Random Variable

Why isn’t anyone translating Isabelle Stenger’s Cosmopolitiques?

I did not believe YouTube capable of producing constructive debate, but I’ve been proved wrong by vlogger GrandNarratives.

I’d like to draw some attention to the last part of Žižek’s recent class on the embedness of ideology, which was a response to another response by Sara Ahmed to his plenary talk on liberal multiculturalism that was given at the Critical Legal Conference last year.

Sara Ahmed took issue with Žižek’s claim that liberal multiculturalism as hegemony is an empirical fact. Here, she takes issue with what she claims is Žižek’s literal reading of multiculturalism. She utilises the concept of a non-performative, that is a performative that functions in its very opposite as a way of reading liberal multiculturalism. In this narrative, multiculturalism takes on a double bind: The racist reads multiculturalism to say that you can be racist, but that you assert your racism in the very way that you profess non-racism, and that this forms the basis of our late modern “civil racism.”

Žižek’s response is to re-describe liberal multiculturalism as fantasy. That is, racism is officially prohibited at the institutional level, but this prohibition becomes an ego-ideal, which must lead to outbursts against shamed racists, which takes on a class dimension. In the Shilpa Shetty Big Brother debacle, Jade Goody was villainised even though the majority of the racism came from Jo O’Meara. Jade Goody personified the working-class racist that liberals all like to dismiss. Another story comes from an incident involving the Roma in Slovenia. The travellers arrived at a small village, where the inhabitants turned to racist exclusionism. Liberals from around the country came to the Roma’s defence, but at no point did they say that the Roma could live next to them. When one looks at the content of the village racists arguments, one can discern real socioeconomic concerns tied in with class alienation.

When one looks over debates over Islam, liberals like to oppose an authentic religion against its bad fundamentalist counterpart. Here, Žižek rightly discerns that multiculturalism relies on the admission of Otherness, but the liberals are the masters who draw the line as to who the good Other is, therefore protecting “true diversity.”

Ahmed then claims that hidden behind liberal multiculturalism is an injunction to monoculturalism. Žižek counters by showing how things are really worse than this. The demand to become British is impossible. One cannot do it, and the liberals secretly enjoy it. This is experienced in conversations as “what about your own culture? I love your closeness to nature!”

Therefore, multiculturalism outputs two different types of racism. A reflexive racism that allows us to discern ourselves from the racist Other on the basis of class or the “intolerant Muslim,” and it also falsely elevates the Other as authentic to a fragile absolute.

So, how do we move beyond the deadlock? Žižek takes on a critical reading of Rowan Williams suggestion that Britain adopts a variant of Islamic Shariah courts. Williams is careful to emphasise two limitations on the adoption of Shariah; both parties must consent to a hearing in front of a Shariah court, and that there should be no conflict with UK criminal law. Žižek argues that nothing really radical happens. If you secede rights to ethnic communities on the basis that they have to assent to the process, then to have a truly free choice, you would need to be educated in making a choice between the rules of the different ethnic and religious groupings. For example, the moment a woman wears a veil as a part of her free choice, it is no longer a sign of integration with her community but an expression of her own individualism. The choice here is always a metachoice.

Beck used the principle of a “double religion” to describe the same thing at his recent lecture on the cosmopolitanisation of religion. He utilises Lessing’s ring parable to call for an ironist position with regards to one own religion—no one is sure that their faith is the one true faith, and therefore cannot proceed on exclusionary grounds. Last year, Beck had no answer as to how cosmopolitan realism could be engendered at the level of public debate, and yet it happened in the unlikeliest quarter—the Anglican Church.

Žižek actually likes this idea of a metachoice. Here, a theological project that authors like Saba Mahmood has discerned in involvements with religious institutions seems near unavoidable. This is probably where research needs to be directed today.

For Žižek, tearing ourselves from all of our roots is the precondition of the rehabilitation of the Left. But I would argue that it can also lead to its opposite—neofundamentalism. Olivier Roy has already documented how fundamentalists do tear themselves from their ethnic roots. In fact, turns to neofundamentalism are often a sort of “protest conversion”:

“Blacks, Latinos and persons of mixed race who find in radical Islamic groups a rebuke to racism and a way to fight a system they reject,…many belong to the same milieu as their Muslim friends; they live in impoverished neighbourhoods and are working-class dropouts, for example, Jose Padilla, Richard Reid and the Frenchman Lionel Dumont – who converted to Islam because ‘the Muslims are the only ones to fight the system’. Many are from racial minorities (such as Blacks, specifically from the Caribbean) that find in radical Islam a truly non-racist environment. To convert to Islam today is a way for a European rebel to find a cause; it has little to do with theology.”

The neofundamentalists live similarly to the noveau rich. Both want gated communities, and travel the world to exploit new opportunities and use the lingua franca of English to communicate. The tearing of one’s self from the roots presents both an opportunity and a threat. I agree with Žižek that capitalism has achieved a global universality—that is why we call it globalisation. The struggle is to locate commonalities in the struggles and divisions for a new mass Left.

Cosmopolitanisation involves civil society as much as it involves the state. The new social movements need to find a message compatible and responsive to the needs of ethnic communities. Powerful states need to work with ethnic communities to bring about change in countries from which they’ve and create a level playing ground of substantive equality with regards to life chances.

Swearing an oath to Britain is code to give up the struggle of the Global South. The post-materialism of the new movements is meaningless for those where the very ground of their material life is being taken away from them.

Cosmopolitanism is not a pedagogical intervention. Nor does it mean sushi on every high street in Britain. It involves deep-level structural and cultural changes in the way societies are organised. It is both an ideal to strive towards, but also our only option to proceed during the 21^st century.

Some notes I’ve made on Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

The problem

Five billion people in the world are living in developing and growing economies. One billion people in the world are living in conditions no better than in the preindustrial era, in areas of conflict, disaster, disease and low life expectancy. The Bottom Billion offers a diagnosis as to why this is the case for a number of countries, mainly centring on Africa and Central Asia.

Civil war is much more likely to break out in low-income countries: halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war.

At the same time, civil war reduces income. A low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14% in any 5-year period. The anticipation of war causes a decline in income. Resource rich countries are considerably more prone to war, as natural resources can be used to finance war. People who join rebel forces tend to be motivated by the prospect of riches, and these are the ones who usually end up in charge. This makes reform harder for members of rebellions who care about social justice. This is the conflict trap.

Democratic rights, hard as they are for a people to establish, do not reduce the risk of civil war, and they do not reduce the risk of coups. When the growth process fails in a low-income society, it is exposed to risks that are hard to contain.

Countries with large resource discoveries end up poorer due to the rentier effect. All bets are off as to producing normal economic activity when natural resources are in play. Resources produce volatile revenues. When prices go up, spending shoots up, which is difficult to control when prices come back down? In addition, resource rents reduce the pressure to build exports. Income generally falls as a result. This is known as “dutch disease”

“Resource rents make democracy malfunction.” Surpluses from natural resource extraction are unsuited to electoral competition, as it lets in the politics of patronage. It may be easier to buy out your voters than provide public services. We can improve the situation by introducing more checks and balances. An example:

“For over a decade prior to 1979 Nigeria had been run by military dictators. To general relief, in that year the country returned to democratic civilian rule, electing Shehu Shagari president. Unfortunately, his regime turned out to be a classic example of patronage-driven electoral competition unrestrained by checks and balances. One of the government’s first acts was to recall a massive pubic investment project for a dam that had been awarded under the military government. The project was rewarded, but its cost according to the new contract rose from $120m to $600m. Politicians had spent a fortune buying the votes that got them elected, and now needed urgently to recoup their investments; their means to do so was a profit from the dam project”

However, this is not an argument for ending democracy. Autocracy only seems to work well for societies which are not ethnically diverse (ala China).

Being landlocked with unfriendly neighbours makes building an economy a lot harder – exports are difficult.

The small countries of the bottom billion suffer from poor governance. This is likely to be due to a lack of educated people in the country (most will have fled) to enact real reform. This reduces the probability of turnarounds succeeding.

The chance of escaping from these traps in any one year is about 2%. What does this mean in the age of globalisation? Collier believes that the bottom billion have missed the boat, and provided they are able to escape the traps, it will be harder to develop their economies. This is because; there is not enough of a difference in production costs between Africa and the Far East. Investment is attracted towards safe, middle-income countries. Reformed countries have a tough time shaking off their recent past. This means they are often ranked at higher risk than they should be by global business elites.

What to be done?

Aid

Aid as budget support often doesn’t work. In one study, less than one percent of aid allocated for rural healthcare was delivered. Aid above 16% of GDP is subject to “diminishing returns”.

Collier and Hoefller have estimated that around 40% of Africa’s military spending is inadvertently financed by aid. There is a case for donors to restrain military spending.

Collier believes that aid is not an effective measure for what it is designed to do – lift as many people out of poverty as possible.

In the conflict trap, big oil makes conflicts more likely to happen, but aid makes coups more likely to happen.

The problem of policy conditionality (or structural readjustment)

“The use of aid as an incentive for policy improvement was initiated in the 1980s…It was a pretty hopeless failure. There were two basic problems with it: the psychology and the economics. They psychological reaction to being told to do something is resistance…So conditionality pushes governments and indeed whole societies into opposing policy changes that would have been highly beneficial. Policy conditionality also messed up accountability. If governments were being ordered about by donor agencies, whom should an electorate, blame if things went wrong? Governments were quick to exploit the full potential for evading responsibility. In the week when the government of Zimbabwe launched economic reforms in 1998, its minister of information told the local press, “They’re not our reforms, they’re the IMF’s. We had to do them” That sort of statement not only shifted the responsibility but made the reforms very easy to reverse. And the government of Zimbabwe most surely reversed them.”

So, how do we initiate the transference to good governance?

“I take a very different view of governance conditionality. The key objective of governance conditionality is not to shift power from governments to donors but to shift power from governments to their own citizens. The struggle for this transfer of power took around two hundred years in Europe, and we should indeed want to speed it up in the bottom billion. External pressure was vital in the European struggle. The most common account of that struggle goes as follows. The threat of war forced governments to defend themselves with big armies. To pay for these armies the governments needed to tax. To get compliance for high taxation they had to concede representation and scrutiny. We cannot go through that process in the bottom billion. In Europe the threat of war turned into a reality sufficiently often for the whole process to have been murderous, and it would probably be so again. It was slow. But the purely internal processes by which citizens force governments to accept scrutiny are probably pretty weak. External pressure is needed. And it is entirely legitimate. Why should we give aid to governments that are not willing to let their citizens how they spend it?”

What about the countries own reformers?

“Imagine being a schoolchild in a bottom billion country on the eve of independence. The bright children in the class aspired to join the cilv service to help build the country. At the other end of the class, what were the aspirations for the dumb class bully? Forget the civil service with its tough exam. So the class bully set his sights on the army. Fast-forward two decades and a coup d’état. The army is now running th government. Between the class bullies, now the generals and their objective of looting the public sector stood the class stars now running the civil service. The generals didn’t like it. Gradually they replaced the clever with people more like themselves. And as they promoted the dumb and corrupt over the bright and the honest, the good chose to leave. Economists have a term for it: “selection by intrinsic motivation.””

Military intervention

How (not) to intervene

“In 2000, the RUF rebel movement [in Sierra Leone] took five hundred [UN] soldiers hostage and stripped them of their military equipment. Was the RUF such a formidable fighting force? Hardly – once a few hundred British troops arrived a few months later, willing to take casualties, the whole rebel army rapidly collapse. The UN troops were an easy target because the RUF understood that they would not resist. They were carrying their guns like tourists flaunting their jewellery.

…Sierra Leone rather than Iraq is the likely future of intervention opportunities in the bottom-billion countries. Look at the contrasts between the two situations. In Sierra Leone our forces were invited in by the government and hugely welcomed by the local population. In Sierra Leone we could not be accused of going in for the oil, as there wasn’t any. In Sierra Leone we did not have to worry about “fixing what we broke,” for there was not much to break, and we ousted the RUF with minimal damage. In Sierra Leone we needed less than a thousand proper soldiers to achieve decisive military change. The differences seem obvious.”

What about domestic troops in postconflict situations?

This is a time consistency problem:

“In postconflict situations, neither side trusts the other. The rebels face the greater problem because governments can maintain their armies during peace much more easily than can the rebels. So although the government has an incentive to promise an inclusive peace deal, as time goes on it has less and less of an incentive to keep its word. As a result, there are sure to be factions among the rebel forces wanting to go back to war pre-emptively, while the option is still open. High military spending by the government may inadvertently signal to the rebel forces that the government is indeed going to renege on any deal and rule by repression.

…Mozambique’s Prime Minister Luisa Diogo gave us the example of her own country. Completely bucking the usual trend, her government has radically cut military spending to virtually nothing, and the peace had endured. It turn[s] out that, far from favouring big military budgets, finance ministers wanted evidence to defend their spending priorities against the demands of the powerful military lobby”

Changes rich countries need to make

Financial and banking reform

The banking pimps who hide away extorted money must be thrown out of the banking profession.

The new anti-bribery laws must be vigorously enforced. Bribes can currently be dressed up as “facilitation payment” for some service [see the recent Newsnight about the dumping of waste].

Other than finance and banking, construction and resource extraction are particularly corruption prone.

Creating norms and laws

Eastern Europe adopted fairly transparent market economies because they had a strong incentive – membership in the European Union. The further away a country from the EU, and the lower its prospects for joining, the worse the country has done.

The bottom billion needs rules that are appropriate for societies at their level of development that address the problems they face. Most of the current standard and codes address the issues of developed and emerging market economies.

A charter for natural resource revenues

The British government has worked some way towards one with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (2002).

• Resource field leases should be auctioned off in a transparent way.
• Companies should bear some of the price risk.
• All payments must be transparent (this was the focus of EITI).
• Transparency in public expenditures, with minimum standards.

After an international charter has been developed, peer pressure from NGOs and civil society should be used to make sure governments adopt them. This has been successful in making companies such as De Beers clean up their acts.

A charter for democracy

A free press is the key to maintaining transparency and in particular for the bottom billion, a free television and radio.

A charter for budget transparency

Uganda is an effective model. In the mid-nineties, inky around 20% of money released for primary schools actually reached the schools, so a different approach was tried.

The Ministry of Finance informed the local media of all the money released, and sent a poster to each school setting out what it would be getting. When the accounts were revisited, 90% of the money was getting through to the schools.

Nigeria now publishes budget releases to states every month. Newspaper circulation spikes up on these days. The polity wishes to know where their money is going.

Countries should also engage in peer review, as the countries in the OECD do.

A charter for postconflict situations

A charter for investment

A number of interesting posts this week.

Harry Brighouse reports on a new book discussing Basic Income Grants, a central tenet of Green policy. The book discusses BIGs against Stakeholder Grants, not entirely dissimilar to Labour’s baby bond:

I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a stake in the debate really. But I was surprised how much new and interesting stuff was in the book, so I thoroughly recommend it whether you are a newcomer to the debate or an old hand.

Tyler comments on carbon offsets:

…these carbon offsets shift back the demand curve for dirty power but they also shift out the supply curve for power as a whole. (The persnickety might argue the demand curve doesn’t even shift back, but if you have to buy all those offsets you will think twice about your next plane trip.) Competition from wind power forces down the price of the monopolistic dirty power company (electricity?), which means that other people buy more of it. The quantity of dirty power consumed might well go up rather than down.

Colin Farrelly comments on Dworkin’s recent Oxford lecture, in which he weighs in on the role religion should have in politics, a major gripe of mine with the “secular left”:

Dworkin then noted that the most powerful argument for establishing religion are not paternalistic. Rather it is the claim that the majority are entitled to a particular culture. So the important question is- Who gets to shape the culture with which we live? How do we decide to answer this question?
The 2 models give different answers. The culture could be shaped organically… millions of independent decisions about what to buy, what to make, who to talk to, etc. can shape the culture. Or the culture could be shaped through collective political/coercive decisions. Dworkin argued that it has OK to collectively shape the moral culture, but if we hope to take his second principle seriously- the principle of special responsibility- the culture must be shaped organically. And this then leads him to endorse model (2)- the tolerant secular state.

Larval Subjects discusses pedagogy from a Deleuzian standpoint:

A pedagogy of problems, a new dialectics, thus becomes the site of a politics– A site where false problems would be revealed and carefully criticized, and where the focus would consist in the articulation of genuine problems where new individuations might take place…

John Quiggin reports on the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change:

It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.

One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.

From Žižek’s “Against the Double Blackmail”

So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin — the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build transnationalpolitical movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?

From Beck’s “Living in World Risk Society“:

In an age of global crises and risks, a politics of ‘golden handcuffs’ – the creation of a dense network of transnational interdependencies – is exactly what is needed in order to regain national autonomy, not least in relation to a highly mobile world economy. The maxims of nation-based realpolitik – that national interests must necessarily be pursued by national means – must be replaced by the maxims of cosmopolitan realpolitik. The more cosmopolitan our political structures and activities, the more successful they will be in promoting national interests and the greater our individual power in this global age will be.

It is, of course, important to look at the unwanted and unpredicted side-effects of this cosmopolitan vision: The call for justice and human rights is used to legitimate the invasion of other countries. How can one be in favour of cosmopolitan legitimacy when it leads to crises and wars and thus to the bloody refutation of the idea itself? Who will rein in the side-effects of a cosmopolitan moral principle, that speaks of peace while facilitating war? What does ‘peace’ mean when it generalises the possibility of war? It is necessary to make a clear distinction between true and false cosmopolitanism and yet such clarity is hard to achieve because it is the comparative legitimacy of cosmopolitanism that makes it so tempting to instrumentalise the latter for national-imperial purposes. Fake cosmopolitanism instrumentalises cosmopolitan rhetoric – the rhetoric of peace, of human rights, of global justice – for national-hegemonic purposes. There are numerous examples of this in history, the Iraq War is only the most recent.

On Wednesday, I had the great privilege of getting a few moments of time to speak with the great man himself. I want to leave what we talked about for later though. On Monday, I saw Saba Mahmood give her Milliband lecture on Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Her thesis is that the social sciences in general have avoided treating secularism as an object of study in itself. She asserts that are assumption up to now is that secularisation always follows the pattern experienced in Europe, but that this doesn’t necessarily hold true in all circumstances. In the Q&A that followed, she gave two examples. Egypt – authoritarian, secular, state replacing civil society services that were provided by religious institutions, but yet a deeply religious society. Lebanon – a state system founded upon religion, but one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. This is exactly the kind of work expected in Beck’s call for methodological cosmopolitanism. However, as a side effect, this opens a critique in Beck’s work itself. Mahmood also claims that attempts by Western institutions to modernise Islam necessarily involves a certain amount of theological and hermeneutic (re)invention. So when Beck asserts the need for negative freedoms that everyone can agree upon (something that is problematic in other ways), does this not imply that Beck’s cosmopolitanism also involves a certain theological project? Read the rest of this entry »

Ulrich Beck is lecturing at LSE next month on “A Cosmopolitan Perspective on the Sociology of Generations” (iCal available at link). Read the rest of this entry »