reflectioncafe.net

College for All?

2012-01-16T18:25:00.000Z

Kevin Carey, The Wilson Quarterly

It would have been understandable if President Barack Obama had ignored education in his first speech to Congress. There were other things to worry about in February 2009: an economy in free fall, health care costs threatening to bankrupt the federal government, a nation bleeding in two protracted foreign wars. Obama had said little about education on the campaign trail. Yet when he took the podium, he made a bold declaration: By 2020, America would regain its historical international lead in college attainment.

Months earlier, Bill Gates had announced a similar priority for his charitable foundation, the richest on the planet. After years of focusing on improving education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, the Microsoft billionaire had set his sights on college. As would Obama, he called for a major increase in the number of adults with college degrees. Together, the most powerful man in the world and one of the richest created a rare moment of purpose and clarity in American education policy.

But effecting a major increase in college attainment is a daunting task. The percentage of American working-age adults who have graduated from college has hovered around 40 percent for years, with roughly 30 percent holding four-year degrees and another 10 percent associate’s degrees. Obama and Gates were calling for a rise in the college attainment rate to nearly 60 percent in less than a generation, even though many public colleges and universities were already bursting at the seams, and cash-strapped state legislatures were handing down further punishing budget cuts.

Moreover, to succeed in college, students need to get a decent high school education. Many don’t. Dropout rates in urban high schools are catastrophic. And while 70 percent of the nation’s 3.3 million high school graduates go directly to two- or four-year colleges every year, and still more enroll by their mid-twenties, less than half of all students are exposed to a legitimate college preparatory curriculum in high school.

Such harsh realities have led a growing number of critics to question the realism and wisdom of the new college attainment agenda. Some don’t believe that the economy can absorb a huge influx of degree holders. That argument has been heard before. In the 1970s, Harvard economist Richard Freeman, author of The Overeducated American (1976), landed in People magazine and on the front page of The New York Times with his prediction that a glut of degree-bearing workers would lead to falling wages for college graduates.

Instead, wages of college-educated workers rose dramatically relative to those of less educated Americans over the following decade. In the mid-1970s, graduates earned about 40 percent more than people with high school diplomas. The gap has relentlessly widened since then and stands near 100 percent today. In fact, college graduates are the only category of workers whose real pay has increased since 1979.

A more controversial argument against wider higher education comes from Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). Murray, who believes that intelligence is strongly determined by genes, contends that “no more than 20 percent” of the population, and probably closer to 10 percent, has sufficient intelligence to earn a legitimate four-year college degree. Internet billionaire Peter Thiel, meanwhile, not only warns of a dangerous higher education “bubble” but is paying a bounty to a select group of talented young people who have agreed to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurial ventures.

Yet there is strong evidence that America needs more people to earn college degrees, not fewer. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce has projected that if current trends continue, the nation will produce three million fewer college graduates by 2018 than the labor market will require. That’s because the economy continues to reorganize itself in ways that favor people with the knowledge and skills that college degrees represent. As economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have argued, America’s economic dominance during the 20th century stemmed in significant part from educational investments that began in the 19th century. “The nation that invested the most in education,” they wrote, “was the nation that had the highest level of per capita income.”

Other nations have noticed. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that highly industrialized competitor nations have increased college attainment faster than the United States in recent decades. A few nations, including South Korea, have even surpassed us in the proportion of the national population from ages 25 to 34 that holds a bachelor’s degree. When associate’s degrees are included, we fall to ninth place in college attainment. Meanwhile, America’s population is becoming increasingly diverse, with the greatest growth occurring among Hispanic citizens who have below-average college attainment rates. Helping new generations of Americans graduate from college will be crucial to the nation’s future prosperity.

There are opportunities to improve college preparation at all levels, beginning with early childhood education. But high schools have a special place in the process. For far too many students, high school is where college aspirations effectively come to an end.

This observation is not new. Sputnik-era reforms sought to improve high school mathematics and science education, and the landmark 1983 federal report A Nation at Risk focused primarily on the shocking lack of academic rigor in secondary education. More recently, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan singled out for reform the so-called dropout factories, a group of approximately 1,750 high schools that have graduation rates of 60 percent or less and produce a disproportionate share of the nation’s dropouts. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, high school math and reading scores have been flat for decades.

One reason for this poor performance is that there has never been a serious effort to establish consistent high standards in America’s secondary schools and to hold schools accountable for achieving them. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and its antecedents focused primarily on elementary and middle school, requiring only one round of tests in high school. Typically, students are given three subject-area tests (in reading, math, and science) in the 10th grade that require little more than eighth-grade skills to pass. From that point on, high schools in many states are subject to only minimal external accountability for how much students learn. For many students, the consequences of this neglect come quickly. One-third of students attending four-year colleges and nearly two-thirds of those attending two-year colleges are required to take remedial courses.

In recent years, a group of governors and nonprofit organizations has been developing the Common Core State Standards, essentially a shared curriculum tied to college and career readiness, which all but a few of the states have pledged to adopt. The federal government has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to developing high-quality assessments of student learning tied to the standards. If these efforts are implemented with fidelity, the great majority of American high school students will for the first time take well-designed tests that were specifically crafted to measure readiness for college and careers—whether those students plan to apply to college or not. High schools will still need talented teachers and other resources to help students meet the standards. But at least the schools will have a common foundation to build on.

Another reform proposal comes from Robert Schwartz and two colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In Pathways to Prosperity, a report published earlier this year, they argue that many students are ill served by a unitary “college for all” strategy, and that America should look to the European system of high school and college vocational training as a model. They favor an expansion of “work-linked learning,” bringing employers and others into schools to help create new occupation-based education opportunities for some students.

However, the contention that high schools are too focused on the traditional route through college is something of a straw man. It may be the case that certain upper-income suburban enclaves are gripped by the “college for all” fever. But most students don’t live in places like that. Indeed, the percentage of students who enroll in four-year colleges without adequate curricular preparation suggests that too few students are being prepared to earn a bachelor’s degree. The European system, moreover, is nested in a larger environment of private-sector unionization and government-supported occupational training that is scarcely imaginable in the United States. At the same time, the risk is greater in more heterogeneous America that disproportionate numbers of low-income, minority, and immigrant students would be channeled into working-class tracks.

The Pathways authors are right to insist that our education system must do a better job of serving students who are unlikely to obtain a four-year college degree. Even if we meet the Obama-Gates college attainment goals, millions of people will be left without college credentials in an economy that pays good wages for little else. The key to helping those students—and all students—is to erase the arbitrary and damaging dividing line between high school and college.

The nature of public education changes profoundly at the point when young people reach the end of high school. Yet in intellectual terms, the freshman year of college is little more than grade 13. Starting around grade 10 and continuing through roughly the first two years of college, students make the transition from acquiring foundational skills to applying them in pursuit of broader knowledge in math, language, the humanities, and the physical and social sciences. The vast majority of students progressing through these grades take the same small group of courses: precalculus, biology, psychology, English composition and literature, American and world history, and so on.

The years between grades 10 and 14 are also the leakiest segment of the education pipeline, a time when students drop out of high school, fail to enroll in college, and drop out of college by the hundreds of thousands every year. Many colleges could also be characterized as “dropout factories.” Among students who enroll as first-time full-time freshmen in four-year universities, less than two-thirds graduate within six years. Among all new college students, the on-time graduation rate is less than 50 percent. In 2009, more than 350 four-year colleges and universities reported a six-year graduation rate of 30 percent or less.

A logical way to get more students through this education choke point is to eliminate some of its artificial barriers. We could begin by extending the public subsidy for education all the way through grade 14. In our system of public education, all students are fully subsidized to take courses such as precalculus at age 17, and must be taught by a licensed teacher. At age 19 or older, students wanting to learn exactly the same thing get a partial subsidy from a wholly separate set of state and federal sources and receive instruction under a completely different regime of curricular standards and professional norms. This makes little sense. As initiatives such as the Common Core State Standards are implemented, it should become possible to require colleges and universities to grant credits for all the basic courses of grades 10 through 14, even if students happen to take some of them in high school. This will help students move more quickly through the system, and thus cut the expense of acquiring a degree. But more changes will be needed.

While American higher education is diverse in many ways, encompassing a variety of missions and constituencies, it is remarkably undiverse when it comes to awarding degrees. Every institution grants the same two- or four-year credentials that signify little more than how many hours the bearer sat in classrooms. Newer institutions such as Western Governors University (WGU) are turning that equation upside down, awarding degrees when students demonstrate defined competencies, regardless of how long it took to achieve them.

WGU is a fully accredited nonprofit institution founded in the 1990s by the governors of 19 western states that now enrolls 25,000 mostly adult students online. It currently focuses on occupation-specific fields such as education, business, and health care. But efforts are afoot to expand the model into more traditional academic fields.

The WGU experiment points to a future public education system in which public subsidies are tied to commonly understood goals for learning, not how old the student happens to be or where he or she happens to live. In increasingly digital learning environments, it will be possible to track, store, and summarize evidence of learning in ways that render traditional time-based credentials obsolete. The federal and state governments should help people learn what’s worth knowing, and when they learn it, government should make sure they have evidence of their knowledge and skills that can be used in their pursuit of employment and further education. A system rebuilt on such principles would look much different and better than what many students suffer through today.

Full text PDF available here.

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=2012

Sacralization of the State, Secular Nationalism, and Civil Religion: The Case of Turkey

2011-12-01T01:45:00.002Z

Talip Kucukcan

Marmara University, Istanbul

The George Washington International Law Review

Vol 41, 2011

This Article will illustrate how secular nationalism has been introduced as a source of collective identity and as a founding ideology of the Turkish state vis-a-vis the Islamic legacy of the Ottoman Empire. This Article will also locate religion in the process of laying the foundations of civil religion and examine how religion has been sidelined, marginalized, and reconfigured by the state ideology. Finally, in the context of Turkey-EU relations, this Article will analyze how the Turkish state has repositioned itself with regard to Islam, non-Muslims, and freedom of religion.

I. SACRALIZATION OF SECULAR NATIONALISM

...

II. INCORPORATION OF RELIGION IN THE STATE

...

III. CONCLUSION

Turkey as a majority Muslim country by population and a secular state by constitution presents a unique case study as far as de-establishment of Islam and its institutions on the one hand, and sacralization of the state through legal reforms, political changes, educational activities, and establishment of new institutions on the other hand. Foundations of civil religion were carefully planned and laid down in the formative period of the Republic, and secular figures, symbols, myths, and institutions were construed. Although the state gradually declared itself a secular entity, religion has been incorporated into the state machinery by the establishment of a state-controlled institution. This top-down elite construction and imposition of civil religion through the power and institutions of the state have been a constant source of tension in Turkish society, and this will remain so for a long time if Turkey does not push forward with democratization to open up space for religion in the public sphere.

Full-text, available at:

http://docs.law.gwu.edu/stdg/gwilr/PDFs/41-4/JLE413.pdf

Occupy Wall Street: A Twenty-First Century Populist Movement?

2011-11-18T23:05:00.001Z

Joe Lowndes, University of Oregon

Dorian Warren, Columbia University

DISSENT Magazine, October 2011

Just over a month since protesters first hit the streets of lower Manhattan, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is well on its way to becoming the first major populist movement on the U.S. left since the 1930s. This direct action, initially ignored by the mainstream media and treated skeptically by liberal critics, swelled at a startling rate, attracting an increasingly diverse group of participants, and inspiring similar phenomena in hundreds of cities. Why has this novel form of protest been successful so far, what potential does it have as a sustained social movement, and what challenges does it face going forward?

The movement’s surprising initial success owes much to a novel expression of what we might call an open-source populism. OWS and its slogan “we are the 99 percent” have antecedents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when populists framed their struggle as one of the common people against a tiny moneyed elite. Such dreams of unity always elide real differences both demographic and political. Yet in this case the economic crisis has had such far-reaching effects, and the culprits are so clear, that the fantasy of unity is understandable and credible. Indeed, what could better affirm its broad, hegemonic quality than the endorsements of Russell Simmons, Slavoj Zizek, and Suze Orman?

While OWS draws a lot of its style from the New Left, substantively it resembles movements from the 1930s or the 1890s more than the 1960s. In part this is because economic issues have returned to center stage. However, this is not a simple return to the New Deal, nor should it be. Liberal writers such as Todd Gitlin and Michael Kazin have argued that the decline of that project is due in part to the emergence of black power and other identity-based movements in the 1960s and 1970s. For these class universalists, the new emphases on race, nationality, gender, and sexuality might have had a dramatic impact for marginalized groups, but they helped destroy the progressive populist vision and allowed the Right to gain control of the national political agenda by asserting its own.

Yet the demand for both inclusion and self-determination by these groups was inevitable given the limitations of both the People’s Party and the New Deal on those very grounds. Indeed, conservatives were able to posit their own populist project in the 1960s precisely because racism has run so deep in American political culture. Conservative strategists saw opportunities across the long civil rights era to win over white working- and middle-class voters to the Republican Party by associating the liberal state with people of color, an alliance they claimed squeezed honest, hardworking whites in the middle.

OWS is better historically situated to take on issues of exclusion. While the Right gained increasing control over the national political agenda after the 1960s, movements of antiracism, black, Latino, and Asian empowerment, feminism, and LGBT liberation also advanced, transforming how American society deals with these forms of exclusion in law, policy, and culture. Just as important, the U.S. workforce itself has become far more female, more multiethnic, and more multinational. Unlike the 1960s (or the 1890s) when the popular image of the American worker was white and male, labor is increasingly identified with immigrants and workers of color, especially women of color. For these reasons, populist assertions on the left today are more inclusive and credible than they were in previous populist movements. In order to be successful OWS will have to draw in the groups most affected by the mortgage crisis, joblessness, and other aspects of the recession, which means blacks and Latinos. For example, according to a recent Economic Policy Institute study African Americans face not recession but depression-like conditions in six U.S. cities. A new sub-movement called Occupy the Hood is highlighting the connection between race and class as it works to draw in more people of color.

THE OCCUPY movements’ claim of broad representation was ingeniously strengthened by the initial lack of specific demands or formal organizational structure. This direct-democratic impulse left the occupation what Ernesto Laclau calls an “empty signifier”—it allows a diverse array of people to attach to it their own grievances, and participate in their own way. This opens up the possibility for groups excluded from prior notions of populist majoritarianism—blacks, Latinos, LGBT folks, and women—to insist on full inclusion and direct participation.

The “99 percent” meme skirts another difficulty for the Left since the 1960s: nationalism. The post-60s Left has opposed chauvinism, imperialism, and nativism, but the 99 percent can be viewed in a patriotic light: it is a national identification insofar as it demands changes in the U.S. political system. Yet the term is vague enough to include both the citizen and the noncitizen immigrant. And by identifying Wall Street as the enemy in an era of neoliberalism, the 99 percent also stands for humanity across borders in alliance against a common global foe.

The moment it engaged in an extralegal direct action in the heart of New York’s financial district, OWS radically opened up the terrain of the possible. It performed the rage felt by millions of Americans about the economic and political wreckage wrought by the financial sector. The occupation symbolically broke out of the business-as-usual, incremental reform politics that typify progressivism today, offering instead a protest that indicts not just Wall Street but both major parties for the crisis in which we find ourselves. The principled militancy of the occupation inevitably resulted in police violence early on, but this only served to underscore the drama of the action and the conviction of the actors involved, while metaphorically playing out the brutality of the system being protected. Footage of the gratuitous pepper-spraying of a young woman by NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, along with images of bloodied protesters, went viral on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, making the silence from the mainstream media at the beginning on the occupation irrelevant. With social media OWS created its own compelling and easily digestible spectacle.

The antiauthoritarian orientation of many of the first occupiers contributed not only to OWS’s militancy but also to a horizontal, egalitarian, and creative style of protest, which has inspired participants and made clear its autonomy from the ossified institutions that currently run politics—including progressive institutions such as unions and other inside-the-beltway groups. The immediate antecedent of OWS’s organizational style are the counter-globalization protests of the 1990s, which, cresting in the powerful yet short-lived “Battle in Seattle,” emphasized participatory democracy and direct action for principled and strategic reasons. But while the actors in that social movement sought broad alliances with labor and environmentalists in opposition to multinational capital and global financial institutions, the targets were too abstract and the protesters too marginal to do more than grab occasional headlines. Under current conditions, however, that model has proved its worth, politically and strategically.

The ubiquitous use of the tools of social media has aided the attempt to remain democratic and “leaderless.” Forging ahead in uncharted political territory, the “open-source populism” of this potential social movement seems committed to empowering the multitude of voices of the 99 percent to speak. This is not to suggest the activists have no structure; they have implemented an inclusive, participatory, and consensus-based set of rules and practices at general assemblies to guide their organizing, decision-making, and direct actions. Smaller committees or working groups focus on specific themes or tasks to be taken up in more depth and then brought back to the broader group for discussion and action. This flattened and democratic model suggests that OWS might be leaderless, but it is not rudderless. Assuming the assemblies stay inclusive and don’t get paralyzed by ideological rigidity or agents provocateurs, OWS has the potential to continue to grow while maintaining its open-source and democratic decision-making structure.

OF COURSE this movement faces many challenges, from without and within. The most significant external challenge the protesters will face (besides the coming winter weather) is outright state repression. As the occupation spreads to cities across the country and around the world, local police directed by political elites might infiltrate, attack, or bring trumped-up charges against protesters, as has already happened in Boston and other cities. While this could backfire and add more fuel to the fire (as happened with the pepper-spray incident and when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatened to remove occupiers under the pretense of cleaning up Zuccotti Park), challenges to political and economic elites remain vulnerable to various forms of state aggression. Given the extraordinary rein given by the Obama administration to the FBI and its recent harassment of antiwar activists, we should assume that the movement will become a target, if it hasn’t already.

But OWS’s internal challenges are just as important. First, while OWS has the potential to overcome the racial and nativist limitations of its populist forebears, there is still much work to do. The commonality of the claim to the 99 percent could become a belief in a homogeneity that flattens out important distinctions that we should acknowledge, struggle with, and benefit from. Participants need to learn how to confront internal forms of hierarchy, and understand the ways that different social locations of participants (according to race, gender, class, and sexuality) can shape movement culture, structure, and strategy, and even the content of demands. It is encouraging that many of the occupations are already raising and struggling with these issues. At the same time, such struggles should not devolve into self-criticism circles that paralyze the hard-won populist character of the movement against its common enemies.

Second, the movement will need to develop clear organizational tools that can help build, sustain, and prevent it from being undermined. While consensus is an honorable goal, as a decision-making structure it has major problems and trade-offs. It is democratic and participatory in small groups, but in large groups it allows small minorities to stymie majoritarian will by vetoing proposals. Consensus has frustrated the potential of many organizations that value direct democracy. The use of consensus in the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1970s, for example, allowed police infiltrators to sow discord and prevent action. OWS will also need to channel its energy toward specific goals at some point, although in our view, the broad critique of capitalism and the failure of democracy inherent in the current message allows for the assemblage of a broad counter-hegemonic movement, one that may foster numerous organizations with differing but associated goals, as has been the case with all large social movements.

Finally, OWS will require vigilance to avoid co-optation by other political organizations or the Democratic Party. The participation of labor, for instance, has been extraordinary and essential to OWS’s current buoyancy (and overcomes the 1960s legacy of the divide between “hardhats” and the antiwar and black freedom movements). But union participation may be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, while unions can provide bodies, resources, and organizational power, they can also potentially steer the movement away from the dramatic militancy that struck such a chord to begin with. Insofar as organized labor is a core constituency of the Democratic Party, the temptation of unions to try to direct OWS toward the party or the Obama re-election campaign will be hard to resist. Vital social movements always have their greatest impact outside conventional channels where their moral power is most compelling, their demands remain uncompromised, and they are free to pursue a wide range of disruptive actions.

Yet despite these external and internal challenges, we are confident the protesters will stay true to their core critique of the nation’s financial interests and broken political system, as well as OWS’s radically democratic ethos. OWS is a uniquely twenty-first century movement committed to end elite rule and establish genuine democracy, and we hope that the protesters continue to garner the crucial resources necessary to sustain it. If the movement can overcome the inevitable challenges facing those who confront extreme concentrations of economic and political power, Occupy Wall Street and its model of open-source populism has the potential to be as transformative as prior populist movements on the left—or even more so.

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=551

Revisiting the Turkish Politics after the June 2011 Elections

2011-11-14T19:01:00.000Z

ÜMİT CİZRE

Istanbul Şehir University

Insight Turkey 13, 4 (2011)

pp.83-105

....

Conclusion: Summer 2011 as a Point of No Return to Status Quo Ante

In its first two terms in office, the AK Party government felt the pressure of a number of socio-political cracks in the country, the republican dogmas of the secular elite, the interventionist mentality of the military, the suspicions of intellectuals, the zigzagging support for the government in the business, and the increasingly vocal renunciations on its reformist political agenda. In the still-developing post-election era, there is a more heightened public awareness, critique and anticipation regarding the fundamental issues waiting to be resolved, not in the ways they were managed ad hoc in the past but in sync with emerging new realities. This fact alone points to a need for all actors, including the opposition forces in the country, to adopt a fresh perspective in assessing and restructuring the major fault lines in Turkey. The impending sense of unfinished business on the part of the AK Party government also gives hope that in the new agenda for change the reform priority of the next four years will not be politics-as-usual.

The opposition is also at a crossroads: to only make leadership changes (like the CHP) while everything else stays the same does not play in the streets. In fact, together with the trigger-happy instigators of the conflict that keeps flaring up in the southeast even when there is a truce, superficial changes and rhetoric work the other way in terms of creating urgency and intensity for wishing to see “something radically different” in place of familiar faces, repetitive rhetoric, business-as-usual attitudes and clichéd ideas. New realizations, aspirations, and trends in the country also stem from Turkey’s new found ambition to project Turkish power across its borders for regional stability and as a credible example of democracy for Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya. To be congruent with that image, the need for a political shake-up that would transform societal and political realities and the remnants of the old order seems to be more intense and urgent.

Those opposition actors which collude with old power centers, be they leftwing, right-wing, secular, or Turkish/Kurdish nationalists, stand in sharp contrast to the vitality, urgency and inventiveness of the new popular critique of the past. They also impose limitations on the transformative role the AK Party can play in the next four years. The actors of the ancien regime are seriously in need of a shake-up to question their heritage, intellectual preparedness and responsibility in making a New Deal.

Full-text of the article, available at:

http://www.insightturkey.com/Insight_Turkey_Volume_13_No_4_2011_Cizre.pdf

Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam

2011-10-24T20:24:00.001+01:00

Shahzad Bashir, Stanford University

Columbia University Press, 2011

Between 1300 and 1500 C.E. a new form of Sufi Islam took hold among central Islamic peoples, joining individuals through widespread networks resembling today’s prominent paths and orders. Understanding contemporary Sufism requires a sophisticated analysis of these formative years. Moving beyond a straight account of leaders and movements, Shahzad Bashir weaves a rich history around the depiction of bodily actions by Sufi masters and disciples, primarily in Sufi literature and Persian miniature paintings of the period.

Focusing on the Persianate societies of Iran and Central Asia, Bashir explores medieval Sufis’ conception of the human body as the primary shuttle between interior (batin) and exterior (zahir) realities. Drawing on literary, historical, and anthropological approaches to corporeality, he studies representations of Sufi bodies in three personal and communal arenas: religious activity in the form of ritual, asceticism, rules of etiquette, and a universal hierarchy of saints; the deep imprint of Persian poetic paradigms on the articulation of love, desire, and gender; and the reputation of Sufi masters for working miracles, which empowered them in all domains of social activity. Bashir’s novel perspective illuminates complex relationships between body and soul, body and gender, body and society, and body and cosmos. It highlights love as an overarching, powerful emotion in the making of Sufi communities and situates the body as a critical concern in Sufi thought and practice. Bashir’s work ultimately offers a new methodology for extracting historical information from religious narratives, especially those depicting extraordinary and miraculous events.

REVIEWS

"This is an excellent work that is a must read for anyone interested in the history of Sufism, the history of Iran and Central Asia, the role of the body in Islam, and the nature of religious authority in Islamic society. A superb book that is not at all likely to be replaced as an authoritative source for many years to come." — Jamal Elias, University of Pennsylvania

"Sufi Bodies is an innovative treatment of Sufi materials that will find a large readership not only in the field of Sufism but also more broadly in the fields of comparative mysticism, religious studies, and the history of sexuality. A paradigm shifting book that is a pleasure to read." — Kathryn Babayan, University of Michigan

"Sufi Bodies provides a very useful, alternative view of Sufi issues, such as love and discipleship, that are often treated in abstract and ethereal—in a word, disembodied—terms. It will prove valuable for a range of audiences and courses." — Marion Katz, New York University"

In Sufi Bodies, Shahzad Bashir, like a litterateur turned detective, exhumes and examines the hidden physicality of premodern Persian Sufism. From food and women to grave sites, he weaves a tapestry of connections to the social and intellectual world of Sufis, with emotive, affective and spiritual messages registered through the body and bodily activities. At once forensic and lyrical, this book provides an interior journey that is inseparable from its external traces in the literary treasure of Sufi adepts. It both complements and exceeds other studies of a pivotal period in Islamic spirituality." — Bruce B. Lawrence, Duke University

Excerpt:

http://cup.columbia.edu/bookpreview/978-0-231-14490-2/

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14490-2/sufi-bodies

The Arab Counterrevolution

2011-09-09T18:25:00.002+01:00

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

New York Review of Books

September 2011

Robert Malley was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff. He is now Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group. (September 2011)

Hussein Agha is Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author, with A.S.Khalidi, of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine. (September 2011)

The Arab uprising that started in Tunisia and Egypt reached its climax on February 11, the day President Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down. It was peaceful, homegrown, spontaneous, and seemingly unified. Lenin’s theory was turned on its head. The Russian leader postulated that a victorious revolution required a structured and disciplined political party, robust leadership, and a clear program. The Egyptian rebellion, like its Tunisian precursor and unlike the Iranian Revolution of 1979, possessed neither organization nor identifiable leaders nor an unambiguous agenda.

Since Mubarak’s ouster, everything that has happened in the region has offered a striking contrast with what came before. Protests turned violent in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. Foreign nations got involved in each of these conflicts. Ethnic, tribal, and sectarian divisions have come to the fore. Old parties and organizations as well as political and economic elites contend for power, leaving many protesters with the feeling that the history they were making not long ago is now passing them by.

Amid rising insecurity and uncertainty there is fear and a sense of foreboding. In many places there are blood, threats, and doubts. People once thrilled by the potential benefits of change are dumbfounded by its actual and obvious costs. As anxiety about the future grows, earlier episodes cease to be viewed as pristine or untouchable. Accounts of the uprisings as transparent, innocent affairs are challenged. In Egypt and Tunisia, plots and conspiracies are imagined and invented; the military and other remnants of the old regime, which continue to hold much power, are suspected of having engineered preemptive coups. In Bahrain, protesters are accused of being Iranian agents; in Syria, they are portrayed as foreign-backed Islamist radicals. Little evidence is offered. It doesn’t seem to matter.

February 11 was the culmination of the Arab revolution. On February 12, the counterrevolution began.

The Arab upheaval of 2011 is often heralded as an unparalleled occurrence in the region’s history. Ghosts of the European revolutions of 1848 and the popular protests that brought down the Soviet bloc in 1989 are summoned. There is no need to look so far back or so far away. The current Arab awakening displays unique features, but in the feelings first unleashed and the political and emotional arc subsequently followed, it resembles events that swept the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the days well before social media and 24/7 television, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a young Egyptian army officer, captivated the imagination of millions of Arabs, prompting displays of popular exhilaration that would withstand comparison with anything witnessed today. The Baath Party took power in Syria and Iraq, promising the restoration of dignity and championing freedom and modernity; a triumphant national liberation movement marched to victory in Algeria; a socialist republic was established in South Yemen; and the odd blend that was Muammar Qaddafi came to power in Libya.

At the time, many people were moved by the illegitimacy and inefficacy of state institutions; rampant corruption and inequitable distribution of wealth; the concentration of power in the hands of parasitic elites; revulsion with subservience to former and current colonial masters; and humiliation, epitomized above all by the Palestinian catastrophe and the inability to redress it. Slogans from that era celebrated independence, Arab unity, freedom, dignity, and socialism.

Although the military was the vanguard then, the rebellions of 2011 arose from similar emotions and were inspired by similar aspirations. The misfortunes of Arab unity have rendered the concept suspect. Socialism too has been tainted. But substitute local and domestic unity within each country (Wihda Wataniyah) for Pan-Arab unity (Wihda Arabiyah) and social justice, as well as attacks against crony capitalism for socialism, and it is hard not to hear clear echoes of the past in today’s calls for change.

The fate of that earlier Arab rejuvenation offers a useful precedent but, more than that, a cautionary tale. Amid the turmoil and excitement, numerous political currents competed. Several espoused a blend of secular nationalism and pan-Arabism, others variants of Marxism, still others more Western-oriented liberalism. In the end, leftists and Communists were suppressed, most violently in Iraq and Sudan; elsewhere, they were co-opted or defeated. Liberal activists never established an authentic foothold; suspected of links to foreign powers, they were marginalized. After briefly flirting with Islamists, regimes quickly came to view them as a threat and, with varying degrees of bloodletting, drove them underground in Egypt, North Africa, and the Levant.

What emerged were ruling coalitions of the army and various secular nationalist movements. These yielded authoritarian, militaristic republics whose professed ideologies of modernism, pan-Arabism, and socialism were more make-believe than real. They exercised power through extensive internal security organizations—the much-dreaded Mukhabarat; the suppression of dissent; and enlistment of diverse social groups in support of the regime—merchants, peasants, industrialists, and state bureaucrats. Politics was the exclusive province of rulers. For others, it became a criminal activity.

The experiment ended in unmitigated failure. Wealth was concentrated in the hands of the few; corruption was endemic. Segments of society that had most enthusiastically greeted their new leaders, from the rural underclass to the urban declassed, were discarded or ignored. Where Arab regimes promised most they arguably accomplished least. They had vowed to reassert genuine national independence. Yet on the regional and international scenes the voice of the Arab world eventually went silent. On crucial issues such as the fate of Palestine, Iraq, and Sudan, regimes made noise of the most grandiloquent sort, but with no discernible impact. As the new millennium set in, even the clatter that by then had become a joke began to fade.

The legacy of this era goes further than material privation, or dysfunctional governance, or internal repression. Regimes born in the heyday of Nasser and Pan-Arabism lost the asset that would have allowed much to be forgiven and without which nothing else will suffice: a sense of authenticity and national dignity. Arab states were viewed as counterfeit. Citizens were put off by how their rulers took over public goods as private possessions and made national decisions under foreign influence. When that happens, the regimes’ very existence—the merciless domination they impose on their people and the debasing subservience they concede to outsiders—becomes a constant, unbearable provocation.

The Arab uprising of 2011 was a popular rebuke to this waste. By pouring onto the streets, many thousands of people rejected what they perceived as alien and aggressive transplants. Although initial slogans alluded to reform, the actual agenda was regime change. In Tunisia and Egypt, they won round one in spectacular fashion. Elsewhere, things got messier, as regimes had time to adapt and shape their response. Violence spread, civil war threatened, foreign powers joined the melee, and centrifugal powers—sectarian, ethnic, tribal, or geographic—asserted themselves.

The Arab awakening is a tale of three battles rolled into one: people against regimes; people against people; and regimes against other regimes. The first involves the tug-of-war between regimes and spontaneous protesters. The demonstrators, most of them political only in the broadest sense of the term, are stirred by visceral, nebulous emotions—paramount among them the basic feeling of being fed up. Many don’t know what they want or who they support but are confident of what they refuse—daily indignities, privations, and the stifling of basic freedoms—and who they reject, which makes them formidable adversaries. Neither of the instruments used by rulers to maintain control, repression and co-optation, can easily succeed: repression because it further solidifies the image of the state as hostile; co-optation because there are no clearly empowered leaders to win over and attempts to seduce convey a message of weakness, which further emboldens the demonstrators.

The second struggle involves a focused fight among more organized political groups. Some are associated with the old order; they include the military, social and economic elites, local chieftains, as well as a coterie of ersatz traditional parties. Others are the outlawed or semitolerated opposition, including exiled personalities, parties, and, most importantly, Islamists. In Libya and Syria, armed groups with various leanings and motivations have emerged. Little of the enthusiasm or innocence of the protest movements survives here; this is the province of unsentimental dealings and raw power politics.

Relations between young protesters and more traditional opposition parties can be tenuous and it is not always clear how representative either are. In Egypt, where the street battle against the regime was quickly won and Mubarak rapidly resigned, organized opposition groups—from the Muslim Brotherhood to long-established parties—subsequently stepped in and sought to muscle the disorganized protesters out. In Yemen, street demonstrators coexist uneasily with organized opposition parties and defectors from the regime. In Libya, rivalry among strands of the opposition has led to bloodshed and could portend a chaotic future. Some of the local popular committees that spontaneously emerged in Syria warily eye and distrust the exiled opposition.

The third struggle is a regional and international competition for influence. It has become an important part of the picture and assumes an increasingly prominent role. The region’s strategic balance is at stake: whether Syria will remain in alliance with Iran; whether Bahrain will drift from Saudi Arabia’s influence; whether Turkey will emerge bolstered or battered; whether stability in Iraq will suffer. One suspects more than faithfulness to reforms and infatuation with democratic principles when Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which both ruthlessly suppress dissent at home, urge Syria to allow peaceful protesters; when Iran, which backs the regime in Damascus, castigates the oppression in Bahrain; and when Ankara hedges its bets between the Syrian regime and its foes.

Interlopers are legion. The sense grows that what happens anywhere will have a profound impact everywhere. NATO fought in Libya and helped oust Qaddafi. Iran and Saudi Arabia play out their rivalry in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria; Qatar hopes to elevate its standing by propelling the Libyan and Syrian opposition to power; in Syria, Turkey sees an opportunity to side with the majority Sunnis yet simultaneously fears what Damascus and Tehran might do in return: could they rekindle Kurdish separatism or jeopardize Ankara’s delicate modus vivendi in Iraq? Iran will invest more in Iraq if it feels Syria slipping away. As they become buoyed by advances in Libya and Syria, how long before Iraqi Islamists and their regional allies rekindle a struggle they fear was prematurely aborted?

The US has not been the last to get involved, but it has done so without a clear sense of purpose, wishing to side with the protesters but unsure it can live with the consequences. The least visible, curiously yet wisely, has been Israel. It knows how much its interests are in the balance but also how little it can do to protect them. Silence has been the more judicious choice.

Any number of outcomes could emerge from this complex brew. Regional equilibriums could be profoundly unsettled, with Iran losing its Syrian ally; the US, its Egyptian partner; Saudi Arabia, stability in the Gulf; Turkey, its newly acquired prestige; Iraq, its budding but fragile democracy. A wider Middle Eastern conflict could ensue. At the domestic level, some uprisings could result in a mere reshuffling of cards as new configurations of old elites keep control. There could be prolonged chaos, instability, and the targeting of minority groups.

The uprisings, partly motivated by economic hardship, ironically make those hardships still more severe. Where elections take place, they likely will prompt confusion, as groups with uncertain political experience compete. As with all upheavals, there will be a messy chapter before clarity sets in and the actual balance of power becomes evident. Increasing numbers could well question whether emerging regimes are improvements. Nostalgia for the past cannot lag far behind.

Some states might fragment because of ethnic, sectarian, or tribal divides. Civil war, a variant of which has broken out in Yemen and is deeply feared in Syria, may emerge. The region is ripe for breakdown. Sudan is partitioned; Yemen is torn between a Houthi rebellion in the north and secessionists in the south; Iraqi Kurdistan teeters on the edge of separation; in Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank each goes its own way; in Syria, Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Druze, and Bedouin tribes might push for greater self-rule. The upheaval could accelerate the drift. The uprisings revitalized symbols of unity—the national flag and anthem—yet simultaneously loosened the state’s hold and facilitated displays of subnational identity. Even the often ignored Berbers of North Africa have become more assertive.

For all this uncertainty, there seems little doubt—as protesters tire and as the general public tires of them—in what direction the balance will tilt. After the dictator falls, incessant political upheaval carries inordinate economic and security costs and most people long for order and safety. The young street demonstrators challenge the status quo, ignite a revolutionary spirit, and point the way for a redistribution of power. But what they possess in enthusiasm they lack in organization and political experience. What gives them strength during the uprising—their amorphous character and impulsiveness—leads to their subsequent undoing. Their domain is the more visible and publicized. The real action, much to their chagrin, takes place elsewhere.

The outcome of the Arab awakening will not be determined by those who launched it. The popular uprisings were broadly welcomed, but they do not neatly fit the social and political makeup of traditional communities often organized along tribal and kinship ties, where religion has a central part and foreign meddling is the norm. The result will be decided by other, more calculating and hard-nosed forces.

Nationalists and leftists will make a bid, but their reputation has been sullied for having stood for a promise already once betrayed. Liberal, secular parties carry scant potential; the appeal they enjoy in the West is inversely proportional to the support they possess at home. Fragments of the old regime retain significant assets: the experience of power; ties to the security services; economic leverage; and local networks of clients. They will be hard to dislodge, but much of the protesters’ ire is directed at them and they form easy targets. They can survive and thrive, but will need new patrons and protectors.

That leaves two relatively untarnished and powerful forces. One is the military, whose positions, as much as anything, have molded the course of events. In Libya and Yemen, they split between regime and opposition supporters, which contributed to a stalemate of sorts. In Syria, they so far have sided with the regime; should that change, much will change with it. In Egypt, although closely identified with the former regime, they dissociated themselves in time, sided with the protesters, and emerged as central power brokers. They are in control, a position at once advantageous and uncomfortable. Their preference is to rule without the appearance of ruling, in order to maintain their privileges while avoiding the limelight and accountability. To that end, they have tried to reach understandings with various political groups. If they do not succeed, a de facto military takeover cannot be ruled out.

And then there are the Islamists. They see the Arab awakening as their golden opportunity. This was not their revolution nor was it their idea. But, they hope, this is their time.

From all corners of the Arab world, Islamists of various tendencies are coming in from the cold. Virtually everywhere they are the largest single group as well as the best organized. In Egypt and Tunisia, where they had been alternatively—and sometimes concurrently—tolerated and repressed, they are full-fledged political actors. In Libya, where they had been suppressed, they joined and played a major part in the rebellion. In Syria, where they had been massacred, they are a principal component of the protest movement.

Living in the wilderness has equipped them well. Years of waiting has taught them patience, the cornerstone of their strategy. They learned the art of survival and of compromise for the sake of survival. They are the only significant political force with a vision and program unsullied, because untested, by the exercise of, or complicity in, power. Their religious language and moral code resonate deeply with large parts of the population. Islamism provides an answer to people who feel they have been prevented from being themselves.

Islamists know the alarm they inspire at home and abroad and the price they formerly paid for it. In the early 1990s, when the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front was on the cusp of a resounding electoral triumph, the army intervened. The world stood aside. A civil war and tens of thousands of casualties later, Algeria’s Islamists have yet to recover. After Hamas’s parliamentary victory in Palestine in 2006, it was ostracized by the world and prevented from governing.

The lesson seems clear: the safest path to power can be to avoid its unabashed exercise. With this history in mind, the Islamists might want to stay away from the front lines. In Egypt, some Brotherhood leaders made it plain that they will regulate their share of the parliamentary vote, preferring to sit in the legislature without controlling it. They will not run for high-profile offices, such as the presidency. They will build coalitions. They will lead from behind.

The Islamists are on a mission to reassure. They might play down controversial religious aspects of their project, with emphasis less on Islamic law than on good governance and the fight against corruption, a free-market economy and a pluralistic political system that guarantees human and gender rights. They will argue for a more assertive and independent foreign policy, but might at the same time strive for good relations with the West. They will be skeptical about peace agreements with Israel but they will neither abrogate them nor push for open hostility to the Jewish state. The model they will hold out will be closer to Erdogan’s Turkey than to the ayatollahs’ Iran or the Taliban’s Afghanistan though, since they lack Turkey’s political culture and institutions, the model they eventually build will be their own.

Quietly, the Islamists might present themselves as the West’s most effective allies against its most dangerous foes: armed jihadists, whom they have the religious legitimacy to contain and, if necessary, cripple; and Iran, whose appeal to the Arab street they can counteract by not shunning the Islamic Republic and presenting a less aggressive, more attractive, and indigenous Islamic model. There are precedents: in the 1950s and 1960s, Islamists in the region sided with the West and Saudi Arabia against Nasser’s Egypt; not long ago they supported Jordan’s monarch against the PLO and domestic dissidents; and, today, Islamist Turkey is both in Washington’s good graces and an active NATO member.

Their quest will not be without challenges. The flip side of their extensive experience of opposition is that they have no experience in governing. Their knowledge of economics is rudimentary. Should they be called upon to participate in affairs of state, their reputation will suffer at a time of predictable popular disillusionment and economic turmoil. The combination of high expectations and unfulfilled promises may expose them to protests they are ill-suited to endure.

The prospect of power and the taste of freedom are testing the Islamists’ legendary discipline and unity. In Egypt in particular, several fissures have opened. Young Muslim Brothers chide their elders for their conservatism, ambivalence toward street protests, and overly cozy relationship with the military. There are grumblings and splinter organizations. Warnings from the past notwithstanding, some Islamists may want to exercise as much power as the movement can gain. There are tensions between those drawn to allying with secular parties and those willing to join with the more puritan and militant Salafists whose Islamism is based on literalist readings of scripture.

Other cracks could appear. Those conditioned by a deeply ingrained suspicion of the US will be reluctant to engage with Washington and will prefer an understanding with Tehran. Others will hope to roll back Shiite power; still others might turn to Riyadh. The Syrian branch of the Brotherhood, which has suffered under the rule of the Iranian-backed Assad regime, is likely to consider any rapprochement with Tehran unthinkable. Islamists could make different calculations in Yemen or Jordan, should they help overthrow their respective pro-Western regimes.

The thorniest challenge to the traditional middle-of-the-road Islamists will come from the Salafists. Their focus traditionally has been on individual morals and behavior and they have tended to oppose party and electoral politics. Yet they have undergone remarkable change. In Egypt, they have established a strong grassroots political presence, created a number of political parties, and plan to compete in elections. Elsewhere, they are actively participating in protests, at times violently. The more traditional Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, bend their views to placate foreign or domestic concerns, the more they take part in governing, the more they risk alienating those of their followers drawn to Salafism and its stricter interpretation of Islam. As the Muslim Brotherhood struggles to strike a balance, the Salafists could emerge as unintended beneficiaries. In Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, the most significant future rivalry is unlikely to be between Islamists and so-called pro-democracy secular forces. It might well be between mainstream Islamists and Salafists.

Of all the features of the initial Arab uprisings, the more notable relate to what they were not. They were not spearheaded by the military, engineered from outside, backed by a powerful organization, or equipped with a clear vision and leadership. Nor, remarkably, were they violent. The excitement generated by these early revolutionary moments owed as much to what they lacked as to what they possessed. The absence of those attributes is what allowed so many, especially in the West, to believe that the spontaneous celebrations they were witnessing would translate into open, liberal, democratic societies.

Revolutions devour their children. The spoils go to the resolute, the patient, who know what they are pursuing and how to achieve it. Revolutions almost invariably are short-lived affairs, bursts of energy that destroy much on their pathway, including the people and ideas that inspired them. So it is with the Arab uprising. It will bring about radical changes. It will empower new forces and marginalize others. But the young activists who first rush onto the streets tend to lose out in the skirmishes that follow. Members of the general public might be grateful for what they have done. They often admire them and hold them in high esteem. But they do not feel they are part of them. The usual condition of a revolutionary is to be tossed aside.

The Arab world’s immediate future will very likely unfold in a complex tussle between the army, remnants of old regimes, and the Islamists, all of them with roots, resources, as well as the ability and willpower to shape events. Regional parties will have influence and international powers will not refrain from involvement. There are many possible outcomes—from restoration of the old order to military takeover, from unruly fragmentation and civil war to creeping Islamization. But the result that many outsiders had hoped for—a victory by the original protesters—is almost certainly foreclosed.

After some hesitation, the US and others have generally taken the side of the protesters. Several considerations were at work, among them the hope that this support will strengthen those most liable to espouse pro-Western views and curry favor with those most likely to take the helm. New rulers might express gratitude toward those who stood by them. But any such reflex probably will be short-lived. The West likely will awake to an Arab world whose rulers are more representative and assertive, but not more sympathetic or friendly.

The French and the British helped liberate the Arab world from four centuries of Ottoman rule; the US enabled the Afghan Mujahideen to liberate themselves from Soviet domination and freed the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Before long, yesterday’s liberators became today’s foes. Things are not as they seem. The sound and fury of revolutionary moments can dull the senses and obscure the more ruthless struggles going on in the shadows.

1989 and 2011: Compare and Contrast

2011-09-09T18:24:00.001+01:00

Michael Zantovsky

World Affairs Journal

July-August 2011

Michael Zantovsky is currently the Czech ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He has previously served as ambassador to Israel and the United States and as press secretary, spokesman, and political director for President Vaclav Havel.

Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina by observing that happy families are all alike but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The opposite seems to be true of countries. While there exist vast differences among countries enjoying a measure of hope, prosperity, satisfaction, and development, be they Latvia, India, South Africa, or Chile, social frustration, discontent, and hopelessness seem to be common to countries where a citizen is alienated from what is happening to the extent that it is hard to think of herself or himself as a citizen at all.

For a person to be reasonably content with his lot, living in a society requires a measure of identification, participation, and ownership. Democracies explicitly guarantee a measure of the second and the third with a reasonable shot at the first. Authoritarian regimes, while severely limiting the second, do not rule out the third and thus facilitate the first. Totalitarian regimes prohibit the third, but make up for it by demanding the second and at least some pretense of the first. Unlike authoritarian regimes, they are not content with making people powerless observers of their misdeeds and crimes, but make them accessories after the fact.

These stipulations are worth keeping in mind when trying to understand, if not explain, the recent massive popular movement in the Arab world, which is sometimes called the “Arab Spring.” Chronologically, the term is a misnomer because the events in Tunisia, Egypt, and even the beginning of the developments in Libya took place in winter. “Spring” is clearly referred to here in its metaphorical sense, meaning an awakening or renewal. “Arab Winter” simply would not do. This meaning of the term borrows from a European coinage, first employed as “the Spring of Nations” in reference to the revolutions and revolts across Europe of 1848, which brought to many parts of the continent the ideas of independence, self-government, and participatory rule. The other well-known use is that of the Prague Spring of 1968, which meant a breath of fresh air from the long Communist winter. The events of 1989, which brought down the whole totalitarian house, were on the other hand never referred to as a spring, perhaps because then there was a complete seasonal change.

People have long resisted, or openly dismissed, any attempt at comparing the developments in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 with the overthrow of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. But the similarities are too obvious and too numerous to ignore. They start from the indisputable fact that what we are witnessing are spontaneous popular movements rather than a planned insurrection of an organized political opposition. Like the revolts of 1989, those now in progress do not follow the Leninist scenario of a determined revolutionary action by a tight-knit political vanguard. In their beginnings at least, they had very little in the way of organized leadership, hierarchical structure, or political program. What unites them is a common disgust with the way things had been before. What sets them in motion is a seemingly random event, like the self-immolation in December 2010 of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor long harassed and humiliated by the authorities, or the mistaken rumors of the death of a student protester in Prague on November 17, 1989. Once sparked, the revolution takes on a life of its own and becomes self-fueled and unstoppable.

Which raises the question of what makes a country ripe for a revolution. In many authoritarian regimes, there are countless episodes of abuse, violence, torture, killings, and humiliations by the powers that be without bringing about popular uprisings. In fact, Khaled Said, the symbol of the Egyptian revolution who was killed by the police on an Alexandrian street in June 2010, was known only to a limited group of Facebook activists until the massive protests started more than seven months later. Only when Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali left Tunisia in disgrace did the protests in Egypt start in earnest.

Which leads to another question. How does a revolution travel? Is geography a factor? Or culture? Why is the bug so virulent in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, but largely dormant in Morocco and Jordan?

The explanation clearly needs to be looked for in what the countries in question had in common rather than in the differences between them. In 1989, the situation was quite simple—all the countries that revolted, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself, had shared the same version of a totalitarian political system that called itself the real socialism to disassociate itself from various idealistic, humanistic, and reform-minded versions of the creed. Along with the name “socialism,” the countries shared the same political and economic structure, the same power mechanisms, and the same claims to legitimacy as an expression of a popular will and international solidarity. Ostensibly they also shared the same ideology, which was endlessly bandied about in the rhetorically atrocious speeches of its leaders, in the boilerplate of its media, in the pathetic exhortations on the red banners and placards, and in the mandatory college courses under titles like Scientific Communism and The History of the International Workers’ Movement. It was this uniform hierarchy and its ideological supporting structure rather than the Soviet nukes that at one time made the Communist threat so ominous. Although many observers have noted that this outside uniformity and coherence had been extracted by violence, intimidation, and blackmail, for some time it went unnoticed that the ideology had become an empty shell, paid lip service by all and believed by none. The Hungarian revolt of 1956 deprived it of claims to universality; the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, of legitimacy; and the imposition of the martial law against the Solidarnoscz in 1980, of any claim to a mandate to defend the interests of the working class. What remained were corruption, greed, and spite.

The quasi-republican Arab regimes of North Africa and the Middle East all came into being at about the same time and were founded on and maintained and governed by similar principles. Anti-colonial rhetoric of the Arab leaders played a role similar to the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Communists—it promised liberation, dignity, and self-government. The Arab nationalism provided an element of international solidarity and a sense of belonging, much like the principle of “proletarian internationalism” did for the Communists. It also made it possible to draw a picture of “the other,” be it the former colonial powers, the newly imperialist America, or the Zionist enemy. The vague ideology of Arab socialism enabled the rulers to concentrate, exploit, and abuse vast economic powers in the hands of the state under the guise of nationalization and socialization.

One by one, the planks of this supporting structure withered away. The colonial powers were long gone without the people’s lot improving much and without much dignity either. The emergence of pan-Arab institutions turned out to demonstrate discord as often as unity. The attempts at an integration along the lines of the Soviet Union between Egypt, Syria, and Yemen failed miserably and revealed a number of underlying social, clan, and ethnic seismic faults. The socialist pretensions of the ruling group degenerated into naked self-enrichment, corruption, and graft, with only an occasional crumb trickling down—the proverbial socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. And the rejectionist approach to Israel not only did not bring statehood to the Palestinians but turned the hundreds of thousands of refugees living in the Arab states into an underprivileged and often despised diaspora.

It hardly mattered for as long as the Middle East remained one of the proxy battlefields of the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its satellites subsidized the crumbling economies of its Arab allies, supplied their armies with military equipment, trained their generals, their terrorists, and their secret police, and on occasion saved them from a total military defeat by intervening on their behalf.

Even before the collapse of Communism, some Arab countries such as Egypt found the Soviet embrace bothersome, unhelpful, and uncomfortably stifling, and turned to the West. The only legacy that such countries preserved from their liaison with the world of real socialism was the mukhabarat state, governed by murky, unaccountable security bodies whose purpose was to intimidate the population into obedience by a combination of harassment, threats, blackmail, violence, torture, and executions.

It is at such time that a regime becomes unsustainable. Stripped of its founding ideals, its claims to legitimacy, its ability to improve the lot of ordinary people, and its capacity to mobilize against an external enemy, it is finally left to rely on threats whose effect is subject to habituation, i.e., eventually wears off. At such moments, any event will spark a conflagration across all the territories that started from a similar point and shared the same gradual erosion of power. In this respect, the cases of Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and Arab North Africa and the Middle East are remarkably similar. (Unlike the Middle East’s hereditary republics, North Africa’s monarchies have been thus far largely spared the popular unrest, which points to an additional, tradition-based, and widely accepted source of legitimacy, absent both in these republics and in the countries of the Soviet bloc.)

This, however, is as far as the similarities go. The differences are just as striking and just as important. The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe quickly developed into a wholesale dismantling of instruments of totalitarian politics and power and just as quickly, however imperfectly, installed standard mechanisms of liberal democracy, free market capitalism, and the rule of law. In the case of one nation that had been straddling the Iron Curtain for forty years, the transformation was almost comical in its simplicity—East Germany became West Germany, West German currency became the East German currency, and Berlin became (a few years later) the capital of a united Germany—but it aptly illustrated the reversal that was contemplated. People chucked out real socialism and put liberal capitalism in its place.

In real life, of course, things were not that straightforward. There were at least two alternatives proposed and to a degree tried and applied. Both failed mainly because they drew heavily on the past and had little to offer the future. The first was the mirage of the “third way,” advocated in Czechoslovakia by some of the hundreds of thousands of former Communists, purged from the party after the Soviet invasion of August 1968 for their true or alleged disapproval of the “internationalist action” to defeat the Czechoslovak “counterrevolution.” Many of them were honorable people, who refused to trade their conscience for their political survival. Some of them were the leading protagonists of the Prague Spring, a unique attempt to bring about “socialism with a human face” (only a few realized the implicit depth of condemnation that made such a qualifier necessary). A few of them became active dissidents, courageously protesting the injustices committed by the political system they had at one time helped to build. They all shared a tendency to think of the Prague Spring as a golden moment, a lost paradise of innocence and harmony and social euphoria. They were not the only ones. It is hard for anyone who was young at the time to forget the thrill of the freedom to speak one’s own mind, of enjoying the suddenly liberated arts, theater, literature, and music, of partaking in the sexual revolution.

Unlike the rest of us, though, they did not remember the time as a fleeting moment of false hope to be replaced by the long despair of normalization, but as a moment of perfection that need not be improved upon or developed further. In fact, socialism with a human face never existed. It was only a set of political proclamations and good intentions that never had a chance to become reality before the Soviet tanks intervened. If it had become reality, it would quickly have taken the same course it took twenty years later, changing from socialism with a human face to capitalism with human flaws.

The other alternative, which happily passed the Czechs by (although it did mark the end of Czechoslovakia as a whole) was the resurgence of nationalism that spread like an epidemic all over the region. After forty years in which expressing a national feeling had been one of the capital heresies in the Communist criminal code, the national reawakening was to some extent natural and perhaps inevitable. At the same time, it offered a fast track to power and wealth to many an unscrupulous politician. Not quite incidentally, most of its leading lights, such as Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, and Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia happened to be former Communists who took up nationalism in order to avoid being marginalized in a democratic system. Before the epidemics petered out in the mid-1990s, leaving behind only an occasional outburst or an obscure group of crazies, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia all became history and in Yugoslavia tens of thousands lost their lives in the worst civil conflict since the end of World War II. In the end, five years of the malaise were enough to show to most people in Central and Eastern Europe that the way forward led through free markets, liberal capitalism, and integration into NATO and the EU. Fifteen years later, the nationalist threat seems to be a thing of the past, although it keeps popping up in the guise of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and populism in a number of places in the Old and New Europe alike.

The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe seem to have been a relatively rare case of political change where the absolute collapse of the ancien régime, a high degree of consensus on a new course, and a lack of viable alternatives combined to make history seem simple and straightforward. For the same reasons, it is unlikely to be replicated in other places at other times, including the countries of North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. The differences and complicating factors are manifold.

First, although many of the countries with recent upheavals shared the political underpinnings and the ideological vacuum of the mukhabarat state, there was not a single center of uniform power, whose weakness and eventual collapse could lead to almost uniform changes. There was no center of gravity, no Soviet Union that could have made the changes appear first impossible and then ludicrously easy. Each country had its own power structures, with their own levels of adaptability, resistance to change, and the willingness to use force, all leading to different outcomes. Thus we could see the limited changes in Tunisia, a revolution in Egypt supervised by the military, a civil war in Libya, and a brutal counter-attack in Syria. After six months and counting, the overall outcome is still uncertain. In contrast, the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe were basically over in six weeks. Only the changes in Romania were accompanied by violence and perhaps not by accident, as Romania had for years been moving in a rather eccentric outer orbit of the Soviet system.

Second, the degree of consensus on what needs to be changed, and how, is much lower in the Middle East than it was in Central Europe twenty years ago. Again, the underlying nature of the ancien régime makes the difference. The Arab countries in question were certainly authoritarian regimes, with a number of methods and mechanisms borrowed from the totalitarian playbook, but they were not totalitarian regimes as such. The difference is between the fragmentary nature of undemocratic power mechanisms in the former and the comprehensive, all-encompassing nature of the latter.

When a totalitarian regime collapses, it collapses totally because no single part of it will eventually function on its own without the rest. The authoritarian governments in the Middle East permeated a number of areas of life, especially those having to do with politics, security, and social change, but left other spheres largely, though not completely, alone. There was a limited interference of the government into the economy, usurping the monopolies for the state, but leaving small entrepreneurs alone if they paid their dues in bribes and in loyalty; a limited censorship; a ban on all political dissent but allowing for Western-type popular culture; a limited uniformity, reserving all political power for the party-state, but allowing for religious plurality; some civic associations and family ties. The difficult task, which we in Europe did not have to face, will be to decide what can be salvaged and what needs to be discarded in the new era.

While there has been in the recent protests no powerful expression of Arab nationalism, which had apparently spent itself in the 1950s and ’60s, and which, unlike nationalism in Europe, had been largely a centripetal rather than centrifugal force, there exists, in Islam, a powerful ideological alternative to liberal capitalism with aspirations to become a dominant political force and organizer of the society. In all post-Communist countries, religion has made a strong resurgence after, and sometimes before and during, the political changes, but it had neither the power, nor perhaps the ambition, to become a central political player. Christian democratic parties, which refer to Christianity and religion as the fountain of their moral ethos but make few if any attempts to impose strictures based in religion on the society as a whole and are totally separated from the clergy and the church, are a standard element of the political system in most European countries but rarely, with the exception of Germany and Austria, the dominant element.

The situation is completely different in the Middle East, which has no separation between the church and the state (and indeed no church), no history of religious reformation, and a tradition of a literal interpretation of the Koran. When it becomes the dominant social force, Islam is not only adopted by the state, it becomes the state. In its mildest incarnation, the state refers to Islam and its legal code, sharia, as the source, fountain, and inspiration of law. In its stricter, fundamentalist form, advocated by the wahhabists in Saudi Arabia or the salafists in Egypt, sharia, complete and immutable (because it is based on the original teachings of the Prophet), becomes the law. It is never clear if this is what the population at large wishes for and wants to see happen. It is, however, crystal clear, that although sharia can become a rule of law sui generis, by token of its being ordained from above, it cannot be the rule of the people and by the people, though it still could be for the people. It is also poorly adaptable to the perpetually changing conditions of the modern world. One of the most essential, though perhaps the least popular, attributes of democracy is its dynamic instability, which makes it possible to change tack and correct past mistakes to clear the way for new ones.

From this perspective, political Islam appears to be an unlikely candidate for benefitting from the popular revolutions whose ethos was clearly future-oriented, aiming for more openness, more democracy, and a reconnecting with the modern world. Islamic leaders in Egypt and elsewhere seem to be aware of this disconnect more than anyone else and are very keen to disclaim any ambition to the leadership of the social processes afoot, let alone any hegemonic aspirations. At the same time, though, they are clearly not ready to let history pass them by and are busy organizing and positioning themselves to benefit from opportunities that they rightly anticipate as coming soon. Just like in Central Europe, the revolutionary upheavals will inevitably bring about a period of uncertainty, insecurity, and economic hardships, leading to massive frustrations, disappointments, and conflicts. The weakening or collapse of the mukhabarat state will give way to organized crime, violence, and chaotic struggle for new economic opportunities. Just like in Central Europe, with its nationalistic flare-ups, this will be the moment for the Islamists to offer the easy solution of collective identity and traditional values as a way to provide the basis for law and order. In this they will draw upon their superior organization and resources, as well as on the support of some strange bedfellows, not least among them many of the people who until recently had been busy suppressing and jailing the Islamists.

The only way to avoid this scenario is a broad movement of the secular forces embodying the ethos of the mass protests and the least common denominator of a consensus on the road ahead so as to generate the critical energy needed to move through the transition process in manageable time and at manageable costs. The Solidarnoscz in Poland or the Civic Forum in Czechoslovakia represented just such a consensus, although they in fact consisted of a number of disparate groups whose incompatibility eventually led to their demise and the emergence of political parties along more or less standard lines. The year or so they stuck together was nevertheless enough to give the transition a direction and a momentum. The victors of the mass protests in North Africa and the Middle East face a similar decision. If they succumb to the temptation to set up immediately a number of tents along ideological, regional, or ethnic divides, or if they begin to clash in a rush to divide the spoils of the revolution, they will likely share the fate of certain democratic oppositions in Europe, once powerful in Belarus, once victorious in Ukraine.

The past is in some respects as treacherous as the future. Decades of injustice, arbitrary rule, and poverty, on the one hand, and wealth derived from corruption, on the other, provoke outbursts of long pent-up anger and clamoring for settling accounts. The instinct is toward quick and wholesale administration of justice to provide an outlet for the popular emotions and win the support of the population. Understandable and justified as it is, a deep breath and some reflection are in order. The incarceration and expected trial of the Mubarak family in Egypt, or of the families of Ben Ali and his wife in Tunisia, are a manifestation of the popular impatience—and of its populist satiation. Whether Mubarak and Ben Ali deserve to be put on trial, which they probably do, is beside the point. The point is that after decades of arbitrary verdicts passing for justice, the prosecutorial and judicial systems are in no position to administer the law in a remotely even-handed fashion. The risk is that such revolutionary justice will spawn new injustices and lead to new conflicts, preventing any chance of a fair resolution. There is a major difference between establishing a new rule and establishing the rule of law.

There are several mechanisms that can be used to deal with the past in a more even-handed and even-tempered way. One is the truth and reconciliation commission, which has been used in such countries as Chile and South Africa after decades of undemocratic rule. Such a commission serves an important role in recounting the stories of suffering and oppression, although it rarely discovers the full truth or attains full reconciliation. The other is the screening and vetting procedures designed to shield the fragile new political systems from high-level former officials and from the agents of security services and practiced at various times and with various outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe following 1989. Still another, not to be recommended, is the kind of consensual amnesia that took hold after periods of authoritarian and totalitarian rule in some European countries. Whichever of these methods is chosen, the result will still be as messy, complex, and frustrating as the history that produced it. In some measure, however, the process is more important than its outcome. Its preemption by what is in one way or another summary justice only serves to obscure the historical record, preserve the anonymity of most of the culprits, and enable the perpetuation of established power structures and their methods of maintaining control.

The last lesson of 1989 that the Arab Spring could conceivably benefit from is that external factors matter. The policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George H. W. Bush, and Helmut Kohl provided a favorable framework for the transition process. There was, with the exception of East Germany, no Marshall Plan, no massive program of economic assistance up front. But there was a consistent support for the democratic forces combined with tangible benefits commensurate to their progress. And there was a massive transfer of democratic know-how and experience through think tanks, programs, conferences, advisers, volunteers, and scholarships. Much of it was aimed at young people. Much of it bypassed the governments and dealt directly with the institutions of the civil society. Twenty years later, these people are the best guarantee of the lasting nature of the changes.

Some of the same considerations may apply to the Arab Spring. The aid and the assistance that are forthcoming should be used to empower the groups that carried the protests forward rather than to subsidize the budgets. A high degree of conditionality should accompany aid to governments. Debt relief, already announced for Egypt, may be unavoidable, but it will not energize the Egyptian economy. What Egypt and the other Arab countries also need are bold economic reforms that will unleash the hidden productive potential and correct the distortions in the market, including the huge subsidies on foodstuffs, fuel, and other products. Again, a firm grasp of the objectives and how to attain them is essential. The signs, thus far at least, are not very encouraging.

The next few months will show whether the Arab revolts of winter 2011 were more like the romantic but ultimately failed European springs of 1848 and 1968 or whether by ushering in irreversible and lasting changes they will prove the distant cousins of the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe of the fall of 1989. To complicate matters further, the changes will take place on several different planes with different temporal characteristics. As Ralf Dahrendorf pointed out in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, it takes about six months to organize a free and democratic election, it takes something like six years to lay down the foundations of a functioning market economy, but it may take three generations before people internalize the changes in their minds. By this definition, we in Central and Eastern Europe are still only somewhere in the middle of the story.

The World Consequences of U.S. Decline

2011-08-17T00:11:00.000+01:00

Immanuel Wallerstein

Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies

Binghamton University, New York

A decade ago, when I and some others spoke of U.S. decline in the world-system, we were met at best with condescending smiles at our naivety. Was not the United States the lone superpower, involved in every remote corner of the earth, and getting its way most of the time? This was a view shared all along the political spectrum.

Today, the view that the United States has declined, has seriously declined, is a banality. Everyone is saying it, except for a few U.S. politicians who fear they will be blamed for the bad news of the decline if they discuss it. The fact is that just about everyone believes today in the reality of the decline.

What is however far less discussed is what have been, what will be the consequences worldwide of this decline. The decline has economic roots of course. But the loss of a quasi-monopoly of geopolitical power, which the United States once exercised, has major political consequences everywhere.

Let us start with an anecdote recounted in the Business Section of The New York Times on August 7. A money manager in Atlanta "hit the panic button" on behalf of two wealthy clients who told him to sell all of their stocks and invest the money in a somewhat insulated mutual fund. The manager said that, in 22 years of doing his business, he had never had such a request before. "This was unprecedented." The newspaper called this the Wall Street equivalent of the "nuclear option." It went against the sanctified traditional advice of a "steady-as-you-go approach" to swings in the market.

Standard & Poor's has reduced the credit rating of the United States from AAA to AA+, also "unprecedented." But this was a quite mild action. The equivalent agency in China, Dagong, had already reduced U.S. creditworthiness last November to A+, and now has reduced it to A-. The Peruvian economist, Oscar Ugarteche, has declared the United States a "banana republic." He says that the United States "has chosen the policy of the ostrich, hoping thereby not to scare away hopes [for improvement]." And in Lima this past week, the assembled Finance Ministers of the South American states have been discussing urgently how best to insulate itself from the effects of U.S. economic decline.

The problem for everyone is that it is very difficult to insulate oneself from the effects of U.S. decline. Despite the severity of its economic and political decline, the United States remains a giant on the world scene, and anything that happens there still makes big waves everywhere else.

To be sure, the biggest impact of U.S. decline is and will continue to be on the United States itself. Politicians and journalists are talking openly of the "dysfunctionality" of the U.S. political situation. But what else could it possibly be but dysfunctional? The most elementary fact is that U.S. citizens are stunned by the mere fact of decline. It's not only that U.S. citizens are themselves suffering materially from the decline, and are deeply afraid that they will suffer even more as time goes on. It's that they have deeply believed that the United States is the "chosen nation" designed by God or history to be the model nation in the world. They are still being assured by President Obama that the United States is a "triple-A" country.

The problem for Obama and for all the politicians is that very few people still believe that. The shock to national pride and self-image is formidable, and it is sudden as well. The country is coping very badly with this shock. The population is seeking scapegoats and lashing out wildly, and not too intelligently, at the presumed guilty parties. The last hope seems to be that someone is at fault, and therefore the remedy is to change the people in authority.

In general, the federal authorities are seen as the ones to blame - the president, the Congress, both major parties. The trend is very strong towards more arms at the level of the individual and a cutback of military involvement outside the United States. Blaming everything on the people in Washington leads to political volatility and to local internecine struggles, ever more violent. The United States today is, I would say, one of the least stable political entities in the world-system.

This makes the United States not only a country whose political struggles are dysfunctional, but one unable to wield much real power on the world scene. So, there is a major drop in the belief in the United States, and its president, by traditional U.S. allies abroad, and by the president's political base at home. The newspapers are full of analyses of the political errors of Barack Obama. Who can argue with this? I could easily list dozens of decisions Obama has made which, in my view, were wrong, cowardly, and sometimes downright immoral. But I do wonder whether, if he had made all the much better decisions his base thinks he ought to have made, it would have made much difference in the outcome. The decline of the United States is not the result of poor decisions by its president, but of structural realities in the world-system. Obama may be the most powerful individual in the world still, but no president of the United States is or could be today as powerful as the presidents of yesteryear.

We have moved into an era of acute, constant, and rapid fluctuations - in exchange rates of currency, in rates of employment, in geopolitical alliances, in ideological definitions of the situation. The extent and rapidity of these fluctuations leads to an impossibility of short-run predictions. And without some reasonable stability of short-term (three years or so) predictions, the world-economy is paralyzed. Everyone will have to be more protectionist and inward-looking. And standards of living will go down. It is not a pretty picture. And although there are many, many positive aspects for many countries because of U.S. decline, it is not certain that, in the wild rocking of the world boat, other countries will in fact be able to draw the profit they hope from this new situation.

It is time for much more sober long-term analysis, much clearer moral judgments about what the analysis reveals, and much more effective political action in the effort, over the next 20-30 years, to create a better world-system than the one in which we are all stuck today.

http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/commentaries/

How the American Public Views the Rise of China?

2011-07-15T02:59:00.000+01:00

ANDREW SCOBELL, RAND Corporation
Political Science Quarterly,
Vol. 126, No. 2, Summer 2011

Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China by Benjamin Page and Tao Xie. New York, Columbia University Press, 2010. 232 pp.

On matters of foreign policy, the conventional wisdom had been that public opinion is fickle and uninformed and it was up to the steadfast an knowledgeable “foreign policy elite” to steer the ship of state. Of course, recent scholarship, notably Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro’s The Rational Public in 1992, has debunked the myth of the clueless masses. Nevertheless, where China is concerned, the American public is routinely assumed to be simplistic, erratic, and easily swayed.

This book is an important correction—demonstrating that the American people are consistent and sensible in their approach to China. The authors analyze a wealth of survey data going back many decades to discern how Americans view China’s rise. Benjamin Page and Tao Xie devote a chapter to each of the following topics: Chinaʼs economic growth, democracy and human rights, China’s growing global diplomatic and military power, and overall American perceptions of China.

According to the authors, American concerns about China are mostly centered on the military dimension ( pp. 58–62). While Americans do not ignore China’s rising economic clout and its impact on the United States, they seem primarily alarmed by the growing security challenge posed to the United States. Yet this does not mean that Americans view China as an enemy. Rather, American views of China are more nuanced, sophisticated, and openminded. The authors opine that, “Overall, the average American has lukewarm to cool feelings toward China” (p. 112). Of course, Americans do have opinions about what China is, where it is going, and what this is likely to mean for the United States. But analysis of the survey data suggests that the U.S. public’s views of China are balanced and sensible views largely untarnished by xenophobia or dogma.

If ordinary Americans are not unduly alarmist, what should we make of the “China threat” hyperbole and hysteria routinely delivered by “television pundits and Washington politicians” who claim to speak on behalf of all Americans (p. 112)? The authors speculate briefly before moving to consider why the “nature of the China policy debate itself” has changed (p. 112). The authors note that on foreign policy matters, it is not uncommon for there to be “substantial gaps between” popular and elite views (p. 113). Of course, public opinion does not decide foreign policy, but Page and Xie believe that it does “impose constraints” on policymakers (p. 5).

What will Chinese readers make of this book? They will probably conclude that Americans really do not care about Taiwan, and that while Americans do care about democracy and human rights, they are largely satisfied when U.S. leaders lecture their Chinese counterparts instead of exerting serious pressure. While these are overly simplistic assessments, they are essentially accurate. Still, these are dangerous conclusions, because public opinion can and does change in response to events. Thus, a repressive China that bullies a democratic Taiwan or commits atrocities against its own citizens can have swift and enduring impact on U.S. public opinion— witness the lasting influence of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre (discussed on p. 101).

What should U.S. leaders take away from this book? Fundamentally, that they should not underestimate ordinary Americans. The analysis in Living with the Dragon suggests that James Mann’s The China Fantasy (New York: Viking, 2007) thesis may be off the mark. Mann claims that successive U.S. leaders have sold the American people a bill of goods—that Washington’s efforts to engage Beijing are sure to bring about Chinese democracy. But Page and Xie indicate that the U.S. public was never gullible enough to buy this idea—almost two-thirds of Americans polled in 2007 believed that if China were to democratize, “it would take…at least twenty years” (p. 74).

In sum, the American public is sensible about China. “Most Americans,” conclude the authors, “are prepared to live peacefully and cooperatively with the Chinese dragon” (p. 121).

http://www.psqonline.org/99_article.php3?byear=2011&bmonth=summer&a=br08free

The History of the Social Sciences since 1945

2011-06-13T21:59:00.001+01:00

Cambridge University Press 2010

This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. A final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a whole. Whereas most of the existing literature considers the social sciences in isolation from one other, this volume shows that they have much in common; for example, they have responded to common problems using overlapping methods, and cross-disciplinary activities have been widespread.

1. Introduction Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine2. Psychology Mitchell G. Ash 3. Economics Roger E. Backhouse 4. Political science Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir 5. Sociology Jennifer Platt 6. Social anthropology Adam Kuper 7. Human geography Ron Johnston

8. Towards a history of the social sciences Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine.

Reviews

'The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 maps the conceptual, social, and institutional contexts of economics, political science, sociology, social anthropology, psychology, and human geography. These important fields have shaped contemporary discourse about the human self, in both individual and collective registers, and deeply influenced policy and practice in the modern world. Individual chapters on separate disciplines, written by respected scholars, take us through the intricacies and the editors' conclusion teases out subtle connections between different fields, sketching a big-picture perspective. The volume is a welcome contribution to the scant historiography, and provides fascinating reading for academic specialists, disciplinary practitioners, or the interested layperson.'

James H. Capshew, Indiana University, and Editor (2006–09) of History of Psychology

'As in all histories of the social sciences, questions of field definitions, paradigms, and boundaries are well addressed here. But the authors take us well beyond these to probe essential issues such as the relative influence across the six disciplines they cover of social scientists' war service, the postwar expansion of higher education, strong pressures toward Americanization, government and foundation patronage, experiments in interdisciplinarity, quantification, hermeneutics, postmodernism, and the cultural turn. They look as well at influences of ideologically charged developments such as the Cold War, decolonization, feminism, the Vietnam War, and the rise of conservative governments - and social science supporting them - in the Anglophone world. The book expertly registers the dazzling multiplicity of local and general factors shaping the construction of social knowledge over the past half century.'

Mary O. Furner, University of California, Santa Barbara

'In this pathbreaking book a team of historians of the social sciences examines the experiences of their disciplines, seen together since World War II. They find many similarities and but also many differences. In a thoughtful and stimulating conclusion, the editors, Backhouse and Fontaine, draw the stories together, identify common themes, and perhaps most importantly, point out the payoff that may come from this eclectic and integrated approach to the histories. Historians and social scientists more generally will find this a valuable and provocative volume.'

Craufurd D. Goodwin, Duke University

'These analytically ambitious essays demonstrate the common direction of the several social scientific disciplines in the second half of the 20th century while taking careful and sophisticated account of the technical particulars of each discipline.'

David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley

'Backhouse and Fontaine's collection is the first fruit of an important initiative to comprehend the postwar social sciences as key participants in a new era of social welfare and democratic capitalism. Particularly welcome is their ambition to look beyond the boundaries of discipline and to conceive as a whole what so often is portrayed in fragments.'

Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles

The Colors of Earth (XXX)

2011-06-01T20:33:00.000+01:00

Tearing Away the Veils: The Communist Manifesto

2011-05-26T18:02:00.003+01:00

Marshall Berman, The City Univ. of New York

Dissent, May 2011

The following essay is the introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto, published this March.

TODAY, IN the early-twenty-first century, the Communist Manifesto is far less read than it once was. It is hard for people who are just growing up to grasp the way in which, for most of the twentieth century, Communist governments dominated much of the world. Communist educational systems were powerful and successful in many ways. But they were twisted in the way they canonized Marx and Engels as official patron saints. It is hard for people who have grown up without patron saints—Americans should not be too hasty to include themselves—to grasp this idea. But for decades, all over the world, any candidate for advancement in a Communist organization was expected to know certain passages and themes from Marx’s writings by heart, and to quote them fluently. (And expected not to know many other Marxian ideas: ideas of alienated labor, ideas of domination by the state, ideas of freedom.)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist political system came apart remarkably fast. All over Central and Eastern Europe, Marx and Engels monuments were torn down. Pictures of people doing this were page-one material for a while. Some people noted skeptically that tearing down public monuments requires lots of organization, and wondered who was doing this organizing. Whatever the answers, it seems certain that, at the end of the twentieth century, there were plenty of ex-citizens of Communist police states who felt that life without Marx was liberation.

Ironically, this thrill was shared by people who were most devoted to Marx. Readers who love writers do not want to see them erected as Sunday-school sages. They can—I should say we can—only be thrilled by this loss of sanctity. Marx’s canonization after 1917 by Communist governments was a disaster. A thinker needs beatification like a hole in the head!

Intellectuals all over the world have welcomed this end-of-the-century crash as a fortunate fall. One of my old bosses at City College, who had grown up under Communist governments in Eastern Europe, said now that the Wall was down, I shouldn’t be allowed to teach Marx anymore, because “1989 proves that courses in Marxism are obsolete.” I told him today’s Marx, without police states, was a lot more exciting than yesterday’s patron saint. Now we could have direct access to a thinker who could lead us through the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist life. He laughed then. But by the end of the century, it seemed that the thrill had caught on. John Cassidy, the New Yorker magazine’s financial correspondent, told us in 1997 that Wall Street itself was full of study groups going through Marx’s writings, trying to grasp and synthesize many of the ideas that are central to his work: “globalization, inequality, political corruption, modernization, impoverishment, technological progress…the enervating nature of modern existence….” He was “the next great thinker” on the Street.

We can learn more about these things from the Communist Manifesto than from any book ever written. Much of its excitement derives from the idea that an enormous range of modern phenomena are connected. Sometimes Marx tries to explain the connections; other times, he just puts some things close to others, and leaves it for us to work it out.

What are Marx’s connections like? First—and startling when you’re not prepared for it—is praise for capitalism so extravagant, it skirts the edge of awe. Very early on, in “Part One: Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Marx describes the processes of material construction that it perpetrates, and the emotions that go with them. He is distinctive in the way he connects historical processes and emotions. He highlights the sense of being caught up in something magical, uncanny:

The bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways…clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of he ground—what earlier century had any idea that such productive powers slumbered in the womb of social labor?

Or, a page before, on an innate dynamism that is spiritual as well as material:

...

I’VE SAVED my favorite Manifesto story for the end. It comes from Hans Morgenthau, the great theorist of international relations who came to America as a refugee from the Nazis. I heard him tell it in the early 1970s, at the City University of New York. He was reminiscing about his childhood in Bavaria before the First World War. Morgenthau’s father, a doctor in a working-class neighborhood of the town of Coburg (mostly miners, he said), had begun to take his son along on house calls. Many of his patients were dying of TB; a doctor in those years couldn’t do much to save their lives, but might help them die with dignity. Coburg was a place where many people who were dying asked to have the Bible buried with them. But when Morgenthau’s father asked his workers for last requests, many said they wanted to be buried with the Manifesto instead. They implored the doctor to see that they got fresh copies of the book, and that priests didn’t sneak in and make last-minute switches. Morgenthau was too young to “get” the book, he said. But it became his first political task to make sure that the workers’ families should get it. He wanted to be sure we would get it, too.

The twentieth century ended with the mass destruction of Marx effigies. It was said to be the “post-modern age”: we weren’t supposed to need grand narratives or big ideas. Twenty years later, we find ourselves in the grip of very different narratives: stories of a dynamic global society ever more unified by downsizing and deskilling—real work disappearing so company stocks can rise, so the rich can get richer and congratulate themselves on what they have done to our world. Few of us today share Marx’s feeling that a clear alternative to capitalism is there, right there. But many of us can embrace, or at least imagine, his radical perspective, his indignation, his belief that modern men and women have the capacity to create a better world. All of a sudden, the iconic may look more convincing than the ironic; that classic bearded presence, that atheist as biblical prophet, still has plenty to say. At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were workers who were ready to die with the Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.

Marshall Berman teaches political theory and urbanism at CCNY/CUNY. He is the author of, among other books, Adventures in Marxism.

Full-text available at:

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=483

Europe’s Most Acute Civilizational Crisis Since WWII

2011-04-25T04:15:00.000+01:00

How Muslims Have Been Taken Hostage by Europe’s Most Acute Civilizational Crisis Since WWII

Raphaël Liogier, Harvard International Review- Jan 2011

Raphaël Liogier is the director of the Observatoire du religieux (www.world-religion-watch.org) and a University Professor in Sociology and Theory of Knowledge at the Institute for Political Studies of Aix-en-Provence [7] in France (Science Po Aix). His last book, Souci de Soi, Conscience du Monde : Self Care, World Awareness, deals with the different aspects of the current individualization and globalization of beliefs.

Since the early 2000s, young women wearing the full veil have been becoming increasingly visible in Europe. One might easily take the resurgence of the veil, which covers the entire face except for the eyes in the tradition of Persian Gulf countries, to be the result of male imposition and the sudden salience of Islamic radicalism. However, neither is the case. This veil is not only by and large voluntary, but hyper-voluntary— it conveys a desire for asceticism, total existential makeover, and radical conversion by encapsulating one's will and making it visible. That such a garment is difficult, if not painful, to wear is yet another reason for its desirability. It expresses no mere subservience to a social order or to an archaic culture, but a profound personal decision which is both binding and conspicuous. It is a veil of distinction, a means of distinguishing oneself in the eyes of God and others, not a tool of conversion. Were everyone to wear it, it would become less desirable. The issue is not one of knowing whether this is "true" Muslim attire. The Gospels do not advocate one style of dress over another, yet this has never prevented millions of Christians from proudly displaying crosses on their chests. What matters is the motivation of the faithful, which bestows meaning on their desire.

The investigation conducted by the Observatoire du Religieux (World Religion Watch) at Sciences Po Aix (Institute of Political Studies, Aix-en-Provence, France), concerning the niqab, sometimes inappropriately called the burqa, in Europe, has identified three categories of women in regards to their views on the veil. The first such category consists of young women between the ages of 17 and 30 from non-practicing families of Muslim origin, typified in the case of Khadîdja, a person of North African descent whose parents work in architecture and medicine and who she describes as not understanding her position. Khadîdja rejects anyone’s rights, especially her parents’, to be judgmental about her “choice.” She maintains that she wants to choose her own life and that no one has the right to impose guidelines on her chosen lifestyle. These young women generally do not adhere to any particular organization but harbor the intent to be “total” Muslims. Some neighborhoods, such as rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, a street in Paris where boutiques for Muslim accessories and “fundamentalist” bookshops are legion, are places where it is fashionable to show off one’s style. In other words, such a self-experimental proliferation of fashions and extreme, deliberately visible expressions, is precisely what defines hypermodernity.

The second category is made up of converts who have also set off on a quest for their “true” self. Between the ages of 30 and 50, such women are attempting to make amends for a regrettable past that is redolent of delinquency, sexual promiscuity, and drug use. For them, the niqab is redemption, a way of completely changing their ways. They may either be single, sometimes divorced or married. In the latter case, they impose their own spiritual disciplines and lifestyle principles on their husbands. The niqab also presents a way of proving commitment and devotion to their spouse and demanding in return a punctilious fidelity. Thus, the veil is an instrument of female empowerment within the couple.

The third and last category, significantly less prevalent in Europe and primarily found in predominantly Muslim countries like Indonesia, is the category which I refer to as post-menopausal. In fact, after menopause, the same traditional requirement of modesty expected during youth and maturity of Muslim women no longer holds and it is exactly at this point that certain women choose to begin wearing the niqab. This conversion, often sudden and described by those concerned as a demand of their rediscovered faith— a revival of sorts in addition to being a spiritual commitment falls into patterns of behavior ranging from coquetry to endeavoring to shroud one's true age with mystery, thus maintaining an element of erotic magnetism. Such women are generally very evasive concerning their true age. The first two categories are not devoid of this erotic dimension either: maintaining the mystique of an elusive, self-effacing beauty, one which is veiled and hence to be deserved and won as extraordinary.

Most European women who have decided to don the niqab do not enounce such amenities as going to the cinema or dining out in a restaurant. They tend to wish to be seen as believers who are both modern and ascetic – trendy followers of a strict, demanding path. If they had not been of Pakistani, North African or sub-Saharan origin, they might have chosen to turn Gothic, neo-Buddhist, neo-Hindu, vegan, join a New Age group, dye their hair bright yellow or meditate ten hours a day and recite mantras. For these women, the status of Islam was initially both something very close because of nostalgia for cultural roots, yet inaccessible because of lost cultural roots. Hence it is desirable and mysterious, while at the same time remaining, of course, off limits and provocative.

We are, undeniably, in the presence of a form of fundamentalism: the desire to revert to fundamentals. However this new type of Muslim fundamentalism is very much akin to the attitude of a fraction of contemporary Western neo-Buddhists. They are not content, like the majority of their fellow devotees, with catching up on a few of the Dalai Lama's teachings on CD-ROM and gracing meditation seminars from time to time, but are radical enough to participate in spiritual role-playing to shave their heads and don an eye-catching saffron robe, with the intent of sauntering barefoot across Paris’s Pont Neuf or braving London's Hyde Park in broad daylight before vaguely curious and amused onlookers.

Only when it comes to the niqab, the vaguely curious are no longer amused, but rather petrified by fear, because they relay an image of Islamism, made hair-raising by the confinement of women behind this "terrible prison of cloth" and Machiavellian conspiracy against “our” sacred values. A common point amongst these women is, however, that the majority are not affiliated with any specific Islamic organization, and self-confessedly responsive only to spiritualist views. So, the upshot is neither Islam nor communalism, but just plain spiritual individualism. Moreover, if indeed there has been violence for women around this issue in certain cases, banning the veil on city streets will by no means prevent men from imposing it in the home, while constraining those women who freely wish to wear it outside to forego their freedom. Though there may have been numberless women who have been physically abused with leather belts, no one has seriously floated the notion that belts should be publicly banned - punishment instead justly falls on the hand which strikes. Here lies the real, ugly question behind this somewhat overheated debate: how is this back-draught of irrational panic and phobic rejection haunting European societies today to be explained?

At the Nexus Between Domestic Socio-economic Causes and a Rapidly Evolving International Context: “Soft” European Islamophobia in the 1980s

We now revert to the 1980s, for it was then that the issue of Neighborhood Islamization first came to the fore in France. 1989 was to be a yardstick year, as it marks the first “affaire du foulard”, or the “Headscarf Debate”, a case involving three young Muslim girls who had been expelled from their Parisian school for wearing Muslim headscarves. The ensuing debate gripped the entire country, often turning sour. Following the oil crises of the mid 1970s, Western Europe had been hit below the belt by successive tidal waves of unemployment which, unlike past crises, affected both the middle and the working classes. Then came the early 1980s when the children of post-World War II immigrant workers reached adulthood. These young Europeans from immigrant backgrounds reacted strongly to the exclusion that their parents had endured, voicing a growing feeling of never-ending frustration at being stranded peripherally in isolated low-standard housing blocks originally destined to the proletariat. At the same time, much of the rest of the population, which until then had considered “the Arabs” to be little more than post-colonial transit labor, woke up to the fact that this second generation was here to stay; it no longer being feasible to simply send them “back home.” From then on, the ethnic Arab population was in the firing line for stealing local jobs and “usurping” the very notion of French citizenship, illegitimately taking the place of “real Europeans.” Closely interlocking with this growing trend among the public at large were new developments in the arena of international conflict, namely the first wave of what is now called Islamic terrorism.

Islam, as an ideology, was to provide the materials for this second generation to construct (or reconstruct) their identity, as well as to be a vector for political commitment. Religion, along with the slang dialect of “verlan”, which is a kind of inverted, rhyming street-talk, and new trends in urban dress, became integral parts of this “banlieue”, or ghetto, culture in the same period. Islam, besides being a religion, henceforth acted as a sort of anti-racist and anti-colonial banner. This new generation, no longer a passive minority, aspired openly to display its difference. Logically, it was also during this period that the veil started to be worn by young girls as the marker of a sort of spiritual revival, a stylistic trait underpinned by a fundamentalist political dimension. Allied to this is the trend among growing numbers of youngsters from racial minorities who, though not originating from Muslim backgrounds per se, claim Islamic identity. One prominent example is rapper Abd el Malik who, originally hailing from a Catholic family from the Congo, has seen his image come to revolve around three key issues: social rebellion, Islam, and rap. This Islam, re-mastered by the younger generations as an anti-Western and anti-capitalist ideology of protest, culminating in the 9/11 attacks, was to be seen as a stumbling block by “native” Europeans, though not yet in more virulent terms than in the United States.

From Social and Economic Crisis to Civilizational Sea-change

From 2000 onward, the situation began to evolve. Up until 2008 at least, in Europe the economic crisis was no longer the main issue, surreptitiously replaced on the agenda by a slow-motion slide towards deeper civilizational, and in fact, symbolic, crisis, differing from that of America where concerns remained primarily focused on economic, social, and moral issues. On the international front, Europeans had at last taken on board that they were no longer America’s most valued partner. Indeed their influence and moral authority have been steadily waning while those of China and India have been steadily growing. Internally, the European Union has also been hit by the failure of the inter-regional Euro Mediterranean Barcelona process, followed by the fiasco of the so-called “Mediterranean Union.”

Accompanying these developments has been the failure of tentative moves toward European federalization, expressed in the complete incapacity of member states to come to an agreement on a common European Union constitution. The various nations of the European Union are entering into a period of mutual friction and frustration, struggling to define their identity, and refusing to cede their sovereignty to that of a centralized Europe, while at the same time attempting to come to terms with their relative insignificance as respective states in a globalized world. France, in particular, once a world intellectual powerhouse, is bearing the full brunt of becoming a peripheral player at the fringes of the Anglosphere, and soon of Asia too. Europeans increasingly harbor the feeling of being encircled, no longer counting on the world stage. Indeed, European nations are now quite unable to showcase their erstwhile supremacy.

Instead, these same nations are seeking out the roots of their identities, be they Catholic, Protestant, or “Rationalist”, and finding out in the process that they can’t even reach consensus on these. We have recently been gratified with a series of Europe-wide debates, often orchestrated by governments, on the idea of “national identity,” of which one of the most recent in France culminated in a bout of ill-concealed Islamophobia. Europeans no longer know what it is to be “French,” “British,” “Dutch,” “German” etc., and end up defining, by way of compensation, what they are not, and that is Muslim. Islam has become almost the only Europe-wide negative element which European identities can define themselves against. Islamization has become the final touchstone of evil in the effort to mobilize Europeans, to bestow meaning on the idea of Europe-wide identity. Halal products, the niqab, visually threatening minarets in the pastoral Swiss landscape, such are the encroaching signs of “ostensible Islamization”, enabling certain opinion-makers to single out the visible enemies of European civilization, enemies which all must rally to combat, together.

“Hard Islamophobia”: A Tool of Governance and Normalization From 2000

Islamophobic discourses, in such a climate, are no longer only tolerated, but actually encouraged, which was never the case during the 1980s. Headscarves were legally banned in state-run schools in France as from 2004. This is not only a crisis which affects the centralized French model of secularism, but rather a deeper symbolic shock-wave, affecting all of Europe, including the notably pluralist British, Dutch and Germans. Anti-Muslim leagues have shot up in popularity: the “English Defence League,” mainly created by former and current soccer hooligans, followed by the Dutch Defense League, and the French “Bloc Identitaire” and “Résistance Républicaine”, which typical French chauvinistic outfits. A whole host of such groupings are committed to fighting the apparent Islamization of Europe. An anti-jihad conference took place in Zurich in 2010 under the auspices of the International Civil Liberties Alliance which, belying its proclaimed credentials, and focused infinitely less on civil liberties than on the question of “de-Islamization.” Another international forum revolving around the “Islamization of our nations,” rallying all the aforementioned groupings, took place in December 2010 in Paris. Such groupings are no longer considered mere crackpot emanations of the extreme right, but henceforth deemed acceptable for airtime by normal media outlets, accompanied by certain politicians who, though democrats in theory, lend credence to their positions. “Riposte Laïque,” for example, a grouping which openly declares Islam to be a harmful religion by nature, was granted quite a serious hearing by the French parliamentary commission on the wearing of the niqab in 2009.

In the midst of this deleterious atmosphere, France recently proceeded to hold a national debate, relayed throughout Europe, on the issue of the niqab. Throughout this discussion period, five principal arguments were advanced in favor of banning the veil: the “feminist argument,” despite the fact that, in the European case, the wearing of the niqab is voluntary and has nothing in common with the same in the Afghan, Saudi or any other such context; the “humanist argument”, maintaining that one becomes unworthy of citizenship by the mere fact of hiding one’s eyes; the “security argument”, founded on the strange idea that by concealing one’s eyes behind a veil, one can more easily commit a terrorist attack or armed robbery, ignoring that one can just as easily do the same from behind a motorcycle helmet, or bandaged on leaving a hospital; the “theological argument,” somewhat ironical in an ostensibly secular state, which involves state representatives handing down interpretations of particular passages from the Qur’an; and finally the “epidemic argument,” the argument predicated on the need to eliminate “Islamic gangrene”, which is somehow infiltrating and disfiguring our beautiful pristine country. This final argument is usually the most enduring, even if the least rational, founded massively on a compulsive rejection of the “other,” in this case, in Muslim form.

Today’s New Global Islam, Far From Being a Threat to Western Societies, Is Actually Undermining the Influence of Islamism

Napoleon’s arrival in Cairo in 1799 marked the first great humiliation of the Arab-Muslim world by a major European power, a trend which was to culminate in a series of demeaning colonization schemes throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The entire Muslim world was to find itself utterly dominated, firstly by military means, then by broader economic and technological factors. This period was also to see the beginning of a deeper symbolic crisis in Muslim societies, societies confronted with an advanced and modernized Europe. This crisis gave rise to a reaction: Islamic fundamentalism—an ostensible utopia of world political transformation culminating in the establishment of a truly Islamic society, a utopia reactive to the image of an “evil West,” a West which must be fought at any price. Islamism, the politicized version of fundamentalism, would lead to a desperate commitment to terrorism.

However, since the middle of the first decade of this century, Islam itself has undergone a radical transformation, starting with the development of a globalized halal food culture, closely mirroring that of bio-food chains. Halal restaurants, new trends of Islamic fashion, training in "Muslim personal development," and eco-Islam are on the rise. Fundamentalism itself is steadily growing less and less "Islamist,” in other words it is becoming depoliticized, taking more of a spiritualist bent, almost New Age in tone in certain cases. It is now an individualist trend.

In advanced industrial societies, the unexpected wish of certain women to wear the niqab is one major illustration of this individualist transformation within Islam. Paradoxically, this new type of radicalism, imbued with eccentricity, has not resulted in a resurgence of Islamism itself, but rather entailed its loss of influence, in favor of a sort of depoliticized spiritualization, something which simply did not exist on any significant scale in the 1980s.

This is not, then, a case of Islam infiltrating modernity but, notwithstanding appearances, rather an ultramodern infiltration of Islam. The niqab is now a feature of the department of "globalized religious items," to be found not only in Europe, but also in Australia, America and elsewhere, worn by the same kind of highly committed individual everywhere. This trend is as surprising for non-Muslims as it is for traditional Muslims themselves.

Indeed, this kind of transformation is not confined to Islam, but is currently affecting all religions. Religious traditions tend to be divided into three main areas: spiritualism, charismatism, and fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Islam, under Western influence, is merging with personal development style spiritualism, which is a manifestation of the ultramodern focus on the self, and thus steadily becoming depoliticized. The Muslim identity complex which entailed the rise of Islamism is diminishing in newer generations, particularly in the case of Euro-Muslims. The same holds, though more at a slower pace, in the Arab world. All this is strongly contributing to fatally undermine the relevance of Huntington’s theory of the “clash of civilizations.”

One of the Most Dangerous “Turns” in Global History

In what is almost a complete reversal of historical fortunes, it is now the turn of the formerly dominant European nations to have to undergo their deepest symbolic self-searching in the last 300 years, and by way of reaction, to witness themselves morphing into fundamentalists. To the same extent that the West was described as the enemy of Islam, Islam is now becoming Europe’s number one public enemy. The "Muslim" has been granted enemy status, leading to the European illusion that by so doing they are somehow fighting the collapse of their own national identities. As stated above, through this targeting of Muslims, European identities can thus be defined by what they are not, giving the impression that globalization is being successfully resisted. European Muslims have fallen hostage to this trend which can be best described as a sort of rite of exorcism.

This situation is, of course, fraught with the worst dangers. It can be compared to the Dreyfus affair in France during the 1890s, or even worse, to Germany in the 1930s, where the image of the treacherous Jew arbitrarily became the collective scapegoat for a major crisis. This crisis, like today’s, was not only economic but also symbolic. Such scapegoating gives rise to all manner of infringement of commonly held public freedoms, up to the point where even openly discriminatory laws can easily be passed with no qualms of conscience. The French government is not even sincerely targeting the imposed wearing of the veil, for the latter already existed among recently arrived 1970s immigrants, without anyone getting the least upset. When all is said and done, the true target is the new, voluntarily worn veil of the 2000s, because it is taken to be a symbolic provocation.

Wherein lies a gross misreading which could turn out to be historically cataclysmic. Conversely to the 1980s, when the simple hijab, basic headscarf, may well also have figured as a form of political provocation or sign of revolt, the full veil of the 2000s is no signifier of Islamization but, on the contrary, one of Islamism’s decline before the inexorable rise of hypermodern religious individualism. The act of targeting this spiritualistic Islam by objectively discriminatory laws, such as the fall 2010 French Act of Parliament banning the niqab in public spaces, incidentally violates the elementary principles of European constitutions, and refurbishes credit to Islamism and its leaders. This again fuels the very frustration that is the source of anti-western reaction. The irony of it all is that those who think that they are fighting against Islamization of Europe today are, in their racist blindness, actually contributing to keep Islamism artificially alive.

http://hir.harvard.edu/islam-a-scapegoat-for-europe-s-decadence?page=0,2

Secularism: America, France and Turkey in Comparative Perspective

2011-04-18T21:09:00.002+01:00

Ahmet T. Kuru, San Diego State University

Cambridge University Press, 2009

Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is "passive secularism," which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is "assertive secularism," which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien régime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.

Excerpt

View excerpt as PDF (153 KB)

Table of Contents

1. Analyzing secularism: history, ideology, and policy

Part I. The United States:

2. Passive secularism and the Christian right's challenge (1981–2008)

3. Religious diversity and the evolution of passive secularism (1776–1981)

Part II. France:

4. Assertive secularism and the multiculturalist challenge (1989–2008)

5. The war of two Frances and the rise of assertive secularism (1789–1989)

Part III. Turkey:

6. Assertive secularism and the Islamic challenge (1997–2008)

7. Westernization and the emergence of assertive secularism (1826–1997)

Reviews

"Professor Kuru's authoritative study, written with remarkable precision, asks taboo-breaking questions and provides iconoclastic responses to them in strict accordance with the maxim facta non verba. First, it shatters the deeply internalized myth that Turkish laïcité is unquestionably sui generis and thus cannot be compared with any other case. Second, it rebuffs the widely accepted premise that Islam and secularism are inherently incompatible, and that assertive secularism would therefore be the only working model for Muslim societies. Third, it clearly shows that in its application of assertive secularism Turkey has gone far beyond its historical model, the French laïcité of the Third Republic. This exemplary piece of scholarship further offers invaluable insight into the present-day tug-of-war over secularism in Turkey." - M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Princeton University

"Kuru's work speaks to a wide audience. Substantively, it explains both the formation and policy consequences of various forms of secularism, which should interest scholars and students of a wide array of subjects. With a precise analytical framework and engaging historical narrative, it introduces the relevance of ideology to the study of religion and politics. It also combines deductive theory witha rich empirical analysis that is sensitive to the historical context. This book deserves high praise for managing to cross so many boundaries in such a sophisticated manner." - Middle East Policy

"...Kuru demonstrates that much can be gleaned from further study of these three constitutionally secular cases. Secularism and State Policies Towards Religion sets a new standard for such studies and should be required reading for anyone interested in the relationship between religion and state.... While Kuru focuses on three states, his theoretical framework is potentially applicable to a wider range of states. I believe the significance of this contribution will be seen in future studies of the role of religion in government policy in which I expect this book to become a required citation." - Jonathan Fox, Bar Ilan University, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

"Kuru's... book is original, scholarly, and wide-ranging, lifting the account of the relationship between religion and politics in Turkey out of the normal single-country context or the simpler comparison with other Muslim societies. Readers whose main interest in the Turkish or Muslim context may be inclined to skip the chapters on the United States and France, but by doing so they will miss an important part of the book which should be illuminating reading for anyone concerned with the role of religion in modern democracies." - William Hale, School of Oriental and African Studies, Middle East Journal

"I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in church-state issues, or in the comparative study of religion and politics. Students of American politics could learn from the book as well, since it puts contemporary US church-state debates in a broader context." - Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University, Journal of Church and State

"Professor Kuru's book is, no doubt, a major contribution to the international literature on the subject, as well as being a much-needed scholarly contribution to the current debates in Turkey, which often presents a picture of a dialogue of the deaf." Ergun Özbudun, Bilkent University, Insight Turkey

"Relying on an extensive list of legal and political documents, interviews with political elites, and existing research sources.... Kuru has produced an impressive body of research. He has shown effectively that ideology can shape preferences and frame debates.... Secularism and State Policies toward Religion helps us understand both the origins and consequences of the variety of secular states and the policies that result." - Roger Finke, Penn State University, Contemporary Sociology

"Secularism and State Policies toward Religion is a very well-written, well-organized, well-argued and easy-to-read book on an important and difficult topic: it is a comparative in-depth analysis of three different regimes of secularism." - Menderes Çınar, Başkent University, New Perspectives on Turkey

"Kuru's book is a priceless contribution to the cutting-edge debate on state–religion interaction... [It] is the best comparative book that has been published recently on contested state attitudes and policies toward religion... The book succeeds in incorporating an extremely nuanced understanding of each of the three cases without losing terminological clarity, analytical consistency, and theoretical depth." - Berna Turam, Northeastern University, International Journal of Middle East Studies

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item2427811/Secularism%20and%20State%20Policies%20toward%20Religion/?site_locale=en_US

10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly

2011-04-01T17:03:00.003+01:00

Michael C. Munger, Duke University

The Chronicle of Higher Education

September 6, 2010

Brian Taylor

Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing.

In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn't, or didn't, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write.

It starts in graduate school. There is a real transformation, approaching an inversion, as people switch from taking courses to writing. Many of the graduate students who were stars in the classroom during the first two years—the people everyone admired and looked up to—suddenly aren't so stellar anymore. And a few of the marginal students—the ones who didn't care that much about pleasing the professors by reading every page of every assignment—are suddenly sending their own papers off to journals, getting published, and transforming themselves into professional scholars.

The difference is not complicated. It's writing.

Rachel Toor and other writers on these pages have talked about how hard it is to write well, and of course that's true. Fortunately, the standards of writing in most disciplines are so low that you don't need to write well. What I have tried to produce below are 10 tips on scholarly nonfiction writing that might help people write less badly.

1. Writing is an exercise. You get better and faster with practice. If you were going to run a marathon a year from now, would you wait for months and then run 26 miles cold? No, you would build up slowly, running most days. You might start on the flats and work up to more demanding and difficult terrain. To become a writer, write. Don't wait for that book manuscript or that monster external-review report to work on your writing.

2. Set goals based on output, not input. "I will work for three hours" is a delusion; "I will type three double-spaced pages" is a goal. After you write three pages, do something else. Prepare for class, teach, go to meetings, whatever. If later in the day you feel like writing some more, great. But if you don't, then at least you wrote something.

3. Find a voice; don't just "get published." James Buchanan won a Nobel in economics in 1986. One of the questions he asks job candidates is: "What are you writing that will be read 10 years from now? What about 100 years from now?" Someone once asked me that question, and it is pretty intimidating. And embarrassing, because most of us don't think that way. We focus on "getting published" as if it had nothing to do with writing about ideas or arguments. Paradoxically, if all you are trying to do is "get published," you may not publish very much. It's easier to write when you're interested in what you're writing about.

4. Give yourself time. Many smart people tell themselves pathetic lies like, "I do my best work at the last minute." Look: It's not true. No one works better under pressure. Sure, you are a smart person. But if you are writing about a profound problem, why would you think that you can make an important contribution off the top of your head in the middle of the night just before the conference?

Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don't worry that what you write is not very good and isn't immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don't just write down ideas.

The articles and books that will be read decades from now were written by men and women sitting at a desk and forcing themselves to translate profound ideas into words and then to let those words lead them to even more ideas. Writing can be magic, if you give yourself time, because you can produce in the mind of some other person, distant from you in space or even time, an image of the ideas that exist in only your mind at this one instant.

5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. And the more unwritten it is, the more brilliant it is. We have all met those glib, intimidating graduate students or faculty members. They are at their most dangerous holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, in some bar or at an office party. They have all the answers. They can tell you just what they will write about, and how great it will be.

Years pass, and they still have the same pat, 200-word answer to "What are you working on?" It never changes, because they are not actually working on anything, except that one little act.

You, on the other hand, actually are working on something, and it keeps evolving. You don't like the section you just finished, and you are not sure what will happen next. When someone asks, "What are you working on?," you stumble, because it is hard to explain. The smug guy with the beer and the cigarette? He's a poseur and never actually writes anything. So he can practice his pat little answer endlessly, through hundreds of beers and thousands of cigarettes. Don't be fooled: You are the winner here. When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired. If you don't feel like that, then you aren't working hard enough.

6. Pick a puzzle. Portray, or even conceive, of your work as an answer to a puzzle. There are many interesting types of puzzles:

"X and Y start with same assumptions but reach opposing conclusions. How?"
"Here are three problems that all seem different. Surprisingly, all are the same problem, in disguise. I'll tell you why."
"Theory predicts [something]. But we observe [something else]. Is the theory wrong, or is there some other factor we have left out?"

Don't stick too closely to those formulas, but they are helpful in presenting your work to an audience, whether that audience is composed of listeners at a lecture or readers of an article.

7. Write, then squeeze the other things in. Put your writing ahead of your other work. I happen to be a "morning person," so I write early in the day. Then I spend the rest of my day teaching, having meetings, or doing paperwork. You may be a "night person" or something in between. Just make sure you get in the habit of reserving your most productive time for writing. Don't do it as an afterthought or tell yourself you will write when you get a big block of time. Squeeze the other things in; the writing comes first.

8. Not all of your thoughts are profound. Many people get frustrated because they can't get an analytical purchase on the big questions that interest them. Then they don't write at all. So start small. The wonderful thing is that you may find that you have traveled quite a long way up a mountain, just by keeping your head down and putting one writing foot ahead of the other for a long time. It is hard to refine your questions, define your terms precisely, or know just how your argument will work until you have actually written it all down.

9. Your most profound thoughts are often wrong. Or, at least, they are not completely correct. Precision in asking your question, or posing your puzzle, will not come easily if the question is hard.

I always laugh to myself when new graduate students think they know what they want to work on and what they will write about for their dissertations. Nearly all of the best scholars are profoundly changed by their experiences in doing research and writing about it. They learn by doing, and sometimes what they learn is that they were wrong.

10. Edit your work, over and over. Have other people look at it. One of the great advantages of academe is that we are mostly all in this together, and we all know the terrors of that blinking cursor on a blank background. Exchange papers with peers or a mentor, and when you are sick of your own writing, reciprocate by reading their work. You need to get over a fear of criticism or rejection. Nobody's first drafts are good. The difference between a successful scholar and a failure need not be better writing. It is often more editing.

If you have trouble writing, then you just haven't written enough. Writing lots of pages has always been pretty easy for me. I could never get a job being only a writer, though, because I still don't write well. But by thinking about these tips, and trying to follow them myself, I have gotten to the point where I can make writing work for me and my career.

Michael C. Munger is chairman of political science at Duke University, a position he has held since 2000.

http://chronicle.com/article/10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less/124268/

China's Foreign Policy Debates

2011-03-23T20:43:00.001Z

Chaillot Paper - n°121, September 2010

ZHU Liqun

Against the background of China’s ascent as a major economic power, this Chaillot Paper offers a unique overview of the debates on foreign policy that have taken place in China over the past decade. It analyses the main trends in the domestic strategic debate and the extent to which they are likely to shape China’s role in the international arena. Various issues are highlighted, including the implications of the ‘peaceful rise’ strategy for China’s foreign policy, the question of China’s international identity and China’s responsibility as a stakeholder in the international system. Chinese attitudes to the concepts of sovereignty, hegemony and multipolarity, and how they differ from prevailing Western assumptions, are also explored. The analysis also focuses on the tensions between the ‘peaceful risers’ and the proponents of a more militant nationalism in China.

China’s future evolution as a world power is an issue of paramount importance to the European Union. For the EU, the key challenge is to engage China in a multilateral approach to global governance. In this context, it is hoped that this Chaillot Paper will provide valuable insights into the different schools of thought underpinning the formulation of Chinese foreign policy.

Cited in Le Monde:
Il est en tout cas l'objet de vifs débats parmi les experts en relations internationales chinois, révèle, dans un numéro des Cahiers de Chaillot de 2010 consacré à la politique étrangère chinoise, la chercheuse Zhu Lijun ...

Chaillot Paper - n°121, September 2010
ZHU Liqun

China's Foreign Policy Debates (80 pages, Pdf)

"The concluding chapter attempts to categorise foreign policy debates in

China based on the current dominant schools of thought in Chinese

international relations. In fact, China’s intellectual worldviews range

along a spectrum from ‘offensive realist’ at the one end to globalist

views at the other end. It is therefore becoming difficult to find

consensus among Chinese IR scholars on the various key aspects

of Chinese foreign policy. Realism is quite often perceived as a

dominant ideology which has had deep roots in Chinese culture

for several centuries, but this paper finds that this is not the case

today. The preponderant voice heard in the Chinese IR community

nowadays is that which champions the liberalist worldview: this

view is represented in at least one third of the international relations

publications studied in this volume, while roughly another one third

comes under the category of the constructivist view. Both these schools

of thought argue for more cooperation with and deeper integration

into the international community. The dynamics behind this new

development stem from both internal factors (great social change)

and external factors (international pressure). As a result of constantly

reforming and changing itself in its process of modernisation and

transformation, China now makes a major impact on the outside

world. Meanwhile China itself cannot escape being influenced and

being changed by others in the world. As China embeds itself more

deeply into the international community, foreign policy making in

China is becoming a more complex business, with more issues to

be dealt with, more challenges to be faced on a variety of fronts,

and a larger constellation of actors becoming involved. Among the

latter ranks the IR community, which is going to become more

conspicuous and in the future will play a more significant role in

the process. Current debates on China’s foreign policy will have a

major impact on China’s interaction with international society in

the years to come" (p.13)

The Colors of Earth (XXIX)

2011-03-21T20:43:00.001Z

Source : flickr.com (last 5 images) / www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/visuals/album/michigan/ (first 5 images, Michigan)

Catholicism's Lessons for Muslim Democracies?

2011-03-18T03:03:00.002Z

The Wilson Quarterly

March 2011

In 2008, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) narrowly missed being outlawed. State prosecutors argued that the conservative AKP—whose official platform includes economic modernization and EU membership—was bent on Islamizing the secular state and moving toward theocracy. Some may see the AKP as the model of a Muslim party, appealing to believers while playing by democracy’s rules, but many others within Turkey and elsewhere continue to fear that Islam and democracy are incompatible.

Concerns that religion and democracy do not mix aren’t new, writes Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller, nor are they confined to Islam. In the 19th century and far into the 20th, Catholicism was the big worry. Many blamed Catholicism for “the persistence of dictatorship in Latin America and on the Iberian Peninsula” and believed that Catholic citizens’ deepest loyalties lay with the Vatican. (Memorably, this was a big issue for Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960.) Yet in the latter half of the 20th century, Christian Democratic parties (generally Catholic-based) informed by “select doctrinal values” but respectful of the church-state divide flourished in Western Europe and to an extent in Latin America. Couldn’t Islam chart a similar course?

Many in the West object that this analogy is false. Some argue that European Catholics only embraced democracy on orders from the Vatican—and Muslims have no similar central institution. Others hold that the character of Christian Democratic ideas wasn’t any more instrumental in Catholics’ eventual political integration than a “specifically Muslim style of democracy” might be, because it is “the structure of democratic inclusion, not the distinctive ideas that inform it, that leads to moderation.”

Don’t be so fast to dismiss the Catholic parallel, says Müller. First, Europe’s newly formed Christian Democratic parties were hardly puppets of the Vatican, which often did not approve of their creation, control their leadership, or condone their left-veering programs. The Vatican endorsed democracy “only after decades of Christian Democratic practice.”

Instead, Müller argues, Christian doctrine did indeed inspire Catholicism’s turn toward democracy. The ideas of French philosopher Jacques Maritain provide one good example. Beginning in the 1930s, he developed an array of arguments that embraced democracy and human rights as Christian ideals. Though Christian Democracy’s “astounding electoral successes” owed a lot to its firm anticommunist stance and other factors, they were aided by an ideology that tacked between believers’ spiritual values and nonbelievers’ need for “assurance that religiously inspired parties would not abandon state neutrality in religious affairs once in power.”

Whether such a path is available to Islam is an open question, Müller concedes. What the Catholic example does show is that “the formation of some liberalized Islam by self-consciously moderate and democratic Muslim intellectuals should not be seen as a sideshow.” Debates among Muslims about the role of sharia in state law and the thinking of such polarizing figures as scholar Tariq Ramadan may cause alarm, but they are important for developing a hospitable foundation for democracy. And in entering the push-and-pull democratic arena, Muslim parties will inevitably be forced to adapt religious precepts and traditions, Müller argues, a fact that “blanket condemnations of Islam as incompatible with democracy overlook.”

...

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/blog/index.cfm/In_Essence/2011/3/7/catholicisms-lessons-for-islam

“Making Muslim Democracies” by Jan-Werner Müller, in The Boston Review, Nov.-Dec. 2010.

Making Muslim Democracies

Jan-Werner Müller

In the summer of 2008, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP) narrowly escaped being banned by the country’s constitutional court. State prosecutors had alleged that the party which is officially committed to economic modernization, conservative moral values, and Turkey’s admission to the European Union was trying to breach the country’s notoriously strict separation of religion and politics, slowly Islamicize the state, and ultimately introduce theocracy.

Many local supporters of the AKP breathed a sigh of relief after the decision, as did non-Muslims who see the AKP as the prototype of a Muslim Democratic party that can appeal to believers while being fully committed to the rules (and values) of the democratic game.

At the same time, loud voices proclaiming that Islam and democracy are incompatible remain in Turkey, and, of course, are not limited to it. Their pronouncements are reminiscent of what many secular liberals in nineteenth-century Europe had to say about democracy and religion, though with an important and instructive twist: back then,Catholicism was deemed an insurmountable obstacle to liberal democracy. Leading French Republican Léon Gambetta famously exclaimed “Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!” in 1877. In fact, far into the twentieth century prominent politicians and social scientists asserted that Catholicism explained the persistence of dictatorship in Latin America and on the Iberian Peninsula. Catholicism, in the words of Seymour Martin Lipset, appeared “antithetical to democracy”; Pierre Trudeau claimed that Catholic countries

are authoritarian in spiritual matters; and since the dividing line between the spiritual and the temporal may be very fine or even confused, they are often disinclined to seek solutions in temporal affairs through the mere counting of heads.

And as with Muslims today, Catholic citizens were suspected of maintaining transnational ties and ultimate loyalties to spiritual institutions elsewhere—a suspicion that still mattered in John F. Kennedy’s election campaigns.

Yet during the second half of the twentieth century, Christian—which mainly meant Catholic—Democratic parties emerged and flourished in Western Europe and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. These were—and in some degree remain—moderately religious parties. They advance political programs infused with select doctrinal values while firmly upholding democratic structures and respecting the separation of state and church.

...

For full-text: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/muller.php/

Jan-Werner Müller, author of the forthcoming Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, teaches politics at Princeton University.

Re-visiting US Foreign Policy Doctrines after the Iraq War

2011-03-07T15:32:00.002Z

Introduction [HTML] or [PDF]

Woodrow Wilson School Faculty Focus
(Ikenberry and Slaughter interview)

Was George W. Bush the true heir of Woodrow Wilson, the architect of liberal internationalism? Was the Iraq War a result of liberal ideas about America's right to promote democracy abroad? In this timely book, four distinguished scholars of American foreign policy discuss the relationship between the ideals of Woodrow Wilson and those of George W. Bush. The Crisis of American Foreign Policy exposes the challenges resulting from Bush's foreign policy and ponders America's place in the international arena.

Led by John Ikenberry, one of today's foremost foreign policy thinkers, this provocative collection examines the traditions of liberal internationalism that have dominated American foreign policy since the end of World War II. Tony Smith argues that Bush and the neoconservatives followed Wilson in their commitment to promoting democracy abroad. Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter disagree and contend that Wilson focused on the building of a collaborative and rule-centered world order, an idea the Bush administration actively resisted. The authors ask if the United States is still capable of leading a cooperative effort to handle the pressing issues of the new century, or if the country will have to go it alone, pursuing policies without regard to the interests of other governments.

Addressing current events in the context of historical policies, this book considers America's position on the global stage and what future directions might be possible for the nation in the post-Bush era.

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Thomas J. Knock is associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University. Anne-Marie Slaughter is director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department. Tony Smith is professor of political science at Tufts University.

Reviews:

"The Crisis of American Foreign Policy examines Wilson's resonance today. Four noted scholars--three Wilson sympathizers and one caustic critic--offer thoughtful essays on what Wilsons historical example might offer twenty-first-century leaders. . . . It is the combatitive essays by Tony Smith and Anne-Marie Slaughter that invigorate the collection. . . . For Smith, Wilsonianism is a distracting Kantian echo in an increasingly Hobbesian world. Slaughter offers a spirited defense of Woodrow Wilson. . . . This academic clash will resonate with progressives, for Smith's skepticism and Slaughter's optimism reside in many of us. And this same battle of ideas--the pragmatic versus the internationalist--will likely be repeated during high-level debates in the Obama administration."--David Milne, The Nation

"This slender volume by fout prominent foreign policy analysts offers a provocative and informative analysis of the impact of Woodrow Wilson's global vision on American foreign policy over the past century and its potential implications for the twenty-first century."--James M. McCormick, Perspectives on Politics

"I recommend this book wholeheartedly on a number of levels: it provides an articulate account of Wilsonianism; the opportunity to see a substantive and expertly argued discourse among intellectual heavyweights is very much welcomed; and the added relevance--perhaps--of Slaughter's new position as director of policy planning at the State Department in the new Obama administration means US foreign policy could have a distinct Wilsonian flavour in the run-up to the centenary of Wilson's arrival in the White House."--J. Simon Rofe, International Affairs

"Particularly timely. . . . The question the book addresses in four short essays is whether Mr Bush's policies--most notably the Iraq invasion--were 'Wilsonian' in inspiration and whether the reverses have weakened or doomed the tradition."--Daniel Dombey, Financial Times

More reviews

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Woodrow Wilson, the Bush Administration, and the
Future of Liberal Internationalism by John Ikenberry 1
Chapter 1: "Playing for a Hundred Years Hence"
Woodrow Wilson's Internationalism and His Would-Be Heirs by Thomas J. Knock 25
Chapter 2: Wilsonianism after Iraq
The End of Liberal Internationalism? By Tony Smith 53
Chapter 3: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century by Anne-Marie Slaughter 89
Notes 119
Contributors 141
Index 143

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8738.html

Turkey: A Democratic Superpower in the Middle East

2011-02-25T03:56:00.001Z

New Perspectives Quarterly, Fall 2010

Reza Aslan is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam.

Istanbul—A political party espousing a commitment to what it calls “Islamic moral values” has brought Turkey closer to a full-fledged democracy than it has ever been.

Last week, 30 years after a military coup overturned the democratically elected government of Suleyman Demirel, Turks voted overwhelmingly for constitutional changes pushed through by the moderate Islamists of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish initials AKP).

The reforms strengthen the rights of women, children and the handicapped, provide greater freedoms for Turkey’s Christian and Kurdish minorities (both of whom have been repeatedly persecuted and marginalized by previous governments), relax Turkey’s restrictive labor laws, curtail the role of the military in political affairs and allow for the creation of more democratic institutions throughout the country. More crucially, the reforms reorganize the structure of the court system, providing greater legal protections for ordinary citizens while stripping the military of its immunity against prosecution in civilian courts.

Opponents in the constitutional referendum argued that it ceded too much power to the president and parliament, particularly when it comes to appointing judges. Yet such arguments failed to persuade voters, nearly 60 percent of whom voted for the package of reforms that the AKP presented as a necessary step toward Turkey’s membership in the European Union. (Interestingly, even as enthusiasm for EU membership has deteriorated in Turkey—support has dropped to 54 percent from 68 percent in 2005—the economic and political changes have proved so popular that they seem no longer to be dependent on what Europe wants from Turkey, but on what Turks want for themselves.)

Since coming to power in 2002, the AKP, which models itself on Europe’s conservative Christian Democratic parties, has steadily chipped away at the military’s self-ascribed role as the protector of Turkish democracy. Instead, the AKP has provided Turks with a model of governance that reflects a commitment to constitutional democracy and the rule of law, but without the need to forcibly repress the country’s religious identity.

Not only has Turkey become a freer, more liberal, more inclusive and more democratic country under the AKP, it has also become a more dominant global power and has experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth. Indeed, the Turkish economy has come out of the global recession stronger than ever, posting a 10.3 percent growth in GDP in the second quarter of this year. That makes Turkey the third-fastest-growing economy in the world behind Singapore and Taiwan.

And yet the AKP continues to face the same tired rhetoric from Turkey’s main opposition parties that it is undermining the “secular foundations” of the state by, for example, allowing girls to go to school while wearing a simple scarf over their hair.

One hears similar criticisms in the United States, where there has been a lot of hand-wringing lately over Turkey’s increasingly assertive foreign policy, its deepening ties with Iran, Syria and Iraq, and its overt criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Some have even suggested that Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, is turning away from its strategic alliance with the West and instead building an “Islamic axis” against America’s interests in the region.

This is nonsense. It is not Islam that drives the AKP’s foreign or domestic policy but rather its economic and national security interests. If Turkey has been focusing its diplomatic efforts on the Middle East, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, it is because that is where its economic growth is coming from, not from Europe or the US.

Further, Turkey’s more robust foreign policy and its attempts to insert itself as a mediator in the region’s conflicts are the result of its revived sense of national confidence. Turkey is no longer willing to be subordinate to the US but insists on being treated as an ally and equal, with its own proposals and policies for dealing with the region’s problems.

That is a good thing, because Turkey’s interests in the region—whether regarding a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or building stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, or keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons—align with those of the US In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Turkey is now America’s most important strategic ally in the Middle East.

More significantly, Turkey has provided the peoples of the Middle East with a more authentic example of Islamic governance than one finds in the secular dictatorships of Egypt, Jordan and Syria or the religious authoritarianism of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The AKP has proved that there need not be any contradictions between Islam and democracy, that a party committed to Islamic values can be equally committed to human rights, constitutionalism, pluralism and the rule of law. And with the passage of the constitutional reforms, Turkey took another step toward solidifying its position as the new superpower of the Middle East: the shining model of what a modern, Muslim-majority democracy can achieve if given the opportunity.

http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2010_fall/11_aslan.html

The Colors of Earth (XXVIII)

2011-02-21T21:06:00.000Z

Source: flickr.com

The Arab 1989?

2011-02-14T14:52:00.000Z

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, David Held, Alia Brahimi

February 11, 2011, opendemocracy.net

The uprisings sweeping across the Middle East portend a political transformation as significant as those of 1989. The economic stagnation of the region, the failures of corrupt and repressive autocratic regimes, conjoined with a disenchanted youthful population wired together as never before, have triggered a political struggle few anticipated. Yet 1989 is not an entirely clear point of reference - the emergence of peaceful mass movements of change is a parallel, but the pull of the West, so marked in 1989, is weaker and more complex. Accordingly, the path ahead for these brave, inspiring, challenging movements is more uncertain.

An extraordinary wave of upheaval is beginning to sweep across the Arab world, with the potential to transform the political order in the Middle East. Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of self-immolation galvanised a generation of marginalised youth to demand political freedom, economic opportunity and above all a sense of human dignity. Millions participated in massive demonstrations that ousted the Ben Ali kleptocracy in Tunisia and heralded the end of the Mubarak regime in Egypt. This turn of events has inspired people to mobilise against repressive autocracies across the Middle East and North Africa. Moreover, the protests directly contradict the myths long spun by these regimes that their secular strong-men are both the guarantors of stability and the only bulwark against a fanatical Islamist takeover. Men, women and children from all backgrounds, classes and levels of education cooperated in non-violent calls for change. The resulting outcome could be transformative in its impact on a regional order that has, for decades, elevated regime and western stability above the democratic and participatory desires of its inhabitants.

Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December after his street stall was confiscated and he was humiliated by local authorities in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid. His plight resonated heavily with young Tunisians facing similar despair with their economic situation and lack of prospects for a better future. Protests began in conservative and rural regions of Tunisia and gradually spread to the cities where they intersected with rising social tensions and anger at the escalating cost of food and basic services. New media and social networking websites acted as powerful transmitters enabling activists, bloggers and journalists to bypass the security services’ repressive crackdown. The gradual convergence of socio-economic and political dissent widened the scope of the protestors’ demands to include the tackling of corruption and granting of political freedoms. Ben Ali responded with incremental concessions that culminated in a pledge not to seek re-election as President in 2014. When the Tunisian military refused to intervene and suppress the protests, Ben Ali was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia on 14 January, and was replaced by a transitional unity government ahead of planned elections.

Demonstrations in Egypt started on 25 January with the organisation of a ‘Day of Anger’ in major cities. As in Tunisia, a trigger (in this instance the ousting of Ben Ali) ignited popular frustration with the Mubarak regime’s perceived inability to address deep social and economic problems. The protests escalated into a ‘Day of Rage’ when thousands of demonstrators overpowered the police and security services and burned symbols of the regime across the country. Previously fragmented opposition groups coalesced behind Mohamed El-Baradei (the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and head of the National Association of Change) and demanded immediate political change. A remarkable feature of the crowds was their commitment to non-violence and ad hoc organisation of relief and other basic services to ensure orderly protests. Muslims and Christians stood side by side in unity and prayer and notably sported Egyptian flags rather than religious symbols. The military acknowledged the protests’ legitimacy and Mubarak was forced into conceding ever-greater checks on his power. These culminated in his announcement to stand down as President following the ‘March of the Millions’ on 1 February, when two million demonstrated in Cairo and several million more throughout Egypt demanded an immediate political transition. In response, pro-Mubarak thugs carried out indiscriminate attacks inflicting more than 1200 casualties and contrasting starkly with the peaceful non-violent nature of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations. This was a desperate act of a beleaguered autocrat and belatedly led the international community to abandon its support for Mubarak.

The political contagion has spread throughout the Arab world although it is strongest in countries where authoritarian regimes have limited fiscal and monetary revenues to defuse popular frustration. In Jordan, rising inflation and high unemployment and poverty levels were causing significant hardship and anti-government feeling long before the outbreak of overtly political protests. These squeezed hardest the middle- and lower-income groups that formed the core of the Arab world’s wave of mobilisation. Jordan’s lively media and social networking sphere also differed markedly from the conservative and tribal composition of the parliament returned in elections boycotted by secular and Islamist opposition groups in November 2010. A generational clash emerged between young activists spanning the religious and ideological spectrum and the monarchy seeking to deflect their frustration onto the parliament. King Abdullah fired the government of Samir Al-Rifai and appointed an ex-army general in his place. This was a strategic move to de-link potential political opposition to the monarchy from economic discontent by channelling the blame for rising socio-economic unrest onto the technocrats. The monarchy also benefits from the split within Jordan between East Bank tribes and formerly-West Bank Palestinians, which represents a safety valve insulating it from a mass popular uprising on the Tunisian or Egyptian scale.

In Yemen, protests initially focused on rampant unemployment and especially bleak economic conditions in a country wracked by internal conflict and fast running out of oil and water. Opposition anger was also directed toward President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s controversial constitutional amendment in January 2011. This removed the two-term presidential limit and cleared the way for him to run for re-election in 2013. In this context, the protestors’ success in extracting a pledge that he would neither seek re-election nor attempt to transfer power to his son was significant. Saleh has twice before broken promises to step down and it remains to be seen whether he will act differently on this occasion. Notably, however, his concession failed to take the sting out of the demonstrations, which instead became more emboldened as events unfolded in Egypt. Saleh lacks the political legitimacy to placate the broad-based opposition to his increasingly repressive 32-year rule, but has thus far taken advantage of opposition disunity to prevent a serious challenge to his rule. Pressure is nevertheless building up in a context in which the regime already faces armed contestation to its rule, and in which nobody seriously believes it will follow-through on meaningful reform.

Popular demand for change is spreading across the Middle East. Throughout the region a fault-line has opened up between young populations exposed to global modernising forces through the internet and satellite television and ossified, oppressive regimes unable to provide opportunities or the reality of a better life. 65% of the population of the Middle East is under the age of 30 and are increasingly technology-savvy and adept at using new forms of communication to bypass state controls and mobilise around common issues or grievances. Bloggers in Egypt and Tunisia were instrumental in publicising and spreading accounts of torture and human rights violations by the security services. They emboldened people everywhere to band together and confront the regimes that had ruled with an iron fist. A decisive threshold has been crossed and, once opened, this Pandora’s Box will be almost impossible to re-seal. Nor, in the age of Twitter and Al-Jazeera providing live-streaming of events across the globe, is it possible for regimes to seal themselves off from the outside world while they take retribution on their opponents, as when the Syrian regime massacred thousands of its domestic opponents in Hama in 1982. Caught between the spotlight of instant global media and an energised and youthful social movement, these police states are being exposed as anachronistic, brittle and incapable of meeting the requirements of modern societies.

This is the storm moving through the Middle East and radically reshaping the nature of state-society relations. Crucially, the uprisings are popular movements emerging organically from below in response to local socio-economic and political conditions. They therefore differ fundamentally from the military-led revolutions from above that swept away the colonial regimes in the 1950s and 1960s and entrenched in power praetorian leaderships built around the military and security apparatus. In addition they are unconnected either to the US-led democratising agenda or the opposing forces in the ‘war on terror.’ They thus have great popular legitimacy in a region that has witnessed numerous recent examples of external interventions that have tarnished local perceptions of ‘democracy.’ Moreover, the sight of regimes and leaders long denounced by Osama bin Laden being toppled through peaceful and largely-secular mass protests demonstrates just how marginalised Al-Qaeda and jihadist ideology really is. Notably, demonstrators chanting in Cairo called for ‘tanmiyya’ (development) and ‘hurriya’ (freedom), often drowning out more overtly religious slogans. It is this realisation that so threatens the confluence of western and regime interests around the fallacy that democracy cannot be a stable alternative to embedded authoritarian regimes.

What caused this cascade of popular rejection of a status quo that for so long appeared set in stone? Moments of revolutionary change often occur when specific triggers interact with slower but no less significant changes gradually taking place. The seemingly random act of Bouazizi’s self-immolation was the catalyst for popular revulsion at the marked inequities and indignities they encountered on a daily basis. Just as the assassin’s bullet that felled Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 set in motion the train of events that led to the outbreak of the First World War, the mushrooming anger following Bouazizi’s death engineered the convergence of socio-economic hardship with political grievances. In both instances, a constellation of internal and external events exacerbated existing schisms and reconfigured the dynamics and interaction of longer-term processes. The result is that while discontent in these authoritarian regimes is not new, it is the speed with which they have threatened to bring several of them to the brink of collapse that is qualitatively different.

...

Full-text is available at:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/kristian-coates-ulrichsen-david-held-alia-brahimi/arab-1989

About the authors:

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a Research Fellow at LSE Global Governance.

David Held is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Co-Director of LSE Global Governance.

Alia Brahimi is a Research Fellow at LSE Global Governance.

Image Source: nytimes.com

The Fading Dream of Europe in Turkey

2011-02-11T03:21:00.000Z

Orhan Pamuk

The New York Review of Books

Feb 10, 2011

In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream.

The schoolbooks of my childhood were texts designed to teach us why a line was to be drawn between the state and religion, why it had been necessary to shut down the lodges of the dervishes, or why we’d had to abandon the Arab alphabet for the Latin. But they were also overflowing with questions that aimed to unlock the secret of Europe’s great power and success. “Describe the aims and outcomes of the Renaissance,” the middle school history teacher would ask in his exam. “If it turned out we were sitting on as much oil as the Arabs, would we then be as rich and modern as Europeans?” my more naive classmates at the lycée would say. In my first year at university, whenever my classmates came across such questions in class, they would fret over why “we never had an enlightenment.” The fourteenth-century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun said that civilizations in decline were able to keep from disintegrating by imitating their victors. Because Turks were never colonized by a world power, “worshiping Europe” or “imitating the West” has never carried the damning, humiliating overtones described by Frantz Fanon, V.S. Naipaul, or Edward Said. To look to Europe has been seen as a historical imperative or even a technical question of adaptation.

But this rose-colored dream of Europe, once so powerful that even our most anti-Western thinkers and politicians secretly believed in it, has now faded. This may be because Turkey is no longer as poor as it once was. Or it could be because it is no longer a peasant society ruled by its army, but a dynamic nation with a strong civil society of its own. And in recent years, there has of course been the slowing down of talks between Turkey and the European Union, with no resolution in sight. Neither in Europe nor in Turkey is there a realistic hope that Turkey will join the EU in the near future. But to admit to having lost this hope would be as crushing as to see relations with Europe break down entirely. So no one has the heart even to utter the words.

That Turkey and other non-Western countries are disenchanted with Europe is something I know from my own travels and conversations. A major cause of the strain in relations between Turkey and the EU was most certainly the alliance that included a sector of the Turkish army, leading media groups, and nationalist political parties, all combining in a successful campaign to sabotage negotiations over entry into the EU. The same alliance was responsible for the prosecutions launched against me and many writers, the shooting of others, and the killing of missionaries and Christian clerics.

There are also the emotional responses whose significance can best be explained by the example of relations with France. Over the past century, successive generations of the Turkish elite have faithfully taken France as their model, drawing on its understanding of secularism and following its lead on education, literature, and art. So to have France emerge over the past five years as the country most vehemently opposed to the idea of Turkey in Europe has been heartbreaking and disillusioning. It is, however, Europe’s involvement in the war in Iraq that has caused the keenest disappointment in non-Western countries, and in Turkey, real anger. The world watched Europe being tricked by Bush into joining this illegitimate and cruel war, while showing immense readiness to be tricked.

When looking at the landscape of Europe from Istanbul or beyond, the first thing one sees is that Europe generally (like the European Union) is confused about its internal problems. It is clear that the peoples of Europe have a lot less experience than Americans when it comes to living with those whose religion, skin color, or cultural identity are different from their own, and that many of them do not warm to the prospect: this resistance to outsiders makes Europe’s internal problems all the more intractable. The recent discussions in Germany on integration and multiculturalism—particularly its large Turkish minority—are a case in point.

As the economic crisis deepens and spreads, Europe may be able, by turning in on itself, to postpone its struggle to preserve the culture of the “bourgeois” in Flaubert’s sense of the word, but that will not solve the problem. When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year and now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble concluding that the poor, unemployed, and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely. Higher walls, tougher visa restrictions, and ships patrolling borders in increasing numbers will only postpone the day of reckoning. Worst of all, anti-immigration politics, policies, and prejudices are already destroying the core values that made Europe what it was.

In the Turkish schoolbooks of my childhood there was no discussion of democracy or women’s rights, but on the packets of Gauloises that French intellectuals and artists smoked (or so we thought) were printed the words “liberté, égalité, fraternité” and these were much in circulation. “Fraternité” came to stand for the spirit of solidarity and resistance promoted by movements of the left. But callousness toward the sufferings of immigrants and minorities, and the castigation of Asians, Africans, and Muslims now leading difficult lives in the peripheries of Europe—even holding them solely responsible for their woes—are not “brotherhood.”

One can understand how many Europeans might suffer anxiety and even panic as they seek to preserve Europe’s great cultural traditions, profit from the riches it covets in the non-Western world, and retain the advantages gained over so many centuries of class conflict, colonialism, and internecine war. But if Europe is to protect itself, would it be better for it to turn inward, or should it perhaps remember its fundamental values, which once made it the center of gravity for all the world’s intellectuals?

—Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely

A New Democratic Wave in the Middle East?

2011-01-31T16:39:00.000Z

Álvaro de Vasconcelos

Álvaro de Vasconcelos is the Director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris.

The Roar of the Democratic Wave

Álvaro de Vasconcelos

project-syndicate.org

PARIS – Has the uprising in Tunisia sparked a new democratic wave that will conquer Egypt and eventually sweep away the authoritarian “Arab exception”? After southern Europe in the 1970’s, Latin America in the late 1980’s, and Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990’s, it seems that now it is the Mediterranean region’s turn. For Europe, democratization immediately to its south is a vital interest.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster in Tunisia signalled the collapse of the Arab “stability” model, praised by many Western leaders, consisting of authoritarianism and overrated economic performance. The surge of anger and revolt in Egypt, whatever its final outcome, marks the beginning of the end for authoritarian nationalist Arab regimes.

In contrast to Tunisia, the military is a pillar of the Egyptian regime. But it is unlikely that Egypt’s huge (mostly conscript) army will engage in massive, violent repression, which would be unprecedented in that country.

Even if President Hosni Mubarak hangs on to complete the remainder of his term, the ruling National Democratic Party’s regime, its legitimacy irreparably shaken, will not survive for long. Omar Suleiman’s appointment as Vice-President (and heir-apparent) indicates that the army has accepted that Mubarak must leave sooner or later. Nor, it seems clear, will Mubarak secure the succession of his son, Gamel, before he goes.

The regime’s international legitimacy is equally in a shambles. The United States, Egypt’s main ally, while stopping short of siding with the protesters, is holding the regime to Mubarak’s promise of a “better democracy,” and demanding swift action to meet the people’s legitimate demands. By hinting strongly that its $1.5 billion in largely military aid would be withheld in the event of unacceptable levels of repression, the US revealed that the post-Mubarak era is already being contemplated.

The US – and Europe – are keen to avoid a sudden collapse of the Egyptian regime. But a protracted and incremental process of small steps towards economic and then political reform – the sequence contemplated by the European Union – is no longer an option. The regime is past reforming, and must give way to a new democratic republic, with a new constitution.

Ideally, this should come about in a manner similar to democratic transitions in Latin America in the 1980’s, when authoritarian, army-backed rulers yielded to popular demands for radical, democratic regime change. Resorting to thugs to carry out widespread intimidation, and blaming violence on the largely peaceful protests of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Egyptians, as their government has done, is not a good omen.

Unlike in Tunisia, Europeans and Americans should increase the pressure on Egypt’s leaders – primarily the military at this stage – to start fulfilling the regime’s promises of political reform. This will lack credibility under Mubarak, whose refusal to stand down is a recipe for chaos. It is necessary that the international community:

· Withdraw support for Mubarak;

· Support the formation of a transitional authority, supported by the military and the “street,” and including independent political figures untainted by the regime, to prepare free and fair elections;

· Call for an amnesty for all political prisoners.

Many of the conditions needed for a democratic transformation – a vibrant and organized civil society, a relatively free press, and well-respected opposition figures, as well as a variety of battered but breathing political parties of different persuasions – are already present.

Fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is only marginally involved in an uprising that it did not initiate and has no hope of controlling, is no excuse for trying to save a failing regime. The tragic consequences of eleventh-hour attempts to save the Shah in Iran should not be forgotten. There is also no reason to believe (contrary to the regime’s insistence) that the Brotherhood would emerge victorious from a democratic transition.

Of course, there are concerns about the future of Egypt’s foreign policy, especially toward Israel. But there is no indication that a non-authoritarian Egyptian regime would call into question the bilateral peace treaty, though a definite end to the Gaza blockade and a shift in attitude towards Hamas – in the sense of a more serious attempt at forging Palestinian unity – are to be expected.

For Europe, the best option is to support the mass movement calling for regime change led by Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The joint declaration by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and British Prime Minister David Cameron, calling for a “broad-based government” and “free and fair elections” in Egypt stands in stark contrast to the embarrassed silence that was heard at the outset of Tunisia’s democratic uprising. It is still too soon, however, to conclude that Europeans have finally overcome their fear of Arab democracy and will not be tempted to accept milder forms of “liberal authoritarianism” should the crisis drag on or a military takeover occur.

That would be a grave mistake, for such an outcome would most likely pave the way for extreme alternatives. Europe and the US must be as supportive of democracy in the Mediterranean region as they are within Europe itself. When tides are turning, people will remember who stood with them and who did not. As it did during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, Europe needs to show that it stands for democracy, not merely for stability.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/vasconcelos10/English

World’s Best Think Tanks (UPenn Rankings)

2011-01-24T04:08:00.000Z

UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY EDITION
JANUARY 18, 2011

World’s Best Think Tanks - 2011 Rankings

THE THINK TANKS AND CIVIL SOCIETIES PROGRAM

James G. McGann, Ph.D. / Director

University of Pennsylvania / January 25, 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS______________________________________________ 4

INTRODUCTION_____________________________________________________5

METHODOLOGY AND TIMELINE_____________________________________ 6

GLOBAL TRENDS AND TRANSITIONS________________________________10

NOMINATED THINK TANKS_________________________________________19

THE TOP THINK TANKS IN THE WORLD (NON-US)_____________________29

TOP THINK TANKS IN THE UNITED STATES___________________________31

TOP THINK TANKS BY REGION______________________________________32

TOP THINK TANKS BY RESEARCH AREA (GLOBAL)____________________41

SPECIAL CATEGORIES______________________________________________ 44

ABOUT THE AUTHOR_______________________________________________ 47

APPENDICES_______________________________________________________ 49

INTRODUCTION

The 2009 Global Go To Think Tank Rankings marks the fourth year edition of what has now become an annual report. The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the International Relations Program, University of Pennsylvania has created a process for ranking think tanks around the world. It is the first comprehensive ranking of the world’s top think tanks, based on a worldwide survey of hundreds of scholars and experts. The think tank index has been described as the insider’s guide to the global marketplace of ideas. For this ambitious project, I have assembled a panel of close to 300 experts from around the world, across the political spectrum and from every discipline and sector to help nominate and select public policy research centers of excellence for 2009. The members of the Expert Panel were asked to nominate regional or global centers of excellence that they felt should be recognized for producing rigorous and relevant research, publications and programs in one or more substantive areas of research.

The Global Go To Think Tank Rankings was launched in 2006 in response to the never-ending requests that I received from journalists, scholars and government officials to provide a list of the leading think tanks in a particular country or region of the world. When I first designed the project it was intended to identify some of the leading think tanks in the world in an attempt to answer these inquiries in a more systematic fashion. Over the last 4 years the process has been refined and the number of institutions and individuals involved in the project has grown steadily.

The primary objective of the rankings is to recognize some of the leading public policy think tanks in the world and highlight the important contributions these organizations are making to governments and civil societies around the world. In four short years the Global Go To Index has become an authoritative source for the top public policy research institutes in the world. Last year’s Report was featured in the January/February issue of Foreign Policy magazine and The Economist and this year the report will be launched at a briefing at the United Nations.

Contained in this Report are the results of the 2009 Global Go To Think Tank Rankings. Also included in this report is a summary of the major trends and issues that think tanks face across the globe. These trends were identified through our annual survey of think tanks and interviews with the staff of think tanks and civil society organizations in every region of the world.

Overall, this year’s rankings and selection process marked a number of significant improvements over previous years. We have continued to expand the participation in the rankings process by adding more members to the Expert Panel, formalizing the recruitment of Expert Panelists, creating an on-line survey instrument and increasing outreach to those regions that were underrepresented in the past. These changes have resulted in a larger, more diverse, and more representative pool of nominees and finalists.

...

1. Top Think Tank in the World

– Top Think Tank Worldwide

2. Top Think Tanks by Region

– Top Think Tanks Worldwide (Excluding US Think Tanks)

– Top Think Tanks- United States

– Top Think Tanks- North America

– Top Think Tanks in Latin America and the Caribbean

– Top Think Tanks in the Middle East and North Africa

– Top Think Tanks in Southern Africa (Including Sub-Saharan Africa)

– Top Think Tanks in Western Europe

– Top Think Tanks in Eastern Europe

– Top Think Tanks in Asia

3. Top Think Tanks by Research Area

– Top International Development Think Tanks

– Top Health Policy Think Tanks

– Top Environment Think Tanks

– Top Security and International Affairs Think Tanks

– Top Domestic Economic Policy Think Tanks

– Top International Economic Policy Think Tanks

– Top Social Policy Think Tanks

– Top Science and Technology Think Tanks

4. Top Think Tanks by Special Achievement

– Think Tanks with the Most Innovative Policy/Idea Proposal

– Best New Think Tank (established in the last 3-5 years)

– Best Use of Internet to Engage the Public

– Outstanding Policy Oriented- Public Policy Research Program

– Best Use of the Media (Print or Electronic) to Communicate Programs and

Research

– Most Impact on Public Policy and Debates

FULL-TEXT of the REPORT (2011)

FULL-TEXT of the REPORT (2010)

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

2011-01-05T22:26:00.000Z

Daniel W. Drezner, Tufts University

Princeton University Press, 2011

Introduction [PDF]

What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner's groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of popular zombie films, songs, and books, Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicts realistic scenarios for the political stage in the face of a zombie threat and considers how valid--or how rotten--such scenarios might be.

Drezner boldly lurches into the breach and "stress tests" the ways that different approaches to world politics would explain policy responses to the living dead. He examines the most prominent international relations theories--including realism, liberalism, constructivism, neoconservatism, and bureaucratic politics--and decomposes their predictions. He digs into prominent zombie films and novels, such as Night of the Living Dead and World War Z, to see where essential theories hold up and where they would stumble and fall. Drezner argues that by thinking about outside-of-the-box threats we get a cognitive grip on what former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the "unknown unknowns" in international security.

Correcting the zombie gap in international relations thinking and addressing the genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave, Theories of International Politics and Zombies presents political tactics and strategies accessible enough for any zombie to digest.

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His books include All Politics Is Global (Princeton). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Zombie Research Society.

Endorsements:

"Drezner is to the zombie attack what Thucydides is to the Peloponnesian War--he is its great chronicler. As witty as he is insightful, Drezner has taken old ideas and traditions in international relations and brought them back to life."--G. John Ikenberry, Princeton University

"Bless Dan Drezner for this book which punches huge holes in the hokum of American foreign policy thinking. Our theories in this business have been thin and often very costly, and if it takes Drezner's 'zombie attack' to puncture their bloat, so be it. Besides, the book is fun."--Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and former New York Times columnist

"One of the most creative books about international relations you will ever read--and one of the smartest."--Peter Beinart, author of The Icarus Syndrome

"This book fills a gnawing gap in the international relations literature and adds flesh to those bones by communicating key international relations theories in a fresh, fun, and effective way."--Daniel Nexon, Georgetown University

"This interesting, thoughtful, and engaging book nicely integrates the classics of zombie work with theories of international politics to make sense of human--and nonhuman--behavior. This is the only international politics textbook that will make students frequently laugh and think at the same time. Indeed, this textbook is food for brains, which may, of course, only attract more zombies."--Stephen Saideman, McGill University

Table of Contents:

Preface ix
Introduction . . . to the Undead 1
The Zombie Literature 11
Defining a Zombie 21
Distracting Debates about Flesh-eating Ghouls 23
The Realpolitik of the Living Dead 33
Regulating the Undead in a Liberal World Order 47
Neoconservatism and the Axis of Evil Dead 61
The Social Construction of Zombies 67
Domestic Politics: Are All Zombie Politics Local? 77
Bureaucratic Politics: The "Pulling and Hauling" of Zombies 87
We're Only Human: Psychological Responses to the Undead 99
Conclusion . . . or So You Think 109
Acknowledgments 115
Notes 119
References 129
Index 149

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9388.html

“What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel?”

2011-01-05T22:21:00.000Z

January 4, 2011

Harvard University Press Blog

– An Excerpt from Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

In the fall of 2009 the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk held Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry, following the likes of Italo Calvino, John Cage, and Jorge Luis Borges. During his stay Pamuk delivered the customary six Norton lectures, from which he later produced a book, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, which we published this past fall. In the following excerpt, taken from a section titled “What Our Minds Do When We Read Novels,” Pamuk describes the quickened mind and piercing focus of his youthful novel reading.

-----

I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And in just the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes

the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being. There was a time in my youth when I completely dedicated myself to novels, reading them intently—even ecstatically. During those years, from the age of eighteen to the age of thirty (1970 to 1982), I wanted to describe what went on in my head and in my soul the way a painter depicts with precision and clarity a vivid, complicated, animated landscape filled with mountains, plains, rocks, woods, and rivers.

What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel? How do such interior sensations differ from what we feel when we watch a film, look at a painting, or listen to a poem, even an epic poem? A novel can, from time to time, provide the same pleasures that a biography, a film, a poem, a painting, or a fairy tale provides. Yet the true, unique effect of this art is fundamentally different from that of other literary genres, film, and painting. And I can perhaps begin to show this difference by telling you about the things I used to do and the complex images awakened within me while I was passionately reading novels in my youth.

Just like the museum visitor who first and foremost wants the painting he’s gazing at to entertain his sense of sight, I used to prefer action, conflict, and richness in landscape. I enjoyed the feeling of both secretly observing an individual’s private life and exploring the dark corners of the general vista. But I don’t wish to give you the impression that the picture I held within me was always a turbulent one. When I read novels in my youth, sometimes a broad, deep, peaceful landscape would appear within me. And sometimes the lights would go out, black and white would sharpen and then separate, and the shadows would stir. Sometimes I would marvel at the feeling that the whole world was made of a quite different light. And sometimes twilight would pervade and cover everything, the whole universe would become a single emotion and a single style, and I would understand that I enjoyed this and would sense that I was reading the book for this particular atmosphere. As I was slowly drawn into the world within the novel, I would realize that the shadows of the actions I had performed before opening the pages of the novel, sitting in my family’s house in Beóiktaó in Istanbul—the glass of water I had drunk, the conversation I’d had with my mother, the thoughts which had passed through my mind, the small resentments I had harbored—were slowly fading away.

I would feel that the orange armchair I was sitting in, the stinking ashtray beside me, the carpeted room, the children playing soccer in the street yelling at each other, and the ferry whistles from afar were receding from my mind; and that a new world was revealing itself, word by word, sentence by sentence, in front of me. As I read page after page, this new world would crystallize and become clearer, just like those secret drawings which slowly appear when a reagent is poured on them; and lines, shadows, events, and protagonists would come into focus. During these opening moments, everything that delayed my entry into the world of the novel and that impeded my remembering and envisioning the characters, events, and objects would distress and annoy me. A distant relative whose degree of kinship to the real protagonist I had forgotten, the uncertain location of a drawer containing a gun, or a conversation which I understood to have a double meaning but whose second meaning I could not make out—these sorts of things would disturb me enormously. And while my eyes eagerly scanned the words, I wished, with a blend of impatience and pleasure, that everything would fall promptly into place. At such moments, all the doors of my perception would open as wide as possible, like the senses of a timid animal released into a completely alien environment, and my mind would begin to function much faster, almost in a state of panic.

Goethe and the German Enlightenment

2010-12-10T02:41:00.000Z

Goethe best symbolizes the great modern epoch of western culture which marked a period of transition from classicism to romanticism in the arts, from the generalizations of mathematical and physical sciences to the new theories of biology and social science, from monarchy and authoritarian government to social and political democracy. Before him, three other titans of European literature—Homer, Dante and Shakespeare symbolized the ancient, medieval and renaissance periods.

This great era of change centered about 1800 which is also the mid point in Goethe’s creative life (1770 to 1831). The vast span of his interests and experience stamp him as the figure most expressive of his time. He became, like Dante, a man with a great mission to humanity, an inspired interpreter of the spiritual issues of his day—a role that appears everywhere in his intensely personal writings, in particular in Faust which has become, in our complex and bewildering world, the summation of man’s search of his soul.

Well past the middle of the eighteenth century Goethe’s homeland Germany remained content with the piety of Reformation, and lagged behind, while England and France forged ahead, exploring the radical ideas of Enlightenment. And yet it is thorough a German word, Aufklarung (Enlightenment) that the age is best defined. It was also Germany that took the movement in a peculiar but important new direction with Goethe leading the way.

The German Aufklarung struggled into being under Duke Karl August during 1775-1828 as he attracted to Berlin literary giants like Goethe, Schiller, Wieland and Herder.

Several standard bearers of the Augklarung influenced Goethe:

Leibnitz, generally considered the Father of the Aufklarung, was a brilliant disciple of the French philosophers and British scientists. Leibnitz invented calculus at the time when Newton was doing the same in England. Through his efforts Leibnitz sought not merely to advance knowledge, but to reconcile its contradictory parts. He was at once a bold innovator and a cautious traditionalist.

Wolff, another standard-bearer of Aufklarung, made Leibnitz’s rational Christianity and rational philosophy popular amongst the Germans. Lessing, popularized religion as an evolutionary process—as both being and becoming. In his Laocoon Lessing argued that some arts were concerned with space, while others were concerned with time, and this made a difference in the artists approach to his subject.

The arts of space-painting and sculptor perpetuate a single moment in time, and their beauty, paradoxically, was therefore, to be judged on their timelessness. Poetry on the other hand, said Lessing, exists in time. It deals not with a single moment but the whole of transitory events. The beauty of poetry is that it traces an emotional event like Laocoon’s agony from beginning to end.

Three other Aufklarer—Winckelmann who had an overwhelming passion for ancient Greece, Wieland with his cult for the tranquil enjoyment of life, and Kant with his three great critiques of pure reason and of judgment—extended the culture of other nations by fusing the different elements of French, English and German thought.

Kant believed that the mind was not simply a passive receptacle for sensory impressions. It did this through categories of perception, inherent in the very structure of mind. The most famous of these was the categorical imperative, which held that the behaviour of man was dictated by an intuitive standard which prompted him to act as he thought other men should act. The influence of Kant was wide and deep. His mind ranged over so many fields and illuminated so many matters that Goethe said: “Reading Kant is like entering a lighted room.”

Along with these formidable Aufklarer Goethe was, as well, influenced by the Sturm and Drang (Storm and Stress) movement that proclaimed the virtues of an art that followed nature and extolled imagination, emotions and intuition. The movement enlisted talented poets and thinkers—Johann Herder, who believed in folk cultures and encouraged the young Goethe to collect the songs of the people from the countryside; Schiller, whose youthful melodramas denounced the established order; and eventually also Goethe who took the movement to its climax with his Sorrows of Werther.

If Werther took the world by storm, it was because in Carlyle’s words, it gave expression to “the nameless unrest and longing discontent which was then agitating every bosom.” The novel is not just maudlin sentiments; Nor is disappointed love its theme. Rather, it reflects the fatal effects of a predilection for absolutes whether in love, art, or the realm of thought.

Two decades after Werther, Goethe published his second important novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which shows how a young man grows with experience into maturity. Unlike Werther, its central character lives in a real world, as well, in the interior world of his own senses. As Wilhelm Meister gradually adjusts his goals to the goals of the society he reveals that mastery of life is not conferred at the end of his apprenticeship, but it is ceaseless wandering, in which the goal is the way and the way is the goal.

When Schiller died in 1805, Goethe was emotionally shattered. He felt he had lost “half of his existence.” Henceforth, he gravitated towards the new school of romantics that included Schlegel, who extolled Greek culture and praised the orient as the summit of Romantic thought and poetry. Through their translations of western and eastern works the romantics were opening up the literary treasures of the world.

World literature became one of Goethe’s most treasured concepts that, he believed, advanced civilization by encouraging mutual understanding and respect. His West-Osterlicher Divan marries East with West, tenderly, playfully and wisely. Goethe included in his Diwan poems by Marianne, his muse, who sang his lyrics and Mozart’s arias enchantingly, wrote excellent verse and exchanged with him poems of Hafiz, Firdausi and other Persian bards.

Inspired by Goethe’s Diwan, Iqbal wrote Piam-e-Mashriq which contains some of his finest poetry in Persian. In the preface to the book, Iqbal adoringly describes Goethe’s Diwan with Heine’s words: “This is a bouquet of love and respect, sent by the West to the East.” Iqbal dedicated a poem to Goethe in which he selects Maulana Rumi, the great mystic poet, to pay tribute to the German poet: “You have entangled the angels and overpowered the Almighty”.

Then, in 1808, Goethe gave the world the first part of his magnum opus Faust. The final part appeared twenty three years later–a year before his death. He started working on it when he was twenty four years old, and poured into it fifty eight years of relentless labor. He had long nurtured in his mind the subject-matter for Faust, that he felt in every fiber of his being—the soul struggling to understand truth and beauty, but losing the struggle because of the elusiveness of truth and the brevity of beauty; yet finding peace by narrowing the goal and broadening the self. But how to envision all this in dramatic form?

Disappointed with an earlier draft of Faust he tore it up and wrote to Schiller: “I am determined to take up my Faust again. I only wish that you would be so kind as to think the matter over on one of your sleepless nights and tell me what you would demand of the whole and to interpret my dreams to me like a true prophet.” Schiller replied: “The duality of human nature and the unsuccessful endeavor to unite in man the godlike and the physical, is never to be lost sight of. The nature of the subject will force you to treat it philosophically and the imagination will have to accommodate itself to serve a rational idea.”

Faust, of course is Goethe. Faust’s aspiration for wisdom and beauty is the soul of Goethe. Faust and Goethe say “yes” to life. By contrast, Mephistopheles is the devil of denial and doubt, for him aspiration is nonsense, beauty is illusion. Faust does not sell his soul unconditionally. He agrees to go to hell only if Mestopheles shows him a pleasure so durably satisfying that he will be glad to stay with it forever.

Faust gives the full literary expression to the romantic philosophy which glorifies life as a search for fulfillment and as a vast adventure into the knowable and the unknowable worlds. Whereas Marlowe’s Faust is doomed to prediction, Goethe’s Faust is saved by the redeeming quality of his continual dissatisfaction, experimentation and striving. Salvation resides in man’s refusal to accept contentment and in his unremitting effort to fulfill the highest prompting of the human spirit.

The first part of Faust tells of Faust’s pact with the devil, who promises him happiness in return for his soul; and his seduction of Gretchen, which ultimately results in her madness and death. In the richly textured second part Faust ventures out into a larger, symbolic world. The devil allows him to know supreme beauty in a marriage with Helen of Troy, and worldly success as the sole ruler of a virgin tract of land which he colonizes according to his idea of a perfect state. Both are won through trickery and force. In the end, however, Faust is welcomed in heaven, partly through his own ceaseless striving to improve his actions, partly through the help of a supernatural love.

As Goethe became older, he grew through science and poetry into a sage, though spending more time on science than in his pursuit of poetry. Darwin recognized him as a fore runner. He was the founder of morphology—the study of forms in plants and animals. He stood for both analysis and synthesis. In his dictum “In the beginning was the deed” we find truth in action rather than in thought, for thought should be an instrument not a substitute for action. Like Kant, Goethe acknowledged that the ultimate nature of reality is beyond us, but this did not commit him to orthodoxy. Quite the opposite, he recommended ignoring the unknowable. He said: “As a poet I am a polytheist, as a scientist pantheist, as a moral being, I stand in need of personal God.” This is one of the meanings he attached to the biblical verse: “In my father’s house are many mansions.”

A day will come, Carlyle predicted in his letter to Ralph Emerson, when “you will find that this sunny looking courtly Goethe held veiled in him a prophetic sorrow deep as Dante’s.” No doubt, Goethe looked deep into the abyss, but he emphasized life and light. He lived life to the full, exuding joi de vivre. As a standard bearer of Aufklarung he was committed to the adventure of science, but he stood in awe and reverence before the mystery of the universe. He shed light through out his life so that bewildered humanity torn between the old and the new, the orthodox and heterodox, between pessimism and optimism, between reason and faith could find the way out of its predicament. Yet when he was dying, he asked for more light.

Just as his Werther knew that the realities of existence are rarely to be grasped by either-or, the reality of Goethe himself eludes any such attempt. Truth for him lay not in compromise but in the embracing of opposites. The only epithet that befits this titan of literature is what Napolean said when he met Goethe at Erfurt: “Voila un home!” (Behold a man).

“The poet,” says Schiller, “is a citizen not only of his country but of his time.” Whatever occupies and interests men in general will interest him still more. Goethe gave voice to that nameless unrest, the blind struggle of a soul in bondage, that high, sad, longing discontent which is agitating every bosom, as we stand at the threshold of the third millennium. He more than any other writer stands with us and shares our bewilderment and spiritual perplexities. He has mastered them and has shown others how to rise above them. Goethe’s writings reflect Goethe’s times in such a sublime way that eternity illumines them.

We draw intellectual and spiritual sustenance from Goethe who dealt with those tangled issues so clearly and so beautifully. Let us remember what he said: “Only he earns his freedom and existence, who daily conquers them anew.”

Source:

http://khmasud.wordpress.com

Image: narrativemagazine.com

Religion and Work Ethic Values: The Case of Turkey

2010-11-01T01:02:00.000Z

THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION OVER WORK ETHIC VALUES:

The Case of Islam and Turkish SME Owner-Managers

Selçuk Uygur, Phd Thesis, 2009

Brunel University, London

Abstract:

The aim of this thesis is to explore the influence of religion on the work ethic values of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner-managers in Turkey. The emergence of religious/pious business people in Turkey has been regarded as a phenomenon. This research pays special attention to the religious transformation and secularism in Turkey. It is based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 32 Turkish SME owner-managers. The sample of the study has been divided into two groups: The practicing Muslim Turkish managers (the religious group), and non/less practicing Muslim Turkish managers (the secular group).

Discourse analysis of the qualitative data, first, clarifies where to seek the religious influence on business activities. It indicates that the influence of religion should be sought within individuals‘ conduct/manner of living leading the moral values and the mentalities of the business people, rather than seeking cause and affect relationship. The contemporary Islamic interpretation in Turkey, as it is called Turkish/Anatolian interpretation of Islam, is found to re-shape the existing teachings of the religion and reproduce the religious structure through the practices. In this respect, five distinguishing characteristics emerged as signs of the religious influence behind the pious business people‘s actions: Hard work as an Islamic duty, good will (intention), responsibility, bounty/benevolence and the balance/equilibrium in one‘s life. It is also observed that the new Islamic discourse in Turkey provides moral energy exclusively for the religious business people in terms of influencing and encouraging entrepreneurial activities.

Meanwhile, the study demonstrates that the work ethic values of the religious Turkish SME owner-managers have been evolving to be more rational and professional, especially after the 1980s liberal economy. This transformation has been evaluated within the concept of secularisation.

Concluding Remarks

It could be concluded that Turkey has entered a healthier modernization process which seems as a road of no return by making the peace between Islam and modernity. It seems that after more than a century of soul-searching‘ has settled upon the idea of re-producing traditional values within the contemporary framework. In the context of this research, the newly emergent business class appears as the carrier of this transformation process. In particular, it has been observed that Turkey‘s new entrepreneurs have been re-shaping their mentalities towards business activities and re-producing the existing work-related values and ethics. Max Weber regards this ethical transformation (Protestantization) as the fundamental prerequisite of an extensive development process, and calls it the spirit‘ of Western capitalism. In this respect, Turkey has been experiencing a similar process in the context of Islam. In terms of being worldly, the secularization of Islam is attempting to provide its own view on several aspects of modern life, including business ethics.

The findings of this research give the impression that Islam, in a Turkish context, has considerable potential to contribute new angles to the modern capitalist system. This moderate view of Islam, which does not contradict with free market or liberal economy, seems to have promising views on business ethics beyond the Western perspective. In a way, it can potentially create new views of capitalism.

Overall, the assimilation of liberal values and being articulated to the modern world makes us optimistic about the future of Turkey. Regardless of the level of religiousness, this tendency seems to be shared by the majority of the society. This study regards secularization of Islam as the catalyst of this broad tendency. In this respect, the new‘ work ethic, which is re-producing the tradition based on a rational way of thinking, could play a vital role in creating a strong enterprise culture in Turkey. Additionally, it can be claimed that this development will make Turkey‘s hand stronger in the EU accession process.

Full-text of the PhD Thesis (pdf, 257 pages) is available at:

http://dspace.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/4396/1/Selcuk%20Uygur_PhD%20Thesis.pdf

The Civic Task of Philosophy

2010-10-25T15:55:00.000+01:00

Ramin Jahanbegloo

http://resetdoc.org

October 13, 2010

As the UNESCO Philosophy Day nears its opening in one month in Tehran, it is time to reflect on the civic role of philosophy in today’s world. We live in a time of widespread ethical relativism which has created for the new generation an attitude of "anything goes", and, not unconnected with this, in a time of widespread public skepticism about the critical role of philosophy. Much of the public has come to believe that a Socratic commitment to the pursuit of truth is a waste of time and an idealistic way of living in our globalized world. Philosophers are presented as insignificant inventors of concepts whose sole aim in life is to struggle to get tenure-track job in North American and European universities.

As such, the claim that philosophy is a liberating activity is likely to be met with cynicism and derision. It is interesting to note that twenty-five hundred years ago Aristophanes, in his play, The Clouds, portrayed Socrates as an amoral Sophist who teaches Athenian youth to cheat through cunning arguments. However, Aristophanes’ dark comedy did not dissuade philosophers to address and put into question some of the basic beliefs of man’s existence in the world.

Among the central concerns of philosophy has been the challenge posed by the idea of freedom and its social and political organization. Why did philosophers care about the problem of freedom? Why is freedom the most important question for a philosopher to tackle? The answer to these two questions can be seen most clearly by examining the consequences of neglecting the issue of freedom. It goes without saying that freedom is the creative force behind philosophical thinking in the same way as philosophy contributes to the understanding and progress of the concept of freedom. Philosophers, therefore, tried to understand freedom as comprehensively and as critically as they could by making a contribution not only to its definition, but also beyond to its realization. Hegel’s remark is as true today as it was nearly 200 years ago when he affirmed that “No idea is so generally recognized as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions (to which therefore it actually falls a victim) as the idea of freedom : none in common currency with so little appreciation of its meaning.” Freedom is a concept that has not only been poorly understood but also intensely misused. This dual unfortunate condition of freedom brings in the forefront of all philosophical discussion the idea that philosophy is a struggle for freedom as the idea that an important part of being free is thinking philosophically. As we can see, the problem of freedom arises within every consideration of the nature of philosophical questioning itself.

If the point of nature of philosophical questioning is to think the concept of freedom, so that human beings can conform to it, some account must be given of how human beings could have strayed from that questioning in the first place, and how it might be possible to return. In other words, philosophy is not only a mode of questioning about the idea of freedom and its social and political applications, but also a mode of thinking and interrogation on the absence of freedom. The mutual enframing of the problem of freedom and the problem of philosophical interrogation points to the possibility that these are two, complementary parts of a more fundamental problem: How is human action or human experience of politics shaped by the intertwining of philosophy and freedom? Rather than concurring with Kant and Sartre that our humanity resides in our freedom, perhaps we should recognize that to create the political is to embody the permanent tension between the institutionalization of freedom and the philosophical interrogation.

To the extent that we are free to think then we can switch to a broader examination of the process of thinking itself. We can, therefore, speak of freedom as philosophy's non-identical twin in the project of questioning and challenging the thinkable and practiced reality. To posit philosophy as a finished and exhaustive knowledge would be as if we defined and practiced freedom as the repetition of the same. The theological covering up of the philosophical interrogation goes hand in hand with the loss of the creative and revolutionary nature of freedom. To be sure, an individual who has already entered the philosophical questioning cannot avoid the explicit and free interrogation of positing other modes of thinking and other forms of the thinkable. It is fascinating to note that the philosophical questioning is a mode of thinking that can create cracks in the surrounding walls of the instituted thought. Philosophy as critical interrogation, therefore, takes place in the gap between free instituting thought and instituted thought. It is here that we might begin to understand why philosophy is the ongoing task of bringing freedom into political life as a lived corrective to the theological.

It is the civic task of philosophy to resist to the very idea of a total theory of reality. To demand that the political organization of a society be founded on a total and complete theory is, therefore, to declare politics non-thinkable and to put an end to the freedom of thinking otherwise and of thinking anew. In other words, there cannot be a democratic society without a democratic questioning or to say it more clearly without a civic questioning on the nature of democracy. The civic questioning is not restricted here to what Martin Luther King called “the thin paper” of democracy, but signifies the critical dimension of civic action that actively and practically forms and educates individuals. And herein resides the sphere of conflict between philosophical interrogation as critical questioning of established norms and meanings and as a mode of thinking positively oriented to freedom and democracy, and an onto-theological closure of all forms of questioning and expressed by a form of what Cornelius Castoriadis calls an “instituted heternomy”. This entails the further assertion that where Gods rule, there is no philosophy.

There is little point in talking and writing about philosophy without having to reflect on the nature of philosophy itself. This is the reason why, the function of the civic philosopher, as a person whose mind watches the inhumanities and injustices of the world, (and most of the time in the name of philosophy), should be maintained, even if the concept has lost today its political strength. The philosopher cannot be replaced by the tenure-track academic even if the temper of the time suggests it. Philosophers have still a lot to contribute to the democratization of democracy. They will certainly be useful to human societies, as long as humans continue to believe that philosophy is not a futile word. In a way, the civic task of philosophy today lies in the struggle between critical thinking and fanaticism. Whatever the price that philosophers will have to pay for their empty hands in the battle against thoughtless tyrannies and hegemonic dominations, we can hope for the victory of an inclusive democratic thought.

http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000021336

The Colors of Earth (XXVII)

2010-10-18T17:03:00.000+01:00

Donetsk, Ukraine

Alaska, USA

Tea Plantation, Malaysia

Hydarabad, Pakistan

Galicia, Spain

Argentina

Washington, USA

Istanbul, Turkey

Thailand

Colorado, USA

Source : Light and Composition Magazine

http://www.lightandcomposition.com/category/photo-of-the-day/

The Colors of Earth (XXVI)

2010-10-15T21:00:00.000+01:00

Source: flickr.com

Interview with Olivier Roy on 'Islam in Europe'

2010-10-11T15:22:00.000+01:00

New Perspectives Quarterly / Summer 2010

Oliviér Roy talked recently to Eren Gvercin about issues central to the debate about Islam in Europe, from revolutionary milleniarism to Muslim Lutheranism. Roy’s recent books include Islam Confronts Secularism and Globalized Islam.

NPQ | The Swiss majority voted for a ban on minarets; France and Belgium are deep in debate about banning headscarves. In Germany, too, the debate about Islam often verges on hysteria. Why are Europeans so preoccupied with religious symbols and “foreign” religions?

Oliviér Roy | The debate in Europe has shifted in the past 25 years from immigration to the visible symbols of Islam. Which means that even people who oppose immigration now acknowledge that the second and third generations of migrants are here to stay and that Islam has put down roots in Europe. And the debate has made a peculiar shift: while the anti-immigration position used to be associated primarily with the conservative right, Islam is now under attack from both left and right, but for very different reasons. The right believes that Europe is Christian and that Islam should be tolerated, but as an inferior religion. While the constitutional principle of freedom of religion prevents it from banning Islam, it takes every opportunity to limit its visibility; the European Court of Human Rights, for example, did not step in to stop France banning the headscarf in schools.

The left argues for secularism, women’s rights and against fundamentalism: It opposes the veil not so much because it is Islamic but because it seems to contradict women’s rights. So, as we see, behind the Islam debate are far more complicated issues: European identity and the role of religion in Europe. Although the left and right take very different stances on these issues, we are seeing the rise of new populist movements (such as Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands) which combine the two approaches, essentially siding with the right but using the arguments of the left.

NPQ | You have said that fundamentalist groups like al-Qaida have nothing to do with Islamic tradition. But in Europe the fundamentalist ideology is regarded as the essence of the traditional thinking. How do you explain this contradiction?

Roy | The sort of terrorism practiced by al-Qaida has neither a Muslim nor a Christian history. It is an entirely new phenomenon. If we consider its manifestations —suicide bombing, killing hostages, targeting civilians—these are all methods that were used before al-Qaida by other organizations: the Tamil Tigers, for example used suicide attacks; the extreme right in Italy was responsible for the Bologna bombing in August, 1980; and the al-Qaida video footage of the execution of foreign hostages in Iraq is a one-to-one “re-enactment” of the execution of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, with the organization’s banner and logo in the background, the hostage handcuffed and blindfolded, the mock “trial” with the reading of the “sentence” and the execution. Al-Qaida’s modus operandi and organization, the declared enemy of US imperialism, the recruitment of young Muslims educated in the West or converts to Islam, all this indicates clearly that al-Qaida is not the expression of traditional Islam or even fundamentalist Islam—it is a new understanding of Islam, cloaked in Western revolutionary ideology.

NPQ | How do you explain the success of such radical movements or ideologies? Is it really linked to poverty and marginalization?

Roy | No. No research has indicated any correlation between poverty and radicalization. There are far more Saudis than Bangladeshis in radical Islamic movements; in fact there are almost no militant Bangladeshis. I think that the current struggle is a continuation of the old confrontation between anti-imperialist movements based in the Third World with the West and specifically the US. Osama bin Laden says comparatively little about religion, but he does talk about Che Guevara, colonialism, climate change etc. Al-Qaida is obviously a generational movement, it is made up of young people who have distanced themselves from their families and their social surroundings and who are not even interested in their country of origin. Al-Qaida has an astonishing number of converts among its members, a fact which is recognized but has not received sufficient attention. The converts are rebels without a cause who, thirty years ago, would have joined the Red Army Faction (RAF) or the Red Brigades, but who now opt for the most successful movement on the anti-imperialist market. They are still in the tradition of a mostly Western revolutionary millenarianism that has turned its back on the idea of establishing a new and just society. The new movements are profoundly skeptical about building an ideal society, which explains the suicidal dimension also present in the RAF.

NPQ | Some Europeans maintain that European culture is essentially a Christian culture, and that everything Islamic is problematic and alien for Europe. What do you say to this?

Roy | They say this at the same time as Pope Benedict XVI, like John Paul II before him, is reprimanding Europe for rejecting and ignoring its Christian roots. The debate about sexual freedom, abortion, or gay rights is not a confrontation between Europeans and Muslims but between secularists on the one hand—who also exist in the Muslim community—and conservative believers on the other, whether they be Muslims, Catholics or Orthodox Jews. Europe is deeply divided about its own culture: secularists consider the Enlightenment (with its human rights, freedom, democracy) to be the true birth certificate of Europe, while certain Christian-oriented factions believe that the Enlightenment also led to communism, atheism and even Nazism.

NPQ | Is there a risk of Islamophobia becoming a European reality?

Roy | This, too, is a question of how we define Islamophobia. Is it just another definition for racism, and specifically racism against people with Muslim names, whatever their religious standing? Or is it the rejection of a religion? There are militant anti-racists who are against the veil—among the feminists, for example—and there are racists who think the veil is irrelevant because they regard Muslims as quintessentially other. What makes this so untenable is the lack of distinction between ethnicity and religion. Of course, the great majority of European Muslims originate from other cultures, but the connection between ethnic background and religion is dissolving—with Europeans converting to Islam and Muslims converting to Christianity. There are atheist “Arabs” and “Turks” and more and more Muslims want to be acknowledged as members of a faith community, but not necessarily as members of a non-European cultural community. We need to distinguish between “ethnic communities” and “faith communities,” because these are different phenomena which need to be approached in differed ways.

NPQ | How should politics deal with these globalized religions which have drifted away from their cultures?

Roy | I think that it is precisely these religions—rather than established institutions like the Catholic Church—that are most “successful” nowadays. It does not make sense to fight this trend, particularly in countries where freedom of religion is written into the constitution. On the contrary, we must shore up the separation of church and state by ensuring full religious equality—not in the sense of religious “multiculturalism” but with an eye to the conditions under which a faith community can freely exercise its rights—with a neutral and clearly defined form of religious freedom within the framework of existing laws.

NPQ | The media frequently promotes a dialectic of “liberal” vs. “radical” Islam. What is your opinion on this terminology and the value judgement it implies?

Roy | I do not think that a believer needs to chose a “liberal” interpretation of his religion to make him a good citizen. And I am not convinced by the call for an Islamic “reformation.” The people who are calling for a Muslim Luther never read Luther. He was not liberal in any way and he was also an avowed anti-Semite. The idea of adapting Muslims to fit a Western context has nothing to do with theology; it is much more about the individual practices and endeavours of the Muslims themselves. They try to reconcile their practices with the Western environment, and they find the necessary tools for this within the environment. In the long run these changes will translate into theological reform of sorts, but it makes no sense to associate modernity with theological liberalism. To do this is either to distort history or to rely on wishful thinking.

Image Source -http://www.michaelbotterill.com/-