I started reading this lecture given by Hanan Ashrawi at the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize today.There had been a big campaign in 2003 conducted by right wing Jewish organizations to prevented her from giving this lecture on the grounds that she supported terrorism. It became a political affair in Australia.
So let us have a look at what Hanan says. That bit never got much airplay in the media. Nor was there much discussion. Hanan says:
"As we witness attempts at imposing a simplistic view of a Manichean universe, of polarization and reductive stereotypes of good and evil, we are most in need of those who will engage in a redemptive validation of pluralism, tolerance, diversity, authenticity of identity, and the comprehensive engagement in collective responsibility. As such, it is up to us jointly to give both a voice and an audience to the silenced, and to grant space and time to the excluded and denied."
Hanan says that we should intervene not only to resolve conflicts but also to prevent them from erupting or generating their own destructive forces that could spiral out of control. That is what Australians did in East Timor.
She goes on to say that the conflict in the Middle East between Palestinians and Israeli's is:
"....an anachronism in that it has all the components of a colonial condition in a post neo-colonial world, plus the requirements of national self-determination as a basis of nascent statehood in a world moving towards regional and global redefinitions."
"Regionally, the conflict has provided a convenient excuse for the suspension of human rights, the evasion of democratic systems of governance, the waste of natural and human resources, and the perpetuation of centralized regimes that held back the challenges of development—all under the guise of “national security” and the external military threat. For decades, war, or the threat of military hostilities, has served to maintain the status quo and has framed the region within misplaced notions of self defense that contributed to the rising power of extremism and fundamentalism rather than human empowerment and global engagement. "
It is hard not to disagree. Peace requires the intervention of the UN.
This is a well known quote:
"....people don't want to go to war.... But, after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country."
Didn't they do this during the Cold War?
Something similar is happening now with the war on terror. Conservative bottom-feeders see liberals as being "soft on terror "and so place the nation at risk. Liberals are also "hostile to traditional "values" of the ordinary Australians. Liberals are overeducated cultural elite who are reeponsible for the cultural rot and are contemptuous of the beliefs and practices of the masses of ordinary people.
As we have seen citizenship in the Australian Constitution had little substantive content.
Before 1901 Australians were British subjects and members of self-governing colonies (in the British Empire). After 1901 when the colonies become states in the new federal Commonwealth of Australia, Australians were British subjects and members of the states and the commonwealth.
That pretty much meant that citizenship, its rights and immunities were left for the parliament to define. Citizenship, its rights and responsibilities were to be found in the general law of Australia that was made up of the common law and the Commonwealth and state statutory law.
That pretty much meant that citizenship was an empty shell, given the discriminatory laws or adminstrative practice. That goes to the heart of the institutional structure of Australian citizenship, and is aptly illustrated by the indigenous people in Australia being 'citizens without rights' in their country until the 1960s.
Australians were not formally called citizens until the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 even though Australians did not cease to being British subjects at that point. British subject status for Australians was not removed until 1983, when it was all too apparent that uniting all Commonwealth countries under the British umbrella was no longer valid.
That institutional understanding of citizenship means that it carries a lot of historical baggage.
In the light of this kind of stuff from President Bush at the UN, we can turn to Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History(1830) with its conception of the panorama of sin and suffering that history unfolds.
In this text Hegel argues that “To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect." Hegel argues that world history is rational. A thinker can uncover the ultimate design of the world by utilizing his or her own reason to explain the rational basis of history, a rational basis that is hidden by faulty and limited thinking.
He then makes the following remark in para 24, in part one entitled, 'Reason Governs the World'. He begins this a paragraph by saying that human passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are the most effective springs of action. Then this:
“When we consider this spectacle of the passions; when the consequences of their violence and the folly that accompanies not only them but even, and indeed pre-eminently, good intentions and legitimate aims, come before our eyes – the ills, the evil, the destruction of the most flourishing realms that the human spirit has created; when we behold individuals with the deepest sympathy for the indescribable misery – then we can only end up with sadness over this transitoriness and, insofar as this destruction is not only a work of nature but of the will of men, even more with moral sadness, with the indignation of the good spirit, if there be any in us, over such a spectacle. We can raise such events, without any rhetorical exaggeration, merely by putting together all the misfortune that the most glorious peoples and states as well as individual virtues or innocence have suffered, into the most horrible portrait, and thus intensify our feeling into the most profound and helpless sadness which cannot be balanced by any conciliatory result…. But even as we contemplate history as this slaughter bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, our thoughts cannot avoid the question for whom, for what final aim these monstrous sacrifices have been made.”
Reason and horror go ang work together with Hegel. It's a very dialectical conception built aroudn the idea of the cunning of reason. It is much more preferrable to the conservatives black versus white (good versus evil) view of history.
In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty' Anthony Burke says that the account of sovereignty given by Hardt and Negri in Empire is flawed.
Hardt and Negri's position is that modern sovereignty is not just an abstract locus of juridical authority, which forms the basis for Westphalian international law and order. It is also a complex disciplinary and ontological machinery of enormous depth and force whose ultimate aim is to harness and control the possibility of freedom within capitalist post-modernity.
It is an account I have much sympathy with.
Burke finds two flaws with their account. The first is that in:
"...the hope of foreseeing a renewed conflict between the revolutionary and repressive possibilities of modernity they assert a radical, irreversible passage from modernity to Empire...We can hardly mock their desire or fail to share their hope – but to do so is not always to share their optimism. I worry that projecting the emergence of the multitude as a new historical phenomenon – in teleological terms - may be to downplay the very real challenges in forming it into being and generating truly revolutionary potential from its disparate (and divided) sites and spaces of struggle."
But Burke leaves this standing, as he moves onto the second flaw in Hardt and Negri's account which is the one that he is more interested in. The second flaw Burke says:
"...is the wanton act of theoretical (and analytical) closure they perform amid this hope....modern sovereignty, in all its repression and horror, is passing away; and the critical paradigms that grappled with it so gamely are now at best passé and at worst complicit with the new hybrid flexible formations of capitalist Empire. This occurs because the world market 'tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state' and with them the stable orders and hierarchies of modern sovereignty."
Hardt and Negri see a world of 'minor and internal conflicts'. since the 'history of imperialist, inter-imperialist and anti-imperialist wars is over'. Now there are only civil wars, police actions, a 'proliferation of minor and indefinite crisis.
Is Iraq just a civil war or police action? Surely it is also about a global power securing a bigger foothold in the Middle East.
Instead of the melting away of sovereignty in Australia in postrmodernity we have the reassertion of sovereignty with economic globalisation. A conservative/neo-liberal government has harsh policies towards asylum seekers, such as mandatory detention, restrictions to legal process, and military operations to repel boats. This discourse is all about protecting our boders, the Australian state deciiding who comes into the country, and the state providing Australians with a sense of security and 'home'.
Two things are happening at once: the Australian stateis colluding in the collude in the construction of Empire, whilst it continue to insist on the ontological primacy of the state and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force as a pre-emptive strike.
We ended the previous post with a question: 'where does the undermining of social democracy leave this political tradition now'? This is important to us Australians because we are talking about the ALP that has transformed itself under Hawke/Keating, then under Latham.
This is an important question since, John Quiggin has argued that the era of neo-liberal tradition has ended. He then says:
"If the neoliberal revolution is behind us, what is ahead. I don't expect to see a return to the institutions of the postwar settlement, to the extent that they have been displaced by neoliberalism. I also don't anticipate a resumption of the rapid growth in the size of the state, relative to the economy as a whole that we saw in the postwar period (actually for the first 75 years of the 20th century). Nevertheless, we have seen a general reassertion of the view, acerbically summarised by WK Hancock that "Australian democracy has come to look upon the State as a vast public utility, whose duty is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number". The idea that governments could hand off their core responsibilities in health, education and the provision of physical infrastructure to markets or private providers has been abandoned."
Luke Martell answers this in terms of social democracy being modernized through an accommodation to neo-liberalism over the last two decades. This modernized social democracy is now the dominant form of social democracy. Martell says:
"Of course, elements of modernising social democracy were present in factions of traditional social democratic parties and vice-versa and recent and older social democratic parties were internally diverse. Rhetorical differences between new and old may have sometimes been greater than real differences. And the divergence between new and old may be stressed by modernisers in order to exaggerate their own novelty and avoid what are percieved to be electorally damaging connections with the past. Nevertheless, modernising social democracy has many discontinuities with traditional social democracy and now dominates the stated ideology and policies of social democratic parties in a way that it did not do so in the past."
" Modernising social democracy, in Britain at least, is not only about finding new means for old social democratic ends – new economic and social policies for pursuing equality and community – in a new globalised context. It has actually redefined old social democratic ends themselves: new times, new means and new ends or values."
Martell gives various instances of the transformation of social democratic ends. Unsuprisingly, the first is equality:
"One significant shift is from equality not only to equal opportunities but to minimum opportunities. Blair [and Latham] does not believe in egalitarian redistribution, and his policies (such as welfare-to-work and the tackling of ‘failing’ schools and poor literacy) are not geared to equal opportunities, but to minimum opportunities for those currently excluded from them. Of course if the socially excluded are granted minimum opportunities this puts them on a more equal footing with others. But beyond that equality is not promoted and the main dynamic is inclusion and minimum opportunities rather than egalitarian redistribution. After that baseline has been achieved it is not clear that more equal outcomes or even the equalisation of opportunities is on the government’s agenda."
Another transformation of the end of social democracy is community. Martell says:
"As such, the oft-spoken value of community also refers to a more inclusive community rather than a more equal one. It does not mean class community or the socio-economic community of old social democracy which was to be built by measures such as redistribution and common experiences of universal health care and comprehensive education. It refers to moral community with the emphasis on the responsibilities of individual citizens to the state rather than of business to the community, a more old social democratic conception, even if it was not often pursued right down to the hilt in practice."
Other values that would be transformed are those associated with the role of active government in a market economy (eg. a rejection of direct interventionist sort advocated by traditional social democracy); the replacement of social liberalism's self-development of the person ethics by a crude utilitarianism; and a replacement of welfare programs with law and order.
Do we end up with Thatcherism with a human face?
This article is useful in the light of this: the lack of a decent social democratic response to the recent economic devastation of particular regions within the nation state. That devastation started to happen during the 1980s with the turn to the global economy, and many of us are living with the consequences of that neo-liberal turn today.
Martell starts by briefly describing social democracy. He says that for social democrats:
"Capitalism is accepted – it can deliver growth and wealth. However capitalism is not all good, it can lead to inequalities and deprivation which need to be mitigated through government intervention, a characteristic on which social democracy begins to differ, in emphasis at least, from many liberals and conservatives. Amongst social democrats there may be differences of emphasis, between those who envisage compensatory policies, which attempt to mitigate or sweep up the social costs of liberal capitalism, and countervailing social democracy, which tries to establish principles which go in a different direction to liberal capitalism. Mitigative policies or reform are initiated and implemented by government from above which is focused on the national arena, on action via the nation-state."
Martell then sketches a brief history that is well known, as it has formed part of our lived experience:
"From 1945 onwards in many countries social democracy was organised around various ideological and policy features: Keynesian economics, a universal welfare state, working class solidarity, the trade unions and corporatist arrangements. Of course, such features varied from place to place. In some countries corporatism took off and became embedded more than in others. The form the welfare state has taken has varied, to take another example. And whether such mainstays of social democracy actually always made their way into concrete practice, or were held to in all factions of social democratic parties can be questioned."
Martell then mentions what happened to the social democratic tradition during the 1970s:
"From the 1970s onwards these ideological and policy features have taken a battering. The size and political loyalty of the traditional manufacturing working class has declined. This does not mean that class as an economic and social division has declined in importance, even if it may have become redefined and restructured. Inequality is still a very important issue. And there have long been significant sections of the middle class who have supported social democracy as well as working class supporters of the right. But it does mean that electorally the core support for social democracy has shrunk with the shift from manufacturing to services and is no longer so loyally social democratic as it used to be."The consquences of this battering has been a policy shift. Martell describes it as policy crises to the issue of changing social base but with other dynamics also involved. He says:
".... it is perceived that state welfare has produced dependency rather than initiative on the part of citizens and the type of government support which would underpin greater opportunities for them. In addition, it is perceived by some social democrats that the willingness of people to financially support such systems through income tax has reached its limits. Furthermore, with growing affluence, welfare, or state systems of health, pensions and such like, no longer need to be so universal. Many can afford to pay for some of these services ourselves. And such systems have become inefficient, geared to producer rather than consumer interests, undemocratic and unwieldy."And:"Keynesian macroeconomic policy is also seen to have been undermined, in part by globalisation. The capacity of governments to control the economy within their own borders seems no longer possible (if it ever really was) because capital can move quickly and easily across national boundaries. High public spending and reflationary strategies may therefore frighten off capital, more attracted to low spending and stable macro-economic government policies. Or the wealth it creates could just be spent by consumers on overseas rather than domestic products or lead to price and wage inflation."This has meant that social democratic parties nowadays (eg., the ALP in Australia) are more concerned with prudence in spending and with attracting investment. Policies for wealth-creation and growth are less about spending and government ownership or direction of industries. They are more about fostering competitive markets and business-friendliness, maintaining private sector confidence and structuring a workforce and incentives which are attractive to potential investors.Where does that leave social democracy now?
In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty', Anthony Burke says that sovereignty is not just a juridical figure. It is also political technology which simultaneously reached into the heart of the citizen and most obscure reaches of the social world, and enabled new forms of governmental power that underpinned and accelerated new forms of technological and economic modernity.
In explicating this he is working from Hardt and Negri's text Empire.
He says that a utilitarian strand of this discourse of sovereignty (eg., Jeremy Bentham) saw security as essential to the progressive imagination of liberal modernity. Security would safeguard an 'expectation' of the future in which economic gain can be pursued without interruption either by social disorder or socialist redistribution; a security which rested not merely on totalising deployments of police or military violence but on desire, discipline and self government – what Foucault termed "governmentality". Burke understands this in terms of 'a political machine that rules across the entire society' - a machine that is disciplinary and bio-political.
He says that:
" ....what I would emphasise is that such power, exercised through economic regulation, disciplinary apparatuses, coercion and desire, is still ultimately organised around the final authority (and emotional appeal) of the state. In the construction of national identities, all too often in fearful and repressive relation to internal and external Others, we ultimately find the link between individualising and totalising power; between the state and the citizen as linked formations of subjectivity secured by security. This closes off democratic possibility and freedom...."
In this way Hardt and Negri's is a brilliant and suggestive analysis that resists essentialism and builds powerfully on an extended body of prior and contemporary theory.
In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty', Anthony Burke asks:
"What is "modern sovereignty"? In developing this concept, Hardt and Negri echo a powerful critique of sovereignty that refutes its basic essentialising claim: that sovereignty forms an unproblematic and legitimate site of authority and legal violence based on its status as a representative signifier for the nation, 'the people'. This is a form of ontological magic first visible in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, where he posits humanity moving on a journey from a mythical 'state of nature' to the 'body-politick', 'a multitude united in One Person'. (1985: 227) Based on this suffocating image of 'many wills' reduced to one, Westphalian sovereignty was made (via Machiavelli) into the basic structural and normative principle for International Relations: the rule of law and morality within the state; the rule of anarchy and amorality outside it, driven by states' eternal competition and struggle for power. (Hobbes 1985; George 1994: 71)"
The history of Australia has been one of the concealment of this violence that involves a politics of forgetting.
Burke says that this politics involves a trading of freedom for security coupled to a powerful image of sovereign identity as perpetually under threat, and as intolerant and repressive of difference.
Anthony Burke asks some good questions that impinge upon Negri and Hardt's Empire:
"In the face of this, a number of questions arise. Why is there this persistence of the idea of modern territorial sovereignty as passing away in the face of economic globalisation, neo-liberal ascendancy, the transnational corporation and so on? What other complexities and understandings does this obscure and occlude? Why does this idea of temporal passage coexist, in Empire, with Hardt and Negri's very suggestive account of a new global apparatus of rule? Is it possible and indeed crucial to argue that sovereignty still exists in a complex (and in many ways enabling or ideal) relation to the new imperial space under construction? Are there violences and struggles whose names still need to be heard from beneath the ongoing wreckage of modern sovereignty?"
And it will argue against essentialist notions of sovereignty----a closed, egoistic mode of national identity intolerant and repressive of otherness?
It sounds promising.
From a Gauche. An interesting link: 'The Perverse Preserverance of Sovereignty' by Anthony Burke from the University of Adelaide in Borderlands. I see that the University without Condition is reading the text.
Anthony says that:
"It's a familiar story: the withering away of the state under globalisation, or if not so much the state, the withering away of a certain idea and formation of sovereignty. A sovereignty that no longer possesses the fullness and power of its Westphalian ideal: a bounded territorial realm in which national authority is absolute, which provides a representative and political principle through which states and their people can manage and control the forces that affect their lives. With the increasing globalisation of capital and trade, the growth of supranational regimes of economic governance such as the WTO, the interventionist zeal of the World Bank and the IMF, and the might and influence of the transnational corporation, sovereignty appears to be a thing of the past - the nostalgic ghost of a world transformed."
I have suspected that Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis is what underpins Australian conservatism these days. They hold that the Islamic terrorists attack Australia because they hate our highest values, our freedoms, our way of life, our civilization. They hate our democratically elected government with its freedom of religion and speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
This is the ideology of the Australian political establishment as it wages its "war against terror." The radical Muslims attack Australia because they hate who we are. They want to destroy us because they hate our freedom, our opportunities, our democratic institutions, our way of life, our Judeo-Christian heritage. It is a hatred that is civilizational. It is rooted in the illiberal, intolerant, misogynist, anti-modernist, and anti-scientific culture of Muslims and their religion.
What then is the clash thesis? Huntington says:
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new worldwill not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
Interesting. It defines federalism as
".....a form of government dividing political authority among two or more levels, usually with a written constitutional document detailing the division of powers among these levels....Federalism is an institutional means of recognizing the need for local communities to rule themselves in accordance with their own perceived interests."
"If all policy decisions were to emanate from a distant capital city, irrespective of the divergent needs of local populations, such a country would come to resemble nothing more than a highly centralized empire, whose every action would likely engender alienation outside the capital itself."
What subsidiarity discloses is the determination of citizens to maintain the vitality of their local communities and to pressure their state (regional) governments' capacity to enable local communities to live flourishing lives.
This review in The Nation of a number of recent books says what many deny. And it says it simply:
"Suddenly everyone has discovered, and accepts as a commonplace, that the United States possesses an empire. For some our newly acknowledged imperial status is a source of celebration, for others of lamentation, but it is in any case something that cannot be denied. It is no longer even a choice, but rather a simple reality.....The empire is what it is, and the power realities will not be greatly different even if the name is euphemized and the personalities who direct it are changed. How long it will last rests in good measure on how well it is managed."
"We are in the early stages of imperial self-recognition. Americans are only just beginning to understand the role their nation plays in the world, and the price incurred by that role. That acknowledgment is late in coming because we have been brought up on an image of ourselves as rebellious colonists winning liberation from the clutches of imperial Europe."
So how do they understand America to be an empire? Steel says:
"If the emerging American empire was not based on the formal acquisition of territory, a territorial concept was inherent in the construction of economic and political control. This was the continuation and expansion of the prewar pattern. Following World War I the United States--unlike its French, British and Japanese allies--claimed no spoils from those it had defeated. Instead it focused on economic expansion (and continued suzerainty over Latin America). Its goal then, and now, was a global Open Door for American trade and investment."
The US is a great imperial power with global interests to protect and advance.
philosophy.com has few Australian readers interested in political philosophy, and there are few philosophically informed weblogs in Australia. So it is always very heartening when a new one arrives on the local scene.
This is one. Don Arthur's Wealth for Toil. Don has writing since June but I have only just noticed. So I have been reading the archives and came across this post. In it Don says:
"The left struggles to achieve two things:to reduce inequalities of status, power, and wealth; and
to prevent inequality in one sphere from translating into inequality in another.Egalitarianism is the defining feature of the left. It is what all leftist projects have in common. The only thing that unites the right is its opposition to equality. It is the only reason groups like religious fundamentalists and economic liberals can find common ground."
I'm not so sure. It would be equality plus sustainability these days. We do not want a just (ie. an equal society) that is premised on unsustainable economic growth, which rips the guts out of the country. That is social democracy.
Few social democrats ask the question: equality for what? Equality is taken to be an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve the good life (a flourishing life well lived).
In the light of this event and the neo-con emphasis on Islamic fundamentalists hating Anglo-Americans, this quote is very appropriate. It is by Michael Scott Duran, and it is from Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb2002.
Michael poses the right question. He asks:
'In the weeks after the attacks of September 11, Americans repeatedly asked, "Why do they hate us?" To understand what happened, however, another question may be even more pertinent: "Why do they want to provoke us?"'
Michael says that David Fromkin suggested the answer can be found in a Foreign Affairs article back in 1975:
'"Terrorism," he noted, "is violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else -- not the terrorist -- to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires." When a terrorist kills, the goal is not murder itself but something else -- for example, a police crackdown that will create a rift between government and society that the terrorist can then exploit for revolutionary purposes. Osama bin Laden sought -- and has received -- an international military crackdown, one he wants to exploit for his particular brand of revolution."'
"Bin Laden produced a piece of high political theater he hoped would reach the audience that concerned him the most: the umma, or universal Islamic community. The script was obvious: America, cast as the villain, was supposed to use its military might like a cartoon character trying to kill a fly with a shotgun. The media would see to it that any use of force against the civilian population of Afghanistan was broadcast around the world, and the umma would find it shocking how Americans nonchalantly caused Muslims to suffer and die. The ensuing outrage would open a chasm between state and society in the Middle East, and the governments allied with the West -- many of which are repressive, corrupt, and illegitimate -- would find themselves adrift. It was to provoke such an outcome that bin Laden broadcast his statement following the start of the military campaign on October 7, in which he said, among other things, that the Americans and the British "have divided the entire world into two regions -- one of faith, where there is no hypocrisy, and another of infidelity, from which we hope God will protect us."
Michael goes on to say that:
".... polarizing the Islamic world between the umma and the regimes allied with the United States would help achieve bin Laden's primary goal: furthering the cause of Islamic revolution within the Muslim world itself, in the Arab lands especially and in Saudi Arabia above all. He had no intention of defeating America. War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument designed to help his brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers. Americans, in short, have been drawn into somebody else's civil war.Washington had no choice but to take up the gauntlet, but it is not altogether clear that Americans understand ... "
It is not altogether clear that Canberra understands either as it prepares to take up the gauntlet with JI in Indonesia.
We have blogged on Terence Stamp's review of Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire in Logos before. But in the light of this I want to pick up on the fear bit.
Terence Stamp says:
"Throughout this book Barber’s particular critique of Bush’s foreign policy is delivered alongside a general argument against the very essence of the conservative weltanschauung: “fear.” Fear as a political rhetoric, it can be said, derives from a sense of vulnerability and weakness in the face of the fecund opponents of American power. It derives from a general pessimism about humanity and its fundamentally evil urges, that says a world without power and order produces anarchy. And perhaps it derives from deep psychic rivulets of historical guilt. "
Some speculation.
Like America, Australian self-identity resorts to a notion of exceptionalism. New world Australia was seen to be “empty” (a terra nullius) and this myth allowed its people to “start the world over again.” To build a new classless (white) world different from a class-ridden Britain. However, Australia's actual beginnings was one of virtuous Australian pioneers confronted by an alien and hostile world that could not be easily tamed or bought under control. The image of Australian exceptionalism in a hostile world continues to be projected outward to the wider anarchic and threatening world of nation-states within the Asia Pacific Rim.
Associating with powerful friends (Britain then America) served the interests of national sovereignty in an anarchic world of fear and evil. It was the only way to protect national virtue faced with threats from the Japanese, communists and terrorists to destroy us. In hitching up to the US Australia now finds itself embarking upon a “righteous war against evil.”
The point of the speculation is to suggest a reason why Empire is no longer a dirty word in Australia. Thus Brett Bowden writes:
"Empire is no longer a dirty word, at least not for some. Why? Because the essential task of empires is to produce and maintain an orderly world. And at the present juncture in world politics, the Unites States and its key allies believe that the world is in need of a good dose of American-led-coalition-of-the-willing imposed order in the name of security and freedom. "
My reason for connecting citizenship with nationality or a national culture is because the Australian Constitution does not define or mention citizenship. Australians are never referred to as citizens in the Constitution, but are referred to as 'people', 'persons', 'electors' and 'subjects of the Queen.'
The foundational principle here is the people of the colonies agreeing to unite in a federal commonwealth under the crown of the UK. It is the consent of the people--their sovereign will---that is the central democratic value. People and person are the central terms of the Australian Constitution.
The only mention of ciitzenship in the Constitution refers to citizens of other countries being precluded from becoming members of the Australian Parliament. The central concern is to exclude. Why so?
I've always regarded the silence about citizenship as a big gap; a flaw in the Australian Constitution. The silence puzzles me because the background debates in the various constitutional conventions talked a lot about citizenship and discussed it extensively.
A suggestion. Exclusion is the key. If citizenship were introduced into the Constitution they would constitutional fathers deal with people of other races, particularly the Chinese and Indian residents who had originated in other British colonies? If they defined "citizens" as subjects of the Queen then not only would Chinese people from Hong Kong be treated differently to those from other parts of China, but those people would also be able to claim citizenship of the Commonwealth.
Asiatics were not wanted in Australia. The Constitution is premised on the states right to exclude aliens.
The sentiments expressed in the Constitutional Convention concerning the Chinese and other non-British immigrants were the result of half a century of growing concerns over the presence of Chinese immigrants in the colonies. The views of the 19th century have had, and continue to have, a significant influence on our understanding of citizenship as exclusion.
When citizenship is connected to a national culture it implies that citizens belong to a political community with a specific cultural heritage and common culture that is valued and shared. It is this heritage and commonality that underpins public life and facilitates public life.
Nationality is what we have in common and what we share even though there is diversity within the commonality. An example of this commonality and sharing would be the emphasis on individual rights visa-vis the state in the USA. It is quite different to Australia, where the emphasis has been on utility not rights.
Another example is language. Though many people in the nation speak different languages English is what we have in common and share. Those who become citizens are required to have a working grasp of English and an understanding of our history.
One way of addressing the lack of the political in Adorno and Horkheimer is through citizenship, which means membership in a political community of the nation-state. It also means loyalty to those members and sharing in a political community. Citizenship is at the core of the politics of democratic nation states.
Yet citizenship is often forgotten, even by those whose concerns are about defending democracy. Thus Cornell West's paper about democracy matters in Logos barely mentions citizenship. He says that the:
"...three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy. This historic devouring in our time constitutes an unprecedented gangsterization of America—an unbridled grasp at power, wealth, and status. And when the most powerful forces in a society—and an empire—promote a suffocation of democratic energies, the very future of genuine democracy is jeopardized."
"No democracy can flourish against the corruptions of plutocratic, imperial forces—or withstand the temptations of militarism in the face of terrorist hate—without a citizenry girded by these three moral pillars of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. The hawks and proselytizers of the Bush administration have professed themselves to be the guardians of American democracy, but there is a deep democratic tradition in this country that speaks powerfully against their nihilistic, antidemocratic abuse of power and that can fortify genuine democrats today in the fight against imperialism....The greatest intellectual, moral, political, and spiritual resources in America that may renew the soul and preserve the future of American democracy reside in this multiracial, rich democratic heritage."
I raise this example because in the Australian context the conventional tendency is to hollow out citizenship by downgrading the link to a national culture. We are offered an account of citizenship in civic terms of democracy, diversity, tolerance and the rule of law. Citizens on this account do not think of themselves as primarily Australians.
This defines citizenship in terms of universal liberal democratic values and downplays the way national culture and patriotism underpin the federal political community. We are offered a citizenship defined by political institutions divorced from a national culture. A national culture is regarded with suspicion, if not hostility.
What Stephen Eric Bonner is doing by reclaiming the Enlightenment tradition is to re-connect emancipatory reason with the progressive politics of modernity.
"The idea of reclaiming the Enlightenment views its subject less as a dead historical artifact than as the necessary precondition for developing any form of progressive politics in the present."
So how does Bonner do this? Alas, in a conventional and cliched way.
He reclaims a common ethos of resistance to the parochial beliefs and the arrogance of power by those representatives of church and tradition, who so vigorously opposed democracy and equality, revolution and reform, cosmopolitanism and internationalism, skepticism and science. He puts the political conflict between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment up front.
He does this by acknowledging the biases and prejudices of the Enlightenment tradition. He says:
"Viewing the Enlightenment as irremediably tainted by anachronistic prejudices only casts a plague on all houses. No need exists to compare the views of the philosophes and the fanatics: both are prejudiced with regard to race or sex or sexual practice and that is that. Forgotten is that the former can be held to their own ethical standards of progress while the latter cannot because they rejected those standards in the first place. "
He argues that illuminating the spirit of the Enlightenment, the best that it had to offer, is the place to begin. What the Enlightenment ethos stands for is a self-critical method that can be used in the fight for liberation from outdated prejudices and dogmas.
It all ends rather lamely. Bonner says:
"....when the salience of the Enlightenment can no longer be taken for granted, when its values have come under attack from both the right and the left, more is necessary than analyzing a few thinkers or some abstract philosophical propositions about history, nature, and “man.” It is a matter of presenting the Enlightenment as an overarching political enterprise and a living tradition—not merely in its ideas but in the actions it inspires."
Criticising the current political practices and democratic institutions that embody the enlightenment tradition in the name of the spirit of the enlightenment has been forgotten. What is presented by Bonner is a very thin and cliched conception of the progressive political discourse of modernity. Thge lack of the political that he criticizes in Adorno & Horkheimer is evident in his text.
Where is Bonner's mention of citizenship?
There is a useful quote about conservatism in an article by Stephen Eric Bonner. Bonner says that:
"The defense of western civilization by conservative intellectuals is, unsurprisingly, mixed with anti-Enlightenment and anti-modern prejudices. They obsess about sexual license and the decline of family values, cultural “nihilism” and the loss of tradition, tolerance for divergent life-styles and the erosion of national identity. Their “west” is not the “west” of the Enlightenment."
My own view is that the Enlightenment rationality is an instrumental rationality that has merged with what Marx termed the “commodity form” underpinning capitalist social relations. Everything thereby becomes subject to the utilitarian calculation of costs and benefits. Even art and aesthetic tastes become defined by a “culture industry”—intent only upon maximizing profits by seeking the lowest common denominator for its products. The culture indiustry would noe include the media and entertainment industries.
That is pretty much the view of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. It means that the conservative economic liberal position is open to criticism on two fronts, and that the standard liberal attack on conservativism in the name of Enlightenment is questionable. By putting the Enlightenment tradition into question in the name of reason not unreason, Adorno and Horkhiemer show that it is possible to criticize the Enlightenment from the standpoint of enlightenment itself.
This offers an alternative position to the standard one that the only game in town is rejecting the countermovememt of religious reaction, conservative prejudice, and fascist irrationalism whose inspiration derived from what is usually called the “Counter-Enlightenment”.
Stephen Eric Bonner defends the Enlightenment. So how does he respond to Adorno & Horkheimer's criticism of that tradition? As you would expect he responds in a negative fashion. Most people do. So what does Bonner say? What reasons does he give?
What Bonner says is this:
'....Horkheimer and Adorno even talked about writing a sequel that would have carried a title like “Rescuing the Enlightenment”. This reclamation project was never completed, and much time has been spent speculating about why it wasn’t. The reason, I believe, is that the logic of their argument ultimately left them with little positive to say. Viewing instrumental rationality as equivalent with the rationality of domination, and this rationality with an increasingly seamless bureaucratic order, no room existed any longer for a concrete or effective political form of opposition: Horkheimer would thus ultimately embrace a quasi-religious “yearning for the totally other” while Adorno became interested in a form of aesthetic resistance grounded in “negative dialectics.”'Nothing is said about what was is wrong with a turn to the aesthetic as a mode of resistance to instrumental reason, or with the immanent critique of a negative dialectics operating within the Enlightenment tradition. There is a hint that the turn to the aesthetic affirms subjectivity (romanticism?) at the expense of political engagement, but no argument is made.
Bonner goes to add that though Dialectic of Enlightenment initiated a radical change in critical theory:
"....its metaphysical subjectivism surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions. Neither of them ever genuinely appreciated the democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and thus, not only did they render critique independent of its philosophical foundations, but also of any practical interest it might serve."
True, there was little interest in social movement or political engagement shown by Adorno and Horkheimer, and their critique of the political was thin.So what does Bonner do? He affirms the the spirit of Enlightenment by which he means an ethos, or an existential stance toward reality, or what might even be termed a “project” uniting the diverse participants in a broader intellectual trend or movement. He also says that appropriating the Enlightenment for modernity calls for reconnecting with the vernacular to arguing clearly and with a political purpose in the tradition of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and Rousseau,
This gives us a reclamation project of rescuing the Enlightenment”, which Adorno and Horkheimer failed to deliver on. Bonner says:
"We need to consider the actual movements with which enlightenment ideals...Dialectic of Enlightenment never grasped what was at stake in the conflict or interrogated its political history. Its authors never acknowledged that different practices and ideals are appropriate to different spheres of activity or that only confusion would result from substituting the affirmation of subjectivity, through aesthetic-philosophic criticism, for political resistance. Horkheimer and Adorno were....remiss ....in ignoring the institutional preconditions for the free exercise of individual capacities. Striking indeed is how those most concerned about the “loss of subjectivity” have shown the least awareness about the practical role of genuinely democratic as against reactionary pseudo-universalism and the institutional lessons of totalitarianism."
Notice the shift in the argument. Adorno and Horkheimer are not longer working within the enlightenment tradition. They are slowly being slipped outside it without an engagement with Adorno's Aesthetic Theory or any indication that Adorno defended democracy and critique against totalitarianism.Having sidelined contemporary critical theorists and postmodernists Bonner can them move on to his real concern--- attacking the Counter Enlightenment (authoritarianism, religious reaction, conservative prejudice, and political irrationalism) in the name of the enlightenment. We are back to the main game in town.
No further consideration is gven to how Bonner's criticism of the enlightenment tradition from within is different from, or better, than that of Adorno and Horkheimer other than poiltical critique.
yeah, I've always wondered about this too.
There has been the intellectual stranglehold of public policy by economists, who have managed to get the neo-liberal model of competitive individualism and corporate globalisation to dominate public discourse and policy-making for the past 20 years.
How can you take neo-classical economics seriously when it's ontology does not even recognize social institutions. Its ontology recognizes are self-interested individuals competitively interacting with one another to give us a complete or perfect competitive market.
The justification is that have is a process of abstraction from the real world that does away with irrelvant details. Large corporations that dominate the market are irrelevant details? Big unions are irrelevant details? Behind the economic rhetoric of small government and welfare-cutting, Australia has created a big conservative state where political, economic and media power is dominated by corporations.
What the neo-liberal economists dished up was US liberal democracy and market capitalism as the only models left for Australia. The economists were trying to universalise the American particular.
This is Paul Keating's Redfern speech, which the former ALP Prime Minister delivered almost a decade ago.
I have returned to it because it shows how truth in politics is linked to the nature of bonding or a sharing of a culture. Keating makes this connection quite explict:
"....we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed.Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous pople of Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.
This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will: our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be - truly the land of the fair go and the better chance.
There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things.
It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia. "
"...the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity - and our own humanity."
Raymond Gaita's understanding of truth in politics does away with any understanding of truth as Truth (ie Absolute Truth). He has a far more prosaic understanding of truth. He says:
"Anything that counts as serious reflection will acknowledge itself to be answerable to the contrast between how things appear to us and how they are. Everyone knows that we must struggle to adjust distorting perspectives, free ourselves from prejudice, try to resist propaganda, try to resist the fashions of the times, try to overcome vanity and fears, try to resist our vulnerability to sentimentality, bathos and cliche, and so on. This is as true of narrative as it is of philosophy. These efforts are not efforts to be objective with a capital "O", they are just what it means to try to be objective in its ordinary, workaday sense of efforts "oriented towards truth".
"To seek to avoid sentimentality, for example, is to seek to avoid falsehood, as much as efforts to check on the facts are efforts to avoid falsehood. But then, one could put the point the other way about - perhaps more congenial to those who fear that talk of truth disguises an inclination to reach for a capital "T". To try to be truthful, to orient one's efforts towards truth, is nothing more than to make one's efforts answerable to those critical concepts whose applications mark our efforts to overcome vanity, seek out of the relevant facts, overcome sentimentality and so on."
Keeping themselves in power is all that matters. Everything is now bent towards ensuring this end. Even sections of the media particapte. Politics is about war and destroying the enemy. Distortion, polemics and misrepresentation have become standard operating procedure of the conservative media.
Gaita concludes his essay by saying:
"The mendacity that now pollutes the life of this nation provokes a degree of understandable cynicism that makes trust an almost saintly virtue. Lower standards and a diminished regard for truthfulness in the public institutions entrusted to serve our need for truth - most notably in the universities and media - make it difficult for us to develop the kind of judgement necessary for trust to be lucid. Both undermine the space in which we must try to learn again about the nature of political virtue and what it can mean for politics to be a vocation."