Posts filed under 'politics'
Steve Dekorte writes on his blog: “Gay couples allowed to marry in California. A bigger victory would have been converting all state marriages to private civil contracts and separating the state from marriage entirely, but this is at least a step forward.”
Finally someone who agrees. Why does the state play a role in deciding who should be allowed to share their life with who? Let people make their own private contracts if they wish, and treat them as individuals for the law, and we can stop talking about gay marriages or the marriage being the cornerstone of society, etc.
June 17th, 2008
So in Ireland we are quickly approaching the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. A fierce campaign at least in terms of posters is going on - wherever you look in Dublin, you see posters in favour or against the treaty. Far more NO posters than YES posters, and the NO posters are generally about risks - either realistic or demagogic - of voting in favour of the treaty, while YES posters are usually big pictures of politicians advertising themselves, with in small font in the corner of the poster a sort of “Oh, yes, and also vote YES”. In other words, not half as convincing.
The posters really make me think, actually, and even though I know most of the NO posters are nonsense and based on scaring people for no clear reason, I think think that if I would have to vote right now, I would vote NO. Now, admittedly, I have not actually read the treaty - it’s 272 pages! - and am by no means an expert in the area. Furthermore, I should state quite clearly that I consider myself close to a European federalist - in other words, I’m very much in favour of European integration and want more rather than less of it. So why would I consider voting no?
- Although the treaty definitely makes good progress towards a more democratic Europe - more power to the European Parliament and somewhat more power to national parliaments - it certainly does not go far enough yet. The European Council (the collection of ministerial representatives from each member state) is still very powerful, even though they are only in a very indirect manner responsible to the voter (you do not vote for a member of the Council, but in most countries you vote for a party, which selects leaders, which negotiate on a coalition, which appoints ministers, which then go to the Council). There will be a new President of the Council, which could at least symbolically be a very important role, but he will be elected by the Council itself - no voters need to get involved. So, a step in the right direction, but by far not far enough.
- The implementation of the treaty itself is even more blatantly at odds with everything democratic. So Europe is the place where democracy was born. We’re proud of our democratic credentials and look down on any dictatorial regime. We believe in self-determination of peoples. Yet, when we implement what looks very much like a constitution for Europe, we don’t get any voters involved! We had referendums in the Netherlands and France and they lost - so we just do not ask them again. Only Ireland votes, because by constitutional law they have to vote on every treaty. Hence, because only one small group of European citizens are asked to voice an opinion, and because the reason that others are not asked is because we know they vote no (!), that small group should send a clear signal and vote NO. We need to make a stand and make clear that this is not how you implement major constitutional changes in the EU.
- How can someone be asked to vote on a treaty of 272 pages? Or on something as cryptic as this? And it is not that “vote YES because it’s good for Ireland” is going to be very convincing when nobody understands what they are voting yes for. Of course Ireland has hugely benefitted from European membership in the last decades and it should be grateful and help build a strong Europe. But it should vote NO now and follow the poster that says “we can get a better deal”. The poster refers to Irish self-interests, of course, but even as European citizens as a whole, “we can get a better deal”. When the referendum took place in the Netherlands I was also tempted to vote NO - I must admit I did not vote at all - and exactly for this reason, that one cannot be asked to vote on a text that nobody understands. Why can they not write a proper constitution of only a few pages that is clear and democratic and which will then be voted upon by all citizens of the EU? Is that not how you create a European identity - something they want so badly?
That summarizes my arguments. The core point is that although I’m much for further integration of the EU (and further expansion), more signalling is necessary that when the EU says it wants to generate a “European identity” and says it wants to “fix the democratic gap”, that we should start to take ourselves seriously and do things that are actually democratic. A constitution without vote, a remaining strong role for the Council (perhaps even stronger with the establishment of the Council presidency), and very little relation between Commission appointments and elections are absolutely not signs of democracy.
On a more dreamy level: the Obama - Clinton campaign, which I followed quite closely and with enthousiasm, makes me jealous. Why do we not have a proper president of the EU, elected by popular vote, so that people actually need to campaign my making themselves known? Sell their ideas? Travel around Europe? Gather in town halls and make speeches? No, instead we have a President of the Council, who visits prime ministers in all countries to lobby behind closed doors for an appointment, and in the end it is as much based on which country gets what as it is on political campaigns. Even a Europe that would not integrate any further than the current version - and for the next decade or so this is quite integrated enough already, I’d say - could be run by a much more democratically elected leadership, based on voter opinions and not based on backroom lobbying by government representatives.
June 10th, 2008
Recently, most of the things I read about Russian politics are rather depressing, see, e.g., this recent post. Today I read some more interesting, positive news, though.
Apparently, a leadership contest is on its way within Yabloko (Apple, an acronym of Yavlinsky, Boldyrev, and Lukin, its founders (source)), an opposition party somewhere between liberal and social-democratic. The current leader, Yavlinsky, is a very well-known Russian politician, but appears to be completely sidelined in current developments. Thanks to a revision of the electoral law, including an increase in the threshold, Yabloko has no presence in the current Duma anymore, the parliament. He has also always been blocking moves towards merging with Soyuz Pravikh Sil (Union of Rightist Forces), a more conservative-liberal opposition party. Without joining forces, Russian opposition stands no chance of changing the tide! As Oleg Kozlovsky puts it: “in the conditions of today’s Russia, such alliances are perfectly natural: after all, before you can choose among various doctrines, you first need to win the right to choose in the first place” (Kozlovsky 2007). Now, the leader of the youth movement of Yabloko, Ilya Yashin, tries to unseat Yavlinsky as the party leader.
Since 2005, Yashin has also been a member of the Oborona (Defence) movement (read more here), of which Kozlovsky is also a prominent member. The movement has no centralized leadership, but instead a networked structure (source) - I guess not only Islamist terrorists can organise themselves like this. Much along the lines of the remark by Koslovsky, Yashin wants Yabloko to join forces with the other opposition parties: “People are not able to choose between good democrats and bad democrats, (…) we need to create a democratic party that will act as a magnet for everyone with these general values” (source). The fact that Yabloko and SPS are so antagonistic to each other has always puzzled me - perhaps there is hope. Maybe Yavlinsky is right that Yashin is still too immature and too radical, but I think it’s good that these things still exist in Russia, especially when you see reports about the new youth movement to support Putin, Nashi (which even campaigns for faster production of Putin supporters through procreation!), which strongly resembles Soviet’s Komsomol.
This map reminded me of my MA thesis, in which I studied the political geography of the support for Yabloko and SPS. It definitely encourages me to someday update that research, with more recent Duma elections added, and taking into account the data here.
December 22nd, 2007
I really don’t like it when people argue that Russia is simply not a democratic culture. That Russians are not “ready” for democracy. The argument is paternalistic and seems to assume that Russians are somehow not able to grasp democracy, which is insulting. But sometimes you wonder … What is happening here? An article in the St Petersburg Times, “City Parliament Slammed For Pro-Putin Statement“, discusses how an official statement by the St Petersburg Duma (local parliament) states that regardless of party preference, all Russians should support the “national leader”. Reading about Russian politics is depressing these days.
November 23rd, 2007
I guess I’ll be a successful lecturer in research methods if I can get my students not to do this!
July 17th, 2007
Today I stumbled on a brilliant little essay, writer unknown, describing how international relations today is analogous to Medieval society: “A Medieval Sociology of International Relations“. Pretty funny stuff.
July 7th, 2007
Yesterday someone pointed me towards an apparently famous short essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, which he wrote in 1946. The essay is truly brilliant and I can highly recommend you all (well, if anyone reads this blog!) read it.
The most brilliant quote in the essay is the paraphrasing of this text from the Ecclesiastes:
“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
And Orwell’s paraphrase in modern English:
“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”
The latter sentence sounds like a quote directly from my thesis! So definitely something to work in …
July 2nd, 2007
In the same journal that I referred to in my previous post, New Political Science, I also read another article, and my impression is exactly the opposite - this is a very good article. The title is “Free Trade: A paradox for democracy” and it’s written by Tom De Luca and John Buell. The article is more in line with common political theory rather than critical theory. It argues how the international pressures for market liberalization and international free trade are presented by proponents of such free trade as something unavoidable, something natural, and something technical, that is beyond the control of democratic governments. It is presented as something that needs to be negotiated behind closed doors, validated by experts, and only rubber stamped by democratically elected parliaments. The result is that it stimulates lack of political efficacy among citizens and hence apathy towards the political system. Furthermore, it stimulates emphasis of one’s own identity, be it race, religion, or nationality, as a superior natural phenomenon, as the only possibly counter force against the globalization of the economy. International free trade, said to promote international peace and democracy, has thus serious negative effects on democracy and stimulates sentiments that usually lead to war rather than peace. The authors are clearly not opposed to free trade, but they argue that presenting it as something natural and unavoidable, without paying attention to its inherent tensions with democracy, leads to conflict rather than to peace. They argue for a less narrow conception of both free trade - which should include more political rights as minimum wages and human immigration policies - and democracy - which should be more than electing rubber stamp parliaments. I very much like the article, partly because it represents the kind of social liberalism I would adhere to as well.
January 4th, 2007
Last night I read an article in New Political Science. A journal of politics & culture. I cannot resist to rant about it for a little bit - how did that ever get published?! The article is by Andrew Davison, entitled “The ‘Soft’ Power of Hollywood Militainment: The case of The West Wing’s attack on Antalya, Turkey”. I should probably clarify two things first: the article is written in the postmodern, critical tradition - in political science there is a stark division between positivist, empirical camp (to which I belong) and the postmodern, critical camp. Secondly, I’m a big fan of The West Wing. In one episode of West Wing, a Republican politician temporarily takes over the White House and while he is in power, a terrorist attack takes place on a fictional cinema in Antalya, Turkey, where American soldiers were watching a movie. The President acts swiftly and decides on a military operation in the area. The director of the series, who had just taken over from the original left-wing director Aaron Sorkin, had made clear in press conferences that the series would start to better reflect the new political atmosphere in the U.S. after 9/11 and that it would give a more fair depiction of the right in U.S. politics.
Davison’s article sets out to argue that this depiction of Antalya is reducing what is a historically complex place with an exceptional beauty and a wide variety of cultures to a foreign, unknown, scary terrorist place. He emphasizes how Hollywood and Washington cooperate in providing the U.S. audience with the images of the outside world that support the policies of the Bush regime. Although I always am very reluctant to believe in such conspiracy theories, it could be an interesting thesis for a political science thesis. It would be very interesting, if you could establish how those links work, how there is intention in depicting the world like this, etc. Davison does nothing of the sort. His conclusion that there is this conspiracy is going on is pretty much assumed from the outset and not at all discussed. By using terms like ‘militainment’ and ‘Washiwood’, he creates an atmosphere of conspiracy without pointing out any details of how this would work. He even starts writing about a ‘milidirector’ and, most stupidly, a ‘millumination’ of something. So, if I just put ‘mili’ before every crucial term, I provide evidence of a conspiracy? He would probably object to the term ‘conspiracy’, since it’s all vaguer, more implicit than that, but still. As an article in a strongly opinionated piece, like a column, this would be a smart way of writing, perhaps. For an academic paper, it is incredible that this passed the reviewers.
Secondly, the article does what, in my opinion, a lot of critical postmodern articles do (and no, I would not argue that they are all bad or useless). He simply throws around the terminology from that literature to make it ‘fit’, without showing any sign of understanding those concepts or using them to shed light on what is really at hand. He uses terms like ‘place’, ‘lived experiences’, ‘hermeneutics’, etc. but it is utterly unclear why those are relevant for his article.
His argument seems to rely on two pillars: 1) the depiction of Antalya in West Wing is meant to be realistic and give a real picture of the post-9/11 world of terrorism; 2) Antalya really is a very nice place, known for its beauty and cultural complexity. The author even did ‘in depth research on location’! - I.e. he went on long holidays to be able to write that it really is a very nice place. To me it is utterly unclear how the two relate. The West Wing episode is indeed scarily realistic. It is indeed a very limited view of the world that is depicted. Antalya is indeed a dot on a satellite image rather than a beautiful city. But that’s the point!!! That’s how such politics work! That’s what the president sees in his Situation Room. He does not go on a holiday, attends annual events, and reads up on the extensive history of a city before deciding how to react to a bombing against his own soldiers. Is this ‘militainment’ and a ‘Washiwood’ attempt to brainwash Americans? No, of course not!
The article reads like a combination of a conspiracy-theory induced column and a tourist guide for Antalya. Both devoid of any solid argumentation, logic, relevance, etc. The basic premise of the article is interesting and could be investigated. This investigation could be done interestingly in a critical post-modern fashion. But this article is just nonsense.
I should add, though, that as a tourist guide, the article has been very convincing, and Antalya sounds like a great holiday location.
January 4th, 2007
I just stumbled on a Dutch blog (in Dutch) by Lagonda. Really brilliant blog! I don’t always agree, but I wish I could write like that. And the analyses of contemporary (Dutch) society and culture are amazingly good. Despite the fact that she votes for the opposite side compared to me. Among other things a lot of comments about islam and multiculturalism and a nice piece about how modern Western (or rather, West-European) society is deeply Marxist in nature. And how that Marxism is directly related to Christian guilt. Pretty cool. She (at least, I think it’s a she) writes continuously against modern left wing ideology, while I actually vote on the left, but she does it in such a well founded, thorough way, it’s quite impressive and interesting.
December 27th, 2006
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