that is,] can be the instrument for achieving undesirable ends…And note, secondly, that the “can” quickly becomes “will” the moment the holders of government power are left to their own devices. This is because of the corrupting influence of power, the natural tendency of men who possess some power to take unto themselves more power. (p. 9-10)

While the anxiety expressed in these two quotes seems quite similar, there is a major difference. Bailyn observes that for the colonists, power existed “everywhere in public life,” while for Goldwater it lives, waits, and threatens from a center—Washington D.C.

Goldwater’s brand of conservatism harked back to anti-Federalist sentiments but had its edges narrowed and radicalized by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. No great intellectual himself, Goldwater nonetheless produced (via his speechwriter L. Brent Bozell, Jr.) an articulate, hugely influential platform for conservatives ever since. Its ideas were shared by many on the far-right during the 1950s and 60s, but with the election of Ronald Reagan (heavily influenced by Goldwater) they truly entered the mainstream. Though never so radical and far more pragmatic than Goldwater, Reagan’s anti-government language was legendary. If the Soviet Union defined an “evil empire,” he also famously stated that the “nine most feared words in the English language are, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Indeed, the connection here runs deep. As Reagan’s “party of ideas,” the GOP adopted far-right fears, also fueled by F.A. Hayek’s work, that New Deal-type programs would transform the U.S. into the U.S.S.R. 

Again, such notions were not really taken too seriously, as a direct attack on the federal government. And in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, there appeared little reason to believe that conservatives on the whole had come to harbor deep fears about the government they themselves were elected to serve. But by 1994, when Republicans took over the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years, their “Contract with America” made clear that an effort was underway not to shrink government so much as to dismantle it. House majority leader, Dick Armey, an author of the “Contract,” spoke in words that Goldwater might have claimed as his own:  “Between our New Deals and New Frontiers and Great Societies you will find…the same sort of person who gave the world its Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward.” There was no place in a free society for any government program like social security, worker safety, or environmental protection. All set a country on the greased downward slide into tyranny.     

The NRA has its place in this history of growing extremism. Founded in 1871, it began life as a marksman’s organization, and for many years taught gun safety and supported rifle clubs nationwide. For the entire first hundred years of its existence, the NRA stood against the bearing of weapons in public and supported the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first law to restrict certain types of weapons (machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, silencers) and require their registration. But in 1977, an insurrection took place. Throughout the 1960s and early 70s, the leadership argued over the future direction of the organization. This intensified after 1968, when a second, more restrictive Gun Control Act passed Congress soon after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy that same year. 

Harlan Carter, a past president of the NRA, representing the more extreme, no compromise side of the debate, led a takeover of the leadership, arguing that new gun laws, passed in the wake of 1960s assassinations, were only the beginning of a government program to confiscate all guns. Carter worked for many years as a head official in U.S. southwestern border control. When a teenager, he killed a Mexican-American youth by shooting him point blank with a shotgun, after the boy threatened him with a knife, then stepped back and laughed at him. Tried and convicted of murder, Carter served two years before being released on appeal. His stance on guns seems to have hardened in the decades thereafter. When testifying about gun rights before Congress in 1975, he was asked whether it made sense to allow violent or otherwise dangerous people to own firearms, he answered, without pause, such was “a price we pay for freedom.”

Carter and his associate Neal Knox re-wrote the NRA’s bylaws, with the notion of protective “gun rights” in mind. Article II, a core statement of aims, states that the primary goals of the NRA are “To protect and defend the Constitution,” especially “the inalienable right…to acquire, possess, collect, exhibit, transport, carry, transfer ownership of, and enjoy the right to use arms.” People must have the ability to “serve effectively in the appropriate militia for the common defense of the Republic and the individual liberty of its citizens.” Implied is the need to be ever vigilant against forces that would weaken the Republic, whether from without or, more likely, within. The logic of more guns equally more freedom stands here, in plain view. 

Since the revolt of 1977, the NRA has remained adamant about threats from government. In concert with Republican conservatives from the 1980s onward, it has fearfully maintained that any restriction on gun ownership was a clear move by Washington (especially under a Democratic administration) to curtail freedom, and that any such law was only the beginning, the crowbar in the door jam. NRA president and actor Charlton Heston spoke in the 1990s of a “looming loss of liberty” due to Clinton Administration’s ban on assault weapons. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the organization went on high alert, sending out messages to its members asking them to support “protecting our God-given freedoms,” “opposing the Department of Justice’s stealth power,” “placing boots on the ground to preserve liberty.” 

Evidence from other countries that might disprove the connection between guns and freedom does not matter. That nations like Switzerland and New Zealand, with far more restrictive gun laws than the U.S., rank much higher on the Human Freedom Index, published by the libertarian Cato Institute, makes no impression on NRA leaders. Nor does historical reality. That armed insurrection has more often led governments in the last century to increase their power, to centralize and militarize it with a willingness to crush dissent does not seem to matter. Nor does the fact that in the U.S., unarmed civil disobedience has gained the most profound results for change, proven by the women’s suffrage and Civil Rights movements. But such truths are not enough to overcome the vision of an armed populace rising up in patriotic fervor and purpose. We are not, after all, in the lands of evidence-based public policy. 

Perhaps the most bald and blunt statement we might expect from this position is Mr. Heston’s own about the Second Amendment. It is, he said, “America’s first freedom,” the most important in the Constitution, because it gives every citizen the ability to defend all the other freedoms granted to them. In a sense, the battle to keep guns in the hands of tens of millions of Americans, with as few constraints as possible, can be called a battle over ideas about the dangers of too much power in too few hands. But to stop there would be monstrously misleading. In the idiom of the NRA, backed by far-right conservatism, the ideas involved have been heated and deformed into a lethal, insouciant extreme. The NRA sees itself as having a distinct role in American history—that of arming the people and thus keeping them free, no matter how many must die because of it. 

 To answer a question no doubt murmuring in the minds of many readers—yes, this is all quite frightening. Yes, it defines a worrisome reality that a hundred million people in the U.S. now own guns, and that there is a politically powerful organization insisting this is not enough. 

And yes, it is no less troubling that this organization continues its extremist stance even though it is beyond obvious that more guns do not make society more safe or polite but more dangerous for men, women, and children. Over 33,000 people now are killed annually, with 70,000 injured, from gunshot wounds, far greater than the total casualties (approx.. 7,000 dead, 53,000 wounded) in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And finally, yes, that such extremism, blind to its own fatal ironies—citizens killing citizens for the sake of liberty…?—has actually become a political and cultural norm for a sizeable part of the U.S. population, reveals beyond any question how deeply astray some part of modern liberal democracy has gone in the nation where it began. 

Can the NRA and its followers be called “populist” in the sense this term is employed today? Absolutely. More than a few opponents have also labelled it a center of domestic terrorism. My feeling is that this misses the point. NRA ideas and actions are anti-democratic for other reasons. They seek fear, hatred, and censuring of one party, the Democrats, in a two-party system, thereby granting the other, conservative Republican, absolute right and legitimacy. They promise a return to power by the people while delivering more opportunities for violence. They pledge security by heightening people’s insecurities, vow support for law and order while attacking the legal institutions of government. Of course, paring down democracy to a single political group for the sake of freedom would seem a view destined to die from irony. Yet the very same might be said of a Freedom Party (Austria) or Party for Freedom (Netherlands) whose platform calls for sealing all borders. 

In the end, Americans would do well to understand the NRA in its true historical light.
 
Like the populist parties in Europe, the rise over decades of the National Rifle Association represents an eroded faith in liberal democratic politics and institutions. Reactionary responses appeal to the fears and anxieties that are the natural sediment of such erosion. For complex reasons that remain to be deciphered, these fears are continually replenished today and cannot be swept away. In a world felt to be uncertain and threatening, a gun can help someone feel safer, even as it hugely expands the risk of deadly violence. Such is a reality that has only grown in the new century, as more and more people have put faith in firearms to protect the home and the self in public. It is no surprise that reactionary passions in the U.S. have chosen, among other things, to ignite over guns and gun ownership. Yet this hardly compensates for the deeply troubling truth of people arming themselves by the millions against one another and the government. I can see no clear solutions to the threat that now exists, for myself, my wife and two sons, my relatives, friends and colleagues, and, not least, my students. It is my hope that, since the power of ideas can so alter society over time, they can remake it during the next era in a better image. 

Image credit: Dean Hochman via Flcikr (CC BY 2.0)