Archive for February, 2008

Citizenship in the Age of Globalization

February 15, 2008

Michael A. Peters
Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email: mpet001@uiuc.edu

During the early part of this decade two competing and influential conceptions of the ‘new imperialism’ emerged to focus on questions of international security, world order, and the evolving world system of states. Robert Cooper (2000), one-time Deputy Secretary of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the British Cabinet Office, posits the development of a postmodern European state system based on transparency, interdependence, and mutual surveillance. He calls for a ‘new imperialism’ – one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values – in order to sort out the problems of rogue states and the chaos of pre-modern states. By contrast, Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri (2001) use the combined resources of Marx and Deleuze to chart the emergence of a new form of sovereignty they call Empire. They narrate a history of the passage from imperialism to Empire, that is, from a modernity dominated by the sovereignty of nation-states under Westphalia, and the imperialisms of European powers, to a postmodernity characterized by a single though decentred, new logic of global rule. They suggest that the passage to Empire, with its processes of globalization, “offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation,” arguing that our political future will be determined by our capacity “not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends.”(p. xv)

In a strong sense, Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Cooper’s ‘new imperialism’ are both geopolitical and juridical forms of globalization that are dependent on emergent forms of global sovereignty though not necessarily forms of global citizenship. Questions of national identity and citizenship are transformed when raised in this new geopolitical context. The difference between the two views is that whereas the former focuses on American Empire as the dominant form the latter concentrates on an emergent European postmodern state system. They both entertain extranational forms of sovereignty based on these supranational systems and yet only the latter problematizes the concept of citizenship based on the bounded system of the sovereign state to describe a complex of rights that varies with scale and location. The U.S., exhibiting a kind of ‘defensive modernity’, recoils from liberal multiculturalism to fiercely defend its borders especially against the southern influx of Mexican migrants who want to equalize global opportunity and world resources. This defensive posturing also focuses negatively on American values and identity in contradistinction to the Other, and often blatantly engages the politics of racism and stereotypes to instil fear, create division, and manipulate the voters.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world experiences processes of both integration and disintegration. The expansion of world markets as a form of economic globalisation can be understood as a process of integration composed of international flows of capital, goods, information, and people. The same process is both a form of economical integration and a polarization of wealth that exacerbates existing tendencies toward greater global inequalities between rich and poor countries and regions. It also accentuates the need for reviewing the templates of the global system of governance that emerged with the Bretton Woods agreement, which founded many of the world institutions that comprised the architecture of the postwar world system. Now, more than at any time in the past, with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet system, the consolidation of the EU, the entry of China in the WTO, and the growth of India, we are witnessing an accelerated set of changes – economic, cultural, technological and political – that impinge on one another in novel ways and create new possibilities and dangers both for the democratic state and the notions of citizenship and national identity that underpin it.

The modern concept of citizenship – a recent concept historically – implies the existence of a civil or political community, a set of rights and obligations ascribed to citizens by virtue of their membership in that community, and an ethic of participation and solidarity needed to sustain it. Most traditional accounts of citizenship begin with the assertion of basic civil, political and social rights of individuals and note the way in which the modern concept as inherently egalitarian, took on a universal appeal with the development of the liberal tradition which is often understood as synonymous with modernity. Yet the concept has appealed to both conservatives and radical democrats: the former emphasise individual freedom at the expense of equality and see state intervention as an intolerable and unwarranted violated of the freedom of the individual while the latter stress the democratic potential of citizenship. Increasingly, on the left the concept has been seen as a means to control the injustices of capitalism. For the left, the most pressing question has been the status of citizenship in the modern state and what kind of political community best promotes it.

The classic theorisation of democratic citizenship is to be found in Marshall’s famous modelling of three forms of citizenship: civil, political and social. In this conception civil citizenship referred to personal liberty and a regime of individual rights, political citizenship referred to both political participation and democratic representation, and social citizenship to intervention by the state to reduce economic inequalities and promote social justice. It is now possible to chart the significant shifts in the definitions of citizenship that have accompanied globalization, including the breakdown of the historic compromise between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state, the rise of neoliberalism, and with it the expansion of world markets.

In the U.S. under the neocons, and the U.K. under the so-called Third Way, a mantle inherited by Prime Minister Brown, there has been a shift from the concept of rights to responsibilities and a move away from state intervention towards the market and the construction of ‘consumer-citizens’ who are increasingly forced to invest in themselves at critical points in their life-cycle (education, work, retirement) or go into debt. At the same time there has been a shift to the third sector with community and church involvement in the definition of social welfare policy and an emphasis on giving, gifting and voluntary work often thinly disguising a moral re-regulation of social life, especially of single women and their children. Increasingly, with the development of information and communications technologies, there has been a rise in state surveillance and, especially after 9/11, an erosion of liberal rights and a shift from active political citizenship to passive political literacy; concomitantly, the same technologies have supported new public spaces and civil networks that are interest-based and transcend the geography of face-to-face communities and even larger collectivities like states.

Perhaps, more than ever before the question of globalization and citizenship revolves around the free movement of peoples. By this I mean not only the modern diaspora, or the planned colonial migrations, or the more recent global mobility of highly skilled labour that is rewarded by citizenship. But more importantly, I mean refugees of all kinds and asylum-seekers and all that that entails – enforced border crossings, ethnic cleansing policies, the huge illegal movement of so-called ‘aliens’ or the ‘undocumented’, detention camps the likes of Woomera in Australia and even Guantanomo Bay, where the concept of rights is fragile or has entirely disappeared. Derrida (2001) argues for a form of cosmopolitanism that entails the right to asylum while Dummett (2001) focuses on refugee and immigration policy, increasingly a defining policy issue for the U.S., France, and the U.K.

The terms ‘globalization’ and ‘citizenship’ are not normally juxtaposed in social and political analysis. They tend to appear as contradictory or, at least, conflicting: the former points to a set of economic and cultural processes of unequal and uneven world integration, based on the unregulated flows of capital and underwritten by developments in new information and communications technologies, while the latter serves mainly as a metaphor for political community or solidarity. To what extent does globalization (as financialization) threaten the sovereignty of the nation-state and with it the notion of citizenship that developed during the modern era? To what extent can citizenship be severed from questions of national identity? Within the context of globalization how can we maintain or develop a sense of community and local identity to establish or defend the hard-won entitlements of social citizenship? What possibilities are there for developing genuine transnational alliances and defining entirely new sets of rights within supranational political arenas? To what extent can the movement of individuals and peoples come to be regarded as genuinely free within states, regions, and continents; and how might states that encourage the free-floating ‘globally integrated enterprise’ also extend universal and lawful protections to migrants, refugees and those seeking asylum? These are critical questions that ought to inform a democratic response to citizenship and to the question of citizenship education.

Cooper, R. (2000) The postmodern state and the world order. London: Demos, The Foreign Policy Centre.

Derrida, J. (2001) On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. London: Routledge.

Dummett, M. (2001) On immigration and refugees. New York: Routledge.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2001) Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

global-e volume 1 number 3 February 2008

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Responsibilities for Protecting Human Rights

February 15, 2008

Mark Gibney
Belk Distinguished Professor
University of North Carolina-Asheville
Email: mgibney@unca.edu

Human rights are universal, meaning that each person possesses certain human rights by the mere fact of this person’s humanity. What does not matter – or at least what should not matter – is where a person lives, how much money a person has (or does not have), whether that person’s country has (or has not) became a party to any particular international human rights treaties, and so on.

Who has the responsibility for meeting these “universal” rights? The (universal) response of states has been that each country is responsible for protecting human rights within its own borders – but that no state has human rights obligations that extend outside of its own territorial jurisdiction. But what if a country is not able or is not willing to protect the human rights of its citizens? Or what if human rights are being violated, in large part due to the actions of outside states? It is here that the silence of the international community has been deafening.

Thus, notwithstanding near-universal declarations of the “universality” of human rights, the responsibility for protecting human rights has been based almost exclusively on territorial considerations. What has this territorial approach to human rights given us? Unfortunately, not nearly enough. Looking at violations of economic rights alone, we live in a world where an average of 50,000 people die every single day due to preventable causes. Yet, notwithstanding this incredible level of human rights atrocities, the territorial approach to human rights has essentially gone unchallenged. However, this has started to change and it has come from the most unlikely of sources: the “war on terror.”

To state matters bluntly, the reason why “enemy combatants” are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and not in some location in this country is that American government officials are of the mind that U.S. obligations under international law do not extend outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. Under this (territorial) approach to human rights, the U.S. government is not bound by the Torture Convention and the Covenant on International Civil and Political Rights (both of which the U.S. is a party to) when it is operating outside the territorial borders of the United States. This same kind of rationale is behind the policy of “extraordinary rendition.” The idea is that the U.S. has not done anything wrong or unlawful when individuals outside the United States are being kidnapped and sent to some third country for “interrogation” purposes – albeit at the behest of, and under the direction and control of, American authorities. Again, the argument is that American obligations under international law are only applicable to actions within the United States.

Fortunately, most people have been able to see behind this façade. That is, they have recognized that territorial considerations should not be used in this manner to demarcate where a country’s human rights obligations begin – but, more importantly, where they end. Most people seem to believe that torture is illegal whether it takes place in Fort Benning, Georgia, or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In that way, the “war on terror” has helped us see that territorial considerations oftentimes make little sense in the context of protecting human rights.

This is not to suggest that “territory” does not matter at all or that states have the same human rights obligations outside their borders as they do domestically. Neither of these propositions happens to be true. Rather, each state has the primary responsibility for protecting human rights within its own domestic borders. However, what we have completely failed to recognize are the secondary responsibilities that the rest of the international community has when the territorial state has not been willing or able to offer human rights protection. And what also has to be said is that this is not simply a moral obligation – wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if we provided some assistance to starving children in some other land – rather, it is a legal obligation. This is most clearly seen in the language of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, one of the so-called International Bill of Rights, whereby each state party to the Covenant has (legally) obligated itself to protect the economic rights of “everyone” by means of “international assistance and cooperation.”

What does “international assistance and cooperation” mean? What it means is that when children in a particular country are being denied an education (to choose one example), this not only constitutes a violation of human rights by the territorial state – but this also constitutes a human rights violation on the part of the rest of the international community, which has pledged to protect those rights.

The point is that human rights are universal, but so are the duties and responsibilities to meet those rights. This is what the framers of the International Bill of Rights, and all of the other international human rights treaties, sought to achieve. This is the only way that the notion of human rights makes any sense. If human rights protection were something that individual states could (and would) do individually, there would be no need for any international conventions. Stripped to their barest essentials, what each one of these treaties represents is nothing less than this: that everyone has an ethical as well as a legal obligation to protect the human rights of all other people. Sadly enough, our inability to recognize the extent of our own human rights obligations has constituted the greatest human rights failure of all.

Mark Gibney is the Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. His latest book is International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles.

global-e volume 1 number 3 February 2008

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Subprime and the World Economy

February 15, 2008

Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Professor of Global Sociology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email: jnp@uiuc.edu

Foreign credit has been entering the US via Treasury bills, bonds and other credit instruments at $3 billion per trading day (2007). This inflow enabled the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, at 1 percent in 2003-04. Low interest rates fuel the American economy in two major ways. Cheap credit enables firms’ leveraged buyouts, and mergers and acquisitions, in turn, prop up the stocks of the firms buying and bought and the middling banks. The Dow Jones rose above 13,000 in 2006. Secondly, low interest rates made mortgages cheap and larger mortgages fuelled a housing bubble. Rising real estate values, mortgage refinancing, and easy credit boosted consumer spending. American consumer spending, in turn, kept the world economy spinning and Asian exports and Asian vendor financing going. This charmed circle has kept the world economy in thrall.

The subprime mortgage sector was the latest extension of the easy credit bubble, the latest extension of funneling credit through the consumer grid, on terms that might be viable if the housing market continued its rise, but since it is the last and lowest segment of the money pyramid this was unlikely from the start.

Subprime mortgages grew massively during this period. Adjustable rate mortgages (ARM) represented 40 percent of mortgages during 2004-05 (at $390 billion). Most of these were due to reset beginning in 2007 (involving $1 trillion). The subprime default rate was already 10 percent in 2006. The subprime market in the US is 20 percent of mortgages (in the UK the subprime market is 8 percent). The loans were sold to banks who securitized them as bonds ($800 billion in 2007) and derivatives and resold them in structured loans and collateralized debt obligations, etc. (incurring a loss of 40 percent in 2007). In late 2006 the housing market began to slow and 2007 brought “payback time.” The collapse of subprime mortgage lending prompted a wider credit crunch.

At the root of the subprime problem was easy credit: lenders and their brokers were often rewarded for generating new mortgages on the basis of volume, without being directly exposed to the consequences of borrowers defaulting. During several years of strong capital markets and strong investor appetite for high-yielding securities, lenders became accustomed to easily selling the risky home loans to Wall Street banks. The banks in turn packaged them into securities and sold them to investors around the globe.[1]

Brokers who earned higher commissions on subprime mortgages offered them also to borrowers who qualify for normal fixed rate mortgages. Automated underwriting software, a technique that was first developed in the 1970s to process car loans and credit card applications, was used to generate as much as 40 percent of subprime loans. A leader in the subprime mortgage market, New Century Financial, on the brink of bankruptcy in 2007, “promised mortgage brokers on its website that with its FastQual automated underwriting system, ‘We’ll give you loan answers in just 12 seconds!’”[2]

Speculative home buying by “flippers” – who borrow money or leverage their own homes with double mortgages to buy properties, make some improvements, and then expect to sell them quickly – joined the pyramid scheme, again on the premise of ongoing expansion. False advertising and nonfunctioning credit rating agencies compounded the situation. The collapse of the subprime sector is a symptom of a wider problem: “The real issue has been the excess liquidity created by the central banks through a decade of ever-more ambitious crisis management. The risks created by those ‘solutions’ were not identified, let alone measured, by their econometric models.”[3]

Facilitating the real estate bubble was securitization or mortgages bundled in credit packages and derivatives sold to other banks. The vanishing boundary between banking and non-bank forms of finance facilitated sprawling derivatives, hedge funds and quantitative investment, supported by insurance companies and pension funds. Hedge funds became larger players than banks though their risks were partly underwritten by banks through arcane methods of splicing debt.

The current crisis resembles the savings and loan crisis of the early nineties, Japan’s real estate bubble bursting, and the Asian crisis of 1997/98. Long term finance provided on short term conditions is vulnerable to short term market fluctuations, as in Thailand’s “hot money” crisis. In this financial crush, however, “Emerging market debt is the new safe haven.”[4] For a change, emerging markets have been unaffected because, having learnt from the Asian crisis, they built cash buffers. Sovereign wealth funds in Singapore, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and other places now emerge as new sources of stable liquidity.

The United States accounts for at least 20 percent of world consumption.[5] The chilling of the American housing market since the end of 2006 has withdrawn $800 billion from consumer spending. American retail sales at chains such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot were down in 2007. A cycle is ending. The world economy is decoupling from American consumer spending and is slowly shifting gear to demand in China, India and Asia. This means a rerouting of financial flows with Shanghai and Hong Kong coming to the fore as financial centers. High petrol prices create surplus liquidity in oil exporting countries with the United Arab Emirates as a financial hub. The Borse Dubai and Qatar together bought a 48% share of the London Stock Exchange in September 2007. Financial centers from London to the Netherlands vie to attract Islamic banking. For some time, the headlines have been changing: “Overseas investors lose taste for U.S. securities.” “Gulf liquidity offers glimmer of hope for subprime relief.”[6] The decoupling of the world economy from American consumers holds momentous ramifications.

[1] B. Masters and S. Scholtes, Payback time, Financial Times, August 9, 2007: 5.

[2] L. Browning, The subprime loan machine, New York Times, March 23, 2007: C1-4.

[3] J. Dizard, Fed and Wall Street farther apart on the credit crunch, Financial Times, August 21, 2007: 8.

[4] Financial Times, August 29, 2007.

[5] Robert Wade, Explaining US financial instability and its global implications, Open Democracy, October 6, 2007.

[6] J. Bater, Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2007: C8. G. Tett, Financial Times, November 23, 2007: 28.

global-e volume 1 number 3 February 2008

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Global Media, Communication Technology, and the War on Terror

February 15, 2008
James Castonguay
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Media Studies and Digital Culture
Sacred Heart University
Email: CastonguayJ@sacredheart.edu

From the telegraph, radio, film, and television to the Internet and mobile satellite networks, media and communication technologies have been integral to the waging and representation of war. Always eager to improve communications, surveillance, and weapons systems, military institutions have funded and developed new communication technologies and media since at least the 19th century, and journalism and entertainment have long been central to governments’ propaganda efforts. In the current context of the Iraq War and the “war on terror,” most accounts of international communication equate media with news (ignoring other genres) and often neglect the crucial role that audiences and newer technologies play within wartime global media culture.

In an attempt to take advantage of the proliferation of satellite TV in Iraq previously outlawed under Saddam Hussein and widely available throughout the Middle East, the Bush administration and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (the presidentially appointed federal agency in charge of the U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq) launched the Virginia-based satellite TV channel Alhurra (“The Free One”) in 2004 to “combat the anti-Americanism” of Arab satellite news channels, most prominently Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. To defray the costs of Alhurra (and its Radio Sawa [“Radio Together”] counterpart), BBG chair and corporate media mogul, Norman Pattiz, drastically cut the Voice of America news staff and broadcasts in favor of a new mix of entertainment and journalism programming, confident that the entertainment would be a positive advertisement for the “American way of life” while also serving as an effective lead-in for news programming produced by the U.S. government.

It has become clear that Alhurra arrived too late to matter given the already thriving pan-Arabic satellite TV market comprised of hundreds of channels that, along with the Internet, had already created a new Arab public sphere filled with contentious and passionate debate about Arab and Muslim identities, Saddam Hussein, democracy, and women’s rights. Consequently, the very naming of the channel “the free one” seems unconvincing to many Arab and Muslim viewers since the channel is completely government funded, unlike some other news sources available to pan-Arab audiences which are at least semi-independent. Thus, Alhurra has been deemed an ineffective, irrelevant, and counter-productive influence (from a U.S. standpoint) on public opinion because Arab and Muslim viewers dismiss and resist its messages as propaganda from the Bush administration. Some Muslim clerics issued written fatwas condemning the channel, and an Alhurra journalist and his son were targeted and killed by militia groups in 2005.

Although there have been cultural and religious objections to satellite TV programs across the Middle East, the popular reality program, Terrorism in the Hands of Justice, has been more politically controversial within Iraq and less visible outside of the region. Broadcast six nights a week exclusively on the state-run and U.S. financed Al Iraqiya station in Iraq, each episode consists of trembling, bruised, and humiliated militia members confessing to kidnappings and murders without a lawyer present. The program’s popularity suggests it is a successful example of U.S. psychological operations and, similar to the long running U.S. program Cops, serves as effective propaganda for the counterinsurgent Iraqi police force. Although many Iraqis take the program as offering overwhelming evidence that insurgents are nothing more than hired hit men motivated by money and power, other Iraqis see it as a hypocritically unethical violation of basic human rights that is anathema to the principles of democracy and would not have been broadcast even under Saddam Hussein’s regime. The program has recently been the subject of a behind-the-scenes video critique that documents its vigilante techniques and lack of due process, and Human Rights Watch has condemned the program for its physical abuse and torture of suspected detainees. It has also been accused of encouraging sectarian divides by showing Shia officials interrogating and humiliating the overwhelmingly Sunni prisoners.

The ongoing war in Iraq is the first major U.S. conflict in which the technological infrastructure of the Internet age facilitated the immediate and global distribution of text, images, video and multimedia from journalists, civilians, and combatants through the Internet, Web, and mobile satellite networks. Even representations of Saddam Hussein’s execution could not be efficiently “controlled” by the Bush administration as cell phone video of the hanging was leaked and shown on television and over the Web, including YouTube, where a version has already been viewed over 2.5 million times. Most recently, in December 2007, Al Qaeda solicited interview questions for Ayman al-Zawahri using Web forums, and in January 2008, Al Qaeda’s media division, Al Sahab, announced that its first batch of cell phone videos (always subtitled in English) were ready for downloading. YouTube.com and other Web sites distribute thousands of amateur videos from inside Iraq documenting civilian casualties, war crimes, corruption, and atrocities. Insurgent propaganda messages and videos of the murder of Western hostages by militia groups are readily available on the Web and over file sharing networks, as are videos from U.S. helicopter cockpits showing the killing of Iraqis (including the pilots’ reactions) along with daily translations of broadcasts from the major pan-Arab TV networks.

It would thus be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which the existence of the Internet has complicated the U.S. government’s efforts to manage information within and outside the “theater of operations.” Indeed, the preference of the current Bush administration would no doubt have been to try to absent all images of suffering and death that have resulted from the 2003 Iraq War as was done during the 1991 Gulf War (with rare exceptions). In response to this new global communications environment, the Pentagon has implementing electronic warfare (EW) strategies outlined in the recently declassified Information Operations Roadmap commissioned and approved by Donald Rumsfeld in 2003. Approaching the Internet as an enemy “weapons system,” the Roadmap’s goal is to “[p]rovide a future EW capability sufficient to provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, denying, degrading, disrupting, or destroying the full spectrum of globally emerging communication systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependant on the electromagnetic spectrum.” A major focus in this regard is the ability to disable cell phones, which at times have been presented by the Pentagon and journalists as a sign of “progress” in Iraq, but are also commonly used as efficient remote detonators for roadside bombs (or IEDs), which can also be activated through Internet messaging applications. The Roadmap also calls for “improvements in PSYOP capability . . . to rapidly generate audience specific, commercial-quality products into denied areas” and “project . . . electronic attacks into denied areas by means of stealthy platforms.” One might conclude that the ultimate goal of the global information war on terror is to remove or control all non-U.S. communication and news from the designated regions.

This brief overview suggests that we should not assume an outdated and reductive model of media imperialism or technological determinism toward an examination of global media, technology and war, since – the Information Operations Roadmap notwithstanding – a wide range of messages are being actively created and resisted in the Middle East, and technologies like the cell phone and the Internet are being put to a variety of uses from the beneficent (calling in suspected IEDs) to the violent (detonating them). Through a broad range and complex mixture of transnational and regional media –along with new technologies of distribution – there are consistent representations of the “American way of life” in addition to war images and information from all sides.


global-e volume 1 number 3 February 2008

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