post-europe

Nussbaum on Banning the Burqa in Europe

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:43:16 +0000

After several posts, I tried to move on from the European Burqa Ban issue, and the NY Times’ coverage of it, but Martha Nussbaum’s eloquent explanation of John Locke’s and Roger Williams’s liberal conceptions of religious freedom and equally eloquent deconstruction of the most common arguments for such bans – all of which have been wheeled out as justification for the current Belgian Burqa Ban and similar proposals in other European states – certainly deserve a mention and a link. I would like to find a similarly cogent philosophical argument in favour of such bans – especially one that argues from a variant of a liberal position - if anyone can point me to one, or wishes to write one themselves I would be much obliged!

Nussbaum responds to readers comments (June 15, 2010)

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FIFA Police State

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:13:04 +0000

Not exactly what the marketing rep had in mind

Is Fifa presiding over the running of a two-tierstyle police state in South Africa? Who on earth allowed them to do this? Every day on the BBC’s world cup commentary we get to hear about the indissoluble relation between football and freedom, how football was so important to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and how professional football embodies all that is good in this troubled world: team spirit, fair play, discipline, hard work, perversely inflated salaries, temper tantrums from grown men, child prostitution…oh sorry, I switched over to TF1 for a moment there. I even had the pleasure of watching former player, moralist, and BBC commentator Alan Shearer, without a hint of incredulity, ask a township resident if hosting the world cup was equal the overthrow of Apartheid.

Now we learn of the special world cup courts that have been convened by the South African ministry of justice at Fifa’s request to deal with such horrible crimes as “ambush marketing”, fans finding their way into team locker rooms and calmly asking the players to play a little better, local residents taking small sundries from VIP boxes. It seems these courts are also operating on an unofficial two-tier system. If you happen to be from a country where an embassy official will get on the phone and explain that the Netherlands (for example) will not take kindly to its nationals being locked up for wearing orange dresses, you’ve got a good chance of posting bail and having to pay only a small fine for your poor choice of colour. If you are a poor local who has nicked a few bottles from the VIP area the punishment is apparently likely to be somewhat harsher.

As the Guardian reports:

With the exception of the Dutch causes célèbres, a typical case features a Soweto man who stole two cans of Coke, two mini cans of soda water, and one mini can of lemonade from a Soccer City corporate hospitality lounge. He admitted guilt and paid a fine. Elsewhere, a pair of tourists who assaulted a local were fined £1,350 between them, while another Joburg resident who stole a few bottles of alcohol from Soccer City had his bail opposed and remains in custody, presumably lacking an irate foreign minister to intervene on his behalf.

In a country in which many residents feel the wheels of justice turn at a glacial pace, if at all, the speed of the World Cup courts was initially welcomed. But as more details emerge of their cost, and the nature of crimes being tried, some have predictably begun to ask whether time might not be better spent bringing more serious matters to court. For largely petty offences, the harsh sentences being handed down have a distinctly showy quality to them. At the weekend, the National Prosecuting Authority was forced to insist it was possible to mount a fair trial in 24 hours.

Though we need not worry too much about the fate of the young dutch women who committed the terrible crime of wearing orange dresses, it is their case that seems to involve the most egregious and worrying development vis-a-vis mutations of the rule of law in order to best serve the private commercial interests of large corporate entities. They will be tried under the special ’2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa Special Measures Act. The women in orange are accused of contravening two sections of this law, namely the parts that prohibit “unauthorised commercial activities inside an exclusion zone” [i.e. wearing orange dresses and attracting attention by cheering and singing] and “enter[ing] into a designated area while in unauthorised possession of a commercial object” [an unmarked orange dress].’

This is a mutation of the name of the Law that goes beyond the pale, the beautiful game has been tarninshed by a logic that “groups all forms of life under the perilous form of industrial productivity” (that is a line from Jan Patocka’s working notes, published in L’Europe après l’Europe - just so you don’t think I’m straying too far off topic).

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Europe is Dead…Long Live Europe?

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:21:03 +0000

Etienne Balibar announces the death of the European Project. Does anyone disagree?

Balibar’s pronouncement reminded me of a paragraph in Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), Sarte writes:

“When a Frenchman, for example, says to another, Frenchman: “We’re finished” – which, to my knowledge, has occurred roughly every day since 1930 – it is a discourse burning with rage and love. The orator puts himself in the same boat as all his countrymen. And then he generally adds: “Unless…” […]. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice, and such remarks shock even less because they spring from a national intersubjectivity. When Fanon, to the contrary, says that Europe is headed for ruin, far from uttering a cry of alarm he is uttering a diagnostic. This doctor does not claim it is a hopeless cause – there have been miracles – nor is he offering a cure: he is stating that it is in its death throes.”

The humour in the beginning of Sartre’s remark should not put us off from its seriousness, nor lead us to dismiss the discourse of rage and love as somehow unserious or unscientific. Yet, Balibar’s voice is I think neither that of a national intersubjectivity or the removed diagnostic of the post-colonial revolutionary (Fanon). The “unless…” that Sarte points to is the hope that we need but make an alteration of course, a few more or less radical changes (an austerity package or bank bailout?) and the European status quo can be maintained at least for some. What Balibar seems to propose here is something rather different (something I think also pointed out by Jan Patočka when he used the term post-european): If we wish to continue to speak of a European Project, the aims, means, and boundaries of this project must be radically re-thought.

Here is a excerpt from Balibar’s article:

In its current form, under the influence of the dominant social forces, the European construction may have produced some degree of institutional harmonisation, and generalised some fundamental rights, which is not negligible, but, contrary to the stated goals, it has not produced a convergent evolution of national economies, a zone of shared prosperity. Some countries are dominant, others are dominated. The peoples of Europe may not have antagonistic interests, but the nations increasingly do.

Second, any Keynesian strategy to generate public “trust” in the economy rests on three interdependent pillars: a stable currency, a rational system of taxes, but also a social policy, aiming at full employment. This third aspect is systematically ignored in most current commentaries.

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ceci n’est pas une apologie

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:41:13 +0000

Working Conditions Have Grown Increasingly Difficult For Many Philosophers

Some posts ago – “Shaming and Naming” – I discussed the threat of cuts to the distinguished philosophy department at Kings College London. More recently I implored you to participate in whatever way possible in the campaign to save the philosophy department at Middlesex University. I am happy to report that the campaign at Kings has had success. An open letter yesterday from David Papineau, head of the department at Kings announced the following:

I’m pleased to report that King’s College London has just announced that it will be able to make the necessary cost savings in the School of Arts and Humanities without any forced redundancies.

This is excellent news, particularly for the Philosophy Department. One result of the difficult last few months has been to bring home to everyone the value of our Department and the importance of preserving its strengths.

Nobody is leaving the Department. In particular Shalom Lappin, Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Charles Travis will all be remaining with us.

What is more, we expect to be advertising one or more new appointments very soon.On behalf of my colleagues, I’d like to thank all those who have done so much to support us over the last few months. They have made all the difference. – David Papineau

The news from Middlesex University is not as positive. If I understand correctly, university management are still refusing to negotiate with student campaigners or faculty members. The justification for the decision to close the University’s best ranked department is, as it turns out, a rather crass economic one, having to do with the university’s business strategy (should universities be governed according to business strategies? I’ll leave that question aside for the moment, but no is the answer I think). Basically, philosophy students are cheap: they require a few books – not that many even – a couple seminar rooms, and a little bit of quiet to think. As a result, the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) allocates £3947/year per philosophy student, it is labeled a “Band D” discipline. Academic disciplines that might require a studio, lab or fieldwork project gets £5131/year per student, they are labeled “Band C” (this includes things like media studies). Disciplines requiring expensive equipment (chemistry, medicine, engineering) get more. Middlesex University calculates that by cutting the number of spots for Band D students and raising the number for Band C students, it can get more money out of HEFCE. So, it is an economically driven decision, but not of the type “we don’t have the money to continue to fund this programme” (after all philosophy departments are understandably cheap to run), but of the type “we think we could make more money if we cut this programme and free up spots for Band C students”. Sarah Amsler discusses this logic in her article on Opendemocracy.net (I don’t like the title of her article, in my experience philosophers are more likely to be suited and booted than most others in the humanities, but ok). If I have misunderstood the situation, I welcome corrections.

For the neo-liberally inclined amongst you (Guy) and the statistic lovers, here is a link where you will find a few (rather old, but I don’t imagine they have changed much) numbers on how well philosophy undergrads do.

For the New York Times faithful, here (and here) are two articles from the American newspaper of record on how philosophers fare in employment. They are from some time ago, but I think that being published prior to the global finance industry being exposed as largely inhabited by greedoholics with little common sense, and ethics and long-term thinking being rediscovered as perhaps helpful attributes of people in general and those handling very large sums of money in particular, makes these articles all the more pertinent. I find that professional philosophers are often loathe to discuss philosophy as good training for other things as well for philosophy itself – when people ask what is the point of philosophy, the proper answer is that philosophy is its own point. It is seen as demeaning the proper activity of philosophy itself to conceive it in instrumental terms, and many academics resent – rightfully – constantly having to do so in order to protect their discipline. But as has always been the case, most of those who study philosophy at university will not go on to be professional philosophers, what an education in philosophy provides them are the intellectual tools (logical reasoning, critical thinking, argumentation, and writing) to contribute in many ways to the communities they live within, no wonder they are so employable.

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“If solidarity goes, Europe goes.”

admin — Tue, 11 May 2010 21:32:32 +0000

Here is a link to Roger Cohen’s op-ed in Tuesday’s NY Times on European Solidarity or lack thereof.

Here are a few remarks:

I think that while reading the complaints about Greece’s overly generous welfare state that currently abound in the Anglophone and German media (though I am not saying that this is all there is to Cohen’s piece, or the coverage in general), there are some important things to also take into consideration. Greece, and Athens in particular, has become an expensive country in the past two decades. It has a large wealth gap relative to many of its European partners, with lower GDP per capita and median income. For many of the people currently protesting, life has gotten progressively more expensive in the past years, wage and pension cuts will make life in already very expensive Athens more difficult.

One of my favourite Greece anecdotes during this recent debacle was the swimming pool stat: just 324 households in Athens’ wealthy northern suburbs reported having swimming pools on their tax returns. When incredulous tax inspectors examined satellite photos they found 16, 974, this means that 98% of pool owners in Northern Athens were lying on their tax returns. But these are not the people protesting on Athens’s streets (they are enjoying their pools). Anecdotal evidence suggests that the pool owning classes in Athens are instead complaining about the civil servants on strike over salary and pension cuts while finding ever more interesting manners of justifying their own tax related malfeasance.

For those who are interested, here are some numbers on cost of living and income in Greece (and Athens) in relation to some of its European partners:

Athens (where about half of Greece lives) was ranked (in 2009) as the 28th most expensive city in the world by Mercer’s cost of living index. This index is compiled as a guide for expats and companies with employees abroad, so the basket of goods used may not be exactly the same as a normal inhabitant, but I think it can still be used as a loose guide. Mercer’s ranking puts Athens above Amsterdam (29), Brussels (41), Munich (47), Frankfurt (48), and Berlin (49), also above Chicago (50), for a non-European comparison. When we look at GDP at PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) per capita a somewhat different picture emerges. Greece ranks behind the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. We can also point to a wider gap between rich and poor in Greece (when compared to some other EU countries) to slightly nuance complaints about spoiled Greek civil servants protesting against cuts in social services, wages, and pensions. Greece has a higher Gini coefficient – standard measure of economic inequality - (33) than Germany (28), Belgium (28) or the Netherlands (30.9), as well as a larger gap (measured by income ratio) between richest 10% and poorest 10% of the population: Greece at 10.2, Netherlands at 9.2, Belgium at 8.2, Germany at 6.9. The UN HDI for 2009 – a slightly less crude and GDP-centric measure of well-being – put Greece at 25th in the world, again behind the Netherlands (6), Belgium (17), and Germany (22). Finally, a study of income disparity and inequality evolution in the EU during the 1990s put Greece in the worst performing group of EU member states alongside the United Kingdom, Portugal, Ireland and Spain, all countries with massive cuts in public infrastructure already having taken place or looming.

Admittedly, any interpretation of these figures is confused by Greece’s inclusion of some black market activities in its GDP projections. In 2006, Greece revised its GDP up by about 25% due to the inclusion of some black market activities. As Manolis Kontopyrakis, the head of the national statistics service, told Reuters in 2006: “The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.” It is estimated that somewhere between 25 and 30% of the economy is ‘in the black’. The revised GDP figures were concocted to keep Greece within the 3% budget deficit limit imposed by the EU. However, Greek tax authorities – and hence social and public infrastructure – won’t see a penny of the estimated $60 billion flowing through Greece’s underground economy (well, the tax collectors probably saw a fair bit of it in Fakelaki – the little envelopes stuffed with cash that plague Greek society – but that is the extent of it) .

The question – with regard to the issue of solidarity – is twofold:

First, what kind of economic and civic solidarity is possible between northern European countries with functioning tax systems and countries like Greece were tax fraud – not creative accounting, but fraud – is not just rife, but has seemingly infected nearly every corner of economic activity. Let me put this in very crude terms: if paying your full tax bill is seen as a sucker’s game by vast swathes of the Greek population, most significantly by a large proportion of the middle class, can German, Belgian, and Dutch (to use the examples from above) taxpayers really be asked to bail Greece out. I think that regardless of what various causes lie at the root of the current economic crisis in Greece, i.e. to what extent a non-functioning tax system is to blame for the current problems (€23.6 billion of lost tax revenue per year would seem to be a pretty big problem), this question of the preconditions of pan-European economic and civic solidarity is a necessary one.

A second question follows naturally from the first: to what degree is pan-European economic and civic solidarity a precondition to the success of a European political project? And what kind of solidarity can be achieved at an institutional level – the solidarity we are talking about here seems to necessarily involve some wealth transfer – between national communities with widely varying shared ideas of intra-communal social responsibility and solidarity?

These are certainly not the only questions to ask regarding the current situation in Greece, its root causes and other member states’ roles/responsibilities in bailing Greece out in order to stabilize the €-zone, but I think that they are important ones, not just for the present situation, but for any further talk about the European project.

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The War on Philosophy!

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:39:46 +0000

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As some of you may have already been made aware, on April 26 Middlesex University in the United Kingdom abruptly announced that it would shut down all of its philosophy programmes effective immediately. Middlesex’s Philosophy programmes are very highly regarded both in the United Kingdom and internationally. Middlesex’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy is one of the most highly regarded research centres for European Philosophy in the United Kingdom. In the last Research Assessment Exercise carried out by the government, the department received a 5 (the highest rating). Philosophy at Middlesex is also a net contributor to the university’s budget thanks to the amount of research money that it brings in from external sources. According to Stella Sandford, one of Middlesex’s highly respected philosophy professors, the reason given for the closure was that despite its excellent international reputation, high research rating, and financial contribution to the university, philosophy at Middlesex did not make a “measurable” contribution to the University’s strategy. The students, staff, and supporters of Middlesex philosophy have launched a strong campaign to save the department. They are currently occupying the main buildings of the university (Etienne Balibar has apparently recently arrived from France to join the occupation). They are also collecting signatures on an online petition and asking supporters to write to the Vice Chancellor of the university. Please help to protect the future of philosophy in the United Kingdom by joining in the campaign to save Middlesex Philosophy.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

FIRST, please sign the online petition against the closure http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy.html

SECOND, If you would like to register your support for Philosophy at Middlesex please email the following people:

Michael Driscoll, vice-chancellor of the university – m.driscoll@mdx.ac.uk
Waqar Ahmad, deputy vice-chancellor, research and enterprise – w.ahmad@mdx.ac.uk
Margaret House, deputy vice-chancellor, academic- m.house@mdx.ac.uk
Ed Esche, dean of the School of Arts & Education – e.esche@mdx.ac.uk

These addresses can be copy-pasted into your email programme m.driscoll@mdx.ac.uk; w.ahmad@mdx.ac.uk; m.house@mdx.ac.uk; e.esche@mdx.ac.uk

A sample text to send to the administrators responsible can be found here: http://savemdxphil.com/2010/04/28/hello-world/

You can follow the developments on the website set up my Middlesex students to protest the closure: http://savemdxphil.com/

THIRD, PLEASE ENCOURAGE OTHERS TO SUPPORT THE CAMPAIGN TO SAVE MIDDLESEX PHILOSOPHY!

Thank you for your support.

5 people like this post.

Belgium to Ban Burqa…well almost?

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:32:48 +0000

Tintin's outfit was deemed an afront to liberal society

Apologies for a long absence, my excellent philosophy students at the University of the West of England have been demanding my time and intellectual energy with their very good questions and essays… how insensitive to you my dear readers!

I was going to post this update on the Liberal Burqa Ban situation in Belgium this time and not in France, but in a shocking development, before the legislation could be moved through parliament the government of Belgium has apparently fallen apart and tendered its resignation. The resignation has not yet been accepted by the King but it will surely hold up the legislative agenda for some time at least.

The dispute within the government is apparently between the Flemish and French speaking liberal parties (the VLD and MR respectively). If I understand correctly, the VLD has withdrawn from the government, accusing their liberal counterparts across the linguistic border of bad faith negociation over the future of the much disputed electoral district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvorde (BHV). Apologies if I have left out any important details here! Any readers with an opinion on the BHV situation are more than welcome to post those opinions in the comments! I am returning to Brussels this evening to investigate!

Anyway, here is what I was going to say about the Burqa Ban situation in Belgium prior the resignation of the government:

This will be quick as it’s just an update on the Burqa ban stories I have been following and then I think it’s time to move on. It seems that Belgium will beat France to the punch and take the step of banning the full veil, niqab, and burqa in public spaces. The discussion in previous posts has been somewhat centred about whether this could be done in a fashion that could in any way be called “liberal”. I said that I thought that from a French perspective banning such practices was not necessarily illiberal, as a French-liberal position was consistent with the idea that it is the responsibility of the state to realize the freedom (and perhaps responsibility) of its citizens to show their faces in the public sphere and participate fully in public life (I took some issue however with the immediate connection between wearing a veil and withdrawal from public life that is I think often assumed by proponents of such bans). Some readers took issue with my rather liberal use of the word liberal.In Belgium, we see politicians using various justifications for such a ban. Corrine De Permentier from the centre-right Mouvement réformateur (MR), the self-described liberal party of francophone Belgium, is reported as saying “we have to free women from this burden”. Such a statement might call into question her liberal credentials, so long as we wish to maintain a gulf between political liberalism and coercive paternalism – this is of course assuming that the couple dozen or so women residing in Belgium who don such garments do so of their own free choice, an assumption that Madame De Permentier probably would refute. It seems that the position that it is not a matter of free choice is held to be self-evident by many supporters of the ban. In the BBC’s interview, De Permentier’s MR colleague Daniel Bacquelaine says just this, that it is not a free choice and a ban would provide rather than restrict freedom. He also points to the issues of community cohesion as a motivation for the ban, and the apparent importance of seeing the faces of other people when interacting with them. In a rather odd comment he proclaims: ”We cannot allow someone to claim to look at others without being seen“. This is obviously also very bad news for all the voyeurs in Belgium whose desire to remain anonymous while gaining enjoyment from looking at others is apparently not compatible with liberal society.

Joking aside, I think it may be necessary to exercise some suspicion about both motives and mechanisms here. As there are apparently such a small number of women residing in Belgium who actually wear full face veils, the bill has been proposed as a “preventative measure” according to its sponsor Daniel Bacquelaine. But targeted measures such as this seem likely to do just the opposite of what the bill’s supporters apparently want, i.e. encourage community cohesion. It seems more likely that a community that already feels victimised by widespread employment discrimination and acceptable casual racism will not take kindly to such targeted legislation. Given the admitted lack of urgency facing the issue in Belgium, would it not have been more constructive for these liberals to propose more positive and constructive measures to ensure the freedoms of their female Muslim constituents before going for a ban. For example, initiatives aimed at decreasing unemployment amongst women in marginalised communities, or in getting more minority women into higher education, government, the police force…would seem to be to be much more effective mechanisms for community cohesion and increasing the freedom of women both within their own communities and the Belgian community as a whole. Maybe these are already on-going and I am unaware.

Hopefully the lack of people who this bill will actually directly impact in Belgium will allow it to remain something of a non-issue.

6 people like this post.

New Lows…

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:48:02 +0000

I sincerely apologize to my distinguished readership (and to all Belgians) for the extremely low-brow nature of the link in this post, it is so insidious that I am ashamed of it by the sheer fact that it is conducted in the language I call my own, all I can really say is UGH!

Nonetheless, it does feature pretty much all of the themes covered in the last however many posts: a cameo by Guy Verhofstadt, European Council President Van Rompuy, the far-right presence in European politics at it’s most cynical and rude (happily and very purposefully degrading the very institution from which they speak).

Again, sorry. I do actually think that there is a lot to say – in terms of how we conduct ourselves in the public domain – about the sheer rudeness of this outburst and the fact that the UKIP MEP in question without doubt thinks that he will earn a good deal of political capital across the channel with his cynical and cringe worthy outburst.

I think that there is also something interesting in the sense of shame that I feel that my mother tongue is being used (by a fellow native speaker though not compatriot) in such a manner, as though it someone implicates and infects my person as well by the sole fact of our participation in a common tongue, but perhaps I am just too sensitive.

In any case, enough space has been devoted to this…playing right into their hands I suppose. Ugh.

4 people like this post.

Shaming and Naming

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:47:46 +0000

Varia: In relation to my last post, I was very flattered to see that former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt is clearly a devoted post-europe reader! While it’s often said that the problem with liberals is that they are hard to find, Verhofstadt may be pretty close to the real thing. He has thoughtfully responded to my post on the French Hijab/Burqa/identity affair with his piece in Le Monde (it’s alright for some). Diplomatically choosing his words, Verhofstadt declares that “There’s Something Rotten in La Republique Francaise”.

For those who may not know, Verhofstadt may have another reason for his affinity to post-europe: he most certainly is of the opinion that he and not van Rompuy should be the Belgian at the top of Europe. Actually, it’s Barroso’s job, he thinks he should have. He was the top candidate for the post way back in 2004, before Tony Blair stepped in and scuppered Guy’s chances in retaliation for his opposition to the Iraq war, the far more manageable Barroso was installed in his stead. In 2009 a broad spectrum of MEPs attempted to block Barroso’s reappointment with Verhofstadt again the candidate of choice. But again European leaders preferred the docile Barroso to proactive and pro-integration Verhofstadt.

Verhofstadt went up in my esteem when during some sort of city wide ‘leave a book on a bench’ initiative in Brussels, Verhofstadt said he would not be participating because he liked his books too much to lend or give them away, never mind just leave one on a bench.

In completely other news, some of you may be aware of the egregious treatment that several members of the King’s College London philosophy dept. have recently had to endure. Due to “restructuring” (at least) three very well respected senior scholars have been told they will lose their jobs. Perhaps they were lacking adequate synergy to operationalize the roll-out of the university’s strategic scalability – in which case they clearly had to go! Apparently the whole of the humanities faculty has been told they may have to reapply for their jobs (I suggest that they simply take a collective decision to refuse). The students at KCL have been at the forefront of the efforts to halt this process. It’s a testament to the excellent education these students are receiving at the KCL philosophy dept. that they have launched a wide campaign in protest, argued their case so eloquently (what do you expect, they are philosophers), and garnered wide support. You can read their letter and more about their campaign here.

American philosopher and blogger Brian Leiter has been posting news on the situation from various sources. He claims that not only are all the academics in humanities being put on alert that they may be sacked or forced to re-apply for their jobs, but while cuts are being made in areas where King’s really excels like philosophy, funds are being allocated for positions in “Culture and Identity” and “Digital and Visual Culture”, so it turns out that while KCL administrators who sees fit to fire well-respected philosophers, linguists and Britain’s only chair in Palaeography, they seem to be funding someone’s pet interests. What’s worse they are trying to sneak in these changes under the guise of necessary recession related cuts. This of course channels into the greater story that while the US, France, and Germany are pouring money into education, the Labour government in the United Kingdom is promising huge – around 10% so far – cuts in the sector.

Addendum (23/02/2010): A rather astute reader pointed out to me that my musings on Guy Verhofstadt’s brand of liberalism and the current crisis facing higher education in the United Kingdom due to draconian cuts imposed by the current labour government (and whoever is behind the debacle at KCL) are anything but “completely other news”. In an of course unverifiable assertion, said loyal reader claims that given the chance Verhofstadt would happily impose just the sort of Mandelsonian cuts that universities in the UK are now facing, cheerily gutting Belgium’s generous and productive academic sector, perhaps alongside a similar “impact” criteria for academic research (see here, but also here). She/he goes on to posit a link between attitudes held toward the welfare state in Verhofstadt’s Open VLD party and the disdain for French Republican attitudes displayed in Verhofstadt’s piece in Le Monde. I simply do not know enough on the matter to say one way or the other, I do of course welcome any suggestions…

Personal ignorance notwithstanding, I leave you with a sobering quote from famous French liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville

“If our guiding lights are ever extinguished, they would grow dim gradually and, as it were, of their own accord. By confining ourselves to practical application, we would lose sight of basic principles and, when these had been entirely forgotten, we would find it difficult to pursue the methods which derive from them. We would stop inventing new ones and would use unintelligently and clumsily scientific processes we would no longer understand.”

Good luck reading this now!

5 people like this post.

European Populism As Seen From New York Part II

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:03:55 +0000

The Rights of Woman?

I don’t mean for this to become a regular feature and I don’t want to do any free publicity for the New York Times (though they need all the help they can get these days), but I have been trying to follow this story and the way that it is presented in the Anglo-American “Liberal” (in both senses) media. The Guardian ran a comment piece earlier this week against the proposed limited ban of the full length Muslim veil in France that I didn’t think was great or even comprehensible at points. The NY Times’ piece is more direct and to the point in accusing the UMP of cynical populist electioneering tactics and trying to engineer diversions from France’s continuing high unemployment by making a national issue over the fewer than 2000 women (NYT’s figure) in France opting to wear the full length veil, Burqa, or Niqab.

The NYT also takes a strong and simple liberal line that people must be left to make these sorts of decisions about what to wear or not to wear by themselves. This of course cuts to the heart of the issue; those in favour of the ban will try to argue that women are in fact coerced, either literally or in a more subtle manner by way of abiding cultural norms, into wearing the veil. This is something of a liberal retort to a liberal objection. Faced with the question of what if such women still chose to wear the full veil, this argument seems powerless. I am not sure if the coercion argument is true or not, both sides of the debate point to anecdotal and empirical evidence to argue their case. Of course France is not a liberal country in the same way that Britain or even to some extent the US is (though often in an odd way). I wonder however if it is not incompatible with French republicanism to argue that it is the state’s responsibility as the guarantor of individual rights and freedoms to ensure that France’s Muslim women are delivered from the oppression and social exclusion from the public sphere that the ban’s proponents think the veil creates. In other words, from this view, the false or poor choice of these veiled women – granting that it is a choice – becomes the responsibility of the state to correct through various institutional mechanisms, civil education being the preferred manner, but that failing a ban on the veil in certain public places becomes acceptable.

In other words, contrary to the NY Times’ assertion that French politicians have no understanding or respect for individual liberties, from the “French liberal” perspective there is nothing illiberal about the use of state power to break arguably retrograde forms of domination and work towards the creation of liberal emancipated citizens even if these forms of “domination” are the free choice of the citizen. Obviously this model of Franco-republican-liberalism does not share the same strong aversion to state power and paternalism as the typical Anglo-American version.

This may all be to over-intellectualize the debate and the NY Times’s point. Within the current debate and context it may indeed be the case that the UMP is not terribly interested in creating “emancipated” citizens out of these veiled women thereby ushering them into the public sphere to help debate and shape the future of France, rather more in scoring cheap electoral points by stirring an already heated pot of racial tension in France and Europe and this is what the NYT and others are protesting. A similar critique was made concerning the supposed “debate on national identity” promoted by the UMP for what were widely understood to be less than honest reasons. Nonetheless, if it is an electoral ploy, it seems to be working. Anecdotal evidence from friends in Paris is that there is support for such a ban across a wide political spectrum of French voters, on the grounds, very coarsely, that ‘this is not what is done in France’. The “this” I suppose refers to wearing a full veil, withdrawing from public life, and acquiescing to a misogynistic framework of gender relations – it is of course debatable whether “this” has a necessary correlation with wearing a full length veil. The current campaign may also ignore the myriad of reasons that western Muslims don the veil. It is often reported that it is a political response to racism and xenophobia encountered in European countries. I do not know to what extent this is true. It is also debatable if when looked at in context the ban on the full veil would have the desired liberalising-emancipatory affect, or whether it would only serve to further entrench and polarize the debate. Again it may be important to point out here that it seems that such a ban on the full veil would apply to less than 2000 women in France. [added on February 7th 2010, revised slightly on March 29th 2010]

Here is a link to the French Parliamentary Committee report

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