Posts Tagged ‘Governance’

Politics of Crisis

May 27, 2011

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, UCSB

There is broad agreement that the 2008 crisis was caused by financial speculation, enabled by deregulation, in short by ‘permissive capitalism’.  After crisis then, we would expect that the Keynesian party of regulation and government intervention should win. Instead, in the US the political winners have been the GOP and the Tea party, and in the UK, the Tories. How do we explain this perplexing phenomenon?

The usual account is the electoral pendulum swing going against incumbents (which implies its swinging back again next time). Also often mentioned is the role of media promoting free market policies. Besides, the incumbents, Democrats in the US and Labor in the UK, have been a party to deregulation and to bailouts of the financial sector without strings attached.

Rather, the general climate is one in which deficits trump regulation deficit hawks rule on both sides of the Atlantic. Regulations of the banking sector, the Frank-Dodd bill in the US and the Vickers Report in the UK, have been thin and meager. The bank reforms in the US have produced even bigger banks. Not only has this not solved the problem of too big to fail but it has created an even larger problem, too big to save. In effect, regulation has morphed into consolidation.

In both countries regulation has been crowded out by the deficit and budget deliberations, which is odd because the deficit didn’t cause the crisis. In fact, for all the talk about the deficit there is little discussion of how it has come about. Nor have there been prosecutions or indictments of bankers—quite unlike after the American Savings and Loan scandal in the early 1980s. Also strangely missing is a public outpouring of moral outrage—tens of thousands marching in the streets furious about financial crisis and government indulgence, crisis-prone behavior on a scale comparable to the Iraq war and the BP Gulf oil disaster. Remuneration of CEOs and bankers is largely back to where it was before crisis, with some cosmetic changes.

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The common shortcut explanation for these trends is ‘neoliberalism’. However, ‘neoliberalism’ doesn’t account for the actual variety of ideas nor does it explain why neoliberalism is accepted. To account for this perplexing situation I offer two main hypotheses: intellectual deficit and power deficit. According to the first hypothesis, the key problem is the lack of alternative ideas. At first sight the notion of an intellectual deficit is patently untrue. In the major US and UK newspapers during recent years there has been a steady stream of articles and comments by noted economists making the case for continued stimulus, rather than austerity, and for stronger regulation—such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Robert Reich, Martin Wolf, John Kay, and many others. Yet, the argument can’t be entirely dismissed. Part of the problem is what John Kay calls ‘confirmation bias’: ‘the lesson most people have learnt [from the crash] is that they were right all along.’ So yes there were alternative ideas, but their resonance was not strong enough to sway the prevailing pro-market ideology in mainstream media and public discourse. A mere crash does not undo thirty years of free market socialization since Thatcher and Reagan. On the pages of the Wall Street Journal free market economists have continued their zeal even after the crash. Besides, ideas without organizational momentum carrying them fall short of ideologies.

Thus we turn to the second hypothesis, power deficit. That is, there are alternative ideas but the political and public momentum backing them isn’t strong enough and the ideas fall on deaf ears. First, in the US, the political economy of labor, the coalition of Democrats and trade unions, anchored in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, has been steadily eroded by thirty years of deindustrialization. Gone from the public sphere are the Keynesian principles of full employment and deficit spending, viewing trade unions as partners in growth, and Fordist principles of labor productivity and wage growth moving in tandem—not because the ideas have vanished but because the power bloc backing them, in Congress and on main street, has crumbled.

In its stead has come the political economy of services: in finance, insurance, real estate (FIRE), health care, software (Silicon Valley), the cultural industries (Hollywood), retail, education, and the government social sector. The service sector is disparate, ideologically dispersed, unorganized, and many are beneficiaries of deregulation. Wall Street and Silicon Valley are progressive factions of capital that are part of the power base of the Obama administration, that is, progressive in a technological sense. Their main ideological umbrella, if any, is innovation, a techno fix that eschews difficult political and economic questions.

The power shift from manufacturing to services is a general feature of postindustrial society, but there are degrees of postindustrialism. In northwest Europe and Japan offshoring and outsourcing to low-wage countries have generally been balanced by inward investment in technologies and factories, while in the US and UK deindustrialization has been far more drastic.

In the US what industry remains (besides the defense industries) or new industry develops is mostly in the South. Dixie capitalism has gradually taken over from Frost Belt capitalism. Starting in the seventies when industries moved from the northeast they went south. Dixie capitalism and Dixie politics trump Frost Belt capitalism. The Republican Party and the Tea Party reflect different shades of the ethos of the South—low taxes, low services, low wages, no unions. The new Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana represent the politics of extreme capitalism, feeding on resentment: if private sector workers have meager benefits and no collective bargaining, then public sector workers should not have them either. It is a politics of bringing everyone down to the Dixie level. In America this is what decline looks like. Hence the issue is not simply ideology but what Galbraith called countervailing power.

Financialization emerged first as an antidote to deindustrialization, masked its effects and enabled the boom of the ‘roaring nineties,’ but has increasingly become a major destabilizing factor, culminating in the crash of 2008. The problem is not financialization per se but the combination of financialization and deregulation, the problem of the ‘sleeping watchdog’. Moreover, low taxes resonate with the market society ethos of possessive individualism. In the US, under the sign of low taxes, liberty trumps equality. In the UK, the Tories call on the Big Society—which is reminiscent of the elder Bush in the US calling on a ‘thousand points of light’ and Bush junior relying on faith-based organizations—suggesting that voluntarism should take over state welfare functions. The paradox is that it is a call to a society in which, given the retreat of the state, market forces have been unleashed, and the call to service therefore falls on deaf ears. A society governed by consumerism and market values is to respond to a call to social values.

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What future trends and options do these conditions portend? Given that major trends are of a structural nature—the growth of postindustrialism, services, financialization—major changes in the next ten to fifteen years are not in the cards. The US and UK will likely undergo gradual decline, mitigated to the degree that they play their cards well. Both rely too much on narrow sectors, especially finance, and anti-government ideology undercuts their capacity for self-correction. Northwest Europe is undergoing milder versions of these trends because industry, regulation and social contracts are stronger and free market ideology has less support. The problem of financialization, its size and lack of regulation, however, is a common factor but on a smaller scale than in US and UK. Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain face different problems, generally GDP growth outstripping productivity growth, weak regulation, and growth borrowed from external financing.

To read the full article, please visit www.jannederveenpieterse.com  and look at the “Politics of Crisis” PDF.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse is Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and specializes in globalization, development studies, and cultural studies. He holds a part-time chair in globalization studies at Maastricht University.

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“Connectivity” over “Connections”: Networking Governance and Technology Down South

January 27, 2011

Dipankar Sinha

This brief essay seeks to draw attention to certain trends that are taking place in the domain of governance-technology relations in developing societies. The question I pose is whether governance-sourced, human development-based networking in developing societies, such as India, is at all keeping pace with the spectacular development of technology-sourced networks. This very question leads us to another vital question: are developing societies prepared yet for such linkage?

In order to address the questions one has to trace the sources of tension between the imperatives of governance networking and those of technology networks.  Let us have a concrete instance. ‘Globalizing’ India is supposed to be going through a phase of transition and restructuring both in governance and technological spheres. The shrill voice and the excessive frequency in which policymakers simultaneously utter “good governance”, “inclusive technology” and “participatory development” should have been reassuring. But, as I have explained elsewhere in greater details (Sinha, 2005; 2010), there is a fundamental flaw in the policymakers’ perception, which tends to ignore the vital point that technology needs to be in the service of the people, and not the other way round.

The root of the problem lies in overestimating technological networks at the cost of human development— the base of effective governance networking. As a result, technology-induced connectivity is prioritized over human-sourced connections. For example, amidst the repeated promise of ‘access’ to information kiosks by ordinary people, the fundamental question of relevant and appropriate content for end users, which lies at the base of democratization and sustenance of access, is underestimated. There is little evidence— with notable exceptions like the voluntary organization-based Info Villages in Pondicherry, South India, or the corporate-driven e-Choupal in select regions of India— of localization of software, use of local language-based keyboards or the linkage of local knowledge and resources to the kiosks. As a result, most kiosks are largely ineffective, with a pathetic lack of footfalls. Policymakers’ zeal to negotiate the more publicized digital divide overwhelms the need to minimize the knowledge divide— making the whole process a self-defeating venture. Not surprisingly the Info Villages(1) and the e-Choupals(2) effectively use the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in conformity with local resources, knowledge and skills.

In general, developing countries are now reverberating with the slogan of ‘good governance’, along with its key indicators— transparency, accountability and responsiveness. Still, we are left with a complex knot when it comes to the interface of governance and technology. Invoking the ‘networks’ mechanically does not really solve the problem; on the contrary, in such a process the ‘solution’ itself becomes the problem.

The question is, what is ‘network’ and why is it of fundamental importance to policymaking? As Manuel Castells (1996) explains, a network is a set of inter-connected nodes which are necessary for the circulation of money, information, technology, images, goods, services, or people throughout the network. Castells adds that the most central distinction in the organizational logic is to be or not to be— in the network. As he puts it, “Be in the network, and you can share and, over time, increase your chances. Be out of the network, or become switched off, and your chances vanish…” It is true that living in the days of globalization— marked most fundamentally by unforeseen contraction of both space and time— policymakers can no longer take refuge in the argument that developing societies still have sufficient time to adjust to the network-dependent scenario. It is all the more true in a world in which late-starters are contemptuously dismissed as ‘laggards’. The imperative of ‘being in the network’ is now guided by the “do it now” spirit. Then again, such initiatives hang loose without a reasonably good baseline of human development.

Let us assert here that (new) technology, contrary to the perception of policymakers in the developing world, is not neutral. As the saying goes, technology is neutral insofar as no one knows what technology is used for and so far it is never used. The intense political implication of such ‘neutral’ stance is inescapable. As Wajcman warns (2002), the view of technology as an external and autonomous force exerting an influence on society narrows the possibility for democratic engagement— through debates and dissent— with the order of technology. We may add that not just technology, but the twin business of governance and development are ‘non-neutral’ ideas and practices as well. They are supposed to be purposive acts based on a sort of positive bias in favour of the welfare of people.

However, in the growing amnesia of policymakers the idea of human development is lost. This happens despite the fact that in the contemporary discourse of development and governance the notion of ‘capability’ has acquired an important place. Conceptually developed by Amartya Sen (1999) and Martha Nussbaum (2000), capabilities, in broadest possible terms, refer to “what people are effectively able to do and be”. Intertwined with the extremely sensitive and significant issues of justice and equality, the shaping of capabilities, as Sen clearly notes, should be an outcome of public deliberations and reasoning based on the specific context in which it occurs. The point is particularly relevant in the context of developing societies in which the poor and the marginalized are in perpetual deprivation. Technology in general and the ICT in particular have great potential to enhance capabilities, but utilizing the power of technology has to rest on two cardinal points: first, technology must limit itself to play the role of the ‘facilitator’; and second, beyond the exclusive emphasis on ‘design transfer’ policymakers need to stress building the capacity of end-users.

Ironically, the ideas of Sen— whom the Government of India and the governments of several federated states of India,  consult for advice — continue to be ignored, with disastrous implications. When technology-induced networks are hyped at the cost of human development/capability-oriented reforms in governance, ordinary people get trapped, downgraded and wasted. Such a process has substantial political implications as well. The process takes its toll by threatening, minimizing and even ending, the traces of dissent and critique vis-a-vis the effectiveness of network initiatives. In India “ICT”— the ‘backbone’ of networks— is a buzzword, a political rhetoric, a magic wand— which is supposed to do away with the symptoms of underdevelopment that “cannot” be addressed otherwise. In this technocratic order the networks are too sacrosanct to come under critical scrutiny. To reiterate, in dealing with the excessively complicated interface of governance networking and technology networks the base-strategy cannot be a blind promotion of the latter at the cost of the former. Policymakers in the developing countries should keep in mind Tom Bentley’s poignant observation (2003): “Governance would be effective not just when every strategic centre is networked but when networks extend from blue sky of long-term strategy to coal-face of everyday experience”.

Notes

  1. Info Village was initiated by M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in 1988. The objective is to provide value-added information for generating livelihood for the families of fishermen and farmers.
  2. e-Choupal, created by the corporate giant ITC, are information kiosks-cum-supply chain, providing local farmers information about agricultural inputs, farm productivity, scientific farming practices, market prices of crops, and also goods and services.
    [Both initiatives have been part of the author’s research projects.]

References
Bentley, Tom. 2003. “Governance as Learning: The Challenge of Democracy”, URL: www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=3&debateId=52&articleId=1314

Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I: The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge MA. Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capability Approach, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom, New York: Random House.

Sinha, Dipankar. 2005. “On Forgetting History: ICT and Colonization of Politics in Post-colonial India” in Amiya K. Bagchi, Dipankar Sinha and Barnita Bagchi eds., Webs of History: Information, Communication and Technology from the Early to Post-Colonial India, New Delhi: Manohar.

Sinha, Dipankar. 2010. (De)Politicizing Information Technology: Towards an Inclusionary Perspective, Working Paper 19, Department of Media and Communication. London: London School of Economics.  URL: www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/pdf/EWP19.pdf

Wajcman, Judy. 2003. ”Addressing Technological Change: The Challenge to Social Theory”, Current Sociology, Volume 50, Number 3, May.

Dipankar Sinha is a Professor of Political Science at Calcutta University and the Hony Professor at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata.

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Strong Governments Underpin Globalization

May 14, 2010

Howard H. Lentner

The “great recession” has brought to light some of the foundations that underpin globalization, in particular state institutions required for guaranteeing private contracts, regulating businesses, providing money that allows transactions to continue, and propping up systemic arrangements of the economy. In the conventional view of globalization these foundations have been obscured by those who believed that the market was trumping the state. A few writers had understood the critical nature of state power and had foreseen the possibility of such vigorous government action in an emergency as we have witnessed since September 2008. In this view globalization does not pit states against markets; instead, both are essential to the stability of economic processes across the world, but the state is the indispensable component. 

Since the early 1980s in the United States and earlier in Britain and even earlier in New Zealand, governments have adopted neoliberal policies designed to reduce government participation in the economy, weaken regulatory agencies, privatize former government activities, and place great faith in the ability of markets to regulate themselves. These policies and the ideology that underlay them remained in place despite the need for significant governmental intervention to prevent economic disaster in the savings and loan crisis of 1988, the Mexican economic crisis of 1994, and the East Asian economic crisis of 1997. With the onset of the great recession in December 2007 and the financial crisis that made its appearance in September 2008, governments across the world have intervened to prevent the collapse of financial systems, bailing out banks, buying firms, and injecting large amounts of money into their respective national economies in an attempt to halt the hemorrhaging of jobs and to resume growth. In this case, governments have, in a halting and piecemeal fashion, questioned the premise that markets are self-regulating and have been putting forth legislation to build a more effective regulatory regime.

In the United States the president and Congress are promoting consumer protection legislation in the face of substantial resistance by adherents of failed neoliberal ideology and the financial services industry. The takeover of portions of the banking, insurance, and auto industries by the government of the United States included provisions for limiting the compensation of the twenty-five top executives of such companies. Underway are plans to reform bank regulation, and proposals have been made for removing government endorsement of ratings agencies. However, intermingling of elites from government and the sectors to be regulated as well as the dependence of elected officials on the largesse in campaign contributions from the leaders of large economic units has led to the rejection of certain regulatory proposals and to resistance to a comprehensive analysis within the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that might lead to coherent reform. For example, in its new protocols for listing derivative instruments on a public exchange, the Obama administration has provided a loophole for exceptions for private trades. Although it seemed unlikely that the barriers between commercial and investment banking that had been in place since the 1930s until their removal ten years ago would be reenacted, Paul Volcker’s appointment as an advisor in the White House improves the chances that barriers between commercial and investment banking may yet be erected. The administration has intervened within firms to limit the compensation of top executives and to restructure incentives, but almost no attention has been given to a preferable alternative, imposing marginal tax rates on high incomes of perhaps fifty percent on incomes of a million dollars or more up to ninety percent on those over five million dollars. Piecemeal and half-hearted reform will probably do little to change behavior, so that we can expect the same risky business practices that led to the great recession will continue. In time, then, another disorder will emerge that will require another massive intervention by the government. Because the regulatory system will have been tinkered with around the margins, the next crisis will be shaped differently in its particulars. Nevertheless the basic pattern of the government’s stepping in to save the system from the unregulated missteps, fraud, and deliberately risky calculations will ensue.

There is an alternative path to be taken. First, a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between the government, on the one side, and powerful private economic actors in society. The distinction, at base, is an intellectual one, but it can be put into practice only by the government’s assigning specific roles associated with setting rules and performing regulative tasks to itself and leaving business decisions within the constraints set to private firms. Just as the government needs to stay out of commercial decisions, it needs to keep private actors out of regulatory and legislative decisions; this can be done only by eliminating or at least minimizing private financing of election campaigns.

Second, in its regulatory capacity the government must draw sharp lines along several dimensions in the operations of the market. Among the most important is the restoration of the wall between commercial and financial investment banking as was embodied in the Glass-Steagall Act. Another border needs to be erected between the task of rating investments and consulting for the firms being rated. In regard to the ratings agencies, they need to be separated from governmental endorsement.

Third, the government needs to correct flaws in regulatory steps already taken. For example, all derivatives trades should be required to be done through a transparent exchange, so the exceptions for “private trades” needs to be eliminated from the plan put forward by the Obama administration.

Fourth, the government must enact clear, relatively simple rules that have to be followed by firms and other private institutions. For example, a rule that sets minimum leverage standards for broad categories of loans would institutionalize prudence in lending. For example, the government could set a minimum down payment for any housing purchase at twenty percent of the sales price, and it could require that each commercial bank retain cash deposits equivalent to ten percent of its loans and that each investment bank maintain a cash reserve of ten percent of its assets.

The fundamental shift required to advance globalization without the incalculable risks attending unregulated markets, especially in the financial sector, is to drop neoliberal ideology and recognize the essential functions that states perform, including the provision of security and stability in the international system and the effective oversight and enforcement of rules governing an economic system. Business cycles will remain an inherent characteristic of capitalist economies, but they need not embody system-threatening features such as firms that are regarded as “too big to fail,” and they can be smoothed out considerably by prudent and effective monitoring and regulation by competent governments.

References

John Cassidy 2009. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Jeffrey Friedman 2009. “A Crisis of Politics, Not Economics: Complexity, Ignorance, and Policy Failure,” in Critical Review 21 (2–3): 127-183.

Howard H. Lentner 2004. Power and Politics in Globalization:  The Indispensable State. New York: Routledge.

Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Report to Congress, October 21, 2009.  http://www.sigtarp.gov/reports/congress/2009/October2009 _Quarterly_Report_to_Congress.pdf

Richard A. Posner 2009. “Financial Regulatory Reform: The Politics of Denial,” in The Economist’s Voice. http://www.bepress.com/ev, November.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2009. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System From Crisis — and Themselves. New York: Viking.

Howard H. Lentner is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City University of New York

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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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Global Migration in Global Society

May 17, 2007

Niklaus Steiner
Director, Center for Global Initiatives
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: nsteiner@unc.edu

In considering the emerging field of Global Studies, an important question appears to be: what is the unit of analysis? It seems to me the answer lies somewhere in the holistic concept of “global society” – that collectivity of 6+ billion individuals and their interactions. Instead of trying to flesh out a definition, let me instead offer some thoughts on one aspect of the interaction of this collectivity in hopes of sharpening the concept.

While the global movement of products, services, ideas, and information is increasingly free, the movement of people across borders remains tightly controlled. This control over migration is highly controversial because it is the result of two forces colliding: never before have so many people had the ability to move from one country to another while at the same time states have never had so much power to control such movement. This simultaneity leads to numerous controversies, and I’ll focus on two: migration links immigration to refugee protection, and it raises questions about national identity.

Both immigrants and refugees are “international migrants” (i.e. people who cross international borders), but immigrants are largely admitted on the basis of national self-interest; the post-war guest worker programs in Northern Europe are good examples of this approach. Refugees, however, arouse a sense of moral responsibility and the treatment of them is guided by an elaborate set of international laws and norms. Refugees are defined by the 1951 UN Convention as individuals who face a well-founded fear of persecution at the hands of their government because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group. Important to note is that economic hardship is not a criterion for being recognized as a refugee. Some advocates, however, argue that a moral obligation exists to accept poor people, especially those whose poverty stems from internal governmental actions or neglect, or when external governmental or corporate policies are implicated. Such advocates question why nations should privilege a migrant facing death due to persecution over one facing death due to poverty. Opposing arguments assert that, while poverty may raise moral questions, all poor people from all over the world cannot practically be granted refugee status. Where to draw the line between these two positions stirs the pot.

The global movement of immigrants and refugees raises the question of citizenship and national identity. Liberal democracies want the people to rule and this wish is declared in such documents as the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution (“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…”) and the Declaration of Independence (“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds…”). These documents express the essence of a democracy, a term derived from the Greek words demos meaning “people” and kratos meaning “rule.” This concept is deceptively simple because letting “the people rule” is by no means a straightforward proposition as it forces the citizens of the country to define the people. Who is going to be included in the demos that is ruling? And by making this decision of inclusion, a decision of exclusion is automatically made: who is not part of the people and why not? Far from being merely abstract questions, they are at the very heart of how we citizens treat foreigners amongst us.

Like most liberal democracies, the United States has a naturalization process for foreigners to become citizens, and I myself went through it by answering such questions as “In what city and in what year was the Declaration of Independence signed?” and “What are the three branches of government?” I also passed a reading and writing test that was absurdly easy for me, but probably quite challenging for others in the room. It made me wonder what kind of test is reasonable to demonstrate that one is now “American.” Perhaps it should also be important to demonstrate knowledge about pop culture (what is YouTube?) or current events (what state was recently badly hit by tornados?). Such questions, though, would surely trip up many citizens and would that somehow make them less American? Maybe there should be different kinds of tests for different kinds of foreigners, or no test at all and just grant citizenship automatically after a set amount of time (5 years? 10 years?).

To add to the complexity is the fact that citizenship is both a legal status and a form of identity. As a legal status, citizenship provides an individual various rights and duties vis-à-vis the state, and as a matter of identity, citizenship grants an individual the sense of belonging to a larger community. It is noteworthy that there is not always a perfect overlap between the two. For example, an American may enjoy the legal status of being a citizen (i.e. votes and pays taxes) but does not feel like an American (perhaps she spent much time abroad or rejects the values that she sees Americans embracing). The reverse is also possible: a foreigner who does not seek or enjoy legal citizenship but who embraces what he considers to be Americana. The ongoing controversy in Europe over Muslims wearing headscarves in public places is a good example of the difference between legal and identity citizenship: they may be French citizens in one way but not in another.

In the face of global migration, it is therefore difficult to set public policy about who to admit and how to make them part of us. The vast field of policy options between the extremes of “Kick them all out” and “Kumbaya…We are the World” is strewn with monetary and moral questions with which we citizens must grapple. Given other pressing needs, how much money should we spend on border patrol? Should we prefer some foreigners over others? How much power should we grant the government to check for proper documentation? In seeking answers, the debate quickly becomes heated because it touches upon core values regarding civil liberties, human rights and the limited role of government. Setting a migration policy forces us citizens to weigh not only how the policy would affect foreigners but also how it would affect us. For on this issue, there is no clear distinction between us and them. That is a function of global society.

global-e volume 1 number 1 may 2007

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