Σάββατο 9 Δεκεμβρίου 2017

Against Passion by James Meek


Against Passion

James Meek


  • The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla
    Harper, 160 pp, £19.00, August, ISBN 978 0 06 269743 1
  • The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla
    NYRB, 166 pp, £9.99, September 2016, ISBN 978 1 59017 902 4
What is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class. Lilla argues that the pursuit of identity politics by liberal graduates, brainwashed by their teachers into a self-centred world-view that filters all issues through their own bespoke set of oppressions, has crippled the Democrats, distracting them from the struggle for institutional power at county, state and congressional level. For Lilla, the Democrats’ failure to win elections isn’t a consequence of bad candidates, or fake news, or Russia, or the Democratic establishment’s chumminess with the billionaire class, or people thinking too many immigrants are coming in and too many jobs are going out. The reason is that liberals haven’t established an ‘imaginative, hopeful vision’ of citizenship all Americans can believe in. Instead they have scattered, spending themselves in the hermetic purity of causes.
Lilla portrays America’s colleges (he is professor of humanities at Columbia University) as dark, suspicious places where debate has been smothered by political correctness and use of the pronoun ‘we’ is anathematised. The great movements for justice in America’s past, in civil rights and gay rights and feminism, he says, worked through political institutions to right wrongs. They sought equality in citizenship. Those who joined them wanted to be part of things, to have the same opportunities and freedoms as straight white men. But during the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by left-wing professors who were inspired, in turn, by French thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, a new politics disseminated from university campuses that rejected such binding concepts as citizenship and duty. It emphasised the special status individuals could acquire by virtue of their claim to a particular identity, whether related to gender, or sexual orientation, or ethnicity, or body type, or disability, or chronic medical condition:
What’s extraordinary – and appalling – about the past four decades of our history is that our politics have been dominated by two ideologies that encourage and even celebrate the unmaking of citizens. On the right, an ideology that questions the existence of a common good and denies our obligation to help fellow citizens, through government action if necessary. On the left, an ideology institutionalised in colleges and universities that fetishises our individual and group attachments, applauds self-absorption, and casts a shadow of suspicion over any invocation of a universal democratic we.[*]
It is the solipsism of liberal identity politics, according to Lilla, that is responsible for the loss of a generation of young liberal activists. Instead of getting out among the people with an inspiring message about advancing together, caring for each other as citizens with common goals, young left-wing graduates seek self-validation in movements that emphasise, through a claim of oppression, the inherited differences that set them apart. For them the unit of political activism is the romantic self; its fullest expression, the urban demonstration in support of a particular cause, as big and boisterous as possible. They are romantics, Lilla says, and not in a good way. ‘We need no more marchers. We need more mayors.’ He calls the Black Lives Matter movement, set up to challenge police brutality against black people, ‘a textbook example of how not to build solidarity’, and, using a term from an article by Tom Wolfe from 1970 about blacks who exploited white guilt to get municipal handouts, accuses the movement of using ‘Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent’.
It’s true that the Democrats, to put it mildly, have a grass roots problem. Long before Trump became president and the Republicans cemented control of both Houses of Congress, the GOP was tightening its grip on power at the state level. Each American state has a mini-congress and head of state of its own, the governor. Out of 99 state legislative chambers (Nebraska, uniquely, has a unicameral legislature) the Democrats now control only 32; only 16 of the 50 governors are Democrats. During Obama’s two terms in office, Democrats at state level suffered a net loss of almost a thousand seats. While the progressives were out occupying Wall Street, it seems, the Republicans were occupying the country.
There’s a large assumption at the heart of Lilla’s case. He presents it as one argument that liberals’ obsession with identity politics prevents them making: a universally appealing case for a civic, communitarian America. In fact, he’s making two arguments: first, that liberals have such an obsession; and, second, that it is identity politics which is to blame for liberal no-shows in the battle for the hinterland. The assumption being that if liberal activists spent less time on movement politics, protests and single-issue campaigns in the coastal cities, they’d have more time to swarm over small-town Illinois, doorstepping swing voters to chat about the Democratic state senatorial candidate’s exciting tax plans. That might happen. But it is just as likely that if energised young liberals, the passionate romantic idealists Lilla regards with such hostility, were discouraged from ‘identity politics’, they would drop out of politics altogether; that instead of turning a diverse, chaotic, squabbling host of overlapping campaigners into a disciplined army of moderate civic foot soldiers, you would extinguish the very force that keeps the Democrats going.
‘If you want to win the country back from the right, and bring about lasting change for the people you care about,’ Lilla advises activists, ‘it’s time to descend from the pulpit.’
You need to visit, if only with your mind’s eye, places where wifi is non-existent, the coffee is weak, and you will have no desire to post a photo of your dinner on Instagram. And where you’ll be eating with people who give genuine thanks for that dinner in prayer. Don’t look down on them. As a good liberal you have learned not to do that with peasants in far-off lands; apply the lesson to Southern Pentecostals and gun owners in the mountain states … Impose no purity tests on those you would convince.
He rather undercuts this message a few pages later:
Whatever might be said about the legitimate concerns of Trump supporters, they have no excuse for voting for him. Given his manifest unfitness for higher office, a vote for Trump was a betrayal of citizenship, not an exercise of it … his voters were generally clueless about how our democratic institutions work … All they seemed to possess was a paranoid, conspiratorial picture of power.
No purity tests, then, except for the 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump.
It’s true that passion has become a cheap commodity, a stale marketing word and a banal political accessory; and that justification by passion risks opening the way to justification by anger. It is right to be wary of those who bring to political activism an egoistical yearning for personal transcendence. But it is hard to distinguish the charlatan, the poser and the ego-tripper from the genuine idealist who wants to do good and whose passion may be sincere. The generalisations of Lilla’s polemic elide such subtleties. In previous books he has been fastidious about the complexity of the past, and scathing about the reactionary mythologising of past golden ages; here he skates over the differences between the various historical manifestations of ‘identity politics’, making a simplistic division of the past hundred years of American political history into a ‘Roosevelt dispensation’ and a ‘Reagan dispensation’.
The phrase ‘identity politics’ is often traced back to the statement issued in 1977 by the black feminist Combahee River Collective, which declared itself to be struggling against interlocking systems of oppression based on race, sex, sexuality and class. ‘We realise,’ they said, ‘that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us … This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.’ Barbara Smith, one of the women who drafted the original Combahee statement, pointed out in 2015 that they hadn’t come up with the term ‘identity politics’ to exclude anybody, only to get themselves included. Yet the phrase was seized on by conservative commentators and has mutated to acquire the pejorative sense in which Lilla uses it. What began as self-proclamation has become a charge levelled by the designator at the participant. The participant makes an assertion of oppression, and a claim for fair treatment; the designator makes the accusation that the participant isn’t really oppressed, just making an unreasonable demand for treatment that is not so much fair as special.
The distinction Lilla makes between the black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which was seeking equal citizenship with whites, and Black Lives Matter, which he admits is also seeking equal citizenship with whites (in the sense that blacks as well as whites have the right not to be shot by the police for no reason), is unclear. It certainly isn’t a distinction Barbara Smith, an active participant in desegregation since she was a schoolchild in the 1960s and a strong supporter of Black Lives Matter, would recognise. Lilla doesn’t appear to notice the similarity between his attitude to Black Lives Matter – that they are an aggressive, impertinent crowd of identity politicians who, for all the legitimacy of their demands, need to be more patient and quiet down – and the queasy attitude of those white ‘moderates’ in the 1960s whom Martin Luther King lamented in his famous letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama were ‘more devoted to “order” than to justice’.
‘The thing is,’ Smith told Curve magazine earlier this year,
everyone has an identity – historically, culturally, politically and economically based – and you can’t get rid of that. You can’t run away from it. What we meant as feminists of colour in the Combahee was not that the only people who are important are people like ourselves. The reason why we asserted identity politics so strongly at that time – at the time black women were so devalued and so marginalised that nobody thought we counted for anything – was that no one thought it was legitimate for us to have our own political perspectives, or that there was even a political perspective to begin with. Where were black women to stand? That was the point we were making.
Is it really possible to find a period in the life of any country when there wasn’t an aggrieved minority – ethnic, class, gender or sexuality-based, geographical, linguistic, sectarian – seeking both recognition and acceptance? Might it not be that majorities are themselves aggregations of minorities brought together by scepticism towards the grievances of others? Might it not be that ‘identity politics’ is just what politics has become – or what it always was, in a way that has only now become impossible to ignore? The formal structure of US politics may still be binary, Republican v. Democrat, and it is a binary world of liberals and conservatives that underpins Lilla’s book, but the reality, as in all world democracies, is that politics is no longer one-dimensional, conducted along a left-right axis, but multi-dimensional. It’s been a struggle to come up with terms for the new landscape as snappy as ‘left’ and ‘right’. The University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill Expert Survey, for instance, has since 1999 been plotting European party ideologies on a double axis – one left/right, the other calibrated with what it calls the ‘GAL-TAN dimension’, standing for ‘Green/Alternative/Libertarian-Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist’. It’s unwieldy, and not very accurate: ‘nationalist’, in Europe, can mean two very different things, and a modern Green government would be extremely hostile to libertarians. But the broad effort is the same whoever is making the attempt: to try to conceptualise the new politics in a single framework that incorporates economic and cultural axes. The economic axis leads from communitarianism, in which citizens are compelled in their own best interest to contribute equally to powerful state structures that meet many of their needs, to libertarianism, which holds that each individual is responsible for their own welfare and their own luck, and must not be compelled to help others. The cultural axis goes from traditionalism, in which citizens are bound by custom, cultural heritage and divinely revealed natural justice (with a big stick for deviants) into observing time-honoured concepts of gender, class and race, to liberalism, in accordance with which all humans are granted equal rights, together with the freedom to be different where that doesn’t restrict the freedoms of others.
In the United States and Britain, two countries notably struggling to keep up the pretence of one-dimensional politics, Labour and the Democrats are united by communitarianism, the Republicans and the British Conservatives by libertarianism. Each party is divided between traditionalists and liberals; each knows that its supporters on one axis are liable to cross party lines on the other. At one time the moderate centrists Lilla yearns for only had to face the enemy to their front and watch that they weren’t stabbed in the back by the radicals at their rear. Modern centrists like Hillary Clinton and Ed Miliband looked isolated because they were: they were surrounded. It’s too late to call for activists to abandon movement politics in favour of some ideal of politics-politics when movement politics is what all politics has become. And not just at the top level: the Tea Party, Momentum, Ukip and the Scottish National Party have shown that movement politics is capable of entering city hall peacefully and passionately.
There is a further problem, which Lilla sidesteps: the awkward issue of identity politics in the age of globalisation. If you frame ‘identity politics’ as a self-indulgent distraction from the vital business of creating a shared vision of America that all Americans can believe in, you’re not only taking identities of gender or race or sexuality out of play; you are also taking for granted what it means to be ‘American’. In a world without the internet or cheap air travel, in a world before there was a global higher education system, in a world where capital couldn’t shop around for the cheapest labour and the lowest taxes, in a world where governments didn’t provide their citizens with pensions and healthcare that could be compared to those in other countries, you could get away with that. But we don’t live in that world today. It is the extreme fluidity of capital, cultures and people that has created today’s multi-axis politics, and to dismiss a preoccupation with race or gender or sexual orientation as ‘identity politics’ while maintaining an unquestioning investment in one’s nationality is cloudy thinking.
*
It can only be coincidence that publication of a new book by Lilla tends to signal that something terrible is about to happen in the United States. His work on thinkers who provide intellectual cover for tyranny, The Reckless Mind, was, he notes ruefully in an afterword to its recent reissue, originally published on 9 September 2001. The Stillborn God, about the separation of religion and state, appeared as the 2007-8 financial crisis erupted from the business section onto the front page. The Shipwrecked Mind, about reactionaries, popped up last year, just before Donald Trump became president. The Once and Future Liberal is unusual in being a response to a crisis, rather than a burst of ideas that happens to go off against the background of a crisis, like a firework display amid an artillery barrage.
Lilla’s earlier books are meticulous, elegant and erudite studies of mainly dead, mainly European thinkers. He cruises the libraries like an academic blue whale, filtering the ocean of scholarship for the krill of insight. There is a connection – not overt, but perceptible – between his crisp analyses of various thinkers’ reprehensible steps away from the path of enlightenment and his recent attack on ‘fellow liberals’, even though he’s dealing with opposites. On the one hand, the philosopher’s corruption by an excess of zeal for an all-encompassing Truth about worldly affairs. On the other, the student’s corruption by an excess of zeal for a single political Cause, rooted in a solipsistic concern for personal definition, which explicitly excludes the idea of action embracing a whole political universe. In fact, the connection is clear enough: Lilla doesn’t like the zeal. He mistrusts the conjunction of reason and ‘passion’.
The Shipwrecked Mind, Lilla writes, is a product of ‘my own aleatory reading’ – ‘random’ would presumably have sounded too random. All the same, a random reader may be looking for something particular. If thinkers can be divided into hedgehogs with one big idea and foxes with many ideas, scholars who delve into thinkers may be reading foxily or hedgehog-wise – taking on board whatever they find, that is, or looking everywhere for versions of a single essential manifestation. Lilla is a hedgehog, and the recurrence that fascinates and disturbs him is the passage of the philosopher to a neighbouring realm of thought (the political, for instance, or the religious), a journey prone to corruption by a surfeit of faith, or emotion, or romanticism, or personal desire, or myth-making.
In The Shipwrecked Mind, the delusion masquerading as reason takes the form of nostalgia, the reactionary’s visceral and dangerous faith in a lost golden age that never was. Lilla picks out Eric Zemmour, author of Le Suicide français (2014), a best-selling dose of apocalypse auto-gratification enumerating the myriad self-inflicted wounds that have doomed France, including birth control, the end of the gold standard and conscription, halal food in schools, the smoking ban, the EU and the surrender to Muslims across the board. He writes about Brad Gregory’s popular book The Unintended Reformation (2012), which fantasises medieval Europe as a kind, loving, harmonious place infused with a universal Christian spirituality, which the Reformation then destroyed, condemning us to the hellhole of modernity. He writes about Leo Strauss, the German-born founder of a school of political science in the University of Chicago, who maintained that the greatest thinkers are bound to be dead, and that it is only through detailed study of their work and their often cryptic teachings that a neo-aristocratic cadre of the enlightened might temper the ignorance of today’s pseudo-democratic masses. These ideas, Lilla says, were appropriated and distorted after Strauss’s death in 1973 by American neo-conservatives wishing to identify the United States as the new avatar of Athenian wisdom.
Lilla contrasts the ‘American’ story of Strauss with the ‘German’ story of Martin Heidegger, another believer in a prelapsarian philosophical idyll – although where for Strauss Socrates was the good old days, for Heidegger Socrates was where the rot set in. Lilla’s essay about Heidegger opens The Reckless Mind, his first book about great thinkers gone bad, and it is in his account of the relationship between Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers that his sense of the proper boundaries of philosophy emerges more clearly, along with his fascination for what happens when they are violated.
The three first intersected in Germany in the 1920s, when Heidegger was the brilliant young philosopher and teacher in Marburg, Jaspers his slightly older, slightly awed philosopher friend, and Arendt the student on the brink of her own life as a thinker. She attended Heidegger’s lectures and for a few years, during which Heidegger published his masterpiece,Being and Time, they carried on an intermittent affair. Jaspers supervised her dissertation. In April 1933 Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University; the following month he joined the National Socialist Party and became an active and eager Nazi.
After the war both Jaspers and Arendt seemed to regard the unrepentant and self-pitying Heidegger as beyond redemption, belittling his ideas, which ostensibly sought to renounce the metaphysical as a new form of superstition and mysticism. But in the end it was only Jaspers who held to the break with his old friend. Arendt decided she couldn’t do without Heidegger’s friendship; they maintained an on-off relationship from 1950 until her death in 1975. She found ways to praise his greatness and helped get his works translated into English; he wrote her poems. She didn’t talk to him about his Nazism. Why?
The word ‘passion’ crops up a lot in Lilla’s essay. More than forty years after first seeing Heidegger speak, Arendt wrote of that early encounter: ‘We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.’ Trying to account for Arendt’s behaviour, Lilla writes: ‘She knew that Heidegger was politically dangerous but seemed to believe that his dangerousness was fuelled by a passion that also inspired his philosophical thought.’ Jaspers’s rejection of Heidegger, Lilla thinks, made him a better friend than Arendt:
[Jaspers] felt betrayed by Heidegger as a human being, as a German, and as a friend, but especially as a philosopher … he saw a new tyrant enter his friend’s soul, a wild passion that misled him into supporting the worst of political dictators and then enticed him into intellectual sorcery … Jaspers displayed more care for his former friend than Hannah Arendt did, and deeper love for the calling of philosophy.
All these concerning passions: Arendt’s personal passion for Heidegger, Arendt’s belief in the desirability, the possibility, of ‘passionate thinking’, Heidegger’s yen for fascism as a possessing ‘wild passion’. These are the fires that Lilla believes threaten the wise soul, though they are also the fires whose heat quickens his own interest.
It wasn’t always as easy as it is today to portray the impassioned as noble and the dispassionate as ignoble. At various times the hero has been the philosopher who calmly drank the hemlock, the saint who quietly went to excruciating martyrdom, the stoic, the one with the stiff upper lip, the rational, the reflective, or, more recently, the resignedly, knowingly, sceptically witty, the world’s Elizabeth Bennets. The word ‘enthusiasm’ was borrowed from the Greek in the 17th century as a term of abuse for those Christians who were seen as intoxicated by personal revelations of the divine – who were, in other words, too passionate. We have come far since then. Lilla gives a nice sense of what the modern dispassionate would be up against in his commentary on the Russian emigré Alexandre Kojève in The Reckless Mind. Kojève, who held court among the intellectuals of Paris before the Second World War, was an apostle of Hegel who believed that either Stalin or the United States – it didn’t matter which – was in the end bound to establish a peaceful, prosperous global order. Whatever the content of intellectual discourse, what was of vital importance to Kojève and his initiates was that they were engaged in ‘passionate thinking’. Lilla quotes Georges Bataille as saying that each encounter with Kojève left him ‘broken, crushed, killed ten times over: suffocated and nailed down’. Bataille felt it necessary to validate an intellectual experience by redescribing it in bodily terms – to purify a synaptic encounter by rendering it hormonal.
In an epilogue to The Reckless Mind Lilla writes about Plato’s failed attempts to check the tyrannical impulses of the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius, who had philosophical aspirations. Plato warned that the souls of weak-minded intellectuals are prey to the lure of eros, a passionate yearning for a truth they cannot reach which, accordingly, drives them mad. It is reasonable to argue that passion is the label on the key that unlocks the door separating the philosopher and the tyrant. It is true that passion is the last defence of the intellectual charlatan. The trouble is, ‘passion’ is also a word to describe the emotional medium through which, in our modern, most un-Athenian democracy of one person, one vote, a political movement ultimately rooted in ideas can refresh the thinking of the electorate.
The most thought-provoking essay in The Reckless Mind deals with the German legal scholar and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt joined the Nazi Party at about the same time as Heidegger, in May 1933, and became an enthusiastic pamphleteer, proselytising for the rights of the German Volk to unite in racial purity under a National Socialist Führer. He caught the eye of Hitler’s future transition team in 1932 when he pleaded the last pre-Nazi German government’s case for emergency powers to rule Prussia. (He lost.) He went on to defend Hitler’s massacre of political opponents on the Night of the Long Knives, even though one of those killed was a close friend of his. At a conference held in 1936 to discuss the ways non-Jewish German lawyers might best make things hot for Jewish Germans, he suggested clearing library shelves of books by Jewish authors. ‘By warding off the Jews,’ he said, quoting Hitler, ‘I struggle for the work of the Lord.’
Still, the Nazis didn’t consider him tough enough, even when he came up with a legal basis for Germany’s territorial expansion. He fell from favour. After the war he was detained by the Americans and the Soviets, responded to interrogation with arrogant self-justifications, was released, and went home to Westphalia. He died there in 1985, aged 96, quite unrepentant; his private notebooks, published a few years later, showed him a virulent Jew-hater even after the war.
Schmitt’s Nazi past didn’t stand in the way of his intellectual rehabilitation after the war, and while he is, according to Lilla, little known in the US, he is considered in Europe (and, Lilla wrote in an intriguing article a few years ago, by the Chinese intelligentsia en masse) one of the great 20th-century political theorists. He writes well; more important, Lilla argues, after the war he was the last German standing who wrote cleverly about such things as sovereignty, national peoples and war. The right-wing case for studying Schmitt is that he exposes as fake the ideal of liberalism – of a tolerant global continuum of individually diverse but equally entitled human beings, their identity rights protected by laws based on universal values:
When they try to cultivate liberalism while neglecting the genuine foundations of a political order, the results are disastrous, especially in foreign policy. Ever since the two world wars, Western liberals have considered war ‘unthinkable’. In the view of Schmitt’s conservative admirers, this only means that war has become more thoughtless, not less frequent or less brutal.
Partly for the same reasons, Schmitt has also been useful to certain thinkers on the left – Derrida, Kojève, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and, more recently, Slavoj Žižek. Schmitt’s appeal at this end of the spectrum is his evocation of a force that smashes the liberal façade of the dominant class, his endorsement of the virtue of antagonism when there is a ruling elite to be overthrown.
In isolation, elements of Schmitt’s political philosophy can be made to sound reasonable, even wise. His 1920s critique of war waged by liberal governments on humanitarian grounds – that it implicitly renders their opponents inhuman, and thus marked not for defeat, but extermination – found a resonance in the years around the turn of the millennium. But taken as a whole, his ideas are ghastly, no less so for the directness and brilliance with which they are expressed. Schmitt doesn’t object to war, only war waged by liberals. War, per Schmitt, is neither necessary nor inevitable, but states only have meaning in so far as they are perpetually on the brink of fighting one. His very definition of politics is based on the idea of enmity. Where aesthetics distinguishes beautiful from ugly, and morality between good and bad, he writes in The Concept of the Political (1932), politics is the skill of distinguishing friend from enemy. ‘For Schmitt,’ Lilla writes, ‘a collectivity is a political body only to the degree that it has enemies.’ And for Schmitt, there’s no middle ground. In his words, ‘if a part of the population declares that it no longer recognises enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them.’
Because the Volk is defined by enmity, and is always on the edge of a war, a point is bound to be reached in the life of a liberal democracy when its faith in peace, love and understanding is shown to be misplaced, and it thereby loses its authority. A natural sovereign takes over: a conceptual dictator, perhaps in the form not of a person but an event, unfettered by laws or universal principles, a decider (hence Schmitt’s doctrine of ‘decisionism’). But the sovereign isn’t simply rescuing the Volk from the shilly-shallying of flabby liberals: it brings the Volk out of a state of blasphemy, since a society defined in enmity is the natural order imposed by God. The biblical injunction to love your neighbour, Schmitt says, ‘certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people’. And as Schmitt made clear in 1938 in an attack on Thomas Hobbes, the particular enmity God had decreed for the Volk was towards the Jews, the greatest beneficiaries of the liberal order, the ‘providential enemy’.
There is much that is Schmittian in the ascent of Trump. Distinguishing friend from enemy is what the new president does. His favourite ideologues preach contempt for liberalism, embrace the idea of a world filled with enemies of America, and want those enemies not merely to respect American might, but to fear it. Yet what I kept thinking of, reading Lilla’s essay on Schmitt, was Brexit: how a liberal democracy with a seemingly robust representational and judicial system, which is used to balancing innumerable interest groups and projects and regulations, suddenly found itself subjugated overnight, for a generation at least, to the one-word answer to a 16-word question. A small majority of the British Folk found its providential enemy in the European Union, and Brexit stands mutely sovereign over all, enclosing Parliament rather than being enclosed by it.
Not only that: just as Schmitt’s apparent ‘realism’ about a world divided into friends and enemies gives way, on closer inspection, to an anti-Semitic, un-Christian divinity egging humans on to war, the supposedly hard-headed, commonsense ideologues of Brexit turn out to be pushing a pagan religion of British ancestor worship, a mythology of British exceptionalism projected onto a future that is built on faith alone. A lot of people bought into it, and that shouldn’t be surprising: such metaphysical ideas as patriotism, self-identification with the heroism of ancestors in wars you didn’t fight in, the oneness of land and people, the holiness of flags and symbols and colours, the special sanctity of certain tombs and landmarks, the rites of pilgrimage to sites hallowed by the past presence of mythologised characters in a national story, the sense of belonging in a landscape and the fear of defilement by non-belongers are present in some measure in most voters. Calling it ‘culture’ doesn’t quite capture the fact that even the least religious among us is likely to have neo-religious feelings, and that even the most Christian or Islamic or Jewish is likely also to have a stake in such pagan notions as patriotism.
In his essays about philosophers gone wrong Lilla is highly sensitive to the signs that a thinker’s lurch into politics might be caused by an excess of neo-religious enthusiasm, of passion, of romantic yearning for the Beyond. There’s no reason here for him to stray from his narrow focus on the intellectual heights of 20th-century Germany, France and the US to consider the hundreds of millions of people who have, since the advent of universal suffrage, been obliged, however briefly, to come up with a personal political philosophy, and act on it in the polling booth. But when, as in The Once and Future Liberal, Lilla moves onto the ground of practical politics, the voters’ philosophy, the voters’ beliefs and the voters’ passions must be taken into account, not just their ability to receive rational ideas rationally. Instead he prefers to scold the activists whose own romantic yearnings may be liberals’ only resource for connecting with those they have alienated.
[*] Still, there’s plenty of invoking going on. Hillary Clinton, in her Democratic nomination acceptance speech in 2016, used ‘we’ 88 times and ‘our’ 95 times.
ΠΗΓΗ: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n23/james-meek/against-passion

Europe in crisis: which ‘new foundation’? BY ETIENNE BALIBAR

                       Europe in crisis: which                        ‘new foundation’?


Étienne Balibar*5 December 2017


This essay is an English adaptation of the main part of the author’s “discourse of acceptance” for the Hannah-Arendt Prize in Political Thought 2017, awarded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the City of Bremen (Germany), on December 1, 2017.

In this Festrede, I will try to use an Arendtian inspiration (the "right to have rights” and “citizenship in the making”) to address current developments in the crisis of European construction, contradictory aspects of Europe’s unity and disunity, as well as the prospects for a “new foundation”, taking Europe as an institution whose foundations are neither to be found in a transcendent revelation nor in some eternal natural rights, but purely in the action of those human beings who jointly apply their diversity to its constitution.[1]

I have relatively little time, therefore I must remain at a very general level, only touching superficially on many questions which deserve a complex discussion. Still, I want to frame a problematic that brings together all the dimensions which need to become correlated if we want to understand what kind of history is now affecting us, what the choices are that now lie before us, and also why we have problems in defining them clearly.

In the first place, I will describe what I suggest we might call ‘the double bind’ of Europe: on the one hand, a political constitution of Europe is more necessary than ever, in the best interest of its population, and even others in the world; on the other hand, it has become indefensible and unsustainable in its current form. To follow, I will discuss the conditions required for a “New Foundation” of Europe. This has become a widely debated concept, albeit interpreted in contradictory ways, but in my view these versions are still not radical enough. Finally, I will invoke a Machiavellian principle (which is typical of the “political theory” whose legacy Arendt was reclaiming) to discuss how such a New Foundation could also be related to the origins of European Construction in the after-war period.

At whichever level a community is instituted – local or continental –, it can neither perpetuate nor develop itself if the foundations of its legitimacy and efficacity are not permanently confirmed. This political truth was enunciated in the past with regard to City-States or Nation-States: it must be applied now to the European Union. However, a blatant contradiction arises when we look at the current situation from this angle. How long it will prove possible to retain its effects is anyone’s guess.

On one side, it is crystal clear that “we” citizens of Europe (by which I understand both nationals of the various member-states, plus all the residents on the “territory” of the Union) have a standing interest in the existence of a European political construction, of whichever juridical form. The reason most frequently invoked is that if European nations belong to a supranational system, adopting a common political project, they may well have opposite interests on many issues, but these will not give rise to violent hostility, in the worst case leading to mutual extermination.

I think this argument, based on past experiences, is valid, but it must undergo an even more dynamic reformulation: this is not only a question of a guarantee against war or applying a precautionary principle, it is a question of endowing Europe with the capacity to build the historic path leading from its past, marked by violence against itself and others, to its future, ripe with challenges and uncertainties, in a global context where Europe, while remaining an important economic, political and cultural ensemble, will never again occupy the place of a “center”.

Our future requires a European frame, therefore, for geopolitical reasons, but also because of our position in the world-economy, and – most importantly – because of planetary environmental issues. Between early modernity and the middle of the twentieth century, Europe was able to impose on the world its domination, drawing from there its prosperity (even if very unevenly distributed) and its universalistic civilization (even if brutally imposed on others). Today, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, it has become “provincialized”. And more precisely it finds itself located in what I would call in Wallersteinian terms a semi-periphery of the world.

The “great Game” for global hegemony is now played between America (the US and its immediate dependencies) and Asia (foremost China), with Europe as a political spectator and a big market. But Europe is also not inscribed in the peripheral regions of overexploitation (and the death zones) to the South and East of the Mediterranean, even if it has many involvements there through investments, armed interventions, border police operations, and movements of populations.

Accordingly, if we don’t want our labour and our lives to become a simple object of maneuvers disposed of in the hegemonic conflicts; if we want Europe to really have weight on norms of international law and systems of protection, to prevent as much as remains possible the devastation of the environment leading to a gradual extinction of life on earth; if we want to impose commercial and financial regulations without which the “European welfare model” (not yet totally dismantled by neoliberalism) can be saved and adapted to new conditions and activities, we need much more than the kind of norms and governance existing today. We need a political unity and an institutional representation of the common interest – which however is not the same as uniformity eliminating every contest or vestige of diversity. 

                 "We need a political unity and an institutional representation of 
             the common interest – which however is not the same as uniformity 
                               eliminating every contest or vestige of diversity"

Are we getting closer to this goal? The total opposite is true. After the historic turning point of 1989, with the reunification of Germany and the end of the separation between the two “parts” of Europe (leaving aside most of the former Soviet Union), there was much talk of “broader” and “deeper” union, but the reality was a steady destabilization of the political foundations of the EU. From whichever angle and over whichever time span you examine these evolutions, they all converge towards the same negative result, which now appears hardly reversible.

What are the causes? They are multiple, of course, but in the first place I will mention policies implemented to neutralize the financial crisis after 2007, which dramatically increased inequalities between territories (hence nations) and social classes throughout the continent. This is true for revenues, for the safety of employment, for the amount of debts of individuals and collectivities: Wolfgang Streeck is right on this point, from which he however draws hazardous and reactionary conclusions.

At this point an economic crisis became a political crisis, or more precisely, it became a crisis of the political institution in Europe. Evidence of this crisis is given by the increasing tendency to substitute authoritarian and technocratic forms of governance for parliamentary procedures: as in France at this moment, where the voice of citizens is no longer really taken into account, which also means that “output legitimacy” has become the single fragile support of a government’s stability. “Representative democracy” seems to have exhausted its capacities, and one country after another becomes “ungovernable”: witness the UK since Brexit, Spain replying to the independentist challenge in Catalonia with infringements of the rule of law unprecedented in a democratic state… Most spectacular and symbolic, ungovernability has reached Germany, a country that not so long ago could be presented as the political model to be imitated everywhere. This is at one and the same time a germ of instability for the whole of Europe.

There is an obvious reverse side to this ungovernability, which is authoritarian “de-democratization”, and this has its own chain of effects. We should inscribe here the universal backlash of nationalism: this is absolutely not a privilege confined to Eastern Europe (Istvan Bibo’s petits Etats d’Europe de l’Est, which were also, in Arendt’s terms, subjected to “continental imperialism”, before falling prey to Nazism and Soviet totalitarian hegemony). It emerges just as strongly in the West, everywhere activating a combination of anxiety about the disaggregation of the community or the historical “We” with feelings of social demise and collective powerlessness.

The outcome is not only “populism” (a misleading category), but actual xenophobia, hence potential violence, and a rebirth of fascism – or, if we want to avoid mechanically transporting categories from one historical situation to another, it is a constitution of neofascist movements in Europe, with more or less aggressive detachments everywhere on the continent, now close to power or accessing it in some countries. 

        "I insist on using this term on purpose: not only is neofascism a danger
             to the levels of tolerance and exercise of liberties in our societies, 
             it is different from past nationalism and more than its recreation."

I insist on using this term on purpose: not only is neofascism a danger to the levels of tolerance and exercise of liberties in our societies, it is different from past nationalism and more than its recreation. If we refer only to nationalism, we create the illusion that this is a phenomenon of the past that is returning, reviving conflicts of interests and collective passions from before European unification. The truth is that the current phenomenon looks instead in the opposite direction: it is a pathological result of European unity in its current form. In particular, identity feelings which, traditionally, were mutually hostile and incompatible, tend to merge into a common hatred toward the Other, the construction of a “public enemy” of all European peoples, whose specter amalgamates all sorts of ethnic, cultural, religious differences inherited from colonization and imported through immigration – with now an added component: the “refugee problem” that is inflated and demonized, in spite of admirable gestures of solidarity by certain countries, certain cities and associations of citizens. Terrorism, a very real threat indeed, contributes to the same artifact.

This explains why I speak of a double bind situation. In Europe there does exist in fact a quasi-federal system of institutions, juridical norms, and interdependent interests: it was again illustrated negatively when attempts at expelling Greece from the monetary union could not succeed, or more recently, through the obvious impossibility for Britain to really exit the Union, at least without important losses. Conversely, an accumulation of inequalities pushing societies to the verge of explosion, ungovernable states no longer masked by such political recipes as centrist parties “alternating” in power or forming “great coalitions”, technocratic rule creating a gulf between the governing bureaucrats and the governed citizens, nationalist ideologies merging into potential violence against the “enemy from within”, all these phenomena generate an existential crisis for the democratic political form in Europe.

It doesn’t lead to a “revolutionary situation”, or a “coming insurrection”, I am afraid, contrary to the sincere hopes of old anarchists and young activists, who dream of a radical break with parliamentary regimes. Rather, it produces a steady decomposition of citizenship. The Union itself, lacking a sense of orientation, seems now to be awaiting the next financial crisis to learn if it will experience the same collapse as was the case for that other great historical attempt at overcoming national limitations on the continent: the Soviet Union. Some pundits now predict as much.

All this sufficiently explains why, suddenly, there is so much discussion among the political class and the experts, of a “new foundation” for the European project. I am far from rejecting this idea, but I want a more radical understanding of what political conditions it would require, and a critical assessment of some pseudo-solutions.

Probably the most coherent plan in this sense is now offered by the French President Emmanuel Macron. It really resumes and updates an idea which, in the past, had been proposed by German conservative politicians: that of Kerneuropa (in the terminology of Wolfgang Schäuble’s and Karl Lamers’s project from 1994). In order to create a “strong core” of the Union, several countries from the eurozone would agree to pool their financial resources into a common treasury, or a European Monetary Fund, which then could be used for long term investments, perhaps even a form of collective planning, in order to prevent financial crises, and under the condition of a stricter control of public debts. Explicitly, this idea leads to institutionalizing “multispeed Europe”. And, as such a plan does in fact increase the “quasi-sovereign” status of financial institutions in Europe, a democratic counterpart is needed (at least in the liberal or social-democratic varieties of the plan), which provides greater legitimacy: e.g. a specific parliamentary representation in the “core”, in addition to the European parliament and the national parliaments.

Undeniably there is some rationality in such a project. This arises from the fact that – since the “community” was built in the post-war period – economic government has been the engine propelling the construction of the political unity of Europe, and the center from which integration proceeded socially and administratively. The project also acknowledges the fact that, in the era of financial globalization, “economy” and “politics” do not really belong to separate spheres. Accordingly, there would be no real possibility to further a federalist agenda if economic and monetary policies did not become more integrated themselves: it would simply never materialize. 

         "We need much more if the reciprocal function is to be fulfilled as well: 
              namely the political control of the economic governmentin forms 
      sufficiently democratic themselves for the” sovereign” to obtain legitimacy."

Granted, but we need much more if the reciprocal function is to be fulfilled as well: namely the political control of the economic government, in forms sufficiently democratic themselves for the” sovereign” to obtain legitimacy. As it appears, the project has two major flaws: first, it keeps the representation of citizens in a subaltern function, meant for consultation only, which doesn’t effectively balance decision-making by the executive or the “directorate” (what Habermas famously called a “postdemokratischer Exekutivföderalismus” – no translation is needed) with a possibility of debate or contest; and, second, it creates a new gap between different types and degrees of membership in the Union, which, while not ensuring that “core” countries will maintain the same interests, is a sure recipe for fostering resentment and stronger nationalism among all the others. In short, rather than a new foundation, the plan appears to develop already existing tendencies towards the concentration of powers and the hegemony of certain nations over others.

Therefore, whereas I completely agree that a new foundation is the order of the day, I suggest that it should be imagined in a more radical way, not just through changes in the existing balance of powers and the delegation of the “piloting” status to some countries. Certain political conditions are always required for a new foundation in history. I can think of five such conditions, heterogeneous no doubt, but effective only if they become tightly combined.

Five conditions

A first condition, already stated, is a material interest of the European peoples, or their great majority, in becoming an active force in the power relations and current conflicts of globalization, in order to transform them for the benefit of European citizens. This cannot rely on “isolationist” or pure “protectionist” ideas (of the kind “make Europe great again” or “Europe first” …). As I said earlier, such an interest amounts to making Europe a power for alternative globalization, particularly in matters of financial regulation and the protection of the environment. A tragic present of proliferating wars and interventions, in the immediate vicinity of Europe, also makes it imperative to push for revitalizing a moribund international law, and nurturing an independent capacity for mediation among declared and undeclared belligerents. 

                     "Such an interest amounts to making Europe a power for 
                    alternative globalization, particularly in matters of financial 
                           regulation and the protection of the environment."

A second condition is to define an institutional objective for Europe, which is also a constitutional novelty in history: this should take us beyond the pseudo-federal state that, in practice, already exists in Europe but is officially denied. Economies, territories, cultures are strongly interdependent: in other words, there exists a European “society” (as argued by Ulrich Bielefeld and others), but national political and technocratic elites retain the monopoly of representation and negotiation with the supranational administrations and the “corporatist” powers (multinational corporations, or professional unions). We need a renewed effort to invent a new form of federation, where nationhood is not abolished, but relativized and transformed in order to share in a joint sovereignty.

A third condition means something different, but correlative:  a great political ideal, making it possible to measure the degree of perfection of the constitution. For many years now, with some others, I have developed the idea that, for Europe to become a political reality, we cannot simply keep the name democracy, doing our best to mitigate the strong “postdemocratic” tendency that is fostered by the global concentration of powers in the economy, communications, or the military.

Our aim must be to push democracy beyond the level it had reached in the nation-states when they were at their best with regard to active citizenship. In other terms, there will be no European federalism if, matching the development of executive, administrative, judiciary, and parliamentary powers above the national level, there is not a rebirth and an activation of popular forms of participatory democracy (sometimes called assembly in today’s political discourse), which are not confined to a local horizon, but communicate across borders. Obviously, such an invention can’t be decided from above, and it will meet powerful oppositions and huge obstacles which are not simply conservative (e.g. linguistic obstacles). To overcome these difficulties, we must add other conditions.

A fourth condition I would call an effective demand for the new foundation, by which I mean not only Europhilic sentiments, supporting governments which commit themselves to working for a new foundation of Europe, but actual collective movements that involve real, active citizens, with their diverse cultural heritage and their anthropological differences, joining forces across borders. Such transnational popular movements can be protest movements (e.g. against fiscal injustice and tax evasion, a plague affecting all European citizens even if it benefits certain states). Or they can be movements pushing towards cultural revolutions that can no longer wait (e.g. to transform those economic modes of production and consumption which have become self-destructive). This may seem very far away in a period of nationalist reaction and declining interest in Europe amongst the population, but I don’t see why we should declare it radically impossible. At least we should try.

Finally, a fifth condition only articulates all the others: it is the explicit definition (which I don’t call exactly a program, although it would have the function of orienting the “party of Europe”) of the political problems that need to be resolved for the European construction to overcome the current crisis. Marx was certainly wrong to believe that “mankind sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”, but the reverse proposition does make sense: only problems which have been actually formulated can be resolved… therefore, a politics for the new foundation of Europe must define its strategic “battles”.

Or, to put it in less militaristic terms, it must clarify the “campaigns” to be organized in order to transform obstacles into terrains for initiatives and communications among people. This is true when it comes to tackling inequalities (based on profession, generation, gender, race, and affecting residence, education, security, health…), to which the current triumph of the principle of competition over solidarity has given free play. It is also true when it comes to tackling the new “national question” in Europe: a crucial and most difficult question which has certainly inherited many determinations from the past (resulting from imperial domination, national antagonisms), but was substantially transformed only when nation-states, on both sides of the Cold War divide, also became “social States” (I once coined the name “national-social State”). And a fortiori it is true when (in Kantian and Derridean terms) it comes to meeting the challenge of hospitality, addressing the effects of migration and other movements of people at global scale, which can’t be dealt with through the current mixture of dishonorable bribery and military interventions, but call for a “just” combination of humanitarian commitment and North-South cooperation…

Growing inequalities, unhappy identities, uprooted populations: these are the problems Europe must confront in a collective manner in order to move into the twenty-first century (already well advanced) not passively, but as a historical agent, combining within itself multiple agencies.

Let me finish with a philosophical reference. In a famous passage from his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (III, 1) (that Arendt knew well, as shown by her elaborations on this thinking in On Revolution and the essay on Authority), Machiavelli explained that a “republic” (or a polity) is able to last only if it proves able to compensate for the corruption generated by weak leadership or citizenry through a return to the origin, reviving its founding principles.

This political theorem would seem to apply directly to the current situation of the European Union. There are difficulties in implementing it, however. In the first place, the “principles” on which the Union is grounded never received a single interpretation. We can even say that they were an object of permanent antagonism, a struggle between different ways as it were, which also evolved over time. In a sense, therefore, several “new foundations” have already taken place, although their true meaning was never openly acknowledged. This happened after the “Fall of the Wall”, when the common currency was adopted by most countries and the idea of a “social Europe” was dropped, or when the procedure of ratifying new treatises among states replaced a failed attempt at having citizens in each country adopt a Constitution project (let us observe in passing that referendums in Europe seldom have the effects predicted…). It happened again when austerity policies were imposed on countries (like Greece) whose possible default threatened the banking system. From my point of view, regarding their long-term effects, these were forms of “corruption” rather than a “new foundation” …

Which leads us to our second difficulty: how can we justify a new foundation that reverses certain decisions already inscribed in texts or treatises? How can we reverse a dominant ideology and a government’s practice which has produced the victory of certain social interests over others, while simultaneously claiming to continue a project that is already ancient, but remains unfinished? How can we suppress the recurrent confusion between relativizing the boundaries of ethnicities and paralyzing the capacity of the demos (or, as Kalypso Nicolaidis would say, the demoi in the plural), hence the democracy itself?

Clearly, we need a new work of interpretation, a revised understanding of the “founding narratives” of the European Union. Hence we need to clearly distinguish between the philosophical prehistory of Europe (more or less mythical references to medieval Christendom, to “Perpetual Peace” projects, to cosmopolitan utopias), the political origins of the federalist project (particularly in antifascist resistance), and the historical beginnings of supranational institutions (at the time of the Cold War). This is a complex web of intricate references among which we may have to make choices to give an orientation to our effort.

For a new foundation, I don’t think that we now need a neoliberal Monnet, or a European De Gaulle, or even a Willy Brandt who would be able to fulfil his promises. Rather, we need people like Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann, who wrote and circulated the Manifesto di Ventotene in 1941, but in the hundreds, to collectively write the new federalist Manifesto, taking into account what the Europeans need, and what the world expects from them.


________________________

[1]  openDemocracy is proud to carry this English adaptation of the main part of Etienne Balibar’s “discourse of acceptance” for the Hannah-Arendt Prize in Political Thought 2017, awarded by the Heinrich Boell Foundation and the City of Bremen (Germany), on December 1, 2017.
About the author



* Etienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor at Paris X Nanterre and Anniversary Chair of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has addressed such questions as European racism, the notion of the border, whether a European citizenship is possible or desirable, violence, identity and emancipation. His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser, New Left Books 1970), Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1991), The Philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and Politics, Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton UP, 2004). His latest publications are Equaliberty (Duke UP, 2014); Violence and Civility (Columbia UP, 2015), Citizenship  (Polity, 2015) and Europe, crise et fin ? (Edition Le Bord de l’Eau, 2016).


ΠΗΓΗ: https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/europe-in-crisis-which-new-foundation

Pablo Iglesias and Perry Anderson on the conjuncture in Spain [Video]

A wide-ranging conversation between Perry Anderson and Pablo Iglesias, on Spain's past and present, and the role of Podemos, set in the larger European context.




On June 5, Pablo Iglesias hosted Perry Anderson on the interview show Otra Vuelta de Tuerka. Reversing the usual format of the show, Anderson posed questions to the host on the "specificity of Spain as a country, as a political culture, and as a situation today." Their wide-ranging conversation touches on the country's past and present — and the role of Podemos within it, as well as its position in the larger contemporary European context, including reflections on the 2017 French elections.
Watch the full video, which includes subtitles, above.  
Πηγή: https://www.versobooks.com/