tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/democracy-futures-new-despotisms-15107/articlesDemocracy Futures: New Despotisms – The Conversation2017-06-16T03:42:35Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/787632017-06-16T03:42:35Z2017-06-16T03:42:35ZAs Trump ups the ante, executive powers should worry Australians too<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173481/original/file-20170613-9404-9z24qs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The executive government in Australia has more power than most people realise, especially when it comes to immigration.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/codydildy/2642025303/">Cody Austin/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> between The Conversation and the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
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<p>The US president’s executive powers are a crucial way to fast-track immigration policies without congressional approval. But with Donald Trump’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-executive-orders-and-what-force-do-they-have-in-us-politics-72088">executive orders</a> barring entry to people from selected countries, these powers are taking on a new flavour.</p>
<p>While we like to think we live in a democracy with a strong separation of powers, in both Australia and the US the executive government has more power than most people realise – especially when it comes to immigration.</p>
<p>In some respects, executive powers are greater in Australia than in the US. In Australia, executive orders relating to immigration are not subject to the same checks and balances as they would be in the US. There are a few reasons for this. </p>
<h2>Differences in transparency</h2>
<p>In the US, all executive orders must be published in the <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/executive-orders">federal register</a>, the official journal of the federal government. This at least makes them visible to Congress and to the general public. </p>
<p>In Australia, there is no such obligation. A good <a href="https://theconversation.com/operation-sovereign-borders-dignified-silence-or-diminishing-democracy-21294">example of this</a> is the immigration minister’s 2013 order authorising “turn-back” operations against vessels carrying asylum seekers as part of Operation Sovereign Borders.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172209/original/file-20170605-31034-tq5vra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">As immigration minister, Scott Morrison wouldn’t release his order authorising turn-backs of asylum-seeker boats.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_in_Australia#/media/File:Scott_Morrison_Malaysian_Maritime_Enforcement_Agency_2014.jpg">DFAT</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>The order was released only after a three-year <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/apr/03/details-of-australias-asylum-seeker-turnback-operations-released-in-foi-battle">Freedom of Information battle</a> initiated by Guardian journalist Paul Farrell. Even then, the details of the turn-back operations were redacted or not released on public interest grounds. </p>
<p>In Australia, the public and the courts may not even be aware of the orders being implemented. That means Australians are unable to scrutinise executive orders to the same extent as Americans can. This, in turn, limits the people’s ability to lodge effective legal actions against the government, as they lack the information to build a case. </p>
<h2>Australia lacks a bill of rights</h2>
<p>A second major difference is that Australia does not have a bill of rights, unlike the US. The US Bill of Rights is constitutionally entrenched as the first ten amendments to the US Constitution. </p>
<p>The success in striking down Trump’s recent executive orders relied upon two main provisions: the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fifth_amendment">Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause</a>, which requires a fair trial and prohibits the government indefinitely detaining people, and the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment">First Amendment Establishment Clause</a>, which has been interpreted as prohibiting discrimination based on religion. </p>
<p>Australia’s lack of such protections (constitutional or otherwise) stymies similar legal actions. Still, the Australian government can’t do whatever it wants with immigration. In the absence of legislative authorisation, actions of the executive will only be authorised to the extent they fall under the executive power set out in <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/Constitution/chapter2">Section 61</a> of the Australian Constitution. </p>
<p>However, the precise scope of this power remains a matter of contention. Judges have generally been highly deferential in terms of what immigration measures they uphold.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/high-court-asylum-case-pits-the-executive-against-the-judiciary-28956">The Tampa affair</a> in 2001 provides a good example. The MV Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, rescued 433 asylum seekers from a vessel in distress in international waters north of Australia. </p>
<p>When the captain attempted to bring them to Australia, the prime minister, John Howard, ordered special forces to storm the vessel. The asylum seekers were detained at sea for several weeks and later sent to Nauru and New Zealand. </p>
<p>While there was no legislative basis for this decision, the full bench of the Federal Court <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/2001/1329.html">upheld</a> the action. The decision was based on a broad interpretation of executive powers in the constitution. The High Court has avoided a clear judgment on this issue in <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/HCA/2015/1.html?stem=0&synonyms=0&query=CPCF">subsequent decisions</a>.</p>
<h2>Trump tests limits of executive power</h2>
<p>In contrast, consider the fate of a series of <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-immigration-order-is-bad-foreign-policy-72053">executive orders</a> issued by President Trump. The most controversial include a 90-day travel ban on people from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan, and a 120-day suspension of the refugee resettlement program. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/02/01/2017-02281/protecting-the-nation-from-foreign-terrorist-entry-into-the-united-states">original order</a>, issued just seven days after Trump’s inauguration, caused panic and chaos at airports all over the world.</p>
<p>Both measures were claimed to be necessary for the purpose of designing <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/16/politics/how-us-vets-immigrants-donald-trump-extreme-vetting/">“extreme vetting”</a> procedures to identify and exclude Islamic extremists. No evidence was provided to show how countries were selected, or why existing procedures were inadequate. Nor were the relevant government departments and agencies consulted in advance.</p>
<p>After just one week, the order was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/federal-judge-temporarily-blocks-trumps-immigration-order-nationwide/2017/02/03/9b734e1c-ea54-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html?utm_term=.9773dae7847a">suspended</a>. A federal judge in Washington state issued a temporary nationwide restraining order. </p>
<p>The decision was based on two constitutional concerns. The first related to due process considerations arising from barring entry to US visa holders without providing them with notice or a hearing. The second was rooted in the prohibition of discrimination based on religion. </p>
<p>While the executive order did not specifically say it targeted Muslims, the court put two and two together, and found the measures discriminatory. The countries subject to the ban were all principally Muslim, and during his campaign Trump had <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/325046-trump-muslim-ban-usa/">promised</a> a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.</p>
<p>The Trump administration responded by issuing a <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/03/09/2017-04837/protecting-the-nation-from-foreign-terrorist-entry-into-the-united-states">new executive order</a>. This order provided more information justifying why nationals from the selected countries presented a heightened security risk. </p>
<p>The number of target countries was also reduced to six, with Iraq being removed, and permanent US residents were exempt. It was the inclusion of US residents in the original ban that had raised the most serious concerns about due process.</p>
<p>Despite these concessions, the courts also suspended the updated executive order. Appeals are <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-loses-appeal-but-travel-ban-fight-isnt-over-yet-72648">pending</a>. The outcome will depend on how the courts apply the long-standing “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/testing-federal-power-over-immigration/505232/">plenary power</a>” doctrine that gives the political branches a broad and largely exclusive authority over immigration. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"871143765473406976"}"></div></p>
<p>In the past, the courts have used this doctrine to uphold discriminatory immigration laws, which would have been unconstitutional in other contexts. This applies particularly to laws targeting immigrants who are outside the US. However, recent decisions indicate that the scope of the <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/36988/muslim-ban-held-unconstitutional-myth-unconstrained-immigration-power/">plenary power may be narrowing</a>.</p>
<p>Trump’s other executive orders on immigration have largely flown under the radar. <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/30/2017-02095/border-security-and-immigration-enforcement-improvements">The Executive Order on Border Security</a> authorises construction of a wall on the Mexican border and <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/18/politics/kelly-guidance-on-immigration-and-border-security/">expands</a> the use of mandatory immigration detention. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/30/2017-02102/enhancing-public-safety-in-the-interior-of-the-united-states">The Executive Order on Interior Enforcement</a> punishes “<a href="http://time.com/4797381/texas-anti-sanctuary-city-bill-protests/">sanctuary cities</a>”, or municipalities that are unco-operative with federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws. It also extends the list of non-citizens prioritised for deportation.</p>
<h2>Other than court action, what protections are there?</h2>
<p>In Australia, protections are provided first and foremost through parliamentary representation, an approach informed by Australia’s British constitutional history. </p>
<p>The government of the day sits in parliament with the assumption that an executive that fails to act in the interests of the public can be thrown out of office at the next general election. The Senate, which is not always dominated by the government of the day, can offer oversight as well.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, these protections don’t always work. New arrivals can’t vote. Even if they become citizens, refugees remain a minority and have little influence over election results. It’s also naive to assume that all waves of migrants operate as a cohesive voting bloc. </p>
<p>The immigration executive can also avoid Senate oversight. Operation Sovereign Borders again provides an instructive example. In 2013, citing national security concerns, the minister refused the Senate’s request for information. </p>
<p>Furthermore, as a result of the way that <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-australia-decides-who-is-a-genuine-refugee-72574">refugee politics</a> has unfolded in Australia, there is bipartisan support for draconian policies. The executive is unco-operative and the Senate does not always punish non-compliance. </p>
<p>For instance, when the minister refused to provide information about Operation Sovereign Borders, a <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/Public_Interest_Immunity/Report/index">Senate committee</a> recommended “political” and “procedural” penalties. None of these were carried out.</p>
<p>The parliament is also often willing to retrospectively authorise immigration-related actions once judicial proceedings have begun. This happened during the recent <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/HCA/2016/1.html?stem=0&synonyms=0&query=M68">High Court challenge</a> to the executive’s power to have asylum seekers detained on Nauru. </p>
<p>Once court proceedings were initiated, <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2015A00104">legislation</a> was swiftly introduced with bipartisan support to retrospectively authorise the government’s action. A similar approach was taken to <a href="http://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/news/tampa-affair-15-years">validate actions during the Tampa affair</a>.</p>
<p>So, as the world reacts with shock each time Trump issues another far-reaching executive order, it is worth remembering that the use of executive power in Australia is, in many ways, more expansive and unchecked than in the US. This is not limited to immigration. Australian courts have been willing to take an expansive view of executive power in a <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/%7E/%7E/link.aspx?_id=C8C131542382464EB28135A33F9EA201&_z=z">whole host of policy areas</a>.</p>
<p>Both the Australian and the US public need to remain vigilant. Tolerance of the executive’s attack on the rights of non-citizens threatens to pave the way for similar action against citizens.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78763/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Boucher receives funding from the Australian Research Council that is unassociated with this current article. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Ghezelbash does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Under US law, the president must publish all of their executive orders for public view. The Australian government is under no such obligation.Anna Boucher, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Political Science, University of SydneyDaniel Ghezelbash, Lecturer, Macquarie Law School, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/746212017-04-04T02:57:32Z2017-04-04T02:57:32ZTurkey on the verge of democide as referendum looms<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160888/original/image-20170315-5324-uym829.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Turkey may soon become one of the few countries in the history of democracy to vote for the death of democracy.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/babasteve/6344040600/">Steve Evans/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> between The Conversation and the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
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<p>The Turkish people will vote in a momentous constitutional referendum on April 16. If adopted, the proposals would drastically alter the country’s political system.</p>
<p>The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) introduced the 18 proposed changes to the constitution, with the support of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Together they secured the minimum 330 parliamentary votes required to launch a public referendum.</p>
<p>Though constitutional referendums are not uncommon in <a href="http://aa.com.tr/en/info/infographic/3637">Turkey’s political history</a>, this particular one is extremely important in terms of the very nature of the country’s political regime. The proposed amendments would take Turkey away from its current parliamentary system. In its place, the country would have an executive presidency “a la Turka”.</p>
<h2>What will ‘reform a la Turka’ look like?</h2>
<p>Despite the arguments of the AKP government, the amendments will not strengthen democracy. Quite the opposite. </p>
<p>In the most basic terms, the referendum presents a choice between parliamentary democracy (as weak as it has been in Turkey) and legally institutionalising <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/ahmet-erdi-ozturk-tar-g-zayd-n/turkey-s-draft-constitutional-amendments-harking-back-to-1876">single-man rule</a>.</p>
<p>The amendments will abolish the post of prime minister and make the president the official head of the executive. The president will then name one or more vice presidents who will inherit the same powers for 45 days in the event the president cannot carry out their duties. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160887/original/image-20170315-5350-fw09hs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The proposed constitutional changes were drafted with one person in mind – President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rt_erdogan/18390076314/">Recep Tayyip Erdoğan/flickr</a></span>
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<p>The president will be able to remain leader of their political party and be given the power to choose cabinet ministers. The president will also be able to appoint these individuals from outside parliament without any vetting processes or being accountable to the public. </p>
<p>Parliament will still be regarded as the legislature, but only in theory. Deputies will continue to draft, discuss and vote on new laws, which will be forwarded to the president for final approval. </p>
<p>However, the president will be able to bypass parliament completely and introduce legislation by issuing decrees with the force of law. The president will also have the power to dissolve parliament and call new elections.</p>
<p>Constitutional law experts like <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/law-experts-criticize-turkeys-proposed-constitutional-amendment/a-36764121">Ergun Ozbudun</a> have strongly criticised the proposed structure, saying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What we have here is the weakening of legislation while the president, with full executive powers, forms a parliament under his influence.</p>
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<p>The constitutional amendments will leave the president in charge of the state budget. As the sole authority to declare a state of emergency, the president will also have complete control over security policy and any decisions related to the deployment of military force. The right to declare war, however, will remain with parliament. </p>
<p>The president will have the power to appoint all senior civil servants, and to restructure ministries and public institutions at his discretion.</p>
<p>Most disturbingly, judicial independence will disappear as the amendments will allow the president to appoint half of the country’s most senior judges. The other half will be elected by parliament. This means that if the president and the majority party in the Grand National Assembly happen to be from one political party (as is currently the case), a single authority will appoint all the members of Turkey’s high judicial bodies.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3sBjE5wbwDg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘I hope this will be good for our country. I hope this will be the beginning of a new era.’</span></figcaption>
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<p>Let not the government and its well-funded army of experts and <a href="https://rsf.org/en/news/media-ownership-monitor-government-control-over-turkish-media-almost-complete">media outlets</a> fool anyone. The regime’s amendments have been drafted to personally benefit the current president, <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-erdogan-becoming-a-turkish-dictator-63294">Recep Tayyip Erdoğan</a>. The aim is to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/10/turkeys-president-erdogan-approves-constitutional-boost-to-his-powers">consolidate</a> all powers – executive, legislative and judicial – in one office.</p>
<h2>An ironic death</h2>
<p>If the Turkish public votes for the constitutional changes, the citizens will effectively terminate democracy in their country. </p>
<p>With surveys so far indicating a <a href="https://www.dailysabah.com/elections/2017/03/14/majority-of-polls-predict-yes-result-in-referendum">slight majority</a> for the “yes” vote, Turkey may become one of the few countries in the history of democracy to democratically choose the death of democracy. It would be a vote to commit what <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/portfolio_page/life-and-death-of-democracy/">John Keane</a> calls “democide”, or democratic suicide.</p>
<p>The fundamental challenge for democracy is that everything is open to challenge and repeal when supported by enough numbers.</p>
<p>In fact, the inclusive nature of this political system necessarily exposes it to diverse views and competing ideas. There are few mechanisms to prevent ideals capable of ending democracy from entering its midst.</p>
<p>So actors who reject democracy are able to slip into the system. And when large enough numbers support these individuals and groups, they can mobilise to topple the very system that enabled their accession. </p>
<p>Simply stated, the difference between democracy and authoritarianism can be a matter of popular choice.</p>
<h2>Democracy at the mercy of its own frailty</h2>
<p>We must be awake to democracy’s fragility. Once constituted, it is not guaranteed to progress on a smooth, linear path. </p>
<p>The nature of democracy ensures it remains susceptible to ending its own life. If the public supports it, its existence can be brought to a decisive end as much as it may be allowed to flourish.</p>
<p>Turkey’s proposed presidential system will remain multi-party, still holding regular elections every five years. Yet the relatively powerless parliament, faced with a presidency that has the constitutional mandate to form government, influence the legislature, control state institutions, issue a state of emergency and dissolve parliament almost unimpeded, offers little protection to a democracy in the face of serious attack and popular repeal.</p>
<p>If the “yes” vote wins, the Turkish people will not have to wait long to see the end of their <a href="https://theconversation.com/turkey-coup-erdogans-tightening-grip-will-test-relations-with-the-west-62706">long-troubled</a> democracy. The AKP is fervently pushing for the presidential system with one person in mind – Erdoğan. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-tragedy-of-turkish-democracy-in-five-acts-62678">Turkey’s decline</a> into authoritarian rule under Erdoğan’s leadership certainly does not provide any hope that he would, given these extraordinary powers, abide by any democratic principles. </p>
<p>Taking advantage of his electoral <a href="http://www.politico.eu/article/recep-tayyip-erdogan-new-ataturk-turkey-coup-eu/">popularity</a>, the regime change is the AKP and Erdoğan’s attempt to institutionalise and legitimise the creeping in of one-man rule that has long been occurring under their reign.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/160890/original/image-20170315-5321-19ez72q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Turkey’s uncertain future proves that democracy remains susceptible to ending its own life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Steffen Kamprath/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If Turkish citizens grant unrestrained power to Erdoğan, they will have done so with full knowledge of the illiberal and repressive character of his rule. There will be no pleading innocent. Nevertheless, the average citizen will not have played as significant a role as the political elite in bringing about democracy’s demise in Turkey.</p>
<p>The elites, after all, are the mass mobilisers, the agenda setters and the visionaries of their societies. All too often, participation in modern representative democracy is reduced to the casting of a single ballot. </p>
<p>But, even with this in mind, it will be true to say that, by giving their consent, the Turkish people were complicit in committing democide.</p>
<p>With Turkey’s impending democide, we can perhaps begin to understand just how precarious a thing democracy is, and how easily it can be lost. The open plain of democracy means that there is nothing that cannot be reworked, contested or cancelled. Even democracy itself, when backed by sufficient numbers, can be made to walk the plank. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>The author dedicates this article to the amazing faculty of academics who became family during his nearly year-long stay in Istanbul in 2016, and to every academic in Turkey who lives with the constant threat of jail, dismissal, beatings and public slander.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74621/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tezcan Gumus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If the ‘yes’ vote prevails in this month’s constitutional referendum, the Turkish people may be in the rare position of democratically approving the death of their own democracy.Tezcan Gumus, PhD Candidate, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/722692017-02-06T19:13:36Z2017-02-06T19:13:36ZTrump, the wannabe king ruling by ‘twiat’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155395/original/image-20170202-1657-cdeeru.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump's reinvention of the royal fiat as rule-by-tweet, or 'twiat', is anti-democratic and needs to be resisted.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump?lang=en">Twitter</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Just weeks after his inauguration as US president, it is clear that Donald Trump is making a further bold claim on power, one that goes beyond the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-executive-orders-and-what-force-do-they-have-in-us-politics-72088">executive orders</a> that are rightly drawing so much attention. He is reinventing the royal fiat by novel means: the rule-by-tweet, or “twiat”. This move is not an extension of popular democracy, but its enemy, and it needs to be resisted.</p>
<p>We are becoming used to Trump’s new way not just of sustaining a political campaign, but of making policy. We wake up to news of another <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/mexico-president-donald-trump-enrique-pena-nieto-border-wall/">state</a>, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/toyota-12bn-value-plummet-shares-stock-market-donald-trump-tweet-move-mexico-tax-a7512096.html">corporation</a>, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-trump-berkeley-20170202-story.html">institution</a> or <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511781106/trump-chelsea-manning-an-ungrateful-traitor-for-criticizing-obama">individual</a> caught in the crossfire of his tweets. Corporations and investors are setting up “Twitter Response Units” and “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/01/06/app-warns-investors-donald-trump-tweets-companies/">Trump Triggers</a>” in case the next tweet is aimed at them. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"827118012784373760"}"></div></p>
<p>The process is so alien to the ways of making policy that have evolved over decades in complex democracies that it is tempting to dismiss it as just funny or naive. But that would be a huge mistake.</p>
<p>A tweet of Trump’s opinion at any moment on a particular issue is just that: an expression of the temporary opinion of one person, albeit one with his hands on more power-levers than almost any other person in the world. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155108/original/image-20170201-12678-1gpou3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trump’s opinions at any moment are subject to change.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sasha Kimel/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such expressions matter, for sure, to <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump?lang=en">Trump’s Twitter followers</a>. But, although one might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, they do not (at 23 million) constitute a significant proportion of the world’s population, or even a large proportion of the US population.</p>
<h2>The king holds court</h2>
<p>A Trump tweet only becomes news if it is reported as news. And it only starts to become policy if those who interpret policy, including the media, start to <a href="http://www.afr.com/news/world/asia/china-weighs-response-to-donald-trumps-tweet-storm-20161205-gt4347">treat this news as policy</a>. Until then, the Trump tweet remains at most a claim on power. </p>
<p>But once key institutions treat it as if were already an enactment of power, it quickly becomes one. Worse, it inaugurates a whole new way of doing power whose compatibility with democracy and global peace is questionable.</p>
<p>Imagine you are a diplomat, trying to schedule a meeting for yourself, or your political master, with Trump in a few weeks’ time. Is it sensible for you to rely on the confidentiality of the meeting? Could a poorly chosen phrase or look – or indeed your most carefully argued reasoning – provoke a tweet that publicly mocks your whole strategy?</p>
<p>How do you deal with a figure who claims the power to broadcast on his own terms his gut reactions to whatever you say or propose? Yes, you can tweet back, but that is already to give up on the quiet space of discussion that was once diplomacy’s refuge.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"827002559122567168"}"></div></p>
<p>The impact of rule-by-tweet is potentially profound: above all, on policy, whether global or domestic, legal or commercial. A new type of power is being claimed and, it seems, recognised: the power, by an individual’s say-so, to make things happen, the twiat. Just the sort of power that <a href="https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-glorious-revolution-of-1688/">revolutions</a> were <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/201524045/The-American-Revolution-and-the-Early-Federal-Republic">fought</a> to abolish.</p>
<p>If Trump is the putative Tweet King, who are his courtiers? Surely they’re the mainstream media institutions that regularly report Trump’s tweets as if they were policy. </p>
<p>If a medieval king’s courtiers refused to pass on his word to the wider world, its impact changed. While courtiers could be replaced overnight, contemporary media corporations cannot (for now at least). So why should the media act as if they were Trump’s courtiers?</p>
<p>We must not underestimate the short-term pressure on media corporations to conform to Trump’s claim on power. For sure, there will be an audience if they report Trump’s tweets, and their financial need to grab audiences wherever they can has never been greater. </p>
<p>But, if news values still mean something, they refer not only to financial imperatives, but to what should count as news. And norms about news must have some relation to what passes for acceptable in a democracy rather than an autocracy.</p>
<h2>Why is the ‘twiat’ anti-democratic?</h2>
<p>Some might say: Trump’s tweets are just the new way of doing democracy, “get with the program” (in the words of Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer). But, as the grim history of mid-20th-century Europe shows, authoritarian grabs on power only ever worked because their anti-democratic means were accepted by those around them as a novel way of “doing democracy”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KVVTTFKRzAY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">White House spokesman Sean Spicer says officials must ‘get with the program’ or go.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The “twiat” is anti-democratic for two reasons. First, it claims a power (to name individuals, pronounce policy, and condemn actions) against which there is no redress. Its work is done once uttered from the mouth of the “king”.</p>
<p>Second, and more subtly, allowing such power back into political decision-making undermines the slower, more inclusive forms of discussion and reflection that gives modern political democratic institutions their purpose and purchase in the first place.</p>
<p>Trump’s claim to a new form of charismatic power through Twitter is, in part, the flip-side of the damaged legitimacy of today’s democratic process. But, instead of curing that problem, it closes the door on it. The presidential tweeting ushers us into a new space that is no longer recognisable as democratic: a space where complex policy becomes not just too difficult but unnecessary, although its substitutes can still be tweeted.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P0sPidpwYCA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Is Trump’s Twitter feed bypassing dishonest media or bypassing the democratic process?</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Can anything be done to stop this? A good start would be to stop reporting the tweets of our would-be Twitter king as if they were news, let alone policy. </p>
<p>Let Trump’s tweets have no more claim on democracy’s attention than the changing opinions of any other powerful figure. Refuse the additional claim to power that Trump’s Twitter stream represents. </p>
<p>Fail to refuse that claim, and all of us risk accepting by default a new form of rule that undermines the restraints on power on which both democracy and media freedoms, in the long term, depend.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72269/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Couldry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Donald Trump is reinventing the royal fiat by novel means: the rule-by-tweet, or ‘twiat’. This move is not an extension of popular democracy, but its enemy, and it needs to be resisted.Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics and Political ScienceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/722712017-02-02T23:28:24Z2017-02-02T23:28:24ZTo resist Trump’s tyranny, just don’t comply<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155125/original/image-20170201-12678-c0zfvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Just say no! Tyranny depends on mass subservience.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/noradbase/32298137402/">Alek S./flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>After his unexpected election win, the immediate question was what would US President Donald Trump actually <em>do</em>? Would his administration be as confused as his speeches or as cunningly effective as his campaign?</p>
<p>In the interim, far from “draining the swamp”, he has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html">assembled a team</a> of billionaires, family and members of the far-right.</p>
<p>On his inauguration – just as they were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/trump-inauguration-crowd-sean-spicers-claims-versus-the-evidence">lying</a> about the size of the audience – LGBT rights, health care, civil liberties and climate change disappeared from the White House homepage. The latter was <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspend-plan-delete-epa-climate-web-page">scrubbed</a> from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website too.</p>
<p>Rounding out his <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/27/donald-trumps-first-week-power-executive-orders-tweets-president/">first week in office</a>, Trump signed a litany of executive orders: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/01/23/can-president-trumps-executive-order-unravel-the-affordable-care-act/?utm_term=.2d6e6a075796">scaling back</a> parts of his predecessor’s Affordable Care Act, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/federal-hiring-freeze.html?_r=0">freezing federal hiring</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/24/trump-gives-green-light-to-dakota-access-keystone-xl-oil-pipelines/?utm_term=.d0ccbda45fe6">greenlighting two oil pipelines</a>, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-trump-administration-orders-epa-media-blackout-contract-freeze/">halting payments to the EPA</a> and imposing a media blackout on it; and <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-ban-will-have-lasting-and-damaging-impacts-on-the-worlds-refugees-72001">denying entry to refugees</a> and immigrants from <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/01/31/512439121/trumps-executive-order-on-immigration-annotated">certain Muslim-majority countries</a>.</p>
<p>He called for a shutdown of parts of the internet in the name of fighting terror. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yfEG4oWz5AY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump argues for ‘closing the internet up’ to counter terrorism.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/26/politics/donald-trump-mexico-import-tax-border-wall/">20% tariff</a> on imports from Mexico would pay to “build that wall”. Trump also claimed that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/donald-trump-torture-works">torture “works”</a>. </p>
<p>In short, Trump seems ruthlessly efficient, wiping out America’s progressive legacy with deft pen-strokes of his grasping, little hand.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CZkopd9m1lw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Project’s Waleed Aly lists everything President Trump has done in his first week of office.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Servitude under Trump</h2>
<p>For many who oppose this suite of unnerving policies, the question is how can Trump be <em>legitimately</em> resisted?</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_de_La_Bo%C3%A9tie">Étienne de La Boétie</a> – the 16th-century French judge and writer – offered a simple, yet elegant <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=like+a+great+Colossus+whose+pedestal+has+been+pulled+away%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=z8cLUWoT_t&sig=9R0u9Ymtm0pyvOxLLJKwLkqlb9s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKnoiDi-vRAhWCE5QKHVQsCMsQ6AEIJjAC#v=on">answer</a>: withdraw support so that “like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away”, the all-powerful ruler is forced to “fall of his own weight and break in pieces”.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155120/original/image-20170201-12681-l548s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563) was a founder of modern political philosophy in France.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>La Boétie reasoned that the rule of any government acting tyrannically would abruptly end as soon as its subjects withdrew their active support, for such power only comes from the “<a href="https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-voluntary-servitude">voluntary servitude</a>” of its subjects. The tyrant has “nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you”. </p>
<p>Given that governments rule by a very few – the ruling class and its functionaries – they are highly susceptible to non-co-operation of the people. </p>
<p>La Boétie’s essay, <em>Discours de la servitude volontaire</em> (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), is his greatest contribution to political thought. It remains relevant, 440 years after it was published, in an age when the public’s understanding of political resistance to institutionalised authority is <a href="http://www.startribune.com/house-hearing-ends-amid-protest-after-bill-cracking-down-on-demonstrators-moves-forward/411660166/">largely quarantined</a> by anti-protest and anti-assembly powers.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155123/original/image-20170201-12681-1rhhnsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1276&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Étienne de La Boétie/Wikipedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The essay concerns tyranny – the rule of one. America is still a democracy, of course, though it is <a href="https://theconversation.com/american-elections-ranked-worst-among-western-democracies-heres-why-56485">now openly</a> “<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com.au/economist-intelligence-unit-downgrades-united-states-to-flawed-democracy-2017-1?r=US&IR=T">flawed</a>”, with some pointing to its emergent <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746">oligarchy</a>. At the same time, attacks on the media, lying to the public, denigrating facts/science, scapegoating minorities and nepotism are all hallmarks of tyranny. </p>
<p>The notable feature of La Boétie’s political theory is that the origin of tyrannical power is irrelevant: whether by election, inheritance or force, if rulership is oppressive, it is tyrannical.</p>
<p>La Boétie interrogates the mind of the ruler and the subservient, and the strategies to overcome this relation of servitude. His second key insight flows from his counter-intuitive analysis of this dynamic. He does not place political agency or power in the hands of the tyrant, but in the people themselves. He <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=Poor,+wretched,+and+stupid+peoples+you+let+yourselves+be+deprived+before+your+own+eyes.&source=bl&ots=z8cLUWpU-v&sig=etUzfHpXdgP3BEFI91rwSZI2GYc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb4oaVj-vR">rails</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, you let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All your “misfortune” descends “not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is”.</p>
<h2>Responsibility for freedom is our own</h2>
<p>La Boétie is unremitting in his criticism of servitude – the servile are “traitors” to themselves. They give tyranny its “eyes” to surveil, its arms to beat and its feet to trample freedom. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, La Boétie intends his work not to cajole but to awaken these voluntary servants to the understanding that their own liberation is in their power. As he <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=Poor,+wretched,+and+stupid+peoples+you+let+yourselves+be+deprived+before+your+own+eyes.&source=bl&ots=z8cLUWpU-v&sig=etUzfHpXdgP3BEFI91rwSZI2GYc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb4oaVj-vR">writes</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This principle of non-co-operation forms the root of civil disobedience movements today. If tyrannical commands cannot be enforced without subjects to do the enforcing, then withdrawal of both <em>consent</em> and <em>action</em> is a pragmatic, peaceful and legitimate means for conventional politics to resist even the most narcissistic of wig-wearers today.</p>
<p>And we can point to real-life heroes acting out this defiance today: <a href="http://www.salon.com/2017/01/26/the-twitter-rebellion-badlands-national-park-is-the-latest-national-park-to-defy-president-trump/">Badlands National Park</a> breaking its gag order to tweet facts of science, or NASA with its <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-nasa-twitter-resist-national-parks-climate-change-rogue-a7546666.html">Rogue 1</a> doing the same.</p>
<p>At the same time, reliance on individual action can be confused and contradictory. For example, the <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/28/politics/donald-trump-travel-ban/">battle at the airports</a> over the Muslim immigration ban now seems to be between federal customs and Department of Homeland Security agents enforcing the executive order, and those following the Federal Court order barring deportations. The separation of powers is reliant on people serving this separation. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/155119/original/image-20170201-12681-vuote7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People gathered at airports around the US to protest Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Livingston/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>La Boétie was quick to realise that the key question is not how tyrannies remain in power, but why subjects do not withdraw their support. Fear and ideology, self-interest and habit all conspire so that the many acquiesce in their own subjection. In Trump’s oft-tweeted word: <em>Sad!</em></p>
<p>So, while acts of peaceful withdrawal should be enough to cripple any oppressive regime, La Boétie’s thesis holds only on the condition that <em>the many</em> oppose <em>the one</em>.</p>
<h2>Clinging to the tyrant</h2>
<p>Here we run into two major problems. Some people lack the critical distance from their social order to question it. More problematic are those who benefit from Trump’s rule. </p>
<p>For La Boétie, this class is the <em>most</em> dangerous. Those who “cling to the tyrant”, who take “the bait toward slavery”, offer him their loyalty in return for institutionalised bribery (including, in today’s idiom, state contracts, tax breaks, administrative assistance and positions of influence). This 1% become the willing hands of tyranny, reaching throughout society.</p>
<p><a href="https://libcom.org/files/Landauer_Revolution_and_Other_Writings.pdf">Gustav Landauer</a> calls this the “internal flaw”, that the people who “feed” tyranny “must stop doing so”. At this point, however, La Boétie leaves us with pure voluntarism as some rational hope against tyranny.</p>
<p>But even this idea can be educative. Much has been made of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/politics/richard-spencer-punched-attack.html">punch on Richard Spencer</a>, the neo-Nazi who <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand-spencer-0">advocates “ethnic cleansing”</a>. Some say that, rather than street violence, resistance must instead go “high”. Having a grandfather who was tortured by the SS, I am less sanguine. Spencer and his ilk promise horrific violence on a mass scale. Believe them. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aFh08JEKDYk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Richard Spencer, the man credited with coining the term “alt-right”, is punched in the head while talking with a reporter.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nevertheless, such punches seem very ineffective in making allies of centrists against Trump. For those who find such acts of resistance unsavoury La Boétie presents an effective middle ground. You don’t have to do anything: just don’t comply, <em>ever</em>. This principle could even appeal to libertarians.</p>
<p>So while La Boétie offers us no panacea for freedom, especially in overcoming political structures of tyranny, he helps jar our thought into recognising that it is <em>we</em> who can act for <em>our</em> freedom. To this end, he offers a legitimate means for even the most apolitical subject to resist: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem today is that many are willing to serve in their own oppression and even more willing to serve in the oppression of others. So the real question he leaves us with is: what are we to do against the willing servants of tyranny?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mu_hCThhzWU?wmode=transparent&start=90" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Has the strategy that Michelle Obama advocated at last year’s Democratic National Convention worked?</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72271/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon Brincat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The origin of tyrannical power is irrelevant: whether by election, inheritance or force, if rulership is oppressive, it is tyrannical. And the way to beat it is deceptively simple: refuse to comply.Shannon Brincat, Research Fellow in International Relations, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/697782016-12-16T21:28:09Z2016-12-16T21:28:09ZWar and democracy in the age of Trump<p>The ancient Greek historian <a href="http://www.shsu.edu/%7Ehis_ncp/Heropers.html">Herodotus</a> once observed that Persian rulers indulged the habit of getting drunk when making important decisions. When sober and sensible next morning, their custom was to reconsider their decision, and either stick to it, or revise or reject it outright. They had another method of decision-making, he noted: they took decisions when sober, then affirmed or declined them when drunk. </p>
<p>His story was probably apocryphal. But let’s for a moment take the cue of Herodotus and imagine a polity whose ruler outdoes the Persians, by a mile: a ruler who is gripped by narcissistic urges, an ethnarch who feels compelled to take decisions and do deals all day and night, intoxicated by his own power. </p>
<p>Another concocted fiction, perhaps. But on the eve of the inauguration of Donald Trump, speculation mounts everywhere that the world is in for trouble at the hands of a deal-making, decision-taking president high on his vast executive powers and his narcissistic self. “Trying to predict how Trump will behave is very difficult,” says Harvard’s <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/unpredictable-commander-in-chief_us_5847f77ae4b0b9feb0da4b6d">Joseph Nye</a>. “This country has never experienced a commander in chief who is this unpredictable. And that surely is dangerous.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150427/original/image-20161216-26077-1rsta8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The power of the US president and the unpredictability of Donald Trump is a dangerous combination.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Randall Hill/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most serious rumours in circulation centre on the possibility that Trump is either preparing to launch a major war, or that his deal-making impulsiveness will <a href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1100/RR1140/RAND_RR1140.pdf">lead to a major war, for instance with China</a>. Such rumours of course overlook the fact that the United States already has troops and military installations in 150 countries, and that it is engaged in constant drone battling and other forms of armed manoeuvring and engagement. The American imperium is <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2016/05/american-imperium/4/">permanently at war</a>. </p>
<p>Whatever Trump does, we can be sure that he won’t break with this pattern. He’ll preserve the all-party consensus, the peculiar fact that America has no peace party. He’ll keep the war machine switched on; succour the widespread belief among the citizens of America that their country has a global responsibility to keep the world safe, for America, in its own self-image. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150472/original/image-20161216-26137-ih71z5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">US drone strike in Renay Parchao area of Afghanistan, 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.dawn.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All this suggests it’s a good moment to look at <em><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10638.html">On War and Democracy</a></em>, the latest publication of Christopher Kutz, the leading scholar of war, ethics and democracy at the University of California Berkeley. This timely book, actually a set of essays, was published some months before Trump’s campaign victory, but the political and ethical territory it covers is more or less the same terrain in which President Trump will operate. </p>
<p>The background ethical question raised by Kutz is whether or not democracies are ethically duty-bound to protect others. Are they obliged to intervene militarily in support of people in far-away lands and cities, the infernos of Aleppo and Idlib, for instance, whose citizens are victimised by insufferable bullying, or terrible violence that crushes and destroys the lives of many tens of thousands? </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150428/original/image-20161216-26062-12l93fj.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1123&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Princeton University Press (2016)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a fine scholar of ethics, Kutz is well aware of normative dilemmas and aporia. None is arguably so fundamental as the ethical dilemma that confronts all states that claim to be democratic: if they intervene in contexts riddled with violence, as India did in Bangladesh in 1971, and the United States first did in Mexico, the Philippines and Cuba, and has repeatedly done around the world during recent decades, then democracies are readily accused of double standards. They are said to have violated the territorial “sovereignty” and autonomy of peoples entitled to govern themselves. Democracies and their democrats are called meddlers, autocrats, colonisers and imperialists.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if democratic states fiddle while people’s lives are ruined, and choose by design or default not to intervene (recent cases include Syria, Ukraine, Rwanda, Palestine and Timor Leste), then democracies are easily accused of hypocrisy. They are condemned for their wilfully blind eyes, their duplicitous ignoring of cruelty that flouts the democratic principle that all people should be treated as dignified equals. </p>
<p>Commander-in-Chief Trump will likely tweet, and treat, this ethical dilemma as an irrelevance in the jungles of global politics. Making America strong again will for him have little or nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with threats, tough bargaining and triumphant deals. It’s a sign of the times that Kutz’s <em>On War and Democracy</em> shares a similar starting point, but for quite different reasons. Using philosophical argument rather than populist prattle, Kutz tries to set aside the ethical dilemma, and to do so by beating a double retreat. </p>
<p>To begin with, the distinguished philosopher opts for a trimmed-down understanding of democracy. For Kutz, it isn’t a whole way of life, as it was for Tocqueville, and today remains for many citizens and political thinkers. He speaks instead of “agentic democracy”. It’s an unlovely neologism, by which he means that democracy is a set of liberal norms centred on free and fair elections protected by law and the “public working out of shared values, in a process of dialogue and accommodation”. </p>
<p>Democracy in this liberal sense is for Kutz not a universal principle. It’s certainly valuable, and to be valued, by decent and reasonable people. But it’s just one political norm among many possible others, including opposite norms such as the sovereign right of states to declare and prosecute war.</p>
<p>What is interesting is that Kutz uses this cut-back definition of democracy to beat a second retreat. He argues against efforts to draw the democratic ethic into the dirty business of geopolitics, military intervention and killing and maiming people. Drawing upon the work of the American philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel">Thomas Nagel</a> and others, the true task of a theory of democratic ethics, says Kutz, is prickliness. The ethic of democracy should be crabby, querulous, ornery. Its ethical obligation is to stand back from talk of war, to sound the alarm against military folly. The democratic ethic should apply pressure on all theories and practices of war by calling into question their claimed permissibility. </p>
<p>Kutz says little about the unfinished global discussion that began a generation ago concerning the ethics of the atomic bomb. It remains relevant, if only because, in the hands of thinkers and writers otherwise as different as <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1179527.Common_Sense_and_Nuclear_Warfare">Bertrand Russell</a>, <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo5953283.html">Hans Jonas</a> and George Orwell (“<a href="http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb">The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle</a>,” he soberly reminded his readers in October 1945), democratic ethics was inclined not just to call for a halt to the production of weapons of war, but to demand the abolition of war itself. </p>
<p>Kutz is rather silent about this line of radical thinking born of the nuclear age. He’s also silent about a more recent version of the absurdity-of-war argument: the rising claim by many people and organisations on our planet that war provides no solution to our principal security challenges, which include species destruction and climate change. Kutz downplays these concerns. He instead wants to point out that the ethic of democracy, as he defines it, stands equally in tension with the old state-centric principle of <em>jus ad bellum</em> (the untrammelled right of “sovereign” states to declare war), the UN Charter and its restriction of war to self-defence, and muscular human rights norms that have been used, in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, to justify military intervention.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150470/original/image-20161216-26102-1mempn3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Homs, once a major industrial centre and third largest city in Syria, February 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">micstagesuk.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The ethic of democracy, says Kutz, is equally opposed to ISIS and al-Qaeda forms of violence that don’t conform to the “regular war constellation” model of uniformed, hierarchically ordered armies. The salient point made by Kutz is that the ethic of democracy is <em>against violence</em>. It is also telic. That’s to say that the norm of democracy should be seen as “relentlessly critical”, as a restraint on “collective violence, not as a new source of war’s legitimacy”. This is the “operating conceit” of <em>On War and Democracy</em>, says Kutz: “the respect for our personhood that animates democracy demands a humility in the face of conflict, rather than the imperial assertiveness that has characterised so much democratic rhetoric, from the French Revolution to the Second Iraq War”.</p>
<p>Like all vanities, the operating conceit of this book is not without limitations, several of them far from trivial. Classicists will note that had Kutz paid attention to scholarship (by <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/war-democracy-and-culture-classical-athens?format=HB&isbn=9780521190336">David Pritchard and others</a>) on the ancient Greek democracies, he would have been forced to ponder, and to worry philosophically about, their ingrained bellicosity. <a href="http://thelifeanddeathofdemocracy.org/">The Life and Death of Democracy</a> points, for instance, to the discomforting but still little-known fact that the norm of <em>dēmokratia</em> originally harboured connotations of military rule. Usually translated as “to rule” or “to govern”, for instance, the root verb <em>kratein</em> [κρατείν] meant mastery, military conquest, getting the upper hand over somebody or something. </p>
<p>Some readers will point out that Kutz says practically nothing about the entanglement of the ethic of democracy with violence <em>inside</em> democracies. Think of the Second Amendment, and the way American democrats use it to justify the God-given right to bear arms in public. Other readers will spot the way this book is mainly silent about the worrying spread in our time of privatised violence perpetrated by <em>condottieri</em> unhindered by the “laws of war” (around 50% of the US forces that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq comprised contractors employed by for-profit companies such as Blackwater). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150474/original/image-20161216-26116-wq0pza.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Private contractor soldier in Iraq, 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">University of Texas at Austin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Still other readers will note how Kutz unwisely presumes, with Francis Fukuyama and other American liberal ideologues, that the normative ideal of “democracy remains unchallenged, even unchallengeable”. Would that things were so simple. This liberal presumption, as these field notes have been pointing out for several years, is crumbling fast. Understandably, since not only does it understate the multiple dysfunctions that are now paralysing states called democracies. The end of history thesis is equally blind to the great resilience of its competitor enemies, including the new phantom democracies of Russia, Iran and China, which are not simply species of “managerial capitalism”, as Kutz claims they are. These regimes are better understood as <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/the-new-despotism-of-the-21st-century-imagining-the-end-of-democracy/">despotisms</a>. </p>
<p>This brings me, finally, to the most serious weakness of this book: the way Kutz’s cut-back liberal definition of democracy concedes too much ground by ignoring recent efforts (<em>The Life and Death of Democracy</em> is my own contribution) to redescribe democracy as not just one norm among others, but as a universal norm. The theory of monitory democracy tries to do this. It treats democracy as a universal norm because it defines democracy as suspicion of all talk of Grand Universal Norms, such as the Market, the Sovereign Nation or God. Monitory democracy puts pressure on all of these arrogant First Principles to admit their own particularity. </p>
<p>Democracy so conceived is a type of anti-foundationalist ethic. It is an ethic of humility and equality. It is an ethic that stands against all forms of arrogant arbitrary power, including on the battlefield. Seen in this way, the ethic of democracy is much more than a <em>prickly outsider</em> of war, and talk of war, as Kutz supposes. The ethic of democracy instead <em>demands entry into the citadels of military power</em>. It does so because it knows of the follies and idiocies of those who arrogantly plan and prosecute war. It therefore calls for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html">slow thinking</a>, for public openness and for the restraint of arbitrary power, especially when it is backed by weapons that kill, maim and destroy humans and the biomes in which they dwell. </p>
<p>Exactly this point about democracy as a universal ethical principle was made with great eloquence against the Blair government by the convenor of the 2016 Iraq Inquiry. In all matters of military power, said <a href="http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/247010/2016-09-06-sir-john-chilcots-public-statement.pdf">Sir John Chilcot</a> in his executive summary, “all aspects of any intervention” must be “calculated, debated and challenged with the utmost rigour”. </p>
<p>In practice, this monitory democracy principle means, of course, that many if not most proposed military interventions would simply never happen. It means, too, that whenever violence of any form is legitimately used under battlefield conditions, for instance in self-defence or for the protection of vulnerable people, those responsible for the violence cannot ever be allowed to wield their power arbitrarily. They must give reasons for what they do, or are planning to do. They must not, and they cannot be allowed to, rape, pillage and wantonly destroy. </p>
<p>When democracy is understood as a universal ethical principle, the double retreat recommended by Kutz looks much too timid, and philosophically unconvincing. It nevertheless has important merits. <em>On War and Democracy</em> is thoughtful, erudite, a cut well above the old discredited consequentialism of “<a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5302.html">democratic peace</a>” theorems. The book draws our attention to subjects as varied as torture, assassination, drones, secrecy and the dilemmas posed by revolutionary transitions to democracy. But the greatest strength of <em>On War and Democracy</em> is surely that it speaks to our troubled times. It’s a philosophical abreaction against the fact that the American democratic empire – like its two predecessors, classical Athens and revolutionary France – is today permanently at war. </p>
<p>We live in an age of “belligerent democracy”, says Kutz. We certainly do. The times they are a changin’, and unless things markedly improve, democrats who aren’t already swimming may well sink like stones, into public irrelevance. In this strange new era of global war, Kutz powerfully reminds us, the ethic of democracy is being victimised by imperial interventions in the name of democracy. Against political talk of “realism”, “war on terror”, “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect”, his fundamental point is that the ethic of democratic politics is irenic. But it’s much more than that. It’s a non-violent weapon that is militant; it’s a precautionary principle that is as active as it is everywhere, and at all times, indispensable. The ethic of democracy speaks against the beasts of war, as surely it will be required to do during the Trump era that has already begun. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/150473/original/image-20161216-26082-1u9dp5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">American-built Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet on a training exercise, 2016.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">paper4pc.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p><em>This column piece is also part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures-14603">Democracy Futures</a> series, a joint global initiative with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The series aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69778/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once observed that Persian rulers indulged the habit of getting drunk when making important decisions. When sober and sensible next morning, their custom was to reconsider…John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/672612016-10-24T03:30:00Z2016-10-24T03:30:00ZThe curious power of hate propaganda in open societies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142279/original/image-20161019-20316-1wzgpfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C64%2C639%2C389&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protestants hold a Sunday service in the open air in Jakarta. Their efforts to erect their own church buildings have been blocked by hardline Muslim groups.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cherian George</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>When George Orwell contemplated trends toward tyranny in 1984, he saw a world where truths were violently obliterated to leave Big Brother’s lies unchallenged. This negation of knowledge and erasure of human experience, <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter1.3.html">he mused</a>, was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… more terrifying than mere torture or death.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But something curious has happened in the post-totalitarian world, which even Orwell’s penetrating gaze did not foresee. </p>
<p>Today, demagogues don’t actually need to silence or censor their opponents. It turns out their followers are quite happy to succumb to wilful blindness, believing what they want to believe even as contradictory evidence stares them in the face.</p>
<p>One result of this is open societies remain surprisingly susceptible to misinformation that instigates intimidation, discrimination and violence against vulnerable groups. Untruths doled out in hate campaigns find ready buyers even in a free marketplace of ideas.</p>
<p>The unholy appeal of outright lies has been on stunning display in Donald Trump’s rise as the Republican candidate for the US presidency. Independent fact-checking organisation PolitiFact <a href="http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/">has found 71%</a> of his statements to be mostly false, false or in the “pants-on-fire” category.</p>
<p>This phenomenon is not new. More than a decade has passed since satirist Stephen Colbert coined the word <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0">“truthiness”</a>, referring to stuff that some people lap up because it feels right – even though it definitely isn’t. </p>
<p>Right-wing conservatives on every continent have long mastered the art of weaving simple, comforting ideas into a security blanket against a complex and diverse world they perceive as threatening to their values and way of life.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NqOTxl3Bsbw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Who needs to think when just feeling is enough?</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This tendency toward self-delusion might be largely harmless but for the fact the untruths being circulated often vilify other communities. And the invective is not confined to idle gossip, but converted into blueprints for action: remove them; ban their places of worship; censor their viewpoints; restrict their practices; kill them.</p>
<p>Often this emerges as straightforward hate speech or misinformation that incites hostility, discrimination or violence against a group. Or it is expressed as righteous indignation, accusing the targeted community of behaving in a manner that causes outrage.</p>
<p>These twin tactics – the giving and taking of offence – meld into a potent political strategy that I call <a href="http://www.hatespin.net/the-book/">“hate spin”</a>. Its practitioners manipulate the visceral, tribal feelings of their audience in order to mobilise supporters and defeat opponents in their quest for power.</p>
<h2>Mobilising intolerance</h2>
<p>Hate spin is distressingly common – and effective – despite its ultimate reliance on half-truths and even pants-on-fire lies. </p>
<p>In the US, a small network of misinformation experts have pushed extreme claims about Muslims from the loony fringe into the edges of mainstream discourse: American mosques are terrorist training centres; the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the US government; Barack Obama is a closet Muslim.</p>
<p>Although <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/06/a-new-estimate-of-the-u-s-muslim-population/">under 2%</a> of the American population is Muslim and there is no lobby urging US courts to recognise Islamic law, several states have enacted statutes or constitutional amendments to protect against sharia. Such has been the power of Islamophobia agents to whip up paranoia about Muslims.</p>
<p>In India, <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-the-origins-of-todays-hindu-nationalism-55092">Hindu nationalists</a> use hate spin to consolidate the country’s religious majority into a dependable vote bank that transcends the internal divides of caste, class and language. </p>
<p>This group has tried to make fundamental a faith that is inherently eclectic and fluid. They have chosen to take violent offence at the killing of cows and the eating of beef, as if Hinduism ever treated such prohibitions as strictly as the Muslim injunction against pork.</p>
<p>The Hindu right claims Muslims – through their polygamy and a “love jihad” conspiracy to convert Hindu girls – will turn Hindus, who currently make up 80% of the population, into a minority in India. This fantastical projection has somehow seeped into the political discourse of a civilisation renowned for its mathematical prowess.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142264/original/image-20161018-15137-1v4j3ds.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Just another piece of misinformation in a democratic marketplace of ideas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andy Herbon/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Demographic delusions seem particularly popular among hate-spin agents. </p>
<p>Indonesia has <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-indonesia-religion-idUKKCN0SM2UY20151028">hardline Islamist groups</a> that claim to have uncovered a conspiracy to Christianise the country. This would be quite an accomplishment, considering Indonesia has some 200 million Muslims – around as many as the five largest Arab states combined. They account for almost nine in ten of the country’s population.</p>
<p>Constitutionally, Indonesia upholds belief in God, but not exclusively Islam. Protestantism and Catholicism have explicit status alongside Islam among Indonesia’s religions. </p>
<p>The central government and Supreme Court have upheld the right of Christians to build churches. Yet local hardline groups have blocked church construction in some localities for years, exploiting religious frictions to extract protection money from Christian congregations.</p>
<p>What’s striking about these cases of hate spin is that they are occurring in established democracies with strong traditions of press freedom and intellectual debate. </p>
<p>The US, India and Indonesia are nowhere near the Big Brother totalitarian regime Orwell described. Each has its own vibrant, noisy marketplace of ideas. It’s just that the market does not seem to value truth as consistently as it should.</p>
<p>Faced with the real harm that can be inflicted by hate propaganda, it’s no wonder that many reasonable people wonder if there should be more restrictions on speech. </p>
<p>Prohibitions on incitement are sometimes warranted, in line with international human rights law. But censorship is not the answer in most cases. Hate spin is more prevalent and dangerous in countries with less freedom of expression, not least because such countries usually have less regard for the equal rights of vulnerable minorities.</p>
<p>Instead, we should begin by recognising that a free marketplace of ideas, while necessary, is not sufficient. Truth’s victory over hate propaganda is neither automatic nor preordained. It requires a commitment to equal rights and norms of tolerance that is at least as determined as the uncompromising hate of demagogues and fascists.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67261/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cherian George's research was partly funded by Hong Kong Baptist University's internal grants. </span></em></p>Truth’s victory over hate propaganda is neither automatic nor preordained. It requires a commitment to equal rights and norms of tolerance.Cherian George, Associate Professor of Journalism, Hong Kong Baptist UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/607782016-08-05T21:53:54Z2016-08-05T21:53:54ZWhither anarchy: the fantasy of natural law<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125846/original/image-20160609-3477-13syepb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Do outdated fantasies of anarchism simply play into the agendas of the rich and privileged? Nuit debout in Paris, 2016. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boklm/26322384582/">Nicolas Vigier/flickr</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. This article is the last of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchy and the prospects for liberty in the world today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>What is the relevance of anarchism today? Should we see a reinvigoration of anarchist tropes and themes or movements – such as <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/the-triumph-of-occupy-wall-street/395408/">Occupy</a>, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/postcard-from-spain-where-now-for-the-quiet-revolution-43779">Spanish Indignados</a> and most recently <a href="https://theconversation.com/are-frances-nuitdebout-protests-the-start-of-a-new-political-movement-57706">Nuit debout in France</a> – as a sign that anarchism is about to enjoy a resurgence?</p>
<p>Notwithstanding the slow but undeniable decline of political ideologies and sources of inspiration for political action, my feeling is that anarchism has fallen into a certain redundancy when confronted with the issues that animate activists today.</p>
<p>The anarchist focus on the state as the locus for its critique of how power and domination operate has a vaguely antique air to it. It’s an analysis that belongs to the early modern era and particularly to the period of high colonialism that inspired the classic works of anarchism in the early and mid-19th century.</p>
<p>What we see in this period is state power being used to eviscerate indigenous ownership over land. This happened both as an internal process of what Marx called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital">primitive accumulation</a>” and as an external process of forced conquest and enslavement of subject peoples. </p>
<p>From this point of view, the anarchists’ argument that the key antagonism lies between a statist metropolitan core and various forms of collective communal existences beyond or outside of the state is compelling. Resistance to the state was thus a logical strategy for those who wish to preserve and consecrate forms of social life beyond or outside the state.</p>
<p>For anarchists such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Joseph-Proudhon">Proudhon</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Alekseyevich-Kropotkin">Kropotkin</a>, society worked best when it ran in accordance with “natural law”, which they, by contrast with the likes of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hobbes">Hobbes</a>, regarded as essentially benign and sociable. </p>
<p>It was the state that disrupted the possibility of social peace and harmony, not “us”. The state was an imposition, an artifice whose origins are rooted in the protection and promotion of inequality and enslavement.</p>
<p>In the mid-19th century, it was perhaps still plausible to cling to the idea of the reinvigoration of “society” as potentially having a distinct life apart from the institutions and processes of the state. </p>
<h2>Battlelines have shifted</h2>
<p>Let’s fast-forward to today’s “anarchistic” movements. What provided the spark for Nuit debout? In origin it was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Khomri_law">Loi de travail</a>. And what is that about? A threat to undermine hard-won gains by generations of trade unionists who have sought to use state power to protect workers’ rights from the encroachments of the market and neoliberals.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125850/original/image-20160609-3497-mrsv2j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Is the problem ‘too much state’ or not enough?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Georges P/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This movement and the protests going on in France as I write are inspired not by the prospect of the state encroaching on society and “natural law”, but by the threat of the state withdrawing from the economic sphere, leaving workers exposed to the law of the market. The problem is not “too much state”, but not enough – or not enough to protect those who stand to lose from the winding back of state protection in the name of economic competitiveness.</p>
<p>The antagonisms that give rise to political mobilisation today have quite a different character to those of 19th century. Once this antagonism was between the state and society. Now the key conflict is between the state and the market. </p>
<p>“Rolling back the state” is a phrase we rightly associate with an aggressive assault on decades of collective agreements, understandings, practices and institutions. Together, these have provided the basis for commodious living under market or capitalist conditions. This includes state-provided health services, education, welfare payments, social housing and the like.</p>
<p>Rolling back the state is no longer suggestive of restoring or preserving the rights of indigenous, tribal or other kinds of “natural” association. There remains a kind of doctrinaire anarchist who is deeply hostile to seeing these facets of collective life as anything other than a sop to capitalism. They are wary of creating “happy slaves” far removed from the image of the fully autonomous individual they believe would be the result of removing the state.</p>
<p>The Occupy protesters, the Indignados, Nuit debout and all the rest know better than that. The absence of a program, ideology or manifesto from these political phenomena can be read as a nod in the direction of an “anarchistic” practice, as can the deliberative assemblies, the <a href="http://berkeleyjournal.org/2014/10/can-prefigurative-politics-replace-political-strategy/">“pre-figurative”</a> gestures of soup kitchens etc.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125848/original/image-20160609-3475-bcwv59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Forget about soup kitchens, what about anarchist community television?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolas Vigier/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But the absence of demands is better read as a desire to maintain an inclusive “anger” about the direction in which our world and our politics is heading – away from social democratic, state-centric collective life towards a warts-and-all “natural existence” where the dominant ethos is “survival of the fittest”. </p>
<p>It’s a world that <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/">Stirner</a> and individualistic anarchists might be comfortable in – but not collectivists or anyone concerned about the least well-off.</p>
<h2>State or society is a false choice</h2>
<p>My hunch is that it is Donald Trump, Wall Street and Big Finance that will gain from “anarchy”, not the poor, the marginal and those whose plight animated the emergence of an anarchist theory and practice in the first place. </p>
<p>Anarchism lost its “natural” constituency in the more or less violent process of the unfolding of modernity, whether of the state capitalist, communist or free market varieties. </p>
<p>What we are left with is not a choice between “state” and “society”, but between a state that serves the needs and interests of its citizens and a state that prioritises the needs and interests of <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21543178">the 1%</a>.</p>
<p>Many anarchists know this, which is why some of them are standing for election in places like Spain, Iceland and Italy – and winning. They understand that the contemporary task is not the abolition of the state, as per the classical anarchist formula, but its transformation into a vehicle that better expresses the needs and wishes of ordinary citizens. </p>
<p>It is not to rid us of political authority in the name of “natural law”, but to create the conditions for a more authentic and more involving form of democracy that protects many of the “wins” from decades of struggles by trade unionists, social movements and progressive political parties.</p>
<p>Today’s anarchists should give up the fantasy of “abolishing the state”. That simply plays into the agenda of the rich and privileged. Instead, they should join in the movement to make the state more democratic, more accountable and better able to reflect the views, needs and interests of all of its citizens.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read the other articles in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/whither-anarchy">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60778/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Tormey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Today’s anarchists should give up the fantasy of ‘abolishing the state’. That simply plays into the agenda of the rich and privileged.Simon Tormey, Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/607772016-08-05T21:53:40Z2016-08-05T21:53:40ZWhither anarchy: ownness as a form of freedom<p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. This article is the third of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchy and the prospects for liberty in the world today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Freedom, that most familiar of concepts in political theory, strikes us today as ever-more ambiguous and opaque. </p>
<p>While freedom has long been the ideological emblem of the liberal capitalist West, it seems increasingly difficult to identify with any real clarity or certainty. Its meaning has been contorted by the rationality of neoliberalism, which offers us only a very narrow notion of freedom through the market while, as <a href="https://medanth.wikispaces.com/Governmentality">Foucault would put it</a>, governing us through our own liberty.</p>
<p>The supposedly free individual is required to conform to certain norms and codes of behaviour, which coincide with the dictates of the market. Thus the individual, in the name of freedom, is pushed back upon himself and becomes solely responsible for his own economic destiny. This inculcates within him an eternal sense of guilt when he fails to live up to prescribed standards of success or “resilience”.</p>
<p>Furthermore, freedom has become absolutely hinged to the ideology of security that is now omnipresent in liberal societies. </p>
<p>We might add to this a consideration of the innumerable daily instances where, in liberal states (I now use this term advisedly), freedom is constrained and curtailed – by, for instance, over-zealous lawmakers, judiciaries, police and other state institutions and private corporations – not to mention the lack of economic “liberty” experienced by the majority of the dispossessed around the world. </p>
<p>We are tempted to say that the concept of freedom finds itself in a dead-end. When we talk about freedom today, we literally don’t know what we’re talking about.</p>
<h2>Stirner on freedom from within</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125843/original/image-20160609-3475-1l0ytzb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=997&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Max Stirner in 1900.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Félix Valloton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the mid-19th century, the little-known German Young Hegelian philosopher <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/">Max Stirner</a> was already arguing that the discourse of freedom was exhausted. </p>
<p>The problem with the standard notions of freedom was that they were dependent on certain external conditions and institutions, like the liberal state, or on the fulfilment of some promise of revolutionary emancipation. They thus reduced freedom to a kind of spectral ideal that always concealed new forms of domination.</p>
<p>If freedom is associated with a certain regime of law or type of community, or is aligned with a higher rational and moral ideal, this in effect alienates the individual’s freedom. </p>
<p>If freedom is associated with a form of state, then one allows the state to determine the limits of freedom.</p>
<p>If freedom is seen as an ideal to be achieved within a higher rational and moral community, then one either pursues an impossible dream, or allows freedom to be determined by a revolutionary vanguard seeking to impose its own vision on society.</p>
<p>In other words, according to Stirner, if external conditions and standards are seen to prescribe and determine the extent of freedom, one ends up disempowering individuals and robbing them of their own capacities for freedom. Such were the limits of freedom that Stirner proposed an alternative notion of ownness, by which he intended a more radical understanding of self-ownership.</p>
<p>What is ownness? Unlike the mystification of freedom, the pursuit of which has become a hollow game (the same could be said about democracy), ownness is a much more tangible experience. I understand it as ontological freedom: the freedom one always already has. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125835/original/image-20160609-3509-188hb8v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Radical self-ownership is a form of freedom we already have.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Eric Huybrechts/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What does this mean? First, it is a singular form of freedom, which is left to individuals to create for themselves, rather than conforming to any universalised or institutionally defined ideal. </p>
<p>Nor is it a question of emancipation, as this simply risks another form of domination – we have seen this in many revolutions aimed at “freeing” a subjugated people. Rather, it is up to the individuals themselves, affirming themselves and their own indifference to all forms of power.</p>
<p>While this might sound like a form of wishful thinking – this was Marx and Engels’ claim against Stirner – it alerts us to what <a href="http://etiennedelaboetie.net/">La Boétie</a> saw as the <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-voluntary-servitude-reconsidered-radical-politics-and-the-problem-of-self-dominatio">voluntary servitude</a> and wilful obedience that underpinned all forms of domination. The flipside of this was a wilful disobedience and a reclamation of one’s own power.</p>
<p>Perhaps we can say that ownness is the experience of self-affirmation and empowerment that ontologically precedes all acts of liberation. Let’s take <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-ego-and-his-own">Stirner’s example of the slave</a>. While the slave has little or no freedom in his chains, he nevertheless has ownness, a sense of self-possession. It is the one thing his master cannot take from him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That I then become free from him and his whip is only the consequence of my antecedent egoism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this situation, freedom, whether liberal or republican, whether understood as non-interference or non-domination, simply cannot account for the slave’s sense of autonomy, his understanding of himself as his own property and not anyone else’s.</p>
<h2>Lessons for today</h2>
<p>What lessons does this have for us today? In recent years we have witnessed an unprecedented breakdown and crisis of legitimacy in our representative political institutions. </p>
<p>In the hands of our political elites, all these high-minded ideals of liberty, rights and democracy no longer signify anything; they have come to be associated with the worst hypocrisies and abuses.</p>
<p>At the same time, we have learnt – rightly – to be wary of revolutionary promises of liberation and alternative forms of social order as an antidote to the current situation. The question of freedom today is located in this gap between crumbling institutions and the eclipse of utopian horizons.</p>
<p>In response to this deadlock we have seen new forms of political experimentation, in which people seek to define their own lives and their relations with others in ways that are autonomous from dominant modes of political and economic organisation. </p>
<p>Institutions are not destroyed – for what would this lead to but simply a new kind of institutionalisation? Rather they are profaned; used without identifying with or investing in them. </p>
<p>We start to think and act as though power no longer existed. This is not the freedom of the neoliberal subject, sacrificing himself to the God of the Market, but the self-determination of owners invested in themselves and, through themselves, in others.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read other articles in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/whither-anarchy">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60777/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Saul Newman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Between institutional collapse and false promises of utopia, people seek to define their own lives and their relations with others by thinking and acting as though power no longer existed.Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory, Goldsmiths, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/599792016-08-05T05:30:55Z2016-08-05T05:30:55ZWhither anarchy: perspectives on anarchism and liberty<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129333/original/image-20160705-19110-1jh0g40.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anarchism's opposition to arbitrary power is often militant, but liberty is no simple thing.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://thetransmetropolitanreview.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/the-transmetropolitan-review-4/">Transmetropolitan Review</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. The essay is the first of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchism and the prospects for liberty in the world today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The following reflections on the subject of anarchism give a voice to the spirit of anarchy. By this I don’t mean what’s conventionally understood by the term: disturbance, disagreement and violent confusion triggered by the lack (<em>an</em>) of a ruler (<em>arkhos</em>). Rather, the perspectives published in this collection of essays brim with interest in the spirit of anarchism and its radical defence of unrestrained liberty, whose reality I first encountered on my hometown streets, with a wham and a whump.</p>
<p>At the high point of public opposition to the Vietnam War, during a rush-hour sit-down by several thousand fellow students, riot police were summoned to clear the traffic snarl we’d caused at the main CBD intersection of our city. The picture below captures something of the swelling mayhem, as helmeted constables, wielding batons, came in on horseback. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130789/original/image-20160717-2153-7bfpr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anti-Vietnam War demonstration, Adelaide (June 1971).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Keane</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To my astonishment, in the midst of tumult and turmoil, the anarchists in our ranks cool-headedly whipped out bags of marbles from deep inside their pockets. Unused to rollerskating, the horses grew unsteady; frightened, they began to rear up and draw back from the crowd. The anarchist tactics were simple, militant and effective. </p>
<p>I was impressed, and that’s perhaps why I soon graduated to The Anarchist Cookbook, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/19/anarchist-cookbook-author-william-powell-out-of-print">written by William Powell</a>. First published in 1971, and oozing so much liberty that governments around the world quickly banned it, the handbook included tips for manufacturing everything from telephone phreaking devices to home-made hash brownies.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129159/original/image-20160704-19094-gr2a2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>Un Chien Andalou</em>, an early favourite.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/47357563@N06/8249357618">Jennifer Mei/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My taste for black, and for surrealist films, soon followed. <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Chien_Andalou">Un Chien Andalou</a></em> was an early favourite: a 1928 short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí whose “dream logic” had no plot in any conventional sense. </p>
<p>Then came some serious reading: George Orwell’s <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13594#.V3sv7JN95Bw">Homage to Catalonia</a> and Noam Chomsky’s <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/american-power-new-mandarins">American Power and the New Mandarins</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Quite generally, what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I paid attention to studies of the first self-organising affluent societies by the radical anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres. Later, I sat at the feet of the priestly <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/dec/09/guardianobituaries.highereducation">Ivan Illich</a>; listened to flamboyant lectures by <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/">Herbert Marcuse</a> on feminism and repressive tolerance; and attended seminars on anarchism and ecology by <a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/bio1.html">Murray Bookchin</a>. </p>
<p>I met the author of <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/greer-germaine/female-eunuch.htm">The Female Eunuch</a> and several times, in clubs so small they felt like Turkish baths, heard The Clash rail against petty injustice, plutocrats, poverty and racism. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sYbHRQ_sYGI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">What’s My Name? A cry against the dole and sentence-happy magistrates (London, July 1978).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I found myself influenced by <a href="http://routledgesoc.com/category/profile-tags/powerknowledge">Michel Foucault’s writings on power/knowledge</a> and <a href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Obituary/debord.html">Guy Debord’s</a> theory of mediated resistance; and I listened intently to lectures by <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/castoria/">Cornelius Castoriadis</a> in defence of the idea of the autonomous individual lucid in her desires, clear-headed about reality, and capable of responsibly holding herself accountable for what she does in the world.</p>
<h2>On Liberty</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130778/original/image-20160716-2141-19ixlib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ocufa.on.ca</span></span>
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<p>It was my doctoral supervisor, <a href="http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/possessive-individualism.html">C.B. Macpherson</a>, who taught me to combine the subject of liberty with the principle of equality, and to do so by way of serious reflection on the past, present and future of democracy. Thanks to the quiet doyen of democratic theory, I became a part-time anarchist. </p>
<p>I still today sympathise with the anarchist disgust for heteronomy and its passion for liberty, with what Saul Newman, in the third of these articles, <a href="http://theconversation.com/whither-anarchy-ownness-as-a-form-of-freedom-60777">calls freedom as ownness</a>, or “the experience of self-affirmation and empowerment which ontologically precedes all acts of liberation”. </p>
<p>The formula probably underestimates what Freud taught us: that all individuals are shaped involuntarily by yearnings, unintelligible fragments, fabrications and omissions rooted in childhood. </p>
<p>Yet the great strength of the anarchist emphasis on “self-affirmation and empowerment” is the agenda it continues to set: to recognise the strangeness of our involuntary love of power, to strive to overcome our voluntary servitude, to rid ourselves of the urge “to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=WvvQfxvGfpYC&pg=PR13&dq=Anti-Oedipus+Preface+Michel+Foucault&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4uaaLvdvNAhWEtpQKHdW_AfQQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=Anti-Oedipus%20Preface%20Michel%20Foucault&f=false">Foucault</a>).</p>
<p>The stress placed by anarchism on these themes, and on the principle that arbitrary power relations are contingent, and hence alterable, still rings true. In recent times, the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0038x9t">anarchist sensibility</a> has again come alive in many different global settings, from Greenpeace “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/11/how-to-change-the-world-greenpeace-power-mindbomb">mind bombs</a>”, the M-15 movement in Spain, Taiwans’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement">Sunflower uprising</a> to the punk band <a href="http://thebaffler.com/blog/punk-rock-and-protest-asim">G.L.O.S.S.</a> (“Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit”). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=252&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=252&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=252&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130777/original/image-20160716-2122-n8vl51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">M-15 public demonstration against austerity in the Plaza de la Corredera, Córdoba, Spain, June 9, 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/72957193@N00/5852321762">Javi/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>For the cause of liberty, all this is well and good. Except that anarchism has no special monopoly on these concerns. In practice, conceptually and politically speaking, democracy handles things better, or so I came to think.</p>
<h2>Institutions</h2>
<p>The following essays by <a href="http://theconversation.com/whither-anarchy-freedom-as-non-domination-60776">Alex Prichard and Ruth Kinna</a> and <a href="http://theconversation.com/whither-anarchy-ownness-as-a-form-of-freedom-60777">Saul Newman</a> emphasise that the anarchist ideal of freedom rejects states, private property in market form, and the “hollow game” of democracy. Such institutions are deemed antithetical to freedom as non-domination. </p>
<p>Written constitutions, watchdog bodies, periodic elections, parliamentary representation, trial by jury, public service broadcasting, education, health and welfare protections: while all these (and other) institutions are motivated by the principle of equality, the anarchists in this series are inclined to dismiss them as mere instruments of disempowerment, as violators of the lives of individuals blessed ontologically with their own “ownness” (<a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/#2">Max Stirner’s <em>Eigenheit</em></a>).</p>
<p>In his contribution to this dossier, <a href="http://theconversation.com/whither-anarchy-the-fantasy-of-natural-law-60778">Simon Tormey</a> notes how this conviction unwittingly aligns anarchists with the “freedom of choice” and “possessive individualism” (Macpherson) ideology of contemporary neo-liberalism; he rightly emphasises the political foolishness of jettisoning institutions that can function as levers of resistance to injustice and subordination. </p>
<p>My encounters with anarchists taught me something else: in group settings, anarchists demand informality (“structurelessness” as <a href="http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm">Jo Freeman called it</a>), yet the lack of institutional rules makes everyone vulnerable to manipulation and takeovers by cunning, well-organised factions.</p>
<p>Strategic objections to anarchist ideas of freedom as “non-domination” are compelling; but, arguably, they don’t burrow deeply enough into why anarchism has no love of institutions. Philosophically speaking, anarchism was born of a 19th-century age blind to the embodied linguistic horizons within which individuation takes place from the moment we are born. </p>
<p>Karl Marx had no developed theory of language, yet he spotted (in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundrisse"><em>Grundrisse</em></a>) that individuals “come into connection with one another only in determined ways”. </p>
<p>Rephrased, we could say, within any culture, that individuals resemble spiders entangled in laced webs of language that structure their time-space identities. What we think, who we are, how we represent ourselves to others and act on the world: all of this, and more, is framed by the linguistic horizons (Wittgenstein called them the language “scaffolding” (<em><a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=bisiGaxtIlcC&pg=PT246&dq=%22part+of+the+framework+%5BGerust%5D%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWgeCP2tvNAhVLEpQKHZExDVkQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Ger%C3%BCst&f=false">Gerüst</a></em>) of our everyday lives.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/130780/original/image-20160716-2153-vul26o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The totally ‘free’ individual is a misleading fiction and impossible utopia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonasb/364609049/">Jonas Bengtsson/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It follows that notions of liberty vary according to the language games people play with others. Since individuals are chronically bound through language to the lives of others, the whole image of “free” individuals as “un-dominated by any other” is both a misleading fiction and impossible utopia. How “individuals” define and practise their “liberty” is shaped by their linguistic engagement with others.</p>
<p>And as these entanglements are infused with power relations, individuation is very much a political matter, a process defined by structured tensions and struggles over who gets what, when and how, and whether they should do so.</p>
<h2>Complex liberty</h2>
<p>The point is that institutions matter. Anarchists excel at criticising factual power, but their proposed counterfactual alternatives are typically weak.
The “cult of the natural, the spontaneous, the individual” (<a href="http://www.ditext.com/woodcock/1.html">George Woodcock</a>) runs deep in their thinking. </p>
<p>Yes, in certain circumstances the “passion for destruction” (<a href="https://www.sfu.ca/history/publications/2006-leier.html">Bakunin</a>) can be creative. But loose talk of “unions of egoists” (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_egoists">Stirner</a>), “social communion” (<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=wQ2PBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=Proudhon+%22social+communion%22&source=bl&ots=3Zt-Oo6lvl&sig=lXdQVGxhPSFcvC4xt7gyfQPrHyg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiCgKyTwNvNAhWJKpQKHdLOAXIQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=Proudhon%20%22social%20communion%22&f=false">Proudhon</a>) and “camp rules” and “constitutionalism” (Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard’s iteration) falls wide of the mark.</p>
<p>Loose talk of liberty neglects the fundamental point that the empowerment of individuals, their exercise of freedom understood as “non-domination”, requires their protection from bossing and bullying by others. That is the meaning of the old maxim that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. </p>
<p>More than a few ugly crimes have been committed in its name, which is why beautiful liberty requires restraint in order to be exercised well. Liberty is no simple thing. It is a political matter bound up with institutionalised struggles for equality among individuals, groups, networks and organisations.</p>
<p>The type of institutions matters. That’s the whole point of democracy: its power-monitoring, power-sharing institutions are designed to conjoin liberty with equality, in complex ways, in defence of citizens and their chosen representatives, in opposition to the disabling effects of arbitrary power.</p>
<p>Armed with the grammar of complex liberty tempered by complex equality, democrats warn of the dark side of anarchism, the dogmatic ism-conviction that in matters of liberty, language and institutions are trumped by the preference for simplicity over complexity.</p>
<p>There’s another sense in which the old anarchist ideology of the autonomous individual is today questionable: its neglect of the non-human. We’ve <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthropocene-raises-risks-of-earth-without-democracy-and-without-us-38911">entered an age</a> of eco-destruction and eco-renewal marked by rising public awareness that we human beings ineluctably live as animals in complex biomes not of our choosing. The contributions below are silent about this trend. </p>
<p>Why? The part-time anarchist in me suspects that it’s because their particular anarchist vision of freedom as “ownness” and non-domination is anthropocentric. Their liberty is the all-too-human licence freely to <em>dominate nature</em>.</p>
<p>If that’s so, then the old subject of anarchy and liberty is confronted by new <em>democratic</em> questions: is it possible to include the non-human in definitions of freedom as the unchecked propensity of humans to act on their worlds? </p>
<p>How might the “ownness” enjoyed by free individuals be brought back to Earth? Can these free individuals hereon be regarded as humble “actants” (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory">Bruno Latour</a>)? Are people capable of living their lives in dignity, unhindered by arbitrary power, as equals, entangled in complex biomes they know are so much part of themselves that they must be their vigilant stewards?</p>
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<p><em>You can read other articles in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/whither-anarchy">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59979/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Keane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Liberty is a political matter bound up with institutionalised struggles for equality among individuals, groups, networks and organisations. This is where the cult of the free individual falls down.John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/607762016-08-05T05:30:51Z2016-08-05T05:30:51ZWhither anarchy: freedom as non-domination<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125826/original/image-20160609-3506-1ywe8h4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anarchists once took constitutionalism very seriously and might well do so again to develop radical decision-making practices. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kjd/2502535352">Kim Davis/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. This article is the second of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchism and the prospects for liberty in the world today.</em></p>
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<p>Which institutions are best suited to realising freedom? This is a question recently asked by the republican political theorist <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/%7Eppettit/">Philip Pettit</a>. </p>
<p>Anarchists, by contrast to republicans, argue that the modern nation-state and the institution of private property are antithetical to freedom. According to anarchists, these are historic injustices that are structurally dominating. If you value freedom as non-domination, you must reject both as inimical to realising this freedom.</p>
<p>But what is freedom as non-domination? In a nutshell, by a line of thinking most vocally articulated by Pettit, I’m free to the degree that I am not arbitrarily dominated by any other. I am not free if someone can arbitrarily interfere in the execution of my choices.</p>
<p>If I consent to a system of rules or procedures, anyone that then invokes these rules against me cannot be said to be curtailing my freedom from domination. My scope for action might be constrained, but since I have consented to the rules that now curtail my freedom, I am not subject to arbitrary domination.</p>
<p>Imagine, for instance, that I have a drinking problem and I’ve asked my best friend to keep me away from the bar. If she sees me heading in that direction and prevents me from getting anywhere near the alcohol, she dominates, but not arbitrarily, so my status as a free person is not affected. </p>
<p>Republican theory diverges from liberal theory because the latter treats any interference in my actions as a constraint on my freedom – especially if I paid good money for the drink, making it my property.</p>
<p>Neither republicans nor liberals suggest that private property and the state might themselves be detrimental to freedom, quite the opposite. By liberal accounts, private property is the bedrock of individual rights. In contemporary republican theory, property ownership is legitimate as long as it is non-dominating. </p>
<p>Republicans further argue that a state that tracks your interests and encourages deliberative contestation and active political participation will do best by your freedom.</p>
<h2>The special status of property and the state</h2>
<p>But why should we assume that property or the state is central to securing freedom as non-domination? The answer seems to be force of habit. For republicans like Pettit, the state is like the laws of physics while private property is akin to gravity. In ideal republican theory, these two institutions are just background conditions we simply have to deal with, neither dominating nor undominating, just there.</p>
<p>While anarchists don’t disagree that property and the state exist, they seek to defend a conception of freedom as non-domination that factors in their dominating, slavish and enslaving effects. Anarchism emerged in the 19th century, when republicanism, particularly in the US, was perfectly consistent with slavery and needed the state to enforce that state of affairs.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/125828/original/image-20160609-3475-hqnq0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Anarchists denounce the institutions of dominance under industrial capitalism.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Quinn Dombrowski/flickr</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The abolition of slavery and the emergence of industrial capitalism were predicated on the extension of the principle of private property to the propertyless, not only slaves, who were encouraged to see themselves as self-possessors who could sell their labour on the open market at the market rate. </p>
<p>Likewise, in Europe millions of emancipated serfs were lured into land settlements that left them permanently indebted to landlords and state functionaries. They were barely able to meet taxes and rents and frequently faced starvation.</p>
<p>The anarchists uniformly denounced this process as the transformation of slavery, rather than its abolition. They deployed synonyms like “wage slavery” to describe the new state of affairs. Later, they extended their conception of domination by analysing sex slavery and marriage slavery.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/proudhon/sp001863.html">Proudhon’s</a> twin dictums “property is theft” and “slavery is murder” should be understood in this context. As he noted, neither would have been possible but for the republican state enforcing and upholding the capitalist property regime. </p>
<p>The state became dependent on taxes, while property owners were dependent on the state to keep recalcitrant populations at bay. And, by the mid-20th century, workers were dependent on the state for welfare and social security because of the poverty-level wages paid by capitalists.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders">Karl Polanyi</a> noted, there was nothing natural about this process. The unfurling of the “free market”, the liberal euphemism for this process, had to be enforced and continues to be across the world. </p>
<p>Republicans might encourage us to think of the state and property like the laws of physics or gravity because this helps them argue that their conception of freedom as non-domination is not moralised – that is, their conception of freedom as non-domination does not depend on a prior ethical commitment to anything else. </p>
<p>But as soon as you strip away the physics, it appears that republican freedom is in fact deeply moralised – the state and private property remain central to the possibility of republican freedom in an a priori way. Republican accounts of freedom demand we ignore a prior ethical commitment to two institutions that should themselves be rejected.</p>
<p>Anarchists argue that private property and the state precipitate structures of domination that position people in hierarchical relations of domination, which are often if not always exacerbated by distinctions of race, gender and sexuality. These are what Uri Gordon calls the multiple <a href="http://news.infoshop.org/opinion/anarchism-and-multiculturalism">“regimes of domination”</a> that structure our lives.</p>
<h2>Looking to constitutionalism as a radical tool</h2>
<p>Anarchists are anarchists to the extent that they actively combat these forces. How should they do this?</p>
<p>Typically, the answer is through a specific form of communal empowerment (“power with” rather than “power over”). This would produce structural power egalitarianism, a situation in which no one can arbitrarily dominate another. </p>
<p>But is this realistic or desirable? Would a reciprocal powers politics not simply result in the very social conflicts that anarchists see structuring society already, as Pettit has argued?</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/128442/original/image-20160628-7851-e226ib.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Even anarchists need rules to guide group decision-making – such as these ones at Occupy Vancouver.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sallybuck/6381994175/in/photolist-aHrq5g-asTREh-bkWFhF-ayMM4U-ayK6Tc-aHXowk-avJLrY-awjZ3F-asRfxv-awfUQE">Sally T. Buck/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And what about radical democracy? Perhaps anarchists could replace engagement with the state with radical practices of decision-making? The problem is that anarchists haven’t even defined the requisite constituencies or how they should relate to one another. What if my mass constituency’s democratic voice conflicts with yours?</p>
<p>There is one implement in the republican tool box that anarchists once took very seriously and which might be resurrected: <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constitutionalism/">constitutionalism</a>. Without a state to fall back on or private property to lean on, anarchists like Proudhon devised radically anti-hierarchical and impressively imaginative constitutional forms. </p>
<p>Even today, when constitutionalism is almost uniformly associated with bureaucracy and domination, anarchists continue to devise constitutional systems. By looking at anarchist practices like the Occupy movement’s <a href="http://www.occupyboston.org/general-assembly/reaching-consensus/">camp rules</a> and declarations (We are the 99%!), we can revive anarchist constitutionalism and show how freedom as non-domination may be revised and deployed as an anti-capitalist, anti-statist emancipatory principle. You can <a href="http://www.anarchyrules.info">see more about this here</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read other articles in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/whither-anarchy">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60776/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Prichard receives funding from the ESRC, under the 'Transforming Social Science' scheme, for a project entitled 'Constitutionalising Anarchy'. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ruth Kinna receives funding from the ESRC, under the 'Transforming Social Science' scheme, for a project entitled 'Constitutionalising Anarchy'.</span></em></p>If anarchists reject private property and the state, they need to devise alternative, radical practices of power-sharing. Republican constitutionalism offers one way to think about this.Alex Prichard, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of ExeterRuth Kinna, Professor of Political Theory, Loughborough UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/585002016-06-03T04:14:08Z2016-06-03T04:14:08ZHumility’s value for democracy in dark times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120316/original/image-20160427-30990-1wfly2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump's boastful and bullying leadership style encapsulates many of the worst features and sentiments of today’s world.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/darronb/23679921353/">Darron Bergenheier/flick</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Surveying the world in 2016, it is hard not to get the feeling that it is starting to come apart at the seams. </p>
<p>The civil <a href="https://theconversation.com/syria-peace-talks-languish-in-the-doldrums-as-fighting-engulfs-aleppo-58662">war drags on in Syria</a>, with a range of external actors willing to engage enough to perpetuate the violence but not enough to resolve the conflict. Iraq and Afghanistan descend further into the abyss, living monuments to the dangerous mixture of vicious idealism and wilful ignorance that marked the early response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>With ongoing conflicts and state repression in many other parts of the world, we face growing numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. These different names describe a similar reality, of people trying to find a place where they can live safer, healthier and happier lives. </p>
<p>The challenge of balancing care towards others with responsibility towards citizens is being felt most acutely in Europe, where countries are <a href="https://theconversation.com/outsourcing-a-humanitarian-crisis-to-turkey-is-that-the-european-thing-to-do-55915">struggling to balance political and humanitarian demands</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120313/original/image-20160427-30973-1e7dhnu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Syrian refugees protest at their treatment in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mstyslav Chernov</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The backdrop to this increased instability is a socioeconomic sphere marked by <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-other-1-lives-wealth-gap-not-the-only-way-in-which-global-elite-is-taking-advantage-53400">deepening inequality</a>, a world in which neoliberalism acts like acid on our political structures. In turn, these trends help <a href="https://theconversation.com/trendy-electoral-superheroes-from-the-americas-to-europe-the-populists-confront-us-51905">fuel populist</a> and <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/136918300115615">nativist movements</a> in <a href="https://theconversation.com/populism-and-democracy-friend-or-foe-rising-stars-deepen-dilemma-39695">Europe</a> and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/european-data-suggests-the-gig-economy-helped-create-trump-sanders-58585">US</a>. This is exemplified in the rise of <a href="https://theconversation.com/youre-fired-donald-trump-shows-rivals-how-its-done-in-entertainment-politics-54323">Donald Trump</a>, an individual who <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-both-the-old-crazy-and-the-new-normal-58728">manages to encapsulate</a> many of the worst features and sentiments of today’s world.</p>
<p>To borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, we are living in “dark times”. She was not simply referring to the horrors of the second world war; the phrase had wider historical resonance, referring to a period when the political realm was shrinking and breaking down. But the increasing frailty of the political order was concealed. As <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=jRMCnTn0Ks4C&pg=PT8&dq=%22by+no+means+visible+to+all%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd2dGpiIjNAhXjtqYKHWK2ATUQ6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=%22by%20no%20means%20visible%20to%20all%22&f=false">Arendt observed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… it was by no means visible to all, nor was it at all easy to perceive … until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this sense, it seems an apt description for the world we find ourselves in.</p>
<p>Jeffrey Isaac borrowed Arendt’s phrase for his 1998 book, <a href="http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100008630">Democracy in Dark Times</a>, which stood in contrast to the confidence surrounding liberal democracy after the Cold War. The years since then have largely confirmed Isaac’s concerns that we may not be well equipped to deal with the most serious challenges now facing democracy.</p>
<p>In the quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the limitations of our democracies have been increasingly laid bare. Some of the defining crises of this period – the 2003 Iraq war, the 2008 financial shock, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident – share both a misplaced confidence in our abilities to understand and control situations and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of the failures that followed from such hubris. </p>
<p>On a more basic level, what these experiences reflect is a world increasingly out of balance, one in which arrogance and unaccountability combine in a corrosive synergy.</p>
<h2>An alternative approach</h2>
<p>In this context, surely there is value in considering a different approach – one that replaces an excess of confidence with a much more humble stance attuned to the limitations and vulnerabilities that unavoidably shape human life.</p>
<p>What exactly does a humble approach entail? And what role can such an old-fashioned idea as humility play in today’s world? </p>
<p>Humility traditionally has been associated with spirituality; conceptions of it can be found across the major religions. A believer accepts there are some things that they cannot know, that they cannot comprehend.</p>
<p>This is a condition all people share, which can be a way of generating compassion and mercy towards others, as all are equally inferior to God or any of the higher powers that we may believe in. Self-reflection – meditating on our limitations – lies at the heart of this understanding of humility.</p>
<p>One can reach a similar conclusion from a secular starting point. One does not need to believe in God to appreciate that there are very real mental and physical limitations that shape what is possible. </p>
<p>In this sense, humility has enduring relevance for both religious and secular approaches. Arguably one of its great strengths is that its value can be appreciated from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds.</p>
<h2>Beyond domination and magic bullets</h2>
<p>It is important to recognise the strong social element at the heart of humility. Reflecting on one’s own position is done with reference to others, and appreciating the way we all share certain physical and mental limitations can provide the foundation for more other-regarding behaviour. </p>
<p>This emphasis on reflection and knowing – on meditating on one’s self and impact on others – flows over into the way we engage with the world.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120317/original/image-20160427-30960-fqxtgi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russian President Vladimir Putin revels in his masculine persona.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Presidential Press and Information Office</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A humble approach means not knowing whether good or bad will result from action, but accepting the possibility of bad occurring and accepting what may follow. This accepting of responsibility for consequences, whatever they may be, is a valuable counterpoint to a world in which passing the buck has become all too common.</p>
<p>And in abandoning the will for mastery, the illusion of control, humility also rejects traits found in a hegemonic form of masculinity. While this does not mean that humility should be considered “feminine”, it certainly stands as a challenge to the patriarchal modes of thinking that still dominate politics.</p>
<p>So what does humility mean for democracy? For citizens, it might actually mean lowering expectations of their leaders. This does not mean passively accepting fools and hypocrites, but being more realistic about what we ask of politicians. </p>
<p>Matthew Flinders has emphasised this point <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2012/08/democratic-realism/">in his work</a>, suggesting that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… too many people expect politicians to be able to deliver simple solutions to complex social problems without contributing to the solutions themselves. There are no simple answers to complex questions, no easy wins, no magic bullets, or technological fixes to the challenges that will define the 21st century.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Likewise, humility demands of leaders a willingness to accept the limits that shape what is possible. In many ways, it returns us to traditional democratic notions of compromise, restraint and deliberation. Perhaps this seems a bit conservative, but when our political structures are being eroded and undermined, a concern with conservation does not seem inappropriate.</p>
<p>In a world where bullies like Assad, Putin, Trump and Xi seem increasingly confident in themselves and their way of treating others, does it make sense to advocate a humble approach?Wouldn’t it be better to fight fire with fire, or, at the very least, adopt a stronger stance than the one humility might imply? </p>
<p>Certainly, there are dangers in advocating a more cautious position in a world where bluster and bravado seem to bring success.</p>
<p>However, if one considers the trajectory of events following the terrorist attacks of September 11, what becomes evident is a tragic course of violence being repaid with violence, of alienation and insecurity becoming more entrenched in a progressively fragmented and unstable world.</p>
<p>In many ways, the “<a href="https://www.globalpolicy.org/war-on-terrorism.html">war on terror</a>” has replicated on a larger and more intense scale the errors of the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-eradicate-drugs-but-we-can-stop-people-dying-from-them-54636">war on drugs</a>”, which has been waged with little success for more than a half a century. Given the ample proof that a forceful, uncompromising response may deepen the problem and reinforce divisions, perhaps it is time to consider alternative approaches.</p>
<p>If one turns to contemporary politics, there are signs that publics may be open to leaders who adopt a more humble stance. One can see the grandstanding of Trump attracting interest, but there is also an opposing trend: growing support for softly spoken and principled politicians like <a href="https://theconversation.com/has-britains-pissed-off-constituency-found-a-leader-in-jeremy-corbyn-45576">Jeremy Corbyn</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-bernie-sanders-made-the-democratic-party-safe-for-liberals-56253">Bernie Sanders</a>. </p>
<p>The extent to which status-quo figures and much of the mainstream media have sought to deride and discredit Corbyn and Sanders may actually point to the underlying strength of their approach. In a contest of pride and bravado, Trump will defeat most, but his limits are much more evident when facing someone who will not play his game.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120322/original/image-20160427-30970-17wqwpa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The support for Bernie Sanders indicates the public is open to more humble leadership.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Phil Roeder/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Humility, not passivity</h2>
<p>It might seem inappropriate to be calling for humility at a time when democracy faces a growing array of serious challenges, and doubts about it are voiced with increasing regularity and tenacity. Historically, humility has had negative connotations, associated with self-abasement or accepting a lower position than one is due.</p>
<p>Certainly, passivity does not match well with a democratic ethos, but if, instead, one understands humility in terms of an awareness of one’s limits and an acknowledgement of what has yet to be achieved, it has the potential to offer a powerful vision of how to approach democratic government. </p>
<p>Retreat from the world is not a viable option, but one must come to terms with the constraints on action that limit what futures are open to us. </p>
<p>A humble approach entails a recognition of the significant achievements of democracy, while appreciating that its strength ultimately – albeit perhaps paradoxically – comes from what it lacks: its inevitable imperfectability and its constant incompleteness. Such a perspective is well matched for a fundamentally human form of government. </p>
<p>Democracy, like the people it is composed of, will always be flawed and frustrating, but also inspiring and promising. This idea of democracy as an ongoing project, marked by a constant attempt to narrow the permanent gap between ideal and reality, echoes the <a href="http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/2-coker.htm">words of T.S. Eliot</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The only wisdom we can hope to acquire</p>
<p>Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58500/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Hobson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In a world out of balance, one in which arrogance and unaccountability combine in a corrosive synergy, humility can offer a powerful alternative vision of how to approach democratic government.Christopher Hobson, Associate Professor, School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/580402016-05-31T00:41:05Z2016-05-31T00:41:05ZDoes Islam have a problem with democracy? The case of the Maldives<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120297/original/image-20160427-30946-17ndkcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The political crisis surrounding the 2012 ousting of Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed led to a return to authoritarian rule.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dyingregime/7003064220/">Dying Regime/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Five years on, confusion and despair have all but replaced the hope of the Arab Spring (with the possible exception of Tunisia). Many have cited the democratic failures and the rise of uglier forms of violence in these states to bolster a <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/16/robert-merry-clash-between-west-and-islam/">“clash of civilisations”</a> worldview.</p>
<p>Yet the tiny Indian Ocean Muslim nation of the Maldives suggests otherwise. Soon after its democratic transition in 2009, the “<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/02/democracy_maldives">modest model in the Arabian Sea</a>” experienced a pattern of de-democratisation attributable to non-religious factors also evident in other Muslim majority states.</p>
<p>Islam has been the only religion in the Maldives for more than 800 years. But democracy did not fail there because it clashed with Islam (at least the Islam of most ordinary Maldivians). </p>
<p>The structural reforms attempted by the new government challenged elite power and privilege in a political culture of corruption, patronage and clientelism. The resulting anti-democratic resistance and the government’s authoritarian reactions soon put democracy in peril. </p>
<p>A new despotism is now in place in the Maldives. World powers have arguably played important roles in this deterioration.</p>
<h2>Islam and ordinary Maldivians</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124267/original/image-20160527-859-3di5l4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Calling for Islamic sharia in the Maldives, protesters use their democratic right to rally against democracy in 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dyingregime/15131729636/in/photolist-p693hN-p4953h-p65puD-p5UxAV-oNCbcs-oNAUuY-oNGRZC-oNByWj-oNEJii-p6b2sF-p653K9-p45U3y-p5Rv1v-p5WooH-oNHpJY-p45sQ9-p6cCiR-p64PXA-oNFLBc-p5UzZn-oNBDzf-p5Qoai-p5QiGR-oNzyk3-oNBx98-oNFJrS">Dying Regime/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/07/10/most-muslims-want-democracy-personal-freedoms-and-islam-in-political-life/">most Muslims</a> in many other Muslim majority states, Maldivians are <a href="http://transparency.mv/en/press-statement/news/transparency-maldives-2015-maldives-democracy-survey-points-to-a-troubled-future-for-democracy-in-the-maldives-9b04d152845ec0a378394003c96da594">solidly in favour</a> of democracy. </p>
<p>In a 2015 survey, 62% thought democracy was the <a href="http://transparency.mv/files/media/6dca8a9f7beda482335bb654b88020f7.pdf">best governance system</a>. 77% believed it was good for the Maldives. Crucially, most Maldivians associate democracy with rights such as freedom of speech and assembly. </p>
<p>If political Islam does have grassroots support, this has not translated into electoral votes. The main Islamist party, Adalat, has never succeeded in elections. Even so, it is in alliance with the main opposition party, the Maldivian Democratic Party, which calls for democracy.</p>
<h2>How the Maldives de-democratised</h2>
<p>Western audiences paid a lot of attention to the non-religious character of the Arab Spring protests. For many commentators, the calls for justice, liberty and democracy transcended religious affiliations. Similarly, Islam played at most a peripheral role in the Maldives’ democratisation, which predated the Arab Spring by several years.</p>
<p>Non-religious elites led the democracy movement. They called for human rights, anti-authoritarianism, multiparty democracy and good governance. In 2008, their activism, supported by transnational human rights advocacy networks, pressured the 30-year dictatorship into holding the country’s first multiparty democratic elections.</p>
<p>The elected government came to power on a platform of complete transformation to “The Other Maldives”. Instructed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, the government launched an ambitious privatisation program, opening up a hitherto state-manipulated economy to competition. Having inherited an enormous budget deficit and external debt, the government subscribed to an IMF structural adjustment program that included austerity measures.</p>
<p>The government attempted to restructure the public sector. It slashed civil service jobs and streamlined salaries and perks. It also introduced new taxes, including a GST and a tourism tax. </p>
<p>All this took place against the backdrop of the world food price crisis of 2007-08 and global financial crisis. The government had to contend with rising inflation, depleting foreign exchange and high unemployment.</p>
<p>Crucially, the reform program challenged the distribution of power, perks, resources and wealth accumulated over three decades of authoritarianism. In an already stressful economic situation, the short-term negatives of some of the reform measures fuelled public discontent.</p>
<p>Wealthy resort owners, businesses, cadres of the former dictatorship, the judiciary, members of parliament, elements of the security services and other beneficiaries of the old regime responded with anti-government actions. MPs were bought, the judiciary failed to uphold the rule of law and the police were often implicated in crimes. This culture of corruption and opportunism further enabled elite challenges to the new government.</p>
<p>The government, in turn, failed to cultivate a politics of real dialogue, compromise and coalition-building. The resistance, along with the real or perceived fear of anti-democratic plotting, prompted the government to react in an authoritarian manner, much like in <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_research/summary/v079/79.2.asad.html">Morsi’s Egypt</a>. This culminated in the arbitrary detention of a criminal court judge. </p>
<p>In the ensuing political conflict, elements of the security forces in collaboration with the former dictator’s supporters deposed the president, Mohamed Nasheed, halfway through his term in February 2012. </p>
<p>While the rhetoric of protecting “Islam and Nation” by largely non-religious actors did play a legitimising role in ousting Nasheed, the elites leading the revolt did not derive power or support from the Islam of ordinary Maldivians.</p>
<h2>The role of other powers</h2>
<p>India and the US were among the first countries to help legitimise the succeeding government at its weakest. </p>
<p>India’s priority was “stability” for its investments in the Maldives. Incoming Maldivian president Mohamed Waheed (then vice-president and a Stanford University graduate) was seen as a “friend” of America. The US sought a Status of Forces Agreement to establish a military base in the Maldives, but no agreement was ever signed. </p>
<p>The Commonwealth, which is supposed to “<a href="http://thecommonwealth.org/our-work">promote democracy</a>”, helped legitimise the new government by overseeing a <a href="http://www.maldivesculture.com/pdf_files/CONI-Report-2012.pdf">Commission of National Inquiry</a> that “found” Nasheed’s own actions were to blame for his ousting. The commission argued that Nasheed lost his legitimacy when political parties that had endorsed him for the presidential elections withdrew their support. </p>
<p>However, in liberal institutional terms, the Maldives has a presidential system where people vote for individual candidates. Elections in liberal democracies also do not require a majority for democratic legitimacy.</p>
<h2>The rise of a new despotism</h2>
<p>Amid the political turmoil, Yameen Abdul Gayoom - half-brother of former dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom – came to power in 2013 following “competitive” elections. Although the Supreme Court manipulated the poll, election observers like the Commonwealth quickly stamped them genuine.</p>
<p>The government has rapidly turned into an example of what <a href="https://theconversation.com/columns/john-keane-267">John Keane</a> calls “<a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/resources/reports-and-publications/13902-lecture-the-new-despotisms-of-the-21st-century">new despotism</a>” in the 21st century. It employs the discourses, formal institutions and other trappings of democracy for undemocratic endeavours.</p>
<p>Yameen’s government has put three or four future presidential hopefuls behind bars. This includes a 13-year sentence for Nasheed on terrorism charges for arbitrarily detaining the judge. More recently, the vice president, Ahmed Adeeb, who purportedly conspired to assassinate the president in 2015, has been detained and impeached.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/124266/original/image-20160527-900-19cqhck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The jailing of Mohamed Nasheed for 13 years did not stop public shows of support for the Maldives’ first democratically elected president.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dyingregime/16567232467/in/photolist-reZp26-rgJm9m-rxmGXv-rxfAsK-qAmQKy-re2ZhH-qAn6c9-rw25XE-rxfZDL-rfN9oC-rydaxJ-rfNaKW-rfUwDM-rgRJ2g-rfMTEQ-qAyWxR-rfMmyu-qAz34F-rv4U45-qAmVQU-re3h4D-qAnfp7-rxmrWt-rfUuRt-rxfjsP-rgKj7A-rv4R73-qAn4Lo-re3j7X-rxfZSb-rfUkcD-rydd45-rfNam9-qAyXB4-rxmvLT-rfUxhv-rfNPvf-rxmoHV-qAzfGB-rfMbwf-re2XRr-rxftAD-rxfzAp-rxfYqy-rfN5xm-rfMcEC-rv4D9A-qAmSSQ-rxg2ZN-rxfB94">Dying Regime/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Before imprisoning opposition leaders through an “independent” judiciary, the president used his legislative majority to remove the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Similarly, the parliament endorsed the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/04/maldives-declares-state-of-emergency">state of emergency</a> imposed (and then revoked under pressure) in November 2015.</p>
<p>To help maintain “monitory legitimacy”, the government hired consultancy firm Omnia Strategy, run by Cherie Blair, wife of the former British prime minister, and US lobbyist Podesta Group.</p>
<p>Over the past few years, China has been carving a bigger space for itself in the Maldives, where it has been financing major projects. In 2014, the Maldives <a href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-18/news/57196236_1_the-maldives-oil-exploration-indian-ocean">signed up</a> to China’s <a href="http://www.cfr.org/asia-and-pacific/building-new-silk-road/p36573">New Silk Road</a> agenda. </p>
<p>This has prompted <a href="http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/kerry-says-maldives/1821312.html">more vocal US criticisms</a> of the government, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/pm-modi-cancels-maldives-visit-due-to-political-unrest-sources/story-uwcd3e6HKTWlYxcWCfFd2M.html">cancelled a 2015 visit</a> to the Maldives.</p>
<h2>The limitations of democracy promotion</h2>
<p>Whether or not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt">Carl Schmitt</a> is right in arguing that ideals like human rights are a mask for powerful states to pursue their interests, the Maldivian government sees the calls in support of such ideals as hypocritical and self-serving.</p>
<p>And, with the Maldives’ increasing reliance on China and Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, it is hard to see how the so-called democracies can support meaningful democratisation if they do not adopt foreign policies consistent with those principles.</p>
<p>The answer for further democratisation lies in new local movements and vocabularies bolstered by a more credible and consistent global network of actors. As the explanation for de-democratisation did not lie with Islam, neither does the fate of democratisation depend on Islam, be it reformist or any other version.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58040/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Azim Zahir does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Democracy did not fail in the Maldives because it clashed with Islam. Instead, a privileged and powerful elite helped topple the elected government, and nations that advocate democratic ideals did little to stop them.Azim Zahir, PhD Candidate and Research Assistant, The University of Western AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/521492016-02-29T00:23:44Z2016-02-29T00:23:44ZHave faith: civil religion can counter the lure of eternal life for jihadists<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109596/original/image-20160129-27342-19c1xll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Statue of Liberty stands as a beacon of the civil religion that is the contemporary faith in human rights.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pixabay.com/en/statue-of-liberty-new-york-city-79931/">Pixabay.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>Everyone wants to die for Allah. We all want to live the best life in the hereafter and we want to make it to the top of the seven levels of Jannah – heaven.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So thinks a young “<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4334796.htm">anonymous Islamic State supporter</a>” who was friends with the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/parramatta-shooting-gunman-identified-as-farhad-jabar-khalil-mohammad-20151003-gk0jze.html">Australian Muslim teenager</a> who murdered a police worker in Sydney before he was shot dead. Perhaps this kind of mantra also resonated in the minds of the Islamic State (IS) killers who carried out the 2015 <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/paris-attacks-2015">massacres in Paris</a>.</p>
<p>Many politicians and public intellectuals have called these murderers “<a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13178582.Obama__The_West_will_defeat__extremist_nihilism__of_the_Islamic_State_terrorists/">nihilists</a>”. This betrays a typically secularist way of thinking about religion. It assumes that eternal life does not exist and that the aspiration to an eternal life is nonsensical, such that killing in the name of a paradisiacal life must mean killing for the sake of “nothing”.</p>
<p>Anthropologist Clive Kessler recently <a href="http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2015/12/01/what-is-islamism/">put forward</a> another typical Weberian reading of political Islam where the prophet is a religious leader whose message is later politicised by other forces.</p>
<p>But what if this is not the case? Everything changes if you underscore that the prophet is a constitution-giver, not a founder of a “religion”. In a political context, this perspective allows us to interpret prophetic religions democratically and philosophically, rather than theologically and juridically.</p>
<p>The question then becomes: what kind of public discourse is appropriate to counter the jihadist’s chosen path? How does one address the desire for “eternal life” that seems to motivate their willingness to sacrifice human life?</p>
<p>Should one respond that the “true” teachings of all religions preach “love of the neighbour” or “love of the stranger”, rather than the jihadist “hatred of the enemy”, as the straightest road to salvation? Although this is, for the most part, correct, it fails to tackle the underlying issues of radicalisation and fundamentalism.</p>
<p>These religious teachings do not reconcile “love of the neighbour” with the political life of citizens. Instead, they teach that to exercise charity means to become a “good citizen” of another sublime kingdom, whose representatives on this earth are churches and priests or mosques and imams. In practice, this has always had the effect of politically dividing citizens and setting them against each other.</p>
<h2>Can secular societies respond in other ways?</h2>
<p>What if one were to take a different starting point? After all, the belief that eternal life exists is shared by the founders of the republican political thought that forms the basis of Western democracies.</p>
<p>It may be worthwhile to revisit another approach that the tradition of <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/republicanism/">republicanism</a> advocated: <a href="http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/civilrel.htm">civil religion</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106206/original/image-20151216-25618-1h7fyul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sydney’s Anzac memorial.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frank Wittig/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The “Anzac spirit” can be understood as a manifestation of civil religion. For many Australians, calling into question the sacrifice made by the young men and women in arms is to utter an impiety. Yet the Anzac is not part of any spiritual religion. Interestingly, the spirit of the Anzacs is not something that any political party or leader can appropriate for themselves alone without desecrating it.</p>
<p>Another example of civil religion is the faith billions on our planet share in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the international “democratic charter”. Our adherence to universal human rights has become something like a global civil faith. </p>
<p>The struggles for basic rights have their prophetic troops such as Médecins Sans Frontières and Amnesty International, along with individuals like Edward Snowden and the Chinese citizen who stood alone in front of a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square, as many have done in other public squares since.</p>
<p>Even before the emergence of liberalism, political thinkers like Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau and Jefferson understood the need for a civil religion where love of thy neighbour and charity were embodied in republican institutions so that tolerance would effectively become the new “<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=rg4m04-j_psC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=religion+of+the+citizen+rousseau&source=bl&ots=mWcNh_QtbU&sig=rCEy7j_DMOE0rbPjtt9tL5f5Ifo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEoQ6AEwCGoVChMIvrW3lNSRyQIVQeemCh0vKA8L#v=onepage&q&f=false">religion of the citizen</a>”.</p>
<h2>Reinterpreting prophets in republican terms</h2>
<p>But how can this be possible? How can prophets like Moses, Jesus or Muhammad be given a republican interpretation? And, conversely, how can the political virtues of Greek and Roman republics be harnessed towards the egalitarian and cosmopolitan ends voiced by true prophets?</p>
<p>Machiavelli’s solution was a new interpretation of the figure of the prophet. The prophet’s role was not to found a new church or empire, but to bring to his people a constitution that guarantees that power shall remain in the hands of the people, not their spiritual or worldly representatives. Hence, a civil religion is a philosophical idea of religion that allows us to interpret prophetic religions in a way that is supportive of republican constitutions.</p>
<p>The first person to have this idea may have been <a href="https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/al-farabi-abu-nasr-c-870-950/v-1">Al-Farabi</a>, a 10th-century Muslim philosopher. His fundamental thought was that the prophet was both a legislator and a philosopher, rather than a theologian or a political leader. </p>
<p>Prophets are legislators because they give their people a political constitution that brings them worldly happiness. Such constitutions are meant to bind the wills of the people and stand higher than any king, prince, priest or imam.</p>
<p>But the prophet is also a philosopher: legislation must be rational, oriented by the idea of the public good. As a product of a philosopher-legislator, the constitution will be based on political principles that are hypothetical in that they must be verified experimentally by the democratic life of peoples that they make possible.</p>
<p>Lastly, for Al-Farabi the true prophet is also a poetic genius. He must be able to communicate the wisdom of a free and equal political life in a way that is accessible to all future individuals regardless of their social or economic condition.</p>
<h2>A religion of worldly happiness</h2>
<p>At this point, some advocates of the liberal solution to the problem of religion will say: why can’t the state just be “neutral” with respect to the pursuit of salvation and happiness and leave it at that?</p>
<p>Certainly, governments must be neutral towards how individuals pursue their private happiness and salvation, but this is not the whole story.</p>
<p>Constitutional governments depend upon the expectation that citizens will achieve public happiness by following their laws. Hence, a constitutional government cannot remain neutral with respect to whether and how its citizens attain public happiness. If the government gives up on its responsibilities in assuring the public happiness of citizens, their energies will be drained by the private pursuit of happiness, which in turn will lead to their disempowerment and eventual unfreedom.</p>
<p>Contemporary social science, for instance, has shown that unless inequality is kept within reasonable limits in a society, the freedom of all citizens – not just the poor – will begin to erode and ultimately vanish. The measure of inequality is a measure of public happiness, not a private one.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106229/original/image-20151216-25606-19hmmmw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many, like these protesters in Melbourne, believe the treatment of refugees shows a dangerous disregard for the natural rights of people.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/takver/5918017660/in/photolist-a1Xotf-afcjze-afcmKe-fFbsG6-fFt3Dh-fi9anQ-fjMYSQ-2Uc4-y4A97h-fjMZaW-fASk4W-fASDVu-affemN-fASSQh-fkPGJD-fihyTL-afcq7B-afcmfP-afcnWk-afck8X-affgzN-a1UwtZ-fmYEgY-9vccJH-afcsUR-affdMC-afcpug-afcoVD-aff8Ss-afcnnR-afcost-affeSu-afffrh-fACskP-fAC5Ep-fASaxQ-fjMYoC-zYK1HM-8rW3EG-8rSUve-8rSSve-8rSV4D-8rSWYT-8rVZ9E-8rSY46-8rSVAn-fhEdxu-8rVXEs-8rW38j-8rW3oC">flickr/Takver</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A similar argument can be made for adopting immigration policies that embody the spirit of cosmopolitan constitutionalism. For if one disrespects the natural rights of stateless peoples, one is cementing the dangerous illusion that the rights of citizens depend exclusively on obedience to their government.</p>
<p>According to the perspective of civil religion, the goal of governments should be the worldly public happiness of their people. This means that any politics or policy that demands sacrifice in this world to be compensated in some “beyond” is illegitimate.</p>
<p>While the idea of “worldly” happiness transcends the human order of things into the natural world, it never leaves our human existence in our human universe. The reality is that we are a part of nature; nature is not a part of us. Hence the God mentioned in the civil religion of the <a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html">Declaration of Independence</a> is called “Nature’s God”.</p>
<p>This means that modern natural science, which is the way we can come to know Nature’s God, has an important role to play in a republican civil religion. The civil-religious function of natural science is to uphold and defend the belief in the eternity of nature.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109603/original/image-20160129-27331-2lvela.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Parallel universes offer us another way of looking at ‘eternal life’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chingster23/11937781733">flickr/Lee Davy</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What does this belief have to do with the pursuit of public happiness and eternal life? Well, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-theory-of-parallel-universes-is-not-just-maths-it-is-science-that-can-be-tested-46497">recent advances</a> in the scientific study of the universe have suggested that nature, rather than being created out of nothing in a single event, is characterised by a rhythm of expanding and contracting parallel universes. </p>
<p>This civil religion of Nature’s God offers a scientifically and politically sound alternative to counter the interpretations of eternal life that spiritual religions offer.</p>
<p>If these scientific theories are correct, then one thing seems to follow: everything that did not happen to you in this world, everything that you regretted doing or omitting to do, everything that has led you to place your faith in “another” world, paradise or beyond, has happened to you not once, but countless times.</p>
<p>In a parallel existence, in some other version of this universe, which may or may not be this very life that you are now living, you have always been happy, you have always “made it to the top” – in fact, you are eternally there. </p>
<p>The idea of eternal recurrence may very well contain the deepest meaning of worldly happiness: if nature contains an infinite number of variations of you, the life you are living is neither the only one you shall ever live, nor is it a life for which you need to seek redemption by sacrificing your life or that of others.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52149/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Miguel Vatter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The tradition of republicanism offered us civil religion, a foundation of belief that could counter any politics or policy that demands sacrifice in this world to be compensated in some “beyond”.Miguel Vatter, Professor of Politics, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/488792015-12-18T01:16:06Z2015-12-18T01:16:06ZWestern democracy’s new maxim: surveillance and soft despotism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103598/original/image-20151130-23045-zpozr8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Who's watching, and who's watching the watchers?</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>September 21, 2014, was a day of global <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/21/climate-change-rallies-held-across-australia">climate action</a>. To testify to the scale of the protest in cities around the world, people at the Sydney rally were asked to smile for the drones flying above us.</p>
<p>It was the first time I had been asked to smile at a drone. I felt uncomfortable. I was being watched, becoming an object of my own protest – a pixel, not an agent.</p>
<p>What kind of society do our so-called “Western and networked democracies” count as normal if humans are constantly objectified, monitored and profiled?</p>
<h2>A vast surveillance toolkit</h2>
<p>The array of mass surveillance tools enhanced by digital technologies is incredibly broad. These range from software that filters and blocks online content to tools that help governments spy on their citizens. </p>
<p>Governments can track our every movement using drones and GPS. They can use voice recognition to scan mobile networks, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/data-visualization/wired-for-repression/">listen in on our calls</a>, read our text messages and emails and even change their contents <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-12/tunisia-after-revolt-can-alter-e-mails-with-big-brother-software.html">en route</a>. </p>
<p>All this information is filtered and organised on such a massive scale that it can be <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-03/syria-crackdown-gets-italy-firm-s-aid-with-u-s-europe-spy-gear.html">used to spy on every person</a> in an entire country. There is ample evidence that technology produced by American, Canadian and European companies is being used by authoritarian governments to facilitate human rights abuses. </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Narus, a Boeing subsidiary, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/one-us-corporations-role-_b_815281.html">was revealed</a> to have sold sophisticated surveillance equipment to Egypt. California’s Blue Coat Systems’ monitoring devices have been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/report-web-monitoring-devices-made-by-us-firm-blue-coat-detected-in-iran-sudan/2013/07/08/09877ad6-e7cf-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html">found in Syria, Iran and Sudan</a>. </p></li>
<li><p>Trovicor, a German firm, <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/spy-tech-companies-their-authoritarian-customers-part-ii-trovicor-and-area-spa">has sold</a> hacking technology to a dozen Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Bahrain, where activists were tortured while being shown transcripts of their text messages and phone calls. </p></li>
<li><p>Cisco Systems is <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/cisco-and-abuses-human-rights-china-part-1">facing litigation</a> in California and Maryland for allegedly selling surveillance equipment to the Chinese government, which has used it to perpetrate human rights abuses.</p></li>
</ul>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1017&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1017&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103641/original/image-20151130-10251-8yuoqq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1017&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edward Snowden’s revelations about government spying on citizens caused outrage around the world.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/15140750406/in/photolist-p4WhaG-oPu6z1-oPtDWE-oPu4hV-oPtgYv-p6Yn5z-p6H3fr-p6H2Sc-oPth4a-p6YmpB-p4WiAN">flickr/Mike Mozart</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is not the end of the story. Mass digital surveillance has <a href="https://theconversation.com/digital-domesday-surveillance-threatens-us-with-a-new-serfdom-41513">become the rule</a> beyond authoritarian states. Since US whistleblower Edward Snowden began releasing <a href="https://theconversation.com/obamas-concession-on-spying-makes-implicit-case-for-leaks-21918">National Security Agency (NSA) documents</a> in June 2013, revelations about government mass surveillance have caused outrage in Western democracies.</p>
<p>Many digital corporations assist government surveillance. In the US, the NSA has outsourced surveillance tasks to <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/">thousands of companies</a> that make money by constantly monitoring citizens. The financial data of Booz Allen Hamilton (the private security firm that employed Snowden) show its profits increased from US$25 million in 2010 to US$219 million in 2013.</p>
<h2>And there’s money to be made</h2>
<p>Corporate mass surveillance is conducted directly by corporations on their consumers. When you share images and videos on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, you grant them a licence to use your posts any way they see fit for free. You also grant them the right to let others use your pictures. </p>
<p>If you search the web for medical information, Google will log and track your activity. Its more than 60 privacy policies enable it to create individual profiles of each user. These join the dots between all the services they access.</p>
<p>So extensive is corporate mass surveillance that in his new book, <a href="https://theconversation.com/julian-assange-on-google-surveillance-and-predatory-capitalism-43176">When Google Met WikiLeaks</a>, Julian Assange declares:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80% of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behaviour, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102930/original/image-20151124-18255-16gtm1c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Corporate surveillance can now capitalise on your death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">portal gda/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We are getting so used to corporate mass surveillance in our everyday lives that a growing number of platforms even take advantage of our online profiles after we die. The Twitter app <a href="http://www.liveson.org/">LivesOn</a> uses bots powered by algorithms to analyse your online behaviour and learn how you speak so it can create a personal digital afterlife:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although companies routinely claim to care about privacy, they are rarely willing to discuss the details of law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ access to their customer databases, or the degree to which they assist or resist such access. This is unsurprising. Few companies can effectively protect their customers’ data from the government.</p>
<p>Any in-depth discussion of the topic would therefore risk alarming consumers, perhaps convincing them to share less with their service providers.</p>
<h2>Despotism with a different character</h2>
<p>The main justification governments provide for these practices is terrorism. For corporations, it’s simply profit. </p>
<p>But the problem is that once these huge banks of metadata are built, they become potentially available to any party wielding a subpoena – or enough cash. Worse still, they can be hacked and even used for torture.</p>
<p>How can you describe modern states where unrestricted mass surveillance (state and corporate) takes place without limits? Are we still in a democracy? Is it soft despotism? Or, as <a href="https://theconversation.com/columns/john-keane-267">John Keane</a> might call it, despotism with a <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/resources/reports-and-publications/13902-lecture-the-new-despotisms-of-the-21st-century">Dolce & Gabbana appearance</a>?</p>
<p>According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America">Democracy in America</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/102932/original/image-20151124-18230-noz90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis de Tocqueville warned that despotism could creep up insidiously on democracies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Théodore Chassériau via Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is precisely what’s happening: we are getting used to mass surveillance. We are even starting to perceive it as a “mild” forgo when we are sold “security” from the government and a free feast of online networking from digital firms.</p>
<p>In the face of this, there is a clear and pressing need for vigilance in ensuring any surveillance practice complies with international human rights law. That includes the right to privacy because bulk surveillance projects often infringe citizens’ rights (even when technically legal).</p>
<p>To protect our civil liberties, the power of all entities with access to citizens’ private information must be constrained in transparent and publicly accountable ways.</p>
<p>UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay released a paramount report in June 2014 on the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Documents/A.HRC.27.37_en.pdf">right to privacy in the digital age</a>. She condemned mass surveillance, citing the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx">International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights</a>. The report reaffirms that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No-one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. Interference authorised by States can only take place on the basis of law, which itself must comply with the provisions, aims and objectives of the Covenant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tocqueville warned of how soft despotism works: sovereign power does not tyrannise; it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies and, finally, it reduces each nation to a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.</p>
<p>Snowden’s revelations show just how far state-based surveillance extends in the West. These also show how much this depends on <a href="https://theconversation.com/digital-domesday-surveillance-threatens-us-with-a-new-serfdom-41513">Big Data practices</a> that implicate digital majors and our everyday social/online media practices.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/103643/original/image-20151130-10269-1rj94nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This year’s Canadian conference CanUX explored Big Data’s potential impacts on the user/citizen experience.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mgifford/22487219829/in/photolist-Ag7T1H-5CTB8N-AcXfY6-5CNJzL-5CJruH-5CNKi3-5CJqFk-5CNJd7-nKYx3-5bFWV-nzko7-nuvSk-5bG4M-AxEpay-5bFWT-nHwnS-5bFWU-5bFWR-5bFKR-nxYxN-5bFKS-ASKQvv-5bG4P-5bG4H-5bFKP-5bG4G-5bG4J-5bFWW-5bFKN-4kkn6e-5CATQn-nxPxt-mmu9YP-nKYsa-AfgybM-4bF9FD-zUTckk-4kpoRN-4kpoQ9-4kpoN3-4kkn9V-4kpoKW-4kpoHA-4kkn58-4kkn3H-4kpoCb-4kkmZv-4kpoz1-4kpoxq-4kpov5">flickr/Mike Gifford</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Now is the time to ask what kind of society we’d like to live in. The only viable solution is to go back to the constitutional traditions of Western democracy and reaffirm the core values of privacy, freedom of information and anonymity over the current trends towards control, repression and profit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48879/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benedetta Brevini does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What kind of society do our so-called “Western and networked democracies” count as normal if humans are constantly objectified, monitored and profiled?Benedetta Brevini, Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/517462015-12-07T01:45:24Z2015-12-07T01:45:24ZTurkey’s democracy leaves little room for democrats<p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The war of rhetoric between Turkey and Russia dramatically escalated recently when Vladimir Putin <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/putin-turkey-shot-jet-protect-isil-oil-supply-151130191513006.html">accused</a> Turkish forces of shooting down a Russian jet to protect Turkey’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-01/is-turkey-is-buying-oil-smuggled-by-islamic-state/6991526">oil trade with Islamic State</a> (IS). Such accusations add to a <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/russia-has-a-new-enemy-no-1-turkeys-president-recep-tayyip-erdogan/articleshow/49982174.cms">long line</a> of similar charges made against the former prime minister and now president, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679">Recep Tayyip Erdoğan</a>, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).</p>
<p>Though Erdoğan and his AKP cadres deny any ties to IS, their policies and actions in Syria are shrouded in secrecy. Pushes for transparency and attempts by journalists and legal practitioners to hold the government to account have proven <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/freedom-of-press-vital-for-fight-against-corruption-transparency-intl.aspx?pageID=238&nID=91198&NewsCatID=339">virtually futile</a> and at times <a href="https://theconversation.com/turkish-mainstream-medias-mask-has-finally-slipped-15187">dangerous</a>.</p>
<p>Turkey’s snap elections on November 1 were seen as a chance to reverse this trend. However, hopes of reinvigorating the democracy <a href="https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Turkey%20Report%20-%202-3-14.pdf">stifled</a> by the illiberal politics of the Erdoğan-AKP nexus were short-lived. The AKP won a <a href="https://theconversation.com/turkey-election-erdogan-and-the-akp-get-majority-back-amid-climate-of-violence-and-fear-49963">resounding victory</a>.</p>
<h2>Democratic process, undemocratic outcomes</h2>
<p>Given what has already happened, the AKP’s win could well lead to democracy sliding further away from Turkey, even to the point of its demise. It’s perplexing that such a potentially undemocratic outcome has been sanctioned through the democratic process.</p>
<p>Under the AKP, Turkey has witnessed a rollback of political and civil rights in recent years. This includes forced takeovers of critical media outlets and holdings, <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/weapons-syria-journalists-prison-story-behind-turkey-s-great-espionage-trial-205370695">jailing of journalists</a>, violent police crackdowns on anti-government protests, whitewashing of <a href="http://www.diplomaticourier.com/turkeys-foray-into-financial-corruption/">serious corruption allegations</a> against party officials, and the general <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezi_Park_protests">deterioration of the rule of law</a>. </p>
<p>An increasingly authoritarian government has, over its 13 years of single-party reign, gradually insulated itself from legal and societal challenges.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104236/original/image-20151203-22452-1fe3ya9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2013, Turkish police attacked peaceful protesters with tear gas in Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Zsombor Lacza/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The AKP has made no secret of its plans for a constitutional overhaul. Unlike much-sought-after liberalising changes, the AKP’s model will deliver the opposite. </p>
<p>The planned shift from a parliamentary to a presidential system amounts to “super-presidentialism”. Authority will be concentrated in the hands of the president without the checks and balances of the US system. Ultimately, this ensures Erdoğan will attain <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/akps-presidential-system-will-lead-to-one-man-rule.aspx?pageID=238&nID=79041&NewsCatID=341">“one-man rule”</a> and potentially end democracy in Turkey.</p>
<h2>Ballot box treated as a blank cheque</h2>
<p>Erdoğan and his AKP view the ballot box as the only form of accountability and legitimacy they need. In Turkey, democracy has traditionally lacked institutionally robust mechanisms of vertical and horizontal accountability. Elections have become a winner-takes-all <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majoritarianism">majoritarian</a> system. </p>
<p>The thinking is that electoral victory legitimates all government policies and actions. In other words, beyond the ballot box, there should be no moral or legal constraint on its rule.</p>
<p>Predictably, the AKP’s electoral victories since 2002, coupled with Erdoğan’s strong sense of mission, have increased their distaste for criticism and opposition. An overwhelming majority throughout its rule has enabled the AKP government to be largely unhindered and unaccountable to political and judicial scrutiny.</p>
<p>Firmly back in control, the AKP has promised to follow through with its constitutional project. Transparency is ever decreasing. The clampdown on personal and political freedoms continues.</p>
<p>In this environment, critics of the government are lambasted as resisting or acting against the “national will”. The angry, condescending and authoritarian tone in response to any criticism, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/turkish-court-asks-gollum-experts-if-erdogan-comparison-insult">especially of Erdoğan</a>, illustrates the party’s majoritarian or even <a href="http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/content/42/2/1.abstract">plebiscitarian interpretation</a> of democracy.</p>
<p>Herein lies the fundamental challenge for democracy: there is nothing that cannot be questioned and revised when supported by enough numbers. At its most extreme, this applies to the institution of democracy itself. Since democratic principles and processes open politics to all perspectives for debate, there is no safeguard against actors who peddle anti-democratic values from attaining power via the democratic process.</p>
<p>Erdoğan and the AKP know this. Aware that they are unable to shake the normative draw of democracy, they operate under its guise. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104235/original/image-20151203-22480-10tuzu4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Turkish journalist Hasan Cemal resigned from the newspaper Milliyet in 2013 after criticism from Erdoğan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Armineaghayan/Wikipedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They are unwilling to strengthen democratic institutions, while manipulating its processes. Instead of openly violating democratic rules, the incumbents routinely abuse the resources of the state by denying the opposition media exposure, <a href="http://www.politico.eu/article/erdogan-gags-turkey-weapons-nationalist/">harassing critical media</a> and using their majority to pass legislation unilaterally for self-seeking agendas. </p>
<p>Journalists, opposition politicians and other government critics may be spied on, harassed or arrested. None of this is alien to the Turkish experience.</p>
<p>For the AKP, democracy involves nothing more than victory at the ballot box. This “proves” the nation’s leaders have legitimacy in the eyes of the people whom they dominate from the saddles of high power. Though their words are coloured by the language of democracy, their track records are anything but democratic. </p>
<p>The AKP-Erdoğan situation is not unique to Turkey. They belong to a global breed of undemocratic actors who are paradoxically sustained within the democratic framework. The days when the game of democracy was for democrats only are long gone.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/51746/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tezcan Gumus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Firmly back in control after winning snap elections, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP government are reducing democratic process to a rubber stamp for their undemocratic project.Tezcan Gumus, PhD Candidate, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/275592014-06-05T11:27:33Z2014-06-05T11:27:33ZThe rise was stunning, but Qatar has plenty of other worries besides football<p>The highly visible role <a href="http://monde-arabe.arte.tv/en/qatar-an-economic-and-religious-offensive/">played by Qatar</a> in spearheading the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12813859">Arab Spring uprisings</a> in north Africa and Syria in 2011 focused world attention on this tiny Gulf emirate. It capped a remarkable year that began with the stunning announcement in December 2010 that this country of two million – of whom only 200,000 are Qatari nationals – would host the <a href="http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/qatar2022/">2022 FIFA World Cup</a>. </p>
<p>Behind these headlines lay a powerful country branding strategy. It took advantage of a benign set of political, economic and security factors in the early 2000s that shaped Qatar’s integration into the international system and imprinted it into the public consciousness. </p>
<p>The dilemma for the young new emir, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23046307">Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani</a>, as he approaches one year in power, is that the levels of global scrutiny that accompanied the country’s emergence as a regional actor with international reach threaten now to do more harm than good to Qatar’s international image. </p>
<h2>A place in the sun</h2>
<p>Numerous factors explain Qatar’s sudden rise to prominence. These include the decision made in 1995 by the incoming leadership of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/emir-of-qatar-profile-who-is-sheikh-hamad-bin-khalifa-al-thani-how-did-he-turn-qatar-into-the-worlds-richest-nation-and-why-has-he-decided-to-abdicate-8672997.html">Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani</a>, the previous emir, to fast-track development of the country’s vast reserves of natural gas. </p>
<p>His administration also displayed a nuanced understanding of the <a href="http://www.e-ir.info/2014/03/20/the-state-of-qatar-a-first-hand-account-of-soft-power/">projection of “soft power”</a>, and, critically, the country enjoyed a highly fortuitous balance between demands and resources. This last factor enabled Qatar to avoid the socio-political and economic pressures generated by the Arab uprisings elsewhere, as in Bahrain, only twenty miles off its northwest shore. </p>
<p>The emir and his prime minister (and foreign minister), <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/sheikh-hamad-bin-jassim-bin-jaber-althani-meet-the-man-who-bought-london-8669134.html">Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani</a> (who both stepped down in June 2013) also pursued an aggressive strategy of internationalisation in order to build for Qatar a worldwide network of investments and strategic partnerships. In particular, supplying <a href="https://www.qatargas.com/English/Pages/default.aspx">liquefied natural gas (LNG)</a> to leading industrialised and emerging economies thickened the web of interdependencies with powerful external actors and gave them a direct stake in the security and stability of Qatar.</p>
<p>As a tiny country in a volatile region that has experienced three major wars since 1980, the task of managing relations with more powerful and potentially aggressive larger neighbours has been a feature of Qatari policy-making objectives. </p>
<h2>The great balancing act</h2>
<p>This need to diversify the bases of external support led the country to develop a reputation for balancing seemingly incompatible policies. It hosts the regional headquarters of <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL31718.pdf">United States Central Command (CENTCOM)</a> and <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com">Al-Jazeera</a>, for example. </p>
<p>It has discrete ties with Israel yet has provided safe haven to Islamists such as <a href="http://themuslim500.com/profile/sheikh-dr-yusuf-al-qaradawi">Yusuf Al-Qaradawi</a>, who are deemed too radical for other states in the Middle East and in the West. Above all, it relies absolutely on the United States for its security while sharing the world’s largest non-associated offshore gas field with large regional neighbour Iran. </p>
<p>Building on its emergence as a gas superpower, the past decade has seen Qatar translate its growing international leverage into considerable soft-power assets. Especially significant was the establishment (by emiri decree) in November 1996 of Al-Jazeera. Showing a level of editorial independence and investigative reporting that far outmatched its regional state-run competitors, it rapidly gained a mass following across the Arab world. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j4s7iffgfdI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Highlights from Al-Jazeera’s Iraq coverage.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Its coverage of Iraq made it a target for the Bush administration, while its no-holds barred reporting saw it banned from numerous countries. These included Saudi Arabia, which <a href="http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200209/30/eng20020930_104178.shtml">withdrew its ambassador</a> from Doha between 2002 and 2007. </p>
<p>In November 2006 the <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/aboutus/2006/11/2008525172949768994.html">creation of a sister English channel</a> internationalised the brand, largely through its critically acclaimed coverage of Israel’s offensive in Gaza in 2009. Its subsequent reporting of the Arab Spring uprisings firmly imprinted Al-Jazeera on the global consciousness, although Al-Jazeera Arabic’s coverage of the upheaval <a href="http://www.meforum.org/3147/al-jazeera">reinforced regional perceptions</a> that Qatar was aligning policy behind political Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.</p>
<p>Other examples of Qatar’s international branding strategy at work include creating the <a href="http://www.myeducationcity.com">Education City</a> centre of regional educational excellence, with its branch campuses from six leading American universities and University College London. </p>
<p>Qatar has aggressively expanded on the <a href="http://kerdowney.com/destinations/qatar/">luxury-end tourism</a> and <a href="http://vae.ahk.de/en/trade-fairs/calendar-gulf-region/trade-fairs-in-qatar/">trade fair circuit</a>. There has been <a href="http://www.qia.qa">sovereign-wealth investment</a> in iconic global brands such as Harrods, Porsche, and the Shard skyscraper in London, while the country has hosted other international organisations such as the <a href="http://www.gecf.org">Gas Exporting Countries’ Forum</a>; and gatherings such as the <a href="http://www.20wpc.com">World Petroleum Congress in 2011</a> and the <a href="http://unfccc.int/meetings/doha_nov_2012/meeting/6815.php">COP 18 round of climate change negotiations in 2012</a>. Coupled with Qatar’s geographic location between West and East, these moves were designed to position the country as a central pivot around which a broader global rebalancing is taking place.</p>
<h2>The cracks behind the make-up</h2>
<p>Yet it is not all plain sailing for Qatar. The World Cup has attracted relentlessly negative attention over issues ranging from the <a href="http://gizmodo.com/a-bleak-look-at-the-life-of-migrant-workers-building-qa-1584898504">desperate plight of migrant labourers</a> to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/fifa-lawyers-would-find-it-hard-to-strip-qatar-of-the-world-cup-27488">murky depths of football politics</a> and a <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/qatars-activism-sparks-a-backlash/1832277.html">post-Arab-Spring backlash</a> against Qatar by re-empowered status quo forces across the region. Earlier this year, a growing sense that Qatari support for Islamists threatened regional security <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26447914">prompted the Saudis to once again withdraw</a> their ambassador from Doha, along with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. </p>
<p>Considerations of national pride mean the Qatari leadership will probably fight tooth and nail to keep the World Cup, but it will be uneasily aware that the challenges have in fact only just begun. The fact that the new government <a href="http://www.mlssoccer.com/worldcup/2014/news/article/2014/04/21/world-cup-qatar-scales-back-2022-plans-will-host-event-eight-stadiums">recently scaled back</a> ambitious plans outlined in the bid document for 12 air-conditioned stadia indicates that the enormous financial costs are coming sharply into focus amid signs it is trying to rein in some of the more profligate legacies of its predecessor. As the searing summer heat approaches, cooler heads in Doha may well be asking themselves if the World Cup is worth another eight years in the public eye. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/27559/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristian Coates Ulrichsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The highly visible role played by Qatar in spearheading the Arab Spring uprisings in north Africa and Syria in 2011 focused world attention on this tiny Gulf emirate. It capped a remarkable year that began…Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Baker Institute Fellow For Kuwait, Rice UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/247192014-03-25T02:49:29Z2014-03-25T02:49:29ZWhat can Australia and the global community do about Russia?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44598/original/3npjpkv2-1395699220.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Will the global community definitively stigmatise Russia as an international pariah until it renounces the use of force to challenge a UN member’s territorial integrity?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Alexey Nikolsky</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The international community has been impotent since Russia responded to the November 2013 Ukraine crisis with force, culminating in <a href="https://theconversation.com/crimea-votes-to-secede-from-ukraine-as-eu-considers-sanctions-against-russia-24426">annexation</a> of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea this month.</p>
<p>The G7’s decision to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/24/g8-summit-canceled_n_5023219.html">boycott</a> the G8 summit scheduled for June in Sochi indicates solidarity, but it is a largely symbolic move. Australia faces a similar opportunity to express opposition if it <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/ukraine-tony-abbotts-g20-summit-threat-to-russia-20140303-340gn.html">disinvites Russia</a> from the G20 summit in November, although the larger number of group members makes a G20 response harder to co-ordinate than the G7.</p>
<p>What can Australia do? As a member of the global community, the government should join in condemnation of Russia’s behaviour, whatever Russia’s historical claims or the desire for self-determination among Crimean residents. The use of military power to impose a pseudo-referendum and takeover by local surrogates is unacceptable.</p>
<p>Given the limited links between the two countries, Australia has little to lose from joining internationally approved sanctions. But we also have little reason to expect that sanctions from Australia will have any impact.</p>
<h2>The system of nations</h2>
<p>Since the United Nations was established in 1945, the global system of nations has been based on the territorial integrity of members. The UN has been reluctant to respond to internal conflict other than by supplying peacekeepers, but has actively responded when a member’s territory has been forcibly annexed (as in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Kuwait#International_condemnation_and_Gulf_War">Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait</a> in 1990). </p>
<p>There have, of course, been exceptions. But never has one of the five permanent Security Council members expanded its national borders by force until Russia did so in 2014.</p>
<p>Russia has appeared decisive in its response to the Ukraine crisis because it does not recoil from using force, while the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/world/europe/obama-ukraine.html?_r=0">US</a> and European Union rule out military involvement. Alone, Ukraine cannot hope to prevail in a military conflict with Russia, and is constrained to turn the other cheek unless its very existence is threatened. This has allowed Russia to play a game of chicken over its territorial aims.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the global community struggles for a response. Censure in the UN will be vetoed by Russia. The move is useful only in exposing Russia’s isolation and pushing China to take a public position (so far, one of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-crisis-russia-vetoes-un-resolution-declaring-crimea-referendum-invalid-9194668.html">non-support for Russia</a>).</p>
<h2>What about sanctions?</h2>
<p>The remaining options are economic and financial sanctions, but they have a poor track record. In the short term, sanctions may promote solidarity among the population of the target country. In the long run, sanctions may take a toll, but their impact is hard to isolate. </p>
<p>These effects were evident in high-profile sanctions cases against ostracised regimes in <a href="http://www.africafocus.org/editor/aa1988.php">Rhodesia</a> (now Zimbabwe) and <a href="http://www.snf.ch/sitecollectiondocuments/nfp/nfp42p/nfp42p_staehelin-e.pdf">South Africa</a>. After unilaterally declaring independence in 1965, the illegal regime in Rhodesia ruled for 15 years. The apartheid regime in South Africa survived even longer after the introduction of sanctions in the 1960s.</p>
<p>In cases such as <a href="http://www.globalpolicy.org/security-council/index-of-countries-on-the-security-council-agenda/north-korea.html">North Korea</a> or <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-15983302">Iran</a>, sanctions may have put pressure on the regimes over several decades, but they have yet to convince the countries to fully abandon their nuclear weapon programs.</p>
<p>The Western response to Russia has been to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/world/europe/russia-starts-to-feel-effect-of-sanctions.html">personalise sanctions</a> by identifying a few dozen targets and hitting them with asset bans and travel freezes. Australia is following this path, although unlike the US or EU, it <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-19/australia-sanctions-russia-ukraine/5331826">declines to name</a> the targets. </p>
<p>But assuming that top Russian policymakers are unlikely to place short-term travel or financial motives above high policy goals, and given the popularity of national expansion among the wider population, these measures seem more like irritants than serious policy responses.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44600/original/ph87rt5z-1395700968.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Australia has an opportunity to express opposition to Russia’s actions if it disinvites Russia from the G20 summit in November.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Jason Reed</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A second obstacle to short-term success is the current strength of the Russian economy. After the post-1999 commodity boom, Russia’s foreign exchange reserves are high. Russia does not lack basic consumption goods or fuel. </p>
<p>The elite may be deprived of luxury imports, but they will grin and bear it, or import via neighbours such as Kazakhstan, which is in a customs union with Russia. Sanctions may work in the longer term given the underlying weaknesses of the Russian economy, but they will not quickly bring Russia to the negotiating table.</p>
<p>The third obstacle is that the costs of sanctions to the imposer are not equally shared. The US has been leading the push for sanctions, but it trades little with Russia and will benefit as a gas exporter if Russian supplies are boycotted. The EU is more reluctant because economic ties with Russia are stronger and the costs of trade disruption are greater. </p>
<p>The two largest EU trading partners with Russia, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10710268/EU-leaders-divided-over-new-sanctions-to-punish-Russia-for-annexing-Crimea.html">Germany and Italy</a>, are the most reluctant sanctioners. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-crisis-russian-oligarchs-with-uk-links-could-face-sanctions-over-crimea-annexation-warns-david-cameron-9208820.html">The UK</a> is lukewarm because financial sanctions will hurt London directly and undermine its reputation as a safe haven for all. France opposes restricting sanctions to military equipment as two Mistral helicopters are being <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/18/ukraine-france-warns-russia-warship-deal">built to order</a> for Russia.</p>
<p>As a middle power, Australia’s obvious forum to express opposition is the G20. And as 2014 host, the government should take the lead in identifying a position that will be supported by an overwhelming G20 majority. </p>
<p>The G20 has <a href="http://www.dw.de/oecd-suspends-russia-accession-talks-while-moscow-vows-symmetrical-sanctions/a-17494773">greater legitimacy</a> than the rich country clubs of the G7 or OECD in stigmatising Russia as an international pariah until it renounces the use of force to challenge a UN member’s territorial integrity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24719/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Pomfret does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The international community has been impotent since Russia responded to the November 2013 Ukraine crisis with force, culminating in annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea this month. The G7’s…Richard Pomfret, Professor of Economics, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223222014-03-06T06:08:54Z2014-03-06T06:08:54ZHow banks can help the move from dictatorship to democracy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43213/original/82yjvqdq-1394044055.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tunisia has its dangers, but it should be safe from financial collapse.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/archer10/8040773225/sizes/l/">archer10</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tunisia has been hailed as a lone success story among the Arab Spring nations. A relatively peaceful transition with a recent agreement on a new constitution has enabled the country to avoid the bloodshed of others in the region and has prevented further economic damage. As usual in political transition processes, this has also affected the financial sector, in both good and bad ways.</p>
<p>Long-ruling authoritarian regimes use the financial system as <a href="http://faculty.london.edu/pvolpin/lobbying.pdf">a way to dominate the economy</a> through easy access to credit, for example, while preventing competitors from gaining the same access. Lobbying by politically connected elites can lead to lower protection for investors, which in turn limits access to finance by non-connected enterprises. </p>
<p>It is a common theme in authoritarian regimes around the world; all leading entrepreneurs are linked to the ruling elite via family or financial ties. Indonesia is a great example. Economist Ray Fisman <a href="http://www1.gsb.columbia.edu/mygsb/faculty/research/pubfiles/1597/estimating_the_value.pdf">has shown</a> how political connections to former president Suharto translated directly into lower stock return towards the end of his reign, as investors expected lower returns on these connections in the future. </p>
<p>As such, “connected lending” and political interference in banks and the regulatory process becomes the norm, undermining both stability and efficiency of the financial system. This is certainly not limited to state-owned banks; it is wide-spread throughout the financial system.</p>
<p>Tunisia was no exception. Even after the departure of the <em>ancien regime</em>, the country had a financial system with a legacy of non-performing assets and doubtful solvency positions as well as weakened regulatory and supervisory authorities. Since 2006, for example, regulators have not carried out a single <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12241.pdf">on-site inspection</a> of banks, relying completely on unverified data and information provided by the institutions themselves.</p>
<p>A transitional economy like Tunisia thus faces several challenges as it tries to develop a financial services sector fit for a functioning democracy. First, losses from previous connected lending have to be recognised and written off. This then leaves banks dangerously short of funds. Not recognising the losses would effectively imply evergreen, or standing, loans with no time limit. Thus fresh lending to other more promising borrowers would be limited. At the same time, recognising the losses means recapitalising banks or, in other words, sending a lot more money their way. </p>
<p>Second, lending to new entrepreneurs must be encouraged, and this isn’t easy in an economy where nepotism and central planning has dominated. Rather than relying on “good names” (or connections) or purely on collateral, banks need to acquire skills in financial and business assessment. Building relationship with new borrowers or developing transaction-based lending techniques such as credit scoring or leasing requires a build-up of expertise and technical capacity. </p>
<p>Third, regulators must make provisions for legacy losses stemming from the old regime. Banks will have lent too much, to the wrong people; firms will have made bad investments. Regulators will have to come up with a solution for banks that are weakened by these losses. At the same time, it is in the interest of the same regulators to see a thriving banking sector. A successful socio-economic transition needs one, after all. It is thus a fine line for regulators, to aim for the <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goldilockseconomy.asp">Goldilocks rate</a> of financial service provision: not too hot and not too cold. </p>
<p>While no transition process is alike and each country is different, some lessons might be learned from the successes in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. There, broad-based institutional reform underpinned the transition process. However it was not painless, with most countries suffering systemic banking distress in the first decade of transition. </p>
<p>In almost all countries, banks initially kept lending to incumbent (formerly) state-owned firms, even in countries where they were privatised. They did this irrespective of the economic prospects of these enterprises; money was thrown at large manufacturing companies with outdated products and production processes. </p>
<p>This had severe macroeconomic repercussions. When these firms were unable to pay back their loans, banks made big losses. The consequent need for funds to recapitalise the banks resulted in rising fiscal deficits and thus inflation. Eventually, this resulted in bank runs and/or solvency crises for banks and governments. </p>
<p>Ultimately, the arrival of foreign banks in Central Europe turned out to be part of the solution. These new banks cut entrenched links between borrowers and lenders, bringing new competition into the economy. Foreign banks contributed to the rise of new enterprises and the reduction of connected lending, as shown by <a href="http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp498.pdf">Mariassunta Giannetti and Steven Ongena</a>. They also provided macroeconomic stability by eliminating the need for bank recapitalisation.</p>
<p>It is important to stress that “foreign banks” does not necessarily imply majority foreign ownership. It could also refer to foreign management. The emphasis is on new leadership, new skills and new clientele. Anything to break the old connections holding back financial systems from Indonesia to Tunisia.</p>
<p>For a nation in transition from authoritarian regime to flourishing democracy, banks are crucial. The recent history of banking crises suggests that the faster losses are recognised and dealt with, the faster the turn-around. For the financial system to play its role in the socio-economic transition process in Tunisia, this resolution cannot come fast enough.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/22322/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thorsten Beck has recently taught a financial stability course at the Central Bank of Tunisia</span></em></p>Tunisia has been hailed as a lone success story among the Arab Spring nations. A relatively peaceful transition with a recent agreement on a new constitution has enabled the country to avoid the bloodshed…Thorsten Beck, Professor of Banking and Finance, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/233462014-02-18T14:26:21Z2014-02-18T14:26:21ZHuman rights in North Korea: the implications of the Kirby report<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/41749/original/j88yjs45-1392690733.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A complex strategic environment.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/KCNA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoIDPRK/Report/A.HRC.25.CRP.1_ENG.doc">report</a> into human rights abuses in North Korea, released on Monday by panel chairman Michael Kirby, highlights the impact of the government’s extreme social controls on ordinary North Koreans.</p>
<p>Despite the attention that the UNHRC investigation <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/17/torture-executions-rapes-north-korea-human-rights">has received</a>, the report does not reveal much new information about the human rights situation in North Korea. It accuses the regime of six main human rights abuses: arbitrary detention and torture, starvation, denial of freedom of thought, denial of freedom of movement, foreign abductions and discrimination.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the report is valuable as a systematic and comprehensive catalogue of evidence. Chief among its recommendations are that “the international community must accept its responsibility to protect the people” of North Korea from crimes against humanity. </p>
<p>However, the obvious moral force of this proposition belies the intractable difficulties of undertaking any real action.</p>
<h2>Lack of enforcement mechanisms</h2>
<p>The fraught strategic environment that has complicated international nuclear non-proliferation efforts in North Korea also makes it difficult to enforce any indictment of the North Korean leadership for crimes against humanity. </p>
<p>Military intervention is a non-starter for obvious reasons. If we consider the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/07/north-korea-the-war-game/304029/">potential impact</a> of war in North Korea, with estimated casualties of up to 500,000 people at a cost of more than US$1 trillion, the risk is too high to justify the desired gain. </p>
<p>It is disingenuous to argue for protecting the human rights of North Korean citizens by risking the lives of millions of Koreans on both sides of the demilitarised zone through international military intervention.</p>
<p>A united front among regional states is vital if military options are to achieve their desired goals. Such unity seems a remote possibility in a region characterised by an emerging <a href="https://theconversation.com/whatever-happened-to-the-pivot-23261">contest</a> between the United States and China. </p>
<p>It is noteworthy that the Chinese government refused the UNHRC investigators access to witnesses in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture adjacent to the North Korean border: an area that is the primary exit route for North Korean defectors. The Chinese government provides support for North Korean border controls by repatriating fleeing North Koreans. China is generally cautious about the international human rights agenda, given its own problems with prominent ethnic minorities.</p>
<p>No other legal mechanisms exist to enforce the indictment of a sitting leader whose country does not recognise the International Criminal Court (ICC). In that context, the report establishes an inventory of Kim regime crimes that could be used as evidence to prosecute high-ranking officials through the ICC, but only in the event that the current government falls.</p>
<p>The Kirby panel’s recommendation that the North Korean leadership be referred to the International Criminal Court should not be seen as an empty threat. But past examples in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia suggest that high-level officials charged with crimes against humanity are generally untouchable until they lose power.</p>
<h2>Transformative change in North Korea</h2>
<p>The UNHRC report makes clear reference to North Korea as a totalitarian state. During the Kim Il-sung era (1945 to 1994), North Korea was one of the closest approximations of a totalitarian state that the world has seen. Nevertheless, there is a danger in emphasising North Korea’s totalitarian tendencies without proper context.</p>
<p>The North Korean coercive apparatus developed in a fortress-like cocoon, influenced initially by the experience of Japanese colonialism and the brutality of the Korean War. It then matured within the polarising political climate of the Cold War and the North’s intense competition with South Korea and the United States. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/41793/original/99tjtvnn-1392701704.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Kirby panel’s recommendation that the North Korean leadership be referred to the International Criminal Court should not be seen as an empty threat.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Salvatore Di Nolfi</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Any attempts to improve human rights in North Korea through engagement should try to avoid aggravating this siege mentality. This is the world view in which human rights violations are justified by the government.</p>
<p>We should also consider the significant economic and social forces that have coalesced in North Korean society since the mid-1990s, which have eroded the country’s totalitarian system. </p>
<p>Food distribution is a good example. The impact of government food rationing has been weakened by broadening access to food from outside the state rationing system, either through local markets, home-grown produce or theft from state farms. Grassroots entrepreneurialism has provided some people at the bottom of the class hierarchy with access to foreign currency and with it an increased ability to buy food. This has decreased the leverage of official social controls.</p>
<p>At the same time as grassroots forces are altering the relationship between the North Korean state and its people, the government has embarked on cautious economic reforms. These are opening the country to foreign capital and expertise. The firewall isolating the people from information about the outside world is also more porous than in the past. </p>
<p>So in the absence of a credible “big stick”, fostering evolutionary social change may present another option to improve the human rights situation. </p>
<p>This is not to downplay the pain of those North Koreans who have suffered horrendous abuses, or excuse the perpetrators of these abuses. But it is important to recognise the impact of the burden of history and the transformative influence of emerging social forces as we consider the implications of the UNHRC report.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/23346/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benjamin Habib does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) report into human rights abuses in North Korea, released on Monday by panel chairman Michael Kirby, highlights the impact of the government’s extreme…Benjamin Habib, Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.